THE ALL-SEEING i

těr'ə-rĭz'əm: Why We Struggle to Define the Defining Threat of Our Time

2007-11-20T21:40:00.000Z

While addressing an international counter-terrorism meeting in Tunis last Thursday (15th), Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary General of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), spoke about the need for the world to come up with a clear, internationally recognised definition of the term ‘terrorism’.

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”– unattributed

Ihsanoglu made a similar call at a High-Level Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly back in September 2005. In doing so, he brought the problem facing the body charged with coming up with a definition - the United Nations Sixth Committee on Aggression - into sharp focus.

To be equitable, any definition of terrorism should include State terrorism, and should not prejudice the rights of people struggling for their selfdetermination or under foreign occupation to resistance.

This has proven to be the main stumbling block for the Committee, with the US and Israel, most notably, rejecting attempts to recognise the rights of those pursuing self-deterministic or nationalistic goals - the fundamental drivers behind the rise in terrorist activity - when defining the term ‘terrorism’ (click to show/hide selected definitions). There was no such debate over its original meaning, however.

The UN’s ‘academic consensus definition’, which was written by Alex Schmid, the Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations states, that:

Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby — in contrast to assassination — the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought.

Whilst not explicitly defining the term ‘terrorism’, The European Union sets out a list of serious offences against persons and property in Article 1 of the Framework Decision on Combating Terrorism (2002).

1. Each Member State shall take the necessary measures to ensure that the intentional acts referred to below in points (a) to (i), as defined as offences under national law, which, given their nature or context, may seriously damage a country or an international organisation where committed with the aim of:

— seriously intimidating a population, or

— unduly compelling a Government or international organisation to perform or abstain from performing any act, or

— seriously destabilising or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organisation, shall be deemed to be terrorist offences:

(a) attacks upon a person’s life which may cause death;

(b) attacks upon the physical integrity of a person;

(c) kidnapping or hostage taking;

(d) causing extensive destruction to a Government or public facility, a transport system, an infrastructure facility, including an information system, a fixed platform located on the continental shelf, a public place or private property likely to endanger human life or result in major economic loss;

(e) seizure of aircraft, ships or other means of public or goods transport;

(f) manufacture, possession, acquisition, transport, supply or use of weapons, explosives or of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, as well as research into, and development of, biological and chemical weapons;

(g) release of dangerous substances, or causing fires, floods or explosions the effect of which is to endanger human life;

(h) interfering with or disrupting the supply of water, power or any other fundamental natural resource the effect of which is to endanger human life;

(i) threatening to commit any of the acts listed in (a) to (h).

The United States Federal Criminal Code, Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 113B, Section 2331 defines terrorism and crimes associated with terrorism.

(1) the term “international terrorism” means activities that—

(A) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State;

(B) appear to be intended—

i. to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
ii. to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
iii. to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(C) occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum;

and;

(5) the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—

(D) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;

(E) appear to be intended—

i. to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
ii. to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
iii. to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and

(F) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

The United Kingdom defined terrorism in the Terrorism Act 2000.

Section 1. -
(1) In this Act "terrorism" means the use or threat of action where-

a) the action falls within subsection (2),
b) the use or threat is designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and
c) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.
d) Action falls within this subsection if it-
e) involves serious violence against a person,
f) involves serious damage to property,
g) endangers a person's life, other than that of the person committing the action,
h) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or
i) is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

(2) The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.

Section 1 (1) b) was amended by the Terrorism Act 2006 to include ‘international governmental organisations’ in addition to ‘government’.

Oxford English Dictionary.

(a) Policy intended to strike with terror those against whom it is adopted;
(b) the employment of methods of intimidation;
(c) the fact of terrorizing or condition of being terrorized.

The American Heritage Dictionary.

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

Merriam Webster’s Dictionary.

[T]he systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.

The first recorded use of the term ‘terrorism’ dates back to 1795 during the French Revolution. It referred specifically to the Reign of Terror (la Terreur), which was instituted by the Jacobin-led French government to defend the nation from what Louis de Saint-Just called the ‘enemies of liberty’.

In his article, Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons, Francois Furstenberg draws some disturbing parallels between 19th century Jacobism and 21st century neoconservatism.

Among the Jacobins’ greatest triumphs was their ability to appropriate the rhetoric of patriotism… and to promote their political program through a tightly coordinated network of newspapers, political hacks, pamphleteers and political clubs.

Even the Jacobins’ dress distinguished “true patriots”: those who wore badges of patriotism like the liberty cap on their heads, or the cocarde tricolore (a red, white and blue rosette) on their hats or even on their lapels.

Insisting that their partisan views were identical to the national will, believing that only they could save France from apocalyptic destruction, Jacobins could not conceive of legitimate dissent. Political opponents were treasonous, stabbing France and the Revolution in the back.

To defend the nation from its enemies, Jacobins expanded the government’s police powers at the expense of civil liberties, endowing the state with the power to detain, interrogate and imprison suspects without due process. Policies like the mass warrantless searches undertaken in 1792 — “domicilary visits,” they were called — were justified, according to Georges Danton, the Jacobin leader, “when the homeland is in danger.”

Robespierre — now firmly committed to the most militant brand of Jacobinism — condemned the “treacherous insinuations” cast by those who questioned “the excessive severity of measures prescribed by the public interest.” He warned his political opponents, “This severity is alarming only for the conspirators, only for the enemies of liberty.” Such measures, then as now, were undertaken to protect the nation — indeed, to protect liberty itself.

‘When you point your finger ‘cos your plan fell through, you got three more fingers pointing back at you.’ - Mark Knopfler, Solid Rock

Furstenberg’s article is as much an allegory of post-9/11 America as it is an historical account of Revolutionary France. But as Edward Peck, former White House Terrorism Task Force Director under President Reagan, admits, suggestions of US involvement in state-sponsored terrorism stretch back well beyond 9/11.

In a 2006 interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, Peck acknowledged that, when his task force was asked ‘to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government’, its work-product was rejected ‘because careful reading would indicate that [the US] had been involved in some of those activities’.

After the task force concluded its work, Congress got into it, and you can google into U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331, and read the U.S. definition of terrorism. And one of them in here says -- one of the terms, “international terrorism,” means “activities that,” I quote, “appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”

Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. Israel is another. And so, the terrorist, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. And I think it’s useful for people who discuss that phrase to remember that Israel was founded by terrorist organizations and terrorist leaders, Menachem Begin, who became statesmen and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And [Hassan] Nasrallah [the leader of Hezbollah, whom Peck had met a few months prior to the interview] may not be the same kind of guy, but his intentions are the same. He wants to free his country from domination by another.

Thus the debate over what is and what isn‘t ‘terrorism’ looks set to continue, not only because the US rejects calls to recognise the rights of those pursuing self-deterministic or nationalistic goals, but also because it would never countenance the adoption of a definition that identified it as a terrorist state.

'[Doublethink is] the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…' - George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four

According to George Orwell, ‘He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.’ There can be little doubt that the US, and by extension, its allies, control the present. Unless and until things change, therefore, illegal unprovoked invasions of sovereign states, mass-murders of civillians and occupations of hydrocarbon-rich lands shall be called ‘liberations’; and that those who try to defend against such atrocities shall be called ‘terrorists’.

Orwell called this self-deception ‘doublethink’, where ‘the lie is always one leap ahead of the truth’.

Attacking Iran: Tragedy or Farce?

2007-11-12T23:29:00.000Z

According to The Telegraph, Washington is losing patience with British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, accusing him of failing to ‘match his more robust private conversations on Iran with hard-hitting public statements’. Is this simply political self-preservation from a man who has yet to face his electorate, or does Brown know what many of us strongly suspect: that claims about the threat posed by Iran have been ‘sexed-up’?

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” - Karl Marx

There are clear parallels between the way public opinion toward Iran is being shaped today and the escalation in rhetoric against Iraq in the months before the 2003 invasion.

You’ll recall that, throughout 2002 we were assured that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States and its allies; that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons programme; that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons; and that Iraq provided funding, training and weapons to terrorist organisations.

Well, we face broadly the same threats from Iran today – or so we are led to believe.

Of course, the claims made against Iraq are now known to have been grossly exaggerated. In March 2004, the House of Representatives Special Investigation Division published a report based upon ‘a database of statements about Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell, and National Security Advisor Rice.’ The report, entitled Iraq on the Record: The Bush Administration’s Public Statements on Iraq, found that the five officials had made 237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq in the 12 months or so prior to the commencement of hostilities.

These statements were made in 125 separate appearances, consisting of 40 speeches, 26 press conferences and briefings, 53 interviews, 4 written statements, and 2 congressional testimonies. Most of the statements in the database were misleading because they expressed certainty where none existed or failed to acknowledge the doubts of intelligence officials. Ten of the statements were simply false.

None of this would have been news to Gordon Brown who, as a recipient of the infamous 2002 Downing Street Memo, would already have known that ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around’ Bush’s policy of removing Saddam.

In that context, maybe Brown is right to be a little more cautious in his handling of the current crisis with Iran than his predecessor, Tony Blair, was with Iraq. The same can be said of the US intelligence community, which seems to be resisting calls to reverse-engineer the ‘facts’ about Iran back in to the politicians’ allegations. As Gareth Porter, writing for Inter Press Service, reported on November 8th:

A National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran has been held up for more than a year in an effort to force the intelligence community to remove dissenting judgments on the Iranian nuclear programme, and thus make the document more supportive of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s militarily aggressive policy toward Iran, according to accounts of the process provided by participants to two former Central Intelligence Agency officers.

That dissenting judgements persist is really no great surprise given that just two years ago, the Washington Post reported that the best intelligence suggested Iran was ‘about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon’, which was roughly double the ‘previous estimate of five years’.

“I have not received any information that there is a concrete active nuclear weapons program going on right now.” - Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency

The US intelligence community is not alone in failing to produce the alarmist judgements that Cheney allegedly demands. Speaking on October 29th, Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that, although he couldn’t ‘give Iran a pass right now’, there was no evidence that Iran was building nuclear weapons. Further, in a move that will undoubtedly have angered Washington, he accused US leaders of ‘spinning and hyping the Iranian issue’, and warned that military force could spark a global conflagration.

There is no shortage of alarm coming from Israel, however, as it continues to trade off of the mistranslation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s famous “wipe off the map” comment.

Even before Ahmadinejad’s had uttered those fateful words, Israel had introduced the concept of the ‘point of no return’ as a possible justification for the use of pre-emptive force against Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities. Since then, speculation has mounted that, if there is to be a strike against Iran, it could well come from Israel and not America.

Back in January 2007, The Times carried an article suggesting that ‘Israel has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities’ using ‘low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”’ in an attack reminiscent of that which crippled Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

Osirak was a 40 megawatt light-water nuclear reactor, which was sold to Iraq by France. Construction began in 1979 at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Center near Baghdad.

Although Iraq insisted that its interest in nuclear energy was a peaceful one, Israeli intelligence determined that Iraq intended to use the facility to produce nuclear weapons. Whilst some estimates suggested Iraq was between five and ten years away from building a nuclear weapon, others indicated it might have happened within one or two years. Convinced that the opposition party might not act pre-emptively should they gain power, Prime Minister Menachem Begin decided his only option was to attack.

Operation Opera commenced in the afternoon of June 7th 1981, when a squadron of eight F16s left Etzion Air Force Base in southern Israel, accompanied by six F15s. At a little after 17:30, Iraq’s reactor was ruined.

Critics of the attack rejected Israel’s claims that this act of ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ was justifiable both under international law and under Article 51 of the charter of the United Nations. Indeed, the United Nations Security Council expressed its ‘deep alarm over the unprecedented Israeli act of aggression… which created a grave threat to international peace and security’, in a resolution dated Novermber 13th 1981.

Interestingly, this resolution was suspended in 2005 following Israel’s continued refusal to comply. And now Israel appears ready to commit another act of ‘pre-emptive self-defence’. This time, however, any such ‘act of aggression’ wouldn’t be ‘unprecedented’.

Passing the 'Buck'

2007-11-06T21:05:00.000Z

Back in June 2003, with its oil exports to Europe already euro-denominated, Dr Mohammed Jaffar Mojarrad, then Vice-Governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), announced that Iran would be prepared to offer member countries of the Asian Clearing Union (ACU) a two-month settlement period for oil transactions. But there was one caveat: though trades would continue to be invoiced in dollars, Iran would require payment in euros.

Although motivated in part by political tensions, Iran recognised that its earlier switch to euros for trades with Europe - which accounts for around 40% of its imports - had provided a degree of insulation from the damaging economic effects of the weakening dollar. The move to adopt the euro as the unit of payment for oil trades with ACU members was simply a pragmatic extension of this policy, particularly given that its oil export destinations by rank were Asia (~60%), Europe (~30%) and Africa (~10%).

“The dollar as a benchmark currency has been weakening quite a lot and it creates distortions in oil markets” - Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s Energy Minister

Today, only 15% of Iran’s oil revenue is dollar-denominated. And, whilst Iran acted unilaterally in moving to abandon the dollar it looks as though long-standing calls from some other OPEC members to discuss the need to establish a basket of currencies for oil pricing are finally being heeded. According to an October 27th Reuters report, “the cartel is slated to hold a summit of the heads of state of OPEC nations in November and a meeting of ministerial delegates in December.”

Having stemmed the influx of dollars, Iran spent much of 2007 steadily diversifying its external reserves away from dollar-denominated assets. On October 23rd, Tahmasb Maaheri, the new Governor of Iran’s Central Bank, announced that this process was almost complete. And it is not alone. Recent US Treasury Department Statistics suggest that several countries in the Middle East, particularly OPEC member countries, have been doing likewise.

The problem for the US is not so much that OPEC member countries own a great deal of US debt, but because such diversification might precipitate an accelerated weakening of the dollar, prompting countries with large dollar reserves and dollar debt instruments, such as China, to do likewise. This could have dire consequences for the US economy.

To appreciate some of the factors at play, it is first important to understand how the dollar became the global reserve currency, and also how US economic and foreign policy is geared around keeping it that way.

In July 1944, delegates at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference signed the Bretton Woods Agreement - a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern commercial and financial relations among independent nation-states. As Daniel Singer explains…

…a multilateral, international institution [was set up] to deal with the financial problems of the world. At its heart was the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was to authorize the very exceptional adjustments in the fixed rates of exchange, but also to act as a supplier of liquidity. (Gradually it became a lender of last resort.) It was to fulfill this function thanks to a fund filled by members’ contributions according to a complex mechanism of quotas, determined by the given country’s economic strength, which also signaled the amount of money that country could borrow.

However, Singer goes on to argue that, in practice, ‘the arrangement [was] an instrument of American domination’, explaining that ‘the new monetary arrangement was in fact a gold-dollar exchange standard, since all currencies were linked to the dollar valued at $35 per ounce of gold’. Furthermore, because the American quota in the IMF was by far the biggest, no decisions could be taken without Washington’s consent. Thus the US exerted its predominance and an economically decimated post-war Europe had little option but to acquiesce.

Initially, the Bretton Woods system worked well. Dollars flowed into the world economy through the institutions established under the agreement, as well as through US aid programmes such as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. This in turn created vibrant overseas markets for US corporations to exploit. Before long, over half of the world’s international money transactions were dollar denominated, establishing it as the de facto global reserve currency.

However, by the late 1960’s, the system was in danger of collapse. The emergence of Germany and Japan as economic rivals, coupled with the enormous costs associated with the Vietnam War, led the US into a period of relative economic decline.

Dollar-holding countries, fearing dollar depreciation, began exchanging their currency reserves for gold. In August 1971, with gold supplies dwindling, President Richard Nixon abandoned the gold-dollar exchange standard, allowing market forces to determine the dollar’s floating value. Without firm backing, the currency became volatile, forcing the US to explore new ways of re-establishing dollar hegemony.

The answer came in the form of ‘petrodollar recycling’, an arrangement brokered by US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whereby oil-producing countries agreed to price their oil exports exclusively in US dollars.

The effect of this ‘recycling’ was elegantly summed up by Henry Liu in his April 2002 article for the Online Asia Times.

World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world’s interlinked economies no longer trade to capture a comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies.

As a consequence of petrodollar recycling, both foreign-owned US debt and dollar reserves have soared astronomically.

Table showing dollar-denominated foreign debt ownership by country: June 2006 (source: US Treasury Department)

Current ‘live’ US Debt Clock.

“China has accumulated a large sum of US dollars. Such a big sum, of which a considerable portion is in US treasury bonds, contributes a great deal to maintaining the position of the dollar as a reserve currency” - Xia Bin, finance chief at the Chinese Development Research Centre

Until now, China’s grossly imbalanced economic relationship with the US has been largely symbiotic; the US has had the benefit of a steady stream of cheap funding for its deficit, whilst China has been able to maintain a high rate of export-led economic growth.

But this sustained high rate of growth has led to domestic inflationary pressure. This is because Chinese citizens are not permitted to hold foreign currency. Instead, exporters hand over any foreign currency they receive to the government in exchange for Chinese yuan. The government then retires dollars from circulation in order to keep the yuan weak relative to the dollar, which in turn fuels further export growth.

China’s rate of export growth for the first three quarters of 2007 was over 27%. Its foreign reserves are growing at the rate of $1 billion per day and have now reached a staggering total of $1.5 trillion.

China’s policymakers recognise things must charge, however they are undecided about the best course of action. The weak yuan, whilst essential for China’s export policy, has not only driven domestic inflation up, it has also widened the trade gap between it and its partners, encouraging some to threaten possible protectionist measures to force a yaun revaluation.

In response, Xia Bin, finance chief at the Development Research Centre, hinted that the Chinese government might be prepared to use – i.e. to dispose of - its foreign reserves as a ‘bargaining chip’, in talks with the US. Pointing out that several countries had already started to look at diversifying away from the dollar, he added:

China is unlikely to follow suit as long as the yuan’s exchange rate is stable against the dollar. The Chinese central bank will be forced to sell dollars once the yuan appreciated dramatically, which might lead to a mass depreciation of the dollar.

“Spring 2007 indeed appears as the tipping point of the global systemic crisis: the US economy went into recession, US interest rates were restored, the bond market is in crisis, the subprime crisis begins to hit large US financial institutions such as Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and Freddie Mac, the US housing crisis is speeding up…” - Laboratoire europeen d’Anticipation Politique, June 16th 2007

In a February 2007 letter to Henry Paulson, Secretary of the United States Department of the Treasury, and Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, US Presidential nominee Hilary Clinton expressed her concerns about the extent to which countries like China had ‘been buying [US] debt and in essence becoming [America’s] banker.’

I have long argued that a great source of vulnerability is the fact that other countries, including China, own so much of our debt. Today, foreign nations according to the most recent Treasury statistics hold over $2.2 trillion or 44% of all publicly held United States (U.S.) debt with Japan and China alone holding nearly $1 trillion. In essence, 16% of our entire economy is being loaned to us by the Central Banks of other nations. Having so much debt owned by other countries can be economically unsound.

…if China or Japan made a decision to decrease their massive holdings of U.S. dollars, there could be a currency crisis and the U.S. would have to raise interest rates and invite conditions for a recession.

More recently, in June, Laboratoire europeen d’Anticipation Politique published an even bleaker assessment in an almost apocalyptic paper entitled ‘Global systemic crisis / Summer 2007: Fed looses control on US interest rates and crisis reaches China and EU’. It really ought to be read in full but, failing that, here is one of the key paragraphs.

The rest of world now determines US rates. Simultaneously systemic uncertainty is back on financial markets. Investors suddenly realise that in the medium- and long-term, they no longer have any guarantee on global system’s trends (while only a few months ago, they were convinced that the current system was sustainable). This situation highlights the fact that it is outside the US that the country’s future economically and financially speaking is being played, as illustrated on three occasions in the last six months by the impact on US markets of Chinese decisions (dollar and stocks). This is a totally new situation for the US ever since the end of WWI which clearly suggests that the world order created after 1945 has come to an end.

And if China’s influence on the US economy policy alone wasn’t worrying enough, it also poses an ever-increasing threat to US energy needs – a threat exacerbated by China’s relative geographic proximity to the vitally important Gulf and Caspian regions, not to mention its strong ties to Iran.

As Senator Joe Liebernam pointed out back in December 2005…

Today… one of the biggest sources of potential friction between the U.S. and the PRC [People’s Republic of China] – that is our global competition for oil. The U.S. and China are now the world’s number one and two consumers of oil respectively, with China’s need growing as rapidly as its economy is.

Over the past decade, China’s population has increased by over 82,000,000 (6.7%), whilst its oil consumption has risen by nearly 3,600,000 barrels per day (105.8%). During the same period, US population has grown by around 28,000,000 (10.3%), yet its oil consumption has increased by just over 2,900,000 barrels per day (16.5%). The upshot is that China’s oil consumption per head has risen by 93% compared to just 5.6% in the US.

According to Lieberman, not only are these trends set to continue, but in a world with increasingly limited resources (see Peak Oil and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) the implications are very clear.

In the next 20 years estimates show that the Chinese demand for oil will double [to around 14,000,000 barrels per day] as their economy grows. Estimates also are that they will need to obtain two thirds of that from outside of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] itself.

What I want to say today is it is time the U.S. and China not only recognize the similarity of our oil dependency status, and the direction that competition may take us, but begin to talk more directly about this growing global competition for oil so that we can each develop national policies and cooperative international policies – even joint research and development projects – to cut our dependency on oil before the competition becomes truly hostile.

Some commentators have recently suggested that preparations for a Sino-American conflict are being made under the guise of the war on terror. In an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald on November 4th, for example, Hugh White, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, claimed that ‘big-ticket’ weapons sales were being publicly portrayed as a response to the threat posed by global terrorism when, in reality, they were ‘designed to contain China’.

Another contributor to the article, Professor Kevin Clements, director of the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland, said ‘the war on terrorism was a front to keep up arms spending to maintain the US’s ability to fight a [sic] wars on three fronts - Asia, the Middle East and Europe.’

Clements’ and White’s views seem to reflect those expressed by the Project for the New American Century in a publication entitled ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ (emphasis added).

Today [the US military’s] task is to secure and expand the “zones of democratic peace;” to deter the rise of a new great-power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American preeminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies. From 1945 to 1990, U.S. forces prepared themselves for a single, global war that might be fought across many theaters; in the new century, the prospect is for a variety of theater wars around the world, against separate and distinct adversaries pursuing separate and distinct goals.

The similarity between Clements’/White’s and PNAC’s positions is striking, particularly when you consider that the former were speaking in 2007 and the latter way back in 2000.

It’s almost as though PNAC was expecting a war on terror, brought about, perhaps, by ‘some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’.

Removing the Regime in Iran From the Page of Time?

2007-10-30T23:52:00.000Z

For anyone who believes the US and her allies have been manipulating the public into supporting military action against Iran, the latest Zogby International poll makes grim reading.

According to this poll, which has an error margin of +/- 3.1%, 52.9% of US voters now believe it is either very likely or slightly likely that ‘Based on what [they] know about Iran's development of a nuclear program… the U.S. will be involved in a military strike against Iran before the next presidential election?’ Further, when asked, ‘Based on what you know about Iran's development of a nuclear program, how supportive are you of a U.S. military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon?’, 52.4% said they would either be somewhat supportive or very supportive.

At first glance, this is a little perplexing, particularly against a backdrop of waning support for the invasion of Iraq. But it simply reflects how successful our leaders have been at convincing us that Iran is determined to both acquire a nuclear weapons capability and use it against us. The truth is, we have no hard evidence that they intend to do either. So why are we buying it?

“…if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is.” - Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency

Perhaps this NewYork Times translation of a speech given by Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in October 2005 to an Islamic Student Associations conference on ‘The World Without Zionism’ has something to do with it.

Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime [Israel] has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world.

This, undoubtedly hostile and inflammatory speech, was quickly interpreted as a call for genocide and specifically, the destruction of the state of Israel.

Naturally, Israel was quick to respond, calling an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and arguing that Iran should be expelled from the UN. Benjamin Netanyahu went so far as to warn that Iran was “preparing another holocaust for the Jewish state”.

The EU also issued a statement, which declared that “[c]alls for violence, and for the destruction of any state, are manifestly inconsistent with any claim to be a mature and responsible member of the international community”. It later adopted a resolution condemning Ahmadinejad’s comments.

Both Canada and the US linked what they saw as Ahmadinejad’s threat of genocide to what Paul Martin, then Canadian Prime Minister, called its ‘obvious nuclear ambitions.’ The US further argued that it had been shown to be right in seeking to halt Iran’s nuclear programme.

More recently, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution aimed at persuading the UN Security Council to charge Ahmadinejad with violating the 1948 Convention on Genocide and the United Nations Charter. At its core was the oft-repeated claim that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’. But when Congressman Dennis Kucinich tried to introduce an alternative translation - ‘the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time’ - into the Congressional record, he was blocked form doing so.

There is clearly a considerable difference between the phrases, ‘Israel must be wiped off the map’ and ‘the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time’. This begs the question, what was Kucinich’s source for this alternative, not to mention unpopular translation, and is it the correct one?

One possible source is Arash Norouzi. In an article from his web site, The Mossadegh Project, Norouzi takes us through a word by word translation of this key phrase.

Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).

Or…

The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.

Norouzi also sets out the context, which he argues is necessary in order to get a fuller understanding of Ahmadinejad’s meaning.

In his speech, Ahmadinejad declares that Zionism is the West’s apparatus of political oppression against Muslims. He says the “Zionist regime” was imposed on the Islamic world as a strategic bridgehead to ensure domination of the region and its assets. Palestine, he insists, is the frontline of the Islamic world’s struggle with American hegemony, and its fate will have repercussions for the entire Middle East.

Ahmadinejad acknowledges that the removal of America’s powerful grip on the region via the Zionists may seem unimaginable to some, but reminds the audience that, as Khomeini predicted, other seemingly invincible empires have disappeared and now only exist in history books. He then proceeds to list three such regimes that have collapsed, crumbled or vanished, all within the last 30 years:

(1) The Shah of Iran- the U.S. installed monarch

(2) The Soviet Union

(3) Iran’s former arch-enemy, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein

In the first and third examples, Ahmadinejad prefaces their mention with Khomeini’s own words foretelling that individual regime’s demise. He concludes by referring to Khomeini’s unfulfilled wish: “The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time. This statement is very wise”. This is the passage that has been isolated, twisted and distorted so famously. By measure of comparison, Ahmadinejad would seem to be calling for regime change, not war.

Juan Cole, President of the Global Americana Institute, agrees with Norouzi, adding:

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah’s government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that “Israel must be wiped off the map” with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Perhaps the most surprising source for this alternative translation, however, is The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Surprising because the institute is led a former Israeli military intelligence officer and has often been accused of distorting selected quotations in order to help present Israeli foreign policy in the most favourable light.

I wonder whether American voters, armed with these alternative translations, would still be so enthusiastic about a pre-emptive strike against Iran.

The Algiers Discord

2007-05-30T01:00:00.000Z

In March 1954, Dr Donald N Wilbur wrote a paper entitled ‘Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran’. It was an historical review of Project TPAJAX, the CIA’s first successful overthrow of a foreign government, which was carried out in August 1953. Although Wilbur himself had been one of the plan’s chief architects, the original idea was a British one.

“Specifically, the aim [of the TPAJAX project] was to bring to power a government which would reach an equitable oil settlement, enabling Iran to become economically sound and financially solvent, and which would vigorously prosecute the dangerously strong Communist Party” – Dr Donald N Wilbur in ‘Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran’

In 1901, the then-Shah of Iran, Mozzafar al-Din Shah Qajar, granted a 60-year concession to British entrepreneur William Knox D’Arcy to search his country for oil. Although he struck oil in 1908, the cost of exploration left D’Arcy financially crippled, and he was forced to sell a controlling interest to the Burmah Oil Company (BOC). In 1909, the BOC incorporated the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) in order to exploit the find.

The British government acquired a controlling interest in the APOC during World War I and maintained it until Iran’s parliament voted in March 1951 to nationalise its oil industry. This represented a major affront to British interests. In response, Britain imposed a blockade, cutting Iran off from its export markets. It also took the case to the International Court of Justice, where it petitioned against Iran’s oil nationalisation bill without success.

Britain then turned to the US with the idea of deposing Dr Mohammed Mossadeq, who had been elected Prime Minister shortly after the bill’s passing. It pointed to Iran’s Communist-backed nationalist movement as evidence of increasing Soviet influence - an argument it hoped would resonate in a country gripped by rampant anti-Communism. As Wilbur writes:

By the end of 1952, it had become clear that the Mossadeq government in Iran was incapable of reaching an oil settlement with interested Western countries; was reaching a dangerous and advanced stage of illegal, deficit financing; was disregarding the Iranian constitution in prolonging Premier Mohammed Mossadeq's tenure of office; was motivated mainly by Mossadeq's desire for personal power; was governed by irresponsible policies based on emotion; had weakened the Shah and the Iranian Army to a dangerous degree; and had cooperated closely with the Tudeh (Communist) Party of Iran. In view of these factors, it was estimated that Iran was in real danger of falling behind the Iron Curtain; if that happened, it would mean a victory for the Soviets in the Cold War and a major setback for the West in the Middle East. No remedial action other than the covert action plan set forth below could be found to improve the existing state of affairs.

Although the outgoing President, Harry Truman, refused to entertain the idea, his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, was more agreeable. In March 1953, General Walter Bedell Smith, US Under Secretary of State, authorised the CIA ‘to consider operations which would contribute to the fall of the Mossadeq government.’ The following month, Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA, accordingly ‘approved a budget of $1,000,000 which could be used… in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadeq.’

At around the same time, a study entitled ‘Factors Involved in the Overthrow of Mossadeq’ identified former cabinet member General Fazlollah Zahedi as the Premier’s most eligible successor, since he had been ‘the only person of stature who had consistently been openly in opposition to Mossadeq and who claimed any significant following’. It was also determined that the Shah’s co-operation would be necessary to ‘assure the action required of the Tehran military garrisons, and to legalize the succession of a new prime minister.’

The plan took shape throughout May and June, and was approved by both the US and UK governments in early July. Once implemented, US and British intelligence officers set about creating a climate for change within Iran.

[A] considerable number of anti-Mossadeq articles were written or outlined by [Wilbur’s] group while the CIA Art Group was given constant guidance in its preparation of a large number of anti-Mossadeq cartoons and broadsheets. In addition, these artists did an effective drawing for a wall poster showing Zahedi being presented to the Iranian people by the Shah.

CIA agents gave serious attention to alarming the religious leaders at Tehran by issuing black propaganda in the name of the [Communist] Tudeh Party, threatening these leaders with savage punishment if they opposed Mossadeq. Threatening phone calls were made to some of them, in the name of the Tudeh, and one of several planned sham bombings of the houses of these leaders was carried out.

Wilbur describes how, in the weeks leading up to the coup, the planners experienced considerable difficulty in persuading the indecisive Shah to sign the firmans (royal decrees), and how on August 14th, the very eve of the operation, the plot was ‘betrayed [to elements loyal to Mossadeq] by the indiscretion of one of the Iranian Army officer participants.’

At 0545 hours on the morning of 16 August 1953, Radio Tehran came on the air with a special government communique covering the so-called abortive coup of the night just ending, and by 0600 hours Mossadeq was meeting with his cabinet to receive reports on the situation and to take steps to strengthen the security forces at government buildings and other vital points.

At that point, it seemed ‘obvious that something - or everything - had gone wrong’. By the 18th the Tehran station was preparing ‘for a clandestine evacuation of up to 15 people from Iran.’

However, hopes were revived when ‘violence flared in the streets of Tehran’ that evening - the mood of the protestors reflecting an apparent revival in pro-Shah sentiment. This was attributed to a number of factors, including the recent defilement of statues of the monarchy by Tudeh Party members, and the culmination of a TPAJAX-backed terrorist campaign in the form of ‘gangs of alleged Tudehites on the streets [of Tehran] with orders to loot and smash shops.’

These demonstrations carried with them irresistible momentum. By mid-morning on the 19th, Chief of Staff General Tahi Riahi ‘informed Mossadeq that he no longer controlled the army’. Later that afternoon, General Zahedi has assumed power in Iran.

The effect of the coup was to consolidate the power of the Shah in Iran until he was eventually toppled by the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Later that same year, the exiled Shah was admitted into the US for cancer treatment. This prompted an outcry in Iran and calls for his extradition to face trial. In protest, student forces loyal to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, invaded the American embassy compound in Tehran – the so-called ‘nest of spies’. They took 66 hostages, 53 of whom were held for the full 444-day duration of the crisis. A settlement was finally reached with the signing of the Algiers Accords.

Point 1: Non-Intervention in Iranian Affairs states that…

The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.

It appears that the US has recently broken this pledge. According to an article on ABC’s ‘The Blotter’ last week, the ‘CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government’ involving a ‘coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of [its] currency and international financial transactions’.

“I can’t confirm or deny whether such a program exists or whether the president signed it, but it would be consistent with an overall American approach trying to find ways to put pressure on the regime” - Bruce Riedel (Ret), former senior CIA official

Not that this will come as any surprise to Iran. On April 5th this year, Gholamali Haddadadel, speaker of Iran’s parliament, said there was ‘no doubt in our minds that the United States spares no effort to put pressure on the Islamic Republic of Iran’. This followed earlier reports from ABC that the CIA has ties to groups designated as terrorist organisations by the US, including the Kurdistan Free Life Party (aka JPAK); the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (aka MEK); and Jundallah, a militant Islamist group based in Baluchestan with links to both al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Jundullah has been particularly active inside Iran’s borders. Led by Abdel-Malik Regi, described by Alexis Debat, a counterterrorism expert at the Nixon Center, as ‘part drug smuggler, part Taliban, part Sunni activist’, it has carried out many attacks, including one against a bus in the city of Zahedan that left 11 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard dead. Other raids have led to the death or kidnap of Iranian soldiers, officials and civilians, some of those captured having been subsequently been executed on camera.

Whilst the US denies directly funding Jundallah, its leaders are apparently in touch with US officials. In a set-up that has more than a whiff of Operation Cyclone about it, the group is also said to be receiving finance and arms through both Afghanistan and Pakistan military sources, as well as through the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service.

It’s no great surprise to find that this proxy war is being co-ordinated, in part, by the Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Although he was implicated in efforts to orchestrate a coup against Venezuela’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Hugo Chavez, he is perhaps best known for his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair (see also Chapter 25 of the Final report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters). The scandal, which came to light in 1987, revealed how Reagan Administration officials had used the proceeds of illegal arms sales to Iran to illegally fund right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua in support of their insurgency against the incumbent leftist Sandanista government.

At the time, Abrams had worked under US Secretary of State George P Shultz with responsibility for Central American issues. As a result of working closely with Lt Col Oliver L North, he ‘became aware of North’s efforts to assist the contras militarily, despite the Boland prohibition’. Abrams himself also sought to circumvent the prohibition by soliciting third-country aid for the contras. His involvement in the affair led to an ignominious fall from grace.

On October 7, 1991, Abrams pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges of withholding information from Congress. Abrams admitted that he withheld from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in October 1986 his knowledge of North’s contra-assistance activities.

“Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has” – from Rebuilding America’s Defenses, published in September 2000 by the Project for the New American Century

Abrams spent much of the 1990’s involved with neoconservative think tanks such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Although a great deal has been made of the role PNAC is said to have played in shaping US policy towards Iraq, the organisation also has strong views about Iran. These attitudes have hardened recently, following remarks made by Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that were interpreted as a threat to Israel.

Abrams, a Jew and staunch advocate of a Middle East strategy based on the overwhelming military power of both the United States and Israel, is said by Republican Senator, Chuck Hagel, to be ‘making policy in the Middle East’. If Hagel is right, then the combination of Ahmadinejad’s recalcitrance and US intrigue has only one endgame.

Is NIST Faking it?

2007-05-20T00:36:00.000Z

I’ve been fascinated by optical illusions for as long as I can remember. My favourite is this [1]…

But this one is right up there…

The image on the left was captured on 9/11 by the NYPD and is used by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in its ‘Working Collapse Hypothesis for WTC7’. The one on the right was taken by Aman Zafar, a witness to the unfolding events that day, from his apartment across the Hudson River in Jersey City. Both have been cropped from larger photographs, and NIST’s has also been ‘skewed’ in order to line up the windows for the purposes of comparison. Here are the original photographs.

The nature of the damage at the Southwest corner of WTC7, said to have been caused by the earlier collapse of the twin towers, sparked a vigorous debate at an online Internet forum, ‘Above Top Secret’ (ATS), where I post as ‘coughymachine’. The principle charge was that NIST had manipulated its image in order to exaggerate this damage. Whilst NIST certainly needs all the help it can get if it is to convince conspiracy theorists that WTC7 wasn’t brought down in a controlled demolition, I wanted to explore all possible explanations before reaching any firm conclusions.

Initial efforts were focussed on establishing the times the photographs had been taken. If it turned out that Zafar’s had been taken earlier than NIST’s, it opened up the possibility that some sort of an ‘event’ had occurred between the two, like the explosion heard in the video below, to account for the apparent anomalies.

Working with the original images, an aerial shot of Manhattan (below) and astronomical data from the US Naval Observatory, I estimated the times to be around 15:30 EDT for NIST’s photograph and around 15:00 EDT for Zafar’s.

The time for NIST’s was corroborated by another ATS contributor. The time for Zafar’s, however, was challenged and a much later time of 17:00 EDT proposed (see [2] for my final estimation). This prompted the suggestion that perhaps Zafar’s image had been manipulated.

This made little sense to me.

I established a dialogue with Zafar in order to try and arrive at a definitive time. Meanwhile, I also began developing an idea I’d introduced in the early stages of the debate – that there was actually no discrepancy between the two images, only the illusion of one caused by a combination of angles and smoke. The following graphics show how this theory evolved.

The first shows that, despite initial impressions, Zafar’s photograph does show significant damage.

The next demonstrates how the Southwest edge of WTC7 could appear intact in Zafar’s image but not in NIST’s.

I finally became convinced by this explanation when, rather than skewing NIST’s image, I skewed Zafar’s. The only apparent anomaly is a ‘missing’ window at the bottom, circled in yellow. But this window has simply been obscured by smoke in the NIST image (right). The same effect can be seen further, up where another window, also circled in yellow, has been partially obscured.

It’s fair to say that not everyone at ATS is convinced by this. For me, however, it’s very much a case of mystery solved.

[1] Checkerboard illusion: the squares marked ‘A’ and ‘B’ are the same shade of grey.

[2] Throughout the course of the ATS discussion, Aman Zafar and I had communicated via email to try and establish a timestamp for his photograph. Initially, he felt that it may have been as early as 14:00 EDT. However, he now accepts it could have been as late as my final estimate, which was 16:15 EDT.

WTC7: The Achilles Heel of 9/11?

2007-05-10T23:54:00.000Z

According to a Zogby International poll dated May 24th 2006, as many as 43% of Americans were ‘not aware of World Trade Center Building 7’s collapse’ at 5:21pm on September 11th 2001. With NIST preparing to release its final report into the collapse, the recent ‘mainstreaming’ of 9/11 conspiracy theories couldn’t have come at a more interesting time.

“We are studying the horizontal movement east to west, internal to the structure, on the fifth to seventh floors… but truthfully, I don’t really know. We’ve had trouble getting a handle on Building No. 7.” - Dr S Shyam Sunder, NIST’s lead WTC investigator

The collapse of the 47 storey WTC7 is often the epiphany for 9/11 conspiracy virgins; unlike WTC1 and 2, WTC7 was not hit by an aircraft yet it collapsed symmetrically, at near free fall speed and largely into its own footprint.

Some believe that, despite the damage caused to WTC7 by the collapse of WTC1, and despite the resulting fires, which went untended throughout the day, the only way to account for such a collapse is by controlled demolition. This would point to foreknowledge of the attacks and thus a conspiracy, since the 47 storey WTC7 would have taken several weeks to prepare for a demolition.

The building’s collapse certainly did have the appearance of a controlled demolition.

Demolitions expert Danny Jowenko agreed.

Two videos even appear to capture the sound of explosions – possibly the same blast event - coming from the direction of WTC7.

The second video also shows the area around the building being cleared in anticipation of a collapse.

In an interview with Bonnie Faulkner, of KPFA’s Guns and Butter, Indira Singh, a volunteer Emergency Medical Technician on 9/11, goes further, suggesting that the area was cleared in anticipation of a controlled collapse (emphasis added).

SINGH [at 11:22]: …pretty soon after noon, after midday on 9/11, we had to evacuate that because they told us Building 7 was coming down. If you had been there, not being able to see very much - just flames everywhere and dark smoke - it is entirely possible… I, I do believe that they brought Building 7 down because I heard that they were going to bring it down because it was unstable because of the collateral damage. That I don’t know - I can’t attest to the… to the um, validity of that. All I can attest to is that by noon or one o’clock they told us we had to move from that triage site up to Pace University, a little further away, because Building 7 was going to come down or be brought down.

FAULKNER: Did they actually use the word ‘brought’ down, and who was it that was telling you this?

SINGH: The fire department. The fire department. And, um, they did use the words “we’re gonna have to bring… we’re gonna have to bring it down”. And for us there, um, observing the nature of the devastation, it was… they made total sense to us that this was indeed a possibility. Given the subsequent controversy over it I… I don't know. You know, I’m not an engineer, I don’t know. All I know is, you know, that was my experience.

We backed off a little bit to Pace University. There was another panic around 4 o’clock because they were bringing the building down. And people seemed to know this ahead of time so people were panicking again and running.

This ties in with recently uncovered CNN footage, in which anchor Aaron Brown announces at 4:10pm that building 7 ‘is on fire and has either collapsed or is collapsing.’

By 4:57pm, the BBC were sure that…

…the Salomon Brothers building [WTC7] in New York, right in the heart of Manhattan, has also collapsed.

Yet a short while later, and much to the BBC’s chagrin, correspondent Jane Standley is filmed in front of the still standing WTC7. The loss of her feed just minutes before the building’s actual collapse served to fuel conspiracists’ claims.

But nothing has done more to arouse suspicion than comments made in September 2002 by the WTC complex owner, Larry Silverstein. During an interview for a PBS documentary entitled America Rebuilds, he said (emphasis added):

I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire. And I said, “You know, we’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is… is pull it.” Er… and they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse.

Conspiracy theorists contend that Silverstein’s use of the term ‘pull it’ is an admission that WTC7 was brought down in a controlled manner. Three years later, Siverstein’s spokesman, Dara McQuillan, offered a different interpretation. The statement, which is published on the US Department of State’s web site, reads:

In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center. The Commander told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the building working to contain the fires. Mr. Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building.

Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his firefighters out of the building and at 5:20 p.m. the building collapsed. No lives were lost at Seven World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

This explanation has proven to be almost as controversial as Silverstein’s original comment. Many people are simply not prepared to accept that Silverstein would have used the term ‘pull it’ rather then ‘pull them’ to refer to the withdrawal of a group of firefighters, arguing instead that ‘pull it’ is a demolitions industry term for a controlled demolition. Silverstein’s defenders counter with the claim that the term ‘pull it’ is not used within the demolitions industry to refer to the demolition of a building by way of explosives, but rather by way of cables. However, this is not strictly true. The terms ‘pull’ or ‘pulling’ are frequently used to describe a part of the ‘implosion’ process whereby cutter charges (or a combination of cutter charges and cables) have been set in a particular way to ensure that the perimeter walls of a building are ‘pulled’ in. This is especially common in situations where the building being brought down is in close proximity to neighbouring buildings.

As Stacy Loizeaux, daughter of Controlled Demolition Incorporated (CDI) founder, Mark Loizeaux, explained during an interview with Nova:

There are a series of small explosions [during an implosion], but the building itself isn’t erupting outward. It’s actually being pulled in on top of itself. What we’re really doing is removing specific support columns within the structure and then cajoling the building in one direction or another, or straight down.

But, even if we accept that the term is not a demolitions industry term for the controlled demolition of a building by way of explosives, there is another problem with Silverstein’s explanation.

According to NIST NCSTAR1-8, The Emergency Response Operations, page 111 (emphasis added)…

One Battalion Chief coming from the building indicated that they had searched floors 1 through 9 and found that the building was clear. In the process of the search, the Battalion Chief met the building’s Fire Safety Director and Deputy Fire Safety Director on the ninth floor. The Fire Safety Director reported that the building’s floors had been cleared from the top down. By this time, the Chief Officer responsible for WTC 7 reassessed the building again and determined that fires were burning on the following floors: 6, 7, 8, 17, 21, and 30. No accurate time is available for these actions during the WTC 7 operations; however, the sequence of event indicates that it occurred during a time period from 12:30 p.m. to approximately 2:00 p.m.

The Chief Officer then met with his command officer to discuss the building’s condition and FDNY’s capabilities for controlling the building fires.

Thus, if the building was cleared by 2:00pm; and if the Chief Officer subsequently discussed ‘the FDNY’s capabilities for controlling the building fires’ with his command officer; then the fire department commander could not have informed Silverstein ‘that [the FDNY] were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire’ until after the building had been evacuated.

In other words, there were no firefighters to withdraw at the time Silverstein spoke with the fire department commander.

That aside, there has been a great deal of speculation about the nature of the damage caused to WTC7 by the collapse of WTC1. Whilst early eyewitness accounts were vague about the extent of the damage, one firefighter, Captain Chris Boyle, did report specifically that…

…on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good.

Until recently, it was thought that Boyle was referring to this trauma at the south west corner. But a recent ‘find’ appears to show the damage was more extensive.

However, the extent to which this new material will support NIST’s preliminary ‘Working Collapse Hypothesis’ for WTC7 is unclear. The vertical gash is towards the west end of the south face. But as ‘Winston Smith’ points out in his paper, entitled ‘Photographic Analysis of Damage to WTC7 and Critical Errors in NIST’s Estimations’…

NIST’s collapse hypothesis hinges on the failure of one or more of columns 79, 80, and 81 [at the east end of the south face]. The report cites the massive size and strength of the three columns as appearing to require “severe fires and/or damaged fireproofing to initiate thermally-related failures. Damage to the building from WTC1 debris is pointed to as the most likely contributing factor or direct cause of that failure, specifically damage to truss #2 (or adjacent components) which was located on the 6th floor. Simply put, a single truss or a single column is claimed to have been the Achilles heel of the structure, a heel that once broken, caused the entire entire [sic] 47 storey building to implode perfectly in on itself, with no resistance and at free fall rate.

NIST then appears to use a rather exaggerated damage assessment to support its theory.

Perhaps the Achilles heel of NIST’s hypothesis will ultimately prove to be the seismic data. I’ll leave you with the words of researcher and Internet discussion board contributor, LaBTop, who explains in his detailed analysis that (original emphasis):

13 seconds before NIST found their first visual event proof of building failure, the east penthouse roof dent photograph by Nicolas Cianca, some seismic event, comparable to the head-on collision of a huge air plane on each WTC 1 and 2 towers, shook the bedrock at the WTC-7 building.

Mohamed Atta's Final Days

2007-05-01T20:14:00.000Z

I have partially reconstructed the movements of the alleged hijackers in the weeks leading up to the September 11th attacks by studying the evidence produced at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, as well as contemporary news sources and public records. The picture that emerges raises more questions than answers.

“And the more I see - the more I know; the more I know - the less I understand. ” – Paul Weller, The Changingman

Much of the uncertainty surrounds the behaviour of the alleged lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta. For clarity, I have stripped out everything that doesn’t relate to either Atta himself, or else to his two closest associates, Marwan al-Shehhi and Abdulaziz a-Omari. I have also limited this study to an examination of period between August 28th and September 11th. Finally, I have avoided repeating the questions raised in my earlier article, Mohamed Atta and the ‘Rosetta Stone’, concerning the bags that mysteriously failed to make it aboard American Airlines Flight 11.

CHRONOLOGY

A. August 28th – Mohamed Atta flies from Baltimore to Fort Lauderdale aboard US Air FL2970 [1].

B. August 29th – Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi return their rented Chevy Corsica to Warrick’s Rent-a-Car. They leave in a rented Ford Escort [1], [13].

C. September 4th – Waleed al-Shehi books reservations for Abdulaziz al-Omari and Satam al-Suqami on Delta FL2462 from Fort Lauderdale to Boston, departing September 6th [2].

D. September 4th – A white Mitsubishi Mirage, which was rented in Springfield, Massachusetts under Atta’s name, is seen at Logan International Airport between 14:15 and 16:00 [3a].

E. September 5th – Mohamed Atta books a reservation on US Air FL2968 from Fort Lauderdale to Boston, departing September 7th [1].

F. September 5th – Marwan al-Shehhi books a reservation on Delta FL2462 from Fort Lauderdale to Boston, departing September 9th [4].

G. September 6th – A white Mitsubishi Mirage, which was rented in Springfield, Massachusetts under Atta’s name, is seen at Logan International Airport between 14:15 and 16:00 [3a].

H. September 6th – Abdulaziz al-Omari & Satam al-Suqami fly from Fort Lauderdale to Boston aboard Delta FL2462. Flight departs at 12:00 and arrives at 15:20 [5].

I. September 7th – Mohamed Atta flies from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore aboard US Air FL2719 [1]. Flight departs at 15:15 [6].

J. September 7th – Mohamed Atta was variously reported to have been with two companions at Shuckums Sports Bar in Hollywood, Florida between 15:00 and 18:00. Some reports suggest the companions may have been Marwan al-Shehhi and Abdulaziz al-Omari [7], [8], [9]. (Note: Time Magazine reported it was September 8th [10])

K. September 9th - Mohamed Atta flies from Baltimore to Boston aboard US Air FL2979 [1].

L. September 9th – Marwan al-Shehhi returns the rented Ford Escort to Warrick’s Rent-a-Car [4].

M. September 9th – Marwan al-Shehhi flies from Fort Lauderdale to Boston aboard Delta FL2462. Flight departs at 12:00 and arrive at 15:20 [4].

N. September 9th – A white Mitsubishi Mirage, which was rented in Springfield, Massachusetts under Atta’s name, is seen at Logan International Airport between 16:15 and 17:39 [3a].

O. September 9th – Marwan al-Shehhi returns the hire car [11] in the afternoon [12]. This is corroborated by the rental agreement, which indicates the time of the return is 17:00 [13]. Apart from Marwan al-Shehhi, none of the alleged hijackers is known to have been in Fort Lauderdale on the 9th [14].

P. September 9th – Mohamed Atta rents a Nissan Altima from Alamo at Boston’s Logan Airport at 18:08 [1].

Q. September 9th – It is alternatively reported that the Nissan Altima was rented by two brothers, Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Abbas Bukhari [15]. Although this is no longer the ‘accepted story’ [16].

R. September 9th – Marwan Shehhi books into the Milner Hotel, Boston for one night at 22:00 [4].

S. September 10th – Mohamed Atta’s credit card is reportedly used in Manhattan [17], [18]. None of the alleged hijackers are known to have been in Manhattan on September 10th [14].

T. September 10th – A white Mitsubishi Mirage, which was rented in Springfield, Massachusetts under Atta's name, is seen at Logan International Airport between 16:25 and 17:05 [3a]

U. September 10th – Mohamed Atta is seen driving a Mitsubishi Mirage at Exit 13 of the Massachusetts Turnpike [19].

V. September 10th – Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari drive from Boston to Portland in the Nissan Altima. They check into The Comfort Inn, room 233 at 17:37 [1].

W. September 11th – Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari check out of the Comfort Inn at 05:33 and drive to Portland International Jetport [1].

X. September 11th – Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari fly from Portland to Boston aboard Colgan Air FL5930. Flight departs at 06:00 [1].

Y. September 11th - Marwan al-Shehhi drives the Mitsubishi Mirage to Boston’s Logan Airport [3b].

REFERENCES

[1] Chronology of Events for Hijackers: Mohamed Atta

[2] Chronology of Events for Hijackers: Waleed al-Shehri

[3] Wikipedia Article: Cars Owned and Rented by Mohammed Atta

[a] A white Mitsubishi Mirage was rented in Springfield, Massachusetts under Atta's name, and is thought to have been the car seen circling the restricted-parking areas of Logan International Airport for several days including on September 4th and 6th (2:15-4pm), 9th (4:15-5:39pm) and 10th (4:25-5:05pm) (Time, 28 January 2002).

[b] On September 11th, Marwan drove the car to the airport, and phoned Atta at 6:45am to confirm the plan was still on.

[4] Chronology of Events for Hijackers: Marwan al-Shehhi

[5] Chronology of Events for Hijackers: Satam l-Suqami

[6] US Bureau of Transportation Statistics - Searchable Database

[7] The Washington Post – September 13th 2001

Last Friday night, Atta, Shehhi and an unidentified man spent 3½ hours at a sports bar, Shuckums, in Hollywood, Fla. While Atta played video games, the other two had about five drinks each and appeared resistant to paying the $48 tab. The manager, Tony Amos, recalled yesterday that he inquired whether they could not afford the bill. Shehhi “looked at me with an arrogant look,” Amos said. “He pulled out a wad of cash and put it on the bar table and said, ‘There is no money issue. I am an airline pilot.’ ”

[8] The Daily Telegraph – September 14th 2001

Tony Amos, the manager of Shuckums Oyster Bar and Restaurant in Hollywood, just north of Miami, was interviewed by the FBI and he and his barman and a waitress all identified Atta and his cousin as some hard drinkers who propped up the bar last Friday.

Atta’s bill for three hours of vodka drinking came to $48 (£33). When he drunkenly disputed the charge, Mr Amos intervened. “Of course I can pay the bill,” Atta told him. “I’m an airline pilot.”

[9] ABC (Australia)

LIZ JACKSON: With three days left to go, the pair spent their last Friday night out on the town in Shuckums bar, Miami, with a friend. It’s a cheap dive.

TONY AMOS, BAR MANAGER: There were three gentlemen that came in that day. Two gentlemen sat — actually where you’re sitting right now and the other gentle — the third gentleman, Mohamed Atta, was sitting at the other end of the bar and he was playing video games.

LIZ JACKSON: Tony Amos was the manager on the night and says, as the evening progressed, Marwan Al-Shehhi got agitated and drunk.

TONY AMOS: And he pulled out a wad of cash and he put it on the bar and he said, “I’m an airline pilot.” So I just took it at face value. I mean, he had been drinking, I found out that him and the other gentleman had five rounds each. Mohamed Atta, he was just drinking cranberry juice. He’d get up once in a while, come over to — who I found out was this Marwan, was his cousin or claimed to be related in some way, and he would just maybe say something in his ear and then go back to the other end of the bar and just continue playing the video game. And he did that for four hours.

[10] Time Magazine

It was at Shuckums, on Sept. 8, that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi did some premass murder tippling. Atta drank vodka and orange juice, while Al-Shehhi preferred rum and cokes, five drinks apiece. “They were wasted,” the bartender recalled, and Atta objected to the $48 bill. Tony Amos, the manager, asked if they were short the cash. “No,” said Atta. “I have plenty of money. I’m a pilot.” And he hauled a wad of $50 and $100 bills from his pocket, eventually leaving a $3 tip.

[11] St Petersburg Times – September 1st 2002

When al-Shehhi returned the rental car for the last time Sept. 9, he asked that the charge be removed from Atta’s credit card and placed on his.

[12] ABC (Australia)

LIZ JACKSON: That weekend, Mohamed Atta headed north to Portland, Maine. Al-Shehhi returned their hire car on the Sunday afternoon.

[13] Warrick’s Rent-a-Car: Rental Agreement for Ford Escort

[14] United States v. Zacarius Moussaoui – Prosecution Trial Exhibits

[15] People’s Daily (China) – September 13th 2001

Police and law enforcement sources said the two brothers suspected in the Boston hijackings were Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Abbas Bukhari, who up until recent days had lived in Vero Beach, Florida. Both of their homes have been searched, the sources said.

The two rented a car, a silver-blue Nissan Altima, from an Alamo car rental at Boston’s Logan Airport and drove to an airport in Portland, Maine, where they got on US Airways Flight 5930 at 6 a.m. Tuesday headed back to Boston, the sources said.

Investigators are analyzing videotapes at the car rental facility and at the Maine airport.

Before CNN learned the identities of the two brothers, Portland Police Chief Mike Chitwood said, “I can tell you those two individuals did get on a plane and fly to Boston early yesterday morning ... I can tell you that they are the focus of a federal investigation.”

[16] Wikipedia Article – Mohamed Atta’s Rented Nissan Altima

While it was initially reported that Adnan and Ameer Bukhari had rented and driven the car, the accepted story is now that Mohamed Atta al Sayed rented the car, although later reports continued to suggest that Adnan Bukhari fell under suspicion because of documents found within the car.

[17] CNN – May 22nd 2002

The FBI has found credit card receipts that appear to place September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Manhattan the day before the attacks, a source close to the investigation told CNN Wednesday.

[18] Freedom of Information Center – May 22nd 2002

The FBI found transactions that show Atta used a credit card in Manhattan the day before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. Until recently, law enforcement officials could not figure out why he was here. New evidence has emerged that leads investigators to believe Atta made a last-minute visit to double-check coordinates of the twin towers and plug them into a sophisticated Global Positioning System device bought by the hijackers, the source said.

Investigators suspect Atta’s trip to the Trade Center was necessary because they believe the hijackers were too inexperienced to handle the jumbo jets without help. They know the hijackers bought GPS devices in the months leading up to the attack.

[19] Newsday – September 30th 2001

It was Monday, Sept. 10, and Atta, 33, an Egyptian who in the past few years had lived a wanderer’s life between several cities in Florida, was stopped at a toll booth at Exit 13 of the Massachusetts Turnpike. He boiled over in anger when the operator demanded that he pay the toll.

When Atta refused and sped away, the operator wrote down the license plate number of his rented white Mitsubishi.

KEY QUESTIONS

Since Mohamed Atta is not known to have been in Springfield, MA at any time between August 16th and September 11th [1], when did he rent the Mitsubishi Mirage [3a]?

If Mohamed Atta was in Fort Lauderdale, FL between August 29th and September 7th [1], [A], [I], who was driving the Mitsubishi Mirage in Boston, MA on both September 4th [D] and September 6th [G]?

Why did Mohamed Atta change his mind about flying US Air FL2968 from Fort Lauderdale to Boston on September 7th [E] and instead opt to fly US Air FL2719 from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore on September 7th [I]?

If Mohamed Atta boarded US Air FL2719 from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore on September 7th [I]; and if US Air FL2719 departed at 15:15 [6]; then who was at Shuckums Sports Bar in Hollywood, Florida on September 7th between 15:00 and 18:00 [7], [8], [9], [10]?

If Mohamed Atta flew from Baltimore to Boston on September 9th [K]; and if Marwan al-Shehhi flew from Fort Lauderdale to Boston at 12:00 on September 9th [M]; and if none of the remaining alleged hijackers are known to have been in Florida on September 9th [14]; then who returned the rented Ford Escort to Warrick’s Rent-a-Car in Pompano Beach, Florida at 17:00 on September 9th [O], [13] ?

Where did information linking Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Abbas Bukhari to the rented Nissan Altima come from [Q]?

What information was Portland Police Chief Mike Chitwood acting upon when he said, “I can tell you [Adnan Bukhari and Ameer Abbas Bukhari] did get on a plane and fly to Boston early yesterday morning…” [14]?

If Mohammed Atta was in Boston [M] and Portland [V] on September 10th, who was seen driving the Mitsubishi Mirage rented in Atta’s name [3a] in Boston’s Logan Airport [T] and around Exit 13 of the Masspike [U] on September 10th?

If Mohamed Atta is in or around Boston, MA on September 10th [K], [T], [U], [V]; and if none of the alleged hijackers are known to have been in New York on September 10th [14]; then who used Atta’s credit card in New York on September 10th [S], [17], [18]?

Why did Mohamed Atta fly from Baltimore to Boston on September 7th [K]; then drive from Boston to Portland on September 10th [V]; and then fly from Portland back to Boston in the early hours of September 11th [X]?

Who is Emmanuel Goldstein?

2007-04-29T23:41:00.000Z

Friday’s announcement that Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, one of al Qaeda’s highest-ranking operatives, has been arrested, is a reminder that the ‘War on Terror’ is still very much a work-in-progress.

But, with President George Bush warning Congress that he will veto their war funding bill (or, more accurately, their Iraq Troop Protection and Reduction Act of 2007 bill), there was more than a hint of suspicion about the timing.

The bill, which sets an March 31st 2008 deadline for the ‘redeployment of United States troops from Iraq’, will be well-received by ordinary Americans, the majority of whom, according to recent polls, now favour a withdrawal. But its passing has angered the White House. It argues that such a precipitous move would serve only to ‘embolden the terrorists’. Bush will have none of it. ‘If the Congress wants to test my will as to whether or not I’ll accept a timetable for withdrawal,’ he said on Friday, ‘I won’t accept one.’ Vice President Dick Cheney also reacted angrily to the bill. Speaking at a fundraising event in Oklahoma, he claimed Congressional Democrats had sent ‘a message to our enemies that the calendar is their friend.’

And then, with impeccable timing, the arrest of al-Iraqi is announced.

Surely even the most ardent government supporter must realise that few see the ostensibly serendipitous appearance of this Goldstein-like figure as anything other than stage-managed propaganda (see footnotes). Especially when you consider that, with media attention focussed elsewhere, news of last year’s detention of al-Iraqi, said to have been chosen personally by Osama bin Laden to monitor operations in Iraq, had to be put on the back burner.

“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.” - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

And no sooner had our bloodlust been sated by the theatre of Saddam’s grizzly demise than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), putative ‘principal architect of the 9/11 attacks’, was wheeled out.

His ‘confession’ to a combatant status review tribunal at Guantanamo Bay - reminiscent of a 1930’s Stalinist purge - was as well-timed as al-Iraqi’s ‘arrest’. It came in mid-March as US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales faced mounting pressure to resign following the politicised dismissals of eight US attorneys. In it, he admitted and affirmed ‘without duress that [he] was a responsible participant, principal planner, trainer, financier (via the Military Council Treasury), executor, and/or a personal participant in’ 31 terror attacks or plots. With his connection to the 9/11 attacks well-established, ‘it is not clear’, as The Guardian points out, ‘why Mohammed would have wished to confess to such a wide-ranging number of outrages.’

There has, of course, been much scepticism about the legitimacy of his confession. Some fear it may have been coerced, citing Bush’s discomfiture with the Geneva Convention’s stipulation that ‘no outrages upon human dignity’ will be committed against detainees during interrogation. Others point out that KSM, who was detained in March 2003, could not have been ‘responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing for the New (or Second) Wave of attacks against the… Plaza Bank, Washington state’, for example, since the Plaza Bank was founded in 2006.

Not much has been said, however, about the admission that most caught my eye:

I was responsible for the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, which was frequented by British and Australian nationals.

This admission, if true, has potentially profound implications.

The 2002 Bali bombings killed 202 and left a further 209 injured. Suspicions immediately fell upon Jemaah Islamiyah, a radical Islamist terror group with links to al Qaeda. But, although several members of this group have since been tried and convicted for their involvement in the plot, one tantalising trail has been allowed to go cold. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, the then Indonesian Prime Minister, Abdurrahman Wahid, believed that the order to plant the bomb which destroyed Bali’s Sari Club came from Indonesia’s ‘armed forces not from the fundamentalist people.’ In other words, the Bali bombing was a false flag operation.

Crucially, it came at a time when Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s support for the War on Terror was perceived as being weak. Some have construed this as evidence that the US isn’t just managing the flow of Goldstein propaganda but is actually managing Goldstein; that al Qaeda is a modern-day network of Gladio-like clandestine armies, prosecuting a modern-day Strategy of Tension (see Operation Gladio and The Strategy of Tension).

Although the US flatly denies both having created Osama bin Laden and having had a relationship with al Qaeda, it is known to have had a pragmatic relationship with its forerunner, the Maktab al Khidamar (MAK), during the Afghan-Soviet War. The MAK, which was co-founded by bin Laden during Operation Cyclone, acted as the intermediary for the flow of arms and recruits from the CIA to the mujahideen. Were informal relations maintained once the war was over?

If so, how should we interpret comments made by Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to the former US President Jimmy Carter, before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on February 1st 2007?

A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

I wonder what Goldstein will do next.

Footnotes:

October 10th - A new video aired by al Arabiya television today shows an al Qaeda militant urging fighters to train hard and encourages training on nuclear weapons. “Man has to prepare himself, starting with the first stages of physical exercise ... etc. to the highest levels of preparations reached by science today, to the nuclear weapons,” said Abu Yahya al Libi on the tape. Al Libi is one of four men who escaped from the U.S. Bagram prison in Afghanistan in July 2005 (source: ABC News).

Note: Elections for the United States House of Representatives were due to be held on November 7th 2006.

Four days before the 2004 presidential election, bin Laden appeared with Bush’s ‘October surprise’ - claiming he ordered 9/11 and appearing to goad Americans with threats of more attacks. The tape enabled Bush to recover vital approval ratings that he had lost to John Kerry in the weeks before and win re-election.

Even veteran newsman Walter Kronkite went public to suggest the tape was a set-up masterminded by Karl Rove (source: Global Research).

Previous to the beginning of the Iraq war, Bin Laden appeared in February 2003 on an audio tape that was touted as proof positive of Al Qaeda links with Saddam Hussein. In another amazing timing coincidence, the tape came barely a week after Colin powell’s [sic] attempts to link Al Qaeda and Saddam in his botched presentation of lies and exaggerations before the UN Security Council.

In an even more bizarre twist, just hours before the tape was found and aired by AlJazeera, Colin Powell announced in the US Senate that a “Bin Laden tape is coming proving Iraq’s links with Al-Qaeda.” How does Colin Powell know what AlJazeera are going to broadcast before they do? (source: Global Research).

United by Noble Lies

2007-04-25T12:07:00.000Z

A March 2004 US House of Representatives Minority report entitled Iraq on the Record, The Bush Administration’s Public Statements on Iraq, found that, beginning twelve months prior to the commencement of hostilities in Iraq, key administration officials made ‘237 misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq’.

This figure ‘does not include statements that appear in hindsight to be erroneous but were accurate reflections of the views of intelligence officials at the time they were made.’

“[T]here’s overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government.” – Vice President Dick Cheney, January 22nd 2004

If German-born philosopher Leo Strauss were still alive, he would no doubt have approved of his former protégés’ tactics.

Strauss agreed with the ancient philosophers that the foolish and vulgar masses had no natural right to liberty; that they should be subordinated by an intellectual elite. He further argued that the elite could not rule directly because the masses would distrust them. Instead, they should command the ear of those in power. As Shadia B Drury explains in her paper, Saving America, Leo Strauss and the neoconservatives …

…Strauss referred to the right of the superior to rule as “the tyrannical teaching” of the ancients which must be kept secret. But what is the reason for secrecy? Strauss tells us that the tyrannical teaching must be kept secret for two reasons - to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals. After all, the people are not likely to be favourably disposed to the fact that they are intended for subordination.

Thus the intellectuals were required to manufacture ‘noble lies’ as a ‘necessary pabulum to placate the people and make them comply with the[ir] will.’

“…politics… requires that you treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It's not personal; you don't have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to vanquish him if necessary.” – Carl Schmitt in his book, ‘In The Concept of the Political’

The ultimate goal of the noble lie is unity. As Strauss himself explains in a letter to fellow neoconservative god, Carl Schmitt:

[M]en can be unified, only in a unity against - against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men. The tendency to separate (and therewith the grouping of humanity into friends and enemies) is given with human nature; it is in this sense destiny, period.

Nowadays, the masses are unified by a pandemic ‘politicization of intelligence’, according to former CIA Chief of Counter-Terrorism, Vince Cannistraro. ‘[D]eliberate disinformation is being promoted. [The neoconservatives] choose the worst-case scenario on everything and so much of the information is fallacious.’

What then are we to make of the current constant stream of anti-Iranian propaganda spewing out of every neoconservative orifice, including the recent suggestion by the Sunday Times that…

Al-Qaeda is active in Iran and has ambitions far beyond the improvised attacks it has been waging against British and American soldiers in Iraq.

When this appears under the headline, Al-Qaeda ‘planning big British attack’, and when the article includes ‘a leaked intelligence report’ assessment that ‘the operation will be on ‘a par with Hiroshima and Naga-saki’’, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Iran has imminent plans to launch a nuclear attack on the UK.

And, it’s probably just a coincidence that this leaked report comes the day before the US was about to embark on ‘a four-day marathon of “simulated” terror attacks across the US and Europe’. This drill, known as Noble Resolve (how Straussian), ‘includes a simulated detonation of a “loose” ten-kiloton nuclear weapon [in] Virginia harbor, smuggled in by a “foreign nation.”’

Anyone who suspects that these events might be connected in a manner designed to prepare us for a switch from diplomacy to military conflict in an effort to curb Iran’s nuclear designs, is just a foolish vulgar mass.

Aren’t they?

AA Flight 11 - Mohamed Atta and the 'Rosetta Stone'

2007-04-24T01:04:00.000Z

According to the ‘official’ version of events…

At 5:33 on the morning of September 11th 2001, lead hijacker, Mohamed Atta, and his co-conspirator, Abdulaziz al-Omari, checked out of room 232 of the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine. Their operation, two and a half years in the planning, had entered its final phase.

They placed their baggage into their rented Nissan Altima and drove to Portland International Jetport, arriving at around 5:45. This gave them just enough time to catch the 6:00 commuter flight to Boston’s Logan airport, from where they would later board the 7:45 departure, Flight 11, to Los Angeles.

This connecting flight to Boston was the last leg of a rather circuitous journey for Atta, which saw him fly from Baltimore to Boston on the 9th, and having collected Omari, drive from Boston to Portland on the 10th. There appears to have been no good reason for the two men to have left Boston, and their decision to do so exposed them to potential delays that could have jeopardised their participation in the mission.

Everybody hates death, fears death… but only those, the believers who know the life after death and the reward after death, would be the ones who will be seeking death – attributed to Mohamed Atta

Having arrived at the airport, Atta tried to check two items of baggage onto the 19-seat commuter flight to Boston. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, he…

…was selected by a computerized prescreening system known as CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), created to identify passengers who should be subject to special security measures. Under security rules in place at the time, the only consequence of Atta's selection by CAPPS was that his checked bags were held off the plane until it was confirmed that he had boarded the aircraft.

These measures, designed to establish that selectees with a high terrorism ‘risk score’ were not carrying explosives, ‘reflected the FAA’s view that non-suicide bombing was the most substantial risk to domestic aircraft.’

As the events unfolded, Atta’s bags remained in Boston’s Logan Airport; they hadn’t made it on to Flight 11. They were discovered later that day and conveniently found to contain what former FBI agent Warren Flagg described as ‘the Rosetta stone of the investigation’.

FBI agent James K Lechner lists the bags’ contents in an affidavit filed on September 12th. They included:

numerous documents, including a letter of recommendation and education-related documentation, bearing the names “Mohamed Mohamed Elamir Awad Elsayed” and “Mohamed Mohamed Elamir Awad Elsayed Atta”; a hand-held electronic flight computer; a simulator procedures manual for Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft; two videotapes relating to “air tours” of the Boeing 757 and 747 aircraft; a slide-rule flight calculator; a copy of the Koran.

One of the documents found was described by Bob Woodward of the Washington Post as ‘a cross between a chilling spiritual exhortation aimed at the hijackers and an operational mission checklist’. In it, the hijackers were reminded to bring ‘knives, your will, IDs, your passport… [and] to make sure that nobody is following you.’ Remarkably, ‘[t]he FBI found another copy of essentially the same document in the wreckage of United Flight 93… [which] suggest[s] the document was shared among at least some of the hijackers.’

Less widely reported, is the equally remarkable claim made by both Flagg and an unnamed former federal prosecutor that the second bag contained the identities of all 19 hijackers.

I want the clothes I wear to consist of three white pieces of cloth, not to be made from silk or expensive material – Mohamed Atta in his will

Lechner’s affidavit also contained a reference to the discovery of ‘a handwritten document in Arabic’; it was Atta’s will.

It is reasonable to assume that this will, although dated 1996, was still applicable as of September 11th. Having encouraged the other hijackers to bring their wills, it seems improbable that Atta himself would have been carrying one that had been superseded. Because of this, and in the context of the events that were about to unfold, both Atta’s instructions and the fact that he planned for the document travel with him seem incongruous. Could he have reasonably expected either his will or his body to have been recovered?

This is just one of a great many question arising from the above.

It would also be interesting to learn why Atta and Omari travelled from Boston to Portland on September 10th? Why did they catch a connecting flight back to Boston early on September 11th giving themselves little room for manoeuvre should they encounter any unforeseen delays?

Why did Atta (and at least one other hijacker who boarded Flight 93) carry operationally sensitive material with him on the morning of September 11th? Why did Atta carry his will with him and why did he instruct the other hijackers to do so? Why does Atta’s will contain instructions for the preparation and internment of his body?

Why were all these materials contained in checked-in baggage (and, therefore, inaccessible once loaded) as opposed to hand-held, carry-on baggage? Why did Atta’s bag not make it onto Flight 11?

And finally, did Atta himself make it aboard Flight 11?

This last question is not as outlandish as it first appears when you consider that Atta was selected for CAPPS screening, and that anyone thus selected was required to board their flight before their baggage was loaded. Further, one of the flight attendants aboard Flight 11, Madeline Amy Sweeney, managed to call ground staff at Boston whilst the hijacking was in progress. According to a BBC report, Sweeney ‘spotted only four’ hijackers and ‘the seat numbers she gave were different from those registered in the hijackers’ names’.

To my mind, those who planned and executed the attacks on 9/11 should have left nothing to chance. But, if the ‘official’ story is to be believed, then they clearly did. What’s more, they took unnecessary risks, none more inexplicable than those taken in the hours before the operation began.

Of course, it is always possible that the ‘official’ story is not accurate…

Part Five: Peak Oil and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

2007-04-17T15:31:00.000Z

Previous - Part Four: Operation Cyclone and the CIA’s Connection to Tim Osman

In 1956, Marion Hubbert King, a geophysicist with the Shell Oil Company, presented a paper to the American Petroleum Institute entitled ‘Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels’. He used this paper to make two predictions about the date the US would reach its peak rate of oil production: a low estimate, with a peak in 1965; and a high estimate, with a peak in 1970. Hubbert’s peak theory has proven to be broadly accurate – US production peaked in 1971.

“…it does pose a national problem of primary importance, the necessity, both with regard to requirements for domestic purposes and those for national defense, of gradually having to compensate for an increasing disparity between the nation’s demands for these fuels and its ability to produce them…” – Marion King Hubbert, writing in ‘Nuclear energy and the Fossil Fuels’

Working on the assumption that any given oil field has a finite endowment, Hubbert theorised that the production rate at a new reserve would increase exponentially at first before peaking at the depletion mid-point. Thereafter, the rate would decrease exponentially. He represented this by way of a broadly symmetrical bell-shaped graph, known as the Hubbert Curve. In simplistic terms, oil is plentiful and cheap to produce on the up-slope, but scarce and increasingly expensive on the down-slope.

By combining the Hubbert Curves of all known oil reserves, one can chart the overall rate of global oil production and estimate the date at which that rate will peak. In his paper, Hubbert placed ‘the date of the [world] peak at about the year 2000’. This is known as ‘Peak Oil’.

A post-Peak Oil world presents a potentially grave threat to mature, industrialised nations such as the US, whose manufacturing, construction, and transportation industries all require energy derived from oil. As Colin J Campbell, writing in The Energy Bulletin, points out, US economic expansion has historically been fuelled by debt, with cheap oil-based energy as collateral. But…

…[t]he decline of oil, the principal driver of economic growth, undermines the validity of that collateral which in turn erodes the valuation of most entities quoted on Stock Exchanges. The investment community however faces a dilemma. It desires to protect its own fortunes and those of its privileged clients while at the same time is reluctant to take action that might itself trigger the meltdown.

But declining oil production is only part of the problem; security of access is the other, particularly for the US, which consumes 25% of global output. The Hubbert Curve posits that if Peak Oil occurred in 2006 (as many now believe it did) then, absent of any mitigating factors, the rate of production in 2026 will be roughly equal to that of 1986. However, the combined effects of a growing population coupled with the increasing oil dependency of newly industrialised nations will lead to an escalation in resource-oriented competition.

To put this into perspective, in 1986 the rate of world oil production was just over 60 mb/d (million barrels per day) and the world’s population was around 5 billion. If Peak Oil occurred in 2006, then by 2026 the theoretical rate of production would also be around 60 mb/d, however, according to the US Census Bureau, the world’s population in 2026 will have grown to around 8 billion.

More significantly, growth in both population and oil consumption rates has not been and will not be uniform. Between 1986 and 2006, for example, the combined populations of China and India grew by around 31% (source: US Census Bureau), whilst the rest of the world grew by just 19%. Regional variations in oil dependency were even more pronounced, with consumption in China and India growing six times fatser than the overall world rate (source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2006).

Asia’s rapidly growing population and oil dependency thus presents a threat to the ability of the US to meet its energy needs. This threat will be exacerbated by a decline in the relative importance of its traditional sources and an increase in the relative importance of the Middle East.

“While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies…” – Dick Cheney, speaking at the London Institute of Petroleum in 1999 as CEO of Haliburton

Historically, despite acquiring around 10% of its oil imports from Saudi Arabia, the US has not relied heavily upon Middle East energy. Nonetheless, as Mamoun Fandy in his 1997 article for Foreign Policy in Focus explains, it has long viewed the region as vital to its strategic interests.

Securing the flow of affordable oil is a cornerstone of U.S. Middle East policy. The U.S. strategy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq, designed to ensure that neiher [sic] Iraq nor Iran is capable of threatening neighboring Gulf countries, is inextricably linked to Washington’s oil policy. Currently, U.S. domestic oil production supplies about 50% of total U.S. consumption. Foreign sources provide the rest, primarily Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, and several African countries.

But dependence upon Canada, Mexico and Venezuela cannot be regarded as a long-term solution to its domestic production deficit. These countries have or are about to experience their own peak. By contrast, the Middle East isn’t expected to peak until around 2011. Furthermore, by 2020, with production rates declining more rapidly elsewhere, the Middle East is expected to produce more oil than all other regions combined.

In 2001, The National Energy Policy Development Group (known as the NEPD Group and chaired by newly appointed-Vice President, Dick Cheney) alluded to this ‘crossover event’ in its ‘National Energy Policy’ report.

By 2020, Gulf oil producers are expected to supply between 54% and 67% of the world’s oil. Thus the global economy will almost certainly continue to depend upon the supply of oil from Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members, particularly in the Gulf.

At the time, Gulf oil producers accounted for just over 30% of total world production.

“I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. ” – Dick Cheney, speaking as CEO of Haliburton in 1998

But the Middle East is not the only region considered vital to US interests. The break-up of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Afghan-Soviet war has also led to a battle for energy dominance in and around the Caspian Sea. This battle has been termed the ‘New Great Game’ (see also Part Four: Operation Cyclone and the CIA’s Connection to Tim Osman), with interested parties competing not only for oil but also for the development of lucrative new transit routes as alternatives to the region’s existing infrastructure. Long-standing US policy goals regarding the now-independent littoral Central Asian Republics were reiterated in a statement to the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations by Doug Bereuter, the Chairman of the subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific. They include…

…fostering the independence of the States and their ties to the West; breaking Russia’s monopoly over oil and gas transport routes; promoting Western energy security through diversified suppliers; encouraging the construction of east-west pipelines that do not transit Iran; and denying Iran dangerous leverage over the Central Asian economies.

Throughout the 1990s, the pursuit of US policy was hampered by the highly politicised and unstable nature of the region, as well as its legacy infrastructure. As John Maresca, Vice President for International Relations at the Unocal Corporation explained to the House subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific:

Central Asia is isolated. Their natural resources are landlocked, both geographically and politically. Each of the countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia faces difficult political challenges. Some have unsettled wars or latent conflicts. Others have evolving systems where the laws and even the courts are dynamic and changing. In addition, a chief technical obstacle which we in the industry face in transporting oil is the region’s existing pipeline infrastructure.

Because the region’s pipelines were constructed during the Moscow-centered Soviet period, they tend to head north and west toward Russia. There are no connections to the south and east. But Russia is currently unlikely to absorb large new quantities of foreign oil. It’s unlikely to be a significant market for new energy in the next decade. It lacks the capacity to deliver it to other markets.

Maresca went on to outline the need for two major infrastructure projects. The first, a pipeline west from the Caspian, terminating at either Novorossiysk in the Black Sea, or else the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, a route backed by US oil companies, including Unocal. The second…

…a pipeline south from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. One obvious route south would cross Iran, but this is foreclosed for American companies because of U.S. sanctions legislation. The only other possible route is across Afghanistan, which has of course its own unique challenges. The country has been involved in bitter warfare for almost two decades, and is still divided by civil war. From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company.

Both projects have since moved forward. An agreement was reached in 1999 to construct the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline; and, in 2002, a memorandum of understanding paving the way for the construction of a trans-Afghanistan natural gas pipeline was signed by the leaders of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan.

In an attempt to counter US growing hegemonic interest in the region, Russia and China, together with co-signatories, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan (coloured blue in the map), signed the ‘Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions’, forming the ‘Shanghai Five’. Uzbekistan was admitted to the group in 2001 and it became known as the The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan have all subsequently applied for membership to the SCO. At present they, together with Kazakhstan and India hold observer status (coloured green in the map).

The organisation’s declared aims are to develop a climate of regional ‘security and stability’; to promote ‘trade and economic relations among member states’; and to strengthen ‘coordination among member states on international arena’. These measures are intended to constrain the ‘three evil forces’ of ‘terrorism, separatism and extremism’; with the constraint of ‘separatism’ acting in part as a euphemism for Sino-Russian desires to prevent struggling Central Asian States from falling under Western spheres of influence.

More recently, Russia and China have begun to openly assert themselves. Russia, for example, has become increasingly reluctant to follow through on its commitment to relinquish state control of its energy reserves, and has challenged US interests in Algeria, where a recent arms deal was intricately woven into Russia’s participation in the development of Algeria’s energy production capabilities.

China has also been active in Africa, most notably in Angola, another key US supplier. Here it has helped to finance several infrastructure projects in a move that has seen Angola supplant Saudi Arabia as China’s largest exporter.

And, as reported by Reuters, China has begun ‘working on a raft of oil deals’ with Venezuela ‘giving impetus to President Hugo Chavez’s attempts to break his country’s dependence on oil exports to the United States’ and ‘stripping major US companies… of their majority stakes in heavy crude projects.’ This relationship will cause some consternation in the US, not only because of the effect it may have on US energy interests, but also because it has the potential to threaten the petrodollar’s hegemonic status. Venezuela, in common with some other major exporters to China, such as Iran, has been exploring a switch to the petroeuro as the unit of accounting for oil transactions (see also Part Two: The Bretton Woods Agreement and the Rise of the Petrodollar). If it does make this switch, it could well prompt China to step-up its diversification away from the dollar, which in turn could cause irresistible downward pressure on the US currency.

You can find out more about Peak Oil and related issues by visiting the web site of The Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO).

Exploiting the Damsel-in-Distress

2007-04-09T15:54:00.000Z

As delighted as I am by the safe return of our sailors and marines from Iran, I can’t help but feel a real sense of disappointment at their decision to sell their stories to the media. I am equally disappointed with the Ministry of Defence for its decision to allow them to sell their stories, though I’m not at all surprised.

“Look after everyone for me, especially Adam and Molly, I love you all more than you will ever know.” – Faye Turney, in her letters from Iran

In a Statement issued on Sunday (9th April), the MoD said that its decision was ‘taken as a result of exceptional media interest,’ arguing that, in any event, their ‘human interest’ stories ‘were likely to have emerged via family and friends.’ In other words, it is a fait accompli. However, to my mind, this explanation does little more than divert our attention from the real reason for the decision, which is encoded in the final paragraph (emphasis added):

It was therefore decided to grant permission to speak to the media to those personnel that sought it, in order to ensure that the Navy and the MOD had sight of what they were going to say – as well as providing proper media support to the sailors and Marines in the same way as would have been the case in more ordinary circumstances.

Maybe I’m allowing my general mistrust of authority to cloud my judgement here, but this whole episode reeks of an MoD-inspired and controlled packaging exercise. Furthermore, it seems to me that this carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign began not with the release of our service personnel, but before they were even captured.

For example, the decision by both the BBC and The Independent newspaper to interview Faye Turney on March 22nd, less than 24 hours before she was seized, looks in retrospect to have been a most auspicious one. “Faye told me that if anything happened to her, she could rely on her family and friends,” reports the BBC’s Ian Pannell. “She said she loved her job, but above all her husband and her young daughter.” Turney herself went on to add that…

…by doing this job I can give [Molly] everything she wants in life and hopefully by seeing me doing what I do, she’ll grow up knowing that a woman can have a family and can have a career at the same time.

It is notable that, despite meeting nearly all fifteen soon-to-be-hostages, Ian Pannell had virtually nothing to say about Turney’s male colleagues. And, since we’re all suckers for a damsel-in-distress, things continued in much the same vein. Throughout the crew’s 13-day ordeal, the media’s attention rarely shifted from Turney. She was even described by Reuters as the ‘human face of [the] Iran-Britain crisis’. Now, having been released, she continues to be the centre of attention.

In order to see just how central, I did a quick Google search using each of the crewmembers’ names plus ‘Iran’. Faye ‘wife to Adam, mother to Molly’ Turney generated about 1,340,000 results. There were 79,000 for Adam Sperry; 78,600 for Nathan Summers; 282,000 for Chris Air; 245,000 for Felix Carman; 84,000 for Arthur Batchelor; 15,000 for Mark Banks; 64,800 for Joe Tindell; 19,200 for Danny Masterton; 18,200 for Paul Barton; 422 for Christopher Coe; 38,600 for Simon Massey; 37,300 for Andrew Henderson; 11,900 for Dean Harris; and 24,400 for Gavin Cavendish.

The way this affair has played out is in marked contrast to the low-key manner with which the government and media responded to the seizure of eight British servicemen by Iran in 2004. The main difference, I guess, is that no women were involved and, in any case, we were too bogged down in Iraq to concern ourselves with attacking Iran.

I also can’t help but wonder whether Turney has helped to deflect our attention from Gavin Cavendish, about whom suspiciously little is known.

Reflecting on Our Relationship With Iran

2007-04-08T09:25:00.000Z

As fifteen British sailors held in Iran for 13 days arrived back in the UK, four British soldiers were reported to have been killed in a roadside bomb blast near Basra in southern Iraq.

“A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves… some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran.” - Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to the former US President Jimmy Carter, testifying before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on February 1st 2007.

For those who suspect the West is seeking to condition the public into supporting a military confrontation with Iran, Tony Blair’s reaction to news of the soldiers’ deaths was chilling. Having first stated that they were “killed as a result of a terrorist act,” he went on to add that…

…it is far too early to say that the particular terrorist act… was an act committed by terrorists that were backed by any elements of the Iranian regime, so I make no allegation in respect of that particular incident, but the general picture, as I have said before, is that there are elements, at least, of the Iranian regime that are backing, financing, arming, supporting terrorism in Iraq.

The inescapable conclusion Blair wants us to reach, despite his ostensible caution, is that Iran is guilty of vicariously murdering our troops. No mention was made of efforts to catch those directly responsible. Instead he chose to implicate Iran in a manner that was reminiscent of the Bush administration’s campaign to link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks ahead of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

He even attempted to compound our sense of outrage by asserting that this was an act of terrorism. However, in so doing, he has somehow robbed the term of any real meaning. If soldiers can be victims of a terrorist attack in a conflict such as the one in Iraq, then it is hard to imagine a definition of ‘terrorism’ that doesn’t cast the soldiers themselves and even Western governments as terrorists.

But most significant of all, was his observation that “[t]his is maybe the right moment to reflect on our relationship with Iran…” This rather sombre suggestion will have caused some alarm in Iran. They suspect the West of looking to stir up anti-Persian sentiment at every opportunity as a prelude to military intervention. This suspicion is further fuelled by recent allegations that the US is running covert operations in the region aimed at destabilising the Iranian government. Indeed, the speaker of their parliament recently accused the CIA of backing Jundullah, a militant Pakistani Islamist group with ties to both al Qaeda and the Taliban, which is believed to be responsible for a string of terrorist attacks against Iranian targets. The CIA is also alleged to be funding the Kurdistan Free Life Party, an armed Kurdish nationalist organisation that is opposed to the government of Iran; and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (aka MEK), which seeks to replace the government of Iran with its own leadership.

As frustrating as this must be to the Iranians, it won’t come as much of a surprise; the CIA does have a history of meddling in Iranian affairs. The most famous example, the 1953 joint Anglo-American plot known as Operation Ajax (or TPAJAX), led to the overthrow of then democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, and the installation of the ‘preferred’ General Fazlollah Zahedi. According to an account prepared in 1954 by one of the plot's architects, Dr. Donald N. Wilber, the Allies had decided by the end of 1952 that…

…it had become clear that the Mossadeq government in Iran was incapable of reaching an oil settlement with interested Western countries; was reaching a dangerous and advanced stage of illegal, deficit financing; was disregarding the Iranian constitution in prolonging Premier Mohammed Mossadeq's tenure of office; was motivated mainly by Mossadeq's desire for personal power; was governed by irresponsible policies based on emotion; had weakened the Shah and the Iranian Army to a dangerous degree; and had cooperated closely with the Tudeh (Communist) Party of Iran.

But most of this is ‘padding’. In truth, we need look no further than the first and last ‘justification’ for the Allies’ motivation. For the US, it was the threat posed by the possibility that Iran would fall under Soviet influence; and for the British, who originally proposed the plot, it was the need to reverse some of the damage caused by Mossadeq’s decision to nationalise the country’s oil industry.

Nowadays, the West’s belligerence is predicated upon the hypothetical threat posed by a nuclear Iran, backed up by the allegation that Iranian elements are supporting insurgents within Iraq. Less widely publicised is Iran’s insistence that it be paid in petroeuros rather than petrodollars for its oil exports to Asia and Europe (see The Bretton Woods Agreement and the Rise of the Petrodollar).

It won’t have escaped anyone’s attention that there’s a great deal of oil there either.

AA Flight 77 - Timeline and Shoot Down Order

2007-04-04T13:19:00.000Z

At 9:37 EDT on September 11th 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 was reported to have crashed into the Pentagon building in Washington DC. More than five years have passed and there is still a great deal of confusion over what really happened.

Whilst the debate about whether or not an aircraft actually hit the building rages, a number of other issues have slipped under the radar. One - the matter of who knew what and when - is replete with troubling contradictions and loose ends. This is a brief look at some of them.

“We, to this day, don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us. It was just so far from the truth.” - Thomas H. Kean, 9/11 Commission Chairman

When NORAD’s Colonel Alan Scott gave evidence to the 9/11 Commission on 23rd May 2003, he explained that…

[a]t 9:24 the FAA reports a possible hijack of 77. That’s sometime after they had been tracking this primary target. And at that moment as well is when the Langley F-16s were scrambled out of Langley.

Scott’s account is consistent with evidence provided by the FAA in the form of a written submission to the Commission entitled, ‘FAA Communications with NORAD on September 11th, 2001’. This was read out during the same hearing (emphasis mine).

Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges that included FAA field facilities, the FAA command center, FAA headquarters, DOD, the Secret Service and other government agencies. The U.S. Air Force liaison to the FAA immediately joined the FAA headquarters phone bridge and established contact with NORAD on a separate line. The FAA shared real-time information on the phone bridges about the unfolding events, including information about loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest, including Flight 77. Other parties on the phone bridges in turn shared information about actions they were taken. NORAD logs indicate that the FAA made formal notification about American Flight 77 at 9:24 a.m. But information about the flight was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges before the formal notification.

NORAD’s logs do indeed corroborate the FAA’s claim. A news release, dated September 18th 2001, sets out the timelines for NORAD’s response to the hijackings, and includes the following information:

American Flight 77 - Dulles enroute to Los Angeles

FAA Notification to NEADS – 0924

Fighter Scramble - Order (Langley AFB, Hampton, Va. 2 F-16s) – 0924

Fighters Airborne 0930

Airline Impact Time (Pentagon) - 0937(estimated)

Fighter Time/Distance from Airline Impact Location - approx 12 min/105 miles

However, in its final report, the 9/11 Commission found that (emphasis mine)…

[a]t the suggestion of the Boston Center’s military liaison, NEADS contacted the FAA’s Washington Center to ask about American 11. In the course of the conversation, a Washington Center manager informed NEADS: “We’re looking – we also lost American 77.” The time was 9:34. This was the first notice to the military that American 77 was missing, and it had come by chance. If NEADS had not placed that call, the NEADS air defenders would have received no information whatsoever that the flight was missing, although the FAA had been searching for it. No one at FAA headquarters ever asked for military assistance with American 77.

It explained these timeline discrepancies away by stating that the ‘notice NEADS received at 9:24 was that American 11 had not hit the World Trade Center and was heading for Washington, D.C.’ It goes on to point out that ‘[i]n fact… NEADS never received notice that Flight 77 was hijacked’ but was reported simply as ‘lost’ at 9:34.

Thus the ‘phantom’ Flight 11 theory was born. No evidence was presented during any of the testimonial hearings to support this assertion; it was only uncovered by the Commission after studying taped conversations, logs and other records. Intriguingly, they were ‘unable to identify the source of this mistaken FAA information.’

These contradictions are perplexing. However, up to this point, the Commission’s timeline carries a greater degree of authority by virtue of our inclination to trust contemporaneous sources over oral testimony. But when you add the testimony of then US Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta to the mix, we must conclude that either the Commission’s findings are flawed; the veracity of its source material was questionable; or else Mineta’s account was not only inaccurate, but was a total fabrication.

Mineta testified that he entered the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) at 9:20am and found Vice President Dick Cheney already in charge. Here is a condensed version of Mineta’s exchange with Commission Vice Chairman, Lee Hamilton.

MR. HAMILTON: I wanted to focus just a moment on the Presidential Emergency Operating Center. You were there for a good part of the day. I think you were there with the vice president. And when you had that order given, I think it was by the president, that authorized the shooting down of commercial aircraft that were suspected to be controlled by terrorists, were you there when that order was given?

MR. MINETA: No, I was not. I was made aware of it during the time that the airplane [was] coming into the Pentagon. There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, “The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to, “The plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the vice president, “Do the orders still stand?” And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?” [during the course of his testimony, Mineta says that this series of exchanges began “Probably about five or six minutes” after entering the PEOC] Well, at the time I didn’t know what all that meant. And –

MR. HAMILTON: The flight you’re referring to is the –

MR. MINETA: The flight that came into the Pentagon.

MR. HAMILTON: Let me see if I understand. The plane that was headed toward the Pentagon and was some miles away, there was an order to shoot that plane down.

MR. MINETA: Subsequently I found that out.

Although Mineta’s Flight 77 timeline is at odds with the Commission’s findings, it is in strong agreement with the testimony given by Scott, the FAA and NORAD. It also appears to be supported by the NTSB’s ‘Flight Path Study - American Airlines Flight 77’, which is based upon an analysis of the Flight Data Recorder recovered from the scene. It states that…

[a]t approximately 9:29 AM, when the aircraft was approximately 35 miles west of the Pentagon, the autopilot was disconnected (f) as the aircraft leveled near 7000 feet.

This ties in well with Mineta’s claim that the aircraft was 50 miles out at or around 9:26 and suggests he was indeed in the PEOC when he said he was. And, unless Mineta is inexplicably mistaken, Cheney must also have been present at that time. This leaves us wondering how the Commission reached the conclusion that ‘the Vice President arrived in the [PEOC] shortly before 10:00, perhaps at 9:58.’ According to its ‘NOTES TO CHAPTER 1’, the source of this information was the Shelter Log. No mention is made of Mineta’s testimony throughout the whole of the Commission’s final report.

It also leaves us wondering about the true nature of what Lee Hamilton referred to as, ‘an order to shoot that plane down’. Based upon Mineta’s description of the exchange between Cheney and the aide, it is hard to believe that it was a shoot down order. If it had been, why would the aide have asked repeatedly if the order still stood? Surely such an order, having been given, would have stood until such time as the aircraft had either been shot down or else crashed.

A more logical conclusion is that Cheney gave a stand down order, perhaps at a time prior to Mineta’s arrival in the PEOC, when the aircraft’s destination was unclear. This would explain why the aide became increasingly anxious as the aircraft closed in on Washington. Furthermore, if this interpretation is correct, we can also infer that fighters were within striking distance of the inbound aircraft from at least 50 miles out; why else would the aide continue to ask if the order still stood unless the military were capable of acting upon a change to that order?

There is no public record of Cheney’s testimony to the Commission. It was given under the condition that he would not be required to take an oath; that his testimony would not be recorded; and that, whilst the Commission’s staff could take notes, they were not to be made public.

Which is a pity, because I feel sure he would have been able to shed some light on this episode.

NOTES:

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) describes itself as ‘a bi-national United States and Canadian organization charged with the missions of aerospace warning and aerospace control for North America.’

According to Wikipedia, The Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS), is a component of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). It is responsible for providing detection and air defense for the U.S. states north of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, with the sector's western perimeter running midway through the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and the western part of Kansas, slicing the panhandle of Oklahoma, and ending at the Red River on the northern border of Texas. The eastern perimeter of the sector is the Atlanta Ocean, and the northern perimeter is the Canadian border.

NEADS is operated by the Air National Guard (ANG) and reports to the Continental U.S. NORAD Region (CONR) headquarters, in Panama City, Florida, which in turn reports to NORAD headquarters, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lists Airspace and Air Traffic Management among its activities. Its role is to ensure ‘[t]he safe and efficient use of navigable airspace’ by operating ‘a network of airport towers, air route traffic control centers, and flight service stations.’ It also ‘develop[s] air traffic rules, assign[s] the use of airspace, and control[s] air traffic.’

Part Four: Operation Cyclone and the CIA's Connection to Tim Osman

2007-04-03T01:05:00.000Z

Previous - Part Three: Operation Gladio and The Strategy of Tension

Competition between Russia and the West – initially the British Empire - for supremacy in Central Asia began in the early 19th century with ‘The Great Game’.

Fearful that Imperial Russia might threaten its dominance of the Indian sub-continent, the British attempted to establish Afghanistan as a buffer state. By 1884, a combination of repeated local resistance and continued Russian expansion brought the two countries to the brink of war. Although war was averted and tensions eased with the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention (1907), the period of detente soon ended with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Afghanistan subsequently signed a Treaty of Friendship with the newly formed Russian Soviet Republic and achieved political self-determination. This marked the beginning of a steady decline in British influence in Afghanistan.

After World War II, Britain was emasculated as an imperial force. An empowered United States, in line with the Truman Doctrine, sought to assert its influence in Central Asia. Its goals, however, were not simply to contain Soviet expansion, but also to develop and protect its energy interests in the region.

“We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Cater

With Britain and Soviet Russia otherwise occupied, Afghanistan enjoyed a long period of relative stability. However, in 1973, the former Prime Minister, Mohammad Daoud Khan, seized power in a coup d’etat alleging government corruption and economic mismanagement. Daoud departed from tradition and replaced the Monarchy with a Republic, but he ran a repressive regime and failed to deliver the promised economic reforms. He also pursued a pro-Western policy, much to the chagrin of Soviet Premier, Leonid Brezhnev, who in turn encouraged the hitherto divided Communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) to re-unite.

At the same, the KGB began attempts to orchestrate a coup against Daoud. They sponsored riots, which broke out on the streets of Kabul in late 1977 and early 1978. The government responded by arresting several prominent PDPA members, one of whom, Mir Akhbar Khyber, was charged with being a KGB spy. When he was killed in custody, the KGB pointed the finger of blame at Daoud, claiming he had ordered the execution. Khyber’s funeral subsequently became the rallying-point for a mass demonstration of Communist unity against Daoud and his government. Daoud responded by ordering the arrest of the PDPA’s leadership, but he was too slow; on April 27, 1978, he was overthrown and executed (see The Saur Revolution). Nur Muhammad Taraki, the Secretary General of the PDPA, then became the first Communist leader of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Taraki’s government immediately began the process of reform. It laid out a Marxist agenda, which included land and education reforms, as well as more liberal attitudes towards women. These were seen as an affront to the traditional rural and feudal Afghan way of life; they were also seen as an attack on Islam. By mid-1978, mujahideen insurgents had already established a base in Pakistan and had turned to the West, in particular the United States, for support. Meanwhile, large parts of the country had revolted and the PDPA responded with disproportionate aggression, fuelling the rebellion and causing around half of the army to either desert or join with the insurgency.

In September 1979, Taraki was killed and Deputy Prime Minister, Hafizullah Amin, took control. Soviet leaders soon began to question his loyalty to Moscow following reports that he was purging the opposition of Soviet sympathisers and that he was a CIA agent. Indeed, the Soviets strongly suspected that the CIA had, for some time, been active within Afghanistan. On 27th December 1979, they intervened militarily in support of the Communist revolution.

The Soviet’s suspicion was later confirmed by the then US National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998.

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the National Security Adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” - English proverb

In January 2005, the US Department of State published the CIA’s response to the hypothetical question: Has the CIA ever provided funding, training, or other support to Usama Bin Laden?

No. Numerous comments in the media recently have reiterated a widely circulated but incorrect notion that the CIA once had a relationship with Usama Bin Laden. For the record, you should know that the CIA never employed, paid, or maintained any relationship whatsoever with Bin Laden (emphasis in original)

More broadly, the Department of State asserted that…

The United States did not “create” Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda. The United States supported the Afghans fighting for their country’s freedom -- as did other countries, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, Egypt, and the UK -- but the United States did not support the “Afghan Arabs,” the Arabs and other Muslims who came to fight in Afghanistan for broader goals.

However, there is evidence to suggest that, not only did both the CIA and the US government have a relationship with Osama bin Laden, but that they were rather important ones.

The CIA’s support of the Islamic mujahideen (Operation Cyclone) relied heavily on the intermediation of Pakistani secret service agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Much of that support, whether in the form of recruits, finance or equipment, was distributed by the ISI to the mujahideen via Maktab al Khidamar (MAK), which was founded by Dr Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden (allegedly pictured above with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Advisor).

Between 1979 and 1992, the CIA is said to have helped train over 100,000 Islamic insurgents at a cost of up to $20 billion. In his book, ‘Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism’, John Cooley reveals that some insurgents were recruited in the US and were sent to the CIA’s spy training camp in Virginia, Camp Peary, where they received paramilitary training. Other ‘unqualified applicants’ were brought into the US using visas issued illicitly by the CIA, according to comments made by Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, during a radio interview on July 3rd 2002.

CBC: So what do you think you were dealing with here; it all sounds a bit like a case of visa fraud perhaps, but why to you think there was anything more than that?

Springman: Well initially I thought that is what it was. There was visa fraud. I had been told by one contact that the price for a visa at the American consulate was the equivalent of $2500 US. But once I got back to the United States, and was out of the foreign service, I ran across a couple of people with ties to the American government, that told me another story; that the CIA was recruiting fighters for the Afghan war against the then Soviets, and that their asset, Osama bin Laden was working with them. They had a recruiting office in Jeddah, they had a recruiting office in Riyadh, and third one somewhere in the Eastern province. And they would send these people to Jeddah, the fifth largest visa issuing post in the Middle East, for visas. They would apparently run these people straight over from their recruiting office over to my visa window. Well obviously, when they were not good solid businessmen, or good upstanding upper class people I would refuse them.

CBC: How many would you estimate that got into the United States that shouldn’t have through this back door?

Springman: Well, in my case I would say as many as 100.

CBC: And when you questioned them, what would they say were their reasons for expecting to get a visa with such slight credentials?

Springman: There was one instance of two Pakistanis who came to me, and they wanted to got to an American auto parts trade show. They couldn’t name the show, and they couldn’t name the city in which it was going to be held. And then the case officer came over and called me on the phone, and said, “Give them a visa”. I said “No, it doesn’t wash”. “Well, we need it, I’m sorry.” Then he went to the head of the consular section and got me overruled, and they got their visas. But when I complained to the powers in the consulate, and the people in Riyadh, I was told to keep quiet, that there was reasons for doing this, that it wasn’t a case of my poor judgment, it was this and it was that. This simply fueled my suspicions that something untoward was going on.

CBC: Was there ever any pattern to these applicants that you could see? To their situations, their skills, their nationalities?

Springman: They seemed to basically people with no real skills. Their nationalities for the most part were Pakistani, Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese. They were young, in their 20s and their 30s say, and they seemed to have no ties to any place in particular.

CBC: Where did Afghanistan seem to fit into this whole pattern? Because it seems they were going to the US to collect or be rewarded for some past deed, or to be trained for another. Where did Afghanistan fit in?

Springman: Afghanistan was the end user of their facilities. My sources told me that they were coming to the United States for training as terrorists, and they would be sent back to Afghanistan. But then the countries that had originally supplied them certainly didn’t want them back. These were people that had been given skills in overthrowing governments, destroying armored columns and things like this, and the various governments in the region frankly didn’t want them back, because they thought they might apply these skills at home.

Michael Springman’s assertion that Osama bin Laden was a CIA asset is corroborated by claims made in an article by J. Orlin Grabbe. Grabbe describes a meeting that took place in 1986 at the Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks, California. This meeting was arranged at the behest of officials within President Ronald Reagan’s administration, who were pushing for arms supplies to the mujahideen to be accelerated. It was said to have been attended by Ted Gunderson, a retired FBI Senior Special Agent; Michael Riconosciuto, a weapons and explosives expert with links to the CIA; Ralph Oberg, who worked at the Afghan desk at the State Department; and Tim Osman, which Grabbe claims was ‘the name assigned to [Osama bin Laden] by the CIA for his tour of the U.S. and U.S. military bases, in search of political support and armaments’ (see ITEM 1 of what is purported to be an official document supporting this claim).

Next - Part Five: Peak Oil and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

Part Three: Operation Gladio and The Strategy of Tension

2007-04-03T01:04:00.000Z

Previous - Part Two: The Bretton Woods Agreement and the Rise of the Petrodollar

On March 12th 1947, US President Harry S Truman addressed a joint session of Congress and spoke about the need to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

Thus he encapsulated the ‘Truman Doctrine’; ostensibly a defensive containment policy aimed at limiting the expansion of Communism in post-war Europe. Truman subsequently signed the National Security Act of 1947, restructuring both the military and Intelligence communities, and creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

“I never heard of [Operation Northwoods]. I can’t believe the chiefs were talking about or engaged in what I would call CIA-type operations.” – Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary to President John F Kennedy

Initially, the CIA was responsible for psychological warfare. According to the National Security Council, “[t]he similarity of operational methods involved in covert psychological and intelligence activities and the need to ensure their secrecy and obviate costly duplication renders the Central Intelligence Agency the logical agency to conduct such operations.” Some within the Intelligence community had argued for a wider remit, including the reintroduction of the offensive covert paramilitary capability that had served the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), so well during World War II. Although the National Security Act did not explicitly authorise such activities, it did contain a catch-all clause, allowing the CIA to ‘perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.’ This rather ambiguous authority, coupled with the fact that the CIA had control of unvouchered funds, gave the organisation some latitude and meant that not all projects or project costs need be subject to Congressional scrutiny.

However attitudes hardened when, in early 1948, the Communist party seized political control in Czechoslovakia. National Security Council Directive 10/2 was introduced. It broadened the CIA’s responsibilities and established The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). The OPC was given direct access to both the State Department and the military without being required to work through the CIA’s administrative hierarchy. This revised mandate for the first time explicitly authorised the CIA to plan and conduct covert operations…

…which are conducted or sponsored by this government against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and conducted that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorised persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Covert action shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.

“…the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret.” - Robert Parry, investigative reporter and author

Operation Gladio (and, ultimately, the Strategy of Tension) has its roots in the Truman Doctrine. Against a background of post-war poverty in Europe, Communism began to flourish. Communist parties enjoyed considerable electoral success, even in Western states such as Italy and France, where it became the largest single party. In response, Truman’s original pledge of military assistance to Europe was augmented by the Marshall Plan. NATO was also formed around this time, superseding the Treaty of Brussels. These developments prompted the US Department of State to undertake a review of US strategic policy and military programmes. The resulting plan, NSC-8, was signed by Truman in 1950 and signalled a shift from passive to active containment.

NCS-68 contrasted the fundamental purpose of America, which was to ‘assure the integrity and vitality of our free society’, with the Soviet’s perceived goal of bringing about ‘the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin.’

It further argued that ‘[p]ractical and ideological considerations therefore both impel us to the conclusion that we have no choice but to demonstrate the superiority of the idea of freedom by its constructive application, and to attempt to change the world situation by means short of war in such a way as to frustrate the Kremlin design and hasten the decay of the Soviet system.’ Such was the zeitgeist into which Operation Gladio was born.

Operation Gladio was originally conceived by Allen Dulles, who went on to become the first civilian Director of the CIA. It was the Italian code name given to NATO’s clandestine stay-behind armies, which were left across Europe after the war to better train partisan groups to counter the threat of Communist expansion. Initially, these armies were coordinated solely by the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC) until, upon the orders of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), a second command centre was formed in the shape of the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC).

These stay-behind armies later became key backers in what was known in Italy as the Strategy of Tension. This right wing, anti-Communist programme was aimed at preventing the increasingly popular Italian Communist Party from participating in a governing coalition. It lasted for over a decade. Throughout the campaign, Gladio members employed both violent and non-violent methods to manipulate public opinion against the Party, often committing false flag attacks and then blaming them on Communist insurgents. These were conducted indiscriminately against both civilian and non-civilian targets, and included the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, the 1972 Peteano car bombing, the attempted assassination of former Interior Minister Mariano Rumor and the 1980 Bologna massacre.

Gladio first came to light in August 1990, when then Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti gave testimony to a Senate subcommittee investigation into terrorism in Italy. Andreotti revealed that the secret army had been hidden within the Defence Ministry as a sub-section of the SISMI and its predecessor, the SOIS, Italy’s military secret service. This revelation infuriated the former Director of SIOS, Vito Miceli, who had “gone to prison because I did not want to reveal the existence of this super secret organization.” An organisation, which according to Vincenzo Vinciguerra, one of the 1972 Peteano car bombers, was required to “attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game [in order to force] the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.” Subsequent investigations have since revealed that Gladio-style armies also operated in Belgium (SDRA8), Denmark (Absalon), Germany (TD BJD), Greece (LOK), Luxembourg (Stay-Behind), the Netherlands (I&O), Norway (ROC), Portugal (Aginter), Switzerland (P26), Turkey (Counter-Guerrilla), Sweden (AGAG), and Austria (OWSGV).

Following these disclosures, the European Parliament issued a Joint resolution condemning Gladio.

A. having regard to the revelation by several European governments of the existence for 40 years of a clandestine parallel intelligence and armed operations organization in several Member States of the Community,

B. whereas for over 40 years this organization has escaped all democratic controls and has been run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO,

C. fearing the danger that such clandestine network may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States or may still do so,

D. whereas in certain Member States military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime as evidenced by, various judicial inquiries,

E. whereas these organizations operated and continue to operate completely outside the law since they are not subject to any parliamentary control and frequently those holding the highest government and constitutional posts are kept in the dark as to these matters,

F. whereas the various 'Gladio' organizations have at their disposal independent arsenals and military resources which give them an unknown strike potential, thereby jeopardizing the democratic structures of the countries in which they are operating or have been operating,

G. greatly concerned at the existence of decision-making and operational bodies which are not subject to any form of democratic control and are of a completely clandestine nature at a time when greater Community cooperation in the field of security is a constant subject of discussion,

1. Condemns the clandestine creation of manipulative and operational networks and Calls for a full investigation into the nature, structure, aims and all other aspects of these clandestine organizations or any splinter groups, their use for illegal interference in the internal political affairs of the countries concerned, the problem of terrorism in Europe and the possible collusion of the secret services of Member States or third countries;

2. Protests vigorously at the assumption by certain US military personnel at SHAPE and in NATO of the right to encourage the establishment in Europe of a clandestine intelligence and operation network;

3. Calls on the governments of the Member States to dismantle all clandestine military and paramilitary networks;

4. Calls on the judiciaries of the countries in which the presence of such military organizations has been ascertained to elucidate fully their composition and modus operandi and to clarify any action they may have taken to destabilize the democratic structure of the Member States;

5. Requests all the Member States to take the necessary measures, if necessary by establishing parliamentary committees of inquiry, to draw up a complete list of organizations active in this field, and at the same time to monitor their links with the respective state intelligence services and their links, if any, with terrorist action groups and/or other illegal practices;

6. Calls on the Council of Ministers to provide full information on the activities of these secret intelligence and operational services;

7. Calls on its competent committee to consider holding a hearing in order to clarify the role and impact of the 'Gladio' organization and any similar bodies;

8. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Commission, the Council, the Secretary-General of NATO, the governments of the Member States and the United States Government.

An Italian Senate report published in 2000, found that ‘[t]hose massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organised or promoted or supported…by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.’

You can read more about NATO’s stay-behind armies in Daniele Ganser’s book, ‘NATO's secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe.’

Next - Part Four: Operation Cyclone and the CIA's Connection with Tim Osman

Part Two: The Bretton Woods Agreement and the Rise of the Petrodollar

2007-04-03T00:45:00.000Z

Previous - Part One: The Day the World Changed

If the McCollum Memo set out the means by which America would be drawn into World War II, the Bretton Woods Agreement and its precursor, The Atlantic Charter, set out the motivation.

When World War II broke out, President Franklin D Roosevelt’s interventionist stance was in marked contrast to the isolationist sentiment held by a great many Americans. Whilst they feared a repeat of the sacrifices made during World War I, he feared that, if allowed to succeed in Europe, the Axis powers would “be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against [the Western] hemisphere.” But he also recognised that intervention would leave the US in a position to exploit an economically exhausted post-war Europe – one that would ultimately be forced to abandon the protectionist measures that had hitherto frustrated US access to the global marketplace. With that in mind, and although somewhat politically constrained, he began to look for ways to support the Allied effort.

“Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

By mid-1940, Germany had overrun France and the Low Countries. A resource-depleted Britain stood alone and vulnerable. On September 2nd 1940, and in defiance of the Neutrality Acts, the US agreed to transfer fifty destroyers to the British Royal Navy under the terms of The Destroyers for Bases Agreement. In exchange, the US was granted the lease of land on various British possessions, “freely and without consideration”, for the “establishment and use of naval and air bases and facilities for entrance thereto and the operation and protection thereof.”

Sensing that America’s isolationist resolve was waning, Roosevelt used his Great Arsenal of Democracy fireside speech of December 29th 1940 to argue that there was “far less chance of the United States getting into war if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis.” He continued this theme in his State of the Union Address (also known as the Four Freedoms speech) on January 6th 1941 “[A]t no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today,” he declared, before insisting that US “policy should be devoted primarily - almost exclusively - to meeting this foreign peril.”

His perseverance paid dividends. On March 11th 1941, in a move that would prove critical to the Allies’ eventual success, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act . This Act entitled the President to authorise the “manufacture [of defense articles] in arsenals, factories, and shipyards, [and] sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease [or] lend” them to “the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” Although primarily intended to help Britain, Lend-Lease appropriations totalling around $50 billion were eventually extended to more than 40 nations by the end of the war.

Almost immediately, those responsible for administering the Lend-Lease program sought to clarify the “extent to which [their] Government intends to commit itself with reference to the defeat of the Axis powers.” On July 9th, 1941, Roosevelt made his position clear by asking both the Secretary of War and the Secretary of Navy to either in person, or through appointed representatives, explore “the overall production requirements required to defeat our potential enemies.” Preparation of the so-called ‘Victory Program’ was well under way by the time Roosevelt sat down with British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, at the Atlantic Conference to discuss the Anglo-American alliance.

“To do it full justice, one must describe the arrangement itself as an instrument of American domination.” – Daniel Singer, author of Whose Millennium, Theirs or ours?

On August 14th, Roosevelt and Churchill issued a joint statement setting out their vision for a post-war Europe. As well as seeking to establish ‘a wider and permanent system of general security’, the Atlantic Charter also contained measures aimed at tearing down the barriers to free trade. It called for ‘all States, great or small, victor or vanquished’, to be granted…

access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity;

…to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the objector securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security;

…[to] enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance;

Nearly three years later, and with the war drawing to a close, these free trade principles took a broader and more substantive form under the terms of the Bretton Woods Agreement. US policymakers understood that their own strong economy, which was based on a sustained period of uninterrupted military spending, must be used to drive global economic growth and prosperity in the post-war era. Without a market for exported goods, the US economy itself would be vulnerable. As Daniel Singer explains…

[o]n paper the draftsmen set up a multilateral, international institution to deal with the financial problems of the world. At its heart was the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was to authorize the very exceptional adjustments in the fixed rates of exchange, but also to act as a supplier of liquidity. (Gradually it became a lender of last resort.) It was to fulfill this function thanks to a fund filled by members’ contributions according to a complex mechanism of quotas, determined by the given country’s economic strength, which also signaled the amount of money that country could borrow. To show accurately the crucial role of the United States, it is not enough to point out that the American quota in the IMF, by far the biggest, prevented any decision from being taken without Washington’s consent or even to stress that the new monetary arrangement was in fact a gold-dollar exchange standard, since all currencies were linked to the dollar valued at $35 per ounce of gold. To do it full justice, one must describe the arrangement itself as an instrument of American domination.

Thus the US exerted its predominance and Europe had little option but to acquiesce.

Initially, the Bretton Woods system worked well, with America’s economic strength providing a stable foundation upon which the world could emerge from the post-war doldrums. Dollars flowed out into the world economy through the institutions established under the agreement, as well as through US aid programmes such as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. This in turn created more vibrant overseas markets for US corporations to tap in to. Before long, over half of the world’s international money transactions were dollar denominated, establishing it as the de facto global reserve currency.

However, by the late 1960’s, the system was in danger of collapse. The ability of the US to underwrite its military spending was predicated upon a world market without competition. The emergence of Germany and Japan as economic rivals, coupled with the spiralling inflation associated with the cost of persecuting the Vietnam War, upset the balance and led the US into a period of relative economic decline.

Dollar-holding countries, worried that the value of the US currency would plummet, began exchanging their reserves for gold. In August 1971, with dollars flooding back into the US and its gold supply greatly diminished, President Richard Nixon abandoned the gold standard, allowing market forces to determine the dollar’s floating value. Without firm backing, the dollar became volatile and inflation soared higher, fuelled by an ever-increasing wartime debt. At this point, the US looked for other ways of encouraging the rest of the world to accept dollars and then hold on to them.

The answer came in the form of ‘petrodollar recycling’. In 1974, through his close relationship with their royal family, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger persuaded Saudi Arabia to price its oil exports exclusively in US dollars. Thereafter, any nation wanting to purchase oil was required to pay for it in dollars. But since Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations could earn more from oil exports than they could invest in their own economies, they bought US Treasury bonds and deposited their surplus dollars in US banks where it was held as reserve currency. These banks then lent the money on to other countries through the dollar-denominated IMF, and they in turn used much of it to buy oil.

The effect of this ‘recycling’ is that oil-purchasing countries are required to hold considerable dollar reserves and sustain a trade surplus in order to do so. Conversely, the US can afford to run an enormous trade deficit on the back of its dollar exports. In simplistic terms, the US gets its oil for free. For example the US buys goods valued at $1 from Japan. Japan buys $1 of oil from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia buys a $1 debt instrument from the US. The US can now recycle that $1 to buy oil. Meantime, when Japan has more goods to sell, the US simply 'creates' more dollars. In practice, the US only pays the amounts required to both service the debt and ‘create’ the dollars.

But such an arrangement can only continue for so long as the petrodollar’s hegemonic status remains unchallenged. Saddam Hussein’s decision to switch the unit of accounting for all Iraqi oil transactions to the petroeuro in 2000 amounted to just such a challenge. Some argue it was one of the key factors behind the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, following which, the policy was quickly reversed. However, a number of other countries have since openly explored the possibility of a switch, including Libya, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and, perhaps most notably in the context of recent events, Iran (see also Part Five: Peak Oil and The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation).

You can read more about Iranian plans to switch to the petroeuro in William Clark’s essay, Iran’s New Oil Trade System Challenges U.S. Currency.

Next - Part Three: Operation Gladio and The Strategy of Tension

Part One: 9/11 - The Day the World Changed

2007-03-24T09:51:00.000Z

At 08:46 EDT on September 11th 2001, the world changed forever. American Airlines Flight 11 was reported to have flown into WTC-1; America was under attack.

In the immediate aftermath, few people had any qualms about hunting down the alleged mastermind, Osama bin Laden. But there were some doubters. Over the years, their numbers have swollen. According to a Zogby International poll, dated August 30th 2004, 49.3% of New York residents believe that the US government ‘knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act.’ Another Zogby International poll, dated 24th May 2006, revealed that 42% of Americans ‘...believe that the US government and its 9/11 Commission concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks, saying there has been a cover-up.’ Type “9/11 conspiracy” into a search engine today and you’ll find some 2,500,000 results, many of them arguing that, not only did the US government know of the attacks in advance, but that some elements actually played an instrumental part in planning and executing them.

The purpose of this, the first in a series of articles, is to try to understand what has led some to think the unthinkable. This is by no means an exhaustive study, nor is it intended to be conclusive. Readers are encouraged to follow the links provided and draw their own conclusions.

~~~~~

“Naturally the common people don't want war: Neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” - Herman Goering.

In November 1997, the John F Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board declassified a quantity of previously secret military records. Among them one that has become known as the ‘Northwoods Document’. This document set out a plan, codenamed Operation Northwoods, which was designed to persuade both the American public and the international community to support US military action against Cuba.

This plan, incorporating projects selected from the attached suggestions, or from other sources, should be developed to focus all efforts on a specific ultimate objective which would provide adequate justification for US military intervention. Such a plan would enable a logical build up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States. This plan would also properly integrate and time phase the courses of action to be pursued. The desired resultant from the execution of the plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western hemisphere.

This is a description of one of the plan’s most disturbing ‘projects’.

It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civilian aircraft enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any group of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

a. An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civilian aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

b. Take off times of the drone and the scheduled aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly to an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone craft meanwhile will continue to fly he filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will being transmitting to the international distress frequency a “MAY DAY” message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to “sell” the incident.

Other ‘projects’ or ‘incidents’ that were considered included:

A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.

Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.

Lob mortar shells from outside the base into base; Some damage to installations.

Sabotage ships in harbour; large fires – napthalene.

We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.

We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even Washington.

We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated).

…the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement…

A “Cuban-based, Castro-supported” filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation…

The plan was approved and signed off on by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, in March 1962. It was, however, subsequently rejected, though it is not known for certain by whom. President Kennedy’s then Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, has always claimed not to have known of the plan’s existence, which suggests that President Kennedy himself rejected the plan.

One interesting point of note is that, in an interview with the Baltimore Sun (archived at Yorkshire Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) back in April 2001, Robert McNamara said: “I never heard of it. I can’t believe the chiefs were talking about or engaged in what I would call CIA-type operations.” His characterisation of Operation Northwoods as a ‘CIA-type’ operation is significant. It hints at what was considered typical and attaches a sense of legitimacy to the planners’ purpose.

As disturbing as the Northwoods Document is, ‘false flag’ operations are not uncommon. It is widely believed, for example, that the Reichstag Fire of 1933, which occurred in Germany just a few days before the 5th March elections, was a self-inflicted wound. Similarly, the 1954 Lavon Affair (or Operation Suzannah) and the Gleiwitz Incident of August 1939 are both believed to have been false flag attacks. Others are not so much single events as campaigns, as was the case with the Strategy of Tension (backed by a NATO stay-behind operation known as Operation Gladio) as well as the recent (unsubstantiated) claims made by the murdered Russian spy, Alexander Litvinenko, that the Russian government had committed acts of domestic terrorism and blamed them on the Chechnyans.

“By the time you become the leader of a country, someone else makes all the decisions. You may find you can get away with Virtual Presidents, Virtual Prime Ministers, and Virtual Everything.” - Bill Clinton

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was established in 1997. It describes itself as a non-profit, educational organisation. Its stated aim is to promote American global leadership. More specifically, it called for the ‘need to increase defense spending significantly’. This is necessary to both, ‘challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values’, and ‘accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.’

Among it members, past and present, are Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Aaron Friedberg, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

Since its inception, PNAC has published various books, policy documents and letters. Perhaps the best known is a report entitled ‘Rebuilding America's Defenses’ (RAD), dated September 2000. This document appears to demonstrate that several of those who subsequently went on to become key policy-shapers within President Bush’s administration were, in advance of the 2000 election, drawing up plans to take military control of the Gulf region. According to PNAC, this American hegemony in the Middle East (or pax Americana) would serve, among other things, to protect ‘enduring American interests in the region.’

However, PNAC was acutely aware that the strategic ‘transformation’ of the U.S. military required to ‘fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars’ would take time and would necessitate a huge increase in defence spending. They estimated this additional amount to be between $15 billion to $20 billion per annum. They articulated both the problem and solution most succinctly in Chapter V of RAD, entitled ‘Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force’, by suggesting that ‘the 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.’

On the face of it, that seems benign enough, if perhaps a little insensitive. But for those familiar with the ‘McCollum Memo’, this particular evocation of the horrors associated with Pearl Harbor is a cause for some alarm.

“In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor precipitated America’s immediate entry into World War II. Up until that point, public opinion towards entering the war had been divided. Pearl Harbor closed those divisions and caused Americans to unite. But did the attack really come as a surprise?

On October 7 1940, Lt. Com. Arthur McCollum, of the Office of Naval Intelligence, submitted a list of recommendations concerning America’s strategy in the Pacific to Navy Captains Walter Anderson and Dudley Knox, two of President Roosevelt’s most trusted military advisers. The memo outlined an eight-point plan apparently aimed at provoking Japan into attacking the United States. Throughout 1941, President Roosevelt implemented all eight recommendations and, on December 7th, Japan attacked.

Here is an extract from that memo (emphasis mine).

9. It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado; and it is barely possible that vigorous action on our part might lead the Japanese to modify their attitude. Therefore, the following course of action is suggested:

A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.

B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.

C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-Shek.

D. Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.

E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.

F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.

G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.

H. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.

10. If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. At all events we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war.

If, as seems possible, President Roosevelt implemented these recommendations in order to ‘engineer’ the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, what was PNAC really thinking when it raised the possibility of a ‘catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor’ as a precursor to a pax Americana?

You can read more about the attack on Pearl Harbor both in an interview with Robert Stinnet, and in his book, ‘Day of Deceit’. There is also a great deal of information about the extent of President Roosevelt's alleged foreknowledge in an article entitled Pearl Harbor: Mother of all Conspiracies.

Next - Part Two: The Bretton Woods Agreement and the Rise of the Petrodollar