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“The history of medicine is littered with wonderful early results which over a period of time turn out to be not so wonderful – or in fact even adverse…there are a whole string of recent examples where preliminary data led to a lot of excitement and caused changes in clinical practice and then eventually we realised they had done more harm than good. Why is it we never learn these lessons?” (Richard Horton, editor The Lancet)(1)
The pharmaceutical industry makes drugs for medical purposes. The industry campaigns hard for stronger patents throughout the world. Even mainstream economists are highly critical of patents in medicine. In some cases, patented drugs sell for thousands of times as much as they would cost if there were no patents. The industry illustrates some of the points discussed in earlier posts about corporate power and corporate crimes.
Researching The Wrong Problems
Most drug research has focused on rich-world problems. The aid agency, Medecins Sans Frontieres, (MSF) said that only 21 of the 1,556 drugs brought onto the global market from 1975 to 2004 were aimed at fighting ‘neglected’ diseases, meaning diseases mostly found in poor countries. Drug companies spend much more time researching lifestyle drugs, such as Viagra, rather than tuberculosis, because that is where the profits are. Yet we could treat many of the major health problems in poor countries for a relatively low cost.(2) In 2006 the World Health Organization (WHO) began to address this problem, but current funding is still inadequate.(3)
Social Costs, Private Profits
The early stages of drug research and development are often funded publicly, with universities and governments throughout the world paying much of the costs.(4) Corporations often become involved only after early tests show promise. As one commentator pointed out:
“The whole ecosystem in which innovation is housed – patents, copyright, finance, universities, research, knowledge transfer, ownership rules, regulation to ensure common standards – is co-created between the public and the private.”(5)
However, the companies that receive the patents keep the profits. Once they have a patent for a drug, companies can charge whatever will maximize their profits. In other words, whatever richer people can afford to pay. In an extreme case, a drug called Cerezyme cost over $200,000 for a year’s treatment, even though almost all of the development had been funded publicly.(6) Healthcare systems in rich countries end up rationing drugs because of their cost.
Under these circumstances, allowing private companies to keep all of the profits from patented drugs makes no sense. It is yet another way in which the whole economy is rigged to transfer immense wealth into the hands of executives and shareholders of big companies.
Depriving Poor Countries of Medicines
Where a medicine could benefit millions of people in poor countries, it needs to be made available as cheaply as possible. However, the big pharmaceutical companies who have the patents for these drugs want to control their availability and charge the highest prices.
The World Trade organization (WTO) enforces patents through an agreement called TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property).(7) However TRIPS does allow poor countries to make cheap copies of important medicines, and there have been some important legal rulings in countries such as India to enable this.(8) Despite that, pharmaceutical companies are still blocking access to medicines throughout the world.(9) Most poor countries are forced to submit to high prices due to threats from the US, Britain, and other advanced nations.
The South African leader, Nelson Mandela, tried to obtain lower-price HIV drugs to treat AIDS. Western companies wanted to charge $15,000/year, whereas an Indian company could make the same medicines for $300/yr. Mandela was threatened with sanctions after drug companies lobbied the US government.(10) Millions of people died in Africa because they were unable to afford over-priced medicines.
“The real issue for the multinationals (drug companies) is not the poor-country markets, which are financially small, but the poor-country examples. How will thousands of people in rich countries, especially the U.S., be persuaded to accept death from cancer and other diseases because they cannot pay the tens of thousands of dollars a year that a new generation of treatments will cost, if companies in India could manufacture and sell the same medicines for a small fraction of the price?”(11)
Many Medicines Are Overpriced Junk
A large proportion of new drugs are no more effective than existing drugs.(12) The US National Institute of Health (NIH) carried out a large study published in 2002 to see if existing drugs for high blood pressure worked. Some of the drugs were among the world’s biggest sellers, yet the study found that old-fashioned diuretics worked as well or better than anything else. The diuretics cost $37 per year. The other drugs tested cost $230 – $715 dollars per year, yet doctors were mostly prescribing the more expensive drugs.(13)
Huge amounts of money have been spent on diabetes drugs, such as Avandia, that turned out to be ineffective.(14) When they were first introduced, they were initially promoted as lifesaving. The flu drug, Tamiflu, had minimal value, but massive stockpiles were purchased against H1N1 influenza in 2009 due to misleading research data and corporate lobbying.(15) The manufacturer, Roche, withheld data to mislead everyone. This should be considered a serious crime, but is not actually illegal.
More Spent on Marketing Than on Research
If a drug is really effective, it requires no marketing. Proper scientific studies demonstrate the benefits, and doctors and healthcare networks all over the world will use it. However, because most drugs are not very effective, companies need to spend huge amounts ‘persuading’ doctors to prescribe them. This includes gifts, holidays and other inducements (a euphemism for bribes). Many doctors are happy to go along with this. In some countries there is also a great deal of more general advertising. In total, more is spent on marketing than on research. This marketing is ultimately paid for by the people who buy the drugs, making them much more expensive.
Many new drugs are copycat drugs. In other words, variations of existing drugs. Good examples are Cialis and Levitra, which are variations of Viagra. Huge sums are spent on marketing these drugs, but if they did not exist, nobody would miss them.
Fraud and Deception are Widespread
The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most corrupt industries in the world. All big pharmaceutical companies have been convicted of selling harmful, sometimes fatal drugs.(16) The industry has been fined over $50 billion during the last twenty years.(17) In 2012, the pharmaceutical company Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) was fined £3 billion in the US for misselling drugs; for fraud, bribery and overcharging; for paying lavish inducements to doctors; for covering up negative research evidence; and for making false claims about medicines. GSK has also been fined in India, South Africa and the UK.(18) Although these figures sound large, they are not enough to deter the companies from continuing to commit these crimes. The sales of a single drug can be worth many times these amounts, so as far as the companies are concerned, crime pays.(19) No individual is prosecuted for criminal offences. In 1997 some pharmaceutical companies were fined for operating a global price-fixing cartel.(20) One author has gone so far as to say that the official definition of organized crime closely describes the activities of the drug companies.(21)
The industry has a long history of exaggerating the benefits of their drugs, understating the downsides, and hiding negative results. A recent study showed that in the real world, medicines tend to be 4 times more harmful than the manufacturers claim.(22) Adverse effects hospitalise a quarter of a million people in the UK and 2 million in the US each year. There were 55,000 deaths from the pain-relief drug, Vioxx, but the data was withheld by the manufacturer, Merck.(23) Large numbers of heart attacks, strokes and deaths were caused by the diabetes drug, Avandia.(24) One expert commentator stated that:
“Until more meaningful penalties and the prospect of jail time for company heads who are responsible for such activity become commonplace, companies will continue defrauding the government and putting patients’ lives in danger.”(25)
Numerous studies have found that when corporations foot the bill, research is more likely to come up with results that support new drugs. In other words, there is now overwhelming evidence that drug companies manipulate the research.(26) Companies test their own medicines, so testing is cleverly designed to emphasize benefits and understate harms. Negative trials have not always been published. They can get away with this because of inadequate regulation.
Regulatory Capture
The pharmaceutical industry spends more than any other industry on lobbying the US government, spending $280 million in 2018.(27) The purpose of this is to ensure that there is very little regulation of the industry. The US regulator is called the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is underfunded, has shown little interest in safety, and has no ongoing, long-term safety analysis.(28) It also has serious conflicts of interest, with many staff connected to the industry. The former FDA chief went to work for the drug company, Pfizer.(29) Many former members of the US congress have taken jobs as lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry.
Astonishingly, the regulatory situation in Britain is even worse. The UK regulator (MHRA) has not successfully prosecuted a single firm, and the fines total just £73,300. The regulator boasted in 2012 of having given 467 warnings and 151 cautions(30) but these have no effect. Laws and regulations are not enforced, and conflicts of interest exist throughout the whole drug approval system.(31)
Not Fit For Purpose
Most people in Britain, and other countries that have something similar to a National Health Service, are unaware of how appalling the pharmaceutical industry is, because they don’t have to pay for medicines themselves. The media rarely discuss the extra costs incurred by the health service because of corporate profiteering. The focus of the drugs system is on corporate profit, not on medical need. The pharmaceutical industry is a glaring example of an industry that is ‘not fit for purpose’. It fails most people in both rich and poor countries. One leading expert, Ben Goldacre, has said that “medicine is broken.”
A nationally run system could provide the same medicines for a fraction of the price. There would be no copycat drugs, no expensive marketing, no lobbying, no legal battles over patents, and no depriving poor countries of medicines. A proper international system could focus on medicines needed in poor countries and make them available as widely as possible, at the lowest possible price. If we want to deal with global poverty we will have to devote significant resources to those diseases where there will be little profit.
The propaganda surrounding pharmaceuticals has not been totally successful, due to media discussions about the need for cheap medicines in poor countries. However, the propaganda around patents for medicines in rich countries has been very successful. The mainstream media rarely challenge the patent system, or discuss the scale of fraud by the industry, or explain that medicines could be researched and produced far more cheaply by other means. The possibility of a government-run pharmaceutical industry is something that is never discussed.
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Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda, and explaining war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media. This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom
Belinda Linden, ‘Basic Blue Skies Research In The UK: Are We Losing Out?’ Journal of Biomedical Discovert and Collaboration, 29 Feb 2008, at www.j-biomed-discovery.com/content/3/1/3
11) John S. James, ‘India Changes Patent Law To Meet WTO Treaty, Making New Medicines Less Available To Most People, Other Countries’, Dec 2004, at www.aidsnews.org/2004/12/india-patent.html
28) Donald W. Light et al, ‘Institutional Corruption of Pharmaceuticals and the Myth of Safe and Effective Drugs’, The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, 1 Oct 2013, at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/jlme.12068
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Brazil is likely to pass the awful mark of 500,000 COVID-related deaths in the next two days. Only the United States has a higher number of dead across the world.
Currently averaging 2,500 deaths a day, Brazil’s P1 variant has long been identified as a highly virulent cause for concern, prompting travel bans to most countries.
But researchers in Sao Paulo, one of the worst-hit cities in the country, say the P1 variant has started infecting and killing pregnant women and their unborn children in startling numbers.
Currently 42 pregnant women die every week from COVID-19; many more women are being intubated and their premature children delivered by caesarean section without consultation with obstetricians, according to medical researchers at the Brazilian Obstetric Observatory.
Dr Rossana Pulcineli Vieira Francisco from the observatory said: “The virus transmissibility is higher with this variant and I think the big problem is that the health system for maternal care in Brazil is very bad.
“In some states the patient starts treatment in one hospital, a general hospital, and when her condition starts to worsen, and she needs to deliver the baby, she will be transported while intubated because they’re not at the right hospital to do the delivery.”
This, she believes, is part of the reason Brazil is seeing a higher rate of maternal mortality.
She says obstetricians and intensivists should be working together to find the right outcomes for mother and child, otherwise it will be very difficult to stop maternal mortality during COVID.
“I think we have more cases because of the variant, and because our maternal health system is very fragile, we have this result.”
People queueing for a COVID vaccine jab in Sao Paulo, but overall rollout in Brazil is slow
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She says that what are called “breakthrough cases” and Delta variant cases are affecting mainly the vaccinated and are in fact adverse reactions to the vaccinations.She says hospitals and hospital doctors will not acknowledge the fact of adverse reactions and report adverse reactions to the vaccine as new Covid cases.The more Covid cases and Covid deaths, the more money the hospital makes, so reporting adverse vaccine reactions as new Covid cases is the way hospitals are maximizing their profits.Obviously, a hospital doctor who disagrees is out of a job.In other words, the truth about Covid and the vaccine is too costly to the hospital to be acknowledged.
The interviewed nurse says that half of the nurses at the hospital where she works are about to lose their jobs, because they refuse to be vaccinated.We have seen, she says, the terrible effects of vaccination on patients and are unwilling to do this to ourselves. Many nurses want to quit regardless, because they cannot stop doctors from making people ill by vaccinating them. Medicine, it seems, has ceased to be about health.
This hospital’s policy is essentially the policy of all the hospitals.It suits NIH, CDC, and FDA, because it protects the vaccine’s reputation and that of the regulators who approved its emergency use, and it protects Big Pharma’s profits, some of which flow back to the regulators.
As Stew Peters sums up the interview, it is murder for money.
The nurse says that the only treatment the hospital gives Covid patients is Remdesivir and puts patients on ventilators.Remdesivir has serious adverse effects of its own, and ventilators are a known killer of Covid patients.
Asked about Ivermectin, hospitals refuse to use it even if a doctor prescribes it for a patient.As I reported, at another hospital a wife had to get a court order that the hospital had to give the dying husband treatment with Ivermectin.But the hospital dragged its feet, and apparently Big Pharma got to the judge and he withdrew his order.The patient has likely been murdered by the refusal of treatment with Ivermectin. For hospitals, it is Big Pharma protocol over life.
Contrast this with the successful widespread use of Ivermectin in India to control Covid, and the decision by the Tokyo Medical Association to recommend that all doctors treat Covid patients with Ivermectin. See this.
The conclusion is that when it comes to Covid treatment, the American medical system is the most backward one in the world.
Unfortunately, the presstitutes will not report any of this, and unfortunately most Americans are too busy wasting their time in the ways they do to save their lives by watching a 15 minute interview.
The Covid lie began with the PCR test run at high cycles that made the test unreliable and a generator of a high rate of false positives.This is how the “pandemic” was created.Millions of people who did not have Covid were reported as having Covid because of the false positives generated by the PCR test.This intentional lie was used to create the fear that drove people to be guinea pigs for a dangerous experimental “vaccine.”
Fear was also driven by financial incentives given to hospitals. Covid deaths meant bonus payments.This cleverness gave hospitals incentives to report all possible deaths as Covid deaths.The flu season, heart attacks, cancer, pneumonia, all became Covid deaths.The greatly exaggerated figure was used to heighten the fear factor.
In truth the people dying were people with Covid and co-morbidities, and they were dying because they were not being treated except with ventilators, which turned out not to be a treatment that addresses Covid.
Known and safe treatments were withheld, because otherwise emergency use could not be granted the pending vaccines.Emergency use authorization is dependent on the absence of treatments that cure.This is why in the US and Europe HCQ and Ivermectin, both long approved, long in use, and so safe that they are available for over-the-counter purchase in most of the world, were demonized as “dangerous,” “unapproved,” and it is why false stories financed by Big Pharma are spread, such as this one — see this — which convince people that there is no alternative to the “vaccine.”
The vaccine is not a vaccine.It is an effort to substitute experimental RNA technology for a vaccine, and it has failed big time.What was yesterday “fully vaccinated” is today unvaccinated.A booster shot is needed, and Fauci now says one will be needed every 8 months or despite numerous shots you will be unvaccinated.In Israel where 84% are “vaccinated,” the pandemic among the vaccinated is so great that the Israeli health czar already has Israelis on a second booster. It seems humanity is to become a pin cushion for vaccine needles.
The so-called vaccine not only fails to protect, it produces serious and deadly adverse effects.Indeed, the likely case is that the great majority of what are said to be new Covid cases are in fact adverse reactions to the vaccine.This would explain why the great majority of what are labeled new Covid cases are among the “fully vaccinated” and why new cases rise with vaccination.See the Israeli table for example.
If already there are variants, it is highly likely that they are results of the vaccine which top rank scientists believe enables the virus to escape immune response.In other words, the more vaccination, the more variants, the more Covid spreads.
It would be impossible to design a greater failure or a greater threat to public health and civil liberty than the mRNA vaccines and the campaign behind them.Many distinguished experts have reached this conclusion and speak it, but they are censored.Why?Is it only because they threaten vaccine profits?
Despite the massive undeniable total failure of the Covid Vaccine, there is enormous pressure from everywhere for universal vaccination.Biden wants it mandated by the Labor Department that every firm with 100 employees requires vaccination as a condition of employment. Hospitals and HMOs are requiring it of their doctors and nurses.Universities are refusing to allow unvaccinated students to even take online courses! See this.There are calls to deny unvaccinated people access to restaurants, hotels, public transportation, sports events, hospitals, and even visits to their own doctor and dentist.A Covid Passport which has to be updated every 8 months means endless paperwork.Every time you turn around it is time to get a new passport.
The pressure is unrelenting. If you make a purchase from a pharmacy in the state of Georgia, it will be handed to you in a red and white bag reading in giant letters: “I said Yes to the Vaccine to Help End the Pandemic.”“Covid Vaccine is safe,” declares the bag. “Side effects are mild and last a day or two.”Now do your part to control the pandemic—Get Vaccinated.Department of Public Health, Government of Georgia.
This from a public health department despite the fact that vaccinationdoes not protect, requires endless booster shots, and is causing a pandemic of adverse reactions and new variants!
The only possible conclusion is that either public officials, employers,and university administrators are so completely stupid that they cannot fathom the clear evidence or they want more adverse vaccine reactions, more new variants, and more Covid cases.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from America’s Frontline Doctors
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According to Reuters, more than 500,000 farmers attended a rally in the city of Muzaffarnagar in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on 5 September. Hundreds of thousands more turned out for other rallies in the state.
Rakesh Tikait, a prominent farmers’ leader, said this would breathe fresh life into the Indian farmers’ protest movement.
He added:
“We will intensify our protest by going to every single city and town of Uttar Pradesh to convey the message that Modi’s government is anti-farmer”.
Tikait is a leader of the protest movement and a spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Indian Farmers’ Union).
Since November 2020, tens of thousands of farmers have been encamped on the outskirts of Delhi in protest against three new farm laws that will effectively hand over the agri-food sector to corporates and place India at the mercy of international commodity and financial markets for its food security.
Aside from the rallies in Uttar Pradesh, thousands’ more farmers recently gathered in Karnal in the state of Haryana to continue to pressurise the Modi-led government to repeal the laws. This particular protest was also in response to police violence during another demonstration, also in Karnal (200 km north of Delhi), during late August when farmers had been blocking a highway. The police Lathi-charged them and at least 10 people were injured and one person died from a heart attack a day later.
A video that appeared on social media showed Ayush Sinha, a top government official, encouraging officers to “smash the heads of farmers” if they broke through the barricades placed on the highway.
Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar criticised the choice of words but said that “strictness had to be maintained to ensure law and order”.
But that is not quite true. “Strictness” – outright brutality – must be imposed to placate the scavengers abroad who are circling overhead with India’s agrifood sector firmly in their sights. As much as the authorities try to distance themselves from such language – ‘smashing heads’ is precisely what India’s rulers and the billionaire owners of foreign agrifood corporations require.
The government has to demonstrate to global agricapital that it is being tough on farmers in order to maintain ‘market confidence’ and attract foreign direct investment in the sector (aka the takeover of the sector).
The farmers’ protest in India represents a struggle for the heart and soul of the country: a conflict between the local and the global. Large-scale international agribusiness, retailers, traders and e-commerce companies are trying to displace small- and medium-size indigenous producers and enterprises and restructure the entire agrifood sector in their own image.
By capitulating to the needs of foreign agrifood conglomerates – which is what the three agriculture laws represent – India will be compelled to eradicate its buffer food stocks. It would then bid for them with borrowed funds on the open market or with its foreign reserves.
This approach is symptomatic of what has been happening since the 1990s, when India was compelled to embrace neoliberal economics. The country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital which rides roughshod over democratic principles and the needs of hundreds of millions of ordinary people.
The authorities know they must be seen to be acting tough on farmers, thereby demonstrating a steely resolve to foreign agribusiness and investors in general.
The Indian government’s willingness to cede control of its agrifood sector would appear to represent a victory for US foreign policy.
“American foreign policy has almost always been based on agricultural exports… It’s by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.”
On the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture. In return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.
The drive is to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a facilitator of private capital and leading to the entrenchment of industrial farming and the replacement of small-scale farms.
Smashing protesters’ heads
A December 2020 photograph published by the Press Trust of India defines the Indian government’s approach to protesting farmers. It shows a security official in paramilitary garb raising a lathi. An elder from the Sikh farming community was about to feel its full force.
But “smashing the heads of farmers” is symbolic of how near-totalitarian ‘liberal democracies’ the world over now regard many within their own populations.
The right to protest and gather in public as well as the right of free speech has been suspended in Australia, which currently resembles a giant penal colony as officials pursue a nonsensical ‘zero-COVID’ policy. Across Europe and in the US and Israel, unnecessary and discriminatory ‘COVID passports’ are being rolled out to restrict freedom of movement and access to services. And those who protest against any of this are often confronted by a massive, intimidating police presence (or actual police violence) and media smear campaigns.
Again, governments must demonstrate resolve to their billionaire masters in Big Finance, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, the World Economic Forum and the entire gamut of forces in the military-financial industrial complex behind the ‘Great Reset’, ‘4th Industrial Revolution, ‘New Normal’ or whichever other benign-sounding term its political and media lackeys use to disguise the restructuring of capitalism and the brutal impacts on ordinary people.
This too, like the restructuring of Indian agriculture – which will affect India’s entire 1.3-billion-plus population – is also part of a US foreign policy agenda that serves the interests of the Anglo-US elite.
COVID has ensured that trillions of dollars have been handed over to elite interests, while lockdowns and restrictions have been imposed on ordinary people and small businesses. The winners have been the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers have been small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and the entire panoply of civil rights their ancestors struggled and often died for. If a masterplan is required to deliver a knockout blow to small enterprises for the benefit of global players, then this is it.
Professor Michel Chossudovskyof the Centre for Research on Globalization says:
“The Global Money financial institutions are the ‘creditors’ of the real economy which is in crisis. The closure of the global economy has triggered a process of global indebtedness. Unprecedented in World history, a multi-trillion bonanza of dollar denominated debts is hitting simultaneously the national economies of 193 countries.”
“The COVID-19 crisis has severely disrupted economies and labour markets in all world regions, with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020, most of which are in emerging and developing countries.”
Among the most vulnerable are the 1.6 billion informal economy workers, representing half of the global workforce, who are working in sectors experiencing major job losses or have seen their incomes seriously affected by lockdowns. Most of the workers affected (1.25 billion) are in retail, accommodation and food services and manufacturing. And most of these are self-employed and in low-income jobs in the informal sector.
India was especially affected in this respect when the government imposed a lockdown. The policy ended up pushing 230 million into poverty and wrecked the lives and livelihoods of many. A May 2021 report prepared by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University (APU) has highlighted how employment and income had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels even by late 2020.
The report, ‘State of Working India 2021 – One year of Covid-19’ highlights how almost half of formal salaried workers moved into the informal sector and that 230 million people fell below the national minimum wage poverty line.
Even before COVID, India was experiencing its longest economic slowdown since 1991 with weak employment generation, uneven development and a largely informal economy. A recent article by the Research Unit for Political Economy highlights the structural weaknesses of the economy and the often desperate plight of ordinary people.
To survive Modi’s lockdown, the poorest 25% of households borrowed 3.8 times their median income, as against 1.4 times for the top 25%. The study noted the implications for debt traps.
Six months later, it was also noted that food intake was still at lockdown levels for 20% of vulnerable households.
Meanwhile, the rich were well taken care of. According to Left Voice:
“The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritising the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.”
Michel Chossudovsky says that governments are now under the control of global creditors and that the post-Covid era will see massive austerity measures, including the cancellation of workers’ benefits and social safety nets. An unpayable multi-trillion dollar public debt is unfolding: the creditors of the state are Big Money, which calls the shots in a process that will lead to the privatisation of the state.
Between April and July 2020, the total wealth held by billionaires around the world has grown from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion. Chossudovsky says a new generation of billionaire innovators looks set to play a critical role in repairing the damage by using the growing repertoire of emerging technologies. He adds that tomorrow’s innovators will digitise, refresh and revolutionise the economy: but, as he notes, let us be under no illusions these corrupt billionaires are impoverishers.
With this in mind, a recent piece on the US Right To Know website exposes the Gates-led agenda for the future of food based on the programming of biology to produce synthetic and genetically engineered substances. The thinking reflects the programming of computers in the information economy. Of course, Gates and his ilk have patented or are patenting the processes and products involved.
For example, Ginkgo Bioworks, a Gates-backed start-up that makes ‘custom organisms’, recently went public in a $17.5 billion deal. It uses ‘cell programming’ technology to genetically engineer flavours and scents into commercial strains of engineered yeast and bacteria to create ‘natural’ ingredients, including vitamins, amino acids, enzymes and flavours for ultra-processed foods.
Ginkgo plans to create up to 20,000 engineered ‘cell programs’ (it now has five) for food products and many other uses. It plans to charge customers to use its ‘biological platform’. Its customers are not consumers or farmers but the world’s largest chemical, food and pharmaceutical companies.
Gates pushes fake food by way of his greenwash agenda. If he really is interested in avoiding ‘climate catastrophe’, helping farmers or producing enough food, instead of cementing the power and the control of corporations over our food, he should be facilitating community-based and led agroecological approaches.
But he will not because there is no scope for patents, external proprietary inputs, commodification and dependency on global corporations which Gates sees as the answer to all of humanity’s problems in his quest to bypass democratic processes and rollout his agenda.
India should take heed because this is the future of ‘food’. If the farmers fail to get the farm bills repealed, India will again become dependent on food imports or on foreign food manufacturers and lab-made ‘food’. Fake food will displace traditional diets and cultivation methods will be driven by drones, genetically engineered seeds and farms without farmers, devastating the livelihoods (and health) of hundreds of millions.
This is a vision of the future courtesy of Klaus Schwab’s (of the elitist World Economic Forum) dystopic transhumanism and the Rockefellers’ 2010 lockstep scenario: genetically engineered food and genetically engineered people controlled by a technocratic elite whose plans are implemented through tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership.
Since March 2020, we have seen the structural adjustment of the global capitalist system and labour’s relationship to it and an attempted adjustment of people’s thinking via endless government and media propaganda.
Whether it involves India’s farmers or the frequent rallies and marches against restrictions and COVID passports across the world, there is a common enemy. And there is also a common goal: liberty.
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Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture and is a Researh Associate of the Centre for Globalization in Montreal.
The widely held belief that the Twin Towers collapsed as a result of the airplane impacts and the resulting fires is, unbeknownst to most people, a revisionist theory. Among individuals who witnessed the event firsthand, the more prevalent hypothesis was that the Twin Towers had been brought down by massive explosions.
9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.
On the fateful day of 9/11, the world watched scenes of destruction so wild that one would think it straight out of a Hollywood production. Beamed live from New York everyone saw the Twin Towers pulverized into a heap of dust.
Many people have only vague memories of the 2001 anthrax attacks. I do not think this is entirely due to the frailties of memory. These attacks have, due to the disastrous failure of the operation’s narrative, been ushered down the memory hole by the FBI.
The battle lines over mandatory COVID-19 vaccines are now going full steam ahead in the U.S. as the Biden Administration is announcing today that all federal employees must now get a COVID-19 shot as a condition for employment, and that they are eliminating the testing opt-out.
Two news items published in these days by the Washington Post – “9/11 families say Biden not welcome at memorial events unless he releases government evidence” and “Biden signs executive order requiring review, release of some classified 9/11 documents” – open other deep cracks in the official version.
Republicans clapped back over the Biden administration’s unprecedented ‘jab or your job’ Executive Order for federal workers and contractors, and a ‘jab or test’ mandate for corporations with over 100 employees. 600,000 postal workers are oddly exempt.
In the U.S., Operation Warp Speed is the federal effort that fast-tracked COVID-19 jab candidates to market. Gene transfer technology platforms emerged as the frontrunners, including adenoviral DNA platforms or messenger RNA (mRNA) platforms designed to deliver genetic material to the human body.
Behind The Headlines’ Dan Cohen explains a little known effort to train Afghan Islamic fundamentalists in propaganda, and how that effort created a blueprint for the White Helmets in Syria.
President Biden is expected to announce today he will impose new vaccination mandates as part of a plan to “return to normal.” When asked if the plan would have an immediate and broad effect on Americans, the White House told reporters: “It depends on if you’re vaccinated or not.”
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack, we bring to your attention previous Global Research articles on the big lie surrounding the 9/11 official narrative and the endless war crimes committed under the guise of America’s Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history, a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.
9/11 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.
We who are so easily dismissed as ‘Conspiracy Nuts’ know, both intuitively and through careful research, that there was lots more about what really went down the morning of September 11th, 2001.
In the 20 years since the September 11 attacks, the United States government has spent more than $21 trillion at home and overseas on militaristic policies that led to the creation of a vast surveillance apparatus, worsened mass incarceration, intensified the war on immigrant communities, and caused incalculable human suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) — which is the U.S. government agency that investigated the World Trade Center’s destruction — the Twin Towers came down “essentially in free fall.”
The official narrative claims that 19 hijackers representing Al Qaeda took over 4 commercial aircraft to carry out attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington D.C.
At 5:21 in the afternoon of 9/11, almost seven hours after the Twin Towers had come down, Building 7 of the World Trade Center also came down. The collapse of this building was from the beginning considered a mystery.
The first step is to ask specific, well-formulated questions. What do we need to know? We need to know things like how explosives got into the WTC, how the North American air defenses failed, how the U.S. chain of command and communication systems failed, how the alleged hijackers got away with so much, and how the planes were hijacked.
Angle pointed out that for the east penthouse of the building to fall as it did, you would have to remove the columns supporting it high in the building, rather than low in the building, which is where NIST claims these columns buckled. However, Angle noted, there were no fires on the upper floors to cause the cause the columns just below the penthouse to fail.
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an indepth police investigation.
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First published by ae911truth.org and Global Research on September 12, 2018
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One of the more perplexing aspects of 9/11 is how the public was so quickly and thoroughly convinced that the airplane impacts and ensuing fires—and not the explosions that so many witnesses reported—had caused the destruction of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
People who have only a passing familiarity with the historical record of 9/11 might assume, understandably, that everyone has always believed, from day one, that the towers came down as a direct result of the airplane impacts.
Closer examination of the record, however, shows that officials in at least three government agencies responsible for responding to the attacks—the White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the New York City Fire Department (FDNY)—said they suspected that the buildings had been brought down with explosives. In addition, many individuals in the news media commented throughout the morning that explosives appeared to be involved.
For anyone attempting to quell suspicions that explosives were used, the simplest tactic would have been to trust that as soon as Al Qaeda was blamed for the attacks—which it was, within hours after the event—members of the media and government would conclude that Muslim terrorists would not have been able to plant explosives in the buildings without being detected; ipso facto, explosives could not have been used to bring them down.
The clearest example of someone ignoring their initial observation after learning the official narrative was structural engineer Ronald Hamburger, who worked for FEMA on the first official investigation of the collapses. Hamburger told TheWall Street Journal on September 19, 2001,
“‘It appeared to me that charges had been placed in the building.’ . . . Upon learning that no bombs had been detonated, [Hamburger said,] ‘I was very surprised.’”
But in response to all those people who early on voiced their suspicion that explosives had brought down the Twin Towers—before the official narrative was promulgated—anyone needing to quell suspicions about controlled demolition would find it necessary to gently dismiss such concerns.
‘It just pancaked’
Dick Cheney and Eric Edelman converse in the PEOC on 9/11.
One government official who openly speculated about the possibility of explosives being used at the World Trade Center was Eric Edelman, Vice President Dick Cheney’ Deputy Chief of Staff on 9/11. He was in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) with his boss as the events unfolded that morning. In a little-known interview with Newsweek Magazine on October 25, 2001, he gave this account of his and Cheney’s reaction to watching the Twin Towers go down:
“Some of us, when the Trade Center came down, and then the second one came down, some of us I think were a bit stunned by how, the way it came down. As you recall from seeing the tapes, it almost looked like (inaudible) charges on each floor to bring it to the ground. Some of us were speculating that maybe, you know, there was some kind of charge on the ground or in the building. You know, we were dealing with all sorts of speculation.
“But [Cheney] basically said, well, just the way it looks to me, it just pancaked and (inaudible), top (inaudible) came down; just pancaked the rest of the building. His sense of all this was pretty impressive, I have to say—not just because I work for him.”
FBI Director Robert Mueller in the PEOC on 9/11.
It is impossible to know whether Cheney had inside information on the Twin Towers’ demolition and was intentionally steering his colleagues away from that suspicion or whether he was reacting genuinely to what he observed. Either way, given that he had unprecedented power in the White House and that he was the man in charge on 9/11, his instant dismissal of the possibility of controlled demolition undoubtedly had some effect on the direction of various investigations that were just getting underway.
Of course, one of those investigations was being conducted by the FBI. Later that day, FBI Director Robert Mueller would join Cheney in the PEOC. It just so happens that the FBI’s “working theory” of the attacks was that explosives had been used to bring down the Twin Towers. We know as much, because USA Today correspondent Jack Kelley provided this report on the day of 9/11:
Kelley: “Apparently, what appears to have happened is that at the same time two planes hit the building, that the FBI most likely thinks that there was a car or truck packed with explosives underneath the building which also exploded at the same time and brought both of them down.”
USA Today Anchor: “Now that’s the first time we’re hearing that. So two planes and explosives that were in the building, is that correct?”
Kelley: “That is the working theory at this point. That is still unconfirmed, but that is what the FBI is going on at this point.”
But at some point and for some unexplained reason, the FBI apparently abandoned its “working theory.”
‘We don’t know of an additional explosion’
Had the FBI continued to pursue the explosives theory, it would have been corroborated by many officials and firefighters in the FDNY. Consider that at around 11:55 AM, approximately 90 minutes after both towers had disappeared from the New York skyline, NBC’s Pat Dawson gave this extensive report on his conversation with the FDNY’s Deputy Assistant Chief of Safety, Albert Turi:
Dawson: “Just moments ago I spoke to the Chief of Safety for the New York City Fire Department, who was obviously one of the first people here on the scene after those two planes were crashed into the side—we assume—of the World Trade Center towers, which used to be behind me over there. Chief Albert Turi told me that he was here just literally 10 or 15 minutes after the events that took place this morning, that is, the first crash. . . . [He] told me that shortly after 9 o’clock he had roughly 10 alarms, roughly 200 men in the building trying to effect rescues of some of those civilians who were in there, and that basically he received word of a possibility of a secondary device—that is, another bomb going off. He tried to get his men out as quickly as he could, but he said that there was another explosion which took place. And then an hour after the first hit here, the first crash that took place, he said there was another explosion that took place in one of the towers here. So obviously, according to his theory, he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building. One of the secondary devices he thinks, that took place after the initial impact, he thinks may have been on the plane that crashed into one of the towers. The second device he thinks, he speculates, was probably planted in the building.”
Turi was just one of many in the FDNY to suspect that explosives were planted in the Twin Towers. Others included firefighters Tyrone Johnson and Jimmy Grillo, whose battalion was stationed in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel as they witnessed explosions coming from the neighboring towers. They gave this account just after the collapse of both towers:
Johnson: “We was in an explosion. We was in the lobby and it—the third explosion, the whole lobby collapsed on us. . . .”
Reporter: “Was that a secondary explosion?”
Johnson: “Yes, it was. Definitely a secondary explosion. Because we was inside waiting to go upstairs, and on the way upstairs, the whole fucking thing blew. . . . Everybody was inside the building waiting to go upstairs, and it just let loose. Everything just let loose inside the building.”
Reporter: “So what you’re telling me is that there was a plane, whatever hit the building, and then the secondary explosion?”
Johnson: “It was like three explosions after that. We came in there after the fire. We came when the fire was going on already. We was in the staging area inside the building, waiting to go upstairs. Then the explosions. Then the whole lobby collapsed inside. . . .”
Grillo: “People don’t understand. There may be more. Any one of these fuckin’ buildings could blow up. This ain’t done yet.”
More than 100 other FDNY personnel, who were stationed outside the towers, said they, too, witnessed phenomena they believed to be explosions—or they surmised that the towers had been brought down with explosives. A small sampling of those eyewitness accounts includes Captain Karin Deshore, Fire Marshal John Coyle, and Firefighter Christopher Fenyo:
Deshore: “Somewhere around the middle of the World Trade Center, there was this orange and red flash coming out. Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash just kept popping all the way around the building and that building had started to explode. The popping sound, and with each popping sound it was initially an orange and then red flash came out of the building and then it would just go all around the building on both sides as far as I could see. These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going both up and down and then all around the building.”
Coyle: “I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards . . . because the debris from the tower had shot out far over our heads. . . . Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up.”
Fenyo: “At that point [after the collapse of the South Tower] a debate began to rage because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges. . . . [M]any people had felt that possibly explosives had taken out 2 World Trade, and officers were gathering companies together and the officers were debating whether or not to go immediately back in or to see what was going to happen with 1 World Trade at that point.”
Despite the fact that most members of the fire department thought the buildings were leveled with explosives—and many of them had directly witnessed what they believed were explosions—Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerikboth denied having any information about secondary explosions at a press conference that afternoon, with FDNY Commissioner Thomas Van Essen standing by their side:
Reporter: “Do you know anything about the cause of the explosions that brought down the two buildings yet? Was it caused by the planes or by something else? There were second explosions.”
Mayor Giuliani: “We believe it was caused by the after effects of the planes hitting the buildings. We don’t know of an additional explosion after that.” (While Giuliani is talking, he turns to Kerik, who shakes his head and appears to mutter the words, “No, nothing like that.”)
Was this a case of Giuliani, Kerik, and Van Essen simply not being in contact with the Deputy Assistant Chief of Safety and other members of the fire department? Were they truly unaware of the numerous reports of explosions from first responders and civilians—reports so ubiquitous that the journalist who posed the question treated the explosions, as well as the belief that they had brought down the towers, as established fact?
It is safe to say that Giuliani, Kerik, and Van Essen were probably better positioned than any other human beings on 9/11 to receive and make sense of all the eyewitness reports of explosions. Indeed, their roles put them in a perfect position to formulate and announce a coherent narrative of what these witnesses were saying had just happened. Yet they professed to have no knowledge of such information.
Whether or not the mayor and his two commissioners knew more than they were admitting, Giuliani’s assertion that it was the “after effects of the planes hitting the buildings” and not secondary explosions that brought down the Twin Towers was broadcast worldwide to millions of people, including members of the media who were just beginning to assemble an account of what had taken place that morning.
‘Simply the planes hitting the buildings’
A less-known government official who also waved off the idea of explosives bringing down the Twin Towers—but who was equally involved in protecting the nation, New York City, and the World Trade Center from terrorist attacks—was counterterrorism expert Jerome Hauer.
According to his biography on the Chertoff Group website, Hauer was “Director of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Senior Advisor to the Secretary for National Security and Emergency Management during the events of September 11, 2001 and the nation’s anthrax crisis.” Mere months earlier, in January 2001, Hauer had been hired to run a new crisis management group at Kroll Associates, the security consulting firm that had designed the security system for the World Trade Center complex in response to the 1993 bombing. And before that, from 1996 to 2000, he had been Mayor Giuliani’s Director of the New York City Office of Emergency Management. In fact, under Hauer’s watch, the OEM installed its Emergency Operations Center on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center Building 7 in June 1999.
On the morning of 9/11, Hauer was a guest on CBS News with Dan Rather, who, like many other television anchors and reporters, speculated that the buildings had come down due to explosives. Their conversation went like this:
Rather: “Based on what you know—and I recognize we’re dealing with so few facts—is it possible that just a plane crash could have collapsed these buildings, or would it have required the sort of prior positioning of other explosives in the building? What do you think?”
Hauer: “No, my sense is that just, one, the velocity of the plane and the fact that you have a plane filled with fuel hitting that building that burned. The velocity of the plane certainly had an impact on the structure itself. And then the fact that it burned, and you had that intense heat, probably weakened the structure as well. And I think it was simply the planes hitting the buildings and causing the collapse.”
Taken together, we have the two government officials most responsible for directing the response to 9/11—Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani—dismissing the notion of controlled demolition within hours after the event. Add to them a man—Jerry Hauer—whose job at various times was to plan for terrorist attacks against the nation, the city, and the World Trade Center complex itself.
It’s possible that all three of them were reacting candidly to what they observed and to the information available to them. If that’s the case, it’s quite unfortunate. Each was in a position to shape the course of ongoing investigations, and it’s undeniable that an unbiased investigation would not have ruled out the possible use of explosives at that point in time.
It’s also possible that one or more of them knew in advance that the Twin Towers were going to be demolished and that they were involved, whether directly or peripherally, in a criminal conspiracy to cover up the murder of thousands of people.
Certainly, we know that a cover-up was carried out in the succeeding months and years. The removal of evidence, the FEMA investigation, the 9/11 Commission Report, and the NIST investigation were key elements of that cover-up. But, looking back, we might wonder if the most critical stage of the entire cover-up was in the minutes and hours immediately following the devastating destruction.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
This is Part One of a three-part re-evaluation of 9/11 in light of startling new evidence that may change many minds about the so-called “craziness” of those who have refused to accept the “official” government story of this traumatic and defining event, which has so tragically misdirected U.S. policy for the past 20 years
Authors’ Note: Everything, we are told, changed in September of 2001. It has been twenty years since the terror spectacle of 9/11. On this grim anniversary, we offer some big picture analysis—a series of articles reflecting on the extent to which everything did and did not change as a result of 9/11. Begun months ago, and building on years of scholarship by the authors, the occasion is all the more salient given some strange synchronicity. Specifically, we have just witnessed the fall of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul. And in the wake of this spectacle, the Biden administration announced plans to declassify information pertaining to the FBI’s investigation into the Saudi role in the attacks.
These events highlight the fact that despite all the investigations and research around the events of September 11, 2001, much remains obscured. As such, this series presents a deeper exploration into the tragic events and catastrophic consequences of 9/11. In this first installment, we examine how the U.S. for decades has utilized Islamic terrorists as assets for its own ends. In Part 2, we look at how CIA figures actively prevented other government agencies from exposing the al Qaeda presence in the U.S. prior to the attacks. In the third and final article, we explore the deep political and historical implications of the U.S. government’s “emergency” powers in order to offer some conclusions about 9/11.
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Project Censored interview: Listen to Peter Dale Scott, Aaron Good and Ben Howard discuss the article with Mickey Huff.
Domestically, the attacks led to substantial changes in the federal government, the most obvious being the creation of a new cabinet-level department with the grave charge of securing “the homeland.”
Perhaps of greater consequence were the ways in which 9/11 further accelerated the abrogation of civil rights and the rule of law in the U.S.
Beginning with the Cold War and previously justified by the “global communist conspiracy,” the security organizations of the federal government had a long and prolific history of operations and episodes that appear straightforwardly illegal. On U.S. soil, these include McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, propaganda campaigns, and the surveillance and infiltration of groups engaging in constitutionally protected political activity.
Internationally, the U.S., since the end of World War II, has repeatedly violated the UN Charter which outlaws even the threat of aggression against other nations. Having been ratified by Congress, the U.S. Constitution’s supremacy clause establishes that the treaty is “the highest law in the land.”
Therefore, the post-World War II U.S. government has violated not just international law, but its own Constitution as a matter of course in the daily execution of its foreign policy.
On the basis of this domestic and international lawlessness, it has been argued by one of our co-authors, Aaron Good, that the maintenance of U.S. hegemony since World War II has entailed exceptionism—the institutionalization of a “state of exception” whereby the state exercises prerogative to override legal restraints on the basis of this or that emergency.[1]
Following 9/11, these trends worsened dramatically.
Introduced after 9/11 and passed by Congress in the wake of the still-unsolved anthrax attacks,[2] the United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (USA PATRIOT Act) kicked off a period in which U.S. civil liberties were drastically eroded.
President Bush signing the USA PATRIOT Act. [Source: Britannica.com]
The NSA launched a massive campaign of warrantless surveillance. Foreign nationals deemed “unlawful enemy combatants” were detained indefinitely. State and local police forces became militarized to an historically unprecedented extent.
In 2012, the U.S. assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki. Two weeks later, his 16-year-old son was killed by a U.S. strike.
In 2017, al-Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter was killed in a U.S. raid. All three were U.S. citizens.
The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) gave the government the power to detain American citizens indefinitely. In the wake of the controversial 2012 NDAA, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) inquired as to whether “the President has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without trial.”
After responding by asserting that such has not happened and is not intended to happen, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder added that a U.S. President could “authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”[3]
The 9/11 Wars
Outside of the U.S., the consequences of the 2001 terror attacks were even more dramatic.
Most notably, the U.S. launched the two “9/11 Wars.” The invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have killed over a million people, displaced tens of millions, and cost trillions of dollars—all with no discernable improvement to U.S. national security.
Furthermore, both wars were launched on very dubious grounds.
None of the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers were Afghan nationals; most of them were from Saudi Arabia.
Alleged 9/11 hijackers. None came from Afghanistan. [Source: pix11.com]
The invasion of Afghanistan was launched following the NATO invocation of Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, but eventually it emerged that the report presented to NATO by U.S. Ambassador Frank Taylor contained no actual forensic evidence to support the assertion that the terror attacks had been orchestrated in Afghanistan.[4]
In mid-October of 2001, President Bush refused a Taliban offer to turn Osama bin Laden over to the moderate, Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference in order to stand trial for the attacks.[5]
The deceptions that led to the Iraq War are so infamous that they need not be restated here in any detail. The Bush administration relied on tendentious, erroneous, and even fabricated[6] intelligence to argue that the Iraqi government had weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda.
As mentioned at the outset, it has often been asserted that 9/11 “changed everything.” Over time, even mainstream commentators eventually had to acknowledge that the U.S. overreacted to the attacks in harmful ways.
In this context, it should be noted that both of the 9/11 Wars were long in planning within the deep state—or if one prefers, within the U.S. foreign policy establishment or foreign policy blob.
Beginning in 1997, the CIA and Pentagon were working with the Uzbek security services to prepare for operations against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.[7] Getting closer to September 2001, that year had seen a series of negotiations between the Taliban and a U.S.-led coalition regarding the creation of a new unity government in Afghanistan.
According to attendee Niaz Naik, former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs, “If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid … And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come.”
Naik also stated that Tom Simons, a U.S. representative at the talks, told them that “‘either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option.’ The words Simons used were ‘a military operation.’”[8]
Such would apparently come to pass after the negotiations broke down. On September 4, 2001, the Bush cabinet authorized the drafting of a new National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD). This document, NSDP-9, called for a sizable covert action initiative which included U.S. ground troops and Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan.
Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, was dead set against U.S. ground troops in Afghanistan but, on September 9, 2001, he was conveniently assassinated, likely with U.S. complicity on some level.[9]
The next day, on September 10, a second NSDP-9 related meeting was held, focusing on various details of the U.S. military and political plans for Afghanistan.[10]
The long-running campaign for regime change in Iraq was even more visible. In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, asserting that “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.”[11]
While Clinton apparently bowed to neoconservative pressure in signing the Iraq Liberation Act, those forces were in the driver’s seat of the incoming George W. Bush administration. According to Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, Bush was set on invading Iraq from the earliest days of his presidency. Said O’Neill, “It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’”[12]
Afghanistan, Iraq, and the U.S. Grand Strategy
In truth, the 9/11 Wars were both prescribed by the U.S. hegemonic grand strategy consensus that was emerging throughout the 1990s. The energy heartlands of Western and Central Asia were very much on the minds of key figures ranging from Establishment realists like Zbigniew Brzezinski to the neoconservative imperialists most famously represented by the notorious Project for a New American Century (PNAC).
In 1997, Brzezinski wrote The Grand Chessboard in which he stated that for the U.S., “the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia.” Since the non-Eurasian U.S. was preeminent in the region, he argued that “[American] global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”[13] His book even included a helpful map of the proposed Unocal pipeline through Afghanistan.[14]
Meanwhile, Iraq is mentioned 25 times in Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the imperial manifesto published by the neoconservative Project for a New American Century.[15]
It is also worth noting that in years prior to 9/11, these Establishment realists and the neoconservatives were bemoaning the fact that it would be difficult to mobilize public opinion for the militarism that would be needed to maintain American primacy well into the 21st century.
Brzezinski wrote that the U.S. was likely to “find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”[16] He also wrote that “The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”[17]
This is congruous with the infamous and oft-cited passage in PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses which stated, “[T]he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”[18]
Islamist Terror and Anglo-U.S. Geopolitics
The modern phenomenon of Islamist terror derives in large part from Western imperialism—most significantly, British and American interventions. For example, Britain supported the reactionary Wahhabist Saudi monarchy and, in 1928, essentially created the Muslim Brotherhood (via the British Suez Canal Company) for the express purpose of countering Egyptian nationalists and leftists.[19]
In the 1930s, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna created the organization’s “Secret Apparatus,” described by Robert Dreyfuss as “an underground intelligence and paramilitary arm with a terrorist wing.” The Muslim Brotherhood worked against the political enemies of Egypt’s (British puppet) King Farouk and was even a major presence at the King’s 1937 coronation where its members provided “order and security.”[20]
After World War II, the most prominent Middle Eastern statesmen were nationalists of a secular bent—Nasser and Mossadegh. Thus, it was no coincidence that Egypt and Iran experienced paramilitary violence from Islamist terror groups backed by the West.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood tried at least twice to assassinate Nasser. The main international leader of the Brotherhood in the 1950s was Said Ramadan, a man who visited Eisenhower in the White House.
Said Ramadan is second from the right in this 1953 photo. He was part of a Muslim delegation that visited the White House and met President Dwight Eisenhower. [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]
Ramadan was likely recruited by the CIA prior to—or shortly after—that visit.[21] A writer in the New York Review of Books flatly stated, “By the end of the decade, the CIA was overtly backing Ramadan.”[22]
In Iran, the CIA bankrolled the militant Warriors of Islam, an outfit described as a “terrorist gang” in an official CIA history. In 1953, various street thugs organized by the CIA created chaos in Tehran, even pretending to be communists whilst attacking mullahs and blowing up a mosque.[23]
Led by the U.S. and aided by various Islamists in the decades after World War II, the West largely succeeded in undermining nationalist governments in the Middle East—Iran and Egypt most notably.
Fundamentalist Islam, Petrodollars, and the Evolution of the Deep State
Throughout the 1970s, the U.S. deepened its relationship with fundamentalist Islam. In 1972, the CIA-founded Asia Foundation began to fund Afghan Islamists at Kabul University, including a young Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [24]
Interestingly, 1972 was also the year that the Center for Afghanistan Studies was founded at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO). Its website boasts that the Center’s “initial partnership with Kabul University would give UNO the experience necessary to establish many other collaborations around the world. At the time [of its founding], Afghanistan was a peaceful country. . . . [T]here was no war and the future looked bright. No one could foresee the history-making events that Afghans and Nebraskans would share.“[25]
Faculty at Center for Afghanistan Studies, University of Nebraska Omaha. [Source: unomaha.edu]
The Center helped shape that future, in part by creating textbooks for Afghan children. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the CIA cut-out USAID paid the Center $51 million to produce the books in Afghan languages. As described by historian Peter Kuznick,
Page after page was filled with militant Islamic teaching and violent images. Children learned to count using pictures of missiles, tanks, land mines, Kalashnikovs, and dead Soviet soldiers. [One passage] shows a soldier adorned with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov. Above him is a verse from the Koran. Below is a statement about the mujahideen, who, in obedience to Allah, willingly sacrifice their lives and fortunes to impose Sharia law on the government. Students learned to read by studying stories about jihad. When the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, they continued using the same violent jihadist texts, simply removing the human images, which they considered blasphemous.[26]
But let us return to the obscure early 1970’s. In 1973, Sardar Daoud overthrew the Afghan monarchy. Soon after, the U.S. began funding opposition figures in the country, including the radical Islamic Party. Beginning in September, the CIA, regional allies (Iran and Pakistan), and Islamist Afghan groups staged a series of raids and failed coups against Daoud. Subsequently, the U.S. State Department identified Muslim Brotherhood members as leaders of a failed rebellion in Afghanistan against Daoud. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the Brotherhood members, fled to Pakistan where he was received by the ISI (Pakistani intelligence). In 1978 and 1979, U.S. state department memos acknowledged that the Muslim Brotherhood were beneficiaries of U.S. anti-communist ventures in Afghanistan.[27]
Around this time, Zbigniew Brzezinski began pressing his “arc of crisis” strategy, asserting that the U.S. could dominate the Middle East by using political Islamism against leftist and nationalist movements.[28]
This led to President Carter’s fateful July 3, 1979, decision to authorize direct CIA funding of the Afghan mujahideen. As a result, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December.[29]
Meanwhile, economic and political events were bringing about major changes to the international monetary system and the American deep state.
When Vietnam War spending led to the end of the Bretton Woods gold-backed dollar, the U.S. was rescued from a difficult financial situation in large part by the “oil shocks”—unprecedented skyrocketing oil prices. The oil shocks were in all likelihood orchestrated by the U.S.
As Yanis Varoufakis summarizes:
[The notion] that the OPEC countries pushed the dollar price of oil sky high against the will of the United States … runs counter to logic and evidence. [How else to explain that America’s] closest allies, the Shah of Iran, President Suharto of Indonesia and the Venezuelan government, not only backed the increases but led the campaign to bring them about? [How do we explain the U.S.] scuttling of the Tehran negotiations between the oil companies and OPEC just before an agreement was reached that would have depressed prices? … Indeed, the Saudis have consistently claimed that Henry Kissinger, keener to manage the flow of petrodollars to America than to prevent the rise of energy prices, was encouraging them all the way to push the price of oil up by a factor of between two and four. So long as oil sales were denominated in dollars, the U.S. administration had no quarrel with the oil price increases.[30]
With the resulting massive accumulation of petrodollars by Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Middle East became an even more essential pillar of U.S. hegemony. Major oil producers like the Saudis and Iran used these dollars to buy U.S. Treasuries, invest in Western (especially U.S.) banks, and purchase arms from U.S. and British companies.
Beyond shoring up the dollar-dominated post-Bretton Woods monetary system, the wealth of these countries—along with their ties to U.S. economic elites and to the U.S. national security state—allowed them to play important roles in the evolution of a supranational American deep state. Powerful actors associated with the CIA needed to ensure that the post-Watergate intelligence investigations in Congress could not derail U.S. covert-operation capabilities.
President Nixon shaking hands with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia following talks at the Risal Palace in Riyadh in July 1974. [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]
To this end, the CIA-connected Saudi arms tycoon Adnan Khashoggi—along with intelligence officials from France, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Israel, and Morocco—established the Safari Club. Prince Turki Al Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, explained it thusly:
In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran … so, the Kingdom, with these countries, helped in some way, I believe, to keep the world safe when the United States was not able to do that. That, I think, is a secret that many of you don’t know.[31]
Theodore Shackley, left, was a key CIA contact for the Safari Club. [Source: wikipedia.org]
Another former head of Saudi intelligence, Kamal Adham, was an early insider with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a bank that came to play an important role in the financial side of the U.S.-dominated covert netherworld.
This milieu—which included the Safari Club, BCCI, and Adnan Khashoggi’s enterprises—was described by our co-author Peter Dale Scott as being
part of a supranational deep state, whose organic links to the CIA may have helped consolidate it. It is clear however that decisions taken at this level by the Safari Club and BCCI were in no way guided by the political determinations of those elected to power in Washington [and were instead] expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions in Washington.[32]
In the latter half of the 1970s and in the 1980s, BCCI would play a key role in facilitating the financing of various covert operations and illicit enterprises. This institutional evolution represented by BCCI and the Safari Club should be placed in the context of key U.S. intelligence creations.
In his dissertation, Aaron Good wrote,
The embryonic [i.e., early-Cold War] deep state had seminal parapolitical institutions including banks (e.g., Castle Bank and Nugan Hand) or privatized paramilitary / intelligence outfits like the World Commerce Corporation and the various Anti-Communist Leagues. The late 1970s saw more powerful iterations, most notably the BCCI-Safari Club milieu which brought together right-wing Republicans, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and networks of wayward and disaffected spooks. With Reagan’s victory, many of these players were brought in from the cold.[33]
This is all to say that while Vietnam, Watergate, and the post-Watergate intelligence revelations all may have appeared as setbacks for U.S. imperialism and its covert apparatus, the outcome was quite opposite. The U.S. became even more dominant with the emergence of the post-Bretton Woods dollar and oil-dominated system. The clandestine realm, dominated by the U.S., became even more powerful and less accountable.
“Reaganism” and Beyond: America’s Deniable Islamist Proxies
With the right-wing Ronald Reagan in the White House, those scattered deep state elements were brought back into the fold. To employ a hyperbolic metaphor: It was as if Sauron and the One Ring had finally been reunited.
In 1981, after twisting some arms in the Senate, President Reagan secured the $8.5 billion sale of Boeing AWACS to Saudi Arabia. A number of sources reported that the deal included a promise from the Saudis to fund Reagan’s covert operations in such a way as to avoid congressional oversight.[34]
Ronald Reagan applauds as Saudi King Fahad speaks at a ceremony at the White House in February 1985. [Source: twitter.com]
The Saudis would go on to play key roles in the creation and funding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and in the Iran-Contra scandal. To summarize: In the wake of Watergate and the intelligence scandals of the 1970s, the end result was essentially an evolved deep-statesystem that was even more opaque and less accountable to any lawful public authority.
As referenced above, the Saudis would play a key role in the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, the funding of Islamist militants in Afghanistan to inflict a costly blow against the Soviet Union. Repeating a pattern from the war in Southeast Asia, the U.S. allies in this conflict became the world’s top heroin traffickers—Gulbuddin Hekmatyar first and foremost among them. Sometimes called the “Arab Afghans,” the fighters and their Saudi-led logistical support networks would evolve into al-Qaeda in the 1990s.
Ronald Reagan meeting with mujahideen leaders in the White House in 1983. [Source: wikipedia.org]
It was in this post-Cold War era that the U.S. began to use Arab Afghan / mujahideen assets in a number of conflicts in regions that had previously been under Soviet influence. An example was an early 1990s operation in Azerbaijan.
The murky Azerbaijan affair involved the U.S. oil majors, military / intelligence veterans like Richard Secord, and Islamist Arab Afghans—some of whom were recruited by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The dénouement was the installation of a regime in Baku that broke with Russia and brought in Western oil companies.[35]
Islamist militants were also used to advance U.S. aims in Bosnia. Some of these fighters were trained by an Egyptian, Ali Mohamed, from the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. The Egyptian terrorist leader Omar Abdel-Rahman (aka the “blind sheikh”) played a lead role from his headquarters in Brooklyn, with Saudi and U.S. assistance.[36]
In North Africa, another notable U.S. adversary was a recurrent target of Islamist violence in the 1990s. Specifically, al-Qaeda assets were directed against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. A whistleblower from Britain’s MI5 revealed that, in 1996, MI6 officers attempted to use Islamist militants to assassinate the Libyan head of state. The operation failed, with Qaddafi unharmed and a number of militants killed in the process.[37]
The Crucial Pre-9/11 Years
Within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, there was disagreement over Central Asia in the mid-to-late 1990s. A relatively dovish side was represented by Bill Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott. In a July 1997 speech, Talbott explicitly warned against any sort of Central Asian “Great Game,” proposing instead the promotion of mutually beneficial cooperative arrangements in the region.[38]
Also in that same year, Pentagon and CIA elements were using NATO to effect, contra-Talbott and the State Department, a “forward strategy” in Central Asia. Under the auspices of the NATO Partnership for Peace (PFP) Program, the U.S. military nurtured “the embryo of a NATO-led military force in the region” by launching a series of training exercises with Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz military forces.[39]
These CENTRAZBAT exercises had in mind the possible future deployment of U.S. combat forces. A deputy assistant secretary of defense, Catherine Kelleher, cited “the presence of enormous energy resources” as a justification for American military involvement.[40] Uzbekistan, which Brzezinski in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard singled out for its geopolitical importance,[41] became the linchpin of U.S. training exercises.[42]
While the energy angle is clearly discernible in these operations, counterterror was also a pretext for U.S. intelligence activities in the region. Building from the foundational 1997 arrangement, the CIA had been working with the U.S. military and Uzbek military/intelligence forces with the ostensible aim of apprehending Osama bin Laden in neighboring Afghanistan.[43]
In hindsight, 1998 was the year when matters became even stranger. To put a finer point on the energy angle: Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney that year declared that he “[could] not think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”[44]
The U.S. fixation on Central Asia transcended partisanship. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated before an audience in Tashkent, “While you are geographically distant from the United States, you are very closely connected to our most vital national interests.” Presumably, Albright was obliquely referring to the $8 billion that U.S. oil majors had invested in Central Asian oil and gas.[45]
However, the U.S. military and intelligence presence in the region increasingly came to be overtly predicated on counterterror operations. Yet, at the same time—similar to the U.S. operations in Bosnia a few years earlier—the ostensible Arab Afghan/al-Qaeda arch-enemies of the U.S. were in the Balkans acting in ways that furthered U.S. geopolitical goals.
Specifically, al-Qaeda forces were working in concert with the U.S.-backed terrorist/mafia organization known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). U.S. military intervention in Kosovo took place through most of 1998 and the first half of 1999. Interpol in 1999 reported that an elite KLA unit in Kosovo was being led by Muhammad al-Zawahiri—a top al Qaeda lieutenant and the brother of current al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri.[46]
The Zawahiri-KLA issue is something that the 9/11 Commission should have investigated and explained. Besides the Kosovo-al-Qaeda angle, an honest investigation would have looked into the U.S.-Azeri-al-Qaeda connections. The links represent important historical background, given that Baku, Azerbaijan, was one of the main hubs for al-Qaeda around the time of the August 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.[47]
While all of this was taking place in the years preceding 9/11, the U.S. and its oil majors were trying to strike a deal for a pipeline through Afghanistan. Notably—and as we detailed in our previous article—the Taliban failure to arrive at a workable pipeline deal acceptable to the U.S. coincided with further U.S. military and intelligence operations geared toward Afghanistan.
In 1999, two CIA counterterrorism officials—Cofer Black and Richard Blee—negotiated a deal with Uzbekistan.[48] This new liaison agreement apparently expanded upon the 1997 arrangement and expanded the targets to include not just bin Laden, but the Taliban government as well.[49]
Also, in 1999, CIA’s Richard Blee met with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and agreed to lobby Washington for increased support for Massoud. Massoud’s remote mountain redoubt of Panjshir was vital to American planning, because by this time it was the only major area not yet dominated by the Taliban. But Massoud himself presented problems to many in Washington.
According to journalist Ahmed Rashid, Massoud was “intensely disliked by the State Department for his … closeness to Iran.”[50] Most significantly, Massoud was dead set against U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan.[51] Yet in 2000, the preparations against Afghanistan rolled on, ramping up as U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) began working directly with the military of Uzbekistan.[52]
October of 2000 saw the bombing of the USS Cole by al-Qaeda forces off the coast of Yemen. In response, Richard Blee pressed the lame duck President Clinton to authorize expanding the Uzbek venture into a joint attack force that would include the Northern Alliance. Clinton refused. Under the new Bush administration, U.S.-led talks with the Taliban resumed. Despite open threats to the Taliban made by U.S. representatives at the talks, no political and/or pipeline deal was struck.
On September 4, 2001, the Bush cabinet held a meeting on NSPD-9, a plan for military action against Afghanistan. On September 9th, the main obstacle for any U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was removed when Northern Alliance chief Ahmed Massoud was assassinated by al-Qaeda suicide bombers.
The murder was ordered by the “blind sheik” Abdel-Rahman, a prisoner in U.S. custody. Abdel-Rahman was under close U.S. surveillance; so was his contact with Muslim radicals abroad, a New York postal worker named Ahmed Abdel-Sattar. Thus, the U.S. government almost certainly knew about the order and apparently allowed the assassination to happen.[53]
The next day, September 10th, Bush officials held another meeting to discuss the NSPD-9 plans for military action against Afghanistan. On the following day, the world witnessed the terror spectacle of September 11, 2001.
*
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Aaron Good is Editor at Large for CovertAction Magazine. His revised doctoral dissertation, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, is to be published by Skyhorse in the spring of 2022. You can follow Aaron on Twitter: @Aaron_Good_
Ben Howard is an independent researcher. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and daughter. You can follow Ben on Twitter: @housetrotter.
Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and poet. Peter has written many important books on the CIA and the so-called “deep state,” including Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California, 1993); The War Conspiracy, rev ed. (Skyhorse, 2008); The Road to 9/11 (University of California, 2007), American War Machine (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010) and The American Deep State (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). You can follow Peter’s work at: peterdalescott.net.
Notes
Aaron Good, “American Exception: Hegemony and the Dissimulation of the State,” Administration and Society 50, no. 1 (2018): 4–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399715581042. ↑
In the wake of 9/11, many letters containing weaponized anthrax were mailed to a number of Americans, including media figures and elected officials. Several people were killed and many more were injured. The attacks were erroneously linked to Iraq and contributed to the campaign for the launching of the Iraq War. They also served to hasten the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act since two of the targets were U.S. senators who were holding up passage of the bill. Though the letters were deceptively drafted to look like they were drafted by Islamist terrorists, the source of the Anthrax was later determined to be the U.S. government. The U.S. attempted to pin the blame for the false flag anthrax letter attacks on a “lone nut” U.S. scientist named Steven Hatfill. When he succeeded in proving his innocence, another “lone nut” U.S. scientist, Bruce Ivins, was identified as the culprit. The case was brought to an end when Ivins died as the result of an apparent suicide, but many observers do not believe that Ivins could have done what the government was accusing him of. See Graeme MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy (Atlanta: Clarity Press Inc., 2014). ↑
Most infamous was the use of a document about uranium from Niger that had already been deemed a forgery before being cited by the president in a speech during the run-up to the Iraq War. ↑
Nasser Saghafi-Ameri, “The Emerging NATO: Impact on Europe and Asia,” in Europe and Asia: Perspectives on the Emerging International Order, V.P. Malik and Erhard Crome, eds. (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers & Distributors, 2006), 153. ↑
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, “The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States” (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 214, https://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report_Ch5.htm. ↑
Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 30. ↑
Saghafi-Ameri, “The Emerging NATO: Impact on Europe and Asia,” 153. ↑
Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36, citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” The Washington Post, September 15, 1997. ↑
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 459. ↑
Rashid, “Epicentre of Terror,” 17. Massoud also had strong supporters at State, notably former U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Peter Tomsen. The real split was over Pakistan, and over the pro-Pakistan CIA. Massoud was taking aid from India, while Pakistan was supporting the Taliban, partly to develop a strong Muslim radical presence against Karimov in Uzbekistan. When the DOD came in, this split was subordinated to the goal of bringing in U.S. troops. But what to do about Pakistan divided Washington then and still does. ↑
Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failure of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 597-598, 796 n25. Journalist Pepe Escobar also confirmed this to our coauthor Aaron Good in personal correspondence. ↑
Ricks and Glasser, “U.S. Operated Secret Alliance With Uzbekistan.” ↑
Scott and Good, “Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001, a Crucial Pre-Condition for 9/11?” ↑
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According to recent polls about 15% of all American and British people think that the attacks in America on 9/11, (2001), were orchestrated by people within the U.S. Government. Among young people in Britain aged between 16 and 24, about 25% think that the attacks were an ‘inside job.’ Polls in other countries show similar or even greater numbers of people who either partially or completely disbelieve the official story of what happened on 9/11. These figures represent millions of people around the world. Yet in the week of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, no single serious mention of this was to be found in all the immense amount of media coverage given to the anniversary. I only know of one exception. In his blog [an internet special interest website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Ed.] for the New York Times, Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote that “What happened after 9/11…was deeply shameful… the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons. The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned.” Krugman has been mercilessly vilified in the U.S. media for his remarks. There is plenteous evidence, however, regarding the truth of Krugman’s comments about the 9/11 attacks being ‘used to justify a … war the Neocons wanted to fight’. The main part of this article will look into this evidence – and then also begin to look at the even more disturbing claims not mentioned by Krugman.
The end of the Cold War and the ‘New American Century’
As the Cold War came to an end in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the frozen stalemate in world politics that had existed since the end of World War Two thawed, a severe unease at the chaos that might result was felt at high levels of power and influence in American foreign policy and government. This unease was answered by an unprecedented and absolute determination for America to remain now the world’s single superpower and for American policy to now literally dominate the entire globe.
In 1986, William Kristol, an influential policy-maker in the government of George Bush Senior, declared that the aim of American foreign policy should be to achieve a: “global unilateralism”. In 1989, another columnist, Charles Krauthammer, wrote an article entitled: “Universal Dominion.” America, he stated, must now unambiguously take the lead in the new “unipolar world”. “The alternative to unipolarity is chaos’”, wrote Krauthammer, and said that what was needed was the USA: ”unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.” In 1992, the last year of George Bush Senior’s presidency, ideas such as this were aired for the first time in official government policy. Dick Cheney, the then secretary of defense, together with his undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad drafted a document for the Pentagon called: Defense Planning Guidance. The document was leaked to the Press, whereupon both its tone and its content caused such a strong negative reaction that the Bush administration quickly attempted to distance themselves from it. The document has been described, quite objectively, as: ‘in effect a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony.’[1]
Dick Cheney is seen as having been the prime creator of this ‘unipolarist blueprint’, helped by his above-mentioned colleagues. Between 1993 and 2001 they – and many other ‘neoconservatives’, or ‘neocons’ as they are often referred to, such as Donald Rumsfeld and William Kristol – lost their positions in government during the eight-year presidency of Bill Clinton. During their period in opposition, however, these neocons from the administration of George Bush Senior were the opposite of inactive. They laid plans and drew up manifestoes for global American domination, which later, during the presidency of the second George Bush (2001-2009), were eventually carried out as fully- fledged U.S. policy.
One of the most significant – and disturbing – activities of the neoconservatives during the Clinton presidency was the creation of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997. The project, in other words, for an American 21st Century – with America, as sole superpower, exercising dominion over the entire ‘unipolar world’. Among the founders of the PNAC were those who would hold the highest positions during the Presidency of George W. Bush: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, as well as Jeb Bush, George Bush’s brother and Dan Quayle, who had been vice-president under George Bush Senior. The (PNAC) was founded by William Kristol (known at one point as ‘Dan Quayle’s brain’) and Robert Kagan. It also included other key policy makers and thinkers, such as Francis Fukuyama, whose book The End of History set out the view that after the Cold War there were no more ideological struggles to be fought, for Western secular democracy must now be seen as valid for all places and all peoples.
The PNAC’s founding principles stated: ‘The history of this century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership… Such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next.’
In September 2000, three months before George Bush became President, and provided the PNAC with its long-awaited moment to try and make their ideas into official government policies, the PNAC published a 76-page document: Rebuilding American Defenses. After an introduction, proposing that the document be seen by the incoming administration as “a road map for the nation’s immediate and future defense plans”, the opening chapter made the document’s intentions completely clear and threw down its gauntlet. To paraphrase: the supremely opportune moment after the Cold War for achieving and maintaining American hegemony across the globe had been shamefully let slip by the Clinton Administration, and without drastic and urgent measures might be lost altogether.
The chapter stressed once again the difference of America’s military priorities today compared with those during the Cold War: “America’s strategic goal used to be containment of the Soviet Union; today the task is to preserve an international security environment conducive to American interests and ideals.” (The document’s seemingly innocuous tone should not fool anyone who calls to mind the vast numbers of deaths caused by the military might and ‘firepower’ by which this ‘international security environment’ is actually ‘preserve(d).’)
Continuing in the same tone, it outlined four main tasks for the U.S. military:
To secure and expand the ‘zones of democratic peace’.
To deter the rise of a new great superpower competitor.
To defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East.
To preserve American pre-eminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies.
We will return to this fourth point, which plays a hugely important role in the PNAC’s “roadmap”, but to carry out all four would obviously demand a massively increased U.S. Defense Budget. The PNAC document therefore set about to demonstrate the utter necessity, as they saw it, for such a budget to be granted.
First of all the document launched an attack against the Clinton administration’s “decade of defense neglect.” The document pointed to the fact that at the time of writing: “America spends less than 3 percent of its gross domestic product on national defense, less than at any time since before World War II.” Under Clinton: “approximately $426 billion in defense investments have been deferred, creating a weapons procurement ‘bow wave’ of immense proportions.”
The challenge was then thrown down to the next president of the United States: “he must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership, or he must pull back from the security commitments that are the measure of America’s position as the world’s sole superpower… This choice will be among the first to confront the president.”
“The transformation of war made possible by new technologies.”
The fifth chapter of Rebuilding American Defenses addresses the fourth task referred to above. In brief – and as, after the huge numbers of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan we increasingly hear called for today – a new form of warfare was seen as necessary, different from that carried out by conventional ground, sea and air forces. Namely, the possibility both to detect and to intercept, from space, any enemy missile the moment it has been launched. To this end: “The first element in any missile defense network should be a galaxy of surveillance satellites with sensors capable of acquiring enemy ballistic missiles immediately upon launch. Once a missile is tracked and targeted, this information needs to be instantly disseminated through a world-wide command-and-control system, including direct links to interceptors.” (My italics.)
The PNAC describes the need, in this context, for “three new missions” in order “to maintain American military preeminence that is consistent with the requirements of a strategy of American global leadership”. These are – 1: “Global missile defenses.” 2: “Control of space and cyberspace… An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its allies in space or the “infosphere” will find it difficult to exert global political leadership.” And 3: “a two-stage strategy for transforming conventional forces” – a first transitional stage, followed by “true transformation, featuring new systems, organizations and operational concepts”.
It does not demand much imagination to envisage the unprecedented amounts of extra Defense expenditure this would involve, or the problems the PNAC would be likely to face from international treaties concerning missile proliferation, or indeed from “ordinary citizens” concerning the presence of a new “galaxy of surveillance satellites.” Even the PNAC themselves acknowledged this.
The expressed need for an event like 9/11
The opening words of the chapter had expressed unequivocally: “To preserve American military pre-eminence the Department of Defense must move more aggressively to experiment with new technologies”. But how, given the obstacles mentioned in the last paragraph, could the need for this central element of the PNAC’s Defense Plan gain acceptance – and so become reality? And do this quickly, moreover, for, as the PNAC never stopped restating, the opportunity was fast running out for America to secure its role as the world’s single superpower. There was, in fact, only one way the PNAC could envisage which would enable this to happen. Only some massive, catastrophic event, which would be etched into people’s minds and psyches, might so change things that the currently prevailing obstacles of funding, international law and public opinion might be overcome. This led to the document’s most ominous statement: “(T)he process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Remarkable as these words are for expressing the need, in advance, for an event such as 9/11, they are in fact only one of several such comments made between 1997 and 2000 from people at the highest levels of U.S policy making. Enter Philip Zelikow – the person who, after 9/11, would be given the main responsibility by the Bush Government for overseeing and authoring the 9/11 Commission Report – the supposedly complete and unbiased official report into the events of 9/11.
Zelikow, together with Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor at the time of 9/11, had played hugely significant roles in forming U.S. policy regarding the direction it took at the close of the end of the Cold War. At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the final end of the Soviet Union (1989-1991) Rice was Senior Director of Soviet and East European Affairs in the National Security Council. In this capacity she helped to determine U.S. policies in favour of German reunification, aided by Zelikow, who was later to be described in the Washington Post as: “a one-person think-tank for Rice.”[2] In 1995 he and Rice co-wrote a book called: Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft. Zelikow was also the director of a major ‘think-tank’ on addressing the ending of the Cold War, called the Aspen Strategy Group. This counted among its members Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and other founder members of the Project for the American Century.
In 1997 Zelikow co-edited a book called Why People Don’t Trust Government, in which he described that history, far from being definable as truth, is in fact “defined… by those critical people and events that… form… the public’s presumptions about its immediate past… Such presumptions are beliefs thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and shared in common within the relevant political community.” (These remarks are of great interest coming from the person who would be given responsibility for the official ‘presumptions’ about 9/11.)
The need to imagine an event like 9/11
After this, Zelikow became project director of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group. (This stemmed from the Kennedy School of Government’s project: Visions of Governance for the Twenty-First Century.)
Zelikow co-authored an article on the work done by the group, entitled: Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy, which was published in the November/December 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs. The article stated:
“(T)he danger of Catastrophic Terrorism is new and grave… The objective of the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group is to suggest program and policy changes that can be taken by the United States government… to prepare the nation better for the emerging threat of Catastrophic Terrorism.”
The title of the article’s first section described the first thing the authors saw to be necessary: Imagining the Transforming Event. The authors couldn’t help mentioning the assistance already given for this by Hollywood movies:
“Long [a] part of Hollywood’s and Tom Clancy’s [author and scriptwriter for espionage and military techno-thriller storylines. Ed.] repertory of nightmarish scenarios, catastrophic terrorism is a real possibility. In theory, the enemies of the United States have motive, means, and opportunity… A successful attack with weapons of mass destruction could certainly kill thousands, or tens of thousands. If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or the distribution of a deadly pathogen, the chaos and devastation would have gone far beyond our meager ability to describe it.”
Friend and colleague of many of the founders of the PNAC, Zelikow then reiterated the need for the U.S. to transform its conventional approach to warfare, especially as others were already doing this: “Practically unchallengeable American military superiority on the conventional battlefield pushes this country’s enemies toward the unconventional alternatives.”
A fascinating footnote inserted at this point appears to point to the presence of highly detailed research into all aspects of such “threat scenarios” which would never be widely known about:
“The most detailed and credible threat scenarios, based on close analysis of specific vulnerabilities, should not be published at all. These would be indispensable but quite sensitive documents to be prepared by relatively small groups of knowledgeable officials and expert consultants.”
The article then urged readers to: “imagine the possibilities for themselves, because the most serious constraint on current policy is lack of imagination.” It then went into considerably more detail than the PNAC document had as to the exact consequences that would ensue from such an event – fitting in very many ways to the event that did take place three years later on 9/11:
“An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history… Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great “success” or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a ‘before’ and ‘after.’ ”
The article then reiterated the PNAC’s demands for necessary changes in defence policy and massive increases in defence funding: “The threat of catastrophic terrorism is therefore a priority national security problem…” The threat thus deserves the kind of attention we now devote to threats of military nuclear attack, as in(…) the resources we devote to defense.”
Further expressions of the need for a “New Pearl Harbor”
The third person who spoke in this way was Zbigniew Brzezinski. In his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), Brzezinski wrote that in America “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion… except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well being.”
Both economic and human sacrifices would need to be made for “imperial mobilization”, and the only thing that would make the American people willing to make these would be “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.” Earlier on in the book, Brzezinski, like both Zelikow and the PNAC, had named the great precedent in recent American history where a reluctant public had completely changed its views and given its support to a massive war effort – when they had supported: “America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”
A fourth example is Donald Rumsfeld, founder member of the PNAC which had described the urgent need for a “transformation of warfare”, involving, among other things, the ability to intercept ballistic missiles from space. In preparation for putting this into practice, in 1998 Rumsfeld chaired the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. In late 2000 he further chaired the U.S. Commission to Assess National Security Space Management and Organization. This latter so-called “Rumsfeld Commission”, announced identical needs, not surprisingly, to those expressed by the PNAC: military “transformation” and the “weaponization of space.” Yet again, the problem was raised of such essential changes being blocked by “resistant bureaucracies”. Yet again, the image was given of what might prove the only possible means to effect such change: “The question is… whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people – a “Space Pearl Harbor” – will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act.”[3] Rumsfeld chaired this commission right up until the end of December 2000, when he was nominated U.S. Secretary of Defense in the new presidential administration of George Bush.
‘No Defense’!
One may well have imagined that with George Bush as President, Dick Cheney as Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense and Paul Wolfowitz as Rumsfeld’s deputy – all the PNAC’s hopes might now be fulfilled. But, during the first nine months of 2001, the leading neocons found, to their horror, that their demands for massive increases in Defense Funding received no more support than they had under Clinton. Having spent eight years in opposition, preparing for this moment and being, by their own admission, the opposite of pacifist in their approach, they were furious at having their expectations thwarted in this way.
On July 23rd, 2001, the main founders of PNAC, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, wrote an article in The Weekly Standard[4] called ‘No Defense.’ From its opening words its message could not have been clearer:
“Here’s some unsolicited advice for two old friends, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz: Resign… (I)t may be the only way to focus the attention of the American people – and the Bush administration – on the impending visceration of the American military. If our suggestion sounds extreme, consider the following… A few weeks ago Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld went to the White House to present his Fiscal Year 2002 budget request… Rumsfeld was mauled… This was the third time in six months that Rumsfeld had had his head handed to him on a platter… Those of us who expressed concern about the Bush administration’s shorting of the military were told not to worry… But (n)ow it’s clear that there is no real prospect for a meaningful defense increase – this year, next year, or for the remainder of Bush’s first term.”
Kristol and Kagan went on: “(T)he consequence of an underfunded military will be the steady erosion of our ability to defend all of America’s vital interests, not only in Europe but in Asia and in the Persian Gulf as well… It now seems certain that the Bush administration will officially abandon the so-called ‘two-war’ standard that has served since the Cold War as the rule of thumb for what is needed for American global pre-eminence.”
[The ‘Two-War’ standard relates to America’s policy at this time of retaining a force capable of rapidly and decisively conducting two large regional wars. Ed.]
Towards the end of the article they then laid down their challenge to the Bush administration:
“Perhaps it’s an isolationist’s dream. For everyone else it’s a nightmare. It ought to be George Bush’s nightmare. For if the president does not reverse course now, he may go down in history as the man who let American military power atrophy and America’s post-Cold War pre-eminence slip away.”
This ‘nightmare’ scenario could clearly not be allowed to continue: “Surely George W. Bush did not seek office to preside over the retrenchment of American power and influence. Surely Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz did not come back to the Pentagon to preside over the decline of the American military.”[5]
‘No Defense’ (July 2011) may have been offering one last chance to those capable of providing the necessary increases to the American Defense Budget. It sounds far more, though, like a clear call to action, in the face of the certainty that these increases would not be granted. Another article in the Weekly Standard, published on the day before 9/11, (Sept 10th, 2001), stated categorically that all chance of any such increases was over. The article, called ‘The Phony Defense Budget War’ was written by Gary Schmitt, Co-Chairman of the PNAC, and Tom Donnelly, the chief author of Rebuilding America’s Defenses which had mentioned that without “an event like a new Pearl Harbor” the PNAC might never see its aims realized.
The article repeated its own and Donald Rumsfeld’s diagnosis of the present crisis: “Over the past decade, hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons research and procurement has been deferred… The challenge of transformation is real. ‘The proliferation of weapons with increasing range and power into the hands of multiple potential adversaries means that the coming years will see an expansion of risk’ to American cities’, warns Rumsfeld.”
The article’s conclusion then gave its verdict on the “disgraceful” failure of the U.S. Government to respond to that crisis:
“(T)he promise of conventional-force transformation, global missile defenses protecting America and its allies, and control of space will be deferred until the distant future… As Rumsfeld himself recently said, ‘Each year we put off these critical investments, each year we kick the can down the road, we are digging ourselves deeper and deeper in the hole’… (T)he president and the Congress, Republicans and Democrats – (are all now) irresponsibly kicking the can down the road. A pretty disgraceful performance all around, but particularly disappointing for an administration that assured us help was on the way.”[6]
September 11th, 2001 – ‘The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century’
For the neocons, though, even if for nobody else, help already was on the way. The events of the following day, September 11th, 2001, as we know, changed everything. Hard as it may be for many people to look past the immense personal tragedy and suffering wrought by the events of 9/11, we must recognize that 9/11 for the neocons was the ‘Pearl Harbor’ moment they had been waiting for.
They themselves were the first to note this. President Bush was reported to have written in his diary that evening: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century took place today.”[7] Donald Rumsfeld admitted that 9/11 created: “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.”[8] Philip Zelikow – who, remember, would later be given responsibility for the 9/11 Commission Report – the supposedly unbiased report into what took place on 9/11 – authored in 2002, the National Security Strategy of the United States of America, stating: “The events of September 11th, 2001… opened vast, new opportunities.”
Within one day, all the expressed intentions of the neocons suddenly proved possible and many received almost immediate public and government support. With regard to Defense Spending the Pentagon was immediately granted by Congress an extra $40 billion, with far more to follow. According to Zelikow, writing this September, 2011: “Measured in constant dollars, spending on national defence in the last ten years has gone up about 67 per cent.”[9](!) The wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq had also been on the neocons’ agenda and the obstacles to fighting them were immediately removed. These wars in turn made possible the much called for military “transformation” or RMA – “revolution in military affairs.” As Andrew Bacevich writes: “After 9/11, the Pentagon shifted from the business of theorizing about war to the business of actually fighting it. This created an opening for RMA… War plans… became the means for demonstrating once for all the efficacy of the ideas advanced by… Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.”[10]
This “transformation”, as we quoted earlier, demanded the ‘control of space and cyber-space’, necessitating a “galaxy of surveillance satellites.” The huge U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), brought in with incredible speed after 9/11, and under whose restrictions everyone in America has since then had to suffer, instigated a gigantic increase in both public and private surveillance. Last but not least, the neocons had admitted that much of what they intended encountered difficulties from – frankly – inconvenient international treaties about what was permissible and impermissible regarding rules of war, interrogation, surveillance, etc.
The 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, authored by Zelikow, took unprecedented new steps, permitting the U.S., for example, to take preemptive military action against enemy threats, even ‘before (these threats) are fully formed.’ As David Ray Griffin writes: ‘This is a step of great significance, because it involves an explicit statement by the United States that the basic principles of international law, as embodied in the United Nations, does not apply to its own behaviour.’[11] This viewpoint, that as regards international politics, America needs only be obedient to itself, has all too frequently been encountered since that time. Already in March 2001 PNAC member Charles Krauthammer had starkly and brutally expressed it: “The U.S. can reshape, indeed remake reality on its own… America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms… and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”[12]
Merely a coincidence?
Let us briefly recapitulate: individuals and groups at the highest levels of American policy-making and power had announced unambiguously what role in world politics they saw it necessary for the U.S. to play after the end of the Cold War. Namely: “undisputed masters of the world.” (Krauthammer.) Four of the most influential of voices – Donald Rumsfeld, Philip Zelikow, Zbigniew Brzezinski and the Project for the New American Century – had even declared that it might take an event something like a ‘New Pearl Harbor’ to create the support both from government and from the public necessary to bring this about. With the start of the Bush Presidency, at the beginning of 2001, these individuals and groups then moved into leading postions of power. To begin with, as they had predicted, little public support could be found for the huge defense budget increases and military (and security) changes and actions they envisaged. Then… 9/11 happened. A “watershed event in America’s history.” (Zelikow – Catastrophic Terrorism.)
Almost immediately all their plans were able to be realized, and have continued being implemented until today.
Were the crime of 9/11 to be investigated like any other murder inquiry, where it would be foolish just to accept whatever may appear to have happened, there is little doubt as to which direction one would first wish to look in for suspects. For those who not only had a motive for the event, but had openly expressed this motive and who had, in fact, achieved from the event everything they had hoped. (The PNAC would certainly be one such starting place. Nine days after 9/11, they wrote an open letter to George Bush which began: “We write to endorse your admirable commitment to ‘lead the world to victory’ in the war against terrorism.” They outlined all the actions that would “constitute the minimum necessary if this war is to be fought effectively and brought to a successful conclusion” and stated: “We urge that there be no hesitation in requesting whatever funds for defense are needed to allow us to win this war.”)[13]
Of course, there was no question whatsoever of the events of 9/11 being investigated like an ordinary murder inquiry. The whole reason that the event galvanized public opinion in the way it had been predicted it might, was because of the utterly overwhelming impression it produced that America was under full-scale attack from foreign Islamic terrorists, providing full justification, therefore, for the “global war on terror” that was announced.
Thinking the unthinkable
But… slowly at first, then gradually snowballing to the percentages mentioned in this article’s first paragraph, people started to look more closely at what had happened on September 11th, 2001, not just blindly accepting what appeared to have happened, employing their wide awake faculties of thinking and perception. As they did so, they began to realize that the never to be forgotten images of the Twin Towers almost exploding before people’s eyes, pulverizing into huge, surging dust clouds, then collapsing straight downwards at almost free-fall speed, with the colossally thick and strong steel core of the buildings – built to withstand almost anything – bursting and shattering into small pieces, could not have been brought about through the fires, however horrific, caused by the aeroplanes plunging into them. No steel-framed buildings have ever, before or since, collapsed in this way as the result of fires.
There are, as everyone who has even lightly researched the issue will know, scores of other contradictions and anomalies regarding the official reports about what happened on 9/11. People can – and should – read or view these and think them through for themselves.
There is one event, however, that occurred on 9/11, whose official explanation is so obviously impossible that it has, rightly, been seen as the one unmistakable ‘smoking gun’ pointing to U.S. complicity, at the highest levels, with what took place on that day. As everyone will remember who watched the events on television, there were three buildings in New York that collapsed on 9/11. After the collapse of the Twin Towers, a third building also came down, another massive steel-framed skyscraper, known as World Trade Centre 7. It had not been hit by any planes. There had been fires in the building caused by burning debris falling from the neighbouring Twin Towers. But its fires were not remotely comparable to those in the two buildings hit by aeroplanes – (WTC1 and WTC2.) Yet this whole vast skyscraper, WTC7, collapsed “into its own footprint” in a matter of seconds – 6 1/2 seconds! For the first eight stories it fell at what has officially been recognized as ‘freefall speed’. Television commentators on the day unhesitatingly pointed out that there was only one thing they had ever known to make buildings collapse in this way: carefully planned controlled demolition, using explosives.
Not only have many firefighters and demolitions experts confirmed this view, but an ever increasing number of professional scientists, engineers and architects have also now demonstrated in great detail – for anyone willing to consider the evidence – that the collapse of WTC7 was unquestionably caused by controlled demolition.[14] Architect Richard Gage, for example, founder of Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, shows in a ten minute video clip how the collapse of WTC7 provides evidence of all ten features of a standard controlled demolition.[15] Another short video: ‘Architects and Engineers: Solving the Mystery of WTC7’ presents the voices of many scientists, architects and engineers on the issue, such as Kamal Obeid, who describes the utter impossibility that fire could have made every single core column of the building collapse simultaneously, as had to happen for it to fall as it did.[16] And once we see that the collapse of WTC7 could only have been caused by controlled demolition, we also see that a different kind of controlled demolition[17] is the only thing able to explain the explosive pulverization and collapse of the Twin Towers themselves.
This research has greatly increased, over the years, in its thoroughness and exactitude, thanks to the work, for example, of physics professor, Steven Jones or of architect Richard Gage, so that everyone now can, and should, examine this evidence for themselves. I have merely pointed to the existence of this evidence in relation to Building 7. The official reports about all the other events of 9/11 have also been subjected to detailed examination, revealing many other glaring inconsistencies and falsifications. Most of these can be looked into, for example, in David Ray Griffin’s groundbreaking book, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004) where he presents what he calls prima facie evidence and then, in Debunking 9/11 Debunking, (2007), where, by also examining the inevitable attempts to ‘debunk’ this research, he is able to describe the evidence for U.S. complicity in the events of 9/11 – in other words that it was an ‘inside job’ – as being “overwhelming”.
9/11 and the Threshold of Knowledge
Time-wise, though, we have jumped ahead of ourselves, for it would be absurd not to recognize the immense hurdles – both in the outer world and within themselves – that individuals had to, and still have to overcome, before first of all imagining, and then becoming able to accept that only ‘insider’ U.S. involvement is able to explain the events of 9/11. David Ray Griffin describes this well: “It seemed to me simply beyond belief that the Bush administration – even the Bush administration – would do such a heinous thing. I assumed that those who were claiming otherwise must be ‘conspiracy theorists’ in the derogatory sense – which means, roughly, crackpots… I fully sympathize, therefore, with the fact that most people have not examined the evidence. Life is short and the list of conspiracy theories is long and we must all exercise judgement about which things are worth our investment of time. I had assumed that conspiracy theories about 9/11 were below the threshold of possible credibility.”[18] Physicist David Chandler also describes how: ‘It took some kind of consciousness-raising on my part before I was willing to look at the possibilities.’[19] Richard Gage describes how for a long time he had simply accepted the official story. And then how, when he realized that he wasn’t being responsible if he didn’t try and take stock of the inconsistencies that were being reported, he had the experience of waking up again to his usual ability to bring his own thinking to bear on his perceptions and experience. And once he did so, as an architect with years of experience behind him in designing steel-framed buildings, like the boy able to see quite clearly that the “emperor has no clothes”, he realized that of course fires could never have led WTC7 to collapse in the way it did; that of course the only explanation for the phenomena everyone witnessed is controlled demolition.
And once people began waking up to this, they woke up to very much else as well, such as all the intentions described in the main part of this article. And millions of people, the world over, are also now waking up to or are already awake to all this. Meanwhile, the ‘official’ view remains impervious to these developments. The 9/11 Commission Report, headed by Philip Zelikow, did not even include a mention of the anomalies in the collapse of WTC 7. In a recent issue of Prospect magazine, in an article entitled: ‘Ten years after 9/11 what have we learned?’ Zelikow merely writes: “The historical work of the commission about what happened before and on 9/11 does not yet need any significant amendment.”[20] Zelikow was publically challenged as to why his report had included no discussion of Building 7, for example, and he answered, significantly, that many things were not discussed in the report, for “you couldn’t have sustained the narrative.”21 We will discuss this comment further in Part Two of this article, look further at how the 9/11 Truth Movement and the official “narrative” have developed, and also attempt to see a wider perspective or ‘narrative’ which is able to include all that has been pointed to in this article.
*
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This was first published in New View magazine, issue 61, Autumn 2011.
Notes
Andrew Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44.
Close Adviser to Rice Plans to Resign, Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, November 28, 2006.
Report of the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management andOrganization.
The neoconservative journal started by William Kristol and financed by Rupert Murdoch.
‘No Defense’ on PNAC website: ‘Defense and National Security’ section – 2001:http://www.newamericancentury.org/defensenationalsecurity2001.htm
Same as note 5 – ‘The Phony Defense Budget War.’
According to the Washington Post, January 27th, 2002.
New York Times, October 12th, 2001.
‘The twilight war. Ten years after 9/11, what have we learned?’ Philip Zelikow. ProspectMagazine, September, 2011.
Bacevich, The New American Militarism, p.173.
‘Neocon Imperialism, 9/11, and the Attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq’, David Ray Griffin.Available on the web at ‘Information Clearing House.’ I am greatly indebted to Griffin’s wonderfully clear and thorough piece which has been the source for several of the quotations in the present article.
‘Bless our Pax Americana’, Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, March 22nd, 1991.
Letter to President Bush on the War on Terrorism, September 20, 2001. ‘Letters/Statements’section of PNAC website.
See “9/11 Blueprint for Truth Video” in 10, 30 or 60 minute version – Architects andEngineers for 911 Truth website: http://www.ae911truth.org See: ’Videos by AE911Truth’.
Same as note 14.
15-minDocumentary: “Architects & Engineers: Solving the Mystery of WTC 7” at http://www.ae911truth.org.
WTC7 first exploded at its base, whereas with WTC1 and WTC2 the collapse began at the tops of the buildings.
The New Pearl Harbor – Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 – David Ray Griffin – Foreword by Michael Meacher, MP – Arris Books, 2004 – pp. xvii-xviii.
See Video in note 16.
See note 9.
See: ‘Zelikow’s parallel universe’ – Snowshoe films – after
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The battle lines over mandatory COVID-19 vaccines are now going full steam ahead in the U.S. as the Biden Administration is announcing today that all federal employees must now get a COVID-19 shot as a condition for employment, and that they are eliminating the testing opt-out.
The argument that only COVID-19 shots will end the endless “pandemic” and the lie that hospitals are over 90% full of unvaccinated people are being used as justification for mandatory mass vaccination.
It doesn’t take much research on one’s own to bypass the corporate media and find out that they are lying, and that there are numerous reports that the exact opposite situation is now happening in the U.S. and around the world, which is that the hospitals are full of people who have already been vaccinated with COVID-19 shots and that the ones who have survived are now filling our hospitals.
This is evident from the last release of data into the government Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which as of last Friday shows that following COVID-19 shots, there have been 13,911 deaths, 18,098 permanent disabilities, 76,160 ER visits, 56,912 hospitalizations, 2,933,377 injury symptoms, and 14,327 life threatening events.
And these are just the cases that have been reported and that the CDC has allowed to be released to the public. Many healthcare workers have stated that there is pressure from doctors and hospital administrations to NOT relate injuries to the COVID-19 shots and to not report them in VAERS, which one nurse stated takes over 30 minutes to do for a single case and is very time consuming.
And just this past week, the Toronto Sun ran a story reporting that more than 100 Ontario youth were sent to the hospital for vaccine-related heart problems.
A report quietly released last week by Public Health Ontario (PHO) tallies the number of people in the province who have presented to hospital with heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination, and it skews heavily towards young people.
As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontarians under the age of 25. That’s slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents. (Full article.)
Here is a video report I put together with testimony from nurses, a doctor, and an occupational therapist explaining what they are currently seeing in the hospitals, so you can hear it yourself from the frontline workers.
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This Article was first published by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth in 2012
A decade has passed since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and many people feel that we have still not had a real investigation into what really happened that day.
Indeed, a growing number of citizens believe that the probe into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) was at best incomplete and at worst fraudulent. These critics include the 1,600-plus architects and engineers who have signed the AE911Truth petition demanding an unbiased, independent investigation into the attacks.
By contrast, Popular Mechanics (PM) has been the primary cheerleader in the mainstream media defending the NIST reports ever since its book, Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up To the Facts, was published in 2006.
For the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, PM put out a second version of its book, which it updated in an attempt to dismiss new findings that corroborate the controlled demolition hypothesis. The main revisions concern the collapse of the Twin Towers and World Trade Center 7.
The revised version of Popular Mechanics’ book Debunking 9/11 Myths, far right, continues to defend myths that are scientifically impossible.
Our 10-part series, which starts with Part 1 today, demonstrates that PM has still not adequately explained the numerous anomalies surrounding the collapse of the Twin Towers (WTC 1 and 2) and WTC 7—anomalies that prove the structures were destroyed with explosives.
World Trade Center Towers 1 & 2
The introduction to PM’s chapter on the collapse of the Twin Towers briefly discusses the main theory put forward by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement: “The buildings were brought down intentionally—not by hijacked airplanes, but by government-planted bombs or a controlled demolition” (pg. 28).
PM then goes on to give a few examples of people promoting this theory. One of the people they cite is a Danish writer named Henrik Melvang, who, according to PM, “markets his book and video claiming the Apollo moon landings were a hoax” (pg. 28). This is obviously an attempt on PM’s part to portray those who question the collapse of the Towers as conspiracy theorists who have irrational beliefs.
PM also cites Morgan Reynolds, the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor during President George Bush’s first term, as someone who believes that the three WTC towers were destroyed through controlled demolition.
We must ask ourselves why PM would choose to cite these people as examples of those who question the cause of the collapse of the Towers. Why didn’t the book cite anyone with experience in the fields of engineering and building construction? According to PM, it’s because the 9/11 Truth Movement doesn’t have any technical credentials. In its 2011 book, PM writes:
Though Reynolds and a handful of other skeptics cite academic credentials to lend credence to their views, not one of the leading conspiracy theorists has a background in engineering, construction, or related fields (pg. 28-29).
This statement is by far one of the most off-the-mark passages in PM’s book. One need only look at what most consider the lead organization in the 9/11 Truth community, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, to see that there are currently over 1,600 professional architects and engineers with backgrounds in engineering, architecture, and building construction who question the destruction of the three WTC high-rises. How can PM possibly have omitted mention of more than a thousand experts who all contend that the Twin Towers and WTC 7 were brought down with explosives? In PM’s entire 216-page book, there is not a single mention made of AE911Truth or its founder, architect Richard Gage.
When one looks back at their 2006 book, we can see that this exact same statement appears on the exact same pages. This fact shows how PM has decided to structure their new book: i.e., update it only where it benefits them. As we will see, this tactic is used more than once in PM’s grossly flawed book.
1.1 The Empire State Building Accident
PM discusses the incident in 1945 when a B-25 bomber lost in the fog crashed into the side of the Empire State Building. They claim that “some conspiracy theorists point to [this incident] as proof that commercial planes hitting the World Trade Center could not bring down the towers” (pg. 29).
To counter this assertion, PM compares the construction of the Towers to the construction of the Empire State Building, calling the former structures “in some ways more fragile” (pg. 30).
They also quote structural engineer Jon Magnusson, who says, “These structures look massive, but they’re mostly air. They are air, punctuated with thin layers of concrete and steel” (pg. 30).
While it is true that the Towers were mostly empty space by volume, this is the case with any large skyscraper. The idea that they were in some way less structurally sound than the Empire State Building is contradicted by a variety of technical sources, including this telegram written by Richard Roth, partner at Emery Roth & Sons, which was the architectural firm that designed the Twin Towers:
THE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS CARRIED OUT BY THE FIRM OF WORTHINGTON, SKILLING, HELLE & JACKSON IS THE MOST COMPLETE AND DETAILED OF ANY EVER MADE FOR ANY BUILDING STRUCTURE. THE PRELIMINARY CALCULATIONS ALONE COVER 1,200 PAGES AND INVOLVE OVER 100 DETAILED DRAWINGS.
…
4. BECAUSE OF ITS CONFIGURATION, WHICH IS ESSENTIALLY THAT OF A STEEL BEAM 209′ DEEP, THE TOWERS ARE ACTUALLY FAR LESS DARING STRUCTURALLY THAN A CONVENTIONAL BUILDING SUCH AS THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDINGWHERE THE SPINE OR BRACED AREA OF THE BUILDING IS FAR SMALLER IN RELATION TO ITS HEIGHT.
…
5. THE BUILDING AS DESIGNED IS SIXTEEN TIMES STIFFER THAN A CONVENTIONAL STRUCTURE. THE DESIGN CONCEPT IS SO SOUND THAT THE STRUCTURAL ENGINEER HAS BEEN ABLE TO BE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE IN HIS DESIGN WITHOUT ADVERSELY AFFECTING THE ECONOMICS OF THE STRUCTURE.1
It is quite apparent that the Towers were extremely well built—and may have been even more structurally sound than the Empire State Building. Even supporters of the official conspiracy theory, such as Thomas Eager, praise the buildings’ structural integrity: “The towers withstood the initial impact of the aircraft. . . . [T]he buildings had more than 1,000 times the mass of the aircraft. . . . [T]his ability to withstand the initial impact is hardly surprising” [Eagar and Musso, JOM, 53 (12) (2001), pp. 8-11].
Next PM quotes WTC assistant structural engineer Leslie Robertson’s comment that the Towers were only designed to take the impact of a Boeing 707, but did not take into consideration the fires that would be produced by the jet fuel. After 9/11, Robertson noted, “I don’t know if we considered the fire damage that [a plane strike] would cause” (pg. 31).
However, someone evidently did consider that problem, and that someone was John Skilling, the original WTC lead engineer. When interviewed in 1993, Skilling told the Seattle Times:
“We looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings, even to the extent of an airplane hitting the side. . . . Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed. [But] the building structure would still be there.”2
Although PM mentions John Skilling briefly in their book, they make no mention of this statement from him. Apparently, PM felt no need to quote the lead WTC engineer on his views about the structural strength and stability of the Towers.
Interestingly, PM quotes a few sources who, after 9/11, claimed that the Towers were doomed once the planes impacted the buildings, yet virtually every engineering source quoted before9/11 said just the opposite.3
1.2 Widespread Damage
The next section of PM’s book deals mainly with the damage to the lobby floors of the Towers and mentions the assertion by the 9/11 Truth Movement that lobby destruction proves explosives were planted in the buildings. The argument that the PM book puts forward is different: It claims that the jet fuel from the planes traveled down through the elevator shafts and caused explosions that damaged the lobby.
The walls and trees in the lobby of one of the Twin Towers show no evidence of being burned by a jet fuel fireball, which Popular Mechanics claims was the cause of an earlier explosion.
Although viewpoints differ within the 9/11 Truth Movement4 regarding the cause of these explosions, some features of the lobby damage indicate that they were not due to a fireball explosion from the jet fuel. For example, the white marble walls show no signs of being exposed to fire. Also, the plants next to the blown-out windows show no signs of having been burned.
And at least one explosives expert said he does not believe the damage was caused by the jet fuel traveling down the elevator shafts, based on the appearance of the lobby.5
Whether or not the lobby damage is indicative of explosives, however, is essentially irrelevant to the discussion of the Towers’ demolitions, since the collapse sequence started above the plane impact zone, not at the lower levels. The lobby damage is not necessary to prove the Twin Towers were destroyed by controlled demolition; there are far more obvious indicators of demolition that will be discussed later in this report. The fact that PM claims that the jet fuel travelled down the elevator shafts is actually more damaging to their case, for it shows that not all of the fuel from the planes contributed to the fires that allegedly brought the Towers down.6
This section of PM’s book also discusses the testimony of firefighter Louie Cacchioli, one of over one hundred first responders who said that there were bombs in the WTC. PM counters this by asserting that members of the 9/11 Truth Movement have taken his quotes out of context. Though Caccholi himself does not believe explosives were placed in the buildings, numerous quotes from firefighters and first responders strongly indicate that explosives were placed in the buildings.7
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Notes
1 Quoted from: City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, pg. 134-136
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Michel Chossudovsky’s Presentation to the 9/11 International Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF) November 2012
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At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an in-depth police investigation.
CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those [foreign governments] who harbor them”.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, without mentioning Afghanistan, pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”
That same evening at 9:30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11:00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The following text was first presented at the International Conference on “9/11 Revisited – Seeking the Truth”, Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF), Kuala Lumpur, November 2012
Introduction: Commemorating 9/11
The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history, a decisive watershed, a breaking point.
Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11.
September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society. The post September 11, 2001 era is marked by the outright criminalization of the US State, including its judicial, foreign policy, national security and intelligence apparatus.
9/11 marks the onslaught of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a “war without borders”, a global war of conquest.
A far-reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11.
9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement and the inauguration of “Police State USA”.
In assessing the crimes associated with 9/11 in the context of a legal procedure, we must distinguish between those associated with the actual event, namely the loss of life and the destruction of property on 9/11, from the crimes committed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 “in the name of 9/11”.
The latter build upon the former. We are dealing with two related dimensions of criminality. The crimes committed “in the name of 9/11” involving acts of war are far-reaching, resulting in the deaths of millions of people as well as the destruction of entire countries.
The 9/11 event in itself– which becomes symbolic– is used to justify the onslaught of the post 9/11 US-NATO military agenda, under the banner of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), not to mention the ushering in of the Homeland police state and the repeal of civil liberties.
The crimes committed in the name of 9/11 broadly consist of two intimately related processes:
1. The launching of the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification to Wage a War of Conquest. This GWOT mandate was used to justify the 2001 and 2003 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The GWOT mandate has since extended its grip to a large number of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where the US and its NATO allies are intervening selectively under a counterterrorism mandate.
2. The derogation of civil liberties and the instatement of an Orwellian police state apparatus within Western countries. In the US, the introduction of the PATRIOT legislation and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks set the stage for the subsequent restructuring of the judicial and law enforcement apparatus, culminating in the legalization of extrajudicial assassinations under an alleged counter-terrorism mandate.
The 9/11 attacks constitute what is referred to in intelligence parlance as a “massive casualty producing event” conducive to the deaths of civilians.
The dramatic loss of life on the morning of 9/11 resulting from an initial criminal act is used as a pretext and a justification to wage an all out war of retribution, in the name of 9/11 against the alleged perpetrators of 9/11, namely the “state sponsors of terrorism”, including Afghanistan, Iraq as well as Iran.
We are dealing with a diabolical and criminal project. The civilian deaths resulting from the 911 attacks are an instrument of war propaganda, applied to build a consensus in favor of an outright war of global domination.
The perpetrators of war propaganda are complicit in the conduct of extensive war crimes, in that they readily justify acts of war as counter-terrorism and/or humanitarian operations (R2P) launched to protect civilians. The “Just War” (Jus ad Bellum) concept prevails: The killing of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq are “rightfully” undertaken in retribution for the deaths incurred on 9/11.
Evidence is fabricated to the effect that the “state sponsors of terrorism” had committed, on the morning of 9/11, an outright act of war against the United States.
Realities are turned upside down. The US and its allies are the victims of foreign aggression. America’s crimes of war in Afghanistan and Iraq are committed in the name of 9/11 under a counter terrorism mandate.
The 9/11 attacks are used to harness public opinion into supporting a war without borders. Endless wars of aggression under the humanitarian cloak of “counter-terrorism” are set in motion.
Video: Michel Chossudovsky’s presentation to the Kuala Lumpur 9/11 Revisited Conference, November 19, 2012
Chronology of Events
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an in-depth police investigation.
CIA Director George Tenet stated that same morning that Osama bin Laden had the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those [foreign governments] who harbor them”.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, without mentioning Afghanistan, pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, “I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”
That same evening at 9:30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11:00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The war cabinet had decided to launch an an illegal and criminal war on Afghanistan, based on essentially two interrelated concepts:
1. The 9/11 attacks although allegedly conducted by Al Qaeda were upheld as an all out military attack by a foreign power.
2. Afghanistan in allegedly supporting Al Qaeda, was responsible for an act of military aggression directed against the United States of America.
The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage war on Afghanistan on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”. Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. In taking on this stance they provided legitimacy to the conduct of war crimes. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11.
In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country in Central Asia of 30 million people.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America. The post 9/11 era was also characterised by the development of Islamophobia, including routine ethnic profiling directed against Muslims.
Where was Osama bin Laden on September 11, 2001?
Is there any proof to the effect that Osama bin Laden, the bogeyman, coordinated the 9/11 attacks as claimed in the official 9/11 narrative?
According to CBS news (Dan Rather, January 28, 2002), “Enemy Number One” was admitted to the urology ward of a Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi on September 10, 2001, courtesy of America’s indefectible ally Pakistan. Rawalpindi is “military city” which hosts the Headquarters of the Pakistani military including its intelligence apparatus. He could have been arrested at short notice which would have “saved us a lot of trouble”, but then we would not have had an Osama Legend, which has fed the news chain as well as presidential speeches in the course of the last eleven years.
DAN RATHER. As the United states and its allies in the war on terrorism press the hunt for Osama bin Laden, CBS News has exclusive information tonight about where bin Laden was and what he was doing in the last hours before his followers struck the United States September 11.
This is the result of hard-nosed investigative reporting by a team of CBS news journalists, and by one of the best foreign correspondents in the business, CBS`s Barry Petersen. Here is his report.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BARRY PETERSEN, CBS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everyone remembers what happened on September 11. Here`s the story of what may have happened the night before. It is a tale as twisted as the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
CBS News has been told that the night before the September 11 terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.
CBS News footage of the Rawalpindi, Pakistan, hospital where bin Laden was allegedly treated the day before 9/11.
[Source: CBS News, above video no longer available, Sept 2017, see video below]
The foregoing CBS report which is of utmost relevance indicates two obvious facts:
1. Osama bin Laden could not reasonably have coordinated the 9/11 attacks from his hospital bed;
2. The hospital was under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts were known to both the Pakistani and US military.
U.S. military and intelligence advisers based in Rawalpindi. were working closely with their Pakistani counterparts. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America’s best known fugitive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed, at the time, that the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden were unknown. According to Rumsfeld: “It’s like looking for a needle in a stack of hay”.
Recovering from his hospital treatment in Rawalpindi on the 10th or 11th of September (unconfirmed), how could Osama have coordinated the 9/11 attacks?
How could Afghanistan be made responsible for these attacks by Al Qaeda? Bin Laden is a national of Saudi Arabia who, according to CBS News, was not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan at the time of the attacks.
September 12, 2001: The Invasion of Afghanistan: NATO’s Doctrine of Collective Security
The immediate response of the US and its NATO allies to the 9/11 attacks was to the declare a war of retribution against Afghanistan on the grounds that the Taliban government was protecting “terror mastermind” Osama bin Laden, who at the time of the attacks was in Pakistan, protected by the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus. In a bitter irony, the Pakistani government and military, which had facilitated bin Laden’s hospitalization in Rawalpindi on September 10, offered to assist the US in “going after bin Laden”. An agreement to this effect was reached on September 12 in Washington between the head of Pakistan’s military Intelligence (ISI) General Mahmoud Ahmed and Secretary Colin Powell.
Parroting official statements, the Western media mantra on September 12, 2001 had already approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in Afghanistan. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.
By allegedly harboring bin Laden, the Afghan government was complicit, according to both the US administration and NATO, for having waged an act of war against the United States.
This decision was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.
On the following morning, September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan (taken by the war cabinet at 11pm on September 11), invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.
Meanwhile, on two occasions in the course of September 2001, the Afghan government –through diplomatic channels– offered to hand over Osama Bin laden to US Justice. These overtures were turned down by president Bush, on the grounds that America “does not negotiate with terrorists”.
The War on Afghanistan: First Stage of the “Global War on Terrorism”
The war on Afghanistan was launched 26 days later on the morning of October 7, 2001. The timing of this war begs the question: how long does it take to plan and implement a major theater war several thousand miles away.
Military analysts will confirm that a major theater war takes months and months, up to a year or more of advanced preparations. Was the war on Afghanistan already in an advanced state of readiness prior to September 11, 2001, which begs the question of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks?
In other words, the 9/11 attacks were used as a means to trigger a military agenda which was already on the drawing board of both the Pentagon and NATO.
The repeal of civil liberties in America was launched in parallel with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan. Immediately following 9/11, the PATRIOT legislation was adopted. The Homeland Security apparatus was launched, with a view to “protecting Americans against terrorists”. This post-911 legal and institutional framework had been carefully crafted prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Article 5 of the Washington Treaty: NATO’s Legal Argument
In invoking Article 5 on the morning of September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council endorsed a criminal military agenda, in derogation of international law.
The legal argument used by Washington and NATO to invade Afghanistan was that the September 11 attacks constituted an undeclared “armed attack” “from abroad” by an unnamed foreign power, and that consequently “the laws of war” apply, allowing the nation under attack, to strike back in the name of “self-defense”.
On the morning of September 12, 2001, NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, responded to the decision of the War Cabinet taken a few hours earlier at 11pm on 9/11, adopted the following resolution:
“if it is determined that the [September 11, 2001] attack against the United States was directed from abroad [Afghanistan] against “The North Atlantic area“, it shall be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty”. (emphasis added)
In this regard, Article 5 of the Washington Treaty stipulates that if:
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” (NATO, What is Article 5, NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
An act of war by a foreign nation (Afghanistan) against a member of the Atlantic Alliance (the USA) was considered as an act of war against all members under NATO’s doctrine of collective security.
Under no stretch of the imagination, can the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon be categorized as an act of war by a foreign country. But nobody seemed to have raised this issue.
“Use of Armed Force” only “If It is Determined…”
There was an “if” in the September 12 resolution. Article 5 would apply only if it is determined that Afghanistan as a Nation State was complicit or behind the 9/11 attacks.
In practice, the “if” had already been waived prior to 9/11. The entire NATO arsenal was already on a war footing. In military terms, NATO and the US were already in an advanced state of readiness. Known to military analysts, but never revealed in the Western media, the implementation of a large scale theater war takes at least one year of advanced operational planning, prior to the launching of an invasion.
The use of article 5 of the Washington Treaty had in all likelihood been contemplated by military planners, as a pretext for waging war, prior to 9/11.
There was, however, no official declaration of war on September 12th. The Alliance waited until 3 days before the invasion to declare war on Afghanistan, an impoverished country which by no stretch of the imagination could have launched an attack against a member state of “The North Atlantic area”.
The September 12 resolution of the Atlantic Council required “determination” and corroborating evidence, that:
1) Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden with the support of a foreign power had ordered the “attack from abroad” on the United States of America;
2) The terrorist attacks of 9/11 constituted a bona fide military operation (under the provisions of Article 5) by an alleged foreign country (Afghanistan) against a NATO member state, and consequently against all NATO member states under the doctrine of collective security:
“Article 5 and the case of the terrorist attacks against the United States: The United States has been the object of brutal terrorist attacks. It immediately consulted with the other members of the Alliance. The Alliance determined that the US had been the object of an armed attack. The Alliance therefore agreed that if it was determined that this attack was directed from abroad, it would be regarded as covered by Article 5. NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson, subsequently informed the Secretary-General of the United Nations of the Alliance’s decision.
Article 5 has thus been invoked, but no determination has yet been made whether the attack against the United States was directed from abroad. If such a determination is made, each Ally will then consider what assistance it should provide. In practice, there will be consultations among the Allies. Any collective action by NATO will be decided by the North Atlantic Council. The United States can also carry out independent actions, consistent with its rights and obligations under the UN Charter.
Allies can provide any form of assistance they deem necessary to respond to the situation. This assistance is not necessarily military and depends on the material resources of each country. Each individual member determines how it will contribute and will consult with the other members, bearing in mind that the ultimate aim is to “to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area”.
By invoking Article 5, NATO members have shown their solidarity toward the United States and condemned, in the strongest possible way, the terrorist attacks against the United States on 11 September.
If the conditions are met for the application of Article 5, NATO Allies will decide how to assist the United States. (Many Allies have clearly offered emergency assistance). Each Ally is obliged to assist the United States by taking forward, individually and in concert with other Allies, such action as it deems necessary. This is an individual obligation on each Ally and each Ally is responsible for determining what it deems necessary in these particular circumstances.
No collective action will be taken by NATO until further consultations are held and further decisions are made by the the North Atlantic Council. (NATO, NATO Topics – NATO and the Scourge of Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
The Mysterious Frank Taylor Report
The final decision to invoke Article 5 in relation to the 9/11 attacks came three weeks later upon the submission to the NATO Council of a mysterious classified report by a US State Department official named Frank Taylor. The report was submitted to NATO on October 2nd, 5 days before the commencement of the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan.
Frank Taylor was working in the US State Department. He had been entrusted with the writing of a brief to establish whether the US “had been attacked from abroad”, pursuant to the North Atlantic Council’s resolution of September 12 2001.
US Ambassador at Large and Co-ordinator for Counter-terrorism Frank Taylor briefed the North Atlantic Council on October 2nd, five days before the commencement of the bombings.
The classified report was not released to the media. And to this date, to our knowledge, it has remained classified.
NATO’s Secretary General Lord Robertson casually summarised the substance of the Frank Taylor report in a press release:
“This morning, the United States briefed the North Atlantic Council on the results of the investigation into who was responsible for the horrific terrorist attacks which took place on September 11.
The briefing was given by Ambassador Frank Taylor, the United States Department of State Coordinator for Counter-terrorism.
This morning’s briefing follows those offered by United States Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and illustrates the commitment of the United States to maintain close cooperation with Allies.
Today’s was classified briefing and so I cannot give you all the details.
Briefings are also being given directly by the United States to the Allies in their capitals.
The briefing addressed the events of September 11 themselves, the results of the investigation so far, what is known about Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida organisation and their involvement in the attacks and in previous terrorist activity, and the links between al-Qaida and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The facts are clear and compelling. The information presented points conclusively to an al-Qaida role in the September 11 attacks.
We know that the individuals who carried out these attacks were part of the world-wide terrorist network of al-Qaida, headed by Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants and protected by the Taliban.
On the basis of this briefing, it has now been determined that the attack against the United States on September 11 was directed from abroad and shall therefore be regarded as an action covered by Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, which states that an armed attack on one or more of the Allies in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.
I want to reiterate that the United States of America can rely on the full support of its 18 NATO Allies in the campaign against terrorism.” (Lord Robertson, NATO Secretary General, statement to the NATO Council, State Department, Appendix H, Multinational Response to September 11 NATO Press http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/10313.pdf, accessed 24 November 2009, emphasis added)
In other words, 2 days before the actual commencement of the bombing campaign on October 7, the North Atlantic Council decided, based on the information provided by Frank Taylor to the Council “that the attacks were directed from abroad” by Al Qaeda, headed by Osama bin Laden, thereby requiring an action on the part of NATO under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty ( NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009):
NATO action under article 5, was outlined in an October 4 decision, 3 days before the commencement of the bombings.
Two days later, on 4 October, NATO agreed on eight measures in support of the United States, which were tantamount to an illegal declaration of war on Afghanistan:
to enhance intelligence sharing and co-operation, both bilaterally and in appropriate NATO bodies, relating to the threats posed by terrorism and the actions to be taken against it;
to provide, individually or collectively, as appropriate and according to their capabilities, [military] assistance to Allies and other states which are or may be subject to increased terrorist threats as a result of their support for the campaign against terrorism;
to take necessary measures to provide increased security for facilities of the United States and other Allies on their territory;
to backfill selected Allied assets in NATO’s area of responsibility that are required to directly support operations against terrorism;
to provide blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other Allies’ aircraft, in accordance with the necessary air traffic arrangements and national procedures, for military flights related to operations against terrorism; to provide access for the United States and other Allies to ports and airfields on the territory of NATO nations for operations against terrorism, including for refuelling, in accordance with national procedures;
that the Alliance is ready to deploy elements of its Standing Naval Forces to the Eastern Mediterranean in order to provide a NATO presence and demonstrate resolve; and that the Alliance is similarly ready to deploy elements of its NATO Airborne Early Warning Force to support operations against terrorism. NATO – Topic: Terrorism, NATO and the fight against Terrorism, accessed 24 November 2009 emphasis added)
Press reports of Frank Taylor’s brief to the NATO Council were scanty. The invocation of Article 5, five days before the bombings commenced, was barely mentioned. The media consensus was: “all roads lead to Bin Laden” as if bin Laden was a Nation State which had attacked America.
What stands out are outright lies and fabrications. Moreover, prior to October 2nd, NATO had no pretext under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty to intervene militarily in Afghanistan.
The pretext was provided by Frank Taylor’s classified report, which was not made public.
The two UN Security Council resolutions adopted in the course of September 2001, did not, under any circumstances, provide a justification for the invasion and illegal occupation of a UN member country of 28 million people. (see Security Council resolution 1368 (2001) Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts, Security Council resolution 1373 (2001) Threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts).
UNSC Resolution 1373 (2001) called for prevention and suppression of terrorist acts, as well suppression of the financing of terrorism:
“(e) Ensure that any person who participates in the financing, planning, preparation or perpetration of terrorist acts or in supporting terrorist acts is brought to justice and ensure that, in addition to any other measures against them, such terrorist acts are established as serious criminal offences in domestic laws and regulations and that the punishment duly reflects the seriousness of such terrorist acts;
…
“3. Calls upon all States to:
“(a) Find ways of intensifying and accelerating the exchange of operational information, especially regarding actions or movements of terrorist persons or networks; forged or falsified travel documents; traffic in arms, explosives or sensitive materials; use of communications technologies by terrorist groups; and the threat posed by the possession of weapons of mass destruction by terrorist groups;
“(b) Exchange information in accordance with international and domestic law and cooperate on administrative and judicial matters to prevent the commission of terrorist acts;
“(c) Cooperate, particularly through bilateral and multilateral arrangements and agreements, to prevent and suppress terrorist attacks and take action against perpetrators of such acts;
…
“4. Notes with concern the close connection between international terrorism and transnational organized crime, illicit drugs, money-laundering, illegal arms-trafficking, and illegal movement of nuclear, chemical, biological and other potentially deadly materials, and in this regard emphasizes the need to enhance coordination of efforts on national, subregional, regional and international levels in order to strengthen a global response to this serious challenge and threat to international security;
Nowhere in this resolution is there any mention of military action against a UN member State.
The US led war on Afghanistan, using 9/11 as a pretext and a justification is illegal and criminal.
The US and NATO heads of state and heads of government from 2001 to the present are complicit in the launching of a criminal and illegal war.
The Big Lie: Al Qaeda Made in America
Amply documented but rarely mentioned by the mainstream media, Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet- Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress, which the mainstream media chose to either dismiss or ignore. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: “he turned against us”.
Both the 9/11 Commission Report as well as the Western media have largely upheld the “outside enemy” mythology, heralding Al Qaeda as the “mastermind” organization behind the 9/11 attacks. The official 9/11 narrative has not only distorted the causes underling the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, it has also erased the historical record of US covert support to international terrorism, while creating the illusion that America and “Western Civilization” are threatened.
Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “Global War on Terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a deck of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.
After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive Al Qaeda “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
This is why a legal procedure directed against the actual perpetrators of 9/11 is absolutely essential.
History of Al Qaeda
Important to the understanding of 9/11, US intelligence is the unspoken architect of “Islamic terrorism” going back to the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war.
Bin Laden was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerrilla training camp. Education in Afghanistan in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war was largely secular. With religious textbooks produced in Nebraska, the number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.
“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad.” (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)
”The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings….The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..”, (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)
Under the Reagan administration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic “freedom fighters”. This endorsement has not in any way been modified.
In a twisted irony, throughout the post 911 era, US intelligence in liaison with Britain’s MI6, an Israel’s Mossad, continues to provide covert support to the radical Islamist organization allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda and its various affiliated groups including the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and factions within the Free Syria Army (FSA) are directly supported by the US and NATO.
In a bitter irony, the US and its allies claim to be waging a “war on terrorism” against the alleged architects of 9/11, while also using Al Qaeda operatives as their foot-soldiers.
Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)
Ronald Reagan meets Afghan Mujahideen Commanders at the White House in 1985 (Reagan Archives)
Iraq: Alleged State Sponsor of the 9/11 Attacks
The formulation of a war of retribution conducted in the name of 9/11 was not limited to Afghanistan.
In the course of 2002, leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, “Osama bin Laden” and “Weapons of Mass Destruction” statements circulated profusely in the news chain. While Washington’s official position was that Saddam Hussein was not behind the 9/11 attacks, insinuations abounded both in presidential speeches as well as in the Western media. According to Bush, in an October 2002 press conference:
The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime’s own actions — its history of aggression, and its drive toward an arsenal of terror. .,.. We also must never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability — even to threats that gather on the other side of the earth. We resolved then, and we are resolved today, to confront every threat, from any source [Iraq], that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America. President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat, October 7, 2002)
Barely two weeks before the invasion of Iraq, September 11, 2001 was mentioned abundantly by president Bush. In the weeks leading up to the March invasion, 45 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was “personally involved” in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. (See . The impact of Bush linking 9/11 and Iraq / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com, March 14, 2003)
Meanwhile, a new terrorist mastermind had emerged: Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
In Colin Powell’s historic address to the United Nations Security Council, in February 2003, detailed “documentation” on a sinister relationship between Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (image below) was presented, focussing on his ability to produce deadly chemical, biological and radiological weapons, with the full support and endorsement of the secular Baathist regime. The implication of Colin’s Powell’s assertions, which were totally fabricated, was that Saddam Hussein and an Al Qaeda affiliated organization had joined hands in the production of WMD in Northern Iraq and that the Hussein government was a “state sponsor” of terrorism.
The main thrust of the disinformation campaign continued in the wake of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. It consisted in presenting the Iraqi resistance movement as “terrorists”. The image of “terrorists opposed to democracy” fighting US “peacekeepers” appeared on television screens and news tabloids across the globe.
Iran: Condemned by a New York City Court for Supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 Attacks
In the wake of the Iraq invasion, the same alleged “state sponsorship” of terrorism accusations emerged in relation to Iran.
In December 2011, the Islamic Republic of Iran was condemned by a Manhattan court, for its alleged role in supporting Al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks.
The investigation into Tehran’s alleged role was launched in 2004, pursuant to a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission “regarding an apparent link between Iran, Hezbollah, and the 9/11 hijackers”. The 9/11 Commission’s recommendation was that this “apparent link” required “further investigation by the U.S. government.” (9/11 Commission Report , p. 241). (See Iran 911 Case ).
In the December 2011 court judgment (Havlish v. Iran) “U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels ruled that Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported al Qaeda in the September 11, 2001 attacks and are legally responsible for damages to hundreds of family members of 9/11 victims who are plaintiffs in the case”.
According to the plaintiffs attorneys “Iran, Hezbollah, and al Qaeda formed a terror alliance in the early 1990s. Citing their national security and intelligence experts, the attorneys explained “how the pragmatic terror leaders overcame the Sunni-Shi’a divide in order to confront the U.S. (the “Great Satan”) and Israel (the “Lesser Satan”)”. Iran and Hezbollah allegedly provided “training to members of al Qaeda in, among other things, the use of explosives to destroy large buildings.” (See Iran 911 Case ).
This judicial procedure is nothing more than another vicious weapon in the fabricated “War on Terror” to be used against another Muslim country, with a view to destabilizing Iran as well as justifying ongoing military threats. It also says a lot more about the people behind the lawsuit than about the accused. The expert witnesses who testified against Iran are very active in warmongering neocon circles. They belong to a web of architects of the 21st century Middle-Eastern wars, ranging from high profile propagandists to intelligence and military officers, including former U.S. officials.
But what makes this case absurd is that in September 2011, a few months before the judgment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has questioned the official 9/11 narrative, was accused by Al-Qaeda leaders of “spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks”. The semi-official media outlet of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, insisted that al-Qaeda “had been behind the attacks and criticised the Iranian president for discrediting the terrorist group.” (See Julie Levesque, Iran Accused of being behind 9/11 Attacks. U.S. Court Judgment, December 2011 (Havlish v. Iran), Global Research, May 11, 2012)
Al Qaeda: US-NATO Foot-soldiers
Ironically, while Washington accuses Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, the historical record and evidence indelibly point to the “state sponsorship” of Al Qaeda by the CIA, MI6 and their intelligence counterparts in Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Realities are turned upside down. Al Qaeda death squads have been recruited to wage America’s humanitarian wars throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
In Syria Al Qaeda units were recruited by NATO and the Turkish High command:
“Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels.” (http://www.debka.com/article/21255/ Debkafile, August 31, 2011).
In Libya, jihadists from Afghanistan trained by the CIA were dispatched to fight with the “pro-democracy” rebels under the helm of “former” Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) Commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj:
Western policy makers admit that NATO’s operations in Libya have played the primary role in emboldening Al Qaeda’s AQIM faction (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb). The Fortune 500-funded Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel in his article, “The New Al Qaeda Menace,” admits that AQIM is now heavily armed thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, and that AQIM’s base in Mali, North Africa, serves as a staging ground for terrorist activities across the region. http://www.globalresearch.ca/al-qaeda-and-natos-pan-arab-terrorist-blitzkrieg/
“Crimes against Civilization”
9/11 mythology has been the mainstay of war propaganda, which in itself constitutes a criminal act under international law.
Fiction prevails over reality. For propaganda to be effective, public opinion must firmly endorse the official 9/11 narrative to the effect that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks. A well organized structure of media disinformation is required to reach this objective. Perpetuating the 9/11 Legend also requires defying as well smearing the 9/11 Truth Movement.
Throughout the post 9/11 era, a panoply of Al Qaeda related events and circumstances is presented to public opinion on a daily basis. These include terrorist threats, warnings and attacks, police investigations, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies, country-level regime change, social conflict, sectarian violence, racism, religious divisions, Islamic thought, Western values, etc.
Muslims are presented as the perpetrators of the 9/11, thereby unleashing a Worldwide demonization campaign.
In turn, 9/11, Al Qaeda – War on Terrorism rhetoric permeates political discourse at all levels of government, including bipartisan debate on Capitol Hill, in committees of the House and the Senate, at the British House of Commons, and, lest we forget, at the United Nations Security Council. All these various bodies are complicit in a criminal project.
September 11 and Al Qaeda concepts, repeated ad nauseam have potentially traumatic impacts on the human mind and the ability of normal human beings to analyze and comprehend the “real outside World” of war, politics and the economic crisis.
What is at stake is human consciousness and comprehension based on concepts and facts.
With September 11 there are no verifiable “facts” and “concepts”, because 9/11 as well as Al Qaeda have evolved into a media mythology, a legend, an invented ideological construct, used as an unsubtle tool of war propaganda.
Al Qaeda constitutes a stylized, fake and almost folkloric abstraction of terrorism, which permeates the inner consciousness of millions of people around the World.
Reference to Al Qaeda has become a dogma, a belief, which most people espouse unconditionally. According to the media, “Muslims were behind the attacks”, thereby justifying a war of retribution against Muslim countries.
Racism and Islamophobia are an integral part of war propaganda.
Is this political indoctrination? Is it brain-washing? If so what is the underlying objective?
People’s capacity to independently analyse World events, as well as address causal relationships pertaining to politics and society, is significantly impaired. That is the objective!
The routine use of 9/11 and Al Qaeda to generate blanket explanations of complex political events is meant to create confusion.
It prevents people from thinking. It strikes at the core of human values. In a sense, it destroys civilization.
All of these complex Al Qaeda related occurrences are explained by politicians, the corporate media, Hollywood and the Washington think tanks under a single blanket “bad guys” heading, in which Al Qaeda is casually and repeatedly pinpointed as “the cause” of numerous terror events around the World.
The criminality underlying post 9/11 propaganda is of much broader nature, affecting people’s mindsets, redefining fundamental social, political and institutional relations.
“Crimes against Civilization” have been committed.
9/11 mythology precipitates the World into barbarity.
In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.
The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.
This article was first posted on Global Research on February 20, 2019
The main objective of the US-supported military coup in Chile in 1973 was to impose the neoliberal economic agenda. “Regime change” was enforced through a covert military intelligence operation. Sweeping macro-economic reforms (including privatization, price liberalization and the freeze of wages) were implemented in early October 1973.
Barely a few weeks after the military takeover, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This “economic shock treatment” had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys.” “While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen. From one day to the next, an entire country had been precipitated into abysmal poverty.
In 1973, I was teaching economics at the Catholic University of Chile. I lived through two of the most brutal US sponsored military coups in Latin America’s history: Chile, September 11, 1973 and less than three years later, Argentina, March 24, 1976 under Operation Condor, which initiated Argentina’s Dirty War: “La Guerra Sucia”.
And today, the Trump administration is threatening to invade Venezuela with a view to “restoring democracy”, replacing an elected president (casually described by the Western media as a “dictator”) by a US proxy.
In recent developments, throughout Latin America, progressive governments are being destroyed, a new wave of neoliberal economic policies has been launched. Strong economic medicine has been imposed (Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Peru) under the helm of the Washington consensus.
In Chile, president Sebastian Pinera has ordered the military to open fire on protesters.
Michel Chossudovsky, October 24, 2019, September 11, 2021
***
Author’s Introduction
Forty-eight years ago on September 11, 1973, the Chilean military led by General Augusto Pinochet, crushed the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende.
The objective was to replace a progressive, democratically elected government by a brutal military dictatorship.
The military coup was supported by the CIA. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger played a direct role in the military plot.
Is Washington’s ongoing initiative directed against Venezuela modelled on Chile?
In early 1970s, in a note to the CIA in relation to Chile, Henry Kissinger recommended “Make the economy scream.” Visibly the same concept has been applied to Venezuela, with advanced techniques of financial warfare, which were not available in the 1970s.
The US sponsored Pinochet dictatorship prevailed during a period of 16 years. During this period, there was no initiative on the part of the US to call for the replacement of the dictatorship by a duly elected government.
In 1989, elections were held and parliamentary democracy was restored. Continuity prevailed. Patricio Aylwin of the Christian Democratic Party (DC) who was elected president in 1989 had endorsed a “military solution” in 1973. He was largely instrumental in the breakdown of the “Dialogue” between the Unidad Popular government and the Christian Democrats (DC). In August 1973, Patricio Aylwin provided a Green Light to the Chilean Armed Forces led by Augusto Pinochet on behalf of the DC.
The following texts shed light on the Chilean Coup d’Etat. The first text first published in 2003 serves as an introduction to the text I wrote in Chile in the month following the September 11 1973 military coup, which describes the chronology of the 1973 military coup.
Chile, September 11, 1973: The Ingredients of a Military Coup. The Imposition of a Neoliberal Agenda,
Global Research, Montreal, 20o3
The Ingredients of a Military Coup
Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, September 1973
Today our thoughts are with the people of Latin America in their ongoing struggle against neoliberalism and US imperialism.
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Chile, September 11, 1973: The Ingredients of a Military Coup. The Imposition of a Neoliberal Agenda
Introduction
In the weeks leading up the 1973 coup, US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis and members of the CIA held meetings with Chile’s top military brass together with the leaders of the National Party and the ultra-right nationalist front Patria y Libertad. While the undercover role of the Nixon administration is amply documented, what is rarely mentioned in media reports is the fact that the military coup was also supported by a sector of the Christian Democratic Party.
Patricio Aylwin, who became Chile’s president in 1989, became head of the DC party in the months leading up to the September 1973 military coup (March through September 1973). Aylwin was largely instrumental in the break down of the “Dialogue” between the Unidad Popular government and the Christian Democrats. His predecessor Renan Fuentealba, who represented the moderate wing of the Christian Democratic (PDC), was firmly against military intervention. Fuentealba favored a dialogue with Allende (la salida democratica). He was displaced from the leadership of the Party in May 1973 in favor of Patricio Aylwin.
The DC Party was split down the middle, between those who favored “the salida democratica”, and the dominant Aylwin-Frei faction, which favored “a military solution”.
On 23 August 1973, the Chilean Camera de Diputados drafted a motion, to the effect that the Allende government “sought to impose a totalitarian regime”. Patricio Aylwin was a member of the drafting team of this motion. Patricio Aylwin believed that a temporary military dictatorship was “the lesser of two evils.”
This motion was adopted almost unanimously by the opposition parties, including the DC, the Partido Nacional and the PIR (Radical Left).
The leadership of the Christian Democratic Party including former Chilean president Eduardo Frei, had given a green light to the Military.
And continuity in the “Chilean Model” heralded as “economic success story” was ensured when, 16 years later, Patricio Aylwin was elected president of Chile in the so-called transition to democracy in 1989.
At the time of the September 11, 1973 military coup, I was Visiting Professor of Economics at the Catholic University of Chile. In the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew.
Salvador Allende in the defense of the Palacio de la Moneda, September 11, 1973 (left)
When the university reopened several days later, I started patching together the history of the coup from written notes. I had lived through the tragic events of September 11, 1973 as well as the failed June 29th coup. Several of my students at the Universidad Catolica had been arrested by the military Junta.
In the days following the military takeover, I started going through piles of documents and newspaper clippings, which I had collected on a daily basis since my arrival in Chile in early 1973. Some of this material, however, was lost and destroyed in the days following the coup.
This unpublished article (below) was written forty-five years ago. It was drafted on an old typewriter in the weeks following the September 11, 1973.
This original draft article plus two carbon copies were circulated among a few close friends and colleagues at the Catholic University. It was never published. For 30 years it lay in a box of documents at the bottom of a filing cabinet.
I have transcribed the text from the yellowed carbon copy draft. Apart from minor editing, I have made no changes to the original article.
The history of this period has since then been amply documented including the role of the Nixon administration and of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the plot to assassinate Allende and install a military regime.
Chicago Economics: Neoliberal Dress Rehearsal of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)
The main objective of the US-supported military coup in Chile was ultimately to impose the neoliberal economic agenda. The latter, in the case of Chile, was not imposed by external creditors under the guidance of IMF. “Regime change” was enforced through a covert military intelligence operation, which laid the groundwork for the military coup. Sweeping macro-economic reforms (including privatization, price liberalization and the freeze of wages) were implemented in early October 1973.
Augusto Pinochet, 1973
Barely a few weeks after the military takeover, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This “economic shock treatment” had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys.”
While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.” From one day to the next, an entire country had been precipitated into abysmal poverty; in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six fold (3700%). Eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.
I completed my work on the “unpublished paper’ entitled “The Ingredients of a Military Coup” (see text below) in late September.
In October and November, following the dramatic hikes in the price of food, I drafted in Spanish an initial “technical” assessment of the Junta’s deadly macro-economic reforms. Fearing censorship, I limited my analysis to the collapse of living standards in the wake of the Junta’s reforms, resulting from the price hikes of food and fuel, without making any kind of political analysis.
The Economics Institute of the Catholic University was initially reluctant to publish the report. They sent it to the Military Junta prior to its release.
I left Chile for Peru in December 1973. The report was released as a working paper (200 copies) by the Catholic University a few days before my departure. In Peru, where I joined the Economics Department of the Catholic University of Peru, I was able to write up a more detailed study of the Junta’s neoliberal reforms and its ideological underpinnings. This study was published in 1975 in English and Spanish.
Needless to say, the events of September 11 1973 also marked me profoundly in my work as an economist. Through the tampering of prices, wages and interest rates, people’s lives had been destroyed; an entire national economy had been destabilized. Macro-economic reform was neither “neutral” –as claimed by the academic mainstream– nor separate from the broader process of social and political transformation.
I also started to understand the role of military-intelligence operations in support of what is usually described as a process of “economic restructuring”. In my earlier writings on the Chilean military Junta, I looked upon the so-called “free market” reform as a well-organized instrument of “economic repression.”
Two years later, I returned to Latin America as a visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina. My stay coincided with the 1976 military coup d’État. Tens of thousands of people were arrested; the “Desaparecidos” were assassinated. The military takeover in Argentina was “a carbon copy” of the CIA-led coup in Chile. And behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” reforms had also been prescribed, this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors.
The IMF’s deadly economic prescriptions under the “structural adjustment program” had not yet been officially launched. The experience of Chile and Argentina under the “Chicago boys” was “a dress rehearsal” of things to come.
In due course, the economic bullets of the free market system were hitting country after country.
Since the onslaught of the debt crisis of the 1980s, the same IMF economic medicine has routinely been applied in more than 100 developing countries. From my earlier work in Chile, Argentina and Peru, I started to investigate the global impacts of these reforms. Relentlessly feeding on poverty and economic dislocation, a New World Order was taking shape.
I should mention that the ongoing US-led economic destabilization of Venezuela including the manipulation of the foreign exchange market, leading to the collapse of the national currency the Bolivar and the dramatic hikes in the prices of essential consumer goods, bears a canny resemblance to the months preceding the September 1973 military coup in Chile.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 11 September 2003, updated 11 September 2018, September 11, 2021
The transition to a right-wing military regime in Chile on September 11 [1973] has resulted after a lengthy and drawn-out process of economic boycott, subversion within the Armed Forces and political opposition to Allende’s Popular unity government.
In October 1970, General René Schneider was assassinated in a plot of the ultra-right together with seditious elements of the Armed Forces led by General Roberto Viaux. The assassination of General Schneider was part of a coordinated plan to prevent Parliament from ratifying Allende’s victory in the September 1970 presidential elections.
Last year’s [1972] October strike which paralyzed the economy for over a month, was organized by the gremios (employers’ organizations together with opposition labor and self employed organizations), the Partido Nacional and the ultra-right nationalist front Patria y Libertad. Some sectors of the Christian Democratic Party were also involved.
The October Strike had initially been planned for September 1972. “Plan Septiembre” was apparently postponed due to the sudden dismissal of General Alfredo Canales from the Armed Forces. Canales together with Air Force General Herrera Latoja had earlier been in touch with Miguel Ubilla Torrealba of the nationalist front Patria y Libertad. Ubilla Torrealba was said to have been closely connected to the CIA. Despite General Canales premature retirement from the Armed Forces, Plan Septiembre was implemented in October beginning with a transport strike. The Right was hoping that those elements of the Armed forces, which had been inspired by General Canales would intervene against Allende. The October “Patronal” strike (employers and self-employed) failed due to the support of the Armed Forces headed by General Carlos Prats, who had integrated Allende’s cabinet as Minister of the Interior.
The June Failed Coup
On June 29, 1973, Coronal Roberto Souper led his tank division in an isolated attack on La Moneda, the Presidential Palace, in the hope that other units of the armed forces would join in. The June coup had initially been planned for the morning of September 27 by Patria y Libertad as well as by several high ranking military officers. The plans were found out by Military Intelligence and the coup was called off at 6pm on the 26th. A warrant for the arrest of Coronal Souper had been issued. Confronted with knowledge of his impending arrest, Colonel Souper in consultation with the officers under his command, decided to act in a most improvised fashion. At 9 am, amidst morning rush hour traffic, Tank Division Number Two drove down Bernardo O’Higgins, Santiago’s main down-town avenue towards the Presidential Palace.
While the aborted June Coup had the appearance of an insolated and uncoordinated initiative, there was evidence of considerable support in various sectors of the Navy as well as from Air Force General Gustovo Leigh, now [September 1973] member of the military junta [on 11 September General Leigh integrated the military Junta headed by General Pinochet]. According to well-informed sources, several high ranking officers in the aero-naval base of Quintero near Valparaiso had proposed the bombing of State enterprises controlled by militant left wing groups, as well as the setting up of an air corridor to transport navy troops. The latter were slated to join up with the forces of Colonel Souper in Santiago.
The June trial coup was «useful» indicating to the seditious elements within the Chilean Armed Forces that an isolated and uncoordinated effort would fail. After June 29, the right-wing elements in the Navy and the Air Force were involved in a process of consolidation aimed at gaining political support among officers and sub-officers. The Army, however, was still under the control of Commander in Chief General Carols Prats, who had previously integrated Allende’s cabinet and who was a firm supporter of constitutional government.
Meanwhile in the political arena, the Christian Democrats were pressuring Allende to bring in members of the Military into the Cabinet as well as significantly revise the programme and platform of the Unidad Popular. Party leaders of the government coalition considered this alternative [proposed by the Christian democrats] as a « legalized military coup» (golpe legal) and advised Allende to turn it down. Carlos Altamirano, leader of the Socialist Party had demanded that an endorsement of the programme of the Popular Unity coalition by the military be a sina qua non condition for their entry into the Cabinet. Upon the impossibility of bringing in the Military into the Cabinet on acceptable terms, Allende envisaged the formation of a so-called “Cabinet of Consolidation” composed of well known personalities. Fernando Castillo, rector of the Catholic University and a member of the Christian Democratic Party, Felipe Herrera, President of the Inter-|American Development Bank and other prominent personalities were approached but declined.
“The Dialogue”
Pressured by economic deadlock and the transport strike, inflation of more than 15 percent per month and mounting political opposition, Allende sought in the course of July [1973] to resume the political dialogue with the Christian Democratic Party. After the March [1973] parliamentary elections, Patricio Aylwin had replaced Renan Fuentealba [May 1973] as leader of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC). Fuentealba, who represented the progressive wing of the Christian Democratic (PDC), was known to be in favor of a rapprochement with Allende. In other words, this rightward shift and hardening of the Christian Democrats in relation to the Unidad Popular, contributed to reinforcing their tacit alliance with the ring wing National Party. This alliance was initially intended as an electoral pact in the March [1973] parliamentary elections in which the Unidad Popular obtained 43 percent of the popular vote.
The Dialogue between Allende and Alwyin was a failure. Aylwin stated :
I have no trust in the democratic loyalty of the Marxist parties because they do not believe in Democracy. They have an inherent totalitarian conception. We are convinced that the democratic path will not solve the underlying economic problems…
The Communist Party Senator and prominent intellectual Volodia Teitelbaum response was:
The Christian Democrats are not that innocent. Basically they are in favor of a coup d’Etat because it constitutes a means to conveniently obtaining political power. The Christian Democrats have moved to the Right. They are not interested a Dialogue which implies a consolidation of revolutionary changes
While the Right was becoming more cohesive, a political split of the Left was imminent. The Communist Part sided with Allende’s constitutional strategy while a section of the Socialist Party (Allende’s own Party) led by Carlos Altamirano and the MAPU (Movimiento de Accion Popular Unitaria -initially a group of Christian Democrats which joined the Unidad Popular in 1969) led by Oscar Garreton, signified their distrust in “bourgeois legality” and the constitutional process and moved increasingly closer to the leftist revolutionary front Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). MIR maintained ideological and strategic relations with Cuban revolutionary groups as well as with the Bolivian and Uruguayan Tupamaros. While endorsing many features the programme of the Unidad Popular, the MIR rejected Allende’s “Chilean Road to Socialism” :
We must create popular power (poder popular) based on the industrial belts (cordones industriales).
The cordones industriales were organized and politicized labor groups. Together with MAPU, MIR was in the process of developing the Grupos de Accion Urbana (Urban Action Groups), with the task of educating and preparing the masses for armed resistance in the case of a military coup.
Purges in the Armed Forces
In August [1973], the Armed forces initiated a series of violent search and arrests directed against the MIR and state enterprises integrated by the industrial belts (cordones industriales). These searches were conducted in accordance with the Fire Arms control Act, adopted by [the Chilean] Congress after the October [1992 employers] strike and which empowered the Armed Forces [bypassing the civilian police authorities] to implement (by Military Law) the control of fire arms. [The objective of this measure was to confiscate automatic weapons in the members of the industrial belts and curb armed resistance by civilians to a military coup]. Meanwhile, right-wing elements in the Navy and Air Force were involved in actively eliminating Allende supporters by a well organized operation of anti-government propaganda, purges and torture. On August 7 [1973], the Navy announced that a “subversive left wing group” integrated by MIR had been found out. Meanwhile, according to reliable sources, a seditious plan of the Right with the intent to bring down Allende’s government, using the Navy to control the entry of supplies into the country, had been discovered. Sailors and officers [within the Navy], who knew about these plans, were tortured and beaten.
The Role of the Political Right
[In August 1973], high ranking military officers and members of Patria y Libertad, met with Senator Bulnes Sanfuentes of the National Party. Admiral Merino now [September 1973] a member of the Junta participated in meetings with members of National Party, senators of the Christian Democratic Party and staff of the US embassy. In fact towards mid-August [1973], In FACT, towards mid-August, a motion declaring US ambassador Nathaniel Davis as persona non grata was drafted by a parliamentary committee of the Unidad Popular. Furthermore, the Armed Forces were colluding with the Ultra-Right by setting up a so-called Base operacional de Fuerzas especiales (BOFE) (Operational Base of Special Forces). BOFE units were integrated by member of the nationalist front Patria y Libertad.
BOFE units were paramilitary divisions receiving material and financial support from the Armed forces. They were intended to undertake subversive and terrorist activities, which the Armed Forces could not openly undertake. BOFE was responsible for the many bomb attacks on pipelines, bridges and electric installations in the months preceding the military coup of September 11 [1973].
General Prats’ Resignation from the Armed Forces
On August 9, Allende reorganized his cabinet and brought in the three joint chiefs of staff, Carlos Prats (Army), Cesar Ruis Danyau (Air force) and Raul Montero (Navy) into a so-called “National Security Cabinet”. Allende was only intent upon resolving the Transport Strike, which was paralyzing the country’s economy, he was anxious to gain whatever support was left within the Armed Forces.
The situation was not ripe for a military coup as long as General Carol Prats was member of the cabinet, commander in Chief of the Army and Chairman of the Council of Generals. Towards mid-August, the armed forces pressured Allende and demanded Prats’ resignation and retirement ” due to basic disagreements between Prats and the Council of Generals”. Allende made a final attempt to retain |Prats and invited General Prats, Pinochet (now [September 1973] head of the Military Junta), Bonilla now Minister of the Interior), and others for dinner at his private residence. Prats resigned officially on August 23, both from the Cabinet and from the Armed Forces: “I did not want to be a factor which would threaten institutional discipline.. or serve as a pretext to those who want to overthrow the constitutional government”
The Generals’ Secret Meeting
With General Carlos Prats out of the way, the road was clear for a consolidated action by the Army, Navy and Air Force. Prats successor General Augusto Pinochet convened the Council of 24 generals in a secret meeting on August 28. The purpose and discussion of this meeting were not made public. In all likelihood, it was instrumental in the planning of the September 11 military coup. The reshuffle of Allende’s National Security Cabinet took place on the same day (28 August). It resulted after drawn out discussions with party leaders of the Unidad Popular coalition, and in particular with Socialist Party leader Carlos Altamirano.
The following day, August 29, Altamirano in a major policy speech made the following statement:
We hope that our Armed Forces have not abandoned their historical tradition, the Schneider Doctrine … and that they could follow a course leading to the installation of a reactionary Brazilian style [military] dictatorship … We are convinced that our armed forces are not prepared to be instrumental in the restoration of the privileges of the financial and industrial elites and landed aristocracy. We are convinced that if the Right wing golpe (coup) were to succeed, Chile would become a new Vietnam.
On the weekend preceding the military coup, leaders of the National Party and Christian Democratic Party made major political statements, declaring Allende’s government illegal and unconstitutional. Sergio Onofre Jarpa of the National Party declared:
After the Marxist downfall, the rebirth of Chile! … We will continue our struggle until we see out of office those who failed to fulfill their obligations. From this struggle, a new solidarity and a new institutional framework (institucionalidad) will emerge.
A few days later, the Presidential Palace was bombed and Allende was assassinated. The “rebirth” of Chile, and a new institutional framework had emerged.
Michel Chossudovsky
Santiago de Chile, September 1973
Selected References on the Role of Henry Kissinger in the 1973 military coup
USA Regrets Role in Chile’s September 11 Tragedy: US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, admitted Washington’s participation in Chile coup of 1973, Pravda, 17 March 2003,http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/91/368/9766_chile.html [this statement was made barely a week after the military occupation of Iraq by US and British troops.]
Authors Writings on the Chilean Military Junta’s Economic Reforms
Capital Accumulation in Chile and Latin America”, Yale University Lecture Series on Post-Allende Chile, North South, Canadian Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. IV, vol. XIII, no. 23, 1978, also published in Economic and Political Weekly.
“Acumulación de Capital en Chile”, Comercio Exterior, vol. 28, no. 2, 1978 (Spanish version of above article)
“Chicago Economics, Chilean Style”, Monthly Review, vol. 26, no. 11, 1975, in Spanish in a book published in Lima, Peru,
“Hacia el Nuevo Modelo Economico Chileno, Inflación y Redistribución del Ingreso, 1973-1974”, Cuadernos de CISEPA, no. 19, Catholic University of Peru, 1974, Trimestre Economico, no. 166, 1975, 311-347.
“The Neo-Liberal Model and the Mechanisms of Economic Repression: The Chilean Case”, Co-existence, vol. 12, no. 1, 1975, 34-57.
La Medición del Ingreso Minimo de Subsistencia y la Politica de Ingresos para 1974, documento de trabajo no. 19, Institute of Economics, Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, 1973, p. 37. (Initial text on the economic reforms of the Chilean Military Junta published in December 1973)
The following article published seventeen years ago, in August 2004 refutes the 9/11 Commission script as to what actually happened on the planes.
Much of this detailed information was based on alleged cell phone conversations between passengers and family members. Yet the technology to use a cell phone on a plane above 8500 feet did not exist in September 2001.
The 9/11 Commission’s Report provides an almost visual description of the Arab hijackers. It depicts in minute detail events occurring inside the cabin of the four hijacked planes.
In the absence of surviving passengers, this “corroborating evidence”, was based on passengers’ cell and air phone conversations with their loved ones.According to the Report, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was only recovered in the case of one of the flights (UAL 93).
Focusing on the personal drama of the passengers, the Commission has built much of its narrative around the phone conversations. The Arabs are portrayed with their knives and box cutters, scheming in the name of Allah, to bring down the planes and turn them “into large guided missiles” (Report, Chapter 1, http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch1.pdf ).
The Technology of Wireless Transmission
The Report conveys the impression that cell phone ground-to-air communication from high altitude was of reasonably good quality, and that there was no major impediment or obstruction in wireless transmission.
Some of the conversations were with onboard air phones, which contrary to the cell phones provide for good quality transmission. The report does not draw a clear demarcation between the two types of calls.
More significantly, what this carefully drafted script fails to mention is that, given the prevailing technology in September 2001, it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft traveling at high speed above 8000 feet:
“Wireless communications networks weren’t designed for ground-to-air communication. Cellular experts privately admit that they’re surprised the calls were able to be placed from the hijacked planes, and that they lasted as long as they did. They speculate that the only reason that the calls went through in the first place is that the aircraft were flying so close to the ground
Expert opinion within the wireless telecom industry casts serious doubt on “the findings” of the 9/11 Commission. According to Alexa Graf, a spokesman of AT&T, commenting in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attacks:
“it was almost a fluke that the [9/11] calls reached their destinations… From high altitudes, the call quality is not very good, and most callers will experience drops. Although calls are not reliable, callers can pick up and hold calls for a little while below a certain altitude”
While serious doubts regarding the cell calls were expressed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, a new landmark in the wireless telecom industry has further contributed to upsetting the Commission’s credibility. Within days of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report in July, American Airlines and Qualcomm, proudly announced the development of a new wireless technology –which will at some future date allow airline passengers using their cell phones to contact family and friends from a commercial aircraft (no doubt at a special rate aerial roaming charge)
“Travelers could be talking on their personal cellphones as early as 2006. Earlier this month [July 2004], American Airlines conducted a trial run on a modified aircraft that permitted cell phone calls.” (WP, July 27, 2004)
Aviation Week (07/20/04) described this new technology in an authoritative report published in July 2004:
“Qualcomm and American Airlines are exploring [July 2004] ways for passengers to use commercial cell phones inflight for air-to-ground communication. In a recent 2-hr. proof-of-concept flight, representatives from government and the media used commercial Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) third-generation cell phones to place and receive calls and text messages from friends on the ground.
For the test flight from Dallas-Fort Worth, the aircraft was equipped with an antenna in the front and rear of the cabin to transmit cell phone calls to a small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station. This “pico cell” transmitted cell phone calls from the aircraft via a Globalstar satellite to the worldwide terrestrial phone network”
Needless to say, neither the service, nor the “third generation” hardware, nor the “Picco cell” CDMA base station inside the cabin (which so to speak mimics a cell phone communication tower inside the plane) were available on the morning of September 11, 2001.
The 911 Commission points to the clarity and detail of these telephone conversations.
In substance, the Aviation Week report creates yet another embarrassing hitch in the official story.
The untimely July American Airlines / Qualcomm announcement acted as a cold shower. Barely acknowledged in press reports, it confirmed that the Bush administration had embroidered the cell phone narrative (similar to what they did with WMDs) and that the 9/11 Commission’s account was either flawed or grossly exaggerated.
Altitude and Cellphone Transmission
According to industry experts, the crucial link in wireless cell phone transmission from an aircraft is altitude. Beyond a certain altitude which is usually reached within a few minutes after takeoff, cell phone calls are no longer possible.
In other words, given the wireless technology available on September 11 2001, these cell calls could not have been placed from high altitude.
The only way passengers could have got through to family and friends using their cell phones, is if the planes were flying below 8000 feet. Yet even at low altitude, below 8000 feet, cell phone communication is of poor quality.
The crucial question: at what altitude were the planes traveling, when the calls were placed?
While the information provided by the Commission is scanty, the Report’s timeline does not suggest that the planes were consistently traveling at low altitude. In fact the Report confirms that a fair number of the cell phone calls were placed while the plane was traveling at altitudes above 8000 feet, which is considered as the cutoff altitude for cell phone transmission.
Let us review the timeline of these calls in relation to the information provided by the Report on flight paths and altitude.
United Airlines Flight 175
United Airlines Flight 175 departed for Los Angeles at 8:00:
“It pushed back from its gate at 7:58 and departed Logan Airport at 8:14.”
The Report confirms that by 8:33, “it had reached its assigned cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.” According to the Report, it maintained this cruising altitude until 8.51, when it “deviated from its assigned altitude”:
“The first operational evidence that something was abnormal on United 175 came at 8:47, when the aircraft changed beacon codes twice within a minute. At 8:51, the flight deviated from its assigned altitude, and a minute later New York air traffic controllers began repeatedly and unsuccessfully trying to contact it.”
And one minute later at 8.52, Lee Hanson receives a call from his son Peter.
[Flight UAL 175] “At 8:52, in Easton, Connecticut, a man named Lee Hanson received a phone call from his son Peter, a passenger on United 175. His son told him: “I think they’ve taken over the cockpit—An attendant has been stabbed— and someone else up front may have been killed. The plane is making strange moves. Call United Airlines—Tell them it’s Flight 175, Boston to LA.
Press reports confirm that Peter Hanson was using his cell (i.e it was not an air phone). Unless the plane had suddenly nose-dived, the plane was still at high altitude at 8.52. (Moreover, Hanson’s call could have been initiated at least a minute prior to his father Lee Hanson picking up the phone.)
Another call was received at 8.52 (one minute after it deviated from its assigned altitude of 31,000 feet). The Report does not say whether this is an air phone or a cell phone call:
Also at 8:52, a male flight attendant called a United office in San Francisco, reaching Marc Policastro. The flight attendant reported that the flight had been hijacked, both pilots had been killed, a flight attendant had been stabbed, and the hijackers were probably flying the plane. The call lasted about two minutes, after which Policastro and a colleague tried unsuccessfully to contact the flight.
It is not clear whether this was a call to Policastro’s cell phone or to the UAL switchboard.
At 8:58, UAL 175 “took a heading toward New York City.”:
“At 8:59, Flight 175 passenger Brian David Sweeney tried to call his wife, Julie. He left a message on their home answering machine that the plane had been hijacked. He then called his mother, Louise Sweeney, told her the flight had been hijacked, and added that the passengers were thinking about storming the cockpit to take control of the plane away from the hijackers.
At 9:00, Lee Hanson received a second call from his son Peter:
It’s getting bad, Dad—A stewardess was stabbed—They seem to have knives and Mace—They said they have a bomb—It’s getting very bad on the plane—Passengers are throwing up and getting sick—The plane is making jerky movements—I don’t think the pilot is flying the plane—I think we are going down—I think they intend to go to Chicago or someplace and fly into a building—Don’t worry, Dad— If it happens, it’ll be very fast—My God, my God.
The call ended abruptly. Lee Hanson had heard a woman scream just before it cut off. He turned on a television, and in her home so did Louise Sweeney. Both then saw the second aircraft hit the World Trade Center.50 At 9:03:11, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. All on board, along with an unknown number of people in the tower, were killed instantly.”
American Airlines Flight 77
American Airlines Flight 77 was scheduled to depart from Washington Dulles for Los Angeles at 8:10… “At 8:46, the flight reached its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet.”
At 8:51, American 77 transmitted its last routine radio communication. The hijacking began between 8:51 and 8:54. As on American 11 and United 175, the hijackers used knives (reported by one passenger) and moved all the passengers (and possibly crew) to the rear of the aircraft (reported by one flight attendant and one passenger). Unlike the earlier flights, the Flight 77 hijackers were reported by a passenger to have box cutters. Finally, a passenger reported that an announcement had been made by the “pilot” that the plane had been hijacked….
On flight AA 77, which allegedly crashed into the Pentagon, the transponder was turned off at 8:56am; the recorded altitude at the time the transponder was turned off is not mentioned. According to the Commission’s Report, cell calls started 16 minutes later, at 9:12am, twenty minutes before it (allegedly) crashed into the Pentagon at 9.32am:
” [at 9.12] Renee May called her mother, Nancy May, in Las Vegas. She said her flight was being hijacked by six individuals who had moved them to the rear of the plane.”
According to the Report, when the autopilot was disengaged at 9:29am, the aircraft was at 7,000 feet and some 38 miles west of the Pentagon. This happened two minutes before the crash.
Most of the calls on Flight 77 were placed between 9.12am and 9.26am, prior to the disengagement of automatic piloting at 9.29am. The plane could indeed have been traveling at either a higher or a lower altitude to that reached at 9.29. Yet, at the same time there is no indication in the Report that the plane had been traveling below the 7000 feet level, which it reached at 9.29am.
At some point between 9:16 and 9:26, Barbara Olson called her husband, Ted Olson, the solicitor general of the United States. [using an airphone]
UAL flight 93 was the only one of the four planes that, according to the official story, did not crash into a building. Flight 93 passengers, apparently:”alerted through phone calls, attempted to subdue the hijackers. and the hijackers crashed the plane [in Pennsylvania] to prevent the passengers gaining control.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_flight_93 ). Another version of events, was that UAL 93 was shot down.
According to the Commission’s account:
“the first 46 minutes of Flight 93’s cross-country trip proceeded routinely. Radio communications from the plane were normal. Heading, speed, and altitude ran according to plan. At 9:24, Ballinger’s warning to United 93 was received in the cockpit. Within two minutes, at 9:26, the pilot, Jason Dahl, responded with a note of puzzlement: “Ed, confirm latest mssg plz—Jason.”70 The hijackers attacked at 9:28. While traveling 35,000 feet above eastern Ohio, United 93 suddenly dropped 700 feet. Eleven seconds into the descent, the FAA’s air traffic control center in Cleveland received the first of two radio transmissions from the aircraft….”
At least ten cell calls are reported to have taken place on flight 93.
The Report confirms that passengers started placing calls with cell and air phones shortly after 9.32am, four minutes after the Report’s confirmation of the plane’s attitude of 35,000 feet. In other words, the calls started some 9 minutes before the Cleveland Center lost UAL 93’s transponder signal (9.41) and approximately 30 minutes before the crash in Pennsylvania (10.03)
“At 9:41, Cleveland Center lost United 93’s transponder signal. The controller located it on primary radar, matched its position with visual sightings from other aircraft, and tracked the flight as it turned east, then south.164 “
This suggests that the altitude was known to air traffic control up until the time when the transponder signal was lost by the Cleveland Center. (Radar and visual sightings provided information on its flight path from 9.41 to 10.03.)
Moreover, there was no indication from the Report that the aircraft had swooped down to a lower level of altitude, apart from the 700 feet drop recorded at 9.28. from a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet:
“At 9:32, a hijacker, probably Jarrah, made or attempted to make the following announcement to the passengers of Flight 93:“Ladies and Gentlemen: Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining sitting.
We have a bomb on board. So, sit.” The flight data recorder (also recovered) indicates that Jarrah then instructed the plane’s autopilot to turn the aircraft around and head east. The cockpit voice recorder data indicate that a woman, most likely a flight attendant, was being held captive in the cockpit. She struggled with one of the hijackers who killed or otherwise silenced her.
Shortly thereafter, the passengers and flight crew began a series of calls from GTE airphones and cellular phones. These calls between family, friends, and colleagues took place until the end of the flight and provided those on the ground with firsthand accounts. They enabled the passengers to gain critical information, including the news that two aircraft had slammed into the World Trade Center.77…At least two callers from the flight reported that the hijackers knew that passengers were making calls but did not seem to care.
The hijackers were wearing red bandanas, and they forced the passengers to the back of the aircraft.80 Callers reported that a passenger had been stabbed and that two people were lying on the floor of the cabin, injured or dead—possibly the captain and first officer. One caller reported that a flight attendant had been killed.81 One of the callers from United 93 also reported that he thought the hijackers might possess a gun. But none of the other callers reported the presence of a firearm. One recipient of a call from the aircraft recounted specifically asking her caller whether the hijackers had guns.
The passenger replied that he did not see one. No evidence of firearms or of their identifiable remains was found at the aircraft’s crash site, and the cockpit voice recorder gives no indication of a gun being fired or mentioned at any time.
We believe that if the hijackers had possessed a gun, they would have used it in the flight’s last minutes as the passengers fought back.82 Passengers on three flights reported the hijackers’ claim of having a bomb. The FBI told us they found no trace of explosives at the crash sites. One of the passengers who mentioned a bomb expressed his belief that it was not real. Lacking any evidence that the hijackers attempted to smuggle such illegal items past the security screening checkpoints, we believe the bombs were probably fake. During at least five of the passengers’ phone calls, information was shared about the attacks that had occurred earlier that morning at the World Trade Center. Five calls described the intent of passengers and surviving crew members to revolt against the hijackers. According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane. They decided, and acted. At 9:57, the passenger assault began. Several passengers had terminated phone calls with loved ones in order to join the revolt. One of the callers ended her message as follows:
“Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.” The cockpit voice recorder captured the sounds of the passenger assault muffled by the intervening cockpit door. Some family members who listened to the recording report that they can hear the voice of a loved one among the din.
We cannot identify whose voices can be heard. But the assault was sustained. In response, Jarrah immediately began to roll the airplane to the left and right, attempting to knock the passengers off balance. At 9:58:57, Jarrah told another hijacker in the cockpit to block the door. Jarrah continued to roll the airplane sharply left and right, but the assault continued. At 9:59, Jarrah changed tactics and pitched the nose of the airplane up and down to disrupt the assault. The recorder captured the sounds of loud thumps, crashes, shouts, and breaking glasses and plates.
At 10:00:03, Jarrah stabilized the airplane. Five seconds later, Jarrah asked, “Is that it? Shall we finish it off?” A hijacker responded, “No. Not yet. When they all come, we finish it off.” The sounds of fighting continued outside the cockpit. Again, Jarrah pitched the nose of the aircraft up and down.At 10:00:26, a passenger in the background said, “In the cockpit. If we dont we’ll die!” Sixteen seconds later, a passenger yelled,“Roll it!” Jarrah stopped the violent maneuvers at about 10:01:00 and said, “Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!” He then asked another hijacker in the cockpit,“ Is that it? I mean, shall we put it down?” to which the other replied, “Yes, put it in it, and pull it down.” The passengers continued their assault and at 10:02:23, a hijacker said, “Pull it down! Pull it down!” The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them. The airplane headed down; the control wheel was turned hard to the right.
The airplane rolled onto its back, and one of the hijackers began shouting “Allah is the greatest. Allah is the greatest. ”With the sounds of the passenger counterattack continuing, the aircraft plowed into an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 580 miles per hour, about 20 minutes’ flying time from Washington D.C. Jarrah’s objective was to crash his airliner into symbols of the American Republic, the Capitol or the White House. He was defeated by the alerted, unarmed passengers of United”
The Mysterious Call of Edward Felt from UAL 93
Earlier coverage of the fate of UAL 93 was based in part on a reported cell call from a passenger named Edward Felt, who managed to reach an emergency official in Pennsylvania. How he got the emergency supervisor’s number and managed to reach him remains unclear.
The call was apparently received at 9.58 am, eight minutes before the reported time of the crash at 10.06 am in Pennsylvania:
“Local emergency officials said they received a cell phone call at 9.58 am from a man who said he was a passenger aboard the flight. The man said he had locked himself in the bathroom and told emergency dispatchers that the plane had been hijacked. “We are being hijacked! We are being hijacked!” he was quoted as saying. A California man identified as Tom Burnett reportedly called his wife and told her that somebody on the plane had been stabbed. “We’re all going to die, but three of us are going to do something,” he told her. “I love you honey.”
The alleged call by Edward Felt from the toilet of the aircraft of UAL 93 was answered by Glenn Cramer, the emergency supervisor in Pennsylvania who took the call.
It is worth noting that Glenn Cramer was subsequently gagged by the FBI.” (See Robert Wallace`s incisive analysis published in Sept 2002 by the Daily Mirror, (http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/WAL403A.html ).
Ironically, this high profile cell call by Ed Felt, which would have provided crucial evidence to the 9/11 Commission was, for some reason, not mentioned in the Report.
American Airlines Flight 11
Flight 11 took off at 7:59. Just before 8:14. The Report outlines an airphone conversation of flight attendant Betty Ong and much of the narrative hinges upon this airphone conversation
There are no clear-cut reports on the use of cell phones on Flight AA11. According to the Report, American 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46.
Concluding Remarks
A large part of the description, regarding the 19 hijackers relies on cell phone conversations with family and friends.
While a few of these calls (placed at low altitude) could have got through, the wireless technology was not available. On this issue, expert opinion within the wireless telecom industry is unequivocal.
In other words, at least part of the Commission’s script in Chapter 1 on the cell phone conversations, is fabricated.
According to the American Airline / Qualcomm [2004] announcement, the technology for cell phone transmission at high altitude will only be available aboard commercial aircraft in 2006. This is an inescapable fact.
In the eyes of public opinion, the cell phone conversations on the Arab hijackers is needed to sustain the illusion that America is under attack.
The “war on terrorism” underlying the National Security doctrine relies on real time “evidence” concerning the Arab hijackers. The latter personify, so to speak, this illusive “outside enemy” (Al Qaeda), which is threatening the homeland.
Embodied into the Commission’s “script” of 911, the narrative of what happened on the plane with the Arab hijackers is therefore crucial. It is an integral part of the Administration’s disinformation and propaganda program. It constitutes a justification for the anti-terror legislation under the Patriot acts and the waging of America’s pre-emptive wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.
The 9/11 Report’s Footnotes on the Cell Phone Conversations
emphasis added
70. On FDR, see NTSB report,“Specialist’s Factual Report of Investigation—Digital Flight Data Recorder” for United Airlines Flight 93, Feb. 15, 2002; on CVR, see FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003; Commission review of Aircraft Communication and Reporting System (ACARS) messages sent to and from Flight 93 (which indicate time of message transmission and receipt); see UAL record, Ed Ballinger ACARS log, Sept. 11, 2001. At 9:22, after learning of the events at the World Trade Center, Melody Homer, the wife of co-pilot Leroy Homer, had an ACARS message sent to her husband in the cockpit asking if he was okay. See UAL record,ACARS message, Sept. 11, 2001.
71. On FDR, see NTSB report,“Specialist’s Factual Report of Investigation—Digital Flight Data Recorder” for United Airlines Flight 93, Feb. 15, 2002; on CVR, see FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003; FAA report,“Summary of Air Traffic Hijack Events: September 11, 2001,” Sept. 17, 2001; NTSB report, Air Traffic Control Recording—United Airlines Flight 93, Dec. 21, 2001.
72.The 37 passengers represented a load factor of 20.33 percent of the plane’s seating capacity of 182, considerably below the 52.09 percent for Flight 93 on Tuesdays in the three-month period prior to September 11 (June 11–September 4, 2001). See UAL report, Flight 93 EWR-SFO load factors, undated. Five passengers holding reservations for Flight 93 did not show for the flight.All five were interviewed and cleared by the FBI. FBI report,“Flight #93 ‘No Show’ Passengers from 9/11/01,” Sept. 18, 2001.
73. INS record,Withdrawal of Application for Admission for Mohamed al Kahtani,Aug. 4, 2001.
74. See FAA regulations,Admission to flight deck, 14 C.F.R. § 121.547 (2001);UAL records, copies of boarding passes for United 93, Sept. 11,2001.One passenger reported that ten first-class passengers were aboard the flight. If that number is accurate, it would include the four hijackers. FBI report of investigation, interview of Lisa Jefferson, Sept. 11, 2001;UAL record, Flight 93 passenger manifest, Sept. 11, 2001.All but one of the six passengers seated in the first-class cabin communicated with the ground during the flight, and none mentioned anyone from their cabin having gone into the cockpit before the hijacking.Moreover, it is unlikely that the highly regarded and experienced pilot and co-pilot of Flight 93 would have allowed an observer into the cockpit before or after takeoff who had not obtained the proper permission. See UAL records, personnel files of Flight 93 pilots. For jumpseat information, see UAL record,Weight and Balance Information for Flight 93 and Flight 175, Sept. 11, 2001;AAL records, Dispatch Environmental Control/Weekly Flight Summary for Flight 11 and Flight 77, Sept. 11, 2001.
75. Like Atta on Flight 11, Jarrah apparently did not know how to operate the communication radios; thus his attempts to communicate with the passengers were broadcast on the ATC channel. See FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003.Also, by 9:32 FAA notified United’s headquarters that the flight was not responding to radio calls.According to United, the flight’s nonresponse and its turn to the east led the airline to believe by 9:36 that the plane was hijacked. See Rich Miles interview (Nov. 21, 2003); UAL report, “United dispatch SMFDO activities—terrorist crisis,” Sept. 11, 2001.
76. In accordance with FAA regulations, United 93’s cockpit voice recorder recorded the last 31 minutes of sounds from the cockpit via microphones in the pilots’ headsets, as well as in the overhead panel of the flight deck. This is the only recorder from the four hijacked airplanes to survive the impact and ensuing fire.The CVRs and FDRs from American 11 and United 175 were not found,and the CVR from American Flight 77 was badly burned and not recoverable. See FBI report,“CVR from UA Flight #93,”Dec. 4, 2003; see also FAA regulations, 14 C.F.R. §§ 25.1457, 91.609, 91.1045, 121.359; Flight 93 CVR data. A transcript of the CVR recording was prepared by the NTSB and the FBI.
77. All calls placed on airphones were from the rear of the aircraft. There was one airphone installed in each row of seats on both sides of the aisle.The airphone system was capable of transmitting only eight calls at any one time. See FBI report of investigation, airphone records for flights UAL 93 and UAL 175 on Sept. 11, 2001, Sept. 18, 2001.
78.FAA audio file, Cleveland Center, position Lorain Radar; Flight 93 CVR data; FBI report, “CVR from UA Flight #93,” Dec. 4, 2003.
79. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Todd Beamer, Sept. 11, 2001, through June 11, 2002; FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Sandy Bradshaw, Sept. 11, 2001, through Oct. 4, 2001.Text messages warning the cockpit of Flight 93 were sent to the aircraft by Ed Ballinger at 9:24. See UAL record, Ed Ballinger’s ACARS log, Sept. 11, 2001.
80.We have relied mainly on the record of FBI interviews with the people who received calls. The FBI interviews were conducted while memories were still fresh and were less likely to have been affected by reading the accounts of others or hearing stories in the media. In some cases we have conducted our own interviews to supplement or verify the record. See FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Todd Beamer, Mark Bingham,Sandy Bradshaw,Marion Britton,Thomas Burnett, Joseph DeLuca,Edward Felt, Jeremy Glick,Lauren Grandcolas, Linda Gronlund, CeeCee Lyles, Honor Wainio.
81. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Thomas Burnett, Sept. 11, 2001; FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Marion Britton, Sept. 14, 2001, through Nov. 8, 2001; Lisa Jefferson interview (May 11, 2004); FBI report of investigation, interview of Lisa Jefferson, Sept. 11, 2001; Richard Belme interview (Nov. 21, 2003).
82. See Jere Longman, Among the Heroes—United Flight 93 and the Passengers and Crew Who Fought Back (Harper-Collins, 2002), p. 107; Deena Burnett interview (Apr. 26, 2004); FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Jeremy Glick, Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 12, 2001; Lyzbeth Glick interview (Apr. 22, 2004). Experts told us that a gunshot would definitely be audible on the CVR. The FBI found no evidence of a firearm at the crash site of Flight 93. See FBI response to Commission briefing request no. 6, undated (topic 11).The FBI collected 14 knives or portions of knives at the Flight 93 crash site. FBI report, “Knives Found at the UA Flight 93 Crash Site,” undated.
83. FBI response to Commission briefing request no. 6, undated (topic 11); FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from Jeremy Glick, Sept. 11, 2001, through Sept. 12, 2001.
84. See FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from United 93.
85. FBI reports of investigation, interviews of recipients of calls from United 93. For quote, see FBI report of investigation, interview of Philip Bradshaw, Sept. 11, 2001; Philip Bradshaw interview (June 15, 2004); Flight 93 FDR and CVR data.At 9:55:11 Jarrah dialed in the VHF Omni-directional Range (VOR) frequency for the VOR navigational aid at Washington Reagan National Airport, further indicating that the attack was planned for the nation’s capital.
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After a “long-winding road”, hostilities in Syria’s Daraa province might be nearing their end.
On September 8th, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) began working to establish permanent positions inside the southern part of Daraa city, known as Daraa al-Balad.
The SAA is going to establish at least 9 posts in the southern part of the city as per the August 31st reconciliation agreement, brokered by Russia.
The SAA entered Daraa al-Balad early in the day. Forces from the Russian Military Police and the 8th Brigade, a unit of the 5th Corps that is dedicated for former rebels in Daraa, facilitated the deployment of the army.
Immediately, a combing operation was carried out, clearing several hideouts and exploding an IED presumably placed for an impromptu attack.
The army also opened the main route leading to Daraa al-Balad, allowing hundreds of civilians who were displaced as a result of the clashes to return.
As for now, more than 900 gunmen in Daraa al-Balad have handed over their weapons and joined the reconciliation process. Those who refuse the agreement will be deported to opposition-held areas in northern Syria.
Meanwhile in Central Syria, efforts to contain ISIS are on-going but not as successful as the SAA and Russia would hope.
On September 7, ISIS cells carried out a large-scale attack against the SAA and allies in the eastern countryside of Homs.
The attack targeted a network of positions near the border with Deir Ezzor, where the militants are concentrated. ISIS terrorists have been clashing with pro-government fighters for a few hours then withdrew back to their hideouts.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 6 pro-government fighters were killed and 8 others were wounded as a result of the attack.
Three days earlier, a similar attack by ISIS cells targeted a number of positions near the town of Ithriyah in the eastern countryside of Hama. The attack claimed the lives of eight Iranian-backed fighters who were supporting the SAA.
Over the last few days, Russian warplanes have carried out dozens of air strikes on ISIS hideouts in the region. At least nine terrorists were killed in the process, but militant attacks still continue.
Syrian government forces and their allies have been operating against ISIS cells in the central region for more than two years now. The terrorist group’s insurgency has slowed down but attacks still happen somewhat regularly. It is unlikely that they will stop anytime soon, unless a massive combing operation is carried out.
The issue is that the SAA and the Russian Aerospace Forces are dealing with several hot spots in different Syrian regions. These include the so-called “moderate opposition” in Greater Idlib, the Turkish Army, the factions it backs and their fights against the Kurds, as well as containing ISIS in the central regions.
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Republicans clapped back over the Biden administration’s unprecedented ‘jab or your job’ Executive Order for federal workers and contractors, and a ‘jab or test’ mandate for corporations with over 100 employees. 600,000 postal workers are oddly exempt.
The sweeping new vaccine requirements, which completely ignore tens of millions in America who have recovered from Covid-19 and have natural immunity, will affect as many as 100 million Americans.
Biden on people who haven't gotten vaccinated:
"We've been patient but our patience is wearing thin and your refusal has cost all of us." pic.twitter.com/Hj4jnmWpuX
In response, the Republican National Committed (RNC) vowed to sue Biden once the mandate goes into effect, with President Ronna McDaniel tweeting that Biden lied.
“Joe Biden told Americans when he was elected that he would not impose vaccine mandates. He lied,” McDaniel said in a statement, adding “Now small businesses, workers, and families across the country will pay the price.”
Joe Biden told Americans when he was elected that he would not impose vaccine mandates. He lied.
When his decree goes into effect, the RNC will sue the administration to protect Americans and their liberties. pic.twitter.com/XinwFw4bam
“President Biden is so desperate to distract from his shameful, incompetent Afghanistan exit that he is saying crazy things and pushing constitutionally flawed executive orders. This is a cynical attempt to pick a fight and distract from the President’s morally disgraceful decision to leave Americans behind Taliban lines on the 20th anniversary of 9/11,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) told the Daily Caller.
Meanwhile, Republican governors across the country have issued statements vowing to sue, or otherwise oppose, the vaccine mandate after Biden threatened them during Thursday’s announcement.
“Let me be blunt,” said Biden. “My plan also takes on elected officials in states that are undermining you in these life-saving actions. Right now local school officials are trying to keep children safe in a pandemic while their governor picks a fight with them and even threatens their salaries or their jobs. Talk about bullying the schools.”
“If they’ll not help, if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I will use my power as president to get them out of the way,” he added.
Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp also responded to Biden’s remarks.
“I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration,” Kemp tweeted.
I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration.
Alabama Governor Key Ivey also released a statement declaring her intention to fight the mandate.
Once again, @POTUS has missed the mark. His outrageous, overreaching mandates will no doubt be challenged in the courts. Read my full statement below. #alpoliticspic.twitter.com/9BNbvenVEJ
Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon also issuing a statement saying: “Not now, and not ever.”
Tennessee’s Governor Bill Lee also stated his broad opposition to the federal mandate.
“The Constitution won’t allow this power grab, and in the meantime, I will stand up for all Tennesseans,” Gov. Lee wrote.
For a fight that requires working together, a lot of cynical and divisive edicts came out of the White House today pitting the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, businesses against employees, and the federal government against states.
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The battle lines over mandatory COVID-19 vaccines are now going full steam ahead in the U.S. as the Biden Administration is announcing today that all federal employees must now get a COVID-19 shot as a condition for employment, and that they are eliminating the testing opt-out.
The argument that only COVID-19 shots will end the endless “pandemic” and the lie that hospitals are over 90% full of unvaccinated people are being used as justification for mandatory mass vaccination.
It doesn’t take much research on one’s own to bypass the corporate media and find out that they are lying, and that there are numerous reports that the exact opposite situation is now happening in the U.S. and around the world, which is that the hospitals are full of people who have already been vaccinated with COVID-19 shots and that the ones who have survived are now filling our hospitals.
This is evident from the last release of data into the government Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which as of last Friday shows that following COVID-19 shots, there have been 13,911 deaths, 18,098 permanent disabilities, 76,160 ER visits, 56,912 hospitalizations, 2,933,377 injury symptoms, and 14,327 life threatening events.
And these are just the cases that have been reported and that the CDC has allowed to be released to the public. Many healthcare workers have stated that there is pressure from doctors and hospital administrations to NOT relate injuries to the COVID-19 shots and to not report them in VAERS, which one nurse stated takes over 30 minutes to do for a single case and is very time consuming.
And just this past week, the Toronto Sun ran a story reporting that more than 100 Ontario youth were sent to the hospital for vaccine-related heart problems.
A report quietly released last week by Public Health Ontario (PHO) tallies the number of people in the province who have presented to hospital with heart inflammation following mRNA vaccination, and it skews heavily towards young people.
As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis/pericarditis in Ontarians under the age of 25. That’s slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents. (Full article.)
Here is a video report I put together with testimony from nurses, a doctor, and an occupational therapist explaining what they are currently seeing in the hospitals, so you can hear it yourself from the frontline workers.
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Dr. Peter McCullough is an internist, cardiologist and epidemiologist who warns that COVID-19 vaccines not only are failing but are putting lives at risk
McCullough believes if the proper safety boards had been in place, the COVID-19 vaccine program would have been shut down in February 2021 based on safety and risk of death
By January 22, 2021, 186 deaths had been reported after COVID-19 vaccination — more than enough to reach the mortality signal of concern
In his practice, McCullough is seeing an array of neurologic syndromes in people who’ve been vaccinated, with symptoms including blindness, paralysis, difficulty swallowing, headaches, ringing in the ears, myocarditis and more
McCullough also mentions antigenic, or immune, escape, which he believes is driving the creation of COVID-19 variants and making the pandemic worse instead of better
Dr. Peter McCullough has an impressive list of credentials1 — he’s an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist and is the editor of two medical journals and published hundreds of studies in the literature. He’s also among those brave and courageous persons speaking out about the dangers of COVID-19 jabs, and putting his medical license and future livelihood at risk by so doing.
“There’s a hunting that’s going on here that’s very disturbing,” McCullough said in an episode of Perspectives on the Pandemic.2 He was referring to state medical boards hunting down doctors and their and threatening revocation of their licenses based on the spreading of unidentified “misinformation.”
“This is absolutely astonishing that this is happening over a fair exchange of ideas,” he said. What is Dr. McCullough sharing that the powers that be don’t want you to hear? It’s about COVID-19 injections and, to sum it up in a sentence, “It’s not working and it’s causing tremendous damage.”
COVID Jab Efficacy and Safety Overstated From the Start
In the U.S., Operation Warp Speed is the federal effort that fast-tracked COVID-19 jab candidates to market. Gene transfer technology platforms emerged as the frontrunners, including adenoviral DNA platforms or messenger RNA (mRNA) platforms designed to deliver genetic material to the human body.
Once the mRNA is injected, the body then takes up the genetic material and changes in some way. These technologies have been under study for years, in most cases being designed to replace a defective gene, which could potentially be used for cancer treatment, for example. Except historically, “all failed,” McCullough said.
In November 2020, however, Pfizer, in a joint venture with Germany-based BioNTech, announced that their mRNA-based injection was “more than 90% effective” in a Phase 3 trial.3 This does not mean that 90% of people who get injected will be protected from COVID-19, though, as it’s based on relative risk reduction (RRR).
The absolute risk reduction (ARR) for the jab is less than 1%. “Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the jab, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a jab, considers the whole population. ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs,” researchers wrote in The Lancet Microbe in April 2021.4
Nonetheless, the jabs received emergency use authorization. By giving the emergency authorization, not approval, the jab administration constituted a research trial, with the sponsors being the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. According to McCullough:5
“We’ve never had two government bodies together be a sponsor of a major research program. Shockingly, they did not have, and to this day they’ve never put together, an external critical event committee, an external data safety monitoring board or a human ethics committee. They had these committees in the registrational trials … and these are standard.
Every large clinical investigation has these three committees … I chair many of these committees for pharmaceutical companies and the National Institutes of Health. Americans should have had at least weekly, if not monthly, reviews of safety to ensure Americans that the jabs are safe.”
By March 2021, McCullough Was Worried
Initially, McCullough said, it seemed like the experimental jabs might be safe, and about 70% of his patients had received one by December 2020. But by March 2021, he was uncomfortable with what he was seeing. From December 14, 2020, through March 8, 2021, more than 92 million doses of COVID-19 jabs were administered in the U.S.
He cited data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, which showed that during that time, there were 1,637 reports of death in people who had received a COVID-19 jab. The CDC and FDA said none of them was related to the jab but, according to McCullough, by January 22, 2021, 186 deaths had been reported — more than enough to reach the mortality signal of concern to stop the program.
“With a program this size, anything over 150 deaths would be an alarm signal,” he said. The U.S. “hit 186 deaths with only 27 million Americans jabbed.” McCullough believes if the proper safety boards had been in place, the COVID-19 jab program would have been shut down in February based on safety and risk of death.
Such was the case in 1976, when a fast-tracked injection program against swine flu was halted after an estimated 25 to 32 deaths.6 Yet, despite a much larger death toll, COVID-19 jabs continues. As of August 6, 2021, VAERS COVID-19 data showed 12,791 deaths related to the jabs, according to McCullough, and tens of thousands of hospital and clinic visits.7
In an analysis of COVID-19 vaccine death reports from VAERS, researchers found that 86% of the time, nothing else could have caused the death, and it appears the vaccine was the cause.8
The researchers noted, “The sample contains only people jabbed early in the program, and hence is made up primarily of those who are elderly or with significant health conditions. Despite this, there were only 14% of the cases for which a COVID injection reaction could be ruled out as a contributing factor in their death.”9
Further research shows, McCullough stated, and this is a very important point that I want you to understand and remember: that 50% of the deaths occurred within 48 hours of getting the shot, while 80% occurred within a week. An informal survey on Twitter, to which 10,000 people responded, also asked whether respondents knew someone who died after a COVID-19 jab.
Twelve percent said they did. “When people see others in their circle dying, you can’t stop that type of organic COVID jab hesitancy,” McCullough said. Other confirmed adverse effects of the COVID jabs include myocarditis and blood clots.10
An Incredible Violation of Human Ethics
Your body recognizes the spike protein in COVID-19 jabs as foreign, so it begins to manufacture antibodies to protect you against COVID-19, or so the theory goes. But there’s a problem. The spike protein itself is dangerous and known to circulate in your body at least for weeks and more likely months11 — perhaps much longer — after the COVID jab.
In your cells, the spike protein damages blood vessels and can lead to the development of blood clots.12,13 It can go into your brain, adrenal glands, ovaries, heart, skeletal muscles and nerves, causing inflammation, scarring and damage in organs over time.
In his practice, McCullough is seeing an array of neurologic syndromes in people who’ve been injected, with symptoms including blindness, paralysis, difficulty swallowing, headaches, ringing in the ears, myocarditis and more. Other research suggests that the heart, brain, immunologic system and hematologic system may be most at risk from the jabs.14
Children, who are at extremely low risk from COVID-19, receive no benefit from the jab, nor do those who have already had COVID and have immunity, McCullough said, calling the situation “a catastrophe in real time” that’s violating human ethics:15
“We’ve seen an incredible violation of human ethics. No one, for an investigational product, under any circumstances, should receive any pressure, coercion or threat of reprisal for not participating in the research.”
The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 jab received FDA approval on August 23, 2021, but prior to this, million-dollar raffles, free tuition, bonuses and other bribes like free beer and doughnuts were offered to entice people to get injected. When that didn’t work, mandates increased, including for many health care workers, and hundreds of U.S. colleges16 are also requiring students to get jabbed in order to attend.
Vaccinated People Are Getting COVID Anyway
Media reports keep referring to the pandemic as a crisis of the unvaccinated, which is simply inaccurate, since COVID-19 continues to affect and spread among those who have been vaccinated. July 30, 2021, the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) posted online details of an outbreak of COVID-19 that occurred in Barnstable County, Massachusetts — 74% of the cases occurred in fully vaccinated people.17
So-called “breakthrough infections,” which used to be known as vaccine failures, were reported by the CDC far earlier, though, including in their May 28, 2021, MMWR, which documented 10,262 breakthrough infections reported January 1 to April 23, 2021, across 46 states.18
This, they believed, was “likely a substantial undercount,” but rather than continuing to assess the situation, they stopped monitoring most COVID-9 infections among vaccinated people:19
“Beginning May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported COVID-19 vaccine breakthrough infections to investigating only those among patients who are hospitalized or die, thereby focusing on the cases of highest clinical and public health significance.”
McCullough also mentions antigenic, or immune, escape. If you put a living organism like bacteria or viruses under pressure, via antibiotics, antibodies or chemotherapeutics, for example, but don’t kill them off completely, you can inadvertently encourage their mutation into more virulent strains. Those that escape your immune system end up surviving and selecting mutations to ensure their further survival.
COVID-19 has a high capacity for mutation but, if the virus isn’t under pressure, it won’t necessarily see a need to select mutations to, for instance, become more infectious. But if you put it under pressure, as is occurring during the mass vaccination campaign, this may change. McCullough stated:20
“If we keep this up with the injections, there is going to be one variant after another … We’re playing with fire here with this mass vaccination … My interpretation as an internist and cardiologist — I’m a trained epidemiologist, I’ve literally done a year of intense COVID research and training — I’m going to tell you, I think this Delta outbreak that we have right now is the product of mass vaccination.
If we didn’t have the jab, we would have been better off. We had already treated this down to a very acceptable level.”
How to Break Through the Trance
McCullough believes many health care providers and the U.S. public are in a vaccination trance. It defies logic and commonsense how public officials and hospital executives can see the vaccines failing to work, can see the rising cases of adverse effects and deaths, and yet increasingly issue vaccine mandates or recommend the vaccine to groups for which it clearly shouldn’t be, like pregnant women. McCullough likens it to a form of psychosis or a group neurosis.
The U.S. public, however, has seen so much fear, hospitalization and death during the pandemic that they may have been prepared to accept casualties associated with the vaccines. Still, a sizable number of Americans aren’t being fooled.
“We’re at this pressure point, and I think right now, in talking to American people in my circles, they’re ready to take a time out,” McCullough said. If it means taking a sabbatical from work or delaying school for a year, many Americans are willing to do it to avoid getting vaccinated. “The only way to stay healthy right now is to stay away from this vaccine. If you get COVID-19, get to one of these treatment networks and get immunity on the other side.”21
McCullough is a proponent of early treatment of COVID-19 and believes treatment options have been suppressed to allow for mass vaccination:22
“I think we’ve completely suppressed any form of treatment or help to people in order to promote the vaccine. Now the vaccine doesn’t work completely and it’s, frankly, dangerous. We’re down to almost one message: Take the jab or else … It’s the scariest time to be an American, and thank goodness half of Americans didn’t take it.
We’re going to have to see what this is going to look like. I think the next month or so is going to be incredibly interesting and it’s going to be ominous.”
McCullough believes that eventually people will break out of the jab trance and realize that the answer isn’t these injections, while the handling of the pandemic, including mass jabs, will become a course in violation of human ethics and the Nuremberg code. With fear, isolation, hospitalizations and deaths still occurring, however, it may take years before the fog is lifted.
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Behind The Headlines’ Dan Cohen explains a little known effort to train Afghan Islamic fundamentalists in propaganda, and how that effort created a blueprint for the White Helmets in Syria.
By now, everyone knows about the White Helmets – the State Department’s propaganda operation to manufacture consent for the U.S.’s dirty war on Syria. But long before the White Helmets were the Afghan mujahideen.
Quick review: The White Helmets were presented as laudable rescue teams who operated in opposition-held territory in Syria.
They also embedded with jihadist groups like al Nusra – al Qaeda’s branch in Syria. And were financed by U.S. government bodies like USAID.
This turned Syria into a made-for-TV warzone, pumping decontextualized war porn into American minds through cable news and Netflix “documentaries.”
This propaganda appealed to the conscience of Western liberals to get them to support U.S. military attacks on Syria such as Donald Trump’s bombing of Douma or Khan Sheikoun. Or, during the Obama era, the Pentagon and CIA arming competing militias and warlords who were consumed by jihadist groups committed to exterminating minorities.
Syria was version 2.0. The original was in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Back then, the U.S. was seeking to overthrow Afghanistan’s socialist government that had come to power in the Saur Revolution. It is well known that the U.S. began funding the mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalist holy warriors who were united with the U.S. in their belief that godless communism was the ultimate evil. Of course, we all know how that alliance turned out.
But at the time, the U.S. public wasn’t interested in Afghanistan – a country seven thousand miles away that everyday Americans couldn’t find on a map – and news barely covered it.
In 1982, the U.S. government sent Hollywood star Kirk Douglas to Peshawar, Pakistan to film a Thanksgiving special in which he met with mujahideen leaders and showed the horrors of the Soviet intervention and the plight of Afghan refugees.
But after that effort flopped, the now-defunct U.S. propaganda arm known as the U.S. Information Agency, or USIA, tried its hand. USIA Director Alvin Synder came up with the idea of training mujahideen in “journalism” and providing them with video cameras. The articles and footage they provided would bolster the U.S. government’s narrative of the Soviet intervention as an invasion of a godless evil empire and the Afghan holy warriors as freedom fighters that America had to support.
Congress passed legislation to train the mujahideen and allocated half a million dollars to set up a journalism school for them. This was done in conjunction with Boston University. The Afghan Media Resource Center was born. Its policy manual specified that every employee must be obedient to the Islamic faith and “must honestly and generously sacrifice for holy jihad and take an active share in Afghanistan’s independence struggle.”
The trainees were sent to the Afghan battlefield, where they captured the realities of war: dead soldiers on both sides, unspeakable tragedies. Cable news outlets like CBS and CNN began to air the footage, and U.S. officials credited their efforts for the eventual Soviet withdrawal.
With a gun in one hand and a camera in the other, the mujahideen propagandists interviewed warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of a guerrilla group known as The Islamic Party and CIA favorite, to whom Washington funneled more than a billion dollars to as he became the biggest drug lord in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar had a reputation for spraying acid in the faces of women who dared be in public without covering their heads. His indiscriminate shelling of Kabul during the war against the Soviet-backed government killed 50,000 and earned him the nickname the “Butcher of Kabul.”
In 2003, after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. designated Hekmatyar a global terrorist as his forces waged a fierce insurgency against the U.S. occupation.
There’s Haji Zaman, a mujahideen commander and drug lord whom, decades later, the U.S. accused of helping Osama Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora.
Then U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Peter Tomsondescribed mujahideen leader Mullah Mulang in glowing terms, saying “He is a very patriotic Afghan; he has contributed a lot to the jihad; he said he is looking forward to contributing more in the future.”
Here’s a photo of Jalaluddin Haqqani. A CIA asset during the anti-Soviet jihad, he founded the Haqqani network, which would become one of the U.S.’s fiercest enemies in Afghanistan.
Decades later, this propaganda formula would be applied to Syria, but in a much more sophisticated way. The U.S. and EU funded media trainers and provided cameras for propagandists to embed with anti-government armed groups including the Syrian al Qaeda branch, al Nusra. In Afghanistan, there was the Afghan Media Resource Center.
In Syria, there were numerous media branches. The Aleppo Media Center – funded by the Washington-based Syrian Expatriates Organization, which famously posted videos of Omran Daqneesh – the four-year-old boy who, against his father’s wishes, became a central part of the war propaganda effort. The person who took the infamous photo of Daqneesh – who became known in U.S. media as “Aleppo boy” – was Mahmoud Raslan.
Raslan was also a member of a U.S.-funded armed group, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, that beheaded10-year-old Palestinian boy Abdallah Issa.
There was Syria Direct – funded by the State Department, as well as French and Australian embassies. Syria Direct trained numerous journalists whose articles were furnished to U.S. media outlets like USA Today, CNN, and Radio Free Europe.
Propaganda has been a key component of every war the U.S. has waged from Vietnam to Grenada to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. These efforts become more sophisticated and insidious over time. Without them, the U.S. permanent war state simply couldn’t operate.
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Dan Cohen is the Washington DC correspondent for Behind The Headlines. He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. He tweets at @DanCohen3000.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
“Why was building seven pulled down? Why was the steel quickly cut up from those holocausts and quickly shipped off to foreign mills? What happened to the black boxes and all the information that they should contain? Were they all destroyed by the fires? If the black boxes were destroyed, how would a simple little passport – I believe it was Mohamed Atta’s – was discovered, at the site of the crash? What damning evidence it is to incite Osama bin Laden and his gang!” – Ed Asner (1929-2021), in a statement to the activists at the International Citizens Inquiry into 9/11 in May 2004 [1]
Even in the age of COVID, the attention of hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world turns once again to 9/11.
As the anniversary arrives CBS plays a three hours special 9/11 20 Years Later. NBC will air America Remembers: 20 Years Later. ABC will air a five hours special – 9/11 Twenty Years Later: America Remembers. All starting around 7am, roughly when the terrorist operations became apparent on Tuesday the 11th, 2001.
The History Channel airs 9/11 programming all day long, including 9/11 The Pentagon, Inside Air Force One, The Hunt for Bin Laden, and so on. The 9/11 attacks also receives all day analysis on CNN of course, including an apparent re-run of 9/11 Fifteen Years Later. CBC will air its own special – 9/11 Twentieth Anniversary Commemoration, including a salute to the people stranded for a time in Gander, Newfoundland as planes were grounded. Even London based BBC airs the tribute – 9/11 Twenty Years On.
No doubt millions of ordinary Americans and people around the world will honour their dead in their own way at public gatherings, a quiet walk, or maybe just silently in their own homes.
But wrapped into these large memorial dates lies a smaller group but one just as serious about the loss of life. We’re talking about what has come to be known as 9/11 truthers. They not only mourn about the horrific attacks, they go further in demanding a new investigation. These people feel quite certain that the 9/11 Commission and the ‘Official Story’ of what happened never got to the bottom of it all.
War games exercises held at that time interrupting aircraft intercept response, cell phone messages on the hijacked aircraft that could not have functioned at the time, large put options on US airline stock just days before the hijackings took place, leader Osama bin Laden’s reported presence in a hospital bed in Rawalpini, Pakistan the day before the attacks and, among the more significant, the numerous details showing collapse caused by explosive devices, all reveal the Big Picture presented by the White House not to be consistent with what independent researchers have uncovered.[2][3]
In other words, these anniversary events should not be merely a testimony to our national collective suffering, bravery, and acts of kindness in the face of grief, it should be a dedicated determination to get at the TRUTH of what happened!
On this, the twentieth anniversary of the event that launched the Global War on Terrorism that according to then US vice-president Dick Cheney, “… may never end. At least, not in our lifetimes,” we bring you a special tribute of our own celebrating the work of two people not satisfied by the great 9/11 fairy tale.
In our first half hour we speak with Matt Campbell, the brother of Geoffrey Thomas Campbell who was one of the 2,977 people killed by the fall of the Twin Towers. Then in our second half hour, we have a conversation with Lesley Hughes, a journalist of some renown, who was struck by 9/11 Truth facts, and paid a heavy personal price running as a politician for the Canadian Liberals.
Matt Campbell has a degree in Mathematical Physics, a Master’s Degree in Applied Mathematics and a Master’s Degree in Scientific Application Software. HE lives in a small village in Sussex, UK. He is one of the featured speakers in the film The Unspeakable, about 9/11 victim’s families doubting the official story. He is the oldest brother of Geoffrey Thomas Campbell who died during the September 11 attacks.
Lesley Hughes is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster based in Winnipeg, Canada. She ran as a candidate for the Liberal Party in 2008 and soon got rejected based on her work researching alternative explanations of 9/11. She recently authored the bookThe Dead Candidate’s Report: a Memoir (2021).
CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.
WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.
Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.
CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am.
Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.
Due notizie pubblicate in questi giorni dal Washington Post – «Le famiglie dell’11 Settembre dicono che Biden non è il benvenuto agli eventi commemorativi a meno che non rilasci le prove in mano al governo» e «Biden firma un ordine esecutivo che richiede la revisione, la declassificazione e il rilascio di documenti classificati dell’11 Settembre» – aprono altre profonde incrinature nella versione ufficiale. Il fatto che, a vent’anni di distanza, ci siano negli armadi di Washington documenti segreti sull’11 Settembre significa che la sua reale dinamica è ancora da appurare.
È invece chiaro quale processo abbia messo in moto l’11 Settembre. Nel decennio precedente, venuto meno l’«impero del male» sovietico, la strategia Usa si era concentrata sulle «minacce regionali», conducendo le prime due guerre del dopo-guerra fredda: quella del Golfo e quella contro la Jugoslavia. Loro scopo: rafforzare la presenza militare e influenza politica Usa nell’area strategica del Golfo e nella regione europea, nel momento in cui se ne stavano ridisegnando gli assetti. Contemporaneamente gli Usa rafforzavano la Nato attribuendole (col consenso degli Alleati) il diritto di intervenire fuori area ed estendendola ad Est nei paesi dell’ex Patto di Varsavia.
Nel frattempo, però, l’economia statunitense, pur restando la prima del mondo, aveva perso terreno anche nei confronti di quella dell’Unione europea. Nel mondo arabo vi erano crescenti segni di insofferenza per la presenza e influenza Usa, mentre in Asia il riavvicinamento russo-cinese prospettava la possibilità di una coalizione in grado di sfidare la supremazia statunitense. Esattamente in questo momento critico, l’attacco dell’11 settembre 2001 permette agli Stati Uniti di aprire una nuova fase strategica, con la motivazione ufficiale di affrontare la «minaccia globale del terrorismo».
È una guerra di nuovo tipo, di carattere permanente, in cui non vi sono confini geografici, condotta contro un nemico che può essere identificato di volta in volta non solo in un terrorista, ma in chiunque ostacoli gli interessi statunitensi. L’immagine perfetta di nemico, intercambiabile e duratura. Il presidente Bush lo definisce «un nemico oscuro, che si nasconde negli angoli bui della Terra», da cui emerge all’improvviso per compiere alla luce del sole azioni terrificanti, con un fortissimo impatto emotivo sull’opinione pubblica.
Inizia così la «guerra globale al terrorismo»: nel 2001 gli Stati uniti attaccano e occupano l’Afghanistan, con la partecipazione dal 2003 della Nato; nel 2003 attaccano e occupano l’Iraq con la partecipazione di alleati Nato; nel 2011 attaccano con la Nato lo Stato libico, distruggendolo (come avevano già fatto con la Jugoslavia); sempre nel 2011 iniziano la stessa operazione in Siria, bloccata quattro anni dopo dall’intervento russo a sostegno di Damasco; nel 2014, con il putsch di Piazza Maidan, aprono in Ucraina un altro conflitto armato.
Nella «guerra globale al terrorismo» gli Usa finanziano, armano e addestrano (con l’aiuto in particolare dell’Arabia Saudita e altre monarchie del Golfo) movimenti terroristici islamici, sfruttandone di volta in volta le rivalità: in Afghanistan mujaidin e talebani; in Libia e in Siria una raccoglitizia armata di gruppi fino a poco prima bollati da Washington come terroristi, provenienti da Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cecenia e altri paesi. Nel maggio 2013, un mese dopo aver fondato l’Isis, il «califfo» Ibrahim al-Badri incontra in Siria il senatore statunitense John McCain, capofila dei repubblicani incaricato dal democratico Obama di svolgere operazioni segrete per conto del governo.
La guerra viene non solo condotta con forze aeree, terrestri e navali ma, sempre più, con forze speciali e droni-killer. Il loro uso offre il vantaggio di non richiedere l’approvazione del Congresso e di rimanere segreto, non suscitando reazioni nell’opinione pubblica. I commandos delle operazioni speciali spesso non portano l’uniforme, ma si camuffano con abbigliamento locale. Gli assassini e le torture che compiono restano così anonimi. La «Team Six», élite dei Navy Seals, è così segreta che ufficialmente non se ne ammette neppure l’esistenza. Secondo il racconto ufficiale è questa unità che nel 2011 uccide Osama bin Laden, il cui presunto cadavere viene sepolto in mare. Oppure viene inscenata l’uccisione di un Bin Laden già morto o catturato.
Per la «guerra non-convenzionale», il Comando Usa per le operazioni speciali impiega sempre più anche compagnie di contractor (mercenari), Nell’area del Comando Centrale Usa, comprendente il Medio Oriente, i contractor del Pentagono sono oltre 150 mila. Si aggiungono quelli assunti da altri dipartimenti e dagli eserciti alleati. Essi vengono forniti da un oligopolio di grandi compagnie, strutturate come vere e proprie multinazionali.
In tal modo la guerra sparisce sempre più dai nostri occhi, mettendoci nella condizione di chi cammina su un terreno apparentemente sicuro, non sapendo che sotto i suoi piedi agiscono le forze che possono provocare un catastrofico terremoto.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Israel has banned family visits for Palestinian prisoners and extended its military closure of the occupied West Bank, as it continues searching for six Palestinian prisoners who escaped Gilboa prison four days ago.
On Wednesday evening, the Palestinian Red Cross told families of Palestinian prisoners that all prison visits in September had been cancelled by the Israel Prison Service (IPS) and that no new visits could be booked.
The decision comes after two days of tension inside Gilboa, Megiddo, Rimon and Katziot prisons in Israel. Palestinian prisoners have protested Israeli procedures to isolate and transfer some of them to other prisons following the Gilboa jailbreak, which has been described as “a major security and intelligence failure” by Israel’s police apparatus.
Palestinian prisoners inside Katziot prison in the Negev desert set seven cells on fire on Wednesday in response to a raid on the prison’s Section Six, carried out by special units and Israeli soldiers deployed from a nearby military base.
The raids are an attempt to disperse prisoners affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement who are refusing to be transferred from their cells.
Palestinian factions and activists had called for a “day of rage” on Friday to support the prisoners.
Wasel Abu Youssef, a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), said that Palestinian factions reject the Israeli “policy of harassment and Israeli violations against [the prisoners.]”
“What is required is a large popular rally in all [Palestinian] governorates, including Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in support of the prisoners… The issue of prisoners unites the Palestinian people in all areas of their presence,” Abu Youssef said.
Violence in West Bank
On Wednesday evening, there were confrontations between Israeli forces and Palestinians in several towns in the West Bank after news emerged of tension inside Israeli prisons. Some social media posts by prisoners from inside the jail warned that Katziot prison was “burning”.
Local media reported that Palestinians had fired at Israeli forces near Beit El settlement, north of Ramallah, on Wednesday evening.
Meanwhile, Palestinian protests erupted in al-Aroub and al-Fawar refugee camps, and Dora town in Hebron. Palestinian News Agency (Wafa) reported that Israeli forces got onto the rooves of Palestinian houses in these areas and shot stun grenades and tear gas at the protestors.
Other protests were seen in al-Khadr town in the city of Bethlehem, while in Jenin, in the northern West Bank, a locally made grenade was thrown at the Israeli checkpoint of al-Jalameh, local media said.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said nearly 100 Palestinians were injured on Wednesday evening in the towns across the Nablus and Hebron governorates and four were injured in clashes in occupied East Jerusalem.
Military closure extended
The Israeli army has also announced the extension of its military closure of the West Bank until next Saturday.
The closure was planned to last from Monday to Wednesday during the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah. But following the Gilboa prison break and the tensions in the West Bank, the closure has been extended.
Some Israeli analysts believe that the situation in the West Bank and in Israeli prisons could lead to another round of widespread protests and clashes in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and even Gaza, and that Israeli security officials fear escalation.
On Monday, six Palestinian prisoners tunnelled out of Gilboa, the most guarded prison in Israel, after they dug a hole from their cell toilet floor to access passages formed during the prison’s construction.
One of them is a former commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and the rest are members of al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement.
They dug the tunnel over the course of several months, according to an IPS official, and managed to exploit a “structural flaw” in the building.
Their successful escape has been celebrated in Palestine and across the Arab world as a victory over Israeli occupation.
*
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Featured image: Free Palestine protest at Parliament Hill, Ottawa, July 2014. Photo: Flickr/Tony Webster
The article below entitled Who is Osama bin Laden? was drafted on September 11, 2001. (scroll down) It was first published on the Global Research website on the evening of September 12, 2001.
Since 2001, it has appeared on numerous websites. The original September 12, 2001 posting became one of the most widely read articles on the internet, pertaining to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Since then it has been carefully “recategorized” by the Search engines. More recently, all articles published by global research.ca are subject to censorship.
The Global Research website was launched 20 years ago on the 9th of September 2001.
The original post of this article was among the first articles published by Global Research.
From the outset, the objective was to use 9/11 as a pretext for launching the first phase of the Middle East War, which consisted in the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan.
Within hours of the attacks, Osama bin Laden was identified as the architect of 9/11. On the following day, the “war on terrorism” had been launched. The media disinformation campaign went into full gear.
Also on September 12, less than 24 hours after the attacks, NATO invoked for the first time in its history “Article 5 of the Washington Treaty – its collective defence clause” declaring the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon “to be an attack against all NATO members.”
What happened subsequently, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is already part of history. Syria, Libya and Yemen were already on the Pentagon’s drawing board, the next phase of the US adminstration’s military roadmap.
9/11 remains the pretext and justification for waging a war without borders.
Michel Chossudovsky, September 11, 2015, September 11, 2017, September 10,, 2021
The main article is preceded by excerpts from Michel Chossudovsky’s Book focussing on the September 11, 2001 Timeline
At eleven o’clock, on the morning of September 11, the Bush administration had already announced that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. This assertion was made prior to the conduct of an indepth police investigation.
That same evening at 9.30 pm, a “War Cabinet” was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11.00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the “War on Terrorism” was officially launched.
The decision was announced to wage war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in retribution for the 9/11 attacks. The following morning on September 12th, the news headlines indelibly pointed to “state sponsorship” of the 9/11 attacks by Afghanistan
In chorus, the US media was calling for a military intervention against Afghanistan.
Barely four weeks later, on the 7th of October, Afghanistan was bombed and invaded by US troops. Americans were led to believe that the decison to go to war had been taken on the spur of the moment, on the evening of September 11, in response to the 9/11 attacks and their tragic consequences.
Little did the public realize that a large scale theater war is never planned and executed in a matter of weeks. The decision to launch a war and send troops to Afghanistan had been taken well in advance of 9/11. The “terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event” as it was later described by (former) USCENTCOM Commander General Tommy Franks, served to galvanize public opinion in support of a war agenda which was already in its final planning stage.
The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage a war on “humanitarian grounds”, with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the “international community”.
Several prominent “progressive” intellectuals made a case for “retaliation against terrorism”, on moral and ethical grounds. The “just cause” military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11, without examining the fact that Washington had not only supported the “Islamic terror network”, it was also instrumental in the installation of the Taliban government in 1996.
In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country of 30 million people.
I started writing on the evening of September 11, late into the night, going through piles of research notes, which I had previously collected on the history of Al Qaeda. My first text entitled “Who is Osama bin Laden?” was completed and first published on September the 12th. (See full text of the 9/12/2001 article below).
From the very outset, I questioned the official story, which described nineteen Al Qaeda sponsored hijackers involved in a highly sophisticated and organized operation. My first objective was to reveal the true nature of this illusive “enemy of America”, who was “threatening the Homeland”.
The myth of the “outside enemy” and the threat of “Islamic terrorists” was the cornerstone of the Bush adminstration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America.
Without an “outside enemy”, there could be no “war on terrorism”. The entire national security agenda would collapse “like a deck of cards”. The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on.
Al Qaeda was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet-Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: “he turned against us”.
After 9/11, the campaign of media disinformation served not only to drown the truth but also to kill much of the historical evidence on how this illusive “outside enemy” had been fabricated and transformed into “Enemy Number One”.
Michel Chossudovsky, Excerpts from the Preface of America’s “War on Terrorism”, Second edition, Global Research, 2005.
A few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence, that “Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime suspects”. CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks “an act of war” and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would “make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them”. Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed his finger at “state sponsorship,” implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger,
“I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution.”
Meanwhile, parroting official statements, the Western media mantra has approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.
The following text outlines the history of Osama Bin Laden and the links of the Islamic “Jihad” to the formulation of US foreign policy during the Cold War and its aftermath.
Prime suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by the FBI as an “international terrorist” for his role in the African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Osama bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war “ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders”. 1
In 1979 “the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA” was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.2:
With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.3
The Islamic “jihad” was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade:
In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166,…[which] authorize[d] stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies — a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, … as well as a “ceaseless stream” of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan’s ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.4
President Reagan and Mujahideen leaders from Afghanistan
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) using Pakistan’s military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) played a key role in training the Mujahideen. In turn, the CIA sponsored guerrilla training was integrated with the teachings of Islam:
“Predominant themes were that Islam was a complete socio-political ideology, that holy Islam was being violated by the atheistic Soviet troops, and that the Islamic people of Afghanistan should reassert their independence by overthrowing the leftist Afghan regime propped up by Moscow.”5
Pakistan’s Intelligence Apparatus
Pakistan’s ISI was used as a “go-between”. The CIA covert support to the “jihad” operated indirectly through the Pakistani ISI, –i.e. the CIA did not channel its support directly to the Mujahideen. In other words, for these covert operations to be “successful”, Washington was careful not to reveal the ultimate objective of the “jihad”, which consisted in destroying the Soviet Union.
In the words of CIA’s Milton Beardman “We didn’t train Arabs”. Yet according to Abdel Monam Saidali, of the Al-aram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, bin Laden and the “Afghan Arabs” had been imparted “with very sophisticated types of training that was allowed to them by the CIA” 6
CIA’s Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Osama bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): “neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help”. 7
Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam. While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA.
With CIA backing and the funneling of massive amounts of US military aid, the Pakistani ISI had developed into a “parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government”. 8 The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers, estimated at 150,000. 9
Meanwhile, CIA operations had also reinforced the Pakistani military regime led by General Zia Ul Haq:
‘Relations between the CIA and the ISI [Pakistan’s military intelligence] had grown increasingly warm following [General] Zia’s ouster of Bhutto and the advent of the military regime,’… During most of the Afghan war, Pakistan was more aggressively anti-Soviet than even the United States. Soon after the Soviet military invaded Afghanistan in 1980, Zia [ul Haq] sent his ISI chief to destabilize the Soviet Central Asian states. The CIA only agreed to this plan in October 1984…. `the CIA was more cautious than the Pakistanis.’ Both Pakistan and the United States took the line of deception on Afghanistan with a public posture of negotiating a settlement while privately agreeing that military escalation was the best course.”10
The Golden Crescent Drug Triangle
The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA’s covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. 11 In this regard, Alfred McCoy’s study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, “the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979… to 1.2 million by 1985 — a much steeper rise than in any other nation”:12
CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests … U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies `because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.’ In 1995, the former CIA director of the Afghan operation, Charles Cogan, admitted the CIA had indeed sacrificed the drug war to fight the Cold War. `Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets. We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade,’… `I don’t think that we need to apologize for this. Every situation has its fallout…. There was fallout in terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.’13
In the Wake of the Cold War
In the wake of the Cold War, the Central Asian region is not only strategic for its extensive oil reserves, it also produces three quarters of the World’s opium representing multibillion dollar revenues to business syndicates, financial institutions, intelligence agencies and organized crime. The annual proceeds of the Golden Crescent drug trade (between 100 and 200 billion dollars) represents approximately one third of the Worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $500 billion.14
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 — coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics– reached a record high of 4600 metric tons.15 Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes.
The ISI’s extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic “jihad” out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan’s military and intelligence apparatus essentially “served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia.” 16.
Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had established themselves in the Muslim republics as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular State. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington’s strategic interests in the former Soviet Union.
Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the civil war in Afghanistan continued unabated. The Taliban were being supported by the Pakistani Deobandis and their political party the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). In 1993, JUI entered the government coalition of Prime Minister Benazzir Bhutto. Ties between JUI, the Army and ISI were established. In 1995, with the downfall of the Hezb-I-Islami Hektmatyar government in Kabul, the Taliban not only instated a hardline Islamic government, they also “handed control of training camps in Afghanistan over to JUI factions…” 17
And the JUI with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements played a key role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
Jane Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that “half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate[d] in Pakistan under the ISI” 18
In fact, it would appear that following the Soviet withdrawal both sides in the Afghan civil war continued to receive covert support through Pakistan’s ISI. 19
In other words, backed by Pakistan’s military intelligence (ISI) which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In last few months there is evidence that Mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia.
No doubt, this explains why Washington has closed its eyes on the reign of terror imposed by the Taliban including the blatant derogation of women’s rights, the closing down of schools for girls, the dismissal of women employees from government offices and the enforcement of “the Sharia laws of punishment”.20
The War in Chechnya
Chechnya’s rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab
With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress’s Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. 21 The summit, was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers. In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan’s ISI in Chechnya “goes far beyond supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war”. 22
Russia’s main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington’s perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin.
The two main Chechen rebel armies (respectively led by Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab) estimated at 35,000 strong were supported by Pakistan’s ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army:
“[In 1994] the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence arranged for Basayev and his trusted lieutenants to undergo intensive Islamic indoctrination and training in guerrilla warfare in the Khost province of Afghanistan at Amir Muawia camp, set up in the early 1980s by the CIA and ISI and run by famous Afghani warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In July 1994, upon graduating from Amir Muawia, Basayev was transferred to Markaz-i-Dawar camp in Pakistan to undergo training in advanced guerrilla tactics. In Pakistan, Basayev met the highest ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officers: Minister of Defense General Aftab Shahban Mirani, Minister of Interior General Naserullah Babar, and the head of the ISI branch in charge of supporting Islamic causes, General Javed Ashraf, (all now retired). High-level connections soon proved very useful to Basayev.”23
Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995. His organization had also developed extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow as well as ties to Albanian organized crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1997-98, according to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) “Chechen warlords started buying up real estate in Kosovo… through several real estate firms registered as a cover in Yugoslavia” 24
Basayev’s organisation has also been involved in a number of rackets including narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia’s oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling of nuclear materials (See Mafia linked to Albania’s collapsed pyramids, 25 Alongside the extensive laundering of drug money, the proceeds of various illicit activities have been funneled towards the recruitment of mercenaries and the purchase of weapons.
During his training in Afghanistan, Shamil Basayev linked up with Saudi born veteran Mujahideen Commander “Al Khattab” who had fought as a volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev’s return to Grozny, Khattab was invited (early 1995) to set up an army base in Chechnya for the training of Mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC, Khattab’s posting to Chechnya had been “arranged through the Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals which channeled funds into Chechnya”.26
Concluding Remarks
Since the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI’s “most wanted list” as the World’s foremost terrorist.
While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America’s war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI –operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has –since the Soviet-Afghan war– supported international terrorism through its covert operations.
In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad –featured by the Bush Adminstration as “a threat to America”– is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organisations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush Adminstration together with its NATO partners from embarking upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.
Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best America’s “War on Terrorism” Second Edition, Global Research, 2005. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization.
1. Hugh Davies, International: `Informers’ point the finger at bin Laden; Washington on alert for suicide bombers, The Daily Telegraph, London, 24 August 1998.
2. See Fred Halliday, “The Un-great game: the Country that lost the Cold War, Afghanistan, New Republic, 25 March 1996):
3. Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999.
4. Steve Coll, Washington Post, July 19, 1992.
5. Dilip Hiro, Fallout from the Afghan Jihad, Inter Press Services, 21 November 1995.
6. Weekend Sunday (NPR); Eric Weiner, Ted Clark; 16 August 1998.
7. Ibid.
8. Dipankar Banerjee; Possible Connection of ISI With Drug Industry, India Abroad, 2 December 1994.
9. Ibid
10. See Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, Oxford university Press, New York, 1995. See also the review of Cordovez and Harrison in International Press Services, 22 August 1995.
11. Alfred McCoy, Drug fallout: the CIA’s Forty Year Complicity in the Narcotics Trade. The Progressive; 1 August 1997.
12. Ibid
13. Ibid.
14. Douglas Keh, Drug Money in a changing World, Technical document no 4, 1998, Vienna UNDCP, p. 4. See also Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1999, E/INCB/1999/1 United Nations Publication, Vienna 1999, p 49-51, And Richard Lapper, UN Fears Growth of Heroin Trade, Financial Times, 24 February 2000.
15. Report of the International Narcotics Control Board, op cit, p 49-51, see also Richard Lapper, op. cit.
16. International Press Services, 22 August 1995.
17. Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November- December, 1999, p. 22.
18. Quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, 3 September 1998)
19. Tim McGirk, Kabul learns to live with its bearded conquerors, The Independent, London, 6 November1996.
20. See K. Subrahmanyam, Pakistan is Pursuing Asian Goals, India Abroad, 3 November 1995.
21. Levon Sevunts, Who’s calling the shots?: Chechen conflict finds Islamic roots in Afghanistan and Pakistan, The Gazette, Montreal, 26 October 1999..
22. Ibid
23. Ibid.
24. See Vitaly Romanov and Viktor Yadukha, Chechen Front Moves To Kosovo Segodnia, Moscow, 23 Feb 2000.
25. The European, 13 February 1997, See also Itar-Tass, 4-5 January 2000.
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President Biden is expected to announce today he will impose new vaccination mandates as part of a plan to “return to normal.” When asked if the plan would have an immediate and broad effect on Americans, the White House told reporters: “It depends on if you’re vaccinated or not.”
President Biden is expected to announce later today he will impose new vaccine mandates as part of a broad plan to put pressure on private businesses, federal agencies and schools to enact stricter vaccination and testing policies.
According to The New York Times, Biden, who was briefed by his team of COVID advisors Wednesday, will address six areas where his administration can push eligible Americans to receive vaccines.
Two officials familiar with the plan said it would include new federal requirements for vaccination, and that its underlying message would be that the only way to return to some sense of normalcy is to get as many people vaccinated as possible.
Biden also will announce new measures for kids in classroom settings.
When asked if Biden will add more detail to existing policies or would outline measures that would have an immediate and broad effect on Americans, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters: “It depends on if you’re vaccinated or not.”
“He’s going to outline the next phase in the fight against the virus and what that looks like, including measures to work with the public and private sector, building on the steps we’ve already announced, the steps we’ve taken over the last few months: requiring more vaccinations, boosting important testing measures and more; making it safer for kids to go to school all at a time when the American people are listening,” Psaki said.
In an interview with MSNBC ahead of Biden’s remarks on Thursday, Psaki said Biden really wants to lay out the path ahead.
“He’s going to speak directly to vaccinated people and their frustration, and he wants them to hear how we’re going to build on what we’ve done to date to get the virus under control and to return to some version of normal in this country,” Psaki said.
Biden to require federal workers to get vaccinated, removes testing options
As part of his six-pronged strategy to boost vaccination Biden is expected to sign two executive orders requiring all federal executive branch employees and contractors be vaccinated against COVID — with no option for weekly testing for the unvaccinated as previously promised — three people familiar with the plan told CBS News.
As The Defender reported July 30, Biden announced all civilian federal employees and contractors would be required to show proof of vaccination against COVID, or submit to regular COVID testing, wear masks and socially distance.
In response to the news Biden would be issuing more mandates and restrictions on the unvaccinated, Mary Holland, Children’s Health Defense president and general counsel, told The Defender:
“The press anticipating President Biden’s speech suggests an utter and complete disavowal of the informed consent ethic for which the United States led the way in the Nuremberg Code at the end of World War II: the consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
“Note the word ‘absolutely’ there must be informed consent. Full stop. President Biden’s efforts to coerce federal workers and those who have elected to remain unvaccinated is clearly in violation of the Nuremberg Code, which has been incorporated into U.S. federal and state law. This is a sad day for ethics and the rule of law.”
United Airlines allows religious exemptions to mandates, but will place workers on unpaid leave
United Airlines told staff on Wednesday those who are granted religious exemptions to COVID vaccines will be placed on temporary unpaid medical leave, CNBC reported.
In August, United became the first major U.S. airline to issue a vaccine mandate for its employees. Employees have until Sept. 27 to get fully vaccinated or will face termination.
“We have no greater responsibility to you and your colleagues than to ensure your safety when you’re at work, and the facts are crystal clear: Everyone is safer when everyone is vaccinated,” United CEO Scott Kirby and President Brett Hart said to employees in a memo obtained last month by The Hill.
Employees, such as such as pilots, flight attendants and gate agents, who directly interact with customers and are granted an exemption will be permitted to return to work “once the pandemic meaningfully recedes,” United reportedly said, though the airline did not specify a timeline or lay out criteria for what “meaningfully recedes” looks like.
Mechanics and dispatchers who are also given exemptions may return to work once United implements new testing procedures and other mitigation measures, according to CNBC.
Airlines’ approaches to encourage vaccination rates of their staff have varied. Delta Air Lines is imposing a $200 surcharge on unvaccinated employees’ company healthcare premiums, and Delta, American Airlines and Alaska Airlines will end pay protections for unvaccinated employees who contract or are exposed to COVID.
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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a proposal backed by two major globalist organizations that serves as a blueprint for governments to implement a worldwide vaccine passport verification system.
Alex Jones breaks down the WHO document:
The document, called “Digital Documentation of COVID-19 Certificates: Vaccination Status,” funded by none other than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller foundation, describes the technical guidance for governments to roll out the program to usher in a global digital ID — in the name of COVID, of course.
“This document lays out an approach for creating a signed digital version of a vaccination record for COVID-19 based on a core data set of key information to be recorded, and an approach for the digital signature. The document leverages existing free and open standards, and is driven by the ethics, use cases and requirements for Digital Documentation of COVID-19 Certificates: Vaccination Status (DDCC:VS).”
“This document is therefore software-agnostic and provides a starting point for Member States to design, develop and deploy a DDCC:VS solution for national use in whichever format best suits their needs (e.g. a paper card with a one-dimensional [1D] barcode or QR code stickers, or a fully functioning smartphone application developed internationally or locally).”
“The primary target audience of this document is national authorities tasked with creating or overseeing the development of a digital vaccination certificate solution for COVID-19. The document may also be useful to government partners such as local businesses, international organizations, non- governmental organizations and trade associations, that may be required to support Member States in developing or deploying a DDCC:VS solution.”
The DDCC:VS is meant for use at schools, at work, for international travel, and for contact tracing initiatives.
The document also shows its proposed vaccine passport template, with a QR code featured on the front, but further in the app shows personal information about the number of vaccines received.
A similar vaccine passport project in the works, called CommonPass, is also backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Economic Forum (WEF).
It’s notable how the only groups actively pushing for global vaccine passports are also the main proponents of the so-called Great Reset, a post-human plan outlined by WEF founder Klaus Schwab which seeks to deindustrialize the West, abolish private property, introduce biometric surveillance, and move humanity to a diet of bugs in the name of fighting climate change.
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This is a guidance document for countries and implementing partners on the technical requirements for developing digital information systems for issuing standards-based interoperable digital certificates for COVID-19 vaccination status, and considerations for implementation of such systems, for the purposes of continuity of care, and proof of vaccination.
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During a press conference, Australian public health chief Dr. Kerry Chant remarked, “We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the New World Order.”
The comments were made during the same briefing in which Premier Gladys Berejikliansaid that unvaccinated people would remain under lockdown indefinitely.
Chant was asked if “exposure sites” such as pubs would still be subject to contact tracing and shut down if someone who visits them tests positive for COVID-19 if and when Australia lifts its brutal lockdown.
“We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the New World Order…yes it will be pubs and clubs and other things if we have a positive case there,” said Chant, who is the Chief Health Officer for New South Wales.
The term ‘New World Order’ then began trending on Twitter as the social media giant desperately tried to assert that the whole thing was an ‘unfounded conspiracy theory.’
“Fact-checkers have regularly debunked claims connected to the conspiracy theory,” claimed the explainer. “The phrase is regularly used to times of change or cultural shift.”
Always funny when they are forced into these desperate denials.
In reality, the term has long been used by world leaders and other public officials as a signal that they are fully on board with the consensus to create a ‘New World Order’ – which in its simplest terms means an aggressive centralization of power at the expense of stripping liberties from the population.
It’s little surprise that the comment came from Dr. Chant, the stern-faced bureaucrat who has become notorious for her authoritarian pronouncements.
As we highlighted earlier this week, Chant said that COVID will be with us “forever” and people will have to “get used to” taking endless booster vaccines
Back in July, she ordered Australians not to talk to each other, even if they were wearing masks.
“Whilst it’s human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately this is not the time to do that,” said Chant, adding, “So even if you run into your next door neighbor in the shopping center…don’t start up a conversation.”
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.
DON’T ACT LIKE A HUMAN. DON’T TALK TO YOUR FRIENDS, EVEN WHEN MASKED. DON’T BE FRIENDLY. THIS IS NOT THE TIME. pic.twitter.com/iiPgz2D8Bb
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Featured image: NSW Chief Medical Officer Dr Kerry Chant and Health Minister Brad Hazzard during a COVID-19 update in Sydney Source: AAP
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Toward late this century global temperatures are likely to either reach super-tropical levels of >>14°C or/and extreme levels of storminess consequent on clashes between Arctic and Antarctic sourced cold and warm air and water masses.
Humans appear to be mainly concerned about any one issue at a time, and while COVID-19 is [allegedly] “claiming the lives of millions” Homo sapiens appears to be increasingly oblivious to the growing threat to billions of humans and to nature, including the inhabitability of large regions and extinguishment of habitats.
The almost universal assumption as if a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is in itself sufficient to prevent further warming is misleading, since positive feedbacks from land and ocean would continue to raise greenhouse levels and temperatures.
Such feedback effects include:
increased evaporation with warming, water vapor being a greenhouse gas;
melting ice decreasing the albedo effect of Earth, exposing dark rock surfaces, reducing the albedo of the polar terrains and sea ice in surrounding oceans, enhancing infrared absorption and heating;
burnt and desiccated vegetation decreasing the albedo;
decreased absorption and solubility of CO₂ in warming oceans;
release of CO₂ and methane from drying vegetation, from melting permafrost and from bogs.
A critical parameter, rarely mentioned in the media, is the inexorable accelerating rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases. With CO₂ reaching 414.6 parts per million, CH₄ (methane) is reaching 1891.3 parts per billion and total greenhouse gas concentration of 500 parts per million, a level unknown since the Miocene about 5.3-23 million years ago.
With a Miocene CO₂ level in the range of ~400-500 parts per million and mean temperatures up to 18.4°C, the atmosphere is tracking toward super-tropical temperatures, which would render large regions uninhabitable.
Anthropocene temperature rise rates are at least an order of magnitude higher than the mean temperature rise since the Last Glacial Maximum:
Given the current mean global land and ocean temperature of 14°C, i.e. 6.2°C warmer than the mean ~7.8°C temperature of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) (~19,000–23.000 years-ago), the mean warming of (~0.00026°C/year rate; 6°C/23.000 years) is an order of magnitude slower than during the Anthropocene.
Late Holocene/Anthropocene: 1.04°C/250 years ~0.004°C/year). This relegates the current global warming to an unprecedented category during the last ~3 million years and longer.
Namely, at ~+4 degrees Celsius of warming toward later the 21st century the Earth’s mean surface land/ocean temperature would be warmer than tropical Miocene temperatures. A lag effect between the rise of greenhouse gases and temperature would delay but not prevent the worst effects of global warming.
But even before such high mean temperatures is reached, the weakened jet stream climate zone boundary, allowing penetration of cold and warm fronts, allowing clashes between air and water masses of contrasting temperatures, would lead to storminess, disrupting human agriculture and habitats, as is already happening in northern Europe and within the Arctic circle.
How long would it take for global temperatures to rise to about ~4°C and higher would depend on:
The acceleration in rising concentration of greenhouse gases and the lag in consequent rising temperatures;
The extent to which ice melt flow from Greenland and Antarctica may slow down further warming in certain regions, such as the north Atlantic and the Southern Ocean;
Further anthropogenic emissions and/or draw-down of atmospheric CO₂.
From the continuing rise of atmospheric greenhouse concentrations (CO₂: 2020 – 414.62 ppm; 2021 – 416.96 ppm) to date global greenhouse gas emissions are hardly slowing down, nor have attempts at mitigation and/or sequestration been effective. In 2019, the world emitted roughly 36.44 billion metric tons (BMT) of carbon dioxide, compared to 14.83 BMT in 1970.
According to the head of the International Energy Agency no new oil, gas or coal development ought to take place if the world is to reach net zero by 2050.
However, rising production of hydrocarbons in several regions, for example new drilling for oil in the North Sea, high production of oil and gas the USA, new coal mines in Australia and elsewhere cast doubt on the level of carbon emissions in future.
Conclusion
A rise in the mean global temperature to about 4 degrees Celsius or higher, as projected by IPCC, and/or a stormy climate consequent due to clashes between air and water masses of contrasting temperatures consequent on weakening of climate zone boundaries, are likely to progress through the 21st Century, severely disrupting natural and human habitats and species.
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Dr Andrew Glikson is an Earth and Paleo-climate scientist, Canberra, Australia. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Yesterday, in Jordan the energy ministers of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan met and agreed on a plan to supply Lebanon with Egyptian natural gas to convert into electricity. The joint press conference confirmed they all had agreed to revive the Arab Gas Pipeline (AGP) which links Egyptian gas to Jordan, where it will be used to produce additional electricity for the network linking Jordan with Lebanon via Syria.
This follows a meeting in Damascus on September 4 between Lebanese and Syrian officials discussing the Lebanese request to import gas from Egypt and Electricity from Jordan through the Syrian territory.
However, US sanctions on Syria are holding up the smooth process to help beleaguered Lebanon, where the public has no access to electricity, gas and even water is scarce.
Egypt and Jordan are pressuring the Biden administration to waive the Syrian sanctions under the Caesar Act, to facilitate the multi-faceted regional deal to go through. The Caesar Act was passed by the US Congress to hurt the Syrian government, but has instead made the Syrian public suffer in a multitude of ways from currency devaluation to hyperinflation.
Currently, Syria is suffering from a severe lack of electricity, with most homes living on 3-4 hours per day. Gasoline powered generators are not the solution, as there is also a severe shortage of gasoline which is rationed. As bad as the situation is in Syria because of US sanctions, the situation in Lebanon is even far worse.
The World Bank has offered to provide funding for the project, but is worried about corruption among the Lebanese ruling elite, who are responsible for the dire situation in Lebanon, which the World Bank has said is the worse financial crisis in 150 years.
In a press conference on September 4, the Secretary-General of the Lebanese-Syrian Higher Council, Nasri Khoury, said:
“The Lebanese side demanded Syria’s assistance to Lebanon in obtaining Egyptian gas and Jordanian electricity through Syrian territory. The Syrian side affirmed Syria’s readiness to meet that request.”
Lebanon Crisis
Lebanon has descended into severe failure after the public revolted against the systemic corruption of the ruling elite. The government failed to provide even the most basic of services: water, gasoline, food, and electricity. Many hospitals have closed, and those open struggle to find medicine.
In the wake of the Lebanese collapse, an effort was made to draw electrical energy from Jordan through Syria, by providing quantities of Egyptian gas to Jordan, enabling it to produce additional quantities of electricity to be placed on the grid linking Jordan with Lebanon via Syria.
Egypt had supplied Lebanon with gas in 2009 and 2010, but supplies ended soon after as Egypt’s gas production dwindled. Egypt restarted exporting gas through the pipeline in 2018, but the gas has overwhelmingly been going to Jordan.
Electricite du Liban signed a deal with Iraq to buy heavy fuel oil to be converted into electricity, which should cover around one third of EDL’s fuel needs, and supply the country for about four months.
Egyptian gas is planned to reach Lebanon to operate gas-fired power stations, which have been out of service for 11 years.
Washington is also being asked to grant a separate license to Jordan to distribute electricity from its power grid to Lebanon, which would need to pass through Syria.
Syrian Crisis
The US government has placed Syria under strict oil sector sanctions, which make the AGP deal complicated for all the regional stakeholders.
Pipeline Attacks
In 2011, when the ‘Arab Spring’ violence began, armed terrorists in Egypt attacked the Egyptian side of the AGP numerous times. The attack on a pipeline isn’t aimed at changing the government, or bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East. Those attacks were aimed to hurt and terrorize the civilian population, and most likely were carried out by locals who were following the Muslim Brotherhood political ideology which justified the slaughter of Muslims, like themselves, to remove a secular government, in the case of Syria, and establish an Islamic State.
The Homs section of the pipeline was attacked in 2012 when CNN’s Arwa Damon was embedded with the terrorists there.
In 2016, and in 2020 the terrorists attacked the AGP in Syria. The Syrian population early on came to know that the terrorists were treating them as the enemy. This is why the Free Syrian Army, and their Al Qaeda affiliates lost their war against the Syrian people, because they failed to receive the support and participation of the public, who came to despise them.
History of the Pipeline
The AGP is 1,200 km-long and is a trans-regional gas export pipeline built to carry natural gas from Egypt to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
The major stakeholders of the AGP include the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS), Engineering for the Petroleum and Process Industries (ENPPI), The Petroleum Projects and Technical Consultations Company (PETROJET), the Egyptian Natural Gas Company (GASCO) and the Syrian Petroleum Company (SPC).
The Egyptian Government in 1995 allowed national and international oil and gas companies to actively drill for gas. The domestic demand for gas was satisfied in 1999, and the government started looking for export markets for the surplus.
In 2001, Egypt and Jordan began dialogues, which later included Syria and Lebanon. Israel, Turkey and Iraq also signed deals to co-operate in the AGP.
The AGP has four sections. The first section extends from Arish in Egypt to Aqaba in Jordan.
The second section runs from Aqaba to El Rehab, which is near the Jordanian-Syrian borders. The third section extends from Jordan (El Rehab) to Syria (Jabber).
The fourth section consists of a gas network in Syria, and has been operational since 2008. It runs from Jabber (Syrian side of Jordanian-Syrian borders) to the Syrian-Turkish borders, ending in Lebanon. This section has four segments. Segment one runs from Jabber to Homs in Syria, while the second segment connects cities of Homs and Aleppo, Syria. The third segment extends from Aleppo to the Syrian-Turkish borders. The fourth segment connects Homs in Syria with Tripoli in Lebanon, and this section includes four launching / receiving stations, 12 valve stations and a metering station.
The AGP can also connect Iraq’s gas grid to facilitate the export of Iraqi gas to the European market.
In January 2008, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between Turkey and Syria for the extension of the AGP from Homs, in Syria, to the Turkish border city of Kilis. From Turkey, the AGP is likely to be connected to the proposed Nabucco pipeline for delivery of the Egyptian gas in to Europe. The Arab Gas Pipeline is also to be connected with Iraq’s gas grid to facilitate the export of Iraqi gas to the European market.
What Is Next?
Will the US waive sanctions to help the Syrian and Lebanese people? France’s President Macron recently co- hosted a regional meeting in Baghdad, and previously hosted a meeting to help Lebanon recover. Will Macron ask Biden to waive the sanctions on Syria to make this deal happen, or will France continue to take their orders from Washington? Does Biden have the political clout to make a waiver on sanctions be accepted by the US Congress? The Arab Gas Pipeline is a group of neighbors trying to work together to solve their own problems, yet it is the US who holds their finger on the light switch.
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Further evidence proving the Covid-19 vaccination programme is a huge failure has been released which confirms throughout the whole of August 80% of the people who allegedly died of Covid-19 had been vaccinated against the disease.
We’re living in strange times, and if you believe the Covid-19 vaccination programme is working because the authorities on the television tell you that it is, then you must surely find it extremely strange that the UK is in the middle of a third wave in the middle of summer? Especially when you consider that in summer 2020 Covid-19 deaths flat-lined to zero even though a Covid-19 injection was not available.
But the strangeness doesn’t end there, just take a look at the latest Covid-19 Statistical Report released by Public Health Scotland (PHS) on the 8th September 2021.
The report provides an array on data on testing, quarantining, vaccinations, cases, hospitalisations, and deaths but it doesn’t get very interesting until you read Table 15 which covers the number of Covid-19 positive cases by week and vaccination status.
Interesting because it shows that the majority of confirmed cases are now among the vaccinated population. In the most recent week from 28th August to 3rd September 2021 the report shows that there were 20,744 confirmed cases among the unvaccinated population, who are more likely to be tested for the simple reason they have not been vaccinated.
But it also shows that there were 5,508 confirmed cases among the partly vaccinated population, and 16,810 cases among the fully vaccinated population – two populations who are least likely to be tested due to be being vaccinated.
This means that between 28th August and 3rd September there were 22,318 cases among the vaccinated population – almost 2,000 more than the unvaccinated population.
The same can also be said for the week of 21st August to 27th August which saw 15,647 cases among the unvaccinated population and 22,234 cases among the vaccinated population, and the same can also be said for the previous two weeks before that.
The data actually shows that between 7th August 2021 and the 3rd September 2021 there were 47,580 cases among the unvaccinated population, 21,020 cases among the partly vaccinated population, and 41,748 cases among the fully vaccinated population. Meaning there were 15,188 more cases among the vaccinated population.
So now that we’ve cleared up that the experimental Covid-19 injections clearly do not prevent infection or spread of Covid-19, let’s find out if they prevent hospitalisations like the authorities claim.
According to table 16 of the report between the 28th August 2021 and the 3rd September 2021 there were 36 admissions to hospital related to Covid-19 among the unvaccinated over 60 population, whilst there were 7 admissions on the partly vaccinated population.
However, there were a huge 299 admissions among the fully vaccinated over 60 population, and the same pattern can be seen for the weeks previous all the way back to the 7th August 2021.
In all for the week of 28th August to 3rd September 2021 there were 271 hospitalisations among the entire unvaccinated population but 423 hospitalisations among the fully vaccinated population. If we base these hospitalisations occurring after the previous weeks confirmed cases then we can calculate the case-hospitalisation rate.
In the week beginning 21st August there were 15,047 confirmed cases among the unvaccinated population. Therefore based on the unvaccinated hospitalisation figures of 271 in the week beginning 28th August the case-hospitalisation rate is 1.7%. However, when we carry out the same calculation for the fully vaccinated population hospitalisations (423) and cases (14,519) we can see that the case-hospitalisation rate is 2.9%.
Therefore, this shows that the Covid-19 injections are increasing the risk of hospitalisation when exposed to Covid-19 by 70% rather than reducing the risk by the 95% claimed by the vaccine manufacturers and authorities.
So now that we’ve cleared up the Covid-19 injections increase the risk of hospitalisation rather than reducing it let’s find out if they prevent deaths like the authorities claim.
Table 17 of the Public Health Scotland report shows the number of deaths to have occurred via vaccination status. However, PHS have been very clever in the way they’ve presented the number of deaths. Because rather than present them on a week by week basis like they have with the number of cases and hospitalisations, they’ve instead included deaths all the way back to the 29th December.
The above table is taken from the report released by Public Health Scotland on the 18th August 2021 and shows deaths due to Covid-19 by vaccination status between the 29th December 2020 and the 5th August 2021. As you can see anyone reading the report would be given the impression that the vaccines are doing a fantastic job at preventing death due to Covid-19.
But fast forward to the most recent report and you will find on Table 17 that there have been 3,102 deaths among the unvaccinated population, 279 deaths among the partly vaccinated population and 298 deaths among the fully vaccinated population between the 29th December and the 26th August 2021.
Therefore, the true number of deaths by vaccination status between the 5th August 2021 and the 26th August 2021 are as follows:
Unvaccinated population – 25 deaths
Partly vaccinated population – 6 deaths
Fully vaccinated population – 92 deaths
This means the unvaccinated population have accounted for just 20% of alleged Covid-19 deaths throughout the whole of August, whilst the fully vaccinated accounted for 75% of them. But couple the partly vaccinated deaths with the fully vaccinated deaths and you can see that throughout August 80% of deaths occurred among the vaccinated population.
However this makes it hard to work out the case-fatality rate so to do this we need to look at how many deaths occurred in the previous weeks report. Up to the 19th August there had been 3,096 deaths among the unvaccinated, 277 deaths among the partly vaccinated, and 264 deaths among the fully vaccinated.
Therefore, the true number of deaths by vaccination status between the 19th August 2021 and the 26th August 2021 are as follows:
Unvaccinated population – 6 deaths
Partly vaccinated population – 2 deaths
Fully vaccinated population – 34 deaths
If we base these deaths on occurring two weeks after the number of confirmed cases then we can work out the case-fatality rate.
In the week beginning 7th August there were 3,788 confirmed cases among the fully vaccinated population. Therefore based on the unvaccinated death figures of 6 in the week beginning 19th August the case-fatality rate is 0.15%. However, when we carry out the same calculation for the fully vaccinated population hospitalisations (34) and cases (3,490) we can see that the case-hospitalisation rate is 1%.
Therefore, this shows that the Covid-19 injections are increasing the risk of death when exposed to Covid-19 by a huge 566% rather than reducing the risk by the 95% claimed by the vaccine manufacturers and authorities.
What’s even more concerning about this is that the number of confirmed cases among the fully vaccinated population have rose significantly in the most recent week compared to four weeks prior. Therefore the number of hospitalisations and deaths that could occur in the next few weeks could possibly be enough for the authorities to justify another lockdown.
The data clearly shows the jabs do not prevent infection or transmission, and it clearly shows that they are increasing the risk of hospitalisation and death rather than reducing the risk.
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Time goes by.It has been 20 years since three World Trade Center skyscrapers designed to withstand airliner collision were destroyed. Building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition as its collapse at free fall acceleration proves conclusively. The destruction of the twin towers was accompanied by a series of explosions, and these buildings also fell into their own footprints at essentially free fall acceleration. The US government’s official coverup story has been totally demolished by authors such as David Ray Griffin, by scholarly conferences, university investigations, expert reports, and by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth.
The great mass of evidence that has been accumulated proves that the official narrative is false, but it doesn’t say who was responsible for the attack.Some, such as Ron Unz, Laurent Guyenot, and Chris Bollyn, have noted the Israeli Connection, but the focus has been on the total implausibility of the official narrative, not on the who and why of the attack.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that 9/11 was a scheme of George W. Bush regime neoconservative officials allied with vice president Dick Cheney and Israel to create a “new Pearl Harbor” that would generate support on the part of the American people and Washington’s European allies for a Middle Eastern “war on terror” whose real purpose was to destroy Israel’s enemies in the interest of Greater Israel.Commentary Magazine editor Norman Podhoretz had called for such a war, and General Wesley Clark reported that he was informed of Pentagon war plans to that effect.
This is the most plausible explanation, but, if true, it is not one that the US and Israeli governments would ever acknowledge.Consequently, we are stuck with an official explanation long championed by the presstitutes that no one believes.In addition to the human casualties of the 9/11 attack, we can list the credibility of the US government and the US media.
I wrote many columns about 9/11 and reviewed the careful work of those proving the counterfactual and implausible nature of the official account.Over the two decades, I wrote anniversary articles.
What gave the utter implausibility of the official narrative away to everyone who has ever served in a high government office is the fact that “the world’s only superpower” suffered the most embarrassing defeat at the hands of a few Saudis armed only with box cutters, and there was no outcry for an investigation how the entirety of an annual trillion dollar military/security complex totally failed, every single part of it.
Never in world history had a superpower experienced such a total defeat, and there was no outcry from the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, the media for an investigation.Indeed, there was active resistance to any investigation.People too stupid to see what this means are too stupid to justify their existence.
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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Travelling to Lebanon last week U.S. Senator Christopher Murphy had promised to find additional means “to support” the population and the Lebanese army. On September 7, Murphy came good on his promise after U.S. President Joe Biden authorized Secretary of State Antony Blinken to raise a total of $47 million to provide aid for the Lebanese military.
It appears that the American aid aims to prevent the implosion of the Lebanese military. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who was a part of Murphy’s delegation, admitted as much by telling reporters:
“Lebanon is in free fall… we’ve seen this movie before and it’s a horror story… but the good news is it can, should, and hopefully will be avoided.”
Lebanon is in chaos and has been for years. However, last year’s Port of Beirut blast tipped the country over the edge, and now even officers in the Lebanese military, one of the most trusted and respected institutions in the country, receive about $400 a month, down from $4,000. A non-commissioned soldier only receives $50 a month.
Mohammed Fahmi, outgoing Lebanese Minister of the Interior, told the Lebanese daily Al Joumhouria on August 31 that the rate of desertion in the Internal Security Forces, Lebanon’s Gendarmerie, has recently increased because of financial issues. A general collapse of Lebanon is occurring, especially as unpaid and/or low paid security forces are no longer responding to street mobilizations and urban violence.
The Lebanese are becoming increasingly frustrated as lines at gas stations are endless, power cuts are more frequent, bakeries and restaurants are closing because of a lack of electricity and pharmacies have run out of medicines.
With general life collapsing in Lebanon and the financial situation seemingly irreconcilable, sectarianism is once again creeping into society. August was marked by clashes between Sunni Arab tribes and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah political and paramilitary group, tensions between Druze villagers and Hezbollah supporters, and acts of vandalism against a Christian village.
Against this backdrop, American aid would therefore be more than welcomed in Beirut as it allows the last respected pillar of the Lebanese state, the military, to not collapse. A collapse of the Lebanese military would likely instigate sectarian clashes between the different religious communities in the country as they seek to protect, and advance, their own interests.
Washington increased its aid to the Lebanese military by 12% last May, reaching $120 million in 2021. This financial support is multisectoral and aims to improve the equipment of the army – from armored vehicles to combat helicopters and night vision systems. Washington is also trying to train Lebanese soldiers, and since 2014, more than 6,000 military personnel have received training in the U.S.
Other western countries, such as former colonial master France, are also privileged partners of the Lebanese military too. French Defense Minister Florence Parly organized a virtual meeting on June 17 to gather emergency aid for the Lebanese army, a “pillar institution, which prevents the security situation in the country from strongly deteriorating,” according to her cabinet. France and Lebanon also signed three conventions last February on defense, naval cooperation and the fight against terrorism. Since 2016, Paris has delivered more than €60 million of equipment to the Lebanese military.
Although the financial support from the U.S. and France is undeniably generous as it helps maintain and preserve Lebanon’s most respected institution, there is undoubtedly a political objective – a policy of rebalancing vis-à-vis Hezbollah and Iran. Washington and Paris fully understand that if the Lebanese military collapses, then Hezbollah will fill the void to maintain security in the country and thus be further cemented into state structures.
Washington believes that the Lebanese army can counterbalance Hezbollah’s influence and power. The U.S. is especially worried that the Lebanese Shi’ite party is less impacted by the economic collapse because of allocated Iranian aid that reaches $700 million per year – a huge amount in Lebanon. The pro-Iranian party has recently undertaken initiatives to alleviate the deficiencies of a failed Lebanese state by importing Iranian oil in an attempt to solve the gasoline shortage, provide assistance to the families that suffered from the Akkar tanker explosion in August, and provide free and/or affordable healthcare.
However, Washington does not consider that the Lebanese army actually has cordial relations with Hezbollah. In fact, relations between Hezbollah and the military are so close that the Shi’ite group has an especially strong presence in Lebanon’s intelligence community and the two forces regularly conduct joint exercises to secure the country’s border. It is recalled that in August 2017, in the context of the Syrian War spilling over the border, Lebanese soldiers and Hezbollah fighters cleared out a pocket of jihadist in the Beqaa valley.
Although the Lebanese military is on the verge of collapse, the U.S. will not allow it to happen as it is their only gateway to any kind of influence in Lebanon. However, it appears that there is a clear misunderstanding or miscalculation in Washington – they will never be able to cut the ties between the Lebanese military and Hezbollah so long as Beirut refuses to make peace with Israel, something that is very unlikely to happen anytime soon.
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It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this book. It is a tour de force that blows away twenty years of U.S. government lies and obfuscations about the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the foundational event of recent times that claimed thousands of victims whose relatives still cry out for truth and justice.
Reading Unanswered Questions will roil you to the depths of your soul and illuminate your mind as Ray McGinnis presents fact after fact backed up by almost one thousand endnotes and twelve years of meticulous research. There is nothing speculative about this book. It is not a “conspiracy theory.”
McGinnis ingeniously and brilliantly documents those murders through the eyes of victims’ relatives and their decades-long, agonizing efforts to seek honest answers from the U.S. government. To have their simple and obvious questions answered. To know the truth about why their loved ones died and who killed them.
Their struggles have been met with cruel indifference from four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden), three New York City mayors (Giuliani, Bloomberg, and de Blasio), the 9/11 Commission, and so many others in positions of authority who have turned deaf ears to their cris de coeur. The corporate mass media have rubbed salt in their wounds as they have stage-managed the lies and coverups. And controlled opposition operatives have played slick games to direct attention away from the heart of the matter.
The families’ search for answers to their questions have been either ignored or answered with lies and dissimulation piled upon dissimulation to protect the guilty. McGinnis is their champion. He insists on answers.
He powerfully unfurls layer upon layer of facts and the government’s fictions in a timeline that brings us to the twentieth anniversary of these atrocities. While reading it, one cannot help but think of the thousands of innocent victims of that terrible day and their suffering families, and the millions of innocent victims throughout the world who have been murdered by the U.S. government in the name of 9/11. The “war on terror” has been waged by a government that continues to refuse to tell the truth about who the “terrorists” were on September 11, 2001.
By refusing to answer the families’ questions and thereby hypothetically claiming the Fifth Amendment for fear of incriminating themselves, government officials have ironically incriminated themselves.
For McGinnis is like a prosecuting attorney who works not for the state but for the people. He forces the issue by asking the questions his clients want answered. Like them, he is persistent and requests answers to a litany of interrogations that are met with silence. The government’s stonewalling is deafening, and readers – who are the jury – are left to decide the case partially based on those non-answers, often justified under the sham of “national security” or just plain arrogance. When answers are forthcoming, they are incomplete and disingenuous.
Seventy per cent of the questions the Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission were left unanswered in The 9/11 Commission Report. Those that were answered raised more questions than they answered.
But the reason that this book is so powerful is because McGinnis answers the questions that the government does not. And so his title – Unanswered Questions – is ironically false while also being true.
This should in no way put off those who still cling to the official story. For McGinnis is exceedingly fair in assessing and presenting the facts and readily admits when there are disagreements.
While focusing on a core group of bereaved families called The Family Steering Committee who are insistent on answers, a group that includes four New Jersey widows known as “The Jersey Girls” whose husbands died in the Twin Towers, he includes many others and does not shy away from saying when they are at odds. The only way a fair-minded person can assess the book is to read it. And if you don’t read it and you have bought the government’s official fabrications or are still sitting on the fence, you are in flight from truth. This book demands attention.
As far as I know, while there have been many excellent books critiquing the government’s account of 9/11, led by about a dozen extraordinary works by David Ray Griffin, and many books supporting the government’s explanation led by The 9/11 Commission Report, Unanswered Questions is the first to approach the subject from the perspective of the questions asked by the relatives of the victims.
For many people, the murders of that day are abstract, although they naturally stir the human emotions of pity, fear, and terror. But from a distance, for they are now fading into history and are not personal. For some, there may have been a catharsis with The 9/11 Commission Report which they no doubt never read although it was said to be a “best-seller.” That would be fake catharsis, for such fiction fails to tell the truth since it was written by people blind in mind and ears as well as in their eyes. But then again, who reads Sophocles or Aeschylus any longer? Better to read The New York Times, Slate magazine, Time, The New Republic, The Nation, etc., all of which effusively praised the 9/11 Commission Report when it was released. As McGinnis reports, “The New York Times called the Report ‘an uncommonly lucid, even riveting narrative’ and an ‘improbable literary triumph.’” This is simply propaganda.
But let us take a look inside Unanswered Questions, a genuine non-fiction book motivated by a deep compassion for the victims and a scholar’s dedication to the truth. It is divided into four parts, each containing multiple chapters.
“Part One: From Grief to Advocacy” is the briefest and introduces the reader to firefighters, first responders, and family members who lost loved ones in the calamity. We learn how their grief turned to advocacy when they formed many groups to channel their energies. We learn how President Bush and his minions (or was Bush the minion and others like Cheney in charge?) opposed establishing a special commission to probe into the events of September Eleventh and how when his opposition was overcome he had the audacity to try to name Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 Commission and how this was stopped. Finally, McGinnis tells us how the families’ questions were greatly expanded after discovering Paul Thompson’s extraordinary Internet timeline with its vast numbers of links to news reports that was later published as The Terror Timeline.
“Part Two: Family Steering Committee Statements to the 9/11 Commission” examines how the 9/11 Commission was a setup from the start, not even close to being an impartial investigation. It began with the naming of Philip Zelikow as the Director. Zelikow had deep ties to the Bush administration and its neocons. He had been a member of Bush’s transition team. Even “Richard Clarke, chairman of the ‘Counterterrorism Security Group,’ said ‘the fix is in’” when Zelikow was appointed. Zelikow completely controlled the investigation and the final report despite many conflicts of interest. He essentially wrote the report before the hearings commenced. He had authored a book with Condoleezza Rice and was an advocate for preemptive war that was used to attack Iraq in early 2003, etc. His appointment was a sick joke, and the Family Steering Committee called for his immediate resignation but was rebuffed just as quickly by Chairman Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton. As a result, the final report ended being a fictional account authored by Zelikow (who has now been named to head a Covid-19 commission).
This section also covers the lies told by Mayor Rudy Giuliani when he testified. Three hundred and forty-three FDNY members were killed that day, heroes who didn’t have to die. Giuliani’s testimony so outraged the families of first responders that their fury was uncontained. McGinnis tells us:
They held up signs that read ‘lies’ and ‘liar.’ Family Steering Committee member Sally Regenhard held up a sign that read ‘FICTION.’ She hollered, ‘My son [Christian Regenhard, a probationary firefighter] was not told to get out! He would’ve gotten out! My son was murdered, murdered because of your incompetence and radios that didn’t work!’
McGinnis captures the increasing anger felt by family members throughout this section as the final report was rammed through despite their protests.
“Part Three: The Family Steering Committee’s Unanswered Questions” is the heart of the book. It contains eleven chapters devoted to questions addressed to NORAD, the FAA, the CIA/SEC/FBI, Mayor Giuliani, President Bush, the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld but never answered. Over a thousand questions were posed to the 9/11 Commission to aid the investigation. McGinnis writes:
The questions were intended to direct the focus of the inquiry, and ask those most directly involved what led to the failures that day. They understood that it would not be the FSC members themselves asking the questions. Instead, they would be posed to witnesses by 9/11 commissioners in public hearings, or asked by Commission staff behind closed-door proceedings.
Some of these questions were directed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). One question the FSC asked the 9/11 Commission was: ‘Why weren’t NORAD jets able to intercept the hijacked planes if they were airborne within eight minutes of notification?’
NORAD had an extremely successful history of intercepting errant aircraft, and a part of their mission was “surveillance and control of the [domestic] territorial airspace “ in the U.S. and Canada. Nevertheless, on September 11, 2001 none of the hijacked aircraft were intercepted even though they were allegedly being flown by inexperienced and incompetent hijackers who, according to experts, could never fly such massive commercial airliners into the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon. Government witnesses either lied about the systemic failures to intercept the planes, omitted important details, or gave contradictory stories. Of course, they were then promoted. And although there was an unprecedented number of war games being “coincidentally” held on September 11, none of the 9/11 Commissioners asked any witnesses about them.
It was clear that all the questions about the failure to intercept the planes would not be answered, but McGinnis makes it obvious that their non-answers were indeed answers by omission, for in this section and all the others, he makes sure the questions are indeed answered and the cumulative effect is devastating. He does this not simply by expressing his own opinions but by quoting others and always giving sources.
In a similar vein, the FSC wished to know from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) why these hijacked planes were able to evade all of the highly sophisticated radar? McGinnis says, “The 9/11 Commission concluded that NORAD had failed to do its job on September Eleventh; NORAD’s decisions impaired the FAA radar operator’s conduct.” Of course the radar questions were linked to the war games issue and since the war games questions were never asked, these massive failures were explained away in gobbledygook worthy of the Three Stooges.
Mindy Kleinberg, a FSC member whose husband Alan died in the North Tower, told the Commission that its theory of luck was bullshit, although she phrased it more diplomatically:
With regard to the 9/11 attacks, it has been said that the intelligence agencies have to be right 100% of the time and the terrorists only have to get lucky once. This explanation for the devastating attacks of September 11, simply on its face, is wrong in its value. Because the 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once; they were lucky over and over again…Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored? Is it luck when 15 visas were awarded on incomplete forms? Is it luck when Airline Security screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray? Is it luck when emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis? To me luck is something that happens once. When you have this repeated pattern of brokenprotocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.
Comically, The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that, as McGinnis notes, “The reason for the attacks was due simply to a [U.S. government] failure of imagination.”
In regard to foreknowledge of the attacks, the families asked the CIA, the SEC, and the FBI for the names of the individuals and financial institutions who placed “put” orders on American and United Airlines in the three weeks prior to 9/11?
This involved the number three man at the CIA, CIA Executive Director Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, former Vice Chairman of the board at Bankers Trust that had been acquired by Deutsche Bank through which many of these suspect stock trades passed. This insider trading that anticipated the 9/11 attacks was connected to a security firm named Stratesec that provided security to Dulles Airport, the World Trade Center, and United Airlines, and to Wirt Walker III, a business partner of the president’s brother, Marvin Bush. Walker III was a board member of the Carlyle Group that was in turn connected to the bin Laden and Bush families.
Despite these and other highly suspect connections, the “9/11 Commission wasn’t interested in exploring leads about possible foreknowledge of the attacks.” Nor were they interested in the strange matter of Larry Silverstein, who had already owned World Trade Center Building 7, but who obtained a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers two months before the attack and who insisted that insurance cover a terrorist attack for $3.5. billion dollars. Silverstein was later awarded $4.55 billion when it was determined that there had been two suicide attacks.
Silverstein later claimed that there was agreement to “pull” (a controlled demolition term) Building 7, which happened at 5:20 PM that day despite never having been hit by a plane. Questions about the collapse of Building 7 were of course never answered, but the videos of its collapse are available for all to see with their own eyes. An excellent film about Building 7, Seven by Dylan Avery, should be seen by all. Seeing is believing, and what any objective observer can only conclude is that the building was taken down by controlled demolition, which the government denies.
Which brings us to other key questions that the FSC asked, McGinnis explores, and that went unanswered: Why did President Bush enter a Sarasota, Florida elementary classroom, stay there as the attacks unfolded, and not immediately return to Washington, D.C.? Why did he enter that classroom at 9:03 AM and remain there for fifteen minutes when it was clear the U.S. was under a terrorist attack? Why was he, unlike Dick Cheney, not immediately taken out of the building by the Secret Service but was allowed to sit and read to children and not depart the building until 9:34 A.M.?
“The vice president was reported by President Bush’s personal secretary as being ‘seized by arms, legs, and his belt and physically’ carried out of his office at 9:03 A.M. Cheney was taken to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center below the White House, where Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta saw him prior to 9:25 A.M.” Yet Bush stayed to read a book when colleagues of the Secret Service agents protecting him had already been evacuated from the largest Secret Service Field Office in WTC 7.
“However,” writes McGinnis, “on December 4, 2001, President Bush made the following statement at a Town Hall meeting about the moment – 9:01 a.m. – that he said he learned about the attack. ‘And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower – the television was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said , “That’s one terrible pilot.” And I said, “It must have been a horrible accident.” But I was whisked off there – I didn’t have much time to think about it.’”
You can’t make this stuff up, yet it’s offered to the public and the victims’ families as acceptable. Bush was informed that a second plane had hit the South Tower by Andrew Card who came into the classroom and whispered in his ear. But three months later he claims he saw on television the first plane hit the North Tower when no one could have seen it since video of the first plane hitting the building at 8:46 A.M. was not available until much later.
These ridiculous discrepancies and other questions the FSC wished the 9/11 Commission to ask Bush under oath in sworn public testimony went unasked and unanswered. Instead, as McGinnis writes:
But, the meeting with Bush and Cheney took place in secret on April 29, 2004. It was not held under oath. No transcript was made available of their conversation with the commissioners. Nothing was learned about why the president remained at an elementary school during the attacks. Nothing was learned about what the president knew regarding foreign intelligence agencies forewarning the U.S. Nothing was learned about why the president had authorized America to prepare for war against Afghanistan in the days and weeks prior to the attacks of September 11.
Nor was anything learned about why Pentagon brass suddenly cancelled flights scheduled for September 11. Nothing about who warned them and why.
Essentially all the key questions the families asked were not answered. But McGinnis answers them, including those addressed to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Giuliani, the CIA, and the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York. By using the documented records against them, he does the job the 9/11 Commission refused to do. He unravels the lies, circumlocutions, and straightforward propaganda used to hide the truth, including the following:
Cheney’s deceptions about when he got to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center and what he was doing there and his orders to his young assistant about the hijacked plane headed toward the capitol.
Rumsfeld with his lies about not knowing anything about the World Trade Center attacks until fifteen minutes before the Pentagon was hit and why the Pentagon was not defended.
Giuliani and the obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M. and the lies about the faulty telephones the firefighters carried.
Since this is not meant to be a book about a book but a book review, I will stop there. I would be remiss, however, if I failed to mention “Chapter 22: The Missing Accounts: FDNY.”
It is part of Part Four: Acceptance And Dissent that leads to McGinnis’s conclusion. Whatever one’s position on the events of September 11, it is generally accepted that firefighters and first responders are objective and brave in the extreme. Of the emergency workers who responded to the call to help save the people in the Twin Towers, the vast majority who lost their lives in attempting to save their fellow human beings were firefighters – 343 of them perished that day. They were doing their duty. So their surviving colleagues’ testimonies are priceless and beyond dispute. They had absolutely no reasons to lie. McGinnis tells us:
On September 11, 2001, Thomas Von Essen, the fire commissioner of New York City, ordered that oral histories be gathered from first responders, firefighters, and medical workers. He wanted to preserve the accounts of what they experienced at the World Trade Center. In the weeks and months following 9/11, 503 oral histories were taken. However, they were not released to the public. The 2002 mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, refused.
The Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission why, but the Commission refused to answer their question. After a law suit, the oral histories that run to 12,000 pages were released. They contain copious accounts of explosions going off in the Towers before the Towers collapsed.
FDNY firefighter John Coyne, who was in the South Tower, recalls how he had called his father and said:
I finally got through to my father and said ‘I’m alive. I just wanted to tell you, go to church, I’m alive. I just so narrowly escaped this thing.’ He said, ‘Where were you? You were there?’ I said, ‘Yeh, I was right there when it blew up.’ He said, ‘You were there when the planes hit?’ I said, ‘No, I was there when it exploded, the building exploded.’ He said, ‘You mean when it fell down?’ I said, ‘No, when it exploded.’ … I totally thought it had been blown up. That’s just the perspective of looking at it, it seemed to have exploded out.
Captain Karin DeShore, who was standing outside, said she saw a sequence of orange and red flashes coming from the North Tower:
Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash…kept popping all around the building and that building started to explode … These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going up and down and the all around the building.
Keith Murphy: “There was tremendous damage in the lobby…like something had exploded out…a distant boom sounded like three explosions.”
Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory: “I saw low-level flashes…[at] the lower level of the building. You know when they demolish a building?”
Explosions were being reported everywhere and by reporters as well. Researchers Graeme MacQueen and Ted Walter viewed 70 hours of television coverage and found that most reporters were saying the Towers came down as a result of explosions and demolition. Take a look here.
There were explosions reported in the sub-basements before the planes hit. William Rodriguez, who was in the sub-basement of the North Tower and heard and felt very loud multiple explosions, told this to 9/11 Commission staff and this never appeared in The 9/11 Commission Report.
The evidence for explosives planted in the Towers and Building 7 is overwhelming but was completely discounted by the 9/11 Commission and the mass media complicit in its coverup. In fact, the demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M was not worthy of a mention in the best-selling report. It should be obvious to any objective thinker that if these building were wired for explosives and were brought down via controlled demolition, then this could not have been done by Osama bin Laden or his followers but only by insiders who were granted secret access to these ultra-high security buildings.
Bob McIlvaine, whose son Bobby died in the North Tower, has persevered for twenty years to expose the lies surrounding September 11. McGinnis reports on his 2006 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation host Evan Solomon:
I believe 100% that the US orchestrated 9/11 with the help of other agencies around the world…There’s people within the US that knew it happened, that planned this to happen.
To Solomon’s question “You think your son was therefore murdered by Americans?” McIlvaine replied, “absolutely.”
He is joined by many others, including Matt Campbell, a British citizen and family member, whose brother Geoff Campbell died on the 106th floor of the North Tower. Matt Campbell and his family have recently demanded a new inquest based on a 3,000 page scientifically-backed dossier claiming the buildings were blown up from within.
After reading Unanswered Questions, you very well might believe it too.
Learning about the determination of such stalwart souls as McIlvaine, Campbell, the FSC, and so many others to extract truth and justice from a recalcitrant and guilty government is inspirational. They will never give up. Nor should we.
There is no doubt that this extraordinary book will answer many questions you may or may not have had about the mass murders of September 11, 2001.
So don’t turn away.
It will break your heart but restore your faith in what a writer dedicated to the truth can do for those family members who have so long sought the bread of truth and were handed stones of silence.
In their ongoing grief, Ray McGinnis has handed them the gift of a bitter solace. He has answered them.
He has also given the public an opportunity to see the truth and demand an independent investigation forthwith.
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Edward Curtin is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Edward Curtin is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies
“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all. Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso. Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable
“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director
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It’s impossible not to start with the latest tremor in a series of stunning geopolitical earthquakes.
Exactly 20 years after 9/11 and the subsequent onset of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the Taliban will hold a ceremony in Kabul to celebrate their victory in that misguided Forever War.
Four key exponents of Eurasia integration – China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan – as well as Turkey and Qatar, will be officially represented, witnessing the official return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. As blowbacks go, this one is nothing short of intergalactic.
The plot thickens when we have Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid firmly stressing “there is no proof”Osama bin Laden was involved in 9/11. So “there was no justification for war, it was an excuse for war,” he claimed.
Only a few days after 9/11, Osama bin Laden, never publicity-shy, released a statement to Al Jazeera:
“I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons (…) I have been living in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders’ rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.”
On September 28, Osama bin Laden was interviewed by the Urdu newspaper Karachi Ummat. I remember it well, as I was commuting non-stop between Islamabad and Peshawar, and my colleague Saleem Shahzad, in Karachi, called it to my attention.
This is an approximate translation by the CIA-linked Foreign Broadcast Information Service:
“I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people.
“I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it.
“Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country or ideology could survive. Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year (…) They need an enemy.”
This was the last time Osama bin Laden went public, substantially, about his alleged role in 9/11. Afterward, he vanished, and seemingly forever by early December 2001 in Tora Bora: I was there, and revisited the full context years later.
And yet, like an Islamic James Bond, Osama kept performing the miracle of dying another day, over and over again, starting in – where else – Tora Bora in mid-December, as reported by the Pakistani Observer and then Fox News.
So 9/11 remained a riddle inside an enigma. And what about 9/9, which might have been the prologue to 9/11?
Arriving in the Panjshir valley in one of Massoud’s Soviet helicopters in August 2001. Photo: Pepe Escobar
A Green Light from a Blind Sheikh
“The commander has been shot.”
The terse email, on 9/9, offered no details. Contacting the Panjshir was impossible – sat-phone reception is spotty. Only the next day it was possible to establish Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Lion of the Panjshir, had been assassinated – by two al-Qaeda jihadis posing as a camera crew.
In our Asia Times interview with Massoud, by August 20, he had told me he was fighting a triad: al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Pakistani ISI. After the interview, he left in a Land Cruiser and then went by helicopter to Kwaja-Bahauddin, where he would finish the details of a counter-offensive against the Taliban.
This was his second-to-last interview before the assassination and arguably the last images – shot by photographer Jason Florio and with my mini-DV camera – of Massoud alive.
One year after the assassination, I was back in the Panjshir for an on-site investigation, relying only on local sources and confirmation on some details from Peshawar. The investigation is featured in the first part of my Asia Times e-book Forever Wars.
The conclusion was that the green light for the fake camera crew to meet Massoud came via a letter sponsored by CIA crypto-asset warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf – as a “gift” to al-Qaeda.
In December 2020, inestimable Canadian diplomat Peter Dale Scott, author among others of the seminal The Road to 9/11 (2007), and Aaron Good, editor at CovertAction magazine, published a remarkable investigation about the killing of Massoud, following a different trail and relying mostly on American sources.
They established that arguably more than Sayyaf, the mastermind of the killing was notorious Egyptian blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, then serving a life sentence in a US federal prison for his involvement in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
Among other nuggets, Dale Scott and Good also confirmed what former Pakistani foreign minister Niaz Naik had told Pakistani media already in 2001: the Americans had everything in place to attack Afghanistan way before 9/11.
In Naik’s words:
“We asked them [the American delegates], when do you think you will attack Afghanistan? … And they said, before the snow falls in Kabul. That means September, October, something like that.”
As many of us established over the years after 9/11, everything was about the US imposing itself as the undisputed ruler of the New Great Game in Central Asia. Peter Dale Scott now notes,
“the two US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were both grounded in pretexts that were doubtful to begin with and more discredited as years go by.
“Underlying both wars was America’s perceived need to control the fossil fuel economic system that was the underpinning for the US petrodollar.”
Massoud versus Mullah Omar
Image on the right: Deceased Taliban founder Mullah Mohammed Omar in a file photo. Photo: Wikimedia
Mullah Omar did welcome Jihad Inc to Afghanistan in the late 1990s: not only the al-Qaeda Arabs but also Uzbeks, Chechens, Indonesians, Yemenis – some of them I met in Massoud’s riverside prison in the Panjshir in August 2001.
The Taliban at the time did provide them with bases – and some encouraging rhetoric – but deeply ethnocentric as they were, never manifested any interest in global jihad, in the mold of the “Declaration of Jihad” issued by Osama in 1996.
The official Taliban position was that jihad was their guests’ business, and that had nothing to do with the Taliban and Afghanistan. There were virtually no Afghans in Jihad Inc. Very few Afghans speak Arabic. They were not seduced by the spin on martyrdom and a paradise full of virgins: they preferred to be a ghazi – a living victor in a jihad.
Mullah Omar could not possibly send Osama bin Laden packing because of Pashtunwali – the Pashtun code of honor – where the notion of hospitality is sacred. When 9/11 happened, Mullah Omar once again refused American threats as well as Pakistani pleas. He then called a tribal jirga of 300 top mullahs to ratify his position.
Their verdict was quite nuanced: he had to protect his guest, of course, but a guest should not cause him problems. Thus Osama would have to leave, voluntarily.
The Taliban also pursued a parallel track, asking the Americans for evidence of Osama’s culpability. None was provided. The decision to bomb and invade had already been taken.
That would have never been possible with Massoud alive. A classic intellectual warrior, he was a certified Afghan nationalist and pop hero – because of his spectacular military feats in the anti-USSR jihad and his non-stop fight against the Taliban.
Jihadis captured by Massoud’s forces in a riverside prison in the Panjshir in August 2001. Photo: Pepe Escobar
When the PDPA socialist government in Afghanistan collapsed three years after the end of the jihad, in 1992, Massoud could easily have become a prime minister or an absolute ruler in the old Turco-Persian style.
But then he made a terrible mistake: afraid of an ethnic conflagration, he let the mujahideen gang based in Peshawar have too much power, and that led to the civil war of 1992-1995 – complete with the merciless bombing of Kabul by virtually every faction – that paved the way for the emergence of the “law and order” Taliban.
So in the end he was a much more effective military commander than politician. An example is what happened in 1996, when the Taliban made their move to conquer Kabul, attacking from eastern Afghanistan.
Massoud was caught completely unprepared, but he still managed to retreat to the Panjshir without a major battle and without losing his troops – quite a feat – while severely smashing the Taliban that went after him.
He established a line of defense in the Shomali plain north of Kabul. That was the frontline I visited a few weeks before 9/11, on the way to Bagram, which was a – virtually empty and degraded – Northern Alliance airbase at the time.
All of the above is a sorry contrast to the role of Masoud Jr, who’s in theory the leader of the “resistance” against Taliban 2.0 in the Panjshir, now completely smashed.
Masoud Jr has zero experience either as a military commander or politician, and although praised in Paris by President Macron or publishing an op-ed in Western mainstream media, made the terrible mistake of being led by CIA asset Amrullah Saleh, who as the former head of the National Directory of Security (NDS), supervised the de facto Afghan death squads.
Masoud Jr could have easily carved a role for himself in a Taliban 2.0 government. But he blew it, refusing serious negotiations with a delegation of 40 Islamic clerics sent to the Panjshir, and demanding at least 30% of posts in the government.
In the end, Saleh fled by helicopter – he may be now in Tashkent – and Masoud Jr as it stands is holed up somewhere in the northern Panjshir.
The 9/11 propaganda machine is about to reach fever pitch this Saturday – now profiting from the narrative twist of the “terrorist” Taliban back in power, something perfect to snuff out the utter humiliation of the Empire of Chaos.
The Deep State is going no holds barred to protect the official narrative – which exhibits more holes than the dark side of the moon.
This is a geopolitical Ouroboros for the ages. 9/11 used to be the foundation myth of the 21st century – but not anymore. It has been displaced by blowback: the imperial debacle allowing for the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to the exact position it was 20 years ago.
We may now know that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11. We may now know that Osama bin Laden, in an Afghan cave, may not have been the master perpetrator of 9/11. We may now know that the assassination of Massoud was a prelude to 9/11, but in a twisted way: to facilitate a pre-planned invasion of Afghanistan.
And yet, like with the assassination of JFK, we may never know the full contours of the whole riddle inside an enigma. As Fitzgerald immortalized, “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” probing like mad this philosophical and existential Ground Zero, never ceasing from asking the ultimate question: Cui Bono?
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This article was originally published on Asia Times.
Pepe Escobar,born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Massoud leaving Bazarak in the Panjshir after our interview in August 2001, roughly three weeks before his assassination. Photo: Pepe Escobar
In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.
The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.
We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.
A grassroots initiative to rewrite the municipal charter of the City of Detroit, Proposal P or the People’s Charter, was drowned out by a multi-million dollar propaganda and psychological warfare campaign aimed at maintaining the status quo.
Since at least this past spring 2021, it’s been clear that the corporate wing of the Democratic party (in basic agreement with McConnell and the Republicans) has been pursuing a strategy of chipping away at fiscal spending proposals promised during the 2020 elections and introduced by Biden upon entering office last January-February.
According to Rutgers University, more than 98 percent of undergrads have complied with its mandate that students upload their coronavirus vaccine card in order to return to dorms and classes this fall. But the few students who chose not to get the vaccine are now finding themselves locked out of fall classes, even classes they had planned to take online only.
The announcement by Taliban spokesman Zahibullah Mujahid in Kabul of the acting cabinet ministers in the new caretaker government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan already produced a big bang: it managed to enrage both woke NATOstan and the US Deep State.
Recently, many news reports picked up on Merck’s theme, lambasting the use of a dangerous horse de-wormer by gullible consumers. The most recent were by the BBC, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, MSN and others, about Oklahoma hospital facilities being strained with ivermectin overdoses, delaying other emergency care.
Today, NATO operates an a budget of €258.9 million for civil purposes and €1.61 billion for military purposes. Its military spending equals 57% of the global Normal total and defence spending of the constituent nation states are aiming for a target of 2% of their GDP by 2024.
The 190 countries that are members of the IMF are entitled to allowances in strong currencies which they do not have to pay back. This device is called Special Drawing Rights. To this we must add loans that the IMF can grant to a country calling for help.
On September 7, 2021, Julie Ponesse, Ethics Professor Huron College University of Western Ontario, London, ON Canada was dismissed for not submitting to medical experimentation.
But the U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end on August 31. It has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that may be less visible—and therefore more politically sustainable.
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Looking back on it now, the 1990s were an age of innocence for America. The Cold War was over and our leaders promised us a “peace dividend.” There was no TSA to make us take off our shoes at airports (how many bombs have they found in those billions of shoes?). The government could not tap a U.S. phone or read private emails without a warrant from a judge. And the national debt was only $5 trillion – compared with over $28 trillion today.
We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.
That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.
Most Americans believe in democracy and many regard the United States as a democratic country. But the U.S. response to 9/11 laid bare the extent to which American leaders are willing to manipulate the public into accepting illegal wars, torture, the Guantanamo gulag and sweeping civil rights abuses—activities that undermine the very meaning of democracy.
Former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz said in a speech in 2011 that “a democracy can only work if its people are being told the truth.” But America’s leaders exploited the public’s fears in the wake of 9/11 to justify wars that have killed and maimed millions of people who had nothing to do with those crimes. Ferencz compared this to the actions of the German leaders he prosecuted at Nuremberg, who also justified their invasions of other countries as “preemptive first strikes.”
“You cannot run a country as Hitler did, feeding them a pack of lies to frighten them that they’re being threatened, so it’s justified to kill people you don’t even know,” Ferencz continued. “It’s not logical, it’s not decent, it’s not moral, and it’s not helpful. When an unmanned bomber from a secret American airfield fires rockets into a little Pakistani or Afghan village and thereby kills or maims unknown numbers of innocent people, what is the effect of that? Every victim will hate America forever and will be willing to die killing as many Americans as possible. Where there is no court of justice, wild vengeance is the alternative.”
Even the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, talked about “insurgent math,” conjecturing that, for every innocent person killed, the U.S. created 10 new enemies. And thus the so-called Global War on Terror fueled a global explosion of terrorism and armed resistance that will not end unless and until the United States ends the state terrorism that provokes and fuels it.
By opportunistically exploiting 9/11 to attack countries that had nothing to do with it, like Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen, the United States vastly expanded the destructive strategy it used in the 1980s to destabilize Afghanistan, which spawned the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the first place.
In Libya and Syria, only ten years after 9/11, U.S. leaders betrayed every American who lost a loved one on September 11th by recruiting and arming Al Qaeda-led militants to overthrow two of the most secular governments in the Middle East, plunging both countries into years of intractable violence and fueling radicalization throughout the region.
The U.S. response to 9/11 was corrupted by a toxic soup of revenge, imperialist ambitions, war profiteering, systematic brainwashing and sheer stupidity. The only Republican Senator who voted against the war on Iraq, Lincoln Chafee, later wrote, “Helping a rogue president start an unnecessary war should be a career-ending lapse of judgment.”
But it wasn’t. Very few of the 263 Republicans or the 110 Democrats who voted for the Iraq war in 2002 paid any political price for their complicity in international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg explicitly called “the supreme international crime.” One of them now sits at the apex of power in the White House.
Trump and Biden’s withdrawal and implicit acceptance of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan could serve as an important step toward ending the violence and chaos their predecessors unleashed after the September 11th attack. But the current debate over next year’s military budget makes it clear that our deluded leaders are still dodging the obvious lessons of 20 years of war.
Barbara Lee, the only Member of Congress with the wisdom and courage to vote against Congress’s war resolution in 2001, has introduced a bill to cut U.S. military spending by almost half: $350 billion per year. With the miserable failure in Afghanistan, a war that will end up costing every U.S. citizen $20,000, one would think that Rep. Lee’s proposal would be eliciting tremendous support. But the White House, the Pentagon and the Armed Services Committees in the House and Senate are instead falling over each other to shovel even more money into the bottomless pit of the military budget.
Politicians’ votes on questions of war, peace and military spending are the most reliable test of their commitment to progressive values and the well-being of their constituents. You cannot call yourself a progressive or a champion of working people if you vote to appropriate more money for weapons and war than for healthcare, education, green jobs and fighting poverty.
These 20 years of war have revealed to Americans and the world that modern weapons and formidable military forces can only accomplish two things: kill and maim people; and destroy homes, infrastructure and entire cities. American promises to rebuild bombed-out cities and “remake” countries it has destroyed have proven worthless, as Biden has acknowledged.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan are turning primarily to China for the help they need to start rebuilding and developing economically from the ruin and devastation left by America and its allies. America destroys, China builds. The contrast could not be more stark or self-evident. No amount of Western propaganda can hide what the whole world can see.
But the different paths chosen by U.S. and Chinese leaders are not predestined, and despite the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the U.S. corporate media, the American public has always been wiser and more committed to cooperative diplomacy than America’s political and executive class. It has been well-documented that many of the endless crises in U.S. foreign policy could have been avoided if America’s leaders had just listened to the public.
The perennial handicap that has dogged America’s diplomacy since World War II is precisely our investment in weapons and military forces, including nuclear weapons that threaten our very existence. It is trite but true to say that, ”when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Other countries don’t have the option of deploying overwhelming military force to confront international problems, so they have had to be smarter and more nimble in their diplomacy, and more prudent and selective in their more limited uses of military force.
The rote declarations of U.S. leaders that “all options are on the table” are a euphemism for precisely the “threat or use of force” that the UN Charter explicitly prohibits, and they stymie the U.S. development of expertise in nonviolent forms of conflict resolution. The bumbling and bombast of America’s leaders in international arenas stand in sharp contrast to the skillful diplomacy and clear language we often hear from top Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats, even when they are speaking in English, their second or third language.
By contrast, U.S. leaders rely on threats, coups, sanctions and war to project power around the world. They promise Americans that these coercive methods will maintain American “leadership” or dominance indefinitely into the future, as if that is America’s rightful place in the world: sitting atop the globe like a cowboy on a bucking bronco.
A “New American Century” and “Pax Americana” are Orwellian versions of Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich,” but are no more realistic. No empire has lasted forever, and there is historical evidence that even the most successful empires have a lifespan of no more than 250 years, by which time their rulers have enjoyed so much wealth and power that decadence and decline inevitably set in. This describes the United States today.
America’s economic dominance is waning. Its once productive economy has been gutted and financialized, and most countries in the world now do more trade with China and/or the European Union than with the United States. Where America’s military once kicked open doors for American capital to “follow the flag” and open up new markets, today’s U.S. war machine is just a bull in the global china shop, wielding purely destructive power.
But we are not condemned to passively follow the suicidal path of militarism and hostility. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan could be a downpayment on a transition to a more peaceful post-imperial economy—if the American public starts to actively demand peace, diplomacy and disarmament and find ways to make our voices heard.
We must get serious about demanding cuts in the Pentagon budget. None of our other problems will be solved as long as we keep allowing our leaders to flush the majority of federal discretionary spending down the same military toilet as the $2.26 trillion they wasted on the war in Afghanistan. We must oppose politicians who refuse to cut the Pentagon budget, regardless of which party they belong to and where they stand on other issues. CODEPINK is part of a new coalition to “Cut the Pentagon for the people, planet, peace and a future” – please join us!
We must not let ourselves or our family members be recruited into the U.S. war machine. Instead, we must challenge our leaders’ absurd claims that the imperial forces deployed across the world to threaten other countries are somehow, by some convoluted logic, defending America. As a translator paraphrased Voltaire, “Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
We must expose the ugly, destructive reality behind our country’s myths of “defending U.S. vital interests,” “humanitarian intervention,” “the war on terror” and the latest absurdity, the ill-defined “rules-based order” whose rules only apply to others—never to the United States.
And we must oppose the corrupt power of the arms industry, including U.S. weapons sales to the world’s most repressive regimes and an unwinnable arms race that risks a potentially world-ending conflict with China and Russia.
Our only hope for the future is to abandon the futile quest for hegemony and instead commit to peace, cooperative diplomacy, international law and disarmament. After 20 years of war and militarism that has only left the world a more dangerous place and accelerated America’s decline, we must choose the path of peace.
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The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
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A grassroots initiative to rewrite the municipal charter of the City of Detroit, Proposal P or the People’s Charter, was drowned out by a multi-million dollar propaganda and psychological warfare campaign aimed at maintaining the status quo.
In 2018, a citywide election was held for candidates to serve for three years on a Charter Commission assigned to develop a new guide for the municipality.
The outcome of the 2018 Charter Commission elections startled the ruling class and its agents within city government including the corporate-imposed Mayor Mike Duggan and the majority compliant City Council. Several of the Commissioners elected in 2018 were committed to making sweeping changes in how the city has operated for many years.
Of course, there were sharp differences between members of the Charter Commission after the officials took office. Meetings during the early phase of the process were marked by intense debate and discussions.
Detroit police officers were called into Charter Commission meetings which were held at various community centers. Such a repressive atmosphere was designed to squash the process of developing a new governance document which was slipping beyond the control of the local ruling elites beholden to the multi-national corporations, banks and the federal government.
To coincide with the actual work of the Charter Commission, numerous task forces were established across Detroit to discuss revisions in the guidelines regulating public safety, water rights, affordable housing, disability rights, immigrant rights and the division of power within the administrative and legislative structures. Meetings for the focus groups were open to the public where people from various neighborhoods, social backgrounds, nationalities and genders participated.
The process under which the revisions were drafted represented the most democratic exercise that the city has undergone in decades. A 145-page document was eventually published encompassing the desires and interests of the majority African Americans, People of Color, immigrants and working-class peoples as a whole.
Detroit Action organizer speaks at rally to demand release of federal CERA funding, Sept. 8, 2021
In previous years during the charter revision process, the City of Detroit through the City Council would provide funding to publicize the proposed charter among the electorate. The funds would be utilized for literature, media ads and other methods of encouraging eligible voters to either support or reject the revisions. These funds desperately needed by the Charter Commission were restricted, hampering the ability of the elected body to educate the voters about the importance of the document.
However, the political and social character of the document drafted by community activists outraged the existing corporate-allied officials. A Committee to Protect Detroit’s Future was formed on May 19 to launch a campaign of legal challenges and disinformation.
The Committee to Protect Detroit’s Future was funded and endorsed by the leading capitalist entities in the city. The Chamber of Commerce, the Restaurant Owners Association, DTE Energy and Blue Cross-Blue Shield were leading firms and associations propping up the anti-charter grouping.
Local compromised ministers, police officials and supporters of the Duggan administration were recruited to appear in television ads and on billboards to spread outright distortions and lies to turn people away from voting yes on the revised charter during the primary elections on August 3. Perhaps the most insidious falsehood was that the Charter would bankrupt the City of Detroit once again. Yet, no discussion was forthcoming on what interests engineered the Financial Stability Agreement (FSA), Emergency Management and the illegally imposed bankruptcy, the largest in the history of the United States. These events took place between 2012-2014.
In fact, it was the banks through predatory lending within the housing sector and municipal finance which drove the City of Detroit to the crisis which occurred beginning in the years between 2005-2009. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans and working-class people were driven out of the city during the census period of 2000-2010. Job losses, home foreclosures, utility and water shut-offs, insurance red lining, police brutality, inferior education and environmental degradation were all caused by the racist and super-exploitative character of governance which prevailed within the city.
The People’s Charter advocates did receive support from two major labor unions, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) and LIUNA, which organizes in the construction industry. These two endorsements were important. However, they were no match financially for the total hostile opposition of the banks, the criminal justice establishment and the comprador operatives within the community that are promoted by the ruling class.
Housing Crisis Escalates in Detroit
Moratorium NOW! Coalition in alliance with several housing and social justice groups including Detroit Action, Detroit Eviction Defense, Charlevoix Village Association and Detroit Will Breathe have mounted a political struggle for the immediate release of the COVID Emergency Relief Assistance (CERA) funds provided through the legislative bills designed to provide a lifeline to people severely impacted by the pandemic and the subsequent economic crisis. A press conference was held on September 1 outside the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center (CAYMAC) located in the heart of downtown. The press conference was given extensive coverage in the local television market as well as some newspapers such as the Metro Times and MLIVE. com.
During the September 1 action, the demands were clear: a moratorium on evictions until the CERA funds are completely dispersed; that the U.S. Congress pass legislation to remedy the legal dilemma created by the Supreme Court decision during late August essentially outlawing the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moratoriums declared as a measure aimed at stemming the new wave of infections taking place throughout the country; and that Chief Judge of 36th District Court, William C. McConico, reimpose a moratorium on eviction proceedings until a methodology is created to address the burgeoning threats of evictions.
The question of quality housing availability and access to supplemental rental funds are inextricably linked to the ruling class war waged against the People’s Charter. Municipal policy under the administration of Mike Duggan seems to be designed to force as many Black, Brown, working class and impoverished people out of the city.
After the mortgage foreclosures of the 2000s involving tens of thousands of homes in the city, by 2015, due to the over assessments of property taxes, there were the imminent seizures of tens of thousands of other homes for delinquencies in taxes for the City of Detroit and Wayne County. Moratorium NOW! Coalition and other community organizations from across the city were able to mobilize public opinion to force the Wayne County Treasurer to allow people to make arrangements on illegally assessed tax bills, therefore, in effect halting yet another exodus from Detroit. A compounding problem to the property tax debacle was the placement of liens on homes by the County for unpaid water bills. A wave of water shut offs in the tens of thousands were implemented during the bankruptcy in the summer of 2014.
Clauses within the People’s Charter viewed water and housing issues as fundamental human rights. A water affordability plan to prevent shut offs would have been embedded in the document governing the city’s operations. In addition, the municipal government would have been compelled to respect the rights of immigrants and people living with disabilities.
The Need for a People’s Movement Remains
Although the People’s Charter was targeted and derailed by the ruling class led by Dan Gilbert, the Illitch Holdings firms, Chase Bank, DTE Energy, among others, the process of democratic discussions and popular actions around the fundamental needs of the working majority continues to be paramount. In reality, there is no real alternative to the continued mobilization and organization of the communities in Detroit based upon their own interests. The failure to not pursue this course of thinking and political work will only result in the rapid decline in population and the consequent political power for the people.
The impact of climate change has been starkly evident. A series of floods since June have damaged untold numbers of homes, apartment buildings and small businesses. A class action lawsuit against the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department (DWSD) and the post-bankruptcy Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) portends much for the fiscal stability of the city and the region. The failure of pumping stations, antiquated equipment and the systematic downsizing of the workforce employed in water services, has resulted in the current situation.
The most recent Census data for Detroit indicates a further decline in population. Among the African American people, the numbers within this majority community have declined by 16% since 2010.
Corruption which is rife within municipal government has been further exposed with the federal investigations and raids against several City Council members. All of the people convicted or presently under scrutiny by U.S. District Attorney for the Eastern District are staunch puppets of the Duggan administration who routinely vote in favor of capital.
These issues will create the conditions for an eventual social explosion in Detroit and other major cities across the U.S. The task of organizers is to be prepared for this inevitability in order to assist in directing the struggle toward victory.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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Since at least this past spring 2021, it’s been clear that the corporate wing of the Democratic party (in basic agreement with McConnell and the Republicans) has been pursuing a strategy of chipping away at fiscal spending proposals promised during the 2020 elections and introduced by Biden upon entering office last January-February.
While most of media attention has focused on the negotiations between Biden’s Democrats and McConnell’s Republicans in Congress, much less attention has been given to the second set of negotiations–i.e. within the factions of the Democratic party itself and specifically between its corporate wing and its so-called progressives.
Three Fiscal Rescue Plans
There were three fiscal spending initiatives introduced by Biden when he took office in late January 2021: The first was the Covid relief measure called the American Rescue Plan (ARP). It’s projected spending was set at $1.9 trillion. However, the amount of authorized spending will be less than $1.9T, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). And even the authorized amount per the CBO will likely get cut over time as arcane Congressional spending rules take effect in 2022 and beyond that put annual limits on spending even what was authorized.
For 2021-22, the CBO’s indicates only $1T spending is actually authorized to be spent. But much less than that will be spent due to more than 20 states discontinuing unemployment benefits early, failure of distribution of rent assistance due to landlord resistance, and other early terminations of programs. Unemployment benefits have already ended, stimulus checks were distributed and spent months ago, increases in food stamp benefits expire this month as well, $85 billion in assistance grants to small businesses have been largely made, and $403 billion in funds to state and local governments mostly distributed.
Despite all these distributions, the net economic effects so far this year appear to have dissipated or had little impact on the economic recovery, which shows signs of fading as of September 2021. A much more aggressive fiscal stimulus is needed as a follow on to the ARP which, in retrospect now, appears more like a ‘mitigation’ fiscal measure than a bona fide ‘stimulus’ measure. The more aggressive fiscal stimulus measures were to be the second and third fiscal ‘plans’ announced by Biden early in the year. These were the Infrastructure spending bill and an initially less well defined ‘Family’ support fiscal spending bill.
The second fiscal spending initiative–the Infrastructure bill–is called the American Jobs Plan (AJP). It was initially intended to spend $2.3 trillion on various traditional as well as new ‘human infrastructure’ initiatives. The latter human infrastructure initiatives, however, were quickly stripped out, leaving only traditional fiscal spending measures on roads, bridges, water, etc. to comprise the what’s called the Infrastructure bill. The stripped out programs were then repackaged into a revision of the third fiscal spending proposal called the ‘Family’ Act, with an initial spending cost of $3.5 trillion.
Over the past summer the $2.3 trillion Infrastructure bill was drastically cut to only $550 billion in actual new spending, to which was appended roughly another $600 billion in previously authorized spending on highways and other. The media and politicians ‘spun’ the already authorized spending as ‘new’ and part of the Infrastructure bill, thus boosting the total to $1.1 trillion or so. Even with the best assumptions, the much reduced net new spending of $550 billion will not get into the US economy until late 2022 and in 2023. So its impact on the slowing recovery today will have no effect whatsoever. The $3.5 trillion ‘catch-all’ human infrastructure proposal (including spending on climate change, medicare, education, etc.) stands even less chance of passage–in this year or next.
So what exists as fiscal stimulus this year is on average only $50 billion a month in government social program spending, in an economy of $2.2 trillion! That’s hardly an economic ‘drop in the bucket’ and won’t move the recovery needle much, if at all. Especially in the final months of 2021 given that nearly all of it has either been spent or discontinued.
Why then is the Biden fiscal stimulus and Covid wracked US economy plan about to fail?
One answer is the three proposals amount to insufficient fiscal stimulus to generate a sustained economic recovery. What remains is just a rebound of the economy as it reopened this summer. And ‘rebounds’ are not ‘sustained recoveries. Fiscal measure #1, the ARP, is already mostly spent or is being discontinued. And the other two fiscal spending proposals are either ‘dead in the water’ in terms of Congressional passage, in worst case scenario, or, should they eventually pass in some form, the magnitudes will be too little too late.
What’s happened the past six months is that the 1st measure, the ARP, was undermined and cut either by Republican states (unemployment benefits early terminations) or by the US Supreme Court (rent moratorium ruled unconstitutional), or inept administration of funds and landlord resistance (rent assistance), or state and local governments sitting on hiring workers with the $400 billion they received from ARP.
The second and third measures (Infrastructure & Family plans) in turn have been sharply reduced or blocked altogether by corporate interests and the corporate wings of both parties, Democrat and Republican alike. This has been evident in the evolution of the Infrastructure bill and negotiations dramatically reducing its projected spending amount from an initial $2.3 trillion to only $550 billion actual new spending. The same sharp reduction in spending is about to occur with the $3.5 trillion Family plan in coming weeks that was witnessed with the evisceration of the $2.3 trillion original Infrastructure bill.
How Corporate Interests Gutted the $2.3 Trillion Infrastructure Bill
This writer warned back in March, as the fight over the $2.3 trillion original infrastructure bill ratcheted up, that corporate interests in the Democratic party would collude with the Republicans to dramatically cut the Infrastructure bill. The $2.3 trillion would be gutted and deeply reduced, leaving it a shell of its original proposals. That of course is exactly what happened. The net new spending both sides agreed would be $550 billion–not $2.3 trillion.
To cover up the nearly $1.8 trillion in cuts, the spin by the corporate wing in both parties was the Infrastructure bill spending was reduced only to $1.1 trillion. But that $1.1 trillion amount was the result of including in the final bill spending on highway and transport previously authorized in legislation passed well before Biden’s original infrastructure proposals. The actual new spending thus was only $550 billion.
The reduction of $1.8 trillion made it possible to fund the final $550 billion new money Infrastructure bill by means of ‘smoke and mirrors’ and thus avoid raising taxes on corporations and investors, which the original $2.3 trillion would have required. And that’s the crux of all the reductions in the three fiscal spending proposals. Neither the Republicans nor the corporate wing of the Democratic party want to spend big on social programs because it will mean taxes will have to be raised on corporations and investors in order to pay for the programs. And they don’t want to raise taxes–which means reverse some of the $4.5 trillion in Trump tax cuts passed in 2017-18.
Avoiding raising taxes has been, and remains, the number one objective of corporate interests in both the Democratic and Republican parties. They got their way with Biden’s Infrastructure bill. None of the Trump tax cuts were reversed. The Infrastructure bill is to be paid for by ‘smoke and mirrors’ measures but not taxes.
Now corporate wings in both parties are intent on doing the same with the $3.5 Trillion ‘human’ infrastructure/climate change/healthcare reform bill (aka the de facto Sanders bill). The corporate goal once again is to prevent funding via taxes.
There were always two negotiations underway simultaneously as Biden’s original $2.3 trillion Infrastructure bill was reduced to $550 billion: one negotiating track in which Biden, in the name of ‘bipartisanship, made concession after concession to McConnell in order to get Republican support to pass the Infrastructure bill without having to end the filibuster or do a budget reconciliation; the other track was the negotiation within the Democratic Party itself over the size and scope of the original Infrastructure proposal as well.
The internal negotiation was led by Senators Manchin and Senema, who were point persons for the corporate wing of their party that was, like the Republicans, intent on paring down the spending on infrastructure.
In the end the Democrats’ corporate wing prevailed: the original $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill was cut to only $550 billion in actual new spending. That was the Republican position all along. McConnell and Republicans got their way: no actual tax hikes (meaning no cuts to Trump’s massive $4.5 trillion 2017 tax cuts). And the Democrat corporate wing got its way as well which was the same objective of no corporate or investor tax hikes. Corporate interests in both parties wanted the same and they got it: reduce the spending enough to avoid raising taxes.
How Corporate Interests Will do the Same with the $3.5 Trillion
Manchin and Senema were leading the charge to reduce spending on infrastructure, and were there to serve as ‘cover’ for the corporate wing. It appeared as if Manchin-Senema were responsible for the slashing of the infrastructure bill from its original $2.3 trillion to $550 billion. However, the negotiations within the Democratic party were really corporate interests vs. the progressives. Manchin-Senema were the corporate wing’s ‘stalking horses’.
Clearly aligned with the broader corporate interests in his party, and not the progressives, Biden gladly cut out much of his original Infrastructure $2.3 trillion. To placate the progressives in the party (Sanders, Warren, etc.), he agreed to shift most of the cuts to a new, repackaged family human infrastructure bill. That’s the $3.5 trillion now on the table. Sanders was satisfied with the move.
So too were Pelosi and the House Progressives. The progressives in the House were placated with Pelosi declaring the two fiscal bills would have to be voted on together: the $550B in new spending on infrastructure and whatever amount resulted of the $3.5 trillion Family bill after negotiations gutted it as well–as shall be evident in the coming weeks.
The same process of gutting the Infrastructure bill that occurred in the Senate will now be replicated with the $3.5 trillion human infrastructure bill; namely, the $3.5T will be reduced in stages in both the House and Senate until corporate interests in both the Democratic and Republican parties are satisfied the final funding will not require big tax hikes.
In fact, the slashing the $3.5T has already begun. Early last week Joe Manchin called for a ‘pause’ in negotiations on the $3.5T saying it was too large for him to support. That formulation signaled he might accept it but not in its present form or size. Yesterday Manchin followed up saying the $3.5T should be reduced to no more than $1.5 trillion over ten years.
It what looks like a nicely coordinated initial position by corporate party interests in the House, Manchin was quickly followed by Jim Clyburn, a power broker in the House, who just declared the $3.5T should be considered only a ‘wish list’ and just a start point for negotiations. In other words, let’s negotiate down from there.
So here we go: just as occurred in the Senate with the original $2.3 trillion traditional Infrastructure bill, the $3.5T human infrastructure/family bill will be slashed in stages in coming weeks, in a nicely choreographed effort by Democratic party corporate interests in the Senate and the House.
McConnell and Republicans will look on with a big smile on their face, nodding their heads, silently urging their corporate cousins in the Democratic party to do their work for them again, and bring them a bill that requires no rollback of Trump’s $4.5 trillion massive 2017 tax cuts.
Meanwhile, what existed of fiscal stimulus this past spring is quickly dissipating. Consumer and retail spending continue to weaken, as unemployment benefits are cut, rent assistance is blocked, employers pull back on job hiring, distribution of funds by state and local governments are hoarded, supply chain bottlenecks globally continue, most of Asia is slipping into recession, business price gouging continues to push up inflation, and the Covid delta wave accelerates.
But hey, what the hell. It’s not all bad. The stock market keeps hitting records. Corporations plan to distribute a record $1.5 trillion this year in stock buybacks and dividend payouts to their shareholders. Corporate spending on global mergers and acquisitions is projected to hit record levels. And the Federal Reserve keeps the financial bubbles going with its $120 billion a month QE free money to bankers and investors.
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Dr. Jack Rasmus is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Matt Kenyon/Financial Times
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We who are so easily dismissed as ‘Conspiracy Nuts’ know, both intuitively and through careful research, that there was lots more about what really went down the morning of September 11th, 2001.
When I first read David Ray Griffin’s 2004 bestseller 9/11 The New Pearl Harbor I literally could not put it down. He laid out countless facts that the whitewash 9/11 Commission failed to even address. Rather than go into the myriad of details allow me to just state a few coincidences: When the FAA and NORAD realized that there were jumbo jets failing to respond to radio contact and on their way to the NYC area, the call was made to scramble fighter jets.
Well, logic would dictate that the call would go to McGuire AFB in New Jersey, whereupon the jets could reach Lower Manhattan, less than 30 miles away, within 15-20 minutes. Yet, the call went out to Otis AFB in Mass., which is over 150 miles from NYC.
Go figure! Then we have the military exercise, Operation Vigilant Guardian, on the day in question. This was a NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) exercise involving fake airplane hijackings in North America.
So, you have tapes of air traffic controllers, as the Four death planes were approaching, saying over their microphones: “Is that one a real hijacking or a fake one?” Meanwhile, the damage was being done. How about Bush Jr. sitting in an elementary school classroom reading to the kids after the 1st plane hit a twin tower? Then, his chief of staff Andrew Card walked over and whispered in Junior’s ear that a 2nd plane hit the other tower. It then took his handlers more than 7 minutes to get him out of there! Now here is the kicker: It was advertised well in advance that Bush Jr. would be at that Sarasota, Florida school that morning. If we were truly under attack, come on, you all see those same films about presidential assassination attempts. In the films, at the first signs of any danger to a president the Secret Service guys rush in, grab the president and hurry him the hell out of wherever he is!
Bottom line: Anyone who has watched the great film Casablanca knows where I am going with this. In the film, Claude Rains playing the Vichy French captain (after the Germans kill his prisoner) states “He was found dead in his cell” and then orders his men to “Round up the usual suspects”. In October of 2001 the ‘Usual Suspects’ were the entire population of Afghanistan, which we proceeded to invade and occupy. Soon after, ditto for Iraq. It was never really about Osama or Saddam. They were just the icing on the cake of empire.
After the two towers came down like pancakes (in less than 10 seconds, a world record – Please note that there is a video of three NYC fireman watching a tower go down on live television. These were three veteran firefighters by the way. As they watch the tower pancake down one says ‘Did you see that? Boom boom boom.’
Another replies ‘Controlled demolition’). Junior Bush sent out the demand to get Wall Street open and working again within 7 days. Meanwhile, all those truly brave and dedicated first responders were trudging around inside a zone of destructive debris — destructive to the human organs. This cloud of a potpourri of dangerous toxins just filled the nasal passages of anyone having to breath them.
Meanwhile, Christine Todd Whitman, head of the EPA at the time, assured America that ‘The air is now safe’. It only took her about 15 years to apologize for her lie. We now surmise that it was the Bush Cabal that ordered her to lie.
Sadly, when you watch all the media doing all those human interest stories of the terrible tragic day, you won’t see or hear much truth. Not at all. Will anyone in the mainstream media dare offer any of the handful of facts I shared in this piece? To add insult to injury, Junior Bush is scheduled to address the nation at the site of the Shanksville, PA crash.
Those who (again) ‘know better’ will realize that he, along with that whole Cabal, is a war criminal. There are actually two theories about how much Junior Bush actually knew about this ‘9/11 Inside Job’. One theory is that he was just too stupid for the Cheney/Rumsfeld et all cabal to allow him to know in advance. He might have screwed things up afterwards. The other theory is that he was ‘schooled’ by those criminals that something like ‘A new Pearl Harbor ‘ was necessary to justify going full speed into Afghanistan and Iraq. Either way, this is just one man’s opinion, for that is what a good columnist does.
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Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on It’s the Empire… stupid website. He is also frequently posted on Nation of Change, and Countercurrents.org,. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 400 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Meine Damen, meine Herren, geschätzte Kolleginnen und Kollegen! Die Zukunft unserer Kultur wird wesentlich davon abhängen, ob es genügend freie Denker geben wird, die uns darüber aufklären, was Wahrheit und was Lüge ist. Dies erfordert von einem unabhängigen Geist, der in Niemandes Dienst steht, ein hohes Maß an Gemeinsinn und das sittliche Bewusstsein, Hüter seines Bruders zu sein. Je größer der Mut eines Denkers, um so mehr wagt er in Frage zu stellen, um so weniger bleibt er mit der Menge konform. Sein Denken ist nicht nur Gedankenspiel: denkend verändert er die Welt. Er ist der Typus eines redlichen Geistes, eines Ethikers und wahren Menschen, der für sich und alle anderen Menschen (denkend) die Verantwortung übernimmt. Mit der Freiheit des Denkens wird die Freiheit überhaupt proklamiert. Denn die Wahrheit ist kein Selbstzweck; sie ist lediglich die Gussform für etwas Größeres, nämlich die Freiheit. Die Wahrheit allein kann uns frei machen. Der Intellektuelle hat deshalb eine viel größere Verantwortung, als man gemeinhin wahrhaben möchte.
Dabei wird ein freier Denker nie behaupten, er verfüge über die allein selig machende Wahrheit. Für den freien Geist gibt es eine unbegrenzte Anzahl von zu entdeckenden und dem Wandel folgenden Wahrheiten. Wahr ist für ihn, was nicht dogmatische Fessel ist und die Menschen nicht in Gläubige und Nichtgläubige oder Andersgläubige trennt, sondern dem Zusammenleben der Menschen nützt, ihr Einvernehmen und den Gemeinsinn fördert.
Da für die Gestaltung der Zukunft jeder Einzelne gebraucht wird, kann nicht auf einen Messias gewartet werden: Es muss hier und jetzt gehandelt werden. Deshalb sehe ich den gewaltfreien Weg allein darin, weiterhin aufzuklären, Hoffnung zu vermitteln und niemals aufzugeben. Totschlagargumente wie „Verschwörungstheoretiker“ oder „Faschist“ sollten freie Geister nicht verunsichern, negative Kategorisierungen noch unentschlossener Mitbürger unterlassen werden. Unentschlossene muss man freundlich und verständnisvoll dort abholen, wo sie sich momentan gefühlsmäßig befinden.
Wenn zum Beispiel Mitbürger davon ausgehen, dass es sich bei den politischen, wirtschaftlichen und klimatischen Horrormeldungen um schicksalhafte Ereignisse handelt, dann sollten sie erfahren, dass die Menschen überall auf der Welt von der herrschenden „Elite“ durch bewusst herbeigeführte Katastrophen aller Art ins Chaos gestürzt werden, damit sie in eine Schockstarre verfallen (Naomi Klein) und nicht mitbekommen, wie hinter ihrem Rücken eine Neue Weltordnung entsteht, in der sie nur noch ein Sklavendasein fristen werden. Aber wie in jedem anderen Krieg birgt der Nebel der Ungewissheit für Bürger die Chance, mithilfe des gesunden Menschenverstands die Wahrheit herauszufinden.
Wenn ein Mitbürger der Meinung ist, dass Politiker mit der Verordnung von Zwangsmaßnahmen wie Lockdown, Quarantäne, Maulkorb oder gen-therapeutische Seren die Gesundheit der Bevölkerung schützen wollen, dann sollte ihm vermittelt werden, dass die Schalthebel der Macht bereits vor Jahren mit korrupten, sittenlosen, unbedeutenden und verlogenen Polit-Darstellern besetzt worden sind, weil diese die Anordnungen der herrschenden Psychopathen bereitwillig umsetzen. Dazu zählen gegenwärtig das mediale Schüren irrationaler Ängste, die Zerstörung des Mittelstands, die Abschaffung des Bargelds, die totale Kontrolle sowie die Reduktion der Bevölkerung und die Isolation „Uneinsichtiger“ in speziellen „Quarantäne-Camps“. Doch diese Lakaien müssen eines Tages abtreten. Das Böse wird nicht siegen, weil der Mensch zwar irritiert, aber von Natur aus gut und sozial ist.
Wenn jemand im Zusammenhang mit den verordneten politischen Zwangsmaßnahmen und der anstehenden Zwangsimpfung meint, dass Politiker und Bürger gut beraten seien, wenn sie auf die Expertisen von Medizinern aller Couleur vertrauen, dann soll er daran erinnert werden, dass kein Berufsstand so tief in die Gräueltaten des Nationalsozialismus verstrickt war wie die Ärzte. Sie bildeten gewissermaßen das Rückgrat nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen.
Wenn Mitbürger nicht wissen oder wahrhaben wollen, dass freie Länder und freiheitliche Regierungen von skrupellosen Großmächten bewusst zerstört werden und die Öffentlichkeit darüber getäuscht wird, dann empfehle man ihnen den Artikel von John Pilger in „Global Research“ und „RT.DE“ über das jahrzehntelange Leiden des afghanischen Volkes: “Das große Spiel, Länder zu zerschlagen“. Der vielfach ausgezeichnete Journalist plädiert dafür, die Wahrheit über die Vergangenheit ernst zu nehmen, damit all dieses Leid nie wieder geschieht. Dabei ist Afghanistan nur eines von vielen Beispielen für die brutalen Eroberungsfeldzüge und Wirtschaftskriege des Imperiums.
Wenn Mitmenschen hoffen, dass die gegenwärtigen Verbrechen an der Menschheit bald ein Ende finden werden, dann sollte man sie schonend darauf vorbereiten, dass bereits nachfolgende Zwangsmaßnahmen geplant sind, um den angeblich von Menschen verursachten Klimawandel einzudämmen. Gleichzeitig sollte man ihnen Hoffnung machen, da weltweit immer mehr Menschen aufwachen und gegen den gigantischen Schwindel und die Verbrechen aufstehen.
Wenn ein Mitbürger wegen der menschenverachtenden Machenschaften der Obrigkeit in eine für ihn ausweglos erscheinende wirtschaftliche, finanzielle und soziale Notlage gerät, dann ist ihm dringend zu empfehlen, sich an Mitmenschen zu wenden, weil das Prinzip der „Gegenseitigen Hilfe“ (Kropotkin) sowie soziale Gefühle und gemeinschaftliche Verbundenheit in der Menschenwelt eine ebenso große Rolle spielen wie der Wille zur Macht und der Eigennutz.
Wenn aber irgendjemand die Mitmenschen zum Aufstand gegen die Staatsgewalt treiben will, dann muss ihnen dringend davon abgeraten werden, weil die Staatsgewalt gut gerüstet ist und mit dem Blut und der Freiheit der anderen schonend umgegangen werden muss.
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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is Diplom-Psychologe und Erziehungswissenschaftler.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
The future of our culture will largely depend on whether there will be enough free thinkers to enlighten us about what is truth and what is a lie. This requires from an independent mind, which is in nobody’s service, a high degree of common sense and the moral consciousness to be his brother’s keeper.
The greater the courage of a thinker, the more he dares to question, the less he /she conforms to the crowd. His thinking is not just mind games: thinking he changes the world. He is the type of an honest spirit, an ethicist and true human being who takes responsibility for himself and all other human beings (thinking). With the freedom of thinking, freedom in general is proclaimed. For truth is not an end in itself; it is merely the mould for something greater, namely freedom. Truth alone can make us free. The intellectual therefore has a much greater responsibility than one would commonly like to admit.
At the same time, a free thinker will never claim to have the only blessed truth. For the free mind, there is an unlimited number of truths to be discovered and to follow change. For him, truth is that which is not dogmatic and does not divide people into believers and non-believers or those of other faiths, but which is beneficial to the coexistence of people and promotes their understanding and common sense.
Since every individual is needed to shape the future, we cannot wait for a Messiah: Action must be taken here and now. Therefore, I see the only non-violent way is to continue to enlighten, to convey hope and to never give up.
Killing arguments like “conspiracy theorist” or “fascist” should not unsettle free spirits, negative categorisations of still undecided fellow citizens should be refrained from. Undecided people have to be picked up in a friendly and understanding way from where they are at the moment.
If, for example, fellow citizens assume that the political, economic and climatic horror reports are fateful events, then they should be told that people all over the world are being thrown into chaos by the ruling “elite” through deliberately brought about catastrophes of all kinds, so that they fall into a state of shock (Naomi Klein) and do not notice how a New World Order is being created behind their backs, in which they will only live a slave existence. But as in any other war, the fog of uncertainty offers citizens the chance to use common sense to find out the truth.
If a fellow citizen thinks that politicians want to protect the health of the population by prescribing coercive measures such as lockdown, quarantine, muzzling or gene therapy serums, then it should be conveyed to him that the levers of power were already occupied years ago by corrupt, immoral, petty and mendacious political actors because they willingly implement the orders of the ruling psychopaths. These currently include the media stoking of irrational fears, the destruction of the middle class, the abolition of cash, total control as well as the reduction of the population and the isolation of “undiscerning” people in special “quarantine camps”. But these lackeys must one day step down. Evil will not triumph because man, though irritated, is good and social by nature.
If anyone thinks, in connection with the prescribed political coercive measures and the upcoming compulsory vaccination, that politicians and citizens would be well advised to trust the expert opinions of medical practitioners of all stripes, then they should be reminded that no profession was as deeply involved in the atrocities of German Nazis as doctors. In a sense, they formed the backbone of German Nazis crimes.
If fellow citizens do not know or do not want to admit that free countries and free governments are being deliberately destroyed by unscrupulous great powers and that the public is being deceived about this, then they are advised to read John Pilger’s article in “Global Research” about the decades of suffering of the Afghan people: “The Great Game of Breaking Up Countries”. The award-winning journalist pleads for taking the truth about the past seriously so that all this suffering never happens again. Yet Afghanistan is only one of many examples of the brutal campaigns of conquest and economic warfare of the empire.
If fellow human beings hope that the current crimes against humanity will soon come to an end, then they should be gently prepared for the fact that subsequent coercive measures are already planned to curb the allegedly man-made climate change. At the same time, they should be given hope as more and more people around the world are waking up and standing up against the gigantic hoax and crimes.
If a fellow citizen finds himself in a seemingly hopeless economic, financial and social plight because of the inhuman machinations of the authorities, then he is strongly advised to turn to fellow human beings, because the principle of “mutual aid” (Kropotkin) as well as social feelings and communal bonds play just as great a role in the human world as the will to power and self-interest.
But if anyone wants to drive fellow human beings to revolt against the power of the state, then they must be strongly advised not to do so, because the power of the state is well armed and the blood and freedom of others must be treated with care.
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Dr Rudolf Hänsel is a Psychologist and educationalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
According to Rutgers University, more than 98 percent of undergrads have complied with its mandate that students upload their coronavirus vaccine card in order to return to dorms and classes this fall. But the few students who chose not to get the vaccine are now finding themselves locked out of fall classes, even classes they had planned to take online only.
Adriana Pinto, 22, is one of those students. Pinto is represented by Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that is already suing Rutgers over its vaccine mandate, and Julio Gomez, the Scotch Plains lawyer who filed the lawsuit.
According to Gomez, Pinto decided not to get the COVID-19 vaccine. She only has one class left to graduate, Quantitative Methods for her psychology degree, which was offered to students either in person or over Zoom this fall.
On Aug. 3, she registered for the remote-only offering of the class, and assumed she was all set for the fall semester. Classes were scheduled to begin Sept. 2.
Except when Pinto later tried to log into her Rutgers account on Aug. 26, she found she was entirely blocked: She had no access to her Rutgers email; she could not access Zoom login links, or her degree requirements or past credits. Her Rutgers account had been entirely frozen, even though Pinto had already paid tuition for her final course.
Gomez and Children’s Health Defense have filed a temporary restraining order against Rutgers, demanding the school unfreeze Pinto’s account.
Rutgers confirmed this has indeed happened to some students. This is because Rutgers is only guaranteeing that full remote learning be available to students who were already enrolled in an existing online-only program.
“A full-remote virtual option will only be available for those enrolled in our degree-granting online programs,” said Rutgers on this COVID-19 page. “Unless you are enrolled in a fully online degree program at Rutgers, you cannot be assured of a fully remote/virtual option … Registering for classes that are fully remote (synchronous/asynchronous) is not the same as being enrolled in a fully online degree-granting program.”
On March 25, Rutgers became the first college in the nation to require students get the COVID shot to return to campus. A Rutgers spokeswoman said the university’s position has not changed since the spring.
“There was no change from March. The policy always said a full-remote virtual option would only be available for those enrolled in degree-granting online programs,” said Rutgers spokeswoman Dory Devlin. “To date, 98.8 percent of our students have complied with the vaccination requirement. We continue to work with students who have not yet uploaded their vaccination information so they can gain access to university systems and classes.”
A spokeswoman for Children’s Health Defense, Rita Shreffler, said she has no idea exactly how many other Rutgers’ students have had their accounts frozen because they are not vaccinated.
But Logan Hollar is another one. Like Pinto, this Rutgers senior also does not want the vaccine and he planned to finish his senior year by taking all online-only classes.
And like Pinto, he was not enrolled in a traditional “online-only” degree program. But he told NJ.com it was his understanding Rutgers gave students a choice: Get the shot and come back to campus, or be unvaccinated and stay remote.
He chose to be unvaccinated and stay remote. Except when he tried to log on for classes on Aug. 27, he too found his account was frozen.
Read the April 13 Rutgers’ formal vaccine policy:
On April 13, Rutgers issued this formal policy outlining its COVID vaccine rules. According to Rutgers, vaccine exemptions apply to:
“A. Students whose entire course of study is entirely web-based, a fully online degree program, and/or fully remote. To qualify, the student must have no physical presence on campus.”
And
“B. Individuals participating in fully online or off-campus Continuing Education Programs.”
Pinto thought that Section A applied to her, said her lawyer.
“She read that to understand that if she took a fully remote schedule, that she would be exempt from the vaccine policy,” said Gomez. “And I think that’s a very reasonable understanding. She did the very responsible thing by choosing to keep herself off campus for this final semester.”
Hollar similarly told NJ.com he thought that applied to him.
“When they put out the guidance in March, I was reading through all the verbiage, which was if you plan to return to campus, you need to be vaccinated,” he told the media outlet. “I figured I wouldn’t be part of that because all my classes were remote … I assumed the emails in my inbox pertaining to (the vaccine) must apply to in-person students.”
Rutgers has until Sept. 14 to respond to the temporary restraining order that seeks to unfreeze the students’ accounts.
Gomez said he has not yet received a response from Rutgers. He has also filed a separate motion to recuse the judge assigned to the case, the Hon. Zahid Quraishi, because he lectured for one year at Rutgers Law School. Lawyers for Rutgers, the Florham Park law firm of Faegre Drinker, are fighting Gomez’ attempt to have the judge removed.
And so far, neither Hollar or Pinto will relent and just get the vaccine.
Hollar told NJ.com he now plans to transfer from Rutgers for his senior year, as he cannot sign up for any courses online and will not get the vaccine.
And Pinto will continue her legal fight: She just filed an affidavit saying she will not set foot on the Rutgers campus, said her lawyer.
“So it would seem to me there is no connection to make someone get a vaccine who is never going to be on campus. She is just looking to take her final course and be done,” said Gomez. “We have no idea how many students are in this boat, where they believed they were exempt (from the vaccine requirement) if they signed up for a fully remote semester. But I suspect there are more students like Adriana out there.”
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On August 31, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. stepped up to the White House podium, squared his shoulders, looked the American public straight in the eye — and told them the biggest lie of his Presidency (so far).
What he said was:
“Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan—the longest war in American history.”
But the U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end on August 31. It has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that may be less visible—and therefore more politically sustainable.
It will also continue to destabilize the Middle East, immiserate and enrage its 246 million inhabitants, and fuel a massive new influx of violent jihadists recruits—formidably armed with our own abandoned weaponry and bent on revenge against America for the deaths of their families and friends. This will, of course, require the U.S. to launch even more drone bombing missions, which will kill even more Afghan people.
That is the perfect recipe for perpetuating the “forever wars” that Biden promised to end. But it is also a perfect reassurance to the military-industrial-intelligence complex, to which Biden promised, at a June 2019 campaign fundraiser, that “nothing would fundamentally change.”
In his speech on August 31, Biden himself admitted,
“We will maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries. We just don’t need to fight a ground war to do it. We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground—or very few, if needed.”
Five days before, on the evening of Thursday, August 26, hours after a suicide bomb was detonated at the gate of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport killing and wounding scores of Afghans trying to flee their country and killing 13 U.S. soldiers, President Biden spoke to the world, “outraged as well as heartbroken,” he said.
Many of us listening to the president’s speech, made before the victims could be counted and the rubble cleared, did not find comfort or hope in his words. Instead, our heartbreak and outrage were only amplified as Joe Biden seized the tragedy to call for more war.
“To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay,” he threatened. “I’ve also ordered my commanders to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities. We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose and the moment of our choosing.”
The president’s threatened “moment of our choosing” came one day later, on Friday, August 27, when the U.S. military carried out a drone strike against what it said was an ISIS-K “planner” in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province.
The U.S. military’s claim that it knows of “no civilian casualties” in the attack is contradicted by reports from the ground. “We saw that rickshaws were burning,” one Afghan witness said. “Children and women were wounded and one man, one boy and one woman had been killed on the spot.”
Fear of an ISIS-K counterattack further hampered evacuation efforts as the U.S. Embassy warned U.S. citizens to leave the airport. “This strike was not the last,” said President Biden. On August 29, another U.S. drone strike killed a family of ten in Kabul.
Image on the right: Predator drone firing over Afghanistan. [Source: wikipedia.org]
The first lethal drone strike in history occurred in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, when the CIA identified Taliban leader Mullah Omar, “or 98-percent probable it was he,” but the Hellfire missile launched by a Predator drone killed two unidentified men while Mullah Omar escaped.
These two recent instances of “force and precision” ordered by Biden twenty years later marked the presumed end to the war there just as it had begun. The intervening record has not been much better and, in fact, documents exposed by whistleblowerDaniel Hale prove that the U.S. government is aware that 90% of its drone strike victims are not the intended targets.
Zemari Ahmadi, who was killed in the August 29 drone strike in Kabul along with nine members of his family, seven of them young children, had been employed by a California based humanitarian organization and had applied for a visa to come to the U.S., as had Ahmadi’s nephew Nasser, also killed in the same attack.
Nasser had worked with U.S. Special Forces in the Afghan city of Herat and had also served as a guard for the U.S. Consulate there. Whatever affinity the surviving members of Ahmadi’s family and friends might have had with the U.S. went up in smoke, that day. “America is the killer of Muslims in every place and every time,” said one relative who attended the funeral, “I hope that all Islamic countries unite in their view that America is a criminal.” Another mourner, a colleague of Ahmadi, said “We’re now much more afraid of drones than we are of the Taliban.”
The fact that targeted killings like those carried out in Afghanistan and other places from 2001 to the present are counterproductive to the stated objectives of defeating terrorism, regional stability or of winning hearts and minds has been known by the architects of the “war on terror,” at least since 2009.
Thanks to Wikileaks, we have access to a CIA document from that year, Making High-Value Targeting Operations an Effective Counterinsurgency Tool. Among the “key findings” in the CIA report, analysts warn of the negative consequences of assassinating so-called High Level Targets (HLT). “The potential negative effect of HLT operations, include increasing the level of insurgent support …, strengthening an armed group’s bonds with the population, radicalizing an insurgent group’s remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or de-escalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.”
The obvious truths that the CIA kept buried in a secret report have been admitted many times by high-ranking officers implementing those policies. In 2013, General James E. Cartwright, the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, reported in The New York Times, “We’re seeing that blowback. If you’re trying to kill your way to a solution, no matter how precise you are, you’re going to upset people even if they’re not targeted.”
In a 2010 interview in Rollingstone, General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, figured that “for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies.” By the general’s equation, the U.S. created a minimum of 130 new enemies for itself in the strikes ordered by President Biden on August 27 and 29 alone.
When the catastrophic consequences of a nation’s policies are so clearly predictable and evidently inevitable, they are intentional. What has happened to Afghanistan is not a series of mistakes or good intentions gone awry, they are crimes.
In his novel, 1984, George Orwell foresaw a dystopian future where wars would be fought perpetually, not intended to be won or resolved in any way and President Eisenhower’s parting words as he left office in 1961 were a warning of the “grave implications” of the “military-industrial complex.”
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange noted that these dire predictions had come to pass, speaking in 2011: “The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the U.S. and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”
No, the war is not over. From a nation that should be promising reparations and begging the forgiveness of the people of Afghanistan comes the infantile raging, “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay” and while pledging to perpetuate the conditions that provoke terrorism, the parting taunt “and to ISIS-K: We are not done with you yet.”
That the U.S. is not done with Afghanistan is seen further in the scramble to recruit new intelligence assets such as Ahmad Massoud, 32, commander of the Tajik-dominated National Resistance Front (NRF), which continues to fight a low-level insurgency in the Panjshir Valley against the Pashtun-led Taliban, who are viewed as a proxy of the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
The CIA’s nefarious activities in Afghanistan and perpetuation of the drone war are little debated in the simplistic dualism of U.S. partisan politics where the issue seems to be only whether the current president should be blamed or should be given a pass and the blame put on his predecessor. This is a discussion that is not only irrelevant but a dangerous evasion of responsibility. Twenty years of war crimes makes many complicit.
In 1972, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote: “Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings. Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, [and] in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
All of us in the U.S., the politicians, voters, tax payers, the investors and even those who protested and resisted it, are responsible for 20 years of war in Afghanistan. We are also all responsible for ending it–definitively.
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Brian Terrell is a peace activist. He can be reached at: [email protected].
In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.
The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
The announcement by Taliban spokesman Zahibullah Mujahid in Kabul of the acting cabinet ministers in the new caretaker government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan already produced a big bang: it managed to enrage both woke NATOstan and the US Deep State.
This is an all-male, overwhelmingly Pashtun (there’s one Uzbek and one Tajik) cabinet essentially rewarding the Taliban old guard. All 33 appointees are Taliban members.
Mohammad Hasan Akhund – the head of the Taliban Rehbari Shura, or leadership council, for 20 years – will be the Acting Prime Minister. For all practical purposes, Akhund is branded a terrorist by the UN and the EU, and under sanctions by the UN Security Council. It’s no secret Washington brands some Taliban factions as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and sanctions the whole of the Taliban as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization.
It’s crucial to stress Himatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban Supreme Leader since 2016, is Amir al-Momineen (“Commander of the Faithful”). He can’t be a Prime Minister; his role is that of a supreme spiritual leader, setting the guidelines for the Islamic Emirate and mediating disputes – politics included.
Akhunzada has released a statement, noting that the new government “will work hard towards upholding Islamic rules and sharia law in the country” and will ensure “lasting peace, prosperity and development”. He added, “people should not try to leave the country”.
Spokesman Mujahid took pains to stress this new cabinet is just an “acting” government. This implies one of the next big steps will be to set up a new constitution. The Taliban will “try to take people from other parts of the country” – implying positions for women and Shi’ites may still be open, but not at top level.
Taliban co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar, who so far had been very busy diplomatically as the head of the political office in Doha, will be deputy Prime Minister. He was a Taliban co-founder in 1994 and close friend of Mullah Omar, who called him “Baradar” (“brother”) in the first place.
A predictable torrent of hysteria greeted the appointment of Sirajuddin Haqqani as Acting Minister of Interior. After all the son of Haqqani founder Jalaluddin, one of three deputy emirs and the Taliban military commander, with a fierce reputation, has a $5 million FBI bounty on his head. His FBI “wanted” page is not exactly a prodigy of intel: they don’t know when he was born, and where, and that he speaks Pashto and Arabic.
This may be the new government’s top challenge: to prevent Sirajuddin and his wild boys from acting medieval in non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, and most of all to make sure the Haqqanis cut off any connections with jihadi outfits. That’s a sine qua non condition established by the China-Russia strategic partnership for political, diplomatic and economic development support.
Foreign policy will be much more accommodating. Amir Khan Muttaqi, also a member of the political office in Doha, will be the Acting Foreign Minister, and his deputy will be Abas Stanikzai, who’s in favor of cordial relations with Washington and the rights of Afghan religious minorities.
Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, the son of Mullah Omar, will be the Acting Defense Minister.
So far, the only non-Pashtuns are Abdul Salam Hanafi, an Uzbek, appointed as second deputy to the Prime Minister, and Qari Muhammad Hanif, a Tajik, the acting Minister of Economic Affairs, a very important post.
The Tao of staying patient
The Taliban Revolution has already hit the Walls of Kabul – who are fast being painted white with Kufic letter inscriptions. One of these reads, “For an Islamic system and independence, you have to go through tests and stay patient.”
That’s quite a Taoist statement: striving for balance towards a real “Islamic system”. It offers a crucial glimpse of what the Taliban leadership may be after: as Islamic theory allows for evolution, the new Afghanistan system will be necessarily unique, quite different from Qatar’s or Iran’s, for instance.
In the Islamic legal tradition, followed directly or indirectly by rulers of Turko-Persian states for centuries, to rebel against a Muslim ruler is illegitimate because it creates fitna (sedition, conflict). That was already the rationale behind the crushing of the fake “resistance” in the Panjshir – led by former Vice-President and CIA asset Amrullah Saleh. The Taliban even tried serious negotiations, sending a delegation of 40 Islamic scholars to the Panjshir.
But then Taliban intel established that Ahmad Masoud – son of the legendary Lion of the Panjshir, assassinated two days before 9/11 – was operating under orders of French and Israeli intel. And that sealed his fate: not only he was creating fitna, he was a foreign agent. His partner Saleh, the “resistance” de facto leader, fled by helicopter to Tajikistan.
It’s fascinating to note a parallel between Islamic legal tradition and Hobbes’s Leviathan, which justifies absolute rulers. The Hobbesian Taliban: here’s a hefty research topic for US Think Tankland.
The Taliban also follow the rule that a war victory – and nothing more spectacular than defeating combined NATO power – allows for undisputed political power, although that does not discard strategic alliances. We’ve already seen it in terms of how the moderate, Doha-based political Taliban are accommodating the Haqqanis – an extremely sensitive business.
Abdul Haqqani will be the Acting Minister for Higher Education; Najibullah Haqqani will be Minister of Communications; and Khalil Haqqani, so far ultra-active as interim head of security in Kabul, will be Minister for Refugees.
The next step will be much harder: to convince the urban, educated populations in the big cities – Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif – not only of their legitimacy, acquired in the frontlines, but that they will crush the corrupt urban elite that plundered the nation for the past 20 years. All that while engaging in a credible, national interest process of improving the lives of average Afghans under a new Islamic system. It will be crucial to watch what kind of practical and financial help the emir of Qatar will offer.
The new cabinet has elements of a Pashtun jirga (tribal assembly). I’ve been to a few, and it’s fascinating to see how it works. Everyone sits on a circle to avoid a hierarchy – even if symbolic. Everyone is entitled to express their opinion. This leads to alliances necessarily being forged.
The negotiations to form a government were being conducted in Kabul by former President Hamid Karzai – crucially, a Pashtun from a minor Durrani clan, the Popalzai – and Abdullah Abdullah, a Tajik, and former head of the Council for National Reconciliation. The Taliban did listen to them, but in the end they de facto chose what their own jirga had decided.
Pashtuns are extremely fierce when it comes to defending their Islamic credentials. They believe their legendary founding ancestor, Qais Abdul Rasheed, converted to Islam in the lifetime of Prophet Muhammad, and then Pashtuns became the strongest defender of the faith anywhere.
Yet that’s not exactly how it played out in history. From the 7th century onwards, Islam was predominant only from Herat in the west to legendary Balkh in the north all the way to Central Asia, and south between Sistan and Kandahar. The mountains of the Hindu Kush and the corridor from Kabul to Peshawar resisted Islam for centuries. Kabul in fact was a Hindu kingdom as late as the 11th century. It took as many as five centuries for the core Pashtun lands to convert to Islam.
Islam with Afghan characteristics
To cut an immensely complex story short, the Taliban was born in 1994 across the – artificial – border of Afghanistan and Pakistani Balochistan as a movement by Pashtuns who studied in Deobandi madrassas in Pakistan.
All the Afghan Taliban leaders had very close connections with Pakistani religious parties. During the 1980s anti-USSR jihad, many of these Taliban (“students”) in several madrassas worked side by side with the mujahideen to defend Islam in Afghanistan against the infidel. The whole process was channeled through the Peshawar political establishment: -overseen by the Pakistani ISI, with enormous CIA input, and a tsunami of cash and would-be jihadis flowing from Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world.
When they finally seized power in 1994 in Kandahar and 1996 in Kabul, the Taliban emerged as a motley crew of minor clerics and refugees invested in a sort of wacky Afghan reformation – religious and cultural – as they set up what they saw as a pure Salafist Islamic Emirate.
I saw how it worked on the spot, and as demented as it was, it amounted to a new political force in Afghanistan. The Taliban were very popular in the south because they promised security after the bloody 1992-1995 civil war. The totally radical Islamist ideology came later – with disastrous results, especially in the big cities. But not in the subsistence agriculture countryside, because the Taliban social outlook merely reflected rural Afghan practice.
The Taliban installed a 7th century-style Salafi Islam crisscrossed with the Pashtunwali code. A huge mistake was their aversion to Sufism and the veneration of shrines – something extremely popular in Islamic Afghanistan for centuries.
It’s too early to tell how Taliban 2.0 will play out in the dizzyingly complex, emerging Eurasian integration chessboard. But internally, a wiser, more traveled, social media-savvy Taliban seem aware they cannot allow themselves to repeat the dire 1996-2001 mistakes.
Deng Xiaoping set the framework for socialism with Chinese characteristics . One of the greatest geopolitical challenges ahead will be whether Taliban 2.0 are able to shape a sustainable development Islam with Afghan characteristics.
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This article was originally published on Asia Times.
Pepe Escobar,born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Latest news reports of a cluster of ivermectin overdoses in Oklahoma were debunked by the hospital. Not one such case. The doctor who fabricated the story hadn’t work there in two months.
On February 4, 2021, Merck, which is readying release of its new COVID-19 treatment drug, molnupiravir, issued a press release about that new drug’s competition, ivermectin.1 Merck itself had developed ivermectin, now off-patent, for human use, securing FDA approval in 1987, and distributed most of its 3.7 billion doses safely used worldwide since.2-4 It was thus curious that Merck’s press release about use of ivermectin for COVID expressed “a concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.”1
Recently, many news reports5-8 picked up on Merck’s theme, lambasting the use of a dangerous horse de- wormer by gullible consumers. The most recent were by the BBC,9Rolling Stone,10The Guardian,11MSN12and others, about Oklahoma hospital facilities being strained with ivermectin overdoses, delaying other emergency care. The hospital system in question debunked the story, noting that it had not one case of ivermectin overdosing and that the doctor who fabricated the story hadn’t worked there in two months.13,14
These false alarms about ivermectin safety, echoing Merck’s, are scientific nonsense. Ivermectin is FDA approved for human use,4its discovery honored with the 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine, for “improving the health and wellbeing of millions,” with “limited side effects.”15 One of the safest modern drugs, it is well tolerated even at very high doses (details below). By a quirk of molecular biology, ivermectin binds to SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and obstructs the morbidity of the virus.16-18 It thereby also obstructs Merck’s anticipated billions in revenues from its new COVID entry. As to Merck’s past playbook for such obstacles, consider its $410 million disinformation campaign for its deadly drug Vioxx,19 withdrawn in 2004.
“Dodge Ball Vioxx.” In a scathing critique of Merck’s duplicitous promotion of Vioxx,20 Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of Lancet, noted how Merck prepared a sales presentation, entitled “Dodge Ball Vioxx,”21 with instructions for dodging awkward inquiries from physicians. To the question, “I am concerned about the cardiovascular effects of Vioxx?” the answer that Merck instructed was: “DODGE!”
“Neutralize,” “discredit,” “destroy.” Merck knew early of Vioxx’s cardiovascular risks, which resulted in up to 139,000 heart attacks and strokes, 30-40% of them likely fatal.22,23 Merck not only concealed some such deaths,22,24but it systematically attacked those who warned of these fatal risks. It created a spreadsheet that named Vioxx critics and noted plans for each, including “neutralize,” “neutralized” or “discredit.”25,26 Merck also listed its staff assigned to each critic—an entire “task force” to one. On October 15, 2001, one Merck executive emailed another: “We may need to seek them out and destroy them where they live.”1,26
Regulatory Capture.27 Horton, the Lancet editor, noted the role of the FDA in enabling Merck’s Vioxx scandal. The FDA saw “the pharmaceutical industry as its customer,” not the US public.20 When an associate FDA director, David Graham, MD, blew the whistle on Vioxx’s deadly record, he was subjected to threats, abuse, and lies orchestrated by his FDA superiors.28 The FDA Commissioner who approved Vioxx resigned and then went on to become senior counsel for Merck’s PR firm.28 Horton summarized, “with Vioxx, Merck and the FDA acted out of ruthless, short-sighted, and irresponsible self-interest.”20
Good journalists get extremely angry when they’ve been had. The major media do not generally spew scientific nonsense. It would appear to take a budget on the order of the $410 million for Merck’s prior Vioxx promotion19 to get incisive, respected journalists such as Paul Waldman of the Washington Post29and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC30 to be duped into echoing Merck’s February PR claim that ivermectin is unsafe. Yet good journalists get extremely angry when they’ve been had. Any newsroom can fact check that ivermectin is FDA approved for human use, Nobel prize-honored, developed by Merck, now molnupiravir’s competitor, and extremely safe. Such brazen overreach can easily backfire into focus on Merck’s prior drug misinformation campaign. It takes rare PR brilliance for Merck, with its new drug release pending, to prompt a searing revisit of its past tactics in promoting its deadly drug, Vioxx.
On the science behind ivermectin and COVID-19, including clinical, animal, and molecular studies, see this recently published review.18 Its lead author is a prominent clinical researcher at Yale. Two coauthors are in the line of the only two Nobel prize-honored treatment breakthroughs for infectious diseases since the one for streptomycin in 1952. Notably, coauthor Thomas Borody in 1990 published the first clinical trial for the cure for H. pylori (peptic ulcers).31 That cure consisted of three repurposed inexpensive drugs: two antibiotics and bismuth.18 It was adopted immediately in Australia, in 1990, saving an estimated 18,000 lives.32 A decade later, after the patents for the billion dollar palliative drugs, Tagamet and Zantac, expired, that cure became the standard of care for peptic ulcers in the rest of the world.18
Ivermectin safety. Ivermectin is well tolerated even at ten times the standard dose of 200 μg/kg,33,34 and at high doses, in particular, for COVID-19 treatment.35,36 Cancer patients who took ivermectin at five times that standard dose daily for up to 180 consecutive days had no serious adverse effects from it, in experimental protocols with harsh additional drugs.37 Of 19 patients who took extreme overdoses up to 1,000-fold that standard dose of either ivermectin or the closely related abamectin, all using veterinary forms, only one 72-year-old male who took 440 times the standard dose died.38
As noted, ivermectin is FDA approved for human use,4 and as is the case with all but one of current COVID- 19 treatment drugs, is used off-label for COVID treatment. More generally, 21% of all drug prescriptions in the US are off-label.39,40Since many news reports have hopelessly confounded the human and veterinary forms of ivermectin, this clarification is useful. Only human drug forms of ivermectin can be recommended for human use. Products for external animal use generally contain ingredients unfit for human consumption. The injectable liquids typically contain glycerol formal, which tastes nasty but is not toxic; these can be overdosed if not dispensed carefully. Most COVID-19 patients facing life-and-death decisions without access to the human drug have used the 1.87% horse paste in a squeeze tube for oral animal ingestion.
Do no harm. It should be noted that in the US, the standard treatment recommendation for the early stage of COVID is palliative, to take Tylenol.41 (Note, incidentally, that in the US, acetaminophen (Tylenol) overdoses account for more than 100,000 calls to poison control centers, 56,000 emergency room visits and an estimated 458 deaths from acute liver failure each year.42) Therefore, per the Hippocratic oath of do no harm, given the safety of ivermectin and solid indications of clinical efficacy against COVID-19,18 it is unconscionable to place obstacles to such clinical use. It is clear that the quest for profits has at times subverted public health, for example, with Merck’s Vioxx, and with the ten-year delay in the deployment of the cure for peptic ulcers until the patents for two billion-dollar drugs expired. It behooves all parties to study the science and refrain from and rectify misleading, negative reports about ivermectin.
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Below are links to key documents, including internal files from Merck and publications from major scientific journals as relate to the above.
Merck press release of April 28, 2000: University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library, qqqw0217. “In response to speculative news reports. Merck & Co., Inc. today confirmed the favorable cardiovascular safety profile of Vioxx.”1
Seife, Oct 1, 2016. Scientific American. How the FDA Manipulates the Media. “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been arm-twisting journalists into relinquishing their reportorial independence, our investigation reveals.”43
Curfman et al., 2000. Expression of concern: Bombardier et al., “Comparison of upper gastrointestinal toxicity of rofecoxib and naproxen in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.24
Gotzsche, 2017, with forewords by Richard Smith, past editor-in-chief, The British Medical Journal, and Drummond Rennie, deputy editor, JAMA. Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.28 Excerpts from Chapter 19.
Eric Topol loses provost/chief academic officer titles at Cleveland Clinic and Lerner College, Medscape, December 11, 2005.46 “Dr Eric Topol may no longer be the provost of the medical college he helped establish and has lost his title as chief academic officer at the Cleveland Clinic, a result of institutional ‘reorganization,’ the renowned cardiologist was told one week ago today. Topol was informed that the change was ‘effective immediately,’ despite the fact that the board of trustees will only today be voting on the restructuring plan. Conspicuously, Topol’s ostensible loss of authority . . . came days after a federal jury heard Topol’s videotaped deposition in the latest Vioxx lawsuit. In it, Topol accused Merck of ‘scientific misconduct’ and testified that Merck’s former chair, Raymond Gilmartin, had in the past called fellow Harvard MBA alumnus Malachi Mixon, the chair of the clinic’s board of trustees, to complain about Topol’s vocal anti-Vioxx stance.”
2001 Profit Plan for Vioxx. University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library, mxpd0217, September 1, 2000.19
Grant, The Scientist, April 29, 2009. Merck published fake medical journal.47 It had the appearance of a peer reviewed journal, but was instead a marketing tool.
Letter from James Fries, MD, to Raymond Gilmartin, CEO of Merck, January 9, 2001, University of California, San Francisco, Industry Documents Library, ltgw0217.48 As described in a letter from a Stanford University professor, James Fries, MD, to the CEO of Merck, Merck “employees have systematically attacked those investigators or speakers who expressed what Merck staff felt were critical opinions.” Fries noted individual cases of eight scientists with academic appointments jeopardized, speaking engagements canceled.
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David E. Scheim, PhD, US Public Health Service, Commissioned Corps, Inactive Reserve Blacksburg, VA, [email protected]
Yagisawa M, Foster PJ, Hanaki H, et al. Global Trends in Clinical Studies of Ivermectin in COVID-19. The Japanese Journal of Antibiotics. 2021;74(1).
Crump A, Ōmura S. Ivermectin, ‘wonder drug’ from Japan: the human use perspective. Proc Jpn Acad Ser B Phys Biol Sci. 2011;87(2):13-28.
Juarez M, Schcolnik-Cabrera A, Dueñas-Gonzalez A. The multitargeted drug ivermectin: from an antiparasitic agent to a repositioned cancer drug. Am J Cancer Res. 2018;8(2):317-331.
Lehrer S, Rheinstein PH. Ivermectin Docks to the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Receptor-binding Domain Attached to ACE2. In Vivo. 2020;34(5):3023-3026.
Zaidi AK, Dehgani-Mobaraki P. The mechanisms of action of Ivermectin against SARS-CoV-2: An evidence-based clinical review article. The Journal of Antibiotics. 2021;10.1038/s41429-021-00430-5.
Santin AD, Scheim DE, McCullough PA, et al. Ivermectin: a multifaceted drug of Nobel prize-honored distinction with indicated efficacy against a new global scourge, COVID-19. New Microbes and New Infections. 2021; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nmni.2021.100924:100924.
Curfman GD, Morrissey S, Drazen JM. Expression of concern: Bombardier et al., “Comparison of upper gastrointestinal toxicity of rofecoxib and naproxen in patients with rheumatoid arthritis,” N Engl J Med 2000;343:1520-8. N Engl J Med. 2005;353(26):2813-2814.
Moynihan R. Court hears how drug giant Merck tried to “neutralise” and “discredit” doctors critical of Vioxx. British Medical Journal. 2009;338:b1432.
Baxter LG. Chaper 2: Understanding Regulatory Capture: An Academic Perspective from the United States. In: Pagliari S, ed. The Making of Good Financial Regulation: Towards a Policy Response to Regulatory Capture. Guildford, Surrey, UK: Grovesnor House Publishing Ltd; 2012.
Gotzsche P. Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare. 1st edition ed: CRC Press; 2017:238-240,247.
George LL, Borody TJ, Andrews P, et al. Cure of duodenal ulcer after eradication of Helicobacter pylori. Med J Aust. 1990;153(3):145-149.
Eslick GD, Tilden D, Arora N, et al. Clinical and economic impact of “triple therapy” for Helicobacter pylori eradication on peptic ulcer disease in Australia. Helicobacter. 2020;25(6):e12751.
Guzzo CA, Furtek CI, Porras AG, et al. Safety, tolerability, and pharmacokinetics of escalating high doses of ivermectin in healthy adult subjects. J Clin Pharmacol. 2002;42(10):1122-1133.
Navarro M, Camprubí D, Requena-Méndez A, et al. Safety of high-dose ivermectin: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. 2020;75(4):827-834.
López-Medina E, López P, Hurtado IC, et al. Effect of Ivermectin on Time to Resolution of Symptoms Among Adults With Mild COVID-19: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2021;10.1001/jama.2021.3071.
Krolewiecki A, Lifschitz A, Moragas M, et al. Antiviral effect of high-dose ivermectin in adults with COVID- 19: A proof-of-concept randomized trial. EClinicalMedicine. 2021;37.
de Castro CG, Jr., Gregianin LJ, Burger JA. Continuous high-dose ivermectin appears to be safe in patients with acute myelogenous leukemia and could inform clinical repurposing for COVID-19 infection. Leuk Lymphoma. 2020;61(10):2536-2537.
Chung K, Yang CC, Wu ML, et al. Agricultural avermectins: an uncommon but potentially fatal cause of pesticide poisoning. Ann Emerg Med. 1999;34(1):51-57.
Topol EJ. Failing the Public Health — Rofecoxib, Merck, and the FDA. New England Journal of Medicine. 2004;351(17):1707-1709.
Wood S. Eric Topol loses provost/chief academic officer titles at Cleveland Clinic and Lerner College. Medscape. December 11, 2005. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/788062.
Comments Off on Merck’s Deadly Vioxx Playbook, Redux: A Debunked Smear Campaign Against Its Competing Drug—the FDA-approved, Nobel prize-honored Ivermectin
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U.K. vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi had earlier stated that a “vaccine passport” scheme like this would never be implemented, calling the idea of it a “conspiracy theory.” That has since changed, apparently, as Zahawi is now planning to force the jabs upon people who wish to do fun things.
Businesses that refuse to obey Zahawi’s orders face being shut down for non-compliance. Zahawi plans to aggressively police them all to ensure that every venue is checking vaccine passports at the door before allowing people to enter.
“When the evidence that you are presented is so clear cut and that we want to make sure the industry doesn’t have to go through [an]open-shut, open-shut sort of strategy, then the right thing to do is to introduce that by the end of September, when all over-18-year-olds have had their two jabs,” Zahawi is quoted as saying, pretending to be a scientist.
“One thing that we have learned is that in large gatherings of people, especially indoors, the virus tends to spike and spread.”
Zahawi is a liar who pretended to oppose vaccine passports
Back in January, Zahawi emphatically wrote on Twitter that the British government has “no plans to introduce vaccine passports,” later calling them “discriminatory.” When asked if he could be held to this promise, Zahawi responded with, “Yes you can.”
Zahawi reiterated at the time that forcing people to get injected in order to live their lives represents discrimination and would thus never be tolerated. That was a bald-faced lie, we now know.
The U.K. is moving in the same direction as France, which recently imposed a much stricter vaccine passport scheme that requires proof of vaccination to even just shop at the grocery store.
Protesters have taken to the streets in Paris and elsewhere in defiance of the order, which was issued by Emmanuel Macron as a way of “flattening the curve” of the so-called “delta variant.”
In the United States, a handful of cities, including New York and New Orleans, are similarly requiring proof of injection in order to enter certain businesses. This is creating a two-tiered society of apartheid between the “fully vaccinated” and the “unvaccinated,” which are now afforded different rights.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) published a lengthy article describing how this series of “missteps” by the government is “the wrong path.” And it “could get worse” if people let it, the EFF warns.
“… imposing such systems on the world will lock out hundreds of millions of people from being able to obtain visas or even travel,” the group says.
“These new trust-based systems, if implemented in a way that automatically disqualifies people who received genuine vaccinations, will cause dire effects for years to come. It sets up a world where certain people can move about easily, and those who have already had a hard time with visas will experience another wall to climb.”
The only real solution is for citizens of the world to resist this type of tyranny with full force. The medical fascists will never get away with their little vaccine passport schemes if We the People just say no to it, no matter the cost.
“Resistance is necessary!” wrote one commenter at The Epoch Times. “Stand against tyranny.”
Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccine” tyranny is shredding the social fabric of countries all around the world. The latest news about this can be found at Fascism.news.
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“The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments.
They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area.
They are resolved to unite their efforts for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security. “
Originally composed of twelve nations on the date of its signing in April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) now encompasses thirty members. [2]
NATO’s purpose as an institution was to guarantee the freedom and security of its members through political and military means. The organization’s literature claims that while it seeks peaceful resolutions in troubled regions or countries, it boasts a military power apparatus capable of executing “crisis-management” operations made possible either by a United Nations mandate, or by the famous Article 5 of the Washington treaty essentially saying an attack against one nation is attack against all of them.[3][4]
Today, NATO operates an a budget of €258.9 million for civil purposes and €1.61 billion for military purposes. It’s military spending equals 57% of the global Normal total and defence spending of the constituent nation states are aiming for a target of 2% of their GDP by 2024.[5][6][7]
NATO has a history of waging warfare since the fall of the Berlin Wall and principally to further the interests of the Anglo-American head-honchos. In 1999 the war on Yugoslavia was waged illegally without a mandate from the United Nations, or a credible threat to any other country. In 2001, the war on Afghanistan was waged on the premise that the country via the terrorists on its soil attacked America – a charge that was never proved.
Canadians have a positive opinion of their nation’s foreign policy. The nation’s apparent reluctance in joining the coalition to join the 2003 Iraq War, for example, is a sign that Canadians are not gung-ho about joining every US military adventure and only do so when the threats to democracy and human rights are high enough. But as NATO continues to demand more and more expenses at the cost of properly addressing social and environmental hazards, with the increasing use of unlimited greenhouse gas emissions, and with the spectre of nuclear weapons being used in a future military confrontation, it is time Canada really asked itself if it was time to bolt this gang of New World Order warlords.
On this week’s Global Research News Hour, we present another panel discussion courtesy of The Canadian Foreign Policy Institute entitled Why Canada Should Leave NATO.
The Canadian Foreign Policy Institute is a non-partisan organization which seeks to inform people living in Canada about the country’s diplomatic, aid, intelligence, trade and military policies abroad which are at odds with their self-portrait as a benevolent force around the world. Its director is Bianca Mugyenyi who will function as the moderator for the discussion.
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Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of numerous works of Russian and Soviet history, international security, military history, and military ethics.
Ludo De Brabander is a Belgian writer and spokesman for the Belgian peace organisation Vrede vzw. He writes opinion pieces for Vrede, Uitpers, Knack.be, De Wereldmorgen and Mo.
Tamara Lorincz is a PhD student in Global Governance at the Balsillie School for International Affairs (Wilfrid Laurier University). Tamara graduated with an MA in International Politics & Security Studies from the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom in 2015. Tamara is currently on the board of the Canadian Voice of Women for Peace and the international advisory committee of Global Network Against Nuclear Power and Weapons in Space.
Bianca Mugyenyi is an activist, a journalist and the director of the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute.
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CADTM: In late August 2021 the IMF announced that it would supply the global economy with US$650 billion to meet urgent needs. This would be achieved through an increase in Special Drawing Rights. What exactly does that mean?
Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: The 190 countries that are members of the IMF are entitled to allowances in strong currencies which they do not have to pay back. This device is called Special Drawing Rights. To this we must add loans that the IMF can grant to a country calling for help. Loans must be repaid with interest and are tied to conditions that reinforce neoliberal policies.
On 23 August 2021,Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director, stated:“The largest allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in history—about US$650 billion—comes into effect today. The allocation is a significant shot in the arm for the world and, if used wisely, a unique opportunity to combat this unprecedented crisis.”She added that the allocation of SDRs“will provide additional liquidity to the global economic system – supplementing countries’ foreign exchange reserves and reducing their reliance on more expensive domestic or external debt. Countries can use the space provided by the SDR allocation to support their economies and step up their fight against the crisis.” [1]
When it announced an additional $650 bn in SDRs, the IMF made it known that member countries could draw on this amount but have to be aware that they cannot claim more than what is allowed by their economic and political weight represented by their quota-shares in the IMF. For instance: the USA have quota-shares of 17.43 while the Democratic Republic of the Congo has only 0.22 quota-shares, i.e. 80 times less. However, the DRC has some 100 million inhabitants and the USA only around 330 million.
CADTM: Are the SDRs a debt towards the IMF?
Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: The SDRs are an international reserve assetdesigned to supplement the official reserves of the 190 IMF member countries and provide liquidity in the event of abalance of payments crisis, i.e. when a government no longer has sufficient financial resources available in foreign currency to meet its financial commitments outside its borders, includingdebt service.
As such they are not a debt towards the IMF either. SDRs are not a currency: you cannot carry out any transaction with them. Their value is determined by a basket of currencies consisting of the US Dollar, the Euro, the Chinese Yuan, the Japanese Yen and the British Pound. SDRs, on the other hand, can be traded against one or more foreign currencies through central banks. In this instance SDRs become a debt, not towards the IMF, but towards the institution with which they were traded. SDRs are not a gift.
To put it in other words, a country that does not have sufficient reserves in one or more foreign currencies to repay its external public debt to one or more of its creditors will be able to use all or part of the SDRs allocated to it to make debt service payments.
CADTM: For the IMF, this increase is of course a “landmark”. While the SDR allocation is not new, its amount is unprecedented. In what way can this allocation benefit the concerned countries?
Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: To go along with the IMF, we could say that this SDR allocation is free of policy conditionalities and is not directly counted by the IMF as a debt. But while this allocation may at first sight represent a breath of fresh air for the countries of the South, the reality is quite different.
CADTM: What do you mean? Is this a deceptive kind of help?
Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: Absolutely! We can point to at least four limitations to this allocation.
We can start with the distribution of those $650 bn. As mentioned above, SDRs “are being distributed to countries in proportion to their quota shares in the IMF.” Consequently, among the 190 member countries, the 135 developing countriesshare $275 bn, i.e. hardly 40% of the allocation, while the 55 rich countries will receive some $375 bn. Moreover, there are strong income inequalities among developing countries, which reinforce inequalities in the distribution of the allocation.
The 29 low-income or poor countries, with 700 million inhabitants, receive less than $21 bn. This is a paltry amount compared with the $450 bn they need to help their economies over the next five years, according to the IMF.
So the allocated amount is questionable. Those $275 bn represent less than 8% of the external public debt and 25% of developing countries’ external public debt servicing from 2020 to 2022. Compared with the thousands of billions of euros and US dollars, respectively, released since the beginning of the pandemic by the EuropeanCentral Bank and the USFederal Reserve, and with the actual needs of the countries of the South, the allocation of 275 billion dollars is derisory.
Another element that must not be forgotten is the political consequences of this allocation. Since the global crisis of 2007–2008, the IMF has once again become inescapable and is present in a majority of countries in the South. To use this allocation is to reinforce the central position of an institution that has constantly failed since its creation, both because of its anti-democratic functioning and its deadly neoliberal ideology. The situation is similar for the 55 richest countries. Negotiations are already underway to redistribute part of the 375 bn they have received to the countries of the South. But note that the proposal that is currently dominating the debate is a fool’s game. The rich countries would demand interest on a share of the SDRs that were allocated to them for free. Not to mention the very likely strategic and trade agreements signed under the table with the governments of the South, who have their hands tied given their critical situation.
Last but not least, we must be aware of what the allocation will be used for. Currently over 25% of countries of the South dedicate more resources to debt servicing than to health care expenditure. And at the same time,neither the initiative to suspend debt servicing, nor the Common Debt Framework or the Disaster Response and Assistance Trust Fund established in 2020 can meet the demand. Moreover, private creditors, who are a large majority, have not yet granted any relief or cancellation of their debts. In such circumstances, the allocation is likely to be used first to directly or indirectly repay private creditors. The current dominating logic for countries of the South is to preserve their trustworthiness on financial markets and with investors. As they give in to the blackmail of creditors andrating agencies, States are clearly undermining international law, human rights and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
For instance, the president of Mexico has already announced that he would use SDRs to repay the country’s external debt instead of using them to fight the impact of the pandemic. Yet there have been more than 260,000 deaths in Mexico due to the coronavirus.
CADTM: Your observation seems implacable. But what other solutions do countries of the South have?
Milan Rivié and Éric Toussaint: What is obvious is that in spite of the unprecedented nature of the crisis and of successive alarming statements, no current international institution has been able to implement unconditional debt cancellation.
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Translated by Christine Pagnoulle and Snake Arbusto
Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the author of Debt System (Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019), Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc. He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. He was the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt from April 2015 to November 2015.
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Doctors at Houston Methodist Hospital have discovered cases of a new variant of COVID-19 among patients being treated for the virus, the hospital confirmed Monday to KPRC 2. This new variant is the “Mu” variant. But that’s not the only interesting thing about this story, which is likely a psychological operation.
“We had our first case of Mu back in May,” said Dr. Wesley Long, medical director of diagnostic microbiology at Houston Methodist and a clinical pathologist.
Long said doctors didn’t refer to those cases as the so-called “Mu” variant until the World Health Organization designated the variant as such last week.
“Once the WHO declared that this would be the Mu variant, we went and looked and saw that we had had a few cases here and there dating back all the way till May,” Dr. Long said. –Click2Houston
The most important thing they need you to know about “Mu” is that it can escape vaccine-induced immunity. Considering the shots everyone has taken aren’t vaccines, that means everyone can get it.
Keep an eye on this new scariant. Once the “vaccinated” start really getting sick, whether it’s from the “vaccine” or not won’t make a difference. It’ll be labeled a COVID-19 death and they may blame it on the Mu variant. Delta is still circulating the news too, but they need to keep that fake strain relevant to convince people to take the shots since they have already told them the “vaccines” offer protection from Delta.
Stay alert and aware. Continue to hone your critical thinking skills. The lies will never end.
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The regional states will be shell-shocked by the brazen way Lt. Gen. Faiz Hameed, head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), coerced the Taliban to announce an interim government that is guaranteed to preserve Rawalpindi’s control over the levers of power in Kabul.
There are several things to be noted about the so-called interim government announced by the Taliban on September 7. The “moderate” Taliban political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, supposedly number 2 in the Taliban hierarchy, has been designated to serve as First Deputy to Mullah Hasan Akhund who will be the acting prime minister.
Baradar who led the Taliban delegation at the Doha talks and was earlier mentioned widely as the likely head of the new Taliban government, has been pigeonholed — assigned to a titular post which will be, typically, an overly restrictive one.
Mullah Akhund will wield the baton. Now, he is one of the most enigmatic figures in the Taliban movement, rarest of rare exceptions of a shadowy figure who did not participate in the “jihad” against the Soviets in the 1980s but only to emerge as the powerful “ideologue” of the movement to serve on the shura councils.
He is singularly credited with the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 and had a pivotal role in the development of the Taliban’s religious identity rooted in the brand of strict Islamist ideology, known as Deobandism.
Akhund dictated the ideological justification for the insurgency against the US-backed Afghan governments. Significantly, he operated almost entirely in exile from Pakistan through the past 20-year period.
Akhund’s impeccable Pashtun lineage is drawn from the powerful Durrani tribe from Kandahar, which, historically, anointed the Afghan rulers. After the overthrow of the Taliban regime (where he had served as foreign minister), Akhund landed with the powerful position as the head of the Rahbari Shura council of leaders, often called the “Quetta Shura”, which the ISI put together to plot the Taliban’s second coming to power.
The sidelining of Baradar is to be attributed to the political tension between him and the Haqqani Network. The ISI has had the final say in the matter. Baradar’s conciliatory politics with Karzai had earlier cost him 8 years’ incarceration in an ISI jail — until President Trump wanted him in Doha. The ISI never trusted him.
The most startling thing about Akhund is that his entrenched beliefs include treating women as mere chattels of men to bear children and treating ethnic and religious minorities as a lower form of life. He has been hard as rock on issues of civil rights. His edicts in the 1990s, adopted by the Taliban, included the banning of women’s education, enforcing gender segregation and the adoption of strict religious garb.
In retrospect, Baradar served merely as the facade of reason before the international community in Doha. With Akhund on one side and Sirajuddin Haqqani, Interior Minister-designate on the other side, he finds himself between the rock and a hard place.
Sirajuddin is unquestionably the blue-eyed boy of the ISI. His appointment is horrible news for New Delhi. But the big question for the future is about the US’ equation with the Haqqani Network. The mythology harps on the FBI notification of a “reward of up to $10 million for information leading directly to the arrest of Sirajuddin Haqqani” and its clarion call, “If you have any information concerning this person, please contact your local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate.”
The FBI calls Sirajuddin “a specially designated global terrorist” with close ties to the al-Qaeda but the charges against him are unsubstantiated and remain vaguely worded. Thus, Sirajuddin is “wanted for questioning in connection with the January 2008 attack on a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed six people, including an American citizen. He is believed to have coordinated and participated in cross-border attacks against United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Haqqani also allegedly was involved in the planning of the assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai in 2008.”
At the same time, the farcical FBI notice also says, “Haqqani is thought to stay in Pakistan, specifically the Miram Shah, North Waziristan, Pakistan, area.” read more
If the US could nab Osama bin Laden from a Pakistani cantonment town, why should it have outsourced the task as in the Wild West — posting a notice in every bar and brothel?
The point is, State Department’s archival materials also show that the US and the Haqqanis go back a long way. The Mujahideen group of Jalaluddin Haqqani was actually the only group in the 1980s jihad, which was trusted by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq to be allowed to have direct dealings with the CIA. The CIA of course described him as a “unilateral” asset who in turn received tens of millions of dollars in cash directly.
Indeed, when the time came for the CIA to transfer Osama bin Laden from Sudan to Afghanistan, it was to the safe custody of none other than Jalaluddin that the fugitive was left. Such was the bonding!
True, Jalaluddin subsequently refused to betray bin Laden and, possibly, helped him to evade the American net in the fastness of the Tora Bora mountain caves in December 2001. But, apparently, the two sides since moved on.
In fact, Lieutenant General John Nicholson, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during hearings when he was picked to lead the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan in January 2016 that the US counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan were not targeting the Haqqani network of militants. To quote the general, “They are not part of that designation right now…The Haqqanis are principally a focus of the Afghan security forces.”
Nicholson gave a laboured explanation that the US counterterrorism actions focused on al-Qaida and Islamic State. The US expected Pakistan to put enough pressure on the Haqqanis to prevent cross-border attacks! read more
The four star general indulged in this sophistry full 8 years after the Haqqani Network’s attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. It is a matter of shame and disgust, nothing less, that India’s Afghan policies all along toed the US strategies in Afghanistan — right up to this day so much so that Prime Minister Modi is reportedly looking forward to discussing with President Biden on the sidelines of the Quad summit in DC how the coordination can be strengthened in the current circumstances.
By the way, who is Maulawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, the foreign minister-designate in the interim government?
Ambassador Peter Tomsen, US Special Envoy on Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992, has written in his classic work The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powersthat then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf personally called US President George W Bush on or about November 2001 for a VIP airlift out of Kunduz which was besieged by the Northern Alliance militia under Rashid Dostum (with support of US Special Forces) in the downstream of the 9/11 attacks.
Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney expressly approved Musharraf’s personal request. The well-known investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later wrote based on briefing from ex-CIA sources that US Central Command set up a special air corridor out of Kunduz to ensure the safety of the Pakistani military flights.
Close to a thousand people were evacuated, including al-Qaeda members, in the Kunduz airlift (known famously as the “Airlift of Evil”) to remote bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir. And the grapevine is that one of the VIPs so evacuated was Maulawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, apart from senior Pakistani military officials. The ISI saw greater destiny for Muttaqi!
Can Pakistan get away with all this? This interim government won’t fly easily, but it won’t wither away either, although it can be recast. The regional capitals will react — Tehran and Moscow (and possibly even Beijing.) They have been taken for a ride by the Pakistani narrative of “inclusive government”.
Pakistan dared to push the envelope with the cool assessment that the US and its Western allies will engage with the Taliban once the dust settled down. The visit by the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb on 3rd September to Islamabad was the clincher. read more
On September 5, Gen. Hameed took off for Kabul. By September 7, we already saw the Taliban’s response to his dog whistle.
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Featured image is a screenshot from a South Front video
Agenda ID2020 – is hardly mentioned by any media, let alone the mainstream. Agenda ID2020, if carried out, is the ultimate control by a small elite – of the One World Order (OWO), also called the New World Order (NWO) – over the world population.
Ted Kuntz of Vaccine Choice Canada talks with Dr. David Martin, an articulate man whose testimony about the pandemic has shocked the world. David revealed with undeniable evidence that the COVID pandemic has been planned for decades.
As of Aug. 7, there were 106 incidents of myocarditis and pericarditis in people under the age of 25 in Ontario — slightly more than half of the total of all such incidents, the Toronto Sun reported.
Nicholas Wansbutter, a criminal defense lawyer and host of Don’t Talk TV, talks about vaccine passports in Canada. According to him, vaccine passports are extremely problematic for two reasons: 1) issue of consent and 2) human rights implications.
Police and firefighters in Los Angeles have formed a resistance group against COVID vaccine mandates for state workers in the city, stating that they aim to “maintain human rights, constitutional rights, civil rights, and civil liberties as sovereign natural free human beings, and American citizens.”
Australian health chief Dr. Kerry Chant says that COVID will be with us “forever” and people will have to “get used to” taking endless booster vaccines.
Several military members told Health Impact News today that their commanders are coercing members of their unit to get the COVID-19 shot TODAY (September 7, 2021) or face the consequences of disobeying a direct order.
The New Development Bank (NDB) was created by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in 2015. The BRICS bank, as it is more commonly known, invests mainly in developing economies in areas such as transportation, water and sanitation, clean energy, digital infrastructure, social infrastructure and urban development.
The likely range of total human-caused global surface temperature increase from 1850–1900 to 2010–2019 is 0.8°C to 1.3°C, with a best estimate of 1.07°C.
Instead of coming to terms with how we are destroying our habitat, instead of learning the lessons nature has been trying to teach us over the past 18 months, we have ignored the wreckage and have refused to be taught. If anything, humanity has only intensified its war against nature during the past year’s pseudo pandemic.
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“Ethics 101. Dr. Julie Ponesse, professor of Ethics at the University of Western Ontario, provides a lesson in courage and integrity.”
On September 7, 2021, Julie Ponesse, Ethics Professor Huron College University of Western Ontario, London, ON Canada was dismissed for not submitting to medical experimentation.
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The Afghanistan Resistance’s last and only stronghold was “conquered” by the Taliban.
Initially Taliban plans were to peacefully take Panjshir and quell the resistance through negotiation, but that failed. After a series of clashes Islamic group took control of the last area that it hadn’t captured yet.
The leaders of the resistance have not been detained nor killed, and they claim that the fight will continue.
Regardless, the Taliban announced an acting government and are moving forward with the creation of an Islamic Emirate.
The members of the government were expected for a while, albeit with a bit of a shuffle of their positions. The cabinet shows that the Taliban truly believe that individuals who were blacklisted by the US, UN and others can introduce an adequate, reformed governance.
Another potential explanation is that the Islamist group is so confident in its own capability that they are acting to spite the US, UN and EU, and to gather more Muslim supporters through their impunity.
Several members of the new interim cabinet were announced. The head will be Mohammad Hasan Akhund, a former leader of the group’s chief council, formed in Pakistan by Taliban leaders after the United States’ invasion in 2001.
Between 1996-2001 he was foreign minister and then deputy prime minister in the Taliban regime. Mullah Akhund is a close associate and adviser of the Taliban’s very first leader and is included in a UN sanctions list.
Abdul Ghani Baradar, expected by many to be Afghanistan’s leader, will be Deputy Prime Minister. He was the Taliban’s political office head.
Acting Second Deputy Prime Minister is Abdul Salam Hanafi. He was Baradar’s deputy in Taliban affairs.
The interior minister position is assumed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, son of the founder of the Haqqani network. The network is one of the most brutal branches of the Taliban and Haqqani has a leading position of the FBI’s most-wanted list for terrorism.
Acting Defence Minister is Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob. He is the son of the Taliban founder, and was in charge of Taliban military operations since 2020.
Acting head of intelligence is Abdul Haq Wasik. A Guantanamo Bay prisoner for 12 years, who was exchanged for US servicemen captured by Haqqani militants.
During official conference, chief spokesperson of the Taliban Zabihullah Mujahid named 33 members of “the new Islamic government”. He added that the remaining posts will be announced after careful deliberation, repeating that this was not final.
That doesn’t mean that there will be elections, but likely the Taliban will try to draft people from other ethnic groups, as most of the government is Pashtun.
Meanwhile, discontent is spreading in Kabul. Hundreds of citizens marched in provincial capitals, including the capital Kabul, where people gathered in front of the Pakistan embassy, protesting against Pakistan’s involvement in Afghan affairs. Many of the protesters were women who held banners calling for a balanced government that includes Afghanistan’s women.
According to the footage from the spot, the crowd managed to break through the armed cordon and enter the embassy’s territory.
The protests were not violently quelled, and the Taliban shot in the air to disperse the crowd. This, however, doesn’t mean a new page has been turned and the Islamist group has decided to allow freedom of speech and expression. Some journalists were prevented from filming the protest, many of them claimed that they had been beaten and their gear had been taken away.
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The only conclusion that can confidently be arrived at right now is that the Hybrid War on Brazil never really ended but simply evolved, recently influenced to an uncertain extent by the US’ own domestic political changes brought about by similar processes as well as the changing geopolitics of the New Cold War.
Is Bolsonaro Following In Trump’s Footsteps?
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro‘s supporters rallied throughout the country on their nation’s independence day following his call to send a strong message to what he claims is a cliquish elite that’s secretly opposing his agenda. He blames his currently low approval ratings and attendant re-election challenges next year on their alleged efforts. Bolsonaro also believes that the electronic voting machines planned to be used during that time might be rigged and is thus demanding paper ballots instead. His ability to inspire massive rallies over such contentious political issues raises concerns among some that he might be trying to replicate the so-called “insurrection” that former US President Donald Trump was accused of earlier this year.
The Relevance Of Hybrid War Theory
There are two interpretations of what’s happening: it’s either a “Democratic Security” exercise aimed at preserving the country’s democratic fundamentals (as imperfectly as they presently exist) or subverting them through a “self-coup” that could even set the pretext for what some fear might be an actual military coup in his support. Both explanations share their common origin in HybridWar theory, especially its ColorRevolution dimension of instrumentalizing protest movements. In its most popular form, an external actor exploits preexisting identity tensions (in this case political and socio-economic ones) for strategic ends via these means, but the technology has proliferated to the point where domestic actors like Bolsonaro can now employ it too.
Miller’s Suspicious Detainment
Adding a wrinkle to that strategic observation is this week’s temporary detainment of Jason Miller, Trump’s former spokesman and current CEO of the new social media platform Gettr, at the alleged behest of one of the Supreme Court justices presently investigating Bolsonaro. Miller was in the country to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) there and personally met with Bolsonaro during his trip. Speculation abounds about whether Miller might have potentially sought to advise the Brazilian leader about his rumored plans, be they of a “Democratic Security” or “self-coup” nature, hence the alleged reason why he was temporarily detained for questioning.
Ideological Collusion (And If So, Between Whom)?
This development raises more questions than it answers. It remains unclear whether there’s any collusion between Miller and Bolsonaro, let alone what the latter might even be planning and whether Miller might be acting as a proxy for Trump and/or other Americans ideologically aligned with the Brazilian leader. Considering that Miller and those who he’s associated with back home aren’t on positive terms with incumbent US President Joe Biden’s administration, it also makes one wonder whether his detainment might have been coordinated with some American political officials, whether to send a message to him and/or as part of an unstated but jointly waged struggle against those who represent the ideologies that they’re opposed to.
Complicated US-Brazilian Ties Under Biden
Biden is completely against the phenomenon of so-called “Trumpism” that Bolsonaro represents, though his administration has also reportedly tried to convince the Brazilian leader to ban Huawei in exchange for his country becoming a NATO partner. US-Brazilian relations are complicated despite Washington being responsible for Bolsonaro’s rise to power in the first place through its earlier Hybrid War on Brazil that was mostly waged through lawfare, Color Revolution, and of course infowar means. The US always demands that its “partners” fully comply with its demands and is thus very perturbed that Trumpist Bolsonaro of all leaders doesn’t have more of an aggressive policy towards China despite having previously campaigned on such.
Trouble Brewing
Pragmatic agricultural-resource-technological ties that ultimately bolster Brazilian strategic sovereignty are responsible for why that hasn’t happened, contrary to many observers’ expectations who thought that the seemingly ideologically obsessed Bolsonaro would sacrifice these interests in the name of a US-backed anti-Chinese crusade. Concurrent with this, there’s no denying that he’s become genuinely unpopular over the past year as a result of his controversial policies, which instead of dividing the electorate as potentially planned in order to more effectively rule them in a Machiavellian fashion actually seem to have had the opposite effect. This raises the odds that former President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva might win if he decides to run next year.
What Exactly Is “Democratic Security”?
Returning to the article’s question of whether Bolsonaro’s rallies represent a “Democratic Security” exercise or preparation for a “self-coup”, more insight should be shared about what these concepts represent, both in general and in the Brazilian context. The first refers to the instrumentalization of protest movements for the purpose of upholding the political system as it’s understood (key word) to be, whether this is objectively the case or simply the way in which relevant actors perceive it. For instance, the “Stop The Steal” rallies that ultimately inspired the 6 January events were premised on pressuring officials to reverse what their participants sincerely believed to be a rigged election. Bolsonaro’s emerging narrative implies something similar.
And What’s A “Self-Coup”?
The second concept concerns the instrumentalization of protest movements to either directly subvert the political system contrary to how it’s understood (once again, that’s the keyword) to be, whether this is objectively the case or simply the way in which it’s perceived. Continuing with the Trump example, his opponents claimed that the participants of the 6 January events sincerely desired to overthrow the constitutional order after storming the Capital no matter how practically impossible it was for such a single act to achieve that outcome. In the Brazilian context, something similar might be in the works for those same ends with similarly impossible odds of success or perhaps to serve as the pretext for a pro-Bolsonaro military coup.
Entrenched Elite
There are some broader themes that these strategic thoughts touch upon which should also be addressed. Firstly, it’s ironic that Bolsonaro is waging an increasingly intense political war against what he claims is a cliquish elite that’s secretly against him since such an elite had previously helped him rise to power with American backing. It’s unclear to what extent they’re truly sabotaging his agenda and how much such claims might just be self-interested rhetoric to excuse his declining approval rating, but there should be no denying that much of the elite is indeed corrupt and potentially still under US influence. On that topic, another theme is worthwhile pondering, and that’s the extent of US influence over recent events.
The Influence Of The New Cold War
Although Bolsonaro is a fiercely pro-US leader, he nevertheless has serious ideological differences with the Biden Administration, both in general and in particular when it comes to Brazil’s role in the New Cold War between the US and China. His refusal to completely bend to his patron’s political will with respect to banning Huawei in exchange for his country becoming a NATO partner must have sent alarm bells ringing in Washington. Bolsonaro’s ties with Miller-connected Trump and other US conservatives fertilize the ground for rumors to abound about whether there might be some collusion between these ideologically allied movements. This also raises questions about whether the Biden Administration might have played a role in Miller’s detainment.
US-Backed Lawfare 2.0?
Building upon that train of thought is the third theme that should be explored more deeply by intrepid observers and it’s whether the US is once again instrumentalizing its lawfare tools in the Brazilian Supreme Court against the country’s incumbent leader. This possibility is in spite of Bolsonaro originally being brought to power partially as a result of such means “hacking” Brazil’s democracy and the its former government’s own “Democratic Security” rallies at the time (albeit of a much less threatening nature) failing to offset this course of events. To be absolutely clear, this doesn’t imply that the current opposition is colluding with the US but it does suggest that the US might be deliberating whether its interests could best be served through them instead.
The Opposition’s Response
This leads to the fourth theme of wondering how the opposition will react to these increasingly complicated developments. Genuine grievances against Bolsonaro and his (former?) US backers veritably exist and none of the above-mentioned concerns should ever be exploited to discredit that. Nevertheless, the scenario is now emerging whereby it’s possible that the US might be preparing for – if not actively working towards – a post-Bolsonaro future considering his low approval ratings as of late and especially his refusal to ban Huawei. Whether through legitimately democratic means during next year’s elections or via lawfare and possibly even fraud, it can’t be discounted that the US is now once again working towards regime change in Brazil.
The Military Factor
The next point to ponder is what role the military might play in shaping the strategic situation. While Bolsonaro-led Brazil is considered to be firmly in the US’ camp, it’s still thus far refusing to go as far as sanctioning Huawei and thus risking the complete rupture of its ties with China which have so far helped preserve some degree of strategic sovereignty. Some speculate that certain influential military forces are opposed to this Faustian deal despite they themselves generally being pro-US in nature, just not to the ultra-extreme point of sacrificing their country’s objective interests for their partner’s sake. It remains to be seen whether they’d play a positive or negative role in Bolsonaro’s speculative plans ahead of next year’s elections.
The Two Most Important Variables
The two most important variables to watch are therefore the lawfare and military ones since these will likely be the decisive factors determining whether Bolsonaro’s “Democratic Security” or “self-coup” plans succeed. If they’re both on the same side against him, then he stands no chance of pulling either scenario off, but if they remain divided as seems to be the case at least at this moment, then the situation will remain much more dynamic and thus uncertain, especially when considering the fact that the opposition will likely stage their own “Democratic Security” rallies in an attempt to thwart what they believe is his planned “self-coup”. The self-sustaining cycle of both sides instrumentalizing protest movements will contribute to Brazil’s destabilization.
“The New Normal”
Intense political warfare, even if only of a mostly non-kinetic nature for now at least, might very well become the so-called “new normal” in the coming future unless something major happens to drastically shift the scales of success in one or another direction. This could be the Supreme Court doing something serious against Bolsonaro and/or the military getting more directly involved, whether in Bolsonaro’s support or against him. The only conclusion that can confidently be arrived at right now is that the Hybrid War on Brazil never really ended but simply evolved, recently influenced to an uncertain extent by the US’ own domestic political changes brought about by similar processes as well as the changing geopolitics of the New Cold War.
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This article was originally published on OneWorld.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Agenda ID2020 – is hardly mentioned by any media, let alone the mainstream. Agenda ID2020, if carried out, is the ultimate control by a small elite – of the One World Order (OWO), also called the New World Order (NWO) – over the world population. It is a mechanism that would allow controlling every movement of each one of the 7.9 billion people of planet earth, including everyone’s health records, cash flows, bank accounts, as well as our behavior in this ultra-controlled society – which I refrain from calling civilization anymore.
Sounds crazy. Yes, but that’s the plan. No conspiracy theory.
“What is the infamous ID2020? It’s an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity. … The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity.
Let Dr. Vernon Coleman describe in simple terms the mechanisms that mankind – you and me – might be confronted with, if the super power elite, the NWO has its way. Watch this 10- min. video on controlling the people – vaccines, microchips and electromagnetic fields (EMF) – an old science turned new…
Wikipedia describes Dr. Vernon Coleman as an English author, columnist and former general practitioner.
He has written over 100 books, including works about human health, politics, cricket, and animal issues, and a range of novels.
It is High Noon, but never too late to Act in solidarity, despite covid-dictated ‘wanton social distancing’, and prevent this human disaster.
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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; New Eastern Outlook (NEO); RT; Countercurrents, Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press; The Saker Blog, the and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
Police and firefighters in Los Angeles have formed a resistance group against COVID vaccine mandates for state workers in the city, stating that they aim to “maintain human rights, constitutional rights, civil rights, and civil liberties as sovereign natural free human beings, and American citizens.”
As reported in the LA Times, two separate police and firefighters groups have come together to oppose vaccine mandates.
‘Firefighters 4 Freedom’ issued a statement on its website noting
“Our goal is to stop the mandated vaccinations for all City employees as well as the citizens of this great country. We want to bring education and truth to the people without being censored.”
The statement further notes that the group believes in “the right to work, freewill, personal choice, medical freedoms, and consent without coercion, retaliation, threats, disciplinary action, or termination.”
Firefighters 4 Freedom, a group of LA city firefighters and police officers, plans to sue the city over the new requirement that city employees be vaccinated. https://t.co/JItyzZBs6J
“This is not a vaccine versus non-vaccine issue, this is not a left verse right political issue. This is a human rights issue.”
“We hope you stand with us, for we believe all members and citizens have the freedom of choice and natural rights. Your body, your choice. My body, my choice,” the statement concludes.
Meanwhile, LAPD officers have joined the movement under the banner ‘Roll Call 4 Freedom’.
LAPD Sgt. Veronica Saucedo stated that
“We are supportive of individual rights, personal choice and for managing our own health.”
The development comes in the wake of first responders in Oregon bringing a lawsuit against the state and the governor for imposing vaccine mandates.
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Several military members told Health Impact News today that their commanders are coercing members of their unit to get the COVID-19 shot TODAY (September 7, 2021) or face the consequences of disobeying a direct order.
One member stated that when they went by the local pharmacy in a drug store, there were many military members lined up to get the shots today, fearful of the consequences if they don’t.
And this is in spite of the fact that military officials are saying publicly that service members still have 2 to 3 months to comply, according to Military.com.
Sailors and Marines Have 90 Days to Get Vaccinated or Face Punishment
Sailors and Marines now have 90 days to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or risk disobeying a lawful order, a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the maritime branches’ top leaders said in a series ofmessagesreleased Tuesday and Wednesday.
Airmen Have Less than Two Months to Get Fully Vaccinated
The Department of the Air Force has set a tight two-month deadline for active-duty troops to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Those who don’t get the shot in time could be punished under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Airmen and Space Force Guardians must be fully vaccinated – including a two-week period after a final shot – by Nov. 2, the Air Force said in a press release Friday. Air National Guardsmen and reservists have until Dec. 2.
Apparently the military commanders are following their own schedule, regardless of what is being stated publicly by the various branches.
Lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives have now proposed legislation that would prevent the military from issuing dishonorable discharges for service members who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine.
Lawmakers Try to Ban Dishonorable Discharges for Troops Who Refuse Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccines
House lawmakers have backed legislation prohibiting dishonorable discharges for troops who refuse the COVID-19 vaccine, as the Navy gave its sailors 90 days to get the shot this week and the Army and Air Force were poised Thursday to enforce their own timetables.
Legislation sponsored by Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., an Army veteran, requires only honorable discharges for anyone who is separated from the military over refusing to be vaccinated. It was added to the fiscal 2022 defense authorization bill, passed by the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
“No American who raises their hand to serve our Nation should be punished for making a highly personal medical decision,” Green said in a statement after the committee vote.
However, service members are telling Health Impact News that this is what some of them are being threatened with, dishonorable discharge, while others have said they have been threatened with demotions and being barred from reenlisting.
Judicial System Again Fails to Protect Constitutional Rights of Citizens by Denying 200,000 Unvaccinated Military a Temporary Restraining Order
On August 17, 2021, two military members filed a lawsuit in federal court in the State of Colorado, claiming that they represented 200,000 service members who were not vaccinated for COVID-19, but that they had previously contracted COVID-19 and recovered, and that therefore there was no need to be vaccinated against COVID-19, as they had “natural immunity.”
On August 24, 2021, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a Memorandum for “SENIOR PENTAGON LEADERSHIP COMMANDERS OF THE COMBATANT COMMANDS DEFENSE AGENCY AND DOD FIELD ACTIVITY DIRECTORS” which stated:
I therefore direct the Secretaries of the Military Departments to immediately begin full vaccination of all members of the armed Forces under DoD authority on active duty or in the Ready Reserve, including the National Guard, who are not fully vaccinated against COVID-19. (Source.)
So on August 31, 2021, Todd Callender, counsel for the military Plaintiffs, filed a motion for a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to stop this directive from being enforced, which was heard by Judge Raymond P. Moore, who then denied the TRO on September 1, 2021.
The Plaintiffs had expert testimony from an affidavit by Dr. Peter McCullough, stating that “people who have the naturally created antibodies resulting from contracting and recovering from the Virus” should not be vaccinated because “it will do more harm than good.”
Judge Moore rejected his testimony and the evidence provided by the plaintiffs, because it was contrary to what the CDC states.
But Plaintiffs ignore all contrary opinion evidence, including obviously relevant guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) recommending vaccination regardless of whether a person has already had COVID-19 because research has not yet shown people are protected once they recover from the virus.
See Frequently Asked Questions about COVID-19 Vaccination, CDC Website, https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html (last visited Sept. 1, 2021).
The Court is not compelled to view Plaintiffs’ evidence in a vacuum or an echo chamber. As a result, the evidence cited by Plaintiffs coupled with their unsubstantiated insistence on their own natural immunity is insufficient to establish a clear and unequivocal right to a TRO under the circumstances of this case. (Read full opinion here.)
Again, to expect relief from COVID-19 vaccine mandates from the judiciary is just not reasonable. The system is rigged. They will quote the CDC, Anthony Fauci, and a whole host of other corrupt government agencies and leaders to deny facts and keep the COVID-19 narrative going that benefits the Pharmaceutical industry and their Wall Street Billionaires and Bankers.
The judiciary works for these Wall Street Billionaires and Bankers, not for the public.
Mass non-compliance is what is needed now, and while there are signs that those in law enforcement and other government agencies are now forming groups to resist (See: Police, Firefighters In LA Form Group To Resist Vaccine Mandates, for example), where are the military commanders who take seriously the oath they took to protect this country and their citizens??
One of the military members that Health Impact News corresponded with today wrote:
As much as I value my uniform, my time in service and fighting back against such obvious abuses of power I’m coming more and more to the realization that this is the new world order, so to speak.
These vaccines aren’t going away no matter how long or how bitterly we fight this in the courts.
It’s time to tell the system to go **** itself and start figuring out how to best take care of ourselves and our families outside of the system.
Our military leadership has no concern for our wellbeing and they have made it clear that they will punish those who can’t see things from their perspective.
I signed up to defend the Constitution and freedom and now my military leadership is intent on violating both. I’m no longer interested in serving my country in this capacity. It’s time to leave while I can still walk to the door.
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Featured image: Pfc. Shaniah Edwards, Medical Detachment, prepares to administer the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to soldiers and airmen at the Joint Force Headquarters, February 12, 2021. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Leona C. Hendrickson – Source.)
Edward Curtin is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies
