Introduction 
        
        On 24 August 1814, things 
        looked very dark for freedom's land. That was the day the British 
        captured Washington DC and set fire to the Capitol and the White House. 
        President Madison took refuge in the nearby Virginia woods where he 
        waited patiently for the notoriously short attention span of the Brits 
        to kick in, which it did. They moved on and what might have been a Day 
        of Utter Darkness turned out to be something of a bonanza for the DC 
        building trades and up-market realtors. 
        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. 
        Meanwhile, our more and more 
        unaccountable government is pursuing all sorts of games around the world 
        that we the spear carriers (formerly the people) will never learn of. 
        Even so, we have been getting some answers to the question: why weren't 
        we warned in advance of 9/11? Apparently, we were, repeatedly; for the 
        better part of a year, we were told there would be unfriendly visitors 
        to our skies some time in September 2001, but the government neither 
        informed nor protected us despite Mayday warnings from Presidents Putin 
        and Mubarak, from Mossad and even from elements of our own FBI. A joint 
        panel of congressional intelligence committees reported (19 September 
        2002, New York Times) that as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist 
        Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was `learning to 
        fly in order to crash a plane into CIA HQ'. 
        Only CIA director George Tenet 
        seemed to take the various threats seriously. In December 1998, he wrote 
        to his deputies that `we are at war' with Osama bin Laden. So impressed 
        was the FBI by his warnings that by 20 September 2001, `the FBI still 
        had only one analyst assigned full time to al-Qaeda'. 
        From a briefing prepared for 
        Bush at the beginning of July 2001: `We believe that OBL [Osama bin 
        Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or 
        Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular 
        and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or 
        interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with 
        little or no warning.' And so it came to pass; yet Condoleezza Rice, the 
        National Security Advisor, says she never suspected that this meant 
        anything more than the kidnapping of planes. 
        Happily, somewhere over the 
        Beltway, there is Europe -- recently declared anti-Semitic by the US 
        media because most of Europe wants no war with Iraq and the junta does, 
        for reasons we may now begin to understand thanks to European and Asian 
        investigators with their relatively free media. 
        On the subject `How and Why 
        America was Attacked on 11 September, 2001', the best, most balanced 
        report, thus far, is by
        Nafeez 
        Mossadeq Ahmed [1] . . . Yes, yes, I 
        know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don't -- 
        particularly about what we are up to. A political scientist, Ahmed is 
        executive director of the 
        Institute for Policy Research and Development [2] 
        `a think-tank dedicated to the promotion of human rights, justice and 
        peace' in Brighton. His book,
        The War 
        on Freedom [3], has just been 
        published in the US by a small but reputable publisher. 
        Ahmed provides a background for 
        our ongoing war against Afghanistan, a view that in no way coincides 
        with what the administration has told us. He has drawn on many sources, 
        most tellingly on American whistleblowers who are beginning to come 
        forth and bear witness -- like those FBI agents who warned their 
        supervisors that al-Qaeda was planning a kamikaze strike against New 
        York and Washington only to be told that if they went public with these 
        warnings they would suffer under the National Security Act.
        
        Several of these agents have engaged David P. Schippers,[4] 
        chief investigative counsel for the US House Judiciary Committee, to 
        represent them in court. The majestic Schippers managed the successful 
        impeachment of President Clinton in the House of Representatives. He 
        may, if the Iraqi war should go wrong, be obliged to perform the same 
        high service for Bush, who allowed the American people to go unwarned 
        about an imminent attack upon two of our cities as pre-emption of a 
        planned military strike by the US against the Taliban. 
        The Guardian 
        (26 
        September 2001 [5]) 
        reported that in July 2001, a group of interested parties met in a 
        Berlin hotel to listen to a former State Department official, Lee 
        Coldren, as he passed on a message from the Bush administration that 
        `the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be 
        considering some military action . . . the chilling quality of this 
        private warning was that it came -- according to one of those present, 
        the Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik -- accompanied by specific details of 
        how Bush would succeed . . .' Four days earlier, the Guardian had 
        reported that `Osama bin Laden and the Taliban received threats of 
        possible American military action against them two months before the 
        terrorist assaults on New York and Washington . . . [which] raises the 
        possibility that bin Laden was launching a pre-emptive strike in 
        response to what he saw as US threats.' A replay of the `day of infamy' 
        in the Pacific 62 years earlier? 
          
        
        Why the US needed a Eurasian 
        adventure 
        On 9 September 2001, Bush was 
        presented with a draft of a national security presidential directive 
        outlining a global campaign of military, diplomatic and intelligence 
        action targeting al-Qaeda, buttressed by the threat of war. According to
        NBC News: `President Bush was expected to sign detailed plans for 
        a worldwide war against al-Qaeda . . . but did not have the chance 
        before the terrorist attacks . . . The directive, as described to NBC 
        News, was essentially the same war plan as the one put into action 
        after 11 September. The administration most likely was able to respond 
        so quickly . . . because it simply had to pull the plans "off the 
        shelf".' 
        Finally, BBC News, 18 
        September 2001: `Niak Naik, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was 
        told by senior American officials in mid-July that military action 
        against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October. It was 
        Naik's view that Washington would not drop its war for Afghanistan even 
        if bin Laden were to be surrendered immediately by the Taliban.' 
        
        Was Afghanistan then turned to 
        rubble in order to avenge the 3,000 Americans slaughtered by Osama? 
        Hardly. The administration is convinced that Americans are so 
        simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the 
        venerable lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does 
        evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us, 'cause we're rich 'n 
        free 'n he's not. Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the most 
        frightening logo for our long contemplated invasion and conquest of 
        Afghanistan, planning for which had been `contingency' some years before 
        9/11 and, again, from 20 December, 2000, when Clinton's out-going team 
        devised a plan to strike at al-Qaeda in retaliation for the assault on 
        the warship Cole. Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, 
        personally briefed his successor on the plan but Rice, still very much 
        in her role as director of Chevron-Texaco, with special duties regarding 
        Pakistan and Uzbekistan, now denies any such briefing. A year and a half 
        later (12 August, 2002), fearless Time magazine reported this odd 
        memory lapse. 
        Osama, if it was he and not a nation, simply provided the necessary 
        shock to put in train a war of conquest. But conquest of what? What is 
        there in dismal dry sandy Afghanistan worth conquering? Zbigniew 
        Brzezinski tells us exactly what in a 1997 Council on Foreign Relations 
        study called 
        The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic 
        Imperatives.[6] 
        The Polish-born Brzezinski was 
        the hawkish National Security Advisor to President Carter. In
        The Grand 
        Chessboard, Brzezinski gives a little history lesson. `Ever 
        since the continents started interacting politically, some 500 years 
        ago, Eurasia has been the centre of world power.' Eurasia is all the 
        territory east of Germany. This means Russia, the Middle East, China and 
        parts of India. Brzezinski acknowledges that Russia and China, bordering 
        oil-rich central Asia, are the two main powers threatening US hegemony 
        in that area. 
        He takes it for granted that 
        the US must exert control over the former Soviet republics of Central 
        Asia, known to those who love them as `the Stans': Turkmenistan, 
        Uzbekistan, Tajikstan and Kyrgyzstan all `of importance from the 
        standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of 
        their most immediate and most powerful neighbours -- Russia, Turkey and 
        Iran, with China signaling'. Brzezinski notes how the world's energy 
        consumption keeps increasing; hence, who controls Caspian oil/gas will 
        control the world economy. Brzezinski then, reflexively, goes into the 
        standard American rationalization for empire. We want nothing, ever, for 
        ourselves, only to keep bad people from getting good things with which 
        to hurt good people. `It follows that America's primary interest is to 
        help ensure that no single [other] power comes to control the 
        geopolitical space and that the global community has unhindered 
        financial and economic access to it.' 
        Brzezinski is quite aware that 
        American leaders are wonderfully ignorant of history and geography so he 
        really lays it on, stopping just short of invoking politically incorrect 
        `manifest destiny'. He reminds the Council just how big Eurasia is. 
        Seventy-five percent of the world's population is Eurasian. If I have 
        done the sums right, that means that we've only got control, to date, of 
        a mere 25 percent of the world's folks. More! `Eurasia accounts for 
        60-per cent of the world's GNP and three-fourths of the world's known 
        energy resources.' Brzezinski's master plan for `our' globe has 
        obviously been accepted by the Cheney-Bush junta. Corporate America, 
        long over-excited by Eurasian mineral wealth, has been aboard from the 
        beginning. 
        Ahmed sums up: `Brzezinski 
        clearly envisaged that the establishment, consolidation and expansion of 
        US military hegemony over Eurasia through Central Asia would require the 
        unprecedented, open-ended militarisation of foreign policy, coupled with 
        an unprecedented manufacture of domestic support and consensus on this 
        militarisation campaign.' 
        Afghanistan is the gateway to 
        all these riches. Will we fight to seize them? It should never be 
        forgotten that the American people did not want to fight in either of 
        the twentieth century's world wars, but President Wilson maneuvered us 
        into the First while President Roosevelt maneuvered the Japanese into 
        striking the first blow at Pearl Harbor, causing us to enter the Second 
        as the result of a massive external attack. Brzezinski understands all 
        this and, in 1997, he is thinking ahead -- as well as backward. 
        `Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it 
        may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy 
        issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely 
        perceived direct external threat.' Thus was the symbolic gun produced 
        that belched black smoke over Manhattan and the Pentagon. 
        Since the Iran-Iraq wars, Islam 
        has been demonized as a Satanic terrorist cult that encourages suicide 
        attacks -- contrary, it should be noted, to the Islamic religion. Osama 
        has been portrayed, accurately, it would seem, as an Islamic zealot. In 
        order to bring this evil-doer to justice (`dead or alive'), Afghanistan, 
        the object of the exercise was made safe not only for democracy but for 
        Union Oil of California whose proposed pipeline from Turkmenistan to 
        Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean port of Karachi, had been 
        abandoned under the Taliban's chaotic regime. Currently, the pipeline is 
        a go-project thanks to the junta's installation of a Unocal employee 
        (John J Maresca) as US envoy to the newly born democracy [7] 
        whose president, Hamid Karzai, is also, according to Le Monde, a 
        former employee of a Unocal subsidiary. Conspiracy? Coincidence! 
        
        Once Afghanistan looked to be 
        within the fold, the junta, which had managed to pull off a complex 
        diplomatic-military caper, -- abruptly replaced Osama, the 
        personification of evil, with Saddam. This has been hard to explain 
        since there is nothing to connect Iraq with 9/11. Happily, `evidence' is 
        now being invented. But it is uphill work, not helped by stories in the 
        press about the vast oil wealth of Iraq which must -- for the sake of 
        the free world -- be reassigned to US and European consortiums. 
        
        As Brzezinski foretold, `a 
        truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat' made it 
        possible for the President to dance a war dance before Congress. `A long 
        war!' he shouted with glee. Then he named an incoherent Axis of Evil to 
        be fought. Although Congress did not give him the FDR Special -- a 
        declaration of war -- he did get permission to go after Osama who may 
        now be skulking in Iraq. 
          
        
        Bush and the dog that did 
        not bark 
        Post-9/11, the American media 
        were filled with pre-emptory denunciations of unpatriotic `conspiracy 
        theorists', who not only are always with us but are usually easy for the 
        media to discredit since it is an article of faith that there are no 
        conspiracies in American life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have 
        thought that most of corporate America had been conspiring with 
        accountants to cook their books since -- well, at least the bright days 
        of Reagan and deregulation. Ironically, less than a year after the 
        massive danger from without, we were confronted with an even greater 
        enemy from within: Golden Calf capitalism. Transparency? One fears that 
        greater transparency will only reveal armies of maggots at work beneath 
        the skin of a culture that needs a bit of a lie-down in order to collect 
        itself before taking its next giant step which is to conquer Eurasia, a 
        potentially fatal adventure not only for our frazzled institutions but 
        for us the presently living. 
        Complicity. The behavior of 
        President George W. Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to all 
        sorts of not unnatural suspicions. I can think of no other modern chief 
        of state who would continue to pose for `warm' pictures of himself 
        listening to a young girl telling stories about her pet goat while 
        hijacked planes were into three buildings. 
        Constitutionally, Bush is not 
        only chief of state, he is commander-in-chief of the armed forces. 
        Normally, a commander in such a crisis would go straight to headquarters 
        and direct operations while receiving the latest intelligence. 
        
        This is what Bush actually did 
        -- or did not do -- according to Stan Goff, a retired US Army veteran 
        who has taught military science and doctrine at West Point. Goff writes, 
        in `The So-called Evidence 
        is a Farce'[8]: `I have no idea why 
        people aren't asking some very specific questions about the actions of 
        Bush and company on the day of the attacks. . . . Four planes get 
        hijacked and deviate from their flight plan, all the while on FAA 
        radar.' 
        Goff, incidentally, like the 
        other astonished military experts, cannot fathom why the government's 
        automatic `standard order of procedure in the event of a hijacking' was 
        not followed. Once a plane has deviated from its flight-plan, fighter 
        planes are sent up to find out why. That is law and does not require 
        presidential approval, which only needs to be given if there is a 
        decision to shoot down a plane. Goff spells it out: `The planes are all 
        hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10am. . . . Who is notified? This is an 
        event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not notified 
        and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.' 
        
        
          
          `By around 8:15am it should be very apparent that something is 
          terribly wrong. The President is glad-handling teachers. By 8:45am, 
          when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the [North Tower], Bush 
          is settling in with children for his photo ops . . . Four planes have 
          obviously been hijacked simultaneously . . . and one has just dived 
          into the . . . twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal 
          Commander-in-Chief. 
          `No one has apparently scrambled [sent aloft] Air Force 
          interceptors either. At 9:03, . . . Flight 175 crashes into the [South 
          Tower]. At 9:05 Andrew Card, the . . . Chief of Staff whispers to . . 
          . Bush [who] "briefly turns somber" according to reporters. Does he 
          cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No. He 
          resumes listening to second-graders . . . and continues the banality 
          even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn 
          over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington DC. 
          `Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air Force? 
          No. An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a 
          public statement telling the United States what they have already 
          figured out; that there's been an attack by hijacked planes on the 
          World Trade Center. There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, 
          but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No. . . .
          
          `At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the 
          Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is 
          not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force 
          in the sky over Alexandria and DC. Now, the real kicker: A pilot they 
          want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for 
          Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral, 
          descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the 
          plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the 
          street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the 
          side of the building at 460 nauts. 
          `When the theory about learning to fly this well at the 
          puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they 
          received further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying 
          you prepared your teenager for her first drive on [the freeway] at 
          rush hour by buying her a video driving game . . . There is a story 
          being constructed about these events.' 
          
        
        There is indeed, and the more 
        it is added to the darker it becomes. The nonchalance of General Richard 
        B. Myers, acting Joint Chief of Staff, is as puzzling as the President's 
        campaigning-as-usual act. Myers was at the Capitol chatting with Senator 
        Max Cleland. A sergeant, writing later in the AFPS (American Forces 
        Press Service) describes Myers at the Capitol. `While in an outer 
        office, he said, he saw a television report that a plane had hit the 
        World Trade Centre. "They thought it was a small plane or something like 
        that," Myers said. So the two men went ahead with the office call.'
        
        Whatever Myers and Cleland had 
        to say to each other (more funds for the military?) must have been 
        riveting because, during their chat, the AFPS reports, `the second tower 
        was hit by another jet. "Nobody informed us of that," Myers said. "But 
        when we came out, that was obvious. Then, right at that time, somebody 
        said the Pentagon had been hit."' Finally, somebody `thrust a cellphone 
        in Myers' hand' and, as if by magic, the commanding general of Norad -- 
        our Airspace Command -- was on the line just as the hijackers mission 
        had been successfully completed except for the failed one in 
        Pennsylvania. In later testimony to the Senate Armed Forces Committee, 
        Myers said he thinks that, as of his cellphone talk with Norad, `the 
        decision was at that point to start launching aircraft'. It was 9:40am. 
        One hour and 20 minutes after air controllers knew that Flight 11 had 
        been hijacked; 50 minutes after the North Tower was struck. 
        This statement would have been 
        quite enough in our old serious army/air force to launch a number of 
        courts martial with an impeachment or two thrown in. First, Myers claims 
        to be uninformed until the third strike. But the Pentagon had been 
        overseeing the hijacked planes from at least the moment of the strike at 
        the first tower: yet not until the third strike, at the Pentagon, was 
        the decision made to get the fighter planes up. Finally, this one is the 
        dog that did not bark. By law, the fighters should have been up at 
        around 8:15. If they had, all the hijacked planes might have been 
        diverted or shot down. I don't think that Goff is being unduly picky 
        when he wonders who and what kept the Air Force from following its 
        normal procedure instead of waiting an hour and 20 minutes until the 
        damage was done and only then launching the fighters. Obviously, 
        somebody had ordered the Air Force to make no move to intercept those 
        hijackings until . . . what? 
        On 28 January 2002, the 
        Canadian media analyst Barry Zwicker
        summed up on 
        CBC-TV [9]: `That morning no 
        interceptors responded in a timely fashion to the highest alert 
        situation. This includes the Andrews squadrons which . . . are 12 miles 
        from the White House . . . Whatever the explanation for the huge 
        failure, there have been no reports, to my knowledge, of reprimands. 
        This further weakens the "Incompetence Theory". Incompetence usually 
        earns reprimands. This causes me to ask whether there were "stand down" 
        orders.'?? On 29 August 2002, the BBC reports that on 9/11 there 
        were `only four fighters on ready status in the north-eastern US'. 
        Conspiracy? Coincidence? Error? 
        It is interesting how often in 
        our history, when disaster strikes, incompetence is considered a better 
        alibi than . . . well, yes, there are worse things. After Pearl Harbor, 
        Congress moved to find out why Hawaii's two military commanders, General 
        Short and Admiral Kimmel, had not anticipated the Japanese attack. But 
        President Roosevelt pre-empted that investigation with one of his own. 
        Short and Kimmel were broken for incompetence. The `truth' is still 
        obscure to this day. 
        The media's weapons of mass 
        distraction 
        But Pearl Harbor has been much 
        studied. 11 September, it is plain, is never going to be investigated if 
        Bush has anything to say about it. On
        
        29 January 2002, CNN reported [10] 
        that `Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit 
        the Congressional investigation into the events of 11 September . . . 
        The request was made at a private meeting with Congressional leaders . . 
        . Sources said Bush initiated the conversation . . . He asked that only 
        the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential 
        breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist 
        attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry . . . Tuesday's 
        discussion followed a rare call from Vice President Dick Cheney last 
        Friday to make the same request . . .' 
        The excuse given, according to 
        Daschle, was that `resources and personnel would be taken' away from the 
        war on terrorism in the event of a wider inquiry. So for reasons that we 
        must never know, those `breakdowns' are to be the goat. That they were 
        more likely to be not break -- but `stand-downs' is not for us to pry. 
        Certainly the one-hour 20 minute failure to put fighter planes in the 
        air could not have been due to a breakdown throughout the entire Air 
        Force along the East Coast. Mandatory standard operational procedure had 
        been told to cease and desist. 
        Meanwhile, the media were 
        assigned their familiar task of inciting public opinion against bin 
        Laden, still not the proven mastermind. These media blitzes often 
        resemble the magicians classic gesture of distraction: as you watch the 
        rippling bright colours of his silk handkerchief in one hand, he is 
        planting the rabbit in your pocket with the other. We were quickly 
        assured that Osama's enormous family with its enormous wealth had broken 
        with him, as had the royal family of his native Saudi Arabia. The CIA 
        swore, hand on heart, that Osama had not worked for them in the war 
        against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Finally, the rumour that 
        Bush family had in any way profited by its long involvement with the bin 
        Laden family was -- what else? -- simply partisan bad taste. 
        But Bush Jr's involvement goes 
        back at least to 1979 when his first failed attempt to become a player 
        in the big Texas oil league brought him together with one James Bath of 
        Houston, a family friend, who have Bush Jr. $50,000 for a 5 per cent 
        stake in Bush's firm Arbusto Energy. At this time, according to Wayne 
        Madsen (In 
        These Times -- Institute for Public Affairs No. 25 [11]), 
        Bath was `the sole US business representative for Salem bin Laden, head 
        of the family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden . . . In a 
        statement issued shortly after the 11 September attacks, the White House 
        vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own 
        money, not Salem bin Laden's, in Arbusto. In conflicting statements, 
        Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in 
        Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests . . . 
        after several reincarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy 
        Corporation.'[12] 
        Behind the Junior Bush is the 
        senior Bush, gainfully employed by the Carlyle Group [13] 
        which has ownership in at least 164 companies worldwide, inspiring 
        admiration in that staunch friend to the wealthy, the Wall Street 
        Journal, which noted, as early as 27 September 2001, `If the US 
        boosts defence spending in its quest to stop Osama bin Laden's alleged 
        terrorist activities, there may be one unexpected beneficiary: bin 
        Laden's family . . . is an investor in a fund established by Carlyle 
        Group, a well-connected Washington merchant bank specialising in buyouts 
        of defence and aerospace companies . . . Osama is one of more than 50 
        children of Mohammed bin Laden, who built the family's $5 billion 
        business.' 
        But Bush pere et fils, 
        in pursuit of wealth and office, are beyond shame or, one cannot help 
        but think, good sense. There is a suggestion that they are blocking 
        investigation of the bin Laden connection with terrorism.
        Agent France 
        Press reported on 4 November 2001 [14]: 
        `FBI agents probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama . . . 
        were told to back off soon after George W. Bush became president . . .' 
        According to
        BBC 
        TV's Newsnight (6 Nov 2001) [15], 
        `. . . just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the 
        Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 
        members of Osama's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the 
        White House, whose official line is that the bin Ladens are above 
        suspicion.' 
        `Above the Law' (Green Press, 14 February 2002) [16] 
        sums up: `We had what looked like the biggest failure of the 
        intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning now 
        is it wasn't a failure, it was a directive.' True? False? Bush Jr will 
        be under oath during the impeachment interrogation. Will we hear `What 
        is a directive? What is is?' 
        Although the US had, for some 
        years, fingered Osama as a mastermind terrorist, no serious attempt had 
        been made pre-9/11 to `bring him to justice dead or alive, innocent or 
        guilty', as Texan law of the jungle requires. Clinton's plan to act was 
        given to Condeleezza Rice by Sandy Berger, you will recall, but she says 
        she does not. 
        As far back as March 1996 when 
        Osama was in Sudan, Major General Elfatih Erwa, Sudanese Minister for 
        Defence, offered to extradite him. According to the Washington Post 
        (3 October 2001), `Erwa said he would happily keep close watch on bin 
        Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the 
        government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over . . . 
        [US officials] said, "just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let 
        him go to Somalia", where he had once been given credit for the 
        successful al-Qaeda attack on American forces that in '93 that killed 18 
        Rangers.' Erwa said in an interview, `We said he will go to Afghanistan, 
        and they [US officials] said, "Let him."' 
        In 1996 Sudan expelled Osama 
        and 3,000 of his associates. Two years later the Clinton administration, 
        in the great American tradition of never having to say thank you for 
        Sudan's offer to hand over Osama, proceeded to missile-attack Sudan's 
        al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory on the grounds that Sudan was harboring 
        bin Laden terrorists who were making chemical and biological weapons 
        when the factory was simply making vaccines for the UN. 
        Four years later, John O'Neill, 
        a much admired FBI agent,
        
        complained in the Irish Times [17] 
        a month before the attacks, `The US State Department -- and behind it 
        the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage -- blocked attempts 
        to prove bin Laden's guilt. The US ambassador to Yemen forbade O'Neill 
        (and his FBI team) . . . from entering Yemen in August 2001. O'Neill 
        resigned in frustration and took on a new job as head of security at the 
        World Trade Centre. He died in the 11 September attack.' Obviously, 
        Osama has enjoyed bipartisan American support since his enlistment in 
        the CIA's war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But by 9/11 there 
        was no Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, indeed there was no Soviet 
        Union. 
        A world made safe for peace 
        and pipelines 
        I watched Bush and Cheney on 
        CNN when the Axis of Evil speech was given and the `long war' 
        proclaimed. Iraq, Iran and North Korea were fingered as enemies to be 
        clobbered because they might or might not be harbouring terrorists who 
        might or might not destroy us in the night. So we must strike first 
        whenever it pleases us. Thus, we declared `war on terrorism' -- an 
        abstract noun which cannot be a war at all as you need a country for 
        that. Of course, there was innocent Afghanistan, which was levelled from 
        a great height, but then what's collateral damage -- like an entire 
        country -- when you're targeting the personification of all evil 
        according to Time and the New York Times and the networks?
        
        As it proved, the conquest of 
        Afghanistan had nothing to do with Osama. He was simply a pretext for 
        replacing the Taliban with a relatively stable government that would 
        allow Union Oil of California to lay its pipeline for the profit of, 
        among others, the Cheney-Bush junta. 
        Background? All right. The 
        headquarters of Unocal are, as might be expected, in Texas. In December 
        1997, Taliban representatives were invited to Sugarland, Texas.[18] 
        At that time, Unocal had already begun training Afghan men in pipeline 
        construction, with US government approval.
        BBC 
        News, (4 December 1997) [19]: 
        `A spokesman for the company Unocal said the Taliban were expected to 
        spend several days at the company's [Texas] headquarters . . . a BBC 
        regional correspondent says the proposal to build a pipeline across 
        Afghanistan is part of an international scramble to profit from 
        developing the rich energy resources of the Caspian Sea.' The
        Inter Press 
        Service (IPS) reported [20]: 
        `some Western businesses are warming up to the Taliban despite the 
        movement's institutionalisation of terror, massacres, abductions and 
        impoverishment.' CNN (6 October 1996): `The United States wants 
        good ties [with the Taliban] but can't openly seek them while women are 
        being oppressed.' 
        The Taliban, rather better 
        organised than rumoured, hired for PR one Leila Helms, a niece of 
        Richard Helms, former director of the CIA. In October 1996, the 
        Frankfurter Rundschau reported that Unocal `has been given the 
        go-ahead from the new holders of power in Kabul to build a pipeline from 
        Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan . . .' This was a real coup for 
        Unocal as well as other candidates for pipelines, including 
        Condoleezza's old employer Chevron. Although the Taliban was already 
        notorious for its imaginative crimes against the human race, the Wall 
        Street Journal, scenting big bucks, fearlessly announced: `Like them 
        or not, the Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace in 
        Afghanistan at this moment in history.' The New York Times (26 
        May 1997) leapt aboard the pipeline juggernaut. `The Clinton 
        administration has taken the view that a Taliban victory would act as 
        counterweight to Iran . . . and would offer the possibility of new trade 
        routes that could weaken Russian and Iranian influence in the region.'
        
        But by 1999, it was clear that 
        the Taliban could not provide the security we would need to protect our 
        fragile pipelines. The arrival of Osama as warrior for Allah on the 
        scene refocused, as it were, the bidding. New alliances were now being 
        made. The Bush administration soon buys the idea of an invasion of 
        Afghanistan, Frederick Starr, head of the Central Asia Institute at 
        Johns Hopkins University, wrote in
        
        the Washington Post (19 December 2000) [21]: 
        `The US has quietly begun to align itself with those in the Russian 
        government calling for military action against Afghanistan and has toyed 
        with the idea of a new raid to wipe out Osama bin Laden.' 
        Although with much fanfare we 
        went forth to wreak our vengeance on the crazed sadistic religious 
        zealot who slaughtered 3,000 American citizens, once that `war' was 
        under way,
        
        Osama was dropped as irrelevant [22] 
        and so we are back to the Unocal pipeline, now a go-project. In the 
        light of what we know today, it is unlikely that the junta was ever 
        going to capture Osama alive: he has tales to tell. One of Defence 
        Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's best numbers now is: `Where is he? 
        Somewhere? Here? There? Somewhere? Who knows?' And we get his best 
        twinkle. He must also be delighted -- and amazed -- that the media have 
        bought the absurd story that Osama, if alive, would still be in 
        Afghanistan, underground, waiting to be flushed out instead of in a 
        comfortable mansion in Osama-loving Jakarta, 2,000 miles to the East and 
        easily accessible by Flying Carpet One. 
        Many commentators of a certain 
        age have noted how Hitlerian our junta sounds as it threatens first one 
        country for harbouring terrorists and then another. It is true that 
        Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured -- or threatened -- party 
        before he struck. But he had many great predecessors not least Imperial 
        Rome. Stephen Gowan's War in Afghanistan: A $28 Billion Racket 
        quotes Joseph Schumpeter who, `in 1919, described ancient Rome in a way 
        that sounds eerily like the United States in 2001: "There was no corner 
        of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger 
        or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those 
        of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be 
        invented . . . The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. 
        Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours."' We have only 
        outdone the Romans in turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism, or 
        poverty, or Aids into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick 
        at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands. 
        As of 1 August 2002, trial 
        balloons were going up all over Washington DC to get world opinion used 
        to the idea that `Bush of Afghanistan' had gained a title as mighty as 
        his father's `Bush of the Persian Gulf' and Junior was now eager to add 
        Iraq-Babylon to his diadem. These various balloons fell upon Europe and 
        the Arab world like so many lead weights. But something new has been 
        added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, `they are threatening 
        us, we must attack first'. Now everything is more of less out in the 
        open. 
        The International Herald 
        Tribune wrote in August 2002: `The leaks began in earnest on 5 July, 
        when the New York Times described a tentative Pentagon plan that 
        it said called for an invasion by a US force of up to 250,000 that would 
        attack Iraq from the north, south and west.' On 10 July, the Times 
        said that Jordan might be used as a base for the invasion. The 
        Washington Post reported, 28 July, that "many senior US military 
        officers contend that Saddam Hussein poses no immediate threat . . ."' 
        And the status quo should be maintained. Incidentally, this is 
        the sort of debate that the founding fathers intended the Congress, not 
        military bureaucrats, to conduct in the name of we the people. But that 
        sort of debate has, for a long time, been denied us. 
        One refreshing note is now 
        being struck in a fashion unthinkable in imperial Rome: the cheerful 
        admission that we habitually resort to provocation. The Tribune 
        continues: `Donald Rumsfeld has threatened to jail any one found to have 
        been behind the leaks. But a retired army general, Fred Woerner, tends 
        to see a method behind the leaks. "We may already be executing a plan," 
        he said recently. "Are we involved in a preliminary psychological 
        dimension of causing Iraq to do something to justify a US attack or make 
        concessions? Somebody knows."' That is plain. 
        Elsewhere in this interesting 
        edition of the Herald Tribune wise
        
        William Pfaff writes [23]: `A 
        second Washington debate is whether to make an unprovoked attack on Iran 
        to destroy a nuclear power reactor being built with Russian assistance, 
        under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency, within the 
        terms of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of which Iran is a 
        signatory . . . No other government would support such an action, other 
        than Israel's (which) would do so not because it expected to be attacked 
        by Iran but because it, not unjustifiably, opposes any nuclear capacity 
        in the hands of any Islamic government.' 
        Suspect states and the 
        tom-toms of revenge 
        `Of all the enemies to public 
        liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it compromises 
        and develops the germ of every other. As the parent of armies, war 
        encourages debts and taxes, the known instruments for bringing the many 
        under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of 
        the executive is extended . . . and all the means of seducing the minds, 
        are added to those of subduing the force, of the people . . .' Thus,
        James Madison warned us [24] 
        at the dawn of our republic. 
        Post 9/11, thanks to the 
        `domination of the few', Congress and the media are silent while the 
        executive, through propaganda and skewed polls, seduces the public mind 
        as hitherto unthinkable centers of power like Homeland Defence (a new 
        Cabinet post to be placed on top of the Defence Department) are being 
        constructed and 4 per cent of the country has recently been invited to 
        join TIPS, a civilian spy system to report on anyone who looks 
        suspicious or . . . who objects to what the executive is doing at home 
        or abroad? 
        Although every nation knows how 
        -- if it has the means and the will -- to protect itself from thugs of 
        the sort that brought us 9/11, war is not an option. Wars are for 
        nations not root-less gangs. You put a price on their heads and hunt 
        them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing that with the Sicilian 
        Mafia; and no one has yet suggested bombing Palermo. 
        But the Cheney-Bush junta wants 
        a war in order to dominate Afghanistan, build a pipeline, gain control 
        of the oil of Eurasia's Stans for their business associates as well as 
        to do as much damage to Iraq and Iran on the grounds that one day those 
        evil countries may carpet our fields of amber grain with anthrax or 
        something. 
        The media, never much good at 
        analysis, are more and more breathless and incoherent. On CNN, 
        even the stolid Jim Clancy started to hyperventilate when an Indian 
        academic tried to explain how Iraq was once our ally and `friend' in its 
        war against our Satanic enemy Iran.[25] 
        `None of that conspiracy stuff,' snuffed Clancy. Apparently, `conspiracy 
        stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth. 
        As of August, at least among 
        economists, a consensus was growing that, considering our vast national 
        debt (we borrow $2 billion a day to keep the government going) and a tax 
        base seriously reduced by the junta in order to benefit the 1 per cent 
        who own most of the national wealth, there is no way that we could ever 
        find the billions needed to destroy Iraq in `a long war' or even a short 
        one, with most of Europe lined up against us. Germany and Japan paid for 
        the Gulf War, reluctantly -- with Japan, at the last moment, irritably 
        quarrelling over the exchange rate at the time of the contract. Now 
        Germany's Schroder has said no. Japan is mute. 
        But the tom-toms keep beating 
        revenge; and the fact that most of the world is opposed to our war seems 
        only to bring hectic roses to the cheeks of the Bush administration 
        (Bush Snr of the Carlyle Group,[13] Bush Jnr 
        formerly of Harken,[12] Cheney, formerly of 
        Halliburton,[26] Rice, formerly of 
        Chevron,[27] Rumsfeld, formerly of 
        Occidental). If ever an administration should recuse itself in matters 
        dealing with energy, it is the current junta. But this is unlike any 
        administration in our history. Their hearts are plainly elsewhere, 
        making money, far from our mock Roman temples, while we, alas, are left 
        only with their heads, dreaming of war, preferably against weak 
        peripheral states. 
        Mohammed Heikal is a brilliant 
        Egyptian journalist-observer, and sometime Foreign Minister.
        On 10 October 
        2001, he said to the Guardian [28]: 
        `Bin Laden does not have the capabilities for an operation of this 
        magnitude. When I hear Bush talking about al-Qaeda as if it were Nazi 
        Germany or the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I laugh because I 
        know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: 
        every telephone call was monitored and al-Qaeda has been penetrated by 
        US intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, Saudi intelligence, Egyptian 
        intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required 
        such a degree of organisation and sophistication.' 
        The former president of 
        Germany's domestic intelligence service, Eckehardt Werthebach (American 
        Free Press, 4 December 2001 [29]) 
        spells it out. The 9/11 attacks required `years of planning' while their 
        scale indicates that they were a product of `state-organised actions'. 
        There it is. Perhaps, after all, Bush Jnr was right to call it a war. 
        But which state attacked us? 
        Will the suspects please line 
        up. Saudi Arabia? `No, no. Why we are paying you $50 million a year for 
        training the royal bodyguard on our own holy if arid soil. True the 
        kingdom contains many wealthy well-educated enemies but . . .' Bush Snr 
        and Jnr exchange a knowing look. Egypt? No way. Dead broke despite US 
        baksheesh. Syria? No funds. Iran? Too proud to bother with a parvenu 
        state like the US. Israel? Sharon is capable of anything. But he lacks 
        the guts and the grace of the true Kamikaze. Anyway, Sharon was not in 
        charge when this operation began with the planting of `sleepers' around 
        the US flight schools 5 or 6 years ago. 
        The United States? Elements of 
        corporate America would undeniably prosper from a `massive external 
        attack' that would make it possible for us to go to war whenever the 
        President sees fit while suspending civil liberties. (The 342 pages of 
        the USA Patriot 
        Act [30] were plainly prepared 
        before 9/11.) Bush Snr and Jnr are giggling now. Why? Because Clinton 
        was president back then. As the former president leaves the line of 
        suspects, he says, more in anger than in sorrow: `When we left the White 
        House we had a plan for an all-out war on al-Qaeda. We turned it over to 
        this administration and they did nothing. Why?' Biting his lip, he goes. 
        The Bushes no longer giggle. Pakistan breaks down: `I did it! I confess! 
        I couldn't help myself. Save me. I am an evil-doer!' 
        Apparently, Pakistan did do it 
        -- or some of it. We must now go back to 1979 when `the largest covert 
        operation in the history of the CIA' was launched in response to the 
        Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Central Asia specialist Ahmed Rashid 
        wrote (Foreign 
        Affairs, November-December 1999 [31]): 
        `With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter 
        Services Intelligence) who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global 
        war, waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 
        Muslim radicals, from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight 
        between 1982 and '92 . . . more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals 
        were directly influenced by the Afghanistan jihad.' The CIA covertly 
        trained and sponsored these warriors. 
        In March 1985, President Reagan 
        issued National Security Decision Directive 166, increasing military aid 
        while CIA specialists met with the ISI counterparts near Rawalpindi, 
        Pakistan.
        
        Jane's Defence Weekly (14 September 2001) [32] 
        gives the best overview: `The trainers were mainly from Pakistan's ISI 
        agency who learnt their craft from American Green Beret commandos and 
        Navy Seals in various US training establishments.' This explains the 
        reluctance of the administration to explain why so many unqualified 
        persons, over so long a time, got visas to visit our hospitable shores. 
        While in Pakistan, `mass training of Afghan [zealots] was subsequently 
        conducted by the Pakistan army under the supervision of the elite 
        Special Services . . . In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created 
        al-Qaeda (The Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic 
        terrorist cells spread across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a 
        blind eye to al-Qaeda.' 
        When Mohamed Atta's plane 
        struck the World Trade Centre's North Tower, George W. Bush and the 
        child at the Florida elementary school were discussing her goat. By 
        coincidence, our word `tragedy' comes from the Greek: for `goat' 
        tragos plus oide for `song'. `Goat-song'. It is highly 
        suitable that this lament, sung in ancient satyr plays, should have been 
        heard again at the exact moment when we were struck by fire from heaven, 
        and a tragedy whose end is nowhere in sight began for us. 
        Copyright © Gore Vidal 2002 
        Reprinted for Fair Use Only.