SCN: Questions that need to be asked re 9-11

[sharma at blarg.net]

My browser just crashed and I think this did not go out. If you get this 
twice, my apologies. I realize that some people are aggressively not 
interested in politics, so if that is you, just hit delete now. For all 
of you who would like more information and analysis re 9-11, this is a 
very interesting point of view and one which will never hit the 
mainstream press. The graphs on dieoff.org are chilling....

-sharma

Forwarded-by: David Michael <harp at olympus.net

[Here are the thoughts of a career military man on the events of 9-11 and
beyond.  It's long but well worth reading.  If you are not on the political
"Left" just fast-forward your reading through those paragraphs.
    This is a very well constructed argument, a point of view which has not
appeared anywhere in the mainstream press, and many questions are asked
which I've been personally pondering and wondering why no one was asking
them.  In short, I'd say this falls into the category of "must
read".....David]

-------------------------------------

"I'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant.  That doesn't cut much for
those who will only accept the opinions of former officers on military
matters, since we enlisted swine are assumed to be incapable of grasping the
nuances of doctrine.

But I wasn't just in the army; I studied and taught military science and
doctrine.  I was a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations Training
Center in Panama, and I taught Military Science at West Point.  And contrary
to the popular image of what Special Forces does, SF's mission is to teach.
We offer advice and assistance to foreign forces.  That's everything from
teaching marksmanship to a private to instructing a Battalion staff on how
to coordinate effective air operations with a sister service.

Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated conflict areas
from Vietnam to Haiti, I have to say that the story we hear on the news and
read in the newspapers is simply not believable.  The most cursory glance at
the verifiable facts, before, during, and after September 11th, does not
support the official line or conform to the current actions of the United
States government.

But the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept its
underlying premises.  I'm not at all surprised about the Republican and
Democratic Parties repeating these premises.  They are simply two factions
within a single dominant political class, and both are financed by the same
economic powerhouses.  My biggest disappointment, as someone who identifies
himself with the left, has been the tacit acceptance of those premises by
others on the left, sometimes naively, and sometimes to score some morality
points.  Those premises are twofold.  One, there is the premise that what
this de facto administration is doing now is a "response" to September 11th.
Two, there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan.  In my opinion, neither of
these is sound.

To put this in perspective we have to go back not to September 11th, but to
last year or further.

A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush, with nothing more than his
name and the behind-the-scenes pressure of his powerful father--a former
President, ex-director of Central Intelligence, and an oil man--is
systematically constructed as a candidate, at tremendous cost.  Across the
country, subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms are put into place to
disfranchise a significant fraction of the Democrat's African-American voter
base.  This doesn't come out until Florida becomes a battleground for
Electoral College votes, and the magnitude of the story has been suppressed
by the corporate media to this day.  In a decision so lacking in legitimacy,
the Supreme Court will neither by-line the author of the decision nor allow
the decision to ever be used as a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards the
presidency of the United States to a man who loses the popular vote in
Florida and loses the national popular vote by over 600,000.

This de facto regime then organizes a very interesting cabinet.  The Vice
President is an oil executive and the former Secretary of Defense.  The
National Security Advisor is a director on the board of a transnational oil
corporation and a Russia scholar. The Secretary of State is a man with no
diplomatic experience whatsoever, and the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.  The other interesting appointment is Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary
of Defense.  Rumsfeld is the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals.  He and
Cheney were featured as speakers at the May 2000, Russian-American Business
Leaders Forum.  So the consistent currents in this cabinet are petroleum,
the former Soviet Union, and the military.

Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his guises, and the general
trajectory of US foreign policy as far back as the Carter Administration, I
feel I can reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern and South Asian fossil
fuels are one of their major preoccupations.  Not just because this klavern
has some very direct financial interests in fossil fuel, but also because
they surely know that worldwide oil production is peaking as we speak, and
will soon begin a permanent and precipitous decline that will completely
change the character of civilization as we know it within 20 years.  Even
the left seems to be in deep denial about this, but the math is available.
And, no, alternative energies and energy technologies will not save us.  All
the alternatives in the world 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.  I further conclude that the economic colonization of the
former Soviet Union is probably high on that agenda, and in fact has a
powerful synergy with the issue of petroleum.  Russia not only holds vast
untapped resources that
beckon to imperialism in crisis, it remains a credible military and nuclear
challenger in the region.

We have not one, but three members of the Bush de facto cabinet with
military credentials, which makes the cabinet look quite a lot like a
military General Staff.  All this way before September 11th.

Then there's the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  NATO
might have expected consignment to the dustbin of the Cold War after the
Eastern Bloc shattered in 1991.  Peace dividend and all that.  But it
didn't.  It expanded directly into the former states of the Eastern Bloc
toward the former Soviet Union, and contributed significant forces to the
devastation of Iraq--a key country in the world oil market, over which
control translates into the ability to manipulate oil prices.

NATO is a military formation, and the United States exerts the controlling
interest in it.  It seemed like a form without a function, but it remedied
that pretty quickly.

Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International Monetary
Fund, the US and Germany began a systematic campaign of destabilization
there, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan in that campaign.
NATO became the military arm of that agenda-the break-up of Yugoslavia into
compliant statelets, the further containment of the former Soviet Union, and
the future pipeline easement for Caspian Sea oil to Western European markets
through Kosovo.

You see, this is important to understand, and people--even those against the
war talk--are tending to overlook the significance of it.  NATO is not a
guarantor of international law, and it is not a humanitarian organization.
It is a military alliance with one very dominant partner.  And it can no
longer claim to be a defensive alliance against European socialists.  It is
an instrument of military aggression.

NATO is the organization that is now going to thrust further along the 40th
parallel from the Balkans through the Southern Asian Republics of the former
Soviet Union.  The US military has already taken control of a base in
Uzbekistan.  No one is talking about how what we are doing seems to be a
very logical extension of a strategy that was already in motion, and has
been in motion for two decades.  Once we recognize the pattern of activity
designed to simultaneously consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South
Asian oil, and contain and colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan is
exactly where they need to go to pursue that agenda.

Afghanistan borders Iran, India, and even China but, more importantly, the
Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan
and Tajikistan.  These border Kazakhstan.  Kazakhstan borders Russia.
Turkmenistan sits on the Southeastern quadrant of the Caspian Sea, whose
oil the Bush Administration dearly covets.  Afghanistan is necessary for two
things:  as a base of operations to begin the process of destabilizing,
breaking off, and establishing control over the South Asian Republics, which
will begin within the next 18-24 months in my opinion, and constructing a
pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver
petroleum to the Asian market.

The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign Secretary, that
senior American officials were warning them as early as mid-July that
military action for mid-October was being planned for Afghanistan.  In 1996,
the Department of Energy was issuing reports on the desirability of a
pipeline through Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal testified before the House
Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific that this pipeline was crucial to
transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian Ocean.  Given this evidence that a
military operation to secure at least a portion of Afghanistan has been on
the table, possibly as early as five years ago, I can't help but conclude
that the actions we are seeing put into motion now are part of a
pre-September 11th agenda.  I'm absolutely sure of that, in fact.  The
planning alone for operations, of this scale, that is now taking shape,
would take many months.  And we are seeing them take shape in mere weeks.

It defies common sense.  This administration is lying about this whole thing
being a "reaction" to September 11th.  That leads me, in short order, to be
very suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided evidence that someone in
Afghanistan is responsible.  It's just too damn convenient.  Which also
leads me to wonder-just for the sake of knowing-what actually did happen on
September 11th, and who actually is responsible.

The so-called evidence is a farce.  The US presented Tony Blair's puppet
government with the evidence, and of the 70 so-called points of evidence,
only nine even referred to the attacks on the World Trade Center, and those
points were conjectural.  This is a bullshit story from beginning to end.
Presented with the available facts, any 16-year old with a liking for
courtroom dramas could tear this story apart like a two-dollar shirt.  But
our corporate press regurgitates it uncritically.  But then, as we should
know by now, their role is to legitimize.

This cartoon heavy they've turned bin Laden into makes no sense, when you
begin to appreciate the complexity and synchronicity of the attacks.  As a
former military person who's been involved in the development of countless
operations orders over the years, I can tell you that this was a very
sophisticated and costly enterprise that would have left what we call a huge
"signature".  In other words, it would be very hard to effectively conceal.

So there's a real question about why there was no warning of this.  That can
be a question about the efficacy of the government's intelligence apparatus.
That can be a question about various policies in the various agencies that
had to be duped to orchestrate this action.  And it can also be a question
about whether or not there was foreknowledge of the event, and that
foreknowledge is being covered up.  To dismiss this concern out of hand as
the rantings of conspiracy nuts is premature.  And there is a history of
this kind of thing being done by national political bosses, including the
darling of liberals, Franklin Roosevelt.  The evidence is very compelling
that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately failed to act to stop Pearl
Harbor in order to mobilize enough national anger to enter the World War II.

I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about
the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks.  Follow along:

Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all the while
on FAA radar.  The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM Eastern
Daylight Time. Who is notified?

This is an event already that is unprecedented.  But the President is not
notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.  By
around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong.
The President is glad-handing teachers.

By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade
Center, Bush is settling in with children for his photo ops at Booker
Elementary.  Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously, an
event never before seen in history, and one has just dived into the world's
best know twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander in
Chief.  No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either.

At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining World Trade Center
building.  At 9:05, Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers to
George W. Bush.  Bush  "briefly turns somber" according to reporters. Does
he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting?  No.

He resumes listening to second graders read about a little girl's pet
fucking goat, and continues this banality even as American Airlines Flight
77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction
of Washington DC.  Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air
Force?  No.

An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public
statement telling the United States what they already have figured out; that
there's been an attack by hijacked planes on the World Trade Center.
There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force
been scrambled to defend anything yet?  No. At 9:30, when he makes his
announcement, American Flight 77 is still ten minutes from its target, the
Pentagon.

The Administration will later claim they had no way of knowing that the
Pentagon might be a target, and that they thought Flight 77 was headed to
the White House, but the fact is that the plane has already flown South and
past the White House no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing through the sky at
over 400 nauts. At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over
the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not
evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky
over Alexandria and DC.

Now, the real kicker.  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 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
horseshit!

There is a story being constructed about these events.  My crystal ball is
not working today, so I can't say why. But at the least, this so-called
Commander-in-Chief and his staff that we are all supposed to follow blindly
into some ill-defined war on terrorism is criminally negligent or
unspeakably stupid.  And at the worst, if more is known or was known, and
there is an effort to conceal the facts, there is a criminal conspiracy
going on.

Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was facing a confluence of
crises from which they were temporarily rescued by this event.  Whether they
played a sinister role or not, there is little doubt that they have at the
very least opportunistically pounced on this attack to overcome their lack
of legitimacy, to shift the blame for the encroaching recession from
capitalism to the September 11th terror attack, to legitimize their
pre-existing foreign policy agenda, and to establish and consolidate
repressive measures domestically and silence dissent.  In many ways,
September 11th pulled the Bush cookies out of the fire.  And gave them the
green light to begin constructing a long-term scenario within which to
establish fascistic control measures at home and abroad as a citadel for the
ruling class in the catastrophic conjuncture that we are entering based on
the end of oil.

This elephant in the living room is being studiously ignored.  In fact, the
domestic repression has already begun, officially and unofficially.  It's
kind of a latter day McCarthyism.  I participated in a teach-in at Chapel
Hill, North Carolina, on the 17th of September, and though not a single
person on the panel excused or justified the attacks, and every person there
offered either condolences and prayers for the victims, we were excoriated
within two days as "enemies of America." Yesterday an op-ed called for my
deportation (to where, one can only guess).  Now Herr Ashcroft is fast
tracking the biggest abrogation of US civil liberties since the so-called
anti-terrorism legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing--which by the way
hasn't resulted in anti-terrorism but in the acceleration of the application
of the racist death penalty.  The FBI has defined terrorist
groups not by whether any given group has ever acted as terrorists, but by
their beliefs.  Some socialists and anti-globalization groups have already
been identified by name as terrorist groups, even though there is not a
single shred of evidence that they have ever participated in any criminal
activity.  It reminds me of the Smith Act that was finally declared
unconstitutional, but only after a hell of a lot of people served a hell of
a long time in jail for the crime of thinking.

I think this also points to yet another huge problem that the Bush regime
was facing.  Worldwide resistance to the whole so-called neoliberal agenda,
which is a prettied up term for debt-leverage imperialism.  While debt and
the threat of sanctions have been used to coerce nations in the periphery,
we have to understand that the final guarantor of compliance remains
military action.  For a global economic agenda, there is always a
corresponding political and military agenda.

The focal point of these actions in the short term is Southern Asia, but
they have already scripted this as a worldwide and protracted fight against
terrorism.  It's far better than drug wars as a rationalization, and the
drug war thing was being discredited in any case.  Leftists are regaining
power and popularity in Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador,
Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and Argentina. Cuba has
gained immense prestige over the last few years.  The empire is beginning to
unravel.  We can hardly justify intervention in these places by saying they
are not
toeing the economic line by allowing the absolute domination of their
societies by transnational corporations.  That exposes the agenda. So we
simply claim they are supporting terrorism.

It's for all these reasons I say the left has missed the boat on this one,
by allowing them to get away with rushing past the question of who did what
on September 11th.  If the official story is a lie, and I think the
circumstantial case is strong enough to stay with this question, then we
really do need to know what happened.  And we need to understand concretely
what the motives of this administration are.

And we need to understand more than just their immediate motives, but where
the larger social forces that underwrite our situation right now are headed.
I do not think this administration is engaged in the deliberative process of
a political grouping that is on top of their game.  They are putting
together some very deliberative technical solutions in response to a larger
situation that is slipping rapidly out of their control.  Like clear
cutting.  There's a very smart technology being employed to do a very dumb
thing.

What they are responding to is not September 11th, but the beginning of a
permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production, the beginning
of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the unraveling of the
empire.

This brings me to a point about what all this means for Americans' security,
which they are perfectly justified to worry about.  The actions being
prepared by this administration will not only not enhance our security, it
will significantly degrade it.  Military action against many groups across
the globe, which is what the administration is telling us quite openly they
are planning to do, will put a lot of backs against the wall.  That can't be
very secure.

The concept of war being touted here is a violation of the principles of war
on several counts, and will inevitably lead to military catastrophes, if
you're inclined to view this from a position of moral and political
neutrality.  And the people who are now in possession of half the world's
remaining oil reserves are subject to destabilization for which we can't
even pretend to predict the consequences--but loss of access to critical
energy supplies is certainly within the realm of possibility.  Worst of all,
we will be destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power in an active conflict
with its neighbor, and we will be provoking Russia, another nuclear power.
The security stakes don't get any higher, and Americans can ill afford to
ignore nukes.

And I think that this domestic agenda is a tremendous threat to the security
of anyone who is critical of the government or their corporate financiers,
and we already know that the real threats are against populations that can
easily be scapegoated as the domestic crisis deepens.  There is a very real
threat right now of creeping fascism in this country, and that phenomenon
requires its domestic enemies. Historically those enemies have included
leftists, trade unionists, and racially and nationally oppressed sectors.
This whole "state of emergency" mentality is already being used to quiet the
public discourses of anti-racism, of feminism, of environmentalism, and of
both socialism and anarchism.  And while there is token resistance by
officials to anti-Muslim xenophobia, the stereotypical images have saturated
the media, and the government is already beginning to
openly re-instate racial profiling.  It is only a short step from there to
go after other groups.  We have long been prepared by the ideologies of
overt and covert racism, and racism as both institution and corresponding
psychology in the United States is nearly intractable.

It's for all these reasons, I say emphatically that we cannot accept
anything from this administration; not their policies or their bullshit
stories.  What they are doing is very, very dangerous, and the time to fight
back against them, openly, is right now, before they can consolidate their
power and their agenda. Once they have done that, our job becomes much more
difficult.

The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its oblivion, needs
to understand its critical roles here.  We have to play the role of
credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a broader
peace-movement.  We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current
historical conjuncture.  And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive
conflict that will emerge to first defeat fascism then take political power.

Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than ever right now. We are not faced with
a choice between socialism and capitalism, but socialism or barbarism. And
what we can least afford are denial and timidity.

  Stan Goff

   I strongly recommend, for anyone who wants to find further background
material on the issues herein check out the websites at http://www.dieoff.org/ 
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/
 and http://www.globalcircle.com/

Need some Cipro? Can you say unreasonable profits?  
http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/hotnews/1ah2511050.html

  "The irreducible core of all war is slaughter of the innocent, organized
   by national leaders and accompanied by lies."

  ---Howard Zinn.
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