Faking the "War on Terror"

This is an excellent short explanation of how 9/11 gives the lie to the 'War on Terror' by Michael Keefer, in his essay, "The Harper Government and Canada's 'War on Terror' immigration policy. This article was published in Global Research on December 12, 2006 http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=KEE20061212&articleId=4137

Keefer is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

"3. Faking the 'War on Terror'

"The 'War on Terror' is spurious because there is strong evidence that the events to which it is purportedly a response-the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001-were orchestrated not by Osama bin Laden (whose partisans or minions served, however, as useful patsies), but rather by high-placed elements within the United States government. There are several converging lines of evidence: taken separately, they cry out for investigation; taken together, they appear seriously incriminating.7"

"There have been substantial developments during the past year in the assessment of material, photographic and testimonial evidence relating to the collapses of the three towers of the World Trade Center (the 47-storey WTC 7 as well as the 110-storey Twin Towers). These include scientifically informed analyses which demonstrate the physical impossibility of the official account of the Twin Towers' collapse,8 analyses of statements by fire department personnel and by survivors that there were numerous secondary explosions in the buildings in the interval between the airplane crashes and the collapses,9 video and photographic evidence that structural steel in the South Tower was being cut and melted by thermate charges during the final minutes before the tower's collapse,10 videos and photographs of the collapses of the towers in which "squibs" (explosive horizontal ejections of dust and debris) are visible well below the lines of collapse,11 and laboratory analyses of structural steel from the towers which point to its having been cut by thermate charges.12"

"Controlled demolition of course implies foreknowledge of the attacks as well as a complex pattern of organization-some aspects of which were made visible by Michael Ruppert, whose book Crossing the Rubicon revealed that the U.S. air defence system was effectively disabled on 9/11 by a network of air-defence and anti-terrorism exercises which transferred most of the available interceptor aircraft out of the northeastern U.S. to Alaska and Alberta, and for a crucial period that morning left the military air traffic controllers responsible for deploying the remaining jet fighters unable to determine which of the many apparently hijacked aircraft appearing on their radar screens were real, and which blips were merely part of a response-to-multiple-hijackings exercise.13 The likelihood that al Qaeda operatives could have organized the demolitions in the World Trade Center complex (whose security was contracted to Securacom, a company with close Bush family connections),14 as well as somehow coordinating airliner hijackings with what amounted to a planned disabling of the air defence system, is close to nil.
Add to this the destruction of material evidence at the WTC site, the extreme reluctance of the Bush administration to permit any inquiry into the events of 9/11, and the well-established fact-mendaciously denied by senior members of that administration-that foreign intelligence services, having evidently penetrated different parts of the 9/11 planning, gave them detailed advance warnings, and a pattern emerges that cries out for criminal investigation. Searching analyses of these issues, as well as of many features of the attacks, the ensuing cover-up, and the underlying geopolitics, have been published by Michel Chossudovsky and by other researchers,15 and the theologian and ethicist David Ray Griffin has produced magisterial summations of the evidence pointing to the Bush administration's implication in the events of 9/11.16"

"The 'War on Terror' is fraudulent, then, because its purported and actual goals are systematically at variance. Only in the most nakedly Orwellian sense can one claim that a project which began with apparent false-flag terrorist attacks that killed some three thousand people on American soil, and has since involved wars of aggression that have killed and maimed well over 25,000 American soldiers-not to mention killing scores of thousands of Afghans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and exposing millions of their fellow citizens to the murderous and ineradicable toxicity of depleted uranium-is in any sense concerned with enhancing the security of Americans, or of anyone else. The pretexts used to legitimize the invasion of Iraq have without exception been exposed as lies and disinformation17-an embarrassing fact that has not prevented the Bush administration, with the supine or active collaboration of the corporate media, and, to their shame, the diplomatic support of western countries including Britain, France, Germany and Canada, from constructing a parallel set of lies and deceptions to legitimize an apparently imminent attack upon Iran.18"

"It is less widely appreciated that the invasion of Afghanistan was likewise carried out under false pretexts. Planned and threatened months before 9/11, this act of aggression was carried out for geopolitical reasons enunciated more than a year earlier by the Project for the New American Century, a pressure group whose key members have all held high office in the Bush administration.19 It should be of some interest to Canadians to know that in September 2001 the United States rejected offers of the Afghani Taliban regime to deliver Osama bin Laden to Pakistan for trial there;20 to know that opium production, which the Taliban had nearly eliminated in the provinces it controlled, bounced back to a new high once the U.S.-backed warlords of the Northern Alliance came to power;21 and to learn that the appalling oppression of Afghan women by reactionary theocrats that the Bush regime adopted as an ex post facto reason for its invasion appears not to have significantly diminished under the Karzai regime.22 Canadians might also be intrigued to discover that in June 2006 a journalist who wondered about the absence of any mention of 9/11 on Bin Laden's FBI Most Wanted listing was informed by Rex Tomb, the FBI's Chief of Investigative Publicity, that the reason for this absence "is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."23 This looks rather like an acknowledgment that the so-called "Bin Laden confession video" released by the U.S. in December 2001, and widely represented as justifying the attack on Afghanistan, is in fact not authentic.24"

"The 'War on Terror' is also fraudulent because while purporting, as Bush himself has declared, to confer upon others what Americans "wish for ourselves-safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life,"25 his administration has in fact sought through false-flag terrorism and shameless propaganda and disinformation to frighten Americans into supporting a resource-war geopolitics of unconstrained aggression. Concomitants of this endless warfare include the devolution of what is now called the "homeland" in the direction of a one-party state,26 a deliberate voiding of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a parallel extinction of international human rights law whose visible embodiment is an archipelago of prisons and torture houses extending from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Graib and Bagram.27"


REFERENCES FOR THIS SECTION OF THE PAPER:

7 The following account of this evidence overlaps at some points with my recent essay "Into the Ring with Counterpunch on 9/11: How Alexander Cockburn, Otherwise So Bright, Blanks Out on 9/11 Evidence," available at Scholars for 9/11 Truth (4 November 2006), http://www.st911.org, and forthcoming in Cold Type (December 2006), http://www.coldtype.net.

8 See for example "MIT Professor [Jeff King] Breaks Down WTC Controlled Demolitions," Google Video (17 March 2006), http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1822764959599063248 ; Judy Wood, "A Refutation of the Official Collapse Theory," (March 2006), http://janedoe0911.tripod.com/BilliardBalls.html ; as well as articles by Frank Legge, Gordon Ross, and Kevin Ryan in the first two issues of the Journal of 9/11 Studies (June and August 2006), and Steven E. Jones, "Why Indeed Did the World Trade Center Buildings Completely Collapse?" Journal of 9/11 Studies 3 (September 2006): 1-48, http://www.st911.org.

9 See David Ray Griffin, "Explosive Testimony: Revelations about the Twin Towers in the 9/11 Oral Histories," 911 Truth.org (18 January 2006), http://www.911truth.org/artice.php?story=20060118104223192 ; and Graeme MacQueen, "118 Witnesses: The Firefighters' Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers," Journal of 9/11 Studies 2 (August 2006): 47-106.
10 See "Shot from street level of South Tower collapsing," Camera Planet, 2 min. 49 sec., posted 24 February 2003, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2991254740145858863&q=cameraplanet+9%2F11 ; and also photographs reproduced by Jones in "Why Indeed....?"

11 Squibs are visible in photographs of the collapses reproduced by Eric Hufschmidt, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (Goleta, California: Endpoint Software, 2002); see also Dylan Avery, Dir., Loose Change (2006), available at http://www.st911.org ; Dustin Mugford, Dir., September 11 Revisited: Were Explosives Used to Bring Down the Buildings? http://www.911revisited.com (2006), available at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4194796183168750014 ; and In the Wake Productions, 911 Mysteries: Part I, Demolitions (2006), http://www.911weknow.com/911-mysteries-movie.html.

12 See J. R. Barnett, R. R. Biederman, and R. D. Sisson, Jr., "An Initial Microstructural Analysis of A36 Steel from WTC Building 7," Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society 53/12:18 (2001); cited by Jones, "Why Indeed...." Jones's own laboratory analysis of steel samples from the Twin Towers is forthcoming.

13 Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2004), pp. 308-436. See also Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2005), pp. 267-91, 304-16.

14 Securacom's CEO from 1999 to January 2002 was Wirt D. Walker III, a cousin of President Bush-whose younger brother Marvin P. Bush was also a principal in the company from 1993 to 2000. See David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor (2nd ed.; Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2004), p. 180.

15 Michel Chossudovsky, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September 11 (Shanty Bay, Ontario: Global Outlook, 2002), The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (2nd ed.; Shanty Bay, Ontario: Global Outlook, 2003), America's "War on Terrorism" (Pincourt, Quebec: Global Research, 2005). See also Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (New York: HarperCollins, 2004); Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, The War on Truth; Webster G. Tarpley, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA (2nd ed.; Joshua Tree, California: Tree of Life Books, 2006); and Paul Zarembka, ed., The Hidden History of 9-11-2001 (New York: Elsevier, 2006).

16 Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor is cited in note 14; see also The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2005), and Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).

17 See Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism"; Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq (London and New York: Verso, 2002); Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2003); Dilip Hiro, Secrets and Lies (New York: Nation Books, 2004); Naomi Klein and others, No War: America's Real Business in Iraq (London: Gibson Square Books, 2005); William R. Clark, Petrodollar Warfare (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2005).

18 See Seymour M. Hersh, "The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon can now do in secret," The New Yorker (24-31 January 2005), http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050124fa_fact , and "The Iran Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?" The New Yorker (17 April 2006), http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060417fa_fact ; Michael Keefer, "Petrodollars and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation: Understanding the Planned Attack on Iran," Centre for Research on Globalization (10 February 2006), http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=KEE20060210&articleid=1936 ; and Jorge Hirsch, "Nuclear Strike on Iran is Still on the Agenda," Antiwar.com (16 October 2006), http://antiwar.com/Hirsch/.

19 See Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, Forbidden Truth, trans. Lisa Rounds et al. (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002).

20 Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, "How Bush Was Offered Bin Laden and Blew It: Give Him an 'F' in the War on Terror," Counterpunch (1 November 2004), http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11012004.html.

21 See Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terror", pp. 224-36.

22 See "On the Situation of Afghan Women," Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), http://www.rawa.org/wom-view.htm ; and Marc Herold, "Afghanistan as an empty space: The perfect Neo-Colonial state of the 21st century, part one," Cursor.org, http://www.cursor.org/stories/emptyspace.html .

23 Ed Haas, "FBI says, 'No hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11," Muckraker Report (6 June 2006), http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html#_ftn1 . For the spin machine's wholly inadequate response to this embarrassment, see Dan Eggen, "Bin Laden, Most Wanted for Embassy Bombings?" The Washington Post (28 August 2006), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/27/AR2006082700687.html .

24 For a judicious analysis of the myth-making surrounding Osama bin Laden, see R. T. Naylor, Satanic Purses: Money, Myth, and Misinformation in the War on Terror (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006).

25 George W. Bush, Speech at West Point Military Academy (1 June 2002), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/ ; quoted by Pierre Guerlain, "New Warriors Among American Foreign Policy Theorists," in Dana D. Nelson, ed., Ambushed: The Costs of Machtpolitik, special issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 106.1 (Winter 2006), pp. 113-14. The Bush administration's claims to be promoting democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere are demolished by Noam Chomsky in Failed States(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp. 102-65.

26 See Michael Keefer, "The Strange Death of American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio," Centre for Research on Globalization (24 January 2006), http://globalresearch.com.ca/articles/KEE501A.html .

27 See Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly, "Crude Wars," Nikhil Singh, "The Afterlife of Fascism," and Thomas L. Dumm, "George W. Bush and the F-Word," in Dana D. Nelson, ed., Ambushed: The Costs of Machtpolitik, pp. 19-35, 71-93, and 153-60. Key collections of documents relating to torture include Mark Danner, ed., Torture and Truth: America, Abu Graib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004); and Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Graib, intro. Anthony Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Onnesha Roychaudhuri, "Tracking the Torture Taxis," The ColdType Reader 9 (November 2006), http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.06/Essays.06/1106.Reader9.pdf .