Theos-Talk Archives (September 2001 Message tt00309)

http://www.raf-phantom.de/ (english version):

Welcome to the New and Improved Police State

David McGowan
September 12, 2001

"We are going to see a great number of articles in the future from so-called
experts and public officials. They will warn about more violence, more
kidnappings, and more terrorists. Mass media, the armed forces, and
intelligence agencies will saturate our lives with fascist scare tactics and
'predictions' that have already been planned to come true."
'Conspiracy theorist' Mae Brussell, 1974

I have a friend with whom I frequently disagree on matters of politics. He
thinks that I am a crazed conspiracy theorist and I think that he is a
reactionary fascist. There was one thing that we agreed on though. A few
weeks ago, I told him that our fearless leaders seemed to be veering
dangerously close to unleashing 'tactical' nuclear weapons upon the world.
Although he seriously doubted that that was in fact the case, he
readily agreed that such an action would be reckless and unconscionable. He
stated that he couldn't envision any scenario under which such a strike
would be justified and that we should avoid at all costs crossing that
threshold. Opening that door, he believed, could only serve to escalate
tensions and make this a much more dangerous world in which to live.
He was one of several people who called me yesterday to discuss the
alleged terrorist attacks on America. During the course of that call, he
stated flatly that when the perpetrators were identified, they and their
backers should be nuked. When I reminded him of our conversation of just a
few weeks before, he said that things have changed now. I asked him if he
had considered whether that wasn't perhaps precisely the point of the
attacks. Unfazed, he reiterated his belief that I am a crazed conspiracy
theorist.
Excuse my cynicism, but have we Americans completely lost our
ability to think? Are we now so thoroughly brain-dead that we are completely
reliant on our media resources, with their endless supply of 'experts,' to
make sense of events in the world? Are we really that stupid or do our
leaders just think that we are?
The actions taken on the morning of September 11 were crimes -
horrendous crimes against humanity, to be sure, but in the final analysis
not so very different from any other crimes. The first step in solving any
crime is to look at who had a motive and who had the means and opportunity
to commit the crime.
As for motive, we are to believe that a band of Islamic terrorists
are the most likely suspects. But is that the case? Was it a state-sponsored
terrorist group that had the most to gain by launching such an assault, or
was it our own political, corporate and military leaders?
While the people of the Palestinian territories may well be dancing
in the streets today in celebration of the blow struck against the United
States, they certainly won't emerge as the winners in this national tragedy.
When the bombs begin to rain down upon them, as they certainly will, the
loss of life, property and hope will be far more profound for them than it
will be for the people of New York. Their short-term 'victory' will be a
hollow one indeed.
This is certainly not to suggest that there are no governments,
groups, or organizations around the world, or within these borders, that
have legitimate grudges against the United States government. The numbers of
such entities are legion. Two hundred years of imperialistic covert and
overt military ventures have created a lot of enemies of the American ship
of state and a tremendous amount of residual bitterness. Yet none of these
groups stood to gain by launching such an attack.
The United States, on the other hand, has much to gain in the
aftermath of this chapter of American history. I am not talking here, of
course, about the people of this country, who will pay a steep price for the
carnage of September 11. Big Brother has assured us that we will be
protected from future acts of this sort, and we will welcome with open arms
the repressive, overtly fascistic 'reforms' that will be enacted.
The people, of this country and of the world, are always the ones to
pick up the tab for acts of gross governmental malfeasance. The people of
some hapless country (or countries) that is identified as the culprit will
pay with their lives and the lives of their children. The people of America
and much of the Western world will pay with the wholesale stripping away of
their remaining human, civil and privacy rights.
Such a scenario only serves to benefit those who sit at the top of
the food chain. Our elected leaders - who are elected only in the sense that
every couple of years we are given a choice between two interchangeable
candidates - will revel in the free reign they will be given to ram through
legislation so appallingly reactionary that it would have been unthinkable
just days ago.
Military spending and the militarization of the country will
escalate to a fever pitch. Welcome to the new and improved police state -
the largest, most powerful, and most technologically advanced the world has
ever seen. With the much-lauded U.S. economy tanking and unemployment
figures hitting their highest levels in years, this will come in very handy
for the 'powers that be.'
The ugly truth is that all 'anti-terrorist' measures are designed
not to protect the American people from attack or to protect our 'freedoms,'
but to protect wealth and power - specifically the unprecedented levels of
wealth currently held by corporate America - and to restrict those very
freedoms that threaten their hold on that wealth.
This American tragedy, in other words, plays directly into the hands
of the corporate and military elite of this nation, who have for years been
propagandizing for a more belligerent and imperialistic foreign policy and
for more repressive legislation here on the home front. Having been
presented with a pretext to enact such measures, it is our leaders - elected
or otherwise - who stand to gain the most from yesterday's bloodshed.
As for the question of who had the means and opportunity to commit
these crimes, the official story holds that they were the work of a
well-organized foreign terrorist organization. Officials have acknowledged
that the operation was an exceptionally well-planned and well-coordinated
series of attacks that required months of planning and a large network of
co-conspirators to pull off.
So well-organized was the operation that government spokesmen and
television talking heads (which are really the same thing) have been at a
loss to explain some of the day's events. Many questions have been left
unanswered and some haven't been asked at all. Some of the answers that have
been offered have strained credibility far past the breaking point.
One question that has gone unanswered is how a plane was able to
penetrate so deeply into the Pentagon's airspace - after two other planes
had already plowed into the World Trade Center towers, no less. Despite the
ridiculous current claims, the airspace surrounding the Pentagon is perhaps
the most tightly controlled, militarily secure airspace in the world. This
would be all the more true in the immediate aftermath of a large-scale
'terrorist' attack on New York City.
Claims have been made that even if the approach of the aircraft had
sounded an alarm, it would not have been targeted due to the fact that it
was a commercial aircraft with many innocent lives on-board. Nonsense.
Anyone who thinks that U.S. military/intelligence personnel would hesitate
to target a commercial airliner is living in a media-induced fantasy world,
particularly in light of the fact that two such aircraft had already been
used in suicide attacks.
The question then of how this plane was able to 'elude' the
Pentagon's formidable defenses is one that should receive close scrutiny
from America's 'free' and 'independent' press. There is virtually no chance
that that will happen. Another question that begs for an answer is how teams
of presumably armed hijackers were able to breach the security measures of
no less than three major airports and successfully hijack four separate
flights.
Contrary to the claims now being made, security precautions
currently in place in U.S. airports are anything but "lax." That fact was
being implicitly acknowledged by this morning as reports began to come in
claiming that the hijackers had improvised weapons from razor blades and
other items carried in their shaving kits. These reports were actually
carried by the network news broadcasters with a straight face.
This scenario would be laughable were this story not such a tragic
one. According to the latest official stories, three to five terrorists
boarded each of the hijacked aircraft. All of these terrorists, of course,
were such religious fanatics that they had agreed to give their lives for
the cause they believed in, and none of them presumably had second thoughts
about that decision once the operation was underway.
Does anyone really believe that a few guys wielding toothbrush
handles embedded with razor blades could quickly and efficiently gain
control of a commercial airliner? I would think that such a group would have
their hands full trying to hold-up a liquor store. How could, as has been
reported, such a 'terrorist cell' possibly simultaneously overpower the
flight crews and corral all of the flights' passengers into the rear of the
planes?
I don't consider myself to be a particularly brave or heroic sort of
guy, but I would not hesitate for a second to take on a couple of guys
wielding toothbrushes, particularly if my life, or the life of my family,
was on the line and if I knew that I had some sixty people (the average
number of passengers on the flights) behind me who would back me up. Maybe
that's just me, but somehow I think most Americans would rise to the
occasion.
Nevertheless, these terrorist teams reportedly succeeded where so
many other better armed terrorists have failed. The majority of hijacking
attempts, as officials have acknowledged, end in failure. There hasn't been
one to succeed in this country for a decade. And yet these teams succeeded,
and on a spectacular scale, in four-out-of-four attempts and with only the
most primitive of 'weapons.' To what are we to attribute that fact? Don't
look to the media for answers.
Perhaps the most obvious question raised by the attacks, and one
that officials have feebly attempted to answer, is how the planning for such
an operation could have escaped the attention of the country's intelligence
services. Whenever such an event occurs, the intelligence agencies rather
predictably hang their heads, slump their shoulders and sheepishly grin as
they explain their powerlessness to predict such things.
We did the best we could, they explain, but our resources are
limited, our adversaries formidable, and our sources not infallible. Give me
a break. The CIA - along with the FBI, ONI, DIA, NSC, NSA, DEA, and
virtually every other three-letter acronym you could think of - constitutes
the largest and most insidious intelligence network the world has ever seen.
Its agents have fully infiltrated every foreign government on the
planet, as well as every 'terrorist' group and every domestic resistance
movement that has ever posed even a remote threat to the goals of the
architects of the American ship of state. It is simply inconceivable that
such an ambitious attack could have been planned, coordinated and launched
without the knowledge of numerous elements of the national security state.
That is the inescapable reality that no amount of media and
government spin can erase, though politicians and their media puppets will
work overtime to do exactly that. One need only to turn their television off
and their brain on though to see how preposterous are the claims that these
attacks took the intelligence community by surprise.
Perhaps the most disturbing question raised by the attacks is what
exactly caused the twin towers of the WTC to collapse? The impact of the
planes affected only the upper floors of the towers; their foundations were
unaffected. The UK's Guardian acknowledged that the initial impact of the
aircraft would result in less stress on the building than is normally caused
by high winds. The buildings were specifically designed to handle such
horizontal movement.
The Guardian and its expert consultants conclude that the collapse
of the buildings was the result of secondary explosions, attributed to the
delayed release of the large supply of jet fuel carried by the aircraft. How
though could the ignition of the jet fuel have occurred as a delayed,
secondary explosion? As the endlessly played videotapes of the attack
graphically illustrate, the initial impact resulted in enormous fireballs
and the immediate engulfing of a portion of the buildings in flames.
It is inconceivable that the aircraft's fuel tanks would not have
burst upon impact and their contents immediately have been ignited. Indeed,
if that wasn't in fact the case, then how are we to explain the initial
explosions and fireballs that were witnessed by the world? What exactly was
it that created the spectacular initial blasts if it wasn't the jet fuel?
But if that was the case, what was it then that created the
secondary explosions that appear to have occurred? These secondary blasts
were acknowledged early in the day by an NBC newsman. The correspondent
stated on the air that he had just talked with the fire department's public
safety commissioner who verified that large secondary explosions
precipitated the collapse of the towers.
A radio broadcaster on WLS in Chicago (according to a
correspondent), whose former colleague* is a CBS journalist who was on the
scene at the towers, said on the air that this colleague had witnessed an
enormous fireball emanating from beneath one of the towers immediately
before it came crashing down. What are we to make of these types of
scattered reports, none of which received any follow-up coverage amidst the
non-stop blizzard of media attention?
To be sure, the collapse of the towers, captured on tape for all the
world to see, had the decided appearance of controlled implosions,
facilitated by the precise placement of technologically advanced explosives.
The world has never before witnessed such complete and utter destruction of
a targeted building by an act of war or a 'terrorist' assault.
We have seen the United States target many a building for
destruction. In the most recent military venture, we saw an embassy building
and a television studio, among many others, take direct and multiple hits
from state-of-the-art bombs and guided missiles. The buildings were
devastated, to be sure, but the damage didn't come close to matching the
pile of rubble that the twin towers were reduced to.
We saw a highrise Israeli apartment building take a direct hit from
an Iraqi Scud missile during the Gulf war. Actually, most of us probably
didn't see that, unless you happened to be tuned in to CNN for the brief few
moments when the footage was aired. As it turns out, that Scud missile was
actually safely intercepted by a trusty Patriot missile, or so it was
claimed - just as if the footage had never aired.
The point though is that the building was hit and did suffer
extensive damage, and undoubtedly at the cost of many lives. But again, the
building - though sheared nearly in half - was in considerably better shape
than the World Trade Center. It occurs to me then that perhaps America has
invested entirely too much time and money in pursuit of creating ever more
powerful and efficient weapons systems.
Who would have ever thought that the best weapon with which to
reduce an entire tower to rubble was the plane itself. It doesn't even have
to be a military plane - any old commercial aircraft will do. Someone
obviously should have followed up on the early work done in this area by the
Japanese during World War II.
In the final analysis, we must ask ourselves the following
questions: Who had the means to get highly trained commando teams onto four
aircraft flying out of three separate airports? Who had the ability to
violate the Pentagon's airspace unmolested? What weapons were really used to
commandeer those aircraft and who had the means to get them on the planes?
Who had the ability to plan and execute such an ambitious, multi-pronged
attack without the interference of the U.S. intelligence services? Who had
the means to staff each of the four teams with at least one well-trained,
and suicidal, pilot? Who had the means and opportunity to plant secondary
explosive charges, if in fact these were used?
Finally, perhaps the most important question to be asked is: who
stands to gain the most in the bleak aftermath? It is certainly not the
American people, or any resistance movement within these borders. It's
definitely not the still-to-be identified target(s) of the nation's wrath
(which will likely include Iraq). That would seem to sort of limit the
choices.
It is quite possible, indeed quite likely, that members of some
'extremist' group served as the foot soldiers of these attacks. But it is
just as likely that they were used as pawns in the global chess game that
serves as our collective reality. It is also likely that these 'terrorists'
were motivated by legitimately perceived grievances with the U.S.
government.
Those motivations weren't likely shared with their puppeteers,
however, who cynically manipulated those belief systems to serve their own
ends. Most of the participants probably did not know that they were
embarking on suicide missions. Quite likely only the pilots knew that, and
they may very well have received a little more 'training' than your average
pilot.
All of this is, by necessity, just speculation at this point. The
true facts of the case will emerge over time in bits and pieces, mixed in
with a healthy dose of disinformation. It matters little though in which
direction those facts point. The official story has already been written.

* It was previously mistakenly reported here that the woman making the call
was the broadcaster's wife. She was actually a long-time colleague. The
correspondent who alerted me to this report contacted the station to inquire
about purchasing an audiotape of the broadcast for September 11, and
received the following brief reply: "Legally, we're not allowed to provide
program tapes."





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