9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, 5th edition

Prefaces

I was already familiar with Webster Tarpley’s work from reading his unauthorized biography of Bush père, which appeared more than a dozen years ago. That is a work which I still consult regularly, even now. There are points which were made in that book which everyone repeats today. In my opinion, that biography will remain as a reference work; it is the best book on the subject.

I therefore expected that Tarpley’s new book on 9/11 would have the same quality of precision. But I found that, in addition, Tarpley has created a totally new genre, a new avenue of inquiry into 9/11.

There have already been many books on 9/11. Paul Thompson has done a kind of exhaustive review on this subject. David Ray Griffin has pointed out the logical contradictions among the successive versions of the official story. Mike Ruppert has attempted to understand the context of these events.

But Tarpley has posed a new question: that of comparing the techniques used by the US intelligence agencies in creating 9/11 with the methods used by US intelligence in the past. Many people are going to copy what Tarpley has done.

That is why this book is so important. The inquiry initiated here needs to be carried further. Not everything found here will necessarily be confirmed, but Tarpley has opened up a new path. People will keep coming back to this book in order to ask new questions along this line of inquiry.

Thierry Meyssan

Président, Réseau Voltaire

Author of

9/11: The Big Lie

and Pentagate

Paris, February 15, 2005

Preface to the Third Edition

The 9/11 Issue: Key to Avoiding World War III

During October and November of 2005, there was great hope that the Scooter Libby indictment, new evidence of Bush’s lies, the Katrina debacle, and the Safavian and Delay-Abramoff prosecutions, combined with the two thousandth officially conceded US battle death in Iraq and growing losses in Afghanistan, might bring about the collapse of the Bush regime. By the spring of 2006, it was clear that this perspective had been illusory. The Bush-Cheney-neocon regime could count on a base of public support amounting to 35–40% of the US population. By March of 2006–after Cheney’s shooting incident again pointed to his mental instability, alcohol abuse, and flagrant violation of the law–Bush was again bumping along at the lower edge of this range. But it would be foolhardy to expect that he would decline much below the 35% level, unless an important sea-change had occurred. The most obvious and efficient sea-change was by way of spectacular public revelations overthrowing the Kean-Hamilton-Zelikow official account, and establishing the criminal participation of US military/intelligence rogue networks in the crimes of 9/11.

Nothing but 9/11 truth could effectively erode and attrite the Bush-Cheney base. These 35–40% were persons of limited political horizon, gulled by the controlled corporate media brainwashing machine. They had accepted the terror demagogy, the Bush-Cheney regime’s war on terror, and were simply scared out of their wits. Such hysterical fear presented an insuperable obstacle to arguments based on reason.

One is tempted to classify the 35–40% who support pre-emptive war as morally insane, or crazed by fear, but we must also remember that these gullible persons had been shamefully betrayed by the left liberal and radical liberal intelligentsia, the principal group in this society which might have been expected to take the lead in denouncing and rejecting the Bush regime’s fantastic, racist, warmongering nightmare account of the events of 9/11 and the war on terror that was supposed to derive from them. Instead of loudly denouncing the official account, these liberals had prostrated themselves before it, even taking up the task of vilifying and ostracizing 9/11 skeptics and heretics.

The 35–40% were virtually impervious to arguments revolving around the criminal folly of the Afghan and Iraq wars, the suicidal insanity of a wider war with Iraq or Syria, and around such issues as Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, secret CIA prisons, illegal renditions, violations of the Geneva Convention, NSA wiretaps, and totalitarian police state measures in general. For the terrified 35–40%, any acts of genocide or aggression must necessarily appear as fully justified measures of self-defense, dictated by the hard necessities of a war on terror which had been imposed on the United States by treacherous killers from abroad. For Bush to fall substantially below 35%, and thus become vulnerable to the impeachment and criminal prosecutions which were so obviously his due, it was necessary to show parts of the 35% that the 9/11 attacks were provocations from inside the bowels of the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and so forth, rather than from Bin Laden’s myth-drenched cave in Afghanistan.

9/11 was the ultimate weapon against Bush; indeed, it was the only effective weapon–how ironic that it was the weapon which the hysterical left liberals categorically refused to take up. Here were persons who claimed they would do anything to stop the war in Iraq, anything to roll back the domestic police state. But address the truth about 9/11, where the absurdities of the official version cried out to heaven? Horrors! Never!–was the response of Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, Michael Moore, The Nation magazine, Greg Palast, and most of the broadcasters associated with Air America. From one plausible point of view, the left gatekeepers were, by their craven refusal to tackle 9/11, taking upon themselves a large measure of Afghan and Iraq (and Iran) war guilt, plus responsibility for totalitarianism on the home front.

What a wretched position was that of the gatekeepers! They were propounding the patent absurdity that, while Bush had been an inveterate liar all his life until September 11, 2001, he mysteriously began to tell the truth on that day–even if he relapsed into mendacity in the early days of January, 2002, before his axis of evil State of the Union speech. The left gatekeepers preened themselves on never believing Bush. If they were caught in public giving credence to Bush on any other issue–be it Iraq, the deficit, Katrina, Plamegate, prescription drug reform, or oil drilling in Alaska, they would have died of mortification and humiliation. But on 9/11, the biggest issue of them all, the fountainhead of all wars, the pretext for all police states, the true caput horum et causa malorum–they were eager not just to repeat Bush’s lies, but to aid in crushing anyone who dared to contradict them.

Was there any doubt that the 9/11 Big Lie was the basis for the Bush regime, the Republican Party, and of all their crimes? If so, one had only to listen to Karl Rove in his early 2006 address to the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee, when this notorious scoundrel announced that Republicans have a post-9/11 world view and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 world view. (Washington Post, January 21, 2006) It was clear from this that 9/11 would be the basis of the Republican campaign in 2006, just as it had been in 2002 and 2004. If even more documentation were needed to enlighten the gatekeepers, they could turn to hilarious variation on the same theme by Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury, including the strip published December 11, 2005, which went beyond Bush’s use of 9/11 as a universal excuse to illustrate how 9/11 could be cited as a free pass to bail out clumsy shop clerks, football players having a bad day, and adulterous husbands caught in the act by their wives.

Just how big a favor the gatekeepers were doing Bush was demonstrated by the courageous observations of the famous actor Charlie Sheen, who was interviewed on the Alex Jones radio program on Monday, March 20, 2006. Alex Jones, the dean of conservative 9/11 critics, is a valiant fighter against the police state and the globaloney new world order, and I have been a strong supporter of his efforts since my first interview on his program on the day before Thanksgiving, 2001. In his talk with Jones, Sheen expressed his strong skepticism about the 19 hijackers, about the nature of the flying objects shown hitting the WTC towers, and about the fall of the buildings. He called for a neutral, international panel–virtually identical to the Independent International Truth Commission described elsewhere in this book. For Sheen, the 9/11 case was not closed.

His remarks were not delivered on prime time television, but on a daytime radio broadcast on a decidedly anti-regime network. Yet they were destined to knock the US controlled corporate media on their ear. Thanks to the Internet, Sheen’s views went around the world. On Wednesday, March 22, Sheen’s critique of the official version was the centerpiece of Showbiz Tonight on CNN Headline News Prime Time Live. The show’s New York host, A.J. Hammer, told the audience that he had never swallowed the official story, and proceeded to give a full airing to what Sheen had said. A short segment showed me recalling that, according to a Zogby poll, 50% of New Yorkers were already LIHOP in the late summer of 2004. This was a tiny fraction of the 15 to 20 minutes I had recorded that day at the CNN Washington DC studio, and it was not one of my signature issues, but it was the first time that a 9/11 author of the full, political, invisible government, MIHOP school had appeared on CNN. Showbiz Tonight returned to the same themes on the following two evenings, and was set to continue the following week when it was stopped, after no spokesperson could be found to defend the official side. CNN’s viewer poll showed 83% supporting Charlie Sheen. On Friday, March 24, I appeared on the Alex Jones radio program along with Charlie Sheen.

On that same Monday, March 20, New York Magazine hit the newsstands and the Internet with an article (The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll) on the 9/11 truth movement by Mark Jacobson, who had attended my lecture at St. Mark’s in the Bowery Church on January 15, 2006, as well as the spirited dinner discussion with Nick Levis and Nico Haupt which followed. In this article, I had in effect the honor of being the keynote speaker for the 9/11 truth movement. Given the obvious limits imposed by the circumstances, Jacobson’s article was a notable achievement. He showed people now in their fifties, sixties, and beyond that they needed to challenge the 9/11 cover-up in the same way that so many of them had rejected the Warren Commission on the Kennedy assassination. Jacobson provided a wealth of facts, more than enough to strike down the government story. He also helpfully listed a multitude of movement websites where skeptics could find out more. He quoted a 9/11 widow saying that the 9/11 truth movement cared more than the official commissioners. It was an article which served the cause of truth. New York Magazine wields considerable influence in the publishing, glitterati, communications, advertising, and financial elites of the city. When CNN called me for an interview later that week, they had learned I was an authority from New York Magazine.

The conservative Alex Jones and the liberals at New York Magazine had provided the best 9/11 reality check in many months. It showed that the obsolete ideological categories of left and right were meaningless husks when it came to the cardinal question of our time. Because I was the single 9/11 author involved in both the Charlie Sheen/Alex Jones and the New York Magazine developments, this book affirmed itself as never before in the weeks after March 20. In the Amazon sales rankings, it outclassed the Kean-Hamilton-Zelikow official version, as well as the Ruppert and D. R. Griffin studies. This book appeared to be challenging the 500 barrier in those rankings when Amazon ran out of copies on March 28, and production of this third edition has had to be accelerated accordingly. The political significance of all this is that the US 9/11 reading public is becoming more sophisticated and more radicalized, and is no longer content with the government’s big lies, nor with a pale and diluted LIHOP, nor with an overall agnosticism about who did what to whom in the 9/11 big picture. Hypertechnical accounts, which focus on whether the murder weapon was an icepick, a hatpin, or an awl, rather than naming the murderer, also fall short. The public wants and deserves a comprehensive and consistent political MIHOP, and this is what I have done everything in my power to provide. My books stands as the only example of such MIHOP originally written in English; the great European studies by Meyssan, von Bülow, Wisnewski, and Blondet are each in their own way MIHOP from the word go.

Charlie Sheen had spoken as a patriotic citizen concerned about his country. Bloggers went wild, pro and con. The entire neocon faction responded by collectively falling on the ground in apoplectic rage and chewing whatever carpet chanced to be nearby. When Alan Colmes asked Sean Hannity what he thought of Charlie Sheen, Hannity vilified Sheen as a leftist. When Colmes responded that conservatives were actually taking the lead, Hannity stammered that the bereaved families were certainly offended. Colmes responded that the families had shown gratitude for the skeptics’ quest for truth. For once the bully was silenced. The chronicles of neocon invective against Charlie Sheen are too long to be reproduced here. Jerry Doyle and many others took part. But other broadcasters gave space to opponents of the government’s lies: Rachel Madow of Air America hosted Mark Jacobson, while Lionel dedicated a program to Victor Thorn’s book on controlled demolition, and Colmes interviewed Phil Berg about the civil RICO suit against Bush-Cheney. Then, in the last days of March, political philanthropist Jimmy Walter and North Tower hero William Rodriguez, speaking from Caracas, told Alex Jones that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government was considering the advisability of a 9/11 truth summit, and the hope here was that it would be along the lines of the Independent International Truth Commission.

The expected countermoves of the US-UK intelligence establishment were not long in coming. On Thursday, April 6, 9/11 agent provocateur Ward Churchill was given an excellent soapbox by the witch-hunting reactionaries of the Students for Academic Freedom in a debate with David Horowitz at George Washington University, with the self-styled Weatherman bomb expert playing the leftist. The next evening, Fox News darling Ward Churchill was given an endless segment to spout his lunatic rant about the 9/11 victims being little Eichmanns. Hannity, who had been silenced by Charlie Sheen two weeks before, had a field day. Remember that Churchill is the most rabid defender of the official version, condemning skeptics as racists who don’t think the Arabs are capable of such great things. If the US public could be convinced that Ward Churchill was the spokesman of the 9/11 truth movement, the official version would be invulnerable forever, no matter how many lies it contained. On March 30, in a related counter-move, Democratic Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, the elected official who had the highest national profile on 9/11 truth, was deliberately harassed by a member of the Capitol Hill police as she entered the Congress. The provocateur was presumably one of the Bull Connor clones who have been hired by the reactionary Republican House leadership over the past years. The media assault on Rep. McKinney was unprecedented. Still, the Charlie Sheen flap proved that the entire pompous castle of 9/11 lies was exceedingly vulnerable. Imagine what a few senators could do with 9/11!

Truly 9/11 truth offered the greatest bang for the buck.

Behind all these events loomed the likelihood that a minority faction of the US-UK ruling elite, correctly judging that the Bush-Cheney regime was unhinged, deranged, off the deep end, living in a bubble, and divorced from reality, had decided to brandish the threat of a limited hangout on 9/11 to discipline these two, and get them to address the main ruling class concern: the death agony of the US dollar, made worse by the end of the yen carry trade, and by the Iran oil bourse. The mood of elite discontent was expressed by calls in the London Financial Times for the immediate ouster of Cheney and Rumsfeld, and by a drum-beat in the Washington Post for the replacement of Treasury Secretary Snow; this latter point showed where the greatest concern was. The conclusive evidence on this came in a Vanity Fair article by Al Gore, who noted that Bush was warned on Aug. 6, 2001, of an attack by Al Qaeda. ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,’ said the intelligence community in a message so important that it was the headline of the President’s daily briefing that day, five weeks before the attacks. Gore lambasted Bush for his inaction: Didn’t he see that clear warning? asked the former Vice President. Why were no questions asked, meetings called, evidence marshaled, clarifications sought? This was the refurbished option of sinking Bush for his catatonic paralysis and non-feasance before 9/11, all well within the confines of the official version, an option developed in Harper’s Magazine of October 2004, and later stressed by Kean-Hamilton commission member Bob Kerrey. 9/11 Truth sectarians would always grumble, but a limited hangout was always better than no hangout at all, primarily because of the chance that enterprising truth activists might push it beyond any limits.

A major attempt to shore up the collapsing 9/11 myth came with the Zacharias Moussaoui show trial in Alexandria, Virginia. This wretched man was a classic patsy, half double agent and half psychotic dupe, several levels of acumen below Lee Harvey Oswald, and a long-time denizen of the FBI-Able Danger patsy stable. Moussaoui had already saved the government’s collapsing case against him once by pleading guilty, and for over three years his defense lawyers had argued that he was a part of a plot not related to 9/11. The government claimed that, if Moussaoui had spilled the beans, they would have mobilized to stop 9/11. If that had been the case, as I told KPFK Los Angeles on March 7, then the FBI’s David Frasca should have been a capital defendant as well, since it was he who had sabotaged the Minneapolis warnings and the Phoenix memorandum, as described in this book. In fact, the FBI had all the facts it needed to roll up the patsy network, were it not for the pervasive moles. The FBI could have stopped 9/11, not because the Arab patsies were really going to fly the planes into the towers, but because if the patsies had all been in jail, they could not have been made the scapegoats. FBI agent Harry Samit of Minneapolis, a colleague of Colleen Rowley, accused the FBI bigwigs of criminal negligence and careerism for ignoring his seventy messages warning of Moussaoui & Co. But this is exactly what invisible government moles are supposed to do. Michael Rolince had been Frasca’s boss at FBI headquarters, and he testified that he had never seen the critical August 18, 2001 warning from Minneapolis.

After severe prosecutorial misconduct in prepping witnesses, Moussaoui obligingly placed his neck in the noose by raving that he had indeed been a part of 9/11, since he and Richard Reid (the shoe bomber of December 2001!) had intended to commandeer a Boeing 747 and crash it into the White House. As shown in this book, Reid was a psychotic derelict even more impaired than Moussaoui, and the two of them could not have hijacked a pushcart. Both were products of the British intelligence School for Patsies maintained at Brixton and Finsbury mosques in London. Moussaoui was reportedly wearing an electric stun belt when he testified–to encourage his eloquence, no doubt. He dumped his defense lawyers, who tried to save him by proving that he was a paranoid schizophrenic; it was an accurate diagnosis. Moussaoui rated lifetime confinement in a prison for the criminally insane.

Other theses of this book have been supported by recent events. Why did Bush refuse to go to the FISA court to get wiretap warrants? The FISA judges, everyone knew, would put a wiretap on a ham sandwich, if asked by the government. Why did Bush not use them? Evidently because Bush’s backers feared that any court supervision might disclose how the rogue networks infesting the government were running and directing ongoing terror activity, as in the case of the terror controllers of Able Danger. Bush’s proposal to Blair on January 31, 2003 to paint a US plane in UN colors and fly it over Iraq in the hopes of getting it shot down was straight out of Operation Northwoods (Philippe Sands, Lawless World).

In the haggling over the Congressional 9/11 resolution, Bush first demanded authorization to use military force to deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States, a declaration of war against the world which the Congress rejected. Just before the final passage, Bush demanded the go-ahead for "all necessary and appropriate force in the United States and against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the 9/11 attacks. This was also rejected, but the threatened use of force in this country clearly foreshadowed civil war. (Tom Daschle, Power We Didn’t Grant," Washington Post, Dec. 23, 2005) Since March 11, 2006 I have been discussing these issues with a series of distinguished guests on my program, World Crisis Radio, on www.RBNLive.com each Saturday from 4 to 6 PM eastern time.

As this book goes to press, the news is full of dire warnings of an imminent dollar disintegration, couched in such terms as payment shock, tsunami, hurricane, cataclysm, systemic disruption, disorderly adjustment, and global financial collapse coming from such figures as the head of the IMF, the Governor of the Bank of England, the European Union Finance Ministers, top officials of the Asian Development Bank and the US Office of Thrift Supervision, Danish pension fund managers and US bond salesmen. Equally prominent are the Strangelove threats of atomic bombing of Iran, or of a thermonuclear first strike against Russia and China, as ventilated in the March/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs by Lieber and Press–a stark reminder of why a mushroom cloud is displayed on the cover of this book. For those who oppose world economic breakdown crisis and thermonuclear war, 9/11 truth is the only road, and more urgent to travel than ever.

Webster Griffin Tarpley, Washington, DC, April 12, 2006

To Defeat Terrorism, Defeat the Bankers and their Rogue Network

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2011

This book aims at providing answers to the main questions posed by the 9/11 terror attacks. Its conclusion is that the 9/11 terror assault was a state-sponsored, false-flag war provocation, carried out from inside the US federal government by a private rogue network which is ultimately controlled by Wall Street and the City of London. This war provocation was executed by an extensive apparatus which included the patsies who were identified and demonized by the FBI and the mass media, the moles who served the rogue network inside government institutions, and the expert but shadowy technicians who actually produced the tragic effects observed. The main aspects of 9/11 were bootlegged or conduited through legally approved drills and war games, which were transformed, re-directed, and taken live by small cadres of rogue network loyalists. The overall command center is likely to have been located in an elaborate war room in a private military firm. All aspects of these events took place in a media environment of the most extreme mass manipulation and mass brainwashing. 9/11 was a coup d’état, or better yet a kind of putsch by cliques of generals, top intelligence officers, and other high government officials against the existing US government. It was geopolitical or spheres of influence terrorism, and successfully started a war of civilizations which US and British imperialist institutions have used down to the present day in an attempt to organize world affairs according to their own perceived priorities.

MIHOP: Made It Happen On Purpose

In the jargon of 9/11 studies, this book thus argues for rogue network or invisible government MIHOP, where MIHOP stands for Made It Happen on Purpose, pointing to the way the rogue faction actively and deliberately produced the events observed by re-directing drills and flipping them live.

These conclusions permit a political analysis and interpretation of 9/11, which is in turn capable of providing political conclusions and political guidance for the future course of national and world politics. With this method, it is possible to identify at least in a general way the specific faction which carried out 9/11, as well as to specify some of its members. This method has also given the most promising results in attempting to ward off repeat performances of 9/11, in similar or in radically different form.

An Attempted New 9/11: the Hijacked Rogue B-52 of August-September 2007

Other approaches have all failed, be these the official US government version exemplified by the widely discredited Kean-Hamilton 9/11 Commission; the obsolete and agnostic unanswered questions school; the blowback thesis dear to the left wing of the CIA; or the LIHOP theory (Let It Happen on Purpose) which asserts that certain government officials, usually Bush and Cheney, allowed real terrorist attacks to succeed by intentionally sabotaging US defenses, with the goal of obtaining the pretexts needed for the wars they wanted to wage. The official version stands refuted, if only because of the widespread perjury before the commission by top US Air Force generals recognized and reported by Kean and Hamilton in their own book, Without Precedent, but which they declined to prosecute.

Ten years and mountains of research after the fact and it is far too late for unanswered questions. The blowback school can be summed up as You bomb them, they bomb you. Blowback argues that 9/11 and related acts of terrorism are a kind of retaliation carried out by the oppressed peoples of the world in response to the arrogance of US imperialism. Many leftists have a deep emotional need to believe that this is what happened. But blowback also breaks down, if only because the oppressed peoples of the world, however intense their hatred for the United States might be, simply lack the physical and technical capabilities required to carry out a stunning operation on the scale of 9/11.

LIHOP dissolves in the face of the massive concentration of drills and exercises which form the centerpiece of this book. All of these approaches are untenable, primarily because all of them accept the existence of an aggressive terrorist power which wants to strike the United States with devastating results, and will surely do so if government incompetence or duplicity provides an opening to do so. The official version, unanswered questions, blowback, and LIHOP all suggest or concede that a global war on terror is urgently needed, although perhaps one commanded by people more skilled than Bush and Cheney.

Ten years after September 11, 2001, the actions carried out by the financiers’ rogue network or invisible government on that day continue to cause grievous damage to the United States and to the American people. 9/11 has given us a decade of belligerent and bellicose imperialist and colonialist foreign policy, starting with the Afghan war initiated in October 2001, and which is still continuing, and is constantly threatening to explode into an overt shooting war with Pakistan–including with nuclear weapons. The post-9/11 hysteria was successfully redirected by the neocons to motivate the infamous US attack on Iraq of March 2003, and this war continues to the present day as well. With Obama’s West Point speech of December, 2009, the Afghanistan war has been officially expanded to include a war against the nuclear power Pakistan. This war has been further accentuated in the spring of 2011 by the much-touted elimination of Osama bin Laden, who in reality had been dead for almost a decade.

An Attempted New 9/11: the Hijacked Rogue B-52 of August-September 2007

After 9/11, we have seen two important moments in which the aggressive actions of the rogue network in pursuit of new false-flag provocations have come very close to being exposed to public view. One of these was the rogue B-52 of August-September 2007. Another came in connection with the Christmas Day 2009 underwear bomber, in which a certain Mutallab of Nigeria was the patsy presented to the public.

During Bush’s second term, there were repeated brushes with an all-out clash with Iran. A moment of such danger occurred in October 2004. There was another period of acute war risk in the late summer of 2005. Another came around Good Friday, 2007 with Operation Bite, which broadly coincided with the Iranian capture of a number of British naval personnel in the Gulf. The most serious action by the rogue network was the commandeering of a B-52 strategic bomber with six nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which was removed from US Air Force command and control in late August 2007–in effect, hijacked by the rogue network—and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana, with the intent of sending it on to the Middle East to attack Iran and/or Syria without reference to the US National Command Authority. This aircraft was eventually halted in Louisiana and returned to US government control, but no serious public investigation has ever been made of this shocking incident.

The rogue B-52 affair happened in the weeks after I published an article entitled Cheney Determined to Strike in US, (July 21, 2011), and less than a week after the publication of the Kennebunkport Warning (August 26, 2011), of which I was a principal author.

August 2011: Cheney Confirms the Kennebunkport Warning of August 2007

As this fifth edition goes to press, newspaper reports are providing summaries of Cheney’s newly published autobiography. His book is entitled In My Time. Here Cheney relates that he attempted to convince Bush in June 2007 of the need to launch a bombing attack on Syria; Cheney claimed to be concerned about that country’s nuclear program. Cheney says that he got no support for this project from other key White House officials, and Bush never approved the attack. The rogue network had thus tried and failed to get a war with Syria approved through the more or less legal government in the persons of Bush and his National Security Council. But, being rebuffed by these figures did not mean that the rogue network was going to abandon their plan. Instead, they went ahead on their own and hijacked a big B-52 with six nukes, and were planning to fly it to the Middle East to commit aggression in coordination with the Israeli bombing of Syria at the end of the first week of September, 2007.

The failure of the broader 9/11 truth movement to embrace and exploit this success in accurately anticipating and denouncing a major act of terrorist treason by the rogue network was a key factor in the subsequent intellectual, moral, and organizational collapse of the 9/11 truth movement during 2008. Many so-called truth activists chose to slander the Kennebunkport warning and its supporters–in spite of the remarkable intelligence success it embodied. These alleged truth activists would have been much better advised to use their energy demanding a full congressional or other investigation of the rogue B-52 incident. Such an investigation, which might have exposed components of the rogue network, has never occurred.

The Christmas Day 2009 Underwear Bomber: Cock-up or Conspiracy?

On Christmas day he, 2009, the youthful Nigerian patsy Omar Farouk Mutallab attempted to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear during the last phases of a transcontinental flight from Europe, which was about to land at Detroit. Among many anomalies in the underwear bomber case, one stood out: the patsy’s father, a wealthy, respectable, and well-known Nigerian banker, had personally delivered a warning to a CIA official in the US Embassy overseas, saying that his son was in Yemen and in all probability in contact with terrorist elements. Normally, this report should have been enough to get Mutallab’s US entry visa revoked, and also to get his name placed on the US no-fly list, thus creating two insuperable barriers that would have blocked the Christmas Day operation–a spectacular stunt which led to several weeks of intense hysteria in the United States, and to the installation of dangerous and humiliating body scanners in US airports. We do not need Michael Chertoff’s body scanners–we need mole detectors installed at the NSC, the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies.

On the evening of January 4, 2010, MSNBC reporter Richard Wolffe told listeners of the Keith Olberman Countdown program that top White House officials had concluded that the underwear bomber incident had been deliberately and intentionally facilitated by factions or networks inside the US intelligence community. Here, we would point out, Wolffe was obviously talking in reality about the rogue network, who had obviously wanted this incident to occur. Wolffe went on to say that these White House officials had concluded that individuals with an alternative agenda had wanted to see the Mutallab affair happen. Wolffe twice repeated the formulation cock-up or conspiracy.

That evening, elements of the rogue network were painfully close to being exposed. If the Obama White House had followed through on its initial inquiry, a number of rogue network operatives could have been identified, posted, and quite possibly indicted. This would have been exceptionally salutary for the Obama presidency and for US political life in general. However, true to form, the Wall Street puppet and feckless coward Obama punted the next day, making clear that he had embraced the bungling excuse rather than the conspiratorial explanation. No invisible government heads would roll.

Undersecretary of State Patrick F. Kennedy: Patsy Kept Visa Thanks to US Agency

More light was thrown on this issue several weeks later, during the testimony of Undersecretary of State Patrick F. Kennedy before the House Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS). Responding to questions from Chairman Thompson about his extraordinarily opaque and convoluted testimony as to why the Christmas Day patsy was allowed to keep his US entry visa, Undersecretary Kennedy revealed that, in an interagency meeting, an unnamed branch of the United States government had expressly requested the State Department allow Mutallab to retain his visa. This had been motivated with a story about how the other agency in question intended to track and observe Mutallab in the hopes that he would lead them to bigger fish and the possibility of rolling up an entire network, rather than simply arresting an individual. Undersecretary Kennedy offered to tell Chairman Thompson and the committee the name of the agency involved, but only in an executive session behind closed doors. If the public had learned the name of the agency and the individual involved in making sure that Mutallab kept his US entry visa, we would have taken an important step in the direction of rolling up the rogue network itself. Needless to say, the name of the agency has not yet been revealed.

The rogue B-52 and the Christmas 2009 underwear bomber thus represent two post 9/11 incidents in which the rogue network has risked significant public exposure. A serious 9/11 truth movement would have embraced both of these questions with the vigor and tenacity which they unquestionably deserve. Instead, many activists were still wandering somewhere north of the Pentagon gas station, in the words of a recent hollow 9/11 debate.

How Covert Operations Are Frequently Exposed by the Passage of Time

One of the main reasons it is so difficult to maintain the secrecy of covert operations over extended periods has to do with the time process itself. As history unfolds, reality develops and shows new aspects, and this often means that old secrets are revealed and old mysteries clarified.

Libya: Al Qaeda Exposed as the CIA Arab Legion

What, for example, is al Qaeda? This book argues that al Qaeda represents the CIA Arab Legion, created under the auspices of such figures as the now-departing US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and used to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. For a while after 9/11, it was difficult for many people to see that al Qaeda was indeed a CIA asset, primarily because of the extreme demonization of this organization by the Anglo-American mass media. The spring of 2011 has ushered in a general campaign by the CIA to sanitize and rehabilitate the Moslem Brotherhood, that notorious creation of British intelligence, which has long been used to combat the Ataturk-Nasser tradition of progressive Arab nationalism under military auspices. The CIA is now in a close worldwide alliance with the Moslem Brotherhood–especially in Syria, where the Moslem Brotherhood is mounting an armed insurrection against the Assad government. Even clearer is the role of al Qaeda in Libya, where terrorists and jihadis from all over the Muslim world have been called in by the CIA and MI6, in order to form the armed rabble deployed by NATO against the neo-Nasserist Colonel Qaddafi. As of this writing, a notorious al Qaeda terrorist butcher variously know as Belhadj or Hasadi or Hasidi is leading the NATO reign of terror in Tripoli, despite the fact that he was a US prisoner of war in Pakistan, as a result of his campaign to kill US soldiers in that part of the world. Al Qaeda is now exposed as a tool of US intelligence.

Drones: From the Global Hawk of 9/11 to the Modern Predator

Another such aspect revealed by time involves drone aircraft. This book argues that the two aircraft which crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City could not have been piloted by the feckless misfit patsies accused by the FBI, but must rather have been guided by remote control. The most likely means for doing this is represented by the Global Hawk guidance system. Ten years later, public opinion has been thoroughly familiarized with the US pilotless drone aircraft flown from a console halfway around the world, all thanks to the Global Hawk guidance system. By now everyone has heard of the Predator drones used by the CIA to spread murder and mayhem in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other places. Accordingly, the idea that the World Trade Center aircraft were commercial airliners fitted with Global Hawk should no longer be so surprising. It should also be easier to understand that the flying object that hit the Pentagon had all the earmarks of a cruise missile or an unmanned aerial vehicle directed by Global Hawk.

False-flag Terrorism Thrives Long After Bush and Cheney Have Gone

Another important lesson which has been imparted by the passage of time is that Bush and Cheney were not the sole bringers of terrorism, nor even the main ones. They were just puppets who served their time and have now departed, while the parade of false-flag operations goes on and on, with new patsies and calls for more and more totalitarian measures. Neocon influence over the US government was already declining rapidly in 2007, while the power of the Zbigniew Brzezinski-Joseph Nye-Samuel Huntington-Samantha Power soft power group was expanding rapidly. Neocon covert operations tend to depend on false-flag terrorist provocations followed by direct US military actions, especially bombing. Under Obama, civil wars have been unleashed in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, while Tunisia and Egypt have instead been destabilized using the characteristic National Endowment for Democracy techniques of the color revolution and the CIA people power coup. False flags are only one tool in the bag of tricks of the rogue network.

Questions About the Top Moles: Where Are They Now?

There is another aspect of 9/11 which cannot be hidden. This involves certain figures whom we may regard as protagonists of this false-flag terror operation. Where are they now? Have they received a string of promotions? An obvious task for honest researchers is to track down the present whereabouts of the NORAD commanders, other top US Air Force Generals, the bosses of the Northeast Air Defense Sector, the security chiefs of the Federal Aeronautics Administration, certain key officials of the FBI who should have put the Phoenix memorandum together with the Minneapolis warnings to round up some key patsies, and other suspect individuals. If such figures have been extravagantly rewarded for their failures, we will have learned something important about the structure of the rogue network.[1]

Political Analysis Trumps Hyper-technical Antiquarianism

Mystery stories are called whodunits, not howdunits, and with good reason. A principal failing of much 9/11 research is that it relentlessly ignores the overarching political questions that might yield knowledge of permanent value suitable for future application, especially when it comes to the fundamental task of blocking new and more dangerous false-flag terror provocations, or new 9/11’s. While the political side is neglected, purely technical questions dominate. This is a kind of scholasticism or hobby pursuit. Often, there is an attempt to transform intrinsically political questions into technical ones. The result is a kind of hyper-technical antiquarianism which is getting farther and farther from current concerns. Without the political dimension, it is not feasible to accost an unemployed and starving man or woman on a bread line after they have been evicted from their home by fraudclosure and announce to them, Let me tell you about building seven.

Distortions Due to Austrian Ideology

Some advocates of 9/11 might call themselves libertarians, meaning in reality that they are right wing anarchist followers of the ultra-reactionary Austrian school of political economy typified by the charlatans von Mises and von Hayek. These activists are interested in portraying the 9/11 events as having been perpetrated by the entirety of the US federal government, meaning 100% of the feds from top to bottom, presumably down to the last rural postmaster. Their interest in demonizing the federal government is to find a back door to attack and destroy the vital New Deal and Great Society economic reforms, including especially Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, WIC, Head Start, S-CHIP, and other necessary programs. These individuals are pursuing what might be called a neo-feudalist agenda, seeking to abolish most aspects of the existing government, while giving all power to a fetishized and omnipotent market. Far from being the interplay of anonymous and impersonal forces they imagine, this market has names and faces: Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan Chase, Moynihan of Bank of America, Pandit of Citibank, and so on. In 2007–2008, many libertarians looked to Ron Paul in the hopes that he would use the televised presidential debates to re-open 9/11. Instead, Congressman Paul used one of those televised debates to denounce and repudiate the cause of 9/11 truth in the most scornful terms.

The goal of 9/11 truth activists should not be the wholesale destruction of the US federal government and the smashing of the Hamiltonian New Deal state because of the crimes of a network loyal to Wall Street and London rather than to the Constitution. The problem of the US federal government reflects the fact that it is far too weak, not that it is too strong. A strong state would reach out and crush the bankrupt zombie banks and oil monopolies which are currently preventing economic recovery. Instead, from Bush to Obama, and from Hastert to Pelosi to Boehner, we see a US federal government so helpless that it must act as a toady for banks, hedge funds, big oil, and a whole array of predatory financier interests.

North of the Gas Station: A Tempest in a Teapot

Over the past several years, much of the 9/11 truth debate has become embarrassingly trivial. Instead of maintaining a focus on the rogue network which infests the US federal government, with a view to exposing it and defeating it politically, many 9/11 truth activists have lost their way in heated controversies about the most nugatory points. The great debate of late has revolved around whether an airplane or a flying object approaching the Pentagon passed to the north of a certain gas station, or to the south of that same gas station. There may be a political point here somewhere, but if so it has been well concealed. The whole business is strongly reminiscent of Jonathan Swift’s account of the bitter faction fight between the big endians and the little endians in Gulliver’s Travels.

The only thing more absurd than the theoreticians who have staked their reputation on the north of the gas station flight path are the self-appointed censors and little Torquemadas who are aghast that anyone is daring to raise these questions in the first place, and who want them silenced by administrative means.

The approach advocated here is emphatically the political one. Using the analytical tools of patsies, moles, technicians, and drills, we can develop a good working concept of the network behind 9/11. Then the imperative is to look ahead, with a view to identifying, denouncing, and preventing future false-flag events. In a broader sense, once we have understood that the essence of the rogue network is an interface between the intelligence community on the one hand and Wall Street and City of London financiers on the other, we know we are dealing with a political faction which can and must be exposed and defeated. This includes the political struggle against the economic and financial policies of the Wall Street elite, which have demonstrably advanced thanks to the reactionary ultra-right political atmosphere provided by 9/11 and similar provocations. This book, it is worth pointing out, is remarkable among 9/11 studies precisely because it makes a major effort to show that recourse to terrorism as a tool of governance and policy by factions of the ruling financier elite is rooted in the overall breakdown crisis and disintegration of the US-UK financial system during the first decade of the 21st century.

The practical realization of 9/11 truth therefore depends on the creation of a political leadership, a political movement, and a political-economic program to destroy the power of the US-UK financier faction. This is admittedly a tall order, but is certainly more feasible now than it might have been ten years ago, and in any case represents the only road. At minimum, this country requires an alert mass movement of political activists who are determined to oppose all false-flag covert operations past, present, and future–and not just to focus attention on 9/11 events frozen in amber. This would include Bali, the Madrid commuter rail bombings of 2004, London 7/7/2005, Mumbai November 2008, Major Hassan of Fort Hood, Texas, Najibullah Zazi of Flushing, Queens; the Times Square bomber; Mutallab the 2009 Christmas Day bomber, Breivik of Norway, and many more to come.

How the Official Version of the 1933 Reichstag Fire was Finally Refuted

As long as the Nazi party ruled that Germany, the world tended to accept the Nazi official version of the burning of the German Parliament or Reichstag in February 1933. This Nazi official version alleged that the arson was the work of communists, specifically the mentally impaired van der Lubbe. It has been pointed out that, if Hitler had won or even survived the Second World War, it is likely that this Nazi official version would continue to rule in world academic circles down to the present day. It was the political and military defeat of Hitler and the Nazis which made possible the overthrow of the official version which they had sought to institutionalize. Instead, Nazi bigwig Hermann Goering has come to be widely recognized as the organizer of this arson. The dynamics of this public opinion process raises a series of fascinating questions which unfortunately cannot be treated here; this was the terrain rather superficially examined by Karl Mannheim in his Erkenntnis und Interesse. The practical point is simply that the definitive junking of the current 9/11 official version (including its variations like unanswered questions, blowback, and LIHOP) depends upon the final political and perhaps military defeat of the US-UK finance oligarchs. The United States, by contrast, must survive.

Those who remain devoted to the cause of 9/11 truth must accordingly transfer their activities to this much broader field. The rogue network is realistic enough to realize that they cannot organize world affairs or even US politics around a single false-flag provocation which is to remain valid for all time. Quite the contrary: they realize that each false-flag provocation has an efficacy which is limited to a rather specific set of circumstances that make up a given historical phase. Blowing up the Maine to get the Spanish-American War was great while it lasted, but soon there was a new enemy, and new provocations had to be manufactured against Germany to enter World War I. Before long, the Morgan interests were organizing a march on Washington against Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the spirit of Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome. In postwar America, we have had the U-2, the Bay of Pigs, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and M. L. King, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Pentagon papers and Watergate (understood as a CIA coup against the presidency), the Carter presidency, Hinckley (understood as a CIA operation to transfer power to Bush the elder), Iran-contra gunrunning and drug running, Monica Lewinsky, and 9/11. Each of these had only a temporary efficacy. 9/11 worked well as a matrix of manipulation as long as Bush and Cheney appeared to be in command, but by late 2007 the ruling elite itself felt the need for a new approach. Accordingly, 9/11 was pushed aside as the dominant covert operation and icon by the Obama coup of 2008, which was much more like a color revolution or CIA people power coup such as we have seen overseas, than like a traditional political campaign. The weak and pliable Wall Street puppet Obama thus became the chosen vehicle for an ideological adjustment or partial reversal of fields, in which the Bush-Cheney Global War on Terrorism has been replaced by Obama’s slogans of human rights and the responsibility to protect civilians engaged in color revolutions. (For further perspective, I refer the reader to my two books on Obama published during 2008.)

The Centrality of the 9/11 Drills, Exercises, War Games, and Operations

The centerpiece of this study is the analysis of how drills, exercises, war games, operations, and various Pentagon and intelligence community activities were used to access government resources and create the tragic effects observed on 9/11. Virtually every important aspect of the 9/11 story mimics or corresponds to one of the 9/11 drills, forcing the conclusion that the observed effects were actually produced by the drill in question going live. The drills and exercises are the keys to everything about 9/11. Yet, many otherwise serious writers in the field simply refuse to acknowledge and discuss this massive and overwhelmingly convincing body of evidence. Many of these researchers prefer the hobby horse of their own trivial pursuits, which unfortunately leaves them stranded somewhere north of the gas station and in the middle of nowhere.

Drills and Deception, from Operation Valkyrie (1944) to Operation South Mistral (2011)

The Tom Cruise film Valkyrie (2008) is a good illustration of the military uses of a drill or pre-planned operation to stage a coup d’état–with the moral signs inverted, compared to 9/11. The anti-Nazi German patriot von Stauffenberg and his associates wanted to topple the Hitler regime. In order to do this, they rewrote and re-directed an existing operational plan called Operation Valkyrie. This was originally a plan to secure Germany against an uprising by foreign slave laborers, perhaps combined with landings by Allied paratroopers. Von Stauffenberg, von Tresckow, and von Quirnheim incorporated changes into the plan which made it the vehicle for an anti-Nazi putsch. If Hitler had been eliminated at the outset, there is good reason to believe that this plan would have been successful in July 1944.

General von Tresckow, Colonel von Stauffenberg, (here played by Tom Cruise) and Margarete von Oven dodged SS and Gestapo patrols to meet in isolated corners of the Grünewald, a large park in Berlin, to rewrite and re-direct Operation Valkyrie, a plan for the imposition of a state of emergency. They transformed Valkyrie into a vehicle for a coup d’etat by the German army (Wehrmacht) against the institutions of Nazi rule.

Another and more recent example is represented by the British and French bombing attack on Libya starting on March 19, 2011. This outrageous act of aggression was originally disguised and camouflaged as a military drill. The United Kingdom and France signed an agreement on November 2, 2010 to carry out a joint exercise or war game under a code name variously reported as Operation South Mistral, Operation Southern Storm, or Operation Harmattan. The preparations for an assault on Libya thus proceeded under the legal cover of a sanctioned drill. When the time came, this drill was flipped live in the form of the genocidal NATO bombing of Libya.

The history of Europe between the two world wars of the last century offers us in the simplest terms a tragedy in three acts, which can be marked as economic depression (1929–33), totalitarian dictatorship (1933–39), and world war (1939–1945). In the current world crisis, we are still in the depression phase, although many harbingers of totalitarianism in the offing are present around us. Once we enter fully into the phase of totalitarian dictatorship, much political organizing will become impossible, and the world may prove to be locked onto the path to a new world war.

Public opinion needs to be inoculated as much as possible against false-flag terrorist provocations, but at the same time we must recognize that this activity will never be enough to prevent the slide into totalitarian dictatorship, for which the main impulsion comes from the economic breakdown crisis and financial disintegration of our times. Today, the fight for world economic recovery from economic depression is synonymous with the struggle to defeat the financier oligarchy which has inflicted 9/11 and so many other needless atrocities on the world. I urge all persons of good will to direct their energies in this direction, starting with my recent book Surviving the Cataclysm.

Dr. Webster Griffin Tarpley Ph.D.

Washington DC

August 30, 2011

Introduction

There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.

–Senator Daniel K. Inouye, during the Iran-Contra scandal.

This book would not have been possible without the efforts of the 9/11 truth movement, a true planetary cooperation by citizens of the world, which was called into being by the crimes of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent cover-up. I am indebted for many insights to numerous authors of print and Internet studies of 9/11; the extent of this indebtedness and the names of the individual researchers are acknowledged in the text and the bibliography. The 9/11 truth movement, its activists, organizers, filmmakers and demonstrators, have the immense historical merit of opposing those who have sought to incarcerate the intellectual life of the world in a grim new prison house of the human spirit, the monstrous 9/11 myth.

On September 7, 2001 I left Dulles Airport in northern Virginia on an Air France flight en route to Europe. 9/11 itself overtook me in Berlin. Because of the time difference, I learned of the terror attacks in the afternoon. I immediately concluded that the events of that day, because of their scope, complexity, and technical precision, could not have been possible without the massive complicity of a faction of the US political and military command structure. This was the intelligence that the US taxpayers were paying $40 billion a year for! not to mention 10 times that sum for defense. It was also clear to me that the goal of this operation was a new world war on a vast scale–something along the lines of the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–1648, which killed about a third of the population of central Europe. In the intentions of its planners, this new conflict was to be a population war, designed to exterminate large parts of the population of the developing sector, including the Arab and Muslim countries, and eventually China. It was the desperate bid of a bankrupt and declining power to re-assert world domination based on blackmail. It was a world-historical turn towards disaster.

On the evening of 9/11, I attended a memorial service at the Berliner Dom, the Berlin cathedral which had been destroyed by allied bombing during World War II, and which had lain in ruins through most of the communist era in East Berlin. I listened and approved as a leading prelate called for a peaceful response to the gigantic atrocity. This was the wisdom of Berlin, a city which had undergone not one, but scores of days of 3,000 dead during the world wars. This was the lesson of the twentieth century, which the neocons refuse to learn: the utter futility of war. A day later, I went to the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Gedächtniskirche, the Emperor William II memorial church on the Kurfürstendamm in what had been the western sector. This church had also been reduced to rubble by the Allied bombing. The remains had been kept as shell-scarred ruins, and a modern chapel was erected next to them during the early 1960s. And here prayer services were being held around the clock in response to the immense tragedy. Here I realized that it was my duty to do everything in my power to establish the truth of 9/11, and to tear down the absurd myth that was already being elaborated as the pretext for new world wars and incalculable human losses.

I issued my first challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy regarding 9/11 on October 26, 2001 at the Indiana Consortium of International Programs, which was held in the beautiful Hoosier countryside about fifty miles east of the Wabash River at Brown County State Park. Here I invited an audience of academics and scholars to think back to Vietnam as a time when the government, most professors, the media, and the pundits were all tragically wrong about virtually everything–facts in the case, diagnosis of the world situation, strategy, and tactics. We were now living through another such time, I argued. The invasion of Afghanistan, then under way, was as I argued not a military operation, but the systematic bribing of the CIA’s old network of druglords and warlords, backed up with bombing and special forces as enforcers.

I gave an expanded, more detailed, and above all more radical version of this critique on January 20, 2002 at Hanover College, a picturesque Indiana campus set on the bluffs of the Ohio River overlooking wooded hills on the Kentucky side. This time the audience was larger, some 150 people in a packed lecture hall. Here I was able to build on the pioneering insights of French activist Thierry Meyssan and the Réseau Voltaire website, on former SPD German Technology Minister Andreas von Bülow’s landmark interview to the Berlin Tagespiegel of January 13, 2002, and former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s incisive remark of December 10, 2001 to German N-TV that the activation of Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty on mutual assistance among the alliance members was illegitimate, since proof had to be delivered that the Sept. 11 terror attacks came from abroad . . . that proof has still not been provided. (N-TV, Dec. 10) Three and a half years and many failed commissions and investigations later, it has still not been provided. My own understanding of the 9/11 events developed further through my participation as speaker and listener in