BEYOND WEIRD
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
- Hunter S. Thompson
"I've been to Europe once, I don't have to go again."
- Dick Armey, US House of Representatives Majority Leader, 1998
The following transcript is genuine. Once you've read it you'll find that hard to believe. Enough said.
TRANSCRIPT
Hardball with Chris Matthews (9:00 PM ET) - CNBC
Wednesday May 1st 2002
CHRIS MATTHEWS, host: Congressman Dick Armey of Texas leads the Republicans in the US
House of Representatives.
Congressman Armey, Mr. Majority Leader, why is the Congress about to pass a resolution
supporting Israel at a time that the president is trying to walk a line between Israel and
its Arab neighbors?
Representative RICHARD ARMEY (Republican, Majority Leader): Well, we've had--we feel very
strongly in the House of Representatives that we have a moral obligation to protect the
safety, security and freedom of Israel. And the Congress wants to speak on that, both
bodies want to do so. We've discussed it with the White House, and everybody is
comfortable. We will go--go ahead with that tomorrow. It is very important to the world
that Israel be--the freedom of Israel be protected and honoured.
MATTHEWS: What good is this going to do anybody?
Rep. ARMEY: Well, I think, again, we--we want to make the point...
MATTHEWS: To whom?
Rep. ARMEY: The president of the United States is trying to make a transition in foreign
policy from what it has been to what it must be in the future. We can no longer appease
aggressors in the Middle East. There obviously will never be a peace. The goal is no Jews
between them and the sea, and we must make it very clear that if you want to talk about
peace and talk the talk, you must walk the walk, and that must be respect for Israel's
right to live freely, safely and securely.
MATTHEWS: OK. Let's talk about the realities over there. There's a fight between the Arabs
and the--and the Israelis over who owns the Pal--all of Palestine. Do you support the idea
that there be a Palestine state alongside Israel?
Rep. ARMEY: I am perfectly content to have a Palestinian state alongside Israel if it is a
state that honors others borders.
MATTHEWS: You are in total, 180 disagreement with Tom Delay who said this week that the
entire West Bank belongs to Israel and it belongs to that country that's not an Arab
country.
Rep. ARMEY: I...
MATTHEWS: It should not have a statehood.
Rep. ARMEY: No, I'm perfectly content to have a Palestinian state. I am not content to
give up any part of Israel for that purpose of that Palestinian state.
MATTHEWS: Wait a minute. Tom Delay's, whose resolution you're going to put on the floor
tomorrow and schedule, has said that the entire West Bank, he calls it Judean Samaria,
belongs to Israel. How can you say that this resolution doesn't support the Delay position
which is Israel has a right to grab the entire West Bank?
Rep. ARMEY: No, I--I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank. I'm also content
to have the Palestinians have a homeland and even for that to be somewhere near Israel,
but I'm not content to see Israel give up land for the purpose of peace to the
Palestinians who will not accept it and would not honor it. It is time to...
MATTHEWS: Well, where do you put the Palestinian state, in Norway? Once the Israelis take
back the West Bank permanently and annex it, there's no place else for the Palestinians to
have a state.
Rep. ARMEY: No, no, that's not--that's not at all true. There are many Arab nations that
have many hundreds of thousands of acres of land and--and soil and property and
opportunity to create a Palestinian state.
MATTHEWS: So you would transport--you would transport the Palestinians from Palestine to
somewhere else and call it their state?
Rep. ARMEY: I would be perfectly content to have a homeland, just as--most of...
MATTHEWS: But not in Palestine?
Rep. ARMEY: Most of the people who now populate Israel were transported from all over the
world to that land and they made it their home. The Palestinians can do the same, and
we're per--perfectly content to work with the Palestinians in doing that. We are not
willing to sacrifice Israel for the notion of a Palestinian homeland.
MATTHEWS: Right, no. No, that's not the question and that's not your answer. The question
here is: What is the future of the Palestinians who are fighting Israel right now? You say
their future is somewhere besides Palestine. That runs in the way of US policy going back
to 1948. It runs--it runs completely against the president's policy and every policy I've
heard a president take, which is that Israel has to give up its settlements on the West
Bank and give it back to the Arabs in exchange for peace. You say the deal should be the
Palestinians leave?
Rep. ARMEY: That's right. Palestinians say the deal should be the Israel--that--that the
Israelis leave.
MATTHEWS: Have you talked about this with the president?
Rep. ARMEY: I happened to believe that the Palestinians should leave.
MATTHEWS: Have you ever told George Bush, the president from your home state of Texas,
that you think the Palestinians should get up and go and leave Palestine and that's the
solution?
Rep. ARMEY: I'm probably telling him that right now. This is...
MATTHEWS: Have you thought this through?
Rep. ARMEY: I have thought this through. I've thought it through for a lot of years. I
believe that Israel is the state for the Jewish people. It needs to be honored. It needs
to be protected.
MATTHEWS: Yeah. That's not what you're saying. You're saying Israel should expand its
borders to the Jordan River...
Rep. ARMEY: No.
MATTHEWS: ...and kick out all the Palestinians? That's what you just said.
Rep. ARMEY: I am--I am content to have Israel occupy that land that it now occupies and to
have those people who have been aggressors against Israel retired to some other arena, and
I would be happy to have them make a home. I would be happy to have all of these Arab
nations that have been so hell bent to drive Israel out of the Middle East to get
together, find some land and make a home for the Palestinians. I think it can be done.
MATTHEWS: So the president, who has been dutifully, for the last couple of weeks, trying
to get the Israeli army to withdraw from the West Bank, should stop that, let the Israeli
defense force take over the West Bank and hold it and make it part of Israel? You
completely disagree with the president's policy then?
Rep. ARMEY: I am--I am perfectly content to have Israel hold and occupy the land that it
has at this moment.
MATTHEWS: Well, how about though-how about the Jenin in Samaria? Tom Delay, whose measure
you're putting on the floor tomorrow, says that all the West Bank, Jenin, Judea, Masada,
everything belongs to Israel. It's not occupied territory. It's Israeli. Is that your
position?
Rep. ARMEY: Well, first of all, Chris, I think we have to be real careful on how you are
interpreting jo--Tom's provision. I think Tom's
provision is principally and primarily that the Jewish people have a right to defend
themselves.
MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are now living on
the West Bank should get out of there?
Rep. ARMEY: Yes.
MATTHEWS: OK. Thank you very much. More with Congressman Dick Armey coming back. You're
watching HARDBALL.
(Announcements)
MATTHEWS: We're back with Congressman Dick Army who is head of the Republican Party. He's
majority leader of the US House of Representatives. Mr. Armey, the president's people,
somebody in the highest levels of this administration, is leaking the fact that the United
States is planning to attack Iraq sometime in next year. Do you think that would require a
congressional resolution?
Rep. ARMEY: I don't know that that leak is out there. It's--I'm missing it if it's out
there. I have to tell you, Chris, in the last year or
so, I've come to where I hardly trust anything I read in the papers anymore until the
president of the United States tells me himself that he is planning such an operation.
MATTHEWS: Yeah. So he never mentioned that in the meeting--in the breakfast meeting today
he never mentioned Iraq?
Rep. ARMEY: No, he certainly did not. He certainly--he certainly did not and he certainly
did not talk about any kind of military operation relative to Iraq.
MATTHEWS: Just so the people out there know where the House of Representatives stands,
does the--does the House of Representatives have to vote to support a US military attack
on Iraq if the president chooses to make one?
Rep. ARMEY: I would think that as we've seen this president and his father act in the
past, before he took any kind of military action that deployed our troops on a field of
conflict, he would probably come to us and ask for our support and our consideration in
the matter.
MATTHEWS: Well, under the Constitution, would that be necessary?
Rep. ARMEY: I think the con--you'll have to go to a constitutional scholar on that.
There's so much confusion on that point right now. I cannot answer it within a
hypothetical context.
MATTHEWS: OK. Let me ask you about this bad news we got this week from Director Mueller,
who is head of the FBI, that they haven't found a shred of paper that gives us any idea of
how the September 11th horror was--was concocted, planned, carried out. No evidence at
all.
Rep. ARMEY: Well, I--you've got a bunch of people hiding in caves, working out plans and
scheming and plotting. Why are we upset that we don't have any hard paper trail on that?
I--I would never have expected to have found one.
MATTHEWS: How do we--how do we feel that we've ended the war against al-Qaeda and caught
the people who did what they did September 11th? How do we know we've won that war?
Rep. ARMEY: Well, I don't know for sure when you know you've won that war. We don't know
how many people are scattered all over the world. This is a--a case even where if you
caught and killed bin Laden you got a snake that can continue to crawl and continue to be
dangerous even if the head has been cut off it. So you have to stay vigilant for a very,
very long time.
MATTHEWS: Whose head would you rather get, Mr. Leader, Mr. Armey? Would you rather get the
head of Osama bin Laden or the head of Saddam Hussein if you had it on the platter? If you
were a salome right now and--and St. John was offering you a head, which head would you
demand?
Rep. ARMEY: Well, I think right now the world would say 'We--we've got to stop bin Laden
who is--who has said, "I'll take this terror to every corner of the world."'
MATTHEWS: Right.
Rep. ARMEY: Saddam Hussein is--at least is confining himself, as it is right now, to his
own territory, although we're sure he's supporting terrorists across the world.
MATTHEWS: I like--I like you now you've said what I wanted you to say finally which is
we've got to get bin Laden. Thank you very much, US Congressman Dick Armey of Texas.
Rep. ARMEY: OK.
Not to be outdone, actor John Malkovich gets in on the act
ACTOR MALKOVICH WANTS GALLOWAY IN KILLING FIELD
A Labour back bencher said yesterday he was consulting his lawyers after Hollywood star
John Malkovich allegedly said he would like to shoot him.
John Malkovich - star of films including Dangerous Liaisons and the Killing Fields - is
reported to have said that George Galloway, Glasgow Kelvin MP, was one of the two people
he would most like to kill.
The MP expressed astonishment that the actor should have such animosity against him.
The unexpected attack came as Malkovich, who is in the UK filming Johnny English with
Rowan Atkinson and Natalie Imbruglia, addressed students at the Cambridge Union debating
society on Wednesday.He was asked by one student who he would most like to fight to the
death, and replied: "I'd rather just shoot them," before naming Mr Galloway and
Robert Fisk, Independent Middle East correspondent, Julian Blake, union spokesman, said.
"He had been speaking to the union president before the event, and he mentioned that
he read the British press and had been following George Galloway's comments," said Mr
Blake.
The actor did not spell out exactly what had sparked his anger, saying only that Mr
Galloway did not tell the truth.
The MP said he assumed his outspoken criticism of American policy in the Middle East,
Afghanistan and Iraq was behind the outburst. Mr Galloway said: "In the current
climate of terrorism and violence and so on, if it was a joke it is not very funny and if
it wasn't a joke, he will be hearing from my lawyers. We can have a high noon at the Old
Bailey."
On a lighter note he added: "It's not every day that a Hollywood star offers death in
the afternoon to a British MP."
HERALD (GLASGOW, SCOTLAND)
As the link between Iraq, Israel and the oil industry becomes ever clearer, some US officials can barely contain themselves. How about forming an organisation dedicated to drilling in a national heritage site on behalf of the Jewish race? If you think I'm kidding, read on.
IRAQ OIL BAN MOOTED TO WIN SUPPORT FOR ARCTIC
DRILLING
Senate Republicans have put together a final energy bill package that would ban Iraqi oil
imports and help fund steelworkers' pensions, a move designed to win support for oil
drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
The proposed embargo on oil from Iraq - which itself has announced a one-month ban on
exports to the US - could draw votes for the drilling from supporters of Israel. However,
it could also raise US oil prices at a time when anxiety over violence in the Middle East
and unrest in Venezuela has already pushed prices higher.
The plan to drill in the ANWR, strongly supported by the White House, passed the House of
Representatives last year with strong labour support, but several Senate Democrats have
promised their allies in the environmental movement they will filibuster the proposal.
Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska, the senior Republican on the energy committee, spoke
yesterday at a rally in support of Israel, hoping to build momentum for the measure. He
has recently announced the formation of a group called "Jews for Drilling". No
oil would flow from ANWR drilling for up to seven years but the proposal is being touted
as an energy independence measure. "This is a moral decision," said a Republican
Senate aide. "The money we give to Iraq is used by Saddam Hussein to pay Dollars
25,000 to the families of suicide bombers."
Iraq is the sixth largest supplier of oil to the US. According to Paul Cheng, an oil
analyst with Lehman Brothers, the long-run impact of an import ban would be to shift the
flow of the oil trade. However, since Iraqi oil is relatively cheap, such a move could
raise oil prices in the US.
Another Murkowski proposal, to help fund an estimated Dollars 10bn-Dollars 12bn (Pounds
7bn-Pounds 8.4bn) shortfall of pension obligations for steelworkers, is designed to
attract Democrats from steel-producing states.
Until Mr Murkowski began adding enticements to his drilling plan, it was estimated that he
had fewer than 50 of the 100 Senate votes. He needs 60 votes to break the filibuster.
The drilling proposal has been drastically scaled back to address the objections of
environmentalists. Activity would be limited to 2,000 acres in the wildlife refuge, aside
from the 80-mile pipeline that would have to be laid, and drilling would take place only
during cold-weather months when no animals migrate to the area.
Copyright © 2002: Financial Times Group
There were some other very curious stories that appeared in the days after, including one about an anonymous phone call made to the Mayor of San Francisco, warning him not to fly on September 10th. Another was an internal memo circulated amongst American trading firms in the Tokyo stock exchange, just prior to 9-11, that warned of an unspecified impending crisis. Some day I'll trawl through my records and dig a few out. Until then.....
Fresh evidence of massive dealing in airline shares before
attack
by
Saeed Shah
20 September 2001
Fresh evidence from Chicago of concerted selling of shares in airlines and insurance companies before last week's terrorist attacks has fuelled suspicion that accomplices of the hijackers have profited from the atrocity.
The Chicago Board Options Exchange has launched investigations into unusually high volumes of business in the days before the attacks. Regulators are examining whether heavy trade in "put" or sell options on some companies which allow buyers to profit from a fall in a share price point to the involvement of people with prior knowledge of the atrocities.
Chicago and other exchanges were alerted by the fact that the handful of options contracts traded on a given day suddenly soared into the hundreds or even thousands for companies affected by the attacks.
For instance, there were 2,000 contracts traded on United Airlines on 6 September that bet the share would fall below $30 (£20) over the next month. This was 285 times the previous average trading volume, according to data from Bloomberg, a financial information provider. United Airlines shares have dropped from more than $32 to about $18 since the attack, netting a profit of about $2m on this transaction alone.
The advantage of dealing in options rather than shares is that a fraction of the amount of capital is required.
Similarly, on some of the days before the terrorist attack, volumes of options in the shares of American Airlines jumped 60 times the previous daily average. Trading in options in the Morgan Stanley investment bank were 27 times the norm. And Marsh & McLennan, an insurance group, saw options volumes jump nearly 100 times on the day before the attack.
These companies have been among the biggest corporate victims of the attacks. Aeroplanes from American Airlines and United Airlines were hijacked by the terrorists, while Morgan Stanley and Marsh & McLennan had thousands of employees in the World Trade Centre's twin towers.
Jon Najarian, an investment adviser at the consultancy 1010WallStreet.com, said: "Frequently insider-type buying or selling evidences itself through listed options or futures ... We know something is up when we see unusual volumes in options of securities or indices."
The Financial Services Authority, the British watchdog, is examining the volumes of British Airways "put" options traded before the attacks.
In the Netherlands, regulators are studying options trading in its national carrier, KLM, which saw a huge rise in dealing before the New York disaster.
Patrick Young, an investment expert and author of Capital Market Revolution, said: "It sounds far-fetched but it's within the bounds of possibility that have been stretched by the events of last week."
However, Mr Young said that terrorists dealing in options might incriminate themselves by leaving a paper trail. "It would be an incredible risk to take," he said. "Even if they used multiple intermediaries, the trail would eventually lead right back to them."
Noam Chomsky once advised people to ignore the warning 'Don't believe all you read on the internet' unless you were prepared to heed the same advice in relation to the mainstream official media. With this in mind I include this article, whose validity I must confess I have not even vaguely bothered to check. See what you make of it.....
WHO WAS BEHIND THE SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH ATTACKS?
A presentation by Thierry Meyssan at the Zayed Center in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates)
on April 8, and posted at disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=149495&article=24052
Your Highness, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
In the first minutes following the first attack on the World Trade Center, officials
suggested to the media that the person behind the attacks was Osama bn Laden, the epitome
of Muslim fanaticism. Not long after, the recently appointed director of the FBI, Robert
Mueller III, designated nineteen kamikazes by name and mobilized all the means at the
disposal of his agency to track down their accomplices. The FBI thus never undertook any
investigation but, instead, organized a man hunt, which, in the eyes much of the United
States public, quickly took on the appearance of an Arab hunt. This reached such a pitch
that people were incited to attack - even kill - Arabs whom they naively considered
collectively responsible for the attacks.
There was no investigation by Congress, which, at the request of the White House,
renounced exercising its constitutional role, supposedly in order not to adversely affect
national security. Nor was there investigation by any media representatives, who had been
summoned to the White House and prevailed upon to abstain from following up any leads lest
such inquiries also adversely affect national security.
If we analyze the attacks of September the eleventh, we notice first off that there was
much more to them than the official version acknowledges.
1. We know about only four planes, whereas at one point it was a question of eleven
planes. Further, an examination of the insider-trading conducted in relation to the
attacks shows put-option speculative trading in the stock of three airline companies:
American Airlines, United Airlines and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.
2. The official version does not include the attack on the White House annex, the Old
Executive Office Building (called the "Eisenhower Building"). Yet, on the
morning of the eleventh, ABC television broadcast, live, pictures of a fire ravaging the
presidential services building.
3. Neither does the official version take into account the collapse of a third building in
Manhattan World Trade Center complex, independently of the twin towers. This third
building was not hit by a plane. However, it, too, was ravaged by a fire before collapsing
for an unknown reason. This building contained the world's biggest secret CIA operations
base, where the Agency engaged in economic intelligence gathering that the
military-industrial lobby considered a waste of resources that should have been devoted to
strategic intelligence gathering.
If we look closely at the attack against the Pentagon, we notice that the official version
amounts to an enormous lie.
According to the Defense Department, a Boeing 757, all trace of which had been lost
somewhere over Ohio, flew some 500 kilometers (300 miles) without being noticed. It
supposedly entered Pentagon air space and descended on to the lawn surrounding the
heliport, bounced off the lawn, broke a wing in collision with an electric transformer
station, hit the façade at the level of the ground floor and first story, and was totally
consumed by fire, leaving no other traces than two dysfunctional black boxes and pieces of
passengers' bodies.
It is obviously impossible that a Boeing 757 could, for some 500 kilometers, escape
detection by civil and military radar, by fighter-bomber planes sent in pursuit of it and
by observation satellites that had just been activated.
It is also obviously impossible that a Boeing 757 could enter the Pentagon's air space
without being destroyed by one or more of the five missile batteries protecting the
building.
When one examines the photographs of the façade, taken in the minutes following the
attack (even before the Arlington civilian fire fighters had time to deploy), one sees no
trace of the right wing on fire in front of the façade, nor any hole in the façade into
which the plane could have been swallowed up.
Apparently without the least fear of laying itself open to ridicule, the Defense
Department declared that the jet engines, made out of tempered steel, had disintegrated
under the shock of the impact - without damaging the façade. The aluminum of the fuselage
is claimed to have combusted at more than 2,500° Celsius within the building and to have
been transformed into gas, but the bodies of the passengers which it contained were so
little burned that they were later identified from their finger prints.
Responding to journalists during a press conference at the Pentagon, the fire chief
claimed that "no voluminous debris from the aircraft" had remained, "nor
any piece of the fuselage, nor anything of that sort". He declared that neither he
nor his men knew what had become of the aircraft.
Close examination of the official photographs of the scene of the attack, taken and
published by the Defense Department, shows that no part of the Pentagon bears any mark of
an impact that could be attributed to the crash of a Boeing 757.
One must acknowledged the evidence: it is impossible that the attack against the Pentagon
on September 11, killing 125 persons, was carried out by a jet airliner.
The scene of the attack was thoroughly disturbed on the following day by the immediate
launch of new construction work, with the result that many of the elements necessary to
reconstruct what had happened are missing. The elements that do remain, however, converge
in a single hypothesis that it is not possible to prove with certainty.
An air traffic controller from Washington has testified seeing on radar an object flying
at about 800 kilometers per hour, moving initially toward the White House, then turning
sharply toward the Pentagon, where it seemed to crash. The air traffic controller has
testified that the characteristics of the flight were such that it could only have been a
military projectile.
Several hundred witnesses have claimed that they head "a shrill noise like the noise
of a fighter-bomber", but nothing like the noise of a civilian aircraft.
Eye-witnesses have said that they saw "something like a cruise missile with
wings" or a small flying object "like a plane carrying eight or twelve
persons".
The flying object penetrated the building without causing major damage to the façade. It
crossed several of the building rings of the Pentagon, creating in each wall it pierced a
progressively bigger hole. The final hole, perfectly circular, measured about one meter
eighty in diameter. When traversing the first ring of the Pentagon, the object set off a
fire, as gigantic as it was sudden. Huge flames burst from the building licking the
façades, then they shrank back just as fast, leaving behind a cloud of black soot. The
fire spread through a part of the first ring and along two perpendicular corridors. It was
so sudden that the fire protection system could not react.
All these testimonies and observations correspond to the effects of an AGM [air to ground
missile]-86C of the third (most recent) generation of CALCM [conventional air launched
cruise missile -- see picture at www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/agm-86c.htm
- Here*.
equipped with depleted uranium warheads and guided by GPS [global positioning system].
This type of missile, seen from the side, would easily remind one of a small civilian
airplane, but it is not a plane. It produces a shrill whistle comparable to that of a
fighter-bomber, can be guided with enough accuracy to be directed through a window, can
pierce the most resistant armor and can set off a fire -independent of its piercing effect
- that will generate heat of over 2,000° Celsius.
This type of missile was developed jointly by the Navy and the Air Force and is fired from
a plane. The missile used against the Pentagon destroyed the part of the building where
the new Supreme Naval Command Center was being installed. Following the attack, the Navy
Chief of Staff, Admiral Vernon Walters, failed to show up in the crisis room of the
National Military Joint Intelligence Center when the other members of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff reported there. Instead, he abruptly left the Pentagon.
Who, then, could have fired such a missile on the Pentagon?
The answer was given by the off-the-record revelations of Ari Fleischer, the White House
spokesman, and by Karl Rove, senior advisor to the president, to journalists from the New
York Times and the Washington Post. Eighteen days later, these men discounted the veracity
of the information they had given the journalists, claiming that they had been speaking
under the stress of great emotion.
According to those close to George W. Bush, in the course of the morning, the Secret
Service received a telephone call from those behind the attacks, apparently in order to
make demands. To give credence to their demands, the masterminds revealed the secret codes
giving access to the secure telephone lines available to the president for secure
communication with the various intelligence agencies and services as well as for access to
the nuclear arsenal. In fact, only a very few persons with the highest security
clearances, in the top ranks of the government, could have had these codes. It follows
that at least one of the persons behind the attacks of September 11 has a top government
post, either civilian or military.
To give credence to the fable of Islamic terrorists, the United States authorities
invented kamikazes. Although it would have been possible for a well organized group of
persons to bring fire arms into commercial air liners, the kamikazes apparently used
cardboard cutters as their only weapons. They are said to have learned to pilot Boeing
757s and 767s in the space of several hours of simulator training, becoming better pilots
than professionals. This mastery allowed them to carry out complex in-flight approach
maneuvers.
The Justice Department has never explained how it established the list of the kamikazes.
The airline companies have furnished the exact number of passengers in each plane, and the
passenger lists, incomplete, do not mention the persons who boarded at the last minute. In
checking the these lists, one notices that names of the kamikazes are not on them and that
only three passengers are not identified for flight 11 and only two for flight 93. It is
thus impossible that 19 kamikazes boarded. Further, several of those listed as kamikazes
have turned up, alive. The FBI nonetheless maintains that the high-jackers have all been
definitively identified and that complementary information such as birth dates makes it
improbable that they could be confused with persons of the same name. For those who might
doubt this, the FBI has a ridiculous proof: whereas the planes burned and the twin towers
collapsed, the passport of Mohammed Atta was miraculously found intact on the smoking
ruins of the World Trade Center.
The existence of high-jackers, whether these or others, is confirmed by telephone calls
made by several passengers to members of their families. Unfortunately, these
conversations are known to us only by hearsay and have not been published, even in the
case of those that were recorded. Thus, it has been impossible to verify that they were
actually made from a particular cell phone of from a telephone on board. Here, too, we are
asked to take the FBI at its word.
Further, it was not indispensable to have high-jackers to carry out the attacks. The
Global Hawk technology, developed by the Air Force, makes it possible to take control of a
commercial airliner regardless of the intentions of its pilot(s) and to direct it by
remote control.
There remains the case of Osama bin Laden. If it is generally admitted that he was a CIA
agent or collaborator during the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the current
version of events claims that he turned coat and became public enemy number one of the
United States. This story does not bear up under scrutiny either. The French daily le
Figaro revealed that last July, Osmam bn Laden was a patient at the American hospital in
Dubai, where he was visited by the head of CIA regional office.
CBS television in the United States has revealed that, on September 10, Osama bin Laden
was undergoing dialysis at the Rawalpindi military hospital, under the protection of the
Pakistani army. And the renowned French journalist Michel Peyrard, who was a prisoner of
the Taliban, has recounted how, last November, Osama bn Laden was living openly in
Jalalabad while the United States was bombing other regions of the country. It is
difficult to believe that the greatest army in the world, come to Afghanistan to arrest
him, was unable to do so, while the mollah Omar was able to escape from United States
military force on a moped.
In view of the elements that I have just presented, it appears that the attacks of
September can not be attributed to foreign terrorists from the Arab-Muslim world - even if
some of those involved might have been Muslim - but to United States terrorists.
The day after the attacks of September 11, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368
acknowledged "the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense in
accordance with the Charter", calling on "all States to work together urgently
to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks
and stresses that those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators,
organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable".
If one wishes to heed the call of the Security Council, to enforce Resolution 1368 and to
punish those who really are guilty, the only way to accurately identify the guilty parties
is to set up a commission of inquiry whose independence and objectivity are guaranteed by
the United Nations. This would also be the only way to preserve international peace. In
the meantime, Your Highness, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, the foreign military
interventions of the United States of America are devoid of any basis in international
law, whether it be their recent intervention in Afghanistan or their announced
interventions in Iran, Iraq and in numerous other countries.
The following however, is true, and enormously disturbing in its' implications.
MIT Invents Videos Of People Saying Things They Never
Said
By
Gareth Cook
Boston Globe Staff
5-15-2002
CAMBRIDGE - Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created the first
realistic videos of people saying things they never said - a scientific leap that raises
unsettling questions about falsifying the moving image.
In one demonstration, the researchers taped a woman speaking into a camera, and then
reprocessed the footage into a new video that showed her speaking entirely new sentences,
and even mouthing words to a song in Japanese, a language she does not speak. The results
were enough to fool viewers consistently, the researchers report.
But scientists warn the technology will also provide a powerful new tool for fraud and
propaganda - and will eventually cast doubt on everything from
video surveillance to presidential addresses.
''This is really groundbreaking work,'' said Demetri Terzopoulos, a leading specialist in
facial animation . But ''we are on a collision course with ethics. If you can make people
say things they didn't say, then potentially all hell breaks loose.''
The researchers have already begun testing the technology on video of Ted Koppel, anchor
of ABC's ''Nightline,'' with the aim of dubbing a show in
Spanish. Yet as this and similar technology makes its way out of academic laboratories,
even the scientists involved see ways it could be misused: to
discredit political dissidents on television, to embarrass people with fabricated video
posted on the Web, or to illegally use trusted figures to endorse products.
''There is a certain point at which you raise the level of distrust to where it is hard to
communicate through the medium,'' said Kathleen Hall Jamieson,
dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. ''There
are people who still believe the moon landing was staged.''
Currently, the MIT method is limited: It works only on video of a person facing a camera
and not moving much, like a newscaster.
But it should not be difficult to extend the discovery to work on a moving head at any
angle, according to Tomaso Poggio, a neuroscientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain
Research, who is on the MIT team and runs the lab where the work is being done. And while
state-of-the-art audio simulations are not as convincing as the MIT software, that
barrier is likely to fall soon, researchers say.
''It is only a matter of time before somebody can get enough good video of your face to
have it do what they like."
For years, animators have used computer technology to put words in people's mouths, as
they do with the talking baby in CBS's ''Baby Bob'' - creating
effects believable enough for entertainment, but still noticeably computer-generated. The
MIT technology is the first that is ''video-realistic,'' the researchers say, meaning
volunteers in a laboratory test could not distinguish between real and synthesized clips.
And while current computer-animation techniques require an artist to smooth out trouble
spots by hand, the MIT method is almost entirely automated.
Previous work has focused on creating a virtual model of a person's mouth, then using a
computer to render digital images of it as it moves. But the new
software relies on an ingenious application of artificial intelligence to teach a machine
what a person looks like when talking.
Starting with between two and four minutes of video the computer captures images which
represent the full range of motion of the mouth and surrounding areas.
The computer is able to express any face as a combination of these faces, the same way
that any color can be represented by a combination of red, green, and blue. The computer
then goes through the video, learning how a person expresses every sound, and how it moves
from one to the next.
Given a new sound, the computer can then generate an accurate picture of the mouth area
and virtually superimpose it on the person's face. The researchers are scheduled to
present the paper in July at SIGGRAPH, the world's top computer graphics conference.
The effect is significantly more convincing than a previous effort, called Video Rewrite,
which recorded a huge number of small snippets of video and then recombined them. Still,
the new method only seems lifelike for a sentence or two at a time, because over longer
stretches, the speaker seems to lack emotion.
MIT's Ezzat said that he would like to develop a more complex model that would teach the
computer to simulate basic emotions.
A specialist can still detect the video forgeries, but as the technology improves,
scientists predict that video authentication will become a growing field - in the courts
and elsewhere - just like the authentication of photographs. As video, too, becomes
malleable, a society increasingly reliant on live satellite feeds and fiber optics will
have to find even more direct ways to communicate.
''We will probably have to revert to a method common in the Middle Ages, which is
eyewitness testimony,'' said the University of Pennsylvania's Jamieson. ''And there is
probably something healthy in that.''
Compare original and synthetic videos from MIT on www.boston.com/globe.
Gareth Cook can be reached at cook@globe.com
This story ran on page A1 ofthe Boston Globe on 5/15/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
Here's another disturbing artcicle about media abuse, and again, another true one.
CNN and The Military
by
Alexander Cockburn
San Jose Mercury News
23rd March 2000
A handful of military personnel from the 4th Psychological Operations Group (i.e. PSYOPs) based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina have until recently been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. An enterprising Dutch journalist named Abe De Vries came up with this important story in mid-February, and he remains properly astounded that no mainstream news medium in the United States has evinced any interest in the story.
I came across translations of De Vries' stories on the matter, after they had appeared in late February in Trouw, the foremost quality newspaper in Holland.
De Vries later told me he'd originally come upon the story via an article in the French Intelligence newsletter (available on a pay-per-story basis on the Internet) Feb. 17, which described a military symposium in Arlington, Va., held at the beginning of that same month, discussing use of the press in military operations.
Col. Christopher St. John, commander of the U.S. Army's 4th PSYOPs Group, was quoted by a French Intelligence correspondent, present at the symposium, as (in the correspondent's words) having ``called for greater cooperation between the armed forces and media giants. He (St. John) pointed out that some Army PSYOPs personnel had worked for CNN for several weeks, and helped in the production of some news stories for the network.''
Reading this in Belgrade, where he's Trouw's correspondent, De Vries saw a good story, picked up the phone, and finally reached Maj. Thomas Collins of the U.S. Army Information Service, who duly confirmed the presence of these Army PSYOPs experts at CNN. ``PSYOPs personnel, soldiers and officers,'' De Vries quoted Collins as telling him, ``have been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program `Training with Industry.' They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news.''
I reported this interesting disclosure in my newsletter, CounterPunch, and made it the topic of my regular weekly broadcast to ``AM Live,'' a program of the South Africa Broadcasting Company in Johannesburg. Among the audience of this broadcast was CNN's bureau in South Africa, which lost no time in relaying news of it to CNN headquarters in Atlanta, and I duly received an angry phone call from Eason Jordan, who identified himself as CNN's president of news gathering and international networks.
Jordan was full of indignation that I had somehow compromised the reputation of CNN. But in the course of our conversation, it turned out that, yes, CNN had hosted a total of five interns from U.S. Army PSYOPs, two in television, two in radio, and one in satellite operations. Jordan said the program had begun on June 7 (just before the end of the war against Serbia), and only recently terminated, I would guess at about the time CNN's higher management read Abe De Vries' stories.
Naturally enough, Eason Jordan and other executives at CNN now describe the Army PSYOPs intern tours at CNN as having been insignificant. Maybe so. Col. St. John, the commanding officer of the PSYOPs group, certainly thought them of sufficient significance to mention at that high-level Pentagon pow-wow in Arlington about propaganda and psychological warfare. Maybe CNN was the target of a PSYOPs penetration and is still too naive to figure out what was going on.
It's hard not to laugh when CNN execs like Eason Jordan start spouting, as he did to me, high-toned stuff about CNN's principles of objectivity and refusal to relay government propaganda.
During the war on Serbia, as with other recent conflicts involving the United States, CNN's screen was filled with an interminable procession of U.S. officers. On April 27 of last year, Amy Goodman of the Pacifica Radio network put the following question to Frank Sesno, who is CNN's senior vice president for political coverage.
GOODMAN: ``If you support the practice of putting ex-military men -- generals -- on the payroll to share their opinion during a time of war, would you also support putting peace activists on the payroll to give a different opinion during a time of war?
SESNO: ``We bring the generals in because of their expertise in a particular area. We call them analysts. We don't bring them in as advocates. In fact, we actually talk to them about that -- they're not there as advocates.''
Exactly a week before Sesno said this, CNN had featured as one of its military analysts, Lt. Gen. Dan Benton, U.S. Army Retired.
BENTON: ``I don't know what our countrymen that are questioning why we're involved in this conflict are thinking about. As I listened to this press conference this morning, with reports of rapes, villages being burned, and this particularly incredible report of blood banks, of blood being harvested from young boys for the use of Yugoslav forces, I just got madder and madder. The United States has a responsibility as the only superpower in the world, and when we learn about these things, somebody has got to stand up and say, `That's enough, stop it, we aren't going to put up with this.'''
Please note what CNN's supposedly non-advocatory analyst Benton was ranting about: a particularly preposterous NATO propaganda item about 700 Albanian boys being used as human blood banks for Serb fighters.
Let's give the last word to the enterprising Abe De Vries. ``Of course, CNN says these PSYOPs personnel didn't decide anything, write news reports, etc. What else can they say? Maybe it's true, maybe not. The point is that these kind of close ties with the Army are, in my view, completely unacceptable for any serious news organization. Maybe even more astonishing is the complete silence about the story from the big media. To my knowledge, my story was not mentioned by leading American or British newspapers, nor by Reuters or AP.''
Alexander Cockburn is a syndicated columnist. CounterPunch, co-edited by Cockburn, is located on the web at http://www.counterpunch.org
You may wonder why I've included the following article. Well, for two reasons: One, if you're having a bad day you are sometimes tempted to actually take it seriously. Two, it appeared in......I almost can't believe that it did.....but it appeared in....in....a world renowned publication....famous for its' humility and compassion........THE NEW YORK TIMES!!!!
We're
America, Get Out of Our WayAnd finally, here's a piece that did the rounds fairly extensively. I've not heard from anyone yet that Mr. Goff is a figment of someone's imagination, and you have to admit, he makes some excellent points. If you've always felt that something was fishy about the sequence of the hijack story, and the frankly ridiculous notion that the FBI could have found Atta's passport intact in the rubble of the WTC, then that fish smell is about to get worse.
Originally written for a discussion
list - not originally intended for wide distribution [but it got out anyway!]
Hear Sgt Goff elaborate on this
essay in a radio interview
I'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. That doesn't cut much for those who will only accept the opinions of former officers on military matters, since we enlisted swine are assumed to be incapable of grasping the nuances of doctrine.
But I wasn't just in the army, I studied and taught military science and doctrine. I was a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama, and I taught Military Science at West Point. And contrary to the popular image of what Special Forces does, SF's mission is to teach. We offer advice and assistance to foreign forces. That's everything from teaching marksmanship to a private to instructing a Battalion staff on how to coordinate effective air operations with a sister service. Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have to say that the story we hear on the news and read in the newspapers is simply not believable. The most cursory glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and after September 11th, does not support the official line or conform to the current actions of the United States government.
But the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept its underlying premises. I'm not at all surprised about the Republican and Democratic Parties repeating these premises. They are simply two factions within a single dominant political class, and both are financed by the same economic powerhouses. My biggest disappointment, as someone who identifies himself with the left, has been the tacit acceptance of those premises by others on the left, sometimes naively, and sometimes to score some morality points. Those premises are twofold. One, there is the premise that what this de facto administration is doing now is a "response" to September 11th. Two, there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion, neither of these is sound.
To put this in perspective we have to go back not to September 11th, but to last year or further.
A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush, with nothing more than his name and the behind-the-scenes pressure of his powerful father--a former President, ex-director of Central Intelligence, and an oil man--is systematically constructed as a candidate, at tremendous cost. Across the country, subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms are put into place to disfranchise a significant fraction of the Democrat's African-American voter base. This doesn't come out until Florida becomes a battleground for Electoral College votes, and the magnitude of the story has been suppressed by the corporate media to this day. In a decision so lacking in legitimacy, the Supreme Court will neither by-line the author of the decision nor allow the decision to ever be used as a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards the presidency of the United States to a man who loses the popular vote in Florida and loses the national popular vote by over 600,000.
This de facto regime then organizes a very interesting cabinet. The Vice President is an oil executive and the former Secretary of Defense. The National Security Advisor is a director on the board of a transnational oil corporation and a Russia scholar. The Secretary of State is a man with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, and the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other interesting appointment is Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. He and Cheney were featured as speakers at the May, 2000, Russian-American Business Leaders Forum. So the consistent currents in this cabinet are petroleum, the former Soviet Union, and the military. Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his guises, and the general trajectory of US foreign policy as far back as the Carter Administration, I feel I can reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern and South Asian fossil fuels are one of their major preoccupations. Not just because this klavern has some very direct financial interests in fossil fuel, but because they surely know that worldwide oil production is peaking as we speak, and will soon begin a permanent and precipitous decline that will completely change the character of civilization as we know it within 20 years. Even the left seems to be in deep denial about this, but the math is available. And, no, alternative energies and energy technologies will not save us. All the alternatives in the world can not begin to provide more than a tiny fraction of the energy base now provided by oil. This makes it more than a resource, and the drive to control what's left more than an economic competition.
I further conclude that the economic colonization of the former Soviet Union is probably high on that agenda, and in fact has a powerful synergy with the issue of petroleum. Russia not only holds vast untapped resources that beckon to imperialism in crisis, it remains a credible military and nuclear challenger in the region. We have not one, but three members of the Bush de facto cabinet with military credentials, which makes the cabinet look quite a lot like a military General Staff. All this way before September 11th. Then there's the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO might have expected consignment to the dustbin of the Cold War after the Eastern Bloc shattered in 1991. Peace dividend and all that. But it didn't. It expanded directly into the former states of the Eastern Bloc toward the former Soviet Union, and contributed significant forces to the devastation of Iraq--a key country in the world oil market, over which control translates into the ability to manipulate oil prices.
NATO is a military formation, and the United States exerts the controlling interest in it. It seemed like a form without a function, but it remedied that pretty quickly. Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International Monetary Fund, the US and Germany began a systematic campaign of destabilization there, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan in that campaign. NATO became the military arm of that agenda--the break-up of Yugoslavia into compliant statelets, the further containment of the former Soviet Union, and the future pipeline easement for Caspain Sea oil to Western European markets through Kosovo. You see, this is important to understand, and people--even those against the war talk--are tending to overlook the significance of it. NATO is not a guarantor of international law, and it is not a humanitarian organization. It is a military alliance with one very dominant partner. And it can no longer claim to be a defensive alliance against European socialists. It is an instrument of military aggression.
NATO is the organization that is now going to thrust further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans through the Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. The US military has already taken control of a base in Uzbekistan. No one is talking about how what we are doing seems to be a very logical extension of a strategy that was already in motion, and has been in motion for two decades. Once we recognize the pattern of activity designed to simultaneously consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan is exactly where they need to go to pursue that agenda. Afghanistan borders Iran, India, and even China but, more importantly, the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. These border Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan borders Russia. Turkmenistan sits on the Southeastern quadrant of the Caspian Sea, whose oil the Bush Administration dearly covets. Afghanistan is necessary for two things: as a base of operations to begin the process of destabilizing, breaking off, and establishing control over the South Asian Republics, which will begin within the next 18-24 months in my opinion, and constructing a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to the Asian market.
The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign Secretary, that senior American officials were warning them as early as mid-July that military action for mid-October was being planned for Afghanistan. In 1996, the Department of Energy was issuing reports on the desirability of a pipeline through Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal testified before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific that this pipeline was crucial to transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian Ocean. Given this evidence that a military operation to secure at least a portion of Afghanistan has been on the table, possibly as early as five years ago, I can't help but conclude that the actions we are seeing put into motion now are part of a pre-September 11th agenda. I'm absolutely sure of that, in fact. The planning alone for operations, of this scale, that are now taking shape, would take many months. And we are seeing them take shape in mere weeks. It defies common sense. This administration is lying about this whole thing being a "reaction" to September 11th. That leads me, in short order, to be very suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided evidence that someone in Afghanistan is responsible. It's just too damn convenient. Which also leads me to wonder--just for the sake of knowing--what actually did happen on September 11th, and who actually is responsible.
The so-called evidence is a farce. The US presented Tony Blair's puppet government with the evidence, and of the 70 so-called points of evidence, only nine even referred to the attacks on the World Trade Center, and those points were conjectural. This is a bullshit story from beginning to end. Presented with the available facts, any 16-year old with a liking for courtroom dramas could tear this story apart like a two-dollar shirt. But our corporate press regurgitates it uncritically. But then, as we should know by now, their role is to legitimize.
This cartoon heavy they've turned bin Laden into makes no sense, when you begin to appreciate the complexity and synchronicity of the attacks. As a former military person who's been involved in the development of countless operations orders over the years, I can tell you that this was a very sophisticated and costly enterprise that would have left what we call a huge "signature".
In other words, it would be very hard to effectively conceal.
So there's a real question about why there was no warning of this. That can be a question about the efficacy of the government's intelligence apparatus. That can be a question about various policies in the various agencies that had to be duped to orchestrate this action. And it can also be a question about whether or not there was foreknowledge of the event, and that foreknowledge is being covered up. To dismiss this concern out of hand as the rantings of conspiracy nuts is premature.
And there is a history of this kind of thing being done by national political bosses, including the darling of liberals, Franklin Roosevelt. The evidence is very compelling that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately failed to act to stop Pearl Harbor in order to mobilize enough national anger to enter the World War II. I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks.
Follow along:
Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all the while on FAA radar. The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time.Who is notified?
This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read. By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers.
By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade Center, Bush is settling in with children for his photo ops at Booker Elementary. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously, an event never before seen in history, and one has just dived into the worlds best know twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander in Chief.
No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either.
At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining World Trade Center building.
At 9:05, Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers to George W. Bush. Bush "briefly turns somber" according to reporters. Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No. He resumes listening to second graders read about a little girl's pet fucking goat, and continues this banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington DC.
Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air Force? No.
An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement telling the United States what they already have figured out; that there's been an attack by hijacked planes on the World Trade Center.
There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No. At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American Flight 77 is still ten minutes from its target, the Pentagon.
The Administration will later claim they had no way of knowing that the Pentagon might be a target, and that they thought Flight 77 was headed to the White House, but the fact is that the plane has already flown South and past the White House no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing through the sky at over 400 nauts.
At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC.
Now, the real kicker. A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460 nauts.
When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further training on a flight simulator.
This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush hour by buying her a video driving game. It's horse shit!
There is a story being constructed about these events. My crystal ball is not working
today, so I can't say why.
But at the least, this so-called Commander-in-Chief and his staff that we are all supposed to follow blindly into some ill-defined war on terrorism is criminally negligent or unspeakably stupid. And at the worst, if more is known or was known, and there is an effort to conceal the facts, there is a criminal conspiracy going on.
Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was facing a confluence of crises from which they were temporarily rescued by this event. Whether they played a sinister role or not, there is little doubt that they have at the very least opportunistically pounced on this attack to overcome their lack of legitimacy, to shift the blame for the encroaching recession from capitalism to the September 11th terror attack, to legitimize their pre-existing foreign policy agenda, and to establish and consolidate repressive measures domestically and silence dissent. In many ways, September 11th pulled the Bush cookies out of the fire. And given them the green light to begin constructing a long-term scenario within which to establish fascistic control measures at home and abroad as a citadel for the ruling class in the catastrophic conjuncture that we are entering based on the end of oil.
This elephant in the living room is being studiously ignored. In fact, the domestic repression has already begun, officially and unofficially. It's kind of a latter day McCarthyism. I participated in a teach-in at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on the 17th of September, and though not a single person on the panel excused or justified the attacks, and every person there offered either condolences and prayers for the victims, we were excoriated within two days as "enemies of America." Yesterday an op-ed called for my deportation (to where, one can only guess). Now Herr Ashcroft is fast tracking the biggest abrogation of US civil liberties since the so-called anti-terrorism legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing--which by the way hasn't resulted in anti-terrorism but in the acceleration of the application of the racist death penalty. The FBI has defined terrorist groups not by whether any given group has ever acted as terrorists, but by their beliefs. Some socialists and anti-globalization groups have already been identified by name as terrorist groups, even though there is not a single shred of evidence that they have ever participated in any criminal activity. It reminds me of the Smith Act that was finally declared unconstitutional, but only after a hell of a lot of people served a hell of a long time in jail for the crime of thinking.
I think this also points to yet another huge problems that the Bush regime was facing. Worldwide resistance to the whole so-called neoliberal agenda, which is a prettied up term for debt-leverage imperialism. While debt and the threat of sanctions has been used to coerce nations in the periphery, we have to understand that the final guarantor of compliance remains military action. For a global economic agenda, there is always a corresponding political and military agenda.
The focal point of these actions in the short term is Southern Asia, but they have already scripted this as a worldwide and protracted fight against terrorism. It's far better than drug wars as a rationalization, and the drug war thing was being discredited in any case. Leftists are regaining power and popularity in Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and Argentina. Cuba has gained immense prestige over the last few years. The empire is beginning to unravel. We can hardly justify intervention in these places by saying they are not towing the economic line by allowing the absolute domination of their societies by transnational corporations. That exposes the agenda. So we simply claim they are supporting terrorism. It's for all these reasons I say the left has missed the boat on this one, by allowing them to get away with rushing past the question of who did what on September 11th. If the official story is a lie, and I think the circumstantial case is strong enough to stay with this question, then we really do need to know what happened. And we need to understand concretely what the motives of this administration are.
And we need to understand more than just their immediate motives, but where the larger social forces that underwrite our situation right now are headed. I do not think this administration is engaged in the deliberative process of a political grouping that is on top of their game. They are putting together some very deliberative technical solutions in response to a larger situation that it slipping rapidly out of their control. Like clear cutting. There's a very smart technology being employed to do a very dumb thing. What they are responding to is not September 11th, but the beginning of a permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production, the beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the unraveling of the empire.
This brings me to a point about what all this means for Americans' security, which they are perfectly justified to worry about. The actions being prepared by this administration will not only not enhance our security, it will significantly degrade it. Military action against many groups across the globe, which is what the administration is telling us quite openly they are planning to do, will put a lot of backs against the wall. That can't be very secure. The concept of war being touted here is a violation of the principles of war on several counts, and will inevitably lead to military catastrophes, if you're inclined to view this from a position of moral and political neutrality. And the people who are now in possession of half the world's remaining oil reserves are subject to destabilization for which we can't even pretend to predict the consequences--but loss of access to critical energy supplies is certainly within the realm of possibility. Worst of all, we will be destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power in an active conflict with its neighbor, and we will be provoking Russia, another nuclear power. The security stakes don't get any higher, and Americans can ill afford to ignore nukes.
And I think that this domestic agenda is a tremendous threat to the security of anyone who is critical of the government or their corporate financiers, and we already know that the real threats are against populations that can easily be scapegoated as the domestic crisis deepens.
There is a very real threat right now of creeping fascism in this country, and that phenomenon requires its domestic enemies. Historically those enemies have included leftists, trade unionists, and racially and nationally oppressed sectors. This whole "state of emergency" mentality is already being used to quiet the public discourses of anti-racism, of feminism, of environmentalism, and of both socialism and anarchism. And while there is token resistance by officials to anti-Muslim xenophobia, the stereotypical images have saturated the media, and the government is already beginning to openly re-instate racial profiling. It is only a short step from there to go after other groups. We have long been prepared by the ideologies of overt and covert racism, and racism as both institution and corresponding psychology in the United States is nearly intractable.
It's for all these reason, I say emphatically that we can not accept anything from this administration; not their policies nor their bullshit stories. What they are doing is very, very dangerous, and the time to fight back against them, openly, is right now, before they can consolidate their power and their agenda. Once they have done that, our job becomes much more difficult. The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its oblivion, needs to understand its critical roles here. We have to play the role of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a broader peace-movement. We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current historical conjuncture. And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will emerge to first defeat fascism then take political power.
Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than ever right now. We are not faced with a choice between socialism and capitalism, but socialism or barbarism. And what we can least afford are denial and timidity.
Stan Goff
Note: I strongly recommend, for anyone
who wants to find further background material on the issues herein check out the websites
at www.dieoff.org www.emperors-clothes.com and www.globalcircle.com