American Gangster

by Mark Jacobson

  Yet, as with many major events, there is the sanctioned history and the the so-called secret history—actions and motives hidden from view, covered up, by the official historians. Many believe this was the case with the Kennedy assassination. Myriad theories have arisen about what really happened that day. Any number of culprits, from the Cuban government, to the Mafia and/or the CIA, have been deemed responsible. These ideas gained increasing traction in the popular mind-set.

  The precise tipping point—the moment the Grassy Knoll supplanted the sixth-floor window—is not exactly clear, but four decades past Kennedy’s murder it is difficult to find anyone who sincerely believes Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible. But if Oswald didn’t kill the President, who did? No comprehensive, universally believed chronicle of events has emerged. 11/22 remains an open case, an open wound.

  Now here we are again, contemplating the unthinkable of September 11. Again we confront an event that occurred on a bright clear day, with thousands of eyewitnesses, yet shrouded in mystery. The official explanation, offered first by the Bush administration and later confirmed, with some amendment, by the 9/11 Commission Report, has been released: the nation was attacked by the forces of radical Islam led by Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda jihadists.

  Again, many Americans believe the official story. But not all.

  2. WAR WITHOUT END

  “We’re just your average wild-eyed, foaming at the mouth, tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy nuts,” said Father Frank Morales, a priest at the St. Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side as he surveyed the two hundred or so graying beatniks and neighborhood anarchist punks sporting “Is It Fascism Yet” buttons who had arrived for the weekly Sunday night meeting of the New York 9/11 Truth movement. They’d come to the church to hear a lecture by Webster Tarpley, author of the recent book, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA.

  Looking like a cross between a kindly medieval parson and Dick Cheney, whom he accuses of “high treason” in his book, the sixty-year-old Tarpley said he was in New York, “the scene of the crime, to debunk the myth … the absurd fairy tale” that tragic events of September 11, 2001, were the work of nineteen guys with boxcutters commanded to fly airplanes into buildings by a bearded cave-dwelling evildoer.

  To this end, Tarpley displayed a slide titled “State-Sponsored False Flag Terrorism,” directing the audience’s attention to a Venn diagram of three interconnected circles. Circle one was labeled “Patsies,” denoted as “dupes,” “useful idiots,” “fanatics,” “provocateurs,” and “Oswalds.” Included here were bin Laden and the alleged lead hijacker, Mohammad Atta. The second sphere, marked “Moles,” contained “government officials loyal to the invisible government” such as Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney and, of course, George W. Bush. The third circle, “professional killers,” encompassed “technicians, CIA and special forces, old boys”—the unnamed ones who did the dirty work and knew how to keep their mouths shut.

  This was the true face of corporatized terror as practiced by the infinite octopus of the “secret government,” said Tarpley, graduate of Flushing High School, class of 1962 (also Princeton). It was a terrain Tarpley knew well, as the author of an “unauthorized” biography of George Herbert Walker Bush, a tome that paints the Bush family patriarch, U.S. Senator Prescott Bush, as knowingly profiting from Hitler’s Third Reich in his role as a director of the Union Banking Corporation.

  According to Tarpley, this is how it went down, roughly, on September 11. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Pet Goat–engrossed president played their assigned roles enabling the strange events of that day, including the whole-scale malfunction of the multitrillion-dollar American air defense system. Cued by fellow mole Richard Clarke, the main players made sure the CIA-owned-and-operated Osama and his alleged seventy-two-virgin craving crew got the racist/religionist-fueled blame as Boeings were flown, likely aided by remote control, into the Trade Center towers, which collapsed not from the impact and resulting fire, as reported by the brainwashed mainstream media, but rather due to planted bombs and controlled demolition.

  Laying out his scenario, Tarpley touched on many of the “unanswered questions” that make up the core of the 9/11 Truth critique of the so-called Official Story.

  Like: How, if no steel-frame building had ever collapsed from fire, did three such edifices fall that day, including 7 World Trade Center, which was not hit by any airplane?

  And why, if hydrocarbon-fueled fire maxes out at 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and steel melts at 2,700 degrees, did the towers weaken sufficiently to fall in such a short time—only fifty-six minutes in the case of the South Tower?

  And why, if the impact destroyed the planes’ supposedly crash-proof flight-recorder black boxes, was the FBI able to find, in perfect condition, the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged American Airlines Flight 11 hijackers?

  And how to explain the nonperformance of the FAA and NORAD? And why did the Defense Department choose to stage an extraordinary number of military exercises on 9/11—occupying matériel and spreading confusion about who was who on that day?

  How could the U.S. government allow, an hour after the first World Trade Center crash, an obviously hostile plane to penetrate the world’s most heavily protected air space and smash into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the entire military-industrial complex, for chrissakes?

  And what about the short-selling spree on American and United airlines stock in the days before the attacks? Betting on the stocks to go down—was this real sicko Wall Street insider trading?

  There were so many questions. But when it came to the big “why” of 9/11, there was only the classic conspiratorial query: “Who benefits?”

  When it came to September 11, this was a virtual no-brainer. Here was a holocaust-as-ordered by the neocon cabal Project for the New American Century who in the mode of its shadowy mentor, Leo Strauss, understood the people of the U.S.A. to be nothing but robotized, meth-addled, postliterate, and postlogical lardasses, a race of “sheeple” who would never rise to mantle of world dominators without (as the PNAC said) “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” In other words, a new Pearl Harbor like the old Pearl Harbor, which Roosevelt was supposed to have known about weeks in advance and used as an excuse to get us into World War II.

  Pearl Harbor, or Reichstag Fire, take your pick. What mattered was that the deed was done; three thousand human beings were dead in the worst single attack on American soil in history, freeing Manchurian Candidate Bush to decree his fraudulent War of Terror, a Social Darwinian/Hobbe-sian “with us or against us” struggle to corner the planet’s dwindling bounty—a global conflict without end in which only the strong, the white, and the Republican would survive.

  3. YOUR HOP LEVEL

  In an April 2004 paper titled “What Is Your Hop Level,” Nick Levis, who co-coordinates the NY911 truth meetings with the aforementioned Father Frank Morales and Les Jamieson, categorizes the basic analytical responses to the events of September 11 “short of those who believe in divine or extraterrestrial intervention.” Although offering a number of off-shoots, Levis’s paper essentially boils down to four major choices.

  A: The Official Story (called the Official Conspiracy Theory by 9/11 truth activists). The received Bushian fantasy: Al Qaeda/Osama, nineteen guys with boxcutters, flight 93 made to crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, by heroic (“Let’s Roll”) passengers, etc., etc. As White House press secretary Ari Fleisher said in his initial response, there was “no warning.”

  B: The Incompetence Theory (a.k.a. the Stupidity, Arrogance, Dysfunctional, “Reno Wall” Theory): accepts the Official Story, yet allows for failure on the part of the White House/FBI/CIA/NSA to heed warnings of the plot brewing right under their taxpayer-funded noses. This line was partially advanced, with much butt-covering compensation, in the Kean 9/11 Commission Report.

  C: LIHOP, or “Let It Happen on Purpose.” Many variations here, but primarily: elements of the U.S.
government and/or well-placed factions of the private sector were aware of specific details of the hijackers’ plans and, recognizing that 9/11 suited their policy goals, did nothing to stop it.

  D: MIHOP, or “Made It Happen on Purpose,” that is, elements of the U.S. government and/or private forces actively planned and executed the attacks, including, quite possibly, using the airplane strikes as a cover to bring down the Trade Center buildings with secreted explosives.

  “What are the alternatives to MIHOP?” asks Webster Tarpley, rhetorically, in the introduction of his book Synthetic Terror, dismissing the only other thinkable possibility, LIHOP, as being “increasingly at war with the masses of evidence.”

  Tarpley’s “rouge network/invisible government MIHOP” is only one of the many MIHOPs floating around 9/11truth circles. Most popular are various configs of Cheney/Bush MIHOP, asserting that the vice president, who appeared to be charge on 9/11 (in violation of the constitutionally decreed chain of command), was the main actor in the plot. Also ambient is Peak Oil MIHOP, an ecodoomsday scenario stemming from the notion that the “peaking” of planetary petroleum reserves prompted the false provocation for the “oil war” in the Middle East.

  Further afield are numerous versions of NWO MIHOP, or New World Order MIHOP, which Nick Levis characterizes as the concerted effort of “a global ruling elite seeking greater control of the world Zeitgeist” as a means to fomenting “a transition to open corporate feudalism.” Many NWO MIHOPs take into account the long-standing influence of secret societies such as the Freemasons (if you don’t believe it, just look at the pyramid-meeting-the-eye on the back every dollar in your pocket, fool!), the Illuminati, and their alleged modern-day standard-bearers like Yale’s Skull and Bones Society (both Bushes bonesmen, John Kerry too), the Council on Foreign Relations, and blue-hat armies of the United Nations.

  Less cited scenarios include a Sino MIHOP claiming the Chinese military was behind 9/11 as a first strike in the inevitable economic conflict between China and the West. And, in what cannot be considered a newsflash, Scientologists have suggested a Shrink MIHOP, claiming evil psychologists were a controlling force in the attack.

  More controversial is Mossad MIHOP, the school of thought that Israeli intelligence played a crucial role in the disaster. This is based in part on the curious story of the “white van,” that is, on the morning of September 11 five men, apparently filming the attack from Liberty State Park, were observed exchanging high fives as the planes hit the buildings. Later that day their moving-company van was pulled over by police on Route 3 by Giants Stadium. One of the men was found to have $4,700 in his sock. Extra passports were also recovered. “We are Israeli,” the driver reputedly told cops. “We are not your problem. Your problems are your problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” The men were taken to the Federal Detention Center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, from where, sans further action, they were deported to Israel. Later an article in the Jewish Forward identified the company that owned the van, Urban Moving Systems, to be a Mossad front.

  Much as been made of this and other such incidents among 9/11truth sources, but this is clearly tricky terrain. As witnessed by the very first of so-called 9/11 conspiracies, the disproved but often repeated story that four thoudand Jewish WTC workers were warned to stay home that day, any Mossad MIHOP can easily morph to Zionist MIHOP and/or Jew MIHOP. In an odd revisionism of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, well-known 9/11truth researcher Eric Hufschmid (author of “Painful Questions”) writes, “I see the Zionists as being analogous to an organization of cats who work together to catch thousands of stupid, unorganized mice. Why should I feel sorry for the mice? Why should I hate the cats?”

  Despite laborious efforts to distinguish the difference between “Zionism” and “Judaism,” this remains a difficult area for NY 9/11truth advocates, many of whom are Jews. The specter of being too easily tarred with the anti-Semite brush by the Abe Foxmans of the world is a real danger. “Do I believe Israel has undue influence over U.S. foreign policy?” asks one local activist. “Absolutely. But there are people in this movement who are fucking Nazis. I think you have to draw the line at Holocaust denial.”

  But this aside, when it comes to 9/11, it is all MIHOP because as far as Truth activists are concerned, we are living in a MIHOP world.

  4. MINUTEMEN OF HISTORY

  “For me, MIHOP was inevitable, because in this, the more you know, the more you know,” says Les Jamieson, a tall, friendly, eminently reasonable seeming forty-five-year-old guy from Brooklyn who serves as Northeast Program Coordinator of the nationwide 9/11truth.org. Like most 9/11truth people, Les remembers the moment when the scales of the Official Story media fog fell from his eyes.

  “On September 11 my first reaction was like everyone else: shock, horror, rage. But then I kept coming across these items. One of the first was a story in Newsweek, which said these generals were told earlier that week not to fly. They said there was no warning, but obviously someone knew. I saw videos about the way the buildings fell, how they seemed to implode. My reaction was: ‘holy shit.’ That’s what this process has been, one ‘holy shit’ after another.”

  Now, most Saturday afternoons, Les can often be found in front of the PATH station at Ground Zero holding up a banner proclaiming that 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB. Reaction to this demonstration has been “mixed,” Les reports. Last Memorial Day, when the Truth activists were “surrounded by these screaming sons of firemen,” it was particularly rough. “It was like we were committing some kind of blasphemy,” recalls Les, who vows to continue the vigils no matter what.

  He says: “I truly believe that we, our 9/11truth movement, are sort of minutemen, trying to make the country aware of this terrible crime that has been committed. We’re like prosecutors in the discovery phase, unearthing evidence for a trial that is sure to come.”

  Father Frank Morales agrees that “this is about history.” Morales, who if not for his priest collar could easily be mistaken for an East Village hipster in his black stocking cap and quarter-inch beard vertically bifurcating his chin, is a longtime neighborhood hero. Raised in the Jacob Riis projects, ordained in 1976, Morales spent years as “a street priest walking in Jesus’ path” in the then burning South Bronx before coming back to the Lower East Side to work with the squatter community. The day after 9/11 he got a call from the diocese asking him to go to Ground Zero to perform last rites for the victims.

  “They said to be prepared because ‘we’re not talking bodies here, Frank, we’re talking body parts,’” Morales recalls.

  “It was a real test of faith, being down there, because I could feel myself getting madder and madder, not the way a priest is supposed to feel,” says Father Frank, who recalls the ground being “rich and moist, enriched with the ground-up bodies of the dead.” Sitting with a fireman who’d been “on the pile like forty-eight hours straight,” Morales remembers cursing the hijackers, screaming that “I just wanna get those motherfuckers.”

  It was at this point, Morales says, that the fireman “put his hand on my shoulder and whispered, ‘Hey, it’s not about that…. You wanna know something? Bush and Bin Laden have the same banker.’”

  It was everything that happened afterward, the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, that turned him into a 9/11truth activist, Morales said. Now, he’s MIHOP too.

  Activists like Nick Levis, Les Jamieson, and Frank Morales know that the sort of 9/11truth they seek is unlikely to meet the ontological standards of Saint Anselm. There are too many nuts around. After all, they’ve got people on their side like the “Web fairy” who runs a site supposedly proving the planes that hit the Trade Center were not planes at all but holograms, or “ghost planes.” What can you say about a truth movement’s relationship to the nature of truth when many of the entries about its main concerns in the Wikipedia bear the caveat “disputed”?

  Yet for all this the 911truth movement retains one irrefutably puissant weapon in its struggle with the Official Story. As Frank Morales asks, �
�Would you believe anything George W. Bush told you?”

  5. A FAST-MOVING MEME

  Type “9/11 conspiracy” into the Google and the bytes bury you. The first truly great conspiracy theory of the Internet Age—imagine JFK assassinationology with the Web!—9/11truth is a fast traveling meme.

  The thicket of “truth” sites seems endless. There is “911truth.org,” “911truth.com,” “911forthetruth.com,” “911truthla.org,” “nakedfor 911truth.com,” “911truthemergence.com,” “911citizenswatch.com,” “911inquiry .org,” “911research.net,” “911–strike.com,” “total911.info.com,” “911blogger.com,” “911review.com,” “septembereleventh.com,” “physics911.com,” “psychics911.com,” and dozens more.

  There are radco guys too, like Alex Jones, proprietor of prisonplanet.com and infowars.com, an inveterate loudmouth who charges ahead with his smorgasbord New World Order MIHOP and video camera into the beating heart of old boy networks, accosting small potatoes like David Gergen outside the Bohemian Grove, supposed site of Bilderbergian Satanic rituals.

  Such antics notwithstanding, it can be argued that a whole new kind of politics is being waged in the 9/11truth assault, a kind of emerging panlibertarianism that trashes not only the slack boundaries of the mainstream but also the supposed “Far” Left and Right. Apocalyptically minded survivalists and extreme Bush-haters are equally attracted to the blanket j’accuse that the U.S. government has attacked its own people to prod them into a ceaseless, baseless terror crusade, a clash of civilizations to end all civilization. Be you a Starbucks window breaker or John Bircher, it ain’t like you need a weatherman to tell you which way Thomas L. Friedman and his globalist windbaggery blows.