9/11 | ukwatch.net

This War on Terrorism is Bogus

Ellie Keen — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 10:53:12 +0000

Massive attention has now been given – and rightly so – to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush’s younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush’s cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says “while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must “discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”. It refers to key allies such as the UK as “the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership”. It describes peacekeeping missions as “demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN”. It says “even should Saddam pass from the scene”, US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently… as “Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has”. It spotlights China for “regime change”, saying “it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia”.

The document also calls for the creation of “US space forces” to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent “enemies” using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons “that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”.

Finally – written a year before 9/11 – it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a “worldwide command and control system”. This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with aeroplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that “al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House”.

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing – on the war on terrorism perspective – that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews airforce base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defence of incompetence.”

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan’s two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden’s extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that “casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured”. The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that “the goal has never been to get Bin Laden” (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called “war on terrorism” is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: “To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11” (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that “the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilising influence to… the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East”. Submitted to Vice-President Cheney’s energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, “military intervention” was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that “military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October”. Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban’s refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them “either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs” (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into “tomorrow’s dominant force” is likely to be a long one in the absence of “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”. The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the “go” button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world’s oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing “severe” gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America’s national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron’s beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India’s west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that “the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts” with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the “global war on terrorism” has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003 meacherm@parliament.uk

Britain's 9/11 "Truth Movement" – Who's Responsible?

Alex Doherty — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 04:48:06 +0000

As the sixth anniversary of the September 11th attacks passes the 9/11 conspiracy industry shows no sign of decline. While most adherents to the various conspiracy theories reside in the United States and the middle east, the conspiracy circus – or “the 9/11 truth movement” as it styles itself – is an increasingly visible presence in the UK. Initially an internet based affair, the UK conspiracy advocates have developed national and local campaigning groups who organise public meetings, teach-ins and film showings and they have become a visible and vocal presence at anti-war demonstrations. Their most high-profile supporter and organiser in the UK is David Shayler, the former Mi5 operative and recent converts to the cause include the widely respected journalist and Middle East expert Robert Fisk and prominent gay rights and anti-war activist Peter Tatchell.

As with most conspiracy theories of this type a wide range of scenarios regarding the events of September 11th 2001 are proposed (the most disturbing being an anti-semitic variant according to which Jewish employees at the WTC had prior knowledge of the attack and did not turn up to work on 9/11). The most popular theory and the one advocated by the “mainstream” of the 9/11 truth movement alleges that the attacks were perpetrated by the Bush administration in order to advance the imperial designs of the neo-con cabal. They allege that the planes that struck the towers were not sufficient to bring down the two towers, but that the towers were instead brought down by controlled explosions. They further claim that the Pentagon was not struck by American Airlines Flight 77, but was instead hit by a cruise missile launched by the American military. Putting to one side the fact that the theory appears to indicate a tremendous desire on the part of the conspirators to get caught red-handed (what kind of evil masterminds decide to vastly increase their chances of being found out by planting explosives in the twin towers and launching a missile in broad daylight at the Pentagon?), there is no serious evidence that contradicts the standard account of what occurred on September 11.

The advocacy works in the way standard to other such supposed conspiracies, (JFK, Bilderberg, the faked moon landings etc.) – by cherry picking evidence, elevating minority accounts that support the theory while completely ignoring the voluminous testimony that backs the standard picture, and lying about the credentials of the “experts” that support the conspiracy theory. To date there is not a single peer-reviewed study in any scientific or engineering journal that butresses the conspiracy theory. It is telling that doubters are usually not pointed in the direction of any scholarly work but instead towards a slickly produced home made video called “loose change”, which it is claimed has been watched by over 100 million people. The theory relies substantially on the “who benefits” question: the US government benefited tremendously from the attacks – therefore they must have carried it out themselves. But the Bush administration were hardly the only people to benefit from the attacks – the attacks were a gift to repressive regimes the world over. (Russia and China conspicuously used the attacks to justify clampdowns on their Muslim populations – were the attacks therefore a Sino-Russian conspiracy?)

The theorists are at a loss to explain how the Bush administration succeeded in covering up an operation that would have required the involvement of thousands of people when US governments have been unable to cover-up scandals of peripheral interest to the US population (Iran-Contra, Watergate, the “secret” bombing of Cambodia etc). Nor do they explain why, if it was indeed an inside job, the Bush administration so severely mis-managed the media side of the operation. Why in the immediate aftermath was George Bush scurrying from airbase to airbase rather than striking heroic poses – unlike Mayor Giuliani? Nor do the theorists explain why, if the US administration was capable of carrying out and covering up such an elaborate plot, they did not bother with the relatively simple task of planting WMD in Iraq.

Many of the conspiracy theory advocates also believe the 7/7 London tube bombings to have been an “inside job”, and their reasoning is no better in this case – doubt is cast on the perpetrators by pointing out that one of them was a teaching assistant and that the bombers were well thought of within their communities (in the same vein one could perhaps argue that Hitler could not have known what his armies were doing in eastern Europe in the 1940s, since he was a vegetarian who was known to be kind to animals and children). In the case of suicide bombers the conspiracy theorists happen to be in total agreement with the mainstream media in depicting suicide bombers as near-psychopathic monsters devoid of all humanity, motivated only by hatred and bereft of any legitimate grievances. In reality such authentic monsters are few and far between.

The various 9/11 and 7/7 conspiracies are so ludicrously devoid of sense that, as Diana Johnstone notes, one has to consider a “psychological explanation”. George Monbiot has suggested that the theory is in effect a displacement activity, a flight into fantasy by people too terrified to confront the myriad problems humanity faces:

“Faced with the mountainous challenge of the real issues we must confront, the chickens in the “truth” movement focus instead on a fairytale, knowing that nothing they do or say will count, knowing that because the perpetrators don’t exist, they can’t fight back. They demonstrate their courage by repeatedly bayoneting a scarecrow.”

Arguing against the suggestion that the public’s readiness to believe the 9/11 theories is in a sense rather hopeful – revealing as it does the public’s open contempt for elite figures and institutions – Alex Cockburn argues that:

“9/11 conspiracism stems from despair and political infantilism. There’s no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery. It’s like saying some lunatic shouting to himself on a street corner has the capacity to be a great orator.”

Manuel Garcia Jr, who has done as much as anyone to rebut the conspiracy theories, takes Cockburn’s despairing position to its logical conclusion:

“What I have come to realize from my entire 9/11 experience… is that the public is basically irrational…

“We are doomed. When I began writing for a public audience, my naive technical idea was that if people understood the facts, they would move out of superstition, and we “all” could agree on the nature of “the problem” and then it would be almost obvious what actions to take to fix it. But, people live for their superstitions. We are no better than the caricatures of natives in 1930s jungle movies, hopping about in crazed deadly frenzy because of our “ju-ju”.”

Cockburn is no doubt correct regarding the “political infantilism” of the 9/11 cult. The decline of orthodox marxism, while welcome in many ways, has unfortunately allowed the most extreme forms of irrationality to proliferate amongst the organised left. As with the rise of the susperstitious grab bag of new age spiritualism following the decline of organised christianity, the gap left by orthodox marxism has to a large extent been filled by various paranoid creeds – in particular a primitivist form of lifestyle-anarchism (a trend in anarchist thought that would have been profoundly alien to the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists, say).

As for despair it is probably significant that the numbers of conspiracy advocates in the UK swelled following the invasion of Iraq. Many no doubt took the message (consciously or otherwise) from the failure of the February 15th demonstration and the subsequent demonstrations to stop the invasion that the public is politically impotent and incapable of derailing the so-called war on terror. Unlike Cockburn and Garcia, I can’t agree that the conspiracy theorists are simply irrational imbeciles incapable of valuable political action, (one has to wonder why Garcia believes he is immune to the generalised insanity he describes). It seems to me that while many left critics have been quick to criticise the conspiracy theorists, they have not asked how the saner sectors of the organised left have contributed to the rise of such paranoid fantasies. It is in fact hardly surprising that many took the message from the Iraq protests that the hard slog of political activism is a waste of time, since strategic and tactical issues are so rarely debated on the left, and the achievements of the anti-war movement and dissident activism more generally are so poorly articulated.

In Regime Unchanged, writer and activist Milan Rai notes that just prior to the February 15th demonstration, the MOD, rattled by the scale of domestic opposition, hastily put together contingency plans for the withdrawal of British troops from the invasion force. How many of those who demonstrated are aware of this? How many of them are aware that while Britain’s involvement was not prevented, protest did work in other countries – most conspicuously in Turkey, usually a steadfast ally of the United States, but which refused to accede to US requests to allow an invasion of Northern Iraq from Turkish territory. How many of those demonstrators are aware that, while they did not prevent the invasion, the protests and the continuing dissidence since may have affected the way in which the war has been waged? The Iraq war has been monstrously brutal – hundreds of thousands of people, maybe more, have been killed, and the worst refugee crisis in the history of the middle east – even surpassing the flight of the Palestinians in 1948 – has been created. Nonetheless, despite the escalation of the air war the USAF have not resorted to carpet bombing urban centres (Fallujah excepted), as they did in Indo-China in the 1960s and 70s.

It is important to note that the worst bombing campaigns in history – against Cambodia, South Vietnam and Laos – occurred in large part because of the absence of public protest, which was mostly confined to the bombing of North Vietnam; the lesson being that when the public is exercising no control over the government, the brutality of the western powers is essentially limitless. For instance, it has recently been discovered that a greater tonnage of explosives was dropped by the USAF on the peasant society of Cambodia than were dropped by the western allies in all theatres during WWII including the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making Cambodia perhaps the most heavily bombed country in history. Again how many are aware of these matters? How many are aware that there is good evidence that the American anti-war movement may well have averted the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam by the Nixon administration? How many understand that while tens of thousands may have been slaughtered by the US-backed Latin America terror states during the 1980s, that slaughter was nonetheless in a certain sense a victory, since the protest movements succeeded in preventing the US government from intevening with direct military force – which would have led to casualties on a par with Vietnam.

Most disturbingly, the concrete achievements of humanitarian dissidence are not only unknown to those new to activism (as a great many on the February 15th demonstration were) but also to many committed activists. A year after the invasion, frustrated by the failure to discuss such matters, I attempted to start a debate on the issue within the university anti-war group I was involved in. I began by asking other members of our group why we were still organising, despite what was widely perceived to be our failure to stop the Iraq invasion. The answers I got were for the most part along the lines of “we have to make a stand – we have to be seen to be still protesting” and other variations on the “fight the good fight” theme. Few of us, it seemed, really believed we were going to effect meaningful change, few even were aware that we had achieved anything at all. It is hard to see how someone new to activism or someone disillusioned in the post-invasion period would be motivated by such sentiments, or inspired by people with so little faith in the possibility of retarding or halting war crimes. It is surely unsurprising that many drifted into the comforting arms of the 9/11 truth movement.

There is a more general point here. While much of the public is profoundly distrustful of the elite sectors of our society, their understanding of social realities is in many respects deeply distorted. In particular, though the public to a large extent perceives that it is lied to and manipulated, the methods of social control are not widely understood. An obvious example is the role of the mainstream media. There is deep distrust of the media in the UK – many are aware that the media was a handmaiden to the invasion of Iraq – continually accepting and boosting government assertions regarding Iraq’s imaginary WMD programme. But while the public may be aware that they are lied to, the mechanics of the media’s institutionalised deceit largely elude them. The prime example regarding the media is the fact that the public for the most part totally misaprehends what the economic function of the commercial media is – believing as they do that the corporate press is in the business of selling newspapers to readers, when in reality they are in the business of selling audiences to other businesses. Newspapers do not make their profits from their circulation – in fact they don’t even break even on sales alone – their profits are made from, and thus their orientation is towards, their advertisers. Knowing this factor – along with others – it becomes rather less surprising that a “free press” caters so obediently to the demands of power and privilege. But without such knowledge, it is not surprising that many instead grope towards other explanations – and the most obvious one that arises is the notion of powerful shadowy figures deciding amongst themselves what the press will say.

Another method of social control that the left does not do enough to expose is the manipulation and distortion of history. Mainstream historical narratives present history for the most part as the plane on which Great Men (and the occasional woman) decide the course of history. The nature of the dominant institutions of our society and the efforts of ordinary people to resist and change them is for the most part obscured; our culture instead reduces major historical change to a game of great personalities far removed from grassroots struggle (so Martin Luther King was the civil rights movement, Emily Pankhurst was the suffragete movement, etc). Of what little the public do learn about popular movements is a hopelessly distorted picture, the recent celebrations of the abolition of slavery being a conspicuous example – attention being focussed on famous individuals such as William Wilberforce rather than the countless participants in slave revolts and grassroots dissidence whose names we will for the most part never know. One might expect that one of the more important tasks of the left would be to counter mainstream narratives of this type. In reality, while the picture is complex, the left to a large extent reinforces this emphasis on prominent individuals. Most recently the anti-war movement has surely not done enough to emphasise the essential continuity of the Blair and Bush governments. The groups surrounding these two figures may have distinguished themselves by their extreme contempt for public opinion and international law, but again these are matters of degree – the Clinton and Major administrations, for instance, presided over the murderous sanctions regime against Iraq, which led to perhaps a million deaths above the normal; it is therefore only relatively recently that the Bush and Blair governments have approached the body count attributable to their more “reasonable” predecessors.

Britain’s imperial violence and internal failings are not the products of particular individuals – the internal structure of the dominant institutions of our society makes the appearance of murderous figures such as a Blair or a Thatcher an inevitablity, and these individuals are essentially interchangeable. Had Neil Kinnock or John Smith become prime minister, there would it is true have been discernible differences in the policies pursued – and given the power concentrated in the executive, even small differences can have profound consequences for those at the sharp end of government policy. Nonetheless, such differences remain a matter of emphasis. Regardless of who had won the 1992 election, Britain would have retained its neo-imperial foreign policy, maintaining the economic drain from the third world to the first (or rather, from the third world to a tiny minority in the first). Economically Britain would have remained a deeply unequal society, in thrall to the narrow sector of the population that is currently experiencing unheard of levels of wealth whilst one in four children are born into poverty -and as for notions of economic democracy and Self-management these would have seemed just as exotic and unlikely under a Smith or a Kinnock as under Blair and Brown. And yet despite the fact that the problems we face are fundamentally the problem of institutions that reward cruelty, dishonesty and violence, the left continues to focus its attention on the iniquities of specific individuals. If we persist in ascribing institutional violence and deceit to individual actors, we can hardly plead innocence if many, as in the case of 9/11, come to view history as the interplay of various shadowy conspiratorial cabals intriguing against the public.

Alex Doherty is a member of the ukwatch.net collective.

alex@ukwatch.net