Google CEO Sundar Pichai denied allegations that the company was engaged in political censorship Monday at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Throughout the hearing, Republicans repeatedly claimed that the company was censoring search results to the detriment of right-wing viewpoints, while Democrats either denied the company’s censorship or justified it.
The fundamental reality—completely ignored at the hearing—is that the real targets of censorship by Silicon Valley, working with the US intelligence agencies and with the consent of both political parties, are left-wing, anti-war and socialist political organizations.
In August 2017, Google announced that it would implement changes to its search algorithm to promote “authoritative” news sources to the detriment of what it called “alternative” viewpoints. This action led to a massive decline in search rankings and traffic to left-wing, anti-war and progressive websites.
The campaign to implement this censorship regime was spearheaded by the Democratic Party, which, based on claims of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election, sought to pressure the technology giants to block and suppress left-wing opposition, which it branded as “extremist viewpoints.”
The narrative of both parties is strikingly at odds with reality. Compared to April 2017, the far-right Breitbart.com had its search traffic increase by 25 percent. By contrast, search results for the World Socialist Web Site are down by 76 percent over the same period, and other left-wing sites remain down by 50 percent or more.
At the hearing, Pichai made one of Google’s most explicit denials to date that it was carrying out political censorship.
“I lead this company without political bias and work to ensure that our products continue to operate that way,” Pichai declared. “To do otherwise would go against our core principles and our business interests. We are a company that provides platforms for diverse perspectives and opinions,” he said.
He added, “It’s not possible for any employee or groups of employees to manipulate our search results.”
In fact, the changes implemented in 2017 by the company were intended to empower “search evaluators” to impact Google search results. These individuals, whose input was added to Google’s more impartial PageRank algorithm, were told to respond negatively to pages displaying “alternative” viewpoints unless users explicitly specified they were looking for such views.
While some political organizations aligned with the Democratic Party were affected by Google’s actions, they either ignored or supported the censorship regime. The far right, meanwhile, made opposition to censorship a rallying cry.
US President Donald Trump, setting the tone for substantial sections of the Republican Party, has prominently accused Google of censoring search results. Republican members of Congress repeatedly held hearings accusing the company of suppressing right-wing and conservative political views.
“Google has long faced criticism for manipulating search results to censor conservatives,” Representative Lamar Smith declared at Monday’s hearing.
The Democrats, for their part, used Pichai’s testimony to alternately deny and justify the company’s censorship. In his remarks, committee chairman Jerrold Nadler declared that “no credible evidence supports this right-wing conspiracy theory.” In effect, Nadler and the other Democrats used the Republicans’ accusations about Google’s ‘liberal’ bias as a straw man, arguing, by extension, that all claims that Google is manipulating search results are a “conspiracy theory.”
Nadler then proceeded to justify Google’s censorship, which he had just denied. “Even if Google were deliberately discriminating against conservative viewpoints, just as Fox News and Sinclair broadcasting and conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh discriminate against liberal points of view, that would be its right as a private company to do so, and not to be questioned by government.”
This, too, is a straw-man. In carrying out their censorship of left-wing views, Google and the other technology giants are acting at the instigation of the US intelligence agencies and leading political figures, serving as the state’s accomplice in violating the Constitution.
Responding to the Republicans’ claims, The Washington Post wrote in an editorial, “Members of the conservative majority on the House Judiciary Committee spent much of their time hammering Mr. Pichai with baseless accusations that Google rigs its search results to censor conservative content. Black-box algorithms will inevitably prioritize some content over other content, and to the extent companies can be transparent about how their systems work, they should be. But a single-minded and mindless focus on a nonexistent left-wing conspiracy within Google has had the paradoxical effect of discouraging companies from properly policing their platforms, as they hesitate to remove content that should be removed for fear of unfounded criticism.”
In other words, the Post is concerned that the Republican’s grandstanding about what they allege to be a bias against right-wing viewpoints might undermine the plans by the US intelligence agencies to intensify their censorship of left-wing opposition.
As working class-opposition throughout Europe and around the world continues to mount, the American political establishment is ramping up demands for censorship. Responding to the Yellow Vest demonstrations against social inequality in France, the New York Times wrote an editorial warning that “the power of social media to quickly mobilize mass anger, without any mechanism for dialogue or restraint, is a danger to which a liberal democracy cannot succumb.”
The clear implication is that a growing international upsurge of the working class will be met with even further repression and censorship.
When technology can be produced that mimics diseases such as schizophrenia, or phenomena such as telepathy, how do we discern fact from fiction? When our memories are fallible, and when people can, over time with great repetition, replace true memories with false — where does this leave us?
One day when I was a child, I enthusiastically told my father that I could “talk, but in my head, where no one can hear me.” When my father replied that what I had described was called “thinking”, and that everyone does it, my heart dropped a bit. It seemed so interesting to me, and so banal to him. The world and my place in it were still mysteries to me, as for all children, and even the most mundane experiences seemed wondrous. I couldn’t blame him for what I saw as his lack of imagination.
I was a book worm and movie enthusiast, science-fiction and fantasy. A few years later, while watching Star Trek: TNG, I realized that mind control and telepathy were a re-occuring theme. There were so many examples of mind altering technology within the series that it reawakened this childhood curiosity, and a fear.
“What if people really could read my thoughts?” I wondered. What if people could control them?
I wasn’t exactly concerned. It was just a childish fancy, something that gets under our skin, but we have already developed the reality testing to maintain it as a hypothetical. A popular trope meant to freak us out. Right? Even before science fiction tried to make mind control tech seem plausible, we spun tales about thoughts and desires altered at a distance, or clandestinely acquired information garnered from supernatural sources. Our inner voice has been a source of anxiety for virtual eons, after all, if someone can control it, how can we trust it?
Just fiction, right? Well, yes and no.
This series will explore some of these connections…
I was mildly religious back in the day, a non-denominational flavor of generic Christian. I should have noticed the similarity between how I felt about fictional mind-control and telepathy, and how I felt about the idea of God watching every thought or move I made. That feeling of having no privacy, of having inner thoughts and opinions weighed out and measured, and judged. Or maybe even manipulated directly. Somehow, I never made a link between the idea of an omniscient deity reading all my thoughts and judging my eternal soul, and telepathy as found in science-fiction and fantasy.
At least, not as a child.
Now I understand the can of worms we are opening. As we will see through the rest of this series, through the fusion of global disinformation, technology that can beam voices into your mind by vibrating the tiny bones in your ear, and the ever-present hum of all ideologies vying for you to attribute those voices to their cause, we’re quickly approaching a semantic apocalypse. This sounds crazy, I know. That’s kind of the point. Imagine you’re hearing a voice in your head that is telling you to kill all the Jews, or that Obama is the Antichrist, and then you open Twitter to find the President is amplifying that paranoia. That’s a hell of force multiplier for mass insanity. Anyone who has watched the news recently should understand how deadly serious this epistemic crisis is.
Let’s begin with “the crazy.” Who hasn’t heard of people wearing “tin-foil hats”? Usually a pejorative allusion to someone who has bought into conspiracy theory, the first recorded idea of a telepathy-blocking device can actually be found in the strange non-fiction book Atomic Consciousness: An Explanation of Ghosts, Spiritualism, Witchcraft, Occult Phenomena and all Supernormal Manifestations written by self-proclaimed seer John Palfrey in 1909, under the name “James Bathurst”. He posited a hypothetical “insulative electrical contrivance encircling the head during thought” for use against “telepathic impactive impingement”.
The first allusion to a “foil-hat” specifically used to block telepathy comes from Julian Huxley, brother of Aldous Huxley, who wrote a short science-fiction story titled “The Tissue-Culture King” (1926), in which a hat made of foil is used to block others from reading the protagonist’s mind.
Philip K. Dick, a popular science fiction writer, was himself beset by strange visions that he assumed were some kind of transmission. Much of his fiction revolves around the dissociation, cognitive dissonance, and paranoia of psychosis, drug-induced or otherwise: forms of invasion, disruption of thought-privacy, and personal autonomy. And the day-to-day experience of living in the techno-authoritarian world we are coming to inhabit.
The tale of Dick’s experience is too long to go into here, and not the focus of the article, but if you’re interested you can find information about it online. There’s even a comic that details the reported experience. I’d like to focus in on a particular quote from Dick’s retelling of the experience. The quote is from a 1979 interview with author and journalist Charles Platt. Dick discusses his confusion about whether he thought the “transmissions” were a supernatural (“God”) or technological (“the Russians”) phenomena.
“On Thursdays and Saturdays I’d think it was God,” he told Platt. “On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I’d think it was extraterrestrials. Some times I’d think it was the Soviet Union Academy of Sciences trying out their psychotronic microwave telepathic transmissions.”
The trope of mind-control or telepathy is not one of modern invention. We can find examples of telepathy, and the various kinds of abuses it would entail, in folklore and mythology spanning centuries.
Readers familiar with Buddhism, particularly Japanese Buddhism, might know the term “satori”, which translates roughly to “comprehension; understanding”. However, there is another “satori”, a folkloric yōkai, a class of spirits or demon. The satori “monster” was said to be able to read people’s minds, and would then speak their thoughts aloud faster than the thinker could think them.
Another example of mind-control can be found in European folklore about witches. The Malleus Malificarum, a 15th century book on witch-hunting written by German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, lists several ways in which a devil or witch may “enter the Human Body and the Head without doing any Hurt” and “the Method by which Devils through the Operations of Witches sometimes actually possess men.”
“From this it is concluded that, since devils operates there where they are, therefore when they confuse the fancy and the inner perceptions they are existing in them. Again, although to enter the soul is possible only to God Who created it, yet devils can, with God’s permission, enter our bodies; and they an then make impressions on the inner faculties corresponding to the bodily organs. And by those impressions the organs are affected in proportion as the inner perceptions are affected in the way which has been shown: that the devil can draw out some image retained in a faculty corresponding to one of the senses; as he draws from the memory, which is in the back part of the head, an image of a horse, and locally moves that phantasm to the middle part of the head, where are the cells of imaginative power; and finally to the sense of reason, which is in the front of the head. And he causes such a sudden change and confusion, that such objects are necessarily thought to be actual things seen with the eyes.”
And of course, among countless other examples, there’s also the Abrahamic God with his alleged omniscience:
“12 For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. 13 Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” Hebrews 4:12–13 New International Version
So whether in science-fiction, religion, or folklore, we can see that humanity has had anxieties about autonomy and privacy of thought for some time. But whether or not you believe in supposed psychic powers and the like, there remains the matter of self-fulfilling prophecies. We find inspiration from fiction, and in the case of weapons and warfare, developing technology specifically to frighten and confuse the targets, in addition to dealing physical harm. This is one of the many ways that fiction is written into reality. Given the role of reality television in politics at this time, we can probably imagine many more.
Where did this begin? There were probably many points of modern origin. But the most well known was MKULTRA was the code name for a now well-known series of declassified CIA experiments involving the use of psychotropic drugs and various techniques to coerce confessions from suspects, and yes, attempted mind-control. More books and articles than I can count have been written on this topic, so I mention it only as a reference point. While the project was ultimately deemed a failure by heavily-involved Sidney Gottlieb (chemist and employee of the CIA at the time of MKULTRA), it provides an example of real-world attempts at harnessing the mythological power of mind-control, a failed experiment that resulted in real casualties.
On November 28, 1953, Frank Olson, a scientist and CIA employee, jumped from a building and killed himself. Years later, the government admitted to his family that he had been covertly given LSD by his supervisor within the CIA just before the suicide. Later, it was uncovered that the CIA was at the time dosing people without their consent to further their MKULTRA experiments. This has been well dramatized on the recent Netflix series Wormwood, but it is only one small piece of the CIA programs that grew out of the cold war conflict, such as Operation Midnight Climax, which by name alone is begging to be turned into another series.
Then there’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Defense responsible for developing emerging technologies to be used by the U.S. Armed Forces. According to WIRED journalist Sharon Weinerberger’s 2007 article, DARPA is trying to develop what they call “hypersound”.
“The goal of the Sonic Projector program is to provide Special Forces with a method of surreptitious audio communication at distances over 1 km. Sonic Projector technology is based on the non-linear interaction of sound in air translating an ultrasonic signal into audible sound. The Sonic Projector will be designed to be a man-deployable system, using high power acoustic transducer technology and signal processing algorithms which result in no, or unintelligible, sound everywhere but at the intended target. The Sonic Projector system could be used to conceal communications for special operations forces and hostage rescue missions, and to disrupt enemy activities.” (Emphasis mine)
The Modern Mythology-adjacent publication Narrative Machines includes some of the details of how and why DARPA is interested in analyzing language and memes in particular.
The interests of organizations seeking to manipulate obviously spans scales and contexts, from global sentiment analysis and manipulation, persona management, and enhancing battlefield awareness. All of these technologies point toward the kind of world we will soon inhabit.
It isn’t only that people are looking for ways to implant thoughts, mind-control, or utilize what amounts to telepathy; we are also starting to realize just how unreliable our memories and perceptions are to begin with — how much of a narrative it is, and a fiction at that. What we consider a closed-off, private space — our minds — actually turns out to be more like a sponge. Porous, an open system with influx and efflux. Liable to fallibility, and exploitation.
There’s a term for when people assume everything they perceive and remember is accurate and accurately depicts the world: naive realism. Its counterpoint is indirect realism, also known as cognitive representationalism.
Indirect realism posits that we cannot have a direct perception of the world, instead we interpret our mental representations of the world. If you doubt cognitive representationalism, simply look at any of the number of “illusion” art pieces on the Internet. (Here are a few examples.)
If naive realism were entirely correct, then there would be no illusions. It’s pretty much that simple. Since there are illusions, we can assume naive realism is somewhat incorrect, even though it is both natural and intuitive for humans to be naive realists. This “intuition” has played a major part in events ranging from the Satanic Panic of the 90’s to reports of individuals under hypnosis “remembering” alien abductions.
Surprisingly, hypnosis has a history of working, though not as intended. A far cry from how it is depicted in fiction — spin the wheel, use the pendulum, get mind-controlled slaves, etc — hypnosis seems to be more applicable as a false-memory implantation technique, or a means of otherwise putting ourselves into a suggestible state.
According to Green, “There’s a cultural expectation that hypnosis will lead to more accurate and earlier memories, but that’s not true.’’
And: “The results suggest that warnings are helpful to some extent in discouraging pseudomemories” […] “Warnings did not prevent pseudomemories and did not reduce the confidence subjects had in those memories.’’ […] “Most research supports the claim that our memories typically begin around age 3 or 4, so it seems quite unlikely that these very early memories actually happened at the stated time. Many people believe that hypnosis can lead to earlier memories, although that has never been shown to be true. People’s expectations about what hypnosis can do will influence what they remember.’’
Elizabeth F. Loftus, a cognitive psychologist and expert on human memory, is known for her work on the “misinformation effect”. She gained notoriety because she suggested that people were capable of accidentally fabricating memories, and for advocating for people convicted of crimes based on eye-witness testimony when such testimony seemed to fall under false-memory syndrome. Her work has been considered both controversial and ground-breaking.
One troubling example is the wrongful conviction of Steve Titus. On October 12, 1980, a teenage girl was raped while hitchhiking. She provided various details on her assailant when she later called the police. The victim later picked Titus out a line-up (both her assailant and he had beards) and his car was the same color as the one the victim described. Titus did not have a three-piece suit (which was one of the details given to police) and his car had several differences to that of the car described by the victim.
Originally only saying that Titus “most resembled” the man who had raped her, the victim eventually declared she was certain it was Titus. This was what led Elizabeth Flotus to get involved in the case upon request, suspicious that this followed the “modus operandi” of false-memory syndrome.
Titus was then convicted of the rape and sent to prison. Eventually, police caught the actual perpetrator, a serial rapist named Edward Lee King, who later confessed to the rape of the hitchhiking teenager while in police custody.
The case of Steve Titus is considered, looking back, an abortion of justice, and wrongful imprisonment. Titus would go on to sue the police department involved in the investigation, but died of a heart attack before the case went to court. The police officer Titus accused of planting evidence — a similar brown folder to that which the victim described in her assailants car was found in Titus’s vehicle, but he denied ever seeing it — died six years later himself of a heart attack.
“Unhappily, Steve Titus is not the only person to be convicted based on somebody’s false memory. In one project in the United States, information has been gathered on 300 innocent people, 300 defendants who were convicted of crimes they didn’t do. They spent 10, 20, 30 years in prison for these crimes, and now DNA testing has proven that they are actually innocent. And when those cases have been analyzed, three quarters of them are due to faulty memory, faulty eyewitness memory.” Loftus said in a TED talk discussion on false-memory.
These various uncertainties about the privacy and ultimate agency of our thoughts are only one part of the epistemic crisis I’ve outlined. A broader view can be found in the unmooring effect of a consumer-tech society itself. Author and philosopher RS Bakker wrote a blog post in 2011 that is showing itself quite prescient, “What Is The Semantic Apocalypse?”, in which he wrote,
The result of this heterogeniety is a society lacking any universal meaning-based imperatives: all the ‘shoulds’ of a meaningful life are either individual or subcultural. As a result, the only universal imperatives that remain are those arising out of our shared biology: our fears and hungers. Thus, consumer society, the efficient organization of humans around the facts of their shared animality.
In biological terms, my fear is that the Semantic Apocalypse is about to happen. Despite the florid diversity of answers to the Question of Meaning, they tend to display a remarkable degree of structural convergence. This is what you would expect, given that we are neurologically wired for meaning, to look at the world in terms of intent, purpose, and propriety. Research in this last, the biology of morality, has found striking convergences in moral thought across what otherwise seem vast cultural chasms.
He continues,
The million dollar question is really one of what happens once that shared neurophysiology begins to fragment, and sharing imperatives becomes a matter of coincidence. It has to be madness, one that will creep upon us by technological degrees.
Why does it have to be madness? Because we define madness according what our brains normally do. Once we begin personalizing our brains, ‘normally do’ will become less and less meaningful. ‘Insanity’ will simply be what one tribe calls another, and from our antiquated perspective, it will all look like insanity.
James Curcio and I are currently exploring this premise (among other things) in the Fallen Cycle web-comic BLACKOUT. Beginning with the false memories and blank spaces of drug blackouts and half-remembered dreams, where we all agree on the extent of our uncertainty, this can so quickly be expanded to all our seemingly waking and sober states.
Sometimes, people acquire false memories on their own, to be sure. But they are just as likely to be goaded one way or the other, depending on their suggestibility, to remember things inquired about by a well-meaning therapist unconsciously guiding them towards a particular recollection. In fact, there is no reason to suspect that people don’t intentionally try to implant false memories and associations via suggestion into other people. That is, after all, the bread and butter of advertising and politics.
Gas-lighting is a popular topic (and activity) on the Internet. While it’s usage has changed somewhat with popular adoption, gas-lighting refers to a concentrated effort to use psychological manipulation to convince someone their sanity, memories, and perception are inaccurate even though in reality, they are accurate. This is only one of an incredibly large toolkit available for global psychic warfare. When amplified through the reach and precision of targeted social media and media echo chambers alone, the most basic school-yard psychological tactics can be devastatingly effective.
Humanity has concerned about the privacy of their minds for centuries, if not longer. We’re concerned that our minds, or our hearts, as mentioned in the Bible, will be laid bare in front of others (supernatural or mortal) to judge. Or even worse, that we may be invaded, made to do things against our wills, controlled. The scrutiny of the Palantir is only the most recent form of this anxiety.
This anxiety comes from a real place. Despite ideological, religious, or philosophical models that state the contrary, I believe we’ve always known on some level our minds are open-systems. This is indicated by anxieties about mind-control and telepathy spanning centuries, across cultures, found in many instances of folk-lore, religion, and mythology. That, no matter how much we might declare ourselves possessing metaphysical free-will, there is an intuitive understanding that we can be manipulated, that our wills can be forced or coerced without our even knowing. That freedom is fleeting when we can’t actually know ourselves. Being forced to confront our “open” minds leaves some of us aghast in cognitive dissonance, only to double down on faith in metaphysical free-will and total autonomy of thought.
Governments, corporations, in truth any group with suitable funding and desire, have taken these human anxieties, as old as humanity itself, and used them as a blueprint with which to forge a new generation of psycho-weaponry, to use on whomever they like.
Once you’ve weaponized insanity, you kick out the legs of people’s grasp on reality. Nobody is sure anymore whether they are ill or being attacked. Genuine insanity is getting reaffirmed, actualized, even actively funded, while the most sane and sober are paralyzed by self-doubt. The implications of a world with these sorts of technologies being used are far-reaching, and the damage it will do to people’s sense of security in the world, of their perceptions, is likely to cause unintended side-effects.
Much of our response to the development of these technologies will be long-overdue. Will they force us to face ourselves, our fallible minds, and those around us who utilize these cognitive exploits as weapons or means of control?
… Or will we just go off the deep end?
Consider a control situation: ten people in a lifeboat. two armed self-appointed leaders force the other eight to do the rowing while they dispose of the food and water, keeping most of it for themselves an doling out only enough to keep the other eight rowing. The two leaders now need to exercise control to maintain an advantageous position which they could not hold without it. Here the method of control is force — the possession of guns. Decontrol would be accomplished by overpowering the leaders and taking their guns. This effected, it would be advantageous to kill them at once. So once embarked on a policy of control, the leaders must continue the policy as a matter of self-preservation. Who, then, needs to control others but those who protect by such control a position of relative advantage? Why do they need to exercise control? Because they would soon lose this position and advantage and in many cases their lives as well, if they relinquished control. […]
Extending the lifeboat analogy to the Ship of State, few existing governments could withstand a sudden, all-out attack by all their underprivileged citizens, and such an attack might well occur if the intentions of certain existing governments were unequivocally apparent. Suppose the lifeboat leaders had built a barricade and could withstand a concerted attack and kill all eight of the rowers if necessary. They would then have to do the rowing themselves and neither would be safe from the other. Similarly, a modern government armed with heavy weapons and prepared for attack could wipe out ninety-five percent of its citizens. But who would do the work, and who would protect them from the soldiers and technicians needed to make and man the weapons? Successful control means achieving a balance and avoiding a showdown where all-out force would be necessary. This is achieved through various techniques of psychological control, also balanced. The techniques of both force and psychological control are constantly improved and refined, and yet worldwide dissent has never been so widespread or so dangerous to the present controllers. — “The Limits of Control,” William S. Burroughs.
Have you ever noticed how rare sincere apologies are in politics? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Normal people apologize to each other every day, for accidentally interrupting someone or standing in their way, for being inconsiderate or forgetful, for being unable to satisfy a customer’s needs; it’s just a part of life we take for granted at work and at home. But in the highest levels of the most powerful governments on earth, where thousands of human lives can be snuffed out by a single unwise decision and ecosystems and economies destroyed on a whim, apologies are almost unheard of. You only ever see them when a leader is cornered in a complete political checkmate with no other options available to them.
This is because the highest levels of the most powerful governments in the world are dominated by highly manipulative people. If you serve truth, humanity and the world, you are almost certainly delightful to be around and you will almost certainly never have a career in federal politics. The system is set up to serve a ruling class of plutocrats and their lackeys, so the way to get to the top of the political ladder is in the exact opposite direction of serving the weak and defenseless and being truthful and compassionate. To win elections you first need to win the blessing of the ruling class, and the way to do that is by kissing the right asses while regurgitating the right sound bytes whenever the cameras are rolling.
This is why all the top career politicians all seem so fake; the Hillary Clintons, Ted Cruzes and Nancy Pelosis didn’t get to where they’re at by serving truth and justice, they got there by manipulating and deceiving in the service of the powerful. They are not interested in honesty and sincerity, they are interested in getting up another rung on the ladder.
Anyone who has ever had a close relationship with someone who is highly manipulative has probably noticed how they never apologize for anything if they can avoid it, but if you apologize to a manipulator for something they will never, ever let you forget it and will bring it up any time you step out of line. For normal, empathetic people, apologies are a way to improve relations with each other and avoid hurting one another in the future; they’re a way of saying “I understand that I did a thing that hurt you, and I’ll try really hard not to do it again in the future.” Narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths and other chronic manipulators don’t see them that way, since they don’t care if they hurt other people and only care about getting what they want. For a manipulator, an apology is a weapon to use against the person making it, which is why you never see them making apologies of their own.
Comedian and activist Jimmy Dore published a sincere, heartfelt apology today to Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer and comedian/progressive media personality Francesca Fiorentini for some Twitter drama, because that’s what normal human beings do when they regret a transgression they feel they’ve made against someone else. Fiorini responded to Dore’s apology the way normal human beings do, tweeting, “Thanks for this Jimmy. I hope we can begin to patch things up.” Bauer responded to Dore’s apology by tweeting a six-part rant calling for Dore’s termination from The Young Turks and smearing him with a litany of other accusations which have nothing to do with Bauer.
One of these folks is not like the others.
Bauer is one of the most virulent proponents of pro-regime change narratives against the Syrian government, aggressively smearing and attacking anyone who questions official allegations leveled by the US-centralized empire against Iraq’s next-door neighbor. Earlier this year he called on blogging outlet Medium to ban me from its platform for my opposition to regime change interventionism in Syria, tweeting after the deplatforming of a few right-wing writers that “If @Medium is serious about cracking down on conspiracy theorists, it needs to go beyond the alt-right and reign in the garbage published on Syria by people like @caitoz.”
Following widespread public criticism from the left, Bauer then deleted his tweet without retraction and, you guessed it, without apology.
Mother Jones' @shane_bauer has deleted his tweet calling for the corporate censorship of the antiwar left without apology or retraction, so for posterity here is documentation that empire loyalists will never be content with merely silencing right-wingers. pic.twitter.com/6LTVizBtLc
I certainly don’t fault Dore for responding to Bauer the way a normal human being responds to other normal human beings. But Shane Bauer, like other war propagandists, is not a normal human being. Deliberately manipulating people in the service of warfare and imperialism is not a normal thing to do, and it’s not something a healthy empathic person would ever think to do.
In a healthy world, which I firmly believe we are capable of creating, the psychological manipulation of others will be regarded as a perverse intrusion into personal sovereignty and rejected with the same ferocity you’d reject a stranger attempting to insert things into your body. Psychologically manipulating people is unhealthy and immoral, and manipulating them to advance the interests of war profiteers and secretive intelligence/defense agencies is pure evil.
Jimmy Dore did us all a favor by attempting to relate to Shane Bauer like a normal human being, because one of the best ways to get a manipulator to show you what he’s made of is to apologize to him and watch what happens. Learn to spot the manipulators.
“Back in the heyday of the old Soviet Union, a phrase evolved to describe gullible western intellectuals who came to visit Russia and failed to notice the human and other costs of building a communist utopia. The phrase was “useful idiots” and it applied to a good many people who should have known better. I now propose a new, analogous term more appropriate for the age in which we live: useful hypocrites. That’s you and me, folks, and it’s how the masters of the digital universe see us. And they have pretty good reasons for seeing us that way. They hear us whingeing about privacy, security, surveillance, etc., but notice that despite our complaints and suspicions, we appear to do nothing about it. In other words, we say one thing and do another, which is as good a working definition of hypocrisy as one could hope for.”—John Naughton, The Guardian
“Who needs direct repression,” asked philosopher Slavoj Zizek, “when one can convince the chicken to walk freely into the slaughterhouse?”
In an Orwellian age where war equals peace, surveillance equals safety, and tolerance equals intolerance of uncomfortable truths and politically incorrect ideas, “we the people” have gotten very good at walking freely into the slaughterhouse, all the while convincing ourselves that the prison walls enclosing us within the American police state are there for our protection.
Call it doublespeak, call it hypocrisy, call it delusion, call it whatever you like, but the fact remains that while we claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.
And then there’s our supposed love-hate affair with technology, which sees us bristling at the government’s efforts to monitor our internet activities, listen in on our phone calls, read our emails, track our every movement, and punish us for what we say on social media, and yet we keep using these very same technologies all the while doing nothing about the government’s encroachments on our rights.
This contradiction is backed up by a Pew Research Center study, which finds that “Americans say they are deeply concerned about privacy on the web and their cellphones. They say they do not trust Internet companies or the government to protect it. Yet they keep using the services and handing over their personal information.”
Let me get this straight: the government continues to betray our trust, invade our privacy, and abuse our rights, and we keep going back for more?
Sure we do.
After all, the alternative—taking a stand, raising a ruckus, demanding change, refusing to cooperate, engaging in civil disobedience—is not only a lot of work but can be downright dangerous.
What we fail to realize, however, is that by tacitly allowing these violations to continue, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.
In this way, what starts off as small, occasional encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, becomes routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible.
And then there were the private prisons, marketed as a way to lower the government’s cost of locking up criminals. Only it turns out that private prisons actually cost the taxpayer more money and place profit incentives on jailing more Americans, resulting in the largest prison population in the world.
Are you starting to notice a pattern yet?
The government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we buy into it, they slam the trap closed.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about red light cameras, DNA databases, surveillance cameras, or zero tolerance policies: they all result in “we the people” being turned into Enemy Number One.
In this way, the government campaign to spy on our phone calls, letters and emails was sold to the American people as a necessary tool in the war on terror.
Instead of targeting terrorists, however, the government has turned us into potential terrorists, so that if we dare say the wrong thing in a phone call, letter, email or on the internet, especially social media, we end up investigated, charged and possibly jailed.
If you happen to be one of the 1.31 billion individuals who use Facebook or one of the 255 million who tweet their personal and political views on Twitter, you might want to pay close attention.
This criminalization of free speech, which is exactly what the government’s prosecution of those who say the “wrong” thing using an electronic medium amounts to, was at the heart of Elonis v. United States, a case that wrestled with where the government can draw the line when it comes to expressive speech that is protected and permissible versus speech that could be interpreted as connoting a criminal intent.
The case arose after Anthony Elonis, an aspiring rap artist, used personal material from his life as source material and inspiration for rap lyrics which he then shared on Facebook.
For instance, shortly after Elonis’ wife left him and he was fired from his job, his lyrics included references to killing his ex-wife, shooting a classroom of kindergarten children, and blowing up an FBI agent who had opened an investigation into his postings.
Despite the fact that Elonis routinely accompanied his Facebook posts with disclaimers that his lyrics were fictitious, and that he was using such writings as an outlet for his frustrations, he was charged with making unlawful threats (although it was never proven that he intended to threaten anyone) and sentenced to 44 months in jail.
Elonis is not the only Facebook user to be targeted for prosecution based on the content of his posts.
In a similar case that made its way through the courts only to be rebuffed by the Supreme Court, Brandon Raub, a decorated Marine, was arrested by a swarm of FBI, Secret Service agents and local police and forcibly detained in a psychiatric ward because of controversial song lyrics and political views posted on his Facebook page. He was eventually released after a circuit court judge dismissed the charges against him as unfounded.
Rapper Jamal Knox and Rashee Beasley were sentenced to jail terms of up to six years for a YouTube video calling on listeners to “kill these cops ‘cause they don’t do us no good.” Although the rapper contended that he had no intention of bringing harm to the police, he was convicted of making terroristic threats and intimidation of witnesses.
And then there was Franklin Delano Jeffries II, an Iraq war veteran, who, in the midst of a contentious custody battle for his daughter,shared a music video on YouTube and Facebook in which he sings about the judge in his case, “Take my child and I’ll take your life.” Despite his insistence that the lyrics were just a way for him to vent his frustrations with the legal battle, Jeffries was convicted of communicating threats and sentenced to 18 months in jail.
The common thread running through all of these cases is the use of social media to voice frustration, grievances, and anger, sometimes using language that is overtly violent.
The question the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to decide in Elonis is whether this activity, in the absence of any overt intention of committing a crime, rises to the level of a “true threat” or whether it is, as I would contend, protected First Amendment activity. (The Supreme Court has defined a “true threat” as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”)
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Elonis, Corporate America has now taken the lead in policing expressive activity online, with social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube using their formidable dominance in the field to censor, penalize and regulate speech and behavior online by suspending and/or banning users whose content violated the companies’ so-called community standards for obscenity, violence, hate speech, discrimination, etc.
Make no mistake: this is fascism.
This is fascism with a smile.
As Bertram Gross, former presidential advisor, noted in his chilling book Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, “Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties, or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism. . . . In America, it would be super modern and multi-ethnic—as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic façade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal.”
The subtle appeal of this particular brand of fascism is its self-righteous claim to fighting the evils of our day (intolerance, hatred, violence) using the weapons of Corporate America.
Be warned, however: it is only a matter of time before these weapons are used more broadly, taking aim at anything that stands in its quest for greater profit, control and power.
This is what fascism looks like in a modern context, with corporations flexing their muscles to censor and silence expressive activity under the pretext that it is taking place within a private environment subject to corporate rules as opposed to activity that takes place within a public or government forum that might be subject to the First Amendment’s protection of “controversial” and/or politically incorrect speech.
Rightly contending that tech companies are just extensions of the government, former Texas congressman Ron Paul believes that social media networks under the control of Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook are working with the U.S. government to silence dissent. “You get accused of treasonous activity and treasonous speech because in an empire of lies the truth is treason,” Paul declared. “Challenging the status quo is what they can’t stand and it unnerves them, so they have to silence people.”
Curiously enough, you know who has yet to be suspended? President Trump.
Twitter’s rationale for not suspending world leaders such as Trump, whom critics claim routinely violate the social media giant’s rules, is because “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets, would hide important information people should be able to see and debate. It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
Frankly, all individuals, whether or not they are world leaders, should be entitled to have their thoughts and ideas aired openly, pitted against those who might disagree with them, and debated widely, especially in a forum like the internet.
Why does this matter?
The internet and social media have taken the place of the historic public square, which has slowly been crowded out by shopping malls and parking lots.
As such, these cyber “public squares” may be the only forum left for citizens to freely speak their minds and exercise their First Amendment rights, especially in the wake of legislation that limits access to our elected representatives.
Unfortunately, the internet has become a tool for the government—and its corporate partners—to monitor, control and punish the populace for behavior and speech that may be controversial but are far from criminal.
Indeed, the government, a master in the art of violence, intrusion, surveillance and criminalizing harmless activities, has repeatedly attempted to clamp down on First Amendment activity on the web and in social media under the various guises of fighting terrorism, discouraging cyberbullying, and combatting violence.
Police and prosecutors have also targeted “anonymous” postings and messages on forums and websites, arguing that such anonymity encourages everything from cyber-bullying to terrorism, and have attempted to prosecute those who use anonymity for commercial or personal purposes.
We would do well to tread cautiously in how much authority we give the Corporate Police State to criminalize free speech activities and chill what has become a vital free speech forum.
Not only are social media and the Internet critical forums for individuals to freely share information and express their ideas, but they also serve as release valves to those who may be angry, seething, alienated or otherwise discontented.
Without an outlet for their pent-up anger and frustration, these thoughts and emotions fester in secret, which is where most violent acts are born.
In the same way, free speech in the public square—whether it’s the internet, the plaza in front of the U.S. Supreme Court or a college campus—brings people together to express their grievances and challenge oppressive government regimes.
Without it, democracy becomes stagnant and atrophied.
Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if free speech is not vigilantly protected, democracy is more likely to drift toward fear, repression, and violence. In such a scenario, we will find ourselves threatened with an even more pernicious injury than violence itself: the loss of liberty.
I rarely use this blog to tell readers what they should believe. Rather I try to indicate why it might be wise to distrust, at least without very good evidence, what those in power tell us we should believe.
We have well-known sayings about power: “Knowledge is power”, and “Power tends to corrupt, while absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” These aphorisms resonate because they say something true about how we experience the world. People who have power – even very limited power they hold on licence from someone else – tend to abuse it, sometimes subtly and unconsciously, and sometimes overtly and wilfully.
If we are reasonably self-aware, we can sense the tendency in ourselves to exploit to our advantage whatever power we enjoy, whether it is in our dealings with a spouse, our children, a friend, an employee, or just by the general use of our status to get ahead.
This isn’t usually done maliciously or even consciously. By definition, the hardest thing to recognise are our own psychological, emotional and mental blind spots – and the biggest, at least for those born with class, gender or race privileges, is realising that these too are forms of power.
Nonetheless, these are all minor forms of power compared to the power wielded collectively by the structures that dominate our societies: the financial sector, the corporations, the media, the political class, and the security services.
But strangely most of us are much readier to concede the corrupting influence of the relatively small power of individuals than we are the rottenness of vastly more powerful institutions and structures. We blame the school teacher or the politician for abusing his or her power, while showing a reluctance to do the same about either the education or political systems in which they have to operate.
Similarly, we are happier identifying the excessive personal power of a Rupert Murdoch than we are the immense power of the corporate empire behind him and on which his personal wealth and success depend.
And beyond this, we struggle most of all to detect the structural and ideological framework underpinning or cohering all these discrete examples of power.
Narrative control
It is relatively easy to understand that your line manager is abusing his power, because he has so little of it. His power is visible to you because it relates only to you and the small group of people around you.
It is a little harder, but not too difficult, to identify the abusive policies of your firm – the low pay, cuts in overtime, attacks on union representation.
It is more difficult to see the corrupt power of large institutions, aside occasionally from the corruption of senior figures within those institutions, such as a Robert Maxwell or a Richard Nixon.
But it is all but impossible to appreciate the corrupt nature of the entire system. And the reason is right there in those aphorisms: absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption. If that were not the case, we wouldn’t be dealing with serious power – as should be obvious, if we pause to think about it.
Real power in our societies derives from that which is necessarily hard to see – structures, ideology and narratives – not individuals. Any Murdoch or Trump can be felled, though being loyal acolytes of the power-system they rarely are, should they threaten the necessary maintenance of power by these interconnected institutions, these structures.
The current neoliberal elite who effectively rule the planet have reached as close to absolute power as any elite in human history. And because they have near-absolute power, they have a near-absolute control of the official narratives about our societies and our “enemies”, those who stand in their way to global domination.
No questions about Skripals
One needs only to look at the narrative about the two men, caught on CCTV cameras, who have recently been accused by our political and media class of using a chemical agent to try to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia back in March.
I don’t claim to know whether Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov work for the Russian security services, or whether they were dispatched by Vladimir Putin on a mission to Salisbury to kill the Skripals.
What is clear, however, is that the British intelligence services have been feeding the British corporate media a self-serving, drip-drip narrative from the outset – and that the media have shown precisely no interest at any point in testing any part of this narrative or even questioning it. They have been entirely passive, which means their readers – us – have been entirely passive too.
That there are questions about the narrative to be raised is obvious if you turn away from the compliant corporate media and seek out the views of an independent-minded, one-time insider such as Craig Murray.
A former British ambassador, Murray is asking questions that may prove to be pertinent or not. But at this stage, when all we have to rely on is what the intelligence services are selectively providing, these kinds of doubts should be driving the inquiries of any serious journalist covering the story. But as is so often the case, not only are these questions not being raised or investigated, but anyone like Murray who thinks critically – who assumes that the powerful will seek to promote their interests and avoid accountability – is instantly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or in Putin’s pocket.
That is no meaningful kind of critique. Many of the questions that have been raised – like why there are so many gaps in the CCTV record of the movements of both the Skripals and the two assumed assassins – could be answered if there was an interest in doing so. The evasion and the smears simply suggest that power intends to remain unaccountable, that it is keeping itself concealed, that the narrative is more important than the truth.
And that is reason enough to move from questioning the narrative to distrusting it.
Ripples on a lake
Journalists typically have a passive relationship to power, in stark contrast to their image as tenacious watchdog. But more fundamental than control over narrative is the ideology that guides these narratives. Ideology ensures the power-system is invisible not only to us, those who are abused and exploited by it, but also to those who benefit from it.
It is precisely because power resides in structures and ideology, rather than individuals, that it is so hard to see. And the power-structures themselves are made yet more difficult to identify because the narratives created about our societies are designed to conceal those structures and ideology – where real power resides – by focusing instead on individuals.
That is why our newspapers and TV shows are full of stories about personalities – celebrities, royalty, criminals, politicians. They are made visible so that we do not notice the ideological structures we live inside that are supposed to remain invisible.
News and entertainment are the ripples on a lake, not the lake itself. But the ripples could not exist without the lake that forms and shapes them.
Up against the screen
If this sounds like hyperbole, let’s stand back from our particular ideological system – neoliberalism – and consider earlier ideological systems in the hope that they offer some perspective. At the moment, we are like someone standing right up against an IMAX screen, so close that we cannot see that there is a screen or even guess that there is a complete picture. All we see are moving colours and pixels. Maybe we can briefly infer a mouth, the wheel of a vehicle, a gun.
Before neoliberalism there were other systems of rule. There was, for example, feudalism that appropriated a communal resource – land – exclusively for an aristocracy. It exploited the masses by forcing them to toil on the land for a pittance to generate the wealth that supported castles, a clergy, manor houses, art collections and armies. For several centuries the power of this tiny elite went largely unquestioned.
But then a class of entrepreneurs emerged, challenging the landed artistocracy with a new means of industrialised production. They built factories and took advantage of scales of economy that slightly widened the circle of privilege, creating a middle class. That elite, and the middle-class that enjoyed crumbs from their master’s table, lived off the exploitation of children in work houses and the labour of a new urban poor in slum housing.
These eras were systematically corrupt, enabling the elites of those times to extend and entrench their power. Each elite produced justifications to placate the masses who were being exploited, to brainwash them into believing the system existed as part of a natural order or even for their benefit. The aristocracy relied on a divine right of kings, the capitalist class on the guiding hand of the free market and bogus claims of equality of opportunity.
In another hundred years, if we still exist as a species, our system will look no less corrupt – probably more so – than its predecessors.
Neoliberalism, late-stage capitalism, plutocratic rule by corporations – whatever you wish to call it – has allowed a tiny elite to stash away more wealth and accrue more power than any feudal monarch could ever have dreamt of. And because of the global reach of this elite, its corruption is more endemic, more complete, more destructive than any ever known to mankind.
A foreign policy elite can destroy the world several times over with nuclear weapons. A globalised corporate elite is filling the oceans with the debris from our consumption, chopping down the forest-lungs of our planet for palm-oil plantations so we can satisfy our craving for biscuits and cake. And our media and intelligence services are jointly crafting a narrative of bogeymen and James Bond villains – both in Hollywood movies, and in our news programmes – to make us fearful and pliable.
Assumptions of inevitability
Most of us abuse our own small-power thoughtlessly, even self-righteously. We tell ourselves that we gave the kids a “good spanking” because they were naughty, rather than because we established with them early on a power relationship that confusingly taught them that the use of force and coercion came with a parental stamp of approval.
Those in greater power – from minions in the media to executives of major corporations – are no different. They are as incapable of questioning the ideology and the narrative – how inevitable and “right” our neoliberal system is – as the rest of us. But they play a vital part in maintaining and entrenching that system nonetheless.
David Cromwell and David Edwards of Media Lens have provided two analogies – in the context of the media – that help explain how it is possible for individuals and groups to assist and enforce systems of power without having any conscious intention to do so, and without being aware that they are contributing to something harmful. Without, in short, being aware that they are conspiring in the system.
When a shoal of fish instantly changes direction, it looks for all the world as though the movement was synchronised by some guiding hand. Journalists – all trained and selected for obedience by media all seeking to maximise profits within state-capitalist society – tend to respond to events in the same way.
Place a square wooden framework on a flat surface and pour into it a stream of ball bearings, marbles, or other round objects. Some of the balls may bounce out, but many will form a layer within the wooden framework; others will then find a place atop this first layer. In this way, the flow of ball bearings steadily builds new layers that inevitably produce a pyramid-style shape. This experiment is used to demonstrate how near-perfect crystalline structures such as snowflakes arise in nature without conscious design.
The system – whether feudalism, capitalism, neoliberalism – emerges out of the real-world circumstances of those seeking power most ruthlessly. In a time when the key resource was land, a class emerged justifying why it should have exclusive rights to control that land and the labour needed to make it productive. When industrial processes developed, a class emerged demanding that it had proprietary rights to those processes and to the labour needed to make them productive.
Our place in the pyramid
In these situations, we need to draw on something like Darwin’s evolutionary “survival of the fittest” principle. Those few who are most hungry for power, those with least empathy, will rise to the top of the pyramid, finding themselves best-placed to exploit the people below. They will rationalise this exploitation as a divine right, or as evidence of their inherently superior skills, or as proof of the efficiency of the market.
And below them, like the layers of ball bearings, will be those who can help them maintain and expand their power: those who have the skills, education and socialisation to increase profits and sell brands.
All of this should be obvious, even non-controversial. It fits what we experience of our small-power lives. Does bigger power operate differently? After all, if those at the top of the power-pyramid were not hungry for power, even psychopathic in its pursuit, if they were caring and humane, worried primarily about the wellbeing of their workforce and the planet, they would be social workers and environmental activists, not CEOs of media empires and arms manufacturers.
And yet, base your political thinking on what should be truisms, articulate a worldview that distrusts those with the most power because they are the most capable of – and committed to – misusing it, and you will be derided. You will be called a conspiracy theorist, dismissed as deluded. You will be accused of wearing a tinfoil hat, of sour grapes, of being anti-American, a social warrior, paranoid, an Israel-hater or anti-semitic, pro-Putin, pro-Assad, a Marxist.
None of this should surprise us either. Because power – not just the people in the system, but the system itself – will use whatever tools it has to protect itself. It is easier to deride critics as unhinged, especially when you control the media, the politicians and the education system, than it is to provide a counter-argument.
In fact, it is vital to prevent any argument or real debate from taking place. Because the moment we think about the arguments, weigh them, use our critical faculties, there is a real danger that the scales will fall from our eyes. There is a real threat that we will move back from the screen, and see the whole picture.
Can we see the complete picture of the Skripal poisoning in Salisbury; or the US election that led to Trump being declared president; or the revolution in Ukraine; or the causes and trajectory of fighting in Syria, and before it Libya and Iraq; or the campaign to discredit Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour party; or the true implications of the banking crisis a decade ago?
Profit, not ethics
Just as a feudal elite was driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of land; just as early capitalists were driven not by ethics but by the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of mechanisation; so neoliberalism is driven not by ethics but the pursuit of power and wealth through the control of the planet.
The only truth we can know is that the western power-elite is determined to finish the task of making its power fully global, expanding it from near-absolute to absolute. It cares nothing for you or your grand-children. It is a cold-calculating system, not a friend or neighbour. It lives for the instant gratification of wealth accumulation, not concern about the planet’s fate tomorrow.
And because of that it is structurally bound to undermine or discredit anyone, any group, any state that stands in the way of achieving its absolute dominion.
If that is not the thought we hold uppermost in our minds as we listen to a politician, read a newspaper, watch a film or TV show, absorb an ad, or engage on social media, then we are sleepwalking into a future the most powerful, the most ruthless, the least caring have designed for us.
Step back, and take a look at the whole screen. And decide whether this is really the future you wish for your grand-children.
“There are no nations. There are no peoples . . . There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. The world is a collage of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.”—Network (1976)
There are those who will tell you that any mention of a New World Order government—a power elite conspiring to rule the world—is the stuff of conspiracy theories.
I am not one of those skeptics.
What’s more, I wholeheartedly believe that one should always mistrust those in power, take alarm at the first encroachment on one’s liberties, and establish powerful constitutional checks against government mischief and abuse.
I can also attest to the fact that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I have studied enough of this country’s history—and world history—to know that governments (the U.S. government being no exception) are at times indistinguishable Civilfrom the evil they claim to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.
And I have lived long enough to see many so-called conspiracy theories turn into cold, hard fact.
Remember, people used to scoff at the notion of a Deep State (a.k.a. Shadow Government), doubt that fascism could ever take hold in America, and sneer at any suggestion that the United States was starting to resemble Nazi Germany in the years leading up to Hitler’s rise to power.
Not with jackboots and salutes, as Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution notes, “but with a television huckster, a phony billionaire, a textbook egomaniac ‘tapping into’ popular resentments and insecurities, and with an entire national political party—out of ambition or blind party loyalty, or simply out of fear—falling into line behind him.”
Given all that we know about the U.S. government—that it treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; that it repeatedly lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; and that it wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad—it is not a stretch to suggest that the government has been overtaken by global industrialists, a new world order, that do not have our best interests at heart.
Indeed, to anyone who’s been paying attention to the goings-on in the world, it is increasingly obvious that we’re already under a new world order, and it is being brought to you by the Global-Industrial Deep State, a powerful cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations.
It is as yet unclear whether the American Police State answers to the Global-Industrial Deep State, or whether the Global-Industrial Deep State merely empowers the American Police State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.
This marriage of governmental and corporate interests is the very definition of fascism.
Where we go wrong is in underestimating the threat of fascism: it is no longer a national threat but has instead become a global menace.
Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and the pharmaceutical industry.
All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins: Walmart, Alphabet (formerly Google), AT&T, Toyota, Apple, Exxon Mobil, Facebook, Lockheed Martin, Berkshire Hathaway, UnitedHealth Group, Samsung, Amazon, Verizon, Nissan, Boeing, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Citigroup . . . these are just a few of the global corporate giants whose profit-driven policies influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.
The U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations are redrawing the boundaries of our world (and our freedoms) and altering the playing field faster than we can keep up.
Global surveillance
Spearheaded by the National Security Agency (NSA), which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.
Yet the government does not operate alone.
It cannot.
It requires an accomplice.
Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.
Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept, “The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”
Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).
Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).
Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.
Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. Trump, no different from his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically, calling on Congress to approve billions more to hire cops, build more prisons and wage more profit-driven war-on-drugs/war-on-terrorism/war-on-crime programs that pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.
Global policing
Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.
There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force.
Then you have the Strong Cities Network program. Funded by the State Department, the U.S. government has partnered with the United Nations to fight violent extremism “in all of its forms and manifestations” in cities and communities across the world. Working with the UN, the federal government rolled out programs to train local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.
What this program is really all about, however, is community policing on a global scale.
It sounds like a good idea on paper, but the problem with the broken windows approach is that it has led to zero tolerance policing and stop-and-frisk practices among other harsh police tactics.
When applied to the Strong Cities Network program, the objective is ostensibly to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting ostensibly as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.
Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist. Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
Are you starting to get the picture now?
We’re the sitting ducks in the government’s crosshairs.
On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, you can bet that the government and its global partners have already struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.
Unless we can put the brakes on this dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.
It’s taken less than a generation for our freedoms to be eroded and the police state structure to be erected, expanded and entrenched.
Rest assured that the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the global police state.
The current or future occupant of the White House will not save us.
For that matter, anarchy, violence and incivility will not save us.
Unfortunately, the government’s divide and conquer tactics are working like a charm.
Despite the laundry list of grievances that should unite “we the people” in common cause against the government, the nation is more divided than ever by politics, by socio-economics, by race, by religion, and by every other distinction that serves to highlight our differences.
The real and manufactured events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have all conjoined to create an environment in which “we the people” are more divided, more distrustful, and fearful of each other.
What we have failed to realize is that in the eyes of the government, we’re all the same.
In other words, when it’s time for the government to crack down—and that time is coming—it won’t matter whether we voted Republican or Democrat, whether we marched on Washington or stayed home, or whether we spoke out against government misconduct and injustice or remained silent.
When the government and its Global-Industrial Deep State partners in the New World Order crack down, we’ll all suffer.
If there is to be any hope of freeing ourselves, it rests—as it always has—at the local level, with you and your fellow citizens taking part in grassroots activism, which takes a trickle-up approach to governmental reform by implementing change at the local level.
One of the most important contributions an individual citizen can make is to become actively involved in local community affairs, politics and legal battles. As the adage goes, “Think globally, act locally.”
America was meant to be primarily a system of local governments, which is a far cry from the colossal federal bureaucracy we have today. Yet if our freedoms are to be restored, understanding what is transpiring practically in your own backyard—in one’s home, neighborhood, school district, town council—and taking action at that local level must be the starting point.
Responding to unmet local needs and reacting to injustices is what grassroots activism is all about. Attend local city council meetings, speak up at town hall meetings, organize protests and letter-writing campaigns, employ “militant nonviolent resistance” and civil disobedience, which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches.
And then, as I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of communities and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.
Nullification works.
Nullify the court cases. Nullify the laws. Nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the principles on which this nation was founded.
We could transform this nation if only Americans would work together to harness the power of their discontent.
This story is so complicated and long, I’ve tried to break it into threads of different colors to make it easier to digest. I’ve made separate pages for each thread, in addition to webpages with all the threads together.
Central Asian oil, Enron and the Afghanistan pipelines. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Information that should have shown what kind of attack al-Qaeda would make. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. US preparing for a war with Afghanistan before 9/11, increasing control of Asia before and since. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Incompetence, bad luck, and/or obstruction of justice. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Suggestions of advanced knowledge that an attack would take place on or around 9/11. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Cover-up, lies, and/or contradictions. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Israeli “art student” spy ring, Israeli foreknowledge evidence. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Anthrax attacks and microbiologist deaths. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Pakistani ISI and/or opium drug connections. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Bin Laden family, Saudi Arabia corruption and support of terrorists, connections to Bush. For a separate page of these entries only, click here. Erosion of civil liberties and erection of a police state. For a separate page of these entries only, click here.
Names/Abbreviations
For simplicity’s sake I don’t always use the full names and jobs of some of the major people or organizations in this story. For instance, every time I say “bin Laden,” I mean the terrorist Osama bin Laden, not one of his family members. I have standardized the spellings of the Islamic names, even within quotes. Al-Qaeda, for instance, can be spelled many ways, and the person known as Saeed Sheikh has too many name variations and spelling variations to count.
Organizations:
CIA: US Central Intelligence Agency
DEA: US Drug Enforcement Administration
FAA: US Federal Aviation Administration
FDA: US Food and Drug Administration
FBI: US Federal Bureau of Investigations
FEMA: US Federal Emergency Management Agency
ISI: Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani intelligence agency
Mossad: The Israeli intelligence agency
NORAD: US North American Aerospace Defense Command
NSA: US National Security Agency
SEC: US Security and Exchange Commission
Taliban: The rulers of Afghanistan, 1996 – 2001
WTC: World Trade Center
USAMRIID: US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
Important individuals: Ahmad: General Mahmud Ahmad, Director of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency Ashcroft: John Ashcroft, US Attorney General under Bush Jr. Atta: Mohamed Atta, lead 9/11 hijacker bin Laden: Osama bin Laden, leader of al-Qaeda terrorist organization Bush: George Bush Jr., US President since January, 2001 Cheney: Richard “Dick” Cheney, US Vice President under Bush Jr. Clinton: Bill Clinton, US President before Bush Jr. Mueller: Robert Mueller, Director of the FBI since July, 2001 Musharraf: General Pervez Musharraf, President of Pakistan since 1999 Powell: Colin Powell, US Secretary of State under Bush Jr. Rice: Condaleezza Rice, US National Security Advisor under Bush Jr. Rumsfeld: Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense Saeed: Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh (and many variations thereof), ISI agent, al-Qaeda money man and supposed murderer of reporter Daniel Pearl Tenet: George Tenet, Director of the CIA since 1997 under Clinton and remaining under Bush Jr.
The hijackers: There are many spellings and aliases – the names and spellings below are the versions preferred by the FBI. *= Some evidence suggests the identity of this person may be incorrect (see September 16-23, 2001).
American Airlines Flight 11 Waleed Alshehri, 22, from Saudi Arabia * Wail Alshehri, 28, from Saudi Arabia, brother of Waleed Alshehri, had psychological problems * Abdulaziz Alomari, 22, from Saudi Arabia * Satam Al Suqami, 25, from Saudi Arabia Mohamed Atta, 33, from Egypt (the likely pilot) * United Airlines Flight 93 Saeed Alghamdi, 21, from Saudi Arabia (had flight training) * Ahmed Alhaznawi, 20, from Saudi Arabia * Ahmed Alnami, 23, from Saudi Arabia * Ziad Jarrah, 26, from Lebanon (the likely pilot) * United Airlines Flight 175 Ahmed Alghamdi, 22, from Saudi Arabia Hamza Alghamdi, 20, from Saudi Arabia, brother of Ahmed Alghamdi * Marwan Alshehhi, 23, from United Arab Emirates (the likely pilot) * Mohand Alshehri, 22, from Saudi Arabia, possible cousin of Marwan Alshehhi and/or from the same extended family as Wail and Waleed Alshehri Fayez Ahmed Banihammad (Alshehri), 24, from United Arab Emirates (had flight training) American Airlines Flight 77 Khalid Almihdhar, 26, from Saudi Arabia (originally from Yemen, changed citizenship in 1996) * Nawaf Alhazmi, 25, from Saudi Arabia Salem Alhazmi, 20, from Saudi Arabia, brother of Nawaf Alhazmi * Hani Hanjour, 29, from Saudi Arabia (the likely pilot) Majed Moqed, 24, from Saudi Arabia *
December 26, 1979:Soviet forces invade Afghanistan. They will withdraw in 1989 after a brutal 10-year war. It has been commonly believed that the invasion was unprovoked. But in a 1998 interview, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser, reveals that the CIA began destabilizing the pro-Soviet Afghan government six months earlier, in a deliberate attempt to get the Soviets to invade and have their own Vietnam-type costly war: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” The US and Saudi Arabia give a huge amount of money (estimates range up to $40 billion total for the war) to support the mujaheddin guerrilla fighters opposing the Russians.
1987-1989: Michael Springman, the head US consular official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, later claims that he is “repeatedly told to issue visas to unqualified applicants.” He turns them down, but is repeatedly overruled by superiors. He claims the visas were issued for recruits fighting for bin Laden against Russia in Afghanistan. Springman loudly complains about the practice to numerous government offices but no action is taken. He eventually is fired and the files he has kept on these applicants are destroyed. Springman speculates the issuing of visas to radical Islamic fighters continued until 9/11. 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers getting their visas through his former Jeddah office. A government report later concludes that all of the known hijacker visa applications should have been rejected, and numerous experts say its improbable that more than a few should have been accepted through luck or incompetence.
1988: Bin Laden forms al-Qaeda this year (some reports claim 1989).
1988: Prior to this year, George Bush Jr. is a failed oil man. Three times friends and investors have bailed him out to keep him from going bankrupt. But in this year, the same year his father becomes President, some Saudis buy a portion of his small company, Harken, which has never worked outside of Texas. Later in the year, Harken wins a contract in the Persian Gulf and starts doing well financially. These transactions seem so suspicious that the Wall Street Journal in 1991 states it “raises the question of … an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.” Two major investors in Bush’s company during this time are Salem bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s father, and Khaled bin Mahfouz. In 1999 bin Mahfouz will be placed under house arrest in Saudi Arabia for contributions he gave to organizations closely linked to al-Qaeda. His sister is married to Osama bin Laden.
August 12, 1988:The first media report appears about Echelon, a high-tech global electronic surveillance network between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Australia and Britain later admit Echelon exists, but the US still denies it. Echelon is capable of “near total interception of international commercial and satellite communications,” including taps into transoceanic cables. The BBC describes Echelon’s power as “astounding,” and elaborates: “Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by powerful computers capable of voice recognition. They home in on a long list of key words, or patterns of messages. They are looking for evidence of international crime, like terrorism.” With such data collecting ability, and al-Qaeda the biggest threat for years, how could the US miss hearing of the 9/11 plot?
1993:Bin Laden buys a jet from the US military in Arizona (the Pentagon approved the transaction). This aircraft is later used to transport missiles from Pakistan that kill American special forces in Somalia. He also has some of his followers begin training as pilots in US flight schools.
1993: An expert panel commissioned by the Pentagon privately postulates that an airplane could be used as a missile to bomb national landmarks. In 1994 one of the panel’s experts will write in Futurist magazine: “Targets such as the World Trade Center not only provide the requisite casualties but, because of their symbolic nature, provide more bang for the buck. In order to maximize their odds for success, terrorist groups will likely consider mounting multiple, simultaneous operations with the aim of overtaxing a government’s ability to respond, as well as demonstrating their professionalism and reach.”
February 26, 1993: A bombing attempt to knock down the WTC fails. Six people are killed in the misfired blast. The bombing is organized by Ramzi Yousef, who has close ties to bin Laden. The New York Times later reports that an undercover agent testifies that the FBI knew about the attack beforehand and told him they would thwart it by substituting a harmless powder for the explosives. However, this plan was called off by an FBI supervisor, and the bombing was not stopped. Several of the bombers were trained by the CIA to fight in the Afghan war – the CIA later concludes in internal documents that it was “partly culpable” for this bombing attempt. Two years later, a statement from bin Laden is found that says, “on the second attempt they would be successful.” Security at the WTC doesn’t appear to have been noticeably improved after these revelations, or later.
1994: Three separate attacks this year involve hijacking airplanes to crash them into buildings. A disgruntled Federal Express worker tries to crash a DC-10 into a company building in Memphis but is overpowered by the crew. A lone pilot crashes a small plane onto the White House grounds, just missing the President’s bedroom. An Air France flight is hijacked by a terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda, with the aim of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower, but French Special Forces storm the plane before it takes off.
September 1994: Starting as Afghani exiles in Pakistan religious schools, the Taliban begin their conquest of Afghanistan. CNN reports, “The Taliban are widely alleged to be the creation of Pakistan’s military intelligence [the ISI]. Experts say that explains the Taliban’s swift military successes.” The CIA also worked with the ISI to create the Taliban. A regional expert with extensive CIA ties says: “I warned them that we were creating a monster.” After 9/11, the Wall Street Journal states: “Despite their clean chins and pressed uniforms, the ISI men are as deeply fundamentalist as any bearded fanatic; the ISI created the Taliban as their own instrument and still supports it.” 1995-April 1996: In 1995, the government of Sudan offers the US all of its files on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but the US turns down the offer. Bin Laden had been living in Sudan since 1991. The Sudanese government collected a “vast intelligence database on Osama bin Laden and more than 200 leading members of his al-Qaeda terrorist network… [The US was] offered thick files, with photographs and detailed biographies of many of his principal cadres, and vital information about al-Qaeda’s financial interests in many parts of the globe.” In April 1996, the US again rejects Sudan’s offer of the files. An American involved in the secret negotiations later says that the offer was blocked by another arm of the federal government: “I’ve never seen a brick wall like that before. Somebody let this slip up… We could have dismantled his operations and put a cage on top. It was not a matter of arresting bin Laden but of access to information… and that’s what could have prevented September 11. I knew it would come back to haunt us.” Sudan again offers the US the files in May 2000, and again is turned down. In 1996 Sudan also offers their files to British intelligence, and are also rebuffed. Sudan makes a standing offer to the British to take the information at any time, but the offer is not taken up until after 9/11.
January 6, 1995: While investigating a possible assassination plan against the Pope, Philippine police uncover plans for Operation Bojinka, an al-Qaeda operation led by 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The plan is to explode 12 passenger planes over the Pacific Ocean simultaneously on January 21, 1995. If successful, up to 4,000 people would have been killed. Plans found for a second phase of attacks are also found. Planes would be hijacked and flown into buildings. The WTC, CIA headquarters, Pentagon and the Sears Tower are specifically mentioned as targets. One pilot, who learned to fly in US flight schools, confesses that his role was to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.
November 13, 1995 and June 25, 1996: Two truck bombs kill five Americans and two Indians in a US-operated training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.On June 25, 1996, bombs destroy the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American soldiers and wounding 500. Al-Qaeda is blamed for both of the attacks.
1996: FBI investigators are prevented from carrying out an investigation into Abdullah and Omar bin Laden, two brothers of Osama. The FBI suspected the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) was terrorist organization and Abdullah was the US director of WAMY. Apparently the case involved espionage, murder, and national security. Four of the 9/11 hijackerslater lived only three blocks from the WAMY offices near Washington DC, at the same time the two bin Laden brothers were there. WAMY still has not been put on a list of terrorist organizations in the US, but has been banned in Pakistan. A high-placed intelligence official tells the Guardian: “There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis. There were particular investigations that were effectively killed.” An unnamed US source says to the BBC, “There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government.”
1996: A paid informant, Aukai Collins, later says provided detailed information about hijacker Hani Hanjour to the FBI at this time. Hanjour was living in Phoenix, Arizona and taking flying lessons. Collins says the FBI “knew everything about the guy.” The FBI denies knowing about Hanjour before 9/11, though they acknowledge that they paid Collins for four years to monitor the Islamic and Arab communities in Phoenix.
1996: The Saudi Arabian government starts paying huge amounts of money to al-Qaeda, becoming its largest financial backer. They also give money to other extremist groups throughout Asia. This money vastly increases the capability of al-Qaeda. US officials later privately complain “that the Bush Administration, like the Clinton Administration, is refusing to confront this reality, even in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks.”
1996:After learning that an al-Qaeda terrorist trained at a US flight school, the FBI visit two flight schools where the terrorist trained. They abandon the investigation when they fail to find any other suspicious students at those schools.
March-May 18, 1996: Pressured by the US to do something about bin Laden, Sudan offers to extradite bin Laden to anywhere he might stand trial. The US decides not to take him because they apparently don’t have enough evidence at the time to charge him with a crime. Saudi Arabia doesn’t want him either. US officials nonetheless insist that Sudan must expel bin Laden. One US intelligence source in the region later states: “We kidnap minor drug czars and bring them back in burlap bags. Somebody didn’t want this to happen.” On May 18, bin Laden and about 150 supporters take a flight to Afghanistan, bringing all of their money, resources and personnel. The US knows in advance that bin Laden is going to Afghanistan, but does nothing to stop him. Sudan’s minister of state for defense later says in an interview: “We warned [the US]. In Sudan, bin Laden and his money were under our control. But we knew that if he went to Afghanistan no one could control him. The US didn’t care; they just didn’t want him in Somalia. It’s crazy.”
June 24, 1996: The Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan signs a deal with Enron “that could lead to joint development of the central Asian nation’s potentially rich natural gas fields.” The $1.3 billion venture teams Enron with the state companies of Russian and Uzbekistan. Two months later, Unocal and Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia come to agreement with state companies in Turkmenistan and Russia to to build a natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. They form the CentGas consortium in October 1997.Halliburton, a company with future Vice President Cheney as CEO, announces an agreement to provide technical services and drilling for Turkmenistan.
July 6-August 11, 1996: US officials identify crop-dusters and suicide flights as potential terrorist weapons that could threaten the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Planes are banned from getting too close to Olympic events. During the games, Black Hawk helicopters and US Customs Service jets are deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft over the Olympic venues. Agents monitor crop-duster flights and airports within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta.
August 1996: Bin Laden issues a religious decree, authorizing attacks on Western military targets in the Arabian Peninsula. In February 1998, he expands the decree, declaring it the religious duty of all Muslims “to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and military … in any country in which it is possible.” In May, 1998, bin Laden publicly discusses “bringing the war home to America.”
September 27, 1996: The Taliban conquer Kabul, establishing control over much of Afghanistan. The oil company Unocal is hopeful that the Taliban will stabilize Afghanistan, and allow its pipeline plans to go forward. In fact, “preliminary agreement [on the pipeline] was reached between the [Taliban and Unocal] long before the fall of Kabul.” “Oil industry insiders say the dream of securing a pipeline across Afghanistan is the main reason why Pakistan, a close political ally of America’s, has been so supportive of the Taliban, and why America has quietly acquiesced in its conquest of Afghanistan.”
October 1996: US intelligence learn of an Iranian plot to hijack a Japanese plane over Israel and crash it into Tel Aviv. The plot is never carried out.
1997: Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski publishes a book in which he portrays the Eurasian landmass as the key to world power, and Central Asia with its vast oil reserves as the key to domination of Eurasia. He notes that because of popular resistance to US military expansionism, his ambitious strategy could not be implemented “except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”
1997: It is later claimed that the special CIA paramilitary teams start entering Afghanistan in this year. In 1999, they place listening devices within range of al-Qaeda’s tactical radios. CIA Director Tenet states that by 9/11, “a map would show that these collection programs and human networks were in place in such numbers to nearly cover Afghanistan. This array meant that, when the military campaign to topple the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda began [in October 2001], we were able to support it with an enormous body of information and a large stable of assets.”
December 4, 1997: Representatives of the Taliban are invited guests to the Texas headquarters of Unocal to negotiate their support for the pipeline. Future President Bush Jr. is Governor of Texas at the time. The Taliban appear to agree to a $2 billion pipeline deal, but will do the deal onlyif the US officially recognizes the Taliban regime. The Taliban meet with US officials, and the Telegraph reports that “the US government, which in the past has branded the Taliban’s policies against women and children ‘despicable,’ appears anxious to please the fundamentalists to clinch the lucrative pipeline contract.”
1998: According to later closed session congressional testimony by the heads of the CIA, FBI and NSA, al-Qaeda begins planning the 9/11 attacks in this year. In a June 2002 interview, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed also says the planning for the attacks begin at this time.
February 12, 1998: Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca – later to become a Special Ambassador to Afghanistan – testifies before the House of Representatives that until a single, unified, friendly government is in place in Afghanistan the trans-Afghani pipeline will not be built. He suggests that with a pipeline through Afghanistan, the Caspian basin could produce 20 percent of all the non-OPEC oil in the world by 2010.
May 18, 1998: The FBI office in Oklahoma City sends a memo on this day warning that “large numbers of Middle Eastern males” are getting flight training in Oklahoma and could be planning terrorist attacks. The memo is apparently ignored. In 1999 it is learned that an al-Qaeda agent had studied flight training in Norman, Oklahoma. Hijackers Atta and Marwan Alshehhi consider studying at that school in 2000; Zacarias Moussaoui does study at the school in 2001.
August 1998: A CIA intelligence report asserts that Arab terrorists loosely tied to al-Qaeda are planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft from a foreign country into the WTC. The FBI and the FAA don’t take the threat seriously because of the state of aviation in that unnamed country.
August 7, 1998: Al-Qaeda terrorists bomb the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The bomb in Nairobi, Kenya kills 213 people, including 12 US nationals, and injures more than 4,500. The bomb in Dar es Salaam kills 11 and injures 85.
August 9, 1998: Northern Alliance capital Mazar-e-Sharif is conquered by the Taliban, giving them control of 90% of Afghanistan, including the entire pipeline route. The CentGas consortium, led by Unocal and the Saudi Arabian Delta Oil, is now “ready to proceed” with the gas pipeline that would run through Afghanistan.
August 20, 1998: The US fires approximately 60 missiles at six training camps in Afghanistan and about 20 missiles at a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan in retaliation for the US embassy bombings. About 30 people are killed in the attacks, but no important al-Qaeda figures. It is later revealed the Sudanese factory had no terrorist connections. Of the six camps targeted in Afghanistan, only four were hit, and of those only one had connections to bin Laden. The missiles were aimed at a “gathering of key terrorist leaders” that actually took place a month earlier, in Pakistan. A US defense analyst later states, “My sense is that because the attack was so limited and incompetent, we turned this guy into a folk hero.”
September 1998: US intelligence finds information that bin Laden’s next operation could possibly involve crashing an aircraft loaded with explosives into a US airport.
October-November 1998: US intelligence learns that al-Qaeda is trying to establish a terrorist cell within the US and are planning to strike a US domestic target.
Autumn 1998: US intelligence hears of a bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington areas. It’s unknown if this is connected to the 9/11 plot or something else.
November 1998: US intelligence learns that a Turkish extremist group loosely connected to al-Qaeda had planned to crash an airplane packed with explosives into a famous tomb during a government ceremony. They were arrested before they could try it.
December 1, 1998: A US intelligence assessment: “[bin Laden] is actively planning against US targets… Multiple reports indicate [he] is keenly interested in striking the US on its own soil… al-Qaeda is recruiting operatives for attacks in the US but has not yet identified potential targets.” Later in the month, a classified document signed by a senior US official states: “The intelligence community has strong indications that bin Laden intends to conduct or sponsor attacks inside the US.”
December 4, 1998:CIA Director Tenet issues a “declaration of war” on al-Qaeda, in a memorandum circulated in the intelligence community. Tenet says, “Each day we all acknowledge that retaliation is inevitable and that its scope may be far larger than we have previously experienced… We are at war… I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the [larger intelligence] community.” Yet it is later found that few FBI agents had ever heard of the declaration. There is no shift in budget priorities, either. For example, the number of CIA personnel assigned to its Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) stays roughly constant until 9/11.
December 21, 1998: In a Time magazine cover story entitled “The Hunt for Osama,” it is reported intelligence sources “have evidence that bin Laden may be planning his boldest move yet – a strike on Washington or possibly New York City in an eye-for-an-eye retaliation. ‘We’ve hit his headquarters, now he hits ours,’ says a State Department aide.”
Late 1998: A captured al-Qaeda operative tells the FBI learns of a telephone number in Yemen, in a safe house owned by hijacker Khalid Almihdhar’s father-in-law. US intelligence taps the phone line and learns the house is an al-Qaeda “logistics center” used by agents around the world to communicate with each other and plan attacks. Even bin Laden called the safe house dozens of times. In late 1999 the phone line will lead the CIA to an important al-Qaeda “summit” in Malaysia. It appears al-Qaeda was still using the phone line until a government raid in February 2002. It also appears the US was able to decipher much of al-Qaeda’s code language. For instance, in 1998 they learned “wedding” meant bomb, and the code name for 9/11 was “The Big Wedding.” Why didn’t monitoring of this phone expose the 9/11 attack?
Late 1998: President Clinton signs a directive authorizing the CIA to plan an assassination of bin Laden. The assassination never happens, supposedly because of inadequate intelligence. An officer who helped draw up the plans says, “We were ready to move” but “we were not allowed to do it because of this stubborn policy of risk avoidance… It is a disgrace.”
1999: British intelligence warns US intelligence that al-Qaeda has plans to use “commercial aircraft” in “unconventional ways”, “possibly as flying bombs.”
1999: Mohamed Atta’s telephone is monitored by the Egyptian secret service in this year. They learn that he had visited Afghanistan at least once recently, but it’s not known if the information was shared or when the surveillance stopped.
July 14, 1999: A government informant records a conversation between some illegal arms dealers and Pakistani ISI agents held within view of the WTC. An ISI agent points to the WTC and says, “Those towers are coming down.” He later makes other references to an attack on the WTC. The informant passes these warnings on to Senator Bob Graham and others, but later claims “The complaints were ordered sanitized by the highest levels of government.” Senator Graham admits being “concerned” about this warning before 9/11, but apparently the warning is not passed on. September 1999: A report prepared for US intelligence entitled the “Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism” is completed. It suggests: “Al-Qaeda could detonate a Chechen-type building-buster bomb at a federal building. Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House.”
December 14, 1999: Al-Qaeda terrorist Ahmed Ressam is arrested trying to enter the US with components of explosive devices. Documents found with Ressam lead to arrests of co-conspirators in New York, Boston and Seattle. These arrests and more in Jordan foil a series of attacks against US targets over the New Year’s weekend. Ressam was to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport. Counterterrorism head Richard Clarke later says, “I think a lot of the FBI leadership for the first time realized that … there probably were al-Qaeda people in the United States.” Yet Clinton’s National Security Adviser Sandy Berger says, “Until the very end of our time in office, the view we received from the [FBI] was that al-Qaeda had limited capacity to operate in the US and any presence here was under surveillance.” No analysis is done before 9/11 to investigate just how big that presence might be.
January 2000:Former PresidentGeorge Bush Sr. meets with the bin Laden family on behalf of the Carlyle Group. He had also met with them in 1998, but it’s not known if he met with them after this.
January-May 2000: The CIA surveils hijacker Mohamed Atta in Germany. He is “reportedly observed buying large quantities of chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for the production of explosives [and/or] for biological warfare. The US agents reported to have trailed Atta are said to have failed to inform the German authorities about their investigation. The disclosure that Atta was being trailed by police long before 11 September raises the question why the attacks could not have been prevented with the man’s arrest.” The surveillance stopped when he left for the US at the start of June. But “experts believe that the suspect remained under surveillance in the United States.”
January 5-8, 2000: About a dozen of bin Laden’s trusted followers hold a secret, “top-level al-Qaeda summit” in the city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Plans are made for the 9/11 attacks. The CIA knows it is an al-Qaeda planning meeting and has Malaysia follow, photograph, and even videotape the attendees, but the meeting is not wiretapped. Even before the meeting begins, the CIA learns that hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi will be attending, and that Almihdhar has a multiple-entry visa for the US good until April 6, 2000. The two already began living in San Diego in November 1999, and the NSA learned earlier in 1999 that Alhazmi is a terrorist. Yet somehow, the CIA fails to notice under after 9/11 that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a top al-Qaeda leader, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and someone the US has been trying to catch since 1995, is at the meeting. Khallad bin Atash, a “trusted member of bin Laden’s inner circle” who was in charge of bin Laden’s bodyguards, also attends, as does top al-Qaeda operative Fahad al-Quso, and a number of terrorists from the Islamic Jihad.Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the would-be 20th hijacker, also attends, but the US says they don’t realize that until after 9/11, despite photographs and video footage of him at the meeting. However, one account says he was recognized at the time of the meeting, which makes it hard to understand why he wasn’t tracked back to Germany and his housemate, hijacker Mohamed Atta. The chances to foil the 9/11 plot based on knowledge of this meeting are many. Had the meeting been wiretapped, presumably the details of the entire 9/11 plot would have been recorded.
January 15, 2000-March 5, 2000: The CIA tracks hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar from the al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia to Thailand, and then tracks Alhazmi as he flies from Bangkok, Thailand, to Los Angeles, California. The US keeps a watch list database known as TIPOFF, with tens of thousands of names of suspected terrorists – even a “reasonable suspicion” that a person is connected with a terrorist group warrants being added to the database. Almihdhar and Alhazmi are important enough to have been mentioned to the CIA Director several times this month, but are not added to the watch list. Furthermore, “astonishingly, the CIA … [didn’t] notify the FBI, which could have covertly tracked them to find out their mission.” In March 2000, another country tells the CIA that Alhazmi flew to Los Angeles and that Almihdhar was on the same flight. Yet again, the CIA fails to put their names on a watch list, and fails to alert the FBI so they can be tracked, and fails to do either until August 23, 2001.
April 2000: A man walks into an FBI office and claims he had trained in Pakistan as part of a plot with 5 or 6 others to hijack a plane in the US, then pilot it to Afghanistan or blow it up. The individual passes a polygraph test, but the FBI is unable to learn more about the plot.
April-May 2000: Hijacker Marwan Alshehhi boasts of planning an attack to a Hamburg librarian. He says, “There will be thousands of dead. You will think of me… In America something is going to happen.” He specifically mentions the WTC. Meanwhile, at the same time in the US, hijacker Mohamed Atta is even more forthcoming when applying for a $650,000 loan at the Department of Agriculture. Atta says he just arrived from Afghanistan, asks about security at the WTC, discusses al-Qaeda and its need for American membership, says bin Laden “would someday be known as the world’s greatest leader,” threatens to cut the throat of the bureaucrat and steal the money from her safe, asks “How would America like it if another country destroyed [Washington] and some of the monuments in it like the cities in [my] country had been destroyed?,” referring to a government building in Washington, asks “How would you like it if somebody flew an airplane into your friends’ building?”, and so on. Incredibly, neither the librarian nor the bureaucrat warn anyone of what they heard. In June 2002, FBI Director Mueller will say of the hijackers, “There were no slip-ups. Discipline never broke down. They gave no hint to those around them what they were about.”
June 29, 2000-September 18, 2000: On the orders of Pakistani ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, Saeed Sheikh wires about $100,000 to hijacker Atta between these dates using the alias Mustafa Ahmed. Saeed Sheikh, later convinced for kidnapping and murdering reporter Daniel Pearl in February 2002.The role of Mahmood Ahmed and the identity of Saeed Sheikh are briefly reported in the US press in early October, 2001, but since then this remarkable story appears to have been forgotten and there have been attempts to connect the Mustafa Ahmed alias with other people. The financial connection between Saeed and the hijackers continues until the day before 9/11, and it’s likely Saeed gave at least half of the $500,000 or so the hijackers spent in the US for the 9/11 plot.
August-September 2000: An unmanned spy plane called the Predator begins flying over Afghanistan, showing incomparably detailed real-time video and photographs of the movements of what appeared to be bin Laden and his aides. Its use is stopped after a few trials when a Predator crashes. It is decided to arm the Predator with a missile, but delays prevent this from happening before 9/11, and no more unarmed flights are conducted.
August 12, 2000-March 2001: Italian intelligence successfully wiretap the al-Qaeda terrorist cell in Milan, Italy from late 1999 until summer 2001. In a wiretapped conversation from this day, terrorist Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman tells terrorist Es Sayed about a massive strike against the enemies of Islam involving aircraft and the sky, a blow that “will be written about in all the newspapers of the world. This will be one of those strikes that will never be forgotten… This is a terrifying thing…” In another conversation, Abdulrahman tells Es Sayed: “I’m studying airplanes. I hope, God willing, that I can bring you a window or a piece of an airplane the next time we see each other.” The comment is followed by laughter. In January 2001, a different terrorist asks Es Sayed about some fake documents: “Will these work for the brothers who are going to the United States?” Sayed responds angrily, saying: “Don’t ever say those words again, not even joking! If it’s necessary … whatever place we may be, come up and talk in my ear, because these are very important things. You must know … that this plan is very, very secret, as if you were protecting the security of the state.” Beginning in October 2000, FBI experts begin helping Italian police analyze the intercepts. Neither Italy nor the FBI understands their meaning until after 9/11, but apparently the Italian government understands enough to give the US an official warning based on these intercepts in March 2001.
September-December 2000: Hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar live with an FBI informant in San Diego. Supposedly, he never told the FBI the hijackers’ names. Neighbors claim that Mohamed Atta and Hani Hanjour are frequent visitors. Neighbors also witness strange late night visits with Alhazmi and Almihdhar, matching reports of neighbors at other buildings the two lived in. For instance, one neighbor says, “There was always a series of cars driving up to the house late at night. Sometimes they were nice cars. Sometimes they had darkened windows. They’d stay about 10 minutes.”
September 15-October 1, 2000: Olympics officials later reveal that “A fully loaded, fueled airliner crashing into the opening ceremony before a worldwide television audience at the Sydney Olympics was one of the greatest security fears for the Games.” During the Olympics, Australia has six planes in the sky at all times ready to intercept any wayward aircraft. In fact, “IOC officials said the scenario of a plane crash during the opening ceremony was uppermost in their security planning at every Olympics since terrorists struck in Munich in 1972.” Bin Laden was considered the number one threat.
October 12, 2000: The USS Cole is bombed in the Aden, Yemen harbor by al-Qaeda terrorists. 17 US soldiers are killed. The Prime Minister of Yemen at the time later claims that hijacker “Khalid Almihdhar was one of the Cole perpetrators, involved in preparations. He was in Yemen at the time and stayed after the Cole bombing for a while, then he left.” John O’Neill and his team of 200 hundred FBI investigators enter Yemen two days later, but are unable to accomplish much due to restrictions placed on them, and tensions with US Ambassador Barbara Bodine. All but about 50 investigators are forced to leave by the end of October. Even though O’Neill’s boss visits and finds that Bodine is O’Neill’s “only detractor,” O’Neill and much of his team is forced to leave in November, and the investigation stalls without his personal relationships to top Yemeni officials. The Sunday Times later notes, “The failure in Yemen may have blocked off lines of investigation that could have led directly to the terrorists preparing for September 11.”
October 24-26, 2000: Pentagon officials carry out a “detailed” emergency drill based upon the crashing of a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon. The Pentagon is such an obvious target that, “For years, staff at the Pentagon joked that they worked at “Ground Zero”, the spot at which an incoming nuclear missile aimed at America’s defenses would explode. There is even a snack bar of that name in the central courtyard of the five-sided building, America’s most obvious military bullseye.” After 9/11, a Pentagon spokesman will say to the press, “The Pentagon was simply not aware that this aircraft was coming our way, and I doubt prior to Tuesday’s event, anyone would have expected anything like that here.”
December 2000-April 2001: According to later German reports, “a whole horde of Israeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, [follow] the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States … In the town of Hollywood, Florida, they [identify] … Atta and Marwan Alshehhi as possible terrorists. Agents [live] in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock.” Supposedly, around April, the Israeli agents are discovered and deported, terminating the investigation. This is popularly known as “the art student spy ring” because all of the spies claim to be art students, when in fact all had “recently served in the Israeli military, the majority in intelligence, electronic signal intercept or explosive ordnance units.”Other reports suggest the spy ring began in January 2000. Over 200 “students” are eventually expelled from the US. Supposedly, the Mossad waits until late August 2001 before informing the CIA what it learns, and the CIA doesn’t take the warning seriously. The US government later admits that large numbers of young Israelis were expelled, but denies they were spies.
Early December 2000: Terrorist Fahad al-Quso is arrested by the government of Yemen. In addition to being involved in the USS Cole bombing, al-Quso was at the January 2000 Malaysian meeting with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar. FBI head investigator John O’Neill feels al-Quso is holding back important information and wants him interrogated but the interrogation doesn’t happen because O’Neill had been kicked out of Yemen by his superiors a week or two before. Al-Quso is finally interrogated days after 9/11, and admits to meeting with Alhazmi and Almihdhar in January 2000. One investigator calls the missed opportunity of exposing the 9/11 plot through al-Quso’s connections “mind-boggling.” The CIA has pictures from the Malaysian meeting of al-Quso next to hijacker Khalid Almihdhar, but the CIA doesn’t share the pictures with the FBI, and Alhazmi and Almihdhar remain undetected in the US.
2001: At some point during the year, Julie Sirrs, a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) agent, travels twice to Afghanistan. She claims DIA officials knew in advance about both trips. Sirrs sees a terrorist training center, and meets with Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Massoud, who is assassinated by the Taliban two days before 9/11. She returns with what she later claims is a treasure trove of information, including evidence that bin Laden is planning to assassinate Massoud. However, upon returning, a security officer meets her flight and confiscates her material. The DIA and the FBI investigate her. She says no higher-ups want to hear what she had learned in Afghanistan. Ultimately, Sirrs’ security clearance is pulled and she eventually quits the DIA in frustration.
January 4, 2001:The FBI’s investigation into the USS Cole bombing learns that terrorist Khallad bin Atash had been a principal planner of the bombing, and that two other participants in the bombing had delivered money to bin Atash at the time of the January 2000 meeting in Malaysia. The FBI shares this information with the CIA, and when CIA analysts reexamine pictures from the Malaysian meeting to learn more about this, they find a picture of him standing next to hijacker Khalid Almihdhar. The CIA is aware that Almihdhar entered the US a year earlier, yet they don’t attempt to find him or warn the FBI. CNN later notes that, again, the CIA at least “could have put [Nawaf] Alhazmi and Almihdhar and all others who attended the meeting in Malaysia on a watch list to be kept out of this country. It was not done.” More incredibly, even bin Atash is not placed on the watch list at this time, despite being labeled the principal planner of the USS Cole bombing. In July, the CIA rediscovers bin Atash’s role, and a CIA agent warns the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC), that bin Atash “is a major league killer, who orchestrated the Cole attack and possibly the Africa bombings.” Yet bin Atash is still not put on a terrorist watch list, and hijackers Alhazmi and Almihdhar continue to live openly in the US.
January 21, 2001: George Bush Jr. is inaugurated as the 43rd US President, replacing Clinton.
January 30, 2001: Hijacker Ziad Jarrah is questioned for several hours at the Dubai International Airport, United Arab Emirates, at the request of the CIA for “suspected involvement in terrorist activities.” He freely admits that he was in Afghanistan for much of the past two months and that he is headed to Florida. US officials were informed of the results of the interrogation before Jarrah left the airport, but he is allowed to go, and he returns to his flight training in Florida. His questioning “fits a pattern of a CIA operation begun in 1999 to track suspected al-Qaeda operatives who were traveling through the United Arab Emirates.”
January 31, 2001: The final bipartisan report of the US Commission on National Security/21st Century, launched in 1998 by then-President Bill Clinton and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is issued. The report has 50 recommendations on how to combat terrorism in the US, but all of them are ignored by the Bush Administration. Instead, the White House announces in May that it will have Vice President Cheney study the potential problem of domestic terrorism, despite the fact that this commission had just studied the issue for 2 1/2 years. According to Senator Hart, Congress was taking the commission’s suggestions seriously, but then, “Frankly, the White House shut it down…”
Late January 2001: The BBC later reports, “After the elections, [US intelligence] agencies [are] told to ‘back off’ investigatingthe Bin Ladens and Saudi royals,and that anger[s] agents.”
February 9, 2001: US intelligence tells Vice President Cheney that it has been conclusively proven bin Laden was behind the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole. However, fearful of ending secret pipeline negotiations begun just days after Bush took office, the US does not retaliate against known al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan as Clinton did in 1998. The US also discontinues the covert deployment of cruise missile submarines and gunships on six-hour alert near Afghanistan’s borders that gave President Clinton the option of assassinating bin Laden.
March 2001: A Taliban envoy meets with US officials in Washington and discusses turning bin Laden over. But the US wants to be handed bin Laden directly, and the Taliban want to turn him over for trial in some third country. About 20 more meetings on giving up bin Laden take place up till 9/11, all fruitless.
March 26, 2001: The Washington Post reports on a major improvements of the CIA’s intelligence gathering capability “in recent years.” A new program called Oasis uses “automated speech recognition” technology to turn audio feeds into formatted, searchable text. It can distinguish one voice from another and differentiates “speaker 1” from “speaker 2” in transcripts. Software called Fluent performs “cross lingual” searches, even translating difficult languages like Chinese and Japanese as well as automatically assessing their importance. One week later, the BBC reports that Echelon has become particularly effective against mobile phones, recording millions of calls simultaneously and checking them against a powerful search engine designed to pick out key words that might represent a security threat. Laser microphones can pick up conversations inside buildings from up to a kilometer away by monitoring window vibrations. If a bug is attached to a computer keyboard it is possible to monitor exactly what is being keyed in, because every key on a computer has a unique sound when depressed.However, the government will later report that messages about the 9/11 attacks weren’t translated until after 9/11 because analysts were “too swamped.”
April 8, 2001: Supposedly, Atta flies from the US to Prague, Czech Republic, and meets with an Iraqi spy. But the US and Czech governments later conclude the meeting never happened and Atta never even flew to Europe at the time. But the story is influential – in October 2002, a few days before Congress votes to approve a possible war with Iraq, a poll shows 66% of Americans believe Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
April 23-June 29, 2001: The 13 hijackers commonly known as the “muscle” – the brute force to protect the hijacker pilots – first arrive in the US.
May 2001: Around this time, intercepts from Afghanistan warn that al-Qaeda could attack an American target in late June or on the July 4 holiday. However, The White House’s Counterterrorism Security Group does not meet to discuss this prospect. This group also fails to meet after intelligence analysts overhear conversations from an al-Qaeda cell in Milan suggesting that bin Laden’s agents might be plotting to kill Bush at the European summit in Genoa, Italy, in late July. In fact, under Bush, the group only meets twice before 9/11 (June 3 and September 4). Under Clinton, the group met two or three times a week between 1998 and 2000. The White House later “aggressively defend[s] the level of attention, given only scattered hints of al-Qaeda activity.”
May 31, 2001: The Wall Street Journal summarizes tens of thousands of pages of evidence disclosed in a recently concluded trial of al-Qaeda terrorists. They are called “a riveting view onto the shadowy world of al-Qaeda.” The documents reveal numerous connections between al-Qaeda and specific front companies and charities. They even detail a “tightly organized system of cells in an array of American cities, including Brooklyn, N.Y.; Orlando, Fla.; Dallas; Santa Clara, Calif.; Columbia, Mo., and Herndon, Va.” Apparently nothing is done. The 9/11 hijackers had ties to many of these same cities and charities.
June 2001: German intelligence warns the CIA, Britain’s MI6, and Israel’s Mossad that Middle Eastern terrorists are planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack “American and Israeli symbols, which stand out.” German intelligence sources later state the information came from Echelon surveillance.
June 2001: A 60-page internal memo on the Israeli “art student” spy ring is prepared by the DEA’s Office of Security Programs. The memo is a compilation of dozens of field reports, and was meant only for the eyes of senior officials at the Justice Department, but it is leaked to the press around December 2001. The report connects the spies to efforts to foil DEA investigations into Israeli organized crime activity involving the importation of the drug Ecstasy. Salon later suggests this was a cover for the more important goal of spying on Muslim radicals. By the time of the report, the US has “apprehended or expelled close to 120 Israeli nationals.” Twenty more are arrested before 9/11, at least 60 more by the end of 2001, and arrests continue until at least May, 2002.
June 4 , 2001: Three Afghan or Pakistani men living in the Cayman Islands are overheard discussing hijacking attacks in New York City. These men are already being investigated by Cayman and British investigators. On this day, they are taken into custody, questioned and released some time later. This information is forwarded to US intelligence. In late August, an anonymous letter to a Cayman radio station will allege these same men are agents of bin Laden “organizing a major terrorist act against the US via an airline or airlines.” The letter is forwarded to the Cayman government, but it is unknown what they did with it.
June 9, 2001: Robert Wright, an FBI agent who spent ten years investigating terrorist funding, writes a memo that slams the FBI. He states, “There is virtually no effort on the part of the FBI’s International Terrorism Unit to neutralize known and suspected international terrorists living in the United States.” He claims “FBI was merely gathering intelligence so they would know who to arrest when a terrorist attack occurred,” rather than actually trying to stop the attacks. Wright claims the FBI shut down his 1998 criminal probe into alleged terrorist-training camps in Chicago and Kansas City. He says his superiors repeatedly blocked his attempts to shut off money flows to al-Qaeda, Hamas and other terrorist groups. Yet his story is largely ignored by the media because the FBI will not allow Wright to provide details. He is now suing the FBI so he can tell his story.
June 11, 2001: FBI agents from the New York office and Washington headquarters meet with CIA officials to discuss the USS Cole investigation. The FBI agents are shown photographs from the al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, including pictures of hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, but are not given copies. “The FBI agents recognized the men from the Cole investigation, but when they asked the CIA what they knew about the men, they were told that they didn’t have clearance to share that information. It ended up in a shouting match.” A CIA official later admits that he knew more about Alhazmi and Almihdhar that he was willing to tell the FBI. The two are still not put on a terrorist watch list.
June 23, 2001: Reuters reports that “Followers of exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden are planning a major attack on US and Israeli interests in the next two weeks.” The report is based on the personal impression of a reporter who interviewed bin Ladenand some of his followers two days earlier. This reporter is quoted as saying: “There is a major state of mobilization among the Osama bin Laden forces. It seems that there is a race of who will strike first. Will it be the United States or Osama bin Laden?”
Summer, 2001: Around this time, the NSA intercepts telephone conversations between al-Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, but does not share the information with any other agencies. Mohammed is on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List at the time, and is later considered the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Supposedly, however, the NSA either fails to translate important messages in a timely fashion, or fails to understand the significance of what was translated. The NSA Director later contradicts other senior US officials and claims no calls involving any of the hijackers have been found.
Summer, 2001: An informant tells an FBI field office agent that he has been invited to a commando training course at a camp operated by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The information is passed up to FBI headquarters, which rejects the idea of infiltrating the camp.
July 2, 2001: Indian sources claim that “bin Laden, who suffers from renal deficiency, has been periodically undergoing dialysis in a Peshawar military hospital with the knowledge and approval of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), if not of [Pakistani President] Musharraf himself.” CBS later reports bin Laden had emergency medical care in Pakistan the day before 9/11, again protected by the ISI.
July 4-14, 2001: Bin Laden, the US’s most wanted criminal with a $5 million bounty on his head, supposedly receives lifesaving treatment for renal failure from American surgeon at the American hospital in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Witnesses claim that on July 12, bin Laden meets with CIA agent Larry Mitchell and possibly another agent. The CIA, the Dubai hospital and even bin Laden deny the story; the doctor named refuses to comment. Le Figaro and Radio France International, who broke the story from French intelligence sources, stand by it.The explosive story is prominently and widely reported in Europe, but barely at all in the US.
July 10, 2001: Phoenix, ArizonaFBI agent Ken Williams sends a memo to FBI headquarters and several other FBI offices, warning about suspicious activities of 10 Middle Eastern men taking flight training lessons in Arizona. The memo specifically suggests that bin Laden’s followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil-aviation system as pilots, security guards or other personnel, and recommends a national program to track suspicious flight-school students. The memo is ignored and no action is taken, not even surveillance of the 10 suspected students. One of the students mentioned periodically roomed and trained with hijacker Hani Hanjour for several years in Arizona. In May 2002, Vice President Cheney states that the memo should never be released to the media or public.
Mid-July 2001: FBI counter-terrorism expertJohn O’Neill privately tell an investigator:”The main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it … All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s organization, can be found in Saudi Arabia.” O’Neill also believes the White House is obstructing his investigation of bin Laden because they are still keeping the idea of a pipeline deal with the Taliban open.
July 16, 2001: British spy agencies warn that al-Qaeda is in “the final stages” of preparing a terrorist attack in the West. The report states there is “an acute awareness” that the attack is “a very serious threat.” In early August, the British add that the attack will involve multiple airplane hijackings. This warning is included in Bush’s briefing on August 6.
July 20-22, 2001: The G8 summit is held in Genoa, Italy. Acting on warnings that al-Qaeda would attempt to kill Bush and other leaders with “an airplane stuffed with explosives,” Italy surrounds the summit with antiaircraft guns, keeps fighters in the air, and closes off local airspace to all planes. Bush sleeps in an aircraft carrier off the coast. The attack is called off because of the heavy security.
July 21, 2001: Three former US officials meet with Pakistani and Russian intelligence officers in a Berlin hotel. It is the third of a series of back-channel conferences using ex-officials called “brainstorming on Afghanistan.” Department official Lee Coldren passes on a message from Bush officials. He later says, “I think there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action.” One specific threat made at this meeting is that the Taliban can choose between “carpets of bombs” – an invasion – or “carpets of gold” – the oil and gas pipelines.
July 26, 2001: CBS News reports that Attorney General Ashcroft has stopped flying commercial airlines due to a threat assessment, but “neither the FBI nor the Justice Department … would identify [to CBS] what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.” The San Francisco Chronicle later concludes, “The FBI obviously knew something was in the wind … The FBI did advise Ashcroft to stay off commercial aircraft. The rest of us just had to take our chances.” CBS’s Dan Rather later says of this warning: “Why wasn’t it shared with the public at large?”
Late July 2001: The Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakillearns that bin Laden is planning a “huge attack” on targets inside America. The attack is imminent, and will kill thousands. He learns this from the leader of the rebel movement in Uzbekistan, which is allied with al-Qaeda. Muttawakil sends an emissary to pass this information on to the US consul general, and another US official, “possibly from the intelligence services,” as well as a United Nations office. The message is not taken very seriously; one source blames this on “warning fatigue” from too many warnings.
Late July 2001: David Schippers, noted conservative Chicago lawyer and the House Judiciary Committee’s chief investigator in the Clinton impeachment trial, later claims that FBI agents in Chicago and Minnesota contact him around this time and tell him that a terrorist attack is going to occur in lower Manhattan. According to Schippers, the agents had been developing extensive information on the planned attack for many months.However, the FBI soon pulls them off the terrorist investigation and threatens them with prosecution under the National Security Act if they go public with the information. As a result, they contact Schippers hoping he can persuade the government to take action. Schippers tries to pass the information on to high government officials but apparently his efforts are ignored. Partly in conjunction with Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm, Schippers is now representing at least ten FBI agents in a suit against the US government in an attempt to have their testimony subpoenaed, which would enable them to legally tell what they know without going to jail.
Late July 2001: CBS reports: “Just days after Atta return[s] to the US from Spain, Egyptian intelligence in Cairo says it received a report from one of its operatives in Afghanistan that 20 al-Qaeda members had slipped into the US and four of them had received flight training on Cessnas. To the Egyptians, pilots of small planes didn’t sound terribly alarming, but they [pass] on the message to the CIA anyway, fully expecting Washington to request information. The request never [comes].”
Late summer 2001: Jordanian intelligence warns the US that a major attack, code named The Big Wedding, is planned inside the US and that aircraft will be used.
Late summer 2001: The Guardian later reports, “Reliable western military sources say a US contingency plan existed on paper by the end of the summer to attack Afghanistan from the north.”
August 2001: A Moroccan informant learns that bin Laden is “very disappointed” that the 1993 bombing had not toppled the WTC, and plans “large scale operations in New York in the summer or fall of 2001.” The International Herald Tribune later calls the story “not proved beyond a doubt” but intriguing.
August 2001: Russian President Putin later states that during this month, “I ordered my intelligence to warn President Bush in the strongest terms that 25 terrorists were getting ready to attack the US, including important government buildings like the Pentagon.” He states that suicide pilots are training for attacks on US targets. The head of Russian intelligence also states, “We had clearly warned them” on several occasions, but they “did not pay the necessary attention.” A Russian newspaper on September 12, 2001 claims that “Russian Intelligence agents know the organizers and executors of these terrorist attacks. More than that, Moscow warned Washington about preparation to these actions a couple of weeks before they happened.”
August 2, 2001: The last secret meeting between US officials and the Taliban is held, apparently in a last ditch attempt to secure a pipeline deal. Talks break off, and the US prepares plans to invade and occupy Afghanistan.
August 6, 2001: President Bush receives classified intelligence briefings at his Crawford, Texas ranch indicating that bin Laden might be planning to hijack commercial airliners. The memo read to him is titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”, and the entire 11 page memo focuses on the possibility of terrorist attacks inside the US. The contents have never been made public. The existence of this memo is kept secret until May 2002. Vice President Cheney later calls the memo just a “rehash” containing nothing new or interesting. But he says Congress and the public should not see it, “because it contains the most sensitive sources and methods. It’s the family jewels.”
August 6, 2001-September 11, 2001: Inside trading based on advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks between August 6, if not earlier, and the day of the attack later lead to investigations around the world. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) later announces that they are investigating the trading of shares of 38 companies in the days just before 9/11. Both the SEC and the Secret Service announce probes into an unusually high volume trade of five-year US Treasury note purchases (considered good investments in a world crisis) around this time. These transactions included a single $5 billion trade.German central bank president Ernst Welteke later says his researchers have found “almost irrefutable proof of insider trading,” not only in shares of heavily affected industries such as airlines and insurance companies, but also in gold and oil. Unusual stock transactions of Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, is also noted by German investigators. US investigators reports that salvaged computers from within the WTC show that over $100 million was rushed through computers even as the disaster unfolded. Investigators say, “There is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time of the plane crashes… [and] thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed.” There are ongoing investigations in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, Cyprus, Japan, Italy, Britain and other countries. Apparently all of these investigations are still continuing, except one in Britain which found no evidence of inside trading.
August 8-15, 2001: At some point between these dates, Israel warns the US that an al-Qaeda attack is imminent. Two high ranking agents from the Mossad come to Washington and warn the FBI and CIA that from 50 to 200 terrorists have slipped into the US and are planning “a major assault on the United States.” They say indications point to a “large scale target”, and that Americans would be “very vulnerable.” Later in the month, France gives a warning that apparently “echoes” this one.
August 15, 2001: After only a few days training to fly a 747 at a Minnesota flight school, terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui is arrested and detained in Minnesota on the excuse of an immigration violation. The FBI confiscates his possessions, including a computer laptop, but doesn’t have a search warrant to search through them. Moussaoui acted so suspiciously that a flight school staffer warned the FBI about Moussaoui, saying, “A 747 fully loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon!”One local FBI agent speculates that Moussaoui might “fly something into the World Trade Center.” But Minnesota FBI agents quickly become frustrated at the lack of interest in the case from higher ups, who refuse to allow the agents to ask for a search warrant from a secret court that, in over 10,000 cases from the FBI, that had never turned down a warrant request. French intelligence then gives evidence clearly tying Moussaoui to al-Qaeda, including evidence that he had trained in Afghanistan on several occasions. But an official at FBI headquarters edits out all the information tying Moussaoui to terrorism, and another attempt to apply for the warrant is rejected. One Minneapolis agent warns that FBI headquarters is “setting this up for failure,” and another agent later asks: “Why would an FBI agent deliberately sabotage a case?” A few weeks earlier, the headquarters official handling the Moussaoui case was also sent a copy of the Ken Williams memo warning that al-Qaeda terrorists might be training in US flight schools, but he apparently fails to see the connection. The search warrant is not approved until after the 9/11 attacks. Too late, evidence is found suggesting Moussaoui could be involved in a hijacking involving New York City. One newspaper claims that information on his computer “might have been enough to expose the Hamburg cell, which investigators believe was the key planning unit for 11 September.” FBI agent Coleen Rowley later suggests that if they would had received the search warrant sooner, “There is at least some chance that … may have limited the Sept. 11th attacks and resulting loss of life.”
August 21, 2001: Walid Arkeh, a Jordanian serving time in a Florida prison, warns FBI agents of an impending terrorist attack. He had befriended three important al-Qaeda figures in a British jail from September 2000 to July 2001. Bin Laden had telephoned one of them over 200 times prior to 1998. Arkeh tells the FBI that he had learned from these three that “something big was going to happen in New York City,” and they had called the 1993 attack on the WTC “unfinished business.” Tampa FBI agents determine that he had associated with these al-Qaeda agents, but nonetheless don’t believe him then or even after 9/11. One agent responds to his warning by saying: “Is that all you have? That’s old news.” The agents fail to learn more from him, but they do pass his warning to the FBI office in New York that is in charge of investigating al-Qaeda. In May 2002 he tells his story to different FBI agents. They are stunned, and later officially deem his warning valid. One says to him: “Let me tell you something. If you know what happened in New York, we are all in deep shit. We are in deep trouble.”
August 22, 2001: Counter-terrorism expert John O’Neill, the government’s “most committed tracker of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network of terrorists,” quits the FBI. He says it’s partly because of the recent power play against him apparently led by Tom Pickard, then interim director of the FBI, but also because of repeated obstruction of his investigations into al-Qaeda. He never hears the CIA warning about hijackers Alhazmi and Almihdhar sent out just one day later nor Ken Williams’ flight school memo, nor of Walid Arkeh’s warning, nor about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, nor is he at a June meeting when the CIA revealed some of what it knew about Alhazmi and Almihdhar. The next day he begins a new job as head of security at the WTC. He dies in the 9/11 attack, one day after moving into his office inside the WTC.
August 23, 2001: According to German newspapers, the Mossad gives the CIA a list of 19 terrorists living in the US and say that they appear to be planning to carry out an attack in the near future. It is unknown if these are the 19 9/11 hijackers or if the number is a coincidence. However, four names on the list are known and are names of the 9/11 hijackers: Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, Marwan Alshehhi, and Mohamed Atta.The Mossad appears to have learned about this through its “art student” spy ring. Yet apparently this warning and list are not treated as particularly urgent by the CIA and also not passed on to the FBI.
August 23, 2001: The CIA finally notifies the State Department, INS, Customs Service, and FBI that hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar be put on the terrorism watch list, which watches for them on any flight to or from the US (but not domestic flights). The CIA also requests that Khallad bin Atash be added to the watch list – eight months after he was known to have been the main planner of the Cole bombing. However, the FBI and other agencies are not told this is an urgent matter, and according to the Wall Street Journal, the search “consisted of little more than entering their names in a nationwide law enforcement database that would have triggered red flags if they were taken into custody for some other reason.” The FBI also fails to check national or state credit card, car registration, driver’s license or bank account databases. All of these would had positive results. Alhazmi’s name was even in the 2000-2001 San Diego phone book, listing the address where he and Almihdhar may have been living off and on until about September 9, 2001. The INS and State Department are not asked to help find the two; both later strongly suggest they could have found them. Although the FBI determines that Almihdhar had previously listed a Los Angeles address, FBI offices in Los Angeles and San Diego are not asked to assist in the search for the two until after 9/11.
August 24, 2001: Frustrated with lack of response from FBI headquarters about Zacarias Moussaoui, the Minnesota FBI asks the CIA for help. The CIA sends messages to stations and bases overseas requesting information about Moussaoui, stating that he might be “involved in a larger plot to target airlines traveling from Europe to the US,” and calls him a “suspect 747 airline attacker” and a “suspect airline suicide hijacker.” In contrast, on September 4, the FBI sends out a message about Moussaoui to the intelligence community and the FAA, but doesn’t suggest he’s a threat or possibly part of a larger plot, and doesn’t ask for any action or help. The FAA decides the warning is not important enough to pass on to the airlines. A terrorist turned informant held by the FBI Seattle knew Moussaoui from an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, but because of the vague FBI message the Seattle FBI doesn’t know to ask the informant about Moussaoui until after 9/11.
August 24-29, 2001: The 19 hijackers book their flights for 9/11, all use their real names. Most pay using credit cards on the internet. An official later states that had the FAA been properly warned about the watchlist on hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, “they should have been picked up in the reservation process.” Almihdhar in turn was in charge of arrangements for 13 other hijackers, and Alhazmi met regularly with Mohamed Atta.
August 28, 2001: The FBI’s New York office recommends that an investigation be launched “to determine if [Khalid] Almihdhar is still in the United States,” but FBI headquarters immediately turns the idea down on the grounds that there should be a wall between criminal investigations and intelligence work. One FBI agent expresses his frustration in an e-mail the next day, saying, “Whatever has happened to this – someday someone will die – and wall or not – the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ Let’s hope the [FBI’s] National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama bin Laden], is getting the most ‘protection.”‘
August 30-September 4, 2001: According to Egyptian President Mubarak, Egyptian intelligence warns American officials that bin Laden’s network is in the advanced stages of executing a significant operation against an American target, probably within the US. He says he learned this information from an agent working inside al-Qaeda.
Early September 2001: The NSA intercepts “multiple phone calls from Abu Zubaida, bin Laden’s chief of operations, to the United States.” The timing and information contained in these intercepted phone calls has not been disclosed.
Early September 2001: According to British inside sources, “shortly before September 11,” bin Laden contacts an associate thought to be in Pakistan. The conversation refers to an incident that will take place in the US on, or around 9/11, and discusses possible repercussions. In another conversation, bin Laden contacts an associate thought to be in Afghanistan. They discuss the scale and effect of a forthcoming operation; bin Laden praises his colleague for his part in the planning. Neither conversation specifically mentions the WTC or Pentagon, but investigators have no doubt the 9/11 attacks were being discussed.
Early September 2001: Bin Laden moves his training bases in Afghanistan “in the days before the attacks.” Presumably this is noticed by US spy satellites.
Early September 2001: Attendees of a New York mosque are warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on 9/11. The FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force interviews dozens of members of the mosque, who confirm the story. An agent in the 9/11 investigation later claims the news “had been out on the street” and the number of leads turning up later is so “overwhelming” that it is difficult to tell who knows about the attacks from secondhand sources and who knows about it from someone who may have been a participant. On September 6, a child in a class of Pakistani immigrants points towards the WTC, and says: “Do you see those two buildings? They won’t be standing there next week.” The FBI later confirms the event. One official at the school says many Arab-American students have come forward with their own stories about having prior knowledge before 9/11: “Kids are telling us that the attacks didn’t surprise them. This was a nicely protected little secret that circulated in the community around here.” Police say that on September 10, a sixth-grade student of Middle Eastern descent in Jersey City, New Jersey, warns his teacher to “to stay away from lower Manhattan because something bad was going to happen.” A few days before 9/11, a Seattle security guard of Middle Eastern descent tells an East Coast friend on the phone that terrorists will soon attack the US; the FBI later verifies the story. Three presumed terrorists talk threateningly in a Florida bar the night before the attacks, one saying: “Wait ’til tomorrow. America is going to see bloodshed.” In June 2002, FBI Director Mueller will claim: “To this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot…” In February 2002, CIA Director Tenet claims the 9/11 plot was “in the heads of three or four people” and even most of the hijackers didn’t know the targets or that it would be a suicide attack until just before the attack.
September 3, 2001: Author Salman Rushdie, the target of death threats from radical Muslims for years, is banned by US authorities from taking internal US flights. He says the FAA told his publisher the reason was because it had “intelligence of something about to happen.” One newspaper states, “The FAA confirmed that it stepped up security measures concerning Mr. Rushdie but refused to give a reason.”
September 6-10, 2001: Suspicious trading occurs on American and United, the two airlines used in the 9/11 attacks, but no other airlines. The New York Stock Exchange sees “unusually heavy trading” in the stocks for these two airlines “and related stocks.” The Chicago Board Options Exchange sees a drastic imbalance between purchases of put options (a speculation that the stock will go down) versus call options (a speculation the stock will go up). One analyst says: “I saw put-call numbers higher than I’ve ever seen in 10 years of following the markets…” On September 29, 2001, $2.5 million in put option profits on American Airlines and United Airlines are reported unclaimed, presumably to avoid being caught. “To the embarrassment of investigators, it has also emerged that the firm used to buy many of the ‘put’ options … on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, now executive director of the CIA.” Krongard was chairman of Alex Brown Inc., which was bought by Deutsche Bank. Krongard was head of the Bankers Trust, a private client business handling investments of the extremely wealthy. The Chicago Board Options Exchange also sees suspicious trading on Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, two of the largest WTC tenants, with numbers so unusual that one expert states,”This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence.” On September 10, the trading ratio on United Airlines is 25 times greater than normal at the Pacific Exchange. According to CBS News, by the afternoon of September 10, “alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the US stock options market.” It has been documented that the CIA and many other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly advanced programs to look for such warnings. So presumably CIA should have had advance warning something unusual was happening with American and United Airlines.
September 7, 2001: A priest famous for his expertise on the Muslim world is told at a wedding in Todi, Italy of a plot to attack the US and Britain using hijacked airplanes as weapons. He isn’t told time or place specifics. He immediately passes what he knows to a judge and several politicians.
September 8-11, 2001: Saeed Sheikh, associated with both al-Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI, transfers money from the United Arab Emirates to Mohamed Atta in Florida on September 8 and 9. On September 9, three hijackers, Atta, Walid Alshehri and Marwan Alshehhi, transfer about $15,000 back to Saeed’s account. Apparently the hijackers were giving money meant for the 9/11 attacks that they didn’t use. Saeed then flies from the United Arab Emirates to Karachi, Pakistan on 9/11. These last minute transfers are touted as the “smoking gun” proving al-Qaeda involvement in the 9/11 attacks, because of Saeed’s al-Qaeda ties. But shouldn’t it also be a “smoking gun” proving ISI involvement in 9/11?
September 9, 2001: General Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, is assassinated by two men posing as journalists. Massoud was far and away the most popular and powerful figure opposing the Taliban, and would have been the natural choice the lead the country had he lived. His killers are connected to both al-Qaeda and the Pakistani ISI. It is widely believed that the killing was a preemptive strike to prevent a resurgence of the Northern Alliance after the 911 attacks. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, an expert on Afghanistan, claims he immediately saw Massoud’s assassination as a sign that “something terrible was about to happen” but the 9/11 attacks happen just a few hours before he is to meet to warn top White House officials about this.
September 9, 2001: It is later reported that on this day, bin Laden calls his mother and said, “In two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” US officials later tell CNN that they had been monitoring calls between bin Laden and his mother for years.
September 9, 2001: A “game plan to remove al-Qaeda from the face of the Earth” is placed on Bush’s desk for his signature. The plan deals with all aspects of a war against al-Qaeda, ranging from diplomatic initiatives to a military invasion in Afghanistan. According to NBC News reporter Jim Miklaszewski, the “directive outlines essentially the same war plan … put into action after the Sept. 11 attacks. The administration most likely was able to respond so quickly to the attacks because it simply had to pull the plans ‘off the shelf.'” Bush was expected to sign it but still hadn’t done so by 9/11. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Advisor, has stated, “You show me one reporter, one commentator, one member of Congress who thought we should invade Afghanistan before September 11 and I’ll buy you dinner in the best restaurant in New York City.” In July 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair will state: “To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11.”
September 9-10, 2001: Donald Rumsfeld threatens to urge a veto if the Senate proceeds with a plan to divert $600 million from missile defense to counter-terrorism. The next day, Attorney General Ashcroft rejects a proposed $58 million increase in financing for the bureau’s counter-terrorism programs. On the same day, he sends a request for budget increases to the White House. It covers 68 programs, but none of them relate to counter-terrorism. He also sends a memorandum to his heads of departments, stating his seven priorities – none of them relating to counter-terrorism. This is more than a little strange, since Ashcroft stopped flying public airplanes in July due to terrorist threats and he told a Senate committee in May that counter-terrorism was his “highest priority.”
September 10, 2001: Amr Elgindy, a notorious inside trader on the financial markets, orders his broker to liquidate his children’s $300,000 trust account fearing a sudden crash in the market the next day. He tells his stock broker that the Dow Jones average, then at 9,600, will fall to below 3,000. Elgindy is later arrested along with two FBI agents. Government prosecutors claim the FBI agents were using their FBI positions to feed him inside information on various corporations. They also claim Elgindy had foreknowledge about the 9/11 attacks.
September 10, 2001: Hijacker Mohamed Atta calls Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the operational planner of the 9/11 attacks, in Afghanistan. Mohammed gives final approval to launch the attacks. This call is monitored and translated by the US, though it isn’t known how quickly that takes and details of the conversation haven’t been released.
September 10, 2001: At least two messages in Arabic are intercepted by the NSA:”The match begins tomorrow” and “Tomorrow is zero hour.” They were sent between someone in Saudi Arabia and someone in Afghanistan. The NSA claims that they weren’t translated until September 12, and that even if they were translated in time, “they gave no clues that authorities could have acted on.” These are only two of about 30 pre-9/11 communications from suspected al-Qaeda operatives or other militants referring to an imminent event, including “There is a big thing coming,” “They’re going to pay the price” and “We’re ready to go.” The NSA Director later claims the “NSA had no [indications] that al-Qaeda was … planning an attack on US soil.”
September 10, 2001: US officials later admit American agents had infiltrated al-Qaeda cells in the US, though how many and how long they had been in al-Qaeda remains a mystery. On this day, electronic intercepts connected to these undercover agents hear messages such as: “Watch the news” and “Tomorrow will be a great day for us.” At least until February 2002, officials claimed the “CIA failed to penetrate al-Qaeda with a single agent.”
September 10, 2001: Two days after 9/11, Newsweek reports: “The state of alert had been high during the past two weeks, and a particularly urgent warning may have been received the night before the attacks, causing some top Pentagon brass to cancel a trip. Why that same information was not available to the 266 people who died aboard the four hijacked commercial aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill.” Far from becoming a hot topic, the incident is never mentioned in the media again, except in the next issue of Newsweek.
September 11, 2001: In Israel, two employees of Odigo, Inc., an Israeli paging company, receive warnings of an imminent attack on the WTC around two hours before the first plane hits the WTC. Odigo has its headquarters two blocks from the WTC. Israeli security and the FBI are notified immediately after the 9/11 attacks begin. The two employees claim not to know who sent the warnings. The company suggests the warning may have been sent to a larger audience.
September 11, 2001: The 9/11 attack: four planes are hijacked, two crash into the WTC, one into the Pentagon, and one crashes into the Pennsylvania countryside. More than 2,800 people are killed.
September 11, 2001: A CIA team at the National Reconnaissance Office, an agency that runs many of the nation’s spy satellites, runs “a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day.” The simulation was to start at 9:00 A.M., four miles from where one of the real hijacked planes took off. The government calls the simulation a “bizarre coincidence.”
September 11, 2001: At the time of the 9/11 attacks, and at least until the second crash into the WTC, Pakistani ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed is meeting in Washington, DC, with the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter Goss (who is also a former CIA clandestine operations agent). Both later head the joint House-Senate investigation into the 9/11 attacks, and claim there is no 9/11 “smoking gun.” Also present are Senator John Kyl and the Pakistani ambassador to the US, Maleeha Lodhi. All of the people named in this meeting also met in Pakistan a few weeks earlier. As previously mentioned, Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed ordered $100,000 sent to hijacker Mohamed Atta in 2000.The New York Times says the terrorist threat from bin Laden is being discussed in the meeting when the 9/11 attacks begin.
September 11, 2001: A National Public Radio correspondent states: “I spoke with Congressman Ike Skelton – a Democrat from Missouri and a member of the Armed Services Committee – who said that just recently the director of the CIA warned that there could be an attack – an imminent attack – on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected.”
September 11, 2001: Hours after the 9/11 attacks, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is given information that three of the names on the airplane passenger manifests are suspected al-Qaeda operatives. The notes he composes at the time are leaked nearly a year later. Rumsfeld writes he wants the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL. [Usama bin Laden] Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” It is later revealed that shortly after 9/11, Rumsfeld sets up“a small team of defense officials outside regular intelligence channels to focus on unearthing details about Iraqi ties with al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks.” It has continued to sift “through much of the same databases available to government intelligence analysts but with the aim of spotlighting information the spy agencies have either overlooked or played down.”
September 11, 2001: Hours after the attacks, five Israelis are arrested for “puzzling behavior” related to the WTC attacks.Neighbors alerted the police after seeing them film the burning WTC from the roof of a building, then shouting in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery. One man was found with $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock, another had two passports on him, and a box cutter was found in the van they were driving when arrested. Investigators say that “There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted… It looked like they’re hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen.” One of these Israelis later says, “Our purpose was to document the event.” ABC News later reports that the FBI determined at least two are Mossad agents, and that all were on a Mossad surveillance mission. The FBI holds them on immigration violations and interrogates them for weeks. They are released on November 20, 2001 as part of a deal with the Israeli government. The owner of the moving van company they all worked for flees to Israel on September 13 and is still wanted by US authorities. The FBI later claims that none of them had any advanced knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
September 11, 2001: An FAA memo written on the evening of 9/11 suggests a man on Flight 11 was shot and killed with a gun before the plane crashed into the WTC. The memo, based on information from a flight attendant’s phone call, stated “that a passenger located in seat 10B shot and killed a passenger in seat 9B… The passenger killed was Daniel Lewin, shot by passenger Satam Al Suqami.” Lewin is later identified as a former member of the Israel Defense Force Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s most successful special-operations unit, a deep-penetration unit with a record of infiltrating then destroying terrorist plots. Officials later deny the gun story and suggest that Lewin was probably stabbed to death instead.
September 12, 2001: The government’s initial response to the 9/11 attacks is there was no evidence whatsoever that bin Laden planned an attack in the US. “There was a ton of stuff, but it all pointed to an attack abroad,” says one official. Furthermore, in the 24 hours after the attack, investigators have been searching through “mountains of information,” “but the vast electronic ‘take’ on bin Laden, said officials who requested anonymity, contained no hints of a pending terror campaign in the United States itself, no orders to subordinates, no electronic fund transfers, no reports from underlings on their surveillance of the airports in Boston, Newark and Washington.”
September 12, 2001: The passport of hijacker Satam Al Suqami is found a few blocks from the WTC. The Guardian says, “the idea that [this] passport had escaped from that inferno unsinged [tests] the credulity of the staunchest supporter of the FBI’s crackdown on terrorism.” (Note the passport did not belong to Atta, as is sometimes claimed.)
September 13-19, 2001: Members of bin Laden’s family and important Saudis are flown out of the US. The New York Times explains, “The young members of the bin Laden clan were driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret assembly point in Texas and then to Washington from where they left the country on a private charter plane when airports reopened three days after the attacks.” A Tampa Tribune article describes a flight carrying Saudi royalty from Tampa, Florida to Lexington, Kentucky on September 13, while the ban on all nonmilitary flights in the US is still in effect. Witnesses describe multiple 747’s with Arabic lettering on their sides are already in Lexington, suggesting another secret assembly point. It appears that the FBI were able to only interview the bin Ladens and Saudis only briefly, if at all. The existence of such flights during this ban is now unfortunately often called an urban legend.
September 14, 2001: FBI Director Mueller describes reports that the hijacker pilots had received flight training in the US as “news, quite obviously,” adding: “If we had understood that to be the case, we would have – perhaps one could have averted this.” It is later discovered that contrary to Mueller’s claims, the FBI had interviewed various flight school staffs about Middle Eastern terrorists on numerous occasions, from 1996 until a few weeks before 9/11. Three days later he says, “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.”
September 14, 2001: The Director of the Air National Guard claims that in 1997, the number of air forces bases defending the US with fighters on 24-hour alert is reduced from over 100 to only 7. This is done to reduce expenses. On 9/11, supposedly there are only 14 fighters (2 at each base) in the entire US ready to defend against an attack, and, as one newspaper puts it, “they no longer included any bases close to two obvious terrorist targets – Washington, DC, and New York City.” The Director explains this is why jets failed to scramble towards the hijacked aircraft for so many minutes. There is evidence suggesting additional bases on the East Coast had fighters on 24-hour alert on 9/11. But if the story is even remotely accurate, why didn’t Bush increase the number of fighters on alert in response to an increasing number of warnings of hijackings and suicide attacks from the air?
September 15, 2001: CIA Director Tenet briefs Bush with a military plan to conquer Afghanistan that was developed before 9/11 (mostly in May 2001), and is nearly exactly the same as the plan eventually used to conquer Afghanistan. In contrast, the Defense Department is caught relatively unprepared and has to defer to the CIA plans. Tenet then divulges a top secret document called the “Worldwide Attack Matrix,” which describes covert operations against al-Qaeda in 80 countries that are either underway or now recommended. The actions range from routine propaganda to lethal covert action.
September 15-17, 2001:Articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and other newspapers suggest that at least seven of the 9/11 hijackers had training in US military bases. Four were at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, and three of those listed that base as their permanent address on their driver’s licenses. The media drops the story after the Air Force makes a not-very-definitive statement, saying that while the names are similar, “we are probably not talking about the same people.” But the military fails to provide any information about the individuals whose names supposedly match those of the alleged hijackers, making it impossible to confirm or refute the story.
September 16-23, 2001: Reports appear in many newspapers suggesting that some of the people the US says were 9/11 hijackers are actually still alive. The London Times reports, “Five of the hijackers were using stolen identities, and investigators are studying the possibility that the entire suicide squad consisted of impostors.”People with the same names and other biographical information of the hijackers speak to the press and governments in the Middle East and claim they were nowhere near the US on 9/11. In some cases, their passports and/or photos appear to have been stolen and used by the hijackers. In a secret report to banks, the US even suggests that one hijacker, Khalid Almidhar, is still alive. However, in November 2001, FBI Director Mueller states, “We at this point definitely know the 19 hijackers who were responsible,” and says that they were sticking with the names and photos released in late September. The Salem Alhazmi still alive in Saudi Arabia says the FBI photo of hijacker Salem Alhazmi is of him, and other details of the hijackers appear to refer to obviously stolen information.
Late September-Early October, 2001: Leaders of Pakistan’s two Islamic parties negotiate bin Laden’s extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden would be held under house arrest in Peshawar and would face an international tribunal, which would decide whether to try him or hand him over to the US. This plan has both bin Laden’s approval and that of Taliban leader Mullah Omar. However, the plan is vetoed by Pakistan’s president Musharraf who says he “could not guarantee bin Laden’s safety.” But it appears the US did not want the deal: a US official later says that“casting our objectives too narrowly” risked “a premature collapse of the international effort [to overthrow the Taliban] if by some lucky chance Mr. bin Laden was captured.”
October 7, 2001: The US begins bombing Afghanistan. Note that shortly after 9/11 former Pakistani Foreign Secretary Niaz Naik claimed that in July 2001 he was told by senior US officials that a military action to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan would “take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”
October 7, 2001: Pakistani ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed is replaced after the FBI establishes that he had ordered Saeed Sheikh to transfer $100,000 into hijacker Mohamed Atta’s bank account prior in 2000. The story is widely reported by Pakistani newspapers, and even by the Wall Street Journal, which says US government sources helped them to confirm the story. The Times of India says: “A direct link between the ISI and the WTC attack could have enormous repercussions. The US cannot but suspect whether or not there were other senior Pakistani Army commanders who were in the know of things. Evidence of a larger conspiracy could shake US confidence in Pakistan’s ability to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition.” However, the story is quickly forgotten, and has never been mentioned in the US media since.
October 27, 2001:Furious government intelligence officials accuse the NSA of destroying data pertinent to the 9/11 investigation. They claim that possible leads aren’t being followed because of the NSA’s lack of cooperation.
December 12-15, 2001: Fox News broadcasts a remarkable series about the Israeli “art student” spy ring: “There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it.” “Investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying … is considered career suicide.” A highly placed investigator says there are ‘tie-ins’ between the spy ring and 9/11. But when asked for details, he flatly refuses to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.'” When a government source is asked if the Israeli spies knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened, he responds: “The principal question is ‘how could they have not known?'”
January 24, 2002: Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle later claims that on this day, Vice President Cheney calls him and urges that no 9/11 inquiry be made. Bush repeats the request on January 28, and Daschle is repeatedly pressured thereafter. Newsweek summarizes one of these conversations: “Bush administration officials might say they’re too busy running the war on terrorism to show up. Press the issue… and you risk being accused of interfering with the mission.”
February 6, 2002: CIA Director Tenet tells a Senate hearing that there was no 9/11 intelligence failure. When asked about the CIA record on 9/11, he says, “We are proud of that record.”
March 2002: Reuters, Le Monde, Salon and others report that many spies in the uncovered Israeli “art student” spy ring seemed to have been trailing some of the 9/11 hijackers. For instance, five Israeli spies are intercepted in the tiny retirement community of Hollywood, Florida, living at the address 4220 Sheridan Street, and four 9/11 hijackers are known to have lived in the same town at 3389 Sheridan Street. Salon claims Israeli spies appear to have been in close proximity to at least 10 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. However, a short Washington Post article completely denies the existence of any Israeli spy ring, and the New York Times has never mentioned the spy ring at all. By mid-March, Jane’s, the respected British intelligence and military analysis service, notes: “It is rather strange that the US media seems to be ignoring what may well be the most explosive story since the 11 September attacks – the alleged breakup of a major Israeli espionage operation in the USA.” Forward, the largest Jewish audience publication in the US, admits that there has been an Israeli spy ring in the US, saying “Israelis in the United States [were] spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.”
April 19 , 2002: FBI Director Mueller states: “In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper—either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that mentioned any aspect of the September 11 plot.” He also claims that the attackers used “extraordinary secrecy” and “Investigators have found no computers, laptops, hard drives or other storage media that may have been used by the hijackers, who hid their communications by using hundreds of pay phones and cell phones, coupled with hard-to-trace prepaid calling cards.” Yet the Wall Street Journal previously reported, “A senior FBI official says investigators have obtained hundreds of e-mails in English and Arabic, reflecting discussions of the planned Sept. 11 hijackings,” USA Todayreported investigators have recovered a ”substantial” number of e-mails by the hijackers “coordinat[ing] their activities,” a letter by a hijacker discussing the plot has been found, and so on.
May 8, 2002: FBI Director Mueller: “There was nothing the agency could have done to anticipate and prevent the [9/11] attacks.”
May 15 , 2002: CBS reveals that President Bush had been warned about al-Qaeda domestic attacks in August 2001. Bush had repeatedly said that he had “no warning” of any kind. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer had stated that while Bush had been warned of possible hijackings, “The president did not – not – receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers.” The Guardian will state a few days later, “the memo left little doubt that the hijacked airliners were intended for use as missiles and that intended targets were to be inside the US … ‘Conspiracy’ begins to take over from ‘incompetence’ as a likely explanation for the failure to heed – and then inform the public about – warnings that might have averted the worst disaster in the nation’s history.”
May 16 , 2002: Vice President Cheney states: “my Democratic friends in Congress … need to be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions, as were made by some today, that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11.” He calls such criticism “thoroughly irresponsible … in time of war” and states that any serious probe of 9/11 foreknowledge would be tantamount to giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy.
May 16 , 2002:National Security Advisor Rice states: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile,” adding that “even in retrospect” there was “nothing” to suggest that. In contrast, former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon has stated that scenario has long been taken seriously by US intelligence: “If you ask anybody – could terrorists convert a plane into a missile? – nobody would have ruled that out.” Rice also states, “The overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was likely to take place overseas.” Rice later concedes that “somebody did imagine it” but says she didn’t know about such intelligence until well after this conference.
May 16 , 2002: The major airlines claim they were never warned of a specific hijacking threat, and were not told to tighten security. For instance, an American Airlines spokesman states the airline ”received no specific information from the US government advising the carrier of a potential terrorist hijacking in the United States in the months prior to Sept. 11, 2001. American receives FAA security information bulletins periodically, but the bulletins were extremely general in nature and did not identify a specific threat or recommend any specific security enhancements.”
May 17 , 2002: CBS anchorman Dan Rather claims that he and other journalists haven’t been properly investigating since 9/11: “There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around people’s necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions.” Three months later, the executive vice-president and general manager of CNN International states: “Anyone who claims the US media didn’t censor itself is kidding you … And this isn’t just a CNN issue – every journalist who was in any way involved in 9/11 is partly responsible.”
May 23, 2002: President Bush says he is opposed to establishing a special, independent commission to probe how the government dealt with terror warnings before 9/11. In September 2002 he changes his stance in the face of overwhelming support for the idea, but in October he sabotages an agreement that Congress had reached to establish the commission. The legislation is then delayed until after the midterm elections in early November. After Republicans win control of the Senate, a much weaker commission is finally approved by Congress in mid-November. In contrast to the previous agreement, Bush now appoints the committee head, and Democrats cannot issue subpoenas without at least one consenting Republican.
May 30, 2002: Afghanistan’s interim leader, Hamid Karzai, Turkmenistan’s President Niyazov, and Pakistani President Musharraf meet in Islamabad and sign a memorandum of understanding on the trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline project. Karzai (who formerly worked for Unocal) calls Unocal the “lead company” in building the pipeline. The Los Angeles Times comments, “To some here, it looked like the fix was in for Unocal when President Bush named a former Unocal consultant, Zalmay Khalilzad, as his special envoy to Afghanistan late last year.” Since then, construction has yet to start, due to continuing violence between warlords along the pipeline route.
June 7, 2002: President Bush states, “Based on everything I’ve seen, I do not believe anyone could have prevented the horror of September the 11th.” Five days earlier, Newsweek reported that FBI agents had prepared a detailed chart showing how they could have uncovered the terrorist plot if the CIA been told them what it knew about the hijackers Almihdhar and Alhazmi sooner. One FBI official says, “There’s no question we could have tied all 19 hijackers together.”
July 23, 2002: The New York City government decides that the audio and written records of the Fire Department’s actions on 9/11 should never be released to the general public. Senior fire officials want to material released and say they were never told that their remarks would be kept confidential.
August 2, 2002: It is revealed that the FBI is questioning and investigating the members of the Senate and House intelligence committees about 9/11-related information leaks. Members of these committees have been investigating the FBI for its 9/11 failures. Congresspeople express “grave concern” for this historically unprecedented and possibly unconstitutional move. A law professor states, “Now the FBI can open dossiers on every member and staffer and develop full information on them. It creates a great chilling effect on those who would be critical of the FBI.” Senator John McCain says, “What you have here is an organization compiling dossiers on people who are investigating the same organization.” The FBI asks senators to take lie detector tests, and turn over phone records, appointment calendars and schedules. One senator says the FBI is “trying to put a damper on our activities and I think they will be successful.”
September 11, 2002: On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, The New York Times writes, “One year later, the public knows less about the circumstances of 2,801 deaths at the foot of Manhattan in broad daylight than people in 1912 knew within weeks about the Titanic, which sank in the middle of an ocean in the dead of night.” A former police commissioner of Philadelphia, says: “You can hardly point to a cataclysmic event in our history, whether it was the sinking of the Titanic, the Pearl Harbor attack, the Kennedy assassination, when a blue-ribbon panel did not set out to establish the facts and, where appropriate, suggest reforms. That has not happened here.”
September 18-October 17, 2002: The Congressional joint committee 9/11 inquiry holds public hearings. The committee was formed in February 2002 but suffered months of delays. The first head of the inquiry was forced to resign after being caught trying to hire a CIA employee who had failed an agency polygraph test as an inquiry staffer. The inquiry is widely seen to be limited by political considerations, but the hearings lead to new interest in an independent commission. The Washington Post reports, “lawmakers from both parties … [protest] the Bush administration’s lack of cooperation in the congressional inquiry into Sept. 11 intelligence failures…” The committee’s director testifies that “the President’s knowledge of intelligence information relevant to this inquiry remains classified even when the substance of that intelligence information has been declassified.” She adds that “the American public has a compelling interest in this information and that public disclosure would not harm national security.”
October 17, 2002: The directors of the US’s three most famous intelligence agencies, the CIA, FBI and NSA, testify before a Congressional inquiry on 9/11. All three say no individual at their agencies has been punished or fired for any of missteps connected to 9/11. Senator Carl Levin says “People have to be held accountable.”
November 11, 2002: It is revealed that while the government didn’t ban box cutters, the airlines’ own rules did. It had been widely reported the hijackers used box cutters because they were legal. It now appears pepper spray was also banned, and like box cutters, should have been confiscated. There is evidence the hijackers used pepper spray as well. It has been reported that nine of the hijackers were given special security screenings on 9/11, and six of those had their bags checked for weapons.
On August 6, a number of giant online media companies, including Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Spotify and Pinterest, took the seemingly coordinated decision to remove all content from Alex Jones and his media outlet Infowars from their platforms.
Jones, perhaps the internet’s most notorious far-right conspiracy theorist, has claimed that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, the Democratic Party is running a child sex ring inside a DC pizzeria and that the Las Vegas shooting was perpetrated by Antifa. Despite or perhaps because of such claims, his website Infowars has built up an enormous following: 3 million Americans, almost 1 percent of the population, visited the site in July 2018, according to Alexa.
The reaction from the media to the decision to ban Jones and Infowarswas largely celebratory. On the Late Show (8/7/18), Stephen Colbert joked that it looked like “Infowars just lost their war on info.” The Daily Beast(8/9/18) urged readers to “shed absolutely no tears for Alex Jones,” while Salon (8/9/18) and CNN (8/9/18) put pressure on Twitter to follow suit, with the former asking, “Why is Alex Jones still allowed on Twitter?”
Some worried about a slippery slope of corporate censorship. Writing in Rolling Stone 8/2/18), Matt Taibbi warned: “The endgame here couldn’t be clearer. This is how authoritarian marriages begin, and people should be very worried.”
Yet this appeared to be a minority opinion. Media critic and news presenter David Doel shared his message to progressives via Twitter (8/6/18):
Lefties defending Alex Jones right now: I hear you, on the surface it appears to set bad precedent to give massive corporations control over who’s silenced. But if you aren’t performing hate speech, libel or slander on a regular basis, then I don’t know what you’re worried about.
Unfortunately, Facebook immediately used this new precedent to switch its sights on the left, temporarily shutting down the Occupy London page and deleting the anti-fascist No Unite the Right account (Tech Crunch, 8/1/18). Furthermore, on August 9, the independent, reader-supported news website Venezuelanalysis had its page suspended without warning.
The site does not feign neutrality, offering news and views about Venezuela from a strongly left-wing perspective. But it’s not uncritical of the Venezuelan government, either, and provides a crucial English-language resource for academics and interested parties on all sides wishing to understand events inside Venezuela from a leftist perspective, something almost completely absent in corporate media, which has been actively undermining elections (FAIR.org,5/23/18) and openly calling for military intervention or a coup in the country (FAIR.org, 5/16/18).
My latest book,Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting, detailed the complete lack of diversity, and the strict adherence to an anti-Chavista editorial line, across corporate media. Venezuelanalysis, praised by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and John Pilger, offers an alternative perspective.
The abrupt nature of its de-platforming is a worrying development for alternative media. Following an appeal and a public outcry on social media, Venezuelanalysis was reinstated on Facebook. However, the social media site offered no explanation for what happened.
Facebook recently announced it had partnered with the Atlantic Council in an effort to combat “fake news” on its platform (FAIR.org, 5/21/18). An offshoot of NATO, the Council’s board of directors is a who’s who of neo-conservative hawks, including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Henry Kissinger and James Baker; CIA directors like Robert Gates, Leon Panetta and Michael Hayden; retired generals like Wesley Clark and David Petraeus; as well as senior tech executives.
Forty-five percent of Americans get their news from Facebook. When an organization like the Atlantic Council decides what news we see and do not see, that is tantamount to state censorship.
Venezuelanalysis (12/13/17) exposed that the Council was working closely with the Venezuelan opposition, donating over $1 million to it, part of a wide-ranging effort at regime change against multiple progressive governments in the region (Brasilwire, 12/28/17). That Facebook censored a news site responsible for investigating its partner is a worrying development in journalism.
Venezuelanalysis’ statement (8/9/18) on its removal noted that “Facebookappears to be targeting independent or left-wing sites in the wake of Russiagate.” As I previously argued (FAIR.org, 7/27/18), the utility of the Russian “fake news” scandal is that it allows corporate media to tighten their grip over the means of communication. Under the guise of combating fake news, media organizations like Google, Bing, Facebook and YouTube have changed their algorithms. The effect has been to hammer progressive media outlets. AlterNet’s Google traffic fell by 63 percent, Media Matters by 42 percent, TruthOut by 25 percent and The Intercept by 19 percent (WSWS, 8/2/17). Sites like these that challenge corporate perspectives are being starved of traffic and advertising revenue.
On August 13, the situation escalated as Facebook, citing a clause in its terms of service barring “hateful, threatening or obscene” media, deplatformed TeleSUR English, an English-language Latin American news network. TeleSUR is funded by a number of Latin American states, including Venezuela, and offers news and opinion from a progressive viewpoint. It was set up precisely to provide an alternative to Western corporate-dominated media. In its statement on its censorship, TeleSUR English (8/13/18) noted, “This is an alarming development in light of the recent shutting down of pages that don’t fit a mainstream narrative.”
That Facebook’s stated concern about stopping the spread of hate speech is genuine is challenged by the fact that the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party went to Facebook headquarters in Berlin in 2017 to discuss how it could use the platform for recruitment and for micro-targeting in the German elections, as Bloomberg Businessweek (9/29/17) reported. Through Facebook and with the help of American companies, AfD nearly tripled its previous vote share, becoming the third-largest party in Germany, the far right’s best showing since World War II.
The Russian fake news scandal has provided enormous media monopolies an avenue to try to reassert control over the means of communication. This latest action by Facebook is part of a worrying trend towards greater censorship of media. It is unlikely it will end here. Progressives should not necessarily shed tears for Jones, but they should be aware that their media is next in line, and that Jones’ deplatforming sets a dangerous precedent that is already being used against them.
Following an appeal and a public outcry on social media, both Venezuelanalysis and TeleSUR English were reinstated on Facebook, with the latter being told its suspension was due to “instability” and “suspicious activity,” though it had earlier gotten a message accusing it of “violating our Terms of Use.” As Venezuelanalysis (8/9/18) noted, “the whole thing is extremely mysterious, to say the least.”
After the Crash 
