9/11 SYNTHETIC TERROR
MADE IN USA
© 2004
by Webster Griffin Tarpley
Advance
Review Package
A. Synopsis. p. 2
B. Gist of Tarpley's Thesis:
his Speech at the 9/11 Inquiry. pp. 3-6
C. Excerpts: Table of Contents, p. 7
Complete Chapters 2, 12 and 15
II: The Theory and Practice of Synthetic Terrorism p. 8
XII: Conspiracy Theory: The Great American Tradition p. 48
XV: Islamic Fundamentalism: Fostered by US Foreign Policy p. 58
Chapters selected uniquely distinguish this work from other books
on 9/11.
D. Bibliography p. 69
9-11
Synthetic Terror: Made in USA
Original title: The 9/11 Terror Fraud: Myth of the 21st Century
by Webster Griffin Tarpley
This book provides an urgent answer to the failure of the US
intelligence agencies, the Congressional Joint Inquiry, and the
Kean-Hamilton 9-11 Commission to discover the basic facts in the
September 2001 terror attacks.
The author starts from the official myth of 9-11 – nineteen
Arab hijackers, al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, the laptop in the cave
in Afghanistan – and shows how this myth was fabricated
during the ten days after 9-11 by media leaks from George Tenet
and Richard Clarke, remarks by Colin Powell, and Bush’s
September 20 address to Congress. In the meantime, each of these
figures has been repeatedly caught blatantly lying about Iraq
and other subjects, and it is high time their lies about 9-11
be exposed.
After a reality check to establish that no proof for the official
account of 9-11 has ever been forthcoming, the author develops
a theory of international terrorism based on the experience of
the Kennedy assassination, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof
group, and other recent cases.
International terrorism – including 9-11 – is overwhelmingly
the product of intelligence agencies, he argues, pointing out
the roles of patsies and fall-guys, of networks of moles inside
the government and the media, of anonymous professionals who actually
carry out the atrocities the public sees, and of secret command
cells in privatized paramilitary settings.
Using this framework, Tarpley proceeds to analyze a score of points
at which the official account of 9-11 is absurd, contradictory,
highly suspicious, or just physically impossible. Answering objections,
the author shows that such vital ideas in American history as
the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s House Divided
Speech, and the 1860 Republican Party platform would be classified
as conspiracy theories by the self-appointed neocon guardians
of orthodoxy today.
Tarpley outlines the long history of terrorism as a tool to manipulate
public opinion in favor of war and dictatorship, from Guy Fawkes
to the Maine to Operation Northwoods. Through his famous spot
resolutions which rejected the Polk administration’s official
account of the outbreak of the Mexican War, the figure of Abraham
Lincoln emerges to exemplify the classical American demand for
truth and rejection of government manipulation.
Webster Griffin Tarpley is an activist and historian best known
for his George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992), which
has become an underground classic on the internet at www.tarpley.net.
An expert on international terrorism with decades of experience,
he directed the study Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro? (Who Killed Aldo
Moro?), which was commissioned by a member of the Italian government
and published in Rome in 1978. He also co-authored American Leviathan:
Administrative Fascism Under the Bush Regime (1991), which identified
many tendencies which have become prominent today, and Surviving
the Cataclysm (1999), an analysis of the world financial crisis.
Against Oligarchy, a collection of his essays and speeches, appeared
on the internet in 1996. He has appeared on CNN Crossfire, Charlie
Rose, many talk radio shows, and cable access television across
North America.
Overview of Tarpley's thesis:
his Speech at the 9/11 Inquiry
A
Coup Against World Civilization
Webster
Tarpley made two presentations to the International Citizens'
Inquiry Into 9/11 in Toronto, entitled The 9/11 Terror Fraud:
A Coup Against World Civilization - Parts One and Two. This transcript
is abstracted from Part One.
Competent
researchers have demonstrated that the official version of 9/11
is absurd, contradictory, and untenable - yet it is still being
used to justify an international anarchy of preventive war, and
liberticide police state measures. This process is fraudulent
and must be opposed by real intellectuals and persons of good
will.
Gerhard Wisnewski and Andreas von Buelow have essentially done
a lot in the history of the Baader-Meinhof group, the so-called
Red Army faction, that's Wisnewski and the general activities
of intelligence services by von Buelow, who for a decade or more
was the head of the German parliamentary committee of oversight
of the BND, the Bundes Nachrichten Dienst, the CIA of Germany.
And I would also modestly suggest that some of my own work is
relevant in this connection as well. Now here I would like to
present a very important diagram that I commend to your attention
and I want to tarry and look at it for a moment. (See diagram.)
We are dealing with state-sponsored, false flag terrorism. I don't
mean state-sponsored in the sense that it has to be sponsored
by the entire command structure of the country in question, but
that it is carried forward by a private network ensconced and
infesting decisive nodal points in the state apparatus of that
country. I'll try to show you what I mean.
Patsies and Fall Guys
Here we have to distinguish a world of patsies, the people that
you hear about, I'll try to show you some of this in detail, the
people we can call the dupes, the useful idiots, the fanatics,
the police agents, the double agents, the provocateurs, in short
the Oswalds, the fall guys. Lee Harvey Oswald - 'I'm just a patsy'
- direct quote. That's one group.
The Moles.
This is the group of government officials, the network of government
officials, whose loyalty is not to the command structure, the
Constitution or their country in some diffuse sense, but rather
their loyalty goes to a private intelligence network, a private
clique, faction, a group of putschists if you will, people trying
to have a coup d'état.
Professional Killers and Asteroids
You also have to distinguish the professional killers. These are
the cold blooded technicians of murder. This is the sort of area
where you see retired veterans of the Special Forces, the Delta
Force, the CIA Operations Directorate, and so on down the line
- the old boys. At the end of the '80s and the beginning of the
'90s, the term for this group in Washington was the asteroids.
All of them operate in a brainwashed world of the controlled corporate
media which establishes the terms of the debate. Now the patsies
are up front, the moles are known but the fact that they are moles
is not well-known. The professional killers don't ever want to
become known, they'd rather be completely anonymous.
Let's just look at the patsies for a second. You can think of
Oswald, you can think of this group of 19 (alleged hijackers),
think of Mohammed Atta and we'll get to him in just a minute.
These are false flag terrorists. I would submit that most of the
time they are pieces of human wreckage. They are psychotic. They
are people with criminal intent, criminal energy but not much
else. They have no mental ability. It helps, because they're not
supposed to realize what is going to happen to them because at
some point it is going to go badly for them. They are psychopaths,
sociopaths, and they are ideologues - they are obsessive about
various ideological points.
They are also capable of being very abrasive, very obvious and
very anxious to be noticed, like Atta and his people going to
strip clubs or getting into fights with people about parking spaces
and all sorts of incomprehensible behavior whose only purpose
was to make sure people remember that they were there. Now most
of these people can't get through life without a comprehensive
support network, they can't make it otherwise. That is why we
find so many of them in south Florida. Why south Florida? Well,
there's something called CIA Miami Station. The CIA is not supposed
to have big offices in the continental United States but they
do, and the biggest one is in Florida with the target of course
being Cuba. This goes back to the early 1960s and that is precisely
where we find all of these terrorists hanging out in these motels,
bars and strip clubs.
So they require a comprehensive support network. They require
protection against ordinary law enforcement because these are
the kinds of people who are likely to get arrested for being drunk
and disorderly, for petty theft, traffic violations and so on
down the line. There has to be somebody from the CIA office of
security or something else there to make sure that they don't
get put in the hoosegow.
The most important thing about the patsies that I would suggest
to you is that when it comes down to it in the crucial instance
they are physically and mentally incapable of carrying out the
large-scale actions ascribed to them. A supermarket-caliber terrorist
who can blow up a bus or a shop is not capable of these tremendous
feats that are associated with 9/11. So we have done the patsies.
Three 9/11 Moles
Let's turn our attention next to the moles. Now the moles are
government officials but they don't work for the government, they
work for this private network. What is their task? Well they have
two, I think, essentially. They have to preserve the patsies from
arrest or elimination because you've got to have the patsies,
they are indispensable: you can't pin it on them if they are in
jail.
They also have to supervise the cover-up. This is absolutely decisive,
because whatever you can do can be investigated and blown but
not if you have moles supervising the cover-up. Now you remember
Colleen Rowley and her little complaint from Minneapolis saying,
I thought that the leaders of the FBI in Washington were a bunch
of moles? Well bravo Ms. Rowley. Indeed David Frasca of the FBI,
the head of the Islamic Fundamentalism Department who rejected
the Phoenix Memo, who rejected the Minneapolis demands and so
forth, is a prime candidate as a mole of 9/11.
This is the unfortunate General Myers, the head of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff in the United States, the guy who was unable to scramble
a single jet fighter until the Pentagon had been hit by something.
Now a couple of weeks ago he goes on the television to talk about
his war crimes in Iraq and he said, "Well I didn't read the
Taguba report [referring to Seymour Hersh's article in Harper's]
I don't read things like that, they don't get to my desk".
He seems to make a business of not knowing anything. This is another
case where you wonder could General Myers find his way to the
men's room without the help of a CIA covert operation (audience
applause, laughter)?
How about the Federal Aeronautics Administration employee who
a couple of weeks ago was found to be directing the burning of
the tapes? There were taped interviews done with the air traffic
controllers the day of the 11th and 12th of September and all
that evidence has now been destroyed. Well that looks like another
mole to me.
The only thing I have to warn you of here, my caveat, is that
you cannot project backwards to the moles because the problem
is this. If the terrorism operation is successful you tend to
shunt the entire government, like an express train going through
a switch, it puts the entire state machine on a new track. At
that point bureaucratic conservatism, self-preservation, all the
bureaucratic instincts kick in. In retrospect it looks like all
the members of the government are moles. But that does not mean
that they were witting before the fact or even that they are witting
after the fact. So you have to be careful about the people to
whom you ascribe witting knowledge of what is actually going on
because these are even fewer than it appears.
Now we have to think about the professional killers. These are
not bunglers, these are not psychotics, at least not in the true
sense, they may be morally insane. They are professional experts
with state-of-the-art training and equipment. These are cold-blooded
technocrats of death and they are eminently capable of performing
terror attacks. They are detached, they are not ideological, they
are often mercenaries, often in it for money. They want secrecy,
they don't want attention, they don't want publicity, they want
to keep a low profile, no profile. Their occupational hazard of
course is that they tend to be liquidated after the fact. But
their goal is never to be heard from again.
The other component is the brainwashed world, but the indispensable
thing of course that I don't show on the picture is a command
cell. This is almost certainly to be not in government but somewhere
privatized. You have to go back to Ronald Reagan's first term
and his Executive Order 12333 which essentially privatized most
of the Cold War functions of the CIA. It put them into these companies
we find around Washington, the so-called Beltway Bandits if you
will. Those are the entire special forces, Delta Force, SEALS,
Special Air Services of Great Britain are very big and very aggressive,
US Air Force intelligence with their utopian ideas, Defense Intelligence
Agency and so on down the line.
The Corporate Controlled Media
Finally the corporate media. They are the indispensable ingredient
because without them you can't have anything. You have to have
mass propaganda to accredit and spread and pound the official
version of the events into the minds of people, and to smooth
over the inevitable absurdities, contradictions, impossibilities
and so forth of the official story. Mass brainwashing in the Anglo-American
tradition is what they propose.
If you want to show this to people at a comprehensible level there's
an interesting movie called The Package made in the late 1980s
that does show the levels of moles, dupes, and professional killers.
Its premise is that Gene Hackman is a good US Army sergeant who
stumbles upon a plot by a clique of US and Soviet officers - there's
a private network - who are determined to assassinate Gorbachev
in order to stop disarmament and détente which they don't
want. We have Tommy Lee Jones as a professional killer, the hit
man. The US generals and Soviet generals who work together are
the moles. Then we have a dim-witted army person from the stockade
that they bring from the Army brig and use him as a patsy. So
I recommend this interesting movie The Package with Gene Hackman
and Tommy Lee Jones. It is the only thing from Hollywood that
I have ever seen that has any connection to reality in it. (Audience
laughter and applause.)
Now, the Kean-Hamilton Commission. The nicest thing that we can
say is that they beg the question. They have assumed as given
that which they have to prove, their official story. They haven't
proven the official story, they haven't come anywhere near it.
It is a scandal, it is an abject failure and as I will try to
show, the tragedy of the Kean-Hamilton Commission is that it leaves
the door wide open to future terrorism because the real terrorist
networks have remained totally untouched, totally uninvestigated,
totally unknown and the 19 patsies have been essentially destroyed.
On the 26th of July, an interesting date, the report is going
to be issued but it is not going to be released to you but to
the White House so it can be censored. So we will have a censorship
of a censorship and what comes out at the end is probably going
to be something like dishwater or hogwash. I guess we'll have
to read it when it comes.
Joyce Lynn, who I think you've heard already, has done a wonderful
job in lining up the various contradictions and impossibilities
in this group, their conflicts of interest: who represents the
CIA, Lee Hamilton represents the Washington establishment, Leeman
just did a hatchet job on the New York City fireman and policemen
and so on down the line. A wretched performance.
However, despite the idiotic direction of the entire thing, it
nevertheless, as an unavoidable and unintended by-product, produced
a number of interesting revelations. Part of it is that thanks
to this fellow here Richard Clarke, it is clear that Bush, Condoleeza
and others lied. (Clarke's confession to the victim families)
"Yes, your government failed you and I failed you."
I wanted to propose this man Clarke for the Academy Award this
year, the Oscar, for his performance in this hearing, because
this was one of the most exceptional pieces of histrionics that
I've ever seen. He was able to sell himself to the victim families
but you just have to remember that everything he says goes in
the direction of attempting to accredit and shore up the bankrupt
official version. In other words, he is the guy who says to Bush,
Don't worry about Iraq, worry about al Qaeda. He should have been
saying, Let's look at the moles inside our own government which
he did not do. (Audience applause.)
So rushing ahead, let's just remember that despite the activities
of this pseudo Commission, 'Cover-up Commission' as it has been
termed, there's absolutely no proof of any of the main allegations.
There's absolutely no documentary serious proof of al Qaeda, bin
Laden, the 19 [hijackers], Atta and so forth. The White Book (of
proof) was promised by General Powell but never delivered.
There is no proven connection to Afghanistan, no proof of who
the hijackers were, if there were any hijackers. There's no proof
of foreign origin and nobody has ever been convicted for anything
in a fair trial.
One of the first skeptics was former German Chancellor Helmut
Schmidt who said it is wrong to invoke the NATO Article 5 calling
for collective self defense because it has never been proven that
the attacks came from outside of the United States. So the entire
NATO Council was stampeded under the results of these events.
COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I – THE MYTH OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
CHAPTER II – THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM
CHAPTER III – THE ROOTS OF 9/11: THE GLOBALIZED CRISIS
OF THE 1990s
CHAPTER IV: AL QAEDA: THE CIA’S ARAB LEGION
CHAPTER V: COULD THE ALLEGED HIJACKERS FLY THE PLANES?
CHAPTER VI: THE COLLAPSE OF WORLD TRADE CENTER 1, 2, AND 7
CHAPTER VII: WHAT HIT THE PENTAGON?
CHAPTER VIII: SHANKSVILLE
CHAPTER IX: “ANGEL IS NEXT” – THE INVISIBLE
GOVERNMENT SPEAKS
CHAPTER X: ANTHRAX
CHAPTER XI: INSIDER TRADING; CELL PHONES; MI-6 AND MOSSAD
CHAPTER XII: CONSPIRACY THEORY: THE GREAT AMERICAN TRADITION
CHAPTER XIII: THE 9/11 MYTH: COLLECTIVE SCHIZOPHRENIA
CHAPTER XIV: NETWORKS OF INTEREST
CHAPTER XV: ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM: FOSTERED BY US FOREIGN POLICY
CHAPTER XVI: ELECTION 2004 IN THE SHADOW OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM
AND WAR
AFTERWORD: 2004: NOT AN ELECTION, BUT A CIA COVERT OPERATION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
C. Excerpts:
Chapters 2, 12 and 15
II: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF SYNTHETIC TERRORISM
And
yet the entire Republic is shaken and disconcerted by these seditious
provocations, and precisely by the action of those who should
have been the first to prevent them…. – Sallust
The original title for this section was “the theory and
practice of state-sponsored, false-flag, synthetic terrorism.
Instead, I have let “synthetic terrorism” sum up this
entire concept. In any political system which relies to even a
small extent for its continued existence on the consent of the
governed, some form of popular legitimation is necessary. But
what happens when the wars, policies and institutional changes
desired by the ruling elite cannot be understood or supported
by the vast majority of the citizens? What happens if the oligarchical
nature of the system endows it with such inertia that it cannot
be motivated to act in the way in which the most powerful oligarchical
factions desire? Under these conditions, especially if the political
and economic systems are in crisis, state sponsored terrorism
may emerge. Here we are not describing the way in which statesmen,
generals and intelligence officers ought to act; we are describing
the way in which they have acted and continue to act. What we
offer here can be thought of as a theory of synthetic terrorism.
This terrorism is synthetic because it brings together the efforts
of a number of disparate components: patsies, moles, professionals,
media, and controllers. It is also synthetic in the sense that
it is artificial: it does not grow up spontaneously out of despair
and oppression, but is rather the product of an effort of organization
and direction in which factions of government play an indispensable
role.
We are not offering erudite scholarship isolated from public
affairs, but an active intervention against the ongoing attempt
to build an entire international system on a monstrous falsehood.
We must stress the idea that the vast majority of international
terrorism conducted on a spectacular scale is indeed state-sponsored
terrorism. This does not mean that such terrorism is sponsored
by the entire government, down to the last GS-4 clerical worker
doing data entry for the Social Security Administration. It does
mean that a faction or network of the government uses its access
to the levers of power to promote the terrorist action in various
ways. In Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the Arab and Islamic
world today, there have been deluded and naïve individuals
and institutions who have somehow associated large-scale international
terrorism with revolutionary or progressive change, or with the
establishment of international justice. Nothing could be further
from the truth. If the Italian left of the 1970s and the German
left of the same period sympathized with the Red Brigades or the
Baader-Meinhof group/Red Army faction, they only showed their
own stupidity, since both of these terrorist operations were created
by and controlled by NATO intelligence. Similarly, any Arab who
feels sympathy for al Qaeda needs to be forcefully reminded that
al Qaeda was created by the CIA and continues to be steered by
the CIA, through various cut-outs and mediations. Terrorism, which
was advertised as a desperate aid to oppressed peoples, has most
often had the opposite effect: the attack on the Munich Olympics
in 1972, the first spectacular blowing up of airliners, the Achille
Lauro – these were actions which set the Palestinian cause
back 20 years.
Terrorism in the modern era is the means by which oligarchies
wage secret wars against the people, under conditions in which
it would be politically impossible to wage the same war openly.
Oligarchy, in turn, always has one and the same political program,
which has not changed since the time of Thucydides, Plato and
the writer that classical historians call The Old Oligarch: the
purpose and program of oligarchy is to perpetuate oligarchy. The
specific political and economic form of the oligarchy is much
less important. The nomenklatura of the old Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics was supposedly based on state property of the means
of production, the primacy of the Communist Party, and Marxist
ideology, but they proved more than willing to throw all that
out the window when they realized that their oligarchical status
and special privilege could not be preserved under communist auspices.
Having understood this, the Soviet oligarchs were eager to transform
themselves into stockjobbers, speculators, profiteers, and young
wolves (as Zhirinovsky put it) under the auspices of wild laissez-faire
capitalism. What was important to them was to preserve their status
as an oligarchy. This is an important lesson, since it shows that
we must be deeply suspicious of the ruling elite of the United
States, which is of course also an oligarchy, but an oligarchy
which operates behind the mask of democratic institutions and
formal democracy. The experience of the USSR suggests that the
US oligarchy will be more than willing to trade in its democratic
costumes for a bureaucratic-authoritarian or even totalitarian
garb if the democratic forms prove to be impossible to maintain,
most likely because of financial and economic difficulties.
The naive view of terrorism is that it grows up directly out
of oppression, economic misery, and political despair. Oppressed
and exploited people, or those who have been colonized by a foreign
power, come together spontaneously in ones and twos, create an
organization, and after a certain time of preparation go over
to armed struggle against their oppressors or occupiers. But this
is the rarest of exceptions.
This view pays no attention to the most important institutional
actor in the world of terrorism – secret intelligence agencies
like CIA, FBI, NSA, KGB, Stasi, MI-6, and the rest. Secret intelligence
agencies are institutions in which the very essence of oligarchy
is at work. Secret intelligence agencies in their modern forms
go back to the Republic of Venice, which was famous for its intelligence
directorate, the Council of Ten, and its pervasive network of
spies, informers, and provocateurs. And the Republic of Venice
was the longest-lasting oligarchical system in world history.
Despite their cultural differences, all of these secret intelligence
agencies are fundamentally alike. Terrorism generally starts within
these secret agencies, or nowadays more likely in their privatized
tentacles – as for example the intelligence community in
the United States has existed since President Reagan’s Executive
Order 12333.
Secret intelligence agencies are fatalists to the extent that
they regard all large-scale sociological and political changes
as inevitable. As soon as they identify a new phenomenon which
they have not yet penetrated, their only thought is how to infiltrate
their agents and assets into it, so they can steer it or influence
it when the time comes. Whenever the leaders of intelligence agencies
see a train leaving the station, their only thought is to climb
on board, quite irrespective of the destination, as Gen. Paul
Albert Scherer, the former head of West Germany’s Military
Counter-Intelligence (Militärischer Abschirmdienst) and one
of the greatest experts in this field, assured me some years back.
This applies to terrorist groups most emphatically. Here the attention
of the secret intelligence agencies is so strongly focused that
their task is most often that of founding, and much more seldom
that of infiltrating and taking over some group which already
exists.
The world of secret intelligence agencies is a realm of falsehood,
camouflage, deception, violence, unspeakable cruelty, treachery,
and betrayal. It is the most desolate and grim sector of human
endeavor, where no human values can subsist. It knows neither
hope nor mercy nor redemption. It is the one area of human life
where Hobbes’s maxim holds true – it is the war of
all against all. But not as chaos – as an ultimately controlled
phenomenon which serves the goal of preserving the state power
that the intelligence agencies serve. During the Cold War, the
conflict of CIA, MI-6, SDECE, KGB, BND, Stasi and the rest was
called the wilderness of mirrors, a desert populated by agents,
double agents, triple agents, multiple agents, their case officers,
their counterintelligence opponents, and the omnipresent specialists
in mokrie dela – wetwork, or assassinations, as the KGB
described them.
We start from the strong presumption that terrorism is therefore
an activity which is controlled by a faction of government, probably
acting under the influence of financier factions which are generally
the ultimate source of authority in the globalized universe after
1991. Terrorism cannot be described as a spontaneous sociological
phenomenon, as the old saying goes – it must rather be seen
as a phenomenon developed by sociologists, along with psychologists,
profilers, psychiatrists, case officers, handlers, and cut-outs.
For every terrorist and terrorist group in the field, an extensive
bureaucratic support system is necessary. Spontaneous combustion
is the last thing that should be expected.
This is an important point, to which we will return. The naïve
or spontaneous theory of terrorism sees the terror group as sprouting
up directly out of the compost of misery, poverty, and desperation.
Our point here is that this explanation neglects the crucial,
indispensable role of the secret intelligence agency, which is
usually present at the creation of the terror group, or very soon
thereafter. The well-known Indian author Arundhati Roy told the
American Sociological Association in San Francisco on August 16,
2004 that “terrorism is the privatization of war”
and that “terrorists are the free marketers of war.”
These are striking formulations, but this does not prevent them
from leading in the wrong direction. Synthetic terrorism remains
very much under state control; it is only that the puppetmaster’s
strings are well concealed from those who do not know what to
look for, or who do not want to know. Thus, a CIA front corporation
is not really part of the private sector – it is an emanation
of Langley just as surely as the local station chief and his staff.
But it should also be clear that state sponsored terrorism cannot
call itself by its own real name. It must necessarily masquerade
as an authentic voice of the oppressed – be they Arabs,
Muslims, workers, national minorities, or whatever. The terror
groups cannot be labeled CIA or KGB – they must call themselves
Red Brigades, Red Army faction, ETA, or al Qaeda. The false flag
and false ideology allows the terror group to pretend that it
is something that it is not, and to convince billions of naïve
viewers of CNN or al Jazeera that the false dumb-show is indeed
reality.
In the nineteenth century, the great headquarters of international
terrorism was London. The defense of the empire required operations
which the public decorum of the Victorian era could not openly
avow. The main vehicle for British terrorist operations in Europe
was Giuseppe Mazzini and his phalanx of organizations starting
from Young Italy: Young Germany, Young France, Young Poland, Young
Turkey, Young America. Mazzini was a paid agent of the British
Admiralty, and received his funding through Admiralty official
James Stansfeld. Mazzini’s terrorism was directed against
what the British called “the arbitrary powers”: Prussia,
Russia, and Austria. Each of these had a large population of oppressed
nationalities, and Mazzini created a terrorist group for each
one of them, often promising the same territory to two or more
of his national sections. The important thing was that rulers
and officials be assassinated, and bombs thrown. The net effect
of all this can be gauged by the complaint of an Austrian about
Mazzini’s operations in Italy: Mazzini aimed at making Italy
turbulent, he lamented, which was bad for Austria, but without
making Italy strong, which might be bad for the British. Mazzini
operated out of London during his entire career, which simply
means that he was officially sanctioned, as were anarchists like
Bakunin and a whole tribe of nihilists. Mazzini worked well for
Europe – including the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas.
For other parts of the world, the Admiralty had specialized operations.
State-sponsored terrorism can have a number of goals. One of
these is to eliminate a politician, business leader. Back around
1500, Niccolò Machiavelli included a long chapter on conspiracies
in his masterwork, The Discourses. For Machiavelli, a conspiracy
meant an operation designed to assassinate the ruler of a state,
and to take his place by seizing power. Modern terrorism is more
subtle: by eliminating a leading politician, it seeks to change
the policy direction of the government that politician was leading.
The paradox here is that a faction or network penetrating the
state sometimes undertakes the elimination of the head of state
or head of government, and often a very eminent and beloved one.
A good example is the French Fifth Republic under President Charles
de Gaulle. De Gaulle would not accept the demand of the US and
UK to dictate policy to France as a member of the Atlantic Alliance.
De Gaulle took France out of the NATO supernational command, ejected
the NATO headquarters from its home near Paris, condemned the
Vietnam war, refused the British entry into the European Economic
Community, challenged the US to pay its foreign obligations in
gold rather than paper dollars, called for a free Quebec, and
otherwise demonstrated creative independence from the Anglo-Americans.
The result was a series of approximately 30 assassination attempts,
carried out by French right-wing extremists. but with the Anglo-American
secret services lurking in the background. None of the attempts
to assassinate De Gaulle was successful.
Another example was Enrico Mattei, the head of the Italian state
oil company ENI. Mattei challenged the hegemony of the US-UK seven
sisters oil cartel. He offered Arab oil producers a 50-50 split
of the profits, far more than the Anglo-Americans were offering,
and he was willing to help the Arabs with their own economic development.
Mattei was growing powerful enough to challenge the subordination
of Italy to the US-UK domination of NATO when his private jet
crashed near Milan in October 1962, an event which can be attributed
to sabotage on the part of the CIA and its alliances, among them
some of the French Algerians who were also the enemies of de Gaulle.
After Mattei’s death, ENI began to abide by the rules of
the Anglo-American oil cartel.
The classic example of political assassination was the murder
of President Kennedy. Kennedy had been alerted by the Bay of Pigs
debacle to the treachery and incompetence of CIA director Allen
Dulles, whom he fired. He refused to listen to the adventurist
advice of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He overrode
his main military advisers, Lyman Lemnitzer and Curtis LeMay,
who wanted to make the Cuban missile crisis the occasion for general
thermonuclear war with the USSR. Kennedy clashed with Roger Blough
of US Steel, who was acting as a representative of Wall Street.
Kennedy challenged the power of the Federal Reserve to be the
sole controller of the US money supply. Kennedy seemed determined
to return to the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and
also to the strong presidency Roosevelt had embodied, but which
the US oligarchy was determined never to permit again. (There
had in any case been an attempt to assassinate FDR in Florida
before he was even inaugurated.) Kennedy was probably planning
to fire FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, who regarded himself as an unaccountable
state within the state. Documents indicate that Kennedy was scaling
down the US presence in Vietnam, rather than escalating it as
his incompetent hawkish advisers wanted, and that he may have
been preparing to liquidate the Vietnam matter entirely after
his re-election in November 1964. Kennedy was assassinated in
Dallas in November, 1963.
Somewhere in the mid-1960s a watershed in the annals of terrorism
is passed. Up to this point, key person assassinations are carried
out by disgruntled officers or colonial refugees, by itinerant
misfits like Oswald, or are simply anonymous. After this point,
assassinations start to be attributed to revolutionary or subversive
groups. During the 1980s and 1990s, those groups gradually drop
their Marxist-Lenininst camouflage and in many cases assume a
right-wing anarchist or Islamist coloration.
In Germany, Detlev Karsten Rohwedder was the chief of the Trusteeship
Agency (Treuhand), which was in 1991 the largest corporation in
the world. In the communist German Democratic Republic, all industry
was the property of the state, and when the GDR collapsed in 1989,
this property was transferred to the Trusteeship Agency. Rohwedder,
as the head of this entity, preferred to keep the vast state property
of the GDR as a state sector, trying to maintain existing levels
of employment and production so as to facilitate the absorption
of the East German regions into unified Germany. Anglo-American
financiers, however, wanted all the GDR state property to be put
on the auction block at once, so that it could be sold off at
bargain basement prices from which Wall Street and the City of
London had everything to gain. When Rohwedder proved reluctant
to accept this policy, he was assassinated around Easter 1991,
just after the first Gulf War, by a group claiming to be the Baader-Meinhof
group, also known as the Red Army faction. Rohwedder’s successor
immediately began selling off GDR state property in the way the
Anglo-Americans wanted.
Aldo Moro was the head of the Italian Christian Democratic Party.
During the 1970s he was the leading advocate of a policy of bringing
the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into the government. This would
have given the Italian government a solid majority for the first
time in many decades, putting an end to the constant parade of
government crises and weak, unstable coalitions cobbled together
with the help of splinter parties. At a certain point, Moro was
warned by a key US figure, identified by some as former US Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger to cease his efforts to bring the PCI
into the government, as Moro’s widow later reported. In
March, 1978 this warning was followed by a terrorist attack on
Moro’s motorcade, in which several of his security detail
were killed. Moro himself was abducted. Responsibility was claimed
by the Red Brigades. After two months of captivity, Moro was killed
by his captors and his body found in the trunk of a car in downtown
Rome. After his death, the PCI was not allowed to enter the government.
As the examples have suggested, the leading terrorist state of
the post-1945 era in Europe was unquestionably the United States,
often acting together with the British MI-5 and MI-6 in the framework
of NATO intelligence. US state-sponsored terrorism generally aimed
at maintaining what can be called the division of the world into
spheres of influence as established at the Big Three (US, UK,
USSR) conference at Yalta in the Crimea in early 1945. Since the
US could not simply arrest and execute its opponents in the way
that Stalin could, terrorism was a favored tool of the US in attempting
to maintain domination and discipline within the western bloc.
Terrorism was thus used against political challenges, like that
of Moro, against economic challenges, like those of Mattei and
Rohwedder, or against figures who represented multiple challenges,
like President de Gaulle. In the cases of President Kennedy and
his brother Robert Kennedy, terrorism was employed to prevent
reforms of the system which decisive groups did not desire, and
which they despaired of blocking through normal political means.
The anti-slavery reforms of the Gracchi brothers were the only
way to preserve the Roman Republic, but the latifundists and slaveholders
felt mortally threatened by them, so the Gracchi were both assassinated.
Terrorism can also be employed to create a radical change in
a political situation or political process. A good example from
the postwar period is the terrorist bombing attack on a bank located
in Piazza Fontana in Milan, Italy, on December 12, 1969, killing
16 and seriously injuring 88 more – a shocking toll in those
days, and a source of horror for public opinion in general. This
bombing took place at the height of the biggest strike wave that
Italy had seen since the end of World War II, the so-called Hot
Autumn, in which the automobile workers and metal workers had
proven to be especially aggressive and militant. The bombings
achieved the remarkable feat of stopping this broadly based and
energetic strike wave dead in its tracks, with all strikes being
called off as the police ran wild, hauling suspected leftist sympathizers
in for questioning and intimidating their families. This successful
method of social control was called the “strategy of tension,”
and it included emergency laws against suspected terrorists and
other favorite measures of Ashcroft today. The Piazza Fontana
bombs were blamed by the police and the press on a pathetic group
of anarchists, the Bakunin Club. Among the members of the Bakunin
Club, which had been thoroughly penetrated by the Italian intelligence
service, the SID, were the railroad worker Giuseppe Pinelli and
the male dancer Pietro Valpreda. Pinelli was pushed to his death
from a fourth-story window in police headquarters, while Valpreda
was vilified as a subhuman beast by the mass media. When the absurd
attempt to pin the atrocity on the anarchists collapsed of its
own weight, the next prime suspects became Freda and Ventura,
two self-styled “Nazi-Maoists.” More than twenty years
after the fact, information came into the public domain that the
bombs of Piazza Fontana had been placed by a secret network called
GLADIO operating under the control of NATO intelligence, which
evidently feared that the success of the strike wave might lead
to the entry of the PCI into the government, which in turn might
have led to the erosion of the NATO alliance as against the Soviet-controlled
Warsaw Pact.
All during the 1970s and into the 1980s, US, NATO and Italian
ruling circles were obsessed with keeping the PCI out of the government,
and with breaking the back of workers militancy. Terrorists incidents
included a bomb which went off during a trade union demonstration
against fascism at Piazza della Loggia in Brescia in May 1974
(8 dead, 100 injured), a bomb on the Italicus express train in
August 1974 (12 dead, 48 injured), and many more. The most spectacular
event in this series was the bomb at the Bologna railway station
on August 2, 1980, which killed 85 and injured some 200. This
was the biggest terrorist attack in Europe before the Madrid train
bombings of March 11, 2004, and shows a similar modus operandi.
Terrorism thus has been known to provide a means of social control.
Parts of the US oligarchy are today almost euphoric about the
seemingly endless panorama of possibilities for exploiting terrorism
they believe they see before them. But it is not wise to try to
build an entire state and social order on terrorism.
Another major goal of terrorism has been to provoke war. In this
variant, state-sponsored false flag terrorist groups carry out
an attack against the power that wants to go to war, which uses
the attacks as a moral pretext to rally its own population for
conflict, whipping up sentiment by waving the bloody shirt of
the victims, the insult to the national honor, and the monstrous
evil of the sub-human perpetrators.
The logic here is that of the provocation which can be observed
along the fringes of any demonstration which the government does
not want to take place. The demonstration proceeds peacefully
and responsibly, with marchers walking an orderly fashion within
the cordons of parade marshals who are there to prevent trouble.
Families with children, elderly people, and youth are all petitioning
effectively for the redress of their grievances. The political
effect is potentially quite positive. All of a sudden, a group
of radical demonstrators, calling themselves anarchists but in
reality police agent provocateurs, breaks away from the main body
of the demonstration and begins smashing the windows of stores
along the route. The anarchists have Molotov cocktails in hand,
and they hurl them at the first units of riot police who arrive,
injuring some of them seriously. The police, by now thoroughly
provoked indeed, begin to fire tear gas grenades in all directions,
and wade in to the peaceful crowd with their truncheons, mercilessly
beating everyone who falls into their hands. Demonstrators are
herded into blind allies, beaten, arrested, and carted off. It
will be a long time before some of them come to another demonstration.
Television coverage focuses on the violent minority, trying to
make it look like the anarchist police agents are typical of the
demonstration as a whole. Pundits pontificate; George Will is
particularly indignant. This is the model for provocations of
all types. It represents a spectacle for the gullible, a theatrical
if bloody manipulation of staged pseudo-reality, and it points
toward the reality of 9/11.
War commonly begins with provocations of this sort. The colossal
bloodletting of World War began in Sarajevo, Bosnia with the assassination
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist
fanatic named Gavrilo Prinkip, an activist of the group called
the Black Hand, a Mazzini-style Serbian underground national liberation
group. But the Black Hand was controlled by Serbian military intelligence.
Colonel Apis of Serbian military intelligence was in turn an asset
of the Okhrana, the Russian intelligence, through the Russian
military attaché in Belgrade, and he and Prinkip may also
have been under the influence of the British-backed Grand Orient
freemasons, which had been working towards a general European
war since about 1906-7.
Another case was the explosion of the battleship USS Maine in
the harbor of Spanish-controlled Havana, Cuba in 1898. The jingoistic
Hearst newspapers, the original of modern yellow journalism, blamed
the Spanish government and called for war against Spain, which
soon ensued. The Hearst papers argued that the US warship had
been sunk by the detonation of a Spanish mine, and drew imaginative
cartoons to show how this might have happened. This war is a fateful
turning-point in world history, since it marks the launching of
US imperialism on the world stage. But an inquiry conducted decades
later by retired Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US
nuclear Navy, led to the conclusion that the explosion had taken
place inside the Maine, probably as the result of sparks amidst
the coal dust of an empty coal bunker, a fairly well-known danger
in those days. But it may also be that the internal explosion
was not an accident, but rather the result of a deliberately placed
bomb.
World War II also began with a provocation, at least as far as
Germany is concerned. When Hitler wanted to invade Poland in September
1939, he knew that the majority of the German population did not
want war. He accordingly hatched a plot which centered on the
Gleiwitz radio station, a German broadcasting station located
near the border with Poland. In late August 1939, Hitler obtained
a group of German convicts, and dressed them in Polish army uniforms.
These wretched men were then taken to the Gleiwitz radio station
and machine-gunned to death. Their bodies were arranged around
the radio station in such a way as to suggest that they had been
shot while storming the building. Nazi agents inside the radio
station then broke into the ongoing program to read a raving anti-German
declaration in Polish, proclaiming that Polish forces had taken
over Gleiwitz and the radio there. This crude farce, when amplified
and repeated hundreds of times by Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda
machinery, secured at least minimal acceptance by the German population
of the inevitability of war, which broke out with Hitler’s
attack on Poland, September 1, 1939.
The classic case of strategic terrorism of this type is doubtless
the Gunpowder Plot of November 5, 1605, a day that is still marked
each year in the English calendar as Guy Fawkes’ Day. In
1605 James I Stuart, a Protestant who united in his person the
crowns of Scotland and England for the first time, was considering
a policy of accommodation with the Spanish Empire, the leading
Catholic power. James was also considering some measures of toleration
for Catholics in England, where the majority of the landed gentry
in the north of the country was still loyal to Rome. An influential
group in London, backed by Venetian intelligence from abroad,
wanted to push James I into a confrontation with the Spanish Empire,
from which they hoped among other things to extract great personal
profit. They also thought it was politically vital to keep persecuting
the Roman Catholics. Chief among the war party was the royal chancellor,
roughly the prime minister, who was Lord Robert Cecil, the Earl
of Salisbury. Cecil set out to convince James I to adopt his policy,
and to accomplish this by means of terrorism. Acting behind the
scenes, Cecil cultivated some prominent Catholics, one of them
Lord Thomas Percy from the famous Catholic Percy family, and used
them as cut-outs to direct the operations of a group of naïve
Catholic fanatics and adventurers, among them a certain gullible
gentleman named Guy Fawkes. Thomas Percy was supposedly a Catholic
fanatic, but in reality was a bigamist. This group of Catholic
fanatics hatched the idea first of tunneling into the basement
of the Houses of Parliament from a nearby house, and then simply
of renting the basement of the Houses of Parliament, in order
to pack that basement with explosives for the purpose of blowing
up King, Lords, and Commons when James I came to open the Parliament
early that November. But instead Guy Fawkes was caught going into
the basement the night before the great crime was scheduled to
occur. Fawkes and the rest of the plotters were tortured and hanged,
and several Catholic clergy were also scapegoated. James I put
aside his plans for toleration of Catholics, and England set out
on a century of wars against the Spanish and Portuguese Empires,
from which in turn the British Empire was born. Guy Fawkes Day
became the yearly festival of “no popery” and hatred
for Spain.
Concerning the Gunpowder Plot, the Jesuit Gerard concludes that
“for purposes of State, the government of the day [meaning
Cecil] either found means to instigate the conspirators to undertake
their enterprise, or, at least, being, from an early stage of
the undertaking, fully aware of what was going on, sedulously
nursed the insane scheme till the time came to make capital out
of it. That the conspirators, or the greater number of them, really
meant to strike a great blow is not to be denied, though it may
be less easy to assure ourselves of its precise character; and
their guilt will not be palliated should it appear that, in projecting
an atrocious crime, they were unwittingly playing the game of
plotters more astute than themselves.” (Gerard 17) Here
we have an excellent definition of state-sponsored terrorism.
Gerard’s method of proof is this: “It will be enough
to show that, whatever its origin, the conspiracy was, and must
have been, known to those in power, who, playing with their infatuated
dupes, allowed them to go on with their mad scheme, till the moment
came to strike with full effect.” (Gerard 55) This can also
be applied to 9/11.
It should be added that James I does not seem to have been aware
of the operation in advance. The plot was not directed against
James I; it rather intended to push him in a specific policy direction.
After November 1605, James I does appear to have realized what
Cecil’s role had been, at least to some extent.
Father Gerard speaks of Thomas Percy, Cecil’s agent in
the Gunpowder Plot, as a “tame duck employed to catch the
wild ones.” (Gerard 152) But the fact that he was Cecil’s
agent did not prevent Percy from being killed as part of the coverup
after November 5. At the risk of mixing metaphors, we can cite
the opinion of a contemporary observer that Cecil, one he had
secured the game birds he was seeking, hanged the spaniel who
had actually caught them for him, “that its master’s
art might not appear.” (Gerard 153)
Towards the end of the 1600s, some leaders of the Whig ministry
decided that France, not Spain, was now the leading Catholic power.
In 1678 they brought forth the charlatan Titus Oates to allege
that he had proofs of a “popish plot” backed by France
to restore Catholicism in England, including by manipulating the
royal succession. Oates may be usefully compared to the many “anti-terrorism
experts” who appear on television news broadcasts to report
on what the terrorists are doing, since it is clear that most
of what these commentators say they have simply invented. When
Oates began to recite his charges there was mass hysteria in England,
and several Jesuits were hanged. The diarist John Evelyn had never
seen “the nation in more apprehension and consternation.”
So great was the fear that “…before the end of 1678
not only did a majority of the English people believe that there
was such a plot, but anyone who ventured to deny it ran the risk
of impeachment as an accessory. ‘‘Twas worse than
plotting to suspect the Plot.’” (Hay 122) The popish
plot had enormous mass appeal: “the extravagant frenzy of
the London mob took most people by surprise…London witnessed
an exhibition of emotional fanaticism which has seldom been equaled
in the history of a civilized nation. Mobs have often been as
wicked, but not often so stupid. ‘The imposture known as
the Oates Plot,’ wrote Lingard, ‘supported by the
arts and declamations of a numerous party, goaded the passions
of men to a state of madness, and seemed to extinguish the native
good sense and humanity of the English character.” (Hay122-3)
The great sponsor of Titus Oates was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord
Shaftesbury, the founder of the Whig Party and a member of the
oligarchical cabinet called the CABAL after the initials of its
members: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale.
The philosopher John Locke was Ashley’s secretary. In the
late summer of 1679 the hysteria began to subside, and it became
apparent that Titus Oates was a fraud and an imposter. At this
point King Charles II put Ashley on trial for treason. Ashley
escaped conviction but had to flee to Holland, where he died.
We now turn to a structural analysis of modern false-flag terrorism
of the type that is commonly sponsored by factions or networks
embedded in the secret intelligence agencies of modern states.
This discussion draws on the work of Andreas von Bülow, Gerhard
Wisnewski, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, and on my own research on the
Moro assassination, the Red Brigades, and Italian terrorism in
general.
PATSIES
“I’m
just a patsy.”
Lee Harvey Oswald,
November 1963
Speaking
of Guy Fawkes and his confreres, Father Gerard comments that “many
intelligent men took for granted that in some way or other the
actual conspirators were but the dupes and instruments of more
crafty men than themselves, and in their mad enterprise played
the game of ministers of State.” (Gerard 43) In this sense,
Guy Fawkes may represent the archetype of the category of person
known in modern intelligence parlance as the patsy.
The real authorship of state sponsored terrorism is to be successfully
concealed, then a collection of scapegoats is the first ingredient
required. These may be defined as the patsies, or alternatively
as fall-guys, scapegoats, useful idiots, or dupes. It is necessary
that they be of low mental ability and great gullibility, since
their mission is to be part of false-flag groups which pretend
to be working for a cause, such as the restoration of the caliphate,
while in reality they are under the control of a private network
inside the US government. It is vital for the terrorist controllers
that the patsies not realize that this or that comrade in arms
is actually a double agent, a provocateur working for the parallel
CIA or some other complicit agency, or which more will be said
later. The best candidates for the patsy role are psychotics,
psychopaths, or sociopaths. They may be fanatics bursting with
criminal energy and criminal intent, or they may be pathetic ideologues
and naifs. Frequently they are also misfits, bunglers, and generally
maladroit in what they undertake.
According to research sponsored in 1999 by the Library of Congress,
in a 1972 study “psychologist B.J. Berkowitz described six
psychological types who would be most likely to threaten or try
to use WMD: paranoids, paranoid schizophrenics, borderline mental
defectives, schizophrenic types, passive-aggressive personality
types, and sociopath personalities. He considered sociopaths the
most likely actually to use WMD. Nuclear terrorism expert Jessica
Stern disagreed. She believed that "Schizophrenics and sociopaths,
for example, may want to commit acts of mass destruction, but
they are less likely than others to succeed." She pointed
out that large-scale dissemination of chemical, biological, or
radiological agents requires a group effort, but that "Schizophrenics,
in particular, often have difficulty functioning in groups...."
(Hudson)
Because the patsies are usually such low-grade subjects, they
require comprehensive support of many types. They may need help
in renting an apartment or in finding a cover job. They always
seem to be getting in trouble with the police, and then it is
necessary to see that they get out on bail as quickly as possible.
If they are lonely, they may need specially trained sex operatives
to comfort them or even to marry them (the KGB and the Stasi called
their sex troops “The Swallows”). Above all they require
constant financial assistance to be able to travel around the
world, as they so frequently seem to be able to do despite the
fact that they are most often without any visible means of support.
The most important thing about patsies is that they are almost
always physically, mentally and technically unable to carry out
the crimes of which they are accused. This is a matter of insufficient
ability and capability, and not of the lack of criminal intent,
which is often abundant.
Patsies can then be used in many combinations. They can be merged
together in false flag terror operations. These organizations
will assume a distinct ideological or religious coloration and
will advertise it, and that will become the key to the process
of creating or reinforcing the enemy image desired by the terrorist
controllers after the terrorist action has been successfully carried
out. That coloration or affiliation will constitute the false
flag, and it will be assiduously prepared. Here some of the members
may be witting; these are the double agents and police informers.
Other components are not witting, at least about the most important
things. What patsies can accomplish by themselves is often supplemented
by the actions of doubles, double agents, and informers, who do
things for them when they can not show up. Sometimes patsies are
sent to make contact with other groups, a process known as sheep-dipping.
If a terrorist controller wants to implicate the Podunk Democratic
Party in terrorism, then he sends a patsy to sign up with them
and attend their meetings before the terrorist act is carried
out. That gives the police a good reason to raid the Podunk Democratic
Party headquarters.
Thus, in 1992 and 1993, the New York City FBI informant and agent
provocateur Emad Salem repeatedly tried to implicate the Sudanese
UN Mission in his own "Islamic terror cell" World Trade
Center bomb plot conspiracy. Here we see how a false flag terror
cell sheep-dips its dupes into contact with a target, which then
becomes the object of police investigation, and possibly later
of military attack.
In January 2002, the Supreme Court of Germany had to call off
all proceedings in the ongoing constitutional trial concerning
the Schroeder government’s attempt to ban the extreme right-wing
or reputedly neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany because
it turned out that the government’s chief witness, a member
of the national NPD party executive, had worked as an informant
for the German Constitutional Protection Agency (Verfassungsschutz,
comparable to the FBI), for many years. The Court ruled that the
trial could not go forward until this issue was clarified.
Osama Bin Laden, the rich misfit, has often been described in
terms which seem to suit him for this category. A CIA agent named
Beardman has asserted that Osama Bin Laden, during the entire
time that he was organizing his mujaheddin fighters to do battle
with the Soviets in Afghanistan, never realized that the operation
was being financed and directed by the CIA. The CIA’s Beardman
confirmed, in this regard, that Osama Bin Laden was not aware
of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words
of Bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers
saw evidence of American help." Bin Laden thus may also qualify
as a clueless dupe.
The patsies ultimately have three vital functions. The first
is that they have to be noticed. They must attract lots and lots
of attention. They may issue raving statements on videotape, or
doubles can be used to issue these statements for them if they
are not up to it. They need to get into fights with passersby,
as Mohammed Atta is said to have done concerning a parking space
at the airport in Maine early in the morning on September 11.
Even if they are presumed dead they must remain prominent, as
in the case of Atta’s passport, which is alleged by the
FBI to have survived the fiery collapse of the World Trade Center
towers to be found undamaged and unsinged on a nearby street.
Even when presumed dead they must be eloquent about themselves
and their activities, as they accused 9/11 hijackers when they
left behind a copy of the Koran, airline schedules, terrorist
literature and videotapes, and Atta’s crudely forged last
will and testament in a car and in luggage.
Despite the need to be noticed as much as possible, the patsies
have to stay out of jail. If they are all in jail, the planned
terror action cannot take place. This is not because the patsies
are needed to carry it out, but rather because they must be on
hand in order to be blamed for it, whether they are on the scene
or far away. If the patsies are in jail, they cannot be scapegoated.
Therefore a lawyer and bail money must be provided, or a complicit
judge told to release the defendant. Immigration authorities and
Customs must be told to look the other way. To keep the patsies
out of jail so they can serve their vital purpose is the job of
the moles, as will soon be shown.
Finally, if all else goes well, it is the destiny of the patsies
to take the blame for the terror action once it has happened.
At this point the moles in the government apparatus, who had earlier
been the patsies’ greatest friends and protectors, become
their most implacable enemies. The patsies must be hunted down
and, preferably, liquidated on the spot, as the British Special
Air Services anti-terrorist force always prefers to do, with a
maximum of firepower. Their faces and stories will be demonized
as the latest manifestation of absolute evil. The nationality,
philosophy, or religion which the media portray them as representing
will become the target of raving vilification, arrest, economic
sanctions, cruise missile retaliation, and armed invasion, as
the case may be.
A pathetic case in point is Richard Reid, the shoe bomber of
December 2001. Shortly after Reid was arrested for having attempted
to blow up the transatlantic airliner in which he was traveling
with the help of explosives planted in the soles of his shoes,
sources in the Washington DC mosque said that they had acquired
the following profile of Reid from Dr. Abdul Haqq Baker of Brixton
mosque in London. According to Baker and others from Brixton,
Richard Reid could only be described as mentally deficient. "He
was not someone who would be medically classified as mentally
retarded," the source reported, "but he was definitely
slow." He could not have hatched any kind of terror attack
on his own, and could not have even put the shoe bombs on his
own feet without help, the source had been told by officials of
the Brixton Mosque. Yet, according to news accounts, Reid spent
time in Iran three or four years before his terror attempt, and
traveled to Tel Aviv from Heathrow Airport near London in the
summer of 2001. He was thoroughly frisked before being allowed
on to the El Al flight, and was forced to sit next to a sky marshal
at the back of the plane. Israeli officials claimed to know nothing
about what Reid was doing in Israel. From Israel, Reid went to
Egypt, and then to Turkey, before returning to London Heathrow.
Reid had been sleeping on the floor at the Brixton Mosque, had
no visible means of support, etc. Reid’s father, who also
converted to Islam, and encouraged his son to do the same, told
the American press that his son must have been brainwashed by
radical Islamists to undertake the suicide attack. (New York Times
and Washington Post, December 29, 2001)
Another case may well be that of Jose Padilla, the man who was
arrested at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and who has
been designated as an enemy combatant by Attorney General Ashcroft
and held incommunicado without charges or a lawyer for months.
Although he may only be a walk-on in Ashcroft’s larger spectacle,
what kind of an Islamic fighter was Padilla supposed to be? According
to Maureen Dowd, this “plotter was a Chicago street punk
named Jose Padilla, a hothead with a long criminal record who
was thrown in jail in Florida for shooting at a motorist in a
road-rage incident. The mind games of fear begin with Abu Zubaydah,
the U.S. captive, one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants,
who fingered Padilla.” (New York Times, June 12, 2002)
The most famous patsy is of course Lee Harvey Oswald, the archetype
of the embittered, lonely misfit and drifter. But he was a misfit
with a difference, one who was able to move from the Marine Corps
to émigré status in the USSR, then back to Texas
and New Orleans as an activist for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
Oswald was someone who seemed to go out of his way to be abrasive
and to attract attention. He handed out leaflets for the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee and got involved in altercations with
anti-Castro Cubans. He appeared in a radio debate, and was interviewed
on television. He took a surprise trip to Mexico City to visit
the Soviet Embassy there. He did everything possible to get noticed.
Indeed, he got noticed so much that at various times there may
have been two or even three Oswald doubles running around, something
that would have required the resources of a major intelligence
organization like the CIA or the FBI. But Oswald was also unable
to manage the petty details of his own everyday life without the
assistance of others, notably of the European aristocrat Georges
de Morenschildt, a patrician who had George H.W. Bush’s
name and phone number in his address book. Oswald was most likely
an FBI informant, working for Special Agent Guy Bannister in New
Orleans. But this did not protect him from being fingered as the
assassin, nor did it save him from being silenced by Jack Ruby
before he could ever testify in his own defense. The problem with
Oswald, as with so many patsies, is that he was neither physically
nor technically capable of carrying out the crime which has been
ascribed to him: using his antiquated Italian 1917 Mannlicher-Carcano
rifle with its crude little telescopic sight, it is clear that
Oswald could never have fired with sufficient speed and accuracy
the four or five shots (at minimum) that were actually heard on
Dealey Plaza that day, and which are necessary to account for
the number of wounds suffered by President Kennedy and Governor
Connally, plus other shots that missed their target. This question
of physical impossibility is often the most obvious weak point
of the official explanations of terrorist actions. In the Kennedy
assassination, it was expressly to address the problem of the
physical impossibility of Oswald’s having acted as a lone
assassin that Arlen Spector, part of the staff of the Warren Commission,
invented his magic bullet theory. Spector asserted that the same
slug had caused seven wounds: an entry wound in Kennedy’s
back, an exit wound at the base of his throat, then an entry wound
in Connally’s back, an exit wound in Connally’s chest,
an entry wound in Connally’s wrist, and exit wound from
the other side of Connally’s wrist, and finally an entry
wound in Connally’s leg. At the end of all this, the bullet
was supposedly found in virtually pristine condition lying in
a stretcher at Parkland Hospital after Kennedy had died. Even
after these incredible contortions, requiring that the same bullet
change course in mid-air at least twice, the problem of physical
impossibility had not been solved, since there were still four
or five shots on the audio tape which had recorded the sounds
of the assassination through the open microphone of a Dallas police
officer’s radio. It was this insuperable problem which led
the House Assassinations Committee of 1978 to rule that Kennedy’s
death was the result of a probable conspiracy, and not simply
of the actions of a deranged lone assassin.
As Sanguinetti sums up, “the outrages that are accomplished
directly by the intelligence agencies and secret services of the
State are not usually claimed by anybody, but are each time imputed
or attributed to some convenient ‘culprit,’ like Pinelli
or Valpreda. Experience has proved that this is the weakest point
of such terrorism, and that which determines the extreme fragility
of it in the political usage that certain forces want to make
of it. It is starting from the results of the same experience
that the strategists of secret services of the State seek, from
this point on, to lend a greater credibility, or at least a lesser
inverisimilitude to their own work …by claiming them directly
through such-and-such initials of a ghostly group….”
(Sanguinetti 2)
THE PATSY MILIEU
You
give yourself for an agent provocateur. The proper business of
an agent provocateur is to provoke. Joseph Conrad, The Secret
Agent (1907).
The patsies inhabit a scene of their own, a place on the outskirts
of society where terrorists, naïve or romantic dupes, provocateurs,
sting operatives, double agents, Dopplegänger and informers
congregate. There was something of this nature among southern
European fascist extremists in Madrid, Athens, and Rome during
the 1960s and 1970s; the denizens of this milieu played their
parts in the “black terrorism” of those years. There
was a parallel milieu of anarchists, Maoists, left communists,
Trotskyists, and anarchosyndicalists in many cities of Europe
during that same time frame. In the 1980s and 1990s, a patsy milieu
developed among right-wing militia activists and paramilitaries
in the great plains and upper Midwest of America. During the 1970s,
1980s, and 1990s, a patsy milieu has grown up not just in the
Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, but also in
western Europe and the United States. In fact, the classic patsy
milieu of the 1990s was in London.
The patsy milieu has been skillfully evoked by Joseph Conrad
in his fascinating novel, The Secret Agent (1907). Here we have
the agent provocateur Verloc meeting with his confreres of the
International Red Committee; Verloc is in the pay of the Russian
Embassy, among others, and attempts to organize a bombing of the
prime meridian at Greenwich Observatory. The Russian Embassy wants
the attentat in order to motivate the international Milan conference
to crack down on nihilists, revolutionaries, and bomb-throwers
all over Europe. A movie which accurately depicts the world of
patsies, moles, and expert professionals is The Package, written
by John Bishop, starring Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones. During
the Gorbachev era, a group of US and Soviet generals opposed to
disarmament decide to sabotage an upcoming treaty by assassinating
Gorbachev during a visit to Chicago. Tommy Lee Jones is the expert
professional who operates in complete anonymity – he is
smuggled into the US under a fake identity. There is also a pathetic
patsy, recruited by one of the mole generals from a military prison
and sent to Chicago to attract attention as a neo-Nazi.
MOLES
…jokes
were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies
or moles, like Robert Hanssen, who were actually working for Osama
Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’ effort. Colleen
Rowley to FBI Director Robert Mueller
As has already been suggested, the patsies are incapable of operating
on their own for any length of time, and certainly do not have
the ability to carry out the vast crimes that are attributed to
them. The assistance which the patsies require in order to carry
out their roles come from another sub-system, of the terrorist
enterprise, the moles. The most important category of moles is
constituted by high-level government officials and managers who
are not loyal to the agencies they work for, and certainly not
to the Constitution they are sworn to serve, but rather operate
as members of a private network which has infiltrated the government
and ensconced itself in it, sometimes over a very long time. In
fact, the US government as it exists today is the result of many
generations of penetration by moles, with the moles of each generation
assisting the careers of the succeeding generation, and so forth,
until loyalty to the Constitution is the exception rather than
the rule.
Foreign moles have been able successfully to operate inside the
US government for long periods. Aldrich Ames worked as a mole
for the Soviets inside the CIA for many years. The same goes for
Soviet mole Robert Hanssen of the FBI, who was discovered in the
spring of 2000. In 1997 the press carried a news item about an
Israeli mole code-named Mega, allegedly controlled by Danny Yatom,
head of the Mossad, who was allegedly ensconced in the Clinton
White House. (Washington Post, May 7, 1997) But here we are not
primarily concerned with outright foreign moles, but rather with
moles whose loyalty goes to networks based on religion, finance,
or other associations based primarily in the US, although here
foreign influence certainly cannot be ruled out. Even so, the
fact that high-level moles were able to operate for so long suggests
a certain nonchalance about the presence of moles in the US government
bureaucracy; certainly a mole working for a US-based subversive
network would have an easier time in operating than one working
for the USSR.
So far, the classic mole suspect of 9/11 according to most published
accounts is Dave Frasca, the head of the radical Islamic fundamentalist
bureau of the FBI, the point at which the Phoenix memorandum and
the Minnesota requests to search Zacharias Moussawi’s laptop
evidently converged, only to be ignored, sabotaged, and sanctioned.
As Time magazine commented:
…in its most searching passage, Rowley’s letter lays
out the case that the FBI made fateful miscalculations by failing
to see a possible connection between the Minneapolis investigation
of flight student Moussaoui and the hunch of Phoenix agent Kenneth
Williams — posited in a report to HQ two months earlier
— that al-Qaeda operatives were attending U.S. flight schools.
Law-enforcement and congressional sources told Time that both
reports landed on the desk of Dave Frasca, the head of the FBI’s
radical-fundamentalist unit. The Phoenix memo was buried; the
Moussaoui warrant request was denied. (Time, May 27, 2002)
Other accounts differ as to the identity of the main blocker
of the Phoenix memorandum and the Minneapolis proposals. According
to former CIA agent Ray McGovern, the official who sat on this
material was Spike Owen, who nevertheless “received a $20,000
cash award from the administration for his duties in safeguarding
the American people.” (Washington Post, July 26, 2004) Was
this a mole?
The Phoenix memorandum, written by Kenneth Williams, an agent
in Phoenix, was sent to FBI headquarters as an electronic computer
message on July 10. It was reviewed by midlevel supervisors, who
headed the bureau’s Bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism
units. The Phoenix memorandum urged FBI headquarters to investigate
Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools, and cited
Bin Laden by name, and suggested that the men might be training
for terror operations against the United States. (New York Times,
May 15, 2002)
Frasca is not mentioned once in the final report of the Kean-Hamilton
commission, and whistle-blower Colleen Rowley, despite having
been featured on the cover of Time as person of the year, never
testified in public, and gets only one fleeting mention of her
interview with the 9/11 commission in footnote 94, page 557, towards
the back of the book.
Rowley’s memo to FBI Director Mueller has been published,
and is worth examining at length. The Supervisory Special Agent
to whom she repeatedly refers is once again presumably David Frasca.
Rowley reports:
The Minneapolis agents who responded to the call about Moussaoui’s
flight training identified him as a terrorist threat from a very
early point. The decision to take him into custody on August 15,
2001, on the INS "overstay" charge was a deliberate
one to counter that threat and was based on the agents’
reasonable suspicions. While it can be said that Moussaoui’s
overstay status was fortuitous, because it allowed for him to
be taken into immediate custody and prevented him from receiving
any more flight training, it was certainly not something the INS
coincidentally undertook of their own volition. I base this on
the conversation I had when the agents called me at home late
on the evening Moussaoui was taken into custody to confer and
ask for legal advice about their next course of action. The INS
agent was assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force
and was therefore working in tandem with FBI agents. To say then,
as has been iterated numerous times, that probable cause did not
exist until after the disastrous event occurred, is really to
acknowledge that the missing piece of probable cause was only
the FBI’s (FBIHQ’s) failure to appreciate that such
an event could occur.
Even without knowledge of the Phoenix communication (and any
number of other additional intelligence communications that FBIHQ
personnel were privy to in their central coordination roles),
the Minneapolis agents appreciated the risk. So I think it’s
very hard for the FBI to offer the "20-20 hindsight"
justification for its failure to act! Also intertwined with my
reluctance in this case to accept the "20-20 hindsight"
rationale is first-hand knowledge that I have of statements made
on September 11th, after the first attacks on the World Trade
Center had already occurred, made telephonically by the FBI Supervisory
Special Agent (SSA) who was the one most involved in the Moussaoui
matter and who, up to that point, seemed to have been consistently,
almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents’
efforts…. Even after the attacks had begun, the SSA in question
was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s
computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere
coincidence with Minneapolis’ prior suspicions about Moussaoui.
The fact is that key FBIHQ personnel whose job it was to assist
and coordinate with field division agents on terrorism investigations
and the obtaining and use of FISA searches (and who theoretically
were privy to many more sources of intelligence information than
field division agents), continued to, almost inexplicably, throw
up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis’ by-now desperate
efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant, long after the French
intelligence service provided its information and probable cause
became clear. HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions
in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause. In
all of their conversations and correspondence, HQ personnel never
disclosed to the Minneapolis agents that the Phoenix Division
had, only approximately three weeks earlier, warned of Al Qaeda
operatives in flight schools seeking flight training for terrorist
purposes! Nor did FBIHQ personnel do much to disseminate the information
about Moussaoui to other appropriate intelligence/law enforcement
authorities. When, in a desperate 11th hour measure to bypass
the FBIHQ roadblock, the Minneapolis Division undertook to directly
notify the CIA’s Counter Terrorist Center (CTC), FBIHQ personnel
actually chastised the Minneapolis agents for making the direct
notification without their approval!
Eventually on August 28, 2001, after a series of e-mails between
Minneapolis and FBIHQ, which suggest that the FBIHQ SSA deliberately
further undercut the FISA effort by not adding the further intelligence
information which he had promised to add that supported Moussaoui’s
foreign power connection and making several changes in the wording
of the information that had been provided by the Minneapolis Agent,
the Minneapolis agents were notified that the NSLU Unit Chief
did not think there was sufficient evidence of Moussaoui’s
connection to a foreign power. Minneapolis personnel are, to this
date, unaware of the specifics of the verbal presentations by
the FBIHQ SSA to NSLU or whether anyone in NSLU ever was afforded
the opportunity to actually read for him/herself all of the information
on Moussaoui that had been gathered by the Minneapolis Division
and the French intelligence service. Obviously verbal presentations
are far more susceptible to mis-characterization and error. The
e-mail communications between Minneapolis and FBIHQ, however,
speak for themselves and there are far better witnesses than me
who can provide their first hand knowledge of these events characterized
in one Minneapolis agent’s e-mail as FBIHQ is "setting
this up for failure." My only comment is that the process
of allowing the FBI supervisors to make changes in affidavits
is itself fundamentally wrong, just as, in the follow-up to FBI
Laboratory Whistleblower Frederic Whitehurst’s allegations,
this process was revealed to be wrong in the context of writing
up laboratory results. With the Whitehurst allegations, this process
of allowing supervisors to re-write portions of laboratory reports,
was found to provide opportunities for over-zealous supervisors
to skew the results in favor of the prosecution. In the Moussaoui
case, it was the opposite – the process allowed the Headquarters
Supervisor to downplay the significance of the information thus
far collected in order to get out of the work of having to see
the FISA application through or possibly to avoid taking what
he may have perceived as an unnecessary career risk. I understand
that the failures of the FBIHQ personnel involved in the Moussa
matter are also being officially excused because they were too
busy with other investigations, the Cole bombing and other important
terrorism matters, but the Supervisor’s taking of the time
to read each word of the information submitted by Minneapolis
and then substitute his own choice of wording belies to some extent
the notion that he was too busy.
To sum up her frustration, Rowley wrote: “I know I shouldn’t
be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the
key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles, like Robert Hansen
[sic], who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so
undercut Minneapolis’ effort.” These lines speak for
themselves. Evidently Frasca was not alone, since he was able
to stay on the job with impunity even after 9/11, and even received
a promotion. Rowley stresses the lack of any accountability whatsoever
in the FBI’s internal process, which seems to be made to
order for facilitating the unhampered operations of moles.
Although the last thing the FBI or the country needs now is a
witch hunt, I do find it odd that (to my knowledge) no inquiry
whatsoever was launched of the relevant FBIHQ personnel’s
actions a long time ago. Despite FBI leaders’ full knowledge
of all the items mentioned herein (and probably more that I’m
unaware of), the SSA, his unit chief, and other involved HQ personnel
were allowed to stay in their positions and, what’s worse,
occupy critical positions in the FBI’s SIOC Command Center
post September 11th. (The SSA in question actually received a
promotion some months afterward!) It’s true we all make
mistakes and I’m not suggesting that HQ personnel in question
ought to be burned at the stake, but, we all need to be held accountable
for serious mistakes. (Time, May 27, 2002)
An internal FBI memo, which became public in May 2002, revealed
that FBI agents had destroyed evidence gathered in an investigation
involving Osama bin Laden’s network after its e-mail wiretap
system mistakenly captured information to which the agency was
not entitled. This was supposedly because the FBI software being
used, called Carnivore, not only picked up the e-mails of its
target, ‘‘but also picked up e-mails on non-covered
targets,’’ said the memo, which was written in March
2000 to agency headquarters in Washington. According to the memo,
“The FBI technical person was apparently so upset that he
destroyed all the e-mail take, including the take on’’
the suspect. These events allegedly took place during an investigation
in Denver in which the FBI’s bin Laden unit was using the
bureau’s Carnivore system to conduct electronic surveillance
of a suspect under a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant.
The memo was addressed to M.E. ‘‘Spike’’
Bowman, the FBI’s associate general counsel for national
security. Another mole?
The Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence and Policy
Review claimed to be furious after learning the evidence captured
by the e-mail wiretap system was destroyed because of the glitch,
the memo states. “To state that she was unhappy at ITOS
(International Terrorism Operations Center) and the UBL (bin Laden)
unit is an understatement,’’ the memo stated, quoting
a Justice official. This incident came to light in the course
of a court battle over whether the Carnivore system was being
used illegally by the FBI to scoop up emails that were not covered
by a warrant. The main reform undertaken by the FBI in this matter
would appear to have been to change the name of Carnivore to DCS-1000.
(D. Ian Hopper, “Memo: FBI Destroyed Evidence in Bin Laden
Case After Glitch With E-mail Surveillance System,” Associated
Press, Boston Globe, May 28, 2002)
Then there is the case of Kevin Delaney, an official of the Federal
Aviation Administration. During the day of 9/11, supervisors had
asked air traffic controllers and other officials to talk about
their experiences, and had taped these statements. It later came
to light that this evidence had been subsequently destroyed by
an FAA official named Kevin Delaney. Press reports in the spring
of 2004 confirmed that Delaney had burned the tapes. Was he a
mole? The 9/11 commission was not interested in this highly significant
and highly indicative matter, and did not bother to include Delaney’s
name in its final report. How many other Kevin Delaneys still
infest the federal bureaucracy may never be known with precision.
But, according to press accounts, federal agency records with
possible bearing on 9/11 were “routinely destroyed”
between September 11, 2001 and the launching of the 9/11 commission
in the spring of 2003. (New York Times, May 6, 2004)
Another FBI whistle-blower was Robert Wright, whose case was
taken up by David Schippers, the lawyer who prosecuted the impeachment
of Bill Clinton before the House of Representatives, and later
by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch. According to Klayman, Wright
had been sounding an alarm within the FBI for years before 9/11
about terrorists within the United States. Rather than act on
Wright’s warnings, the FBI deflected and obstructed his
efforts to curtail dangerous movements by agents of Hamas and
Hezbollah. Wright’s work within the FBI was geared towards
thwarting money-laundering activities by these agents, and after
going public he claimed that his efforts were stymied because
of an official desire to coddle pro-Palestinian groups to protect
the reputation of Yasser Arafat. But Wright’s expertise
does not reach up that high; all he knew was what he saw, and
the explanations he cites are hearsay or speculation. The important
thing is the phenomenon. In the course of Wright’s probing,
a Saudi businessman named Yasin Kadi had become implicated in
the terrorism funding. Wright was careful to note that, one month
after the 9/11 attacks, Kadi was named by the Federal government
as a financial supporter of Osama bin Laden. Wright’s frustration
about the FBI’s inaction regarding his warnings led him
to write a 500 page manuscript detailing the Bureau’s anti-terrorism
failings entitled “Fatal Betrayals of the Intelligence Mission.”
At a press conference in May, 2002, Wright summed up: “My
efforts have always been geared towards neutralizing the terrorist
threats that focused on taking the lives of American citizens,
in addition to harming the national and economic security of America.
However, as a direct result of the incompetence, and at times
intentional obstruction of justice by FBI management to prevent
me from bringing terrorists to justice, Americans have unknowingly
been exposed to potential terrorist attacks for years." He
went on to state, "Knowing what I know, I can confidently
say that until the investigative responsibilities for terrorism
are removed from the FBI, I will not feel safe.” (William
Rivers Pitt, Truthout, May 31, 2002)
For analytical purposes, we must stress once again that these
activities of reputed FBI moles all have to do with the key mole
mission of preventing the patsies from being rounded up and put
out of action. The patsies, we recall, are not the actual authors
of the crime, but their presence as the scapegoats is indispensable
to the entire operation. And if the patsies are to operate, their
support network, including funding, must operate undisturbed.
Ironically, shutting down the patsies tends to shut down the operation,
even though the patsies are not part of the operation itself.
But they are needed for its propaganda exploitation. The question
of the actual authors of the crime will be dealt with shortly.
But is there any hope that things may have gotten better after
9/11. Let us look for a moment at the FBI’s own in-house
investigation of what went wrong. According to the Washington
Post, the leader of this internal inquiry turns out to have been
the official whose most important achievement in his previous
career had been the stubborn obstruction of the inquiry into the
Waco massacre by former Senator and current US UN Ambassador John
Danforth. The FBI official in question was Thomas A. Kelley, the
head of the team looking into what the FBI knew and didn’t
know prior to Sept. 11 for the JICI. Kelley had previously been
the deputy general counsel of the FBI. In that capacity he obstructed
Danforth’s investigation into the FBI’s role at the
Branch Davidian compound in Waco in the spring of 1993. A December
2000 internal FBI memo reported that Kelley “continued to
thwart and obstruct” the Waco investigation to the point
that Danforth was forced to send a team to search FBI headquarters
for the documents he needed. The memo said that Kelley should
have been investigated by the Office of Professional Responsibility
for “unprofessional conduct, poor judgment, conflict of
interest, hostile work environment and retaliation/reprisal”
in connection with his role in the Waco investigation. Sen. Charles
Grassley (R-IA), in a letter to the leaders of JICI, expressed
concern about Kelley’s presence in the investigation, and
noted that Kelley retired from the FBI before an OPR probe could
get off the ground. Officials JICI said they were waiting for
confidential memos and other documents relating to the allegations
against Kelley before deciding how to proceed. Danforth himself,
in an interview last year, faulted the FBI’s “spirit
of resistance” to outside scrutiny. He said getting the
information he needed for his investigation “was like pulling
teeth.” (Washington Post, June 22, 2002)
In the recent history of terrorism, we have been able to observe
situations in which the moles inside the state apparatus and the
terrorists in the field have become almost impossible to distinguish.
In other words, the moles have gone out into the field in the
guise of double agents and infiltrators. One such case involves
the shadowy Greek terrorist group, November 19. This group advertises
itself as a reaction to the US-backed fascist colonels’
coup in Greece in 1967. More recently, November 19 has inveighed
in its communiqués against US imperialism, the capitalist
class, the European Community, and Germany, which it has defined
as the “Fourth Reich,” a slogan which smacks of the
Thatcher-Ridley regime in Britain in 1989-90. It was the November
19 group which in December 1975 claimed responsibility for the
assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens.
This crime had been especially useful to the CIA, to its incoming
chief, George H.W. Bush, and to the Ford administration in general,
who had been on the defensive in intelligence matters for many
months because of the aggressive investigations of the Church
Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House, which
had unearthed much evidence of illegal and questionable activity
by the US spy agencies. The Pike Committee had even issued a contempt
of Congress citation against none other than Henry Kissinger,
the strongman of the Ford regime. Columnists friendly to the CIA
impudently blamed the death of Welch directly on the Church and
Pike committees, although neither of them had ever mentioned Welch
or Athens. (Tarpley 1992 300-301)
Over the years the November 19 organization, while carrying out
some 40 armed attacks and assassinations, demonstrated a remarkable
ability to escape capture, evading the most carefully prepared
traps and ambushes. Gradually the awareness spread that November
19 somehow had access to information from the secret councils
of the Greek anti-terror authorities. After four November 19 operatives
escaped a police ambush in March 1992, the case broke open to
some extent. The boss of the Greek anti-terror unit EKAM, Mihalis
Mavroleas, was ousted from his job. It soon became evident that
the investigators and the terrorists were in fact the same persons!
The Greek Minister for Public Order and the national Chief of
Police were obliged to come forward with the extremely embarrassing
revelation that November 19 possessed a network of spies within
the police. The EKAM, which had been founded in 1990 as the anti-terror
corps d’elite, had allegedly been completely penetrated!
About half of the anti-terror personnel were fired. But the Athens
authorities were clearly doing their best at damage control. As
damaging as their revelations were, they were not as damning as
the obvious truth, which was that November 19 was in fact a wholly
owned subsidiary of the Greek police and intelligence services,
perhaps with ties to the CIA and to NATO intelligence. This impression
is confirmed by persistent reports of the existence in Greece
of a paramilitary formation founded some decades back and supposedly
dedicated to the task of organizing guerilla warfare against Soviet
occupying forces in case Greece were conquered in the course of
a some future war. This unit would thus fit the logic of the stay-behind
organization, which has been amply documented in the case of Italy
in the case of Gladio, which we describe below. (Wisnewski 1994
395-400)
Something quite similar has been established in regard to the
Italian Red Brigades. In 1982 an important official of the Italian
Justice Ministry in Rome, Giovanni Senzani, was arrested on the
charge of being the head of the Red Brigades in the Naples area.
Senzani had been the object of a campaign in the Rome press about
the need to discover the identity of “la talpa,” the
mole in the state bureaucracy. Senzani was in close relations
to SISMI, the Italian military intelligence service, an agency
which had been implicated in the Milan bomb of 1969 and other
terrorist atrocities. This would indicate that at least part of
the Red Brigades structure was directed from inside the government.
The Red Brigades had been created in the late 1960s at the Sociology
Department of the University of Trento in northern Italy. The
original members had displayed sociopathic symptoms, and they
had gradually been eliminated by arrests and shootouts with the
police. The Italian investigating judge Ferdinando Imposimato
asserted in 1982 that the Red Brigades had been infiltrated by
the Israeli Mossad no later than 1978. Based on testimony from
two jailed former members of the Red Brigades, Imposimato reported
that the Mossad had provided the Italian terrorists with weapons,
money, and information. As the original members suffered attrition,
they were replaced by new recruits. One of these was Mario Moretti,
reputedly the leader of the Red Brigades during the Moro kidnapping.
More senior members complained from their jail cells that Moretti
failed to pass on warnings of coming police raids, and sabotaged
attempted jail breaks. Moretti advocated a policy of constantly
escalating violence, and was widely considered an agent provocateur
of the CIA.
In these cases, it is not the terrorist organization which has
infiltrated the state apparatus, but the state apparatus which
finds it convenient to practice a virtual interchangeability with
top members of the state apparatus. Sanguinetti notes that, in
certain safe houses or lairs of the Red Brigades, there was found
“an abundance of ultra-confidential material issuing from
police headquarters, central police stations and even from ministries.
In view of such eloquent facts, spectacular information [i.e.
new broadcasts] always claimed to explain them by emphasizing
the ultra-efficient organization of the terrible Red Brigades,
and by adding, in order to enhance this wonderful godsend for
advertising, the fact that these clandestine militants, so hunted-down
but so tentacular, have infiltrated everywhere, even ministries
and central police stations.” This, as we will see, is like
some 9/11 researchers who conclude that, since the attacks took
place on a day when so many special exercises were taking place,
Al Qaeda must have infiltrated the Pentagon in order to know exactly
when to strike. Naturally Sanguinetti cannot entertain such nonsense.
His conclusion: “It is not the Red Brigades who have infiltrated
the central police stations and ministries, but agents of the
State, issuing from the central police stations and ministries,
who have infiltrated the Red Brigades by design, and not only
their top leadership, to be sure.” (Sanguinetti 21)
SIBEL EDMONDS: INSIDE THE FBI MOLE HILL
A
similar and highly significant case has come to the surface in
connection with 9/11. This involves Sibel Edmonds, who worked
as a translator for the FBI’s Washington field office. Edmonds’
story may give some the impression that the FBI has been penetrated
by some subversive Middle East organization, but a careful reading
suggests the reverse. Edmonds became known to the public as a
whistle blower protesting very strange activities in her FBI work
place. As a result, she was accused of having breached FBI security,
and was fired. The heart of Edmonds’s allegation is that
the FBI office where she worked was staffed by members of the
very same Middle Eastern group whose wiretapped conversations
the office was working to translate. The FBI, of course, denied
everything. But Edmonds recounts that when she told Dennis Saccher,
a special agent in the Washington field office who was conducting
the surveillance, about the co-worker’s actions, Saccher
had replied, "It looks like espionage to me." But Saccher
refused to comment for the press. Edmonds was fired in March 2002
after she reported her concerns. Government officials said the
FBI fired her because her “disruptiveness” hurt her
on-the-job “performance.” Edmonds said she believes
she was fired in retaliation for reporting on her co-worker.
Edmonds began working at the FBI in late September 2001. She
later reported that she had become particularly alarmed when she
discovered that a recently hired FBI translator was going around
saying that she belonged to precisely the same Middle Eastern
organization whose taped conversations she had been translating
for FBI counterintelligence agents. FBI officials did everything
that they could to prevent the name of the target group from being
revealed to the public, allegedly for national security reasons.
This case became public when a Washington Post reporter discovered
Edmonds’s name in her whistle-blowing letters to federal
and congressional officials and approached her for an interview.
Edmonds said that on several occasions, her fellow translator
had tried to recruit her to join the targeted foreign group. “This
person told us she worked for our target organization,”
Edmonds said in an interview. “These are the people we are
targeting, monitoring.” Of course, what all this means is
that the target organization was also controlled by the FBI, or
was itself part of the FBI – not that the FBI had been infiltrated.
The other translator was an unidentified 33-year-old U.S. citizen
whose native country is home to the target group. This is also
the country were Edmonds was born, and is probably Turkey or Iran.
Both Edmonds and the other translator are U.S. citizens. The other
woman, who is still working under contract for the FBI’s
Washington field office, refused to comment. Edmonds also reported
that the woman and her husband, a U.S. military officer, suggested
that Edmonds become a member of their group during a hastily arranged
visit to Edmonds’s Northern Virginia home on a Sunday morning
in December 2001. “He said, ‘Are you a member of the
particular organization?’’ Edmonds recalled the woman’s
husband saying. The military officer went on to add: “It’s
a very good place to be a member. There are a lot of advantages
of being with this organization and doing things together and
one of the greatest things about it is you can have an early,
unexpected retirement. And you will be totally set if you go to
that specific country.” Edmonds also reported that the military
officer assured her that she would easily be admitted to the group,
especially if she said she worked for the FBI. Later, Edmonds
said, the same woman approached her with a list dividing up individuals
whose phone lines were being secretly tapped: Under the plan,
the woman would translate conversations of her fellow members
of the target organization, and Edmonds would handle other phone
calls. Edmonds said she refused and that the woman told her that
her lack of cooperation could put her family in danger
Edmonds also brought her concerns to her supervisor and other
FBI officials in the Washington field office. When no action was
taken, she also reported to the FBI’s Office of Professional
Responsibility, then to Justice’s inspector general. “Investigations
are being compromised,” Edmonds wrote to the inspector general’s
office in March 2002. “Incorrect or misleading translations
are being sent to agents in the field. Translations are being
blocked and circumvented.” Edmonds had also written to Dale
Watson, the bureau’s counterterrorism chief. Her case has
been referred to Justice’s Office of the Inspector General.
(Washington Post, June 19, 2002) But in the meantime, the Ashcroft
Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of declaring
the Edmonds case a state secret, meaning that literally everything
is classified. Sibel Edmonds was interviewed by the 9/11 commission,
and makes it into the commission report just once, in footnote
25, page 490, in the course of a discussion about how important
it is to have good translators. But the substance of her case
goes completely unreported. This is not surprising, since the
entire case has been classified by Ashcroft as a state secret.
After the 9/11 commission had issued its report, Edmonds sent
an open letter to Kean and Hamilton pointing out that much of
the evidence she had delivered to the commission had simply been
ignored. She also escalated her critique by naming the names of
FBI supervisors, some of whom qualify for our purposes here as
potential moles. Edmonds’ letter provides another rare glimpse
at how moles operate inside intelligence agencies to sabotage
law enforcement and make sure that patsies are not rounded up
or effective warnings given until it is too late.
Melek Can Dickerson, a Turkish translator, was hired by the FBI
after September 11, and was placed in charge of translating the
most sensitive information related to terrorists and criminals
under the Bureau’s investigation. Melek Can Dickerson was
granted Top Secret Clearance, which can be granted only after
conducting a thorough background investigation. Melek Can Dickerson
used to work for semi-legit organizations that were the FBI’s
targets of investigation. Melek Can Dickerson had on going relationships
with two individuals who were the FBI’s targets of investigation.
For months Melek Can Dickerson blocked all-important information
related to these semi-legit organizations and the individuals
she and her husband associated with. She stamped hundreds, if
not thousands, of documents related to these targets as ‘Not
Pertinent.’ Melek Can Dickerson attempted to prevent others
from translating these documents important to the FBI’s
investigations and our fight against terrorism. Melek Can Dickerson,
with the assistance of her direct supervisor, Mike Feghali, took
hundreds of pages of top-secret sensitive intelligence documents
outside the FBI to unknown recipients. Melek Can Dickerson, with
the assistance of her direct supervisor, forged signatures on
top-secret documents related to certain 9/11 detainees. After
all these incidents were confirmed and reported to FBI management,
Melek Can Dickerson was allowed to remain in her position, to
continue the translation of sensitive intelligence received by
the FBI, and to maintain her Top Secret Clearance. Apparently
bureaucratic mid-level FBI management and administrators decided
that it would not look good for the Bureau if this security breach
and espionage case was investigated and made public, especially
after going through Robert Hanssen’s case (FBI spy scandal).
This case (Melek Can Dickerson) was confirmed by the Senate Judiciary
Committee….
Here we have a serious allegation of serious federal crimes,
far worse than Sandy Berger stuffing some old documents into his
pants at the National Archives. It also raises the question: is
Mike Feghali a conscious, witting mole, or merely an incompetent?
Given the chaos inside the FBI, it is sometimes hard to tell.
Edmonds also shows that there is no effective discipline or accountability
inside the FBI molehill:
Today, more than two years since the Dickerson incident was reported
to the FBI, and more than two years since this information was
confirmed by the United States Congress and reported by the press,
these administrators in charge of FBI personnel security and language
departments in the FBI remain in their positions and in charge
of translation quality and translation departments’ security.
Melek Can Dickerson and several FBI targets of investigation hastily
left the United States in 2002, and the case still remains uninvestigated
criminally. Not only does the supervisor facilitating these criminal
conducts remain in a supervisory position, he has been promoted
to supervising Arabic language units of the FBI’s Counterterrorism
and Counterintelligence investigations.
Edmonds also revealed a specific pre-9/11 warning on patsy activities
which was simply ignored by the FBI, and then ignored again by
the 9/11 commission:
Over three years ago, more than four months prior to the September
11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset
who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990,
provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information
regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama Bin Laden.
This asset/informant was previously a high-level intelligence
officer in Iran in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan. Through
his contacts in Afghanistan he received information that: 1) Osama
Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United
States targeting 4-5 major cities, 2) the attack was going to
involve airplanes, 3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying
out this attack were already in place in the United States, 4)
the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months.
The agents who received this information reported it to their
superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism, Thomas
Frields, at the FBI Washington Field Office, by filing 302 forms,
and the translator translated and documented this information.
No action was taken by the Special Agent in Charge, and after
9/11 the agents and the translators were told to ‘keep quiet’
regarding this issue. The translator who was present during the
session with the FBI informant, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, reported
this incident to Director Mueller in writing, and later to the
Department of Justice Inspector General. The press reported this
incident, and in fact the report in the Chicago Tribune on July
21, 2004 stated that FBI officials had confirmed that this information
was received in April 2001, and further, the Chicago Tribune quoted
an aide to Director Mueller that he (Mueller) was surprised that
the Commission never raised this particular issue with him during
the hearing.
Was Frields a mole? This is the kind of question the 9/11 commission
should have asked, but which it always ducked. Edmonds goes on
to mock the clichés about connecting the dots and sharing
intelligence which are the stock in trade of the controlled corporate
media. She points out that the Phoenix memo, the Minneapolis alarms,
and the Sarshar material all converged in the J. Edgar Hoover
Building in Washington DC. The FBI had all that it needed to know
that a large operation was afoot, which it could have disrupted
by rolling up parts of the patsy network. But the FBI did nothing,
and the 9/11 commission dropped the ball here as well, as Edmonds
stresses:
All this information went to the same place: FBI Headquarters
in Washington, DC, and the FBI Washington Field Office, in Washington
DC. Yet, your report claims that not having a central place where
all intelligence could be gathered as one of the main factors
in our intelligence failure. Why did your report choose to exclude
the information regarding the Iranian asset and Behrooz Sarshar
from its timeline of missed opportunities? Why was this significant
incident not mentioned; despite the public confirmation by the
FBI, witnesses provided to your investigators, and briefings you
received directly? Why did you surprise even Director Mueller
by refraining from asking him questions regarding this significant
incident and lapse during your hearing (Please remember that you
ran out of questions during your hearings with Director Mueller
and AG John Ashcroft, so please do not cite a ‘time limit’
excuse)?
Mike Feghali appears in Edmonds’ account as a consummate
bureaucratic bungler and dissembler. But the question stubbornly
arises: was he a mole as well? And what about the bureaucrats
who promoted him? Here Feghali is sabotaging translations requested
by field agents:
In October 2001, approximately one month after the September
11 attack, an agent from a (city name omitted) field office, re-sent
a certain document to the FBI Washington Field Office, so that
it could be re-translated. This Special Agent, in light of the
9/11 terrorist attacks, rightfully believed that, considering
his target of investigation (the suspect under surveillance),
and the issues involved, the original translation might have missed
certain information that could prove to be valuable in the investigation
of terrorist activities. After this document was received by the
FBI Washington Field Office and re-translated verbatim, the field
agent’s hunch appeared to be correct. The new translation
revealed certain information regarding blueprints, pictures, and
building material for skyscrapers being sent overseas. It also
revealed certain illegal activities in obtaining visas from certain
embassies in the Middle East, through network contacts and bribery.
However, after the re-translation was completed and the new significant
information was revealed, the unit supervisor in charge of certain
Middle Eastern languages, Mike Feghali, decided NOT to send the
re-translated information to the Special Agent who had requested
it. Instead, this supervisor decided to send this agent a note
stating that the translation was reviewed and that the original
translation was accurate. This supervisor stated that sending
the accurate translation would hurt the original translator and
would cause problems for the FBI language department. The FBI
agent requesting the re-translation never received the accurate
translation of that document. (Sibel Edmonds, Letter to Thomas
Kean, August 1, 2004)
Before we leave the moles, we must make one further important
methodological point. Before the terrorist action occurs, the
moles appear as embedded in a government bureaucracy which is
resisting the new course which they wish to impose. After the
fact, providing that the terrorist action has gone off successfully,
the entire government seems to be made up exclusively of moles.
Now the moles no longer appear isolated. In fact, the entire government
is speaking the language which before the terror attack seemed
to be the factional distinction of the moles, to the extent that
they said anything. The government bureaucracy can be thought
of as a gigantic freight train. With the successful terrorist
act, a switch is turned, and the entire train goes rumbling in
a new direction. The transformation achieved by a successful act
of spectacular terrorism goes beyond what can be achieved by mere
directives emanating from the office of the president or some
cabinet secretary. Public opinion is shocked and stunned; the
Congress is stampeded; the entire bureaucracy senses that the
terrorist controllers have proven that it is they who are the
strongest. After all, in Byzantine and neocon theory, law is an
act of the will of the stronger over the weaker. The neocons regard
a successful act of force as a valid act of legislation in that
sense. The bureaucracy therefore inclines to the side of the plotters.
Once the new policy has been institutionalized, every bureaucrat
will attempt to defend it as a matter of self-preservation. Bureaucratic
inertia will now adapt itself to the new party line. This is why,
in retrospect, it looks as if the entire government is composed
of nothing but moles. But this impression is misleading. It is
not feasible for every high government official to be a witting
party to the terrorist action. Some, of course, can be given a
specific task on a need to know basis, and they may or may not
be able to intuit the larger design in which they are a cog. Others
need to know everything. But the fully witting participants will
number in the hundreds, not the thousands. This is Machiavelli’s
most vehement advice in the chapter on conspiracies in The Discourses:
keep the number of witting participants as low, limiting it if
possible to oneself and at most one other person. In today’s
society that would be too few. Of course, after the fact, more
officials figure out what is going on, and thus join the ranks
of the witting. But it ought to be axiomatic that the entire command
structure cannot be in on the secret; what if somebody objects
to the planned operation, and has the courage to do something
about it? This might become very embarrassing for the plotters.
Those who persist in seeing the state apparatus as a whole, of
the US command structure as a whole as being behind 9/11 face
the problem of what to do about the Phoenix memorandum and the
Minneapolis actions, followed by the Rowley whistleblower memo.
Here were government officials who were subjectively opposed to
the 9/11 operation, even if they were only able to express this
opposition in regard to the patsy network with which they were
dealing.
EXPERT PROFESSIONALS
Much
low-level terrorism consists of crude local attacks on buses,
supermarkets, hotels, and the like. Such actions are sometimes
within the capability of low-level activists, but when we go beyond
such actions, special technical preparation and training become
necessary. When we get to the level of spectacular international
terrorism of the type represented by 9/11, it is clear that only
skilled professionals have the physical ability to produce the
effects observed. The third sub-system which must examined to
account for modern synthetic terrorism is therefore that of the
expert professionals. They are the well-trained, well-equipped
operatives who really do have the technical, physical, and mental
ability to bring about the terrorist acts which the public sees.
They are the members of the team which was indeed able, using
the best state of the art sniper rifles and related equipment,
to fire the requisite number of shots in Dealey Plaza, and to
fire them with sufficient accuracy within the objective time limits
imposed by the situation. They are the ice-cold technocrats of
death who were able to direct the aircraft into the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon. The expert professionals are the persons
who can accomplish the amazing feats which the media attribute
to the pathetic patsies.
The expert professionals and the patsies differ in many fundamental
ways. The expert professionals are neither ideologues nor fanatics
in the way that the patsies tend to be. They are proud of their
professional competence. Not infrequently, they are mercenary
in their motivation. They do not try to get noticed. They are
not abrasive, and they do not go out of their way to pick quarrels
with passersby. They do not give interviews, and would never hand
out leaflets. Their goal is the lowest possible profile, and if
possible, complete anonymity. They would always like to escape
attention, and to melt away into the shadows. They come from out
of town, and disappear as soon as their work is done. Their main
occupational hazard is not that of arrest by the police, but their
risk of being liquidated by their own employers as a basic security
measure.
Because of these factors, we know less about the expert professionals
than we do about the patsies, about whom so much gossipy detail
is known, or about the moles, who cannot always escape detection
after the fact. The attempt to identify the expert professionals
is the same as the attempt to name the snipers of Dallas on November
22, 1963: we have no certitude, but only speculation. Were they
disgruntled members of the French OAS? Were they central European
fascists left over from World War II? We do not know.
There are, however, some instances in which something more about
the expert professionals may be learned. At the end of the Cold
War it turned out that the prime suspects in many of the terrorist
attacks in Italy and other countries were in fact members of a
CIA-sponsored stay-behind network, the Italian branch of which
was called Gladio. The existence of Gladio was revealed to the
Italian Parliament, which had never been informed, in a report
issued by then-Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on February 26,
1991. Apparently a secret clause of the North Atlantic Alliance
required member states who might be subject to Soviet invasion
and occupation to make some provision in advance for promoting
armed resistance and guerrilla warfare against the feared Soviet
occupiers of the future – that was, at least, the cover
story. In 1951 the Italian military intelligence, then called
SIFAR, signed an agreement with the CIA on the creation of the
infrastructure of a totally secret, clandestine stay-behind operation.
This underground group was called Gladio, the Italian word for
the Roman sword. Gladio was tasked with espionage, sabotage, guerrilla
warfare, and propaganda in the event of a Soviet occupation. Its
headquarters were located on the island of Sardinia, which the
Italian general staff thought it could control even if mainland
Italy had fallen to the Red Army.
In 1959, Gladio became an integral part of the Clandestine Planning
Committee (CPC) at SHAPE headquarters. Later, in 1964, it was
included in the European-wide apparatus managed by the Allied
Clandestine Committee (ACC) of NATO, along with US, UK, France,
Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and West Germany. When SIFAR
became SID and later SISMI, Gladio continued to operate as its
secret arm. Gladio was set up according to a cell structure, meaning
that each team was compartmentalized and separated from all the
other teams – a good idea in case of Soviet invasion, but
also a good way for a single cell to become the vehicle for spectacular
terrorism if it happened to be composed of persons with a certain
outlook. In peacetime, Gladio’s activity was devoted largely
to training and recruitment of new members. Some of the training
was placed in the hands of the Training Division of MI-6, the
British Secret Intelligence Service, an institution that was directing
terrorist operations on a grand scale when the CIA did not yet
exist. Other training courses were set up at the CIA’s so-called
farm in Virginia. Operative links with the CIA were always present.
Gladio had 40 cells: 6 for espionage, 10 for sabotage, 6 for propaganda,
6 for getting key people out of the Soviet-occupied zone, and
12 for guerrilla warfare. The sabotage and guerrilla warfare cells
amounted to secret units of highly trained special forces commandos.
This structure was somewhat revamped in 1974-76. There were 622
official members of Gladio, 83% of whom had been born before 1945,
16% between 1945 and 1960, and the rest born after 1960. These
were of course cadres, or officers, around whom a much larger
number of operatives would be assembled. We must also assume that
this official report represents a modified limited hangout, designed
to reveal a few facts, hide many more, and accustom public opinion
to the existence of the secret structure by minimizing its importance.
Other estimates of Gladio’s numerical strength range up
to 15,000, a more realistic figure.
In addition to the cells, Gladio also possessed large amounts
of weapons and explosives. There were 138 secret arms deposits,
most often buried in cemeteries, containing stocks of portable
weapons, explosives, hand grenades, precision sniper rifles, radios,
and other equipment. These were sealed in plastic containers to
prevent rust and deterioration. According to Andreotti’s
report, these arms caches were buried during the 1960s. When they
were all finally dug up again between 1973 and 1990, it turned
out that two caches with 6 containers of arms and explosives in
the province of Udine near the Yugoslav border had been pilfered.
These would have been more than enough to provide the raw materials
for the strategy of tension between 1967 and 1985, approximately.
These weapons have never been recovered. Andreotti announced the
dismantling of Gladio in 1990. According to the report, Belgium,
France, Luxemburg, and Switzerland terminated their own secret
stay-behind programs in 1990; Austria was said to have done so
in 1970. As for Greece and Germany, it is not clear that the stay-behind
networks were ever terminated. (For the original Italian text
of Andreotti’s report, see www.zaratrustra.it/relazionegladioandreotti.htm)
The hypothesis is unavoidable that the Gladio had drawn its recruits
from the fascists of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic
of 1943-1945 in northern Italy, behind German lines. Since Gladio’s
mission was allegedly to prevent the country from becoming a permanent
Soviet satellite, its commanders in SIFAR-SID-SISMI, CIA and MI-6
may have decided to act pre-emptively: to use the secret Gladio
capabilities plus its arms deposits to prevent the Italian Communists
and their trade union allies from ever participating in the government,
which they might have seen or pretended to see as a step towards
Soviet domination. The circumstantial case is very strong that
the Gladio teams provided the well-trained, well-equipped professionals
who placed the bombs in Milan in 1969, in Brescia and the Italicus
express in 1974, and at the Bologna railway station in 1980. In
this, the Gladio people may have been assisted by such notorious
SID-SISMI assets as Stefano delle Chiaie, a terrorist who made
his base in Madrid until the death of Franco and the fall of the
fascist regime in 1976.
The case concerning Gladio as a state-sponsored terrorist underground
grows stronger if we also consider the role of the P-2 or Propaganda
Due freemasonic lodge. The existence of this secret power center
became public knowledge in the early 1980s. Among the P-2 members
were many of the most prominent political, financial, economic,
media, and military leaders of Italy, including Andreotti and
the current prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. There were no communists
and no labor leaders present. The P-2 was most likely a descendant
of a pro-Mazzini Masonic lodge sometimes identified as Propaganda
Uno, which would have been functioning during the second half
of the nineteenth century and in to the twentieth. P-2 was notable
for its overwhelming links to the US. In the view of some, P-2
grandmaster Licio Gelli, a former fascist, and his assistant Umberto
Ortolani, may have represented a command center for terror operations
in Italy, including those executed by the trained professionals
of the Gladio network. Or, more likely, they may have represented
a conduit for instructions from higher up to be passed along to
the various personalities of the local establishment.
Gladio in any case represents an extremely instructive case for
students of 9/11. Here we have one of the five advanced industrial
countries, a founding member of the European Community, and a
member of NATO, in which state sponsored terrorism would appear
to have been practiced for about 15 years on a very large scale,
all as a matter of raison d’état, specifically because
of the Soviet threat. The human toll over this time numbers certainly
in the hundreds, about one order of magnitude less than 9/11,
but in a country about one fourth the size of the US. There seems
to have been very little compunction about turning lethal terrorism
against one’s own population. Those who believe that a self-inflicted
wound on the scale of 9/11 in the US case, organized by US intelligence
networks, is a moral and human impossibility will gain no support
from this example.
OPERATION NORTHWOODS
In
July 1961, Democratic Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, noting
the activities of General Edwin Walker, called for an investigation
of the Institute for American Strategy, the Richardson Foundation,
the National War College, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff –
all for subversive activity. Fulbright compared the mentality
of some US military men to that of the OAS (Secret Army Organization)
in Algeria, which plotted against General de Gaulle and was implicated
in various assassination plots against him. All in all, there
were about thirty attempts to kill the French President. (See
Target de Gaulle)
Fulbright’s warnings were more accurate than he knew at
the time. The crucial exhibit in this regard is Operation Northwoods,
a plan to provoke a war with Cuba, which was supported by the
entire Joint Chiefs of Staff and their Chairman, General Lyman
Lemnitzer. This document, titled "Justification for U.S.
Military Intervention in Cuba" was provided by the JCS to
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the
key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request
from the Chief of the Cuba Project, General Edward Lansdale, the
Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer
various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. The
documents of Operation Northwoods were first published in Australia
by John Elliston in his PsyWar on Cuba: The Declassified History
of US Anti-Castro Propaganda (1999). They became prominent around
the time of 9/11 thanks to the study Body of Secrets by James
Bamford, a former ABC newsman.
Lemnitzer had worked with Allen Dulles during World War II, and
was part of Dulles’ Operation Sunrise, the separate surrender
of German forces in Italy by SS General Karl Wolf. Lemnitzer had
helped to assemble the first stay-behind networks of the Gladio
type, which were often staffed by former Nazis and fascists. Lemnitzer,
along with Curtis LeMay of the Air Force, favored using the Cuban
missile crisis of October 1962 to provoke general nuclear war
with the USSR. Robert Dallek’s new biography of Kennedy
documents the reckless and irresponsible advice Lemnitzer gave
Kennedy on a number of military problems; it usually came down
to recommending nuclear weapons under all circumstances as the
only way to guarantee victory. In 1962 Lemnitzer was denied his
ambition of being re-appointed to a second term as JCS chairman,
but he was given the post of NATO Supreme Commander, where he
presided over the creation of the first Gladio arms and explosives
caches on the Italian front. Lemnitzer did not retire from active
duty until 1969. President Gerald Ford asked Lemnitzer to join
the agitation of the Committee on the Present Danger, a retread
of a CIA front group from the early 1950s. The CPD was the private-sector
arm of CIA Director George Bush’s Team B, an exercise in
anti-Soviet alarmism that foreshadowed the Feith-Luti-Shulsky
Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon. Ford also promoted General
William H. Craig, who had been a part of the Northwood cabal,
to be the head of the Army Security Agency, an arm of the supersecret
National Security Agency, the center of electronic surveillance.
Lemnitzer died in November 1988.
Senator Albert Gore senior, the father of the later vice president,
thought that Lemnitzer was a part of the subversive machinations
associated with General Edwin Walker, who distributed inflammatory
anti-Kennedy propaganda to his troops in Germany. When Walker
returned to the US, he organized a racist riot against the hiring
of a black professor at the University of Mississippi, and was
prosecuted by Attorney General Robert Kennedy for sedition, insurrection,
and rebellion. Walker was thought to have joined with French OAS
military in plotting to kill de Gaulle; these same circles are
also suspect in the Kennedy assassination. A little later, in
1963 and 1964, George H. W. Bush ran for the Senate in Texas on
a platform that included the overthrow of Castro and the use of
tactical nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. (Meyssan 2002
139-146)
General Edward Lansdale was one of the most prominent practitioners
of special forces, special operations, and related utopian military
methods during the Cold War. He was one of the leading architects
of the catastrophic US involvement in Vietnam. Lansdale was the
founder of the US Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina. Lansdale worked closely together with Allen Dulles,
the Wall Street lawyer who became the head of the CIA during the
Eisenhower administration, and who cooked up the plan for the
Bay of Pigs and foisted it off on the newly inaugurated President
Kennedy. When the Bay of Pigs failed, and Kennedy wisely decided
to cut his losses by not throwing more military assets into what
was already a hopeless debacle, the Allen Dulles clique and many
counterinsurgency-oriented military officers blamed not their
own incompetent planning, but Kennedy. In February, 1962, Robert
Kennedy told Lansdale that his covert Operation Mongoose, a plot
to kill Castro, should be frozen, and the emphasis shifted to
gathering intelligence.
The Dulles-Lemnitzer-Lansdale networks should not be thought
of as an extinct feature of the past, but rather as a living presence
in the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and other agencies. Given the track
record of this network, they must necessarily come under scrutiny
in the context of 9/11.
The Northwoods documents start from the premise that the US should
be seeking war with Cuba over the short term for the purpose of
regime change: “[T]he Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that
a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted
by the United States. They also recommend that such intervention
be undertaken as soon as possible and preferably before the release
of National Guard and Reserve forces presently on active duty.”
Part of the effort would be to demonize Castro and his communist
government. The Northwoods planners thought that “world
opinion, and the United Nations forum, should be favorably affected
by developing the international image of the Cuban government
as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable
threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere.” How could
Castro be demonized? Norhtwoods: “Exploding a few plastic
bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and
the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement
also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible
government.” In addition, “hijacking attempts against
civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as harassing
measures condoned by the Government of Cuba.”
Northwoods planners did not hesitate to prescribe attacks on US
ships, planes, or installations: “We could blow up a U.S.
ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” they wrote; “casualty
lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national
indignation.” Northwoods had not forgotten the Maine incident
of 1898. Nor did they hesitate to propose a murderous campaign
of terror against US civilians: “We could develop a Communist
Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities
and even in Washington," proposed the JCS planners. “The
terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven
in the United States.” So much for any notions that rogue
Pentagon and CIA elements have any profound metaphysical inhibitions
about killing their own troops or US citizens in general; this
is an important lesson to bring to the analysis of 9/11.
In the search for a pretext, the JCS planners also considered
a massacre of foreign citizens: “We could sink a boatload
of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). . . . We could
foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States
even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized.”
The most complicated project proposed by the Northwoods brainstormers
was a plan to “create an incident which will demonstrate
convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down
a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to
Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would
be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The
passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday
or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering
a non-scheduled flight.” From here the plan was articulated
as follows:
An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact
duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary
organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate
would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be
loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully
prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted
to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]. Take off
times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled
to allow a rendezvous south of Florida….
From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will
descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary
field at Eglin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate
the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status.
The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight
plan. When over Cuba the drone will be transmitting on the international
distress frequency a “May Day” message stating he
is under attack by Cuban MiG aircraft. The transmission will be
interrupted by destruction of the aircraft, which will be triggered
by radio signal. This will allow ICAO [International Civil Aviation
Organization] radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell
the U.S. what has happened to the aircraft instead of the U.S.
trying to "sell" the incident.
There was also a plan to “make it appear that Communist
Cuban MiGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters
in an unprovoked attack.” When Colonel John Glenn was about
to attempt his orbital flight, Lemnitzer and the Northwoods cabal
were ready. They did not explicitly prepare to sabotage Glenn’s
rocket, but they were ready to exploit any mishap to attain the
goal which, as always, was the invasion of Cuba. Lemnitzer proposed
that an astronaut disaster could be turned into a pretext for
war “by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would
prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”
The inventiveness of the Northwoods cabal was endless. They were
eager to stage “a series of well coordinated incidents to
take place in and around" the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba. This would entail a group of anti-Castro Cubans decked
out in Cuban army uniforms who would “start riots near the
main gate of the base. Others would pretend to be saboteurs inside
the base. Ammunition would be blown up, fires started, aircraft
sabotaged, mortars fired at the base with damage to installations.”
Another path to war might be through embroiling the Cubans in
conflict with other Caribbean nations through covert operations
and US provocations: “Advantage can be taken of the sensitivity
of the Dominican [Republic] Air Force to intrusions within their
national air space. ‘Cuban’ B-26 or C-46 type aircraft
could make cane burning raids at night. Soviet Bloc incendiaries
could be found. This could be coupled with ‘Cuban’
messages to the Communist underground in the Dominican Republic
and ‘Cuban’ shipments of arms which would be found,
or intercepted, on the beach. Use of MiG type aircraft by U.S.
pilots could provide additional provocation.” Finally, there
was a plan to "make it appear that Communist Cuban MiGs have
destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked
attack." It was a particularly believable operation given
the decade of shoot downs that had just taken place. Lemnitzer
was emphatic that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and not the CIA,
ought to be in charge of these covert operations: “It is
recommended,” he concluded, “that this responsibility
for both overt and covert military operations be assigned to the
Joint Chiefs of Staff.” (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/)
Northwoods was never carried out in regard to Cuba. However,
this does not mean that these concepts were never implemented.
In the Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964, two US destroyers
were operating along the coast of North Vietnam very near South
Vietnamese ships which were raiding and bombarding the north.
The Pentagon then announced that the two destroyers, the Maddox
and the Turner Joy, had been attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo
boats. President Johnson then ordered US air strikes on nearby
North Vietnamese ports and naval bases, and also used this incident
to exort the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution from the Congress,
which gave him unlimited power to wage war. Later, it turned out
that there probably had not been any North Vietnamese torpedo
boats, but more likely only ghost images on the radar screens
of the destroyers. After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Johnson
was clearly embarked on the path of escalating the Vietnam war,
with disastrous consequences for all concerned. The mind which
produced Northwoods and the Gulf of Tonkin affair is a mind which
would have no difficulty in producing 9/11. And there is no sign
that those networks have ever been eradicated.
THE MOSSAD’S FALSE FLAG AL QAEDA CELL
Rashid
Abu Shbak, the head of Palestinian Preventive Security in the
Gaza Strip said on Friday, December 6, 2002 that his forces had
identified a number of Palestinian collaborators who had been
ordered by Israeli security agencies to “work in the Gaza
Strip under the name of Al-Qaeda.” Al-Jazeera TV reported
that the Palestinian authorities had arrested a group of Palestinian
“collaborators with Israeli occupation” in Gaza, who
were trying to set up an operation there in the name of bin Laden’s
Al-Qaeda. The Palestinian Authority spokesman said the members
of the group had confessed that they were recruited and organized
by the Israeli intelligence, Mossad. Sharon had personally claimed
on December 4, 2002 that he had proof of Al-Qaeda operations in
Gaza, and used the allegations to justify brutal Israeli Defense
Forces attacks in the Gaza Strip the next day–which was
the start of the Islamic holiday, Eid, celebrating the end of
Ramadan. Ten civilians were killed in the IDF assaults. Reuters
published an extensive featured story on the affair by Diala Saadeh
on December 7, 2002, under the headline “Palestinians: Israel
Faked Gaza Al Qaeda Presence.” The article quoted President
Arafat, who told reporters at his West Bank Ramallah headquarters,
“It is a big, big, big lie to cover [Sharon’s] attacks
and his crimes against our people everywhere.” Information
Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo explained: “There are certain
elements who were instructed by the Mossad to form a cell under
the name of Al Qaeda in the Gaza Strip in order to justify the
assault and the military campaigns of the Israeli occupation army
against Gaza.” (Haaretz, Reuters and Al Jazeera, December
7, 2002) Sharon is of course a past master of false-flag tactics
like these, having been implicated in the direction of the Abu
Nidal organization and also in the setting up of Hamas.
On Sunday, December 8, 2002, Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority
Planning and International Cooperation Minister, held a press
conference with Col. Rashid Abu Shbak, head of the PA’s
Preventive Security Apparatus in the Gaza Strip, to release documents
and provide further information about the Israeli intelligence
creation of a self-styled Al Qaeda cell. Shaath called on the
diplomats to “convey to their countries that they assume
the responsibility of exerting pressure on the Israeli government
to stop the Israeli aggression,” and announced that the
PA had handed ambassadors and consuls of the Arab and foreign
countries documents revealing the involvement of the Israeli Intelligence
in recruiting citizens from Gaza Strip in a fake organization
carrying the name of Qaeda. The goal of the operation was to create
a new pretext for aggression against the inhabitants of the Gaza
Strip. Shbak said that the PA had found eight cases of fake Al
Qaeda recruiting over the previous nine months. Three Palestinians
were arrested, while another 11 Palestinians were released, “because
they came and informed us of this Israeli plot.” The PA
Security Service had traced mobile phone calls and e-mails, purportedly
from Germany and Lebanon, back to Israel; these were messages
asking Palestinians to join Al Qaeda. One e-mail even bore the
forged signature of Osama bin Laden. “We investigated the
origin of those calls, which used roaming, and messages, and found
out they all came from Israel,” Shbak said. The recruits
were paired with collaborators in Gaza, and received money and
weapons, “although most of these weapons did not work.”
The money was provided by collaborators, or transferred from bank
accounts in Israel and Jerusalem. (Palestine Ministry of Public
Information, IslamOnline, December 9, 2002)
TERRORIST MURDER AS BRITISH STATE POLICY
In
April 2003, Great Britain was rocked by one of the greatest secret
intelligence scandals in the entire postwar period. Metropolitan
Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens, the most senior police official
in Great Britain, delivered the third installment of his report
documenting that a special branch of British army intelligence
had coordinated the murders of some thirty Roman Catholics in
Northern Ireland in the years 1989-1990. Stevens had begun his
investigation already back in 1989, but the report was not published
until 2003, after two postponements during 2002. The Stevens investigation
centered on the British Army intelligence’s Force Research
Unit (FRU), for working in collusion Protestant loyalist paramilitary
groups to kill Catholics. An aggravating factor was that the head
of the FRU at the time when these murders were being committed,
in 1989-90, was an army officer named Gordon Kerr. Until February
2003, Kerr was the British military attaché in Beijing,
one of the highest military posts for a British military officer.
Sir John Stevens confirmed that in that same month of February
2003 he was preparing papers for the Director of Public Prosecutions
(DPP) relating to a prosecution of Kerr. At that point Kerr, by
then an army brigadier general, was moved to Kuwait, and was serving
in Iraq when the Stevens report came out. (BBC, April 17, 2003)
The Stevens report represented, in its author’s words,
“the largest investigation undertaken in the United Kingdom,”
with 9,256 statements recorded, 10,391 documents logged (over
1 million pages), and 16,194 evidentiary exhibits seized. By April
2003, the Stevens probe had generated 144 arrests and 94 convictions.
(Stevens 17) Stevens’ findings centered on collusion in
the Finucane and other murders. “Collusion is evidenced
in many ways. This ranges from the willful failure to keep records,
the absence of accountability, the withholding of intelligence
and evidence, through to the extreme of agents being involved
in murder.” (Stevens 18)
It was evident to all that Kerr and his FRU could never have
committed such atrocities on their own, but would have required
“orders from the highest level,” that is, from Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher’s office. Whether the Stevens
investigation would implicate Thatcher remained to be seen. The
British press was focused on the fact that Kerr’s chief
FRU operative for coordinating the Ulster Defence Association
(UDA) in the commission of at least 30 murders was a certain Brian
Nelson. Nelson, under Kerr’s direction, had intrigued to
become the UDA’s intelligence chief. In January 1990, the
Stevens team identified Nelson as a key suspect, and planned to
arrest him and others in a dawn raid. The officers went to their
secure investigation headquarters, hours before the planned arrests,
to find a fire raging in their offices, with fire alarms, telephones,
and heat-sensitive intruder alarms not working, and with many
of their files destroyed. This was an obvious case of arson. To
top off the story, Brian Nelson died the week before Stevens III
was issued, supposedly of a brain hemorrhage. The Stevens investigation
had been launched in 1989, following the murder of top Catholic
lawyer Pat Finucane. Finucane’s family had always insisted
that the security forces were involved in his murder, and dismissed
the Stevens report as inadequate. Finucane’s widow, Geraldine,
demanded a full judicial inquiry as the only way to deal with
the issue. Alex Maskey, the Lord Mayor of Belfast, commented on
the Stevens report: “This is not about rogue elements with
the British system. It is about a state policy sanctioned at the
highest level.”
The Stevens inquiry did not develop in a vacuum. It had been
stimulated by the work of film-maker and author Sean McPhilemy,
whose book, The Committee: Political Assassination in Northern
Ireland, had appeared in 1998. McPhilemy systematically documented
the murderous collusion among the British government, the British
military, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Loyalist paramilitary
death squads, and respected Protestant citizens in planning and
perpetrating the murders of Republican paramilitaries and Catholics.
The roles of the RUC, its Special Branch, the Force Research Unit,
and British Army agent Brian Nelson, in the murder of human rights
attorney Pat Finucane and others were revealed in McPhilemy’s
book. McPhilemy also provided evidence implicating British domestic
intelligence (MI5) and Secret Air Services (SAS) commandos in
these operations.
CONTROLLED CORPORATE MEDIA
It
almost goes without saying that the effective political exploitation
of a large-scale terrorist operation like 9/11 depends to an extraordinary
degree on the complicity of the controlled corporate media. So
far we have discussed moles primarily as a private network inside
the visible government, but the media are honeycombed with moles
as well: these are persons whose task it is to act in support
of the terror project in its totality. On 9/11, it was the media
moles who first began churning out the mythical party line about
Bin Laden and al Qaeda. They are in this sense the main propagators
of the myth, with Bush and others bringing up the rear. We have
already suggested that a majority of the leaks implicating Bin
Laden and al Qaeda on the basis of no evidence whatsoever probably
came from Richard Clarke and George Tenet. It is no secret that
the CIA has long recruited media managers and media personalities
to be its agents of influence. The corporate bosses of the media
conglomerates, in their capacity as powerful oligarchs, may also
be more or less witting parties to the unfolding operation. They
may therefore instruct their own media personalities on the line
they are to espouse.
A COMMAND CENTER
This panoply of elements – patsies, moles, professionals,
and media – clearly presupposes an additional element: a
center of command and coordination to guide all these operational
components towards the desired outcome. A number of accounts of
9/11 have gone so far as to suggest that President Bush himself
was the coordinator, but it must be countered in all seriousness
that this is impossible, and not only for the reason of mental
and technical inability which must always be applied in questions
of terror. As a matter of propaganda it is permissible and probably
necessary to direct mass anger against Bush as the person generally
responsible for 9/11; since he does qualify for this opprobrium
in various ways, although not in the simple, linear way that some
people might think. However, when we are attempting to analyze
in detail how 9/11 came about, it is equally clear that in any
serious conspiracy, a figure of the caliber of Bush 43 would normally
be one of the last to know. He is after all merely a figurehead,
a front man for the CIA-Brown Brothers Harriman-Skull & Bones-neocon-Bush
family faction, which is itself an oligarchical congeries, not
a disciplined, centralized apparatus.
It is hardly likely that the command center of 9/11 could have
been in the upper reaches of government, and far more likely that
it was outside of government altogether. Since Reagan’s
first term, the US intelligence community has been largely privatized
under the aegis of Executive Order 12333. This means that the
really crucial capabilities for an operation like 9/11 are no
longer to be sought in the George Bush intelligence center in
Langley, Virginia which houses the headquarters of the CIA, but
rather in a myriad of private military firms, technology companies,
think tanks, law firms, public relations firms, and front companies
of all types. It is here, rather than a secret government office,
that the planning and command center for 9/11 would normally be
sought. However, given the considerable audacity of the operation,
it cannot be excluded that some specific subdivisions of government
agencies may have been involved. Possible candidates here might
include a focal point operation within the Defense Department,
or a special, secret military unit.
For those who find it incredible that terrorism against the Pentagon
should be directed from inside the Pentagon, we recall that French
President Francois Mitterrand, Italian Prime Minister Bettino
Craxi, and Italian financier Michele Sindona each at one time
or another caused a near-miss terror attack against himself, presumably
as a means of garnering public sympathy.
CONDUCTED BY A NETWORK
It
is important to stress that large-scale synthetic terrorism of
the 9/11 type is generally conducted, not so much by identifiable
institutions acting as a totality, but rather by a network or
faction of like-minded plotters which cuts across the institutions
transversally. It is not the visible, elected government which
plots terrorism, but rather the parallel, invisible, or secret
government, and that secret government is hidden inside the public
and elected one. The essence of this phenomenon is a private network
which has ensconced its operatives in decisive, influential positions,
from which entire bureaucracies can be controlled, manipulated,
or paralyzed. To take an extreme case, it might be argued that
the FBI belongs completely to a network of moles. But even though
the power of the moles in the FBI is admittedly very great indeed,
the Phoenix memo and the Colleen Rowley memo are enough to show
that even the FBI is not composed exclusively of moles. That the
FBI generally acts like a mole organization pure and simple is
due to the preponderant power of certain well-placed moles who
can make the institution do what their faction wants on key issues.
The secret, private network at the higher levels of the US government
which was behind 9/11 has been around for some time. We see its
footprints in such events as the U-2 crisis, the Bay of Pigs,
the Kennedy assassination, the Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy
assassinations, parts of Watergate, Iran-Contra, the bombing of
Kosovo (and of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade), the Kursk incident,
and other operations. This list could be extended. It is an aggressive,
imperialistic, murderous network, restlessly seeking to preserve
itself through conflict and confrontation.
In waging political conflict, it is often necessary and indispensable
to personalize matters by encouraging citizens to direct their
anger at an odious leader of the opposing faction; this often
allows a more efficient mobilization than calling for the defeat
of an abstraction or of a collectivity. In this sense, it is good
politics and close to the truth to blame Bush for 9/11, but not
in the simple way that many might think. It is a naïve argument
to say that if there was US government collusion in 9/11, which
there certainly was, then this proves that the titular head of
the US government and tenant of the White House, G. W. Bush, must
have been the leader of the plot. This reflects a media-conditioned
overestimation of the powers of the presidency. After the death
of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US oligarchy made a collective pledge
that never but never would they ever allow an elected leader actually
to exercise the constitutional powers of the presidency. This
was codified in the term limit contained in the XXII Amendment
of 1947-1951, which has weakened the office of the presidency
in comparison to earlier times. Then began the parade of puppet
presidents: Harry S Truman was always susceptible to blackmail
for his role in the crooked Pendergast machine of Missouri; Truman
meekly took his orders from a committee that included Clark Clifford,
Dean Acheson, Averill Harriman, and Robert Lovett, and the oligarchy
has held him up as exemplary ever since. Eisenhower was the easy-going
chairman of the board who did not force Montgomery and Patton
to coordinate during World War II; much of the real power was
exercised by the Dulles brothers. The oligarchy considered Kennedy
a playboy and sex maniac; he turned out to be a man of much positive
principle. Kennedy showed his willingness to put the Federal reserve
on a leash, forced Wall Street in the person of US Steel to back
down, and refused to let his advisers (EXCOMM) use the Cuban missile
crisis to launch world war against the USSR, and the response
of the oligarchy came the following year. Lyndon B. Johnson’s
pathologies crippled him, despite his apparent power, and made
him accept the Vietnam adventure Kennedy had refused. Doris Kearns
Goodwin has studied this matter well enough in her book on LBJ.
Richard Nixon had been through a kind of nervous breakdown during
the 1960s through his loss of the 1962 California gubernatorial
election and the death of his mother; he was willing to take orders
from Kissinger, who took them from the Rockefeller brothers, etc.
Ford, according to LBJ, was so mentally impaired that he was not
capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. Carter had
gone through a nervous breakdown of his own after being ousted
as Governor of Georgia. Reagan had learned to mask his mean and
vindictive tendencies behind a mask of avuncular joviality; he
acted the role of the good uncle, one of the archetypes of the
American ideology, but he delegated most decisions, after Haig
was forced out, to Bush and Baker. In the meantime, Reagan dozed
and drooled; by 1987 his mental impairment was obvious enough
to cause a scandal. Bush 41 was a very sick man by the second
half of his presidency; his thyroid problem was the symptom of
psychosomatic disorders which live on in the various syndromes
exhibited by his son, such as the penchant for snap decisions.
(Tarpley 1992) Bush 41 had made his career thanks to Kissinger,
and he let Kissinger’s partners Scowcroft and Eagleburger
share power with Baker. On big issues, like the Kuwait crisis,
Bush took orders from Thatcher. Dukakis, the Democratic competitor
in 1988, was also a seriously disturbed personality, as I pointed
out at the time. Clinton was profiled, like JFK, as a sex maniac
and Anglophile, but he turned out to be more intelligent than
the oligarchs had reckoned with. He was accordingly allowed to
serve two terms, but real power was seized after January 1998
by the Principals’ Committee acting under cover of impeachment.
The mental wreck that is Bush 43 is described in detail in another
section of this book. All in all, the oligarchy favors candidates
who are intellectually and morally incapable of governing according
to the full powers of the office, and who are therefore willing
to have their options pre-determined by servants of finance oligarchy
from the Washington establishment. In any case, much of the original
power of the presidency has been transferred to the unelected
and unaccountable Federal Reserve Board.
During the Reagan years, a high administration official told
me that the permanent bureaucratic class considered Reagan a perfect
president. His job, said this official, was to be a head of state,
which meant that his task came down to ministering to the emotional
and symbolic needs of the country during moments of great sorrow
and stress – given that there were now more disasters than
victories. The assistant secretaries and the deputy assistant
secretaries actually ran the government through the interagency
groups and special interagency groups – and these were the
figures who controlled the principals in the later principals’
committee. The presidency was symbolic, while the permanent bureaucracy
(plus the White House palace guard) made up a kind of collective
prime minister who actually made decisions and ran the government
– and even that within the parameters defined by the controlled
corporate media. Given all this, the notion that the US president
possesses real power, or makes real decisions, is slightly fantastic.
According to Bush 43’s own testimony, he saw himself as
a symbolic figure needing to project strength, rather than as
a crisis manager, during the crucial minutes at the Booker School,
during the reading of “My Pet Goat.” The government
was being run by Richard Clarke of the permanent bureaucracy,
who also made the call on al Qaeda.
David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor has represented
a significant progress in 9/11 research, but this book has the
defect of listing as suspects only identifiable institutions,
such as the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and the White
House. In reality, the likely suspect is a network of moles that
cuts across all of these, but which most likely keeps its center
of gravity and command center somewhere in the privatized public
sector.
P2OG AS OFFICIAL AGENTS PROVOCATEURS
Newspaper
readers may have not believed their eyes when they read the following
story:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 26, 2002 (UPI) – The United States should
create an elite group of counter-terror operatives to make the
war on terrorism pre-emptive and proactive, duping al Qaida into
undertaking operations it is not prepared for and thereby exposing
its personnel, a Pentagon report advocating more than $7 billion
in new spending will recommend. The counter-terror operations
group alone would require 100 people and at least $100 million
a year. Rather than simply trying to find and foil terrorists’
plans – the approach that characterizes the current strategy
– the "Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group"
– known as P2OG – would devise ways to stimulate terrorists
into responding or moving operations, possibly by stealing their
money or tricking them with fake communications, according to
the report.
The group would be comprised of specialists in information operations,
psychological operations, computer network attack, covert activities,
signal intelligence, human intelligence, special operations forces
and deception operations. The Defense Department already maintains
a secretive counter-terror operations group known as Delta Force
that is called in when a crisis happens; P2OG would focus its
efforts on preventing those crises from even occurring in the
first place.
The starting point for this operation appears to be Rumsfeld,
who said in May 2002: "Prevention and preemption are ...
the only defense against terrorism. Our task is to find and destroy
the enemy before they strike us." This is plainly a proposal
for the creation of de facto terror cells under the authority
of the Pentagon. If the goal is to provoke terror, there is nothing
to prevent P2OG from infiltrating agents into existing terror
groups, or creating its own terror groups, with the mission of
causing those groups to engage in specific terrorist attacks.
There is no form of supervision or oversight which could ever
guarantee that abuses of this type would not take place; they
would be inherent in the design of the project itself. Indeed,
just the fact that the project outline exists strongly suggests
that P2OG also exists, and has presumably been at work.
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 increasingly 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 half way 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, a neocon
before there was a word for it, 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 he 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 – coordinated 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, 1857-1861], 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.
XV: ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM: FOSTERED BY US FOREIGN POLICY
We
must stress again that international terrorism should never be
seen as a spontaneous sociological phenomenon arising directly
out of oppression and misery. International terrorism and national
liberation struggles are always mediated through a level of clandestine
organization in which the efforts of intelligence agencies come
decisively into play. Many international terrorist groups are
false-flag operations from the very beginning. Others assume false-flag
status as the result of coordinated arrests, assassinations, and
takeovers by intelligence agencies. Even where there is an authentic
national liberation organization, intelligence agencies will create
false-flag operations under their own control to mimic it, perpetrating
atrocities in its name in an effort to isolate and discredit it.
Here again, deception and dissembling are the rule.
Again and again, terrorist groups with US-UK backing have intervened
against progressive nationalists in the Arab world, and in favor
of their Islamic fundamentalist competition.
Recruiting for terrorist groups once they exist is another matter.
The ability to recruit is profoundly influenced by the prevalence
of misery, poverty, and oppression. Here we must account for the
relative economic and political distress of the Arab world, and
of parts of the broader economic world as well. What we find are
the fruits of imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. The
political climate in the Arab world today cannot be understood
as the outcome of autochthonous factors, as thinkers in the Oswald
Spengler Kultur tradition like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis
would have us believe. These experts prefer to forget that the
Arab world they see before them has been occupied, trampled, and
manipulated by two centuries of European intervention, going back
to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. Neocons such as Lewis and
Huntington also prefer a radically anti-historical approach, according
to which anti-western Islamic fundamentalism, especially in its
terrorist emanations, is simply a self-evident fact. But it is
not a self-evident fact, as we now will seek to show.
What needs to be grasped is the fact that US policy, like that
of the British Empire earlier, objectively favors the growth of
Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic fundamentalism can mean many things,
but here it is taken to mean an anti-western theocratic regime
in which the Islamic clergy, mullahs, imams, and ayatollahs as
they may be, play the leading role. We must recall that, until
the Ottoman Empire was destroyed by the British and the French
during the First World War, most of the countries of the Middle
East had been subject to the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople,
who was simultaneously the Caliph of Islam. The Ottoman Empire
claimed to operate according to the Islamic law, or sharia. For
centuries, the British had cultivated the smaller ethnic groups
of the Ottoman Empire with a view to inciting them to rebel against
the Ottoman Sultan: thus, the British began working with the Serbs
around the time of the American Revolution; they helped the Greeks
to become independent after the Napoleonic wars. Under Lord Palmerston
in the 1830s and 1840s, the British introduced the ideas of a
homeland for the Jews in Palestine. At first, British Jews were
not interested: Lord Rothschild, it was said at that time, wanted
a seat in the House of Lords, not a seat under a palm tree in
Palestine. Later, the British developed a presence among the Copts,
the Armenians, and others. The French posed as protectors of Christians
in the Levant, and became the backers of the Lebanese Maronite
Christians.
During these years the British Arab Bureau and the British Indian
Office carefully profiled the Arab psychology and ideology. Their
starting point was that the Arabs would inevitably become hostile
to British colonialism, and that nothing could be done to prevent
this. However, these British orientalists also concluded that
it might well be possible to provide synthetic ideologies for
the inevitable Arab revolt which would help to make it self-isolating,
abortive, and impotent. An obvious way to do this was to make
the revolt not specifically anti-British, but anti-western and
anti-European in general, lest the Arabs be able to ally with
Russia or Germany to eject the UK. The Islamic tradition offered
the raw material for the fabrication of a synthetic ideology of
Arab rejection of the west to which today’s more fantastic
ideologues of the Arab and Islamic worlds are much indebted.
When the Ottoman Empire took the German side during the First
World War, British Col. T.E. Lawrence was able to incite the Arabs
of Hedjaz (today’s Saudi Arabia) to rebel against the Ottoman
sultan. The British in effect promised that all Arab lands occupied
by the Ottoman Turks would be turned over to the Arabs when the
war had been won. However, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917,
the British also promised part of this same territory to the Jews
for their homeland. To make matters worse, the British and the
French also promised most of these same lands to each other in
the secret Sykes-Picot agreement.
Precisely because it was imperial, Ottoman imperial rule had
not been conducive to intellectual or material progress –
as had been understood by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini and Nicholas
Cusanus in the latter half of the fifteenth century when the Ottoman
domination was beginning. The Ottoman peoples did not participate
in the European reformation and the wars of religion, notably
the Thirty Years War, which had convinced Europeans that political
solutions and war-avoidance were better than hecatombs of slaughter
waged by doctrinaire religious factions. Ottoman economic development
also lagged behind that of Europe. Because of these conditions,
there are basically four types of regimes which are currently
possible in the ex-Ottoman territories. These are:
1. reactionary monarchies – This was the variant at first
favored by the British when they occupied various Arab states
under the League of Nations mandates after 1918. Working with
the House of Saud and the Hashemite family, the British promoted
monarchy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. These
regimes, like that of King Farouk in Egypt, were widely viewed
as corrupt puppets of the imperialists who were not interested
in national progress, but rather in amassing private wealth. In
Saudi Arabia, for example, human chattel slavery remained legal
until 1965, and was widely practiced after that, especially in
households. Household slavery also remains common in the Gulf
emirates, and explodes onto the local pages of the Washington
papers every now and then when a visiting diplomat from the Gulf
brings a personal slave or two on a diplomatic mission. Ironically,
chattel slavery was abolished in Kuwait thanks to the Iraqi invasion
of 1990, but was then re-established with the help of Bush’s
Operation Desert Storm in 1991. (Tarpley 1996) Most of the Arab
monarchs were overthrown, although monarchy still hangs on in
Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and among the petty princelings
of the Gulf. Iran, although not an Arab country, was ruled by
an emperor until 1979. Clearly, these regimes are not suitable
for the task of economic development and general progress in their
countries.
2. modernizing nationalist regimes – These may be democratic
republics, but they are more likely to be military governments
possibly evolving into plebiscitary forms of democracy. They may
call themselves Arab socialists, as Nasser did. The best hope
the Arabs had of sharing in the level of scientific and technological
progress attained in the most advanced parts of the world was
offered by nationalist regimes whose program was one of economic
development and modernization. The first example was that of Mustapha
Kemal Ataturk, who created the first permanent republic in Asia,
the Turkish Republic of 1923. Rejecting the sultanate and the
caliphate in favor of the Turkish nation, Ataturk implemented
the separation of mosque and state, making Turkey a modern, secular
republic. He introduced the Roman alphabet in place of Arabic
script, outlawed the veil for women and the fez for men, and promoted
the European hat as the “headgear of civilization.”
Harems were discouraged, while women were given the right to vote
and held public office. Ataturk introduced the Gregorian calendar,
the metric system, and family names. A dirigist Five-Year plan
for economic development was introduced in 1933. Public law was
based on modern European criminal and civil codes, rather than
the sharia. Ataturk saw religion as a matter of purely personal
and private belief and preference, and all religions were tolerated.
Ataturk would have to rank at or near the top of any list of the
nation-builders and modernizers of the twentieth century. Among
his other achievements, he helped Turkey to be the only defeated
power of World War I which escaped fascist rule. In retrospect,
if there was one experiment in the Muslim world which the US should
have supported, it was that of Ataturk. If his ideas had prevailed
more generally, there could be no talk of the clash of civilizations
today. Given this impressive record, how did the Allies of World
War I, including the United States treat Ataturk? They tried with
every means possible to overthrow him, to isolate him, and to
carve Turkey into a series of petty states. In the Peace of Paris
in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles with Germany was bad, but the
Treaty of Sèvres which was imposed upon Turkey was an act
of grotesque lunacy. It was clearly the peace to end all peace.
Turkey was supposed to be divided into French, Italian, and Greek
zones of occupation, while the Bosporus and the Dardanelles were
occupied by the British and French. There was an attempt to create
an independent Armenia in eastern Anatolia. The British and French
even attempted to lure the US into taking over a piece of Turkey,
but in those days the US was smart enough to decline. That was
fortunate, since Ataturk was able to defeat the armies the Allies
threw at him; he was able to guarantee the national independence
and territorial integrity of Turkey. His brutal treatment of Greek
and Armenians, who were fighting for the Allies, must be seen
in this context.
3. hereditary dictatorships – These hereditary dictatorships
have emerged after the fall of monarchies, and sometimes occur
as a degenerate form of the nationalist-modernizing state. Key
examples are the regime of Hafez Assad and his son in Syria after
1963, and indeed that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, with the first
being far more odious. Hafez Assad ruled a murderous, pervasive
police state in which the minority Allawites ruled over a resentful
majority. Yet, Assad always the darling of New York and London:
Kissinger once said that he hoped God would forgive him, but that
there always be a soft spot in his heart for Hafez Assad. The
regimes of the Assads in Syria, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and of
the mercurial Colonel Qaddafi in Libya can be assimilated to this
group.
4. fundamentalist theocracies – The leading example is
Iran, which is enough to show that this form cannot be effective
for national development in the hostile climate of globalization.
In 1978, President Carter’s National Security Director Zbigniew
Brzezinski, anxious to avenge Soviet support for North Vietnam
against the US in the recent Vietnam War, was convinced by British
Arabists and orientalists that Islamic fundamentalism could be
used to destabilize the five large Muslim-majority republics of
Soviet central Asia – Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Khirgizia, and Turkmenistan. This outlook could also be employed
to disrupt the ethnic labyrinth of the Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus
– notably in Chechnya. In this way, Brzezinski argued, Islamic
fundamentalism could become the definitive “bulwark against
communism.” In order to provide a powerful center from which
this new ideology could radiate, Brzezinski and Carter connived
to foment a typical CIA “people power” pseudo-revolution,
this time with Islamic fundamentalist overtones, in order to overthrow
the Shah of Iran in 1979. The Shah was personally in many respects
a monster, and his Savak secret police were as murderous as any
in the world. However, the Shah was bringing in European construction
firms to create infrastructure and whole new cities; a good example
was the immense building operation at Bandar Abbas (today Bandar
Khomeini) by the Italian civil engineering firm Condotte d’Acqua
under Loris Corbi. But since the Shah could not tolerate free
political activity, he had no effective mass political party to
support him. The chosen instrument for the Shah’s ouster
was the benighted Ayatollah Khomeini, a figure of ineffable darkness,
worse than Savonarola. Let there be no mistake: Brzezinski did
everything to overthrow the Shah, and then to make sure that no
secular politician like Shapour Baktiar took power in his stead:
US Air Force Gen. Robert Huyser from Al Haig’s NATO staff
was sent to Iran with the message that only Khomeini would be
acceptable to the United States. (Dreyfus and La Levée
50-53) The rise of Khomeini represented a novelty in the recent
history of the Middle East: it was a theocracy of the Islamic
clerics or mullahs, bankrolled by wealthy bazaar merchants and
related interests. The ascendancy of Khomeini meant that Iran’s
economic and cultural development was frozen – or in reverse
– for most of two decades. But Khomeini’s Iran did
become a center of propagation of Islamic fundamentalist ideology,
just as Brzezinski had intended, although the Soviets were not
the only ones to pay the price. Soon the US-UK intelligence agencies
were able to play Iraq against Iran in the 8-year long Gulf War
of the 1980s, which wrecked and bankrupted both societies even
further. The Israelis were so pleased with this war that they
wanted it to go on forever, while the Iranian mullahs organized
suicidal human wave assaults by little children against prepared
and fortified Iraqi positions.
Despite neocon blathering about democracy, and Bush’s so-called
Middle East initiative, the US never had any serious plans for
democracy in Iraq. To begin with, the US cannot seriously be described
as a democracy; the US is currently an oligarchy in Plato’s
precise definition of a “constitution teeming with many
evils…based on a property qualification…wherein the
rich hold office and the poor man is excluded,” a system
favoring “the member of a ruling class – oligarchy.”
(Republic 544c, 550c, 545a) Sure enough, the regime created by
the US in Iraq in the spring of 2003 was an … oligarchy,
composed of twenty-five handpicked puppet oligarchs with a weak
revolving presidency. Such arrangements have been perpetuated
after the alleged restoration of Iraqi sovereignty. US interference
in post-communist Russia favored oligarchical domination through
the Yeltsin coterie in a similar way. As of right now, there is
probably not a sufficient material-economic basis for western-style
democracy in Iraq, although after several years of economic reconstruction
there might well be. But in any case, it is clear that the US
as presently constituted is no longer a progressive force on the
world scene – which was not always the case in the past.
The open secret of the post-1945 world is that the US and the
other NATO states have systematically and implacably opposed the
reasonable alternative of modernizing secular nationalism among
the Arab and Islamic states, while favoring the fundamentalist
alternative, the more benighted the better. Modernizing secular
nationalists are by far the most effective adversaries of the
imperialists – they have the potential to score real political,
diplomatic and cultural gains for their countries. Theocratic
reactionaries are easier to isolate, since their appeal is more
circumscribed. In practice, Washington and London have always
fostered the rise of fundamentalists, while attempting to eliminate
modernizing nationalists.
It must be added that while fundamentalist figures like Ayatollah
Khomeini of Iran were baneful from every point of view, there
are today perfectly reasonable figures who identify themselves
as Islamists – people like Adel Hussein of Egypt and Hassan
Turabi of Sudan. These figures seem to represent something of
the progressive impulses of the 1950s-1960s, expressed today within
the dominant Islamic idiom. Significantly, these figures are incessantly
vilified and targeted by imperialists of all stripes. If reasonable
policies were ever to re-emerge in the west, reasonable Islamists
would have no trouble in finding modes of cooperation.
Despite US-UK hostility, Arab leaders of the Nasser type had
some margin of maneuver as long as the Soviets offered some kind
of an alternative to Washington and London. But as the USSR weakened
and finally disintegrated, this margin grew narrower and finally
disappeared in 1991, when the Soviets could do nothing for their
former ally, Iraq.
Iran – After World War II, the first attempt to renew the
progressive nationalism of Ataturk came with the rise of Prime
Minister Mossadeq in Iran. Mossadeq’s program centered on
the 1951 nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, known
today as BP. With the breaking of the British protectorate in
Iran, the fledgling CIA of Allen Dulles and Kermit Roosevelt organized
a military coup against Mossadeq, which was followed by a restoration
of imperialist control over Iran’s oil, and an era of political
reaction under the Shah.
Egypt – In 1952, a group of nationalist army officers ousted
the notoriously corrupt and inept King Farouk. A coup by junior
officers brought Colonel Gamal abd el Nasser to power. Nasser’s
progressive nationalist program was based on the expulsion of
the British occupation forces, followed by the nationalization
of the Suez Canal, with the canal tolls being used to finance
the building of the Aswan High Dam on the Upper Nile. The Aswan
project was key for flood control and hydroelectric energy, on
the model of FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority. After the
British were gone, Nasser seized the canal with great fanfare,
becoming an Egyptian national hero. Nasser was quickly opposed
by British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden and the Dulles brothers,
and soon became the target of a British-French-Israeli intrigue:
Israel would launch a surprise attack across the Sinai, and an
Anglo-French task force would seize the canal under the guise
of restoring order. This crude conspiracy led to the Suez crisis
of October-November 1956, and was seen as a personal affront by
US President Eisenhower. After the USSR issued a unique nuclear
ultimatum to the British and French, threatening London and Paris
with nuclear destruction, the US and the USSR joined in the UN
Security Council to vote against the old-style Anglo-French imperialists
and their Israeli auxiliaries. The US position in the post-1956
Middle East was founded on the broad sympathy won when Washington
torpedoed the adventurous plans of the British and French imperialists.
Sadly, those gains were totally squandered during the subsequent
decades, as the US itself assumed the role of the chief imperial
oppressor of the Arab states. But in 1956, Nasser’s Egypt
had clearly emerged as the leading Arab state. Egypt became the
nucleus of an attempted re-unification of the Arab world in the
form of a secular United Arab Republic, which Syria and Yemen
joined, and towards which Iraq gravitated for a time. Nasser used
his radio, the Voice of the Arabs, to condemn the Saudi monarchy
for its practice of chattel slavery, especially of black Africans.
Egypt became the target of another Israeli pre-emptive attack
in the June 1967 Six-Day War, and was unable fully to recover
in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which was orchestrated by Kissinger.
As for Nasser, he was hounded mercilessly until he died in 1970.
He was replaced by Sadat, who ousted the Soviet advisers Nasser
had brought in. But even Sadat was too much of a nationalist for
the Anglo-Americans: he was assassinated in 1980 by a group which
included al-Zawahiri, today alleged to be Bin Laden’s right-hand
man and personal physician. Despite his role in the Sadat assassination,
Zawahiri was able to live openly in London for years. This suggests
that Zawahiri is indeed an asset of MI-6.
Iraq – When the British seized control of Iraq in 1919,
they installed a reactionary monarchy of the Hashemites. In 1958,
the puppet monarch King Feisal was assassinated. General Kassem
became prime minister and instituted a program of modernizing
reforms, including the progressive constitution of 1959. The 1959
Iraqi constitution and other Kassem-era legislation made literacy
compulsory, abolished slavery, and guaranteed equal rights for
women. The impact of these reforms was permanent. To cite only
one example, during the mid-1970s the Iraqi Ambassador to Rome
was a highly intelligent woman, Selima Bakir. As any Iraqi nationalist
would, Kassem assumed the position that Kuwait was an integral
part of Iraq. In this he was correct since Kuwait had been illegally
detached from the Ottoman Empire by the British in 1899 to prevent
the German-sponsored Berlin to Baghdad railway from ever reaching
the head of the Gulf. In 1962 the British fomented a revolt of
the Kurds under the Barzani clan, and Kassem was assassinated
in 1963. With the death of Kassem, the chance for successful development
in Iraq was severely limited. The positive features of Iraq during
the Saddam Hussein years were largely inherited from the Kassem
era.
Pakistan – The great opportunity for modernization in Pakistan
came under Ali Bhutto in the mid-1970s. Bhutto was determined
to advance his country to the leading edge of modern technology
with a peaceful nuclear energy program in the Eisenhower Atoms
for Peace tradition. He was soon confronted by Kissinger, who
threatened to make a terrible example of him unless he desisted
from his ambitious development plans. Shortly thereafter, Bhutto
was overthrown by the US-supported coup of General Zia ul Haq.
Bhutto was framed up on various charges and hanged by the new
regime in accordance with Kissinger’s earlier threats. Bhutto’s
wife and children later took refuge in West Germany. Fundamentalist
tendencies have grown in the era following the death of Bhutto.
Kosovo – When the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began
to break up in 1991, the ethnic Albanian Muslim population of
the province of Kosovo under the leadership of the secular nationalist
LDK party responded by a highly effective non-violent self-organizing
process, which allowed them to defy the Serb occupiers for most
of the rest of the 1990s. Using the tools of passive resistance,
the Kosovars created their own parallel government, including
their own school system, their own separate elections, their own
public health system, and their own parallel system of economic
enterprises. The leader of this magnificent effort was Ibrahim
Rugova, who made pilgrimage after pilgrimage to Washington during
the 1990s, always sporting the Parisian red silk scarf which was
his trademark. But the US was never willing to lift a finger for
Rugova and the eminently reasonable LDK. When Slovenia, Croatia
and Bosnia declared independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia,
Rugova hesitated: the Kosovars, unlike the others, had no guns,
and the US had never provided them. In 1997, the neighboring state
of Albania, with which the Kosovars wished to be united, disintegrated
as the result of the collapse of a series of Ponzi-scheme financial
speculations. As the Albanian state collapsed, its weapons depots
were looted, and many of these weapons soon found their way across
the border into Kosovo. This engendered the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA), a very dubious outfit composed of narcotics smugglers,
Islamic fundamentalists from Kosovo and abroad, and out-and-out
terrorists. As the KLA’s clashes with the Serbian police
and army increased, the Serbs responded as any occupier would,
and atrocities on both sides became the order of the day. In the
event the US, in the person of Madeleine Albright, became the
direct sponsor of the terrorist KLA. Starting in March, 1999,
the US and NATO waged a criminal 78-day bombing campaign against
Serbia, one of the great acts of international vandalism in then
late twentieth century – all in support of KLA-related demands.
As for Rugova and the LDK, they were trampled, and the US depended
more and more on the KLA.
Afghanistan – This country was able to manage some slow
modernization during the 1950s under King Mohammed Zahir, who
had assumed the throne in 1933. Afghan development has always
hinged on a large hydroelectric and water project in the center
of the country, which has never been fully carried out. The King
was deposed in 1973, and by 1978 there emerged the progressive
regime of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a pro-Marxist poet and novelist
with very special talents. Taraki legalized trade unions, instituted
a minimum wage, and promoted housing, health care, and public
sanitation. He favored improvements in the status of women. Taraki
tried to eradicate the cultivation of the opium poppy, which had
made his country the world’s leading producer of heroin.
Taraki also cancelled all debts owed by farmers, including tenant
farmers, and began a land reform program to break up the holdings
of absentee landlords and latifundists. Taraki thus offended the
feudal interest, which was strong in the country. Brzezinski regarded
Taraki as a Soviet asset, although he was largely indigenous in
origin. As Brzezinski later boasted to the Nouvel Observateur,
US destabilization teams launched a clandestine operation against
Taraki in early 1979, prominently playing the Islamic fundamentalist
card. In September 1979 there followed a US-backed coup by the
CIA asset Hafizulla Amin, who executed Taraki and rolled back
his reforms in the name of setting up a fundamentalist Islamic
state in the service of the feudal landowners. Amin’s reactionary
measures resulted in a backlash against him, and he was himself
toppled within two months. In the face of renewed assaults by
Brzezinski’s opium-poppy mujaheddin, the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan at Christmas, 1979. During the various phases of the
Afghan war that followed, the CIA always supported the most benighted,
the most reactionary, the most opium-mongering factions –
especially their favorite, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA was looking
for forces of absolute self-isolating negativity, incapable of
getting along with Iran or anyone else. In the decade of war that
followed (December 1979- February 1989), Afghanistan was economically
and demographically destroyed. The second generation of Brzezinski’s
mujaheddin, the Islamic fundamentalist students or Taliban, assumed
power in 1994. Like Pol Pot in Cambodia in the wake of Kissinger’s
bombing destruction of that country in the 1970s, the Taliban
represented an unspeakable retrogression towards barbarity. But,
just as Kissinger and G.H.W. Bush had supported Pol Pot, the Bush
41 administration found many ways to support the Taliban, who
were viewed as ideal because of their inability to ally with Iran
or any of the ex-Soviet central Asian republics. As Michael Parenti
has pointed out, the US taxpayers paid the salaries of the entire
Taliban government in 1999. (Parenti 65) And under Bush 43, this
support became even more explicit, as UNOCAL lobbyists sought
a deal with the Taliban to build their oil pipeline to central
Asia. During this phase, Kissinger, neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, retired
State Department anti-terror official Robert Oakley and Leili
Helms (daughter of the former CIA director) were successfully
lobbying on behalf of Unocal. The goal was to keep the Taliban
regime off the State Department terrorist state list, since listing
there would have blocked any pipeline deal. In his first spring
in office, Bush offered a large grant to the Taliban. This caused
columnist Robert Scheer to comment: “Enslave your girls
and women, harbor anti-US terrorists, destroy every vestige of
civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will
embrace you. That’s the message sent with the recent gift
of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan. The gift…makes
the US the main sponsor of the Taliban.” (“Bush’s
Faustian Deal with the Taliban,” Los Angeles Times, May
22, 2001)
Palestine – After Israeli had occupied the west bank of
the Jordan River, the Gaza strip and the Sinai peninsula in June,
1967, the Israelis found themselves ruling over some two million
Palestinians. Under the United Nations system it is illegal to
annex territory acquired through armed conflict without the approval
of the United Nations Security Council, which in this case was
not forthcoming. Rather, the UNSC passed resolution 242, calling
on Israel to withdraw to the internationally recognized borders
as they had been before June 1967. (In the run-up to the Iraq
war, Bush spokesmen accused Iraq of having violated some 17 United
Nations Security Council resolutions; they conveniently forgot
that Israel was the all-time champion in that department, since
Israel is currently in violation of some 30 UNSC resolutions regarded
the territories it has occupied since 1967. But the US never proposed
war to enforce compliance with those resolutions.) The Israeli
occupation of conquered Palestine was oppressive and humiliating,
and a national resistance soon emerged in the form of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization. Its leader was Yassir Arafat, a secular
nationalist more or less in the Nasser mold. Since the PLO had
few weapons, and since the Israeli army was a dominant presence,
the PLO began doing what the Jews had done between 1945 and 1948
against the British occupation of the same territory: they launched
guerilla warfare, which the occupiers quickly labeled terrorism.
The official Israeli line was that there was no Palestinian people,
but this was soon disproved. From the beginning, the Israeli Mossad
was active in conducting provocations which it sought to attribute
to the PLO and its peripheries: attacks on airliners and on the
1972 Olympic games in Munich are therefore of uncertain paternity.
The more horrendous the atrocity, the greater the backlash of
world public opinion against the PLO. There is no doubt that the
Mossad controlled a part of the central committee of the organization
known as Abu Nidal, after the nom de guerre of its leader, Sabri
al Banna. In 1987-88, just as the first Palestinian intifada uprising
was getting under way, there emerged in the occupied territories
the organization known as Hamas. Hamas combined a strong commitment
to neighborhood social services with the rejection of negotiations
with Israel and the demand for a military solution which was sure
to be labeled terrorism. Interestingly enough, one of the leading
sponsors of Hamas was Ariel Sharon, a former general who was then
a cabinet minister. These facts are widely recognized: US Ambassador
to Israel Daniel Kurzer, an observant Jew, stated late in 2001
that Hamas had emerged “with the tacit support of Israel”
because in the late 1980s “Israel perceived it would be
better to have people turning toward religion, rather then toward
a nationalistic cause.” (Ha’aretz, Dec. 21, 2001)
In an acrimonious Israeli cabinet debate around the same time,
Israeli extremist Knesset member Silva Shalom stated: “between
Hamas and Arafat, I prefer Hamas…Arafat is a terrorist in
a diplomat’s suit, while the Hamas can be hit unmercifully.”
(Ha’aretz, Dec. 4, 2001) This tirade provoked a walkout
by Shimon Peres and the other Labor Party ministers. Arafat added
his own view, which was that “Hamas is a creature of Israel
which, at the time of Prime Minister Shamir, gave them money and
more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities,
and mosques. Even [Israeli Prime Minister] Rabin ended up admitting
it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of Mubarak.”
(Corriere della Sera, Dec. 11, 2001) With incredible arrogance,
the Bush administration has pronounced Arafat as unfit to be a
negotiating partner. In effect, they are choosing Hamas –
or worse, an act of incalculable folly for Israel and for the
United States as well.
This list could go on and on. In Bangladesh, Kissinger persecuted
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League, the leading nationalist
force on the scene after independence in the early 1970s. In Lebanon,
Kissinger did everything possible to destroy the 1943 multi-sectarian
constitution and set off a civil war. Later, when Gen. Aoun, a
Maronite Christian but much more a Lebanese nationalist, attempted
to save the country’s independence, he was sabotaged by
the United States.
The flip side of this pattern is the brutal treatment meted out
to those in Europe who have wanted to make development deals with
the Arab states on the obvious basis of mutual advantage. A celebrated
case is that of Enrico Mattei, the president of the Italian state
oil company, ENI. Mattei was famous for challenging the Anglo-American
Seven Sisters oil cartel’s dominance of Arab nations by
offering the Arabs an alternative partner and a better deal: a
fifty-fifty split in place of the lopsided 60-40 or worse profit
sharing offered by the Anglo-American cartel. Mattei’s private
jet was tampered with by the CIA, resulting in his death in a
plane crash near Milan in October 1962. The German banker Juergen
Ponto was interested in financing development projects in the
Arab world and in Africa; he was eliminated by the Baader-Meinhof
gang in 1977. It is evident that the Baader-Meinhof was acting
as a false-flag operation for CIA and MI-6. There were some thirty
attempts to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle. There
were many motivations for this, but a prominent one was the pro-Arab
diplomacy of the French government.
Given the implacable US and NATO persecution of progressive Arab
nationalist leaders, this breed has tended to disappear entirely
from the scene. With the remaining choices narrowed to reactionary
monarchies, such as the Saudis, repressive dictatorships, such
as that typified by Hafez Assad, or experiments with Islamic fundamentalism,
it is not surprising that many young Arabs regard the fundamentalists
as the viable option. If the western powers do not like this,
they must be reminded that it is they who have, with their mindless
imperialist arrogance, rendered the progressive nationalists almost
extinct.
As I stated in 1994 in my address to the Inter-Religious Conference
in Khartoum, Sudan, the basis of Christianity comes down to the
two great commandments: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Love of God is a matter of faith, about the details of which it
may prove impossible to agree. But where agreement is eminently
possible is the second sphere: love your neighbor, the Golden
Rule. In today’s world, love your neighbor means good works
in the form of large-scale economic and infrastructural development
projects to tackle the still-unfinished business of the post-1945
world: the integral scientific, technological, and economic advancement
of the former colonial sector, of the third world. Here Christian
charity converges with Muslim social solidarity, with Confucian
benevolence, with the similar imperatives in Buddhism and Hinduism,
and with the imperatives readily embraced by secularists of good
will.
Not so long ago, the world witnessed United Nations Development
Decades, oil for technology conferences, and related international
efforts to promote world economic development. Today such efforts
have disappeared. All that remains is globalization, which is
destroying the Arab and Islamic worlds in the same way it is destroying
every other part of the planet. Deranged thinkers like Huntington,
Brzezinski, and Kissinger imagine that their crude geopolitics
is a clever, even cunning pursuit of US imperial self-interest.
In reality, their policies are suicidal. If we wish to identify
some policies which have actually worked well for the United States
in past years, the census looks as follows:
The Monroe Doctrine, for establishing the United States as a
supporter of the rights of small nations to the freedom of the
seas, and as an opponent of European colonialism.
The Atlantic Charter of 1941, for proposing the Four Freedoms
– freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear,
freedom from want – as the basis for the postwar world.
The Bretton Woods system of 1944-1971, for using New Deal methods
to foster the greatest economic expansion the world has ever seen.
The Marshal Plan of 1947, for providing a model of economic reconstruction
for war-ravaged Europe, and for preventing a resurgence of economic
depression in the US.
The US response to the 1956 Suez crisis, for repudiating imperial
domination of the Middle East, and advocating fair treatment for
the Arabs.
The strong world position of the US in the third quarter of the
twentieth century was largely due to these policies. Today’s
neocons and their fellow travelers are structurally incapable
of advocating anything so effective. New leadership in the wake
of the expected US party re-alignment is required. These policies
must of course be supplemented by the creation of an independent
and sovereign Palestinian state in the west bank and Gaza, made
viable by a comprehensive economic development program from which
all states in the region, including Israel, should benefit. In
the meantime, the US must drop its double standard on terrorism:
Israel’s policy of targeted assassination of its opponents
without benefit of judicial process is the essence of state sponsored
terrorism, no matter how many times it is endorsed by Cheney.
The US has armed Israel with $70 billion worth of weapons, including
the F-16s and missiles which are used to kill Palestinian civilians
in direct violation of US law. All such US aid should be used
as a lever to secure Israeli acceptance of the two-state solution.
These steps would go far towards inhibiting terrorist recruitment.
D.
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