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.

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DaanSpeak
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