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 9:04 am

CHAPTER VIII: SHANKSVILLE

United 93 took off from Newark Airport at 8:42 after a 40-minute delay. It left the ground just as the hijacking of United 175 out of Boston was becoming known to the FAA. The airplane headed west, and its hijacking became known at 9:36. At this point United 93 turned off its transponder and headed back towards the east. Again, the moment the transponder channel ceased to operate is the likely moment when Global Hawk or some other system of remote control assumed control of the aircraft.

Around this time, Bush and Cheney were discussing the need to authorize shoot-downs of civilian airliners by the pilots in the Combat Air Patrols the Air Force was now straining to deploy. Clarke told the teleconference of key agencies: "Three decisions. One, the President has ordered the use of force against aircraft deemed to be hostile. Two, the White House is also requesting fighter escort of Air Force One. Three, and this applies to all agencies, we are initiating COG. Please activate your alternate command center and move staff to them immediately." (Bamford 200466) COG was continuity in government, the centerpiece of the long-standing machinery for emergency rule from bunker complexes which had been developed over the years, including with the help of figures like Oliver North and Buster Horton. Clarke spoke at around 9:55 AM.

Soon after, the authorization to open fire on hijacked aircraft that refused to obey the instructions of interceptor jets passed down the chain of command. Bamford, with access to interviews with 9/11 insiders, portrays this moment: "Sitting in the glassed-in Battle Cab of NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Operations Center [NEADS] at Rome, New York, Air Force Colonel Robert Marr received the call. Then he sen1: out word to air traffic controllers to instruct fighter pilots to destroy the United jetliner and any other threatening passenger plane. 'United Airlines flight 93 will not be allowed to reach Washington DC,' said Marr. Maj. Daniel Nash, the F-15 pilot from Cape Cod, heard the message while patrolling over Manhattan. 'The New York controller did come over the radio and say if we have another hijacked plane we're going to have to shoot it down,' he said. 'From where we were sitting, you could see there were people dying and it had to stop. So if that's what it's going to take, that was our job. We would have done it." (Bamford 2004 66)

So what was the U.S. air defense posture over southern Pennsylvania at about 10 a.m. -- 74 minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and about a half-hour after air traffic controllers and United started to suspect that Flight 93 had been hijacked? The 9/11 commission claimed that NORAD pilots never got a shoot-down order in time to impact the course of United 93: "The Vice President was mistaken in his belief that shootdown authorization had been passed to the pilots flying at NORAD's direction." (44) According to the commission, the first fighters to operate under a shootdown order were fighters of the 133th Wing of the District of Columbia Air National Guard, operating from Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, and responding to a direct appeal from the Secret Service. The first of these fighters, the 9/11 commission says, took off at 10:38, and then established a Combat Air Patrol over the capital by 10:45. At 9:55, the Page 237 Secret Service ordered all pilots to defend the White House at all costs. Around this time also, Cheney had his ambiguous exchanges with the "young man" who kept asking him whether his orders stood as a plane approached Washington DC. The young man told Cheney that Air Force fighters were close to the hijacked plane.

CBS reported before 10:06 -- just as the flight of United 93 was ending -- that two F-16s were on the tail of United 93. (AP, September 13,2001; Nashua Telegraph, September 13, 2001) Some time later, an Air Traffic Controller working for the FAA, ignoring the blanket ban imposed on public statements by government officials with inside knowledge of the 9/11 events, said that an F- 6 had closely followed United 93, even making 360 degree turns to stay in close range of the airliner. The federal flight controller said the F- 16 was "in hot pursuit" of the hijacked United jet. "He must have seen the whole thing," an unnamed aviation official said. (Independent, August 13, 2002; CBS News)

According to a Reuters report dated September 13, 2001 the FBI was at that point refusing to rule out that Flight 93 was shot down by a U.S. fighter jet before it crashed in Pennsylvania. Citing indications that this plane was indeed shot down, this report stated: "Pennsylvania state police officials said on Thursday [September 13] debris from the plane had been found up to 8 miles away [from the crash site] in a residential community where local media have quoted residents as speaking of a second plane in the area and burning debris falling from the sky." Finding debris so far from the crash site indicates that the aircraft was disintegrating well before it hit the ground, as would be the case if it had been shot down. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on September 12 that among debris found miles from the crash site were "clothing, books, papers and what appeared to be human remains."

Shortly after the crash, rumors began circulating in the local community that United 93 had been shot down by a U.S. fighter jet, but had no authoritative confirmation. The news desk at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was contacted September 22 by the Idaho Observer. The editor confirmed the news release and stood by the information contained in it. The editor also said that, although the FBI later changed its story, "The FBI confirmed to us that the debris came from that airliner!" (The Idaho Observer, October 2001)

Rumsfeld, the FBI, and NORAD soon united on a common line: United 93 had not been shot down. The Bush administration was transparently eager to avoid the opprobrium of having shot down a commercial airliner carrying American citizens; this would have exposed the regime as impotent to defend the lives of its own citizens, but able to kill some of those citizens to protect top oligarchs in the White House and other Washington buildings. This would have led to an outcry from the victims' families far beyond anything that was in fact observed.

The other complicating factor was that United 93 appeared to have been the scene of a partially successful US citizens' counterattack against the shadowy enemy, on a day which otherwise offered only stories of US incompetence, bungling, and abject defeat. This was the version of events which was developed around a cell phone call made around 9:45 EDT by United 93 passenger Todd Beamer to Lisa Jefferson of the GTE Airfone Customer Care Center in Oakbrook, Illinois near Chicago. This call lasted slightly more than 15 minutes, according to published accounts. It was towards the end of this conversation that Todd Beamer told Lisa Jefferson that he and a group of other passengers had decided to storm the cockpit and overpower the hijackers. Todd asked Lisa to recite the Lord's prayer with him, and then he pronounced the famous words: "Let's roll!" (Beamer 216) "Let's roll!" became the symbol of the resistance of the American people against terrorist fanatics and murderers.

Todd Beamer had been on the phone with Lisa Jefferson, and not with his own wife, Lisa Beamer. According to her account, Jefferson had offered to put the call through to Lisa Beamer, but Todd had, strangely enough, declined. It was from Ms. Jefferson that Mrs. Beamer obtained the story which made her husband and herself famous. Ms. Beamer soon appeared on Good Morning America, Primetime, NBC Dateline, CNN's Larry King Live, and other television programs. She was then invited to attend Bush's address to the joint session of Congress, where she sat next to Joyce Rumsfeld, the wife of the Pentagon boss. Early in his speech, Bush intoned:

In the normal course of events, presidents come to this chamber to report on the state of the union. Tonight, no such report is needed. It has already been delivered by the American people. We have seen it in the courage of passengers who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground. Passengers like an exceptional man named Todd Beamer. And would you please help me to welcome his wife, Lisa Beamer, here tonight?"


As Ms. Beamer retells it, "The room erupted in applause The entire Congress of the United States of America rose to its feet in one motion, so almost instinctively, I rose as well. The Congress applauded and applauded, and it was the most humbling experience of my life to know that they were applauding me, in an indirect effort to express their appreciation to Todd and the other heroes aboard Flight 93. I was overwhelmed." (Beamer 247-248)

With that, the reality of United 93 had been eclipsed by the propaganda needs of the Bush machine. The "Let's roll!" story originally had the passengers breaking into the cockpit and struggling for the controls with the hijackers, resulting in the crash. Later, during 2003, the FBI backed away from this story and fell back on a second version which described the hijackers deciding to crash the plane into the ground as passengers were about to force their way into the cockpit. The FBI has never let the general public have a transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder, which apparently survived. The FBI has played that CVR tape to a gathering of the United 93 victims' families, but only after swearing them to secrecy. Finally, small portions of the tape were played during the 9/1 1 commission hearings in the spring of 2004.

The official story has evolved over time. As CNN noted just before the release of the 9/11 commission report in late July 2004: "In the weeks and months after the attacks, there were reports that officials believed passengers had overtaken the plane, forcing it to crash in the field in Pennsylvania. However, last year, officials began backing away from that theory. [The 9/11 commission report] gives no indication that passengers ever broke through the cockpit door, but it makes clear that passengers' actions thwarted the plans of the terrorists." ( http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/07/22/91 ... index.html )

The "Let's roll!" story, despite some doubts about the technical feasibility of the in-flight cell phone call to Lisa Jefferson, may be real. It certainly does appear that the passengers were about to take back the plane. It also appears that Global Hawk, or whatever the system of remote control was which was supposed to take control of United 93, had malfunctioned in the case of this flight. The pilot and co-pilot had reportedly been killed, but on board United 93 were Donald F. Greene, who was an experienced pilot of an amphibious, single-engined, four-seater private plane, which he used to fly from his home near Greenwich, Connecticut to northern Maine. There was also Andrew Garcia, a former Air Traffic Controller with the California National Guard. (Longman 182) These two, with much assistance from Air Traffic Controllers and other personnel, might well have been able to land the aircraft. But this would have posed immense problems for the entire official 9/11 story. An aircraft safely landed meant, in all probability, living hijackers who could have been interrogated. What would their cover story have been? What would they have revealed about their own intentions and their own understanding of what they were doing? Would their testimony have exploded the official version? And what if there simply were no hijackers on board? The official version would fall to the ground. It was a risk that the terrorist controllers could not afford to run. And then again, there was the aircraft. Would a forensic examination have revealed the presence of Global Hawk, defective or otherwise, or of some other remote control guidance system? Would the FBI have succeeded in destroying this evidence as well? Despite the prolific capabilities of the FBI in destroying evidence, this might have been beyond their powers. These considerations point, along with abundant physical evidence and a large portion of the eyewitness accounts, towards the conclusion that United 93 was shot down to destroy evidence and silence suspects and witnesses forever.

UA93 was identified as a hijack at 9:16 AM. At 9:24, NORAD ordered three F-16s from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to scramble. They were airborne at 9:30. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz confirmed a few days later on TV that "we were already tracking that plane that crashed in Pennsylvania." At 9:35 AM, three F-16s were ordered to "protect the White House at all costs" when it turned towards the capital. At 10:06 AM. it crashed at Shanksville, just minutes' flying time from Washington at full throttle.

Based on the plane's easterly course, the official consensus view was that Flight 93 was headed toward Washington for a strike on the White House or the Capitol. The 9/11 commission has endorsed this notion. But in 2002, the London Times, quoting U.S. intelligence sources and noting the plane's low altitude and erratic course, suggested that the real target might have been a nearby nuclear power plant. The Three Mile Island plant, near Harrisburg, was about than 10 or 15 minutes' flying time away. An attack on a nuclear reactor might have caused severe disruptions, although it should also be stressed that the protective shell of a US nuclear reactor is designed to protect the vessel by resisting the impact of a crashing airliner. Oliver North told Fox News that he thought Flight 93 was headed towards Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, where the national emergency military command center is located.

At approximately 9:58 AM, roughly eight minutes before impact, a 911 emergency dispatcher in neighboring Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, took a call from a distraught passenger, Edward Felt, who said he had locked himself in the bathroom of Flight 93, and reported that the plane had been hijacked. The caller said there had been an explosion aboard the plane and that he could see white smoke. Authorities have never been able to explain this report, and the 911 tape itself was immediately confiscated by the inevitable FBI. In addition, the supervisor who took the call has been gagged by the FBI. The FBI evidently has not made the full recording of this call public, despite their evident desire to discredit this report. Cell phone calls from the passengers all stopped about 9:58 AM -- roughly the same time that the caller to 911 in Westmoreland County stated there had been an explosion. The plane didn't come down until 10;06 -- leaving an 8-minute gap of unexplained flying time, and thus a great mystery. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001)

PHYSICAL EVIDENCE

The former mine where the plane crashed is composed of very soft soil, and searchers said that much of the wreckage was found buried 20-25 feet below the large crater. But despite that, there was also widely scattered debris in the immediate vicinity and also some much farther away. Considerable debris washed up more than two miles away at Indian Lake, and a canceled check and brokerage statement from the plane was found in a deep valley some eight miles away later that week.

The official version insists the plane exploded on impact, yet a one-ton section of the engine was found over a mile away and other light debris was found scattered over eight miles away. This account is confirmed by a number of media accounts. Some of the details may vary -- at least one version has a half-ton piece of jet engine being found over a mile away -- but most accounts converge on concentrations of debris two, three, and eight miles away. Needless to say, this indicates that the end of United 93 was caused by an explosion within the aircraft or a missile -- almost certainly fired by the US Force pursuant to an order from Bush and Cheney -- rather than a crash provoked by an altercation between passengers and hijackers in the cockpit, or as a result of a desperate decision by the hijackers to dive the plane into the ground because they feared that the seizure of the cockpit by passengers was imminent. The FBI has tried to account for the widely scattered debris by citing the wind. As we read in Jere Longman's rendering of the official version: "Debris was found as far as eight miles from the crash of flight 93, in a southeast direction, but this airborne material had traveled from the crater in the direction of the prevailing wind." But this only makes sense if the plane had broken up in mid-air, which is exactly the conclusion which the FBI was seeking to disprove. While the FBI has asserted the plane was largely obliterated by the roughly 500 mph impact, they also conceded that an engine -- or at least a 1,000-pound fragment of one -- was found "a considerable distance" from the main impact crater. That information further buttresses the shoot-down theory, since a heat-seeking, air-to-air Sidewinder missile from an F-16 would likely have impacted one of the Boeing 757's two large engines.

The mayor of Shanksville, Ernie Stull, changed his story several times after giving interviews to reporters and investigators. (Wisnewski 2003 197-198; Spiegel, September 8, 2003) But one of his first comments after the demise of United 93 was that he knew of two people who had heard a missile. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001) The presence of debris at Indian Lake, between 1.5 and 2 miles away, also supports the theory that there had been a mid-air explosion of some kind before United 93 hit the ground. Debris rained down on the lake; this is almost impossible to account for if the plane had actually been intact when it hit the ground. "It was mainly mail, bits of in-flight magazine and scraps of seat cloth," according to witness Tom Spinelli." The authorities say it was blown here by the wind. " But there was only a 10 mile per hour breeze and you were a mile and a half away?" Light debris was also found eight miles away in New Baltimore. The FBI said the impact bounced it there. But the few pieces of surviving fuselage, in the words of local coroner Wallace Miller, were "no bigger than a carry-on bag."

EYEWITNESSES

Laura Temyer, who lives in Hooversville, several miles north of the crash site, was hanging some wash on the line outside when she heard an airplane pass overhead. That struck her as unusual since she had just heard on TV that all flights had been ordered grounded.

She told the Philadelphia Daily News: "I heard like a boom and the engine sounded funny. I heard two more booms -- and then I did not hear anything." Temyer's explanation for what she heard is this: "I think the plane was shot down." Temyer told a reporter she had twice told her story to the FBI. She also insists that people she knows in state law enforcement agreed with her story, namely that the plane was shot down and that decompression sucked objects from the aircraft, which would account for the wide debris field.

Nevin Lambert, a neighbor, had a different account. According to him, the plane seemed to be fully, or largely, intact. "I didn't see no smoke, nothing," said, this elderly farmer, who witnessed the crash from his side yard less than a half-mile away. Lambert added that he also later found a couple of pieces of debris, one, a piece of metal, less than 12 inches across, with some insulation attached. A caller to the Howard Stern Radio Show related the story of how he saw Flight 93 in flames while it was in the air and also saw two other aircraft circling it. (Howard Stern Show, April 21 2004)

OTHER AIRCRAFT

A minimum of six witnesses claimed to have seen a small military-type plane in the vicinity shortly before UA93 crashed. Some-spoke of a mysterious white jet which they had observed in the vicinity. The FBI stubbornly denied the presence of any other aircraft. The London Daily Mirror wondered later whether "in the moments before the airliner piled into the black, spongey earth at 575 miles per hour did an American fighter pilot have to do the unthinkable and shoot down a US civil airliner?"

Susan McElwain, 51, who lived two miles from the crash site, told a British reporter that she had seen a white aircraft pass directly over her head. 'It came right over me, I reckon just 40 or 50ft above my mini-van," she said. "It was so low I ducked instinctively. It was traveling real fast, but hardly made any sound. Then it disappeared behind some trees. A few seconds later I heard this great explosion and saw this fireball rise up over the trees, so I figured the jet had crashed. The ground really shook. So I dialed 911 and told them what happened. I'd heard nothing about the other attacks and it was only when I got home and saw the TV that I realized it wasn't the white jet, but Flight 93. I didn't think much more about it until the authorities started to say there had been no other plane. The plane I saw was heading right to the point where Flight 93 crashed and must have been there at the very moment it came down. There's no way I imagined this plane -- it was so low it was virtually on top of me. It was white with no markings but it was definitely military, it just had that look. It had two rear engines, a big fin on the back like a spoiler on the back of a car and with two upright fins at the side. I haven't found one like it on the internet. It definitely wasn't one of those executive jets. The FBI came and talked to me and said there was no plane around. Then they changed their story and tried to say it was a plane taking pictures of the crash 3,000 feet up. But I saw it and it was there before the crash and it was 40 feet above my head. They did not want my story -- nobody here did." (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Ms. McElwain, a special education teacher, refused to accept the official version of what she saw, in part because of a conversation she had several hours after the fact with the wife of friend of the family who is in the Air Force. According to McElwain, that friend "said her husband had called her that morning and said 'I can't talk, but we've just shot a plane down."' "I presumed they meant Flight 93.1 have no doubt those brave people on board tried to do something, but I don't believe what happened on the plane brought it down. If they shot it down, or something else happened, everyone, especially the victims' families, have a right to know." (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Lee Purbaugh, aged 32, was the sole person to see the final seconds of Flight 93 as it descended on the former strip-mining land at precisely 10.06 AM -- and he also saw the white jet. He was at his job at the Rollock Inc. scrapyard on a ridge overlooking the point of impact, less than half a mile away. "I heard this real loud noise coming over my head," he told a journalist of the London Daily Mirror. "I looked up and it was Flight 93, barely 50 feet above me. It was coming down in a 45 degree and rocking from side to side. Then the nose suddenly dipped and it just crashed into the ground. There was this big fireball and then a huge cloud of smoke." Lee Purbaugh also saw the mysterious other plane; "Yes, there was another plane. I didn't get a good look but it was white and it circled the area about twice and then it flew off over the horizon."

Tom Spinelli, 28, was working at India Lake Marina, a mile and a half away. "I saw the white plane," he reported. "It was flying around all over the place like it was looking for something. I saw it before and after the crash."

At 9:22 AM a sonic boom, almost certainly caused by supersonic f1ight, was registered up by a seismic monitoring station in southern Pennsylvania, 60 miles from Shanksville. (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Kathy Blades, who was in her small summer cottage with her son about a quarter-mile from the impact site, also reported seeing a white aircraft. Blades and her son ran outside after they heard the crash and saw the jet, which according to them had sleek back wings [sic] and an angled cockpit, race overhead. "My son said, 'I think we're under attack!"' Blades remembered.

A few days after the crash, the FBI tried to provide a plausible explanation for this embarrassing and mysterious white jet which the various witnesses had identified. The FBI now claimed that a private Falcon 20 jet bound for nearby Johnstown was in the vicinity and was asked by authorities to descend and help survey the crash site. But the authorities failed to provide the identity of the owner of the jet, and also could not justify why it was still flying some 40 minutes after the Federal Aviation Administration had ordered all planes to land at the nearest airport. "I think it was shot down," was the opinion of Dennis Mock, who did not see United 93 come down, but who lived closest to the crash site, immediately to the west of the crater. "That's what people around here think," he added. (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Even though United 93 had supposedly been flying at an altitude of less than 10,000 feet, there was no tail section, no jet engines, no large sections of fuselage in view anywhere near the impact crater. This can be compared to the crash scene at Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Here a Boeing 747 was destroyed by a bomb at an altitude of 30,000 feet. One whole side of the forward part of the plane and many other pieces were clearly identifiable as coming from a large commercial airliner. If there were a plane in Shanksville, it appeared to have disappeared into the ground -- as in the case of the Valujet which had crashed into the Everglades swamp in 1994. But the Pennsylvania countryside was not the Everglades. Here is the depiction of the last moments of United 93 from former New York Times reporter Jere Longman's Among the Heroes, probably the most sustained attempt to present the official version of this flight:

Traveling at 575 miles per hour, the 757 had inverted and hit the spongy earth at a 45-degree angle, tunneling toward a limestone reef at the edge of a reclaimed strip mine. Because the plane crashed upside down, the engines and stowed landing gear thrust upward and forward. The ground became littered with the fractured underbelly of the plane, electronics, shredded wiring. The cockpit and first class shattered like the point of a pencil, and remnants sprayed into a line of hemlock pine trees. The fuselage accordioned on itself more than thirty feet into the porous, backfilled ground. It was as if a marble had been dropped into water. (Longman 215)


Longman is not interested in the shootdown hypothesis, nor does he wonder much about the presence of other aircraft in the area. But Longman must also deal with the amazement of the local emergency workers, who found that they were not dealing with a normal crash site. Here is Longman's reconstruction of what one rescuer saw as he approached the crash site:

As he approached the scene, adrenaline thoughts raced through [the rescuer's] head. What are we going to see? Is there going to be a fire in the fuselage? Will people be trapped? He jumped out of his truck and noticed small fires in different places, but he could not see the plane.

Where is it?

He was sure a commercial airliner had crashed, but he saw only small broken pieces. A 757 is composed of six hundred twenty-six thousand parts, fastened by six hundred thousand bolts and rivets, connected with sixty miles of wire. That's all that he could see now, fragmented parts and rivets and wires, a catastrophic uncoiling. Other firemen and townspeople at the scene had the same quizzical looks. Metal and plastic and paper were everywhere, in the trees, on the ground, a shirt, a shoe, underwear, a backless seat sitting in its aluminum track, a remnant of seat cushion smoking on the roof of a nearby cabin. The pine trees were peppered with shrapnel. King saw the pushed-up earth and crater that measured thirty feet or more in diameter, and he knew it had been the point of impact. He sent a crew to hose down the smoldering debris, but still he did not realize what had plunged into the disturbed ground. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think half the plane was down there," King said.

Maybe it wasn't a commercial airliner.

The rumors started. There were two hundred people on the plane, four hundred. There were no passengers, only mail. Bewilderment prevailed. No one knew anything for certain. King sent his men into the woods to search for the fuselage, and they kept coming back and telling him, 'Rick. There's nothing.' (Longman 215-216)


Longman struggles to account for the pulverized state of the aircraft, which is simply not consistent with the crash of an airplane which had not already broken up in mid-air:

In the hours after the crash, Pennsylvania state troopers said that they had seen no piece of the plane larger than a phone book. Later, an eight-by-seven foot section of the fuselage containing several windows would be found. It was about the size of the hood of a car. A piece of one engine, weighing a thousand pounds, landed more than a hundred yards from the crater, apparently jettisoned upward in a tremendous arc. The cockpit data recorder, one of the so-called black boxes, would be excavated fifteen feet into the crater and the cockpit voice recorder at twenty-five feet. Ash and paper, a canceled check, a charred brokerage statement, traveled eight miles from the crash on a prevailing wind. Brush fires would spark up in the woods for more than a week. Where were the people? Where were the bodies? (Longman 215-216)


Notice that Longman slyly diverges from the eyewitness accounts in attempting to locate the jet engine wreckage much closer to the impact crater -- 100 yards instead of about a mile. But Longman cannot avoid the extraordinary pulverization of the plane: "'You couldn't take a step without stepping on some part of that aircraft," said Craig of the FBI ... two weeks before Christmas, rivets and wires littered the field as if someone had spilled a plane-building kit. Ninety- five percent of the airplane had been recovered, the FBI said, but thousands of splintered pieces lay about in the field." (Longman 262)

There was also the gruesome detail that the human remains collected were not commensurate with the number of passengers. "The collective weight of the forty-four people aboard the plane was seven thousand five hundred pounds, the coroner said. Only six hundred pounds of remains were discovered ...." (Longman 260) According to a reporter: "the largest piece of human tissue found was a section of spine eight inches long." (London Daily Mirror, 2002)

The FBI was adamant that there was no evidence of explosives of any kind having been used. All of this led to speculation not only that United 93 had been shot down by the US Force, but that the plane had been destroyed -- pulverized in mid-air -- by a futuristic weapon based on new physical principles. Wallace Miller, the coroner, commented that he believed the plane had not been shot down, "unless there is some new technology we don't know about." (Longman 264) According to Longman, there was a military aircraft, a Lockheed Hercules C-130 transport plane, about 17 miles away. Such a plane could easily have carried a powerful airborne chemical laser, and this type of directed energy weapon based on new physical principles might have accounted for the physical effects actually observed on the scene.

The FBI was not curious to find out what had actually happened. Coroner Wallace Miller and Dennis Dirkmaat, a forensic anthropologist from Mercyhurst College in Erie PA, had proposed a detailed analysis of the crash site; they wanted to divide the area up into a grid with 60-foot squares. Distribution patterns would have cast light on how the plane struck the ground. The FBI, true to form, refused to allow this investigation. To justify this, they invented a soap opera theory that the investigation was designed to reveal in an invidious fashion who had stormed the cockpit and who had not. According to the FBI: "There was no mystery to solve about the plane. Everyone knew what happened with the plane." (Longman 262) But precisely what is well-known is least understood, as Hegel might have argued.

As of early September 2004, the FBI, which assumed control of the accident investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board, continues to refuse to make public the complete data from either of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. The pretext is, as always, the exigencies of the alleged war on terrorism. It is worth recalling that in the case of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in Queens in November 2001, NTSB officials had made public detailed information about the cockpit voice recorder within less than 36 hours. (Philadelphia Daily News, November 15, 2001; London Daily Mirror, 2002)

Before departing, the FBI made sure that the crime scene was rendered totally opaque. The crater was filled in with dirt, to be followed by a layer of topsoil. The scorched trees were cut down and shredded into mulch. The FBI was gone two weeks after the crash. (Longman 258) More evidence had gone into the FBI's black hole in a molehill. Still, relatives of the victims had persistent questions for the FBI. Bob Craig of the FBI's evidence gathering team tried to convince them of the official account: "Turn the picture of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center on its side, and, for all intents and purposes, the face of the building is the strip mine in Shanksville. Look at the fireball in the picture. That's what happened." (Longman 260) According to Longman, "conspiracy theorists continued to assert that the plane was shot down, but evidence indicated otherwise."

The FBI later announced that the cockpit voice recorder had been recovered. The FBI at first kept the tape secret, but then agreed to let the bereaved families hear it. The tape was played at Princeton, New Jersey on April 18, 2002. Before they could hear the tape, the families had to sign a special waiver agreeing not to sue the government about any issue arising from the tape. They were forbidden to record the tape, or to take notes. Later, note taking was allowed. The FBI claimed that these procedures were necessary to prevent any damage to the prosecution of Zacarias Moussawi. The families listened through headphones while an FBI transcript was projected on a screen. Some family members later said that the tape raised more questions than it had answered. (Longman 270)

The tragedy of United Airlines flight 93 ended at 10:06 AM Eastern Daylight Time. This was a full 110 minutes, one hour and fifty minutes, after the hijack of United flight 11 from Boston. The US air defense system, usually a well-oiled machine, had failed utterly and completely. Had the air defense system compounded its own failure by shooting down United 93 to prevent the interrogation of hijackers, and the inspection of an aircraft that might have been equipped with Global Hawk? Had the air defense system in this last phase performed the same function as Jack Ruby in the Kennedy assassination -- the elimination of patsies whose testimony might have been fatal to the myth which the leakers and the media were busily constructing even before the tragedy of United 93 was complete?
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:11 am

PART 1 OF 3

CHAPTER IX: "ANGEL IS NEXT" -THE INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT SPEAKS

From 10:00 a.m. to approximately 8:00 p.m. (on Sept. 11 ), U.S. government officials were not thinking that this was the work of Arab terrorists, but rather that it was an expression of a military coup being carried out by U.S.-based extremists who were capable of provoking a nuclear war. -- Reseau Voltaire, Paris, September 27, 2001

"Sheikh: They [the Americans] were terrified thinking there was a coup." -- ("Bin Laden" tape of December 2001, Meyssan 2002 197)


The current tenant of the White House most probably was not familiar in advance with a detailed outline of the 9/11 plot. He was assisted in not knowing and not acting by his cognitive impairment, his contempt for detailed, accurate information, and his habitual mental lethargy. Whether or not he suspected that something was coming, whether or not he knew this or that detail, are all matters to be determined with the help of open archives and cross-examination of the subject. The guess here is that Bush knew far less than many of his most severe critics might surmise. Bush's crime was not the crime of knowing everything in advance; it was rather the crime of not knowing what he should have known, and of then compounding that by capitulating, by turning the US government and polity in the direction demanded by the terror plotters. Better than "Bush knew," as we will see, is "Bush surrendered." "Bush knew" makes a good political slogan, but it cannot be a guide to understanding the true scope of what actually happened. Students of 9/11 who build their work around the thesis that "Bush knew" are on treacherous ground.

As I pointed out in my 1992 study of Bush 41, the typical model of a Bush presidency is that of a weak and passive executive who comes into office with few ideas beyond the basic desire to rule and to appoint rich cronies to key posts, and who sits in the White House waiting for his networks to tell him what it is he must do. These impulses, naturally, are mediated through the handlers of the White House palace guard. But here lies the danger: when Bush was running for office, it was widely conceded by his supporters that their candidate was a moron, but a moron who would hire the best advisers available, who would guide him through the crises of his presidency. In this sense, the Bush 41 presidency was an oligarchical presidency, with the chief magistrate in fact functioning as the front man for a committee. The events of 9-11 showed the grave danger of such an oligarchical presidency: what happened if the advisors turned out to be traitors, misfits, or absent, as they did on 9/11: the presidency itself was paralyzed and incapable of acting, as occurred during the dark eternity of horror the world experienced as Bush busied himself with reading "My Pet Goat."

If the forces favorable to a policy of open-ended clash of civilizations warfare had been in total control of the government, they might have been able to orchestrate the outbreak of war directly, through an incident involving a target country like: Iraq -- somewhat along the lines of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. This would have been enough to convince the mass media and the population. But the coup faction, the golpistas, felt that they needed to convince the state apparatus as well. It is significant that they did not pursue this option. Rather, they felt that they had to shake the state to its foundations, threaten the life of Bush in a number of ways, and run the risk of being caught in some highly treasonous activities, in order to get what they wanted. This can be shown through an analysis of Bush's conduct on 9/11.

As part of his "endless summer" approach to the presidency which had seen him on vacation for over 40% of his time in office up to 9/11, Bush was spending the evening of September 10 at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, a narrow coral island in the Gulf of Mexico, off Sarasota, Florida. This resort, a favorite destination for plutocrats, was billed as "America's greatest tennis resort." Here Bush dined on the evening of September 10 with his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, and a group of Republican politicians and rent seekers. Bush awoke at 6 AM on the morning of September 11, 2001, and went for his habitual jog. But in the night of September 10 to 11, Bush's security detail received a warning that he was in imminent danger. The Sarasota ABC affiliate reported on 9/11: "The warning of imminent danger was delivered in the middle of the night to Secret Service agents guarding the President," said reporter Monica Yadov "and it came exactly four hours and thirty-eight minutes before Mohammed Atta flew an airliner into the World Trade Center. (Hopsicker 2004 40)

ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

On the evening of September 10, Zainlabdeen Omer, a Sudanese national who was a local resident, reported an assassination threat against Bush to the Secret Service. Omer reported that a person he knew had made violent threats against Bush and was now in town, so Omer was worried about Bush's safety. Omer said the person in question was named Ghandi. The next day, 9/11, the Secret Service searched a Sarasota apartment in connection with this report. Three Sudanese men were questioned for about ten hours. The Secret Service also raided a Sarasota beauty supply store, whose owner, identified as "Hakim," told the agents that "Ghandi" was a member of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, a group fighting against the fundamentalist Muslim government in Sudan. (Hopsicker, July 22, 2002) The SPLA, led by US agent John Garang, is an asset of the CIA and the Mossad. It is not possible to determine whether this story represents the danger about which the local ABC station said Bush was warned.

It was at Longboat Key that Bush was the target of a possible assassination attempt. As Bush was preparing for his morning run, a van carrying several Middle Eastern men pulled up to the security post at the Colony's entrance. The men claimed to be a television news crew with a scheduled poolside interview with the president. They asked for a certain Secret Service agent by name. The message was relayed to a Secret Service agent inside the resort, who hadn't heard of the agent mentioned or of plans for an interview. He told the men to contact the president's public relations office in Washington, DC, and had the van turned away. (Longboat Observer, September 26, 2001; Hopsicker 2004 39-48)

This technique may have been the same one used to eliminate General Ahmed Shah Massoud two days earlier. Here a television camera crew composed of suicide bombers had gained access to the legendary anti-Soviet fighter and leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance. After setting up their equipment, a bomb inside their camera had detonated, killing Massoud and others. The official version sees this event as a preparation for 9/11, through attempting to cripple the Northern Alliance which the CIA was sure to use against the Taliban regime. But there is a more cogent view; Massoud was a proud nationalist who would not have taken orders from the CIA and UNOCAL, so it was urgent for the CIA to eliminate him. In the latter case, Bush may have come close to joining Massoud as the victim of the same rogue network of US intelligence which planned 9/11. In any case, the fact that a likely assassination attempt had been foiled would normally have been the basis for canceling the rest of Bush's schedule for the day and for quickly hurrying him back to Washington or some other secure destination. But on 9/11, the most minimal precautions were flaunted. Was it security stripping?

Bush's publicity event at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, on September 11, 2001, had been in the planning phase since August, but was only publicly announced on the morning of September 7. (White House, September 7, 2001) Later that same day of September 7, alleged 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi had traveled to Sarasota for drinks and dinner at a Holiday Inn located two miles down the beach from where Bush was scheduled to stay during his Sarasota visit. (Longboat Observer, November 21, 2001, Washington Post, January 27, 2002) Was this a coincidence, or did it have something to do with a possible assassination attempt on Bush?

On the surface, Bush's security arrangements at the Colony appeared elaborate. Surface-to-air missiles were placed on the roof of the resort (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 10, 2002), and an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) plane circled high overhead. (Sammon 25) Did this represent an enhanced level of protection for Bush in comparison to the usual norm?

At about 8;50 AM (when reports of the first World Trade Center crash were first broadcast), while standing on the Sarasota bay front waiting for the presidential motorcade to pass by, a passerby observed two Middle Eastern men in a dilapidated van "screaming out the windows 'Down with Bush' and raising their fists in the air." The FBl supposedly questioned the source of this report, but it is not clear if this was the same van that had appeared at the Colony security checkpoint. (Longboat Observer, September 26, 2001)

When did Bush learn that American flight 11 had hit the North Tower? There are several reports that Bush was told of the first crash before he arrived at the Booker school. The initial flashes of American 11's crash into the World Trade Center began around 8:48 AM, two minutes after the crash happened. (New York Times, September 15, 2001) Nevertheless, at 9:03 AM, fifteen minutes after a grave emergency was obvious, Bush sat down with a classroom of second-graders and begin a 20-minute photo opportunity? Part of the answer to this may lie in Bush's mental inertia and weak hold on external reality. But it may also be that Bush was being subjected to some form of security stripping by the networks who were carrying out the 9/11 attacks. It should be recalled that the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas was greatly facilitated by the absence of many of the redundant layers of security that usually envelop a traveling president. The many lapses in Bush's personal security on 9/11 suggest that the Secret Service was anything but immune to the rogue network operating behind the scenes.

An alert security detail would have taken Bush out of the Booker school at the first news that American 11 had hit the North Tower. A local reporter commented: "[Bush] could and arguably should have left Emma E. Booker Elementary School immediately, gotten onto Air Force One and left Sarasota without a moment's delay But he didn't." (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 12, 2001)

Months later, Bush offered his famous garbled and impossible account of how he learned of the first plane impacting the WTC. On December 4, 2001, Bush was asked: "How did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?" Bush answered, "1 was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I didn't have much time to think about it." (White House, 12/4/01) Many commentators have noted that the only known film of American 11 hitting the North Tower, the Naudet video, was not broadcast until many hours later. Some have verged into real nonsense, imagining that a secret camera had filmed the first impact and transmitted the pictures to a special television screen set up in the school, all for the edification of Bush. This vastly overestimates the importance of Bush, who was after all just another puppet president. More likely, this garbled version is simply another index of Bush's well-known mental impairment.

The children were opening their books to read a story together when Bush's White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card entered the room and whispered to Bush: " A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack." (San Francisco Chronicle, September 11, 2002) Bush did not respond. He did not ask questions. He wanted no further information. He gave no orders or directives. He tasked no bureaucracies. He did literally nothing. Bush had run for president with the admission that he was a person of limited mental ability, but one who would hire the best advisers available. This moment showed the fatal weakness of that formula, of the oligarchical presidency. Now there was no time for options to be prepared; quick action, crisp orders were required -- orders to mobilize all air defenses, to evacuate key sites, to investigate what was happening. Bush had never been qualified for the presidency, and at this moment he proved it: he froze. As Dr. Franks has pointed out, Bush clings obsessively to his routine as a means of preventing the public disintegration of his personality. On 9/11, Bush clung to a routine with a vengeance, even as the world was crumbling around him. And when a head of state and a head of government fumbles, the goal line is wide open behind him. This was the defining moment of the Bush 43 presidency: the raging infantile id paralyzed by fear and dread. And this was Bush's pattern: When an American EP-3E spy plane had been forced down on the coast of China in the spring of 2001, "neither Bush nor Rice seemed anxious about the situation's deteriorating into a hostage crisis .... Bush went to bed around his usual time, before midnight .... In the White House, it was mostly business as usual. Bush came back from Camp David early on Sunday, not because of the crisis, but because bad weather interfered with his outdoor recreation." (Newsweek April 16, 2001)

"MY PET GOAT"

Bush's defense, as summarized by the 9/11 commission was that "the President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening." (9/11 commission report 38) This is exactly the ceremonial conception of the weak presidency, which sees the office as an object of popular emotional cathexis and symbolism, rather than as a policy-making post oriented toward action in the real world. It was left to the foreign press to ask the obvious question: whatever Bush's animadversions might have been, why was he not picked up and carried out? A Canadian reporter noted that "for some reason, Secret Service agents (did) not bustle him away." (Globe and Mail, September 12, 2001) There had in fact been one attempt. A member of Bush's entourage, variously identified as a Secret Service agent or as a Marine from the communications detail, had said, "We're out of here. Can you get everyone ready?" (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 10, 2002) But nothing happened. What strange process was at work behind the scenes to leave Bush as a sitting duck in a highly publicized location at a time of gravest danger? Was security stripping going on in the background? This lackadaisical response of Bush's Secret Service detail contrasts sharply with the aggressive manhandling of Cheney, who was lifted up by main force and carried toward the PEOC, the White House bunker, by Secret Service agents.

As for Bush, he was taking orders from his handlers, as usual. From the back of the room, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer held up a sheet of paper with the words "DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET" written on it in big block letters. (Washington Times, October 7, 2002) In the interval, Bush was listening to a pupil read the celebrated story of "My Pet Goat," while the crisis unfolded around him. This is the interval portrayed so graphically in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911; how long did Bush stay in the classroom after he was told of the second attack. The Tampa Tribune thought he had remained there "for eight or nine minutes" -- until sometime between 9:13 and 9:16. (Tampa Tribune, September 1, 2002) At a certain point a reporter asked Bush, "Mr. President, are you aware of the reports of the plane crash in New York? Is there anything ..." Bush, obedient to the instructions of Ari Fleischer to keep his mouth shut on this topic, responded, "I'll talk about it later." But even now the president did not depart. He tarried to shake hands with Ms. Daniels, the second grade teacher. It was evident that Bush felt no urgency to take any action in particular. "He was taking his good old time .... Bush lingered until the press was gone." According to Bill Sammon, a Bush backer who wrote for the Moonie- controlled Washington Times, Bush here earned the title of "the dawdler in chief" (Sammon 90)

This singularly lethargic conduct by Bush attracted criticism very early on. 9/11 widow and activist Kristen Breitweiser said on the Phil Donahue show: "It was clear that we were under attack. Why didn't the Secret Service whisk (Bush) out of that school? ... (H)e is the commander-in-chief of the United States of America, our country was clearly under attack, it was after the second building was hit. I want to know why he sat there for 25 minutes." (Donahue, August 13, 2002) This critique is all the more justified because of the security warning of the previous night, and the attempted assassination attempt of earlier that same morning.

One way to account for Bush's behavior in the classroom that morning, and perhaps the most likely one, is the notion that Bush simply froze in fear and insecurity about what to do. "We've seen Bush's sense of omnipotence threatened before -- in the hours following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon," wrote Dr. Frank. "All of us were understandably frightened, but Bush's fear at first appeared paralytic: he continued reading to the second grade class he was visiting for a full twenty minutes after he was told that the first tower had been hit. Then he fled for an entire day, serpentining across the country until the coast was clear and he could finally make it back to Washington." (Frank 99)

The 9/11 commission accepted without criticism and even without comment Bush's absurd decision to continue reading the story about the goat while the country was under attack, along with his explanation that this was motivated in his own mind by the desire to project an image of strength -- an answer which suggests that he was more concerned about maintaining appearances in his own delusional world than he was about providing concrete measures of national defense in this world.

Bush went to a private room in the school and conferred with his advisors. Then, at 9:30, he read the following statement:

THE PRESIDENT: Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I, unfortunately, will be going back to Washington after my remarks. Secretary Rod Paige and the Lt. Governor will take the podium and discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at Booker Elementary School for their hospitality.

Today we've had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. I have spoken to the Vice President, to the Governor of New York, to the Director of the FBI, and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families, and to conduct a full- scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.

Terrorism against our nation will not stand. And now if you would join me in a moment of silence. May God bless the victims, their families, and America. Thank you very much.

END 9:31 A.M. EDT


The operative term here is "apparent terrorist attack." As Meyssan argues, the general tone of Bush's remarks, including especially the term "test," might suggest a military conflict or internal insurrection just as easily as terrorism. (Meyssan 2002 47)

Soon after this, Bush left the Booker School for the nearby Sarasota Airport. But before he left, the Secret Service was to receive news of another threat to Bush: As the local paper reported a few days later: "Sarasota barely skirted its own disaster. As it turns out, terrorists targeted the president and Air Force One on Tuesday, maybe even while they were on the ground in Sarasota and certainly not long after. The Secret Service learned of the threat just minutes after Bush left Booker Elementary." (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, September 16, 2001)

Another account confirms that the Secret Service learned of a new threat to Bush and Air Force One "just minutes after Bush left Booker Elementary." Karl Rove, who was traveling with the president, commented: "They also made it clear they wanted to get us up quickly, and they wanted to get us to a high altitude, because there had been a specific threat made to Air Force One ... A declaration that Air Force One was a target, and said in a way that they called it credible." (New Yorker, October 1, 2001)

Air Force One took off from Sarasota between 9:55 and 9:57 AM, as many news reports confirm. The takeoff was a hurried one, followed by a steep climb to higher altitudes. Communications Director Dan Bartlett remembered, "It was like a rocket. For a good ten minutes, the plane was going almost straight up." (CBS, September 11, 2002) Air Force One began to roll down the Florida runway just as WTC 2 was about to collapse. "As the President sat down in his chair, (he) motioned to the chair across from his desk for me to sit down," recalled Karl Rove. "Before we could, both of us, sit down and put on our seat belts, they were rolling the plane. And they stood that 747 on its tail and got it about 45,000 feet as quick as I think you can get a big thing like that up in the air." (Bamford 2004 63)

However, despite the pattern of grave threat, Air Force One took off without any military fighter protection. This was about one hour after the impact on the South Tower. There was no lack of nearby air bases which should have been on continuous alert: Homestead Air Station was 185 miles from Sarasota, and Tyndall Air Station was 235 miles away. It should have been possible to improvise a small fighter escort in that interval. This poses the question: was fighter cover being denied to Bush by the rogue network, as part of the pattern of security stripping? This question is made more urgent by the fact that, according to most accounts, Air Force One did not get a fighter escort until well over one hour after it had made its emergency takeoff.

"AIR FORCE ONE IS NEXT"

Once in the airplane, Bush was in continuous contact with Cheney and others. Around this time, officials feared that as many as 11 airliners had been hijacked. (CBS, September 11, 2001) Some reports place Bush out of the loop because of communication difficulty, but out of the loop was his father's line from Iran-contra.

Shortly after takeoff, Cheney apparently informed Bush of "a credible threat" to Air Force One. (AP, September 13, 2001) US Representative Adam Putnam said he "had barely settled into his seat on Air Force One ... when he got the news that terrorists apparently had set their sights on the plane." (Orlando Sentinel, September 14, 2001) The Secret Service had received an anonymous message saying: "Air Force One is next." The caller spoke in the code words relating to Air Force One procedures. Colonel Mark Tillman, who was piloting Air Force One, was informed of the threat, and an armed guard was stationed at his cockpit door. The Associated Press reported that the threat came "within the same hour" as the Pentagon crash -- before 10:00 AM, and approximately when the plane took off. (AP, September 13, 2001) The threat contained in this message, "Air Force One is next," would appear to have been distinct from the earlier warning that came upon leaving Booker School, but this cannot be established with total certainty.

Bush wanted to go to Washington, but he was overruled by the White House palace guard. Card told Bush, "We've got to let the dust settle before we go back." (St. Petersburg Times, September 8, 2002) The plane apparently stayed over Sarasota until it was decided where Bush should go. Accounts conflict, but through about 10:35 AM (Washington Post, January 27, 2002), Air Force One "appeared to be going nowhere. The journalists on board -- all of whom were barred from communicating with their offices -- sensed that the plane was flying in big, slow circles." (London Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2001) What was being discussed on the secure phone during this time? Was Cheney communicating the demands of the coup faction to Bush? Was Cheney reporting these demands, or was he joining in urging Bush to accept them? At various points in the narrative, Cheney appears to be acting not just as relayer of information, but as a spokesman for the secret government network which was in action on 9/11. It is thus Cheney, far more than Bush, who must be considered a prime suspect in any serious investigation of 9/11.

"ANGEL IS NEXT"

According to Bob Woodward's canonical mainstream account; "At about 10:30 AM Cheney reached Bush again on Air Force One, which was still on its way toward Washington. The White House had received a threat saying 'Angel is next.' Since Angel was the codeword for Air Force One, it could mean that terrorists had inside information." Allegedly because of this report, Cheney argued that Bush should not return to Washington. "There's still a threat," said Cheney. (Woodward 18) Within minutes, the plane turned away from Washington and flew to Louisiana instead. (Washington Post, January 27, 2002) Was this now a third threat, after the post-Booker threat and the "Air Force One is next" threat? Did the terrorist controllers now add the code word "Angel" to further document their insider status, and their possible access to nuclear codes? Or are we dealing with two versions of the same threat?

We will return to "Angel is next." This represents the single most important clue as to the sponsorship of 9/11, since it was at this point that the sponsors showed their hand. They were not located in a cave in Afghanistan, but were rather a network located high within the US government and military. It was a moment of capital importance, the thread which, if properly pulled, will unravel the entire fabric of 9/11 deceit.

Around 10:55 AM, there was yet another threat to Air Force One. The pilot, Colonel Mark Tillman, said he was warned that a suspect airliner was approaching from dead ahead. "Coming out of Sarasota there was one call that said there was an airliner off our nose that they did not have contact with," Tillman related. Tillman took evasive action, pulling his plane even higher above normal traffic. (CBS, September 11, 2002) Reporters on board noticed the increased elevation. (Dallas Morning News, August 28, 2002; Salon, September 12, 2001) It has not been possible to establish exactly what the basis of this threat report was. Was the rogue network blackmailing Bush? Was this suspect airliner a military aircraft using participation in Vigilant Guardian/Vigilant Warrior as a cover story for assisting the plot?

Air Force One had some protection against heat-seeking missiles in the form of an infrared jammer code-named "Have Charcoal." There were also other electronic anti- missile countermeasures. The plane is shielded against the electromagnetic pulse effect (EMP) which can be generated by nuclear explosions, and which produces damage even at a considerable distance. (Bamford 2004 84)

At the time of this incident, it is apparent that Air Force One still had no fighter escort. Why were the fighters being withheld, and by whom? It was later reported that, in Cheney's 10:32 phone call, he told Bush that another 40 to 90 minutes would be required to get protective fighters up to escort Air Force One. (Washington Post, 1/27/02) This would have left Bush without fighter cover until noon. What was the tone of this remark by Cheney? Was it a threat? Was it blackmail? Our only certainty is that at the time of the 10:55 AM evasive action, there was still no fighter escort. By 1:30 there were reportedly six fighters protecting Air Force One. (Sarasota Magazine, September 19, 2001) According to another version, when the Air Force sent an AWACS early warning radar aircraft plus two F-16s to escort Air Force One, the presidential party treated them on a need to know basis. "We were not told where Air Force One was going. We were just told to follow the President," said Major General Larry Arnold of NORAD (Bamford 2004 87) Was the Bush party suspicious of certain military elements?

BARKSDALE AND NIGHT WATCH

Aboard Air Force One on the way to Barksdale, passengers, including the numerous press corps, were told to turn off their cell phones. The Secret Service then came around and removed the batteries from each phone to prevent the emission of any kind of signal that might reveal the plane's location. These measures turned out to be of dubious value, since the Shreveport television stations had placed at least one camera crew near the main runway. "The strange part about it was, here we were turning off cell phones and taking precautions, and we could see ourselves landing at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on the TV," recalled Eric Draper, Bush's personal photographer. (Bamford 2004 86)

Air Force One landed at Barksdale Air Force base near Shreveport, Louisiana at about 11:45 a.m. (CBS, September 11, 2002; Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2001) "According to intelligence sources, a key reason for deciding to land there was that Barksdale was home to the US Strategic (Air) Command's alternate underground command post, a bunker from which Bush could run a war if necessary. It was also a place where the President could rendezvous with 'Night Watch,' the 'Doomsday Plane.' Once a specially outfitted Boeing 707 known as the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, by 2001 it had become a heavily modified military version of the Boeing 747-200, similar to Air Force One. Renamed the National Airborne Operations Center (NAOC), the aircraft was designed to be used by the President to direct a war in case of nuclear attack. During the Cold War, one of the four Night Watch aircraft was always in the air, twenty-four hours a day. But in the 1990s, the decision was made to keep the alert aircraft on the ground with the ability to take off on fifteen minutes' notice." (Bamford 2004 84)

During the morning, Clarke had instituted Continuity of Government, the measures prescribed for emergency rule in the face of a catastrophic emergency. "Our coordinator for Continuity of Government (we will call him Fred here to protect his identity at the request of the government) joined us. 'How do I activate COG?' I asked him. In the exercises we had done, the person playing the President had always given that order. 'You tell me to do it,' Fred replied." After relaying messages to Bush and Cheney, Clarke added: "'Tell them I am instituting COG.' I turned back to Fred: 'Go."' (Clarke 8) Clarke, we see again, was running the country, while Bush zig-zagged.

It was at Barksdale that Bush made a second statement for television broadcast; it was taped and put on the air only after he had left the base. Bush said:

Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended. I want to assure the American people that the full resources of the federal government are working to assist local authorities to save lives and to help the victims of these attacks. Make no mistake: The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts. I've been in regular contact with the vice president, secretary of defense, the national security team and my Cabinet. We have taken all appropriate security precautions to protect the American people. Our military at home and around the world is on high-alert status and we have taken the necessary security precautions to continue the functions of your government. We have been in touch with the leaders of Congress and with world leaders to assure them that we will do whatever is necessary to protect America and Americans. I ask the American people to join me in saying thanks for all the folks who have been fighting hard to rescue our fellow citizens and to join me in saying a prayer for the victims and their families. The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake: We will show the world that we will pass this test. God bless."


The crucial point here is that all reference to terrorism or terrorists had disappeared. Bush was now speaking under the impact of "Angel is next," which had given him the idea that his adversaries were not what the term "terrorists" would normally suggest.

While Bush was reading his 219-word statement, "he looked nervous," said The New York Times reporters David E. Sanger and Don Van Natta Jr. The Washington Post reporters Dan Balz and Bob Woodward agreed. "When Bush finally appeared on television from the base conference room, they wrote, "it was not a reassuring picture. He spoke haltingly, mispronouncing several words as he looked down at his notes." Judy Keen of USA Today noted that "Bush looked grim. His eyes were red-rimmed." An administration official later admitted, "It was not our best moment." (Bamford 2004 87)

While at Barksdale, Bush "spent the next hour and a half talking on the phone," still disputing with Cheney and others over where he should go next. (Sarasota Magazine, November 2001) There was probably much more at issue than Bush's itinerary. Were Bush and Cheney haggling about whether or how to accept the rogue group's demands, such as the war of civilizations? When Bush requested a return to Washington, Karl Rove answered: "Our people are saying it's unstable still." (Associated Press, September 13, 2001) Bush was told he should go to the US Strategic Command center in Offutt, Nebraska, and he agreed to go.

While still at Barksdale, Bush received word of yet another threat. Just after 1:00 PM, Bush reportedly "received an intelligence report from the base commander that a high- speed object was headed for his ranch in Crawford, Texas." It turned out to be a false alarm. (Sammon 117) By 12:16 PM, US airspace was supposedly empty, since all flights were thought to have landed. Was this another psychological warfare ploy by the rogue network in order to keep Bush off balance? (USA Today, August 12, 2002) Air Force One left Barksdale for Offutt Air Force Base around 1:30 PM. Perhaps better to mask the nature of Bush's predicament, most of the White House press corps were jettisoned at Barksdale. Bush's party was pared down to a few essential staffers such as Ari Fleischer, Andrew Card, Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett, and Gordon Johndroe (White House, September 11, 2001), plus a pool of about five reporters. (AP, September 12, 2001) Were these reporters intelligence community assets who could be relied on not to report potentially explosive details? On the way to Offutt, Bush remained in "continuous contact" with the White House Situation Room and Vice President Cheney.

"By then (as Bush was leaving Barksdale) many in the press were beginning to question why the President hadn't returned to Washington during the grave crisis. The question was put to presidential counselor Karen Hughes, then at FBI headquarters. "Where's the President?" asked one reporter. "Is he coming back to DC?" asked another. Instead of answering, she simply turned on her heels and walked out of the room. NBC's Tim Russert, host of Meet the Press and the Washington bureau chief, also remarked about the nation needing the leadership of its president. Yet, rather than return to Washington, the decision was made to keep moving as quickly as possible in the opposite direction. It was a risky choice. '"If he stayed away," reported London's Daily Telegraph, "he could be accused of cowardice." (Bamford 2004 87)

OFFUTT, NEBRASKA: STRATCOM

Air Force One landed at Offutt shortly before 3:00 p.m. Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha Nebraska was the principal headquarters of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), the successor organization to Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command of Cold War vintage. This base possessed the main military command bunker of the US for nuclear warfighting purposes. Bush arrived here at 2:50 Eastern Daylight Time. He went at once to the bunker, which was several stories underground, and protected by a series of blast doors and the like. The conference room was ABC proof: As Bamford evokes the tableau: "It was like a scene from Dr. Strangelove, or Seven Days in May. Never before had all the pieces been in place for the instant launch of World War III. The military alert level was at its highest level in thirty years. The Vice President was in the White House bunker, senior administration officials were at Site R, congressional officials had been flown to Mount Weather, the Secretary of Defense and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in the Pentagon War Room, and the President of the United States was in the nuclear command bunker at STRATCOM." (Bamford 2004 89) Was all of this because of terrorism, or was there some more serious threat of subversion to the state, perhaps complicated by the danger of a thermonuclear exchange? All of this behavior suggests at the very least that the White House thought that forces far more formidable than Bin Laden and his Afghan troglodytes were involved.

Both movies cited by Bamford involve military madmen attempting either to precipitate general thermonuclear war, or else to stage a coup d'etat in the US. A Straussian might see a hidden message here. The US military posture was now DEFCON DELTA, the highest state of alert short of all-out war. At Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, there were 200 Minuteman III ICBM silos, each one ready to launch three warheads. At other bases there were MX ICBM silos, and here each missile carried even more warheads.

Bush convened the NSC as a teleconference call with Vice President Cheney, National Security Advisor Rice, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, CIA Director Tenet, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, and others. Rice recalled that during the meeting, Tenet told Bush, "Sir, I believe it's al-Qaeda. We're doing the assessment but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like al-Qaeda." (CBS, September 11, 2002) Was Tenet articulating the program of the coup faction, and obliquely demanding that Bush declare that the clash of civilizations in the form of warfighting had commenced?

The plutocrat Warren Buffett happened to have been at Offutt that day, hosting an unpublicized charity benefit inside the base at 8:00 AM. With him were business leaders and several executives from the World Trade Center, including Anne Tatlock of Fiduciary Trust Co. International, who likely would have died had it not been for the meeting. (San Francisco Business Times, February 1, 2002)

Bamford notes that "... it was close to 4:30 on the East Coast, and except for the brief, two-minute taped comments made at Barksdale, no one had seen or heard from the President or even knew where he was. Republicans back in Washington were becoming worried. "I am stunned that he has not come home," said one Bush fundraiser. "It looks like he is running. This looks bad." William J. Bennett, a former education secretary and a drug czar under former President George Bush, said that it was important for Bush to return to the White House as soon as possible. "This is not 1812," he said. "It cannot look as if the President has been run off, or it will look like we can't defend our most important institutions." (Bamford 2004 91)

Air Force One left Offutt around 4:30 PM and landed at Andrews Air Force Base at 6:34 PM, escorted by two F-15 fighters and one F-16. Bush then took the Marine One helicopter to the White House, arriving shortly before 7:00 PM. Bush gave a nationally televised speech at 8:30 PM, speaking for about five minutes.

This speech is too long to be included here, but it is readily available. Indeed, the White House commemorative edition leaves out the earlier two statements, and begins with this one. The change of tone is remarkable. Bush is now possessed of a Manichean certainty about the events of the day. He is back to the line that the perpetrators were terrorists. One important passage came at the beginning, where Bush stated: "Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts .... Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror." (Bush 1) Later in this statement, Bush presented the kernel of what would later be termed the Bush doctrine, his declaration of war on the world: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." (Bush 2)

What had changed for Bush during the course of the afternoon and early evening? It may have been only at this moment that Bush began to recover from the panic which had gripped him around 9 AM that morning. Clarke noted that "unlike in his three television appearances that day, Bush was confident, determined, forceful." (Clarke 23) As we will argue below, there is persuasive evidence that he had decided to capitulate to the demands of the sponsors of the terrorist attacks by launching the war of civilizations which this network had demanded. This surrender, carried out sometime in the afternoon or evening of September 11, constitutes Bush's great betrayal of the Constitution and his great crime against humanity. Everything Bush has done since, down to the very structure of his personality, has been determined by the moment in which he declined to fight the rogue network, but rather preferred to follow its orders, in violation of his oath of office. Never before had the United States surrendered to an enemy in this way.

After his 8:30 PM television address, Bush met with key officials in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. According to Clarke, who was there, this was "a place he had never seen." (Clarke 23) This 9:00 PM meeting with Bush's full National Security Council was followed roughly half an hour later by a meeting with a smaller group of advisors. Bush and his advisors had already decided bin Laden was behind the attacks. CIA Director Tenet told Bush that al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan were essentially one and the same. When Bush insisted on sleeping in his own bed, he was warned that any threat would require that he go to the bunker. "And sure enough," said Mr. Bush. "We are in bed at about 11:30, and I can hear a guy breathing quite heavily. "Mr. President, Mr. President! There's an unidentified aircraft heading towards the White House!"' It turned out to be a false alarm -- or was it a good night kiss from the rogue network? (Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2001) Before going to sleep, Bush wrote in his diary, "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today We think it's Osama bin Laden." (Washington Post, January 27, 2002) There is no evidence that Bush, the man who never reads, writes enough to keep a diary. This reference to a diary would seem to be a vehicle to convey that depth of Bush's capitulation to the rogue network behind 9/11, a kind of intimate confession that he truly believed in the new party line he had embraced that afternoon or evening.

There was a brief phase of recrimination against Bush after 9/11, and it was based largely on his evasive retreats to Barksdale and Offutt. Human Events, the conservative magazine which had been favored by Reagan, noted that "some in the media were caustic in their description of the flight." The New York Times called it a "zigzag course." The New York Daily News charged, "A shocked and shaken President Bush - -who was hopscotched around the country yesterday in an extraordinary effort to keep him safe ..." Journalists were whispering about the president's absence. And even some friends are disturbed by the implications that the president or Washington may not have been safe. One former official with the first Bush administration said he was "deeply disappointed by his zigzagging across the country." "We had control of the skies by 10 o'clock," the source added. "I was hoping to see a Churchillian or Reaganesque sign of defiance. Bush was poorly served by his staff." (Human Events Online, 9/17/01)

There are several additional significant incidents which must be taken into account. These vanished early on from narratives of the event; they made the defenders of the official version uncomfortable. The first of these was a fire at the Old Executive Office Building or Eisenhower Building (OEOB), which is where the offices of the National Security Council are located. This is an integral part of the White House compound, and was the work place of such figures as Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and others. The ABC television network broadcast live pictures of a fire at the OEOB on 9/11 at 9:42 AM local time. (Meyssan 2002)

Another is the issue of a car bomb at the State Department: "Lisa slipped a note in front of me: "CNN says car bomb at the State Department. Fire on the Mall near the Capitol." (Clarke 9) According to another account, "at 10:20 a report came in that a huge car bomb had gone off outside the State Department in Washington. It wasn't true, but it changed the picture once more." (Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2001) The fire on the Mall near the Capitol is yet another incident. Clarke also recounts receiving a report: "There has been an explosion in the Pentagon parking lot, maybe a car bomb." (Clarke 7)

If we put these events together with the possible early morning attempt to assassinate George Bush, we see that the scope of the 9/11 plot was altogether broader and more inclusive even than the acts of spectacular synthetic terrorism which the world observed that day.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:12 am

PART 2 OF 3 (CH. 9 CONT'D.)

SAFIRE: INSIDE THE BUNKER

An initial exposition of Bush's claim to have acted under threats on 9/11 came in a September 13 New York Times column entitled "Inside the Bunker" from William Safire, a hardened old neocon sinner from the Nixon White House. According to Safire, "A threatening message received by the Secret Service was relayed to the agents with the president that 'Air Force One is next.' According to the high official, American code words were used showing a knowledge of procedures that made the threat credible."

Safire identified his source as Karl Rove, Bush's political Svengali. According to Rove, when Bush stubbornly insisted that he was going back to Washington, "the Secret Service informed him that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts. In light of the specific and credible threat, it was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort." Another Safire source, who was with Cheney in the White House bunker, related that it was Cheney who "suggested Air Force One go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, headquarters of the Strategic Air Command, with a communications facility where the president could convene the National Security Council."

Safire correctly pointed out that "The most worrisome aspect of these revelations has to do with the credibility of the 'Air Force One is next' message. It is described clearly as a threat, not a friendly warning -- but if so, why would the terrorists send the message? More to the point, how did they get the code-word information and transponder know- how that established their mala fides? That knowledge of code words and presidential whereabouts and possession of secret procedures indicates that the terrorists may have a mole in the White House -- that, or informants in the Secret Service, FBI, FAA or C.I.A. If so, the first thing our war on terror needs is an Angleton-type counterspy." (New York Times, September 13, 2001) Of course, it may well be that the dubious Angleton networks, given their penchant for fascism, are themselves among the suspects. But that is another story.

The essential details given by Safire were confirmed by an AP wire that same day, also inspired by the opportunistic Rove. Here Ron Fournier wrote:

Hopscotching across half the country while America was under attack, President Bush vented his frustration with Secret Service officials who told him of an anonymous call saying; "Air Force One is next." Within the hour, the Secret Service received an anonymous call: "Air Force One is next." According to a senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, the caller knew the agency's code words relating to Air Force One procedures and whereabouts. (AP, September 13, 2001)


Foreign press organs, more critical than the controlled corporate media of the US, reported this story straight. The London Financial Times wrote that after Bush had taken off from Florida, "within an hour, an anonymous call reached the Secret Service. Using code words known only to the agency's staff, the caller issued a chilling warning: 'Air Force One is next."' (Financial Times, September 14, 2001)

The principal clue leading us to the existence of the rogue network behind 9/11 is the "Angel is next" threat. Since hasty attempts to deny that this ever existed came soon after 9/11, we pause to document the evidence that this call really did take place.

In an interview with Tony Snow on Fox News Sunday, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice confirmed that the September 11 threat against President Bush's life included a secret code name.

SNOW: Sept. 11 there was a report that there was a coded message that said, "We're going to strike Air Force One" that was using specific coded language and made the threat credible. Is that true?

RICE: That is true.

SNOW: So we have a mole somewhere?

RICE: It's not clear how this coded name was gotten. We're a very open society and I don't think it's any surprise to anyone that leaks happen. So, I don't know -- it's possible the code name leaked a long time ago and was just used.

SNOW: How on earth would that happen?

RICE: I don't know. I don't know. We're obviously looking very hard at the situation. But I will tell you that it was plenty of evidence from our point of view to have special measures taken at that moment to make sure the president was safe.


This exchange was reported by Carl Limbacher of NewsMax.com, who added that "U.S. intelligence officials have not ruled out the possibility that a government mole may have given terrorists the top secret code language they used to deliver the threat 'Air Force One is next' as the World Trade Center and Pentagon were under attack." (NewsMax.com, September 23, 2001) Of course, the real imperative was to consider whether the rogue network behind the attacks extended into the ranks of holders of top secret security clearances.

The threat to Air Force One was repeated by others in the administration. In the September 12 White House briefing, Ari Fleischer told reporters, "We have specific and credible information that the White House and Air Force One were also intended targets of these attacks." The next day Fleischer was asked, "[It was] yesterday reported that some of the people in the Pentagon were a little bit skeptical about your comments yesterday that the White House and Air Force One were attacked -- were targets of attack, given that the plane had come from the south. What do you --"Fleischer: "Who are these people?" Reporter: "Well, I don't know. They weren't my sources, so ..." Fleischer: "No. There's -- I wouldn't have said it if it wasn't true." Reporter: "Can you confirm the substance of that threat that was telephoned in ... that Air Force One is next and using code words?" Fleischer: "Yes, I can. That's correct." (September 13)

On Meet the Press of September 16, Cheney began to back away from the story, telling Russert: "The president was on Air Force One. We received a threat to Air Force One -- came through the Secret Service ..." Russert: "A credible threat to Air Force One. You're convinced of that." Cheney: "I'm convinced of that. Now, you know, it may have been phoned in by a crank, but in the midst of what was going on, there was no way to know that. I think it was a credible threat, enough for the Secret Service to bring it to me." (Meet the Press, September 16) Notice that the top-secret code words, the really sensitive point, have now disappeared. Still, the Bushmen were extremely sensitive to any impugning of their man's courage under fire. A journalist who said Bush was "flying around the country like a scared child, seeking refuge in his mother's bed after having a nightmare" and another who said Bush "skedaddled" were fired. (Washington Post, September 29, 2001)

In the short term, the Bushmen were eager to use the threat incidents to defend their leader from the charge of cowardice, and also to provide a cover for the reasons that had actually caused him to flee across the country. However, the "Angel is next" story contained an explosive potential for the longer term, since by pointing toward the existence of highly-placed moles within the administration who had access to top secret code words and procedures, it threatened to explode the official myth of 9/11 which was then taking shape. As Bush gathered momentum with his "war on terrorism" and Afghan invasion, the need to use the "Angel" story for political cover diminished, and the need to protect the coherence of the official myth became paramount. It was at this time that the threat story began to be denied, not by officials speaking on the record, but by mysterious, anonymous leakers. One of these leaks came two weeks after 9/11; "Finally, there is this postscript to the puzzle of how someone presumed to be a terrorist was able to call in a threat against Air Force One using a secret code name for the president's plane. Well, as it turns out, that simply never happened. Sources say White House staffers apparently misunderstood comments made by their security detail." (Jim Stewart, CBS Evening News, September 25, 2001) An AP wire of the same day, also based on an anonymous leak, read: "[Administration officials have] been unsuccessful in trying to track down whether there was such a call, though officials still maintain they were told of a telephone threat Sept. 11 and kept Bush away from Washington for hours because of it." (AP, September 25, 2001) But the "Angel" story was persistent. One full year after 9/11, CBS revived the story that terrorists had broken Air Force One's secret codes, even though it was CBS which had aired the leaked denial a year earlier. (CBS, September 11, 2002)

After these leaks, Fleischer also dropped the story. On September 26, a reporter asked about the September 11 warning. Fleischer replied: "I'm not going to comment on any particular threats coming toward the White House ... it is not an uncommon occurrence for people to threaten the government of the United States, regardless of whether it's President Bush or any of his predecessors. And that's why there are security precautions taken at the White House as a matter of routine." (Washington Post, September 27, 2001) Latent hatred and resentment of Bush made it easy for reporters to trivialize the threat story, and make it appear as a devious invention of the loathsome Karl Rove. In her column in the September 23 New York Times, the gossipy Maureen Dowd noted that Karl Rove had "called around town, trying to sell reporters the story -- now widely discredited -- that Mr. Bush didn't immediately return to Washington on Sept. 11 because the plane that was headed for the Pentagon may have really been targeting the White House, and that Air Force One was in jeopardy, too." Rove was indeed a scoundrel, but there was something much more important at stake.

Especially eager to dispense with the threat story and focus on the soap opera of Bush the skedaddler were the leftists. To illustrate these, we take the case of Joe Conason, who wrote indignantly that "The Bush administration told an outrageous lie that the president was a target of terrorists -- and Americans deserve an explanation." Conason, already inclining to defend the most reactionary lie of all, the official version, was especially upset about the reference to "code-word confirmation" -- since this was the point that threatened the al Qaeda myth. Conason was even more worried about the demand for an investigation to root out the mole network inside the US government:

Only when those assertions were shot down by CBS News and the Associated Press did the spinners back down, claiming that it had all been a "misunderstanding" by staffers, with little elaboration. How serious? In addition to undermining public confidence in the White House during a national emergency, this spinning of the president's flight from Washington led New York Times columnist William Safire, among others, to demand an internal investigation that would determine whether an administration "mole" had revealed top-secret information to America's enemies. That paranoid theme was immediately picked up in the foreign media, no doubt worrying allies and potential allies engaged in sensitive discussions with the United States. (Slate, October 5, 2001)


Conason's reference to foreign paranoids may have been meant for the Reseau Voltaire, which was already performing yeoman service in dismantling the official version. In the 9/11 commission hearings, it was Ben-Veniste who took care to assert that the story was spurious. As a leading public opponent of the Bush dynasty since the time of Bush 41, I yield to nobody in my determination to put an end to the monstrous prominent role of this family in US public life. However, to think that the moron Bush could have organized 9/11 is absurd. As we have seen, part of the project was evidently to liquidate Bush and pass power to Cheney, whose credentials as a possibly witting plotter are infinitely stronger. By surviving the Colony interview hit, Bush lived to encounter 9/11 as a fait accompli, in which he was told at gunpoint to acquiesce, and he promptly did so. To reduce everything to "Bush knew" is a good slogan -- far better than the official version -- but it does not deal with the rogue network which antedates 9/11, and which remains in place today, posing a constant threat of new terrorist attacks, with or without Bush.

Paul Thompson, whose empirical work on the 9/11 timelines is a valuable resource for all researchers, unfortunately buys into the denials of the threat story. After marshalling the available evidence, Thompson, who prides himself on his empirical precision, concludes: "Was there a mole in the White House? No. It turned out the entire story was made up." (Citizine, May 9, 2003) But it is far too simple to let this entire complex of problems and the vast issues it raises be swept under the rug by mere anonymous leaks, no matter how many times they might have been repeated. At stake is the most important clue in the entire 9/11 case. The regime is hiding something crucial here, and they must not be allowed to abscond. "Had terrorists hacked their way into sensitive White House computers?" Thompson asks. But the issue is much larger. If the threat to Bush came encrusted with code words, this means that the terror attacks were organized by high- level moles inside the US government -- not that a hacker in an Afghan cave had cracked the Pentagon mainframes.

BUSH AND PUTIN ON 9/11

The potential for a thermonuclear confrontation or even of an all-out thermonuclear exchange growing out of 9/11 has generally been ignored by the US controlled media, but such a potential was clearly present. It was inherently present because of the tense relations among the US, Russia, and China in the wake of the bombing of Serbia and the Kursk incident. It was made explicit when a flying object, probably a cruise missile, hit the Pentagon. As the 9/11 commission report notes, one fighter pilot who saw the damage to the Pentagon immediately thought of Russia as the most likely adversary. This innate mental reaction must have been repeated thousands of times in the minds of non-witting military personnel on the day of 9/11. Clarke points out that the US proclamation of Defcon Delta, the level of readiness just below actual war, was inevitably immediately noticed by Russia, and came near causing immediate countermeasures of readiness on the Russian side. This was the first Defcon Delta since Henry Kissinger had ordered a world- wide alert to deter possible Soviet intervention into the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East in October 1973. Defcon Delta posed the danger of an escalation of mobilization between the two leading nuclear powers:

Frank Miller reported that DOD had gone on a global alert, DEFCON 3: "This hasn't happened since the '73 Arab-Israeli War."

"State, State, go." Armitage acknowledged the call. "Rich, DOD has gone to DEFCON 3 and you know what that means." Armitage knew; he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration.

"It means I better go tell the Russkies before they shit a brick." Armitage activated the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, down the hall from the State Department Operations Center. The NRRC was connected directly to the Russian Ministry of Defense just outside of the Kremlin. It was designed to exchange information in crisis to prevent misunderstanding and miscalculation.

Armitage reappeared. "Damn good thing I did that. Guess who was about to start an exercise of all their strategic nuclear forces?" He had persuaded his Russian counterpart to defer the operation. (Clarke 15-16)


Most US 9/11 commentators have virtually nothing to say about Bush's famous telephone conversation with Russian President Putin; Bamford, Thompson, and others exhibit elaborate disinterest in this matter. And yet, this is another one of the central moments of 9/11. In order to avoid a possible thermonuclear exchange, Putin needed to be reassured that the US Defcon Delta was not a cover for a thermonuclear sneak attack upon his country, something perfectly within the realm of possibility from the Russian view. Putin also needed to be told that thermonuclear launches from the US toward the Middle East or other areas were the work of a rogue network, not of the constituted government. Putin, in short, had to be asked for cooperation and restraint.

During the hours after the 9/11 attacks, Putin became the first world leader to place a call to Bush. Officially, this was done so that Putin could offer his condolences. But in the course of this conversation, Putin told Bush that he had ordered a stand down of Russian strategic forces, meaning that the maneuvers planned for the Arctic Region were cancelled. Putin also sent an official telegram to Washington DC conveying "anger and indignation" against the "series of barbaric terrorist acts directed against innocent people." (See "On Russian President Vladimir Putin's Telegram of Condolence to US President George Bush, 11 September 2001, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, http://www.In.mid.ru ) [4] Bush later noted his appreciation for Putin's gesture and for Putin's strategic stand down of the Russian strategic rocket troops in deference to the US Defcon Delta. "It was a moment where it clearly said to me that he understands the Cold War is over." (Washington Post, October 4, 2004)

In a national television address later that day, Putin vehemently condemned the 9/11 attacks as "an unprecedented act of aggression on the part of international terrorism." These attacks, he claimed, were not a localized American issue but an event that "goes beyond national borders." Terrorism, Putin declared, is the "plague of the twenty first century" and "Russia knows first hand what terrorism is. So, we understand as well as anyone the feelings of the American people." Putin described 9/11 as "a brazen challenge to the whole of humanity, at least to civilized humanity." Resonating with Bush, Putin set up his own Manichean dichotomy between terrorist barbarism and 'civilized humanity.' Putin assured Bush that "we entirely and fully share and experience your pain. We support you." ("Statement by President Putin of Russia on the Terrorist Acts in the US, Moscow, September 11, 2001," http://www.In.mid.ru ) Putin later declared a national minute of silence in commemoration of the victims of the attacks.

Putin's actions on 9/11 can be seen as a successful attempt at war avoidance in extremis. Putin, as a KGB veteran, would have had no doubt that the official US version was hogwash, something a number of prominent Russian military officers expressed in the wake of 9/11. Putin could also see that the rogue network responsible for the bombing of Serbia and the sinking of the Kursk momentarily had the upper hand, and with them negotiation would be fruitless. Putin was determined not to play into the hands of the unhinged US rogue network behind 9/11. At a deeper level, his policy was therefore one of strategic deception or of maskirovka -- to gain time in the wake of the catastrophe. Putin must have seen that secret government madmen ferociously hostile to Russia had now taken over the US regime to an unprecedented degree. He could also see that the neocons, with their obsession with Israel's strategic predicament, might well attack various countries in the Middle East before they got around to attempting to deal with Russia. Such Middle East tar baby scenarios could only weaken, overextend, discredit, and isolate the United States, thus offering Russia some advantage. Putin was also busily working on the follow-on to the very formidable Topol missile, a weapons system that was probably superior to anything in the US arsenal, which would very likely allow Russia to defeat the US side's primitive off-the-shelf missile defense system. All these considerations suggested that Putin should camouflage himself for the time being as Bush's bosom buddy.

On September 24, 2001 Putin made a major television address, which grew out of a weekend of strategizing with his top advisors and a forty-minute phone call with President Bush. In this speech Putin accepted the establishment of US bases in the former Soviet republics of central Asia, which the US wanted to set up as staging areas for the imminent invasion of Afghanistan. On the surface this was capitulation, but underneath was still strategic deception. For a time, it appeared that a great US-Russian alliance was in the making, but this was more appearance than substance. Bush joined with Putin at a school in Crawford, Texas on November 15, 2001. The Bush-Putin honeymoon lasted into 2002. By the time Bush began seeking UN carte blanche for his war on Iraq, Russia had been attracted into the French-German continental bloc.

The existence of Russian strategic maneuvers on 9/11 involving bombers had been known to the Pentagon, since it was the explicit premise for the maneuver Northern Vigilance. In this case, it would have been known to the plotters as well. Therefore, the planners of 9/11 were well aware that their incendiary actions would take place against a backdrop of simultaneous US and Russian aircraft maneuvers.

BAMFORD: THE US INTELLIGENCE VERSION

Bamford compares Bush's actions on 9/11 with the behavior of President Lyndon B. Johnson on the day of the Kennedy assassination. Despite worries that the killing of the president might have been just the beginning of the strategic decapitation of the US under conditions of Cold War confrontation with the USSR, Johnson flew directly back to Washington and gave a short television address just after leaving his airplane. According to the usual procedure, Cheney should have gone to Site R on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. But he refused to go. Why? "Bush could have easily ordered Vice President Cheney to a secure location outside Washington to preserve the continuity of government and then flown back to Andrews Air Force Base and given a defiant, Johnson-like speech. Then, with the public -- and the rest of the world -- feeling confident that despite the terrorist actions the US government remained stable and firm, he could have gone back either to the White House or to one of the other highly protected, secure locations. That would have been the courageous thing to do." (Bamford 2004 70)

"Instead, the decision was made to leave Vice President Cheney in the White House while President Bush hopscotched around the country. Though reporters were told of a supposed call to the White House threatening Air Force One -- the reason for the President's odyssey -- later it was concluded that no such call or threat ever took place. 'They've been unsuccessful in trying to track down whether there was such a call,' one administration official told the Associated Press. CBS News reported the call 'simply never happened,' and the Washington Post headlined its article on the subject: 'White House Drops Claim of Threat to Bush.' (Bamford 2004 70) Bamford thus avoids most of the really essential questions about 9/11.

THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE VIEW

One of the most detailed accounts of the high-level state secrets possessed by the 9/11 conspirators was provided by the internet journal Debka, which often reflects the views of the Israeli Mossad. This Israeli analysis stresses the extent of the top-secret information controlled by the plotters, and the extensive network that would be necessary to have gathered such information. According to Debka, the message "Air Force One is next" was received by the U.S. Secret Service at 9 AM. For Debka, Cheney was hustled into the bunker three minutes later. Debka suggests that the code name of Air Force One is changed daily, and that "the terrorists' message threatening Air Force One was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code words." At the heart of Debka's account is the estimate that

...the terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals. This made it possible for a hostile force to pinpoint the exact position of Air Force One, its destination and its classified procedures. In fact, the hijackers were picking up and deciphering the presidential plane's incoming and outgoing transmissions. The discovery shocked everyone in the president's emergency operations center -- Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. Their first question was; How did the terrorists access top-secret White House codes and procedures? Is there a mole, or more than one enemy spy in the White House, the Secret Service, the FB1, the CIA or the Federal Aviation Administration?


Nor was this all; the reach of the conspirators was even greater: "In the week after the attacks in New York and Washington, more hair- raising facts emerged. The terrorists had also obtained the code groups of the National Security Agency and were able to penetrate the NSA' s state-of-the-art electronic surveillance systems. Indeed, they seemed to have at their disposal an electronic capability that was more sophisticated than that of the NSA."

According to Debka's information, the US intelligence community also believed "that terrorists are in possession of all or part of the codes used by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence and the intelligence offices of the State Department and Department of Energy."

According to Debka, the plotters had even mastered steganography, a technology which "enables users to bypass electronic monitoring by hiding messages randomly in seemingly innocent digital files, such as music files, those of the popular online marketplace eBay, pornographic files or even e-mail headers."

Here were the sure-fire premises for an incontrovertible argument that the 9/11 attacks were the work of a rogue network of dissident moles inside the US government and military. But after having made precisely this case, Debka attempted to lead its audience back to the myth of al Qaeda, this time presented as possessing scientific and technological capabilities superior to those of the US government! As one of the parties guilty of having given al Qaeda the codes, Debka fingered World Space Communication, described as "one of the known bin Laden assets," which the US counter-terrorism agencies, including the NSA, had supposedly been tracking. Debka also alleged that "Bin Laden also has the NSA beat on the employment front," since the wily Saudi had supposedly hired "the best computer experts on the market. One such is Nabil Khan Kani, a Syrian who lived in Barcelona with his Spanish wife, Jenna Florine, in the late 1980s and early 1990s."

Through one salto mortale after another, Debka clawed its way to the astounding conclusion that the only agency which could have secured access to all those code words was -- Iraq!! Debka wrote:

The nagging question of a mole in the highest reaches of the U.S. government and intelligence community -- with direct or indirect links with bin Laden -- remains. Since no single individual has access to every top-level code at any given time -- a single mole would not answer the case; it would have to be a large, widely spread number. U.S. experts do not believe bin Laden was capable of infiltrating double agents into the heart of the U.S. administration on a large scale. They are looking elsewhere, instead, at a country with a very well-oiled intelligence apparatus -- Iraq. (Debka, "Digital moles in White House? Terrorists had top-secret presidential codes." WorldNetDaily.com, September 22, 2001)


While this conclusion was absurd in the extreme, Debka had provided a valuable estimate of how high up in the US command structure the rogue network reached.

A CRITICAL FRENCH ACCOUNT

During the weeks after 9/11, the Reseau Voltaire of Paris represented one of the strongest voices calling the official version into question. Reseau Voltaire's most prominent writer was Thierry Meyssan, the well-known civil rights activist. His book on 9/11, L'effroyable imposture, was primarily a demonstration that the official thesis of a large commercial airliner striking the Pentagon was absurd and impossible. But Meyssan also focused on the central political-institutional questions posed by 9/11, and especially the "angels" question. For Meyssan, the plotters' use of top-secret code words suggested that they had access to other codes, including the US nuclear missile launch codes. At the heart of 9/11 was therefore a blackmail threat to the Bush regime that, if he refused to launch the war of civilizations, the plotters were in a position to do it on their own in a much more sweeping manner, by launching a US nuclear strike against a series of Arab and Islamic capitals. Whatever the Russian and Chinese attitude to such a launch might have been was not specified. Meyssan's thesis was that "from 10:00 AM to approximately 8:00 PM (on Sept. 11), US government officials were not thinking that this was the work of Arab terrorists, but rather that it was an expression of a military coup being carried out by U.S.-based extremists who were capable of provoking a nuclear war." ( http://www.reseauvoltaire.net , September 27, 2001)

On his website, and in his later books The Big Lie and Pentagate, Meyssan offered a detailed analysis of the events of the day, with special stress on the insurrectionary behavior of the US rogue network. He narrates that

About 10:05, the Secret Service, in charge of protecting top personalities, reportedly received an encoded telephone call from the assailants. They thus would have had at their disposal transmission and authentication codes for the White House and Air Force One. In other words, the security of the top American leaders is no longer guaranteed and the enemies of America are able to usurp the identity of President Bush, including to order a nuclear launch. According to Brian L. Stafford, director of the Secret Service, it is not a matter of the United States' facing terrorist actions, but facing a situation of war. He orders the implementation of the COG (Continuity of Government) plan. This ultra-secret procedure is orchestrated by FEMA ... which has already been supervising the rescue operations and working in coordination with the FBI. From this moment, FEMA steps ahead of the FBI and becomes the highest civilian authority of the administration. This agency, which cultivates opacity, is directed by Joe M. Allbaugh, a former campaign treasurer for the Bush family. ( http://www.reseauvoltaire.net )


The keystone of this aspect of Meyssan's analysis is the "angel" call:

According to sources close to George W. Bush, the Secret Service received during the course of the morning a telephone call from the authors of the attacks, probably to make demands. In order to accredit their call, the assailants revealed presidential transmission and authentication codes. Only a few trusted persons at the apex of the state apparatus could have access to these codes. It therefore follows that at least one of the authors of the September 11 attacks is one of the civilian or military leaders of the United States of America. (http://www.reseauvoltaire.net)


For Meyssan, the "angel" call definitely came from the "sponsors of the terror attacks in New York and Washington." He argues that "from 10 AM to 8 PM approximately, American officials did not think that those strikes were the result of Middle Eastern terrorists, but that they manifested an attempted military coup by American extremists capable of provoking nuclear war." The content of the call had been not so much to claim responsibility for the attacks, but to "pose an ultimatum, to force the hand of the President of the United States." The trump card of the plotters was their possible possession of nuclear launch codes, and to counteract that, "during some 10 hours, President Bush was forced to run away from Washington and to go personally to the US Strategic Command (Offut, Nebraska) both to take direct control of the armed forces; and especially so that no one could usurp his identity and unleash nuclear war." In Meyssan's view, in the wake of the "angel" call, "No member of the National Security Council thinks any longer about terrorist attacks, all think about a military putsch which is ongoing. Calm will only be restored at 8:30 PM." (Reseau Voltaire, Information Note 235-236, September 27, 2001)

The call was followed by the descent of Cheney and Rice into the White House bunker. Meyssan sees the defense preparations around the White House as directed against a possible attack by insurrectionary US troops:

Simultaneously, the Secret Service has the Presidential areas evacuated, and deploys special agents and sharpshooters armed with machine guns and rocket-launchers in the surrounding area. It prepares to repel a possible assault by airborne troops. The Secret Service also informs President Bush of the situation; he is on board Air Force One, en route to Washington.


Within this context, Meyssan sees the pattern of threats to Bush and to Air Force One:

The U.S. Strategic Air Command indicates to the President that it has detected a signal, moving towards Air Force One. Considering the velocity, it is probably a missile. To protect the President, the military demand that Air Force One, despite its profile, continue its flight at tree- top level and follow an evasive course, while the F- 5 and F-16 join it and escort it. But the military do not shut off its weather apparatus on board the Presidential plane, such that it continues to emit a signal allowing the international meteorological network to know its position continuously ... Over a scrambled phone line, Bush consults the Vice President. He decides to go to Offutt Air Force Base (Nebraska), headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command. If his identity can be usurped by the perpetrators, the only possibility to prevent them from giving orders to the U.S. army in his place, is for him to be physically where all the weapons of mass destruction are controlled, including nuclear bombs. But Air Force One consumes too much fuel flying at low altitude, and its refueling in flight is impossible for safety reasons. A stop is therefore planned for the military base at Barksdale. (http://www.reseauvoltaire.net )


Meyssan reported that his research team attempted to determine what network might have been behind the 9/11 attacks. His prime suspect was a group he called the "special forces underground," a terrorist network associated with US-controlled stay-behind networks of the Gladio type which in his opinion maintained close ties to Bin Laden among others. (Reseau Voltaire, Information Note 235-236, September 27, 2001)

Meyssan sums up the world-historical significance of 9/11 in these terms: "The attacks were thus not ordered by a fanatic who believed he was delivering divine punishment, but by a group present within the American state apparatus, which succeeded in dictating policy to President Bush. Rather than a coup d'etat aimed at overthrowing existing institutions, might it not involve instead the seizure of power by a particular group hidden within those institutions?" (Meyssan 202 48) This means that the September criminals are still at large, and capable of striking again.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:12 am

PART 3 OF 3 (CH. 9 CONT'D.)

THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE VIEW: NAMAKON

The Russian opposition weekly newspaper Zaftra, edited by the maverick Russophile Aleksandr Prokhanov, published on July 16, 2002 excerpts from a German-language EIR news agency report on the background of the attempted internal U.S. coup of 9/11. EIR's thesis was that "the New York and Washington attacks could not have occurred without the witting complicity of high-level rogue elements within the US military-intelligence command structures." Together with this material, Zaftra included some comments on the 9/11 issue from "Namakon" -- the pen-name used by a group of top-level former Soviet intelligence officers. Namakon agreed that the events of September 11 could not have occurred without high-level complicity by a network or faction within the U.S. military. Namakon also emphasized that the decision by President Bush, urged on by Tony Blair and others, on the evening of September 11 to endorse and embrace the Bin Laden cover story "meant a de facto capitulation of the U.S. Presidency to the real organizers of the attack, and the adoption of their policy of confrontation with the Islamic world, according to Huntington's formula for a 'Clash of Civilizations."'

Namakon also called attention to the much-neglected fact that the attempted orchestration of an escalating nuclear alert between the U.S. and Russia was a crucial part of the 9/11 coup plot. Namakon explicitly linked this potential for thermonuclear confrontation with the August 2000 sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, the full story of which has yet to be told. Namakon wrote that this "hypothesis leads us to ask whether the Kursk catastrophe might not also have been an included facet of the operations of the US putsch group, since an attack of such dimensions would necessarily lead to a large-scale reaction by the Russian military and population, creating an atmosphere favorable to provoking nuclear escalation." The escalation of the Kursk incident, which high ranking Russian military officials repeatedly blamed on the presence of NATO submarines near the site of the sinking in the Barents Sea, came perilously close to succeeding. A serious confrontation was avoided only by a direct hot line consultation between Russian President Putin and then-U.S. President Clinton. This telephone call was followed within 48 hours by a highly unusual visit to Moscow by CIA Director George Tenet. (Zaftra, July 16, 2002; EIR, July 22, 2004) In the case of 9/11, the immediate parallel was the telephone conversation between Bush and Putin, which, strangely enough, is never mentioned by an otherwise well-informed author like Bamford.

Many features of the analysis developed here with the help of lsraeli, French, and Russian sources in particular have become current among well-informed European circles. On August 23, 2002, at a moment when the neocon drive for war with Iraq appeared stalled, an influential British political figure made the following comments to the late investigative journalist Mark Burdman of EIR:

I have been noticing, as you have, the growing opposition, in Britain, in the United States, to this Iraq war. Last night, something occurred to me that I think is very relevant. I think the crowd that wants this Iraq war may well do something drastic in the coming days to regain the momentum. Some very big terrorism, perhaps. It is all very well that there are these challenges to the Iraq war. But we should not lose sight of the fact that there are powerful people in Washington, who pulled off this September 11 last year. They have their Plan A, which is now in trouble. But they also have their Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. They may well have been thinking until very recently that their coup that began on September 11 was going very well. But suddenly, they have to re-think. And I think they are desperate, and capable of a lot. (EIR, August 23, 2002)


In other words, the rogue network was still in place, and it might resort to a new round of terrorism.

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 -- WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE SAID

We now leave the terrain of what actually happened, and move to a hypothetical sphere in which we can best try to shed further light on the events of 9/11. At this point a detailed account and timelines of what really happened behind the scenes on 9/11 cannot be attempted. However, we can speculate as to what an honest and courageous president might have done. Such a president might not have immediately understood the full scope of the 9/11 plot, but he would have insisted upon political accountability for appointed officials and on an immediate and thorough investigation. Some guidance might have come from an examination of the Ed Meese press conference of November 1986 which blew the lid off the Iran-contra scandal, and which was accompanied by the firing of Oliver North and John Poindexter, then the NSC director. The speech on the evening of 9/11 might have sounded something like this:

My fellow citizens:

Today our country and our political system have been targeted by large-scale acts of terrorism. These are monstrous crimes against humanity, and they will not go unpunished. We send our solidarity to the brave firemen, policemen, military people, and office workers who have borne the brunt of this assault. We promise an equitable and equal compensation for the human losses of this day. Insistent and irresponsible voices have been raised in my own White House and in the intelligence agencies, and have inspired media reports attributing these attacks to Arab or Islamic terrorists of the al Qaeda Bin Laden organization. But this is no time for snap decisions or a rush to judgment when we are dealing with the present and future peace of the world. It is true that we have bitter enemies around the world, but the capabilities displayed today appear to go far beyond the technical and physical means available to al Qaeda. We must also recall that, under the reckless and irresponsible policies of my predecessors, the CIA had been one of the main sponsors of Bin Laden and al Qaeda. If we think back to the attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, we remember that media voices attempted in the first hours to attribute that tragedy to the Arab world. Although I am convinced that we still do not know the full story of Oklahoma City, it is clear that the Arab world was not involved.

There are too many unanswered questions at this point. How were the terrorists who seem to have been involved allowed to enter the United States and operate freely in this country? Why was there no air defense over a period of one hour and fifteen minutes? I have ordered an immediate inquiry into this question, and in the meantime I have accepted the resignations of Gen. Myers of the Air Force, the deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and of Gen. Bernhard of NORAD, whose agency failed the people today. There is also evident reason to believe that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service have not performed satisfactorily, based on the fragmentary accounts available so far. I have therefore accepted the resignations of the leaders of those agencies, and of their principal deputies. I have furthermore accepted the resignation of the Secretary of Defense and his deputy, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Transportation, and of my National Security Adviser, since it is evident to me that they could not continue to serve the nation effectively because of the immense tragedy which has occurred on their watch. We rightly demand accountability from teachers, from railroad engineers, and from physicians. We therefore have all the more reason to demand accountability and responsibility from those who have been entrusted with the management of the executive departments, several of which have not served us well today.

Another question involves the collapse of the World Trade Center towers many minutes after they had been impacted by the airplanes. These events, as you know, represent an absolute anomaly in the history of skyscrapers. In particular, there is no explanation whatsoever for the collapse of building seven at five o 'clock in the afternoon.

Accordingly, and consistent with our urgent measures to save any victims remaining in the rubble, I am ordering the Seventh Mountain Division of Fort Drum, New York, to seize control of the site of the World Trade Center, cordoning it off as a crime scene and taking immediate measures for preserving the evidence we must have to determine what really happened. Not one scrap of metal will be removed before a full forensic survey has been carried out. Contrary to media accounts, we have not been able to identify the flying object which apparently hit the Pentagon, although it seems likely that it was not a Boeing 757, and thus could hardly have been United flight 73. As for the tragedy over Shanksville, we are investigating whether this aircraft was shot down by our own forces, and why. All crash sites are being secured by military units, acting under my direct orders, whose loyalty to the Constitution is beyond question.

The overriding question is whether the criminals who acted today enjoyed support or collaboration from within our own country and even within our own government. I have created a special unit of federal investigators which will act under my direct orders and which will report to me and to me alone. The first task of that unit will be to determine why there was no air defense, in violation of the standard operating procedures of NORAD and the FAA. Another task will be to examine the entire roster of FBI and CIA double agents presently infiltrating terrorist groups and how they are managed, with a view to identifying possible factors of collusion. Another task will be to determine why our watch list procedures and other forms of vigilance were not effective in screening the criminals out.

As far as the FBI is concerned, I urge the Congress to join me in breaking up this tragically dysfunctional agency. After Ruby Ridge, Waco, the FBI crime lab, Wen Ho Lee, the Atlanta Olympics and Richard Jewel, the withheld documents in the McVeigh case, we now have September 11, 2001. The FBI has never recovered from the corruption and mismanagement instilled during the fifty year reign of J. Edgar Hoover, a man whom we know today to have been unfit for public office. The FBI has many dedicated public servants, but they are trapped today in a structure of incompetence, corruption, and worse. Accordingly, I am placing the FBI into receivership by executive order with immediate effect; this agency will operate for the time being under the direction of my special assistant for internal security.

In determining the full scope of what happened today, I need the help of all our citizens. If you know something important about what happened today, I want to hear it. Call the White House and talk with one of my staff, who are mobilized to take your calls. If you see anyone, including especially federal agents, attempting to tamper with evidence, or if a federal agent attempts to intimidate you into saying you saw or heard something you did not see, I want to know about that, too.

I am also determined to find out if foreign intelligence agencies or foreign citizens were involved in today's events. I am appointing myself as temporary Director of the CIA, and in that capacity I will undertake a comprehensive review of foreign operations on American soil. No foreign agency will be exempted, and I promise you a full initial progress report.

In addition to the immediate investigations I have mentioned so far, I am also empanelling a board of inquiry to study today's events and offer a second opinion on what may have gone wrong. I am asking Senator Byrd to be the chairman of this body, and Lawrence Walsh, a Republican, the former Iran-contra prosecutor, to be the vice chairman. I have invited former Secretary of the Treasury O 'Neill, former President Carter, General Zinni, former Governor Ryan of Illinois to serve. I am also actively soliciting participation by outsiders and academics who have been critics of our government policies of recent years. I am inviting Susan Sontag, Eric Foner, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Howard Zinn, and Seymour Hersh to become members of the board of inquiry. Let them play the devil's advocates, if they will, so long as we obtain truth and justice. They will all receive the necessary security clearances directly from me personally, if necessary. I will personally supervise the rapid declassification of documents as recommended by the board of inquiry in order to educate the public about the board's findings. We all remember the failure of the Warren Commission; that failure will not be repeated during my presidency.

I recall the words of President Eisenhower in the wake of the Kennedy assassination: the American people, he commented will not be stampeded. I ask you to support your government and its constitutional institutions, and not to give way to the voices of hatred, fear, aggression, and paranoia. I promise that swift justice will be rendered for those who have struck us today, no matter who they turn out to be.

These dastardly attacks will not force this great nation off course; they will not force us to become something we are not. We will remain ourselves. We will go forward in the great American tradition of the Monroe Doctrine, the Good Neighbor Policy, the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan, and the Four Freedoms of the Atlantic Charter, starting with the freedom from fear.

Further attacks cannot be ruled out in the coming days and weeks. Because of the office I hold, and because of the constitutional responsibilities I must meet, I ask for your support -- no matter what may happen during the coming days and weeks.

Good night.


SEPTEMBER 25, 2001 -- WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WOULD HAVE SAID

A real president would have glanced at Cicero's orations against Catiline, with which that orator had gone into the Roman Senate to stop the impending coup d'etat of the bankrupt aristocrat Lucius Sergius Catilina in 63 BC, who had planned to seize power through a massacre of Roman political leaders. He would have been mindful of General de Gaulle's 1962 speech in which he expressed his determination to defeat the coup attempt of four fascist generals in Algiers.

My fellow citizens:

Tonight I would like to present, as promised; a progress report on the investigations into the events of September 11, investigations which have been the main task of your government over the past several weeks. The tidings I bring you this evening are very grave, and they are related to the tempestuous events of the last few days which are known to you in whole or in part.

As many of you may know, during the morning of 9/11 the White House received a telephone call saying, "Angel is next." "Angel " was the top-secret code word designating my official aircraft, Air Force One, so this was a threat to shoot down Air Force One. It was also something more: as I realized immediately, it was quite possible that this telephone call had indeed come from the authors of the 9/11 terror attacks. If that was so, there existed the definite possibility that this group, whoever they were, also had access to other top-secret code words used by our government. This meant that there was imminent danger that the terrorist group might possess the code words and related signals that could be used to target thermonuclear ballistic missiles on targets in foreign countries -- or even here at home. A duplicate of the briefcase known as "the football," which follows me everywhere, might be in the hands of the plotters. I decided at once to proceed as quickly as possible to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska with a small force of bodyguards for the purpose of countermanding, by the immediate physical presence of the commander in chief, any and all illegal attack orders that might be issued by the rogue terrorist network which had so plainly declared war on our country. My intent was to assume direct personal control over the nuclear deterrent forces of this country, wherever they might be located.

During my flight to Nebraska, I received a phone call which presented this threat in the most concrete form. The call came from a man who identified himself as the spokesman for a secret organization of clandestine operatives and special forces -- clearly a subversive and insurrectionary group acting as a tool for a coterie of very powerful, wealthy, and ruthless persons. This spokesman told me that his organization had orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as a means of reversing the inexorable decline of American power in the world -- a process which I and my elected predecessors had been wholly negligent in allowing, he asserted. He also demanded that I immediately make a televised public statement identifying al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, Afghanistan, and Iraq as those responsible for the terror attacks, and announcing our government's plans to invade and occupy these two countries. Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, he added, might have to come later. If l failed to accept this ultimatum, the conspirators were determined to use the nuclear launch code words in their possession to destroy Cairo, Baghdad, Teheran, Rabat, Tunis, Karachi, Jakarta, Damascus, Pyongyang, Riyad, Havana, and possibly other cities. That would start 100 years of war of civilizations, they told me, and once it had started, nothing could stop it. I told this spokesman that he and his group, in addition to being guilty of high treason, were courting suicide. The Russian Federation might interpret the missile firings as the beginning of a US first strike against Russian targets, and might respond by initiating procedures for launch under attack, in an attempt to use their nuclear assets against us before they were destroyed on the ground. The People's Republic of China might respond in the same way. These countries might also conclude that our government had been taken over by madmen, and that their only hope of safety might lie in the use of military means against us. The spokesman for the group of plotters replied that those dangers were real, but that it was up to me to avoid this danger by granting the demands of the terrorist controllers, which came down to US attacks on Afghanistan, and Iraq, with the overthrow of the government of Saudi Arabia likely along the way. The terror group, he boasted, welcomed the bloody global conflict that I seemed to fear, and even regarded the prospect of world war engulfing this planet as preferable to the relative decline of the United States for which he said I and those like me were responsible.

At this moment, our country faced the greatest danger in our entire history. To accept the ultimatum of the plotters and to wage war against their target list of Arab and Islamic states would have cast the United States adrift on an ocean of blackmail, lies, and adventures. Blackmailers always escalate their demands, and the addiction to terrorism of the victorious criminal network might have poisoned our national life for decades, or even for centuries. If I had capitulated; I would have been a puppet of the plotters for as long as I remained in office, indeed for the rest of my life. On the other side, the danger of world war was immediate. I decided that the only honorable course coherent with my oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution was to defy the terrorists. At this point we had reached the SAC headquarters in Nebraska. I terminated my conversation with the spokesman for the plotters.

At this point, I activated several units of the Secret Service and Army intelligence under hand- icked officers whose constitutional loyalty I knew I could trust. I briefed them on what I knew so far, and gave them the task of finding the rogue terror network and rooting it out. These fine patriotic men and women went to work at once, and within 72 hours the main outlines of the plot were evident. Let me sum up what we have learned so far.

A group of al Qaeda operatives, manipulated by a cabal of rogue CIA case officers, had chosen September 11 to hijack several aircraft, force them to land, and use the passengers as hostages to extort the liberation of certain prisoners being held in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Among these al Qaeda operatives were several double agents, also under the control of rogue elements in our own intelligence community. These were dissolute and evil persons, who had been trained using the infrastructure left over from the Iran-contra affair.

Air defense that day was completely absent, in part because of four air exercises which were taking place at the same time in various parts of North America. A number of officers in critical positions at NORAD, its regional office in Rome, New York, and in the FAA appear to have been party to the plot. By a kind of collective inertia, they ignored the well-known and long-established standard operating procedures which govern the cooperation of FAA and NORAD, and were able to misdirect our few remaining fighter interceptors, out over the Atlantic Ocean in one case. More arrests are imminent as a result of ongoing investigations in this area.

What the al Qaeda operatives apparently did not know was that the aircraft they had chosen to hijack had been equipped with a new technology making it possible to seize control of these aircraft and operate them by remote control from a command center on the ground. It was this new technology, and not the dubious skills of the hijackers, which allowed the planes to hit their targets with such precision.

But even direct hits by the two planes could not have been enough to bring down the towers. According to the information we have developed; the collapse of World Trade Center buildings one, two, and seven was the direct result of controlled demolition -- the result of explosive charges which had been placed in these buildings over the previous days and weeks by the terror network, who infiltrated the buildings in the guise of cleaning and security personnel. We have not yet been able to solve all the problems posed by the collapse of the twin towers, since energy sources appear to have been at work which go beyond the realm of today's conventional technology. I will have more to report on this later, In the meantime, I regret to report that I have had to order the arrest of the Mayor of New York, who repeatedly attempted to bring about the destruction of evidence at the crime scene.

As for the Pentagon, it was struck by a US Air Force cruise missile fired from an aircraft above West Virginia, and not by one of the hijacked airliners. We have not yet been able to determine what happened to American flight 77, and we call on citizens to come to our aid in this matter. The launch of the cruise missile was the work of an entire Air Force unit in Ohio, and these traitors have all been taken into custody.

The airplane that crashed in Shanksville was cynically shot down through the actions of a rebel mole placed in a highly sensitive position at NORAD. This mole was aware that the passengers had retaken control of the aircraft from the lightly armed hijackers, and realized that the interrogation of the hijackers on board would have revealed critical dimensions of the real plot in which the hijackers, although certainly acting with criminal intent, were ultimately mere expendable pawns. The NORAD mole also feared that an examination of the aircraft might reveal the presence of the remote control technology, which had for some reason failed to function. Accordingly, the mole cynically directed jet interceptors to destroy this airplane, even though it was far away from any target of interest to the hijackers.

Several FBI officials and agents have been indicted for obstruction of justice; they have been accused of destroying security camera tapes at the Pentagon, and intimidating witnesses at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Members of the FBI crime lab and the NTSB team have been discovered attempting to sabotage the cockpit voice recorders of the planes in question; the recordings we have heard are consistent with the account of the 9/11 events I have just described.

Sadly, I must address the three mysterious suicides from the highest ranks of our own government which have caused so much speculation over the past several days. The vice president was found dead in his bunker at Site R last Thursday; the coroner has ruled this a suicide, and has established that the cause of death was a potassium cyanide pill. The same finding has been delivered in the case of the former deputy secretary of defense some hours later on that same day. The death of the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by a gunshot wound to the head in the Pentagon at around that same time has also been ruled a suicide. I can only confirm that arrest warrants for all three had been issued by a federal grand jury empanelled to investigate the tragic events of September 11.

The mutiny of the Delta Force battalion based near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has been quelled by loyal troops and planes. The appeal of the rebel commander for a military rebellion against the legal government and for a military coup has been ignored.

As you may also know, a top former anti-terror official and several other high officials of the CIA and FBI have been missing for over two weeks, and are presumed to have fled abroad. I can confirm that arrest warrants have been issued for these persons. A number of journalists have also disappeared, and this may also be related to the recent upheaval. I can assure you that our constitutional procedures are just as vigorous as they have ever been, that habeas corpus remains alive, well, and in full force. We have no secret prisons and no secret prisoners, and I will tolerate none. Our open courts continue to function, and they will continue to do so.

We have uncovered complicity between the rogue network in this country and a number of foreign intelligence agencies. One of these is the British MI-6. After the raid by Scotland Yard on the headquarters of MI-6 in Oxford Circus, and after the resignation of Mr. Blair, I look forward to working with the new Labour Party prime minister to eradicate any remaining insurrectionary elements. We continue to observe the situation in several other countries we believe may have been involved in the 9/11 plot. I regret that General Sharon has refused to cooperate, and I invite the Congress to consider what response may be required.

I would like to thank President Putin of the Russian Federation and the leadership of the People's Republic of China for their wisdom and restraint, especially during the morning of 9/11, when the rebel network engaged in visible preparations for a nuclear launch. I am certain that the great powers, having weathered this storm, will be able to return to the path of confidence building measures at our summit next week.

More details will be announced as soon as practicable. In conclusion, let me say a few words about the state of the world.

I do not assert that terrorism is a spontaneous outgrowth of poverty and misery. In fact, I assert the opposite: terrorism is usually organized by an outside agency, often by a government or a network operating inside a government. But it is certainly true that poverty and misery provide the indispensable environment in which terrorist groups can recruit, or be created by intelligence agencies. In today's world, there are about 2 billion people who are attempting to get by on less than $1 per day. There are some 600 million homeless -- that is equal to about the entire population of Europe. About one and one half billion people do not have clean water to drink. With about one billion people unemployed, the unemployment rate in our world is about 33%, about one third. When that happened in our own country during the 1930s, we called that a great depression, and we must therefore acknowledge the existence of a world economic depression of unprecedented severity today. Two thirds of the people in the world -- 65% -- have never made a phone call. About 40% do not have access to electricity for household use; I would call that a clear need for rural and urban electrification. Every day in this world of ours, some 40,000 human beings perish from malnutrition and from easily treated diseases like diarrhea. Another 40,000 lose their lives each month as the result of warfare, all of which is absolutely futile and which has often been cynically fomented by foreign economic interests. I am thinking here of the crisis in Africa most specifically. In Africa, the standard of living of the average family has declined by 20% over the last twenty years. Eighty-nine countries are now worse off than they were at the beginning of the 1990s. 175 million people leave their home countries every year in the desperate search for jobs and food -- about 3% of humanity. The price of a human slave on the slave markets of southern Europe at this very moment is about 4,000 euros. In the midst of all this, the two hundred fifty-eight richest persons in the world own more in the way of assets and other property than the poorest 3 billion persons. When two hundred fifty eight own more than half of the human population of the world, I hope you will agree with me that such a world cannot be stable. Yet, this is the world that lies before us. I plan to use my powers as president to ameliorate this situation with every means at my disposal, and I call upon the Congress and upon all citizens to support these steps for a new world economic order that will be more just, more equitable, more prosperous, and more dynamic.

We have now been tested in the crucible of a brutal crisis. From this experience we must take renewed devotion to our best values. The decade of globalization has been revealed as a colossal failure, for ourselves as well as for others. We must find a better, more humane, more equitable way of organizing the affairs of this planet, To do this, we must work closely with almost two hundred sovereign states, and work out the details with them, since every country has an inherent right to economic development, science, technology, and dignity. The old imperialism denied these, and the old imperialism is now on the junkheap of history. In the days to come, my two lodestars will be peace and economic development, seen as the two sides of the same coin. Our world has turned over several times in the past month, but I am more certain than ever that I can count on the support of the American people in getting the world back on the right track. I ask you once again to remember the victims of the recent tragedy in your prayers. Good night.


CONCLUSIONS

So far we have come to the following conclusions:

1. The government's assertion that the so-called hijackers operated without being detected by official surveillance is untenable, and evidence is strong that the alleged hijackers acted in coordination with a faction within the government itself. The hijackers were therefore in all probability expendable double agents or, more bluntly, patsies.

2. The government's assertion that the four supposedly hijacked airliners were taken over and piloted by the four accused hijackers identified by the FBI is at or beyond the limits of physical and technical reality. The planes were in all probability guided to their targets by some form of remote access or remote control.

3. The government's assertion that the failures o fair defense were caused by the fog of war is lame and absurd. Air defense was in all probability sabotaged by moles operating inside the government.

4. The government's assertion that a Boeing 757-200 hit the Pentagon is physically impossible. Some other type of flying object, possibly a cruise missile, must therefore be considered.

5. The government's assertion that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center collapsed as a result of the impact of aircraft and of the subsequent fire is physically impossible. The fall of the towers cannot be explained without the hypothesis of controlled demolition of some form, possibly including unconventional methods employing new physical principles.

6. The government's assertion that World Trade Center 7 collapsed at 5:20 PM EDT on September 11 purely as a result of fire is physically impossible. The collapse of WTC 7 is coherent with controlled demolition of the conventional type.

7. The government's assertion that United Flight 93 crashed because of actions by the hijackers or because of a struggle in the cockpit is physically impossible, given the pattern in which the wreckage was distributed. All evidence points towards the hypothesis that United 93 was shot down by US military aircraft.

8. The government's refusal to investigate insider trading in American Airlines and United Airlines put options, the wholesale seizure and destruction of evidence, the systematic intimidation of witnesses by the FBI, and a series of other incidents point unmistakably to an attempted coverup on the part of the entire US government and establishment.

BUSH IN HELL

At the bottom of Dante's Inferno, in that third part of the traitors' ninth circle which is called Tolomea, Dante and Vergil encounter a certain Frate Alberigo of Faenza. Tolomea is devoted to that species of traitors who have betrayed their own guests. The peculiarity of Frate Alberigo is that he is apparently alive on earth, even while his soul is being tormented in the depths of Hell. Frate Alberigo explains that in cases of particularly heinous betrayal, the damned soul departs from the body and descends directly into Hell. The body remains alive, but it is operated by a demon during the rest of its natural life span. Something similar happened to Bush when he betrayed his oath of office by turning the US government over to the rogue network on 9/11. The demon has been in control ever since.

_______________

Notes:

4. For Putin's statements related to 9/11, see John O'Loughlin, Gearaid O Tuathail (Gerard Toal), and Vladimir Kolossov, " A 'Risky Westward Turn '? Putin's 9-11 Script and Ordinary Russians."
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:20 am

CHAPTER X: ANTHRAX

The anthrax incidents of October 2001 must be regarded as an integral part of the entire 9/11 operation. The 9/11 terror attacks were highly effective in terrorizing urban populations, since no one knew when another city might be struck, and with what means. But what of the vast suburbs, and what of rural America? Here kamikaze aircraft, poison gas and dirty bombs were hardly likely. But everyone in the country had a mailbox, and now that mailbox could become the delivery system for a deadly disease. Even the most humble and obscure person living in the most remote location could never be sure that a piece of junk mail in the letterbox had not brushed up against an envelope teeming with lethal anthrax spores. The most harmless daily routine, that of checking the mailbox, suddenly became a tense encounter with the world of biological warfare.

The anthrax attacks also provided a most welcome pretext for the Bush administration and the FBI to scale down and to slow down the ongoing probes into 9/11. The anthrax letters provided a reason to re-assign FBI agents to the new danger, before they got anywhere near unearthing the explosive secrets of 9/11. On October 10, FBI assets were shifted away from the 9/11 investigation with the explanation that they were needed for the anthrax emergency.

At the same time the anthrax attacks, if properly regarded, can become the Achilles heel of the entire 9/11 operation, since it is here that the cause and effect relationship reaching into the secure weapons labs and military facilities of the US federal government is the most obvious. Anthrax cannot be synthesized by a bunch of rag-heads in a distant cave. Weaponized anthrax can only be obtained at the US Army's biological weapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and at a very few other centers of the same type controlled by other governments. The existence of weaponized anthrax is ipso facto a strong case for US government collusion in terror attacks on this country.

The anthrax cases also provide a case study in FBI obstruction of justice. After the anthrax letters were used as a pretext for paring down the 9/11 searches, the agents so re- assigned accomplished virtually nothing. For a long time the bureau pretended that any microbiologist could have been the killer. But the pool of potential anthrax suspects was of course much smaller -- it numbered in the dozens, or less. But, in order to define a realistic suspect pool, the FBI would have had to admit that the most likely source of the anthrax attacks was the government labs themselves, and that was something the FBI clearly did not want to do, lest this revelation be projected backwards onto 9/11. After a while Stephen Hatfill, a supposedly disgruntled former biowar researcher with a sinister resume and opinions, and thus a probable diversionary scapegoat, was identified as a person of interest. He was vilified by FBI leakers, but never indicted. The FBI made a Potemkin show of an investigation by draining a pond near Frederick, Maryland, but Hatfill was never charged.

We may also note in passing that the US government response to the anthrax cases pointed up the extent of oligarchical stratification in this society. Bush and the White House staff started taking Cipro, an antidote to anthrax, before the attacks even started. Members of Congress and congressional staffers got Cipro as soon as anthrax letters were found on Capitol Hill, and their offices were shut down instantly. In the case of black postal workers, the Postal Service expected them to keep working in tainted facilities, while at the same time there was a marked reluctance to give out free Cipro to these workers. The head of the USPS, a Bush appointee, said that any criticism o fhow he ran his agency amounted to aid and comfort for terrorists.

We cannot exclude the hypothesis that the anthrax cases were intended to become a much larger epidemic, one that might have claimed thousands of lives rather than just a few. Finally, in the anthrax cases, we have a prima facie case for political targeting. The first recipients of anthrax letters were a tabloid newspaper which had been prominent in publicizing the disorderly and at times illegal conduct of Bush 43's two substance- abusing daughters. Other recipients, like Senators Daschel and Leahy, were possible sources of opposition to the Patriot Act and other liberticide measures demanded by Bush and Ashcroft.

Between October 10 and October 11, just one week after the first case of anthrax had been reported, the FBI contacted the University of Iowa in Ames, Iowa. For seventy years this university had maintained a comprehensive repository of samples of every known strain of anthrax pathogen. This university was furthermore the source which provided samples of anthrax pathogen to researchers seeking cures, and also to labs seeking to weaponize the pathogen. Immediately after this phone call by the FBI, the University of Iowa destroyed the Ames anthrax repository. While it is not difficult to imagine the cover stories the FBI might have used to obtain this result, it is also clear that the Ames repository could have been the key to definitively solving the anthrax letters case. Analysis of the anthrax spores in the letters by chemical and DNA techniques identified these spores as belonging to the Ames strain. With the help of the samples collected in the repository, it would have been possible to identify with great precision the specific batch from which the anthrax letters had been filled, along with a paper trail leading to the agency to which the sample had been transferred. As the New York Times reported:

Shortly after the first case of anthrax arose, the FBI said it had no objection to the destruction of a collection of anthrax samples at Iowa State University, but some scientists involved in the investigation now say that collection may have contained genetic clues valuable to the inquiry.

Criminal investigators have not visited many of the companies, laboratories, and scientific institutions with the equipment or capability to make the kind of highly potent anthrax sent in a letter to Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader. Where investigators have conducted interviews, they often seemed to ask general questions unlikely to elicit new evidence, several laboratory directors said.

Evidence Disappears

Last month, after consulting with the FBI, Iowa State University in Ames destroyed anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept in more than 100 vials. A variant of the so-called Ames strain had been implicated in the death of a Florida man from inhalation anthrax, and the university was nervous about security. Now, a dispute has arisen, with scientists in and out of government saying the rush to destroy the spores may have eliminated crucial evidence about the anthrax in the letters sent to Congress and the news media.

If the archive still existed, it would by no means solve the mystery. But scientists said a precise match between the anthrax that killed four people and a particular strain in the collection might have offered hints as to when the bacteria had been isolated and, perhaps, how widely it had been distributed to researchers. And that, in turn, might have given investigators important clues to the killer's identity.


No matter how scientifically illiterate they might be, the reflex response of any real detective would be to veto the destruction of anything remotely resembling evidence, or even of a key to interpreting evidence. But this time around, the FBI was pleading ignorance. According to Bill Tobin, a former forensic metallurgist who had worked at the infamous and scandal-ridden FBI crime laboratory in Washington DC, "The bureau was caught almost as unaware and unprepared as the public was for these events. It's just not realistic to ask 7,000 agents to overnight become sufficiently knowledgeable about bioterrorist agents [sic] and possible means of theft of those items and how they might be disseminated lethally to an American public."

Dr. Martin Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University, commented: "If those cultures were still alive they could have helped in clearing up the muddied history" of the spores found in the letters. Ronald M. Atlas, the president-elect of the American Society of Microbiology, the world's largest group of "germ professionals," saw large legal implications in the destruction of evidence. "Potentially," he said, "it loses evidence that would have been useful" in the legal investigation. (New York Times, "Experts See FBI Missteps Hampering Anthrax Inquiry," November 11, 2002) The FBI was obviously out to sabotage its own investigation. Here is yet another case of manifest obstruction of justice by the FBI molehill. The 9/11 commission ignores both the anthrax affair overall and the obstruction of justice by the FBI.

Starting about a week after 9/11, anthrax letters began to arrive at the offices of The Sun, a supermarket tabloid based in Florida, of Senators Daschle and Leahy, NBC News, and the New York Post. On October 5, Bob Stevens, photo editor of The Sun, died of anthrax. A number of postal workers in Washington DC also succumbed. A total of five people died. The anthrax spores found in the letters were the product of very sophisticated milling, and were coated with a chemical, silica, that is unique to US laboratories, Iraqi anthrax, by contrast, is coated with bentonite, a mixture of silica and aluminum.

A great deal of publicity was given to a series of reports by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a former government official and microbiologist at the State University of New York who was also working for the Federation of American Scientists. Rosenberg's work was enthusiastically supported by the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), and the radical ecologists of Greenpeace. The FBI orchestrated a series of derogatory leaks about Rosenberg, suggesting that a gang/counter-gang operation might be in progress. Rosenberg's basic thesis was that the anthrax attacks were the work of a disgruntled lone assassin who had once worked for the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, but had subsequently been laid off. Naturally, the lone assassin approach tended to rule out an action by a more extensive network of moles in the federal government, which seems much more probable. Whenever extremely complicated and demanding operations are attributed to a disgruntled loner, we should be on guard against disinformation fabricated by the intelligence community. For example, the terrorizing impact of the anthrax letters was vastly increased by their synchronization with the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Was this a mere coincidence, or did the authors of the anthrax operation have advance knowledge that 9/11 was coming? How could Hatfill have been able to coordinate his supposed actions with 9/11? Once again, the rogue networks of the invisible government, and not any disgruntled loner, emerge as the prime suspects.

And there were other disinformation operations. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a neocon who worked for a law firm representing Achmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, began a vigorous campaign to blame the anthrax attacks on Iraq. In addition, an anonymous letter was sent to police, apparently in September, accusing an Egyptian- born American scientist who had been laid off by USAMRIID of being a terrorist. The FBI questioned him and said that he was innocent. Details of the letter have not been released. Rosenberg thought it likely that this letter had been sent by the perpetrator.

According to Rosenberg's January 2002 statement,

The FBI has surely known for several months that the anthrax attack was an inside job. A government estimate for the number of scientists involved in the US anthrax program over the last five years is 200 people. According to a former defense scientist the number of defense scientists with hands-on anthrax experience and the necessary access is smaller, under 50. The FBI has received short lists of specific suspects with credible motives from a number of knowledgeable inside sources, and has found or been given clues (beyond those presented below) that could lead to incriminating evidence. By now the FBI must have a good idea of who the perpetrator is. There may be two factors accounting for the lack of public acknowledgement and the paucity of information being released: a fear that embarrassing details might become public, and a need for secrecy in order to acquire sufficient hard evidence to convict the perpetrator.


As for the anthrax, Rosenberg agreed that there was no doubt that the spores came from a US government lab:

All letter samples contain the same strain of anthrax, corresponding to the AMES strain in the Northern Arizona University database (which has been used for identification) Contrary to early speculation, there are no more than about 20 laboratories known to have the Ames strain. The names of 15 of these have been found in the open literature. Of these, probably only about four in the US might possibly have the capability for weaponizing anthrax. Those four include both US military laboratories and a government contractor.


Rosenberg based these conclusions on a technical analysis of the anthrax spores:

The extraordinary concentration (one trillion spores per gram) and purity of the letter anthrax is believed to be characteristic of material made by the optimal US process. The optimal US weaponization process is secret -- Bill Patrick, its inventor, holds five secret patents on the process and says it involves a combination of chemicals. There is no evidence that any other country possesses the formula. Under the microscope, the letter anthrax appears to be unmilled. Milled anthrax spores are identifiable because they contain debris. The optimal US process does not use milling. The Daschle sample contains a special form of silica used in the US process. It does not contain bentonite (used by the Iraqis). A "coating" on the spores in the letter sample, indicative of the secret US process, has been observed.


Rosenberg's thesis was that the sender of the anthrax letters had been familiar with a study about using a scenario of this type for a terror attack which had been conducted by anthrax weaponization expert Bill Patrick of USAMRID a couple of years earlier:

A classified report dated February, 1999 discusses responses to an anthrax attack through the mail. The report, precipitated by a series of false anthrax mailings, was written by William Patrick, inventor of the US weaponization process, under a CIA contract to SAIC. The report describes what the US military could do and what a terrorist might be able to achieve ... the report predicted about 2.5g of anthrax per envelope (the Daschle letter contained 2g) and assumed a poorer quality of anthrax than that found in the Daschle letter. If the perpetrator had access to the materials and information necessary for the attack, he must have had security clearance or other means for accessing classified information, and may therefore have seen the report and used it as a model for the attack.


Rosenberg offered the following portrait of the anthrax killer: "Insider in US biodefense, doctoral degree in a relevant branch of biology; Middle-aged American; Experienced and skilled in working with hazardous pathogens, including anthrax, and avoiding contamination; Works for a CIA contractor in Washington, DC area; Has up-to-date vaccination with anthrax vaccine; Has clearance for access to classified information; Worked in USAMRIID laboratory in the past, in some capacity, and has access now; Knows Bill Patrick and has probably learned a thing or two about weaponization from him, informally; Has had training or experience in covering evidence; May have had an UNSCOM connection; Has had a dispute with a government agency; Has a private location where the materials for the attack were accumulated and prepared; Worked on the letters alone or with peripheral encouragement and assistance; Fits FBI profile; Has the necessary expertise, access and a past history indicating appropriate capabilities and temperament; Has been questioned by FBI." (Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, "Analysis of the Source of the Anthrax Attacks," January 17-31, 2002)

During the autumn of 2001, the FBI blanketed central New Jersey with leaflets showing a sample of the anthrax killer's handwriting. The FBI also sent questionnaires to 32,000 US microbiologists, most of whom worked in fields that had nothing to do with the government's anthrax labs. This was clearly busy work designed to avoid making the government the prime suspects in the attacks. George Monbiot of The Guardian mocked this farce as "kind of 'investigation' which might have been appropriate for the unwitnessed hit and run killing of a person with no known enemies. Rather than homing in on the likely suspects, in other words, it appears to have cast a net full of holes over the entire population." Monbiot reported that he had telephoned an FBI spokesman about this issue. "Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? 'The investigation is continuing,' the spokesman replied. 'Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government office?' I asked. He put down the phone." Monbiot speculated that the reticence had to do with covering up US violations of international biowarfare treaties, since "the army's development of weaponized anthrax, for example, directly contravenes both the biological weapons convention and domestic law. So does its plan to test live microbes in 'aerosol chambers' at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research programmes which the US government has secretly funded. Several prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigour we might have expected because the federal authorities have something to hide. The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure." (The Guardian, May 21, 2002)

This would appear to have been Barbara Hatch Rosenberg's line as well. In a sympathetic profile in the March 18, 2002 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann reported that Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may be in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons convention. If the anthrax attacks were the work of a lone, disgruntled, mad scientist, the case for strengthening international safeguards would be enhanced. Rosenberg's basic demand was that this program be monitored. Fair enough, but not the whole story.

Towards the end of June, 2002 the FBI obtained a search warrant to examine the Maryland home of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 48, a bio-defence researcher who had worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Hatfill said at once that he was the victim of a witch-hunt. When he lived in Rhodesia, Hatfill once studied close to a school which bears the same name as the bogus address on the envelopes containing the fatal doses of anthrax. (The Guardian, June 28, 2002)

On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as "Mr. Z" and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist. "If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. It's time for the FBI to make a move: Either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion." In essence, the FBI did neither.

Kristof and the other journalists hostile to Hatfill claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these attacks. Hatfill held a press conference on August 12, 2002 in which he once again denied everything. In late August 2002, a paid two-page advertisement in the Washington Times argued that the anthrax killer had to be a member of the US military, probably someone with access to the U.S. off-budget, secret biological-warfare laboratories, or else someone with access to the Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) report on anthrax-mailing. The author of the ad was a certain Pete Yelis. Yelis asserted that Steven Hatfill was not the perpetrator. Yelis maintained that the evidence indicated that the mailings were probably prepared beginning two years earlier, and that the purpose was political -- to scare the U.S. into a domestic security/wartime response -- and not to kill a lot of people. He noted that the targets were among the strongest potential opponents of "Executive Branch/Homeland Security Wartime Powers expansions," citing, for example, the mailing to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The SAIC report, which Yelis says contained "the exact specifications of the anthrax mailed" would suggest that the mailers came from a group of military officers with access to the SAIC report. (Washington Times, August 26,2002) A day earlier Hatfill and his lawyer held a second press conference, which received exceptionally broad media coverage, denouncing the FBI and Attorney General John Ashcroft for the tactics used in their investigation.

Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, after having been interviewed by the FBI, said that the agents had asked repeatedly whether a team of government scientists could be trying to frame Hatfill. "They kept asking me did I think there might be a group in the biodefense community that was trying to land the blame on Hatfill," she told the press. (Washington Times, August 3, 2002)

Whatever the gyrations of the FBI, it was clear that the anthrax came from the US government, and that the FBI had deliberately flubbed the investigation. The pond draining of 2003 changed nothing in this picture. By the summer of 2004, it was evident that the FBI would never solve the anthrax case because it did not want to awaken the US population to the reality that terrorism can come, and indeed does come, not out of a distant cave, but out of a US government lab on a military base. As for Hatfill, he was most probably a fall guy. If the FBI was incompetent before 9/11, and incompetent in its first major test thereafter, what then is the likely truth value of the statements made by the FBI about 9/11 itself?

THE WASHINGTON DC AREA SNIPER

In the fall of 2002, a series of sniper murders once again immersed the Washington DC area in fear and terror. These started in Montgomery County, Maryland, and soon spread south into Virginia. Here again the suspect pool was defined as snipers, and snipers are trained by the military services and certain police units. Any competent investigation would have started with lists of snipers trained by the government, especially recently retired or disgruntled ones. But this would once again have made the government into the prime suspect, and again the FBI refused to do this. The investigation was supposedly placed under the control of Montgomery County police chief Charles Ramsey, who ignored the imperative of sifting through the sniper pool, and instead acted as if the shooters could have been any casual passerby. Ramsey announced that telephone tip lines were being set up, and that he would rely on information from the citizenry to catch the felons. Weeks went by. After every sniper attack, road blocks were set up to encircle the entire surrounding area, but nothing was ever found. Local radio stations featured interviews with trained snipers who argued that real snipers were humanitarians who would never fire on unarmed civilians. Finally information arrived which permitted the identification of the vehicle used by the shooters, who were caught while sleeping at a rest stop on I-270. Sure enough, the older of the two shooters had been trained as a sharpshooter by the US Army. He and his younger partner were quickly categorized as lone itinerant psychopaths. This affair served to terrorize the national capital area, including Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive departments, for the best part of two months. It refreshed and revived the horror generated by 9/11, and provided the immediate backdrop for the November 2002 election. That time around, al Qaeda and its mythical apparatus were not needed.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:23 am

CHAPTER XI: INSIDER TRADING, CELL PHONES; MI-6 AND MOSSAD

A week after 9/11, the Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT, also cited in some reports as the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism), located in Herliya, Israel, called attention to very suspicious patterns of insider trading in put options (options to sell stock) in the shares of United Airlines and American Airlines, two companies whose planes were involved in the 9/11 attacks. Entitled "Black Tuesday: World's Largest Insider Trading Scam," the article was written by Don Radlauer. According to Radlauer's research, there was a 9,000% increase in United Airlines (UAL) put options between September 6 and September 10. Put options trading in UAL stock went up to 285 times the normal daily average on the Thursday before 9/11. American Airlines witnessed a 6,000% increase in put options in comparison to the usual average. In addition, there was a sharp rise in short interest in the shares of brokerage houses that had offices in the World Trade Center. Put options on Morgan Stanley went up to 27 times the usual level, and shorts of Merrill Lynch jumped to 12 times normal. This was accompanied by unusual buying of 5-year US Treasury notes, US government securities which are considered among the safest instruments for asset protection in case of some large world catastrophe.

Put options represent bets that a given stock will decline in value in a specific time frame. If the stock goes down, the trader who buys put options will rack up a profit. Selling the stock of a company short is a way to attempt to profit from the expected decline of the stock. The CBS broadcast Sixty Minutes commented on September 19 that "the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the US stock options market." Bloomberg Business News remarked on September 20 that "this could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your life ... this would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it were a coincidence."

It is widely assumed that the CIA tracks all important stock transactions, including the sensitive area of put options, in real time. The San Francisco Chronicle soon reported that a "source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, the American investment banking arm of the German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options." (Marrs 90) Alex Brown (A.B. Brown), supposedly the oldest investment bank in the US. Alex Brown had been swallowed up by Bankers Trust in 1997. Alex Brown had numerous CIA connections. Until 1998, the chairman was A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who left in that year to become counselor to CIA Director George Tenet. On March 26, 2001, Krongard received an important promotion within the CIA. (Marrs 90)

The US Securities and Exchange Commission pledged to get to the bottom of this question, and so did the German Bundesbank, the central banking authority of that country. But all references to 9/11 insider trading soon disappeared from the press. The finance oligarchs were not interested in pursuing this investigation, which appeared by its very nature to undercut the official version of 9/11. The 9/11 commission was eager to liquidate the entire matter in a few mendacious lines:

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the 9/11 attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options -- investments that payoff only when a stock drops in price -- surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 -- highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single US-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific US-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC and the FBI, aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous. (9/11 commission 498 note 130)

Here is yet another example of the 9/11 commission begging the question. The issue is not whether the 9/11 commission's alleged "single US-based institutional investor" had "no conceivable ties to al Qaeda." It is rather whether such an investor had inside foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda, after all, is an organization of patsies whose primary role in the entire affair is to distract attention from the underlying realities of the case. We must conclude once again that the 9/11 commission is lying.

CELL PHONE CALLS?

In the first days and weeks after 9/11, phone calls made by passengers of the hijacked jetliners to persons on the ground played a central role in the fabrication of the official version of 9/11. If the 9/11 commission had been serious, it would have published a complete compendium of the phone calls made by 9/11 victims, with complete transcripts and complete recordings where available. The phone calls should have been thoroughly investigated to determine their authenticity. This is one of the many obvious things which it was the plain duty of the 9/11 commission to do, but which it refused to do. Instead, the 9/11 commission has relied on fragmentary hearsay evidence for the contents of the calls, which it has then used without any process of evidentiary evaluation to shore up its 9/11 story.

The assembling, collating, and evaluation of the entire canon of alleged 9/11 phone calls is a task which goes beyond the scope of the present study, and which needs to be tackled in a separate and comprehensive effort. The alleged Barbara Olsen telephone call, which loomed so large during the first week after 9/11, presents many contradictions; these have been discussed by Gerhard Wisnewski. The main difficulty with the reported Barbara Olsen phone calls is that the sole source is Theodore Olsen, the Solicitor General of the United States and a central figure in an aggressive and reactionary clique which played a key role in the Clinton impeachment and other destabilization operations against the legal government. This was again the same Olsen who had instructed 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) Without attempting to set forth the numerous internal problems presented by the available version of the Barbara Olsen phone calls, we can safely disregard this material as very dubious hearsay evidence from an entirely unreliable source.

Other phone calls present mutual contradictions. As Woody Box has pointed out, the two American 11 flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney allegedly each made a separate phone call to report the ongoing hijacking. Ms. Ong talked about hijackers spraying mace, but Ms. Sweeny did not. Ms. Sweeny reported seeing a bomb with yellow wires, which Ms. Ong did not mention. Are the two flight attendants reporting events as seen in different parts of the plane, or are the calls fakes, simulated by well-trained imposters working for intelligence agencies as part of the general orchestration of 9/11? These are important questions, but too much questions of opinion to be considered here.

In conformity with the methodology employed in this study, we rather need to ask if there is anything about the reported 9/11 victims' phone calls which takes us beyond the realm of opinion and into that of physical-technical impossibility. The answer to this is at least a provisional and partial yes: there is persuasive evidence that cell phone calls from planes flying above about 8,000 feet would have been intermittent at certain times, and totally unfeasible at others.

The 9/11 commission report never inquired as to whether cell phone calls can be made from planes at any altitude. It therefore conveys the notion that cell phones would work fine at 10,000 feet, at 20,000 feet, or 30,000 feet, and would allow conversations of several minutes or more in length. Some of the 9/11 phone calls may have been made with GTE Airphones, the telephones typically installed in the seat back in from of each passenger. These required credit cards for activation, and would have been reasonably reliable at most altitudes and in most locations. Other 9/11 phone calls were almost certainly made with cellular wireless telephones. Whether these cell phones could have been used or not on 9/11 in some of the ways described is subject to serious question.

CELL PHONE CALLS NOT FEASIBLE OVER 8,000 FEET

Airlines banned the use of cell phones a number of years ago because the cell phone signals interfered with the navigation systems of their aircraft. For this reason, many people have never tried to use cell phones while traveling in planes. If they did, they might be surprised to find that their cell phones do not work very well, or do not work at all. Professor Michel Chossudovsky contends that "given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8,000 feet.

One expert quoted by Chossudovsky comments: "Wireless communications networks weren't designed for ground-to-air communication. Cellular experts privately admit that they're surprised the calls were able to be placed from the hijacked planes, and that they lasted as long as they did. They speculate that the only reason that the calls went through in the first place is that the aircraft were flying so close to the ground. ("Will They Allow Cell Phones on Planes?, by Christopher Elliott ) Just after 9/11, Alexa Graf a spokeswoman for AT&T, told a reporter: "It was almost a fluke that the [9/11] calls reached their destinations ... From high altitudes, the call quality is not very good, and most callers will experience drops. Although calls are not reliable, callers can pick up and hold calls for a little while below a certain altitude." ("Final Contact," by Betsy Harter)

Further doubts were raised about the slovenly and duplicitous methods of the 9/11 commission just a few days after its final report was released in late July 2004. This occurred when American Airlines and Qualcomm announced that they would, in the near future, be able to offer consumers a new wireless technology that would permit airline passengers to use their cell phones while aloft in a commercial airliner. The very fact that this event was placed in the future as of July 2004 was irrefutable real-world evidence that it had not generally been possible in the past, for example in September 2001. (See "American Airlines and QUAL COMM Complete Test Flight to Evaluate In-Cabin Mobile Phone Use" )

This innovation was notable enough to attract the attention of the press. One paper commented: "Travelers could be talking on their personal cell phones as early as 2006.Earlier this month [July 2004], American Airlines conducted a trial run on a modified aircraft that permitted cell phone calls." (Washington Post, July 27, 2004) Aviation Week described the new technology as follows:

Qualcomm and American Airlines are exploring ways for passengers to use commercial cell phones in-flight for air-to-ground communication. In a recent 2-hour proof-of-concept flight, representatives from government and the media used commercial Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) third-generation cell phones to place and receive calls and text messages from friends on the ground.


For the test flight, which took off from Dallas-Fort Worth, an airliner was fitted out with antennas in the front and rear of the cabin to transmit cell phone calls to a small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station. This "pico cell" transmitted cell phone calls from the aircraft via a Globalstar satellite to the worldwide terrestrial phone network. (Aviation Week, July 20, 2004) Needless to say, neither this service, nor the associated third generation hardware, nor the pico cell CDMA base station inside the cabin (which functions as the equivalent of a cell phone communication tower inside the plane) was operational in September 2001.

According to aviation communications experts, the crucial consideration in determining whether the cell phone calls could have been made is the altitude of the aircraft at the time. Once a plane reaches 8,000 feet, which often occurs just a few minutes after takeoff, cell phone calls are in general not feasible. Professor Chossudovsky concludes that, "given the wireless technology available on September 11, 2001, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude." The only way passengers could have gotten through to family, friends, and authorities using their cell phones is if the planes were flying below 8,000 feet. And even at low altitudes of below 8,000 feet, cell phone communication is of poor quality. The crucial question is therefore: at what altitude were the planes traveling, when the calls were placed? The details provided by the 9/11 commission on the altitude of the airplanes are fragmentary, but there is no blanket contention that the planes were consistently traveling at low altitude. On the contrary, the 9/11 commission report seems to indicate that a considerable number of the cell phone calls were placed while the planes were traveling at altitudes above 8,000 feet, which is generally the maximum altitude for cell phone transmission. (Michel Chossudovsky, "More Holes in the Official Story: The 9/11 Cell Phone Calls.") Professor Dewdney has arrived at similar conclusions. Here is yet another area where the 9/11 myth and the 9/11 commission report collide with the boundaries of physical reality and possibility.

MI-6 AND MOSSAD

9/11 was carried out primarily by a US-centered rogue network or invisible government faction, but it was not carried out alone. The foreign intelligence service which contributed the most indirect support to 9/11 was unquestionably the British MI-6. The cooperation and interpenetration of the Anglo-American intelligence agencies is so overwhelming and so thoroughly institutionalized that it is hardly noticed by US commentators. The CIA and MI-6 are virtually Siamese twins sharing a number of vital organs. This fact is much deplored by those of us who believe that the British Crown, the City of London, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Oxford Circus (the London home of MI-6) are among the most baneful factors influencing American national life, but it is by now a well-established and entrenched fact. Whatever is known to the US National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, is known simultaneously to the British GCHQ at Cheltenham, by virtue of bilateral intelligence sharing agreements. Some light has been thrown on this phenomenon by Claire Short, when she reported that the red boxes sent to her by the UK intelligence service contained texts of private conversations of Kofi Annan which had been bugged by the Anglo-Americans. GCHQ has also had a recent whistle-blower who has fleshed out other parts of this picture. Many of these arrangements go back to World War II, and they have never been abrogated. The British functioned as the junior partners of the US invisible government during the Iran-contra affair, and they continue to do so today. In addition, although the British may be the junior partners in terms of military assets and disposable resources, they are often very much the senior partner when it comes to developing strategies and plans. Who could know the Arab and Moslem worlds better than the British orientalists? The overall Anglo-American plan for the balkanization of the Middle East, the Bernard Lewis plan, is really a distillation of two centuries of historical experience by the British Arab Bureau and the British India Office. The extraordinarily close US-UK alliance lets the British side do what it wants within institutional channels, discretely, and silently. If we were to detail the extent of British participation in the history of NATO state- sponsored terrorism, in the Afghan guerilla movement against the Soviets, in the foundation of al Qaeda, in the development of the figure of Bin Laden (who once reportedly kept a pied-a-terre in the London suburb of Wembley) in the role of London as the premier world center of Islamic fundamentalism and of other terrorism, and a host of other subjects, we would essentially have to re-write almost this entire book from a slightly different point of view. There can be in short no doubt that the main supporting role in 9/11 was played by British intelligence and British assets generally.

CIA and MI-5/MI-6 have also practiced a certain division of labor. Although congressional and parliamentary oversight is usually derisory, there is always the chance that an investigation may reveal embarrassing secrets. Therefore it has sometimes seemed advantageous to have the CIA undertake certain tasks in the UK, and to have MI-6 do certain jobs in the US -- precisely to avoid the problem of legislative oversight in the country whose territory was being violated. During World War I and World II, the British were happy to run operations designed to get the US embroiled in war -- operations which were welcomed by the Wall Street finance oligarchy. In 1976, by contrast, CIA Director George Bush was implicated in a campaign to overthrow the Labour Party government of Britain by helping to orchestrate a series of scandals. (Tarpley 1992 internet edition) This campaign was part of a transatlantic effort to install the unspeakable Margaret Thatcher as British Prime Minister.

The Israelis, by contrast, have never wanted to accept the reciprocity of intelligence sharing which the British have more or less instituted. Israel is far less willing to share its state secrets than the British have been. The result has been that the Israelis have had to work hard to purloin the kind of US secrets which the British have obtained as a matter of course. The archetypal British deployment in this regard occurred when they staffed their Washington Embassy with Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, and Guy Burgess. The British got the information they wanted, and some of it even ended up in Moscow and Beijing -- thanks to these three dedicated triple agents of the British Crown. This trio had some close scrapes, but they never saw the inside of jail. The Israelis, by contrast, had to rely on US Navy civilian employee Jonathan Pollard, who was found out in the mid-1980s and sentenced to life in prison, where he still remains despite pleas on his behalf by Netanyahu. British espionage can use the existing channels set up by treaties and agreements; the Israelis have to improvise networks informally as they go along, which can often be more risky.

Perhaps this is why the more picaresque stories of foreign intelligence involvement in the US during 2001 tend to focus on the Israelis. One such episode involved five Israeli moving men who were arrested on 9/11 after cavorting on a New Jersey rooftop while they were filming, with evident jubilation, the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

According to Haaretz, they "were arrested after they went up on the: roof of a building and posed grinning for photographs with the burning towers in the background. Police found a large amount of cash in their car and suspected them of being members of a terrorist group." They were later charged with living and working in the US without permits and were ordered deported. The five were held for more than two months in a Brooklyn prison. Israeli Ambassador David Ivry, Richard Clarke's friend, claimed they were being held under poor conditions. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two New York Congressmen worked to secure their release. When the men were arrested, they all had two sets of passports, one Israeli and one European, prompting the law enforcement authorities to consider them Mossad agents and apparently suspects in the 9/11 attacks. In addition, An Israeli drug gang was rounded up shortly after the 9/11 attacks. One of the gang leaders, whose apartment was two blocks from the WTC, was arrested when he refused to evacuate his apartment in the emergency. Drugs, cash, and guns were discovered in his apartment, and he was arrested, as were his accomplices. (Haaretz, October 29, 2001)

The five moving men were finally deported, according to the New York Times of November 21, 2001. According to this report, "The five were asked to take polygraph tests before being allowed to leave. But Paul Kurtzberg refused on principle to divulge much about his role in the Israeli Army or subsequent work for people who may have had ties to Israeli intelligence." Kurtzberg's attorney, Steven Noah Gordon, said that his client and the others had all finally agreed to the polygraph exams. One of Kurtzberg's interrogations lasted seven hours. The other four Israelis were Oded Ellner, Omer Gavriel Marmari, Sivan Kurzberg, and Yaron Shmuel. Two additional Israelis were detained in Cleveland, both of whom had just completed their service in the Israeli Defense Forces. At least 50 Israelis were detained after 9/11, with arrests reported in San Diego, Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis, New York, and Cleveland. (New York Times of November 21, 2001)

At the time of 9/11, Israeli intelligence was clearly in an aggressive mode. Mexican authorities arrested two Israeli men on October 10, as they attempted to enter the Legislative Palace in Mexico City. The two men were armed with 9-mm pistols, nine grenades, explosives, three detonators, and 58 bullets. The two men, Salvador Gersson Smike and Sar Ben Zui, were wrestled to the ground by a group of Mexican workers, and were then detained by the Mexican Attorney General's office. (Cronica de Roy, October 13, 2001)

MEGA

In January 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted a phone conversation between an Israeli official at the embassy in Washington, and Danny Yatom, the head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service. The official wanted permission from the spy boss to "go to Mega" in order to procure a copy of a confidential letter that had been sent by then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, containing US assurances about a recently negotiated agreement for an Israeli military withdrawal from the Hebron area in the West Bank. Yatom, according to the NSA intercept, rejected the request, admonishing his agent, "This is not something we use Mega for." (Washington Post, May 7, 1997) A name mentioned in relation to the Mega scandal was that of Leon Fuerth, Vice President Albert Gore's national security adviser, and a fanatical supporter of the Likud. The Washington Post, in a 1998 profile of Fuerth, reported that he had been under suspicion by US intelligence officials of delivering sensitive US policy information to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud. Why was the Mega issue dropped? In March 1999, British author Gordon Thomas asserted in his book entitled Gideon's Spies that Israel had blackmailed the Clinton Administration with a threat to release tapped telephone conversations between the President and Monica Lewinsky. In her testimony before independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Lewinsky had reported that the President had warned her, on March 29, 1997, at the height of the Mega hunt, that he suspected the White House telephones were being tapped by agents of an unnamed foreign country.

THE CARL CAMERON REPORTS, DECEMBER 2001

US public attention was focused on Israeli intelligence activities by a series of three news features by Carl Cameron in mid-December 2001. Cameron had received detailed information from Washington sources. At the time of this report, Cameron said that 60 Israelis were still being held by US authorities. As many as 140 Israelis had been arrested, including many before the 9/11 attacks. According to Cameron, many of the Israelis "stated they served in military intelligence, electronic surveillance intercept and/or explosive ordnance units." The Israelis, some of whom were "described as active Israeli military or intelligence operatives, have been detained on immigration charges or under the new Patriot Anti-Terrorism Law," Cameron reported. According to this report, there was "no indication the Israelis were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance and not shared it." On this sensitive issue, a highly placed investigative source told Fox News there were "tie-ins," but refused further details. "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified, cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It is classified information," the source said. An Israeli Embassy spokesman offered categorical denials, and said any suggestion of Israelis spying on or in the United States is simply not true. Another group of Israelis in North Carolina was suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs whom the U.S. authorities were investigating for links to terrorism. It was further reported that numerous US government agencies were part of a working group that had been compiling evidence in the case since the mid-1990s. The probe had documented hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country; the investigators had concluded that this extensive pattern might "well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity." Many Israelis detained claimed that they were art students from the University of Jerusalem or Bezalel Academy. These self-styled Israeli art students often sought to make contact with US government personnel by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork. Cameron's documents indicated that these art students had "targeted" and penetrated military bases, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and dozens of other government facilities -- including even secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel. Another phase of the investigation, said Cameron, had resulted in the detention and arrest of dozens of Israelis working at kiosks and pushcarts in American malls, where they had been selling toys called "Puzzlecar" and "Zoomcopter." These vendors had ceased their operations when press reports surfaced about Israelis being arrested for immigration violations.

A report obtained by Cameron from the General Accounting Office investigation which referred to Israel under the euphemism of "Country A" reported: "According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the U.S. of any U.S. ally." A Defense Intelligence Agency report specified that Israel had a "voracious appetite for information .... The Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every fact of their political and economic policies." "[Israel] aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target." "Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives," the DIA document concluded. (Carl Cameron, "Suspected Israeli Spies Held by U.S." Fox News, Dec. 11-14, 2001)

AMDOCS

Another of Cameron's installments dealt with the role of the Israeli-controlled company AMDOCS in the installation of the new White House communications system during the mid-1990s. This issue had surfaced earlier. According to a May 2000 story in Insight magazine, the employees of an Israeli company had enjoyed almost unsupervised access to White House telephone lines and other extremely sensitive communications equipment. The Insight article, entitled "FBI Probes Espionage At Clinton White House," reported that FBI counterintelligence investigators were probing an Israeli operation to spy on top U.S. officials through hacking into secure telephone networks. "More than two dozen US intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials have told Insight that the FBI believes Israel has intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis," the story said, specifying that the investigation involved eavesdropping on calls to and from the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, and the State Department. According to Insight, the FBI was tracking an Israeli businessman working for a local phone company, whose wife was suspected of being a Mossad officer working out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Federal agents searched the businessman's office, and found a list of the FBI's most sensitive phone numbers, including "black" lines used for wiretapping. "Some of the listed numbers were lines that the FBI used to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation," said Insight. Authorities were alerted to this operation by a phone manager who became suspicious about the activities of a subcontractor working on phone-billing software and hardware designs for the CIA; the subcontractor was employed by an Israeli-based company. Insight reported that the means of spying involved a private company which provides record-keeping software and support services for major phone companies in the United States. Insight quoted an anonymous US government source as saying, "It is a politically sensitive matter. I can't comment on it beyond telling you that anything involving Israel on this particular matter is off-limits. It's that hot." Insight did not name this firm as AMDOCS, but Cameron later supplied the name.

Cameron reported that, over the previous year and a half, the FBI had been investigating Bell Atlantic and the telecommunications billing company AMDOCS of Chesterfield, Missouri. According to Cameron's sources, a senior-level employee of AMDOCS had a separate TI data phone line running directly from his St. Louis offices to Tel Aviv. Cameron noted that AMDOCS had the contracts with the 25 largest telephone companies in the United States to handle their directory assistance, calling record and billing work, which in effect gave AMDOCS real-time access to every telephone in the US, including records of all phone calls. According to Cameron, AMDOCS had been investigated on several occasions by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, for suspected ties to the Israeli Mafia, as well as to espionage. In 1999, the National Security Agency issued a TOP SECRET/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information report, warning that US phone records were getting into the hands of foreign governments -- specifically the Israeli government. US authorities were especially concerned about the possibility that the Israeli Mafia was monitoring their communications traffic. One reason for this concern was a 1997 incident in which FBI, Secret Service, DEA and LAPD telecommunications were "completely compromised by Israeli organized crime," using precisely the data streams supervised by AMDOCS. In this instance, a major Federal and local investigation of an Israeli-linked organized-crime ring, trafficking in cocaine and ecstasy, had been thwarted, because "the bad guys had the cops' beepers, cell phones, and even home phones under surveillance." Investigators concluded that AMDOCS may have been the source of the information.

And AMDOCS was not the only Israeli company with access to White House communications. The London Sunday Times had reported in the spring of 2001 that Israeli intelligence agents had used Telrad, a company subcontracted by Nortel to develop a communications system for the White House, to tap data flowing from the White House. These data were copied into a secret Israeli computer in Washington and then transferred to Tel Aviv two to three times a week. According to this report, Israel had intercepted e-mails from President Clinton as a result of this operation. Telrad was Israel's leading telecommunications company, and began by supplying phones to the Israeli Ministry of Communications in 1951. In 2001, Telrad provided "secure communications systems for the Israeli Defense Forces," according to the website of its major parent company, Koor Industries. Koor owned 80% of Telrad; the other 20% was owned by Nortel. Nortel itself was reported to be in a marketing partnership with Comverse. (London Sunday Times, May 21, 2000)

Comverse was Comverse Infosys, an Israeli-controlled company which provided "wire tapping equipment for law enforcement." Using Comverse software, law enforcement agencies employ computers to tap into the elaborate nationwide system of telephone switchers and routers, routing the targeted phone conversations into the computers of investigators authorized to do the wiretaps. Comverse managed and maintained the computers and the software, giving Comverse potential access to all of the data. Fox reported that "Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned October 18th in a hand delivered letter from 15 local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, who complained that "law enforcement's current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today" than they were before Comverse was brought in under new US federal legislation. In Israel, Fox reported, Comverse worked so closely with the government that the Ministry of Industry and Trade (formerly headed by Ariel Sharon) paid 50% of the firm's research and development costs. Fox added: "But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue, or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse, is considered career suicide." Fox reported that the FBI center at Quantico, Virginia handled the government contracting and purchasing of the wiretap equipment and, "for years they have thrown much of the business to Comverse. A handful of former US law enforcement officials involved in awarding Comverse government contracts over the years were then hired to work for the company. Numerous sources say some of those individuals were asked to leave government service under troubling circumstances. What troubles investigators most is that in some cases in New York, certain suspects altered their behavior dramatically right after supposedly secret wire taps had begun, and this caused grave concern that they were tipped in advance." (Fox News, Dec. 13, 2001)

COMVERSE INFOSYS

Fox linked the Israeli spy operation to September 11, saying that "U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of AMDOCS." This segment dealt with another Israeli high-tech company, Comverse Infosys, which furnished wiretapping equipment for U.S. law enforcement. Under a 1994 law, private telecommunications and computer companies were required to make their network of switchers and routers available to law enforcement for wiretapping. Some investigators believed that Comverse electronic eavesdropping equipment had a "back door" through which wiretaps could be intercepted by unauthorized parties. One source said that the standing joke among U.S. law-enforcement agents was that their wiretaps were going directly to Tel Aviv.

Secretary of State Colin Powell commented on the Israeli arrests at a State Department briefing held on December 13:

Reporter: There were 60 Israeli citizens who have been picked up in the post- September 11 sweep, many of whom, if not all of whom, are connected to Israeli intelligence .... Are you concerned about such intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and have you taken up this issue with your counterpart in Israel?

Powell: I'm aware that some Israeli citizens have been detained, and I've been in touch with the Israeli government as to the fact that they have been detained in making sure that they have rights of access to Israeli diplomatic personnel here in the United States. With respect to why they are being detained, and the other aspects of your question, whether it's because they are in intelligence services or what they were doing, I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that, because, frankly, I deal with the consular parts of that problem, not the intelligence or law-enforcement parts of that problem.


The Israeli Embassy in Washington offered its usual blanket denial of any Israeli espionage in the US. Pro-Israeli pressure groups mobilized in the wake of the Carl Cameron broadcasts in an effort to suppress this highly embarrassing and suspicious news. Among the most active was a group called CAMERA ("Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America"), which launched an e-mail, fax, and phone call campaign, to force Fox TV to drop its probe of the Israeli espionage scandal. Fox soon caved in, and no more reports were broadcast. Fox had also removed the transcripts of Cameron's reports from its website by the end of December 2001.

In the fall of 2002, the German liberal weekly Die Zeit of Hamburg returned to the question of Israeli espionage in the US before 9/11. This paper concluded that "between December 2000 and April 2001 a whole horde of lsraeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, followed the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. In their secret investigations, the Israelis came very close to the later perpetrators of September 11. In the town of Hollywood, Florida they identified the two former Hamburg students and later accused terror pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi as possible terrorists. Agents lived in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock." According to Die Zeit, "the Israelis provided a list including the names of at least four of the 19 hijackers of September 11, but this was apparently not treated as sufficiently urgent by the CIA and therefore not passed on to the FBI." According to this account, the US agencies dawdled and temporized, and then reacted with annoyance when the massive presence of Israeli espionage was discovered. Two who were on the alleged Israeli list were Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, both supposedly on American 77, the plane the government claims hit the Pentagon. (Die Zeit, October 1, 2002) The Israelis doubtless knew a great deal in advance, but they can always point to their pro forma warning to the US government that an attack was imminent.

Adding up these reports, we can conclude that Israel maintained a massive and illegal espionage operation in the US, spying on all phases of American life, from the White House and the federal agencies through the business world to the foot traffic in shopping malls. Israel minutely observed the Atta-Shehhi-Jarrah-Hanjour patsy operation, and the Israeli government formally warned the US about it. The central contention coming out of the Carl Cameron reports is once again that "U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects [meaning the 19 alleged hijackers] may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of AMDOCS." Naturally, this evaluation presupposes the validity of the official version which is contested and rejected here. If the 19 patsies were working under the direction of a faction of the US invisible government, as is contended here, what could the role of the Israelis have been? Could the Israelis have functioned as a cutout, allowing certain kinds of communication between the US mole network and the patsies? This is possible, but there is no compelling reason to assume it. The very serious matters of Israeli agents of influence in the US government attempting to co-determine US policy towards Iran and other countries, urgently raised by the FBI investigation of Larry Franklin as an Israeli mole in the Pentagon in late August 2004, is discussed in the closing chapter.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz later reported that, about two hours before American 11 hit the North Tower, two employees of the Israeli company Odigo who worked in Herzliya, Israel, had received an email message warning that terror attacks in New York City were imminent. Odigo was an internet instant messaging service. The message had been sent through Odigo's instant messaging. Odigo had offices in New York City about two blocks from the World Trade Center. The full text was never made public. (Haaretz, September 26, 2001) The FBI was informed of this message, but, true to form, did nothing. The last press references to the Odigo warnings came in late November 2001. The 9/11 commission ignored this matter.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:26 am

CHAPTER XII: CONSPIRACY THEORY: THE GREAT AMERICAN TRADITION

The neocons, who are themselves a conspiracy, do not like conspiracy theories. But if we look at actual American history, we find conspiracy theories everywhere, even in the most exalted places. The neocon hysteria about conspiracy theories is therefore radically anti- historical, like so much else about this ideological and fanatical faction.

As the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn convincingly argues in his prize-winning study, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), the American Revolution was based on a conspiracy theory which saw the individual actions of George III as all being governed by a singly unifying design, which was to impose tyranny on the UK's North American colonies. This theory had been learned by some among the founding fathers from such British political figures as Edmund Burke, who made similar allegations themselves in a slightly different context. As Bailyn points out, the notion of a conspiracy centered on George III and his court was shared by the broadest spectrum of the founding fathers, from firebrand revolutionaries to cautious right-wingers like Dickinson.

Before the United States ever existed, there was a conspiracy theory. According to Bailyn, the Americans of the eighteenth century

... saw about them, with increasing clarity, not merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and in America. The danger in America, it was believed, was in fact only the small, immediately visible part of the greater whole whose ultimate manifestation would be the destruction of the English constitution, with all the rights and privileges embedded in it. This belief transformed the meaning of the colonists' struggle, and it added an inner accelerator to the movement of opposition. For, once assumed, it could not easily be dispelled: denial only confirmed it, since what conspirators profess is not what they believe; the ostensible is not the real; and the real is deliberately malign. It was this -- the overwhelming evidence, as they saw it, that they were faced with conspirators against liberty determined at all costs to gain ends which their words dissembled -- that was signaled to the colonists after 1763; and it was this above all else that in the end propelled them into Revolution. (Bailyn 95)


This conception was endorsed by George Washington in the Fairfax. Resolution of 1774, written in collaboration with George Mason. Here Washington asserted the existence of a "regular, systematic plan" of oppression. In conformity with this plan, the British government was "endeavoring by every piece of art and despotism to fix the shackles of slavery upon us." Washington wrote in a letter of this time that "beyond the smallest doubt ... these measures are the result of deliberation ... I am as fully convinced as I am of my own existence that there has been a regular, systematic plan formed to enforce them." (Bailyn 120)

Thomas Jefferson agreed; he wrote in a pamphlet of 1774 that although "single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day ... a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery." (Bailyn 120) This language prefigures the final text of the Declaration of Independence.

John Adams estimated in 1774 that "the conspiracy was first regularly formed and begun to be executed in 1763 or 4." At other times Adams traced the conspiracy back to the 1750s and the 1740s, mentioning in this context Governor Shirley of Massachusetts. According to Adams, the proponents of the conspiracy were exchanging letters that were "profoundly secret, dark, and deep;" this was a part of what Adams called a 'junto conspiracy." (Bailyn 122) According to the Boston Committee of Correspondence, one of the most important pre-revolutionary institutions, awareness of the conspiracy was a gift of divine providence, practically a revelation. They thanked God who had "wonderfully interposed to bring to light the plot that has been laid for us by our malicious and invidious enemies." (Bailyn 122) For these colonists, God was a conspiracy theorist.

Even the Tories, the pro-British faction among the colonists, believed in a conspiracy theory of their own. In 1760 the royalist Governor Bernard of Massachusetts alleged that a "faction" had organized a conspiracy against the customs administration; he saw this group as a secret, power- hungry cabal. (Bailyn 151 )

As Bailyn sums up his exhaustive reading of the pamphlet literature and political writings of the time, "the conviction on the part of the Revolutionary leaders that they were faced with a deliberate conspiracy to destroy the balance of the constitution and eliminate their freedom had deep and widespread roots -- roots deeply embedded in Anglo-American political culture .... The configuration of attitudes and ideas that would constitute the Revolutionary ideology was present a half-century before there was an actual Revolution ... and among the dominant elements in this pattern were the fear of corruption -- of its anti-constitutional destructiveness -- and of the menace of a ministerial conspiracy. At the very first signs of conflict between the colonies and the administration in the early 1760s the question of motivation was openly broached and the imputation of secret purposes discussed ... The conviction that the colonies, and England itself, were faced with a deliberate, anti-libertarian design grew most quickly where the polarization of politics was most extreme .... But in some degree it was present everywhere; it was almost universally shared by sympathizers of the American cause ... The explosion of long-smoldering fears of ministerial conspiracy was by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. It was experienced in England too " (Bailyn 144-145)

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE: CONSPIRACY THEORY

The US Declaration of Independence signed in Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, is one of the most celebrated conspiracy theories of all time. Here we read towards the beginning a description of the present situation of the states which notes that

... when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security ....


This is followed by a long catalogue of misdeeds and abuses committed by the British monarch, introduced by the refrain: "He has ...." At the end of the catalogue, there is a summary paragraph which makes clear that what has been presented should not be thought of as a laundry list of complaints about disparate events, but rather as the implacable and systematic operations of a concerted plot -- of a conspiracy. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, as edited by Benjamin Franklin and others:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States.


The ministers changed, the policies shifted, but the controlling goal of tyranny remained. It is a conspiracy theory of the type which would make many a modern academic or neocon talk show host squirm. It is also one of the greatest political documents of world history. Were Jefferson and Franklin paranoids, mere conspiracy buffs?

It is perfectly correct to say that the United States as a country was founded on conspiracy theory, one which served as a powerful unifying ideology for the entire revolutionary generation. The approach of their analysis, it should be noted, was empirical as well as analytical: they recognized the need to back up their conspiracy theory with an abundant supply of factual material. This point of documentation and intelligibility is a key point, which the analysts and researchers of today need to remember.

Abraham Lincoln often serves as a kind of touchstone of morality and legitimacy in American politics, and he generally deserves this distinction. For progressives as well as traditionalists and conservatives (as distinct from right wing radicals and neofascist neocons), the notion of getting right with Lincoln has long been a fixture of American political thinking.

What would Lincoln do if he were confronted -- as we are today -- with the attempt to found an entire system of government upon a set of uncorroborated assertions about a certain violent event which has aroused hysterical passions and which has been seized upon by those in power to set off an unjust and aggressive war of conquest? Instead of speculating as to what Lincoln might have done, let us look at what he actually did do.

For Lincoln was, in his youth, confronted with a situation very much like our own after 9/11 and the beginning of continuous warfare.

SPOTTY LINCOLN

For the young Lincoln, the question regarded the James K. Polk administration's policy towards Mexico. Polk was a slaveholder and a proto-Confederate who wanted to expand US territory towards the south in such a way as to increase the power and influence of the slave bloc. Polk was willing to make sweeping territorial concessions to the British in regard to the disputed Oregon Territory, where he repudiated the famous "fifty-four forty or fight" slogan in favor of a rotten compromise. By contrast, Polk's entire administration was devoted to tireless efforts to embroil the US in an aggressive war with Mexico. Polk first sent an envoy named Stockton to meet with the leaders of Texas, urging them to start a conflict with Mexico which the US could then portray as a new outrage perpetrated by the dictator Santa Anna. But Sam Houston wisely rejected this proposal, and would not act as Polk's provocateur. The best study of this attempt is Glenn W. Price's The Origins of the War with Mexico: The Polk-Stockton Intrigue ( 1967), and it can be shown to those who assert that conspiracies do not exist. Here was one which tried to provoke war but failed.

Later, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to take a military force across the Nueces River to the Rio Grande. The international border between Texas and Mexico was then about halfway between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. When Taylor's forces got to the present site of Brownsville, Texas on the northern bank of the Rio Grande, they marched across Mexican farms and into the middle of a Mexican township located there. This inevitably led to fighting in which some of the US troopers were killed. Polk then used this incident as a pretext for extorting a declaration of war from the US Congress: after all, US troops had been killed by Mexicans on US soil! The Mexican War of 1846-1848 was on. The armed clash provoked by Polk became the 9/11 tocsin for the Mexican War. The pressure on any politician to go along with Polk's orchestrated incident was as great as today's pressure to go along with the 9/11 myth.

In the midst of the war hysteria, some of the better Americans of the age refused to go along. One was Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail rather than pay a special surtax connected with the conflict. Former President John Quincy Adams led a group of antislavery northeastern Whigs called the Immortal Fourteen who voted against Polk's supplemental budget request to fund the army in the field.

Abraham Lincoln in early 1848 was an obscure Illinois Whig and admirer of Henry Clay who had just arrived in Washington to begin serving his term as a member of the US House of Representatives. We are dealing here not with Lincoln the war president who saved the union, but rather with Lincoln as a member of the opposition during another war -- the Mexican War. Polk's 1848 State of the Union address was a defense of the administration's policy in regard to Mexico. This was the first major speech that Lincoln heard after being sworn in as a congressman. Polk was an earlier president who could never admit to having been mistaken:

... the great bulk was his justification in detail, page after page, of every one of the actions of the United States, and the Polk administration, in the war with Mexico. The most salient quality of this long presentation was its relentless self-righteousness. Its total defensiveness. Polk and America were always and in every regard in the right; Mexico was always and in every way in the wrong. Doubly wrong: Mexico was not just the aggressor who started the war; Mexico was also wrong in every point leading up to that beginning, and had been wrong at every point since. And now Mexico was further wrong in not agreeing swiftly to her own dismemberment -- to the "liberal" and "generous" terms that we are now offering. (Miller 164)


It was under these circumstances that the young Illinois congressman offered his famous series of Spot Resolutions -- demanding to know from Polk exactly where, in what spot it had been on American soil that the bloodshed had taken place -- with the obvious overtone that the fighting had not taken place on US territory at all, but in an area long settled by Mexicans and belonging to Mexico. Lincoln made a speech in favor of his Spot Resolutions on December 22, 1847, after just ten days in the House. Lincoln hammered away at these same issues in later speeches on January 12 and again on January 22, 1848.

The January 22 speech portrayed Polk as a provocateur, and demanded that he tell the truth about what had happened:

Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where Washington sat, and so remembering, let him answer, as Washington would answer. As a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded, so let him attempt no evasion -- no equivocation. If the president cannot or will not give the desired answers ... then I shall be fully convinced, of what I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong -- that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.

Lincoln argued that Polk had been determined all along to find a pretext for war with Mexico; Polk had proceeded

... by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory -- that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood -- that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy -- he [Polk] plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.

Lincoln did not hesitate to attack Polk personally, nor to advance doubts about his mental state:

How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream is the whole war part of his late message! ... His mind, tasked beyond its power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease ... As I have said before, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant that he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscience, more painful than all his mental perplexity!


Lincoln was convinced that the attempt to assign Polk's plots, lies and provocations such a central role in American public life was destined to have terrible consequences, and in this he was amply justified. The Mexican War and its aftermath, built upon Polk's falsehoods, precipitated the crisis that led directly to the Civil War. But before that Lincoln paid a considerable personal price for his principled stand in favor of truth. For his adversaries, he became "Spotty Lincoln," who had refused to support Polk's rationale for the war. Some Democratic editors referred to Lincoln as a Benedict Arnold.

One who baited Lincoln in such terms was Senator Steven Douglas, the Illinois Democrat who was later one of Lincoln's four opponents in the 1860 presidential election. At the very first of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, held at Ottawa, Illinois, Douglas spoke of Lincoln in these terms: "Whilst in Congress he distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican War, taking the side of the common enemy against his own country [voice from audience: That's true"] and when he returned home he found the indignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former friends [voice from audience: "And will be again"]."

Lincoln never gave up his principled position about Polk's method of engineering the war. When Lincoln received the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, he was asked to assemble a short campaign autobiography or autobiographical sketch for use in the campaign. Here it would have been easy to omit all mention of the Spot Resolutions, but Lincoln obviously felt that the question of truth was more important. He stood his ground in the 1860 sketch, arguing that

... the act of sending an armed force among the Mexicans was unnecessary inasmuch as Mexico was in no way molesting, or menacing the US or the people thereof, and ... it was unconstitutional, because the power of levying war is vested in the Congress, and not in the President.


On this point, Lincoln never wavered. Many scholars and biographers who otherwise admire Lincoln have been puzzled or even scandalized by his tenacity on this issue. What Lincoln saw, and which the scholars often do not see, was the fatally pernicious consequences of lies in public life. In this sense, as in so many others, Lincoln was the anti-neocon. Lincoln also knew that if provocations were allowed to pass unchallenged, executive rule by provocation and by the threat of provocation would soon be the result. As he wrote to his friend Herndon on February 15, 1848:

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose -- and you allow him to make war at pleasure .... Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars (Miller 164-191)


These examples from the life of Abraham Lincoln suggest that, if he were alive today, our greatest president would hardly have accepted the fantastic myth of 9/11 in the way that most current politicians have done. Lincoln would have been at the very least a skeptic in regard to the official version and its many fallacies. He might well have been sympathetic to the 9/11 truth movement, since it is this movement which has stood up for the best of traditional American values against the overbearing oppression of the much- repeated lie. All of the neocon arguments about the need to stifle domestic dissent in time of war fall to the ground when confronted with the example of Lincoln.

THE PARANOID STYLE

Objections to the 9/11 imposture in its official version are often dismissed as conspiracy theories. Supporters of the official version use this a term of contempt, even though it is clear that to label a point of view as a conspiracy theory is in no way to refute it. The charge or insult of conspiracy theory is not only demagogical, but also intellectually dishonest, since the official version, involving as it does Bin Laden and al Qaeda acting at a distance from remote caves with the help of laptops, represents a conspiracy theory of a peculiarly fantastic type. Implicit in this procedure is the assumption that a conspiracy theory which is endorsed and embraced by the controlled corporate media is no longer a conspiracy theory, but rather respectable, and presumed true. Minority views which are not supported by the controlled corporate media remain conspiracy theories, and cannot be credible, no matter how true they can be shown to be. To these applies the warning issued by the deranged prevaricator in the White House:

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)


The entire controversy about conspiracy theory is a diversion, and is generally conducted in such a way as to lead away from the facts on the table. Charges of conspiracy theory represent in their own way a form of ideological terrorism, and grow out of the intellectual climate of cold war McCarthyite witch-hunts. Conspiracy itself has a history as long as humanity, since it is one of the primordial forms of political action. Machiavelli writes about conspiracy in a long chapter of his Discourses; what he means by conspiracy is a plot to kill a ruler and to seize power in his place, like the conspiracy organized by the Pazzi family against the Medici in the 1480s. Conspiracy is also an active category of the Anglo-Saxon common law.

Conspiracy theory as a term of opprobrium is relatively new. It dates back to the work of Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University. Hofstadter was himself a kind of neocon ante litteram who became a direct beneficiary of McCarthyism: he took over a job vacated by Prof. Philip Foner, who had come under ostracism as a member of the Communist Party USA. In his essay on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (1964) and in his other writings Hofstadter took issue with the 1880s-1890s prairie populist critique of international bankers, a critique which today seems prophetic in its foreshadowing of the destructive shenanigans of Lord Montagu Norman of the Bank of England during the interwar period (Norman was part of Brown, Shipley in London, the home office of Prescott Bush's Brown Brothers, Harriman in Wall Street) and of the International Monetary Fund during the entire postwar period. But for Hofstadter, radical critics of Anglo- American finance oligarchy were paranoids. His essay is doubly suspect because it appeared in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, and seemed to suggest that the many critics of the Warren Commission report were also -- paranoids. An interesting problem was posed for Hofstadter in that sophisticated western Europe, where populist paranoia was supposedly less strong, was even more critical of the Warren Commission report than was the alleged US citadel of paranoia.

Hofstadter's favorite habit of tarring political forces he did not like, such as the populists, with the brush of paranoia appears illegitimate. The paranoid typically fears that there is a conspiracy afoot specifically against himself. For Hofstadter, this notion becomes impossibly broad: anyone who thinks he sees a conspiracy anywhere is ipso facto a paranoid. What is lost here is the necessary reference point in reality: is there a conspiracy going on or not? US Attorneys have been proving the existence of conspiracies to juries for a long time, and they have generally escaped the charge of paranoia.

It is impossible to write political history without admitting from time to time the possibility of confidential agreements for concerted action made in advance. There are of course times when conspiracy plays no role: an absolute tyrant at the height of his power has no need of conspiracy; he can act directly by issuing orders. (Yet even here, even figures like Hitler and Stalin turn out to have been less absolute than usually assumed; it is enough to think of Hitler's chronic need to keep an eye on his Gauleiters, or the fact that the USSR functioned as an oligarchy during more years of its history than it did as a tyranny.) Similarly, an absolutely spontaneous mob -- a rarity, although a theoretical possibility -- is also innocent of conspiratorial planning. Between these two extremes, some form of surreptitious concerted action can frequently be found. As has been stressed throughout this book, US society today is neither a tyranny nor a democracy; it is organized from top to bottom according to the principle of oligarchy or plutocracy. The characteristic way in which an oligarchy functions is by means of conspiracy, a mode which is necessary because of the polycentric distribution of power in an oligarchical system, and the resulting need to secure the cooperation and approval of several oligarchical centers in order to get things done. Furthermore, the operations of secret intelligence agencies tend to follow conspiratorial models; this is what a covert operation means -- oordinated and preplanned actions by a number of agents and groups leading towards a pre-concerted result, with the nature of the operation remaining shielded from public view. So, in an oligarchical society characterized by the preponderant role of secret intelligence agencies -- such as the United States at the beginning of the twenty- first century -- anyone who rules out conspiracies a priori runs the risk of not understanding very much of what is going on. One gathers that the phobia against alleged conspiracy theory in much of postmodern academia is actually a cover story for a distaste for political thinking itself.

"Conspiracy theorist" as an all-purpose term of ad hominem argument to dismiss arguments which cannot be refuted thus goes back to the years after the Kennedy assassination, when the public was expected to accept that it was US government policy that this great crime, along with the further assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, would remain permanently unsolved, and that those who objected would be vilified.

A more recent hue and cry against so-called conspiracy theory has been raised by the neocon academic Daniel Pipes, doubtless a nepotistic close relative of the Richard Pipes who was a prominent member of Bush 41's exercise in anti-Soviet alarmism, Team B. Pipes is a neo- McCarthyite who harasses academics who show sympathy for the Palestinian cause through his witch-hunting Campus Watch organization. He was also a beneficiary of a recess appointment to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, a procedure to which Bush 43 resorted when it became apparent that the US Senate would never approve Pipes. Pipes' book, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (1997) defines conspiracy theory as "the fear of a nonexistent conspiracy," as well as a form of political pornography. But what if the conspiracy exists? For Pipes, ones own ignorant prejudice that no conspiracy exists trumps anything that might be determined by empirical research. Pipes relies frequently on his interpretation of Occam's razor, the nominalist proposition that explanations should be kept simple, or more precisely that theoretical entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem). In the hands of Pipes, this becomes an infallible all-purpose argument in favor of lone assassins over multi-member plots, since a lone assassin approach is always more economical than a conspiratorial group. But what if necessity, which even Occam mentions, dictates something more complicated to account for the effects observed? Pipes and his friend Gerald Posner, who has written an especially meretricious book supporting the 9/11 myth, have no answer. There is one conspiracy which Pipes does believe in: he alleges an Islamist conspiracy to take over or destroy the United States. According to Pipes, one of the focal points for this conspiracy is the Committee for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he thinks wants to impose Islamic law on this country. In any case, we can be certain that Pipes has learned all about conspiracies from his enthusiastic participation in the neocon mutual admiration and self- promotion society, which has been remarkably successful in making its banal and mediocre members into intellectual and political authorities.

LINCOLN'S HOUSE DIVIDED SPEECH: CONSPIRACY THEORY

Probably the most famous speech in American political history is the one which students still know as the House Divided Speech of 1858. This is Lincoln's address to the Illinois Republican Convention in the process of his nomination as candidate for the US Senate. Here Lincoln is dealing with a series of events which had greatly increased sectional tensions between north and south, between the slave and free states. These events included Stephen Douglas's sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, an attempt to mandate squatter sovereignty on the question of slavery in the territories which had set off a severe round of violence on the part of free-staters and pro-slavery border ruffians. The pro-slavery forces had been helped by the policies of President Franklin Pierce, a doughface and an ancestor of Barbara Bush, the mother of the current tenant of the White House. These policies had been continued under President James Buchanan, another doughface or northerner who embraced the slave bloc for political reasons. Finally, there had been the infamous Dred Scott decision, written by the old Jacksonian Democrat Roger Taney, who had asserted that blacks could not be citizens, that they had no rights, and that federal limitations on slavery were illegal. Were these events, carried out over a period of several years by a heterogeneous group of protagonists, mere coincidence and happenstance, or did they possess an internal coherence and interrelation? Lincoln saw it as very likely that the events of the 1850s were the result of conspiracy:

We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen -- Stephen [Douglas, Senator and Democratic Party leader], Franklin [Pierce, US President, 1854-57], Roger [Taney, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, and author of the Dred Scott decision], and James [Buchanan, US President, 1857- 861], for instance -- and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill -- ... in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood each other from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn before the first lick was struck.


Yes, the House Divided speech adumbrates a conspiracy theory. Nor was Lincoln the only founder of the Republican Party with a penchant for this form of analysis: a similar outlook can be found in the speeches of William Seward, the New York governor and senator who went on to serve as Secretary of State under Lincoln and Johnson. Seward was responsible for the 1860 campaign platform and key slogans of the Republicans. Seward needed a way to express distaste for the slavery-based southern society, along with resentment about the insatiable and inordinate power of the southern states over the federal government. He chose to do this while avoiding outright abolitionism. Seward's answer was the theory of the Slave Power Conspiracy, understood as the coordinated actions of the slave bloc designed to consolidate permanent power over the federal government. It was this slogan that helped to put Lincoln in the White House in 1860. Here the reference of conspiracy could not be more explicit. Any Republican of today who objects in principle to conspiracy theory should be reminded of the absurdity of his position, since his party rose on the basis of an overt conspiracy theory, expounded by leaders who were moral and intellectual giants compared to the pygmies of today.

As Eric Foner has shown in his work on the ideology of the early Republican Party, when the GOP prepared to contest the election of 1860, the new party needed a clearer ideological vision than it had possessed in 1856. On the one hand, the slavery issue loomed very large. On the other hand, the Republicans did not wish to make outright abolition in to their main slogan, for fear of a backlash in various states, including in the north. The central concept of the Republican Party in 1860 thus turned out to be the Slave Power Conspiracy. This theory saw the ruling slaveholder elite of the southern states as preparing to assert total control over the federal government in Washington, and thus threatening the freedom and the livelihood of every person in the north, whether they cared about slavery as an issue or not.

Thus, the United States was founded on a conspiracy theory. Abraham Lincoln's first important speeches in Congress were devoted to exposing a conspiracy by Polk and his friends to unleash the Mexican War. Lincoln's House Divided speech, the most celebrated political utterance in the chronicles of the US, adumbrates a conspiracy theory. The Republican Party itself first captured the presidency thanks to the efficacy of a conspiracy theory.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:30 am

CHAPTER XIII: THE 9/11 MYTH: COLLECTIVE SCHIZOPHRENIA

The wily Shafts of state, those Juggler's tricks
Which we call deep Design and Politicks
(As in a Theatre the Ignorant Fry,
Because the Cords escape their Eye
Wonder to seethe Motions Fly) ...
Methinks, when you expose the Scene,
Down the ill-organ'd Engines fall;
Off fly the Vizards and discover all,
How plain I see thro' the Deceit!
How shallow! And how gross the Cheat! ...
Look where the Pully's tied above!
Oh what poor Engines move
The Thoughts of Monarchs, and Design of States,
What pretty Motives rule their Fates! ...
Away the frighted Peasants fly,
Scar'd at th 'unheard-of Prodigy ...
Lo, it appears!
See, how they tremble! How they quake!"
-- Jonathan Swift, "Ode to the Honourable Sir William Temple" (1689)


Received opinion in the United States has come to regard the official version of the events of 9/11, that is to say the 9/11 myth, as normal. Those who doubt the veracity of the official, mythical account are likely to be accused of being mentally imbalanced, and possibly paranoid. In this chapter, we will seek to turn the tables on the official mythographs and their gullible followers. We have already discussed some of the fantastic, contradictory, and absurd features of the official myth. We now turn our attention to the problem of why this myth has been accepted by so many people, especially in the English-speaking world. Our conclusion is that readiness to believe in the myth is correlated with a mental outlook which can only be described as schizophrenic and autistic. In other words, there is something more than fear and stress at work. The resulting outlook operates not just at the level of individuals, but also in the Anglo-American culture as a whole. To do justice to this dangerous but fascinating phenomenon, we must venture into the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis to develop a familiarity with some of the main features of schizophrenic and autistic thinking. This will allow us to evaluate the 9/11 myth as a product of troubled and clouded thinking, and will also shed light on the role of the main purveyor of the myth, G. W. Bush.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," said Franklin D. Roosevelt at his inauguration in March, 1933. The advice of the Bush regime to the American people is, by contrast, "Be afraid! Always!" As we have seen, in the aftermath of 9/11 U.S. public life has come to be founded more and more upon an outright fantastic myth which is often invoked, but never demonstrated or proven. U.S. institutions have more and more built their foundations upon a provocation. The impact of the myth on American life and on the psychology of individual citizens has not been sufficiently studied by psychologists, since most of them also worship at the shrine of the myth. But in a general way, it is possible to see that the prevalence of the myth reflects a mass psychopathology of delusion and false consciousness, a turning away from reality into a politics of myth. The United States is well on its way under the second Bush regime to becoming an autistic power, estranged and alienated from surrounding reality. This poses the question: why does anybody believe the official story of 9/11, with all of its absurdities? What explains the power of the myth?

Countries which have chosen to build their polity upon myth have generally fared poorly. The classical example is of course German Nazism, whose leaders openly rejected reality in favor of a fantastic world of Germanic and Wagnerian heroes and monsters. The politics of modern Serbia, which has seen defeats dating back to the fourteenth century as more real and more relevant than the economic realities of today, are another example. Unless the 9/11 myth can be deconstructed and demystified, we will soon experience many more of the unpleasant effects of mythical politics here in the United States. The desperate expedient of turning to terrorism to deal with a crisis is like choosing to initiate a heroin habit to get through a rough patch of personal life, as Sanguinetti reminds us. A key aspect to consider, Sanguinetti argues, "in connection with a strategy which is founded upon provocation, is as old as the world: Seneca already remarked -- and if I quote him, it is because, being Nero's counselor, he was an expert in state terrorism and provocations -- that it is 'easier not to embark upon this path than it is to stop, once embarked upon it.' Like a drug, artificial terrorism needs and requires to be administered in always more massive and more frequent doses." (Sanguinetti 19) The problem, after all, is that terrorism -- like all kinds of murder -- will out, and open secrets cannot be kept forever. As Sanguinetti stresses, "the fragility of such artificial terrorism resides however in this: once you proceed with such politics, it becomes even more well-known, and therefore judged, and all that had constituted the strength of this politics now constitutes its weakness, whilst the great advantages it assured its strategists now turn into a major inconvenience." (Sanguinetti 40)

PLATO'S CAVE AND LOCKE'S SENSE CERTAINTY

In retrospect, 9/11 emerges as a made-for-television spectacle of death and destruction in which all plausibility is sacrificed for visual effectiveness on the screen. A half century ago, such an operation would have been much more difficult. Movies go back over 100 years. By 2004, the U.S. population had been addicted to the television screen for some 50 years; the younger generations had never known anything else. Computer screens had been around for 30 years. Finally, the vogue of video games had been strong for several decades. The result was that a world of flickering images projected on screens of various sizes and types had displaced experienced reality for many, or rather had become the centerpiece of their experienced reality. The computer enhancement of Hollywood films had further blurred the notion of what was real.

This was an old problem, the problem of sense certainty, appearing in a new form. It had been discussed by Plato in The Republic, in the celebrated passage of Book VII devoted to the cave. In the age of 9/11, Plato's cave was even enjoying a new revival of interest because of the way it had been crudely reflected in the movie The Matrix. Plato imagined ignorant and unenlightened humanity as confined to an underground cave, illuminated only by faint diffuse sunlight from the cave entrance and the light of a fire. Humanity sat tied and fettered, forced to stare at a blank rock face in front of them; they could not turn their heads. Behind them was a wall, and between the wall and the fire a walkway. Along the walkway came bearers of statues, effigies and other artifacts, holding them up above the wall so that their shadows were cast on the rock face in view of the fettered audience. The bearers supplemented their flickering shadowy show with sound effects as best they could, which echoed from the rock face. The fettered audience of course became convinced that the shadows on the rock face in front of them were the very substance of reality, and prided themselves on their knowledge of the various shadows and the order in which they usually appeared. If any of the fettered victims were brought into the sunlight, he would suffer unspeakable pain and take a long time to become accustomed to the light. If any of them who had been in the sunlight tried to explain the nature of the world above to the cave dwellers, he risked enraging them, and being torn to pieces.

This is Plato's figure for the predicament of mankind, always starting from a naive epistemology of sense certainty applied to the discrete manifold that is accessible to the senses. Because of the attractive power of sense certainty, most people do not want to advance from opinion, which deals with shadows and reflections, to the higher form of understanding, which deals with mathematical thinking, and to the highest faculty of reason, which seeks to clarify the good and the other Platonic ideas through the exercise of dialectical thought. But this is the path which those who love truth and reason, the philosophers, must attempt to tread.

In modern times, the ruler of the cave has been John Locke, the great codifier of English empiricism, with his doctrine that the mind is a blank slate, and that the entire content of the mind derives from the accumulation of sense impressions. Locke's sensationalism, itself borrowed from Paolo Sarpi of Venice, has been the key to the degradation of mental life in the English-speaking world for over three centuries. By comparison, the French Cartesian approach, although deeply flawed, has fared marginally better. The Leibnizian outlook has fared best, even though undercut by the most difficult of circumstances. This may be at least one of the reasons why mass gullibility in regard to 9/11 has been the greatest in the English-speaking world, while France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and other nations have all had either a best-selling book and/or a prime time nationwide television program devoted to a serious critique of 9/11. What we need to remember is that if Plato's cave were to be depicted for the modern world, it would have an endless video tape of the events of 9/11 projected on the rock face in front of the fettered cave inmates.

THE 9/11 MYTH AS MASS SCHIZOPHRENIA

Our thesis here is that the 9/11 myth represents a form of mass schizophrenia. It was designed in this form by the terrorist controllers, far from any Afghan caves, who actually planned and executed this project. The schizophrenia of the 9/11 myth is congenial to the mental outlook of Bush and the neocons, who have been the most energetic propagators of the myth. The mass broadcasting of the myth as a compulsory article of faith by numerous important institutions has clearly induced a schizophrenic shift in the collective psychology of the US population, and may well be generating individual cases of schizophrenia at an accelerated rate. Something in this direction has been suggested by Dr. John Gray, the celebrated author of Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, in his remarks to the International Inquiry on 9-11 held in Toronto at the end of May 2004.

The purpose of terrorism, of course, includes terror -- the chilling effect of fear which has already heavily impacted political speech, trade union militancy, and intellectual life. This is so obvious that it hardly needs to be commented upon. As all those who lived through it can remember, the shock of 9/11 was profound, and successfully paralyzed whatever real political life there was in the U.S. for more than two years, certainly until the Democratic primary contest began to heat up towards the end of 2003. The Democratic Party collapsed during 2002, and it is not clear that it has recovered to this day.

According to the distinguished psychoanalyst Dr. Justin A. Frank, M.D., Bush functions as a highly effective purveyor of fear and terror because he is gripped by real fear in his own subconscious. One cause of Bush's fear is the disintegration of his own personality, which is never far away. In this regard, Bush's "tightly held belief system shields him from challenges to his ideas -- from critics and opponents, but, more importantly, from himself. Just beneath the surface, it's hard not to believe that he suffers from an innate fear of falling apart, a fear too terrifying for him to confront .... He's appeared close to falling apart in public repeatedly; after wandering off the track while speaking, his statements disintegrate into often meaningless fragments until he finds his way, ends the discussion, or attacks the questioner." (Frank 64) In Frank's view, Bush also fears retribution, something which the public might associate with his fear of a Nuremburg prosecution for his crimes in the Iraq war, but which at a deeper level certainly involves 9/11 in some form: "the terror of which [Bush] promises to rid the world is in fact a different fear altogether: his intractable dread of his own individual punishment. And now that Bush has, in his grandiose imagination, identified himself with the entire nation, the nation has become the target for the personal retribution he feels is his due." (Frank 100) This would suggest that Bush's internal guilt, anxiety and stress may well have increased sharply in the wake of 9/11, and of Iraq. Dr. Frank's study Bush on the Couch, although eminently useful in many respects, does not discuss the evolution of Bush's pathologies over time, as for example in relation to the history of his administration. Frank also avoids the obvious implications of his findings for 9/11, which he seems to find too hot to handle.

At its root, the belief structure of the 9/11 myth is not a factual account of an historical, real-world event. Still less is it an example of euhemerism, in which real events are preserved in more or less distorted mythical form. The 9/11 myth is rather a collective psychosis of a paranoid schizophrenic type. Let us explore for a moment what this might mean. What is now referred to as schizophrenia was formerly known as dementia praecox; the change in terminology is due to Eugen Bleuler, who used it to describe not so much a split personality as a lack of coordination among various psychological functions. Bleuler was also the first to speak of the special quality of schizoid thinking, which he called autistic. Simple schizophrenia is marked by a reduction in external relations and interests; this may include a lack of curiosity. "Emotions are lacking in depth; ideation is simple and refers to concrete things ... and a retreat to simpler or stereotyped forms of behavior." Paranoid schizophrenia generally occurs in later life, and "is characterized primarily by unrealistic, illogical thinking, with delusions of persecution or grandeur, and often by hallucinations." In psychoanalysis, the description of schizophrenia emphasizes "regressive symptoms," seen as "a retreat to less mature levels of the ego (the reality-testing portion of the psyche)," along with attempts to replace the existing world, from which the patient has retreated, by such phenomena as hallucinations, delusions, fantasies of world reconstruction, and peculiarities of language." (Silvano Arieti, "Schizophrenia," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971) The points of contact with Bush as the chief 9/11 fear-monger, and with the 9/11 myth, are manifold.

In this context, neocon utopian thinking, with its explicit "fantasies of world reconstruction," can be seen as a step towards schizophrenic thinking. One is reminded of the comments of retired Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was serving as Colin Powell's chief of staff in the State Department, apropos of certain leading neocons. "I call them utopians," Wilkerson told a reporter. "I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you 're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it." Wilkerson added that he had "a lot of reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die. A person who comes to mind in that regard is Richard Perle, who, thank God, tendered his resignation and no longer will be even a semiofficial person in this administration. Richard Perle's cavalier remarks about doing this or doing that with regard to military force always, always troubled me." (Washington Post, May 5, 2004)

Thus, it is the mythographers and myth-mongers -- those who love to brand critics and skeptics as paranoids -- who are really the psychopaths. Chief among these is of course Bush 43 himself, who has functioned as the leading propagandist of the 9/11 myth, from a few days after 9/11 through the 2004 Republican National Convention and his fall re-election campaign. The thesis of this chapter is the existence of a destructive dialectic between the mass psychosis of 9/11 and the personal psychopathologies of Bush as a media presence. In this dialectical relationship, the mass psychosis and the individual pathologies of the (apparent) ruler become each other's simultaneous cause and effect. To make this clearer, let us turn to a discussion of the paranoid personality written twenty-five years before Bush became a fixture on the national scene: "The person most vulnerable to a persecutory paranoid state is the tense, insecure, suspicious person who has little basic trust in other persons, who has always found it difficult to confide in others, tends to be secretive, usually has few close friends, and is addicted to solitary rumination. These characteristics are sometimes hidden behind a facade of superficial sociability and talkativeness. Above all, there is a rigidity about such a person's thinking which becomes most obvious when he is under emotional stress. This may give an impression of certainty and self-assurance, but actually it is based upon profound insecurity, upon a need to be dogmatic because of an inability to tolerate suspended judgment." (Norman Alexander Cameron, "Paranoid Reactions," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971 )

FRANK: BUSH AS MEGALOMANIAC AND SCHIZOPHRENIC

This reads like a psychological profile of George W. Bush, and is coherent with the lucid analysis of Bush's mentality given by Dr. Justin Frank in his recent Bush on the Couch. Frank describes Bush as a megalomaniac operating behind the hail-fellow-well-met affability of a small-town philistine booster of the Babbitt type. According to Frank, "a careful consideration of the evidence suggests that behind Bush's affable exterior operates a powerful but obscure delusional system that drives his behavior. The most precise psychiatric term to describe his pathology is most frequently used to identify a particular condition exhibited by schizophrenics that, as we'll see, has broader applications as well: megalomania. The psychological concept of megalomania refers as much to a mental attitude as to actual behavioral manifestations .... Freud calls megalomania a protective delusion of power and greatness that serves as a defense against fear, against paranoid anxieties." (Frank 200-201) Bush is thus that type of schizophrenic called a megalomaniac, and the 9/11 myth to which he has devoted his life is entirely coherent with his mentality. The 9/11 myth is in fact a massive attempt to impose schizophrenic and autistic thinking on the entire American and world public. This may explain why those who wish to rebel against the myth often tend to insist that Bush (or Cheney) had to have planned and directed every aspect of 9/11 personally and in advance. Even though Bush's limited mental equipment seems to rule this out, this reaction is humanly understandable, since Bush has been beyond any doubt the main propagandist of the 9/11 myth. So, to destroy the myth, it is often seen as necessary to blame the mythograph. The extent of Bush's actual responsibility is discussed elsewhere in this book, where it is asserted that Bush was probably not informed of the details in advance, but certainly embraced the demands of the perpetrators soon after the fact. In this sense, the insistence on blaming Bush is justified as a matter of political shorthand, if not of precise analysis and historical fact.

Dr. Frank writes about Bush 41's favorite technique of "evacuating" his fear onto the U.S. population, both for his own relief and better to terrorize the electorate. He also discusses Bush 43's penchant for projection. Here is another passage from the earlier discussion of this complex: "The paranoid patient gets rid of his intolerable sense of guilt through unconscious mechanisms of denial and projection. He denies his primitive hostile or erotic impulses and projects them -- that is, he ascribes them to other persons. Projection is rarely done at random. Usually the patient unwittingly selects, as the alleged carriers of his own impulses and his own guilt, persons who have correspondingly minimal unconscious trends." (Norman Alexander Cameron, "Paranoid Reactions," Encyclopedia Britannica, 1971) This fits well with what Dr. Franks writes about projection in Bush 43: Projection for Frank is "the primitive defense mechanism by which an individual endows others with his own negative attributes." (Frank 152) Applying this to the tenant of the White House, Frank finds that, "incapable of safely confronting the true extent of his own sadism, Bush had to project his sadism onto an enemy of his own creation -- one he entered the White House ready to demonize and destroy; one whose annihilation would serve to protect his own fragile, deluded sense of self." (Frank 115) As always, Frank is talking about Iraq, but, like most of his analysis, this applies just as well to Bin Laden and al Qaeda as it does to Saddam.

No thinking person can fail to have been impressed by the degree to which Bush, in his attempt to demonize Saddam Hussein, engaged in self-description. Saddam, Bush alleged, was an oppressor, a violator of international law, a leader in contempt of the international community, an aggressor -- all accusations which applied just as well or better to Bush himself. Joseph Gabel's comment is highly relevant: "... racist regimes, being generally insensitive to humor ... are, by contrast, keen on caricature, mainly in its crude forms ... The caricaturist, without realizing it, is really drawing himself ... Clearly the caricaturist sees his own essence. In this category of ideas, one could say that the sociocentric and ethnocentric caricature is the deranged perception of false consciousness." (Gabel 123-4 note) Frank calls attention to Bush's tendency for projection and description in regard to Saddam Hussein, although the same dynamics are at work in the portrayal of Bin Laden. According to Franks, "none of this has gone unnoticed by the public. Indeed, the pronounced parallels between Bush and Saddam may well have promoted a wider understanding of Bush's destructive self rather than hiding it. As suggested by the many circulating photos of Bush's face digitally merged with Saddam's image -- a computer trick that reveals a dramatic pictorial understanding of the process of projection -- satirists instinctively understand that there is a pot-calling-the- kettle-black aspect to the showdown between Bush and Saddam." (Frank 116) And, more to the point, between Bush and the supposed authors of the 9/11 attacks.

Part of Bush's guilt is almost certainly the fact that, while he probably was not aware of the full 9/11 plot before the fact, he became aware of most of it after that fact, most likely during the course of the day on September 11. Bush was the recipient of an ultimatum by the rogue network inside the US government which carried out the attacks, an ultimatum demanding that he go on television and denounce foreign terrorists for the attacks, and then proceed to implicate Bin Laden, al Qaeda, Afghanistan, and to wage the war of civilizations against the Arab and Moslem world which the plotters evidently desired. For these reasons, Bush's burden of guilt and dissembling must be very heavy indeed.

So much for preliminaries. When we enter the world of the 9/11 myth, we find ourselves on the terrain of mass psychosis, mass hallucination, mass delusion. The twentieth century has shown how powerful these ideological figments can be. This book proceeds from the standpoint of Platonic idealism; a Marxist might say that with 9/11, we enter the world of radically false consciousness, where the superstructure has become completely detached from social and material reality in a way that Marx never contemplated in his writings. A suggestive study that addresses precisely this complex of problems is Joseph Gabel's 1975 False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification. Gabel sees reification (hypostatization) as the making of people, ideas, and time into things. His point of departure is the gross fact of mass belief in ideological chimeras, specifically Nazi and Stalinist ideology. The 9/11 myth is of a piece with these.

GABEL: THE POLICE CONCEPT OF HISTORY

Gabel elaborates a lengthy definition of the political world view which is correlated with alienated and manipulated political life under the rule of schizophrenic/autistic ideologies which exhibit a low degree of fidelity to reality. Gabel called this the "police concept of history;" if he were writing today, he might well have called it the intelligence community or CIA theory of history. Gabel writes: "The police concept of history is the negation of the historical dialectic, in other words the negation of history .... History's driving force is not the ensemble of objective forces but good or evil individual action ... since the 'event' is no longer understood as the normal substratum of the course of History, but as miracle or catastrophe; it is no longer dependent on scientific explanation but on black or white magic. In the Manichean diptych of this view, the hero (leader) and the traitor represent two poles of the same principle of reificational negation of the autonomy of history. It is therefore a pseudo-history, a non-dialectical result either of success due to the genius of the leader or failure explicable through treason; an authentic 'syndrome of external action' permits the privileged system to evade eventual responsibility. The police concept of history represents the extreme form of political alienation; it is both a sociocentrism which dichotomizes the world into a privileged system [the US] and a non-privileged remainder [the Arab and Islamic world] and a phenomenon of consciousness of a schizophrenic nature. Since the privileged system is considered as perfect, extra-temporal and extra-dialectical, the event -- particularly the unfavorable event -- can only be explained by means of external action; it is experienced as an unexpected, 'undeserved' catastrophe, which is no longer integrated into the normal course of events whose succession constitutes the threat of concrete, dialectical temporality. One can compare this ensemble with the two specific elements in the clinical picture of schizophrenia, the syndrome of external action and the deranged experience of the end of the world (Weltuntergangserlebnis, abbreviated as WUE by German authors), the clinical translation of the appearance of the dialectic in a reified world which can accept the event only as a catastrophe." (Gabel 115-116, with my interpolations)

Here we have the principal elements or memes of the 9/11 myth in a clinical description a quarter century before the fact. The event has nothing to do with real historical forces. The realities of world commodity flows and of the world financial system in particular go out the window. Bin Laden and al Qaeda provide a deus ex machina of absolute evil and black magic. 9/11 is the undeserved catastrophe or WUE, experienced as a nightmare out of the blue. In order for such notions to gain mass acceptance, the American ideology had to already have traveled a considerable distance down the road towards schizophrenia and autism, and such mass acceptance has in turn further accelerated that descent. For Gabel, schizophrenia is a loss of contact with reality and with history. His definition of schizophrenia depends heavily on the notion that, for the schizophrenic, development over time has become incomprehensible, while relations in space have become all-important. In space we can often choose to move, but time does not permit this. Therefore there is a close relationship between a radically anti-historical view of the world, as for example among the neocons and the Bush regime, and the syndromes of clinical schizophrenia, prominent among whose symptoms Gabel sees morbid rationalism, understood as a weak hold on reality: "In the light of recent work, schizophrenia appears as a loss of the sense of personal history, and psychotherapy therefore consists of a reconstruction of the totality of the person with a reintegration into history. From the viewpoint of the investigator the schizophrenic loss of the historico-dialectical perception of reality can be seen in the form of a preponderance of the spatial factor or as a loss of experienced time: as over-spatialization or as sub-temporalization." (Gabel 116) Gabel's work here dovetails with that of Frank, who points to Bush 43's notorious refusal to discuss the details of his youthful debauchery before the age of about 40. It is as if these episodes were repressed and no longer accessible to memory -- at least, in Bush's own propaganda patter. Frank is certainly on firm ground when he points to the fundamentalist belief structure of Bush and of so much of his base as representing a rejection of human history, personal history, and of natural history as well: "Just as fundamentalist creationist teachings deny history, the fundamentalist notion of conversion or rebirth encourages the believer to see himself as disconnected from history. George W. Bush's evasive, self-serving defense of his life before he was born again displays just this tendency. To the believer, the power of spiritual absolution not only erases the sins of the past, but divorces the current self from the historical sinner." (Frank 59- 60)

WUE: CATASTROPHE FROM OUTSIDE A PERFECT SYSTEM

A vital part of the WUE brought about inside the perfect system by evil forces is that these evil forces are axiomatically seen as coming from outside of that perfect system. Evil is always external, never home grown, as it was for the racist southern sheriff who thought that all racial tensions were the work of outside agitators. "The result is that when the evidence of the historicity of existence forces itself on the misoneism [hatred of change] of reified consciousness, it appears as an unexpected catastrophe, inexplicable and often attributed therefore to external action .... For sociocentrism, the privileged system being perfect, any change (particularly any unfavorable change) is the work of external maleficent powers." (Gabel 288 and note) Gerhard Wisnewski has related this idea most directly to 9/11. As Wisnewski points out, "from outside" is the central slogan of the official version of 9/11. "The impression is produced that the perpetrators came 'from outside': from outside of the building, from outside of America, even from outside civilization. The official version of these events screams 'outside, outside, outside.'" (Wisnewski 143)

In a world axiomatically defined by terrorism, the Manichean outlook seems destined always to win out. Sanguinetti saw something similar in Italy at the beginning of the strategy of tension: "In view of terrorism presented as absolute evil, evil in itself and for itself: all the other evils fade in to the background and are even forgotten; since the fight against terrorism coincides with the common interest, it already is the general good, and the State, which magnanimously conducts it, is good in itself and for itself. Without the wickedness of the devil, God's infinite bounty could not appear and be appreciated as is fitting." (Sanguinetti 3)

Gabel insists again and again on the key role played by the loss of the historical dimension, and it is clear that this problem was shared by twentieth-century America with Nazi Germany and with Soviet Russia. Anglo-American propaganda exhibits an overwhelming tendency to demonize enemy leaders: Noriega, Milosevic, Bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein are notable examples, but the tendency goes back to Kaiser Wilhelm at the very least. Today the explicit speech of propaganda is conducted on the overtly infantile plane: we hear of good guys and bad guys, of bad actors, and most of all of terrorists. Gabel writes: "For Gabel, this is another symptom of reification (hypostatization): "As a prisoner of a universe where space takes the place of duration, man in the reified world cannot understand history as the expression of creativity and spontaneity. Consequently the undeniable fact of change forces itself on this 'consciousness of immediacy' as a catastrophe, as a sudden change coming from the outside that excludes mediation. ...Seen in this perspective, history appears as a function of demiurgic action. An external force (God, the hero, a party) transcends the efficiency of its autonomous dialectic. Reified consciousness is essentially ahistorical: mens momentanea seu carens recordatione,' [a mind in the moment, or lacking memory] said Leibniz on this subject." (Gabel 151) Here is history reduced to a fairy tale, with the cocaine-abusing, alcoholic, mentally-impaired Bush as the hero of the good, and the rich, misfit, raving ideologue Bin Laden as the champion of evil. How can hundreds of millions of people believe in such a product?

Gabel discusses the stress on biological heredity and race as one of the leading anti-historical features of the Nazi outlook, and there is evidence that Hitler was also well aware of this. Gabel points out that Nazi ideology, with its glorification of race and biology, was marked by "morbid rationalism in its worst form." Gabel argues that "any unfavorable event for this racial pseudo-value is itself extra-historicized and 'understood' in terms of treason or conspiracy: the ideology of national socialism is logically inseparable from the theory of the 'stab in the back."' (Gabel 117) If fascism comes to the United States, it is now certain that its ideology will prominently feature the 9/11 events as a stab in the back to a benefactor by an ungrateful and treacherous outside world; fascist neocons are already spouting this point of view. Ironically, the German request for an armistice in 1918, which Hitler later condemned as a stab in the back by Social Democratic politicians, was actually the work of Field Marshal Ludendorff and other future backers of Hitler. As for 9/11, which Bush blames on the Arab and Moslem world, it too had some of its main backers inside the US military and intelligence services.

SCHIZOPHRENIA: REJECTION OF HISTORY AND REALITY

Frank sees Bush's paranoid schizophrenic hostility to real historical processes reflected in some well-known aspects of his bureaucratic methods. One is his insistence on absolute, unquestioning loyalty on the part of his underlings: "Like the alcoholic father who is threatened by the independence of his family members, Bush demands absolute loyalty and conformity, trying to freeze his national family in time. ..." (Frank 46) For Frank, Bush has no use for history in any form; he remarks, "with a president who refuses to view history as anything but an enemy he cannot afford to acknowledge or engage, it's impossible not to wonder what painful lessons of history we may be doomed to repeat." (Frank 161)

One way of denying historical reality is to wipe out the past; another is to insist that the leading delusion of one's own time is destined to last forever. The Nazis did this in one way, Bush in another: "the historical time of national socialism was dominated ... by the chimerical hope of an empty eternity" -- there was the promise of a thousand year Reich, sometimes escalated to 20,000 years of Nazi world domination. (Gabel 134) For Bush and the neocons, this has become the nightmare vision of a war against terrorism which is literally endless.

Bush's fraudulent "war on terrorism" is of course a war of civilizations directed against the 1 billion Arab and Moslem people in the world; it is more hypocritical than Hitlerism because it assiduously denies its own real content. In reality, the "war on terrorism" is a racist war against Arabs and Moslems today, with China and perhaps Russia as candidates for all-out attack at some later time. From time to time the real essence explodes to the surface, as in Bush's call for a crusade, or in General Boykin's comments on satanic Islam. Neocon radio talk show hosts like Michael Savage are more explicit every day, and it is they who service the belief structure of Bush's hard-core followers. Gabel sees racism as another denial of reality and history: "The racist perception of human reality is schizophrenic in several ways," he observes. Gabel also detects a depersonalization of members of the targeted group, "which is reflected particularly in caricature, the strongest weapon of ethnocentrism." (Gabel 123)

In Bush's fear-mongering oratory, the denial of reality is so great that it often approaches the qualities of hallucination, and sometimes enters into that domain. "It will be admitted that there exists a certain analogy between hallucinatory consciousness which, in its demand for homogeneity, is forced to alienate in a hallucinatory form the tendencies that it no longer manages to organize in a concrete totality, and, on the other hand, reified political consciousness which, in its postulate of political homogeneity -- a postulate which the totalitarian state tries to put into practice -- attributes to the foreigner (in the widest sense of the term, implying also political heterodoxy) facts for which a simple dialectical consideration of reality would permit a rational explanation to be given." (Gabel 279-280) Frank connects this to the hatred of the lawful character of reality, which we see manifested in Bush -- who loves to live outside the law as an individual, from his drunk driving arrests through his National Guard shenanigans to his illegal election -- and in the neocons -- who hate the very concept of international law: "Wilfred R. Bion points out that the part of the personality that hates internal law -- the laws of reality, of time, of responsibility, of loss -- hates external reality as well. It attacks links made in the mind, undermining the capacity to think and organize that comes from facing reality and its limitations. Living outside the law of mature responsibility becomes both the midwife of omnipotent fantasy and the mortician of the capacity to think." (Frank 89)

Bush boasts about his own penchant for seeing the world in black and white, as a single Manichean opposition of good and evil, with no nuances or gray areas. As Frank notes, "there are no shades of gray in this fight for civilization .... Either you're with the United States of America, or you're against the United States of America." (Frank 13) Gabel saw the same phenomenon in the Nazis: "By virtue of the implicit Manichean postulate of ideological thought, the enemies of enemies so often enjoy an undeserved favorable prejudice; for the political Manichean one is either "with us or against us," as Bush constantly repeats. (Gabel 97 note)

INFANTILE EGOCENTRISM AND ETHNOCENTRISM

Many have noted the primitive and childish quality of the Bush/neocon analysis, with its mindless parroting about good guys and bad guys. Bush's oratory also shares another key feature of the infantile mind -- egocentrism, or the tendency to see large and distant events as having been caused by ones own petty actions. This is exemplified by the suburbanite who thinks that getting the car washed will make the rain come down. After 9/11, Bush notoriously divided the world into terrorist bad guys and pro-American good guys. He insisted, in other words, that the world should be forever organized around this single event. Gabel shows that adult egocentrism and schizophrenia go together: "A zoologist who, having been successively bitten by a dog and a cat, used as a scientific concept 'the animal species which bites zoologists' would be guilty of false egocentric identification ... False identification is an important aspect of the anti-dialectical structure of ideologies and, at the same time, a valued technique of economy of effort for propaganda." (Gabel 92) What egocentrism represents in the stunted individual, ethnocentrism accomplishes for the sick society. Think of Bush's Post-9/11 axis of evil, composed of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Yet, there had been no rogue states' summit to sign a treaty of alliance among these three. Iraq and Iran had been enemies, and North Korea, a true hermit kingdom, lived in its own isolation. Yet, Bush insisted like a small child in defining the three exclusively in relation to himself -- within, it should go without saying, a universe of discourse already defined by the 9/11 myth. Once again, Gabel described something similar under the Nazis. Under the Nazi regime, "the non-German world seems to a large extent to have been interpreted in terms of the postulate that the enemy world was homogeneous. This was less because of a working hypothesis about propaganda than ideological convictions of a delirious nature." (Gabel 120) The Nazis portrayed a world of capitalists, Bolsheviks, and Jews who were all mythically united in their hatred for Germany.

Although often couched in religious terms, the neocon ideology is close not only to that of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, but also to that of the Nazi sociologist Gumplowitz, whose major work was devoted to the conflict of the races. This is also not far from Huntington's clash of civilizations. In each of these cases, history is dominated by mythical entities. We think of the Cambone-Boykin-Geoffrey Miller axis in the Pentagon and US Army; Boykin was responsible for a raving declaration that his Christian God is stronger than the God of Islam, and that Islam is satanic. In reality, Boykin knows nothing of universal Christianity, and the god he worships is between totem and Mammon. Schizophrenic personalities like Boykin and Miller (a member of the sinister religious sect called The Fellowship) were observed to have been over-represented among the personnel of the Nazi concentration camps. The same would appear to be the case among the Bush administration; Cambone, Boykin, and Miller have become the architects of the gulag that stretches from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib to the system of illegal CIA secret dungeons and illegal ghost prisoners reported to be operating in numerous countries. Frank notes that "the eminent psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan has written that we need an enemy to rally the community around a 'chosen trauma.' Almost immediately after 9/11, Bush began speaking of the war, in grandiose terms, as a kind of epic and eternal struggle .... Making the war against terrorism perennial keeps him in power, by keeping the terror externalized." (Frank 98) Although Frank hesitates to say so, 9/11 is obviously the chosen trauma.

BUSH'S DIVINE MISSION AS SCHIZOPHRENIC SYMPTOM

Bush has spoken of his own role in regard to 9/11 and Iraq as a divine mission assigned to him by God; especially chilling was his remark that he did not consult his own father before the aggression against Iraq, but did consult his "higher father." Here we have the image of the hero who goes forth on a divine quest to hold back the forces of chaos and the WUE. As Frank reminds us, "Bush has always been surprisingly explicit in declaring that he sees himself on a mission from God, and it is his belief in that divine assignment in which we see the most potent combination of politics, psychology, and faith at work." (Frank 71) For Gabel, this notion of a divine mission is an integral part of the schizophrenic misperception of historical change in the real world. Gabel links "the syndrome of external action and the deranged experience of the end of the world.... Consequently, when the event forces itself into reified consciousness, the latter makes this evident through a double technique of partial obscuration: from the point of view of causal explanation it interprets it as the act of an external power; on the level of lived experience it experiences it either as a catastrophe or, on the contrary, as a sudden significant (and always heteronomic) irruption into the axiological void [vacuum of values] of the world itself: a divine mission. In short, like a manic crisis, the WUE is an axiological crisis, a sort of storm of values on the boundaries of two atmospheres of different axiological-dialectical density .... Thus a connection is created between morbid rationalism and the phenomenon of the end of the world experience. It is as one aspect of the anti-dialectical mode of being-in-the-world that one can place the WUE in the same ambit as deranged perceptions, hallucinations, and other elements of sub-realist experience." (Gabel 292- 93) Heteronomy is the opposite of autonomy; it is the unfree state of being controlled by outside forces, such as manipulation of the traumas of one's own past.

In a striking insight, Gabel shows that the road to a thoroughly schizophrenic foreign policy is paved with ultimata. The Bushes have been prodigal with ultimata: there was one to Saddam Hussein in 1991, one to the Taliban regime in 2001, and another to Saddam in 2003. For Gabel, these come straight from the schizophrenic tool kit of projection; he says that "behavior does exist on a societal level that is phenomenologically close to the psychiatrists' 'mirror symptom' -- This is when a State -- usually totalitarian -- chooses a fictitious interlocutor in order to have an act of violence or a territorial conquest ratified in the form of a supposed negotiation. This is -- just like the clinical phenomenon in question -- an illusion of encounter with an artificial interlocutor; a behavior of schizophrenic structure." (Gabel 259)

Reagan hailed the "magic of the marketplace," obviously a very white magic. In the grim times of 9/11, Bush 43 has had to deal mostly with black magic, but there have been exceptions. One was in the dreamtime that lasted a week or two for some observers after the fall of Baghdad to the Anglo-American aggressors. Frank is right to comment that "there's no clearer example of magical thinking than the 'Mission Accomplished' banner that served as a backdrop to Bush's flight-suit photo op on the Abraham Lincoln." (Frank 86) The essence of magic is action at a distance, which Sir Isaac Newton unfortunately made presentable in the Anglo-American world. The official story of 9/11, with everything directed in the last analysis by Bin Laden using his laptop in the distant cave of Afghanistan, represents a thinly veiled version of magical action at a distance. Gabel pointed out more than a quarter of a century earlier that racism too is based on a magical and irrational world outlook which "also admits fairly often the existence of action at a distance of an undeniably magico-schizophrenic nature ... this is the very definition of paranoid deranged thought ...." (Gabel 123-4)

RESULT: THE 9/11 MYTH AS PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

Because of the capitulation of the Democratic party and of the liberal intellectual establishment associated with it, Bush and the neocons have enjoyed success as mythographers beyond their wildest dreams. The tenant of the White House may have discovered in the powers of myth a stimulant more potent than his beloved Jack Daniels; at one point, according to a reporter, Bush appeared "bedazzled by his administration's own mythmaking." (New York Times, July 31, 2003) Out of the preceding considerations, we can gradually come to understand the 9/11 myth in its actual status as a kind of Ersatz (substitute) religion, or more precisely as an hysterical Ersatz civic religion designed to promote social cohesiveness when all other ideologies have failed. What Franks says in his summary of Bush and Iraq applies even better to the American public and the 9/11 myth: "The individual who clings tenaciously to unverified beliefs confuses his beliefs with fact, and often inflicts this confusion on others in his struggle to resolve it in his favor. When many people are persuaded to subscribe to the same pretense, of course, it can gain the aura of objectivity; as British psychoanalyst Ron Britton has observed, 'we can substitute concurrence for reality testing, and so shared phantasy can gain the same or even greater status than knowledge.' The belief doesn't become a fact, but the fact of shared belief lends it the valuable appearance of credibility. The belief is codified, takes hold, and rises above the level where it might be questioned. Shared beliefs can come to define a community; religion is, after all, a communal structure, uniting groups in shared beliefs. In societies where religion is especially powerful, such shared beliefs can actually become law, imposed on others, often restricting their behavior." (Franks 62)

THE 9/11 MYTH AND THE EPIDEMIC OF AUTISM IN THE US

There remains the question of to what degree the social and intellectual hegemony of the 9/11 myth, especially as purveyed by its mentally impaired poster boy, is generating avoidable schizophrenic disorders in the US population and abroad. One form that such an epidemic might take would be an upsurge of autism among the most vulnerable members of society -- among children, who are amazingly adept at absorbing the fears, anxieties, and distortions of the adult world around them. Evidence of just such a phenomenon is not hard to find. About two years after September 11, Newsweek devoted an important cover story to "Girls, Boys, and Autism." According to the article, there are now more than a million Americans suffering from this disorder, 80% of them males. The article gives no figures for the growth in the number of cases, but the publication of this article and the attention it received suggests that the number of cases is rising, especially among the most vulnerable -- children, but not among them alone. (Newsweek, September 8, 2003) In 2002 the New York Times reported that "a shocking report from California last week suggested that a large increase in childhood autism in that state over the last 15 years is a true epidemic, not a statistical mirage inflated by artificial factors." (New York Times, October 23, 2002) Research by qualified experts will be necessary to determine whether there is in fact a causal link between the 9/11 myth and these disturbing reports.

According to some, the autism epidemic is genetically determined. According to others, it is a by-product of certain ill-advised vaccinations. But there is no reason why it could not be socially, culturally, and politically determined. This is exactly what one would expect in a traumatized country dominated by a compulsory schizophrenic belief system, whose apparent leadership figure demonstrates a whole range of megalomaniac schizophrenic symptoms. One means of fighting the growth of culturally and socially induced autism would surely be to junk the schizophrenic myth of 9/11, and replace it with a true and reasoned account of what took place in the real world.
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:35 am

PART 1 OF 2

CHAPTER XIV: NETWORKS OF INTEREST

... no one can be called a good man who, in order to support himself, takes up a profession that obliges him at all times to be rapacious, fraudulent, and cruel, as of course must be all of those -- no matter what their rank -- who make a trade of war.
--Niccolo Machiavelli, The Art of war
.


The neocons are an intensely ideological faction, and we are therefore on firm ground if we examine their ideology as a guide to their conduct. We must only remember that the neocons make a rigid separation between the elite truths that they tell each other -- their esoteric doctrine -- and the belief structure they offer for the edification of the masses -- the exoteric doctrine. The esoteric doctrine is often transmitted verbally, rather than by published writings. Still, the published writings allow us to see the basic neocon outlook clearly enough. What we find is an embrace of war, violence, hatred, coups, martial law, and, most important for our present purposes, terrorism.

The supreme neocon guru is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught politics for many years at the University of Chicago, and later at St. John's of Annapolis. Strauss was a Marburg Kantian of the Herman Cohen school who did his doctorate with the irrationalist Ernst Cassirer. Strauss studied for two years with grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, which he procured with the help of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Among Strauss's students were Alan Bloom, the author of the Closing of the American Mind, and Harvey Mansfield of Harvard. The Straussian-neocon network is now extensive, and stretches over three generations. Neocons are famous for helping one another up the career ladder, and for teaching courses based only on neocon texts. They are narrow-minded, sectarian, and essentially ignorant of philosophy and history. They are an ideological faction, often a fanatical faction. We are talking about Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Luti, Schulsky, Scooter Libby, Cambone, Hadley and others who run the Bush administration. Neocons outside of government include Perle, Woolsey, Irving and William Kristol, Norman and John Podhoretz, Saul and Adam Bellow, and so forth. The older generation of neocons were often Trotskyist communists; they have retained Trotskyite theories like the notion of competing elites; the neocons see a battle between the liberal elite and themselves as central to the political process.

LEO STRAUSS'S NIHILIST REVOLUTION: AN APOLOGY FOR TERROR

At the heart of Leo Strauss's political thought is an open apology for terrorism. This idea is illuminated in Strauss's exchange of comments with Alexandre Kojeve, a neo-Hegelian official of the French finance ministry, in the 1950s. At the heart of this debate is the question of the universal and homogenous state, and how philosophers should react to its existence. The universal homogenous state means something like a world where war and underdevelopment have been eliminated, and in which leisure time and well-being are rising. For most people, the universal homogenous state would look like a world of peace, progress, and prosperity.

But for Strauss and Kojeve, peace, progress, and prosperity mean the end of history because they wipe out the higher human values, which depend upon politics, and thus upon war. (Implicit also is the idea that peace, progress, and prosperity are bad for oligarchical domination, a cause dear to Strauss and Kojeve.) Strauss sums it up thus: "This end of History would be most exhilarating, but for the fact that, according to Kojeve, it is the participation in bloody political struggles as well as in real work or, generally expressed, the negating action, which raises man above the brutes." (Strauss 208)

For Strauss and Kojeve, "unlimited technological progress and its accompaniment, which are indispensable conditions of the universal and homogeneous state, are destructive of humanity. It is perhaps possible to say that the universal and homogeneous state is fated to come. But it is certainly impossible to say that man can reasonably be satisfied with it." (Strauss 208) This view of technology is that of the Greek historian called the Old Oligarch
(who did not like the long walls and the Athenian navy), and is certainly not that of Plato. For Strauss, Greek philosophy is a screen upon which he projects his own ignorant opinions.

Not caring about what Plato really thought, Strauss advances towards his terrible conclusion: "If the universal and homogeneous state is the goal of History, History is absolutely 'tragic. ' Its completion will reveal that the human problem, and hence in particular the problem of the relation of philosophy and politics, is insoluble." (Strauss 208)

In Strauss's view, the imminent coming of the universal homogeneous state means that all progress accomplished by mankind to date has been worthless: "For centuries and centuries men have unconsciously done nothing but work their way through infinite labors and struggles and agonies, yet ever again catching hope, toward the universal and homogeneous state, and as soon as they have arrived at the end of their journey, they realize that through arriving at it they have destroyed their humanity, and thus returned, as in a cycle, to the prehuman beginnings of History." (Strauss 209)

This raises the question of the violent revolt against the universal homogeneous state, which is what Strauss regards as inevitable and desirable:
"Yet there is no reason for despair as long as human nature has not been conquered completely, i.e., as long as sun and man still generate man. There will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action or of great deeds." (Strauss 209)



When the real men revolt against too much peace, progress, and prosperity, what will be their program? Strauss: "They may be forced into a mere negation of the universal and homogeneous state, into a negation not enlightened by any positive goal, into a nihilistic negation. While perhaps doomed to failure, that nihilist revolution may be the only great and noble deed that is possible once the universal and homogeneous state has become inevitable. But no one can know whether it will fail or succeed. (Strauss 209, emphasis added)

What can be understood by nihilistic negation and nihilist revolution? In the nineteenth century, nihilism was an ideology of terrorism; the crazed bomb-throwers who assassinated statesmen and rulers across Europe and America (including President McKinley) were atheists, anarchists and nihilists. In the twentieth century, the nihilist revolution was synonymous with some of the most extreme factions of fascism and Nazis. "Long live death!" was a slogan of some of them. With these lines, Strauss has opened the door to fascism, murder, mayhem, war, genocide, and most emphatically to terrorism. And he is not shy about spelling this out.

LEO STRAUSS: BACK TO THE STONE AGE

What will the nihilist revolution look like? Strauss writes: "Someone may object that the successful revolt against the universal and homogeneous state could have no other effect than that the identical historical process which led from the primitive horde to the final state will be repeated." (Strauss 209, emphasis added) The primitive horde or primal horde refers to the human communities of the Paleolithic hunting and gathering societies, to the foragers and cave people of the Old Stone Age. Strauss is endorsing a nihilistic revolt that will have the effect of destroying as much as 10,000 years of progress in civilization, and in hurling humanity back to its wretched predicament in the Paleolithic. Here Strauss finds a momentary common ground with Rousseau, who also had a liking for the Paleolithic; here we are close to the ideas which animated the reign of terror in the French Revolution.

Strauss comes as a Job's comforter to those who have been thrown back into the Old Stone Age: "But would such a repetition of the process -- a new lease on life for man and humanity -- not be preferable to the indefinite continuation of the inhuman end? Do we not enjoy every spring although we know the cycle of the seasons, although we know that winter will come again?" (Strauss 209) Springtime for Leo Strauss has thus acquired the idiosyncratic meaning of a return to the horrors of the Old Stone Age.

Blood shone at me from the red light of the crystal, and when I picked it up to discover its mystery, there lay the horror uncovered before me: in the depths of what is to come lay murder. The blond hero lay slain. The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. Out of that burst the powerful and ever unvanquished source of blood. This was what was to come, which you now experience in your life, and it is even more than that. (I had this vision on the night of 12 December 1913.)

-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung


Short of turning back the clock to the Paleolithic, Strauss sees one promising possibility latent in Kojeve's universal homogeneous state. This concerns the opportunity for political violence, yet another form of terrorism: "Kojeve does seem to leave an outlet for action in the universal and homogeneous state. In that state the risk of violent death is still involved in the struggle for political leadership .... But the opportunity for action can exist only for a tiny minority. And besides, is this not a hideous prospect: a state in which the last refuge of man's humanity is political assassination in the particularly sordid form of the palace revolution?" (Strauss 209) Such sporadic and limited violence is not enough for Strauss.

Marx and Engels had written about the realm of freedom which would result from higher stages of economic development in the form of a communist utopia. Strauss transforms their communist slogan into an invective against middle class progress and middle class values in general when he concludes this passage with the call: "Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of the 'realm of freedom.' Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, the 'realm of necessity."' (Strauss 209) Putting aside the superficial polemic against communist utopia, Strauss's goal here is to argue that peace, progress, and prosperity are destructive to oligarchy, and anything must be preferred to such an outcome.

Being An Answer To Mr. Burke's Attack On The French Revolution

Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke's pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the People of France, nor the National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and that Mr. Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy.

There is scarcely an epithet of abuse to be found in the English language, with which Mr. Burke has not loaded the French Nation and the National Assembly. Everything which rancour, prejudice, ignorance or knowledge could suggest, is poured forth in the copious fury of near four hundred pages. In the strain and on the plan Mr. Burke was writing, he might have written on to as many thousands. When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.

Hitherto Mr. Burke has been mistaken and disappointed in the opinions he had formed of the affairs of France; but such is the ingenuity of his hope, or the malignancy of his despair, that it furnishes him with new pretences to go on. There was a time when it was impossible to make Mr. Burke believe there would be any Revolution in France. His opinion then was, that the French had neither spirit to undertake it nor fortitude to support it; and now that there is one, he seeks an escape by condemning it.

Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives) and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information.

Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says: "The political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:

1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves."

Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.

-- Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine


Here we have a blanket endorsement of forms of violence and mayhem, including terrorism and war, in doses large enough to send world civilization back to the Stone Age. This implies genocide on a scale far beyond Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Today's world population is about 6.25 billion, and barely subsists on the basis of realized technological and industrial progress. But under hunting and gathering conditions, the demographic carrying capacity of the earth would be reduced to 25-50 million. If implemented today, Strauss's program for dismantling the universal homogeneous state would mean a genocide of something approaching 6 billion victims, two whole orders of magnitude beyond Hitler.

And even this must be put into perspective. Strauss notoriously feared to write what he really believed; the public could never face the full truth of his doctrines. Therefore, what we find written in On Tyranny is very likely a somewhat diluted view of his real views. So if Strauss lite, the exoteric version that he felt comfortable publishing at the height of his career, spells up to 6 billion victims, God save us from the full fury of Strauss's esoteric version as it may be transmitted among the neocons infesting and controlling the United States government under the Bush regime.

The most urgent anti-terrorist measure of them all would thus appear to be a purge of neocons from all branches of government (including the Carl Schmitt disciples Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas on the Supreme Court), and a general quarantine of neocons as what they really are, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis.


NEOCONS PREFER WAR TO PEACE

When Strauss talks about the universal and homogenous state, as we have seen, he is referring to something which the ordinary person might identify as peace, progress, and prosperity, with a good measure of equality and of international pacification. For most people, such a situation might seem to be almost ideal, but for the self-styled neocon intellectual, it represents the abolition of all human values and of everything that makes life worth living. The US Constitution mandates that the government pursue the General Welfare, but for the neocons this is anathema, since among other things it threatens their most cherished principle -- oligarchy. In particular, the neocons were not happy with the subsiding of the Cold War, and viewed the 1993 Oslo peace accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as the Good Friday agreement regarding Northern Ireland in 1998 -- which the world warmly welcomed -- with great consternation. These aspects of neocon thought are derived most prominently from the proto-fascist Nietzsche, but also from the card-carrying Nazis Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, and of course from their chief guru, the neo-fascist professor Leo Strauss. Since the neocon rejection of some of the greatest goods of civilization is likely to be incomprehensible to many readers, we need to pause to illustrate it.

In May 2004 the Washington Post carried an article by Corey Robin, assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College in the City University of New York. Robin had carried out interviews with some well-known neocons and fellow travelers in the late summer of 2001, just before synthetic terrorism transformed the scene. Here we can sample the deep discontent and restless desire for conflict which prevailed among these circles at that time.

Robin heard from Irving Kristol, the father of William Kristol, the central figure of the warmongering Project for a New American Century, whose web site was vainly calling for full-scale war with Iraq during Clinton's second term. Kristol lamented that the US was too focused on economic prosperity, and was not sufficiently aggressive in the defense of its global hegemony. "It's too bad," complained Kristol. "I think it would be natural for the United States ... to play a far more dominant role in world affairs ... to command and give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world where an authority willing to use troops can make ... a healthy difference." Kristol reserved particular scorn for any concern about the health or well-being of the population in general, which he scorned as a matter for accountants. "I think it's disgusting that ... presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people."

Robin found that the neocons prized "mystery and vitality over calculation and technology," and even over money and markets. Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, one of the schemers who brought us the Iraq war, commented that "the cult of peace and prosperity found expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy," which had made it easier for Bin Laden to run wild. Robin commented further: "Though conservatives reputedly favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine, they disdained Clinton for his very pursuit of these virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society that lost its depth and political meaning." And again: "Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives argued, betrayed an unwillingness to take on a world of power and violence, of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtue, qualities many conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity."

The neocons, according to Robin, see 9/11 as an opportunity to exalt their "political virtues such as heroism and struggle" over "the numbing politics of affluence" because of their new-found ability to go to the public with "calls for sacrifice and destiny."
The neocons were afflicted by a self-righteous and hypocritical megalomania: they fervently believed that the United States, with its $500 billion yearly trade deficit and its hollow army of ten divisions could "govern events -- and determine the outcome of history." Based on this evidence, it is fair to say that at the turn of the millennium, the neocon faction was searching for new opportunities for conflict and violence. When those opportunities arrived, the neocons rejoiced and rushed into their favorite enterprise of sending other people's children into useless wars. (Washington Post, May 2, 2004)

NEOCONS: CUCKOLDS OF MARS

Catholic traditionalist Patrick Buchanan showed some awareness of this same restlessness and desire for new conflicts among the neocons during the 1999-2000 presidential campaign, when he commented that he was alarmed by the clique around candidate G. W. Bush -- a reference to the neocon group that pretentiously and ignorantly called itself the "Vulcans." In a speech about foreign policy, Buchanan noted that he had worked with some of these neocons in previous administrations, and that he now found them consumed by nostalgia for the Cold War, and therefore very likely to pursue "conflict," "intervention," "confrontation," and "bullying." Buchanan ridiculed the "little magazines" of the neocon cabal, where they had been developing their concept of the US as a "benevolent global hegemon" -- a role which many other states could be counted upon to reject. Buchanan added that, while the Clinton crowd had at least been canny enough to pick fights with smaller powers like Serbia, the Bush clique was determined to promote confrontation with larger powers who had the capability of inflicting great harm on the United States. The great exemplar of all these trends, said Buchanan, was Wolfowitz, who at that time thought he was on the way to being secretary of state.

Vulcan, or Hephaestos, was of course the Graeco-Roman god of volcanoes, fire, and the smithy. He was married to Venus, but she betrayed him in favor of Mars, the god of war. So Vulcan was a cuckold of Mars, as our ignorant and pretentious Vulcans seem to have forgotten. But Mars has come back to make them cuckolds too, in Iraq and shortly in Afghanistan as well.

David Brooks had written in Newsweek that, during the 1990s, Americans had "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, jacuzzis, and gas grills." Leaving aside the arid banality of Brooks' class-distorted view of the world, we must recall that for most Americans there was no peace dividend worth mentioning at the end of the Cold War. (Washington Post, May 2, 2004) And the pre-9/11 world was in reality no idyll, but rather a world of growing financial breakdown and military tension, as we have shown elsewhere in this book.

The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology of world historical significance. For a while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the fact that there is not a single large state in which it is a going concern undermines completely its pretensions to being in the vanguard of human history. And the death of this ideology means the growing "Common Marketization" of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.

This does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se. For the world at that point would be divided between a part that was historical and a part that was post historical. Conflict between states still in history, and between those states and those at the end of history, would still be possible. There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post historical world. Palestinians and Kurds, Sikhs and Tamils, Irish Catholics and Walloons, Armenians and Azeris, will continue to have their unresolved grievances. This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.

-- The End of History?, by Francis Fukuyama


CARL SCHMITT: POISON GAS ON GERMAN CITIES

Leo Strauss was the product of three main intellectual and political influences. First among these was the proto-Nazi Friedrich Nietzsche, who was designated by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg as one of the four precursors of Hitlerism (the others were the operatic composer Richard Wagner, the anti-Semitic LaGarde, and the racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain). A second was the card-carrying Nazi Martin Heidegger, who praised Hitler in his inaugural speech as rector of the University of Freiburg. Finally, there is the card-carrying Nazi Cart Schmitt, the main legal theorist of the Third Reich.

Schmitt's ideas have directly contributed to the shattering of the US political consensus under the Bush regime. For Schmitt, politics comes down to the distinction between friend and foe. Starting from this extremely meager reduction of human motivation, he goes on to equate politics with warfare: if there is no warfare or conflict, then politics is dead, and life is no longer worth living. Schmitt therefore wants politics to be the monopoly of a strong state, and he does not like the idea that the state or the government could be influenced by the citizens. Schmitt's thought is thus revealed as authoritarian, dictatorial, fascistic. It is from Schmitt that Samuel Huntington got his idea that an enemy image is absolutely necessary for the cohesion of any society. In reality, however, it is primarily an oligarchical society which requires an enemy image, because that society is based on an irrational principle of domination which cannot stand the kind of scrutiny it would receive in peacetime.George Orwell understood this aspect well when he suggested in 1984 that the endless war among Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia was really a war waged by each of these states against its own population, for the purpose of perpetuating a hierarchical society.

The card-carrying Nazi Schmitt was also a bitter opponent, not just of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, but of international law and international treaties in general. Like his neocon descendants of today, he was an ardent unilateralist. Here are some of Schmitt's typical comments about international law: "We are talking again about basic rights, about the basic rights of peoples and of states, and especially about the basic rights of those states who have, mindful of their own race, gotten themselves into the proper domestic order. Such a state is the national socialist state, which has led the German people back to an awareness of itself and its race. We proceed from the most self-evident of all basic rights, the right to one's own existence. This is an inalienable, eternal basic right, in which the right to self-determination, self-defense, and to the means of self-defense is included ... From our solid standpoint we can see through that world of legalistic argumentation and that huge apparatus of treaties and pacts, and assign this tower of Babel to its rightful place in the history of international law."

Schmitt was the author of Article 48 of the 1919 Constitution of the Weimar Republic, which was the clause that allowed the Reich President to declare an emergency or state of siege and thereafter rule by decree. Schmitt's activity during the 1920s was largely devoted to agitating in favor of the dissolution or marginalization of the Reichstag (parliament) and the institution of a dictatorship of the President of the Reich. One of Schmitt's favorite sayings was that sovereignty meant the ability to declare a state of emergency. If you can find what organ of government has the ability to call out the state of siege, suspend the legislature, and impose martial law, Schmitt reasoned, you have found the place where sovereignty is actually located.

For Schmitt, the concept of emergency rule is a totally lawless realm; under it, the ruling authority can do literally anything it wants, without regard to law, separation of powers, constitutional freedoms, equity, or anything else. In one of his essays Schmitt approvingly quotes a speech by the Reich Justice Minister Schiffer to the Reichstag on March 3, 1920, in which Schiffer points out that under Article 48, the Reich President can attack "German cities with poison gas, if that is, in the concrete case, the necessary measure for the re-establishment of law and order."
(Schmitt, Die Diktatur, 201) Schmitt was adamant that the emergency provisions of the Weimar constitution were theoretically and practically unlimited, and could be used to justify the greatest imaginable atrocities. We see here a tradition of thought, alive in the Schmittian-Straussian neocons of today, which would have no trouble in accommodating a crime on the scope of 9/11.

In July, 1932 the Nazis and their allies carried out a cold coup against the minority Social Democratic caretaker government in Prussia, the largest political subdivision of Germany. The pro-Nazi government in Prussia then became the springboard for Hitler's seizure of power via a legal coup in January 1933. Carl Schmitt was the lawyer for the coup forces in the German supreme court in Leipzig. (The parallels of this action to the Schwarzenegger/Warren Buffet oligarchical coup in California in 2003 are more than suggestive, since California is the largest US political subdivision in the same way that Prussia was in Germany.) Schmitt also provided legal services for Hitler's seizure of power in January, 1933.

Carl Schmitt wrote articles for the gutter-level anti-Semitic tabloid Der Sturmer, edited by Julius Streicher. In 1934, when Hitler massacred the brown-shirted SA leader Ernst Rohm and his faction for supporting a second revolution against the financiers, industrialists, and the army, Schmitt quickly emerged as one of Hitler's most shameless apologists. In his scurrilous pamphlet, "Der Fuhrer Schutz das Recht" ("The Fuhrer defends the law"), Schmitt endorsed the Byzantine theory according to which law is a successful act of strength by the stronger party against the weaker. Schmitt wrote that the primary task of the Fuehrer was "to distinguish friend from enemy ... The Fuhrer takes the warnings of German history seriously. That gives him the right and the power to found a new state and a new order ... The Fuhrer protects the law from the worst abuse, when he -- in the moment of danger -- through the power of his leadership as supreme judge, directly creates law. His role as supreme judge flows from his role as supreme leader. Anyone who wants to separate one of these from the other is trying to unhinge the state with the help of the justice system .... the Fuhrer himself determines the content and scope of a crime." (Schmitt 200) This opens the door to every arbitrary outrage under color of law. While these ideas, so dear to today's ruling neocons, have been applied to Abu Ghraib, it is also clear that they are equally applicable to 9/11.

STRAUSS AND NIETZSCHE

As a young man, Strauss was an enthusiastic devotee of Nietzsche. Strauss wrote: "I can only say that Nietzsche so dominated and bewitched me between my 22nd and 30th years, that I literally believed everything that I understood of him ..."(Strauss to Karl Lowith, 23 June 1935, in Strauss, Leo and Karl Lowith, "Correspondence," Independent Journal of Philosophy, vol. 516, 1988, pp. 177-192.) For the young Strauss, Nietzsche was an idol, and the main vehicle of his youthful protests: "... the young Strauss, after a day of reading at the Prussian State Library, would go to a cafe on Unter den Linden and pronounce the name 'Nietzsche' loud enough to be heard at the other tables." (See Leo Strauss, "An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John's," Interpretation, vol. 7, no. 31-2; cited by Michael Platt in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective [Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1987], 23.) According to Straussian scholars, "In Nietzsche, Strauss certainly discovered the immoderation of philosophy, but in Nietzsche, especially the late Nietzsche, he also met the love of his life." (Deutsch and Soffer, 23)

As the neocons never tire of reminding us, ideas have consequences. If Strauss is based to such an extraordinary degree on Nietzsche, then we may be permitted to take a minute to see which Nietzsche it was that Strauss admired so much. The guess here is that it was Nietzsche as the glorifier of hierarchy, slavery, violence, war, and terrorism. In some of the notes that Nietzsche made during the time he was writing his Genealogy of Morals, we read: "Which way? We need a new terrorism." ("Das Problem wohin? Es bedarf eines neuen Terrorismus.") (Nietzsche vol. XIV, p. 334, emphasis added.)

Or, in the section of Ecce Homo entitled "Why I am a fate," we find the following: "I know my fate. My name will be linked someday to the memory of something monstrous -- to a crisis whose like never existed on earth, to the deepest clash of conscience, to a decision conjured up against everything which had been believed, promoted, held sacred up to then. I am not a man, I am dynamite." ("Ich kenne mein Los. Es wird sich einmal an meinem Namen die Erinnerung an etwas Ungeheures AnknUpfen, -an eine Krisis, wie es keine aufErden gab, an die tiefste Gewissens- ollision, an eine Entscheidung, heraufbeschworen gegen alles, was bis dahin geglaubt, gefordert, geheiligt worden war. Ich bin kein Mensch, ich bin Dynamit.") (Nietzsche vol. VII p. 317, emphasis added.) This passage was a favorite of the German neocon Armin Mohler, the author of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932.

Nietzsche was full of contempt and hatred for the middle class, family life, and the quest for economic security, which he always saw in connection with the inferior "last men." Nietzsche is the great glorifier of war, conflict, violence, and cruelty, which he regards not just as unavoidable but also as positive goods: "We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and deviltry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species 'man' as much as its opposite does." (Beyond Good and Evil 54-55) It is from Nietzsche that today's neocons derive their endless fascination with warfare and bloodshed: "You should always be such men as are always looking for an enemy -- for your enemy. And with some of you there is hate at first sight. You should seek your enemy and wage your war -- a war for your opinions. ... You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long. I do not exhort you to work but to battle. I do not exhort you to peace, but to victory. May your work be a battle, may your peace be a victory! ... You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity .... Are you ugly? Very well, my brothers! Take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly." (Zarathustra 74)

Bush's supporters among the Christian fundamentalists and Christian Zionists would perhaps be surprised to know what neocons (to whom Bush has turned over the government) think about Christ and Christianity. Nietzsche referred to Christ as an "idiot," (Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist 202). In addition to his famous proposition that God is dead, Nietzsche also proclaimed a special role for himself: "I am ... the Anti-Christ" (Ecce Homo III 2) Nietzsche, like Strauss after him, was an exponent of European atheist nihilism, and this remains the underlying -- esoteric -- outlook of the neocons who are ruling the US. At one point Nietzsche asks himself, "What does nihilism mean?" His answer "That the highest values are devalued. The goal is missing: the answer to 'why?' is missing." (Lukacs, Von Nietzsche zu Hitler [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1966], 69) If God is dead, all crimes are allowed.

Thus the neocon publicist Robert Kaplan, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force, wrote in his recent Warrior Politics that a pagan ethos of war and cruelty is necessary to face the great crises of this age. For Kaplan, the philosophical and social content of Christianity is a great obstacle to inculcating the proper attitude in the US ruling class. Among other things, Kaplan finds that the Roman Emperor Tiberius (under whose rule the crucifixion of Christ took place) has been treated unfairly by historians, and deserves to be rehabilitated. Similarly, one of neocon Paul Wolfowitz's favorite quips is reportedly the infamous "Oderint dum metuant" -- let them hate me, as long as they fear me -- a line from the Latin writer Accius later popularized by the infamous Emperor Caligula.

Strauss is well aware that Nietzsche is a genocidalist, but this does not disturb his admiration for the sage of Turin. As Strauss wrote in What is Political Philosophy (1959): "Being certain of the tameness of modern western man, [Nietzsche] preached the sacred right of 'merciless extinction' of large masses of men. He used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of passionate and fascinating speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialism and communism, but conservatism, nationalism, and democracy as well. After having taken upon himself this great political responsibility, he could not show his readers a way to political responsibility. [I.e., he could not seize power, WGT] He left them no choice except that between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus prepared a regime which, as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy look again like a golden age. He tried to articulate his understanding both of the modern situation and of human life as such by his doctrine of the will to power." In other words, Strauss knows very well that Nietzsche was a precursor of Hitler, but supports him anyway as a philosopher for today.

A storm cellar for neocons and failed pols in the Rumsfeld Pentagon has been the Defense Policy Board, Chaired by Richard Perle, the virulent neocon warmonger whom British Labour Party Foreign Secretary Dennis Healey dubbed the "prince of darkness" back in the 1980s. On September 19, 2001, Perle used the Defense Policy Board as the springboard for the neocon war drive against Iraq that produced an unprovoked and aggressive war in March 2003. Other members of the Defense Policy Board included: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Fred Ikle, James Schlesinger, Dan Quayle, Harold Brown, James Woolsey, and Newt Gingrich. Perle was eventually forced to resign, in part because of corruption charges against him stemming from Trireme Corp, and his relation with Hollinger Corp. boss Lord Conrad Black. This board of unelected and unaccountable extremist ideologues, known as the Wolfowitz cabal, needs to be urgently and permanently dissolved.

In a 19-hour meeting on September 19-20, 2001 Perle, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey, and Wolfowitz pushed hard for an immediate operation against Iraq. Wolfowitz's plan was to have the U.S. take over southern Iraq militarily as an opposition beachhead and use the Basra oil revenues to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Perle wanted Saddam Hussein's "regime ...overthrown quickly with military force." This was too much for Powell, at least in that phase. (October 12, 2001)
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Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley

Postby admin » Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:35 am

PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 14 CONT'D.)

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: IT WILL HAPPEN HERE

Samuel Huntington, in his 1981 study entitled American Politics, described the periodic explosions of the "American Creed," which he saw as a mixture of liberty, equality, individualism, and democracy." He viewed American history as punctuated by a series of periods of heightened political awareness and activity which he called "creedal passion periods." His forecast was that "if the periodicity of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century." Huntington included the Great Awakening religious movement of the 1740s, the Revolution of 1776, the Great Revival c. 1800, the Jacksonian movement, the abolitionism of the 1850s, the Progressives, the 1968 student and antiwar movements, etc. However, Huntington blurred his attempt to look into the future by excluding from consideration social and economic upheavals like the Populists of the 1890s and the mass strikes of the 1930s. If these are included, what Huntington might call a creedal passion period might occur during the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, i.e., between 2005 and 2010. The Carl Schmitt disciple Huntington associated this with a coming turn toward an authoritarian or fascist regime. In the next creedal ferment explosion, he wrote, "the oscillations among the responses could intensify in such a way as to threaten to destroy both ideals and institutions" in this country. This might include "the replacement of the weakened and ineffective institutions by more authoritarian structures more effectively designed to meet historical needs."

ARMAGEDDON AND APOCALYPSE IN THE US MILITARY

Although the neocons are an obvious focus of danger in the American society of today, they by no means represent the only threat. We must also pay attention to those self- styled religious factions which cultivate notions of the approaching end of the world and the return of the Messiah. These are the groups which propagate notions of the end of historical time through the apocalypse, and embellish this with the imminence of Armageddon, the mythical last battle before the end of the world. Those who profess these doctrines blatantly disregard the advice of St. Augustine, the greatest father of the Latin church, who warned Christians that it was "ridiculous" to become obsessed with the date and time of the end of the world. The modern irrationalists who camouflage themselves as Christians have left traditional Christianity behind, and have reduced the content of their religion to the cynical support of such figures as Bush and Ariel Sharon, both regarded, and perhaps accurately, as harbingers of the apocalypse.

The presence of a large mass of apocalyptic Armageddon thinkers in American life is a serious problem, since some versions of this belief structure call upon the individual to act in ways which are thought to accelerate the end time towards world catastrophe, thus speeding the return of the Messiah. The popular novels of the "Left Behind" series, which deal with life after the so-called rapture, or in-gathering of the saved elect, have fostered mass delusions on precisely this point.

Apocalyptic and Armageddon thinkers in the high ranks of the military services represent an even more serious problem than they do in the society in general. How can we let a self-styled "evangelical Christian" close to a nuclear button, when that person's demented belief structure may dictate that the launching of a rogue missile attack on Russia, China or some Arab state would bring with it the beneficial by-product of the end of the world and the creation of the kingdom of God on earth? The various fellowships and chaplaincies of evangelical-Pentecostal stamp in the US military, which are often under the influence of British or Israeli intelligence agencies, therefore represent a grave threat to US national security. Is the US officer corps reliable? Under present conditions of pervasive apocalypse-Armageddon network penetration, their reliability is open to grave doubt.

In December 2001, a senior European diplomatic source observed that the current situation in the Middle East contained the danger of a world war even before the end of that year. "If this goes much further," said the source, "we in the West will be coming closer, to a general conflict with 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. And never forget the 'Armageddon Factor,' the powerful Christian fundamentalist elements in the United States, who are applying massive pressure on the American Administration, to give full backing to the Israelis, so that the fundamentalists can achieve their Armageddon aims." (EIR, December 4, 2001)

To sample the mentality of these networks, let us hear now from General Albion Knight, US Army retired, who was the 1992 vice-presidential candidate for the US Taxpayer Party, and thus the running mate of Howard Philips on that ticket that year. We cite from Gen. Knight's essay, "Old Testament Parallels to Our Times," which was published in early 1990s by the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor:

Our current military leadership are a bunch of wimps! ... The final -- and probably the most important part of my analysis -- is following through on the implications of the claim that I (and a growing number of others) make that there is a close similarity between the conditions described in the Old Testament about the two Jewish nations, Israel and Judah, between 750 B.C. and 586 B.C. and those we see in America today. They were rotting from within at the same time they faced major external danger. Therefore, the Lord removed His protection from them, allowed them to be defeated, taken in exile and screened out to find the solid remnant of 10% which He used to rebuild. I was drawn into an intensive study of the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Joel and Habakkuk. It was like reading today's newspaper they were so startlingly descriptive of today's conditions in America. From this study, I am strongly convinced that God has removed His protection from America and we shall very soon experience a series of sudden and violent crises which will shake us to our roots. They will drive us to our knees -- either in despair or prayer. I am afraid that there will be more of the despair than of the prayer. The solution given to God to those two nations was, "Stop doing the evil that you are doing and turn back to Me and I will heal your land. If not, you will have disaster on your hands." That is our message, too. Now my own attitude, from these analyses, I was put into a mood of deep despair. Yet, the Bible study also reminded me that God uses a few strong men who know who they are, whose they are, and what they ought to do. I must also admit that the words of Winston Churchill, "Never, Never, Never, Never Give up!" rang in my ear. Also the example of Howard Phillips who takes a realistic but optimistic view -- We must be prepared in case God finds use for us in His plan. So I am not throwing in the towel. (emphasis added)


Here the General expresses the common contempt for the current political and military leadership of this country, along with the idea that future US catastrophes will present well-deserved punishment for the monstrous excesses of this country. One senses that the sort of outlook would regard such cataclysmic events as 9/11 with a grim satisfaction, as proof of the efficacy of God's will and God's retribution.

In May 2000, we find another fragment, "America Betrayed," which is expressive of General Knight's views towards the close of the Clinton administration. Here we find that the Republican impeachment agitation has indeed resonated deeply among religious irrationalists of this type, and has in effect pushed Gen. Knight and his associates very far down the road of rebellion against the elected government. Gen. Knight writes: "Sex and perjury were the wrong impeachment offenses. It should have been on his [President Clinton's] treachery and failure to live up to his oath of office." Gen. Knight went on to recount that, during the Reagan years, he had been asked to draw up a program of what actions a crypto-communist American president might take if he got into power. "We concluded that a Marxist and/or communist president, if he ever came to power, would focus on the transfer of national sovereignty at every opportunity to international organizations. He or she would also weaken the armed forces physically, mentally and spiritually. The 'dumbing down' of our public school educational system would also accelerate. Furthermore, we decided that a Marxist president would assist all or most of America's enemies -- Russia, China, Cuba, radical Islam, North Korea and others. He would disregard the Constitution at every opportunity and rule by decree, meaning executive orders would earmark such an administration. Bogus arms control agreements, buying-off or intimidating Congress by stealing the FBI files of its members, controlling the media and trying to stop all alternative media would also be major goals."

Inevitably, Gen. Knight concluded that Clinton had carried out the crypto-Marxist program in full: "What has Clinton done in this regard? He has hit everyone of the above actions and more .... Clinton has helped Marxists and terrorists and their 'world revolution' at every opportunity. Cultural Marxism is also a key Clinton goal. He has been giving us a bad example that it is all right to lie, cheat, steal, threaten and even rape women if it is done in high office. There is a steady movement toward a Gestapo-like control over the people. There is today in the U.S. a total lack of any sense of nation and its protection as required by his oath-of-office. Furthermore, Clinton has been selling and giving our nuclear and other high technology secrets to communist China and giving Russia the money to re-arm at U.S. taxpayers' expense." (Anthony LoBaido, WorldNetDaily.com, May 6, 2000.)

When. General Edwin Walker gave speeches of this type to his troops in Germany in the early 1960s, he was given the sack, and Senator Fulbright denounced him as a harbinger of a threatened military coup in this country. Now active duty officers are presumably more discreet, but there are obviously many active duty officers of high rank who believe what Gen. Knight feels free to talk about. Here if anywhere was an area for the 9/11 commission to probe, but it did not do so.

These considerations lead us back to the self-styled patriot militias of the 1990s, who were so often led by retired officers with military intelligence connections. In those days, the foreign intelligence agency that was most active in fomenting militia activity was unquestionably Britain's MI-6. Today the media emphasis is on al Qaeda, and the militias are seldom heard of: But in the real world of secret intelligence operations, things move more slowly. The patriot militia networks are still there with their anti-government, right- wing anarchist, and white supremacist-xenophobic programs.

After Oklahoma City, the potential of the right-wing anti-government evangelical fanatics for terrorism and violence was re-affirmed by an armed standoff between police and "Republic of Texas" activists demanding the secession of Texas in April 1997. This insurrection was led by Richard Otto, alias "White Eagle," who put out a call inviting members of militias around the country to come to the site, armed for a shootout. The agent provocateur Otto turned out to have been "trained and set into motion by an Air Force officer who toured the world practicing New Age pagan rituals, in consultation with senior British intelligence drug-rock-sex gurus such as Gregory Bateson." Otto finally surrendered on May 3, 1997. (Tony Chaitkin, "The Militias and Pentecostalism")

Another anti-government agitator with impeccable military credentials was a certain Jim Ammerman. Ammerman was a charismatic Pentecostal who controlled various networks of chaplains in the US armed forces, in federal prisons, and in the FBI. He claimed to possess supernatural prophetic powers, and preached the imminent end of the world. According to Ammerman, the US government was illegal; in his view, Clinton deserved to be executed. During the April 1997 siege, Ammerman was brought in to mediate between the Texas separatist fanatics and the FBI. Ammerman exemplifies one of several apocalyptic networks within the US military.

A videotape popular among militia groups in the 1990s was "The Imminent Military Takeover of the United States," a speech by the Reverend Colonel Ammerman to the Prophecy Club of Topeka, Kansas. Here Ammerman warned that President Clinton, aided by masses of foreign troops he claimed were already on American soil, would soon put the nation under martial law -- if God did not end the world before the current President can act. Ammerman proclaimed that President Bill Clinton should long ago have been executed for avoiding the Vietnam draft. Ammerman, who retired in 1977 as a U .S. Army colonel and chaplain, was described by the Prophecy Club as a former Green Beret and "CIA official" with 26 years in the military and a top-secret security clearance. He was the leader of some 200 chaplains serving in the U.S. Armed Forces under the aegis of the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches. He and his chaplains were accustomed to speak in tongues and perform supernatural cures. Ammennan boasted to his audiences in those years that his chaplains were providing him with inside information about military activities ordered by what he claimed was the illegal dictatorship of the US President. ("The Militias and Pentecostalism")

In an interview granted on May 22, 1997, Colonel Ammerman stated: "There is a network of colonels and above, throughout the military, who would stand by the Constitution and against the President. They know who they are, and they are in close communication with each other. They could control the country if they need to." ("The Militias and Pentecostalism," emphasis added)

Ammerman spoke frequently in this context of the "multi-jurisdictional task force," a repeated theme in his exhortations to the militias. The military was allegedly combined, under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with other departments of the Federal government and with local governments. When the President tried to use this overreaching military against the people, Ammerman claimed, the "good" military officers would side with armed citizens against the President. Ammerman's own organization was created at the request of an Army officer, Gen. Ralph E. Haines, Jr., General Haines had been vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army in 1967-68, and at that time was in charge of counterinsurgency preparations in the continental United States. He worked with the full resources of the Army under him, including military intelligence capabilities, to plan to cope with black ghetto riots and civil disturbances during the Vietnam War. Haines deployed combat units to Detroit and Washington, D.C., during rioting after Martin Luther King's assassination. General Haines went public in an April 11, 1968 press conference, describing his "Operation Garden Plot." He had planned and directed the military arrangements for the takeover of every single American city, and arranged the linkages between the military and Justice Department, local police, and state governments. Haines "said that detailed military planning for the summer began in February. The 'garden plot' preparations were national, he said, including 'every city you can think of.' Many officers who were to be assigned to specific cities in a military mobilization visited them in mufti [civilian clothes] to familiarize themselves with the terrain, the social and economic problems of potential riot areas, and the police with whom they would work if called, the general said." (New York Times, April 14, 1968) An admirer of the Haines-Ammerman project was the same Gen. Albion Knight, an apocalyptic co-thinker from whom we have already heard.

Militia units under the direction of military intelligence controllers have never hesitated to attack military facilities in the same way the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11. Just one example: during July 1997, a certain Bradley P. Glover and six other persons were rounded up for plotting to bomb U.S. military bases, beginning with Fort Hood, Texas. The FBI said that Glover and an associate were arrested on July 4 near Fort Hood, in possession of various weapons; others in on the alleged plot were charged with possession of pipe bombs and machine guns. The arrests allegedly resulted from Missouri state police infiltration of paramilitary groups. Glover was featured in the Wichita Eagle on April 30, 1995, as the pre-eminent Kansas militia leader. He was said to control about 1,000 armed men in the southern half of the state. In a 1995 interview, Glover said that he had initiated the militia movement in Kansas in November 1994. Glover also said he was a former Naval Intelligence officer. ("The Militias and Pentecostalism")

PRIVATE MILITARY FIRMS

Machiavelli warned the Italian princes of his day in his Arte della Guerra that unemployed mercenaries and professional soldiers would inevitably stir up coups and conflicts in order to procure jobs and glory for themselves. This warning became highly relevant at the end of the Cold War. A little later the story of Wallenstein's camp in the Thirty Years War shows that certain kinds of military activities can become self-perpetuating and totally disconnected from their original political purpose.

After Vietnam, the US military exhibited the pathologies of a defeated army. These recalled the sociological developments among the defeated or embittered forces of Germany and Italy after the First World War, when defeated veterans became one of the initial constituencies of fascism. When the Cold War ended, many of these same defeated officers became unemployed or in fear of becoming so. Defeated and unemployed military officers represent a dangerous phenomenon in any society, and today this problem is compounded by the issue of a mercenary (or all-volunteer) force. Machiavelli wrote about precisely this problem in his 1521 Art of War, in which he drew on his parallel study of the ancient world and or the events of his own tumultuous times. His conclusion was a warning which we would do well to bear in mind today:

I say ... that ... governments should fear those persons who make war their only business ... And if a prince has not enough power over his infantry to make them disband and return cheerfully to their former occupations when a war is over, he is on the road to being ruined. For no infantry can be so dangerous as that which is composed of men who make war their only calling, because a prince either must keep them continually engaged in war, or must constantly keep them paid in peacetime, or must run the risk of their stripping him of his kingdom. But it is impossible to keep them forever engaged in war, or forever paid when war is over; therefore, a prince must run no small risk of losing his kingdom. (Machiavelli 19-20)


Retired US military officers are notoriously venal; they feel that they have missed out on the chance for wealth which civilians have enjoyed. How many such military officers lost their retirement investments or were otherwise financially ruined by the crash of the NASDAQ after the spring of 2000? Probably quite a few, and here is where an acute observer like Machiavelli might start looking for desperate men, ruined by debt, with superb martial skills, who might be recruitable as mercenaries for a desperate enterprise.

Private military firms received a massive round of public attention in relation to the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal of May, 2004. According to press accounts at the time, employees of CACI in Arlington, Virginia as well as those of Titan Corporation of San Diego worked in that infamous Iraqi jail. CACI's website announced that it had taken up the task of helping US intelligence agencies worldwide in gathering information for the war on terrorism, and in analyzing and managing that information. Titan claimed that it only provided translators for Abu Ghraib, not torturers. CACI has 7,600 employees and a turnover of $845 million per year. It provided what it called interrogation specialists for places as distant as Afghanistan and Kosovo. A CACI instructor was fired at Abu Ghraib for urging military police to carry out interrogations using illegal techniques.

In the spring of 2004, there were 25,000 employees of private military firms in Iraq. In addition to the inevitable Halliburtons and Bechtels, these mercenaries included employees of Vinnell Corporation, who received the task of training the new Iraqi army. Dyncorp, a competitor of Vinnell, received the contract for training the new Iraqi police. Olive Security of the UK protected television camera crews during the war, and later turned to providing security for the construction projects of Bechtel. The leader of this security detachment was Harry Legge- Bourke, who had gone skiing with Prince Charles. Also active in Iraq was the American security firm Kroll Associates. The security firm Blackwater provided snipers who flew over Baghdad, killing Iraqis without benefit of judicial process. It was the killing of some Blackwater employees in Fallujah which provoked the epic April-May 2004 battle for that town which ended in a US defeat. The firm Custer Battles provided security along the road leading to the Baghdad Airport, a shooting gallery for passing occupation vehicles. There were other private military firms: Centurion, Global Risk, and the Stone Foundation, to name just a few. Northrop Grumman, Halliburton, and other companies developed or acquired private military firms as their corporate subsidiaries.

According to the German newsmagazine Spiegel, private military firms claim competence in all departments of warfare, including "nuclear planning." Most of the employees of the private military firms come from the retirees of the US Navy Seals, the US Army Delta Force and Rangers, and the British SAS. The vogue of the private military firm began in grand style in 1992, when then-Pentagon boss Dick Cheney awarded a contract to Brown & Root, a pillar of the US establishment and today Kellogg, Brown and Root, to determine which military jobs could best be outsourced to private firms. (Spiegel, "Die Folterer von Baghdad," May 3, 2004)

US and British intelligence operations have been in the process of privatization since the 1970s. This process was more advanced in Britain, and was given an additional impetus in the US by Reagan's Executive Order 12333, which opened the door to the privatization of virtually everything. One of the mothers of British private defense firms is the Special Air Services (SAS), the commando operation long commanded by Colonel David Stirling. The SAS are traditionally heavily Scottish, and one of their traditions is that they allegedly take no prisoners. In other words, they execute prisoners in flagrant violation of the laws of war. One is reminded of the Private Eye cover of a few years back, which appeared after a particularly blatant SAS assassination of a suspect. One SAS trooper asks the other: "Why did you shoot him 43 times?" The answer: "I ran out of bullets."

The privatized SAS system illustrates the many advantages of the private military or security firm for maintaining plausible denial in covert operations, while at the same time reducing or eliminating the oversight powers of government. The SAS has over the years spun off a series of private security and mercenary recruitment firms led by its retired or reserve-status officers. Among the first and most infamous of these was Keenie Meenie Services (KMS), whose name was taken from the Swahili term for the motion of a snake in the grass. During its heyday in the 1980s, KMS shared offices with Saladin Security, another SAS firm, next door to the 22nd SAS Regimental HQ in London. The firms were run by Maj. David Walker, an SAS South American specialist; Maj. Andrew Nightingale of SAS Group Intelligence; and Detective Ray Tucker, a former Arab affairs specialist at Scotland Yard.

Other SAS spin-off firms have included Kilo Alpha Services (KAS), directed by former SAS, Counter-Terrorism Warfare team leader Lt. Col. Ian Crooke; Control Risks, run by former SAS squadron leader Maj. Arish Turtle; and J. Donne Holdings, run by SAS counterespionage specialist H.M.P.D. Harclerode, whose firm later provided bodyguards and commando training for Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.

SAS operations under the KMS label were important during Iran- contra: in 1983, Lt. Col. Oliver North hired KMS to train the Afghan mujahideen, to mine Managua harbor in Nicaragua, and to train the Nicaraguan Contras. At the same time, KMS provided personal security for the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar, a close associate of Bush 41 and Bush 43. KMS has a long history in the Arab and Muslim world. One of its first known assignments in the 1970s, was to aid Oman in repressing a revolt in its province of Dhofar. Oman remains a de facto British colony; its officer corps is dominated by retired British officers. KMS has also worked in Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, all of which include numerous former SAS officers in their security apparatus. The security chief in Bahrain, Ian Henderson, for example, was an SAS officer in Kenya during the Mau Mau period. The Omani chief of security was a former SAS officer, as was the case in Dubai, the home of KMS official Fiona Fraser, a Stirling relative.

The relations of these SAS firms with the Iran-Contra narcotics trafficking emerged dramatically in August 1989, when reports surfaced in the British and Italian press that the Colombian Cali Cartel, historically most closely tied to the George Bush machine, had hired SAS veterans to assassinate Pablo Escobar of the rival Medellin Cartel. On Aug. 16, 1989, three days after the story broke, Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, an opponent of the drug trade, was assassinated. Some in the Colombian government said British mercenaries were involved. Among those reportedly working for the Cali Cartel were Col. Peter McAleese, a former SAS officer in Malaysia; Alex Lenox, a former member of the SAS Counter-Terrorism Warfare task force; and David Tomkins, a veteran of Afghanistan. Among other British private military firms are also the London- based Defence Systems Ltd. and Executive Outcomes, both of which were active over a number of years in destabilizing the peace process in Angola. (Joe Brewda, "The SAS: Prince Philip's Manager of Terrorism," EIR, October 13, 1995)

Another private military firm is Aegis Defense Services Ltd., which in the summer of 2004 was awarded a $293 million contract to provide security for the US Project and Contracting Office in Iraq, the entity which is tasked with distributing $18.4 billion of US largesse there. The chief executive of Aegis is Tim Spicer, a former lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guards who has a past history of involvement in British colonial atrocities in Northern Ireland. Two soldiers under Spicer's command were convicted of murder in the 1992 shooting death of Belfast teenager Peter McBride. Spicer stubbornly defended the two murderers, despite their conviction which was confirmed on appeal in the British courts. Irish-American civil rights groups protested the awarding of the lucrative Iraq contract to Spicer. Paul O'Connor of the Pat Finucane Centre (named after the victim of an MI-5 terrorist provocateur) pointed out that Spicer evidently believed that his troops were above the law. Rev. Sean McManus of the Irish National Caucus told a reporter, "President Bush should tear up this contract immediately out of decency and respect." During the 1990s, Spicer worked for Sandline International in Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone. In 1999 a British parliamentary inquiry found that Sandline had shipped arms into Sierra Leone in violation of a UN arms embargo. Sandline also fought a dirty war against rebels in Papua New Guinea in 1997. (Washington Post, August 9, 2004)

RAND CORPORATION NUCLEAR PLANNERS

The imagination which produced 9/11 was evidently an imagination that did not hesitate to sacrifice thousands of lives. But intellectuals ready to sacrifice not thousands but tens or even hundreds of millions of lives to the imperatives of imperial hegemony have been influential in and around the United States government for more than half a century. These are the "defense intellectuals," the nuclear planners of the RAND Corporation. These are the Strangeloves who have been studying charts marked "World Targets in Megadeaths" for many years.

One of the most influential of these was Albert Wohlstetter, who died in January, 1997 at the age of 83. According to his admirers, Wohlstetter was more influential in national affairs than Henry Kissinger, even though the later is more bombastic and more infamous. From 1960 to 1990, Wohlstetter was the premier US strategic thinker. Among his disciples, he counted leading neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. At his death, Wohlstetter was lionized by Robert L. Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal and, as a participant in the Olson salon, one of the prime movers in the impeachment of Clinton. Every editorial on America's geopolitical strategy that appeared in The Wall Street Journal during the previous 25 years was said to have been the product of Wohlstetter. Neocons saw Henry Kissinger as the leader of the "dove team" in foreign policy over much of this period, stressing diplomatic strategems, while in this perspective Wohlstetter was the undisputed leader of the "hawk team," which stressed military moves of breathtaking creativity and imagination.

One of Wohlstetter's best-known and most typical works was his article, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," which appeared in Foreign Affairs in January 1959. The main thesis here was that the US was very vulnerable to a Soviet first strike; an adequate US retaliation to a surprise attack was not at all assured. Wohlstetter urged his readers to support "maintaining the delicate balance of terror" with measures involving sacrifice, and to develop "a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent danger." Wohlstetter's pessimistic finale: "It is by no means certain that we shall meet the task. " (Kaplan 171 ) This is the eternal neocon refrain, from Wohlstetter to the bomber gap/missile gap to Team B and the window of vulnerability to the terrorism experts of today.

Early exponents of this school were Bernard Brodie, author of The Absolute Weapon (1946), who advocated US nuclear first use against the Soviets, and John von Neumann, the game theorist. In the intelligence unit of Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command there were Stefan Possony, a right- wing extremist from Hungary, and General George Keegan. Another Hungarian was Leo Szilard, an early theoretician of mutually assured destruction, or deterrence theory. Then there was Herman Kahn, the author of On Thermonuclear War (1960), who advocated nuclear first strike capabilities, limited nuclear war, fallout shelters, and generally thinking the unthinkable. The review of this book in Scientific American read: "This is a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it." (Kaplan 228)

RAND nuclear war scenarios from around 1960 called for -- depending on the kind of strategy used -- 150 million Americans dead and 60% of US industry destroyed, with 40 million Soviets dead and 40% of Soviet industry destroyed; or else 110 million Americans dead and 50% of US industry destroyed, with 75 million Soviets dead and 50% of Soviet industry gone. (Kaplan 228) A mind that could imagine this would have no trouble imagining 9/11. Fortunately, the RAND Strangeloves never got the chance to test their crackpot theories in a confrontation with the USSR. The Cuban missile crisis, the world's greatest thermonuclear confrontation, was conducted by President Kennedy in complete disregard of RAND, and of aggressive leaders like Dean Acheson and generals like Curtis Lemay and Lyman Lemnitzer, the Northwoods terrorist planner who chaired the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. The one place where RAND ideas were used was Vietnam, where a conventional version of the RAND counterforce doctrine was attempted in the form of Operation Rolling Thunder, a shock and awe exercise involving massive B-52 carpet bombing. But the utopian strategy of the RAND crackpots proved a complete failure. As Fred Kaplan wrote, "Vietnam brought out the dark side of nearly everyone inside America's national security machine. And it exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the defense intellectuals. It revealed that the concept of force underlying all their formulations was an abstraction, practically useless as a guide to action." (Kaplan 336) This mood of military defeat and intellectual bankruptcy is the starting point for today's neocon cabal, since this is the world toward which the Wohlstetter proteges Wolfowitz and Perle gravitated in precisely those years.

The RAND Corporation remains a sinister threat, but it also provided a rollicking farce in the run- p to the Iraq war. A special briefing on the nefarious nature of Saudi Arabia before the Defense Policy Board was ordered up by Perle, who could find no better orator than Laurent Murawiec, an undistinguished former member of my own staff in the EIR bureau in Wiesbaden, Germany during the 1980s. Despite the fact that he was by no stretch of the imagination an area specialist, Murawiec was tapped in the summer of 2002 by Perle to give a delirious PowerPoint presentation on Saudi Arabia as "the focus of evil" in the modern world. Even the Bush administration was embarrassed.

YODA: ANDREW MARSHAL, RUMSFELD'S FUTUROLOGIST

Andrew Marshal was one of Albert Wohlstetter's whiz kids at the RAND Corporation back in the 1950s. He has worked for the Defense Department for more than forty years, and is one of the last survivors of the original RAND kindergarten run by Wohlstetter. Born in 1921, the octogenarian heads up Rumsefeld's Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon. Marshal is able to count among his proteges such figures as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. Marshal was a strong backer of Bush 41's Team B alternative estimates group in 1976, which was the way that Wolfowitz and other neocons prepared for their leading roles in the Reagan Administration. Marshal was also close to the ultra-right Committee on the Present Danger, where General Lyman Lemnizter, the author of Operation Northwoods, was also an activist. Lemnitzer had been encouraged to work with CPD by President Gerald Ford. Here is an important element of continuity between the Operation Northwoods clique and today's Pentagon. Marshal is no conservative; his profile is rather that of a radical right-wing reformer and Utopian thinker. He is one of many bureaucrats who has never been called to account over 9/11.

An exchange from a recent interview is typical: "Q: What's the next radical change the US will reveal on the battlefield? Marshal: One future intelligence problem: knowing what drugs the other side is on .... People who are connected with neural pharmacology say that new classes of drugs will be available relatively certainly within the decade. These drugs are just like chemicals inside people, only with behavior-modifying, performance-enhancing characteristics. [This leads to] jokes that a future intelligence problem is going to be knowing what drugs the other guys are on."

Marshal is an apostle of shock and awe: "There are ways of psychologically influencing the leadership of another state. I don't mean information warfare, but some demonstration of awesome effects, like being able to set off impressive explosions in the sky. Like, let us show you what we could do to you. Just visually impressing the person." Are we safer? Marshal opines: "A friend of mine, Yale economist Martin Shubik, says an important way to think about the world is a curve of the number of people 10 determined men can kill before they are put down themselves. That has varied over time. His claim is that it wasn't very many for a long time, and now it's going up. It's not just the US. All the world is getting less safe."

A very revealing question is this one: "Q: Did 9/11 change your mind about anything? Marshal: Not much. It was obvious that we were wide open to attack." (Douglas McGray, "The Marshal Plan," Wired Magazine, November 2002) A rather cavalier statement, since Marshal's job was supposed to be using his imagination to devise possible futuristic modes of attack against this country, and recommending timely measures to ward off such peril. If the 9/11 catastrophe was due to a failure of imagination, Marshal's Office of Net Assessment comes as close as anything to being the US government's imagination bureau. But Marshal wants no part of the responsibility for 9/11, despite having been an influential leader in the Pentagon for more than four decades.

Marshal is also associated with the view of China as a bellicose and hegemony-seeking power destined to clash with the US during the 21st century. Marshal is not surprisingly the darling of many neocon think tanks like Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, one of the nerve centers of the neocon warmonger elite in Washington. "He's as Delphic as they come -- days may go by before he utters a word," says a former member of Marshal's Office of Net Assessment. Says another: "He's hard to draw a bead on because he spends his time coming up with every conceivable future scenario that could threaten the US." Everyone except 9/11, it would seem. According to Jonathan Pollack of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Marshal "is not very interested in the here and now, but is primarily interested in hypothesizing futures that cut against the grain, and you can argue that we really do need someone like that. His interest is to take events as they are understood and find a way to turn them on their head, to conflate understanding, and look for patterns or possibilities that could be studied. And he often comes up with quirk results. It's like he thinks of the world as a bell curve and is only interested in the tails of distribution. [He is] a worrywart." But not overly worried about 9/11, as we have seen. (Jason Vest, "The Dubious Genius of Andrew Marshal," The American Prospect Online, February 15, 2001)

The official version of 9/11 says that the attacks came out of a distant cave in Afghanistan. But it might make more sense to explore network and agencies which have means, motive, and opportunity, as well as a track record of advocating and promoting large-scale violence. Who knows what capabilities are being prepared even now in an isolated branch office of some private military firm, Armageddon network, public relations firm, or Utopian-reactionary think tank?
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