9/11 Synthetic Terror Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

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PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 16 CONT'D.)

LARRY FRANKLIN, MOSSAD, AND IRAN

As July turned into August, the visible emphasis shifted from terror and martial law towards a new war, this time with Iran. Naturally, war and terror were linked, as they always had been. On August 27, 2004 CBS News broke the story of an alleged Israeli mole in the Pentagon who had been passing US secrets to the Israeli Embassy by way of AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Council, a powerful arm of the Zionist lobby. Under investigation was Larry Franklin, a middle-level functionary working for the Wolfowitz-Feith-Luti-Shulsky clique in the Pentagon. The FBI was asking questions about Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, and David Wurmser, an Iran specialist working for Cheney. The general line of questioning about these figures was: "Do you believe certain people would spy for Israel and pass secret information?" (Washington Post, September 4, 2004)

This same Larry Franklin had been named in my June 6 news release, "Rogue Bush Backers Prepare Super 9/11 False Flag Terror Attacks. "Franklin was indicated as one of the vulnerable links in the neocon network which found itself in a hysterical flight forward to try to salvage the debacle of their Iraq war by expanding that war to neighboring countries, notably Iran. The threat of a new round of "own goal" synthetic terrorism, quite possibly in the ABC dimension, was linked to the preparation of that wider war. The logic at work was that of an "October surprise," this time on the scale adequate to shock the post 9/11 world.

The best working hypothesis to understand the Israeli mole investigation was that neocon networks in the Pentagon were very close to embroiling the United States in a war with Iran. This would likely come as an Israeli and/or US pre-emptive bombing attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, possibly combined with a terrorist attack inside the US using weapons of mass destruction, which the corporate controlled media would immediately blame on Iran.

Whatever forces were behind the naming of Franklin, it was safe to assume that their main aim was to break up neocon preparations for a surprise attack on Iran, which the neocons had been boasting about in the media with special emphasis for some weeks. Backing the Franklin probe were in all probability military factions who had no desire to be fed into the Iranian meatgrinder, and who did not fancy a neocon fascist dictatorship. The immediate goal was to knock Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Rice, Abrams and their cheering section in the media and think-tanks onto the defensive. While the exposure of Franklin was a positive step, it was far from decisive, and the neocons still in a position to unleash the dogs of war, especially with the help of Sharon. The US was therefore not far from the brink of war with Iran, and at the same time was entering a period of steadily increasing danger of synthetic terrorism designed to steal or cancel the November elections, and thus freeze the current neocon clique in power for the foreseeable future.

IRAN: OCTOBER SURPRISE IN SEPTEMBER?

On August 19, Martin Sieff of UPI warned: "Forget an October Surprise, a much worse one could come in September: Full-scale war between the United States and Iran may be far closer than the American public might imagine." Sieff quoted remarks made by Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani on August 18 which bluntly warned that if Iranian military commanders believed the United States were serious about attacking Iran to destroy its nuclear power facility at Bushehr, or to topple its Islamic theocratic form of government, the Iranian military would not sit back passively and wait for the U.S. armed forces to strike the first blow, as President Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq did in March 2003. They would strike first. "We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us," Shamkhani told al-Jazeera. "Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly," he added. With this, the Iran-Iraq border became a flash point of hair-trigger confrontation in the restless war agitation of the neocons. Iranian General Yahya Rahim Safavi, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, said earlier in August: "If Israel should dare to strike our nuclear installations, we will come down on its head like a heavy hammer crushing its skull." This was in response to repeated threats by Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz that his forces were ready to take the "necessary steps" to eliminate the Iranian capability, an oblique reference to Israel's 1981 destruction of Iraq's Osirak reactor. (Washington Post, August 30, 2004)

One day earlier, neocon Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton had told an audience at the Hudson Institute in Washington that it was imperative that the Iranian nuclear program be brought before the U.N. Security Council. "To fail to do so would risk sending a signal to would-be proliferators that there are no serious consequences for pursuing secret nuclear weapons programs," said Bolton. "We cannot let Iran, a leading sponsor of international terrorism, acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to Europe, most of central Asia and the Middle East, or beyond," Bolton added. "Without serious, concerted, immediate intervention by the international community, Iran will be well on the road to doing so." Similar threatening noises came from Condoleezza Rice at the Bush National Security Council. According to well-informed sources, Rice was directed by Cheney to call Sharon during the last week of August 2004; she advised the Israeli leader that the US was considering an attack on Iran, and suggested that Sharon put his withdrawal from the Gaza strip on hold for the time being, and focus rather on dealing with the "Iranian menace. On August 19, William Luti of the Pentagon neocon cabal told a conference call of Congressional aides from both parties that there were at least five or six countries in the world with traits which "no responsible leader can allow." Luti appeared to be hinting that Bush's axis of evil needed to be expanded, resulting in additional countries which would be eligible for pre-emptive attack. (Time, September 13, 2004)

Iranian public opinion had been shocked by a raving, psychotic column by Charles Krauthammer in the July 23 Washington Post: Krauthammer had written: "The long awaited revolution (in Iran) is not happening. Which [makes] the question of pre-emptive attack all the more urgent. If nothing is done, a fanatical terrorist regime openly dedicated to the destruction of 'the Great Satan' will have both nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. All that stands between us and that is either revolution or pre-emptive attack." Iranian observers compared this to the US propaganda campaign which had preceded the attack on Iraq.

Anxious to return the compliment, the Iranians responded to the publication of the 9/11 commission report by attacking the 9/11 myth, always a sensitive point for the US regime. The Teheran Times described the report as a "whitewash," because it assumed that the CIA, FBI, and US military all "acted in good faith." The paper said the commission report excluded "a priori the most important question raised by the events of September 11, 2001: did US government agencies deliberately permit -- or actively assist -- the carrying out of this terrorist atrocity, in order to provide the Bush administration with the necessary pretext to carry out its program of war in central Asia and the Middle East and a huge buildup of the forces of state repression at home?" The paper scored the report's refusal to name names, and specifically asked, "were any of the Al Qaeda operatives, especially the ringleaders and organizers of the suicide hijackings, at some point assets or agents of the US intelligence services?" In this context, the Teheran Times recalled the origins of al Qaeda in the guerrilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, where the central role of the US intelligence agencies was well documented. The article noted: "Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, the reported mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was a longtime associate of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance and current ally of the US-backed Afghans president, Hamid Karzai." (Teheran Times, July 27, 2004)

US FORCES IN IRAQ AS HOSTAGES TO IRAN -- OR TO SHARON?

Competent US military commanders dread the prospect of war with Iran. Iran is four times the area of Iraq, and has three times the population. Its infrastructure was not destroyed during the Kuwait war in the way that Iraq's was, and Iran has not been subjected to 13 years of crippling UN sanctions on everything, including food and medicine. The Iranian military forces are intact. In case of war, Iran could be expected to use all means ranging from ballistic missile attacks on US and Israeli bases to asymmetrical warfare. The situation of the US forces already in Iraq could quickly become extraordinarily critical. Shamkhani alluded to this prospect when he said that "The U.S. military presence will not become an element of strength at our expense. The opposite is true because their forces would turn into a hostage." In reality, the US forces in Iraq were already hostages -- to Sharon, who could involve them in war with Iran at any time of his choosing.

For purposes of analogy, the Iraq war so far could be compared to the first months of the Korean War, from June to November 1950. By provoking Iran to go beyond logistical support for guerrillas and the sending of volunteers, and come into the war with both feet, the neocons would be inviting a repeat of the Chinese intervention and the disastrous US retreat south from the Yalu to south of Seoul, which still stands as the longest retreat in US military history. Just as Chinese entry into the Korean conflict in late November 1950 created a wholly new and wider war, Iranian entry into the US-Iraq war would have similarly incalculable consequences. The choices might quickly narrow to the large-scale use of nuclear weapons or defeat for the current US hollow army of just 10 divisions. War with Iran meant a military draft, just for starters. If Iran could close the Straits of Hormuz with its new anti-ship missiles, it would mean rationing of food and fuel. Bloated speculative financial structures could hardly survive.

ANOTHER STEP TOWARDS WORLD WAR III

In the case of Iran, the use of nuclear weapons by the US would have a dangerous complication: Iran is an important neighbor and trading partner of the Russian Federation, which is helping with Iran's nuclear power reactor program. The threatened US/Israeli raid on Iran might kill Russian citizens as well. Such a US attack on Iran might prod the Russian government into drawing its own line in the sand, rather than sitting idle as the tide of US aggression swept closer and closer to Russia's borders, as one country after another in central Asia was occupied. In other words, a US attack on Iran bids fair to be the opening of World War III, making explicit what was already implicit in the invasion of Iraq. The Iran war project of the neocons was the very midsummer of madness, and it underlined once more that the neocons had to go.

RUSSIANS EXPOSE US-UK TERROR ROLE AFTER SCHOOL MASSACRE

In early September, 2004, terrorists attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in the Russian Federation. Before this hostage crisis was over, more than 300 people, over half of them children, were killed. On Monday. September 6, Russian President Vladimir Putin made remarks to the western press which exposed the key role of the US and British governments in backing Chechen terrorism. Whatever Putin's previous role in events regarding Chechnya, his post-Beslan political posture tended to undercut the legitimacy of the supposed Anglo-American "war on terror," and pointed up the hypocrisy of the Bush regime's pledge that it would make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them -- since Washington and London were currently harboring Chechens implicated in terrorism. All in all, Putin's response to the Chechen events, on the eve of the third anniversary of 9/11, brought the collapse of the official 9/11 myth measurably closer. The hypocritical terror demagogy of Bush and Blair was now undercut by the head of state of another permanent member of the UN Security Council.

On Monday September 6, Putin spoke for three and one half hours with a group of some 30 western correspondents and Russia experts at his dacha near Novo Ogarevo outside Moscow. Most US press ignored these remarks. Putin, a KGB veteran who knew whereof he spoke, told the gathering that the school massacre showed that "certain western political circles would like to weaken Russia, just as the Romans wanted to destroy Carthage." He thus suggested that the US and UK, not content with having bested Russia in the Cold War, now wanted to proceed to the dismemberment and total destruction of Russia -- a Carthaginian peace like the one the Romans finally imposed at the end of the Punic Wars in 146 BC, when they poured salt into the earth at Carthage so nothing would ever grow there again. (Le Monde, September 8, 2004) There was no link between Russian policy in Chechnya and the hostage-taking in Beslan, said Putin, meaning that the terrorists were using the Chechen situation as a pretext to attack Russia. According to a paraphrase in Le Monde: "The aim of this international terrorism, supported more or less openly by foreign states, whose names the Russian president does not want to name, is to weaken Russia from the inside, by criminalizing its economy, by provoking its disintegration through propagating separatism in the Caucasus and the transformation of the region into a military staging ground (place d'armes) for actions directed against the Russian Federation."

"Mr. Putin," continued Le Monde, "restated the accusation he had launched in a veiled form against western countries which appear to him to use double-talk. On the one side, their leaders assure the Russian President of their solidarity in the fight against terrorism. On the other hand, the intelligence services and the military -- 'who have not abandoned their Cold War prejudices,' in Putin's words -- maintain contacts with those the international press calls the 'rebels.' 'Why are those who emulate Bin Laden called terrorists and the people who kill children, rebels? Where is the logic?' asked Vladimir Putin, and then gave the answer: 'Because certain political circles in the West want to weaken Russia just like the Romans wanted to destroy Carthage.' 'But, continued Putin, "we will not allow this scenario to come to pass."' Le Monde went on: "This is, according to [Putin] a bad calculation, because Russia is a factor of stability. By weakening it, the Cold War nostalgics are clearly acting against the interests of their own country." In Putin's words: "We are the sincere champions of this cooperation [against terrorism], we are open and loyal partners. But if foreign services have contacts with the 'rebels,' they cannot be treated as reliable allies, as Russia is for them." (Daniel Vernet, "M. Poutine accuse et s'explique sur sa 'guerre totale' au terrorisme," Le Monde, September 8, 2004)

In Guardian correspondent Jonathan Steele's account of the meeting with Putin, the Russian President gave this response to the US and UK on the question of negotiating with the Chechen guerrillas of Asian Maskhadov: "Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace? You find it possible to set some limitations in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child-killers?" (London Guardian, September 7, 2004)

On Saturday, September 4, Putin had delivered a national television address to the Russian people on the Beslan tragedy, which had left more than 300 dead, over half of them children. The main thrust was that terrorism constitutes international proxy warfare against Russia. Among other things Putin said: "In general, we need to admit that we did not fully understand the complexity and the dangers of the processes at work in our own country and in the world. In any case, we proved unable to react adequately. We showed ourselves to be weak, and the weak get beaten." "Some people would like to tear from us a tasty morsel. Others are helping them. They are helping, reasoning that Russia still remains one of the world's major nuclear powers, and as such still represents a threat to them. And so they reason that this threat should be removed. Terrorism, of course, is just an instrument to achieve these gains." "What we are dealing with, are not isolated acts intended to frighten us, not isolated terrorist attacks. What we are facing is direct intervention of international terror directed against Russia. This is a total, cruel and full- scale war that again and again is taking the lives of our fellow citizens." (Kremlin.ru, September 6, 2004; EIR, September 7, 2004)

Around the time of 9/11, Putin had pointed to open recruitment of Chechen terrorists going on in London, telling a German interviewer: "In London, there is a recruitment station for people wanting to join combat in Chechnya. Today -- not officially, but effectively in the open -- they are talking there about recruiting volunteers to go to Afghanistan." (Focus -- German weekly newsmagazine, September 2001) In addition, it is generally known in well-informed European circles that the leaders of the Chechen rebels were trained by the CIA, and that the Chechens were backed by US- sponsored anti-Russian fighters from Afghanistan. In the summer of 2004, US-UK backed Chechens destroyed two Russian airliners and attacked a Moscow subway station, in addition to the school atrocity.

Some aspects of Putin's thinking were further explained by a press interview given by Aslambek Aslakhanov, the Chechen politician who was one of Putin's official advisors. A dispatch from RIA Novosti reported Aslakhanov's comments as follows: "The terrorists who seized the school in Beslan, North Ossetia, took their orders from abroad. 'They were talking with people not from Russia, but from abroad. They were being directed,' said Aslambek Aslakhanov, advisor to the President of the Russian Federation. 'It is the desire of our "friends" -- in quotation marks -- who have probably for more than a decade been carrying out enormous, titanic work, aimed at dismembering Russia. These people have worked very hard, and the fact that the financing comes from there and that they are the puppet masters, is also clear." Aslakhanov, who was named by the terrorists as one of the people they were going to hold talks with, also told RIA Novosti that the bid for such "talks" was completely phony. He said that the hostage-takers were not Chechens. When he talked to them, by phone, in Chechen, they demanded that he talk Russian, and the ones he spoke with had the accents of other North Caucasus ethnic groups. (RIA Novosti, September 6, 2004; EIR, September 7, 2004)

On September 7, RIA Novosti reported on the demand of the Russian Foreign Ministry that two leading Chechen figures be extradited from London and Washington to stand trial in Russia. A statement from the Russia Foreign Ministry's Department of Information and Press indicated that Russia would put the United States and Britain on the spot about extraditing two top Chechen separatist officials who had been given asylum in Washington and London, respectively. They were Akhmad Zakayev, known as a "special representative" of Asian Maskhadov (currently enjoying asylum in London), and Ilyas Akhmadov, the "Foreign Minister" of the unrecognized "Chechen Republic- Ichkeria" (then residing in the USA). (RIA Novosti, September 7, 2004; EIR, September 8, 2004)

"SCHOOL SEIZURE WAS PLANNED IN WASHINGTON AND LONDON"

This was the headline of an even more explicit unsigned commentary by the Russian news agency KMNews.ru. This analysis blamed the Beslan school massacre squarely on the U.S. and British intelligence agencies. The point of departure here was that Shamil Basayev, the brutal Chechen field commander, had been linked to the attack (something that Putin advisor Aslambek Aslakhanov had said was known to the Russian FSB, successor of the KGB). The article highlighted the recent rapprochement of London and Washington with key representatives of Asian Maskhadov: Britain's giving asylum to Akhmad Zakayev (December 2003) and the USA's welcoming Ilyas Akhmadov (August 2004). Basayev, viewed in European circles as a straight-out CIA agent, openly claimed responsibility for the school massacre almost two weeks after the fact.

KMNews: CHECHEN TERROR BOSS ON US STATE DEPARTMENT PAYROLL

The Russian news agency KMNews wrote: "In early August ... 'Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Chechen Republic-lchkeria' Ilyas Akhmadov received political asylum in the USA. And for his 'outstanding services,' Akhmadov received a Reagan-Fascell grant," including a monthly stipend, medical insurance, and a well-equipped office with all necessary support services, including the possibility of meetings with political circles and leading U.S. media. "What about our partners in the 'anti-terrorist coalition,' who provided asylum, offices and money to Maskhadov's representatives?" asked the Russian press agency. Citing the official expressions of sympathy and offers of help from President Bush, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, KMNews warned: "But let's not shed tears of gratitude just yet. First we should ask: were 'Special Representative of the President of CRI' Zakayev or 'Minister of Foreign Affairs of the CRI' Akhmadov, located in Great Britain and the USA, aware of the terrorist acts that were in preparation? Beyond a doubt ... and let's also find out, how Akhmadov is spending the money provided by the Reagan-Fascell Foundation. We note: this Foundation is financed by the U.S. Congress through the budget of the State Department! "Thus, the conclusion is obvious. Willingly or not, Downing Street and the White House provoked the guerrillas to these latest attacks. Willingly or not, Great Britain and the USA have nurtured the separatists with material, information and diplomatic resources. Willingly or not, the policy of London and Washington fostered the current terrorist acts." "As the ancients said, cui bono? Perhaps we are too hasty with such sweeping accusations against our 'friends' and 'partners'? Is there a motive for the Anglo-American 'anti-terrorist coalition' to fan the fires of terror in the North Caucasus?" "Alas, there is a motive. It is no secret, that the West is vitally interested in maintaining instability in the Caucasus. That makes it easier to pump out the fossil fuel extracted in the Caspian region, and it makes it easier to control Georgia and Azerbaijan, and to exert influence on Armenia. Finally, it makes it easier to drive Russia out of the Caspian and the Caucasus. Divide et impera! -- the leaders of the Roman Empire already introduced this simple formula for subjugation."

KMNews: TERROR SUPPORTERS "ON THE BANKS OF THE THAMES AND THE POTOMAC"

KMNews continued: "Alas, it must be recognized that the co-authors of the current tragic events are to be found not in the Arab countries of the Middle East, but on the banks of the Thames and the Potomac. Will the leadership of Russia be able to make decisions, in this situation?" "Yes -- if there is the political will. The first thing is that black must be called black, and white, white. It is time to admit that no "antiterrorist coalition" exists, that the West is pursuing its egotistical interests (spreading its political influence, seizing fossil fuels deposits, etc.). Our own coalition needs to be formed, with nations that are genuinely interested in eliminating terror in the North Caucasus. Finally, it is time to change the entire tactics and strategy of counterterrorism measures. It is obvious that catching female suicide bombers on the streets of Moscow or carrying out operations to free children who are taken hostage, are, so to speak, the 'last line of defense.' It is time to learn to make preemptive strikes against the enemy, and it's time to carry combat onto the territory of the enemy. Otherwise, we shall be defeated." (Source: KMNews.ru, September 7, 2004; EIR, September 8, 2004)

Izvestia stressed the probable ethnic composition of the terrorist death squad, and its likely role in exacerbating tensions in the ethnic labyrinth of the Caucasus. Izvestia found the targeting of North Ossetia in the Beslan incident "not accidental," pointing to the danger of "irreversible consequences" for interethnic relations between Ossetians, Ingushis and Chechens. "Russia is now facing multi-vectored threats along the entire Caucasus," the paper wrote. (Izvestia, September 3, 2004)

In the wake of Putin's speech, prominent Russian commentators discussed the recent terror campaign against Russia in terms of a possible "casus belli" for a new East-West conflict. Several commentaries reaffirmed Putin's key statement that international terrorism has no independent existence, but functions only as "an instrument," wielded by powerful international circles committed (in part) to the early destruction of Russia as a nuclear-armed power. A commentary in the widely read Russian business news service RosBusinessConsult (RBC) was entitled "The West is unleashing Jihads against Russia." In language reminiscent of the Cold War, RBC charged that the recent wave of terror attacks against Russia, beginning with the sabotage of two airplanes and a terror bombing at a Moscow subway station, and culminating so far in the Beslan attack, was immediately preceded by what RBC calls "an ultimatum from the West," for Russia to turn over the Caucasus region to "Anglo-Saxon control."

ANGLO-AMERICAN TERROR ULTIMATUM TO RUSSIA FROM THE LONDON ECONOMIST

"Some days prior to the onset of the series of acts of terrorism in Russia, which has cost hundreds of lives, a number of extremely influential Western mass-media, expressing establishment positions, issued a personal warning to Vladimir Putin, that Russia should get out of the Caucasus, or else his political career would come to an end. Therefore, when the President on Saturday spoke of a declaration of war having been made against Russia, this was not just a matter of so-called 'international terrorism' ... One week prior to the first acts of terrorism, the authoritative British magazine, the Economist, which expresses the positions of Great Britain's establishment, formulated the Western position concerning the Caucasus, and above all the policy of the Anglo- Saxon elite, in a very precise manner," RBC wrote.

CZECH NGO BLOWS UP RUSSIAN TANK; BRITISH EXPERTS TRAIN CHECHEN GANGS

The RBC commentary went on to cite the Economist of August 19, 2004, which contained what RBC characterized as the virtual ultimatum to Russia. RBC noted that "the carrying out of such a series of coordinated, highly professional terrorist attacks, would be impossible without the help of qualified 'specialists'." RBC noted that at the end of August one such "specialist," working for an NGO based in the Czech republic, was arrested for blowing up a Russian armed personnel carrier. Also, British "experts" were found instructing Chechen gangs in how to lay mines. "It cannot be excluded, that also in Beslan, the logistics of the operation were provided by just such 'specialists'," noted RBC.

The RBC editorial concluded: "Apparently, by having recourse to large-scale terrorist actions, the forces behind that terrorism have now acted directly to force a 'change' in the political situation in the Caucasus, propagating interethnic wars into Russia. "The only way to resist this would be for Moscow to make it known that we are ready to fight a new war, according to new rules and new methods -- not with mythical 'international terrorists', who do not and never existed, but with the controllers of the 'insurgents and freedom fighters'; a war against the geopolitical puppet-masters who are ready to destroy thousands of Russians for the sake of achieving their new division of the world." (RBC, September 7, 2004; EIR, September 1 2004)

In a related comment, the Chairman of the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, Dmitri Rogozin, declared in an interview on Sunday September 5: "I think [those behind the terrorism] are those who would like to see Russia totally discredited as a power ... I think that the aim is to destabilize the political situation in the country and plunge Russia into total chaos." (Ekho Moskvy, September 6, 2004) Western press organs responded to the school massacre with a campaign to blame, not the terrorists, but the Putin regime and Russian society. This disingenuous policy further stoked Russian resentment. On September 6, Strana.ru headlined, "Western Press: The Tragedy Is Russia's Own Fault," commenting that "unlike official politicians, journalists do not want to admit that the bombings and hostage-takings in our country are acts of international terrorism." (EIR, September 7, 2004) Another example this Putin-bashing was the article by Masha Lippman in the Washington Post of September 9, 2004. This was quickly followed by a campaign against Putin for being undemocratic, including, with indescribable hypocrisy, the complaint that Putin had not purged his intelligence officers after the school massacre -- this from the US, where no one had been held accountable for 9/11.

A basic reason for the US-UK surrogate warfare against Russia was the great Anglo-Saxon fear of a continental bloc of the type which emerged during the run-up to Bush's Iraq aggression. The centerpiece of the continental bloc would be the German-Russian relationship. Washington and London feared that Russia would soon agree to accept euros in payment for its oil deliveries. This would not just prevent the Anglo-Americans from further skimming off oil transactions between Russia and Europe. It would represent the beginning of the end of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world, a role which the battered greenback, weakened by Bush's $500 billion yearly trade deficit and Bush's $750 billion budget deficit, can no longer fulfill. If Russia were to adopt the euro, it was expected that the Eurasian giant would quickly be followed by Iran, Indonesia, Venezuela, and other counties. This would put an end to the ability of the US to run astronomical foreign trade deficits, and would place the question of a US return to a production- based economy on the agenda.

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The 9/11 myth was still a menace to mankind.

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PART 1 OF 2

AFTERWORD: 2004: NOT AN ELECTION, BUT A CIA COVERT OPERATION

The Bush operation in Iowa had all the smell of a CIA covert operation. ... Strange aspects of the Iowa operation [included] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at a very convenient point, with Bush having a six point bulge. ... Manchester Union Leader, February 24, 1980. (Tarpley and Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, p. 343.)

Do you think that the electoral system in the United States is without flaws? Need I remind you of how their elections were held in the United States? -- Vladimir Putin, December 23, 2004.

The November 2004 election was the first presidential contest to be held in the US after 9/11. The rogue networks of the US invisible government, whose power had been enormously enhanced by their successful execution of the 9/11 crimes, were not inclined to tolerate any changes in the White House which might dilute their power, however minimally. Those who had presided over 9/11 and the subsequent cover-up had to remain in power, partly as a guarantee that no September criminals would be thrown to the wolves, and partly to ensure that the neocon attempt to organize the world through a war of civilizations would not be de-emphasized, but escalated.

Other countries expressed their consternation over the cold coup that gave Bush a second term not so much by protesting the blatant vote suppression and vote fraud, but rather by dumping the US dollar, provoking a dollar crisis which made it clear to all that it was the last days of Pompeii for the moribund US currency. As the dollar reached 1.35 to the euro, the handwriting on the wall presaged the jettisoning of the greenback as the residual reserve currency of the world. This 1.35 figure was also a powerful argument that the entire neocon effort to shore up the US imperial position after 9/11 had been a failure. Since the dollar (including the London eurodollar and the various xenodollars) was the nerve and fist of Anglo-American world domination, the response of the US-UK finance oligarchs and of the intelligence agencies which they control was a sudden frenzy to increase the looting rate of the world economy in a bid to give the US currency some hope for survival.

One feature of this financier frenzy was the attempt to inflict yet another strategic humiliation on the Russian Federation, this time by orchestrating a pro-NATO "people power" coup on the streets of Kiev in the Ukraine. This effort to extend the claws of NATO so far into the Russian defensive glacis revealed US intentions as openly hostile, with blunt warnings and inflammatory propaganda campaigns on both sides. (Glacis: a smooth slope or apron of a fortification.)

After their attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and after blustering their war threats all through 2004 against Iran and Syria, the neocon fascist madmen were evidently contemplating the absolute zenith of suicidal folly: a confrontation with the Russian Federation, a thermonuclear power which, as Wolfowitz, Brzezinski, and their cliques were well aware, was the only one which retained the unquestioned ability to annihilate the United States and most of its people within a few hours. Every previous case of neocon lunacy was eclipsed by this new outburst of insanity. These events were indicative of what life would henceforth be like in the US under the rule of the 9/11 invisible government networks.

NOT AN ELECTION, BUT A CIA COVERT OPERATION

By all indications, if an honest vote count had occurred, Bush would have lost the Electoral College and very likely the popular vote as well. Every device of vote suppression, voter intimidation, vote fraud, ballot-box stuffing, e-tampering, electronic hacking, and vote stealing was cynically thrown into action by the CIA-Bush machine. Kerry had repeatedly promised his supporters that he would fight to guarantee that every vote be counted. In the hours after the polls had closed, Edwards was sent out with a short speech saying that Kerry would not capitulate, and that "every vote would be counted." But the Kerry campaign crassly reneged on this promise by conceding the election on Wednesday, November 3.

A serious candidate would have announced comprehensive legal actions to seize and impound the electronic, punch card, and optical scan voting machines which had so obviously been rigged in favor of Bush with a view to proving in court that they had been tampered with. Instead, Kerry rushed to surrender, and it was left up to the Green party and the Libertarian Party to demand an Ohio recount and pay for it with $125,000 of their own money. Kerry, in spite of his war record, proved to be a coward. He had won the election, but he would not fight to save the country from four more years of the Bush gang.

On the Thursday after the vote, Greg Palast contributed a useful article entitled "Kerry Won," which published at TomPaine.com. Here Palast argued that Kerry was the rightful winner in Ohio and New Mexico, among other states. The limitation of Palast's argument was his preponderant stress on "spoilage," the factor which causes about 3% of all votes cast in the US to be thrown out or otherwise invalidated. Spoilage is of course concentrated in low-income, black, and Hispanic polling places which usually vote heavily Democratic. All of this is of course true as far as it goes, although Palast too exclusively focused on these traditional, structural, forms of vote fraud, which have been typical over the past 40 years since William Rehnquist got his start harassing Hispanic voters. But 2004 was not your father's vote fraud. It was a very modern, hi-tech version which could not have been carried out without the full involvement of secret intelligence agencies. In other words, the 2004 vote was stolen by a conspiracy involving the Bush machine and the intelligence community, and it is this question of a grand offensive conspiracy involving spooks which appears to be, as usual, the sticking point for Palast.

During the afternoon of election day, anti-Bush sentiment was buoyed by leaks of exit polls showing that Bush was losing. Exit polling was conducted by Edison Media Research in cooperation with Mitofsky International on behalf of the National Election Pool, the name currently given to the consortium of television networks and the Associated Press which in the past has been called News Election Service, Voter News Service, etc. According to one press report, "the major networks and the Associated Press began receiving exit-poll data in the early afternoon but pledged in advance not to use it until all the polls had closed in a particular state -- even though such information, which is hardly conclusive, routinely leaks out on the Internet. Slate.com and the Drudge Report touted in mid-afternoon early exit polls showing Kerry with a one-percentage point lead in Florida and Ohio as well as significant leads in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. ... NBC's Tim Russert noted that Kerry was winning six in 10 independent voters in Ohio. CBS's Ed Bradley noted that Kerry "won women, he won men, he won first-time voters and he won the independents in New Jersey." (Washington Post, November 3, 2004)

As these reports were transmitted through the blogosphere, the impression grew that Bush was on his way to defeat. In an article written in the late evening after the polls closed we read that "according to National Election Poll interviews of voters leaving the polls, Bush appeared to be in a real fight to hold his presidency and avoid joining his father in being swept out of office after a single term. President George H. W. Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992 to Bill Clinton, and the current president systematically sought to avoid the mistakes he believed cost his father that election. But judging from exit polls yesterday, he had not expanded his coalition in any significant ways from four years ago, leading to the fight that was unfolding last night." (Washington Post, November 3, 2004)

This is also what Bush and his entourage were thinking. Bush started his day in Crawford, Texas, where he voted. He then proceeded to a rally in Ohio. Here, according to some reports, he met personally with J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Secretary of State of Ohio, the rabidly partisan black Republican who was on the one hand the head of Bush's re-election drive in that state, and at the same time the state official overseeing the voting. Bush then flew to Washington. According to one version, "It was on the plane that strategist Karl Rove started calling around to get the results of early exit polls. But the line kept breaking down. The only information that came through as the plane descended was a BlackBerry message from an aide that simply read: "Not good." Not long afterward, Rove got a more detailed picture and told the President and senior aides the bad news. Florida Governor Jeb Bush had been saying the state was looking good, and the Bush team had expected to be ahead in Ohio. But Kerry was leading everywhere. "I wanted to throw up," said an aide onboard. ... On the ground in Arlington, Va. , that afternoon, chief strategist Matthew Dowd was walking around Bush campaign headquarters looking like a "scientist whose formulas were all wrong," said a top Bush staff member. Dowd had designed the strategy for targeting voters, and the exit polls were undermining his every theory. It would take him six long hours to crack the code. When the actual vote counts started coming in at 8 p.m., Dowd noticed that in South Carolina, Virginia and Florida the numbers were what the Republicans expected them to be; the President was outperforming the exit polls. "We've got to go talk to the press. The exit polls are wrong," Dowd said. (Time, November 15,2004, emphasis added)

The gloom had been deep in the Bush camp that afternoon. "Discouraging exit polls had poured into Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters in Arlington, with Bush strategists privately describing the early picture as cataclysmic. ... When the networks initially decreed that Virginia was too close to call, Bill Kristol of Fox News said: "That can't be good for President Bush. ..But they started reminding reporters and top supporters that those polls had been wrong in 2000, and they asserted that Bush was doing better than the figures suggested. Bush invited reporters into the White House residence around 9:37 PM in an attempt to steady his troops. 'We are very upbeat, thank you. I believe I will win, thank you very much.' The setting was designed to project confidence after a grim day around the White House." (Washington Post, November 3, 2004, emphasis added)

Another account corroborates these events: "I saw this look on [Rove's] face and then the phone died," said White House communications director Dan Bartlett. "He said, 'Not good.' It was, Bartlett added, 'like a punch in the gut.' 'I was sick,' Rove said in an interview as he talked about those moments on the president's plane. 'But then I got angry when I started seeing the numbers. None of them made any sense.' Those exit polls, of course, turned out to be wrong, as many inside the Bush headquarters believed once they began to examine them in detail, and today Rove is celebrated by none other than the president as 'the architect' of the reelection victory." (Washington Post, November 7, 2004) But the exit polls were not wrong. The exit polls were by every indication an accurate barometer of the votes the citizens thought they had cast. The difference between the exit polls and the final reported results represents the margin of vote fraud.

Electronic-cybernetic vote fraud of the type practiced by the CIA-Bush machine habitually includes a computer breakdown in the thick of the action, as the 1980 comment from William Loeb reminds us. In 2002, "a computer meltdown resulted in no release of data on Election Day. On Tuesday [November 2, 2004], new problems surfaced: a 2.5 hour data blackout and samples that at one point or another included too many women, too few Westerners, not enough Republicans and a lead for Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry in the national survey that persisted until late in the evening. In two instances on election night -- the results for Virginia and South Carolina -- the networks held off projecting a winner when voting ended because exit polls showed the races were too close to call, only to see President Bush win easily in both states," wrote one journalist. "Successive waves of the national exit poll in the afternoon and evening reported that Kerry had had a two or three-percentage point lead over Bush nationally and in several key states, including Ohio. Preliminary exit poll results had leaked throughout the day and were posted on a number of websites, including the widely viewed Drudge Report site, which added to the confusion and fanned the media frenzy."

Then came the indispensable computer breakdown, which is generally used as a cover to cook the existing data: "To compound the problem further, a server at Edison/Mitofsky malfunctioned shortly before 11 p.m. The glitch prevented access to any exit poll results until the technicians got a backup system operational at 1 :33 AM yesterday. The crash occurred barely minutes before the consortium was to update its exit polling with the results of later interviewing that found Bush with a one-point lead. Instead, journalists were left relying on preliminary exit poll results released at 8: 15 PM, which still showed Kerry ahead by three percentage points." (Washington Post, November 4, 2004) Bush was officially awarded Iowa on the Friday after the election. It had been too close to call, "but with Bush holding a 12,000-vote advantage, Iowa officials determined yesterday that there were not enough absentee votes for Kerry to overcome Bush's lead." (Washington Post, November 6, 2004)

OHIO OUTRAGES

Bush was saved by a "red shift" of about 3% to 5% in a number of key states between the exit polls and the reported results. These discrepancies, it should be noted, were always in favor of Bush, and never to his detriment. The red shift was attributable to vote fraud. A full analysis of vote fraud in the 2004 elections goes beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that Bush's forces used every known device to falsify the results of the elections. The mechanisms of vote fraud in the key battleground state of Ohio have been documented by Robert Fitrakis and his friends at http://www.freepress.org, and need not be repeated in detail here. A typical case of electronic vote fraud was the following:

The vote counting was marred in several places by computer glitches. The most serious appears to be in Ohio, which provided Bush with his decisive margin. Election officials in Franklin County, in the Columbus area, said yesterday that a computer error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct out of 638 votes cast, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told the Columbus Dispatch. It was not clear whether Ohio experienced any other problems with electronic ballots. About 30 percent of the voters in the state voted electronically. (Washington Post, November 6, 2004)

In Ohio, vote suppression had been meticulously prepared. Blackwell had seen to it that lists of registered voters had been purged of numerous Democratic voters just before the election, using the favorite GOP pretext that these black, Hispanic, and poor people were actually convicted felons. By the time many of those purged realized what had happened, it was too late for them to be reinstated. Blackwell outdid himself in inventing technical pretexts for rejecting new registrations, and for denying and disallowing absentee ballots for voters suspected of being Democrats. Newly registered Democratic voters received threatening letters informing them that their registrations were being challenged by the Republican Party. They could bring a lawyer and witnesses to their hearings, these letters ominously added. Phantom leaflets alleged that voting had been extended through Wednesday. Other leaflets announced that would-be voters who had unpaid parking tickets, unpaid child support payments, or overdue library books would be dragged from the polls and put in prison.

Imposters placed telephone calls to likely Democratic voters telling them that their polling places had been changed -- a fraud which was revealed in many cases only after would-be voters had waited for several hours in the rain to cast their ballots, and were told to start from scratch at their original polling places. Many polling places in black, Hispanic, and low-income areas opened late. When they did open, many of them had no pencils for paper ballots, and above all far fewer electronic voting machines than in previous years, since the Blackwell machine had arranged to transfer these voting machines to affluent Republican suburbs. The lack of voting machines resulted in long lines on a rainy day, and many of the frailer voters simply gave up. Many Republican employers threatened their hourly and other workers with firing if they tarried too long at the polls, and not a few. were actually fired. Innumerable votes were lost in this way.

In the days before the election, Blackwell had demanded for the Republican Party the right to place "challengers" inside each polling place. These anti-voter vigilantes were in effect racist and fascist goons whose function was to intimidate and eject likely Democratic voters, whose names were recorded on "caging lists." These challengers had been ruled illegal by the federal district court, but this decision had been overturned by the federal circuit court in the wee hours of election day morning. The US Supreme Court had refused to hear an appeal to this outrageous decision. The knowledge that GOP goons would be running wild in the polling places doubtless convinced many other citizens to stay home. In many polling places, black voters were automatically challenged by the GOP goons and therefore given a provisional paper ballot. The provisional ballot became a new form of second class citizenship, a new Jim Crow system for the 21st century.

There were reports of boxes of provisional ballots being loaded onto mysterious privately owned trucks without any official supervision and disappearing into the night. Hispanic voters were challenged to produce proof of citizenship, including forms of identification that were not prescribed by Ohio law. This made it much harder for Hispanics to cast a ballot. Those who did get to vote had to deal with touch-screen voting machines which did not generate a voter-verifiable paper trail. Many machines persistently registered votes for Bush despite repeated efforts to vote for Kerry or others. All across the US, electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold, Election Systems and Software, and Sequoia did yeoman service for the Bush campaign, falsifying countless votes. Bush was alleged to have won Ohio by 136,000 votes. When Kerry capitulated, over 155,000 provisional ballots and over 92,000 "spoiled" ballots, most of them from heavily Democratic polling places, had not been counted. All in all, it was a blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act, and a colossal constitutional crisis. But had not the neocon judge Scalia in December 2000 denied that US citizens had any constitutional right to vote?

The grim result of the Bush-Rove vote fraud and the capitulation of the Kerry campaign was yet another step towards domestic anarchy in the United States. The rogue networks of the invisible government were for the moment the masters of the situation. Bush was no president, but an illegitimate ruler a lawless usurper leading a rogue state, a bandit regime. The "political capital" which Bush claimed he had earned in his post-election press conference was counterfeit. His alleged mandate was as worthless as a rubber check.

After more or less successful coups in 1998 (impeachment), 1999 (bombing Serbia), 2000 (the stolen election), 2001 (the 9/11 attacks), 2002 (the illegal grant of war powers to Bush), 2003 (the Iraq war), and 2004 (another stolen presidential election), the invisible government was already planning its inevitable successor coup for 2005. One form which this may take is a further radical reduction in the powers of the Congress. Senator Frist of Tennessee, the Republican Majority Leader in the Senate, announced that the Democrats' practice of using the filibuster to prevent the confirmation of a handful of right-wing extremists to the federal appellate bench was intolerable, and must come to an end.

Frist's "nuclear option" was unilaterally to re-write the Senate rules by a coup de main, a power grab making a filibuster against judicial nominations impossible. Such a measure would reduce the Senate to a one-party fiefdom along the lines of the current House of Representatives, and weaken the Constitutional system of checks and balances by making it far more difficult for the Senate to check a president determined to put racists and fascists into the federal judiciary. The few Republican traditionalists were uneasy over this extremist proposal, and Democratic leaders threatened to paralyze the Senate with parliamentary obstructionism, but whether these forces could stop the Frist coup was not clear.

Naturally, the November 2004 coup could not have gone as smoothly as it did without the willingness of Senator Kerry to capitulate. For some, Kerry's refusal to contest manifest vote fraud was simply the consequence of his Skull & Bones pedigree. These observers imagine that Kerry received a call from Skull & Bones headquarters instructing him to throw in the towel, which he promptly did. The view here is rather that Kerry (and his wife) was an oligarchical specimen, somewhat above the average in intelligence for those circles, but unable to imagine anything other than oligarchical rule and oligarchical methods. The world of the foundations inhabited by Mrs. Kerry is in particular one of the decisive centers of oligarchical influence on American life, and there is every indication that the candidate felt at home here. It is thus Kerry's oligarchical mentality which predisposed him to surrender. Concerning the specific dynamics of the hoisting of the white flag on the day after the elections, Kerry appears to have been convinced to capitulate by Bob Shrum, who had wrecked the early phases of his campaign, and by Mary Beth Cahill, that the provisional ballots plus the absentee ballots in Ohio were not enough to surmount Bush's alleged lead.

Did Kerry have an alternative? He did: from the defeat of the Kapp putsch in Berlin in March 1920 to the defeat of the Aznar putsch in Madrid in March 2004, the successful model for resistance to an attempted coup d'etat by a clique of reactionaries has been an open-ended general strike by the labor movement, progressive political parties, students and youth, women's organizations, and their allies. This is what prevented Aznar from setting up a dictatorship in the wake of the Spanish train bombings.

In the United States in November 2004, this would have taken the form of a general strike in favor of constitutional government called out by the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO, environmentalists, women, progressives, students, and the like. The goal would have been to shut the country down until an accurate vote count had been carried out, which would unquestionably result in the defeat of Bush. Jesse Jackson proposed something along these lines to Gore in 2000, but the idea was refused. It is a rare oligarch who is willing to detonate mass action in the streets, and Kerry too proved no exception. As for the Democratic Party, it feared alienating its plutocratic financial backers far more than the loss of any single election, and was therefore structurally incapable of mass action. If Nader contributed nothing else, he contributed an apt characterization of the Democratic Party as gutless, spineless, feckless, and clueless.

The Democrats were even afraid of taking their stand on the US Constitution. Article XIV, passed by Congress on June 13, 1866 and ratified on July 9, 1868 in response to post-Confederate election chicanery against freedmen, included provisions precisely tailored to activities of the Bush machine in Ohio, Florida, and several other states. Here we read in Section 2:

But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

References to male voters in this amendment would of course be expanded to include all voters in the light of the XIX Amendment. Here was at least a minimal response to Bush's vote fraud coup: cut the basis of representation in the House and Senate in the vote fraud states, thereby diminishing the number of their electors in the Electoral College as well as in the two chambers.

THE 9/11 ISSUE WAS INDEED DECISIVE

Starting in November 2003, I had argued that the 9/11 issue would be the dominant one in the 2004 elections. This thesis recognized first of all that a party re-alignment was due in 2004 in which some new pattern of dominance in the Electoral College was likely to replace the post-1968 pattern of Republican hegemony based on the racist Southern Strategy developed by Kevin Phillips for Nixon. Such a party re-alignment would continue the pattern which has held true since the inception of the current US federal Constitution in 1788, and which has included similar re-alignments in 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932, as well as 1968. My point was that, if the 9/11 myth had been dismantled, the 2004 election would probably lead to a progressive party re-alignment. If, however, the 9/11 myth were to survive intact, there was an acute danger that the party realignment would produce some form of fascist rule. Unfortunately, this second variant may now be on its way to fulfillment, although it may still be too early to say.

For those seriously committed to defeating the 9/11 myth, the most promising approach was represented by the Independent International Truth Commission, modeled more or less on the Russell-Sartre Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal of 1966-67. The failure of the 9/11 truth movement to convene the IITC prior to November 2004 constituted the single most important defeat of the 9/11 truth movement -- a defeat which all the other successes of this movement were not sufficient to counterbalance. The IITC was the adequate forum to demolish the 9/11 myth among intellectuals and opinion leaders internationally as well as to erode it nationally in the US. Instead, the initiatives which were carried out succeeded only in the regional attrition of the myth within the US, which unfortunately turned out not to be enough.

The Bush campaign presented the 9/11 myth as a new compulsory pagan civic mystery cult of which their candidate was the high priest. Bush unwaveringly built his entire campaign on the demagogic ethos of 9/11 and its related chauvinistic and racist themes. 9/11 was evoked in the majority of the most widely used Bush-Cheney television ads. The entire Republican National Convention was organized around the 9/11 motif. 9/11 was conjured up by Bush, Cheney, and their surrogates in every speech. Bush spoke about 9/11 in the televised debates, and returned to stress 9/11 in his campaign crescendo at the end of October. 9/11 was Bush's chief alibi, his pretext, his escape clause; when Bush found that his back was to the wall, he invariably reached for 9/11. The weak and vacillating Kerry allowed Bush to use the 9/11 fiasco, in reality the moment of his greatest malfeasance, as a positive credential.

The veteran Democratic Party consultant (and habitual loser) Bob Shrum argued that, after 9/11, the American people would not tolerate divisive campaigning, and would only reward a positive and upbeat campaigner. Shrum therefore prohibited the obvious attack line against Bush -- that he was the Nero of 9/11, the man who fiddled or otherwise dithered while New York burned. This, Shrum held, would represent sacrilege to the 9/11 myth and the oligarchical consensus that stood behind it. Kerry allowed himself to be dominated by Shrum until after the Republican convention, when it was already too late. These events presaged Kerry's final surrender.

Even so, the 9/11 myth came under significant attack. Howard Dean noted in December 2003 that many thought the Bush administration knew about 9/11 in advance, and objected to the phony terror alert designed to step on Kerry's convention bounce. However, Kerry and Edwards failed to hold Bush systematically accountable for his passivity before 9/11, and for freezing that day.

Former Senator Bob Kerrey, himself a 9/11 commission member, announced some days after the vote that he no longer felt bound by the non-partisan pledge sworn by all the commissioners, and outlined how the 9/11 issue could in his opinion have been turned against Bush. In Kerrey's view, this could have been done by stressing Bush's inertia, passivity, and failure to act in any way in response to the many warnings the White House was receiving about the imminence of major attacks -- the Nero of 9/11 argument. This would have amounted to an attempt to spin the 9/11 story against Bush from within the confines of the myth, and it can be debated whether such a strategy would have proven effective, but Democratic candidate Kerry was not even capable of this. This approach was also illustrated in the cover story by Benjamin DeMott in the October 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine; here the 9/11 commission report a "whitewash," a "cheat and a fraud."

There's little mystery about why the Commission is tongue-tied. It can't call a liar a liar. The most momentous subject before the 9/11 commission was: What did President Bush know about the Al Qaeda threat to the United States, when did he know it, and if he knew little, why so?.. Facing his questioners in April 2004, the President said he had not been informed that terrorists were in this country. Conceivably it was at or near the moment when Bush took this position that the members of the Commission who heard him grasped that casting useful light on the relation between official conduct and national unpreparedness would be impossible. The reason? The President's claim was untrue. It was a lie, and the Commissioners realized that they couldn't allow it to be seen as a lie. Numberless officials had ... provided circumstantial detail about their attempts ... to educate Bush as candidate, then as president-elect, then as commander in chief, about the threat from terrorists on our shores. The news these officials brought was spelled out in pithy papers both short and long; the documentation supplied was in every respect impressive. Nevertheless, the chief executive, seated before the Commission, declared: Nobody told me. And challenging the chief executive as a liar entailed an unthinkable cost -- the possible rending of the nation's social and political fabric. (Harper's, October 2004)

DeMott reviewed the much-touted Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001, the gambit employed by Richard Clarke, which was declassified in April 2004 as a result of the fracas generated by the 9/11 commission hearings. This document, it will be remembered, was entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," and contained the notation that "the FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related." This is juxtaposed by DeMott with the 9/11 commission's summary of Bush's private testimony on this issue: "The President told us the August 6 report was historical in nature."

DeMott's article should have been used as a briefing paper for a series of attacks by Kerry which would have focused on Bush's evident failure as a leader during the days and weeks leading up to 9/11, when no extraordinary meetings were held, no cabinet officers tasked, no agency heads instructed, no inter-agency process established, and in short nothing done to respond to so many urgent warnings from "clandestine, foreign government, and media reports" about imminent terrorism. This could have been done without challenging the central features of the 9/11 myth itself; it would have relied on what the non-witting part of the government, in other words the various Colleen Rowleys, was reporting about the invisible government rogue networks.

In Apri1 2004, the Washington Post had carried a cartoon (repeated in "The Year in Cartoons" on December 19, 2004) which shows a tin man Cheney, a cowardly lion FBI, a scarecrow CIA, and a "Dorothy" Bush watching while a witch flies across the sky, tracing this message: "Surrender Dorothy! Or I'll fly planes into buildings. -- Osama." The FBI lion comments: "What's it mean?" 'It's too vague!" complains the CIA scarecrow. "Yeah ... and who is this 'Dorothy' character?" adds Bush. Seconded by the ever-scowling Miss Rice, Bush acted as if measures to foil the 9/11 plot were some kind of debutante cotillion which he would never dream of attending unless he had received an engraved invitation with his name calligraphically embossed upon it. That Kerry was incapable of even addressing this mass of empirical evidence of Bush's unfitness for office is a damning commentary on the Democratic challenger's lack of intellectual courage; granted, he owed his candidacy to Dean's immolation by the media on the 9/11 issue.

There would have been an adequate demographic base for an attack on the 9/11 myth. A Zogby International poll commissioned by Jimmy Walter in late August showed that just under 50% of New York City residents did not believe the official version, and thought the US had foreknowledge of the attacks; slightly fewer in New York state agreed.

A Pentagon flash animation on the Internet debunking the government contention that a Boeing 757-200 hit the Defense Department headquarters attracted a mass audience, forcing an article on this subject in the Washington Post. For the highbrow, BBC-2 television in October broadcast "The Power of Nightmares," a documentary which contended that al Qaeda simply does not exist, except as a "myth" and "dark illusion." This myth had been created by failed politicians whose slogans no longer work, and who were desperate to keep their power, this program argued. For the lowbrow, Howard Stern hosted spokesmen for the 9/11 truth movement and told his 13 million listeners that he did not believe a commercial airliner hit the Pentagon; a cruise missile, he said, was a far more plausible explanation.

To this must be added the collective impact of scores of websites, plus conferences in Berlin, Lucerne, San Francisco, and Toronto, -- all multiplied through innumerable Internet radios, alternative television, videocassettes, DVDs, books, blogs and streaming web postings. The September 11 rally at Manhattan Center in New York City was advertised in the main newspapers of the metropolitan area, and was attended by some 1,300 people. The Los Angeles Citizens' Grand Jury, which met at the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall on October 24, was a people's initiative in which ordinary citizens went far beyond the unanswered questions to roundly condemn several key features of the official myth as physically impossible, while specifying that a rogue network inside the US government were the prime suspects in the case.

Towards the end of October, one hundred left liberal notables and 9/11 researchers including Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Ralph Nader, and Howard Zinn demanded the re-opening of the 9/11 investigation and petitioned New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to undertake this task. But, like all purely legal tactics, the Spitzer complaint ceded the initiative and the timetable to the lawyers, rather than keeping politics in command. Whatever chances this tactic may have had were sharply diminished when Spitzer announced that he was running for governor of New York State; Spitzer was hardly likely to compromise his gubernatorial prospects by becoming the Jim Garrison of the 9/11 cover-up scandal. It is also worth noting that Ralph Nader, in the several C-SPAN press conferences this writer was able to monitor, never brought up 9/11 as one of his core issues, and in fact almost never mentioned 9/11 at all.

The 9/11 truth movement was hobbled by those who persisted in making the "unanswered questions" theme their central issue. One could imagine that, come judgment day, when Gabriel sounds his horn to announce the resurrection, some misguided activists will jump out of their graves to repeat their still unanswered questions. Three years and more after 9/11, it was time to develop some answers.

Another weakness of the 9/11 truth movement was the tendency of some to rely on bereaved family members for their moral and political authority. The 9/11 families represented a broad spectrum; some were models of irenic humanitarianism in the quest for world peace and atonement. Others appeared to be xenophobes and even racists. Some supported Kerry, some supported Bush. One group, obsessed with what it called "intelligence reform," agitated above all to enact the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, some of which amounted to Patriot Act II on the installment plan, and all of which left the actual September criminals untouched. It was in any case a tragic waste to devote the two or three hours the 9/11 truth movement had on C-SPAN to pointless testimonials by family members. For those seriously committed to defeating the 9/11 myth, the only road remained the Independent International Truth Commission.

For the moment, the CIA-Bush machine may appear to have jammed a crowbar into the wheels of history. But it is also worth recalling that the 36-year cycles are only approximations which have held true since the aftermath of the Civil War; in earlier years we can observe a 40-year cycle (1788-1828) and a 32 year cycle (1828-1860). This means that while some profound change in the ruling regime is now unquestionably overdue, this cannot be calculated with chronometric precision. The 1788-1828 cycle almost ended in 1824, when a disputed election thrown into the House of Representatives ended with the victory of John Quincy Adams, with the backing of Henry Clay, over Andrew Jackson. This outcome had the positive effect of prolonging the first 36-year cycle for four more years under Adams, before the disasters of the Jackson presidency. Something of this sort may have happened in 2004 to produce Bush's second term, but in a disastrous and negative key.

There is of course also the more sinister possibility that the long-running era of US constitutional government is simply coming to its natural or unnatural end, and that the Bush cold coup of 2004 is a harbinger of that grim fact. And indeed, the general tendency of the recent machinations of the US shadow government appears as the incessant weakening of the US power base of empire -- as a result of foolhardy actions which are supposed to be shoring it up.

Of course, it is only in the world of cable television schizophrenic make-believe that George Bush has been re-elected as president of the United States. Bush is a legitimate president only in the eyes of those well-paid commentators who spent the days after the election inventing fantastic stories about the triumph of moral values (in the person of the alcohol and cocaine-ravaged George W. Bush!) as the true key to the 2004 election. In the real world Bush was defeated by virtue of majority opposition in the country to his misrule, and that majority opposition, although demoralized and disoriented by Kerry's craven capitulation, can only remain and grow.

Normally a failed politician like Bush would have departed after one term, as his notorious father did, taking with him all the hatred, resentment, scandals, and vendettas of a wretched first term. In particular, the rustication of Bush to Crawford, Texas, would have tended to defuse such latent scandals as the exposure of Valerie Plame, the traducing of US state secrets to neocon darling Ahmed Chalabi, the counterfeiting of the Niger yellowcake documents, and the Israeli mole in the Pentagon. As it is, all these scandals, like the Watergate break-in of 1972, remain to haunt the second Bush term. And to these must be added the far greater scandals first of the 9/11 attacks themselves, and now of the massive vote fraud of 2004. Here is a mass of scandal material more than sufficient to blow Bush II into interplanetary space.

But now G. W. Bush wants to prolong his hold on the White House for four more years. The conflicts which were suppressed by voter intimidation and vote fraud are still boiling in the cauldron of a US society tormented by war and depression, and these conflicts will necessarily find ways to explode in Bush's face. One way that this may happen is through conflict inside the Republican Party. In the weeks before the election I had argued that the Republicans might not survive relegation to the opposition. This was true enough, but it now would appear that they may not be able to survive their current monopoly of the entire US federal government either. Since the GOP dominates the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches, we can expect that conflicts in the broader society will also take the form of conflicts within the Republican Party. The rush to the exits of Powell, Ashcroft, Ridge, and other cabinet secretaries in the weeks after the election was not a good omen for Bush. Then Bush attempted to nominate former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, a stooge and creature of Rudolph Giuliani, to be the new Secretary of Homeland Security. The result was an avalanche of derogatory revelations about Kerik which speedily terminated his candidacy.

Then, in the wake of a question from a soldier about the failure of the Pentagon to provide armored vehicles for the troops in Iraq, there followed a wave of vehement attacks against Rumsfeld. This time the glib rhetoric of the Pentagon boss was not effective. Republican senators like McCain, Hagel, and others proclaimed they had no confidence in the Defense Secretary. William Kristol joined the yelping pack to call for Rumsfeld's ouster, showing that there is no loyalty among neocons (or at least no loyalty to one who is not a professed disciple of Leo Strauss).

All of this took place before Bush's second term had even begun. Eisenhower's second term was marred by the scandal of White House chief of staff Sherman Adams and his vicuna coats. Nixon's second term was cut short by the Watergate affair. Reagan could easily have been impeached over the Iran-Contra affair of his second term, had Lee Hamilton not been on the scene to protect the invisible government. Clinton was of course impeached in his second term, although over trifles in comparison to what is hanging around Bush's neck. There is therefore good reason to see Bush as vulnerable to second-term problems of much greater magnitude.

This will no doubt be exacerbated by Bush's characteristic megalomania; his announced determination is to privatize the Social Security system. Wall Street financiers know that, in addition to the problems generated by the weakness of the dollar, they also face a demographic problem: by about 2007, the first cohorts of the postwar baby boom generation will begin to retire. At this point they will stop being net buyers of stocks and mutual funds, and will become net sellers of those instruments. This means that the current updraft in the stock market will be replaced by a powerful downdraft, potentially leading to a crash. The finance oligarchs have therefore been concerned to find a way to pump US government funds directly into the stock market, in the hopes of maintaining the bloated speculative prices that still prevail. Their preferred solution is to batten on to the Social Security payroll tax for that purpose. This amounts to the destruction of the last surviving component of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal. Bush may well find that his efforts to loot Social Security for the benefit of the Wall Street financiers will unleash forms of social and political resistance which it will be difficult for him to withstand.

[admin]

PART 2 OF 2 (AFTERWORD CONT'D.)

IRAQ AND PALESTINE: THE FUTILITY OF IMPERIALISM

Soon after Bush's vote fraud operation, the US moved with sickening predictability to crush the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah. After an immense slaughter of civilians, the US command announced that it had "broken the back" of the Iraqi resistance. The US propaganda machine had been at great pains to build up a certain Zarkawi as the leader of the Iraqi resistance, and there was every reason to believe that Zarkawi, to the extent that he exists at all, was run by the US as a countergang to the coalition forces. Notably, during the same week in October when BBC 2 was broadcasting its documentary entitled "The Power of Nightmares," which advanced philosophical doubts about the existence of bin Laden and his band in the real world, Zarkawi felt moved to rush to the defense of bin Laden's credibility by proclaiming his own eternal loyalty to the erratic Saudi sheikh -- which only confirmed that both bin Laden and the phantomatic Zarkawi, around whom the strangest rumors swirl, are CIA/MI-6 projects from beginning to end.

In reality, the US forces had only succeeded in shifting the main theater of resistance combat northward to Mosul. The death of Arafat during the same period underlined that the US occupation of Iraq was now just as bankrupt as the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. In both cases, the foreign occupation of sovereign Arab territory is the cause of the resistance; the only way to end hostilities is to end the foreign occupation, which becomes more odious to the victim population with each successive month.

In the case of the Palestinian territories, the general outlines for peace are doubtless those of the Yasser Abed Rabbo Yossi Beilin Geneva accord of November 2003: all Israeli settlements must be removed from the occupied territories, and a Palestinian state must be erected in the West Bank and Gaza as a sovereign state, not a glorified Bantustan. The Israeli wall might be legitimate, but only on Israeli land, if it follows the internationally recognized line of demarcation. The Palestinian right of return must apply only to the new Palestinian state, and not to Israel. Israeli settlers and Palestinian refugees ought of course to be indemnified, and here is one area where the United States and the European Union could contribute. The Palestinian state must extend security guarantees to Israel, and to be effective, these must not be undermined by false-flag synthetic terror. One Italian philosopher, Enrico Nuzzo of Salerno, has suggested that both Israel and Palestine could become members of the European Union, a proposal which would facilitate economic reconstruction and development. In one way or another, a comprehensive Marshall Plan for the underdeveloped and war-torn states of the entire Middle East should be provided, under non-monetarist auspices.

The mindless Bush regime never tires of repeating the mantra of "finish the job" and "a democratic Iraq." Here again, it is the US occupation which is radicalizing the situation by eliciting a national resistance. Peace can come only after the occupation is ended. The situation of the hapless US forces in the country could soon become extraordinarily critical, leading to their concentration in a few enclaves in the desert supplied from the air. Iraq would appear to be converging on something like the famous Sicilian vespers of 1282, when a spontaneous general mass uprising, triggered by an insult to a Sicilian lady leaving a church service, suddenly drove the French occupying forces of Charles of Anjou out of that Mediterranean island.

THE DEATH AGONY OF THE DOLLAR SYSTEM

In November 2004, the US dollar collapsed to a level of $1.35 to the euro. Exchange bureaus in Europe were selling euros for $1.45, as American tourists howled. It looked like the beginning of a new world monetary crisis, for the first time since 1973. The immediate trigger was a comment from Greenspan, attending a finance conference, to the effect that the US current account deficit was unsustainable because foreigners could not be counted on to keep buying dollar-denominated assets. Soon the Russian and Indonesian central banks signaled that they were continuing to diversify out of the dollar, and it became clear that the Chinese central bank was doing the same thing.

Although the euro had been gaining ground fast of late, two thirds of world central bank reserves were still kept in dollars, for a value of $2.3 trillion. At stake was the absurd and obsolete role of the dollar as the sole reserve currency of the world, a role which has become increasingly untenable since the emergence of a solvent rival currency in the form of the euro. The US was by far the world's largest debtor nation, with almost $3.3 trillion in net foreign liabilities.

The inherent instability in the dollar system was that the dollar was the reserve currency while the US was also the biggest debtor on the planet, and things were getting worse fast. According to the OECD Economic Outlook, the US current account deficit was on track to rise to $825 billion per year (or 6.4% of GD P) by 2006, approximately the mid-point in Bush's second term.

By 2008, when Bush is getting ready to head for the last roundup, the US current account deficit would likely rise to 8% of GDP per year. But, as the gnomes of the City of London pointed out, the breaking point will be reached well before that. The dollar, in their view, was headed for a $1.80 to the euro exchange rate in the near future. That would then pose a problem for the holders of some $11 trillion in dollar-denominated assets, the largest single category of the world's "wealth." If the dollar were to begin an even more dramatic slide, they would be motivated to run for the exits, dumping their dollar assets and sinking the greenback. That would blowout the US housing bubble causing a "deep recession," the polite term for a world economic breakdown crisis. Fear of this is mainly what is keeping many central bankers from selling off their dollars right now; this is what Larry Summers, Clinton's Treasury Secretary (now president of Harvard) has called "the balance of financial terror." (London Economist, December 4, 2004) In other words, a dollar devaluation of the most serious type is now inevitable, and may bring down what passes for a world monetary system. How much of that $11 trillion in dollar-denominated paper will survive? Will it be 40%? Or 25%? Or less? In any case, the amount of wealth in the world is going to turn out to be much less than is currently thought, because so much of that $11 trillion will shortly be exposed as purely fictitious capital.

The dollar's reserve currency status is the true heart of US international arrogance. As Simon Nixon commented, the privileged status of the dollar gives the US "the freedom to keep printing dollars without sparking inflation, enabling it to fund wars, giant trade deficits, government spending programs and tax cuts." The US is thus bereft of an economic reality principle. The really decisive issue is when a major oil producer will stop accepting dollars. Nixon notes that the British pound's half-life as a reserve currency after World War II ended when Saudi Arabia stopped taking pounds. Today, when it comes to the dollar, "even the Saudis are wavering ... If the oil producers turn their back on the dollar, the ramifications for the global economy will be immense. ...[b ]oth oil exporters and importers would switch a significant proportion of their reserves into euros, thus triggering a stampede out of the dollar into euros." Another "danger is that if Asian central banks do stop buying dollars, the result will be a devastating collapse of the US currency." The US therefore faces "a challenge to their economic hegemony." (London Spectator, October 18, 2003; Philadelphia Trumpet, February 2004) During 2004, there has already been a net outflow from the US of long-term foreign investment.

Perhaps the neocons will goad Saudi Arabia or Russia into taking the plunge. Putin and Schroder discussed how the EU could buy oil from Russia with euros in early October, 2003. That news "set off a chain reaction in the private sector, leading to a fourfold increase in euro deposits in Russian banks this year and sending Russian citizens scrambling to change their stashes of greenbacks into euro notes." (Daily Telegraph, October 10, 2003; Philadelphia Trumpet, February 2004) The solution to the world monetary crisis was a new Bretton Woods system among euro, yen, and dollar, with fixed parities set by participating governments, the comprehensive re-regulation of financial markets, and a mechanism for international clearing and gold settlement to prevent any participant from running chronic deficits in the way the Anglo-Americans customarily had. Most important, the new Bretton Woods had to be a monetary system explicitly geared to the fullest scientific, technological, and economic development of the third world, with rising living standards, longevity, and energy throughput for humanity as a whole.

THE NEW COLD WAR WITH RUSSIA

This book differs from all studies of 9/11 which have been examined so far in the importance it gives to the US-Russian nuclear forces relation as the framework in which the 9/11 criminal attacks must be understood. This book proceeds from an intelligence and counterintelligence picture of explosive US-Russian military, political, and terrorist tensions which have been masked to some extent by the charade of friendship which Bush and Putin have practiced in public. The view here is that on 9/11 Putin, seeing the hegemony of the invisible government lunatics in Washington and London, decided to adopt a policy of war avoidance through broad concessions to the US at many levels, including central Asia.

Putin could see that the neocon war plans for the Middle East would exhaust, weaken, and disperse US forces, while Russia might become stronger over the same months and years. In the service of this policy, Putin was prepared silently to swallow many a bitter affront and injury. To this extent, the relation between Bush and Putin may be seen in the light of the Hitler-Stalin relationship of September 1939-June 1941. This analogy is suggestive, but we should not follow it into every detail. We must also remember, as General Suvorov's "icebreaker" thesis specifies, that Stalin was preparing his own attack on Hitler, Operation Thunder, for early July 1941. Hitler, with his smaller forces, was able to strike first, in effect beating Stalin to the draw. This is the kind of unstable relation that now obtains between the world's two great nuclear powers. And there should be no doubt that, if Russia can destroy the US superpower, as it most assuredly can, then it is a sophistry to deny that Russia emphatically qualifies as a superpower too. Scenarios have suddenly become plausible which lead to general thermonuclear war.

The future being prepared for Russia by the neocons became clear shortly after Putin assumed power. Shortly before 9/11 Jeffrey Tayler wrote a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly ("Russia is Finished") in which he developed an apocalyptic perspective for the Eurasian giant:

Internal contradictions in Russia's thousand-year history have destined it to shrink demographically, weaken economically, and possibly disintegrate territorially. The drama is coming to a close, and within a few decades Russia will concern the rest of the world no more than any Third World country with abundant resources, an impoverished people, and a corrupt government. In short, as a Great Power, Russia is finished. (Atlantic, May 2001)

Note well: "internal contradictions." Cultural determinism, and not the IMF, not the great criminal revolution of shock therapy, not Jeffrey Sachs, not Anders Aslund, not the US-UK oil cartel's campaign to loot the oil of Siberia, not US UK support for Chechen and other terrorists.

In this contest, Putin has the decisive merit of simply wanting to defend his country from the Anglo-Americans. As the Beslan school massacre showed, Putin was also the victim of Anglo-American terrorism. Putin has shown great restraint in not reacting to US-UK provocations, like the Kursk incident and others. Putin has also been right: the neocons have substantially weakened the US military position in the world. Putin has also been correct in thinking that a few years might give Russia some important strategic trump cards useful for facing down the self-styled Anglo-American neocon supermen. This was illustrated on November 18, 2004, when Putin announced that Russia possessed a new and advanced strategic nuclear missile unlike any held by any other country.

Some speculated that this was a mobile third generation version of the Topol M missile, known to NATO as the SS-27. Others thought Putin was referring to the Bulava submarine launched long-range ballistic missile. Whichever it was, it appeared that this new Russian missile had capabilities which would allow it to defeat any US strategic anti-missile defense over the relevant historical future. Putin stressed that foreign countries would not be able to match his new missile for a very long time. Russia appeared to be ahead of the US in a number of key strategic departments; it appeared that Putin had chosen to generously support certain key areas of weapons development which might give him a critical advantage over the Anglo-Saxons if confrontation were to loom.

Another example of this was the SS-N-22 Sunburn, called Moskit in Russian, a supersonic cruise missile which could fly as fast as Mach 3 and as low as nine feet above the surface of the water. This formidable weapon had clearly been conceived for the purpose of destroying US aircraft carriers, and it was said to have been sold to China (and to Iran, according to some unconfirmed reports). Russia's nuclear deterrent was not just alive and well, it was extremely robust.

Why Putin had chosen November 18 to make this momentous announcement became clearer on Sunday, November 21, when the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) attempted a "people power" coup in Ukraine. The cynical propaganda technicians of Connecticut Avenue had orchestrated a mass movement of street mobs around the presidential candidacy of former prime minister Yushchenko, whose main attraction for them was his pledge to lead Ukraine into full membership in NATO. The candidacy of current Prime Minister Yanukovych had received explicit support from Putin.

The Yushchenko supporters were using the playbook developed by the NED in toppling Milosevic in Serbia in 2000; the same methods had also been successful in ousting the pro-Moscow Eduard Shevardnadze in the "revolution of roses" in Georgia in the first days of 2004. (In Belarus, a similar attempt had been beaten back.) The Yushchenko forces styled themselves as the orange revolution, and blocked the streets of Kiev, claiming that the apparent election victory by Yanukovych represented vote fraud. Many were sincerely interested in democratic reform, but this did not make them any less dupes of the perception-mongers from Washington. The street mobs were able to secure the rejection of the election results by the supreme court, and the calling of a new election for several weeks later.

Much of the operation had been conduited through Poland by the Brzezinski family clique; in addition to Zbigniew, the prophet of 9/11 and the man responsible for the 1979-1988 Afghan War and thus for the emergence of bin Laden & Co., there was now also his nepotistic son Mark, a veteran of the Clinton NSC. Zbigniew was notorious as a hysterical Russophobe and nostalgic of the petty Polish nobility, or szlachta. Both Brzezinskis were giving media interviews around the clock during the first days of the Ukraine crisis, and it may have been in their service that Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland, made bold to offer his services in Ukraine as a mediator.

Support for Yanukovych was strong in the industrialized cities in the eastern Ukraine, where much of the population were ethnic Russians. Yushchenko's own political fiefdom was an economic wasteland. Fascist skinheads could be seen among Yushchenko's orange legions, but western commentators were willing to count them as democratic because they were anti-Russian. When Yanukovych's victory was abrogated in the courts, officials in the eastern Ukraine began to talk about home rule, and then about secession. If secession were tried, would anyone try to prevent it by force? Would Russia intervene on the side of the secessionists? Would Poland, now a NATO power, intervene against Russia? Would the US and the rest of NATO then be drawn into the worst of all insane adventures? Putin had some sharp exchanges with EU foreign affairs spokesmen, since many Europeans had foolishly allowed themselves to be taken in by the orange carnival. However, German Chancellor Schroder seemed to have some understanding of the farce in Kiev, and his planned summit with Putin was successfully held in Schleswigjust before Christmas, although the crucial step of adopting the euro for paying the EU's oil bills was apparently not taken.

Needless to say, Ukraine is the royal road taken by every invader of Russia, from Napoleon to Hitler. Tampering with Ukraine is a recipe for triggering the instinctive defense of Russia, which is still a powerful instinct in most Russians. What possible American interest could be served by extending NATO all the way to the Crimea? In the meantime, this book's view of the world strategic context had been decisively validated. Putin underlined this with his wry Christmas present to the Anglo-Americans, which was the nationalization of the huge Yukos oil company, whose former boss, the oligarch Khodorkovsky, remained in jail. Putin's move was seen as a prelude to the large-scale roll-back of the widespread illegal nomenklatura privatizations of Soviet state property under Yeltsin's pro-IMF regime in the early 1990s.

The Bush regime won yet another Oscar for international hypocrisy in regard to the Ukrainian situation. Bush had just stolen another term in office thanks to a vote fraud of pharaonic proportions. But while he savored vote fraud in Ohio and Florida, he claimed to find it intolerable in Kiev. The same was true of the farcical European Union election observers, who had been invited in by the US State Department under the auspice of the Helsinki accords and the OSCE. They were blind to vote fraud in Columbus, but eagle-eyed in Kiev. (The same crew proposed to validate the bloody grand guignol of US-backed elections in Iraq -- but only from the safety of Jordan!)

US strategy had been concerned with isolating, impoverishing, and destabilizing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, its successor states, and its alliances for a long time. In 1989-90, the NATO coalition had succeeded in dismantling its long-time adversary, the Warsaw Pact. With the fall of the communist regimes in eastern Europe, the Soviet-led economic bloc, the Comecon or CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), also fell apart. The Soviet Union itself had needlessly been driven into extinction in December 1991. In 2004, it became increasingly evident that Anglo-American policy aimed at breaking up the Russian Federation, the old RSFSR, itself. The overarching goal here was absolute and uncontested Anglo-American world domination, to be obtained by completing the Balkanization of Russia as a great power. The Russian strategic arsenal would be removed or at least divided somewhere along the way. An included feature of this geopolitical quest was of course Russia's status as the world's second largest oil exporter.

The great development of 2003 was the re-emergence, after a century of futile and fratricidal conflict, of the continental bloc of France, Germany, and Russia, the main alternative to bankrupt Anglo-American world domination. In 2002 Germany had provided leadership for this bloc with Schroder's steadfast rejection of the neocon Iraq aggression. In 2003 Chirac and Villepin had taken over the lead, also with regard to Iraq. In 2004, Putin had challenged the Anglo-Americans over their sponsorship of terrorism and hostile intent.

The last days of 2004 were a somber time. There was much consternation across the world because of the prospect of four more years of Bush. There is a considerable body of evidence that the modern territorial national state is becoming obsolete and may need to be replaced. But it may not yet be conclusive.

If we recall Machiavelli's three moments of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy ( corresponding to the ontological categories of the one, the few, and the many, which will always be with us), then we must note that all attempts to go beyond the national state (the United Nations, the European Union) have been conducted on an oligarchical basis, and thus contain strong tendencies which are antithetical to human progress and to the overcoming of the current world crisis. The main problem of oligarchy is its mediocrity and inertia, the latter being especially stubborn because change requires convincing so many different oligarchs to cooperate. The prevalent oligarchy needs to be balanced by a strong executive, in effect a world president. This was the genius of the new monarchy of early modern Europe, in which kings like Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England allied with their respective bourgeoisies to terminate the abuses of the feudal aristocracy.

Given the profoundly oligarchical nature of the current world, it is much to be feared that any world government institutions which might be created in the foreseeable future would be even more vitiated by oligarchy than the existing ones. The problem facing advocates of world government is to chart a course for arriving at a unified world executive, an extremely touchy matter for many obvious reasons. If it could be done peacefully, a future world federal state might supercede the current United Nations in the same way the US federal Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation, which had an oligarchical congress but no executive to check them. But, given the power of the neocon warmonger clique in today's world, it appears dilatory and utopian to even speculate on such possibilities. It is unfortunately more likely that world government will be attained, if it ever is, as a result of a new and cataclysmic world war in which entire national states, weakened by the globalization depression, will disappear as readily as royal dynasties did at the end of World War I.

We are living in the twilight of the Anglo-American world order, a system of planetary domination by the Whig financier faction since just after 1700. This system had certain positive features, but it has now become a barrier to human progress, and it is past time for it to exit the world scene:

The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
-- Tennyson

By some reckonings, we now stand at the beginning of a new fascist era. If that night must come, let it at least have the vivid clarity and sharpness of a polar night, not clouded by the fog of myth and lies.

W.G.T.
December 23, 2004

[admin]

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