SKY TERROR

Project Bojinka

 

Source: U.S., U.K. at odds over timing of arrests

By: John Amato @ 5:04 PM - PDT
Anyone doubt the timing of this
 story now?

British wanted to continue surveillance on terror suspects, official says. NBC News has learned that U.S. and British authorities had a significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects in the alleged plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States.

A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports. http://www.crooksandliars.com/

8/11/06 COAST TO COAST AM
INTERVIEW: PETER LANCE...BOJINKA PROJECT
HOW TO MAKE A BOMB ON AN AIRPLANE....!!!!
AUDIO:
http://www.apfn.net/pogo/A001I060810-radio1.MP3



ENTER: PETER LANCE INDEX:

CONTACT PETER LANCE:
pl@cinema21group.com


Walid Shoebat

AUDIO:
http://www.apfn.net/pogo/A001I060810-radio1.MP3

INTERVIEW: Cont'd....
http://www.apfn.net/pogo/A002I060810-radio2.MP3

There are few things that are quite evident from this chart:
- Whenever his ratings dip, there's a new terror alert.
- Every terror alert is followed by a slight uptick of Bush approval ratings.
- Whenever there are many unfavorable headlines, there's another alert or announcement (distraction effect).
http://img70.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img70&image=aproval_vs_alert_chart_NEW.gif 


WAYNE MADSEN REPORT http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

Aug. 11, 2006 -- UPDATED. According to knowledgeable sources in the UK and other countries, the Tony Blair government, under siege by a Labor Party revolt, cleverly cooked up a new "terror" scare to avert the public's eyes away from Blair's increasing political woes. British law enforcement; neo-con and intelligence operatives in the United States, Israel, and Britain; and Rupert Murdoch's global media empire cooked up the terrorist plot, liberally borrowing from the failed 1995 "Oplan Bojinka" plot by Pakistan- and Philippines-based terrorist Ramzi Ahmad Yousef to crash 11 trans-Pacific airliners bound from Asia to the United States. In the latest plot, it is reported that liquid bombs were to be detonated on 10 trans-Atlantic planes outbound from Britain to the United States.

British and American authorities permitted a man with a liquid bomb to board a U.S.-bound flight in Heathrow on Aug. 6 -- the pilot foiled secret UK-US attempt to hype an incident en route to or at Boston Logan.

The London terror plan was "known" last Sunday by British and American authorities, according to the Indian press. American Airlines flight 109 from London Heathrow to Boston boarded a family of five, however, after the plane left Heathrow authorities determined that the father appeared on a British suspect list drawn up after the 7/7 London transit attacks. At first, the pilot was instructed to fly all the way to Boston where U.S. authorities could claim credit for apprehending the suspect. However, the pilot, fearing for the safety of his passengers and crew, refused and quickly returned to Heathrow without informing the passengers. Once on the ground, it was discovered that the male had in his carry-on baggage the type of combination liquid explosive and electronic device now being hyped by the British and American media.

British sources report that the reason for the delay in informing the airlines and traveling public about the liquid bomb on the American flight was to maximize the beneficial political impact for Blair and George W. Bush, both plummeting in the polls from the situations in Iraq and Lebanon.

Earlier this week, two employees of Murdoch's London tabloid, News of the World, were charged with hacking into the voice and text cell phone messages of three members of the staff of Clarence House, the residence of Princes Charles, William, and Harry. One of those charged with the wiretapping was Clive Goodman, the Royals editor of the News of the World. The same paper earlier tried to politically damage two anti-Iraq war British politicians -- Scottish Socialist Tommy Sheridan and Respect Party MP George Galloway. The paper charges that Sheridan was unfaithful to his wife by going to swinger's clubs. He won a quarter million dollar lawsuit against the paper. Galloway was confronted by Mazher Mahmood, an individual who uses the moniker "Fake Sheik," who posed as a wealthy Arab businessman and tried unsuccessfully to get Galloway to accept cash and make anti-Semitic remarks. In fact, Mahmood was and continues to be a reporter for News of the World, his continued employment approved by Murdoch. Goodman has merely been suspended by Murdoch but he has not been fired.

 

Murdoch uncovered Prince Charles-Gordon Brown plot to oust Blair. Phony terror plan cooked up to derail political coup plans.

However, what prompted Murdoch and Blair to hype a new global "terror" threat was what Murdoch learned from eavesdropping on the phone calls of Prince Charles' staff at the future king's office, home, and limousine. The eavesdropping revealed that Charles was working with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is to the left of Blair, to conduct the same type of political maneuver that John Major used to oust Margaret Thatcher from office. London's left-wing Mayor, Ken Livingston, was also in on the Charles-Brown plan and it was expected that in return for his support, Livingston would get a senior position in a Brown cabinet -- a development that sent shock waves through the neo-con circles in London, Washington, and Jerusalem, including British Home Secretary John Reid and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The Charles-Brown plan was briefed by Blair to Bush during the former's recent visit to Washington. However, because the phony terror plot was known to both leaders -- they decided to be away on vacation when the terror plot was "uncovered." Bush is vacationing at his Crawford, Texas "ranch," while Blair is on vacation in Barbados, staying at Sir Cliff Richard's luxurious villa.

After Blair met with Bush in Washington, he flew to California where on July 30 he attended Murdoch's News Corporation private corporate executive conference at the posh Inn at Spanish Bay golf resort in Pebble Beach. Blair met with Murdoch, Israeli former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newt Gingrich, and various Fox, Star, and Sky News executives. The final touches were agreed to by Blair and Murdoch on how the fake terror plot would play out in Murdoch's media empire.

 

Airline terror plot cooked up by Blair, Bush, and Murdoch to save Tony's political ass.

Blair told Bush that a Brown government would move to withdraw British troops from Iraq, break the "special relationship" with the Bush White House, and move closer to the European Union and the United Nations.

The Israeli attack on Lebanon created a rift within Blair's Cabinet with some former Blair loyalists signaling their support for the political coup against Blair. As a result, a suspect passenger was permitted to board an American aircraft at Heathrow with a liquid bomb to lay the groundwork for the media and travel hysteria five days later.

Final touches on fake terror plot were agreed to by Blair and Murdoch at July 30 News Corp/Fox VIP meeting at the Inn at Spanish Bay in Pebble Beach, California.

The wiretapping of Charles' messages also indicated that he has weighed in with various European royal families to discourage them from inviting Bush on state visits to their nations. This, reportedly upset the Bush and Blair regimes, who were working together to improve Bush's image in Europe. The White House's displeasure with the monarchies in Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Norway are a direct result of the Murdoch eavesdropping on Charles' staff.

Murdoch-Bush-Blair perception management hoax: Be afraid, be very afraid.

Not surprisingly, after Galloway tore into a Sky News reporter on a recent televised interview, The Sun, a Murdoch paper, is now reporting that one of the 24 British aircraft liquid bomber suspects now under arrest, Waheed Zaman, met with Galloway "many times." The paper quotes the sister of the suspect. A Galloway spokesman denies that Galloway knows the suspect. What is suspect is the Murdoch media empire that makes up news and commits illegal acts to provide cover for the false flag operations being conducted by Britain, the U.S., and Israel.

Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) agency has helped provide the cover story for the alleged liquid bombers. Working with British and U.S. intelligence, the ISI says it broke up the plot after arresting terrorist suspects in Lahore and Karachi. However, the ISI claims that the men were affiliated with the Kashmiri terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, a group that is run and funded by the ISI itself.

The disclosure of the Charles-Brown plot has already created a backlash from the neo-cons. The Murdoch media is already floating the rumor that Home Secretary Reid is now Blair's chosen successor, while there will be an effort to scandalize Charles in an effort to convince the British public that it would be best to skip over him and have Prince William assume the throne upon Queen Elizabeth's death or abdication.

British commentators are noting that it is Reid, a noted neo-con, who is chairing national security "Cobra" meetings in Blair's absence. Blair bypassed Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and many political observers believe that Prescott was passed over because of evidence that he was involved in supporting the Charles-Brown coup. Prescott chaired Cobra meetings in the wake of the July 7, 2005 (7/7) London transit bombings.

Meanwhile, Republican governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney used the occasion to boost their sagging popularity by placing their states' National Guardsmen at major airports in their states. http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/


Bush staff wanted bomb-detect cash moved
WASHINGTON - While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology.

Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of steps by the Homeland Security Department that has left lawmakers and some of the department's own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terror technologies.

Homeland Security's research arm, called the Sciences & Technology Directorate, is a "rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course," Republican and Democratic senators on the Appropriations Committee declared recently.

"The committee is extremely disappointed with the manner in which S&T is being managed within the Department of Homeland Security," the panel wrote June 29 in a bipartisan report accompanying the agency's 2007 budget.

Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn., who joined Republicans to block the administration's recent diversion of explosives detection money, said research and development is crucial to thwarting future attacks and there is bipartisan agreement that Homeland Security has fallen short.

"They clearly have been given lots of resources that they haven't been using," Sabo said.

Homeland Security said Friday its research arm has just gotten a new leader, former Navy research chief Rear Adm. Jay Cohen, and there is strong optimism for developing new detection technologies in the future.

"I don't have any criticisms of anyone," said Kip Hawley, the assistant secretary for transportation security. "I have great hope for the future. There is tremendous intensity on this issue among the senior management of this department to make this area a strength."

Lawmakers and recently retired Homeland Security officials say they are concerned the department's research and development effort is bogged down by bureaucracy, lack of strategic planning and failure to use money wisely.

The department failed to spend $200 million in research and development money from past years, forcing lawmakers to rescind the money this summer.

The administration also was slow to start testing a new liquid explosives detector that the Japanese government provided to the United States earlier this year.

The British plot to blow up as many as 10 American airlines on trans-Atlantic flights was to involve liquid explosives.

Hawley said Homeland Security now is going to test the detector in six American airports. "It is very promising technology and we are extremely interested in it to help us operationally in the next several years," he said.

Japan has been using the liquid explosive detectors in its Narita International Airport in Tokyo and demonstrated the technology to U.S. officials at a conference in January, the Japanese Embassy in Washington said.

Homeland Security is spending a total of $732 million this year on various explosives deterrents and has tested several commercial liquid explosive detectors over the past few years but hasn't been satisfied enough with the results to deploy them.

Hawley said current liquid detectors that can scan only individual containers aren't suitable for wide deployment because they would bring security check lines to a crawl.

For more than four years, officials inside Homeland Security also have debated whether to deploy smaller trace explosive detectors — already in most American airports — to foreign airports to help stop any bomb chemicals or devices from making it onto U.S.-destined flights.

A 2002 Homeland report recommended "immediate deployment" of the trace units to key European airports, highlighting their low cost, $40,000 per unit, and their detection capabilities. The report said one such unit was able, 25 days later, to detect explosives residue inside the airplane where convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid was foiled in his attack in December 2001.

A 2005 report to Congress similarly urged that the trace detectors be used more aggressively, and strongly warned the continuing failure to distribute such detectors to foreign airports "may be an invitation to terrorist to ply their trade, using techniques that they have already used on a number of occasions."

Tony Fainberg, who formerly oversaw Homeland Security's explosive and radiation detection research with the national labs, said he strongly urged deployment of the detectors overseas but was rebuffed.

"It is not that expensive," said Fainberg, who retired recently. "There was no resistance from any country that I was aware of, and yet we didn't deploy it."

Fainberg said research efforts were often frustrated inside Homeland Security by "bureaucratic games," a lack of strategic goals and months-long delays in distributing money Congress had already approved.

"There has not been a focused and coherent strategic plan for defining what we need ... and then matching the research and development plans to that overall strategy," he said.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (news, bio, voting record) of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said he urged the administration three years ago to buy electron scanners, like the ones used at London's airport to detect plastics that might be hidden beneath passenger clothes.

"It's been an ongoing frustration about their resistance to purchase off-the-shelf, state-of-the-art equipment that can meet these threats," he said.

The administration's most recent budget request also mystified lawmakers. It asked to take $6 million from Homeland S&T's 2006 budget that was supposed to be used to develop explosives detection technology and instead divert it to cover a budget shortfall in the Federal Protective Service, which provides security around government buildings.

Sens. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the top two lawmakers for Senate homeland appropriations, rejected the idea shortly after it arrived late last month, Senate leadership officials said.

Their House counterparts, Reps. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., and Sabo, likewise rejected the request in recent days, Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Brost said. Homeland said Friday it won't divert the money.

___

Associated Press writer Leslie Miller contributed to this story. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060811/ap_on_go_ot/terror_explosives_detection


Today, George W. Bush said, "Islamo-facists are trying to use any means to kill us because they hate the freedom we all love."

Yes, Islamic terrorists are trying to kill us. But why? Islamic terrrorists are trying to kill us because our government has been funding and arming Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine for decades now.

Posted Aug 10, 2006 01:43 PM PST http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

Bush's dubious terror alerts
Is administration's political agenda driving warnings of terrorism?


WASHINGTON -- "The Bush administration has discovered no evidence of imminent plans by terrorists to attack U.S. financial buildings, nearly two weeks after the government issued startling warnings about such possible threats, a White House official said." -- Associated Press, August 12, 2004.
When the going gets tough, the "tough" get to issuing terrorist alerts, announcing high profile arrests, and raising the terrorism threat level. Since January 2002, according to JuliusBlog, an Internet web log, there have been at least fifteen incidents where Team Bush, responding to adverse news or dipping presidential poll numbers, turned either Attorney General John Ashcroft or Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge loose to ramp up talk of terrorism and terrorist attacks.

The latest episode aired on August 1, shortly after the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, when Secretary Ridge raised the Homeland Security Department's terrorist level to Code Orange -- "high threat of terrorist attacks" -- claiming that there was ample information about terrorists targeting the financial services sector in New York City, northern New Jersey and Washington, D.C. to warrant the action. In prepared remarks, Ridge told the press: "...reports indicate that al-Qaeda is targeting several specific buildings, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in the District of Columbia; Prudential Financial in Northern New Jersey; and Citigroup buildings and the New York Stock Exchange in New York." The rest of the country remained at Code Yellow -- "significant risk of terrorist attacks."

One week later, the New York Times reported that Pakistan had warned the United States "that Al Qaeda has considered using tourist helicopters in terror attacks in New York City." Within hours reporters were on the scene interviewing heliport personnel and scaring the bejeezus out of tourists coming off their flights.

In the run-up to the Republican Party Convention in New York City later this month, terrorist alerts are rolling out of the Dept. of Homeland Security faster than the grounds crew rolls out the Yankee Stadium tarp during a sudden summer shower.

With each real or perceived threat, the American people are reminded of the president's belief that we live in the age of the permanent war against terrorism, a stance he spelled out in a November 2002 document titled "Securing the Homeland, Strengthening the Nation." While outlining his budget priorities, Bush maintained that the threat of terrorism is "an inescapable reality of life in the 21st century" and "a permanent condition to which America and the entire world must adjust." The president also said:


"Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with a wide variety of weapons. The most urgent terrorist threat to America is the Al Qaeda network. We will prosecute our war with these terrorists until they are routed from the Earth. But we will not let our guard down after we defeat Al Qaeda. The terrorist threat to America takes many forms, has many places to hide, and is often invisible. We can never be sure that we have defeated all of our terrorist enemies, and therefore we can never again allow ourselves to become overconfident about the security of our homeland."

Ramping up the Homeland Security Dept.'s threat level may result in greater vigilance amongst both law enforcement and the public, and it is conceivable that a terrorist attack may have been prevented. The cranking-up of the threat level, however, also drives the panic-mongers, most notably the 24/7 cable news networks: "Terrorist Alert" banners drape the screen, crawls get creepier, and terrorist experts are trucked out to provide wall-to-wall commentary.
After several years of warnings, and no major terrorist incident, some are questioning the accuracy and timing of these alerts: Are they based on new information or old information? Is the information reliable? How great is the threat? Should we take for granted the administration's oft-heard mantra that Al Qaeda wants to disrupt the November elections?

With the presidential election less than three months away, there are those with the temerity to question these warnings: Are there other stories -- the continued fighting in Iraq, the mounting death toll of U.S. service personnel, more Abu Ghraib revelations -- that are overshadowed by terrorist warnings? Are the recent warnings aimed at discouraging protesters from demonstrating at the GOP convention? Is there a relationship between how the president is doing at the polls and the issuing of terrorist alerts?

JuliusBlog, posted under the pseudonym Julius Civitatus, along with Biltud, put together a chart and timeline (available at the site) which in part compares "Bush approval numbers to the timeline of terror alerts." Although JuliusBlog doesn't claim that all the "alerts are politically motivated," it "is important to note...that many of these 'immediate' terror alerts were later on discredited."

A few examples provided by JuliusBlog:


February 2002: A week after Ken Lay was subpoenaed by Congress to testify about Enron, and the media latched on to the Bush/Lay connection, Attorney General John Ashcroft called on "all Americans to be on the highest state of alert" after an FBI warning of a possible imminent terrorist attack.
June 9, 2002: Whistleblower Coleen Rowley testified before Congress "that she had tried to notify her superiors about the suspicious flight students 9/11...compare[ing] the agency's bureaucracy to the 'Little Shop Of Horrors,' [and told] Congress the FBI could have done more to prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Two days later, at a press conference in Russia, Attorney General Ashcroft announced the arrest of Jose Padilla, the "dirty bomb" suspect.

July 25 through July 29, 2003: After delaying the publication of Congress' findings on 9/11, the government publishes them, but deleted 28 pages "believed to detail Saudi funding of members of Al Qaeda in the Untied States prior to Sept. 11." Shortly after U.S. troops were charged with beating Iraqi POWs and 15 U.S. soldiers died over 8 days in Iraq, the Department of Homeland Security "issue[d] a warning about the possibility of suicide attacks on airplanes."

December 18, through December 21, 2003: During this period, 9/11 Committee Chair Thomas Kean pointed out that the attacks were preventable; a federal appeals court ruled the government can not detain U.S. citizen Jose Padilla indefinitely without pressing charges against him or allowing him access to the courts; the Wall Street Journal reported that Pentagon auditors accused Halliburton of refusing to hand over internal documents related to allegations that it overcharged the U.S. government in Iraq; and David Kay, the heads of the weapons inspection team in Iraq, quits, having found no WMDs. Secretary Ridge raised the terror threat level in time for the holidays.



According to JuliusBlog: 1) when Bush's poll ratings dip, "there's a new terror alert"; 2) the alerts are followed by "a slight uptick" in the president's approval ratings; 3) "Whenever there are many unfavorable headlines, there's another alert or announcement (distraction effect)"; 4) As the November elections get closer, "the number and frequency of terror alerts keeps growing, to the point that they collapse in the graphic."
JuliusBlog is paying a price for his work. In an e-mail, the creator of the web log told me that while the "attacks on his computer were waning," the first few days after the posting he received "an avalanche of emails loaded with viruses, some even disguised (or forged), as journalists asking about the timeline. Even though I'm very savvy about these matters, and won't ever open any of these virus-laden emails, somehow something nasty got into my home computer on Sunday and destroyed all data and boot records."

Although he admits to not having a "clue" as to who might be behind the sabotage, it is "obviously someone unhappy" with the chart and timeline. "There are some infamous right-wing activists groups on the net that engage in all sorts of harassment activities like these. While I have no clue or proof to point at anyone in particular, I am working with my ISP and email provider to locate the origins of these attacks."

"Julius Civitatus" said that he was "surprised that nobody in the so-called mainstream media thought about plotting all the terror alerts in a chart."

It is worth remembering that since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, other than the anthrax attacks in 2001 -- the perpetrator/s of those incidents remain at large -- there has been a series of seemingly well-orchestrated false alarms: Terrorist attacks on bridges, water systems, transportation hubs, and nuclear power plants have not occurred; the use of chemical or biological weapons have not materialized; there have been no "dirty bombers" or suicide bombers; and the much-hyped smallpox epidemic -- remember when President Bush pushed for a national smallpox vaccination program? -- has not happened.

When the threat level is raised, polls invariably find Americans becoming more fearful and more anxious. The alerts sustain public anxiety even if information later proves the threat was over-hyped. This was best exemplified by the near-panic atmosphere Secretary Ridge caused by his Duct Tape & Plastic Sheeting Advisory in early 2003. Imagine the response if there actually were another foreign-initiated terrorist attack on American soil?

Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17495


If Not for the British, America Would've Faced Catastrophic Attack. Despite What Bush Says, We're Less Safe than Before 9/11

The simple reality in this country is that we are less safe today than before 9/11. President Bush and his kool-aid-drunken supporters constantly point to the fact that we've not been attacked since 9/11 as proof that we are indeed more secure. But the fact is, had the British police and intelligence officials not brilliantly thwarted this week's terror plot to blow up 10 planes en route to the United States, we'd would've faced a horrific attack resulting in hundreds if not thousands of American deaths.

It was not our intelligence that foiled this chilling plot. And that's the real scary part. Our financial, political, military and intelligence resources are being shamelessly squandered in Iraq while American citizens abroad and at home still face the very real threat of a terrorist attack. The Busheviks have taken their eyes off the real enemy. Bush will tell us we're more secure since 9/11, but we're not. Bush will tell us the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror, but it's not. he will continue to insist that we need to "stay the course" in Iraq, but we don't. The Repuglicans will be relentlessly driving the talking points home between now and November that a vote for Democrats will weaken America and cause another attack on U.S. soil, but it will not. It was on Bush's watch that we were attacked on 9/11, and, if not for the British, I hate to think what'd be happening here again in the days or weeks to come.
http://www.ostroyreport.blogspot.com/#81006


Terror Plot Mirrors Bojinka: Run By US Government Agent

Prison Planet | August 10 2006

Associated Press reports that the dastardly new terror plot is a re-hash of Operation Bojinka - a 1995 plot to blow up 10 Western airliners simultaneously. What they don't report is that its ringleader - Ramzi Youssef - was protected by the US government in 1992.

In September of 1992 Youssef entered the US with Ahmad Ajaj. Ajaj's luggage contained documents on how to make bombs and was stuffed with fake passports and ID's.

Ajaj was arrested - amazingly Youssef was released.

Youssef later masterminded the WTC '93 bombing after FBI agents provided the terrorists with real explosives under cover of a supposed sting operation.

Ramzi Youssef is a US government agent and his Bojinka plot - supposedly foiled by his intelligence agency bosses - is now being used as the latest monster under the bed to scare US and UK citizens into surrendering what's left of their rights.

Isn't it amazing that US government officials claimed ignorance of any Bojinka style plans before 9/11 and yet now they re-hash one for a faux terror alert.

Government enforcers and frightened slaves are all hot and bothered about the latest supposed terror plot targeting UK flights inbound to the US.

Ridiculous restrictions have been slapped on travelers, with mother's having to taste baby milk before they board planes and all hand luggage, including liquid drinks, being banned.

The new alert arrives with the 9/11 truth movement on the cusp of a wave of media exposure.

Evidence of government sponsored terror and how they use the fear of terror to control society is bursting out at the seams as editorials nationwide in the US are uniform in attempting to debunk research that questions the official version of 9/11.



Statistical analysis has proven that every time Blair and Bush sag in approval ratings, a fresh terror alert gives them a bounce back up the charts.

Every single major terror alert issued by either the US, Canadian or UK governments has proven to be either a manufactured facade, an entrapment sting or an outright hoax.

Recently, a supposed plan to hijack planes and fly them into London landmarks was exposed as a concoction of UK government lobbyists and news chiefs.

The July 2005 London bombings were a British intelligence operation. The alleged ringleader, Mohammed Siddique Khan, was working for MI5.

Here is a compendium list of other reports where the role of governments and security agencies in manufacturing artificial terror plots is exposed - within these stories are links to even more.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2006/100806terrorplot.htm


New Terror Alert: The Repuglican Homestretch Scare Campaign Begins

Now that we're in the homestretch of the November midterms race, as expected, the terror alerts have begun. To be fair, this latest scare comes out of Britain, where police arrested 20 individuals suspected of being part of a terrorist cell that planned a signifcant attack using liquid explosives in carry-on bags to blow up several commercial flights between the United Kingdom and the United States. According to British authorities, intelligence indicates that the foiled plot was likely masterminded by al Qaeda and was "intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale." As a result, England's airports have been crippled, and American travelers will face more stringent security measures at U.S. airports. The Department of Homeland Security has raised the threat level to "severe" or red for commercial flights originating in the United Kingdom bound for the United States, and to "high" or orange for all other flights.

But make no mistake. Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman and the GOP terror thugs will pounce on this new overseas threat as their pivotal "Aha!" moment to scare the crap out of Americans in their new post-Lamont "Democrats are weak on defense and national security" homestretch campaign:

"See, we told ya so. We told ya that Osama bin Laden (remember him? the guy Bush "doesn't spend too much time on anymore?") was out there plotting to attack Americans. We told ya that that's why we need to "stay the course" in Iraq. To "fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em here." We told ya these namby-pamby anti-war liberals wussies are wrong for America and will not keep us safe and secure like us brave old Repuglican chickenhawks. So we're tellin' ya again, voting for these liberal cowards will mean and end to the Iraq war, a win for Osama and the terrorists, and a new round of bloody murderous attacks here at home."

Anyone want to take bets on when the next U.S. terror alert occurs? http://www.ostroyreport.blogspot.com/#81006


Bush Admin. Tried To Cut Millions In Bomb Detection Technology...

Bush staff wanted bomb-detect cash moved
WASHINGTON - While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology.

ADVERTISEMENT

Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of steps by the Homeland Security Department that has left lawmakers and some of the department's own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terror technologies.

Homeland Security's research arm, called the Sciences & Technology Directorate, is a "rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course," Republican and Democratic senators on the Appropriations Committee declared recently.

"The committee is extremely disappointed with the manner in which S&T is being managed within the Department of Homeland Security," the panel wrote June 29 in a bipartisan report accompanying the agency's 2007 budget.

Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn., who joined Republicans to block the administration's recent diversion of explosives detection money, said research and development is crucial to thwarting future attacks and there is bipartisan agreement that Homeland Security has fallen short.

"They clearly have been given lots of resources that they haven't been using," Sabo said.

Homeland Security said Friday its research arm has just gotten a new leader, former Navy research chief Rear Adm. Jay Cohen, and there is strong optimism for developing new detection technologies in the future.

"I don't have any criticisms of anyone," said Kip Hawley, the assistant secretary for transportation security. "I have great hope for the future. There is tremendous intensity on this issue among the senior management of this department to make this area a strength."

Lawmakers and recently retired Homeland Security officials say they are concerned the department's research and development effort is bogged down by bureaucracy, lack of strategic planning and failure to use money wisely.

The department failed to spend $200 million in research and development money from past years, forcing lawmakers to rescind the money this summer.

The administration also was slow to start testing a new liquid explosives detector that the Japanese government provided to the United States earlier this year.

The British plot to blow up as many as 10 American airlines on trans-Atlantic flights was to involve liquid explosives.

Hawley said Homeland Security now is going to test the detector in six American airports. "It is very promising technology and we are extremely interested in it to help us operationally in the next several years," he said.

Japan has been using the liquid explosive detectors in its Narita International Airport in Tokyo and demonstrated the technology to U.S. officials at a conference in January, the Japanese Embassy in Washington said.

Homeland Security is spending a total of $732 million this year on various explosives deterrents and has tested several commercial liquid explosive detectors over the past few years but hasn't been satisfied enough with the results to deploy them.

Hawley said current liquid detectors that can scan only individual containers aren't suitable for wide deployment because they would bring security check lines to a crawl.

For more than four years, officials inside Homeland Security also have debated whether to deploy smaller trace explosive detectors — already in most American airports — to foreign airports to help stop any bomb chemicals or devices from making it onto U.S.-destined flights.

A 2002 Homeland report recommended "immediate deployment" of the trace units to key European airports, highlighting their low cost, $40,000 per unit, and their detection capabilities. The report said one such unit was able, 25 days later, to detect explosives residue inside the airplane where convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid was foiled in his attack in December 2001.

A 2005 report to Congress similarly urged that the trace detectors be used more aggressively, and strongly warned the continuing failure to distribute such detectors to foreign airports "may be an invitation to terrorist to ply their trade, using techniques that they have already used on a number of occasions."

Tony Fainberg, who formerly oversaw Homeland Security's explosive and radiation detection research with the national labs, said he strongly urged deployment of the detectors overseas but was rebuffed.

"It is not that expensive," said Fainberg, who retired recently. "There was no resistance from any country that I was aware of, and yet we didn't deploy it."

Fainberg said research efforts were often frustrated inside Homeland Security by "bureaucratic games," a lack of strategic goals and months-long delays in distributing money Congress had already approved.

"There has not been a focused and coherent strategic plan for defining what we need ... and then matching the research and development plans to that overall strategy," he said.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (news, bio, voting record) of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said he urged the administration three years ago to buy electron scanners, like the ones used at London's airport to detect plastics that might be hidden beneath passenger clothes.

"It's been an ongoing frustration about their resistance to purchase off-the-shelf, state-of-the-art equipment that can meet these threats," he said.

The administration's most recent budget request also mystified lawmakers. It asked to take $6 million from Homeland S&T's 2006 budget that was supposed to be used to develop explosives detection technology and instead divert it to cover a budget shortfall in the Federal Protective Service, which provides security around government buildings.

Sens. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the top two lawmakers for Senate homeland appropriations, rejected the idea shortly after it arrived late last month, Senate leadership officials said.

Their House counterparts, Reps. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., and Sabo, likewise rejected the request in recent days, Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Brost said. Homeland said Friday it won't divert the money.

___

Associated Press writer Leslie Miller contributed to this story. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060811/ap_on_go_ot/terror_explosives_detection


Nation
Toying With Terror Alerts?
In the Bush era, the timing and quality of "arrests" and "warnings" have a suspicious ring
By JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL
Posted Friday, Jul. 07, 2006
In these perilous days, we must be ready to think the unthinkable. No, I don't mean the possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack. After 9/11, that's all too easy to imagine. No, I'm talking about a thought that even now seldom forces its way into respectable conversation: the quite reasonable suspicion that the Bush Administration orchestrates its terror alerts and arrests to goose the GOP's poll numbers.

Now, I'm a respectable columnist. I don't want to draw rolled eyes. But think about it.

The 18 months prior to the 2004 presidential election witnessed a barrage of those ridiculous color-coded terror alerts, quashed-plot headlines and breathless press conferences from Administration officials. Warnings of terror attacks over the Christmas 2003 holidays, warnings over summer terror attacks at the 2004 political conventions, then a whole slew of warnings of terror attacks to disrupt the election itself. Even the timing of the alerts seemed to fall with odd regularity right on the heels of major political events. One of Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge's terror warnings came two days after John Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate; another came three days after the end of the Democratic convention.

So it went right through the 2004 election. And then not long after the champagne corks stopped popping at Bush campaign headquarters, terror alerts seemed to go out of style. The color codes became yesterday's news. With the exception of one warning about mass-transit facilities in response to the London bombing on July 7, 2005, that was pretty much it until this summer. I live in lower Manhattan and my wife works in a building overlooking Ground Zero. So I want to know when something's really up and not worry that I'm getting bamboozled to amp the President's approval rating.

Can I prove any of this was politically motivated? Of course not. But that's the magic of the terror-alert song and dance. There's no way to know. All the key facts are veiled in secrecy, as they must be. So it's impossible to know from the outside whether it's on the level or not. But with another election looming, it seems we're about to get a bunch of new chances to wonder.

On June 23, cable-news channels went gonzo over a raid on a homegrown terror cell in Miami that foiled an alleged plot to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales held a press conference to announce the arrests. Even Vice President Dick Cheney weighed in and called the group a "very real threat." He did so at a political fundraiser.

But as often is the case in these announcements, it turned out to be a lot less than advertised, unless you were a writer for Saturday Night Live. When the FBI raided the abandoned warehouse where the group hung out in Miami's impoverished Liberty City neighborhood, they found no weapons, no money and no evidence of ties to any terrorist group anywhere. Indeed, these would-be jihadis were so early in their planning for jihad that they hadn't yet set aside time to become Muslims. The group, according to a follow-up report from Reuters, "mixes Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Freemasonry, Gnosticism and Taoism." Their covert methods included taking turns guarding the abandoned warehouse (which served as their clubhouse) wearing black uniforms, ski masks and combat boots in the hot Florida summer. Their leader, Narseal Batiste, roamed the streets in a bathrobe with a crooked wooden staff recruiting men to join his group. The oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda they allegedly made to an FBI informant seems as likely as not to have been prompted by the informants' offer of new pairs of boots for the gang. Shoes were apparently in short supply.

You don't need to be a Muslim or even that bright a bulb to create deadly mayhem. Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber, was a klutz, but one who might have downed an airliner en route to the U.S. in the days after 9/11. But the Miami warehouse cult that gave Cheney the willies seemed like they'd have trouble finding a Sears let alone blowing up the Sears Tower.

Two weeks later there was another report of a foiled plot, this one a far more serious-sounding scheme to blow up the Holland Tunnel, which connects New Jersey to Manhattan. Sensing their credibility might be running thin, FBI officials as well as members of media started referring to these plotters as the "real deal" plotters, presumably to distinguish them from whack jobs in Miami. These guys too, it turned out, hadn't done much more than talk in an Internet chat room about blowing something up. And their plan to flood downtown New York City with sea water from a demolished tunnel would have been complicated a bit by the fact that, unlike New Orleans, Manhattan is well above sea level.

The "tell" in this case was the date. The FBI got wind of this plot last summer and arrests were made back in April. So why did we hear about them on July 7, the anniversary of the London bombings? I believe the question answers itself. The story was leaked to pump up the anniversary of the London subway bombings on July 7, 2005, and remind people that if it could happen in London it could happen here. The dozens if not hundreds of law enforcement folks who worked on thwarting this embryonic plot were not part of some political scheme. But whoever chose July 7 to leak the story clearly was. With the mid-term election less than four months away, for some people, that's a helpful message.

Joshua Micah Marshall is head of TPM Media and the founder of Talkingpointsmemo.com  
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1211369,00.html

 

Bojinka II: The Pakistani Connections

Funds Wired to Britain from Pakistan, LeT Founder Placed Under ‘House Arrest’

By Steve Schippert

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, th