October 10, 2001
Narco News 2001
The
So-Called
Evidence
Is a Farce
By Stan Goff
Stan Goff Joined
the U.S. Armed Forces in 1970 and Left in 1996
To Read
More About the Author,
Click
Here
Master
Sgt. author of
"The So-Called
Evidence is a Farce"
(Published
by Narco News)
Article that Started
It All Appears Below
Narco News Commentary:
The following text
has been circulating as an e-mail for some hours now. It has
found a home at Narco News.
About two years ago, Stan
Goff came to our attention when he wrote a brilliant
critique of U.S. policy in Colombia and its narco-pretext for
other agendas.
This essay, like his previous work, is a "must read"
for anyone attempting to understand the immediate historical
situation that all the world today faces.
Goff writes, specifically
relevant to Our América, that "wars on terrorism"
are "far better
than drug wars as a rationalization, and the drug war thing was
being discredited in any case. Leftists are regaining power and
popularity in Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia,
the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and Argentina. Cuba has
gained immense prestige over the last few years. The empire is
beginning to unravel...."
Like Goff, who understands
how recent events in this hemisphere have pulled the thread that
was on the verge of unraveling the drug war - the prior pretext
for squelching true democracy, human rights and peace with justice
at home and abroad - we don't believe that governments are telling
us the truth right now. We don't accept the party line. We demand
better evidence from Power.
Goff cites two premises
that should not, that must not, be accepted at this hour without
more convincing proof: "One,
there is the premise that what this de facto administration is
doing now is a 'response' to September 11th. Two, there is the
premise that this attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion, neither
of these is sound."
At Narco News,
having reported on the corrupt and dishonest behavior of the
U.S. government in all América with the "war on drugs,"
we, too, distrust the official agenda claimed by its "war
on terrorism." We don't have to agree with every single
conclusion reached by Goff to know that he is asking the right
questions. He walks in the traditions of Thomas Paine and Simón
Bolívar by stating his questions and conclusions clearly,
boldly, and without equivocation. Averaging between 25,000 and
35,000 hits per day, we felt a moral duty to share his words
with our readers, and hope his essay succeeds in widening the
inquiry beyond the commercial media's currently limited discourse.
The fate of all América, of all the peoples of the world,
is at stake. His questions demand answers not just from Power,
but from all of us.
The
So-Called
Evidence
Is a Farce
By Stan Goff
I'm
a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant.
That doesn't cut much for those who will only accept the opinions
of former officers on military matters, since we enlisted swine
are assumed to be incapable of grasping the nuances of doctrine.
But I wasn't just in the army. I studied
and taught military science and doctrine. I was a tactics instructor
at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama, and I taught
Military Science at West Point. And contrary to the popular image
of what Special Forces does, SF's mission is to teach. We offer
advice and assistance to foreign forces. That's everything from
teaching marksmanship to a private to instructing a Battalion
staff on how to coordinate effective air operations with a sister
service.
Based on that experience, and operations
in eight designated conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have
to say that the story we hear on the news and read in the newspapers
is simply not believable. The most cursory glance at the verifiable
facts, before, during, and after September 11th, does not support
the official line or conform to the current actions of the United
States government.
But the official line only works if they
can get everyone to accept its underlying premises. I'm not at
all surprised about the Republican and Democratic Parties repeating
these premises. They are simply two factions within a single
dominant political class, and both are financed by the same economic
powerhouses. My biggest disappointment, as someone who identifies
himself with the left, has been the tacit acceptance of those
premises by others on the left, sometimes naively, and sometimes
to score some morality points. Those premises are twofold. One,
there is the premise that what this de facto administration is
doing now is a "response" to September 11th. Two, there
is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion,
neither of these is sound.
To
put this in perspective we have to
go back not to September 11th, but to last year or further.
A man of limited intelligence, George
W. Bush, with nothing more than his name and the behind-the-scenes
pressure of his powerful father-a former President, ex-director
of Central Intelligence, and an oil man-is systematically constructed
as a candidate, at tremendous cost. Across the country, subtle
and not-so-subtle mechanisms are put into place to disfranchise
a significant fraction of the Democrat's African-American voter
base. This doesn't come out until Florida becomes a battleground
for Electoral College votes, and the magnitude of the story has
been suppressed by the corporate media to this day. In a decision
so lacking in legitimacy, the Supreme Court will neither by-line
the author of the decision nor allow the decision to ever be
used as a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards the presidency of the
United States to a man who loses the popular vote in Florida
and loses the national popular vote by over 600,000.
This de facto regime then organizes a
very interesting cabinet. The Vice President is an oil executive
and the former Secretary of Defense. The National Security Advisor
is a director on the board of a transnational oil corporation
and a Russia scholar. The Secretary of State is a man with no
diplomatic experience whatsoever, and the former Chair of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other interesting appointment is Donald
Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is the former CEO
of Searle Pharmaceuticals. He and Cheney were featured as speakers
at the May, 2000, Russian-American Business Leaders Forum. So
the consistent currents in this cabinet are petroleum, the former
Soviet Union, and the military.
Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in
all his guises, and the general trajectory of US foreign policy
as far back as the Carter Administration, I feel I can reasonably
conclude that Middle Eastern and South Asian fossil fuels are
one of their major preoccupations. Not just because this klavern
has some very direct financial interests in fossil fuel, but
because they surely know that worldwide oil production is peaking
as we speak, and will soon begin a permanent and precipitous
decline that will completely change the character of civilization
as we know it within 20 years. Even the left seems to be in deep
denial about this, but the math is available. And, no, alternative
energies and energy technologies will not save us. All the alternatives
in the world can not begin to provide more than a tiny fraction
of the energy base now provided by oil. This makes it more than
a resource, and the drive to control what's left more than an
economic competition.
I further conclude that the economic colonization
of the former Soviet Union is probably high on that agenda, and
in fact has a powerful synergy with the issue of petroleum. Russia
not only holds vast untapped resources that beckon to imperialism
in crisis, it remains a credible military and nuclear challenger
in the region.
We have not one, but three members of
the Bush de facto cabinet with military credentials, which makes
the cabinet look quite a lot like a military General Staff. All
this way before September 11th.
Then there's the subject of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO might have expected consignment
to the dustbin of the Cold War after the Eastern Bloc shattered
in 1991. Peace dividend and all that. But it didn't. It expanded
directly into the former states of the Eastern Bloc toward the
former Soviet Union, and contributed significant forces to the
devastation of Iraq-a key country in the world oil market, over
which control translates into the ability to manipulate oil prices.
NATO is a military formation, and the
United States exerts the controlling interest in it. It seemed
like a form without a function, but it remedied that pretty quickly.
Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball
with the International Monetary Fund, the US and Germany began
a systematic campaign of destabilization there, even using some
of the veterans of Afghanistan in that campaign.
NATO became the military arm of that agenda-the
break-up of Yugoslavia into compliant statelets, the further
containment of the former Soviet Union, and the future pipeline
easement for Caspain Sea oil to Western European markets through
Kosovo.
You see, this is important to understand,
and people-even those against the war talk-are tending to overlook
the significance of it. NATO is not a guarantor of international
law, and it is not a humanitarian organization.
It is a military alliance with one very
dominant partner. And it can no longer claim to be a defensive
alliance against European socialists. It is an instrument of
military aggression.
NATO is the organization that is now going
to thrust further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans through
the Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. The
US military has already taken control of a base in Uzbekistan.
No one is talking about how what we are doing seems to be a very
logical extension of a strategy that was already in motion, and
has been in motion for two decades. Once we recognize the pattern
of activity designed to simultaneously consolidate control over
Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and colonize
the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan is exactly where they need
to go to pursue that agenda.
Afghanistan borders Iran, Pakistan, and
even China but, more importantly, the Central Asian Republics
of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
These border Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan borders Russia. Turkmenistan
sits on the Southeastern quadrant of the Caspian Sea, whose oil
the Bush Administration dearly covets.
Afghanistan
is necessary for two things: as a base
of operations to begin the process of destabilizing, breaking
off, and establishing control over the South Asian Republics,
which will begin within the next 18-24 months in my opinion,
and constructing a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan,
and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to the Asian market.
The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik,
a Pakistani Foreign Secretary, that senior American officials
were warning them as early as mid-July that military action for
mid-October was being planned for Afghanistan. In 1996, the Department
of Energy was issuing reports on the desirability of a pipeline
through Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal testified before the
House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific that this pipeline
was crucial to transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian Ocean.
Given this evidence that a military operation
to secure at least a portion of Afghanistan has been on the table,
possibly as early as five years ago, I can't help but conclude
that the actions we are seeing put into motion now are part of
a pre-September 11th agenda. I'm absolutely sure of that, in
fact. The planning alone for operations, of this scale, that
are now taking shape, would take many months. And we are seeing
them take shape in mere weeks.
It defies common sense. This administration
is lying about this whole thing being a "reaction"
to September 11th. That leads me, in short order, to be very
suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided evidence that someone
in Afghanistan is responsible. It's just too damn convenient.
Which also leads me to wonder-just for the sake of knowing-what
actually did happen on September 11th, and who actually is responsible.
The
so-called evidence is a farce. The
US presented Tony Blair's puppet government with the evidence,
and of the 70 so-called points of evidence, only nine even referred
to the attacks on the World Trade Center, and those points were
conjectural. This is a bullshit story from beginning to end.
Presented with the available facts, any 16-year old with a liking
for courtroom dramas could tear this story apart like a two-dollar
shirt. But our corporate press regurgitates it uncritically.
But then, as we should know by now, their role is to legitimize.
This cartoon heavy they've turned bin
Laden into makes no sense, when you begin to appreciate the complexity
and synchronicity of the attacks. As a former military person
who's been involved in the development of countless operations
orders over the years, I can tell you that this was a very sophisticated
and costly enterprise that would have left what we call a huge
"signature".
In other words, it would be very hard
to effectively conceal.
So there's a real question about why there
was no warning of this. That can be a question about the efficacy
of the government's intelligence apparatus. That can be a question
about various policies in the various agencies that had to be
duped to orchestrate this action. And it can also be a question
about whether or not there was foreknowledge of the event, and
that foreknowledge is being covered up. To dismiss this concern
out of hand as the rantings of conspiracy nuts is premature.
And there is a history of this kind of thing being done by national
political bosses, including the darling of liberals, Franklin
Roosevelt. The evidence is very compelling that the Roosevelt
Administration deliberately failed to act to stop Pearl Harbor
in order to mobilize enough national anger to enter the World
War II.
I have no idea why people aren't asking
some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company
on the day of the attacks.
Follow
along:
Four planes get hijacked and deviate from
their flight plans, all the while on FAA radar. The planes are
all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time.
Who is notified?
This is an event already that is unprecedented.
But the President is not notified and going to a Florida elementary
school to hear children read.
By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent
that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handing
teachers.
By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight
11 crashes into the World Trade Center, Bush is settling in with
children for his photo ops at Booker Elementary. Four planes
have obviously been hijacked simultaneously, an event never before
seen in history, and one has just dived into the worlds best
know twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander
in Chief.
No one has apparently scrambled any Air
Force interceptors either.
At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into
the remaining World Trade Center building. At 9:05, Andrew Card,
the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers to George W. Bush. Bush
"briefly turns somber" according to reporters.
Does he cancel the school visit and convene
an emergency meeting? No.
He resumes listening to second graders
read about a little girl's pet fucking goat, and continues this
banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled
point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington
DC.
Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card
to scramble the Air Force? No.
An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally
deigns to give a public statement telling the United States what
they already have figured out; that there's been an attack by
hijacked planes on the World Trade Center.
There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to
Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything
yet? No.
At 9:30, when he makes his announcement,
American Flight 77 is still ten minutes from its target, the
Pentagon.
The Administration will later claim they
had no way of knowing that the Pentagon might be a target, and
that they thought Flight 77 was headed to the White House, but
the fact is that the plane has already flown South and past the
White House no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing through the sky
at over 400 nauts.
At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn,
360 degrees over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by
radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still
no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria
and DC.
Now, the real kicker: A pilot they want
us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for
Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral,
descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings
the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires
across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint
accuracy into the side of this building at 460 nauts.
When the theory about learning to fly
this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it
was added that they received further training on a flight simulator.
This is like saying you prepared your
teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush hour by buying her
a video driving game. It's horse shit!
There is a story being constructed about
these events. My crystal ball is not working today, so I can't
say why.
But at the least, this so-called Commander-in-Chief
and his staff that we are all supposed to follow blindly into
some ill-defined war on terrorism is criminally negligent or
unspeakably stupid. And at the worst, if more is known or was
known, and there is an effort to conceal the facts, there is
a criminal conspiracy going on.
Certainly, the Bush de facto administration
was facing a confluence of crises from which they were temporarily
rescued by this event. Whether they played a sinister role or
not, there is little doubt that they have at the very least opportunistically
pounced on this attack to overcome their lack of legitimacy,
to shift the blame for the encroaching recession from capitalism
to the September 11th terror attack, to legitimize their pre-existing
foreign policy agenda, and to establish and consolidate repressive
measures domestically and silence dissent. In many ways, September
11th pulled the Bush cookies out of the fire.
And given them the green light to begin
constructing a long-term scenario within which to establish fascistic
control measures at home and abroad as a citadel for the ruling
class in the catastrophic conjuncture that we are entering based
on the end of oil.
This elephant in the living room is being
studiously ignored. In fact, the domestic repression has already
begun, officially and unofficially. It's kind of a latter day
McCarthyism. I participated in a teach-in at Chapel Hill, North
Carolina, on the 17th of September, and though not a single person
on the panel excused or justified the attacks, and every person
there offered either condolences and prayers for the victims,
we were excoriated within two days as "enemies of America."
Yesterday an op-ed called for my deportation (to where, one can
only guess). Now Herr Ashcroft is fast tracking the biggest abrogation
of US civil liberties since the so-called anti-terrorism legislation
after the Oklahoma City bombing - which by the way hasn't resulted
in anti-terrorism but in the acceleration of the application
of the racist death penalty. The FBI has defined terrorist groups
not by whether any given group has ever acted as terrorists,
but by their beliefs. Some socialists and anti-globalization
groups have already been identified by name as terrorist groups,
even though there is not a single shred of evidence that they
have ever participated in any criminal activity. It reminds me
of the Smith Act that was finally declared unconstitutional,
but only after a hell of a lot of people served a hell of a long
time in jail for the crime of thinking.
I think this also points to yet another
huge problems that the Bush regime was facing. Worldwide resistance
to the whole so-called neoliberal agenda, which is a prettied
up term for debt-leverage imperialism. While debt and the threat
of sanctions has been used to coerce nations in the periphery,
we have to understand that the final guarantor of compliance
remains military action. For a global economic agenda, there
is always a corresponding political and military agenda.
The focal point of these actions in the
short term is Southern Asia, but they have already scripted this
as a worldwide and protracted fight against terrorism.
It's
far better than drug wars as a rationalization,
and the drug war thing was being discredited in any case. Leftists
are regaining power and popularity in Venezuela, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti,
Brazil, and Argentina. Cuba has gained immense prestige over
the last few years. The empire is beginning to unravel. We can
hardly justify intervention in these places by saying they are
not towing the economic line by allowing the absolute domination
of their societies by transnational corporations. That exposes
the agenda. So we simply claim they are supporting terrorism.
It's for all these reasons I say the left
has missed the boat on this one, by allowing them to get away
with rushing past the question of who did what on September 11th.
If the official story is a lie, and I think the circumstantial
case is strong enough to stay with this question, then we really
do need to know what happened. And we need to understand concretely
what the motives of this administration are.
And we need to understand more than just
their immediate motives, but where the larger social forces that
underwrite our situation right now are headed. I do not think
this administration is engaged in the deliberative process of
a political grouping that is on top of their game. They are putting
together some very deliberative technical solutions in response
to a larger situation that it slipping rapidly out of their control.
Like clear cutting. There's a very smart technology being employed
to do a very dumb thing.
What they are responding to is not September
11th, but the beginning of a permanent and precipitous decline
in worldwide oil production, the beginning of a deep and protracted
worldwide recession, and the unraveling of the empire.
This brings me to a point about what all
this means for Americans' security, which they are perfectly
justified to worry about. The actions being prepared by this
administration will not only not enhance our security, it will
significantly degrade it. Military action against many groups
across the globe, which is what the administration is telling
us quite openly they are planning to do, will put a lot of backs
against the wall. That can't be very secure.
The concept of war being touted here is
a violation of the principles of war on several counts, and will
inevitably lead to military catastrophes, if you're inclined
to view this from a position of moral and political neutrality.
And the people who are now in possession
of half the world's remaining oil reserves are subject to destabilization
for which we can't even pretend to predict the consequences-but
loss of access to critical energy supplies is certainly within
the realm of possibility. Worst of all, we will be destabilizing
Pakistan, a nuclear power in an active conflict with its neighbor,
and we will be provoking Russia, another nuclear power. The security
stakes don't get any higher, and Americans can ill afford to
ignore nukes.
And I think that this domestic agenda
is a tremendous threat to the security of anyone who is critical
of the government or their corporate financiers, and we already
know that the real threats are against populations that can easily
be scapegoated as the domestic crisis deepens.
There
is a very real threat right now of
creeping fascism in this country, and that phenomenon requires
its domestic enemies. Historically those enemies have included
leftists, trade unionists, and racially and nationally oppressed
sectors. This whole "state of emergency" mentality
is already being used to quiet the public discourses of anti-racism,
of feminism, of environmentalism, and of both socialism and anarchism.
And while there is token resistance by officials to anti-Muslim
xenophobia, the stereotypical images have saturated the media,
and the government is already beginning to openly re-instate
racial profiling. It is only a short step from there to go after
other groups. We have long been prepared by the ideologies of
overt and covert racism, and racism as both institution and corresponding
psychology in the United States is nearly intractable.
It's for all these reasons that I say
emphatically that we can not accept anything from this administration;
not their policies nor their bullshit stories. What they are
doing is very, very dangerous, and the time to fight back against
them, openly, is right now, before they can consolidate their
power and their agenda. Once they have done that, our job becomes
much more difficult.
The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize
out of its oblivion, needs to understand its critical roles here.
We have to play the role of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian
partners in a broader peace-movement. We have to study, synthesize,
and describe our current historical conjuncture. And we have
to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will emerge
to first defeat fascism then take political power.
Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than
ever right now. We are not faced with a choice between socialism
and capitalism, but socialism or barbarism.
And what we can least afford are denial
and timidity.
Stan Goff
Stan Goff
I strongly recommend, for anyone who wants
to find further background material on the issues herein check
out the websites at dieoff.org,
emperors-clothes.com,
and globalcircle.net.
For more Narco
News, click here
Because
Governments Lie