The 9/11 Plan: Cheney, Rumsfeld and the “Continuity of Government”

“If a mandarinate ruled America, the recruiting committee on September 11 would have had to find someone like Cheney.”Washington Post author Barton Gellman in his book “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency”

Terrorism. Emergency plans. Political careers. The history of 9/11 can be written from many angles.

But whatever point of view is chosen, Dick Cheney is a central figure. “Principle is okay up to a certain point”, he once said, “but principle doesn´t do any good if you lose the nomination”. He´s surely an elusive character. Not less than Donald Rumsfeld, his close companion. Both of their lifes are inseperably bound with a dark side of recent American history. The core of the following story was originally told by the authors James Mann and Peter Dale Scott whose thorough research is deeply appreciated. Yet a lot of background information was added. Thus a bigger picture slowly took shape, showing a plan and its actors …

Cheney and Rumsfeld were an old team. Major parts of their careers they had spent together. Both had no privileged family background. Cheney´s father worked as an employee for the department of agriculture, Rumsfeld´s father had a job in a real estate company. The families´ living conditions were modest. Both sons could go to university only with the backing of scholarships.

Rumsfeld, born 1932, chose political science. He was a rather small and sturdy person, but with energetic charisma. While at university he engaged in sport and was known as a succesful ringer. Later Rumsfeld went to the Navy to become a pilot. The Navy hat paid a part of his scholarship. At the end of the 1950s he eventually started his career in politics as assistant of a congressman. Meanwhile father of a young family, and following a short intermezzo at an investment bank, Rumsfeld himself ran for Congress, at the age of 29 only.

Getting backing

The prospects in his Chicago home district were unfavorable. He was inexperienced and almost without any voter base, compared to the other candidates. But the dynamic and ambitious Rumsfeld impressed some of Chicago´s business leaders, such as the boss of pharma heavyweight Searle. They paid for his campaign. With this economic power in his back also one of Chicago´s newspapers supported him. Rumsfeld won the election in 1962 and went to Washington as a republican representative.

At the beginning of the 1960s he visited lectures at the University of Chicago, where Milton Friedman was teaching, one of the most influential economists of his time. Friedman was one of the founding fathers of neoliberalism. He called for less influence of the state and praised the self regulation of the markets. In 1962 his bestsellerCapitalism and Freedom was published. Rumsfeld was impressed by these thoughts. In a speech honoring Friedman 40 years later he remembered: “Government, he has told us, has three primary functions: It should provide for the military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. And it should protect citizens against crimes against themselves or their property.” (1) This self-imposed restriction of politics was also the core of Rumsfeld´s belief while he served in Congress in the 1960s.

An apprentice in politics

Cheney, 9 years younger than Rumsfeld, meanwhile studied political science as well. First at Yale, where he left soon because of poor grades, then at a less prestigious university in the Midwest. Contrary to the forceful Rumsfeld he appeared rather defensive, quiet and cautious. His imminent recruiting to the Vietnam war he avoided by getting deferred from military service because of his study at the university and the pregnancy of his wife, until he couldn´t be recruited because of his age in 1967.

At the age of 27 Cheney was looking for a job in Washington. He applied for an internship at Rumsfeld´s office. But Rumsfeld rejected him. The failed interview was embarrassing for Cheney who in later times liked to tell the story of this flop as an anecdote. But soon both men found together.

Under president Nixon, Rumsfeld had switched in 1969 from Congress to government. First he ran the Office of Economic Opportunity. There he administered federal social programs – not exactly one of his major concerns, but still one step forward in career. Rumsfeld was looking for new staffers to pass on work. By recommendation of a befriended representative he employed Cheney as his assistant. Cheney was a diligent worker and quickly made himself indispensable. Whoever wanted something from Rumsfeld, learned soon to try it via Cheney.

Rumsfeld´s career developed. People started becoming aware of him nationwide. He looked good, was energetic and had a catching smile. His intelligence was outstanding. But he also liked to exaggerate and escalate conflicts and often was unnecessarily blunt to others. Soon he became president Nixon´s advisor (who would praise him as a “ruthless little bastard”). Three years later he went to europe becoming NATO´s ambassador there – escaping from Washington shortly before the Watergate affair would kill the careers of many of Nixon´s advisors.

Tasting power

In the mid of the 1970s politics in America went through a time of upheaval. The economy was in crisis. With the lost war in Vietnam, nationwide student protests and Watergate the leadership of the superpower showed internal signs of decay, culminating in Nixon´s resignation in 1974. Successor Gerald Ford appointed Rumsfeld to become chief of staff with Cheney shadowing him closely as his deputy.

Now both men had arrived in the centre of power. The position of chief of staff was seen as highly influential in the White House. He was the closest advisor to the president, controlled his schedule and also decided who would meet him. After Nixon, Watergate and the extensively publicly discussed CIA scandals the new administration had to fight with a damaged reputation. This difficult situation, with a relatively weak president, increased the importance of the chief of staff.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were partners now and had great influence on president Ford. When he reshuffled his cabinet abruptly in 1975 in the so-called “Halloween massacre”, firing among others the CIA director and the secretary of defense, many suspected Rumsfeld being the wirepuller. Fact was at least that he and Cheney were profiteering.

Rumsfeld now took over the command at the Pentagon. There he started expensive and prolonged defense projects like the Abrams tank and the B-1 bomber, building economic impact for decades. At the same time the 34 years old Cheney moved up to become chief of staff in the White House. Now he was no longer only assistant but an authority with relevant beliefs. One of his rules went: “Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn´t do any good if you lose the nomination.” (2)

Revolving doors

However soon just that happened. After the defeat of the Republicans in 1976 both men dropped out of government. Together with their families they spent holidays with each other in the Caribbean. Rumsfeld remembers the relaxing break with pleasure: “We played Tennis, boated, and spent time in the sun talking about life. Cheney grilled steaks and made chili.” (3)

Back home Cheney started capitalizing his Washington insider knowledge by working for a consulting company, helping wealthy clients with their investment decisions. But soon he returned to politics. At the end of the 1970s he went as elected Congressman to the House of Representatives. Yet the stress and pressure had their effect on the cautious and restrained Cheney – at age 37 he suffered his first heart attack.

Rumsfeld on the other hand found his new place for a longer time in private business. Dan Searle, the Chicago pharma magnate who had financed his first election campaign 15 years before, now entrusted him his whole company, appointing him to Searle´sCEO. Financially Rumsfeld climbed to new heights with that job. As CEO he got 250.000 Dollars a year, about four times more than as secretary of defense. (4) And also in his new job he made no half measures. Within short time Rumsfeld fired more than half of the employees, generating a huge increase in corporate profit. The business newspapers praised him as an outstanding manager.

In the 1980s the Republicans came back to power with Ronald Reagan. The new president conjured up the threatening picture of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and increased military spending. The Cold War gained new momentum.

The Armageddon Plan

At this time the White House also developed a secret emergency plan, put in action however only at September 11th, 2001 for the first time. Initially it should guarantee that the government could continue its operations even after a Soviet nuclear strike. The plan was called COG (Continuity of Government) and called for a very special emergency measure: when disaster struck, three teams should be sent to different places in the country, replacing the government. Each team would have an own “president” as well as other people standing in for the different departments and government agencies. If one team would be killed, the next one could be activated. So the planners hoped to keep control over the military and the most important parts of the administration, after an atomic bomb or another disaster had wiped out the government in Washington. (5)

These worries about a possible “decapitation” of the national leadership were deemed very seriously because exactly this course of action was also part of the U.S. war strategy towards the Soviets. (6)

The COG plan existed not only on paper. It was exercised in reality regularly in the 1980s. Once a year the teams, each consisting of a “president”, a “chief of staff” and about 50 staffers, were secretly flown from Washington to a closed military base or a bunker somewhere in the United States. There they played the emergency scenario for several days. Not even their closest relatives knew about the location or purpose of the exercise. (7)

Richard Clarke, later anti-terror coordinator under the presidents Clinton and Bush junior, recalls one of the maneuvers at that time:

”I remember one occasion where we got the call. We had to go to Andrews Air Force Base and get on a plane and fly across the country. And then get off and run into a smaller plane. And that plane flew off into a desert location. And when the doors opened on the smaller plane, we were in the middle of a desert. Trucks eventually came and found us and drove us to a tent city. You know, this was in the early days of the program. A tent city in the middle of the desert — I had no idea where we were. I didn’t know what state we were in. We spent a week there in tents, pretending that the United States government had been blown up. And we were it. It’s as though you were living in a play. You play-act. Everyone there play-acts that it’s really happened. You can’t go outside because of the radioactivity. You can’t use the phones because they’re not connected to anything.” (8)

Part of every team was one authentic secretary, leading a government department also in real life. He had to play the president. Yet his real life portfolio didn´t matter – at one point even the secretary of agriculture played the president. In the end the secretary taking part in the exercise was usually just the one being dispensable. Apparently more important was the role of the chief of staff. This part was routinely played only by a person who had been White House chief of staff also in real life. (9)

Therefore Rumsfeld and Cheney were regular participants of the secret annual COG exercises. Other attendants described them as being involved in shaping the program. (10) So at a time when the two men had no position whatsoever in government (Rumsfeld, as mentioned, was boss of a pharma company, Cheney was congressman), both of them disapeared every year for a few days to practice the take-over of the government after a disaster.

Above the law

The plan was secret also because it bypassed the constitution. Since the presidential succession was already explicitly fixed by law: if the president died, the vice president took over, then followed by the speaker of the house, after him the longest serving senator, then the secretaries of state, treasury, defense and so forth. However the COG plan simply ignored this well balanced constitutional arrangement. In an emergency it called instead for a president who was not democratically legitimized at all.

The plan was authorized with a secret directive by president Reagan. According to his security adviser Robert McFarlane Reagan personally decided who would lead the individual teams. The COG liaison officer in charge inside the National Security Council was Oliver North, who later became known as the key person in the center of the Iran-Contra scandal. (11)

Only incidentally, in connection with that scandal, the first details of the secret plan came to light in 1987. Under president Reagan Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North had coordinated a series of steps building in effect a shadow government, Congress didn´t know about, let alone having approved it. The Miami Herald wrote about this in 1987: “Oliver North helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad. (…) From 1982 to 1984, North assisted FEMA, the U.S. government’s chief national crisis-management unit, in revising contingency plans for dealing with nuclear war, insurrection or massive military mobilization.” (12)

That the COG plan, suspending the constitution, could indeed not only be activated in case of a nuclear war, was laid out in a further directive authorized by Reagan in the last days of his presidency in November 1988. According to this directive the plan should be executed in a “national security emergency”, defined rather vague as a “natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States”. (13) In effect this meant a massive undermining of democratic principles. The COG plan, executed unter the circumstances mentioned, could also be used as cover for a coup d’état.

Meanwhile Cheney and Rumsfeld went on secretly exercising the take-over of the government during their annually running maneuvers. Belonging to this inner circle of potential state leaders had to be an uplifting feeling for both men. In case of a huge disaster the fate of the nation would lie in their hands.

Reach for the presidency

At the end of the 1980s Cheney moreover had climbed to the board of the Council on Foreign Relations, the elite network connecting business leaders and politicians, well known for its huge influence on American foreign policy. In the meantime Rumsfeld had become a multimillionaire through the sale of the pharma company he had led. He planned running for the presidency in 1988. But his campaign didn´t succeed. From the outset Reagan´s vice president Bush senior had been the republican frontrunner – and finally also won the election.

But now Cheney got his chance. He became secretary of defense in the new administration, the same position Rumsfeld had already held 12 years before. Cheney successfully managed the first Iraq war in 1991, which led – parallel to the decline of the Soviet Union – to a permanent deployment of U.S. troops in the oil-rich Saudi Arabia. The control over Iraq was now in reach.

After the defeat of the Republicans in 1992 Cheney also considered an own presidential campaign. Yet soon he had to realize that he lacked support. Instead he moved to the private sector, becoming CEO of Halliburton, one of the world´s biggest oil supply companies. As secretary of defense he already had build connections to the firm, leading later to multi-billion-dollar contracts with the Pentagon. The new job now also filled Cheney´s pockets, making him a multimillionaire as well.

Meanwhile Rumsfeld had established himself as a highly effective and ambitious business executive. In the 1990s he first led a telecommunications company, then a pharma corporation.

The COG plan still existed, however with other presumptions. After the fall of the Soviet Union it no longer focused on the Russian nuclear threat, but on terrorism. Though it was reported in the mid 1990s that president Clinton wanted the program to phase out, it later became clear that this announcement only applied to the portion of the plan relating to a nuclear attack. (14) Then anti-terror coordinator Richard Clarke later disclosed that he had updated the COG plan in 1998. (15) The corresponding presidential directive (PDD-67) was secret. Its precise content was never made public. (16)

Cold War reloaded

At the same time a circle of neoconservatives around Rumsfeld and Cheney prepared for return to power. At the end of the 1990s they founded an organisation called “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC). Their self declared desire: “increase defense spending significantly” and “challenge regimes hostile to our interests”. (17)

In parallel Rumsfeld headed a congressional commission assessing the threat of foreign long range missiles. Already in the 1980s Ronald Reagan had started plans for a national missile defense, which burdened the national budget over the years with about 50 billion dollars. Yet in the 1990s even the own intelligence agencies saw no longer a real threat. Because who should fire missiles on Washington in the near future? Yeltsin´s Russia? Or China, that became economically more and more interdependent with the United States? However the so-called “Rumsfeld Commission” revised the assessment of the intelligence agencies. In its 1998 published report new possible aggressors were named: North Korea, Iran and Iraq. (18)

The same year Rumsfeld and his PNAC associates had already written an open letter to president Clinton, urging him to be tougher on Iraq. Saddam Hussein´s regime should be “removed”, the letter demanded. (19)

Finally, in September 2000, two month before the presidential election, PNAC published a lengthy strategy paper, giving policy guidance to the next administration. “Rebuilding America´s Defenses” was its programmatic title and it analysed principles and objections of a new defense policy.

Basically the paper called for a massive increase in defense spending and a transformation of the armed forces into a dominant but mobile, rapidly deployable power factor. The aim was enduring military supremacy, which according to PNAC would urgently require new weapons systems like the missile defense. Yet the paper made also clear that the process of implementing these demands would be a long one and provoke resistance, “absent” – quote – “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” (20)

A question of energy

After George W. Bush´s inauguration in January 2001 the members of this circle secured important posts in the new administration. Cheney turned into the leading figure. This had become apparent well before the election. As early as April 2000 Bush had asked him to handle the selection of his vice presidential running mate. In the end Cheney had all but proposed himself for the job. (21) Meanwhile the workaholic had survived three heart attacks. One of his first recommendations to Bush was the appointment of Rumsfeld, almost 70, as secretary of defense. Deputy of his old associate became Paul Wolfowitz, a hardliner who had already worked for Cheney as chief strategist in the Pentagon at the beginning of the 1990s. Compared to these men president Bush himself was a newcomer in Washington. Though he was blessed with political instinct and a very practical intuition, he could hardly hold a candle to these old hands intellectually.

One of the first steps of the new administration was the creation of a “National Energy Policy Development Group”. It was headed directly by Cheney. Its final report, issued in May 2001, described the situation quite openly:

“America in the year 2001 faces the most serious energy shortage since the oil embargoes of the 1970s. (…) A fundamental imbalance between supply and demand defines our nation´s en­ergy crisis. (…) This imbalance, if allowed to continue, will inevitably undermine our economy, our standard of living, and our national security. (…) Estimates indicate that over the next 20 years, U.S. oil consumption will increase by 33 percent, natural gas consumption by well over 50 percent, and demand for elec­tricity will rise by 45 percent. If America´s energy production grows at the same rate as it did in the 1990s we will face an ever-in­creasing gap. (…) By 2020, Gulf oil producers are projected to supply between 54 and 67 percent of the world´s oil. Thus, the global economy will almost certainly continue to depend on the supply of oil from Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members, particularly in the Gulf. This region will remain vital to U.S. interests.” (22)

Later it was disclosed that Cheney´s energy task force had also secretly examined a map of the Iraqi oil fields, pipelines and refineries along with charts detailing foreign suitors for il-field contracts there. Again, the date was March 2001.

Anticipating the unthinkable

Concurrently to its effort in energy policy the new administration created an “Office of National Preparedness”. It was tasked with the development of plans responding to a possible terror attack and became assigned to the “Federal Emergency Management Agency” (FEMA). (23) FEMA was already responsible for the COG plan since the 1980s. To call it back to mind: “From 1982 to 1984, Oliver North assisted FEMA in revising contingency plans for dealing with nuclear war, insurrection or massive military mobilization.” (24)

Back then Cheney had played a role in shaping these plans. Now he could continue the work – because Bush appointed him to head the new program. (25) Director of FEMA on the other hand became Joe Allbaugh, who had little professional expertise, but could offer other qualities. Allbaugh was Bush´s campaign manager, a man for tough and rather rude matters and also one of the president´s closest confidants. Back in 1994 he had managed Bush´s campaign to become governor of Texas and at the end of 2000 he had helped stopping the recount of votes in Florida. (26) That an expert for political tricks was appointed to head FEMA indicates that the administration had political plans with the emergency management agency from the outset.

Till today it´s undisclosed how the COG plan was refined in detail under Cheney´s direction in 2001. However the following is apparent: in the months leading to 9/11 Cheney linked anti-terror and emergency management measures with national energy policy. Commissions working on both issues were handled by him simultaneously. This connection anticipated the policy after 9/11, which could be summarized as using a terror attack as rationale for extending the power of the executive and waging war to seize control of world regions important for energy supply.

The emergency plans Rumsfeld and Cheney were involved with since the 1980s culminated in autumn 2001. On the morning of September 11th the secret COG program was implemented for the first time. (27) Shortly before 10:00 a.m., after the impact of the third plane into the Pentagon, Cheney gave the order to execute it. (28)

The shadow government

Almost nothing is known about the content of the plan and the specific effects of its activation. The secrecy in this respect appears grotesque. Even the simple fact of the plan´s implementation on 9/11 was concealed for months. After sporadic hints in the press theWashington Post finally disclosed some details in March 2002. In an article titled “Shadow government is at work in secret” it reported that about 100 high-ranking officials of different departments were working outside Washington as part of the emergency plan since 9/11:

“Officials who are activated for what some of them call ‘bunker duty’ live and work underground 24 hours a day, away from their families. As it settles in for the long haul, the shadow government has sent home most of the first wave of deployed personnel, replacing them most commonly at 90-day intervals. (…) Known internally as the COG, for ‘continuity of government’, the administration-in-waiting is an unannounced complement to the acknowledged absence of Vice President Cheney from Washington for much of the past five months. Cheney’s survival ensures constitutional succession, one official said, but ‘he can´t run the country by himself.’ With a core group of federal managers alongside him, Cheney – or President Bush, if available – has the means to give effect to his orders.” (29)

But what orders gave Cheney to his strange “shadow government” while his stays at the bunker? And what justified extending this emergency measure for seemingly infinite time? For the White House clearly hadn´t been wiped out by bombs. The president lived and his administration was able to act. Who needed a permanent second secret government?

After the first disclosure of these facts in spring 2002 leading politicians of the legislative immediately started expressing their astonishment. Soon it became clear that neither Senate nor House of Representatives knew anything about the activation of COG and the work of the “shadow government” in secret. The parliament had simply been ignored. (30) Later the 9/11 Commission experienced similar executive secrecy. Though it mentioned in its final report the implementation of the plan on 9/11, it also admitted not having investigated the issue in depth. Instead the Commission had only been briefed “on the general nature” of the plan. (31)

Patriots under pressure

An immediate response to 9/11 was the Patriot Act, passed only one month later, and allowing a broad range of highly controversial measures, from domestic wiretapping to warrantless detention of foreign terror suspects. The latter legalized the forthcoming procedures at Guantánamo, leading to secret U.S. prisons all over the world.

Two influential opponents of these legal changes were Tom Daschle, Senate Majority Leader, and Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Both received letters with spores of deadly anthrax. The source was never traced with certainty. After that Daschle and Leahy gave up their resistance against the new legislation and approved the Patriot Act. (32)

In their radical nature the hastily passed changes bore resemblance to decrees while a state of emergency. And indeed were they similarly already part of the COG plan in the 1980s. (33)

Government officials familiar with COG indicated after 9/11 that the plan could really have resulted in martial law – if additionally to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon also large numbers of congressmen and executive branch leaders had been killed on that day. (34)

Is it in this context a coincidence only that the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11 was heading towards Washington to hit the Capitol or the White House? (35)

Killers from Sudan?

There is also circumstantial evidence for an assassination attempt on president Bush in Florida that morning. The Secret Service had received a related warning the night before at 4:08 a.m., according to a TV report by a local ABC affiliate. (36) A few hours later Secret Service agents searched an apartment in Sarasota and arrested four men from Sudan, apparently belonging to the south sudanese liberation army SPLA, a paramilitary force secretly supported by the United States. (37) Also AP reported these arrests mentioning that the suspects had been released soon again because they had “no connection” to 9/11. The whole issue just would have been a “coincidence”. (38)

President Bush spent the night before 9/11 at a resort on Longboat Key, an island right next to Sarasota where he planned to visit an elementary school on the next morning. Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan was a further witness of the possible assassination attempt. He said that at about 6 a.m. on September 11th a van with self-proclaimed reporters of middle eastern descent had pulled up at Bush´s resort, stating they had a “poolside” interview with the president. The men asked for a special Secret Service agent by name but where turned away by the guards. (39)

Were these “reporters” identical with the Sudanese temporarily arrested by the Secret Service later that morning in Sarasota? The incident resembled at least the successful assassination of Taliban foe Ahmed Shah Massoud two days before on September 9th in Afghanistan. The suicide attackers there were also a fake TV team using a bomb hidden in a camera, as the New York Timesreported on September 10th. (40)

Additionally three witnesses remembered seeing Mohammed Atta and a companion at Longboat Key´s Holiday Inn on September 7th, three days before Bush would spend the night on that same small island. (41) September 7th was also the day the White House first publicly announced Bush´s schedule to travel to Sarasota. (42) In this context it is surely worth to consider if Atta scouted out the place for an assassination plot.

Completing the plot

The question arises: Did a circle around Cheney, Rumsfeld and some associates use 9/11 for a disguised coup d’état, partly failed in its execution?

Regardless of the answer to that question – 9/11 in fact allowed the implementation of emergency measures, the weakening of the legislative, the start of several wars and a massive increase in defense spending. The amounts in question easily exceed the imagination of observers.

While in the second half of the 1990s the average national defense budget totaled about 270 billion dollars a year, that number nearly doubled in the decade after 9/11, when the average annual budget went up to over 500 billion. (43) For the Pentagon´s private contractors that meant a sales increase of inconceivable 2.300 billion dollars between 2001 and 2010.

A national economy under arms

If one looks at the development of defense spending in the United States since 1940, some far-reaching conclusions arise. (44) It seems as if the attack on Pearl Harbor and the following involvement in World War II led to a structural change of the American economy. The budgetary value of the military was never reduced to a “normal” level after that. On the contrary it increased decade by decade. Thus the whole economy got into a fatal dependency on the defense business.

This ongoing development came to a halt only with the fall of the Soviet Union. Ten years later then 9/11 became the catalyzing event to kick-start the military buildup again – with all its broad economic effects on the country.

Cheney and Rumsfeld don´t seem to be driving forces in this “game”, but merely two talented managers, risen to the top in the stream of events. Author James Mann, who had disclosed their involvement in the COG plan first in 2004, described their political role this way:

“Their participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its own right, also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades, from the Ford Administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were, in a sense, a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America keeps on fighting.” (45)

Notes

(1) US Department of Defense, 09.05.02, “Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld speaking at Tribute to Milton Friedman”

http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=216

(2) James Mann, “Rise of the Vulcans. The History of Bush ́s War Cabinet”, New York 2004, p. 73

(3) Donald Rumsfeld, “Known and Unknown. A Memoir”, New York 2011, p. 240

(4) Ibid., p. 245

(5) James Mann, “Rise of the Vulcans. The History of Bush ́s War Cabinet”, New York 2004, pp. 138-145

(6) Ibid., p. 139

(7) Ibid., p. 138

(8) ABC, 25.04.04, “Worst Case Scenario – Secret Plan to Control U.S. Government After an Attack Went Into Motion on 9/11″

http://web.archive.org/web/20040429063810/

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Nightline/Politics/armageddon_plan_040425.html

(9) James Mann, “Rise of the Vulcans. The History of Bush ́s War Cabinet”, New York 2004, p. 140

(10) Ibid., p. 138;

Washington Post, 07.04.04, “‘Armageddon’ Plan Was Put Into Action on 9/11, Clarke Says”, Howard Kurtz

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55877-2004Apr6

(11) James Mann, “Rise of the Vulcans. The History of Bush ́s War Cabinet”, New York 2004, p. 142

(12) Miami Herald, 05.07.87, “Reagan Aides and the ‚secret‘ Government”, Alfonso Chardy

http://theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/secret_white_house_plans.htm

(13) Peter Dale Scott, “The Road to 9/11. Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America”, Berkeley 2007, p. 185;

Executive Order 12656 – “Assignment of emergency preparedness responsibilities”, 18.11.88

http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/codification/executive-order/12656.html

(14) Peter Dale Scott, “The Road to 9/11. Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America”, Berkeley 2007, p. 186

(15) Richard Clarke, “Against All Enemies. Inside America ́s War on Terror”, New York 2004, p. 167

(16) PDD-NSC-67 – “Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations”, 21.10.98

www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd/pdd-67.htm

(17) Project for the New American Century, 03.06.97, “Statement of Principles”

http://newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

(18) New York Times, 16.07.98, “Panel Says U.S. Faces Risk Of a Surprise Missile Attack”, Eric Schmitt

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/16/us/panel-says-us-faces-risk-of-a-surprise-missile-attack.html

(19) Project for the New American Century, 26.01.98, “Iraq Clinton Letter”

www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

(20) Project for the New American Century, September 2000, “Rebuilding America´s Defenses”, p. 51

(21) Barton Gellman, “Angler. The Cheney Vice Presidency”, New York 2008, Chapter 1

(22) “National Energy Policy – Report of the National Energy Policy Development Group”, 16.05.01

(23) White House press release, 08.05.01, “Cheney to Oversee Domestic Counterterrorism Efforts”

http://www.usembassy.it/file2001_05/alia/a1050801.htm

(24) Miami Herald, 05.07.87, “Reagan Aides and the ‚secret‘ Government”, Alfonso Chardy

http://theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/secret_white_house_plans.htm

(25) White House press release, 08.05.01, “Cheney to Oversee Domestic Counterterrorism Efforts”

http://www.usembassy.it/file2001_05/alia/a1050801.htm

(26) Peter Dale Scott, “The Road to 9/11. Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America”, Berkeley 2007, p. 210

(27) 9/11 Commission Report, p. 38

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf

(28) “Brief Timeline of Day of 9/11 Events, drafted by White House”

www.scribd.com/doc/12992821/Brief-Timeline-of-Day-of-911-Events-drafted-by-White-House

Washington Post, 27.01.02, “America’s Chaotic Road to War”, Dan Balz and Bob Woodward

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/18/AR2006071801175_pf.html

(29) Washington Post, 01.03.02, “Shadow Government Is at Work in Secret”, Barton Gellman and Susan Schmidt

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/09/AR2006060900891.html

(30) Washington Post, 02.03.02, “Congress Not Advised Of Shadow Government”, Amy Goldstein and Juliet Eilperin

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26212-2002Mar1

(31) 9/11 Commission Report, p. 555

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf

(32) Salon, 21.11.01, “Why Daschle and Leahy?”, Anthony York

http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/feature/2001/11/21/anthrax/index.html

(33) Miami Herald, 05.07.87, “Reagan Aides and the ‚secret‘ Government”, Alfonso Chardy

http://theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/secret_white_house_plans.htm

(34) ABC, 25.04.04, “Worst Case Scenario – Secret Plan to Control U.S. Government After an Attack Went Into Motion on 9/11″

http://web.archive.org/web/20040429063810/http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Nightline/Politics/armageddon_plan_040425.html

(35) 9/11 Commission Report, p. 14

http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf

(36) Daniel Hopsicker, “Welcome to Terrorland”, 2004, p. 42

(37) Ibid., p. 44

(38) Ibid., p. 45

(39) Longboat Observer, 26.09.01, „Possible Longboat terrorist incident – Is it a clue or is it a coincidence?“, Shay Sullivan

http://web.archive.org/web/20030220064542/http://www.longboatobserver.com/showarticle.asp?ai=1874

(40) New York Times, 10.09.01, „Taliban Foe Hurt and Aide Killed by Bomb“

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/10/world/taliban-foe-hurt-and-aide-killed-by-bomb.html

(41) Longboat Observer, 21.11.01, „Two hijackers on Longboat?“, Shay Sullivan

http://web.archive.org/web/20021209013255/

http://www.longboatobserver.com/showarticle.asp?ai=2172

(42) White House, 07.09.01, „Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer“

http://web.archive.org/web/20010913052601/

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010907-1.html#week

(43) US Office of Management and Budget, “Table 3.1 – Outlays by Superfunction and Function: 1940–2016″

www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

(44) Ibid.

(45) The Atlantic, March 2004, “The Armageddon Plan”, James Mann

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0318-14.htm

James Mann, “Rise of the Vulcans. The History of Bush ́s War Cabinet”, New York 2004, p. 145

http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=o8b4necab&v=001vd12ggE3Xa6boSQG9QOwX3ZrTB08P2Mtfxi7Vcay2mSdBPDMMxcgAqRdd5eUpiu-SMEbX7evtACttSOb1HNk924mBEbY13KoDWriQVDsxREFl7bDUxm6wQ%3D%3D

Your comprehensive answer to every Sandy Hook conspiracy theory

salon.com

While it’s often best not to engage with conspiracy theorists on their own turf, as you can probably never convince them, it’s worth setting the record straight on all the myths and phony evidence surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre.

We’ve rounded up every major piece of evidence we could find that leads theorists to say the “official narrative” of events “doesn’t add up” and provided the facts that show why these questions can be easily explained. We’ve ignored the empty accusations with no evidence to support them (it was the Jews!) and focused only on the theories that try to present actual empirical or circumstantial evidence.

Let us know if we missed any and we’ll add to it as more myths emerge. In no particular order, here is your comprehensive guide to disproving the Sandy Hook Truthers:

Why aren’t the adults sadder?  “They aren’t behaving the way human beings would act,” as conspiracy theorist Jay Weidner told fellow conspiracy theorist Jeff Rense on his radio show. Theorists have zeroed in on Robbie Parker, who they say wasn’t grieving hard enough for his slain 6-year-old daughter, Emilie. In one widely circulated clip, Parker laughs before stepping up to the microphone, and apparently someone says “read from the card” (as in cue card) before Parker breathes heavily in anticipation of beginning a press conference. “This is what actors do to get into character,” one popular YouTube video states. Rense and Weidner also take issue with the mourning of the school nurse, the family of slain teacher Victoria Soto, and others. “ALL ACTORS??? NO TEARS,” wonders the author of SandyHookHoax.com on a page featuring videos with numerous interviews from the shooting.

Answer: People mourn in many different ways, sometimes all at once. As a recent Scientific American article on gref noted, “oscillation between sadness and mirth repeated itself in study after study … Time and again, a grief-stricken person’s expression would change from dejection to laughter and back.” George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University who studies grief, even developed a way to determine if this mourner’s laughter was genuine or merely a facade to hide grief — he determined that they “exhibited the real thing.” Scientists think this is part of our internal resilience mechanisms kicking in, because constant grief is simply too much for a person to handle.

What about Emilie? One of the most common myths circulated on message boards and in YouTube videos is that Emilie Parker is actually alive. The “proof” is a photo purportedly showing her with President Obama when he visited the school after the shooting. Conspiracists know it’s Emilie because she’s wearing the same dress as the one Emilie wore in a family portrait taken before the shooting (an alternative theory is that the girl in the photo with Obama is her “double”). Other websites take issue with the family portrait, alleging it was Photoshopped for some reason, pointing to the fact that the Emilie is making a “devil’s horns” sign with her hands and “making the devil’s horn hand sign isn’t easy. Try it yourself. Imagine getting a 3- and 4-year-old do it.”

Answer: The girl on Obama’s lap is Emilie’s little sister. It’s amazing that we have to say this, but sometimes younger siblings wear clothes passed down to them from older siblings, and sometimes siblings look alike because they are siblings. And there’s no evidence or even motive given for why the portrait would be Photoshopped. Making a “devil’s horn” gesture is actually incredibly easy. Try it yourself.

Why do they all look the same? Numerous websites juxtapose pictures of people from Newtown against pictures of similar looking people from Aurora, Colo., and assert they are the same actors.

Answer: Not all women with brown hair are the same person.

But what about the rifle? Alleged shooter Adam Lanza used a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle as his primary weapon, but conspiracist have seized on footage of police removing a long gun from the trunk of Lanza’s car. “This reveals the ‘Big Lie’ of the mainstream media … the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle was left in Lanza’s car,” conspiracy website NaturalNews states in a story picked up by Alex Jones’ InfoWars this week.

Answer: Actually, the gun shown being removed from Lanza’s car was a shotgun he never used. Lanza brought three guns inside the school — the AR-15 and two handguns — all of which were found inside the school.

How come the memorial pages were created before the shooting? One of the most cited pieces of “hard evidence” in the hoax theory is that memorial pages for the victims were allegedly created before the shooting even took place. Theorists point to Google results giving dates before the shooting for various pages.

Answer: Actually, this is a very common glitch for constricted-date Google searches. The results are imprecise and can often display incorrect dates on the search page, even when the date on the actual page is correct when you click through to it.  For instance, here’s a Fox News story on the Sandy Hook shooting that Google says is from Oct. 1, 1983 — how come Fox News didn’t stop the shooting if it had 30 years advance notice???

What about the car? Early on, theorists latched on to the notion that the black Honda Accord driven by Lanza was not actually owned by his mother, as police say, but by a man named Chris Rodia, who was mentioned on a police scanner at the time of the shooting. One theory is that Rodia may have been an additional shooter. An even more advanced theory is that Rodia may have been taking advantage of mentally ill people like Lanza and using drugs to make them do his bidding.

Answer: This one was debunked by the theorists themselves just a few days after the shooting. BeforeItsNews, a conspiracy website, obtained the police audio definitively debunking the myth (Rodia appeared on the scanner because he was getting pulled over in a traffic stop miles away, but his license plate doesn’t match Lanza’s car). “This was a huge blow, because lots of people were making big leaps on this … but we now have to look elsewhere,” another amateur investigator said on YouTube.

What about the man in the woods? Central to proving any conspiracy theory is finding co-conspirators, which in this case means multiple shooters. Theorists have seized on helicopter footage of a man getting chased by police through the woods behind the school as evidence there was more than one shooter. Who is this man?

Answer:  It was Chris Manfredonia, the father of a 6-year-old who attends the school. He was on his way to the school to make gingerbread houses with first-graders when he heard gunfire and smelled sulfur, so he ran.

But there was another man in the woods (maybe): Eyewitnesses saw a second man in the woods wearing camouflage pants and a dark jacket, and said that he may have been armed. Must be a second shooter.

Answer: Actually, he was, according to the Newtown Bee, “an off-duty tactical squad police officer from another town” who heard the gunfire.

What about the third man at the firehouse? Children fleeing the school said they saw a man pinned down on the ground in handcuffs outside the firehouse. Could this be a second or third shooter?

Answer: No, like Manfredonia, this man was briefly detained by police in the hectic aftermath, but quickly released when it was determined he was just a passerby, Connecticut State Police spokesperson Lt. Paul Vance, who was on the scene, confirmed to Salon. “Were there other people detained? The answer is yes. In the height of battle, until you’ve determined who, what, when, where and why of everyone in existence … that’s not unusual,” Vance said.

Then why did some eyewitnesses report multiple shooters? Theorizers have parsed conflicting media reports and interviews with eyewitnesses saying they saw multiple shooters. How could they be wrong?

Answer: In the stress and confusion of a situation like a mass shooting, misreporting is not just common, but the rule. And there’s a reason eyewitnesses are viewed so skeptically in criminal court cases: They often get things wrong. The Supreme Court has called eyewitness testimony “notoriously unreliable” while the Innocence Project says ”eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions.” Yet theorists would have you believe that a small handful of media interviews with people on the scene trumps all the other interviews with people there and police and media reports.

What about that Gene Rosen guy? Theorists have fixated on Rosen’s account of that day and harassed him for it. Rosen sheltered six children during the shooting, but theorists have alternately claimed that Rosen’s accounts are suspiciously too consistent in various interviews he gave, or suspiciously inconsistent. Other people claim Rosen was an actor, because they claim he is a member of the Screen Actors Guild. And what happened to the bus driver? Why did Rosen sit with the kids for hours? Why didn’t he take them to the firehouse down the street where authorities were staging?

Answer: Rosen did invite the bus driver inside and she helped him contact their parents. An early AP report erroneously reported that he sat with the kids for hours, but he told us that the children were only inside his house for about 35 minutes. He did call their parents. Four parents came right away and Rosen took the remaining two to the fire station. Rosen is not a member of SAG (that’s a different Gene Rosen, who is seven years younger).

But how was the dead principal quoted? Theorists seized on a quote on the shooting in the Newtown Bee from a Sandy Hook principal Dawn Hochsprung, who died in the shooting. How could she have been quoted if she “died”?

Answer: The Bee quickly posted a retraction and an apology: “An early online report from the scene at the December 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School quoted a woman who identified herself to our reporter as the principal of the school. The woman was not the school’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the Friday morning attack.” Things are confusing in the aftermath.

What about the LIBOR connection? Early theories posited that the fathers of both Lanza and alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes were set to testify before the Senate on the (real) LIBOR banking scandal. Could bankers have been involved in the shooting to discredit the supposedly explosive testimony set to be given by these two men?

Answer: This one falls apart in just about every way and the hardcore theorists abandoned it weeks ago as a bogus. Ben Swann, the Ohio TV reporter who thinks there were probably multiple shooters at Sandy Hook, investigated and determined there was “no evidence” to support any of the assumptions in the LIBOR theory. TPM also looked into it and found it to be “100% false.” There are no LIBOR hearings scheduled, neither man was selected as a witness, and neither man is in much of a position to deliver an explosive testimony on the scandal anyway.

Vance  said he was disgusted by the conspiracy theories–

“There’s no hoax. I was there. I stepped over the dead children. That’s no hoax. And it’s offensive to me as an investigator, and it’s offensive to the families who lost their babies to have people come up with silliness like this. Whatever their reasoning is, whatever their rationale is, it’s just terribly offensive,”Vance added.

http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/your-comprehensive-answer-to-every-sandy-hook-conspiracy-theory/#more-50341

Conspiracy Theorists Blame Jews For Sandy Hook Massacre

CONGRATS, ‘TRUTHERS’–ADL IS NOW USING ‘SANDY HOOK’ TO TAR 9/11 MOVEMENT, EXACTLY AS PREDICTED HERE

adl.org

In the after­math of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary, inter­net posts blam­ing Jews for the killings began to spring up on var­i­ous online mes­sage boards and con­spir­acy the­ory web­sites.  One the­ory, for exam­ple, pro­motes the notion that a sup­pos­edly Jewish-controlled Hol­ly­wood encour­ages killing sprees with sub­lim­i­nal mes­sages glo­ri­fy­ing gun vio­lence. Another attrib­utes the vio­lence to the State of Israel, claim­ing Israel per­pe­trated a “false flag” ter­ror­ist attack on Amer­i­can soil as alleged pun­ish­ment for Amer­i­can for­eign pol­icy on Israel and the Palestinians.

Among the most well-known pro­mot­ers of racist and anti-Semitic beliefs to claim that Jews were behind the shoot­ing spree is for­mer Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. On his web­site, where he dis­sem­i­nates his white suprema­cist ide­ol­ogy and specif­i­cally anti-Jewish views, Duke alleges that what hap­pened at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary is a result of Jew­ish con­trol over sev­eral Amer­i­can insti­tu­tions and for­eign pol­icy. Duke con­cludes that it is the sup­posed Zion­ist con­trol over the media that resulted in the Sandy Hook shootings:

“Lead bul­lets are not mur­der­ers. The real mur­der­ers are not the bul­lets, but the Bul­lies of the Zio Media…Guns did not cre­ate the hor­ror in that lit­tle school in Sandy Hook, Con­necti­cut. The Zio mas­ters of the media did. They have devoured the real Amer­ica. The mas­ters of the media con­tinue to take us down the path of human depravity…”

Press TV, the Iran­ian government’s plat­form to dis­sem­i­nate its ide­ol­ogy to the English-speaking world, also exploited this tragedy to espouse anti-Semitic “expla­na­tions” of what hap­pened at the Con­necti­cut ele­men­tary school. In an inter­view broad­cast on Press TV today, Mike Har­ris, a con­trib­u­tor to the anti-Semitic web­site Vet­er­ans Today who has ties to mem­bers of the neo-Nazi National Social­ist Move­ment (NSM), held Zion­ists account­able for a num­ber of mass shoot­ings in America:

“We have had a Zionist-controlled Hol­ly­wood, a Zionist-controlled news media that is the con­duit to all of these vio­lence, these imagery, into every home in Amer­ica and so you won­der why there is a cul­ture of vio­lence? It is because it comes from the Jews in Hol­ly­wood. That is where the con­duit of vio­lence comes from. That is the source of it… You have to real­ize Israel has been oper­at­ing death squads in the United States since Gabrielle Gif­fords and Judge Roll were shot in Tus­can. There have been other inci­dents as the Col­orado shoot­ing, that was again Israeli death squads oper­at­ing in the US.”

In an arti­cle pub­lished on the Press TV web­site by Gor­don Duff, Senior Edi­tor of Vet­er­ans Today, Duff asked Har­ris if he stands by his claims that Israel is respon­si­ble for the mas­sacre. His response: “You [Israel] mur­der chil­dren as part of ‘busi­ness as usual,’ you shouldn’t be sur­prised that when chil­dren are mur­dered, peo­ple look to you.”

This is not the first time David Duke and Press TV have exploited a tragedy in Amer­ica to spew their hate­ful anti-Jewish ide­ol­ogy. On the 11^th anniver­sary of the 9/11 attacks, David Duke appeared on Press TV claim­ing that Zion­ists mas­ter­minded the attacks on 9/11.

http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/conspiracy-theorists-blame-jews-for-sandy-hook-massacre/#more-50342

Illuminati, Nazis and the Illegal State of Israel – it’s finally coming out for everyone to read. Sooner or later, it will work it’s way down to everyone. I’ve waited a long time for this. . .

It’s Worse Than Anyone Thinks – Who Still Can, and Dares to

   … by  Dean Henderson   …for Veterans Today

 

[Editors Note: Dear Readers, We are pleased to bring you Dean’s well researched material. Work like this can save the rest of us countless hours of duplicated effort which can be better spent sharing the material with others…Jim W. Dean]

Rothschild Agent Balfour, planting the Zionists in the Middle East

If we wish to end the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, we need to know who created Israel and why. 

In 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour penned a letter to Zionist Second Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild in which he expressed support for a Jewish homeland on Palestinian-controlled lands in the Middle East. 

This Balfour Declaration justified the brutal seizure of Palestinian lands for the post-WWII establishment of Israel.

Israel would serve, not as some high-minded “Jewish homeland”, but as lynchpin in Rothschild/Eight Families control over the world’s oil supply.

Baron Edmond de Rothschild built the first oil pipeline from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean to bring BP Iranian oil to Israel.  He founded Israeli General Bank and Paz Oil and is considered the father of modern Israel.

The Rothschilds are the planet’s wealthiest clan, worth an estimated $100 trillion.  They control Royal Dutch/Shell, BP, Anglo-American, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Bank of America and scores of other global corporations and banks. 

They are the largest shareholders in the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve and most every private central bank in the world.  They needed a footprint in the Middle East to protect their new oil concessions, which they procured through Four Horsemen fronts like the Iranian Consortium, Iraqi Petroleum Company and Saudi ARAMCO.

The Brothers Rothschild

Rothschild’s Shell and BP formed these cartels with the Rockefeller half of the Four Horsemen- Exxon Mobil and Chevron Texaco.  This new alliance required a “special relationship” between Great Britain and the US, which still exists today.

Rothschild and other wealthy European shareholders could now utilize the United States military as a Hessianized mercenary force, deployed to protect their oil interests and paid for by US taxpayers.

Israel would serve the same purpose in closer proximity to the oilfields.  The Israeli Mossad is less a national intelligence agency than it is a Rothschild/Rockefeller family security force.

The Rothschilds exert political control through the secretive Business Roundtable, which they created in 1909 with the help of Lord Alfred Milner and Cecil Rhodes- whose Rhodes Scholarship is granted by Cambridge University, out of which oil industry propagandist Cambridge Energy Research Associates operates. Rhodes founded De Beers and Standard Chartered Bank.

The Roundtable takes its name from the legendary knight King Arthur, whose tale of the Holy Grail is synonymous with the Illuminati notion that the Eight Families possess Sangreal or holy blood- a justification for their lording over the people and resources of the planet.

According to former British Intelligence officer John Coleman, who wrote Committee of 300, “Round Tablers armed with immense wealth from gold, diamond and drug monopolies fanned out throughout the world to take control of fiscal and monetary policies and political leadership in all countries where they operated.”

John Coleman

Rhodes and Oppenheimer deployed to South Africa to launch the Anglo-American conglomerate.  Kuhn and Loeb were off to re-colonize America with Morgan and Rockefeller.

Rudyard Kipling was sent to India.  Schiff and Warburg manhandled Russia.  Rothschild, Lazard and Israel Moses Seif pushed into the Middle East.  At Princeton, the Round Table founded the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) as partner to its All Souls College at Oxford.

IAS was funded by the Rockefeller’s General Education Board.  IAS members Robert Oppenheimer, Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein created the atomic bomb.

In 1919 Rothschild’s Business Roundtable spawned the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London.  The RIIA sponsored sister organizations around the globe, including the US Council on Foreign Relations.  The RIIA is a registered charity of the Queen and, according to its annual reports, is funded largely by the Four Horsemen.

Former British Foreign Secretary and Kissinger Associates co-founder Lord Carrington is president of both the RIIA and the Bilderbergers.  The inner circle at RIIA is dominated by Knights of St. John Jerusalem, Knights of Malta, Knights Templar and 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Freemasons.

The Knights of St. John were founded in 1070 and answer directly to the British House of Windsor.  Their leading bloodline is the Villiers dynasty, which the Hong Kong Matheson family- owners of the HSBC opium laundry- married into. The Lytton family also married into the Villiers gang.

Edward Lytton – Bloodlines of de Rascals

Colonel Edward Bulwer-Lytton led the English Rosicruciansecret society, which Shakespeare opaquely referred to asRosencranz, while the Freemasons were symbolized byGuildenstern.

Lytton was spiritual father of both the RIIA and Nazi fascism.  In 1871 he penned a novel titled, Vril: The Power of the Coming Race.  Seventy years later the Vril Society received ample mention in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Lytton’s son became Viceroy to India in 1876 just before opium production spiked in that country.  His good friend Rudyard Kipling introduced the swastika to India and later worked under Lord Beaverbrook as Propaganda Minister, alongside Sir Charles Hambro of the Hambros banking dynasty.

Children of the Roundtable elite are members of a Dionysian cult known as Children of the Sun.  Initiates include Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and H. G. Wells.  Wells headed British intelligence during WWI.  His books speak of a “one-world brain” and “a police of the mind”.

William Butler Yeats, another Sun member, was a pal of Aleister Crowley.  The two formed an Isis Cult based on a Madam Blavatsky manuscript, which called on the British aristocracy to organize itself into an Aryan priesthood.  Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society and Bulwer-Lytton’s Rosicrucians joined forces to form the Thule Society, out of which the Nazis emerged.

Rothschild, Rockefeller and the rest of the Illuminati bankers backed the Nazis.  Max and Paul Warburg sat on I. G. Farben’s board, as did H. A. Metz, who was director at the Warburg Bank of Manhattan- later Chase Manhattan.  Bank of Manhattan director and Federal Reserve Board member C. E. Mitchell sat on the board of I. G. Farben’s US branch.

In 1936 Avery Rockefeller set up a combination with the German Schroeder family, who served as Hitler’s personal bankers.  Time magazine called the new Schroeder, Rockefeller & Company “the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis”.  Morgan Guaranty Trust and Union Banking Corporation (UBC) also funded the Nazis.  UBC board member Prescott Bush is W’s grandfather.

___________________________________

The WWI Veteran in the Crowd – Adolf Hitler

In 1933 at the home of banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder, a deal was cut to bring Hitler to power.  Attending the meeting were brothers John Foster and Allen Dulles- Rockefeller cousins and partners at law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, which represented Schroeder Bank.

Schroeder, managing director T. C. Tiarks, was a director at the Rothschild-controlled Bank of England.  In the spring of 1934 Bank of England Chairman Montagu Norman convened a meeting of London bankers who decided to covertly fund Hitler.

Royal Dutch/Shell Chairman Sir Henri Deterding helped in this effort.  Even after the US went to war with Germany, Exxon Chairman Walter Teagle remained on the board of I. G. Chemical- the US I. G. Farben subsidiary.  Exxon was integral in supplying the Nazis with tetraethyl lead, an important component of aviation fuel.  Only Exxon, Du Pont and GM made the stuff.  Teagle also supplied the Japanese with his product.

Exxon and I. G. Farben were such close business associates that by 1942 Thurman Arnold – head of the US Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division- produced documents that showed, “Standard and Farben in Germany had literally carved up the world markets, with oil and chemical monopolies established all over the map.”

Daddy Prescott Bush had his companies seized during WWI for ‘trading with the enemy’ – but managed to get all his money back after the war, which financed the Bush political dynasty.

In 1912 railroad magnate Edward Harriman’s widow joined John D. Rockefeller in funding a eugenics research lab at Cold Spring Harbor, NY.  That same year the First International Congress of Eugenics was convened in London with Winston Churchill presiding.

In 1932 the conference was held in New York.  Hamburg-Amerika Shipping Line, owned by George Walker and Prescott Bush, brought the German contingent to the gene-fest.

One member of the German delegation was Dr. Ernst Rudin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy in Berlin.  He was unanimously elected president for his work in founding the German Society of Race Hygiene- a forerunner to Hitler’s race institutes.

As of 1998 there were still scores of lawsuits pending against Ford, Chase Manhattan, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Allianz AG and several Swiss banks for their dealings with the Nazis.

At the heart of Hitler’s inner circle were the secret societies Germanordern (brothers of Yale’s Skull & Bones), the Thule Society, and Vril.  The concepts “Great Masters”, “Adepts” and the “Great White Brotherhood”, which the Nazis used to justify their idea of Aryan superiority, were ancient ideas carried forth from the Egyptian Mystery Schools by the Teutonic Knights, the Illuminati, and Hebrew Cabalists.

These same concepts can be found in today’s New Age Movement, whose New Age magazine was first published by the Grand Orient Masonic Lodge of Washington, DC.  Henry Kissinger was an early supporter.

Nazi occultists believed ancient German tribes were the true keepers of the Ancient Mysteries which had their origin in Atlantis, when seven races of God-men were introduced to Earth.  Thule was a Teutonic Atlantis believed by the Nazis to house these long-vanquished races, who lost their godly Annunaki powers by interbreeding with humans.

At the inner core of the Thule Society were Satanists who practiced black magic. Hitler was once described as a “child of Illuminism”.

Is it time to check Hitler’s DNA?

According to Dr. Walter Langer, who did a war-time psychoanalysis of Hitler for the CIA-predecessor OSS, Hitler was also a Rothschild.  Langer uncovered an Austrian police report proving Hitler’s father was an illegitimate son of a peasant cook named Maria Anna Schicklgruber, who at the time of her conception was a servant in the Vienna home of Baron Rothschild.

In May 1941 Rudolf Hess parachuted into the estate of the Duke of Hamilton, saying a supernatural force told him to negotiate with the British.  Hitler was ostensibly visited by this same apparition and suddenly turned vehemently against occultism.

He ordered a crackdown against Freemasons, Templars and the Theosophical Society.  Suddenly the international banker crowd pulled the plug on Hitler’s finances and began to denounce him.  Six months later the Hessianized US military entered WWII.

Hitler’s fate was no different than that of Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega.  The Illuminati bankers’ modus operandi is to use men of low integrity to do their dirty work, before conveniently discarding and distancing themselves from them.

The horrific Holocaust that ensued assured sympathy for the already-planned state of Israel.  Towards the end of WWII, the murderous Haganah and Stern Gangs were deployed by the Rothschild bankers to terrorize Palestinians and steal their land.  Jews who escaped Hitler’s gas chambers were those of means who bought into Zionism.

For a fee of $1,000 – lots of money at that time – these right-wingers bought passage to Israel and escaped the fate of the poor Jews, Serbs, communists and gypsies.  The whole bloody affair was a massive eugenics project.  It had more to do with culling the herd along class lines, than it did with ethnicity or religion.

The key to this historic puzzle is to understand that the Rothschild/Rockefeller sangreal international bankers supported both the rise of the Nazis and the creation of Israel.  None of this has anything to do with religion.  It has everything to do with oil, arms, drugs, money and power.

The Rothschilds say they are Jewish.  The Rockefellers claim to be Christian.  These are irrelevant smokescreens.  Any demagogue- who blames injustice a religion or race of people- is sadly misinformed.  Throughout history the Illuminati Satanists have sacrificed people of all race and religion to further their agenda of total planetary control.

Israel is not a “Jewish homeland”.  It is an oil monopoly lynchpin.  Its citizens are being put in harms way- used by the Four Horsemen and their Eight Families-owners as geopolitical pawns in an international resource grab.  No peaceful solution is possible until the stolen land is returned to its rightful Palestinian owners.

Israel is an illegal entity.  Viva Palestine!

Dean Henderson is the author of four books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve & Stickin’ it to the Matrix.  You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

 Editing:  Jim W. Dean

Systemic Destabilization as “A Strategy of Tension”: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing

ntroduction: Structural Deep Events and the Strategy of Tension in Italy

From an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20^th century, by a series of what I call structural deep events. I have defined these as “events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the … social structure, have a major impact on … society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”²

The examples in Italy, well known to Italians, include the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969, the Piazza della Loggia bombing of 1974, and the Bologna railway bombing of 1980.

These bombings, in which over one hundred civilians were killed and many more wounded, were attributed at the time to marginal left-wing elements of society. However, thanks chiefly to a series of investigations and judicial proceedings, it is now clearly established that the bombings were the work of right-wing elements in collusion with Italian military intelligence, as part of an on-going “strategy of tension” to discredit the Italian left, encourage support for a corrupt status quo, and perhaps move beyond democracy altogether.³ As one of the conspirators, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, later stated, “The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency.”⁴

Vinciguerra also revealed that he and others had also been members of a paramilitary “stay-behind” network originally organized at the end of World War II by the CIA and NATO as “Operation Gladio.”

In 1984, questioned by judges about the 1980 Bologna station bombing, Vinciguerra said: “With the massacre of Peteano, and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should by now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages…[it] lies within the state itself…There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity that is, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army…A secret organisation, a super-organisation with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them…A super-organisation which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on Nato’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces.⁵

Gladio connections to sustained false-flag violence, again involving NATO and the CIA, were subsequently revealed in other countries, notably Belgium and Turkey.⁶

The original purpose of Gladio was to consolidate resistance in the event of a Soviet takeover. But many of the senior Italians involved in the bombings implicated the CIA and NATO in them as well:

General Vito Miceli, the Italian head of military intelligence, after his arrest in 1974 on a charge of conspiring to overthrow the government, testified “that the incriminated organization, … was formed under a secret agreement with the United States and within the framework of NATO.” Former Italian defense minister Paulo Taviani told Magistrate Casson during a 1990 investigation “that during his time in office (1955-58), the Italian secret services were bossed and financed by ‘the boys in Via Veneto’—i.e. the CIA agents in the U.S. Embassy in the heart of Rome.” In 2000 “an Italian secret service general [Giandelio Maletti] said . . . that the CIA gave its tacit approval to a series of bombings in Italy in the 1970s to sow instability and keep communists from taking power. . . . ‘The CIA wanted, through the birth of an extreme nationalism and the contribution of the far right, particularly Ordine Nuovo, to stop (Italy) sliding to the left,’ he said.”⁷

Another conspirator, Carlo Digilio, “described how he passed on details of planned bomb attacks to his CIA contact, Captain David Carret, who had told him that the bombing campaign was part of a US plan to create a state of emergency.”⁸ Daniele Ganser, in his important book Nato’s Secret Armies, has endorsed a Spanish report that in 1990 NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner (aGerman politician and diplomat) secretly confirmed that NATO’s headquarters, SHAPE, was indeed responsible:

The Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), directing organ of NATO’s military apparatus, coordinated the actions of Gladio, according to the revelations of Gladio Secretary-General Manfred Wörner during a reunion with the NATO ambassadors of the 16 allied nations.⁹

Extrapolating from such testimony, Ola Tunander has compared the strategy of tension in Italy, with its false-flag bombing attacks, to “what the Turkish military elite might describe as the correction of the course of democracy by the ‘deep state’ [a Turkish term].”¹⁰

Strategy of Tension

But I believe it would be too simplistic an analysis to blame the Italian strategy of tension exclusively on Vinciguerra’s “super-organisation which… took up the task [of false-flag bombings], on Nato’s behalf.” There appear to have been other directing forces besides NATO and those elements Vinciguerra was aware of through Italian military intelligence (the SID, later SISMI). It is important to recall that the Italian trials of those convicted for the 1980 Bologna bombing implicated not only Vinciguerra, SISMI, and Gladio, but also elements of the Italian mafia (the Banda della Magliana) and the Italian Masonic Lodge Propaganda-Due (P-2), with links to criminal bankers and the Vatican.¹¹

In short, if we suggest that something like the Turkish deep state was involved in the Italian strategy of tension, this does not suggest a solution to the Italian mystery, so much as a zone, or interlocking network, for further research.

Has a Strategy of Tension Been Exercised in America?

Gladio connections to sustained false-flag violence, again involving NATO and the CIA, were subsequently established in other countries, notably Belgium and Turkey.¹² I wish to propose that America, as well as Europe, has also suffered from a similar series of false-flag structural deep events, including bombings, that have, in conformity with the same strategy of tension, systematically moved America into its current condition, a state of emergency.

Nato headquarters

Among the false flag structural deep events I wish to consider today are

The John F. Kennedy assassination of 1963, or 11/22, which led to the CIA’s Operation Chaos against the anti-Vietnam War movement. (11/22 was clearly a deep event: many documents in the area of Lee Harvey Oswald’s relations to CIA operations are still being withheld, despite statutory and court orders to release them.¹³

The Robert Kennedy assassination of 1968, followed immediately by emergency legislation which led to state-sponsored violence at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention.

The 1993 first World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which led to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

9/11 and the subsequent false flag anthrax attacks of 2001, which led to the imposition of Continuity of Government (COG) measures, the Patriot Act, and the proclamation, on September 14, 2001, of a State of Emergency which remains in effect. (In September 2012 it was once again renewed for another year).¹⁴

These structural deep events have had a common and cumulative result: the erosion of public or constitutional power, and its progressive replacement by unconstrained repressive force. I have argued elsewhere that

1) as in Italy, all of these events were blamed on marginal left-wing elements, but in fact involved elements inside America’s covert intelligence agencies, along with their shadowy underworld connections.

2) some of these structural deep events bore a relationship to the ongoing secret planning – known in the Pentagon as the Doomsday Project – for Continuity of Government (or COG) in an emergency, which entailed its own secret communications network, and arrangements for what (in the Oliver North Hearings) was called “suspension of the American Constitution.”

3) in every case, the official response to the deep event was a set of new repressive measures, usually in the form of legislation.

4) cumulatively, these events suggest the on-going presence in America of what I have called a “dark force” or “deep state,” analogous to what Vinciguerra described in Italy as a “secret force…occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the [successive] outrages.”¹⁵

The Oklahoma City Bombing (4/19) and 9/11

Recently I viewed for a film, “A Noble Lie,” about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.¹⁶ This gave me a chance, for the first time, to test these hypotheses against the case of Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, or what I shall call 4/19. More than I could have anticipated, 4/19 fit into and strengthened this analysis.

Oklahoma City Bombing

The film “A Noble Lie,” itself points to some striking similarities between the events of 1995 and of 2001. The most obvious is the alleged destruction of a steel-reinforced building by external forces (a truck bomb in the case of the Murrah Building in 1995, flying debris in the case of Building Seven in 2001). Experts in both cases have asserted that the buildings in fact could only have been brought down by cutting charges placed directly against the sustaining columns inside the building. Here for example is a report to Congress from General Benton K. Partin, a retired U.S. Air Force Brigadier General and expert on non-nuclear weapons devices:

When I first saw the pictures of the truck-bomb’s asymmetrical damage to the Federal Building, my immediate reaction was that the pattern of damage would have been technically impossible without supplementing demolition charges at some of the reinforcing concrete column bases…. For a simplistic blast truck-bomb, of the size and composition reported, to be able to reach out on the order of 60 feet and collapse a reinforced column base the size of column A-7 is beyond credulity.¹⁷

There is now a broad and growing consensus among architects, engineers, and other experts, that the three buildings which collapsed on 9/11 in the World Trade Center were also most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges.¹⁸

Another important similarity was the legal consequence of most of these events: the response to Oklahoma City was the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, while the response to 9/11 was the first implementation of COG and the passage (after a false flag anthrax attack) of the Patriot Act. “A Noble Lie” focuses on the domestic consequences of the Antiterrorism Act, and indeed it did, like the Patriot Act after it, provide for significant restrictions on the right of habeas corpus as the courts had interpreted it. In other words, both acts provided pretexts for implementation of the proposals for warrantless detention that had been a central focus of COG planning in the 1980s with Oliver North. This fit into a larger ongoing pattern of the progressive restriction of our constitutional rights by unrestrained coercive power — a pattern that I will trace back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.

But there were important foreign consequences of the 1996 Antiterrorism Act as well, in particular Section 328, which amended the Foreign Assistance Act to bolster

assistance in the form of arms and ammunition to certain specific countries, for the purpose of fighting terrorism.¹⁹ This in turn led in 1997 to the creation of secret “Eyes Only” liaison agreement between the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) and Saudi Arabia, followed by a subsequent CIA agreement in 1999 with Uzbekistan (i.e. two of the most secretive and repressive regimes in the world today).²⁰

I have argued that these secret liaison agreements – with Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan – may have provided the cover for secret CIA withholding of information before 9/11 about the designated 9/11 culprits al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.²¹ Thus, if my analysis of the CIA’s withholding in 2000-2001 is accurate, then 4/19 in 1995 did not just exhibit similarities to 9/11: it was a significant part of the build-up which allowed this withholding to occur, and also 9/11 itself.

Increases in Repressive Power After Deep Events

That 4/19 in 1995 had repressive legal consequences links it both to 9/11 in 2001 and also to 11/22 in 1963, after which the Warren Commission used the JFK assassination to increase CIA surveillance of Americans. As I wrote in Deep Politics, this was the result of

the Warren Commission’s controversial recommendations that the Secret Service’s domestic surveillance responsibilities be increased (WR 25-26). Somewhat illogically, the Warren Report concluded both that Oswald acted alone (WR 22), . . . and also that the Secret Service, FBI, CIA, should coordinate more closely the surveillance of organized groups (WR 463). In particular, it recommended that the Secret Service acquire a computerized data bank compatible with that already developed by the CIA.²²

In the ensuing Vietnam War this involvement of the CIA in domestic surveillance led to the CIA’s Operation Chaos, an investigation of the antiwar movement in which the CIA, despite its Charter’s restrictions on domestic spying,

amassed thousands of files on Americans, indexed hundreds of thousands of Americans into its computer records, and disseminated thousands of reports about Americans to the FBI and other government offices. Some of the information concerned the domestic activity of those Americans.²³

The pattern of increased repression would repeat itself four years later in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, in response to which two US Army brigades were (until 1971) stationed on permanent standby in the United States, as part of Operation GARDEN PLOT to deal with domestic unrest.²⁴

The pattern was repeated again with

the assassination of Robert Kennedy. In the twenty-four hours between Bobby’s shooting and his death, Congress hurriedly passed a statute— drafted well in advance (like the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964 and the Patriot Act of 2001) — that still further augmented the secret powers given to the Secret Service in the name of protecting presidential candidates.²⁵

This was not a trivial or benign change: from this swiftly considered act, passed under Johnson, flowed some of the worst excesses of the Nixon presidency.²⁶ The change also contributed to the chaos and violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Army intelligence surveillance agents, seconded to the Secret Service, were present both inside and outside the convention hall. Some of them equipped the so-called “Legion of Justice thugs whom the Chicago Red Squad turned loose on local anti-war groups.”²⁷

Other Similarities between Dallas in 1963 and Oklahoma City in 1995

The repressive consequences after 11/22 in 1963, and after 4/19 in 1995, are linked to other shared features between the two events. Almost immediately after 11/22 there were reports from both inside and outside government, suggesting that Oswald had killed the president as part of an international Communist conspiracy.

In Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, I called these “Phase-One” reports, part of

a two-fold process. Phase One put forward the phantom of an international plot, linking Oswald to the USSR, to Cuba, or to both countries together. This phantom was used to invoke the danger of a possible nuclear confrontation, which induced Chief Justice Earl Warren and other political notables to accept Phase Two, the equally false (but less dangerous) hypothesis that Oswald killed the President all by himself. …. [T]he Phase-One story… was first promoted and then defused by the CIA. Michael Beschloss has revealed that, at 9:20 AM on the morning of November 23, CIA Director John McCone briefed the new President. In Beschloss’ words: “The CIA had information on foreign connections to the alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, which suggested to LBJ that Kennedy may have been murdered by an international conspiracy.”²⁸

To this day both Phase-One and Phase-Two stories have dominated the treatment of 11/22 in the governing media, to the virtual exclusion of non-establishment analyses treating 11/22 as a deep event.

Many have forgotten that there was a Phase One-Phase Two process with respect to 4/19 as well. Both immediately and thereafter there were a number of reports linking McVeigh and Nichols to Iraqis and other Middle Easterners, including Ramzi Yousef, the fugitive bomber in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (which also used an ammonium nitrate (ANFO) bomb in a Ryder rental truck.)²⁹Both Clinton and his Counterterrorism Coordinator, Richard Clarke, have confirmed that some of these stories were discussed at a meeting of the Counterterrorism Security Group on the day of 4/19.³⁰ Both men also claim to have dismissed them in favor of a low-grade Phase Two local conspiracy led by the two designated culprits: Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. But reports of Middle Eastern involvement, sometimes attributed to sources inside government, continued to appear in the governing media, including CBS, NBC, and the New York Times.³¹

First World Trade Center bombing of 1993

Meanwhile, signs of a local Iraqi conspiracy were industriously pursued by an Oklahoma City NBC reporter, Jayna Davis, and collected in her book The Third Terrorist. Her Phase-One evidence was centered on an all-points-bulletin initial search, quickly suppressed, for an unnamed John Doe #2. Her research was subsequently endorsed in a Congressional Report by Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.³²

Moreover Richard Clarke has written that the Oklahoma City bombing was followed by a spate of new internal Presidential Decision Directives or PDDs (in addition to the Antiterrorism Act), which were drafted by himself. One of these addressed a security problem in response to the Oklahoma City bombing, and another conferred new counterterrorism powers on himself, including his new title as National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism. Two (PDD 62 and especially PDD 67) dealt with what he calls a more “robust system of command and control” for “our Continuity of Government program,” which in his words “had been allowed to fall apart when the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack had gone away.”³³

These words recall Tim Weiner’s report of April 1994 in the New York Times that in the post-Soviet Clinton era, “the Doomsday Project, as it was known” was scheduled to be scaled way back, because “the nuclear tensions” of the Soviet era had faded away.³⁴ In other words Clinton had planned to scale back the Doomsday Project (which was governed by a secret extra-governmental committee including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, then both not in government); but Richard Clarke used Oklahoma City to save the Doomsday Project, make it more robust and place it under his own control.

According to author Andrew Cockburn, a new target was found:

Although the exercises continued, still budgeted at over $200 million a year in the Clinton era, the vanished Soviets were now replaced by terrorists. . . . There were other changes, too. In earlier times the specialists selected to run the “shadow government” had been drawn from across the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans alike. But now, down in the bunkers, Rumsfeld [and Cheney] found [themselves] in politically congenial company, the players’ roster being filled almost exclusively with Republican hawks. “It was one way for these people to stay in touch. They’d meet, do the exercise, but also sit around and castigate the Clinton administration in the most extreme way,” a former Pentagon official with direct knowledge of the phenomenon told me. “You could say this was a secret government-in-waiting.”³⁵

Of course the fact that 4/19 was followed by a strengthening of COG does not of itself corroborate my thesis that COG planning has been a significant factor in the planning and execution of America’s structural deep events³⁶ However there were other recurring features in the picture I have presented of America’s structural deep events, and we do find these in the Oklahoma City story.

Of these the most prominent is the importance in the official story of designated culprits who were very possibly government informants or double agents.³⁷ Perhaps the best documented recent example is the US Government’s use and protection of the senior al-Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed as a double agent inside al Qaeda; this protection allowed him to train some of the participants of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and later help organize the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing in Kenya.³⁸

In my 2008 book The War Conspiracy I discussed the possibility that both Lee Harvey Oswald and some of the Arabs designated in 9/11 (Ali Mohamed, al-Hazmi, al-Mihdhar) may in fact have been double agents working with a US Government agency, such as the FBI or Army Intelligence.³⁹Others have suggested that at the very least Oswald was an FBI informant; and Lawrence Wright wrote in The New Yorker that, in withholding the names of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar from the FBI, “The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it.”⁴⁰

In this context I noted with great interest the contention in “A Noble Lie” that Timothy McVeigh, the prime designated culprit in 4/19, may also have been an informant or double agent working for the U.S. Army.⁴¹ Of course this contention remains unproven, but the film provides some corroborative evidence.

The Oklahoma City Bombing and Operation PATCON

What is certain is that McVeigh, like Oswald, al-Hazmi, and al-Mihdhar, was in a milieu of known informants and or double agents, who were part of an important secret operation. In the case of Oswald and the two Saudis, this suggests reasons for the U.S. Government’s on-going suppression of important facts about them, both before the crimes they are alleged to have committed, and ever since to the present day.⁴²

In 2005 John M. Berger, an excellent researcher, discovered that in the 1990s the FBI, in a major counterintelligence operation, codenamed PATCON for “Patriot-conspiracy,” had been investigating McVeigh’s milieu of armed right-wingers — or what Berger called

a wildly diverse collection of racist, ultra-libertarian, right-wing and/or pro-gun activists and extremists who, over the years, have found common cause in their suspicion and fear of the federal government. The undercover agents met some of the most infamous names in the movement, but their work never led to a single arrest. When McVeigh walked through the middle of the investigation in 1993, he went unnoticed.⁴³

PATCON was particularly focused on a former asset of Oliver North’s illegal network to supply arms to the Nicaragua Contras: Tom Posey and his paramilitary group Civilian Material Assistance (CMA). In the 1980s, according to Paul de Armond, CMA had begun as “as an adjunct to the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.”⁴⁴ Enrolled in the Contra supply effort by first the Defense Intelligence Agency and then Oliver North, CMA’s “volunteer” work in patrolling the Arizona border against incoming aliens persuaded then-Congressman John McCain to serve on its board.⁴⁵ But in PATCON’s eyes in the Post-Reagan era, “Posey was a notorious black market arms dealer, suspected of having contraband sources on more than one U.S. military base.”⁴⁶

In both JFK and 9/11 it seems clear to me that the subsequent cover-ups derive from the fact that the respective plots were skillfully designed to piggy-back on authorized covert operations, in such a way as to ensure a subsequent cover-up. Berger’s important essay in Foreign Policy on PATCON does not suggest a connection between McVeigh’s plot and the FBI operation. However he notes deep in the essay that Dennis Mahon, an associate of McVeigh and another important target of PATCON,

would go on to be a well-known figure in white supremacist circles and was convicted in February for the 2004 mail bombing of a state diversity official in Arizona. After his arrest in 2009, Mahon told his cellmate that he was “the number three anonymous person in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation.”

In other words, Mahon identified himself as John Doe #2.

Berger, on his own Website Intelwire, has written that “Mahon has spoken of knowing McVeigh in the past,” and has concluded that, “Based on those comments and other information, it is at least plausible that Mahon was involved in the [Oklahoma City] bombing.⁴⁷ Berger’s “other evidence” is the testimony of ATF informant Carol Howe, transmitted first by Jayna Davis and then by Congressman Rohrabacher, that before 4/19 “Mahon talked about targeting federal buildings for bombings. …[and] took three trips [with McVeigh’s contact Andre Strassmeir] to Oklahoma City.”⁴⁸

Mahon has been characterized as a self-aggrandizing loose talker. However, it seems safe to say that we better understand the context of Oklahoma City after considering the new evidence relating to PATCON, a secret FBI operation from 1991 to 1993 then known only to insiders.

Was Oklahoma City “a Sting Gone Wrong”?

Although PATCON itself was officially terminated in 1993, we learn from its files that there were in fact a number of ongoing informants at Elohim City, Oklahoma very likely including not only Howe but also Strassmeir.⁴⁹ The Government’s lack of response to the reports they received of an intended bombing strengthens the hypothesis, voiced in the film “A Noble Lie,” that the 4/19 plot was initially intended as a sting, the lethal result of which represented “a sting gone wrong.”

If so, this would increase the similarity between 4/19 and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. According to the official account, this was also a conspiracy penetrated by the FBI, also involving an ANFO bomb on a Ryder rental truck that was also later identified by its vehicle identification number (VIN) on a metal fragment.⁵⁰ In the 1993 bombing the New York Times later reported from tapes of interviews of the FBI’s informant with his FBI handler:

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.⁵¹

This Times story of the 2003 WTC bombing clearly describes a conspiracy that had been effectively penetrated by the FBI, which nonetheless, for whatever reason, reached its lethal conclusion. One such case of a penetrated operation “gone wrong” in 1993 might be attributed to confusion, bureaucratic incompetence, or the problems of determining when sufficient evidence had been gathered to justify arrests. A repeated catastrophe two years later raises the question whether the lethal outcome was not intended.

Together with the example of inaction on the CIA’s prior knowledge of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, the three mass murders strengthen the claim to the International Criminal Court of Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, the Honorary President of Italy’s Supreme Court: that 9/11 was “a repeat of the CIA’s ‘strategy of tension’ carried out in Italy” from the 1960s to the 1980s.⁵² I appreciate that it will be difficult as well as painful for most Americans to contemplate that America’s own history, like that of Italy a half century ago, could have been systemically manipulated and destabilized by unknown forces. But the more research I do, the more I am convinced that something like Judge Imposimato’s verdict must be considered.

Moreover, if the Italian analogy is applicable to the United States, then the judgment that “9/11 was “a repeat of the CIA’s ‘strategy of tension’ carried out in Italy” raises a larger question about all the structural deep events we have considered, especially the bombings of 1993 and 1995. Were these all part of a single sustained strategy of tension? It is too early to tell. But at the very least the WTC bombings of 1993 and 2001 show suggestive signs of common origins – both outside government (the plotters Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the informant Ali Mohammed) and possibly inside (as indicated by the overlapping, ongoing cover-ups of both).⁵³

In contrast, all of the structural deep events I have been discussing are predictably treated by the governing media as the work of marginal outsiders – by a “lone nut” like Oswald, or a “lone wolf” like Timothy McVeigh. The commonalities between these events I have presented suggest a different analysis: that insiders including intelligence officials and other government officers, as well as outsiders, including government agents and double agents, must be held responsible for repeatedly designing plots that, because of their interface with sanctioned intelligence operations, will not be revealed by government.

My own analysis identifies these insiders as part of an on-going milieu, admittedly amorphous and unstructured, linking the secret networks in government to other powerful forces in our society, For want of a better phrase, I have labeled this milieu, reluctantly, as the “deep state.”⁵⁴ But as I remarked earlier with respect to Italy, the term “deep state” is not offered as a solution to these unsolved crimes, but as a focus for further research.

An Alternative Analysis of Deep Events: State Crimes Against Democracy

Let me contrast my own analysis with those of two others. The first is the notion of a “secret government” put forward in an important PBS program in 1987 by Bill Moyers.⁵⁵ It rightly points to the dangerous rise of covert agencies, and above all the CIA, inside government since the National Security Act of 1947. And it analyzes the crimes of Iran-Contra in particular as an example of secret government escaping from the jurisdiction of the law and other restraints of the Constitution and public state.

In the words of the Moyers show

The Secret Government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and superpatriots, who, for a variety of motives, operate outside the legitimate institutions of government.

In other words, the show was pointing to the “Enterprise” used by North and his allies inside and outside the Executive Office Building to implement Iran-Contra and other policies that violated law and/or the directives of Congress. As I have shown elsewhere, North, implementing these policies, availed himself of the emergency antiterrorist network, codenamed Flashboard, that had been put together, at immense cost, by the Doomsday Project.⁵⁶ In so doing, he was “piggy-backing:” using the authorized secret network for an illicit, criminal program, outside of the network’s designated purpose.

Such an analysis could be screened on PBS in 1987 because one part of the U.S. government at that time was at war with another – a war which set Casey at odds not only with Congress but even with senior officers in his own agency the CIA.⁵⁷ One can locate Moyers’ show as part of a series of insider leaks and governing media exposés of Oliver North’s off-the-books “Enterprise,” which North (and behind him CIA director Casey) had used to violate official policies and laws.⁵⁸ In short Moyers’ challenge to Casey’s and North’s “warriors” suited the aims of the traditional CIA (and their usual backers, the “traders” on Wall Street).⁵⁹

Thus we should not be surprised that it had nothing to say about the role of North’s superior, Vice-President Bush, or about the stake of corporate interests in promoting CIA covert operations around the world (such as the much larger 1980s CIA operation in Afghanistan). Above all, it had not a word about North’s Doomsday Project planning to “suspend the U.S. Constitution,” even though this did surface for an instant in the Iran-Contra Hearings.⁶⁰ By its silence about the Doomsday Project, the show failed to address the ongoing planning which, I believe, allowed for the fruition of COG plans in 9/11 and the Patriot Act. To sum up, the Moyers attack on the secret government was largely confined to what was already in the public record. It did not venture into deep politics.

More recently the concept of State Crimes Against Democracy, or SCADs, has been proposed by Prof. Lance deHaven-Smith, and endorsed by some of my friends in the 9/11 Truth community, including Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff. By SCADs, Prof. deHaven-Smith means “concerted actions or inactions by government insiders intended to manipulate democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty.”⁶¹

One great advantage of the SCAD hypothesis is that, unlike my own work, it has been discussed in academic journals, thus breaking a kind of sound barrier. But I have problems with the term “State Crimes.” On the one hand I would claim that the State, or some segments of the state, is often the victim of deep events, as in 4/19. On the other I see the State as primarily a guarantor of democracy, not simply an enemy of it.

I agree that some government insiders play an important role in these events, indeed, I have documented some of these in the preceding pages. But I find it misleading to pin the blame for the crime on the State alone. After all, if a bank insider opens the door to a group of bank robbers, what ensues (even if you choose to call it an “inside job”) is unmistakably a robbery of the bank, not by it.

SCAD analysis is far more useful and sophisticated than I can present it here, and I expect to continue to learn from those who pursue it. But it is not deep political analysis. DeHaven-Smith’s list of SCADs includes “the secret wars in Laos and Cambodia,” two relevant policy decisions (rather than events) that we know came from the Oval Office; although covert at the time, and very arguably illegal, they were when exposed not at all mysterious and thus essentially not very deep.

By positing SCADs as a struggle between the State on the one hand and democracy on the other, I believe this analysis oversimplifies both concepts, and underestimates (as Moyers did not) the internal contradictions within each. Democracy is after all a form of the state in which the people’s freedom and power is constitutionally guaranteed by the state (or what I call the public state). And at least one of deHaven-Smith’s SCADs – the JFK assassination – might more logically be considered a crime against the state, rather than by it.

Phillips and Hoff seem to recognize this difficulty: they drop the JFK assassination from their own list of SCADs.⁶² But this artificially segregates the JFK assassination from other deep events, such as the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, which I believe are parts of a common syndrome.

In short I believe in the crucial importance of a distinction that SCAD analysis does not make – between the public state that is ostensibly dedicated to fostering the welfare, rights and upward power of the people, and that residue of unofficial powers inside and outside government, or what I have awkwardly called the deep state, that for a half century has been progressively eroding that upward or persuasive power, and replacing it with unrestricted, unconstitutional power (or violence) of its own.

My final objection to SCAD analysis is practical. If the state is the author of these crimes, then the work of critics must be to mobilize public opinion against the state. This fits the libertarian politics of those who (like Alex Jones and other lovers of the Second Amendment) profoundly distrust the public US state in its entirety, and not just its covert agencies. Prof. DeHaven-Smith’s own analysis implicates not just covert intelligence agencies of the US Government but the government as a whole, and perhaps particularly the courts. (In support of this indictment, he is able to point to the Supreme Court’s unusual action, in 2000, of itself electing George W. Bush as president, by a vote of five to four.)

But a strategy of attacking the state as a whole seems to me an example of defeatist politics. Here again we can be enlightened by the Italian strategy of tension, which is a tale of indiscriminate terror with a happier ending. The terror bombings ended after Bologna in 1980, thanks to a series of vigorous and courageous investigations by first journalists, then parliamentary commissions, and finally the courts (not least the court of Judge Imposimato himself, which investigated the murder of Italian premier Aldo Moro and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II). The victory of truth over violence did not come easily: journalists, parliamentarians, and at least one judge were themselves killed. And it was clearly a victory against one part of the state, which was achieved through the countervailing forces of other parts.

The Italian example proves that the forces behind a strategy of tension are not invincible. They also suggest that, if the dark forces of the deep state are to be defeated, this will take the combined resources, not just of the people, but of those elements in government that can, eventually, be aroused in search of the truth.

If this essay contributes to this purpose, it will be because others take up the line of inquiry I have indicated. I myself do not claim to understand the inner truth about these structural deep events. But I hope I have successfully indicated some of the directions which future investigations should pursue.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, “Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10 Issue 39, No. 2, September 24, 2012.

Articles on related subjects

• Peter Dale Scott, Why Americans Must End America’s Self-Generating Wars

• Peter Dale Scott, The NATO Afghanistan War and US-Russian Relations: Drugs, Oil, and War

• Peter Dale Scott, The Doomsday Project and Deep Events:JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11

• Peter Dale Scott, Norway’s Terror as Systemic Destabilization: Breivik, the Arms-for-Drugs Milieu, and Global Shadow Elites

• Tim Shorrock, Reading the Egyptian Revolution Through the Lens of US Policy in South Korea Circa 1980: Revelations in US Declassified Documents

Notes:

¹ This essay is adapted from a talk I presented at the 2012 Oakland 9/11 Film Festival presented by the Northern CA 9/11 Truth Alliance.

² Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events: JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and 9/11,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 21, 2011, http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3650.

³ Daniele Ganser, Nato’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Routledge, 2005); Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy(London: Constable, 1991).

⁴ Vincenzo Vinciguerra, in “Strage di Piazza Fontana spunta un agente USA,” La Repubblica, February 11, 1998, here.

⁵ “Secret agents, freemasons, fascists . . . and a top-level campaign of political ‘destabilisation,’” The Guardian, December 5, 1990, here; quoted in Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 7.

⁶ Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 125-47, 224-44.

⁷ Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 181. Cf. Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 6.

⁸ Ola Tunander, “The War on Terror and the Pax Americana, ” in David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2007), I, 164.

⁹ Ganser, Nato’s Secret Armies, 26; citing El Pais, November 26, 1990.

¹⁰ Tunander, “The War on Terror,” 164.

¹¹ Cf. Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 30: “In February 1989 Italian Special Prosecutor Domenico Sica asserted that responsibility for at least some of the terror bombings during the past decade lay also with the Mafia—that is, what I am referring to as the global drug connection.”

¹² Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies, 125-47, 224-44.

¹³ Scott Shane, “C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery,” New York Times, October 16, 2009,here. For my analysis of deep similarities between 11/22 and 9/11, see Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: The Mary Ferrell Foundation, 2008), 341-96.

¹⁴ See White House, “Message from the President Regarding the Continuation of the National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks,” September 11, 2012, here.

¹⁵ For my ambivalent use of the term “deep state,” see Scott, American War Machine, 20-23.

¹⁶ For an introduction to the film, see “A Noble Lie: Oklahoma City 1995 with James Lane and Chris Emery,” Alex Jones Channel, December 16, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmHnePnaR6E.

¹⁷ General Benton K. Partin, letter to members of Congress, May 17, 1995; in David Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Los Angeles: Feral House, 1998); on line at here. Another explosives expert, Samuel Cohen, wrote to a Congressman that “It would have been absolutely impossible and against the laws of nature for a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil… no matter how much was used… to bring the building down” (ibid.). Anton Breivik’s ammonium nitrate car bomb in front of the Norwegian Prime Minister’s office would seem to corroborate Partin and Cohen: Breivik’s bomb shattered windows but caused no structural damage whatever to the building.

¹⁸ “9/11: Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out,” a film prepared by AE911Truth, PBS, September 16, 2012; viewable on line at here. Cf. Bill Christison (a former senior official of the CIA), “Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11,” Dissident Voice, August 14, 2006, here.www.dissidentvoice.org: The WTC buildings “were most probably destroyed by controlled demolition charges placed in the buildings.”

¹⁹ Charles Doyle, “Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996: A Summary,” Federation of American Scientists, June 3, 1996, here. In a December 2000 memo, Richard Clarke confirmed that this assistance was being supplied “through the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center (CTC) and State’s Anti-Terrorism Program (ATA)”

²⁰ Scott, “Launching the U.S. Terror War,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, here; citing Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, The Eleventh Day (New York: Ballantine Books, c2011), 396.

²¹ Scott, “Launching the U.S. Terror War.” This withholding of information is a significant parallel with the CIA’s withholding of significant information about Lee Harvey Oswald from the FBI in 1963, in the weeks just before the 11/22 JFK assassination.

²² Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 280; quoted in Scott, “Doomsday Project.”

²³ Church Committee, Report, Book III – Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 682.

²⁴ Nate Jones, “Document Friday: ‘Garden Plot:’ The Army’s Emergency Plan to Restore “Law and Order” to America.” National Security Archive, August 11, 2011, here.

²⁵ Public Law 90-331 (18 U.S.C. 3056); discussion in Peter Dale Scott, Paul L. Hoch, and Russell Stetler, The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (New York: Random House, 1976), 443-46; quoted in Scott, “Doomsday Project.”

²⁶ Army intelligence agents were seconded to the Secret Service, and at this time there was a great increase in their number. The Washington Star later explained that “the big build-up in [Army] information gathering…did not come until after the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King” (Washington Star, December 6, 1970; reprinted in Federal Data Banks Hearings, p. 1728); quoted in Scott, “Doomsday Project.”

²⁷ George O’Toole, The Private Sector (New York: Norton, 1978), 145, quoted in Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 278-79, also Scott, “Doomsday Project.”

²⁸ Peter Dale Scott, “Overview: The CIA, the Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico,” History Matters,here; citing Michael Beschloss, ed., Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-1964(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 22. “Phase-One” stories, followed by “Phase-Two” media rebuttals, have continued ever since, most recently in 2012 with the publication by former CIA officer Brian Latell of an informant’s claim that Castro had prior knowledge of what would happen in Dallas (Brian Latell, Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012]).

²⁹ Wall Street Journal, September 5, 2002, here; “Take AIM: Jayna Davis on OKC Third Terrorist,” AIM.org, here. Cf. Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, “The Oklahoma City Bombing: Was There A Foreign Connection?” Report, December 26, 2006, here.

³⁰ Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), 97-99.

³¹ Jim Naureckas , “The Oklahoma City Bombing: The Jihad That Wasn’t,” Extra! (Fair), July/August 1995, here.

³² Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing(Nashville TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004); Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman’s Report, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation.

³³ Clarke, Against All Enemies, 167.

³⁴ Tim Weiner, “Pentagon Book for Doomsday Is to Be Closed,” New York Times, April 17, 1994: quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 186.

³⁵ Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy(New York: Scribner, 2007), 88; quoted in Scott, Road to 9/11, 187.

³⁶ Scott, “The Doomsday Project and Deep Events.”

³⁷ Over and over the daily news provides instances of new deep events that involve informants. As I write, the headlines report widespread Muslim violence throughout the world, in response to a despicable anti-Muslim film one of whose promoters admitted to be a deliberate provocation (Sheila Musaji, “The Tragic Consequences of Extremism,” The American Muslim, September 14, 2012,here). I was not surprised to read later that one of the men responsible for the film, Nakoula Nakoula, was also a federal informant (“Producer Of Anti-Islam Film Was Fed Snitch,” The Smoking Gun, September 14, 2012, here). As I wrote on my Facebook page, “I don’t think anyone should leap to sweeping conclusions from this revelation that one of the film’s makers, Nakoula Nakoula, was a government informant. But this fact so complicates the background of this allegedly “amateurish” film that I feel justified in my original assumption: that we might be facing here another deep event (as defined in my book American War Machine).”

³⁸ Scott, Road to 9/11, 151-60.

³⁹ Scott, War Conspiracy, 355-56, 357-63 (“The Role of Double Agents”); Cf. Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 247-53, 257-60.

⁴⁰ See Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: PocketBooks, 1994), ch.29, n4; Harrison E. Livingstone, The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy (Bloomington, IN: Trafford, 2006), 131 (Oswald); Lawrence Wright, “The Agent,” New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68; cf. Wright, Looming Tower, 339-44 (al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar).

⁴¹ This is in line with other features he exhibited in conformity with those I had previously pointed to in the designated culprit stereotype. One is the absurd ease and speed with which he was soon arrested for driving without license plates. In 2008 I compared Oswald with the alleged 9/11 hijackers under the heading “Instant Identification of the Culprits” (Scott, War Conspiracy, 347-49). David Hammer, who was on Death Row with McVeigh, has written that McVeigh confided to him at length how in fact he was a federal undercover agent in a sting operation targeting right-wing extremists. See David Paul Hammer, Deadly Secrets: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing(B.oomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2010).

⁴² Jefferson Morley and Michael Scott, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2008) [11/22]; Kevin Fenton, Disconnecting the Dots (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2011) [9/11].

⁴³ J.M. Berger, “Patriot Games: How the FBI spent a decade hunting white supremacists and missed Timothy McVeigh,” Foreign Policy, April 18, 2012, here.

⁴⁴ “First organized by Tom Posey as part of his Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) organization, the CMA operated as a shadow wing of the Reagan administrations illegal Contra network. Posey and the CMA began as an adjunct to the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. They were first active in smuggling weapons to Central America with the assistance of a Defense Intelligence Agency operation called “Yellow Fruit” and later absorbed into Oliver North’s Contra re-supply operation. Posey was later indicted for violations of the Neutrality Act for his gunrunning activities. North and Reagan administration officials intervened in the trial and the charges were dismissed under the curious grounds that the Neutrality Act only applied during peacetime and the Contra operation was the equivalent of a formal state of war” (Paul de Armond, “Racist Origins of Border Militias”).

⁴⁵ “John McCain has worked with white racists before,” Daily Kos, October 12, 2008, here. I have not been able to determine whether this is the Tom Posey whom David Koch named to be Treasurer of his Citizens for a Sound Economy. Cf. “Tom-Posey, KKK, Koch Brothers, CSE,” here.

⁴⁶ Berger, “Patriot Games.”

⁴⁷ John Berger, “Witness Mahon Claimed He Was Third Man in Oklahoma City Bombing,” Intelwire, January 10, 2012, here.

⁴⁸ Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman’s Report, Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee, Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation.

⁴⁹ For Strassmeir as an intelligence agent, see e.g. Investigative Report prepared for Oklahoma Representative Charles Key, in Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, Final Report, 460-62; David Hoffman, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror (Venice City, CA: Feral House, 1998), 121-47.

⁵⁰ Athan G. Theoharis, The FBI: A Comprehensive Reference Guide (Phoenix, Ariz.: Oryx Press, 1999), 94.

⁵¹ Ralph Blumenthal, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” New York Times, October 28, 1993, here.

⁵² “Top Italian Judge Refers 9/11 to International Criminal Court,” Aangirfan, September 11, 2012,here.

⁵³ Scott, Road to 9/11, 151-61. Both before and after 1993, and again before and after 2001, a key role in the cover-up was played by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. See Scott, Road to 9/11, 152, 155-59; Peter Lance, Triple Cross (New York: Regan/HarperCollins, 2006), 219-23, 274-79, 298-301, 317-18, 358-64, etc.

⁵⁴ Scott, American War Machine, 20-23.

⁵⁵ Bill Moyers, The Secret Government, PBS 1987; here.

⁵⁶ Peter Dale Scott, “Northwards without North,” Social Justice (Summer 1989); revised as “North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project: The Original Congressional Cover Up of Continuity-of-Government Planning,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, February 21, 2011, here.

⁵⁷ See e.g. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 396-404; Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 125-64. (Posey),

⁵⁸ North’s ventures into illegality eventually involved the mobilization of known drug-traffickers in support of the Contras. One of his more dubious assets was the patriot paramilitary group Civilian Military Assistance of Tom Posey, which eventually became a prime target of PATCON (Berger, “Patriot Games).

⁵⁹ For the distinction between traders and warriors or “Prussians,” see Michael Klare, “Beyond the “Vietnam Syndrome” (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981); Peter Dale Scott, “Korea (1950), the Tonkin Gulf Incident, and 9/11: Deep Events in Recent American History,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, June 22, 2008, here.

⁶⁰ A personal note: when I was at a think tank in Washington dealing with Iran-Contra, I was videotaped at length by the two producers of Moyers’ show. One week before the show aired on PBS, they assured me that I would be in it. But in the end, all that remained of me in the show was my forearm, in an unexplained group shot of the think tank sitting around a conference table. At the time my research focused on the activities of Bush and North (including North’s alleged plans for “suspension of the constitution”) that the Committees, like the Moyers program, did not pursue. See Scott, “North, Iran-Contra, and the Doomsday Project.”

⁶¹ Lance deHaven-Smith, “Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government,” American Behavioral Scientist, 53, 796; citing Lance deHaven-Smith, “When political crimes are inside jobs: Detecting state crimes against democracy. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 28(3).

⁶² Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, “State Crimes Against Democracy,” Media Freedom International, Mar 2, 2010, here.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/systemic-destabilization-as-a-strategy-of-tension-911-the-jfk-assassination-and-the-oklahoma-city-bombing/

US-Backed Terrorists Murder US Ambassador in Libya

MURDERED US AMBASSADOR EXPOSES LIBYA „PROGRESS” PROPAGANDA – PROVIDES A WARNING AGAINST US MEDDLING IN SYRIA

By Tony Cartalucci

 “I have met with these brave fighters, and they are not Al-Qaeda. To the contrary: They are Libyan patriots who want to liberate their nation. We should help them do it.” – Senator John McCain in Benghazi, Libya April 22, 2011.

….

McCain’s “Libyan patriots” have now murdered US Ambassador John Christopher Stevens in the very city McCain spoke these words. An assault on the American consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi, the epicenter of not only last year’s violent subversion and destruction of sovereign Libya, but a decade’s old epicenter of global terrorism, left Ambassador Stevens dead along with two of his aides.

The violence, Western media claims, stems from an anti-Islamic film produced in the US. In reality, the coordinated nature of the attacks on both the US Embassy in Libya, as well as its embassy in Cairo, Egypt, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, are most likely using the Neo-Conservative Clarion Fund-esque propaganda film as a false pretense for violence long-planned. The Clarion Fund regularly produces anti-Muslim propaganda, like “Iranium,” specifically to maintain a strategy of tension using fear and anger to drive a wedge between Western civilization and Islam to promote perpetual global wars of profit.

 

Image: Senator John McCain in the terrorist rat nest of Benghazi after marshaling cash, weapons, and political support for militants tied directly to Al Qaeda. McCain’s insistence that the terrorists he helped arm and install into power were “not Al Qaeda” runs contra to the US Army’s own reports which state that Benghazi’s terror brigades officially merged with Al Qaeda in 2007. McCain’s “Libyan patriots” have now killed US Ambassador Stevens with RPG’s most likely procured with cash and logistic networks set up by NATO last year, part of a supranational terror campaign that includes violently subverting Syria – a campaign McCain also supports.

 

NATO Knowingly Handed Libya to Al Qaeda 

Indeed, the US Army’s West Point Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) noted that Benghazi and the neighboring city of Darnah served a disproportionately high role in supplying foreign fighters to wage terror against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan – foot soldiers brought in to fuel a destructive and divisive sectarian war that undermined a united Sunni-Shi’ia resistance to Western troops who had invaded.

Image: In Benghazi, in front of the very courthouse McCain and other representatives of the West’s corporate-financier driven foreign policy voiced support for Libya’s terror brigades, sectarian extremists took the streets waving the flag of Al Qaeda, even hoisting it atop the Benghazi courthouse itself. Despite a concerted effort by Western media houses to portray Libya as in the hands of progressive democratic secularists, the country was intentionally handed over to extremists to serve as a base of militancy to destabilize and destroy targets of Western interest around the word.

….

The men McCain was defending were Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) militants, terrorists linked directly with Al Qaeda according to West Point reports (.pdf), and listed to this day by the US State Department, the UK Home Office (.pdf), and the UN as a “foreign terrorist organization.” McCain was not only rhetorically supporting listed terrorists, but calling for material support including weapons, funds, training, and air support in direct violation of USC § 2339A & 2339B, “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.”

These same terrorists are now not only the defacto rulers of much of Libya, but are leading death squads in Syria and arming militants in Mali, an exponential expansion made possible by a non-partisan effort including Republicans and Democrats, as well as Bush-era Neo-Conservatives who concurrently lead both anti-Islam propaganda while leading calls to arm the most radical sectarian extremist groups, including groups directly affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Syria is Next 

Not only has US policy been exposed as not “promoting democracy” but purposefully spreading destabilization, violence, and terrorism, but the exact same militants behind the death of the US’ own ambassador are literally leading US efforts to visit the same violence, destabilization, and chaos upon Syria.

Reuters, in their article, “Libyan fighters join Syrian revolt,” reported, that Mahdi al-Harati, “a powerful militia chief from Libya’s western mountains,” who is actually a militant of the US, British, and UN listed terrorist organization Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), “now leads a unit in Syria, made up mainly of Syrians but also including some foreign fighters, including 20 senior members of his own Libyan rebel unit.” Reuters would go on to explain, “the Libyans aiding the Syrian rebels include specialists in communications, logistics, humanitarian issues and heavy weapons,” and that they “operate training bases, teaching fitness and battlefield tactics.”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-backed-terrorists-murder-us-ambassador-in-libya/

Image: Libyan Mahdi al-Harati of the US State Department, United Nations, and the UK Home Office (page 5, .pdf)-listed terrorist organization, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), addressing fellow terrorists in Syria. Harati is now commanding a Libyan brigade operating inside of Syria attempting to destroy the Syrian government and subjugate the Syrian population. Traditionally, this is known as “foreign invasion.” 

….

Reuters concedes that the ongoing battle has nothing to do with democracy, but instead is purely a sectarian campaign aimed at “pushing out” Syria’s minorities, perceived to be “oppressing” “Sunni Muslims.”

Reuters’ propaganda piece is rounded off with a Libyan terrorist allegedly threatening that “the militancy would spread across the region as long as the West does not do more to hasten the downfall of Assad,” a talking point plucked straight from the halls of America’s corporate-financier funded think-tanks. In fact, just such a think-tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative, recently published astatement signed by Bush-era Neo-Conservatives stating:

“America’s national security interests are intertwined with the fate of the Syrian people and the wider region.  Indeed, Syria’s escalating conflict now threatens to directly affect the country’s neighbors, including Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel, and could provide an opening for terrorist groups like al Qaeda to exploit.”

Along with “War on Terror” proponent John McCain, Al Qaeda’s LIFG and America’s Neo-Con establishment are now operating in tandem, as well as in direct contradiction to a decade of “War on Terror” propaganda. It should be remembered that those who signed this statement, including Elliott Abrams, Max Boot, Ellen Bork, William Kristol, Paul Bremer, Paula Dobriansk, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan, Clifford D. May, Stephen Rademaker, Michael Weiss, Radwan Ziadeh, were among the very engineers of the fraudulent “War on Terror” that McCain himself is such a fervent supporter of. Radwan Ziadeh, last on the list, is in fact a “Syrian National Council” member – one of several proxies the US State Department is hoping to slip into power in Syria.

Russia, China, Iran, and Others Oppose Terrorism in Syria for a Reason 

With Libya’s “democratic progress” exposed as only tenuously covering up NATO’s creation of a nation-wide safe haven for Al Qaeda terrorists to subsequently be deployed against the West’s political enemies across he Arab World and beyond, it will be even more difficult, if not impossible to continue promoting this same “change” in Syria.  Libya, through direct action of NATO, has been overrun by terrorists. Syria’s government is desperately trying to prevent its people from being likewise overrun.

And even as the US buries its own ambassador, killed by terror brigades it itself armed and thrust into power through covert and direct military intervention, in a nation now wrecked by sectarian and tribal infighting, it insists on replicating its “success” in Syria.

Russia, China, Iran, and a growing number of nations have been opposing this campaign of supranational terrorism – with the death of Ambassador Stevens laying bare the true nature of America’s proxy “freedom fighters,” the list of global opposition will only grow, leaving only the most shameless and deeply invested to defend America’s invasive and bloody foreign policy.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-backed-terrorists-murder-us-ambassador-in-libya/

A Brief History of False Flag Attacks: Or Why Government Loves State Sponsored Terror

False flag attacks occur when government engages in covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations seem as if they are being carried out by other entities.

False flag terrorism is a favorite political tactic used by governments worldwide. They influence elections, guide national and international policy, and are cynically used to formulate propaganda and shape public opinion as nations go to war.

Nero and the Great Fire of Rome

The Roman consul and historian Cassius Dio, his contemporary Suetonius and others say the Emperor Nero was responsible for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD.

Legend claims Nero had one-third of the city torched as an excuse to build Domus Aurea, a 300 acre palatial complex that included a towering statue of himself, the Colossus of Nero.

Prior to the fire, the Roman Senate had rejected the emperor’s bid to level a third of the city to make way for a “Neropolis,” an urban renewal project.

The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that when the population of Rome held Nero responsible for the fire, he shifted blame on the Christians for “hating the human race” and starting the fire.

The Spanish American War: Remember the Maine

By the late 1800s, the United States was looking for an excuse to kick Spain out of Cuba. U.S. business was heavily invested in sugar, tobacco and iron on the Caribbean island.

The U.S.S. Maine was sent to Havana in January of 1898 to protect these business interests after a local insurrection broke out. Three weeks later, early on the morning of February 15, an explosion destroyed the forward third of the ship anchored in Havana’s harbor, killing more than 270 American sailors.

President McKinley blamed Spain after the U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry declared that a naval mine caused the explosion.

American newspapers blamed the Spanish despite a lack of evidence. “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst told Frederic Remington after the illustrator reported that the situation in Cuba did not warrant invasion.

A number of historians and researchers later argued that the ship was blown up by the United States to provide a false flag pretext to invade Cuba and expel Spain.

The United States occupied Cuba from 1898 until 1902, although an amendment to a joint resolution of Congress forbid the U.S. to annex the country.

Wilson’s Pretext for War: The Sinking of the Lusitania

Nearly two thousand travelers, including one hundred Americans, were killed on May 7, 1915, when a German U-boat torpedoed the RMS Lusitania, a luxury Cunard Line British ocean liner.

Prior to the sinking, the German embassy in Washington issued a warning. Newspapers in the United States refused to print the warning or acknowledge the German claim that the ship carried munitions.

Wilson’s government issued a flurry of diplomatic protests after the sinking and exploited the tragedy two years later as a pretext for America to enter the First World War.

Nearly a hundred years later, in 2008, divers discovered the Lusitania carried more than four million rounds of rifle ammunition.

“There were literally tons and tons of stuff stored in unrefrigerated cargo holds that were dubiously marked cheese, butter and oysters,” Gregg Bemis, an American businessman who owns the rights to the wreck and is funding its exploration, told The Daily Mail.

Hitler’s Fascist Dictatorship: The Reichstag Fire

In February of 1933, a month after convincing Germany’s president that parliament must be eliminated, Hitler and the Nazis instigated the Reichstag fire.

Hitler then urged president Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree restricting personal liberty, including the right to free expression and a free press, limitations on the rights of association and assembly, warrantless searches of homes, property confiscation, and violations of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications “permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”

 

The Nazis used the decree and cracked down on their political opponents . They worked behind the scenes to force through the Enabling Act, which legally allowed Hitler to obtain plenary powers and establish a dictatorship.

Gestapo Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring would admit that “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

Prelude to World War: The Gleiwitz Incident

Six years after the Reichstag Fire, the Nazis staged the Gleiwitz incident. Nazi commandos raided a German radio station in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany. The raid was part of Operation Himmler, a series of operations undertaken by the SS as Hitler set the stage for the invasion of Poland and the start of theSecond World War.

SS operatives dressed in Polish uniforms attacked the radio station, broadcast an anti-German message in Polish, and left behind the body of a German Silesian known for sympathizing with the Poles. The corpse was then offered to the press as evidence that the Poles had attacked the radio station.

Israeli False Flag Terror: The Lavon Affair

In 1954, the Israelis activated a terrorist cell in response to the United States making friends with the Egyptian government and its pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Israelis were worried Nasser would nationalize the Suez Canal and continue Egypt’s blockade of Israeli shipping through the canal.

Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion decided a false flag terrorist attack on American interests in Egypt would sour the new relationship. He recruited and dispatched a terror cell that pretended to be Egyptian terrorists.

The plan, however, contained a fatal flaw. Israel’s top secret cell, Unit 131, was infiltrated by Egyptian intelligence. After a member of the cell was arrested and interrogated, he revealed the plot and this led to more arrests. Israeli agents were subjected to a public trial revealing details of the plan to firebomb the U.S. Information Agency’s libraries, a British-owned Metro-Goldwyn Mayer theatre, a railway terminal, the central post office, and other targets.

In order to deflect blame, the Israeli government tried to frame its own Defense Minister, Pinhas Lavon, but the true nature of the plot was eventually made public.

Operation Northwoods: Targeting American Citizens

In the covert war against the communist regime in Cuba under the CIA’s Operation Mongoose, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously proposed state-sponsored acts of terrorism in side the United States.

The plan included shooting down hijacked American airplanes, the sinking of U.S. ships, and the shooting of Americans on the streets of Washington, D.C. The outrageous plan even included a staged NASA disaster that would claim the life of astronaut John Glenn.

Reeling under the embarrassing failure of the CIA’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, president Kennedy rejected the plan in March of 1962. A few months later, Kennedy denied the plan’s author, General Lyman Lemnitzer, a second term as the nation’s highest ranking military officer.

In November of 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

Gulf of Tonkin: Phantom Attack on the U.S, Military

On August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson went on national television and told the nation that North Vietnam had attacked U.S. ships.

“Repeated acts of violence against the armed forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with a positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak tonight,” Johnson declared.

Congress soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which provided Johnson with pre-approved authority to conduct military operations against North Vietnam. By 1969, over 500,000 troops were fighting in Southeast Asia.

Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, had bamboozled Congress and the American people. In fact, North Vietnam had not attacked the USS Maddox, as the Pentagon claimed, and the “unequivocal proof” of an “unprovoked” second attack against the U.S. warship was a ruse.

Operation Gladio: State Sponsored Terror Blamed on the Left

Following the Second World War, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 collaborated through NATO on Operation Gladio, an effort to create a “stay behind army” to fight communism in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

Gladio quickly transcended its original mission and became a covert terror network consisting of rightwing militias, organized crime elements, agents provocateurs and secret military units. The so-called stay behind armies were active in France, Belgium, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Germany, and Switzerland.

Gladio’s “Strategy of Tension” was designed to portray leftist political groups in Europe as terrorists and frighten the populace into voting for authoritarian governments. In order to carry out this goal, Gladio operatives conducted a number of deadly terrorists attacks that were blamed on leftists and Marxists.

In August of 1980, Gladio operativesbombed a train station in Bologna, killing 85 people. Initially blamed on the Red Brigades, it was later discovered that fascist elements within the Italian secret police and Licio Gelli, the head of the P2 Masonic Lodge, were responsible for the terror attack. Other fascist groups, including Avanguardia Nazionale and Ordine Nuovo, were mobilized and engaged in terror.

Operation Gladio ultimately claimed the lives of hundreds of people across Europe.

According to Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a Gladio terrorist serving a life-sentence for murdering policemen, the reason for Gladio was simple. It was designed “to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.”

http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/08/15/a-brief-history-of-false-flag-attacks-or-why-government-loves-state-sponsored-terror/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pakalert+%28Pak+Alert+Press%29

9/11: A Conspiracy Theory

Reblogged from THE INTERNET POST:

Transcript and sources: http://www.corbettreport.com/?p=2594

Everything you ever wanted to know about the 9/11 conspiracy theory in under 5 minutes.

Not the first time this has surfaced, but worth publishing here because it is a concise summary and seems to be very much on the ball.

Also because it is the root cause/excuse for all the recent-past, and current Middle East enslavement by the Western forces.

Here is the transcript:

TRANSCRIPT: On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men armed with boxcutters directed by a man on dialysis in a cave fortress halfway around the world using a satellite phone and a laptop directed the most sophisticated penetration of the most heavily-defended airspace in the world, overpowering the passengers and the militarycombat-trained pilots on 4 commercial aircraft before flying those planes wildly off course for over an hour without being molested by a single fighter interceptor. These 19 hijackers, devout religious fundamentalists who liked to drink alcohol, snort cocaine, and live with pink-haired strippers, managed to knock down 3 buildings with 2 planes in New York, while in Washington a pilot who couldn’t handle a single engine Cessna was able to fly a 757 in an 8,000 foot descending 270 degree corskscrew turn to come exactly level with the ground, hitting the Pentagon in the budget analyst office where DoD staffers were working on the mystery of the 2.3 trillion dollars that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had announced “missing” from the Pentagon’s coffers in a press conference the day before, on September 10, 2001. Luckily, the news anchors knew who did it within minutes, the pundits knew within hours, the Administration knew within the day, and the evidence literally fell into the FBI’s lap. But for some reason a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists demanded an investigation into the greatest attack on American soil in history. The investigation was delayed, underfunded, set up to fail, a conflict of interest and a cover up from start to finish. It was based on testimonyextracted through torture, the records of which were destroyed. It failed to mention the existence of WTC7, Able Danger, Ptech, Sibel Edmonds, OBL and the CIA, and the drills of hijacked aircraft being flown into buildings that were being simulated at the precise same time that those events were actually happening. It was lied to by thePentagon, the CIA, the Bush Administration and as for Bush and Cheney…well, no one knows what they told it because they testified in secret, off the record, not under oath and behind closed doors. It didn’t bother to look at who funded the attacks because that question is of “little practical significance“. Still, the 9/11 Commission did brilliantly, answering all of the questions the public had (except most of thevictims’ family members’ questions) and pinned blame on all the people responsible (although no one so much as lost their job), determining the attacks were “a failure of imagination” because “I don’t think anyone could envision flying airplanes into buildings ” except the Pentagon and FEMA and NORAD and the NRO. The DIA destroyed 2.5 TB of data on Able Danger, but that’s OK because it probably wasn’t important. The SEC destroyed their records on the investigation into the insider trading before the attacks, but that’s OK because destroying the records of the largest investigation in SEC history is just part of routine record keeping. NIST has classified the data that they used for their model of WTC7′s collapse, but that’s OK because knowing how they made their model of that collapse would “jeopardize public safety“. The FBI has argued that all material related to their investigation of 9/11 should be kept secret from the public, but that’s OK because the FBI probably has nothing to hide. This mannever existed, nor is anything he had to say worthy of your attention, and if you say otherwise you are a paranoid conspiracy theorist and deserve to be shunned by all of humanity. Likewise him, him, him, andher. (and her and her and him). Osama Bin Laden lived in a cave fortress in the hills of Afghanistan, but somehow got away. Then he was hiding out in Tora Bora but somehow got away. Then he lived in Abottabad for years, taunting the most comprehensive intelligence dragnet employing the most sophisticated technology in the history of the world for 10 years, releasing video after video with complete impunity (and getting younger and younger as he did so), before finally being found in a daring SEAL team raid which wasn’t recorded on video, in which he didn’t resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which these crack special forces operatives panicked and killed this unarmed man, supposedly the best source of intelligence about those dastardly terrorists on the planet. Then they dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Then a couple dozen of that team’s members died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. This is the story of 9/11, brought to you by the media which told you the hard truths about JFK and incubator babies and mobile production facilitiesand the rescue of Jessica Lynch. If you have any questions about this story…you are a batshit, paranoid, tinfoil, dog-abusing baby-hater and will be reviled by everyone. If you love your country and/or freedom, happiness, rainbows, rock and roll, puppy dogs, apple pie and your grandma, you will never ever express doubts about any part of this story to anyone. Ever. This has been a public service announcement by: the Friends of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DIA, SEC, MSM,White House, NIST, and the 9/11 Commission. Because Ignorance is Strength.

Related articles

• General Conspiracies – Re: 9/11 ‘truther’ leading Egyptian presidential race(disclose.tv)
• The War Economy That Is America in 2012 (afteramerica.wordpress.com)

Searching for Connections Amid Terrorist Threats

By Scott Stewart

In past Security Weeklies we have often noted how analyzing terrorism is like assembling a puzzle. After an attack has transpired, it is easier to piece the disparate clues together because you have the luxury of knowing what the finished puzzle should look like. You know the target, the method of attack, the time, the place, etc. These factors frame your approach to the bits of evidence you gather and allow you to assemble them into a cohesive, logical framework. While there will certainly be missing pieces at times, having the reference point of the attack itself is helpful to investigators and analysts.

On the other hand, analyzing a potential threat before an attack takes place is far more difficult. It is like sifting through pieces of thousands of different puzzles, all jumbled together in one big pile, and attempting to create a complete picture without knowing what the end result – the attack – will look like. Sometimes pieces look like they could be related, but it is often difficult to determine if they really are without having the picture of the finished attack and the important framework for investigative reference: target, method of attack, time and place. It is often easy to look back after an attack and criticize authorities for not making a critical connection, but it is difficult to piece things together before the attack occurs without the assistance of hindsight.

Over the past few weeks we have been studying a number of interesting puzzle pieces pertaining to potential threats to U.S. interests by transnational jihadists. It is currently unclear if they all fit together to form a seamless narrative, but the implications of a potential convergence are too big to ignore. We feel compelled to write about this potential convergence in much the same way we did in September 2009, when we discussed the possibility of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) using innovative bomb designs to bring down passenger aircraft rather than to assassinate individuals. The earlier convergence came to fruition on Dec. 25, 2009, when AQAP attempted to destroy a Northwest/Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit using an improvised explosive device (IED) concealed in the suicide operative’s underwear. Time will tell if the current grouping of events is a true picture of what is about to happen or is simply a false positive.

The Pieces

The pieces of the current case began emerging a few weeks ago, before the May 2 anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death. Reports began to surface that AQAP’s lead bombmaker, Ibrahim Hassan Tali al-Asiri, had been seen again. American officials originally said al-Asiri was killed in the Sept. 30, 2011, airstrike that also resulted in the death of AQAP’s English-speaking ideologue, Anwar al-Awlaki. A few days after the strike, reports surfaced that al-Asiri had in fact survived the attack, but he has maintained a low profile since then.

While al-Asiri is certainly not AQAP’s only bombmaker, he is an innovative, out-of-the-box thinker. Not only was he behind the device that his brother, Abdullah al-Asiri, used in his suicide bombing attempt against Saudi Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef on Aug. 27, 2009, and the underwear bomb used in December 2009, he was also responsible for the attempted attack against two U.S. cargo aircraft in October 2010 using IEDs hidden in computer printer ink cartridges. Indeed, he is the technical author of every AQAP transnational attack attempted so far. Even though all of those attacks have failed, he is still considered a threat. This fact was highlighted by the May 7 reports of a thwarted bomb plot using an improved version of al-Asiri’s underwear device.

A second, AQAP-related piece of the puzzle surfaced on May 2, when the group published two editions of its English-language Inspire magazine, ending the publishing hiatus that began after the magazine’s editor, Samir Khan, died in the same Sept. 30, 2011, airstrike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki. AQAP watchers wondered why the group released two editions of the magazine so closely together, and the revelation of a plan for another transnational bomb plot directed against American aircraft appears to provide the answer to that question.

Last week, we wrote about the third piece of the puzzle: the proliferation of Libyan shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, also known as MANPADS, among jihadist militants in Africa and perhaps elsewhere. Many of these missiles are older SA-7s that have limited utility against modern military aircraft equipped with countermeasures, but they could be employed effectively against a commercial airliner during the vulnerable takeoff or landing phases of a flight. While this threat has existed for some time, we are hearing recent reports of missile dissemination and planning discussions.

Another important piece of the puzzle is the ongoing trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Mohammed, better known by his initials KSM, is the captured al Qaeda operational planner who was named the principal architect of the 9/11 operation in the 9/11 Commission Report. He was also involved in a number of other plots prior to 9/11, including the 1994Operation Bojinka plot in the Philippines, the 2001 shoe-bomb plot and the 2002 Library Tower plot.

KSM’s operational style had several distinctive hallmarks, including the frequent choice of aircraft as targets; the notion of multiple, simultaneous strikes; and the use of modular IEDs smuggled aboard the aircraft. Although KSM was arrested in March 2003, he continued to influence other jihadist planners. This influence was clearly seen in the August 2006 Heathrow liquid-bomb plot, which targeted nine American airliners. AQAP’s cargo bombing attempt, which targeted multiple aircraft, reflected KSM’s preference for multi-pronged plots, and the reports of the thwarted May 7 bombing attempt indicate that aircraft are still considered desirable targets for jihadist groups.

KSM’s trial began May 5, three days after the anniversary of bin Laden’s death. With the trial in the world’s media spotlight, it is quite possible that jihadists are planning an operation in homage to KSM and bin Laden, and that KSM’s operational hallmarks could be seen again.

Paradigm Shifts

Of course, this is nothing new. Commercial aviation has been threatened by terrorism for decades now, and as discussed above, airliners have been under constant threat from jihadist groups because they are highly visible targets that are readily associated with specific nations, and a successful attack generates a large number of casualties and a high level of press coverage.

But as airline security measures have shifted in response to threats, so too have the modes of attack. When security measures were put in place to protect against Bojinka-style attacks in the 1990s – attacks that involved modular explosive devices smuggled onto planes and left on board – the jihadists adapted and conducted 9/11-style attacks. When security measures were put in place to counter 9/11-style attacks, jihadists quickly responded by shifting to onboard suicide attacks with concealed IEDs inside shoes. When that tactic was discovered and shoes began to be screened, they switched to camouflaging containers filled with liquid explosives. When security measures were adjusted to restrict the quantity of liquids that people could take aboard aircraft, jihadists altered the paradigm once more and attempted the underwear bombing using a device with no metal components. When security measures were taken to increase passenger screening in response to the underwear bombing, AQAP decided to attack cargo aircraft with IEDs hidden in printer cartridges.

It is notable that, after the failed underwear-bomb attack in December 2009, air security measures began to include additional pat downs and an increased use of body scanners that have the ability to identify items hidden under passengers’ clothing. As with the previous changes in security procedures, al-Asiri and AQAP’s operational planners likely accounted for these changes while planning the devices for the latest plot. They would need to use a device that would not be detected by a pat down or a body scanner. The reports indicate that they attempted to do this by creating a more form-fitting device hidden inside briefs.

Another way planners could evade detection is by using devices that are either implanted inside a suicide operative or hidden inside a body cavity. The advantage to using a body cavity to smuggle the device is that the device could then be removed from the body and detonated in close proximity to a critical component of the aircraft. Removing it from the body would also prevent the body from attenuating the force of the blast, which is what appeared to have happened in the Nayef attack. Creating security measures to search for devices hidden inside a potential bomber’s body would be difficult and more intrusive than current procedures.

The original underwear IED reportedly contained less than three ounces of pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), a high explosive. One could fabricate five such devices with a single pound of PETN, and explosives have always been extremely easy to acquire in Yemen – even more so now that the country has been ravaged by civil war and AQAP and tribal elements have ransacked government arms depots. To date, al-Asiri’s imaginative bombs have been successfully deployed in the underwear-bomb, printer-bomb and Nayef plots, but they all failed to destroy their targets. If AQAP is able to address this quality-control issue, the only thing effectively limiting AQAP from launching multiple suicide IED attacks is the availability of operatives who are willing to conduct such attacks and able to travel abroad.

Since the suicide operative is a critical node in this type of operation, the United States and its allies have a place to focus their efforts. If they can find the suicide operatives before they depart Yemen, the threat can be minimized. It is worth noting that the suicide operative involved in the plot disclosed May 7 was reportedly a double agent. It is unclear if the purported bomber in the recent threat case was a plant sent in to penetrate AQAP, a loyal jihadist who was intercepted and turned, or an operative that simply got cold feet – something we have seen in the past. It is also not clear if the group hoped to deploy more than one of the devices in a KSM-style, multi-pronged attack, as it did in the printer-bomb plot. We have noted recent reports of European citizens arrested in Yemen for having ties to AQAP, but we have seen no indication that they are related to this threat.

An attack against multiple airliners would be the type of spectacular terrorist strike that would have international repercussions and would deeply affect international air transportation. If such an attack was coordinated with, or followed closely by, an attack against multiple airliners using MANPADS, it could have an even deeper impact. This would affect the American people – and, consequently, the American government – especially given that 2012 is a presidential election year in the United States, and President Barack Obama would almost certainly take measures to demonstrate that he was tough on terrorism. We stress the impact on the United States because, as the latest edition of AQAP’s Inspire magazine indicated, the United States remains the prime jihadist target and U.S. airliners will likely be targeted again in any plot.

Of course, it would not be easy for AQAP to recruit multiple suicide operatives and transport the operatives and their IEDs out of Yemen without detection. (Although it does appear the operative in the thwarted plot was able to successfully get the device out of Yemen.) It would also be quite difficult for different al Qaeda franchises to coordinate their attacks in either a multi-pronged or parallel attack scenario. We have not seen them take such an approach in the past, although we have in recent months seen increased indications of communication and coordination between AQIM, Boko Haram, al Shabaab and AQAP. This lends itself to the idea of a convergence, especially one related to the MANPADS threat, but it does not provide any direct evidence.

Still, with so many puzzle pieces suggesting some sort of merging of threats is taking place – even if it is only accidental – a possible convergence is worth discussing because of the significant consequences it could have.

Read more: Searching for Connections Amid Terrorist Threats | Stratfor

THE 9/11 MYTH: State Propaganda, Historical Revisionism, and the Perpetuation of the 9/11 Myth

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30721

In the immediate wake of President Obama’s May 1, 2011 announcement of the alleged extrajudicial killing of Osama bin Laden by US military forces, a struggle reemerged over the official 9/11 myth that major journalistic outlets have been complicit in perpetuating over the past decade. The corporate media’s reaction to the robust skepticism over bin Laden’s assumed execution suggested a great deal about the extent to which they are locked in to upholding the broader 9/11 parable and serving the Anglo-American political-economic establishment and status quo. After Obama’s statement on bin Laden’s fate citizen journalists and activists employing blogs and social media posed questions that should have been asked by professional journalists—specifically pointing to the need for further evidence supporting the president’s claims and the Obama administration’s curiously inconsistent description of events. Many cited reports and commentary by mainstream news outlets, such as CBS, CNN, and The New York Times, quoting government sources that bin Laden was in failing health and likely died in December 2001. Nevertheless, once a lie has been put in to motion and accepted as truth by the intellectual class it often becomes a de facto reality the broader society is obliged to endure, for better or worse. In 2005 author and media critic Normon Solomon contacted the Washington Post to inquire whether its reporting of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident alleging the North Vietnamese attacked US ships was ever retracted. Though later proven false, the reports were carried as front page news in US papers and figured centrally in the Congressional passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution formally initiating the Vietnam War. Solomon eventually caught up with one especially pertinent Post staffer. „’I can assure you that there was never any retraction,’ said Murrey Marder, a reporter who wrote much of the Washington Post‘s coverage of August 1964 events in the Gulf of Tonkin. He added: ‘If you were making a retraction, you’d have to make a retraction of virtually everyone’s entire coverage of the Vietnam War.’” A similar dynamic is at play in defending the 9/11 myth. Yet today public skepticism more forcefully presents itself as an unmanageable chorus of disbelief through the internet. Nevertheless, following the lead of official spokespersons when such sources should be vigorously scrutinized, the so-called free press continues its willful immersion in a false historical reality. In so doing it condemns much of society to a constant forgetting and continued existence in a government-devised milieu impervious to conventional reason and logic. Journalistic outlets exercising true independence and not beholden to maintaining the official 9/11 story would have likewise exhibited skepticism at Barack Obama’s claims, especially in light of the administration’s clearly contrived attempts at selling the event, such as photos of cabinet members allegedly watching it via satellite. Instead, journalists became part of the dutiful cheering section, attacking detractors’ assertions as “conspiracy theories”. In keeping with a tradition of largely superficial reportage of 9/11 and its aftermath, many stories derided what professional journalists themselves should have been forcefully demanding: more proof of the operation’s authenticity and outcome. In fact, this skepticism is exactly what a variety of bloggers and like alternative news outlets offered. When such assertions can’t be easily suppressed they must be ridiculed. A LexisNexis search yields over 100 stories and opinion pieces appearing in major newspapers and wire services for the week of May 2, 2011 dismissing criticisms and calls for further evidence as “conspiracy theories”. In light of the following one must ponder whether the national media’s output would differ significantly if the US government exercised direct control over them. “The White House was facing mounting pressure Monday night to release concrete evidence that Osama bin Laden had been assassinated, after conspiracy theories began to circulate suggesting he may have survived the attack.” –Canwest News Service, May 2, 2011. “[W]hile the watery grave may help diminish bin Laden’s status as a martyr to his followers, it was already fueling conspiracy theories; as the administration resisted releasing even photographs of the slain terrorist leader on Monday, a predictable haze of myth and rumor has already, inevitably, begun to rise around him.” –Politico.com, May 2, 2011. “While much of America celebrated the dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden, the Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists still had questions. For them and a growing number of skeptics, the plot only thickened.”—Washington Post, May 2, 2011. “Osama bin Laden had scarcely drawn his last breath when the conspiracy theories sprouted: Where’s the body? Where are the photos of the corpse? Why didn’t they take him alive? The theorists demanded.”—Atlanta Journal Constitution, May 3, 2011. “Less than 48 hours after the White House announced the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and his burial at sea, ‘conspiracy theories’ are racing across the planet.”—Christian Science Monitor, May 3, 2011. “As blogs hummed with allegations that the Obama administration had faked the middle-of-the-night raid, the Bin Laden ‘death hoax’ threatened to replace questions about President Obama’s citizenship as the latest Internet rumor to go viral.”—Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2011. “The news that Osama bin Laden was killed by an American military raid ordered by President Obama is too far from the narrative of those who desperately cling to the twisted notion that our president is a passive, hate-America-first, subversive Al-Qaeda sympathizer, if not operative.”—Palm Beach Post, May 3, 2011. “The White House says Osama bin Laden is dead and buried deep under the Arabian Sea. But conspiracy theorists in Pakistan, the United States and other countries insist that like Elvis, he’s still in the room.”—Toronto Star, May 4, 2011. “Like clockwork, the death of Osama bin Laden has ushered in another round of conspiracy theories. The al-Qaida leader’s body may be beyond the reach of his followers’ veneration as it rests on the sea floor, but the lack of a corpse in custody has offered proof of a conspiracy to those inclined to doubt the official narrative.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 4, 2011. “The decision not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden’s corpse and the way the White House has changed its account of how he died has prompted conspiracy theories about his death. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these theories have proliferated across the web.”—UK Guardian, May 6, 2011. When the world’s most powerful journalistic institutions resort to name calling there is something seriously amiss in the broader intellectual climate. Much like 1964, it involves a conscious betrayal of the historical record and the attendant consequences of such. The conspiracy theory/theorist soubriquet is reflexively feared by professional journalists and academics alike who believe (with some justification) their reputations will be undermined by such thought crimes against the state. Thus, like an instrument that would easily be at home in the most extreme totalitarian regimes, intellectual workers self-discipline themselves as the “conspiracy theory” mechanism determines the trajectory and parameters of public discourse, dissent, and recollection. Intellectual cowardice is reinforced by a set of circumstances whereby even if alternative accounts questioning the official line are exhaustively researched and documented with credible information and sources, mobilization of the “conspiracy theory” label by state censors and their journalistic accomplices will render the counter-arguments suspect. And, in an on-the-go culture where citizens are heavily reliant for information on headlines and sound-bites versus deliberate analysis, such lines of reasoning are destined for the memory hole.