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If what I say is right, the whole
US
government should end up behind bars.
- Andreas von Bülow, former German governmment
minister, author of "Die CIA und der 11. September."
At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promised: “What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict. It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before.” The invasion that ensued was, like all wars, destructive and resulted in the loss of thousands of lives. Yet Baghdad fell in a mere three weeks and just six weeks after the invasion commenced, President Bush announced: “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” Despite the death and destruction, it was hardly a war of a ‘force,’ ‘scope’ and ‘scale’ beyond what had been seen before.
However, before it began, there were indications that some people wanted a far more destructive war than that which ensued. For example, ridiculous as it may now sound, it was suggested that Britain and America might use nuclear weapons against Iraq. As The Guardian reported at the time:
From last year’s US defence review and the testimony of the Defence Secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, to the defence select committee last March it was clear that a major change in the US and UK nuclear policy was taking place.
For the first time Britain and America were contemplating using nuclear weapons against an enemy using only chemical or biological weapons.
Referring to “states of concern”, and Saddam Hussein in particular, Mr Hoon told the committee: “They can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons.”
A month before the invasion, Hoon repeated his warning: “Saddam can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use nuclear weapons.” As investigative journalist John Pilger points out: “No British minister has ever made such an outright threat.”
Thankfully, the invasion passed without our resorting to nuclear weapons. But it seemed the desire for a bigger conflict remained, with attempts beginning almost immediately to find a new, more formidable enemy. In particular, Iran and Syria seemed next on the list for ‘liberation.’ At a press conference in July 2003, President Bush issued a stern warning to both countries, accusing them of harboring terrorists. “This behaviour is completely unacceptable,” he said, “and states that continue to harbour terrorists will be held completely accountable.” Three months later, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton told journalists: “There is awareness of the threat posed by Iran and consensus that threat has to be eliminated.” Yet these warnings failed to capture much public interest.
Instead, there was a growing interest around the investigation into the attacks of September 11, 2001. Previously, the press had largely ignored the work of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, better known as the “9-11 Commission.” When it held its second public hearings in May 2003 on the key issue of air defense, the New York Times and Los Angeles Times failed to write any articles about it. Suddenly though, in March 2004 the Commission became the center of attention when former White House security expert Richard Clarke publicly testified before it and criticized the Bush administration for failing to address terrorism when it first came into office. Since then, the 9/11 Commission remained a major news story and the book of its final report became an instant bestseller. However, the mass media were still overlooking the fact that increasing numbers of people were seriously questioning the entire official account of 9/11. More and more books had been released around the world giving evidence of possible U.S. government complicity in the attacks. Polls suggested that millions of people were suspicious: A Zogby poll in late August 2004 found 49 per cent of New York City residents and 41 per cent of New York citizens overall agreed that “some leaders in the U.S. government knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to take action.” A survey three months earlier found 63 per cent of Canadians believed the U.S. government had “prior knowledge of the plans for the events of September 11th, and failed to take appropriate action to stop them.” A July 2003 poll had found almost a fifth of Germans believed the U.S. government, or elements within it, were responsible for organizing the attacks.
With attempts at identifying a new ‘external enemy’ so far failing, I believe it is possible that, instead, this growing suspicion around 9/11 will develop into an unprecedented public scandal. But what are these suspicions about? Are they simply the result of rumour and ‘urban legend,’ or could some of the disturbing allegations now being made be found true in future? In this article, I will examine some of the arguments put forward by 9/11 skeptics, along with supporting evidence. Then I will examine some of the psychohistorical evidence that shows why we could be heading for a major scandal over the events of 9/11. Until the controversy around 9/11 is brought into the open and investigated properly, it is up to individuals to draw their own conclusions. However, in my opinion, the volume of evidence now gathered is enough to suggest a massive scandal is a real possibility. The implications of this would be extraordinary. As one of the most prominent 9/11 skeptics, former German government minister Andreas von Bülow, says: “If what I say is right, the whole US government should end up behind bars.”
The 9/11 Commission was established in late 2002 to provide a full and complete accounting of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and offer recommendations on how to prevent such attacks recurring. On June 16-17, 2004, it held its twelfth and final public hearing. Most revealing was the hearing’s second day, examining the federal government’s immediate response to the attacks. This looked at the actions of the two agencies responsible for the defense of U.S. airspace on 9/11: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The job of the FAA is to regulate the safety and security of civil aviation, whilst NORAD is the military organization responsible for defending the airspace over North America. The 9/11 attacks all occurred within NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector, known as NEADS. Below, I have summarised some of the new information that was revealed at this hearing:
This evidence seemed to depict an appalling level of confusion and incompetence by the FAA. However, the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion was that this was understandable considering the unprecedented nature of the situation. They said NORAD and the FAA “were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet.”20 To most, this probably seemed a fair evaluation. Yet for people familiar with previous accounts of 9/11, this new evidence added to a long list of contradictions and oddities in the official narrative. Amongst other things, the Commission had failed to mention that while hijackings are rare, the scrambling (immediate launching) of fighter aircraft to intercept civilian planes in emergency situations is a common occurrence.
Quite often civilian planes stray from their pre-arranged flight course or else lose contact with air traffic control. For situations like these, the Federal Aviation Administration has established procedures for air traffic controllers to follow. Regulations in force on September 11 stated that controllers should “Consider that an aircraft emergency exists…when: … There is unexpected loss of radar contact and radio communications with any…aircraft.”21 In addition: “If…you are in doubt that a situation constitutes an emergency or potential emergency, handle it as though it were an emergency.”22 To deal with these emergencies, fighter jets can be launched. As MSNBC describes: “If a plane deviates by 15 degrees, or two miles from [its] course, the flight controllers will hit the panic button…. It’s considered a real emergency…. F-16 interceptors can fly alongside a plane to see who’s flying it. They can also try to force it off course.”23 This is a routine procedure that does not require White House approval: Between September 2000 and June 2001, the U.S. military launched fighter jets 67 times to chase suspicious aircraft. 24
It is important that controllers follow these procedures promptly and reliably. If it were otherwise, with thousands of planes flying over the United States at a time, an off-course plane could easily crash into another plane. In fact, this almost happened on 9/11 when, minutes after going off course, the second hijacked plane – Flight 175 – nearly crashed into another commercial flight.25 Paul Hellyer, the former Canadian minister of national defense, asked in a recent interview: “Why did airplanes fly around for an hour and a half without interceptors being scrambled from Andrews [Air Force Base]…right next to the capital?” He says: “with a quick-reaction alert they should have been in the air in five minutes or ten minutes. If not, as a minister of national defense, which in the United States would be the secretary of defense, I would want to say ‘why not?’” 26
What 9/11 skeptics find suspicious is that the routine procedure of quickly scrambling fighter jets to intercept wayward aircraft apparently failed four times in a row on 9/11. If it was the result of incompetence, why was this incompetence only evident on September 11? One man who addresses this point is retired Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bowman. Bowman served in the U.S. Air Force for 22 years. He has been Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the Air Force Space Division. He flew 101 combat missions over Vietnam and has personal experience of doing intercepts. Bowman describes the timeline for the morning of 9/11:
We look at the fact that contact was lost with American Airlines 11 at 8:13:50 a.m. That the transponder stopped at 8:20. That the airliner went off course at 8:20. That at 8:21 a stewardess reported the hijacking. So it’s reasonable to me to think that within five minutes somebody should have told NORAD and gotten those planes scrambled. The planes in short should have been scrambled at 8:26. They were actually scrambled at 8:46, 20 minutes later. They got airborne in 6 minutes, which is about as good as you can do…so they could have been airborne at 8:32. Based on going full-throttle, afterburner all the way, getting there in the shortest possible time, they could have intercepted American Airlines Flight 11 at 8:42 and been at the World Trade Center at 8:43. The first plane didn’t hit the World Trade Center until 8:46 and a half.
The timelines for the Pentagon, it’s even worse. Those planes made a U-turn and headed directly back for Washington, DC, without radio contact, without transponder, off their assigned course, and nothing was done. Again a stewardess reported the hijacking and still nothing was done. Two minutes after the stewardess reported: “Yes indeed this isn’t just a problem, this is a hijacking,” NORAD could have been notified. That would have allowed the F-16s from Langley Air Force Base to be scrambled, airborne by 9:04 and they could have been over the Pentagon at 9:18. That’s 19 minutes before American Flight 77 – if that’s what it was – something flew into the Pentagon at 9:37.
The conclusion to me, as a former fighter pilot, is this. If normal communications, common sense actions, had taken place between the airlines, air traffic control, FAA, NORAD and the interceptor bases, the interceptors would have arrived in time to save both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with many minutes to spare. So while I conclude that the fighter pilots themselves were not culpable, somebody was. The question is who was it? 27
Bowman concludes: “No one has been court-martialled. No one has been reprimanded. No one has been demoted. No one is to blame. That only tells me one thing. The ones to blame are too high up to play scapegoat.” 28
WAR GAMES
The 9/11 Commission also almost totally ignored what may have been a crucial factor in preventing the successful interception of the four hijacked planes: On the morning of September 11, there was a series of war games being carried out within America. One exercise called “Operation Northern Vigilance,” commenced two days earlier, had U.S. fighter jets deployed to Northern Canada and Alaska to monitor an exercise being conducted by the Russian Air Force. 29 Another was a weeklong semi-annual training exercise conducted by NORAD, called “Vigilant Guardian,” that posed an imaginary crisis to North American Air Defense outposts nationwide. Lieutenant Colonel Dawne Deskins, the mission crew chief for Vigilant Guardian, reportedly thought: “It must be part of the exercise,” when the FAA called at 8:40 to report a hijacked aircraft.30 NORAD commander Larry Arnold says that when he first heard of the hijacking, “First thing that went through my mind was, ‘Is this part of the exercise? Is this some kind of a screw-up?’”31 That morning, three F-16 fighter jets assigned to Andrews Air Force Base, 10 miles from Washington, were involved in another training mission over 200 miles away in North Carolina. They only arrived back at Andrews some time after the Pentagon was hit.32 Furthermore, a drill was planned for 9 a.m. based around a corporate jet plane crashing into a building. The exercise was to be conducted by the National Reconnaissance Office, just outside Washington, which draws its staff from the CIA and military. 33
Pioneering 9/11 researcher and former LAPD narcotics investigator Mike Ruppert has investigated these military exercises for himself. He says they are what caused the failure to intercept the hijacked planes:
The wargames will tie Bush and/or Cheney and Rumsfeld directly into a complete paralysis of fighter response on 9/11. I have gone directly to many NORAD, DoD, NRO, and other sources and questioned them. I have knocked on many doors and I have even obtained some documents. I have obtained an on-the-record statement from someone in NORAD, which confirmed that on the day of 9/11 the Joint Chiefs (Myers) and NORAD were conducting a joint, live-fly, hijack Field Training Exercise (FTX) which involved at least one (and almost certainly many more) aircraft under US control that was posing as a hijacked airliner. That is just the tip of what I have uncovered. 34
Speaking at the prestigious Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, he elaborated:
In some cases false blips were deliberately inserted onto FAA and military radar screens and they were present during (at least) the first attacks. This effectively paralyzed fighter response because, with only eight fighters available in the region, there were as many as 22 possible hijackings taking place. Other exercises, specifically Northern Vigilance had pulled significant fighter resources away from the northeast U.S. – just before 9/11 – into northern Canada and Alaska. In addition, a close reading of key news stories published in the spring of 2004 revealed for the first time that some of these drills were “live-fly” exercises where actual aircraft, likely flown by remote control – were simulating the behavior of hijacked airliners in real life. All of this as the real attacks began. 35
According to Ruppert, Dick Cheney is a prime suspect in planning and carrying out the attacks, and on the morning of 9/11 he was running a separate command, control and communications system, which superseded any orders given by the National Military Command Center (NMCC) or the White House situation room. He did this using a Secret Service communications system based within or near a bunker below the White House called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC). Ruppert says he has established conclusively that “in May of 2001, by presidential order, Richard Cheney was put in direct command and control of all wargame and field exercise training and scheduling through several agencies, especially FEMA. This also extended to all of the conflicting and overlapping NORAD drills on that day.” 36
Is it because of these wargames that the FAA appeared so confused and incompetent on 9/11? Is this why the standard procedure of intercepting off-course planes failed four times in succession? What is more, a major biological-terrorism drill called “Tripod II” had been scheduled for the morning of September 12, 2001, in a huge commercial warehouse on Pier 92 of the Hudson. As a result, an equipped and fully staffed Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), New York City and Department of Justice command center was conveniently ready to go into operation when the attacks occurred. 37
Yet another oddity surfaced during the final public hearing of the 9/11 Commission: The personal statement of Navy Captain Charles J. Leidig, Jr. revealed that from 8:30 on the morning of 9/11, he temporarily stood in as deputy director for operations for the NMCC within the Pentagon. In this key role, he was responsible for convening a Significant Event Conference, later upgraded to an Air Threat Conference, in response to the attacks. What is odd is that the regular deputy director, Brigadier General Montague Winfield, only requested the previous day that Leidig fill in a portion of his duty on 9/11. Even though Leidig had only qualified the previous month to stand watch in this post, Winfield only relieved him and resumed his duties around 10:30 a.m.38 In other words, Brigadier General Winfield allowed a newly qualified stand-in to fill his vitally important post for almost the entire duration of the attacks.
We also now know that six air traffic controllers at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center who were involved in dealing with the hijacks made a tape recording on September 11, describing the events that had occurred, with each controller giving a short statement. Yet, without the tape being transcribed or listened to by any investigators, an FAA quality-assurance manager destroyed it. Despite the FAA having sent an e-mail instructing officials to preserve all records, the manager reportedly “crushed the cassette in his hand, cut the tape into little pieces and dropped them in different trash cans around the building.” Neither this quality-assurance manager nor the center manager disclosed the tape’s existence to their superiors and its destruction was only revealed by coincidence when one of the air traffic controllers asked to review it before giving testimony for a report. 39
One of the most bizarre of the controversies over what happened on September 11 is around what occurred at the Pentagon. According to the official story, the Pentagon was hit by the third hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 77: a Boeing 757-200. This departed Dulles International Airport, near Washington, around 8:20 a.m., bound for Los Angeles. Some time shortly after 8:50 it is thought to have been hijacked. Then, around 8:54, it veered off course over Ohio, with its transponder going off a couple of minutes later. Around 9:30 flight controllers at Dulles Airport sounded an alert after noticing an unidentified aircraft flying at high speed towards Washington. Just before 9:38, this aircraft crashed into the west side of the Pentagon. 40
This would seem fairly straightforward. Yet what have aroused suspicion are the photographs taken soon after the Pentagon was hit. Skeptics say these pictures show that damage before the Pentagon’s west block collapsed – about 35 minutes after being hit – was way too small to have been made by a Boeing 757. The main damage was a hole at most just 13 feet wide and 26 feet high.41 Steve DeChiaro, the president of a New Jersey technology firm who was arriving at the Pentagon when it was hit, ran towards the impact point. He has said: “when I looked at the site, my brain could not resolve the fact that it was a plane because it only seemed like a small hole in the building. No tail. No wings. No nothing.”42 Photos clearly show that windows beside this main hole were unbroken. There is some additional damage across the building’s first floor, but this covers an area at most 90 feet in width. How was this possible? Research scientist and software engineer Jim Hoffman points out that a 757 is over 44 feet high; its wingspan is over 124 feet; and as the aircraft that hit the Pentagon approached at a 45-degree angle, he calculates that the damage a 757 would have made would be about 177 feet in width.43 According to air crash investigator François Grangier: “What is certain when one looks at the photo of [the Pentagon] façade that remains intact is that it’s obvious the plane did not go through there. It’s like imagining that a plane of this size could pass through a window and leave the frame still standing.” 44
The damage was so low in the building that, for Flight 77 to have caused it, it would need to have flown perfectly horizontally, barely inches above the lawn in front of the Pentagon. Yet photos clearly show this lawn was left perfectly intact, with no scorch marks or signs of gouging from a Boeing. Nor do any photographs show large pieces of debris recognizable as belonging to Flight 77.45 Apparently 60 tons of aluminum simply disappeared. April Gallop was working in the west block of the Pentagon on 9/11, preparing to take her infant son to the day-care center there. After the building was hit, she managed to locate her son, then crawled out of the wreckage and was driven to hospital. However, whilst there she was visited more than once by some men in suits. These men never identified themselves nor said which agency they worked for. Yet, says Gallop, they told her “what to do, which was to take the [Victim Compensation Fund] money and shut up. They also kept insisting that a plane hit the building. They repeated this over and over. But I was there and I never saw a plane or even debris from a plane.” 46
According to the FBI, the man who piloted Flight 77 was a 29-year-old Saudi called Hani Hanjour. The 9/11 Commission claims Hanjour “was perhaps the most experienced and highly trained pilot among the 9/11 hijackers.”47 Yet descriptions from those who met him contradict this. Months before the attacks, staff at an Arizona flight school Hanjour was attending reported him to the FAA at least five times, concerned that his English and flying skills were so poor that he should not be allowed to keep his pilot’s license. The manager of the school has said: “I couldn’t believe he had a commercial license of any kind with the skills that he had.” She says his English was so poor that it took him five hours to complete a section of an oral exam meant to last just two hours.48 A former employee of the school has said: “I’m still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all.”49 Newsday describes what happened when Hanjour tried to rent a small plane one month before 9/11: “[H]e had trouble controlling and landing the single-engine Cessna 172. Even though Hanjour showed a federal pilot’s license and a log book cataloging 600 hours of flying experience, chief flight instructor Marcel Bernard declined to rent him a plane without more lessons.”50
How could this man who had never before flown a jet plane successfully navigate a Boeing across America without any assistance from air traffic control, then fly it into the side of the Pentagon? Here is how CBS News describes the final maneuver Hanjour supposedly performed:
Radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes.
The steep turn was so smooth, the sources say, it’s clear there was no fight for control going on. And the complex maneuver suggests the hijackers had better flying skills than many investigators first believed.
The jetliner disappeared from radar at 9:37 and less than a minute later it clipped the tops of street lights and plowed into the Pentagon at 460 mph. 51
According to Gary Eitel, an experienced military pilot, this maneuver would be beyond the capabilities of 90 per cent of the best, most experienced military pilots in the world. 52
Furthermore, video footage that would show the Pentagon being hit was promptly seized by the FBI and has never been made public. The security cameras of a nearby gas station and hotel caught the attack. But, says the gas station supervisor: “I’ve never seen what the pictures looked like. The FBI was here within minutes and took the film.”53 The Washington Times reported how the nearby hotel similarly had its security film quickly seized by the FBI.54
On the basis of this evidence and more, skeptics say the physical evidence of the Pentagon crash is more consistent with it having been hit by something smaller, like a missile or unmanned military aircraft such as a Global Hawk. Yet if this was so, why did many individuals claim they saw a Boeing 757 flying at the Pentagon that morning? There are two main theories attempting to explain this. The first takes a psychological perspective, examining the problems of eyewitness testimony: If an event happens very rapidly such that a person’s senses are unable to capture all its details, to make their perception more complete and coherent their brain might replace a poorly received sensation with another from acquired memory. Thus, if Pentagon witnesses heard on the news about Boeings hitting the WTC and later heard that it was a 757 that hit the Pentagon, they might then report that they did indeed see Flight 77 there, when in fact what they saw occurred too fast for them to say with certainty that it was a Boeing rather than a smaller aircraft.55 The second theory is that there were two aircraft flying towards the Pentagon on 9/11. One of them, an American Airlines 757, was used to divert people’s attention. It flew towards the Pentagon then veered off, landing unnoticed at Reagan National Airport just a mile away. Approaching the Pentagon at the same time, but much lower, was a smaller aircraft, maybe a missile. It was this that crashed into the Pentagon whilst the 757 flew over the top. 56
Outlandish as it may at first sound to suggest a missile hit the Pentagon, this appears something that could well capture the public interest should there be a 9/11 scandal. For example, this suggestion featured prominently in two recent major articles in British publications about the controversy over 9/11. One of these was in Britain’s second most popular daily newspaper, the Daily Mail; the other, in a popular weekly magazine for young men.57 It was also a key subject of a book that became a record-breaking bestseller in France in 2002.58 If it were ever found that the Pentagon was indeed hit by something other than Flight 77, this would certainly ruin the official account of 9/11. Furthermore, we would be left with new and baffling questions. For example, if Flight 77 didn’t hit the Pentagon, what happened to it? What happened to the passengers? Who was behind this outrageous act? And why fly something like a missile into the Pentagon then claim it was a Boeing?
Let us next consider how probably the three most important people within the Bush administration behaved during the course of the 9/11 attacks and what they have done since in relation to the events that day. I am focusing on these three – Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush – because they are well known and therefore, I believe, were they ever found to be in any way complicit in 9/11 it would be particularly shocking to the general public.
As U.S. secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld was on 9/11 second in the military chain-of-command behind the president. Yet details of what he did during the attacks are sketchy and from what we currently know, he did nothing in response to the crisis until it was too late to make a difference.
According to Rumsfeld, on the morning of September 11 he was hosting a breakfast meeting at the Pentagon for some members of Congress. He told them that “sometime in the next two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve months there would be an event that would occur in the world that would be sufficiently shocking that it would remind people again how important it is to have a strong healthy defense department.”59 Soon after, someone walked in and gave him a note saying a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Yet Rumsfeld apparently was not moved to take action. “[W]e adjourned the meeting, and I went in to get my CIA briefing,”60 he has said. Whilst in his office with the CIA briefer, Rumsfeld says he was told of the second plane hitting the WTC. Yet he went ahead with a meeting in his private dining room at the Pentagon with his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz and U.S. Representative Christopher Cox, to discuss how to win votes for Bush’s defense plan.
During this meeting, Rumsfeld was apparently oblivious to the fact that an airplane was heading towards Washington. However, he made another prediction: “let me tell you, I’ve been around the block a few times,” he told Representative Cox. “There will be another event.” For emphasis, he repeated: “There will be another event.”61 Just minutes later the Pentagon was hit. Rumsfeld says: “I went outside to determine what had happened. I was not there long because I was back in the Pentagon with a crisis action team shortly before or after 10:00 a.m. On my return from the crash site and before going to the executive support center, I had one or more calls in my office, one of which was with the president.”62 Rumsfeld didn’t enter the National Military Command Center within the Pentagon though until 10.30. Brigadier General Montague Winfield says: “For 30 minutes we couldn’t find him. And just as we began to worry, he walked into the door of the National Military Command Center.”63 As the 9/11 Commission conclude: “The Secretary of Defense did not enter the chain of command until the morning’s key events were over.”64 Nor is Rumsfeld on the record as having given any orders that morning.
Yet, according to military procedure, if the Federal Aviation Administration were to notify the National Military Command Center of a hijacking, with the exception of “immediate responses” the NMCC was required to “forward requests for DOD assistance to the Secretary of Defense for approval.”65 Of course, 9/11 would easily come under the heading of “immediate responses.” All the same, Rumsfeld has yet to be asked whether he was contacted in line with this military procedure and, if so, what did he do in response?
Interestingly, since 9/11 Donald Rumsfeld has made statements suggesting why he may have wanted an event like 9/11 to occur. For example, in a televised interview two years after the attacks, he described how he thinks about what a senior leader in the Gulf told him, that maybe 9/11 was “a blessing in disguise,” and a “wake-up call” for the world to deal with the growing threat of terrorism. Rumsfeld said he agreed with this, that 9/11 was indeed a ‘wake-up call.’66 He wrote a similar thing in his prepared testimony to the 9/11 Commission:
Think about what has been done since the September 11th attacks: two state sponsors of terrorism have been removed from power, a 90-nation coalition has been formed which is cooperating on a number of levels… All of these actions are putting pressure on terrorist networks. Taken together, they represent a collective effort that is unprecedented – which has undoubtedly saved lives, and made us safer than before September 11th. 67
Based upon mainstream accounts, Vice President Cheney’s actions during the attacks appear less suspicious than those of Bush and Rumsfeld. However, there are some odd contradictions in the reports of what he did. On the morning of September 11, before learning about the attacks, Dick Cheney was in his office in the White House. According to the 9/11 Commission, just before 9 a.m. he was preparing for a meeting when his assistant “told him to turn on his television because a plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.”68 Cheney subsequently saw the second aircraft hitting the South Tower. Then, “just before 9:36,” the Secret Service ordered the evacuation of the vice president and agents took him down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the bunker below the East Wing of the White House. “The Vice President entered the underground tunnel leading to the shelter at 9:37.” 69
However, according to White House photographer David Bohrer who was present at the time, this evacuation occurred just after 9 a.m.70 Furthermore, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta described before the 9/11 Commission how a young man had come into the PEOC to inform the vice president of the approach towards Washington of the aircraft that hit the Pentagon. According to Mineta, this occurred around 9:25 or 9:26.71 This suggests that the report of Cheney only reaching the underground tunnel leading to the shelter at 9:37 is incorrect. If Cheney were in fact evacuated soon after 9, why would it later be claimed this took place about half an hour later? One possibility is that it was to make the failure of the Secret Service to evacuate President Bush from his location that morning appear less suspicious. (See below.) Alternatively, if Michael Ruppert’s allegations about the vice president’s involvement in the attacks are correct, then this claim could simply be an attempt to conceal his complicity.
Soon after 9:15, Cheney spoke over the phone with the president, who was at a school in Florida that morning. Also, “sometime before 10:10 to 10:15,” he reportedly phoned the president to discuss the rules of engagement for the combat air patrol above Washington. Supposedly, he recommended the president authorize the military to shoot down any civilian airliners that might be under the control of hijackers. Bush later recalled his response being “You bet.”72 The president also emphasized in his private meeting with the 9/11 Commission that he had authorized the shootdown of hijacked aircraft.73 This is an important point, because the shooting down of a wayward aircraft before it crashed into a populated area could save many lives. Yet, according to the 9/11 Commission, “there is no documentary evidence for this call.”74 Newsweek adds: “Nor did the real-time notes taken by two others in the room, Cheney’s chief of staff, ‘Scooter’ Libby – who is known for his meticulous record-keeping – or Cheney’s wife, Lynne, reflect that such a phone call between Bush and Cheney occurred or that such a major decision as shooting down a U.S. airliner was discussed.”75 According to Newsweek, some of the Commission’s staff were highly skeptical of Cheney’s account, with one well-informed source claiming some of them “flat out didn’t believe the call ever took place.”76 All the same, whether or not Bush authorized him to do so, “by the time Cheney issued his shoot-down order, between 10:10 and 10:15 a.m., United Flight 93, the last plane-turned-missile on 9/11, had already crashed in Pennsylvania (at 10:03 a.m.).” 77
Furthermore, it appears that Cheney – along with Bush – was reluctant for 9/11 to be investigated: When then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press in May 2002, he said Cheney had, on January 24 that year, urged him not to investigate the events of September 11. Daschle added that four days later Bush made the same request. When the program’s moderator Tim Russert asked: “It wasn’t, ‘Let’s not have a national commission, but let’s have the intelligence committees look into this,’ it was ‘No investigation by anyone, period’?” Daschle replied: “That’s correct.” He added that the request had been repeated on “other dates following.” 78
September 11, 2001 was the most important day of George W. Bush’s life. As American president he was commander in chief of the U.S armed forces. His actions were crucial. According to the 9/11 Commission, the only people that day with authority to order the shooting down of a civilian plane if, say, it were heading towards a populated area (like the World Trade Center or the Pentagon) were the president or the secretary of defense.79 I have already shown that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was apparently ‘out of the loop’ during the attacks. What then did Commander in Chief Bush do?
Before examining this question, it is important to recognise that the U.S. president does not travel alone. He takes with him an entire staff, including members of the Secret Service, who are responsible for his safety. The president’s travelling entourage have the best communications equipment in the world. They have contact with, or can easily reach, the cabinet, the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, the FAA and other Secret Service agents.80 We might therefore assume George Bush would have been one of the first people informed of the extraordinary chain of events unfolding on September 11.
Furthermore, Bush’s location for that morning was made public four days previously, on September 7: He would be in Sarasota, Florida, to “continue his focus on reading and education.”81 We might assume then that once it was recognised that America was under attack, the president would have been considered a potential target and immediate action would have been taken to protect him and ensure the safety of all around him. Yet, despite the horrifying sequence of events in progress, Bush continued with his pre-planned visit to the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, where he listened to a class full of children reading. He remained at the school until around 9:35 a.m.81 – nearly 50 minutes after the first plane hit the WTC and over half an hour after the second plane hit. Incredibly, the president’s support team, including the Secret Service, allowed this.
According to Philip Melanson, an expert on the Secret Service, Bush should have been removed from the school immediately after Flight 175 hit the second WTC tower. Melanson says: “With an unfolding terrorist attack, the procedure should have been to get the president to the closest secure location as quickly as possible, which clearly is not a school. You’re safer in that presidential limo, which is bombproof and blastproof and bulletproof.”83 Furthermore, considering the president’s responsibilities as commander in chief, Melanson adds that Bush’s limousine had key advantages: “In the presidential limo, the communications system is almost duplicative of the White House – he can do almost anything from there but he can’t do much sitting in a school.” 84
Bush was informed of the second plane hitting the WTC when, around 9:05, his Chief of Staff Andrew Card came across the classroom and reportedly whispered to him: “A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”85 According to the 9/11 Commission: “The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis.”86 Furthermore, “The Secret Service told us they were anxious to move the President to a safer location, but did not think it imperative for him to run out the door.”87 Yet this inaction could have had disastrous consequences. In the words of 9/11 researchers Allan Wood and Paul Thompson: “Why hasn’t Bush’s security staff been criticized for their completely inexplicable decision to stay at the school? And why didn’t Bush’s concern for the children extend to not making them and the rest of the 200 or so people at the school terrorist targets?”88 As the reporter Gail Sheehy concludes, the final report of the 9/11 Commission shows that on the morning of September 11, “the president and the other top officials in charge of the systems to defend the country from attack were, in essence, missing in action: They did not communicate, did not coordinate a response to the catastrophe, and in some cases did not even get involved in discussions about the attacks until after all of the hijacked planes had crashed.” 89
With the best communications in the world available to him, we might assume Bush would have been one of the first people informed of the hijackings and the first plane hitting the WTC. Yet according to official accounts, he remained oblivious even whilst millions of people saw what had happened on television. Strangely, there have been at least seven different accounts of when and from whom Bush first heard of Flight 11 crashing into the WTC.90 As Allan Wood and Paul Thompson note, Bush’s own recollections only add to the confusion:
Less than two months after the attacks, Bush made the preposterous claim that he had watched the first attack as it happened on live television…. On December 4, 2001, Bush was asked: “How did you feel when you heard about the terrorist attack?” Bush replied, “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower – the TV was obviously on…. I said, it must have been a horrible accident.”91
Yet, as Wood and Thompson point out, “There was no film footage of the first attack until at least the following day.” They continue:
It’s doubly strange why his advisors didn’t correct him or – at the very least – stop him from repeating the same story only four weeks later. On January 5, 2002, Bush stated: “Well, I was sitting in a schoolhouse in Florida…and my Chief of Staff – well, first of all, when we walked into the classroom, I had seen this plane fly into the first building. There was a TV set on.” 92
On the morning of 9/11, Bush promised that he had “ordered that the full resources of the federal government go…to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.”93 Yet it appears more like he has tried to hinder investigations. As Salon reported in June 2003:
The White House long opposed the formation of a blue-ribbon Sept. 11 commission, some say, and even now that panel is underfunded and struggling to build momentum. And, they say, the administration is suppressing a 900-page congressional study, possibly out of fear that the findings will be politically damaging to Bush.
“We’ve been fighting for nearly 21 months – fighting the administration, the White House,” says Monica Gabrielle. Her husband, Richard, an insurance broker who worked for Aon Corp. on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center’s Tower 2, died during the attacks. “As soon as we started looking for answers we were blocked, put off and ignored at every stop of the way. We were shocked. The White House is just blocking everything.”
Another 9/11 family advocate…was more blunt: “Bush has done everything in his power to squelch this [9/11] commission and prevent it from happening.” 94
After opposing the creation of the 9/11 Commission, the White House wanted to limit any appearance by the president to just one hour spent with two of the commissioners. A compromise was met such that George Bush did eventually meet with the Commission on April 29, 2004, but only under stringent conditions. Bush had to have Dick Cheney at his side, testifying at the same time; testimony was given in private and not under oath; no press coverage was allowed; and no recordings or transcripts were made of what they said.95 Further suspicion had been raised just over two weeks earlier, when the White House was forced to release a daily intelligence briefing given to the president whilst on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, five weeks before 9/11. The briefing was titled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US,” and stated: “FBI information…indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York…. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Laden supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.”96 Despite receiving this, according to the New York Times, “Bush broke off from work early and spent most of that day fishing.” 97
What is also interesting is that several key members of the Bush administration, including Cheney, Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, had been members of a neoconservative think-tank called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In September 2000, PNAC wrote a report called Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, which they hoped would be “a road map for the nation’s immediate and future defense plans.” In it they complained: “The post-Cold War world will not remain a relatively peaceful place if we continue to neglect foreign and defense matters.” However, they added: “serious attention, careful thought, and the willingness to devote adequate resources to maintaining America’s military strength can make the world safer and American strategic interests more secure now and in the future.”98 They stated that to “preserve American military preeminence in the coming decades” America would need to undergo a “military transformation.”99 However, they wrote, this transformation would be “a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”100 [Italics mine] One year later, 9/11 happened. As George W. Bush wrote in his diary that night: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.” 101
After this catastrophic, catalyzing event, actions proposed by the Project for the New American Century soon came into force. As John Pilger wrote of PNAC:
[In 2000] it recommended an increase in arms-spending by $48bn so that Washington could “fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars”. This has happened. It said the United States should develop “bunker-buster” nuclear weapons and make “star wars” a national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking power, Iraq should be a target. And so it is. 102
Furthermore, during his 2000 election campaign and after, Bush repeatedly promised a budget surplus, except in the event of a recession, war or a national emergency. In the days after 9/11, he said to his budget director: “Lucky me. I hit the trifecta.” 103 (A ‘trifecta’ is a kind of bet that requires picking the top three finishers in a race.)
With so much suspicious evidence, one lawyer, Stanley Hilton – a former aide to Senator Bob Dole – has filed a $7 billion suit on behalf of the families of 14 victims of the 9/11 attacks, alleging that Bush, along with Cheney, Rumsfeld and others, actually ordered 9/11 to happen for political gain. Hilton says he has incriminating documents and witnesses showing this. Calling it “the biggest act of treason and mass murder in American history,” he claims that 9/11 was a ‘decoy operation’: “You make the people focus on the decoy to avoid looking at the real criminals. So they are focusing on these so-called nineteen hijackers and saying, ‘Oh, it must have been these Arabs.’ When, in fact, the guilty person is at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – sitting in the Oval Office.” 104
I have already discussed White House attempts to prevent or hinder any official inquiry into 9/11. But another less known example, where there has been a lack of investigation and a suppression of important evidence relating to 9/11, is in the unlikely situation of the retirement community that is Venice, in southwestern Florida.
Of the four alleged 9/11 suicide-pilots, three had been in attendance at two flight schools at the tiny airport in Venice, Florida: Huffman Aviation and Florida Flight Training. Both were owned by Dutch men who purchased the schools within months of each other, in 1999. Soon after they took over, the schools began training unprecedented numbers of Arab flight students.105 Yet Huffman Aviation and Florida Flight Training, along with the dubious characters who ran them, have so far avoided any serious investigation or media attention. One man who has tried to make up for this is investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker, who spent two years following the attacks in Venice, examining the training of the alleged hijackers. He reports his findings in his book Welcome to Terrorland: Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-up in Florida. As well as describing evidence of large-scale illegal activity going on in and around the Venice Airport, this book casts serious doubt upon the official account of who the hijackers really were.
We have all heard how these 19 alleged hijackers were Islamic extremists. Yet evidence uncovered by Hopsicker, particularly regarding alleged ringleader Mohamed Atta, depicts unlikely personalities and lifestyles for a bunch of religious fanatics. For example, almost totally ignored by the mainstream press is that Atta had an American girlfriend for over two months whilst in Venice, with whom he would go out clubbing almost every night. At the time, this attractive young woman – Amanda Keller – had spiky pink hair and was working as a ‘lingerie model’ for an escort service called Fantasies & Lace. Atta is known to have been a heavy drinker who snorted cocaine. Local newspapers reported how in February 2001, along with Keller, he went on a three-day binge of drinking and drug taking in Key West. 106
Just days before 9/11, Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi (another of the alleged suicide-pilots) spent the evening drinking heavily at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The bar’s manager later told reporters that the men “got wasted,”107 drinking “Stolichnaya and orange juice, and Captain Morgan’s spiced rum and Coke.” Bartender Patricia Idrissi concurred, saying: “Atta drank Stoli vodka for three straight hours…. They were wasted.” Amanda Keller describes a typical night out at a club with Atta: “Marwan [al-Shehhi] was in the reggae room drinking with a bunch of women at the bar, there were a lot of women around him, and he was just flaunting money.” As Hopsicker points out: “It’s one thing to hear Atta described as living it up with wine, women and song. But Marwan flaunting money at the bar pretty much puts the lie to the ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ tag.”10
Hopsicker suggests that, rather than being a fundamentalist Muslim, Mohamed Atta better fits the profile of a member of Arab society’s privileged elite and also a spy. Amongst many oddities contradicting the ‘fundamentalist’ label is the fact that his e-mail list included the names of several employees of U.S. defense contractors.109 More alarming, he and as many as six of the other alleged 9/11 hijackers appear to have trained at U.S. military bases. Hopsicker writes:
On the Saturday following the Tuesday attack, the Los Angeles Times broke the story in a long article on their front page.
“A defense official said two of the hijackers were former Saudi fighter pilots,” reported the paper, “who had studied in exchange programs at the Defense Language School at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.”
The story went wide the next day, Sunday, September 15th. Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald all reported as many as seven of the terrorist hijackers in the September 11th attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations.
“Two of 19 suspects named by the FBI, Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi, have the same names as men listed at a housing facility for foreign military trainees at Pensacola. Two others, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alnami, have names similar to individuals listed in public records as using the same address inside the base,” the Washington Post reported.
“In addition, a man named Saeed Alghamdi graduated from the Defense Language Institute at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, while men with the same names as two other hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, appear as graduates of the U.S. International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, respectively,” the Post said. 110
Newsweek detailed how U.S. military facilities routinely trained pilots for other countries: “A former Navy pilot told NEWSWEEK that during his years on the base, ‘we always, always, always trained other countries’ pilots…. Whoever the country du jour is, that’s whose pilots we train.’ Candidates begin with ‘an officer’s equivalent of boot camp,’ he said. ‘Then they would put them through flight training.’” 111
Hopsicker explains how this crucial story came to be dismissed:
Someone was going to have to answer… for a lot.
“But Atta is a fairly common surname in the Middle East,” the Post quoted Laila Alquatami of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee as saying, and the suspected hijacker’s first name is “probably the No. 1 name that is given to babies, in honor of the prophet Mohamed.”
The Boston Globe reported the Pentagon’s denial: “Some of the FBI suspects had names similar to those used by foreign alumni of U.S. military courses,” said the Air Force in a statement. “Discrepancies in their biographical data…indicate we are probably not talking about the same people.”
How easy was it to tell the Pentagon was lying? Think about it. It is neither plausible nor logical that the reports were false because of seven separate cases of mistaken identity. One or two, maybe. But seven? No way. 112
None of the newspapers retracted the story, yet it disappeared. One person who sought answers was Senator Bill Nelson, who faxed Attorney General John Ashcroft, demanding to know if the story was really true. However:
The Senator has still not received a reply, we heard from his spokesman, when we called his office eleven months later.
“In the wake of those reports, we asked about the Pensacola Naval Air Station but we never got a definitive answer from the Justice Department,” stated the Senator’s press spokesman.
“So we asked the FBI for an answer ‘if and when’ they could provide us one. Their response to date has been that they are trying to sort through something complicated and difficult.” 113
Deciding to investigate for himself, Hopsicker phoned the Pentagon and spoke with the public information officer who helped write and disseminate their original denial of the story:
“Biographically, they’re not the same people,” she explained patiently, using the same language contained in the Air Force’s press release. “Some of the ages are twenty years off.”
… Was she saying that the age of the ‘Mohamed Atta’ who had attended the Air Force’s International Officer’s School at Maxwell Air Force Base was different than that of ‘terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta?’
Not exactly, she admitted. She could not confirm that – in this specific instance – they had different ages. What she could do was once again deny that the International Officer’s School attendee named Mohamed Atta had been the Mohamed Atta who piloted a passenger plane into the World Trade Center.
However, she could offer no specifics for her assertion, and repeatedly declined requests for biographical details about the Mohamed Atta who had trained at Maxwell Air Force Base. 114
After Hopsicker’s persistent questioning, she finally said in exasperation: “I do not have the authority to tell you who attended which schools.” Hopsicker reflects: “It was hard to read this as anything other than a back-handed confirmation. When she said that she didn’t have the authority, the clear implication was that someone else does… Somewhere in the Defense Dept. a list exists with the names of Sept. 11 terrorists who received training at U.S. military facilities. She just didn’t have the authority to release it.” 115 Furthermore, Hopsicker spoke to a woman who works at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama:
“I have a girlfriend who recognized Mohamed Atta. She met him at a party at the Officer’s Club,” she told us.
“The reason she swears it was him here is because she didn’t just meet him and say hello. After she met him she went around and introduced him to the people that were with her. So she knows it was him.”
Saudis were a highly visible presence at Maxwell Air Force Base, she said. “There were a lot of them living in an upscale complex in Montgomery. They had to get all of them out of here.
“They were all gone the day after the attack.” 116
Despite it being a key 9/11 crime scene, there has been a surprising absence of investigations into the goings on in Venice, Florida. In fact, to the contrary, “the FBI’s full attention seemed to have been engaged – not in investigating what had happened – but in suppressing evidence and even intimidating the witnesses who had seen and heard things that fly in the face of the ‘official story.’”117 For example, Mohamed Atta’s former girlfriend Amanda Keller says that even after she left Venice, the FBI called on her every other day for several months, telling her not to talk to anybody. Similarly, a woman called Stephanie Frederickson who lived next-door to Atta and Keller in Venice reported how she and other residents at the same apartment building were harassed and intimidated by FBI agents, to prevent them from talking to reporters. According to Frederickson:
The question [the FBI] asked was always the same. You aren’t saying anything to anybody, are you?
At first, right after the attack, they told me I must have been mistaken in my identification. Or they would insinuate that I was lying. Finally they stopped trying to get me to change my story, and just stopped by once a week to make sure I hadn’t been talking to anyone. 118
What is more, the FBI arrived in Venice just hours after the 9/11 attacks. A former manager from Huffman Aviation said: “They were outside my house four hours after the attack.” He added: “My phones have been bugged, they still are…. How did the FBI get here so soon? Ask yourself: How’d they got here so soon?”119 Within 24 hours of the attacks, records from Huffman Aviation, where Atta and al-Shehhi attended, were escorted aboard a C-130 cargo plane to Washington by Florida governor and brother of the president Jeb Bush. Similarly, according to a sergeant with the Venice police, the FBI took all their files and flew them to Washington with Jeb Bush aboard. (Presumably this was on the same flight as the Huffman records.) Hopsicker notes: “The important point was that taking files was a lot different than copying them. The FBI wasn’t taking any chances.”120 He concludes: “There is a demonstrable, provable, and massive federally-supervised cover-up in place in Florida.” 121
As this and my previous evidence shows, there are countless unanswered questions about 9/11 that at some point are going to have to be properly examined. Even an investigation into just a few of these questions, such as those around the war games on 9/11, could be enough to start a major scandal. However, as numerous writers and independent researchers have found, there are so many suspicious circumstances that the truth could be very different to what we have been led to believe. The human rights lawyer Richard Falk has written: “There are so many gaping holes in the official accounts of 9/11 that no plausible coherent narrative remains, and until now we have been staggering forward as if the truth about these traumatic events no longer mattered.”122 But if the mainstream press start investigating properly, it could lead to a completely unprecedented ‘9/11 scandal.’
There are in fact specific psychohistorical reasons I have identified why there could be a major 9/11 scandal in future. I detail some of these in my previous article, “Killer Women Group-Fantasies and the 9/11 Controversy,” in which I examined signs of the current public mood in Britain and America.123 My evidence suggested both countries are in a state of particularly high anxiety and will need some kind of large crisis to make us all feel better. But with no new ‘external enemy’ having been found, I suggested we might instead be veering towards ‘regicidal solution’ – where we somehow ‘sacrifice’ our own leaders. For Britain this might mean Prime Minister Tony Blair at some point being forced to resign, perhaps if the situation in Iraq deteriorates further. And for the U.S., I suggested a scandal around possible complicity by some within the Bush administration, U.S. military and intelligence services in the events of 9/11. But what is the cause of the current public anxiety? And why have our leaders been unable to find a new ‘external enemy’ to invade?
Lloyd deMause describes how wars have generally occurred after periods of increased prosperity and social progress, especially when accompanied by more personal freedom. He has found that increased wealth and social change causes many individuals anxiety and discomfort:
That personal achievement and prosperity often make individuals feel sinful and unworthy of their success is a commonplace observation of psychotherapy ever since Freud’s first case studies of people “ruined by success.” Yet no one seems to have noticed that feelings of sinfulness are usually prominent in the shared emotional life of nations after long periods of peace, prosperity, and social progress, particularly if they are accompanied by more personal and sexual freedom. 124
As deMause points out: “‘wars between great powers occur during periods of economic expansion, while stagnation hinders their outbreak.’”125 Furthermore, “Wars not only occurred far more frequently after prosperous periods, but were longer and bigger after prosperity, ‘six to twenty times bigger as indicated by battle fatalities.’” 126
DeMause has found recurrent images of guilt and poison blood in the media, following periods of prosperity and progress. The progress and increased wealth are felt to have “‘polluted the national blood-stream with sinful excess,’ making men ‘soft’ and ‘feminine,’ a frightful condition that can only be cleansed by a blood-shedding purification.”127 DeMause continues:
Wars have often been thought of as purifying the nation’s polluted blood by virtue of a sacrificial rite identical to the rites of human sacrifice so common in early historical periods, when the blood of those sacrificed was believed to renew all the people. War, said those preparing for the bloody Finnish Civil War, purges guilt-producing material prosperity through the blood of soldiers sacrificed on the battlefield. 128
So, in the case of the 1991 Gulf War, once it was over:
The sacrificial ritual had been carried out exactly as planned: by a genocide of women and children. The nation had been cleansed of its emotional pollution. The President’s popularity rating rose to 91 percent, the highest of any American leader in history. The stock market soared…. The country had been united by slaughter as it had never been by any positive achievement…. We felt cleansed, purified, as though we had been reborn. 129
To summarize then, periods of growth and prosperity cause much discomfort to many people: feelings of guilt, sinfulness, being ‘soft’ or ‘feminine,’ etc. And one way that nations frequently relieve these unpleasant feelings is by going to war.
The 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium certainly rank as a period of prosperity and change. Along with increasing wealth and social change, we have experienced a technological revolution, with cheaper and increasingly powerful home computers, DVD players, digital cameras, and many other previously unavailable gadgets. For example, between 1991 and 2001, the number of UK households with a home computer increased from 21 to 50 per cent;131 between 1998 and 2003, the number of UK households with Internet access rose from 9 to 48 per cent; whereas just 16 per cent of UK households had a mobile phone in the 1996-97 period, by 2001-02 this was up to 65 per cent.132 One writer recently concluded: “We live in the freest, happiest, least bigoted, healthiest, most peaceful and longest-lived era in human history…. [W]e are richer and have the power to alter and control our environment in ways that would have seemed like magic 200 years ago.” 133
Considering deMause’s observations about wars correlating with change and economic growth, it seems the conditions have been right for a particularly large war to occur. Although we have had recent wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), these have been small in comparison to some key wars of the 20th century. For example, the Vietnam War lasted many years, from the 1960s through to the early 70s. During this conflict, the U.S. used weapons of mass destruction, spraying South Vietnam with a deadly chemical called ‘Agent Orange,’ which causes fetal death, congenital defects and cancer.134 Several million Southeast Asians were killed, along with around 58,000 American soldiers. The recent attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq pale in comparison. So surely we’ll need a bigger war than either of these, considering all the prosperity and change of the last decade. However, as I said at the start of this article, following the 2003 Iraq invasion attempts by Britain and America to find a new, more formidable enemy to attack have so far failed.
I believe the reason for this is because there are now larger than ever numbers of people opposing war. This in turn, I believe, is thanks to improvements in childrearing during the latter half of the 20th century. For years, psychohistorians have observed a steady evolution in childrearing that is now more rapid than ever before. Lloyd deMause writes:
Progress in childrearing evolution may be extremely uneven, but the trends are nonetheless unmistakable. The overall direction is from projection to empathy, from discipline to self-regulation, from hitting to explaining, from incest to love, from rejection to overcontrol and then to independence.
… Just the sheer cost of raising a child in dollars has been going up so fast that it now costs a middle-class American family $1.5 million for each child over 22 years, up 20 percent in the past three decades. The families I know in my section of Manhattan easily devote over half of their spare time and half their income to their children. Compare this to the small fraction of parents’ time and money given over to children in earlier centuries with children even spending most of their lives working for adults in various ways and one can begin to comprehend the overall direction of childrearing evolution. 135
Similarly, in 1998 psychohistorian Robert McFarland wrote: “Improvements in parenting practices can now be measured in decades rather than in centuries. Since Sweden banned hitting children in 1979, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Austria have followed.”136 And whereas in 1992 over 90 per cent of American parents hit their young children, by 1999 this had dropped to 57 per cent. 137
Due to this steady ‘evolution of childhood,’ the average level of childrearing experienced by today’s young adults in developed countries will have been better than that experienced by previous generations. Consequently there are now more and more people in the higher ‘psychoclasses’: individuals who, due to their more loving childhoods, have a higher level of psychological health. These individuals will be more able to enjoy their increased prosperity and the new technology that has become available over recent years, along with any increased personal freedoms. As a result, they will have less, if any, desire for war.
This relationship between childhood experience and support for, or opposition to war, has been found by, amongst others, political psychologist Michael Milburn. Milburn says:
We found that, particularly for males who had never had any psychotherapy, when they reported a high level of childhood punishment, they were significantly more likely to endorse a range of punitive public policies like…support for the use of military force.
… [T]he higher level of punitiveness among political conservatives is really strongly associated with experiences, generally, of harsh punishment from childhood. It’s not just going to be that they were spanked; there’s a whole family climate, and punishment is just going to be one of those indicators of that. 138
If a person who experiences a severe and punitive childhood is likely to grow up into the kind of adult who favours the use of military force, we might logically assume the opposite is also true: Individuals who had better childhoods will be less supportive of wars. Lloyd deMause confirms this, describing his observations of young adults today who have experienced far more loving childhoods:
[These individuals] are far more empathic and therefore more concerned about others than we ever were, and this has made them far more activist in their lives in trying to make a difference and change the world for the better, mostly involving themselves in local activities rather than global political changes. They lack all need for nationalism, wars, and other grandiose projects, and in the organizations they start are genuinely nonauthoritarian. There is no question that if the world could treat children with helping-mode parenting, wars and all the other self-destructive social conditions we still suffer from in the twenty-first century will be cured. 139
With the gradual improvement in the average level of childrearing over recent decades (in developed countries at least), we would expect a corresponding decrease in support for war. This was clearly evidenced by the unprecedented level of opposition to the 2003 Iraq invasion. In London, for example, on Saturday February 15, 2003, an estimated one to two million people marched in protest against the imminent invasion: the largest public demonstration ever to occur in Britain. The following month, 400,000 marched through London, the biggest protest in Britain against a war during wartime.140 Weeks before the war started, Tony Blair suffered the biggest Commons revolt of his premiership when 199 MPs rejected his direction over Iraq. As the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Charles Kennedy, observed: “Despite investing masses of political and parliamentary capital, the government has still failed to persuade a third of the House of Commons.” 141
According to leading political scholar and critic of American foreign policy Noam Chomsky, in an interview around this time:
There’s never been a time that I can think of when there’s been such massive opposition to a war before it was even started…. Even in the United States there is overwhelming opposition to the war and that corresponding decline in trust in the leadership that is driving the war…. If you compare it with the Vietnam war, the current stage of the war with Iraq is approximately like that of 1961 – that is, before the war actually was launched, as it was in 1962 with the US bombing of South Vietnam and driving millions of people into concentration camps and chemical warfare and so on, but there was no protest. In fact, so little protest that few people even remember. 142
Chomsky points out how even our governments are aware of this new reluctance towards war and have had to modify their actions accordingly:
[W]hen any administration comes into office the first thing it does is have a worldwide intelligence assessment – “What’s the state of the world?” – provided by the intelligence services…. When the first Bush administration came in 1989 parts of their intelligence assessment were leaked, and they’re very revealing about what happened in the subsequent 10 years about precisely these questions.
The parts that were leaked said that it was about military confrontations with much weaker enemies, recognising they were the only kind we were going to be willing to face, or even exist. So in confrontations with much weaker enemies the United States must win “decisively and rapidly” because otherwise popular support will erode, because it’s understood to be very thin. Not like the 1960s when the government could fight a long, brutal war for years and years practically destroying a country without any protest. Not now. 143
Although the peace movement failed to prevent the Iraq invasion, when the war began it seemed they had made a significant difference. As Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian:
The campaign began not with “shock and awe” but a subtler knife, aimed at the surgical decapitation of Saddam Hussein and his regime. One night’s bombing of Baghdad lasted no more than an hour.
… There could be a stack of explanations for that initial deployment of the short, sharp blow…. But there may be another motive for the initial preference for short-and-sweet over shock-and-awe. The US might have wanted to avoid a wave of worldwide revulsion. A series of tight, well-aimed strikes at the regime would have confounded the global fear of colossal Iraqi civilian casualties. It’s as if Washington had heard the peace movement’s objection to this war – that too many innocents would die – and was attempting to heed it. 144
Freedland continues:
[P]erhaps the clearest proof of the anti-war camp’s efforts came from our own prime minister: “I know this course of action has produced deep divisions of opinion in our country,” he said, just seconds into his own TV message to the nation. No leader wants to go into a war admitting such a thing. But Blair had no choice. As with much else, the peace movement has changed the landscape for this conflict – and the men of war are having to deal with it. 145
What peace activists may well have achieved is the prevention of further invasions of ‘axis of evil’ countries. As Lindsey German of the Stop the War Coalition said: “does anyone think Tony Blair can ever stand up in parliament again and say the words ‘trust me’? As they talk up targeting Iran and Syria, do you think anyone will ever believe this government when they say we’ve got the intelligence to prove it?” 146
Maybe the improvements in childrearing over recent decades that account for this unprecedented opposition to war, will also mean there are now enough people less afraid to challenge authority and face unpleasant truths, so as to help bring about a 9/11 scandal. Compare this to, say, the truth about the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. We now know that President Franklin Roosevelt and his top military advisers knew in advance that Japan was planning a ‘surprise attack’ on America. Japanese radio messages had been intercepted and it was known when and where they would attack the U.S. Despite this foreknowledge, Roosevelt allowed the attack to go ahead so as to create a pretext for America to join World War II. Yet these facts only became more widely known in 2000, with the release of Robert B. Stinnett’s book Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. 147 Robert McFarland points out: “While it was 58 years before Stinnett’s book made the facts about Pearl Harbor widely known, two important books about 9/11 came out within a year… Since these books came out quickly, we are apparently more willing to look at bad news than we were in 1941.” 148
While a 9/11 scandal would be a sufficiently large public crisis to help ease the particularly high level of public anxiety (‘growth panic’) among the lower psychoclasses, unlike a massive war it ought also be acceptable to the more peaceful higher psychoclass individuals. If we do have such a scandal, the emotional effect will undoubtedly be intense. Consider how the general public would feel if people start openly accusing some within the Bush administration of complicity in the 9/11 attacks. How would Americans feel who had voted for these men, trusted and respected them? I can imagine many people finding such events devastating. What if security camera footage of the attack on the Pentagon had to be made public at some point and it showed something other than a Boeing 757 hitting the Pentagon? Surely millions of people would feel horrified. The full implications of a 9/11 scandal would be colossal. It would be the emotional equivalent of a massive war. So maybe instead of the war “of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before,” that Donald Rumsfeld promised back in 2003, there is going to be a scandal of a ‘scope and scale’ that is ‘beyond what has been seen before.’”
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