The Iranian Special Ops unit accused of meddling in Iraq has a fierce history and powerful friends.
By Christopher Dickey and John Barry
Newsweek
Feb. 26, 2007 Issue
MSNBC
The Iranian Special Operations unit called the Quds Force...its specialty is different: striking fear in the hearts of generals.
Over the past 25 years, the Quds Force has proved ferociously effective at organizing, training and equipping guerrillas to confront the world's most vaunted armies. Quds played a vital role in creating Hizbullah to fight the Israelis in Lebanon. It supported the legendary Ahmed Shah Massoud against the Russians and his Taliban rivals in Afghanistan. Quds helped the Bosnians hold back the Serbian war machine. And now—it's in Iraq.
...the unit appears to be as close to America's Shiite and Kurdish allies...The relationship between the Quds Force and figures like Iraqi President Jalal Talabani or Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (both of whom have been received in the White House recently) goes back two decades to the days when only Tehran was aiding Saddam Hussein's enemies.
"Do the Americans think they would stop working with us because Americans told them so?" says an Iranian intelligence official who is not authorized to speak on the record.
Quds operatives captured recently were working directly under the protection, respectively, of Talabani and Hakim.
Because of the bad intelligence that the Bush administration used to pave the way to war with Iraq in 2003, skeptics worry it may be using similar tactics to provoke a fight with Iran.
But when it comes to the Quds Force, the American military's concerns are much more down to earth.
The weapons known as "explosively formed penetrators" or EFPs, which Quds allegedly helped design and supply to some Shiite factions in Iraq, send a molten slug at phenomenal speed through heavy armor.
Each one costs perhaps $50, but is capable of crippling an Abrams tank that costs more than $4 million, and they are increasingly common.
Meanwhile, since the beginning of the year, U.S. helicopters have been shot out of the sky with unprecedented frequency. Although none of the five confirmed shootdowns have been linked to the Quds Force, or to Iran, U.S. commanders are worried about their troops' ability to move on the ground and in the air. So they're looking for any way to relieve the pressure...
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Neocon Imperialism, 9/11, and the Attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq
David Ray Griffin
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
My purpose in publishing this essay is to introduce a perspective, relevant to the debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that thus far has not been part of the public discussion.
One way to understand the effect of 9/11, in most general terms, is to see that it allowed the agenda developed in the 1990s by neoconservatives—-often called simply “neocons”---to be implemented. There is agreement on this point across the political spectrum. From the right, for example, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke say that 9/11 allowed the “preexisting ideological agenda” of the neoconservatives to be “taken off the shelf . . . and relabeled as the response to terror.”1 Stephen Sniegoski, writing from the left, says that “it was only the traumatic effects of the 9/11 terrorism that enabled the agenda of the neocons to become the policy of the United States of America.”2
What was this agenda? It was, in essence, that the United States should use its military supremacy to establish an empire that includes the whole world--a global Pax Americana. Three major means to this end were suggested. One of these was to make U.S. military supremacy over other nations even greater, so that it would be completely beyond challenge. This goal was to be achieved by increasing the money devoted to military purposes, then using this money to complete the “revolution in military affairs” made possible by the emergence of the information age. The second major way to achieve a global Pax Americana was to announce and implement a doctrine of preventive-preemptive war, usually for the sake of bringing about “regime change” in countries regarded as hostile to U.S. interests and values. The third means toward the goal of universal empire was to use this new doctrine to gain control of the world’s oil, especially in the Middle East, most immediately Iraq.
In discussing these ideas, I will include recognitions by some commentators that without 9/11, the various dimensions of this agenda could not have been implemented. My purpose in publishing this essay is to introduce a perspective, relevant to the debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that thus far has not been part of the public discussion.
1. Neoconservatives and Global Empire:
The “neo” in the term “neo-conservative” is a remnant of the fact that the first generation neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, had moved to the right after having been members of the left. Kristol, often called “the godfather of neoconservatism,” famously defined neoconservatives as liberals who had been “mugged by reality.” No such move, however, has characterized most of the second-generation neocons, who came to dominate the movement in the 1990s. As Gary Dorrien says in Imperial Designs:
Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana, “the new neocons had never been progressives of any kind.”3 The term “neoconservatism” is, in any case, used here to refer strictly to an ideology, not to any biographical facts about those who hold this ideology.
I mean “biographical facts” to include ethnicity. Although many of the prominent neoconservatives have been Jewish, leading some people to think that Jewishness is a necessary condition for being a neo-conservative, this is not so. As Dorrien points out, “a significant number of prominent neocons were not Jews.”4
This discussion has its primary importance in relation to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. If neoconservatism is understood to be entirely a matter of ideology, not also partly a matter of biography, then there is no reason not to think of Cheney and Rumsfeld as neocons. As former neocon Michael Lind, says: “[N]eoconservatism is an ideology, like paleoconservatism and libertarianism, and Rumsfeld and Dick . . . Cheney are full-fledged neocons, . . . even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists.”5
Neoconservatism in its early decades was a multi-faceted phenomenon, but the focus here is on its foreign policy. Neoconservative foreign policy was originally oriented around opposition to Communism. This fact meant that the end of the Cold War produced a crisis for neocons. In 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, Podhoretz said that he was not sure what “America’s purpose should be now that the threat of Communism . . . had been decisively eliminated.” Five years later, he even published a eulogy to the movement, declaring it dead.6
Unipolarity:
Other neocons, however, believed that they had a new cause to champion. Already in 1986, Irving Kristol argued that the United States needed to move toward a foreign policy of “global unilateralism.” But that would be difficult, he pointed out, as long as America is “an imperial power with no imperial self-definition.”7 The new cause was to shape this new self-definition, thereby getting Americans ready to accept a policy of global unilateralism.
As soon as the Cold War ended, this cause was taken up by others. At the close of 1989, Charles Krauthammer, one of the best-known neocon columnists, published a piece entitled “Universal Dominion,” in which he argued that America should work for “a qualitatively new outcome--a unipolar world.”8 In 1990, he argued that unipolarity has already arrived and that the United States, being the “unchallenged superpower,” should act unilaterally. Saying that “[t]he alternative to unipolarity is chaos,” Krauthammer explained what unipolarity requires of the United States: “unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.”9 The following year, in an argument for a “robust interventionism,” he said of this unipolar world: “We Americans should like it---and exploit it.”10
The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance:
The first effort to turn such thinking into official policy came in 1992, which was the last year of the presidency of George H. W. Bush and hence also the end of Dick Cheney’s tenure as secretary of defense. Before leaving office, Cheney had Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense for policy, prepare---with the help of his top assistant, Lewis “Scooter” Libby---a draft of the Pentagon’s “Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG).11 Stating that America’s “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” this DPG draft was, in Andrew Bacevich’s appraisal, “in effect a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony.”12
This draft produced, after portions of a leaked copy were published in the New York Times and the Washington Post,13 an outpouring of criticism. The ideas did get some support, especially from neoconservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal, which praised the draft’s plan for a “Pax Americana.”14 But most of the reaction was critical. Senator Alan Cranston complained that the Bush administration was seeking to make the United States “the one, the only main honcho on the world block, the global Big Enchilada.”15 Senator Robert Byrd said that the document’s stance seemed to be: “We love being the sole remaining superpower in the world and we want so much to remain that way that we are willing to put at risk the basic health of our economy and well-being of our people to do so.”16
Seeking to calm the waters, especially because it was an election year, the administration of George H. W. Bush distanced itself from this draft, depicting it, in Bacevich’s words, “as the musings of an insignificant lower-tier appointee acting without official sanction.”17 Although Wolfowitz would refer to it as “my 1992 memorandum” many years later,18 he claimed at the time that he had not seen it.19 Cheney also claimed not to have seen it, even though one long section began by acknowledging “definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense.” This latter fact has, incidentally, been pointed out by David Armstrong, who calls this draft an early version of Cheney’s “Plan . . . to rule the world.”20 Although this draft came to be known as “the Wolfowitz plan,” it is important to recognize that it was Cheney who, in Dorrien’s words, “hatched the original unipolarist blueprint in 1992.”21 Indeed, as Nicholas Lemann has reported in the New Yorker, the DPG draft resulted from a secret team that Cheney had set up in the Pentagon “to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War.”22
The recognition that this unipolarist blueprint was inspired by Cheney is important in light of the unprecedented power that he would exercise in the second Bush administration. As presidential historian Douglas Brinkley would say in 2002: “Cheney is unique in American history. . . . He is the vortex in the White House on foreign policymaking. Everything comes through him.”23
In any case, Cheney, under pressure from the White House, had the document significantly rewritten by Libby, in language more acceptable at the time. For example, whereas the first draft spoke of spurning collective action through the United Nations, this new version spoke of strengthening the U.N.24 Cheney put an end to this brief public debate about the wisdom of a unipolarist foreign policy by having this softer version, which was later published,25 leaked to the press.26
The 1990s and PNAC:
This rewriting did not mean, however, that the ideas were dropped by Cheney and other neoconservatives. Indeed, after the election was over, Cheney, before leaving office, put out another revision, in which some of the neo-imperial language was restored.27 Then Zalmay Khalilzad, who had joined Cheney’s team in 1991, put out a book early in 1995 entitled From Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World after the Cold War, which expresses quite forthrightly the idea of preventing, by military force if necessary, the rise of any rival power.28 In 1996, Robert Kagan, “who emerged in the 1990s as perhaps the most influential neocon foreign policy analyst,”29 argued that the United States should use its military strength “actively to maintain a world order which both supports and rests upon American hegemony.”30 In 1998, Kagan and William Kristol, who in 1995 had founded the Weekly Standard (which quickly became the main organ of neocon thinking), wrote that unless America takes charge, we will have “world chaos, and a dangerous twenty-first century.”31 In January of 2001, as the Bush-Cheney administration was ready to come to power, Kagan criticized “Clinton and his advisers” for “having the stomach only to be halfway imperialists.”32
It is important to understand the development of this neoconservative ideology, given the fact that after 9/11, the neocon agenda became the agenda of the United States. As Halper and Clarke said in 2004, “if one wishes to understand the direction of American foreign policy today, one must read what neo-conservatives were writing ten years or more ago.”33
The most important development within the neocon movement in the 1990s was William Kristol’s founding, in 1997, of a unipolarist think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).34 Closely related to the American Enterprise Institute ideologically and even physically and financially, PNAC differed primarily in focusing entirely on foreign policy.35 In its “Statement of Principles,” PNAC called for “American global leadership,” asking whether the United States has “the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.”36
In September of 2000, just three months before the Bush-Cheney administration took office, PNAC published a 76-page document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses (RAD). Saying that “[a]t present the United States faces no global rival,” RAD declared that “America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position” and thereby “to preserve and enhance [the] ‘American peace.’” To “enhance” the “American peace” means, of course, to increase the size of the American empire. Explicitly referring back to the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance draft of 1992, RAD said that “the basic tenets of the DPG, in our judgment, remain sound.” The continuity between the two documents is no surprise, partly because Libby and Wolfowitz are listed as participants in the production of this 2000 document.37
What is said in the PNAC’s documents is highly important because many of PNAC’s early members, including Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Eliot Cohen, Paula Dobriansky, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, James Woolsey, and---most significantly---Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, became central members of the new Bush administration. PNAC neocons thereby took key positions in the Vice President’s Office, the Pentagon, and the (only semi-independent) Defense Policy Board. They did so well primarily because of Cheney, who was put in charge of the transition team, and secondarily because of Rumsfeld, after Cheney chose him to head the Pentagon.38
9/11 and Empire Talk:
With the new administration in place, neocon commentators such as Krauthammer became even more explicit and exuberant about the use of America’s power for imperial ends. Mocking Clinton for being concerned to be “a good international citizen” and praising Bush for understanding that “the U.S. can reshape, indeed remake, reality on its own,” Krauthammer said: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms . . . and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”39
However, it was not until after 9/11, and especially after the devastating assault on Afghanistan, that the neocon effort to get Americans to accept an imperial self-definition started showing widespread success. Early in 2002, Krauthammer, having noticed the difference, said: “People are coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’” Driving home his main message, Krauthammer added that Americans needed to face up to the responsibilities entailed by the fact that they are now “undisputed masters of the world.”40
A year later, this unilateralist idea was voiced in the Atlantic Monthly by neocon Robert Kaplan, who argued that America should use its power unilaterally to “manage an unruly world,” leaving behind “the so-called international community,” especially the United Nations, with its “antiquated power arrangement.”41
9/11 and the 9/11 wars---meaning those that have been justified by appeal to the attacks of 9/1142---resulted in empire talk beyond the circles of neocons. Early in 2002, after the American assault on Afghanistan, Paul Kennedy, who had 15 years earlier been predicting America’s decline as a great power,43 declared: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power.” Describing America’s empire as the greatest of all time, he said: “Charlemagne’s empire was merely Western European in reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.”44
A very important development that same year was the publication of Andrew Bacevich’s American Empire, which closes by saying that the question before Americans is “not whether the United States has become an imperial power” but only “what sort of empire they intend theirs to be.”45 Bacevich himself, while a conservative, strongly distanced himself from the imperial agenda of the neocons.46
But it was their agenda, not Bacevich’s cautionary critique, that would determine the “sort of empire” that the United States would seek to become during the Bush-Cheney administration. And it was 9/11 that allowed this agenda to be implemented. As Claes Ryn said, the neoconservatives “have taken full advantage of the nation’s outrage over 9/11 to advance their already fully formed drive for empire.”47
2. Military Omnipotence:
The tool for fulfilling this drive for empire, neocons have always held, is military power. To a great extent, in fact, the neoconservative movement began in reaction to the widespread view after the Vietnam war that American military power should never again be used for imperialistic purposes. In the early 1980s, rejecting the left’s conclusion that force had become “obsolete as an instrument of American political purposes,” Norman Podhoretz argued that military power constitutes “the indispensable foundation of U.S. foreign policy,” adding that “without it, nothing else we do will be effective.”48
The Cheney-Wolfowitz DPG of 1992, having said that “[o]ur first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” added that “we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a regional or global role.” These “mechanisms” referred, of course, to various kinds of military power.
Space and Full Spectrum Dominance:
The U.S. military in the 1990s developed concepts to attain the kind of military superiority envisaged in this document. One of these concepts was “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which, says Bacevich, is the attempt “to achieve something approaching omnipotence.”49 He is here referring to a document entitled “Joint Vision 2010,” which was first published by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1996. Defining “Full Spectrum Dominance” as “the capability to dominate an opponent across the range of military operations,” this document says that it “will be the key characteristic we seek for our Armed Forces in the 21st century.”50 Given the fact that the U.S. military was already dominant on the land and the water and in the air, the new component needed was dominance in space.
Space dominance was described in a 1997 document entitled “Vision for 2020,” published by the U.S. Space Command, a division of the Air Force. The unique mission of the Space Command is to “dominat[e] the space dimension of military operations.” By merging this “space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority,” the U.S. military will have Full Spectrum Dominance.51
This notion was further developed in the Pentagon’s “Joint Vision 2020,” which first appeared in 2000.52 It speaks of full spectrum dominance as involving not just four but five dimensions: “space, sea, land, air, and information.” In addition, this document says, “given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.” This statement gives support to Bacevich’s observation that after the end of the Cold War, “the Department of Defense completed its transformation into a Department of Power Projection.”53
PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses appeared in September of that same year. Written to influence the next administration, RAD’s main point was that “the next president of the United States . . . must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership.”54
Besides arguing for increased spending across the board, RAD argued in particular for increased funding for the U.S. Space Command. Saying that “the ability to have access to, operate in, and dominate the aerospace environment has become the key to military success in modern, high-technology warfare,” it advocated not only “missile defense” but also “placing . . . weapons in space.” The weapons, moreover, are not simply for defensive purposes, but also for “the ability to conduct strikes from space,” which will give the U.S. military a “global first-strike force.”55
The Revolution in Military Affairs:
This development of space-based weapons was presented as simply one part, albeit probably the most important part, of a more general transformation of the military that exploits the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), which has been made possible by information technologies.56 This RMA transformation of the military was said to be “sufficiently important to consider it a separate mission.”57
In spite of this importance, however, the authors of RAD, ever mindful of budgetary constraints and widespread commitment to more traditional ways, warned that the needed transformation would not occur quickly, at least if the present climate continued. In a statement that has been widely quoted in the 9/11 truth movement, they wrote that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event---like a new Pearl Harbor.”58
The emphasis in RAD on exploiting the RMA to transform the Pentagon’s approach is no surprise, since one of the participants in the project to produce this document was Wolfowitz, who had long before fallen under the spell of Albert Wohlstetter (one of the models for “Dr. Strangelove”59). Wohlstetter had been the main early proponent of the ideas that came to be dubbed the “revolution in military affairs” by Andrew Marshall, who later became the main proponent.60 Marshall, who at this writing was still serving as the RMA guru in the Pentagon, numbers Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld among his disciples.61
Rumsfeld, in fact, was at the same time heading up a special commission to make recommendations about the military use of space. This “Rumsfeld Commission,” endorsing the idea of military transformation, including the weaponization of space, said that the United States should “[e]mploy space systems to help speed the transformation of the U.S. military into a modern force able to deter and defend against evolving threats directed at . . . [our] forward deployed forces.”62 (In other words, although the language of “defense” and “deterrence” is used, part of the purpose of the space weapons is to prevent attacks on America’s offensive operations.) This report, interestingly, also used the Pearl Harbor analogy. Warning against the tendency to consider an attack on U.S. space satellites as too improbable to worry about, the report of the Rumsfeld Commission said:
History is replete with instances in which warning signs were ignored and change resisted until an external, “improbable” event forced resistant bureaucracies to take action. The question is whether the U.S. will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce U.S. space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people—-a “Space Pearl Harbor”—-will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act.63
9/11 as the New Pearl Harbor:
The attacks of 9/11 were widely referred to as a new Pearl Harbor. President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary on the night of 9/11: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.”64 Immediately after the attacks, many people, from Robert Kagan to Henry Kissinger to a writer for Time magazine, said that America should respond to the attacks of 9/11 in the same way it had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor.65
Moreover, just as the attack on Pearl Harbor gave the United States the opportunity to enter World War II, which in turn allowed it to replace Great Britain as the leading imperial power, the attacks of 9/11 were widely regarded as an opportunity. Donald Rumsfeld stated that 9/11 created “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.”66
Condoleezza Rice reportedly told senior members of the National Security Council to “think about ‘how do you capitalize on these opportunities’ to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th.”67 In a public address, she said that “if the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 bookend a major shift in international politics, then this is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity.”68 According to Bob Woodward, the president himself said that the attacks provided “a great opportunity.”69
Only two days after 9/11, in fact, Bush said in a telephone conversation with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki of New York: “[T]hrough the tears of sadness I see an opportunity.” The next day, he reportedly used exactly the same words while talking to the press.70
Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker, dealing with this response to 9/11 as an opportunity, reports that he was told by a senior official of the Bush administration (who insisted on anonymity) that, in Lemann’s paraphrase, “the reason September 11th appears to have been ‘a transformative moment’ is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas.”71 We did not, of course, hear that stated publicly by any member of the Bush-Cheney administration.
The attacks of 9/11 also reduced Congressional resistance to providing increased funding for Pentagon programs. On the evening of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld held a news briefing on the Pentagon attack. At this briefing, Senator Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked: “Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don’t have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending?”72 Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and much more later, with few questions asked.
The attacks of 9/11, moreover, aided those who favored a transformation of the military along RMA lines. In the weeks before September 11, Bacevich reports, “military transformation appeared to be dead in the water,” because the military brass were “wedded to existing weapons systems, troop structure, and strategy.”73 But, Bacevich continues:
President Bush’s decision after September 11 to wage a global war against terror boosted the RMA’s stock. After 9/11, the Pentagon shifted from the business of theorizing about war to the business of actually waging it. This created an opening for RMA advocates to make their case. War plans . . . became the means for demonstrating once for all the efficacy of the ideas advanced by Wohlstetter and Marshall and now supported by . . . Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.74
After the removal of Saddam Hussein, Richard Perle, who had long shared Wolfowitz’s enthusiasm for Wohlstetter’s ideas, said: “This is the first war that’s been fought in a way that would recognize Albert’s vision of future wars.”75
These ideas for achieving military omnipotence became official policy with the publication, one year after 9/11, of the Bush-Cheney administration’s National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS 2002), which said: “We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge” so that we can “dissuade future military competition.”76
The conviction that 9/11 provided an opportunity was also reflected in NSS 2002, which said: “The events of September 11, 2001, . . . opened vast, new opportunities.”77 One of the things for which it most clearly provided an opportunity was the doctrine of preemptive-preventive war.
3. Preemptive-Preventive War:
This hyphenated term is used here for clarity. The doctrine in question, which involves attacking another country even though it poses no immediate threat, is technically called “preventive war.” This doctrine, which violates international law as reflected in the charter of the United Nations, is to be distinguished from what is technically called “preemptive war,” which occurs when Country A attacks Country B after learning that an attack from Country B is imminent---too imminent to allow time for the U.N. to intervene. These technical terms, however, are problematic, because although preventive war, being illegal, is worse than preemptive war, to most ears “preemption” sounds worse than “prevention.” As a result, many people speak of “preemptive war” when they mean preventive war. The term “preemptive-preventive war,” while somewhat cumbersome, solves this problem.78
Historical Emergence of the Doctrine:
This doctrine of preemptive-preventive war had been advocated by neocons long before 9/11. It was contained already in the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, which said that the United States should use force to “preempt” and “preclude threats.”79
In 1996, Richard Perle and other neocons prepared a strategy paper entitled “A Clean Break” for Benjamin Netanyahu, who had recently been elected prime minister of Israel. This paper recommended that Israel, in making a clean break from previous strategies, establish “the principle of preemption.”80
In 1997, PNAC’s “Statement of Principles” argued that to exert “global leadership,” America needs to “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.”81
In 1998, a letter from PNAC, signed by Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and 15 other members, urged President Clinton to “undertake military action” to eliminate “the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.”82
The Doctrine of Preemptive-Preventive War after 9/11:
Although these neocons were anxious to have their doctrine of preemptive-preventive war accepted as national policy, this did not occur during the Clinton presidency or even during the first eight months of the Bush-Cheney administration. After 9/11, however, it did. “The events of 9/11,” observes Bacevich, “provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power.”83
The idea of preemptive-preventive war, which came to be known as the “Bush doctrine,” was first clearly expressed in the president’s address at West Point in June 2002 (when the administration started preparing the American people psychologically for the attack on Iraq). Having stated that, in relation to the “new threats,” deterrence “means nothing” and containment is “not possible,” Bush even took aim at the traditional understanding of preemption, saying: “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” Then, using the language of preemption while really meaning preemptive-prevention, he said that America’s security “will require all Americans . . . to be ready for preemptive action.”84
NSS 2002:
However, although the West Point speech provided a first statement of this new doctrine, it was in NSS 2002, published that September, that the new doctrine was laid out at some length. The covering letter, signed by the president, says that with regard to “our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies,” America will, in self-defense, “act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”85 The document itself, saying that “our best defense is a good offense,” also states:
Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today's threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries' choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.86
To justify this doctrine, NSS 2002 argues that the United States must “adapt” the traditional doctrine of preemption, long recognized as a right, to the new situation, thereby turning it into a right of anticipatory (preventive) preemption:
For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. . . . We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. . . . The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, . . . the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.87
With this argument, the authors of NSS 2002 tried to suggest that, since this doctrine of anticipatory preemption simply involves adapting a traditionally recognized right to a new situation, it involves no great change. But it does. According to the traditional doctrine, one needed certain evidence that the other country was going to launch an immediate attack. According to the Bush Doctrine, by contrast, the United States can attack another country “even if uncertainty remains” and even, more flagrantly, if the United States knows that the threat from the other country is not yet “fully formed.”
The novelty here, to be sure, involves doctrine more than practice. The United States has in practice attacked several countries that presented no imminent military threat. But it always portrayed these attacks in such a way that they could appear to comport with international law. The attack on North Vietnam after the alleged incident in the Tonkin Gulf provides an example. But “[n]ever before,” point out Halper and Clarke, “had any president set out a formal national strategy doctrine that included [preventive] preemption.”88 This is a step of great significance, because it involves an explicit statement by the United States that the basic principle of international law, as embodied in the United Nations, does not apply to its own behavior.
Zelikow as Primary Drafter of NSS 2002:
Max Boot, a neocon who has become well known through his newspaper columns, has described NSS 2002 as a “quintessentially neo-conservative document.”89 Now that the basic ideas of this document have been laid out, we can see the accuracy of his observation.
We can also see the importance of a still little-known fact: that Philip Zelikow, who would later become the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, was chosen by Condoleezza Rice to be the primary drafter of NSS 2002.90
According to James Mann in The Rise of the Vulcans, after Rice saw the first draft of this document (which had been prepared by Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in Colin Powell’s State Department), she “ordered the document be completely rewritten. She thought the Bush administration needed something bolder. . . . Rice turned the writing over to her old colleague, . . . Philip Zelikow.”91
(Rice and Zelikow had worked together in the National Security Council in the administration of the first President Bush; when the Republicans were out of power during the Clinton presidency, they wrote a book together; and then when she was appointed National Security Advisor for the second President Bush, she brought on Zelikow to help with the transition to the new National Security Council.)
Given the content and tone of the document, one might assume that Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz had been involved in the process of creating it. According to Mann, however, “the hawks in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office hadn’t been closely involved, even though the document incorporated many of their key ideas. They had left the details and the drafting in the hands of Rice and Zelikow, along with Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley.”92
Some insight into Zelikow’s views before coming to this task might be garnered from an essay he co-authored in 1998 on “catastrophic terrorism.” In this essay, which suggests that he had been thinking about the World Trade Center and a new Pearl Harbor several years prior to 9/1, Zelikow and his co-authors say:
If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.93
In any case, in light of Zelikow’s close relationship with the Bush administration and especially his authorship of NSS 2002, we cannot take seriously the claim of the 9/11 Commission that it sought to be “independent.”94 As executive director, he had tremendous power to shape the work of the Commission, deciding which issues it would investigate and which not, and he was primarily responsible for the final form of The 9/11 Commission Report.95 The Family Steering Committee, which represented families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, vigorously protested his appointment, calling for “Dr. Zelikow’s immediate resignation” and for the “Commission to apologize to the 9/11 families and America for this massive appearance of impropriety.”96 But these calls were dismissed.
Given Zelikow's close relationship with the Bush-Cheney administration and his own authorship of NSS 2002, it is certainly no surprise that, as I reported in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions,97 there is no mention of imperial interests that might have served as motives for the Bush-Cheney administration to have orchestrated or at least permitted the attacks of 9/11.
The Zelikow-led Commission did not, for example, mention that PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses had suggested that the transformation of the military, through which unipolarity could be enforced more effectively, could occur more quickly if there were to be “a new Pearl Harbor”; it did not mention that the administration had had plans, to be discussed below, to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq prior to 9/11; and it did not mention that 9/11 had been described as presenting “opportunities” by Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, and, in fact, NSS 2002. Once we know of Zelikow’s authorship of that document, moreover, it is also no surprise to see that The 9/11 Commission Report contains a chapter---“What to Do? A Global Strategy”---that provides propaganda for the Bush-Cheney administration’s post-9/11 foreign policy.
I return now to the discussion of possible imperial motives for 9/11 within the Bush-Cheney administration.
4. The Attack on Afghanistan:
Many times since the formal enunciation of the doctrine of preemptive-preventive warfare, the Bush-Cheney administration has defended it as necessitated by 9/11. In an address to the nation in 2004, for example, Bush said that the two lessons of 9/11 are that this country “must deal with gathering threats” and that it “must go on the offense and stay on the offense.”98 The first victim of this claimed right to “go on the offense” was Afghanistan.
Although the attacks of 9/11 were, according to the official story, planned and carried out by a non-state organization, al-Qaeda, rather than by some state, the Bush-Cheney administration used the attacks as a pretext to launch attacks on states---attacks that had been planned before 9/11. The justification for this switch was provided by Bush’s address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, in which he declared: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”99 The attack on Afghanistan was then justified on the grounds that the Taliban was “harboring” Osama bin Laden, the evil genius behind the 9/11 attacks, whom Bush on September 17 said he wanted “dead or alive” (after Cheney had said that he would willingly accept bin Laden’s “head on a platter”).100
But this was a pretext rather than the real reason for attacking Afghanistan---as illustrated by the fact that when the Bush administration had an opportunity to take bin Laden alive, it showed no interest. A week after 9/11, the Taliban said that it would hand OBL over---if the United States presented proof of his involvement in 9/11. But Bush refused to provide any such evidence, saying that there would be no negotiations or even discussion.101 Again, four weeks after the U.S. attack on Afghanistan began, a Taliban spokesman said: "We will negotiate. But . . . [w]e are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama's involvement, but they have refused. Why?"102
There are probably two answers to this question. First, there is much evidence that the Bush administration did not want bin Laden, either dead or alive. One part of this evidence consists of several reports that the U.S. military in Afghanistan deliberately let bin Laden escape more than once.103 A second reason is that the Bush administration, besides knowing that bin Laden was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks, evidently decided that it could not even marshal convincing (albeit false) case that he was (as suggested by the fact that, after a White Paper presenting this proof was promised, it was never produced104).
More recently, the FBI, in response to a query as to why does not list 9/11 as one of the crimes for which bin Laden is wanted, has said: “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11”105(a rather astounding admission that, one might think, should have been reported on the nightly news and in The New York Times).
To understand the real reasons for the attack on Afghanistan, one needs to look at some developments prior to 9/11. One such development was the publication in 1997 of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. As the subtitle shows, Brzezinski, while not a neoconservative, shared the neocons’ concern to maintain and enhance U.S. “primacy.” Portraying Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to world power, Brzezinski argued that America, to ensure its continued primacy, must get control of this region, which would mean establishing several military bases there.
However, Brzezinski added, American democracy posed an obstacle:
America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. . . . The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.106
Brzezinski, however, then suggested a way in which this obstacle could be overcome. Having said that in the United States “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion,” he then added: “except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well being.”107 The American people would be willing to make the economic and human sacrifices needed for “imperial mobilization,” he suggested, if there were “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”108 The kind of threat he had in mind was suggested by his statement, earlier in the book, that the public was willing to support “America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”109
It is possible that Brzezinski’s discussion here inspired the statement about a “new Pearl Harbor” in PNAC’s 2000 document, which can be read as a call for a false-flag operation that would provide a pretext for turning PNAC’s agenda into official policy. The plausibility of this reading was increased, moreover, by a statement made by Brzezinski’s during his warning, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1, 2007, that a “head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large” was the likely outcome of the US frustration in Iraq. “A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran,” Brzezinski suggested, involves “a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran.” Adding that a “mythical historical narrative” for an expanded attack on Islamic countries “is already being articulated,” Brzezinski said that “9/11 [is being presented] as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack.”110
Be that as it may, a more specific motivation for the post-9/11 attack on Afghanistan was provided by the “pipeline war” that was going on.111 The Bush-Cheney administration supported--as had the Clinton-Gore administration until 1999--UNOCAL’s plan to build an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan, which was in competition with plans from oil companies based in other countries. What happened in 1999 was that UNOCAL, having become convinced that Afghanistan under the Taliban would never have the peace and stability needed for the pipeline project, decided to withdraw. Ahmed Rashid, finishing his book on the Taliban in mid-1999, wrote that the Clinton administration had shifted its support to the pipeline route from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey, adding that “by now nobody wanted to touch Afghanistan and the Taliban.”112
When the Bush administration came to power, however, it decided to give the Taliban one last chance. This last chance occurred at a four-day meeting in Berlin in July 2001. Representatives of the Bush-Cheney administration, trying to persuade the Taliban to share power with US-friendly factions in a “unity government,” reportedly gave the Taliban an ultimatum: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”113 When the Taliban refused, the Americans reportedly said that “military action against Afghanistan would go ahead . . . before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”114
Given the fact that the attacks on New York and Washington occurred on September 11, the U.S. military had time to get ready, logistically, to begin its war in Afghanistan on October 7. By October 10, the U.S. Department of State had informed the Pakistani Minister of Oil that “in view of recent geopolitical developments,” UNOCAL was ready to go ahead with the pipeline project.115
The contention that at least one of the purposes of the war was to support this project is suggested by the fact that the post-Taliban Prime Minister, Hamid Karzai, had previously been on UNOCAL’s payroll, as had been PNAC member Zalmay Khalilzad, who in 2001 was appointed Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan and then in 2003 became the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. As Chalmers Johnson said in 2004: “The continued collaboration of Khalilzad and Karzai in post-9/11 Afghanistan strongly suggests that the Bush administration was and remains . . . interested in oil.”116 (In March of 2005, Khalilzad would become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.117)
Still more evidence is provided by the placement of the military bases in Afghanistan. As one Israeli writer put it: “If one looks at the map of the big American bases created, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.”118
The concern to enable an American oil company to build this pipeline should not, however, be considered the only or even the primary motivation. The larger concern, suggests Chalmers Johnson, was “to establish an American presence in Central Asia.” Evidence for this view is provided by the fact that the United States, besides establishing long-term bases in Afghanistan, had within a month after 9/11 arranged for long-term bases in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.119
The new Pearl Harbor that occurred on 9/11, therefore, allowed the United States to support UNOCAL’s pipeline project and, more generally, to fulfill the program, suggested by Brzezinski, of taking control of this region of the world.
The fact that 9/11 provided the necessary condition for the war in Afghanistan was stated by both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. In 2004, Wolfowitz told the 9/11 Commission that if the Department of Defense had asked Congress for permission to invade Afghanistan prior to 9/11, this request would not have been taken seriously. Rumsfeld, telling the Commission that “it can take a tragedy like September 11th to awaken the world to new threats and to the need for action,” said that prior to 9/11 the president could not have convinced Congress that the United States needed to “invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban.”120
Afghanistan and the surrounding region was not, however, the primary target in the sights of the Bush-Cheney administration. That target was Iraq.
5. The Attack on Iraq:
Several neocons, including some who became central members of the Bush-Cheney administration, had been wanting to bring about regime change in Iraq ever since Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Leading voices for this policy included Cheney and Wolfowitz, who were then secretary and under-secretary of defense, respectively, and also Richard Perle, who chaired a committee set up by neocons called Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf. But this idea was opposed by President Bush along with General Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander, so it was not carried out.121
In 1992, Albert Wohlstetter, who had inspired Perle and Wolfowitz and other neocons, expressed exasperation that nothing had been done about “a dictatorship sitting on the world’s second largest pool of low-cost oil and ambitious to dominate the Gulf.”122 (Wohlstetter’s statement reflected his conviction, expressed back in 1981, that America needs to establish forces, bases, and infrastructure so as to enjoy unquestioned primacy in the region.123)
In 1996, the “Clean Break” paper, written for Israel by Perle and other neocons, proposed that Israel remove from power all of its enemies in the region, beginning with Saddam Hussein. This 1996 document, in the opinion of Arnaud de Borchgrave, president of United Press International, “provided the strategic underpinnings for Operation Iraqi Freedom seven years later.”124
In 1997, Wolfowitz and Khalilzad published a statement arguing that “Saddam Must Go.”125
In 1998, Kristol and Kagan, in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough,” called for “finishing the job left undone in 1991.”126 Wolfowitz told the House National Security Committee that it had been a mistake in 1991 to leave Saddam in power. Also, writing in the New Republic, he said: “Toppling Saddam is the only outcome that can satisfy the vital U.S. interest in a stable and secure Gulf region.”127 And the afore-mentioned letter to President Clinton from PNAC---signed by Cheney, Kristol, Perle, and Wolfowitz, among others---urged him to “take the necessary steps, including military steps,” to “remov[e] Saddam’s regime from power.” Then, getting no agreement from Clinton, PNAC wrote a similar letter to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, then the leaders of the House and the Senate, respectively.128
In 2000, PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, pointing out that “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” added: “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.”129
Given the fact that Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other neocons were given central positions in the new Bush administration, it is not surprising to learn, from two former members of this administration, that it came into office intent on attacking Iraq. Paul O’Neill, who was secretary of the treasury and hence a member of the National Security Council, has said that within days of the inauguration, the main topic was going after Saddam, with the question being not “Why Saddam?” or “Why Now?” but merely “finding a way to do it.”130 Richard Clarke, who had been the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, confirmed O’Neill’s charge, saying: “The administration of the second George Bush did begin with Iraq on its agenda.”131
Until the attacks of 9/11, however, no one had found “a way to do it.” As neocon Kenneth Adelman has said: “At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn’t doable. . . . That changed with September 11.”132 Bob Woodward makes the same observation in Bush at War, saying: “The terrorist attacks of September 11 gave the U.S. a new window to go after Hussein.”133
However, even 9/11, by itself, was not a sufficient basis for getting the American people’s support for an attack on Iraq. Not for lack of effort by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. On the afternoon of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld said in a note to General Richard Myers—-the acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--that he wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]."134 In the following days, both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz argued that Saddam's Iraq should be, in Woodward’s paraphrase, “a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism.”135
Colin Powell, however, argued that both the American people and other countries would at that time support an attack on Afghanistan, to do something about al-Qaeda, but not an attack on Iraq, since there was no evidence that it had anything to do with 9/11. He added, however, that after a successful campaign in Afghanistan, a war on Iraq would become more feasible. Bush accepted this argument.136 In doing so, he was not rejecting the proposal to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq, merely postponing its implementation: A plan for going to war in Afghanistan that Bush signed on September 17 also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.137
Stephen Sniegoski, explaining why the attack on Iraq could not be launched immediately, says:
“[A]lthough the 9/11 atrocities psychologically prepared the American people for the war on Iraq, those horrific events were not sufficient by themselves to thrust America immediately into an attack on Iraq.” A “lengthy propaganda offensive” would also be needed.138
This propaganda offensive involved convincing a majority of the American people of the truth of two false claims: that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11 and that he possessed, or soon would possess, weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, with which he could attack America. This part of the story is too well known to need much rehearsal. The point to emphasize here is that although this later propaganda was necessary, its success depended on 9/11. Halper and Clarke say that “it was 9/11 that provided the political context in which the thinking of neo-conservatives could be turned into operational policy.”139
Sniegoski, spelling out the point more fully, says:
The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and fearful. Ordinary Americans wanted
to strike back at the terrorist enemy, even though they weren’t exactly sure who that enemy was. . . . Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible to the administration’s propaganda that the United States had to strike Iraq before Iraq somehow struck the United States. . . . It wasn’t that difficult to channel American fear and anger into war against Iraq.140
Much of this channeling was done by the Bush-Cheney administration, especially Bush and Cheney themselves. In August of 2002, for example, Cheney declared that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction . . . [and] is amassing them to use . . . against us.”141 In October, Bush said that, having “experienced the horror of September the 11th, . . . America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”142
The administration was greatly aided in this propaganda offensive by neoconservatives outside the government, who “linked their preexisting agenda (an attack on Iraq) to a separate event (9/11).”143 Through their incessant propaganda---most widely spread in Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol’s The War over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission---“Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were morphed into the same enemy” and “the war on terror and war in Iraq were joined at the hip.”144
This propaganda campaign was enormously successful. Shortly before the war on Iraq was launched, the two key ideas in the campaign---that Saddam Hussein had played a direct role in the attacks of 9/11 and that he was a threat because he had weapons of mass destruction---were accepted by 70 percent of the American people.145 As a result, point out Halper and Clarke, the Bush-Cheney administration was “able to build the environment surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 2001 into a wide moral platform from which to launch a preemptive strike.”146
That this propaganda campaign would be successful would have been predictable. As Hermann Göring, one of the top Nazi officials, said: “[I]t is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.”147
Accordingly, the fact that there were no Iraqis among the alleged hijackers does not mean that the desire for a pretext to attack Iraq could not have been one of the imperial motives behind the attacks of 9/11. The crucial precondition for the war in Iraq was a psychological state of mind in the American public---one of fear and anxiety combined with a desire for revenge---that would countenance the new doctrine of preemptive-preventive war.
This state of mind was abundantly created by 9/11. Then, just as the ensuing propaganda offensive against Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban created almost unanimous acceptance of the war in Afghanistan, the propaganda offensive directed at Saddam Hussein was rather easily able to channel this fear, anxiety, and desire for revenge into a widespread feeling that a war to bring about regime change in Iraq was justified.
Conclusion:
The attacks of 9/11 allowed the imperialist agenda of leading neoconservatives to be implemented. Can we infer from this effect that the hope to have this agenda fulfilled was one of the motives for the 9/11 attacks? Of course not. One of the basic principles of criminal investigations, however, is the question: Who benefits? Those who most benefit from the crime are usually the most likely suspects. But an answer to that question cannot by itself be used as proof of the suspects’ guilt. The prosecution must also show that the suspects had the means and the opportunity to commit the crime. It must also present evidence that the suspects actually committed the crime---at least indirect evidence, perhaps by showing that they were the only ones who could have done it.
I have elsewhere presented evidence---what I first called prima facie evidence but now call overwhelming evidence148---that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by leading members of the Bush-Cheney administration.
This evidence includes many reasons to conclude that the official accounts of the World Trade Center collapses, the attack on the Pentagon, the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, and the failure of the U.S. military to intercept the other flights cannot be true.
This evidence also includes many reasons to conclude that The 9/11 Commission Report involved a systematic cover-up of dozens of facts that conflict with the official conspiracy theory about 9/11, according to which the attacks were conceived and carried out entirely by al-Qaeda---evidence that instead points to official complicity.
One example of this evidence is the fact that the Commission changed by about 45 minutes the time at which Vice President Cheney went down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House, thereby indicating that he could not have been responsible, as evidence suggests, for allowing the strike on the Pentagon and ordering the downing of UA 93.149
Many people, to be sure, feel that there is no need to examine the evidence that the attacks were arranged by members of the Bush administration because they feel certain, on a priori grounds, that it simply would not have done such a thing.
Having addressed most of those grounds elsewhere,150 I have here dealt with only one of them, which is often phrased as a rhetorical question:
What motive could they possibly have had for arranging attacks on their own citizens?
Having suggested that the motive was to have a pretext to turn the neocon agenda into national policy, I should add that it is probably only the neocons in office, and even only some of them, who should be suspected of involvement in the planning for 9/11.
To say that 9/11 allowed the agenda of the neocons in general to be implemented does not imply that many or even any neocons outside the government were involved in the planning for, or even had advance knowledge of, the attacks of 9/11. A
bout eight months after 9/11, for example, William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote pieces urging the Bush-Cheney administration to undertake an investigation to see if the attacks might have been prevented. Gary Dorrien, reporting that this call “earned a sharp rebuke from Cheney,” adds that “the Bush administration had no intention of allowing an investigation on that subject.”151
No genuine investigation has been carried out to this day.
If Congress would authorize such an investigation, the American people, I am convinced, would see that the grounds for impeaching Bush and Cheney are even stronger than those that have been part of the public discussion thus far.
They would also see that the reasons for opposing the war in Iraq are even stronger than those publicly discussed thus far, because it was from the start an imperialistic war based on a false-flag operation (as well as additional lies).
They would even see that, although many critics of the administration have said that we should pull our troops out of Iraq and put them in Afghanistan, our attack on that country was no more legitimate.
This essay is a revised version of “Imperial Motives for a ‘New Pearl Harbor,’” chap. 6 of David Ray Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 : A Call to Reflection and Action (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006).
Griffin is professor emeritus at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University.
His most recent books are Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy and Debunking 9/11 Debunking.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
My purpose in publishing this essay is to introduce a perspective, relevant to the debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that thus far has not been part of the public discussion.
One way to understand the effect of 9/11, in most general terms, is to see that it allowed the agenda developed in the 1990s by neoconservatives—-often called simply “neocons”---to be implemented. There is agreement on this point across the political spectrum. From the right, for example, Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke say that 9/11 allowed the “preexisting ideological agenda” of the neoconservatives to be “taken off the shelf . . . and relabeled as the response to terror.”1 Stephen Sniegoski, writing from the left, says that “it was only the traumatic effects of the 9/11 terrorism that enabled the agenda of the neocons to become the policy of the United States of America.”2
What was this agenda? It was, in essence, that the United States should use its military supremacy to establish an empire that includes the whole world--a global Pax Americana. Three major means to this end were suggested. One of these was to make U.S. military supremacy over other nations even greater, so that it would be completely beyond challenge. This goal was to be achieved by increasing the money devoted to military purposes, then using this money to complete the “revolution in military affairs” made possible by the emergence of the information age. The second major way to achieve a global Pax Americana was to announce and implement a doctrine of preventive-preemptive war, usually for the sake of bringing about “regime change” in countries regarded as hostile to U.S. interests and values. The third means toward the goal of universal empire was to use this new doctrine to gain control of the world’s oil, especially in the Middle East, most immediately Iraq.
In discussing these ideas, I will include recognitions by some commentators that without 9/11, the various dimensions of this agenda could not have been implemented. My purpose in publishing this essay is to introduce a perspective, relevant to the debates about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, that thus far has not been part of the public discussion.
1. Neoconservatives and Global Empire:
The “neo” in the term “neo-conservative” is a remnant of the fact that the first generation neoconservatives, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, had moved to the right after having been members of the left. Kristol, often called “the godfather of neoconservatism,” famously defined neoconservatives as liberals who had been “mugged by reality.” No such move, however, has characterized most of the second-generation neocons, who came to dominate the movement in the 1990s. As Gary Dorrien says in Imperial Designs:
Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana, “the new neocons had never been progressives of any kind.”3 The term “neoconservatism” is, in any case, used here to refer strictly to an ideology, not to any biographical facts about those who hold this ideology.
I mean “biographical facts” to include ethnicity. Although many of the prominent neoconservatives have been Jewish, leading some people to think that Jewishness is a necessary condition for being a neo-conservative, this is not so. As Dorrien points out, “a significant number of prominent neocons were not Jews.”4
This discussion has its primary importance in relation to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. If neoconservatism is understood to be entirely a matter of ideology, not also partly a matter of biography, then there is no reason not to think of Cheney and Rumsfeld as neocons. As former neocon Michael Lind, says: “[N]eoconservatism is an ideology, like paleoconservatism and libertarianism, and Rumsfeld and Dick . . . Cheney are full-fledged neocons, . . . even though they are not Jewish and were never liberals or leftists.”5
Neoconservatism in its early decades was a multi-faceted phenomenon, but the focus here is on its foreign policy. Neoconservative foreign policy was originally oriented around opposition to Communism. This fact meant that the end of the Cold War produced a crisis for neocons. In 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, Podhoretz said that he was not sure what “America’s purpose should be now that the threat of Communism . . . had been decisively eliminated.” Five years later, he even published a eulogy to the movement, declaring it dead.6
Unipolarity:
Other neocons, however, believed that they had a new cause to champion. Already in 1986, Irving Kristol argued that the United States needed to move toward a foreign policy of “global unilateralism.” But that would be difficult, he pointed out, as long as America is “an imperial power with no imperial self-definition.”7 The new cause was to shape this new self-definition, thereby getting Americans ready to accept a policy of global unilateralism.
As soon as the Cold War ended, this cause was taken up by others. At the close of 1989, Charles Krauthammer, one of the best-known neocon columnists, published a piece entitled “Universal Dominion,” in which he argued that America should work for “a qualitatively new outcome--a unipolar world.”8 In 1990, he argued that unipolarity has already arrived and that the United States, being the “unchallenged superpower,” should act unilaterally. Saying that “[t]he alternative to unipolarity is chaos,” Krauthammer explained what unipolarity requires of the United States: “unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them.”9 The following year, in an argument for a “robust interventionism,” he said of this unipolar world: “We Americans should like it---and exploit it.”10
The 1992 Defense Planning Guidance:
The first effort to turn such thinking into official policy came in 1992, which was the last year of the presidency of George H. W. Bush and hence also the end of Dick Cheney’s tenure as secretary of defense. Before leaving office, Cheney had Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense for policy, prepare---with the help of his top assistant, Lewis “Scooter” Libby---a draft of the Pentagon’s “Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG).11 Stating that America’s “first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” this DPG draft was, in Andrew Bacevich’s appraisal, “in effect a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony.”12
This draft produced, after portions of a leaked copy were published in the New York Times and the Washington Post,13 an outpouring of criticism. The ideas did get some support, especially from neoconservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal, which praised the draft’s plan for a “Pax Americana.”14 But most of the reaction was critical. Senator Alan Cranston complained that the Bush administration was seeking to make the United States “the one, the only main honcho on the world block, the global Big Enchilada.”15 Senator Robert Byrd said that the document’s stance seemed to be: “We love being the sole remaining superpower in the world and we want so much to remain that way that we are willing to put at risk the basic health of our economy and well-being of our people to do so.”16
Seeking to calm the waters, especially because it was an election year, the administration of George H. W. Bush distanced itself from this draft, depicting it, in Bacevich’s words, “as the musings of an insignificant lower-tier appointee acting without official sanction.”17 Although Wolfowitz would refer to it as “my 1992 memorandum” many years later,18 he claimed at the time that he had not seen it.19 Cheney also claimed not to have seen it, even though one long section began by acknowledging “definitive guidance from the Secretary of Defense.” This latter fact has, incidentally, been pointed out by David Armstrong, who calls this draft an early version of Cheney’s “Plan . . . to rule the world.”20 Although this draft came to be known as “the Wolfowitz plan,” it is important to recognize that it was Cheney who, in Dorrien’s words, “hatched the original unipolarist blueprint in 1992.”21 Indeed, as Nicholas Lemann has reported in the New Yorker, the DPG draft resulted from a secret team that Cheney had set up in the Pentagon “to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War.”22
The recognition that this unipolarist blueprint was inspired by Cheney is important in light of the unprecedented power that he would exercise in the second Bush administration. As presidential historian Douglas Brinkley would say in 2002: “Cheney is unique in American history. . . . He is the vortex in the White House on foreign policymaking. Everything comes through him.”23
In any case, Cheney, under pressure from the White House, had the document significantly rewritten by Libby, in language more acceptable at the time. For example, whereas the first draft spoke of spurning collective action through the United Nations, this new version spoke of strengthening the U.N.24 Cheney put an end to this brief public debate about the wisdom of a unipolarist foreign policy by having this softer version, which was later published,25 leaked to the press.26
The 1990s and PNAC:
This rewriting did not mean, however, that the ideas were dropped by Cheney and other neoconservatives. Indeed, after the election was over, Cheney, before leaving office, put out another revision, in which some of the neo-imperial language was restored.27 Then Zalmay Khalilzad, who had joined Cheney’s team in 1991, put out a book early in 1995 entitled From Containment to Global Leadership? America and the World after the Cold War, which expresses quite forthrightly the idea of preventing, by military force if necessary, the rise of any rival power.28 In 1996, Robert Kagan, “who emerged in the 1990s as perhaps the most influential neocon foreign policy analyst,”29 argued that the United States should use its military strength “actively to maintain a world order which both supports and rests upon American hegemony.”30 In 1998, Kagan and William Kristol, who in 1995 had founded the Weekly Standard (which quickly became the main organ of neocon thinking), wrote that unless America takes charge, we will have “world chaos, and a dangerous twenty-first century.”31 In January of 2001, as the Bush-Cheney administration was ready to come to power, Kagan criticized “Clinton and his advisers” for “having the stomach only to be halfway imperialists.”32
It is important to understand the development of this neoconservative ideology, given the fact that after 9/11, the neocon agenda became the agenda of the United States. As Halper and Clarke said in 2004, “if one wishes to understand the direction of American foreign policy today, one must read what neo-conservatives were writing ten years or more ago.”33
The most important development within the neocon movement in the 1990s was William Kristol’s founding, in 1997, of a unipolarist think tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).34 Closely related to the American Enterprise Institute ideologically and even physically and financially, PNAC differed primarily in focusing entirely on foreign policy.35 In its “Statement of Principles,” PNAC called for “American global leadership,” asking whether the United States has “the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.”36
In September of 2000, just three months before the Bush-Cheney administration took office, PNAC published a 76-page document entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses (RAD). Saying that “[a]t present the United States faces no global rival,” RAD declared that “America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position” and thereby “to preserve and enhance [the] ‘American peace.’” To “enhance” the “American peace” means, of course, to increase the size of the American empire. Explicitly referring back to the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance draft of 1992, RAD said that “the basic tenets of the DPG, in our judgment, remain sound.” The continuity between the two documents is no surprise, partly because Libby and Wolfowitz are listed as participants in the production of this 2000 document.37
What is said in the PNAC’s documents is highly important because many of PNAC’s early members, including Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Eliot Cohen, Paula Dobriansky, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Peter W. Rodman, James Woolsey, and---most significantly---Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, became central members of the new Bush administration. PNAC neocons thereby took key positions in the Vice President’s Office, the Pentagon, and the (only semi-independent) Defense Policy Board. They did so well primarily because of Cheney, who was put in charge of the transition team, and secondarily because of Rumsfeld, after Cheney chose him to head the Pentagon.38
9/11 and Empire Talk:
With the new administration in place, neocon commentators such as Krauthammer became even more explicit and exuberant about the use of America’s power for imperial ends. Mocking Clinton for being concerned to be “a good international citizen” and praising Bush for understanding that “the U.S. can reshape, indeed remake, reality on its own,” Krauthammer said: “America is no mere international citizen. It is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms . . . and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.”39
However, it was not until after 9/11, and especially after the devastating assault on Afghanistan, that the neocon effort to get Americans to accept an imperial self-definition started showing widespread success. Early in 2002, Krauthammer, having noticed the difference, said: “People are coming out of the closet on the word ‘empire.’” Driving home his main message, Krauthammer added that Americans needed to face up to the responsibilities entailed by the fact that they are now “undisputed masters of the world.”40
A year later, this unilateralist idea was voiced in the Atlantic Monthly by neocon Robert Kaplan, who argued that America should use its power unilaterally to “manage an unruly world,” leaving behind “the so-called international community,” especially the United Nations, with its “antiquated power arrangement.”41
9/11 and the 9/11 wars---meaning those that have been justified by appeal to the attacks of 9/1142---resulted in empire talk beyond the circles of neocons. Early in 2002, after the American assault on Afghanistan, Paul Kennedy, who had 15 years earlier been predicting America’s decline as a great power,43 declared: “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power.” Describing America’s empire as the greatest of all time, he said: “Charlemagne’s empire was merely Western European in reach. The Roman empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.”44
A very important development that same year was the publication of Andrew Bacevich’s American Empire, which closes by saying that the question before Americans is “not whether the United States has become an imperial power” but only “what sort of empire they intend theirs to be.”45 Bacevich himself, while a conservative, strongly distanced himself from the imperial agenda of the neocons.46
But it was their agenda, not Bacevich’s cautionary critique, that would determine the “sort of empire” that the United States would seek to become during the Bush-Cheney administration. And it was 9/11 that allowed this agenda to be implemented. As Claes Ryn said, the neoconservatives “have taken full advantage of the nation’s outrage over 9/11 to advance their already fully formed drive for empire.”47
2. Military Omnipotence:
The tool for fulfilling this drive for empire, neocons have always held, is military power. To a great extent, in fact, the neoconservative movement began in reaction to the widespread view after the Vietnam war that American military power should never again be used for imperialistic purposes. In the early 1980s, rejecting the left’s conclusion that force had become “obsolete as an instrument of American political purposes,” Norman Podhoretz argued that military power constitutes “the indispensable foundation of U.S. foreign policy,” adding that “without it, nothing else we do will be effective.”48
The Cheney-Wolfowitz DPG of 1992, having said that “[o]ur first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,” added that “we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a regional or global role.” These “mechanisms” referred, of course, to various kinds of military power.
Space and Full Spectrum Dominance:
The U.S. military in the 1990s developed concepts to attain the kind of military superiority envisaged in this document. One of these concepts was “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which, says Bacevich, is the attempt “to achieve something approaching omnipotence.”49 He is here referring to a document entitled “Joint Vision 2010,” which was first published by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1996. Defining “Full Spectrum Dominance” as “the capability to dominate an opponent across the range of military operations,” this document says that it “will be the key characteristic we seek for our Armed Forces in the 21st century.”50 Given the fact that the U.S. military was already dominant on the land and the water and in the air, the new component needed was dominance in space.
Space dominance was described in a 1997 document entitled “Vision for 2020,” published by the U.S. Space Command, a division of the Air Force. The unique mission of the Space Command is to “dominat[e] the space dimension of military operations.” By merging this “space superiority with land, sea, and air superiority,” the U.S. military will have Full Spectrum Dominance.51
This notion was further developed in the Pentagon’s “Joint Vision 2020,” which first appeared in 2000.52 It speaks of full spectrum dominance as involving not just four but five dimensions: “space, sea, land, air, and information.” In addition, this document says, “given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.” This statement gives support to Bacevich’s observation that after the end of the Cold War, “the Department of Defense completed its transformation into a Department of Power Projection.”53
PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses appeared in September of that same year. Written to influence the next administration, RAD’s main point was that “the next president of the United States . . . must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership.”54
Besides arguing for increased spending across the board, RAD argued in particular for increased funding for the U.S. Space Command. Saying that “the ability to have access to, operate in, and dominate the aerospace environment has become the key to military success in modern, high-technology warfare,” it advocated not only “missile defense” but also “placing . . . weapons in space.” The weapons, moreover, are not simply for defensive purposes, but also for “the ability to conduct strikes from space,” which will give the U.S. military a “global first-strike force.”55
The Revolution in Military Affairs:
This development of space-based weapons was presented as simply one part, albeit probably the most important part, of a more general transformation of the military that exploits the “revolution in military affairs” (RMA), which has been made possible by information technologies.56 This RMA transformation of the military was said to be “sufficiently important to consider it a separate mission.”57
In spite of this importance, however, the authors of RAD, ever mindful of budgetary constraints and widespread commitment to more traditional ways, warned that the needed transformation would not occur quickly, at least if the present climate continued. In a statement that has been widely quoted in the 9/11 truth movement, they wrote that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event---like a new Pearl Harbor.”58
The emphasis in RAD on exploiting the RMA to transform the Pentagon’s approach is no surprise, since one of the participants in the project to produce this document was Wolfowitz, who had long before fallen under the spell of Albert Wohlstetter (one of the models for “Dr. Strangelove”59). Wohlstetter had been the main early proponent of the ideas that came to be dubbed the “revolution in military affairs” by Andrew Marshall, who later became the main proponent.60 Marshall, who at this writing was still serving as the RMA guru in the Pentagon, numbers Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld among his disciples.61
Rumsfeld, in fact, was at the same time heading up a special commission to make recommendations about the military use of space. This “Rumsfeld Commission,” endorsing the idea of military transformation, including the weaponization of space, said that the United States should “[e]mploy space systems to help speed the transformation of the U.S. military into a modern force able to deter and defend against evolving threats directed at . . . [our] forward deployed forces.”62 (In other words, although the language of “defense” and “deterrence” is used, part of the purpose of the space weapons is to prevent attacks on America’s offensive operations.) This report, interestingly, also used the Pearl Harbor analogy. Warning against the tendency to consider an attack on U.S. space satellites as too improbable to worry about, the report of the Rumsfeld Commission said:
History is replete with instances in which warning signs were ignored and change resisted until an external, “improbable” event forced resistant bureaucracies to take action. The question is whether the U.S. will be wise enough to act responsibly and soon enough to reduce U.S. space vulnerability. Or whether, as in the past, a disabling attack against the country and its people—-a “Space Pearl Harbor”—-will be the only event able to galvanize the nation and cause the U.S. Government to act.63
9/11 as the New Pearl Harbor:
The attacks of 9/11 were widely referred to as a new Pearl Harbor. President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary on the night of 9/11: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.”64 Immediately after the attacks, many people, from Robert Kagan to Henry Kissinger to a writer for Time magazine, said that America should respond to the attacks of 9/11 in the same way it had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor.65
Moreover, just as the attack on Pearl Harbor gave the United States the opportunity to enter World War II, which in turn allowed it to replace Great Britain as the leading imperial power, the attacks of 9/11 were widely regarded as an opportunity. Donald Rumsfeld stated that 9/11 created “the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world.”66
Condoleezza Rice reportedly told senior members of the National Security Council to “think about ‘how do you capitalize on these opportunities’ to fundamentally change American doctrine, and the shape of the world, in the wake of September 11th.”67 In a public address, she said that “if the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 bookend a major shift in international politics, then this is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity.”68 According to Bob Woodward, the president himself said that the attacks provided “a great opportunity.”69
Only two days after 9/11, in fact, Bush said in a telephone conversation with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki of New York: “[T]hrough the tears of sadness I see an opportunity.” The next day, he reportedly used exactly the same words while talking to the press.70
Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker, dealing with this response to 9/11 as an opportunity, reports that he was told by a senior official of the Bush administration (who insisted on anonymity) that, in Lemann’s paraphrase, “the reason September 11th appears to have been ‘a transformative moment’ is not so much that it revealed the existence of a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American military involvement overseas.”71 We did not, of course, hear that stated publicly by any member of the Bush-Cheney administration.
The attacks of 9/11 also reduced Congressional resistance to providing increased funding for Pentagon programs. On the evening of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld held a news briefing on the Pentagon attack. At this briefing, Senator Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was asked: “Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don’t have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending?”72 Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and much more later, with few questions asked.
The attacks of 9/11, moreover, aided those who favored a transformation of the military along RMA lines. In the weeks before September 11, Bacevich reports, “military transformation appeared to be dead in the water,” because the military brass were “wedded to existing weapons systems, troop structure, and strategy.”73 But, Bacevich continues:
President Bush’s decision after September 11 to wage a global war against terror boosted the RMA’s stock. After 9/11, the Pentagon shifted from the business of theorizing about war to the business of actually waging it. This created an opening for RMA advocates to make their case. War plans . . . became the means for demonstrating once for all the efficacy of the ideas advanced by Wohlstetter and Marshall and now supported by . . . Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz.74
After the removal of Saddam Hussein, Richard Perle, who had long shared Wolfowitz’s enthusiasm for Wohlstetter’s ideas, said: “This is the first war that’s been fought in a way that would recognize Albert’s vision of future wars.”75
These ideas for achieving military omnipotence became official policy with the publication, one year after 9/11, of the Bush-Cheney administration’s National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS 2002), which said: “We must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge” so that we can “dissuade future military competition.”76
The conviction that 9/11 provided an opportunity was also reflected in NSS 2002, which said: “The events of September 11, 2001, . . . opened vast, new opportunities.”77 One of the things for which it most clearly provided an opportunity was the doctrine of preemptive-preventive war.
3. Preemptive-Preventive War:
This hyphenated term is used here for clarity. The doctrine in question, which involves attacking another country even though it poses no immediate threat, is technically called “preventive war.” This doctrine, which violates international law as reflected in the charter of the United Nations, is to be distinguished from what is technically called “preemptive war,” which occurs when Country A attacks Country B after learning that an attack from Country B is imminent---too imminent to allow time for the U.N. to intervene. These technical terms, however, are problematic, because although preventive war, being illegal, is worse than preemptive war, to most ears “preemption” sounds worse than “prevention.” As a result, many people speak of “preemptive war” when they mean preventive war. The term “preemptive-preventive war,” while somewhat cumbersome, solves this problem.78
Historical Emergence of the Doctrine:
This doctrine of preemptive-preventive war had been advocated by neocons long before 9/11. It was contained already in the Cheney-Wolfowitz Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, which said that the United States should use force to “preempt” and “preclude threats.”79
In 1996, Richard Perle and other neocons prepared a strategy paper entitled “A Clean Break” for Benjamin Netanyahu, who had recently been elected prime minister of Israel. This paper recommended that Israel, in making a clean break from previous strategies, establish “the principle of preemption.”80
In 1997, PNAC’s “Statement of Principles” argued that to exert “global leadership,” America needs to “challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values.”81
In 1998, a letter from PNAC, signed by Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and 15 other members, urged President Clinton to “undertake military action” to eliminate “the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.”82
The Doctrine of Preemptive-Preventive War after 9/11:
Although these neocons were anxious to have their doctrine of preemptive-preventive war accepted as national policy, this did not occur during the Clinton presidency or even during the first eight months of the Bush-Cheney administration. After 9/11, however, it did. “The events of 9/11,” observes Bacevich, “provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the fetters restricting the exercise of American power.”83
The idea of preemptive-preventive war, which came to be known as the “Bush doctrine,” was first clearly expressed in the president’s address at West Point in June 2002 (when the administration started preparing the American people psychologically for the attack on Iraq). Having stated that, in relation to the “new threats,” deterrence “means nothing” and containment is “not possible,” Bush even took aim at the traditional understanding of preemption, saying: “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” Then, using the language of preemption while really meaning preemptive-prevention, he said that America’s security “will require all Americans . . . to be ready for preemptive action.”84
NSS 2002:
However, although the West Point speech provided a first statement of this new doctrine, it was in NSS 2002, published that September, that the new doctrine was laid out at some length. The covering letter, signed by the president, says that with regard to “our enemies’ efforts to acquire dangerous technologies,” America will, in self-defense, “act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.”85 The document itself, saying that “our best defense is a good offense,” also states:
Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today's threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries' choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.86
To justify this doctrine, NSS 2002 argues that the United States must “adapt” the traditional doctrine of preemption, long recognized as a right, to the new situation, thereby turning it into a right of anticipatory (preventive) preemption:
For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. . . . We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. . . . The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient threat to our national security. The greater the threat, . . . the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.87
With this argument, the authors of NSS 2002 tried to suggest that, since this doctrine of anticipatory preemption simply involves adapting a traditionally recognized right to a new situation, it involves no great change. But it does. According to the traditional doctrine, one needed certain evidence that the other country was going to launch an immediate attack. According to the Bush Doctrine, by contrast, the United States can attack another country “even if uncertainty remains” and even, more flagrantly, if the United States knows that the threat from the other country is not yet “fully formed.”
The novelty here, to be sure, involves doctrine more than practice. The United States has in practice attacked several countries that presented no imminent military threat. But it always portrayed these attacks in such a way that they could appear to comport with international law. The attack on North Vietnam after the alleged incident in the Tonkin Gulf provides an example. But “[n]ever before,” point out Halper and Clarke, “had any president set out a formal national strategy doctrine that included [preventive] preemption.”88 This is a step of great significance, because it involves an explicit statement by the United States that the basic principle of international law, as embodied in the United Nations, does not apply to its own behavior.
Zelikow as Primary Drafter of NSS 2002:
Max Boot, a neocon who has become well known through his newspaper columns, has described NSS 2002 as a “quintessentially neo-conservative document.”89 Now that the basic ideas of this document have been laid out, we can see the accuracy of his observation.
We can also see the importance of a still little-known fact: that Philip Zelikow, who would later become the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, was chosen by Condoleezza Rice to be the primary drafter of NSS 2002.90
According to James Mann in The Rise of the Vulcans, after Rice saw the first draft of this document (which had been prepared by Richard Haass, the director of policy planning in Colin Powell’s State Department), she “ordered the document be completely rewritten. She thought the Bush administration needed something bolder. . . . Rice turned the writing over to her old colleague, . . . Philip Zelikow.”91
(Rice and Zelikow had worked together in the National Security Council in the administration of the first President Bush; when the Republicans were out of power during the Clinton presidency, they wrote a book together; and then when she was appointed National Security Advisor for the second President Bush, she brought on Zelikow to help with the transition to the new National Security Council.)
Given the content and tone of the document, one might assume that Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz had been involved in the process of creating it. According to Mann, however, “the hawks in the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office hadn’t been closely involved, even though the document incorporated many of their key ideas. They had left the details and the drafting in the hands of Rice and Zelikow, along with Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley.”92
Some insight into Zelikow’s views before coming to this task might be garnered from an essay he co-authored in 1998 on “catastrophic terrorism.” In this essay, which suggests that he had been thinking about the World Trade Center and a new Pearl Harbor several years prior to 9/1, Zelikow and his co-authors say:
If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.93
In any case, in light of Zelikow’s close relationship with the Bush administration and especially his authorship of NSS 2002, we cannot take seriously the claim of the 9/11 Commission that it sought to be “independent.”94 As executive director, he had tremendous power to shape the work of the Commission, deciding which issues it would investigate and which not, and he was primarily responsible for the final form of The 9/11 Commission Report.95 The Family Steering Committee, which represented families of victims of the 9/11 attacks, vigorously protested his appointment, calling for “Dr. Zelikow’s immediate resignation” and for the “Commission to apologize to the 9/11 families and America for this massive appearance of impropriety.”96 But these calls were dismissed.
Given Zelikow's close relationship with the Bush-Cheney administration and his own authorship of NSS 2002, it is certainly no surprise that, as I reported in The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions,97 there is no mention of imperial interests that might have served as motives for the Bush-Cheney administration to have orchestrated or at least permitted the attacks of 9/11.
The Zelikow-led Commission did not, for example, mention that PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses had suggested that the transformation of the military, through which unipolarity could be enforced more effectively, could occur more quickly if there were to be “a new Pearl Harbor”; it did not mention that the administration had had plans, to be discussed below, to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq prior to 9/11; and it did not mention that 9/11 had been described as presenting “opportunities” by Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, and, in fact, NSS 2002. Once we know of Zelikow’s authorship of that document, moreover, it is also no surprise to see that The 9/11 Commission Report contains a chapter---“What to Do? A Global Strategy”---that provides propaganda for the Bush-Cheney administration’s post-9/11 foreign policy.
I return now to the discussion of possible imperial motives for 9/11 within the Bush-Cheney administration.
4. The Attack on Afghanistan:
Many times since the formal enunciation of the doctrine of preemptive-preventive warfare, the Bush-Cheney administration has defended it as necessitated by 9/11. In an address to the nation in 2004, for example, Bush said that the two lessons of 9/11 are that this country “must deal with gathering threats” and that it “must go on the offense and stay on the offense.”98 The first victim of this claimed right to “go on the offense” was Afghanistan.
Although the attacks of 9/11 were, according to the official story, planned and carried out by a non-state organization, al-Qaeda, rather than by some state, the Bush-Cheney administration used the attacks as a pretext to launch attacks on states---attacks that had been planned before 9/11. The justification for this switch was provided by Bush’s address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, in which he declared: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”99 The attack on Afghanistan was then justified on the grounds that the Taliban was “harboring” Osama bin Laden, the evil genius behind the 9/11 attacks, whom Bush on September 17 said he wanted “dead or alive” (after Cheney had said that he would willingly accept bin Laden’s “head on a platter”).100
But this was a pretext rather than the real reason for attacking Afghanistan---as illustrated by the fact that when the Bush administration had an opportunity to take bin Laden alive, it showed no interest. A week after 9/11, the Taliban said that it would hand OBL over---if the United States presented proof of his involvement in 9/11. But Bush refused to provide any such evidence, saying that there would be no negotiations or even discussion.101 Again, four weeks after the U.S. attack on Afghanistan began, a Taliban spokesman said: "We will negotiate. But . . . [w]e are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama's involvement, but they have refused. Why?"102
There are probably two answers to this question. First, there is much evidence that the Bush administration did not want bin Laden, either dead or alive. One part of this evidence consists of several reports that the U.S. military in Afghanistan deliberately let bin Laden escape more than once.103 A second reason is that the Bush administration, besides knowing that bin Laden was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks, evidently decided that it could not even marshal convincing (albeit false) case that he was (as suggested by the fact that, after a White Paper presenting this proof was promised, it was never produced104).
More recently, the FBI, in response to a query as to why does not list 9/11 as one of the crimes for which bin Laden is wanted, has said: “The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11”105(a rather astounding admission that, one might think, should have been reported on the nightly news and in The New York Times).
To understand the real reasons for the attack on Afghanistan, one needs to look at some developments prior to 9/11. One such development was the publication in 1997 of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. As the subtitle shows, Brzezinski, while not a neoconservative, shared the neocons’ concern to maintain and enhance U.S. “primacy.” Portraying Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to world power, Brzezinski argued that America, to ensure its continued primacy, must get control of this region, which would mean establishing several military bases there.
However, Brzezinski added, American democracy posed an obstacle:
America is too democratic at home to be autocratic abroad. This limits the use of America’s power, especially its capacity for military intimidation. . . . The economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and the human sacrifice (casualties even among professional soldiers) required in the effort are uncongenial to democratic instincts. Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization.106
Brzezinski, however, then suggested a way in which this obstacle could be overcome. Having said that in the United States “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion,” he then added: “except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well being.”107 The American people would be willing to make the economic and human sacrifices needed for “imperial mobilization,” he suggested, if there were “a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”108 The kind of threat he had in mind was suggested by his statement, earlier in the book, that the public was willing to support “America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”109
It is possible that Brzezinski’s discussion here inspired the statement about a “new Pearl Harbor” in PNAC’s 2000 document, which can be read as a call for a false-flag operation that would provide a pretext for turning PNAC’s agenda into official policy. The plausibility of this reading was increased, moreover, by a statement made by Brzezinski’s during his warning, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1, 2007, that a “head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large” was the likely outcome of the US frustration in Iraq. “A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran,” Brzezinski suggested, involves “a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran.” Adding that a “mythical historical narrative” for an expanded attack on Islamic countries “is already being articulated,” Brzezinski said that “9/11 [is being presented] as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack.”110
Be that as it may, a more specific motivation for the post-9/11 attack on Afghanistan was provided by the “pipeline war” that was going on.111 The Bush-Cheney administration supported--as had the Clinton-Gore administration until 1999--UNOCAL’s plan to build an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan, which was in competition with plans from oil companies based in other countries. What happened in 1999 was that UNOCAL, having become convinced that Afghanistan under the Taliban would never have the peace and stability needed for the pipeline project, decided to withdraw. Ahmed Rashid, finishing his book on the Taliban in mid-1999, wrote that the Clinton administration had shifted its support to the pipeline route from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey, adding that “by now nobody wanted to touch Afghanistan and the Taliban.”112
When the Bush administration came to power, however, it decided to give the Taliban one last chance. This last chance occurred at a four-day meeting in Berlin in July 2001. Representatives of the Bush-Cheney administration, trying to persuade the Taliban to share power with US-friendly factions in a “unity government,” reportedly gave the Taliban an ultimatum: “Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”113 When the Taliban refused, the Americans reportedly said that “military action against Afghanistan would go ahead . . . before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”114
Given the fact that the attacks on New York and Washington occurred on September 11, the U.S. military had time to get ready, logistically, to begin its war in Afghanistan on October 7. By October 10, the U.S. Department of State had informed the Pakistani Minister of Oil that “in view of recent geopolitical developments,” UNOCAL was ready to go ahead with the pipeline project.115
The contention that at least one of the purposes of the war was to support this project is suggested by the fact that the post-Taliban Prime Minister, Hamid Karzai, had previously been on UNOCAL’s payroll, as had been PNAC member Zalmay Khalilzad, who in 2001 was appointed Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan and then in 2003 became the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. As Chalmers Johnson said in 2004: “The continued collaboration of Khalilzad and Karzai in post-9/11 Afghanistan strongly suggests that the Bush administration was and remains . . . interested in oil.”116 (In March of 2005, Khalilzad would become the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.117)
Still more evidence is provided by the placement of the military bases in Afghanistan. As one Israeli writer put it: “If one looks at the map of the big American bases created, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.”118
The concern to enable an American oil company to build this pipeline should not, however, be considered the only or even the primary motivation. The larger concern, suggests Chalmers Johnson, was “to establish an American presence in Central Asia.” Evidence for this view is provided by the fact that the United States, besides establishing long-term bases in Afghanistan, had within a month after 9/11 arranged for long-term bases in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.119
The new Pearl Harbor that occurred on 9/11, therefore, allowed the United States to support UNOCAL’s pipeline project and, more generally, to fulfill the program, suggested by Brzezinski, of taking control of this region of the world.
The fact that 9/11 provided the necessary condition for the war in Afghanistan was stated by both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. In 2004, Wolfowitz told the 9/11 Commission that if the Department of Defense had asked Congress for permission to invade Afghanistan prior to 9/11, this request would not have been taken seriously. Rumsfeld, telling the Commission that “it can take a tragedy like September 11th to awaken the world to new threats and to the need for action,” said that prior to 9/11 the president could not have convinced Congress that the United States needed to “invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban.”120
Afghanistan and the surrounding region was not, however, the primary target in the sights of the Bush-Cheney administration. That target was Iraq.
5. The Attack on Iraq:
Several neocons, including some who became central members of the Bush-Cheney administration, had been wanting to bring about regime change in Iraq ever since Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Leading voices for this policy included Cheney and Wolfowitz, who were then secretary and under-secretary of defense, respectively, and also Richard Perle, who chaired a committee set up by neocons called Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf. But this idea was opposed by President Bush along with General Colin Powell, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the field commander, so it was not carried out.121
In 1992, Albert Wohlstetter, who had inspired Perle and Wolfowitz and other neocons, expressed exasperation that nothing had been done about “a dictatorship sitting on the world’s second largest pool of low-cost oil and ambitious to dominate the Gulf.”122 (Wohlstetter’s statement reflected his conviction, expressed back in 1981, that America needs to establish forces, bases, and infrastructure so as to enjoy unquestioned primacy in the region.123)
In 1996, the “Clean Break” paper, written for Israel by Perle and other neocons, proposed that Israel remove from power all of its enemies in the region, beginning with Saddam Hussein. This 1996 document, in the opinion of Arnaud de Borchgrave, president of United Press International, “provided the strategic underpinnings for Operation Iraqi Freedom seven years later.”124
In 1997, Wolfowitz and Khalilzad published a statement arguing that “Saddam Must Go.”125
In 1998, Kristol and Kagan, in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Bombing Iraq Isn’t Enough,” called for “finishing the job left undone in 1991.”126 Wolfowitz told the House National Security Committee that it had been a mistake in 1991 to leave Saddam in power. Also, writing in the New Republic, he said: “Toppling Saddam is the only outcome that can satisfy the vital U.S. interest in a stable and secure Gulf region.”127 And the afore-mentioned letter to President Clinton from PNAC---signed by Cheney, Kristol, Perle, and Wolfowitz, among others---urged him to “take the necessary steps, including military steps,” to “remov[e] Saddam’s regime from power.” Then, getting no agreement from Clinton, PNAC wrote a similar letter to Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, then the leaders of the House and the Senate, respectively.128
In 2000, PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses, pointing out that “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” added: “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.”129
Given the fact that Cheney, Libby, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other neocons were given central positions in the new Bush administration, it is not surprising to learn, from two former members of this administration, that it came into office intent on attacking Iraq. Paul O’Neill, who was secretary of the treasury and hence a member of the National Security Council, has said that within days of the inauguration, the main topic was going after Saddam, with the question being not “Why Saddam?” or “Why Now?” but merely “finding a way to do it.”130 Richard Clarke, who had been the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism, confirmed O’Neill’s charge, saying: “The administration of the second George Bush did begin with Iraq on its agenda.”131
Until the attacks of 9/11, however, no one had found “a way to do it.” As neocon Kenneth Adelman has said: “At the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but it wasn’t doable. . . . That changed with September 11.”132 Bob Woodward makes the same observation in Bush at War, saying: “The terrorist attacks of September 11 gave the U.S. a new window to go after Hussein.”133
However, even 9/11, by itself, was not a sufficient basis for getting the American people’s support for an attack on Iraq. Not for lack of effort by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. On the afternoon of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld said in a note to General Richard Myers—-the acting head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--that he wanted the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Usama bin Laden]."134 In the following days, both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz argued that Saddam's Iraq should be, in Woodward’s paraphrase, “a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism.”135
Colin Powell, however, argued that both the American people and other countries would at that time support an attack on Afghanistan, to do something about al-Qaeda, but not an attack on Iraq, since there was no evidence that it had anything to do with 9/11. He added, however, that after a successful campaign in Afghanistan, a war on Iraq would become more feasible. Bush accepted this argument.136 In doing so, he was not rejecting the proposal to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq, merely postponing its implementation: A plan for going to war in Afghanistan that Bush signed on September 17 also directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for an invasion of Iraq.137
Stephen Sniegoski, explaining why the attack on Iraq could not be launched immediately, says:
“[A]lthough the 9/11 atrocities psychologically prepared the American people for the war on Iraq, those horrific events were not sufficient by themselves to thrust America immediately into an attack on Iraq.” A “lengthy propaganda offensive” would also be needed.138
This propaganda offensive involved convincing a majority of the American people of the truth of two false claims: that Saddam Hussein had been behind 9/11 and that he possessed, or soon would possess, weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, with which he could attack America. This part of the story is too well known to need much rehearsal. The point to emphasize here is that although this later propaganda was necessary, its success depended on 9/11. Halper and Clarke say that “it was 9/11 that provided the political context in which the thinking of neo-conservatives could be turned into operational policy.”139
Sniegoski, spelling out the point more fully, says:
The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and fearful. Ordinary Americans wanted
to strike back at the terrorist enemy, even though they weren’t exactly sure who that enemy was. . . . Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible to the administration’s propaganda that the United States had to strike Iraq before Iraq somehow struck the United States. . . . It wasn’t that difficult to channel American fear and anger into war against Iraq.140
Much of this channeling was done by the Bush-Cheney administration, especially Bush and Cheney themselves. In August of 2002, for example, Cheney declared that “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction . . . [and] is amassing them to use . . . against us.”141 In October, Bush said that, having “experienced the horror of September the 11th, . . . America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”142
The administration was greatly aided in this propaganda offensive by neoconservatives outside the government, who “linked their preexisting agenda (an attack on Iraq) to a separate event (9/11).”143 Through their incessant propaganda---most widely spread in Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol’s The War over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny and America’s Mission---“Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were morphed into the same enemy” and “the war on terror and war in Iraq were joined at the hip.”144
This propaganda campaign was enormously successful. Shortly before the war on Iraq was launched, the two key ideas in the campaign---that Saddam Hussein had played a direct role in the attacks of 9/11 and that he was a threat because he had weapons of mass destruction---were accepted by 70 percent of the American people.145 As a result, point out Halper and Clarke, the Bush-Cheney administration was “able to build the environment surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 2001 into a wide moral platform from which to launch a preemptive strike.”146
That this propaganda campaign would be successful would have been predictable. As Hermann Göring, one of the top Nazi officials, said: “[I]t is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. . . . All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked.”147
Accordingly, the fact that there were no Iraqis among the alleged hijackers does not mean that the desire for a pretext to attack Iraq could not have been one of the imperial motives behind the attacks of 9/11. The crucial precondition for the war in Iraq was a psychological state of mind in the American public---one of fear and anxiety combined with a desire for revenge---that would countenance the new doctrine of preemptive-preventive war.
This state of mind was abundantly created by 9/11. Then, just as the ensuing propaganda offensive against Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban created almost unanimous acceptance of the war in Afghanistan, the propaganda offensive directed at Saddam Hussein was rather easily able to channel this fear, anxiety, and desire for revenge into a widespread feeling that a war to bring about regime change in Iraq was justified.
Conclusion:
The attacks of 9/11 allowed the imperialist agenda of leading neoconservatives to be implemented. Can we infer from this effect that the hope to have this agenda fulfilled was one of the motives for the 9/11 attacks? Of course not. One of the basic principles of criminal investigations, however, is the question: Who benefits? Those who most benefit from the crime are usually the most likely suspects. But an answer to that question cannot by itself be used as proof of the suspects’ guilt. The prosecution must also show that the suspects had the means and the opportunity to commit the crime. It must also present evidence that the suspects actually committed the crime---at least indirect evidence, perhaps by showing that they were the only ones who could have done it.
I have elsewhere presented evidence---what I first called prima facie evidence but now call overwhelming evidence148---that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by leading members of the Bush-Cheney administration.
This evidence includes many reasons to conclude that the official accounts of the World Trade Center collapses, the attack on the Pentagon, the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, and the failure of the U.S. military to intercept the other flights cannot be true.
This evidence also includes many reasons to conclude that The 9/11 Commission Report involved a systematic cover-up of dozens of facts that conflict with the official conspiracy theory about 9/11, according to which the attacks were conceived and carried out entirely by al-Qaeda---evidence that instead points to official complicity.
One example of this evidence is the fact that the Commission changed by about 45 minutes the time at which Vice President Cheney went down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the White House, thereby indicating that he could not have been responsible, as evidence suggests, for allowing the strike on the Pentagon and ordering the downing of UA 93.149
Many people, to be sure, feel that there is no need to examine the evidence that the attacks were arranged by members of the Bush administration because they feel certain, on a priori grounds, that it simply would not have done such a thing.
Having addressed most of those grounds elsewhere,150 I have here dealt with only one of them, which is often phrased as a rhetorical question:
What motive could they possibly have had for arranging attacks on their own citizens?
Having suggested that the motive was to have a pretext to turn the neocon agenda into national policy, I should add that it is probably only the neocons in office, and even only some of them, who should be suspected of involvement in the planning for 9/11.
To say that 9/11 allowed the agenda of the neocons in general to be implemented does not imply that many or even any neocons outside the government were involved in the planning for, or even had advance knowledge of, the attacks of 9/11. A
bout eight months after 9/11, for example, William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote pieces urging the Bush-Cheney administration to undertake an investigation to see if the attacks might have been prevented. Gary Dorrien, reporting that this call “earned a sharp rebuke from Cheney,” adds that “the Bush administration had no intention of allowing an investigation on that subject.”151
No genuine investigation has been carried out to this day.
If Congress would authorize such an investigation, the American people, I am convinced, would see that the grounds for impeaching Bush and Cheney are even stronger than those that have been part of the public discussion thus far.
They would also see that the reasons for opposing the war in Iraq are even stronger than those publicly discussed thus far, because it was from the start an imperialistic war based on a false-flag operation (as well as additional lies).
They would even see that, although many critics of the administration have said that we should pull our troops out of Iraq and put them in Afghanistan, our attack on that country was no more legitimate.
This essay is a revised version of “Imperial Motives for a ‘New Pearl Harbor,’” chap. 6 of David Ray Griffin, Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 : A Call to Reflection and Action (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006).
Griffin is professor emeritus at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University.
His most recent books are Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy and Debunking 9/11 Debunking.
BBC's 9/11 Conspiracy Files: Points Which Were Ignored
Courtesy Of: WhatReallyHappened
On February 18, 2007 the BBC aired the documentary 9/11: The Conspiracy Files:
A Brief Summary Of The Programme:
The USAF could not prevent the attacks because transponders in the hijacked jets were turned off. Explosives in the twin towers were "debunked" by Popular Mechanics (now there's a joke). The demolition of WTC 7 was also "debunked" by the ever reliable Popular Mechanics. The rest of the programme was dedicated to straw men. Was the Pentagon was hit by a plane? Did Flight 93 crash in Pennysylvania or did it land elsewhere? Did 4000 Jews skip work in the WTC on 9/11? Were the attacks predicted in the pilot of the "Lone Gunmen" TV show? Finally, the programme finished with an irrelevant piece on pre-9/11 warnings which were missed.
The conclusion of the BBC: the evidence doesn't support conspiracy theories.
Okay, let's take a look at a some facts which were "overlooked" by the BBC.
Fact: FEMA was in New York on September 10.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/fematape.html
Fact: Odigo workers received warning of the 9/11 attacks.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/odigo_9-11_warning.html
Fact: There were bombs in the WTC buildings.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/911_firefighters.html
Fact: The Office of Emergency Management issued a collapse warning to a select few people.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/oem_wtc.html
Fact: Giuliani was warned of the collapses.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc_giuliani.html
Fact: Five Israelis danced as the twin towers burned.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/fiveisraelis.html
Fact: 600ºC+ fires did not exist in either of the twin towers.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc_fire.htm
Fact: The core of WTC 1 failed below the third floor.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc1_core_collapse.html
Fact: The BBC stated there were no casualties when WTC 7 collapsed. This is flat out wrong. Master Special Officer Craig Miller of the Secret Service died when the building came down.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/silverstein_pullit.html
Fact: An explosion was reported on Flight 93.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/shootdown.html
Fact: The Secret Service were not concerned about the safety of the President on 9/11.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/9-11secretservice.html
Fact: The President was in no hurry to get out of Booker Elementary School.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/schoolvideo.html
Fact: Eight minutes before the Pentagon crash Flight 77 was tracked by radar as it closed to within 30 miles of Washington, therefore the whereabouts of the plane was known, therefore it could have been intercepted.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/911stand.html
Fact: Dick Cheney left Washington undefended on 9/11.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/usaf_911.html
The BBC briefly mentioned that Flight 77 hit a reinforced section of the Pentagon. What they failed to mention is that reinforcements on this section were completed on 9/11/2001 meaning this section of the building was nearly deserted when the plane hit.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/911_pentagon_renovations.html
Fact: White House staff started taking Cipro on 9/11.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/frameup.html
Finally, why did the BBC report that WTC 7 had collapsed ~20 minutes before the event occurred?
"...more on the latest building collapse in New York ... we was talking a few minutes ago about the Salomon Building [WTC 7] collapsing, well indeed it has. ... it was because the building had been weakened during this morning's attacks." [15.6 MB WMV download]
News reporters only repeat what they have been told, and it is obvious that these reporters did not know what WTC 7 looked like because it is the building burning in the background of this live footage.
Who told the reporters that WTC 7 had collapsed?
How did they have foreknowledge of the collapse?
Why was Google compelled to remove this video from their servers minutes after it appeared?
[More details]
22 Meg Quicktime file of the relevent portions
15 Meg Quicktime file of the relevent portions
Note time stamp on this clip from BBC News. 21:54 London time is 16:54 (4:54 PM) East Coast time, 20 minutes BEFORE WTC-7 actually collapsed.
Many "government huggers" have tried to dismiss the above footage as being a live reporter in front of a green screen, but there are two reasons why this is not the case.
First, the BBC camera zooms in on the scene, which is something not possible with a green screen shot.
Second, the woman BBC reporter is not under a studio light but under the harsh backlight seen in other live on-the-scene shots such as this one from CNN.
The evidence doesn't support conspiracy theories?
Crap.
The evidence doesn't support the official version, and that is why this programme focussed on trivial issues.
See also: 9/11 Index of What Really Happened
On February 18, 2007 the BBC aired the documentary 9/11: The Conspiracy Files:
A Brief Summary Of The Programme:
The USAF could not prevent the attacks because transponders in the hijacked jets were turned off. Explosives in the twin towers were "debunked" by Popular Mechanics (now there's a joke). The demolition of WTC 7 was also "debunked" by the ever reliable Popular Mechanics. The rest of the programme was dedicated to straw men. Was the Pentagon was hit by a plane? Did Flight 93 crash in Pennysylvania or did it land elsewhere? Did 4000 Jews skip work in the WTC on 9/11? Were the attacks predicted in the pilot of the "Lone Gunmen" TV show? Finally, the programme finished with an irrelevant piece on pre-9/11 warnings which were missed.
The conclusion of the BBC: the evidence doesn't support conspiracy theories.
Okay, let's take a look at a some facts which were "overlooked" by the BBC.
Fact: FEMA was in New York on September 10.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/fematape.html
Fact: Odigo workers received warning of the 9/11 attacks.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/odigo_9-11_warning.html
Fact: There were bombs in the WTC buildings.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/911_firefighters.html
Fact: The Office of Emergency Management issued a collapse warning to a select few people.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/oem_wtc.html
Fact: Giuliani was warned of the collapses.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc_giuliani.html
Fact: Five Israelis danced as the twin towers burned.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/fiveisraelis.html
Fact: 600ºC+ fires did not exist in either of the twin towers.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc_fire.htm
Fact: The core of WTC 1 failed below the third floor.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc1_core_collapse.html
Fact: The BBC stated there were no casualties when WTC 7 collapsed. This is flat out wrong. Master Special Officer Craig Miller of the Secret Service died when the building came down.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/silverstein_pullit.html
Fact: An explosion was reported on Flight 93.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/shootdown.html
Fact: The Secret Service were not concerned about the safety of the President on 9/11.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/9-11secretservice.html
Fact: The President was in no hurry to get out of Booker Elementary School.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/schoolvideo.html
Fact: Eight minutes before the Pentagon crash Flight 77 was tracked by radar as it closed to within 30 miles of Washington, therefore the whereabouts of the plane was known, therefore it could have been intercepted.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/911stand.html
Fact: Dick Cheney left Washington undefended on 9/11.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/usaf_911.html
The BBC briefly mentioned that Flight 77 hit a reinforced section of the Pentagon. What they failed to mention is that reinforcements on this section were completed on 9/11/2001 meaning this section of the building was nearly deserted when the plane hit.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/911_pentagon_renovations.html
Fact: White House staff started taking Cipro on 9/11.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/frameup.html
Finally, why did the BBC report that WTC 7 had collapsed ~20 minutes before the event occurred?
"...more on the latest building collapse in New York ... we was talking a few minutes ago about the Salomon Building [WTC 7] collapsing, well indeed it has. ... it was because the building had been weakened during this morning's attacks." [15.6 MB WMV download]
News reporters only repeat what they have been told, and it is obvious that these reporters did not know what WTC 7 looked like because it is the building burning in the background of this live footage.
Who told the reporters that WTC 7 had collapsed?
How did they have foreknowledge of the collapse?
Why was Google compelled to remove this video from their servers minutes after it appeared?
[More details]
22 Meg Quicktime file of the relevent portions
15 Meg Quicktime file of the relevent portions
Note time stamp on this clip from BBC News. 21:54 London time is 16:54 (4:54 PM) East Coast time, 20 minutes BEFORE WTC-7 actually collapsed. Many "government huggers" have tried to dismiss the above footage as being a live reporter in front of a green screen, but there are two reasons why this is not the case.
First, the BBC camera zooms in on the scene, which is something not possible with a green screen shot.
Second, the woman BBC reporter is not under a studio light but under the harsh backlight seen in other live on-the-scene shots such as this one from CNN.
The evidence doesn't support conspiracy theories?
Crap.
The evidence doesn't support the official version, and that is why this programme focussed on trivial issues.
See also: 9/11 Index of What Really Happened
Time Stamp Confirms BBC Reported WTC 7 Collapse 26 Minutes In Advance
Debunkers' claims about blue screens, inconclusive time frame of Jane Standley footage eviscerated
Paul Joseph Watson
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Prison Planet
If there was any remaining doubt that the BBC reported the collapse of Building 7 over 20 minutes before it fell then it has now evaporated with the discovery of footage from the BBC's News 24 channel that shows the time stamp at 21:54 (4:54PM EST) when news of the Salomon Brothers Building is first broadcast, a full 26 minutes in advance of its collapse.
According to FEMA, WTC 7 collapsed at 5:20pm on the afternoon of 9/11. Since British Summer Time is five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, the BBC reported the collapse of Building 7 at 4:54PM EST, a full 26 minutes before it collapsed.
"News is continuing to come in as you can imagine. We're now being told that another enormous building in New York has collapsed. It is the 47-story Salomon Brothers building [better known as WTC Building 7] which was situated very close to the World Trade Center, right there in this financial capitol," states the anchor Gavin Estler.
Following the controversy created by Monday's footage in which BBC correspondent Jane Standley is seen live in New York reporting the collapse of Building 7 as it remains standing behind her, many debunkers tried to claim that the images were inconclusive because there was no time stamp on the footage. Others alleged that Standley was merely standing in front of a dated blue screen image and that the shot in her background was a recording from earlier in the day. Both these objections can now be easily dismissed by the addition of the News 24 footage confirming that the news that Building 7 had collapsed was prematurely reported by 26 minutes.
Since the BBC obviously had a source for this information, though they refuse to acknowledge exactly what that source was, it can be surmised that the news took a few minutes to make its way to the on air anchor, therefore we can approximate that someone knew Building 7 was going to collapse at least half an hour before it fell. However, if we factor in CNN's Aaron Brown reporting that Building 7 "has collapsed or is collapsing" at 4:15PM EST, then that's over an hour before the building imploded into its own footprint.
First responders, firefighters and police are all on the record as stating they were told Building 7 was to be "brought down" and many took that to mean that it was going to be intentionally demolished by means of explosives. Some even reported a 20 second countdown preceding the building's collapse, which can only mean one thing - that it was deliberately imploded according to a pre-determined schedule.
Building 7 stood 355 feet away from the north tower. Structures closer to the twin towers that were bombarded with debris and essentially hollowed out remained standing for weeks after 9/11, until they were demolished by explosive crews, whereas Building 7 suffered relatively little damage and yet imploded hours after the towers fell. In their Conspiracy Files "documentary" the BBC said WTC 7 was a "raging inferno" when in fact fires were confined to just eight floors according to FEMA.
World Trade Center Building 3 (pictured above), known publicly as the 22-story Marriott Hotel positioned between the twin towers, was heavily damaged during the collapse of WTC 2, yet it did not experience uniform collapse either vertically or horizontally.
The BBC's pathetic excuse for not being able to confirm that they reported the collapse of WTC 7 in advance, that they lost the tapes of the BBC World 9/11 coverage, was nothing more than an attempt to make questions about this huge controversy go away. It remains to be seen if they'll issue another response now that it is 100% certified that they reported the collapse of a building 26 minutes before it happened. So far wider mainstream coverage of this mammoth story has been all but mute.
We received an interesting e mail from a CNN archivist in Atlanta who stated their utter disbelief at the notion that BBC has lost any of their 9/11 archives.
"I'm an archivist with the CNN News Library in Atlanta, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, the mere idea that news agencies such as ours would "misplace" any airchecks from 9/11 is preposterous. CNN has these tapes locked away from all the others. People like myself, who normally would have access to any tapes in our library, must ask special permission in order to view airchecks from that day.
Multiple tapes would have been recording their broadcast that day, and there are also private agencies that record all broadcasts from all channels - constantly - in the event that a news agency missed something or needs something.
They don't just have one copy... they have several. It's standard procedure, and as soon as the second plane hit, they would start recording several copies on other tapes machines all day long."
"The only information they need to give out is the source of the collapse claim. No one is saying the BBC is "part of the conspiracy," we're saying that someone gave that reporter the information ahead of time. The source of that information is the only thing they can reveal that would be meaningful."
Just ten days after the airing of its bias, error ridden, propagandistic hit piece against the 9/11 truth movement, the BBC's program directors are probably wishing they had never gone near the subject. The response metered out against them, bolstered by the Building 7 fiasco, has tarnished the corporation's credibility and their sophistic attempt to rebut the accusations has only made matters worse.
Suffice to say it would be a very stupid decision to re-air Guy Smith's farce of a documentary in any country ever again. Perhaps the BBC could do us all a favor and 'lose' the tapes just like they claim to have lost the tapes of their 9/11 coverage.
Paul Joseph Watson
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Prison Planet
If there was any remaining doubt that the BBC reported the collapse of Building 7 over 20 minutes before it fell then it has now evaporated with the discovery of footage from the BBC's News 24 channel that shows the time stamp at 21:54 (4:54PM EST) when news of the Salomon Brothers Building is first broadcast, a full 26 minutes in advance of its collapse.
According to FEMA, WTC 7 collapsed at 5:20pm on the afternoon of 9/11. Since British Summer Time is five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, the BBC reported the collapse of Building 7 at 4:54PM EST, a full 26 minutes before it collapsed.
"News is continuing to come in as you can imagine. We're now being told that another enormous building in New York has collapsed. It is the 47-story Salomon Brothers building [better known as WTC Building 7] which was situated very close to the World Trade Center, right there in this financial capitol," states the anchor Gavin Estler.
Following the controversy created by Monday's footage in which BBC correspondent Jane Standley is seen live in New York reporting the collapse of Building 7 as it remains standing behind her, many debunkers tried to claim that the images were inconclusive because there was no time stamp on the footage. Others alleged that Standley was merely standing in front of a dated blue screen image and that the shot in her background was a recording from earlier in the day. Both these objections can now be easily dismissed by the addition of the News 24 footage confirming that the news that Building 7 had collapsed was prematurely reported by 26 minutes.
Since the BBC obviously had a source for this information, though they refuse to acknowledge exactly what that source was, it can be surmised that the news took a few minutes to make its way to the on air anchor, therefore we can approximate that someone knew Building 7 was going to collapse at least half an hour before it fell. However, if we factor in CNN's Aaron Brown reporting that Building 7 "has collapsed or is collapsing" at 4:15PM EST, then that's over an hour before the building imploded into its own footprint.
First responders, firefighters and police are all on the record as stating they were told Building 7 was to be "brought down" and many took that to mean that it was going to be intentionally demolished by means of explosives. Some even reported a 20 second countdown preceding the building's collapse, which can only mean one thing - that it was deliberately imploded according to a pre-determined schedule.
Building 7 stood 355 feet away from the north tower. Structures closer to the twin towers that were bombarded with debris and essentially hollowed out remained standing for weeks after 9/11, until they were demolished by explosive crews, whereas Building 7 suffered relatively little damage and yet imploded hours after the towers fell. In their Conspiracy Files "documentary" the BBC said WTC 7 was a "raging inferno" when in fact fires were confined to just eight floors according to FEMA.
World Trade Center Building 3 (pictured above), known publicly as the 22-story Marriott Hotel positioned between the twin towers, was heavily damaged during the collapse of WTC 2, yet it did not experience uniform collapse either vertically or horizontally.
The BBC's pathetic excuse for not being able to confirm that they reported the collapse of WTC 7 in advance, that they lost the tapes of the BBC World 9/11 coverage, was nothing more than an attempt to make questions about this huge controversy go away. It remains to be seen if they'll issue another response now that it is 100% certified that they reported the collapse of a building 26 minutes before it happened. So far wider mainstream coverage of this mammoth story has been all but mute.
We received an interesting e mail from a CNN archivist in Atlanta who stated their utter disbelief at the notion that BBC has lost any of their 9/11 archives.
"I'm an archivist with the CNN News Library in Atlanta, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, the mere idea that news agencies such as ours would "misplace" any airchecks from 9/11 is preposterous. CNN has these tapes locked away from all the others. People like myself, who normally would have access to any tapes in our library, must ask special permission in order to view airchecks from that day.
Multiple tapes would have been recording their broadcast that day, and there are also private agencies that record all broadcasts from all channels - constantly - in the event that a news agency missed something or needs something.
They don't just have one copy... they have several. It's standard procedure, and as soon as the second plane hit, they would start recording several copies on other tapes machines all day long."
"The only information they need to give out is the source of the collapse claim. No one is saying the BBC is "part of the conspiracy," we're saying that someone gave that reporter the information ahead of time. The source of that information is the only thing they can reveal that would be meaningful."
Just ten days after the airing of its bias, error ridden, propagandistic hit piece against the 9/11 truth movement, the BBC's program directors are probably wishing they had never gone near the subject. The response metered out against them, bolstered by the Building 7 fiasco, has tarnished the corporation's credibility and their sophistic attempt to rebut the accusations has only made matters worse.
Suffice to say it would be a very stupid decision to re-air Guy Smith's farce of a documentary in any country ever again. Perhaps the BBC could do us all a favor and 'lose' the tapes just like they claim to have lost the tapes of their 9/11 coverage.
China Develops Remote Control Pigeons
03/01/2007 01:01 AM
ShortNews
The People's Daily Online reports that Chinese scientists have successfully created brain implants for pigeons that can enable people to control their flight by remote control.
"It's the first such successful experiment on a pigeon in the world," said the lead researcher, who hopes the work will have "practical use" in the future.
Similar experiments have been conducted by other countries in the past. In the US, for example, the Pentagon once attempted to develop remote controlled sharks whose movements would also be guided using brain implants.
ShortNews
The People's Daily Online reports that Chinese scientists have successfully created brain implants for pigeons that can enable people to control their flight by remote control.
"It's the first such successful experiment on a pigeon in the world," said the lead researcher, who hopes the work will have "practical use" in the future.
Similar experiments have been conducted by other countries in the past. In the US, for example, the Pentagon once attempted to develop remote controlled sharks whose movements would also be guided using brain implants.
BOMBSHELL: 9/11 COVER-UP UNRAVELING
CNN, BBC 24 Reports Conclusively Prove Media Prior Knowledge and False-Start Scripting of Building 7 Controlled Demolition
JonesReport
Aaron Dykes and Alex Jones /Jones Report February 27, 2007:
It has now been discovered that BBC 24 also reported the Building 7 collapse before it fell. Furthermore, CNN’s Aaron Brown reported that Building 7 "has collapsed or is collapsing" over an hour before it fell.
These clips both reinforce the shocking, newly discovered BBC coverage wherein Jane Standley reports the collapse early-- with the building still standing behind her.
The early timing of these reports is now verified twiceover-- the BBC 24 report is time stamped at 21.54-- or 4:54 P.M. Eastern Standard Time [See World Time Zones] Secondly, CNN's Aaron Brown states the time as "4:15 Eastern Daylight Time," announcing Building 7 has fallen-- more than one hour before its actual collapse.
Furthermore, both the BBC report with Jane Standley and the CNN report with Aaron Brown clearly show Building 7 still standing, 'billowing with smoke' as the collapse is reported-- so premature reporting is confirmed visually as well.
There is no longer any doubt they were all reading off the same script. Reports mirrored testimony of scores of fire fighters, police and emergency workers who were told to get back from the building in the 2 hours before Salomon Brothers building (better known as WTC 7) fell at free-fall speed.
Rescue workers were told the building was to be brought down in a controlled demolition.
The group that carried out the demolition of Building 7 was in a position to feed the media and local authorities an official story. We have the controlled demolition of Building 7 hidden in plain sight-- including an admission by the building's 99-year lease holder Larry Silverstein.
We are witnessing the unraveling of the 9/11 cover-up.
New video and audio clips of emergency workers who were told the Building 7 was to be purposefully brought down are coming out on an hour-by-hour basis as thousands of 9/11 researchers investigate publicly available archives.
Alex Jones in his car on the afternoon of 9/11 also heard ABC News report that the government was considering demolishing Building 7. Jones didn't’t realize what he was hearing for several weeks. Now the evidence is coming out.
CNN'S REPORT IN-FOCUSAARON BROWN QUESTIONS SCRIPT ON-AIR, UNLIKE BBC:
It is interesting to note that Aaron Brown seems to realize the incongruity of his reporting as he looks over his shoulder at Building 7-- still standing and emitting massive trails of smoke.
Just after announcing that WTC 7 "has collapsed or is collapsing," he lets onto his confusion, stating:
"And I—I—You, to be honest, can see these pictures more clearly than I, but building number 7, one of the buildings in this very large complex of buildings that is that is the trade center."
Clearly, Brown, slicker than the BBC reporter, caught the errors in the script during live
coverage and revised his words, saying instead-- as he looked at the standing structure:
"And now we are told that there’s a fire there and that building may collapse as well as you can see."
BBC 24 REPORT IN-FOCUS:
Time-Stamped BBC Broadcast Seals Media Foreknowledge of Building 7 Collapse and Use of Scripting
An alternate local BBC report-- which included a live time-stamp-- now positively establishes that BBC reported the collapse of WTC Building 7 at least 25-minutes prior to the actual collapse of the building.
The feed seen above (at top) reports at 21.54 London time that:
News is continuing to come in as you can imagine. We're now being told that another enormous building in New York has collapsed. It is the 47-story Salomon Brothers building [better known as WTC Building 7] which was situated very close to the World Trade Center, right there in this financial capitol.
21.54-- 5 hours earlier in New York-- is 4:54 p.m., well before the actual collapse at 5:20 p.m.
This live feed did not show WTC 7 standing during the announcement, as it was showing B-roll of rescue workers on the ground.
The words used are very similar to the BBC report with Jane Standley, who also reported the WTC 7 collapse prematurely-- with the building visible in the live frame beyond the window. The latter coverage also included an explanation by the co-anchor that the building was not attacked, but, rather, was "weakened"-- perfectly in line with the official story even before the collapse took place.
BBC'S ABSURD RESPONSE IN-FOCUS:
BBC Claims 9/11 Tapes Lost; CNN Archivist Contradicts This, Citing Multiple Copies Recorded
BBC responded to news of the early report on Building 7's collapse, claiming, amongst other excuses, that their 9/11 tapes have been lost.
A CNN archivist in Atlanta, and Infowars reader, corrected this erroneous notion:
"I'm an archivist with the CNN News Library in Atlanta, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, the mere idea that news agencies such as ours would "misplace" any airchecks from 9/11 is preposterous. CNN has these tapes locked away from all the others. People like myself, who normally would have access to any tapes in our library, must ask special permission in order to view airchecks from that day. Multiple tapes would have been recording their broadcast that day, and there are also private agencies that record all broadcasts from all channels - constantly - in the event that a news agency missed something or needs something. They don't just have one copy... they have several. It's standard procedure, and as soon as the second plane hit, they would start recording several copies on other tapes machines all day long.
The only information they need to give out is the source of the collapse claim. No one is saying the BBC is "part of the conspiracy," we're saying that someone gave that reporter the information ahead of time. The source of that information is the only thing they can reveal that would be meaningful."
WTC COMPLEX IN-FOCUS:
WTC 3 Was Structurally Destroyed by Falling Debris, Yet Did Not Uniformly Collapse at Free-Fall Speed Like WTC 7
World Trade Center Building 3 -- known publicly as the 22-story Marriott Hotel positioned between the Twin Towers-- was heavily damaged during the collapse of WTC 2, yet it did not experience uniform collapse either vertically or horizontally-- but rather a crater of inconsistent breakage.
WTC Building 3 Was Heavily Damaged by the Collapse of Tower 2, Yet Did Not Collapse Uniformly.
Yet, Building 7, which was comparably far removed from the two buildings hit by airliners, suffered only minor fires and sudden, uniform collapse-- typically indicative of a controlled demolition.
Clearly, the difference in damage between the two steel buildings is baffling and untenable under the explanation offered by the government's official story.
SEE ALSO: Another Smoking Gun? Now CNN Jumps the Gun: On 911 CNN Announced WTC 7 "Has Either Collapsed or is Collapsing" Over an Hour Before it Fell
MORE INFORMATION TO COME AS THESE NEW DEVELOPMENTS CONTINUE TO SURFACE THROUGH INDEPENDENT 9/11 RESEARCH.
BBC Responds to Building 7 Controversy; Claim 9/11 Tapes LostPathetic five paragraph blog rebuttal does not answer questions as to source of report that Salomon Building was coming down, BBC claims tapes lost due to "cock-up" not conspiracy
Paul Joseph Watson / Prison Planet February 27, 2007:
The BBC has been forced to respond to footage showing their correspondent reporting the collapse of WTC 7 before it fell on 9/11, claiming tapes from the day are somehow missing, and refusing to identify the source for their bizarre act of "clairvoyance" in accurately preempting the fall of Building 7.
Here is the BBC's response to the questions about the footage that was unearthed yesterday, with my comments after each statement.
1. We're not part of a conspiracy. Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn't get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn't receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening.
"We didn't get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down." If this is true, then how on earth did the BBC report the collapse of Building 7 before it happened? Psychic clairvoyance? Of course they were told that WTC 7 was coming down, just like the firefighters, police, first responders and CNN were told it was coming down. They had to have had a source for making such a claim. The BBC is acting like the naughty little boy who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. No one here is claiming the BBC are "part of the conspiracy," but their hideous penchant to just repeat what authorities tell them without even a cursory investigation (and with the Building they are telling us has collapsed mockingly filling the background shot of the report), is a damning indictment of their yellow journalism when it comes to 9/11.
2. In the chaos and confusion of the day, I'm quite sure we said things which turned out to be untrue or inaccurate - but at the time were based on the best information we had. We did what we always did - sourced our reports, used qualifying words like "apparently" or "it's reported" or "we're hearing" and constantly tried to check and double check the information we were receiving.
How do "chaos and confusion" explain how the BBC reported on the collapse of a building, a collapse that happened "unexpectedly" according to their Conspiracy Files hit piece documentary, before it happened? In one breath the BBC is claiming they were not told of the impending collapse of the Building and in the next they are telling us that all their information is sourced. Which is it to be? Did the BBC have a source telling them the building was about to collapse or not? If not, how on earth could they pre-empt its fall? Do BBC reporters have access to a time machine? What was the source of this information?
3. Our reporter Jane Standley was in New York on the day of the attacks, and like everyone who was there, has the events seared on her mind. I've spoken to her today and unsurprisingly, she doesn't remember minute-by-minute what she said or did - like everybody else that day she was trying to make sense of what she was seeing; what she was being told; and what was being told to her by colleagues in London who were monitoring feeds and wires services.
Trying to make sense of what she was being told? She obviously didn't make much sense of the fact that the Building she was reporting had collapsed was prominently standing behind her! Unfortunately, for a news organization that prides itself on accuracy and credibility, "she doesn't remember" just doesn't cut it as an excuse.
BBC included a screenshot of yesterday's Prison Planet article in their brief response.
4. We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I'd love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don't help clear up the issue one way or another.
We are asked to believe that the world's premiere news organization has somehow lost all its tapes of perhaps the biggest news event of the past 60 years. This is a copout. Whether they have lost the tapes or not, the BBC simply doesn't want to verify one hundred per cent their monumental foul-up, because they know it would only increase the exposure of this issue and lead to further questions. What is there to clear up? The reporter is standing in front of the building while saying it has already collapsed! This is a blatant effort to try and placate people making complaints while refusing to admit a monumental faux pas that further undermines the BBC's credibility in the aftermath of the Conspiracy Files debacle.
5. If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that. As one of the comments on You Tube says today "so the guy in the studio didn't quite know what was going on? Woah, that totally proves conspiracy... "
So now the BBC are so devoid of answers, they have to enlist the help of some moronic comment on a You Tube blog? Instead of issuing official statements and seeking the advice of legal professionals they produce a cobbled together five paragraph blog and include the testimony of some moron on a You Tube comment board. Pathetic! Answer the question BBC - what was your source for reporting on multiple occasions that Building 7 had collapsed before it had collapsed, and identify the source that enabled the anchorman to comment that the building had collapsed due to it being weakened, an explanation still unanswered by NIST five and a half years later.
If you had reported the collapse of the twin towers before it happened would that have been just an error too? This "error" translated as $800 million plus in insurance bounty for Larry Silverstein - I'm sure Industrial Risk Insurers would be interested to know the source of your "error."
In addition, two seperate sources reported that Secret Service Agent Craig Miller died as a result of the collapse of Building 7. Do you think he would have been interested in the "error" that led to your correspondent reporting the building's downfall in advance?
JonesReport
Aaron Dykes and Alex Jones /Jones Report February 27, 2007:
It has now been discovered that BBC 24 also reported the Building 7 collapse before it fell. Furthermore, CNN’s Aaron Brown reported that Building 7 "has collapsed or is collapsing" over an hour before it fell.
These clips both reinforce the shocking, newly discovered BBC coverage wherein Jane Standley reports the collapse early-- with the building still standing behind her.
The early timing of these reports is now verified twiceover-- the BBC 24 report is time stamped at 21.54-- or 4:54 P.M. Eastern Standard Time [See World Time Zones] Secondly, CNN's Aaron Brown states the time as "4:15 Eastern Daylight Time," announcing Building 7 has fallen-- more than one hour before its actual collapse.
Furthermore, both the BBC report with Jane Standley and the CNN report with Aaron Brown clearly show Building 7 still standing, 'billowing with smoke' as the collapse is reported-- so premature reporting is confirmed visually as well.
There is no longer any doubt they were all reading off the same script. Reports mirrored testimony of scores of fire fighters, police and emergency workers who were told to get back from the building in the 2 hours before Salomon Brothers building (better known as WTC 7) fell at free-fall speed.
Rescue workers were told the building was to be brought down in a controlled demolition.
The group that carried out the demolition of Building 7 was in a position to feed the media and local authorities an official story. We have the controlled demolition of Building 7 hidden in plain sight-- including an admission by the building's 99-year lease holder Larry Silverstein.
We are witnessing the unraveling of the 9/11 cover-up.
New video and audio clips of emergency workers who were told the Building 7 was to be purposefully brought down are coming out on an hour-by-hour basis as thousands of 9/11 researchers investigate publicly available archives.
Alex Jones in his car on the afternoon of 9/11 also heard ABC News report that the government was considering demolishing Building 7. Jones didn't’t realize what he was hearing for several weeks. Now the evidence is coming out.
CNN'S REPORT IN-FOCUSAARON BROWN QUESTIONS SCRIPT ON-AIR, UNLIKE BBC:
It is interesting to note that Aaron Brown seems to realize the incongruity of his reporting as he looks over his shoulder at Building 7-- still standing and emitting massive trails of smoke.
Just after announcing that WTC 7 "has collapsed or is collapsing," he lets onto his confusion, stating:
"And I—I—You, to be honest, can see these pictures more clearly than I, but building number 7, one of the buildings in this very large complex of buildings that is that is the trade center."
Clearly, Brown, slicker than the BBC reporter, caught the errors in the script during live
coverage and revised his words, saying instead-- as he looked at the standing structure:
"And now we are told that there’s a fire there and that building may collapse as well as you can see."
BBC 24 REPORT IN-FOCUS:
Time-Stamped BBC Broadcast Seals Media Foreknowledge of Building 7 Collapse and Use of Scripting
An alternate local BBC report-- which included a live time-stamp-- now positively establishes that BBC reported the collapse of WTC Building 7 at least 25-minutes prior to the actual collapse of the building.
The feed seen above (at top) reports at 21.54 London time that:
News is continuing to come in as you can imagine. We're now being told that another enormous building in New York has collapsed. It is the 47-story Salomon Brothers building [better known as WTC Building 7] which was situated very close to the World Trade Center, right there in this financial capitol.
21.54-- 5 hours earlier in New York-- is 4:54 p.m., well before the actual collapse at 5:20 p.m.
This live feed did not show WTC 7 standing during the announcement, as it was showing B-roll of rescue workers on the ground.
The words used are very similar to the BBC report with Jane Standley, who also reported the WTC 7 collapse prematurely-- with the building visible in the live frame beyond the window. The latter coverage also included an explanation by the co-anchor that the building was not attacked, but, rather, was "weakened"-- perfectly in line with the official story even before the collapse took place.
BBC'S ABSURD RESPONSE IN-FOCUS:
BBC Claims 9/11 Tapes Lost; CNN Archivist Contradicts This, Citing Multiple Copies Recorded
BBC responded to news of the early report on Building 7's collapse, claiming, amongst other excuses, that their 9/11 tapes have been lost.
A CNN archivist in Atlanta, and Infowars reader, corrected this erroneous notion:
"I'm an archivist with the CNN News Library in Atlanta, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, the mere idea that news agencies such as ours would "misplace" any airchecks from 9/11 is preposterous. CNN has these tapes locked away from all the others. People like myself, who normally would have access to any tapes in our library, must ask special permission in order to view airchecks from that day. Multiple tapes would have been recording their broadcast that day, and there are also private agencies that record all broadcasts from all channels - constantly - in the event that a news agency missed something or needs something. They don't just have one copy... they have several. It's standard procedure, and as soon as the second plane hit, they would start recording several copies on other tapes machines all day long.
The only information they need to give out is the source of the collapse claim. No one is saying the BBC is "part of the conspiracy," we're saying that someone gave that reporter the information ahead of time. The source of that information is the only thing they can reveal that would be meaningful."
WTC COMPLEX IN-FOCUS:
WTC 3 Was Structurally Destroyed by Falling Debris, Yet Did Not Uniformly Collapse at Free-Fall Speed Like WTC 7
World Trade Center Building 3 -- known publicly as the 22-story Marriott Hotel positioned between the Twin Towers-- was heavily damaged during the collapse of WTC 2, yet it did not experience uniform collapse either vertically or horizontally-- but rather a crater of inconsistent breakage.
WTC Building 3 Was Heavily Damaged by the Collapse of Tower 2, Yet Did Not Collapse Uniformly.
Yet, Building 7, which was comparably far removed from the two buildings hit by airliners, suffered only minor fires and sudden, uniform collapse-- typically indicative of a controlled demolition.
Clearly, the difference in damage between the two steel buildings is baffling and untenable under the explanation offered by the government's official story.
SEE ALSO: Another Smoking Gun? Now CNN Jumps the Gun: On 911 CNN Announced WTC 7 "Has Either Collapsed or is Collapsing" Over an Hour Before it Fell
MORE INFORMATION TO COME AS THESE NEW DEVELOPMENTS CONTINUE TO SURFACE THROUGH INDEPENDENT 9/11 RESEARCH.
BBC Responds to Building 7 Controversy; Claim 9/11 Tapes LostPathetic five paragraph blog rebuttal does not answer questions as to source of report that Salomon Building was coming down, BBC claims tapes lost due to "cock-up" not conspiracy
Paul Joseph Watson / Prison Planet February 27, 2007:
The BBC has been forced to respond to footage showing their correspondent reporting the collapse of WTC 7 before it fell on 9/11, claiming tapes from the day are somehow missing, and refusing to identify the source for their bizarre act of "clairvoyance" in accurately preempting the fall of Building 7.
Here is the BBC's response to the questions about the footage that was unearthed yesterday, with my comments after each statement.
1. We're not part of a conspiracy. Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn't get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn't receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening.
"We didn't get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down." If this is true, then how on earth did the BBC report the collapse of Building 7 before it happened? Psychic clairvoyance? Of course they were told that WTC 7 was coming down, just like the firefighters, police, first responders and CNN were told it was coming down. They had to have had a source for making such a claim. The BBC is acting like the naughty little boy who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. No one here is claiming the BBC are "part of the conspiracy," but their hideous penchant to just repeat what authorities tell them without even a cursory investigation (and with the Building they are telling us has collapsed mockingly filling the background shot of the report), is a damning indictment of their yellow journalism when it comes to 9/11.
2. In the chaos and confusion of the day, I'm quite sure we said things which turned out to be untrue or inaccurate - but at the time were based on the best information we had. We did what we always did - sourced our reports, used qualifying words like "apparently" or "it's reported" or "we're hearing" and constantly tried to check and double check the information we were receiving.
How do "chaos and confusion" explain how the BBC reported on the collapse of a building, a collapse that happened "unexpectedly" according to their Conspiracy Files hit piece documentary, before it happened? In one breath the BBC is claiming they were not told of the impending collapse of the Building and in the next they are telling us that all their information is sourced. Which is it to be? Did the BBC have a source telling them the building was about to collapse or not? If not, how on earth could they pre-empt its fall? Do BBC reporters have access to a time machine? What was the source of this information?
3. Our reporter Jane Standley was in New York on the day of the attacks, and like everyone who was there, has the events seared on her mind. I've spoken to her today and unsurprisingly, she doesn't remember minute-by-minute what she said or did - like everybody else that day she was trying to make sense of what she was seeing; what she was being told; and what was being told to her by colleagues in London who were monitoring feeds and wires services.
Trying to make sense of what she was being told? She obviously didn't make much sense of the fact that the Building she was reporting had collapsed was prominently standing behind her! Unfortunately, for a news organization that prides itself on accuracy and credibility, "she doesn't remember" just doesn't cut it as an excuse.
BBC included a screenshot of yesterday's Prison Planet article in their brief response.
4. We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I'd love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don't help clear up the issue one way or another.
We are asked to believe that the world's premiere news organization has somehow lost all its tapes of perhaps the biggest news event of the past 60 years. This is a copout. Whether they have lost the tapes or not, the BBC simply doesn't want to verify one hundred per cent their monumental foul-up, because they know it would only increase the exposure of this issue and lead to further questions. What is there to clear up? The reporter is standing in front of the building while saying it has already collapsed! This is a blatant effort to try and placate people making complaints while refusing to admit a monumental faux pas that further undermines the BBC's credibility in the aftermath of the Conspiracy Files debacle.
5. If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that. As one of the comments on You Tube says today "so the guy in the studio didn't quite know what was going on? Woah, that totally proves conspiracy... "
So now the BBC are so devoid of answers, they have to enlist the help of some moronic comment on a You Tube blog? Instead of issuing official statements and seeking the advice of legal professionals they produce a cobbled together five paragraph blog and include the testimony of some moron on a You Tube comment board. Pathetic! Answer the question BBC - what was your source for reporting on multiple occasions that Building 7 had collapsed before it had collapsed, and identify the source that enabled the anchorman to comment that the building had collapsed due to it being weakened, an explanation still unanswered by NIST five and a half years later.
If you had reported the collapse of the twin towers before it happened would that have been just an error too? This "error" translated as $800 million plus in insurance bounty for Larry Silverstein - I'm sure Industrial Risk Insurers would be interested to know the source of your "error."
In addition, two seperate sources reported that Secret Service Agent Craig Miller died as a result of the collapse of Building 7. Do you think he would have been interested in the "error" that led to your correspondent reporting the building's downfall in advance?