The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.
The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. national security state and its civilian allies to great effect to divide the American population, to attack independent reporting as well as independent thought, to gut the anti-war movement, and to normalize the U.S. government’s overt and persistent degradation of the country’s Constitution. This, of course, is in addition to the illegal U.S. occupations and drone wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that were also born out of this event.
The true beneficiaries of 9/11
As a nation, the U.S. populace has failed to grapple with these realities, and many others, in the two decades since the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7 fell. Far from bringing any benefit to the alleged masterminds of the event, the results of 9/11 instead overwhelmingly favored the ambitions of a powerful faction within the U.S. national security state that had long sought to bring the dissident-elimination efforts it spent decades implementing abroad – from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Operation Condor in South America – home to roost.
As a result, the response of the U.S. government to the attack supposedly launched by those “who hate us for our freedom” was to work to reduce our freedoms and civil liberties. Now, 20 years on, the sophisticated “War on Terror” apparatus has been fully turned into a “War on Domestic Terror,” with many of those who once opposed the war on terrorism abroad now cheering on the ratcheting up of its domestic equivalent.
Yet, the domestic terror apparatus being swiftly created and implemented very clearly targets individuals and ideologies on both sides of the political divide. It is also extremely vague, essentially leaving it up to those holding the reins of political power – whether Democrat, Republican or something else – to decide who is “terrorist” and who is not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Joe Biden back in the mid-1990s who introduced legislation that would have given the president sole and unappealable authority to define what constitutes “terrorism,” a fact that was omitted from media coverage of last year’s presidential campaign and the past several months of his presidency.
A crisis of courage
It seems clear at this point that one of the key reasons the U.S. continues to hemorrhage its remaining civil liberties, either as a result of the new “War on Domestic Terrorism” or as a response to COVID-19, is that it is undergoing a crisis of conscience and courage in grappling with not just the true nature of the events of 9/11 itself, but with the orthodoxy over the “official story” of those events.
Even two decades after the fact, it is still deemed too controversial or unthinkable to question whether the official story is an accurate portrayal of the events that transpired on and led to that day. This is despite the fact that the official story itself, presumably the same story told by the 9/11 Commission report, has been labeled incomplete, and unable to answer major questions about that day, by its very authors. In addition, the official story relies heavily on testimony obtained through extreme torture, meaning it is of questionable accuracy.
Many of those who have been quick and vocal to point out the lies of the U.S. government when it comes to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and other consequences of the War on Terror have been unable to even consider that the official story of 9/11 may not be legitimate and may indeed have been dealt from the same pack. This may be for a variety of reasons, including a strong desire to not be de-legitimized by their peers as bearers of the “conspiracy theorist” smear and an unwillingness to face a political reality where U.S. government officials may have been complicit in a deadly attack on American soil. In those two examples, however, the failure of such individuals, particularly in media, to even consider that there may be more to the story boils down to a desire for self-preservation in the case of the former and preservation of a particular worldview in the case of the latter. Yet, in both cases, the casualty is the truth and the cause is cowardice.
By failing as a society to thoroughly examine the events of 9/11 and why those events occurred, the American public has shown the powers that be that their desire to preserve a “safe” worldview — and to preserve their own careers, in the case of certain professional classes — is enough to keep people from questioning world-altering events when they emerge. Those powers are well aware of this refusal and have been using it to their advantage ever since.
The poison remains in our system
Today, with the COVID-19 crisis still dragging on, we are similarly immersed in a situation where nuance and facts are being cast aside, militantly in some cases, in favor of the establishment narrative. Is everyone who chooses not to take this particular vaccine a “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaxxer”? Does it really make sense to so dramatically divide the public into groups of vaccinated and unvaccinated through a new ID system when the vaccine claims to reduce the severity of illness but not to stop disease transmission? Should those that question the motivation of politicians, powerful pharmaceutical corporations and mainstream media “experts” be censored from expressing those views online?
You do not need to agree with those who hold such views, but what is wrong with hearing what they have to say and debating their evidence with your own? We are losing the ability to have rational public discourse about these issues — and losing it swiftly, at a speed comparable to what took place in the aftermath of 9/11, when questioning the motives of the Bush administration, U.S. intelligence agencies and other groups, as well as their proposed responses and “solutions,” was deemed “unpatriotic” and even “treasonous” by some. Calls were made to strip an entire class of Americans of their freedom for merely sharing the same ethno-religious identities as those we were told attacked us, and many went along with it. Freedom became treated as a privilege only for certain groups, not as a right, and this insidious fallacy has reared its head yet again in recent months in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine debate and also the war on domestic terror.
Our pandemic of fear
Though the failure to consider explanations for 9/11 that deviate from the official story can be called cowardice, the most enduring lesson 20 years on from 9/11 is perhaps that fear was and remains the most powerful tool that has been consistently used to whittle down our freedom and civil liberties. While the divide-and-conquer strategies have raged on from 9/11 to the present, the largest wealth transfers in history have occurred, creating an unaccountable and ultra-wealthy super-elite that dominates an ever-growing underclass.
The march towards this de facto neo-feudalism certainly didn’t begin on or after 9/11, but our collective failure to grapple with the narrative orthodoxies of that day have prevented us from fully understanding the big picture of that event as well as many subsequent and similarly consequential events. For too long, the desire to preserve our self-image, our reputation, and the worldview we are taught in school has all too often made hard, difficult truths a casualty.
In order to truly understand the War on Terror, the domestic surveillance state and our current reality, we must accept that we were lied to about 9/11. We must ask the hard questions and accept hard truths. We must put an end to the 20-plus-year-long pandemic of fear over “invisible enemies,” fear that has pushed us to surrender the very freedoms that we are told we are protecting.
The United States, and much of the world, is quickly becoming an unrecognizable and authoritarian dystopia. We cannot wait another two decades to grapple with the difficult questions and realities that arose after 9/11 and persist into the present. We will either be remembered as a country that took freedom and liberty for all seriously or we will be remembered as a nation of cowards who, driven by fear, were willing to deprive this group, then that group, of their freedom — before losing that freedom entirely.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for MintPress News. She currently writes for her own outlet Unlimited Hangout and contributes to The Last American Vagabond and MintPress News
TWO decades after 9/11, which was eleven years to the day after President George H W Bush delivered his famous ‘new world order’ speech, the historical significance of both events is now much clearer.
Two decades of permanent ‘most favoured nation’ trading status for China has produced the largest transfer of wealth, technology, manufacturing capacity and markets in human history, and destroyed the American industrial economy.
Two decades of the ‘War on Terror’ and the cancerous growth of a global surveillance state has destroyed Western liberty and obliterated civil rights.
Two decades of the corporate internet, social media and smartphones has lobotomised Western culture, destroyed key Western institutions, engineered a rolling mass psychosis and transferred regional political and economic power to Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Two decades of the occupation of Afghanistan, then Iraq, drone war and collateral murder in Pakistan, attacks on Libya, Syria and Yemen has destroyed the authority of the United States and its allies to the point where the senile winner of a crooked election mumbling prepared talking points inside a fortified Capitol is the nominal leader of what was once called the free world.
Before 9/11 it was still almost possible to believe America’s idealised story of itself. Today the USA can be compared to the most corrupt regimes in history, and may even be the most corrupt, given the scale of corruption now possible.
Gangster states, which are merely criminal rather than sadistic and depraved, now look at the United States with justified disgust.
But America is also no longer really America, just as Britain is no longer really Britain. Both are no more than holding companies of a global commercial conglomerate hostile to national power as a barrier to global domination, just as developing national power in an earlier era was determined to weaken regional power.
All this was accelerated after 9/11 through the imposition of a war whose structural outcome, if not objective, was the demolition of the democratic West, and it is now being accelerated yet further via the pandemic.
Once again shock propaganda has been used to declare a state of emergency and enable the seizure of power from the people to State and transnational organs. Here, too, a highly profitable permanent war has been declared against an invisible enemy with no definable conditions of victory, or even coherently stated aims.
Again, the winners are the same global political, economic and security elites who consolidated after 9/11 by destroying the independence and competence of the institutions over which they had acquired control in the process of converting them into instruments of domination.
Here too, beyond a lingering and misplaced respect for institutional authority, the plausibility-effect produced by endless, mantra-like repetition, and the production of irrelevant distractions, the official story remains unpersuasive.
In the days which followed 9/11 questions were already being asked about the relationship between the official story, the actual pattern of the evidence and a series of imponderables, and they have continued to be asked.
What is without question is that one hour after the attack in New York, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had identified the likely perpetrator as Osama Bin Laden (Bin Laden would later deny any involvement) and called for the declaration of a global ‘war against terror’ extending beyond the perpetrators of 9/11 itself to confront terror generally.
The paradigm was adopted wholesale by George Bush in a speech to Congress nine days later. ’Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda,’ Bush said, ‘but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.’
Islam itself was not the enemy, we were told. Al Qaeda had only ‘hijacked’ Islam for the purpose of ‘remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere’.
In subsequent years this vague and ambiguous distinction would be used to support the extension of police state surveillance not just of rapidly growing Muslim populations across the West (to monitor evidence of dangerous radicalization) but also anyone articulating suspicion towards Muslims. By 2019 more ‘Right-wingers’ than Islamic activists were being referred to the Prevent programme. Last month the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin implying that if Americans question and challenge the COVID shot mandates, they are now considered potential ‘Domestic Violent Extremists’.
In truth, Bush and his associates and masters had hijacked Al-Qaeda and Islam for the purpose of imposing their own radical agenda. Spun between a belligerent discourse of Islamofascism and a police discourse of Islamophobia, a schizoid and insulting fantasy of a liberal Islam became the object of a new imperialism in the stated cause of Western values, and in reality enacting their destruction.
Just as recent calls to ‘Save the NHS’ have served to camouflage the liquidation of the NHS, the rhetoric of ‘nation-building’ efforts to extend Western democracy across the world have, in reality, destroyed democracy everywhere.
Even as mass Muslim immigration into the West accelerated following their destruction of their countries, a steady drumbeat of slaughter and atrocity in London, Madrid, Paris and elsewhere, staged by actors invariably known to intelligence agencies, maintained a climate of hostility and madness to the benefit of the occupational elites. The language of permanent terror bled into a culture (what is a safe space but a refuge from a world of terror?) as a psychologically brutalized population regressed into a cloying “thoughts and prayers” martyrology, in fact promoted or exploded into murderous psychosis, combining in cases like Usman Khan, who shortly before his London Bridge rampage attended a conference on criminal rehabilitation as a rehabilitated criminal. https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-indoctrination-of-the-justice-system/ (The Millwall supporter who helped to disarm him, Roy Larner, was later added to terror watchlist.)
In February 2007, when former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski denounced before the Senate ‘a historical, strategic and moral calamity . . . driven by Manichaean impulses and imperial hubris’, the full extent of the damage was not yet clear. What now is clear is that the War on Terror was a weapon directed against the West itself which has succeeded beyond all expectations.
Whether through a conscious plan or what Hegel called the cunning of reason, the West has been destroyed. What now exists is a shadow West, which still speaks as if it was the West for camouflage, but in the service of completely different goals. It is not a coincidence that the characters promoted and rewarded for their participation in the War on Terror have either remained in place or returned to play a role in the pandemic: from their perspective there has been no error. What has materialised over the last thirty years, and especially the last eighteen months, is a new system of power, which although still defined within the context of the history of the nation-state, represents its ultimate destruction.
It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of this book. It is a tour de force that blows away twenty years of U.S. government lies and obfuscations about the mass murders of September 11, 2001, the foundational event of recent times that claimed thousands of victims whose relatives still cry out for truth and justice.
Reading Unanswered Questions will roil you to the depths of your soul and illuminate your mind as author Ray McGinnis presents fact after fact backed up by almost one thousand endnotes and twelve years of meticulous research. There is nothing speculative about this book. It is not a “conspiracy theory.”
McGinnis ingeniously and brilliantly documents those murders through the eyes of victims’ relatives and their decades-long, agonizing efforts to seek honest answers from the U.S. government. To have their simple and obvious questions answered. To know the truth about why their loved ones died and who killed them.
Their struggles have been met with cruel indifference from four presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden), three New York City mayors (Giuliani, Bloomberg, and de Blasio), the 9/11 Commission, and so many others in positions of authority who have turned deaf ears to their cris de coeur. The corporate mass media have rubbed salt in their wounds as they have stage-managed the lies and coverups. And controlled opposition operatives have played slick games to direct attention away from the heart of the matter.
The families’ search for answers to their questions have been either ignored or answered with lies and dissimulation piled upon dissimulation to protect the guilty. McGinnis is their champion. He insists on answers.
He powerfully unfurls layer upon layer of facts and the government’s fictions in a timeline that brings us to the twentieth anniversary of these atrocities. While reading it, one cannot help but think of the thousands of innocent victims of that terrible day and their suffering families, and the millions of innocent victims throughout the world who have been murdered by the U.S. government in the name of 9/11. The “war on terror” has been waged by a government that continues to refuse to tell the truth about who the “terrorists” were on September 11, 2001.
By refusing to answer the families’ questions and thereby hypothetically claiming the Fifth Amendment for fear of incriminating themselves, government officials have ironically incriminated themselves.
For McGinnis is like a prosecuting attorney who works not for the state but for the people. He forces the issue by asking the questions his clients want answered. Like them, he is persistent and requests answers to a litany of interrogations that are met with silence. The government’s stonewalling is deafening, and readers – who are the jury – are left to decide the case partially based on those non-answers, often justified under the sham of “national security” or just plain arrogance. When answers are forthcoming, they are incomplete and disingenuous.
Seventy per cent of the questions the Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission were left unanswered in The 9/11 Commission Report. Those that were answered raised more questions than they answered.
But the reason that this book is so powerful is because McGinnis answers the questions that the government does not. And so his title – Unanswered Questions – is ironically false while also being true.
This should in no way put off those who still cling to the official story. For McGinnis is exceedingly fair in assessing and presenting the facts and readily admits when there are disagreements.
While focusing on a core group of bereaved families called The Family Steering Committee who are insistent on answers, a group that includes four New Jersey widows known as “The Jersey Girls” whose husbands died in the Twin Towers, he includes many others and does not shy away from saying when they are at odds. The only way a fair-minded person can assess the book is to read it. And if you don’t read it and you have bought the government’s official fabrications or are still sitting on the fence, you are in flight from truth. This book demands attention.
As far as I know, while there have been many excellent books critiquing the government’s account of 9/11, led by about a dozen extraordinary works by David Ray Griffin, and many books supporting the government’s explanation led by The 9/11 Commission Report, Unanswered Questions is the first to approach the subject from the perspective of the questions asked by the relatives of the victims.
For many people, the murders of that day are abstract, although they naturally stir the human emotions of pity, fear, and terror. But from a distance, for they are now fading into history and are not personal. For some, there may have been a catharsis with The 9/11 Commission Report which they no doubt never read although it was said to be a “best-seller.” That would be fake catharsis, for such fiction fails to tell the truth since it was written by people blind in mind and ears as well as in their eyes. But then again, who reads Sophocles or Aeschylus any longer? Better to read The New York Times, Slate magazine, Time, The New Republic, The Nation, etc., all of which effusively praised the 9/11 Commission Report when it was released. As McGinnis reports, “The New York Times called the Report ‘an uncommonly lucid, even riveting narrative’ and an ‘improbable literary triumph.’” This is simply propaganda.
But let us take a look inside Unanswered Questions, a genuine non-fiction book motivated by a deep compassion for the victims and a scholar’s dedication to the truth. It is divided into four parts, each containing multiple chapters.
“Part One: From Grief to Advocacy” is the briefest and introduces the reader to firefighters, first responders, and family members who lost loved ones in the calamity. We learn how their grief turned to advocacy when they formed many groups to channel their energies. We learn how President Bush and his minions (or was Bush the minion and others like Cheney in charge?) opposed establishing a special commission to probe into the events of September Eleventh and how when his opposition was overcome he had the audacity to try to name Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 Commission and how this was stopped. Finally, McGinnis tells us how the families’ questions were greatly expanded after discovering Paul Thompson’s extraordinary Internet timeline with its vast numbers of links to news reports that was later published as The Terror Timeline.
“Part Two: Family Steering Committee Statements to the 9/11 Commission” examines how the 9/11 Commission was a setup from the start, not even close to being an impartial investigation. It began with the naming of Philip Zelikow as the Director. Zelikow had deep ties to the Bush administration and its neocons. He had been a member of Bush’s transition team. Even “Richard Clarke, chairman of the ‘Counterterrorism Security Group,’ said ‘the fix is in’” when Zelikow was appointed. Zelikow completely controlled the investigation and the final report despite many conflicts of interest. He essentially wrote the report before the hearings commenced. He had authored a book with Condoleezza Rice and was an advocate for preemptive war that was used to attack Iraq in early 2003, etc. His appointment was a sick joke, and the Family Steering Committee called for his immediate resignation but was rebuffed just as quickly by Chairman Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton. As a result, the final report ended being a fictional account authored by Zelikow (who has now been named to head a Covid-19 commission).
This section also covers the lies told by Mayor Rudy Giuliani when he testified. Three hundred and forty-three FDNY members were killed that day, heroes who didn’t have to die. Giuliani’s testimony so outraged the families of first responders that their fury was uncontained. McGinnis tells us:
They held up signs that read ‘lies’ and ‘liar.’ Family Steering Committee member Sally Regenhard held up a sign that read ‘FICTION.’ She hollered, ‘My son [Christian Regenhard, a probationary firefighter] was not told to get out! He would’ve gotten out! My son was murdered, murdered because of your incompetence and radios that didn’t work!
McGinnis captures the increasing anger felt by family members throughout this section as the final report was rammed through despite their protests.
“Part Three: The Family Steering Committee’s Unanswered Questions” is the heart of the book. It contains eleven chapters devoted to questions addressed to NORAD, the FAA, the CIA/SEC/FBI, Mayor Giuliani, President Bush, the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York, Vice President Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld but never answered. Over a thousand questions were posed to the 9/11 Commission to aid the investigation. McGinnis writes:
The questions were intended to direct the focus of the inquiry, and ask those most directly involved what led to the failures that day. They understood that it would not be the FSC members themselves asking the questions. Instead, they would be posed to witnesses by 9/11 commissioners in public hearings, or asked by Commission staff behind closed-door proceedings.
Some of these questions were directed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). One question the FSC asked the 9/11 Commission was: ‘Why weren’t NORAD jets able to intercept the hijacked planes if they were airborne within eight minutes of notification?’
NORAD had an extremely successful history of intercepting errant aircraft, and a part of their mission was “surveillance and control of the [domestic] territorial airspace “ in the U.S. and Canada. Nevertheless, on September 11, 2001 none of the hijacked aircraft were intercepted even though they were allegedly being flown by inexperienced and incompetent hijackers who, according to experts, could never fly such massive commercial airliners into the World Trade Towers or the Pentagon. Government witnesses either lied about the systemic failures to intercept the planes, omitted important details, or gave contradictory stories. Of course, they were then promoted. And although there was an unprecedented number of war games being “coincidentally” held on September 11, none of the 9/11 Commissioners asked any witnesses about them.
It was clear that all the questions about the failure to intercept the planes would not be answered, but McGinnis makes it obvious that their non-answers were indeed answers by omission, for in this section and all the others, he makes sure the questions are indeed answered and the cumulative effect is devastating. He does this not simply by expressing his own opinions but by quoting others and always giving sources.
In a similar vein, the FSC wished to know from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) why these hijacked planes were able to evade all of the highly sophisticated radar? McGinnis says, “The 9/11 Commission concluded that NORAD had failed to do its job on September Eleventh; NORAD’s decisions impaired the FAA radar operator’s conduct.” Of course the radar questions were linked to the war games issue and since the war games questions were never asked, these massive failures were explained away in gobbledygook worthy of the Three Stooges.
Mindy Kleinberg, a FSC member whose husband Alan died in the North Tower, told the Commission that its theory of luck was bullshit, although she phrased it more diplomatically:
With regard to the 9/11 attacks, it has been said that the intelligence agencies have to be right 100% of the time and the terrorists only have to get lucky once. This explanation for the devastating attacks of September 11, simply on its face, is wrong in its value. Because the 9/11 terrorists were not just lucky once; they were lucky over and over again… Is it luck that aberrant stock trades were not monitored? Is it luck when 15 visas were awarded on incomplete forms? Is it luck when Airline Security screenings allow hijackers to board planes with box cutters and pepper spray? Is it luck when emergency FAA and NORAD protocols are not followed? Is it luck when a national emergency is not reported to top government officials on a timely basis? To me luck is something that happens once. When you have this repeated pattern of broken protocols, broken laws, broken communication, one cannot still call it luck.
Comically, The 9/11 Commission Report concluded that, as McGinnis notes, “The reason for the attacks was due simply to a [U.S. government] failure of imagination.”
In regard to foreknowledge of the attacks, the families asked the CIA, the SEC, and the FBI for the names of the individuals and financial institutions who placed “put” orders on American and United Airlines in the three weeks prior to 9/11.
This involved the number three man at the CIA, CIA Executive Director Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, former Vice Chairman of the board at Bankers Trust that had been acquired by Deutsche Bank through which many of these suspect stock trades passed. This insider trading that anticipated the 9/11 attacks was connected to a security firm named Stratesec that provided security to Dulles Airport, the World Trade Center, and United Airlines, and to Wirt Walker III, a business partner of the president’s brother, Marvin Bush. Walker III was a board member of the Carlyle Group that was in turn connected to the bin Laden and Bush families.
Despite these and other highly suspect connections, the “9/11 Commission wasn’t interested in exploring leads about possible foreknowledge of the attacks.” Nor were they interested in the strange matter of Larry Silverstein, who had already owned World Trade Center Building 7, but who obtained a 99-year lease on the Twin Towers two months before the attack and who insisted that insurance cover a terrorist attack for $3.5. billion dollars. Silverstein was later awarded $4.55 billion when it was determined that there had been two suicide attacks.
Silverstein later claimed that there was agreement to “pull” (a controlled demolition term) Building 7, which happened at 5:20 PM that day despite never having been hit by a plane. Questions about the collapse of Building 7 were of course never answered, but the videos of its collapse are available for all to see with their own eyes. An excellent film about Building 7, Seven by Dylan Avery, should be seen by all. Seeing is believing, and what any objective observer can only conclude is that the building was taken down by controlled demolition, which the government denies.
Which brings us to other key questions that the FSC asked, McGinnis explores, and that went unanswered: Why did President Bush enter a Sarasota, Florida elementary classroom, stay there as the attacks unfolded, and not immediately return to Washington, D.C.? Why did he enter that classroom at 9:03 AM and remain there for fifteen minutes when it was clear the U.S. was under a terrorist attack? Why was he, unlike Dick Cheney, not immediately taken out of the building by the Secret Service but was allowed to sit and read to children and not depart the building until 9:34 A.M.?
“The vice president was reported by President Bush’s personal secretary as being ‘seized by arms, legs, and his belt and physically’ carried out of his office at 9:03 A.M. Cheney was taken to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center below the White House, where Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta saw him prior to 9:25 A.M.” Yet Bush stayed to read a book when colleagues of the Secret Service agents protecting him had already been evacuated from the largest Secret Service Field Office in WTC 7.
“However,” writes McGinnis, “on December 4, 2001, President Bush made the following statement at a Town Hall meeting about the moment – 9:01 a.m. – that he said he learned about the attack. ‘And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower – the television was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, “That’s one terrible pilot.” And I said, “It must have been a horrible accident.” But I was whisked off there – I didn’t have much time to think about it.’”
You can’t make this stuff up, yet it’s offered to the public and the victims’ families as acceptable. Bush was informed that a second plane had hit the South Tower by Andrew Card who came into the classroom and whispered in his ear. But three months later he claims he saw on television the first plane hit the North Tower when no one could have seen it since video of the first plane hitting the building at 8:46 A.M. was not available until much later.
These ridiculous discrepancies and other questions the FSC wished the 9/11 Commission to ask Bush under oath in sworn public testimony went unasked and unanswered. Instead, as McGinnis writes:
But, the meeting with Bush and Cheney took place in secret on April 29, 2004. It was not held under oath. No transcript was made available of their conversation with the commissioners. Nothing was learned about why the president remained at an elementary school during the attacks. Nothing was learned about what the president knew regarding foreign intelligence agencies forewarning the U.S. Nothing was learned about why the president had authorized America to prepare for war against Afghanistan in the days and weeks prior to the attacks of September 11.
Nor was anything learned about why Pentagon brass suddenly cancelled flights scheduled for September 11. Nothing about who warned them and why.
Essentially all the key questions the families asked were not answered. But McGinnis answers them, including those addressed to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Giuliani, the CIA, and the Port Authority/WTC/City of New York. By using the documented records against them, he does the job the 9/11 Commission refused to do. He unravels the lies, circumlocutions, and straightforward propaganda used to hide the truth, including the following:
Cheney’s deceptions about when he got to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center and what he was doing there and his orders to his young assistant about the hijacked plane headed toward the capitol.
Rumsfeld with his lies about not knowing anything about the World Trade Center attacks until fifteen minutes before the Pentagon was hit and why the Pentagon was not defended.
Giuliani and the obvious controlled demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M. and the lies about the faulty telephones the firefighters carried.
Since this is not meant to be a book about a book but a book review, I will stop there. I would be remiss, however, if I failed to mention “Chapter 22: The Missing Accounts: FDNY.”
It is part of Part Four: Acceptance And Dissent that leads to McGinnis’s conclusion. Whatever one’s position on the events of September 11, it is generally accepted that firefighters and first responders are objective and brave in the extreme. Of the emergency workers who responded to the call to help save the people in the Twin Towers, the vast majority who lost their lives in attempting to save their fellow human beings were firefighters – 343 of them perished that day. They were doing their duty. So their surviving colleagues’ testimonies are priceless and beyond dispute. They had absolutely no reasons to lie. McGinnis tells us:
On September 11, 2001, Thomas Von Essen, the fire commissioner of New York City, ordered that oral histories be gathered from first responders, firefighters, and medical workers. He wanted to preserve the accounts of what they experienced at the World Trade Center. In the weeks and months following 9/11, 503 oral histories were taken. However, they were not released to the public. The 2002 mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, refused.
The Family Steering Committee asked the 9/11 Commission why, but the Commission refused to answer their question. After a law suit, the oral histories that run to 12,000 pages were released. They contain copious accounts of explosions going off in the Towers before the Towers collapsed.
FDNY firefighter John Coyne, who was in the South Tower, recalls how he had called his father and said:
I finally got through to my father and said ‘I’m alive. I just wanted to tell you, go to church, I’m alive. I just so narrowly escaped this thing.’ He said, ‘Where were you? You were there?’ I said, ‘Yeh, I was right there when it blew up.’ He said, ‘You were there when the planes hit?’ I said, ‘No, I was there when it exploded, the building exploded.’ He said, ‘You mean when it fell down?’ I said, ‘No, when it exploded.’ … I totally thought it had been blown up. That’s just the perspective of looking at it, it seemed to have exploded out.
Captain Karin DeShore, who was standing outside, said she saw a sequence of orange and red flashes coming from the North Tower:
Initially it was just one flash. Then this flash…kept popping all around the building and that building started to explode … These popping sounds and the explosions were getting bigger, going up and down and the all around the building.
Keith Murphy: “There was tremendous damage in the lobby… like something had exploded out… a distant boom sounded like three explosions.”
Assistant Commissioner Stephen Gregory: “I saw low-level flashes… [at] the lower level of the building. You know when they demolish a building?”
Explosions were being reported everywhere and by reporters as well. Researchers Graeme MacQueen and Ted Walter viewed 70 hours of television coverage and found that most reporters were saying the Towers came down as a result of explosions and demolition. Take a look here.
There were explosions reported in the sub-basements before the planes hit. William Rodriguez, who was in the sub-basement of the North Tower and heard and felt very loud multiple explosions, told this to 9/11 Commission staff and this never appeared in The 9/11 Commission Report.
The evidence for explosives planted in the Towers and Building 7 is overwhelming but was completely discounted by the 9/11 Commission and the mass media complicit in its coverup. In fact, the demolition of Building 7 at 5:20 P.M was not worthy of a mention in the best-selling report. It should be obvious to any objective thinker that if these building were wired for explosives and were brought down via controlled demolition, then this could not have been done by Osama bin Laden or his followers but only by insiders who were granted secret access to these ultra-high security buildings.
Bob McIlvaine, whose son Bobby died in the North Tower, has persevered for twenty years to expose the lies surrounding September 11. McGinnis reports on his 2006 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation host Evan Solomon:
I believe 100% that the US orchestrated 9/11 with the help of other agencies around the world… There’s people within the US that knew it happened, that planned this to happen.
To Solomon’s question “You think your son was therefore murdered by Americans?” McIlvaine replied, “absolutely.”
He is joined by many others, including Matt Campbell, a British citizen and family member, whose brother Geoff Campbell died on the 106th floor of the North Tower. Matt Campbell and his family have recently demanded a new inquest based on a 3,000 page scientifically-backed dossier claiming the buildings were blown up from within.
After reading Unanswered Questions, you very well might believe it too.
Learning about the determination of such stalwart souls as McIlvaine, Campbell, the FSC, and so many others to extract truth and justice from a recalcitrant and guilty government is inspirational. They will never give up. Nor should we.
There is no doubt that this extraordinary book will answer many questions you may or may not have had about the mass murders of September 11, 2001.
So don’t turn away.
It will break your heart but restore your faith in what a writer dedicated to the truth can do for those family members who have so long sought the bread of truth and were handed stones of silence.
In their ongoing grief, Ray McGinnis has handed them the gift of a bitter solace. He has answered them.
He has also given the public an opportunity to see the truth and demand an independent investigation forthwith.
Welcome to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news. This week:
Families Issue Statement Over MSM Smear Job: “We are not conspiracy theorists… We are family members seeking the truth about the murder of our loved ones.”
Who Were the Israelis Living Next to Mohammed Atta?
What was in the Van on the New Jersey Shore?
How did Two Hijackers Land on Watch List Weeks Before 9/11?
Who Shut Down Fox News’ Carl Cameron?
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO – “be on lookout” – was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a “vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack”:
White, 2000 Chevrolet van… with ‘Urban Moving Systems’ sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center… Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.
At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and “was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag”. With guns drawn, the police then “physically removed” Kurzberg, while four other men – two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning – were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights. They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo’s report, “this officer was told without question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg], ‘We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.’” Another of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo – falsely – that “we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident”.
From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock. According to New Jersey’s Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle “maps of the city … with certain places highlighted. It looked like they’re hooked in with this”, the source told the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. “It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.”
The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the “high-fivers” for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks. Then he failed it.
Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national, abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter’s departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.
It was New York’s venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this to me, noting that movers’ vans are a common intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government itself admitted that the men were spies. A “former high-ranking American intelligence official”, who said he was “regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials”, told reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government “acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington”. Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in the Mossad denied the story. “Nobody stopped talking to me”, he said. In June 2002, ABC News’ 20/20 followed up with its own investigation into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site of their “celebration” with foreknowledge of the attack to come. From the beginning, “the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the Israelis had foreknowledge”, according to Cannistraro. A second former CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were pursuing two theories. “One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other was that they were at the park location already”. Either way, investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when they got there.
Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were “high-level negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials”, a settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported that by the last week of October 2001,some six weeks after the men had been detained, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified “prominent New York congressmen” were lobbying heavily for their release. According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report, high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.) And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.
Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered. There is sufficient reason – from news reports, statements by former intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government – to believe that in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given Israel’s concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What’s incendiary is the idea – supported, though not proven, by several pieces of evidence – that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11 in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a Congressional investigation.
Yet none of this information found its way into Congress’s joint committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission’s final report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. “There weren’t even stories saying it was bullshit”, says The Forward’s Perelman. “Honestly, I was surprised”. Instead, the story disappeared into the welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.
It’s no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story doesn’t fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel’s obligation not to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor, but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil.
Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story’s disappearance – and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.
Torpedoing the FBI Probe
All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives. Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with or without knowledge of the terrorists’ plans, have been tracking the men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?
In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an intelligence operation in the United States. “No evidence recovered suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad”, FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not respond to questions for this article.)
According to the source at ABC News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups. “There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case”, the source told me. “They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully investigated.” Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter, whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact.
Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar frustration within the CIA: “People I’ve talked to at the CIA were outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that there hadn’t been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging out there without any conclusion.”
However, what was “absolutely certain”, according to Vincent Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance network in the New York – New Jersey area. The network’s purpose was to track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as Arabic speaking linguists “running technical operations” in northern New Jersey’s extensive Muslim communities.
The former CIA officer said the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: “Our conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with this”. The ABC News source added, “What we heard was that the Israelis may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the morning of 9/11”. The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: “There was no question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If somebody says we don’t want the Israelis implicated in this – we know that they’ve been spying the hell out of us, we know that they possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be a political nightmare to deal with.”
Israel’s “Art Student Spies”
There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the peculiar tale of the Israeli “art students”, detailed by this reporter for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Office of Security Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11 attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly – and seemingly inexplicably – attempting to penetrate DEA offices and other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the country. The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged in “an organized intelligence gathering activity”, but to what end, U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, “the most activity [was] reported in the state of Florida” during the first half of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be “a central point for these individuals with several having addresses in this area”.
In retrospect, the fact that a large number of “art students” operated out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept officers in the Israeli military – training and experience far beyond the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their “traveling in the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background”, according to the DEA report.
One “art student” was a former Israeli military intelligence officer named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers. Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty’s apartments, serving as crash pads for at least two other “art students”, were located at 4220 Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta’s mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street – approximately 2,700 feet from Serfaty’s Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818 Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty’s South 21st Avenue apartment.
In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission’s staff statements and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers, suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaeda–connected suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for various periods during 2000–01 in the run-up to the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg, Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.
Israeli “art students” also lived close to terror suspects in and around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old “art student” named Michael Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs, especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with “art student” activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002 told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the “art students”, that “Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]”. It’s plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the Holy Land Foundation came from “art student” spies in the Richardson area.
Others among the “art students” had specific backgrounds in electronic surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for example, as “a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for the Israeli military”. Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence “working with classified information”. Hanan Serfaty, who maintained the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le Monde meanwhile reported that six “art students” were apparently using cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in the U.S.A.
Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems’ American subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey, not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli “movers” were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to “DEA Groups”. How he acquired information about so-called “DEA Groups” – via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping company – was never determined, according to DEA documents.
“Art student” Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving, Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure. (The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)
According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law enforcement officials examined the “art students” phenomenon, they came to the tentative conclusion that “the Israelis likely had a huge spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a number of the hijackers”. The German daily Die Zeit reached the same conclusion in 2002, reporting that “Mossad agents in the U.S. were in all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers”.
The Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. “There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it”, Fox correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was the first major exposé of allegations of 9/11-related Israeli espionage. “A highly placed investigator said there are ‘tie-ins’. But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’”
One element of the allegations has never been clearly understood: if the “art students” were indeed spies targeting Muslim extremists that included al-Qaeda, why would they also be surveilling DEA agents in such a compromising manner? Why, in other words, would foreign spies bumble into federal offices by the scores and risk exposing their operation? An explanation is that a number of the art students were, in fact, young Israelis engaged in a mere art scam and unknowingly provided cover for real spies. Investigative journalist John Sugg, who as senior editor for the Creative Loafing newspaper chain reported on the “art students” in 2002, told me that investigators he spoke to within FBI felt the “art student” ring functioned as a wide-ranging cover that was counterintuitive in its obviousness. DEA investigators, for example, uncovered evidence connecting the Israeli “art students” to known ecstasy trafficking operations in New York and Florida. This was, according to Sugg, planted information. “The explanation was that when our FBI guys started getting interested in these folks [the art students] – when they got too close to what the real purpose was – the Israelis threw in an ecstasy angle”, Sugg told me. “The argument being that if our guys thought the Israelis were involved in a smuggling ring, then they wouldn’t see the real purpose of the operation”. Sugg, who is writing a book that explores the tale of the “art students”, told me that several sources within the FBI, and at least one source formerly with Israeli intelligence, suggested that “the bumbling aspect of the art student thing was intentional.”
When I reported on the matter for Salon.com in 2002, a veteran U.S. intelligence operative with experience subcontracting both for the CIA and the NSA suggested a similar possibility. “It was a noisy operation”, the veteran intelligence operative said. The operative referred me to the film Victor, Victoria. “It was about a woman playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that was in your face, that didn’t make sense, that couldn’t possibly be them”. The intelligence operative added, “Think of it this way: how could the experts think this could actually be something of any value? Wouldn’t they dismiss what they were seeing?”
U.S. and Israeli officials, dismissing charges of espionage as an “urban myth”, have publicly claimed that the Israeli “art students” were guilty only of working on U.S. soil without proper credentials. The stern denials issued by the Justice Department were widely publicized in the Washington Post and elsewhere, and the endnote from officialdom and in establishment media by the spring of 2002 was that the “art students” had been rounded up and deported simply because of harmless visa violations. The FBI, for its part, refused to confirm or deny the “art students” espionage story. “Regarding FBI investigations into Israeli art students”, spokesman Jim Margolin told me, “the FBI cannot comment on any of those investigations.” As with the New Jersey Israelis, the investigation into the Israeli “art students” appears to have been halted by orders from on high. The veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative told me in 2002 that there was “a great press to discredit the story, discredit the connections, prevent [investigators] from going any further. People were told to stand down. You name the agency, they were told to stand down”. The operative added, “People who were perceived to be gumshoes on [this matter] suddenly found themselves hammered from all different directions. The interest from the middle bureaucracy was not that there had been a security breach but that someone had bothered to investigate the breach. That was where the terror was”.
Choking Off the Press Coverage
There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli espionage. A former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 exposé on the celebratory New Jersey Israelis, “Enormous pressure was brought to bear by pro-Israeli organizations” – and this pressure began months before the piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC News colleagues wondered, “how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found out we were doing the story. Pro-Israeli people were calling the president of ABC News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls. The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through – the management insulated [reporters] from the pressure”.
The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent at Fox News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps more typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack against Cameron and Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (itself currently embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department and Israeli Embassy). “CAMERA peppered the shit out of us”, Carl Cameron told me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually crashed the Fox News.com servers. Cameron himself received 700 pages of almost identical e-mail messages from hundreds of citizens (though he suspected these were spam identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex Safian later told me that Cameron’s upbringing in Iran, where his father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered the reporter “very sympathetic to the Arab side”. Safian added, “I think Cameron, personally, has a thing about Israel” – coded language implying that Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the accusation.
According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News’ parent, News Corp., to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, “Look, you guys have generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this stuff out there? You’re killing us”. The Fox News source continued, “As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well, what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, ‘Stop the e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we’ll stop being in your face – by way of taking our story down off the web. We will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we will at least take it off the web.’” Following this meeting, within four days of the posting of Cameron’s series on Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message, “This story no longer exists”.
What Did Mossad Know and Tell the U.S.?
Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn the U.S. government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon. The British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that two senior agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August 2001 “to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation”. The Telegraph quoted a “senior Israeli security official” as saying the Mossad experts had “no specific information about what was being planned”. Still, the official told the Telegraph, the Mossad contacts had “linked the plot to Osama bin Laden”. Likewise, Die Zeit correspondent Oliver Schröm reported that on August 23, 2001, the Mossad “handed its American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who were staying in the U.S. and were presumably planning to launch an attack in the foreseeable future”. Fox News’ Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also reported warnings by Israel: “Based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided ‘general’ information to the United States in the second week of August that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent”. The U.S. government later claimed these warnings were not specific enough to allow any mitigating action to be taken. Mossad expert Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon’s Spies, says German intelligence sources told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the United States had made surveillance contacts with “known supporters of bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was those surveillance contacts that later raised the question: how much prior knowledge did Mossad have and at what stage?”
According to Die Zeit, the Mossad did provide the U.S. government with the names of suspected terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who would eventually hijack the Pentagon plane. It is worth noting that Mihdhar and Hazmi were among the hijackers who operated in close proximity to Israeli “art students” in Hollywood, Florida, and to the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in northern New Jersey. Moreover, Hazmi and at least three “art students” visited Oklahoma City on almost the same dates, from April 1 through April 4, 2001. On August 24, 2001, a day after the Mossad’s briefing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed by the CIA on a terrorist watch list; additionally, it was only after the Mossad warning, as reported by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on August 27, informed the FBI of the presence of the two terrorists. But by then the cell was already in hiding, preparing for attack.
The CIA, along with the 9/11 Commission in its adoption of the CIA story, claims that Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed on the watch list solely due to the agency’s own efforts, with no help from Mossad. Their explanation of how the pair came to be placed on the watch list, however, is far from credible and may have served as a cover story to obscure the Mossad briefing [See accompanying story on page 8 – “The Kuala Lumpur Deceit”]. This brings up the possibility that the CIA may have known about the existence of the alleged Israeli agents and their mission, but sought, naturally, to keep it quiet. A second, more troubling scenario, is that the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent operation on U.S. soil. In his 9/11 investigative book, The Looming Tower, author Lawrence Wright notes that FBI counterterrorism agents, infuriated at the CIA’s failure to fully share information about Mihdhar and Hazmi, speculated that “the agency was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them”. The two al-Qaeda men, Wright notes, “must have seemed like attractive opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI…” Wright further observes that the CIA’s reticence to share its information was due to a fear “that prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign services”
When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA’s domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn’t reject it out of hand. The operative noted that in recent years the CIA’s human intelligence assets, known as “humint” – spooks on the ground who conduct surveillances, make contacts, and infiltrate the enemy – had been “eviscerated” in favor of the NSA’s far less perilous “sigint”, or signals intelligence program, the remote interception of electronic communications. As a result, “U.S. intelligence finds itself going back to sources that you may not necessarily like to go back to, but are required to”, the veteran intelligence operative said. “We don’t like the fact, but our humint structures are gone. Israeli intel’s humint is as strong as ever. If you have an intel gap, those gaps are not closed overnight. It takes years and years of diligent work, a high degree of security, talented and dedicated people, willing management and a steady hand. It is not a fun business, and it’s certainly not one without its dangers. If you lose that capability, well… organizations find themselves having to make a pact with the devil. The problem [in U.S. intel] is very great”.
If such an understanding did exist between CIA and Mossad with regard to al-Qaeda’s U.S. operatives, the complicity would explain a number of oddities: it would explain the CIA’s nearly incoherent, and perhaps purposely deceptive, reconstruction of events as to how Mihdhar and Hazmi joined the watch list; it might even explain the apparent brazenness of the Israeli New Jersey cell celebrating on the morning of 9/11 (protected under the CIA wing, they were free to behave as they pleased). It would also explain the assertion in one of the leading Israeli dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth, that in the months prior to 9/11, when the Israeli “art students” were being identified and rounded up, the CIA “actively promoted their expulsion”. The implication in the Yedioth Ahronoth article was that the CIA was simply being careless, not trying to spirit the Israelis safely out of the country. At this point we cannot be certain.
Israeli spying against the U.S. is of course hotly denied by both governments. In 2002, responding to my own questions about the “art students”, Israeli embassy spokesman Mark Regev issued a blanket denial. “Israel does not spy on the United States”, Regev told me. The pronouncements from officialdom are strictly pro forma, as it is no secret that spying by Israel on the United States has been wide-ranging and unabashed. A 1996 General Accounting Office report, for example, found that Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally”. More recently, a former intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that “[t]here is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities directed against the United States”. It is also routine that Israeli spying is ignored or downplayed by the U.S. government (the case of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in prison in 1986, is a dramatic exception). According to the American Prospect, over the last 20 years at least six sealed indictments have been issued against individuals allegedly spying “on Israel’s behalf”, but the cases were resolved “through diplomatic and intelligence channels” rather than a public airing in the courts. Career Justice Department and intelligence officials who track Israeli espionage told the Prospect of “long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were shut down prematurely”.
The Questions That Await Answers
Remarkably, the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, when interrogated by the FBI, explained their motives for “celebration” on the New Jersey waterfront – a celebration that consisted of cheering, smiling, shooting film with still and video cameras and, according to the FBI, “high-fiving” – in the Machiavellian light of geopolitics. “Their explanation of why they were happy”, FBI spokesman Margolin told me, “was that the United States would now have to commit itself to fighting [Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an understanding and empathy for Israel’s circumstances, and that the attacks were ultimately a good thing for Israel”. When reporters on the morning of 9/11 asked former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the effect the attacks would have on IsraeliAmerican relations, he responded with a similar gut analysis: “It’s very good”, he remarked. Then he amended the statement: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans]”.
What is perhaps most damning is that the Israelis’ celebration on the New Jersey waterfront occurred in the first sixteen minutes after the initial crash, when no one was aware this was a terrorist attack. In other words, from the time the first plane hit the north tower, at 8:46 a.m., to the time the second plane hit the south tower, at 9:02 a.m., the overwhelming assumption of news outlets and government officials was that the plane’s impact was simply a terrible accident. It was only after the second plane hit that suspicions were aroused. Yet if the men were cheering for political reasons, as they reportedly told the FBI, they obviously believed they were witnessing a terrorist act, and not an accident.
After returning safely to Israel in the late autumn of 2001, three of the five New Jersey Israelis spoke on a national talk show that winter. Oded Ellner, who on the afternoon of September 11 had, like his compatriots, protested to arresting officer Sgt. Dennis Rivelli that “we’re Israeli”, admitted to the interviewer: “We are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event”. By his own admission, then, Ellner stood on the New Jersey waterfront documenting with film and video a terrorist act before anyone knew it was a terrorist act.
One obvious question among many comes to mind: If these men were trained as professional spies, why did they exhibit such outright oafishness at the moment of truth on the waterfront? The ABC network source close to the 20/20 report noted one of the more disturbing explanations proffered by counterintelligence investigators at the FBI: “The Israelis felt that in some way their intelligence had worked out – i.e., they were celebrating their own acumen and ability as intelligence agents”.
The questions abound: Did the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, ready to “document the event”, arrive at the waterfront before the first plane came in from the north? And if they arrived right after, why did they believe it was a terrorist attack? What about the strange tale of the “art students”? Could they have been mere hustlers, as they claimed, who ended up repeatedly crossing paths with federal agents and living next door to most of the 9/11 hijackers by coincidence? Did the Israeli authorities find out more about the impending attacks than they shared with their U.S. counterparts? Or did the Israeli spies on the ground only intercept vague chatter that, in their view, did not warrant breaking cover to share the information? On the other hand, did the U.S. government receive more advance information about the attacks from Israeli authorities than it is willing to admit? What about the 9/11 Commission’s eliding of reported Israeli warnings that may have led to the watchlisting of Mihdhar and Hazmi? Were the Israeli warnings purposely washed from the historical record? Did the CIA know more about pre-9/11 Israeli spying than it has admitted?
The unfortunate fact is that the truth may never be uncovered, not by officialdom, and certainly not by a passive press. James Bamford, who in a coup of reporting during the 1980s revealed the inner workings of the NSA in The Puzzle Palace, points to the “key problem”: “The Israelis were all sent out of the country”, he says. “There’s no nexus left. The FBI just can’t go knocking on doors in Israel. They need to work with the State Department. They need letters rogatory, where you ask a government of a foreign country to get answers from citizens in that country”. The Israeli government will not likely comply.
So any investigation “is now that much more complicated”, says Bamford. He recalls a story he produced for ABC News concerning two murder suspects – U.S. citizens – who fled to Israel and fought extradition for ten years. “The Israelis did nothing about it until I went to Israel, knocking on doors, and finally found the two suspects. I think it’d be a great idea to go over and knock on their doors”, says Bamford.
The suspects are gone. The trail is cold. Yet many of the key facts and promising leads sit freely on the web, in the archives, safe in the news-morgues at 20/20 and The Forward and Die Zeit. An investigator close to the matter says it reminds him of the Antonioni film “Blow-Up”, a movie about a photographer who discovers the evidence of a covered-up murder hidden before his very eyes in the frame of an enlarged photograph. It’s a mystery that no one appears eager to solve.
Christopher Ketcham is a freelance journalist who has written for Harper’s and Salon. Many of his writings, including his groundbreaking story on the Israeli art students, can be read on his website: christopherketcham.com, as can the Shea memo.
What does it mean when intelligence services start describing the next terror attack . . . despite having no intelligence about it? And what does it mean when former cabinet officials start comparing bodily autonomy advocates to suicide bombers? There’s a false flag coming. And don’t you believe it when they pull it off.
President Joe Biden is being praised in some circles because he finally ended the war in Afghanistan that in all likelihood should never have begun. President George W. Bush initiated the conflict on a series of lies about 9/11 and the Taliban role in that attack and what followed. After bringing about regime change, he decided to remake the country into a western style democracy. President Barack Obama subsequently allowed a “surge” which actually increased the militarization of the conflict and made things worse. The joint effort produced no free elections but delivered instead tens of thousands of deaths and a huge hole in the US Treasury. Bush and Obama were followed by President Donald Trump who actually promised to end the war but lacked the conviction and political support to do so, handing the problem over to Biden, who has bungled the end game but finally done the right thing by ending the fiasco. Biden also has been right to accede to a withdrawal of the last US combat troops from Iraq by year’s end, a move that will considerably ease tension with the Baghdad government, which has been calling for such a move since last January.
But America’s war on those parts of the world that resist following its self-defined leadership is not about to go away. An interesting recent article in the foreign policy establishment The Hill written by a former senior CIA operations and staff officer Douglas London sees an Orwellian unending war against major adversaries Russia and China. Derived from his own experience, he concludes that sustained and enhanced clandestine actions should now replace conventional military forces confrontation, which has been somewhat outdated as an option due to the development of relatively cheap missile technologies that have undermined classic conventional weapons. Some of the clandestine activity he appears to recommend would undoubtedly fall under cover of classic espionage “plausible denial,” i.e. that the White House could disavow any knowledge of what had occurred, but sabotage and cyber-attacks, particularly if implemented aggressively, would quickly be recognized for what they are and would invite commensurate or even disproportionate retaliation. This would amount to an all-out semi-covert war against powerful adversaries which could easily escalate into a shooting war.
The London article is an interesting insight into the thinking of those in both the Democratic and Republican parties who continue to argue that the United States is threatened by largely asymmetrical warfare being conducted by what are regarded as “autocratic” regimes in Moscow and Beijing as well as by non-governmental terrorist groups that is seeking to undermine confidence in US policymakers, the “democratic” government system and the stability of its other institutions.
That the White House is listening to at least some of the complaints coming from the neoconservatives and neoliberals calling for more “democracy promotion” and “regime change” would appear to be the case as there have been renewed calls for greater engagement in various fora, to include NATO leadership now urging the alliance to stand up to Russian “aggression.” The US has meanwhile also called on “friends” in the Middle East to block any attempts by China to establish “military bases” in that region, with the State Department arguing that “The current assessment is that China has a global strategy of pursuing military installations all over, including in the Middle East.” The United States, by one estimate, has nearly 1100 military bases worldwide while China has only one in Djibouti.
Admittedly this time, the US will have to go about its usual school bully behavior without much in the way of allies. The Europeans will not show up as they are disgusted with American vacillation and inability to anticipate obvious developments, as was the case in Afghanistan. Israel and Saudi Arabia will likely line up, or pretend to, while also continuing their collaboration with radical groups that Washington would prefer to avoid.
To be sure there are many in Washington who would be quite happy to continue the US naval build up in the South China Sea while also sending ships to the Black Sea to cruise defiantly off the Russian coast. And then there is also Iran and its ally Syria, both of which continue to be targets of opportunity for sabotage, covert action and the Israeli Air Force, which last week again attacked Syria after penetrating Lebanese air space. So there are always wars and rumors of wars available, which is precisely what the US military-industrial-congressional complex wants to sustain. And in so doing they know that they will have the mainstream media on board, which has the same objective.
But still, it is important to have a plausible threatening enemy, and China is still somewhat over the horizon in that context. So, you turn to the one-size-fits-all option, which is “international terrorism,” preferably Islamic, to continue to empower the central government and fatten one’s friends in the national security industry. And it doesn’t hurt along the way to label some domestic opponents in the same fashion to guarantee one’s political supremacy for the foreseeable future. It’s a win-win.
So, the Biden Administration is either inadvertently or by design setting up the next chapter in its “America goes to war” narrative even as it has not yet figured out how to extricate the soldiers it has sent to assist in the evacuation of Kabul and who are now potential hostages at the airport surrounded by heavily armed Taliban.
But key figures in the Administration and elsewhere inside and outside the government are already looking beyond that, arguing that the new Afghan state will become a terrorist haven and those radicals will look to the United States for a target, as al-Qaeda reportedly did. Jamil Jaffer, founder and executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University argues that “There’s no question that the return of the Taliban opens up space in this new Islamic emirate for al Qaeda to return, rebuild a base, and for other groups associated or previously associated with al Qaeda, like ISIS, to return to the region. Jihadi fighters of all stripes will now once again make Afghanistan their home, as they did in the lead-up to 9/11.”
Indeed, some of those “experts” are seeing the twenty years spent in Afghanistan as a plus as it kept in check those extremists who might have been inclined to act in Europe and the US. That of course ignores the continued existence of many other unsettled parts of the world where terrorists of various kinds have been able to flourish successfully without feeling any need to bomb New York. Senators Lindsey Graham and Mark Warner have warned of a likely resurgence in terrorism, as have both General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Graham laments that “The likelihood of an attack coming from Afghanistan now is through the roof.” The Department of Homeland Security has also done its bit, warning that possible Afghanistan-derived attacks from Islamic extremists on or near the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 event “could serve as a catalyst for acts of targeted violence.”
Anyway, you look at it, terrorism with be the national security flavor du jour over the next year or more. The only real question is, “Will it be domestic or foreign?” Either way the seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will be history but the search for new enemies will continue no matter who is president or which party dominates congress.
As part of a concerted effort to pressurize Iran ahead of the expected resumption of nuclear talks in Vienna, Washington and its European allies appear to be using a mysterious and not entirely understandable attack on an oil tanker operated by Israel to extract additional concessions from Tehran. In doing so, says the well-informed Iranian newspaper Ettelaat, they are unwittingly playing into the hands of an Israeli scheme aimed at railroading the very nuclear deal that Washington and the Europeans are supposedly trying to revive. The controversy over the recent attack on the Israeli Mercer Street continues unabated, and the US and Britain rushed to bring the issue even to the UN Security Council. However, they failed to reach a consensus on Iran there.
In this connection, it may be recalled that an Israeli ship was attacked off the coast of Oman on July 29 while it was sailing from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to the Port of Fujairah, United Arab Emirates. An oil tanker operated by Zodiac Maritime, owned by Israeli shipping magnate Eyal Ofer, was reportedly attacked by suicide drones. A Zodiac Maritime spokesman said two crew members, British and Romanian nationals, died in the attack. The attack, for which Tel Aviv, London, and Washington instantly issued unsubstantiated accusations against Iran, marked the beginning of a coordinated diplomatic campaign against Tehran at a time when nuclear talks on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal had stalled after six rounds of painstaking negotiations in Vienna. The last round of talks in Vienna was completed more than a month ago, and differences over how to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are still unresolved. The US has steadfastly refused to lift all sanctions imposed by the Donald Trump administration and to give assurances that it will not withdraw from the JCPOA again, as it did in the past. The sixth round was also held when a transfer of power in Iran connected with the June 18 presidential elections, in which Ebrahim Raisi won a confident and predictable victory.
In a separate statement, US CENTCOM spokesman Capt. Bill Urban said that based on the fact that “the vertical stabilizer is identical to those identified on one of the Iranian UAVs designed and manufactured for the one-sided kamikaze attack, we could assume that Iran was actively involved in the attack.” In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of the G7 countries (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States) condemned Iran for the attack. “This was a deliberate and targeted attack and a clear violation of international law,” the statement said. “All available evidence points to Iran.” There is no excuse for this attack. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh instantly responded that the G7 condemnation consisted of unfounded accusations. “Israel is likely to be the real culprit behind the attack,” the spokesman added. “For experts and those who know the history of our region, it is nothing new that the Zionist regime is scheming such plots,” Said Khatibzadeh emphasized.
Sensing a change of plans in Tehran, the US and its European allies launched a diplomatic campaign to intimidate Iran into returning to the talks in Vienna without any new demands. Washington’s main concern was that the negotiating team of new President Ebrahim Raisi would return to Vienna with new spirit and demands, amounting to a reversal of the American progress made in the last six rounds. This concern is not groundless: the Tehran Times, which presents the official point of view, reported that the Iranians were even considering, among other options, abandoning the results of the Vienna talks under Hassan Rouhani. The same newspaper, citing official sources, concludes that Tehran may reject the results and set a new agenda for negotiations with the West to resolve the remaining issues in a new format and spirit. This is why the US, in an apparent attempt to influence the plans of the Iranian ayatollahs, has sought to increase diplomatic pressure on Iran since the end of the sixth round. They have threatened and are threatening to withdraw from negotiations, openly opposed to lifting all sanctions, and have even prepared new oil sanctions against Iran.
Then there was the incomprehensible attack on Mercer Street, which the US and its allies saw as a gift to exert further pressure on Iran. While the hype surrounding this attack is still going on, the known provocateur, Britain and its allies, in a spirit of high probability, have concocted several stories about the hijacking of commercial ships off the coast of the United Arab Emirates in the Gulf of Oman. Once again, they have accused Iran, without evidence and with impudence, of playing a role in these events. How can we not recall the dirty work of London and its notorious international organization Médecins Sans Frontières in accusing Damascus of the use of poisonous substances?
Iran fully understands the ulterior motives behind this drama, which the West has habitually turned into a farce. Iranian officials warned the West not to engage in dirty propaganda games to gain concessions. Commenting on the alleged attempted seizure of a ship in the Gulf of Oman, the Iranian Embassy in Britain stated on Twitter: “To mislead the public around the world for diplomatic gain in New York is not fair game.” But this unfair game can lead to the opposite result. The US and Britain have enlisted Israel’s help in their campaign of putting pressure on Iran, which is likely to have unintended consequences for them.
“We have just heard a distorted statement about the Mercer Street incident. Immediately after the event, Israeli officials blamed Iran for the incident. That’s what they usually do. This is a standard practice of the Israeli regime. Its purpose is to divert world attention from the regime’s crimes and inhumane practices in the region,” said Zahra Ershadi, the charge d’affaires ad interim of Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations. She made the remarks after a closed-door UN Security Council meeting on the recent oil tanker incident in the Gulf of Oman.
Israel’s ambassador to the US and the UN, Gilad Erdan, threw aside his restraint and revealed some of these targets. He said that Israel would ultimately like to see the current regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran overthrown. “In the end, we would like [the government] to be overthrown and [for] regime change to take place in Iran,” Gilad Erdan said when asked about Israel’s strategy toward the Islamic Republic, according to the Times of Israel. The statement was made after Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s blunt remarks that Tel Aviv allegedly knows for a fact that it was Iran that attacked Mercer Street.
Regardless of Israel’s goals for Iran, the current approach of London and Washington is unlikely to produce results, as Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi has unequivocally and firmly made it clear that the West is unlikely to succeed in intimidating the Iranians and the country’s leadership. Moreover, no one will force the Iranians to give up their legal rights and freedoms.
More than seven months have passed since an unarmed protester named Ashli Babbitt was shot dead inside the US Capitol while attempting to climb through an opening in a glass door.
Six months after her death, her killer – a police officer who apparently shot her without warning, and certainly without having made any effort to stop her short of putting a fatal bullet through her chest – has never been publicly identified, let alone charged or disciplined.
During those same seven months – during which every self-respecting liberal demanded a criminal penalty for the policeman who killed George Floyd – Ashli Babbitt, the victim of an equally questionable police killing, has been the target of an orgy of media character assassination.
When Donald Trump recently mentioned her death as “a terrible thing” (hardly a radical assessment), New York Magazine’s response seethed with victim-blaming outrage, insisting that the unarmed Babbitt, with no criminal history of any kind:
was leading the mob [inside the Capitol] violently forward toward its goal of threatening or killing officials.”
There’s no evidence that Babbitt intended to kill anyone, let alone that she actually tried to. And there’s plenty of reason to believe that her fatal shooting was illegal. But facts about Ashli Babbitt have never counted for much in liberal media.
For the press, the top priority has been to ensure that in any story told about the 2020 election, Donald Trump and his supporters are the ones who tried to destroy American democracy, while Joe Biden’s Democratic Party heroically came to its rescue.
In this respect, New York’s slander is altogether typical. Refracted through the editors’ invective, in which (among other things) Republican politicians are, weirdly, accused as the real culprits in Babbitt’s death, the underlying message emerges as an ideological tautology: Ashli Babbitt had to die because she joined the wrong sort of protest.
No wonder New York concluded that the hapless 35-year-old was killed “for a very good reason.”
The January 6 demonstration in which she participated has been as relentlessly demonized in the press as Babbitt herself.
According to mainstream media, the men and women who marched to the Capitol to protest the machinations by which Biden ousted Trump from the White House were – take your pick – “fascists” (PBS), “white supremacists” (CNN), “terrorists” (MSNBC), or a violent “mob” bent on paralyzing the United States government (USA Today), while virtually every mainstream media outlet still insists – against all evidence – that, collectively, the demonstrators staged an armed “insurrection” that only just failed to turn the United States into a right-wing dictatorship.
And anyone who imagined that, after seven months of this, the slanders against Ashli Babbitt couldn’t get any more venomous reckoned without the inflammatory effect of mass media Trump-hatred.
When, on July 12, the former President suggested that Babbitt’s killer should at least be publicly identified, the New Republic swung into anti-Republican overdrive, claiming in a hysterical screed that the unarmed Babbitt was a monster who had hoped for “the mass execution of Democratic politicians and prominent liberals” when she went to Washington to be killed on January 6.
Merciful heavens, the woman was so freaking bloodthirsty that she actually used to watch – Tucker Carlson!
Even that wasn’t all. The same rant that accused Ashli Babbitt of harboring dreams of mass murder described the January 6 protest as “a mob of thousands who…rampaged through the halls of Congress,” when in fact only a small fraction of the protesters entered the Capitol at all, and only a handful of those have been accused of possessing “weapons” (most of which seem to have been flagpoles); with a single exception, not one of the charged “insurrectionists” even thought to bring a gun to the coup. (The lone protester facing criminal charges who did carry a pistol into the Capitol never drew it, according to police.)
But hey, fantasy breeds fantasy: for liberals like the TNR editors, where there are Trump supporters, there’s just got to be mayhem.
Lest I be accused of playing an after-the-fact role in the “insurrection” myself, let me emphasize that I do not share Ashli Babbitt’s politics, and that I do not approve of the actions of the protesters who broke into the Capitol on January 6. Nor do I regard the 2020 presidential election as having been “stolen,” at least not in the sense that many of the protesters evidently believed it was – of which more presently.
But whether Ashli Babbitt was right about Donald Trump or about the 2020 election is ultimately beside the point. The plain truth is that as far as anyone can tell she was the victim of an extrajudicial execution – an execution made even more heinous by the fact that Babbitt’s actual offenses inside the Capitol involved no violence and placed no one in jeopardy.
It is an outrage that in the United States of America a police officer can shoot a woman dead for trespassing. And it is doubly an outrage that so few ostensible civil libertarians have been willing to say so.
Scores of liberals, politicians, op-ed writers and public moralists demanded a full-scale investigation into the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor. Why couldn’t one of them utter a single word of protest about the lethally trampled civil rights of Ashli Babbitt?
The smear campaign against Babbitt is more than the product of a pernicious double standard. It also serves to distract the public from the very real issues that spurred the protest in the first place.
I repeat: I don’t credit stories about the ghost of Hugo Chavez rising from the grave to manipulate secretly-programmed voting machines on Election Day. (In fact, I suspect these “theories” have been amplified in popular media precisely because they’re relatively easy to refute.)
But the January 6 protesters did have excellent reasons to be angry about the electoral process that put an end to Trump’s term of office. And since the popular press refuses to discuss the protesters’ legitimate grievances, allow me to enumerate three of the most important ones.
1. The balloting procedures used in key jurisdictions were probably illegal.
In several closely contested states – Georgia, Illinois, Michigan and Pennsylvania among them – state executives made unilateral changes in the election laws in order to facilitate voting by mail rather than at polling booths, citing the “killer virus” as a pretext. Yet in every such case, the applicable state constitution assigns questions of public policy – including the extent to which people can vote by mail – to the state’s legislators rather than the executive branch; these matters cannot legally be determined by gubernatorial fiat except in strictly defined “emergencies.”
Nor can it be claimed that COVID19 posed such an emergency. Even Atlantic Magazine, one of the most sedulous organs of coronavirus hysteria, conceded barely a month before the presidential election that “voting with a mask on is no more dangerous than going to a grocery store with a mask on – something millions of Americans do every week.”
That means that the balloting procedures used in several important states were fundamentally flawed – not only violating the relevant state constitutions but probably transgressing the “due process of law” requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution itself. And while there’s no way to know whether these wrongly altered procedures actually changed the outcome of the election, Trump voters had every right to condemn them.
2. The election was effectively decided by mass media misinformation.
It is ironic that so much recent propaganda accuses Trump and his supporters of circulating “misinformation.” In fact, one of the most consequential misinformation campaigns of modern times was largely responsible for Trump’s defeat.
Post-election observers are in general agreement that Joe Biden – that mumbling mummy – would have stood little chance of besting Trump had it not been for the popular press’ relentless stoking of coronavirus hysteria.
Of particular impact was the claim – repeated in various forms in more venues than I can count – that Trump was “personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths,” as one typical hit piece insisted in the run-up to the election.
But was he? For all the huffing and puffing, no one has presented any real evidence to support the accusation. Yes, the man in the bad wig behaved as anyone familiar with his record might have expected: he made some foolish remarks, picked needless feuds with Democratic governors, hogged the spotlight, reversed himself without acknowledgment, and took credit for things that would have happened just as well without him.
But the fact remains that presidential action had little effect on the virus or its consequences; nearly all the important decisions – including the disastrous lockdowns and small business closures, not to mention the suspension of representative democracy and the attacks on education, public worship and the arts – were made at the state level.
In all of this, the White House was largely irrelevant. Trump’s most culpable act – in my opinion – was backing the Food and Drug Administration as it cut the corners of the testing procedures that should have been required for the COVID19 “vaccines” and granted the manufacturers blanket legal immunity for any adverse medical consequences.
But on that point, remember, Trump was supported by the “experts” and even by his political opponents. Legitimate criticism never figured in the media blitz against the former President. Instead, he was blindsided over claims so vague they couldn’t even be specified, with dire-sounding but meaningless words like “downplaying” or “mishandling” repeated so often that eventually they seemed to prove themselves. It was an impressive display of emotion-churning propaganda. It contained little or no truth.
Did the avalanche of misinformation violate any election laws? Alas, no. But that fact certainly did not deprive angry voters of their right to protest.
3. Biden’s election guaranteed the worsening of the coronavirus coup.
The protesters’ conviction that Trump actually won the election probably won’t stand the test of time. But in one important sense, they did know perfectly well what they were fighting for – and so did we.
Joe Biden has never made a secret of his fondness for attacks on freedom in the name of “health” regulation. Less than two months into his term, Biden was openly mulling an executive fiat that would require the muzzling and six-foot separation of all American workers, even those who have submitted to the “vaccines.”
He has also suggested that anyone who declines to be a guinea pig for Big Pharma is unpatriotic, and has announced a plan to have “local health leaders” hawk the scantily-tested drugs from door to door to add even more pressure to the vaccination campaign – even as the unprecedented “gene therapy” has already figured in more than 5,300 deaths nationwide.
And this is clearly just the beginning.
Each passing week sees the lockdown-lovers flaunting still more contempt for the Bill of Rights. Mandatory muzzling has been reintroduced in Los Angeles County. Geraldo Rivera, a media stalking horse for the administration, has endorsed Jim Crow restrictions for the “unvaccinated” that would bar them from grocery stores and nearly all public places.
The US Surgeon General is publicly calling for still more censorship on social media (where dozens of accounts have already been canceled for disseminating information the authorities don’t like).
The nastiest aspect of all these police-state tactics is the growing intensity of the hate speech aimed at dissenters. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden insisted (falsely) on July 16.
Rochelle Walensky, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, took the incitement a step farther, blaming even infections among vaccinated Americans on “outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage.” In other words: if you get sick, you can thank those dastardly freethinkers who still imagine they’re entitled to civil rights.
It’s a dangerous and divisive strategy. And anyone unsure where it leads need only look to Italy, France and Greece, where officials are already forcing health care workers to submit to vaccinations on pain of losing their livelihoods.
French President Emmanuel Macron, not even bothering to seek parliamentary approval, is mandating “vaccine passports” for anyone who wants to eat at a restaurant or to travel by train.
And these strong-arm tactics are doubtless intended to prepare us for worse still to come. Anthony Fauci himself has declared that COVID19 vaccination should be compulsory in as many places as possible – even though federal law holds otherwise, since the drugs have only been granted “emergency use” authorization – because he thinks it “horrifying” that people should decide the fate of their own bodies. (The good doctor sings a different tune on the question of legalized abortion, but since when have our ruling mandarins been consistent?)
In short, to say that a lot was at stake in the 2020 presidential election would be putting it very mildly. Liberal pundits have expressed shock at the willingness of thousands of people to converge on Washington to denounce the election results that effectively intensified the coronavirus coup. I think it would have been shocking had they not done so.
It’s not just that our government – and its tame mouthpieces in the press – is using the pretext of “health regulation” to demonize those citizens who choose to exercise their right not to be injected with an untested drug. The entire vaccine-blackmail program is premised on a lie.
The campaign necessarily assumes that the COVID19 “vaccines” prevent transmission of the virus from one person to another. They do no such thing.
The manufacturers have acknowledged, and the FDA has explicitly confirmed, the absence of any evidence that the new “vaccines” prevent either infection or transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The argument that vaccination is necessary to “protect the public” against COVID19 is simply fraudulent.
Not only does the fear-mongering about “the unvaccinated” falsely assume that the “vaccines” prevent transmission, it completely ignores the presence of genuine immunity among those who have already been exposed. As with any respiratory virus, exposure to SARS-CoV-2 triggers the development of antibodies and T-cells that serve to prevent future infections and, therefore, to block the virus’ transmissibility.
In October 2020, the prominent Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta estimated that “three months, maybe six is sufficient time for enough immunity to accumulate…that the vulnerable could resume normal lives” in the United States. More than nine months have now passed since Gupta’s assessment.
Even if her estimate turns out to have been overly optimistic, there can be no doubt that enough natural immunity exists in the general population to have a profound effect on the transmissibility of COVID19, with or without the experimental drugs the government wants us to use. Any “analysis” that omits that obvious fact is patently dishonest.
And suppose, for argument’s sake, that one overlooks all this and accepts the “case” numbers peddled by the CDC. Even so, the statistical basis for all the shrieking about “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” is riddled with too many inconsistencies to be taken seriously.
The southern states of Mississippi and Arkansas, for instance, are both at the low end of the vaccination-level range, at 33.6% and 35.2% respectively.
If the Biden-Walensky propaganda were correct, those states would be inundated in comparable outbreaks of new COVID19 infections.
In fact, after adjusting for the small difference in population size, Arkansas’ most recent 7-day average for “new cases” is nearly 2.5 times higher than Mississippi’s. Such a disparity in the official numbers clearly cannot be explained on the basis of COVID19 vaccination rates.
And things are no different at the high end of the vaccination spectrum. Maryland has “fully vaccinated” 57.6% of its population, while New York lags just slightly behind at 55.8%. Yet, after adjustment for the different population sizes of the two states, New York still has nearly 2.5 times the 7-day average number of new “cases” of COVID19 that Maryland has – as big a gap as that between Mississippi and Arkansas.
Or consider the wildly different “case” levels to be found in California, which has a “fully vaccinated” rate of 51.5%, and in Pennsylvania, where the rate is 51.1%. Again, after adjusting for population, California’s latest “new case” average is well over double that of Pennsylvania’s – even though the vaccination level in the two states is virtually identical. Anomalies like these make nonsense of any argument that the US is experiencing a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
And what about the “vaccinated”? Here, too, the propaganda doesn’t withstand even cursory scrutiny. Recently, six “fully vaccinated” people at a single wedding – held in a “large, open-air tent” – all came down with COVID19. Of those six, two were hospitalized and one died.
In a rather desperate brush-off typical of mainstream media, Insider’s Hilary Brueck described this as a “small outbreak that underscores how effective vaccines are against even variants of the virus.”
Ah, how nimbly propagandists put about in a changing wind! A year ago, six symptomatic cases of COVID19 would have marked the ceremony where they originated as a dreaded “superspreader event” – it would have been touted as proof that anyone selfish enough to invite guests to a wedding ought to be treated as a public menace.
And if, on top of that, fully a third of those infected had been hospitalized, and over 16% of them had dropped dead – well, I will leave it to the reader to imagine the hysterical headlines that would have erupted about that. Are we really supposed to chant hosannas now that the identical evils are showing up in the wake of COVID19 “vaccinations”?
But let us return to January 6 and the conspiracy of silence surrounding the killing of Ashli Babbitt.
Apart from her violent death – the only one that occurred in the Capitol on January 6 – the incidents of that day were strikingly incommensurate with the media’s horrified depictions of the “storming” of Congress.
Yes, there were scuffles with police, but such things were hardly unprecedented in Washington. And the media’s obsessive use of the phrase “deadly riot” misrepresents the unfortunate but nonviolent deaths (other than Babbitt’s) that occurred during or immediately after the protest.
Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died the following day, and whose death – as we were assured by the New York Times on the basis of “anonymous” reports – resulted from being clubbed over the head with a fire extinguisher by one of the “insurrectionists,” actually died of natural causes (as did two of the older protesters).
The only other supposedly “violent” death, that of protester Rosanne Boyland, was determined by the D.C. medical examiner’s office last April to be the consequence of “acute amphetamine intoxication,” though that didn’t prevent the Times from offering its readers back in January a gorily detailed – and false – account of how Boyland was “trampled” and “crushed” to death by “the mob.”
(By the way, I am not aware that the ostensibly meticulous fact-checkers at the Times have ever printed a directretraction of either of these two bogus articles. Innocent errors do sometimes merit a correction at the Paper of Record; malicious errors almost never do.)
The threat allegedly posed by the demonstrators to members of Congress seems also to have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the media’s early insistence that the “insurrection” was led by sinister “right-wing extremists,”only a handful of those who breached the Capitol had any ties to the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters or Aryan Nations.
“More than four-fifths” of those charged for their actions on January 6 “come from various backgrounds, from business owners to white-collar professionals,” the BBC reported in February. The claim that the “rioters” brought zip-tie handcuffs to use on Democratic politicians turned out to be another falsification: the one protester photographed holding the “restraints” actually found them on a table inside the Capitol. The police had brought them there.
And frankly, I find it a little hard to believe the stories of lawmakers who say they feared for their lives during the “siege” when one of them, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands, could generate straight-faced media reports by claiming that she preferred a “possible confrontation with the insurrectionist mob” to sharing a “secure location” with some Republicans who were – gasp – not wearing masks!
True, her insistence that masks on the Republicans would have protected her, while her own would not, is part of the magical thinking we’ve all been asked to swallow throughout the propaganda campaign.
But would anyone who genuinely thought she was running from a lynch mob refuse a safe haven just because “I wouldn’t be able to see the virus as it was coming toward me” from a few un-muzzled legislators across the room? What was evidently meant to sound like a horror story reads, to me, much more like farce.
So it turns out that anyone genuinely concerned about “deadly violence” during the January 6 protest can have only one real subject to investigate: Ashli Babbitt. And the more one investigates her death, and the circumstances surrounding it, the less justifiable the whole scenario appears.
Just how, for instance, did protesters manage to enter the Capitol in the first place?
No one in power has offered any convincing answer to that question.
Federal government buildings in Washington are normally among the most zealously guarded in the world. And everyone knew that a large political protest was planned for January 6, the day Joe Biden’s election as President was to be officially certified.
Why couldn’t Capitol police use tear gas to stop the unarmed demonstrators as soon as they breached the entrances, especially since “tear gas munitions were used by other federal police agencies against protesters in front of Lafayette Park” just a few months earlier? And assuming the local police force was somehow unable to handle the crowd, where was the vaunted National Guard?
Some of the protesters believe that they were deliberately entrapped. As one of them later told the FBI, “law enforcement purposefully did not have enough resources there so that supporters of the former president could overrun the Capitol and be subsequently labeled as ‘intruders.’” I cannot prove this theory correct – but I also cannot dismiss it as implausible.
As early as February 4, Time Magazine’s Molly Ball reported that a “conspiracy” involving “an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans” had orchestrated a “vast, cross-partisan campaign” to ensure Biden’s smooth entry into office.
This “conspiracy” was so effective that it “got states to change voting systems” and, on the day of the January 6 protest itself, saw to it that the protesters who converged on the Capitol “were met by virtually no counterdemonstrators” who might otherwise “be blamed for any mayhem.”
Surely a cabal capable of that much could also arrange for the protest to get just far enough out of hand to guarantee media images that would discredit Donald Trump with the nation’s political elites – which, of course, is exactly what happened. Or was it all just coincidence?
Along similar lines, the strange absence of the National Guard on January 6 has been widely reported – but only as an inexplicable blunder.
Yet couldn’t this, like the parallel absence of counter-demonstrations, have been deliberate?
We know that the deployment of National Guard or military personnel to the Capitol would have required the consent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And we know that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was General Mark Milley, a man who (according to a soon-to-be-published book) told his aides that Trump reminded him of Hitler, and whose determination to ensure that Biden was installed as President – “come hell or high water” – went so far that he “informally planned for different ways to stop Trump” after the election, including private telephone conversations with (Democratic) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
In fact, credible reports maintain (though he denies it) that General Walter Piatt, director of Army staff, specifically refused to send National Guard troops to the Capitol on January 6 because “it wouldn’t look good.”
An honest press – if we had one – would be taking a hard look into the possibility that the “deadly riot” was really political theater, organized not by the protesters but by the very democracy-haters the protesters came to challenge. That would make Babbitt’s killing an even uglier miscarriage of justice.
Meanwhile, the refusal of the media, the pundits, the civil rights organizations, the politicians – just about everyone in power – to give Ashli Babbitt’s death the attention it deserves is more than a wrong in itself. It is part of a larger pattern of political gaslighting by which the victors in the 2020 election, while accusing Trump & Co. of an attempted “coup,” continue to advance a coup of their own.
Today the coup marches under the name “Delta variant.” But this is only a temporary phase. Specific terrors will vary from month to month, but there will always be some reason for whittling down our remaining freedoms. This latest scare is entirely typical.
Notwithstanding the ballyhoo, there’s no real evidence that the “Delta variant” is particularly dangerous – not even the CDC has attempted to make that case – and as a general rule, subsequent variants of a respiratory virus are less severe than those they follow.
(As a matter of fact, there’s only sketchy evidence that the new “variant” is even more transmissible than the original version, despite popular media’s insistence on this as a matter of fact: the CDC cites only one study about the alleged contagiousness of the “Delta variant,” which is based entirely on manifestly unreliable public “test” data. It’s also rife with anomalies, such as the finding that the variant spreads more rapidly among Asians than among white people, while among blacks it actually appears to be less transmissible. Go figure.)
In other words, like nearly everything the “experts” have claimed about COVID19 for the last seventeen months, the “deadly Delta” story is much less about facts than it is about maintaining public hysteria.
And the motive for the fear porn is perfectly clear. The Biden administration never intended to give the public anything more than a brief honeymoon from coronavirus terror.
True, there had to be some kind of reward for voting Donald Trump out of office. But now it’s time to get back to business – “business” being the deepening confinement of the American public.
“The carefree Covid season is over,” barked CNN on July 17. And the network was quick to identify the next targets of the crackdown: conservative media, for encouraging “vaccine hesitancy,” and “Republican-led states” that “have tried to outdo each other in limiting the power of cities and counties to impose Covid restrictions in case of a new outbreak.”
It’s a short step from condemning defenders of basic liberties to uprooting the liberties themselves. So if you thought this was all about roasting a TV commentator like Tucker Carlson or a politician like Ron DeSantis, think again: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Can we still pry our country loose from the grip of the fear campaign? I hope so, believing as I do in the aspirations to which our political system is dedicated, and still more in the value of the human lives that have grown up under the influence of those ideals.
But if we want each life to matter, we have to prove that Ashli Babbitt’s life mattered too. We need to demand more from the federal Justice Department than the cynical conclusion that there was:
no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defence or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber.”
We need to seek an explanation for the fact that “the officer,” unlike Derek Chauvin – currently behind bars for killing George Floyd – has never faced charges of any kind for gunning down an unarmed woman under circumstances that placed no one in serious danger.
We must ask why there are no crowds in the streets to support the Babbitt family’s lawsuit against the Capitol police, as there would be if she had been killed by a cop during a Black Lives Matter rally.
It must be clear by now that the coronavirus coup isn’t going away of its own accord. If we don’t demand an end to it, there will be no end.
There will only be more fear porn, more manipulated elections, more wrecked livelihoods, more attacks on freedom – and more tragedies like the killing of Ashli Babbitt, who believed that by taking her protest to the seat of government she could make a difference.
Whether she was right about that is no longer up to her. It’s up to us.
Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014)
In the United States we now live under a government that largely operates in secret, headed by an executive that ignores the constitutional separation of powers and backed by a legislature that is more interested in social engineering than in benefitting the American people. The US, together with its best friend and faux ally Israel, has become the ultimate rogue nation, asserting its right to attack anyone at any time who refuses to recognize Washington’s leadership. America is a country in decline, its influence having been eroded by a string of foreign policy and military disasters starting with Vietnam and more recently including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the Ukraine. As a result, respect for the United States has plummeted most particularly over the past twenty years since the War on Terror was declared and the country has become a debtor nation as it prints money to sustain a pointless policy of global hegemony which no one else either desires or respects.
It has been argued in some circles that the hopelessly ignorant Donald Trump and the dementia plagued Joe Biden have done one positive thing, and that has been to keep us out of an actual shooting war with anyone able to retaliate in kind, which means in practice Russia and possibly China. Even if that were so, one might question a clumsy foreign policy devoid of any genuine national interest that is a train wreck waiting to happen. It has no off switch and has pushed America’s two principal rivals into becoming willy-nilly de facto enemies, something which neither Moscow nor Beijing wished to see develop.
Contrary to the claims that Trump and Biden are war-shy, both men have in fact committed war crimes by carrying out attacks on targets in both Syria and Iraq, to include the assassination of senior Iranian general Qasim Soleimani in January 2020. Though it was claimed at the time that the attacks were retaliatory, evidence supporting that view was either non-existent or deliberately fabricated.
Part of the problem for Washington is that the US had inextricably tied itself to worthless so-called allies in the Middle East, most notably Israel and Saudi Arabia. The real danger is not that Joe Biden or Kamala Harris will do something really stupid but rather that Riyadh or Jerusalem will get involved in something over their heads and demand, as “allies,” that they be bailed out by Uncle Sam. Biden will be unable to resist, particularly if it is the Israel Lobby that is doing the pushing.
Perhaps one of the more interesting news plus analysis articles along those lines that I have read in a while appeared last week in the Business Insider, written by one Mitchell Plitnick, who is described as president of ReThinking Foreign Policy. The article bears the headline “Russia and Israel may be on a collision course in Syria” and it argues that Russia’s commitment to Syria and Israel’s interest in actively deterring Iran and its proxies are irreconcilable, with the US ending up in an extremely difficult position which could easily lead to its involvement in what could become a new shooting war. The White House would have to tread very carefully as it would likely want to avoid sending the wrong signals either to Moscow or Jerusalem, but that realization may be beyond the thinking of the warhawks on the National Security Council.
To place the Plitnick article in its current context of rumors of wars, one might cite yet another piece in Business Insider about the July 30th explosive drone attack on an oil tanker off the coast of Oman in the northern Indian Ocean, which killed two crewmen, a Briton and a Romanian. The bombing was immediately attributed to Iran by both Israel and Washington, though the only proof presented was that the fragments of the drone appeared to demonstrate that it was Iranian made, which means little as the device is available to and used by various players throughout the Middle East and in central Asia.
The tanker in question was the MT Mercer Street, sailing under a Liberian flag but Japanese-owned and managed by Zodiac Maritime, an international ship management company headquartered in London and owned by Israeli shipping magnate Eyal Ofer. It was empty, sailing to pick up a cargo, and had a mixed international crew. Inevitably, initial media reporting depended on analysis by the US and Israel, which saw the attack as a warning or retaliatory strike executed or ordered by the newly elected government currently assuming control in Tehran.
US Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who could not possibly have known who carried out the attack, was not shy about expressing his “authoritative” viewpoint, asserting that “We are confident that Iran conducted this attack. We are working with our partners to consider our next steps and consulting with governments inside the region and beyond on an appropriate response, which will be forthcoming.”
The US Central Command (CENTCOM) also all too quickly pointed to Iran, stating that “The use of Iranian designed and produced one way attack ‘kamikaze’ UAVs is a growing trend in the region. They are actively used by Iran and their proxies against coalition forces in the region, to include targets in Saudi Arabia and Iraq.”
Tehran denied that it had carried out the attack but the Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz was not accepting that and threatened to attack Iran, saying predictably that “We are at a point where we need to take military action against Iran. The world needs to take action against Iran now… Now is the time for deeds — words are not enough. … It is time for diplomatic, economic and even military deeds. Otherwise the attacks will continue.” Gantz also confirmed that “Israel is ready to attack Iran, yes…”
New Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett also made the same demand, saying Israel could “…act alone. They can’t sit calmly in Tehran while igniting the entire Middle East — that’s over. We are working to enlist the whole world, but when the time comes, we know how to act alone.” If the level of verbal vituperation coming out of Israel is anything to go by, an attack on Iran would appear to be imminent.
After the attack on the MT Mercer Street, there soon followed the panicked account the panicked account of an alleged hijacking of a second tanker by personnel initially reported to be wearing “Iranian military uniforms.” The “… hijacking incident in international waters in the Gulf of Oman” ended peacefully however. The US State Department subsequently reported that “We can confirm that personnel have left the Panama-flagged Asphalt Princess… We believe that these personnel were Iranian, but we’re not in a position to confirm this at this time.”
So, the United States government does not actually know who did what to whom but is evidently willing to indict Iran and look the other way if Israel should choose to start a war. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan is right to compare the drone attack on the Mercer Street to the alleged Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, which was deliberately distorted by the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration and used to justify rapid escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam War. Buchanan observes that it is by no means clear that Iran was behind the Mercer Street attack and there are a number of good reasons to doubt it, including Iranian hopes to have sanctions against its economy lifted which will require best behavior. Also, Iran would have known that it would be blamed for such an incident in any event, so why should it risk going to war with Israel and the US, a war that it knows it cannot win?
Buchanan observes that whoever attacked the tanker wants war and also to derail any negotiations to de-sanction Iran, but he stops short of suggesting who that might be. The answer is of course Israel, engaging in a false flag operation employing an Iranian produced drone. And I would add to Buchanan’s comments that there is in any event a terrible stink of hypocrisy over the threat of war to avenge the tanker incident. Israel has attacked Iranian ships in the past and has been regularly bombing Syria in often successful attempts to kill Iranians who are, by the way, in the country at the invitation of its legitimate government. Zionist Joe Biden has yet to condemn those war crimes, nor has the suddenly aroused Tony Blinken. And Joe, who surely knows that neither Syria nor Iran threatens the United States, also continues to keep American troops in Syria, occupying a large part of the country, which directly confront the Kremlin’s forces. Israel wants a war that will inevitably involve the United States and maybe also Russia to some degree as collateral damage. Will it get that or will Biden have the courage to say “No!”
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
A week ago, the MT Mercer Street, a Japanese-owned tanker managed by a U.K.-based company owned by Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer, sailing in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Oman, was struck by drones.
A British security guard and Romanian crew member were killed.
Britain and the U.S. immediately blamed Iran, and the Israelis began to beat the war drums.
Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said action against Iran should be taken “right now.”
Tuesday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned Israel could “act alone.” “They can’t sit calmly in Tehran while igniting the entire Middle East — that’s over,” said Bennett. “We are working to enlist the whole world, but when the time comes, we know how to act alone.”
Wednesday, Gantz ratcheted it up, “Now is the time for deeds — words are not enough. … It is time for diplomatic, economic and even military deeds. Otherwise the attacks will continue.”
Thursday, Gantz went further: “Israel is ready to attack Iran, yes. … We are at a point where we need to take military action against Iran. The world needs to take action against Iran now.”
And what do the Americans say?
“We are confident that Iran conducted this attack,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “We are working with our partners to consider our next steps and consulting with governments inside the region and beyond on an appropriate response, which will be forthcoming.”
Iran, however, has repeatedly denied that it ordered the attack.
What makes the attack puzzling is its timing, as it occurred just days before the inauguration of the newly elected president of Iran, the ultraconservative hardliner Ebrahim Raisi.
Query: Would Raisi have ordered a provocative attack on an Israeli-owned vessel, just days before taking office, when his highest priority is a lifting of the “maximum pressure” sanctions imposed on his country by former President Donald Trump? Why?
Would Raisi put at risk his principal diplomatic goal, just to get even with Israel for some earlier pinprick strike in the tit-for-tat war in which Iran and Israel have been engaged for years? Again, why?
If not Raisi, would the outgoing president, the moderate Hassan Rouhani, have ordered such an attack on his last hours in office and risk igniting a war with Israel and the U.S. that his country could not win?
Could the attack have been the work of rogue elements in the Iranian Republican Guard Corps? Gantz and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid claim that Saeed Ara Jani, head of the drones section of the IRGC, “is the man personally responsible for the terror attacks in the Gulf of Oman.”
Or was this simply a reflexive Iranian reprisal for Israeli attacks?
For years, Israel and Iran have been in a shadow war, with Iran backing Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and the Shia militia in Syria and Iraq.
Israel has both initiated and responded to attacks with strikes on Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and by sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program and assassinating its nuclear scientists.
But whoever was behind the attack in the Gulf of Oman, and whatever the political motive, the U.S. was not the target, and the U.S. should not respond militarily to a drone strike that was not aimed at us.
No one has deputized us to police the Middle East, and we have not prospered these last two decades by having deputized ourselves.
With America leaving Afghanistan and U.S. troops in Iraq transiting out of any “combat” role, now is not the time to get us ensnared in a new war with Iran.
Lest we forget. It was in an August, 57 years ago, that the Tonkin Gulf incident occurred, which led America to plunge into an eight-year war in Vietnam.
President Joe Biden’s diplomatic goal with Iran, since taking office, has been the resurrection of the 2015 nuclear deal from which former President Donald Trump walked away. In return for Iran’s reacceptance of strict conditions on its nuclear program, the U.S. has offered a lifting of Trump’s sanctions.
Whoever launched the drone strike sought to ensure that no new U.S.-Iran deal is consummated, that U.S. sanctions remain in place, and that a U.S. war with Iran remain a possibility.
But, again, why would Tehran carry out such a drone attack and kill crewmen on an Israeli-owned vessel — then loudly deny it?
Since he took office, Biden has revealed his intent to extricate the U.S. from the “forever wars” of the Middle East and to pivot to the Far East and China. By this month’s end, all U.S. forces are to be out of Afghanistan, and the 2,500 U.S. troops still in Iraq are to be repurposed, no longer to be designated as combat troops.
Those behind this attack on the Israeli-owned vessel do not want to reduce the possibility of war between the United States and Iran.
They want to make it a reality. We ought not accommodate them.
An article in the Washington Post about the January 6 protests at the Capitol goes a long way toward explaining why people do not trust the mainstream media. The article, written by a Post reporter named Mike DeBonis, focuses on allegations that the FBI infiltrated the ranks of the protestors and actually helped to incite them to illegally enter the Capitol and engage in mayhem after doing so.
The overall tone that DeBonis sets forth is one that is oftentimes found in the mainstream media when it comes to alleged wrongdoing by the federal government. The article has a mocking tone to it, suggesting that the people who are making this allegation are conspiracy theorists for actually believing that federal officials would do such a horrible thing.
There is a critical sentence in DeBonis’s article: “The FBI declined to comment.”
Why is that line important? Because there are two ways that a reporter can go when he is writing a story about this type of allegation.
On the one hand, he can mock and ridicule those who are making the allegation, pointing out that they haven’t produced any evidence to support their “unfounded claim.”
On the other hand, he can aggressively go after FBI officials and demand a definitive yes-or-no answer instead of simply settling for a “no comment” by the FBI and also engage in an aggressive investigative effort to determine whether there is evidence to support the allegation.
DeBonis chose the first route. But why? After all, a “no comment” answer by the FBI is about as incriminating as an answer can be, short of an outright admission of wrongdoing. That’s because if the FBI were not guilty of the wrongdoing, it would undoubtedly simply say, “The allegation is false.” The FBI clearly did not do that with its “no comment” answer. It’s “no comment” answer leaves open the possibility — perhaps even the likelihood — that the FBI was involved in wrongdoing,
DeBonis makes a big issue of out of the fact that the people who are making this allegation have not provided any evidence to support their allegation. But what people have pointed out is a similar course of conduct by the FBI in other cases, which would be enough to cause any reasonable person to assume that it might have engaged in the same course of conduct with respect to the January 6 protests.
For example, consider the case that involves the alleged kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. DeBonis is aware of that case because he links to an article from BuzzFeedNews.com about the case. That article alleges that the FBI played a major role in inducing the defendants in the case to commit the kidnapping. Even if what the FBI allegedly did wasn’t enough to support a defense of entrapment, its alleged actions are nonetheless enough to cause any reasonable citizen, including investigative journalists, concern.
Given the history of the FBI engaging in this type of misconduct, you would think that any journalist worth his salt would say, “I need to get to the bottom of this latest assertion. I need to know whether the FBI did the same thing here. Rather than mocking and ridiculing these people by pointing out that they have furnished no evidence to support their allegation, I need to do my job and go after the FBI to see if there is any evidence to support the allegation.”
Rather than do that, DeBonis goes off on the other track by implicitly assuming that the FBI would never do such a thing and implicitly assuming that those who are making the allegation are nothing more than “conspiracy theorists.”
That’s why so many people don’t trust the mainstream media.
This is not a recent phenomenon.
We can go all the way back to Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s secret program in the 1960s and 1970s whose aim was to acquire CIA assets from within the mainstream press, whose secret job would be to come to the defense of the national-security establishment whenever necessary, including but calling people “conspiracy theorists” whenever they allege wrongdoing on the part of CIA officials.
According to the Wikipedia entry on “Operation Mockingbird,”
In a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, “The CIA and the Media,” reporter Carl Bernstein expanded upon the Church Committee’s report and said that around 400 press members were considered intelligence assets by the CIA, including New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, columnist and political analyst Stewart Alsop and Time magazine. Berstein documented the way in which overseas branches of major US news agencies had for many years served as the “eyes and ears” of Operation Mockingbird, which functioned to disseminate CIA propaganda through domestic US media.[6]
The best example, of course, of the deference to the authority of the national-security establishment relates to the Kennedy assassination. Today, there are two separate worlds when it comes to that assassination: the world of the mainstream media and the world of Internet. They are two completely different worlds — actually, parallel universes.
On the Internet, it’s possible to find people analyzing, questioning, and challenging the official lone-nut theory of the case, pointing to the mountain of evidence, for example, that establishes that the national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 as well as the recorded presentations at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s recent conference “The National Security State and the Kennedy Assassination.”
Not so in the mainstream press. It is considered verboten in the mainstream press for any reporter or commentator to challenge or question any aspect of the official lone-nut theory of the assassination. Woe to the reporter or commentator who does so. He will be looking for a new job post haste — somewhere on the Internet.
In the December 6, 1963, issue of Life magazine, a well-known Life magazine reporter named Paul Mandel wrote an article about the assassination in which he claimed that the famous Zapruder film showed that the president had turned around to face the Texas School Book Depository. The president’s action, Mandel said, explained how it was that the president was shot in the throat.
No one could verify Mandel’s statement because Life magazine had purchased the film from Abraham Zapruder for $150,000, which in today’s dollars amounted to around $1.2 million. Life locked the film away, saying that it wanted to protect the American people from ever having to see such violence.
In 1969, Jim Garrison, the district attorney in New Orleans, brought a criminal prosecution against a man named Clay Shaw in which Garrison alleged that the Kennedy assassination was actually a sophisticated regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment. Garrison subpoenaed the Zapruder film from Life magazine and showed it in court. The film showed that the president had never turned around and faced the school book depository. By this time, of course, the official story revolved around the magic bullet theory, which posited that the president had actually been shot in the rear of the neck (i.e., not through the throat), with the bullet supposedly having come out the front (and then supposedly striking Gov. John Connally in multiple places, with the bullet magically ending up in a pristine condition.)
In other words, Mandel had lied, either intentionally or because someone at Life magazine had falsely told him that that’s what the film showed. There is no other conclusion that can be reached. There is no way that Mandel’s allegation could be construed to be an innocent mistake, because Life magazine had the film.
There is another interesting aspect to the saga. According to Wikipedia:
General Charles Douglas (C. D.) Jackson (March 16, 1902 – September 18, 1964) was a United States government propagandist and senior executive of Time Inc. As an expert on psychological warfare he served in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and later as Special Assistant to the President in the Eisenhower administration…. After Abraham Zapruder took the famous film in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Jackson purchased it on behalf of Time/Life to “protect the integrity of the film.” Upon viewing it on Sunday morning, he ordered it locked in a vault at the Time/Life building in Manhattan.
In 1972 — three years after the Zapruder film was shown in the Shaw trial — Life magazine, which had been one of the most popular weekly magazines in history, cease publication as a weekly. Some people said that it was because of the rising popularity of television. Another possibility is that people no longer trusted Life magazine.
For the past 25 years, the mainstream media has been losing readershipand money. Some people blame it on the rising popularity of the Internet. Another possibility is that people no longer trust the mainstream media.
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | October 3, 2010
Last week’s grotesque revelation about American public health doctors infecting nearly 700 Guatemalans with venereal disease to test penicillin from 1946-48 marked just the start of the U.S. government’s post-World War II abuse of that Central American country.
Indeed, as troubling as the VD experiments were, U.S. administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan would do much worse, treating Guatemala as a test tube for Cold War counterinsurgency experiments that led to the slaughter of some 200,000 people, including genocide against Mayan Indian tribes. … continue
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More than seven months have passed since an unarmed protester named Ashli Babbitt was shot dead inside the US Capitol while attempting to climb through an opening in a glass door.
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