This week in Haiti
The So-Called Evidence Is a Farce
by Stan Goff
(Second of three parts)
The so-called evidence is a farce. The US presented Tony Blair's puppet government with the evidence, and, of the 70 so-called points of evidence, only nine even referred to the attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC), and those points were conjectural. This is a bullshit story from beginning to end. Presented with the available facts, any 16-year-old with a liking for courtroom dramas could tear this story apart like a two-dollar shirt. But our corporate press regurgitates it uncritically. But then, as we should know by now, their role is to legitimize.Citing press reports and strong circumstantial evidence, Stan Goff argues that the U.S. was planning a war against Afghanistan well before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Last week, he explored some of the geo-political and economic factors behind Washington's military thrust into Southern Asia. This week, with a military eye, he analyzes official reaction to events on Sept. 11.
This cartoon heavy they've turned bin Laden into makes no sense, when you begin to appreciate the complexity and synchronicity of the attacks. As a former military person who has been involved in the development of countless operations orders over the years, I can tell you that this was a very sophisticated and costly enterprise that would have left what we call a huge "signature".
In other words, it would have been very hard to effectively conceal.
So there's a real question about why there was no warning of this. That can be a question about the efficacy of the government's intelligence apparatus. That can be a question about various policies in the various agencies that had to be duped to orchestrate this action. And it can also be a question about whether or not there was foreknowledge of the event, and whether that foreknowledge is being covered up. To dismiss this concern out of hand as the rantings of conspiracy nuts is premature.
There is a history of this kind of thing being done by national political bosses, including the darling of liberals, Franklin Roosevelt. The evidence is very compelling that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately failed to act to stop Pearl Harbor in order to mobilize enough national anger to enter the World War II.
I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks.
Follow along:
Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all the
while on FAA radar. The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM
Eastern Daylight Time.
Who is notified?
This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is
not notified while going to a Florida elementary school to hear children
read.
By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers.
By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade Center, Bush is settling in with children for his photo-op at Booker Elementary. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously, an event never before seen in history, and one has just dived into the world's best-known twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander-in-Chief.
No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either.
At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the second WTC tower. At 9:05, Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff, whispers to George W. Bush. Bush "briefly turns somber," according to reporters.
Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No.
He resumes listening to second graders read about a little girl's pet goat, and continues this banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point-turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington, DC.
Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air Force? No.
An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement telling the United States people what they already have figured out: there's been an attack by hijacked planes on the World Trade Center.
There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.
At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American Flight 77 is still ten minutes from its target, the Pentagon.
The Administration will later claim they had no way of knowing that the Pentagon might be a target, and that they thought Flight 77 was headed to the White House, but the plane has already flown south and past the White House no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing through the sky at over 400 nauts.
At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC.
Now, the real kicker: A pilot, whom they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460 nauts.
When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further training on a flight simulator.
This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush hour by buying her a video driving game. It's horse shit!
There is a story being constructed about these events. My crystal ball is not working today, so I can't say why.
But at the least, this so-called Commander-in-Chief and his staff, whom we are all supposed to follow blindly into some ill-defined war on terrorism, is either criminally negligent or unspeakably stupid. And at the worst, if more is known or was known, and if there is now an effort to conceal the facts, there is a criminal conspiracy going on.
Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was facing a confluence of crises from which they were temporarily rescued by this event. Whether they played a sinister role or not, there is little doubt that they have at the very least opportunistically pounced on this attack to overcome their lack of legitimacy, to shift the blame for the encroaching recession from capitalism to the Sept. 11 terror attack, to legitimize their pre-existing foreign policy agenda, and to establish and consolidate repressive measures domestically and silence dissent. In many ways, Sept. 11 pulled the Bush cookies out of the fire.
It has also given them the green light to begin constructing a long-term scenario within which to establish fascistic control measures at home and abroad thereby creating a citadel for the ruling class in the catastrophic conjuncture that we are entering based on the end of oil.
This elephant in the living room is being studiously ignored. In fact, the domestic repression has already begun, officially and unofficially. It's kind of a latter-day McCarthyism. For example, I participated in a teach-in at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Sept. 17. Although not a single person on the panel excused or justified the attacks, and although every person there offered either condolences or prayers for the victims, we were excoriated within two days as "enemies of America." A few days later, an op-ed called for my deportation (to where, one can only guess). Now Herr Ashcroft has fast-tracked through Congress the biggest abrogation of US civil liberties since the so-called anti-terrorism legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing -- which, by the way, hasn't resulted in anti-terrorism but in the acceleration of the application of the racist death penalty. The FBI has defined terrorist groups not by whether any given group has ever acted as terrorists, but by their beliefs. Some socialists and anti-globalization groups have already been named as terrorist groups, even though there is not a single shred of evidence that they have ever participated in any criminal activity. It reminds me of the 1940 Alien and Registration Act, usually called the Smith Act, which was used to persecute and imprison anybody who would "advocate and teach the principles of Marxism-Leninism," in the words of U.S. government prosecutors [much in the same way that Haiti's Duvalier dictatorships outlawed "communism"- Ed.]. The legislation was finally declared unconstitutional, but only after a hell of a lot of people served a hell of a long time in jail for the crime of thinking.
I think this points to yet another huge problem that the Bush regime was facing. Worldwide resistance to the whole so-called neoliberal agenda, which is a prettied up term for debt-leverage imperialism. While debt and the threat of sanctions have been used to coerce nations in the periphery, we have to understand that the final guarantor of compliance remains military action. For a global economic agenda, there is always a corresponding political and military agenda.
The focal point of these
actions in the short term is Southern Asia, but they have already scripted
this as a worldwide and protracted fight against terrorism.
It's far better than drug
wars as a rationalization, and the drug war thing was being discredited
in any case. Leftists are regaining power and popularity in Venezuela,
El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti,
Brazil, and Argentina. Cuba has gained immense prestige over the last few
years. The empire is beginning to unravel. We can hardly justify intervention
in these places by saying they are not toeing the economic line because
they don't allow the absolute domination of their societies by transnational
corporations. That exposes the agenda. So we simply claim they are supporting
terrorism.
It's for all these reasons
I say the Left has missed the boat on this one, by allowing them to get
away with rushing past the question of who did what on Sept. 11. If the
official story is a lie, and I think the circumstantial case is strong
enough to stay with this question, then we really do need to know what
happened. And we need to understand concretely what the motives of this
administration are.
(to be continued)
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