An Overview of The War on Terrorism

As questions remain over the attacks of September 11, so too must questions be asked about the vested interests behind the US-led push for a war on terrorism.

Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 9, Number 1 (December-January 2002)

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

-- President John F. Kennedy

Americans are now beginning to pay the price for sleeping through history classes, ignoring important information in the alternative media and neglecting to participate in their own political process. They find themselves in a new war--the War on Terrorism. This is a war they never asked for and never envisioned, anaesthetised as we all are by the flickering tube of distraction. It is a war predicated on the premise that a sneak attack was made on the United States on September 11, 2001.

Unlike previous wars, there is no Berlin or Tokyo to capture and hence no victory to be won, except for those who profit from war. The real victims of this war will be the average American citizen, right along with the starving
Afghan.

This new war might well be compared to the failed War on Drugs and the nearly forgotten War on Poverty. No clear victory has yet been achieved over the misuse of drugs or the ravages of poverty within our own nation. Our prisons are overflowing with drug offenders, with no appreciable lessening of either demand or supply of illegal drugs, and our basic civil rights have been badly mauled. Just like those failed campaigns, the War on Terrorism for the foreseeable future will set us all on a costly course of restrictions on individual freedom, ever more centralised authority and omnipresent fear.

And where are the voices of those who would argue the merits of this new war? The airwaves and newspapers only ratchet the fear factor upwards each day, with little or no effort to hear the many thoughtful Americans who are asking themselves, "Do I really need to give up my freedoms in order to save them?"

So with flags flying on the antennae of our gas-guzzling vehicles and love of country pulsing in our hearts, we march off to yet another war for oil.

WARS FOR OIL

Yes, oil. Petroleum has been behind all recent wars, beginning in the early 1940s when a mostly rural and isolationist America was suddenly thrown into World War II as a reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Americans mourned the loss of some 3,000 soldiers and civilians in Hawaii and, in righteous indignation, allowed their country to be turned into a giant military camp.

The Federal government, which had consolidated so much power unto itself under the Depression-busting policies of President Franklin Roosevelt, grew even stronger and more centralised under the aegis of "national security".
It all seemed quite natural and necessary at the time.

But serious students of history now know that even that "good war" was the result of machinations by a handful of wealthy and powerful men. By closing off Japan's oil supplies in the summer of 1941, Roosevelt, the quintessential Wall Street insider, ensured an eventual attack on the United States. It has now been well established that Roosevelt and a few close advisers knew full well that Pearl Harbor would be attacked on December 7, 1941, but chose to allow it to happen to further their agenda for launching America into war. (The details of this may be found in my book, Rule by Secrecy.)

The Vietnam War was prosecuted by men who were close to Roosevelt and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and who had long voiced a desire to gain control over Indochina's oil, magnesium and rubber assets. Again a provocation was created. In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson whipped Congress into a frenzy by claiming that North Vietnamese gunboats had attacked the US Sixth Fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam. "Our boys are floating in the water," he cried.

Congress responded by passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which bypassed the Constitution and gave Johnson the power to wage war to stop attacks on Americans. It was the beginning of the real-shooting Vietnam War.

And it was all a lie. No evidence has ever been brought forward that such an attack took place. In fact, editors for US News & World Report (July 23, 1984) called it "The 'Phantom Battle' that Led to War".

While America was waging war against North Vietnam, which we were told was merely a puppet of communist Russia and China, Johnson was encouraged by his CFR advisers to grant the Soviet Union loans at higher levels than offered during World War II when they were our ally. US-backed loans provided Russia with the means to build facilities which turned out war materials that were then sent to North Vietnam for use against American troops. This was a good example of the duplicity of our modern wars.

The Gulf War was all about oil, from the wells in Kuwait slant-drilling into Iraq's southern reserves to the destruction of the oilfields at its finish. Here we found a new Hitler in Saddam Hussein, an enemy armed and financed by the CIA--an agency whose top officials have long been connected to oilmen, CFR members and other globalists (see Rule by Secrecy).

Saddam Hussein, strapped for cash due to his eight-year war against Iran on behalf of the US, decided to regain Kuwait as a means of increasing his income. Kuwait had been carved out of southern Iraq by British troops. When asked her thoughts on this move, US Ambassador April Glaspie replied that the US Government had "no opinion" and that the matter of Kuwait was not associated with America. But when he moved his troops into Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush mobilised a United Nations force against him, backed by a US$4 billion secret fund provided by his business associates in Saudi
Arabia.

Yet, as those patriotic soldiers closed in on Saddam, the whole war stopped and George H. W. Bush's old business partner is still in power. It appears to have been yet another provocation. And as in Vietnam, even as we prepared to fight against Saddam, the American taxpayers backed $500 million in loans that Bush used to purchase arms for use against our forces.

CASPIAN SEA OIL COVETED

Today the real issue is the rich oil reserves of the Caspian Sea region--the prize sought by Hitler, whose drive to that area was stopped only by the tenacious Russian defence of the Volga River city of Stalingrad.

In the late 1970s, with the Soviet discovery of vast untapped oil in Chechnya, the region was ripe for exploitation but control over Afghanistan was needed to ensure the safety of a pipeline to bring the oil to world markets. But after almost 10 years of brutal, no-quarter fighting against Afghans and Arab mercenaries including Osama bin Laden, and backed by the US, the Soviets were forced to withdraw. The economic stress of this Russo-Afghan War was enough to topple communism in the early 1990s.

Now the international bankers and oilmen have a foothold in cash-strapped Russia, and the estimated $40 billion in Caspian Sea oil is again attracting serious attention. In 1997, six international companies and the Government of Turkmenistan formed Central Asian Gas Pipeline Ltd (CentGas) to build a 790-mile-long pipeline to Pakistan and perhaps on to the New Delhi area of India. Leading this consortium was Unocal Corporation, whose president, John F. Imle, Jr, said the project would be "the foundation for a new commerce corridor for the region--often referred to as the Silk Road for the 21st century".

But problems developed with the fundamentalist Muslim government in Afghanistan, not the least of which was the Taliban government's treatment of women which prompted feminist demonstrations against firms seeking to do business there. Additionally, the Taliban regime was creating chaotic conditions by pitting the various Islamic sects against each other in order to maintain control. In mid-1999, Unocal withdrew from the pipeline consortium, citing the hazardous political situation, and the project languished.

Notice that in President George W. Bush's declaration of War on Terrorism, he never mentioned terrorists in Northern Ireland or Palestinian suicide bombers. Attention was focused only on Afghanistan, the one nation necessary to complete the lucrative pipeline.

It should also be noted that Vice President Dick Cheney headed Halliburton, a giant oil industry service company with vested interests in the region, and he is generally thought to be more powerful than the President.

AFGHAN ACTION PLANNED LONG AGO

Today it can be demonstrated that military action against Afghanistan was in the works long before the September 11 attacks.
As reported by the BBC's George Arney, former Pakistan Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik was alerted by American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would be launched by mid-October.

At a UN-sponsored meeting concerning Afghanistan in Berlin, Naik was informed that unless bin Laden were handed over, America would take military action either to kill or capture both him and Taliban leader Mullah Omar as the initial step in installing a new government there.

In a 1998 interview published in the French publication Le Nouvel Observateur (the significant portions of which never made it to the United States), former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that American activities in Afghanistan actually began six months prior to the Soviet action of December 1979.

Brzezinski said the Jimmy Carter administration began secretly funding opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul in July 1979, with the full knowledge that such action might provoke a Soviet invasion. Soviet leaders at the time argued that the invasion was necessary to thwart American aggression in Afghanistan. The former National Security Adviser, who helped found the globalist Trilateral Commission, expressed no regret at this provocation, stating: "That secret operation was an excellent idea. It brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire." It also produced the Taliban regime which we are fighting today, as well as Osama bin Laden.

By 1984, with Vice President George Bush overseeing the Afghan situation, bin Laden was in charge of the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), which funnelled money, arms and manpower from the outside world into the war against the Soviets. He soon helped form a polyglot formation of Muslim troops from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps, whom the CIA found easier to deal with than the Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan.

There should be considerable soul-searching about America's role in arming and training an international group of Muslim extremists in Afghanistan, long after their comrades destroyed the Marine barracks in Beirut and hijacked numerous airliners.

Little noticed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks were reports that China had signed a pact with the Afghans and was quietly inducted into the controversial World Trade Organization--action which under normal circumstances would have drawn widespread protest. Although such a pact is unconfirmed at this time, Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf, chairman of their joint chiefs and chief of the Pakistani Army Staff, this year visited China at their request and discussed matters of mutual interest.

Although it is claimed that Pakistan is aiding the US in the current War on Terrorism, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, Michael Sheehan, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that Pakistan supports and trains terrorist groups in Afghanistan.

This raises the spectre of Chinese intervention, should US forces become bogged down in mountainous Afghanistan. This prospect is particularly unsettling, as back in 1555 the French prophet Nostradamus, who has been proven correct in so many of his prophecies, published his prediction that America and Russia would go to war against a coalition made up of Arab nations and China (see C. III v. 60; also C. VI v. 21). Until just recently, such a notion seemed absurd.

WOULD AMERICANS ATTACK AMERICANS?

The WTC/Pentagon attacks provided a convenient excuse to launch the pre-laid plans for military action against Afghanistan. But were they simply allowed to happen, or were they contrived? The question becomes: "Would any American allow an attack on fellow Americans, just to further his own business or political agenda?" The answer unfortunately appears to be "Yes".

Incredibly, 40-year-old government documents, thought to have been destroyed long ago but recently made public, show the US military in the early 1960s proposed making terrorist attacks in the United States and blaming them on Fidel Castro. They are discussed in a recent book on the National Security Agency (NSA), entitled Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, by James Bamford [see Reviews this issue of NEXUS. Ed.].

These documents were produced beginning in late 1961, following the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that spring. President John F. Kennedy, angered by the inept actions of the CIA, had shifted responsibility for Cuba from that agency to the Department of Defense. Here, military strategists considered plans to create terrorist actions which would alarm the American population and stampede them into supporting a military attack on Cuba. Under consideration in Operation Northwoods were plans:
¥ to create "a series of well-coordinated incidents" in or around the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to include inciting riots and blowing up ammunition stores, aircraft and ships;
¥ to "develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington";
¥ to "sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)...foster attempts on the lives of Cuban refugees in the United States";
¥ to explode bombs in carefully chosen locations and coordinate with the release of "prepared documents" pointing to Cuban complicity;
¥ to use fake Russian aircraft to harass civilian airliners;
¥ to make "hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft", even to simulating the shooting down of a civilian airliner.

Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods and senior military officers ordered the documents destroyed. But someone slipped up and the papers were discovered by the Assassination Records Review Board and recently released by the National Archives.

On a more recent event, The New York Times (October 28, 1993) reported that an informant named Emad Salem was involved early in 1993 with Middle Eastern terrorists connected to Osama bin Laden, to develop a bomb for use against New York's World Trade Center. Salem, a former Egyptian Army officer, wanted to substitute a harmless powder for the explosive, but his plan to thwart the attack was blocked by an FBI official who apparently did not want to expose the inside informant. The attack was allowed to proceed. The February 26, 1993 explosion in the WTC resulted in six deaths, more than 1,000 casualties, and damage in excess of half a billion dollars.

We now see that creating crises to further political goals was a methodology well understood and utilised in the 20th century. Is this the game today? Let's examine the September 11 attacks.

QUESTIONS OVER THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS

Superficially, it all seemed straightforward enough. According to the official story, about 19 suicidal Middle Eastern terrorists, their hearts full of hatred for American freedom and democracy, hijacked four airliners, crashing two into the twin towers of New York City's World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon. The fourth reportedly crashed in western Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to fight the terrorists.

But many disturbing questions have arisen. Among them:

- Why was the US military preparing war plans against Afghanistan months before the September 11 attacks? Were they just looking for some event to propel the normally disinterested American public into a war, as in the past?

- How could paper documents incriminating bin Laden be found intact at the WTC, but the planes' "black box" flight recorders--designed to withstand crashes--were damaged beyond use?

- Even days and weeks after the WTC attack, why were news cameramen prevented from photographing the ruins from certain angles, as complained about by CBS correspondent Lou Young, who asked, "What are they afraid we're going to see?"

- Why has the NYPD liaison to the FBI been sent packing as a "security risk", as reported in the October 16 New York Times? Whose security is at risk? The FBI's? What is it that the Bureau does not want NYPD to know?

- How could an obviously sophisticated terrorist plan, involving perhaps as many as 100 persons and in the works for five years, escape the notice of our intelligence services, especially the FBI and CIA? And why, instead of cashiering those responsible for this intelligence failure and totally restructuring these agencies, are we doubling their budgets?

- Why did the WTC South Tower collapse first, when it was not as extensively damaged as the North Tower which burned for almost an hour and a half before collapsing?

- Why did many witnesses claim to hear further explosions within the buildings? And why did the destruction of the towers appear more like a controlled implosion than a tragic accident?

- Why did FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledge that the list of named hijackers might not contain their real names? Doesn't everyone have to show a photo ID to claim a boarding pass? Where was the normal security?

- Why was there a discrepancy of 35 names between the published passenger lists and the official death toll on all four of the ill-fated flights? Internet columnist Gary North reported that "the published names in no instance match the total listed for the number of people on board". Why the discrepancy?

- As none of these listed passengers had an Arabic-sounding name, how did the government know which ones were the hijackers?

- Why did the seat numbers of the hijackers, given in a cellphone call from Flight Attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney to Boston Air Traffic Control, not match the seats occupied by the men the FBI claims were responsible?

- Since Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister claimed five of the proclaimed hijackers were not aboard the death planes and in fact are still alive, and a sixth man on that list was reported to be alive and well in Tunisia, why are these names still on the FBI list?

- Why were no names of the named hijackers on any of the passenger lists? If they all used aliases, how did the FBI identify them so quickly?

- Why did one of the named hijackers take luggage on a suicide flight, then leave it along with an incriminating note in his car at the airport?

- As for the overall investigation into the September attacks, by late October US authorities conceded that most of their promising leads for finding accomplices and some of their long-held suspicions about several suspects have unravelled, according to the New York Times. Since more than 800 people have been arrested and more than 365,000 tips have been received from the public, why has nothing substantial been forthcoming in the largest US criminal investigation in history?

- Why, of the nearly 100 people still being sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is none seen as a major suspect?

- Why are we bombing Afghanistan, when apparently no listed hijackers were Afghans but instead Arabs from various Middle Eastern nations? Since Iraq was implicated in the 1993 WTC attack, why are we not bombing that "rogue" nation?

- Why does the heavy drinking and searching for hookers by some of the hijackers in Boston, as reported by Reuters news service, sound more like mercenaries carousing before a mission than pious religious fundamentalists about to meet their maker?

- How did the terrorists obtain top-secret White House and Air Force One codes and signals--the excuse for hustling President Bush all across the country on September 11? Was this evidence of an inside job, or was it, as reported by Fox News, evidence that former FBI employee and double agent Robert Hanssen had delivered an updated version of the purloined Promis computer software to his Russian handlers who passed it along to bin Laden? Does this software, which was stolen from a US company during the Reagan administration by Justice Department officials under Attorney-General Ed Meese, allow outsiders carte blanche entrée to our top-security computers? (Hanssen's last job before being arrested as a spy was to upgrade the FBI's intelligence computer systems.)

- If United Airlines Flight 93 crashed as the result of a struggle between heroic passengers and the hijackers, why did witnesses tell of a second plane which followed it down, falling burning debris, no deep crater and crash wreckage spread over a six-mile area, indicative of an aerial explosion?

- Why did news outlets describe the throat-cutting and mutilation of passengers on Flight 93 with box cutters, when Time magazine on September 24 reported that one of the passengers called home on a cellphone to report, "We have been hijacked; they are being kind"?

As Internet pundit Gary North wrote: "We need a theory of the coordinated hijackings that rests on a plausible cause-and-effect sequence that does not assume the complete failure of both check-in procedures and the on-board seating procedures on four separate flights on two separate airlines. I don't see how anyone can make an accurate judgment about who was behind the attacks until he has a plausible explanation of how hijackers got onto the planes and were not removed."

But the Federal government, aided by a sycophantic mass media, did not allow such rational thinking to interfere with a rush to judgement that Osama bin Laden was the culprit behind the attacks.

OSAMA BIN LADEN AND HIS FRIENDS

As in the JFK assassination, authorities had a suspect even before anyone knew for certain what had happened. Osama bin Laden, born into a wealthy Saudi oil/construction family, received arms and financing from the US Government during the Russo-Afghan War of the 1980s. Despite the fact that bin Laden has denied any knowledge of the September 11 attacks, he is presumed guilty by both the government and the press. No other interpretation of the attacks has been allowed in the corporate mass media.

Bin Laden is a made-to-order enemy, the man reportedly behind the 1993 WTC attack and a fugitive from United States justice for more than a decade. It has been noted that the government apparently has spent more time and money chasing Microsoft's Bill Gates than in capturing bin Laden. This may be due to the business connections between our new terrorist enemy and wealthy American companies.

According to several reports, including Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne's book The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of the BCCI (Random House, NY, 1993) and American Free Press (October 15, 2001) (the reincarnation of the Washington newspaper The Spotlight), Bush family friend James R. Bath used money from Osama bin Laden's older brother, Salem, to open a partnership with George W. Bush in Arbusto Energy, a West Texas drilling company. Bush believed the Spanish word arbusto to mean "bush", although it generally refers to "shrub".

According to the Houston Chronicle, Salem bin Laden named Bath his business representative in Texas shortly after the senior Bush was named CIA Director by appointed President Gerald Ford in 1975. It was the Bush family, particularly Jeb and Neil, who were involved in the 1989-93 Savings and Loan debacle that cost taxpayers more than US$500 billion.

Through a tangled web of Texas oilmen, wealthy Saudi sheiks and unscrupulous bankers connected to BCCI, the younger George Bush eventually gained a sizeable interest in a new oil company called Harken Energy. Two months before Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi troops into Kuwait, Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock, netting himself nearly a one-million-dollar profit. The stock dropped when the Iraqi invasion began.

The BCCI was closed by federal investigators in 1991 after suffering some US$10 billion in losses. It was a Pakistani-run institution with front companies in the Cayman Islands that used secret accounts for global money-laundering and it was used by US intelligence to funnel money to bin Laden and the Mujahedin in Afghanistan who were fighting against the Soviet-backed government.

Salem bin Laden, incidentally, was killed in the strange crash of an ultralight aircraft in 1988. The single-passenger craft suddenly and inexplicably veered into high-voltage electric powerlines near San Antonio, Texas.

It should be noted that during the Persian Gulf War it was Binladen Brothers Construction (now the Saudi Binladen Group) that helped build airfields for US aircraft. The bin Laden brothers were then described as "a good friend of the US Government".

Later, the bin Laden firm continued to be hired to construct an American air base in Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that Osama had already been blamed for terrorist acts such as the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers at the Dhahran base, which killed 19 Americans. A WorldNetDaily writer commented: "So let's get this straight. Osama blows up our facilities and his family gets the contract for rebuilding them. Do you get the feeling there is more going on than meets the eye?"

Another close connection between bin Laden and the Bush family is the $12-billion private international investment firm known as The Carlyle Group. Although it has removed its website since the September 11 attacks, it is known that Carlyle directors include former Reagan Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former Bush Secretary of State James Baker, and former Reagan aide and GOP operative Richard Darman. The New York Times reported that former President Bush was allowed to buy into Carlyle's investments, which involve at least 164 companies around the world.

According to the Wall Street Journal (September 28, 2001): "George H. W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through The Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm." It has been confirmed by the senior Bush's chief of staff that Bush sent a thank-you note to the bin Laden family after a social visit in early 2001.

With such connections and a son as a sitting President of the United States, the senior Bush and his Carlyle involvement were questioned by Larry Klayman, chairman and general counsel of Judicial Watch, who said: "Any foreign government or foreign investor trying to curry favor with the current Bush administration is sure to throw business to The Carlyle Group. And with the former President Bush promoting the firm's investments abroad, foreign nationals could understandably confuse The Carlyle Group's interests with the interests of the United States Government."

After detailing some of the Carlyle/bin Laden investments in several businesses including aerospace industries, web writer and former LA policeman Michael C. Ruppert commented: "In other words, Osama bin Laden's attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, with the resulting massive increase in the US defense budget, have just made his family a great big pile of money."

What made these business dealings that entangle former and current American political leaders with Middle Easterners even more suspect was the announcement that several US firms were being investigated for short-selling stocks just prior to the September 11 attacks.

SHORT-SELLING INDICATES FOREKNOWLEDGE

Short-selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls. Historically, if this precedes a traumatic event, it is an indication of foreknowledge. It is widely known that the CIA uses the Promis software to routinely monitor stock trades as a possible warning sign of a terrorist attack or suspicious economic behaviour.

A week after the September 11 attacks, the London Times reported that the CIA had asked regulators for the Financial Services Authority in London to investigate the suspicious sales of millions of shares of stock just prior to the terrorist acts. It was hoped the business paper trail might lead to the terrorists. The Times said market regulators in Germany, Japan and the US all had received information concerning the short-selling of insurance, airlines and arms companies stock, all of which fell sharply in the wake of the attacks.

City of London broker and analyst Richard Crossley noted that someone sold shares in unusually large quantities beginning three weeks before the assault on the WTC and Pentagon. He said he took this as evidence that someone had insider foreknowledge of the attacks. "What is more awful than he should aim a stiletto blow at the heart of Western financial markets?" he added. "But to profit from it. Words fail me."

The US Government also admitted it was investigating short- selling which evinced a foreknowledge of the tragedy. There was unusually heavy trading in airline and insurance stocks several days before September 11, which essentially bet on a drop in the worth of the stocks. It was reported by the Interdisciplinary Center, a counterterrorism think-tank involving former Israeli intelligence officers, that insiders made nearly US$16 million profit by short-selling shares in American and United Airlines, the two airlines that suffered hijacking, and the investment firm of Morgan Stanley, which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center.

Apparently none of the suspicious transactions could be traced to bin Laden because this news item quietly dropped from sight, leaving many people wondering if they tracked back to American firms or intelligence agencies.

According to Michael C. Ruppert, these transactions were handled primarily by Deutsche Bank-A. B. Brown, a firm which until 1998 was chaired by A. B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who today is Executive Director of the CIA. Besides Krongard, other prominent Americans who have been connected to both the CIA and Wall Street power include Clark Clifford (who was a key player in gaining legitimacy for the BCCI), John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles (Allen oversaw the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and sat on the Warren Commission), Bill Casey, David Doherty, George Herbert Walker Bush, John Deutch, Nora Slatkin and Hank Greenburg.

As detailed in Rule by Secrecy, the CIA historically has been top heavy with members of the Wall Street elite who desire to advance their globalist agenda. It also operates a number of front companies which themselves deal in stocks and bonds.

"I am absolutely convinced that the Central Intelligence Agency had complete and perfect foreknowledge of the attacks, down to the date, time, place and location," Ruppert told OnLine Journal on October 12.

There were other indications of foreknowledge. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown stated that on September 10 he was warned by his personal "airport security" not to fly the next day, according to radio station KSFO.

More ominous was a piece in the September 28 edition of the Washington Post, stating that officials with the instant messaging firm of Odigo in New York have confirmed that two employees in Israel received text messages warning of an attack on the WTC two hours before the planes crashed into the buildings. The firm's Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Alex Diamandis, said it was possible that the warning was sent to other Odigo members, but they had not received any reports of such.

Military forces had been on a heightened state of alert for several days before the attack, and several psychics claimed to have had a premonition that something was afoot.

Even the Russians got in on the act. Dr Tatyana Koragina, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Macroeconomic Researches, part of the Russian Ministry of Economic Development, gained credibility due to her July prediction that an unusual catastrophe would strike America in late August, ruining the economy. In a Pravda interview, she stated: "The US has been chosen as the object of financial attack because the financial centre of the planet is located there. The effect will be maximal. The strike waves of economic crisis will spread over the planet."

Following the September 11 attacks, Dr Koragina was interviewed again and asserted that the "powerful group" behind the attacks will make new strikes. "When [Americans] understand after the upcoming, new strikes that their government can guarantee them nothing, they will panic, causing a collapse of their financial system."

Asked who was really behind this odious plan, she replied that it is not the 19 terrorists identified by the FBI but, rather, a larger group seeking to reshape the world. She said this group of extremely powerful private persons hold total assets of about $300 trillion and intend to legitimise their power under a new global government.

REMOTE-CONTROLLED AIRCRAFT A REALITY

Thanks to newly revealed technology, it is now possible to theorise that none of the hijackers intended to die. "Global Hawk" is the name of the latest version of a high-altitude, long-endurance. unmanned air vehicle (UAV); in other words, an unmanned drone plane that can take off, conduct missions such as photographing battlefields and land by remote electronic control.

This Buck Rogers equipment made its first operational flight on October 7 when it was used for reconnaissance over Afghanistan in preparation for US air and missile strikes against the Taliban regime. But this remote-controlled plane, similar to a Boeing 737 commercial airliner, was successfully tested earlier in 2001, first at Edwards Air Force Base and later at Edinburgh Air Force Base in South Australia.

When news of Global Hawk was first released, there was speculation that the UAV technology might be used to thwart airline hijackings. Once a hijacking took place, the Global Hawk technology would be triggered and the captured plane flown to a landing at a safe location regardless of the actions of the flight crew or the hijackers.

In fact, following the attacks the New York Times, in a September 28 article on increasing air safety, mentioned "new technology, probably far in the future, allowing air traffic controllers to land distressed planes by remote control". This made it seem that such technology is not yet available, but earlier in 2001 a former chief of British Airways suggested that such technology could be used to commandeer an aircraft from the ground and control it remotely in the event of a hijacking.

Needless to say, there are those today who question if Global Hawk's first truly operational use might have been conducted on September 11. After all, as all experienced aviation and military persons well know, if a technology such as Global Hawk is publicly revealed, it most probably has been in secret use for several years. But regardless of how the planes with the terrorists were controlled, it is clear that their managers had information, if not help, from inside the government.

BIN LADEN AND THE MEDIA

And what of Osama bin Laden? What did he have to say about all this? Don't look to the corporate mass media to inform you, as they have all agreed not to broadcast anything that might detract from the official government story, even though it is acknowledged that Bush's media denunciations of bin Laden have been more filled with descriptions like "evil" and "evil-doer" than specific evidence.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAR) noted that, on October 10, network executives representing ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and CNN were involved in a conference call with National Security Adviser and Council on Foreign Relations heavyweight Condoleezza Rice. The execs apparently agreed to limit how and what they broadcast regarding bin Laden or his al-Qaeda group. Bush people even tried unsuccessfully to have al-Jazeera, called "the CNN of the Middle East", broadcasting from Qatar, tone down its coverage of bin Laden. They were more successful with members of Congress when they threatened to cut off intelligence reports if members spoke offhand to the media. The next day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, already on the record as saying Americans "need to watch what they say", extended this constraint by contacting major newspapers and asking that they not print full transcripts of bin Laden's interviews.

According to a FAR news release: "The point is not that bin Laden or al-Qaeda deserve 'equal time' on US news broadcasts, but that it is troubling for government to shape or influence news content. Withholding information from the public is hardly patriotic. When the White House insists that it's dangerous to report a news event 'in its entirety', alarm bells should go off for journalists and the American public alike."

Here's what bin Laden did say in an interview on September 28, according to the Pakistani newspaper Ummat: "I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of battle. It is the United States which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people."

In this interview, apparently suppressed in the United States, bin Laden unsurprisingly blamed the attacks on Israel, claiming: "All that [has been] going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel [and for] what had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and Bosnia."

Bin Laden went on to state: "We are not hostile to the United States. We are against the [US Government] system which makes other nations slaves to the United States or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom."

One cannot, of course, take bin Laden at face value - but then, the same could be said for the US Government, which has been caught in so many lies and deceits in the past that it is surprising that anyone pays any attention to official pronouncements.

US FOREIGN POLICY

What should be thoughtfully considered is the dismal record of United States foreign policy since World War II. This policy, as confirmed by the New York Times years ago, has been in the hands of the Council on Foreign Relations elite since at least 1939. This elite and its associates includes former Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and (the late) Richard Nixon, virtually every CIA Director as well as a considerable number of familiar past and present government officials such as Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Wesley Clark, Strobe Talbott, Alexander Haig, Alan Greenspan, James A. Baker III, Sandy Berger, Colin Powell, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank C. Carlucci, John Deutch, Lawrence Eagleburger, Robert McFarlane and Casper Weinberger.

This policy has been one of neo-colonialism; that is, the subjugation and control of other nations through military dictators or wealthy families supported by, and often placed in power by, the US military or intelligence services. The names of nations that have felt the brunt of US CIA and/or military activity as a result of foreign policy include Somalia, Afghanistan, Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Colombia, Indonesia, Dominican Republic, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Palestinian Territories, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Nicaragua, Lebanon, Grenada, Haiti, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Brazil, Chad, Sudan and many others.

As Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, stated during the Vietnam War: "My government is the world's leading purveyor of violence." He did not say "my country" or "my people". It is the government--or, rather, those who control it--that is responsible, although we, the distracted and unaware citizens who claim to live in a democracy, must take our fair share of the blame.

HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS

Is there precedence in history for what is happening to America today? So much so, there is not enough space to present it all. Nero burned Rome, blamed it on his enemies and took dictatorial power. But consider what happened just last century.

On February 27, 1933, the German Reichstag or Parliament was destroyed by fire. Hitler and his Nazis blamed the destruction on communist terrorists. They even caught one: a retarded Dutch youth named Marinus van der Lubbe, who carried a Communist Party card. After some time in custody, the youth confessed to being the arsonist. However, later investigation found that one person could not have started the mammoth blaze and that incendiaries had been carried into the building through a tunnel which led to the offices of Hitler's closest partner, Hermann Goering.

Less than a month later, on March 24, 1933, a panicky German Parliament voted 441 to 94 to pass an "Enabling Act" at Hitler's urging, which was the starting point for his dictatorship. As a result of this act, Germans soon saw gun confiscation, national identity cards, racial profiling, a national security chief (Heinrich Himmler) and, later, mass murders and incarcerations in concentration camps.

One of the Western leaders who supported Hitler and his policies was Prescott Bush, grandfather of President George W. Bush. He must have taken notice of Hitler's method for gaining unwarranted power.

Since the Reichstag fire, the Bush family and their associates in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers have often mimicked Hitler's tactics of creating a problem, offering a draconian solution and advancing their agenda through any resulting compromise.

The real enemy is whoever is behind the September 11 terror attacks. Osama bin Laden, so closely connected to the financial interests of the Bush family and the CIA, may be the mastermind, or he may be a convenient scapegoat--yet another provocation to stampede Americans into another war for oil.

We must thoughtfully consider where the real source of terror lies: with one bearded fanatic in an impoverished Middle Eastern country, or with those who would profit while shredding the US Constitution in the name of defending freedom.

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Sidebar:

Major-General Smedley Butler on Interventionism

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defence at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns six per cent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 per cent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again, as I have done, to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for: one is the defence of our homes, and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss": supernationalistic capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man, to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.

In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had--as the boys in the back room would say--a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

 (Source: Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933 by Major-General Smedley Butler, USMC.)