Funds
Wired to Britain from Pakistan, LeT
Founder Placed Under ‘House Arrest’
From
ABC
News, Brian Ross and
Richard Esposito report that
British Intelligence had a
man on the inside of the
30-man cell that sought to
blow up US-bound airliners
in a plot becoming known as
“Bojinka
II,” nearly identical
in scope and method to
Operation Bojinka I in
1995. In
British Penetrate Terror
Cell, it is also
detailed that an arrest in
Pakistan two days earlier
caused the British operation
– Operation Overt – to
descend upon the cell before
they learned of the
individual arrested. A link
between the deep mole and
the arrested would have
apparently tipped the cell
to the British operation.
Also, the
BBC
reports that a
Pakistan arrest several
weeks ago originally
unearthed the plot,
which Pakistan claims
uncovered the plot and led
to the British
investigation.
While it was feared that
the Pakistani arrest on the
Afghan border days ago would
jeopardize the British
operation, it is worth
noting that the five
ringleaders of the 30-man
terror cell are not among
the apprehended and on the
loose, presumably still in
Britain. Word from Pakistan
would logically reach the
leaders first. Did they take
immediate evasive action and
run aground in haste without
informing the 24 who were
eventually arrested?
With regard to the nature
and connectedness of the
terrorists in the Bojinka II
cell, the
ABC
report characterizes the
cell members in a fashion
that is sure to be echoed by
far too many. Referring to
the plot as “homegrown” and
the British cell’s members
as “young, longtime
residents or citizens,
inspired by al Qaeda and
perhaps loosely linked to
the old hierarchical terror
group” misses the mark.
At the end of the day,
these “young, longtime
residents or citizens” of
Britain must be recognized
as no more British than they
are Mexican. Most of the
cell members were of
Pakistani origin or descent.
They clearly did not
identify with their host
nation nor hold any affinity
for it.
It is difficult to
imagine the condition as
‘loosely linked’ to
al-Qaeda, certainly with an
operation of this ambition
and scale. As the ‘foot
soldiers’ that they were,
their plot was either guided
and/or funded by al-Qaeda or
it was not. But, as should
be increasingly clear, the
name of the label – al-Qaeda
or otherwise – should matter
far less than is popularly
perceived. There is an ever
increasing trend among
terror groups to shelve
their ideological and
religious differences and
focus on the common enemy,
Israel and America -
Jews and Crusaders - and
all that ally with them in
the West, including Britain.
Further, make no mistake;
the “old hierarchical terror
group” is alive and well and
not a ‘new, busted-up
decentralized mess’ as the
chosen descriptor implies.
Consider the
quality of al-Zawahiri’s
latest messages and one
must conclude that funding
is still adequate and that
command and control is still
effective. al-Qaeda
leadership, bruised and
pursued, is not remanded to
the dark recesses of a cave
in Pakistan, cut off from
the rest of the world and
the rest of their terrorist
organization.
Here’s the rub: If the
plot was “homegrown,” as
asserted, and the terrorists
merely “al-Qaeda-inspired”
as opposed to al-Qaeda-led,
why would a terrorist arrest
in Pakistan cause the cell
to scatter? This expected
reaction is not consistent
with ‘loose links’ to an
arrested terrorist(s) in
Pakistan. What prompted
these arrests in Pakistan?
But more importantly,
where did the money for the
complex operation come from?
Who was funding the airline
tickets for dry runs and the
six to ten actual attack
flights? Who was funding the
lab equipment and chemicals
and supplying the technical
skills necessary?
Consider
Thursday’s arrest of Hafiz
Mohammed Saeed in
Lahore, Pakistan,
apprehended at virtually the
same time the British
arrests were made. Saeed was
the founder of
Lashkar-e-Taiba, the
terrorist group believed to
be
responsible for the July 11,
2006 synchronized train
bombings in Bombay, India
that killed more than 200
civilians. The
Lashkar-e-Taiba attack list
is quite extensive.
Lashkar-e-Taiba’s links
to al-Qaeda are both
intimate and strong. In
late 2004, Dan Darling
described the group as
“basically subcontracted by
al-Qaeda to run its
infrastructure, propaganda,
and recruiting efforts in
South Asia while the central
leadership remains
underground.”
Lashkar-e-Taiba was
banned by Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf
in 2002 following an
LeT and
Jaish-e-Mohammad
attack on the Indian
Parliament in December
2001.
Hafiz Mohammed Saeed
then turned his energies to
creating a new ‘charity’
called Jamaat al-Dawat,
whose benefactors include
many madrassas throughout
Pakistan. In fact, at least
one of the terrorists in the
July 7, 2005 London bombings
attended one of Jamaat al-Dawat’s
madrassas.
In April of this year,
the US State Department
officially listed Saeed’s
Jamaat al-Dawat as a
terrorist organization.
But it should be noted
that Saeed’s arrest is only
‘house arrest’ and for a
confinement duration of only
one month. Prone to fiery
speech and crowd incitement,
this is
not the first time Saeed
has been placed under ‘house
arrest’ by the Pakistani
government in 2006.
Was the charitable Saeed
a source of the Bojinka II
plotters’ funding? What
action initiated his ‘house
arrest’? Money was known to
have been wired to the
plotters from Pakistan,
which means authorities knew
of both ends of the
transaction
And what of Pakistan’s
claims of supporting the
British operation? Was it
genuine support or – with
the Lahore and Karachi
arrests that accompanied the
UK arrests Thursday – was it
possibly a matter of
Pakistan simply getting
ahead of the news knowing
the trail will inevitably
lead back to their own soil?
Regardless of the
unknowns, what is known is
that a terrorist plot on the
scale of the 9/11 attacks
was successfully thwarted
and pre-empted.
What is also known is
that all things al-Qaeda
inevitably lead directly to
Pakistan.
Sins of Statecraft: The War on Terror Exposed :: Theories on
Militarism and Prospects for Transformation ::
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/32944
"...1979, the year that international terrorism
found a new incarnation through consolidation of
converging interests and the “war on terror" was
conceived. (Its conception was necessarily
followed by a process of maturation: first
applied to the Cold War and in rhetoric within
limited theaters, such as the Palestine-Israel
situation; second in the post-Cold War
formulation of a “war on terror” plan during the
1990s; and third in its implementation after
9-11.)"
|
Few things are more crucial to our global situation today than a
comprehensive understanding of the fundamental habits and recent
overtly aggressive trend present in United States foreign policy. To
achieve such requires a look into the long-standing tradition of
creating external threats to conceal unsavory imperial operations
conducted elsewhere in the world. This paper includes an examination
of the US-USSR Cold War and the so-called “war on terror” as covers
for expansion of imperialism, and 9-11 in the context of provoked
and internally engineered first strikes throughout American history,
devoting much of its contents to theories on militarism and
post-World War II influence on policymaking—how and why those in
power do what they do.
The reasons for the use of the long-standing instruments of fear and
militarism in the cause of navigating the contours and undulations
of the Cold War are revealed in the context of the post-Cold War
“war on terror,” which employs the same rhetoric and means of
manipulation. Such revelations are not limited to identical methods,
but spring forth from statements voiced by the manipulators
themselves. A recent example (among many) came from the wife of
Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, founder of the Committee for the
Free World, and cofounder of a plethora of single-minded think tanks
ranging from the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present
Danger (CPD), Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Coalition for a
Democratic Majority, to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
In a 2004 Los Angeles interview, Decter stated, “We’re not in the
Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’re there
to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely,
oil.” [1]
Statements like these surface after years, even decades, of
manipulations that use very different and far more publicly
palatable rhetoric to arrive at the tipping point when pretexts “to
get” what manipulators want are achieved and exploited.
Regarding methods, again reflecting undulations in tensions between
presidents and individuals acting in groups to influence
policy—groups whose objectives invariably have little or nothing to
do with democracy and the welfare of the American people—a clear
pattern of self-serving interests emerges from the comparison of the
ascendancy of 32 CPD members to posts in the pro-Cold War Reagan
administration with the ascendancy of a roughly similar number of
PNAC members to posts in the pro- “war on terror” Bush
administration. Though the precise reasons have somewhat varied
between the end of World War II and today, they have in common the
convergent interests of such influential groups with likeminded
groups outside the US, who together stood to gain from imperial
ambitions pursued under the cloak of American projection of force as
a response to the well-fashioned threats of “communist enslavement”
and “international terrorism” respectively.
All of this is and has been about control of Central Asia and
counteracting or inhibiting Russian and Chinese moves to control its
resources. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observes, “For America, the chief
geopolitical prize is Eurasia.... Eurasia is the globe’s largest
continent and is geopolitically axial. That puts a premium on
maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a
hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s
primacy.” Importantly, he adds, “Moreover, as America becomes an
increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to
fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the
circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external
threat,” [2] a statement that should be understood in the context of
one made earlier in his book: “The public supported America’s
engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of
the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.” [3]
Daniel Yergin identified two axioms of Soviet intentions that led up
to the creation and eventual adoption in 1950 of the most important
foreign policy document of the last 56 years, NSC-68: the Riga axiom
of belligerency (a militarized version of George Kennan’s early,
hostile viewpoints while stationed in Riga and Moscow before and
during World War II) and the Yalta axiom (based on the greater
understanding achieved at the Yalta Conference with regard to
postwar visions that would employ cooperation, compromise, and
face-to-face diplomacy).[4] While in 1945 great strides were being
made under the Yalta axiom in Moscow meetings with Joseph Stalin, at
home the Yalta axiom was under attack from an inner circle of State
Department officials who recognized an economic opportunity in the
vacuum left by the fall of the Third Reich and the exhaustion of old
European powers. Notably, many in this inner circle that would later
trumpet the adoption of NSC-68 had worked together in Wall Street
investment firms, served in high military positions, or were
otherwise intimately connected to the corporate web from which they
stood to reap massive profits in a heightened military state. These
State Department officials, projecting the Riga axiom, insisted that
Russia was an aggressive totalitarian power bent on world conquest,
contradicting Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessments.[5]
Thus, between 1946 and late 1950 the Yalta axiom came to be rejected
by a confused and pliant President Truman, setting in motion a
lucrative tragedy and an escalating trend that continues to this
day.[6]
Two points illustrated by Jerry Sanders’ book, Peddlers of Crisis,
are useful in understanding manipulation. Firstly, NSC-68, while
presented as a military strategy in response to an imminent threat,
was in reality an economic strategy requiring military buildup to
suggest that a threat existed. Secondly, CPD was formed by
supporters of NSC-68 to manipulate the public and Congress into
embracing NSC-68’s recommendations. NSC-68 itself, drafted in
January 1950 and signed by Truman in April 1950, was not enough to
persuade, nor was the advent of the Korean War in June 1950. Only
after CPD was formed and issued a series of media statements,
followed by echoing statements from President Truman in December
1950, did the public and Congress perceive a threat grave enough to
motivate the adoption of NSC-68’s recommendations for “a three-fold
increase in military spending on nuclear and conventional forces—a
bold program of rearmament.” [7] In April 1950, when NSC-68 was
signed, four months after Truman had approved the hydrogen bomb
program, the US possessed some 500 atomic weapons and was producing
them at the rate of four per week, while the Soviets had only
recently tested their first atomic bomb and possessed at most a
dozen such weapons.[8]
This perception—or deception—highlights the thesis of this study:
that the US majority acquiesces to an aggressive arrogance arising
whenever the three spheres of financial, military, and political
powers fall into the hands of an elite self-serving minority that is
highly influential through media, lobbying, one-on-one persuasion,
and key connections within these spheres.
As NSC-68 reveals in its own language, and as revealed in the
statements of its supporters, the notion of an external threat (in
this case, the Soviet Union) was required to maintain US-European
trade advantages gained from World War II. The illusion of a Soviet
threat in Europe was key to preventing European trade partners from
ratifying the prevailing desire among Soviets and Europeans alike
for a neutralist trade environment, while the external threat in the
US was necessary to persuade the public and Congress into acceptance
of NSC-68’s huge defense budget increases, ostensibly to provide
protection, but in reality to legitimize the threat and produce
economic growth both in the US and Europe (whereas growth in Europe
meant more growth in the US).[9]
In other words, the threat was not as real as NSC-68’s economic
goals, but only the threat could achieve those goals, and only
through exaggeration. NSC-68 was therefore an offensive strategy
disguised as a defense against “communist enslavement.” The
resulting new foreign policy of what Sanders calls Containment
Militarism, adopted by Truman (and which should not be confused with
the conventional notion generated from the term “containment policy”
), consisted of a structure that grew and prevails today, requiring
new external threats to maintain today’s US- global trade
advantages, mainly produced in the intervening years (and
previously) through imperial coercion. Thus, the degree of deceit
necessary to sway public opinion also grew, often employing first
strikes against Western assets both to satisfy this demand for
acceptance/acquiescence, and to serve as pretexts for the placement
of forces in geostrategic regions and approval of finances necessary
to sustain key areas of the structure.
Today this geostrategy is directly linked to the predicted peak in
world oil production. Since lucrative control of renewable resources
is much more difficult to concentrate in the hands of a few, Western
nations have chosen to maintain their immediate investments and
establish supremacy over remaining energy reserves by supporting US
foreign policy, though they have little choice but to acquiesce and
follow US policy because of the strength of its military. In any
event, the exaggeration of threats in the “war on communism” have
given way to more virulent preemptive and preventive policies in the
“war on terror” that represent a trend far more devastating to
American founding principles and produce a danger to global security
on a scale not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Between 1798 and 2004, the United States conducted 322 operations
involving US forces abroad, not counting covert operations, disaster
relief, and routine alliance stationing and training exercises.[10]
153 of these occurred between 1946 and 2004, and have dramatically
increased in frequency decade by decade. This astounding number
represents the most prolific global projection of power by any
empire in history. Even worse, no nation in modern times has worked
so hard to kill independence movements, and the US has routinely
done so in the name of freedom and democracy.
In The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat, published in 1979, Alan
Wolfe states that, “Without a sharply negative view of an enemy, it
is difficult to justify an activist foreign policy.” [11] He rightly
suggested that “postwar American policy has gone through two peaks,
two valleys, and now seems to be entering a third peak,” with a peak
being a US assertion of strength against Soviet ideology represented
by an increased defense budget or interventions and symbolic
displays such as moving the American fleet. For the first peak,
Wolfe pointed to the period from the end of World War II to the
early 1950s, particularly the decision to build the hydrogen bomb
and the issuance of NSC-68, the blueprint for every belligerent
strategy report issued by the Pentagon under the Bush
administration, and similar documents drafted by Paul Wolfowitz and
PNAC prior to the ascendancy of George W. Bush to the presidency.
The second peak began in 1957 with the Gaither Report and culminated
in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The third peak began in 1976 with the
Team B Report, authorized by then CIA director George Bush Sr.; the
resulting push for intelligence community reform; and the
reappearance of CPD, which flooded the media with false notions of
an impending Soviet first strike.[12] (Paul Nitze was instrumental
in all three peaks as primary author of each of the three
belligerent documents.)
It could be argued that a third valley arrived with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, so sudden as to deflate and disappoint such
staunch neoconservatives as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz.
When asked in 1990 why he had stopped writing, Podhoretz lamented
that he had lost his compass and no longer knew what to think,
humorously noting that Kristol had moved all the way to Washington
just as “the spirit blew out of the Beltway.” [13] However, as
Stephen Cohen argues below, the US-USSR Cold War never ended.
Indeed, the consistent belligerent and bipartisan condescension of
US foreign policy toward Russia since 1991 is indicative of
deep-rooted and fundamental flaws that have plagued the US majority
in the form of an aggressive arrogance that arises whenever
financial, military, and political powers fall into the hands of a
negative-activist minority. (I apply the term “negative” to signify
the decidedly self-serving and willful use of violence in the
process of manipulating the majority.)
Stephen Blank, professor and expert on Russia at the US Army War
College, states: “The obvious implication of current policy is that
NATO under US leadership will become an international policeman and
hegemon in the Trans-Caspian, and define the limits of Russian
participation in the region’s expected oil boom.” [14]
Immediately after 9-11, Vladimir Putin promised support for Bush’s
“war on terror,” with the caveat that NATO cease its eastward push.
Bush agreed, and just as immediately set about pushing NATO
eastward. Professor Stephen Cohen of NYU points out that (thus) the
Cold War never ended, and with the US today openly stating that
Georgia and Ukraine are to become NATO partners, with US troops
present—and with Putin having drawn the line with Ukraine, as Russia
subsidizes much of Ukraine’s economy—a new and very real tension has
risen once again between the two largest possessors of nuclear arms.
(In fact, a US warship and 200 Marines were chased out of the
Russian province of Crimea just weeks ago by a massive group of
protesters.) [15]
Implicit in the above is that the illusion or projection of Cold War
triumphalism asserted under the Clinton and Bush II administrations
has lent additional leverage to those negative activists who were
already seeking global supremacy and a new external threat in the
wake of the Cold War. (While Russians saw the end of the Cold War as
an agreement between East and West, negative-activists in the US
declared a triumph of “freedom and democracy” over a “tyrannical
regime.” )
Moreover, for the average American, the valleys described by Alan
Wolfe—the mid 1950s, the 1960s and early 1970s (and the Clinton
years)—seemed to offer hope, but a sustained increase in general
prosperity that a shift away from the spending of a national
security state and toward domestic growth never arrived. Such a
shift would have required a sincere and sustained investment in the
rise of an international justice system, and the removal of US
military forces from around the world. Persistent extremists in
elite US foreign policy circles did all they could through these
valleys to see that this would never happen; America was the only
true force for good in the world, they argued, and had “a duty” to
project that force—with heavy emphasis on “force.”
The United States has shipped much its infrastructural technology
and economic wealth to Japan, South Korea, Germany, and elsewhere in
exchange for its continued overseas military presence and expansion,
some of it due to an obsession with roots in the racisms of 19th
century Manifest Destiny, all of it due to a determination to
control the economic affairs of the world through intimidation
rather than chart an equitable new course: “Indeed, if there is one
common thread running from 1945 to the present, it is the
ever-widening sphere of American containment of an unruly world,
with no end in sight.” [16]
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Cold War with the Soviet Union
was less about confrontation between two superpowers and more about
two superpowers ultimately exploiting the illusion of confrontation
for domestic and global ventures of a profitable nature. For Soviet
leaders, this illusion permitted the resolution and consolidation of
its internal difficulties, most prominently rooted in its
multiculturalism. Its borders grew more secure, and the suppression
of dissent became easier. For the United States, exploiting the
“threat of Soviet communism” in Europe fostered its wider economic
command in European and global affairs. There were actually three
cold wars, two of which are still raging: in East Asia, and in Latin
America. The United States found this “threat” convenient in both of
these regions, lending an easy excuse for basing its troops in East
Asia—which again goes back to America’s historic obsession with
China—and providing a distracting cover for long-standing exploits
in Latin America, installing dictators to allow American fruit
companies and other businesses to perpetually exploit the land while
indigenous farmers suffer immensely.[17] In fact, the best thing
that ever happened to help cover the United States’ imperial
ambitions in Latin America was the rise of Fidel Castro, allowing
the US to point to the “spread of communism” and thus legitimize
military operations, particularly under President Reagan, which in
nearly every case targeted and killed the rise of national
independence efforts, also known as democracy movements.[18]
As an undergraduate recipient of Oregon’s most prestigious award for
overseas study in Japan, and as a graduate with honors in Japanese
history, I was shocked to learn only after creating my
nontraditional independent masters degree program in Peace Studies
how the transfer of power in Korea, from Japanese to American hands
in September 1945, held in place much of the divisive Japanese
colonial structure and kept in power Koreans who had sided with the
Japanese, thus alienating nearly all Koreans and serving to thwart
attempts at reunified independence to allow occupation by US forces
to this day—a shameful trend repeated in Vietnam and countless
locations throughout recent history.[19]
If we for a moment equate occupation with terrorism rather than the
one-sided equating of anti-occupation movements with terrorism,
another advantage of using terrorism is illustrated by Harvard
Professor Stephen Rose (director of the Olin Institute, a primary
funding source for extremist think tanks): “The maximum amount of
force can and should be used as quickly as possible for
psychological impact—to demonstrate that the empire cannot be
challenged with impunity. We are in the business of bringing down
hostile governments and creating governments favorable to us.
Imperial wars end, but imperial garrisons must be left in place for
decades to ensure order and stability.” [20]
To approach an understanding of the nature of US foreign policy, it
is useful to begin with an assessment of arguably the most crucial
juncture in policymaking between the end of World War II and the
present: a period spanning the mid 1970s to the early 1980s.
Let us, therefore, back up to the subject of Midge Decter and
husband Norman Podhoretz for the sake of highlighting once again
their true objectives. Podhoretz’s end-of-the-Cold-War lament did
not last long, and indeed both he and his wife had apparently
overlooked the solution to their need for a new external threat,
which was present through a simple reorientation of a tactic laid
out in the 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism they
had attended. (This recount is best served with a brief discussion
of the years leading up to 1979, most of which is common knowledge.)
In 1974, when Gerald Ford took over for Richard Nixon in the White
House after Watergate, Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld insisted that
Ford appoint Dick Cheney as Assistant to the President. Ford had no
idea who Cheney was, but under the pressure of Rumsfeld’s
insistence, Ford approved Cheney’s appointment.
The following year, on November 4, 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney
executed the infamous Halloween Massacre, persuading Ford to
severely reduce the powers of the pro-détente, anti-Cold War Henry
Kissinger, limit the role of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and
most importantly, replace the proud Director of Central Intelligence
(DCI) William Colby with the extremely anti-détente and pro-Cold War
oil man George Bush Sr. Rumsfeld also bumped himself up to Secretary
of Defense, and Cheney moved up to Rumsfeld’s old position of White
House Chief of Staff.[21]
This set the stage for devastating intelligence reforms and the
eventual return of brutal policies in the CIA that had been
drastically curtailed after Watergate, Vietnam, and other sins of
statecraft.
Each year the CIA produces National Intelligence Estimates (NIE),
and William Colby had staunchly defended their veracity in showing
that the Soviet Union urgently sought parity through diplomacy (as
it had all along), was in severe decline economically, and strongly
desired an end to the Cold War. The NIE produced in 1976 showed
precisely this, but the new DCI George Bush Sr. called for an
independent team of outside analysts to challenge his CIA’s own
findings. Far from independent, each member of this group, called
Team B, was closely tied to the defense industry and all were
extreme anti-Soviet, anti-détente, pro-Cold War hawks. Members
included Paul Nitze, who had authored the scariest documents
throughout the Cold War, indeed had officially launched the Cold War
with his NSC-68 (while serving in the State Department as Director
of Policy Planning), and Paul Wolfowitz, Nitze’s protégé, who has
since produced the scariest post-Cold War documents.
Dissenting views were allowed in NIE in the form of footnotes, and
the most prolific writer of dissenting footnotes in the NIE of 1976
was General George Keegan.[22] Keegan had a history of creating
pretexts, among them the Northwoods plan (below), and the “death ray
scare” of the early 1970s designed to build public and military
opposition to détente. Keegan also had close ties, in the religious
fundamentalist sense, with Jack Kemp, Gary Bauer, General Daniel O.
Graham, and many other figures prominent in the rise of
interventionist policy after Team B.[23]
Team B did not challenge any facts whatsoever, but simply
embarrassed the youthful CIA team by alleging with great skill and
flourish that the Soviets were building fantastical new weapons in
preparation for a first strike. In any event, the outcome was that
Bush used Team B’s perspective to reform the entire basis for
assessing Soviet capabilities, so that henceforth NIE were based not
on facts (a.k.a. intelligence) but on imagined potential.
The results, coupled with increasing pressure from the reincarnated
CPD, forced the incoming President Carter to adopt a hard-line
foreign policy to the extent that by 1980 he was so strongly
outgunned by pro-Cold War people within the intelligence community
and the Pentagon, as well as within his own administration, that he
announced in his State of the Union address precisely what had been
put before him rather than what he may have believed or desired.
Chronologically digressing for a moment to provide useful
background, among the previous sins of statecraft in US history were
Operation Northwoods and Operation Mongoose of 1962, two parts of
one plan designed with help from both General Keegan and Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Lyman Lemnitzer. Northwoods was a
plan to target American citizens in several cities and put the blame
on Cuba, serving as a pretext for invasion of Cuba. (President
Kennedy rejected the plan, and some contend that this rejection led
Keegan, Lemnitzer, E. Howard Hunt, and others to plot his
assassination.) In the declassified Northwoods documents,
suggestions also include building a plane that looked like a Cuban
MIG fighter jet to shoot down a chartered US commercial plane filled
with students flying over Cuba on their way to a Caribbean holiday;
staging a military strike on the US base at Guantanamo dressed as
Cuban soldiers; and flying a remote-controlled commercial plane over
Miami and using a fake Cuban MIG fighter to shoot it down in broad
daylight for the American public to witness.
I pause to mention this because pretexts such as these have been
used throughout US history, and represent the rising trend—from
national to international—of organized assertions of combined powers
of influence exercised in the hands of a negative-activist minority
upon the majority in the form of terrorism. First strikes on US
assets have served as pretexts for almost every major war in which
it was involved. Even in its struggle for independence from Britain,
rebels in 1770 engineered a first strike against colonists, called
the Boston Massacre, to galvanize public opinion and demonize an
enemy. In extremely organized fashion, British soldiers were
provoked into killing five colonists—a pivotal event leading to the
War of Independence. Boston revolutionaries under the leadership of
Samuel Adams portrayed the event as a “cold-blooded slaughter of
defensive colonists revealing England as murderous and oppressive,”
and “proof that there was no alternative to war.” [24] The findings
of deep research into actual details of this event as noted in
Nafeez Ahmed’s The War on Truth are both startling and instructive
in understanding the efficiency of such methods.
Widely praised as the best critique of the official inquiry into
9-11, the final chapter of The War on Truth illustrates America’s
legacy of arranging first strikes against itself to establish new
external threats, to legitimize these threats in the minds of
congressional leaders, and to galvanize public sentiment for war.
Executive director of Britain’s Institute for Policy Research and
Development, Ahmed highlights Professor John McMurtry’s explanation
of such events as follows:
Shocking attacks on symbols of American power as a pretext for
aggressive war is, in fact, an old and familiar pattern of the
American corporate state…with an attendant corporate media frenzy
focusing all public attention on the Enemy to justify the next
transnational mass murder. Throughout there is one constant to this
long record of hoodwinking the American public into bankrolling ever
rising military expenditures and periodic wars for corporate
treasure…to provide the pretext and the public rage to launch wars
of aggression against convenient and weaker enemies by which very
major and many-leveled gains are achieved for the US
corporate-military complex.
Ahmed’s final chapter describes how such methods were systematically
applied to the Mexican-American War, and by the sinking of the
Maine, which sparked the Spanish-American War; the sinking of the
Lusitania, which ultimately brought the US into World War I; Pearl
Harbor, with overwhelming evidence that the Japanese attack was
deliberately provoked and allowed to occur to generate public
support for entry into World War II; Operation Northwoods, the
rejected plan to carry out acts of terrorism within US cities
designed to spark a war with Cuba; and the Gulf of Tonkin incident,
an official lie that succeeded as a pretext for US expansion of the
Vietnam War.[25] In this context, Ahmed points out, “it is perfectly
reasonable to consider the possibility that the 9-11 terrorist
attacks were the outcome of the same sort of geostrategic
thinking—rooted in long-standing political, social, and economic
forms—that gave rise to previous US operations along a similar
framework.”
Now back to 1979, the year that international terrorism found a new
incarnation through consolidation of converging interests and the
“war on terror” was conceived. (Its conception was necessarily
followed by a process of maturation: first applied to the Cold War
and in rhetoric within limited theaters, such as in Latin America
and the Palestine-Israel situation; second in the post-Cold War
formulation of a global “war on terror” plan during the 1990s; and
third in its implementation after 9-11.) On January 21, 1979, 170
admirals and generals published a letter to President Carter in
major US newspapers, calling for US military superiority over the
Soviet Union, the recognition of Israel’s strategic value and the
reinforcement of its military capabilities, and a final renunciation
of détente. The organizers of this campaign were the previously
mentioned General Lemnitzer, the Operation Northwoods Joint Chiefs
of Staff chairman from the early 1960s; General Daniel O. Graham, a
major Team B participant; and General Keegan, the second half of the
Northwoods leftovers and the footnote man from the 1976 NIE.[26]
Around June of 1979, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The United
States launched a covert operation to bolster anticommunist
guerrillas in Afghanistan at least six months before the 1979 Soviet
invasion of that country. We did not push the Russians into
invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they
would.” [27] The US had actively recruited Afghan warlords to form
terrorist groups along the northern border, forcing the USSR to
conduct a full-scale invasion in December to counter the US
destabilization program. Among the methods used by the US in this
program was the production and distribution of textbooks to schools
(madrassas) promoting the war-values of murder and fanaticism,
fostering a generation steeped in violence.
The US government ‘in collusion with Pakistan’s leaders took abusive
advantage of the opportunity…to rule out the creation of any
responsible and independent organization among Afghans…in complete
disregard to the Afghan people’s sovereignty and sacrifices.’ [28]
In other words, the United States once again crushed a democratic
uprising, resulting in the occupation of Afghanistan by Soviet
forces, and allowing the US to form its own resistance group against
the occupation. This is where the bin Laden family became deeply
involved. The family helped fund the rebellion, and enthusiastically
supported Osama bin Laden’s decision to join the struggle.
Between July 2 and July 5, 1979, in Nafeez Ahmed’s words from The
War on Truth, citing Philip Paull’s brilliant 1982 thesis on the
organized reinvention of international terrorism,
“a group of powerful elites from various countries gathered at an
international conference in Jerusalem to promote and exploit the
idea of ‘international terrorism.’ The (Jerusalem) conference (on
International Terrorism, or JCIT) established the ideological
foundations for the ‘war on terror.’ JCIT’s defining theme was that
international terrorism constituted an organized political movement
whose ultimate origin was in the Soviet Union. All terrorist groups
were ultimately products of, and could be traced back to, this
single source, which—according to the JCIT—provided financial,
military, and logistical assistance to disparate terrorist movements
around the globe. The mortal danger to Western security and
democracy posed by the worldwide scope of this international
terrorist movement required an appropriate worldwide anti-terrorism
offensive, consisting of the mutual coordination of Western military
intelligence services.” [29]
The nonexistent target of this antiterrorist program leads us to ask
what the real target was.
According to former State Department official Richard Barnet, the
inflation of Soviet-sponsored ‘international terrorism’ was useful
precisely for demonizing threats to the prevailing US-dominated
capitalist economic system. [30]
It is crucial to identify the architects of the JCIT’s terrorism
project. Thanks to Philip Paull, we know they were, “present and
former members of the Israeli and United States governments, new
right politicians, high-ranking former United States and Israeli
intelligence officers, the anti-détente, pro-Cold War group
associated with the policies of Senator Henry M. Jackson—a group of
neoconservative journalists and intellectuals—and reactionary
British and French politicians and publicists.” Among prominent
individuals who participated were Menachem Begin, Benjamin
Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, and George Bush Sr. (The aforementioned
anti-détente, pro-Cold War group associated with the policies of
Senator Henry Jackson are well known to be Paul Wolfowitz, Richard
Perle, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan, Charles Horner,
and James Woolsey, to name a few.)[31]
Importantly, Paull’s thesis includes the entire list of the JCIT
participants, many of them intimately connected to the 1976 Team B
assault on National Intelligence Estimates and to CPD. Participants
from the United States at this conference, arranged by Benjamin
Netanyahu and George Bush Sr., were neoconservative organizers
Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter (CPD), Senator John
Danforth, Professor Joseph Bishop, General George Keegan (Team B),
Ray Cline (former CIA deputy director who had assisted with
Operation Northwoods, and director of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies), Jack Kemp (CPD), Lane Kirkland (CPD’s
connection to the AFL-CIO), journalist George Will, nuclear
physicist and staunch Cold War hawk Edward Teller, Richard Pipes
(Team B, CPD), Bayard Rustin (CPD’s connection to the A. Philip
Randolph Institute), Professor Thomas Schelling (RAND), Ben
Wattenberg (CPD), Claire Sterling, and Senator Henry “Scoop”
Jackson. Participants also came from Britain, France, Italy, the
Netherlands, West Germany, Canada, Ireland, and the largest
contingency was comprised of Israeli military, government, and
intelligence service personnel. The bulk of the international
representatives not from Israel and the US were media propagandists
long connected to covert operations.[32]
In 1981, some of the conference attendees published books, including
Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s
International Terrorism Challenge and Response: Proceedings of the
Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, asserting the
existence of this Soviet-backed threat.
For a decade or more, the United States government, like the
governments of most Western powers, was largely silent on the
question of Soviet complicity in international terrorism. Beginning
in about 1979, and culminating in 1981 with the publication of
Claire Sterling’s book, The Terror Network, the evidence that the
Soviet Union had provided substantial supplies and training to a
broad spectrum of terrorist organizations became so compelling that
it was difficult to deny it. [33]
In 1982, within just a few years of this conference, Philip Paull,
the masters degree student at San Francisco State University, used
his thesis to demonstrate that the JCIT’s literature and source
documentation was profoundly flawed, with authors citing each other
and altering official documents. Its assertion that there was a
ten-fold increase in international terrorism between 1968 and 1978
had been deliberately fabricated, and contradicted CIA data showing
a decline.
According to Ahmed: “It also routinely relied on techniques of
blatant disinformation, misquoting and misrepresenting Western
intelligence reports, as well as recycling government sponsored
disinformation published in the mainstream media. Paull thus
concludes that the 1979 JCIT was:
... a successful propaganda operation... the entire notion of
‘international terrorism’ as promoted by the Jerusalem Conference
rests on a faulty, dishonest, and ultimately corrupt information
base.... The issue of international terrorism has little to do with
fact, or with any objective legal definition. The issue, as promoted
by the JCIT and used by the Reagan administration, is an ideological
and instrumental issue. It is the ideology, rather than the reality,
that dominates US foreign policy today.”
Nevertheless, Ahmed continues,
The new ideology of ‘international terrorism’ justified the Reagan
administration’s shift to ‘a renewed interventionist foreign
policy,’ and legitimized a ‘new alliance between right-wing
dictatorships everywhere’ and the government. Thus, the
administration had moved to ‘legitimate their politics of state
terrorism and repression,’ while also alleviating pressure for the
reform of the intelligence community and opening the door for
‘aggressive and sometimes illegal intelligence action,’ in the
course of fighting the international terrorist threat. [34]
In other words, this plan was similar in nature to the Team B
assault on intelligence in that it was an effort to fan Cold War
flames and produce stronger intelligence community cover for
continued and further imperial projections, which was the primary
purpose of the US-USSR Cold War in the first place (as University of
Chicago professor of history Bruce Cumings and East Asia expert and
former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson suggest).
Upon taking office in January 1981, Reagan outlined his new foreign
policy in a speech by Alexander Haig, which boiled down to an
adoption of the JCIT theme: “International terrorism will take the
place of human rights in our concern.” [35] Thus, the 1979 US
destabilization program using terrorist groups to lure the Soviets
into Afghanistan was used by the US to call the Soviet invasion
“terrorism” and to point to that invasion as a model for
“Soviet-backed terrorism” around the world.
A nation of such greed and superior strength will often allow itself
to be attacked because it can afford to do so, and because in the
minds of a negative-activist minority it makes strategic sense to do
so. In Inventing the Axis of Evil, Bruce Cumings notes that:
From Polk’s attack on Mexico to the South’s shelling of Fort Sumter,
the sinking of the Maine and the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Korean
War, the Tonkin Gulf incident, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait,
presidents who were bent on war or not, expecting it to erupt or
not, nonetheless waited until the enemy made the first move. [36]
Cumings goes on to point out that the George W. Bush
administration’s invasion of Iraq did not fit that typical
pattern—though it is now clear from documents and statements, many
of them authored by Paul Wolfowitz, that this administration (and
its supporting base of influential negative-activist groups) was
obsessed with Middle East intervention and global dominion via force
long before they took office, with Iraq as their first stepping
stone. Thus, 9-11 was a plausible pretext, and one for which
President Bush’s administration was willing to wait.
Paul Wolfowitz’s obsession with Iraq dates back at least to 1973. It
was then that Wolfowitz—who had studied under the pro-Cold War
nuclear weapons advocate Albert Wohlstetter at the University of
Chicago, and whose father had been Albert Wohlstetter’s math teacher
at Columbia University—visited the Pentagon and asked why there were
no war room contingencies for the Persian Gulf. Later, while serving
under President Carter in the capacity of Deputy Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Regional Programs and tasked with generating a
Limited Contingency Study to examine possible third-world threats in
regions including the Middle East, Wolfowitz voiced the view that no
attention was being paid to the possibility of the Soviets turning
southward to seize the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. He advised
the deployment of military equipment to the Gulf, but his advice was
rejected. Indeed, the first written expression of such Middle East
contingencies appeared in the 1977 Military Strategy and Force
Posture Review authorized by President Carter (also known as
Presidential Review Memorandum 10/NSC-10), which incorporated
Wolfowitz’s studies.[37] After joining the Reagan administration,
his advice was accepted and tankers of military equipment were
anchored in the Persian Gulf (and later used by George Bush Sr.).
In 1986, according to Ahmed:
Osama bin Laden’s activities occurred ‘with the full approval of the
Saudi regime and the CIA.’ Under contract with the CIA, he and the
family company built the multi-billion dollar caves known as the
Tora Bora complex: ‘to serve as a major arms storage depot, training
facility, and medical center for the Mujaheddin.’ [38]
With CIA support to override visa requirements, Osama rounded up
recruits and sent them into the United States for terrorist training
by the CIA; the recruits then returned to fight against Soviet
forces. At the height of this operation, the US was shipping 65,000
tons of arms annually to Osama bin Laden’s fighters. Pakistani
operatives in contact with bin Laden received assistance from
“American Green Beret commandos and Navy SEALS in various US
training establishments,” and by 1988, Jane’s Defense Weekly
reported that “with US knowledge, bin Laden created Al-Qaeda (The
Base): a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells
spread across at least 26 countries.”[39]When Iraq invaded Kuwait
after the fall of the Soviet Union, Osama bin Laden attempted to
rally the Saudi royal family to organize civil defense and raise a
group of Afghan war veterans to fight against Iraq. This offer was
declined, and instead the royal family accepted the stationing of
300,000 US soldiers. This is said to be the point at which Osama
chose to become an enemy of the Saudi regime, although according to
a classified intelligence report, a deal was struck with the tacit
approval of the CIA that allowed Osama to leave Saudi Arabia with
his funding and supporters. The deal also stipulated that funding
for his activities would continue with the caveat that he not target
the Saudi kingdom.[40]Al-Qaeda subsequently received increased
funding through Saudi Arabia, stronger organizational support from
Pakistani intelligence services, and more equipment and training
from the CIA. Its network received direct assistance from these
three sources, with active and tacit support of Western intelligence
agencies in spreading to 40 countries and conducting pro-Western
operations in Macedonia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Chechnya (and Moscow), Bosnia,
Philippines, Spain, Morocco, Kenya, and others (including the US and
United Kingdom), covering key regions where Western interests are at
stake: the Balkans, the Caucasus, North Africa, the Middle East,
Central Asia, and the Asia Pacific—all central to control of the
Eurasian continent.[41] Thus, in the wake of the Cold War with
Russia, US means of statecraft grew more aggressive.
Following the departure of Soviet forces, Afghanistan experienced
heavy conflict between various factions; among the most brutal of
these was the Northern Alliance (whose portrayal in US media after
9-11 was anything but brutal). By the mid 1990s, several factions
joined to form the Taliban movement, which captured Kabul and took
power in 1996, reportedly orchestrated by Pakistani intelligence and
the oil company Unocal,[42] and approved by the CIA, to provide
easier oil pipeline negotiations and the greater chance of its
successful construction through Afghanistan. In other words, the
Taliban were installed because they were easier to bribe than the
previous leadership. These negotiations occurred during the mid to
late 1990s between the Taliban and current US Ambassador to Iraq
Zalmay Khalilzad (then a Unocal advisor). The negotiations involved
Condoleeza Rice (then an advisor for Chevron), current President of
Afghanistan Hamid Karzai (then an advisor for Unocal), and Enron,
which paid $750,000 for the pipeline survey using a grant funded by
US taxpayers.[43] However, the negotiations deteriorated in the year
prior to 9-11, leading to a major US invasion plan,[44] for which
wargames were conducted in January 2001.[45] From February to May
2001, Vice President Dick Cheney gathered executives from the
world’s major energy corporations for his Energy Task Force
meetings. Maps acquired by Judicial Watch show the carving up among
these corporations of Iraq’s oilfields and much of its other
infrastructural assets. [46]
In 1993, the bombing of the World Trade Center had led investigators
to a wealth of evidence indicating intelligence community
complicity, and warnings of another, larger attack. In 1995, Project
Bojinka, in which eleven commercial jets were to be hijacked and
flown into major buildings in the United States, was thwarted,
producing another mass of evidence that planes would be used as
flying bombs. The top concern of Olympic officials for the 2000
Sydney games, in fact, was an airliner-based attack by al-Qaeda.[47]
Subsequent investigations strongly indicated that the next attack
date would be September 11, the anniversary of the 1996 conviction
of those caught in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing campaign.[48]
Throughout the years leading up to 9-11, especially in the nine
months prior to the attacks, investigators and representatives from
dozens of nations and within US borders attempted to warn top White
House and US intelligence officials of an attack set for the second
week of September 2001 using hijacked planes as flying bombs. All
attempts were systematically ignored. Statements by top officials
immediately after the attacks, that no one was prepared for or could
have predicted the events—and that no plans for an invasion of
Afghanistan existed—therefore, were lies. In fact, in October 2000,
the Pentagon held an evacuation drill with the theme that an
airplane had been hijacked and flown into the building.[49] Warned
of an impending al-Qaeda attack on the Genoa, Italy, G8 Summit in
July 2001, the office of President Bush, who was scheduled to
attend, arranged to have the skies cleared and secured, just as they
had been for the 2000 Olympic games.[50] Also in July 2001, US
representative Tom Simons warned Taliban leaders, “we will offer you
a carpet of gold or bury you with a carpet of bombs.” [51]
So, the US had at last put its reinvented (post-Cold War)
international terrorism plan to work, knowingly paving the path to
the “war on terror” well before it began. This military option was
perfect for those who longed for a new Pearl Harbor for economic
gain at the hands of “international terrorists.” The groundwork was
complete; the evil mastermind created, and all that was needed to
complete the Unocal pipeline was a legitimate excuse for taking
control of the region. The CIA was still negotiating the pipeline
deal in August 2001 while troops were already stationed in
surrounding states. Thus, all that was needed was a trigger, a
pretext to galvanize public opinion.
In June 2001, Paul Wolfowitz’s speech to the graduating class at
West Point had cited Pearl Harbor and stressed the imminence of a
similar surprise.[52] On September 9, two days before the attacks,
President Bush was presented with detailed plans to invade
Afghanistan and remove the Taliban before the heavy snowfalls of the
Afghan winter.[53] The plans highlighted a global campaign against
al-Qaeda. How long, we must ask, were the Pentagon and CIA drawing
up these plans simultaneous to their operations that had created and
supported the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the first place? The answer,
according to law professor Francis Boyle, is four years, with
wargames and troop gatherings in neighboring states for this
invasion commencing in 1997.[54]
After September 11, top insiders of the
military-industrial-academic-congressional-thinktank complex
exploited a fearful electorate, not because of a real threat, but
because the door to profits had been kicked open. This is why
security has not improved, only the spending for war and the price
of oil to pay for it have increased while profits have skyrocketed.
According to Ahmed:
A plausible conclusion from all this is that the (2001-present) US
military campaign in Afghanistan, assisted by Pakistani military
intelligence, was not really designed to destroy al-Qaeda at all.
Rather, it was designed to crush the (uncooperative) Taliban regime,
in the knowledge that al-Qaeda would be displaced elsewhere to
safety. Fighting a ‘war on terror’ against al-Qaeda had never been
the real goal of the plans for a military invasion of Afghanistan,
which had been formulated years before 9-11. Those plans were
motivated by other strategic and economic interests. But the 9-11
terrorist attacks happened to provide a convenient and powerful
pretext to implement those plans, as well as other geostrategic
imperatives. [55]
In other words, the US created the threat and, through the resultant
fear, the worldwide authoritarian means to pretend to deal with it
while exercising the full scope of its imperial ambitions. This is
why the US has more than 750,000 troops in at least 134 countries
today.[56] Moreover, that the US knowingly harbored al-Qaeda cells
throughout the 1990s and up to if not beyond 9-11 lends a new
perspective to President Bush’s post-9-11 promise to “make no
distinction between those who committed these terrible acts and
those who harbor them.”
On September 16, 2001, Osama bin Laden issued a statement to Al
Jazeera: “The US government has consistently blamed me for being
behind every occasion its enemies attack it. I would like to assure
the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to
have been planned by people for personal reasons.” [57] Evidence
appears to support his contention that 9-11 was not a result of his
orders, but rather a convenient outcome of manipulations of people
within his sphere of influence by oil company representatives,
intelligence services, and others in preceding years.
Speaking of Enron, it is Professor Peter Dale Scott’s opinion that
the American people remain traumatized by the 2000 election, a
crisis that was substantially influenced by Enron’s interests in
Afghanistan. Enron paid Christian Coalition president Ralph Reed
$500,000 to stop John McCain’s campaign, and was the biggest donor
to the Bush campaign.[58] (Enron was also one of the largest donors
to the Gore campaign.) It is plausible that 9-11 was on the table of
persons other than Osama bin Laden, especially in light of
revelations regarding 9-11 complicity of top-level American Airlines
officials at its center in Fort Worth, Texas.[59]
Regardless, Professor Scott is correct in stating that:
We are living in an atmosphere which creates the possibility for
minorities to govern acquiescent majorities. Covert power produces
fallout similar to nuclear power: trained terrorists turn on their
former trainers, the criminal complicity of governments which
hinders prosecution of such people, and society’s overall
corruption. The result is deep politics: the immersion of public
political life in an immobilizing substratum of unspeakable scandal
and bad faith, and the result in practice is 9-11. [60]
The fallout of training people how to blow things up and kill others
gives them an upper hand, because secrets are shared that cannot be
revealed in the homeland, in this case the US. All parties complicit
agree not to implicate one another.
Americans had double agents in al-Qaeda and in the Project Bojinka
group (the Philippines’ Abu Sayyaf), which merged and melded with
al-Qaeda from the very beginning. Double agents become triple
agents, and their intermediaries are up to their own misdeeds or
simply unable to report all the information to their superiors. All
in all, with Enron’s stake in the Central Asian Republics [and
Halliburton, Unocal, Chevron, et al] and the 2000 election, the best
possible outcome for those who were put in office—and setting
conditions for the indefinite control of the majority in the US—was
9-11, legitimizing entry into the region on a massive scale whether
engineered or not. [61]
The Cold War phenomenon of a foreign policy driven more by domestic
politics than concerns for national security has in the transition
to “war on terror” become reversed: domestic policies are in large
part driven today by the peripheral effects of and blowback from the
rise to prominence of a grand neo-Manifest Destinarian vision. In
the words of Bruce Cumings, “Not since McKinley seized the
Philippines have we had a president who justifies his aggression by
virtue of an open pipeline to God.” [62]
This points to an almost self-fulfilling prophecy or cultivation of
an international terrorist threat as envisioned by the JCIT back in
1979, again, invented and then reinvented not to counter Soviet
actions, but “useful for demonizing threats to the prevailing
US-dominated capitalist economic system.” The crux of Philip Paull’s
thesis is that the JCIT represented a precisely coordinated and
globally oriented propaganda network for the purposes of selling a
pretext for war. This is what the so-called “war on terror” really
is, and Americans would not have accepted it without a massive media
propaganda effort accompanying an attack against the United States,
or with the kind of enlightenment about such tyrannical behavior
that a truly competent education system should provide.
Democrat and Republican administrations have been equally complicit
in using invented threats as cover for imperial expansion. No
fundamental changes in this pattern have occurred as a result of the
election of a new president—ever. The current Bush administration
has made the most effective use of the ideology of international
terrorism; the only difference is the Soviet Union as the alleged
sponsor has been replaced by the newly invented and CIA-approved
transnational Islamist threat at taxpayer expense. This point is
crucial: Power in the United States is conventionally believed to be
derived from the consent of the governed, yet the governed have
unknowingly paid the salaries of every Taliban leader and member
(thus tacitly supported the immense suffering under their
leadership), paid for Pakistani intelligence services, paid for
pipeline surveys and construction, paid for CIA and Pentagon black
operations and negotiations between US representatives and Taliban
leaders, paid for every gun and bullet used in installing and
removing them, and for everything throughout the Cold War and since
that had nothing to do with promoting the general welfare.
This small story of Afghanistan is just the tip of the tyranny
iceberg. For example, since abandoning the democratization of Japan
in 1952 in favor of using it as a permanent military base, the US
continues to pay Japan (and other nations) with the exportation of
technology, and jobs lost in the US, in exchange for acquiescence to
and support for the US military presence of some 100,000 troops in
East Asia.
Nearly all of these wars and external threats are and have been for
US economic gain in various regions of the world. Corporations feed
on profits from conflict and the threat of conflict. In my research,
I went looking for companies on the Pentagon payroll, expecting to
find weapons manufacturers. But, in a stroke of lucrative genius,
Dick Cheney had begun the outsourcing boom of every aspect of
militarism to the private sector before leaving office in January
1993 by commissioning Halliburton to conduct a study on hiring firms
to move US forces abroad rapidly. Halliburton itself responded by
accepting the task of transporting troops to Somalia, and by
subsequently hiring Cheney (who, while in public service,
nevertheless continues to receive kickbacks from Halliburton [63]).
The Clinton administration then fueled the boom with great zeal,
hiring Halliburton to assist in outsourcing everything from milk
shakes and missiles to all-beef patties with special sauce, lettuce,
cheese, pickles, and onions on sesame-seed buns.[64]
During the Cold War with Russia, US weapons production was dispersed
among the 50 states to motivate representatives to continually
approve weapons programs for the sake of jobs in their respective
states, however wasteful these weapons were for the taxpayer,
however destructive they were to social progress. But from the 1990s
outsourcing, I found more than 300,000 companies on the Pentagon
payroll, including Campbell’s Soup, Avon Cosmetics, Bumble Bee
Seafood, and Hallmark Cards. I also found more than 350 universities
among these companies. San Diego city proper has 3,600 DOD-dependent
companies, including 12 colleges.[65] In my town, Eugene, Oregon,
there are 56 companies on the Pentagon payroll, including my school,
University of Oregon. In Lowell, Oregon, with a population of 750
people, ten companies work for the Pentagon, and whether they make
shovels, ladders, or gun barrels, that small town pulls in $1.5
million a year, making it a junior partner in the structure of
dependence on militarism, not to mention less likely to question the
aggressive actions of its government.[66] Moreover, many board
members of the largest consumer product firms also sit on the boards
of the largest media and defense corporations.[67]
America’s top industry since 1950 has been weapons. The US is
addicted to conflict, and in a capitalist society, profits must
escalate. Thus, it was remarkably profitable for the Bush
administration to invent an “axis of evil” in a famous January 2002
speech, despite the complete falsehoods employed in doing so. By
2002, Iraq, as is now widely known, was a nation on its knees. Iran
had undergone a twelve-year pro-democracy reformation in the wake of
the Iran-Iraq war, with women performing a far greater role in
society than ever before. North Korea had signed an agreement with
the Clinton administration in 1994 that halted its nuclear
ambitions, provided a window for reunification with South Korea, and
would have led to the removal of US forces. [68]
Therein lies the reason for the Bush administration breaking of this
agreement and the inclusion of North Korea in the “axis of evil”
speech. With that one speech all three nations became external
threats, alienating them immediately, and thus to an extent
fulfilling Bush’s assertion that they are anti-American. In light of
the fact that North Korea today insists on direct talks with
Washington alone indicates that the issue for North Korea is about
the breaking of the previous agreement. The fact that the US insists
on bringing four additional nations into the discussion can thus be
seen as an effort to legitimize the status quo (of US forces in
South Korea, and the separation of North and South).
The recent US response to the testing of missiles by North Korea
illustrates the extent to which deceit is employed in White House
rhetoric to maintain military forces abroad. The rhetoric is
designed to suggest that the world community is united with the Bush
administration’s determination to maintain a military presence in
South Korea, and that indeed it is North Korea that is refusing to
be rational in joining the world community as a separate nation,
while the previous (1994) agreement framework and the desire on the
part of both North and South to reunify without the presence of US
forces are rendered as non-issues. Even before the tests were over,
Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill asserted that not only
were nations united against North Korea’s actions, but that North
Korea was stubbornly refusing a rational solution, as if the
previous agreement had never existed:
Just about every responsible country in the world weighed in against
it… So, the first thing they have done is to unite us all…. Well,
the provocation is that—you know, we put out, last September, a
pretty in-depth agreement, an agreement in principle on how we could
denuclearize North Korea, and, in return, they would be offered an
open road into the international community. And, so, instead, they
seem to want to go in another direction.
In reality, by breaking the 1994 agreement, it is the Bush
administration that has chosen “another direction.” Moreover, out of
the group of six nations the Bush administration has tasked to
“settle” the situation—aside from the US and North Korea itself—
two, Japan and South Korea, are essentially US military states, far
from being capable of issuing opposing opinions on the matter; and
the other two, China and Russia, are anything but united or aligned
with the Bush administration’s position. This is well known, and
Hill touches on it in his own statements, which, as seen between the
lines and in light of statements by China and Russia, carry a heavy
degree of condescension toward the two larger powers and attempts to
force North Korea into “international organizations” that the US
clearly dominates:
The six parties—you know, originally, or…back in the 1990s, we were
trying to deal with this bilaterally. And it was basically the US
and North Korea. And the US and North Korea was not prepared,
really, to reach agreement. So, Japan is a part of that. South Korea
is part of that. China and Russia are all part of the six-party
process. And the point is that when we reach settlement—and I do
believe that, at some point, we will reach a settlement—all of these
countries have a role to play. I mean, we are very concerned about
this. The—we have been talking to our South Korean allies, our
Japanese allies. And we’re going to start having some in-depth
discussions with the Chinese. And we’re going to see what we can do.
Part of the draft, the September agreement, was that North Korea
needs energy. Well, South Korea is going to be providing them
energy. They need economic assistance. Japan was prepared, under the
September agreement, to provide that kind of economic assistance.
We’re prepared to help them—help North Korea get into international
organizations. [Emphasis mine.]
The US position, as seen in Hill’s comments, can also be seen as a
pretext for pushing missile defense:
So, it is a provocation. I mean, we’re obviously going to have to be
working with our partners about how to protect ourselves. After all,
we had a little country firing off six missiles in different
directions. You know, clearly, this is a threat to a number of
countries in the region. So, we have to look at the whole issue of
how to defend ourselves. [69]
Again, Bruce Cumings helps illustrate the dangers inherent in
concentrating power in the hands of a few:
In a classic article in 1941, Harold Lasswell defined ‘the Garrison
State’ as one in which ‘the specialists on violence are the most
powerful group in society.’ North Korea is a classic garrison state,
perhaps the best example in world history of a thoroughly
militarized nation; this was their (unfortunate) answer to the
defining crisis of the regime—occupation by an American army. But we
are also well advanced toward a national security-dominated system,
making the country of the founding fathers unrecognizable above all
to them. [70]
It can be safely argued that a fourth and permanent “peak” in Alan
Wolfe’s ups and downs of militarist postures and rhetorical gestures
arrived in the form of official statements following the events of
September 11, 2001, and in national security documents under the
Bush administration beginning in 2002 and culminating with the
Quadrennial Defense Review and National Security Strategy of 2006,
which openly declare a “long global war” to “rid the world of evil,”
and cite several future enemies, including China. These public
documents—to which the public is largely oblivious—have deep roots
in NSC-68.
The rhetorical summation of NSC-68 as a blueprint for all subsequent
scary documents intended to motivate citizens and representatives
alike can be observed in a single sentence, typifying Paul Nitze’s
style: “The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is
animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks
to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world.”
In light of the fact that Paul Wolfowitz began working closely with
Paul Nitze in 1969, it is of interest to compare that statement with
these excerpts from an April 2004 speech by Paul Wolfowitz, honoring
Paul Nitze at The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies (where Wolfowitz had both taught and
served as dean during the Clinton years):
When Don Rumsfeld and I had lunch with members of the 9-11
commission recently, one member asked what could they do to ensure
that their report would make a real difference. What I told them,
basically, was to write something similar to George Kennan’s Long
Telegram or Paul Nitze’s NSC-68.
I hope that we might agree that the phenomenon of terrorist
fanaticism has presented itself to us with such a horrible and
menacing face that we need to confront it with the same openness of
mind and breadth of vision that a young Paul Nitze confronted the
menace of Soviet communism with more than 50 years ago. Like 50
years ago, there is an urgency and a need to act. As NSC-68
explained so well, the Soviet threat was not just military, but
ideological. In some ways, the ideology of terrorist fanaticism is
even more dangerous. With them, we face an enemy who hides among the
shadows, shifting positions and methods with the wind. As they go
about their ugly business, they exploit the freedom of open
societies. There is one constant, however, across half a century.
Theirs, too, is an ideology of evil. But today we face an enemy that
not only hates freedom; it hates life itself and worships death.
This is not about America imposing its values on other people. It’s
about America enabling other people to enjoy the values from which
we benefit so enormously. [71]
In other words, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had lunch with members of the
9-11 Commission (tasked with investigating government failures)
during its deliberations, whereupon Wolfowitz advised them to write
what was essentially a declaration of war.[72]
It is a fact that Iraq was discussed within the Bush Cabinet just
hours after the attacks on 9-11, and it is a fact that two months
later, during the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, President Bush
asked Donald Rumsfeld to begin plans for invading Iraq. What we are
left with, then, with this “long war” to “rid the world of evil,” is
a permanent state of defense buildup and preparation for advanced
warfare, and other lucrative perpetual peaks of power assertion via
real interventions and official (and belligerent) Pentagon
strategies. It is not comforting that likely and so-called moderate
presidential candidates such as Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton
support the war in Iraq, or that Republican Senator John McCain, who
speaks against torture, also stated that, “The United States is the
greatest force for good in the world. We have not an obligation to
go out and start wars but to spread democracy and freedom throughout
the world.” [73] Both views keep the past ghosts of our manifest
failures alive to threaten our future while fortunes flow to the
ruling minority.
Coincidentally, the 9/11 attacks were ultimately fortuitous for the
Bush administration, which was facing both a domestic and an
international crisis of legitimacy prior to 9/11. Under the mantle
of the new ‘war on terror’ that followed the attacks, the government
was able to significantly divert and reverse these trends. The
domestic crackdown on basic civil rights, combined with the
demonization of dissent, has arrived part and parcel with the
granting of unlimited war powers—lending the US state a free hand to
embark on a new unlimited war against any regime that challenges US
interests. [74]
In a Meet the Press interview televised on March 2, 2003, Richard
Perle was asked about the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq.
Perle gave this reply: “If the whole world were democratic, we’d
live in a much safer international security system, because
democracies do not wage aggressive wars.” [75] His associate,
Michael Ledeen, asserts that “Every ten years or so, the United
States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it
against the wall, just to show the world that we mean business.”
[76] Likewise, in an interview with Ted Koppel, William Kristol,
cofounder of PNAC (along with Perle, Ledeen, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and
Rumsfeld), justified the policy of invading Iraq by saying, “This is
a bold and ambitious American foreign policy. I think it’s right for
us and right for the world.” [77] Another important perspective is
voiced in a lengthy essay by Major Ralph Peters, which can be summed
up in one statement: “There will be no peace. The de facto role of
the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy,
and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair
amount of killing.” [78]
Outrageous in their arrogance, these quotes represent a euphoria
descended from power and propelled through the cohesive and
expanding self-reinforcing and self-congratulatory nature of elite
negative-activist circles, wherein the motivation is not democracy,
domination through force, geostrategic primacy, or even oil in and
of itself. The motivating force common in all similar pursuits of
empire is money and the maintenance of lucrative power. A natural
product of escalating corruption in an almost totally unchecked
government system is the merging of corporate, military, and
administrative forces. When these spheres are dominated by
negative-activist minority circles, and their deeds are disguised as
acts of goodness, liberation, and protection, the total abuse of
power becomes possible, if not inevitable. The majority (“the
people”) in such a “democracy” is irrelevant, except as workers,
soldiers, and voters to equip, expand, and legitimize “democracy’s”
imperial conquests for money and the maintenance of lucrative power
under the fearful illusion of external threats.
None of this is new; all of this has been refined over centuries.
The only difference today is the scope of the negative consequences
of empire, which presents the question of how long the Earth’s
ecosystem will tolerate empire’s exhaust. Thanks to the complete
failure of democracy in the American experiment, America’s
time—empire’s time—has reached its closing act. There is no
substantial residual value in America’s founding documents, and very
little real power left among the common people. All that remains is
a countdown to catastrophe, one (or many) that may or may not allow
the people to demand a paradigm shift. Such a shift should begin
with legal action against those who have neglected the people’s
general welfare in favor of a lucrative warfare state. The total US
withdrawal from the Kyoto Accords presents one such basis for
legitimate action. The increasing defense budget in light of the
accompanying increase in carbon emissions through industry and
conflict presents another. The absence of any law that requires US
citizens to pay taxes from wages is clearly a cause for legal
action.[79]
The contrast between reality and status quo rhetoric is both comedic
and tragic, as illustrated by Undersecretary of Defense for
Personnel and Readiness, David Chu, who, attempting to justify the
raising of age brackets for Army recruitment goals, explained that
upping the age level to 42 is not a change in standards, “because
people are living longer these days.” The other reason for upping
the age bracket is that Donald Rumsfeld is turning 74 and becomes
“quite offended when anyone suggests that 42 is ‘old’.” Chu went on
to tout a 75-year-old serviceperson who is currently on his third
tour of duty.[80]
Typically as empires end, their rulers become more ruthless and
authoritarian, often using unexpected tactics. To illustrate this
today, some neoconservatives are turning to the Democratic Party and
speaking with green tongues about climate change: tactics to keep
power by playing the current anti-Bush sentiment to their advantage.
In any event, their installed neo-Manifest Destinarian military
strategies stand to be honored by both parties beyond the tenure of
this administration. While human nature, as Noam Chomsky explains,
may preclude the majority from stealing ice cream out of the hands
of children, it obviously does not prevent the rise of equally
reprehensible indicators among the minority inner circles of humans
motivated when presented with seemingly irresistible opportunities
for abuse in the combined spheres of finance, warfare, and politics.
In a speech to the House of Representatives in 2003, Republican
Congressman Ron Paul of Texas highlighted the dangers of the three
spheres of power:
Our obsession with policing the world, nation building, and
pre-emptive war are not likely to soon go away, since both
Republican and Democratic leaders endorse them. Liberty is virtually
impossible to protect when the people allow their government to
print money at will. Inevitably, the left will demand more economic
interventionism, the right more militarism and empire building. Both
sides, either inadvertently or deliberately, will foster
corporatism. Those whose greatest interest is in liberty and
self-reliance are lost in the shuffle. Though left and right have
different goals and serve different special-interest groups, they
are only too willing to compromise and support each other’s
programs. If unchecked, the economic and political chaos that comes
from currency destruction inevitably leads to tyranny—a consequence
of which the Founders were well aware. [81]
My final words of indictment against the negative-activist minority
involve a heart-wrenching event related to the film The Battle of
Algiers, al-Qaeda, and current Pentagon policy. In December 1991,
some 26 years after Gillo Pontecorvo made his landmark film, he was
asked by Italian media to revisit Algeria and assess the situation
in the context of the rise of a new political party, the Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS), which had just won a landslide victory.
During his visit (captured on film and available in a three-disc DVD
set some nine-hours long), Pontecorvo interviewed the new president
of Algeria, Mohamed Boudiaf, a former member of the National
Liberation Front (FLN) that had been the subject of Pontecorvo’s
1965 film. Boudiaf pointed to—and the documentary footage clearly
shows—tremendous tensions within Algeria in the wake of the 1991
election. One week later, after Pontecorvo’s arrival back in Italy,
Boudiaf was assassinated.[82] In The War on Truth, Nafeez Ahmed
points out that:
In December 1991, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) won a landslide
victory in Algeria’s national democratic elections. But before the
parliamentary seats could be taken in January 1992, the Algerian
military violently overturned democracy. The elections were canceled
while the Army rounded up tens of thousands of Algerian FIS voters
into concentration camps in the middle of the Sahara…. This was a
dark day for democracy. According to Ben Lombardi, who is with the
Directorate of Strategic Analysis at the Department of National
Defense in Ottawa, Canada: “In 1991, the West supported the coup in
Algeria in an effort to prevent Islamic fundamentalists from coming
to power through the ballot box.” As noted by John Entelis,
professor of political science and director of the Middle East
Program at Fordham University in New York: “The Arab world had never
before experienced such a genuinely populist expression of
democratic aspirations…. Yet when the army overturned the whole
democratic experience in January 1992, the United States willingly
accepted the results…. In short, a democratically elected Islamist
government hostile to American hegemonic aspirations in the region…
was considered unacceptable in Washington.”
The new junta, in contrast, expressed “willingness to collaborate
with American regional ambitions,” which included “collaborating
with Israel in establishing a Pax Americana in the Middle East and
North Africa. Not long after the coup, hundreds of civilians were
being mysteriously massacred by an unknown terrorist group… calling
itself the Armed Islamic Group (GIA)…[whose] “core members are the
thousands of ‘Afghans,’ men who have received their military
training from Afghanistan.” The formation of the GIA was rooted in
al-Qaeda. [83]
Ahmed goes on to state that the death toll from the massacres came
to some 150,000 civilians, and that, “According to Stephen Cook, an
expert on Algeria at the Brookings Institute, ‘there are Algerian
[terrorist] cells spread all over Europe, Canada, and the United
States’.” [84]
Not surprisingly, Algeria’s primary resource is oil.
On August 27, 2003, the US Directorate for Special Operations and
Low Intensity Conflict arranged a screening of The Battle of Algiers
for a top-level, civilian-led group within the Pentagon. The flier
for the showing stated, “How to win a battle against terrorism and
lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range.
Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds
to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds
tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a
rare showing of this film.” A discussion followed the film, but no
details were provided.[85]
The “strategic” lesson of the film is that torture by the French
Army ultimately cost them the war in Algeria, though they had won
the battle of Algiers. Apparently, judging from Guantanamo, Abu
Ghraib, and the process of rendition, the civilian-led group within
the Pentagon failed miserably to “understand why.” Or did they? The
result of French torture was that all Europeans became targets of
the French Army (which later admitted it had planted bombs to
provoke attacks on European settlers and thereby justify further
urban warfare) and of the Algerian FLN, which had taken the war from
the Algerian countryside into the urban setting of the capital to
win public sentiment. Ultimately, such tensions produced a nexus
that carried out horrific acts against both sides to prevent
acceptance of a deal between the French government and the FLN.
Herein we see the complexities—militarists would say “the
opportunities” —of terrorism.[86]
This begs the question of who is killing coalition forces in Iraq
(and elsewhere). After all, though Westerners are the targets in the
“war on terror,” who benefits most? Those who stand to gain and have
the greatest motive are the Western (minority) rulers. Using
financial and military powers against their own human assets, they
reap perpetual profits and geostrategic victories. The human
(majority) element is once again the only expendable asset: such
people are not power; they are pawns.
Moreover, Guantanamo by its very nature breeds worldwide contempt,
providing fuel for the fire—a far better strategic rationale for its
existence as a place of torture than official explanations offer.
Again, there are three primary spheres of concern for rulers:
financial (corporate, economic motives), military (threats and
demonstrations of force to pursue the motives), and political
(manipulation of the people to achieve the motives). The latter is
of no moral significance to the rulers; manipulation is the
operative word, whether the people are domestic or otherwise. Thus,
law is something to be circumvented or reinvented globally at any
price and at every opportunity.
Featured in the film (and its accompanying interviews) is the issue
of French determination not to allow Algerians to form a strong
allegiance to the FLN. In my December 2005 London interview with
Iraq’s Southern Oil Worker’s Union president, Hassan Juma, he
clearly described how the US occupation forces had rented at
exorbitant costs all the halls and meeting places in southern Iraq,
thus preventing unions from gathering to discuss the possibility of
peaceful worker strikes against US occupation. The US also
terminated the contracts of the majority of the oil workers and
replaced them with non-Iraqis and Kurds, sowing further tensions.
What appear to be acts of war between two distinct sides in reality
can be something completely different. Where rules of war were once
applied, in today’s world there is little such clarity, and
opportunists rule the day. Where torture moved the French public to
pressure the French government to establish Algerian independence in
1962, the memories of torture at the hands of Nazis or anyone else
are today not present in the consciousness of Americans sufficient
to produce the same scale of societal rejection. Meanwhile, as one
interviewee emphasizes in disc three of The Battle of Algiers,
“Torture only leads to revolt.” The battle of ideas is lost as
hatred is sown. Thus, the American majority stand to bear the
fallout of the acts of the American negative-activist minority in
power.
Nafeez Ahmed’s concluding thoughts reflect my own, and my words
could not state them better:
The rise to power of the conglomerate of neoconservative factions
represented in the Bush administration and its web of political,
financial, and religious connections was, perhaps, merely the
inevitable outcome of the very logic of the interests and operations
of US and Western power in the post-Cold War period. US/Western
military-intelligence policy has consistently been conducted in a
manner that is fundamentally unaccountable to meaningful democratic
influence. The root of this problem clearly lies in the structure of
Western power itself, which—although conventionally believed to be
the epitome of democracy—is in reality conjoined to a sprawling
network of overarching criminal and financial interests that tends
to drive US/Western foreign policies and which in the post-Cold War
period has driven the West and international terrorism into an
increasingly dynamic (and unstable) interconnected continuum of
power.
The criminalization of Western power and the corruption of Western
democracy is therefore not a new phenomenon exclusively linked to
the rise of the Bush administration. On the contrary, the Bush
administration has merely followed through with the inner logic of
the historical trajectory of the policies of previous US
administrations. The rise of the Bush administration simply
demonstrated the extreme degree to which the criminalization of
power has come to penetrate so deeply into the structure of society.
It is therefore crucial to recognize that the cause of the problem
here is not a particular group of individuals, or a particular set
of ideologies, or a particular party’s political program, linked to
the Bush—or any other—administration. The problem, which has plagued
both Democratic and Republican administrations to varying degrees
and has only grown increasingly entrenched with time, relates
fundamentally to the structure of the international system, which
Western power dominates. It is these structures that generate the
individuals, ideologies, and political programs that promote the
climate in which international terrorism flourishes. [87]
As Alan Wolfe concluded in 1979, our task is to unmask the illusion
of the threat so the underlying undemocratic and monopolistic
economic program is revealed. “If Americans wake up to the danger
posed from those within their midst who would destroy the best
features of their country in order to militarize it against an
illusory enemy, they have a chance to create the kind of future that
they will then deserve.” [88]
Sadly, the trend of the movement against global economic injustice
since the death of Dr. King, as I see it, has been near total
dysfunction of the whole due to the self, and little more than group
therapy in a burning house. This positive-activist movement is
dysfunctional because of the flailing and fragmented myopic approach
that persists regardless if a true solution or a prime piece of the
puzzle is presented. There is a myriad-symptom-addressing “peace”
movement when a narrow and more specific root-cause exposure and
unified approach is required.
Though 9-11 was either an engineered pretext for assertion of power,
a conveniently provoked trigger for assertion of power, or both,
either way our government brought it on with imperial ambitions in
the shadows of deception and public ignorance in a nation founded on
power derived from the consent of its people. Such arrogant and
longstanding policies of bullying and lying for corporate wealth
remain for the moment traditional tools of US foreign and domestic
policy. But this “fourth and permanent peak” is in the end likely to
prove fatal for the negative-activist continuum, perhaps fatal for
humankind itself. Regardless, the positive-activist movement is on
the verge of shifting into high gear.
Today the world as we know it is in for a serious makeover—what
David Korten calls The Great Turning from Empire to Earth Community.
The age of global economic injustice driven by the greatest
polluter—militarization—cannot survive its own methods.
Globalization, militarization, corporatization, overpopulation,
domination by a sole superpower—these conditions will be rendered
obsolete by nature itself, and humans thus stand to experience a
forced awareness quite soon. Those who recognize that time has
nothing to do with humankind, who begin to demand a massive shift in
priorities to attempt to offset and prepare for the severity of the
consequences of empire, and who demand a new paradigm of coexistent
cooperation—those who “labor to keep alive in (their) hearts that
celestial fire called conscience”[89] and are willing to adapt will
be in the best position to do so. In the face of nature’s vengeance,
Dr. King’s dream is still the only path forward. Gandhi’s way of
life is the way of the future. Our swift transformation from killers
to caretakers will be the only means of surviving together the
coming change. Humankind will carry forth a triumph of vision if we
do survive—not a triumph of human superiority, but a triumph of
surrendering the concept of superiority to the higher power of
cooperation, with a perspective of our place as caretakers of life.
True security is the rejection of exploitative policies in favor of
the selfless surrender of ego as our personal engine and the
collective and adaptive surrender to the Earth as our master.
Diversity is the struggle to minimize hierarchies and banish
prejudices in the selfless effort to maximize life in harmony for
the common good, making closed minds the true minority. What is
called self-awareness is really the awareness of All and our role as
part of All. Beneath the trappings of training for a particular
society and in a particular body lies common ground where flexible
humans fundamentally agree, where they are one, where the struggle
for awakening and productive communing is waged. This awakening or
empowerment—this elimination of suffering—cannot progress without
its conscious pursuit, without deliberate self-diminishment and
deliberate elevation of others in pursuing spiritual equality and
material justice.
Massive popular demand for change through positive activism will
recognize in this challenge its natural allies: that nearly every
nation on Earth deplores America’s tyrannical government, that the
majority of Americans are good people who simply require a unified
and empowering awakening, and that the planet’s increasing rejection
of empire’s impact puts Earth itself on our side as the awakening
device.
Obvious immediate solutions, if we had a choice, might include
banning think-tank and corporate lobbying and corporate personhood
and standing armies, reforming the banking industry, crushing the
Federal Reserve, and diverting excessive wealth. But these are
almost irrelevant, as the Earth will soon shudder and reform the
human condition, if not banish us altogether.
In the age of the end of empire, America is its last vestige, the
most selfish construct on Earth. In the process of the end of
empire, there comes a time when the illusions and falsehoods of the
ruling elite become like an old and irreparable shoe: neither fit to
wear in the light of dawning realities nor useful in the expediency
of the forward march of life. To use a different metaphor, there
comes a time when the passengers of empire’s crumbling slave
ship—with its human cargo chained to the anchor—must together and
with wisdom free themselves, fashion a new vessel out of faith, and
set course toward community, partnership, and life in balance with
nature. This will become a clear choice to many Americans as the
effects of global climate change and the depletion of resources come
home to impact their lives.
In the final throes of the end of empire, in fashioning a lifeboat
fit to endure Earth’s tortured, irritable seas, the new course must
be substantial, built of an understanding of history and of faith in
transcendence, generating a brilliance based on a deliberate choice
against failed frameworks in favor of the timeless safety of
cooperation in the Earth’s embrace. As it rejects the plague of
empire, nature provides proof that we must awaken to our silent
complicity as consumers, as followers of traditions of conflict and
disunity.
We will no longer see ourselves as special because of wealth, but
because we realize wealth does not make us special. Our sins of
statecraft will compel a new responsibility for caretaking an equal
world, for sharing a new wealth of spirit, for building a lasting
legacy that will absolve us of these sins that have caused untold
suffering. To avert extinction, humans can only be special in acting
out the desire to transform the suffering of so many into harmony
for all.
Summing up theoretical conclusions, beyond the human perspective lay
other possibilities of driving forces. It is not without a certain
degree of gravity that I suggest another documentary, though
seemingly innocuous, may have also come to the attention of negative
activists in foreign policy circles. Sharks at Risk describes
how—absent human intervention—sharks maintain the security of the
oceans by eliminating only the old, weak, and injured among marine
species, thereby increasing the genetic strength and numbers of each
species (and ultimately the number of potential shark victims).[90]
This is not to say that only humans who have seen this documentary
would imagine themselves as shark-like predators, but that some
human individuals do appear to operate on different frequencies of
aggressiveness, to the extent that they seem to others to be acting
out of tune, even on a course that, in the case of the overall
ecosystem, is decidedly suicidal in the long term.
Moving farther beyond the confines of the human experience and
conventional theories of militarism and empire, an explanation may
lie—and indeed be observed in the microcosm of human behavior—in
what physicists call the “string” theory. This theory that
apparently unites general relativity with quantum mechanics suggests
that everything in the universe, including space that appears to be
dark to the human (and the telescopic and scientifically measurable)
eye, is composed of a fabric of vibrating strings too small to be
measured in any known way, but that are logically independent
(individuals, if you will) parts of the whole, operating on a
dazzling array of frequencies.[91] That there are humans who,
consciously or not, operate as over-the-top aggressive sharks in
moderating the entire chain of life on Earth—and that there are
humans of other inclinations of thought—could be a product of this
theory as well. Most significantly, and offering a thrillingly
hopeful possibility, the theory also suggests that the cosmos is
progressing toward a kind of intelligent balance of
positive-activist unity, and that everything in the cosmos is part
of that progression.
In fact, personally, this explains the lifelong driving force that
continues to sustain my positive activism. Long before I heard of
string theory, my motivation was that we are challenged by a worthy
opportunity in the harshest of circumstances and the most dangerous
of times surrounding human activity (that we know of), and that
perhaps this was a choice made by or for us because it generates a
brilliance of positive energy, or ultimately has the potential to do
so. In this respect, we are part of a symphony, seeking to play in
tune with an orchestra that we can neither see nor yet imagine.
So many creation myths and belief systems talk of a transformation,
a judgment day, a rapture, whereupon we are judged—or perhaps
collectively challenge ourselves through a forced awareness of the
full scope of a natural cosmic progression toward positive activism.
Mainstream television now speaks of scientists in ninety-nine
percent agreement that humans have caused climate change and that
the consequences may be unstoppable and ultimately fatal if not
urgently addressed within ten years. This presents a collectively
physical and self-tasking chasm of the most transformative kind. How
we shall respond, whether miserably or magnificently, may depend not
on our idea of human nature (wherein that “nature” has been to date
contaminated by a minority), but on the ability of the majority to
think ahead and take the positive-activist and adaptive leap of
faith forward.
The Mayan calendar points to an “end” on December 21, 2012.[92] Who
are we to say that this coinciding and apparently random number is
not definitively linked to human behavior and the “string” theory of
a positive-activist universe? We do seem to be rushing down a vortex
of turmoil, like a star collapsing inward before a supernova. Time
will tell, but one thing is certain: if our minds do not change, our
fate is sealed—and this vortex toward cataclysm is wholly capable of
changing minds in a hurry.
What appears random may be anything but random as we collectively
recognize the need for, prepare for, and execute the necessarily
humbling measures for a leap across the chasm from dark uncertainty
to an enlightened existence, changing entirely the connotation of
“intelligence,” from the negative-activist “gathering of secret
information about an enemy,” to its primary meaning, the
positive-activist “ability to use memory, knowledge, experience,
understanding, reasoning, imagination, and judgment in order to
solve problems and adapt to new situations.” [93]
In the end, “doubt that the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth
move,” the answer—as in Shakespeare’s time—is that in the micro and
macro sense, we do not yet know all it would take to know what
drives us. After all, theory is mere conjecture. However, every
indication imaginable suggests that this, too, is about to change
with a monumental forward leap.
Notes:
[1]. Midge Decter interview, The Warren Olney Show, Los Angeles,
[http://www.nndb.com/people/376/000052200], 21 May 2004.
[2]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), pp. 338-339.
[3]. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (New York:
HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 24-25. Some nations have regrettably
studied and adopted methods or perspectives of defeated powers
(e.g., Nitze’s fascination with Albert Speer’s 1946 statement—in a
personal interview with Nitze—asserting that Germany would have won
World War II had it suffered a Pearl Harbor at the outset to
galvanize the public, and France’s use of torture in Vietnam and
Algeria). Indeed, former Nazis and Japanese counterparts were
employed by the US following the war for the purpose of espionage in
the affairs of the Soviet Union and Korea, and to extract a greater
understanding of barbaric methods used in warfare.
[4]. Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1978), pp, 17-68.
[5]. Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence
Agency 2001; CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1999: ORE
22-48, April 1948, Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action
During 1948; ORE 22-48, September 1948, (Addendum) Possibility of
Direct Soviet Military Action During 1948-49; ORE 46-49, May 1949,
Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1949.
[6]. It must be noted that the proponents of the Riga axiom were
greatly assisted in the formulation of a national security,
military-dependent state by Dwight Eisenhower’s “Memorandum for
Directors and Chiefs of War Department, General and Special Staff
Divisions and Bureaus and the Commanding Generals of the Major
Commands,” of 27 April 1946 (available at: http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/samgen/index.htm).
This boost came just two months after the distribution of George
Kennan’s Long Telegram among Washington’s foreign policy elite by
then-Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. Forrestal became the
first Secretary of Defense a year later, and served in this capacity
until his apparent suicide in 1949.
[7]. Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis (Boston: South End Press,
1983), pp. 34-38.
[8]. David Callahan, Dangerous Capabilities (New York:
HarperCollins, 1990) p. 78.
[9]. Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis (Boston: South End Press,
1983), pp. 54-55. This trade or “dollar gap” was of deep concern to
influential US defense industry executives, who were severely
impacted by the postwar economic downturn in the period from 1946 to
1950, and many of whom had during this time lobbied top officials in
Washington’s military circles. A turnaround occurred in 1948 and
profoundly so after the adoption of NSC-68’s recommendations in
December 1950. For further insight, see Frank Kofsky’s Harry S.
Truman and the War Scare of 1948.
[10]. Richard F. Grimmett, “Instances of Use of United States Armed
Forces Abroad, 1798-2004,” [http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/forces.htm],
14 March 2005.
[11]. Alan Wolfe, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat
(Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1979), p. 25.
[12]. Ibid., pp. 7-9.
[13]. Gary J. Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New
Pax Americana (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 14.
[14]. Stephen J. Blank, “The United States: Washington’s New
Frontier in the Trans-Caspian,” in Oil and Geopolitics in the
Caspian Sea Region, Michael P. Croissant and Bulent Aras, ed.,
(London: Praeger, 1999), p. 252.
[15]. Stephen Cohen, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose Show,
Public Broadcasting System, “The New American Cold War,” 28 June
2006.
[16]. Bruce Cumings, “Time of Illusion: Post-Cold War Visions of the
World,” in Cold War Triumphalism, Ellen Schrecker, ed., (New York:
The New Press, 2004), pp. 96-99.
[17]. Chalmers Johnson, “The Three Cold Wars,” in Cold War
Triumphalism, Ellen Schrecker, ed., (New York: The New Press, 2004),
pp. 237-239.
[18]. Ibid., p. 257. This pattern is most hauntingly memorable in
the case of Vietnam, which had declared its non-communist
independence—using as its model the United States’ Declaration of
Independence—after Japanese occupation ended with America’s defeat
of Japan in World War II.
[19]. Whether or not this gap in my traditional education represents
a general national nuance toward protecting the status quo in
international relations—and I am convinced it does—the lack of
emphasis on such past and current unsavory government policies in
traditional education programs represents the US government’s
economic addiction to the global status quo, a deliberately
maintained vacuous state of general public awareness, and an immense
threat to global security. It is essential that students and
citizens have access to stark realities, to learn unsavory truths so
they can participate in the rejection of such policies as preventive
regime change under the absurd guise of spreading democracy.
[20]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 335.
[21]. “The Dark Side,” Frontline, Public Broadcasting System,
[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside], 20 June 2006.
[22]. John Prados, “Team B: The Trillion Dollar Experiment,”
(Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 49, no. 3, April 1993), pp.
27-31.
[23]. Operation Northwoods, Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense:
Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba, [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/
northwoods.pdf], 13 March 1962 (declassified 18 November 1997); John
Pike, “The Death-Beam Gap: Putting Keegan’s Follies into
Perspective,” [http://www.fas.org/spp/eprint/keegan.htm], October
1992; Erik German, “Mind Machines,” The Prague Post, [http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/
6583/project190.html], 5 July 2000; Eric Jewell, “The Unholy
Alliance: Christianity and the New World Order,” [http://www.rense.com/general20/unholy.htm],
25 February 2002.
[24]. Ed Rippy, “How the US has Gotten into Wars,” IndyMedia,
[http://www.indymedia.org/display.php3?
article_id=182889&group=webcast], July 2002.
[25]. Cryptologic Quarterly, Center for Cryptologic History, NSA, 24
February 1998, [www.nsa.gov/vietnam/releases/relea00012.pdf],
declassified 3 November 2005.
[26]. Sam Marcy, “Generals Over the White House,” [http://www.workers.org/marcy/cd/samgen/index.htm],
1980. The letter to the president and a list of the 170 signatories
is also available at this link.
[27]. Cited by Agence France Press, 14 January 1998. See also Greg
Guma, “Cracks in the Covert Iceberg,” Toward Freedom, May 1998, p.
2; Leslie Fienberg, “Brzezinski brags, blows cover: US intervened in
Afghanistan first,” Workers World, 12 March 1998; Corroborated by
former DCI Robert Gates in his memoirs, From the Shadows.
[28]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 8.
[29]. Ibid., p. 3.
[30]. Ibid., p. 4.
[31]. All are members of the Project for the New American Century
and are current or former Bush administration officials or advisors.
Charles Horner, along with other PNAC members Daniel Pipes, Stephen
Hadley, Kenneth Adelman, and Peter Rodman, and CPD members Kenneth
Jensen, John Moore, and Robert Turner—as well as Caspar Weinberger
and many other pro-interventionists—created and/or serve or have
served on the board of the United States Institute of Peace.
(Hadley, Pipes, and Adelman are also CPD members.) This compelled me
to design an independent peace studies program, as USIP funds the
majority of peace and conflict studies graduate programs in the US,
and sends out annual surveys to its recipients.
[32]. Philip Paull, “International Terrorism”: The Propaganda War,
San Francisco State University, California, June 1982. Other JCIT
participants cited by Paull (info circa 1982): Canada—David Barrett
(former premier of British Columbia); France—Professor Annie Kriegel
(University of Paris, Nanterre), Jacques Soustelle (correspondent
for l’Aurore, former governor of Algeria 1955-6, charged with
subversion for attempted OAS coup 1962, 1962-8 in exile, author of
La longue marche d’Israel 1968); Ireland—Frank Cluskey (Irish Labour
Party); Israel—Professor Mordechai Abir, Major-General Meir Amit
(Knesset member and business executive, former chief Mossad 1963-8,
director Al Aman military intelligence 1961-3), Mordechai Ben-Ari
(president El-Al Airlines 1967-77, former commanding officer Haganah
1948, active in Alliyah “B” Austria and Eastern Europe 1948-50),
Asher Ben-Natan (special advisor to Ministry of Defense 1976-8,
ambassador to France 1970-5 and West Germany 1965-9, director
general of Ministry of Defense 1965), Vladmir Bukovsky (author and
Soviet émigré), Ambassador Walter Eytan, Ambassador Michael Comay,
Major-General Shlomo Gazit (director Al Aman military intelligence
1973-9, director Department of Military Intelligence and Coordinator
of Activities in Occupied Territories 1967-74, Intelligence Branch
IDF 1964-7), General Chaim Herzog (business executive and lawyer,
permanent representative to the United Nations 1975-8, first
governor of the West Bank 1967, director Al Aman military
intelligence 1948-50 1959-62, chief Security Department of Jewish
Agency 1947-8, media expert), Yitzak Navon (president of Israel
1978-[83], former chair Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs
Committee, chairman World Zionist Council 1973-8), Gideon Rafael
(ambassador to United Kingdom 1973-8, senior political advisor to
Foreign Ministry 1972-3, former United Nations ambassador,
intelligence service Foreign Ministry), Brigadier-General Meir
Shamgar (justice of the Supreme Court 1975-[95], military advocate
general and legal advisor to Ministry of Defense 1968-75),
Major-General Aharon Yariv (director Center for Strategic Studies
Tel-Aviv University 1977-?, minister of information 1974-5, special
advisior to prime minister 1972-3, director Al Aman military
intelligence); Italy—Manlio Brosio (former secretary general NATO),
Piero Luigi Vigna (attorney general Florence); Netherlands—Harry Van
Den Bergh (member of parliament), Edward Van Theyjn (deputy leader
Socialist Party), Joop Den Uyl (prime minister 1973-77); United
Kingdom—Lord Chalfont (Arthur Gwynne Jones, director IBM-UK 1973,
foreign editor New Statesman 1970-1, minister of state Foreign
Commonwealth Office 1964-70, British Army staff and intelligence
appointments 1940-61, Russian expert), Brian R. Crozier (cofounder
and director Institute for the Study of Conflict 1970-?, chairman
Forum World Features 1965-74, editor Conflict Studies 1970-5, former
publisher Economist Foreign Report, correspondent for National
Review), Michael Elkins (BBC correspondent, Israel), Rt. Hon. Hugh
Fraser (conservative MP, minister of defense for RAF 1964, Special
Air Service World War II), Paul B. Johnson (journalist and
broadcaster, New Statesman 1955-70, author of Enemies of Society
1977), Robert Moss (coauthor of The Spike 1980, former editor of
confidential Economist Foreign Report, author of new book Death Beam
[…“this spy-vs-spy thriller reveals how an unknowing world reaches
the brink of total war ‘when the Soviets perfect an incomparably
powerful death beam…and point it at the United States’”--PP], now
with Heritage Foundation), Rt. Hon. Merlyn Rees (home secretary
1976-9, secretary of state for Northern Ireland 1974-6,
undersecretary Ministry of Defense 1965-8); West Germany—Eric
Blumenfeld (member of Bundestag), Hans Joseph Horchem (Hamburg
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), Gerard
Loewenthal (journalist). Use Google.com for comprehensive up-to-date
information on all names in these notes and this paper. Grateful
acknowledgment to James Zogby and the Arab American Institute for
promptly sending Paull’s thesis.
[33]. James Q. Wilson, “Thinking About Terrorism,”
[http://www.commentarymagazine.com/
Summaries/V72I1P36-1.htm], July 1981.
[34]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 4.
[35]. “Excerpts from Haig’s Remarks at First News Conference as
Secretary of State,” New York Times, 19 January 1981, p. 1. Haig’s
subsequent ouster from the administration as it took a far sharper
turn to the right is equated (by Jerry Sanders in Peddlers of
Crisis, p. 341) with George Kennan’s ouster from the Truman
administration, both of which have in common the rise in stature of
Paul Nitze.
[36]. Bruce Cumings, “Decoupled from History,” in Inventing the Axis
of Evil (New York: The New Press, 2004), p. 29.
[37]. Presidential Review Memorandum 10/NSC-10, 18 February 1977
(declassified 6 January 1992), pp. II-6, II-7. Perhaps
understandable from today’s perspective, the only section redacted
or blacked out of PRM-10’s entire 150 pages is the one-page-length
section on the Middle East. PRM-10 was declassified with this
redaction while Paul Wolfowitz was serving as Undersecretary of
Defense for Policy.
[38]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 10.
[39]. Ibid., pp. 9-11.
[40]. Ibid., pp. 12-13.
[41]. Ibid., p. 368. The CIA’s list of these countries and its
records of al-Qaeda communications with various nations does not
include Iraq.
[42]. Unocal headquarters are located in Sugarland, Texas; Tom
DeLay’s congressional base.
[43]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 20.
[44]. Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (New York: HarperCollins,
2004), pp. 119, 121-123.
[45]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), pp. 28-29.
[46]. Oilfields and assets maps from Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task
Force meetings, released by Judicial Watch, 17 July 2003, [http://www.apfn.net/Messageboard/04-12-05/
discussion.cgi.46.html]. See also “The Struggle for Iraq: The New
Looting,”
[http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=
F60F1EFB3B5A0C7B8EDDAC0894DC404482], 28 May 2004 (and previous New
York Times articles on the looting of Iraq).
[47]. Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (New York: HarperCollins,
2004), p. 83.
[48]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 160.
[49]. Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (New York: HarperCollins,
2004), p. 29. See also pp. 30-31: “March 4, 2001, Television Show
Eerily Envisions 9/11 Attacks,” Contradicting the later claim that
no one could have envisioned the 9/11 attacks, a short-lived Fox
television program called The Lone Gunmen airs a pilot episode in
which terrorists try to fly an airplane into the WTC. The heroes
save the day and the airplane narrowly misses the building. There
are no terrorists on board the aircraft; they use remote control
technology to steer the plane. Ratings are good for the show, yet
the eerie coincidence is barely mentioned after 9/11. Says one media
columnist, “This seems to be collective amnesia of the highest
order.” In the show, the heroes also determine, “The terrorist group
responsible was actually a faction of our own government. These
malefactors were seeking to stimulate arms manufacturing in the lean
years following the end of the Cold War by bringing down a plane in
New York City and fomenting fears of terrorism.”; “April 2001:
Military Considers Exercise Simulating Flying Airplanes into
Pentagon,” NORAD is planning to conduct a training exercise named
Positive Force. Some Special Operations personnel trained to think
like terrorists unsuccessfully propose adding a scenario simulating
“an event having a terrorist group hijack a commercial airliner and
fly it into the Pentagon.” Military higher-ups and White House
officials reject the exercise as either “too unrealistic” or too
disconnected to the original intent of the exercise. The proposal
comes shortly before the exercise, which takes place this month.
(Paul Thompson’s book is wholly comprised of media reports, official
statements, and other competent 9/11-related source material.)
[50]. Michael Ruppert interview, Aftermath: Unanswered Questions
from 9/11, film directed by Stephen Marshall (GNN Productions & The
Disinformation Company, 2003).
[51]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 27-28; Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (New
York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 134.
[52]. “Prophetic Remarks of Hon. Paul Wolfowitz,” Commencement
Address at the US Military Academy, West Point, [http://www.virtualwp.org/wpwebcasts/grad_2001_wolfowitz_text.htm],
2 June 2001.
[53]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 29.
[54]. Ibid., p. 30.
[55]. Ibid., p. 153; Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (New York:
HarperCollins, 2004), p. 136.
[56]. Chalmers Johnson interview, Why We Fight, film directed by
Eugene Jarecki (Sony Pictures Classics, 2005).
[57]. CNN Student News [http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/2001/fyi/news/
09/20/backgrounder.afghanistan/index.html], 20 September 2001.
[58]. Bush reciprocated on his third day in office by raising the
energy rates for the state of California, driving it into
bankruptcy, and generating billions of dollars for Enron executives.
Bush Family Fortunes: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Greg Palast
(DVD, 2004).
[59]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 276-277; Gail Sheehy, “9/11 Tapes Reveal Ground
Personnel Muffled Attacks,” (New York Observer, 15 June 2004): “You
would have thought American’s SOC would have grounded everything.
They were in the lead spot, they’re in Texas—they had control over
the whole system. They could have stopped it. Everybody should have
been grounded. In Fort Worth, two managers in SOC were sitting
beside each other and hearing it. They were both saying, ‘Do not
pass this along. Let’s keep it right here. Keep it among the five of
us’.”
[60]. Peter Dale Scott interview, Aftermath: Unanswered Questions
from 9/11, film directed by Stephen Marshall (GNN Productions & The
Disinformation Company, 2003).
[61]. Ibid.
[62]. Bruce Cumings, “Decoupled from History,” in Inventing the Axis
of Evil (New York: The New Press, 2004), p. 5.
[63]. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton];
[http://www.citizenworks.org/corp/halliburton.php].
[64]. William D. Hartung, “Outsourcing Blame,” TomPaine.com,
[http://www.tompaine.com/articles/outsourcing_blame.php], 21 May
2004.
[65]. Pentagon Statistical Information Analysis Division (SIAD),
ST25 Fiscal Year 2004: “States and US Territories single-year
listing of the dollar summary of prime contract awards by state,
county, contractor, and place,” [http://www.dior.whs.mil/peidhome/procstat/procstat.htm],
site disabled after download and printout of 1000 pages; remaining
contents due pending FOIA compliance to request filed February 2,
2006 (Dave Henshall, Senior Advisor, Information and Privacy, Office
of Freedom of Information, Department of Defense, 1155 Defense
Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301-1155).
[66]. Ibid.
[67]. Project Censored study [http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/big_media_interlocks.html],
August 2005; This study served as a platform for a more extensive
study by Intelligent Future that led to the discovery through SIAD
of 300,000 companies on the Pentagon payroll. Crosschecking through
theyrule.net, projectcensored.org, and crj.org/tools resulted in a
three-fold increase in the number of media, consumer product, and
defense board members who served on multiple boards. (Copy available
upon request.)
[68]. Bruce Cumings, “Decoupled from History,” in Inventing the Axis
of Evil (New York: The New Press, 2004), pp. 52-73.
[69]. Christopher Hill, interview by Gwen Ifill, Newshour with Jim
Lehrer, Public Broadcasting System, “U.S. Envoy Says Missile Test
Further Isolates North Korea,” [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/
july-dec06/northkorea_07-05.html], 5 July 2006.
[70]. Bruce Cumings, “Decoupled from History,” in Inventing the Axis
of Evil (New York: The New Press, 2004), p. 50.
[71]. Paul Wolfowitz, “Paul Nitze’s Legacy: For a New World,”
[http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/2004/
sp20040414-depsecdef0262.html], 15 April 2004.
[72]. See Chapter 14 of Ahmed’s The War on Truth, “The Failure of
the 9/11 National Commission,” for his detailed investigation of the
ten panel members and many on the staff of the 9-11 Commission,
revealing extreme conflicts of interest that should have
disqualified them.
[73]. John McCain interview, Why We Fight, film directed by Eugene
Jarecki (Sony Pictures Classics, 2005).
[74]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), p. 364.
[75]. Richard Perle, interview by Tim Russert, Meet the Press
[http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j022603.html], 2 March 2003.
[76]. Michael Ledeen, quoted by Ervand Abrahamian in “Empire Strikes
Back: Iran in US Sights,” Inventing the Axis of Evil (New York: The
New Press, 2004), p. 93.
[77]. ABC Nightline, “Tonight, ‘The Plan,’ how one group and its
blueprint have brought us to the brink of war,” entire script at
[http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ThePlan.htm], 5 March 2003.
[78]. Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict: a look behind the philosophy
and practice of the US push for domination of the world’s economy
and culture.” (US Army War College: Parameters, Summer 1997, pp.
4-14), [http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3011.htm].
At the time he wrote this article, Major Ralph Peters was assigned
to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where
he was responsible for future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign
Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical
level. Peters is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff
College, and holds a masters degree in international relations. Over
the past several years, his professional and personal research
travels have taken Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia,
Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia,
Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland,
Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos,
Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge.
[79]. “America: From Freedom to Fascism,” film directed by Aaron
Russo [freedomtofascism.com], June 2006.
[80]. “Military Recruitment Goals from the Pentagon,” C-SPAN 2, 11
July 2006.
[81]. Ron Paul, “Paper Money and Tyranny,” [www.fame.org/PDF/Paper%20Money%
20and%20Tyranny.pdf], 5 September 2003.
[82]. The Battle of Algiers, Disc 3, “Remembering History,” and
“Etats D’Armes,” (State of Arms), Gillo Pontocorvo, with Edward Said
(series producer Tariq Ali, Criterion Collection, 2004). It is worth
noting, as the DVD series reveals, Pontecorvo was deeply conscious
that his film portrayal of terrorism could be exploited. He had
carefully weighed the matter against the positive aspects of
bringing to the world’s attention the extent to which an oppressed
people’s popular cause could free them from their oppressor.
[83]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), pp. 65-66.
[84]. Ibid., p. 66.
[85]. Michael T. Kaufman, “Film Studies,” [http://www.rialtopictures.com/eyes_xtras/battle_times.html],
7 September 2003.
[86]. It is deeply troubling to note that the greater part of the
Pentagon’s plans for the future, as spelled out in its Quadrennial
Defense Review of 2006, revolve around tactics for urban warfare.
[87]. Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch
Press, 2005), pp. 347-348.
[88]. Alan Wolfe, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat
(Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1979), p. 89.
[89]. Quote from President George Washington.
[90]. “Sharks at Risk,” Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures,
Public Broadcasting System, 12 July 2006.
[91]. “Einstein’s Dream: The Elegant Universe,” Nova, Public
Broadcasting System, 10 July 2006.
[92]. Mayan Calendar [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar].
This is not the date for the end of the world, but for the end of an
age for humankind. The end of the world, according to the Mayan
“Long Count,” will occur on October, 13, 4772.
[93]. 21st Century Dictionary (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1996), p. 706.
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/32944
I don't get it. It takes many months of investigation to
uncover this plot, and only after the plot is thwarted
and 18 arrested, do they radically tighten up the
carry-on baggage policy.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060810.wTerrorattack0809/CommentStory/Front/home
Terror Alert: Severe Risk of Hype
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, June 27, 2006; Page A21
It is the sheerest luck, I know, that Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales looks (to me) a bit like Jerry Mahoney,
because he fulfills the same function for the Bush
administration that the dummy did for the ventriloquist
Paul Winchell. At risk to his reputation and the mocking
he must get when he comes home at night, Gonzales will
call virtually anyone an al-Qaeda-type terrorist. He did
that last week in announcing the arrest of seven
inferred (it's the strongest word I can use) terrorists.
I thought I saw Dick Cheney moving his lips.
The seven were indicted on charges that they wanted to
blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI bureau in
Miami. The arrests came in the nick of time, since all
that prevented mass murder, mayhem and an incessant
crawl at the bottom of our TV screens was the lack of
explosives, weapons or vehicles. The alleged
conspirators did have boots, which were supplied by an
FBI informant. Maybe the devil does wear Prada.
Naturally, cable news was all over the story since it
provided pictures . These included shots of the Sears
Tower, the FBI bureau, the seven alleged terrorists and,
of course, Gonzales dutifully playing his assigned role
of the dummy. He noted that the suspects wanted to wage
a "full ground war" against the United States and "kill
all the devils" they could -- this despite a clear lack
of materiel and sidewalk-level IQs. Still, as Gonzales
pointed out, if "left unchecked, these homegrown
terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like
al-Qaeda." A presidential medal for the man, please.
It is not now and never has been my intention to
belittle terrorism. Clearly, if what the government
alleges turns out to be the truth -- look, that
sometimes happens -- then these guys deserve punishment.
But theirs was such a preposterous, crackpot plot that
the only reason it rose to the level of a televised news
conference by the nation's chief law enforcement officer
was the Bush administration's compulsive need to hype
everything. For this, Gonzales, like a good Boy Scout,
is always prepared.
Does it matter? Yes, it does. It matters because the
Bush administration has already lost almost all
credibility when it comes to terrorism. It said there
were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and there were
none. It said al-Qaeda and Iraq were in cahoots and that
was not the case. It has so exaggerated its domestic
success in arresting or convicting terrorists that it
simply cannot be believed on that score. About a year
ago, for instance, President Bush (with Gonzales at his
side) asserted that "federal terrorism investigations
have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects,
and more than half of those charged have been
convicted." The Post looked into that and found that the
total number of (broadly defined) "terrorism"
convictions was 39.
This compulsion to exaggerate and lie is so much a part
of the Bush administration's DNA that it persists even
though it has become counterproductive. For instance,
the arrest of the seven suspects in Miami essentially
coincided with the revelation by the New York Times that
the government has "gained access to financial records
from a vast international database and examined banking
transactions involving thousands of Americans." Almost
instantly, the administration did two things: It
confirmed the story and complained about it. The Times
account only helped terrorists, Cheney said.
Is he right? I wonder. This is a serious matter. After
all, Americans are being asked to surrender a measure of
privacy and civil liberties in the fight against
terrorism -- essentially the argument Cheney has been
making. I for one am willing to make some compromises,
but I feel downright foolish doing so if the fruit of
the enterprise turns out to be seven hapless idiots who
would blow up the Sears Tower, if only they could get to
Chicago.
Cheney in particular has zero credibility, but his
administration colleagues are not far behind. Prominent
among them, of course, is the attorney general, a man so
adept at crying wolf and mouthing the administration's
line that he simply cannot be believed any more.
The Sears Tower. The Miami bureau of the FBI. Please.
Someone, put the dummy back in his box.
cohenr@washpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/26/AR2006062600974.html
THE MIAMI SEVEN
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/miami7.htm
Smoke & Mirrors - Today's UK
Terror Alerts
With support for the "War On Terror" at an all time low,
with Blair being hounded by the media in every direction
and looking increasingly like he is on his last legs,
with the UK's involvement in Rendition Flights, and
their support of Israel's slaughter of the innocents
being highlighted in the media, with lots of dead UK
soldiers on foreign soil... I ask you, what better time
to foil a "major terrorist atrocity", and right here on
home soil too...
This is the Power Of Nightmares, the Neo-Conservatives
once again using fear to exert yet more control over
YOU, the citizens of this as I mentioned abovenation,
because fear means power.
Take a step back and look at this carefully managed
stage show. The purpose of this is three fold:
a) to keep up the spectre of fear
b) national morale - what better than a hero story, a
story of victory and triumph over so called terrorists
in this dark time
c) to justify stepping up their campaign in Iraq and
Afghanistan and probably further afield - into Iran and
Syria next.
The timing could hardly have been any better, a
coincidence - I think not.
You can bet your bollix to a barn dance that in the
coming weeks and months you will see the government
stepping up the pressure to introduce biometric ID
cards, further rollout of ANPR announced, more plans for
mass surveillance, tracking and monitoring of the
ordinary person than ever before - and of course, lots
of new taxes to pay for it.
Meanwhile the terrorist card will be played against Iran
& Syria for their "assistance" to Hezbollah and plans to
move against them will be furthered. It's all about
control of the oil, before China, the Sleeping Dragon,
truly awakes.
World War Three has commenced, and this time it's
global.
Wake up. Am I the only one who sees through this sh*t?
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/8/10/9059/38569
EXCLUSIVE
Project Bojinka -
More Indications Of
Prior US Knowledge Of
Hijacker Attack Plans
RENSE.com EXCLUSIVE
©. 2001 All Rights Reserved
9-23-1
Note - The following email was forwarded to us by a
person related to the person whose name we have wittheld
for his/her protection. Following this email exchange of
September 20-21, 2001 is an official airline industry
worldwide terrorist warning of June 23, 2001 which ALSO
mentions 'Project Bojinka'... - Jeff Rense
Date: Friday, September 21, 2001 3:09 AM
Subject: Fw: Project Bojinka
For those who don't know, this was sent to me by a
cousin in Connecticut.
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2001 10:35 PM
Subject: Project Bojinka
Friends, I would like to take this occasion to share
with you e-mail correspondence from my friend,
Ambassador Asher Naim of Israel.
Here is what he wrote:
Dear (name wittheld),
Last week I received Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes
article from The Wall Street Journal of May 31. I sent
it to some friends including a dear Philippine friend
Ambassador Ramon Pedrosa who in turn sent me this very
interesting information from the Philippines on Project
Bojinca, and I wish to call your attention to it just in
case it is not known to you.
Shanah Tova,
Asher Naim
From: From: (name withheld and protected)
Subject: Project Bojinka
To my Classmates:
Sometime in January 1995, when Philippine Police
authorities captured Ramsey Youssef in Manila, I was
asked, because of my affiliation with the NBI, to help
decode and decipher the hard drives of the computers
found in Youssef's possession. This is where we found
most of the evidence of the projects that were being
funded by Osama Bin Laden in the Philippines.
The first plan was to assassinate Pope John Paul II who
was then scheduled to visit the Philippines. The second
was Project Bojinka, which called for the hijacking of
US bound commercial airliners from the Philippines,
Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Honking(sic -ed) and Singapore,
and then crash them into key structures in the United
States. The World Trade Center, the White House, the
Pentagon, the Transamerica Tower, and the Sears Tower
were among prominent structures that had been identified
in the plans that we had decoded.
A dry-run was even conducted on a Tokyo bound Philippine
Airlines flight, which fortunately was aborted by our
security personnel.
It was also from these computers that we found the plans
for the first bombing of the World Trade Center in
February 1993. This evidence was eventually used to
convict Ramsey Youssef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan
for the WTC bombing.
Obviously, the original Project Bojinka was modified to
give it more significant impact on the USA. By hijacking
planes that originated from within the United States
instead of Asia, they made sure that AMERICANS would be
killed in the hijacking instead of Asians, which
obviously would elicit a stronger reaction from the
Americans. And transcontinental flights (East Coast to
West Coast) would have more fuel for most of the targets
which were on the East Coast. Abdul Hakim Murad admitted
that they had been taking flying lessons in the
Philippines for Project Bojinka. Obviously, after they
were caught and convicted, a new set of terrorists were
trained in the United States (Venice, Florida) for the
modified Bojinka.
The Philippines has been having a lot of problems lately
because Osama Bin Laden has been funding the activities
of the Abu Sayyaf through his brother-in-law, Khalifa
Janjalani. The success of these recent terrorist acts in
the United States will embolden Commander Robot and
Commander Sabaya, both of the Abu Sayyaf, to wreak more
havoc in our part of the world.
What is strange is that the United States agencies that
took possession of the evidence that we gathered,
obviously, did not take Project Bojinka seriously. I
would have thought that intelligence operatives would
have analyzed all the evidence and worked out various
scenarios that could have included the modified Bojinka
plan. If they had done so, the US would have been
prepared for this attack.
Let us thank God that many of our friends were spared
from the horrors of the other day. I have been stuck in
Minneapolis for the last two days after attending the
reunion of the East Coast Eagles in Washington, DC. I am
irritated that I am unable to travel but I am gratified
that I am still alive enough to be irritated! ___
More On 'Project Bojinka'
Airline Industry Warning Of June 23, 2001
AIRJET AIRLINE WORLD NEWS -- AJN 23JUN2001 23:00 UTC
Airline News Wire:
http://AirlineBiz.com/wire
*** U.S. Airlines may be a terror risk over next 3 days
WASHINGTON - 23JUN2001 (AirlineBiz.Com) - With U.S. Gulf
forces already on high alert, the U.S. State Department
is expected to issue a travel advisory shortly warning
Americans traveling overseas to be on their guard.
Videotapes allegedly show Osama bin Laden threatening to
attack U.S. interests in the region. Indictments against
13 Saudi nationals and one Lebanese, charging them with
killing 19 US servicemen at a military base in Saudi
Arabia in 1996 appears to be the catalyst.
With the announcement of the indictments, U.S. Attorney
General Ashcroft noted how terrorists are targeting the
United States. "Americans are a high-priority target for
terrorists," he said.
In recent years, U.S. citizens have found themselves the
target of several attacks by the terror network of Osama
bin Laden. One such attack involved a plot to destroy 12
U.S. airliners in Asia.
A jury found Ramzi Ahmed Yousef the alleged mastermind
of the scheme, and two other defendants, guilty on all
counts. Yousef is also the alleged mastermind of the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and is also
linked to schemes to assassinate President Clinton and
the Pope.
Just prior to the attack of the Saudi military base,
officials uncovered the plot to blow up 12 U.S.
airliners on January 6, 1995 when a fire broke out in a
Manila apartment.
During the trial a Secret Service agent testified that
Yousef boasted during his extradition flight to New York
that he would have blown up several jumbo jets within a
few weeks if his plan had not been discovered. The
government said the defendants even devised a name for
their airline terror plot named, "Project Bojinka."
Tapes played in court showed the defendants talking
about how much they enjoyed killing Americans. In a test
run, a bomb was placed on a Philippine Air Lines 747
flight to Tokyo. It exploded, killing a Japanese
passenger.
The Arabic satellite television channel MBC has
reported, "the next two weeks will witness a big
surprise."
A reporter of MBC said, "A severe blow is expected
against U.S. and Israeli interests worldwide." MBC said
the reporter met with Osama bin Laden two days ago in
Afghanistan.
"There is a major state of mobilization among the Osama
bin Laden forces. It seems that there is a race of who
will strike first. Will it be the United States or Osama
bin Laden?" the correspondent said.
June 25 is the fifth anniversary of the 1996 bombing of
the Khobar Towers bombing which killed 19 U.S.
servicemen. Bob Monetti, President of the Victims of Pan
Am Flight 103 said, "I hope the airlines are watching
this situation closely."
Mr. Monetti, who lost his son Rick on Pan Am 103 is also
a special advisor to the FAA on security related
matters. Monetti is hopeful about the progress that has
been made since the bombing of Pan Am 103.
However, Monetti expressed serious concern about the
abilities of the airlines to stop a terrorist
organization from carrying out their plans as promised.
Monetti noted that Osama bin Laden has had several
terrorist targets over the years and not all of them
have been military.
"The airlines are at risk -- They need to take all
appropriate measures and counter-measures to ensure the
safety of their passengers," Monetti said.
Airline News Wire: http://AirlineBiz.com/wire
http://web.archive.org/web/20011202024628/http://www.hcfhawaii.com/news/terror_risk.htm
http://www.rense.com/general14/known.htm
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