Notes:1. On the idea of moral principles common to all traditions, see Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), and Gene Outka and John P. Reeder Jr., eds., Prospects for a Common Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). This idea of a common morality presupposes moral realism, according to which some basic moral principles exist in the nature of things. I have defended moral realism in “Morality and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts,” in Philosophy of Religion in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Eugene Thomas Long, ed. Jeremiah Hackett and Jerald Wallulis (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publications, 2004), 81-104, and in “Theism and the Crisis in Moral Theory: Rethinking Modern Autonomy,” in Nature, Truth, and Value: Explaining the Thought of Frederick Ferré, ed. George Allan and Merle Allshouse (Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2005).
2. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 30, 218-19.
3. Krauthammer’s statement is quoted in Emily Eakin, “All Roads Lead To D.C.,” New York Times, Week In Review, March 31, 2002.
4. Charles Krauthammer, “The Bush Doctrine,” Time, March 5, 2001, quoted in Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Henry Holt [Metropolitan Books], 2004), 68.
5. Robert Kagan, “The Benevolent Empire,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1998: 24-35.
6. Dinesh D’Souza, “In Praise of an American Empire,” Christian Science Monitor, April 26, 2002.
7. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Era,” in Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., The Imperial Tense: Prospects and Problems of American Empire (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 47-65, at 59. This track record, he says, proves that “the United States is not an imperial power with a desire to rule other countries.”
8. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Henry Holt [Metropolitan Books], 2003). As shown by this and many of Chomsky’s previous books--one of which is titled Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992 [2nd ed.])--his reading of America’s “track record” is very different from Krauthammer’s.
9. Richard Falk, “Will the Empire Be Fascist?” Global Dialogues, 2003; “Resisting the Global Domination Project: An Interview with Prof. Richard Falk,” Frontline, 20/8 (April 12-25, 2003).
10. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 33, 4.
11. In light of the fact that the present lecture was delivered at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (April 18, 2005), I should point out that Bacevich discusses two left-leaning historians from whose analysis of US foreign policy he has benefited, Charles Beard and William Appleton Williams, and that Williams studied at Madison (where Beard exerted great influence) and then began teaching there in 1957, becoming the founding father of what historians have dubbed the “Wisconsin school” (see Bacevich, American Empire, 3-31).
12. Bacevich, American Empire, 7, 46.
13. Ibid., 133, 52.
14. See Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival, his 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories, 2001), and his Foreword to Phyllis Bennis, Before and After: US Foreign Policy and the September 11th Crisis (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2003); for Rahul Mahajan, see The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003) and Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); for Johnson, see The Sorrows of Empire.
15. See
www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=855. This information, however, was evidently not considered news fit to print by the New York Times and other mainstream sources. Also generally unknown is the fact that already in 2002, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, believing that Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney had charged that the Bush administration had foreknowledge of the attacks, conducted a poll that asked its readers if they were “satisfied the Bush administration had no advance warning of the September 11 attacks.” Surprisingly, 46 percent of the respondents said “No, I think officials knew it was coming.” See “Poll Shocker: Nearly Half Support McKinney's 9/11 Conspiracy Theory,” Newsmax, Wednesday, April 17, 2002 (
www.newsmax.com/showinside.shtml?a=2002/4/17/144136). I discussed the McKinney episode in The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2004), 161-64, 242-44nn.
16. On the Canadian poll, see the Toronto Star, May 26, 2004. On the German poll, see Ian Johnson, “Conspiracy Theories about Sept. 11 Get Hearing in Germany,” Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2003.
17. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
18. This interpretation is given in the most extreme, simplistic, and misleading terms in David Frum and Richard Perle, An End of Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2003). To mention Frum and Perle as publicly endorsing the official view of the 9/11 attacks does not, of course, imply that they actually hold this view.
19. I quoted this statement in The New Pearl Harbor (henceforth cited as NPH), 69.
20. This statement is contained in the summary of the final report of the Joint Inquiry conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees, posted at
http://intelligence.senate.gov/press.htm under December 11, 2002; it is quoted in NPH, 69.
21. See The Alex Jones Show, Oct. 10, 2001; “David Schippers Goes Public: The FBI Was Warned,” Indianapolis Star, Oct. 13, 2001; and “Active FBI Special Agent Files Complaint Concerning Obstructed FBI Anti-Terrorist Investigations,” Judicial Watch, Nov. 14, 2001.
22. William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” The New American 18/5 (March 11, 2002).
23. The San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 29, 2001. The 9/11 Commission tried to scotch these suspicions. Its most important claim is that it found that 95 percent of the puts for United Airlines were purchased by “[a] single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda” (The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, Authorized Edition [New York: W. W. Norton, 2004], 499 note 130). But this argument is viciously circular. What is at issue is whether people other than al Qaeda knew about the attacks in advance, perhaps because they had helped plan them. But the Commission simply assumes that al Qaeda and only al Qaeda planned and knew about the attacks. Accordingly, runs the Commission’s logic, if the investors who purchased the put options in question had no ties with al Qaeda, they could not possibly have had insider knowledge. They were simply lucky.
24. UPI, Feb. 13, 2001; Michael Ruppert, “Suppressed Details of Criminal Insider Trading Lead Directly into the CIA’s Highest Ranks,” From the Wilderness Publications (
www.fromthewilderness.com), Oct. 9, 2001.
25. William Norman Grigg, “Did We Know What Was Coming?” The New American (
www.thenewamerican.com) 18/5: March 11, 2002.
26. Major Mike Snyder, a NORAD spokesman, was quoted right after 9/11 as saying that interceptions are carried out “routinely”; see Glen Johnson, “Otis Fighter Jets Scrambled Too Late to Halt the Attacks,” Boston Globe, Sept. 15, 2001 (
http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Arc ... tion=print). With regard to the figure of about 100 times a year, the FAA has reported that there were 67 interceptions between September 2000 and June 2001 (FAA News Release, August 9, 2002, cited in William Thomas, “Pentagon Says 9/11 Interceptors Flew: Too Far, Too Slow, Too Late,” in Jim Marrs, Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies [San Rafael: Origin Press, 2004], 145-49).
27. This “fact” in the cover story of the March 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, “9/11: Debunking Myths,” is typical of the quality of research provided by its “senior researcher,” 25-year old Benjamin Chertoff, cousin of Michael Chertoff, the new head of the Department of Homeland Security (see Christopher Bollyn, “Ben Chertoff of Popular Mechanics: Cousin of Homeland Security Director, Michael Chertoff,”
www.911wasalie.com/phpwebsite/index.php ... PAGE_id=33). Young Chertoff’s debunking article, published shortly after a coup at this Hearst-owned magazine in which the editor-in-chief was replaced (see Christopher Bollyn, “The Hidden Hand of the C.I.A. and the 9/11 Propaganda of Popular Mechanics,”
www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/members/f ... ?bem=67011), has itself been effectively debunked by many genuine 9/11 researchers. See, for example, Jim Hoffman, “Popular Mechanics’ Deceptive Smear Against 9/11 Truth,”
http://911review.com/pm/markup/index.html, and Peter Meyer, “Reply to Popular Mechanics re 9/11,”
www.serendipity.li/wot/pop_mech/reply_t ... hanics.htm. To be sure, these articles by Hoffman and Meyer, while agreeing on many points, take different approaches in response to some of the issues raised in Chertoff’s article. But both articles demonstrate--in their distinctive points as well as the points they have in common--that Popular Mechanics owes its readers an apology for publishing such a massively flawed article on such an important subject. (As a professor, I would give it a D-, unless, of course, it had been written for a class in the art of composing effective propaganda, in which case a grade of B- would be assigned--nothing higher because its distortions and outright falsehoods can be so easily exposed by anyone knowing much about the topic.)
28. See David Ray Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton: Olive Branch [Interlink Books], 2005), 141-43 (this book is henceforth cited as 9/11CROD).
29. See 9/11CROD, 143-51.
30. My accounts of the Report’s lies aimed at defending the US military’s behavior, which I cannot even begin to summarize here, fill Chapters 12-16 of 9/11CROD.
31. 9/11CROD, 159-64.
32. Thierry Meyssan, Pentagate (London: Carnot, 2002), 115, quoting “PAVE PAWS, Watching North America’s Skies, 24 Hours a Day” (
www.pavepaws.org).
33. Thierry Meyssan, 9:11: The Big Lie (London: Carnot, 2002), 112, 116.
34. For my discussion of these problems in the official story, see either Chapter 2 and the Afterword of NPH (updated edition) or Chapter 3 of 9/11CROD. Confirmation from the Department of Justice that such videos (from the Citgo Gas Station and the Sheraton Hotel near the Pentagon) do exist is provided at
http://www.flight77.info/pics/2.jpg.
35. For discussion of these features of the collapses, see NPH, Chapter 1 and the Afterword (updated edition), or 9/11CROD, Chapter 2.
36. See NPH, 20, 177; 9/11CROD, 30.
37. The 9/11 Commission Report (see note 23, above), 541 note 1.
38. See NPH 20-23 or 9/11CROD 28-32.
39. “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times,” New York Times, October 12, 2001. Condoleezza Rice made a very similar comment, which is quoted in Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 229. Also The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published September 2002, frankly said on page 28: “The events of September 11, 2001 opened vast, new opportunities” (
www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html).
40. David North, “America’s Drive for World Domination,” in Bacevich, ed., The Imperial Tense, 66-77, at 66.
41. This document, which was signed in February 1997 by then USAF Commander in Chief Howell M. Estes III, was at one time available at
www.spacecom.af.mil/usspace. This website is, however, no longer functional. Also, although the US military has a website devoted to “Joint Vision Historical Documents” (
www.dtic.mil/jointvision/history.htm), the February 1997 document is not included. There is a document from May of that year entitled “Concept for Future Joint Operations,” which is subtitled “Expanding Joint Vision 2010.” The website also has that previous document (Joint Vision 2010), which was published during the tenure of General John Shalikashvili as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1993 to 1997). But it as if the document from February 1997 never existed; perhaps it was later deemed too candid. However, at this writing it could still be found on the website of Peace Action Maine (
http://www.peaceactionme.org/v-intro.html). And it was discussed in Jack Hitt, “The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space,” The New York Times Magazine, August 5, 2001.
42. Air Force Space Command, “Strategic Master Plan FY06 and Beyond,” October 1, 2003 (
www.peterson.af.mil/hqafspc/Library/Library.asp).
43. Quoted in Hitt, “The Next Battlefield May Be in Outer Space.”
44. The Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (
www.newamericancentury.org).
45. Ibid., 51.
46. This according to the Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2002.
47. Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon Attack (
www.defenselink.mil/cgi-bin/dlprint.cgi), quoted in The New Pearl Harbor, 100.
48. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 24-25.
49. Ibid., 212; cf. 35-36.
50. See NPH 89-92 or 9/11CROD 122-28.
51. See NPH 92-95 or 9/11CROD 129-34.
52. Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 14.
53. Fair-minded people will, of course, wait until I have actually published this proposal, with my explanations of what I mean--and do not mean--by “global democracy” and why I believe it to be necessary, before they proceed to offer criticisms of it.