Has Someone Been Sitting On The FBI?

I received a phone call from a high_placed member of a US intelligence agency. He tells me that while there's always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to "back off" investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents. I'm told that since September 11th the policy has been reversed. FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings. A spokesman said: "There are lots of things that only the intelligence community knows and that no_one else ought to know.
© 2001 Award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast writes, Inside Corporate America, fortnightly in the Observer (London), Sunday paper of Britain's Guardian. At http://www.GregPalast.com you can read and subscribe to Greg Palast's columns

Rightly or wrongly, Alice had it right. Or, as that great Yogi named Berra once said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

Confuse people long enough (about 25 seconds for the average TV viewer) - and they will click channels, tune into less arduous distractions, and reset their brains to "snooz" control.

It’s a time-tested formula. Everyone who runs a scam for personal, political or financial gain relies on their audience’s fractured attention to get away with story lines that seem absolutely compelling in the heat of some manufactured moment - but collapse into complete nonsense if we run the tape back and view it frame-by-frame.

Take the events Sept. 11, 2001. Absolutely riveting video, relentlessly repeated. Authoritative news anchors looking dazed and grim, throwing out official statements like lifelines to millions of dazed and desperate viewers drowning in shock and disorientation.

It couldn’t be real, but it had to be true.

* * *

So we bought it. Or most of it anyway. We didn’t ask why intelligence agencies who couldn’t catch a whiff of the most complex "hit" since the invasion of Normandy knew the names of 19 cremated hijackers and their renal-challenged ringleader within 48 hours of attacks that killed 50,000, no 25,000, no 6,000, no 2,500 people..

We didn’t ask how frightened young men who couldn’t fly Cessnas could navigate and steer heavy jets into their targets. Or why none of their names turned up on the passenger lists of the four airplanes they were supposed to have commandeered. (Total number of Middle Easterners among 257 passengers and crew: zero.)

We didn’t ask what the United and American pilots (three of them military veterans) were doing while men armed with quarter-inch knives demanded death to fellow Americans, why their cockpit conversations were never released, why eight indestructible "black boxes" holding the keys to so many questions were rendered "inoperable" while hijackers’ paper passports escaped explosions and fire unscathed.

We didn’t ask why a plane supposedly driven by its passengers into two separate crash sites in the Pennsylvania countryside came apart in mid-air. Or why the president of the United States remained more interested in the story of a pet goat than reports of airliners crashing into Manhattan skyscrapers and the Pentagon.

We didn’t ask why U.S. forces were poised to attack across the Tajikistan border into Afghanistan in an assault announced last June - but could not scramble a single fighter to defend the U.S. capitol before three airliners hit their targets on a sunny morning in September.

We didn’t ask why the CIA met with an ailing Osama bin Laden in an American hospital as the biggest British battle fleet since the Falklands sailed for waters off Afghanistan, why Washington gave the Taliban $43 millions in May, or why the FBI and Attorney General of the United States repeatedly ignored warnings and blocked investigations into the impending attacks.

We didn’t ask what the CIA was doing in the upper echelons of Big Banks that profited hugely from "short-selling" United and American Airlines stocks in the final days before someone dialed 9.11

We didn’t ask why the head of the WTC arson investigation told reporters there were "explosive devices" in the building, why so few survivors were burned, or why New York firefighters were dragged away from Ground Zero just when the site was becoming safe and they were getting close to the bottom of things.

* * *

We did not ask because we were not told what had really happened.

Like good Germans in Hitler’s heyday, we looked the other way when more than 1,100 not-quite-white people bearing Middle Eastern names were thrown into U.S. prisons, interrogated, abused, held without notifying their families or lawyers - without ever being charged with terrorist acts. We were sure it couldn’t happen to us.

Anthrax held us enthralled. Instead of asking what a weaponized" strain of a decades old "Made In The USA" bacteria was doing in silent letter bombs, we clamored for risky antidotes and even more dangerous vaccines without stopping to consider that anthrax is not contagious, easily treated, rarely fatal - and that bee stings pose a far more serious threat to most Americans.

Like frightened Germans after the Reichstag fire, we demanded that authorities "do something". They did. A Constitution generations of Americans had given their lives to defend was suspended. Laws were quickly passed permitting surveillance, assets seizure, arrest and detention of suspects" - without formal charges or judicial oversight. Evidence will be sealed. Special tribunals will hear these cases. Forcible quarantine and inoculations are next.

A president who told Americans the day he "took" office - "If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator" - appointed himself supreme ruler of a his new Supreme National Security Council. A hundred thousand troops were called up for "internal security". And we said thank God, not realizing that soon perhaps we could be busted for that, too.

* * *

Everyone knows the score by now.

FEMA is only for hurricanes, the Florida recount can wait, Timothy McVeigh blew up a big building with the same sort of fertilizer used to cover up his cohorts, Osama bin Laden is an ungrateful madman just like Saddam and Noriega and all the other thugs we’ve hugged, Bush’s "War on Drugs" is just as urgent and honest as his "War on Terrorism". And kids as precious as our own being blown up in Afghanistan should just get out of the way.

We have to get bin Laden. Or maybe we don’t. It’s no longer clear. For sure, we have to topple the Taliban. What they’re doing to women must be stopped. But now our leaders say maybe it would be okay if they rule the southern half of the country and let us take the rest where the pipelines have to go through.

Pakistan is our ally. They are sending troops to fight on the side of the Taliban. They have nukes. The general who heads their intelligence service sent $100,000 to a fanatic the FBI says led the suicide planes against Manhattan. But it’s okay now. The FBI complained and the general has resigned.

* * *

Already the vultures are gathering.

On Oct. 10, 2001 U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain called on the Pakistani oil minister to get moving on the stalled Unocal pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to a Pakistani port. Selling oil and gas to China is back on the table she says, "in view of recent geopolitical developments." In the context of appeasing China, Chamberlain is an interesting name.

In the context of Sept. 11, China’s ascension to the WTO before the WTC’s dust had settled seemed almost scripted. Like some kind of quid pro quo - you give us oil and a seat on the organization divvying up the world, we do something for you.

What could that be? At least 15,000 Chinese Muslim troops have been sent to the defense of the Taliban.

Some people think President Bush II’s second modern "crusade" is a contest between Allah and Christ. They are dangerously wrong. This war is being fought to reinstate the real "god" - gold, oil and drugs.

You and I can switch to bicycles or electric cars. But militaries cannot convert to battery-operated battleships or B-52s. The hi-tech allied armed forces needed to keep a lid on people being ripped off - which includes just about everyone on the planet - is running out of oil. The world’s biggest remaining oil reserves are in the Caspian basin. A 20- billion barrel transfusion must begin flowing through 48-inch arteries just as soon as they can be laid across Afghanistan - and injected into the industrialized veins of increasingly desperate oil addicts.

Forget global warming, catastrophic climate change, the oppressed women of Afghanistan, the starving millions shivering with the onset of winter, and millions more moderate Muslims who are beginning to believe that Osama bin Laden is right. We’re talking serious money here: $3 to $5 trillion worth of oil and natural gas, and hundreds of billions more in that other addiction supplied by a country called Afghanistan.

An American administration intimately linked to the international drug trade and the banks that launder its dirty money has been beside itself since the Taliban declared poppy-growing against Shariah Islamic law. Maybe the mullahs were miffed at the CIA for cranking up Afghanistan’s heroin production to finance Osama bin Laden.

Their decree was issued 19 months ago. The fields are fallow; 60% of U.S. heroin imports have been shut off. Junkies are having withdrawals almost as bad as the White House, where some $250 billion a year in illicit drug money waters Wall Street, Big Banks, and various Bushes.

On the scale of national budgets, the only usable amounts of cash are in the drug trade. Everything else is a digital dream. If the drugs stop flowing, the world economy will instantly collapse.

The "shadow" administration hopes Columbia can pick up the slack. But a few dedicated drug enforcement officials haven’t gotten the word. They keep cracking down on drug lords like Lehder linked to people with names like Cheney and Bush.

All the details are in the lawsuits brought by a former Green Beret, a Contra drugs-for-arms dealer and smugglers gone straight.

But the media ignores the news.

* * *

It’s imperative that the Taliban get turfed and fresh poppies planted. Don’t get confused. These aren’t the poppies for Remembrance Day. Though in a way they are. Americans have been conned into wars for oil and drug profits beyond their knowledge or imagination since the U.S. Navy tracked the Japanese carriers steaming toward Pearl Harbor, the Maddox fought phantom Viet Cong gunboats in the Gulf of Tonkin, and Iraqi soldiers ignored the incubator babies in Kuwait.

The documentation is voluminous. Much it comes from government sources. Does anyone really believe the puppeteers behind the Sept. 11 attackers do not have a similar agenda?

You decide. Search the Internet. Check the references in the back of this book. Cultivate independent news sources. Evaluate. Read the evidence presented in All Fall Down: The Politics of Terror and Mass Persuasion. See if it resonates.

Ask yourself: "Who benefits? Who gains?"

Well," says David Icke, "The Illuminati want a world government and army, a world currency and centralized global financial dictatorship and control. They want micro-chipped people and a society based on constant surveillance of all kinds at all times. And they want a frightened, docile, subservient, people who give their power away to the authorities" who can save them from what they have been manipulated to fear."

That pretty well nails it down.

* * *

Ted Rall has traveled extensively through Central Asia. His cartoons are savagely astute. So is his analysis. Rall writes that the Sept. 11 attacks have provided Washington with "the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. has wanted all along - invade Afghanistan and install a puppet pipeline regime in Kabul."

Amend that to: "puppet poppy pipeline regime."

Michael Ruppert is a former LAPD investigator. He has submitted written testimony to the Senate Committee on Intelligence. After investigating the events leading up to Sept. 11, Ruppert responds, "I absolutely believe, at this moment, that the United States government had foreknowledge of the attacks and allowed them to occur."

Dr. Len Horowitz, the man who wrote the books on Washington’s complicity in a cull, says of Sept. 11: "There is a conspiracy within our own government - a conspiracy of silence at minimum."

After two solid months on this case, after evaluating gigabytes of corroborative information, after presenting the patterns formed by that evidence in this book, All Fall Down - I fully concur. There can be zero doubt that the attacks of Sept. 11 were foreseen and facilitated by agents and agencies within the United States government.

I did not say, "initiated". I have no evidence of that yet.

But in any courtroom worthy of that name, accomplices to mass murder are no different from those who pull the triggers. Or fly the suicide planes.

* * *

So what to do?

In a media-branded "terrorist" camp in the British Columbia interior, where armed native warriors were preparing to defend their Shaman and their land against heavily armed tactical police, their leader pointed to the campfire we were sitting around and told me that he welcomed a massacre that would spark an uprising across Canada.

Wolverine knew that provoking a heavy-handed response to one small band occupying ancestral lands would "scatter the embers" among the far-flung dry tinder of long-held resentments and rage.

Osama bin Laden knows this too. The Iraqis, Jordanians and Saudis I met during the Gulf War were businessmen troubled by American terror from the skies. They come from a tribal people with long memories. Even the more moderate Koran they follow teaches the absolute obligation of the faithful to avenge the killing of innocents - unless acceptable reparations and apologies are made.

Killing one million Iraqis - mostly children under the age of 15 - through bombings, radiations and epidemic-sparking sanctions…then bombing people with the lowest per-person calorie intake in the world and killing millions more in the coming cold of a mountain winter…is not a wise policy for anyone this side of such a vast gulf in history and perception.

Not if we want to keep opening letters, boarding airliners and working in tall buildings.

We certainly want to reduce the level of terror, certainly not escalate it," Noam Chomsky told a San Francisco peace rally. "There is one easy way to do that and therefore it is never discussed. Namely stop participating in it. That would automatically reduce the level of terror enormously."

What else?

Beyond that, we should rethink the kinds of policies, and Afghanistan is not the only one, in which we organize and train terrorist armies. Rethink the policies that are creating a reservoir of support," Chomsky adds.

Want to stop terrorism dead in its tracks? Stop looking the other way. Stop arming people with heavy grievances and their own agendas. Take out the training camps, from Fort Benning, Georgia to the Beka’a Valley. Give angry, hungry kids in refugee camps a home, a homeland, an education, a stake in a worthwhile future.

Give them respect.

Listen to what they are saying. Before they feel driven to say it with 30-pounds of explosives strapped to their chests. The biggest thing I learned before bullets started flying at Gustafsen Lake is that people with grievances just want to be heard.

* * *

Bill Moyers has another startling suggestion. Reduce our need for oil. In a keynote address to the Environmental Grantmakers Association on October 16, 2001 Moyers asked, "Do we want to send the terrorists a message? Go for conservation. Go for clean, home-grown energy."

He said, "As for national security, well, it’s time to expose the energy plan before Congress for the dinosaur it is. Everyone knows America needs to reduce our reliance on fossil fuel. But this energy plan is more of the same: more subsidies for the rich, more pollution, more waste, more inefficiency... America's unchecked consumption of oil has become our Achilles heel. It leaves our economy dangerously vulnerable to price shocks. It invites environmental degradation, ecological disasters, and potentially catastrophic climate change."

He's right.

* * *

Feeling used, enslaved, scammed, betrayed, lied to, burned out, bummed out. manipulated, screwed over, mind controlled, emotionally blackmailed, tantalized, toyed with, jerked around, ripped off, threatened, harassed, patronized, exhorted, extorted, attacked by powerful interests who keep telling you it's all "for your own good" and that there is no such thing as conspiracy at high and hidden levels?

Take heart! In September, 2001 more than 50 million North Americans accessed the Internet from their homes. An online community of real flesh and blood brothers and sisters is coming together very quickly now. Nothing is hidden, all is being rapidly revealed. Despite the complacent complicity of media mesmerizers, the first mass-marketed war to come up against the worldwide web is being undone by hundreds of millions of people bypassing its contradictions and coercions to share solidarity and insights on the net.

From North, South, East and West people of all persuasions are coming together in a rapidly coalescing consciousness. Each new participant brings another vital piece of personal perspective that is already forming a new world view that is inclusive, respectful, compassionate and celebratory of its differences and diversity.

We can turn this around. We've all been traumatized. We’re all mad as New Yorkers. And we’re smarter and more generous than our fear and anger.

People know what’s going on. Even those who don’t have access to alternative information sense that there is much more to motives and events than they are being told. By the grace of a wired world and the spirit within us all, we are joining together to pull the plug on cynical profiteers whose only god" is the payouts they receive in gold, oil and drugs.

Here are some things we can do:

Remember the children.

Unplug all brainwashing broadcast machines within eye and earshot.

If someone tries to sell you a box of bombs and flags. Just say, "Forget it. I'm not buying until I read the label."

Buy only necessities.

Do not sign up, do not subscribe, do not join the party line. It leads to a gulag. Then over a cliff.

Do not look down.

Try spreading your wings instead.

Move always toward the light.

Call home immediately. Remember that prayer is more powerful than any weapon or ill intention every devised.

Listen to each other’s stories. There is more wisdom in personal experience than any agenda-serving "analysis".

Hug someone you care about right now

Whenever you feel love and gratitude, express it out loud. Do this often. The whole universe hears you. Every creature who benefits will bless you for your gift.

Resist much. Obey little. Think for yourself.

When they come with retina scans, wear contacts inscribed with your favorite slogan.

THINK LIKE SOMEONE IN A COUNTRY OCCUPIED BY A FOREGIN POWER ACT LIKE SOMEONE SHARING A PLANET OCCUPIED BY A FOREIGN POWER REMEMER THAT YOU HAVE THE POWER

We must depart the script prepared for us. Reality is consensual. We can all change our minds. If we stand together in the face of tyranny, if we laugh at fear and choose to walk away from this scam - it all falls down.

Then we can build a saner, more compassionate, more joyful world together. -William Thomas

All statements excerpted from Chapter 9 above are fully described and documented in:

Exactly one year ago, in the corridors of a county office building in downtown Miami, a gang of imported Republican operatives tried to shove history toward George W. Bush. On the day before Thanksgiving 2000, the event described approvingly by the gentleman who now oversees the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal as a "bourgeois riot" stopped the recount of disputed ballots in Florida’s biggest county. Organized at the behest of former Secretary of State James Baker by a consultant whose reputation for dirty tricks dates back to the Nixon era, the "Brooks Brothers mob" embodied the iron will of the Bush campaign to win.

As we now know, the 10,750 ballots that the G.O.P. goon squad sought to suppress would probably not have done damage to their cause. So concluded the newspaper consortium that reported the results of its lengthy, million-dollar examination of all the Florida Presidential ballots. According to their analysis, a hand recount by the four counties that were the focus of the Gore campaign’s legal strategy would still have yielded an exceedingly narrow victory for the Bush-Cheney ticket.

And that is how—amid war in Afghanistan and overwhelming approval ratings for the Commander in Chief—the media consortium played their findings. But the National Opinion Research Center recount, which proved beyond any hint of doubt that thousands more Florida voters intended to elect Al Gore, has meaning only in a context ignored by those tardy accounting adjustments.

Context is amply provided, along with clarity and color, by Jeffrey Toobin’s Too Close to Call, a book that deserves study by anyone who professes to care about American democracy. As Mr. Toobin explains, that nasty fracas on Thanksgiving eve was only the most violent expression of the Bush campaign’s thorough manipulation of the post-election process. Striving for fairness, Mr. Toobin doesn’t hesitate to draw attention to the grievous shortcomings of the Democratic campaign and its candidate. Mr. Gore comes off as a sincere but hapless figure, in thrall to the opinions of newspaper editors who never cared for him.

Yet whenever Mr. Toobin takes his readers inside the back rooms, it is the ruthless character of modern Republicanism that stands out.

Seizing upon their home-court advantage, the Republicans controlling the process in the Sunshine State cheated and lied. As Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris was required by law to ensure a full automatic recount of every ballot in every county, because the margin separating the candidates was less than one-half of 1 percent. Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker continuously pointed to this statutory recount as proof that all the votes had been "counted and recounted."

In fact, as Mr. Toobin reveals, some 1.58 million votes cast in 18 counties were never recounted as the law prescribed—an extraordinary violation that Ms. Harris and her aides knew but never mentioned, let alone remedied. If the mandated recount had been completed in a timely and lawful fashion, Mr. Gore might well have pulled ahead by a few votes in the first week, changing the entire complexion of the post-election struggle.

"This subterranean story of the automatic recount," writes Mr. Toobin, "marked just the first time that Harris’s office performed heroic, if necessarily unsung, service to the Bush campaign."

Sworn to uphold the law and conduct a fair election despite her allegiance to Mr. Bush and his brother Jeb, the Florida governor, Ms. Harris did the opposite. According to Mr. Toobin, her strings were pulled by Mac Stipanovich, the sharp corporate lobbyist placed in her office by the Bush campaign within two days after the election to be her "minder." A former Republican staffer and campaign manager, Mr. Stipanovich personified the formidable forces behind Mr. Bush, which have enjoyed the spoils of his triumph ever since. Following the 1999 legislative session in Tallahassee, Mr. Stipanovich told a local reporter, "I got everything. I don’t know what the poor people got, but the rich people are happy, and I’m ready to go home."

There is much more in Too Close to Call that should embarrass Bush partisans, if they were capable of that healthy emotion. Indeed, there is much here to embarrass all of us, as our brave brothers and sisters again venture out under arms in the name of democracy.

Meeting with with congressional leaders from both parties shortly after the Supreme Court appointed him president, George W. Bush joshed that, "If this were a dictatorship, this would be a heck of a lot easier." Chortling at his own wit, he added, "Just so long as I'm dictator." In the wake of several new laws and decrees granting himself and Attorney General John Ashcroft the authority to serve as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner over anything they choose to call "terrorism," some skeptics have begun to wonder if Bush isn't one of those people who only says what he means when he pretends to be joking.

Could be. As Mark Crispin Miller points out in his book "The Bush Dyslexicon," the only time Bush doesn't sound like somebody speaking a foreign language he learned in high school is when he's angry or teasing somebody. But what's important is that Bush and Ashcroft have used the September 11 outrage as a pretext to turn America into a country where government agents can monitor your communications and/or break into your home without a warrant. They can seize (or create) evidence of loosely defined subversive activity, arrest you without probable cause, imprison you indefinitely without notifying anybody, covertly monitor your conversations with your attorney (if you're allowed one), try you before a military tribunal, admit hearsay (what an enemy says you said), deny you the right to see the evidence against you or to confront your accusers, find you guilty and put you to death.

All in complete secrecy and with no right of appeal. At a recent press conference, Ashcroft actually said the government's motive for concealing the identities of the 1000 foreigners being held in federal prisons is to protect their "rights and privacy." Sort of the way they did it in Buenos Aires and Moscow in the bad old days. Your reputation is always safe with the secret police. As for the rest of us, our patriotic duty is to trust that Bush knows best in the best of all possible countries, and get on with shopping. "We believe that when we have arrested violators of the law that we think have been associated with terrorists," Ashcroft explained "that that is a valuable component of defending the United States of America."

Back when the flames were still visible at the World Trade Center, almost everybody thought so. Ashcroft's rallying cry was "the Constitution does not apply to terrorists." Few protested what sounded like bellicose hyperbole. As, indeed, the U.S Constitution does not apply to Osama bin Laden and his cohorts holed up in Afghan caves. Having declared holy war on the United States, one fervently hopes they're about to experience the martyrdom they seek.

For that matter, few lost any sleep over those detained. A couple of months in an American federal prison wouldn't kill anybody; continuing lax enforcement of U.S. immigration laws certainly could. Those who decried "racial profiling" sounded like members of the crybaby culture mouthing phrases they'd heard on TV.

As the star chamber powers have accumulated, however, it's not just the ACLU who's getting nervous. No less a conservative than New York Times columnist William Safire has sounded the alarm. "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney general," he argued, Bush had seized "what amounts to dictatorial power." Cowed by terrorists, Americans "are letting George W. Bush get away with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts." Safire argues that the new policies mock not merely the Constitution, but the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Safire, who led cheers for Kenneth Starr, thinks that liberals won't speak up for fear of being called unpatriotic. He may be right for a change. If so, here's one liberal who thinks he may be understating the danger. So far, the most draconian policies apply only to aliens. But since their supposed rationale is to hide intelligence secrets and protect jurors from reprisals, the same logic would also apply to American citizens.