June 21, 2003
Who was really behind it?
We know that the Bush administration has adroitly exploited 911 from the moment it took place to further its Project for a New American Century, to dominate the world militarily and squelch civil liberties domestically. Because the administration has forcefully kept the lid on information about 911 and prevented investigations about it, it is extremely difficult to know precisely how much the Bush administration had to do with either allowing it to happen, or engineering it.Check out this site, an amazing resource: www.oilempire.us. This site pinpoints many of the central features of the strategy of world domination of the Bush oligarchy, and links to many of the essential documents that make the case for the Bush mob's neo-nazi plan to dominate the world. This is an amazing archive and well worth the time to explore it. Here is the site's own description of itself: "OILEMPIRE.US is an encyclopedia of pointers to information on the internet -- from US corporate media, international press and domestic dissent -- that collectively paint an extremely disturbing scenario about 9-11, the psychological trigger used to promote the Cheney-Bush regime's crusades to dominate the world's oil supplies and to implement a 'neo-feudalist' police state. At the very least, the attacks were allowed to happen to support an aggressive policy of world empire, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asian oil fields, which contain energy supplies that will become even more critical in the near future as oil extraction declines in the non-Islamic world. (It has been said that the last two barrels of oil will be Saudi and Iraqi.)"
This is an extremely well-articulated, eminently reasonable presentation of the explanation of 911 that runs most diametrically opposite to the official/corporate media view. It's the proposition that the power structure represented by Bush created the catastrophe of 911 in order to further the agenda of world military domination presented in its papers, such as "Rebuilding America's Defenses," in which it was lamented that, "The process of [military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."
The site runs through the various alternative explanations in their various shades, such as the theory of "blowback", that the events of 911 were the unintended consequences of US foreign policy. It's the theory of the "liberal-left establishment (The Nation, Z magazine, Noam Chomsky, etc.)"
David Corn, of the Nation, went on a personal crusade to attack anyone who suggested that the Bush administration might have had prior knowledge or -- God forbid -- actually had a hand in the attacks. His attacks skirted around the obligation to disprove the idea, and instead just mounted an attack upon the character of anyone who would dare suggest such an outrageous thing.
Mike Ruppert, who operates the From the Wilderness site and is one of the foremost authorities on 911, was just an ex-cop who got hurt by a woman and went a little crazy, Corn said. That's what caused him to say all those stupid things. Without bothering to explain why the stupid things were really stupid, Corn made it very simple: no president would do such a thing.
"I expressed doubt that the Bush Administration would kill or allow the murder of thousands of American citizens to achieve a political or economic aim," Corn said. (For more on Corn and the attack of "the left" on "the left", see "What is Crazy?", "The Corn Crusade", "Failure of Imagination" and the World Socialist Web Site's "'Left' apologists for US imperialism red-bait the anti-war movement".
By Corn's logic, being in a position of power -- even if you achieved your position through corrupt means -- somehow makes you incapable of acting in a corrupt manner. The idea that "no president" would act in such a manner is a blatant absurdity, and a very dangerous frame of mind that would render one incapable of defending oneself against the threat of a Hitler, for example, one who shattered precedent.
Corn's position was not to disprove the case that the Bush administration was complicit in 911, but to ridicule or discredit those who proposed the idea, not to seek the truth, but to stifle debate.
June 20, 2003
Gore Vidal (from "The Enemy Within"): "One year after 9/11, we still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil-libertarians that 9/11 applied not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected president with the oil and gas Cheney/Bush junta." Profanity corner -- Is it okay to use the word "putz"? Sometimes a word is too perfect a match to give it up, even if it's an illegal word. Michael Powell is a putz. He's a pampered toad of a general's son who was going to enthrone Murdoch and the other media border ruffians as the new corporate ministry of information and he didn't care if 10 million letters and e-mails came in against it. That little tight-lipped baby, pouting his way arrogantly through congressional hearings, haughtily offended that the rifraff could dare to impinge upon his doing his job for his masters. Michael Powell, go dig yourself a hole somewhere! You foul creature! Get acquainted with the dead -- At blackvoices.com There's a little catalog of Americans who died in Iraq in service of a lie. It's a chance to pay them your respects and acknowledge that they were human beings and no one of them should have been killed in this ignoble enterprise. There are no insignificant casualties. In a flash you see the lives they could have had, but which were instead extinguished. Come face to face with the death represented by the numbers. Mad, maniacal and murderous Don Rumsfeld is also viciously vindictive, and he now has his talons spread upon the neck of France for its uncooperative posture as Rummy prepared to unleash annihalation upon Iraq. Knight-Ridder reports that Rumsfeld is trying to "punish" France. "In the latest in a series of Pentagon blasts at France, Rumsfeld has prevailed on U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John C. Jumper not to invite his French counterpart, Gen. Richard Wolsztynski, to a prestigious September conference of air force commanders from around the world." Ooooooh! The general won't get to go to the party!