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

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:20 am

PART 1 OF 3

CHAPTER I: THE MYTH OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connection to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, “just to keep the people frightened.”
-- Orwell, 1984, 127.


With the publication of the Report of the Commission to Investigate Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (also known as the Kean-Hamilton Commission after its chairman and vice- chairman), the pattern of coverup and incompetence on the part of the officially constituted investigative agencies of the United States Government is complete. Since September 11, 2001, no part of the United States Government has offered a convincing, coherent, complete explanation of the events of that day, and of other events related to them. Indeed, no US government agency has ever so much as proposed to prove the truth of the official account, even in the way that the Warren Commission attempted to demonstrate the veracity of its version of the Kennedy assassination.

The Kean-Hamilton Commission called no hostile witnesses, no skeptics, no devil’s advocates. It ignored a growing number of book-length studies which have appeared in English, French, German, and other languages around the world. It never invited to its plenum FBI whistle-blowers like Colleen Rowley (who shared Time Magazine’s Person of the Year honors at the end of 2002), nor did it call FBI agent Kenneth Williams, the author of the famous Phoenix memo, to testify in its plenary meetings. The Commission was, by contrast, happy to invite the obsessive anti-Iraq ideologue Laurie Mylroie, a fanatic so notorious that she is dismissed with contempt as “totally discredited” even by Richard Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies. (Clarke 232) As we will show at various points in this study, the Kean-Hamilton Commission represents a cynical and meticulously orchestrated exercise in coverup and obfuscation. The net overall result of the Kean-Hamilton Commission has been to obscure even those few relevant facts which had become well established in the mainstream media prior to its inception.

Before the Kean-Hamilton Commission, the chronology of events regarding the interplay among the Federal Aeronautics Administration (FAA), the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and other government agencies had been fairly well established by the 9/11 truth movement. The deliberately doctored chronologies offered by the Kean-Hamilton staff have turned that clear picture into chaos. Before the Kean- Hamilton operation went to work, there was an important debate about whether phone calls received at the White House on the morning of September 11 had indicated that unauthorized persons were in possession of top-secret US government code words. The Kean-Hamilton Commission has now assured us that this crucial incident in effect never happened. Before Kean-Hamilton, Congressional Committees and the National Institute of Standards and Technology had been forced to grapple in public with the blatant anomalies of three modern steel skyscrapers collapsing on the same day as the result of fire – something that has happened on no other day of world history. For the Kean- Hamilton Commission, this problem simply does not exist – it has disappeared from the official narrative. No account has been taken of critical or skeptical commentaries, even when these have been the centerpieces of books which have reached the top of the best- seller charts in important countries like France, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere, or have been telecast in prime time in these same places. The demands of the bereaved families of 9/11 have been ignored – even though it was because of the persistent lobbying of these families that the Kean-Hamilton Commission ever came into being in the first place. A cruel hoax has been practiced on these families, and those who thought that an attempt to cooperate in good faith with the Kean-Hamilton Commission to guide it toward the truth have received a bitter disappointment. The Kean-Hamilton Commission in short has shown no decent respect for the opinions of mankind, and has submitted no important facts to a candid world.

The Kean-Hamilton Commission has turned out to be nothing more than a colossal exercise in begging the question. Everything that was controversial, everything that was dubious in the eyes of billions around the world has been simply assumed to be true and posited as the starting point for the entire inquiry. As a fallacy this has been around since the medieval schoolmen, who called it petitio principii. In the hands of the Kean- Hamilton Commission, begging the question is meant to work as an arrogant, bureaucratic act of superior power. Believe this, said the Inquisition, or be damned. Believe this, says the Kean-Hamilton Commission, or be vilified as a paranoid obsessed with conspiracies. Thus, when the 9/11 commission was created, it formed nine investigative teams. The first of these was entitled: “Al Qaeda and the Organization of the 9/11 Attack.” That is a clear case of rush to judgment and jumping to conclusions, since such a finding should be the end result of an inquiry, and not its starting point.

For the Kean-Hamilton Commission is not a contribution to scholarly debate. It is just as much a part of the US government’s assault on the world as an F-16 bombing Fallujah. For the Kean- Hamilton Commission is an act of ideological terrorism worthy of Senator Joe McCarthy. Behind it stands the taboo proclaimed by the figurehead of the regime:

We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty. (UN General Assembly, November 10, 2001)


It is a point of view at variance with the best moments in American history, as we intend to show. But no amount of bureaucratic arrogance has been able to paper over the manifold absurdities, the contradictions, the impossibilities, the outrageous flaws that infest the official version of the 9/11 events. The Kean-Hamilton Commission simply has no answer for questions about how the alleged hijackers were identified, how they were able to operate, why WTC Building 7 collapsed, why air defense was non-existent, what hit the Pentagon, what happened over Shanksville, what happened to the insider trading, and many more. For any serious, intelligent person – and there are many – the Kean- Hamilton pastiche can only be rejected.

The failure of the Kean-Hamilton Commission leaves the world with the imbecilic myth: the four airliners were hijacked by nineteen Arabs, from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait. Their squad leaders were Atta, Shehhi, Hanjour, and Jarrah. Their “mastermind” was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Their rear echelon was Ramzi Binalshib. Their guru was Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist pope who lives in a cave. From his distant grotto in the mountains of Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden, the diabolical genius of the twenty-first century, directed the worldwide network that attacked the United States.

THE SEPTEMBER CRIMINALS ARE STILL AT LARGE

At a deeper level, closer to the heart of the matter, the Kean-Hamilton has failed to indict the real September criminals. It leaves untouched the network of moles in the US government without whose efforts, both in preparation and in coverup, the events of 9/11 could never have happened. It has not identified the clandestine command center which directed the operation. It has taken not one step towards locating the technocrats of death who actually had the physical and technical capability to make these events happen, in contrast to the supermarket-caliber terrorists who are supposed to have caused them. All of these networks remain in place, and remain anxious to avoid detection. The September criminals and their project, the clash of civilizations in the form of a new Thirty Years War, remain at large, their desperation magnified, but their power undiminished. Think of this when you hear the strident clatter of the Bush regime as it warns the public that a new wave of terror attacks, quite possibly using weapons of mass destruction of the atomic, bacteriological and chemical varieties, is inevitable before the November 2004 elections. The government has failed us, and the Kean-Hamilton Commission has failed us, before, during and after 9/11. The September criminals remain in place, with every intention of striking again, then to take cover behind the shield of martial law.

We are opposed to terrorism. We seek to prevent a new wave of terrorism. We want to identify the September criminals and bring them to justice, because no one has laid a glove on them so far. We have no illusions about the psychotic Arab patsies whose antics are being used to cover up what was in reality a coup d’etat made in the USA, a coup d’etat not against Bush but in favor of a specific policy, that of the clash of civilizations. We condemn terrorism because terrorism is the means used by oligarchs to wage secret war against the people. But the terrorism we fight is the real terrorism of the real world, not the idiotic distortions dished up by the regime and the media.

The official 9/11 account has by now taken on all the characteristics of a myth. In the minds of many, credulousness in regard to the myth has taken on the overtones of religious sanctity. It has taken root deeply in the dark places of the American mind. The myth is a sensitive subject, hedged round with powerful reaction formations and fearful taboos. Challenge these and the subject will often respond with irrational anger and indignation. Nevertheless, the fact remains: the official version has never been proved. It is an unproven assertion, and in the end a myth. Attempts to base an entire world order on unproven assertions and lies did not fare well in the twentieth century: the war guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, which assigned exclusive responsibility for the war to Germany and her allies, while completely exonerating the Allies, was intended as a means to extort some 55 billion gold dollars in reparations. But it turned out to be the key to Hitler’s successful demagogy, and generally one of the main causes for fascism, Nazism, and World War II. Let us not build our political house on unproven assertions. Indeed, we should recall that it was the Nazis themselves who avidly embraced myth as the basis for politics: the official chief ideologist of the Nazi movement was Alfred Rosenberg, and his famous work was The Myth of the Twentieth Century. The story of Osama in the distant cave is already the myth of the twenty-first century.

Because of the events of 9/11, the regime proclaims, the world as we knew it has disappeared. We are confronted with a new world of preventive and pre-emptive war, of first use of nuclear weapons, of unilateral aggression, of barbarian racism and hatred, of the glorification of violence and killing, of force and the threat of force. Yet before we go willingly into this monstrous new world, it is our right to demand that the events of 9/11 – precisely because they are said to have caused all this – be more thoroughly examined. Before we accept the neocon death warrant for civilization, culture, and every human value, we demand the right of an appeal to the court of reason.

That project will be undertaken in this book. We will draw on the extensive research completed by the 9/11 truth movement during the time since that catastrophic day. Specific indebtedness and especially meritorious works will be acknowledged in the text, or in the footnotes. Participants in the 9/11 truth movement have almost always been private citizens, more or less isolated, more or less bereft of means, but nevertheless determined to seek the truth. The researchers, writers, scientists, historians, websites, and activists of the 9/11 truth movement have upheld the values of universal intellect – la république des lettres – as these were spurned by the mass media, the US government, and most academics. They have produced what can now be seen as a coherent body of work which is readily accessible to anyone who wants to learn. This field is no more free from aberrant theories, petty squabbles, and crank positions than any other, and not everything can be taken for pure gold, but the difference between this honest research and the corrupt, controlled corporate media and official pronouncements is as day and night. The 9/11 truth movement is a work in progress which has already accomplished much, and which now awaits wider discussion and the further refinement which that greater exposure will undoubtedly bring.

We urge you to grapple with the issues presented in this book. This is important because of the imminent threat of new terrorist attacks, organized in large part by the original September criminals. It is important also because this is a time of aggravated world economic, political, and strategic crisis, wars, depression, and breakdown crisis, as we will have occasion briefly to show as part of our explanation of why the 9/11 attacks happened. We must also be aware of the underlying long waves of American history. As we will outline towards the end of this book, the 2004 election has completed a fateful cycle of that history – the pattern of party re-alignment which has recurred every 36 or so years since the ratification of the federal Constitution, taking place in 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932, and 1968. We are due for a profound shakeup in the party structure and the basic pattern of political life in this country. The reason for sending this book into the world is this: if the 9/11 myth can be dismantled, discredited, and denounced before the masses, there is hope that the party re-alignment may unfold in a progressive direction, perhaps with the collapse of the Republican Party, perhaps with the split of the Democratic Party into factions representing roughly the views of Senator Lieberman and those of Senator Kennedy. Under these conditions, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan can be terminated, and new aggressions warded off. The neocons can be brought to justice. International monetary reform, world reconstruction and economic development, vast projects of infrastructure can be addressed. But if the 9/11 myth is allowed to stand intact as the basis for US national life, the current regime, and the Republican and Democratic Parties, then there is every reason to fear that the likely party re-alignment will represent the transition to fascism in some form whose outlines we can already see.

The dominant oligarchies of the United States and several other countries committed a serious error when they decided to accept the crude conspiracy theory peddled by the Bush regime concerning 9/11. This was a matter where a careful and judicious ruling class would have exercised more restraint, and kept more options open. The wholesale endorsement of the official 9/11 myth by the controlled corporate news media, by the two major political parties, and by large parts of academia has created a situation in which the 9/11 myth is now the indispensable basis of large sectors of American life. Many institutions have in effect wedded their entire credibility to the myth. This was very unwise. We cannot be entirely certain that the truth about 9/11 will ever become generally accepted by the masses, but if such revelations should ever occur, they will now destroy far more than the 9/11 myth. The dismantling of the myth in favor of an account at least closer to reality will have the most profound institutional implications. The Republican Party, because it has presided over the institutionalization and exploitation of the myth, would tend toward extinction. The contradictions inside the Democratic Party would explode. Many careers would go by the boards. Because the entire society is so heavily invested in the myth, the entire social order would be called into question. Even the prevalent property relations, at least in regard to media, defense industries, oil and some other sectors, would inevitably be called into question. The current status of the 9/11 myth as the substratum of so many hegemonic institutions helps to explain the absolute hysteria of the ruling elite whenever substantive critiques of the myth arise, as they must ever tend to do.

Everything depends on intellectual activists like you. The 9/11 myth is the last line of defense of a bankrupt regime. Was the Iraq war based on lies? Do the atrocities of Abu Ghraib violate the laws of war and the Geneva Convention? Is the middle class being crushed? The regime, with its back to the wall, has only one answer, “9/11.” The mantra of 9/11 is the carte blanche for black propaganda, war crimes, a police state, and thievery until the end of time, if we listen to those now in power. And there is an irony: if the regime itself has been able to cite the need for wartime solidarity in regard to Afghanistan, the Democratic Party has had only the litany of 9/11 to fall back on. The Democratic Party has portrayed itself as the true believers in the 9/11 myth, eyes fixed on the quest to find Bin Laden, while the Republicans were going astray in Mesopotamia. Senator Kerry, until he can be convinced to think otherwise, is more married to the 9/11 myth than Bush is. The Democrats are Johnny one note, while Bush has the means to modulate. Result: 9/11 is the lever used by all factions of the oligarchy to keep the masses in submission. This lever we will break before their faces.

WHAT DO YOU KNOW AND HOW DO YOU KNOW IT?

Many readers are by now spluttering with indignation. We can hear them expostulating: “The official version of 9/11 is a myth and a lie!” – followed by a string of obscenities worthy of Dick Cheney. But think for a minute: if you think you know all about 9/11, how do you know what you think you know?

The first identification of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda as the perpetrators came during the day on September 11, as various commentators and announcers for cable, broadcast, and public television began floating the charge that Bin Laden and al Qaeda were behind the attacks. Apparently CNN was the first to mention Bin Laden, and the other myth- mongers immediately followed its lead. In retrospect, we know that many of these leaks came from two important functionaries in the Washington bureaucracy. These were George Tenet, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who should have been fired that same day, but who was allowed to resign in disgrace in June 2004, on the eve of the publication of a Senate Intelligence Committee report which pilloried him and his agency for gross incompetence. This was the same Tenet who later assured Bush that the case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a pretext for a US invasion was a “slam dunk.” The other prime myth-monger was Richard A. Clarke, the former terror czar of the Clinton administration who had been kept on by Bush. Clarke had a long history, of which many of his gulled victims at those hearings were unaware. He had been dropped from the State Department by James Baker III because he was accused of concealing Israeli exports of US military technology to the People’s Republic of China which were banned under US law, and which the Israelis had agreed in advance not to carry out. In some quarters, Richard Clarke’s name was mentioned at the time of the hunt for MEGA, the Israeli mole thought to be operating in the White House. Clarke is a close friend of Israeli defense officials, among them David Ivry of the Israeli Defense Ministry.

As Clarke recounts in his recently published memoir: “At the outset of the first Gulf War, Ivry and I conspired to get our governments to agree to deploy a US Army Patriot unit in Israel. No foreign troops had ever been stationed before in Israel. We also worked together to sell Patriots to Israel, and to tie in the Kiriat [the Israeli Pentagon] with American satellites that detected Iraqi Scud missile launches towards Israel. After the war, the CIA circulated unfounded rumors that Israel had sold some of the Patriots to China. Many in the State Department who thought I was ‘too close to Israel’ sought to blame me.” (Clarke 46) Clarke was a protégé of Arnold L. Raphael (killed in the same plane crash with Gen. Zia of Pakistan), and worked closely with Morton Abramowitz.

On the morning of Sept. 11, as the White House was being evacuated for fear that it could be hit after the strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the first top official to say “This is Al Qaeda!” had been Richard Clarke. (New York Times, December 30, 2001). When Clarke arrived at the White House a little after 9 AM on 9/11, he found Cheney and Condoleezza Rice alone in Cheney’s office. “What do you think,” asked the horrified Cheney. Clarke’s immediate reply: “It’s an al Qaeda attack and they like simultaneous attacks. This may not be over.” (Clarke 2) This is the moment of conception of the 9/11 myth. At this moment Clarke, as a New Yorker would say, didn’t know from nothing. Had he ever heard of strategic deception? Had he ever heard of diversionary tactics? Had he ever heard of feints?

Clarke tells us in his memoir that he attempted to collect his thoughts about the events going on around him as he walked from the White House Secure Videoconferencing Center just off the Situation Room across the White House to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, which was Cheney’s underground bunker:

In the quiet of the walk, I caught my breath for the first time that day: This was the “Big al Qaeda Attack” we had warned was coming and it was bigger than almost anything we had imagined, short of a nuclear weapon. (Clarke 17)


This is already one of the most fateful snap judgments in world history. Had Clarke utterly forgotten the lessons of Oklahoma City, when leakers had inspired the report that the explosion was the work of Moslems? Clarke had no proof then, and has come forward with none since.

Rushing to overtake Clarke as the leading hipshot in snap strategic diagnosis was CIA Director Tenet. While Bush was cowering in his spider hole at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, he conducted a National Security Council meeting by means of teleconference screens. “Who do you think did this to us?” Bush asked Tenet. Tenet was emphatic: “Sir, I believe it’s al Qaeda. We’re doing the assessment, but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like Al Qaeda.” (Bamford 2004 91) In other words, Tenet also had no proof, no evidence, no case – just his crude Lockean sense certainty.

Later, after World Trade Center 7 had gone through its inexplicable and embarrassing collapse at about 5:20 PM, Clarke addressed a high-level interagency meeting from the Situation Room. Present by video link were Armitage of State, General Meyers of the JCS, and other important officials. Clarke stated: “Okay, we all know this was al Qaeda. FBI and CIA will develop the case and see if I’m right. We want the truth but, in the meantime, let’s go with the assumption it’s al Qaeda. What’s next?” (Clarke 23) Before he went to bed in the White House, Bush jotted a note to himself: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today. We think it’s Osama Bin Laden.” (Bamford 2004 92)

Given the fecklessness of Bush, Cheney, and Rice, Richard Clarke was running the US government on 9/11, and it was he who made the myth of the exclusive responsibility of al Qaeda/Bin Laden into the official policy of the US. Clarke can thus claim pride of place as the originator of the 9/11 myth. And Clarke was more than a mythograph. Clarke also shared in the responsibility for the bungling and stupid attack on an aspirin factory in Khartoum, Sudan, after the bombing of US embassies in east Africa in the summer of 1998. If there were an Oscar for deception, Clarke’s performance at the Kean-Hamilton Commission hearings in April 2004 would have won it. It was that virtuoso performance which launched Clarke on his current career as a television commentator predicting imminent WMD terrorist attacks on this country and advocating the speedy imposition of martial law. We will hear more about this gentleman later. All we need to note right now is that anyone would be foolish to buy a used car from Clarke or Tenet.

Another early official fingering of Osama Bin Laden as the guilty party came from Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 13. At this point Powell was competing for attention with the fulminations and Schrecklichkeit of neocons like Wolfowitz, who was ranting that the US would “end states harboring terrorism,” and would do so unilaterally, without reference to the collective security of the United Nations. Already voices of caution were being raised about another ill-prepared rush to judgment. Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University's peace department, warned against assuming Middle East extremists were behind the tragedy. “We've been here before. With Oklahoma, everybody assumed it was Middle East [terrorists], then it turned out to be home-grown Timothy McVeigh,” he said. “Again with the pipe bomb in Atlanta, it turned out to be domestic.” (Guardian, September 11, 2001) In any event, this was the same Colin Powell, who in February 2003, before the United Nations Security Council, perjured himself on the question of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. This was the same Colin Powell who alleged mobile biological weapons labs, chemical weapons dispensers, and tubes being used for centrifuges in the process of uranium enrichment. This was the same Colin Powell who committed the most spectacular perjury in the history of the United Nations Security Council.

On September 14, the FBI, which had known nothing about anything before the attacks, published its infamous list of nineteen hijackers. As we will soon see, the mortality rate among those supposed kamikazes was less than 100%, with no less than seven of the suspects named turning up alive and well in the days after this list was published. More importantly, this was a list prepared by the same FBI which had been responsible for the Waco massacre of men, women, and children in 1992, the agency that illegally withheld documents in the capital murder trial of Timothy McVeigh, an abuse which ought to have caused his conviction to be thrown out, but which only caused it to be delayed. This is the agency whose vaunted Crime Lab turned out to be a sewer of incompetence and corruption. This is the same FBI which clumsily attempted to entrap and frame up the innocent Richard Jewel during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games, while the real culprit went free. This is the same FBI which persecuted the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee without any grounds, accusing him of having transferred secrets to the People’s Republic of China. This is the same FBI which permitted the Soviet mole Robert Hanssen to operate inside it for fifteen years. This is the agency which ostracized John O’Neill, and which ignored the Phoenix memorandum and Colleen Rowley’s warnings from Minneapolis. This is the same FBI which could not capture the Unabomber over decades, until his own brother turned him in. This is the same agency which, over the previous months, in the words of Governor Kean of the 9/11 Commission, “failed and failed and failed and failed and failed.” Are we then to believe that on September 14 this troubled and incompetent agency enjoyed a brief interlude of success, as represented by the list of the 19? And if they did succeed that day, they must have soon lapsed back into incompetence again, as seen in their utter failure to prevent the October 2001 anthrax attacks, or ever to identify the perpetrator, perhaps because the anthrax in question was weapons grade material which had come from a US military lab, probably Fort Detrick, Maryland. This was the same FBI whose main activity after 9/11 seemed to consist in confiscating relevant evidence and tampering with witnesses, telling them that had not seen what they knew they had. Anyone familiar with the record will have a very hard time taking seriously such allegations coming from the discredited, dysfunctional FBI.

Nelson-Rees returned from his week in Miami like the local boy come home from battle. Reporters were still pursuing him. Friends showered him with congratulatory phone calls and letters. And the laboratory's resident bard immortalized his accomplishments in a limerick that appeared on one of the office bulletin boards:

A perceptive young Nelson named Rees,
Dumbfounded genetic police
When HeLa he found
To abound all around,
In cell lines from West and from East.


In addition to all the excitement it generated, the publication of their report brought great relief to Nelson-Rees, Flandermeyer, and the rest of the crew. It had been frustrating to know what they knew without having a means of broadcasting it. Now that the news was out, it might be easier to spread the word about future screwups.

Yes, spreading the word, that was the goal here. The publicity was fun, of course. It was nice for an "outhouse project" to steal the show for a moment. But getting the news out to those who needed to hear it -- the scientific community -- that was the main point of all this. And the publication of their paper was really just the beginning.

Frantic scientists had been calling and writing from all over the United States and several other countries to request copies of the article. In a few weeks Nelson-Rees's secretary had mailed out all 400 reprints and had to order another batch from Science. The author himself was in equally high demand. Would he give a lecture at the Stanford School of Medicine? Could he address a meeting of viral cancer researchers in Hershey, Pennsylvania? Would he brief a group at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois?

***

Nelson-Rees hit the road, preaching and proselytizing like biology's Billy Graham. At one stop he would tell the stories of such victims as Bassin and Plata who, through lack of vigilance, fell prey to HeLa's sabotage. At another he would describe the waste and futility of trying to learn about breast or prostrate or kidney cells by studying cultures of cervical cancer. And he would always conclude with the exhortation: Never trade cells without reliable information about what they are and where they've been. And always double-check them, before and after your experiment.

In some respects Nelson-Rees's early evangelizing looked like a touring revival of Gartler's performance at the Bedford Springs Hotel. Like Gartler, Nelson-Rees was telling audiences they had torpedoed years of their own work by being sloppy and letting HeLa creep in on them. He encountered the same reactions, shock and skepticism. And he too was offering new tools, chromosome banding along with other techniques, to help set things straight.

But Nelson-Rees soon added a new message that was less scientific in tone and more philosophical, or perhaps more political. It was at a 1975 meeting of cell culturists and cancer researchers in Lake Placid, New York, that he began to talk about two different reasons for cell mixups. One was simple sloppiness. "It can be combatted in individual laboratories by adherence to increasingly stricter techniques," he explained. The other effect was "more lasting and insidious." It had to do with researchers' attitudes, "frailties of the human ego ... exigencies of profit margins ... the threat of cuts of support in contractual arrangements."

Most members of the audience had gone into his talk thinking they had a pretty good idea what Nelson-Rees was going to say. But when he hit this stuff about scientists' attitudes and frailties of the human ego, they didn't know quite what to make of it.

It was curious, he told his fellow researchers, how well they handled a problem involving bacteria, for example, or viruses. Most of them quickly faced up to it when a cell culture became spoiled by such infectious agents. Not so with cell mix-ups. They seemed to take it personally when someone claimed their cultures had been overtaken by other human cells, he said.

"Cases of cellular contamination have been known to precipitate lengthy diatribes and are the reason for lectures such as this one," he clucked. "This kind of contamination would certainly be easy to control if one could frankly and readily discuss it and eradicate it without fear of offending colleagues' feelings."

At the moment, said Nelson-Rees, there was no friendly forum for discussing cell mix-ups and no means of rapidly notifying the scientific community of contaminated cultures. The audience raised a few eyebrows in disapproval as he said, "I would now like to describe to you how difficult it was for us to publish our results on those cultures which we have vouched are HeLa derivatives."

He began with the story of the Russian cells. He recounted how reluctant institute officials had been to believe his results, how for months they merely ignored the rapidly accumulating data. He read aloud the reviewer's critique that accused him of making a "gratuitous attack" on the Russians, and he named a few names. Then he moved on to the American cells: HBT3, HBT39B, HEK, and the others. He explained that Science had originally turned down the now celebrated report, quoting sarcastically from Abelson's rejection letter: "The manuscript and the referees' comments are enclosed. I trust the comments will be helpful to you when you prepare the paper for submission elsewhere."

Stan Gartler had certainly never done this. He had presented his findings, disturbing as they were, made a couple of suggestions, and taken his leave. But here was Nelson-Rees hauling out the dirty laundry. He was pointing out the stains and explaining how they had got there, and more than a few members of the audience were starting to squirm.

To say that a few cell lines had got shuffled around, that was one thing. But to suggest that scientists were letting their egos get in the way of good science or that they avoided publishing important information because it might be controversial ... well, it just wasn't done.

-- A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman's Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused, by Michael Gold


BUSH AS INVETERATE LIAR

The definitive identification of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda as the authors of the atrocity came only on September 20, in Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress. Bush stated:

The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda. They are the murderers indicted for bombing American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole. […] This group and its leader – a person named Osama Bin Laden – are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction. The leadership of al Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al Qaeda’s vision for the world. […] And tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban: deliver to the United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land. […] These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share their fate. […] Our war on terror beings with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. (Bush 10-11)


Here we can see how inextricably the naming of Bin Laden and al Qaeda is bound up with the unilateral preventive war doctrine, the attack on Afghanistan, and the aggression against Iraq. But let us put these remarks into contact. Some months later, delivering his January 2003 State of the Union address from the same podium in the well of the House of Representatives, this same Bush intoned:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. (January 28, 2003)


These infamous sixteen words added up to one Big Lie in Dr. Goebbel’s sense, as has been amply demonstrated. In the same speech this same Bush claimed:

We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States. (January 28, 2003)


No such vehicles ever existed. This same Bush also alleged:

From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them. (January 28, 2003)


Mobile labs of the type described by Bush have never been found in Iraq. Experts have speculated that these wildly exaggerated reports were based on vans used for public health purposes, or perhaps on ice cream trucks. On another occasion the very same Bush asserted:

The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has had numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his “nuclear mujahedeen,” his nuclear holy warriors. (October 7, 2002)


But the renewed nuclear program turned out to be a chimera, most likely invented by the neocon darling, convicted bank embezzler, and betrayer of American state secrets, Achmed Chalabi, to justify his $400,000 monthly stipend provided by the American taxpayer. This was the same Bush who had conjured up the specter of an Iraqi nuclear attack on the United States:

Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. (Cincinnati, Ohio, October 2, 2002)


The internet teems with web sites dedicated primarily to keeping up with Bush’s legendary, picaresque mendacity. Bush has lied about the cost of his prescription drug boondoggle, about nonexistent economic reports he claimed had buttressed his economic prognostications, about all spheres of policy. He has lied about funding first responders, grants for port security, payments to children’s hospitals, and veterans’ benefits. The tenant of the White House has a troubled relation to the very concept of truth.

This is the man who has acquired an unparalleled at home and abroad reputation as a liar – at least, in those quarters, like the Office of Canadian Prime Minister Chretien, where he was dismissed as a moron. This is an administration in which blatant lying has become part of the daily routine – in part because of neocon guru Leo Strauss’s theory that truth is dangerous for the masses, and rulers therefore have to be esoteric, that is, lie through their teeth. But whether Bush is a cretin or a liar, his statements offer no sufficient basis for falling in with the neocons in their march towards endless war against the entire world. Knowing what we knew as of late 2004, no person of good judgment could ever accept statements from the current regime at face value. Nevertheless, otherwise intelligent people who would not dream believing Bush about Iraq or other issues are content to swallow his biggest whopper of them all: his 9/11 story. This doublethink must end. The Bush regime is a castle of lies and fabrications, and the keystone of all of them is the 9/11 myth.

It is now proverbial in Washington to remark that there is no proof linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11, and this is certainly true. But, by the very same token, there is also no proof in the public domain anywhere that adds up to a case against Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda. We should point out that we hold no brief for the misfit sheikh and his sociopathic followers. Bin Laden was a creation of the CIA, and his al Qaeda followers, to the extent that they exist at all, are doubtless individuals characterized by a surfeit of criminal intent. But we must not join the anonymous CIA agent author of the recent book Imperial Hubris in portraying the inept and unstable Bin Laden as a genius. Taken by themselves, Bin Laden and his band represent supermarket-caliber terrorists, capable of bombing a shopping center, or of destroying a bus. Any capabilities above and beyond this can only be explained through assistance provided by intelligence agencies, primarily but not limited to the American ones. There is no doubt that Bin Laden and his benighted gaggle would have desired to inflict destruction on the scale of 9/11. What is at issue is their physical and technical capability of doing so on their own in the universe as we otherwise know it to be constituted. From this point of view, Bin Laden and company emerge perhaps as actors in the plot, but playing the parts of patsies, dupes, fall-guys, or useful idiots. The main point remains that Tenet, Clarke, Powell, the FBI, and Bush have produced no convincing evidence to establish the 19 Moslem men, al Qaeda, and Bin Laden as the authors of the crimes.

Another Bush administration mythograph has been Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. But Rumsfeld as well has a troubled relation to truth. In a press conference, he was asked if he planned to lie in order to protect state secrets. Rumsfeld boasted that he was clever enough to keep secrets in other ways, but that his underlings might have to preserve secrecy any way they could:

Rumsfeld: Of course, this conjures up Winston Churchill’s famous phrase when he said – don’t quote me on this, okay? I don’t want to be quoted on this, so don’t quote me. He said sometimes the truth is so precious that it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies…. That is a piece of history, and I bring it up just for the sake of background. I don’t recall that I’ve ever lied to the press, I don’t intend to, and it seems to me that there will not be reason for it. There are dozens of ways to avoid having to put yourself in a position where you’re lying. And I don’t do it.

Reporter: That goes for everybody in the Department of Defense?

Rumsfeld: You’ve got to be kidding. (Laughter.) (September 25, 2001)


Theodore Olson, together with his wife Barbara Olson, had been the host of a salon which served in 1998-1999 as a meeting place for one of the principal cliques supporting the Clinton impeachment. This group included the late Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Federal Appellate Judge Robert Silberman, failed Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork, and other militant reactionaries. Olson had on one occasion lectured the US Supreme Court that “it is easy to imagine an infinite number of situations…where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out.” (Yahoo News, March 22, 2001) Mrs. Olson was later counted among the victims of 9/11; we will return to her story.

In neocon philosophy, the art of lying has been raised to a fine art. Let us take the case of William Kristol, a leading Washington Straussian, and founder of the Project for a New American Century, a congeries of warmongers. Kristol told Nina J. Easton, the author of a profile of some top neocon leaders of the 1990s, Gang of Five (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) that “One of the main teachings [of Strauss] is that all politics are limited and none of them is really based on the truth. So there's a certain philosophic disposition where you have some distance from these political fights....You don't take yourself or your causes as seriously as you would if you thought this was 100% ‘truth.’ Political movements are always full of partisans fighting for their opinion. But that's very different from 'the truth.'” With the help of money from Rupert Murdoch, Kristol has cultivated the art of the Goebbels Big Lie since 1995 in his weekly magazine, the Weekly Standard, the neocon house organ.

But, discredited as Tenet, Clarke, Powell, the FBI, Rumsfeld, Kristol, and Bush may appear, perhaps other proof has been offered since? No.

In the days right after the attacks, Colin Powell promised the world a white paper or white book to set forth the contentions of the United States government about what had happened, with supporting evidence. Powell did this on NBC’s Meet the Press, where the following exchange occurred on September 23, 2001:

Question: Are you absolutely convinced that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for this attack?

Secretary Powell: I am absolutely convinced that the al Qaeda network, which he heads, was responsible for this attack. […]

Question: Will you release publicly a white paper, which links him and his organization to this attack, to put people at ease? Secretary Powell: We are hard at work bringing all the information together, intelligence information, law enforcement information. And I think, in the near future, we will be able to put out a paper, a document, that will describe quite clearly the evidence we have linking him to the attack. And also, remember, he has been linked to previous attacks against US interests and he was already indicated for earlier attacks against the United States. ( http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/5012.htm )


The following day, September 24, saw a front page article in the New York Times which bragged that Powell’s evidence “reaches from the southern tip of Manhattan to the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.” However, there was clearly something wrong with the US case, since, in an appearance with Bush at the White House rose garden on September 24, Powell somewhat obliquely retracted his promise. And on that same afternoon, Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer, a past master of mendacity, said that Powell had been the victim of a misunderstanding. No white paper would be forthcoming, he suggested. According to Fleischer, much of the information of Bin Laden was classified, and making it public would compromise US intelligence methods and sources. Even the press trollops in the White House briefing room rebelled at this attempted sleight of hand. A reporter challenged Ari, asking if there was in fact “any plan to present public evidence so that the average citizen, not just Americans, but people all over the world can understand the case against Bin Laden.” Fleischer disappeared in a cloud of verbiage: “In a democracy it’s always important to provide the maximum amount of information possible. But I think the American people also understand that there are going to be times when that information cannot immediately be forthcoming.” As of this writing, it still has not been forthcoming.

Bush himself rejected any white paper. He said that any such publication may “make the war more difficult to win.” (AP, September 24, 2001) Amidst much embarrassment, the Bush regime quickly fell back on the following ploy: they would assemble a watertight case against Bin Laden, but this was so sensitive that could only be shown to governments. We must always bear in mind that these assertions were not presented in the manner of a scholarly debate, but as part of brutal pressure on sovereign states to yield to Bush’s manichean Diktat.

Even though Bush did not have enough information on the 9/11 events to put out a credible white paper, he nevertheless ordered the FBI to curtail their investigation of the case. The FBI order to stop probing described the investigation done so far as “the most exhaustive in its history.” A government official said in an understatement that “The investigative staff has to be made to understand that we’re not trying to solve a crime now.”

BANKRUPT LEFTISTS

Not just the impotence, but the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of many US leftists was pitilessly displayed by the events of 9/11. Many who would never dream of believing Bush or the FBI on matters far less important were willing to swallow the entire official story this time around. Noam Chomsky went so far as to issue a lengthy interview in the wake of 9/11; he even had it published as a small book. This passage is at the heart of the matter:

Q: NATO is keeping quiet until they find out whether the attack was internal or external. How do you interpret this?

Chomsky: I do not think that is the reason for NATO’s hesitation. There is no serious doubt that the attack was ‘external.’ […]

Q: Could you say something about connivance and the role of America secret service?

Chomsky: I don’t quite understand the question. This attack was surely an enormous shock and surprise to the intelligence services of the West, including those of the United States.” (Chomsky 17)


This leaves our poor Chomsky far to the right of the 9/11 euroskeptics – and that means foreign ministers, defense ministers, and generals -- in the NATO ministerial council! Michael Parenti’s book on the terrorism trap falls into it, at least as far as the 9/11 official story is concerned. Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now radio program banned all criticism of the official 9/11 story, while proclaiming her own superlative courage in tackling issues like East Timor. When she finally let the dignified academic David Ray Griffin come on her show, she insisted on balancing him with the slimy character assassin Chip Berlet, who knew nothing in particular about 9/11.

The left wing of the Democratic Party, grouped around The Nation magazine, was rudderless. Some time after 9/11 this magazine produced an anthology of its most important post-9/11 articles. A key contributor to this collection was Jonathan Schell, who wrote in his introduction: “It was clear from the start that Islamic fundamentalists were responsible, almost certainly in the service of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, but the magnitude of the force involved remained hazy in the extreme.” (Vanden Heuvel xv) Other articles in the collection, some by very distinguished and well-meaning authors, may have more or less merit, but they do not rise above this inadequate level. The US left might object all it liked to the consequences which Bush derived from his fabricated 9/11 premise, but unless those leftists were willing to attack the premise, it was clear that their efforts would not be effective. Even in the pages of The Nation, it was the neocon bully Christopher Hitchens, billed until only yesterday as the “last Marxist,” who seemed to carry the day, based on the refusal of all the others to challenge the myth he shamelessly used to club them into submission.

Some governments found ways to leak their estimate of Bush’s alleged proof. One was the government of Pakistan, which had been placed under a US war ultimatum to cooperate in an attack on Afghanistan. Here the distinguished retired military leader General Mirza Aslam Beg told an interviewer some months after the fact that the “evidence” provided to Pakistan's Musharraf government “would not hold in a court of law, because of the inherent weaknesses.” (EIR, December 10, 2001) In a newspaper interview, Gen. Beg insisted that the attacks had been the work of highly-trained experts “who used high technology for destruction. He argued that even ordinary trained pilots could not have carried out the missions observed. (Nawa- Waqt, September 13, 2001) [1]

Egyptian strategic analyst Tal’at Muslim argued in al-Akhbar of Cairo that the resources available to Arab and Islamic terror organizations were “well below” what was plainly necessary to carry out operations on the scale of 9/11. (September 13, 2001) In the Palestinian paper al-Quds, Hatim Abu Sha’ban found that the US authorities were searching for the perpetrators in entirely the wrong places. “They accused…the least likely to be perpetrators in light of the operation’s nature, which requires great planning capabilities, knowledge of information, and mobility on the part of the criminals who committed this terrorist operation.” (September 18, 2001)

The Saudi government complained that its citizens were being accused of crimes, but that the US had provided no hard evidence. Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef said that he viewed Osama Bin Laden more “as a tool,” than the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. “He's at the top of the pyramid from the media point of view, but from my personal views and conviction, I don't think he's at the top of the pyramid,” commented Prince Nayef. U.S. officials were claiming that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. But Nayef noted that “until now, we have no evidence that assures us they are related to September 11. We have not received anything in this regard from the United States.” (New York Times, December 10, 2001)

Some indication of the problems being encountered by the US bureaucracy in trying to pin 9/11 on Bin Laden were reflected in a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Faint Trail: It's Surprisingly Tough To Pin Terror Attacks on the ‘Prime Suspect.’” Here the paucity of evidence was the dominant note. Such evidence as did exist was largely circumstantial, the Journal noted, such as ties of suspected hijacker Mohammed Atta to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which allegedly was part of bin Laden's Al Qaeda; the presence of one hijacker in Malaysia in January 2000, meeting with someone linked to the bombing of the USS Cole, which was in turn allegedly linked to bin Laden; communications intercepts showing Al Qaeda operatives had some advanced knowledge of the strikes; or that two of the suspected hijackers were perhaps linked to a suspected bin Laden operative in Boston. The Journal conceded that the issue of proof was a key component of the U.S.'s ability to enlist support of Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and perhaps Syria. “The issue of proof is no small matter,” one Administration official was cited as observing. But the US case was plainly a lame one, with an unidentified intelligence official concluding weakly that “no information has come up that suggests that bin Laden wasn't involved.” None of this could even begin to explain how these ragtag forces could mount such a spectacular action. Here was surely no justification for abandoning the entire edifice of international law, which had been formed in large part as a result of wars in which tens of millions of people had perished.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:20 am

PART 2 OF 3 (CH. 1 CONT'D.)

BLAIR’S 9/11 DOSSIER: THE CLIFF’S NOTES VERSION

With the US regime struggling, into the breach rushed Tony Blair, a glib and slippery apologist for war. On October 2, Blair’s office in Number 10 Downing Street released the first of his celebrated dossiers. It was entitled “Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States.” Unfortunately, Blair’s dossier was obliged to begin on an uncertain note: “This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Osama Bin Laden in a court of law.” Why not, given what is at stake? Answer: “Intelligence often cannot be used evidentially, due both to the strict rules of admissibility and to the need to protect the safety of sources. But on the basis of all the information available HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] is confident of its conclusions as expressed in this document.” Of course, this means that since the proof may be insufficient, we are expected to believe Blair & Co. on the basis of their general integrity and credibility. This is a controversial point, to which we will soon return.

Blair’s main finding:

The clear conclusions reached by the government are: Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the atrocities on 11 September 2001; Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda retain the will and the resources to carry out further atrocities; The United Kingdom, and United Kingdom nationals are potential targets; and Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were able to commit these atrocities because of their close alliance with the Taliban regime, which allowed them to operate with impunity in pursuing their terrorist activity.” (Blair at http://www.counterpunch.org/dossier1.html, 1)


Blair’s dossier then went on for 16 of its 19 pages reciting the nefarious deeds of which Bin Laden had been accused: Bin Laden has worked with the Taliban, attacked the USS Cole, and bombed the US embassies in East Africa. He had doubtless issued bloodthirsty calls for murder against the US and its citizens. As for his claims of responsibility, they could simply be the ravings of a megalomaniac. But none of this adds up to 9/11 or anything approaching it. If working in favor of the Taliban were a crime, it would have been necessary to indict Henry Kissinger, who lobbied Congress in favor of Unocal’s pipeline project there. And throughout the argument, Blair relied on unnamed intelligence sources for most of his material.

When Blair finally got to 9/11, he proceeded through a chain of unproven assertions, as signaled by a shift into the vagueness of the passive voice: “Nineteen men have been identified as the hijackers from the passenger lists of the four planes hijacked on September 11. At least three of them have already been positively identified as associates of al-Qaeda.” (Blair 21) But all this means is that the FBI is accusing them, which is wholly inadequate.

From intelligence sources, the following facts have been established subsequent to 11 September; for intelligence reasons, the names of associates, though known, are not given. In the run-up to 11 September, bin Laden was mounting a concerted propaganda campaign amongst like- minded groups of people – including videos and documentation – justifying attacks on Jewish and American targets; and claiming that those who died in the course of them were carrying out God’s work. We have learned, subsequent to 11 September, that Bin Laden himself asserted shortly before 11 September that he was preparing a major attack on America. In August and early September close associates of Bin Laden were warned to return to Afghanistan from other parts of the world by 10 September. Immediately prior to 11 September some known associates of Bin Laden were naming the date for action as on or around 11 September. Since 11 September we have learned that one of Bin Laden’s closest and most senior associates was responsible for the detailed planning of the attacks. There is evidence of a very specific nature relating to Bin Laden and his associates that is too sensitive to release. (Blair 22-23, emphasis added)


All we have here is an exercise in check kiting. The CIA had forwarded a bouncing check to MI-6, and MI-6 had sent it back to Washington by simply citing the claims of the CIA as fact, and covering the whole in a mantle of the Official Secrets Act. It is perfectly plausible that Bin Laden and his associates were planning a terror attack on the US which seemed large to them. The issue, once again, is their physical and technical ability to bring about destruction in the places and on the scale observed. Blair’s document brought the central issue to a head when he asserted:

The modus operandi of 11 September was entirely consistent with previous attacks….The attacks of 11 September are entirely consistent with the scale and sophistication which went in to the attacks on the East African Embassies and the USS Cole. (Blair 23)


The problem is that the 9/11 attacks were incomparably larger and more serious than anything attempted by al Qaeda previously – they were in fact several orders of magnitude larger. This is apart from the question, which we will address later, of the degree to which al Qaeda has continued to receive technical assistance from certain rogue elements of US intelligence and others. So Tony Blair’s dossier turned out to be a string of unsubstantiated assertions, and thus a miserable excuse for proof.

In addition, later events taught us more about Tony Blair’s methods in compiling dossiers.

NUMBER 10 DOWNING STREET – KITCHEN OF LIES

New light on the putative value of intelligence dossiers issued by Tony Blair’s office in Number 10 Downing Street was not long in coming. In September 2002, Blair published amid great fanfare his dossier purporting to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq currently possessed weapons of mass destruction. This was entitled “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,” and it was clearly crafted to provide a pretext for waging unprovoked and aggressive war against Iraq. This dossier was exposed as a fraud in two distinct waves of demystification. The first exposure took place in February 2003, when it emerged that entire sections of this report, which had been billed as the most up-to-date evaluation that could be offered by the very formidable capabilities of MI-6 and the rest of the British intelligence machine, had simply been lifted, plagiarized without attribution, from older documents in the public domain. The Iraq dossier had been concocted by Blair and his media guru Alistair Campbell, a figure who combined the worst of image-mongers like Michael Deaver and Karl Rove, using materials provided by British intelligence. Parts of Blair’s dossier had been stolen from articles written by Sean Boyne of Jane’s Intelligence Review, who was horrified by the nefarious use to which his work had been put. “I don’t like to think that anything I wrote has been used as an argument for war. I am concerned because I am against the war,” complained Boyne. Another source from which Blair had lifted material verbatim was a thesis entitled “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network,” published in September 2002 by a graduate student, Ibrahim al-Marashi, a California resident. Al-Marashi was equally indignant, commenting that “this is wholesale deception. How can the British public trust the government if it is up to this sort of tricks? People will treat any other information they publish now with a lot of skepticism from now on.” And not just from now on; it is our contention here that this disbelief in regard to Tony Blair’s work product should also be applied retrospectively.

The British Parliament was appalled by Blair’s mendacity, which was so crude that the coded titles of the Microsoft Word documents that made up the dossier had been allowed to remain visible on the Number 10 Downing Street web site. Many pointed to Alistair Hamilton as the dervish of spin behind the entire sordid operation. Former Labour Party Defense Minister and current Member of Parliament Peter Kilfoyle observed that Blair’s deception merely “adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths. I am shocked that on such thin evidence that we should be trying to convince the British people that this war is worth fighting. Labour MP Glenda Jackson added “It is another example of how the Government is attempting to mislead the country and Parliament. And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary euphemism for lying.” (Daily Mirror, February 8, 2003)

Blair’s nonchalance in cribbing together dossiers on subjects of vast importance also attracted the barbs of British wits. AheadOfNews.com spoofed Blair’s plagiarized Iraq dossier by writing that “a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged recently that the report, ‘Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,’ had been cobbled together from a variety of sources, including old term papers, Readers Digest, and several tabloids. John Miller, Undersecretary for Cutting- and-Pasting, explained that ‘plagiarized’ sections of the report included spelling errors, such as ‘weapons of mass distraction,’ and ‘Untied States’ found in the originals. “Our deceptions might have succeeded,’ he said, ‘except for our bloody incompetent proofreaders.” (February 12, 2003) Blair’s Iraq dossier was an international laughingstock, but that had not prevented Colin Powell from praising it in his infamous speech to the United Nations Security Council.

But Blair’s dossier was in the end no laughing matter: it contributed to the deaths of perhaps 15,000 people in Iraq within a year. It also brought tragedy to one of the British intelligence officials who had collaborated in its creation.

In June, 2003, when the Iraq war had already begun to go badly for the aggressors, BBC News broadcast a story by correspondent Barnaby Mason reporting that Blair and Campbell had personally supervised the concoction of the Iraq WMD dossier, sending proposed drafts back to the Joint Intelligence Committee “six to eight times” to be “sexed up” through the addition of more lurid and sensational details. One of these details was thought to be Blair’s fantastic claim that Iraq had WMD which could be launched within 45 minutes. Blair delivered this warning in such a way as to suggest that Iraq would be capable of striking the UK within 45 minutes, despite the fact that Iraq possessed no delivery systems capable of doling this.

The response of the Blair regime to this report was to promote a witch-hunt to ferret out the source inside the government who had leaked such embarrassing material to Barnaby Mason. Officials of the British Defense Ministry allowed journalists to read them lists of persons suspected of being the leaker, and were willing to confirm the identity of their prime suspect as soon as the journalists mentioned his name. In this way, the Defense Ministry in effect betrayed one of its own employees, Dr. David Kelly. A few days later Kelly was found dead in a forest near his home, with his wrists slashed. His death was quickly ruled a suicide. After Kelly’s death, a UN diplomat recalled that he had asked Kelly back in February 2003 what would happen if Tony Blair went through with his plan to join Bush in attacking Iraq. “I will probably be found dead in the woods,” was Kelly’s prophetic reply.

Blair’s fabrications have been covered up with the help of two devious Lords, Lord Hutton and Lord Butler, both of whom have absolved the Prime Minister and his cohorts of deliberately fabricating intelligence. But the London press has dismissed these two reports as “Whitewash” and “Whitewash II” respectively. Each of them is a politically motivated coverup designed to save the interests of the British oligarchy, which has heavily invested in Blair, the 9/11 myth, and the Iraq war. The probative value of these whitewashes is nil.

In the light of all these facts, anyone interested in truth as distinct from propaganda can hardly accept at face value dossiers issued by the man whom his countrymen have now dubbed “Tony Bliar.” Such skepticism must apply not only to Blair’s Iraq dossier, but also to his earlier Bin Laden dossier, which was an important building block in the Bin Laden myth.

TORRICELLI: AN IMMEDIATE BOARD OF INQUIRY

In contrast to the relentless stonewalling of the Bush administration on any serious investigation of 9/11, Democratic New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli soon came forward as the most consistent spokesman for a real probe, accompanied by accountability for the nonfeasance or malfeasance of federal officials. Torricelli represented New Jersey, the state where the largest number of victims of 9/11 had lived, and he appeared to take seriously the need for finding out what happened. Torricelli’s fate therefore becomes a case study of the workings of the US regime in the wake of 9/11. On September 26, Torricelli made an address to the Senate in which he began by talking about how much New Jersey had suffered:

There is not a small town or a city in northern New Jersey that has not been touched or changed. At the time the final body has been found and the search has concluded, 2,000 to 3,000 people in New Jersey may have lost their lives. It is estimated there are 1,500 orphans in my State. It struck everywhere.


He then turned to the US intelligence community, which had manifestly failed its citizens in the most grievous way. He talked about the disproportion between the means allocated and the results obtained:

It is reported in the media that the United States, in what would otherwise be a classified figure, may spend $30 billion per year on intelligence services, including the CIA and the NSA. The Washington Post reports the FBI counterterrorism spending grew to $423 million this year, a figure which in the last 8 years has grown by 300 percent. It is not enough to ask for more. It is necessary to assess what went wrong. Did leadership fail? Were the plans inadequate? Did we have the wrong people, or were they on the wrong mission?


This was a challenge to the CIA, FBI, and the other spy agencies. Torricelli then began to enumerate several concrete examples of incompetence by these same agencies:

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that over the past 2 years the Central Intelligence Agency had provided to the FBI the names of 100 suspected associates of Osama bin Laden who were either in or on their way to the United States. Yet the Washington Post concludes that the FBI “was ill equipped and unprepared” to deal with this information.

Some of the allegations reported in the media are stunning and deeply troubling, not simply about what happened but revealing about our inability to deal with the current crisis. Previous terrorist investigations, it is alleged, produced boxes of evidentiary material written in Arabic that remained unanalyzed for lack of translators. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial, agents discovered that photos and drawings outlining the plot had been in their possession for 3 years, but they had not been analyzed.

Since 1996, the FBI had evidence that international terrorists were learning to fly passenger jets at U.S. flight schools, but that does not seem to have obviously raised sufficient concern, and there was no apparent action.

In August, the FBI received notice from French intelligence that one man who had paid cash to use flight simulators in Minnesota was a “radical Islamic extremist” with ties to Afghani terrorist training camps. Regrettably, this intelligence information was apparently not seen in the greater context of an actual threat that has now been realized. […]


Torricelli then raised his key demand, which was for the immediate convocation of a Board of Inquiry on 9/11, modeled on the boards of inquiry which had been convened after the explosion of the USS Maine, the Pearl Harbor attack, and the losses of the space shuttle Challenger:

On behalf of the people of my State, if I need to return to this Chamber every day of every week of every month, this Senate is going to vote for some board of inquiry. I joined my colleagues after the Challenger accident, recognizing that that loss of life, the failure of technology and leadership, indicated something was wrong in NASA. The board of inquiry reformed NASA and the technology and gave it new leadership, and it served the Nation well.

After Pearl Harbor, we recognized something was wrong militarily. We had a board of inquiry. We found those responsible, we held them accountable, and we instituted the changes.


Torricelli stressed the necessary moment of accountability for the high government officials who had been found wanting:

Indeed, that formula has served this Nation for years in numerous crises. Now I call for it again. First, review the circumstances surrounding this tragedy, the people responsible, the resources that were available, where there was a failure of action, and make recommendations and assign responsibility. Second, develop recommendations or changes of law or resources or personnel so it does not happen again. I cannot imagine we will do less. I call upon us to do more. I will not be satisfied with new assignments of powers or appropriating more money. I want to know what went wrong, and why, and who.


On October 4, Torricelli took the floor again, to repeat his demand for an immediate Board of Inquiry, and to motivate it further:

A number of my colleagues are joining with me in the coming days in introducing legislation to create a board of inquiry regarding the terrorist attacks of September 11. It is my intention to offer it as an amendment to legislation that is currently working its way through the Senate dealing with this tragedy. […]

I cannot predict any of these answers, but what is important is neither can anyone else in this Congress or the administration because without some analysis, as we have done throughout our country's history, we will never know. Indeed, if we fail to have a board of inquiry in the midst of this crisis about these circumstances, I believe history will instruct us it will be the first time in the history of the Republic that the Government did not hold itself accountable and subject to analysis when our American people have faced a crisis of this magnitude.

The people deserve an answer. The Government should hold itself accountable, and only a board of inquiry, independent of the Congress and the Executive, has the credibility to do it.


Torricelli’s proposals had an undeniable power. If a board of inquiry had been possible in desperate days at the beginning of World War II, with a real shooting war being fought against real and formidable enemies, why was it not possible now? Pro-Bush spokesmen were forced into such contortions as arguing that the current situation was infinitely more dangerous than any moment of World War II, or of the Cold War. For those who remembered the Cuban missile crisis, when 100,000,000 million Americans might have died in the first hour of a nuclear exchange, these notions were patently absurd.

Alarmed by the threat of a rapid and credible investigation being raise by the agitation of Torricelli and a small group of like-minded senators, Bush took the highly unusual step of asking House and Senate leaders to allow only two congressional committees to investigate the government's response to the events of September 11, officials said. Bush wanted the inquiry to be limited to the House and Senate intelligence committees, whose proceedings are generally secret. Senate Democratic leaders wanted a broader investigation, involving some committees that would be free to air their findings. But even the Democrats had already narrowed the focus to intelligence failures preceding the terrorist attacks. In ruling out any serious probes, Bush attempted to wrap himself in the banner of military necessity in the prosecution of his alleged war on terror; a senior administration official said “the president thinks it's important for Congress to review events in a way that does not unduly burden the defense and intelligence communities as they are still charged with fighting a war.” Bush made this request of Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D- .D.) during a breakfast meeting with congressional leaders. Daschle told reporters that Cheney had “expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism.” Daschle said he agreed with the demand by Bush and Cheney to “to limit the scope and the overall review of what happened.” In other words, the supposed opposition was agreeing that there was no need to prove the US government’s official version of events. What were they hiding? (“Bush Seeks To Restrict Hill 9/11 Probes, Intelligence Panels' Secrecy Is Favored,” Washington Post, January 30, 2002) The milquetoast Daschle was a poor substitute for a real opposition leader. His capitulation on the board of inquiry issue set the tone for a series of Democratic Party surrenders that lasted for the duration of 2002, and which included abdicating to Bush the constitutional monopoly of the Congress on the power to declare war.

And what happened to Torricelli? He was owed much by his party. As head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, he was often given credit for the 2000 election victories that brought Senate Democrats from 45 seats to 50. Soon after that, he became the target of corruption charges regarding his campaign finances and gifts he had allegedly accepted. For years, he had been profiled as a severe critic of the intelligence agencies. In January 2002, Torricelli supporters hailed U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White's decision not to pursue prosecution of Torricelli for accepting illegal gifts as a vindication. But even on that occasion, The New York Times kept up the pressure for Torricelli to be skewered, arguing in an editorial that “the allegations against Mr. Torricelli are serious and cry out for prompt investigation and resolution in a manner worthy of public respect. If the [Senate Ethics] committee will not provide it, it might as well disband.” Torricelli’s seat was up in 2002, and he was headed for almost certain re-election when the Senate Ethics Committee found he had damaged the reputation of that august body by accepting expensive personal gifts from a campaign contributor. At this point, Torricelli dropped to even with his opponent. Then, a federal judge ordered federal prosecutors to release to the press a letter which some thought suggested that Torricelli might have been guilty of more than talking gifts. A furious press campaign against the senator ensued. At this point, in September, Torricelli’s position in the polls collapsed, and he dropped out of contention. The Democratic Party replaced him with former Senator Frank Lautenberg, who won the seat. Most significantly, federal prosecutors have never to this day brought any charges against Torricelli based on the contents of the supposedly incriminating letter, or any other charges. Their interference in Torricelli’s re-election campaign thus appears to have been a political dirty trick at the outer limits of legality, designed to drive him out of political life. A reason for this operation is evident: they were defending the establishment’s omertà, its code of silence, on 9/11.

The initial congressional effort at dealing with the events of 9/11 was the pitiful coverup offered by the Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security of the House Intelligence Committee. Most of the subcommittee’s work remained cloaked under a veil of secrecy, but a short executive summary containing analysis and a few anodyne recommendations were made available to the public. This simulacrum of a real probe was directed by Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, an opportunistic scoundrel who, at the same time he was superintending this superficial report, was conducting one of the most shameful senate campaigns in US history. Chambliss was seeking to unseat Georgia Democrat Max Cleland, a future member of the Kean-Hamilton Commission. Cleland was a war veteran who had left both his legs and one arm on the battlefield – triple amputee. Chambliss, like Cheney and so many other hypocritical Bush backers, had had other priorities during the Vietnam era. But this did not prevent Chambliss from running as a warmonger, while vilifying Cleland, the war hero, as unpatriotic because he refused to support Bush’s Iraq adventure. And it had worked: Chambliss was elected to the Senate a few months after the report was published. This may have represented the oligarchy’s reward to Chambliss for his yeoman service in piloting the first Congressional coverup of 9/11.

Chambliss billed his handiwork as “a very critical report,” but it was nothing of the kind. Starting from a wholly uncritical acceptance of the 9/11 myth as its premises, the report merely attempted to identify shortcomings in US intelligence and to offer helpful hints about how they might be remedied. Although the subcommittee chronicled the well- known failures of FBI, CIA, NSA and others, no disciplinary action against any sitting federal bureaucrat was recommended. According to Rep. Jane Harman, Democrat of California and the ranking member, the report was “designed to give good people better tools, more resources, access to good watch lists, digital technologies, enhanced platforms, better language training, and career support.” The subcommittee was of the opinion that the 9/11 attacks could not have been prevented, even if all the intelligence in the possession of the entire US government had been synthesized and brought to bear – an absurd thesis. However, by virtue of so much ineptitude, the tradition of begging the question had been further solidified. (CNSNEWS.com, July 17, 2002)

The healthy skepticism displayed by world public opinion in response to the fantastic and unsubstantiated stories peddled by the dubious US regime rankled with Paul Wolfowitz, the chief neocon and the number two in the Rumsfeld Pentagon. When a new Bin Laden tape appeared in which Bin Laden was understood by some as claiming responsibility for the attacks, Wolfowitz expressed the wish that this new tape would put an end to “conspiracy theories.” According to Wolfowitz, the new find “confirms everything we've known about him already. There's nothing new or surprising in it. It's just further confirmation and hopefully, maybe, we'll stop hearing anything more about these insane conspiracy theories that somehow that the US has made this up or that somebody else did it.” (Sam Donaldson, ABC, December 9, 2001)

The US Congress mounted an inquiry, which was conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, acting as the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. The history of this committee, known as the JICI, was a troubled one. Three months into the probe, the original staff director suddenly resigned. This was L. Britt Snider, the former inspector general of the CIA. He was known for being a creature of Tenet, and was considered too eager to spare his former colleagues any embarrassment. But on the other hand, Snider had been favored by Democrat Bob Graham of Florida, who wanted to run for president, and was opposed by Republican senators. Snider was replaced temporarily by Rick Cinquegrana, another CIA officer, and then permanently by Eleanor Hill. “Members are trying to say, ‘We've got to get to the bottom of what happened’ while also saying, ‘We don't want to make it into a witch hunt,’” said L. Paul Bremer, who led a previous probe of intelligence agencies after the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa. Bremer later became notorious as Bush’s proconsul in Mesopotamia. Those impulses, Bremer said, “will be an inherent tension irrespective of who is the staff director.” When this JICI’s report was published in December 2002, the most notable thing about it was that 28 pages were absolutely blank – redacted at the insistence of the administration. Remarks by Graham and others fueled speculation that the 28 blank pages contained information that somehow implicated Saudi Arabia, and the press made much of this. But the general approach of the JICI was that there had been an intelligence failure, and that there ought to be measures to avoid more intelligence failures – nothing more.

SKEPTICAL GOVERNMENTS

The other factor that ought to give any thoughtful citizen cause to reflect is the significant number of dissenting opinions registered in the months after 9/11. We have assembled some of these here for inspection. Naturally, few if any of these critical strictures on 9/11 were ever presented in the US news media. That was unconscionable, since many of those who manifested serious doubts on the main issues of 9/11 were eminently respectable, experienced persons with decades of background in government, politics, academia, and military affairs. There were prime ministers and ministers, generals, professors, and well-established experts. Even in the midst of the shock and trauma experienced by world public opinion in the wake of 9/11, they were able to formulate coherent objections to the official version, objections which in many cases have been ignored and not answered down to the present day.

The European NATO partners were confronted with the need to evaluate the US version of 9/11 in a very direct way: immediately after 9/11, the Bush regime demanded the activation of Article Five of the North Atlantic Pact, calling upon member states to assist the United States in warding off an attack from abroad. The US, however, had never offered any proof that the 9/11 attacks had indeed come from outside of its own borders. Under the shock of the 9/11 events, and fearing the retribution of a crazed regime that was announcing its determination to “end states,” the European allies approved the resolution unanimously, even though no proof had been provided. One who objected to this procedure was Helmut Schmidt, the former Chancellor and Defense Minister of Germany for the Social Democratic Party, Several months after the vote, Schmidt reiterated that the European acquiescence had been a mistake. “For that article to be put into action, proof had to be delivered that the Sept. 11 terror attacks came from abroad. That proof has still not been provided,” Schmidt. (N-TV, December 10, 2001; EIR, December 13, 2001)

Another skeptic was former Italian President, Prime Minister, and Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga, who had been in charge of Italy’s internal security during the 1978 kidnap-murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Cossiga indicated his suspicion that the attacks presupposed some form of complicity within the US security system. The mastermind of the attack, Cossiga observed must have been a “sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.” As for Bin Laden, Cossiga added that “it is not thinkable that he did everything by himself.” (La Stampa, September 14, 2001; EIR September 15, 2001)

General Heinz Karst was one of the founders of the reconstituted German military forces, or Bundeswehr, in the mid-1950s. Like other experienced military men, Karst found the 9/11 story purveyed by the Bush administration suspiciously incomplete. In an interview, he noted that “British secret service coordinator, Pauline Neville-Jones considers--as most experts do--a Bin Laden co-authorship likely. But as far as the logistical operation is concerned, she is almost sure that the attacks were planned out in America, over the last six months.” Karst put these comments in historical context: “When, in 1995, the Federal building in Oklahoma was blown up and 168 human beings were killed, people first thought of Islamic terrorists. But they were Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, two elite soldiers of the Green Berets. The Americans have a long tradition of assassination attacks and of terrorism. Their most famous President, Abraham Lincoln, was shot dead in the theater. Martin Luther King was shot dead. John F. Kennedy was shot dead. His assassin was shot dead. Bob Kennedy was shot dead. Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt. There are rumors that also American ex-military have their hands in many cases.” (Deutschlandmagazin, December 17, 2001; EIR)

Also in Germany, former Technology Minister and deputy Defense Minister Andreas von Bülow developed a broad critique of the official 9/11 story, to which we will have occasion to refer several times. In early January 2002 von Bülow told the Berlin Tagespiegel that “planning the attacks was a masterwork, in technical and organizational terms. To hijack four big airliners within a few minutes and fly them into targets within a single hour and to do so on complicated flight routes! That is unthinkable, without backing from the secret apparatus of state and industry.” He called attention to the fact that covering up the real authorship of a terrorist crime with false tracks for investigators to follow has “been an accompanying feature of covert operations ever since they have been launched by influential agencies.” Von Bülow’s conclusion was that the full truth about September 11 had yet to be told. (Berlin Tagespiegel, January 13, 2002; EIR)

Another critical view of the 9/11 story came from Dr. Johannes B. Koeppl, a former official in the German Defense Ministry, and an advisor to the former NATO General Secretary, Manfred Woerner. Koeppl told Mike Ruppert: “The interests behind the Bush administration, such as the CFR, the Trilateral Commission – founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller – and the Bilderberger group, have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens.” (From the Wilderness, November 6, 2001)

A well-informed European source interviewed by EIR News Service on September 24, 2001 was of the opinion that 9/11 had been organized by a highly sophisticated operation inside the US. He added that “the Russians are aware of this, and that what is behind the operation, is a “vast geostrategic arrangement,” that touches upon the most sensitive Russian interests. The lack of proof of a foreign role, he thought, “makes all this talk of invoking Article 5 so problematic, because Article 5 is not valid, if the attack emanates from inside a NATO country. But the United States is hugely reluctant, to discuss the internal American factors in this. Yet, the fact is, everything that happened on 9/11, was organized, executed, and raised inside the United States. All this obsession on Osama bin Laden is pure nonsense. In fact, this was all well-organized, the people who did it were geniuses, I wish they were on our side.” He elaborated that, “as far as the Russians are concerned, there are two elements involved in all this: There is the United States as such, and there is the situation in Central Asia. All this talk of Islamic terrorism, is a cover for the fact that there are vast geostrategic rearrangements afoot, in all this.” Asked about how 9/11 came about, this source replied: “This was not primarily Islamic at all. I'm sure there were Islamic elements, but what is behind this, is a deeply embedded conspiratorial and organized operation, that took two-plus years to put together. These were people, who were able to make sophisticated moves on the markets, right before it happened. It was very carefully initiated and carried out, using American dissident groups, of which there are a lot, some quite violent. Probably the militia elements would have been tapped, although you have to keep in mind, they are a cover for something else. In any case, what I can say to you with certainty, this was not done by a handful of Islamic fanatics.”

General Mirza Aslam Beg of Pakistan voiced the doubts of his own government, even as Pakistan was being employed as a staging area for the US invasion of Afghanistan. Beg commented that “Many of us in this region believe that Osama or his al-Qaeda were not responsible for 11 September attacks in New York and Washington, yet the coalition led by United States is busy on ‘Afghan bashing,’ chasing objectives, which go much beyond Osama bin Laden. The information which is now coming up, goes to prove that involvement by the ‘rogue elements’ of the U.S. military and intelligence organization is getting more obvious. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda definitely do not have the know- how and the capability to launch such operations involving such high precision coordination, based on information and expertise.” (EIR, December 10, 2001)

Leading British academics also found the US official version unpalatable. Fred Halliday, London School of Economics Professor of International Relations and a well-known expert on the Middle East, told the BBC on September 11 that he would look for a domestic origin within the US of the September 11 events, along the lines of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He had underlined that it would be a mistake to depend on Bin Laden/Islamist track, since, in the Middle East, bin Laden has often been derided as an American agent. (London Observer, November 25, 2001)

The Arab world in general was not buying Washington’s account, especially in the absence of concrete evidence. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the leading conservative daily in Germany, lamented towards the end of November that the Arab public preferred its own “conspiracy theories” to the assurances offered by the Bush administration. The Arabs, complained the FAZ, tend to believe that “American intelligence circles planned and executed the Sept. 11 attacks in order to launch a long- prepared general assault against the Arab and Muslim world.” As an example, the FAZ cited the November 3 lead editorial in the semi-official Egyptian newspaper paper Al Ahram, whose author, Dr. Mustafa Mahmud wrote: “History has not ended. Slowly the truth is emerging. American groups planned and executed the attacks of Sept. 11. The anthrax cases in the United States are a further indication for this. We don't know what else will come up in the coming days.... History has not ended yet. There are murderers around, who have not been punished, criminals who have not paid the price for their deeds.” (FAZ, November 23, 2001; EIR)

MOSLEM VOICES CONDEMN 9/11, DENY OFFICIAL STORY

In a talk show broadcast on the government’s official nation-wide first program of Egyptian television featuring the leading intellectual Professor Mohammed Selim on November 24, all the participants agreed that organizing the 9/11 attacks was simply beyond the ability of Osama bin Laden and company. “No one in Egypt believes that Osama bin Laden did it,” the professor noted. The London-based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat is generally viewed as the semi-official organ of the Saudi government and the Saudi royal family, and has the largest circulation in the kingdom. This paper carried a commentary by the former Minister of Culture, Farouk Al-Berbir, which attempted to refute the US official account. According to Berbir, “the war on terrorism is an umbrella for the clash of civilizations. Saudi officials suspect that American terrorists were behind the September 11 attacks.” Berbir elaborated that “probably, the statements made by some Saudi officials, who say that they suspect that terrorists from inside the United States itself have been involved in this sophisticated operation, is enough to prove the meaninglessness of accusing bin Laden,...who was financed and armed by the CIA to fight the war against the Soviets.” According to Berbir, the “war against Islamic terrorism” is simply a new cloak for the old familiar American “arrogance of power” and for the powerful Zionist faction in the US administration. In Berbir’s view, the “U.S. has failed to prove or present a single tangible proof for” its official 9/11 story. (Al-Sharq Al- Awsat, November 30, 2001) The Saudi press also accused the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, of complicity in the attacks. Columnist Abd al-Jabbar Adwan wrapped up this paper’s view when he pointed to the numerous Armageddon and Apocalypse cults now operating on the American scene, writing: “Perhaps everyone will be surprised to find that, once again, the operation was ‘Made in the USA,’ as American society is filled with religious groups who consider themselves to be enemies of the state, its mechanisms and its liberal society. (Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, September 13, 2001)

Iran’s Siyasat-e Ruz carried a front-page editorial entitled “A Blow From Within,” in which it argued that since the attacks must have been carried out according to “a complicated methodical, technical and intelligence plan, [this] must have been done by a group or organization that has precise intelligence, access to America’s vital and sensitive center, access to high quality weapons and explosives and infiltrators in those organs.” In this paper’s view, the prime suspects were “dissident elements in the American community, especially the American military, who played the main role in the explosions at the Oklahoma federal center.” (September 13, 2001)

Ferdinando Imposimato, one of the most prominent investigating judges in Italy during the years of the Red Brigades, the Moro assassination, and the attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II, also found it impossible to accept the Bush administration account.

Imposimato was also a former senator and television personality. Speaking to students at Rome University on November 8, 2001 concerning the question of the clash of civilizations, Imposimato made clear that his own view of 9/11 centered on “the participation of internal US forces” in the attacks.

Policy elites in western Europe tended towards skepticism, thus prefiguring the clash of many of them with the Bush administration over Iraq and other issues. An influential and well-informed British observer noted that he had “been convinced, that behind the official story, there has been another story that is not being told. But instead of telling the truth, the policymakers are starting new adventures, as a preemptive move, to take our minds off what is really going on, to avoid reality. The dilemma that they face, though, is that they are only creating more and greater problems. It is the famous story of the Chinese box: you solve one crisis in one box, and then another crisis pops up….Instead of honestly facing the implications of that, Washington has hoped to preempt reality, by creating more problems elsewhere, primarily in this Afghanistan-South Asia region.” (EIR, January 9, 2002)

THE LIES OF THE US PRESS

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the US media were gripped by chauvinist hysteria and war psychosis. Two courageous editors, Ron Gutting of the Texas City, Texas City Sun and Dan Guthrie of the Grants Pass, Oregon, Daily Courier, where fired for lèse majesté (or was it Wehrkraftzersetzung?) when they dared to criticize Bush, including for his cowardice on 9/11. Edward Herman, professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, pointed out that “Pravda and Izvestia in the former Soviet Union would have been hard-pressed to surpass the American media in their subservience to the official agenda….They have abandoned the notion of objectivity or even the idea of providing a public space where problems are discussed and debated…. It’s a scandal that reveals the existence of a system of propaganda, not of serious media so essential in a Democratic society.” (Meyssan 2002 87)

Of course, the 9/11 myth could not have been generated and propagated by official leaks, statements, documents and reports alone. These had to be dished up to a gullible public by the corporate press, followed by the electronic media. Richard Bernstein and other New York Times staffers produced an elaboration of the official version entitled Out of the Blue: The Story of September 11, 2001, From Jihad to Ground Zero. Surely this embrace of 9/11 orthodoxy by the newspaper of record ought to give us some confidence that the basic facts have been checked? But of course the fact that one reads something in the New York Times guarantees nothing these days. The problem is not limited to the excesses of Jason Blair, who was terminated. Far more disturbing were the activities of neocon regime stenographer Judith Miller, a crony of the crank author Laurie Mylroie. Miller was responsible for uncritically purveying the lies of the Wolfowitz clique about Iraq’s phantomatic weapons of mass destruction. Partly because of Miller’s excess of neocon zeal, and absolute lack of critical screening, the New York Times was forced to apologize to its readers for its defective coverage. But unlike the hapless Blair, the disingenuous Miller, whose falsifications have contributed to a world tragedy, has continued to scribble. But if the New York Times had to apologize for serving as a megaphone for Bush’s lies of 2002 and 2003, how long will it be before they are forced to apologize for trumpeting Bush’s even bigger lies of 2001? How long will it be before the New York Times has to apologize for its pitiful propaganda piece, Out of the Blue?
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:21 am

PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 1 CONT'D.)

THE MEACHER CRITIQUE

A decisive turn in the transatlantic 9/11 debate came in the late summer of 2003, when the dimensions of the Anglo-American fiasco in Iraq were becoming evident. Michael Meacher had been a close associate of Tony Blair and one of the most prominent leaders of New Labour. He was a member of Parliament, and from May 1997 to June 2003, he had been the Environment Minister of Britain. Other members of the Blair cabinet, such as the former Overseas Development Minister, Claire Short, had quit over the Iraq adventure. Meacher was more courageous and more radical: he called into question the heart of the myth which the Bush administration wanted to foist off on the world. Meacher wrote:

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16, 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that “al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House.”

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6, 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15, 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3, 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20, 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at no later than 8.20 AM, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06 AM. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from US Andrews Air Force base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 AM. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13, 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence.”

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr. Bin Laden was captured.” The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that “the goal has never been to get Bin Laden” (AP, April 5, 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19, 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13, 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism. (Michael Meacher, “This war on terrorism is bogus.” The Guardian, September 6, 2003)


This is by all odds the most powerful critique of the 9/11 myth to come from an elected official in Britain. One senses the spirit of Tony Benn, the indomitable leader of the Labour left, who gave Meacher moral support. As for Claire Short, when asked in an interview if there was any common ground between Meacher’s critique of Blair and her own, she nervously replied that Meacher had taken himself completely “out of the mainstream.”

PAUL HELLYER REJECTS THE US ORTHODOXY

Another high-ranking skeptic on the official US account was Paul Hellyer, who had been Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Canada in three Liberal Party governments of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Because of this, he brought the expertise of a top- ranking NATO insider to the question under consideration. Some years later, in 2004, Hellyer told an interviewer: “Terrorism is a terrible thing, but this was a police problem and an intelligence problem. What was wrong with your intelligence? Why didn't you know this was going to happen? You spend billions and billions with spooks all over the world and surely you should have known what was going on. And, so I began to be concerned about that. And then questions were raised by others. Why did the President just sit in the schoolroom when he heard the news? Why did he not acknowledge that he already knew what was going on? As a former Minister of National Defense, when the news came out I had to wonder. Why did airplanes fly around for an hour and a half without interceptors being scrambled from Andrews [Air Force Base]? Isn’t Andrews right next to the capitol?” “With a quick action alert they should have been there in five minutes or ten minutes. If not, as the Minister of National Defense, which in the United States is the Secretary of Defense, I would want to say “why not?” (911Visibility.org, May 27, 2004)

POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY

If ever the world needed voices of reason and wisdom, it was in the traumatized days after 9/11. There were still persons in the world who aspired to the title of philosophers; were they able to provide humanity with any guidance? The picture was bleak. Jürgen Habermas, the most prominent representative of what remains of the Frankfurt School, was interviewed in New York in December 2001 by Giovanna Borradori. Habermas managed a certain veneer of skepticism; he noted that “if the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, as many think, then it must be able to stand comparison to other events of world historical impact.” (Borradori 26) He realizes that Carl Schmitt was somehow an issue, and he criticized Schmitt as a “fascist.” (Borradori 42) He was against Samuel Huntington; he regarded Bush’s alleged war on terrorism as “a serious mistake.” (Borradori 34) But when we get to the heart of the matter, Habermas remained imprisoned within the Clarke-Tenet-Powell-Blair-Bush official version, although he was clearly uncomfortable in that prison house of the human spirit. “The monstrous act itself was new,” Habermas observed. “And I do not just mean the action of the suicide hijackers who transformed the fully fueled airplanes together with the hostages into living weapons, or even the unbearable number of victims and the dramatic extent of the devastation….one factor above all seems to me to be relevant: one never really knows who one’s enemy is. Osama Bin Laden, the person, more than likely serves the function of a stand-in …. The terrorism we associate for the time being with the name ‘al Qaeda’ makes the identification of the opponent and any realistic assessment of the danger impossible.” (Borradori 28-29) We see that Habermas, however obliquely, was content to accept the official version. Is terrorism political? “Not in the subjective sense in which Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian citizen who came from Hamburg and piloted the first of the two catastrophic airplanes, would offer you a political answer.” (Borradori 33) I myself was in Berlin on 9/11, and saw how the lurid tabloid press there, led by the Bild Zeitung, attempted to awaken a new sense of guilt in the German population because Atta, the “terror beast,” had lived in Hamburg. Postwar German philosophy had been in many ways a campaign of resistance against the Bild Zeitung and its world outlook; now Habermas capitulated.

Another leading European philosopher interviewed by Borradori was Jacques Derrida, the deconstructionist. Derrida, as always, was obscured by the clouds of his own verbiage. He had the merit of proposing at least one realistic step for the post-9/11 configuration: “What would give me the most hope in the wake of all these upheavals is a potential difference between the new figure of Europe and the United States. I say this without any Eurocentrism.” (Borradori 116) Derrida also sensed that Carl Schmitt was somehow involved. He was well aware that “it was not impossible to foresee an attack on American soil by these ‘terrorists ….’” (Borradori 91) He knew that the guerillas who fought in Afghanistan were trained by the US. (Borradori 95) Derrida commented that the values he thought were important – politics, democracy, international law, human rights – “none of this seems to have any place whatsoever in the discourse of ‘Bin Laden.’” (Borradori 113) When it came to these values, “I don’t hear any such promises coming from ‘Bin Laden,’ at least not one for this world.” (Borradori 114) Again, the unease of the inmate shut inside the prison house of the official version was palpable, but it looked like no jail break would be attempted. Derrida said he used the term “Bin Laden” as a synecdoche, but use it nevertheless he did, and not, for example, “invisible government” or “rogue network.”. From these two examples we might be tempted to conclude that, on the great questions of human progress, European philosophy represented a spent force – but this may be premature.

Probably the leading US philosopher at the moment of 9/11 was the neopragmatist Richard Rorty. In the aftermath of 9/11, Rorty moved into a position of critical support for Bush. A year later, Rorty was perhaps less enthusiastic about Bush, but still focused on the “defense of civilization against terrorism” and “the chances of further attacks.” According to Rorty, “The catastrophes that rich monomaniacs like bin Laden are now able to cause are more like earthquakes than like attempts by nations at territorial aggrandizement or attempts by criminals to get rich. We are as baffled about how to forestall the next act of terrorism as about how to forestall the next hurricane.” (The Nation, October 21, 2002) Al Qaeda is thus a force of nature, which will be buffeting us for many years. This is much inferior even to Habermas and Derrida.

For even the beginnings of a sensible summary, we must go to Trudy Govier out in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada. Govier lists four theories on 9/11: there is the Zion theory, which blames the Mossad; the theory of internal collusion, which asserts that the CIA and the FBI let it happen (sometimes abbreviated as LIHOP, let it happen on purpose); the chickens coming home to roost theory, which explains the attacks as a product of destructive US foreign policies; the Gandhian internationalist theory, which accepts the official version of 9/11 but rejects the aggressive US response; and the Standard Theory, with which we are already amply familiar. Govier’s argument against the internal collusion theory has no rigorous basis in fact or logic, but reduces everything to a matter of personal opinion (in Plato’s sense of opinion as inferior knowledge). “Were the attacks a setup?,” asks Govier. “I doubt it. The idea that US intelligence operatives would collude in such devastating attacks against their own country, including such potent symbols as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, strikes me as wildly unlikely.” (Govier 127-128) She therefore capitulates to the Standard Theory, with a nod to John Stuart Mill on the importance of dissent. Govier does not mention the more radical approach which is endorsed here, namely that 9/11 was the product of a network of moles inside the US government and intelligence agencies, backed up by covert action teams of expert professionals, seeking to provoke a war of civilizations as a means of shoring up Anglo-American world domination. The acronym for this approach is MIHOP – made it happen on purpose.

Finally, it is worthwhile to note that the entire question of 9/11 remains taboo in American politics. This question may provide the key to the demise to Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in the early months of 2004. Whatever else Dean may have been or not been, he was demonstrably the only Democratic candidate who was willing to make 9/11 and Bush’s conduct in relation to it into a campaign issue. He did so on December 2, 2003 in a radio interview with Diane Rehm on NPR. Dean suggested that Bush’s obsession with withholding documents on 9/11 might be attributable to his having known what was about to happen. “The most interesting theory I’ve heard so far – which is nothing more than a theory, it can’t be proved – is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis,” Dean remarked. This was a direct challenge to the heart of Bush’s rationale for re- election – his allegedly sterling performance in the so-called war on terror. It also tended to undermine the bi-partisan group which had been attempting to pin the 9/11 attacks on Saudi Arabia. Dean was walking on a minefield. He went on to say: “Now, who knows what the real situation is? But the trouble is, by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kinds of theories, whether they have any truth to them or not.” In the absence of total disclosure, Dean added, such theories will inevitably “get repeated.” He concluded that Bush “is taking a great risk by suppressing the key information that should go in the Kean Commission.” Dean’s acknowledgement that the 9/11 coverup had become a major issue was received with howls of “conspiracy theorist” from some of the corporate media who mentioned it. This incident was soon followed by a concerted campaign of denigration and ridicule against the former Vermont governor from such organs as the Washington Post. Dean, like Torricelli, had violated the oligarchical consensus which demanded silence on the real issues of 9/11.

THE FAILURE OF THE KEAN-HAMILTON 9/11 COMMISSION

The utter failure of the Commission to Investigate Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, popularly known as the 9/11 commission or the Kean-Hamilton commission, requires special attention. The Kean-Hamilton commission came into the world as an orphan. The Bush regime and the Washington oligarchy in general had never desired its creation. They had successfully fabricated and propagated the 9/11 myth, and they saw no need whatever for any further rummaging through the events of that catastrophic day. The creation of the 9/11 commission was due largely to the agitational and lobbying efforts of the 9/11 Families Steering Committee, a body largely composed of New Jersey housewives, the widows of men who had died in the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The most active among these widows was the quartet known as the Jersey girls – Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg, and Lorie van Auken. Another group had as its spokesman Stephen Push. After months of trips to Washington to lobby Congress, Kristen Breitweiser was designated by the 9/11 victims’ families to testify in the first public hearing of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JICI) inquiry at the US Capitol. The four widows soon became embittered as they saw that members of Congress and their staffs were determined to avoid the questions that seemed most important to them. They were indignant that the Ashcroft Justice Department had prescribed that “minders” had to be present whenever the JICI interviewed officials from the intelligence agencies, a rather overt form of witness intimidation which was later continued in regard to the Kean-Hamilton Commission.

They also began to notice that the FBI continued to lie systematically, and in the process they became aware of some of the anomalies in the government story. Two of the accused hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had been known to US intelligence agencies well before 9/11, and important facts about them had been languishing unused in federal files for 15 months. As the JICI discovered, these two persons had had extensive dealings with a longtime FBI counterterrorism informant based in California. The case was very suspicious.

Since the JICI was mandated to cease its operations upon delivering its report at the end of 2003, the four widows and others began pressing for the board of inquiry which Torricelli had demanded, but which Bush had successfully blocked, during the months immediately after 9/11. This proposal was also stubbornly opposed by Bush, who wanted no further investigation at all.

In May 2002, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Daschle endorsed the idea of an independent investigating commission. There was a diehard group of partisan Republicans in the House who sought to block the probe as long as they could. They were leads by Tom Delay, who ranted that “a public commission investigating American intelligence in a time of war is ill-conceived and irresponsible.” (New York Times, May 21, 2002) This was of course what Bush and Cheney also thought.

The House finally agreed to the bill for a commission on July 25, 2002. Rep. Tim Roemer was the bill’s sponsor, and it was not a coincidence that he was later named to the commission, since he was out of the House and needed a job. After the commission was finally voted up by the Senate in late November 2002, Bush sought to name Henry Kissinger as the commission chairman. With that everyone in Washington knew that the fix was in: the new commission was intended by the establishment to carry forward the coverup, not to discover the truth about what had happened. Kissinger’s old adversary Daniel Schorr was one who said so bluntly, adding that the Bush administration was “desperately anxious” to avoid being pilloried for the obvious intelligence failures of that day. (NPR, November 30, 2002)

The bankruptcy of the 9/11 commission is expressed first of all in the conflicts of interests inherent in the pedigrees of the well-heeled insiders who composed it.

The blueblood former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, currently president of Drew University, was on the board of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Council of Prince Philip’s and Prince Bernhard’s World Wildlife Fund. He has also been on the board of Amerada Hess Corporation, which has been engaged in a joint venture with Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia. Delta Oil is owned by the bin Mafouz and al Amoudi families of Saudi Arabia, who have been charged at various times with helping to fund al Qaeda – as for example in the $1 trillion lawsuit brought by 9/11 victims’ heirs against Saudi Arabian interests. Kean has been insistently linked to Khalid bin Mafouz, one of Bin Laden’s relatives by marriage. He is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). This is the so-called Project Democracy, a bi-partisan organ of quasi-autonomous US government subversion of the rest of the world. The NED is in effect the privatized version of the Cold War CIA under Reagan’s Executive Order 12333. This was the mother, so to speak, of the Bush 41 – Poindexter – Oliver North double dealing that history has come to know as the Iran-contra affair. In a 1987 essay entitled “Project Democracy’s Program: The Fascist Corporate State,” I had occasion to observe:

Even in an epoch full of big lies like the late 20th century, it is ironic that the financiers of the Trilateral Commission should have chosen the name “Project Democracy” to denote their organized effort to install a fascist, totalitarian regime in the United States and a fascist New Order around the world. …Project Democracy is fascist, designed to culminate in the imposition of fascist institutions on the United States, institutions that combine the distilled essence of the Nazi Behemoth and the Bolshevik Leviathan. Project Democracy is high treason, a conspiracy for the overthrow of the Constitution. An organization whose stock in trade is destabilization and putsch in so many countries around the world it can hardly be expected to halt its operations as it returns to the US border. For Project Democracy, it can happen here, it will happen here.” (Tarpley 1987 40)


Lee Hamilton may be the all-time champion as regards the sheer number of commissions he has served on. While working on the 9/11 commission, he moonlighted as president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a thinly veiled intelligence operation. Hamilton served as congressman from Indiana for 34 years, specializing in the House International Relations Committee, which he chaired. He was also on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran – better known as the Iran- contra committee, which catapulted Oliver North to notoriety. At that time, Hamilton had commented that indictment or impeachment of Reagan or Bush would not have been “good for the country.” Instead, Hamilton supported the indictment of Reagan NSC director John Poindexter, North, and General Richard Secord, while assiduously protecting both Reagan and Vice President George Bush, the latter of whom had directed every phase of Iran-contra drug-running and gun-running (Tarpley 1992). All in all, Hamilton is 0 for 4 in finding serious malfeasance by top oligarchs in any of the investigating committees or commissions he has worked on.

John Lehman was Secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987, during the Reagan-Bush administrations, working with Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci. His current role was that of Wall Street corporate raider in his capacity as chairman of J. F. Lehman & Company, a private equity investment firm specialized in leveraged buyouts. Lehman counts as a Kissinger clone; he got his start as special counsel and member of the senior staff in Kissinger’s Nixon-era National Security Council. He was one of the more accomplished practitioners of psychological warfare among the commissioners, as reflected in his expert baiting of the FDNY representatives during the commission’s last hearings in New York City. Thanks in part to this arrogant performance, the last commission session in New York almost turned into a riot against the 9/11 commission, and the commissioners were no doubt glad to get out of town that day.

Jamie S. Gorelick, a partner of Wilmer, Cutler, & Pickering, was also the vice-chair of Fannie Mae, a purveyor of mortgage-backed securities which was reportedly in deep financial trouble as a result of the Greenspan housing bubble. She had been deputy Attorney General during the Clinton years. Gorelick, who served on the CIA’s National Security Advisory Panel as well as on the President’s Review of Intelligence, counted as a personal creature of CIA Director George Tenet, to whom she displayed fawning deference whenever he appeared for testimony before the 9/11 commission. Her lines of questioning typically tried to deflect guilt and opprobrium away from Langley, and towards such favored scapegoat agencies as the FAA.

James R. “Big Jim” Thompson was a Republican wheelhorse from Illinois, where he had held on as governor from 1977-1991, an all-time record for that state. He was a member of the law firm of Winston & Straw, which finds its niche in defending corporations accused of wrongdoing – among them, Philip Morris, the target of numerous class action lawsuits by tobacco victims. Thompson’s caliber may be most easily gauged from examining his role in overseeing a “corporate kleptocracy” as a member of the audit committee of Hollinger Corporation, the British intelligence front which was mercilessly looted over many years by Lord Conrad Black and his rapacious consort, Barbara Amiel, a self-styled “fascist bitch.” According to a report prepared for Hollinger by former SEC chairman Richard C. Breeden, between 1997 and 2003, Black and his management cohorts steered 95.2% of Hollinger’s gross income into their personal accounts, depriving shareholders of about $400 million of company funds. Black and Amiel reportedly viewed Hollinger as a personal “piggybank.” This neocon power couple, who had played a key role in the Clinton impeachment via their control of the London Daily Telegraph, used the Hollinger corporate jet as their personal property, shuttling among Chicago, Toronto, and vacation spots like Palm Springs and others. One 33-hour junket to Bora Bora alone cost Hollinger shareholders $533,000. Black billed the company $90,000 to refurbish his Rolls Royce, and another $8 million for memorabilia that once belonged to Franklin D. Roosevelt, about whom Black wrote a book. A birthday party organized by Black for Amiel at New York’s La Grenouille cost Hollinger $42,870. Black shoveled $5.4 million to neocon windbag Richard Perle, whom he described as a “trimmer and sharper” in private company emails. In the midst of this bacchanal sat Big Jim Thompson of the audit committee, flanked by former State Department operative Richard Burt. Thompson came in for harsh criticism in the Breeden report for having done nothing to prevent Black’s picaresque looting of Hollinger, which was supposed to be preserved as an asset of the British intelligence community. If Big Jim Thompson could not see the kleptocracy raging around him, how could he be expected to come up with any meaningful facts about 9/11? (Washington Post, September 1, 2004)

Former Senator Slade Gorton worked with the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis LLP. He had represented Washington state in the Senate for 18 years, 1982-2000. He himself attributed his appointment to his close personal friendship with GOP Senate leader Trent Lott, who was soon forced to quit his leadership post because of his effusive praise for Dixiecrat segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Gorton can be considered the representative of the smoke-filled room of Republican senators who exert decisive influence in the GOP.

Former Indiana Democratic Congressman Tim Roemer was a partner at Johnston and Associates, and a scholar at George Mason University in Virginia. He served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was part of the JICI coverup, and was one of the authors of the House bill which set up the 9/11 commission.

Fred Fielding was a senior partner with the Wiley, Rein, & Fielding law firm. He had been Reagan’s lawyer between 1981 and 1986. He had been associate counsel between 1970 and 1972, and associate counsel between 1972 and 1974. His role as Nixon’s lawyer was such that, after a multi-year probe, investigative journalism students at the University of Illinois declared that Fielding had been the fabled Deep Throat who fed leads to Woodward and Bernstein about Watergate back in 1972-74. At that time Fielding had worked in John Dean’s office.

Former Senator Max Cleland of Georgia was the one possible wild card among the commissioners. He had been defeated in his re-election bid in 2002 by an underhanded Republican campaign of character assassination waged by the shameless Saxby Chambliss. Cleland had attempted to preserve union bargaining rights and job security for the employees of the new Department of Homeland Security, but had been wildly defamed by the GOP attack machine, including the juxtaposition of his picture with that of Bin Laden. Cleland, we recall, had left two legs and one arm on the battlefield in Vietnam. In the current scoundrel time in Washington, he quickly became persona non grata.

Democratic Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste was a former federal prosecutor from New York City who gained prominence during the Watergate scandal against the Nixon White House in 1973- 74, when he was chief lawyer for the Sam Ervin Senate Watergate Committee. Since then he had been a fixture on the Democratic side of various investigations. Currently a member of the law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe, and Maw, Ben- Veniste was previously with Weil, Gotshal, and Manges, one of the largest bankruptcy firms in the world, which was reportedly in the process of making some $200 million out of the bankruptcy proceedings of Enron, the company looted by Bush’s top backer of 2000, Ken “Kenny Boy” Lay. In the past, Ben-Veniste had represented the Iran-contra drug smuggler and pilot, Barry Seal.

Commission staff director Philip Zelikow was the director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller professor of History at the University of Virginia. He had previously served as the executive director of the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by Carter and Ford. Zelikow was one of the editors of The Kennedy Tapes, a collection marked by flawed editorial criteria and thus of dubious value to scholars. Zelikow was co-author with Condoleezza Rice of Germany Unified and Europe Transformed. As a partner with Rice in a book venture, Zelikow thus had a further crippling conflict of interest. He was also the director of the Aspen Strategy Group, a program of the utopian Aspen Institute. He is a Bushman, and was a part of the 2000-2001 Bush-Cheney transition team. Rice, for example, had been accused of covering up for a payment of some $100,000 sent to lead patsy Mohamed Atta by General Mahmoud Afmad of the Pakistani Interservices Intelligence in September 2001, almost certainly at the behest of the CIA. Zelikow was appointed by the Bush administration to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on October 5, 2001; the PFIAB chair at that time was the lugubrious General Brent Scowcroft, formerly of Kissinger Associates. At several points in the investigation, Zelikow was forced to recuse himself, since he had been a part of the actions being probed. In another case, he was interviewed by other representatives of the 9/11 commission in relation to his role in pre-9/11 intelligence. At this rate Zelikow could have simplified the investigation by interviewing himself.

The resident lawyer of the 9/11 commission was David Marcus of the arch-establishment law firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering. One of the clients of this law firm was Saudi Prince Mohammed al Faisal, who was named as one of the three most important financiers of 9/11 in the $1 trillion families’ lawsuit. (Michel Chossudovsky, “Who’s Who on the 9/11 ‘Independent’ Commission,” globalresearch.ca; Joyce Lynn, “The 9/11 Cover-Up Commission,” http://www.communitycurrency.org/joycelynn.html)

Four out of the ten commissioners – Kean, Hamilton, Lehman, and Gorelick – were members of the elitist Council on Foreign Relations in New York City.

As if to document its lack of seriousness, the 9/11 commission was indifferent to a glaring case of perjury that occurred on the part of witnesses testifying under oath. In one session, former FBI Acting Director Thomas Pickard testified that Attorney General John Ashcroft had told him before 9/11 not to provide any more briefings on the terrorist threat, since he was not interested in hearing them. Ashcroft later directly denied that this was true. One of the two, most likely Ashcroft, was lying on a matter of considerable materiality. But the 9/11 commission never acted.

The 9/11 families had expected that at least one of their number would be named as a member of the new commission which they had bludgeoned a very unwilling Washington establishment into setting up. When the appointments came out, the commission was composed of hacks, wheelhorses, and professional insiders from the two political parties. The most the families and their allies could manage was to get Mindy Kleinberg on the agenda for a hard-hitting presentation to one of the early public plenary sessions of the commission. The commissioners listened politely, thanked Ms. Kleinberg extensively, and proceeded completely to ignore the letter and the spirit of her remarks. (New York Observer, September 14, 2003)

The 9/11 commission was never a fighting investigation, like the Church Committee and the Pike Committee back during the Ford administration. The Pike Committee, we must recall, once issued a richly deserved contempt of Congress citation against Henry Kissinger. The only time it looked like the Kean-Hamilton Commission might actually be going somewhere came towards the end of 2003, when Commissioner Max Cleland became indignant about the high-handed arrogance with which the Bush White House was insisting on conducting its coverup. The Commission, which was armed with subpoena power, had chosen to negotiate with Bush about its access to important White House documents, notably the presidential daily briefings about which certain details had come out through the earlier probes. Bush was offering to let two members of the commission see the a pre-censored selection of the sensitive documents in question, in a guarded room, without the possibility of taking notes. Cleland, for whom the defeat at the hands of Saxby Chambliss in the 2002 election still rankled, became indignant with the sort of righteous anger which is so seldom seen in today’s Washington. Calling the Bush proposal “disgusting,” and warning against dirty deals, Cleland forthrightly demanded that all the commissioners be able to see all the documents they wanted and take all the notes they thought necessary. (New York Times, October 26, 2003) If Bush chose to oppose this, then the commission would have to use its subpoena powers, and let the matter play out through the courts – incidentally inflicting maximum public relations damage on the always-surreptitious Bush. Just as it appeared that Cleland and perhaps one or two other commissioners were about to clash with Governor Kean and Congressman Hamilton, it was announced that Cleland would be departing the commission to accept a post on the board of directors of the Export-Import Bank. According to the statute that set up the commission, these two jobs could not be held at the same time. The old warrior’s courage had failed him. Who knows what threats had been issued to secure this outcome?

But Cleland’s departure meant that there was a vacancy on the commission which now had to be filled. This time a group of family activists officially nominated Kristen Breitweiser for the seat being vacated by Cleland. But, in an act of cynical contempt for the families and their sacrifices, Senator Daschle, in whose power it was to nominate a successor, chose instead to name former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerry, currently the head of the New School University in New York City. Kerry was an austerity Democrat and deficit hawk from the right wing of his party who had developed into a very vehement warmonger and xenophobe in the days after 9/11. Subjects like Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda could evoke from him adamant demands for US military retaliation that bordered on psychotic episodes.

For Kerry was not only a troubled man; he was reportedly a war criminal of the Vietnam era. As recounted by Newsweek correspondent Gregory L. Vistica in his article “One Awful Night in Thanh Phong” (New York Times Magazine, April 25, 2001), one night in 1969 “Kerry’s Raiders” had attacked the small Vietnamese hamlet of Thanh Phong, slaughtering at least 13 civilians, including women, old men, and children. This account, relying heavily on the testimony of Gerhard Klann, one of Kerry’s fellow Navy Seals, recounts how Kerry helped Klann dispatch an elderly Vietnamese man, holding him down while Klann cut his throat with a bayonet. Disturbingly, Kerry reportedly claims nowadays that he does not remember his role in the slaying of the old man. If true, this obviously suggested that his mental equipment was not up to the task of serving on such an important commission. (See also Justin Raimondo, “Is Bob Kerrey a War Criminal? Yes.” http://www.antiwar.com, April 27, 200)

The 9/11 commission was stonewalled by the FAA, JCS, CIA, NORAD, and Homeland Security. FAA and NORAD were so reticent that subpoenas were finally issued to get them to disgorge documents. At first, witnesses before the 9/11 commission were not even sworn in under oath. This changed under pressure from the bereaved families. The administration intimidated witnesses, with minders – overseers from the agency they worked for – present during the testimony at all times to make sure they did not get too talkative. The final report of the 9/11 commission was “vetted,” meaning censored or screened, by the Bush White House.

The apex of interest in the 9/11 commission was the Clarke testimony of April 2004, which resulted in the declassification and publication of Clarke’s famous Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” This was a document which Rice had claimed contained merely historical data. However, the net effect was to strengthen the myth, not to broaden the horizons of the public. This, of course, was Clarke’s intent. Condoleezza Rice first refused to appear, until public pressure became unbearable. But when she did show up the results were disappointing.

When the 9/11 commission report was released on July 22, 2004, it received the approval of a bi-partisan oligarchical consensus. The ruling elite approved of the coverup, and also approved of the recommendations for structural reform, notably the idea of having a single intelligence czar of cabinet rank to preside over CIA, DIA, NSA, and the rest. In reality, the nation would be better served by keeping the present fragmented system, since it provided a pluralism of opinion, and could not so easily be dragooned in a given direction. What if the intelligence czar were a neocon of the ilk of Feith, Luti, or Schulsky? Under the current system, there was always the chance that one intelligence agency might help the country by investigating the crimes of another intelligence agency. But that seemed to be precisely what the Kean-Hamilton consensus did not want.

There were a few dissident voices in the controlled corporate media. William Raspberry condemned the 9/11 commission report as “a childlike explanation” which managed to avoid any semblance of individual responsibility,” analogous to a child’s saying “The lamp broke.” Raspberry quoted CIA alumnus Ray McGovern of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity commenting that “the whole name of the game is to exculpate anyone in the establishment…why is it that after all this evidence and months and months of testimony, the commission found itself unable even to say if the attacks could have been prevented?” McGovern’s overall estimate of the 9/11 commission itself: “This commission is not representative of America or of the families of those who died in 9/11. It is an archetypically establishment body, consisting of people who, with the exception of a token white woman, look exactly like me. They are all lawyers or politicians or both – and all acceptable to Vice President Cheney, who didn’t want a commission in the first place. The result is facile, mischievous, and disingenuous.” (Washington Post, July 26, 2004)

As a result of the official failure to provide a competent investigation of the 9/11 events, there has been absolutely no accountability or responsibility for what occurred. The JICI and the Kean-Hamilton commission agreed in essence that, although there was certainly an intelligence failure, it was systemic, meaning that no individuals were responsible. In bureaucratic usage, the propositions that everyone was responsible means that in practical terms no one was responsible. The only official of any note whose career seems to have been harmed by 9/11 was the security director of the FAA, and even he was allowed to resign.

In the US Navy, a captain who runs his ship aground is relieved of command, no matter whose fault it turns out to be. In many countries, if the national team does poorly in the World Cup soccer championships, the sports minister must resign. In other countries, if a train wreck occurs, the transportation minister is automatically required to step down. This is the principle of ministerial responsibility, the overall political responsibility of the head of an executive department.

After 9/11, the Bush administration did not observe this principle. Instead, figures like Ashcroft argued in effect that, the greater the disasters that occurred on their watch, the more numerous their failures, the more emergency powers they deserved to be given. Their maxim was “the more I fail, the more dictatorial power I deserve to have.” Ashcroft seemed to think that he was entitled to bungle his way into a dictatorship. Such an arrangement provides a positive stimulus for bureaucrats to be less than zealous in preventing disasters from being visited on the citizens. The principle of ministerial responsibility provides the most rudimentary and the most essential reality principle for government officials: the sure knowledge that if catastrophes take place on their watch, they will be sacked. In an oligarchical system like ours, this is absolutely necessary to create a minimum common interest between security officials and the citizens. The alien neocon notion of martial law abolishes this reality principle by threatening to freeze the failed officials in power as a reward for their own bungling incompetence – or for their treasonous complicity.

The following comments on the Gunpowder Plot of nearly four hundred years ago bear an eerie resemblance to the 9/11 operation: “The determined manner in which this object was ever kept in view, the unscrupulous means constantly employed for its attainment, the vehemence with which matters were asserted to have been proved, any proof of which was never seriously attempted – in a word, the elaborate system of falsification by which alone the story of the conspiracy was made to suit the purpose it so efficiently served, can inspire us with no confidence that the foundation upon which such a superstructure was erected, was itself what it was said to be. On the other hand, when we examine into the details supplied to us as to the progress of the affair, we find that much of what the conspirators are said to have done is well-nigh incredible, while it is utterly impossible that if they really acted in the manner described, the public authorities should not have had full knowledge of their proceedings.” (Gerard 16-17) These comments on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 are equally applicable to the 9/11 attacks of four centuries later. The Anglo-American financier faction, whose birth was marked by terrorism under James I, has resorted to even more spectacular terrorism in the epoch of its historic decline.

And so we say to all persons of good will: you would never believe the utterances of Bush & Co. about any issue of importance without independently verifying the facts. Why do you persist in believing Bush on the most central question of our time, 9/11?

On September 14, 2001, the US Congress, contemptuously flaunting the lessons of the infamous and fraudulent Golf of Tonkin resolution of August 1964, which had been paid for with the lives of 50,000 Americans and a million Vietnamese, gave Bush carte blanche to wage war, authorizing him to employ “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.” The only dissenting voice was that of Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, who defended the honor of the American people with her superb courage in the face of hysteria. It is Bush’s determination of those who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 9/11 events which we must now examine.

_______________

Notes:

1. Citations from newspapers of the Arab and Islamic world are from Cameron S. Brown, “The Shot Heard Round the World: Middle East Reactions to September 11,” in Middle East Review of International Affairs, vol. 5, no. 4, December 2001.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:02 am

PART 1 OF 3

II: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM

And yet the entire Republic is shaken and disconcerted by these seditious provocations, and precisely by the action of those who should have been the first to prevent them….
-- Sallust


The original title for this section was “the theory and practice of state-sponsored, false-flag, synthetic terrorism. Instead, I have let “synthetic terrorism” sum up this entire concept. In any political system which relies to even a small extent for its continued existence on the consent of the governed, some form of popular legitimation is necessary. But what happens when the wars, policies and institutional changes desired by the ruling elite cannot be understood or supported by the vast majority of the citizens? What happens if the oligarchical nature of the system endows it with such inertia that it cannot be motivated to act in the way in which the most powerful oligarchical factions desire? Under these conditions, especially if the political and economic systems are in crisis, state sponsored terrorism may emerge. Here we are not describing the way in which statesmen, generals and intelligence officers ought to act; we are describing the way in which they have acted and continue to act. What we offer here can be thought of as a theory of synthetic terrorism. This terrorism is synthetic because it brings together the efforts of a number of disparate components: patsies, moles, professionals, media, and controllers. It is also synthetic in the sense that it is artificial: it does not grow up spontaneously out of despair and oppression, but is rather the product of an effort of organization and direction in which factions of government play an indispensable role.

We are not offering erudite scholarship isolated from public affairs, but an active intervention against the ongoing attempt to build an entire international system on a monstrous falsehood.

We must stress the idea that the vast majority of international terrorism conducted on a spectacular scale is indeed state-sponsored terrorism. This does not mean that such terrorism is sponsored by the entire government, down to the last GS-4 clerical worker doing data entry for the Social Security Administration. It does mean that a faction or network of the government uses its access to the levers of power to promote the terrorist action in various ways. In Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the Arab and Islamic world today, there have been deluded and naïve individuals and institutions who have somehow associated large-scale international terrorism with revolutionary or progressive change, or with the establishment of international justice. Nothing could be further from the truth. If the Italian left of the 1970s and the German left of the same period sympathized with the Red Brigades or the Baader-Meinhof group/Red Army faction, they only showed their own stupidity, since both of these terrorist operations were created by and controlled by NATO intelligence. Similarly, any Arab who feels sympathy for al Qaeda needs to be forcefully reminded that al Qaeda was created by the CIA and continues to be steered by the CIA, through various cut-outs and mediations. Terrorism, which was advertised as a desperate aid to oppressed peoples, has most often had the opposite effect: the attack on the Munich Olympics in 1972, the first spectacular blowing up of airliners, the Achille Lauro – these were actions which set the Palestinian cause back 20 years.

Terrorism in the modern era is the means by which oligarchies wage secret wars against the people, under conditions in which it would be politically impossible to wage the same war openly. Oligarchy, in turn, always has one and the same political program, which has not changed since the time of Thucydides, Plato and the writer that classical historians call The Old Oligarch: the purpose and program of oligarchy is to perpetuate oligarchy. The specific political and economic form of the oligarchy is much less important. The nomenklatura of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was supposedly based on state property of the means of production, the primacy of the Communist Party, and Marxist ideology, but they proved more than willing to throw all that out the window when they realized that their oligarchical status and special privilege could not be preserved under communist auspices. Having understood this, the Soviet oligarchs were eager to transform themselves into stockjobbers, speculators, profiteers, and young wolves (as Zhirinovsky put it) under the auspices of wild laissez-faire capitalism. What was important to them was to preserve their status as an oligarchy. This is an important lesson, since it shows that we must be deeply suspicious of the ruling elite of the United States, which is of course also an oligarchy, but an oligarchy which operates behind the mask of democratic institutions and formal democracy. The experience of the USSR suggests that the US oligarchy will be more than willing to trade in its democratic costumes for a bureaucratic-authoritarian or even totalitarian garb if the democratic forms prove to be impossible to maintain, most likely because of financial and economic difficulties.

The naive view of terrorism is that it grows up directly out of oppression, economic misery, and political despair. Oppressed and exploited people, or those who have been colonized by a foreign power, come together spontaneously in ones and twos, create an organization, and after a certain time of preparation go over to armed struggle against their oppressors or occupiers. But this is the rarest of exceptions.

This view pays no attention to the most important institutional actor in the world of terrorism – secret intelligence agencies like CIA, FBI, NSA, KGB, Stasi, MI-6, and the rest. Secret intelligence agencies are institutions in which the very essence of oligarchy is at work. Secret intelligence agencies in their modern forms go back to the Republic of Venice, which was famous for its intelligence directorate, the Council of Ten, and its pervasive network of spies, informers, and provocateurs. And the Republic of Venice was the longest-lasting oligarchical system in world history. Despite their cultural differences, all of these secret intelligence agencies are fundamentally alike. Terrorism generally starts within these secret agencies, or nowadays more likely in their privatized tentacles – as for example the intelligence community in the United States has existed since President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333.

Secret intelligence agencies are fatalists to the extent that they regard all large-scale sociological and political changes as inevitable. As soon as they identify a new phenomenon which they have not yet penetrated, their only thought is how to infiltrate their agents and assets into it, so they can steer it or influence it when the time comes. Whenever the leaders of intelligence agencies see a train leaving the station, their only thought is to climb on board, quite irrespective of the destination, as Gen. Paul Albert Scherer, the former head of West Germany’s Military Counter- intelligence (Militärischer Abschirmdienst) and one of the greatest experts in this field, assured me some years back. This applies to terrorist groups most emphatically. Here the attention of the secret intelligence agencies is so strongly focused that their task is most often that of founding, and much more seldom that of infiltrating and taking over some group which already exists.

The world of secret intelligence agencies is a realm of falsehood, camouflage, deception, violence, unspeakable cruelty, treachery, and betrayal. It is the most desolate and grim sector of human endeavor, where no human values can subsist. It knows neither hope nor mercy nor redemption. It is the one area of human life where Hobbes’s maxim holds true – it is the war of all against all. But not as chaos – as an ultimately controlled phenomenon which serves the goal of preserving the state power that the intelligence agencies serve. During the Cold War, the conflict of CIA, MI-6, SDECE, KGB, BND, Stasi and the rest was called the wilderness of mirrors, a desert populated by agents, double agents, triple agents, multiple agents, their case officers, their counterintelligence opponents, and the omnipresent specialists in mokrie dela – wetwork, or assassinations, as the KGB described them.

We start from the strong presumption that terrorism is therefore an activity which is controlled by a faction of government, probably acting under the influence of financier factions which are generally the ultimate source of authority in the globalized universe after 1991. Terrorism cannot be described as a spontaneous sociological phenomenon, as the old saying goes – it must rather be seen as a phenomenon developed by sociologists, along with psychologists, profilers, psychiatrists, case officers, handlers, and cut-outs. For every terrorist and terrorist group in the field, an extensive bureaucratic support system is necessary. Spontaneous combustion is the last thing that should be expected.

This is an important point, to which we will return. The naïve or spontaneous theory of terrorism sees the terror group as sprouting up directly out of the compost of misery, poverty, and desperation. Our point here is that this explanation neglects the crucial, indispensable role of the secret intelligence agency, which is usually present at the creation of the terror group, or very soon thereafter. The well-known Indian author Arundhati Roy told the American Sociological Association in San Francisco on August 16, 2004 that “terrorism is the privatization of war” and that “terrorists are the free marketers of war.” These are striking formulations, but this does not prevent them from leading in the wrong direction. Synthetic terrorism remains very much under state control; it is only that the puppetmaster’s strings are well concealed from those who do not know what to look for, or who do not want to know. Thus, a CIA front corporation is not really part of the private sector – it is an emanation of Langley just as surely as the local station chief and his staff.

But it should also be clear that state sponsored terrorism cannot call itself by its own real name. It must necessarily masquerade as an authentic voice of the oppressed – be they Arabs, Moslems, workers, national minorities, or whatever. The terror groups cannot be labeled CIA or KGB – they must call themselves Red Brigades, Red Army faction, ETA, or al Qaeda. The false flag and false ideology allows the terror group to pretend that it is something that it is not, and to convince billions of naïve viewers of CNN or al Jazeera that the false dumb-show is indeed reality.

In the nineteenth century, the great headquarters of international terrorism was London. The defense of the empire required operations which the public decorum of the Victorian era could not openly avow. The main vehicle for British terrorist operations in Europe was Giuseppe Mazzini and his phalanx of organizations starting from Young Italy: Young Germany, Young France, Young Poland, Young Turkey, Young America. Mazzini was a paid agent of the British Admiralty, and received his funding through Admiralty official James Stansfeld. Mazzini’s terrorism was directed against what the British called “the arbitrary powers”: Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Each of these had a large population of oppressed nationalities, and Mazzini created a terrorist group for each one of them, often promising the same territory to two or more of his national sections. The important thing was that rulers and officials be assassinated, and bombs thrown. The net effect of all this can be gauged by the complaint of an Austrian about Mazzini’s operations in Italy: Mazzini aimed at making Italy turbulent, he lamented, which was bad for Austria, but without making Italy strong, which might be bad for the British. Mazzini operated out of London during his entire career, which simply means that he was officially sanctioned, as were anarchists like Bakunin and a whole tribe of nihilists. Mazzini worked well for Europe – including the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. For other parts of the world, the Admiralty had specialized operations.

State-sponsored terrorism can have a number of goals. One of these is to eliminate a politician, business leader. Back around 1500, Niccolò Machiavelli included a long chapter on conspiracies in his masterwork, The Discourses. For Machiavelli, a conspiracy meant an operation designed to assassinate the ruler of a state, and to take his place by seizing power. Modern terrorism is more subtle: by eliminating a leading politician, it seeks to change the policy direction of the government that politician was leading. The paradox here is that a faction or network penetrating the state sometimes undertakes the elimination of the head of state or head of government, and often a very eminent and beloved one.

A good example is the French Fifth Republic under President Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle would not accept the demand of the US and UK to dictate policy to France as a member of the Atlantic Alliance. De Gaulle took France out of the NATO supernational command, ejected the NATO headquarters from its home near Paris, condemned the Vietnam war, refused the British entry into the European Economic Community, challenged the US to pay its foreign obligations in gold rather than paper dollars, called for a free Quebec, and otherwise demonstrated creative independence from the Anglo- Americans. The result was a series of approximately 30 assassination attempts, carried out by French right- ing extremists. but with the Anglo-American secret services lurking in the background. None of the attempts to assassinate De Gaulle was successful.

Another example was Enrico Mattei, the head of the Italian state oil company ENI. Mattei challenged the hegemony of the US-UK seven sisters oil cartel. He offered Arab oil producers a 50-50 split of the profits, far more than the Anglo-Americans were offering, and he was willing to help the Arabs with their own economic development. Mattei was growing powerful enough to challenge the subordination of Italy to the US- UK domination of NATO when his private jet crashed near Milan in October 1962, an event which can be attributed to sabotage on the part of the CIA and its alliances, among them some of the French Algerians who were also the enemies of de Gaulle. After Mattei’s death, ENI began to abide by the rules of the Anglo-American oil cartel.

The classic example of political assassination was the murder of President Kennedy. Kennedy had been alerted by the Bay of Pigs debacle to the treachery and incompetence of CIA director Allen Dulles, whom he fired. He refused to listen to the adventurist advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He overrode his main military advisers, Lyman Lemnitzer and Curtis LeMay, who wanted to make the Cuban missile crisis the occasion for general thermonuclear war with the USSR. Kennedy clashed with Roger Blough of US Steel, who was acting as a representative of Wall Street. Kennedy challenged the power of the Federal Reserve to be the sole controller of the US money supply. Kennedy seemed determined to return to the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and also to the strong presidency Roosevelt had embodied, but which the US oligarchy was determined never to permit again. (There had in any case been an attempt to assassinate FDR in Florida before he was even inaugurated.) Kennedy was probably planning to fire FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, who regarded himself as an unaccountable state within the state. Documents indicate that Kennedy was scaling down the US presence in Vietnam, rather than escalating it as his incompetent hawkish advisers wanted, and that he may have been preparing to liquidate the Vietnam matter entirely after his re-election in November 1964. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November, 1963.

Somewhere in the mid-1960s a watershed in the annals of terrorism is passed. Up to this point, key person assassinations are carried out by disgruntled officers or colonial refugees, by itinerant misfits like Oswald, or are simply anonymous. After this point, assassinations start to be attributed to revolutionary or subversive groups. During the 1980s and 1990s, those groups gradually drop their Marxist-Lenininst camouflage and in many cases assume a right-wing anarchist or Islamist coloration.

In Germany, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder was the chief of the Trusteeship Agency (Treuhand), which was in 1991 the largest corporation in the world. In the communist German Democratic Republic, all industry was the property of the state, and when the GDR collapsed in 1989, this property was transferred to the Trusteeship Agency. Rohwedder, as the head of this entity, preferred to keep the vast state property of the GDR as a state sector, trying to maintain existing levels of employment and production so as to facilitate the absorption of the East German regions into unified Germany. Anglo-American financiers, however, wanted all the GDR state property to be put on the auction block at once, so that it could be sold off at bargain basement prices from which Wall Street and the City of London had everything to gain. When Rohwedder proved reluctant to accept this policy, he was assassinated around Easter 1991, just after the first Gulf War, by a group claiming to be the Baader-Meinhof group, also known as the Red Army faction. Rohwedder’s successor immediately began selling off GDR state property in the way the Anglo-Americans wanted.

Aldo Moro was the head of the Italian Christian Democratic Party. During the 1970s he was the leading advocate of a policy of bringing the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into the government. This would have given the Italian government a solid majority for the first time in many decades, putting an end to the constant parade of government crises and weak, unstable coalitions cobbled together with the help of splinter parties. At a certain point, Moro was warned by a key US figure, identified by some as former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to cease his efforts to bring the PCI into the government, as Moro’s widow later reported. In March, 1978 this warning was followed by a terrorist attack on Moro’s motorcade, in which several of his security detail were killed. Moro himself was abducted. Responsibility was claimed by the Red Brigades. After two months of captivity, Moro was killed by his captors and his body found in the trunk of a car in downtown Rome. After his death, the PCI was not allowed to enter the government.

As the examples have suggested, the leading terrorist state of the post-1945 era in Europe was unquestionably the United States, often acting together with the British MI-5 and MI-6 in the framework of NATO intelligence. US state-sponsored terrorism generally aimed at maintaining what can be called the division of the world into spheres of influence as established at the Big Three (US, UK, USSR) conference at Yalta in the Crimea in early 1945. Since the US could not simply arrest and execute its opponents in the way that Stalin could, terrorism was a favored tool of the US in attempting to maintain domination and discipline within the western bloc. Terrorism was thus used against political challenges, like that of Moro, against economic challenges, like those of Mattei and Rohwedder, or against figures who represented multiple challenges, like President de Gaulle. In the cases of President Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy, terrorism was employed to prevent reforms of the system which decisive groups did not desire, and which they despaired of blocking through normal political means. The anti- slavery reforms of the Gracchi brothers were the only way to preserve the Roman Republic, but the latifundists and slaveholders felt mortally threatened by them, so the Gracchi were both assassinated.

Terrorism can also be employed to create a radical change in a political situation or political process. A good example from the postwar period is the terrorist bombing attack on a bank located in Piazza Fontana in Milan, Italy, on December 12, 1969, killing 16 and seriously injuring 88 more – a shocking toll in those days, and a source of horror for public opinion in general. This bombing took place at the height of the biggest strike wave that Italy had seen since the end of World War II, the so-called Hot Autumn, in which the automobile workers and metal workers had proven to be especially aggressive and militant. The bombings achieved the remarkable feat of stopping this broadly based and energetic strike wave dead in its tracks, with all strikes being called off as the police ran wild, hauling suspected leftist sympathizers in for questioning and intimidating their families. This successful method of social control was called the “strategy of tension,” and it included emergency laws against suspected terrorists and other favorite measures of Ashcroft today. The Piazza Fontana bombs were blamed by the police and the press on a pathetic group of anarchists, the Bakunin Club. Among the members of the Bakunin Club, which had been thoroughly penetrated by the Italian intelligence service, the SID, were the railroad worker Giuseppe Pinelli and the male dancer Pietro Valpreda. Pinelli was pushed to his death from a fourth-story window in police headquarters, while Valpreda was vilified as a subhuman beast by the mass media. When the absurd attempt to pin the atrocity on the anarchists collapsed of its own weight, the next prime suspects became Freda and Ventura, two self-styled “Nazi-Maoists.” More than twenty years after the fact, information came into the public domain that the bombs of Piazza Fontana had been placed by a secret network called GLADIO operating under the control of NATO intelligence, which evidently feared that the success of the strike wave might lead to the entry of the PCI into the government, which in turn might have led to the erosion of the NATO alliance as against the Soviet-controlled Warsaw Pact.

All during the 1970s and into the 1980s, US, NATO and Italian ruling circles were obsessed with keeping the PCI out of the government, and with breaking the back of workers militancy. Terrorists incidents included a bomb which went off during a trade union demonstration against fascism at Piazza della Loggia in Brescia in May 1974 (8 dead, 100 injured), a bomb on the Italicus express train in August 1974 (12 dead, 48 injured), and many more. The most spectacular event in this series was the bomb at the Bologna railway station on August 2, 1980, which killed 85 and injured some 200. This was the biggest terrorist attack in Europe before the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, and shows a similar modus operandi.

Terrorism thus has been known to provide a means of social control. Parts of the US oligarchy are today almost euphoric about the seemingly endless panorama of possibilities for exploiting terrorism they believe they see before them. But it is not wise to try to build an entire state and social order on terrorism.

Another major goal of terrorism has been to provoke war. In this variant, state-sponsored false flag terrorist groups carry out an attack against the power that wants to go to war, which uses the attacks as a moral pretext to rally its own population for conflict, whipping up sentiment by waving the bloody shirt of the victims, the insult to the national honor, and the monstrous evil of the sub- human perpetrators.

The logic here is that of the provocation which can be observed along the fringes of any demonstration which the government does not want to take place. The demonstration proceeds peacefully and responsibly, with marchers walking an orderly fashion within the cordons of parade marshals who are there to prevent trouble. Families with children, elderly people, and youth are all petitioning effectively for the redress of their grievances. The political effect is potentially quite positive. All of a sudden, a group of radical demonstrators, calling themselves anarchists but in reality police agent provocateurs, breaks away from the main body of the demonstration and begins smashing the windows of stores along the route. The anarchists have Molotov cocktails in hand, and they hurl them at the first units of riot police who arrive, injuring some of them seriously. The police, by now thoroughly provoked indeed, begin to fire tear gas grenades in all directions, and wade in to the peaceful crowd with their truncheons, mercilessly beating everyone who falls into their hands. Demonstrators are herded into blind allies, beaten, arrested, and carted off. It will be a long time before some of them come to another demonstration. Television coverage focuses on the violent minority, trying to make it look like the anarchist police agents are typical of the demonstration as a whole. Pundits pontificate; George Will is particularly indignant. This is the model for provocations of all types. It represents a spectacle for the gullible, a theatrical if bloody manipulation of staged pseudo-reality, and it points toward the reality of 9/11.

War commonly begins with provocations of this sort. The colossal bloodletting of World War began in Sarajevo, Bosnia with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist fanatic named Gavrilo Prinkip, an activist of the group called the Black Hand, a Mazzini-style Serbian underground national liberation group. But the Black Hand was controlled by Serbian military intelligence. Colonel Apis of Serbian military intelligence was in turn an asset of the Okhrana, the Russian intelligence, through the Russian military attaché in Belgrade, and he and Prinkip may also have been under the influence of the British-backed Grand Orient freemasons, which had been working towards a general European war since about 1906-7.

Another case was the explosion of the battleship USS Maine in the harbor of Spanish-controlled Havana, Cuba in 1898. The jingoistic Hearst newspapers, the original of modern yellow journalism, blamed the Spanish government and called for war against Spain, which soon ensued. The Hearst papers argued that the US warship had been sunk by the detonation of a Spanish mine, and drew imaginative cartoons to show how this might have happened. This war is a fateful turning-point in world history, since it marks the launching of US imperialism on the world stage. But an inquiry conducted decades later by retired Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear Navy, led to the conclusion that the explosion had taken place inside the Maine, probably as the result of sparks amidst the coal dust of an empty coal bunker, a fairly well-known danger in those days. But it may also be that the internal explosion was not an accident, but rather the result of a deliberately placed bomb.

World War II also began with a provocation, at least as far as Germany is concerned. When Hitler wanted to invade Poland in September 1939, he knew that the majority of the German population did not want war. He accordingly hatched a plot which centered on the Gleiwitz radio station, a German broadcasting station located near the border with Poland. In late August 1939, Hitler obtained a group of German convicts, and dressed them in Polish army uniforms. These wretched men were then taken to the Gleiwitz radio station and machine-gunned to death. Their bodies were arranged around the radio station in such a way as to suggest that they had been shot while storming the building. Nazi agents inside the radio station then broke into the ongoing program to read a raving anti-German declaration in Polish, proclaiming that Polish forces had taken over Gleiwitz and the radio there. This crude farce, when amplified and repeated hundreds of times by Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda machinery, secured at least minimal acceptance by the German population of the inevitability of war, which broke out with Hitler’s attack on Poland, September 1, 1939.

The classic case of strategic terrorism of this type is doubtless the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605, a day that is still marked each year in the English calendar as Guy Fawkes’ Day. In 1605 James I Stuart, a Protestant who united in his person the crowns of Scotland and England for the first time, was considering a policy of accommodation with the Spanish Empire, the leading Catholic power. James was also considering some measures of toleration for Catholics in England, where the majority of the landed gentry in the north of the country was still loyal to Rome. An influential group in London, backed by Venetian intelligence from abroad, wanted to push James I into a confrontation with the Spanish Empire, from which they hoped among other things to extract great personal profit. They also thought it was politically vital to keep persecuting the Roman Catholics. Chief among the war party was the royal chancellor, roughly the prime minister, who was Lord Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury. Cecil set out to convince James I to adopt his policy, and to accomplish this by means of terrorism. Acting behind the scenes, Cecil cultivated some prominent Catholics, one of them Lord Thomas Percy from the famous Catholic Percy family, and used them as cut-outs to direct the operations of a group of naïve Catholic fanatics and adventurers, among them a certain gullible gentleman named Guy Fawkes. Thomas Percy was supposedly a Catholic fanatic, but in reality was a bigamist. This group of Catholic fanatics hatched the idea first of tunneling into the basement of the Houses of Parliament from a nearby house, and then simply of renting the basement of the Houses of Parliament, in order to pack that basement with explosives for the purpose of blowing up King, Lords, and Commons when James I came to open the Parliament early that November. But instead Guy Fawkes was caught going into the basement the night before the great crime was scheduled to occur. Fawkes and the rest of the plotters were tortured and hanged, and several Catholic clergy were also scapegoated. James I put aside his plans for toleration of Catholics, and England set out on a century of wars against the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, from which in turn the British Empire was born. Guy Fawkes Day became the yearly festival of “no popery” and hatred for Spain.

Concerning the Gunpowder Plot, the Jesuit Gerard concludes that “for purposes of State, the government of the day [meaning Cecil] either found means to instigate the conspirators to undertake their enterprise, or, at least, being, from an early stage of the undertaking, fully aware of what was going on, sedulously nursed the insane scheme till the time came to make capital out of it. That the conspirators, or the greater number of them, really meant to strike a great blow is not to be denied, though it may be less easy to assure ourselves of its precise character; and their guilt will not be palliated should it appear that, in projecting an atrocious crime, they were unwittingly playing the game of plotters more astute than themselves.” (Gerard 17) Here we have an excellent definition of state-sponsored terrorism. Gerard’s method of proof is this: “It will be enough to show that, whatever its origin, the conspiracy was, and must have been, known to those in power, who, playing with their infatuated dupes, allowed them to go on with their mad scheme, till the moment came to strike with full effect.” (Gerard 55) This can also be applied to 9/11.

It should be added that James I does not seem to have been aware of the operation in advance. The plot was not directed against James I; it rather intended to push him in a specific policy direction. After November 1605, James I does appear to have realized what Cecil’s role had been, at least to some extent.

Father Gerard speaks of Thomas Percy, Cecil’s agent in the Gunpowder Plot, as a “tame duck employed to catch the wild ones.” (Gerard 152) But the fact that he was Cecil’s agent did not prevent Percy from being killed as part of the coverup after November 5. At the risk of mixing metaphors, we can cite the opinion of a contemporary observer that Cecil, one he had secured the game birds he was seeking, hanged the spaniel who had actually caught them for him, “that its master’s art might not appear.” (Gerard 153)

Towards the end of the 1600s, some leaders of the Whig ministry decided that France, not Spain, was now the leading Catholic power. In 1678 they brought forth the charlatan Titus Oates to allege that he had proofs of a “popish plot” backed by France to restore Catholicism in England, including by manipulating the royal succession. Oates may be usefully compared to the many “anti-terrorism experts” who appear on television news broadcasts to report on what the terrorists are doing, since it is clear that most of what these commentators say they have simply invented. When Oates began to recite his charges there was mass hysteria in England, and several Jesuits were hanged. The diarist John Evelyn had never seen “the nation in more apprehension and consternation.” So great was the fear that “…before the end of 1678 not only did a majority of the English people believe that there was such a plot, but anyone who ventured to deny it ran the risk of impeachment as an accessory. ‘’Twas worse than plotting to suspect the Plot.’” (Hay 122) The popish plot had enormous mass appeal: “the extravagant frenzy of the London mob took most people by surprise … London witnessed an exhibition of emotional fanaticism which has seldom been equaled in the history of a civilized nation. Mobs have often been as wicked, but not often so stupid. ‘The imposture known as the Oates Plot,’ wrote Lingard, ‘supported by the arts and declamations of a numerous party, goaded the passions of men to a state of madness, and seemed to extinguish the native good sense and humanity of the English character.” (Hay122-3) The great sponsor of Titus Oates was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, the founder of the Whig Party and a member of the oligarchical cabinet called the CABAL after the initials of its members: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. The philosopher John Locke was Ashley’s secretary. In the late summer of 1679 the hysteria began to subside, and it became apparent that Titus Oates was a fraud and an imposter. At this point King Charles II put Ashley on trial for treason. Ashley escaped conviction but had to flee to Holland, where he died.

We now turn to a structural analysis of modern false-flag terrorism of the type that is commonly sponsored by factions or networks embedded in the secret intelligence agencies of modern states. This discussion draws on the work of Andreas von Bülow, Gerard Wisnewski, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, and on my own research on the Moro assassination, the Red Brigades, and Italian terrorism in general.

PATSIES

“I’m just a patsy.”
-- Lee Harvey Oswald, November 1963


Speaking of Guy Fawkes and his confreres, Father Gerard comments that “many intelligent men took for granted that in some way or other the actual conspirators were but the dupes and instruments of more crafty men than themselves, and in their mad enterprise played the game of ministers of State.” (Gerard 43) In this sense, Guy Fawkes may represent the archetype of the category of person known in modern intelligence parlance as the patsy.

The real authorship of state sponsored terrorism is to be successfully concealed, then a collection of scapegoats is the first ingredient required. These may be defined as the patsies, or alternatively as fall-guys, scapegoats, useful idiots, or dupes. It is necessary that they be of low mental ability and great gullibility, since their mission is to be part of false-flag groups which pretend to be working for a cause, such as the restoration of the caliphate, while in reality they are under the control of a private network inside the US government. It is vital for the terrorist controllers that the patsies not realize that this or that comrade in arms is actually a double agent, a provocateur working for the parallel CIA or some other complicit agency, or which more will be said later. The best candidates for the patsy role are psychotics, psychopaths, or sociopaths. They may be fanatics bursting with criminal energy and criminal intent, or they may be pathetic ideologues and naifs. Frequently they are also misfits, bunglers, and generally maladroit in what they undertake.

According to research sponsored in 1999 by the Library of Congress, in a 1972 study “psychologist B.J. Berkowitz described six psychological types who would be most likely to threaten or try to use WMD: paranoids, paranoid schizophrenics, borderline mental defectives, schizophrenic types, passive-aggressive personality types, and sociopath personalities. He considered sociopaths the most likely actually to use WMD. Nuclear terrorism expert Jessica Stern disagreed. She believed that "Schizophrenics and sociopaths, for example, may want to commit acts of mass destruction, but they are less likely than others to succeed." She pointed out that large-scale dissemination of chemical, biological, or radiological agents requires a group effort, but that "Schizophrenics, in particular, often have difficulty functioning in groups ...." (Hudson)

Because the patsies are usually such low-grade subjects, they require comprehensive support of many types. They may need help in renting an apartment or in finding a cover job. They always seem to be getting in trouble with the police, and then it is necessary to see that they get out on bail as quickly as possible. If they are lonely, they may need specially trained sex operatives to comfort them or even to marry them (the KGB and the Stasi called their sex troops “The Swallows”). Above all they require constant financial assistance to be able to travel around the world, as they so frequently seem to be able to do despite the fact that they are most often without any visible means of support. The most important things about patsies are that they are almost always physically, mentally and technically unable to carry out the crimes of which they are accused. This is a matter of insufficient ability and capability, and not of the lack of criminal intent, which is often abundant.

Patsies can then be used in many combinations. They can be merged together in false flag terror operations. These organizations will assume a distinct ideological or religious coloration and will advertise it, and that will become the key to the process of creating or reinforcing the enemy image desired by the terrorist controllers after the terrorist action has been successfully carried out. That coloration or affiliation will constitute the false flag, and it will be assiduously prepared. Here some of the members may be witting; these are the double agents and police informers. Other components are not witting, at least about the most important things. What patsies can accomplish by themselves is often supplemented by the actions of doubles, double agents, and informers, who do things for them when they can not show up. Sometimes patsies are sent to make contact with other groups, a process known as sheep-dipping. If a terrorist controller wants to implicate the Podunk Democratic Party in terrorism, then he sends a patsy to sign up with them and attend their meetings before the terrorist act is carried out. That gives the police a good reason to raid the Podunk Democratic Party headquarters.

Thus, in 1992 and 1993, the New York City FBI informant and agent provocateur Emad Salem repeatedly tried to implicate the Sudanese UN Mission in his own "Islamic terror cell" World Trade Center bomb plot conspiracy. Here we see how a false flag terror cell sheep-dips its dupes into contact with a target, which then becomes the object of police investigation, and possibly later of military attack.

In January 2002, the Supreme Court of Germany had to call off all proceedings in the ongoing constitutional trial concerning the Schroeder government’s attempt to ban the extreme right-wing or reputedly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany because it turned out that the government's chief witness, a member of the national NPD party executive, had worked as an informant for the German Constitutional Protection Agency (Verfassungsschutz, comparable to the FBI), for many years. The Court ruled that the trial could not go forward until this issue was clarified.

Osama Bin Laden, the rich misfit, has often been described in terms which seem to suit him for this category. A CIA agent named Beardman has asserted that Osama Bin Laden, during the entire time that he was organizing his mujaheddin fighters to do battle with the Soviets in Afghanistan, never realized that the operation was being financed and directed by the CIA. The CIA's Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Osama Bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of Bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help." Bin Laden thus may also qualify as a clueless dupe.

The patsies ultimately have three vital functions. The first is that they have to be noticed. They must attract lots and lots of attention. They may issue raving statements on videotape, or doubles can be used to issue these statements for them if they are not up to it. They need to get into fights with passersby, as Mohammed Atta is said to have done concerning a parking space at the airport in Maine early in the morning on September 11. Even if they are presumed dead they must remain prominent, as in the case of Atta’s passport, which is alleged by the FBI to have survived the fiery collapse of the World Trade Center towers to be found undamaged and unsinged on a nearby street. Even when presumed dead they must be eloquent about themselves and their activities, as they accused 9/11 hijackers when they left behind a copy of the Koran, airline schedules, terrorist literature and videotapes, and Atta’s crudely forged last will and testament in a car and in luggage.

Despite the need to be noticed as much as possible, the patsies have to stay out of jail. If they are all in jail, the planned terror action cannot take place. This is not because the patsies are needed to carry it out, but rather because they must be on hand in order to be blamed for it, whether they are on the scene or far away. If the patsies are in jail, they cannot be scapegoated. Therefore a lawyer and bail money must be provided, or a complicit judge told to release the defendant. Immigration authorities and Customs must be told to look the other way. To keep the patsies out of jail so they can serve their vital purpose is the job of the moles, as will soon be shown.

Finally, if all else goes well, it is the destiny of the patsies to take the blame for the terror action once it has happened. At this point the moles in the government apparatus, who had earlier been the patsies’ greatest friends and protectors, become their most implacable enemies. The patsies must be hunted down and, preferably, liquidated on the spot, as the British Special Air Services anti-terrorist force always prefers to do, with a maximum of firepower. Their faces and stories will be demonized as the latest manifestation of absolute evil. The nationality, philosophy, or religion which the media portray them as representing will become the target of raving vilification, arrest, economic sanctions, cruise missile retaliation, and armed invasion, as the case may be.

A pathetic case in point is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of December 2001. Shortly after Reid was arrested for having attempted to blow up the transatlantic airliner in which he was traveling with the help of explosives planted in the soles of his shoes, sources in the Washington DC mosque said that they had acquired the following profile of Reid from Dr. Abdul Haqq Baker of Brixton mosque in London. According to Baker and others from Brixton, Richard Reid could only be described as mentally deficient. "He was not someone who would be medically classified as mentally retarded," the source reported, "but he was definitely slow." He could not have hatched any kind of terror attack on his own, and could not have even put the shoe bombs on his own feet without help, the source had been told by officials of the Brixton Mosque. Yet, according to news accounts, Reid spent time in Iran three or four years before his terror attempt, and traveled to Tel Aviv from Heathrow Airport near London in the summer of 2001. He was thoroughly frisked before being allowed on to the El Al flight, and was forced to sit next to a sky marshal at the back of the plane. Israeli officials claimed to know nothing about what Reid was doing in Israel. From Israel, Reid went to Egypt, and then to Turkey, before returning to London Heathrow. Reid had been sleeping on the floor at the Brixton Mosque, had no visible means of support, etc. Reid's father, who was also a convert to Islam, and encouraged his son to do the same, told the American press that his son must have been brainwashed by radical Islamists to get him to undertake the suicide attack. (New York Times and Washington Post, December 29, 2001)

Another case may well be that of Jose Padilla, the man who was arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and who has been designated as an enemy combatant by Attorney General Ashcroft and held incommunicado without charges or a lawyer for months. Although he may only be a walk-on in Ashcroft’s larger spectacle, what kind of an Islamic fighter was Padilla supposed to be? According to Maureen Dowd, this “plotter was a Chicago street punk named Jose Padilla, a hothead with a long criminal record who was thrown in jail in Florida for shooting at a motorist in a road-rage incident. The mind games of fear begin with Abu Zubaydah, the U.S. captive, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, who fingered Padilla.” (New York Times, June 12, 2002)

The most famous patsy is of course Lee Harvey Oswald, the archetype of the embittered, lonely misfit and drifter. But he was a misfit with a difference, one who was able to move from the Marine Corps to émigré status in the USSR, then back to Texas and New Orleans as an activist for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald was someone who seemed to go out of his way to be abrasive and to attract attention. He handed out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and got involved in altercations with anti-Castro Cubans. He appeared in a radio debate, and was interviewed on television. He took a surprise trip to Mexico City to visit the Soviet Embassy there. He did everything possible to get noticed. Indeed, he got noticed so much that at various time there may have been two or even three Oswald doubles running around, something that would have required the resources of a major intelligence organization like the CIA or the FBI. But Oswald was also unable to manage the petty details of his own everyday life without the assistance of others, notably of the European aristocrat Georges de Morenschildt, a patrician who had George H.W. Bush’s name and phone number in his address book. Oswald was most likely an FBI informant, working for Special Agent Guy Bannister in New Orleans. But this did not protect him from being fingered as the assassin, nor did it save him from being silenced by Jack Ruby before he could ever testify in his own defense. The problem with Oswald, as with so many patsies, is that he was neither physically nor technically capable of carrying out the crime which has been ascribed to him: using his antiquated Italian 1917 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with its crude little telescopic sight, it is clear that Oswald could never have fired with sufficient speed and accuracy the four or five shots (at minimum) that were actually heard on Dealey Plaza that day, and which are necessary to account for the number of wounds suffered by President Kennedy and Governor Connally, plus other shots that missed their target. This question of physical impossibility is often the most obvious weak point of the official explanations of terrorist actions. In the Kennedy assassination, it was expressly to address the problem of the physical impossibility of Oswald’s having acted as a lone assassin that Arlen Spector, part of the staff of the Warren Commission, invented his magic bullet theory. Spector asserted that the same slug had caused seven wounds: an entry wound in Kennedy’s back, an exit wound at the base of his throat, then an entry wound in Connally’s back, an exit wound in Connally’s chest, an entry wound in Connally’s wrist, and exit wound from the other side of Connally’s wrist, and finally an entry wound in Connally’s leg. At the end of all this, the bullet was supposedly found in virtually pristine condition lying in a stretcher at Parkland Hospital after Kennedy had died. Even after these incredible contortions, requiring that the same bullet change course in mid-air at least twice, the problem of physical impossibility had not been solved, since there were still four or five shots on the audio tape which had recorded the sounds of the assassination through the open microphone of a Dallas police officer’s radio. It was this insuperable problem which led the House Assassinations Committee of 1978 to rule that Kennedy’s death was the result of a probable conspiracy, and not simply of the actions of a deranged lone assassin.

As Sanguinetti sums up, “the outrages that are accomplished directly by the intelligence agencies and secret services of the State are not usually claimed by anybody, but are each time imputed or attributed to some convenient ‘culprit,’ like Pinelli or Valpreda. Experience has proved that this is the weakest point of such terrorism, and that which determines the extreme fragility of it in the political usage that certain forces want to make of it. It is starting from the results of the same experience that the strategists of secret services of the State seek, from this point on, to lend a greater credibility, or at least a lesser inverisimilitude to their own work …by claiming them directly through such-and-such initials of a ghostly group….” (Sanguinetti 2)
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:03 am

PART 2 OF 3 (CH. 2 CONT'D.)

THE PATSY MILIEU

You give yourself for an agent provocateur. The proper business of an agent provocateur is to provoke.
-- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907).


The patsies inhabit a scene of their own, a place on the outskirts of society where terrorists, naïve or romantic dupes, provocateurs, sting operatives, double agents, Dopplegänger and informers congregate. There was something of this nature among southern European fascist extremists in Madrid, Athens, and Rome during the 1960s and 1970s; the denizens of this milieu played their parts in the “black terrorism” of those years. There was a parallel milieu of anarchists, Maoists, left communists, Trotskyists, and anarchosyndicalists in many cities of Europe during that same time frame. In the 1980s and 1990s, a patsy milieu developed among right-wing militia activists and paramilitaries in the great plains and upper Midwest of America. During the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, a patsy milieu has grown up not just in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, but also in western Europe and the United States. In fact, the classic patsy milieu of the 1990s was in London.

The patsy milieu has been skillfully evoked by Joseph Conrad in his fascinating novel, The Secret Agent (1907). Here we have the agent provocateur Verloc meeting with his confreres of the International Red Committee; Verloc is in the pay of the Russian Embassy, among others, and attempts to organize a bombing of the prime meridian at Greenwich Observatory. The Russian Embassy wants the attentat in order to motivate the international Milan conference to crack down on nihilists, revolutionaries, and bomb- throwers all over Europe. A movie which accurately depicts the world of patsies, moles, and expert professionals is The Package, written by John Bishop, starring Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones. During the Gorbachev era, a group of US and Soviet generals opposed to disarmament decide to sabotage an upcoming treaty by assassinating Gorbachev during a visit to Chicago. Tommy Lee Jones is the expert professional who operates in complete anonymity – he is smuggled into the US under a fake identity. There is also a pathetic patsy, recruited by one of the mole generals from a military prison and sent to Chicago to attract attention as a neo-Nazi.

MOLES

…jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hanssen, who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis' effort.
-- Colleen Rowley to FBI Director Robert Mueller


As has already been suggested, the patsies are incapable of operating on their own for any length of time, and certainly do not have the ability to carry out the vast crimes that are attributed to them. The assistance which the patsies require in order to carry out their roles come from another sub- system, of the terrorist enterprise, the moles. The most important category of moles is constituted by high-level government officials and managers who are not loyal to the agencies they work for, and certainly not to the Constitution they are sworn to serve, but rather operate as members of a private network which has infiltrated the government and ensconced itself in it, sometimes over a very long time. In fact, the US government as it exists today is the result of many generations of penetration by moles, with the moles of each generation assisting the careers of the succeeding generation, and so forth, until loyalty to the Constitution is the exception rather than the rule.

Foreign moles have been able successfully to operate inside the US government for long periods. Aldrich Ames worked as a mole for the Soviets inside the CIA for many years. The same goes for Soviet mole Robert Hanssen of the FBI, who was discovered in the spring of 2000. In 1997 the press carried a news item about an Israeli mole code-named Mega, allegedly controlled by Danny Yatom, head of the Mossad, who was allegedly ensconced in the Clinton White House. (Washington Post, May 7, 1997) But here we are not primarily concerned with outright foreign moles, but rather with moles whose loyalty goes to networks based on religion, finance, or other associations based primarily in the US, although here foreign influence certainly cannot be ruled out. Even so, the fact that high-level moles were able to operate for so long suggests a certain nonchalance about the presence of moles in the US government bureaucracy; certainly a mole working for a US-based subversive network would have an easier time in operating than one working for the USSR.

So far, the classic mole suspect of 9/11 according to most published accounts is Dave Frasca, the head of the radical Islamic fundamentalist bureau of the FBI, the point at which the Phoenix memorandum and the Minnesota requests to search Zacharias Moussawi’s laptop evidently converged, only to be ignored, sabotaged, and sanctioned. As Time magazine commented:

…in its most searching passage, Rowley's letter lays out the case that the FBI made fateful miscalculations by failing to see a possible connection between the Minneapolis investigation of flight student Moussaoui and the hunch of Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams — posited in a report to HQ two months earlier — that al-Qaeda operatives were attending U.S. flight schools. Law-enforcement and congressional sources told Time that both reports landed on the desk of Dave Frasca, the head of the FBI's radical- fundamentalist unit. The Phoenix memo was buried; the Moussaoui warrant request was denied. (Time, May 27, 2002)


Other accounts differ as to the identity of the main blocker of the Phoenix memorandum and the Minneapolis proposals. According to former CIA agent Ray McGovern, the official who sat on this material was Spike Owen, who nevertheless “received a $20,000 cash award from the administration for his duties in safeguarding the American people.” (Washington Post, July 26, 2004) Was this a mole?

The Phoenix memorandum, written by Kenneth Williams, an agent in Phoenix, was sent to FBI headquarters as an electronic computer message on July 10. It was reviewed by midlevel supervisors, who headed the bureau’s Bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism units. The Phoenix memorandum urged FBI headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools, and cited Bin Laden by name, and suggested that the men might be training for terror operations against the United States. (New York Times, May 15, 2002)

Frasca is not mentioned once in the final report of the Kean-Hamilton commission, and whistle- blower Colleen Rowley, despite having been featured on the cover of Time as person of the year, never testified in public, and gets only one fleeting mention of her interview with the 9/11 commission in footnote 94, page 557, towards the back of the book.

Rowley’s memo to FBI Director Mueller has been published, and is worth examining at length. The Supervisory Special Agent to whom she repeatedly refers is once again presumably David Frasca. Rowley reports:

The Minneapolis agents who responded to the call about Moussaoui's flight training identified him as a terrorist threat from a very early point. The decision to take him into custody on August 15, 2001, on the INS "overstay" charge was a deliberate one to counter that threat and was based on the agents' reasonable suspicions. While it can be said that Moussaoui's overstay status was fortuitous, because it allowed for him to be taken into immediate custody and prevented him from receiving any more flight training, it was certainly not something the INS coincidentally undertook of their own volition. I base this on the conversation I had when the agents called me at home late on the evening Moussaoui was taken into custody to confer and ask for legal advice about their next course of action. The INS agent was assigned to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force and was therefore working in tandem with FBI agents. To say then, as has been iterated numerous times, that probable cause did not exist until after the disastrous event occurred, is really to acknowledge that the missing piece of probable cause was only the FBI's (FBIHQ's) failure to appreciate that such an event could occur.

Even without knowledge of the Phoenix communication (and any number of other additional intelligence communications that FBIHQ personnel were privy to in their central coordination roles), the Minneapolis agents appreciated the risk. So I think it's very hard for the FBI to offer the "20- 20 hindsight" justification for its failure to act! Also intertwined with my reluctance in this case to accept the "20-20 hindsight" rationale is first- hand knowledge that I have of statements made on September 11th, after the first attacks on the World Trade Center had already occurred, made telephonically by the FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) who was the one most involved in the Moussaoui matter and who, up to that point, seemed to have been consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents' efforts…. Even after the attacks had begun, the SSA in question was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui's computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Minneapolis' prior suspicions about Moussaoui.

The fact is that key FBIHQ personnel whose job it was to assist and coordinate with field division agents on terrorism investigations and the obtaining and use of FISA searches (and who theoretically were privy to many more sources of intelligence information than field division agents), continued to, almost inexplicably, throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis' by-now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant, long after the French intelligence service provided its information and probable cause became clear. HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause. In all of their conversations and correspondence, HQ personnel never disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix Division had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of Al Qaeda operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist purposes! Nor did FBIHQ personnel do much to disseminate the information about Moussaoui to other appropriate intelligence/law enforcement authorities. When, in a desperate 11th hour measure to bypass the FBIHQ roadblock, the Minneapolis Division undertook to directly notify the CIA's Counter Terrorist Center (CTC), FBIHQ personnel actually chastised the Minneapolis agents for making the direct notification without their approval!

Eventually on August 28, 2001, after a series of e-mails between Minneapolis and FBIHQ, which suggest that the FBIHQ SSA deliberately further undercut the FISA effort by not adding the further intelligence information which he had promised to add that supported Moussaoui's foreign power connection and making several changes in the wording of the information that had been provided by the Minneapolis Agent, the Minneapolis agents were notified that the NSLU Unit Chief did not think there was sufficient evidence of Moussaoui's connection to a foreign power. Minneapolis personnel are, to this date, unaware of the specifics of the verbal presentations by the FBIHQ SSA to NSLU or whether anyone in NSLU ever was afforded the opportunity to actually read for him/herself all of the information on Moussaoui that had been gathered by the Minneapolis Division and the French intelligence service. Obviously verbal presentations are far more susceptible to mis- characterization and error. The e-mail communications between Minneapolis and FBIHQ, however, speak for themselves and there are far better witnesses than me who can provide their first hand knowledge of these events characterized in one Minneapolis agent's e-mail as FBIHQ is "setting this up for failure." My only comment is that the process of allowing the FBI supervisors to make changes in affidavits is itself fundamentally wrong, just as, in the follow-up to FBI Laboratory Whistleblower Frederic Whitehurst's allegations, this process was revealed to be wrong in the context of writing up laboratory results. With the Whitehurst allegations, this process of allowing supervisors to re-write portions of laboratory reports, was found to provide opportunities for over-zealous supervisors to skew the results in favor of the prosecution. In the Moussaoui case, it was the opposite -- the process allowed the Headquarters Supervisor to downplay the significance of the information thus far collected in order to get out of the work of having to see the FISA application through or possibly to avoid taking what he may have perceived as an unnecessary career risk. I understand that the failures of the FBIHQ personnel involved in the Moussa matter are also being officially excused because they were too busy with other investigations, the Cole bombing and other important terrorism matters, but the Supervisor's taking of the time to read each word of the information submitted by Minneapolis and then substitute his own choice of wording belies to some extent the notion that he was too busy.


To sum up her frustration, Rowley wrote: “I know I shouldn’t be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen [sic], who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’ effort.” These lines speak for themselves. Evidently Frasca was not alone, since he was able to stay on the job with impunity even after 9/11, and even received a promotion. Rowley stresses the lack of any accountability whatsoever in the FBI’s internal process, which seems to be made to order for facilitating the unhampered operations of moles.

Although the last thing the FBI or the country needs now is a witch hunt, I do find it odd that (to my knowledge) no inquiry whatsoever was launched of the relevant FBIHQ personnel's actions a long time ago. Despite FBI leaders' full knowledge of all the items mentioned herein (and probably more that I'm unaware of), the SSA, his unit chief, and other involved HQ personnel were allowed to stay in their positions and, what's worse, occupy critical positions in the FBI's SIOC Command Center post September 11th. (The SSA in question actually received a promotion some months afterward!) It's true we all make mistakes and I'm not suggesting that HQ personnel in question ought to be burned at the stake, but, we all need to be held accountable for serious mistakes. (Time, May 27, 2002)


An internal FBI memo, which became public in May 2002, revealed that FBI agents had destroyed evidence gathered in an investigation involving Osama bin Laden's network after its e-mail wiretap system mistakenly captured information to which the agency was not entitled. This was supposedly because the FBI software being used, called Carnivore, not only picked up the e-mails of its target, ''but also picked up e-mails on non-covered targets,'' said the memo, which was written in March 2000 to agency headquarters in Washington. According to the memo, “The FBI technical person was apparently so upset that he destroyed all the e-mail take, including the take on'' the suspect. These events allegedly took place during an investigation in Denver in which the FBI's bin Laden unit was using the bureau's Carnivore system to conduct electronic surveillance of a suspect under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant. The memo was addressed to M.E. ''Spike'' Bowman, the FBI's associate general counsel for national security. Another mole?

The Justice Department's Office of Intelligence and Policy Review claimed to be furious after learning the evidence captured by the e-mail wiretap system was destroyed because of the glitch, the memo states. “To state that she was unhappy at ITOS (International Terrorism Operations Center) and the UBL (bin Laden) unit is an understatement,'' the memo stated, quoting a Justice official. This incident came to light in the course of a court battle over whether the Carnivore system was being used illegally by the FBI to scoop up emails that were not covered by a warrant. The main reform undertaken by the FBI in this matter would appear to have been to change the name of Carnivore to DCS- 1000. (D. Ian Hopper, “Memo: FBI Destroyed Evidence in Bin Laden Case After Glitch With E-mail Surveillance System,” Associated Press, Boston Globe, May 28, 2002)

Then there is the case of Kevin Delaney, an official of the Federal Aviation Administration. During the day of 9/11, supervisors had asked air traffic controllers and other officials to talk about their experiences, and had taped these statements. It later came to light that this evidence had been subsequently destroyed by an FAA official named Kevin Delaney. Press reports in the spring of 2004 confirmed that Delaney had burned the tapes. Was he a mole? The 9/11 commission was not interested in this highly significant and highly indicative matter, and did not bother to include Delaney’s name in its final report. How many other Kevin Delaneys still infest the federal bureaucracy may never be known with precision. But, according to press accounts, federal agency records with possible bearing on 9/11 were “routinely destroyed” between September 11, 2001 and the launching of the 9/11 commission in the spring of 2003. (New York Times, May 6, 2004)

Another FBI whistle-blower was Robert Wright, whose case was taken up by David Schippers, the lawyer who prosecuted the impeachment of Bill Clinton before the House of Representatives, and later by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch. According to Klayman, Wright had been sounding an alarm within the FBI for years before 9/11 about terrorists within the United States. Rather than act on Wright's warnings, the FBI deflected and obstructed his efforts to curtail dangerous movements by agents of Hamas and Hezbollah. Wright's work within the FBI was geared towards thwarting money- laundering activities by these agents, and after going public he claimed that his efforts were stymied because of an official desire to coddle pro-Palestinian groups to protect the reputation of Yasser Arafat. But Wright’s expertise does not reach up that high; all he knew was what he saw, and the explanations he cites are hearsay or speculation. The important thing is the phenomenon. In the course of Wright’s probing, a Saudi businessman named Yasin Kadi had become implicated in the terrorism funding. Wright was careful to note that, one month after the 9/11 attacks, Kadi was named by the Federal government as a financial supporter of Osama bin Laden. Wright's frustration about the FBI's inaction regarding his warnings led him to write a 500 page manuscript detailing the Bureau's anti-terrorism failings entitled “Fatal Betrayals of the Intelligence Mission.” At a press conference in May, 2002, Wright summed up: “My efforts have always been geared towards neutralizing the terrorist threats that focused on taking the lives of American citizens, in addition to harming the national and economic security of America. However, as a direct result of the incompetence, and at times intentional obstruction of justice by FBI management to prevent me from bringing terrorists to justice, Americans have unknowingly been exposed to potential terrorist attacks for years." He went on to state, "Knowing what I know, I can confidently say that until the investigative responsibilities for terrorism are removed from the FBI, I will not feel safe.” (William Rivers Pitt, Truthout, May 31, 2002)

For analytical purposes, we must stress once again that these activities of reputed FBI moles all have to do with the key mole mission of preventing the patsies from being rounded up and put out of action. The patsies, we recall, are not the actual authors of the crime, but their presence as the scapegoats is indispensable to the entire operation. And if the patsies are to operate, their support network, including funding, must operate undisturbed. Ironically, shutting down the patsies tends to shut down the operation, even though the patsies are not part of the operation itself. But they are needed for its propaganda exploitation. The question of the actual authors of the crime will be dealt with shortly.

But is there any hope that things may have gotten better after 9/11. Let us look for a moment at the FBI’s own in-house investigation of what went wrong. According to the Washington Post, the leader of this internal inquiry turns out to have been the official whose most important achievement in his previous career had been the stubborn obstruction of the inquiry into the Waco massacre by former Senator and current US UN Ambassador John Danforth. The FBI official in question was Thomas A. Kelley, the head of the team looking into what the FBI knew and didn't know prior to Sept. 11 for the JICI. Kelley had previously been the deputy general counsel of the FBI. In that capacity he obstructed Danforth’s investigation into the FBI’s role at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in the spring of 1993. A December 2000 internal FBI memo reported that Kelley “continued to thwart and obstruct” the Waco investigation to the point that Danforth was forced to send a team to search FBI headquarters for the documents he needed. The memo said that Kelley should have been investigated by the Office of Professional Responsibility for “unprofessional conduct, poor judgment, conflict of interest, hostile work environment and retaliation/reprisal” in connection with his role in the Waco investigation. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), in a letter to the leaders of JICI, expressed concern about Kelley's presence in the investigation, and noted that Kelley retired from the FBI before an OPR probe could get off the ground. Officials JICI said they were waiting for confidential memos and other documents relating to the allegations against Kelley before deciding how to proceed. Danforth himself, in an interview last year, faulted the FBI's “spirit of resistance” to outside scrutiny. He said getting the information he needed for his investigation “was like pulling teeth.” (Washington Post, June 22, 2002)

In the recent history of terrorism, we have been able to observe situations in which the moles inside the state apparatus and the terrorists in the field have become almost impossible to distinguish. In other words, the moles have gone out into the field in the guise of double agents and infiltrators. One such case involves the shadowy Greek terrorist group, November 19. This group advertises itself as a reaction to the US-backed fascist colonels’ coup in Greece in 1967. More recently, November 19 has inveighed in its communiqués against US imperialism, the capitalist class, the European Community, and Germany, which it has defined as the “Fourth Reich,” a slogan which smacks of the Thatcher-Ridley regime in Britain in 1989-90. It was the November 19 group which in December 1975 claimed responsibility for the assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. This crime had been especially useful to the CIA, to its incoming chief, George H.W. Bush, and to the Ford administration in general, who had been on the defensive in intelligence matters for many months because of the aggressive investigations of the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House, which had unearthed much evidence of illegal and questionable activity by the US spy agencies. The Pike Committee had even issued a contempt of Congress citation against none other than Henry Kissinger, the strongman of the Ford regime. Columnists friendly to the CIA impudently blamed the death of Welch directly on the Church and Pike committees, although neither of them had ever mentioned Welch or Athens. (Tarpley 1992 300-301)

Over the years the November 19 organization, while carrying out some 40 armed attacks and assassinations, demonstrated a remarkable ability to escape capture, evading the most carefully prepared traps and ambushes. Gradually the awareness spread that November 19 somehow had access to information from the secret councils of the Greek anti-terror authorities. After four November 19 operatives escaped a police ambush in March 1992, the case broke open to some extent. The boss of the Greek anti-terror unit EKAM, Mihalis Mavroleas, was ousted from his job. It soon became evident that the investigators and the terrorists were in fact the same persons! The Greek Minister for Public Order and the national Chief of Police were obliged to come forward with the extremely embarrassing revelation that November 19 possessed a network of spies within the police. The EKAM, which had been founded in 1990 as the anti-terror corps d’elite, had allegedly been completely penetrated! About half of the anti-terror personnel were fired. But the Athens authorities were clearly doing their best at damage control. As damaging as their revelations were, they were not as damning as the obvious truth, which was that November 19 was in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of the Greek police and intelligence services, perhaps with ties to the CIA and to NATO intelligence. This impression is confirmed by persistent reports of the existence in Greece of a paramilitary formation founded some decades back and supposedly dedicated to the task of organizing guerilla warfare against Soviet occupying forces in case Greece were conquered in the course of a some future war. This unit would thus fit the logic of the stay-behind organization, which has been amply documented in the case of Italy in the case of Gladio, which we describe below. (Wisnewski 1994 395-400)

Something quite similar has been established in regard to the Italian Red Brigades. In 1982 an important official of the Italian Justice Ministry in Rome, Giovanni Senzani, was arrested on the charge of being the head of the Red Brigades in the Naples area. Senzani had been the object of a campaign in the Rome press about the need to discover the identity of “la talpa,” the mole in the state bureaucracy. Senzani was in close relations to SISMI, the Italian military intelligence service, an agency which had been implicated in the Milan bomb of 1969 and other terrorist atrocities. This would indicate that at least part of the Red Brigades structure was directed from inside the government.

The Red Brigades had been created in the late 1960s at the Sociology Department of the University of Trento in northern Italy. The original members had displayed sociopathic symptoms, and they had gradually been eliminated by arrests and shootouts with the police. The Italian investigating judge Ferdinando Imposimato asserted in 1982 that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by the Israeli Mossad no later than 1978. Based on testimony from two jailed former members of the Red Brigades, Imposimato reported that the Mossad had provided the Italian terrorists with weapons, money, and information. As the original members suffered attrition, they were replaced by new recruits. One of these was Mario Moretti, reputedly the leader of the Red Brigades during the Moro kidnapping. More senior members complained from their jail cells that Moretti failed to pass on warnings of coming police raids, and sabotaged attempted jail breaks. Moretti advocated a policy of constantly escalating violence, and was widely considered an agent provocateur of the CIA.

In these cases, it is not the terrorist organization which has infiltrated the state apparatus, but the state apparatus which finds it convenient to practice a virtual interchangeability with top members of the state apparatus. Sanguinetti notes that, in certain safe houses or lairs of the Red Brigades, there was found “an abundance of ultra-confidential material issuing from police headquarters, central police stations and even from ministries. In view of such eloquent facts, spectacular information [i.e. new broadcasts] always claimed to explain them by emphasizing the ultra-efficient organization of the terrible Red Brigades, and by adding, in order to enhance this wonderful godsend for advertising, the fact that these clandestine militants, so hunted-down but so tentacular, have infiltrated everywhere, even ministries and central police stations.” This, as we will see, is like some 9/11 researchers who conclude that, since the attacks took place on a day when so many special exercises were taking place, Al Qaeda must have infiltrated the Pentagon in order to know exactly when to strike. Naturally Sanguinetti cannot entertain such nonsense. His conclusion: “It is not the Red Brigades who have infiltrated the central police stations and ministries, but agents of the State, issuing from the central police stations and ministries, who have infiltrated the Red Brigades by design, and not only their top leadership, to be sure.” (Sanguinetti 21)

SIBEL EDMONDS: INSIDE THE FBI MOLE HILL

A similar and highly significant case has come to the surface in connection with 9/11. This involves Sibel Edmonds, who worked as a translator for the FBI’s Washington field office. Edmonds’ story may give some the impression that the FBI has been penetrated by some subversive Middle East organization, but a careful reading suggests the reverse. Edmonds became known to the public as a whistle blower protesting very strange activities in her FBI work place. As a result, she was accused of having breached FBI security, and was fired. The heart of Edmonds’s allegation is that the FBI office where she worked was staffed by members of the very same Middle Eastern group whose wiretapped conversations the office was working to translate. The FBI, of course, denied everything. But Edmonds recounts that when she told Dennis Saccher, a special agent in the Washington field office who was conducting the surveillance, about the co-worker's actions, Saccher had replied, "It looks like espionage to me." But Saccher refused to comment for the press. Edmonds was fired in March 2002 after she reported her concerns. Government officials said the FBI fired her because her “disruptiveness” hurt her on-the-job “performance.” Edmonds said she believes she was fired in retaliation for reporting on her co-worker.

Edmonds began working at the FBI in late September 2001. She later reported that she had become particularly alarmed when she discovered that a recently hired FBI translator was going around saying that she belonged to precisely the same Middle Eastern organization whose taped conversations she had been translating for FBI counterintelligence agents. FBI officials did everything that they could to prevent the name of the target group from being revealed to the public, allegedly for national security reasons. This case became public when a Washington Post reporter discovered Edmonds's name in her whistle-blowing letters to federal and congressional officials and approached her for an interview. Edmonds said that on several occasions, her fellow translator had tried to recruit her to join the targeted foreign group. “This person told us she worked for our target organization,” Edmonds said in an interview. “These are the people we are targeting, monitoring.” Of course, what all this means is that the target organization was also controlled by the FBI, or was itself part of the FBI – not that the FBI had been infiltrated.

The other translator was an unidentified 33-year-old U.S. citizen whose native country is home to the target group. This is also the country were Edmonds was born, and is probably Turkey or Iran. Both Edmonds and the other translator are U.S. citizens. The other woman, who is still working under contract for the FBI's Washington field office, refused to comment. Edmonds also reported that the woman and her husband, a U.S. military officer, suggested that Edmonds become a member of their group during a hastily arranged visit to Edmonds's Northern Virginia home on a Sunday morning in December 2001. “He said, ‘Are you a member of the particular organization?’’ Edmonds recalled the woman's husband saying. The military officer went on to add: “It's a very good place to be a member. There are a lot of advantages of being with this organization and doing things together and one of the greatest things about it is you can have an early, unexpected retirement. And you will be totally set if you go to that specific country.” Edmonds also reported that the military officer assured her that she would easily be admitted to the group, especially if she said she worked for the FBI. Later, Edmonds said, the same woman approached her with a list dividing up individuals whose phone lines were being secretly tapped: Under the plan, the woman would translate conversations of her fellow members of the target organization, and Edmonds would handle other phone calls. Edmonds said she refused and that the woman told her that her lack of cooperation could put her family in danger.

Edmonds also brought her concerns to her supervisor and other FBI officials in the Washington field office. When no action was taken, she also reported to the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, then to Justice's inspector general. “Investigations are being compromised,” Edmonds wrote to the inspector general's office in March 2002. “Incorrect or misleading translations are being sent to agents in the field. Translations are being blocked and circumvented.” Edmonds had also written to Dale Watson, the bureau's counterterrorism chief. Her case has been referred to Justice's Office of the Inspector General. (Washington Post, June 19, 2002) But in the meantime, the Ashcroft Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of declaring the Edmonds case a state secret, meaning that literally everything is classified. Sibel Edmonds was interviewed by the 9/11 commission, and makes it into the commission report just once, in footnote 25, page 490, in the course of a discussion about how important it is to have good translators.

But the substance of her case goes completely unreported. This is not surprising, since the entire case has been classified by Ashcroft as a state secret.

After the 9/11 commission had issued its report, Edmonds sent an open letter to Kean and Hamilton pointing out that much of the evidence she had delivered to the commission had simply been ignored. She also escalated her critique by naming the names of FBI supervisors, some of whom qualify for our purposes here as potential moles. Edmonds’ letter provides another rare glimpse at how moles operate inside intelligence agencies to sabotage law enforcement and make sure that patsies are not rounded up or effective warnings given until it is too late.

Melek Can Dickerson, a Turkish translator, was hired by the FBI after September 11, and was placed in charge of translating the most sensitive information related to terrorists and criminals under the Bureau's investigation. Melek Can Dickerson was granted Top Secret Clearance, which can be granted only after conducting a thorough background investigation. Melek Can Dickerson used to work for semi-legit organizations that were the FBI's targets of investigation. Melek Can Dickerson had on going relationships with two individuals who were the FBI's targets of investigation. For months Melek Can Dickerson blocked all-important information related to these semi-legit organizations and the individuals she and her husband associated with. She stamped hundreds, if not thousands, of documents related to these targets as 'Not Pertinent.' Melek Can Dickerson attempted to prevent others from translating these documents important to the FBI's investigations and our fight against terrorism. Melek Can Dickerson, with the assistance of her direct supervisor, Mike Feghali, took hundreds of pages of top-secret sensitive intelligence documents outside the FBI to unknown recipients. Melek Can Dickerson, with the assistance of her direct supervisor, forged signatures on top-secret documents related to certain 9/11 detainees. After all these incidents were confirmed and reported to FBI management, Melek Can Dickerson was allowed to remain in her position, to continue the translation of sensitive intelligence received by the FBI, and to maintain her Top Secret Clearance. Apparently bureaucratic mid-level FBI management and administrators decided that it would not look good for the Bureau if this security breach and espionage case was investigated and made public, especially after going through Robert Hanssen's case (FBI spy scandal). This case (Melek Can Dickerson) was confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee….


Here we have a serious allegation of serious federal crimes, far worse than Sandy Berger stuffing some old documents into his pants at the National Archives. It also raises the question: is Mike Feghali a conscious, witting mole, or merely an incompetent? Given the chaos inside the FBI, it is sometimes hard to tell. Edmonds also shows that there is no effective discipline or accountability inside the FBI molehill:

Today, more than two years since the Dickerson incident was reported to the FBI, and more than two years since this information was confirmed by the United States Congress and reported by the press, these administrators in charge of FBI personnel security and language departments in the FBI remain in their positions and in charge of translation quality and translation departments' security. Melek Can Dickerson and several FBI targets of investigation hastily left the United States in 2002, and the case still remains uninvestigated criminally. Not only does the supervisor facilitating these criminal conducts remain in a supervisory position, he has been promoted to supervising Arabic language units of the FBI's Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence investigations.


Edmonds also revealed a specific pre-9/11 warning on patsy activities which was simply ignored by the FBI, and then ignored again by the 9/11 commission:

Over three years ago, more than four months prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990, provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama Bin Laden. This asset/informant was previously a high-level intelligence officer in Iran in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan. Through his contacts in Afghanistan he received information that: 1) Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting 4-5 major cities, 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes, 3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States, 4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months. The agents who received this information reported it to their superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism, Thomas Frields, at the FBI Washington Field Office, by filing 302 forms, and the translator translated and documented this information. No action was taken by the Special Agent in Charge, and after 9/11 the agents and the translators were told to ‘keep quiet’ regarding this issue. The translator who was present during the session with the FBI informant, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, reported this incident to Director Mueller in writing, and later to the Department of Justice Inspector General. The press reported this incident, and in fact the report in the Chicago Tribune on July 21, 2004 stated that FBI officials had confirmed that this information was received in April 2001, and further, the Chicago Tribune quoted an aide to Director Mueller that he (Mueller) was surprised that the Commission never raised this particular issue with him during the hearing.


Was Frields a mole? This is the kind of question the 9/11 commission should have asked, but which it always ducked. Edmonds goes on to mock the clichés about connecting the dots and sharing intelligence which are the stock in trade of the controlled corporate media. She points out that the Phoenix memo, the Minneapolis alarms, and the Sarshar material all converged in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC. The FBI had all that it needed to know that a large operation was afoot, which it could have disrupted by rolling up parts of the patsy network. But the FBI did nothing, and the 9/11 commission dropped the ball here as well, as Edmonds stresses:

All this information went to the same place: FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and the FBI Washington Field Office, in Washington DC. Yet, your report claims that not having a central place where all intelligence could be gathered as one of the main factors in our intelligence failure. Why did your report choose to exclude the information regarding the Iranian asset and Behrooz Sarshar from its timeline of missed opportunities? Why was this significant incident not mentioned; despite the public confirmation by the FBI, witnesses provided to your investigators, and briefings you received directly? Why did you surprise even Director Mueller by refraining from asking him questions regarding this significant incident and lapse during your hearing (Please remember that you ran out of questions during your hearings with Director Mueller and AG John Ashcroft, so please do not cite a 'time limit' excuse)?


Mike Feghali appears in Edmonds’ account as a consummate bureaucratic bungler and dissembler. But the question stubbornly arises: was he a mole as well? And what about the bureaucrats who promoted him? Here Feghali is sabotaging translations requested by field agents:

In October 2001, approximately one month after the September 11 attack, an agent from a (city name omitted) field office, re-sent a certain document to the FBI Washington Field Office, so that it could be re- translated. This Special Agent, in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, rightfully believed that, considering his target of investigation (the suspect under surveillance), and the issues involved, the original translation might have missed certain information that could prove to be valuable in the investigation of terrorist activities. After this document was received by the FBI Washington Field Office and re-translated verbatim, the field agent's hunch appeared to be correct. The new translation revealed certain information regarding blueprints, pictures, and building material for skyscrapers being sent overseas. It also revealed certain illegal activities in obtaining visas from certain embassies in the Middle East, through network contacts and bribery. However, after the re-translation was completed and the new significant information was revealed, the unit supervisor in charge of certain Middle Eastern languages, Mike Feghali, decided NOT to send the re-translated information to the Special Agent who had requested it. Instead, this supervisor decided to send this agent a note stating that the translation was reviewed and that the original translation was accurate. This supervisor stated that sending the accurate translation would hurt the original translator and would cause problems for the FBI language department. The FBI agent requesting the re-translation never received the accurate translation of that document. (Sibel Edmonds, Letter to Thomas Kean, August 1, 2004)


Before we leave the moles, we must make one further important methodological point. Before the terrorist action occurs, the moles appear as embedded in a government bureaucracy which is resisting the new course which they wish to impose. After the fact, providing that the terrorist action has gone off successfully, the entire government seems to be made up exclusively of moles. Now the moles no longer appear isolated. In fact, the entire government is speaking the language which before the terror attack seemed to be the factional distinction of the moles, to the extent that they said anything. The government bureaucracy can be thought of as a gigantic freight train. With the successful terrorist act, a switch is turned, and the entire train goes rumbling in a new direction. The transformation achieved by a successful act of spectacular terrorism goes beyond what can be achieved by mere directives emanating from the office of the president or some cabinet secretary. Public opinion is shocked and stunned; the Congress is stampeded; the entire bureaucracy senses that the terrorist controllers have proven that it is they who are the strongest. After all, in Byzantine and neocon theory, law is an act of the will of the stronger over the weaker. The neocons regard a successful act of force as a valid act of legislation in that sense. The bureaucracy therefore inclines to the side of the plotters.

Once the new policy has been institutionalized, every bureaucrat will attempt to defend it as a matter of self-preservation. Bureaucratic inertia will now adapt itself to the new party line. This is why, in retrospect, it looks as if the entire government is composed of nothing but moles. But this impression is misleading. It is not feasible for every high government official to be a witting party to the terrorist action. Some, of course, can be given a specific task on a need to know basis, and they may or may not be able to intuit the larger design in which they are a cog. Others need to know everything. But the fully witting participants will number in the hundreds, not the thousands. This is Machiavelli’s most vehement advice in the chapter on conspiracies in The Discourses: keep the number of witting participants as low, limiting it if possible to oneself and at most one other person. In today’s society that would be too few. Of course, after the fact, more officials figure out what is going on, and thus join the ranks of the witting. But it ought to be axiomatic that the entire command structure cannot be in on the secret; what if somebody objects to the planned operation, and has the courage to do something about it? This might become very embarrassing for the plotters. Those who persist in seeing the state apparatus as a whole, of the US command structure as a whole as being behind 9/11 face the problem of what to do about the Phoenix memorandum and the Minneapolis actions, followed by the Rowley whistleblower memo. Here were government officials who were subjectively opposed to the 9/11 operation, even if they were only able to express this opposition in regard to the patsy network with which they were dealing.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:03 am

PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 2 CONT'D.)

EXPERT PROFESSIONALS

Much low-level terrorism consists of crude local attacks on buses, supermarkets, hotels, and the like. Such actions are sometimes within the capability of low-level activists, but when we go beyond such actions, special technical preparation and training become necessary. When we get to the level of spectacular international terrorism of the type represented by 9/11, it is clear that only skilled professionals have the physical ability to produce the effects observed. The third sub-system which must examined to account for modern synthetic terrorism is therefore that of the expert professionals. They are the well- trained, well-equipped operatives who really do have the technical, physical, and mental ability to bring about the terrorist acts which the public sees. They are the members of the team which was indeed able, using the best state of the art sniper rifles and related equipment, to fire the requisite number of shots in Dealey Plaza, and to fire them with sufficient accuracy within the objective time limits imposed by the situation. They are the ice-cold technocrats of death who were able to direct the aircraft into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The expert professionals are the persons who can accomplish the amazing feats which the media attribute to the pathetic patsies.

The expert professionals and the patsies differ in many fundamental ways. The expert professionals are neither ideologues nor fanatics in the way that the patsies tend to be. They are proud of their professional competence. Not infrequently, they are mercenary in their motivation. They do not try to get noticed. They are not abrasive, and they do not go out of their way to pick quarrels with passersby. They do not give interviews, and would never hand out leaflets. Their goal is the lowest possible profile, and if possible, complete anonymity. They would always like to escape attention, and to melt away into the shadows. They come from out of town, and disappear as soon as their work is done. Their main occupational hazard is not that of arrest by the police, but their risk of being liquidated by their own employers as a basic security measure.

Because of these factors, we know less about the expert professionals than we do about the patsies, about whom so much gossipy detail is known, or about the moles, who cannot always escape detection after the fact. The attempt to identify the expert professionals is the same as the attempt to name the snipers of Dallas on November 22, 1963: we have no certitude, but only speculation. Were they disgruntled members of the French OAS? Were they central European fascists left over from World War II? We do not know.

There are, however, some instances in which something more about the expert professionals may be learned. At the end of the Cold War it turned out that the prime suspects in many of the terrorist attacks in Italy and other countries were in fact members of a CIA-sponsored stay-behind network, the Italian branch of which was called Gladio. The existence of Gladio was revealed to the Italian Parliament, which had never been informed, in a report issued by then-Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on February 26, 1991. Apparently a secret clause of the North Atlantic Alliance required member states who might be subject to Soviet invasion and occupation to make some provision in advance for promoting armed resistance and guerrilla warfare against the feared Soviet occupiers of the future -- that was, at least, the cover story. In 1951 the Italian military intelligence, then called SIFAR, signed an agreement with the CIA on the creation of the infrastructure of a totally secret, clandestine stay-behind operation. This underground group was called Gladio, the Italian word for the Roman sword. Gladio was tasked with espionage, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and propaganda in the event of a Soviet occupation. Its headquarters were located on the island of Sardinia, which the Italian general staff thought it could control even if mainland Italy had fallen to the Red Army.

In 1959, Gladio became an integral part of the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) at SHAPE headquarters. Later, in 1964, it was included in the European-wide apparatus managed by the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) of NATO, along with US, UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and West Germany. When SIFAR became Sill and later SISMJ, Gladio continued to operate as its secret arm. Gladio was set up according to a cell structure, meaning that each team was compartmentalized and separated from all the other teams -- a good idea in case of Soviet invasion, but also a good way for a single cell to become the vehicle for spectacular terrorism if it happened to be composed of persons with a certain outlook. In peacetime, Gladio's activity was devoted largely to training and recruitment of new members. Some of the training was placed in the hands of the Training Division ofMI-6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, an institution that was directing terrorist operations on a grand scale when the CIA did not yet exist. Other training courses were set up at the CIA's so-called farm in Virginia. Operative links with the CIA were always present. Gladio had 40 cells: 6 for espionage, 10 for sabotage, 6 for propaganda, 6 for getting key people out of the Soviet- occupied zone, and 12 for guerrilla warfare. The sabotage and guerrilla warfare cells amounted to secret units of highly trained special forces commandos. This structure was somewhat revamped in 1974-76. There were 622 official members of Gladio, 83% of whom had been born before 1945, 16% between 1945 and 1960, and the rest born after 1960. These were of course cadres, or officers, around whom a much larger number of operatives would be assembled. We must also assume that this official report represents a modified limited hangout, designed to reveal a few facts, hide many more, and accustom public opinion to the existence of the secret structure by minimizing its importance. Other estimates of Gladio's numerical strength range up to 15,000, a more realistic figure.

In addition to the cells, Gladio also possessed large amounts of weapons and explosives. There were 138 secret arms deposits, most often buried in cemeteries, containing stocks of portable weapons, explosives, hand grenades, precision sniper rifles, radios, and other equipment. These were sealed in plastic containers to prevent rust and deterioration. According to Andreotti's report, these arms caches were buried during the 1960s. When they were all finally dug up again between 1973 and 1990, it turned out that two caches with 6 containers of arms and explosives in the province of Udine near the Yugoslav border had been pilfered. These would have been more than enough to provide the raw materials for the strategy of tension between 1967 and 1985, approximately. These weapons have never been recovered. Andreotti announced the dismantling of Gladio in 1990. According to the report, Belgium, France, Luxemburg, and Switzerland terminated their own secret stay-behind programs in 1990; Austria was said to have done so in 1970. As for Greece and Germany, it is not clear that the stay-behind networks were ever terminated. (For the original Italian text of Andreotti's report, see http://www.zaratrustra.it/relazionegladioandreotti.htm )

The hypothesis is unavoidable that the Gladio had drawn its recruits from the fascists of Mussolini's Italian Social Republic of 1943-1945 in northern Italy, behind German lines.

Since Gladio's mission was allegedly to prevent the country from becoming a permanent Soviet satellite, its commanders in SIFAR-SID-SISMI, CIA and MI-6 may have decided to act preemptively to use the secret Gladio capabilities plus its arms deposits to prevent the Italian Communists and their trade union allies from ever participating in the government, which they might have seen or pretended to see as a step towards Soviet domination. The circumstantial case is very strong that the Gladio teams provided the well-trained, well-equipped professionals who placed the bombs in Milan in 1969, in Brescia and the Italicus express in 1974, and at the Bologna railway station in 1980. In this, the Gladio people may have been assisted by such notorious SID- ISMJ assets as Stefano delle Chiaie, a terrorist who made his base in Madrid until the death of Franco and the fall of the fascist regime in 1976.

The case concerning Gladio as a state-sponsored terrorist underground grows stronger if we also consider the role of the P-2 or Propaganda Due freemasonic lodge. The existence of this secret power center became public knowledge in the early 1980s. Among the P-2 members were many of the most prominent political, financial, economic, media, and military leaders of Italy, including Andreotti and the current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. There were no communists and no labor leaders present. The P-2 was most likely a descendant of a pro-Mazzini Masonic lodge sometimes identified as Propaganda Uno, which would have been functioning during the second half of the nineteenth century and in to the twentieth. P-2 was notable for its overwhelming links to the US. In the view of some, P-2 grandmaster Licio Gelli, a former fascist, and his assistant Umberto Grtolani, may have represented a command center for terror operations in Italy, including those executed by the trained professionals of the Gladio network. Or, more likely, they may have represented a conduit for instructions from higher up to be passed along to the various personalities of the local establishment.

Gladio in any case represents an extremely instructive case for students of 9/11. Here we have one of the five advanced industrial countries, a founding member of the European Community, and a member of NATO, in which state sponsored terrorism would appear to have been practiced for about 15 years on a very large scale, all as a matter of raison d'etat, specifically because of the Soviet threat. The human toll over this time numbers certainly in the hundreds, about one order of magnitude less than 9/11, but in a country about one fourth the size of the US. There seems to have been very little compunction about turning lethal terrorism against one's own population. Those who believe that a self-inflicted wound on the scale of 9/11 in the US case, organized by US intelligence networks, is a moral and human impossibility will gain no support from this example.

OPERATION NORTHWOODS

In July 1961, Democratic Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, noting the activities of General Edwin Walker, called for an investigation of the Institute for American Strategy, the Richardson Foundation, the National War College, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- all for subversive activity. Fulbright compared the mentality of some US military men to that of the GAS (Secret Army Organization) in Algeria, which plotted against General de Gaulle and was implicated in various assassination plots against him. All in all, there were about thirty attempts to kill the French President. (See Target de Gaulle)

Fulbright's warnings were more accurate than he knew at the time. The crucial exhibit in this regard is Operation Northwoods, a plan to provoke a war with Cuba, which was supported by the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and their Chairman, General Lyman Lemnitzer. This document, titled "Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba" was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, General Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans covertly to engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. The documents of Operation Northwoods were first published in Australia by John Elliston in his PsyWar on Cuba: The Declassified History of U.S. Anti-Castro Propaganda (1999). They became prominent around the time of 9/11 thanks to the study Body of Secrets by James Bamford, a former ABC newsman.

Lemnitzer had worked with Allen Dulles during World War II, and was part of Dulles' Operation Sunrise, the separate surrender of German forces in Italy by SS General Karl Wolf Lemnitzer had helped to assemble the first stay-behind networks of the Gladio type, which were often staffed by former Nazis and fascists. Lemnitzer, along with Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, favored using the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 to provoke general nuclear war with the USSR. Robert Dallek's new biography of Kennedy documents the reckless and irresponsible advice Lemnitzer gave Kennedy on a number of military problems; it usually came down to recommending nuclear weapons under all circumstances as the only way to guarantee victory. In 1962 Lemnitzer was denied his ambition of being re-appointed to a second term as JCS chairman, but he was given the post of NATO Supreme Commander, where he presided over the creation of the first Gladio arms and explosives caches on the Italian front. Lemnitzer did not retire from active duty until 1969. President Gerald Ford asked Lemnitzer to join the agitation of the Committee on the Present Danger, a retread of a CIA front group from the early 1950s. The CPD was the private-sector arm of CIA Director George Bush's Team B, an exercise in anti-Soviet alarmism that foreshadowed the Feith-Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. Ford also promoted General William H. Craig, who had been a part of the Northwood cabal, to be the head of the Army Security Agency, an arm of the supersecret National Security Agency, the center of electronic surveillance. Lemnitzer died in November 1988.

Senator Albert Gore senior, the father of the later vice president, thought that Lemnitzer was a part of the subversive machinations associated with General Edwin Walker, who distributed inflammatory anti-Kennedy propaganda to his troops in Germany. When Walker returned to the US, he organized a racist riot against the hiring of a black professor at the University of Mississippi, and was prosecuted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy for sedition, insurrection, and rebellion. Walker was thought to have joined with French GAS military in plotting to kill de Gaulle; these same circles are also suspect in the Kennedy assassination. A little later, in 1963 and 1964, George H. W. Bush ran for the Senate in Texas on a platform that included the overthrow of Castro and the use of tactical nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. (Meyssan 2002 139-146)

General Edward Lansdale was one of the most prominent practitioners of special forces, special operations, and related utopian military methods during the Cold War. He was one of the leading architects of the catastrophic US involvement in Vietnam. Lansdale was the founder of the US Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Lansdale worked closely together with Allen Dulles, the Wall Street lawyer who became the head of the CIA during the Eisenhower administration, and who cooked up the plan for the Bay of Pigs and foisted it off on the newly inaugurated President Kennedy. When the Bay of Pigs failed, and Kennedy wisely decided to cut his losses by not throwing more military assets into what was already a hopeless debacle, the Allen Dulles clique and many counterinsurgency-oriented military officers blamed not their own incompetent planning, but Kennedy. In February, 1962, Robert Kennedy told Lansdale that his covert Operation Mongoose, a plot to kill Castro, should be frozen, and the emphasis shifted to gathering intelligence.

The Dulles-Lemnitzer-Lansdale networks should not be thought of as an extinct feature of the past, but rather as a living presence in the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and other agencies. Given the track record of this network, they must necessarily come under scrutiny in the context of 9/11.

The Northwoods documents start from the premise that the US should be seeking war with Cuba over the short term for the purpose of regime change: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States. They also recommend that such intervention be undertaken as soon as possible and preferably before the release of National Guard and Reserve forces presently on active duty." Part of the effort would be to demonize Castro and his communist government. The Northwoods planners thought that world opinion, and the United Nations forum, should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere." How could Castro be demonized? Norhtwoods: "Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government." In addition, "hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba."

Northwoods planners did not hesitate to prescribe attacks on US ships, planes, or installations: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," they wrote; "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation." Northwoods had not forgotten the Maine incident of 1898. Nor did they hesitate to propose a murderous campaign of terror against US civilians: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," proposed the JCS planners. "The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States." So much for any notions that rogue Pentagon and CIA elements have any profound metaphysical inhibitions about killing their own troops or US citizens in general; this is an important lesson to bring to the analysis of 9/11.

In the search for a pretext, the JCS planners also considered a massacre of foreign citizens: "We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). ... We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized."

The most complicated project proposed by the Northwoods brainstormers was a plan to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight." From here the plan was articulated as follows:

An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. ...

From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a "May Day" message stating he is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAG [International Civil Aviation Organization] radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S. trying to "sell" the incident.


There was also a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack." When Colonel John Glenn was about to attempt his orbital flight, Lemnitzer and the Northwoods cabal were ready. They did not explicitly prepare to sabotage Glenn's rocket, but they were ready to exploit any mishap to attain the goal which, as always, was the invasion of Cuba. Lemnitzer proposed that an astronaut disaster could be turned into a pretext for war "by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans."

The inventiveness of the Northwoods cabal was endless. They were eager to stage "a series of well coordinated incidents to take place in and around" the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This would entail a group of anti-Castro Cubans decked out in Cuban army uniforms who would "start riots near the main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations."

Another path to war might be through embroiling the Cubans in conflict with other Caribbean nations through covert operations and US provocations: "Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their national air space. 'Cuban' B-26 or C-46 type aircraft could make cane burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries could be found. This could be coupled with 'Cuban' messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic and 'Cuban' shipments of arms which would be found, or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S. pilots could provide additional provocation." Finally, there was a plan to make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack." It was a particularly believable operation given the decade of shoot downs that had just taken place. Lemnitzer was emphatic that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and not the CIA, ought to be in charge of these covert operations: "It is recommended," he concluded, "that this responsibility for both overt and covert military operations be assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff." ( http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/ )

Northwoods was never carried out in regard to Cuba. However, this; does not mean that these concepts were never implemented. In the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964, two US destroyers were operating along the coast of North Vietnam very near South Vietnamese ships which were raiding and bombarding the north. The Pentagon then announced that the two destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. President Johnson then ordered US air strikes on nearby North Vietnamese ports and naval bases, and also used this incident to extort the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution from the Congress, which gave him unlimited power to wage war. Later, it turned out that there probably had not been any North Vietnamese torpedo boats, but more likely only ghost images on the radar screens of the destroyers. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Johnson was clearly embarked on the path of escalating the Vietnam war, with disastrous consequences for all concerned. The mind which produced Northwoods and the Gulf of Tonkin affair is a mind which would have no difficulty in producing 9/11. And there is no sign that those networks have ever been eradicated.

THE MOSSAD'S FALSE FLAG AL QAEDA CELL

Rashid Abu Shbak, the head of Palestinian Preventive Security in the Gaza Strip said on Friday, December 6, 2002 that his forces had identified a number of Palestinian collaborators who had been ordered by Israeli security agencies to "work in the Gaza Strip under the name of Al-Qaeda." Al-Jazeera TV reported that the Palestinian authorities had arrested a group of Palestinian "collaborators with Israeli occupation" in Gaza, who were trying to set up an operation there in the name of bin Laden's Al-Qaeda. The Palestinian Authority spokesman said the members of the group had confessed that they were recruited and organized by the Israeli intelligence, Mossad. Sharon had personally claimed on December 4, 2002 that he had proof of Al-Qaeda operations in Gaza, and used the allegations to justify brutal Israeli Defense Forces attacks in the Gaza Strip the next day -- which was the start of the Islamic holiday, Eid, celebrating the end of Ramadan. Ten civilians were killed in the IDF assaults. Reuters published an extensive featured story on the affair by Diala Saadeh on December 7, 2002, under the headline "Palestinians: Israel Faked Gaza Al Qaeda Presence." The article quoted President Arafat, who told reporters at his West Bank Ramallah headquarters, "It is a big, big, big lie to cover [Sharon's] attacks and his crimes against our people everywhere." Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo explained: "There are certain elements who were instructed by the Mossad to form a cell under the name of Al Qaeda in the Gaza Strip in order to justify the assault and the military campaigns of the Israeli occupation army against Gaza." (Haaretz, Reuters and Al Jazeera, December 7, 2002) Sharon is of course a past master of false-flag tactics like these, having been implicated in the direction of the Abu Nidal organization and also in the setting up of Hamas.

On Sunday, December 8, 2002, Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority Planning and International Cooperation Minister, held a press conference with Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, head of the PA 's Preventive Security Apparatus in the Gaza Strip, to release documents and provide further information about the Israeli intelligence creation of a self-styled Al Qaeda cell. Shaath called on the diplomats to "convey to their countries that they assume the responsibility of exerting pressure on the Israeli government to stop the Israeli aggression," and announced that the PA had handed ambassadors and consuls of the Arab and foreign countries documents revealing the involvement of the Israeli Intelligence in recruiting citizens from Gaza Strip in a fake organization carrying the name of Qaeda. The goal of the operation was to create a new pretext for aggression against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Shbak said that the PA had found eight cases of fake Al Qaeda recruiting over the previous nine months. Three Palestinians were arrested, while another 11 Palestinians were released, "because they came and informed us of this Israeli plot." The PA Security Service had traced mobile phone calls and e-mails, purportedly from Germany and Lebanon, back to Israel; these were messages asking Palestinians to join Al Qaeda. One e-mail even bore the forged signature of Osama bin Laden. "We investigated the origin of those calls, which used roaming, and messages, and found out they all came from Israel," Shbak said. The recruits were paired with collaborators in Gaza, and received money and weapons, "although most of these weapons did not work." The money was provided by collaborators, or transferred from bank accounts in Israel and Jerusalem. (Palestine Ministry of Public Information, Islam Online, December 9, 2002)

TERRORIST MURDER AS BRITISH STATE POLICY

In Apri12003, Great Britain was rocked by one of the greatest secret intelligence scandals in the entire postwar period. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens, the most senior police official in Great Britain, delivered the third installment of his report documenting that a special branch of British army intelligence had coordinated the murders of some thirty Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland in the years 1989-1990. Stevens had begun his investigation already back in 1989, but the report was not published until 2003, after two postponements during 2002. The Stevens investigation centered on the British Army intelligence's Force Research Unit (FRU), for working in collusion Protestant loyalist paramilitary groups to kill Catholics. An aggravating factor was that the head of the FRU at the time when these murders were being committed, in 1989-90, was an army officer named Gordon Kerr .Until February 2003, Kerr was the British military attache in Beijing, one of the highest military posts for a British military officer. Sir John Stevens confirmed that in that same month of February 2003 he was preparing papers for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) relating to a prosecution of Kerr. At that point Kerr, by then an army brigadier general, was moved to Kuwait, and was serving in Iraq when the Stevens report came out. (BBC, April 17, 2003)

The Stevens report represented, in its author's words, "the largest investigation undertaken in the United Kingdom," with 9,256 statements recorded, 10,391 documents logged (over 1 million pages), and 16,194 evidentiary exhibits seized. By Apri12003, the Stevens probe had generated 144 arrests and 94 convictions. (Stevens 17) Stevens' findings centered on collusion in the Finucane and other murders. "Collusion is evidenced in many ways. This ranges from the willful failure to keep records, the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence and evidence, through to the extreme of agents being involved in murder." (Stevens 18)

It was evident to all that Kerr and his FRU could never have committed such atrocities on their own, but would have required "orders from the highest level," that is, from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's office. Whether the Stevens investigation would implicate Thatcher remained to be seen. The British press was focused on the fact that Kerr's chief FRU operative for coordinating the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in the commission of at least 30 murders was a certain Brian Nelson. Nelson, under Kerr's direction, had intrigued to become the UDA's intelligence chief In January 1990, the Stevens team identified Nelson as a key suspect, and planned to arrest him and others in a dawn raid. The officers went to their secure investigation headquarters, hours before the planned arrests, to find a fire raging in their offices, with fIfe alarms, telephones, and heat-sensitive intruder alarms not working, and with many of their files destroyed. This was an obvious case of arson. To top off the story, Brian Nelson died the week before Stevens III was issued, supposedly of a brain hemorrhage. The Stevens investigation had been launched in 1989, following the murder of top Catholic lawyer Pat Finucane. Finucane's family had always insisted that the security forces were involved in his murder, and dismissed the Stevens report as inadequate. Finucane's widow, Geraldine, demanded a full judicial inquiry as the only way to deal with the issue. Alex Maskey, the Lord Mayor of Belfast, commented on the Stevens report: "This is not about rogue elements with the British system. It is about a state policy sanctioned at the highest level."

The Stevens inquiry did not develop in a vacuum. It had been stimulated by the work of film- aker and author Sean McPhilemy, whose book, The Committee: Political Assassination in Northern Ireland, had appeared in 1998. McPhilemy systematically documented the murderous collusion among the British government, the British military, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Loyalist paramilitary death squads, and respected Protestant citizens in planning and perpetrating the murders of Republican paramilitaries and Catholics. The roles of the RUC, its Special Branch, the Force Research Unit, and British Army agent Brian Nelson, in the murder of human rights attorney Pat Finucane and others were revealed in McPhilemy's book. McPhilemy also provided evidence implicating British domestic intelligence (MI5) and Secret Air Services (SAS) commandos in these operations.

CONTROLLED CORPORATE MEDIA

It almost goes without saying that the effective political exploitation of a large-scale terrorist operation like 9/11 depends to an extraordinary degree on the complicity of the controlled corporate media. So far we have discussed moles primarily as a private network inside the visible government, but the media are honeycombed with moles as well: these are persons whose task it is to act in support of the terror project in its totality. On 9/11, it was the media moles who first began churning out the mythical party line about Bin Laden and al Qaeda. They are in this sense the main propagators of the myth, with Bush and others bringing up the rear. We have already suggested that a majority of the leaks implicating Bin Laden and al Qaeda on the basis of no evidence whatsoever probably came from Richard Clarke and George Tenet. It is no secret that the CIA has long recruited media managers and media personalities to be its agents of influence. The corporate bosses of the media conglomerates, in their capacity as powerful oligarchs, may also be more or less witting parties to the unfolding operation. They may therefore instruct their own media personalities on the line they are to espouse.

A COMMAND CENTER

This panoply of elements -- patsies, moles, professionals, and media -- clearly presupposes an additional element: a center of command and coordination to guide all these operational components towards the desired outcome. A number of accounts of 9/11 have gone so far as to suggest that President Bush himself was the coordinator, but it must be countered in all seriousness that this is impossible, and not only for the reason of mental and technical inability which must always be applied in questions of terror. As a matter of propaganda it is permissible and probably necessary to direct mass anger against Bush as the person generally responsible for 9/11; since he does qualify for this opprobrium in various ways, although not in the simple, linear way that some people might think. However, when we are attempting to analyze in detail how 9/11 came about, it is equally clear that in any serious conspiracy, a figure of the caliber of Bush 43 would normally be one of the last to know. He is after all merely a figurehead, a front man for the CIA-Brown Brothers Harriman-Skull & Bones-neocon-Bush family faction, which is itself an oligarchical congeries, not a disciplined, centralized apparatus.

It is hardly likely that the command center of 9/11 could have been in the upper reaches of government, and far more likely that it was outside of government altogether. Since Reagan's first term, the US intelligence community has been largely privatized under the aegis of Executive Order 12333. This means that the really crucial capabilities for an operation like 9/11 are no longer to be sought in the George Bush intelligence center in Langley, Virginia which houses the headquarters of the CIA, but rather in a myriad of private military firms, technology companies, think tanks, law firms, public relations firms, and front companies of all types. It is here, rather than a secret government office, that the planning and command center for 9/11 would normally be sought. However, given the considerable audacity of the operation, it cannot be excluded that some specific subdivisions of government agencies may have been involved. Possible candidates here might include a focal point operation within the Defense Department, or a special, secret military unit.

For those who find it incredible that terrorism against the Pentagon should be directed from inside the Pentagon, we recall that French President Francois Mitterrand, Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, and Italian financier Michele Sindona each at one time or another caused a near-miss terror attack against himself, presumably as a means of garnering public sympathy.

CONDUCTED BY A NETWORK

It is important to stress that large-scale synthetic terrorism of the 9/11 type is generally conducted, not so much by identifiable institutions acting as a totality, but rather by a network or faction of like-minded plotters which cuts across the institutions transversally. It is not the visible, elected government which plots terrorism, but rather the parallel, invisible, or secret government, and that secret government is hidden inside the public and elected one. The essence of this phenomenon is a private network which has ensconced its operatives in decisive, influential positions, from which entire bureaucracies can be controlled, manipulated, or paralyzed. To take an extreme case, it might be argued that the FBI belongs completely to a network of moles. But even though the power of the moles in the FBI is admittedly very great indeed, the Phoenix memo and the Colleen Rowley memo are enough to show that even the FBI is not composed exclusively of moles. That the FBI generally acts like a mole organization pure and simple is due to the preponderant power of certain well-placed moles who can make the institution do what their faction wants on key issues.

The secret, private network at the higher levels of the US government which was behind 9/11 has been around for some time. We see its footprints in such events as the U-2 crisis, the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, the Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy assassinations, parts of Watergate, Iran-Contra, the bombing of Kosovo (and of the Chinese embassy in (Belgrade), the Kursk incident, and other operations. This list could be extended. It is an aggressive, imperialistic, murderous network, restlessly seeking to preserve itself through conflict and confrontation.

In waging political conflict, it is often necessary and indispensable to personalize matters by encouraging citizens to direct their anger at an odious leader of the opposing faction; this often allows a more efficient mobilization than calling for the defeat of an abstraction or of a collectivity. In this sense, it is good politics and close to the truth to blame Bush for 9/11, but not in the simple way that many might think. It is a naive argument to say that if there was US government collusion in 9/11, which there certainly was, then this proves that the titular head of the US government and tenant of the White House, G. W. Bush, must have been the leader of the plot. This reflects a media-conditioned overestimation of the powers of the presidency. After the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US oligarchy made a collective pledge that never but never would they ever allow an elected leader actually to exercise the constitutional powers of the presidency. This was codified in the term limit contained in the XXII Amendment of 1947 -1951, which has weakened the office of the presidency in comparison to earlier times. Then began the parade of puppet presidents: Harry S Truman was always susceptible to blackmail for his role in the crooked Pendergast machine of Missouri; Truman meekly took his orders from a committee that included Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson, Averill Harriman, and Robert Lovett, and the oligarchy has held him up as exemplary ever since. Eisenhower was the easy-going chairman of the board who did not force Montgomery and Patton to coordinate during World War II; much of the real power was exercised by the Dulles brothers. The oligarchy considered Kennedy a playboy and sex maniac; he turned out to be a man of much positive principle. Kennedy showed his willingness to put the Federal reserve on a leash, forced Wall Street in the person of US Steel to back down, and refused to let his advisers (EXCGMM) use the Cuban missile crisis to launch world war against the USSR, and the response of the oligarchy came the following year. Lyndon B. Johnson's pathologies crippled him, despite his apparent power, and made him accept the Vietnam adventure Kennedy had refused. Doris Kearns Goodwin has studied this matter well enough in her book on LBJ. Richard Nixon had been through a kind of nervous breakdown during the 1960s through his loss of the 1962 California gubernatorial election and the death of his mother; he was willing to take orders from Kissinger, who took them from the Rockefeller brothers, etc. Ford, according to LBJ, was so mentally impaired that he was not capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. Carter had gone through a nervous breakdown of his own after being ousted as Governor of Georgia. Reagan had learned to mask his mean and vindictive tendencies behind a mask of avuncular joviality; he acted the role of the good uncle, one of the archetypes of the American ideology, but he delegated most decisions, after Haig was forced out, to Bush and Baker. In the meantime, Reagan dozed and drooled; by 1987 his mental impairment was obvious enough to cause a scandal. Bush 41 was a very sick man by the second half of his presidency; his thyroid problem was the symptom of psychosomatic disorders which live on in the various syndromes exhibited by his son, such as the penchant for snap decisions. (Tarpley 1992) Bush 41 had made his career thanks to Kissinger, and he let Kissinger's partners Scow croft and Eagleburger share power with Baker. On big issues, like the Kuwait crisis, Bush took orders from Thatcher. Dukakis, the Democratic competitor in 1988, was also a seriously disturbed personality, as I pointed out at the time. Clinton was profiled, like JFK, as a sex maniac and Anglophile, but he turned out to be more intelligent than the oligarchs had reckoned with. He was accordingly allowed to serve two terms, but real power was seized after January 1998 by the Principals' Committee acting under cover of impeachment. The mental wreck that is Bush 43 is described in detail in another section of this book. All in all, the oligarchy favors candidates who are intellectually and morally incapable of governing according to the full powers of the office, and who are therefore willing to have their options pre-determined by servants of finance oligarchy from the Washington establishment. In any case, much of the original power of the presidency has been transferred to the unelected and unaccountable Federal Reserve Board.

During the Reagan years, a high administration official told me that the permanent bureaucratic class considered Reagan a perfect president. His job, said this official, was to be a head of state, which meant that his task came down to ministering to the emotional and symbolic needs of the country during moments of great sorrow and stress -- given that there were now more disasters than victories. The assistant secretaries and the deputy assistant secretaries actually ran the government through the interagency groups and special interagency groups -- and these were the figures who controlled the principals in the later principals' committee. The presidency was symbolic, while the permanent bureaucracy (plus the White House palace guard) made up a kind of collective prime minister who actually made decisions and ran the government -and even that within the parameters defined by the controlled corporate media. Given all this, the notion that the US president possesses real power, or makes real decisions, is slightly fantastic. According to Bush's own testimony, he saw himself as a symbolic figure needing to project strength, rather than as a crisis manager, during the crucial minutes at the Booker School, during the reading of "My Pet Goat." The government was being run by Richard Clarke of the permanent bureaucracy, who also made the call on al Qaeda.

David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor has represented a significant progress in 9/11 research, but this book has the defect of listing as suspects only identifiable institutions, such as the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and the White House. In reality, the likely suspect is a network of mo les that cuts across all of these, but which most likely keeps its center of gravity and command center somewhere in the privatized public sector.

P2OG AS OFFICIAL AGENTS PROVOCATEURS

Newspaper readers may have not believed their eyes when they read the following story:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26, 2002 (UPI) --The United States should create an elite group of counter-terror operatives to make the war on terrorism pre-emptive and proactive, duping al Qaida into undertaking operations it is not prepared for and thereby exposing its personnel, a Pentagon report advocating more than $7 billion in new spending will recommend. The counter-terror operations group alone would require 100 people and at least $100 million a year. Rather than simply trying to find and foil terrorists' plans -- the approach that characterizes the current strategy -- the "Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group" -- known as P2OG -- would devise ways to stimulate terrorists into responding or moving operations, possibly by stealing their money or tricking them with fake communications, according to the report.

The group would be comprised of specialists in information operations, psychological operations, computer network attack, covert activities, signal intelligence, human intelligence, special operations forces and deception operations. The Defense Department already maintains a secretive counter-terror operations group known as Delta Force that is called in when a crisis happens; P2OG would focus its efforts on preventing those crises from even occurring in the first place.


The starting point for this operation appears to be Rumsfeld, who said in May 2002: "Prevention and preemption are ...the only defense against terrorism. Our task is to find and destroy the enemy before they strike us." This is plainly a proposal for the creation of de facto terror cells under the authority of the Pentagon. If the goal is to provoke terror, there is nothing to prevent P2OG from infiltrating agents into existing terror groups, or creating its own terror groups, with the mission of causing those groups to engage in specific terrorist attacks. There is no form of supervision or oversight which could ever guarantee that abuses of this type would not take place; they would be inherent in the design of the project itself Indeed, just the fact that the project outline exists strongly suggests that P2GG also exists, and has presumably been at work.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:12 am

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER III: THE ROOTS OF 9/11: THE GLOBALIZED CRISIS OF THE 1990s

I'm not going to start the Third World War for you.
-- General Sir Michael Jackson to Wesley Clark, June 1999


Contrary to popular belief, the 9/11 events were anything but a bolt out of the blue. They grew out of the severe and increasing global instability of the world and of the United States during the 1990s. These years were marked by repeated trips to the brink of systemic breakdown crisis of the world financial and monetary systems, against a backdrop of recrudescence of the great power tensions among the US, Russia, and China which had supposedly been relegated to the past at the end of the Cold War. The US political system was exhibiting many of the crisis symptoms of Weimar Germany ( 1919- 1933). The common denominator of the tempests of the 1990s was financial globalization as expressed in the form of the Washington Consensus, which proved itself to be an absolutely unworkable way of organizing the economic life of the world.

Within this crisis, there were aggressive, militaristic and lawless networks at work within the United States. One of these was the Dulles Brothers-Lemnitzer-Lansdale network as it had emerged from the Iran-contra years; this was the world of the asteroids, or privatized intelligence community operations. The events of 9/11 should redirect our attention to these lawless networks inside the US government which have periodically asserted themselves, with devastating consequences. This is the network which we can associate with the U-2 crisis, with the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Martin Luther King assassination, the Robert Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Iran-contra, and a score of lesser events. Another aggressive and adventurous network was the neocon network, always calling for new wars to be fought by other people's children.

As Sanguinetti points out, modern states tend to resort to terrorism and violence during their birth, when they are in severe crisis, and in the process of their extinction. In the 9/11 instance, the roots of terrorism are to be sought only marginally in events taking place in the Middle East, and certainly not in any distant cave in Afghanistan. Monocausal explanations embraced by corporate elites, such as the Hubbert "peak oil" thesis, are also unsatisfactory, since we are dealing not with geological events per se, but rather with the breakdown crisis of a political economy.

OLIGARCHICAL MALTHUSIANISM THEN AND NOW

From 9/11 to "peak oil" is a dangerous leap, and from "peak oil" to population reduction is more dangerous still. Because oligarchs have always held humanity in general in contempt, they have from time immemorial exhibited the outlook which has, during the last 200 years, been called Malthusian. Back among the early Greeks, one school of thought explained the Trojan War as necessary to remove the weight of the masses of mankind which were oppressing the breast of Mother Earth. Together with the axiomatic notion of overpopulation has gone a profound hostility to science and technology, especially because of their egalitarian effects. During the time of Thucydides in Athens, the writer called the Old Oligarch complained that the high-tech Athenian navy was helping the plebs to achieve upward mobility, while the equally high-tech long walls between Athens and Piraeus kept the armies of oligarchical Sparta at bay. During the agony of the Roman Empire, the decrees of the Emperor Diocletian in effect banned technological progress by making it illegal to alter the equipment and property of any guild. During the decline of the Venetian Empire, the decadent Giammaria Grtes (1713- 1798) elaborated the notion that the earth had an absolute and unalterable maximum carrying capacity, which he set at 3 billion persons. Ortes was the original from which the English Reverend Thomas Malthus copied. Malthus' well-known contention that population increases geometrically while food supply increases arithmetically stands in contradiction with thousands of years of successful human development. Malthus' real interest, it should be remembered, was to convince capitalists that they had to pay to maintain a numerous state church made up of people like himself, whose consumption would make sure that no crises of overproduction occurred. This was Malthus' notorious slogan, "The church with a capacious maw is best." Malthus was in turn the key to the bankruptcy of Darwin, who based himself on the greedy prelate. There is no doubt about evolution, but Darwin is a completely separate kettle of fish, especially his wayward thesis about the "blind watchmaker," meaning that the universe is a totally random process. The present writer agrees rather with Leibniz's view of a least action universe which has a definite in-built tendency towards greater order, greater energy organization, and greater development.

The fatal flaw of Keynesian economics is that they are based on Malthusian premises: there is a surplus which has to be consumed, and Keynes is unable to distinguish between productive and parasitical ways of doing this. In more recent times, the Malthusian outlook has been promoted with great success by the sinister Club of Rome, founded by Alexander King and Aurelio Peccei. The Club of Rome sponsored that infamous hoax, the 1968 Meadows and Forrester Limits to Growth. This fraudulent study took a snapshot of the then-known reserves of the main industrial commodities, and then simply extrapolated when these would be gone, based on the current rate of consumption. Almost forty years later, not one of these dire predictions has come to pass, and known reserves of many raw materials are greater than they were in 1968.

In 1971-1973, the long period of world economic expansion associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt's Bretton Woods system and postwar economic reconstruction came to an end in a series of monetary crises that destroyed the most successful monetary arrangement the world had ever seen. Since 1971-73, long-term economic growth in the main industrial countries has been cut in half: from about 5% per year to about 2.5% per year. This, plus the later push for deindustrialization, is the main reason why living standards in the US have declined by about 50% over the same period, and the costs of essential services like health care and education have gone into the ionosphere. After 1971-73, we are no longer dealing with a normal economy, but with an increasingly sick one.

THE FAKE OIL SHOCKS OF THE 1970s

Building on the lies of the Club of Rome and the Limits to Growth, Wall Street, the City of London, and the Federal Reserve, backed by the Seven Sisters Anglo-American oil cartel, decided to jack up the price of oil to save the dollar while making western Europe and Japan foot the bill. This cynical maneuver was associated with Henry Kissinger's Kippur War in the Middle East of October 1973. After the hostilities began, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced an Arab oil boycott. In late December 1973, the OPEC speeches had become the pretext for a 400% increase in the price of oil carried out by banks and speculators in the commodity trading pits of New York and Chicago. OPEC was blamed, but OPEC was never the real cartel. OPEC was largely a Potemkin cartel. The real cartel were the Seven Sisters. Without the connivance of the Seven Sisters and their Royal Dutch Shell/British Petroleum leadership, none of OPEC's antics could have been made to stick. In reality, there had been no reduction in oil deliveries to the US. In December 1973, oil-bearing supertankers of the leading oil companies were put into a holding pattern on the high seas because storage facilities were already full to bursting with crude. But that did not stop greedy speculators from bidding up the price.

The plan for the entire exercise had been provided by Lord Victor Rothschild, the sometime head of a think tank attached to Royal Dutch Shell, the dominant force within the Seven Sisters oil cartel. The operation had been discussed at a meeting of the self-styled Bilderberger Group of finance oligarchs held at Saltsjobaden, Sweden on May 11-13, 1973. The effect of the oil price hike was to create a massive artificial demand for US dollars, thus effectively saving the greenback from a short-term collapse which would have ended its role as a reserve currency, and would have also ended the ability of US-UK finance to loot the world using this mechanism. In particular, if the posted price of oil were no longer expressed in dollars, then New York and London would no longer exercise de facto control over the oil reserves of the world. The 1973 oil crisis, followed by petrodollar recycling from the OPEC countries to David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank, kept the dollar in demand and thus prevented it from being dumped. Of course, the world paid the price for all this wizardry in the form of the deepest recession since World War II.

In 1978-79, Carter and Brzezinski, acting in the service of Brzezinski's lunatic thesis that Islamic fundamentalism was the greatest bulwark against Soviet communism, toppled the regime of the Shah of Iran. In line with this project, the U.S. also made sure that the Shah was replaced by Khomeini, who embodied the negation in toto of modern civilization. Having done so well on the fake 1973-74 oil crisis, the New York and London finance oligarchs decided to repeat the operation, this time using the spectre of Khomeini's self-styled Islamic revolution. This time prices went up by another 200%. When 1979 was over, it emerged that world oil production had not fallen, but the prices stayed up anyway. The 1979 doubling had more dramatic economic effects than the 1973 quadrupling, since the world economy was much weaker by 1979.

CHENEY WANTS $100 A BARREL OIL

When we see a book like Paul Roberts' The End of Oil being hyped by Lou Dobbs on CNN, accompanied by a barrage of articles in the controlled corporate media on this same line, we can see that an Anglo-American consensus in favor of $100 per barrel oil is developing. The rationale is not hard to find, and has little to do with geological facts: the US dollar is once again in terminal crisis, and oil at $100 per barrel would create a new wave of artificial demand, making the dollar a little more attractive for oil producers and others, and perhaps staving off for a few more years the end of its reserve currency and posted price status. It is reported that the center of the agitation for $100 a barrel oil is, not surprisingly, the Vice Presidential office of Dick Cheney, managed by the ruthless neocon operative Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby.

As far as the substantive argument about oil reserves is concerned, it is clear that oil should be used less and less as a fuel, and employed rather for petrochemicals. It is also clear that the internal combustion engine is now a technology that is more than 100 years old, and is due to be replaced. However, it is also clear that a growing world population and, hopefully, increased levels of world economic development will require greater energy sources. Every fixed array of human technology in world history has always defined certain components of the biosphere as usable resources, with the inevitable corollary that these resources would one day be exhausted. Under such conditions, the great imperative of human evolution cannot be retrenchment and austerity, but rather innovation, invention, discovery, and progress. If existing energy sources are insufficient, then science will have to find new ones, without ideological preclusions. Solar energy gathered outside the ionosphere in earth orbit might be one future solution. The one thing we must not do is to leap from a rising oil price to coerced population reduction, since that represents the core program of the Malthusian Anglo-American oligarchy, and has been in place as a policy goal since Kissinger's infamous NSSM 200 [2] and the Global 2000/Global Futures campaigns of the Muskie State Department under the disastrous Carter administration.

The pervasive oil and raw material grabs of today's world suggest nothing more than world economic breakdown and imminent world war. In 1941, Japan's main war aim was to secure the oil of the Dutch East Indies. Hitler's panzer divisions in Operation Barbarossa were pointed towards Baku, which was Stalin's oil aorta. Stalin's own attack plan aimed at Ploesti in Romania, Germany's sole source of oil. Each of these plans sought to deny oil to an adversary and procure it for their authors as a means of winning a war. Much the same dynamic is afoot today, partially under the cover of "peak oil."

US OLIGARCHICAL CONSENSUS FOR TERRORISM

During the 1990s, the US oligarchy came to a consensus regarding the need for synthetic terrorism to preserve its system of rule under conditions of increasing economic and financial breakdown. This consensus was elaborated through commissions associated with names like Hart and Rudman, Gillmore, Rumsfeld, and the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Terrorism, the oligarchy concluded, was needed to maintain the cohesion of the hierarchical system, and the legitimacy of irrational domination. This was in line with the Carl Schmitt "enemy image" thesis, as elaborated more recently by Samuel Huntington. Terrorism was also needed as an instrument of maintaining Anglo-American world domination, especially to wage oblique warfare to isolate, weaken, and contain powers like Russia, China, Japan, and some others who were too strong to be openly attacked on the Iraqi model. This type of terrorism was a continuation of the NATO geopolitical terrorism, whose goal was to maintain the Yalta division of the world against the self-asserting and self-liberating tendencies of countries like Germany, Italy, and others. Terrorism would serve as well to prevent threatened defections from the dollar zone, and shore up the battered greenback as the world's residual reserve currency. Terrorism would also help to consolidate US-UK control over oil, strategic metals, and other critical raw materials, in part by weakening and destabilizing economic nationalist or pro-development third world regimes.

9/11 must rather be viewed as a symptom of a perhaps insoluble crisis inside the US political and economic system. Whether or not the crisis of the 1990s represents the first phase of the terminal crisis of the United States as presently constituted remains to be seen; by contrast, there can be little doubt that the post-1945 hegemony of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency is now ending, and that is more than enough to generate the cataclysmic events observed.

Complacent and superficial commentators like David Brooks have attempted to portray the 1990s as a time of idyllic tranquility, when the polyanna US failed to pay attention to the gathering storm of terrorism "out there." In reality, the 1990s were a period of aggravated financial and economic breakdown and of severe if masked tensions among the US, China, the USSR, and other states. The United States devastated Iraq at the beginning of the decade, destroying the civilian infrastructure with the cowardly and duplicitous "bomb now, die later" policy. The US said at the time that coalition aircraft had flown 120,000 sorties over Iraq. If each sortie had killed just one Iraqi, that would already have been 120,000 dead; the reality was probably three or four times greater. The unspeakable suffering in Iraq was made much worse by the US-backed and UN- enforced economic sanctions of 1990-2003, which, in violation of all relevant international law, banned the import of food and medicine completely until certain limited purchases were allowed under the UN oil for food program in the later 1990s. The estimates of the number of Iraqi victims of these murderous sanctions vary widely, but it seems likely that the number of fatalities involved is between 500,000 and 1,000,000, with infants, children, and elderly people -- all non-combatants -- accounting for the majority. Some estimates take the death toll above 2 million Iraqis. When once asked about this policy, Madeleine Albright replied that in her opinion it was "worth it" to contain Iraq. During the 1990s, the present writer warned repeatedly that the economic sanctions were sowing a harvest of hate among Iraqis with which the US would one day have to reckon. The harvesting of that accumulated hate began in 2003, with a vengeance. All this was compounded by the unilateral imposition by the US and UK of no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, which involved the almost daily bombing of Iraqi targets during the entire decade of the 1990s. The Gulf crisis of 1990-91 disrupted the regional economy and led to the collapse of Somalia, where the lame duck Bush intervened just after Thanksgiving 1992. This was billed as a humanitarian mission, but US political meddling led to resistance by certain groups, and an orgy of gratuitous killing of black-skinned Arabs resulted.

THE 1990s: DECADE OF US FINANCIAL CRISIS

During these years the US was lurching from one financial crisis to the next. For a full account of this process, see my Surviving the Cataclysm (1999). The entire energy of the system was expended on impossible efforts to shore up the speculative edifices of stocks, bonds, and derivatives, which were always on the brink of panic collapse. The specter of some bankruptcy or panic setting off a systemic crisis, the implosion of the entire world dollar-based system, was a constant threat during the 1990s. US financial policy makers have been caught for decades in an impossible predicament. If they lower interest rates to keep the domestic system solvent, hot money will flee abroad, tending to collapse the overvalued dollar. If they raise interest rates to make the dollar more attractive, domestic bankruptcies begin to multiply. Fed governor Paul Volcker's worst nightmare had been an accelerating dollar collapse which could not be stopped. The stock market crash of 1987 was in reality sandwiched in between two dollar crises which had the potential of sinking the battered and bloated greenback. That same stock market crash of 1987 brought on a collapse of the commercial real estate market in many cities, causing the bankruptcy of real estate firms like Olympia and York in 1992. As the real estate market collapsed, it undermined the main US money center banks. In 1990 the Bank of New England went bankrupt. Just as bankrupt from a technical point of view, but too big to fail because of the economic and political repercussions, were the twin giants of US banking, Chase Manhattan and Citibank. In July 1990, bank analyst Dan Brumbaugh stated on the ABC network program Nightline that not only Citicorp, but also Chase Manhattan, Chemical Bank, Manufacturers Hanover and Bankers Trust were all already insolvent. During September 1990, there was a near electronic panic run on Citibank, while Chase Manhattan, and other New York money center banks were also under increasing pressure. Around Thanksgiving 1990, Citibank was quietly seized by federal regulators who then proceeded to run it for more than a year; the controlled media were silent to prevent panic runs, although they did not wholly succeed. In August 1991, Rep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) observed that Citibank was "technically insolvent" and "struggling to survive." Lloyd's of London also defaulted around this time. In the background, Russia had lost two thirds other productive activity as the result of IMF shock therapy. By the middle of the decade, former Secretary of the Treasury Brady reported that there was $1 trillion per day in currency speculation alone. Much of this was related to a new, parasitical, and highly unstable form of financial vehicle -derivatives. Felix Rohatyn of Lazard Freres admitted in the spring of 1994 that he was nervous about the derivatives crisis "because the genie is out of the bottle and could touch off a financial nuclear chain reaction, spreading around the world with the speed of light." By the end of the year Grange County, California had gone bankrupt because of derivatives dealings, reporting a two-billion dollar loss. But that was peanuts. In January 1995 Mexico went bankrupt, bringing the world banking and financial system to about 48 hours from a total world-wide meltdown; at stake here was implicitly the huge mass of debt owed by the developing countries, which had reached $1.6 trillion. The tequila crisis required a $50 billion bailout which was thrown together in extremis by the Clinton administration. Camdessus of the IMF noted with much alarm on February 2, 1995 that "Mexico was in imminent danger of having to resort to exchange controls. Had that happened, it would have triggered a true world catastrophe." A few weeks later Barings Bank of London, one of the world's oldest financial institutions, went belly up, and contrived to blame the default on a rogue trader.

AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1998: RUSSIA AND LTCM TAKE WORLD TO BRINK

In 1997 the Asian contagion crisis began in earnest; it was in reality another crisis of the world dollar-based system. This led on August 17, 1998 to the default and state bankruptcy of Russia, with a series of banking panics wiping out the savings of the middle class. Russian economic reform, better known as IMP shock therapy, had been the great international financier project of the first half of the 1990s, and it ended in dust and ashes. Anti-oligarchical Russian economist Tatyana Koryagina observed around this time that "the world economy has reached the point where -- if economic liberalism is a dead- end street, it has hit the concrete wall at the end of the street. This liberalism will explode the entire economy and then there will be global chaos, which will be economic fascism. A 'New World Order' is economic fascism, when a huge number of people are thrown into desperate poverty, and only the speculators make any profit. We are on the verge of a particular sort of anti-financier revolution -a revolution against financial speculators." (Tarpley 1999 chapter 1 )

When Russian blew up, real panic spread around the world. The newspaper that expresses the views of the Swiss financial community noted with consternation: "With the ruble collapse and the de facto state bankruptcy of Russia, the crisis which has been boiling for a year is now threatening to turn into a global GAU" -- Großten aller Unfalle, or worst possible catastrophe, wrote this paper. "Like dominoes, one currency after another, one financial market after another, are falling allover the globe. The specter ofa worldwide recession is spreading." (Neue Zuricher Zeitung, August 29, 1998)

The Russian state bankruptcy in turn provoked the failure of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), a giant Connecticut hedge fund with close ties to the US Federal Reserve. With LTCM, the world banking system was once more on the brink of systemic meltdown. Only a crony capitalist bailout of LTCM's creditors by Greenspan prevented the immediate collapse of the US money center banks, the US securities markets, and the reeling US dollar. LTCM had posed the immediate danger of a chain-reaction bankruptcy of the entire world banking system, leading to financial and monetary chaos. The New York Fed, in the person of its President William McDonough, -undertook an emergency bailout as lender of last resort for the syndicate of big banks that were scrambling to save themselves by taking over LTCM, which was bankrupt with a reported $1 trillion in derivatives outstanding. Long Term Capital Management was leveraged at 500:1, but what of that? J.P. Morgan was leveraged at over 600:1, with $6.2 trillion in derivatives as against just $11 billion in equity capital. The story was broken by David Faber of CNBC on the afternoon of Wednesday, September 23, 1998. Within a few days, Union Bank of Switzerland announced a $685 million loss, and Dresdner Bank said it was $144 million to the downside. LTCM' s total loss was about $4 billion. If the US banks had gone under, the FDIC would have had to pay depositors, and the taxpayers would soon have had to bailout the FDIC. Between August 29 and October 19, currency in circulation grew at an annual rate of 16.4%, and the M3 money supply grew at 17% annually. Greenspan was using system repurchase agreements, coupon passes, and open market operations to churn out liquidity. The dollar softened and the gold price spiked upward: there were reports that central banks were replenishing their gold stocks in the face of the hurricane. Between late September and early October, the dollar managed to fall ¥ 10 (or, in forex jargon, "ten big figures") in just 10 days. In August and September 1998, the world finance oligarchy had been forced to look into the glowing bowels of Hell. The half- million bankers and fund managers who are the chief beneficiaries of the globaloney system had felt the icy breath of panic on their necks. But their near-death experience had not impelled them to consider any serious reforms.

By the end of 1998, the debt superpower of Brazil was on the brink of default, once more threatening to bring down the banks of Wall Street. George Soros demanded that the banks be protected by a "wall of money," and Greenspan complied. Using the pretext of providing liquidity to cushion the shocks of the transition from 1999 to 2000, when multiple computer breakdowns were feared, Greenspan began to print fresh US dollars at an unprecedented rate. Much of this new cash rushed into the NASDAQ stock market, where it stoked the merging dot com bubble. But by the early months of 2000, it was clear that the dot com companies still had no profits, and their high burn rate of cash on hand spelled the end of the bubble. In a spectacular decline that did not stabilize until the middle of 2002, the NASDAQ lost a breathtaking 75% of its value. Many hedge funds, banks, and insurance companies were on the verge of imploding, but Greenspan kept pumping new dollars to stave off chain reaction bankruptcies. Interest rates reached new historical lows, and oil producers began to consider dumping the dollar in favor of the more stable euro, which was now available as an alternative. A housing bubble and a bond market bubble now emerged in the US. Greenspan's response was to tout the "wealth effect," meaning that the housing bubble was raising the fictitious value of private homes, allowing home owners to take out second mortgages and use the cash to speculate in the stock market. The bond bubble began to falter in the spring of 2004. In the meantime the entire system had been back to the brink in late 2001 and early 2002 with the declaration of a formal debt moratorium -- a payment halt -- by Argentina. Derivative financial instruments were always close to detonating a systemic crisis; there is some evidence that a derivatives disaster of the first magnitude had overtaken Citibank around the middle of 200l, but was papered over by Federal Reserve loans under the cover of 9/11. Citibank was forced to sell Travelers Insurance for $4 billion, apparently to raise cash to plug a considerable hole.

Towards the end of the decade, Eisuke Sakakibara of the Japanese Finance Ministry a well-known official who had earned the nickname of "Mr. Yen" in the world press, had summed up the problems of the US-UK system as follows: "... I think the financial system we have today is inherently unstable. We need to set up a new system to stabilize financial markets. Otherwise, the repetition of crisis after crisis. ..is going to result in a major meltdown of the world financial system." -- (Japanese Finance Ministry, January 22, 1999)

TO THE BRINK OF SYSTEMIC BREAKDOWN: Financial Crises and Panics After 1987

1. October 1987 -- American stock market and futures market crash
2. December 1987- January 1988 -- Greenspan dollar crisis
3. January - February 1990 -- Bankruptcy of Drexel-Burnham-Lambert, RJR-Nabisco default threat, Campeau stores bankruptcy, junk bond collapse
4. 1990-1991 -- Failure of Bank of New England, threatened insolvency of Citibank, Chase, and other US banks
5. September 1992 -- European Rate Mechanism crisis
6. August 1993 -- Second speculative assault on European Rate Mechanism, leading to permanent loosening of fixed parities
7. February 1994- February 1995 -- World bond market crisis, Orange County-Mexico-Barings
8. August - September 1995 -- Japanese banking crisis: $1 trillion in bad loans
9. November 1995 -- Daiwa Bank threatened by insolvency in wake of $1.1 billion bond trading losses
10. June 1996 -- Sumitomo copper futures trading crisis; 31% decline in world copper price
11. July-November 1997 -- Southeast Asia currency and stock market crisis, featuring Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, with world stock market panic
12. November 1997 -- Japanese banking crisis
13. December 1997 -- South Korean insolvency crisis
14. November 1997-April 1998 -- Indonesian crisis
15. May 1998 and July - August 1998 -- Russian monetary stock market, and interbank crisis starting in May 1998. Failure of IMF bailout attempt, July-August 1998. Russian default, August 1998
16. September 23, 1998 -- Long Term Capital Managemen1 insolvency with bailout by New York Federal Reserve. Threat of world banking panic and interbank settlements freeze
17. December 1998- January 1999 -- Brazilian crisis and Soros "wall of money"
18. March 2000- August 2002 -- Collapse of NASDAQ bubble, down 75%
19. Summer 2002 -- J. P. Morgan Chase derivatives monster implodes
20. 2002 ff. -- Argentine crisis with debt default
21. May 2003 -- US dollar in bear market; world dumping of dollar looms
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:13 am

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 3 CONT'D.)

END OF DOLLAR HEGEMONY?

Perhaps most serious for the Anglo-American system of world domination was the impact of these events on the fate of the US dollar. By virtue of the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, the dollar had replaced the British pound as the world's reserve currency. The Bretton Woods system disintegrated in 1971-73, and we are now living among its rubble, but the primacy of the dollar has remained unchallenged. This means that most world trade was and still is conducted in dollars, including Eurodollars based in London. The prices for the main raw materials, and especially oil, are quoted in US dollars. If Europe wants Russian or Saudi oil, it must pay in dollars, thus creating demand for a currency which otherwise might find few buyers, since the US produces so little to sell. This allows the US-UK banking community to skim 5-10% off all world trade by providing import-export financing; this used to be called invisible earnings. More important still, if the dollar is the only way you can buy oil, then whoever controls the dollars -- meaning the US -- will in effect control the oil, no matter whether it is nationalized or not, no matter who formally owns it. The role of the dollar in the posted price for Gulf crude is thus the central symbol of the world dominance of the dollar. And the dollar is the nerve and fist of US world domination.

As an anonymous expert quoted by William Clark correctly pointed out in early 2003: "The Federal Reserve's greatest nightmare is that GPEC will switch its international transactions from a dollar standard to a euro standard. Iraq actually made this switch in November 2000 (when the euro was worth around 80 cents), and has actually made off like a bandit considering the dollar's steady depreciation against the euro. ( http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CLA302A.html ) The dollar declined 17% against the euro in 2002.

IRAQ

For Iraq, the decision to quit the dollar for the euro was an explicitly political one. Iraqi Finance Minister Hekmat Ibrahim al-Azzawi announced the move by saying: "The dollar is the currency of an enemy state, and must be abandoned for other currencies, including the euro," Azzawi said. The Iraqi central bank announced in October 2000 that it had begun to buy European currencies. (AFP via energy 24.com, October 12, 2000) Saddam Hussein stopped accepting dollars for oil in November 2000, and at the same time shifted ten billion dollars on deposit in the UN oil for food fund into the euro. Sure enough, the 2003 US occupation regime put Iraqi oil exports back on a dollar, rather than a euro, standard. The US invasion also helped to intimidate any nation which might have been considering switching to the euro. Since late 2001, the dollar was steadily declining and the euro was steadily gaining, with periodic plateaus, so those who chose the euro were rewarded to the tune of 20% or more. Bush's second axis of evil country, North Korea, switched to the euro on December 2, 2002. Here the economic impact was limited, but the political symbolism was still quite strong.

IRAN

The third of Bush bugaboos, Iran, which is also the number two OPEC producer, was also considering a move out of the dollar, and the arrival of US military forces next door was doubtless designed to dissuade the Iranians from such thoughts. The Iranian approach was less flamboyant and confrontational, but the threat to the dollar was there none the less. Iranian sources were quoted in September 2002 as remarking that "Iran's proposal to receive payments for crude oil sales to Europe in euros instead of U.S. dollars is based primarily on economics." Still, an anti-US political animus could not be denied, since dumping the dollar would be an "opportunity to hit back at the U.S. government, which recently labelled it part of an 'axis of evil. ' As this proposal was considered, Iran was moving currency assets out of the dollar anyway. Russian and China announced during 2003 that they were doing the same thing.

VENEZUELA

And what of Venezuela, the number four producer of oil? Here the CIA, with the help of Iran- contra veteran Otto Reich, attempted to overthrow President Chavez with a botched coup in Apri12002. Many saw this as a move to secure oil supplies in case the attack on Iraq got messy. But a year before the coup, Venezuela's ambassador to Washington, Francisco Mieres-Lopez, apparently floated the idea of switching the posted price for Venezuelan crude to the euro. Under Chavez, Venezuela also embarked on a policy of direct barter deals for oil, which had been concluded with about a dozen Latin American countries. In these cases the dollar was cut out of the oil transaction cycle, and the ability of the Wall Street banks to skim off these transactions was eliminated. Venezuela had for example a deal with Cuba under which Cuban doctors and health workers served in the Venezuelan countryside, while Castro got his crude oil needs covered in return, thus meeting a need that had been acute since the collapse of the USSR cut off oil deliveries to Cuba from Soviet fields.

INDONESIA

Pertamina, the Indonesia oil giant, showed every sign of jumping on the bandwagon. According to a Jakarta paper, in Apri12003, "Pertamina ... dropped a bombshell. It's considering dropping the US dollar for the euro in its oil and gas trades." The paper pointed to the "major implications for the world's biggest economy." ("Indonesia May Dump Dollar, Rest of Asia Too?" Jakarta Post, Apri1 22, 2003) In the same issue, two economists, Nur Azis and Jason Meade, from the Center for Indonesian Reform, Jakarta, urged that Indonesia cast off its dollar dependence. They argued that the dollar would "remain weak over the next decade at least, for a number of reasons."

MALAYSIA

The former Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahatir Mohamed, was perhaps the most outspoken against the dollar. He repeatedly called on oppressed Arabs to turn away from suicide bombing, and fight the US-UK combine with the far more potent weapon of dumping the dollar in favor of the euro. Mahatir was blunt about the need to replace the world dollar standard. In early 2003, Mahatir told a group of reporters that the international community needed to be encouraged to use other currencies or even gold as the benchmark in international trade. This was because the domination of the U.S. dollar in global transactions was distorting the world's economy. Mahatir suggested that the Euro, yen, or even gold should be used for transactions. "We should be given the choice to use whatever currency that we want," he said at a meeting with 31 foreign editors and senior journalists. He pointed to the greater danger of manipulation when international business is all conducted in one nation's currency. "For the purpose of trade, we shouldn't say that oil should be quoted only in U.S. dollars. Today, the oil price has gone up, but the value of the U.S. dollar has gone down, something that the people do not point out," he added. "The oil price today was not actually US $36 if this was compared with the value of the dollar a year or three years ago." Mahatir said he had read an article which pointed out that the United States was actually living on borrowed money and that it always faced a huge deficit. Despite that, he said, the u.s. economy continued growing at a tremendous rate for the past 10 years while Japan, which had made a lot of money and had very healthy reserves, was facing economic problems. "This is a contradiction. Why is this happening? It is simply because we are giving value to the U.S. dollar which it doesn't really have. There is nothing to back the U.S. dollar other than people's belief in it." (The Star, February 28,2003) Later in 2003, Mahatir, noting the fall of the dollar against the euro, told the Nikkei Forum in Tokyo: "The U.S. dollar is not a stable currency at all. We have to think of some other ways of determining exchange rates. We need to rethink whether we can depend on the U.S. dollar or not. Initially yes, we have to depend on the U.S. dollar, but we should move away from the U.S. dollar." (The Edge Daily, June 6, 2003)

SAUDI ARABIA: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS WITH THE US, AUGUST 2001

Most significant of all were the signs that even Saudi Arabia, long considered a client state or even a ward of the United States, was considering breaking away from the US system. Here the falling dollar, Bush's slavish support of Sharon, and preparations for new US attacks on Arab states were doubtless playing a role. According to the Wall Street Journal, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah sent a letter to Bush at the end of August 2001 -before the events of September 11 -- and warned him, in reference to the US- Saudi relationship, that "a time comes when peoples and nations part." The letter went on to say that "it is time for the United States and Saudi Arabia to look at their separate interests. Those governments that don't feel the pulse of the people and respond to it will suffer the fate of the Shah of Iran." Prince Abdullah read from this letter at a meeting of 150 prominent Saudis in October 2001, in an effort to convince them that the Saudi government is defending Arab and Muslim interests. During a phone call with Bush around the same time, Abdullah again called for the U.S. to restrain Israel. Diplomats said that there was considerable debate within the Saudi royal family over the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the cost of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. One Western diplomat said that the failure to resolve the Middle East conflict was going to make it harder for Saudi Arabia to continue its relationship with the U.S. in the same manner. (Wall Street Journal, Oct. 29, 2001) Saudi Arabia was a pillar of the US empire; without it, the empire would collapse. For the imperialists, action was imperative to prevent this critical defection.

The dubious Michael Moore and others parroted the Mossad line that Saudi Arabia was responsible for 9/11. It is more likely that the unproven allegations about Saudi hijackers were cooked up as a means of blackmailing the Saudis, who were evidently ready to distance themselves from Washington.

THE EUROPEAN UNION

Europe for its part was eager to eliminate the dollar. Jacques Santer, former president of the European Commission, called on Gulf Arab oil exporters to price their crude in the euro rather than the US dollar as a means to stabilize the oil market. "It could be the instrument to consolidate oil markets" and would be less affected by US foreign policy, he told a Gulf-Euro conference in Dubai. ("Santer calls for oil to be priced in euros," The Irish Times Gctober 8, 2000) The biggest issue here was whether Russia would phase out the dollar in favor of the euro, as the Germans and others were proposing. In addition, dumping the dollar was popular. Newspaper columnists and antiw'ar activists in countries from Morocco to Indonesia shared the sentiments expressed in a Nigerian street protest witnessed by a Wall Street Journal reporter during the run-up to the Iraq war: "Euro yes! Dollar no!" ( http://journeyman.1hwy.com/J-Big-OneIIIb.html ) US elites had long been painfully aware of the colossal vulnerability represented by the world's dollar overhang - the masses ofdollars held outside of the United States. Republican Senator Pete Dominici of New Mexico commented on May 18, 1995: "What would happen if the Saudi Arabians said they didn't want to be paid [for oil] in dollars anymore, but wanted instead, to be paid, say in yen. There would be inflation that would make the 15 to 20 percent inflation in the early '80s look good." (C- SPAN II, 18 May 1995)

The impact of a world move to dump the dollar can be deciphered from the following commentary from an insider newsletter: "The US dollar is 'over-owned.' 77. 7% of world central bank reserves are in US dollars. That's disproportionate to the US share of world trade. There'll now be some diversification, especially to the euro. Just as central banks sold gold, they'll now sell US dollars. A study revealed at a central bank confab at Jackson Hole by Professors Obstfeld and Rogoff suggests the US dollar could drop 24%- 40% if foreigners move quickly to exchange dollars. Foreigners own a record 38% of US Treasury market (44% excluding Federal Reserve holdings), 20% of US corporate bonds, 8% of US stocks. A change of sentiment, now suddenly in the air, could start a dollar brushfire." (The International Harry Schultz Letter, January 19, 2001)

If oil producers in general were to make the leap from the dollar to the euro, many central banks would have to shift reserves into the European currency. The value of the dollar might crash between 20 and 40%, as Clark's article points out. The impact of this inside the US might be hyperinflation of 1000% or more per year. As the expert cited by Clark summed up: "One of the dirty little secrets of today's international order is that the rest of the globe could topple the United States from its hegemonic status whenever they so choose, with a concerted abandonment of the dollar standard. This is America's pre- eminent, inescapable Achilles Heel for now and the foreseeable future. That such a course hasn't been pursued to date bears more relation to the fact that other Westernized, highly developed nations haven't any interest to undergo the great disruptions which would follow -- but it could assuredly take place in the event that the consensus view coalesces of the United States as any sort of 'rogue' nation. In other words, if the dangers of American global hegemony are ever perceived as a greater liability than the dangers of toppling the international order. The Bush administration and the neo-conservative movement have set out on a multiple-front course to ensure that this cannot take place, in brief by a graduated assertion of military hegemony atop the existent economic hegemony. The paradox I've illustrated with this one narrow scenario is that the quixotic course itself may very well bring about the feared outcome that it means to pre-empt. We shall see!" ( http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CLA302A.html )

The US economy was very sick indeed. Electrical infrastructure was at the breaking point, with major blackouts every summer. The air transportation system was bankrupt. Commuter and freight railroads were subject to constant breakdowns. The budget deficit was rising towards $500 billion - r $750 billion, and the merchandise trade deficit was rising towards $500 billion. The US public debt was headed towards $6.5 trillion, with over $4 trillion in foreign debt. The military forces were comprised often hollow infantry divisions -not an adequate force to conquer the world, except in a neocon fantasy.

THE CATASTROPHE OF GLOBALIZATION

After the fall of the East German communist regime in 1989, and 1:he extinction of the USSR in December 1991, the United States presided over the inauguration of a new era, that of the globalized world economy. I have discussed the main features of globalization in Surviving the Cataclysm (1999), my study of the world financial crisis. For our present purposes, it is enough to focus on the consequences of globalization. Globalization has completed the destruction of the United States as a political economy, and has substantially wrecked the entire world economy, as it was evident to clear-minded observers no later than 1992, when globalization began the demolition of the Russian economy. Together with globalization came the ascendancy of parasitical financier elites oriented exclusively towards short-term speculative gain in such areas as derivatives speculation, and perfectly incompetent in regard to the economic requirements of civilized progress. It was not September 11,2001 which destroyed the world as we had known it; it was the marauding and immiserating march of economic globalization.

The great lesson of the twentieth century was that financial disintegration and economic depression set the stage for world war. The same dynamic was at work during the 1990s. For most people in the United States, western Europe and Japan, this underlying dynamic was masked by currency arrangement centering on the dollar which tended to shield these parts of the world from the full fury of globalization, while inflicting intensified looting and impoverishment on the underdeveloped countries. But even so, the economic decline in the supposedly rich countries was breathtaking.

As the United States became financially more unstable and economically less viable, ruling elites began to exhibit greater readiness for military adventures abroad. This aggressivity was common to the Republican and Democratic wings of the oligarchy, but was somewhat alleviated by Bill Clinton 's personal distaste for foreign military adventures and keen awareness of the risks they posed for himself politically. But after the Monica Lewinsky crisis emerged at the beginning of 1998, executive authority was increasingly usurped by a group of high officials calling themselves the principals' committee, who carried out the bombing of Iraq (Operation Desert Fox) at the end of 1998, and who then turned to the bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999. Not to be outdone, the neoconservative faction of the oligarchy attempted at the same time to stir up conflict with China, whose high rates of economic growth posed in their eyes the threat of the emergence of a new and competing superpower. Conflict with Russia, always latent, threatened at various junctures to erupt into more visible hostility.

The prevalent conception of Russia on the part of US foreign policy elites is that of a strategic adversary. Russia has retained significant parts of the strategic missile forces built during the Soviet era, and has supplemented them with new developments such as the Topol missile. Because of Russia's traditional strength in basic science, this country may be ahead of the US in certain key areas of military technology, although Russian engineering problems still hold this back. The Russian middle class has been bankrupted twice, once in the 1300% hyperinflation of 1992-93, and a second time in the banking panic associated with the Russian state default in August and September 1998. This fact alone is very ominous. The last time the middle class of a great power was subjected to two waves of bankruptcy was in Weimar Germany, when the middle class lost all its savings and investments through the combination of the hyperinflation of 1923, followed by the deflationary depression of 1929.

Under Yeltsin, Russia was the playground of a group of rapacious financiers who arrogantly called themselves the oligarchs -- these were figures like Berezvosky, Potanin, Smolensky, Friedman, and Khodorkhovsky. Khodorkhovsky seized control over most of the Siberian oil reserves, and appeared ready to sell them off to the Anglo-American oil cartel. The beginning of the end for the oligarchs came with the resignation of Yeltsin and the elevation of Putin to the Russian presidency on December 31, 1999. The KGB officer Putin tended to repress the oligarchs in conformity with the usual Russian statist model of political economy. Putin's arrival was punctuated by bombings of apartment houses in Moscow which were attributed to Moslem Chechen terrorists. This terror wave helped to consolidate Putin's power through the usual stampeding effect, but this may not be the whole story. The entire Chechen insurrection has been sponsored by the US and the British within the framework of what Brzezinski calls the "grand chessboard," and its leaders are reputed to be assets of the CIA. Perhaps the CIA and MI-6 had provided the terror wave upon which Putin rode to power.

US AS WEIMAR GERMANY

One of the favorite theses of the neocons is that the United States today can be directly compared to the Weimar Republic, that is to say, to Germany between 1919 and 1933. Here the neocons are correct, although it must be added that one of the main factors contributing to the similarity is the role of the neocons themselves. Weimar was financially unstable, as seen in the hyperinflation of 1923 and the deflationary depression of 1929. It was also politically unstable, with right-wing coup attempts (like the Kapp- Luttwitz putsch of 1920 on the part of army officers and top bureaucrats, the Hitler- Ludendorff Munich beer hall putsch of November 1923) alternating with attempts at communist insurrection (the Bavarian Soviet republic and the German Communist Party's coup attempts). This kind of instability finds a precise analogue in the globalized United States starting at the end of the 1990s. We have had at least one coup or coup attempt per year, starting in 1998.

Image

ONE COUP PER YEAR: USA, 1998-2004

1998: Impeachment coup against Clinton -- successful
1999: Conviction coup against Clinton -- failed due to mass support for
Clinton
1999: Principals' committee coup; bombing of Serbia -- successful
2000: Bush stolen election coup -- successful
2001: 9/11 terror coup -- successful
2002: War powers coup by Bush -- successful
2003: Iraq war coup by Bush -- successful
2004: Threatened 2nd wave terror coup; stolen election coup; war with Iran, Sudan, Syria, Russia --
?

On September 11, 1994, Frank Eugene Corder crashed his Cessna 150 L into the White House lawn two floors below Clinton's bedroom, killing himself in the process. Clinton was not there. The dead pilot had spoken of his hatred for Clinton. These events marked an attempt by the permanent Washington oligarchy -- the Establishment -- to break the will of Clinton, a person for whom many of the Washington establishment felt a wholly irrational but intense hatred. So the White House lawn was hit by a plane on September 11, 1994.

In the late summer of 1995, the Gingrich Republicans attempted permanently to weaken the constitutional powers of the presidency by unilaterally dictating the federal budget. This was an attempted coup by the GOP congressional leadership. They announced their willingness to deny spending authority to the Treasury in such a way as to provoke the default of the United States -- an unprecedented event which would have meant national bankruptcy and chaos. Clinton held firm as the government shut down, and the population turned against Gingrich, permanently weakening him. The Republicans were forced to back down, and the budget was enacted according to the relevant constitutional norms.

During 1998, the impeachment of Bill Clinton was prepared and carried out by a coalition of oligarchical reactionaries. The pre-history of this coup goes back to the beginning of the Clinton presidency, when stories about sexual excesses in the White House were circulated by disgruntled pro-Bush elements in the Secret Service. After 12 years of feeding at the public trough, the Bush faction and its allies experienced loss of power as a kind of traumatic cold turkey, and their response was an aggressive rage against Clinton, which fed on the relatively minor positive achievements of the new president. The impeachment coup was promoted by the reactionary millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, and also by the Hollinger press empire of Conrad Black, with its flagship London Daily Telegraph and its star reported Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a man known to be in contact with British intelligence. Another contributing group was the Barbara and Ted Olson salon in northern Virginia, which was attended by such reactionary gurus as Clarence Thomas, failed Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork, Lawrence Silberman of the DC circuit court of appeals, Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, and others. The spearhead of impeachment in the House was Tom "the Hammer" Delay, a former pest exterminator. (See Tarpley in Hidell)

The scandal escalated in January 1998 as a result of Linda Tripp's illegal taping of her conversations with the pathetic Monica Lewinsky. Tripp had been encouraged by Lucienne Goldberg, a hardened Republican operative. Tripp was a GS-16 federal bureaucrat with a background in Army Intelligence. During the Iran-contra era, Tripp had served as personal secretary to General Richard Secord of the Army Delta Force; she had also been involved in one of the front companies on Oliver North's flow chart. When Tripp revealed the Clinton-Lewinsky story to GGP zealot special prosecutor Ken Starr, Starr redirected his probe from Whitewater to Monica, and the US presidency was paralyzed for two years.

The impeachment propaganda of the Republicans resonated deeply within the military, where the relatively new presence of female officers and enlisted personnel had led to a series of sexual abuse and sexual harassment scandals. Most famous of these was the 1991Tailhook affair, involving an orgy in which naval aviators and female officers participated, some under duress. Resentment grew over cases like that of Rear Admiral Ralph L. Tindal, who was ousted in December 1995 for sex harassment and adultery. Serving and retired military whose careers had been damaged or terminated by charges of sexual misconduct became enraged against Clinton, for whom they thought a double standard was being applied. Although such rage by itself might never add up to an attempted coup, it could help set the stage for one. Widespread hatred for President Kennedy in the CIA, its Cuban paramilitaries, and the US military after his failure to escalate the Bay of Pigs crisis and the Cuban missile crisis certainly helped to weaken the defenses of the presidency, and may have contributed something to the ease of recruitment of key officers to the plot and the above all to the cover-up.

In December 1998, with Clinton facing immediate impeachment by the House of Representatives, the principals' committee effectuated a minor coup within the White House bureaucracy. The visible expression of this was the bombing of Iraq just before Christmas under the code name of Operation Desert Fox. At the beginning of 1999, the attempted ouster of Clinton from the presidency was a coup that failed. Clinton's survival was the result of his continued strong public support, expressed in part as unusual off-year gains for Democratic congressional candidates. Pro-impeachment oligarchs registered foaming rage and resentment not just against Clinton, but against the US population as a whole, which they claimed had not paid enough attention to the moral rectitude of the impeachers. Paul Weyrich of the Mellon-Scaife funded Free Congress Foundation talked of withdrawing from political affairs altogether, without making clear what the alternative field of endeavor might be. This incident tended to heighten the bureaucratic-authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies inside the reactionary wing of the US oligarchy, since it was evident that the population was not convinced by arguments which seemed self-evident to them. One may say that through these events the oligarchy was being educated in the need for a fascist transformation of some sort. Furthermore, there are unsubstantiated rumors that around this time US military circles, especially in the Navy, considered plans for a coup d'etat with the goal of ousting Clinton and replacing him with Ross Perot. These plans were reportedly abandoned when the other services declined to go along.

Nevertheless, a successful coup d'etat did take place in 1999. It involved the seizure of power by an organism known as the principals' committee, which was composed at that time of Vice President Gore and his dubious national security adviser Leon Fuerth, Defense Secretary William Cohen, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, National Security Council director Samuel Berger, and Gen. Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. George Tenet of the CIA was sometimes present, and the bureaucratic eminence grise of the committee was terror czar Richard Clarke, the star of the Kean-Hamilton commission in 2004. The pretext for ascendancy of the principals' committee was the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, which had begin in June 1990, when Yugoslavia had started to break up. After massacres of Moslems by Serbs at Srebrenica in July 1995, the US and NATO undertook a bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serb positions around besieged Sarajevo. These air strikes lasted from August 28 to September 13, 1995, with about 3400 missions flown. These air strikes had the merit of putting an end to the Yugoslav civil war, which had claimed the lives of 250,000 dead, and had seen numerous war crimes by Bosnian Serb leaders Karadjic and Mladic, and by others. Ex-Yugoslavia was finally pacified when all parties signed the Dayton accords on November 21, 1995 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. US and other NATO peacekeepers entered Bosnia in December. Then, in 1997, Albania, which neighbors Serbia and the province of Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian and Moslem majority, collapsed as a result of an orgy of financial speculation and Ponzi schemes. Weapons which had been the property of the Albanian government were pilfered, and found their way into the province of Kosovo, where they were used to arm the emerging Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a US- backed organization which relied on drug running for much of its financing. Clashes between the KLA and the Serbian military and police started in February-March 1998, and were soon seized upon by Madeleine Albright as a means of making an example of Serbia and of intimidating the world community in general, and in particular Russia, the traditional Orthodox backer of the Serbs. Fighting in Kosovo intensified during the summer of 1998. Responding to the threat of NATO air strikes, the Yugoslav leader Milosevic pulled most Serb units out of Kosovo.

But in the spring of 1999 the fighting flared up again. Now a crisis summit was convened at Rambouillet, near Paris. Here the KLA half-accepted the solution demanded by Albright, while the Serbs rejected it outright, since it included a clause giving US and NA TG forces the right to go anywhere and everywhere in Serbia, while seizing buildings and commandeering supplies. The Serbian national identity was based on a fierce commitment to independence, which had been expressed as guerrilla warfare against the Nazis, and then in successfully facing down Stalin at the height of his power. In response to the predictable Serb refusal, Albright became hysterical, feeling her entire secretaryship was in danger of collapse. She then sent Richard Holbrooke to Belgrade to give Milosevic an ultimatum: capitulate or face NATO bombing. Milosevic, realizing that giving up Kosovo and letting NATO forces into his country would mean his own political doom, rejected the US ultimatum. At this point Russian Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov was en route to Washington, seeking to help mediate a negotiated solution for the crisis. There is good reason to believe that serious talks between the US and Primakov would have allowed a peaceful solution, since it was a Russian mediation that finally did bring a cessation of the bombing. But with Primakov over the Atlantic, Vice President Al Gore, acting on behalf of the principals' committee, insisted on giving the order to start the bombing. Seeing an affront, Primakov turned back and returned to Moscow. Now began 78 days of merciless bombing of Serbia, directed by General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander. Serbian civilian dead were estimated at 10,000 or more -at least three times the death toll of 9/11, all imposed as part of a proxy war designed to humiliate Russia and break the will of small countries who might want to resist the Anglo- American universal bullies.

APRIL 9, 1999: YELTSIN WARNS OF WORLD WAR

The bombing of Kosovo was a giant step towards the international anarchy that manifested itself during the Iraq war of 2003. Russia and China were opposed to the bombing, but their peace plan was vetoed by the US, Britain, and France. However, NATO bombed without the benefit of a UN security council resolution. US-Russian relations reached a post-1991 low, with militant demonstrations at the US embassy in Moscow every day. The bombing of Kosovo duplicated the cowardly "bomb now, die later" method pioneered in the first Iraq war of 1991, with civilian power stations, water systems, and sewage treatment plants all being targeted. The bridges over the Danube were destroyed, an act of despicable vandalism which paralyzed Europe's most important waterway.

As the bombing went on week after week without any Serb capitulation, NATO leaders were seized by the hysterical fear that if NATO's first war were to end in a draw, the now wholly artificial alliance would begin to collapse, The US needed NATO as a tool for out of area deployments, meaning attacks on developing countries. Tony Blair began proposing an invasion of Serbia with land forces, an option which Clinton had explicitly ruled out. Joining Blair in this insane proposal was General Wesley Clark. On April 9, 1999 Russian President Yeltsin predicted that an invasion of Serbia by land forces would lead to "European war for sure, and possibly a world war." Russian General Seleznyov reminded NATO that Russian nuclear missiles were still pointed towards the western powers. This was the first serious mention of world war by a major international figure during the 1990s. Not caring about Yeltsin ' s warnings, Blair attempted to use his visit to Washington for the NATO 50th anniversary on April 23 to convince Clinton to start the ground invasion, but he was rebuffed.

NATO tried to justify its bombing by citing the large numbers of Albanian refugees leaving Kosovo. There were also wild reports of Serb massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Many of these exaggerations were conduited from US State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin to his wife, the meretricious CNN correspondent Christiana Amanpour. The US claimed that 100,000 Albanians had been massacred and placed in mass graves; postwar investigation showed that there were perhaps 3,000 -- a tragedy, but consistent with a guerrilla war of the type started by the KLA. The motivation for the bombing was therefore a big lie, manufactured by the US government and its media minions. ( http://www.antiwar.com/iustin/j082100.html )

How far was the aggressive clique within NATO prepared to go? According to Louis Sell, Milosevic was bludgeoned into capitulation by a threat by Finnish NATO spokesman Ahtisaari, who told the Serbs that "if he refused the deal, NATO was prepared to attack a much broader range of targets -including the remaining bridges across the Danube, the power and heating systems, and the telephone network." (Sell 311) This was a program of genocidal bombing with devastating delayed-action demographic impact - the "bomb now, die later" method employed in Iraq.

"I'M NOT GOING TG START WORLD WAR III FOR YOU"

Russia, now in the person of Chernomyrdin rather than ousted Primakov, was finally able to induce Milosevic to capitulate in early June. The Russian army, anxious to demonstrate solidarity with the Serbs, and resentful because of NATO attempts to deny Russia an occupation zone in Kosovo, on June 12 carried off a coup de main. They quickly shifted a couple of companies of armored vehicles to the airport in Pristina, a city in Kosovo not far from the border of Serbia proper. At this point General Wesley Clark (later Michael Moore's favorite presidential candidate in 2004) became frantic, and ordered the NATO ground commander, British General Sir Michael Jackson, to deny the Russians the use of the airport. There were reports that Russia was about to send a sky train of paratroopers to back up its demand. General Jackson flatly refused to carry out Clark's order, making the now-famous reply:

I'm not going to start the Third World War for you.


General Jackson later told the BBC: "We were [looking at] a possibility of confrontation with the Russian contingent which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command." Clark planned to order British tanks and armored cars to block the runways to prevent any Russian transport planes from landing. Clark said he believed it was "an appropriate course of action." But the plan was again vetoed by Britain. Here was a second serious warning about world war. (BBC, March 9, 2000)

It is evident in retrospect that the Kosovo operation was a proxy war between the United States and Russia, in which the NATO mauling the Serb civilian population was supposed to illustrate to Russia the formidable military potential of the US-led alliance. The Pristina crisis cooled down, but US-Russian relations were dangerously strained. Milosevic had been indicted for war crimes in May 1999. As NATO troops streamed into defeated Serbia, they were accompanied by suitcases full of US dollars to be used by the National Endowment for Democracy to organize the overthrow of Milosevic, which duly followed in the spring of2000, when the dictator was toppled by a textbook CIA "people power" revolution. In mid-2001, a couple of months before 9/11, Milosevic was illegally kidnapped from Serbia and taken to stand trial at a kangaroo court in The Hague.

MAY 7, 1999: US BOMBS CHINESE EMBASSY

The Kosovo adventure ruined US relations with China as well. On May 7, a US stealth bomber destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing a number of Chinese. This incident may have disrupted a potential agreement that might have ended the bombing a month earlier than turned out. The Chinese leadership orchestrated a vehement anti-US campaign, with mass demonstrations everywhere. Albright's deputy James Pickering flew to Beijing on June 16 to deliver the official US apology and claim the attack was an accident, but this was brusquely rejected by the Chinese government. Matters were complicated by the arrest of US scientist Wen Ho Lee, who had been charged in March with spying for China. On May 25, 1999, the Cox Committee of the: US House of Representatives delivered an exaggerated and provocative report about Chinese espionage in the US. US-Chinese relations were now dangerously strained.

This was followed by what some journalists saw as a possible brush with actual thermonuclear war between the US and Russia. The occasion was the mysterious sinking of the newest and most powerful Russian nuclear submarine, the Kursk, in the Barents Sea during maneuvers on August 12, 2000. Russian officials reported that there had been a NATO submarine in the area when the Kursk was lost. NATO denied any involvement. The Kursk had been launched in 1994. During the Cold War and well into the 1990s, the Barents Sea had been the scene of dangerous underwater cat-and-mouse games between the US and Russia, with hunter-killer subs trailing ballistic missile subs on each side. US and Russian subs had last collided in the Arctic Ocean on March 20, 1993, when the USS Grayling crashed into a Russian Delta III class ballistic missile sub carrying 16 SS-N18 submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) about 105 miles north of the Soviet fleet base at Murmansk, during what was alleged by the US to be a routine patrol. At that time the Russian Defense Ministry had stated that the "high command of the Russian military fleet expresses its extreme concern over the latest incident of dangerous maneuvering by foreign submarines in military training zones."

THE KURSK: "WORLD WAR III COULD HAVE BEGUN SATURDAY"

While American and European media have jumped the gun in attributing the Kursk sinking to onboard explosions, probably caused by a battery fire or torpedo detonation, the preponderance of evidence in fact suggests that the Kursk collided with another vessel -- a U.S. or British submarine, or drone vehicle -or, in the extreme case, was possibly hit by a torpedo. A commission of Russian Navy officers officially endorsed the finding that the Kursk had been destroyed by a collision with a foreign sub. The Kursk, with a crew of 118 sailors and officers, was found at the bottom of the Sea. The crew members were instantly killed in what Russian officials asserted was a collision with the second vessel. On August 21, the Russian news agency Interfax reported that Russian rescue workers had found a fragment of a submarine, "most likely British," near the Kursk. This followed earlier reports that emergency buoys, also identified as British, were seen floating near the collision site.

On August 22, 2000, Pravda.ru ran a story on the Kursk disaster under the headline: "World War III Could Have Begun on Saturday." According to this piece, "On Saturday, August 12, an incident occurred in the Barents Sea, where the Russian Federation's Northern Fleet was conducting exercises, which nearly led to the outbreak of full-scale combat--a third world war For several days the world hung by a thread, and one false political move could have led to an exchange of nuclear strikes." Citing hydroacoustical evidence of three explosions, "indicating the possibility that the Kursk had suffered a torpedo attack." Pravda.ru described the incident as a possible casus belli, but concluded, "Happily, the incident in the Barents Sea was successfully resolved by political means. Agreement to 'end the affair in peace' was reached during a telephone conversation between Vladimir Putin and Bill Clinton. The Presidents' conversation lasted 25 minutes, and nothing of its content was reported in the mass media." (New Federalist, August 28, 2000)

On August 22, John Helmer, a Moscow-based journalist who wrote for the Journal of Commerce and the Moscow Times, commented in the Singapore-based Straits Times that "the Russian sub drama looked like war at the start." Dismissing the hysterical Western media criticism of President Putin, who remained at the "vacation Kremlin" at Sochi, Helmer wrote, "If you were the ruler of Russia, and you were told late one night that one of your most powerful and secret submarine weapons had been hit bya mysterious explosion, and sent to the bottom without word from the crew, would it be prudent for you to suspect an attack? An attack by a nuclear superpower and old rival? And if it is your sworn duty to defend your country from attack, would it be reasonable for you to determine whether there was a cause for war, or an accident?" Also noteworthy was Putin's growing convergence with the former Prime Minister Yevgeni Primakov, an advocate of a Eurasian perspective for Russia, who on August 23 delivered a strongly worded statement warning the West and the Russian oligarchs not to try to exploit the near-war crisis. (EIR, September 1, 2000)

The US claimed that an anti-submarine rocket fired from the Kursk had gotten jammed in a firing tube, causing the deadly explosion. But Russian authorities insisted that a foreign sub of the same general type as the Kursk had been present. As the US media were concerned, the Kursk crisis calmed down after a surprise visit to Moscow by CIA Director Tenet, but tensions between the two powers remained extreme. This is the immediate background to Vladimir Putin's telephone call to Bush on the morning of September 11, 2001.

THE NEOCONS ANTAGONIZE CHINA

The great neocon project of the late 1990s was that of a US confrontation with China. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations crisis cookbook had identified two challengers to Anglo-American world domination: the Moslems, because of their population growth, and China, because of its economic growth. Neocon thinking oscillates between these two as the more immediate threat. After the Taiwan straits confrontation of 1996, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, the Wen Ho Lee case, the Cox report on alleged Chinese espionage, and the Chinagate accusations of Beijing funding for Clinton, US-Chinese relations were at a low ebb. As former US Ambassador to Beijing James Lilley pointed out, ":...there has been a dramatic change that is pervasive and, at times, ugly. After the Belgrade bombing accident in May of 1999, we saw the full face of anger, hostility, and even hate on the faces of the Chinese attacking our embassy." Lilley went on in a threatening tone: "If China continues to expand its military parameters, it will encounter our power. China can avoid this confrontation by buying into economic globalization, and lowering nationalistic tensions. To do otherwise is to risk tearing down the who le structure." (Newsweek, April 16, 2001)

The good will expressed towards the US by the Chinese students in Tien An Men Square in 1989 had completely dissipated, and was replaced by loathing -- well before 9/11 and Iraq. Something similar had happened in Russia and elsewhere -- also before 9/11.

Bush's first months in office were dominated by an incident involving the mid-air collision between a US EP-3E Aries II spy plane and a Chinese F-8 fighter jet just off the coast of China near the main base of the Chinese South Sea Fleet in Zhangjiang.. Here US planes on electronic surveillance missions had long been regularly buzzed and harassed by Chinese interceptors. During one such encounter the Chinese fighter collided with the larger and slower US plane; the Chinese jet crashed and the pilot was lost, while the US plane had to make an emergency landing at a Chinese airport on Hainan Island. The plane and its crew of 19 were detained for a couple of weeks before being returned to the US. The Chinese demanded a formal apology, which the pugnacious Bush administration was reluctant to make. The Chinese press ran pictures of the downed US spy plane with headlines reading "Proof of Bullying," and contemptuous attacks on "Little Bush." Chinese internet chatrooms buzzed with talk of imminent war; "Are you ready? This is war," said one posting. The neocon Weekly Standard headlined its story about the Hainan incident " A National Humiliation," and authors William Kristol and Robert Kagan, both prominent chickenhawk warmongers, accused the newly installed Bush 43 of "weakness" in handling the affair. The neocons were disturbed by Colin Powell's reliance on diplomacy to get back the plane and crew for the US, and especially by the attitude of the US business community, which was more interested in profitable deals than in seconding the neocons' distorted view of national honor. (Newsweek April 16, 2001) The whole experience was an object lesson to the neocon clique and the military provocateurs. For eight years they had writhed in bitterness because of Clinton's sane reluctance to resort to military force. Now, after the tremendous effort required to put Bush into the White House, the result was not much more satisfactory. We can safely assume that neocons and provocateurs drew the obvious lessons: that they must begin thinking along more grandiose lines, and planning for an outside event several orders of magnitude greater than any attempted thus far.

Tensions increased elsewhere as well. During the 1990s, Moscow and Beijing were repeatedly and pointedly reminded of the presence of an aggressive faction inside the US government and military which was intent on provoking periodic incidents to exacerbate tensions among the major powers. From Kosovo to Belgrade, from the Barents Sea to the South China Sea, from Iraq to Somalia, this aggressive faction had provoked clashes, manufactured pretexts for intervention, and fought a proxy war near the heart of Europe. The 1990s were anything but idyllic; they were a period of escalating economic and strategic crisis. The sympathetic interest in US life seen in 1989-1991 in Russia and China had by mid-2001 been replaced by overwhelming hostility. At the same time, the aggressive and adventurous network inside the US government was deeply dissatisfied with their own failure to achieve decisive results. Every passing year brought population increases throughout the Moslem world, and 10-15% economic growth rates to China, while the US real economy (apart from Wall Street's paper swindles) continued to stagnate. Like the British contemplating German economic growth in 1905-1907, the US war faction concluded that a long period of world peace could only result in the further relative decline of the US. To create the political preconditions for what they wanted to do, the US war party therefore began to feel an overwhelming need to become the party of synthetic terror.

The groundwork for the aggressive and terror-based consensus at the end of the 1990s had been laid starting in March 1992, when Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the Pentagon's Under Secretary for Policy submitted his long-term Defense Planning Guidance to then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. As the press wrote at that time, the Pentagon policy paper asserted "that America's political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to insure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territory of the former Soviet Union." The role of the UN would dwindle to insignificance, the paper indicated, and US unilateral action would dominate the world. Wolfowitz's plan also stressed "using military force, if necessary, to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in such countries as North Korea, Iraq, some of the successor republics to the Soviet Union and in Europe." Direct nuclear blackmail of Russia was also prominent; the Wolfowitz document underlined that American strategic nuclear weapons would continue to target vital aspects of the former Soviet military establishment. The rationale for this targeting policy was that the United States "must continue to hold at risk those assets and capabilities that current -- and future -- Russian leaders or other nuclear adversaries value most" because Russia would remain "the only power in the world with the capability of destroying the United States." The essence of US policy was seen in intimidation, "convincing potential competitions that they need not aspire to a greater role," thus guaranteeing that no rival superpower would be allowed to emerge. (The New York Times, March 8, 1992)

Richard Perle later elaborated an aggressive strategy for Israeli politician Beniamin Netanyahu known as the "Clean Break" policy, which was based on rejecting a negotiated peace with Arabs and Palestinians in favor of endless war. Brzezinski's 1997 Grand Chessboard touted the benefits of US meddling central Asia for geopolitical reasons; this study was similar in spirit to the Karl Haushofer's 1934 Weltpolitik von heute, the manual of Nazi geopolitics. But how to manipulate the American people into accepting the burdens and human losses associated with such meddling? Brzezinski, a petty Polish aristocrat, replied: "The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor." (Brzezinski 24-25)

An even more explicit call for US world domination came from the Project for a New American Century, a neocon movement that provided most of the top officials for the Bush 43 administration. After discussing their imperialist plans, the PNAC authors, led by chickenhawk William Kristol, focused on the way of duping the American people into supporting the raft of new foreign adventures: "... the process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." (PNAC, September 2000) It is in this restless mood, desirous of a new global conflict to pre-empt the emergence of challengers to a new Anglo-American world order, viewing the democratic system as unresponsive to their elitist warmongering, and eager for the assistance that a spectacular external attack would bring, that the roots of 9/11 are to be sought.

_______________

Notes:

2. US National Security Council, "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests," National Security Study Memorandum 200, December 10, 1974. This document posited a "special US political and strategic interest" in population reduction or limitation in many developing sector nations because of potential competition with the US for access to natural resources and raw materials. This amounted to a strategy of thinly veiled genocide, and facilitated US support for the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:27 am

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER IV: AL QAEDA: THE CIA'S ARAB LEGION

"I thought these guys [Atta & Co] were double agents."
-- former executive, Huffman Aviation, Venice FL (Hopsicker 150)


Al Qaeda and its best-known leader Bin Laden would not exist without the help of the United States, which created them for use against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan, and which continues to support them until this day. At various times, the U.S. Special Forces have been Bin Laden's valets; the State Department has acted as his defense counsel and his travel bureau, and the CIA has furnished his public relations advisors and his preferred health plan; the British government has acted as his Human Resources department to recruit new personnel.

Osama Bin Laden is a rich recluse who speaks to the world by means of video tapes and audio tapes, the validity of which cannot be determined. Bin Laden may be dead, or he may be one of the CIA's several hundred ghost prisoners, who are being held in secret prisons around the world in violation of the Geneva Convention. There is no way of determining the authenticity of any of Bin Laden's tapes, and the statements that are made in them by the figure representing Bin Laden are contradictory. For example, in the weeks after 9/11, a Pakistani newspaper published an interview with "Osama Bin Laden" in which we find the following denial of any role in 9/11:

I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Moslem, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel. There is also a warning for those Moslem countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and Bosnia? Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers: that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Moslem countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are either rulers or enemies of Moslems.

The countries which do not agree to become the U.S. slaves are China, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria [Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia] and Russia. Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed. According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the U.S. Government has stated. But the Bush Administration does not want the panic to spread. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the U.S. system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be anyone, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the U.S. itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot target the American- Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.

Then there are intelligence agencies in the U.S., which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This [funding issue] was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger. They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Osama and Taliban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush Administration approved a budget of 40 billion dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance. Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the U.S. secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it is President Bush or any other U.S. President, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. (Ummat, Karachi, September 28, 2001)


This may be the voice of one of several Bin Ladens, or it may be the Pakistani voice of one Bin Laden. Several weeks after this interview a tape surfaced in which a rather different Bin Laden seemed to acknowledge, at least obliquely, that he was involved in 9/11. This Bin Laden comments that

The brothers, who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a martyrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America but they didn't know anything about the operation, not even one letter. But they were trained and we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they boarded the planes. (Meyssan 2002 196)


Which, if either, is the real Bin laden? There is no way of knowing, so every assertion made about the mysterious, mercurial, and erratic Saudi millionaire is an exercise in speculation.

AL QAEDA, BIN LADEN: THE ACCUSED

Osama Bin Laden appears as a rich misfit, certainly a sociopath, and doubtless obsessed with his own fanatical ideological vision of what the world should be. His main goal would appear to be the restoration of the caliphate, the combined emperor and pope of the Islamic world, an institution which was until about 1924 embodied in the figure of the Ottoman Turkish Sultan. Of course, this utopian Pan-Arab program means that Bin Laden is automatically the enemy of any existing state in the Arab or Islamic world, and thus allows him to conduct what amount to Anglo-American destabilization operations against these states under a cloak of radical Islamic historical legitimacy which certain rulers are clearly hard put to answer.

But Bin Laden is not the greatest political genius of today's world, as the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris attempts to convince us. Bin Laden is a dilettante who could not survive very long without powerful protectors and a comprehensive support network, including kidney dialysis. Rather than a political genius, we evidently see in Bin Laden a clueless dupe, a patsy who cannot comprehend the forces around him which make his day to day activity and above all his universal notoriety possible. According to one of Bin Laden's handlers by the name of Beardman, during the Afghan years Bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of Bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help." (Meyssan 2002 7) In an interview with Frontline, Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, said that when he first met bin Laden, in the nineteen-eighties, "I thought he couldn't lead eight ducks across the street."

Osama Bin Laden was one of dozens of children in the Bin Laden harem, which was presided over by the patriarch of the Saudi Bin Laden construction company fortune. Osama's mother was not the number one wife or valide sultan in this seraglio; she was instead one of the least favored and least important of the numerous spouses. This peculiarity made Osama what we would call in the language of European feudal aristocracy a cadet or younger son, and cadet sons are by definition expendable. The Bin Laden family was one of the wealthiest in Saudi Arabia, and functioned as compradors of the British and the U.S., including the dirty operations of MI-6 and CIA; Osama was for example a relative by marriage of the Iran-contra businessman Adnan Kashoggi. Since he was a cadet son and not one of the Saudi royals, Osama was doubly expendable. He was allegedly asked in 1979 by Prince Turki of Saudi intelligence to mobilize money and volunteers for operations against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Prince Turki wanted a Pan-Arab force to go and fight the Red Army and the Kabul regime. Part of Osama's role was simply to be a bagman for Saudi government funds being sent to the Afghan fighters. In these efforts, Bin Laden worked closely with the Pakistani Interservice Intelligence, and thus also with the CIA and MI-6. The CIA had teams in Afghanistan in early 1979, well before the Soviet invasion which Brzezinski provoked. According to former CIA Director Robert Gates, the big expansion of the U.S. covert operation in Afghanistan began in 1984. During this year, "the size of the CIA's covert program to help the Mujaheddin increased several times over," reaching a level of about $500 million in U.S. and Saudi payments funneled through the Zia regime in Pakistan. As Gates recalled, "it was during this period [1985] that we began to learn of a significant increase in the number of Arab nationals from other countries who had traveled to Afghanistan to fight in the Holy War against the Soviets. They came from Syria, Iraq, Algeria, and elsewhere, and most fought with the Islamic fundamentalist Muj groups, particularly that headed by Abdul Resaul Sayyaf. We examined ways to increase their participation, perhaps in the form of some sort of' international brigade, but nothing came of it. Years later, these fundamentalist fighters trained by the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan would begin to show up around the world, from the Middle East to New York City, still fighting their Holy War, only now including the United States among their enemies. Our mission was to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. We expected a post-Soviet Afghanistan to be ugly, but never considered that it would become a haven for terrorists operating worldwide." (Gates: 349) But the international brigade Gates talked about was in fact created -- as the group now known as al Qaeda.

The story is then that Bin Laden was shocked and alienated by the arrival of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia for operation Desert Shield, after Saddam Hussein's takeover of Kuwait. The FBI and CIA have accused Bin Laden of having been behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 that killed six people, two bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 in which 24 American servicemen died, and the bombings of two American embassies in east Africa in 1998 that killed 224 people, as well as the attack on the 2000 U.S.S. Cole which killed 19 sailors. (New York Times, September 9, 2001)

FBI Director Robert Mueller confessed to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco on April 19, 2002 that, after six months in Afghanistan, the U.S. forces had found absolutely no documentary evidence there relating to 9/11. This was a huge scandal, just as big as the later failure to discover the phantomatic weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mueller admitted: "The hijackers also left no paper trail. In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper -- either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere -- that mentioned any aspect of the September 11th plot. The hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any kind. They used hundreds of different pay phones and cell phones, often with prepaid calling cards that are extremely difficult to trace. And they made sure that all the money sent to them to fund their attacks was wired in small amounts to avoid detection."

Clearly the U.S. would now rather not see Bin Laden, if he still exists, be taken alive, for fear of what his testimony might be. On November 21, 2001, Rumsfeld was quite explicit on this point, saying on the CBS "60 Minutes 11" program he would prefer that Osama bin Laden be killed rather than taken alive. "You bet your life," he said.

It became known shortly after 9/11 that Osama Bin Laden's half-brother Salem was an investor in Arbusto Petroleum in the late 1970s, and thus can be counted as a former business partner of George W, Bush. Two weeks after 9/11, the London tabloid Daily Mail carried the banner headline: "Bin Laden's Amazing Business Link with President Bush." George W. Bush and Salem Bin Laden were both present at the creation of Arbusto Energy, an oil company in Texas. Salem Bin Laden had very close business ties to a friend of George W. Bush, a certain James Bath. According to researchers, it is likely that the $50,000 that Bath invested in Arbusto in 1978 actually came from Salem Bin Laden. Salem Bin Laden died in a plane crash in Texas in 1983. This Daily Mail story was singled out on BBC's "European Press Roundup" the following morning, but these facts have never been given adequate coverage by the U.S. media. The Bath angle was, however, stressed by Michael Moore in his Fahrenheit 911. (Daily Mail, September 24, 2001)

The Bin Ladens were benefactors of Harvard University, where there were fellowships offered bearing their name. This fact attracted the attention of the media, but the willingness of Harvard students to accept the Bin Laden money appeared undiminished after 9/11. Andy Tiedemann, a spokesperson in the Harvard University development office, said no Harvard students had called to object to the bin Laden fellowships. The Bin Laden family's endowed fellowships totaled $2 million, for use at Harvard's law and design schools. (Harvard Crimson, October 5, 2001)

ALBRIGHT SABOTAGES EXTRADITION OF BIN LADEN BY SUDAN

During the mid-1990s, Bin Laden established himself in Sudan. By 1996, he had become an embarrassment to the rulers of that country, General Bashir and Hassan Turabi. Sudan had shown in 1994 that it had nothing to do with terrorism when it turned the legendary terrorist Carlos the Jackal over to French authorities, who put him away for good. Early in 1996, the Sudanese government offered to deliver Bin Laden to the Saudis, who declined on the grounds that any prosecution of the fanatical sheikh in his home country might cause a split in the ruling elite, to say nothing of public disorder. In March 1996, Sudan offered to deliver Bin Laden to the U.S. government. Instead of gratefully accepting the extradition of the man who was already one of the world's top terrorists, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chose this moment to provoke a new wave of tensions with Sudan, even contriving -- no doubt as a clever diversion -- to shut down the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum because of alleged terrorist threats. The Sudanese offer remained on the table until May 19, 1996, when Bin Laden departed Sudan for Afghanistan, but Albright invented pretext after pretext to say no. Here we have a crucial experiment that proves the duplicity and hypocrisy of the U.S. regime: they could have had Bin Laden's head on a platter, and they turned it down. Bin Laden, after all, had a great career ahead of him -- he was destined to become the great false-flag countergang leader of lslamic opposition to the U.S. empire.

CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on October 17, 2002 that the CIA officially knew nothing about a Sudanese offer to give Bin Laden to the U.S.: "Mr. Chairman, CIA has no knowledge of such an offer," said Tenet. The 9/11 Commission announced in one of their staff reports that they found no evidence that Sudan had offered to deliver Bin Laden directly to the U.S., but they did establish that Sudan was willing to extradite him to Saudi Arabia. (9/11 commission staff report, March 24, 2004) The 9/11 commission final report, ever true to form, simply ignores the Sudanese offer and with it the key issue of why the Albright State Department refused to accept Bin Laden's extradition or rendition. (9/11 commission 61-(62)

These findings simply ignore the public record as documented by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post soon after 9/11-- a specialty of the 9/11 commission. According to Gellman, in 1999, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir referred elliptically to his government's 1996 willingness to send bin Laden to Saudi Arabia. What remained to be added was the role of the U.S. government and a secret channel from Khartoum to Washington. Gellman wrote:

The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at a Rosslyn hotel on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later. Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts at the time, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture. (Washington Post, Wednesday, October 3, 2001)


The Sudanese envoy to the U.S. in this attempted rendition was Sudan's 2001 UN ambassador, major general Elfatih Erwa, who, as Sudan's minister of state for defense in 1996, flew from Khartoum to Washington for secret negotiations with the CIA.

Anthony Lake, then U.S. national security adviser, says Washington was skeptical of Sudan's offer -- meaning that there was an offer. Lake told the Village Voice that Sudan brought up the story after 9/11 because it feared U.S. bombing attacks during the war on terrorism. Apart from the hindsight, why did the U.S. not test the sincerity of the Sudanese offer by demanding the rendition of Bin Laden? The Sudanese offer of Bin Laden was also obliquely confirmed by Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state for African affairs who was then senior director for Africa on the NSC. Rice's variation is the claim that Sudan made the offer knowing the U.S. couldn't accept it. "They calculated that we didn't have the means to successfully prosecute Bin Laden. That's why I question the sincerity of the offer." Again, rather than indulge in such hairsplitting, why not test Sudanese sincerity by demanding Bin Laden's extradition? One U.S. intelligence source in the region seemed to be close to an answer when he called the lost opportunity a disgrace. "We kidnap minor drug czars and bring them back in burlap bags. Somebody didn't want this to happen." (Village Voice, October 31, 2001) Indeed: a most valuable patsy had to be protected.

But the U.S. refusal to take Bin Laden from the Sudan remains an important point, embarrassing enough to engage Richard Clarke, the true high priest of the Bin Laden myth. Clarke writes in his memoir:

Turabi and Bin Laden parted as friends, and pledged to continue the struggle and to use Khartoum as a safe haven. In recent years Sudanese intelligence officials and Americans friendly to the Sudan regime have invented a fable about Bin Laden's final days in Khartoum. In the fable the Sudanese government offers to arrest Bin Laden and hand him over in chains to FBl agents, but Washington rejects the offer because the Clinton administration does not see Bin Laden as important or does and cannot find anywhere to put him on trial. The only slivers of truth in this fable are that a) the Sudanese government was denying its support for terrorism in the wake of the UN sanctions, and b) the CSG had initiated informal inquiries with several nations about incarcerating Bin Laden, or putting him on trial. There were no takers. Nonetheless, had we been able to put our hands on him we would gladly have done so. U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White in Manhattan could, as the saying goes, "indict a ham sandwich." She certainly could have obtained an indictment for Bin Laden in 1996 had we needed it. In the spring of 1998, she did so. The facts about the supposed Sudanese offer to give us Bin Laden are that Turabi was not about to turn over his partner in terror to us and no real attempt to do so ever occurred. (Clarke 142)


This cover story falls to the ground without any refutation because of its own internal contradictions; Clarke is simply lying, and his statements about terrorism need to be read with full awareness of the mendacity of which he is capable. In addition, if the U.S. waited until 1998 to indict Bin Laden, this confirms the story told in La verite interdite that the U.S. had failed to issue an Interpol warrant for Bin Laden after the Khobar Towers attack of 1996. (Brisard and Dasquie 136)

It is enough to repeat that the reason Bin Laden was not taken into U.S. custody was to preserve a patsy of incalculable value. We should recall once again that Clarke was reportedly ushered out of the James Baker State Department for covering up Israeli violations of the U.S. arms export laws involving the illegal Israeli sale of Patriot missile systems to China. In August 1998, Clarke was reportedly one of the key figures who planted false information about Sudan's involvement in the East Africa U.S. Embassy bombings, which led to U.S. cruise missile attacks on a Sudanese pharmaceutical company in Khartoum which turned out to be producing nothing but aspirin. In this incident, Clarke is said to have retailed disinformation from British-Israeli covert operations stringer Yosef Bodansky that provided a pretext for the targeting of Sudan. The Sudan extradition story was confirmed in "Targeted: Bin Laden," broadcast by the History Channel on September 15, 2004, with interviews by Anonymous, Steve Coll, Saudi Prince Turki, Robert Baer, and others. In reality, Sudan cooperated before and after 9/11 in legitimate international anti-terrorism efforts. One such case came in late spring 2002, when Sudan arrested Abu Huzifa, a suspected AI Qaeda-linked terrorist, at the request of the United States. Abu Huzifa detailed his infiltration of Saudi Arabia, to profile vulnerability of U.S. troops to terrorist attack, and described how he had fired a SAM missile at a U.S. warplane near the Prince Sultan Air Base, one of the headquarters of the U.S. Afghan military operations. According to former Clinton-era ambassador to Sudan Tim Carney, Sudan had been totally cooperative with the United States in the war on terror. (Washington Post, June 14, 2002)

FBI TOLD BY BUSH TO BACK OFF BIN LADENS

FBI agents have testified that Bush 43 ordered the bureau to relax their surveillance of the Bin Laden family members living in the United States. According to BBC Newsnight of November 6, 2001, the FBI "was told to back off bin Laden family." The program said it had been told by a highly placed source in a U.S. intelligence agency there had always been "constraints" on investigating Saudis, but under President George Bush these had become much worse. After the 2000 elections, the intelligence agencies were told to "back off" from investigating the bin Laden family and the Saudi royals. BBC2's Newsnight also said that it had secret documents from the FBI investigation into the terrorist attacks which showed that despite claims that Osama bin Laden was the black sheep of the family, at least two other U.S.-based members were suspected of having links with a possible terrorist organization. The BBC report was based on a secret FBI document numbered 1991 WF213589 and emanating out of the FBI's Washington field office. One of the organizations that the FBI was supposedly ordered to ignore was the "Saudi-funded World Association of Moslem Youth (WAMY), a suspected terrorist organization." WAMY's accounts were frozen by Pakistan after 9/11, and India "claimed that this group was linked to an organization involved in bombing in Kashmir." (Times of India, November 8, 2001) Whatever the specifics, this is the familiar pattern of police agencies finding reasons for not rolling up the financial infrastructure required to keep their indispensable patsies in the field, at least until the big hit has been accomplished.

Just after 9/11, FBI agents swooped down on the Boston suburb where around twenty wealthy relatives of Bin Laden lived, and questioned them at a condominium complex in Charlestown. Agents even visited nightclubs to collect credit cards of younger members of the family. Bin Laden's younger brother Mohammed, who was said to have moved back to Saudi Arabia with his wife and children several years before, owned a ten-bedroom mansion in nearby Wayland. Another younger brother, Abdullah, was a 1994 graduate of Harvard Law School. But, despite the official U.S. story demonizing their maverick half-brother, the plutocratic Bin Ladens had nothing to fear. Soon reports began circulating widely that the Bush regime organized special flights out of the U.S. for members of the Bin Laden family and some other wealthy Saudis. Craig Unger and others have told the story of these special flights which whisked the Bin Ladens and other Saudis out of the U.S. during a time when civil aviation was still suspended. The 9/11 commission denies that these took place between Tuesday and Sunday, that is to say during the days when all U.S. commercial aviation was grounded. The Tampa Tribune carried a story about a Lear Jet which took off from Tampa on September 13 and flew to Lexington, Kentucky with Saudi plutocrats on board. The plane started from a private hanger at Raytheon Airport Services in Tampa. It is possible that this Lear Jet was rented from Wally Hilliard, the man who financed Rudi Dekkers' Huffman Aviation in nearby Venice, Florida, where Atta and Shehhi took flight lessons. (Hopsicker, Mad Cow Morning News 11)

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. forces constantly imitated the Israeli practice of simply seizing family members of accused terrorists and holding them as hostages. If these illegal methods are good enough for the little people, and if Bin Laden was the heart and soul of world terrorism, why were the opulent Bin Ladens not simply declared enemy combatants and hustled off to Guantanamo for a round of sleep deprivation and other torture, until the family disgorged the fugitive sheikh? U.S. methods, although they are certainly brutal and illegal, are not consistent.

Quite apart from these flights, the U.S. State Department has long functioned as al Qaeda's virtual in-house travel agency. The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, Michael Springman, told BBC Newsnight in the fall of 2001: "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants -- people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained there. I complained here in Washington ... and I was ignored." He added: "What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists, recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come back to the United States for training to be used in the war in Afghanistan against the then Soviets."

BUSH 41 WORKS FOR BIN LADENS VIA CARLYLE GROUP

The business cooperation of the Bush and Bin Laden families did not stop with Arbusto. A few weeks after 9/11, readers of the Wall Street Journal were more than mildly surprised to learn that the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, the father of the current tenant of the White House, was in effect a paid part-time employee of the Saudi Bin Laden Group, the Bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia, through the intermediary of the Carlyle Group, an international investment and consulting firm, in which the Bin Ladens invested. There had been at least two documented meetings of Bush 41 with the Bin Laden business clan, and in reality there had doubtless been more on social occasion and the like. Other top Republicans were also associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker, Bush 43's lawyer during the 2000 stolen election, and Iran-Contra heavy Frank Carlucci, a former Secretary of Defense. Also working with Carlyle were Reagan Treasury official Richard Darman, and Bush 41's White House chief of staff, John Sununu. The Journal story repeated the cover story that Osama bin Laden had supposedly been "disowned" by his family, which was running a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and was a major investor in the senior Bush's firm. Other reports have questioned, though, whether members of his Saudi family have truly cut off Osama bin Laden. It was also reported that the FBI had subpoenaed the Bin Laden family business's bank records. (Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001; Judicial Watch, September 28, 2001).

Almost everything about Osama Bin Laden remains uncertain, down to the question of whether he is dead or alive, free or in captivity, and whether he is one person or a group of Doppelgangers. But there is no doubt that CIA, MI-6, and their satellites have showed a remarkable loyalty to Bin Laden, building him up and lionizing him at every opportunity. These agencies do this because they need to establish the credibility of their patsy. Because of his notorious track record as a CIA asset, Bin Laden needs all the public relations assistance the agency can give him. In the days after 9/11, a large demonstration was held against terrorism by the middle classes of Teheran, Iran, and one of the most prominent signs read "Bin Laden = CIA agent."

One of Bin Laden's flacks is none other than Bernard Lewis of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the author of the operational U.S.-UK-Israel long-term strategic plan for the dismemberment and Balkanization of the Arab and Islamic states of the Middle east and of the "arc of crisis" which we see in action in Iraq and elsewhere today. Lewis bent over backward to establish the Islamic legitimacy and bona fides of Bin Laden in an interview given about two months after 9/11.

BERNARD LEWIS: BIN LADEN'S FLACK

Lewis argued that bin Laden's brand of Islamic terrorism was completely consistent with classical Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of the infidels to Islamic law. Lewis documented Bin Laden's place in the great tradition of the Moslem world by citing the passage in Bin Laden's recent videotape in which he spoke of "humiliation and disgrace ... for more than 80 years," a reference to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France after 1918. Lewis located Bin Laden in the tradition of jihad, "bequeathed to Moslems by the Prophet." In principle, Lewis went on, the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Moslem government ruled and Moslem law prevailed, and the House of War, meaning the rest of the world, which was still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Moslem state. Among all the different "infidels" ruling the House of War, according to Lewis, Christianity was singled out as "their primary rival in the struggle for world domination." In a masterpiece of Geschichtskletscherei, Lewis cited slogans painted on the walls of the Dome of the Rock from the 7th Century assailing Christianity. Next, Lewis asserted that the evolution of modern Islamic terrorism, specifically al-Qaeda terrorism, had a long history within Islam, dating to the Assassins of the 11-13th Centuries. He also identified Saudi Arabia and Egypt as the two regimes singled out by the Islamic jihadists for their corruption by modernism. He concluded ominously: "For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world that began in the 7th Century ... If Bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bigger struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam -- Russia, China, India -- who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Moslems and their sanctities. If Bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam." (New Yorker, November 19, 2001)

THE LANGLEY BIN LADEN FAN CLUB

The most comprehensive document of Bin Ladenolatry so far produced comes from the bowels of the CIA, the work place of Anonymous, the author of Imperial Hubris. This book can only be interpreted as a semi-official compendium of CIA doctrine on today's world. Anonymous is sure that Bin Laden will be able to strike the U.S. again, and this time most likely with a weapon of mass destruction, but he still offers the erratic millionaire praise without stint:

Viewed from any angle, Osama Bin Laden is a great man, one who smashed the expected unfolding of universal post-Cold War peace. The New York and Washington attacks, Andrew Bacevich and Sebastian Mallaby wrote in the Wilson Quarterly, "revealed that the pilgrimage to perfection was far from over," though "not for a moment did they cause American political leaders to question the project's feasibility." Post-11 September, Dr. Bruce Hoffman also offered an acute judgment of Bin Laden's impact. "Whatever else," Hoffman wrote, "Bin Laden is one of the few persons who can argue that they changed the course of history." ... All told, Bin Laden is certainly the most popular anti-American leader in the world today. His name is legend from Houston to Zanzibar to Jakarta, and his face and sayings are emblazoned on T-shirts, CDs, audio and videotapes, posters, photographs, cigarette lighters, and stationery across the earth. "Afghanistan's children," Daniel Bergener wrote in the New York Times Magazine in July 2003, "suck on Bin Laden candies, sugary balls in wrappers showing the leader's face, his pointed finger and the tip of a rocket." So too with his name: "one of the most common names for newborn males is Osama," James Kitfield reported in the National Journal in November 2002. "Even among those who publicly denounce his terrorist methods, the namings indicate the nearly mythical status the Islamic world has bestowed on Osama Bin Laden." (Anonymous 104-105)


Our anonymous CIA agent waxes positively indignant about those in Saudi Arabia and around the world who impugn Bin Laden's world-historical genius. He is especially upset about certain Saudis who have worked closely with Bin Laden in the past, and who find it impossible to believe that he is now functioning as the evil demiurge of the twenty-first century. Anonymous detects a "theme of Bin Laden's limited mental and leadership abilities" which has been spread by "a number of Saudi officials and writers. Their intent seems simple enough: to prove that Bin Laden is intellectually incapable of managing al Qaeda and designing its operations." (Anonymous 107) As an example of this line, Anonymous quotes an account given by Saudi Prince Mahmoud bin Abdel Aziz to the U.S. press. The Prince recalled

that night a decade ago when Osama Bin Laden attended an evening salon to describe his exploits fighting in Afghanistan.... [The prince] remembers young Osama floundering when guests questioned him about the interpretation of religious texts. "Finally, I had to signal with my hands for them to stop it," said the prince. "He really is quite a simple man." (Anonymous 108)


Here we have a rich misfit and fanatic who cannot hold his own in theological debates, which should supposedly be his strongest suit. In Anonymous' view, "the most common form of the Saudis' defamation of Bin Laden is done by having his friends in the kingdom describe him as a gentle, amiable, and relatively unintelligent man." (Anonymous 108) But the yelping detractors of Bin Laden do not stop here. According to Anonymous: "A final side to the effort in the Moslem and Western worlds to denigrate Bin Laden's brains and talents lies in the studied attempt to depict Bin Laden as a simpleton who is directed by that evil terrorist genius Ayman al-Zawahiri, former chief of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and now Bin Laden's deputy in al Qaeda. 'My knowledge of Bin Laden makes me unable to conceive what is happening now,' said Dr. Abdullah al Muayyad, a former director general of the Saudi finance ministry who worked with Bin Laden during the Afghan jihad." (Anonymous 107) Like a good CIA agent, Anonymous tries to make his readers think that the Saudis are passing the buck to the nefarious Egyptians, but this is hogwash. Zawahiri, once again, was a key part of the Sadat assassination, and afterwards was protected by London. The world needs to remember Sadat's widow, Jehan Sadat, recalling in a television interview after 9/11 that Zawahiri, a murderer of her husband, had lived in London for years after that crime, while extradition to Egypt was always refused by the UK. The guess here would be that Zawahiri is a double agent working for MI-6, while Bin Laden is indeed a fanatical, deluded patsy and dupe; at any rate, if this is Bin Laden's mentality, it would make him the ideal type for the role he is presently carrying out.

Anonymous devotes a lyrically fulsome passage to evoking Bin Laden's status as a beloved figure among the Moslems; the Moslem love for Osama, he argues, is

love not so much for Osama Bin Laden the person -- although there is much of that -- but love for his defense of the faith, the life he lives, the heroic example he sets, and the similarity of that example to other heroes in the pantheon of Islamic history. (Anonymous 124)


Anonymous concludes this paean to his hero Bin Laden by favorably comparing the psychotic sheikh to Abraham Lincoln. This is all coming, we recall, from a high-level CIA officer, one of the founding members of the "Manson family," as the original CIA Bin Laden station called itself. If Arabs and Moslems can be convinced that Bin Laden is really their leader, and not a creature of the CIA, then they will never accomplish the modernizing reforms which the progressive nationalists promised. They will spend their time fighting among themselves in the name of re-creating the caliphate. They will be unable to make alliances against the Anglo-Americans with Europe, with the Orthodox, the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Confucians, the atheists, or anybody else; they will self-isolate themselves in endless backwardness. Bin Laden's mass line is, after, all, that it is the duty of every Moslem to kill infidels wherever they are found. If applied literally, this would even cut off all scientific and commercial exchanges in a kind of murderous self-embargo. All these factors will make the Moslem ummah ever so much easier to divide and defeat. No wonder the CIA is so proud of having made Bin Laden a folk hero of the Moslem world, with the help of the 9/11 attacks which the unstable dreamer could never have carried out by himself: literally billions of dollars of publicity for the Saudi misfit have paid off in one of the greatest psychological warfare operations of all time. Any cause that chooses Bin Laden or some similar figure as its leader, we may be certain, is damning itself to a lonely and ignominious defeat at the hands of the laughing CIA kuffar.

Even more notable are the support service which the CIA and it minions continue to provide Bin Laden. Here the evidence is fragmentary but persistent and finally overwhelming. According to CBS News, "the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan ... Bin Laden was spirited into a military hospital in Rawalpindi for kidney dialysis treatment. (Barry Peterson, "Hospital Worker: I Saw Osama," CBS News, January 29, 2002: http://www.cbsnews.com ) Before we criticize Pakistan, though, we should realize that the ISI in this case was probably acting on U.S. instructions, as it generally does.

LE FIGARO: BIN LADEN TREATED AT AMERICAN HOSPITAL, JULY 2001

On October 31, 2001, Le Figaro, the leading French conservative newspaper, published a front page story about medical treatment received by Bin Laden in Dubai in the summer before 9/11. This remarkable revelation came in an article by Alexandra Richard entitled "La CIA a rencontre Ben Laden a Dubai. en juillet," (The CIA met Bin Laden in Dubai in July). At around the same time, similar facts were reported by Agence France Presse and Radio France International, the French external broadcasting service. The AFP dispatch read in part:

Bin Laden Underwent Treatment in July at Dubai American Hospital

Osama bin Laden underwent treatment in July at the American Hospital in Dubai where he met a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official, French daily Le Figaro and Radio France International reported. Quoting "a witness, a professional partner of the administrative management of the hospital," they said the man suspected by the United States of being behind the September 11 terrorist attacks had arrived in Dubai on July 4 by air from Quetta, Pakistan. He was immediately taken to the hospital for kidney treatment. He left the establishment on July 14, Le Figaro said.

During his stay, the daily said, the local CIA representative was seen going into bin Laden's room and "a few days later, the CIA man boasted to some friends of having visited the Saudi-born millionaire."

Quoting "an authoritative source," Le Figaro and the radio station said the CIA representative had been recalled to Washington on July 15. Bin Laden has been sought by the United States for terrorism since the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But his CIA links go back before that to the fight against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

Le Figaro said bin Laden was accompanied in Dubai by his personal physician and close collaborator, who could be the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as bodyguards and an Algerian nurse. He was admitted to the urology department of Doctor Terry Callaway, who specializes in kidney stones and male infertility. Telephoned several times, the doctor declined to answer questions. Several sources had reported that bin Laden had a serious kidney infection. He had a mobile dialysis machine sent to his Kandahar hideout in Afghanistan in the first half of 2000, according to "authoritative sources" quoted by Le Figaro and RFI. (AFP, Wednesday October 31, 2001, 2:04 PM)


The CIA was quick to deny these embarrassing facts reported by real investigative journalists, who apparently still exist in France. A spokeswoman at CIA Langley, VA headquarters described the Le Figaro article as "complete and utter nonsense. It's nonsense, it's absurd, it's ridiculous, it's not true." The CIA said it intended to protest to Le Figaro. The American Hospital in Dubai denied that Bin Laden had been a patient. (The Scotsman, November 1, 2001) But the French author Richard LaBeviere countered that Osama Bin Laden had been working for the CIA since 1979, a fact which was generally accepted in Europe. (October 31, 2001) Radio France International stuck to its guns and followed up on its story with further details about Bin Laden's CIA handler and case officer, Larry Mitchell: "The local representative of the CIA who visited Osama Bin Laden last July 12 at the American Hospital in Dubai is called Larry Mitchell. If his visiting card specifies that he is a "consular agent," everyone in Dubai knows, especially in the small expatriate community, that he is working under cover. To say it openly, Larry Mitchell belongs to the 'big house', otherwise known as the CIA. He himself does not hide it." RFI went on: " An expert in the Arab world and especially in the Arabian peninsula, Larry Mitchell is a colorful personality who livens up the somewhat drab evenings of the expatriates of Dubai. One of his friends likes to say that his natural exuberance often gets into classified matters. That is perhaps one of the reasons why he was called back to the United States last July 15. About twenty days after the September 11 attacks, in a statement dated October 5, the CIA dismissed as baseless rumors the story that the agency had had contacts with Bin Laden and his group in the past, especially at the time of the war against the U.S.S.R. in Afghanistan. It happens that this communique of the CIA is in complete contradiction with the earlier official statements of several representatives of the U.S. administration itself." ( http://www.rfi.fr/1 novembre 2001)

It is thus clear that the CIA was providing vital support services to Bin Laden long after he had allegedly turned into the world's leading anti-American monster. The reality is that Bin Laden and al Qaeda have never stopped serving the CIA strategic agenda, whatever that happened to be. As Thierry Meyssan writes, "In reality, the CIA continued to have recourse to Osama Bin Laden's services against Russian influence as it had done against the Soviets. You don't change a winning team. The 'Arab Legion' of Al Qaeda was used, in 1999, to support the Kosovar rebels against the dictatorship in Belgrade. It was also operational in Chechenya, at least until November 2001, as was attested to by the New York Times. (Michael Wines, December 9, 2001) The alleged hostility of Bin Laden against the United States permitted Washington to deny responsibility for these dirty operations." (Meyssan 2002 106-7)

In a discussion of the impact of the anonymous Imperial Hubris CIA tract during the summer of 2004, the Washington Post provided a succinct summary of al Qaeda's strategic services to the CIA: "Al Qaeda' s camps were staffed by veteran fighters who trained insurgents who fought and trained others to fight, not only against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, but also against national armies in Indian Kashmir, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Eritrea, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Tajikistan, Egypt, Bosnia, western China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and the Philippines." (Review of Anonymous, Imperial Hubris, Washington Post, July 11, 2004) Notice that all these states were or are targets of U.S. destabilization. And even this list is far from complete; it leaves out Libya, for example.

The Iranian press also noted the strange affinities of al Qaeda for figures who were clearly still on the U.S. payroll. While panning the 9/11 commission report, the Teheran Times observed that none other than KSM, "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 U.S.-backed Afghans president, Hamid Karzai." (Teheran Times, July 27, 2004)

AL QAEDA AND NATO'S BALKAN DRUG RUNNING

Another thing that is known about al Qaeda is that Bin Laden's supposed followers are drug pushers in grand style -- once again a foible they share with MI-6 and CIA. During a fall 2001 strategic briefing, Gwen McClure of Interpol's Criminal Subdivision officially informed a group of parliamentarians from NATO countries that Interpol had evidence that the Bin Laden group "is linked to Albanian gangs who have taken over the growing web of crime across Europe. The investigations of Interpol have also shown that bin Laden deployed one of his top military commanders for an elite KLA unit during the NATO Kosovo war." The Interpol official also stated that a special meeting took place in Albania in the presence of bin Laden, according to Albanian police. Several Algerian terrorists were present at the meeting. "It was during this meeting," the official stressed, "that many structures and networks were established for propaganda and fund raising activities and for providing the Algerian armed groups with logistical support." During and immediately after the Kosovo war, when the KLA took over the Kosovo, heroin and weapons traffic exploded unchecked. The so-called "Albanian mafia" ended up controlling 80% of the heroin distribution in Western Europe, using the NATO Kosovo protectorate as its base. The criminal and the terrorist networks became indistinguishable, with a multiplying destructive effect. "These crime syndicates have formed alliances of convenience and are willing to cooperate or make business arrangements with other organized crime groups," the Interpol official told the parliamentarians. She also said Interpol had evidence of the involvement in the criminal and terrorist activities of the Chechnya terrorists. According to Balkan sources and other records, the man in charge for the Balkan terrorism-organized crime connection was Bin Laden's chief adviser or controller, the head of the Egyptian Jihad, Ayman al Zawahiri. Zawahiri's brother Mohamed was reported to be in Macedonia just after 9/11, leading a gang of ideological mercenaries to launch another major KLA assault against the country. Ayman al Zawahiri was in Albania to play a leading role in the KLA/NATO offensive against Serbia in 1999. (Independent, October 24, 2001) According to some experts, the al Qaeda/KLA united front had taken over the 1980s "Bulgarian connection" or Balkan Route, which involved a gigantic arms-for-drugs traffic with the involvement of numerous NATO, Warsaw Pact, and other intelligence services and various ethnic mafias. The Bulgarian connection had come under intense scrutiny after the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II on May 13 1981. (The Independent, October 24, 2001)

ZAWAHIRI AND NATO'S DARLING, THE KLA

The brother of Bin Laden's second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri, was reported after 9/11 to be taking part in terrorist actions in Northern Macedonia, where NATO's puppet Albanian KLA had started a new terror campaign. The Zawahiri connection surfaced on October 25, 2001, when the "new" KLA in Macedonia, the Albanian National Army (ANA), claimed responsibility for the bombing of the police station and municipal building of Tearce in north Macedonia. Tearce was one of the Macedonian towns -- previously assaulted, occupied and "cleansed" of its Macedonian inhabitants which became the scene of a symbolic policing by a mixed police patrol of ethnic Albanians and Macedonians.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:28 am

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 4 CONT'D.)

BRITISH TERROR SCHOOLS FOR PATSIES

A window into the London state-sponsored synthetic terror milieu came in December 2001, when British authorities were forced to arrest and question Mark Yates, a self- styled security expert who ran a firearms training camp in Alabama, Yates was suspected of helping Islamic terrorist patsies from Britain who were to hone their marksmanship skills on American soil before going off to fight for Islamic causes around the globe. Yates, a British bodyguard and firearms trainer who had operations in both the United Kingdom and the United States, allegedly offered "live fire" weapons training in America for aspiring holy warriors. British police thought that Yates was involved on the U.S. end of the "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" training program offered on the London market by the Sakina Security Services company, owned by Suleiman Bilal Zain-ul-abidin. Yates, who was also the operations and training director at the Ground Zero firearms training camp outside Marion, Alabama, denied everything. "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" included instruction in "art of bone breaking," and learning to "improvise explosive devices." British Moslems would be given the opportunity to squeeze off up to 3,000 rounds at a shooting range in the United States before heading off to fight for Islamic causes around the world. "All serious firearms training must be done overseas" because of British gun laws, advertising for the course noted. British prosecutors said their investigators had searched Zain-ul-abidin's apartment and seized documents believed to be related to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, anti-Semitic material and what appeared to be disabled firearms, including a rifle and two handguns. The Sunday Telegraph reported about another military training course, this time at a secret camp near the village of Yetgoch in southern Wales. Young Moslems and others learned how to use Uzi machine guns at the camp, which was run by Trans Global Security International.

The reports of the Welsh training camp rekindled a debate in Britain over how the UK had become a hotbed for military recruitment by radical Islamic elements. Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a firebrand Islamic leader in London, founder of the fundamentalist al-Muhajiroun organization, and Bin Laden's sometime spokesman, said in 2000 that between 1,800 and 2,000 British Moslems were going abroad each year for military training. "We find young men in university classes or mosques, invite them for a meal and discuss ... ongoing attacks being suffered by Moslems in Chechnya, Palestine or Kashmir," Bakri Mohammed said. "We ... make them understand their duty to support the jihad (holy war) struggle verbally, financially and, if they can, physically in order to liberate their homeland." Bakri's al-Muhajiroun group, like al Qaeda, advocated wiping out the world's 50-plus existing Moslem-majority states and replacing them with a single "khilafah" (caliphate), or Islamic state. (Sunday Telegraph, MSNBC, December 27, 2001)

Satellite phone records of a phone used by Osama bin Laden during 1996-98, revealed that "Britain was at the heart of the terrorist's planning for his worldwide campaign of murder and destruction," according to the London Sunday Times. Bin Laden and his most senior aides made more calls to Britain than to any other country; they made more than 260 calls from Afghanistan to 27 numbers in Britain. According to documents from the trial of the U.S. east African embassy bombings, the telephone was bought in 1996 with the help of Dr Sa ad al Fagih, 45, the head of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia. Al Fagih had been regularly used by the BBC as an expert on Bin Laden. His credit card was also used to buy more than 3,000 minutes of pre-paid airtime. The records showed calls to ten other countries, the next most frequent after the UK being Yemen. There were no calls to Iraq. (London Sunday Times, March 24, 2002)

AL QAEDA AND LONDONISTAN

The role of London as the leading center of Islamic radicalism has been an open secret for years, but has never been reported by the U.S. controlled corporate media. In the nineteenth century, when Mazzini and Marx operated out of London, the slogan was that "England supports all revolutions but her own." In the post-colonial world, the British have found it to their advantage to encourage violent movements which could be used for destabilizations and assassinations in the former colonies, which their ex-masters did not want to see become strong and effective modern states. Between 1995 and 1999, protests were lodged by many countries concerning the willingness of the British government to permit terror groups to operate from British territory. Among the protestors were: Israel, Algeria, Turkey, Libya, Yemen, India, Egypt, France, Peru, Germany, Nigeria, and Russia. This is a list which, if widely known, might force certain U.S. radio commentators to change their world picture about who is soft on terrorism.

A number of groups which were cited as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department had their headquarters in London. Among them were the Islamic Group of Egypt, led by Bin Laden's current right-hand man, Zawahiri, who was a known participant in the plot to assassinate Egyptian President Sadat; this was also the group which had murdered foreign tourists at Luxor in an attempt to wreck the Egyptian tourist industry. Also present in London were Al Jihad of Egypt, Hamas of Palestine, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) of Algeria (responsible for large-scale massacres in that country), the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), which attacked targets in Turkey, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) of Sri Lanka, who assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi. Sheikh Bakri, Bin Laden spokesman's spokesman, was openly active in London into mid-1998 and later; he gave a press conference after the bombings of the U.S. East African embassies. The killings of figures like Sadat and Rajiv Ghandi should indicate the scale of the destabilization in developing countries of which some of these groups are capable.

Non-Anglo-Saxon press organs have from time to time pointed up the role of London in worldwide subversion. "The track of ... the GIA leader in Paris leads to Great Britain. The British capital has served as logistical and financial base for the terrorists," wrote Le Figaro on Nov. 3, 1995, in the wake of a murderous terror attack carried out in France. A report by the French National Assembly in October 2001 alleged that London played the key role as clearinghouse for money laundering of criminal and terrorist organizations. On March 3, 1996: Hamas bombed a market in Jerusalem, leaving 12 Israelis dead. A British newspaper reported soon after: "Israeli security sources say the fanatics ... are funded and controlled through secret cells operating here. ... Military chiefs in Jerusalem detailed how Islamic groups raised £7 million in donations from British organizations." (Daily Express, London, March 5, 1996)

In the midst of a campaign of destabilization against Egypt in the mid-1990s, the semi- official organ of the Egyptian government pointed out that "Britain has become the number one base in the world for international terrorism." (Al Ahram, Cairo, September 7, 1996) Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak noted that "... some states, like Britain, give political asylum to terrorists, and these states will pay the price for that." (Al-Hayat, September 18, 1996) British newspapers were also alarmed by the level of Islamic extremist activity they saw around them. By the late 1990s, there were so many Islamic extremists in London that the city had acquired the nickname of "Londonistan." The leading right-wing paper in the UK wrote: "Britain is now an international center for Islamic militancy on a huge scale. ..and the capital is home to a bewildering variety of radical Islamic movements, many of which make no secret of their commitment to violence and terrorism to achieve their goals." (London Daily Telegraph, November 20, 1999) President Putin of Russia saw a direct link between the London Islamic scene and terrorism in his own country. He said in an interview with a German newsmagazine: "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, September 2001)

Brixton Mosque was one of the notorious centers for terrorist recruitment in the heart of London. This was the home base of Zacharias Mousawi, the French citizen put on trial in Alexandria, Va. It was also the home of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of December 2001. Imam Qureshi of Brixton and others were allowed by the British authorities to preach anti-U.S. sermons to the some 4,000 Moslem inmates in British prisons, and thus to recruit new patsies for the world-wide terror machine. According to Bakri, Bin Laden's spokesman, during the late 1990s 2,000 fighters were trained yearly, including many in the U.S. because of the lax firearms legislation. The rival of Brixton Mosque was the equally redoubtable Finsbury Mosque, the home of the Saudi demagogue al Masri, who was finally taken into custody in the spring of 2004. There is every reason to believe that London is one of the main recruiting grounds for patsies, dupes, fanatics, double agents, and other roustabouts of the terrorist scene.

AL QAEDA AND MI-5 AGAINST LIBYA

Muammar Qaddafi of Libya, who had been bombed by the U.S. in the mid-1980s, not coincidentally became a target of al Qaeda. In March 1994, Bin Laden supporters killed 2 German agents in Libya. In November 1996, there was an MI-5 assassination attempt against the Libyan dictator with the help of the local Bin Laden organization, in which several people were killed. Here is a prime example of al Qaeda being employed by UK intelligence for purposes of state sponsored terrorism with the goal of eliminating a political leader who was not appreciated by London. (Hollingsworth and Fielding) The conclusion is clear: al Qaeda is a subsidiary of Anglo-American intelligence.

According to the French authors Brisard and Dasquie, Bin Laden's controllers had been using him to cause trouble for Qaddafi since the early 1980s, when Bin Laden had demanded permission to set up a base of operations in Libya, but was rebuffed by Qaddafi. "Enraged by Libya's refusal, Bin Laden organized attacks inside Libya, including assassination attempts against Qadaffi," Dasquie told IPS press service. The French authors cited the Islamic Fighting Group, headquartered in London, as the Libyan opposition group most closely allied with Bin Laden. Author Dasquie told IPS, "Qadaffi even demanded that Western police institutions, such as Interpol, pursue the IFG and Bin Laden, but never obtained cooperation. Until this very day [late 2001], members of IFG openly live in London." In 1998, former MI5 officer David Shayler told reporters that the British secret services had financed the assassination attempt against Qadaffi. (Inter Press service, November 15, 2001)

A rare moment of truth about the infrastructure of international terrorism was provided in October 2001 by Qaddafi, who was aware of al Qaeda's track record of attempting to eliminate him in the service of the U.S. and UK. In an appearance on the popular Al-Jazeera program "The Opposite Direction," Qaddafi condemned the 9/11 attacks, and referred to Bin Laden's Arab Afghans as "stray dogs" and terrorists. But then Qaddafi began to talk about the support network for al Qaeda:

I am actually puzzled. I mean, if America were serious about eliminating terrorism, the first capital it should rock with cruise missiles is London.

Interviewer: London!?

Qaddafi: London. It is the center of terrorism. It gives safehousing to the terrorists. I mean, as long as America does not bomb London, I think the U.S. is not serious, and is using a double standard. I mean, on the contrary, London is far more dangerous than Kabul. How could it rock Kabul with missiles and leave London untouched? (Al-Jazeera, Qatar-Tripoli, October 25, 2001)


The interviewer, a former BBC employee, quickly changed the subject before the mercurial dictator could say more. At this time, al Jazeera was closely monitored by all the international wire services, since it had the best reporting from inside Afghanistan. But none of them reported these illuminating remarks from Qaddafi.

NEOCONS' PLAN FOR AL QAEDA'S GLOBAL FUTURE

Voices from the Washington neocon oligarchy leave no doubt that the U.S. establishment's reliance on al Qaeda as its tool for ordering world affairs is intended to be a long-term one. The neocon retired Army colonel Robert Killebrew considers al Qaeda as the "once and future threat, : since he believes that "the al Qaeda we will face in 2010 will be an even more dangerous threat to Americas than the al Qaeda our troops are fighting today." According to Killebrew, "we can expect that within a decade al Qaeda will open one, or possibly several, political fronts in predominantly Islamic states, transforming itself from a deadly but diffuse terrorist movement into implacably hostile governmental factions throughout the Middle East that will pose critical geostrategic challenges to America and our allies.... the political transformation of al Qaeda into a radical pan Islamic movement would divide the world between the progressive West and a number of deeply reactionary, nuclear-armed states, and raise the possibility of far more serious conflict." (Washington Post, August 8, 2004) Here we see the oligarchy's intent of employing the benighted ideology of al Qaeda to organize the Arab and Islamic worlds for their own destruction. As we will see, neocolonial and neo-imperial powers have always feared secular Arab nationalism of the Nasser type, and have been eager to foment fundamentalist alternatives in the hope of perpetuating backwardness and isolation. The big danger for the U.S. has always been that Arab oil producers would reach their own economic development accords with western Europe, Japan, and the larger third world nations, such as Brazil. Al Qaeda fanaticism makes precisely these types of understandings impossible, preventing the forms of cooperation which would do the most damage to U.S.. The U.S. is biggest backer of al Qaeda, in just the same way that the Bank of England, Royal Dutch Shell, the City of London, and Wall Street were the biggest boosters of Hitler: if you know that you may face an adversary, the reasoning goes, then try to make sure that adversary will have a raving, incompetent, fanatical leader who will be structurally incapable of making successful alliances with your other foes.

Perhaps this is what Bush 43, whose family tradition includes grandfather Prescott Bush's implication in the Thyssen Nazi financial infrastructure, meant when he said in late 2001 that the United States has "the best intelligence we can possibly have," and what Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who chaired the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 2001, meant when he denied that any intelligence failure had taken place around 9/11. (R.W. Apple, New York Times, December 14, 2001)

PRELIMINARIES: TERRORISM IN THE 1990s

Guys, now you saw this bomb went off and you both known we could avoid that.
-- Emad Salem to the FBI, 1993


Synthetic terrorism is an enterprise that terrorist controllers often choose to escalate gradually, partly to enhance their own technical preparedness, and partly as a means of progressively degrading public intelligence while institutionalizing fantastic lies about what is going on. The Italian terrorism of 1967-1985, for example, which was directed by NATO intelligence, MI-6, the CIA, and SISMI, shows an unmistakable pattern of escalation, inasmuch as each terrorist attack became the stepping stone of the successive one, with an overall tendency towards larger and more complicated operations with higher and higher numbers of victims, reaching a culmination at Bologna in 1980. lf we look at terrorism in the U.S. during the 1990s, we see a similar pattern. One has the impression of looking at a crescendo of terror attacks, in which each new attack introduces new elements which will be important in the attacks to come. It is worth pointing out that, during the 1990s, few if any wealthy oligarchs became victims of terrorism; the dead were almost always the little people, the masses, and so it was to remain on 9/11. In addition, each new distortion accepted by the public increased the overall gullibility of the political system.

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER 1993: THE FBI SET IT UP AND LET IT HAPPEN

The bomb detonated in the underground parking garage at the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 killed six people, resulted in injuries to a thousand more, and threw lower Manhattan into chaos. At the center of the terror cell was a bombmaker who had been in the Egyptian army. He was also a paid informer and provocateur for the FBl. Other participants in the terror operation had entered the country with the connivance of the CIA, despite the fact that normally they would not have been allowed in. The FBI was aware of every phase of the plot, but refused to exploit numerous opportunities to stop it. The first WTC bomb of 1993 went off with the full complicity of the FBl, which tried repeatedly to pass off the blame to the Sudanese mission to the United Nations. The Kean-Hamilton Commission has nothing to say about this.

A detailed narrative of these events has appeared under the title The Cell. It is a coverup, written by participants in the operation. This book ignores the central and most dramatic event of the entire affair, which was the publication of the tapes secretly made by FBl provocateur Emad Salem of his own conversations with his FBI controllers -tapes which he wisely surmised he might need later as an insurance policy. Salem appears to have been passed from British intelligence to the FBI.

Even without the Salem tapes, The Cell presents a story of criminal incompetence within the FBI. The story starts with the November 1990 assassination in New York City of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an Israeli terrorist leader who had founded the Jewsih Defense League several decades earlier. The accused assassin of Kahane was El Sayyid Nosai, an Egyptian fanatic. But Nosair was not just a drifting fanatic: when the police searched his apartment, "there were training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. There were copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. How had Nosair come up with those? Clearly, he had a source in a sensitive position in the U.S. military." (Cell 45) Much more likely, his terrorist controller occupied a sensitive position in the U.S. military, as any fool can see.

Nosair's Arabic-language files were said to contain the detailed plan of a series of future terrorist acts, including the 1993 WTC bombing. But the FBI was not interested in having these documents translated; it simply put them into storage and ignored them until it was too late. This vital evidence, according to our authors, "entered a black hole."

Sheikh Abdel Rahman, known to Kean-Hamilton commission devo1:ees as the blind Sheikh, was a known terrorist, a friend of the CIA's favorite Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and of Osama Bin Laden. He had been placed under house arrest in Egypt. Nevertheless, he was allowed to enter the U.S., coming from Sudan. In the light of the subsequent demonization of the blind Sheikh as one of the key terrorist plotters of the 1990s, we are entitled to ask why he was allowed to come to the us in the first place. The preferred answer: "Abdel Rahman's visa was signed by a CIA officer stationed at the Sudanese consulate, and one theory advanced by FBI agents is that the Agency sponsored his immigration. The CIA, in that scenario, may have wanted to nurture its ties to the Egyptian fundamentalists in order to avoid a replay of Iran in 1979, when the overthrow of the Shah left U.S. intelligence out in the cold. Another theory was that the officer had 'gone bad."' (Cell 54) More likely, the CIA or the moles within it simply wanted to use the Sheikh for terror operations against Egypt and/or the U.S.. As for the Shah, he was deliberately overthrown by the U.S. in the framework of Brzezinski's Islamic fundamentalism strategy, with the CIA as an active participant. (See Dreyfus)

The key wrecker in this episode seems to be one Carson Dunbar, an FBI manager working in the FBI National Security Division who oversaw the activities of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City. Salem's two controllers were Louie Napoli and John Anticev, who reported to Dunbar. Even though Salem was supposedly providing good information, Dunbar "was reluctant to trust too much" in him. (Cell 70-71) Salem for his part did not want to wear a wire when talking to his terrorist confreres, since that would mean he would have to testify in court, which would put an end to his career as an infiltrator. Dunbar increasingly insisted that Salem wear a wire, and Salem kept refusing. This then led to the alleged "firing" of Salem as an FBI informant by Napoli, acting under pressure from Dunbar. The cover story" "... many people in the Bureau, especially street agents, blamed Dunbar for dropping Salem." (Cell 75) A more sophisticated interpretation would be that Dunbar was deliberately wrecking the surveillance of the terror cell. Was Dunbar a mole?

When alleged terror planner Ramzi Yousef comes on the scene, the INS inspector at the airport suggests that he be locked up. But by some strange coincidence "there was not enough room in the INS lockup, so he was released with the promise that he would turn up at a hearing later." (Cell 77)

When the terrorists in the cell decide that they need training, they turn to Garrett Wilson, former Army Ranger who worked as a military police officer at a naval base near Philadelphia. Wilson was an agent of NCIS, meaning naval intelligence. The idea was now supposedly that while Wilson provided the training -- allegedly for Jihad in Bosnia, which matched U.S. government policy at the time -- the FBI could monitor the comings and goings of the terrorists, and track each one of them to his home and job. Dunbar once again attempted sabotage: "Dunbar was concerned that the Bureau was training potential terrorists, holy warriors who may not be breaking the law now, but who might one day turn the skills they were acquiring against the U.S. ... Dunbar ... was uncomfortable with the entire mission." (Cell 88) Because of these scruples, Dunbar was able to contrive an outcome in which the terrorist got their training, while the FBI was deprived of the promised harvest of valuable information. On a certain weekend in January 1993, about a month before the WTC bombing, the terrorists had all gathered on a farm near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The FBI had the place staked out and surrounded. All that was needed was the patience to wait until the terrorists got into their cars and drove off for home, and the FBI would know precisely where each of them lived and slept, making it possible to roll up the entire cell on demand. But at this critical moment, Dunbar decided that this was nothing but a waste of manpower. He called all the FBI agents back to New York, preventing them from tailing their suspects home. He also wanted to dump the entire investigation on the FBI's Newark office, washing his hands of it.

The JTTF was just a whisper away from the World Trade Center plot. But once more Dunbar lost patience with the operation ... At that point, JTTF's jihad investigation was effectively dead in the water, killed by an investigative stroke of the pen. ( Cell 91)


The way was now clear for the attack on the WTC a few weeks later. The FBI had thoroughly bungled the case:

There were very few strangers to law enforcement among the men who blew up the World Trade Center. Mohammed Salameh and Mahmoud Abouhalima had been collared by Eddie Norris's detectives after the Rabbi Kahane murder, but then let go under pressure from the NYPD brass. JTTF's people had surveilled a number of the other bombers at the shooting range in Calverton, even before the Kahane case. Emad Salem had become a trusted member of the group's larger circle, with close links to Abdel Rahman, Nosair, Abouhalima and el Gabrowny. He'd been in the thick of the original 'twelve Jewish locations' plot and a hair's breadth away from the actual World Trade Center bombers. Tommy Corrigan's colleagues had tailed several more of their associates to the training camp in Harrisburg just a few months ago. In fact, the last of the surveillances had run up until just a few weeks before the bombing, when one group seemed to be asking the other if they knew how to get detonators ... the two cases were both shut down based on a series of FBI management concerns that were more administrative than exigent. (Cell 98)


Thus far the coverup, which appears damning enough in its own way. But The Cell constitutes only a limited hangout, conceding incompetence in the hopes of obscuring real treason. The procedure is not a new one, having been outlined some four hundred years ago by Paolo Sarpi of Venetian intelligence, who perfected the technique of speaking well of someone while pretending to speak ill. The technique amounts to criticizing a valued asset because he beats his wife, while remaining silent on the fact that he is also a serial killer.

We get far closer to reality with the following article by Ralph Blumenthal from the New York Times which appeared on October 28, 1993:

Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast

Law enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an FBI supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings that Mr. Salem secretly made of his talk with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as being in a far better position than previously known to foil the February 26th bombings of New York's tallest towers.

Supervisor 'Messed It Up'

After the bombing, [Salem] resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed FBI supervisor who, he said, "came and messed it up."

"He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor.

"He requested to make me testify, and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder, and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that."


The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to FBI headquarters in Washington about the Bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.

Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him, "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York Office to go to Washington DC."

Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute Mr. Salem's account, but rather appears to agree with it, saying of the 'New York people': "well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed."


Salem was later given $1.5 million by the FBI to keep his mouth shut. This extraordinary article, and the transcripts upon which it is based, leave no doubt that a faction within the FBI was determined to have the first WTC bombing take place, aru:1 sabotaged any and all serious law enforcement efforts which non-witting FBI personnel and New York police undertook in good faith to try to avoid this disaster. FBI managers wanted a real bomb, and at the same time wrecked the surveillance operation that had been watching the terrorist cell. So far as is known, none of the FBI moles involved has ever been called to account. The Kean-Hamilton commission has nothing whatever to say about this "intelligence failure." In any sane society, the active participation of the FBI in the first WTC bomb plot conspiracy would have been the occasion for the breakup of this dysfunctional agency, or at the very least a thorough purge of the officials involved. The silence of the 9/11 commission on this matter is yet another indicator of its moral and conceptual bankruptcy.

OKLAHOMA CITY

The attack on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, and marked a definite escalation in the pattern of synthetic terrorism. Here many of the components of the 9/11 attacks were experimented with and tested, partly to gauge the degree to which the public would believe that the techniques being used were what the FBI claimed that they were. Local media coverage concurred that there had been more than one explosion at the Federal Building, and at first the national media attempted to suggest that a Middle East terror organization had been involved. Soon Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were arrested, and McVeigh in particular was subjected to a thorough demonization by the controlled corporate media. The casualties and building damage were attributed according to the official account to a single truck bomb containing some 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate transported in a Ryder van, and parked in front of the building. All reference to multiple explosions soon disappeared. Retired Brigadier General Benton Partin of the U.S. Air Force, an expert in explosives, including nuclear detonations, came forward with a convincing analysis showing that the official explanation was physically impossible, given what is known about the propagation of a shock wave through the atmosphere. Air, Partin stressed, is a very inefficient coupling mechanism when it comes to directing such a shock wave against heavily reinforced concrete beams and columns. Blast damage potential, according to his analysis, decreases more rapidly than an inverse function of the cube of the distance, so there was no way that a fertilizer bomb could have accounted for the extensive damage observed. Partin concluded:

"The Murrah Federal Building was not destroyed by one sole truck bomb. The major factor in its destruction appears to have been detonation of explosives carefully placed at four critical junctures on supporting columns within the building. The only possible reinforced concrete structural failure solely attributable to the truck bomb was the stripping out of the ceilings of the first and second floors in the 'pit' area behind columns B4 and By. Even this may have been caused by a demolition charge at column B3. It is truly unfortunate that a separate and independent bomb damage assessment was not made during the cleanup -- before the building was demolished on May 23 and hundreds of truck loads of debris were hauled away, smashed down, and covered with dirt behind a security fence .... All ambiguity with respect to the use of supplementing demolition charges and the type of truck used could be quickly resolved if the FBI were required to release the surveillance camera coverage of this terribly tragic event." ( http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCH ... IN/ok2.htm )

Soon after the explosion, Controlled Demolition Inc. was called in to destroy those parts of the building which had remained standing, and to speedily dispose of all the rubble of the building. This, of course, prefigures the blatant tampering with a crime scene which became the hallmark of Mayor Giuliani's approach to the World Trade Center.

We need have no illusions about Gen. Partin, who belonged to a dubious organization called the Rushmore Foundation, which occupied itself with working with and studying the right-wing militias that proliferated during the 1990s.



Partin made special reference to the problems posed by tampering with the crime scene in a July 30, 1995 letter to GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Here Partin wrote that "no government law enforcement agency should be permitted to demolish, smash, and bury evidence of a counterterrorism sting operation, sabotage, or terrorist attack without a thorough examination by an independent, technically competent agency. If an aircraft crashed because of a bomb, or a counterterrorism sting or an FAA controller error, the FAA would not be permitted to gather and bury the evidence. The National Transportation Safety Board would have been called in to conduct an investigation and where possibly every piece of debris would have been collected and arrayed to determine cause of failure." But nobody in power was willing to protect the crime scene or force the FBI to disgorge the evidence it had sequestered. The suggestible public had been given a spectacular example of how fragile steel-reinforced concrete buildings are supposed to be in the delusional world of synthetic terrorism, and the precedent of bringing in Controlled Demolition to destroy the evidence had also been established for all to see. These advances on the part of the terrorist controllers would become components in the future synthetic terrorism of 9/11.

Before leaving Oklahoma City, we should recall that the prevalent form of counter-gangs which were fielded during the 1990s by the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Britain was precisely these right wing militias. They were a widespread phenomenon during that decade but now, from the point of view of the controlled corporate media, they have simply disappeared. But such a large recruiting ground for trained manpower does not disappear from one decade to the next. Some of the case officers who directed the duped rank and file of the right-wing militias have doubtless found their way into the clandestine ops/special forces element which made its contribution to 9/11.

TWA 800

On July 17, 1996, TWA flight 800, a Boeing 747, crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 persons on board. Pierre Salinger, the former White House press secretary to President Kennedy and a former ABC newsman, soon came forward with the charge that the plane had been destroyed by a U.S. Navy missile which had gone astray. At a press conference in Paris, Salinger offered a 69-page document and a set of radar images to bolster his case. The FBI, Pentagon and federal air safety investigators simply rejected this theory, which spread through the Internet following the July 17, 1996 crash. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman James Hall called Salinger's allegations "irresponsible." Salinger claimed the 'missile' was fired during a "super- secret" U.S. Navy exercise off Long Island and was meant to target a Tomahawk missile, but hit Flight 800 instead when it "lost its lock on its original target." They alleged that the missile was either a kinetic energy missile or a continuous rod missile; the continuous rod missile would "slice through" the plane. Salinger alleged that witnesses monitoring secret Navy anti-terrorism exercises heard a male voice say, "Oh, my God, I just hit that plane." Salinger also asserted that two Russian satellites active above the scene of the disaster had recorded images showing a missile hitting the TWA aircraft. Salinger's personal stature makes it necessary to take his charges seriously, but this case has remained clouded by mystery. (CNN, March 13, 1997)

U.S. SPECIAL FORCES SERGEANT ALl MOHAMED: BIN LADEN'S PERSONAL ASSISTANT

The other detail about the 1993 WTC bombing which we need to know is that the bombers were in fact trained by the picaresque Sergeant Ali Mohammed of the United States Army Special Forces. At different stages of his colorful career, Mohamed worked, or seemed to work, for the Egyptian Army, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. Army Special Forces, the al Kifah Refugee Services Office, the Afghan mujaheddin and Osama Bin Laden.

Ali Mohamed was born in Egypt in 1952. He attended the Military Academy in Cairo and gained promotion in the Egyptian Special Forces and military intelligence, rising to the rank of major. In 1981 he came to train with the U.S. green berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. While still in Egypt, he had become associated with the blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, who was allegedly part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. It was four officers from Ali Mohamed's unit who carried out the October 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Ali Mohamed was attending courses in Fort Bragg at the time, and he was never implicated in the plot. But, supposedly because he was considered a sympathizer with the assassins, Ali Mohamed was obliged to resign his commission.

In 1984, Ali Mohamed began working as a security adviser for Egypt Air. He tried to go to work for the CIA, but after a short time on the job he was dumped for having unreported contacts with Hezbollah, and his name was placed on the State Department watch list. Despite this, he was nevertheless allowed to enter the U.S. in 1986. Ali Mohamed married an American woman who worked in Silicon Valley, and became an American citizen, despite his well-established terrorist links.

In 1986, Ali Mohamed enlisted in the U.S. Army Special Forces, despite still being on the watch list. He was recruited by Lt. Col. Steve Neely to give lectures on Islamic culture and politics to the anti- in Laden units being trained at Fort Bragg.

In 1987, Ali Mohamed told Lt. Col. Neely that he wanted to use a 30-day leave to go to Afghanistan, where guerrilla warfare was raging against the Soviet Red Army occupiers. This might have created a grave incident with the Soviets, and Lt. Col. Neely sent a report about Mohamed's plan to his superiors, who failed to intervene. When Mohamed came back from Afghanistan, he told Lt. Col. Neely that he had taken part in combat and had wiped out more than one Russian patrol. Neely composed a report on Mohamed's findings about the Soviet spetsatz special forces. Ali Mohamed left the army when his enlistment expired, but he remained in the reserves. Ali Mohamed was in the Fort Bragg 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) throughout this period. A retired special ops source has stated that particularly this unit involves a virtual lifetime, informal membership; "they never drop off the radar screen." From 1989 to 1992-93, Ali Mohamed gave paramilitary training in the New York City area to the "Islamic terror" clique convicted for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. It was he who trained Nosair, and he might also have been the source of the secret documents found in Nosair's apartment. (The Cell 140 ff) The training took place at an Islamist center in Brooklyn. According to the London Independent, a CIA internal review conducted in 1998 would reveal that the Agency was "partly culpable" for the WTC bomb of 1993.

Another of Sgt. Ali Mohamed's supervisors at Fort Bragg was Col. Norville de Atkine of the Fort Bragg Special Forces School, who later turned up as the co-author with anti- Moslem agitator Daniel Pipes - -appointed by Bush to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace -- in a 1995 piece entitled "Middle Eastern Studies: What Went Wrong" in Pipes' Middle East Quarterly.

Ali Mohamed now attempted once more to go to work for the CIA. Starting in 1990, he attempted to enter the FBI as a translator. During his interview process he told the FBI about a passport- forging operation run by Hamas, and became an FBI informant. Twice during the early 1990s, Ali Mohamed brought the person the corporate media today call Bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to the U.S. for fund-raising tours in California. The second tour came in 1995, exactly the time Zawahiri and his brother were beginning the mujahideen deployment into the Balkans under protection of corrupted networks within NATO. This channel became a key component of the NATO-run KLA guerrillas in Kosovo. Also in 1995, Ali Mohamed had applied for a security job in the high security area of a Department of Defense subcontractor near his home in Santa Clara, CA. He was interviewed three times by the Defense Security Service (DSS). Ali Mohamed's friend in Santa Clara, Abu El-Dahab, ran a phone patch communications link for the alleged "bin Laden Network" around the world.

In 1991, Ali Mohamed worked as a personal assistant to Osama Bin Laden, helping with security and other matters when Bin Laden moved his operation from Pakistan to Khartoum, Sudan. Ali Mohammed performed other services for Bin Laden. "In 1992, I conducted military and basic explosives training for al Qaeda in Afghanistan," Ali Mohamed told U.S. authorities in 1999. "I also conducted intelligence training for al Qaeda. I taught my trainees how to create cell structures that could be used for operations." (The Cell 145) Supposedly the FBI, in the person of agent John Zindt, got its first news of al Qaeda from an interview with Ali Mohamed in May 1993. Toward the end of the 1990s, the FBI would arrest Ali Mohamed as the prelude to putting him on the permanent payroll as an informer.

In 1993, Ali Mohamed, who was traveling in the company of an al Qaeda terrorist, was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP); the FBI intervened, with Ali Mohamed's FBI case officer asking the RCMP to release Mohamed. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, Ali Mohamed was "working with U.S. counter-terrorist agents, playing a double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993."

Patrick J. Fitzgerald who prosecuted Ali Mohamed twice as U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, told the 9/11 commission that Ali Mohamed was a top al Qaeda agent who "trained most of al Qaeda's top leadership" including "the persons 'who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade center bombing."

Ali Mohamed was put on trial in 2000 for his role in the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which the Washington establishment had rushed to blame on Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, in part because of their sophisticated coordination. Ali Mohamed was allowed to cop a plea bargain. As part of the deal, Mohamed revealed that he had trained the 1993 WTC bombers. According to a State Department summary of Ali Mohamed's testimony, he was ordered by the FBI in 1994 to fly from Kenya to New York, and he complied. He was debriefed by an FBI agent in the context of the upcoming trial of the blind Sheikh Abdel Rahman on charges stemming from the 1993 WTC attack. Mohamed stated: "I flew back to the United States, spoke to the FB1, but I didn't disclose everything that I knew."

After Ali Mohamed had been released by the RCMP on orders from the FBI, he flew to Nairobi, Kenya, where he photographed the U.S. Embassy. According to Mohamed's 2000 confession, "Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber." [3] Another cluster of attacks ascribed to Bin Laden was the bombings of U.S. East African embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

In the 9/11 commission's report we read: "As early as December, 1993, a team of al Qaeda operatives had begun casing targets in Nairobi for future attacks. It was led by Ali Mohamed, a former Egyptian army officer who had moved to the 1Jnited States in the mid-1980s, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and became an instructor at Fort Bragg. He had provided guidance and training to extremists at the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn, including some who were subsequently convicted in the February 1993 attack on the World trade Center." (68)

Since September 11th, many publicly available leads pointing to Bin Laden in fact draw on the corrupted investigation and trial results from the 1993 WTC and 1998 African embassy bombings, a timeframe in which Ali Mohamed was in repeated contact with the FBI and Department of Defense, and was permitted to operate in the modus operandi of an officially sanctioned rogue intelligence operative. Ali Mohamed must be considered one of the most successful double agents of the party of international terror ensconced in the U.S. government.

EGYPTAIR 990: THE DEBUT OF GLOBAL HAWK?

October 31, 1999 was Halloween, and this day was marked by the mysterious crash of Egyptair flight 990, a Boeing 767 bound from New York's JFK to Cairo. At a little before 2 AM, the plane abruptly descended from its normal altitude of 33,000 feet and, after some desperate maneuvers, crashed into the sea. The U.S. government, in the person of the National Transportation Safety Board, alleged that the plane had been deliberately crashed by Co-pilot Gameel al-Batouti. The U.S. case was built on the cockpit voice recorder, which, the NTSB claimed, had registered Batouti's Islamic prayer, "I rely on God," just before the plane started its dive, and again at several points on the way down. Batouti was thus accused of being the first Islamist suicide pilot of the current phase. The Egyptian government rejected this explanation, and demanded a more objective investigation.

Of this incident, the 9/11 commission writes: "In late 1999, a great deal of discussion took place in the media about the crash off the coast of Massachusetts of Egyptair Flight 990, a Boeing 767. The most plausible explanation that emerged was that one of the pilots had gone berserk, seized the controls, and flown the aircraft into the sea. After the 1999-2000 millennium alerts, when the nation had relaxed, Clarke held a meeting of his Counterterrorism Security Group devoted largely to the possibility of a possible [sic] airline hijacking by al Qaeda." (345) Clarke, as we see, was always anxious to build up the reputation of al Qaeda in the U.S. government. The 9/11 commission also does not mention that this flight carried a group of Egyptian military officers who had just been trained in the United States to fly Apache helicopters, despite strenuous objections on the part of the government of Israel. (von Bulow 207 ff; 264 n. 204)

This case became widely known because of an article by William Langewiesche in the Atlantic Monthly which was published shortly after 9/11 ("The Crash of Egyptair 990," November 2001). According to Langewiesche, the supposed "suicide bomber" was a 60-year old bon vivant three months away from his retirement. He was married and had five children, one of whom was a girl who suffered from lupus but who had been receiving successful treatment in Los Angeles. Batouti had a comfortable home in Cairo and a vacation home by the Mediterranean. He was carrying with him an automobile tire he had bought in New Jersey the day before, and had a number of Viagra samples to distribute to his friends as gifts. Any attempt to depict this man as a suicide pilot is destined to shipwreck on the shoals of absurdity.

According to Langewiesche's tendentious account, at 1:48 the flight's pilot, Captain Habashi, went to the bathroom, leaving Batouti alone at the controls. At 1:48:30 an unintelligible sound was recorded on the CVR, which he claims was "control it" or "hydraulic." The word was probably in English, with three syllables, and the accent was on the second syllable. What this might mean remains a mystery. Then Batouti repeated four times as the aircraft descended: "I rely on God."

Absolutely no Cockpit Voice Recorders from 9/11 have ever been made available in full to the general public or to researchers; the FBI and the government obviously have a great deal to hide. If those CVRs could speak, they might sound something like this dialogue:

Habashi: What's happening? What's happening?

Batouti: I rely on God. I rely on God.

Habashi: What's happening, Gameel? What's happening?

Habashi: What is this? What is this? Did you shut the engines?

Habashi: Get away in the engines! ...shut the engines!

Batouti: It's shut.

Habashi: Pull! Pull with me! Pull with me! Pull with me!

[Silence]


Perhaps Egyptair 990 was no longer under the control of its pilots, but was now being remotely controlled by the U.S. Force's Global Hawk system, the same technology used to guide the Predator drone used in Afghanistan about which Richard Clarke had so much to say at the 9/11 commission in Apri1 2004. Perhaps Egyptair 990 was the Boeing 767 chosen for the dress rehearsal for 9/11. In the light of subsequent events, this hypothesis is far more credible than the absurd explanation espoused by the NTSB and its minion, Langewiesche.

It was later found from the Flight Data Recorder that the elevators on the tail were split, with one in position to lower the nose of the plane, and the other positioned to raise it. "The ailerons on both wings had assumed a strange upswept position, normally never seen on an airplane." (46) These anomalies did not interest the NTSB, which had espoused the "suicide pilot" thesis.

The Egyptian representatives at the NTSB proceedings pointed out that when Batouti idled the engines, it was to keep from gaining speed as the plane had begun its dive. When he cut the engines, Batouti was carrying out the prescribed restart procedure, because he erroneously believed -- based on the low oil pressure warning light that was flashing in the cockpit -- that the engines had flamed out. Habashi was apparently under the same impression. When Habashi called on him to pull, Batouti did so, as the FDR showed. Despite so much uncertainty, the U.S. government arrogantly pushed forward with its own improbable version of the event -- Vice President Al Gore reportedly angered Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during his state visit to Washington by making a crack about "the suicide flight." The reality may have been the debut of Global Hawk as a system for synthetic terrorism.

Tarek Selim, the chief pilot of Egypt Air, told a British reporter that the plane was going so fast that it must somehow have lost its tail assembly. Selim called the FBI's theory that one of the pilots had deliberately crashed the plane in a suicide action as "ridiculous" and "nonsense." Selim's view was that the Egyptian aircraft "had been brought down by either a bomb or a missile that hit the plane's tail." (Al-Ahram Weekly, The Guardian, November 26, 1999)

As for Langewiesche, the primitive level of his propaganda style can be seen in the passage in which he attempts to win his readers' gullible devotion for the NTSB. According to its apologist Langewiesche, the NTSB is shielded from the political currents of Washington; it "represents the most progressive American thinking on the role and character of good government " (44) Langewiesche goes on: "In part because the NTSB seems so lean, and in part because by its very definition it advocates for the 'right' causes, it receives almost universally positive press coverage. The NTSB is technocratic. It is clean. It is Government Lite." (44) Egypt Air, by contrast, is portrayed as a sinister enterprise, operating out of Stalinist-style office buildings, which refuses to be privatized. Our reporter's lack of impartiality could hardly be more evident. Of course, the specialty of the NTSB in the 1990s was to run interference for the asset-strippers and corporate wreckers who had taken over the freight railways of this country with every intention of running them into the ground while extracting the maximum of loot from the deteriorating fixed capital. They did this by ruling that trainwrecks were human error, and not the fault of the railroads. One such case was the February 17, 1996 crash of a freight train with a local commuter train on the Chesapeake and Ohio tracks near Silver Spring, Maryland. Eleven persons were killed and 24 were injured when an Amtrak train collided with a Maryland Rail Commuter (MARC) train. The cause of the crash was clearly the railroad's lack of upkeep on the signal system, but the NTSB ruled that the cause was human error -on the part of the engineer who was dead. The NTSB is mandated by law to provide a timely accident investigation for all fatal transportation mishaps in the U.S. or involving U.S. carriers abroad; so far the NTSB has failed to report on the four plane crashes believed to have occurred on 9/11. Perhaps it is not so well insulated from dirty Washington politics as it would like to make people think. Langewiesche established his credentials for dishonesty so well in this article that he was immediately assigned to cover the WTC crime scene, where he managed to write 200 pages without saying anything about the illegal removal of evidence in a criminal case that was going on all around him, as we will soon see.

AMERICAN 587

Two months after 9/11, American Airlines Flight 587 -- an Airbus 300-600 -- left John F. Kennedy International Airport en route to the Dominican Republic. Less than three minutes after takeoff, the aircraft crashed in a blazing inferno in the heart of a Queens neighborhood. All 265 people aboard perished. According to the NTSB, the tail fin and rudder of the plane sheared off as it accelerated. This was the second deadliest crash in U.S. history, but it also "was the first example where we had an in-flight failure of a major structural component of an aircraft that in fact was made of composite materials," said National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairwoman Marion Blakey.

In the case of American Airlines Flight 587, federal officials seemed interested in avoiding the question of terrorism, and so they released detailed information about the cockpit voice recorder within less than 36 hours. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001) While this crash also remains very suspicious, and exhibits some technical parallels to Egyptair 890, it appears impossible to come to a definite conclusion at this time as to what causes were involved.

_______________

Notes:

3. Peter Dale Scott, "9/11 Commission Misses FBI's Embarrassing al Qaeda Dealings," http://www.dissidentvoice.org , June 27, 2004.
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