The Story We Hear On The News And Read In The Newspapers Is Simply Not
Believable

by Stan Goff
Retired U.S. Special Forces Master Sergeant


Centre for Research of Globalisation, globalresearch. ca,

20 October 2001


I'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant.
That doesn't cut much for those who will only accept the opinions of
former officers on military matters, since we enlisted swine are assumed
to be incapable of grasping the nuances of doctrine.

But I wasn't just in the army, I studied and taught military science and
doctrine.
I was a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations Training Center in
Panama, and I taught Military Science at West Point.
And contrary to the popular image of what Special Forces does, SF's
mission is to teach.
We offer advice and assistance to foreign forces.
That's everything from teaching marksmanship to a private to instructing
a Battalion staff on how to coordinate effective air operations with a
sister service.

Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated conflict
areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have to say that the story we hear on the
news and read in the newspapers is simply not believable.

The most cursory glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and
after September 11th, does not support the official line or conform to
the current actions of the United States government.

But the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept its
underlying premises.
I'm not at all surprised about the Republican and Democratic Parties
repeating these premises.
They are simply two factions within a single dominant political class,
and both are financed by the same economic powerhouses.
My biggest disappointment, as someone who identifies himself with the
left, has been the tacit acceptance of those premises by others on the
left, sometimes naively, and sometimes to score some morality points.

Those premises are twofold. One, there is the premise that what this de
facto administration is doing now is a "response" to September 11th.
Two, there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan.
In my opinion, neither of these is sound.

To put this in perspective we have to go back not to September 11th, but
to last year or further.

A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush, with nothing more than
his name and the behind-the-scenes pressure of his powerful father-a
former President, ex-director of Central Intelligence, and an oil man-is
systematically constructed as a candidate, at tremendous cost.

Across the country, subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms are put into
place to disfranchise a significant fraction of the Democrat's
African-American voter base.
This doesn't come out until Florida becomes a battleground for Electoral
College votes, and the magnitude of the story has been suppressed by the
corporate media to this day.
In a decision so lacking in legitimacy, the Supreme Court will neither
by-line the author of the decision nor allow the decision to ever be
used as a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards the presidency of the United
States to a man who loses the popular vote in Florida and loses the
national popular vote by over 600,000.

This de facto regime then organizes a very interesting cabinet.
The Vice President is an oil executive and the former Secretary of
Defense.
The National Security Advisor is a director on the board of a
transnational oil corporation and a Russia scholar.
The Secretary of State is a man with no diplomatic experience
whatsoever, and the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The other interesting appointment is Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of
Defense. Rumsfeld is the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals.
He and Cheney were featured as speakers at the May, 2000,
Russian-American Business Leaders Forum.
So the consistent currents in this cabinet are petroleum,
the former Soviet Union, and the military.

Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his guises, and the general
trajectory of U.S. foreign policy as far back as the Carter
Administration, I feel I can reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern and
South Asian fossil fuels are one of their major preoccupations.
Not just because this klavern has some very direct financial interests
in fossil fuel, but because they surely know that worldwide oil
production is peaking as we speak, and will soon begin a permanent and
precipitous decline that will completely change the character of
civilization as we know it within 20 years.

Even the left seems to be in deep denial about this, but the math is
available. And, no, alternative energies and energy technologies will
not save us.
All the alternatives in the world can not begin to provide more than a
tiny fraction of the energy base now provided by oil.
This makes it more than a resource, and the drive to control what's left
more than an economic competition.

I further conclude that the economic colonization of the former Soviet
Union is probably high on that agenda, and in fact has a powerful
synergy with the issue of petroleum.
Russia not only holds vast untapped resources that beckon to imperialism
in crisis, it remains a credible military and nuclear challenger in the
region.

We have not one, but three members of the Bush de facto cabinet
with military credentials, which makes the cabinet look quite a lot like
a military General Staff.
All this way before September 11th.

Then there's the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO
might have expected consignment to the dustbin of the Cold War after the
Eastern Bloc shattered in 1991.
Peace dividend and all that. But it didn't. It expanded directly into
the former states of the Eastern Bloc toward the former Soviet Union,
and contributed significant forces to the devastation of Iraq-a key
country in the world oil market, over which control translates into the
ability to manipulate oil prices.

NATO is a military formation, and the United States exerts
the controlling interest in it.
It seemed like a form without a function, but it remedied that pretty
quickly.

Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International
Monetary Fund, the US and Germany began a systematic campaign of
destabilization there, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan in
that campaign.
NATO became the military arm of that agenda-the break-up of Yugoslavia
into compliant statelets, the further containment of the former Soviet
Union, and the future pipeline easement for Caspian Sea oil to Western
European markets through Kosovo.

You see, this is important to understand, and people-even those against
the war talk-are tending to overlook the significance of it. NATO is not
a guarantor of international law, and it is not a humanitarian
organization. It is a military alliance with one very dominant partner.
And it can no longer claim to be a defensive alliance against European
socialists. It is an instrument of military aggression.

NATO is the organization that is now going to thrust further along the
40th parallel from the Balkans through the Southern Asian Republics of
the former Soviet Union.
The U.S. military has already taken control of a base in Uzbekistan.

No one is talking about how what we are doing seems to be a very logical
extension of a strategy that was already in motion, and has been in
motion for two decades.
Once we recognize the pattern of activity designed to simultaneously
consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain
and colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan is exactly where they
need to go to pursue that agenda.

Afghanistan borders Iran, India, and even China but, more importantly,
the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
These border Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan borders Russia. Turkmenistan sits on
the Southeastern quadrant of the Caspian Sea, whose oil the Bush
Administration dearly covets. Afghanistan is necessary for two things:
as a base of operations to begin the process of destabilizing, breaking
off, and establishing control over the South Asian Republics, which will
begin within the next 18-24 months in my opinion, and constructing a
pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver
petroleum to the Asian market.

The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign Secretary,
that senior American officials were warning them as early as mid-July
that military action for mid-October was being planned for Afghanistan.
In 1996, the Department of Energy was issuing reports on the
desirability of a pipeline through Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal
testified before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific that
this pipeline was crucial to transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian
Ocean.

Given this evidence that a military operation to secure at least a
portion of Afghanistan has been on the table, possibly as early as five
years ago, I can't help but conclude that the actions we are seeing put
into motion now are part of a pre-September 11th agenda.
I'm absolutely sure of that, in fact.
The planning alone for operations, of this scale, that are now taking
shape, would take many months.
And we are seeing them take shape in mere weeks.

It defies common sense.
This administration is lying about this whole thing being a "reaction"
to September 11th.
That leads me, in short order, to be very suspicious of their
yet-to-be-provided evidence that someone in Afghanistan is responsible.
It's just too damn convenient.
Which also leads me to wonder-just for the sake of knowing-what actually
did happen on September 11th, and who actually is responsible.

The so-called evidence is a farce.
The U.S. presented Tony Blair's puppet government with the evidence, and
of the 70 so-called points of evidence, only nine even referred to the
attacks on the World Trade Center, and those points were conjectural.
This is a bullshit story from beginning to end.
Presented with the available facts, any 16-year old with a liking for
courtroom dramas could tear this story apart like a two-dollar shirt.
But our corporate press regurgitates it uncritically.
But then, as we should know by now, their role is to legitimize.

This cartoon heavy they've turned bin Laden into makes no sense,
when you begin to appreciate the complexity and synchronicity
of the attacks.
As a former military person who's been involved in the development of
countless operations orders over the years,
I can tell you that this was a very sophisticated and costly enterprise
that would have left what we call a huge "signature".

In other words, it would be very hard to effectively conceal.

So there's a real question about why there was no warning of this.
That can be a question about the efficacy of the government's
intelligence apparatus.
That can be a question about various policies in the various agencies
that had to be duped to orchestrate this action.
And it can also be a question about whether or not there was
foreknowledge of the event, and that foreknowledge is being covered up.
To dismiss this concern out of hand as the rantings of conspiracy nuts
is premature.
And there is a history of this kind of thing being done by national
political bosses, including the darling of liberals, Franklin Roosevelt.
The evidence is very compelling that the Roosevelt Administration
deliberately failed to act to stop Pearl Harbor in order to mobilize
enough national anger to enter the World War II.

I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions
about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks. Follow
along:

Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all the
while on FAA radar. The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM
Eastern Daylight Time.

Who is notified?

This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not
notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.

By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is terribly
wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers.

By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade
Center, Bush is settling in with children for his photo ops at Booker
Elementary. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously, an
event never before seen in history, and one has just dived into the
worlds best know twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal
Commander in Chief.

No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either.

At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining World Trade Center
building. At 9:05, Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers
to George W. Bush. Bush "briefly turns somber" according to reporters.

Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No.

He resumes listening to second graders read about a little girl's pet
fucking goat, and continues this banality even as American Airlines
Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the
direction of Washington DC.

Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air Force? No.

An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public
statement telling the United States what they already have figured out;
that there's been an attack by hijacked planes on the World Trade
Center.

There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington,
but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.

At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American Flight 77 is still ten
minutes from its target, the Pentagon.

The Administration will later claim they had no way of knowing that the
Pentagon might be a target, and that they thought Flight 77 was headed
to the White House, but the fact is that the plane has already flown
South and past the White House no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing
through the sky at over 400 nauts.

At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the
Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not
evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the
sky over Alexandria and DC.

Now, the real kicker. A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a
Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a
well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in
two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it
clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and
flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460
nauts.

When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper
school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further
training on a flight simulator.

This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on
I-40 at rush hour by buying her a video driving game. It's horse shit!

There is a story being constructed about these events. My crystal ball
is not working today, so I can't say why.

But at the least, this so-called Commander-in-Chief and his staff that
we are all supposed to follow blindly into some ill-defined war on
terrorism is criminally negligent or unspeakably stupid.
And at the worst, if more is known or was known, and there is an effort
to conceal the facts, there is a criminal conspiracy going on.

Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was facing a confluence of
crises from which they were temporarily rescued by this event. Whether
they played a sinister role or not, there is little doubt that they have
at the very least opportunistically pounced on this attack to overcome
their lack of legitimacy, to shift the blame for the encroaching
recession from capitalism to the September 11th terror attack, to
legitimize their pre-existing foreign policy agenda, and to establish
and consolidate repressive measures domestically and silence dissent.
In many ways, September 11th pulled the Bush cookies out of the fire.

And given them the green light to begin constructing a long-term
scenario within which to establish fascistic control measures at home
and abroad as a citadel for the ruling class in the catastrophic
conjuncture that we are entering based on the end of oil.

This elephant in the living room is being studiously ignored. In fact,
the domestic repression has already begun, officially and unofficially.
It's kind of a latter day McCarthyism.
I participated in a teach-in at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on the 17th
of September, and though not a single person on the panel excused or
justified the attacks, and every person there offered either condolences
and prayers for the victims, we were excoriated within two days as
"enemies of America." Yesterday an op-ed called for my deportation (to
where, one can only guess). Now Herr Ashcroft is fast tracking the
biggest abrogation of US civil liberties since the so-called
anti-terrorism legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing-which by the
way hasn't resulted in anti-terrorism but in the acceleration of the
application of the racist death penalty.
The FBI has defined terrorist groups not by whether any given group has
ever acted as terrorists, but by their beliefs.
Some socialists and anti-globalization groups have already been
identified by name as terrorist groups, even though there is not a
single shred of evidence that they have ever participated in any
criminal activity.
It reminds me of the Smith Act that was finally declared
unconstitutional, but only after a hell of a lot of people served a hell
of a long time in jail for the crime of thinking.

I think this also points to yet another huge problems that the Bush
regime was facing.
Worldwide resistance to the whole so-called neoliberal agenda, which is
a prettied up term for debt-leverage imperialism.
While debt and the threat of sanctions has been used to coerce nations
in the periphery, we have to understand that the final guarantor of
compliance remains military action.
For a global economic agenda, there is always a corresponding political
and military agenda.

The focal point of these actions in the short term is Southern Asia, but
they have already scripted this as a worldwide and protracted fight
against terrorism.
It's far better than drug wars as a rationalization, and the drug war
thing was being discredited in any case.
Leftists are regaining power and popularity in Venezuela, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and
Argentina. Cuba has gained immense prestige over the last few years.
The empire is beginning to unravel.
We can hardly justify intervention in these places by saying they are
not towing the economic line by allowing the absolute domination of
their societies by transnational corporations.
That exposes the agenda. So we simply claim they are supporting
terrorism.

It's for all these reasons I say the left has missed the boat on this
one, by allowing them to get away with rushing past the question of who
did what on September 11th.
If the official story is a lie, and I think the circumstantial case is
strong enough to stay with this question, then we really do need to know
what happened.
And we need to understand concretely what the motives of this
administration are.

And we need to understand more than just their immediate motives, but
where the larger social forces that underwrite our situation right now
are headed.

I do not think this administration is engaged in the deliberative
process of a political grouping that is on top of their game.
They are putting together some very deliberative technical solutions
in response to a larger situation that it slipping rapidly out of their
control. Like clear cutting. There's a very smart technology being
employed to do a very dumb thing.

What they are responding to is not September 11th, but the beginning of
a permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production, the
beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the
unraveling of the empire.

This brings me to a point about what all this means for Americans'
security, which they are perfectly justified to worry about.
The actions being prepared by this administration will not only not
enhance our security, it will significantly degrade it. Military action
against many groups across the globe, which is what the administration
is telling us quite openly they are planning to do, will put a lot of
backs against the wall. That can't be very secure.

The concept of war being touted here is a violation of the principles of
war on several counts, and will inevitably lead to military
catastrophes, if you're inclined to view this from a position of moral
and political neutrality.

And the people who are now in possession of half the world's remaining
oil reserves are subject to destabilization for which we can't even
pretend to predict the consequences-but loss of access to critical
energy supplies is certainly within the realm of possibility.
Worst of all, we will be destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power in an
active conflict with its neighbor, and we will be provoking Russia,
another nuclear power.
The security stakes don't get any higher, and Americans can ill afford
to ignore nukes.

And I think that this domestic agenda is a tremendous threat to the
security of anyone who is critical of the government or their corporate
financiers, and we already know that the real threats are against
populations that can easily be scapegoated as the domestic crisis
deepens.

There is a very real threat right now of creeping fascism in this
country, and that phenomenon requires its domestic enemies. Historically
those enemies have included leftists, trade unionists, and racially and
nationally oppressed sectors.
This whole "state of emergency" mentality is already being used to quiet
the public discourses of anti-racism, of feminism, of environmentalism,
and of both socialism and anarchism.
And while there is token resistance by officials to anti-Muslim
xenophobia, the stereotypical images have saturated the media, and the
government is already beginning to openly re-instate racial profiling.
It is only a short step from there to go after other groups.

We have long been prepared by the ideologies of overt and covert racism,
and racism as both institution and corresponding psychology in the
United States is nearly intractable.

It's for all these reason, I say emphatically that we can not accept
anything from this administration; not their policies nor their bullshit
stories.

What they are doing is very, very dangerous, and the time to fight back
against them, openly, is right now, before they can consolidate their
power and their agenda.
Once they have done that, our job becomes much more difficult.

The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its oblivion,
needs to understand its critical roles here.
We have to play the role of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian
partners in a broader peace-movement.
We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current historical
conjuncture.
And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will
emerge to first defeat fascism then take political power.

Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than ever right now.
We are not faced with a choice between socialism and capitalism,
but socialism or barbarism.
And what we can least afford are denial and timidity.


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The URL of this article is:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/GOF110A.html

Copyright, Stan Goff, 2001. For fair use only.



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