911 - THE VIEW FROM MARRS

AN OVERVIEW OF THE WAR ON TERRORISM

by Jim Marrs

Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Philosopher George Santayana

"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."

President John F. Kennedy

Americans are now beginning to pay the price for sleeping through history classes, ignoring important information in the alternative media and neglecting to participate in their own political process.

They find themselves in a new war --- the War on Terrorism. This is a war they never asked for and never envisioned, anesthetized as we all are by the flickering tube of distraction. It is a war predicated on the premise that a sneak attack was made on the United States September 11, 2001.

Unlike previous wars, there is no Berlin or Tokyo to capture and hence, no victory to be won, except for those who profit from war. The real victims of this war will be the average American citizen, right along with the starving Afghan.

This new war might well be compared to the failed War on Drugs and the nearly forgotten War on Poverty. No clear victory has yet been achieved over the misuse of drugs or the ravages of poverty within our own nation. Our prisons are overflowing with drug offenders with no appreciable lessening of either demand or supply and our basic civil rights have been badly mauled.

Just like those failed campaigns, the War on Terrorism for the foreseeable future will set us all on a costly course of restrictions on individual freedom, ever more centralized authority and omnipresent fear.

And where are the voices of those who would argue the merits of this new war? The airwaves and newspapers only ratchet the fear factor upwards each day with little or no effort to hear the many thoughtful Americans who are asking themselves, Do I really need to give up my freedoms in order to save them?

So with flags flying on the antennae of our gas-guzzling vehicles and love of country pulsing in our hearts, we march off to yet another war for oil.

Wars For Oil

Yes, oil. Petroleum has been behind all recent wars, beginning in the early 1940's, when a mostly rural and isolationist America was suddenly thrown into a world war as a reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Americans mourned the loss of some 3,000 soldiers and civilians in Hawaii and, in righteous indignation, allowed their country to be turned into a giant military camp.

The federal government, which had consolidated so much power unto itself under the Depression-busting policies of President Franklin Roosevelt, grew even stronger and more centralized under the aegis of national security . It all seemed quite natural and necessary at the time.

But serious students of history now know that even that good war was the result of machinations by a handful of wealthy and powerful men. By closing off Japan s oil supplies in the summer of 1941, Roosevelt, the quintessential Wall Street insider, ensured an eventual attack on the United States. It has now been well established that Roosevelt and a few close advisers knew full well that Pearl Harbor would be attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, but chose to allow it to happen to further their agenda for launching American into war. (The details of this may be found in my book Rule by Secrecy.)

The Vietnam War was prosecuted by men who were close to Roosevelt and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) who had long voiced a desire to gain control over Indochina s oil, magnesium and rubber assets. Again a provocation was created. In August, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson whipped Congress into a frenzy claiming that North Vietnamese gunboats had attacked the US Sixth Fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam. Our boys are floating in the water, he cried. Congress responded by passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which bypassed the Constitution and gave Johnson the power to wage war to stop attacks on Americans. It was the beginning of the real shooting Vietnam War.

And it was all a lie. No evidence has ever been brought forward that such an attack took place. In fact, editors for US News & World Report (July 23, 1984) called it The

While America was waging war against North Vietnam, which we were told was merely a puppet of communist Russia and China, Johnson was encouraged by his CFR advisers to grant the Soviet Union loans at higher levels than offered during World War II when they were our ally. US-backed loans provided Russia with the means to build facilities which turned out war materials that were then sent to North Vietnam for use against American troops. This was a good example of the duplicity of our modern wars.

The Gulf War was all about oil, from the wells in Kuwait slant drilling into Iraq s southern reserves to the destruction of the oil fields at its finish. Here we found a new Hitler in Saddam Hussein, an enemy armed and financed by the CIA, an agency whose top officials have long been connected to oil men CFR members and other globalists (See Rule by Secrecy).

Saddam Hussein, strapped for cash due to his eight-year war against Iran on behalf of the US, decided to regain Kuwait as a means of increasing his income. Kuwait had been carved out of southern Iraqi by British troops. When asked her thoughts on this move, US Ambassador April Glaspie replied that the US government had no opinion on the matter and that the matter of Kuwait was not associated with America. But when he moved his troops into Kuwait, Bush mobilized a United Nations force against him, backed by a $4 billion secret fund provided by his business associates in Saudi Arabia.

Yet, as those patriotic soldiers closed in on Saddam, the whole war stopped and George H. W. Bush s old business partner is still in power. It appears to have been yet another provocation. And as in Vietnam, even as we prepared to fight against Saddam, the American taxpayers backed $500 million in loans that he used to purchase arms for use against our forces.

Today the real issue is the rich oil reserves of the Caspian Sea region, the prize sought by Hitler whose drive to that area was stopped only by the tenacious Russian defense of the Volga River city of Stalingrad.

In the late 1970's, with the Soviet discovery of vast untapped oil in Chechnya, the region was ripe for exploitation but control over Afghanistan was needed to ensure the safety of a pipeline to bring the oil to world markets. But after almost 10 years of brutal, no-quarter fighting against Afghans and Arab mercenaries backed by the United States, including Osama bin Laden, the Soviets were forced to withdraw. The economic stress of this Russo-Afghan War was enough to topple communism in the early 1990's.

Now the international bankers and oilmen have a foothold in cash-strapped Russia and the estimated $40 billion in Caspian Sea oil is again attracting serious attention. In 1997, six international companies and the Government of Turkmenistan formed Central Asian Gas Pipeline, Ltd. (CentGas) to build a 790-mile-long pipeline to Pakistan and perhaps on to the New Delhi area of India.

Leading this consortium was Unocal Corporation, whose president, John F. Imle, Jr., said the project would be the foundation for a new commerce corridor for the region - often referred to as the Silk Road for the 21st Century.

But problems developed with the fundamentalist Muslim government in Afghanistan, not the least of which was the Taliban government s treatment of women which prompted feminist demonstrations against firms seeking to do business there. Additionally, the Taliban regime was creating chaotic conditions by pitting the various Islamic sects against each other in order to maintain control. In the mid-1999, Unacol withdrew from the pipeline consortium, citing the hazardous political situation and the project languished.

Notice that in President Bush s declaration of war on terrorism, he never mentioned terrorists in Northern Ireland or the Palestinian suicide bombers. Attention was only focused on Afghanistan, the one nation necessary to complete the lucrative pipeline. It should also be noted that Vice President Dick Cheney headed Halliburton, a giant oil industry service company and is generally thought to be more powerful than the president.

Today it can be demonstrated that military action against Afghanistan has been in the works long before the Sept. 11 attacks.

As reported by BBC s George Arney, former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik was alerted by American officials in mid-July that military action against Afghanistan would be launched by mid-October. At a UN-sponsored meeting concerning Afghanistan in Berlin, Naik was informed that unless bin Laden was handed over, America would take military action to either kill or capture both him and Taliban leader Mullah Omar as the initial step in installing a new government there.

It should be noted, however, that American intervention in Afghanistan began years ago, at least six months prior to the Soviet invasion in December, 1979.

In a 1998 interview with former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in the French publication Le Nouvel Observateur, the significant portions of which never made it to the United States, he admitted that American activities in Afghanistan actually began six months prior to the Soviet action.

Brzezinski said the Jimmy Carter administration began secretly funding opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul in July of 1979 with the full knowledge such action might provoke a Soviet invasion. Soviet leaders at the time argued the invasion was necessary to thwart American aggression in Afghanistan. The former national security advisor, who helped found the globalist Trilateral Commission, expressed no regret at this provocation, stating, That secret operation was an excellent idea. It&brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire. It also produced the Taliban regime which we are fighting today, as well as Osama bin Laden.

By 1984, with Vice President George H. W. Bush overseeing the Afghan situation, bin Laden was in charge of the Maktab al-Khidamir (MAK) which funneled money, arms and manpower from the outside world into the war against the Soviets. He soon helped form a polyglot formation of Arabic troops from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps, whom the CIA found easier to deal with than the Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan.

There should be considerable soul-searching about America s role in arming and training an international group of Muslim extremists in Afghanistan long after their comrades destroyed the Marine barracks in Beruit and hijacked numerous airliners.

Little noticed in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks were reports that China had signed a pact with the Afghans and was quietly inducted into the controversial World Trade Organization, action which under normal circumstances would have drawn widespread protest. Although such a pact is unconfirmed at this time, Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf, chairman of their joint chiefs and chief of the Pakistani Army Staff, this years visited China at their request and discussed matters of mutual interest.

Although, it is claimed that Pakistan is aiding the US in the current War Against Terrorism, the State Department s coordinator for counterterrorism, Michael Sheehan, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that Pakistan supports and trains terrorist groups in Afghanistan

This raises the specter of Chinese intervention should US forces become bogged down in mountainous Afghanistan. This prospect is particularly unsettling as back in 1555, the French prophet Nostradamus, who has been proven correct in so many of his prophecies, predicted that America and Russia would go to war against a coalition made up of Arab nations and China. Until just recently, such a notion seemed absurd.

The WTC/Pentagon attacks provided a convenient excuse to launch the pre-laid plans for military action against Afghanistan. But were they simply allowed to happen or were they contrived? The question becomes: Would any American allow an attack on fellow Americans just to further his own business or political agenda?

Incredibly, 40-year-old government documents thought to have been destroyed long ago recently were made public show the US military in the early 1960's proposed making terrorist attacks in the United States and blaming them on Fidel Castro.

These documents are discussed in a recent book on the National Security Agency (NSA) entitled Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford.

These documents were produced beginning in late 1961 following the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that spring. President John F. Kennedy, angered by the inept actions of the CIA, had shifted responsibility for Cuba from that agency to the Department of Defense. Here, military strategists considered plans to create terrorist actions which would alarm the American population and stampede them into supporting a military attack on Cuba.

Under consideration in Operation Northwoods were plans:

to create a series of well-coordinated incidents in or around the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to include inciting riots, blowing up ammunition stores, aircraft and ships.

to develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.

to &sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)..foster attempts on the lives of Cuban refugees in the United States&

to explode bombs in carefully chosen locations along with the release of prepared documents pointing to Cuban complicity.

to make Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft even to simulating the shooting down of a civilian airliner.

Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods and senior military officers ordered the documents destroyed. But someone slipped up and the papers were discovered by the Assassination Records Review Board and recently released by the National Archives.

More recently, according to The New York Times (October 28, 1993), an informant named Emad Salem early in 1993 was involved with Middle Eastern terrorists connected to Osama bin Laden to develop a bomb for use against New York s World Trade Center. Salem, a former Egyptian Army officer, wanted to substitute a harmless powder for the explosive but his plan to thwart the attack was blocked by an FBI official who apparently did not want to expose the inside informant. The attack was allowed to proceed.

The February 26 explosion in the WTC resulted in six deaths, more than 1,000 casualties and damage in excess of half billion dollars.

We now see that creating crises to further political goals is a methodology well understood and utilized in the 20th century. Is this the game today?

Superficially, it all seemed straightforward enough. According to the official story, about 19 suicidal Middle Eastern terrorists, their hearts full of hatred for American freedom and democracy, hijacked four airliners, crashing two into the twin towers of New York City s World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon. The fourth reportedly crashed in western Pennsylvania after passengers attempted to fight the terrorists.

Why was the US military preparing war plans against Afghanistan months before the Sept. 11 attacks? Were they just looking for some event to propel the normally disinterested American public into a war as in the past?

How could paper documents incriminating bin Laden be found intact at the WTC but the plane s black recording boxes designed to withstand crashes were damaged beyond use?

Even days and weeks after the WTC attack, why were news cameramen prevented from photographing the ruins from certain angles, as complained about by CBS Correspondent Lou Young, who asked, What are they afraid we re going to see?

Why has the NYPD liaison to the FBI been sent packing as a security risk as reported in the Oct. 16 New York Times? Whose security is at risk? The FBI? What is it that the bureau does not want NYPD to know?

How could an obviously sophisticated terrorist plan involving perhaps as many as 100 persons and in the works for five years escape the notice of our intelligence services, especially the FBI and CIA? And why, instead of cashiering those responsible for this intelligence failure and totally restructuring these agencies, are we doubling their budgets? Will we now get twice as much failure as before?

Why did the South Tower collapse first when it was not as extensively damaged as the North Tower which burned for almost an hour and a half before collapsing?

Why did many witnesses claim to hear further explosions within the buildings? And why did the destruction of the WTC towers appear more like a controlled implosion than a tragic accident?

Why did FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledge that the list of named hijackers might not contain their real names? Doesn t everyone have to show a photo ID to claim a boarding pass? Where was the normal security?

Why was there a discrepancy of 35 names between the published passenger lists and the official death toll on all four of the ill-fated flights? Internet Columnist Gary North reported, &the published names in no instance match the total listed for the number of people on board. Why the discrepancy?

As none of these listed passengers had an Arabic-sounding names, how did the government know which were the hijackers?

Why did the seat numbers of the hijackers given by a cell phone call from Flight Attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney to Boston air traffic control not match the seats occupied by the men the FBI claimed were responsible?

Since Saudi Arabia s foreign minister claimed five of the proclaimed hijackers were not aboard the death planes and in fact are still alive and a sixth man on that list was reported to be alive and well in Tunisia, why are these names still on the FBI list?

Why were none of the named hijacker s names on any of the passenger list? If they all used aliases, how did the FBI identify them so quickly?

Why did one of the named hijackers take luggage on a suicide flight, then leave it along with an incriminating note in his car at the airport?

As for the overall investigation into the September attacks, by late October U.S. authorities conceded that most of their promising leads for finding accomplices and some of their long-held suspicions about several suspects have unraveled, according to The New York Times. Since more than 800 people have been arrested and more than 365,000 tips have been received from the public, why has nothing substantial has been forthcoming in the largest U.S. criminal investigation in history?

Why are none of the nearly 100 people still being sought by the Federal Bureau of Investigation seen as a major suspect?

Why are we bombing Afghanistan when apparently none of the listed hijackers were Afghans, but instead Arabs from various Middle Eastern nations? Since Iraq was implicated in the 1993 WTC attack, why are we not bombing that rogue nation?

Why does the heavy drinking and searching for hookers by some of the hijackers in Boston, as reported by Reuters New Service, sound more like mercenaries carousing before a mission than pious religious fundamentalists about to meet their maker?

How did the terrorists obtain top-secret White House and Air Force One codes and signals, the excuse for hustling President Bush all across the country on Sept. 11? Was this evidence of an inside job or was it, as reported by Fox News, evidence that former FBI employee and double agent Robert Hanssen delivered an updated version of the purloined computer software Promis to his Russian handlers who passed it along to bin Laden? Does this software, which was stolen from a US company during the Reagan Administration by Justice Department officials under Attorney General Ed Meese, allow outsiders carte blanch entrщe to our top security computers? (Hanssen s last job before being arrested as a spy was to upgrade the FBI s intelligence computer systems.)

If United Flight 93 crashed as the result of a struggle between heroic passengers and the hijackers, why did witnesses tell of a second plane which followed it down, falling burning debris, no deep crater and crash wreckage spread over a six-mile area indicative of an aerial explosion?

Why did news outlets describe the throat-cutting and mutilation of passengers on Flight 93 with box cutters when Time magazine on Sept. 24 reported that one of the passengers called home on a cell phone to report, We have been hijacked. They are being kind. ?

As Internet pundit Gary North stated, We need a theory of the coordinated hijackings that rests on a plausible cause-and-effect sequence that does not assume the complete failure of both check-in procedures and the on-board seating procedures on four separate flights on two separate airlines&I don t see how anyone can make an accurate judgment about who was behind the attacks until he has a plausible explanation of how hijackers got onto the planes and were not removed.

But the federal government aided by a sycophantic mass media did not allow such rational thinking to interfere with a rush to judgment that Osama bin Laden was the culprit behind the attacks.

As in the JFK assassination, authorities had a suspect even before anyone knew for certain what had happened. He was the son of a wealthy Middle Eastern oil family, Osama bin Laden, who during the Russo-Afghan War of the 1980s, received arms and financing from the US Government. Despite the fact that bin Laden has denied any knowledge of the attack, he was presumed guilty by both the government and the press. No other interpretation of the attack was allowed in the corporate mass media.

Bin Laden is a made-to-order enemy, the man reportedly behind the 1993 WTC attack and a fugitive from United States justice for more than a decade. It has been noted that the government apparently has spent more time and money chasing Microsoft s Bill Gates than in capturing bin Laden.

This may be due to the business connections between our new terrorist enemy and wealthy American companies.

According to several reports, including Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne s book The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of the BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993) and American Free Press (October 15, 2001), the reincarnation of the Washington newspaper The Spotlight, Bush family friend James R. Bath used money from Osama bin Laden s brother, Salem, to open a partnership with George W. Bush in Arbusto Energy, a West Texas drilling company. Bush believed the word arbusto to mean Bush in Spanish, although it generally refers to a shrub .

According to The Houston Chronicle, Salem bin Laden named Bath his business representative in Texas shortly after the senior Bush was named CIA director by appointed President Gerald Ford in 1975.

It was the Bush family, particularly Jeb and Neil, who were involved in the savings and loan debacle from 1989 to 1993 that cost taxpayers more than $500 billion.

Through a tangled web of Texas oilmen, wealthy Saudi sheiks and unscrupulous bankers connected to BCCI, the younger Bush eventually gained a sizable interest in a new oil company called Harken Energy. Two months before Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi troops into Kuwait, Bush sold two-thirds of his Harken stock, netting himself nearly a one million dollar profit. The stock dropped when the Iraqi invasion began.

It should be noted that during the Persian Gulf War, it was Binladen Brothers Construction (now the Binladen Group) that helped build airfields for US aircraft. The bin Laden brothers were then described as a good friend of the US government .

Later the bin Laden firm continued to be hired to construct an American air base in Saudi Arabia despite the fact that Osama had already been blamed for terrorist acts such as the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers at the Dhahran base which killed 19 Americans. A WorldNetDaily writer commented, So let s get this straight. Osama blows up our facilities, and his family gets the contract for rebuilding them. Do you get the feeling there is more going on than meets the eye?

Osama s older brother, Salem, was killed in the strange crash of an ultralight aircraft in 1988. The single-passenger craft suddenly and inexplicably veered into high-voltage electric power lines near San Antonio, Texas. The BCCI bank was closed by federal investigators in 1991 after suffering some $10 billion in losses. BCCI was a Pakistani-run institution with front companies in the Cayman Islands that used secret accounts for global money-laundering and was used by U. S. intelligence to funnel money to bin-Laden and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviet-backed government.

Another close connection between bin Laden and the Bush family is a $12-billion private international investment firm known as the Carlyle Group. Although it has removed its web site since the Sept. 11 attacks, it is know that Carlyle directors include former Reagan Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, former Bush Secretary of State James Baker and former Reagan aide and GOP operative Richard Darman. The New York Times reported that former President Bush was allowed to buy into Carlyle s investments which involve at least 164 companies around the world.

According to the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 28, 2001), George H. W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm. It has been confirmed by the senior Bush s chief of staff that Bush sent a thank you note to the bin Laden family after a social visit in early 2001.

With such connections and his son as a sitting President of the United States, the senior Bush s Carlyle involvement was questioned by Larry Klayman, chairman and general counsel of Judicial Watch, who said, Any foreign government or foreign investor trying to curry favor with the current Bush Administration is sure to throw business to the Carlyle Group. And with the former President Bush promoting the firm s investments abroad, foreign nationals could understandably confuse the Carlyle Group s interests with the interests of the United States government.

After detailing some of the Carlyle/bin Laden investments in several businesses, including aerospace industries, writer Michael C. Ruppert commented, In other words, Osama bin Laden s attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, with the resulting massive increase in the US defense budget, have just made his family a great big pile of money.

What makes these business dealings that entangle former and current American political leaders with Middle Easterners even more suspect was the announcement that several US firms were being investigated for short selling stocks just prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Short selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls. Historically, if this precedes a traumatic event, it is an indication of foreknowledge. It is widely known that the CIA uses the Promis software to routinely monitor stock trades as a possible warning sign of a terrorist attack or suspicious economic behavior.

A week after the Sept. 11 attacks, the London Times reported that the CIA had asked regulators for the Financial Services Authority in London to investigate the suspicious sales of millions of shares of stock just prior to the terrorist acts. It was hoped the business paper trail might lead to the terrorists. The Times said market regulators in Germany, Japan and the US all had received information concerning the short selling of insurance, airlines and arms companies stock , all of which fell sharply in the wake of the attacks.

City of London broker and analyst Richard Crossley noted that someone sold shares in unusually large quantities beginning three weeks before the assault on the WTC and Pentagon. He said he took this as evidence that someone had insider foreknowledge of the attacks.

What is more awful than he should aim a stiletto blow at the heart of Western financial markets?, he added. But to profit from it. Words fail me.

The US Government also admitted it was investigating short selling, which evinced a foreknowledge of the tragedy. There was unusually heavy trading in airline and insurance stocks several days before Sept. 11 which essentially bet on a drop in the worth of the stocks.

It was reported by the Interdisciplinary Center, a counter-terrorism think tank involving former Israeli intelligence officers, that insiders made nearly $16 million profit by short selling shares in American and United Airlines, the two airlines that suffered hijacking, and the investment firm of Morgan Stanley, which occupied 22 floors of the WTC.

Apparently none of the suspicious transactions could be traced to bin Laden because this news item quietly dropped from sight, leaving many people wondering if it tracked back to American firms or intelligence agencies.

According to web writer and former LA policeman Michael C. Ruppert, these transactions were handled primarily by Deutsche Bank-A. B. Brown, a firm which until 1998 was chaired by A. B. Buzzy Krongard, who today is executive director of the CIA.

Besides Krongard, other prominent Americans connected to both the CIA and Wall Street power include Clark Clifford (who was a key player in gaining legitimacy for the BCCI), John Foster and Allen Dulles (Allen oversaw the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and sat on the Warren Commission), Bill Casey, David Doherty, George Herbert Walker Bush, John Deutch, Nora Slatkin and Hank Greenburg.

As detailed in Rule by Secrecy, the CIA historically has been top heavy with members of the Wall Street elite who desire to advance their globalist agenda. It also operates a number of front companies which themselves deal in stocks and bonds. I am absolutely convinced that the Central Intelligence Agency had complete and perfect foreknowledge of the attacks, down to the date, time, place and location, Ruppert told OnLine Journal on Oct. 12.

There were other indications of foreknowledge. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown stated on that on Sept. 10 he was warned by his personal airport security not to fly the next day., according to radio station KSFO.

More ominous was a piece in the Sept. 28 edition of the Washington Post stating that officials with the instant messaging firm of Odigo in New York confirmed that two employees in Israel received text messages warning of an attack on the WTC two hours before the planes crashed into the buildings. The firm s vice president of sales and marketing, Alex Diamandis said it was possible that the warning was sent to other Odigo members, but they had not received any reports of such.

Military forces had been on a heightened state of alert for several days before the attack and several psychics claimed to have had a premonition that something was afoot.

Even the Russians got in on the act. Dr. Tatyana Koragina, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Macroeconomic Researches which is a part of the Russian Ministry of Economic Development, gained credibility due to her July prediction that an unusual catastrophe would strike America in late August ruining the economy.

In a Pravda interview, she stated, The US has been chosen as the object of financial attack because the financial center of the planet is located there. The effect will be maximal. The strike waves of economic crisis will spread over the planet&

Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Koragina was reinterviewed and asserted the powerful group behind the attacks will make new strikes. When [Americans] understand after the upcoming, new strikes, that their government can guarantee them nothing, they will panic - causing a collapse of their financial system.

Asked who was really behind this odious plan, she replied it is not the 19 terrorists identified by the FBI but rather a larger group seeking to reshape the world. She said this group of extremely powerful private persons hold total assets of about $300 trillion and intend to legitimize their power under a new global government.

Some took Dr. Koragina s eerily correct predictions as evidence that Russia itself may be behind some of the current events. It is a fact that Russia has backed several state sponsors of terrorists, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea and Cuba.

But let us not forget the indications that someone in Israel had foreknowledge of the attacks. And there were questions concerning the number of Israeli citizens killed in the attacks. The day after, the Jerusalem Post claimed two Israelis died on the hijacked airplanes and that 4,000 were missing at the WTC. A week later, a Beirut television station reported that 4,000 Israeli employees of the WTC were absent the day of the attack. This information spread across the Internet but was quickly branded a hoax. On Sept. 19, the Washington Post reported about 113 Israelis were missing at the WTC and the next day, President Bush noted more than 130 Israelis were victims. Finally, on Sept. 22, the New York Times stated There were, in fact, only three Israelis who had been confirmed as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting the towers on business and who was identified and buried.

Of all the nations of the world, Israel probably profited the most from the events of Sept. 11.

A permanent American military force in the Middle East is now assured, offering an umbrella of protection to that small nation despite the anger engendered in Arab states. After Ariel Sharon s provocative visit to the Muslim mosque in Jerusalem resulted in widespread violence by Palestinians, world opinion began to shift away from uncritical support of Israel. It has been reported that the Bush Administration was beginning to seriously consider support for a separate Palestinian state.

Israel s powerful and effective intelligence agency, the Mossad, is not beyond suspicion, according to the US Army s School of Advanced Military Studies. The Washington Times on Sept. 10, just 24 hours before the attacks, ran an article quoting officers of the school as describing the Mossad as Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.

It is generally known that the Mossad has penetrated every Arab and Muslim organization and would have had little problem in finding any number of fanatics to carry out a suicide mission in the belief they were serving Allah.

Indeed, recent news reports contended that not all of the hijackers knew their mission would end in death.

Thanks to newly revealed technology, it is now possible to theorize that none of the hijackers intended to die.

Global Hawk is the name of the latest version of a high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned air vehicle (UAV), in other words, a unmanned drone plane that can take off, conduct missions such as photographing battlefields and land by remote electronic control.

This Buck Rogers equipment made its first operational flight Oct. 7 when it was used for reconnaissance over Afghanistan in preparation for US air and missile strikes against the Taliban regime.

But this remote-controlled plane, similar to a Boeing 737 commercial airliner, was successfully tested earlier this year, first at Edwards Air Force Base and later at Edinburgh Air Force Base in southern Australia.

Prior to leaving Australia, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defense Dr. Brendan Nelson said, Global Hawk will create aviation history again during its return journey to become the first unmanned aircraft to fly non-stop from Australia to the United States west coast.

When news of Global Hawk was first released, there was speculation that the UAV technology might be used to thwart airline hijackings. Once a hijacking took place, the Global Hawk technology would be triggered and the captured plane flown to a landing at a safe location regardless of the actions of the flight crew or the hijackers.

In fact, following the attacks, the New York Times on Sept. 28 in an article on increasing air safety, mentioned new technology, probably far in the future, allowing air traffic controllers to land distressed planes by remote control . This made it seem such technology is not yet available, yet earlier this year, a former chief of British Airways suggested that such technology could be used to commandeer an aircraft from the ground and controlled remotely in the event of a hijacking.

Needless to say, there are those today who question if Global Hawk s true first operational use might have been conducted on Sept. 11. After all, as all experienced aviation and military persons well know, if a technology such as Global Hawk is publicly revealed, it most probably has been in secret use for several years.

But regardless of how the planes with the terrorists were controlled, it is clear that their managers had information, if not help, from inside the government.

Early on, the Bush White House issued a statement stating that credible evidence showed that the hijackers had access to the top secret codes of Air Force One, in which the President fled from Florida to Louisiana and on to Nebraska. This statement made the President s zig-zag journey of 9-11 more like that of a careful and prudent commander than a fleeing coward.

White House officials later said this information was untrue, leaving the public with the question of what else has the Bush people told us that is untrue, or that the their first statements were true, raising the possibility that there may have been inside help in obtaining the codes.

It is certainly true that various agencies knew for some time that suspected terrorists were operating in the United States.

As early as 1995, it was known within police and military circles and reported in VFW and American Legion publications that some 5,000 former Iraqi prisoners of war had been allowed in this country by the Clinton Administration beginning in 1993. Most had worked with the CIA at one time or another and were allowed in this country to avoid death at the hands of a vengeful Saddam Hussein.

Many of these men had been with the Iraqi Republican Guard which blew up the Kuwaiti oil fields at the end of the Gulf War, so they obviously were trained in explosives.

They were resettled in various US cities and where they formed cells. These cities included New York City, Boston, Washington, D. C., Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Kansas City and more.

These men participated in fundraising activities for the HAMAS and Hezballah terrorist chains. They have been connected to Osama bin Laden through a Cebu City connection in the Philippines, the location that convicted bomber Terry Nichols visited with his Philippine wife. At least 12 of these former POWs are believed to have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Although this may seem a strange and unreported connection, there is a wealth of information linking Iraqi operatives to Timothy McVeigh. In fact the Oct. 29 edition of U.S. News & World Report revealed that top Defense officials believe McVeigh was acting as an agent for Iraq, an astounding development in light of the extent the government continued to deny any conspiracy other that aid from Terry Nichols.

These same trained soldiers reportedly created a number of clandestine laboratories to produce biological warfare germs, including anthrax, bubonic plague, various hemorrhagic fevers and other deadly combinations.

In 1996, The FBI finally was moved to action concerning the biological threat. Ohio microbiologist Larry Wayne Harris had tried to alert the public to the danger of anthrax being smuggled into the United States by Muslim extremists but was demonized by the mass media as a conspiracy buff. In 1998, Harris, along with Nevada microbiologist William Leavitt, was arrested by the FBI in Las Vegas for possessing anthrax cultures.

The mass media broadcast this news widely, repeating the government s charge that the men were testing the deadly toxins in preparation for an attack on New York. These allegations were quietly dropped only a few days later when it was found that the men possessed a harmless veterinary anti-anthrax vaccine. They were attempting to find their own antidote to anthrax, a dangerous disease the government continued to dismiss in the mid-1990s. (US News & World Report, March 2, 1998 and March 9.)

It is interesting that at that same time, several people were warning that an anthrax vaccine ordered for all US military personnel was actually going to be used to spread the disease and provoke a United Nations takeover once enough US soldiers were incapacitated. It was claimed that this plan would be set in motion by an emergency blamed on foreigners which would hasten the use of the vaccine. Several military persons were brought before a court martial for refusing to take the vaccine.

Don t look to the corporate mass media to inform you as they have all agreed not to broadcast anything that might detract from the official government story, even though it is acknowledged that Bush s media denunciations of bin Laden have been more filled with adjectives like evil and evildoer than specific evidence.

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAR) noted that on Oct. 10, network executives representing ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and CNN were involved in a conference call with National Security Adviser and Council on Foreign Relations heavyweight Condoleeza Rice. The execs apparently agreed to limit how and what they broadcast regarding bin Laden or his Al Qaeda group. Bush people even tried unsuccessfully to have al Jazeera, called the CNN of the Mideast, broadcasting from Qatar tone down its coverage of bin Laden. They were more successful with members of our Congress, when they threatened to cut off intelligence reports if they spoke offhand to the media.

The next day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, already on the record saying Americans need to watch what they say, extended this constraint by contacting major newspapers asking that they not print full transcripts of bin Laden s interviews.

According to a FAR news release, The point is not that bin Laden or Al Qaeda deserve

equal time on US news broadcasts, but that it is troubling for government to shape or influence news content. Withholding information from the public is hardly patriotic. When the White House insists that it s dangerous to report a news event in its entirety , alarm bells should go off for journalists and the American public alike.

Here s what bin Laden did say in an interview on Sept. 28, according to the Pakistani newspaper Ummat, I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, not do I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children and common people&

In this interview, apparently suppressed in the United States, bin Laden unsurprisingly blamed the attacks on Israel, claiming, All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel&.(and) what had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya and Bosnia. (A full text of this interview may be found at http://www.khilafah.com/1421/category.php?DocumentID=2392&TagID=2)

Bin Laden went on to state, &we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the [US Government] system which makes other nations slaves to the United States or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom.

One cannot, of course, take bin Laden at face value, but then the same could be said for the US Government which has been caught in so many lies and deceit in the past that it is surprising that anyone pays any attention to official pronouncements.

What should be thoughtfully considered is the dismal record of United States foreign policy since World War II. This policy, as confirmed by the New York Times years ago, has been in the hands of the Council on Foreign Relations elite since at least 1939. This elite and its associates includes former Presidents Bush and Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, virtually every CIA director as well as a considerable number of familiar past and present government officials such as Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Wesley Clark, Strobe Talbott, Alexander Haig, Alan Greenspan, Bruce Babbitt, James A. Baker III, Sandy Berger, Colin Powell, Harold Brown, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank C. Carlucci, Richard Darman, John Deutch, Lawrence Eagleburger, Robert McFarlane, Brent Snowcroft, Condoleeza Rice and Casper Weinberger.

This policy has been one of neo-colonialism, that is the subjugation and control of other nations through military dictators or wealthy families supported by, and often placed in power, by the US military or intelligence services.

The results of this neo-colonial policy has been dismal at best and catastrophic at worst. Never mind the historical aggression displayed by American foreign policy in the Mexican War of 1848 and the Spanish-American War of 1898. Consider this policy since World War II.

In 1951, when Iran s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry in that Mideast nation, he was deposed by a coup instigated by the CIA and the Shah came to power, assuming complete control in 1963. Thousands of Iranians, perhaps millions died during the repressive rule of the Shah and his SAVAK secret police. The Shah was finally forced out in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who became the US s latest foreign enemy despite the fact that he had been on the CIA payroll while living in Paris. The Shah was granted asylum in the United States.

In Guatemala in 1954, again the CIA toppled the popularly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, which had nationalized United Fruit property. Prominent American government officials such as former CIA Director Walter Bedell Smith, then CIA Director Allen Dulles, Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs John Moors Cabot and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were all closely connected to United Fruit. An estimated 120,000 Guatemalan peasants died in the resulting military dictatorships.

Fidel Castro, with covert aid from the CIA, overthrew the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and instituted sweeping land, industrial and educational reforms as well as nationalizing American businesses. Swifty labeled a communist, the CIA then organized anti-Castro Cubans resulting in numerous attacks on Cuba and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. The island nation has been the object of US economic sanctions since that time.

More than 3,000 persons died in the wake of an invasion of the Dominican Republic by US Marines in 1965. The troops ostensibly were sent to prevent a communist takeover, although later it was admitted that there had been no proof of such a takeover.

Also in 1965, the US began the bombing of North Vietnam after President Johnson proclaimed the civil war there an aggression by the north. Two years later, American troop strength in Vietnam had grown to 380,000. US dead by the end of that Asian war totaled some 58,000 with casualties to the Vietnamese, both north and south, running more into the millions.

In 1973, the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile was overthrown by a military coup aided by the CIA. Allende was killed and some 30,000 persons died in subsequent violence and repression, including some Americans.

In 1968, General Sukarno, the dictator of Indonesia, was overthrown by the General Suharto, again with aid from the CIA. Suharto proved even more dictatorial and corrupt than his predecessor. A reported 800,000 people died during his regime.

Another 250,000 persons died in 1975 during the brutal invasion of East Timor by the Suharto regime aided by the US Government and Henry Kissinger.

In 1979, the powerful Somoza family, which had ruled Nicaragua since 1937, was finally overthrown and Daniel Ortega was elected president. CIA-backed Contra insurgents operating from Honduras fought a protracted war to oust the Ortega government in which an estimated 30,000 people died. The ensuing struggle came to include such shady dealing in arms and drugs that it created a scandal in the United States called Iran-Contra, which involved selling arms to Iran and using the profits to support the Contras.

US Marines landed in Lebanon in 1982 in an attempt to preventing further bloodshed between occupying Israeli troops and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Thousands died in the resulting civil war, including several hundred Palestinians massacred in refugee camps by Christian forces. Despite the battleship shelling of Beirut, American forces were withdrawn in 1984 after a series of bloody attacks on them.

In 1983, US troops invaded the tiny Caribbean island nation of Grenada after a leftist government was installed. The official explanation was to rescue a handful of American students who initially said they didn t need rescuing.

For nearly 20 years, during the 1970s and 1980s, the US Government gave aid and arms to the right wing government of the Republic of El Salvador for use against it leftist enemies. By 1988, some 70,000 Salvadorans had died.

More than one million persons died in the 15-year battle in Angola between the Marxist government aided by Cuban troops and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, supported by South Africa and the US Government.

When Muammur al-Qaddafi tried to socialize the oil-rich North African nation of Libya beginning with his takeover in 1969, he drew the wrath of the US Government. In 1981, it was claimed that Qaddafi had sent hit teams to the United States to assassinate President Reagan and in 1986, following the withdrawal of U.S. oil companies from Libya, an air attack was launched which missed Qaddafi but killed several people including his infant daughter.

In 1987, an Iraqi missile attack on the US frigate Stark resulted in 37 deaths. Shortly afterward, the Iraqi president apologized for the incident. In 1988, a US Navy ship shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf resulting in 290 deaths. The Reagan Administration simply called it a mistake.

Thousands of freedom seeking Chinese were killed in Beijing s Tiananmen Square in 1989 after hardliners conferred with former President Richard Nixon on how to deal with the dissidents. Nixon, of course, was the only US president to resign under threat of criminal indictment.

About 8,000 Panamanians died over Christmas, 1989, when President George H. W. Bush sent US troops to invade that Central American nation to arrest his former business partner, Manuel Noriega. The excuse was that Noriega was involved in the importation of drugs to the United States. U.S. News & World Report noted that in 1990, the amount of drugs moving through Panama had doubled.

Iraqi casualties, both military and civilian, totaled more than 300,000 during the short Persian Gulf War of 1991. It has been estimated that more than one million Iraqis, including women and children, have died as a result of the continued missile and air attacks over the past decade as well as economic sanctions against that nation.

Also in 1991, the United States suspended assistance to Haiti after the election of a liberal priest sparked military action. Eventually, US troops were deployed.

The names of nations that have felt the brunt of US CIA and/or military activity as a result of foreign policy include Somalia, Afghanistan, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Brazil, Chad, Sudan and many others. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated during the Vietnam War, My government is the world s leading purveyor of violence.

He did not say my country or my people, it is the government, or rather those who control it, that are responsible. Although we the distracted and unaware citizens who claim to live in a democracy must take our fair share of the blame.

Is there precedence in history for what is happening to America today? So much so that there is not enough space to present it all. Nero burned Rome, blamed it on his enemies and took dictatorial power.

But consider what happened just last century. On February 27, 1933, the German Reichstag or Parliament was destroyed by fire. Hitler and his Nazis blamed the destruction on communist terrorists. They even caught one, a retarded Dutch youth named Marinus van der Lubbe who carried a Communist Party card. After some time in custody, the youth confessed to being the arsonist. However, later investigation found that one person could not have started the mammoth blaze and that incendiaries had been carried into the building through a tunnel which led to the offices of Hitler s closest partner, Hermann Goering.

Less than a month later, on March 24, 1933, at Hitler s urging, a panicky German Parliament voted 441 to 94 to pass an Enabling Act which was the starting point for Hitler s dictatorship. As a result of this act, Germans soon saw gun confiscation, national identity cards, racial profiling, a national security chief (Heinrich Himmler) and later, mass murders and incarcerations in concentration camps.

One of the western leaders who supported Hitler and his policies was Prescott Bush, grandfather of President George W. Bush. He must have taken notice of Hitler s method for gaining unwarranted power.

Since the Reichstag fire, the Bush family and their associates in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and Bilderbergers have often mimicked Hitler s tactics of creating a problem, offering a draconian solution and advancing their agenda through any resulting compromise.

The real enemy is whoever is behind the Sept. 11 terror attack. Osama bin Laden, so closely connected to the financial interests of the Bush family and the CIA, may be the mastermind or he may be a convenient scapegoat, yet another provocation to stampeded Americans into another war for oil.

We must thoughtfully consider where the real source of terror lies --- with one bearded fanatic in an impoverished Middle Eastern country or with those who would profit while shredding the US Constitution in the name of defending freedom.