by Jon E. Lewis
There’s an energy-related cost to be borne as well. Oil-producing nations are already replacing lost Iraqi and Kuwaiti output. More than half of what was lost has been made up, and we’re getting superb cooperation. If producers, including the United States, continue steps to expand oil and gas production, we can stabilize prices and guarantee against hardship. Additionally, we and several of our allies always have the option to extract oil from our strategic petroleum reserves, if conditions warrant. As I’ve pointed out before, conservation efforts are essential to keep our energy needs as low as possible. We must then take advantage of our energy sources across the board: coal, natural gas, hydro and nuclear. Our failure to do these things has made us more dependent on foreign oil than ever before. And finally, let no one even contemplate profiteering from this crisis. We will not have it.
I cannot predict just how long it’ll take to convince Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Sanctions will take time to have their full intended effect. We will continue to review all options with our allies, but let it be clear: We will not let this aggression stand.
Our interest, our involvement in the Gulf, is not transitory. It pre-dated Saddam Hussein’s aggression and will survive it. Long after all our troops come home, and we all hope it’s soon, very soon, there will be a lasting role for the United States in assisting the nations of the Persian Gulf. Our role then is to deter future aggression. Our role is to help our friends in their own self-defense. And something else: to curb the proliferation of chemical, biological, ballistic missile and, above all, nuclear technologies.
And let me also make clear that the United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people. Our quarrel is with Iraq’s dictator and with his aggression. Iraq will not be permitted to annex Kuwait. And that’s not a threat. It’s not a boast. That’s just the way it’s going to be.
Our ability to function effectively as a great power abroad depends on how we conduct ourselves at home. Our economy, our armed forces, our energy dependence and our cohesion all determine whether we can help our friends and stand up to our foes.
For America to lead, America must remain strong and vital. Our world leadership and domestic strength are mutual and reinforcing; a woven piece, as strongly bound as Old Glory.
[. . .]
Once again, Americans have stepped forward to share a tearful goodbye with their families before leaving for a strange and distant shore. At this very moment, they serve together with Arabs, Europeans, Asians and Africans in defense of principle and the dream of a new world order. That is why they sweat and toil in the sand and the heat and the sun.
If they can come together under such adversity; if old adversaries like the Soviet Union and the United States can work in common cause, then surely we who are so fortunate to be in this great chamber – Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives – can come together to fulfil our responsibilities here.
Thank you. Good night. And God bless the United States of America.
9/11
At 8.35 on the humdrum morning of Tuesday 11 September 2001, a hijacked plane crashed into the north tower of New York City’s World Trade Center. Thirty minutes later, a second plane hit the south tower. Over in Washington DC, a third crashed into the Pentagon.
Nearly 3,000 people died as a result of these attacks. The US had just suffered its worst terrorist incident in history. Kjalid Sheikh Mohammed, the head of the military committee of Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda, accepted responsibility: “Yes, we did it,” he told al-Jazeera TV. According to intelligence received, the White House of George W. Bush agreed that al-Qaeda had committed the attack.
Case closed? Not quite.
9/11 was a tragedy for all except paranoid conspiracy theorists, to whom every cloud of explosive smoke has a silver lining. Within weeks of 9/11 the internet was humming with alternative versions of whodunnit and why? By mid-2007 the 9/11 internet conspiracy documentary Loose Change had been downloaded over 4 million times.
For all the multiplicity of post-9/11 conspiracy theories, they boil down to two main hypotheses: that George W. Bush either staged the 9/11 attacks or purposely allowed them to occur because the attacks would generate public support for an invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and other fuel-rich countries. With American oil running out, such invasions were a strategic necessity.
Proponents of the theories – who include Hollywood luminaries Charlie Sheen and David Lynch – point accusingly at the Project for the New American Century, the right-wing think-tank that campaigns for increased American global leadership. Former PNAC members include 9/11-era Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney. An internal PNAC document, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, allegedly claims that “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor” would be needed to move public opinion in their favour. Proponents of this theory also note the Bush-Bin Laden Connection, the long ties between the two families, together with the administration’s initial opposition to an investigation into the attacks. Could the US government willingly allow an attack on its own people?
Proponents answer “Pearl Harbor”. Even commit a false-flag attack on its own people? Answer: Operation Northwoods. This latter plan, proposed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, proposed a stage-managed “terrorist” attack on US soil; Castro would get the blame, thus providing the justification for an invasion of Cuba. Northwoods was rejected by the Kennedy administration.
So far as the false-flag case goes, theorists find quite a lot of evidence that the government put its rampant political desires into practice.
First there’s the sheer amount of incriminating evidence the plotters left around. Oddly, amidst 1.6 million tons of debris, investigators found the intact passport of Mohammed Atta, the man alleged to be the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks. So fortuitous was this find, conspiracy researchers suggest, that it must have been a plant. In fact, a number of other laminated passports were found in the debris. Atta also left flight-simulation manuals behind in a car, and apparently a will. However, he cannot have minded their discovery since he was intent on suicide. In fact, he may have wished them to be discovered to let the world know his martyrdom.
Second, what befell the towers of the World Trade Center bears examination. To most observers what happened to the WTC towers on 9/11 is straightforward: two planes hit the towers, then the towers fell down. This “reality” was soon challenged by conspiracy theorists, together with a covey of scientific experts.
Before 9/11 no steel-framed skyscraper had collapsed because of fire, yet WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 collapsed like pancakes. Particularly unusual was the death of WTC 7, which was not hit by an aircraft. Additionally, according to at least one demolition expert, the billows of dust coming out of the towers were more indicative of explosion than fire. Steel wreckage recovered from the site shows that it became molten; fire is not usually able to effect this change in steel. But a bomb is.
The “controlled demolition hypothesis” is a central plank of 9/11 conspiracy theory, featuring heavily in David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor (2005), and most cogently argued by Steven Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University. Jones asserts that without demolition charges a “gravity-driven collapse” of the sort that happened to the WTC buildings would defy the laws of physics.
By the laws of “controlled demolition hypothesis” the WTC was rigged with explosive devices, probably containing thermite. The strange comment by Larry Silverstein, owner of WTC 7, on a PBS documentary that he told the fire department to “pull it” makes sense in this scenario: “pull it” is demolition industry slang for setting off demolition charges. (Silverstein’s spokesman said later that Silverstein meant “pull it” as in “pull outta there”.) The bottom-to-top-style collapse of WTC buildings 1, 2 and 7 is said to be typical of controlled demolitions. Fuelling conspiracy theory is the fact that building 7 housed offices of the CIA and the FBI, plus New York City’s emergency command bunker.
In counterpoint t
o the controlled-demolition hypothesis is the finding of the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report into 9/11. According to this report the fireproofing on the Twin Towers’ steel infrastructures was blown off by the impact of the planes, thus opening them to fire damage. Fires weakened the trusses supporting the floors, which made the floors sag. Sagging floors pulled on the exterior steel columns, making them bow inwards. Buckled columns could not support the building. Thus the buildings collapsed. NIST’s finding are supported by a whole range of independent researchers.
What the controlled-demolition hypothesis fails to take into account is the aviation fuel carried by the planes. Skyscrapers were never made to withstand the effects of having thousands of gallons of ignited aviation fuel swilling around inside them.
Demolition experts have also weighed in on NIST’s side. To place enough lethal charges around three skyscrapers would require weeks of work and tons of explosive. Security at the WTC was among the tightest in the US, following a terrorist attack there in 1993. Wouldn’t somebody have noticed men carrying in bags of explosives for days on end or heard the drilling work needed to secure the devices to the steel frames?
Over to Washington DC. Like the WTC, the Pentagon was hit by a hijacked plane … or was it? Whereas in NY the dramatic extent of the damage done by the hijacked planes arouses suspicion, in Washington it is the limited extent of the damage done that incurs disbelief. In 2002 French writer Thierry Meyssan published 9/11: The Big Lie, which noted that the hole in the outer wall of the west wing was too small to have been caused by an incoming Boeing 747 and that the interior of the Pentagon was suspiciously undamaged. According to Meyssan, the hole was caused by a cruise missile. (A more realistic weapon, some commentators feel, than the HAARP-like energy beam nominated by Assistant Professor Judy Woods as the doomslayer-of-the-day on 9/11.) To counter the growing controversy, the Pentagon released five frames of CCTV footage from the stock that it had, on security grounds, confiscated after 9/11.
But to release just five frames prompted an obvious question: what was being hidden that the remainder of the frames might reveal? The 9/11 conspiracy theory gained a new lease of life. The plane – most now agreed there was a plane – that crashed into the Pentagon had been able to fly towards Washington for 40 minutes, despite radar, despite missile batteries, despite the proximity of Andrews Air Force Base. The section of the Pentagon which the plane crashed into was nearly empty at the time. All this is taken by the 9/11 Truth Campaign as definite evidence that 9/11 was stage-managed or known about.
The clincher is the footage of George W. Bush’s infamous response when his reading of a story to a Florida kindergarten was interrupted by an aide to tell him of the attacks. Bush continued reading. He could only have carried on being so calm, the theory goes, if he knew about the attacks in advance.
The fact is that the Pentagon was designed to withstand an air attack. The limestone layers shattered with the impact of the Boeing but the reinforced steel internal cage remained intact, hence the apparent lack of internal damage. Bush’s response can be explained in a multitude of ways: he wanted to give the appearance of calm, he was shocked into immobility, he was too unintelligent to grasp what had occurred . . .
If the Pentagon didn’t shoot down Flight 77 as it homed in on the Pentagon, the obvious question in the looking-glass world of paranoid conspiracy theory is: did the Pentagon shoot down Flight 93? Flight 93 was the fourth airliner hijacked by terrorists that morning. Unlike the others, it failed to find its target, instead plummeting into a Pennsylvania field. It is commonly considered that Flight 93 came down because its passengers heroically fought back against the hijackers and, in the melee, the plane went out of control or perhaps a terrorist aboard pulled the pin on a bomb.
The conspiracy theory is that Flight 93 was shot down on the orders of the White House before it could reach its target – which almost certainly was that selfsame White House. Here the evidence is unclear. By 8.52 the White House had ordered fighters into the air to seek out any hijacked airliners. Around 10 a.m. CBS TV reported that F-16 fighters were tailing Flight 93. Several witnesses to the Flight 93 crash report seeing a white plane nearby. The wide spread of debris from the plane, it is alleged, points to a midair crash. In 2004 Donald Rumsfeld seemed to say that Flight 93 had been shot down, though the White House later maintained he’d made a slip of the tongue.
Some cynics suggest that 9/11 was a poor false-flag operation if the White House had to then stage a cover-up of its shooting down of Flight 93. Whatever, shooting down a hijacked plane to stop its potential use as dive-bomber is not in the same moral league as a false-flag operation.
The weight of evidence is that al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda alone, carried out the 9/11 attacks. Elements of the assault were planned and directed by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but the donkey work was done by a self-supporting al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, led by Mohammed Atta. After receiving training in Afghanistan, the cell moved to the US by summer 2000; in Florida Atta opened an account at the SunTrust bank into which $109,000 was transferred from Dubai, seemingly to finance the upcoming operation. In the following year, al-Qaeda sent a number of Saudi volunteers to join Atta. On the morning of 9/11 a total of 19 terrorists hijacked four aircraft from East Coast airports . . .
The rest is history, not conspiracy theory.
Elements in the Pentagon conspired to stage or allow 9/11: ALERT LEVEL 3
Further Reading
David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor, 2005
Jim Marrs, Inside Job: Unmasking the Conspiracies of 9/11, 2005
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, The 9/11 Commission Report, 2004
www.Loosechange911.com
www.91ltruth.org
OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING
Just after 9 a.m. on 19 April 1995, a massive explosion ripped through the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. When the clouds of dust settled, the face of the Murrah building had been shorn off and a crater created that was 30 feet (9m) wide. Sifting through the rubble and wreckage, emergency crews found 169 dead, including 19 children who had been attending a nursery for federal employees on the second floor. Another victim of that day was the American psyche; after Oklahoma it would be more fragmented and suspicious than ever before, with right and left both seeing the bloody hand of the other in the blast’s perpetration. The Oklahoma blast, as federal investigators immediately announced, was no accident, but the result of a bomb.
The debris at the Murrah building offered up the evidence needed to identify one of the bomb-planters. Police found a truck axle which they traced to a Ryder truck rented in Junction City, Kansas. Eyewitnesses at the scene reported seeing a yellow Ryder truck stopped in the disabled parking area at the front of the building, from which two men had descended and hastily hopped into a Mercury car. It was then that the investigators got lucky; at 10.20 a.m., 60 miles (100km) north of Oklahoma, a traffic cop pulled over a 1977 Mercury Marquis for speeding. As officer Charles Hangar approached the car, he noticed it had no licence plates and that the driver appeared to have the telltale bulge of a handgun under his jacket. Hangar took out his own revolver and aimed it at the driver’s head, at which the driver calmly handed over a .45 Glock pistol and a hunting knife.
The driver was one Timothy James McVeigh, a former army sergeant and the future star turn in conspiracy chat rooms. Initially 26–year-old McVeigh was charged with illegally transporting a loaded weapon and driving without licence plates. Two days after his arrest, the charges against him were added to; he was charged with perpetrating the worst terrorist bombing carried out on US soil to that date.
There was much to tie McVeigh to the Oklahoma City crime. He matched eyewitness descriptions of a man with a military haircut exiting the Ryder truck. He allegedly dropped a business card advertising Paulsen’s Military Supply in Hangar’s squad car; on the back of the card McVeigh had written, “More five-pound sticks of TNT by
1 May.” He was found to be carrying a phone debit card issued by the anti-Semitic Liberty Group, and later investigations showed he had used the card to contact the suppliers of the plastic barrels and fertilizer used to make the home-made bomb placed at the Murrah building. Traces of explosive were found on his clothing and his fingerprints were discovered on a receipt for 2,000 lb (900kg) of fertilizer.
McVeigh’s comedy of criminal errors continued. In the lockup in Noble County he listed James Nichols as his next of kin; when Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officials visited the Nichols farm they turned up an array of bomb-making materials, including blasting caps, Primadet detonator cords, and ammonium nitrate. Nichols’s brother Terry gave himself up and was charged with the Oklahoma City bombing alongside McVeigh.
The federal authorities had little trouble in finding the motive for the bombing. In the glove compartment of McVeigh’s rented car the FBI found a letter written by him avowing revenge for the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco; the attack on the Murrah building was staged exactly two years to the day after this raid. McVeigh and Nichols, Michigan militiamen both, considered that the Branch Davidians had been murdered by the federal government. Quite possibly McVeigh was inspired to bomb the Murrah building by reading of a similar coup de main in the novel The Turner Diaries (1980) by the American Nazi William Pierce, aka Andrew Macdonald.
Initially McVeigh proclaimed his innocence, telling Time magazine, “I enjoy guns as a hobby … I follow the beliefs of the Founding Fathers. If that means I was involved in the bombing then . . . about a billion other Americans were involved in the bombing as well.” Unfortunately for him, his own sister damned him in court, telling the jury he had bragged before the bombing that “something big is going to happen”. He changed his tune after the federal court found him guilty on eight counts of murder, writing from prison that the bombing was “a retaliatory strike” for, as the police suspected, the federal attack on Waco.
