Presidents get very little credit for doing things they said they would do, and that we want done. Obama announced today that “America’s war in Iraq will be over” by the end of the year. This is what he promised us, and this is what he ran on in 2008. Still, it feels like there’s a feeling of “meh, well he told us he’d end the war. Big deal.” It’s not a feeling of sarcasm, but of indifference.
I am indescribably glad that we’re ending a war we should never have started. I also value a president that keeps his word, especially when he keeps his word on a policy or action I agree with. Also, I praise Obama for ending a war. Very few presidents get to announce that a war has ended. Still, I feel like it won’t be remembered as a major accomplishment that Obama ended a war. The media will rush off to the next conflict, protest, or attention-deficit grabbing topic.
Pause for a moment, and give President Obama credit for bringing our troops home.
A couple months ago, “Occupy Wall Street” wasn’t a phrase. The Arab Spring was just ending; it was spilling over into Israel, which was having its own Israeli Summer. People were camped out on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv protesting many of the same things as those before them in Tahrir Square in Egypt and those after them in Zuccotti Park in New York. “Social justice isn’t only about alleviating poverty. It is about a very simple idea: people should be able to make a decent living if they invest in their education, take a lot of responsibility and work hard.”
In February, I wrote an article about why there would be no protests in Israel.
Why should people here take to the streets? We have democracy, don’t we? Free press, free consumption, a flourishing free market. People aren’t going hungry, Facebook and Twitter are open to everyone.
But the truth is that it is difficult to expect the Israeli public to take to the streets, because in fact it has too many things to protest….continued occupation, the recurrent wars, depriving workers’ rights, diminishing health and welfare services, increasing and aggravating societal gaps of all kinds, and – in more recent years – eroding democratic rights and personal freedoms, and growing government corruption.
The difference I see between this critique of Israel, and any critique of America, is the word ‘occupation, and the difference between the word ‘Israeli’ or ‘American’.
I was, I need hardly point out, quite mistaken. Israelis took to the streets to protest – indeed, to occupy – several months later. The reasons should be obvious. Graduates with an MA in Clinical Psychology found that
after having worked around the clock to enter one of the most competitive programs in higher education; after having studied about the human soul and how to alleviate psychological suffering, the outlook for their future was bleak.
After finishing their MA, in order to qualify as clinical psychologists, they have to do a four-year internship, at least 30 hours a week, for which they receive less than NIS 2,000 a month. This means that all of them will have to take additional jobs, often late into the night, to make ends meet. To make things worse: many of them will have to wait for up to three years to find a slot for the internship. “I finished my studies to continue working as a waiter”, one of them said.
You may have noticed that this situation is not unique to Israel. Indeed, the lucky college graduates in America are able to begin or keep their job waiting tables or tending bars; the unlucky ones have occasional volunteer jobs (or pay money to have an internship), and most live at home with their parents because nothing else is economically feasible.
The reasons for Occupy Wall Street should be obvious. “What we’re demanding – what people in the Occupy movement are demanding – is the same responsibility from these large institutions, and the so-called 1%. It’s really that simple.” And, “many people are asking why? While the occupation of city squares all over the nation is inspiring many people, others are (understandably) a bit perplexed. But I think people understand more than they know. Something is very wrong with our country and our world. The rich got richer from our economic crisis and the poor barely got the crumbs from their banquet table.”
And, “in the midst of the financial crash of 2008, enormous debts between banks were renegotiated. Yet only a fraction of troubled mortgages have gotten the same treatment. [Professor David Graeber] said: ‘Debts between the very wealthy or between governments can always be renegotiated and always have been throughout world history. … It’s when you have debts owed by the poor to the rich that suddenly debts become a sacred obligation, more important than anything else. The idea of renegotiating them becomes unthinkable.'” It’s not surprising that “President Barack Obama has proposed a jobs plan and further efforts to reduce the deficit. One is a so-called millionaire’s tax, endorsed by billionaire Obama supporter Warren Buffett. The Republicans call the proposed tax ‘class warfare.'”
After all, we see a
powerful cultural protest against the corruption of capitalism in the last decade, the crony-ridden political system that even now is trying to stall or gut Dodd-Frank, and against the staggering inequalities that now exist in this country and threaten to change its core democratic nature. And this is a good thing. It’s a good thing because it provides essential balance to the Tea Party’s case against government as a whole. Only one entity can restore some equity to the system and it’s government. Disempowering government at a time when the current system is consigning millions to decades of unemployment while rewarding a fraction of that with simply unimaginable rewards … that’s a recipe for social unrest.
In other words, this street movement is emerging to demand some accountability from the bankers who helped destroy this economy, from the politicians who used our money to save them, from the GOP even now balking at basic regulations on Wall Street to help prevent another crash, and from Obama whose conciliatory style so many now regard as betrayal.
It’s a question of movement and mood. The anger was first directed at Obama from the right (and largely redirected away from Bush and Cheney). Now it is being directed at those who were rescued after staggering recklessness. Each mood creates a different climate.
Or we could just read communiques put out from Occupy, which still has a somewhat participatory, horizontal leadership, structure. “On Saturday we held a general assembly, two thousand strong. … By 8 p.m. on Monday we still held the plaza, despite constant police presence. … We are building the world that we want to see, based on human need and sustainability, not corporate greed.” Not everyone who attempts to interview the group appreciates the style, though. Although the group “declares it is for and by everyone, that everyone has equal say and no claim to leadership over anyone else. I [Michael Morgenstern] was told that having a blog did not qualify me as media; that if I wanted to count as media, I would have to attend a media leadership training the next day, and until then I would have to leave.”
Also, the reaction from the establishment left, which for years and decades has been working on the same cause as Occupy Wall Street, has been somewhat mixed or unflattering. “There is no danger that the protesters who have occupied squares, parks and plazas across the nation in defiance of the corporate state will be co-opted by the Democratic Party or groups like MoveOn. The faux liberal reformers, whose abject failure to stand up for the rights of the poor and the working class, have signed on to this movement because they fear becoming irrelevant”. Union leaders, as they bargain away rights and benefits of the rank and file, know the foundations are shaking. “So do Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi. So do the array of ‘liberal’ groups and institutions, including the press, that have worked to funnel discontented voters back into the swamp of electoral politics and mocked those who called for profound structural reform.” The official Obama campaign position is that the movement is exciting, but that the campaign can’t take a position or help in any way.
Chris Hedges, perhaps a tad pessimistic, found that “these protesters in that one glorious moment did what the traditional ‘liberal’ establishment has steadily refused to do—fight back. Resistance, real resistance, to the corporate state was displayed when a couple of thousand protesters, clutching mops and brooms, early Friday morning forced the owners of Zuccotti Park and the New York City police to back down from a proposed attempt to expel them in order to ‘clean’ the premises.” However, in a realpolitik sense, Hedges is right that
tinkering with the corporate state will not work. We will either be plunged into neo-feudalism and environmental catastrophe or we will wrest power from corporate hands. This radical message, one that demands a reversal of the corporate coup, is one the power elite, including the liberal class, is desperately trying to thwart. But the liberal class has no credibility left. It collaborated with corporate lobbyists to neglect the rights of tens of millions of Americans, as well as the innocents in our imperial wars. The best that liberals can do is sheepishly pretend this is what they wanted all along. Groups such as MoveOn and organized labor will find themselves without a constituency unless they at least pay lip service to the protests. The Teamsters’ arrival Friday morning to help defend the park signaled an infusion of this new radicalism into moribund unions rather than a co-opting of the protest movement by the traditional liberal establishment. The union bosses, in short, had no choice.
The Occupy Wall Street movement, like all radical movements, has obliterated the narrow political parameters. It proposes something new. It will not make concessions with corrupt systems of corporate power. It holds fast to moral imperatives regardless of the cost. It confronts authority out of a sense of responsibility. It is not interested in formal positions of power. It is not seeking office. It is not trying to get people to vote. It has no resources. It can’t carry suitcases of money to congressional offices or run millions of dollars of advertisements. All it can do is ask us to use our bodies and voices, often at personal risk, to fight back. It has no other way of defying the corporate state. This rebellion creates a real community instead of a managed or virtual one. It affirms our dignity. It permits us to become free and independent human beings.
In fact, Occupy Wall Street is something of a moral imperative. “What kind of nation is it that spends far more to kill enemy combatants and Afghan and Iraqi civilians than it does to help its own citizens who live below the poverty line? What kind of nation is it that permits corporations to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves to save their sons and daughters? What kind of nation is it that tosses its mentally ill onto urban heating grates? What kind of nation is it that abandons its unemployed while it loots its treasury on behalf of speculators? What kind of nation is it that ignores due process to torture and assassinate its own citizens? What kind of nation is it that refuses to halt the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry, dooming our children and our children’s children?”
showed that hundreds of defense contractors found guilty of civil fraud received more than $1.1 trillion in defense contracts since 2001. The study only took into account companies that were found to have defrauded taxpayers of more than $1 million dollars.
More than $573 billion went directly to companies that were guilty of defrauding taxpayers, and when you factor in the awards that went to the parent companies of those contractors, the total is $1.1 trillion. Of that $573 billion, over two-thirds–$398 billion—went to companies after they had been found guilty of fraud.
Some of the country’s biggest defense contractors were implicated. “The ugly truth is that virtually all of the major defense contractors in this country for years have been engaged in systemic fraudulent behavior, while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money,” said Sanders. According to the report:
Lockheed Martin in 2008 paid $10.5 million to settle charges that it defrauded the government by submitting false invoices on a multi-billion dollar contract connected to the Titan IV space launch vehicle program. That didn’t seem to sour the relationship between Lockheed and the Defense Department, which gave Lockheed $30.2 billion in contracts in fiscal year 2009, more than ever before.
In another case, Northrop Grumman paid $62 million in 2005 to settle charges that it “engaged in a fraud scheme by routinely submitting false contract proposals,” and “concealed basic problems in its handling of inventory, scrap and attrition.” Despite the serious charges of pervasive and repeated fraud, Northrop Grumman received $12.9 billion in contracts the next year, 16 percent more than the year before.
Rabbi Geoffrey Mitelman, on Why Judaism Embraces Science:
“There’s a great Yiddish expression that says, “If I knew God, I’d be God.” In fact, I think that claiming that you “know God’s will” is an act of incredible hubris. Instead, what we say about God has much more to say about us than about God…
And while I can only speak personally here, to me, “God” isn’t really a noun at all — it’s a verb.
Here’s why. The most common name that God gives Godself in the Torah is “YHVH,” a name that is sometimes thought to be so holy that no one was allowed to pronounce it. But that’s not exactly right — it’s not that “YHVH” was not allowed to be pronounced, it’s that it is literally unpronounceable, since it consists of four Hebrew vowels (yod, hay, vav and hay). By the way, that’s also why some people incorrectly call this name “Yahweh,” since (as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner once said), if you tried to pronounce a name that was all vowels, you’d risk serious respiratory injury.
But even more importantly, the name YHVH is actually a conflation of all the tenses of the Hebrew verb “to be.” God’s name could be seen as “was-is-will be,” so God isn’t something you can’t capture or name — God is only something you can experience….
God responds that God’s name is “Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” which is often translated as “I am what I am.” But it could also be translated as, “I am what I will be.” So God is whatever God will be — we simply have no idea. Indeed, for my own theology, I believe that God is found in the “becoming,” transforming “what will be” into “what is….”
Science is about creating hypotheses and testing data against these theories. Judaism is about how we act to improve this world, here and now.”
For the second time in a month, I announce that I was without wireless internet in my domain (er, home),which severely limited my ability to write social commentary here.
Indeed, I can quote myself from a few weeks ago, and the statement is almost the same.
If you’ve been following along you may have noticed a lapse in fairly regular discourse here. As I was preparing a many-part series about, and to be begun on, 9/11 the technology so may of us take for granted was turned off. Lacking in wireless internet, my internet was limited to hard-wiring my computer in other rooms in the house, or Starbucks.
I now have wireless internet, for which I am doubly thankful now that I’ve experienced trying to write, email, facebook, and work without a dependable connection.
I have returned, with a backlog of things to write about, about ten days of news I’ve missed, and things that should be done.
Unlike various government agencies, including the Post Office, which face shut down or reduction in funding, I think I can continue to provide my usual services now that I have internet.
Authors are best able to write about what they know (non-fiction and fiction), or an extrapolation of what could happen based on what they know (fiction and science fiction). Only occasionally are authors able to capture the human ideal, which makes their work resonate through ages beyond their own. Aristotle, K’ung Fu-Tse (Confucius), Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, Thomas Paine, and countless others fall into this category. So does Victor Hugo, of Notre Dame De Paris fame. A few paragraphs in his lesser-known work 1793, about the French revolution, encapsulates perfectly likely reaction to at least one of two recent events – the killing of US-born Anwar al-Awlaki by US forces in a foreign country, and the state-ordered execution of Troy Davis, a man probably innocent of his accused crimes.
Hugo writes, in Book Three, Chapter VI,
Among these men [at the Convention who were] full of passions were mingled men filled with dreams. Utopia was there under all its forms, under its warlike form which admitted the scaffold, and under its innocent form which would abolish capital punishment; a spectre as it faced thrones, an angel as it faced the people. Side by side with the spirits that fought, were the spirits that brooded. Some had war in their heads, other had peace; one brain Carnot, brought forth fourteen armies; another intellect, Jean Debry, meditated a universal democratic federation.
Hugo switches in mid-paragraph from talk of peace or war – two drastically different actions that spring from the same impulse – to talk of governing philosophy, which is the subject of peace or war on a domestic level. It continues, unbroken:
Amid this furious eloquence, among these shrieking and growling voices, there were fruitful silences. Lakanal remained voiceless, and combined in his thoughts the system of public education; Lanthenas held his peace, and created the primary schools; Revelliere-Lepeaux kept still, and dreamed of the elevation of Philosophy to the dignity of Religion. Others occupied themselves with questions of detail, smaller and more practical. Guyton-Morveaux studied means for rendering the hospitals healthy; Maire, the abolition of existing servitudes; Jean-Bon-Saint-Andre, the suppression of imprisonment for debt and constraint of the person; Romme, the proposition of Chappe; Duboe, the arrangement of the archives; Coren-Fustier, the creation of the Cabinet of Anatomy and the Museum of Natural History; Guyomard, river navigation and the damming of the Escaut. Art had its fanatics and even its monomaniacs. On the twenty-first of January, while the head of monarchy was falling on the Place de la Revolution, Bezard the representative of the Oise, when to see a picture of Rubens, which had been found in a garret in the Rue Saint-Lazare. Artists, orators, prophets, giant-men like Danton, child-men like Coots, gladiators and philosophers, all had the same goal, Progress.
All had the same goal, Progress. “Nothing Disconcerted them. The grandeur of the Convention was the searching how much reality there is in what men call the impossible.”
The essence of the Convention is that we are all things at once: peace and war, noise and silence, possible and impossible, clinging to the past and progressing toward the future.
In 2001 the FAA and NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) were focused on external threats and traditional hijackings. The government report tells us that “the FAA was mandated by law to regulate the safety and security of civil aviation.” The Air Traffic Control System Command Center was different from the FAA Operations Center, which was in charge of incidents, “including accidents and hijackings.”
“On 9/11, the four hijacked aircraft were monitored mainly by the [control] centers in Boston, New York, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. Each center thus had part of the knowledge of what was going on across the system. What Boston knew was not necessarily known by [the other] centers, or for that matter by the Command Center in [Virginia] or by FAA headquarters in Washington.”
Controllers track aircraft by data emitted from transponders on planes. All planes over 10,000 feet are required to have their transponder on, each of which is unique. On 9/11, three of the four planes that were hijacked had the transponder turned off. The airlines could be tracked by radar, but would not be recognized as a unique plane. Not surprisingly, “the simultaneous loss of radio and transponder signal would be a rare and alarming occurrence, which would normally indicate a catastrophic system failure or an aircraft crash. In all of these instances, the job of the controller was to reach out to the aircraft, the parent company of the aircraft, and other planes in the vicinity in an attempt to reestablish communications and set the aircraft back on course. Alarm bells would not start ringing until these efforts – which could take five minutes or more – were tried and had failed.” In those five minutes, a plane could easily go fifty miles.
Like so many bureaucratic relics, NORAD was a reactionary system designed to detain Russian Communism. A partnership with Canada to protect the North American airspace, NORAD was created to”defend the airspace and protect the continent. That mission does not distinguish between internal and external threats; but because NORAD was created to counter the Soviet threat, it came to define its job as defending against external attacks.”
The Cold War is long over; “members of the air defense community advocated the importance of air sovereignty against emerging ‘asymmetric threats’ to the United States…NORAD perceived the dominant threat to be from cruise missiles. Other threats were identified during the late 1990s, including terrorists’ use of aircraft as weapons. Exercises were conducted to counter this threat, but they were not based on actual intelligence. In most instances, the main concern was the use of such aircraft to deliver weapons of mass destruction.”
Before 9/11, “it was understood that an order to shoot down a commercial aircraft would have to be issued by the National Command Authority (a phrase used to describe the president and secretary of defense). Exercise planners also assumed that the aircraft would originate from outside the United States, allowing time to identify the target and scramble interceptors. The threat of terrorists hijacking commercial airlines within the United States – and using them as guided missiles – was not recognized by NORAD before 9/11.”
Despite what seems like a bureaucratic mess, the FAA and NORAD worked together before 9/11, and there were probably several other agencies who did their job properly, or even stepped beyond mere formality.
The FAA and NORAD had developed protocols for working together in the event of a hijacking. As they existed on 9/11, the protocols for the FAA to attain military assistance from NORAD required multiple levels of notification and approval at the highest levels of government.
FAA guidance to controllers on hijack procedures assumed that the aircraft pilot would notify the controller via radio or by “squawking” a transponder code of “7500” – the universal code for a hijack in progress. Controllers would notify their supervisors, who in turn would inform management all the way up to FAA headquarters in Washington. Headquarters had a hijack coordinator, who was the director of the FAA Office of Civil Aviation Authority or his or her designate.
If a hijack was confirmed, procedures called for the hijack coordinator on duty to contact the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center (NMCC) and to ask for a military escort aircraft to follow the flight, report anything unusual, and aid search and rescue in the event of an emergency. The NMCC would then seek approval from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to provide military assistance. If the approval was given, the orders would be transmitted down NORAD’s chain of command.
The NMCC would keep the FAA hijack coordinator up to date and help the FAA centers coordinate directly with the military. NORAD would receive tracking information for the hijacked aircraft either from joint use radar or from the relevant FAA air traffic control facility. Every attempt would be made to have the hijacked aircraft squawk 7500 to help NORAD track it.
The protocols did not contemplate an intercept. They assumed the fighter escort would be discreet, “vectored to a position five miles directly behind the hijacked aircraft,” where it could perform its mission to monitor the aircraft’s flight path.
In sum, the protocols in place on 9/11 for the FAA and NORAD to respond to a hijacking presumed that
- the hijacked aircraft would be readily identifiable and would not attempt to disappear;
- there would be time to address the problem through the appropriate FAA and NORAD chains of command; and
- the hijacking would take the traditional form: that is, it would not be a suicide hijacking designed to convert the aircraft into a guided missile
We can all agree with the government report, which informs us that “on the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen.” As the saying goes, hindsight is 20-20.
What does 20-20 hindsight tell us about the death of Nick Berg? We last took the work of an author who chose to remain anonymous – perhaps for good reason – and allowed his speculation that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi probably was not actually responsible for the death of Nick Berg. Our anonymous author blames the Mossad – Israel’s intelligence agency – for the death. Some of the fourteen suspicious parts of the videotaped execution, pointed out by our author, include:
- Why does a man who wears a scarf to hide his identity announce his name to the public?
- Why is the Muslim executioner’s face covered with a scarf when tradition suggests that Muslim executioners do not wear facial coverings?
- Why would five Muslim executioners be dressed in all-black commando style outfits(except for the clean white sneakers), when you rarely see terrorists in uniform in other videos and news clips?
- Why would there be a general consensus that the dialect spoken by the terrorist in the video was not the same as that of the terrorist identified by the CIA, Al-Zarqawi?(Interestingly, the US Army had reported Al-Zarqawi killed by the bombing of Falluja, a month earlier.) Even more interesting, their Arabic is heavily accented(Russian, Jordanian, Egyptian). An aside comment in the video – in Russian – has been translated as “do it quickly”. The Russian presence becomes an increasingly important factor as this story emerges. It is not insignificant.
- How does it happen that the white chair shown in the execution video is the same style and color of the chairs shown in videos of Abu Ghraib prison, and the painted wall and floor boards the same color as that of Abu Ghraib? (Interestingly,subsequent news revelations by U.S. General Karpansky about the prison have identified “secret” holding sites, which allowed Israeli interrogators to keep prisoners out of public site.)
- Why would the Iraqi Police deny holding Berg as a prisoner when the FBI claimed he was an Iraqi Police prisoner?
- Why would the US Military deny holding Berg as a prisoner, when the FBI had notified his parents, after investigating, that Berg was a prisoner of the US military
- Why would firearms experts state that the AK-47 carried by one of the purported terrorists in the video was actually a “Galil” – an Israeli made, enhanced AK-47. It is very expensive and generally unavailable to Muslim “terrorists.”
These many facts may not be enough to convince that al-Zarqawi didn’t do it. But, just as it shouldn’t be taken for granted that an anonymous author claims al-Zarqawi didn’t do it, and that the Mossad did it, nor should it be taken for granted that al-Zarqawi was responsible. We’ll never know; much like a court of law in which the defendant is dead, we’ll have to go based on probable cause and circumstantial evidence. “There are just too many coincidences and inconsistencies to be ignored. (Web sites on the Internet list as many as fifty such discrepancies, but these appear to be the most pertinent.) Together, they suggest that someone pretended to be Al Qaeda or Musab al-Zarqawi, and did a relatively poor job at it.”
This is Part Three of a many part series, synthesizing the stories of 9/11, its aftermath, and our future.
An incredibly prescient letter to those seeking freedom in the Middle East was written a few months ago. In terms of news, it is quite old, but in terms of aspiration and inspiration it is quite up to date.
I am an Israeli-born American citizen. And I can tell you (and I am sure you already know) that in Israel and America and much of the world your revolutions have stirred up mixed emotions.
Some among us tell us to fear what is happening. They tell us that by tearing down the old regimes in your nations you have opened the door to a takeover by militants who would support violence toward us. They point to every incident of violence or expression of anger toward us as evidence of a threat.
I write this letter because I need you to know that I don’t share their fear. I don’t pretend to know what will happen in your countries. But I do know that when I see what you are doing on the streets of Cairo and Tunis and Tehran and Damascus, fear is not what I feel. Instead, I feel admiration. For your courage, for your dignity, for your audacity.
I am not naïve. I know some among your countrymen may truly hate Israel and America and the West. But I refuse to assume you share that feeling, or that you will be fooled by efforts to distract your revolutions with appeals to old hatreds. The tyrants who have ruled your nations and the would-be dictators seeking to hijack your movements will certainly try to redirect anger toward Israel, America and the West as a path to gain power. But if, as you say and I believe, you truly took to the streets to bring dignity to your own lives, I am confident you won’t be swayed from that goal by tired rhetoric and false threats.
I have this confidence because when I watch your revolution, I don’t see an enemy. You look like someone I would meet in a café or a conference or a classroom. Like someone I would start a business with or approach as a customer. Someone I could find on Facebook or follow on Twitter.
We have the choice to fear those who desire a better world. They’re called, derogatorily, ‘progressives,’ ‘protesters,’ and ‘activists.’ But I’ll join this American-Israeli Jew, a citizen of the world, in saying that “I want you to know that me, and many more like me, are inspired by what you are doing. We are going to stand beside you. We will continue to support you through what will surely be a long struggle to build a future for yourselves and your countrymen that is based on freedom, democracy, human dignity and peace.”
If we choose to fear these people, we fear that which is best within ourselves. I would rather “acknowledge what we have in common and start trying to work together, rather than focusing on ancient grudges, preconceived notions and a history that serves no one but those who want to control our lives.” That’s not an easy task; if it was, our problems would have long ago been solved. But that’s no reason to delay. It’s no reason to lose hope.
Progress, that dreaded thing desired by progressives, does not occur without action. That action need not be violent or rebellious, yet I see some hints of desire for change in saying “we know the fundamental truth of our moment is that it falls to us to clean up messes left to us by preceding generations.” We must now rebuild, and build the world we want to see, a world that is fair for everyone and gives everyone the chances they both need and deserve.
The United Nations is in session for its annual meeting, so it must be time for some sparring rhetoric between Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the United States. Beyond the usual clash of rhetoric, “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says that as an engineer he’s sure the twin towers were not brought down by jetliners. Ahmadinejad, in an interview with The Associated Press, says it would have been impossible for two jetliners to bring down the towers simply by hitting them. He says some kind of planned explosion must have taken place.”
At some point, we’ll return to the discussion of what caused the towers to fall. The North and South towers were each hit by a plane. At 8:46:40 – 47 minutes after takeoff – American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower. The plane was hijacked about fifteen minutes into the flight; in the duration of the flight two stewardesses kept contact with the ground by phone. At 9:03:11 United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower. It took off at 8:14 and was hijacked about thirty minutes later. Did the planes cause each building to fall?
Two more planes were hijacked and two more planes crashed that day. Whether these two planes that were hijacked were the same planes as the ones that crashed will delight the discussion of those who pay attention to basic laws of nature for years to come. “At 9:37:46 American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, traveling at approximately 530 mph.” However, as will be discussed in the anonymously authored report at a later time, and as you could find for yourself, the hole created is much smaller than the size of a jumbo jet. Whatever the reality is, damage was done to the Pentagon, and the anonymous report will later look at why.
“The hijackers had planned to take flights scheduled to depart at 7:45 (American 11), 8:00 (United 175 and United 93), and 8:10 (American 77). Three of the flights had actually taken off within 10 to 15 minutes of their planned departure times. United 93 would ordinarily have taken off about 15 minutes after pulling away from the gate. When it left the ground at 8:42, the flight was running more than 25 minutes late.” The names of the four flights of September 11th have become engrained in our cultural memory; not least United Flight 93. It appears to be the only story of successful resistance by passengers to the hijacking, if dying in a field is to be considered success.
Over the past decade the world has “seen the emergence of two major terrorist groups – Osama Bin Laden’s ‘Al Qaeda’ and more recently, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Terrorist incidents around the globe have been attributed to both groups, with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi establishing global notoriety with the video-taped beheading of three hostages in Iraq.” Just after the video-taped beheading of Nicholas Berg, Eugene Armstrong, and Nick Hensley, al-Zarqawi swore allegiance to Bin Laden, although they had always been reported as rivals. This created “the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq that helped justify the US invasion – a link that could not be proven, until someone created it and drew world attention to it.”
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi comes from an impoverished and uneducated background. Osama Bin Laden came from a wealthy and well-educated family. However, “if funding is a prerequisite to the level of activity supported by terrorists, one is forced to conclude that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is funded from some unknown source. One is also forced to conclude that al-Zarqawi had access to passport forgery capabilities, and that he had significant connections for the purchase of weapons, explosives, chemicals and more. More simply, the newer, more public Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq represented a mature, sophisticated intelligence operation.” Of course, “CIA and British intelligence made Osama the success he is, and as long as he threatened the stability of Iran, or the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, he received all the arms and money he required.” It should be obvious that al-Zarqawi required the same advantages, if he was to be the same kind of operative. How does this relate to the beheadings al-Zarqawi is accused of?
A careful review of the facts which surround these executions suggests that little is at is appears. An alternative interpretation of the events is suggested:
1. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is most likely a Mossad (Israeli intelligence) counter-espionage front (Whether this group is the original al-Zarqawi, or someone assuming his identity becomes immaterial.) This front was probably established under the direction of General Meir Dagan, current head of the Mossad who was responsible for setting up an Israel intelligence network in Iraq after the Iraqi-Kuwait War
2. The executed hostages of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were probably not innocent bystanders and victims, but rather players in the world of espionage. To that point, a number of other, less publicized beheadings were broadcast as the executions of CIA agents. (In passing, one should note that no “Israeli” agents have been publicly executed by this group, although it is reported that Dagan did set up a network in Iraq.)
3. The hostages executed in Iraq were most likely executed by the Mossad for five reasons: 1) to create publicity and credibility for their Muslim front in Iraq, 2) to create American support for Israel against the Muslim threat to Israel’s existence, 3)to clean-up loose ends in their own intelligence world, 4) to send a message to other operatives and intelligence trespassers that the Middle East belongs to the Mossad,and that Mossad deals with its enemies harshly, and 5) to foster divisiveness amongst the Iraqi Muslim population, ultimately resulting in break-up of Iraq into smaller countries – a Balkanization of Iraq.
4. There are, in all likelihood, two arms to the Mossad: one of which is patriotic and public-service oriented, with another that is a more-or-less a rogue operation, heavily infiltrated by Russian mafia, ex-KGB and ex-Israeli Special Forces. This latter side is the ‘dark side’. This group has extensive connections to the international black market in armaments originating from former Soviet republics. It is linked to the conservative right-wing of Israeli politics: Sharon and the Likud Party. The different sides of the Mossad work together when it serves their own purposes – but neither controls the other
However incredible this may seem, a review of the public record suggests this interpretation is far more credible than the current, common view that the Muslim terrorists are fanatics striking out against America…The probability that the level of sophistication demonstrated by Musab al-Zarqawi is not the product of a well-established intelligence organization is pretty slim.
The contention that Musab al-Zarqawi is a “front” for a Western ally is not isolated to this terrorist group. As shall later be shown, this contention is consistent with the reports that show that most of the Muslim terrorist groups which ring the former Soviet Union (the “Islamic Liberation Party, the World Wide Islamic Front, the Defenders of the Shariat, the Mukhadjiri movement, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and Al Qaeda) are funded and controlled out of Western capitals by Western diplomats.
This is Part Two of a many part series, synthesizing the stories of 9/11, its aftermath, and our future.
The Dole Blog 