November 4, 2001
Narco News 2001
Transcript
of the Interview:
"You've
Got To
Be Up
Front"
The Stan Goff
Interview
By Mike McCormick
Stan Goff Joined
the U.S. Armed Forces in 1970 and Left in 1996
This
is the Transcript of an Audiofile:
Master
Sgt. author of
(Published
by Narco News)
The following
is a transcript of an interview I conducted with Stan Goff on
October 24, 2001 regarding his article, "The So-Called Evidence
is a Farce".
Mike McCormick: I was hoping you could go through and reiterate
everything or a lot of what you had covered in your article "The So-Called Evidence is a Farce".
Stan Goff: Yeah, let me kind of preface that a bit because
the way that thing got started was that I was participating in
a list and I sent that to the discussion list and someone from
the discussion list forwarded to someone and then it got forwarded
to someone else and now the thing is showing up like in Pravda
and places like that, it took off. It wasn't really meant for
public consumption but I still stand by everything I said.
I think that while it's important to emphasize
that there's a lack of credibility sort of built into the structure
of the official story on this and there's a deep lack of credibility
related or not to whether this is a pre-existing agenda which
I think that it's pretty clear that it was, I don't want people
to think that I'm trying to advance some specific conspiracy
theory. I think that's really important to say at the outset.
I don't know what happened on Sept. 11th and I think it's important
to know, but it's even more important to know what is this agenda
that's being pursued because I think it's an extremely dangerous
agenda and I think it can be traced all the way back to as early
as 1973 in the first oil shock with the OPEC embargo. So that's
my preface.
MM:
Ok. So I think some of the strength of your, if I can call it
an article now since its...
SG:
Yeah it's sort of turned into one.
MM:
Part of that came from your experience with the military, that
you are in fact what many would call an authority and I'm wondering
if you could give us a brief bio of your experience with the
military.
SG:
Well, I retired in February 1996. I went into the Army in January
1970, did a tour in Vietnam, came back and did a tour in the
82nd Airborne Division. Took a little break in service. Went
back in again. Worked as a Cav Scout for a while then went to
work at 2nd Ranger Battalion. That was the first of three Ranger
assignments. Went to work at the Jungle Operations Training Center
in Panama. Went to and the worked at the Counter-Terrorist Outfit
that's sort of popularly known as Delta. Left there and went
to work as a military science instructor at West Point for three
semesters. Had another short break where I instructed SWAT teams
as a training captain at the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Facility in
Oak Ridge Tennessee. Went back in the Army on active duty again
from a reserve status and ran a Ranger platoon of First Ranger
Battalion in Savannah Georgia. Went from there to Special Forces
qualification course, entered Seventh Special Forces. Did a good
deal of work in Latin America with them. After Seventh Group
I returned back working for the Regimental staff at 75th Ranger
Regiment, participated in the Somalia Operation. Came back from
there, was promoted sort of out of that position and back into
3rd Special Forces where I participated in the Haiti Operation.
Overall that stuff, there were eight conflict
areas with a great deal of concentration for a while there in
Latin America and the Caribbean, but also some experience elsewhere
in Africa and Asia and so forth. But primarily that work was
in the Special Operations field which as you know, they're busy
boys right now. They're doing most of the heavy lifting from
what I can gleam in Afghanistan right now. In fact, one of the
big commanders out there, Frank Tony, if I've heard correctly,
was B Company Commander in 2nd Ranger Battalion in 1979-80 when
I was stationed there with A Company, right next door. He wasn't
very well thought of then, he was thought as an inveterate brown-noser
and it's just the same old folks showing up, they've just been
promoted.
MM:
And from what little we can get from the media currently, do
you think they are accurately portraying what is happening with...?
SG:
(laughter) The media has never accurately portrayed a military
operation as long as I've been involved with this stuff. I've
never seen an accurate portrayal to this day, not one. But then
again I've never seen an accurate portrayal by the military public
affairs officers either. The public is kept pretty much in the
dark about how military operations are really conducted and what
may be going on now and I think we are all being kept deeply
in the dark about Afghanistan right now. I strongly suspect that
the collateral damage as they call it is far worse than they
are going to allow anyone to know. And it's a dumb operation.
It's just not a very smart operation in a lot of ways. I think
it's comparable in many respects to Somalia.
MM:
How so? How's it similar?
SG:
Well, I'll have to give you a little background on this. When
I was with Special Forces, we were part of a foreign policy doctrine
called IDAD, which is Internal Defense and Development. Special
Forces basically had four primary kinds of missions. Some of
them were combat missions but a lot of them were advice and assistance
kinds of missions. That's changed. There's a much stronger doctrinal
and technological emphasis now on something called OOTW or Operations
Other Than War and that's got some sinister implications for
us at home because it really is part of this whole sort of merger
between police and military forces.
The problem in Somalia and the problem
here is related to a military that's still predicated on a structure
that was developed out of the Cold War where we were facing off
against the Warsaw Pact. Everything was designed to stop the
Russians at the Fulda Gap. Afghanistan is a far different reality.
When I went with the task force to capture Mohammed Fara Aidid,
we had all these gadgets, the most technologically sophisticated
Special Operations Force probably ever assembled up to that time
and that's why people were stunned in the United States when
all of a sudden that task force comes home with its dead and
wounded and its tail between its legs and its been defeated by
this feudal warlord. There's been all kinds of nonsense written
about why this happened, how this happened, you know there sort
of this perennial claim that politicians keep soldiers from exerting
the necessary force to get the job done. It's the same thing
they said about Vietnam. It's really a military rationalization,
it's not real.
Military success is not a function of
force, or force alone. It's not a function of geography and weather
alone. It's not a function of technology alone. It's not a function
of intelligence alone. It's not a function of political context
alone. You see it's a combination of all these things. Then you
throw into the equation a host of all sorts of other uncontrollable
variables, just accidents and there's no shortage of fools in
the military. It's a bureaucracy and so it sort of breeds these
folks. They have a real strong vested interest in mystifying
military operations for the public because they want the public
to leave it to the experts and ignore their dishonesty, their
corruption and accept their little BS excuses for their failures.
It's a very contagious thing and I think it's actually infected
George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and all these other would-be
generalissimos that are running the United States right now.
What they think they can do is they think
they can win in Afghanistan but again going back to Somalia,
Afghanistan is similar in the following ways. Afghanistan is
backward, it's tribalistic. It's coherent as a nation only because
they've got a boundary around it that says this is a political
geographic definition but within that geographic definition there
is nothing that resembles a nation.
The Taliban is one of many many groups,
made in the USA by the way. But there's not one singular cogent
military force for the U.S. to focus its efforts against and
that's a violation of a principle of war called objective. There's
a host of factions. They're all very well armed thanks to the
United States because they armed them to topple a socialist regime
there years ago and they change alliances down there like you
and I change underwear. It's a country that physically divided
by some very forbidding and mountainous terrain. There is no
infrastructure. You can't attack a society's infrastructure if
it doesn't exist and so it nullifies the kind of strategy they
used against Iraq for instance. So there's no clear enemy and
without a clear enemy there's no clear decisive objective. I'm
speaking strictly in a morally neutral way here. A military task
force can't conquer a nation if there's not really a nation there.
So you take this situation and you got
all these different warlords and factions and you can introduce
a couple dozen Stinger missiles or 500 assault rifles or like
in Somalia 200 RPGs and what that does, the introduction of a
comparatively small amount of hardware, can instantly shift the
entire balance of power in a region and completely change the
character of the battlefield. Our military is not versatile or
agile enough to respond to that and moreover there's still no
clearly defined objective. So just from the point of view of
the military it's crazy. The Taliban, they claim they have 10,000
or so there about Afghani Arabs which are not Afghanis at all.
Bin Laden for instance is a Saudi. His daddy is a big construction
magnate with connections to the Bush family back in Saudi Arabia.
38% of Afghanistan is Pashtun and even the Pashtun ethnicity
is subdivided between the Ghilazi and Durrani and 25% of Afghanistan
are Tajiks. Their loyalties are divided between Afghanistan and
Tajikistan. Then the Hazara who are Shites constitute 19% and
they are kind of prone to favor the Iranians and then there are
Uzbeks. Then you've got a Sunni majority among the Muslims but
you've got a Shite minority that's fairly significant.
Most of the folks there speak a form of
Farsi called Dari. That's a Pashtun dialect but you have Turkic
dialects, there's about 30 minor languages alone. Then they say
they are going to make an alliance with this Northern Alliance,
it's not even an alliance. The only thing that those people are
allied around is their opposition to the Taliban. When they're
not allied against the Taliban then they spend as much time blood
letting among themselves as they do doing anything else and in
fact they've been very opposed to Pashtun nationalism in the
past and the Pashtun have a much closer ties to Pakistan... You
see what I'm saying? This is extremely complex and it's dynamic.
It changes from day to day and there's no way that a great power,
unquote, like the United States can go in there and achieve some
sort of a military resolution to the problem. Journalists have
called it a quagmire; you know mission creep and all that stuff.
To me it's like if anybody remembers their youth and Uncle Remus
stories I think about tar babies. That's what's going on there.
This is going to be far more problematic than Vietnam from a
military standpoint.
MM:
So you mentioned earlier that some of the real reasons that what
we're doing in Afghanistan date back to 1973. Could you go into
that?
SG:
Well I think that first of all we just have to be clear that
this is about oil. When you look at the question of oil it becomes
historically kind of complex but I'll simplify it as much as
I can sort of what I've found out studying this in detail. Now
you've got to look at oil production first of all as something
that's finite. The Neo-Malthusians now are making some very good
points and I don't necessarily agree with their analysis at a
political level but certainly from a physical level they are
saying that oil is about to run out and I think that's demonstrable
with the data that's available.
Oil as an extractable resource follows
something called a Hubbert curve. Once it peaks in production
then it begins a very precipitous decline, forever, because it's
a finite, it's a physically finite resource. But it doesn't peak
in production in all the same regions, so you've got aggregate
world production peaking at one point and then you have different
regions peaking at different points along the way. This really
changes the kind of power dynamics that exist between these different
regions. In 1973 we got hammered by an oil embargo that was primarily
the work of the Gulf States through OPEC but the Gulf States
to this day still have the largest repository of recoverable
oil. Especially Saudi Arabia but also Iran and also Iraq and
now some people believe and some people doubt but there's a fair
amount in the Caspian basin in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan and
around there.
Right now the world is consuming somewhere
around 75 million barrels a day. World oil production as an aggregate
is peaking sometime between now and next year and then it'll
begin a permanent decline aggregate worldwide. The problem is
demand is going up so that around 2010 our demand is going to
be 100 million barrels a day which means the demand is going
to go up 25 million barrels a day between now and the end of
this particular decade and the problem is even if everything
that they're trying to do right now in increasing the recovery
of oil in the Gulf States and the Caspian has a potential only
with the introduction of around a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure
would recover only around 15 additional million barrels a day
which means they still have a 10 million barrel deficit in terms
of what their demand is and what's actually available.
Now that's not the real trick. The real
trick here is if you divide the world up, just for the sake of
argument into OPEC which is primarily Gulf States. Venezuela
is also a member but we're just talking about Gulf States and
we'll call them OPEC. Then you look at all the non-OPEC and I
just call them NOPEC for the sake of argument. NOPEC production
peaked years ago. It peaked in the last decade. It's on the way
down so NOPEC is losing its relative power to control the market
and NOPEC is something that the United States was very heavily
invested in for the purpose of offsetting the potential power
of the Gulf States as oil producers. But now OPEC is on the rise
until 2010, so between now and 2010, OPEC, every day that goes
by gains more power to control the market, the world market for
petroleum.
The only thing that attenuates that problem
for the U.S. right now is that after 1973 they began a very aggressive
program of offering all sorts of perquisites to the Saudis and
convinced them to invest their petroleum money in U.S. financial
instruments and so the dollar became the petrodollar you see.
But when the dollar became the petrodollar it also became the
foundation currency for world trade and that's one reason the
dollar has maintained its strength is because it's what's oil
is traded in. The Saudi regime that protects our interests there,
right now, and some of the other regimes in the region who would
potentially protect our interests are in a lot of trouble. There's
a great deal of social unrest and when you look at them attacking
Osama Bin Laden in a place like Afghanistan.
You have to wonder since Osama Bin Laden
represents right now and I think represents very well strictly
from the point of view of whether they have influence or not,
this not Islam but Islamism, the radical fundamentalism that's
taken root in really a sea of declining social conditions over
there. Because the Saudi standard of living and the standard
of living throughout the region as oil profits have gone down
and as corruption has rooted itself further and further in these
regimes has created again this ocean of potentially 100 million
people whose lives are getting worse all the time and this is
really fertile ground for something like this Islamism, this
radical fundamentalism to take root.
So Osama Bin Laden in a sense is really
the potential opposition in a place like Saudi Arabia and Saudi
Arabia is the prize. It is the prize. Whoever controls Saudi
Arabia controls oil worldwide and Bin Laden said himself a couple
of years ago at a public interview that he was going to raise
the price of oil to $144 a barrel. Now I don't know where that
number came from or why it was that arbitrary and specific but
at $50 a barrel U.S. power dissolves. Our stock market crashes.
So they've got some real concerns and
they also have some very specific concerns as individuals or
the members of this administration do because their also heavily
invested in oil, most of them. This trillion dollars of potential
infrastructure going into the Middle East, North Africa and Central
Asia is something that Halliburton Oil, Dick Cheney's old company
very well may be contracted to construct. I've got about six
inches deep worth of research over here and I don't want to bore
listeners with all the details but there's more here than meets
the eye.
MM:
I don't think you're boring us at all with the details. So can
you make the connection to potentially the benefits of getting
Afghanistan under control for the extraction of oil?
SG:
I think it's a pipe dream. I don't think they can get Afghanistan
under control. What I've come to believe is that really the U.S.'s
ability to dominate the entire planet is unraveling. This is
just part of a historical evolution that is at some point inevitable
and I think it's about to happen. I think what they're doing
now is not something they're doing out of a position of strength
but out of a position of desperation and panic. These are very
panicked kind of moves in a sort of broad overall view of things
which makes them exceedingly dangerous.
I think historically we can go back and
see that when big capital gets in trouble and the market's not
working for them anymore they have to find a way, cause right
now there is a worldwide production over-capacity that's created
a recession that's about to go deep and about to go long and
one of the ways that they've traditionally gotten themselves
out of that is to liquidate a bunch of that capital and the best
way to liquidate capital real fast is war. That's the way they
correct the problem they use non-market mechanisms to correct
for a fallen rate of profit within a market economy.
And I think what's even more dangerous
is we are looking at this huge imperial power that's the United
States right now and they're trying to control everything at
once and their empire is beginning to unravel on them and I think
what is particularly dangerous for people like me and probably
people like y'all and a lot of your listeners is that in the
process of doing this they're going to have to exercise more
and more despotic measures at home to step on resistance and
so I think we're really in very serious and immediate danger
of an emergence of a form of fascism in the United States. And
I think John Ashcroft at the helm of the Justice Dept. is not
a particularly great thing and I think if people take a close
look at the kinds of initiatives he's involved in right now in
this bizarre Orwellian sounding The Office of Homeland Security
with Tom Ridge of all people. These are very disturbing developments.
I think one of the reactions that the
public had to the events of Sept. 11th and it's a very sensible
and understandable reaction is this incredible sense of a loss
of security and a sense of endangerment. That's being sort of
demagogically played out by this opportunistic administration
but I think what people need to understand and if we are going
to appeal to the public at large about what their interests are
I think that what's going on right now, the policies that are
being pursued by the de facto Bush administration are policies
that are contrary to our security and in fact a threat to our
long term security and it's just an attempt to consolidate a
citadel of power for a handful of the elite in this country at
the expense of everyone else and it's only a matter of time before
they turn on us too. Because this is not a crisis that can be
overcome.
Oil is running out in the long term and
we have 6 to 7 billion people living on the planet right now
that thoroughly depend on this one resource that's not just a
regular commodity. It's the life blood of the entire global capitalist
system and it's going to be cut off and it's going to be cut
off by nature it's not going to be cut off by us but in the process
I think again that you'll see a retrenchment of power and it's
that retrenchment that I think is extremely dangerous.
MM:
Can you go into some more specifics of how the current policies
that the Bush administration is following are a threat to our
security?
SG:
Oh my goodness, well start with the notion of going over what
I think is really the beginning of a war of extermination among
a 100 million Muslim people. That don't strike me as something
very secure. If they wanted to find a good way to go out there
and manufacture new terrorists they're going about it exactly
the right way. This unilateralism and this willingness to go
over there and drop bombs on Afghani civilians which they are
doing. That's exactly why they've cut the media off.
But I think there's also some real geostrategic
issues. They are introducing a much higher level of tension now
between the Pakistanis and the Indians who've been on the brink
of nuclear war with one another already. And I think within a
couple of years when they begin what's gonna be inevitably the
attempt to break up Uzbekistan and Turkminestan and to pull them
away from the orbit of the Russians I think that's going to create
another problem. The Russians are working with us right now but
that's short term. And I think domestically and again I go back
to this doctrine of Operations Other Than War (OOTW), worldwide
this recession is going to kick in and create problems in the
center, in the industrialized nations, but also in the periphery.
And I think they've been very alarmed
by the growth of this anti-globalization movement you know that
people have seen most recently in Genoa but before that in Quebec
and Seattle. These things are very disturbing I think to the
power elite right now and I think, we've seen it already over
time, there's this closer and closer relationship and blurring
of the lines between the military and police and I mean I participated
in this. In the early eighties I was actually involved as an
active duty military in training the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team.
They were just "Woofo" SWAT, Washington Field Office
SWAT, at the time, so we were militarizing them and at the same
time they started doing operations with Special Forces and the
Marines augmenting the Border Patrol. So there was already in
progress this developmental trajectory that was beginning to
merge the roles of the police and the military. And I think what
we're seeing is worldwide especially under the influence of the
United States.
I think there is an hallucination, out
there, of the Pax Americana, you know, and what they're developing
now, is a military and police doctrine for urban civil war. And
for us that means in the short term that they are developing
a doctrine for severe population control. I don't know about
any one else, but that don't make me feel anymore secure. (chuckles).
That makes me feel very insecure. Because it's only a short step
before people start getting thrown in jail for what they believe
in again. I think we're moving toward the reintroduction of something
similar to the Smith Act in this country right now.
MM:
What was that?
SG:
The Smith Act was finally declared unconstitutional, but only
after people spent like a decade in jail. That's back in the
Post WWII. That's part of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon. They
introduced something called the Smith Act. Ah, rounded up people
who belong to socialist organizations threw them all in jail,
for the crime of thinking. They did absolutely nothing wrong,
and they just put them in jail for their beliefs. I don't think
we are but a hop skip and a jump away from that right now.
MM:
Well especially with this week where I believe the FBI is now
seeking changing the laws so they will be allowed to torture
people.
SG:
Yeah. Did you see that? Or if they can't torture them here, they'll
ship them overseas to someone who can. You know, the people need
to be paying attention. Stop waving that flag for about five
minutes and go take a real close look at what's going on because
this has nothing to do with patriotism. I care about my country.
Heck, I was born and raised here, you know. Members of my family
are American citizens. So it's not a question of this thing trying
to equate the notion of caring about your country with supporting
the asinine, dangerous, opportunistic policies of an illegitimate
administration. I don't buy it. It's not the same thing. I will
never support the Bush Administration. I don't care what they
do, because first of all they weren't elected. People seemed
to have forgotten that. And that's why I say, man, you know,
what's the ol' saying, cui bono, who benefits?
MM:
Go into that some more if you would cause again in your email
that you sent out that somehow turned into, through a mass circulation,
turned into a somewhat famous article now. You talked about how
many people in the current Bush Administration have connections
to oil.
SG:
Oh my goodness, (chuckles), Okay, well you know. Start with Bush.
Start with the de facto president right now. He was the CEO of
Harken Energy. That is his own little company, you know. As it
turns out, he wasn't very good at it. You know, his dad, was
an oil man. So you've got two generations in oil right there.
Okay. And his dad was also you know the former President, the
former Vice-President, the director of Central Intelligence.
George Herbert Walker Bush is on the board of Carlyle Group.
Carlyle Group is right now a $12 billion dollar equity company,
but it's heavily invested in all kinds of things, including oil
and it's also I think 11th or 12th whatever, biggest defense
contractors in the country right now. It's getting very incestuous.
And in fact, Carlyle put Bush junior on the board of one of its
subsidiaries, which is Cater Air. A little shuttle service, a
little puddle jumper service. Sort of as a sop to dad.
The new ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert
Jordan, is a Dallas lawyer and an old Bush booster. Jordan works
for a Baker Botts. That's a firm with offices in Riyadh. And
Baker Botts represents Carlyle Group over there. And the Baker
in Baker Botts is James Baker, who was Secretary of State for
George Herbert Walker Bush, but he is also the guy that engineered
the whole Florida coup d'etat, in the 2000 election. He was the
midwife of that little venture.
Some of the other folks in Carlyle, Fidel
Ramos, former Chief of the Philippines. Park Tae Joon of South
Korea. John Major. Everybody remember John Shalikashvili, former
chairman of the Joint Chiefs? And you can go back with the Bush
family. Prescott Bush, Rockefellers, Duponts, Standard Oil, Morgans,
Fords, all these other folks were anti-Semites and anti-Communists
way back. They also actually financed the rise to power of Adolph
Hitler. They financed it. I mean, that's a historical fact. It's
irrefutable. And Prescott Bush did business with the Nazis all
the way up to 1942 until he was censured by the United States
under the Trading with the Enemy Act. And after the War, he turned
right around and ran for Congress in Connecticut and won. This
is an interesting family.
Anyway, Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton
Oil. Got $34 million before he took office in stock options from
Halliburton. As the CEO, Cheney, and I'm looking at my notes,
oversaw $23.8 billion dollars in oil industry contracts to Iraq
alone. Now this is interesting, because Cheney found the loopholes
in the embargo on Iraq. Now the attack on Iraq was done when
Cheney was the Secretary of Defense. He stepped down as Secretary
of Defense and turned right around and became the CEO of Halliburton,
took advantage of the loopholes and went back there and made
$23.8 billion dollars in Iraq by rebuilding the infrastructure
that we bombed out of existence. Halliburton is also involved
with the Russian mob. They've got sort of two things going on.
One is oil and the other is drug trafficking. Halliburton is
a story all by itself.
Secretary of State, Colin Powell. This
man has no diplomatic credentials. He was the former chairman
of Joint Chiefs of Staff and all of sudden he is in charge of
the entire diplomatic corps of the United States. That's interesting
just by itself. He has cash holdings or stock holdings in a number
of defense contractors. Tony Prinicipi, Secretary of Foreign
Affairs. Lockheed Martin, defense contractor. The biggest defense
contractor in the world. Andrew Card, Chief of Staff... General
Motors. Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England. General Dynamics.
Secretary of the Airforce, James Roche, Northrup Grummond.. Secretary
of the Army, General Thomas White retired. Enron Energy. These
folks are (chuckles) all defense contractors or oil people. The
whole bunch of them are. Donald Rumsfeld is Secretary of Defense.
What people don't realize is he is also the former CEO of Searle
Pharmaceuticals. They get big defense contracts. But he is also
with General Signal Corporation, a defense contractor. And interestingly
enough, he is also heavily invested in biotech, which is probably
gonna make a killing here pretty soon with whatever Anthrax vaccines.
…I've got a picture of Cheney and Rumsfeld in May 2000 at
the Russian-American Business Leaders Forum together. Arms around
each other, and smiling. Dick Armitage. Deputy Secretary of Defense,
he's a guy like me, he's a former special ops guy, Seal. He had
to leave the Reagan Administration because he was up to his neck
in Iran contra drug problems. And now he's working directly with
the Russian Mafia. And he is also a board member of Carlyle.
Remember that? Chief of Carlyle is Mr. Carlucci, who is also
with the Middle East Policy Council, you see how this stuff intersects?
Commerce Secretary is Donald Evans who
owns Colorado Oil Company. You have to take a very close look
at this cabinet, which I think was constructed in a very systematic
way to figure out what their foreign policy priorities are.
MM:
Let me also ask you about the actual if we could go into the
actual events on September 11th. Because again, in your email
that went out you had some...you raised some very good questions
that I think were on a lot of peoples' minds as to the exact
timing of different incidents.
SG:
Well, and again, and I don't want to imply that there's a conspiracy,
it might just be incompetence, but it strikes me as very odd.
And I'm sort of looking at my notes here. First of all, every
fifteen seconds they would show on the TV these planes blowing-up
into the World Trade Center, over and over. It was like we were
trying to be hypnotized by that-by that image. Almost as if they
didn't want us to think about well how did this come to pass,
you know. Well, it came to pass in a situation that was unprecedented
in the history of the world. Four simultaneous hijackings inside
the United States: That's never happened. Never ever, ever. And
hijacked in a span of twenty-five minutes. 7:45-8:10am. Eastern
daylight. And all these planes are on FAA radar.
You fly around the United States, you
are on FAA radar. You've got four hijackings, and nobody notifies
the President. The President, he is going to this visit to an
elementary school down in Florida. By 8:15, somebody should know
something is wrong because these planes have deviated from their
flight plans, but nothing happens. The President, he's skinnin'
and grinnin' with the teachers and doing his photo op thing.
8:45: American Airlines flight 11 hits the World Trade Center.
Okay, 8:45. Now Bush, he's at Booker Elementary. You've got four
planes hijacked and one of them has just crashed into the World
Trade Center and still nobody is notifying the Commander in Chief.
No one has scrambled a single Air Force air-to-air attack missile,
er, airplane. There are no Air Force inceptors in the air. 9:03
United flight 175 hits the other building in the World Trade
Center. 9:05 Andrew Card finally bends over to the President
and whispers something in his ear, okay. Did the President stop
and convene the meeting? Hun-ah. He goes back to reading with
second graders.
Now they've tracked American Airlines
flight 77. It's over Ohio headed west, conducts a point turn
unscheduled and off the flight plan over Ohio and turns around
and starts making a beeline for Washington D.C. Has Andrew Card
been told to scramble the Air Force? No! Twenty-five minutes
later, still the President finally gives a public statement telling
people that there have been some hijacked planes flown into the
World Trade Center.
By this time, we've all seen it live on
TV. And, in meantime, there's this plane that is still headed
to D.C. Air Force has still not been scrambled. 9:30 The President
makes his announcement. Flight 77 is still ten minutes from the
Pentagon. Actually over ten minutes. The Administration later
on tells people that they didn't know the Pentagon was the target
and they thought it was the White House, but in fact, this was
on FAA radar and it's shown that it had already flown south past
the White House no-fly zone and was headed to Alexandria. 9:35
This plane conducts another turn. This is very strange turn.
It's at altitude; it conducts a 360 degree turn and begins a
maneuver. A tight spinning descent, a tight spiral descent.
This is something that is supposedly,
you know, this pilot that was trained at this Florida puddle
jumper school, where they teach you how to fly a Cessna has conducted
this spiral turn, descends 7,000 feet in 2 and 1/2 minutes. Brings
the plane up, stable, flat, flies it in so low that it knocks
the electric lines down across the street from the Pentagon and
with pinpoint accuracy slams into the building going 460 knots.
Later on, you know, people saying wait a minute, how in the hell
did someone learn how to fly a plane that well and this little
ol' school down in Florida? And the people turn around and start
add on to the story. Well, they went to a flight simulator. And
what I said in my little post was its like saying you prepared
your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush hour by buying
her a video driving game. This don't make any sense.
Now, what happened? I don't know, you
know. I just don't know, but at a very bare minimum and this
is what was said that apparently resonated with people, we've
either got a criminal conspiracy or we've got criminal negligence
on the part of this Administration. But in either case, there
are parts of this thing that could have been prevented but nobody
did a thing. You know, that's what it looks like from where I'm
sitting.
MM:
To me, that was one of the things that, so many things in your
letter, your article really resonated with me, but that was one
of the things that really stuck out as well was because I think
a lot of us still have questions about that, and none of the
media, no one is asking these questions.
SG:
But, you have to remember that they are also invested in defense
companies and oil companies. Westinghouse and GE are some of
the biggest defense contractors around. All of them got oil stocks.
It's not like a big conspiracy. You know what I saw in El Salvador.
A lot of the reporters down there would hangout at the Camino
Real Hotel, which is right down the street from the Embassy.
And they would not dare say anything that would piss off anyone
at the Embassy, because then the Embassy would cut them off from
their scoops. You see they would loose their contacts. So they
really have to nurture relationships with these power holders
and if they do anything without clearing it with them, then they
are subject to be squeezed out, and eventually throws their career
off track. So it doesn't work like from the top down, it's very
systemic.
MM:
Well I guess I could understand it with the, you know, with the
corporate media not doing that, they're pretty much following
a pattern, but even amongst, let's say the alternative media
there's been very little questioning of the incidents themselves.
SG:
Well, yeah, I think that's part of, what I consider, an intellectual
malaise on the Left in the United States. They've deserted their
roots, you know, and they have forgotten how to do analysis.
They get involved in this moral score keeping. It's almost reminiscent
of Vietnam, you know, who has a bigger body count, so people
on the Left say well the Americans have the bigger body count
so they're worse. It doesn't tell us a thing about motives. It
doesn't tell us a thing about the trajectory of the system. It
doesn't tell us a thing about the historical development of the
situation. It doesn't tell us any of that stuff. And, I think,
what the Left has really done itself a disservice in getting
involved in this tit-for-tat competition for the moral high ground
with the Right, when they need to be subjecting the situation
to some intense analysis and getting people the information they
need to begin to ask the right questions. So you know I hold
, I sort of hold progressives accountable on that too. I think
we've failed in a lot of ways.
It's important to say that politics is
hypocritical, but most of us already know that. That's just the
nature of politics. It's not designed to be morally consistent.
What they tell you is a story to legitimatize an action that
has a motive that they can't expose to the public, otherwise,
they'll lose their support. I think our job is to expose those
motives to the public, and not just ...you know, well, the United
States did bad things too.
First of all, in a deeply racialized society, like ours, it doesn't
fly. Most people in this country don't care that we're bombing
Afghani children. They don't care. Because there's already a
predominant racist ideology in this country that says if you're
not white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, in some cases, that you're
less than human, that your life has less value. Or if you get
into this jingo patriotism it's like I don't care if we kill
a million of them as long as we save one American life. So, we're
not going to gain anyone's ear by comparing moralities, I don't
think. Some people you will, some people will be called to account
on that. But I think we have to appeal to the self-interest too
and what's going on right now is going to be very bad for most
Americans in a very short period of time.
MM:
One other question specific to the actual incidents on September
11th, would it be fair to say that the area around the White
House is probably the most secure, or the most watched airspace
worldwide? Can you think of anything that would have higher security?
SG: I have no idea.
MM:
Okay, well could you think anything that would have higher security
in terms of airspace than the White House?
SG:
It'd be difficult. It'd be difficult. It's a pretty high priority
I would expect. I wouldn't presume to say that it's the highest
because I just don't know. But yeah, you have the most powerful
Air Force in the world and the Chief of State's residence in
that same country, I think you've got a pretty strong assumption
right there that it should be pretty well covered. That airspace
should be very well covered.
MM:
All right. What do you see that we need to start focusing on
as a country if we are going to get our country back, basically?
SG:
Oh gosh, I'm not qualified to speak for ... I know what I'm doing.
I'm getting involved in the organizing. Where I am, there's sort
of two different pieces going on. I think the broader forces
need to be brought together in an anti-war movement to create
something for people to plug into as they begin to be disillusioned
as they inevitably will be with this foreign policy. That they've
got a movement to plug into; the same as an anti-war movement
back during the Vietnam era that finally stopped all that nonsense.
And then for people who are more consciously
Left or consciously progressive, I think it's really important
for us to begin articulating, not just articulating but beginning
to do the organizing around the issue of developing some sort
of a nucleus of an anti-fascist movement inside this country.
I think it's been coming for a long time. It's not just something
that happened September 11th. It began with the popular acceptance
of books like the Bell Curve and things like that. But I think
it has much more urgency now, so I'm involved in anti-war organizing
with my colleagues around here and friends. We're also beginning
to talk about what we can do to ensure that we are not subjected
to the same thing that Germany was subjected to because it only
took them a couple of years to tumble into barbarism. It won't
take us nearly as long, because we're much closer to start with.
MM:
When anyone questions the current direction that our Administration,
our government is taking right now, they are called unpatriotic.
Would you address that?
SG:
You know, they're wrong. But that's the way this works. It's
a creation of an atmosphere of intimidation. I have seen and
talked to a number of people who have begun displaying flags
as a form of self-protection, especially Muslim folks. And folks
from the Middle East around here started hanging flags all over
everything they own just as a way to protect them selves. I've
seen a lot of people in my African-American colleague's and friend's
whose neighborhoods now are sprouting American flags like mushrooms
after a four-day rain. These aren't folks who are really caught
up in this whole patriotic thing, and in fact have some serious
reservations about hanging that flag out there when the flag
was the one that also flew over slavery and Jim Crow and so forth,
but that atmosphere of intimidation is out there. And I think
there is only one way to overcome that and that's for the people
who do understand what's going on to be kind of bold and step
out. You've got to be up front.
People have to be aggressive about defending
their positions. You have to demonstrate to other people that
you don't have to be afraid. Because if we do back away now,
that's going to allow this tendency to strengthen and that's
what we can't do. I think we have to fight fascism before it
emerges, not afterwards. And to continue to construct a counter-narrative
to all this stuff that is official propaganda. To give people
information and give it to them, not necessarily in a real confrontational
way. I don't think I've ever changed anyone's mind by preaching
to them, but if you present them with some alternative information
and they have some time to sit down and process that then a lot
of times they'll come around. A lot of work to do. A lot of work
to do.
MM:
What are some good sources that you'd recommend for alternative
information?
SG:
Well for people who have computer access, there's a number of
good websites... Indymedia.org, Globalcircle.net, Emperors-Clothes.
Those are all websites. Dieoff.org is a very good one to read
about petroleum. But also alternative newspapers...depends on
where you are. There's some close by somewhere. And, there are
some books out there too. Some of the stuff like William Blum
and folks like that written in the last few years. You know it
doesn't hurt to get a hold of South End, Common Courage Press,
and see what's on their lists. And get a few of their books.
There are some analytical and well-documented books out there
that talk about historical development of the situation that
we find ourselves in right now. And you know listening to shows
like this on the radio don't hurt. (chuckles) A lot of people
listen to the radio and that's what I do when I'm stuck in traffic,
I listen to the radio. You know you all have a powerful medium
and I appreciate someone using it for the right thing.
(Transcript co-produced by Kurt Grela).
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