Part 1 -  What really happened on Sept. 11^th?

For four months I’ve been waiting in vain for the North American media to pursue questions about the startling events of September 11^th. Here’s what I want to know:

The multiple hijackings are unprecedented. The first occurs at 7:45 in the morning. It’s a full hour before the first plane hits the World Trade Center. But it’s an hour and 20 minutes -- and after the second plane hits – that the President allegedly becomes informed. Think about that.

Then, he gives no orders. Why? He continues to listen to a student talk about her pet goat. Why?

It’s another 25 minutes until he makes a statement, even as flight 77 is making a bee-line for Washington, DC.

In the almost two hours of the total drama not a single U.S. Air Force interceptor turns a wheel until it’s too late. Why? Was it total incompetence on the part of aircrews trained and equipped to scramble in minutes?

Well, unlike the U.S. Air Force, I’ll cut to the chase. Simply to ask these few questions is to find the official narrative frankly implausible. The more questions you pursue, it becomes more plausible that there’s a different explanation: namely, that elements within the top U.S. military, intelligence and political leadership – which are closely intertwined – are complicit in what happened on September the 11^th.

Why U.S. complicity, you ask?

Well, to stampede public opinion into supporting the so-called war on terrorism, to justify a war on Afghanistan for a future oil pipeline, the grab for Middle East oil, big budget increases for the military, and the general drive for global domination by the American Empire.

I know it sounds incredible.

But here’s some historical context from this book, Body of Secrets. Its author is James Bamford. Bamford until recently was Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News tonight with Peter Jennings. I learned of this book on ABC’s website.

Bamford’s information comes from interviews with, for instance, the former dean of the U.S. intelligence community and from government documents. It takes 80 pages to list Bamford’s more than 600 information sources.

Here’s the story. It’s 1962. John F. Kennedy is U.S. president. Robert McNamara is Secretary of Defense. And Admiral Lyman Lemnitzer heads the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The CIA has failed in its illegal Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

JFK decides, Bamford writes, to back away from military solutions to the Cuban problem.

But Lemnitzer, the CIA and others at the top remain obsessed with Cuba. Writes Bamford:

“As the Kennedy brothers appeared to suddenly ‘go soft’ on Cuba, Lemnitzer could see his opportunity to invade … quickly slipping away. …attempts to provoke the Cuban public to revolt seemed dead…”

Continues Bamford: “Lemnitzer and the other chiefs knew there was only one option left that would ensure their war. They would have to trick the American public and world opinion…”

Lemnitzer comes up with Operation Northwoods.

“We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba…casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”

“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.”

An elaborate variation: create “an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft…” “At a designated time the duplicate would be…loaded with…selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [a remotely controlled unmanned aircraft]”… “the destruction of (that) aircraft will be triggered by radio signal.”

The Cubans would be blamed.

Finally, another variation is described by Bamford:

“On February 20^th, 1962 (John) Glenn was to lift off from Cape Canaveral…on his historic journey. Lemnitzer “proposed … that should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, ‘the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that…the fault lies with (Cuba)…” “by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.”

Thus, Bamford notes, “as NASA prepared to send the first American into space, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were preparing to use John Glenn’s possible death as a pretext to launch a war.”

The Operation Northwoods plan shows the Pentagon was capable, according to Bamford, “of launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting a (war on Cuba).”

Can we be sure, therefore, that complicity by the Pentagon in the events of Sept. 11^th is entirely out off the question?

Next week, a more precise look at the events of that fateful day.

And what about bin Laden? I’ll have more on him too. And the arrests of people named as terrorists around the world.
 

Sources
WEBSITES

USATODAY.com (for animated map of the routes of the four hijacked airliners). This has been taken off the USA TODAY website.

Body of Secrets, Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, From the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century, by James Bamford (author of The Puzzle Palace), hard cover, Doubleday, New York, 2001, 721 pages, ISBN 0-385-49907-8

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Part 2 - What really happened on Sept. 11^th?
Transcript of Mon., Jan. 28 2002 Broadcast

Next, more troubling questions. Part 2 in my series of commentaries about the events of September 11^th.

As you’ve heard in the panel discussion, a common explanation as to why no U.S. military interceptors took to the skies on September 11^th until it was too late, is that it was “simple incompetence.”

Well, let me deal with the “incompetence theory” by first taking you back to October 26^th, 1999. That is the day the chartered Learjet carrying golfer Payne Stewart crashes, killing all on board. This from the official National Transportation Safety Board crash report:

• 9:19 a.m.: the flight departs

• 9:24: The Learjet’s pilot responds to an instruction from air traffic control
  9:33: The controller radios another instruction. No response from the pilot. For 4 ½ minutes the controller tries to establish contact.

• 9:38: Having failed, the controller calls in the military. Note that he did not seek, nor did he require, the approval of the President of the United States, or indeed anyone. It’s standard procedure, followed routinely, to call in the Air Force when radio contact with a commercial passenger jet is lost, or the plane departs from its flight path, or anything along those lines occurs.

• 9:54 – 16 minutes later -- the F-16 reaches the Learjet at 46,000 feet and conducts a visual inspection.
  Total elapsed time: 21 minutes.

So what does this prove? Well, it proves that standing routines exist for dealing with all such emergencies, for instance loss of radio contact. All personnel in the air and on the ground are trained to follow the routines, which have been fine-tuned over decades, as the Learjet incident illustrates.

For large scheduled aircraft, tracked throughout on radar, to depart extravagantly from their flight paths, would trigger numerous calls to the military, especially after two have hit the World Trade Centre and now one is speeding toward Washington, D.C.

It flies over the White House, turns sharply and heads toward the Pentagon. Everyone – and I mean everyone – now knows these planes are very bad news. It’s been reported on all TV networks for more than half an hour that this is a terrorist attack.

Now, Andrews Air Force Base is a huge installation. It’s home to Air Force One, the President’s plane. It’s home base for two combat-ready squadrons of jet interceptors mandated to ensure the safety of the U.S. capital. Andrews is only 12 miles from the White House.

On September 11^th the squadrons there were:

• The 121^st Fighter Squadron of the 113^th Fighter Wing, equipped with F-16s

• The 321^st Marine Fighter Attack Squadron of the 49^th Marine Air Group, Detachment A, equipped F/A-18s

This information was on the website of the base on September 11^th. [POSSIBLE (cuts)] On September 12^th, Andrews chose to update its website. I find it odd that after the update there’s no mention of the F-16 and F-18 fighters. The base becomes, according to the website, home to a transport squadron only.

Yet at 6:30 the evening of September 11^th NBC Nightly News, along with many outlets, reported:

"It was after the attack on the Pentagon that the Air Force then decided to scramble F-16s out of the DC National Guard Andrews Air Force Base to fly … a protective cover over Washington, D.C."

Throughout the northeastern United States are many air bases. But that morning no interceptors respond in a timely fashion to the highest alert situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which have the longest lead time and are 12 miles from the White house.

Whatever the explanation for the huge failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. This further weakens the “Incompetence Theory.” Incompetence usually earns reprimands.

This causes me to ask – and other media need to ask – if there were “stand down” orders.

Next week, bin Laden was a longtime close ally of the CIA, according to the CIA itself. Why did he suddenly turn against them? Or did he?
 

Sources
WEBSITES

Report by National Transportation Safety Board re crash of chartered Learjet 26 October 1999,carrying golfer Payne Stewart:
http://www.ntsb.gov/aviation/aviation.htm
click on “Aviation,” then “Major investigations,” then “Aberdeen, South Dakota.”

For commercial aviation flight rules and procedures:
http://www.faa.gov/ 

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Part 3 - What really happened on Sept. 11^th?
Transcript of Mon., Feb 4, 2002 Broadcast

Osama bin Laden is not an easy subject. Characterizations of him vary wildly. The most common, because it’s the official narrative of cardboard cutout simplicity, is that he’s the world’s number one villain, the diabolical mastermind behind the events of September 11^th. Another view: Osama is “… the conscience of Islam.”

Well, globally, Osama is like a Rorschach ink blot. His character and role morph into what various publics project upon him, based on what they’re led to believe.

Take books. There’s an adage “You can’t tell a book by its cover”. Maybe so, but you can tell it by its index. “Bin Laden, the Man Who Declared War on America” is by Yossef Bodansky, former senior consultant to the Pentagon and U.S. state department. “Bodansky explains (a) vast global conspiracy…” it says in the foreword.

The index entries on bin Laden in this 440-page book run almost two pages. But there are just four references to the CIA, mostly brief and reveal nothing. Yet the decades-long eight-billion-dollar CIA covert operation in Afghanistan was also its largest ever, according to numerous sources, including journalist John Cooley in his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism.

Contrast the Bodansky book with this one, “Taliban,” by Ahmed Rashid. He’s a Pakistani journalist who’s covered Afghanistan for 21 years. In his index are eight entries about bin Laden and 11 about the CIA.

Now, back to bin Laden. What do most sources agree on? We know bin Laden is born in Saudi Arabia in 1957. Okay we’re not sure about the year. His father becomes a close friend of the king, and “fabulously wealthy.” Bin Laden Corporation becomes one of the largest construction companies in the Middle East.

In this business you’re dealing with the Pakistani intelligence—the ISI, Saudi intelligence, the CIA. With his family’s blessing Osama becomes closely associated with the CIA in the Afghan war against the Soviets. Bin Laden Corp built major training camps for the CIA.

“In 1986 he helped build the Khost tunnel complex, which the CIA was funding as a major arms storage depot, training facility and medical centre for the mujaheddin…” At this point bin Laden’s story, like Stephen Leacock’s horse, “rides madly off in all directions.”

My questions: Did he turn against the CIA? Maintain ties while making anti-American statements? Was he manipulated?

“Former associates describe him as deeply impressionable, always in need of mentors,” Rashid writes.

You’re forced to turn to a larger canvas. As in the final draft of this to-be-published book “The War on Freedom, Causes and Consequences of 9-11” by Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in Brighton, England. He’s an Oxfam campaigner who specializes in writing international reports on human rights. News of his reports have been carried by Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, The Independent, the Jewish Chronicle and the London Jewish News.

Ahmed writes that bin Laden is merely a piece in a chess game. The stakes of the game are the last of the world’s oil reserves and “…the Bush administration’s “(consolidation of power) to pursue a drastic unlimited militarization of foreign policy on a massive and unprecedented scale required by long-standing elite planning, while crushing domestic dissent and criminalizing legitimate protest.”

I believe that if we shrink from testing Ahmed’s overview and accept only the headlines of the day we will fail to see the forest for the trees.

The USA helped recruit, train and equip thousands of killer mujahideen in the anti-Soviet war. Ahmed’s book and other evidence shows the recruiting and training terrorists, including those in al-Qaeda, has continued for years. The White House “went underground” with this aid.

This is detailed in the 1993 book “The Outlaw Bank, A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI.” BCCI stands for Bank of Credit and Commerce International. It collapsed after exposure of its massive fraud and corruption. The book’s authors are Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne. Beaty was an investigative reporter and senior correspondent for Time magazine; Gwynne Time’s economics editor and author of “Selling Money.”

The book reveals the BCCI’s connections with the CIA and “a Washington coverup that …protected the BCCI… ” The BCCI’s ‘Black Network’ operating in Afghanistan and other countries dealt in “drug deals and terrorism.” The authors describe what they found as “a disturbing criminal conspiracy.”

Further evidence of the long and deep involvement of the CIA in terrorism is found in the 1987 book The Crimes of Patriots, A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, by Jonathan Kwitny. Kwitny at the time had been a Wall Street Journal reporter for 16 years.

He wrote that neither the director of the CIA nor the deputy director,

“had, in his career, shown any reluctance to shed American or foreign blood in covert military operations as a means to carrying out their assignments.” The book details “how some of the biggest names in American defense and intelligence were involved in an operation that promoted the dope trade, tax evasion, and gun running…”

Michael Springmann is a Washington lawyer. He worked for the US State Department’s foreign service for 20 years. He spent two years as chief of the visa section at the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. His superiors repeatedly ordered him to issue visas to unqualified applicants. It was illegal. He protested.

He’s just written this article in the reputable Covert Action Quarterly of Washington, D.C. and was interviewed by the CBC radio program Dispatches. “I had not been protesting fraud. What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by [the Agency and] Osama bin Laden, to the U.S. for terrorist training by the CIA.” He details numerous cases.

“The State Department did not run the Consulate in Jeddah. The CIA did. Of the roughly 20 Washington-dispatched staff there, I know for a certainty that only three people (including myself) had no ties, either professional or familial, to any of the U.S. intelligence services.”

What bugs me to no end is that mainstream media journalists operate as if these books – written by the most professional of their ranks – they operate as if these books don’t exist! Fellow journalists, the dots exist. For goodness’ sake, connect them, while you can.

There are plenty of what we call in the news biz “pegs.” Solid current evidence. New dots. But these dots, past and present, are never connected. Take this November 22^nd front page story in The Globe and Mail. I almost missed the startling information in this myself because the headline indulges a stereotypical Canadian self-putdown: us stupid Canadians, we let a terrorist -- one Ali Mohamed -- get away.

The real story is buried. “Mr. Mohamed … was a U.S. Army sergeant…but trained bin Laden’s bodyguards.”

What?

“Ali Mohamed was in the Americans’ good books…” “…Ali Mohamed wasn’t so shadowy in those days. He was one of their guys.”

A terrorist one of the FBI’s “guys?”

The headline on this story might have read: “FBI Protected Top al-Qaeda Operative.” And it might well have been the banner.

Ahmed’s own conclusion is that,

“the documentation… strongly suggests the United States, or more precisely significant elements of the U.S. government, military and intelligence, had extensive foreknowledge of the 11^th September attacks, and were in various ways complicit in those attacks.”

All this and more must be considered when asking “What really happened on Sept. 11^th?”

And bin Laden? Journalist and former Los Angeles Police Department detective Michael Ruppert quipped recently: “One guess is that he’s in Switzerland having his nails done.”

Next week, George W. Bush and the Oiligarchy.
 

Sources
BOOKS

Ahmed, Nafeez Mossaddeq: “The War on Freedom, Causes and Consequences of 9-11 (draft version),” to be published, 220 pages.
The most complete book I know of, at this time, summarizing the relevant background and foreground intersecting upon the events of September 11, 2001.

Bodansky, Yossef: “Bin Laden, The Man Who Declared War on America,” Forum, 1999, 439 pps, soft cover, ISBN 0-7615-3581-0.
This book is pure propaganda in the worst sense, an example of sophisticated disinformation. It’s designed to fool people into thinking they’re getting the lowdown from an insider. A check of the index’s startling omissions give it away. It’s well-known that Osama bin Laden has been a key CIA “asset.” Any book on bin Laden, therefore, should explore the CIA-bin Laden connection thoroughly. Yet the CIA is barely mentioned. Omission is a crucial tool of propaganda.

Cooley, John: “Unholy Wars:Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism,” Pluto Press, 299 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0 7453 1691 3.
One of the more reliable reporters, from whom Noam Chomsky draws material. He continues to track developments and his work is worth watching.

Kwitny, Jonathan: “The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA,” W. W. Norton & Company, 1987, 424 pps, hard cover, ISBN 0-393-02387-7.
Kwitny when he wrote this had been a Wall Street Journal reporter for 16 years, and had received the Honor Medal for Career Achievement by the University of Missouri School of Journalism. The book is well written, detailed, persuasive and shocking, one of the books concerned citizens should consider reading to inform themselves of the deep-rooted lawless and malignant nature and scope of the CIA, protected by billions of dollars of taxpayer money, secrecy and political cover under Republican and Democratic administrations.

Rashid, Ahmed: “Taliban,” Yale University Press, 2001, 279 pp, soft cover, ISBN0-300-08902-3.
Rashid’s long experience in Afghanistan, his credentials as a journalist, and his attempts to connect the historical and current dots in his region of the world, make his work reasonably credible.

Beaty, Jonathan, and Gwynne, S. C.: “The Outlaw Bank, a Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI,” Random House, New York, 399 pp, hardcover, ISBN 0-679-41384-7.
At the time they wrote this book, Beaty was an investigative reporter and senior correspondent for Time magazine, and Gwynne was Time’s economics editor. This book is as exhaustively documented as Kwitny’s, and uncovers the same kind of widespread deceitful, violent, criminal activities by the CIA as does Kwitny. It also discovers, as does Kwitny, that these illegal and violent activities are protected by those at the top of the corporate, financial and political hierarchy.

PERIODICALS:

Covert Action Quarterly (CAQ), Washington, D.C.
Formerly the Covert Action Intelligence Bulletin (CAIB), this reputable periodical publishes only thoroughly-researched work on the depredations of the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Its Winter 2001 issue is titled: “Removing the Veil / U.S. Intelligence & the Origins of 911.” Articles include Michael Parenti’s “The Terrorism Totality,” and Michael Springmann’s “CIA’s Visa Machine.”

Publisher: CovertAction Publications, Inc.
Street address: 1500 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Suite 732, Washington, DC 20005, USA
Tel.: (202) 331-9763 / FAX: (202) 331-9751
E-mail address: info@covertactionquarterly.org 

WEBSITES

www.emperors-clothes.com
Site founder: Jared Israel. I discovered Emperior’s Clothes about two years ago and have found its facts reliable, its knowledge of history solid, its analyses prescient. One of the best online journalism sites imaginable.

URL for the emperors-clothes article on 9/11: http://www.emperors-clothes.com/indict/indict-3.htm

www.copvcia.com
Site founder: Michael Ruppert. I have heard and met Michael Ruppert and consider him a totally reliable, profound and courageous person. He’s a former Los Angeles Police Department detective, who saw with his own eyes CIA agents dealing large amounts of drugs in L.A. He’s campaigned to expose CIA wrong-doing ever since and this has led him to a larger, disturbing, picture which we citizens – anywhere -- must be aware of, to plan a future. His organization is called From The Wilderness (FTW). That’s also the title of his publication, available in print and online.

Log in at www.copvcia.com to connect with all subscription and other information.
 

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Part 4 (the Oiligarchy) - What Really Happened on Sept. 11^th?
Transcript of Mon., Feb 11, 2002 Broadcast

Even among those who believe that the war on Afghanistan was part of the so-called war on terrorism, there’s a fairly wide recognition that the outcome – the occupation of Afghanistan -- might have something to do with the ambitions of U.S. oil corporations.

Which brings us to the connection between September 11^th and the Oiligarchy. Let me start with a crash course in globe-oil reality. A framework little mentioned by the mainstream media.

First, the size and power of Big Oil.

“Together, oil and coal constitute the biggest single industry in history,” writes Ross Gelbspan in his book, The Heat is On. “Big oil alone does well over a trillion dollars a year in business.”

Second, we’re at the end of the petroleum era. Total world oil extraction is peaking. These charts, from Scientific American and other equally reliable sources, tell the story. And the supply does not drop off gently.

If you think this industry is rich and powerful now, wait ‘til the supply is clearly on the wane. At the website www.dieoff.com, you can learn that “in 1995, Petroconsultants published a report for oil industry insiders ($32,000 per copy) titled WORLD OIL SUPPLY 1930-2050 which concludes that world oil (extraction) could peak as soon as the year 2000 and decline to half that level by 2025. Large and permanent increases in oil prices were predicted after the year 2000.”

Black gold is going to go platinum.

Hey wait, we’ll just switch to other energy sources, right? Wind, solar, biomass, tidal. Wrong.

“All the alternatives in the world,” writes former U.S. army officer and political analyst Stan Goff, “cannot begin to provide more than a tiny fraction of the energy base now provided by oil. This makes it more than a resource, and the drive to control what’s left more than an economic competition.”

 

“Most experts agree,” writes Larry Chin in Online Journal, “that the Caspian Basin and Central Asia are the keys to energy in the 21^st century. …energy expert James Dorian in the Oil & Gas Journal… “Those who control the oil routes out of Central Asia will impact all future direction and quantities of flow and the distribution of revenues from new (extraction).”

In other words a pipeline through, of all places, Afghanistan. Needed to carry an estimated 5-trillion dollars’ worth of Caspian oil and gas reserves to markets. A significant detail that surely is not lost on those in power in the United States. So just who are these people? Let’s start with the occupant of the Oval Office himself.

George W. Bush was CEO of Harken Energy.

George Herbert Walker Bush, his dad and the former president, was an oil man. Now he’s on the board of the Carlyle Group, which is heavily invested in oil and armaments.

Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense during Desert Storm. He stepped down to become CEO of Halliburton Oil. Cashed in 34 million dollars in Halliburton stock options before taking office as vice president.

Donald Evans, Bush’s Commerce Secretary, was with Colorado Oil.

Zalmay Khalilzad is the Bush-appointed special envoy to Afghanistan. Khalilzad previously was an aide to the American oil company Unocal. He drew up Unocal’s risk analysis on its proposed trans-Afghan gas pipeline.

Khalilzad reports to Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser. When she was a board director of Chevron Corporation, she served as its principal expert on Kazakhstan, where Chevron holds the largest concession of any of the international oil companies.

Khalilzad will liaise with the new Afghani leader Hamed Karzai. A former consultant to Unocal.

You get the idea.

A General Motors president once said: “Structure is strategy in slow motion.” The structure of this cabinet shows, in my opinion, the primacy of oil interests.

How does this connect with the events of 9/11? Well, it’s hard to just invade a country out of the blue, I believe. The perfect pretext is a so-called war on terrorism – founded firmly, so far, upon the official narrative of what happened on September 11^th.

The psychological trick at the heart of September 11^th, by the way, is that people confuse their compassion for the victims with their certainty about who the perpetrators are. The public was presented with instant perpetrators. The trick will most likely continue working for all future planned invasions – looks as if Iraq is next – so long as the public remains blindfolded by the media.

9/11 serves the ends of the Oiligarchy. That does not, in itself, prove a connection between Big Oil and what happened on September 11^th. But the fact that it does serve those ends must be taken together with other evidence. Just part of which is the illegal importation, training and protection of terrorists on U.S. soil by the CIA. The much-publicized failure of U.S. intelligence. The failure of the U.S. Air Force on the day. The inexplicable trades of United and American Airlines stocks in the days prior. The big economic difficulties the Bush administration was facing. And the loomingEnron scandal.
 

Sources
BOOK

Gelbspan, Ross, “The Heat Is On -- The High Stakes Battle Over Earth’s threatened Climate,” 278 pages, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1997, ISBN 0-201-13295-8 (hard cover). Gelbspan has been an editor and reporter at The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The book lays out the dangers of global warming and the massive disinformation campaign by the fossil fuel lobby to obscure the Earth realities that threaten our existence.

WEBSITES

www.dieoff.com
This is another of the sites founded and run by an individual (in this case Jay Hanson) informed by a single passionate intelligence. On this site is a tremendous collection of resources about the Earth’s fast-diminishing resources and what we can and should do about a fast-approaching “permanent state of emergency,” to borrow a phrase from Ross Gelbspan (see “Book.”)

www.narconews.com
Click on Issue #14 (Aug. 25 to Oct. 24), scroll down to “The So-Called Evidence is a Farce,” for the article and transcript of radio interview by Goff, Stan. Goff is a veteran of 27 years in the U.S. Army, most of it in the Special Forces, such as the Delta Force. He served in eight conflict areas around the world and taught military science for three semesters at West Point. During the U.S. operation in Haiti his political consciousness was awakened. He wrote a book about this titled “Deadly Dream.”

Narconews is a dependable site for well-researched information about the drug trade and therefore about the banking system’s involvement in money laundering, and corruption in politics, and the relationship of media to the subject of the drug trade. Narconews recently (see top of home page) won an historic court case in the Supreme Court of New York State against a large bank, which states that freedom of speech on the Internet is as sacrosanct as freedom of speech in print or in broadcast. (Most media outlets failed to report about this case.)

www.onlinejournal.com
Sub-titled “Building a New News Media By, Of and For the Public,” Online Journal, established in 1998, features well-documented original articles on matters of wide public concern.

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Part 5 - What Did George Bush Know and When Did he Know it? -  What Really Happened on Sept. 11^th?
Transcript of Mon., Feb 18, 2002 Broadcast

September 11^th has brought mostly unpleasant changes, including curtailment of civil liberties and threatened perpetual war. All rooted in the official story of what happened on September 11th. Namely that one evil man and his network are responsible. And that the U.S. military, intelligence and political establishments were all caught totally off guard.

Millions of intelligent people accept this story as their own.

“Any argument about any aspect of the conduct of the war against terrorism,” as Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson puts it, “must begin with those airplanes smashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And then it must stay there and never move from that spot.”

If it’s that important -- and I agree it is -- then it’s the duty of the media and of intelligent citizens to inquire about any anomalies about September 11^th. Today’s question: what did George Bush know and when did he know it on September 11^th?

[VIDEO CLIP] David Halton on CBC-TV in a story on the first anniversary of George Bush’s taking office (Bush is seen sitting in a classroom at Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida and Andrew Card comes to whisper in Bush’s ear):
 

TRANSCRIPT: "Bush was first informed of the suicide attack at an education event in Florida, his face creasing into anxiety. The crisis transformed his presidency..."

This image, embedded in the official story, has led the world to believe that when Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card whispered into his ear at an elementary school at 9:05 that morning, it was the first the U.S. president learned that, in his words, America was under attack. But a growing number of people including the careful researchers at www.emperors-clothes.com  don’t think so. Using verifiable publicly-available information, Ilarion Bykov and Jared Israel, an intrepid Canadian, raise questions mainstream media stubbornly refuse to even acknowledge.

Consider, Bykov and Israel say, the words of journalist John Cochrane, who was travelling with the president on the morning of September 11^th, on an ABC Special Report. Cochrane is speaking to Peter Jennings:

"Peter, as you know, the president’s down in Florida talking about education. He got out of his hotel suite this morning, was about to leave, reporters saw the White House chief of staff, Andy Card, whisper into his ear. The reporter said to the president, ’Do you know what’s going on in New York?’ He said he did, and he said he will have something about it later. His first event is about half an hour at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida."

“So Bush knew,” writes emperors-clothes, “about the first… incident before leaving his hotel.”

Take other evidence. By 8:20, according to its own official report, the Federal Aviation Authority, the FAA, is fully aware of the unprecedented emergency in the skies.

As Bycov and Israel point out,

“The (president of the United States)… travels with an entire staff…(including) the Secret Service, which is responsible for his safety. The members of this support team have the best communications equipment in the world. They maintain contact with, or can easily reach, Bush’s cabinet, the national Military Command Center in the Pentagon, the (FAA)…”

In other words, around 8:46 at the absolute latest the Secret Service and the President would have known of all four hijacked airliners and that one had hit the World Trade Center.

That’s two sets of proofs that question the famous whisper-in-the-ear at 9:05. Still not convinced? How about the typically garbled words of the President himself? From the transcript of a Town Hall session in Orlando, Florida on December 4^th:

JORDAN (a third grader): “…how did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?” [applause]

THE PRESIDENT: “Thank you, Jordan. Well, Jordan… I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there’s one terrible pilot…. But I was whisked off there, I didn’t have much time to think about it. And I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my Chief of Staff… walked in and said, ‘A second plane has hit the tower, America is under attack.’ And, Jordan, I wasn’t sure what to think at first.”

Wait a minute! The president tells us he saw the incredible image of the first plane going in. He went ahead with an easily-cancelable appointment. Why? He tells us he knew his country was under attack, yet he continued to listen to a student talk about her pet goat, and such, for another 25 minutes. Why?

Where can you find that Town Hall transcript? On the White House web site. Thanks to a viewer on the West Coast for drawing it to my attention.

In other words, no matter how you cut it, George W. Bush is acting right here. There are many other facts, equally puzzling. At least for anyone still clinging to the official story of 9-11. His schedule and whereabouts had been publicly announced. Why did the Secret Service not whisk him away for safety’s sake?

Do you think there’s anything here that mainstream media should follow up? Have you noticed any such follow-up? Do you find this as incredible as I do? What will it take to snap people out of the hypnotic trance of the official story and start asking questions? Maybe you calling an editor and raising hell.

Until the world finds out the truth about what really happened on September 11^th, the world is held hostage to the so-called war on terrorism. And surely it’s time to recognize that for what it is: harsh final steps to what the U.S. military terms “full spectrum dominance.”

Next week the final installment of “The Great Deception:” Moral and spiritual challenges that arise amidst fear and denial in a propagandized society.
 

Sources
WEBSITES

www.emperors-clothes.com
Follow the story headings

www.whitehouse.gov
Click “News and Policies,” then “December 2001,” then scroll down (close to the end) to the part of transcript of the Orlando, Florida town hall that I quote. You can also listen to the U.S. president in streaming audio.

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Part 6 - Conclusion
Transcript of Mon.,Feb 25, 2002 Broadcast

"What Really Happened on Sept. 11^th?"

Conclusion (What Did George Bush Know and When Did he Know it?" popularly known as "The Great Deception")

Subject: Moral and spiritual challenges amidst fear and denial in a propagandized society

The editors at the New York Times made the right judgment call, in my opinion, by playing this story [“Pentagon Readies Efforts to Sway Sentiment Abroad; Debate over Credibility; New Office Proposes to Send News or Maybe False News to Even Friendly Lands,” by James Dao and Eric Schmitt] at the top of their front page recently. Because a campaign of government deception is a moral issue.

But in a way, these headlines are laughable, including as they do phrases such as “…readies efforts…?” And “…proposes to send…false news…?”

Are readers supposed to believe the Pentagon might… start lying?

Those who have seen the documentary The Panama Deception will find this assumption impossible to swallow.

[VIDEO CLIP from “The Panama Deception,” Jeff Cohen of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of New York City, speaking]:

“The U.S. military said 250 civilians were killed. There isn’t a single credible source in Panama that believes that’s true, whether it’s ambulance drivers, human rights monitors, people – doctors who worked in hospitals, neighbours of bombed-out blocks. It’s just clearly false. That story would be so easy to tell for any journalist worth his or her salt. But they’re not telling it.”

Back to the Times article. The odd thing about it is that you can go over it with a divining rod and find that neither the writers, nor anyone they quote, makes so much as a passing reference to the simple wrongness of government lying. Not once are the words “moral,” “morality,” “ethics” or such, used, let alone “lies” or “lying.”

In my moral book, publishing a story with morality at its heart, without mentioning the word, is committing the sin of omission.

The story also accepts foolish statements about Saddam Hussein and prints them with a straight face, as it were. It’s claimed he “…has a charm offensive going on…’ ”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve noticed the offensive part but not the charm part.

“ ‘…and we haven’t done anything to counteract it,’ a senior military official said.”

Well, if you don’t count the U.S. government’s all-out propaganda campaign against the Iraqi leader for more than a decade, then I guess this guy’s got a point.

Readers are also misled to focus on side issues such as “public perceptions,” “strategy,” “possible illegality” and bureaucratic turf wars. This article – representing the crème de la crème of U.S. journalism – symbolizes how disconnected the U.S. media and government have become from moral questions, one might almost say, from reality.

To give credit where credit’s due the Times ran an editorial terming the Pentagon’s proposed new Office of Strategic Influence “Orwellian.” Yet the editorial fails as well to question the fundamental justness of the Pentagon.

Which brings me to my main point. The less people ask themselves questions about deceit the more it clears the way for organizations such as the CIA to continue to receive seemingly unending billions of dollars. Taxpayer money used to train terrorists, as the CIA acknowledges it has. To destabilize governments, as former CIA agent John Stockwell writes in his book In Search of Enemies. And to inject toxic grey, white and black disinformation into the world’s information systems, as William Blum spells out in Killing Hope. All with barely a whisper of dissent.

“The lie,” wrote theologian Andre Dumas, “is biblically portrayed as ‘the first and most poisonous source of injustice.’” “Truth telling,” he wrote “is…absolutely essential to the very life and health of the whole community.”

Which is at the heart of the Great Deception, about what really happened on September 11^th. For the past five weeks I’ve asked questions: How could it be that no U.S. Air Force jet interceptors turned a wheel on September 11^th until it was too late? Is it coincidence that the war on Afghanistan triggered by September 11^th will clear the way for petroleum pipelines of huge interest to the White House? How to explain the virtual non reaction of President George Bush immediately following the planes slamming into the World Trade Center?

These marked-up passages are from my dog-eared copy of a gem of a book, The Idea of Disarmament, Rethinking the Unthinkable, by Alan Geyer. Geyer, in 1982, writes:

“The nuclear arms race has become this generation’s severest test of truth. It is zealously promoted with false words, deceptive jargon, pretentious dogmatics, hateful propaganda, and arbitrary bars on access to the truth". “No realm of public policy,” he continues, “is more corrupted by untruthful speech than national security.”

Today the Big Lie of the so-called war on terrorism – itself firmly based on the linchpin of the implausible official version of what happened on September 11^th -- is an even more severe test of truth, in my opinion. Under the banner of the war on terrorism George W. Bush – with the aid of the media -- zealously promotes perpetual global war in the service of resource looting and permanent popularity for himself.

There’s unprecedented militarism. The USA is spending more than half its budget on wars past, present and future, according to the Center for Defense Information.

As Christian humanist Geyer writes in words truer today, in my view, than when written:

“Demythologizing has become the indispensable theological tool of peacemaking: it is the operation empowering the people of God to understand the stratagems by which inhuman speech violates the Word of God. Those stratagems include a relentless outpouring of myths about weapons, strategy, security, enemies, history, and human nature – from government bureaucracies and adjunct think tanks and co-opted media and electronic theologians.”

And in this gem of a book I find the perfect conclusion to this series about what really happened on September the eleventh, about the Great Deception, about moral and spiritual challenges amidst fear and denial.

In the 1930s there was a powerful peace movement. At that time a play by Viennese poet Stefan Zweig was produced. The play’s principal character, Jeremiah, bursts forth with these words:

"Peace is not a thing of weakness.
It calls for heroism and action.
Day by day you must wrest it from the mouths of liars.
You must stand alone against the multitude, for clamor is always on
the side of the many.
And the liar has ever the first word.
The meek must be strong."

Sources
BOOKS

Blum, William: Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Black Rose Books, 1998, 457 Pages, soft cover, ISBN 1-55164-096-1

Geyer, Alan: The Idea of Disarmament! Rethinking the Unthinkable, The Brethren Press, Elgin, Illinois and The Churches’ Center for Theology and Public Policy, Washington, D.C., 1982, 256 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0-87187-396-7

Stockwell, John: In Search of Enemies, A CIA Story, W. W. Norton & Company, 1978, 285 pages, soft cover, ISBN 0-393-00926-2

FILMS

The Panama Deception, 1992, by The Empowerment Project, in association with Channel Four, London, and Rhino Home Video. Produced by Barbara Trent, Joanne Doroshow, Nico Panigutti and David Kasper. One of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. Greatly relevant to our future.

NEWSPAPERS

The New York Times, Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2002, pages A1 and A10.

Toronto Star, Thursday, Feb. 21, 2002, page A24

WEBSITES

http://www.cdi.org/
Center for Defense Information

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