From my inbox, read and enjoy
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
IV. Why Did the President and His Secret Service Agents
Remain at the School?
Upon hearing that a plane had struck one of the Twin
Towers, President Bush reportedly believed that it was an
accident. It was not terribly strange, therefore, that he
decided to go ahead with the photo-op at the school in
Sarasota. Word of the second strike, however, should have
indicated to his Secret Service agents---assuming that
these strikes were unexpected---that the country was
undergoing an unprecedented terrorist attack. And yet he
was allowed to remain at the school for another half hour.
This behavior was very strange. The president's location
had been highly publicized. If the attacks were indeed
unexpected, the Secret Service, having no idea how many
planes had been hijacked, would have suspected that the
president himself was one of the targets: What could be
more satisfying to foreign terrorists attacking high-value
targets than to kill the president? For all the Secret
Service would have known, a hijacked airliner might have
been bearing down on the school at that very minute, ready
to crash into it, killing the president and everyone else
there---including the Secret Service agents themselves. It
is, in any case, standard procedure for the Secret Service
to rush the president to a safe location whenever there is
any sign that he may be in danger. And yet these agents,
after allowing the president to remain in the classroom
another 10 minutes, permitted him to deliver his regularly
scheduled TV address, thereby announcing to the world that
he was still at the school.
Would not this behavior be explainable only if the head of
the Secret Service detail knew that the targets did not
include the president? And how could this have been known
unless the attacks were being carried out by people within
our own government? The 9/11 Commission, far from asking
these questions, said only: “The Secret Service told us
they . . . did not think it imperative for [the president]
to run out the door.”[58] A serious inquiry into this
matter, therefore, remains to be made.
V. Why Did the 9/11 Commission Lie about Vice President
Cheney’s Activities?
One sign of the complicity of Vice President Cheney is the
fact that the 9/11 Commission evidently felt a need to lie
about the time of two of his activities: his entry into the
Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) under the
White House and authorization to shoot down any hijacked
airliners.
It had been widely reported that the vice president had
gone down to the PEOC shortly after the second strike on
the WTC, hence about 9:15.[59] The most compelling witness
was Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, who
testified to the 9/11 Commission that when he entered the
PEOC at 9:20, Cheney was already there. The 9/11 Commission
Report, however, claimed that Cheney did not enter the PEOC
until “shortly before 10:00, perhaps at 9:58.”[60] Mineta’s
testimony was simply omitted from the final report of the
Zelikow-led 9/11 Commission. Why would the Commission go to
such lengths---telling an obvious lie and omitting publicly
available evidence---to conceal the true time of Cheney’s
entry into the PEOC?
One possible reason would involve the testimony of Mineta,
who said:
During the time that the airplane was coming in to the
Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say
to the Vice President, “The plane is 50 miles out.” “The
plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to “the plane
is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the Vice
President, “Do the orders still stand?” And the Vice
President . . . said, “Of course the orders still stand.
Have you heard anything to the contrary?”[61]
Mineta reported that this conversation occurred at about
9:25 or 9:26.
This testimony creates a problem for the official story.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s spokesman, in explaining
why the Pentagon was not evacuated before it was struck,
claimed that “[t]he Pentagon was simply not aware that
this aircraft was coming our way.”[62] The 9/11 Commission
supported this claim, alleging that there was no warning
about an unidentified aircraft heading towards Washington
until 9:36 and hence only “one or two minutes” before the
Pentagon was struck at 9:38.[63] Mineta’s account, however,
says that Cheney knew about an approaching aircraft more
than 10 minutes earlier. There would have been over
12 minutes for the Pentagon to be evacuated; 125 lives
could have been saved.
Mineta’s account also implies that Cheney had issued stand-
down orders. Mineta himself did not make this allegation,
saying instead that he assumed that “the orders” were to
have the plane shot down. But that interpretation does not
fit what actually happened--the aircraft was not shot down.
It would also make the story unintelligible: The young
man’s question whether the orders still stood would not
make sense unless they were orders to do something
unexpected---not to shoot the aircraft down. By omitting
Mineta’s testimony and stating that Cheney did not enter
the PEOC until almost 10:00, the 9/11 Commission implied
that Cheney could not have given a stand-down order to
allow an aircraft to strike the Pentagon.
The full brazenness of the Commission’s lie is illustrated
by the fact that it contradicts Cheney’s own account, which
can still be read on the White House website. Speaking on
NBC’s “Meet the Press” five days after 9/11, Cheney said:
“[A]fter I talked to the president, . . . I went down into
. . . the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. . . .
[W]hen I arrived there within a short order, we had word
the Pentagon's been hit.”[64] So he got there, as Mineta
said, some time before the Pentagon was struck, not 20
minutes afterwards.
The lie about Cheney’s entry into the PEOC was also
important to the controversy over whether the US military
shot down Flight 93. The 9/11 Commission, simply ignoring
a vast amount of evidence that the plane had been shot
down,[65] supported the official claim that it was not
shot down by claiming that Cheney, having not arrived at
the PEOC until almost 10:00, did not issue the shoot-down
order until after 10:10---which would have been seven or
more minutes after Flight 93 had crashed (at 10:03, accord-
ing to the official account). But in addition to the
evidence that Cheney had been in the PEOC since about 9:15,
we also have evidence---including statements from Richard
Clarke, who was the national coordinator for security and
counterterrorism, and Colonel Robert Marr, the head of
NORAD’s northeast sector (NEADS)[66]---that Cheney’s shoot-
down order was issued well before 10:00.[67]
The 9/11 Commission’s obvious lies about Cheney’s
activities give reason to suspect that it, under the
leadership of Philip Zelikow, was trying to conceal
Cheney’s responsibility for the Pentagon strike and the
downing of Flight 93.[68]
Incidentally, although Michael Bronner’s aforementioned
article and the movie United 93, on which he worked, were
obviously intended to bolster the official account about
this flight, they do not refute the conclusion that this
account is false. For one thing, the cell phone calls,
which play a central role in the drama, were
technologically impossible in 2001.[69] Moreover, Major
General Larry Arnold, who was the commanding general of
NORAD’s Continental Region at the time, said after seeing
United 93: “The movie trailer said the military was not
notified of UAL 93 until 4 minutes after it had crashed.
That is not true as we were notified a short time before
it crashed. . . . I advised Col. Marr to intercept UAL
93.”[70]
VI. Did the Bush-Cheney Administration Have Motives for
Orchestrating the 9/11 Attacks?
When prosecuting attorneys seek to prove the defendant to
be guilty as charged, they have to show “means, motive,
and opportunity.” It is clear that the Bush-Cheney
administration, including its Pentagon under the leadership
of Donald Rumsfeld, had---unlike al-Qaeda---the means and
the opportunity to orchestrate the events of 9/11. Of the
several motives that high officials in the administration
would have had, I will mention three:
Afghanistan: Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book, The Grand
Chessboard, said that establishing military bases in
Central Asia would be crucial for maintaining “American
primacy,” partly because of the huge oil reserves around
the Caspian Sea. But American democracy, he added, “is
inimical to imperial mobilization,” which requires
“economic self-denial (that is, defense spending) and
. . . human sacrifice (casualties even among professional
soldiers).” Explaining that the public had “supported
America’s engagement in World War II largely because of
the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,”
Brzezinski suggested that Americans today would support
the needed military operations in Central Asia only “in
the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived
direct external threat.”[71]
Support for these operations was generated by the 9/11
attacks plus the claim by the Bush-Cheney administration
that these attacks had been planned in Afghanistan by
Osama bin Laden—-a claim for which the administration
refused to provide any proof[72] and for which even the
FBI admits that it “has no hard evidence.”[73]
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A more specific motivation was provided by the “pipeline
war.”[74] The Bush-Cheney administration supported UNOCAL’s
plan to build an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan,
but the Taliban, being unable to provide sufficient
security, had become regarded as an obstacle. In a July
2001 meeting in Berlin, representatives of the
administration, trying to get the Taliban to share power
with other factions, reportedly said, “Either you accept
our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a
carpet of bombs.”[75] 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.”[76]
Given the fact that the attacks on New York and Washington
occurred on September 11, the U.S. military had time to get
logistically ready to begin the attack on Afghanistan on
October 7.
Iraq: Some key members of the Bush-Cheney administration---
including Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Donald
Rumsfeld, and privates Cheney himself---had in the late 1990s
been active members of an organization, the Project for the
New American Century (PNAC), that advocated attacking Iraq
to remove Saddam Hussein, establish a strong military
presence, and control the oil.[77] PNAC’s Rebuilding
America’s Defenses, released late in 2000, reiterated the
idea of a permanent military presence in the Gulf region,
saying that the “unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the
immediate justification,” but “the need for a substantial
American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue
of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”[78]
Immediately upon taking office, both Paul 0’Neill and
Richard Clarke have revealed, the Bush administration was
intent on taking over Iraq. The only question was “finding
a way to do it,” as O’Neill put it. “The terrorist attacks
of September 11,” said Bob Woodward, “gave the U.S. a new
window to go after Hussein.” Although no Iraqis were among
the alleged hijackers, the Bush administration was able to
use 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Given the state of
fear created of fear created in the American psyche by
9/11, the administration needed only to fabricate evidence
that Saddam was acquiring nuclear weapons while also
suggesting that he had been involved in 9/11.[79]
Increased Military Spending: A second possible motive was
provided by PNAC’s more general goal of increasing America’s
military superiority sufficiently to establish a global Pax
Americana. This goal had already been asserted in the 1992
draft of the “Defense Planning Guidance,” written by
Wolfowitz and Libby under the guidance of Cheney, who was
completing his tenure as secretary of defense.
In 2000, Wolfowitz and Libby were participants in PNAC’s
project to produce Rebuilding America’s Defenses, in which
this goal showed up again. This document also contained an
idea perhaps derived from Brzezinski’s book: After saying
that the desired Pax Americana “must have a secure
foundation on unquestioned U.S. military preeminence”
and that such preeminence will require a technological
transformation of the US military, it added that this
process of transformation will “likely be a long one,
absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event--like a new
Pearl Harbor."[80]
When 9/11 came, it was immediately treated as “the Pearl
Harbor of the 21st century,” as Bush reportedly called it
that very night.[81] It was also characterized as, in
Bush’s words, “a great opportunity,”[82] with Rumsfeld
adding that 9/11 created “the kind of opportunities that
World War II offered, to refashion the world.”[83] This
idea then showed up in the previously mentioned Rice-
Zelikow document, The National Security Strategy of the
United States of America for 2002, which brazenly said:
“The events of September 11, 2001 opened vast, new
opportunities.”[84]
A central dimension of the desired technological
transformation of the military was the weaponization
of space, euphemistically called “Missile Defense.”
(One neocon, Lawrence Kaplan, has candidly said:
“Missile defense isn’t really meant to protect America.
It’s a tool for global domination.”[85]) In January of
2001, the Commission to Assess U.S. National Security
Space Management and Organization, which was chaired
by Rumsfeld, published its report. Speaking of the need
for massive funding for the U.S. Space Command, the
Rumsfeld Commission asked whether such funding would
occur only after a “Space Pearl Harbor.”[86]
On the evening of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld held a press
conference. 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?”[87] Congress immediately appropriated
an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and hundreds
of billions more later, with few questions asked.
Conclusion: The Preeminent Importance of 9/11
The above evidence, plus the fact that all the “evidence”
that seems to implicate the alleged hijackers, such as
cellphone calls, airport photos, and discovered luggaqe
and passports, appears to have been fabricated, leads to
the conclusion that 9/11 was a false-flag operation
orchestrated by the Bush administration for primarily
imperial reasons.[88]
If this conclusion is correct, then exposing the falsity of
the official account of 9/11 should be high on the agenda
of all people committed to reversing the present policies
of the U.S. government, for at least four reasons.
First, 9/11 has provided the pretext for at least most of
the malevolent and destructive policies carried out by
the Bush-Cheney administration since that day. When any
objection is raised to this administration’s illicit
policies---from illegal invasions to torture to illegal
spying to weaponizing space to talk of a nuclear first
strike---the answer is always the same: “The critics fail
to understand that the world changed on 9/11.” Until the
truth about 9/11 is exposed, it will remain a blank check
for virtually anything desired by this administration.
Second, the truth about 9/11 is one truth that the American
people would not tolerate. They have proven remarkably,
even disturbingly, tolerant of many other things---such as
the clear indication from the Downing Street memo that the
Bush administration planned to “fix” the intelligence
about Iraq’s WMDs---that should have led to demands for
impeachment.[89] But the American people simply would not
allow an administration to stay in power after learning
that it had orchestrated the attacks of 9/11.
Third, the orchestration of the attacks of 9/11 goes
far beyond any previous instance of “high crimes and
misdemeanors” that have previously been cited as cause
for impeachment. The attacks were---in the words of Bush,
Cheney, and Rumsfeld themselves---heinous crimes. Any U.S.
citizens who participated in planning, carrying out, and/or
covering up these attacks are guilty of treason, as defined
by Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution, because these
attacks were acts of war against the United States---again,
according to the assessment of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld
themselves. If this treason is not publicly uncovered and
prosecuted, there is little hope for the survival of the
democratic forms we still have. If we fail to have a
serious investigation of the prima facie evidence for such
treason---especially given the fact that this evidence,
once examined, is overwhelming[90]---we will in effect be
telling the perpetrators that they can get away with
virtually anything.
Finally, to reverse the policies of the Bush-Cheney
administration will require more than simply removing
this administration from office---something that could be
legitimately done for any number of reasons. The attacks
of 9/11 were orchestrated to further the project of
creating an American empire of truly global scope and,
as we saw earlier, this has been a long and bipartisan
project. Differences have involved strategy, emphasis,
and demeanor more than the goal itself. The replacement
of the Bush-Cheney administration by a Democratic
administration for some reason other than 9/11 would
probably simply result in a reversion to the subtler,
more sophisticated, and hence more effective form of
imperialism that the United States previously exercised.[91]
What needs to be publicly recognized is that the bipartisan
global domination project is, as I have put it elsewhere,
“propelled by fanaticism based on a deeply perverted value
system.”[92] Those who read books and magazines about U.S.
imperialism know that there has long been abundant evidence
for this assessment. But the public revelation of the truth
about 9/11 could have an educative value extending far
beyond the circles of those who read policy-oriented books
and magazines. If Americans came to see that the attacks
of 9/11 were, in the minds of those who planned them,
justified by the goal of creating an all-encompassing
empire, this realization could lead to widespread revulsion
against the goal itself and the values implicit in it---
values that are diametrically opposed to basic values
embedded in all the world’s religions and ethical systems.
------------------------------------------------------------
[58] The 9/11 Commission Report, 39.
[59] Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and
Distortions, 241-44.
[60] The 9/11 Commission Report, 40.
[61] 9/11 Commission, Public Hearing, May 23, 2003. YouTube
has Mineta’s exchanges with Hamilton and Roemer, during
which these statements were made.
[62]“Air Attack on Pentagon Indicates Weaknesses,” Newsday,
September 23, 2001.
[63] The 9/11 Commission Report, 34.
[64] “The Vice President appears on Meet the Press with Tim
Russert,” Camp David, September 16, 2001.
[65] See Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and
Distortions, 238-39. Additional evidence came from Paul
Cellucci, Washington’s envoy to Canada in February of 2005.
Seeking the convince Canada to support the missile defense
shield, he told his Toronto audience that a Canadian
general [Captain Michael Jellinek] was in charge of NORAD
on 9/11 when it scrambled military jets to shoot down a
hijacked aircraft headed for Washington (Colin Perkel and
Beth Gorham, “Missile Rejection Perplexes U.S.,” Canadian
Press, Feb. 23, 2005).
[66] Clarke reports that he received the authorization from
Cheney shortly after 9:45, when the evacuation of the White
House began (Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on
Terror [New York: Free Press, 2004], 7-8). According to
James Bamford and an ABC News program entitled “9/11”
(September 11, 2002), Colonel Marr, after receiving
Cheney’s shoot-down order, “sent out word to air traffic
controllers to instruct fighter pilots to destroy the
United jetliner” (Bamford, A Pretext for War [New York:
Doubleday, 2004], 65-66).
[67] See Griffin, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions
and Distortions, 237-40.
[68] Why exactly the military and the White House denied
shooting down Flight 93, rather than taking credit for
preventing a second attack on Washington, is unclear. But
the very fact that they have steadfastly denied shooting
down Flight 93 suggests that this was a criminal act,
which needed to be covered up.
[69] See Michel Chossudovsky, “More Holes in the Official
Story: The 9/11 Cell Phone Calls,” Aug. 10, 2004) and A. K.
Dewdney, “The Cellphone and Airfone Calls from Flight
UA93,” Physics 911. However, the technology of “voice
morphing,” through which the calls could have been faked,
was sufficiently developed at the time, as explained in a
1999 article by William Arkin (“When Seeing and Hearing
Isn’t Believing,” Washington Post, Feb. 1, 1999). I discuss
this issue at considerable length in Debunking 9/11
Debunking.
[70] Larry Arnold, “MG Larry Arnold on UAL Flight 93,”
NavySEALs.com, June 8, 2006.
[71]Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American
Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic
Books, 1997), 24-25, 35-36, 212.
[72] Secretary of State Colin Powell promised to prepare
a White Paper presenting this proof but never did. And
although the Taliban said that it would hand bin Laden
over if the United States presented evidence of his
involvement in 9/11, Bush rejected the request (“White
House Warns Taliban: ‘We Will Defeat You,’” CNN.com,
Sept. 21, 2001).
[73] Ed Haas of the Muckraker Report, being puzzled by
the fact that the FBI’s list of the attacks for which bin
Laden is wanted does not include 9/11, asked Rex Tomb,
Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI, why not.
Tomb, reported Haas, 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”
(“FBI says, ‘No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to
9/11’” Muckraker Report, June 6, 2006).
[74] See Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and
Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), chaps. 12 and 13, entitled “Romancing the
Taliban: The Battle for Pipelines.”
[75]Julio Godoy, “U.S. Taliban Policy Influenced by Oil,”
Inter Press Service, Nov. 16, 2001.
[76]This according to Niaz Naik, the highly respected
Pakistani representative at the meeting, as reported in
George Arney, “U.S. ‘Planned Attack on Taleban,’” BBC
News, Sept. 18, 2001. According to a story in the Guardian,
“Threat of U.S. Strikes Passed to Taliban Weeks Before NY
Attack” (Sept. 22, 2001), one of the American
representatives confirmed that this discussion of military
action did occur.
[77] See Paul D. Wolfowitz and Zalmay M. Khalilzad, “Saddam
Must Go,” Weekly Standard, Dec. 1997; PNAC, “Letter to
President Clinton on Iraq,” Jan. 26, 1998; and PNAC,
“Letter to Gingrich and Lott,” May 29, 1998. The signers
of the latter two letters included Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld.
[78] The Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding
America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a
New Century, September 2000.
[79] For Paul O’Neill, who was secretary of the treasury
and hence a member of the National Security Council, see
Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the
White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2004), and O’Neill’s interview on CBS’s
“60 Minutes”. Richard Clarke, confirming O’Neill’s charge,
said: “The administration of the second George Bush did
begin with Iraq on its agenda” (Against All Enemies, 264).
Woodward’s statement is in his Bush at War (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2002), 83. I have discussed the way in
which 9/11 was morphed into a pretext to attack Iraq in
“Imperial Motives for a New Pearl Harbor” (in Christian
Faith and the Truth behind 9/11).
[80]Rebuilding America’s Defenses, 50-51.
[81]Washington Post, January 27, 2002.
[82]Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster,
2002), 32.
[83] “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York
Times,” October 12, 2001. Condoleezza Rice made a similar
statement (Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire, 229).
[84]The National Security Strategy of the United States
of America, Sept. 2002 (
www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html).
[85] Lawrence Kaplan, New Republic 224 (March 12, 2001),
cover text; quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, 223.
[86]Report of the Commission to Assess U.S. National
Security Space Management and Organization
(
www.defenselink.mil/cgi-bin/dlprint.cgi).
[87] Department of Defense News Briefing on Pentagon
Attack, 6:42 PM, Sept. 11, 2001.
[88] “False-Flag Operations, 9/11, and the New Rome: A
Christian Perspective,” in Kevin Barrett, John B. Cobb Jr.,
and Sandra Lubarsky, eds., 9/11 and American Empire:
Christians, Jews, and Muslims Speak Out (Northampton:
Olive Branch, 2007).
[89] For an analysis of the memo and the press coverage,
see Mark Danner, “Why the Memo Matters,” New York Review
of Books, July 14, 2005.
[90] In calling the evidence “overwhelming,” I mean the
total evidence now available (much of which is contained
in my five books on 9/11), not merely the brief summary
given here.
[91] See David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb, Jr., Richard
Falk, and Catherine Keller, The American Empire and the
Commonwealth of God (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
2006).
[92] “9/11 and the American Empire: How Should Religious
People Respond?” Originally on BookTV (C-Span 2), April
30, 2005; text published at 9/11 CitizensWatch, May 7,
2005. A somewhat revised version, entitled “9/11, the
American Empire, and Common Moral Norms,” is in Griffin
and Scott, eds., 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals
Speak Out. I have used the term “demonic” for this value
system in “The Divine and the Demonic,” chap. 8 of
Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11.
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