Webster Griffin Tarpley on 'Synthetic Terror' - Pt. 1
This is a transcript of Part One of Webster Griffin Tarpley’s interview on KPFA’s Guns and Butter radio program.
9/11 Synthetic Terror, Part One, Wednesday, April 6th, 2005.
Real Media stream
Bonnie Faulkner (BF): I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Webster Tarpley. Webster Tarpley is an author and lecturer based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of ‘Against Oligarchy: A Collection of Essays and Speeches from 1970 to 1996’, ‘Surviving the Cataclysm: A Study of the World Financial Crisis’ and co-author of the critical study, ‘George Bush: the Unauthorized Biography’.
His latest book, ‘911 Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA’, debunks the official 9/11 story and exposes the fraud of the war on terror.
Webster Tarpley, welcome.
Webster Griffin Tarpley (WT): Thank you so much, it’s always a pleasure to be here.
BF: Webster, I see you have a new book out titled, ‘9/11 Synthetic Terror’. What do you mean by the term ‘synthetic terror’?
WT: Well, I think there are two ideas involved putting ‘synthetic’ into the title… I thought these were important. One is the notion that it’s artificial. It’s something that would not occur in the normal course of affairs. It’s not a sociological phenomenon; it’s not spontaneously generated by social conditions, no matter how horrendous, but rather, something that’s created by the deliberate intervention of intelligence agencies, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, British intelligence, MI5, MI6… and so forth. So, ‘synthetic’ in the sense that it’s fake, fictitious.
The other aspect is ‘synthesis’, meaning ‘drawing things together’ like bringing elements together that are disparate and don’t seem to belong together, but really do.
And that’s the conceptual framework I offer in there, and some charts on the back, and at various points in the book. The question of the moles, patsies, the professional killers, and the command center which coordinates all of that within the framework of a brainwashed world of controlled corporate media.
In particular I try to show, in the case of the patsies, leaning on some research by Daniel Hopsicker, who has been delving around in Florida for some years, that in the case of Atta and some of the other pilots training at the airport in Venice, Florida, they are the products of the precise airports that were being used by Oliver North and Secord, and Felix Rodriguez in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, for gun running into Central America and bringing back crack cocaine and heroin and other lethal narcotics into the United States.
That’s what Atta comes from and it’s very interesting that the 9/11 patsies are so closely connected to the Iran/Contra infrastructure. These are the kinds of elements of continuity that I try to show in the book.
These patsies, as Hopsicker shows, Atta is a psychotic, he’s a cat torturer, he is a cocaine addict, he frequents prostitutes, he is apparently living with a prostitute, he’s not an Islamic fundamentalist, he is a drunk also. Can’t be an Islamic fundamentalist, he’s rather some kind of a double-agent or fanatic, or something of this sort. The main thing about him is, no matter how great his criminal intent may be, he and his alleged team, (for whom of course there is no proof), but the alleged 19 could not in any case have ever created the physical events that you can see. They can’t fly planes into buildings, they can’t bring down buildings, they can’t do what happens at the Pentagon where there’s nothing left of any plane so there is no plane at the Pentagon.
The people who can do that, are members of the ‘secret team’. The professionals, the trained killers, the ice-cold technocrats of death, the CIA old boys, highly trained, highly equipped, but, not ideological in the sense of wanting to blab, or get noticed in the way that the patsies do, but simply content to operate behind the scenes.
The ‘moles’ of course are the government officials who allow all this to happen, they make sure the warnings are disregarded, they make sure the Minneapolis memo is disregarded, the Phoenix warnings, all the government warnings coming in from overseas, simply make sure that that does not get anywhere, that the patsies are not interfered with in any way, because if the patsies had all been arrested, the event could hardly have taken place because if we don’t have the patsies running around free, you can’t blame them, or at least it’s a little bit harder, so therefore the patsies have got to be left out in the open, and (that’s) the task of the moles, and we see some moles on the cover; I label Wolfowitz, Cheney, Tony Blair, Rumsfeld, these are moles, these are selected top moles but there are quite a few more that are mentioned in the text, people in the FAA, in the CIA, in the FBI, that are labeled as moles, these are people who are in one way or another loyal to the network that’s carrying this out.
And then we have the question of the command center. Some authors recently have alleged that Cheney was the one who’s directing this entire thing from the White House bunker and I would say that’s not technically feasible, and there’s no reason to run those risks when you can simply have one of those private military firms, the ones that we’ve heard so much about in Iraq… I won’t name some of them because I don’t really want to accuse any specific ones but we all know the names of these people that have been sending mercenaries into Iraq.
These are companies that claim that they can do nuclear strategy if necessary, that they can do nuclear war fighting. So they certainly have the ability to set up a command center in some private office which means that they’ll be free from kinds of surveillance that would be routine really in any government bureau. So that’s the conceptual framework, and that’s the synthesis that the book offers.
BF: Then since you characterize 9/11 as ‘synthetic terror’, would you then consider the ‘war on terror’ a phony war?
WT: Yes, absolutely. It’s a fictitious war, I mean it’s real enough in terms of killing people but the alleged motivation is fake. One of my chapters is ‘Al Qaeda is the CIA Arab Legion’. And this is historical fact. Al Qaeda was created by the CIA in Afghanistan, and it has been maintained by the CIA as a kind of military capability in the Arab and Islamic world. Look at the history of Al Qaeda, they have attacked countries like Bosnia, when the US was attacking Bosnia, Al Qaeda attacked Bosnia. When the US was attacking Libya, Al Qaeda attacked Libya1 and tried to kill Qaddafi, the dictator of Libya.
The US in attempting to bust up the Russian Federation, Al Qaeda provides terrorists for Chechnya, so, the target list for US imperialism and the target list for Al Qaeda are exactly the same.
I also show that in the CIA, there’s a remarkable phenomenon, there’s a Bin Laden fan club, and I have a couple of documents on this, one is a guy called Michael Scheuer, who wrote a book called ‘Imperial Hubris’ which came out during 2004. And the interesting thing is when he wrote this book; he was a serving CIA official, the person who had run at a previous time the Bin Laden station. And what’s his thesis about Bin Laden?
He says that Bin Laden is the greatest political genius of the 21st century he actually compares him to Abraham Lincoln. He defends him against criticism, because I think the obvious thing is Bin Laden is a bungler, a dreamer, an ideologue, he’s probably somebody who couldn’t find his way around without a CIA covert operation to help him. The person who actually makes the decisions looks like Zawahiri, who was part of the Sadat assassination, who then lived in England for a long time, even thought the Egyptians had arrest warrants out for him killing a head of state, Zawahiri looks like an agent of MI5 or MI6, the British intelligence agencies.
Most impartial observers would say that Zawahiri runs the show and that Bin Laden is simply somebody that they bring out to babble at certain times, if he exists at all. But what you can see is what the CIA wants to do is build up Bin Laden. Why would the CIA want to build up Bin Laden?
They want Bin Laden to be the political leader of the Arab world. Because if Bin Laden is the political leader of the Arab world, the Arab world is doomed. Bin Laden’s line is, if you’re a real believer, and you meet a non-believer, you have to kill the infidel. Think what that means, if you’re an Arab country, in today’s world you need to find some kind of an ally against the British and the US, you need to find Russia, or China, or Pakistan, or South Africa, or Japan or somebody and all of them, or most of them are likely to be non-Muslim. So if you cut yourself out of those types of alliances, you’re guaranteed to be absolutely isolated, and very, very easy prey for the British and the US.
So this guy Scheuer, who came out of the closet in the last couple of months, after writing the book and getting the book published while he was still in the CIA, a remarkable situation, comes on as somebody who wants to defend Bin Laden. We also have the case of ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, another top CIA official. He just retired as the executive director of the CIA. Buzzy Krongard’s name also comes up in regard to the stock trading on the eve of 9/11, he was part of the investment bank that carried out some of these ‘put’ options on the eve of 9/11 in regards to United Airlines, AmericanAirlines and some others.
Buzzy Krongard after leaving the CIA, comes out and says I hope Bin Laden is never captured… Well, why do you? Well, he says, because then we might have to face more radical figures, if he weren’t there. So it’s just so evident that the CIA loves Bin Laden and would like nothing better to have all opposition forces in the Arab and Islamic world gathered under the banner of Bin Laden because if they do that, they’re sure to be defeated.
The only way these countries could ever get anywhere is by making deals say with Europe or with some of these other countries I’ve mentioned. If they follow Bin Laden, they never will.
BF: A couple of qualifications, Webster, what is the name of the CIA agent who made the remarks that you’re quoting, and was Bin Laden actually quoted as telling Arabs to kill infidels?
WT: Yes, as far as I can see that’s what Bin Laden says in his various writings, now of course Bin Laden, we try to show in the book various pictures of Bin Laden, sometimes he’s skinny, sometimes he’s fat, sometimes he’s a little bit taller… Bin Laden is some kind of a clone, he’s a palimpsest of these different things that come together, whether he exists at all is anybody’s guess.
But the one thing is that the CIA is determined to build the image of this guy… the first one is ‘Anonymous’, the author of ‘Imperial Hubris’, later revealed to be Michael Scheuer… and Buzzy Krongard, former executive director of the CIA.
BF: Webster, I see that Thierry Meyssan has written a very nice forward for your book ‘9/11 Synthetic Terror’…
WT: Yes, it’s very kind of him to do that. Meyssan of course is the world leader in 9/11 research in the sense that it was just 10 days after the events that he came out with the thesis that no commercial aircraft of any size had hit the Pentagon. Probably no commercial aircraft of any size at all. That affirmation has stood the test of time, against all kinds of people who have come forward, especially recently, saying that it was a commercial aircraft and so forth.
There are some people who try to make the notion of some kind of airliner hitting the Pentagon some kind of ‘required credential’ before you can be taken seriously as a researcher in this field, which I think is absolutely absurd. And I would just take this opportunity to say we don’t need ‘gatekeepers’ ‘border guards’ ‘Thought Police’ or whatever, in this debate we need, rather, an open debate in which it’s perfectly legitimate to attack people for their ideas, but not this kind of ad hominem stuff.
Meyssan writes in his introduction that my work is a new genre, it’s a new track of investigation into this, and what he says is that I try to show, and this is true, I try to show at least the continuity of the methods used in 9/11, with the methods used by the British and US intelligence agencies in the decades before.
Maybe I can say a couple of words about this, one side of it is, the invisible government. Who has the technical ability and the motivation to bring about events on this scale? Think back to Iran/Contra, think back to Senator Inouye making a remark in the course of those hearings in the middle of the 80’s, that there was in the United States an invisible government with its own Pentagon, its own State Dept. its own Treasury, its own foreign policy its own military line, and its own notion of how world affairs ought to be shaped.[2]
You can call that the invisible government, the secret government, the parallel government, the secret team… it’s clear if you look at recent US history that there is something infesting the Federal government at the level of top CIA officials, Generals, State Dept. officials, or, members of the Federal executive service, such as Richard Clarke. The man who ran the US government on 9/11, and was the first one to come into the White House at about 9 o’clock in the morning, based on no evidence whatsoever, saying ‘this is Bin Laden, this is Al Qaeda’. This is the same Richard Clarke who became the darling of some very misguided family members at those hearings about a year ago, when he came forward to say, ‘I failed you and your government failed you’. Yes he did fail, and his biggest failure, which I think was a consciously deliberate one, was to come in and say, ‘this is Bin Laden, this is Al Qaeda’, he is the main launcher of this crazy myth.
These are the kinds of people who seem to march to the tune of an invisible government network, that would be a private network that cuts across the executive departments and the agencies transversely, where some people are witting, some people are semi-witting of what’s going on, others simply don’t know and are told what to do, and the net result is the kind of thing that we see. So, this has been around for a while, the Kennedy assassination, the U2, the Bay of Pigs, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Vietnam War, Iran/Contra, the impeachment of Clinton.
A lot of these things come together in the shape of a permanent insurrection, if you like, against the Constitution, inside these institutions that goes on and on. The other element of continuity that I try to show is that I would view 9/11 through the lens of NATO spheres of influence, terrorism or geo-political terrorism, especially in central Europe in the 1970’s and 1980’s. What I’m talking about here just to make it simpler maybe is; the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, the so-called ‘Red Army Faction’ and the Italian ‘Red Brigades’, although I talk also about some terrorist groups in Greece and some other countries.
The common denominator between all of those is that NATO had a ‘stay-behind’ capability. The cover story on this was, well if the Soviets invade we need terrorist groups with weapons and training and communications to be able to launch guerilla warfare against the Soviets once the Soviets are here. But then of course they seem to have said, well, why wait for the Soviets to get here, why don’t we do things before they get here to make sure that they don’t get here, like making sure the Italian Communist Party doesn’t enter the governments in the 1970’s. Of course, it’s absurd to think that the Italian Communist Party entering the government would have meant the Soviets took over Italy, it’s absolutely crazy, but that does seem to be the way these people saw it. Probably Henry Kissinger was part of this worldview.
My background is having studied the Italian ‘Red Brigades’, the Morrow case is a good example maybe, Morrow was somebody who wanted to bring the Italian Communist Party into the government. He was threatened by a top US official, some have identified this as Kissinger, and he didn’t stop, he was kidnapped and murdered by the ‘Red Brigades’ and now, as the years go on, more and more comes out that the ‘Red Brigades’ were a wholly owned or largely owned subsidiary of the CIA. There was even a special organization called ‘Gladio’ which was this ‘stay-behind’ network in the Italian case about which quite a bit is known.
And there are some books about the Secret Armies of NATO that are now coming out on this kind of stuff, so I think 9/11 fits into that kind of continuity. That’s how you have to see 9/11. It’s not completely new; it’s really, a tradition.
BF: So are you making a connection then, between a present-day state terrorism and what you have been describing I understand, is sometimes referred to as ‘the strategy of tension’?
WT: Yes, exactly. One of the people I quote in here is Gianfranco Sanguinetti who is an Italian expert on precisely this, although he’s written other things that I wouldn’t agree with, but he was one of the people in December, 1969 when this first big bombing attack took place in Milan, it was an interesting situation, it was the biggest post-war strike wave in Italy that might have indeed brought the Communist Party into the government. And at the height of the strike wave, bombs went off in a bank in Milan killing about 20 people, which today would not seem like a very big deal, but in those days it was considered horrendous.
And this then led to a partial state of Martial Law where the trade unions and the left wing parties were essentially knocked onto the defensive, and people were terrified by police state measures going on, and that seems to have been the goal, and in retrospect it looks like those bombs came out of the NATO offices in north-east Italy, in Verona, Piecenza, and places like this. So yes, I think the strategy of tension is exactly the kind of thing you have to think of as being the tradition where 9/11 fits in.
BF: Now, when you reference NATO, are you referring more specifically to certain governments within NATO?
WT: Well, on the cover of the book we have some things that the people of our country have never seen, the seal of MI6, which is the British equivalent of the CIA… or MI5 which would be the equivalent of the FBI. One of the things I show in here is these agencies, between the US and the British, are the dominant forces in NATO intelligence. They, (in particular MI5), had a policy in Northern Ireland of deliberate murder. And this is a deliberate policy which seems to have been accepted by the leaders of MI5, all the way up to Thatcher, in Number 10 Downing St.
This is the Finucane murder story, and the details are in the book, that MI5 according to an official report that was issued by a blue ribbon panel of the British government, MI5 deliberately sent out agent provocateurs to murder leading Catholic activists as a means of trying to manage the situation in Northern Ireland and prevent things from getting out of British control.
So there we have a case of absolutely documented state-sponsored false-flag terrorism conspiracy, that no amount of wishing can get out of the world.
BF: Also though, with regard to the strategy of tension and the bombings, particularly in Europe which are post World War II bombings, you do think that the US government was very much involved, don’t you? Or even more so than the British?
WT: Yes, absolutely, NATO intelligence is essentially the British and the US acting together, so that’s the way all this was done. By the way, a guy that I knew in Italy at the time, I write about him in the introduction, one of the members of the Italian government actually pointed out at the time of the Moro assassination, De Gaulle kicked NATO out of France in 1966, and the French have been relatively free, relatively free, of the kind of terrorism that you have in Germany and Italy… and Greece where the NATO infrastructure was very strong. So what he was suggesting was that if you kick out NATO, you won’t have a terrorist problem. Meaning, terrorism comes from NATO intelligence, and I think that this is exactly correct.
BF: I didn’t know that De Gaulle had kicked NATO out of France.
WT: Sure, I think it was the speech in 1964 or 65 in which he said the NATO headquarters which had been located near Paris, had to leave. And they moved it to Mons in Belgium, near Brussels, and it’s stayed there until the present time. Plenty of terrorism in Belgium, too. But France got off relatively easy, they didn’t have the kind of spectacular stuff, the Moro assassination or the various things that went on in Germany with planes and Mogadishu and things of this sort. So, again, this is the historical continuity that you have to look at.
BF: That’s interesting. I see you have a chart here in one of your chapters called ‘One Coup Per Year. USA, 1998 – 2005’.
WT: Yeah, we’re in a very, very unstable situation, because of the collapse of the world economy, because of the threatened collapse of the dollar, this terminal crisis of the anglo-american imperialist system and their striving for world domination against China and Russia, we’re extremely unstable. And one of the forms that takes is what I would call ‘Weimar Politics’ it looks increasingly like Germany in the early 1930’s. You have to think about what that means, you know, Hitler coming in 1933— we may be a certain number of years from that, what I try to show here, I’ll tick them off if I can remember them, in 1998 you have the impeachment of Clinton which is a coup. It’s a ‘cold coup’. In 1999 there’s an attempt to convict Clinton and throw him out of office which fails because of popular support, interestingly, because not all coups succeed.
Later on in 1999 there’s another coup from a different quarter you might say, the Principals Committee, this would be Gore, Albright, Coen, General Shelton and that famous Richard Clarke that we can’t forget. Ordering the bombing of Serbia.
That is a proxy war against Russia. I mean, people need to remember, World War I started when Russia tried to defend Serbia. You bomb Serbia, and it’s like bombing Russia, and that’s exactly how that was understood in Russia at the time. So that was really done not by Clinton but by this Principals Committee. Clinton basically had no power left he had mortgaged his soul to avoid being ousted from the presidency.
In 2000 of course, you’ve got the first stolen election by Bush. In 2001, you have the really big one, the 9/11 terror coup, in 2002 you have a coup against the Constitution which is this War Powers transfer much denounced by Senator Byrd at the time, which essentially violates the Constitution, saying the President can declare war any time he wants. The Congress has essentially transferred the power to declare war to the President. That’s not what the Constitution says, you can’t do that by statute.
Then in 2003, the inevitable fruit of that… Bush uses those powers to attack Iraq. 2004, (I have an afterward about this), this you could probably call ‘Life Under the Invisible Government’. What does electoral politics look like in a country that is so completely run by invisible government intelligence agencies… the stolen election. My title there is, ‘Not an Election but a CIA Covert Operation’ and I try to show how this is pretty much the Bush Family tradition, but this time much more blatant, the stealing of the election in Ohio, in Florida, the so-called ‘red shift’ the massive difference between the exit polls and the recorded results which is essentially attributable to vote fraud, which is in favor of Bush, by a colossal mechanism, which I try to at least sketch, and now here we are in 2005. What’s gonna be the coup this year?
Well, you can imagine a wider war, the extension of the war into Iran, the US is already practically at war with Iran with drones and airplanes flying over, secret teams on the ground killing people and spying. Maybe it’s Syria, where we have to assume the same thing is going on, the US is attempting to interfere in Lebanon, we’ve got CIA ‘people-power’ revolutions, the ‘Cedar Revolution’ in Lebanon, the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine, it’s exactly the same thing, I’m afraid, despite whatever people may think, Georgia… the Roses, so that’s one possibility is a war coup.
The other possibility is the so-called ‘nuclear option’ which would be a radical change in the rules of the Senate, to outlaw the filibuster on judges, and once it’s judges, probably anything else, making the Senate into a rubber-stamp of the Republican Party bosses in the same way that the house already is, this is what Senator Byrd’s talked about when he came out and compared the Republican leadership of the Senate to Hitler, saying… that Hitler knew the value of maintaining legality, that the Republicans were doing the same thing, that they were essentially trying to turn the law upside down and against itself, so that they can simply ram things through without the traditional debate which is such an important part of what the Senate is supposed to do, it’s supposed to be that part of the government that says ‘Wait a minute, let’s see if wiser heads can prevail’ that would be another possible coup for 2005, or, of course, ever lurking in the background, atomic, bacteriological, chemical, radiological, terrorism of the kind that they seem to be talking about now in February or March (2005) much more than they did in November, December or January. So that’s always there as a possibility to provide a pretext for new police state measures.
This by the way, just in terms of theory, this is pure Leo Strauss and Carl Schmidt, this is exactly what the Neocons write about, Carl Schmidt essentially says, ‘sovereignty means the ability to declare the state of siege and have a coup’. So what we’re doing is we’re getting it kind of on the ‘installment plan’ but you can see these different steps, and it’s getting to be more and more of a suffocating grip on the government.
BF: If people wanted to reference Senator Inouye’s remarks with regard to the secret government, where could they find copies of those remarks?
WT: Well, the key quote is right in my book, so you get my book and it’s the epigraph of the first chapter in the book.
BF: Now, you have a section called ‘Angel is next.’ What do you mean by ‘Angel is next.’?
WT: Look, this is a forgotten clue of 9/11, which seems to me is the most important, because this is when the invisible government speaks. You may remember that at one point during the morning, 10:00 probably on 9/11, a death threat against Bush came into the Secret Service, saying, Angel is next. It essentially means, Air Force One will be shot down as the next step in these developments.
There’s no doubt that this telephone call took place, it was confirmed by Cheney indirectly, Condoleeza Rice very directly, many other Republicans directly, then later on it was denied. ‘Oh it was a confused or garbled message that came in.’
At the beginning it seemed to serve Bush, because it seemed to explain why he had gone from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska. Why he had been running across the country, scurrying away, instead of taking up his position in Washington, but as time went on, that became less important, and what became more important was that with this little message, you are opening up the world of the secret government which otherwise hardly appears to the superficial observer.
‘Angel is next.’ Implies the top-secret codename or codeword for the Presidential aircraft, Air Force One. I go into intelligence agency reports, now let me just make a parenthesis, (9/11 didn’t occur in a vacuum, it occurs in a world in which there are others watching. Who’s watching? Well, Russia’s watching, Israel’s watching very much, the French are watching, there’s Germans, Japan…), what I found is 3 separate reports, one is the Réseau Voltaire which is obviously benefiting from leaks from French intelligence. The Réseau Voltaire version, which came out September 20th (or) 25th, says that the ‘Angel is next.’ phone call came complete with top secret codeword, across a variety of agencies, suggesting that the people that were behind the attacks were a powerful faction inside the US intelligence community and government in general.
And that secondly, they had the nuclear launch codes in their possession. This report goes on to say that the Bush team thought during most of the day, that they were the target of a military coup. And it was only somehow later in the day that the situation was recomposed. Now what would it mean?
Essentially it means that the invisible government force behind 9/11 tells Bush that he must respond by stating that its Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Arabs, the Islamic world, and that what’s gonna happen is the invasion of Afghanistan, and above all the beginning of the ‘war of civilizations’ that Samuel Huntington writes about. An open-ended aggression of the United States against the Arab and Islamic world.
The implication seems to be, in the Réseau Voltaire report, that if Bush doesn’t do this, that this group is capable of starting that same war, using not conventional forces but nuclear missiles. Simply ordering the launch of missiles toward, well, Afghanistan perhaps, but maybe Baghdad, maybe Damascus, maybe Tehran, maybe Cairo, maybe Islamabad, Rabat, Tunisia, Kuala Lumpur, you name it. Any place in the Arab or Islamic world that would then start the war of civilizations with a vengeance.
The Debka, Debka is an internet service that generally reflects the views of the Israeli Mossad, and they are even more emphatic that this telephone call came complete with multiple codeword indicating that the invisible government force behind the attack which stretched through numerous Federal agencies and executive departments. They knew a whole selection of codeword that they seemed to have included with this phone call.
Finally there’s the Soviets, in this case Russia, it’s called Namakon, a very shadowy group. You can’t just call them up. But they speak from time to time, these are KGB old boys. And this appeared in the Russophile newspaper Zaftra, it’s a group that’s seeking confrontation, they have this nuclear launch capability, and they’re interested in nuclear confrontation also with Russia. Because, if it ever had come to this, in the middle of 9/11, if missiles had ever gone up, as soon as missiles are launched, Russia and China and others, see it, and they don’t know where those missiles are going. In the initial phase it’s not clear what the target is, so it takes a while to figure out where the missile is actually headed. It’s important to remember Russia was on a very high level of strategic alert on 9/11 because it had been carrying out strategic bomber maneuvers over the North Pole. (Of course the only conceivable target is Canada and the United States), and if you read Richard Clarke’s book, he says that the State Dept. had to call the Soviets and ask them to call off their strategic bomber maneuvers, and essentially the Soviets were asked not to go to a higher level of defense readiness, because the US had raised the DEFCON level to a sub-war level, but a very high level, in response to the 9/11 attacks. It’s also important to remember that one of the main events of 9/11 that nobody writes about, is the call between Putin and Bush, if you look at the big timeline that’s just been published about 9/11 it seems to have absolutely no reference to this, and it’s really one of the huge developments on 9/11, that Bush and Putin get on the phone and it starts a kind of a honeymoon. I would call it a Hitler/Stalin pact disguised as a honeymoon.
And Putin says, sure, send your forces into Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, all you want. Invade Afghanistan, all you want. Some have described it as a breathtaking turn by Putin, vis a vis the United States. I think it’s simply Putin saying, ‘…madmen are now ruling the United States, I will not get in their way now, I will let them disperse their forces across the world: make war against Afghanistan, make war against Iraq, they’ll become weaker, I’ll become stronger, I’m building missiles, I’m getting ready, this is not the time, I know they’re crazy but I’m putting on my smiley face as strategic deception…’ and I think that has become more and more clear as time has one on, so this is probably another aspect of my book, we haven’t rendered the concept quite as clear as it might be, but it is complicated.
I try to put 9/11 in the context of the world in which we live, and that is one in which the superpower tensions between the US and Russia, the main nuclear powers in the world remain extremely strong. They were strong as a result of the bombing of Serbia in 1999, there was talk of the 3rd World War then, which the American media completely blacked out, and right now we’re in a… new cold war situation, where that honeymoon seems to have ended. I think the 9/11 events also have to be seen within the thermonuclear balance of terror in the world, this is now “real” terror, this is the kind of thing where you could have had a thermonuclear exchange.
BF: How do we know about the phone call between Putin and Bush?
WT: That’s extremely well documented, that’s been written about in all kinds of academic journals, that’s readouts by the Kremlin, readouts by the White House that there’d been this wonderful, friendly telephone call between the two, and I quote some academics who wrote about this thing, that this was the most breathtaking pro-western turn by any Russian leader in the entire history of the country, despite the fact that there was a very strong anti-US feeling in Russia as a result of that bombing of Serbia, Putin did this.
And again, I think he’s saying, ‘I’m playing for time, Bush will make the US weaker, he’ll attack other countries before he attacks me, I will become stronger, I will conserve my forces, and if Bush decides to attack me later on, (and the Neocons), they will be spread out across the world, and I will be more ready than they are.’
Again, the Hitler/Stalin pact, I don’t want to try and make a one-to-one comparison between Bush and Hitler, (although you can do that), and Putin and Stalin, but something of that nature is going on behind the scenes in this world. The tensions are much, much greater than you think, and 9/11 was a moment when they seemed to be disappearing, but really were boiling behind the scenes.
BF: Your chapter goes on to speak about ‘Barksdale’ and ‘Nightwatch’. What about that?
WT: Well, what I’m trying to do here is make some sense of the erratic movements of Bush across the country. So he takes off from the area of Sarasota, Florida he then goes to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, then Offutt AFB, Nebraska. What explained this?
At the time it attracted a great deal of criticism, because Bush was accused of running like a rabbit, scurrying away, fleeing, and so forth. I try to make sense of this with the help of those 3 intelligence reports, the Réseau Voltaire, the Debka, and the Namakon KGB old boys report. Réseau Voltaire is very emphatic about this, according to Réseau Voltaire, Bush is concerned, or the traveling party with him, perhaps the traveling party back in the White House, are concerned that the coup group which has carried out 9/11 now, and is demanding the war of civilizations, we must assume, might use launch codes which they have indicated that they may well have, to launch nuclear missiles, to begin the war of civilizations on a nuclear plane, so how could Bush counteract that?
The Réseau Voltaire argument, and that’s French intelligence talking in some degree, is that Bush has to physically go to nuclear command centers to somehow be able to countermand orders with his physical presence. If some call comes in using the launch codes, Bush can be there and say, ‘no it’s not coming from me, I’m here’ so he goes to Barksdale, Louisiana. Now what is that?
That happens to be the secondary nuclear war fighting bunker of the United States, (already quite interesting), other than that it is the base of a series of Boeing 747’s known as ‘Nightwatch’ planes. This is a system of flying command centers, used to be known as ‘Looking Glass’ and what these are is Boeing 747’s which take off, can be fueled in the air, have these long trailing antennas which can communicate with thermonuclear submarines around the word, and a whole system of communications, and they can stay in the air for a week to ten days, each one of them, and essentially become the command center for fighting a thermonuclear war, so Bush goes to where they are located.
Then he makes his statement, I believe the peculiarity of that statement is that he doesn’t say anything about terrorism, that has somehow disappeared from his statement. And he then goes off to Offutt base in Nebraska which is an even more complex bunker system, the primary nuclear war bunker, it used to be the SAC, the Strategic Air Command and now it’s this STRATCOM, is what they call it now, and he stays there until the afternoon.
Now the issue about the embarrassment of this, the embarrassment is real enough, and at a certain point Cheney begins leaking and Karl Rove begins leaking the story that the threat has come in ‘Angel is next.’ Fine. These are scoundrels, these are liars, if it were only them saying this I would be extremely skeptical, but again it’s the French, Israeli, and Russian intelligence consensus that seems to indicate that there was a phone call and it did contain codeword.
So, Safire is the one who puts that out, Bush in the bunker, and I also quote Condoleeza Rice in a television interview saying, ‘yes they came in with these codeword’ and then she’s asked by I guess Tony Snow, ‘do we have moles in the government? How would they know these things?’ and Rice starts babbling, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know’. What they’re finding is that although this story seems to work as a cover story for Bush, it’s opening the fact that there’s an invisible government, in other words, some faction, which is not located in a cave or a tent or a desert, but rather right in the executive departments of the US is somehow behind this, so, I think that’s extremely important. That’s a dimension that has tended to get completely forgotten, which I try to make the centerpiece of an entire chapter.
Then of course later in the day you get this conversation between Bush and Putin… which seems also to be an attempt to manage the fact that madmen have taken over the US, probably at some point late in the day, Bush makes clear that’s he’s absolutely willing to do what this group demands, go on television, talk about Bin Laden, talk about Al Qaeda, there’s also somewhere in the Réseau Voltaire report that Tony Blair is somehow instrumental in convincing Bush that he’s got to talk about Al Qaeda and Bin Laden.
Now, this is more complex than the apparent surface version of events, I’m not arguing that anybody should have anything but the most absolute contempt for Bush, the hatred of Bush is one of the healthiest emotions you have in this population, and I hope my own anti-Bush dynasty credentials are fairly strong after writing this book in 1992, and having it on the internet since 1996, but if you want to realize what’s going on, it’s something more widespread than just Bush, or just Cheney. It’s an entire invisible government network including a very aggressive group that simply takes action and the elected officials have to pretty much fall into line, and get on the party line very fast, because there’s also an implication that if they don’t, they’ll get their heads blown off.
So, we are now living in that kind of lawless universe, the de facto dictatorship of the invisible government, which is a gangster faction as bad as any that we’ve seen in recent years, in the 20th century, I mean, in the world.
BF: ...so you would then include Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice, along with George W. Bush as possibly having been ‘out of the loop’ on this.
WT: It’s hard to say because… here we’re in areas of political judgment, and to some degree speculation. You’d say it’s clear that Cheney seems more on top of events than Bush. Rice is certainly a willing tool of the invisible government, probably was before… how much they’ve been told in advance it’s impossible to know, they were probably told that ‘something’ will happen, they better be ready for it, they better be receptive, they’d better be willing to go along, but exactly how that works we just don’t know. Hopefully the archives will be opened or indeed the tribunal will take place one day with subpoena power if it comes to that, again, the notion that Cheney ran the whole thing from a console in the White House, I think would be foolish to organize things that way, because suppose somebody walks in who’s not witting, who’s not a part of this?
And you can see this in the government, the Colleen Rowley’s, the people in Phoenix, the people at other levels, they’re not all witting participants, there are some of them who might be against it, and you never know. The next person who walks through the door in the White House might be somebody who is not a part of this, and who might be indignant about it. Whereas if you’re in a private, completely controlled environment, where you absolutely determine who gets in and who doesn’t then you’re much safer. So I’d think a ‘putsch’ faction, a coup faction would have to think in those terms.
BF: That’s very interesting. Is there anything else that you wanted to add about the invisible government?
WT: Well, the other thing is, this is all an act of incredible folly. I try to point that out at least in passing. When you have a large state apparatus, that chooses to go down the path of terrorism, you have essentially burned a lot of important bridges, and you have gone into a realm of lawlessness. An intelligent oligarchy would have said, ‘No. Don’t do this.’ But that didn’t happen, and now it’s been done and so the die is cast. We now have a situation where the basis of the entire US government, the Republican Party, the Bush administration, the Democratic Party equally, or perhaps even more so, really the entire social order, property relations, just about the whole society is now based on the fraud of terrorism, the myth of 9/11.
This is not wise. Intelligent oligarchs would have said, ‘This is an adventure of incalculable folly, we don’t want any part of it.’ What it indicates to me is there’s a breakdown in the ruling oligarchy of the US, which I saw already during the impeachment. There was nobody in the oligarchy to come forward to these scurrilous types like Tom DeLay and Gingrich and the impeachment crew, and tell them, ‘Stop rocking the boat. This is a system which has made us wealthy and powerful and we’re gonna keep it. The illusion of legitimacy that this government has, is our most precious possession, and we don’t intend to lose it because of the lust for power of Tom DeLay.’
That didn’t happen, the impeachment was pretty much played out. The same thing with 9/11, it has occurred, so we get the impression that the whole oligarchy is in disarray, that they have no consensus, they’re going in different directions, they’re probably prey to manipulations from abroad, from Britain, from other countries. So I think it’s a very dangerous situation.
BF: You mentioned in passing William Safire’s column and the fact that… I guess he was told that the codes, the secret codes for Air Force One had been known or leaked for this phone call to come in? How did he know about this?
WT: The quote I have here is, Safire says, the secret service told me that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts. (Bush) In light of this incredible threat it was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort.
Except, this is another important feature, when Bush took off from Florida, he had no fighter escort. And Air Force One was constantly receiving messages saying ‘There’s an aircraft headed your way, watch out.’
There’s another report that Bush’s home in Crawford, TX was somehow under attack, or surveillance, or something along these lines, so you can imagine these messages coming into the mind of the terrified Bush. So, the other thing of course, I have to cite somebody that I don’t always agree with but Daniel Hopsicker has gone into Florida over the years and has done meticulous research about the activities of the patsies.
Again, I call them patsies, he thinks they carried out the 9/11 attacks, this is where we part company, but Atta was psychotic, a cat torturer… frequenting all kinds of bars and strip joints and so forth. And all of this in the infrastructure of the Iran/Contra affair. But what Hopsicker dug up, was that when Bush was spending the night between the 10th and 11th of September on Longboat Key, I think it is, in that Sarasota area, on the morning of 9/11, there was something that looked suspiciously like an assassination attempt against Bush. Which is a group of Arabs drive up and say, we’re a camera crew, we have an appointment to interview Bush, please let us in, secret service turns them away. (Longboat Observer, Sept. 26, 2001).
Maybe that was some kind of a warning, perhaps that was communicated to Bush, so I’m simply trying to point to the complexity of the situation, and the fact that there’s an agency operating which you can’t simply boil down to Bush and Cheney, the people in the visible government. There’s some kind of very aggressive, very adventurous and violent secret team that’s lurking there in the background, and they have left these tracks across the media, and of course most of this stuff is completely ignored.
There’s also the question why was Bush kept in the school for so long? When it was clear that the country was under attack, and his whereabouts were known. Why was he kept there? Some secret service agents tried to say we’ve got to get out of here right away, but it never happened, what was going on? Was Bush being hung out to dry? Was he being ‘security stripped’?
But again, all of these things, (and not to generate sympathy for Bush), but to show how he capitulated, and turned over the government to this secret team that had successfully carried off most of the elements of 9/11, perhaps not all of the things that they might have wanted, but a good number of them.
BF: Right, assuming that he was unaware of what was going to happen beforehand.
WT: Right, and that gets us into the theory of the modern presidency. I have a couple of pages here where I simply try to indicate that since the time of FDR, the oligarchy has been adamant that they don’t want a real President, they don’t want somebody who’s mentally capable of carrying out the inherent Constitutional powers of the presidency, they want puppets. Because they’re an oligarchy and they don’t intend to be bossed around by a President. Which a real President would be able to do. So we find Presidents that are chosen because they have mental impairment, because they’re dotards, (in the case of Reagan), or they’ve been through nervous breakdowns in the case of Carter, they’re ‘born again’ or whatever it is.
Or they’re thought to be sex maniacs like Kennedy was thought to be, or Clinton later on. So the oligarchy likes to pick Presidents who are inherently flawed, weak, blackmail-able and so forth, and there’s no real reason to think that Bush is anything more than such a puppet President, and therefore expendable, we’ve got Cheney and if you don’t have Cheney, you’ve got Hastert and so on down the line. So, there are always possible replacements and if you’re gonna do a terror action of this scale, the assassination of a President could not present insuperable problems to a group like this.
BF: Not at all, since we’ve seen that in the past.
WT: Yes, exactly, the whole thesis is that there is an invisible government, that they killed Kennedy, and they’re ready to kill again if it comes to that. In the case of Bush it’s clearly not necessary, but who knows?
1 Via the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
2 “There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” – Senator Daniel K. Inouye during the Iran-contra scandal.
Copyright 2005 Guns and Butter (hyperlinks and footnotes added.)