9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics

The Deep State and 9/11

The unthinkable – that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians – has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle’s plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools.1 Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, who was subsequently murdered in London in November 2006, have charged that the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings around Moscow, attributed to Chechen separatists, were in fact the work of the Russian secret service (FSB).2

Similar attacks in Turkey have given rise to the notion there of an extra-legal "deep state" – a combination of forces, ranging from former members of the CIA-organized Gladio organization, to "a vast matrix of security and intelligence officials, ultranationalist members of the Turkish underworld and renegade former members of the [Kurdish separatist] PKK."3 The deep state, financed in part by Turkey’s substantial heroin traffic, has been accused of killing thousands of civilians, in incidents such as the lethal bomb attack in November 2005 on a bookshop in Semdinli. This attack, initially attributed to the Kurdish separatist PKK, turned out to have been committed by members of Turkey's paramilitary police intelligence service, together with a former PKK member turned informer.4 On April 23, 2008, the former Interior Minister Mehmet Agar was ordered to stand trial for his role in this dirty war during the 1990s.5

In my book The Road to 9/11, I have argued that there has existed, at least since World War Two if not earlier, an analogous American deep state, also combining intelligence officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld.6 I also pointed to recent decades of collaboration between the U.S. deep state and al-Qaeda, a terrorist underworld whose drug-trafficking activities have been played down in the 9/11 Commission Report and the mainstream U.S. media.7

Still to be explained is the suppressed anomalous fact that al-Qaeda’s top trainer on airplane hijackings, Ali Mohamed, was simultaneously a double-agent reporting to the FBI, and almost certainly still maintained a connection to the CIA which had used him as an agent and helped bring him to this country in the 1980s.8 It is not disputed that Ali Mohamed organized the Embassy bombing in Kenya; and that he did so after the RCMP, who had detained him in Vancouver in the presence of another known terrorist, released Mohamed on instructions from the FBI.9

From this historic background of collaboration, I would offer a hypothesis for further investigation: that the American deep state is somehow implicated with al-Qaeda in the atrocity of 9/11; and that this helps explain the conspicuous involvement of the CIA and other U.S. agencies in the ensuing cover-up.

Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish-American who was formerly an FBI translator, has publicly linked both al-Qaeda and American officials to the Turkish heroin trafficking that underlies the Turkish deep state. Although she has been prevented from speaking directly by an extraordinary court order,10 her allegations have been summarized by Daniel Ellsberg:

Al Qaeda, she's been saying to congress, according to these interviews, is financed 95% by drug money - drug traffic to which the US government shows a blind eye, has been ignoring, because it very heavily involves allies and assets of ours - such as Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan - all the 'Stans - in a drug traffic where the opium originates in Afghanistan, is processed in Turkey, and delivered to Europe where it furnishes 96% of Europe's heroin, by Albanians, either in Albania or Kosovo - Albanian Muslims in Kosovo - basically the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army which we backed heavily in that episode at the end of the century….Sibel says that suitcases of cash have been delivered to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, at his home, near Chicago, from Turkish sources, knowing that a lot of that is drug money.11

In 2005 Sibel Edmonds’ charges were partly aired in Vanity Fair. There it was revealed that she had had access to FBI wiretaps of conversations among members of the American-Turkish Council (ATC), about bribing elected US officials, and about "what sounded like references to large-scale drug shipments and other crimes."12

9/11: Not a Coup d’Etat, but One of a Series of American Deep Events

In 2003 Italian journalist Maurizio Blondet published a book entitled 11 settembre: colpo di stato (September 11th: A Coup d’Etat, [Milan, Effedieffe, 2002]).13 Over the years the view of 9/11 as a "coup d’état" has been endorsed by a number of observers, including Gore Vidal.14 In May 2008 a Google search for "coup d’état + 9/11" yielded 297,000 hits. One of the most recent hits, from Ed Encho, has suggested that the heart of the coup may have been the introduction on 9/11, without debate or even notice, of so-called "Continuity of Government" (COG) orders – secret orders still unknown but with constitutional implications.15 Unquestionably, as the 9/11 Commission Report states, COG, the fruit of two decades of secret Cheney-Rumsfeld collaboration, was implemented on 9/11.16 As we shall see, it is not clear just what this implied, either then or today. But journalists have claimed that earlier versions of COG plans involved suspension of the constitution.17

However to call 9/11 a coup d’état exaggerates the difference between the current weakened condition of the public state, and the prior state of affairs that has been building for years, indeed for decades, towards just such a dénouement. For half a century the constitution and laws of the open or public state have been first evaded, then eroded, then increasingly challenged and subverted, by the forces of the deep state. I wish to suggest that this erosion has been achieved in part through a series of important deep events in post-war American history – events aspects of which (it is clear from the outset) will be ignored or suppressed in the mainstream media.

Recent history has seen a number of such events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that are so inexplicable by the public notions of American politics that most Americans tend not even to think of them. Instead most accept the official surface explanations for them, even if they suspect these are not true. Or if others say they believe that "Oswald acted alone," they may do so in the same comforting but irrational state of mind that believes God will reward the righteous and punish the wicked.

Thus on the one hand we must see that America has reached a condition where traditional civil rights are flagrantly restricted as never before – as when former Attorney General Gonzalez told a shocked congressional committee that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution."18 At the same time, we must see that 9/11, as an unexplained or deep event nudging us away from constitutional normalcy and into an unnecessary permanent state of war, is not unprecedented. It is one of a series of similar unexplained events, all of which have had similar results, reaching back to the second Tonkin Gulf incident, the Kennedy assassination, even the misremembered outset of the Korean War.

The simulated "surprise" of the Bush administration to the 9/11 attack is indeed analogous to the simulated "surprise" of the Truman administration to the outbreak of war in Korea on June 25, 1950. The historian Bruce Cumings, in a volume of 957 pages, has recalled the curious behavior in previous weeks of high levels in Washington:

The CIA predicts, on June 14, a capability for invasion [of South Korea] at any time. No one disputes that. Five days later, it predicts an impending invasion. . . . Now, Corson … says that the June 14 report leaked out to "informed circles," and thus "it was feared that administration critics in Congress might publicly raise the issue. In consequence, a White House decision of sorts was made to brief Congress that all was well in Korea." . . . Would it not be the expectation that Congress would be told that all was not well in Korea? That is, unless a surprised and outraged Congress is one’s goal.19

In his exhaustive analysis of the war’s origins, Cumings sees this U.S. deception by high level officials as a response to manipulated events, which in turn were the response to the threat of an imminent expulsion of the Chinese Nationalist KMT from Taiwan, together with a peaceful reunification of Korea. The details are complex, but of relevance to 9/11, not least because of the involvement of the opium-financed KMT:

By late June, [U.S. Secretary of State Dean] Acheson and Truman were the only high officials still balking at a defense of the ROC [the "Republic of China," the KMT Chinese Nationalist remnant on Taiwan]….Sir John Pratt, an Englishman with four decades of experience in the China consular service and the Far Eastern Office, wrote the following in 1951: "The Peking Government planned to liberate Formosa on July 15 and, in the middle of June, news reached the State Department that the Syngman Rhee government in South Korea was disintegrating. The politicians on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel were preparing a plan to throw Syngman Rhee out of office and set up a unified government for all Korea."….Thus the only way out, for Chiang [Kai-shek, the KMT leader], was for Rhee to attack the North, which ultimately made Acheson yield and defend Nationalist China [on Taiwan].20

Meanwhile, in South Korea,

an Australian embassy representative sent in daily reports in late June, saying that "patrols were going in from the South to the North, endeavouring to attract the North back in pursuit. Plimsoll warned that this could lead to war and it was clear that there was some degree of American involvement as well." [According to former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam,] "The evidence was sufficiently strong for the Australian Prime Minister to authorize a cable to Washington urging that no encouragement be given to the South Korean government."21

Cumings also notes the warning in late April from an American diplomat, Robert Strong, that "desperate measures may be attempted by [the Chinese] Nationalist Government to involve [U.S.] in [a] shooting war as [a] means of saving its own skin."22 In chapters too complex to summarize here, he chronicles the intrigues of a number of Chiang’s backers, including the China Lobby in Washington, General Claire Chennault and his then nearly defunct airline CAT (later Air America), former OSS chief General William Donovan, and in Japan General MacArthur and his intelligence chief Charles Willoughby. He notes the visit of two of Chiang’s generals to Seoul, one of them on a U.S. military plane from MacArthur’s headquarters. And he concludes that "Chiang may have found …on the Korean peninsula, the provocation of a war that saved his regime [on Taiwan] for two more decades:"

Anyone who has read this text closely to this point, and does not believe that Willoughby, Chiang, [Chiang’s emissary to Seoul, General] Wu Tieh Cheng, Yi Pōm-sōk, [Syngman] Rhee, Kim Sōk-won, Tiger Kim, and their ilk were capable of a conspiracy to provoke a war, cannot be convinced by any evidence.

He adds that anti-conspiratorialist Americans "are prey to what might be called the fallacy of insufficient cynicism" -- a charge that may be revived, if it can ever be shown that 9/11 also was "a conspiracy to provoke a war."23

9/11, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK Assassination

In 1964 Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, in response to Secretary of Defense McNamara’s assurances that there was "unequivocal proof" of a second "unprovoked attack" on U.S. destroyers. Today we know not only that there was no such second attack, but that the combined harassments of CIA-controlled PT boats and US destroyers in North Vietnamese waters were so provocative as to invite one. George Ball, who at the time was an Undersecretary of State, later commented in a 1977 BBC radio interview that

Many of the people who were associated with the war were looking for any excuse to initiate bombing. The sending of a destroyer up the Tonkin Gulf was primarily for provocation. ... There was a feeling that if the destroyer got into some trouble, that it would provide the provocation we needed.24

The Tonkin Gulf deep event presents a number of similarities to the Korean deep event in 1950. Tonkin Gulf also can be analyzed into three different phases: the deception of Congress by high level officials, preceded by provocative intrigues in Asia, and reinforced by deceptive manipulation of reports inside the NSA. (All three phases can also be discerned in the provocative maneuvers in 1968 of the U.S.S. Pueblo, in an incident or deep event that did not lead, as some clearly wished, to a military response against North Korea.)25

We now know from a recently declassified in-house NSA history that on August 4, 1964, NSA possessed 122 pieces of SIGINT (signals intelligence) which taken together indicated clearly that there was no second North Vietnamese attack on August 4: "Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August." But of these 122 pieces, the White House was supplied with only fifteen – "only SIGINT that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers."26

Meanwhile, over at CIA, "By the afternoon of Aug. 4, the CIA’s expert analyst on North Vietnam … had concluded that probably no one had fired on the U.S. ships. He included a paragraph to that effect in the item he wrote for the Current Intelligence Bulletin, which would be wired to the White House and other key agencies and appear in print the next morning. And then something unique happened. The Director of the Office of Current Intelligence, a very senior officer …, descended into the bowels of the agency to order the paragraph deleted. He explained: `We’re not going to tell LBJ that now. He has already decided to bomb North Vietnam’"27

The parallel events in NSA and CIA illustrate how a shared bureaucratic mindset, or propensity for military escalation, can generate synergistic responses in diverse milieus, without there having necessarily been any conspiratorial collusion between the two agencies.

Of more than passing interest is the fact that the CIA in the 1960s still had senior officers who believed that sooner or later a showdown with the Chinese Communists was inevitable, and had renewed General Chennault’s old proposal for a large-scale landing by Chiang on the Chinese mainland.28 This seems to explain a series of manipulative escalatory moves in Laos, shortly before the Tonkin Gulf incidents, with a similar momentum towards expanding the U.S. war beyond South Vietnam. In 1963-64 one notes again, as in 1950, the intriguing of local KMT elements, in this case forces directly involved in the opium traffic.29

As for 9/11, the paradox between surface tranquility and alarming warnings is as evident as it was in 1950. Even the 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that in the summer of 2001 "the system was blinking red" for an al-Qaeda attack. Its record amply refutes Condoleezza Rice’s claim in May 2002 that "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would … try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."30 Yet in the midst of this crisis the CIA in August 2001 was flagrantly withholding crucial evidence from the FBI that, if shared, would have assisted the FBI in its current efforts to locate one of the alleged hijackers, Khaled al-Mihdar. This withholding provoked an FBI agent to predict at that time, accurately, that "someday someone will die."31

As I describe in the forthcoming expanded reissue of my book The War Conspiracy, this culpable withholding of crucial evidence from the FBI by the CIA closely parallels the CIA’s withholding from the FBI of important information about Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1963. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that this withholding was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.32 Without these withholdings, in other words,

neither the Kennedy assassination nor 9/11 could have unfolded in the manner in which they did.

And without understanding the details, we can safely conclude that operations of the CIA – the deep state -- were somehow implicated, whether innocently or conspiratorially, in the background of both the JFK assassination and 9/11. With respect to the CIA’s withholding of information from the FBI about Oswald, even a former CIA officer, Jane Roman, has agreed that this indicates "some sort of [CIA] operational interest in Oswald’s file."33 Lawrence Wright, commenting in The New Yorker about the CIA’s analogous withholding of information about al-Mihdar, has reached the similar conclusion that "The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it."34

In short, from this perspective, 9/11 is not wholly without precedent in U.S. history. It should be seen not as a unique departure from orderly constitutional government – a coup d’état – but as yet another unexplained deep event of the sort that has continued to erode the American constitutional system of open politics and civil liberties.

9/11: Not Just Another Deep Event, But a Constitutional Deep Event

It is however a deep event of a new and unprecedented order. Deep events related to political control of this country are far more frequent than most of us like to recognize. Since the conspicuous assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s – all deep events -- at least six politicians have also died in single-plane crashes. Although many of these crashes were probably accidental, it is striking that only one Republican has died in this fashion, as opposed to five Democrats.35 Official accounts of the deaths of three of these Democrats – Senator Paul Wellstone, and Congressmen Hale Boggs and Nick Begich, have been challenged, as has the very suspicious "accidental" death in a 1970 single-plane crash of UAW labor leader Walter Reuther.36

Of these deep events, some – notably the JFK assassination -- stand out as having had structural impact on American political society. America’s three major wars since World War Two – Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq – have all been preceded by deep events that have cumulatively contributed to America’s current war-based economy. Looked at in this way, 9/11 falls into a sequence in which it is preceded by the Second Tonkin Gulf Incident and by the intrigues and lies in June 1950 concerning Korea.

But of all these deep events, 9/11 can be seen as the first to have had not only structural but constitutional implications. For with the introduction of COG before 10:00 AM on September 11, 2001, the status of the U.S. constitution in American society has changed, in ways that still prevail. What COG means in practice is still largely unknown to us. It is clear though that in abridging habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment, the innovations after COG and 9/11 made the U.S. constitutional situation more like the situation in Britain, where written statutes are explicitly restricted supplemented by an undefined royal prerogative: a collection of powers belonging to the Sovereign which have no statutory basis.37

Abuse of the British royal prerogative was one of the explicit grievances which ultimately led to the American Revolution. Then as now it was linked to imperial arrangements for standing armies to wage war. It could be said that in America today, the powers needed for imposing U.S. global dominance in the world have again come to restrict the scope of the constitutional public state.

The extent to which presidential power is limited by congressional statute has been and will be continuously and extensively debated. It is clear however that the George W. Bush administration has revived the extreme or monarchical view expressed, for the first time in American political history, by former president Richard Nixon: that "when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."38

Jack Goldsmith, a former Assistant Attorney General in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, has reported that, inside the White House, Cheney’s legal advisor David Addington frequently argued that "the Constitution empowers the President to exercise prerogative powers to do what is necessary in an emergency to save the country."39 Goldsmith concluded that "The presidency in the age of terrorism – the Terror Presidency – suffers from many of the vices of [Nixon’s] Imperial Presidency."40

Cheney, supported by Addington, made clear in his Iran-Contra Minority Report of 1987 his belief that "the Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the law." Cheney supported this claim by pointing to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, which Jefferson, without using the word "prerogative," justified by "the laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of serving our country when in danger."41 But the Cheney-Addington defense of an on-going prerogative in an on-going war on terror has far more in common with 17^th-century British monarchical legal theory, than with Jefferson’s single resort to such action, after a lifetime of attacking the notion of prerogative power.42

As part of the case for an unrestrained or monarchical view of executive power, we have seen the contention that the President may disregard or marginalize treaty obligations prohibiting torture. Before COG was declared on September 11, 2001, a network of laws, developed through checks and balances by all three branches of federal government, prohibited torture. "It was not to last."43

In keeping with Cheney’s COG planning in the 1980s, the Bush administration has made similar inroads on habeas corpus, a right conferred by Magna Carta, reaffirmed by the English parliament in a statute of 1679, and mentioned in the U.S. constitution. Nevertheless, in defining the constitutional crisis we now face, it is important to see that it is not an unprecedented and anomalous event, but rooted in developments over decades.

9/11, Deep Events, and the Global Dominance Mindset in American Society

The continuity of past deep events is part of the problem facing those who wish to understand and correct what underlies them. For the mainstream U.S. media (as we now clearly see them) have become so implicated in past protective lies about Korea, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK assassination that they, as well as the government, have now a demonstrated interest in preventing the truth about any of these events from coming out.44

This means that the current threat to constitutional rights does not derive from the deep state alone. As I have written elsewhere, the problem is a global dominance mindset that prevails not only inside the Washington Beltway but also in the mainstream media and even in the universities, one which has come to accept recent inroads on constitutional liberties, and stigmatizes, or at least responds with silence to, those who are alarmed by them.45 Just as acceptance of bureaucratic groupthink is a necessary condition for advancement within the state, so acceptance of this mindset’s notions of decorum has increasingly become a condition for participation in mainstream public life.

In saying this, I mean something more narrow than the pervasive "business-defined consensus" which Gabriel Kolko once asserted was "a central reality," underlying how "a ruling class makes its policies operate."46 I would agree that, at least since the Reagan era, the mindset I am describing has become more and more clearly identified with the mentality of an overworld determined to protect its privileges and even enlarge them at the expense of the rest of society.

But the mindset I mean is narrower in focus – originally concerned with defending and now increasingly concerned with enlarging America’s dominance in the world, in an era of finite and increasingly scarcer resources. And it is also, increasingly, less a consensus than an arena of serious division and debate.

It is clear that the mindset is not monolithic. There have been recurring notable dissents within it, such as when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed in the New York Times that the Bush administration, in defiance of the FISA Act, was engaged in warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone calls inside the United States.47 But on other issues, notably the Iraq War, the Times has conspicuously failed to play the judicious critical role that it did with respect to the U.S. war in Vietnam. In general, as Kristina Borjesson reports in her devastating book, "Investigative reporting is dwindling…because it is expensive, attracts lawsuits, and can be hostile to the corporate interests and/or government connections of a news division’s parent company."48 And as to critical thinking about 9/11, as before about the Kennedy assassination, the Post has predictably gone out of its way to depict the 9/11 truth movement as a "cacophonous and free-range…bunch of conspiracists."49

According to a survey of Lexis Nexis, the New York Times did not report Attorney General Gonzalez’ newsworthy claim that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution." (The Washington Post reported it, without comment, in a story of 197 words.)50 And on the question of torture even a liberal Harvard University professor, Michael Ignatieff, has argued in a University Press book from an even-handed starting point – "A democracy is committed to both the security of the majority and the rights of the individual" -- to an alarming defense of "coercive questioning."51

In this state of affairs, I shall argue, the Internet provides an opportunity for opposition, of potentially immense political importance.

Deep Events as Intrigues within the Global Dominance Consensus

Many critics of American foreign policy on the left tend to stress its substantial coherence over time, from the War-Peace Studies for post-war planning of the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1940s, to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson’s plans in the 1950s for a "permanent war economy," to Clinton’s declaration to the United Nations in 1993 that the U.S. will act "multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary."52

This view of America’s policies has persuaded some, notably Alexander Cockburn, to lament the displacement of coherent Marxist analysis by the "fundamental idiocy" and "foolishness" of "9/11 conspiracism."53 But it is quite possible to acknowledge both that there are ongoing continuities in American policy and also important, hidden, and recurring internal divisions, which have given rise to America’s structural deep events. These events have always involved friction between Wall Street and the Council on Foreign Relations, on the one hand, and the increasingly powerful oil- and military-dominated economic centers of the Midwest and the Texas Sunbelt on the other.

At the time that General MacArthur, drawing on his Midwest and Texas support, threatened to challenge Truman and the State Department, the opposition was seen as one between the traditional Europe-Firsters of the Northeast and new-wealth Asia-Firsters. In the 1952 election, the foreign policy debate was between Democratic "containment" and Republican "rollback." Bruce Cumings, following Franz Schurmann, wrote later of the split, even within the CIA, between "Wall Street internationalism" on the one hand and "cowboy-style expansionism" on the other.54

Many have followed Michael Klare in defining the conflict as one, even within the Council on Foreign Relations, between "traders" and warrior "Prussians."55 Since the rise to eminence of the so-called "Vulcans" – notably Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, backed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – the struggle has frequently been described as a struggle between the multilateralists of the status quo and the unilateralists seeking indisputable American hegemony.56

Underlying every one of the deep events I have mentioned, and others such as the U-2 incident, can be seen this contest between traderly (multilateralist) and warriorly (unilateralist) approaches to the maintenance of U.S. global dominance. For decades the warriorly faction was clearly a minority; but it was also an activist and well-funded minority, in marked contrast to the relatively passive and disorganized traderly majority. Hence the warriorly preference for war, thanks to ample funding from the military-industrial complex and also to a series of deep events, was able time after time to prevail.

The 1970s can be seen as a turning-point, when a minority CFR faction, led by Paul Nitze, united with corporate executives from the military-industrial complex like David Packard and pro-Zionist future neocons like Richard Perle to forge a succession of militant political coalitions, such as the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD). Cheney and Rumsfeld, then in the Ford White House, participated in this onslaught on the multilateral foreign policy of Henry Kissinger.57 In the late 1990s Cheney and Rumsfeld, even while secretly refining the COG provisions put into force on 9/11, also participated openly in the successor organization to the CPD, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

From his office interfacing between CIA and the U.S. Air Force, Col. L. Fletcher Prouty deduced that there was a single Secret Team, within the CIA but not confined to it, responsible for not only the Tonkin Gulf incidents (timed to enable already planned military action against North Vietnam) but other deep events, such as the U-2 incident of 1960 (which in Prouty’s opinion was planned and timed to frustrate the projected summit conference between Eisenhower and Khrushchev) and even the assassination of President Kennedy (after which the Secret Team "moved to take over the whole direction of the war and to dominate the activity of the United States of America").58

In language applicable to both Korea in 1950 and Tonkin Gulf in 1964, Prouty argued that CIA actions followed a pattern of actions which "went completely out of control in Southeast Asia:"

The clandestine operator… prepares the stage by launching a very minor and very secret, provocative attack of a kind that is bound to bring open reprisal. These secret attacks, which may have been made by third parties or by stateless mercenaries whose materials were supplied secretly by the CIA, will undoubtedly create reaction which in turn is observed in the United States…. It is not a new game. [but] it was raised to a high state of art under Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy against North Vietnam, to set the pattern for the Gulf of Tonkin attacks.59

I mention Prouty’s thesis here in order to record my partial dissent from it. In my view his notion of a "team" localizes what I call the global dominance mindset too narrowly in a restricted group who are not only like-minded but in conspiratorial communication over a long term. He exhibits the kind of conspiratorialist mentality once criticized by G. William Domhoff:

We all have a tremendous tendency to want to get caught up in believing that there's some secret evil cause for all of the obvious ills of the world …. [Conspiracy theories] encourage a belief that if we get rid of a few bad people, everything will be well in the world.60

My own position is still that which I articulated years ago in response to Domhoff:

I have always believed, and argued, that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to `a few bad people,’ but to the institutional and parapolitical arrangements which constitute the way we are systematically governed.61

Quoting what I had written, Michael Parenti added, "In sum, national security state conspiracies [or what I would call deep events] are components of our political structure, not deviations from it."62

The outcome of the deep events I have mentioned so far has been chiefly a series of victories for the warriors.63 But there have been other structural deep events, notably Watergate in 1972-74 and Iran-Contra in 1986-87, which can be interpreted, if not as victories for the traders, at least as temporary setbacks for the warriors. In The Road to 9/11 I have tried to show that Cheney and Rumsfeld, while in the Ford White House, bitterly resented the setback represented by the post-Watergate reforms, and immediately set in motion a series of moves to reverse them. I argue there that the climax of these moves was the imposition after 9/11 of their long-planned provisions for COG, formulated under their supervision since the early 1980s.

Thus since World War Two the warriorly position, initially that of a marginal but conspiratorial minority, has moved since the Reagan and Bush presidencies into a more and more central position. This is well symbolized by the rise in influence since 1981 of the Council for National Policy, originally funded by Texas oil billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt and explicitly designed to offset the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations.64 Comparing the 1950s with the present decade, it is striking how much the status of the State Department has declined vis-à-vis the Pentagon. With the accelerated militarization of the U.S. economy, the question arises whether a more traderly foreign policy can ever again prevail.

And since 9/11, especially with the institution of unknown COG procedures, some have talked of the overall subversion of democracy, by a new Imperial Presidency in the Bush White House.65

9/11, the Threat to Constitutional Rights, and Congress

A skeptic might observe that there is still a Congress, with constitutional powers to review and restrict what the executive does. And it is true that a joint congressional committee, in 2002, did investigate CIA and FBI activities before and after 9/11.66 The powers of Congress have been weakened, however. A crucial section of this report, dealing precisely with the CIA’s and Saudi government’s relationship to the alleged hijacker al-Mihdar, was classified and withheld by the administration. When some of the explosive information was leaked to Newsweek, the committee members and staff (rather than the Saudi government) became the focus of a criminal leak investigation by the FBI.67 The chairman, Senator Bob Graham

thought the leak investigation was an obvious effort by the administration to intimidate Congress. And if that was the intention, it worked. Members of the joint committee and their staffs were frightened into silence about the investigation.68

It would appear that the election of Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress has done little to change this state of affairs. Warrantless electronic surveillance (which the President has referred to as a COG provision)69 was endorsed by the new 110^th Congress in the Protect America Act of 2007, an act which restricted FISA Court supervision as the President had wished. This same 110^th Congress failed to undo the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which (as Robert Parry wrote in the Baltimore Chronicle) "effectively eliminated habeas corpus for non-citizens, including legal resident aliens."70

Just as alarmingly, Congress has shown little or no desire to challenge, or even question, the over-arching assumptions of the war on terror. We are still in a proclaimed national emergency that was first proclaimed by President Bush on September 14, 2001.71 As the Washington Times wrote on September 18, 2001, "Simply by proclaiming a national emergency on Friday, President Bush activated some 500 dormant legal provisions, including those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law." The Washington Times was referring to presidential Proclamation 7463 of September 14, 2001, "Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks." The state of emergency that was subsequently declared on September 23, 2001, by Executive Order 13224, was again formally extended by the president on September 20, 2007.72

COG, NSPD-51, and the Challenge to Congressional Checks and Balances

The constitutional implications of this state of emergency were aggravated by the President’s "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive" (NSPD)-51, of May 9, 2007, which decreed (without even a press release) that

When the president determines a catastrophic emergency has occurred, the president can take over all government functions and direct all private sector activities to ensure we will emerge from the emergency with an "enduring constitutional government."73

The Directive, without explicitly saying so, appeared to override the post-Watergate statutory provisions for congressional regulation enacted in 1977 by the National Emergencies Act.74

Among major newspapers, only the Washington Post reported NSPD-51 at all, noting that the "directive formalizes a shift of authority away from the Department of Homeland Security to the White House."75 It added that

After the 2001 attacks, Bush assigned about 100 senior civilian managers to rotate secretly to locations outside of Washington for weeks or months at a time to ensure the nation's survival, a shadow government that evolved based on long-standing "continuity of operations plans."

However the Post failed to note that these continuity of operations (COG) plans, which reportedly involve suspension of the Constitution and possibly Congress, were secret -- the fruit of secret planning over two decades by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, even during periods of time when neither of the two men held a government position.76

After urging from constituents, including many members of the 911truth movement, Congressman Peter deFazio did attempt to see the Continuity of Government (COG) plans in the classified Appendices of NSPD-51. Both he, and eventually the entire House Committee on Homeland Security, were denied the opportunity to see these appendices, on the grounds that the Committee did not possess the requisite clearances. This should have been a line in the sand for Congress to assert its constitutional rights and duties. As I have reported elsewhere,

The story, ignored by the mainstream press, involved more than the usual tussle between the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. Government. What was at stake was a contest between Congress's constitutional powers of oversight, and a set of policy plans that could be used to suspend or modify the constitution.77

But it appears that the current Congress will do nothing to support Congressman deFazio’s efforts at congressional oversight of COG.

Congress and the On-Going Cover-Up of 9/11

Furthermore, the 110^th Congress took no action to ensure that all government agencies will collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission’s commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009.78 A law to ensure this is badly needed.

The FBI has been declassifying documents cooperatively with respect to this commitment, and recently the CIA has begun to cooperate as well.79 But some federal agencies, notably the FAA and Pentagon, are not collaborating with the 9/11 Commission’s commitment at all. It may take a law to get them to do so. Both the FAA and the Pentagon declined to release important records to the 9/11 Commission, despite its statutory powers, until required to do so by judicial subpoena.80 But the law which created the 9/11 Commission in 2002 made no legal determination for the future of its records.81

This is a matter of concern, because 9/11 has clearly initiated a major readjustment of our traditional constitutional balances and civil rights. I submit that a vigorous defense of the constitutional traditions of this country requires vigorous pressure for the release of the 9/11 Commission’s records, so that we can begin to resolve the mysteries of how this constitutional crisis arose.

In short, we are living in an on-going state of emergency whose exact limits are unknown, on the basis of a controversial deep event – 9/11 -- that is still largely a mystery. Without endorsing the notion that a coup d’état has occurred, I would categorically assert that a radically hegemonic mindset, located primarily in Vice-President Cheney’s office, is currently using 9/11, the war on terror, and secret COG rules to assert prerogative limitations on the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution, without any significant challenge from a compliant Congress and media.

9/11, the Public, and Internet Politics

This raises the question whether the public, about to vote in the 2008 election, can exercise the constitutional restraints that Congress and the media have failed to supply. The answer, I submit, lies in what I would call Internet Politics, the mobilization of nationwide pressures on candidates in the next election through internet coordination.

There is I believe a latent majority of Americans who could agree to ask all candidates to

a) review and revise the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to unequivocally restore habeas corpus, within the limitations of the U.S. Constitution, Article One, Section 9;

b) unequivocally outlaw torture;

c) review and restrict the provisions for warrantless electronic surveillance in the Protect America Act of 2007.

d) vote for The American Freedom Agenda Act of 2007 (H.R. 3835), which addresses these and other issues. This bill was introduced by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul on October 15, 2007, and is supported by both the Republican American Freedom Agenda, and the Democratic American Freedom Campaign.82

Those in the 911truth movement could ask candidates to take two further steps

d) insist on the right of the Homeland Security Committees in Congress to review the COG appendices to National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD)-51;

e) support a law to force all government agencies to collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission’s commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009.83

But social thought is socially fashioned. For it to be effective it must be mobilized, and become more than a chorus of bloggers croaking from our backwater lilypads in the blogomarsh. Clearly it would take a strenuous concerted effort to create or persuade a movement, such as MoveOn, to take on all these issues.

Is it possible that some organization can be persuaded to accept this challenge, and take the first steps in mobilizing such a force?

NOTES

1 In the single month of March 1962, the OAS set off an average of 120 bombs per day ("The Generals' Putsch," http://countrystudies.us/algeria/34.htm).

2 BBC News, November 24, 2006: "Alexander Litvinenko wrote a book in which he alleged Federal Security Service (FSB) agents in Russia coordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in the country that killed more than 300 people."

3 Gareth Jenkins, "Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War," Terrorism Monitor, May 1, 2008,
http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2374142.

4 Nicholas Birch, Irish Times, November 26, 2005,

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2005/1126/1908792893FR26TURKEY.html.
Former Turkish president and prime minister Suleyman Demirel later commented on this incident that "It is fundamental principle that there is one state. In our country there are two….There is one deep state and one other state ….The state that should be real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one." (Jon Gorvett, "Turkey’s `Deep State’ Surfaces in Former President’s Words, Deeds in Kurdish Town," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2006, http://www.washington-report.org/archives/Jan_Feb_2006/0601037.html ).

5 Jenkins, "Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War." A Google search on June 7, 2008, for "Semdinli + PKK" in major world English-language publications yielded 157 results. Of these just two were from the United States. Of these one (Washington Times, December 6, 2005) did not mention the deep state’s involvement in the incident at all. The other (Newsweek, November 28, 2005) defined the deep state without mentioning its underworld involvement. A similar search for "deep state" revealed the same paucity of coverage in the U.S. media.

6 Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 4-7, 14-17, etc.

7 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 121-22, 124-27, 163-69.

8 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 139-42, 150-60, etc.; Peter Lance, Triple Cross: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI –and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006).

9 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 153; citing Toronto Globe and Mail, November 22, 2001. It is no accident that the mainstream U.S. press have been silent, not just concerning this important fact, but also about the two books recording it: Peter Lance’s Triple Cross and my own The Road to 9/11. Triple Cross finally got mentioned by name in the New York Times, but only because its publisher, Judith Regan, was dismissed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (New York Times, December 19, 2006).

10 On October 18, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the State Secrets Privilege in order to prevent disclosure of the nature of Edmonds' work on the grounds that it would endanger national security.

11 Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06,
http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.com/2006/10/ellsberg-hastert-got-suitcases-of-al.html.

12 Vanity Fair, September 2005. According to the ATC web site, "As one of the leading business associations in the United States, the American-Turkish Council (ATC) is dedicated to effectively strengthening U.S.-Turkish relations through the promotion of commercial, defense, technology, and cultural relations. Its diverse membership includes Fortune 500, U.S. and Turkish companies, multinationals, nonprofit organizations, and individuals with an interest in U.S.-Turkish relations." It is thus comparable to the American Security Council, whose activities in 1963 are discussed in Scott, Deep Politics, e.g. 292.

Edmonds has been partially corroborated by Huseyin Baybasin, another Turkish heroin kingpin now in jail in Holland, in his book Trial by Fire: "I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England." But as he adds: "I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part." Baybasin claimed he was assisted by Turkish officers working for NATO in Belgium ("The Susurluk Legacy," By Adrian Gatton, Druglink Magazine, Nov/Dec 2006, http://adriangatton.com/archive/1990_01_01_archive.html).

13 Also in 2003 former government consultant Chalmers Johnson declared, in an interview, that what happened in Florida after the 2000 election was a "coup d’état" (Critical Asian Studies, 35, no. 2 [2003], 303). In the same year Bill Moyers, a veteran of the Johnson White House, wrote of the G.W. Bush to realign government as "the most radical assault on the notion of one nation, indivisible, that has occurred in our lifetime" (Text of speech to the Take Back America conference sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future, June 4, 2003, Washington, DC,
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0610-11.htm).

14 Interview with Alex Jones, November 2, 2006, http://jonesreport.com/articles/021106_vidal.html.

15 Ed Encho, "9/11: Cover For a Coup D'Etat?" OpEdNews, May 27, 2008,

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=7521.

16 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, Road to 9/11, 228-29.

17 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats, and the FBI: The Covert War against the Central America Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 184; Alfonso Chardy, Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.

18 Robert Parry, "Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus," Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007, http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/011907Parry.shtml.

19 Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II, 611, 613; quoting William R. Corson, The Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial, 1977), 315–21; whole passage quoted in Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 61. Cumings quotes further from Dean Rusk’s testimony to Congress on June 20: ‘‘We see no present indication that the people across the border have any intention of fighting a major war for that purpose’’ (taking over South Korea). He notes that General Ridgway later said he "was shocked" by Dean Rusk’s reassuring testimony.

20 Cumings, Origins, II, 600-01. My selective quotations cannot do justice to the complexity of Cumings’ book, which presents three different possible explanations for the outbreak of the war. Cumings depicts a contest for the future of the peninsula -- and also Taiwan -- in which local leaders on both sides were looking for support from their respective megapowers.

21 Cumings, Origins, II, 547; citing Gavin McCormack, Cold War/Hot War (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1983), 97; E. Gough Whitlam, A Pacific Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981), 57-58.

22 Cumings, Origins, II, 527.

23 Cumings, Origins, II, 600, 601. Yi Pōm-sōk was a pro-Chiang advocate in Seoul of attacking North Korea. Kim Sōk-won was a Korean commander who had previously attacked North Korea. Tiger Kim was a Korean veteran of the Japanese army close to Rhee, and a war criminal.

24 James Bamford, Body of Secrets (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 301. William Bundy has taken issue with this judgment, arguing that escalating the war north "didn’t fit in with our plans at all" (Robert McNamara, "The Tonkin Gulf Resolution," in Andrew Jon Rotter, Light at the End of the Tunnel: A Vietnam War Anthology [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991], 83). But Ball was correct in reporting that bombing fit in with some people’s plans.

25 Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008), 178-215.

26 Robert J. Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964," Cryptologic Quarterly, declassified in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 132,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/relea00012.pdf.

27 Ray McGovern, "CIA, Iran & the Gulf of Tonkin," ConsortiumNews, January 12, 2008, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/011108a.html.

28 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 132, cf. 67; citing Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), 318, 314.

29 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 88, 93-103.

30 "National Security Advisor Holds Press Briefing," White House Website, May 16, 2002,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020516-13.html.
We now know that on 9/11 there were a number of war games and exercises, including an exercise at the National Reconnaissance Office near Dulles Airport, testing responses "if a plane were to strike a building." (Scott, Road to 9/11, 215-16; Evening Standard [London], August 22, 2002; Boston Globe, September 11, 2002,
http://www.boston.com/news/packages/sept11/anniversary/wire_stories/0903_plane_exercise.htm ).

31 9/11 Commission Report, 259, 271; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 352-54 (FBI agent). After 9/11 another FBI agent was even more bitter: "They [CIA] didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business – that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI…. And that’s why September 11 happened. That is why it happened….They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands" (James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies [New York: Doubleday, 2004], 224).

32 Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel, & Parker, 1987), 268; quoted in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 389.

33 Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 196-98; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 387-88.

34 Lawrence Wright, "The Agent," New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; discussion in Scott, The War Conspiracy (2008), 388-89.

35 Republican Senators Heinz and Tower also died in plane crashes, but after collisions between two aircraft. Conservative Democrat Larry McDonald died when the civilian airliner KAL 007 was shot down by Soviet interceptors in September 1983.

36 Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996), 201, 206: "In the years before the fatal crash there had been assassination attempts against Walter and Victor [Reuther]. (Victor believes the attempt against him was intended as a message to Walter.) In each of these instances, state and federal law-enforcement agencies showed themselves at best lackadaisical in their investigative efforts, suggesting the possibility of official collusion or at least tolerance for the criminal deeds. … Third, like the suspicious near-crash that occurred the previous year, the fatal crash also involved a faulty altimeter in a small plane. It is a remarkable coincidence that Reuther would have been in two planes with the exact same malfunctioning in that brief time frame....In a follow-up interview with us, Victor further noted: `Animosity from government had been present for some time [before the fatal crash]. It was not only Walter's stand on Vietnam and Cambodia that angered Nixon, but also I had exposed some CIA elements inside labor, and this was also associated with Walter .... There is a fine line between the mob and the CIA There is a lot of crossover. Throughout the entire history of labor relations there is a sordid history of industry in league with Hoover and the mafia .. . . You need to check into right-wing corporate groups and their links to the national security system.’ Checking into such things is no easy task. The FBI still refuses to turn over nearly 200 pages of documents regarding Reuther's death, including the copious correspondence between field offices and Hoover. And many of the released documents-some of them forty years old-are totally inked out. It is hard to fathom what national security concern is involved or why the FBI and CIA still keep so many secrets about Walter Reuther's life and death."

37 See discussion in Jack N. Rakove, "Taking the Prerogative out of the Presidency: An Originalist Perspective," Presidential Studies Quarterly 37.1, 85–100; Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. and Aziz Z. Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New York: Rodale, 2007), 153-58

38 Interview with David Frost, aired May 11, 1977; in Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 159; Robert D. Sloane, "The Scope of Executive Power in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction," Boston University Law Review 88:341,
http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr/documents/SLOANE.pdf, 346.

39 Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration (New York : W.W. Norton, 2007), 82.

40 Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 183

41 Minority Report, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, 100^th Congress. 1^st Session, H. Rept No 100-433, S. Rept No. 100-216, p. 465.

42 Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 174.

43 Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 72; cf. Sloane, "The Scope of Executive Power," 347.

44 Cf. the investigative journalist and media critic Philip Weiss, "When Black Becomes White," in Kristina Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 186: "The mainstream media’s response [to theories of the Kennedy assassination] has been a dull one – to solemnly and stoically report the government’s assertions, over and over."

45 Scott, War Conspiracy, 10, 383, 395.

46 Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon, 1969), xii-xiii.

47 James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. "Spying Program Snared U.S. Calls", New York Times, December 21, 2005.

48 Borjesson, Into the Buzzsaw, 13. Even former George W. Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has referred to the media in his book as "complicit enablers" of Bush administration war propaganda (Scott McClellan, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception [New York: Public Affairs, 2008], 70, 125).

49 Washington Post, September 8, 2006. Cf. BBC, "Paranoia paradise," April 4, 2002,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1909378.stm. \
The common tactic of such essays is to focus on absurdly eccentric beliefs, and try to pass them off as representative of all those criticizing received anti-conspiratorial opinion.

50 Washington Post, January 23, 2007. However on May 4, 2008, the Post discussed the remark in a favorable review of former Republican Congressman Mickey Edwards’ book Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost -- And How It Can Find Its Way Back.

51 Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8.

52 E.g. Paul L. Atwood, "War and Empire Are and Always Have Been the American Way of Life," Global Policy Forum, February 2006,
http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2006/022006history.htm.

53 Alexander Cockburn, "The Age of Irrationality: The 9/11 Conspiracists and the Decline of the American Left," CounterPunch, November 28, 2006,
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html.

54 Cumings, Origins, II, 123; cf. 13-14; Herbert Franz Schurmann, The Logic of World Power: An

Inquiry into the Origins, Currents, and Contradictions of World Politics (New York: Random House, 1974).

55 Michael Klare, Beyond the "Vietnam Syndrome" (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981).

56 E.g. Robert Wright, "All Quiet on the Western Front," Slate, October 11, 2001,

http://www.slate.com/id/117170/ .

57 Scott, Road to 9/11, 57-61, etc. Cf. Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983).

58 L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (1997), http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/.

59 Prouty, The Secret Team (1997), Chapter II.

60 G. William Domhoff, in Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-Ups, and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 125-26.

61 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 11.

62 Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996),

63 This has been doubted in the case of the JFK assassination, notably by Chomsky. For my latest contribution to this old argument, see Scott, War Conspiracy (2008).

64 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 14; Michael Standaert, Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2006), 112-14.

65 Charlie Savage, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (New York: Little Brown, 2007), 51. Strangely, Savage does not mention COG by name, but he refers to the decade of COG planning in the 1980s as evidence for his case that a "cabal of zealots" has been planning for "the return of the imperial presidency" ever since Cheney and Rumsfeld lost their posts in the Ford Administration.

66 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.

67 See "The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002.

68 Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2008), 54-55.

69 "Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed `every 45 days’ as part of planning to assess threats to `the continuity of our government’"
(Christopher Ketcham, "The Last Round-Up," Radaronline, May 15, 2008,
http://circleof13.blogspot.com/2008/05/last-roundup.html).

Cf. President’s Radio Address, December 15, 2005,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051217.html :
"The activities I authorized are reviewed approximately every 45 days. Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland."

70 Parry, "Gonzales Questions Habeas Corpus," Baltimore Chronicle, January 19, 2007.

71 9/11 Commission Report, 38, 326; Scott, The Road to 9/11, 228-29.

72 White House Notice of September 20, 2007,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070920-9.html.

73 Jerome Corsi, "Bush makes power grab," WorldNetDaily, May 23, 2007, \
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55824.

74Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, "National Emergency Powers," updated August 30, 2007, pp. 10ss,
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/98-505.pdf.

75 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.

76 Scott, The Road to 9/11, 183-87; citing James Mann, "The Armageddon Plan," Atlantic Monthly (March 2004), http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200403/mann; James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 138–45; James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 70-74. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, "Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown", Counterpunch, March 31, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/scott03312008.html.

77 Peter Dale Scott, "Congress, the Bush Adminstration and Continuity of Government Planning: The Showdown", Counterpunch, March 31, 2008, http://www.counterpunch.org/scott03312008.html.

78 Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.

79 The National Archives started a pilot project for the declassification of Commission records. According to their interim report, dated June 22, 2007, they have made progress with the Commission’s internal files. However the following excerpt shows that of other agencies, only the FBI was cooperating in 2007:

FBI Decisions:

Declassified: 98 documents (241 pages)

Declassified, but needs referral elsewhere: 31 documents (132 pages)

Sanitized: 100 documents (400 pages)

Sanitized and needs referral elsewhere: 170 documents (1,067 pages)

Withheld in full: 4 documents (15 pages)

The CIA, the agency with the second highest number of pages in this pilot, has indicated that they have "made no decision regarding how and when it will apply any resources to this request."

Other than FBI, we have received no official response from the other referral agencies ("Update on the Declassification of the Records of the 9/11 Commission," June 22, 2007, http://www.archives.gov/declassification/pidb/meetings/06-22-07-tilley.pdf.)

The CIA subsequently resolved to review relevant records.

80 John Farmer, " ‘United 93’: The Real Picture," Washington Post, April 30, 2006. Cf. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 87: "The staff front office suggested that the NORAD situation bordered on willful concealment."

81 Public Law 107-306, Nov. 27, 2002, Title VI, Section 610.

82 Amerrican Freedom Agenda, http://www.americanfreedomagenda.org; American Freedom Campaign,
http://www.americanfreedomcampaign.org.

83 Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 312, cf. 9/11 Commission, Media Advisory, August 20, 2004, which set a date of January 9, 2009.


Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He is the author of the forthcoming book (reissued and much enlarged) The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, due in August 2008. It can be pre-ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press at http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/MFF_Store. Scott’s website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.

Peter Dale Scott is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Peter Dale Scott

Evidence of Mossad Treachery in the WTC

THERE is an on-going Internet debate and controversy about the number of Jewish casualties in the World Trade Center tragedy. How many Israelis did survive the bombing? We have kept out of this, but the discussion below deserves posting as it summarises different and often untenable positions

Let's look at the hard evidence indicating the Mossad had foreknowledge of the September 11 attack. The day after the attack on the World Trade Center, the Jerusalem Post, the most respected and famous Israeli newspaper in the world, reported that 4,000 Israelis were missing in the attack on the WTC.

The Jerusalem Post (08:15 - Wed) Thousands of Israelis missing near WTC, Pentagon Wednesday September 12, 2001 The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack.

The list is made up of people who have not yet made contact with friends or family, Army Radio reported.

Telephone connections between Israel and the New York City and Washington, D.C. areas has been sporadic and unreliable since the multiple attacks yesterday.

Ten thousand people are estimated to have been killed in the New York attacks and another 800 in Washington.

Several hundred also went down with the hijacked planes.

September 13, 2001: Four Israelis were almost certainly in the twin towers of the World Trade Center when they collapsed, the Israeli consul in New York said this evening. He added that in all likelihood, four more Israelis in nearby buildings are also among the casualties, Army Radio reported.

Thursday September 13, 2001 Search in NYC locates 1,000 missing Israelis By Melissa Radler NEW YORK (Sept. 13) -- The number of Israelis considered missing in New York dropped to three last night when Ya'acov Habbi and his daughter Gali were located. Ya'acov, who lives near the World Trade Center, and Gali were trapped in a car next to the site for about 20 hours.

The Foreign Ministry compiled the number from Israeli relatives who in the first few hours after the attack, contacted the Israeli Foreign Ministry and gave the names of Israeli friends and relatives who worked in the WTC or who had business scheduled in it or its adjacent structures.

Even without seeing the article in the Jerusalem Post, logic alone would tell you that there would be many hundreds, if not thousands of Israelis in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks.

The international Jewish involvement in banking and finance is legendary. Two of the richest firms in New York are Goldman-Sachs and the Solomon Brothers; and both firms have offices in the Twin Towers.

Many executives in these firms regularly commute back and forth to Israel.

New York is the center of world wide Jewish financial power and the World Trade Center is at its epicenter.

One would expect the Israeli death toll to be catastrophic. The Jerusalem Post certainly thought so on September 12, 2001.

Here is the beginning of its article:

Thousands of Israelis missing near WTC, Pentagon.

The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem has so far received the names of 4,000 Israelis believed to have been in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attack. [...]

When George Bush made his speech before Congress, it turns out that he made a significant error other than saying that the WTC attackers did it because they "hated freedom," Bush made a point of saying that in addition to thousands of Americans, 130 Israelis died in the WTC.

The implication was to say that Israel shared in our suffering, and that we and Israel are in this thing together.

Upon hearing the number of 130 Israeli dead, it seemed suspiciously low to me.

If 4,000 Israelis were at the WTC and the WTC death toll was about 4,500 (about 10 percent of the 45,000 people normally in the buildings at that time), the Israeli toll should have probably been between 300 and 500.

130 deaths would have been unusually low. As a place for doing business and for employment, the world Trade Center was not a huge MacDonalds; it housed tens of thousands of highly paid, high tech and high level jobs and executive positions.

They were primarily international finance, trade, banking and brokerage firms.

These are the kinds of businesses where Israelis are traditionally over-represented.

I asked myself how there could be only 130 Israelis dead, while there were an estimated 199 dead from Columbia and 428 from the Philippines? In previous articles I wrote on the September 11 terror, I did not allude to these suspicions because I have always taken pride in not writing anything I could not firmly substantiate.

But, while researching this article on Israeli terrorism against Palestine and America, I discovered the most surprising fact I have ever run across in all my years of research and writing.

I discovered a simple fact that has enormous ramifications in regard to the September terror attack.

October 15, 2001 JERUSALEM DISPATCH. Holy Terror by Yossi Klein Halevi Post date 10.05.01 | The destruction of the World Trade Center has partially rehabilitated, if only by default, the Zionist promise of safe refuge for the Jewish people. In the last year, it had become a much-noted irony that Israel was the country where a Jew was most likely to be killed for being a Jew. For many, the United States had beckoned as the real Jewish refuge; in a poll taken just before the bin Laden attacks, 37 percent of Israelis said their friends or relatives were discussing emigration. That probably changed on September 11. I was among the thousands of Israelis who crowded Kennedy Airport on the weekend after the attack, desperate to find a flight to Tel Aviv. "At least we're going back where it's safe," people joked. Everyone seemed to have a story about an Israeli living in New York who just barely escaped the devastation. If this could happen in Manhattan, the reasoning went, you might as well take your chances at home."

The New York Times

September 22, 2001 THE TALLY Officials Say Number of Those Still Missing May Be Overstated [...] But interviews with many consulate officials yesterday suggested that the lists of people they were collecting varied widely in their usefulness. For example, the city had somehow received reports of many Israelis feared missing at the site, and President Bush in his address to the country on Thursday night mentioned that about 130 Israelis had died in the attacks. But today, Alon Pinkas, Israel's consul general here, said that lists of the missing included reports from people who had called in because, for instance, relatives in New York had not returned their phone calls from Israel. There were, in fact, only three Israelis who had been confirmed as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting the towers on business and who was identified and buried.

After searching through dozens of articles trying to track down the true Israeli death toll, I finally found a New York Times piece that clarified the precise number of Israelis who died in the World Trade Center attack.

Of the 130 Israelis President Bush claimed had died in the World Trade Center, it turned out that 129 of them were still alive. Only one Israeli had actually died in the catastrophe of the World Trade Center.

I was incredulous.

"Good God," I said outloud to myself, "only one Israeli!" Here is the pertinent excerpt from the NY Times:

But interviews with many consulate officials Friday suggested that the lists of people they were collecting varied widely in their usefulness.

For example, the city had somehow received reports of many Israelis feared missing at the site, and President Bush in his address to the country on Thursday night mentioned that about 130 Israelis had died in the attacks.But Friday, Alon Pinkas, Israel's consul general here, said that lists of the missing included reports from people who had called in because, for instance, relatives in New York had not returned their phone calls from Israel.

There were, in fact, only three Israelis who had been confirmed as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting the towers on business and who was identified and buried. (New York Times, Sept. 22)

The very low death toll of 130 suggested that a number of Israelis at the Trade Center had been warned before the attack.

When I found out the truth that only one Israeli had died, there could be no doubt that there had been a prior warning for many Israelis.

Having only one Israeli casualty among the 4,500 dead at the WTC is simply a statistical impossibility.

Even if the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Jerusalem Post had grossly overestimated the number of Israelis in the World Trade Center by 3,000 (400 percent), there still should have still been one thousand Israelis there at the time of the attacks.

Again, even if only a few hundred Israelis were present at the time of the attack, only one Israeli death occurring there is statistically absurd.

Either September 11 had to be a big Israeli holiday, or a number of Israeli citizens had some advance warning of the impending attack.

The fact is that no Israeli or Jewish holiday falls on September 11.

Prior Warning to Israelis.

The next thing I researched was to see if there were any confirmed warnings to Israelis prior to the attack.

I quickly found an article in Newsbytes, a news service of the Washington Post, titled "Instant Messages To Israel Warned Of WTC Attack." The Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, also confirmed the prior warnings to Israel and confirmed that the FBI is investigating the warnings.

The articles detailed that an Israeli messaging firm, Odigo, with offices in both the World Trade Center and in Israel, received a number of warnings just two hours before the attack. [...]

Now, who would have warned Israelis of the impending attack, if not Israel's Mossad?

---

November 23, 2001

From: Robert Reis

Odd but true

TODAY a person -- who was very angry with me for observing that the Newsday site listing all victims at World Trade Center did not include the anticipated percentage of names of people of the Jewish heritage -- approached me and said I was an evil person full of .... because he had gone to the CNN list and found 35 -- 40 % Jewish names.

He asked sarcastically "Aren't Horowitz and Rubenstein Jewish enough for you?"

I went to CNN and could not find such a list. I went to ABCnews.com and searched their list. No Horowitz and no Rubenstein. I went to Newsday list and found no Horowitz and no Rubenstein. I went to elbnet.com and did a victim search. No Horowitz and no Rubenstein.

Robert Reis

P.S.There were two "REIS" victims in WTC

---

From: Ed Toner

The Asbury Park Press printed the names of ALL the victims from Monmouth and Ocean Counties. Quite heavily Jewish populations. Many commuters to the WTC, daily. There was ONE "identifiable" Jewish name. Following the obituaries, I saw ONE more, a name which was not particularly Jewish sounding. That's TWO in the whole area.

Sunday, November 25, 2001

9/11: A Desperate Provocation By U.S. Capitalism

The War on Terrorism is a fraud. Its purpose is to maintain carte blanche for the ever more desperate agenda of American capital: the domination of the continent of Eurasia, and the crushing of the Left worldwide, especially its anti-capitalist core.

9/11 : A Desperate Provocation

9/11 : A DESPERATE PROVOCATION BY U.S. CAPITALISM

The "War on Terrorism" is indeed a fraud, as Australian film and print journalist John Pilger has repeatedly pointed out. "Terrorism" is simply taking the place of "Communism" during the Cold War as the propaganda line spewed by the state and the corporate media to rally a confused and fearful population against "enemies" who supposedly threaten them. This most effective form of social control was recommended by Hitler's chief propagandist, Josef Goebbels. The purpose of the "War on Terrorism" is to maintain carte blanche for the ever more desperate agenda of American capital: the domination of the continent of Eurasia (the critical sector of which is Central Asia, precisely where the "War on Terrorism" just happens to have begun), and the crushing of the Left worldwide, especially its explicitly anti-capitalist core.

In the face of this juggernaut the Left has shown a potentially fatal lack of intellectual rigor as well as nerve. The evidence that the attacks on September 11 were in all likelihood a black operation of the US intelligence services, a state "provocation" designed as a pretext to launch the global "War on Terrorism", is very substantial. It is also painful to consider, but the task must not be shirked. The purpose of this essay is to consider its relevance to the future of the only force which holds any hope of saving humanity and the planet from the megadeath capital is preparing, the anti-capitalist Left.

Shock, Propaganda And Paralysis

Four months after September 11, it appears that most of the Left is asleep at the switch. Just about the only response has been the "anti-war movement", which has been weak, especially in the U.S., where the propaganda barrage has successfully marshalled the bulk of the population, including many leftists, into lockstep with their masters' plans. In any case the movement hasn't stopped the "war" in Afghanistan (really a one-sided attack against an essentially defenseless target, not a war). Nor is there any reason to imagine that it has frightened the Bush cabal from implementing plans to 0unleash its death machine on any number of additional targets in the future. US troops are massing in Kuwait and Qatar, in preparation for an attack on Iraq, and "special operations" are underway already in Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines and perhaps Sudan. Then there's Colombia. . .Venezuela. . .Bolivia. . .Mexico, and these are just the most obvious near-term objects of attention from the Sickos in command.

It is probably safe to say that the anti-war sector of the US population is almost entirely restricted to the left end of the political spectrum. But today's Left is a truncated remnant of its past self, both in size and in critical understanding. Much of it, when hit by the double whammy of the events of 9/11 and the immediate subsequent government and media propaganda assault, jumped right in line behind our new Fuhrer. After all, "we" have been attacked! The rump that is still anti-war has been pretty feeble, not so much in terms of the number of demonstrators in the streets, but above all in their acceptance of much of the elite's propaganda.

Most of the endless stream of "analysis" from the Left or "progressive" side has centered on "terrorism", posing and answering questions such as "what is terrorism?" or "why do they hate us?" For example, the "Marxist" Tariq Ali's critique of events amounts to pointing out the ineffectiveness of the US military assault as a method of eliminating terrorism. His main conclusion seems to be that the US rulers are really dumb; anybody with half a brain can see that the attack in Afghanistan will only breed more terrorists! It never occurs to him that maybe they're not dumb, but have a different purpose in mind; he takes their propaganda at face value. And so do most other "critics" of the war. This is the wrong way to stamp out terrorism! Wage peace instead! Dispense justice! Be nice! Then "they" won't hate "us" anymore (and "we" can carry on with our relentless pursuit of money and goodies like SUVs).

Evidently the Left, like everybody else, spends too much of its time watching TV and reading the newspapers, i.e., absorbing propaganda. How else to comprehend why almost everyone from "liberal" Democrats and "progressives" to Marxists and anarchists has accepted the propaganda line of the corporate media and psyops specialists in the US government: the attacks on September 11 were planned and carried out by Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists, namely Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaida, and caught the US national security apparatus completely offguard. The fact that no proof has ever been produced doesn't seem to bother anyone. And when this lack of proof is pointed out, and all the innumerable facts and circumstances that cast very serious doubt on this story are brought up, even "critics" of the war dismiss these persistent questions as lunatic "conspiracy" mongering.

Professor John McMurtry of the University of Guelph points to a deeper explanation of the difficulty people have had in analyzing all the evidence objectively. The crimes of September 11 were so shocking that for many, perhaps most people, even those on the Left, it is literally unthinkable that they could have been committed or intentionally permitted by the Bush administration or some secret operations group working for it:

"There is growing suspicion, which is officially unspeakable, that the Afghanistan War is a set-up, including September 11 itself. With any such hypothesis, one looks not only for the evidence confirming it, but more conscientiously, for the evidence disconfirming it. The principal reason against is the assumption that it is impossible that the U.S. national security apparatus would ever permit such a mass killing of Americans on U.S. soil, but this assumption itself is shaky given that Pearl Harbour itself was likely known about in advance, and non-defensive wars since have sacrificed tens of thousands of U.S. citizens (not to say millions of others) for so-called 'foreign policy and national security objectives'".

McMurtry proceeds to make a succinct statement of some of the suspicions that arise in the minds of those who are not paralyzed by this assumption: "The forensic principle of 'who most benefits from the crime?' clearly points in the direction of the Bush administration. One would be naïve to think the Bush Jr. faction and its oil, military-industrial and Wall Street backers who had stolen an election with its man rated in office by the majority of Americans as poor on the economy (a Netscape Poll taken off the screen when the planes hit the towers), and more deplored by the rest of the world as a deep danger to the global environment and the international rule of law, do not benefit astronomically from this mass-kill explosion. If there was a wish-list, it is all granted by this numbing turn of events. Americans are diverted from a free-falling economy to attack another foreign Satan, while the Bush regime's popularity climbs. The military, the CIA and every satellite armed security apparatus have more money and power than ever, and become as dominant as they can over civilians in the 'the whole new era' already being declared by the White House. The anti-missile plan to rule the skies is now exonerated (if irrelevantly so), and Israel's apartheid civil war is vindicated at the same time. Even the surgingly popular 'anti world-trade' movement is now associated with foreign terrorists blowing up the World Trade Centre. The more you review the connections and the sweeping lapse of security across so many co-ordinates, the more the lines point backwards."

The failure to look hard facts in the face could be fatal, especially to the Left, which, judging by its response to this point, doesn't seem to realize that it is one of the principal targets of the coming global war. We need to look at all the clues which could lead us to discover who the criminals behind September's events really are, and we need to do so right away. A huge mass of evidence suggests that the events of September were planned and carried out by the same team of "rogue" secret government planners and operatives who have wrought so much murder and destruction worldwide for the last 40+ years: the CIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and their contractees.

A War Long Planned

One way to assess the plausibility of the hypothesis that the attacks of September 11 were a black operation, a "provocation" on an unheard-of scale, is to evaluate the subsequent actions of the Bush administration. Another dimension to the horrors of that day was added by the violent assault of the US Government and the corporate media on the United States and world populations which took off just minutes after the planes struck their targets. This aggressive "response", surely, is fair game for a critical Left analysis, undertaken from a position of strong skepticism toward any official statements.

Why "strong skepticism?" First let's ask why would any rational person on the Left believe or take at face value, anything said by anyone in the Bush administration. It is important to remember that Bush stole the election: he lost the popular vote by over 500,000 votes (NOT too close to call!) and stole Florida's electoral votes and the Presidency by a complex, sophisticated and advance-planned operation involving the elimination of many thousands of voters from the registration lists, obstruction and intimidation at the polls, intimidation during the post-election recount process, and finally by a totally outrageous intervention by the Supreme Court.

Then Bush loaded his Cabinet with oilmen (and women) and "Cold Warriors" from his father's rolodex, giving plain notice of his administration's plans (at least for those with eyes to see). Michael Ruppert, who has been tracking the secret operations of the CIA and the Bush family for years, was able to predict in January 2001 the essential pattern of events which is now unfolding:

"Make no mistake about it. The United States is preparing for war. Events immediately following the 2000 US election debacle are ominous predictors for the Bush-Cheney Administration. . .the key posts of Treasury, Defense, Justice and National Security Advisor point to the most militarized oil-and-big-business-friendly administration in 35 years. . .We can be assured that an empire (as opposed to a republic) is emerging in the United States more quickly than many have expected. And the Bush Administration is already acting in a "godlike" manner. It is an empire that may have little need even of the pretence of democracy as American corporate fascism removes its mask in the wake of our election circus, the prostitution of our Supreme Court and the virtual destruction of American government as a servant of anything other than money, greed and power."

Go to war they did, and on a tight, pre-planned schedule. Overwhelming evidence shows that the war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with "terrorism" and everything to do with geostrategic plans for domination of Asia and control of rapidly dwindling natural gas and oil resources. The US has been planning the "war" in Afghanistan for years, and the attacks in the US on September 11 were remarkable in their provision of the shock necessary for the American population to fall into line behind the imperial adventure to take over Central Asia. The whole plan is laid out in exquisite detail by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, in which he repeatedly emphasizes the probable need for an attack comparable to Pearl Harbor to bring the US domestic population onboard. Michael Ruppert has presented anacute analysis of the relevance of this book for an understanding of the current situation.

American imperial planners such as Brzezinski see the necessity for the US to secure its global domination in the near term; they fear the rise of a contesting power, such as Russia or China, in the Eurasian heartland, which they see as key for global supremacy. But other, less "grand" imperatives are uppermost in the minds of the Bush Oiligarchy, including the coming "Big Rollover" when oil and gas supplies peak and then precipitously decline, estimated to occur as early as 2003. Within a very few years the amount of oil extracted from the ground will start to drop inexorably, regardless of the rate at which new sources are developed. This reduction of availability combined with the capitalist imperative of continual expansion of production and growing global consumption will place severe stress on the global capitalist system, stress which the US planners intend to manage for their own benefit. By launching the "war" in Afghanistan, the US has established a permanent presence on the ground in Central Asia (it now has bases in nine countries in the region), with the ability to exert its will over the development of the oil and gas resources of what is considered the last major untapped field in the world (although Somalia, the Pentagon's likely next target, is thought to contain substantial reserves as well).

The Houston-based oil company Unocal has been planning gas and oil pipelines across Afghanistan for years, but its plans were frustrated by the instability of the country and the difficulty of working out a deal with the Taliban. One of the first things the newly emplaced Bush regime did was reopen negotiations with them over the terms under which they would provide protection for oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, across Afghanistan to Pakistan. A new book, Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth, by Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveals details of these negotiations, including the true Mafiosi-style offer in which "US representatives told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.'" Somehow the Taliban found it an offer they could, and did, refuse. Now, after extensive carpet bombing, the Taliban have been removed, a puppet regime installed by the US in Kabul (both Hamid Karzai, the new interim Prime Minister, as well as US Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, are former Unocal consultants), and the plans for pipelines are underway once again. In the Machiavellian world of "diplomacy", this is called "establishing credibility".

Mention should also be made of the history of close association of Osama bin Laden with the CIA and Pentagon. Installed in Afghanistan in the 1980s by the CIA and Saudi royal family (working through their local proxies, the Inter Service Intelligence or ISI of Pakistan) to attract "freedom fighters" from the Arab world to fight against the Russians and "give Russia its Vietnam", Bin Laden went on after the pullout of Russia to supply mujahedin to other battle zones in Asia and Europe. He collaborated with the US in Chechnya and Bosnia, supplying training and fighters to the Chechens and Bosnian Muslims, and continued the same type of service to the US proxy Kosovo Liberation Army during the NATO attack on Serbia. His most recent collaboration with the US has been in the ongoing provision of mercenaries in Macedonia to destablize the government there, along the lines of US policy in Kosovo and Albania. The evident reason for all this "Byzantine" complexity? The laying of an oil pipeline from Burgas on the Black Sea across Bulgaria and Macedonia to the port of Vlore on the Adriatic coast of Albania, now currently under construction by the US oil company AMBO. As they say, "once a CIA agent, always a CIA agent". There is strong reason to doubt the US propaganda line that Bin Laden is the mastermind behind the attacks of September 11, because he is still on the payroll of the CIA. If he did have anything to do with them, then he must have been following orders.

The assault on the domestic population in the US is motivated by equally complex and related considerations. The USA PATRIOT Act is presented as a response to an unexpected terrorist strike, but was in fact already written and ready to go as the sun rose on September 11. Hundreds of pages in length, it contains all the pet projects of the national security apparatus for complete control of the population: surveillance of phone and internet communications; CIA operations within the US; sharing of information by the CIA and domestic law enforcement agencies; provision of grand jury materials to the CIA, which can then be widely shared as well; seizure of assets; surreptitious entry of private homes and businesses and removal of "evidence"("black bag" jobs); and arrest and detention without formal charges of anyone the government deems a "terrorist", with no judicial review. The bill was passed by both houses of Congress in record speed, so fast in fact that no one in Congress had time to read it first; evidently they didn't need to.

Numerous people have pointed out that the bill really provides few new powers that would significantly strengthen protections against terrorism from abroad, but does provide the whole list of powers over the US domestic population desired by the CIA and FBI for decades. Essentially a new COINTELPRO has been authorized, undoubtedly with the primary target, as previously, being the Left. This, combined with the Operation Garden Plot system of concentration camps, already in place on federal facilities near major cities around the country, surely should make people on the Left suspicious. They should be trying to figure out what is coming -- for what purposes has the government taken these steps? An obvious and plausible interpretation is that the government is greatly disturbed by the growing strength of the "anti-globalization movement" (and especially its anti-capitalist core), in the US since the events of Seattle in 1999, and foresees future social upheaval as the global recession moves into an oil-starved depression. Could it be that they want to have draconian social control mechanisms in place and operational before the crunch comes? If so, their principal target will be those deemed "leftists", as has happened before in US history (the Red Scare after World War I, and the McCarthy period after WWII). This time, however, the attack on the Left will be even deadlier, if the past actions of the people now in charge of the government are any clue.

The assault launched by the US military, police and intelligence powers since September 11 is described by the mainstream media as a "response" to the attacks of terrorists from abroad. The nature of the response, however, makes this claim highly dubious. Instead, the attack on Afghanistan and the stripping of civil liberties in the US in themselves suggest a high likelihood that the " terrorist attacks" in New York and Washington DC were an operation by some secret arm of the government to provide the pretext to unleash a global and domestic offensive. Although much has been written and posted online to examine this possibility, virtually no word of such speculation reaches the mass media (unless on the lips of Bush or Cheney themselves, who seem to have some concern about "conspiracy theories" circulating widely just under the surface).

Anomalies, Incredibilities and Suspicious Circumstances

At this point it will be useful to survey the many lines of evidence and argument which, taken together, make the standard account of the events surrounding the attacks on September 11 and the subsequent US Government response highly dubious. Links are provided to the most useful discussions of the different lines of evidence.

It is simply not credible that the vast global surveillance and "intelligence" system maintained by the US Government, with annual budgets, prior to its historic "failure" on September 11, totaling at least $30 billion, would have missed the huge "intelligence signature" such a complex and sophisticated operation would inevitably have made. US intelligence experts are muzzled but Europeans have been highly skeptical of the claim that a network such as Al-Qaida would have the capability to pull it off. Eckehardt Werthebach, former head of Germany's FBI, the Verfassungschutz, has stated that "the deathly precision" and "magnitude" of the attacks would have required "years of planning" and "the fixed frame" of a state intelligence organization. Following this logic many have speculated that the Israel's Mossad, Pakistan's ISI or even Saudi Arabia may have been the perpetrator. And this complete "failure" also required an adamantine lack of response to many warnings to the US from foreign intelligence services (including Russia, Egypt, Germany and Israel) as well as US citizens like attorney David Schippers who, tipped off by informants, contacted the government with warnings prior to September 11.

The incredibilities accumulate as the attacks take place. Four planes are hijacked, supposedly by "Arab" terrorists, but the passenger lists from the four flights do not include the name (real or assumed) of a single one of them! This casts doubt on the list of 19 Arabs produced by the FBI, and raises the possibility that there actually were no hijackers on the planes at all. The planes, all equipped with "Home Run" anti-hijack computer technology which would have made it possible to seize control of the flights from the ground, veer from their approved flight paths and head for their targets. The FAA, as it is required to do, issues alerts to the US military, but no interceptor aircraft are scrambled to investigate, as required by standard procedure. The "explanations" of this "failure" are unconvincing. Dick Cheney claimed that it was an excruciatingly tough decision to order the jetliners shot down, a decision that only the President is authorized to make. This is pure smoke. The standard response to planes off course is interception, not shooting down. No interception took place, and no credible explanation has been given for this "failure" of the US air defenses. On the contrary, stand down orders apparently were issued from the highest command levels.

The hijacked airliners, unhindered (in at least three out of four cases) then proceeded to execute their spectacular aerial maneuvers. Two of them, the one which struck the second, south tower of the World Trade Center, and the one which crashed into the Pentagon, displayed the flying skills that only crack pilots possess. A problem for the standard account here is that none of the 19 supposed hijackers was a crack pilot. The "evidence" presented about their "training" for their mission is limited to short courses at small-plane flight schools. Experienced pilots have expressed doubts about the possibility that inexperienced pilots could have flown the jetliners at such high speeds with such unerring accuracy. Retired career Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff has highlighted the problem of the official story with respect to the Pentagon strike:

"A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460 nauts. When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further flight training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush hour by buying her a video driving game. It's horse shit!" Again, no explanation has been offered to make the government's claims credible.

Other very real possibilities do offer explanations, however. The planes may have been "hijacked" electronically, using the onboard Home Run technology. The system allows flight controllers on the ground to take over all flight functions from people onboard the plane, and could as easily be employed to cause a remote-controlled hijacking as to seize control of a plane hijacked by persons onboard. No 19 Arabs were necessary! This would explain the absence of any of the "19 hijackers" from the passenger lists, as well as the inexplicable demonstration of the highest flying skills in the crashes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Interestingly, the Home Run system just happens to permit one person, at a remote location, to fly four planes simultaneously. One highly skilled operator could have performed all the aerial feats of the hijacked planes. An explanation would also be provided for some additional anomalies, including why the Home Run system was not used to rescue the planes as it was designed to do, and why none of the "black boxes" with their Cockpit Voice Recorders have ever been "found" and the contents revealed. They might reveal the surprise of those onboard at the remote-controlled takeover of the planes.

After the World Trade Centers were struck by the airliners they collapsed, as did the nearby WTC #7 (a mere 47 stories tall), which was not struck by any plane. No entirely convincing explanations of these collapses have been forthcoming; many people have doubted that buildings designed to withstand such a blow from an airliner, as they were, would have disintegrated. These critics contend that only a professional demolition job could have caused the buildings to collapse in the manner in which they did. The official investigation into the cause of the collapse has been undermined from the start; the steel from the collapsed structures was recycled immediately, supposedly by decision of the City of New York, before any team of qualified forensic engineers could examine it.

Finally, there are many lines of evidence indicating advance knowledge of the attacks, including insider trading in airline and insurance company stocks (rather implausibly attributed to Al-Qaida), and warnings to various people (including San Francisco mayor Willie Brown) not to fly on September 11. A major shift of the offices of high-ranking Pentagon planners took place one week before the plane crashed into the space they had vacated; no high level officers or civilian officials was killed. No Congressional investigation of any of the unexplained "anomalies" surrounding September 11 has been launched. No one has been punished for the massive failures of established procedures and expectations; on the contrary the agencies which "failed" so spectacularly have been rewarded by increased funds and powers.

Furthermore it has been revealed that the Bush regime stopped FBI investigations into Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida in the early summer of 2001, causing the lead investigator, John O'Neill, to resign in protest. Circulating in the background is the close business relationship between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, their joint ownership of major shares of the Carlyle Group (a large US defense company now profiting handsomely from the new surge in military expenditures), and the abundant evidence that Osama bin Laden has continued to receive major financial support from the Saudi royal family.

All this complexity is really just a "short list" of some of the unexplained facts, incredible assertions and suspicious circumstances surrounding the events of September 11. There are many more. The many highly technical aspects of the questions raised make it extremely difficult for anyone to get a firm grasp of the whole picture. Nevertheless, people on the Left should be able to look at them and evaluate them objectively as well as they can, especially given the high stakes, but few have done so.

Who Really Rules

As Jim Garrison pointed out in 1967, after frustrating years trying to penetrate the layers of official obscurity erected around the real perpetrators of the JFK assassination, "In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the population in line. . . .The test is, what happens to the individual who dissents?. . .the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment seem destined. . .to bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the State and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. . .fascism will come to America in the name of national security." Garrison's nightmare vision is now plainly visible to all who are willing to look.

"Fascism" has been back on people's lips a lot lately, especially since the events of Genoa in July, 2001, in which Silvio Berlusconi launched a typical Italian fascist police attack on leftists demonstrating against the heads of state of the G8 nations. Berlusconi was not the only one there with fascist connections; the Bushes have been linked with fascism since the 1920s, when George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush became bankers for the Nazi Party. George W. Bush is a figure rather similar in certain fundamental ways to Ronald Reagan. He is the titular President, but isn't up to the job; he is a puppet controlled by unknown persons behind the scenes. The probable puppet-master is his father, George Herbert Walker Bush, the man who correctly said "I am not a one-term President". Long time CIA agent, and Director of the CIA when the leftist minister from Salvador Allende's government, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated by a car-bomb in the streets of Washington DC, George H.W. Bush was actually in charge of the country for twelve years, during Reagan's two terms and his own one. Gene Wheaton, a military criminal investigator who at one time was very close to the CIA but couldn't stomach the outrageous covert operations of "Iran-Contra" and was an early whistle blower of the affair, provided a rare insider's view of the reality of the Reagan years:

"Reagan never really was the president. He was the front man. They selected a guy that had charisma, who was popular, and just a good old boy, but they got George Bush in there to actually run the White House. They'd let Ronald Reagan and Nancy out of the closet and let them make a speech and run them up the flagpole and salute them and put them back in the closet while these spooks ran the White House. They made sure that George Bush was the chairman of each of the critical committees involving these covert operations things. One of them was the Vice President's Task Force on Combating Terrorism. They got Bush in as the head of the Vice President's task force on narcotics, the South Florida Task Force, so that they could place people in DEA and in the Pentagon and in Customs to run interference for them in these large-scale international narcotics and movement of narcotics money cases. They got Bush in as the chairman of the committee to deregulate the Savings and Loans in '83 so they could deregulate the Savings and Loans, so that they would be so loosely structured that they could steal 400, 500 billion dollars. . .they ran the whole operation, and Bush was the de facto president even before the '88 election when he became president.

"See, when Harry Truman signed the National Security Act creating the CIA, he specifically stated in that act that they could not have any police powers. And they could not operate domestically in the United States, because he feared a secret police coup. By creeping in a little at a time, that coup has taken place.

"This crowd really believes that the unwashed masses are ignorant, that we are people who are not capable of governing ourselves, that we need this elitist group to control the country, and the world -- these guys have expanded. They look at the United States not as a country, not in any patriotic mode now, but they look on it as a state within a world that they control. And that's this attitude they have. They're not unlike any other megalomaniac in the world. They're nutty as a fruitcake, but they've got distinguished gray hair, three-piece dark suits and they carry briefcases, and they'll stand up and make speeches just as articulate as anybody in the world, but they don't socialize and function outside their own little clique. My experience with them is that they could be certified as criminally insane and put away in a rubber room and have the key thrown away. That's how dangerous they are. But they're powerful, and they're educated. And that makes them twice as dangerous. And that's basically what's running the world right now."

In all likelihood the structure within the current White House is similar: a well-rested front man for the photo-ops, a powerful Vice President actually running the day-to-day operations, and heavies from the CIA and Pentagon doing the long-range strategizing, all veterans of George H.W. Bush's regime. If this hypothesis is even partially accurate, an analysis of the past, when the elder Bush was in power, would most probably provide solid clues to what the new regime is currently planning. The Gulf War of 1990 shows obvious parallels to today; it was very largely about oil, as is the "War on Terrorism", and followed a deceptive move on the part of Bush administration, which duped Saddam Hussein into making his move on Kuwait. This then provided the pretext for the US to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, as well as to try out all the new weaponry that had been developed and awaited its exemplary debut.

Another salient feature of the Reagan/Bush period was the systematic murder of thousands of leftists around the world, in countries controlled by puppet regimes of the US, and most especially so in Latin America. Death squads trained at the School of the Americas eliminated radicals, unionists, students, teachers, landless peasants, professors and priests in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. In every case these killings were in keeping with US government policy: leftists are the enemy and will be killed wherever possible, preferably in as painful and horrific a manner as possible. This activity is still taking place, especially in Colombia, where the US is currently funding a massive escalation in military and paramilitary attacks on the population, called Plan Colombia.

So What Is Plan United States?

Could it really be that the current regime has intentions of crushing the Left in the US, with massive arrests, torture, and disappearances, as in Latin America? Before rejecting the proposition out of hand, it would be wise to consider recent events from the standpoint of what they suggest about the concern our rogue capitalist masters have regarding people like us.

A clue to understanding the real core of the situation is to recognize how destablilizing is the imperial adventure embarked upon by the Bush regime. The attack on Afghanistan threatens to destroy a very delicate balance in the Middle East and South and Central Asia, both regionally and within individual countries. The attack is incredibly risky, a daring throw in a high stakes game. Such a move, undertaken by the most powerful nation in the world, must be a sign of desperation.

Two sources of this desperation have already been identified: the coming Big Rollover, when the supply of oil will peak and can no longer keep up with demand, putting severe strain on the capitalist system which relies so heavily on abundant and cheap energy; and the rapidly growing global anti-capitalist movement, which will be well positioned to advance as the oil shortages materialize. The planners of capital have seen their every attempt to meet and strategize contested by ever-growing numbers of demonstrators, and all over the world major development projects of capital, for dams, pipelines, power or chemical plants, are strongly contested by local people affected by them. The role of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Trade Organization, World Economic Forum, NAFTA, European Union and similar planning and developmental agencies of capital are recognized all over the world as imperialist and neo-colonialist weapons of the capitalist marauder class, designed to impose the "new" corporate-state oligarchy. Such agencies and the powers behind them, states and corporations, are now increasingly seen as illegitimate all over the world. The US state, as the global center of capital and coercion, has now launched a preemptive war in response to this crisis of illegitimacy, which it correctly sees is potentially fatal for global capital.

The fake black bloc provocations, the murder of Carlo Giuliani and the crackdown by hooded storm troopers on the Genoa Social Forum and Indymedia center in Genoa in July 2001 was a return to familiar methods by the Berlusconi regime; the Italian state is famed for the murderous brutality it displays toward left-wing contestation. Provocations and fake terror have long been part of the state arsenal. In Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s the state secret services as part of the "strategy of tension" set off bombs in public places and blamed the non-existent "Red Brigades", using this as a pretext to launch a sweep against the Autonomist Workers movement (Autonomia) and left-wing intellectuals, in which over 5000 people were arrested and charged with "armed insurrection against the powers of the State". More than 150 remain in prison to this day. So well-executed and effective has the tactic been that even some of these political prisoners, e.g. Toni Negri, although insisting on their own personal innocence, do not question the events or the reality of the Red Brigades.

But others saw through the operation at the time, and analyzed it clearly. The situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti, in "Is the Reichstag Burning?" (dated 19 December 1969), laid out an analysis which has been confirmed by subsequent events and document discoveries: that the bombings were carried out by the state to strengthen the security forces and provide pretexts for crushing the most radical sector of the Left. The fake terror campaign was an act of weakness on the part of the Italian capitalist state, recognizing that without such methods it could not stop the growing power of the autonomist movement.

Genoa in July was just more of the same strategy. It is easy to imagine Bush and Blair enjoying the show put on by the Carabinieri, and saying to their chum Berlusconi, "That's good, very nice, but just wait. Wait till you see what we can do!" Behind their barricades in the Ducal palace, plans were being laid for the present assault on the workers of the world. As before, the principal target is that section of the working class which has developed some understanding of the social situation, beyond the immediate individual struggle to survive. The USA PATRIOT Act and similar legislation passed in Europe signal the impending campaign of arrests, summary trials, torture, executions and disappearances, all conducted under the pretext of "terrorism", as formerly, under the rubric "Communism", they were the norm in the rest of the world. "Globalization" really means the globalization of capitalist coercion in all its forms, never excluding the physical. Capital, in its campaign to reduce workers' conditions to the lowest common denominator, so obvious in the flight of production to China, India, Mexico, and Malaysia, does not forget to "harmonize" state terror worldwide as well. As Starhawk said after the events in Genoa, they're coming soon to your home too.

Capitalism Is Organized Crime

The critical Left is the only major enemy capital has, potentially a formidable one if its numbers swell under social duress. The "War on Terrorism" makes clear that capital's strategists have decided that the time has come to strike a preemptive blow, before the coming global depression, which will make that of the 1930s look like a picnic, makes hordes of new leftists out of the unemployed and newly impoverished. The process they fear has already started in Argentina, where people are forming assemblies in their neighborhoods to plan their collective self-defense against the attacks that the Argentine state is imposing upon them. It is time for something along these lines in the North, in the US and Europe.

To defend itself under the new conditions imposed by the state, the Left must organize and exert itself to the utmost, starting now:

* First, we need to loudly and widely reject all the propaganda which is pouring out of Washington DC and London, and out of the mass media: the "War on Terrorism" is a fraud.

* We must articulate a clear, strong analysis of what capital is doing: seizing resources and preparing to crush the working class resistance to its totalitarian domination worldwide.

* We need to publicly demand in all our anti-war and anti-capitalist demonstrations and writing that the criminals who launched the fake terror on September 11 be brought to trial: not Osama Bin Laden but the secret operatives and strategizers in the US government. The criminality of what they have done can be used as a powerful weapon against them and against capitalism, which is inherently criminal.

* We must loudly reject both capitalist war and capitalist "peace", and practice total non-cooperation with both poles of the capitalist agenda.

* And clearly, like the men and women at this moment in Argentina, we need to focus on self-defense measures, and plan for what may very well be a fight to the death. There is no time to be lost.