 |
Note:
This article was first posted on January 24, 2002 at
Indymedia. Although many new facts have come out since then, especially
involving the physical evidence for controlled demolition of the Twin
Towers and WTC7, the overview it provides is still useful, especially
for its articulation of the class-war context of the attacks. [MK,
1/11/10]
The "War on
Terrorism" is indeed a fraud, as Australian film and print journalist
John Pilger has
repeatedly pointed out. "Terrorism" is simply taking the place of
"Communism" during the Cold War as the propaganda line spewed by the
state and the corporate media to rally a confused and fearful
population against "enemies" who supposedly threaten them. This most
effective form of social control was recommended by Hitler's chief
propagandist, Josef Goebbels. The purpose of the "War on Terrorism"
is to maintain carte blanche for the ever more desperate agenda of
American capital: the domination of the continent of Eurasia (the
critical sector of which is Central Asia, precisely where the "War on
Terrorism" just happens to have begun), and the crushing of the Left
worldwide, especially its explicitly anti-capitalist core.
In the face of
this juggernaut the Left has shown a potentially
fatal lack of intellectual rigor as well as nerve. The evidence that
the attacks on September 11 were in all likelihood a black operation
of the US intelligence services, a state "provocation" designed as a
pretext to launch the global "War on Terrorism", is very substantial.
It is also painful to consider, but the task must not be shirked. The
purpose of this essay is to consider its relevance to the future of
the only force which holds any hope of saving humanity and the planet
from the megadeath capital is preparing, the anti-capitalist
Left.
Shock, Propaganda And
Paralysis
Four months
after September 11, it appears that most of the Left
is asleep at the switch. Just about the only response has been the
"anti-war movement", which has been weak, especially in the U.S.,
where the propaganda barrage has successfully marshalled the bulk of
the population, including many leftists, into lockstep with their
masters' plans. In any case the movement hasn't stopped the "war" in
Afghanistan (really a one-sided attack against an essentially
defenseless target, not a war). Nor is there any reason to imagine
that it has frightened the Bush cabal from implementing plans to
unleash its death machine on any number of additional targets in the
future. US troops are massing in Kuwait and Qatar, in preparation for
an attack on Iraq, and "special operations" are underway already in
Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines and perhaps Sudan. Then there's
Colombia. . .Venezuela. . .Bolivia. . .Mexico, and these are just the
most obvious near-term objects of attention from the Sickos in
command.
It is probably
safe to say that the anti-war sector of the US
population is almost entirely restricted to the left end of the
political spectrum. But today's Left is a truncated remnant of its
past self, both in size and in critical understanding. Much of it,
when hit by the double whammy of the events of 9/11 and the immediate
subsequent government and media propaganda assault, jumped right in
line behind our new Fuhrer. After all, "we" have been attacked! The
rump that is still anti-war has been pretty feeble, not so much in
terms of the number of demonstrators in the streets, but above all in
their acceptance of much of the elite's propaganda.
Most of the
endless stream of "analysis" from the Left or
"progressive" side has centered on "terrorism", posing and answering
questions such as "what is terrorism?" or "why do they hate us?" For
example, the "Marxist" Tariq Ali's critique of events amounts to
pointing out the ineffectiveness of the US military assault as
a method of eliminating terrorism. His main conclusion seems to be that
the US rulers are really dumb; anybody with half a brain can see that
the attack in
Afghanistan will only breed more terrorists! It never occurs to him
that maybe they're not dumb, but have a different purpose in mind; he
takes their propaganda at face value. And so do most other "critics"
of the war. This is the wrong way to stamp out terrorism! Wage peace
instead! Dispense justice! Be nice! Then "they" won't hate "us"
anymore (and "we" can carry on with our relentless pursuit
of money and goodies like SUVs).
Evidently the
Left, like everybody else, spends too much of its
time watching TV and reading the newspapers, i.e., absorbing
propaganda. How else to comprehend why almost everyone from
"liberal" Democrats and "progressives" to Marxists and anarchists has
accepted the propaganda line of the corporate media and
psyops specialists in the US government: the attacks on September 11
were planned and carried out by Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists,
namely Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaida, and caught the US national
security apparatus completely offguard. The fact that no proof has
ever been produced doesn't seem to bother anyone. And when this
lack of proof is pointed out, and all the innumerable facts and
circumstances that cast very serious doubt on this story are brought
up, even "critics" of the war dismiss these persistent questions as
lunatic "conspiracy" mongering.
Professor John
McMurtry of the University of Guelph points to a deeper
explanation of the difficulty people have had in analyzing all
the evidence objectively. The crimes of September 11 were so shocking
that for many, perhaps most people, even those on the Left, it is
literally unthinkable that they could have been committed or
intentionally permitted by the Bush administration or some secret
operations group working for it:
"There is
growing suspicion, which is officially unspeakable, that
the Afghanistan War is a set-up, including September 11 itself.
With any such hypothesis, one looks not only for the evidence
confirming it, but more conscientiously, for the evidence
disconfirming it. The principal reason against is the assumption that
it is impossible that the U.S. national security apparatus would ever
permit such a mass killing of Americans on U.S. soil, but this
assumption itself is shaky given that Pearl Harbour itself was likely
known about in advance, and non-defensive wars since have sacrificed
tens of thousands of U.S. citizens (not to say millions of others)
for so-called 'foreign policy and national security objectives'".
McMurtry
proceeds to make a succinct statement of some of the
suspicions that arise in the minds of those who are not paralyzed by
this assumption: "The forensic principle of 'who most benefits from
the crime?' clearly points in the direction of the Bush
administration. One would be naïve to think the Bush Jr. faction
and its oil, military-industrial and Wall Street backers who had
stolen an election with its man rated in office by the majority of
Americans as poor on the economy (a Netscape Poll taken off the
screen when the planes hit the towers), and more deplored by the rest
of the world as a deep danger to the global environment and the
international rule of law, do not benefit astronomically from this
mass-kill explosion. If there was a wish-list, it is all granted by
this numbing turn of events. Americans are diverted from a
free-falling economy to attack another foreign Satan, while the Bush
regime's popularity climbs. The military, the CIA and every satellite
armed security apparatus have more money and power than ever, and
become as dominant as they can over civilians in the 'the whole new
era' already being declared by the White House. The anti-missile plan
to rule the skies is now exonerated (if irrelevantly so), and
Israel's apartheid civil war is vindicated at the same time. Even the
surgingly popular 'anti world-trade' movement is now associated with
foreign terrorists blowing up the World Trade Centre. The more you
review the connections and the sweeping lapse of security across so
many co-ordinates, the more the lines point backwards."
The failure to
look hard facts in the face could be fatal,
especially to the Left, which, judging by its response to this point,
doesn't seem to realize that it is one of the principal targets of
the coming global war. We need to look at all the clues which could
lead us to discover who the criminals behind September's events
really are, and we need to do so right away. A huge mass of evidence
suggests that the events of September were planned and carried out by
the same team of "rogue" secret government planners and operatives
who have wrought so much murder and destruction worldwide for the
last 40+ years: the CIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency
and their contractees.
A War Long Planned
One way to
assess the plausibility of the hypothesis that the
attacks of September 11 were a black operation, a
"provocation" on an unheard-of scale, is to evaluate the subsequent
actions of the Bush administration. Another dimension to the horrors
of that day was added by the violent assault of the US Government and
the corporate media on the United States and world populations which
took off just minutes after the planes struck their targets. This
aggressive "response", surely, is fair game for a critical Left
analysis, undertaken from a position of strong skepticism toward any
official statements.
Why "strong
skepticism?" First let's ask why would any rational
person on the Left believe or take at face value, anything said by
anyone in the Bush administration. It is important to remember that
Bush stole the election: he lost the popular vote by over 500,000
votes (NOT too close to call!) and stole Florida's electoral votes
and the Presidency by a complex, sophisticated and advance-planned
operation involving the elimination of many thousands of voters from
the registration lists, obstruction and intimidation at the polls,
intimidation during the post-election recount process, and finally by
a totally outrageous intervention by the Supreme Court.
Then Bush
loaded his Cabinet with oilmen (and women) and "Cold
Warriors" from his father's rolodex, giving plain notice of his
administration's plans (at least for those with eyes to see). Michael
Ruppert, who has been tracking the secret operations of the CIA and
the Bush family for years, was
able to predict in January 2001 the essential pattern of events
which is now unfolding:
"Make no
mistake about it. The United States is preparing for war.
Events immediately following the 2000 US election debacle are ominous
predictors for the Bush-Cheney Administration. . .the key posts of
Treasury, Defense, Justice and National Security Advisor point to the
most militarized oil-and-big-business-friendly administration in 35
years. . .We can be assured that an empire (as opposed to a republic)
is emerging in the United States more quickly than many have
expected. And the Bush Administration is already acting in a
"godlike" manner. It is an empire that may have little need even of
the pretence of democracy as American corporate fascism removes its
mask in the wake of our election circus, the prostitution of our
Supreme Court and the virtual destruction of American government as a
servant of anything other than money, greed and power."
Go to war they
did, and on a tight, pre-planned schedule. Overwhelming evidence shows
that the war in Afghanistan has nothing to
do with "terrorism" and everything to do with geostrategic plans for
domination of Asia and control of rapidly dwindling natural gas and
oil resources. The US has been planning the "war" in Afghanistan for
years, and the attacks in the US on September 11 were remarkable in
their provision of the shock necessary for the American population to
fall into line behind the imperial adventure to take over Central
Asia. The whole plan is laid out in exquisite detail by Zbigniew
Brzezinski in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, in which he
repeatedly emphasizes the probable need for an attack comparable to
Pearl Harbor to bring the US domestic population onboard. Michael
Ruppert has presented an acute
analysis of the relevance of this book for an understanding of the
current situation.
American
imperial planners such as Brzezinski see the necessity
for the US to secure its global domination in the near term; they
fear the rise of a contesting power, such as Russia or China, in the
Eurasian heartland, which they see as key for global supremacy. But
other, less "grand" imperatives are uppermost in the minds of the
Bush Oiligarchy, including the coming "Big Rollover" when oil and
gas
supplies peak and then precipitously decline, estimated to occur
as early as 2003. Within a very few years the amount of oil
extracted from the ground will start to drop inexorably, regardless
of the rate at which new sources are developed. This reduction of
availability combined with the capitalist imperative of continual
expansion of production and growing global consumption will place
severe stress on the global capitalist system, stress which the US
planners intend to manage for their own benefit. By launching the "war"
in Afghanistan, the US has established a permanent presence on the
ground in Central Asia (it now has bases in nine countries in the
region), with the ability to
exert its will over the development of the oil and gas resources of
what is considered the last major untapped field in the world
(although Somalia, the Pentagon's likely next target, is thought to
contain
substantial reserves as well).
The
Houston-based oil company Unocal has been planning gas and oil
pipelines across Afghanistan for years, but its plans were frustrated
by the instability of the country and the difficulty of working out a
deal
with the Taliban. One of the first things the newly emplaced Bush
regime did was reopen negotiations with them over the terms under
which they would provide protection for oil and gas pipelines from
Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, across Afghanistan to
Pakistan. A new book, Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth, by
Charles
Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveals details of these negotiations,
including the true Mafiosi-style offer in which "US representatives
told the Taliban, 'either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold,
or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.'" Somehow the Taliban found
it an offer they could, and did, refuse. Now, after extensive carpet
bombing, the Taliban have been removed, a puppet regime installed by
the US in Kabul (both Hamid Karzai, the new interim Prime Minister, as
well as US Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, are former Unocal
consultants), and the plans for pipelines are underway once again. In
the Machiavellian world of "diplomacy", this is called
"establishing credibility".
Mention should
also be made of the history of close association of
Osama bin Laden with the CIA and Pentagon. Installed in Afghanistan
in the 1980s by the CIA and Saudi royal family (working through their
local proxies, the Inter Service Intelligence or ISI of Pakistan) to
attract "freedom fighters" from the Arab world to fight against the
Russians and "give Russia its Vietnam", Bin Laden went on after the
pullout of Russia to supply mujahedin to other battle zones in Asia and
Europe. He collaborated
with the US in Chechnya and Bosnia, supplying training and fighters
to the Chechens and Bosnian Muslims, and continued the same type of
service to the US proxy Kosovo Liberation Army during the NATO attack
on Serbia. His most recent collaboration with the US has been in the
ongoing provision of mercenaries in Macedonia to destablize the
government there, along the lines of US policy in Kosovo and Albania.
The evident reason for all this "Byzantine" complexity? The laying of
an oil pipeline
from Burgas on the Black Sea across Bulgaria and Macedonia to the
port of Vlore on the Adriatic coast of Albania, now currently under
construction by the US oil company AMBO. As they say, "once a CIA
agent, always a CIA agent". There is strong reason to doubt the US
propaganda line that Bin Laden is the mastermind behind the attacks
of September 11, because he is still on the payroll of the CIA. If he
did have anything to do with them, then he must have been following
orders.
The assault on
the domestic population in the US is motivated by
equally complex and related considerations. The USA PATRIOT Act is
presented as a response to an unexpected terrorist strike, but was in
fact already written and ready to go as the sun rose on September 11.
Hundreds of pages in length, it contains all the pet projects of the
national security apparatus for complete control of the population:
surveillance of phone and internet communications; CIA operations
within the US; sharing of information by the CIA and domestic law
enforcement agencies; provision of grand jury materials to the CIA,
which can then be
widely shared as well; seizure of assets; surreptitious entry of
private homes and businesses and removal of "evidence"("black bag"
jobs); and arrest and detention without formal charges of anyone the
government deems a "terrorist", with no judicial review. The bill was
passed by both houses of Congress in record speed, so fast in fact
that no one in
Congress had time to read it first; evidently they
didn't need to.
Numerous people
have pointed out that the bill really provides few
new powers that would significantly strengthen protections against
terrorism from abroad, but does provide the whole list of powers over
the US domestic population desired by the CIA and FBI for decades.
Essentially a new COINTELPRO
has been authorized, undoubtedly with
the primary target, as previously, being the Left. This, combined
with the Operation
Garden Plot system of concentration camps, already
in place on federal facilities near major cities around the country,
surely should make people on the Left suspicious. They should be
trying to figure out what is coming -- for what purposes has the
government taken these steps? An obvious and plausible interpretation
is that the government is greatly disturbed by the growing strength
of the "anti-globalization movement" (and especially its
anti-capitalist core), in the US since the events of Seattle in 1999,
and foresees future social upheaval as the global recession moves
into an oil-starved depression. Could it be that they want to have
draconian social control mechanisms in place and operational before
the crunch comes? If so, their principal target will be those deemed
"leftists", as has happened before in US history (the Red Scare after
World War I, and the McCarthy period after WWII). This time, however,
the attack on the Left will be even deadlier, if the past actions of
the people now in charge of the government are any clue.
The assault
launched by the US military, police and intelligence
powers since September 11 is described by the mainstream media as a
"response" to the attacks of terrorists from abroad. The nature of
the response, however, makes this claim highly dubious. Instead, the
attack on Afghanistan and the stripping of civil liberties in the US in
themselves suggest a high likelihood that the " terrorist attacks" in
New York and Washington DC were an operation by some secret arm of the
government to provide the pretext to unleash a global and domestic
offensive. Although much has been written and posted online to
examine this possibility, virtually no word of such speculation
reaches the mass media (unless on the lips of Bush or Cheney
themselves, who seem to have some concern about "conspiracy theories"
circulating widely just under the surface).
Anomalies,
Incredibilities and Suspicious Circumstances
At this point
it will be useful to survey the many lines of
evidence and argument which, taken together, make the standard
account of the events surrounding the attacks on September 11 and the
subsequent US Government response highly dubious. Links are provided
to the most useful discussions of the different lines of
evidence.
It is simply
not credible that the vast global surveillance and
"intelligence" system maintained by the US Government, with annual
budgets, prior to its historic "failure" on September 11, totaling at
least $30 billion, would have missed the huge "intelligence
signature" such a complex and sophisticated operation would
inevitably have made. US intelligence experts are muzzled but
Europeans have been highly skeptical of the claim that a network such
as Al-Qaida would have the capability to pull it off. Eckehardt
Werthebach, former head of Germany's FBI, the Verfassungschutz, has
stated that "the
deathly precision" and "magnitude" of the attacks
would have required "years of planning" and "the fixed frame" of a
state intelligence organization. Following this logic many have
speculated that the Israel's Mossad, Pakistan's ISI or even Saudi
Arabia may have been the perpetrator. And this complete "failure"
also required an adamantine lack of response to many
warnings to the US from foreign intelligence services (including
Russia, Egypt, Germany and Israel) as well as US citizens like attorney
David
Schippers who, tipped off by informants, contacted the government
with warnings prior to September 11.
The
incredibilities accumulate as the attacks take place. Four
planes are hijacked, supposedly by "Arab" terrorists, but the passenger
lists from the four flights do not include the name (real
or assumed) of a single one of them! This casts doubt on the list of
19 Arabs produced by the FBI, and raises the possibility that there
actually were no hijackers on the planes at all. The planes, all
equipped with "Home Run" anti-hijack computer technology which would
have made it possible to seize control of the flights from the
ground, veer from their approved flight paths and head for their
targets. The FAA, as it is required to do, issues alerts to the US
military, but no interceptor aircraft are scrambled to investigate, as
required by standard procedure.
The "explanations" of this "failure" are unconvincing.
Dick Cheney
claimed that it was an excruciatingly tough decision to order the
jetliners shot down, a decision that only the President is authorized
to make. This is pure smoke. The standard response to planes off
course is interception, not shooting down. No interception took
place, and no credible explanation has been given for this "failure"
of the US air defenses. On the contrary, stand down
orders apparently were issued from the highest command levels.
The hijacked
airliners, unhindered (in at least three out of four
cases) then proceeded to execute their spectacular aerial maneuvers.
Two of them, the one which struck the second, south tower of the
World Trade Center, and the one which crashed into the Pentagon,
displayed the flying skills that only crack pilots possess. A problem
for the standard account here is that none of the 19 supposed
hijackers was a crack pilot. The "evidence" presented about their
"training" for their mission is limited to short courses at
small-plane flight schools. Experienced pilots have expressed doubts
about the possibility that inexperienced pilots could have flown the
jetliners at such high speeds with such unerring accuracy. Retired
career Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff has highlighted the problem
of the official story with respect to the Pentagon strike:
"A pilot they
want us to believe was trained at a Florida
puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a
well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in
two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it
clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and
flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460
nauts. When the theory about learning to fly this well at the
puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they
received further flight training on a flight simulator. This is like
saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush
hour by buying her a video driving game. It's horse shit!" Again, no
explanation has been offered to make the government's claims
credible.
Other very real
possibilities do offer explanations, however. The
planes may have been "hijacked" electronically, using onboard
remote control technology. The system allows flight controllers on
the
ground to take over all flight functions from people onboard the
plane, and could as easily be employed to cause a remote-controlled
hijacking as to seize control of a plane hijacked by persons onboard.
No 19 Arabs were necessary! This would explain the absence of any of
the "19 hijackers" from the passenger lists, as well as the
inexplicable demonstration of the highest flying skills in the
crashes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Interestingly,
the Home Run system just happens to permit one person, at a remote
location, to fly four planes simultaneously. One highly skilled
operator could have performed all the aerial feats of the hijacked
planes. An explanation would also be provided for some additional
anomalies, including why the Home Run system was not used to rescue
the planes as it was designed to do, and why none of the "black
boxes" with their Cockpit Voice Recorders have ever been "found" and
the contents revealed. They might reveal the surprise of those
onboard at the remote-controlled takeover of the planes.
After the World
Trade Centers were struck by the airliners they
collapsed, as did the nearby WTC #7 (a mere 47 stories tall), which
was not struck by any plane. No entirely convincing explanations of
these collapses have been forthcoming; many people have doubted that
buildings designed to withstand such a blow from an airliner, as they
were, would have disintegrated. These critics contend that only a professional
demolition job could have caused the buildings to
collapse in the manner in which they did. The official investigation
into the cause of the collapse has been undermined from
the start;
the steel from the collapsed structures was recycled immediately,
supposedly by decision of the City of New York, before any team of
qualified forensic engineers could examine it.
Finally, there
are many lines of evidence indicating advance
knowledge of the attacks, including insider
trading in airline and insurance company stocks (rather implausibly
attributed to Al-Qaida), and warnings to various people (including San
Francisco mayor Willie Brown) not to fly on September 11. A major shift
of the offices of high-ranking Pentagon planners took place one week
before the plane crashed into the space they had vacated; no high level
officers or civilian officials was killed. No Congressional
investigation of any of the unexplained "anomalies" surrounding
September 11 has been launched. No one has been punished for the
massive failures of established procedures and expectations; on the
contrary the agencies which "failed" so spectacularly have been
rewarded by increased funds and powers.
Furthermore it
has been revealed that the Bush regime stopped FBI
investigations into Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida in the early
summer
of 2001, causing the lead investigator, John O'Neill, to resign in
protest. Circulating in the background is the close business
relationship between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family, their
joint ownership of major shares of the Carlyle Group (a large US
defense company now profiting handsomely from the new surge in
military expenditures), and the abundant evidence that Osama bin
Laden has continued to receive major financial support from the Saudi
royal family.
All this
complexity is really just a "short list" of some of the
unexplained facts, incredible assertions and suspicious circumstances
surrounding the events of September 11. There are many more. The many
highly technical aspects of the questions raised make it extremely
difficult for anyone to get a firm grasp of the whole picture.
Nevertheless, people on the Left should be able to look at them and
evaluate them objectively as well as they can, especially given the
high stakes, but few have done so.
Who Really Rules
As Jim Garrison
pointed out in 1967, after frustrating years
trying to penetrate the layers of official obscurity erected around
the real perpetrators of the JFK assassination, "In a very real and
terrifying sense, our
Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with
Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot
this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for
such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We
won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the
mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises
to be far more effective in keeping the population in line. . . .The
test is, what happens to the individual who dissents?. . .the awesome
power of the CIA and the defense establishment seem destined. . .to
bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the
State and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. .
.fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
Garrison's nightmare vision is now plainly visible to all who are
willing to look.
"Fascism" has
been back on people's lips a lot lately, especially
since the events of Genoa in July, 2001, in which Silvio Berlusconi
launched a typical Italian fascist police attack on leftists
demonstrating against the heads of state of the G8 nations.
Berlusconi was not the only one there with fascist connections; the
Bushes have been linked with fascism since the 1920s, when George
Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush became bankers for the Nazi Party.
George W. Bush is a figure rather similar in certain fundamental ways
to Ronald Reagan. He is the titular President, but isn't up to the
job; he is a puppet controlled by unknown persons behind the scenes.
The probable puppet-master is his father, George Herbert Walker Bush,
the man who correctly said "I am not a one-term President". Long time
CIA agent, and Director of the CIA when the leftist minister from
Salvador Allende's government, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated by
a car-bomb in the streets of Washington DC, George H.W. Bush was
actually in charge of the country for twelve years, during Reagan's
two terms and his own one. Gene Wheaton, a military criminal
investigator who at one time was very close to the CIA but couldn't
stomach the outrageous covert operations of "Iran-Contra" and was an
early whistle blower of the affair, provided a rare insider's view of
the reality
of the Reagan years:
"Reagan never
really was the president. He was the front man. They selected a guy
that had charisma, who was popular,
and just a good old boy, but they got George Bush in there to
actually run the White House. They'd let Ronald Reagan and Nancy out
of the closet and let them make a speech and run them up the flagpole
and salute them and put them back in the closet while these spooks
ran the White House. They made sure that George Bush was the chairman
of each of the critical committees involving these covert operations
things. One of them was the Vice President's Task Force on Combating
Terrorism. They got Bush in as the head of the Vice President's task
force on narcotics, the South Florida Task Force, so that they could
place people in DEA and in the Pentagon and in Customs to run
interference for them in these large-scale international narcotics
and movement of narcotics money cases. They got Bush in as the
chairman of the committee to deregulate the Savings and Loans in '83
so they could deregulate the Savings and Loans, so that they would be
so loosely structured that they could steal 400, 500 billion dollars.
. .they ran the whole operation, and Bush was the de facto president
even before the '88 election when he became president.
"See, when
Harry Truman signed the National Security Act creating
the CIA, he specifically stated in that act that they could not have
any police powers. And they could not operate domestically in the
United States, because he feared a secret police coup. By creeping in
a little at a time, that coup has taken place.
"This crowd
really believes that the unwashed masses are ignorant,
that we are people who are not capable of governing ourselves, that
we need this elitist group to control the country, and the world --
these guys have expanded. They look at the United States not as a
country, not in any patriotic mode now, but they look on it as a
state within a world that they control. And that's this attitude they
have. They're not unlike any other megalomaniac in the world. They're
nutty as a fruitcake, but they've got distinguished gray hair,
three-piece dark suits and they carry briefcases, and they'll stand
up and make speeches just as articulate as anybody in the world, but
they don't socialize and function outside their own little clique. My
experience with them is that they could be certified as criminally
insane and put away in a rubber room and have the key thrown away.
That's how dangerous they are. But they're powerful, and they're
educated. And that makes them twice as dangerous. And that's
basically what's running the world right now."
In all
likelihood the structure within the current White House is
similar: a well-rested front man for the photo-ops, a powerful Vice
President actually running the day-to-day operations, and heavies
from the CIA and Pentagon doing the long-range strategizing, all
veterans of George H.W. Bush's regime. If this hypothesis is even
partially accurate, an analysis of the past, when the elder Bush was
in power, would most probably provide solid clues to what the new
regime is currently planning. The Gulf War of 1990 shows obvious
parallels to today; it was very largely about oil, as is the "War on
Terrorism", and followed a deceptive move on the part of Bush
administration, which duped Saddam Hussein into making his move on
Kuwait. This then provided the pretext for the US to establish
military bases in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, as well as to try
out all the new weaponry that had been developed and awaited its
exemplary debut.
Another salient
feature of the Reagan/Bush period was the
systematic murder of thousands of leftists around the world, in
countries controlled by puppet regimes of the US, and most especially
so in Latin America. Death squads trained at the School of the
Americas eliminated radicals, unionists, students, teachers, landless
peasants, professors and priests in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras,
Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. In every case these
killings were in keeping with US government policy: leftists are the
enemy and will be killed wherever possible, preferably in as painful
and horrific a manner as possible. This activity is still taking
place, especially in Colombia, where the US is currently funding a
massive escalation in military and paramilitary attacks on the
population, called Plan Colombia.
So What Is Plan United
States?
Could it really
be that the current regime has intentions of
crushing the Left in the US, with massive arrests, torture, and
disappearances, as in Latin America? Before rejecting the proposition
out of hand, it would be wise to consider recent events from the
standpoint of what they suggest about the concern our rogue
capitalist masters have regarding people like us.
A clue to
understanding the real core of the situation is to
recognize how destablilizing is the imperial adventure embarked upon
by the Bush regime. The attack on Afghanistan threatens to destroy a
very delicate balance in the Middle East and South and Central Asia,
both regionally and within individual countries. The attack is
incredibly risky, a daring throw in a high stakes game. Such a move,
undertaken by the most powerful nation in the world, must be a sign
of desperation.
Two sources of
this desperation have already been identified: the
coming Big Rollover, when the supply of oil will peak and can no
longer keep up with demand, putting severe strain on the capitalist
system which relies so heavily on abundant and cheap energy; and the
rapidly growing global anti-capitalist movement, which will be well
positioned to advance as the oil shortages materialize. The planners
of capital have seen their every attempt to meet and strategize
contested by ever-growing numbers of demonstrators, and all over the
world major development projects of capital, for dams, pipelines,
power or chemical plants, are strongly contested by local people
affected by them. The role of the International Monetary Fund, World
Bank, World Trade Organization, World Economic Forum, NAFTA, European
Union and similar planning and developmental agencies of capital are
recognized all over the world as imperialist and neo-colonialist
weapons of the capitalist marauder class, designed to impose the
"new" corporate-state oligarchy. Such agencies and the powers behind
them, states and corporations, are now increasingly seen as
illegitimate all over the world. The US state, as the global center
of capital and coercion, has now launched a preemptive war in
response to this crisis of illegitimacy, which it correctly sees is
potentially fatal for global capital.
The fake black
bloc provocations, the murder of Carlo Giuliani and
the crackdown by hooded storm troopers on the Genoa Social Forum and
Indymedia center in Genoa in July 2001 was a return to familiar
methods by the Berlusconi regime; the Italian state is famed for the
murderous brutality it displays toward left-wing contestation. Provocations
and fake terror have long been part of the state
arsenal. In Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s the state secret
services as part of the "strategy
of tension" set off bombs in public
places and blamed the non-existent "Red Brigades", using this as a
pretext to launch a sweep against the Autonomist Workers movement
(Autonomia) and left-wing intellectuals, in which over 5000 people
were arrested and charged with "armed insurrection against the powers
of the State". More than 150 remain in prison to this day. So
well-executed and effective has the tactic been that even some of
these political prisoners, e.g. Toni Negri, although insisting on
their own personal innocence, do not question the events or the
reality of the Red Brigades.
But others saw
through the operation at the time, and analyzed it
clearly. The situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti, in "Is the Reichstag
Burning?" (dated 19 December 1969), laid out an analysis which has
been confirmed by subsequent events and document discoveries: that
the bombings were carried out by the state to strengthen the security
forces and provide pretexts for crushing the most radical sector of
the Left. The fake terror campaign was an act of weakness on the part
of the Italian capitalist state, recognizing that without such
methods it could not stop the growing power of the autonomist
movement.
Genoa in
July
was just more of the same strategy. It is easy to
imagine Bush and Blair enjoying the show put on by the Carabinieri,
and saying to their chum Berlusconi, "That's good, very nice, but
just wait. Wait till you see what we can do!" Behind their barricades
in the Ducal palace, plans were being laid for the present assault on
the workers of the world. As before, the principal target is that
section of the working class which has developed some
understanding of the social situation, beyond the immediate
individual struggle to survive. The USA PATRIOT Act and similar
legislation passed in Europe signal the impending campaign of
arrests, summary trials, torture, executions and disappearances, all
conducted under the pretext of "terrorism", as formerly, under the
rubric "Communism", they were the norm in the rest of the world.
"Globalization" really means the globalization of capitalist coercion
in all its forms, never excluding the physical. Capital, in its
campaign to reduce workers' conditions to the lowest common
denominator, so obvious in the flight of production to China, India,
Mexico, and Malaysia, does not forget to "harmonize" state terror
worldwide as well. As Starhawk said after the events in Genoa,
they're coming soon to your home too.
Capitalism Is
Organized Crime
The critical
Left is the only major enemy capital has, potentially
a formidable one if its numbers swell under social duress. The "War
on Terrorism" makes clear that capital's strategists have decided
that the time has come to strike a preemptive blow, before the coming
global depression, which will make that of the 1930s look like a
picnic, makes hordes of new leftists out of the unemployed and newly
impoverished. The process they fear has already started in Argentina,
where people
are forming assemblies in their neighborhoods to plan
their collective self-defense against the attacks that the Argentine
state is imposing upon them. It is time for something along these
lines in the North, in the US and Europe.
To defend
itself under the new conditions imposed by the state,
the Left must organize and exert itself to the utmost, starting
now:
* First, we
need to loudly and widely reject all the propaganda
which is pouring out of Washington DC and London, and out of the mass
media: the "War on Terrorism" is a fraud.
* We must
articulate a clear, strong analysis of what capital is
doing: seizing resources and preparing to crush the working class
resistance to its totalitarian domination worldwide.
* We need to
publicly demand in all our anti-war and
anti-capitalist demonstrations and writing that the criminals who
launched the fake terror on September 11 be brought to
trial: not Osama Bin Laden but the secret operatives and
strategizers in the US government. The criminality of what they have
done can be used as a powerful weapon against them and against
capitalism, which is inherently criminal.
* We must
loudly reject both capitalist war and capitalist
"peace", and practice total non-cooperation with both poles of the
capitalist agenda.
* And clearly,
like the men and women at this moment in Argentina, we
need to focus on self-defense measures, and plan for what may very
well be a fight to the death. There is no time to be lost.
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