FALSE FLAGS: The Reichstag Fire And Others, Metaphors of the Pentagon Papers

 

FALSE FLAGS: REICHSTAG FIRE AND OTHERS, METAPHORS OF THE PENTAGON PAPERS

Forgotten Terror – The DC Sniper, Another Government False Flag

So Obvious any Moron Would Notice, Special Forces/CIA Hit Team Plays “DC Terrorist”

DC Sniper, “Homeless Man” Who Vacationed Often and Very Expensively

 

Back during the Bush era, selling terrorism was a big business, that and silencing people. 

One of the government operations stumbled over was the famed “DC Sniper,” forgotten by all.

We will begin with the impossible.

Williams was a combat vet, fought in Desert Storm, 16 successful years in the military, real records of special schools, records the army lies about when asked but doesn’t disprove.

This man was intelligent, a success, a perfect soldier, highly fit, top expert in martial arts, record of leadership ability, heading to a fat retirement and then he goes off the map and begins a life of “cover and deception,” a typical spy, a modern day “Michael Weston,” hardly a serial killer.

Movie star good looks, Armani at the homeless shelter, there isn’t a single word of truth thus far heard about him until now.

This is someone with access to top circles in DC, now, we are told, dead in the quickest execution in history, all arranged through his own wife, if you can imagine the coincidence.

Oh, you will love this film and my deep appreciation and respect to the very real journalist who put it all together.  To begin, we get the “short and sweet.”

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Here is what Wikipedia tells us, for those who have forgotten:

The Beltway sniper attacks took place during three weeks in October 2002 in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Ten people were killed and three other victims were critically injured in several locations throughout the Washington Metropolitan Area and along Interstate 95 in Virginia. It was widely speculated that a single sniper was using the Capital Beltway for travel, possibly in a white van or truck.

It was later learned that the rampage was perpetrated by one man, John Allen Muhammad, and one minor, Lee Boyd Malvo, driving a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan, and had apparently begun the month before with murders and robbery in Louisiana and Alabama, which had resulted in three of the deaths.^[1]

In September 2003, Muhammad was sentenced to death. One month later, Boyd Malvo was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. On November 10, 2009, Muhammad was executed by lethal injection.

 

The video above was received from a “source.”  It was uploaded from the Netherlands, has a very misleading title and is one of the finest pieces of investigative journalism I have seen.  It ties the DC sniper to the CIA and US Special Forces, proves him to be an army trained sniper and more.

It shows he became a “Muslim” only days before becoming a killer, had unlimited funds and his helper, “Boyd Malvo” was walked out of an immigration detention center to be his assistant instead of being deported.

Williams, his real name, had a wife on Attorney General John Ashcroft’s staff, spent money like water, ski trips, in and out of the Caribbean, all trips booked by his travel agent while staying in homeless shelters.

See the entire tape, all 16 minutes.  One section shows him being given what I know to be a hypnotic suggestion to surrender, something also so obvious no one but a moron would miss it, and it is here for everyone to see.

What was the fastest execution in American history was the killing of a government “hit man” operating under psychological programming. 

I am also certain he was very real US Special Forces trained, not saying that for amusement sake, had been “disappeared” from records as have more than a few of my contracting friends who operate with nuclear facility clearances or ties to “Delta.”

Do remember all the anthrax attacks.  Though not publicized, the CIA was attacked also.  The anthrax was, as most suspect, made by the US government, weaponized, and no one has been arrested.

Several associates were attacked, people with unusual ties to highly classified operational intelligence but also respected members of the DC community.

Some attacked were clearly otherwise.

I will add two videos for context.  The first one is categorical proof that 9/11 was an inside job.  Using the old “OJ trial” adage, “If it doesn’t fit, you must  acquit,” the following video proves 9/11 was an inside job.

We have the police tape of the arrest of two bombers captured on 9/11, all live for you to hear but those involved, the bombers, the dispatcher, the police officers, the forensic evidence, even the forensic team and, no wait, it gets better, the 188 eye witnesses have all “disappeared.”

Imagine the threats.

Dan Rather, on this video quite clearly, says “this isn’t me.”  Does Rather have an evil twin somewhere?

There is no record that the news videos, nationally broadcast  by CNN and CBS had ever existed but you can see them here.  All records were destroyed but loyal Americans at local affiliates were there to help.  We thank them.

Do we laugh over so many deaths?

Any more and we would, old as we are, be unable to control ourselves.

“Men in Black” is a joke in comparison to things the US does every day.

One was “anthraxed,” a former Chief of Staff for the Central Intelligence Agency, and anther friend jailed on bizarre charges whose last employment was Chief Legal Council for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Another associate is in hiding, a former member of the National Security Council, assistant to Paul Wolfowitz and Condi Rice and briefer of President Bush (43).  Hiding from the US government.

Mysterious deaths, silencings, disappearances, arrests, convictions, and in most cases, these were people with direct access to the President.

Then again, one of these people is in hiding because they were wearing an FBI wire when the Presidents Chief Advisor on Counter-Terrorism turned over national secrets to a foreign spy while being witnessed by, among others, the Secretary of State of the United States.

The AIPAC-Steve Rosen espionage investigation led to very high government officials. Historically, these are then quashed as a threat to the national security, that is, the public knowing that Israeli espionage has, for a long time involved our top people who effectively cannot be prosecuted.

The FBI agents involved tried for months to get this and the Rosen (a complex issue on its own)  case prosecuted but those involved in the spying were under the personal protection of someone above the president.

For fun, they look at things and take them apart, seeing what is real and how clever some can be in fooling others.

Think about it, do governments have a major national security interest in being able to determine what is real video and what has been faked? How long would you image we have had this capacity for? How about decades?

CONCLUSION

Who Really Selected Romney to Run? Why are Ron Paul Delegates being Cleansed from the Convention?

One might ask why things are put together. I call something like this a “mosaic of deceit.”  It describes, for Americans, our lives.

We all have learned our political system is hopeless.  For the last “hold outs” Ron Paul being pushed aside by “joke candidate” Mitt Romney is the lesson.

For the older among us, the Kennedy murders, government hits, pure, simple easy to prove when they happened were the lesson.

Who didn’t watch 9/11 and say, “Aren’t we supposed to have NORAD send fighter planes?”

We all knew, it is just so many can’t take that sick feeling anymore that we are all getting, helplessness.

Prepare for the next designed deceptive event that pushes the ignorant into demanding an even greater stratum of tyranny. Homeland security never had it so good, when it plans the burning of the last semblance of representative constitutional government, as it substitutes an unmitigated totalitarian collectivist dictatorship over our beleaguered nation. "Is the threat from foreign terrorists the undertaking of homeland insecurity? The preoccupation since 911 with a self-serving "War of Terror" has been masked under the appearance of national security. Tracking down targeted Jihad terrorists and waging regional search and destroy missions has become the growth industry of the new millennium. The rationale and justification for such a protracted conflict rests upon a cowardly attack on American soil. If you listen to the official version of events anyone who questions the validity of blaming Islamic Fascists must be unpatriotic."

On behalf of every one in the 9/11 Truth movement; in memory of the three thousand Americans who perished needlessly on that tragic day; and the million-plus innocents who have been slaughtered (and continue to be massacred) in distant lands on account of this fiendish fraud; it would be fitting, proper, and necessary to conclude with a message to all those who have awoken to The Big Lie, yet choose to do nothing: Silence is complicity.

Attack & Cover-Up Means & Motive Info Warfare contents Means & Motive means remote control NORAD's no-show stand-down war games demolition tech energetic materials covert demolition wtc explosives military command motive manufacturing enemies empire expansion attack on Afghanistan invasion of Iraq drug trafficking petroleum pursuit corporate profiteering corporate welfare urban renewal gold heist precedent 20th century attacks Reichstag Fire Operation Himmler Pearl Harbor Gulf of Tonkin Operation Gladio Operation Ajax 1990s attacks Kuwaiti incubators WTC 93 bombing Oklahoma City attack scenarios Northwoods Operation Bojinka

The 9/11 Fraud: Plots within Plots One of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed and nothing can be known… nothing of significance, that is.– E. Martin Schotz, HISTORY WILL NOT ABSOLVE US (1996) 9/11 appears to have been a classic “false flag” operation in which an attack is planned by one source but blamed upon another.  In this case, the evidence suggests neo-cons in the Department of Defense and their allies in the Executive Branch were actually responsible for the execution of the atrocities of 9/11.  That story was buried, however, in a surfeit of alternative explanations for which the evidence was far more tenuous but which were of much greater political utility.  And in each case, qualified experts uncovered evidence that induced sincere but false beliefs that they were “the real deal”. The situation encountered with regard to 9/11 turns out to be far more sophisticated than the efforts that were made to divert attention from the conspirators in the case of the assassination of JFK, where “Track #1”, as we might call it, implicated Lee Harvey Oswald as “the lone assassin”.  Track #2 suggested that he working for Fidel Castro and that Cuba had done it.  Track #3 was redirected domestically to encompass the mob, while Track #4 targeted the Soviet Union.  But these were superficial distractions for which most of the evidence was flimsy and inconclusive. 9/11 presents a greater challenge to unpack, because in this case, planted evidence was more extensive and appeared to be real. Deep black covert operations, of course, are by their very nature shrouded in layers of secrecy, protected by the “need to know” and sensitive compartmentalized information (SCI).  Since WWII, however, major covert operations have become increasingly sophisticated and new models have been developed which take full advantage of the extensive national security laws and practices guaranteed under the National Security Acts of 1947 and 1952. The experts who create these plots are specialists in PSYOPS, which entails accessing, stimulating and manipulating the subconscious minds of the target population as a single unit in order to create beliefs and instill motivations in the public mind that are necessary to support of their actions but would normally be viewed as unacceptable. This is related to Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs”.  When basic primal survival fears are activated in the “group mind” of the masses, this fear induces the motivation for a population to willingly give up their rights and liberty even for merely the promise of more protection from the boogeymen.  This principal is the basis for successful PSYOPS. The use of multi-track intermeshed, deep-black covert operations also creates massive cognitive dissonance among federal investigators, private researchers and the public, which typically eventually results in folks abandoning the issue and going away in “quiet desperation”,  which is the actual intended result of those who plan and activate them. Deep Black/False Flag Ops The “shroud of secrecy” they afford provides perfect cover to plan and carry out these sophisticated multi-track deep black covert operations and keep them secret–even from those operatives who are involved as well as the government’s own agents who do the investigations.  The “national security” cover can be dropped on any matter that is at risk of being disclosed to the public and then can be invoked again at any time.  Thus, alphabets who discover what really happened can be silenced and the media can be gagged with the delivery of a “national security letter”. One of the greatest advances in deep black, false flag/stand-down covert operations has been the development of a new, more complex design, best referred to as “multi-track, enmeshed”.  This involves using a complicated design with independent covert operations, each of which could individually do the job if they were actually “taken live”.  These operations, however, are designed to be enmeshed at the nexus of the actual target, at which point some are de-activated and one or more taken live. This can completely confound even the most seasoned investigators, thus creating so much conflict among researchers that these emergent conflicts between them provide the best cover possible for what was actually done and how it was done.  Multi-track and interwoven deep black covert operations are therefore designed from the very start to obfuscate the actual operation that is selected and taken live, thereby denying most intel and government officials as well as the public any real knowledge of the actual operational purpose and information about the covert operation or why a particular covert operation was taken live as the predominant op. As an illustration, when we attempt to peel the 9/11 onion, we discover there are at least five different alternative theories for which evidence has emerged, where each of them has sincere supporters who falsely believe that they have found critical evidence about that happened on 9/11. Each of these is actually one plot of many plots, which were deliberately contrived to creating sufficient confusion that everything about 9/11 turns out to be believable and nothing is knowable.  Such deep black cover op designs can thereby provide sufficient “after the fact” cover to keep the truth buried in confusion forever. Palestinians Did It Cover Story #1: Palestinians Did It!  Efforts were being made before the Twin Towers were destroyed to imply Palestinian responsibility for commandeering those planes and committing those crimes, which may have taken the lives of as many as 3,000 citizens and employees.  Those who were watching closely saw archival footage of Palestinians rejoicing on a festive occasion being broadcast as though it were contemporaneous to convey the impression—meant to be indelible—that the Palestinian people had taken pleasure at inflicting misery on America. An early report from CNN even asserted that the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine had claimed responsibility for 9/11—and that was before Flight 175 had hit the South Tower!  So during that brief interval between the first hit on the North Tower at 8:46:40 and the second on the South Tower at 9:03:11, a propaganda operation to implicate the Palestinians was well under way.  The immediate availability of this report and video footage indicates the direction in which responsibility for these attacks was originally intended to be cast And that might have become the official cover story, were it not for observant residents near Liberty State Park in New Jersey who watched as five young men, dressed in Arab garb, filmed the destruction of the Twin Towers, cheering and celebrating, which came across as odd behavior, under the circumstances. When they were apprehended in a white van from Urban Moving Systems, the driver would inform the arresting officer that they were not the problem: “We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem.” They were found to have $4,700 in cash, box cutters, and foreign passports in their possession.  Urban Moving Systems would subsequently be identified as a Mossad front.  After 71 days of incarceration, the Dancing Israelis would be released and return to Israel, where three of them would go on TV there and explain that their purpose had been to document the destruction of the Twin Towers.  Once they had been arrested, however, the story was quietly dropped. It was just too revealing that Israel had been profoundly involved in the events of 9/11. Arab Hijackers Did It Cover Story #2:  19 Arab Hijackers Did It.  If these attacks could not be blamed on the Palestinians without revealing Israeli complicity, the fall back was effortless.  We know “the official account”—that nineteen Islamic terrorists hijacked four commercial carriers, outfoxed the most sophisticated air defense system in the world and perpetrated these atrocities under the control of a guy in a cave in Afghanistan.  It would turn out that 15 of the 19 alleged terrorists were from Saudi Arabia and none were from Iraq. But that would not matter in the grand scheme of things, where Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld would push 9/11 as a justification for attacking Iraq.  Not only was the public being fed false information about weapons of mass destruction and collusion with al Qaeda, but the national press was oblivious to the obvious question that remained unaddressed by government officials or the main stream media:  If 15 of 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two from the UAE, one from Lebanon and Egypt, then why were we attacking Iraq? Osama bin Laden with al Qaeda Even our own FBI would eventually acknowledge that it had no “hard evidence” that Osama bin Laden had had anything to do with 9/11. But the range of evidence that exonerates al Qaeda and implicates the Bush/Cheney administration in these crimes has become as broad as it is deep.  Elias Davidsson, for example, has shown that the US government had never produced evidence that the alleged “hijackers” were even aboard those four planes. Muslims. David Ray Griffin, the leading expert on 9/11 in the world today, has shown that the alleged phone calls from those planes were faked, where even our own FBI has confirmed that Barbara Olsen never spoke to her husband, Ted. Leslie Raphael has offered reason after reason for concluding that the Jules Naudet film was staged. The evidence that no planes crashed in Shanksville or hit the Pentagon is beyond reasonable doubt, where others have shown that the videos of Flight 175 hitting the South Tower are fake, which may have been a brilliant stroke to generate dissension within the 9/11 Truth movement, since the truth of video fakery has proven to be politically divisive.   The scientific evidence disproving the official account is also abundant and compelling. Given what we know now, anyone who continues to believe the “official account” of 9/11 is either unfamiliar with the evidence or cognitively impaired. Pakistan/Turkey/Saudi Arabia Cover Story #3.  The Pakistanis Did It. This track was based upon the supposition that well-financed Pakistani intel were able to buy expensive “K Street” lobbyists and gain influence with high officials in the government and Department of Defense, who had much to gain from a “staged terror attack” such as 9/11. It was the next layer of the onion to be peeled when and if the Arab hijackers story wouldn’t work any longer and  was initiated by the revelation that Omar Sheikh, a British-born Islamist militant, had wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, allegedly the lead hijacker, at the direction General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). As Michael Meecher has observed, it is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count.  It certainly raises the prospect that the ISI was deeply involved and possibly responsible for the events of 9/11. Even if it were true, however, it cannot begin to account for the causal nexus that brought about 9/11 or identify those who were “pulling the strings”. “Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers,” Meecher writes, “was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to “retire” by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn’t the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court?”  Although a number of reasons have been advanced for not taking this story seriously, Meecher mentions  a number of sources who have information that might or might not implicate the ISI and expose those who were behind 9/11, the most important of whom appears to be former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds, who has recently been speaking out. Sibel Edmonds Edmonds, a 33-year-old Turkish-American linguist, who is fluent in both Turkish and Azerbaijani, has tried to blow the whistle on the cover-up of intelligence that names some of the culprits who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. While Sibel has been under gag orders forbidding her from testifying in court or mentioning the names of the people or of the countries involved, she has said. “My translations of the 9/11 intercepts included [terrorist] money laundering, detailed and date-specific information … if they were to do real investigations, we would see several significant high-level criminal prosecutions in this country [the US] … and believe me, they will do everything to cover this up”. Revelations claimed to emerge from her case have been described as being explosive, including “that foreign operatives who were working in the translation department been tried to recruit her for their operations; that there exists a nuclear spy ring aided and abetted by high ranking US government officials who have been selling America’s nuclear secrets on the black market; that foreign language intelligence directly pertaining to 9/11 was deliberately withheld from FBI agents in the field; that Osama bin Laden had an ‘intimate relationship’ with the United Stages government right up until 9/11.” While most of this is probably true, the theory of the case that she appears to imply—that Turkey (with assistance from actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia) had been using Bin Laden and the Taliban as a proxy terrorist army to promote its own agenda—may be true in its own right, but based upon the totality of what we know now, does not begin to approach an explanation for the stand-down by NORAD, for example, or of how the demolitions were situated or the post-attack cover-ups. The US “Let it Happen” Cover Story #4: It was allowed to happen.  The distinction between “LIHOP” (let it happen on purpose) and “MIHOP“ (made it happen on purpose) has been powerfully reinforced by the “Able Danger” contretemps. As a highly classified, anti-terrorist intelligence operation, Able Danger fell under Special Operations (SOCOM) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) control. When claims arose that the US had had advanced knowledge of 9/11 and had allowed it to happen, a 16-month investigation by the Senate Intelligence committee reported in December 2006 that there had been no knowledge of the 9/11 attacks by US authorities. The evidence, however, indicates that was not the case—and, indeed, that the events of 9/11 were orchestrated and staged by elements within the Department of Defense with help from their friends in the Mossad.  As the 10th observance of 9/11 approaches, we know that there were a minimum of two independent deep cover covert operations which were operating on dual track, parallel and also interwoven.  The first one was the creation and tracking—principally by the Mossad—of some “low tech” terrorist cells, which were set up, financed, and trained by US and other intelligence agencies. “Able Danger” discovered this low-tech terror cell sub-track, which we can call “Track A”.  The operation was designed to be discovered to create false cover, so that when 9/11 succeeded, it could be shown by information discovered by a bona fide intelligence group that this terror cell was responsible. That would be the role played by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, other members of the “Able Danger” team, and Coleen Rowley of the FBI in Minneapolis.  Track A, however, was designed to be discovered and then the investigation stopped, creating the image of high-level US incompetence that had allowed this terror cell to succeed in hijacking aircraft with box-cutters and then flying those aircraft into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. When the folks from “Able Danger” swear that they uncovered “a real terrorist cell plot”, they are telling the truth.  It was set up this way as a false track.  When Coleen Rowley expresses frustration because she could not obtain a search warrant for the hard drive of Zacarias Moussaui because he was involved in this terror cell, she was telling the truth.  But Track A was set up as a false track to be terminated before the 9/11 attacks to provide a convincing cover story for the highest levels of US intelligence and make the government appear to be merely hugely incompetent.  After all, how could government officials of this incompetence have staged a successful and effective covert operation? The US “Made it Happen” Actual Story: The US “Made it Happen”. Track B, by comparison, was a high-tech track designed to use readiness exercises on 9/11, including some 17 anti-terrorist drills on 9/11 that disrupted communication and coordination between NORAD and the FAA, by taking some of them live and substituting high-tech weapons and in order to target the Twin Towers and the Pentagon by that means. Track B involved the use of numerous different demolition means, including incendiaries and multiple modes of destruction, most of which alone would be insufficient cause for the detonation of the Twin Towers, which was arguably used to induce false leads confusing investigators and researchers. A perfect example turns out to be the “hard science” 9/11 Truth group’s insistence that nanothermite was the principal element used in the demolition of the Twin Towers.  This position, which has assumed a status akin to that of a dogma within the 9/11 movement, turns out to be unsustainable in light of research that has established that nanothermite is non-explosive—or, at best, a feeble explosive—and cannot have been responsible for blowing the towers apart, for ejecting massive steel assemblies hundreds of feet, or for the pulverization of concrete or the destruction of steel by means of shockwaves.  To a bona fide explosives expert, the claim that nanothermite provided the explosive energy or enough shockwave velocity to perform these tasks had to be an obvious deception.  If it was deliberately planted to divert research on 9/11 along an ultimately unproductive line, it may have succeeded beyond the wildest intel dreams as a classic “red herring”. Another example, surprisingly, is the Pentagon attack, where some of those within the 9/11 community have argued strenuously for not going there, because the Department of Defense might spring a new video on the public that proves a Boeing 757 actually did hit the building.  The evidence contradicting that contention is abundant and compelling, however, including the expert assessment of Major General Albert N. Stubblebine, USA (ret.),  perhaps the world’s leading expert on image analysis and interpretation, who has concluded that no plane hit the Pentagon. When you take all the evidence into account, the case against a plane is staggering, but internal dissension has precluding using it— and other powerful proofs of governmental fakery —and has taken this evidence out of the public domain: “From the photographs I have analyzed very, very carefully,” Stubblebine has explained, “it was not an airplane.” During an interview in Germany, he explained that there should have been wing marks on the façade of the Pentagon.  “If it had wings, it would have left wing marks.  [There are] those who claim that the plane tilted and hit the ground first and lost a wing.  But airplanes have two wings, and he could not find indications of any wing in any of those photographs.”  Regarding the Twin Towers, he added, “Look at the buildings falling—they didn”t fall down because of an airplane hit them. They fell down because explosives went off inside. Demolition. Look at Building 7, for God’s sake.” Whistleblowing as Deception The politics of 9/11, however, are far more murky than the science. So when folks from Able Danger swear that they uncovered a real terror cell plot, they are telling the truth.  It was set up this way as a false track.  When a Colleen Rowley expresses frustration because she could not get a search warrant for Moussaui’s hard-drive because he was involved in this terror cell, she is telling the truth.  When a Sibel Edmonds is gagged by court order and tries to tell how certain how administration officials were communicating with this terror cell, she is telling the truth.  Indeed, the effort to mislead our own experts even extended to Richard Clarke, who has explained that he himself had been given the false impression that, apart from a few analysts, the CIA had been unaware of what was going on prior to 9/11, which was intended to support the theory of US incompetence. Clarke, who was the nation’s leading anti-terrorism expert, recently observed, “It’s not as I originally thought, which was that one lonely CIA analyst got this information and didn’t somehow recognize the significance of it,” Clarke said during an interview. “No, fifty, 5-0, CIA personnel knew about this. Among the fifty people in CIA who knew these guys were in the country was the CIA director. … We therefore conclude that there was a high-level decision inside CIA ordering people not to share that information. … It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence in order to get around that restriction … These are only theories about the CIA’s failures to communicate vital information to the bureau … Perhaps the agency decided that Saudi intelligence would have a better chance of recruiting these men than the Americans. That would leave no CIA fingerprints on the operation as well.” Indeed, as Ian Henshall has observed, if you substitute the Mossad for the Saudis, you have the explanation for the dancing Israelis, who were apprehended for filming and celebrating during the destruction of the Twin Towers and were released later under orders from Michael Chertoff, then an advisor Attorney General John Ashcroft and a dual US-Israel citizen, who would become Director of the new Department of Homeland Security—which leads directly to reports like those from Dr. Steve Pieczenik that 9/11 was indeed “an inside job” and studies like those from Alan Sabrosky, Ph.D., who has explain that 9/11 involved complicity between neo-con Zionists in the Department of Defense and the Mossad, where Israel had very powerful motives for 9/11 and, along with the Bush/Cheney administration, has been its primary beneficiary. But Israel cannot have done this alone.  The NORAD “stand down” and the attack on the Pentagon required complicity at the highest levels of the Department of Defense. And the benefits to the Bush/Cheney administration have likewise been enormous. As Patrick Martin has observed, “Without 9/11, there would be no US occupation of Iraq, putting an American army squarely at the center of the world’s largest pool of oil. Without 9/11, there would be no US bases across Central Asia, guarding the second largest source of oil and gas. And without 9/11, the Bush administration would have been unable to sustain itself politically, faced with a deteriorating economy and widespread opposition to its tax cuts for millionaires and social measures to appease the fundamentalist Christian Right.” The Fourth Reich Indeed, the extreme motivation of a small number of radical Israelis and their lobbies like AIPAC to manipulate US foreign policy in the Mideast may have created huge future trap for them in their role as “classic cutouts”, which can be later exposed in a limited hangout admission in order to direct blame toward the Mossad and the small number of radical Jews involved, who do not represent most Jewish folks at all, thus directing blame away from from those who used them in their cutout role and who were actually at the top of the command structure. This limited hangout disclosure could then later be used to blame all Jews and add them to the large and growing Homeland Security watch-list list of possible domestic terrorists such as Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, returning veterans, Ron Paul supporters, Constitutionalists and tax protestors, and member of any current social group that is trying to gain exposure and cessation of rampant government corruption and creeping tyranny of the government at all levels, which of course encompasses those dedicated to 9/11 Truth. Richard Clarke, Anti-Terrorism Czar It does not take a PSYOPS expert to discern the pattern here when Richard Clarke resuscitates the incompetence theory, according to which the US “let 9/11 happen”. Even on the assumption that he is sincere, we have a fall-back position intended to minimize concern for complicity by the Bush/Cheney administration and its friends in the Mossad—who, moreover, do not necessarily represent the highest level of control over the atrocities of 9/11.  Because Clarke was in the crucial position of being the nation’s anti-terrorism czar, his affirmations about incompetence between agencies, such as the CIA and the FBI, come across to the public and can be widely promoted as admirable and courageous acts of whistle blowing, when their role in deceiving the public drowns amidst the anguish and concern that “if only we had done better” and “we must not let this happen again”, oblivious of the role that his reports are playing in burying the truth about 9/11. We have now reached the point in America where any citizen or group wanting to obtain needed social justice, or the cessation of undeclared, unprovoked, and un Constitutional wars, in violation of international law and the UN Charter, are now placed on a secret watch list and considered as “potential domestic terrorists” by Homeland Security, which some—with ample justification—view as “The New American Gestapo.”  If the US has been hijacked by offshore corporate and banking interests, which have their own anti-American agenda and are now in the process of Nazifying America, as some astute researchers have suggested, then certainly this could lead to a “Fourth Reich” run by offshore banks and large international corporations and we could see a replay of the unlimited persecution of minorities and special scapegoats such as specific groups such as Muslims, Jews and Christians who dissent from The New Tyranny. So If you have wondered why covert operations like 9/11 are so difficult to unravel or why it is all but impossible to convince the feds who investigated it that this was actually a US false flag/stand-down/inside-job, deep-black covert operation, the answer to that question appears to be that the plan was designed from conception to obfuscate what happened, not only regarding the public but also the government’s own experts, who would be assigned to investigate them—and even to keep most of those who had an actual part in those operations in the dark, so only those at the highest levels of the government knew what happened and,  even among them, only a few probably knew the full dimensions of the plan.  The objective throughout, accordingly, has always been to keep the public in a state of uncertainly, where everything about these events is believable and nothing is knowable—which is the ultimate objective of disinformation.   The Reichstag Fire Reichstag name for the diet of the Holy Roman Empire, for the lower chamber of the federal parliament of the North German Confederation , and for the lower chamber of the federal parliament of Germany from 1871 to 1945. Under the German Empire (1871-1918) the Reichstag, which represented the country at large, had little real power; it was mainly a deliberative body. Election was on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. The Reichstag under the Weimar Constitution The republican Weimar Constitution of 1919 did not alter the structure of the Reichstag, but it introduced proportional representation and extended voting rights to women. The new Reichstag, however, was not powerless; it was the supreme legislative body of the republic. The states were represented by an upper chamber, the Reichsrat. The jurisdictions of the Reichstag and Reichsrat were limited to matters affecting Germany as a whole; in other matters the member states were sovereign. The Reichsrat had only a power of suspensive veto over legislation approved by the Reichstag. The federal cabinet, appointed by the president and headed by the chancellor, was responsible to the Reichstag and normally had to resign if it received a vote of no confidence. However, the president of the republic could, on the advice of his cabinet, dissolve the Reichstag and order new elections before the normal term (four years) had ended. After 1930, under President Paul von Hindenburg , the Reichstag was suspended several times at the instigation of successive chancellors, and rule by presidential emergency decree began to replace parliamentary rule. Hitler and the Reichstag Fire   In Jan., 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor without an absolute majority, the Reichstag was dissolved and new elections were set for Mar. 5; a violent election campaign ensued. On Feb. 27, 1933, a fire destroyed part of the Reichstag building. Hitler immediately accused the Communists of having set the fire. President von Hindenburg proclaimed a state of emergency and issued decrees suspending freedom of speech and assembly. The elections gave a bare majority of seats to Hitler's National Socialists (Nazis; see National Socialism ) and their allies, the German Nationalists. Severe measures were taken against the Communist party, and its deputies were barred from the Reichstag. On Mar. 23 the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which gave the government, i.e., Hitler, dictatorial powers. Only the Social Democrats dissented. In the sensational Reichstag fire trial of 1933, a Dutchman named Marinus van der Lubbe was charged with having set the fire as part of a Communist plot. Several Communist leaders, including Georgi Dimitrov , were charged with complicity. Van der Lubbe was sentenced to death; the others were found not guilty. For many years it was assumed outside Germany that the Reichstag fire was carried out by the Nazis themselves as a propaganda maneuver to ensure the defeat of the Communists and other leftist parties in the elections. However, later evidence indicated that Van der Lubbe alone set the fire, and that Hitler merely used it as a pretext to launch a campaign against the Communists. During Hitler's rule, the Reichstag was merely summoned from time to time to approve important government measures. The Reichsrat was abolished in 1934, along with sovereignty of the German states. The Reichstag since World War II After World War II the new constitutions (1949) of West Germany and East Germany replaced the Reichstag and Reichsrat with other legislative bodies. The Reichstag building in Berlin was redone in the 1960s, deemphasizing most of its former grandeur. After German reunification, a restored, redesigned, and largely rebuilt glass-domed renovation of the building, designed by British architect Lord Norman Foster , was reopened in 1999 to house the German parliament. The 1933 Reichstag Fire was a key event in Adolf Hitler's ascendancy to power. During the night of February 27th, the Reichstag Building, which housed the German Parliament, was gutted by a massive fire. Adolf Hitler, who had become President Paul von Hindenburg's chancellor less than a month earlier, pressured von Hindenburg to give him essentially dictatorial powers. Hitler used the attack to roll back the legal guarantees of personal liberty enshrined in the constitution. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist who had been protesting against Hitler's new government, was picked up on the night of the fire and charged, along with four other Communists, with setting the fires. Van der Lubbe was executed on January 10th, 1934, while the other defendants were acquitted. Most historians think that Hitler had the fire set, while finding a scapegoat in the impoverished Dutchman, van der Lubbe. e x c e r p t title: The Rise and Fall of the Third Riech (Simon and Schuster, 1960) authors: William Shirer The whole truth about the Reichstag fire will probably never be known. Nearly all those who knew it are now dead, most of them slain by Hitler in the months that followed. Even at Nuremberg the mystery could not be entirely unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish beyondi a reasonable doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own political ends. From Goering’s Reighstag’s Presidents Palace an underground passage, built to carry the central heating system, ran to the Riechstag building. Through this tunnel Karl Ernst, a former bellhop who had become the Berlin S.A. leader, led a small detachment of storm troopers on the night of February 27 to the Riechstag where they scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals and then made their way quickly back to the palace the way they had come. At the same time, a half-witted Dutch communist with a passion for arson, Marinus van der Lubbe, had made his way into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building and had set some small fires of his own. The feeble-minded pyromaniac was a godsend to the Nazis. He had been picked up by the S.A. a few days before after having been overheard in a bar boasting that he had attempted to set fire to several buildings and that he was going to try the Riechstag next. The coincidence that the Nazis had found a demented Communist arsonist who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determined to do seems incredible but is nevertheless supported by the evidence ... ... On the day following the fire, February 28, [Hitler] prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree “for the Protection of the People and the State” suspending seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. Described as a “defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state, the decree laid down that: Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and phone communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations, as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed. In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including “serious disturbances of the peace” by armed persons. Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat "official," as it were, to throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over. Some four thousand Communist officials and a great many Social Democrat and liberal leaders were arrested, including members of the Reichstag, who, according to the law, were immune from arrest. This was the first experience Germans had had with Nazi terror backed up by the government. 9/11: The Clarke/Tenet Deception Gambit   "FALL GUY" GEORGE TENET BEING MEASURED FOR THE NOOSE With Wikileaks Dead, New 9/11 Deception Ploy In Motion   Conspiracy buffs were given a magic revelation regarding 9/11.  Richard Clarke pointed the finger at former CIA director, George Tenet, declaring the CIA “allowed” the 9/11 hijackers to operate freely.  The rationale?  Tenet and the CIA had plans to use “them” in some way, maybe turn them into secret double agents, even triple agents.  What’s wrong with this picture? I feel as though I had stepped back into time.  It’s 1963 and Lee Oswald, Marine U2 technician, Russian spy, CIA agent, pro-Castro activist, anti-Castro activist just shot President Kennedy, with 6 of 3 rounds fired from 3 different directions killing Kennedy and wounding Texas governor John Connelly, all while Oswald was in a lunch room full of witnesses. The Famous Rifle That the Public Knows So Little Notwithstanding the broken rifle with the loosened scope or Oswald killing a police officer with a revolver that discarded shell casings of a different caliber as though it were an automatic (Colt .38 “Super” semi-automatic pistol) reselling the “lone gunman” myth continues. Now we are trying the same with 9/11.  Can I say “notwithstanding” again? A Tired Looking Oswald - the Famous Patsy Even if someone were to believe thousands of tons of steel vaporized magically with a few gallons of kerosene, the “twin towers” story, 9/11 fell apart years ago when the Commission itself distanced itself from their own findings as a “whitewash” and “fraud.”  Then hard, irrevocable facts came in, Building 7 was ordered destroyed, something requiring months of preparation but done with 20 minutes notice.  The other weak link, the Pentagon, a missile attack, no aircraft could have done it, long proven, no pilot capable, no plane could have survived it, no wreckage one day and a few “pristine” pieces the next. Past this we learned that the flight 93 drama, the calls, the storming of the cockpit, all made up, no calls were made, all a story. More seriously, the idea of hijackers fell apart also.  There was no proof they existed other than a few pieces of obviously planted evidence and wild claims never backed up by hard evidence. There were no hijackers, no box cutter armed Arabs with “Cessna” training flying better than Top Gun instructors. It was all made up, every bit of it. [Editor]:  Here is a good recap video. Be sure to select the 360 resolution for much better clarity. YouTube - Veterans Today - – 911 Missing Links Taking Whose Oath - And for What ?? After ten years of lies, of torture, of trillions of dollars stolen, of America in Afghanistan in the biggest drug cartel ever dreamed of, ten years of fairy stories and now, all of a sudden, Richard Clarke, infamous weakling and “mama’s boy” points the finger at George Tenet. The CIA director was always hated by the Bush White House, someone kept in the dark, pushed aside by Cheney and his “privatization,” the perfect dupe. With the ten year anniversary coming up, increasingly Israel’s hand is seen in 9/11, not just from conspiracy websites or “Jew haters” but from top analysts. The “fall back” story Israel uses is that they had agents all over the US who were “shadowing” the hijackers while others, team after team, were in New York, admittedly informed in advance of the attacks, “documenting.” The problem there, every reliable report from “ground zero” says the explosions started before planes hit anything, then explosion after explosion.  Films show the explosions.  Forensic evidence shows explosives.  Seismic evidence shows explosives. Then we have Richard Clarke, years later, talking about hijackers again, the imaginary box cutter story, the phone calls that never happened, the magic pilots, the impossible planes. Ah...The Wicked Web They Weave Why Clarke? Normally, stories like this, stories providing cover, “game theory” stories, come from Julian Assange and Wikileaks.  Always the same, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.  Wikileaks? Peddling Israeli plots against Iran and Pakistan using dirt gathered on the United States, no difficult task there, carefully “seeded” as Zbigniew Brzezinski call it back in December 2010, with “pointed” information from an intelligence agency. Wikileaks is Mossad and Wikileaks “friends” are “hasbara,” the helpers who serve Israel’s intelligence services. But Wikileaks “crashed and burned,” so obvious they became a joke. Now all that is left to sell the hijacker/box cutter story is weakling Richard Clarke, a minor figure, we are told, in the planning of 9/11, a White House “gofer” pointing his finger at poor George Tenet, the CIA director who never directed the CIA. All of this, of course, is cheap theatre, cover for Israel, cover for Bush, cover for Cheney and Rumsfeld, for Rove and Ashcroft, for Gonzales, for Mike Harari. [Editor note: Notice how wikipedia does not have a photo of him on this page, when they are available and they have them on eveybody else's pages.] Using Clarke, ”Mr. Small Potatoes,” to peddle poor George Tenet as mastermind of the crime of the century, all I can say is “Good luck with that.” ***[Editor's Note]  We will close with an example of just one of the many little missing pieces of past events which are hiding in plain sight in terms of the public’s general knowledege. How many of you have even seen or heard of Oswalk’s fake Selective Servid ID? Let us know in the comment section. We need your feed back. Thanks. Fake selective service (draft) card in the name of Alek James Hidell, found on Oswald when arrested. A.Hidell was the name used on both envelope and order slip to buy the alleged murder weapon (see CE 773), and A. J. Hidell was the alternate name on the New Orleans post office box rented June 11, 1963, by Oswald. Both the alleged murder weapon and the pistol in Oswald’s possession at arrest had earlier been shipped (at separate times) to Oswald’s Dallas P.O. Box 2915, as ordered by “A. J. Hidell”. 9/11 PLANNERS CONFESS ON NETWORK TELEVISION     FOR OUR FRIENDS WHO STILL DON’T GET IT By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor How can a nation like the United States be duped into two wars and total bankruptcy?  It would be one thing if the “truth” about 9/11 was internet conspiracy theory.  This isn’t the case.  It was all right there in everyone’s living room.  They fooled us once and then fooled us again and again.  Yes, America has some tail to kick but this time, maybe we should make sure our boot goes up the right rear end for a change. The real hole in the Pentagon, before construction equipment enlarged it was so small a man had to duck his head to enter.  For 9 years, this photograph was captioned “Second Floor.”  This photograph has a firefighter in the foreground and, unless gravity was suspended on 9/11, he is standing on the Pentagon’s lawn.  Listen to CNN describe a crash site with no aircraft parts of any kind, seats, bodies, wings, engines, tail section….none of it.  Can it be this simple? YouTube - Veterans Today - The CNN reporter at the Pentagon immediately after the “crash” found no aircraft debris.   After closing off the site, the next morning, huge pieces of plane were hauled away, pieces that weren’t in any of the photographs on 9/11.  I hate it when media stooges scripted by the real terrorists don’t check the time carefully enough. YouTube - Veterans Today - Watch a BBC reporter talk about a building collapsing that was still standing, actually with very little damage, right behind her.  Yes, Americans are that easy to lie to. YouTube - Veterans Today - Watch Larry Silverstein tell network news that WTC 7, the same virtually undamaged building was “pulled” by firefighters.  Since making this statement, no single individual, firefighter, 9/11 Commission member or anyone else has backed up this wild claim.  Need we mention that setting demolition charges alone would require weeks? YouTube - Veterans Today - Here, Dan Rather on CBS describes the collapse of Building 7 as “like films of controlled demolition we have seen, buildings deliberately destroyed by well placed dynamite….” Some Americans are burning Korans to celebrate 9/11.  Some are deeply disturbed about an Islamic community center being built nearby.  If I might suggest, perhaps 9/11 might be better served as “hallowed ground” if it were a place of execution.  A great nation could transplant it’s mightiest oak to the site.  That hallowed oak and a few lengths of hemp used with intelligence and consideration on our enemies at home and abroad would best honor our dead. Just a thought…. There is currently no conclusive forensic evidence that the airliners indicated nor the hijackers accused were ever involved in 9/11 in any way. Perhaps worst of all, Fox News itself, released the following story indicating that 60 Israeli’s were arrested after 9/11, some active duty military who had advance knowledge of 9/11.  Later, the number exceeded 200, tied to espionage and suspected terrorism.  Yes, the term “terrorism” is used.  All investigations were eventually quashed.  You can come to your own conclusions as to what is and isn’t being said. YouTube - Veterans Today - Yes, Americans are that dumb.  You wonder why our banks are empty?   THE NAZIFICATION OF GERMANY: 1933–34 THE THEORY WHICH HITLER had evolved in his vagabond days in Vienna and never forgotten—that the way to power for a revolutionary movement was to ally itself with some of the powerful institutions in the State—had now worked out in practice pretty much as he had calculated. The President, backed by the Army and the conservatives, had made him Chancellor. His political power, though great, was, however, not complete. It was shared with these three sources of authority, which had put him into office and which were outside and, to some extent, distrustful of the National Socialist movement.     Hitler's immediate task, therefore, was to quickly eliminate them from the driver's seat, make his party the exclusive master of the State and then with the power of an authoritarian government and its police carry out the Nazi revolution. He had been in office scarcely twenty-four hours when he made his first decisive move, springing a trap on his gullible conservative "captors" and setting in motion a chain of events which he either originated or controlled and which at the end of six months would bring the complete Nazification of Germany and his own elevation to dictator of the Reich, unified and defederalized for the first time in German history.     Five hours after being sworn in, at 5 P.M. on January 30, 1933, Hitler held his first cabinet meeting. The minutes of the session, which turned up at Nuremberg among the hundreds of tons of captured secret documents, reveal how quickly and adroitly Hitler, aided by the crafty Goering, began to take his conservative colleagues for a ride.*(1) Hindenburg had named Hitler to head not a presidential cabinet but one based on a majority in the Reichstag. However, the Nazis and the Nationalists, the only two parties represented in the government, had only 247 seats out of 583 in Parliament and thus lacked a majority. To attain it they needed the backing of the Center Party with its 70 seats. In the very first hours of the new government Hitler had dispatched Goering to talk with the Centrist leaders, and now he reported to the cabinet that the Center was demanding "certain concessions." Georing therefore proposed that the Reichstag be dissolved and new elections held, and Hitler agreed. Hugenberg, a man of wooden mind for all his success in business, objected to taking the Center into the government but on the other hand opposed new elections, well knowing that the Nazis, with the resources of the State behind them, might win an absolute majority at the polls and thus be in a position to dispense with his own services and those of his conservative friends He proposed simply suppressing the Communist Party; with its 100 seats eliminated, the Nazis and the Nationalists would have a majority. But Hitler would not go so far at the moment, and it was finally agreed that the Chancellor himself would confer with the Center Party leaders on the following morning and that if the talks were fruitless the cabinet would then ask for new elections.     Hitler easily made them fruitless. At his request the Center leader, Monsignor Kaas, submitted as a basis for discussion a list of questions which added up to a demand that Hitler promise to govern constitutionally. But Hitler, tricking both Kaas and his cabinet members, reported to the latter that the Center had made impossible demands and that there was no chance of agreement. He therefore proposed that the President be asked to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections. Hugenberg and Papen were trapped, but after a solemn assurance from the Nazi leader that the cabinet would remain unchanged however the elections turned out, they agreed to go along with him. New elections were set for March 5.     For the first time—in the last relatively free election Germany was to have—the Nazi Party now could employ all the vast resources of the government to win votes. Goebbels was jubilant. "Now it will be easy," he wrote in his diary on February 3, "to carry on the fight, for we can call on all the resources of the State. Radio and press are at our disposal. We shall stage a masterpiece of propaganda. And this time, naturally, there is no lack of money."(2)     The big businessmen, pleased with the new government that was going to put the organized workers in their place and leave management to run its business as it wished, were asked to cough up. This they agreed to do at a meeting on February 20 at Goering's Reichstag President's Palace, at which Dr. Schacht acted as host and Goering and Hitler laid down the line to a couple of dozen of Germany's leading magnates, including Krupp von Bohlen, who had become an enthusiastic Nazi overnight, Bosch and Schnitzler of I. G. Farben, and Voegler, head of the United Steel Works. The record of this secret meeting has been preserved.     Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. "Private enterprise," he said, "cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality . . . All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen . . . We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist." He promised the businessmen that he would "eliminate" the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). "Now we stand before the last election," Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that "regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat." If he did not win, he would stay in power "by other means . . . with other weapons." Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of "financial sacrifices" which "surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years."     All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament. Krupp, the munitions king, who, according to Thyssen, had urged Hindenburg on January 29 not to appoint Hitler, jumped up and expressed to the Chancellor the "gratitude" of the businessmen "for having given us such a clear picture." Dr. Schacht then passed the hat. "I collected three million marks," he recalled at Nuremberg.(3)     On January 31, 1933, the day after Hitler was named Chancellor, Goebbels wrote in his diary: "In a conference with the Fuehrer we lay down the line for the fight against the Red terror. For the moment we shall abstain from direct countermeasures. The Bolshevik attempt at revolution must first burst into flame. At the proper moment we shall strike."     Despite increasing provocation by the Nazi authorities there was no sign of a revolution, Communist or Socialist, bursting into flames as the electoral campaign got under way. By the beginning of February the Hitler government had banned all Communist meetings and shut down the Communist press. Social Democrat rallies were either forbidden or broken up by the S.A. rowdies, and the leading Socialist newspapers were continually suspended. Even the Catholic Center Party did not escape the Nazi terror. Stegerwald, the leader of the Catholic Trade Unions, was beaten by the Brownshirts when he attempted to address a meeting, and Bruening was obliged to seek police protection at another rally after S.A. troopers had wounded a number of his followers. Altogether fifty-one anti-Nazis were listed as murdered during the electoral campaign, and the Nazis claimed that eighteen of their own number had been done to death.     Goering's key position as Minister of the Interior of Prussia now began to be noticed. Ignoring the restraining hand of Papen, who as Premier of Prussia was supposedly above him, Goering removed hundreds of republican officials and replaced them with Nazis, mostly S.A. and S.S. officers. He ordered the police to avoid "at all costs" hostility to the S.A., the S.S. and the Stahlhelm but on the other hand to show no mercy to those who were "hostile to the State." He urged the police "to make use of firearms" and warned that those who didn't would be punished. This was an outright call for the shooting down of all who opposed Hitler by the police of a state (Prussia) which controlled two thirds of Germany. Just to make sure that the job would be ruthlessly done, Goering on February 22 established an auxiliary police force of 50,000 men, of whom 40,000 were drawn from the ranks of the S.A. and the S.S. and the rest from the Stahlhelm. Police power in Prussia was thus largely carried out by Nazi thugs. It was a rash German who appealed to such a "police" for protection against the Nazi terrorists.     And yet despite all the terror the "Bolshevik revolution" which Goebbels, Hitler and Goering were looking for failed to "burst into flames." If it could not be provoked, might it not be invented?     On February 24, Goering's police raided the Karl Liebknecht Haus, the Communist headquarters in Berlin. It had been abandoned some weeks before by the Communist leaders, a number of whom had already gone underground or quietly slipped off to Russia. But piles of propaganda pamphlets had been left in the cellar and these were enough to enable Goering to announce in an official communiqué that the seized "documents" proved that the Communists were about to launch the revolution. The reaction of the public and even of some of the conservatives in the government was one of skepticism. It was obvious that something more sensational must be found to stampede the public before the election took place on March 5. *This cabinet meeting, of course, was private, and, like most of the other conferences, many of them taking place in the strictest secrecy, held by Hitler and his political and military aides during the Third Reich, its proceedings and decisions were not accessible to the public until the captured German documents were first perused during the Nuremberg trial. A great many of these highly confidential discussions and the decisions emanating from them—all regarded as state secrets—will henceforth be chronicled in this book, which, from here to the end, largely rests on the documents which recorded them at the time. At the risk of somewhat cluttering the pages with numbers indicating notes, these sources will be indicated. No other history of a nation over a specific epoch has been so fully documented, I believe, as that of the Thrid Reich, and to have left out reference to the documents, it seemed to the author, would have greatly weakened whatever value this book may have as an authentic historical record. THE REICHSTAG FIRE     On the evening of February 27, four of the most powerful men in Germany were gathered at two separate dinners in Berlin. In the exclusive Herrenklub in the Vosstrasse, Vice-Chancellor von Papen was entertaining President Hindenburg. Out at Goebbels' home, Chancellor Hitler had arrived to dine en famille. According to Goebbels, they were relaxing, playing music on the gramophone and telling stories. "Suddenly," he recounted later in his diary, "a telephone call from Dr. Hanfstaengl: 'The Reichstag is on fire!' I am sure he is telling a tall tale and decline even to mention it to the Fuehrer." (4)     But the diners at the Herrenklub were just around the corner from the Reichstag.     Suddenly [Papen later wrote] we noticed a red glow through the windows and heard sounds of shouting in the street. One of the servants came hurrying up to me and whispered: "The Reichstag is on fire!" which I repeated to the President. He got up and from the window we could see the dome of the Reichstag looking as though it were illuminated by searchlights. Every now and again a burst of flame and a swirl of smoke blurred the outline. (5)     The Vice-Chancellor packed the aged President home in his own car and hurried off to the burning building. In the meantime Goebbels, according to his account, had had second thoughts about Putzi Hanfstaengl's "tall tale," had made some telephone calls and learned that the Reichstag was in flames. Within a few seconds he and his Fuehrer were racing "at sixty miles an hour down the Charlottenburger Chaussee toward the scene of the crime."     That it was a crime, a Communist crime, they proclaimed at once on arrival at the fire. Goering, sweating and puffing and quite beside himself with excitement, was already there ahead of them declaiming to heaven, as Papen later recalled, that "this is a Communist crime against the new government." To the new Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, Goering shouted, "This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up."(6)     The whole truth about the Reichstag fire will probably never be known. Nearly all those who knew it are now dead, most of them slain by Hitler in the months that followed. Even at Nuremberg the mystery could not be entirely unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own political ends.     From Goering's Reichstag President's Palace an underground passage, built to carry the central heating system, ran to the Reichstag building. Through this tunnel Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop who had become the Berlin S.A. leader, led a small detachment of storm troopers on the night of February 27 to the Reichstag, where they scattered gasoline and self-igniting chemicals and then made their way quickly back to the palace the way they had come. At the same time a half-witted Dutch Communist with a passion for arson, Marinus van der Lubbe, had made his way into the huge, darkened and to him unfamiliar building and set some small fires of his own. This feeble-minded pyromaniac was a godsend to the Nazis. He had been picked up by the S.A. a few days before after having been overheard in a bar boasting that he had attempted to set fire to several public buildings and that he was going to try the Reichstag next.     The coincidence that the Nazis had found a demented Communist arsonist who was out to do exactly what they themselves had determined to do seems incredible but is nevertheless supported by the evidence. The idea for the fire almost certainly originated with Goebbels and Goering. Hans Gisevius, an official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior at the time, testified at Nuremberg that "it was Goebbels who first thought of setting the Reichstag on fire," and Rudolf Diels, the Gestapo chief, added in an affidavit that "Goering knew exactly how the fire was to be started" and had ordered him "to prepare, prior to the fire, a list of people who were to be arrested immediately after it." General Franz Halder, Chief of the German General Staff during the early part of World War II, recalled at Nuremberg how on one occasion Goering had boasted of his deed. At a luncheon on the birthday of the Fuehrer in 1942 the conversation turned to the topic of the Reichstag building and its artistic value. I heard with my own ears when Goering interrupted the conversation and shouted: "The only one who really knows about the Reichstag is I, because I set it on fire!" With that he slapped his thigh with the flat of his hand.* *Both in his interrogations and at his trial at Nuremberg, Goering denied to the last that he had any part in setting fire to the Reichstag.     Van der Lubbe, it seems clear, was a dupe of the Nazis. He was encouraged to try to set the Reichstag on fire. But the main job was to be done—without his knowledge, of course—by the storm troopers. Indeed, it was established at the subsequent trial at Leipzig that the Dutch half-wit did not possess the means to set so vast a building on fire so quickly. Two and a half minutes after he entered, the great central hall was fiercely burning. He had only his shirt for tinder. The main fires, according to the testimony of experts at the trial, had been set with considerable quantities of chemicals and gasoline. It was obvious that one man could not have carried them into the building, nor would it have been possible for him to start so many fires in so many scattered places in so short a time.     Van der Lubbe was arrested on the spot and Goering, as he afterward told the court, wanted to hang him at once. The next day Ernst Torgler, parliamentary leader of the Communists, gave himself up to the police when he heard that Goering had implicated him, and a few days later Georgi Dimitroff, a Bulgarian Communist who later became Prime Minister of Bulgaria, and two other Bulgarian Communists, Popov and Tanev, were apprehended by the police. Their subsequent trial before the Supreme Court at Leipzig turned into something of a fiasco for the Nazis and especially for Goering, whom Dimitroff, acting as his own lawyer, easily provoked into making a fool of himself in a series of stinging cross-examinations. At one point, according to the court record, Goering screamed at the Bulgarian, "Out with you, you scoundrel!" JUDGE [to the police officer]: Take him away.     DIMITROFF [being led away by the police]: Are you afraid of my question, Herr Ministerpraesident?     GOERING: You wait until we get you outside this court, you scoundrel!     Torgler and the three Bulgarians were acquitted, though the German Communist leader was immediately taken into "protective custody," where he remained until his death during the second war. Van der Lubbe was found guilty and decapitated.(7)     The trial, despite the subserviency of the court to the Nazi authorities, cast a great deal of suspicion on Goering and the Nazis, but it came too late to have any practical effect. For Hitler had lost no time in exploiting the Reichstag fire to the limit.     On the day following the fire, February 28, he prevailed on President Hindenburg to sign a decree "for the Protection of the People and the State" suspending the seven sections of the constitution which guaranteed individual and civil liberties. Described as a "defensive measure against Communist acts of violence endangering the state," the decree laid down that: Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications; and warrants for house searchers, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.     In addition, the decree authorized the Reich government to take over complete power in the federal states when necessary and imposed the death sentence for a number of crimes, including "serious disturbances of the peace" by armed persons.(8)      Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat "official," as it were, to throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over. Some four thousand Communist officials and a great many Social Democrat and liberal leaders were arrested, including members of the Reichstag, who, according to the law, were immune from arrest. This was the first experience Germans had had with Nazi terror backed up by the government. Truckloads of storm troopers roared through the streets all over Germany, breaking into homes, rounding up victims and carting them off to S.A. barracks, where they were tortured and beaten. The Communist press and political meetings were suppressed; the Social Democrat newspapers and many liberal journals were suspended and the meetings of the democratic parties either banned or broken up. Only the Nazis and their Nationalist allies were permitted to campaign unmolested.     With all the resources of the national and Prussian governments at their disposal and with plenty of money from big business in their coffers, the Nazis carried on an election propaganda such as Germany had never seen before. For the first time the State-run radio carried the voices of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels to every corner of the land. The streets, bedecked with swastika flags, echoed to the tramp of the storm troopers. There were mass rallies, torchlight parades, the din of loudspeakers in the squares. The billboards were plastered with flamboyant Nazi posters and at night bonfires lit up the hills. The electorate was in turn cajoled with promises of a German paradise, intimidated by the brown terror in the streets and frightened by "revelations" about the Communist "revolution." The day after the Reichstag fire the Prussian government issued a long statement declaring that it had found Communist "documents" proving:     Government buildings, museums, mansions and essential plants were to be burned down . . . Women and children were to be sent in front of terrorist groups . . . The burning of the Reichstag was to be the signal for a bloody insurrection and civil war . . . It has been ascertained that today was to have seen throughout Germany terrorist acts against individual persons, against private property, and against the life and limb of the peaceful population, and also the beginning of general civil war.     Publication of the "documents proving that Communist conspiracy" was promised, but never made. The fact, however, that the Prussian government itself vouched for their authenticity impressed many Germans.     The waverers were also impressed perhaps by Goering's threats. At Frankfurt on March 3, on the eve of the elections, he shouted:     Fellow Germans, my measures will not be cripped by any judicial thinking . . . I don't have to worry about justice; my mission is only to destroy and exterminate, nothing more! . . . Certainly, I shall use the power of the State and the police to the utmost, my dear Communists, so don't draw any false conclusions; but the struggle to the death, in which my fist will grasp your necks, I shall lead with those down there—the Brownshirts. (9)     Almost unheard was the voice of former Chancellor Bruening, who also spoke out that day, proclaiming that his Center Party would resist any overthrow of the constitution, demanding an investigation of the suspicious Reichstag fire and calling on President Hindenburg "to protect the oppressed against their oppressors." Vain appeal! The aged President kept his silence. It was now time for the people, in their convulsion, to speak.     On March 5, 1933, the day of the last democratic elections they were to know during Hitler's life, they spoke with their ballots. Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler. All the persecution and suppression of the previous weeks did not prevent the Center Party from actually increasing its vote from 4,230,600 to 4,424,900; with its ally, the Catholic Bavarian People's Party, it obtained a total of five and a half million votes. Even the Social Democrats held their position as the second largest party, polling 7,181,629 votes, a drop of only 70,000. The Communists lost a million supporters but still polled 4,848,058. The Nationalists, led by Papen and Hugenberg, were bitterly disappointed with their own showing, a vote of 3,136,760, a mere 8 per cent of the votes cast and a gain of less than 200,000.     Still, the Nationalists' 52 seats, added to the 288 of the Nazis, gave the government a majority of 16 in the Reichstag. This was enough, perhaps, to carry on the day-to-day business of government but it was far short of the two-thirds majority which Hitler needed to carry out a new, bold plan to establish his dictatorship by consent of Parliament. (1) NCA, III, pp. 272-75 (N.D. 351-PS). (2) Goebbels, Kaiserhof, p. 256. (3) See affidavit of Georg von Schnitzler, NCA, VII, p. 501 (N.D. EC-439); speeches of Goering and Hitler, NCA, VI, p. 1080 (N.D. D-203); Schacht's interrogation, NCA, VI p. 465 (N.D. 3725-PS); Funk's interrogation, NCA, V. p. 495 (N.D. 2828-PS). (4) Goebbels, Kaiserhof, pp. 269-70. (5) Papen, op. cit., p. 268. (6) Rudolf Diels, Lucifer ante Portas, p. 194. (7) For sources on the responsibility for the Reichstag fire see: Halder's affidavit, NCA, VI, p. 635 (N.D. 3740-PS); transcript of Gisevius' cross-examination on April 25, 1946, Trial of the Major War Criminals [hereafter cited as TMWC], XII, pp. 252-53; Diehl's affidavit, Goering's denial, TMWC, IX, pp. 432-36, and NCA, VI pp. 298-99 (N.D. 3593-PS); Willy Frischauer, The Rise and Fall of Hermann Goering, pp. 88-95; Douglas Reed, The Burning of the Reichstag; John Gunther, Inside Europe (Gunther attended the trial at Leipzig). There are many alleged testaments and confessions by those claiming to have participated in the Nazi firing of the Reichstag or to have positive knowledge of it, but none, so far as I know, has ever been substantiated. Of these, memoranda by Ernst Oberfohren, a Nationalist deputy, and Karl Ernst, the Berlin S.A. leader, have been given some credence. Both men were slain by the Nazis within a few months of the fire. (8) NCA, III, pp. 968-70 (N.D. 1390-PS). (9) NCA, IV, p. 496 (N.D. 1856-PS). from pages 247 - 256     The radio and the motion pictures were also quickly harnessed to serve the propaganda of th Nazi State. Goebbels had always seen in radio (television had not yet come in) the chief instrument of propaganda in modern society and through the Radio Department of his ministry and the Chamber of Radio he gained complete control of broadcasting and shaped it to his own ends. His task was made easier because in Germany, as in the other countries of Europe, broadcasting was a monopoly owned and operated by the State. In 1933 the Nazi government automatically found itself in possession of the Reich Broadcasting Corporation.     The films remained in the hands of private firms but the Propaganda Ministry and the Chamber of Films controlled every aspect of the industry, their task being—in the words of an official commentary—"to lift the film industry out of the sphere of liberal economic thoughts . . . and thus enable it to receive those tasks which it has to fulfill in the National Socialist State."     The result in both cases was to afflict the German people with radio programs and motion pictures as inane and boring as were the contents of their daily newspapers and periodicals. Even a public which usually submitted without protest to being told what was good for it revolted. The customers stayed away in droves from the Nazi films and jammed the houses which showed the few foreign pictures (mostly B-grade Hollywood) which Goebbels permitted to be exhibited on German screens. At one period in the mid-Thirties the hissing of German films became so common that Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior, issued a stern warning against "treasonable behavior on the part of cinema audiences." Likewise the radio programs were so roundly criticized that the president of the Radio Chamber, one Horst Dressler-Andress, declared that such carping was "an insult to German culture" and would not be tolerated. In those days, in the Thirties, a German listener could still turn his dial to a score of foreign radio stations without, as happened later when the war began, risking having his head chopped off. And perhaps quite a few did, though it was this observer's impression that as the years went by, Dr. Goebbels proved himself right, in that the radio became by far the regime's most effective means of propaganda, doing more than any other single instrument of communication to shape the German people to Hitler's ends.     I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one's inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime's calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were. EDUCATION IN THE THIRD REICH     On April 30, 1934, Bernhard Rust, an Obergruppenfuehrer in the S.A., onetime Gauleiter of Hanover, a Nazi Party member and friend of Hitler since the early Twenties, was named Reich Minister of Science, Education of Popular Culture. In the bizarre, topsy-turvy world of National Socialism, Rust was eminently fitted for his task. Since 1930 he had been an unemployed provincial schoolmaster, having been dismissed in that year by the local republican authorities at Hanover for certain manifestations of instability of mind, though his fanatical Nazism may have been partly responsible for his ouster. For Dr. Rust preached the Nazi gospel with the zeal of a Goebbels and the fuzziness of a Rosenberg. Named Prussian Minister of Science, Art and Education in February 1933, he boasted that he had succeeded overnight in "liquidating the school as an institution of intellectual acrobatics."     To such a mindless man was now entrusted dictatorial control over German science, the public schools, the institutions of higher learning and the youth organizations. For education in the Third Reich, as Hitler envisaged it, was not to be confined to stuffy classrooms but to be furthered by a Spartan, political and martial training in the successive youth groups and to reach its climax not so much in the universities and engineering colleges, which absorbed but a small minority, but first, at the age of eighteen, in compulsory labor service and then in service, as conscripts, in the armed forces.     Hitler's contempt for "professors" and the intellectual academic life had peppered the pages of Mein Kampf, in which he had set down some of his ideas on education. "The whole education by a national state," he had written, "must aim primarily not at the stuffing with mere knowledge but at building bodies which are physically healthy to the core." But, even more important, he had stressed in his book the importance of winning over and then training the youth in the service "of a new national state"—a subject he returned to often after he became the German dictator. "When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,'" he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, "I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already . . . What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'" And on May 1, 1937, he declared, "This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing." It was not an idle boast; that was precisely what was happening.     The German schools, from first grade through the universities, were quickly Nazified. Textbooks were hastily rewritten, curricula were changed, Mein Kampf was made—in the words of Der Deutsche Erzieher, official organ of the educators—"our infallible pedagogical guiding star" and teachers who failed to see the new light were cast out. Most instructors had been more or less Nazi in sentiment when not outright party members. To strengthen their ideology they were dispatched to special schools for intensive training in National Socialist principles, emphasis being put on Hitler's racial doctrines.     Every person in the teaching profession, from kindergarten through the universities, was compelled to join the National Socialist Teachers' League which, by law, was held "responsible for execution of the ideological and political co-ordination of all teachers in accordance with the National Socialist doctrine." The Civil Service Act of 1937 required teachers to be "the executors of the will of the party-supported State" and to be ready "at any time to defend without reservation the National Socialist State." An earlier decree had classified them as civil servants and thus subject to the racial laws. Jews, of course, were forbidden to teach. All teachers took an oath to "be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler." Later, no man could teach who had not first served in the S.A., the Labor Service or the Hitler Youth. Candidates for instructorships in the universities had to attend for six weeks an observation camp where their views and character were studied by Nazi experts and reported to the Ministry of Education, which issued licenses to teach based on the candidates' political "reliability."     Prior to 1933, the German public schools had been under the jurisdiction of the local authorities and the universities under that of the individual states. Now all were brought under the iron rule of the Reich Minister of Education. It was he who also appointed the rectors and the deans of the universities, who formerly had been elected by the full professors of the faculty. He also appointed the leaders of the university students' union, to which all students had to belong, and of the lecturers union, comprising all instructors. The N.S. Association of University Lecturers, under the tight leadership of old Nazi hands, was given a decisive role in selecting who was to teach and to see that what they taught was in accordance with Nazi theories.     The result of so much Nazification was catastrophic for German education and for German learning. History was so falsified in the new textbooks and by the teachers in their lectures that it became ludicrous. The teaching of the "racial sciences," exalting the Germans as the master race and the Jews as breeders of almost all the evil there was in the world, was even more so. In the University of Berlin alone, where so many great scholars had taught in the past, the new rector, a storm trooper and by profession a veterinarian, instituted twenty-five new courses in Rassenkunde—racial science—and by the time he had really taken the university apart he had eighty-six courses connected with his own profession.     The teaching of the natural sciences, in which Germany had been so pre-eminent for generations, deteriorated rapidly. Great teachers such as Einstein and Franck in physics, Haber, Willstaetter and Warburg in chemistry, were fired or retired. Those who remained, many of them, were bitten by the Nazi aberrations and attempted to apply them to pure science. They began to teach what they called German physics, German chemistry, German mathematics. Indeed, in 1937 there appeared a journal called Deutsche Mathematik, and its first editorial solemnly proclaimed that any idea that mathematics could be judged nonracially carried "within itself the germs of destruction of German science."     The hallucinations of these Nazi scientists became unbelievable, even to a layman. "German Physics?" asked Professor Philipp Lenard of Heidelberg University, who was one of the more learned and internationally respected scientists of the Third Reich. "'But,' it will be replied, 'science is and remains international.' It is false. In reality, science, like every other human product, is racial and conditioned by blood." Professor Rudolphe Tomaschek, director of the Institute of Physics at Dresden, went further. "Modern Physics," he wrote, "is an instrument of [world] Jewry for the destruction of Nordic science . . . True physics is the creation of the German spirit . . . In fact, all European science is the fruit of Aryan, or, better, German thought." Professor Johannes Stark, head of the German National Institute of Physical Science, thought so too. It would be found, he said, that the "founders of research in physics, and the great discoverers from Galileo to Newton to the physical pioneers of our time, were almost exclusively Aryan, predominantly of the Nordic race."     There was also Professor Wilhelm Mueller, of the Technical College of Aachen, who in a book entitled Jewry and Science saw a world-wide Jewish plot to pollute science and thereby destroy civilization. To him Einstein, with his theory of relativity, was the archvillian. The Einstein theory, on which so much of modern physics is based, was to this singular Nazi professor "directed from beginning to end toward the goal of transforming the living—that is, the non-Jewish—world of living essence, born from a mother earth and bound up with blood, and bewitching it into spectral abstraction in which all individual differences of peoples and nations, and all inner limits of the races, are lost in unreality, and in which only an unsubstantial diversity of geometric dimensions survives which produces all events out of the compulsion of its godless subjection to laws." The world-wide acclaim given to Einstein on the publication of his theory of relativity, Professor Mueller proclaimed, was really only a rejoicing over "the approach of Jewish world rule which was to force down German manhood irrevocably and eternally to the level of the lifeless slave."     To Professor Ludwig Bieberback, of the University of Berlin, Einstein was "an alien mountebank." Even to Professor Lenard, "the Jew conspicuously lacks understanding for the truth . . . being in this respect in contrast to the Aryan research scientist with his careful and serious will to truth . . . Jewish physics is thus a phantom and a phenomenon of degeneration of fundamental German Physics."(7)     And yet from 1905 to 1931 ten German Jews had been awarded Nobel Prizes for their contributions to science.     During the Second Reich, the university professors, like the Protestant clergy, had given blind support to the conservative government and its expansionist aims, and the lecture halls had been breeding grounds of virulent nationalism and anti-Semitism. The Weimar Republic had insisted on complete academic freedom, and one result had been that the vast majority of university teachers, antiliberal, antidemocratic, antiSemetic as they were, had helped to undermine the democratic regime. Most professors were fanatical nationalists who wished the return of a conservative, monarchical Germany. And though to many of them, before 1933, the Nazis were too rowdy and violent to attract their allegiance, their preachments helped prepare the ground for the coming of Nazism. By 1932 the majority of students appeared to be enthusiastic for Hitler.     It was surprising to some how many members of the university faculties knuckled under to the Nazification of higher learning after 1933. Though official figures put the number of professors and instructors dismissed during the first five years of the regime at 2,800—about one fourth of the total number—the proportion of those who lost their posts through defying National Socialism was, as Professor Wilhelm Roepke, himself dismissed from the University of Marburg in 1933, said, "exceedingly small." Though small, there were names famous in the German academic world: Karl Jaspers, E. J. Gumbel, Theodor Litt, Karl Barth, Julius Ebbinghaus and dozen of others. Most of them emigrated, first to Switzerland, Holland and England and eventually to America. One of them, Professor Theodor Lessing, who had fled to Czechoslovakia, was tracked down by Nazi thugs and murdered in Marienbad on August 31, 1933.     A large majority of professors, however, remained at their posts, and as early as the autumn of 1933 some 960 of them, led by such luminaries as Professor Sauerbruch, the surgeon, Heidegger, the existentialist philosopher, and Pinder, the art historian, took a public vow to support Hitler and the National Socialist regime.     "It was a scene of prostitution," Professor Roepke later wrote, "that has stained the honorable history of German learning."(8) And as Professor Julius Ebbinghaus, looking back over the shambles in 1945, said, "The German universities failed, while there was still time, to oppose publicly with all their power the destruction of knowledge and of the democratic state. They failed to keep the beacon of freedom and right burning during the night of tyranny."(9)     The cost of such failure was great. After six years of Nazification the number of university students dropped by more than one half—from 127,920 to 58,325. The decline in enrollment at the institutes of technology, from which Germany got its scientists and engineers, was even greater—from 20,474 to 9,554. Academic standards fell dizzily. By 1937 there was not only a shortage of young men in the sciences and engineering but a decline in their qualifications. Long before the outbreak of the war the chemical industry, busily helping to further Nazi rearmament, was complaining through its organ, Die Chemische Industrie, that Germany was losing its leadership in chemistry. Not only the national economy but national defense itself was being jeopardized, it complained, and it blamed the shortage of young scientists and their mediocre caliber on the poor quality of the technical colleges.     Nazi Germany's loss, as it turned out, was the free world's gain, especially in the race to be the first with the atom bomb. The story of the successful efforts of Nazi leaders, led by Himmler, to hamstring the atomic-energy program is too long and involved to be recounted here. It was one of the ironies of fate that the development of the bomb in the United States owed so much to two men who had been exiled because of race from the Nazi and Fascist dictatorships: Einstein from Germany and Fermi from Italy.     To Adolf Hitler it was not so much the public schools, from which he himself had dropped out so early in life, but the organizations of the Hitler Youth on which he counted to educate the youth of Germany for the ends he had in mind. In the years of the Nazi Party's struggle for power the Hitler Youth movement had not amounted to much. In 1932, the last year of the Republic, its total enrollment was only 107,956, compared to some ten million youths who belonged to the various organizations united in the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations. In no country in the world had there been a youth movement of such vitality and numbers as in republican Germany. Hitler, realizing this, was determined to take over and Nazify it.     His chief lieutenant for this task was a handsome young man of banal mind but of great driving force, Baldur von Schirach, who, falling under Hitler's spell, had joined the party in 1925 at the age of eighteen and in 1931 had been named Youth Leader of the Nazi Party. Among the scarfaced, brawling Brownshirts, he had the curious look of an American college student, fresh and immature, and this perhaps was due to his having had, as we have seen, American forebears (including two signers of the Declaration of Independence).(10)     Schirach was named "Youth Leader of the German Reich" in June 1933. Aping the tactics of his elder party leaders, his first action was to send an armed band of fifty husky Hitler Youth men to occupy the national offices of the Reich Committee of German Youth Associations, where an old Prussian Army officer, General Vogt, head of the committee, German naval heroes, Admiral von Trotha, who had been Chief of Staff of the High Seas Fleet in the First World War and who was now president of the Youth Associations. The venerable admiral too was put to flight and his position and organization were dissolved. Millions of dollars' worth of property, chiefly in hundreds of youth hostels scattered throughout Germany, was seized.     The concordat of July 20, 1933, had specifically provided for the unhindered continuance of the Catholic Youth Association. On December 1, 1936, Hitler decreed a law outlawing it and all other non-Nazi organizations for young people.     . . . All of the German youth in the Reich is organized within the Hitler Youth. The German youth, besides being reared within the family and schools, shall be educated physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of National Socialism . . . through the Hitler Youth.(11)     Schirach, whose office had formerly been subordinate to the Ministry of Education, was made responsible directly to Hitler.     This half-baked young man of twenty-nine, who wrote maudlin verse in praise of Hitler ("this genius grazing the stars") and followed Rosenberg in his weird paganism and Streicher in his virulent anti-Semitism, had become the dictator of youth in the Third Reich.     From the age of six to eighteen, when conscription for the Labor Service of the Hitler Youth. Parents found guilty of trying to keep their children from joining the organization were subject to heavy prison sentences even though, as in some cases, they merely objected to having their daughters enter some of the services were cases of pregnancy had reached scandalous proportions.     From the age of six to ten, a boy served a sort of apprenticeship for the Hitler Youth as a Pimpf. Each youngster was given a performance book in which would be recorded his progress through the entire Nazi youth movement, including his ideological growth. At ten, after passing suitable tests in athletics, camping and Nazified history, he graduated into the Jungvolk ("Young Folk"), where he took the following oath:        In the presence of this blood banner, which represents our Fuehrer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God.     At fourteen the boy entered the Hitler Youth proper and remained there until he was eighteen, when he passed into the Labor Service and the Army. It was a vast organization organized on paramilitary lines similar to the S.A. and in which the youngsters approaching manhood received systematic training not only in camping, sports and Nazi ideology but in soldiering. On many a weekend in the environs of Berlin this writer would be interrupted in his picnicking by Hitler Youths scrambling through the woods or over the heath, rifles at the ready and heavy army packs on their backs.     Sometimes the young ladies would be playing at soldiering, too, for the Hitler Youth movement did not neglect the maidens. From ten to fourteen, German girls were enrolled as Jungmaedel—literally, "young maidens"—and they too had a uniform, made up of a white blouse, full blue skirt, socks and heavy—and most unfeminine—marching shoes. Their training was much like that of the boys of the same age and included long marches on weekends with heavy packs and the usual indoctrination in the Nazi philosophy. But emphasis was put on the role of women in the Third Reich—to be, above all, healthy mothers of healthy children. This was stressed even more when the girls became, at fourteen, members of the B.D.M—Bund Deutscher Maedel (League of German Maidens).     At eighteen, several thousand of the girls in the B.D.M. (they remained in it until 21) did a year's service on the farms—their so-called Land Jahr, which was equivalent to the Labor Service of the young men. Their task was to help both in the house and in the fields. The girls lived sometimes in the farmhouses and often in small camps in rural districts from which they were taken by truck early each morning to the farms. Moral problems soon arose. The presence of a pretty young city girl sometimes disrupted a peasant's household, and angry complaints from parents about their daughters' having been made pregnant on the farms began to be heard. But that wasn't the only problem. Usually a girls' camp was located near a Labor Service camp for young men. This juxtaposition seems to have made for many pregnancies too. One couplet—a take-off on the "Strength through Joy" movement of the Labor Front, but it applied especially to the Land Jahr of the young maidens—went the rounds of Germany: In the fields and on the heath I lose Strength through Joy.     Similar moral problems also arose during the Household Year for Girls, in which some half a million Hitler Youth maidens spent a year at domestic service in a city household. Actually, the more sincere Nazis did not consider them moral problems at all. On more than one occasion I listened to women leaders of the B.D.M.—they were invariably of the plainer type and usually unmarried—lecture their young charges on the moral and patriotic duty of bearing children for Hitler's Reich—within wedlock if possible, but without it if necessary.     By the end of 1938 the Hitler Youth numbered 7,728,259. Large as this number was, obviously some four million youth had managed to stay out of the organization, and in March 1939 the government issued a law conscripting all youth into the Hitler Youth on the same basis as they were drafted into the Army. Recalcitrant parents were warned that their children would be taken away from them and put into orphanages or other homes unless they enrolled.     The final twist to education in the Third Reich came in the establishment of three types of schools for the training of the elite: the Adolf Hitler Schools, under the direction of the Hitler Youth, the National Political Institutes of Education and the Order Castles—the last two under the aegis of the party. The Adolf Hitler Schools took the most promising youngsters from the Jungvolk at the age of twelve and gave them six years of intensive training for leadership in the party and in the public services. The pupils lived at the school under Spartan discipline and on graduation were eligible for the university. There were ten such schools founded after 1937, the principal one being the Akademie at Brunswick.     The purpose of the Political Institutes of Education was to restore the type of education formerly given in the old Prussian military academics. This, according to one official commentary, cultivated "the soldierly spirit, with its attributes of courage, sense of duty and simplicity." To this was added special training in Nazi principles. The schools were under the supervision of the S.S., which furnished the headmasters and most of the teachers. Three such schools were established in 1933 and grew to thirty-one before the outbreak of the war, three of them for women.     At the very top of the pyramid were the so-called Order Castles, the Ordensburgen. In these, with their atmosphere of the castles of the Order of Teutonic Knights of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were trained the elite of the Nazi elite. The knightly order had been based on the principle of absolute obedience to the Master, the Ordensmeister, and devoted to the German conquest of the Slavic lands in the East and the enslavement of the natives. The Nazi Order Castles had similar discipline and purposes. Only the most fanatical young National Socialists were chosen, usually from the top ranks of the graduates of the Adolf Hitler Schools and the Political Institutes. There were four Castles, and a student attended successively all of them. The first of six years was spent in one which specialized in the "racial sciences" and other aspects of Nazi ideology. The emphasis was on mental training and discipline, with physical training subordinated to it. This was reversed the second year at a Castle where athletics and sports, including mountain climbing and parachute jumping, came first. The third Castle, where the students spent the next year and a half, offered political and military instruction. Finally, in the fourth and last stage of his education, the student was sent for a year and a half to the Ordensburg in Marienburg in East Prussia, near the Polish frontier. There, within the walls of the very Order Castle which had been a stronghold of the Teutonic Knights five centuries before, his political and military training was concentrated on the Eastern question and Germany's need (and right!) of expanding into the Slavic lands in its eternal search for Lebensraum—an excellent preparation, as it turned out and no doubt was meant to turn out, for the events of 1939 and thereafter.     In such a manner were the youth trained for life and work and death in the Third Reich. Though their minds were deliberately poisoned, their regular schooling interrupted, their homes largely replaced so far as their rearing went, the boys and the girls, the young men and women, seemed immensely happy, filled with a zest for the life of a Hitler Youth. And there was no doubt that the practice of bringing the children of all classes and walks of life together, where those who had come from poverty or riches, from a laborer's home or a peasant's or a businessman's, or an aristocrat's, shared common tasks, was good and healthy in itself. In most cases it did no harm to a city boy and girl to spend six months in the compulsory Labor Service, where they lived outdoors and learned the value of manual labor and of getting along with those of different backgrounds. No one who traveled up and down Germany in those days and talked with the young in their camps and watched them work and play and sing could fail to see that, however sinister the teaching, here was an incredibly dynamic youth movement.     The young in the Third Reich were growing up to have strong and healthy bodies, faith in the future of their country and in themselves and a sense of fellowship and camaraderie that shattered all class and economic and social barriers. I thought of that later, in the May days of 1940, when along the road between Aachen and Brussels one saw the contrast between the German soldiers, bronzed and clean-cut from a youth spent in the sunshine on an adequate diet, and the first British war prisoners, with their hollow chests, round shoulders, pasty complexions and bad teeth—tragic examples of the youth that England had neglected so irresponsibly in the years between the wars. from pages 1095 - 1096     On New Year's Day Hitler threw eight German divisions into an attack in the Saar and followed it with a thrust from the bridgehead on the Upper Rhine by an army under the command of—to the German generals this was a bad joke—Heinrich Himmler. Neither drive got very far. Nor did an all-out assalt on Bastogne beginning on January 3 by no less than two corps of nine divisions which led to the most severe fighting of the Ardennes campaign. By January 5 the Germans abandoned hope of taking this key town. They were now faced with being cut off by a British-American counteroffensive from the north which had begun on January 3. On January 8 Model, whose armies were in danger of being entrapped at Houffalize, northeast of Bastogne, finally received permission to withdraw. By January 16, just a month after the beginning of the offensive on which Hitler had staked his last reserves in men and guns and ammunition, the German forces were back to the line from which they had set out.     They had lost some 120,000 men, killed, wounded and missing, 600 tanks and assault guns, 1,600 planes and 6,000 vehicles. American losses were also severe—8,000 killed, 48,000 wounded, 21,000 captured or missing, and 733 tanks and tank destroyers.* But the Americans could make good their losses; the Germans could not. They had shot their last bolt. This was the last major offensive of the German Army in World War II. Its failure not only made defeat inevitable in the West, it doomed the German armies in the East, where the effect of Hitler's throwing his last reserves into the Ardennes became immediately felt. *Among the American dead were several prisoners shot in cold blood by Colonel Jochen Peiper's combat group of the 1st S.S. Panzer Division near Malmédy on December 17. According to the evidence presented at Nuremberg 129 American prisoners were massacred; at the subsequent trial of the S.S. officers involved, the figure was reduced to 71. The trial before an American military tribunal at Dachau in the spring of 1946 had a curious denouement. Forty-three S.S. officers, including Peiper, were condemned to death, twenty-three to life imprisonment and eight to shorter sentences. Sepp Dietrich, commander of the Sixth S.S. Panzer Army, which fought in the northern side of the Bulge, received twenty-five years; Kraemer, commander of the 1st S.S. Armored Corps, ten years, and Hermann Priess, commander of the 1st S.S. Panzer Division, eighteen years.     Then a hue and cry arose in the U.S. Senate, especially from the late Senator McCarthy, that the S.S. officers had been treated brutally in order to extort confessions. In March 1948 thirty-one of the death sentences were commuted; in April General Lucius D. Clay reduced the death sentences from twelve to six; and in January 1951, under a general amnesty, John J. McCloy, the American High Commissioner, commuted the remaining death sentences to life imprisonment. At the time of writing all have been released. Almost forgotten in the hubbub over the alleged ill-treatment of the S.S. officers was the indisputable evidence that at least seventy-one unarmed U.S. war prisoners were slain in cold blood on a snowy field near Malmédy on December 17, 1944, on the orders—or incitement—of several S.S. officers.

 

^

Everyone knows that “truth is the first casualty of war“. And one of the most highly decorated American soldiers of all time said that “war is a racket”. FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, constitutional law expert professor Jonathan Turley, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and the Washington Post have all said that U.S. government officials “were trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power”. Indeed, the former Secretary of Homeland Security – Tom Ridge – admits that he was pressured to raise terror alerts to help Bush win reelection. A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that the war on terror is “a mythical historical narrative”. In terms of a possible “why”, remember that psychologists and sociologists have demonstrated that fear of terrorism makes people stupid and easy to manipulate and control.   War is always sold to it’s people by artificially demonizing the enemy: Countries need to lie about their enemies in order to demonize them sufficiently so that the people will support the war. That is why intelligence “failures” – such as the following – are so common: The U.S. Navy’s own historians now say that the sinking of the USS Maine — the justification for America’s entry into the Spanish-American War — was probably caused by an internal explosion of coal, rather than an attack by the Spanish. It is also now well-accepted that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which led to the Vietnam war was a fiction (confirmed here). And two lies were used to justify the 1991 Gulf War: the statement that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies and the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)(technically, the statement about Kuwaiti babies did not come from the U.S. government, but from a public relations firm hired by the government). Indeed, in a newly-released documentary, U.S. soldiers admit that if they accidentally kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants:   On Monday, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton told Jon Stewart that a Clinton cabinet member proposed letting Saddam kill an American pilot as a pretext for war in Iraq: (And see this; and this excerpt from General Shelton’s book). This might seem, at first glance, like just an odd, one-off suggestion. However, as reported by the New York Times and other newspapers, George W. Bush also suggested to Tony Blair that a U.S. plane be painted in United Nations colors so that – if Saddam shot it down – it would create a casus belli. As the Times wrote in 2006: The memo [confirmed by two senior British officials as being authentic] also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire …. Indeed, the former director of the National Security Agency said: By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation. (audio here).Former FBI station chief Ted Gundersen also says most terror attacks are committed by our CIA and FBI: Specific Historical Examples The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister. The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred). As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960′s, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Nine months earlier, a false flag attack was discussed in order to justify an invasion of the Dominican Republic. Specifically, according to official State Department records, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles wrote on June 3, 1961: The Vice President [Lyndon Johnson], [Attorney General] Bob Kennedy, Secretary [of Defense Robert] McNamara, Dick Goodwin [who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs], [head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General Lemnitzer, Wyn Coerr, and Ted Achilles were here. Bob McNamara and Lemnitzer stated that under the terms of the contingency paper, they were required to be prepared to move into the island on short order if required to do so, and this, in their opinion, called for substantially more troops that we had in the area. After some discussion we considered two more aircraft carriers, some destroyers, and 12,000 marines should be moved into a position some one hundred miles off the Dominican Republic shore… The tone of the meeting was deeply disturbing. Bob Kennedy was clearly looking for an excuse to move in on the island. At one point he suggested, apparently seriously, that we might have to blow up the Consulate to provide the rationale. His general approach, vigorously supported by Dick Goodwin, was that this was a bad government, that there was a strong chance that it might team up with Castro, and that it should be destroyed–with an excuse if possible, without one if necessary. Rather to my surprise, Bob McNamara seemed to support this view … The entire spirit of this meeting was profoundly distressing and worrisome, and I left at 8:00 p.m. with a feeling that this spirit which I had seen demonstrated on this occasion and others at the White House by those so close to the President constitutes a further danger of half-cocked action by people with almost no foreign policy experience, who are interested in action for action’s sake, and the devil take the highmost … [At a subsequent meeting], Bob McNamara went along with their general view that our problem was not to prepare against an overt act by the Dominican Republic but rather to find an excuse for going into the country and upsetting it.   When Congress was originally asked to pass the Patriot Act in late 2001, the anthrax attacks which occurred only weeks earlier were falsely blamed on spooky Arabs as a way to scare Congress members into approving the bill. Specifically: The FBI was actually told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials High-level government insiders pointed towards Iraq as the source of the anthrax, even though there was absolutely no reason to think that the anthrax had come from Iraq Indeed, many people have questioned whether or not the anthrax was intentionally sent to scare people. For example: The anthrax letters attempt to link 9/11 and the anthrax attack and pretend to be from radical Muslims and be anti-America and anti-Israel Would Arab terrorists have targeted only Congress men who were likely to oppose the Patriot Act and other tyrannical measures? Would they have gotten that specific in their targeting? In order to terrorize America as a whole, wouldn’t real Arab terrorists have sent anthrax to the Congressional leaders of both parties, regardless of their political postures towards particular legislation? Shouldn’t it have been obvious to the FBI that the killer was pro-tyranny, rather than being simply Anti-American? The “war on terror” and Iraq war were largely based on the claim that Saddam and Muslim extremists were behind the anthrax attacks (and see this and this) Senator Patrick Leahy said: And I think there are people within our government — certainly from the source of it — who know where it came from. [Taps the table to let that settle in] And these people may not have had anything to do with it, but they certainly know where it came from. The FBI gave its consent in October, 2001 for the remaining samples of the Ames anthrax strain to be destroyed, thereby permanently destroying crucial “genetic clues valuable to the criminal inquiry”. Why would the FBI allow the Ames samples to be destroyed, other than to prevent fingers from being pointed toward the real killer, someone who worked for the U.S. government and had access to U.S. bioweapons? The American bioweapons expert who actually drafted the current bioweapons law (the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989), who holds a doctorate of law magna cum laude and a Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard University, and teaches international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-92) and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court, and who “advised the FBI in its initial investigation of the anthrax letters”, is convinced that the anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the Patriot Act and the later Military Commissions Act. He has said: Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy were holding it up because they realized what this would lead to. The first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas corpus [which protects citizens from unlawful imprisonment and guarantees due process of law]. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, come these anthrax attacks. Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.” As Chris Floyd and many others have noted, this plan has gone live. United Press International reported in June 2005: U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance. There is substantial additional evidence of hanky panky in Iraq. We’re not alone. Countries around the world have played this terrible game for thousands of years. If We Don’t Learn Our History, We’re Doomed to Repeat It Indeed, many former high-level officials are warning that it could happen again: A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation. A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents stated that if there was another major attack in the U.S., it would lead to martial law. He went on to say: “We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was some terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them, or seemingly to allow them to get what they want.” The former CIA analyst would not put it past the government to “play fast and loose” with terror alerts and warnings and even events themselves in order to rally people behind the flag. Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, said “if there is another terror attack, “I believe the president will get what he wants”, which will include a dictatorship…….Why we got snookered into the Vietnam war. On the night of Aug. 4, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf -- a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war: air strikes against North Vietnam. But Johnson ordered U.S. bombers to "retaliate" for a North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened. Prior to the U.S. air strikes, top officials in Washington had reason to doubt that any Aug. 4 attack by North Vietnam had occurred. Cables from the U.S. task force commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to "freak weather effects," "almost total darkness" and an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing ship's own propeller beat." One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was squadron commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and then Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate. "I had the best seat in the house to watch that event," recalled Stockdale a few years ago, "and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets -- there were no PT boats there.... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power." In 1965, Lyndon Johnson commented: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there." But Johnson's deceitful speech of Aug. 4, 1964, won accolades from editorial writers. The president, proclaimed the New York Times, "went to the American people last night with the somber facts." The Los Angeles Times urged Americans to "face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities." An exhaustive new book, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam, begins with a dramatic account of the Tonkin Gulf incidents. In an interview, author Tom Wells told us that American media "described the air strikes that Johnson launched in response as merely `tit for tat' -- when in reality they reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing its overt military pressure against the North." Why such inaccurate news coverage? Wells points to the media's "almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information" -- as well as "reluctance to question official pronouncements on `national security issues.'" Daniel Hallin's classic book The `Uncensored War' observes that journalists had "a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account [of Tonkin Gulf events]; it simply wasn't used. The day before the first incident, Hanoi had protested the attacks on its territory by Laotian aircraft and South Vietnamese gunboats." What's more, "It was generally known...that `covert' operations against North Vietnam, carried out by South Vietnamese forces with U.S. support and direction, had been going on for some time." In the absence of independent journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam -- sailed through Congress on Aug. 7. (Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, provided the only "no" votes.) The resolution authorized the president "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The rest is tragic history. Scott Ritter, the former UN Weapons Inspector (an American) – who stated before the Iraq war started that there were no weapons of mass destruction – is now saying that he would not rule out staged government terror by the U.S. government And a member of the British Parliament stated that “there is a very real danger” that the American government will stage a false flag terror attack in order to justify war against Iran and to gain complete control domestically Postscript: Most serving in our military are good and honorable people who want to protect America and her people. It is only rogue elements within civilian and military circles who carry out false flag attacks. It’s not that the average American isn’t aware that we still have tens of thousands or troops in Iraq, or that nearly 4,400 U.S. military personnel have died there since the war began. Scattered demonstrations were scheduled around the country to call for the troops’ swift return. But with so much else going on — a torpid economy, a climactic debate over health care reform, a mounting conflict in Afghanistan — it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Americans are still fighting and dying in  Iraq. Thus far, the war in Iraq has cost over $740,000,000,000 -- but the cumulative cost could be between two and three trillion dollars.  The war has caused the death of over 4,400 American troops, and left more than 31,000 wounded. July 25, 1990: US Ambassador Gives Seeming ‘Green Light’ for Iraq’s Invasion of Kuwait April Glaspie and Saddam Hussein. [Source: Wilson's Almanac]The US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, goes to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry to meet with Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, to deliver a statement made earlier in the week by State Department spokesperson Margaret Tutwiler. The statement is equivocal about Iraq’s belligerent pose towards Kuwait (see July 22, 1990), noting that although the US has no mutual defense pact with Kuwait, “Iraq and others know there is no place for coercion and intimidation in the civilized world.” Deputy Chief of Mission Joseph Wilson will later describe Glaspie as having “a keen mind and a profound understanding of the issues.” [Wilson, 2004, pp. 98] One-on-One with Saddam Hussein - Shortly after her meeting with Aziz, she is summoned back to the Foreign Ministry and driven from there to a meeting with Saddam Hussein. Wilson will write: “This was unprecedented. During the two years she had been ambassador, Saddam had never held a private meeting with her, delegating all contact to Aziz or other underlings.” During the meeting, Glaspie promises Hussein that President Bush wants “better and deeper relations.” She tells Hussein that Bush is an “intelligent man,” and adds, “He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq.” [Washington Post, 12/30/2002; London Times, 12/31/2002; Wilson, 2004, pp. 98] 'No Opinion on Arab-Arab Conflicts' - Glaspie tells Hussein: “We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait.… We know you need funds. We understand that, and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. We can see that you have deployed massive numbers of troops in the south. Normally that would be none of our business, but when this happens in the context of your other threats against Kuwait, then it would be reasonable for us to be concerned. For this reason, I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship—not confrontation—regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?” Hussein answers that he intends to try to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Kuwait; Glaspie asks what solutions Hussein would find acceptable. Hussein wants to keep the entire Shatt al Arab [a strategically important waterway] under Iraqi control, and if given that, he is willing to make concessions to Kuwait. However, if he has to give up some control of the Shatt, he will renounce all control in favor of bringing Kuwait back under Iraqi dominion. Glaspie replies: “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.” Reportedly Hussein takes this as a green light from the US to proceed with the invasion. [New York Times, 9/23/1990; Los Angeles Times, 1/5/2003] Glaspie Said to Be Scapegoated - Wilson will later write that the US policy failure that led to the invasion is not Glaspie’s fault and that she is merely made a scapegoat for it (see July 25, 1990 and After): “The one-on-one meeting with Saddam was fateful for Ambassador Glaspie. Out of it emerged the charge that she had not been tough enough with him and had somehow given him a green light to invade Kuwait. Nothing could be further from the truth.” Charge of US Manipulation - Author and investigative producer Barry Lando will say that the price of oil was manipulated with US connivance before the crisis in an effort to hurt Iraq (see Around July 25, 1990). Entity Tags: Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein, April Glaspie, Joseph C. Wilson, James A. Baker, Margaret Tutwiler Timeline Tags: US-Iraq 1980s Category Tags: Iraq Invasion of Kuwait, US-Iraq Collaboration July 25, 1990: Hussein Pretends to Bluff over Intent to Invade Kuwait During a meeting with US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie (see July 25, 1990), Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein interrupts the meeting to take a phone call from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak has worked tirelessly to mediate the burgeoning dispute between Iraq and Kuwait. After the phone call, Hussein tells Glaspie that he has just told Mubarak the same thing he told her—that he will not invade Kuwait so long as there is an active negotiating process taking place. The US later learns that Hussein asked Mubarak not to share that piece of information with Kuwait in order to keep his “bluff” alive. Mubarak apparently honors the request, because Iraq’s subsequent invasion (see August 2, 1990) is a complete surprise to Kuwait. Mubarak is reportedly infuriated at Hussein’s apparent betrayal of his trust. [Wilson, 2004, pp. 98] In 2003, Glaspie’s then-deputy, Joseph Wilson, will tell an interviewer that Hussein “lied to [Glaspie]. He lied to President Mubarak that he was going to allow the negotiating process to go forward.” [PBS, 2/28/2003] In 2004, Wilson will write: “I believe that he met with Glaspie for the express purpose of deceiving us about his intentions, as he did with… Mubarak at the same time. In this way, he maintained the element of surprise. [Wilson, 2004, pp. 123] Entity Tags: Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, April Glaspie Category Tags: Iraq Invasion of Kuwait July 25, 1990 and After: US Ambassador Scapegoated for Giving Iraq Permission to Invade? The deputy for US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie, Joseph Wilson, later writes of the fateful meeting between Glaspie and Saddam Hussein (see July 25, 1990). In his view, Glaspie will become a scapegoat, receiving unfair blame for giving Hussein tacit permission to invade Kuwait. Wilson later writes, “The one-on-one meeting with Saddam was fateful for Ambassador Glaspie. Out of it emerged the charge that she had not been tough enough with him and had somehow given him a green light to invade Kuwait. Nothing could be further from the truth. Glaspie has been made a convenient scapegoat for a more complicated and complex failure of foreign policy.… Her explanation of American policy towards Arab disputes did not waver from our standing instructions. The United States did not take positions on the merits of such quarrels between Arab nations, although the policy was to, in the strongest terms, urge that the parties to a dispute resolve it diplomatically or through international mediation, and not via military threats or action.” During the meeting, Hussein made clear to Ambassador Glaspie that Iraq had no intention of taking any military action against Kuwait so long as there was an ongoing negotiating process. He tells Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the same thing (see July 25, 1990). In later years, Iraqi officials such as Aziz and then-Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Nizar Hamdun will acknowledge that Glaspie did nothing more than reiterate the main points of US policy towards Iraq to Hussein. Wilson, a friend of Hamdun’s, will recall his last conversation with Hamdun before his death in July 2003, where the ailing Hamdun confirmed that, in Wilson’s words, “The Iraqi leadership had not come away thinking she had tacitly indicated that the US condoned the use of force. On the contrary, [Hussein] knew exactly what the American position was—opposition to Iraqi military action, under any and all circumstances.” [Wilson, 2004, pp. 99-101] Entity Tags: Saddam Hussein, Joseph C. Wilson, Nizar Hamdun, April Glaspie, Hosni Mubarak Events Leading Up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq Pre-9/11 Plans for War Project: Events Leading Up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq Open-Content project managed by Derek, KJF, blackmax add event | references May 1991: President Bush Authorizes CIA to Create Conditions for Removal of Saddam Hussein; CIA Hires PR Firm President George H. W. Bush signs a covert “lethal finding” authorizing the CIA to spend a hundred million dollars to “create the conditions for removal of Saddam Hussein from power.” [New Yorker, 6/7/2004] The CIA forms the Iraqi Opposition Group within its Directorate of Operations to implement this policy. [Ritter, 2005, pp. 128] Awash in cash, the agency hires the Rendon Group to influence global political opinion on matters related to Iraq. According to Francis Brooke, an employee of the company who’s paid $22,000 per month, the Rendon Group’s contract with the CIA provides it with a ten percent “management fee” on top of whatever money it spends. “We tried to burn through $40 million a year,” Brooke will tell the New Yorker. “It was a very nice job.” The work involves planting false stories in the foreign press. The company begins supplying British journalists with misinformation which then shows up in the London press. In some cases, these stories are later picked up by the American press, in violation of laws prohibiting domestic propaganda. “It was amazing how well it worked. It was like magic,” Brooke later recalls. Another one of the company’s tasks is to help the CIA create a viable and unified opposition movement against Saddam Hussein (see June 1992). This brings the Rendon Group and Francis Brooke into contact with Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi (see After May 1991). The CIA will soon help Chalabi and Rendon create the Iraqi National Congress (INC) to further the goal of toppling Hussein. [New Yorker, 6/7/2004] Author and intelligence expert James Bamford will later say, “Chalabi was a creature of American propaganda to a large degree. It was an American company, the Rendon Group, that—working secretly with the CIA—basically created his organization, the Iraqi National Congress. And put Chalabi in charge basically.… From the very beginning Chalabi was paid a lot of money from the US taxpayers. The CIA paid him originally about 350,000 dollars a month, to Chalabi and his organization.” [PBS, 4/25/2007] Entity Tags: Saddam Hussein, Rendon Group, Iraqi Opposition Group, James Bamford, George Herbert Walker Bush, Francis Brooke, Central Intelligence Agency, Ahmed Chalabi, Iraqi National Congress Timeline Tags: Domestic Propaganda Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Chalabi and the INC March 8, 1992: Raw US World Dominance Plan Is Leaked to the Media The New York Times headline on March 8, 1992. [Source: Public domain]The Defense Planning Guidance, “a blueprint for the department’s spending priorities in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union,” is leaked to the New York Times. [New York Times, 3/8/1992; Newsday, 3/16/2003] The document causes controversy, because it hadn’t yet been “scrubbed” to replace candid language with euphemisms. [New York Times, 3/10/1992; New York Times, 3/11/1992; Observer, 4/7/2002] The document argues that the US dominates the world as sole superpower, and to maintain that role, it “must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.” [New York Times, 3/8/1992; New York Times, 3/8/1992] As the Observer summarizes it, “America’s friends are potential enemies. They must be in a state of dependence and seek solutions to their problems in Washington.” [Observer, 4/7/2002] The document is mainly written by Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who hold relatively low posts at the time, but become deputy defense secretary and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, respectively, under George W. Bush. [Newsday, 3/16/2003] The authors conspicuously avoid mention of collective security arrangements through the United Nations, instead suggesting the US “should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted.” [New York Times, 3/8/1992] They call for “punishing” or “threatening punishment” against regional aggressors before they act. [Harper's, 10/2002] Interests to be defended preemptively include “access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, [and] threats to US citizens from terrorism.” The section describing US interests in the Middle East states that the “overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve US and Western access to the region’s oil…, deter further aggression in the region, foster regional stability, protect US nationals and property, and safeguard… access to international air and seaways.” [New York Times, 3/8/1992] Senator Lincoln Chafee (R) later says, “It is my opinion that [George W. Bush’s] plan for preemptive strikes was formed back at the end of the first Bush administration with that 1992 report.” [Newsday, 3/16/2003] In response to the controversy, US releases an updated version of the document in May 1992, which stresses that the US will work with the United Nations and its allies. [Washington Post, 5/24/1992; Harper's, 10/2002] Entity Tags: Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, Lincoln Chafee, Soviet Union, United States Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, US International Relations, Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Motives June 1992: Iraqi National Congress Formed The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), headed by Masud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), headed by Jalal Talabani, meet in Vienna along with nearly 200 delegates from dozens of Iraqi opposition groups to form an umbrella organization for Iraqi dissident groups. [Federation of American Scientists, 8/8/1998; New Yorker, 6/7/2004] The event is organized by the Rendon Group, which has been contracted by the CIA to organize the wide spectrum of Iraqi dissidents into a unified movement against Saddam Hussein. Rendon names the group the “Iraqi National Congress” (INC). The CIA pays the Rendon Group $326,000 per month for the work, funneled to the company and the INC through various front organizations. [ABC, 2/7/1998; CounterPunch, 5/20/2004; Rolling Stone, 11/17/2005 Sources: Unnamed former CIA operative] Thomas Twetten, the CIA’s deputy directorate of operations, will later recall: “The INC was clueless. They needed a lot of help and didn’t know where to start.” [New Republic, 5/20/2002; Bamford, 2004, pp. 296-297] Rendon hires freelance journalist Paul Moran and Zaab Sethna as contract employees to do public relations and “anti-Saddam propaganda” for the new organization. [SBS Dateline, 7/23/2003] Entity Tags: Paul Moran, Zaab Sethna, Iraqi National Congress, Rendon Group, Jalal Talabani, Masud Barzani, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Kurdistan Democratic Party, Central Intelligence Agency, Thomas Twetten Category Tags: Chalabi and the INC, Pre-9/11 Plans for War November 1993: Iraqi Exile Plans to Overthrow Hussein, with Approval of Clinton Administration Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi (see 1992-1996) approaches the Clinton administration with a plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Defense Intelligence Agency agent Patrick Lang will later recall that the plan, dubbed “End Game,” starts with a revolt by Iraq’s Kurdish and Shi’a insurgents that will, theoretically, trigger an insurrection by Iraqi military commanders. The military will replace Hussein with a regime friendly to both Israel and the US. Clinton officials give the plan tentative approval, though as Lang will later write: “The plan was based on a belief that Iraq was ripe for revolt and that there were no units in the armed forces that would fight to preserve Saddam’s government. Since the same units had fought to keep Saddam in power during the Kurdish and Shi’a revolts of a few years before, it is difficult to see why the sponsors of End Game would have thought that.” Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein learns of the plan and prepares his own response. When Chalabi puts the plan into action, the Iraqi military, instead of revolting against Hussein, kills over 100 INC-backed insurgents (see March 1995). After the debacle, neither the CIA nor the White House will have anything more than superficial contact with Chalabi until 2001. [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004; Unger, 2007, pp. 126] Entity Tags: Saddam Hussein, Central Intelligence Agency, Clinton administration, Patrick Lang, Ahmed Chalabi Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War March 1995: Chalabi Military Operation against Saddam Hussein Fails Ahmed Chalabi creates a militia army of about 1,000 fighters in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and bribes tribal leaders in the city of Mosul to support a planned rebellion against Saddam Hussein (see November 1993). He is also hosting members of Iranian intelligence who promise that when the operation is launched, Iran will simultaneously hit Iraq from the south. But the CIA learns that Baathist officials have caught wind of the plot and the CIA instructs agent Robert Baer to tell Chalabi that “any decision to proceed will be on your own.” Chalabi, who has no military experience, decides to go through with the plot anyway. But the operation quickly flounders when over 100 INC fighters are killed by Iraqi forces, many more of Chalabi’s fighters desert, the bribed Iraqi tribal leaders stay home, and the Iranians do nothing. The CIA is furious that it funded the operation, which becomes known within the agency as the “Bay of Goats.” [CounterPunch, 5/20/2004; New Yorker, 6/7/2004; Unger, 2007, pp. 126] CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni has similar feelings. “It got me pretty angry,” he recalls. “They were saying if you put a thousand troops on the ground, Saddam’s regime will collapse, they won’t fight. I said, ‘I fly over them every day, and they shoot at us. We hit them, and they shoot at us again. No way a thousand forces would end it.’ The exile group was giving them inaccurate information. Their scheme was ridiculous.” Zinni had warned Congress that Chalabi’s invasion plan was “pie in the sky, a fairy tale,” but was ignored. [Unger, 2007, pp. 160-161] Entity Tags: Saddam Hussein, Robert Baer, Iraqi National Congress, Central Intelligence Agency, Anthony Zinni, Ahmed Chalabi, Rendon Group, Francis Brooke Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Chalabi and the INC July 8, 1996: Neoconservative Think Tank Advocates Aggressive Israeli Foreign Policy Richard Perle. [Source: Public domain]The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, an Israeli think tank, publishes a paper titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” [Washington Times, 10/7/2002; Chicago Sun-Times, 3/6/2003] The paper, whose lead author is neoconservative Richard Perle, is meant to advise the new, right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Other authors include: influential neoconservative academic and former Bush adviser Richard Perle, primarily responsible for the content of the paper; Meyrav Wurmser, the future director of the neoconservative Hudson Institute’s Center for Middle East Policy; her husband David Wurmser, the future chief adviser for Middle East policy for future vice-president Dick Cheney; neoconservative Douglas Feith, who will be the prime architect of the Iraq war; and a number of lesser-known neoconservatives, including James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Jeffrey T. Bergner, Jonathan Torop, and Robert Loewenberg. Rebuilding Zionism by Abandoning Past Policies - It advocates making a complete break with past policies by adopting a strategy “based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism.…” [Guardian, 9/3/2002] Aggressive, Militant Israeli Policy towards Arab Neighbors - Much along the lines of an earlier paper by Israeli Oded Yinon (see February 1982), the document urges the Israelis to aggressively seek the downfall of their Arab neighbors—especially Syria and Iraq—by exploiting the inherent tensions within and among the Arab States. The first step is to be the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. A war with Iraq will destabilize the entire Middle East, allowing governments in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and other countries to be replaced. “Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them,” the paper says. [Perle, 7/8/1996; Guardian, 9/3/2002; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 3/19/2003] Iraq is first on the list of nations to be transformed. Saddam Hussein must be overthrown, the authors say. But Iraq has long served as a counterweight to the Shi’ite theocracy of Iran; with the two at loggerheads, neither could pose as serious a threat to Israel as it could if not opposed by the other. To counter this, Perle and his co-authors propose restoring the Hashemites (an ancient Arab dynasty; King Faisal I of Iraq was a Hashemite) to power. Instead of the largely Shi’ite Iraqis aligning themselves with their fellow Shi’a in Iran after Hussein’s overthrow, the Hashemite government would align itself with the pro-Western Jordan, long a Hashemite regime. Unfortunately, the authors propose no plan to actually make such an extraordinary regime succession happen, nor do they seem concerned with some Iraqi Shi’ites’ alignment with Islamist terrorists or with many Shi’ites’ close ties to Iran. [Unger, 2007, pp. 145-148] Abandoning Oslo Accords, Militant Palestinian Policy - Other suggestions for Israel include abandoning the Oslo Accords, developing a foreign policy based on a traditional balance of power strategy, reserving its right to invade the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of a strategy of “self-defense,” abandoning any notion of “land for peace,” reestablishing a policy of preemptive strikes, forging closer ties to the US while taking steps towards self-reliance, and seeking an alternative to Yasser Arafat as leader of the PLO. [Perle, 7/8/1996] 'Seeds of a New Vision' - All these questions need not be answered right away, according to co-author Meyrav Wurmser. The document is “the beginning of thought,” she says, “… the seeds of a new vision.” Similar to American Christian Right's Vision - According to author Craig Unger, the ideology of “ACB” is, in essence, a secularized version of the theology of the American Christian Right. Christian Zionists insist that Jews were ordained by God to reclaim the Biblican land of Judea and Samaria in the West Bank; the paper asserts that claim as well. The paper echoes Christian fundamentalists by demanding “the unconditional acceptance of Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension.” Perle and his fellow neoconservatives want to push the boundaries even further: the Bible can be interpreted to countenance Jewish dominion over all or parts of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and even Saudi Arabia. Thusly, the authors claim that Israel and the US, by waging war against Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, would reshape the “strategic environment” in the Middle East and greatly expand Israel’s influence in the region. Influence in Upcoming Bush Administration - Perle will later become chairman of President Bush’s influential Defense Policy Board and will be instrumental is moving Bush’s US policy toward war with Iraq after the 9/11 attacks, as will Feith and the Wurmsers. [Unger, 2007, pp. 145-148] Entity Tags: Richard Perle, Robert Loewenberg, Meyrav Wurmser, Jonathan Torop, Richard V. Allen, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Benjamin Netanyahu, David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, Jeffrey T. Bergner, Douglas Feith Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, US International Relations, Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Motives, Pre-9/11 Plans for War November 12, 1997: Neoconservative Advocates Backing INC in Overthrowing Hussein David Wurmser, director of the Middle East program at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, writes an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the US government should support Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress [INC] and work to foment “an Iraqi insurgency to depose the butcher of Baghdad.” Wurmser writes: “Washington has no choice now but to abandon the coup option and resurrect the INC. An insurgency may be able to defeat Saddam’s weak and demoralized conventional army. But one thing is clear: There is no cost-free way to depose Saddam. He is more resolute, wily and brutal than we. His strength lies in his weapons of terror; that is why he is so attached to them…. Organizing an insurgency to liberate Iraq under the INC may provoke Saddam to use these weapons on the way down. Better that, though, than current policy, which will lead him to use them on his way back up.” [Wall Street Journal, 11/12/1997] Entity Tags: David Wurmser, Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Chalabi Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Propaganda, Chalabi and the INC January 26, 1998: Neoconservative Think Tank Urges US to Attack Iraq PNAC logo. [Source: Project for the New American Century]The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an influential neoconservative think tank, publishes a letter to President Clinton urging war against Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein because he is a “hazard” to “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.” In a foretaste of what eventually happens, the letter calls for the US to go to war alone, attacks the United Nations, and says the US should not be “crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.” The letter is signed by many who will later lead the 2003 Iraq war. 10 of the 18 signatories later join the Bush Administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretaries of State Richard Armitage and Robert Zoellick, Undersecretaries of State John Bolton and Paula Dobriansky, presidential adviser for the Middle East Elliott Abrams, Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, and George W. Bush’s special Iraq envoy Zalmay Khalilzad. Other signatories include William Bennett, Jeffrey Bergner, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Peter Rodman, William Schneider, Vin Weber, and James Woolsey. [Project for the New American Century, 1/26/1998; Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 3/16/2003; Unger, 2007, pp. 158] Clinton does heavily bomb Iraq in late 1998, but the bombing doesn’t last long and its long term effect is the break off of United Nations weapons inspections. [New York Times, 3/23/2003] The PNAC neoconservatives do not seriously expect Clinton to attack Iraq in any meaningful sense, author Craig Unger will observe in 2007. Instead, they are positioning themselves for the future. “This was a key moment,” one State Department official will recall. “The neocons were maneuvering to put this issue in play and box Clinton in. Now, they could draw a dichotomy. They could argue to their next candidate, ‘Clinton was weak. You must be strong.’” [Unger, 2007, pp. 158] Entity Tags: Robert B. Zoellick, Vin Weber, William Kristol, William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, William Schneider Jr., Richard Perle, William J. Bennett, Richard Armitage, Robert Kagan, Paula J. Dobriansky, Donald Rumsfeld, Craig Unger, Peter Rodman, Elliott Abrams, John R. Bolton, James Woolsey, Francis Fukuyama, Jeffrey T. Bergner, Paul Wolfowitz Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Key Events Related to DSM, Motives, Pre-9/11 Plans for War February 19, 1998: Neoconservative Group Calls on US to Help Overthrow Hussein The Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG), a bipartisan group made up largely of foreign policy specialists, sends an “Open Letter to the President” calling for President Clinton to use the US military to help Iraqi opposition groups overthrow Saddam Hussein and replace him with a US-friendly government. US law forbids such an operation. The group is led by, among others, former Representative Stephen Solarz (D-NY) and prominent Bush adviser Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense. Largely Neoconservative in Makeup - Many of its co-signers will become the core of the Bush administration’s neoconservative-driven national security apparatus. These co-signers include Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Stephen Bryen, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, Fred Ikle, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, William Kristol, Michael Ledeen, Bernard Lewis, Peter Rodman, Donald Rumsfeld, Gary Schmitt, Max Singer, Casper Weinberger, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser, and Dov Zakheim. [CNN, 2/20/1998; Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] The CPSG is closely affiliated with both the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC—see June 3, 1997 and January 26, 1998) and the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), both of which boast Perle as a powerful and influential member. Jim Lobe of the Project Against the Present Danger later learns that the CPSG is funded in large part by a sizable grant from the right-wing Bradley Foundation, a key funding source for both the PNAC and the AEI. According to Counterpunch’s Kurt Nimmo, the plan for overthrowing Iraq later adopted by the Bush administration, and currently advocated by the CPSG, will be echoed in the PNAC’s September 2000 document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (see September 2000). [CounterPunch, 11/19/2002] Advocates Supporting Iraq-Based Insurgency - The letter reads in part: “Despite his defeat in the Gulf War, continuing sanctions, and the determined effort of UN inspectors to root out and destroy his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein has been able to develop biological and chemical munitions.… This poses a danger to our friends, our allies, and to our nation.… In view of Saddam Hussein’s refusal to grant UN inspectors the right to conduct unfettered inspections of those sites where he is suspected of storing his still significant arsenal of chemical and biological munitions and his apparent determination never to relinquish his weapons of mass destruction, we call upon President Clinton to adopt and implement a plan of action designed to finally and fully resolve this utterly unacceptable threat to our most vital national interests.” The plan is almost identical to the “End Game” scenario proposed in 1993 (see November 1993) and carried out, without success, in 1995 (see March 1995). It is also virtually identical to the “Downing Plan,” released later in 1998 (see Late 1998). In 2004, then-Defense Intelligence Agency official Patrick Lang will observe, “The letter was remarkable in that it adopted some of the very formulations that would later be used by Vice President [Dick] Cheney and other current administration officials to justify the preventive war in Iraq that commenced on March 20, 2003” (see March 19, 2003). The CPSG advocates: US support for Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC—see 1992-1996) as the provisional government to replace Hussein’s dictatorship; Funding the INC with seized Iraqi assets, designating areas in the north and south as INC-controlled zones, and lifting sanctions in those areas; Providing any ground assault by INC forces (see October 31, 1998) with a “systematic air campaign” by US forces; Prepositioning US ground force equipment “so that, as a last resort, we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq”; Bringing Hussein before an international tribunal on war crimes charges. Carrying out these actions, Solarz says, would completely eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction that he claims Iraq owns. [Abrams et al., 2/19/1998; CNN, 2/20/1998; Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] Entity Tags: Richard Burt, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, Paula J. Dobriansky, Peter Rosenblatt, Project for the New American Century, Richard V. Allen, Peter Rodman, Robert A. Pastor, Saddam Hussein, Robert Kagan, William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton, William Kristol, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, William B. Clark, Sven F. Kraemer, Stephen Solarz, Roger Robinson, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen, Robert C. McFarlane, Michael Ledeen, Patrick Lang, Fred C. Ikle, Dov S. Zakheim, Elliott Abrams, Frank Carlucci, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, Donald Rumsfeld, Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, American Enterprise Institute, Ahmed Chalabi, Max Singer, David Wurmser, Bernard Lewis, Caspar Weinberger, Gary Schmitt, Kurt Nimmo, Leon Wienseltier, Martin Peretz, Joshua Muravchik, Frederick L. Lewis, John R. Bolton, Jeffrey T. Bergner, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Jarvis Lynch, Jeffrey Gedmin, Jim Lobe, Iraqi National Congress Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Alleged WMDs, Politicization of Intelligence, Pre-9/11 Plans for War May 29, 1998: PNAC Calls on Republican Congressional Leaders to Assert US Interests in Persian Gulf The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) publishes a letter addressed to Congressman Newt Gingrich and Senator Trent Lott. The letter argues that the Clinton administration has capitulated to Saddam Hussein and calls on the two legislators to lead Congress to “establish and maintain a strong US military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect [US] vital interests in the Gulf—and, if necessary, to help removed Saddam from power.” [Century, 5/29/1998] Entity Tags: Saddam Hussein, Newt Gingrich, US Congress, Project for the New American Century, Trent Lott, Clinton administration Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War July 1998: Prominent Neoconservative Says INC Control of Northern Iraq Would Increase Israeli Security David Wurmser says that having a region in northern Iraq controlled by the Iraqi National Congress would provide the missing piece to complete an anti-Syria, anti-Iran block. “If Ahmed [Chalabi] extends a no-fly, no-drive in northern Iraq, it puts scuds out of the range of Israel and provides the geographic beachhead between Turkey, Jordan and Israel,” Wurmser says. “This should anchor the Middle East pro-Western coalition.” [Forward, 7/31/2003] Entity Tags: David Wurmser, Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Chalabi and the INC October 31, 1998: Clinton Signs Law Making It US Policy to Remove Hussein in Iraq President Clinton signs the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (ILA) into law. The act, which passed with overwhelming support from Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate, was written by Trent Lott (R-MS) and other Republicans with significant input from Ahmed Chalabi and his aide, Francis Brooke. [US Congress, 10/31/1998 ; Washington Post, 1/25/2002; New Yorker, 6/7/2004] (Former Defense Intelligence Agency official Patrick Lang will later write that one of the driving goals behind the ILA is to revive the failed 1995 coup plans against Saddam Hussein, called “End Game”—see November 1993.) [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] The act makes it “the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” To that end, the act requires that the president designate one or more Iraqi opposition groups to receive up to $97 million in US military equipment and nonlethal training. The act authorizes another $43 million for humanitarian, broadcasting, and information-collection activities. To be eligible for US assistance, an organization must be “committed to democratic values, to respect for human rights, to peaceful relations with Iraq’s neighbors, to maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity, and to fostering cooperation among democratic opponents of the Saddam Hussein regime.” [US Congress, 10/31/1998 ; Washington Post, 1/25/2002; New Yorker, 6/7/2004] Chalabi Receives Millions from State Department - Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress receives $17.3 million from the State Department to carry out what it calls the “collection and dissemination of information” about Saddam Hussein’s atrocities to the public. It will continue to receive hundreds of thousands per month from the Defense Department as well. [Mother Jones, 4/2006] However, the Clinton administration itself has little use for Chalabi. One administration official will say, “He represents four or five guys in London who wear nice suits and have a fax machine.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 160] Zinni Warns of Legislation Presaging Military Action - While few in Washington see the ILA as presaging military action against Iraq, one who does is Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, the commander of CENTCOM. As the bill works its way through Congress, Zinni tells some of his senior staff members that the bill is far more serious than most believe. It is much more than a sop for the pro-war crowd, Zinni believes, but in reality a first step towards an invasion of Iraq. In 2004, former ambassador Joseph Wilson will write, “He was, of course, right, but few were listening.” [Wilson, 2004, pp. 290] Entity Tags: Patrick Lang, Francis Brooke, Iraqi National Congress, Clinton administration, US Department of State, Trent Lott, Ahmed Chalabi, US Department of Defense, William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Chalabi and the INC Late 1998: ’Downing Plan’ to Overthrow Hussein Government Rejected by General Zinni A number of neoconservatives, led by retired General Wayne Downing (see 1990-1991) and retired CIA officer Duane “Dewey” Clarridge (see December 25, 1992), use the recently passed Iraqi Liberation Act (ILA—see October 31, 1998) to revive the failed “End Game” coup plans against Saddam Hussein (see November 1993 and March 1995). Both Downing and Clarridge are “military consultants” to Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, who attempted to carry out the coup in 1995 with dismal results. Downing and Clarridge produce an updated version of the INC’s “End Game” scenario, calling it “The Downing Plan.” The Downing scenario varies very little from the original plan. Their plan stipulates that a “crack force” of 5,000 INC fighters, backed up by a detachment of US Special Forces soldiers, could bring down the Iraqi Army. Clarridge later tells reporters: “The idea from the beginning was to encourage defections of Iraqi units. You need to create a nucleus, something for people to defect to. If they could take Basra, it would be all over.” Former Defense Intelligence Agency official Patrick Lang will later write, “It is difficult to understand how a retired four-star Army general [Downing] could believe this to be true.” General Anthony Zinni, commander of CENTCOM, which has operational control of US combat forces in the Middle East, is provided with a copy of Chalabi’s military plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein. “It got me pretty angry,” he later recalls. He warns Congress that Chalabi’s plan is a “pie in the sky, a fairy tale,” and predicts that executing such a poorly envisioned assault would result in a “Bay of Goats.” Chalabi’s INC is nothing more than “some silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London;” neither the INC nor any of the other 91 or so Iraqi opposition groups have anywhere near “the viability to overthrow Saddam.” He tells the New Yorker: “They were saying if you put a thousand troops on the ground Saddam’s regime will collapse, they won’t fight. I said, ‘I fly over them every day, and they shoot at us. We hit them, and they shoot at us again. No way a thousand forces would end it.’ The exile group was giving them inaccurate intelligence. Their scheme was ridiculous.” Zinni earns the enmity of the neoconservative developers of the plan for his stance. [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004; New Yorker, 6/7/2004] Entity Tags: Wayne Downing, Patrick Lang, Saddam Hussein, Ahmed Chalabi, Anthony Zinni, US Congress, Duane Clarridge, Iraqi National Congress Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade, Chalabi and the INC 1999: George W. Bush Hints at Invading Iraq in Future Presidency Mickey Herskowitz. [Source: Public domain]Presidential candidate George W. Bush tells prominent Texas author and Bush family friend Mickey Herskowitz, who is helping Bush write an autobiography, that as president he would invade Iraq if given the opportunity. “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief,” Herskowitz remembers Bush saying. “My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of [Kuwait] and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.” Herskowitz later says he believes Bush’s comments were intended to distinguish himself from his father, rather than express a desire to invade Iraq. [Houston Chronicle, 10/31/2004] Entity Tags: George W. Bush, Mickey Herskowitz Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade, Key Events Related to DSM February 1999: David Wurmser Urges US to Support Insurgency in Iraq In his book, Tyranny’s Ally: America’s Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute urges the US to support an insurgency aimed at toppling the Bath’ist government of Saddam Hussein as part of a broader policy to defeat pan-Arabism in Iraq. In its place, the US should encourage the creation of a “loosely unified Iraqi confederal government, shaped around strong sectarian and provincial entities,” Wurmser argues. [Wurmser, 1999, pp. 136-137] What happens in Iraq is vitally important, Wurmser notes, because the country is of extreme strategic importance. “It is a key transportation route, and it is rich in both geographic endowments and human talent,” he explains. “Its location on pathways between Asia and Europe, Africa and Asia, and Europe and Africa makes it an ideal route for armies, pipelines, and trade from both the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor to the Persian Gulf. Iraq also has large, proven oil reserves, water, and other important resources. Its geographic centrality and abundance of natural advantages alone make the country a regionally important center.” [Wurmser, 1999, pp. 116-117] Entity Tags: David Wurmser Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Motives February 4, 1999: President Clinton Designates 7 Iraqi Opposition Groups as Eligible for US Funding President Clinton signs Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 99-13 designating seven Iraqi opposition groups as being eligible to receive US federal funds under the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act (see October 31, 1998). The act stated that the policy of the US should be to support regime change in Iraq. The seven groups include the Iraqi National Accord, the Iraqi National Congress, the Islamic Movement of Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the Movement for Constitutional Monarchy, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. [White House, 2/4/1999] Entity Tags: Kurdistan Democratic Party, Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Movement for Constitutional Monarchy, William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton, Iraqi National Congress, Islamic Movement of Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraqi National Accord Category Tags: Chalabi and the INC, Pre-9/11 Plans for War April-July 1999: ’Desert Crossing’ War Game Predicts Instability, Potential Chaos if Saddam Hussein Ousted by US Photo of the cover of the Desert Crossing after-action briefing. [Source: National Security Archives]The US Central Command, or CENTCOM (see October 1, 1986), conducts a series of war games called “Desert Crossing” centered on the scenario of Saddam Hussein being ousted as Iraq’s dictator. CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni will later say of the scenario, “I thought we ought to look at political reconstruction, economic reconstruction, security reconstruction, humanitarian need, services, and infrastructure development.” The game concludes that unless measures are taken, “fragmentation and chaos” will ensue after his overthrow. The after-action report finds that regime change may cause instability throughout the Middle East by giving impetus to “rival forces bidding for power” which, in turn, could cause societal “fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines” and antagonize “aggressive neighbors.” Securing borders and civil order may not be enough to restabilize Iraq, the report speculates, if the new government is perceived as either weak, subservient to outside governments, or out of touch with other Middle Eastern governments. The report finds that an exit strategy would be complicated by differing ideas for how a post-Saddam Iraq should be. Any US-supported transitional government will find it difficult to restrain various factions from pursuing their own tribal and sectarian vendettas against one another, the report finds. The game is quickly forgotten; years later, when the Bush administration will begin planning for its invasion of Iraq, the retired Zinni will recommend that his successors “dust off Desert Crossing,” and they will respond: “What’s that? Never heard of it.” [John Prados, 11/4/2006; Roberts, 2008, pp. 125, 233] Entity Tags: Anthony Zinni, Saddam Hussein, US Central Command, Bush administration Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Pre-war Planning, Predictions, The Decision to Invade November 19, 1999: Congress Allocates $10 Million for Iraq Opposition Groups Congress allocates $10 million “to support efforts to bring about political transition in Iraq, of which not less than $8 million shall be made available only to Iraqi opposition groups designated under the ILA [Iraq Liberation Act of 1998] for political, economic humanitarian, and other activities of such groups, and not more than $2 million may be made available for groups and activities seeking the prosecution of Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi Government officials for war crimes.” President Clinton signs the appropriation bill into law on November 29. [US Congress, 11/29/1999 ] This $10 million dollars is the first allocation of funds to Iraqi opposition groups out of the total $97 million that was authorized by the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act (see October 31, 1998). Entity Tags: William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton, Iraqi National Congress Category Tags: Chalabi and the INC, Pre-9/11 Plans for War 2000: US Political Parties Advocate Regime Change in Iraq During the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican Party calls for “a comprehensive plan for the removal of Saddam Hussein.” Similarly, the Democratic Party’s platform supports using “America’s military might against Iraq when and where it is necessary.” [Republican National Committee, 2000; Democratic National Committee, 2000, pp. 46] Entity Tags: Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade 2000: Former CIA Director Woolsey Works With Chalabi’s INC Former CIA director James Woolsey serves as a corporate officer for the Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation which manages the Iraqi National Congress’ US funding. Also during this time, Woolsey and his former law firm, Shea and Gardner, provide the INC and Iraqi exiles with pro bono work. [Knight Ridder, 7/16/2004] Entity Tags: Shea and Gardner, Iraqi National Congress, James Woolsey Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Chalabi and the INC Spring 2000: Future Bush Adviser: ‘Number One’ Agenda to Overthrow Hussein Stephen Hadley, a neoconservative foreign affairs analyst who will become the future President Bush’s national security adviser (see November 2, 2004), briefs a group of prominent Republicans on the national security and foreign policy agenda of Bush. Hadley tells the assembled policymakers that Bush’s “number-one foreign policy agenda” will be removing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from power. Hadley also says Bush will spend little or no time trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. According to Virginia Military Institute professor Clifford Kiracofe, who speaks to many of the policymakers after the meeting, many of them are shocked at the briefing. [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004; Unger, 2007, pp. 175] Entity Tags: Clifford Kiracofe, George W. Bush, Stephen J. Hadley Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade, Decision to Invade Quotes May 17, 2000: Bush Allegedly Says He Will Take Saddam Hussein Out Osama Siblani. [Source: Publicity photo]Presidential candidate George W. Bush allegedly tells Osama Siblani, publisher of an Arab American newspaper, that if he becomes president he will remove Saddam Hussein from power. “He told me that he was going to take him out,” Siblani says in a radio interview on Democracy Now! almost five years later. Siblani will also recall that Bush “wanted to go to Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction, and he considered the regime an imminent and gathering threat against the United States.” As Siblani will later note, as a presidential candidate Bush has no access to classified intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs. [Democracy Now!, 3/11/2005] Entity Tags: George W. Bush, Osama Siblani Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Key Events Related to DSM, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade September 2000: Neoconservative Think Tank Writes ‘Blueprint’ for ‘Global Pax Americana’ People involved in the 2000 PNAC report (from top left): Vice President Cheney, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby, Undersecretary of State John Bolton, Undersecretary of Defense Dov Zakheim, and author Eliot Cohen. [Source: Public domain]The neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century writes a “blueprint” for the “creation of a ‘global Pax Americana’” (see June 3, 1997). The document, titled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces and Resources for a New Century, was written for the George W. Bush team even before the 2000 presidential election. It was written for future Vice President Cheney, future Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, future Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Florida Governor and Bush’s brother Jeb Bush, and Cheney’s future chief of staff Lewis Libby. [Project for the New American Century, 9/2000, pp. iv and 51 ] Plans to Overthrow Iraqi Government - The report calls itself a “blueprint for maintaining global US preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” The plan shows that the Bush team intends to take military control of Persian Gulf oil whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power and should retain control of the region even if there is no threat. It says: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” The report calls for the control of space through a new “US Space Forces,” the political control of the internet, the subversion of any growth in political power of even close allies, and advocates “regime change” in China, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran and other countries. It also mentions that “advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool” (see February 7, 2003). [Project for the New American Century, 9/2000 ; Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 9/7/2002] Greater Need for US Role in Persian Gulf - PNAC states further: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” 'US Space Forces,' Control of Internet, Subversion of Allies - PNAC calls for the control of space through a new “US Space Forces,” the political control of the Internet, and the subversion of any growth in political power of even close allies, and advocates “regime change” in China, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran, and other countries. Bioweapons Targeting Specific Genotypes 'Useful' - It also mentions that “advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” 'A New Pearl Harbor' - However, PNAC complains that thes changes are likely to take a long time, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” [Los Angeles Times, 1/12/2003] Bush Will Claim a 'Humble' Foreign Policy Stance - One month later during a presidential debate with Al Gore, Bush will assert that he wants a “humble” foreign policy in the Middle East and says he is against toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq because it smacks of “nation building” (see October 11, 2000). Around the same time, Cheney will similarly defend Bush’s position of maintaining President Clinton’s policy not to attack Iraq, asserting that the US should not act as though “we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.” [Washington Post, 1/12/2002] Author Craig Unger will later comment, “Only a few people who had read the papers put forth by the Project for a New American Century might have guessed a far more radical policy had been developed.” [Salon, 3/15/2004] A British member of Parliament will later say of the PNAC report, “This is a blueprint for US world domination—a new world order of their making. These are the thought processes of fantasist Americans who want to control the world.” [Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 9/7/2002] Both PNAC and its strategy plan for Bush are almost virtually ignored by the media until a few weeks before the start of the Iraq war (see February-March 20, 2003). Entity Tags: Robert Kagan, Robert Martinage, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, Robert Killebrew, Peter Rodman, Project for the New American Century, Roger Barnett, Paula J. Dobriansky, Saddam Hussein, William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton, Steve Forbes, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, William J. Bennett, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Vin Weber, Stephen A. Cambone, Steve Rosen, Thomas Donnelly, Norman Podhoretz, Phil Meilinger, Midge Decter, Donald Kagan, Donald Rumsfeld, Dov S. Zakheim, Devon Gaffney Cross, Aaron Friedberg, Abram Shulsky, Michael Vickers, Dan Quayle, Eliot A. Cohen, Dan Goure, Alvin Bernstein, Barry Watts, David Epstein, Elliott Abrams, Frank Gaffney, John Ellis (“Jeb”) Bush, James Lasswell, Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, Mark P. Lagon, Mackubin Owens, Francis Fukuyama, Henry S. Rowen, Gary Schmitt, Fred C. Ikle, Fred Kagan, David Fautua, Hasam Amin, George Weigel Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Key Events Related to DSM, Motives, Pre-9/11 Plans for War October 5, 2000: Vice Presidential Candidates Advocate Tough Stance Toward Iraq; Cheney Says the Use of Force against Iraq May Be Necessary During the vice presidential debates, both Joseph Lieberman and Dick Cheney advocate a tough stance toward Saddam Hussein. Lieberman says he and Gore would continue to support Iraqi opposition groups “until the Iraqi people rise up and do what the people of Serbia have done in the last few days: get rid of a despot.” Cheney says it might be necessary “to take military action to forcibly remove Saddam from power.” [CATO Daily Dispatch, 10/6/2000] Entity Tags: Joseph Lieberman, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, George W. Bush Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: The Decision to Invade, Pre-9/11 Plans for War October 25, 2000: Congress Allocates $25 Million for Iraq Opposition Groups Congress substantially increases its support for Iraqi opposition organizations, more than doubling the groups’ funding to $25 million for 2001. Of this amount, $18 million is specifically designated for the Iraqi National Congress: $12 million for “food, medicine, and other humanitarian assistance,” and $6 million for the “production and broadcasting inside Iraq of radio and satellite television programming.” In addition, $2 million is allocated for groups and activities seeking the prosecution of Saddam Hussein, while the remaining $5 million is “to support efforts to bring about political transition in Iraq.” [US Congress, 11/6/2000 ; US Congress, 11/6/2000 ] Entity Tags: Iraqi National Congress, William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton Category Tags: Chalabi and the INC, Pre-9/11 Plans for War November 1, 2000: David Wurmser Urges US and Israel To ‘Strike Fatally’ Against Arab Radicalism In an op-ed piece published by the Washington Times, David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute calls on the US and Israel to “broaden” the conflict in the Middle East. The US, he says, needs “to strike fatally, not merely disarm, the centers of radicalism in the region—the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza” —in order to “reestablish the recognition that fighting with either the United States or Israel is suicidal.” This is necessary, according to Wurmser, because the policies of the US and Israel during the last decade have strengthened Arab radicalism in the Middle East. Wurmser complains that the two countries have mistakenly identified the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and their own behavior as the primary causes of anti-Israeli and anti-American violence instead of focusing on what he claims are the real sources of resentment among Arab leaders—Israeli and American values. “Few anti-American outbursts or Arab-Israeli confrontations initially have much to do with Israel’s or America’s behavior; they have more to do with what these two countries are: free societies,” Wurmser writes. “These upheavals originate in the conditions of Arab politics, specifically in the requirements of tyrannies to seek external conflict to sustain internal repression.… A regime built on opposition to freedom will view free nations, such as the United States and Israel, as mortal threats.” The US and Israeli failure to grasp this reality, along with the Clinton administration’s reluctance to remove Saddam from power, according to Wurmser, has only empowered Arab radicalism. The answer, he argues, is to forcefully reassert US and Israeli power. [Washington Times, 11/1/2000] Entity Tags: David Wurmser Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War December 19, 2000: Clinton Tells Bush His Top Priority Should Be Bin Laden; Bush Says It’s Saddam Hussein Instead Clinton and Bush meeting in the White House on December 19, 2000. [Source: NBC]President Clinton and President-Elect Bush meet for their "exit interview," in a two-hour meeting. [CNN, 12/19/2000] Clinton gives Bush his list of his top five priorities. At the top of the list is dealing with Osama bin Laden. Clinton also discusses the tensions between Pakistan and India, who are threatening each other with nuclear strikes; the crisis in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine; he discusses North Korea; and he discusses Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Bush shakes Clinton’s hand after Clinton wraps up his presentation, and says, "Thanks for your advice, Mr. President, but I think you’ve got your priorities wrong. I’m putting Saddam at the top of the list." [Moore, 3/15/2004, pp. 16-17] Just one day before, CIA Director George Tenet had warned Clinton that al-Qaeda could attack US interests in the next several weeks (see December 18, 2000). In 2003, Clinton will speak about the interview, saying that he recognized Bush felt the biggest security issues facing the US was Iraq and a national missile defense: "I told him that in my opinion, the biggest security problem was Osama bin Laden." [Reuters, 10/16/2003] Entity Tags: Saddam Hussein, George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, William Jefferson (“Bill”) Clinton Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, 9/11 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade Before January 20, 2001: Pre-Inaugural Discussions about Removing Saddam Hussein There are discussions among future members of the Bush administration, including Bush himself, about making the removal of Saddam Hussein a top priority once they are in office. After the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke will say that the Bush team had been planning regime change in Iraq since before coming to office, with newly named Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (see December 28, 2000) and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz (see January 11, 2001) taking the lead. “Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq,” he will write in his book Against All Enemies. “My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002.” [Clarke, 2004, pp. 7-9; Unger, 2007, pp. 192] During an appearance on Good Morning America on March 22, 2004, he will say, “[T]hey had been planning to do something about Iraq from before the time they came into office.” [Good Morning America, 3/22/2004] Evidence of pre-inaugural discussions on regime change in Iraq comes from other sources as well. Imam Sayed Hassan al-Qazwini, who heads the Islamic Center of America in Detroit, will tell the New York Times in early 2004 that he spoke with Bush about removing Saddam Hussein six or seven times, both before and after the 2000 elections. [New York Times, 1/12/2004] In 2007, author Craig Unger will write: “In certain respects, their actions were a replay of the 1976 Team B experiment (see Early 1976 and November 1976), with one very important difference. This time it wasn’t just a bunch of feverish ideologues presenting a theoretical challenge to the CIA. This time Team B controlled the entire executive branch of the United States.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 192] Entity Tags: Richard A. Clarke, Imam Sayed Hassan al-Qazwini, Craig Unger, Saddam Hussein, ’Team B’, George W. Bush, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Key Events Related to DSM, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade After January 20, 2001: Cheney to Push for Invasion of Iraq for Political Reasons, Personal Vendettas Vice President Cheney takes office with every intention to push President Bush into invading Iraq. According to an unnamed former subordinate of Cheney’s while Cheney was secretary of defense (see March 20, 1989 and After), Cheney wants to “do Iraq” because he thinks it can be done quickly and easily, and because “the US could do it essentially alone… and that an uncomplicated, total victory would set the stage for a landslide re-election in 2004 and decades of Republican Party domination.” Cheney believes that overthrowing Saddam Hussein “would ‘finish’ the undone work of the first Gulf War and settle scores once and for all with a cast of characters deeply resented by the vice president: George H. W. Bush, Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, and Jim Baker.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 182] Entity Tags: George Herbert Walker Bush, Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, George W. Bush, James Baker, Saddam Hussein Category Tags: Motives, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade Shortly after January 20, 2001: Pentagon Analysts Replaced With Neoconservative Ideologues Shortly after George W. Bush is inaugurated, “[k]ey personnel, long-time civilian professionals” at the Pentagon’s Near East South Asia (NESA) desk are moved or replaced with people from neoconservative think tanks. [American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] Joe McMillan, the Office Director, is moved to a new location outside of the Pentagon, which according to Karen Kwiatkowski, who works at the NESA desk, is odd because “the whole reason for the Office Director being a permanent civilian (occasionally military) professional is to help bring the new appointee up to speed, ensure office continuity, and act as a resource relating to regional histories and policies.” [American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004; Salon, 3/10/2004] Larry Hanauer, who has long been at the Israel-Syria-Lebanon desk and who is known to be “even-handed with Israel,” is replaced by David Schenker of the Washington Institute. [American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] Other veteran NESA employees who are banished include James Russell, who has served as the country director for Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, and Marybeth McDevitt, the country director for Egypt. [Mother Jones, 1/2004] Entity Tags: Marybeth McDevitt, David Schenker, Larry Hanauer, James Russell, Karen Kwiatkowski, Joe McMillan Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Politicization of Intelligence, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Office of Special Plans January 22, 2001 and After: Neoconservatives Begin Push for Invasion of Iraq An orchestrated push in the media begins to make the case for the need to invade Iraq. The San Diego Union-Tribune reprints a Weekly Standard article by William Kristol and Robert Kagan that tells readers (after comparing President Bush favorably to Ronald Reagan, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Harry Truman, and lauding Bush’s “steely determination”) that US military action “could well be necessary to bring Saddam down.” They write: “At some point, Bush could well find himself confronted by an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction. During these past few years, it was relatively easy for congressional Republicans to call for arming and funding the Iraqi opposition. That remains a good idea. But the more sober of Bush’s advisers, like Robert Zoellick and Paul Wolfowitz (see February 18, 1992 and February 27, 2001), have recognized that this alone will not do the trick. Some use of American military force, both from the air and on the ground, could well be necessary to bring Saddam down, no matter how wonderfully the Iraqi opposition performs. Whether he chooses it or not, Bush may quickly be faced with the same decision his father had to make in 1990. He has in his cabinet at least one person who counseled inaction the last time [referring to Secretary of State Colin Powell]. If the crisis comes, Bush, like his father, will not be able to rely only on the judgment of the men and women around him: He will have to act from his own instincts and his own courage.” [Weekly Standard, 1/22/2001; Unger, 2007, pp. 206] In the coming weeks, an onslaught of print and television op-eds and commentaries, some from Bush administration officials, will advocate the overthrow of Hussein (see February 27, 2001, February 16, 2001, April 9, 2001, and July 30, 2001). Entity Tags: Robert Kagan, William Kristol Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Media Coverage, Motives, Politicization of Intelligence, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Public Opinion on Iraqi Threat January 29, 2001: Bush Tells Muslim Leader Hussein Must Go Imam Sayed Hassan al-Qazwini, who heads the Islamic Center of America in Detroit, one of the nation’s largest mosques, meets with President Bush in the White House about the administration’s policy towards Iraq. The president says he supports a policy aimed at removing Saddam Hussein from power, though he does not discuss by what means. “No method was discussed at all,” al-Qazwini will tell the New York Times two years later. “It was a general desire for regime change.” He will also tell the newspaper that he had spoken with Bush about removing Saddam Hussein a total of six or seven times, both before and after the 2000 elections. [New York Times, 1/12/2004] Entity Tags: George W. Bush, Imam Sayed Hassan al-Qazwini Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade January 30, 2001: First National Security Council Meeting Focuses on Iraq and Israel, Not Terrorism The Bush White House holds its first National Security Council meeting. The focus is on Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [Bamford, 2004, pp. 261] This meeting sets the tone for how President Bush intends to handle foreign affairs. Counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke wants to focus on the threat from al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism, especially in light of the recent attack on the USS Cole (see October 12, 2000). But Bush isn’t interested in terrorism. [Unger, 2007, pp. 201] Israeli-Palestinian Conflict to be 'Tilted Back Towards Israel' - Instead, Bush channels his neoconservative advisers, particularly incoming Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (see February 18, 1992 and April-May 1999), in taking a new approach to Middle East affairs, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Referring to President Clinton’s efforts to make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Bush declares: “Clinton overreached, and it all fell apart. That’s why we’re in trouble. If the two sides don’t want peace, there’s no way we can force them. I don’t see much we can do over there at this point. I think it’s time to pull out of the situation.… We’re going to correct the imbalance of the previous administration on the Mideast conflict. We’re going to tilt it back towards Israel.” His view is that the Israeli government, currently headed by Ariel Sharon, should be left alone to deal as it sees fit with the Palestinians. “I’m not going to go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon. I’m going to take him at face value. We’ll work on a relationship based on how things go.” Justifying his position, he recalls a recent trip he took to Israel with the Republican Jewish Coalition. “We flew over the Palestinian camps. Looked real bad down there.… I don’t see much we can do over there at this point.” Secretary of State Colin Powell, surprised by Bush’s intended policy towards the 50-year old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, objects. According to Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neil, Powell “stresse[s] that a pullback by the United States would unleash Sharon and the Israeli army.” When Powell warns the president that the “consequences of that [policy] could be dire, especially for the Palestinians,” Bush shrugs. “Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things,” he suggests. [Bamford, 2004, pp. 265-266; Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] In this and subsequent meetings, Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, “parrot[s]… the neocon line,” in author Craig Unger’s words, by discussing Iraq. “Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region,” she says, clearly alluding to regime change and overthrow in that nation (see March 8, 1992, Autumn 1992, July 8, 1996, Late Summer 1996, Late Summer 1996, 1997-1998, January 26, 1998, February 19, 1998, September 2000, Late December 2000 and Early January 2001, and Shortly after January 20, 2001). [Unger, 2007, pp. 201] Possible WMD Sites in Iraq Spark Bush to Order Plans for Ground Assaults - The meeting then moves on to the subject of Iraq. Rice begins noting “that Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region.” She turns the meeting over to CIA Director George Tenet who summarizes current intelligence on Iraq. He mentions a factory that “might” be producing “either chemical or biological materials for weapons manufacture.” The evidence he provides is a picture of the factory with some truck activity, a water tower, and railroad tracks going into a building. He admits that there is “no confirming intelligence” on just what is going on at these sites. Bush orders Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Hugh Shelton to begin preparing options for the use of US ground forces in Iraq’s northern and southern no-fly zones in support of a native-based insurgency against the Hussein regime. [Bamford, 2004, pp. 267; Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] Author Ron Suskind later sums up the discussion: “Meeting adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about Iraq. Rumsfeld had said little, Cheney nothing at all, though both men clearly had long entertained the idea of overthrowing Saddam.” Defense Intelligence Agency official Patrick Lang later writes: “If this was a decision meeting, it was strange. It ended in a presidential order to prepare contingency plans for war in Iraq.” [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] Regime Change Intended from the Outset - US Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, later recalls: “From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.… From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime. Day one, these things were laid and sealed.” O’Neill will say officials never questioned the logic behind this policy. No one ever asked, “Why Saddam?” and “Why now?” Instead, the issue that needed to be resolved was how this could be accomplished. “It was all about finding a way to do it,” O’Neill will explain. “That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this.’” [CBS News, 1/10/2004; New York Times, 1/12/2004; Guardian, 1/12/2004; Vanity Fair, 5/2004, pp. 234] Another official who attends the meeting will later say that the tone of the meeting implied a policy much more aggressive than that of the previous administration. “The president told his Pentagon officials to explore the military options, including use of ground forces,” the official will tell ABC News. “That went beyond the Clinton administration’s halfhearted attempts to overthrow Hussein without force.” [ABC News, 1/13/2004] Unger later writes, “These were the policies that even the Israeli right had not dared to implement.” One senior administration official says after the meeting, “The Likudniks are really in charge now.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 201] Funding the Iraqi National Congress - The council does more than just discuss Iraq. It makes a decision to allow the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an Iraqi opposition group, to use $4 million to fund efforts inside Iraq to compile information relating to Baghdad’s war crimes, military operations, and other internal developments. The money had been authorized by Congress in late 2004. The US has not directly funded Iraqi opposition activities inside Iraq itself since 1996. [Guardian, 2/3/2005] White House Downplays Significance - After Paul O’Neill first provides his account of this meeting in 2004, the White House will attempt to downplay its significance. “The stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear,” Bush will tell reporters during a visit to Mexico In January 2004. “Like the previous administration, we were for regime change.… And in the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with desert badger or fly-overs and fly-betweens and looks, and so we were fashioning policy along those lines.” [New York Times, 1/12/2004] Entity Tags: Richard B. Myers, Hugh Shelton, Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, George J. Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Craig Unger, Iraqi National Congress Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Key Events Related to DSM, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade February 2001: Bush: If US Determines that Iraq Is Developing WMD, ‘We Will Take the Appropriate Action’ President Bush hosts British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Camp David. Iraq is on the agenda. Bush and Blair tell reporters that they want to restructure the sanctions on Iraq through the United Nations, using what the White House calls “smart sanctions”—sanctions that are designed to constrain the Iraqi government without harming the Iraqi citizenry. The new sanctions are primarily aimed at tightening controls on “dual-use” goods, items that can be used for both civilian and military purposes, and to keep the regime from getting illicit funds from oil smuggling. Bush says: “A change in sanctions should not in any way, shape, or form, embolden Saddam Hussein. He has got to understand that we are going to watch him carefully and, if we catch him developing weapons of mass destruction, we’ll take the appropriate action. And if we catch him threatening his neighbors we will take the appropriate action.” In 2008, former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan will write: “Saddam was viewed more as a ‘problem’ to deal with than a ‘grave and gathering danger’ in the early days. Talk centered on if he was developing WMD, not that he was developing them.” [McClellan, 2008, pp. 93-94] Entity Tags: George W. Bush, Scott McClellan, United Nations, Tony Blair Category Tags: Alleged WMDs, Pre-9/11 Plans for War February 2001 and After: Bush Administration Begins Planning for Regime Change in Iraq “Within weeks” of taking office, the Bush administration begins planning for a post-Saddam Iraqi government. The State Department convenes a series of secret discussions attended by prominent Iraqi expatriates, many with ties to US industries, to plan for a post-Saddam Iraq. The meetings are held in the home of Falah Aljibury, an adviser to OPEC, Goldman Sachs, and Amerada Hess’s oil trading arm. He also served as Ronald Reagan’s backchannel to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. According to Aljibury, the discussion group, led by Pamela Quanrud, an NSC economics expert, quickly evolves into an “oil group.” The plan they develop is said to represent the views of the oil industry and the State Department. According to the plan, Saddam Hussein would be replaced by some former Baathist general, while the rest of the government would continue to function as before. One of the candidates that is considered to head post-Saddam Iraq is Gen. Nizar Khazrahi (see Between February 2001 and February 2003), who is under house arrest in Denmark awaiting trial for war crimes. “The petroleum industry, the chemical industry, the banking industry—they’d hoped that Iraq would go for a revolution like in the past and government was shut down for two or three days,” Aljibury will later tell reporter Greg Palast. “You have martial law… and say Iraq is being liberated and everybody stay where they are… Everything as is.” [BBC Newsnight, 3/17/2005; Democracy Now!, 3/21/2005; Harper's, 4/2005, pp. 74-76] Entity Tags: Falah Aljibury, Pamela Quanrud, Bush administration, Nizar Khazrahi Category Tags: Motives, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Pre-war Planning February 1, 2001: Rumsfeld Wants to Get Rid of Hussein in Iraq; Envisions Iraq After Hussein Is Gone The Bush White House holds its second National Security Council meeting. Like the first meeting (see January 30, 2001), the issue of regime change in Iraq is a central topic. [CBS News, 1/10/2004; New York Times, 1/12/2004] Officials discuss a memo titled “Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,” which talks about troop requirements, establishing war crimes tribunals, and divvying up Iraq’s oil wealth. [ [Sources: Paul O’Neill] Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld interrupts Colin Powell’s discussion of UN-based sanctions against Iraq, saying, “Sanctions are fine. But what we really want to discuss is going after Saddam.” He continues, “Imagine what the region would look like without Saddam and with a regime that’s aligned with US interests. It would change everything in the region and beyond it. It would demonstrate what US policy is all about.” [Suskind, 2004, pp. 85-86 Sources: Paul O’Neill] According to Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Rumsfeld talks at the meeting “in general terms about post-Saddam Iraq, dealing with the Kurds in the north, the oil fields, the reconstruction of the country’s economy, and the ‘freeing of the Iraqi people.’” [New York Times, 1/12/2004 Sources: Paul O’Neill] Other people, in addition to O’Neill, Bush, and Rumsfeld, who are likely in attendance include Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers. [US President, 2/13/2001] Entity Tags: Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush, George J. Tenet, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard B. Myers Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Pre-war Planning, The Decision to Invade, Key Events Related to DSM February 21, 2001: US and British Forces Bomb Iraqi Military Facilities, Leading to Conflict within US Military Leadership A joint US-British air force strike team bombs 20 radar and command centers inside Iraq, enforcing the UN no-fly zones in the largest air strikes within Iraq in two years. While the White House is informed of the strikes by a general from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is livid because he feels he hasn’t been given enough information about the strikes quickly enough. Rumsfeld’s information comes to him, by established law and protocol, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Henry Shelton; thus it could be hours before Rumsfeld learns of such events. Saying, “I’m the secretary of defense. I’m in the chain of command,” Rumsfeld decides to upend the entire system and ensure that he, not Shelton, will be informed first about any such operations. Rumsfeld presses Shelton for information about the reporting of the air strikes: who had selected those targets and why, who had briefed, who had been briefed, and most importantly, why wasn’t Rumsfeld consulted? CNN had reported air strikes in Baghdad, though the actual bases struck were not in the city itself; it looked for a moment if the US had just declared unilateral war on Iraq. Rumsfeld feels misled and ignored. He is the one in the chain of command, he insists, he is the one reporting to the president, so he should be informed first. Shelton replies that he has to know what’s going on, to know what details to press for and what questions to ask, in order to properly inform the Secretary of Defense, who can then properly inform the president. Rumsfeld insists on being informed before Shelton, and demands a top-to-bottom review of the procedures involving the National Military Command Center (NMCC) and detailed timelines of each incident where Shelton was informed before Rumsfeld. [Woodward, 2006, pp. 22-25] Entity Tags: Joint Chiefs of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Hugh Shelton, US Department of Defense, National Military Command Center Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Pre-war Attacks against Iraq Spring 2001: White House Pressures CIA to Drop Objection to Chalabi During a White House meeting, Bush administration officials discuss new proposals on how to undermine Saddam Hussein. At one point during the meeting, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley tells Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin that the CIA needs to stop bad-mouthing Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi so the Bush administration can work with Chalabi to overthrow the Iraqi government. McLaughlin reportedly makes it clear to Hadley that the agency will not undermine White House efforts to work with Chalabi. Hadley’s pressure on the CIA produces the intended results. Though the CIA will never work directly with Chalabi, the CIA will nonetheless allow the Pentagon to disseminate intelligence reports to other US intelligence agencies based on information from Iraqi defectors supplied by Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress. One CIA official later tells author James Risen that the White House message to drop its objections to Chalabi was sent to the CIA “a thousand times, in a thousand different ways.” [Risen, 2006, pp. 183-184] Entity Tags: Central Intelligence Agency, John E. McLaughlin, Ahmed Chalabi, Stephen J. Hadley Category Tags: Politicization of Intelligence, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade Between March 2001 and May 2001: Richard Clarke: Bush Officials Discuss Creating Casus Belli for War with Iraq Counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke later says that sometime between March and May, Bush administration officials discussed creating a casus belli for war with Iraq. In a 2007 interview with radio show host Jon Elliot, Clarke says: “Prior to 9/11 a number of people in the White House were saying to me you know this—this administration, particularly Cheney, but also Bush [and] people like Wolfowitz in the Pentagon, are really intent on going to war with Iraq. And this was the whispered conversations in the National Security Council staff.… Early, early on in the administration people I knew and trusted in the administration were saying to me, ‘You know. They’re really going to do it. They are going to go to war with Iraq.’ And I was flabbergasted. Why would you want to do that of all the things in the world that one could choose to do?… And how are we going to do it? How are we going to cause that provocation? And there was some discussion of ‘Well maybe [we’ll] keep flying aircraft over Iraq and maybe one day one of them will be shot down.’… And some of the talk I was hearing—in the March, April, May timeframe—‘Maybe we’ll do something that is so provocative and do it in such a way that our aircraft will be shot down.’ And then we’ll have an excuse to go to war with Iraq.” [Jon Elliot Show, 1/11/2007 Sources: Richard A. Clarke] Entity Tags: Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, George W. Bush, Richard A. Clarke Timeline Tags: Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks, Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade March 2001: US Begins Giving Weapons Training to Members of INC Retired US soldiers give weapons training to members of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the Iraqi opposition group led by Ahmed Chalabi. The five-day training session takes place in College Station, Texas, and is said to only be the first round of training. The INC has a contract with the Guidry Group, a consulting firm comprised of ex-secret service agents, to learn diplomatic security. Previously, the US backed training for the INC, but limited it only to “non-lethal” activities such as public relations, emergency medical care, and war crimes investigations. But with the Bush administration newly in power, approval has been given to let the INC learn how to use 12-gauge shotguns, pistols, Kalishnikov rifles, and other fire-arms. Retired Gen. Wayne Downing says, “This is significant because this is the first lethal training. It is designed to protect, so the significance is that this is the first time they are being trained to do anything on this level.” Downing, who has been advising the INC for three years, calls the training “a drop in the bucket.” He adds, “This is not the training they will need to put together a liberation army. There you would need individual training, basic training, weapons training, involving anti tank weapons, machine guns, rockets and that sort of thing.” The Washington Post will later call Downing the INC’s “mentor and biggest cheerleader.” [United Press International, 2/12/2001; Washington Post, 11/20/2001] Entity Tags: Ahmed Chalabi, Wayne Downing, Guidry Group, Iraqi National Congress Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade March 2001: Cheney’s Energy Task Force Eyes Iraq’s Oil Reserves Cheney’s Energy Task Force authors a variety of documents relating to the oil industries of Iraq, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. [Judicial Watch, 7/17/2003; CBS News, 1/10/2004; New York Times, 1/12/2004] Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts - This document, dated March 5, 2001, includes a table listing 30 countries which have interests in Iraq’s oil industry. The document also includes the names of companies that have interests, the oil fields with which those interests are associated, as well as the statuses of those interests. [Vice President, 2001 ; Vice President, 2001] Map of Iraq's oil fields - The map includes markings for “supergiant” oil fields of 5 billion barrels or more, other oilfields, fields “earmarked for production sharing,” oil pipelines, operational refineries, and tanker terminals. [Vice President, 2001 ] Other documents - Other documents include oil field maps and project tables for both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates [Vice President, 2001; Vice President, 2001; Vice President, 2001; Vice President, 2001] Entity Tags: Richard (“Dick”) Cheney Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: The Decision to Invade, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Motives March, 2001: Perle Says Hussein Has Weapons of Mass Destruction Defense Policy Board chairman and prominent neoconservative Richard Perle tells the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Does Saddam [Hussein] now have weapons of mass destruction? Sure he does. We know he has chemical weapons. We know he has biological weapons.…How far he’s gone on the nuclear-weapons side I don’t think we really know. My guess is it’s further than we think. It’s always further than we think, because we limit ourselves, as we think about this, to what we’re able to prove and demonstrate…. And, unless you believe that we’ve uncovered everything, you have to assume there is more than we’re able to report.” Perle fails to offer any evidence of his claims to the senators, and fails to provide evidence from UN inspectors that shows virtually all of Iraq’s WMD stockpiles and programs have long since been destroyed. [Hersh, 2004, pp. 209-210] Entity Tags: Richard Perle, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Saddam Hussein Timeline Tags: Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Pre-war Attacks against Iraq April 12, 2001: Report on Energy Security Argues US Needs to Review Policy on Iraq A report commissioned by former US Secretary of State James Baker and the Council on Foreign Relations, titled “Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century,” is completed and submitted to Vice President Dick Cheney. The report was drafted by the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Edward L. Morse, an energy industry analyst, chaired the project, and Amy Myers Jaffe was the project’s director. The paper urges the US to formulate a comprehensive, integrated strategic energy policy to address the current energy crisis, which it attributes to infrastructural restraints, rapid global economic expansion, and the presence of obstacles to foreign investment in the oil-rich Middle East. The report says the world’s supply of oil is not a factor in the crisis. “The reasons for the energy challenge have nothing to do with the global hydrocarbon resource base…. The world will not run short of hydrocarbons in the foreseeable future,” the paper says. One of the report’s recommendations is to “[r]eview policies toward Iraq” with the ultimate goal of stemming the tide of anti-Americanism in the Middle-East and “eas[ing] Iraqi oil-field investment restrictions.” Iraq, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, remains a “destabilizing influence… to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East.” It also notes, “Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets.” Therefore, the report says, the “United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and political/diplomatic assessments” and work with key allies to develop a new integrated strategy toward Iraq. Key elements of the new policy should include narrowing the focus of sanctions and using diplomatic means to enforce existing UN resolutions. [University, 4/2/2001 ; Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 10/5/2002; Sydney Morning Herald, 12/26/2002] Entity Tags: Council on Foreign Relations, James A. Baker, Edward L. Morse, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, Amy Myers Jaffe, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Motives, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade, Key Events Related to DSM (Show related quotes) Excerpts “[T]he United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma, suffering on a recurring basis from the negative consequences of sporadic energy shortages. These consequences can include recession, social dislocation of the poorest Americans, and at the extremes, a need for military intervention.”  — April 2001 [University, 4/2/2001, pp. 34 ; University, 4/2/2001, pp. 34 ] “Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to… the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. This would display his personal power, enhance his image as a pan-Arab leader and pressure others for a lifting of economic sanctions against his regime. The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments. The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies…”  — April 2001 [University, 4/2/2001, pp. 42 ; University, 4/2/2001, pp. 42 ] “Iraqi [oil] reserves represent a major asset that can quickly add capacity to world oil markets and inject a more competitive tenor to oil trade.”  — April 2001 [University, 4/2/2001, pp. 43 ; University, 4/2/2001, pp. 43 ] May 2001: Feith, Perle, and Wolfowitz Discuss Iraq Invasion; Scowcroft Initially Favorable According to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, “Four months before 9/11”, FBI monitoring overhears Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz “discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the US would invade Iraq and divide the country.… They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil.” National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, later a critic of the Iraq War, is initially in favor of the plan, but will later drop his support when it becomes clear Turkish demands for control of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq will not be granted. [The American Conservative, 11/1/2009] Entity Tags: Sibel Edmonds, Brent Scowcroft, Douglas Feith, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Paul Wolfowitz Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War Late July or Early August 2001: US Authorities Look into Theory that Iraq Had Role in 1993 WTC Bombing Laurie Mylroie. [Source: Publicity photo]US authorities re-open the files on Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the WTC bombing in 1993, and begin looking into the theory that Yousef may have actually been an Iraqi agent. Presumably this is in response to requests by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz the month before to look into the matter (see June 2001). Yousef was convicted in 1996 (see September 5, 1996) and has been in custody since 1995 (see February 7, 1995). According to the official version of events, Yousef’s real name is Abdul Basit, a 27-year-old Pakistani who until 1989 was a computer student studying in South Wales. In late 2000, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America arguing in support of the theory that Yousef was actually an Iraqi agent (see October 2000). The book, written by AEI scholar Laurie Mylroie, says that Basit was living with his parents in Kuwait in 1990 when Iraq invaded the country (see November 8, 1990). During the occupation, Iraqis presumably murdered him and his family and then altered police files so Iraqi intelligence could use his identity. [New Republic, 9/13/2001; London Times, 9/22/2001] In February 2001, former CIA Director James Woolsey traveled to Britain in an attempt to find evidence to support this theory (see February 2001). But Mylroie’s theory is debunked by authorities who match the fingerprints of Yousef to those of Basit. [Washington Monthly, 12/2003; Isikoff and Corn, 2006, pp. 81] Entity Tags: Ramzi Yousef, American Enterprise Institute, Abdul Basit, Laurie Mylroie, Paul Wolfowitz Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline, Neoconservative Influence Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War Summer 2001: IAEA Scientist: US ‘Wants to Attack’ Iraq After CIA analyst Joe Turner’s presentation to UN atomic energy scientists (see Late July 2001), one of the scientists calls David Albright, a nuclear physicist who runs the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, and warns him that the “people across the river [i.e., the CIA] are trying to start a war. They are really beating the drum. They want to attack.” [Isikoff and Corn, 2006, pp. 37] Entity Tags: David Albright, Institute for Science and International Security, Central Intelligence Agency Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade, Aluminum Tubes Allegation August 6, 2001: Perle’s Concern About Iraq, North Korea, and Iran Before 9/11 Becomes Axis of Evil Afterward Richard Perle, head of the Defense Policy Board and foreign policy adviser to Bush, is asked about new challenges now that the Cold War is over. He cites three: “We’re concerned about Saddam Hussein, We’re concerned about the North Koreans, about some future Iranian government that may have the weapon they’re now trying so hard to acquire…” [Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 8/6/2001] Note that these three nations are the same three named in Bush’s famous January 2002 “axis of evil” speech (see January 29, 2002). [US President, 2/4/2002] Entity Tags: Richard Perle, North Korea, Iran, Saddam Hussein Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War September 2, 2001: Bush Administration Enthusiastic to ‘Take Down Saddam Once and For All’ Time magazine reports, “Enthusiasm is building inside the Administration to take down Saddam once and for all. Powell too would love to see Saddam [Hussein] unhorsed, says an official at State. ‘But you need a serious plan that’s doable. The question is how many lives and resources you have to risk.’” Powell is said to have doubts about how to remove Hussein, and calls such an idea still “hypothetical.” But Time notes that “plenty of others on the Bush team are gung-ho.” [Time, 9/2/2001] Entity Tags: Colin Powell, Saddam Hussein, Bush administration Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade Mid-September, 2001: Cheney and Rumsfeld Create ‘Cabal’ to Influence Foreign Policy Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz create a secretive, ad hoc intelligence bureau within the Pentagon that they mockingly dub “The Cabal.” This small but influential group of neoconservatives is tasked with driving US foreign policy and intelligence reporting towards the goal of promoting the invasion of Iraq. To this end, the group—which later is folded into the slightly more official Office of Special Plans (OSP) (see 2002-2003)—gathers and interprets raw intelligence data for itself, refusing the participation of the experts in the CIA and DIA, and reporting, massaging, manipulating, and sometimes falsifying that information to suit their ends. [New Yorker, 5/12/2003] In October 2005, Larry Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, will say of the Cabal and the OSP (see October 2005), “What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. Now it is paying the consequences of making those decisions in secret, but far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences.” [Financial Times, 10/20/2005] Entity Tags: Thomas Franks, Paul Wolfowitz, Office of Special Plans, “The Cabal”, Central Intelligence Agency, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, Colin Powell, Douglas Feith, Lawrence Wilkerson, Defense Intelligence Agency, Donald Rumsfeld Timeline Tags: US confrontation with Iran, Domestic Propaganda Category Tags: Alleged WMDs, Alleged Al-Qaeda Ties, Media Coverage, Politicization of Intelligence, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Pre-war Planning, Propaganda, The Decision to Invade, Aluminum Tubes Allegation, Poisons and Gases, Office of Special Plans, Alleged WMDs, Alleged Al-Qaeda Ties, Media Coverage, Politicization of Intelligence, Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Pre-war Planning, Propaganda, The Decision to Invade, Aluminum Tubes Allegation, Poisons and Gases, Office of Special Plans September 17, 2001: Republican Senator: US Needs to Foment Regime Change in Middle Eastern Countries Senator George Allen (R-VA) says on CNN that the US needs to consider fomenting regime change in Iraq, Iran, and Syria. [Unger, 2007, pp. 217] Entity Tags: George F. Allen Timeline Tags: Complete 911 Timeline Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, The Decision to Invade, Democracy Rhetoric Autumn 2002: Anthrax Attacks Suspect Hatfill Helps Train US Special Forces while FBI Investigates Him In autumn 2002, US Delta Force units train on a mobile biological weapons factory to prepare them for dealing with mobile biological weapons factories in Iraq. The factory is just like the factories the US accuses the Iraqi government of having but which it does not have. The chief designer of the factory is Steven Hatfill, who is also the FBI’s main suspect at the time for the 2001 anthrax attacks (see October 5-November 21, 2001). Hatfill began designing the factory while working for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a contractor for the US military and the CIA. He begins gathering parts to build it in 2000, and construction began in September 2001, at a metalworking plant near Fort Detrick, Maryland. SAIC fired him in March 2002, after he failed to get a high-level security clearance and he came under suspicion for the October 2001 anthrax attacks. But Hatfill continues to work on the half-built factory on his own, for no pay, until it is finished later that year. Once it is done, Hatfill continues to advise the US military about it, and sometimes supervises Delta Force training exercises on it at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. However, at the same time, the Justice Department and the FBI is heavily investigating Hatfill for the anthrax attacks, and there is a conflict between agencies over Hatfill’s continued role with the factory. The FBI wants to confiscate the factory, but the military will not give it up. Its equipment includes a fermenter, a centrifuge, and “a mill for grinding clumps of anthrax into the best size for penetrating human lungs,” according to experts familiar with it. However, its components are not connected and it is never used to make lethal germs. The FBI examines the unit but finds no anthrax spores or any other evidence linking it to the anthrax attacks. [New York Times, 7/2/2003] Hatfill will be cleared of any connection to the anthrax attacks in 2008 (see June 27, 2008). Entity Tags: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Steven Hatfill, Delta Force Timeline Tags: 2001 Anthrax Attacks Category Tags: Pre-9/11 Plans for War, Alleged WMDs, 2001 Anthrax Attacks September 2002: ’Office of Special Plans’ Created; ‘Stovepipes’ Questionable Intelligence Reports to Office of Vice President William Luti. [Source: Helene C. Stikkel / Defense Department]Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, both staunch neoconservatives, rename the Northern Gulf Affairs Office on the Pentagon’s fourth floor (in the seventh corridor of D Ring) the “Office of Special Plans” (OSP) and increase its four-person staff to sixteen. [Knight Ridder, 8/16/2002; Los Angeles Times, 11/24/2002; New Yorker, 5/12/2003; Inter Press Service, 8/7/2003; Tom Paine (.com), 8/27/2003; American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Vice President Cheney, is put in charge of the day-to-day operations [Guardian, 7/17/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] , apparently at the behest of Cheney. Luti was, according to former Defense Intelligence Agency official Patrick Lang, a member of Cheney’s “shadow National Security Council.” [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] Transforming NESA - Luti worked for the Near East and South Asian Affairs desk (NESA) at the Pentagon since mid-2001. Lang later describes NESA as having been “a Pentagon backwater, responsible primarily for arranging bilateral meetings with military counterparts” from various nations. Before the Afghanistan war, NESA worked closely with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense Intelligence Officer (DIO) for the Near East, South Asia, and Counterterrorism. During Luti’s first months at NESA, the DIO was Bruce Hardcastle. The Pentagon dismantled the entire DIO system, partly because of friction between Luti and Hardcastle (see Early 2002). Lang will write, “The roots of the friction between Hardcastle and Luti were straightforward: Hardcastle brought with him the combined wisdom of the professional military intelligence community. The community had serious doubts about the lethality of the threat from Saddam Hussein, the terrorism links and the status of the Iraqi WMD programs. Luti could not accept this. He knew what he wanted: to bring down Saddam Hussein. Hardcastle could not accept the very idea of allowing a desired outcome to shape the results of analysis.” Luti transforms NESA into what Lang will call “a ‘de facto’ arm of the vice president’s office,” and in the process shuts Hardcastle out of NESA (and later OSP) intelligence briefings. Luti does not report to either Feith or Donald Rumsfeld, as his chain of command delineates, but to Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby. OSP staffer Karen Kwiatkowski later recalls being “shocked” to learn that Luti reports to Libby and not to his putative Pentagon superiors. She will say, “In one of the first staff meetings that I attended there, Bill Luti said, ‘Well, did you get that thing over to Scooter? Scooter wants this, and somebody’s got to get it over to him, and get that up to him right away.’ After the meeting, I asked one of my co-workers, who’d been there longer, ‘Who is this Scooter?’ I was told, ‘That’s Scooter Libby over at the OVP (Office of the Vice President). He’s the Vice President’s chief of staff.’ Later I came to understand that Cheney had put Luti there.” Under Luti, NESA becomes a virtual adjunct to the OSP. [Inter Press Service, 8/7/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004; Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] Strong Neoconservative Influence - The Office of Special Plans is staffed with a tight group of like-minded neoconservative ideologues, who are known advocates of regime change in Iraq. Notably, the staffers have little background in intelligence or Iraqi history and culture. [Salon, 7/16/2003; Inter Press Service, 8/7/2003; American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] Some of the people associated with this office were earlier involved with the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, also known as the “Wurmser-Maloof” project (see Shortly After September 11, 2001). They hire “scores of temporary ‘consultants‘… including like-minded lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous right-wing think-tanks in the US capital.” Neoconservative ideologues, like Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Newt Gingrich, are afforded direct input into the Office of Special Plans. [Guardian, 7/17/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004; Vanity Fair, 7/2006, pp. 150] Kwiatkowski later says she saw Ledeen going “in and out of there (OSP) all the time.” [Vanity Fair, 7/2006, pp. 150] Planning for Post-Saddam Iraq - The official business of Special Plans is to help plan for post-Saddam Iraq. The office’s staff members presumably “develop defense policies aimed at building an international coalition, prepare the secretary of defense and his top deputies for interagency meetings, coordinate troop-deployment orders, craft policies for dealing with prisoners of war and illegal combatants, postwar assistance and reconstruction policy planning, postwar governance, Iraqi oil infrastructure policy, postwar Iraqi property disputes, war crimes and atrocities, war-plan review and, in their spare time, prepare congressional testimony for their principals.” [Insight, 12/2/2003] Covert Source of 'Alternative' Intelligence - But according to numerous well-placed sources, the office becomes a source for many of the administration’s prewar allegations against Iraq. It is accused of exaggerating, politicizing, and misrepresenting intelligence, which is “stovepiped” to top administration officials who use the intelligence in their policy decisions on Iraq. [Knight Ridder, 8/16/2002; Los Angeles Times, 11/24/2002; New Yorker, 5/12/2003; Inter Press Service, 8/7/2003; Tom Paine (.com), 8/27/2003; American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004; Daily Telegraph, 7/11/2004; CNN, 7/11/2004] 'Top Secret' - There are very few news reports in the American mainstream media that report on the office. In fact, the office is reportedly Top Secret. [Bamford, 2004, pp. 308] “We were instructed at a staff meeting that this office was not to be discussed or explained,” Kwiatkowski will later say, “and if people in the Joint Staff, among others, asked, we were to offer no comment.” [American Conservative, 12/1/2003] Part of a 'Separate Government,' Powell Feels - Colin Powell is said to have felt that Cheney and the neoconservatives in this “Gestapo” office had established what was essentially a separate government. [Washington Post, 4/17/2004] Powell’s former chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, is even more blunt. “When I say ‘secret cabal,’ I mean ‘secret cabal,’ he says of the White House officials behind the OSP. He compares Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the neoconservatives to the Jacobins, the radical zealots who plunged 18th-century France into the Reign of Terror. “I see them as messianic advocates of American power from one end of the globe, much as the Jacobins in France were messianic advocates of the French Revolution. I don’t care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. You’re never going to bring utopia, and you’re going to hurt a lot of people in the process.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 299-300] Among the claims critics find most troubling about the office are: Heavy Reliance on Intelligence from Exiles and Defectors - The office relies heavily on accounts from Iraqi exiles and defectors associated with Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (INC), long considered suspect by other US intelligence agencies. [New Yorker, 5/12/2003; Salon, 7/16/2003; Guardian, 7/17/2003; Inter Press Service, 8/7/2003; Independent, 9/30/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] One defector in particular, code-named “Curveball,” provides as much as 98 percent of the intelligence on Iraq’s alleged arsenal of biological weapons. [CNN, 7/11/2004] Much of the information provided by the INC’s sources consists of “misleading and often faked intelligence reports,” which often flow to Special Plans and NESA directly, “sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service and sometimes through the INC’s own US-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon.” [Mother Jones, 1/2004] According to Kwiatkowski, the movement of intelligence from the INC to the Office of Special Plans is facilitated by a Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich. [Newsweek, 12/15/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004; Salon, 3/10/2004] Bruner “was Chalabi’s handler,” Kwiatkowski will tell Mother Jones. “He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi’s folks.” [Mother Jones, 1/2004] Kwiatkowski also finds that OSP personnel, along with DIA and CIA officials, are taking part in the debriefing of INC informants. She will recall confronting one DIA officer, John Trigilio, about the practice: “I argued with [Tregilio] after the president’s Cincinnati speech (see October 5, 2002 and October 6, 2002). I told him that the president had made a number of statements that were just not supported by the intelligence. He said that the president’s statements are supported by intelligence, and he would finally say, ‘We have sources that you don’t have.’ I took it to mean the sources that Chalabi was bringing in for debriefing… Trigilio told me he participated in a number of debriefs, conducted in hotels downtown, or wherever, of people that Chalabi brought in. These debriefs had Trigilio from OSP, but also CIA and DIA participated… If [the information] sounded good, it would go straight to the OVP or elsewhere. I don’t put it out of possibility that the information would go straight to the media because of the (media’s) close relationship with some of the neoconservatives. So this information would make it straight out into the knowledge base without waiting for intelligence [analysts] to come by with their qualifications and reservations.” [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] Cherry-Picked Intelligence - The Office of Special Plans purposefully ignores intelligence that undermines the case for war while exaggerating any leads that support it. “It wasn’t intelligence—it was propaganda,” Kwiatkowski will later explain. “They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.” [New York Times, 10/24/2002; New Yorker, 5/12/2003; Salon, 7/16/2003; Guardian, 7/17/2003; Inter Press Service, 8/7/2003; Independent, 9/30/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] “At the OSP, what they were doing was looking at all the intelligence they could find on WMD. That was the focal point, picking bits and pieces that were the most inflammatory, removing any context that might have been provided in the original intelligence report, that would have caused you to have some pause in believing it or reflected doubts that the intelligence community had, so if the intelligence community had doubts, those would be left out… They would take items that had occurred many years ago, and put them in the present tense, make it seem like they occurred not many years ago… But they would not talk about the dates; they would say things like, ‘He has continued since that time’ and ‘He could do it tomorrow,’ which of course, wasn’t true… The other thing they would do would be to take unrelated events that were reported in totally unrelated ways and make connections that the intelligence community had not made. This was primarily in discussing Iraq’s activities and how they might be related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups that might be against us, or against Israel… These kinds of links would be made. They would be made casually, and they would be made in a calculated way to form an image that is definitely not the image that anyone reading the original reports would have. The summaries that we would see from Intelligence did not match the kinds of things that OSP was putting out. So that is what I call propaganda development. It goes beyond the manipulation of intelligence to propaganda development.” [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] No Intelligence Oversight - The OSP bypasses established oversight procedures by sending its intelligence assessments directly to the White House and National Security Council without having them first vetted by a review process involving other US intelligence agencies. [New Yorker, 5/12/2003; Salon, 7/16/2003; Guardian, 7/17/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004] The people at Special Plans are so successful at bypassing conventional procedures, in part, because their neoconservative colleagues hold key positions in several other agencies and offices. Their contacts in other agencies include: John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security; Bolton’s adviser, David Wurmser, a former research fellow on the Middle East at the American Enterprise Institute, who was just recently working in a secret Pentagon planning unit at Douglas Feith’s office (see Shortly After September 11, 2001); Elizabeth Cheney, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs; Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser; Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council’s top Middle East aide; and Richard Perle, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey and Kenneth Adelman of the Defense Policy Board. The office provides very little information about its work to other US intelligence offices. [Salon, 7/16/2003; Guardian, 7/17/2003; Inter Press Service, 8/7/2003] 'Stealth Organization' - Greg Thielmann, the former director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office at the State Department’s Intelligence Bureau, later says of the OSP: “It was a stealth organization. They didn’t play in the intelligence community proceedings that our office participated in. When the intelligence community met as a community, there was no OSP represented in these sessions. Because, if they had done that, they would have had to subject their views to peer review. Why do that when you can send stuff right in to the vice president?” [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004; Unger, 2007, pp. 299] Lang will say in January 2004 that what happened was fundamentally different from anything that had happened under previous presidents. Cheney’s staff and allies “behaved as though they had seized control of the government in a ‘silent coup,’” The result, according to Lang, is “a highly corrupted system of intelligence and policymaking, one twisted to serve specific group goals, ends, and beliefs held to the point of religious faith.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 301] Pressuring Intelligence Analysts - Retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Dale Davis, who headed the International Programs Department at the Virginia Military Institute until March 2004, and an expert on Middle East affairs, later says he believes intelligence analysts at the CIA and other agencies were pressured indirectly. Davis will say, “By creating the OSP [Office of Special Plans], Cheney was able to say, ‘Hey, look at what we’re getting out of OSP. How come you guys aren’t doing as well? What is your response to what this alternative analysis that we’re receiving from the Pentagon says?’ That’s how you do it. You pressure people indirectly.” Vincent Cannistraro, a former senior counterterrorism official with the CIA, will agree: “Over a long period of time, there was a subtle process of pressure and intimidation until people started giving them what was wanted… When the Senate Intelligence Committee interviewed, under oath, over 100 analysts, not one of them said, ‘I changed my assessment because of pressure.‘… The environment was conditioned in such a way that the analyst subtly leaned toward the conceits of the policymakers… The intelligence community was vulnerable to the aggressiveness of neoconservative policymakers, particularly at the Pentagon and at the VP’s office. As one analyst said to me, ‘You can’t fight something with nothing, and those people had something. Whether it was right or wrong, fraudulent or specious, it almost didn’t make any difference, because the policymakers believed it already, and if you didn’t have hard countervailing evidence to persuade them, then you were at a loss.’” [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] Strong Pro-Israel, Anti-Arab Biases - Lastly, the people involved in Special Plans openly exhibit strong pro-Israel and anti-Arab bias. The problem, note critics, is that the analysis of intelligence is supposed to be apolitical and untainted by ideological viewpoints. [American Conservative, 12/1/2003] According to a CIA intelligence official and four members of the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, Special Plans is the group responsible for the claim Bush will make in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from an African country (see 9:01 pm January 28, 2003). [Nation, 6/19/2003; Information Clearing House, 7/16/2003] Personal Grudges against Intelligence Community - The OSP reflects the personal grudges and ill will of many in the Office of the Vice President against the intelligence community, in part because of the CIA’s refusal to give much weight to the claims of Chalabi and the INC. “This had been a fight for such a long period of time, where people were so dug in,” a friend of one of Vice President Cheney’s senior staffers will later reflect. A colleague of the senior staff later says, “They so believed that the CIA were wrong, they were like, ‘We want to show these f_ckers that they are wrong.’” [New Republic, 11/20/2003] Propaganda - Kwiatkowski will later recall that the OSP generated a large amount of what she terms propaganda, in the form of “talking points” used in briefings and in press conferences. “With the talking points, many of the propagandistic bullets that were given to use in papers for our superiors to inform them—internal propaganda—many of those same phrases and assumptions and tones, I saw in Vice President Cheney’s speeches and the president’s speeches,” she will say. “So I got the impression that those talking points were not just for us, but were the core of an overall agenda for a disciplined product, beyond the Pentagon. Over at the vice president’s office and the [neoconservative news magazine] Weekly Standard, the media, and the neoconservative talking heads and that kind of thing, all on the same sheet of music.” Kwiatkowski identifies Abram Shulsky, a neoconservative academic and recent Pentagon hire, as the source of many of these talking points. [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004] Denials, Counter-Accusations after Public Learns of OSP - After the existence of the Office of Special Plans is revealed to the public, the Pentagon will deny that it served as a direct conduit to the White House for misleading intelligence, instead claiming that its activities had been limited to postwar plans for Iraq. [New York Wikeleaks Exposed Bush 1 approved Saddam ‘s invasion of Iraq, then turned tables and made Saddam a neo Hitler. Ron Paul addressed congress about this crime and the start of the 20 years war. More than one million Iraqi deaths since US invasion As part of its campaign to justify a long-term US occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration has increasingly resorted to warning of chaos and even genocide in the wake of a withdrawal of American troops. But a new report suggests that something akin to genocide is already taking place, under American auspices. The British polling agency ORB reported Thursday that the death tool in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion has passed the one million mark. According to ORB, US-occupied Iraq, with an estimated 1.2 million violent deaths, has “a murder rate that now exceeds the Rwanda genocide from 1994 (800,000 murdered),” with another one million wounded and millions more driven from their homes into internal or external exile. 5/11 - Cheney Gives Speech at Institute of Petroleum, Autumn 1999, posted by Derek 4/19 - ConocoPhillips CEO ‘Covet[s] the Opportunity to Get’ Iraq Oil, February 2003, posted by Derek 4/19 - Former Iraqi Oil Minister Believes Iraq Could One Day Rival Saudi Arabia in Oil Production, February 2003, posted by Derek 4/19 - Shell Oil Looking for PR Officer with ‘Strong Family Connections’ to Work for Shell Iraq, August 2004, posted by Derek 4/18 - US-Educated Iraqi Oil Minister Announces that Plan for Privatization of Iraq’s Oil Industry is in the Works, September 4, 2003, posted by Derek 5/6 - State Department Oil and Energy Working Group Publishes its Formal Policy Recommendations for Post-Invasion Iraq, April 2003, posted by Derek 4/17 - British Foreign and Commonwealth Office Advise Iraqi Oil Ministry, After Summer 2004, posted by Derek 5/7 - UK Says Iraq Needs to Work with Foreign Oil Companies to Increase Oil Output, Summer 2004, posted by Derek 4/17 - British Secretary of War Writes That Control over Oil in Iraq and Iran Is ‘a First Class British War Aim’, 1918, posted by Derek 5/12 - NSC Refuses Request from Pentagon Investigators to Interview Stephen Hadley, (2006), posted by Derek 5/7 - Iraq Study Group Final Report Recommends Urgent Changes to Iraq’s Oil Industry, December 2006, posted by Derek 3/27 - Pentagon Investigation Finds That Office of Special Plans Inappropriately Produced ‘Alternative’ Intelligence Reports on Iraq, 2007, posted by Derek 3/20 - British Paper States That Middle East Is a ‘Vital Prize’ for Any Power Seeking ‘Domination’, 1947, posted by Derek 3/14 - US State Department Official Calls Saudi Oil ‘One of the Greatest Material Prizes in World History’, 1945, posted by Derek 3/12 - Top CIA Operative: No Evidence that Saddam Hussein Supported Al-Qaeda, (2006), posted by Derek 3/12 - Former British Official Tells Butler Inquiry What British Government Really Thought about Iraq Prior to the Invasion, June 9, 2004, posted by Derek 3/9 - David Kay Meets with President and Other White House Officials to Discuss Lack of WMDs, January 29, 2004, posted by Derek 3/9 - Cheney Insists That Iraq Supported Al-Qaeda and That WMD Evidence Has Been Found in Iraq, September 14, 2003, posted by Derek 3/9 - CIA Determines There Is No Evidence That Iraq Is Planning to Attack US Mainland with Drones, Early March 2003, posted by Derek 3/9 - Wolfowitz: Iraqis ‘View Us as Their Hoped-For Liberator’, March 11, 2003, posted by Derek Showing 1-20 of 100 recently added events:    next 20 Recently Updated Events Showing 1-20 of 39 recently updated events:    next 20 4/25 - Pentagon Creates Coalition Provisional Authority, January 2003, posted by Derek 4/19 - Bush Proposes US Free Trade Zone for Middle East, May 9, 2003, posted by Derek 4/19 - US Government Memo Discusses Importance of Middle East Oil for US and UK Energy Needs, July 30, 2003, posted by Derek 4/19 - Iraqi Oil Ministry Gets New US Oil Advisors, September 2003 or October 2003, posted by Derek 4/18 - US State Departments and Former Oil Executives Plan Iraq’s Post-Invasion Oil Industry, Fall 2002-January 2003, posted by Derek 4/18 - State Department Oil and Energy Working Group Plans for Post-Invasion Iraqi Oil Industry, December 20-21, 2002, posted by Derek 4/17 - During Visit to Crawford, Blair Tells Bush Britain Will Support US Military Action against Iraq, April 6-7, 2002, posted by Derek 4/17 - Wolfowitz and Feith Set Up the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, Shortly After September 11, 2001, posted by Derek 3/9 - Iraq Survey Group: Trailers Not for Biological Weapons, October 6, 2004, posted by Derek 3/9 - David Kay: No Evidence of WMD in Iraq, October 2, 2003, posted by Derek 3/9 - A Joint Report by the CIA and DIA Concludes that Trailers Found in Iraq Were Designed to Produce Biological Weapons, May 28, 2003, posted by Derek 3/8 - Tenet Calls Powell’s Hotel Room with Concerns That Too Much Had Been Cut from Speech, 2:30 a.m. February 5, 2003, posted by Derek 3/7 - Cheney’s Energy Plan Foresees Government Helping US Companies Expand Into New Markets, May 16, 2001, posted by Derek 3/7 - CIA Official: ‘This War’s Going to Happen Regardless of What Curveball Said or Didn’t Say’, February 4, 2003, posted by Derek 3/7 - Powell’s Top Aide Refuses to Include Material From White House Reports in Powell’s Upcoming UN Speech, January 30, 2003-January 31, 2003, posted by Derek 3/6 - Powell Refuses to Include Certain Material in His Speech Linking Iraq to Islamic Militants, February 1, 2003-February 4, 2003, posted by Derek 3/6 - Powell Asks Top Aide To Vett Material in White House Report before It’s Included In His Speech, January 29, 2003, posted by Derek 3/5 - Italian Journalist Gives US Embassy in Rome Copies of Niger Documents, October 9, 2002, posted by Derek 3/5 - Intelligence Peddler Gives Forged Niger Documents to Italian Journalist, Afternoon October 7, 2002, posted by Derek 3/2 - Tenet Briefs Senate Intel Committee on National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, September 24, 2002, posted by Derek William Rodriguez, 9/11 Hero and the last man out of the Towers, with President George W. Bush at White House award ceremony; with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad at a private 9/11 presentation. “There was a huge explosion in the basement—several seconds BEFORE the plane hit the tower!” Richard Roepke William “Willy” Rodriguez is the 9/11 hero who helped save hundreds of lives, and the last person to escape alive from the World Trade Center (WTC) Towers. Although the thrust of this narrative is meant to be about the selflessness and nobleness of heroism, be forewarned. In its effort to reveal the essential goodness that resides in the hearts of most human beings, it also inexorably exposes the vilest evil that festers in the minds of a few. Once past the heroism, this story begins to slice through the slimy underbelly of a vile, pathological beast that controls our lives, and gives us glimpses of the innards of this creature that grins gleefully at our gullibility and simple innocence while trampling on our most basic human rights. This story is a wake-up call to all citizens of planet Earth. Decorated Hero Employed at the WTC for 19 years as a maintenance worker, Rodriguez was responsible for the upkeep and safety of the stairwells within the 110-storey North Tower. On the morning of 9/11, Rodriguez was the only person at the WTC site with the master key to the North Tower stairwell doors. [For fire containment purposes, only doors on every fourth level were normally left unlocked.] In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Rodriguez personally rescued fifteen injured persons from the WTC by leading—often carrying—them to safety. Having evacuated the injured from the basement levels, he rushed back into the tower and led firefighters up the stairwells. Unlocking doors to various floors as they ascended, he aided in the successful evacuation of unknown hundreds of survivors. At great risk to his own life, Rodriguez re-entered the structure three times, and even rescued people trapped between floors in elevator cars by lowering ladders down into shafts. Having helped lead everyone he could find to safety, he finally decided to exit the building. Rodriguez is believed to be the last person to leave the collapsing North Tower alive. He survived the building’s collapse by diving beneath a fire truck, where he lay trapped, completely buried in a mountain of dust and rubble for over two hours. Barely able to breathe, he thought he would “die for sure” under that truck where he was literally entombed. An agnostic, he prayed for the first time in his adult life. As he now unshakably believes, God does listen to heartfelt prayers, and miracles do happen. A policeman who had been standing across the street had caught a fleeting glimpse of Rodriguez as he leapt under the truck a split second before the tower collapsed in an avalanche of debris. It was this officer who later returned with help believing that the man under that truck might still be alive. Rodriguez has been spiritually transformed by this experience and has embraced his faith again with deep reverence. For his outstanding heroism during America’s desperate hour, William Rodriguez received a special commendation for valor from President George W. Bush at a special White House ceremony. And that is the extent of the official story as it pertains to William Rodriguez’s involvement relating to rescue efforts following the 9/11 attacks. But, as you shall see, his incredible heroism was but the tip of the 9/11 iceberg. “Bombs! Bombs!” Heroism and accolades aside, what is truly incredible about Rodriguez’s story is a shocking fact that has been concealed from public knowledge, and remains largely unknown to this day. Rodriguez and a handful of co-workers who were down in the basement at the time of the attack, actually heard and felt huge explosions beneath their feet in the lower basement levels. While this anomaly in itself should have been cause for serious investigation, it is the timing of these explosions that is extremely troubling: They occurred several seconds BEFORE the first airplane impacted the tower. The first of these explosions, which occurred about 7-8 seconds before the plane struck the tower was so powerful it literally threw Rodriguez upwards, clean off the floor, as parts of the false ceiling collapsed onto and around him. Rodriguez heard and felt at least three explosions going off down in the basement levels within seconds of each other. Absolute pandemonium broke out, with screams of “Bombs! Bombs!” rising above the din as terrified workers scattered in all directions, frantically seeking ways to escape. [NB: There were a total of six basement levels. Level-2, immediately below Rodriguez’s position and the apparent location of the first explosion, was a “Mechanical Floor”—a restricted access area.] But the “bombs” were by no means confined to the basement levels. During his subsequent rescue efforts on the upper floors, Rodriguez claims he heard explosions going off “all over the building.” Felipe David, a colleague, who was working at the far end of basement Level-1 across from Rodriguez, fell victim to the second explosion. David was walking towards a supply room when the entire wall suddenly exploded in front of him. Burned beyond recognition, David managed to stagger towards Rodriguez. Willy took one look at the man and froze. The skin on his face had almost completely peeled away exposing raw, pink flesh, and the burnt skin of his outstretched arms was hanging horrifically, “like sheets of loose cloth.” David was the first casualty whose life Rodriguez saved by carrying him up to paramedics at street level, after which he returned to the basement in spite of police orders. The 9/11 Commission Hearing At the closed-door 9/11 Commission hearing, Rodriguez testified under oath that explosions were going off in the basement of the North Tower before the first plane impacted the building. He explained in great detail to the Commissioners the numerous cases of serious injuries he had personally witnessed that were caused by these explosions. He even provided the panel with a list of firsthand witnesses to the explosions, people who were ready to testify under oath. One of the individuals Rodriguez recommended the panel summon was his friend and fellow employee, John Mongello. Mongello was in the lobby of the neighboring South Tower when the first aircraft plowed into the North Tower where Rodriguez was located. It would be another sixteen minutes before the second aircraft would rip into the one Mongello was in. Yet, within a minute of the first plane hitting the North Tower, an elevator in the SOUTH Tower exploded to smithereens right before his eyes! Mongello and others were literally blown backwards by the blast, as people—many, horribly burned—began to run willy-nilly shrieking in pain, shock, and sheer terror. Thick, black smoke could be seen billowing out of the now exposed elevator shaft, and the pungent smell of “gunpowder” was very evident. Again, just as with the North Tower, this explosion occurred inside a building that had NOT YET BEEN STRUCK BY A PLANE! How could a plane crashing into the North Tower possibly have caused elevators in the SOUTH Tower to explode? The esteemed 9/11 Commission never bothered to find out. Worse, and to his utter disbelief, Rodriguez later discovered that his statements were completely omitted from the official record. As a result, not one word of this decorated hero’s startling testimony appeared in the much-ballyhooed 9/11 Commission Report, a document that continues to be touted as “the most detailed, definitive study of the events of 9/11.” Furthermore, Rodriguez was told, quite emphatically, not to speak about the explosions to others until “further investigations” had been carried out. As the world knows, this has yet to happen. As a result of much public pressure, the Commission’s investigation records were finally made public—seven years later, in January 2009. Rodriguez was stunned to find that his testimony was among those marked “restricted,” and thus inaccessible to the public. His crucial evidence remains restricted to this day. Waking Up Naturally, Rodriguez was flabbergasted by the Commission’s clearly suspect actions, but anger at the subterfuge was soon eclipsed by his far deeper anxiety. The bombs. He was convinced beyond a doubt there were explosives planted within the Towers. The official explanation—jet fuel, which is simply kerosene—made no sense at all. Besides, he had overheard many exchanges on firemen’s two-way radios that day that confirmed virtually all the jet fuel had burned off, and the few remaining scattered fires looked like they could easily be knocked out. He was convinced the explosions he had seen, felt, and heard that day were not caused by kerosene. He believed they were caused by deliberately positioned explosives. What cemented his belief and reinforced it even further was something he saw on television the next day: WTC building 7 collapsing into its footprint like a house of cards. In a matter of seconds. [1] He had walked by that building numerous times. WTC7 was a 47-storey steel-framed skyscraper that was located a few hundred feet away from the Towers, and a plane had not even struck it. But, just as with the Twin Towers, it, too, it suddenly collapsed into its own footprint later that very afternoon. The first thought that struck him was, “That building was a fortress. How could it just have fallen like that?” Having experienced the explosions in the North Tower firsthand, and then having seen footage of Building 7 collapse in freefall, there were no doubts whatsoever left in his mind: All three buildings were purposely demolished with explosives. [NB: In regard to WTC7, the 9/11 Commission Report, again, mentioned absolutely nothing about this 47-storey skyscraper’s sudden and unbelievable collapse. Nor did it mention a word about the numerous eyewitness accounts of multiple explosions within that building. Not one word. As with the explosions reported in the North and South towers, the 9/11 Commission Report completely ignored this shocking event as well.] As to who might have planted the explosives, he was at a loss. He couldn’t conceive how the alleged terrorists could have pulled it off; they couldn’t possibly have gained access to these buildings. He was convinced there had to have been other players involved—insiders. He found such a prospect not only ominous in the extreme, but also disorienting and confusing on many levels. Suddenly, nothing seemed to make sense. Only one thought consumed him. Who were the killers? Strange Recollections Having worked at the WTC for close upon two decades, Rodriguez obviously was very familiar with its general layout. The North Tower, in particular, was nigh a second home to him. An extremely affable fellow, Rodriguez had many friends in the WTC community. His days almost invariably began with breakfast with co-workers at the employees’ cafeteria at Windows On The World, the elegant restaurant on the 107th floor. Especially following the 1993 bombing, security in the towers was extremely tight. That was glaringly obvious wherever he went. So how did the culprits manage to gain access? He started to look into the security company in charge of the WTC complex, Securacom, and was more than a little surprised by the identities of two of its top executives. President George W. Bush’s brother Marvin Bush and his cousin, Wirt Walker III, were both principals of the company. Further, he found this very same company was in charge of security at Dulles airport and United Airlines—both central to the attacks. Brushing this curious connection aside as coincidence, he began to wonder about the practical difficulties the perpetrators would have encountered in gaining access to the buildings. He tried to recall having seen any suspicious people, or strange occurrences. Pieces began to slowly come together. He recalled seeing small teams of men in white “HazMat” coveralls busily moving about the building in the weeks preceding the attacks. Their presence didn’t strike him as particularly odd at the time, except for the fact that they used the stairwells almost exclusively and avoided using the service elevators. But he now began to wonder about these men’s real identities and true purpose. One particularly bizarre incident snapped into focus, one that was so frightening he recalls it made his “hair stand up.” A few weeks prior to the attacks, he was working in a stairwell on the 34th floor, which he knew to be completely vacant. Suddenly, he heard the strangest sound—one he’d never heard inside the tower in his nearly twenty years there. It was a powerful, ominous, “rumbling” sound of something extremely heavy being rolled about. It sounded like a “huge metal dumpster on steel wheels, containing something extremely heavy—tons—being rolled around” a floor that he knew to have been totally empty—devoid even of furniture. Yet, Rodriguez categorically maintains there was “someone” on that floor moving some monstrous contraption about. Oddly, he admits to having been gripped by intense fear at the time, but he was having difficulty verbalizing to me the exact nature of his apprehension. While this didn’t strike me as having been a particularly inauspicious occurrence, it was clear he had been deeply affected by it. He immediately reported the incident to the main office, but was reassured it was a vacant floor. Rodriguez was emphatic that he felt so frightened by this incident he didn’t dare open the door to look inside because he literally feared for his life. He intuitively sensed grave danger behind that door, and did his best to avoid the 34th floor thereafter. [NB: It is worth considering that long-term occupancy (and thus control) of a whole floor would have granted occupants virtually unlimited and unobstructed access from all sides to the entire 47-column central core of the tower via the elevator shafts. By sequentially disabling individual elevators for ‘servicing,’ the occupants would have had clear access to the entire 1,350-ft central load-bearing core columns—from the penthouse right down the 6th level basement sitting on bedrock.] Willy does not strike me as a man who can be frightened very easily, and this one anecdote has always intrigued me. The emotions I saw in his eyes, and his body language as he was describing the event were real. I was left with no doubt that what he experienced that day was extremely frightening and deeply impressionable. Man on a Mission I first met Willy in 2004 when he was touring the country with millionaire philanthropist Jimmy Walter. Walter had recently awoken to 9/11 truth, and was an indomitable firebrand. Frenziedly mass-producing DVDs, organizing public events and seminars, and doing everything he possibly could to get the message out to the world, Jimmy was a one-man tour de force on his own mission of truth. Such was his fervor, he once even stood in lone protest outside the White House bearing a placard that read, “9/11 was an inside job.” I recall being greatly impressed by the spectacle of such a wealthy, successful man willingly facing scorn and ridicule by going that far out on a limb in the service of a cause as incendiary as 9/11. Quite a guy, Jimmy. Walter, seeing in Rodriguez the clear mark of authenticity, drive, and commitment, soon took Willy under his wing. Once the two teamed up, Rodriguez was telling his extraordinary story at various public gatherings that Walter was helping to organize. Willy had been “advised” by officials to keep to himself his “different” views on the events of that day, but that wasn’t about to stop him. His deeply traumatic experience and the shocking anomalies he had witnessed simply would not allow him to keep from asking the kind of questions most found exceedingly “uncomfortable”—even outrageously ‘unpatriotic.’ The Dalliance with Politics The White House ceremony had all but guaranteed his meteoric rise to stardom as a national hero. However, his newfound celebrity status would soon have its concomitant obligations. More than a few high-ranking officials had advised him of the “sensitivity” of the times, and told him in no uncertain terms that it would be unwise for him to pursue his disquieting inquiries into “unfounded theories.”. It was proving to be “very embarrassing.” Ironically, at the same time, there was also tremendous support and encouragement being lavished by these very same officials, soliciting his participation on an altogether different agenda: To promote “patriotic unity” and emphasize to the nation the dire need for America to strike back hard at the ‘enemy.’ And things actually got rather intoxicating for a while. Rodriguez the hero was soon inveigled with promises of political office in the Hispanic community, and carrots of all kinds were dangled before him. He found the attempts to win him over by various Republican power-players to be almost overwhelming. The heady publicity had suddenly thrust him onto the national stage, and he was deemed by Party strategists to be the ideal Republican candidate to woo the more than 30 million Hispanic voters in the country. Charismatic, articulate, good-looking, fluently bi-lingual and a national hero to boot, he was a natural—the perfect political candidate. Before joining the WTC staff, Rodriguez had worked for ten years as an aide to New York Governor Mario Cuomo, helping organize press conferences for high-level policy-making events, so he even had the basic political training already under his belt. [He also possessed stage panache to boot. An avid amateur magician, he had worked in his younger days as an assistant to The Amazing Randi.] The Republican Party even made arrangements to send him to train for political office, and offered Rodriguez millions of dollars in campaign financing to run on the national Hispanic platform. For a brief while he was a rising star with stellar prospects. But this titillating new potential career also carried with it a huge price—one, he soon discovered, that was in tension with his probity, and sense of righteousness and duty. It didn’t take him long to decide. He refused to be seduced into concealing a truth he believed the world absolutely needed to know. There was no doubt in Rodriguez’s mind that the official narrative re 9/11 was far from true. He believed it was his patriotic duty to alert his fellow Americans to what actually happened that terrible day. “I had to choose whether to tell the truth, or play their game,” he told me. “I couldn’t get myself to play their game.” Tempting as the alternatives were, the forces of truth had prevailed. Celebrity No More That pivotal decision caused all Republican encouragement and offers of political support to evaporate. The decorated 9/11 hero was now quite suddenly not only a Party pariah, but also persona non grata in the halls of high power. By taking his courageous stand, Rodriguez had unwittingly assumed a very dangerous role, one that would pose a direct threat to powers that lay behind the veneer of party politics. He had just signed his own political death warrant. Naturally, the muzzled media didn’t appear willing to report any of what Rodriguez had to say. As always, they felt obliged to promote whatever the propaganda ministry wanted the masses to believe. It takes enormous courage to go against such opposition, but that’s the kind of man Willy is. He says he owes it to his many friends—more than two hundred of them—who were butchered that day by an evil shadowy group in pursuit of some diabolical geopolitical agenda. Shocked, inconsolable and deeply disturbed to this day, he continues his campaign with extraordinary energy and an admirable sense of purpose. When I suggested it might be time for him to throttle back a notch, he responded, “I can’t. I am driven because I have a need to find out who the real killers are. The alleged Arab hijackers couldn’t possibly have rigged all those explosives. No way.” The Mission Goes Global Jimmy Walter wasted no time financing a “9/11 Truth World Tour” to raise awareness about the 9/11 fraud by first taking the message across America and later, around the world. And money was no object. Not one to approach such a grand and noble undertaking with anything less that total commitment, Walter famously offered a $1 million cash reward to any engineer or scientist in the world who could prove, in an academic technical paper, that the three towers could have collapsed the way they did without explosives. Despite massive national publicity—the million-dollar challenge was even sent to the engineering faculties of over 100 universities, as well as a host of major architectural and structural engineering firms—there were no takers. None. Zero. The prize remains unclaimed to this day. [But is this surprising? How does one prove water isn’t wet?] Walter’s group was comprised of a team of world-class experts: architects, engineers, pilots, firefighters, metallurgists, chemists, and psychologists, among others [2]. The group made a slew of public presentations in major cities across the US before moving on to Europe, and later, Venezuela, Singapore, Japan and elsewhere speaking to packed audiences everywhere they traveled. Walter and Rodriguez even made private presentations to former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. They were surprised to find both these leaders were more than a little knowledgeable about the cover-up. Willy told me that the home of Nicolas Maduro, president of the Venezuelan Assembly, was brimming with books, videos and documents about the 9/11 cover-up. Maduro, Venezuela’s top legislator, intoned that he was ready to create an international investigative committee to look into the “international crime scene” that is 9/11, and that this would be structured via Chavez’s government. Walter and Rodriguez also appeared on every major Venezuelan television and radio station, both private and state-owned, and gave presentations to several universities. They were also scheduled to appear on Chavez’s weekly broadcast ‘Alo Presidente’, but this was canceled at the last minute for unspecified reasons. And things evidently got quite dicey during their trip. Rodriguez discovered that undercover FBI agents on the ground in Venezuela had asked the hotel where he and Walter were staying to turn over a list of names of residents. On hearing this, the Venezuelan National Assembly provided both men armed military protection for the entirety of their trip. A Serious Setback All of these valiant efforts by these two incredibly courageous men eventually amounted to naught. Quite unexpectedly, and inexplicably, all the energy, enthusiasm and momentum they had amassed suddenly appeared to have hit a brick wall. They were informed, rather sheepishly by cohorts of the two leaders, that 9/11 was simply too big an issue to “rush into,” and that it would be advisable to postpone further action to allow time for “more research.” Such is the awesome fear-inspiring power and global reach of the amorphous perpetrators of this monstrous crime. Eventually, in utter frustration at his inability to make any real headway after over three years of tireless effort and colossal expense, and hampered by poor health, Jimmy Walter finally decided to call it a day. That little adventure had cost Walter over $6 million of his personal money. Jimmy’s parting words to me, in 2007, embodied a truth that continues to resonate and gain currency as the years roll by: “Trying to outdo the mainstream media by throwing a few million bucks around is like trying to outshine the sun with a flashlight.” It’s hardly surprising you’ve heard nothing about these men’s heroic initiatives on the local evening “news”—little more than bread and circuses, artfully packaged and insidiously seeded for consumption by the gullible, clueless masses. Witnesses Begin to Drop Dead It wasn’t long afterwards that Rodriguez got his next wake-up call. Kenny Johanneman, another of Willy’s close friends and former WTC colleague, had also been in the basement with him when the bombs were going off. Willy, now working on behalf of the community of Hispanic victims, survivors and their families, had decided to contact everyone he knew who had been present at the WTC that day so he could record their personal experiences on video. During a lengthy interview, Johanneman recounted his experience in great detail, holding back nothing. Johanneman, who had made it his personal mission to tell everyone he knew—and anyone else who’d listen—that he had seen “floors blow up in the basement before the plane hit,” appeared extremely eager (almost nervously so, Willy now recalls) to get his story on tape. Three days after the interview, Rodriguez received the bad news. Kenny Johanneman had suddenly “committed suicide.” Gunshot to the head. This is frighteningly reminiscent of Barry Jennings, the former New York Housing Authority Emergency Coordinator and key 9/11 witness who suddenly died of unknown causes days before the release of NIST’s “amended” report on the collapse of WTC7. Jennings is on record [3] stating, unequivocally and emphatically regarding Building 7, that “explosions were going off all over the place”—while the Twin Towers were still standing! Jennings also stated during an interview that he was “stepping over bodies” in the main lobby of WTC7 as he was being led out by firemen. The lobby, he testified on video, “looked like a bomb had gone off inside it.” [NB: This is virtually identical to John Mongello’s testimony about elevators exploding in the South Tower before a plane even hit that building.] Mr. Jennings, who was known to be in excellent health, also suffered a sudden and mysterious death at age 53. Dylan Avery, a documentary producer, commissioned a private detective to investigate Jennings’ suspicious death (and the subsequent disappearance of his wife and two children). Within days the man returned Avery’s’s check to him and, giving no reason, refused to continue with the case. The latest casualty in the long line of 9/11 expert witnesses to die under suspicious circumstances was Dutch demolition expert Danny Jawenko, president of Exposieve Demolitie BV, a leading Dutch controlled demolition company. Having watched a video of WTC Building 7 suddenly fall at freefall speed, Mr. Jawenko had the courage to stand up and authoritatively assert [4] that he was “absolutely positive” WTC7 was brought down by controlled demolition. On July 18, 2011, while driving home alone in his own car, Mr. Jawenko’s vehicle suddenly accelerated, swerved off the road and crashed into a tree at high speed. Danny Jawenko was killed instantly. The brave individuals mentioned above are just a few of a long list [5] of individuals who have made the ultimate sacrifice. The Mission Ratchets Up During Rodriguez’s long crusade, he also contacted the FBI, but they never followed up on his reports. [It’s almost certain they did, but were probably allowed to take it only so far.] The same holds true with the mainstream media. CNN spent a day interviewing Rodriguez at his home, but when it was broadcast the following day it had been thoroughly edited: they glamorized the heroic rescues and the White House tamasha, of course, but wholly excised anything pertaining to the explosions. It was a total whitewash. Some reporters have subtly warned Rodriguez to keep quiet, as his outspokenness could jeopardize his life. “You don’t know whom you’re dealing with,” one major-network insider told him. But Willy had already defiantly looked death in the face and will probably continue to tell his story, damn the torpedoes. He says he is speaking for his friends who were forever rendered speechless, and adds, “I am living on borrowed time; I probably should be dead anyway.” It’s probably this do-or-die attitude that has imbued Rodriguez with the guts to take his dauntless campaign as far as he has. How gutsy is he, and how far is he willing to go? In 2004 Rodriguez was the lead plaintiff in a RICO lawsuit filed against President George W. Bush and 155 of his henchmen, accusing them of complicity in the 9/11 attacks, conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes. This is hardly the behavior of a man afraid of getting whacked. But don’t hold your breath waiting for a sensational courthouse drama with Dubya sweating it out in the hot seat. The court dismissed Rodriguez’s claims against the USA, DHS, and FEMA, and gave Rodriguez until July 7, 2006 to show cause why his lawsuit should not be dismissed with respect to the other 153 defendants. Due to a falling out with his attorney, Rodriguez failed to do so, and the court dismissed the case. But he’d be the first to tell you this was never about winning. It was about getting the public to wake up to the facts about 9/11—the single most heinous crime and unconscionable fraud ever foisted on the inhabitants of this planet. Preparing For The 10th Anniversary The 9/11 Truth movement is growing almost exponentially, with literally hundreds of groups active worldwide, and more blossoming by the day. But it was a long, arduous process to get to this point. So utterly overwhelming was the initial mainstream propaganda barrage, and so raw were people’s emotions and sensitivities in the aftermath of the attacks, those who were quick to see through the fraud couldn’t even think of organizing a handful of local activists, let alone a worldwide network. Gradually—and thanks almost entirely to the Internet—lines of communication began to open across the country and around the world, helping activists to organize, communicate, build cohesion, and spread the word to the millions still asleep. It was only a matter of time before people would slowly become aware of the mountains of shockingly obvious evidence freely available online—such as videos of WTC7 in freefall [1]. That would be their Eureka moment. Common sense then usually kicks in, and osmosis takes over. After all, there is a limit to denial. [Then again, perhaps not. There will always be those who, even if the perpetrators were to confess to the crime, be tried in court and hanged in the town square, would continue to insist the Muslims did it.] As a result of the steadfast efforts of thousand of dedicated activists, what began as a trickle is now fast reaching torrential proportions. Reaching critical mass is no longer a distant hope. Especially given the millions waking up around the world to 9/11’s odious offspring—the bogus ‘war on terror’, DHS, the militarized police state, the monumental Bankster fraud—critical mass re 9/11 is now imminent, and an absolute certainty. Thousands of activists around the world are helping spread the 9/11 message via public presentations, free DVDs, even huge highway billboards. All too aware of the astonishing rise in public awareness, desperate operations are currently afoot by the ‘powers that be’ to counter this worrisome trend. Major Hollywood stars—including Robert DeNiro—have been signed up to read the fairytale script pushing the ‘Official Conspiracy Theory.’ I.e., how nineteen clueless Arabs who, without tickets or boarding passes, climbed aboard four airliners, hijacked the craft using little box-cutters, and then brilliantly outwitted the most formidable military force on the planet and its entire multi-trillion-dollar defense apparatus for almost two hours—all without a single fighter interceptor in the fearsome American arsenal so much as turning a wheel for the entire duration. This upcoming mass-media pageant, of course, will be further bolstered by the government’s openly proclaimed—and ongoing—assault on 9/11 “conspiracy” groups. Obama’s regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, has officially initiated a nakedly aggressive program of “cognitive infiltration,’ an insidious initiative where government agent provocateurs have been ordered to covertly penetrate 9/11 truth groups and attempt to structurally disable these organizations from within by sowing disinformation. One can only wonder why this kind of deep sabotage would be necessary—unless these “conspiracy nuts” now pose a real and present danger to the ‘powers that be.’ But, take heart, dear reader: although truth lives a wretched life, it outlives a lie every time. Every time. Besides, it would take a lot more than a covert program of “cognitive infiltration”’ to dismantle 9/11 truth—that would first require rewriting the laws of physics. On the side of Truth, we have literally thousands of professional architects, engineers, firefighters, pilots, scientists, and other similar groups comprised of professionals with impeccable credentials who are planning their own public relations initiatives [2]. But, in a country where 78% of its citizens get 92% of their news from television, these groups have their work cut out for them. Despite the challenges that lie ahead, I cannot bring myself to agree with Jimmy Walter’s assessment that this would be an undertaking tantamount to “trying to outshine the sun with a flashlight.” Rather, I would prefer to invoke the wisdom of Victor Hugo: “No army can stop an idea whose time has come.” The Power Of One Meanwhile, there is one brave man packing a gargantuan flashlight who’s working wonders on his own. And he dismisses defeat as an impossibility. I was elated to discover that Willy Rodriguez’s relentless efforts are in full swing and about to reap rich rewards. The man is on fire. He’s been reeling off interviews with major media outlets around the world at a ferocious rate, gearing up for a full-blown one-man 10th anniversary assault on the Dark Force. Rodriguez recently mentioned some of the interviews he already has in the bag: Yomiuri Shinbun (Japan), Arbitron (worldwide), Shanghai Morning Post (China), Express News (Pakistan), Global National News (Canada), Telemondo (Latin America), Le Point (France), RT (Russia), Radio Televicion Espanola (Spain), Reuters, and CNN (again). There are many more in the works that will be ready by 9/11/12. [NB: Willy was quick to mention he’d learnt a bitter lesson from his last encounter with CNN—now, he rattles off his responses as seamlessly as possible to deny cutting-room craftsmen their “edit points!”] Rodriguez is also polishing up a brilliant new documentary all his own, “From The Rubble,” which will also be released in time for the 10th anniversary. I recently watched the raw version in its entirety. It’s a brilliant bit of work—profoundly emotive, incredibly detailed, fact-filled and chockablock with riveting interviews with WTC employees, firemen, police officers, paramedics and other first-responders. These are all rescuers who were there, hands-on, in the thick of it, and witnessed the entire tragedy firsthand. Even in its current rough state, I can unreservedly state it’s the most compelling 9/11 documentary I’ve seen to date. Time To Give It Our All Given the appalling trail of deaths of 9/11 witnesses over the past ten years [5], it would make sense that the best way to ensure the safety of surviving key witnesses like Rodriguez and others would, ironically, be for these individuals to continue to stay planted in the public spotlight. Considering the serious threat these brave souls pose to the criminals at large, this might be the only strategy that could offer them a modicum of safety. The more people who know about this brave man, and the many other men and women like him, the greater the chances of thwarting their ‘suicides’ or ‘heart attacks.’ On behalf of every one in the 9/11 Truth movement; in memory of the three thousand Americans who perished needlessly on that tragic day; and the million-plus innocents who have been slaughtered (and continue to be massacred) in distant lands on account of this fiendish fraud; it would be fitting, proper, and necessary to conclude with a message to all those who have awoken to The Big Lie, yet choose to do nothing: Silence is complicity. 1 Army Sgt. Nick Wysong keeps watch as the Army's 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, the last formal U.S. military combat detachment to leave Iraq, stops for fuel south of Baghdad, Iraq, on August 17, 2010. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT) 2 At sunrise, members of the Army's 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, the last formal U.S. military combat detachment to leave Iraq, crossed the Iraq desert a few miles from the Kuwait border in a tactical road march on August 17, 2010. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT) 3 Young Iraqi shepherds wave to members of the Army?s 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry, the last formal U.S. military combat detachment to leave Iraq. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT) 4 Lt. Col. Richard D. Heyward, left, and Sgt. Nick Wysong, right, keep watch as the Army's 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, the last formal U.S. military combat detachment to leave Iraq, crosses the southern desert lands of Iraq on August 17, 2010. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT) 5 After two twelve-hour troop movements, Army Specialist John Ray rests inside a Stryker vehicle as the Army's 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry, the last formal U.S. military combat detachment to leave Iraq, make their way towards the Kuwait border. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT) 6 Army Specialist Tyson Kuwaye lifts Specialist Matt Cullum after they completed a two-day road march with their division, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry, the last formal U.S. military combat detachment to leave Iraq, to the Iraq-Kuwait border on August 18, 2010. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT) 7 In this Aug. 16, 2010 photo, U.S. Army soldiers from 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment pose with an American flag for a photograph after crossing the border from Iraq into Kuwait. The soldiers from 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, are the last combat brigade to leave Iraq as part of the drawdown of U.S. forces. (AP Photo/ Maya Alleruzzo) 8 At Taji Base outside of Baghdad, Iraq, members of the Army?s 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry, the last formal U.S. military combat detachment to leave Iraq, prepares to leave on August 17, 2010, for the Kuwait border. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT) Osama bin Laden's "Mountain Fortress", shown to the US public by the corporate media, and like Saddam's nuclear weapons, never actually existed. Below a song to the veterans and love ones an old melody but still current to the times. 121 9 A soldier with the Army's 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, the last formal U.S. military combat detachment to leave Iraq, puts down his weapon at Camp Taji, Iraq, on August 15, 2010. (Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/MCT) 10 A U.S. Army soldier from 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division waves from his Stryker armored vehicle after crossing the border from Iraq into Kuwait Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2010. The soldiers are part of the last combat brigade to leave Iraq as part of the drawdown of U.S. forces. (AP Photo/ Maya Alleruzzo) 11 Marine Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, 20, of Kentucky, a member of Charlie Company of the U.S. Marines First Division, Eighth regiment, smokes a cigarette. Miller came to be known as the "Marlboro Man" for this iconic photograph from the Iraq War. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times) 13 Tens of thousands of antiwar protesters gather on the National Mall in Washington to protest the war on Iraq Saturday, Jan. 18, 2003. (AP {Photo/Rick Bowmer) 14 Haylee Schimmelpfenneg embraces her father, Sergeant First Class Robert Schimmelpfenneg, after a deployment ceremony for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team in Fort Carson. The soldier deployment from Fort Carson for impending war in Iraq is the greatest since the Vietnam War. (Glenn Asakawa/The Denver Post) 15 Soldiers salute during the National Anthem at the beginning of a deployment ceremony for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team in Fort Carson. The soldier deployment from Fort Carson for impending war in Iraq is the greatest since the Vietnam War. (Glenn Asakawa/The Denver Post) 16 Smoke covers the presidential palace compound in Baghdad 21 March 2003 during a massive US-led air raid on the Iraqi capital. Smoke billowed from a number of targeted sites, including one of President Saddam Hussein's palaces, an AFP correspondent said. AFP PHOTO/Ramzi HAIDAR   Related posts: Red Alert: Help Stop False Flag Terror War on Terror is a Reichstag Fire False Flag Operation The Stage Is Set For a Nuclear False Flag Government Infiltrates Terror Cells Time and Again … But Fails to Stop Attacks Webster Tarpley: FSB False Flag, Anti-Putin Campaign or Real Separatist Attack? Will There Be A New False Flag Attack In Chicago’s Sears Tower? 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