--- Begin Message ---
9/11 : A DESPERATE PROVOCATION BY U.S. CAPITALISM
Max Kolskegg
Jan 28 '02 (Modified on Feb 19 '02)
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
unleash 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 an acute 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 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 1991 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 North America 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.
-- Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have
had to lay waste
to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is
imperative to catch them in
time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing,
their dirty minds would
see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools,
but we shall turn them
into imbeciles lilke ourselves, with high IQs if possible.
(R.D. Laing)
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Buy Stock for $4.
No Minimums.
FREE Money 2002.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/BgmYkB/VovDAA/ySSFAA/xYTolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
Please let us stay on topic and be civil.
To unsubscribe please go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cia-drugs
-Home Page- www.cia-drugs.org
OM
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--- End Message ---
