Bush-Cheney Heading
For Nuclear Rendevous
At Desert One
By Webster Griffin Tarpley
Author - 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in USA
8-27-5
WASHINGTON DC/LOS ANGELES -- With the direct threat of military attack
against Iran issued Aug. 13 by Bush, the world has entered a phase of
new and acute danger of general war. Bush made the threat in an
interview with Israeli television. "All options are on the table,"
said Bush, speaking from his estate in Crawford, Texas. Asked if that
included the use of force, Bush replied: "As I say, all options are on
the table. The use of force is the last option for any president and
you know, we've used force in the recent past to secure our country."
(Reuters, dateline Jerusalem, August 13, 2005) Bush's comments were
ostensibly made in the context of the US campaign to shut down the
Iranian nuclear program, but in reality came in the midst of feverish
US-UK preparations for a new 9/11 of state-sponsored, false flag
synthetic terrorism which is intended in the intentions of the
terrorist controllers in London and Washington to set the stage for
the attack on Iran, as well as for martial law austerity dictatorships
throughout the English-speaking world, and beyond.
A possible scenario for what is in store over the next few weeks could
well include a nuclear detonation under US military auspices on the
coast of the Carolinas under the cover of the anti-terrorism exercise
Sudden Response 05, but blamed on Hezbollah or some other alleged
Iranian asset, followed by US atomic bombing of Iranian military
bases, nuclear sites, and other strategic targets, using nuclear
devices of various yields. US confrontation with Russia, China, and
the other powers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization would not be
far behind. With that, the nuclear genie would be out of the bottle,
and we would not see him confined again in our lifetimes.
With these new threats from Bush, so reminiscent of his 2002-2003
demagogy in advance of the invasion of Iraq, there could be no
rational doubt that the US regime was in headlong flight forward
towards war with Iran. Bush and Cheney, and their masters in the US
secret government, appeared determined to repeat, on a grand scale,
the fiasco of the April 1980 Operation Eagle Claw the attempt to
extract the US hostages from Iran which left 8 US dead among a field
of burning aircraft at the Iranian site labeled Desert One. This time,
the toll would be many orders of magnitude greater.
GERMANY: "EXTREMELY DANGEROUS" "UNCONTROLLED ESCALATION"
That Bush's threats were no mere throw-away lines was shown by the
blunt response just a few hours later by German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder, who in August 2002 had been the first NATO head of
government to repudiate the then-imminent Iraq war. "Take the military
options off the table, since we,ve seen that they are worthless," said
Schroeder in a campaign speech in Hanover. He told the newspaper Bild
am Sonntag: "I consider the military option extremely dangerousI can
definitely exclude that under my leadership this government would be a
part of it." Instead, Schroeder spoke in favor of "patient diplomacy,"
and also of German-Russian reconciliation. Schroeder pointed to the
evident limits of the much-touted US "superpower," noting that "in the
United States, one should realize that the US might, unilaterally, win
wars, but cannot win peace, as we have seen in Afghanistan, and even
more so in Iraq." (BamS, August 14, 2005) German Foreign Minister
Fischer warned that military operations against Iran would always
bring the risk of uncontrollable escalation. (DPA, August 13)
In an irony of history, Schroeder's prompt stand against a wider war
has increased the penalty for the aggression now being planned by the
Bush-Cheney regime and its backers. If the US attacks Iran before the
September 18 German elections, Schroeder might be swept back into
office, given the clear inability of his feckless opposition to resist
US dictation. When Wolfgang Schaeubele, one of Schroeder's key
opponents, visited Bush, Bush told him that "his greatest concern is
Iran." However, Bush reassured his guest that there would be no US
attack on Iran before the German vote on September 18. (Frankfurter
Rundschau, August 18)
The British Foreign Office was compelled to align itself with
Schroeder's critique. The Foreign Office spokesman stated: "Our
position is clear and has been made very, very clear by the Foreign
Secretary. We do not think there are any circumstances where military
action would be justified against Iran. It does not form part of
British foreign policy." (Sunday Times, August 14, 2005) Thus,
according to all present indications, the US would go into Iran
utterly alone, without even the window dressing of a sham coalition of
the bribed and the blackmailed.
PUTIN: DON,T LOWER THE NUCLEAR THRESHOLD
Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his own response to Bush from
the deck of the Russian battle cruiser Peter the Great in the Barents
Sea. Putin's warning addressed the Cheney-Rumsfeld reliance on
low-yield nuclear weapons as a key component of US strategy. "I think
that lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear arms is a dangerous
trend, because somebody may feel tempted to use nuclear weapons,"
Putin told journalists. "If that happens, the next step can be taken
-- more powerful nuclear arms can be used, which may lead to a nuclear
conflict. This extremely dangerous trend is in the back of the mind of
some politicians and military officials," the president said.
(Interfax, August 17) This can be read as a nuclear counterthreat in
response to Bush's "all options are on the table." The threatening
overtone took on consistency over the following hours. Putin flew in a
Tupolev-160 strategic bomber with Major General Anatoly Zhikharev,
deputy commander of the Russian strategic air force. With Putin on
board, this plane was one of two which successfully flight-tested what
Russia described as "a new, high-precision, long-range cruise
missile." Putin had his picture taken in a flight helmet and, in
contrast to Bush's ludicrous "Mission Accomplished" bluster, announced
that the cruise missiles had hit their target. A new Russian RSM-54
ICBM, called SS-N-23 Skiff by NATO, was fired from the submerged
nuclear sub Yekaterinburg in the Barents Sea and also hit its target
on the Kura testing range on the Kamchatka peninsula. All this was in
the context of maneuvers by the surface warships and subs of the
Russian Northern Fleet.
Russia was also joining with China in Peace Mission 05, an
unprecedented joint exercise in the Far East between August 18 and
August 26, evidently directed against US-UK meddling in the region.
The political basis of this cooperation against hegemonism had been
outlined in the July 15 Russo-Chinese joint statement on the world
strategic situation. At the same time, intelligence agencies of
Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus held a drill involving the
prevention of terror attacks on energy assets. Between August 22 and
August 30 the combined air defense forces of the Commonwealth of
Independent States will drill warding off air attacks around Astrakhan
at the northern end of the Caspian Sea. The hypothetical aggressor
was, once again, clearly the United States. Russian military sources
indicated that the US and NATO had so far not mounted military
exercises on this scale in multiple regions. The message of all this
is that Russia's military comeback has succeeded to a remarkable
degree, with more to come: Putin also announced a 22% increase in the
Russian military budget, which is still dwarfed overall by the US.
Russia, however, has been able to maintain substantial superiority in
a limited number of strategically decisive categories. As the US has
grown weaker under catastrophic neocon misleadership, Putin has grown
more assertive: On August 17, Putin met with King Abdullah of Jordan
in Sochi and called for a fixed timetable for the gradual departure of
foreign forces from Iraq the theme Bush sees as taboo. Putin also
called for the convocation before the end of the year of an
international conference to stabilize Iraq another Bush bugaboo. US
intentions in the Far East had been made clear by attack dog Zbigniew
Brzezinski in a July 29 article in the Moscow Nezavisimaya Gazeta,
which boasted that the Russian presence in that region was about to
collapse. During August, Pakistan was holding Tri-Service maneuvers
along its border with Iran, thus possibly creating a diversion to
complicate Iran's situation.
WAR PSYCHOSIS IN WASHINGTON
For weeks, top US officials foolishly ignoring rumblings from many
quarters around the world -- have given free rein to their obsession
with Iran. When a few days after the London 7/7 attacks, a bomb in
Israel claimed the lives of two victims, Rumsfeld placed the blame on
Hezbollah and Iran. On August 9, Rumsfeld and outgoing Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers complained that Iran was
responsible for the availability in Iraq of new types of shaped charge
explosive devices, which had played a key roll in the heavy US losses
of early August. Press accounts alleged that the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards had created a special terror unit for anti-US operations inside
Iraq, featuring the use of sophisticated and deadly shaped charges
which were capable of easily knocking out the US Abrams tanks.
According to one version, the Iranian commander of this irregular
warfare group is a certain Abu Mustafa al Sheibani, who leads a score
of teams of Iraqi Shiites and Hezbollah fighters who are expert in
using the shaped charges. The overall commander of the effort is
identified as Brigadier General Qassim Sullaimani. (Michael Wane,
"Inside Iran's Secret War for Iraq," Time, August 21, 2005) The
propaganda value of such stories for whipping up an anti-Iran war
psychosis is obvious.
In an article appearing August 1, Rumsfeld went far towards declaring
Moslems in general as inferior beings against which crusades could and
should be waged. According to Rumsfeld, the terrorists "seek to
destroy things they could never build in 1,000 years and kill people
they could never persuade." (London Financial Times, August 1, 2005)
These statements were accompanied by a campaign of warmongering
hysteria in the reactionary and neofascist media. Arnaud de
Borchgrave, the Belgian count who runs United Press International,
wrote on August 16 that Iran is responsible for having made Iraq "hell
for the US," and that the current Jaafari regime represents a step
towards a "greater Iranian Shiite empire." In de Borchgrave's view,
the "military option for air strikes is on the table." (UPI, August
16, 2005)
THE GIRALDI SIGNAL PIECE
The acute danger of a US nuclear sneak attack on Iran had been
indicated by a signal piece contributed by CIA veteran Philip Giraldi
to the magazine The American Conservative. Giraldi is the partner of
retired CIA operations man Vince Cannistraro, and can be presumed to
be drawing on high-level leaks by those opposed to the Bush-Cheney war
scenario. Giraldi wrote:
"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President *****
Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command
(STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in
response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States.
The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both
conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more
than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected
nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are
hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by
conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of
Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved
in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several
senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly
appalled at the implications of what they are doing that Iran is being
set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack but no one is prepared to
damage his career by posing any objections." (The American
Conservative, August 1, 2005; reprinted by Justin Raimondo,
Antiwar.com, July 25, 2005)
The notion of a massive nuclear and conventional attack on Iran which
is so graphically evoked here should not obscure the other, more
immediately important, element of this warning: Cheney is counting on
"another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." It is
evident that such a determined warmonger as Cheney is hardly likely to
leave the coming of that indispensable terrorist provocation to
chance: the terror event that provides the pretext for war must be an
integral part of the plan being pushed through the US bureaucracy by
the secret government, their spokesmen Bush and Cheney, and the neocon
faction in general. We are dealing in short with state sponsored
terrorism.
As for the military side, US nuclear sneak attack plans have been in
the works for some years under the supervision of the utopian
Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In the summer of 2004, Rumsfeld
promulgated an "Interim Global Strike Alert Order." "Global strike" is
Pentagon jargon for pre-emptive attack or, in plain English, a sneak
attack. Under this order, the US STRATCOM (Strategic Command,
corresponding to the Cold War Strategic Air Command) in Nebraska
revamped its posture to be ready to deliver nuclear and conventional
attacks on states alleged to be developing weapons of mass destruction
(WMD). The plans to deal with an alleged threat from North Korea
and/or Iran go under the designation CONPLAN (or contingency plan)
8022-22. This planning was ordered by Bush in a January 2003 secret
directive in order to provide a "full-spectrum" global strike,
including notably "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range,
precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements
of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and
national objectives." A centerpiece of CONPLAN 8022-22 is the
so-called bunker-busting nuclear projectile, a specially configured
earth-penetrating bomb designed to destroy deeply buried facilities,
command bunkers, and the like. The entire package was foreshadowed in
the pre-emptive war clauses of Bush's National Security Strategy
published in September 2002, supposedly in response to the 9/11
events. In December 2002, the Pentagon's quadrennial Nuclear Posture
Review ordered STRATCOM to prepare for greater flexibility in nuclear
attack options against Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria and China
quite an enemies, list.
According to Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force,
his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had been reorganized to be able to
carry out such short-notice pre-emptive attacks. "We're now at the
point where we are essentially on alert," Carlson said in an
interview. "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes."
Carlson boasted that his headquarters was the U.S. Strategic Command's
"focal point for global strike" and were ready to execute an attack
"in half a day or less." In July 2004, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised the progress made on CONPLAN
8022-22, gloating that "the president charged you to 'be ready to
strike at any moment's notice in any dark corner of the world' [and]
that's exactly what you've done." The May 15, 2005 Washington Post
article by William Arkin detailing CONPLAN 8022-22 was an important
signal piece and would take an important place in a chronology of the
current escalation.
CONPLAN 8022-22 appears to ignore the messy experience of defeat in
Iraq and rather chooses to harken back to a mythologized version of
the Afghan campaign of 2001-2002. It calls for nuclear and
conventional air strikes, with limited use of Special Forces teams:
the result is practically no "boots on the ground" or "follow-on
ground operations," according to published reports. Afghanistan was
subdued in 2001-2002 by means of air power to enforce deals made on
the ground by CIA negotiators with local warlords and druglords.
Something similar involving bribery of Iraqi generals was tried on the
way to the bloody morass of present-day Iraq. The CONPLAN 8022-22
strategy is utopian enough to enrage any military traditionalist
concerned about logistics, depth, and political factors. It is
Blitzkrieg, with the utopian elements accentuated.
Wayne Madsen reports information he describes as coming from the
Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German foreign intelligence
service, according to which the nuclear and conventional bombing
campaigns already detailed will be supplemented by infrastructure
sabotage and other acts of terrorism by the People's Mujaheddin
(Mujaheddin e Khalq, MEK), US Special Operations units, and other
marauders. (Despite recent talk of a US "war on terror," the Pentagon
is not reticent about using the MEK, who are still on the State
Department list of terrorist organizations, as auxiliaries. In fact,
some of the MEK personnel have been personally rehabilitated by none
other than General Geoffrey Miller, one of the principal felons of
Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.) The goals of the US operations include
inciting a rebellion in the Khuzestan province of southwestern Iran,
the site of many of Iran's oil fields and refineries, most probably
including the critical Kharg Island tanker terminal. The majority of
this area's population are Shiite Arabs. According to one scenario,
the US would intervene in response to an appeal from the phantomatic
Al Ahwaz Popular Democratic Front, whose program would include
secession from Iran and the declaration of an independent Arab state
calling itself Ahwaz. This simulacrum of Ahwaz corresponds to the new
state called simply "Arabistan" in the standard Bernard Lewis Plan for
the Balkanization of the Middle East. (see map). Also in
correspondence with the Bernard Lewis Plan, the CIA is agitating among
Kurds and Turkmen along the border with Iraq and Turkey and among
Baluchis along the border with Pakistan by promising them their own
balkanized homelands. The Persians, according to this report, would be
relegated to an oil-poor "Irani triangle" (or "Iranistan," in classic
Bernard Lewis Plan terminology) around Teheran, Isfahan, and Qom.
According to the BND, the US Navy is tapping Iranian undersea cables,
while US Task Force 121 covert action teams are swarming over
sensitive points inside Iran. The presence of US special forces teams
on Iranian territory has been an open secret since the beginning of
2005, along with numerous violations of US airspace by US military
aircraft. (See
<http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/>http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/,
August 10, 2005)
US WAR AIMS: THE BERNARD LEWIS PLAN
To clarify these points, a map reflecting the Bernard Lewis Plan for
the Balkanization of the Middle East is included with this article.
This map is based on one published in Linda de Hoyos, Derivative
Assassination: Who Killed Indira Ghandi? (New York: New Benjamin
Franklin House, 1985), with some changes. Bernard Lewis served during
World War II as an agent of the British Arab Bureau, the imperialist
agency charged with keeping the Arab world weak so as to preserve
London's domination. Bernard Lewis is associated with two principal
ideas about the Moslem and Arab world. The first is that the real
basis of Islam is not at all to be found in the luminous Baghdad
Renaissance of the Caliph Haroun al Rashid around 800 AD, in its time
the most advanced civilization in the world, but is to be sought
rather in the benighted irrationalism of al Ghazali and his
Destruction of Philosophy the world of dervishes, sheikhs, and
necromancers. Over more than a century, the British have sought to
control the Arab and Islamic sense of identity by finding,
publicizing, and glorifying the most backward and self-destructive
tendencies in one and a half millennia of Moslem history, attempting
to accredit these as the true essence of Islam. Bernard Lewis,
glorification of Moslem irrationalism thus prepares the way for the
ideology attributed to al Qaeda. Lewis, second idea is that the
existing Arab countries are illegitimate, and need to be carved up
into a crazy quilt of ridiculous petty states who will be unable to
threaten any important interest of Anglo-American imperialism. In a
1992 Foreign Affairs article in which he surveyed the region in the
aftermath of the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, Lewis offered the
following prophecy of the coming Lebanization of the entire Middle
East on the lines of the post-1975 Lebanese civil war:
"The eclipse of pan-Arabism has left Islamic fundamentalism as the
most attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be
something better, truer and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of
their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from
outside... The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it
gives to fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists. If
the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil
society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national
identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then
disintegrates"as happened in Lebanon"into a chaos of squabbling,
feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."
Of course, Bernard Lewis only repeats with his usual arid banality the
geopolitical nostrums which his British imperialist predecessors had
expressed with far greater panache. T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), for
example, who was a far more colorful operative than Lewis, developed
similar ideas in an October 29, 1918 meeting with Lord Cecil, Lord
Curzon, Lord Balfour, General Smuts, and Mark Sykes of the Foreign
Office, who helped draw up the map of the modern Middle East in the
infamous Sykes-Picot deal. At that time the British effort was to
break up and balkanize a Caliphate that actually existed, with its
center in Constantinople. Lawrence stated:
"If the Sultan of Turkey were to disappear, then the Caliphate by the
common consent of Islam would fall to the family of the prophet, the
present representative of which is Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca.
Hussein's activities seem beneficial to us, because it marches with
our immediate aims, the breakup of the Islamic bloc and the disruption
of the Ottoman Empire, and because the states he would set up to
succeed the Turks would be as harmless to ourselves as Turkey was. If
properly handled the Arab states would remain in a state of political
mosaic, a tissue of jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and
yet always ready to combine against an outside force."
In other words, the eternal British mantra of divide and conquer, now
embraced with giddy enthusiasm by fanatical parvenu neocons, greedy
barbarian Bushmen, and cost-plus arrivistes along the Potomac.
The Bernard Lewis Plan represents the real US-UK war aims in the
Middle East. This map is what Appalachian poor whites, no-future rural
youth, and black and Hispanic ghetto victims are dying for in Iraq.
The hogwash spouted by neocons about democracy, or Bush's pledge to
bring reform and modernization to Arab societies, are cynical
subterfuges to achieve this goal. In the light of this analysis, the
basic purpose of Bush's Iraq invasion was quite simply the destruction
of that society, and the deliberate provoking of a three-way civil
war. This is, after all, what we are observing empirically. Maybe it
is now clear why, despite an alleged $20 billion in reconstruction
funds available, there is so little electricity in Baghdad.
THE WAR PLANS FOR IRAN
According to one high-ranking retired US military officer, a warning
has been issued inside the Pentagon about a large-scale terrorist
attack in the US around the fourth anniversary of 9/11 on September
11, 2005. (EIR, August 16, 2005) According to this source, US CENTCOM
(Central Command), SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and STRATCOM
(Strategic Command) were asked what their capabilities against Iran
would be. CENTCOM reported that it was bogged down in Iraq and had
nothing to spare. SOCOM replied that it could mount raids inside Iran,
but these would not be sufficient to eliminate the Iranian nuclear
program, and might include losses so heavy as to be politically
unacceptable. STRATCOM offered a target list for nuclear attack.
According to this source, the reluctance of the US military to cross
the nuclear threshold with a sneak attack was great, with key generals
"highly resistant" to such a move. This source implied that the center
of support for US nuclear aggression against Iran was in INSCOM, the
Intelligence and Security Command, the home of utopian psychological
warfare strategists and assorted Strangeloves. (EIR, August 16, 2005)
Generally speaking, INSCOM and SOCOM, with their old boy networks and
interfaces with CIA, DIA, NSA, etc., are the prime suspects in the
terror provocations now looming.
The US campaign which thus shapes up has many of the characteristics
of a punitive expedition, The US would bomb the bases of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards, along with the nuclear facilities at Bushehr,
Isfahan, and related locations. But published reports also indicate
that the Pentagon utopians feel that they will also need to seize
control of the areas where the laboratories, research facilities,
factories, universities, and reactors are located, in order to ensure
their complete destruction. The utter devastation of these areas might
require as much as one month. After this, the US forces would leave
most of Iran immediately, except perhaps for some advisers attached to
the Ahwaz forces and other rebels. It will thus will be a campaign of
pure vandalism and destruction, designed to push Iran back into the
Stone Age. It will aim at the destruction of modern civilization. This
will be the main thrust, and not any neocon slogans about democracy,
modernization, women's rights or other Orwellian lies.
The war party in Washington was shocked by the July 8 demand of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization that the US establish a firm
timetable for vacating the Uzbek and Kyrgyz bases in central Asia
which were extorted by Bush from Putin on September 11, 2001. On July
29, President Karimov of Uzbekistan had given the US an ultimatum to
get out of his country within 180 days, meaning by January 29, 2006.
As Sovietologist Stephen Cohen noted on WTOP radio in Washington DC
soon afterwards, this represented the first rollback of US-UK
expansionism into the former Soviet sphere since the collapse of the
USSR in 1991. On August 2, the Russian government newspaper Rossiskaya
Gazeta suggested that, once the US left, Russia would take over this
key airbase. It was also clear that the US was shopping all over the
region for bases from which to attack Iran and other states. In this
connection, a Russian newspaper suggested that Azerbaijan President
Ilham Aliyev, who shares a border with Iran, was ready to grant the US
a base or perhaps even two. But Aliyev's top international affairs
adviser denied it, and indicated that his country was not interested
in joining US moves against Iran. Central Asia is beginning to
resemble the Balkans of the pre-1914 or 1939-41 phases, with the great
powers jostling each other for advantage as hostilities loom closer.
Despite the limited ground forces which the Pentagon utopians imagine
they will need to vandalize Iran, the US forces in neighboring Iraq
will nevertheless require reinforcement during the time of operations
in Iran. There may be insurrections among the Iraqis, counterattacks
across the border by the Iranians, and the like. The most probably
means to accomplish a buildup of 20,000 to 30,000 US troops in Iraq
will be available in the time between October 15 and December 15.
Anecdotal reports of individual servicemen having their leaves
cancelled for this approximate time frame have been received. US
military spokesmen have already referred to their plans for a
"plus-up" of their numerical strength during this period, allegedly
because of the need to protect the October 15 constitutional
referendum and the December 15 national elections. But that will be a
pretext, a deception. Indeed, all such US troop strength projections
are based on nothing but deception, as in the case of Rumsfeld's July
27 visit to Iraq to promise some form of troop reduction during 2006.
These statements are calculated to deceive US voters in advance of the
(scheduled) November 2006 US Congressional election, but above all to
deceive the Iranian leadership. They are also designed to fool US
soldiers, giving them the mirage of light at the end of the tunnel in
their personal predicament. Their truth content is equivalent to that
of certain protestations of mutual friendship made during May and
early June of 1941 by Hitler and Stalin. The US government and mass
media are currently operating in a total wartime propaganda mode. At
the New York Times, for example, the despicable tradition of Judith
Miller, Iraq war stenographer for the neocon regime, showed itself
alive and well, as Richard Bernstein attempted to write off the German
warnings as a mere election ploy by Schroeder. "No country, including
the United States, is making serious military threats against Iran,"
wrote the mendacious Bernstein in the face of all reality. (NYT,
August 16, 2005)
MEDIA BLACKOUT
An example of the US covert buildup with active press complicity and
lying came in the August 18 edition of The Washington Post. Here we
are informed by staff writer Bradley Graham that 700 members of the
1st battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne
Division will be going to Iraq soon. The deployment will be "to
bolster prison operations," wrote Graham, who also cited Pentagon
spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable as saying that "The basic fact
driving this deployment is the steady rise of the prison population.
There need to be some additional resources devoted to this." Elsewhere
in the article we read that the troops will "not necessarily provide
prison guards but rather engage in a number of detention-related
operations, such as securing the area around a prison compound or
transporting detainees from one prison to another." To see the
absurdity of this cover story, we need only recall that paratroopers
are by definition among the most highly trained elite shock troops,
whose main purpose is to carry out offensive operations behind the
lines of an enemy. To use them for defensive operations is a waste.
Unless the Pentagon generals have gone mad as hatters on the tactical
plane as well as the strategic one, they would know that the many
hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to train a paratrooper will
be quickly lost if that trooper is required to act for any length of
time as a prison guard, detainee convoy escort, or garrison soldier
around a prison. Paratroopers must train as paratroopers or they soon
cease to be paratroopers and become useless. These paratroopers and
others being shipped to Iraq are earmarked for use in the upcoming
attack on Iran, the only possible offensive use for such troops at the
present time. The US press is now full of falsifications of this
puerile character.
Pentagon planners are aware that Iran would respond to a foreign
invasion with an array of asymmetrical warfare techniques. But they
may not realize how aggressive Iran might be when facing attack. The
US has no monopoly on preventive attacks. The Taliban had few
opportunities for preventive attacks. Saddam Hussein, possibly because
of his long-standing ties to the US, never undertook preventive action
during Operation Desert Shield in late 1990, when US forces in
northern Saudi Arabia were very weak, and his passivity probably
continues to disorient US planners to this very day. Iranian officials
have proclaimed repeatedly that they are not Iraq, and will not resign
themselves to an exclusively defensive posture if hostilities are
imminent. And since the US has already committed multiple acts of war
against Iran with teams on the ground and overflights, international
law will be on the Iranian side.
IRANIAN COUNTERMEASURES
How might Iran respond to a US attack? An obvious measure would be to
step up the flow of bombs, guns, and fighters into Iraq. But the main
Iranian card is that country's long Persian Gulf coast. This narrow
seaway is of course the oil aorta of the world, and Iran would have
many operations to sever it. Iran is thought to possess an array of
missiles ranging from obsolete Chinese Silkworms to ultra-modern
Russian 3M-82 Moskit (called SS-N-Sunburn by NATO) and even the
SS-NX-26 Yakhonts sea-skimming cruise missiles. The Sunburn, for
example, has been designed for the express purpose of sinking US
aircraft carriers, and could also destroy supertankers. Even artillery
pieces and tank cannon could become interdicting factors when deployed
in the rough territory along the northern coast of the Gulf. A few
hulks scuttled in the Straits of Hormuz could block all traffic as
totally as did the freighters sunk by Nasser in the Suez canal in
1956. And then there are mines. A few Iranian mines set adrift in the
Gulf in 1987 caused the maritime insurance premiums for tankers to
rise so sharply that the Emir of Kuwait was forced to re-flag his
ships under US registry so as to procure US escorts and minesweepers.
Deliveries destined mainly for Europe, Japan and China would be cut
off, and the economies of these countries would be severely curtailed.
The oil price would rise into the ionosphere, with the mythical
Hubbert's peak nowhere in sight. The US would view the results with
some Schadenfreude, since powerful economic and strategic rivals would
be dealt stunning blows, even as a wholly artificial demand for
dollars would emerge as nations scrambled to pay their imported oil
bills. But the constriction of Gulf oil traffic would be a prelude to
the thermodynamic collapse of the world economy.
Finally, there is no guarantee that Iran would imitate the restraint
shown by Saddam Hussein, who never so far as is known contemplated
attacks on targets located on US territory.
As for the US forces engaged in Iran, they might quickly find
themselves in an extraordinarily critical situation, somewhat along
the lines of Mogadishu in 1993, or like the British at Saratoga. If
the Iranian human wave assaults of the Iran-Iraq war are any
indication, significant parts of the Iranian population may prove
willing to wage a form of people's war against the invaders. At worst,
the US forces might face a fate similar to that of the German army in
Romania in the closing months of 1944 annihilation. Responsible US
military leaders must act now to prevent such a needless catastrophe.
The Pentagon has a trick of flying dying soldiers out of theatre and
not counting them in the Iraq casualty statistics even if they expire
a few moments after their airplane has left the ground. Some
reckonings of actual US deaths as a result of Iraq operations range
between 7,000 and 9,000, with part of the discrepancy due to this
practice. (Brian Harring, The Harring Report, TBRNews.org) US
deserters must be approaching 6,000, with many of them taking the last
available chance to make a run for it when their planes land at
Shannon Airport in Ireland for refueling. Cases of documented fragging
have now surfaced. These factors, plus the difficulty of attracting
recruits to be sent into the Iraqi shooting gallery, add up to the
collapse of US land forces Army and Marines by early 2006 at the
latest.
ZARQAWI: A CLASSIC FALSE FLAG COUNTERGANG
Inside Iraq, the US-UK coalition has been cynically employing
terrorism as a counterinsurgency tactic. These operations have been
developed in accordance with the British colonial doctrine of General
Frank Kitson, the author of such classics as Low Intensity Operations:
Subversion, Insurgency, Peace Keeping and Gangs and Counter-Gangs.
These speak to the heart of false flag operational doctrine. When
Kitson found anti-British nationalism developing in Kenya during the
time of the Mau-Mau, he deliberately created false flag units which,
presenting themselves as Mau-Mau, committed the most unspeakable
atrocities. The effect was to discredit the nationalists and slow down
the country's progress towards independence. As I noted in 9/11
Synthetic Terrorism, the Zarqawi operation in Iraq is a US-UK asset.
Zarqawi is manifestly a false flag countergang, tasked to carry
kidnappings and grisly murders as necessary for the purpose of
discrediting and demonizing the opposition to continued occupation.
The average person around the world might well be astounded that the
neocon administration in Washington, who never learned the lesson of
Vietnam, have also been unable to learn the lesson of Iraq. The
neocons would assert that they are acting on the lessons of Iraq,
which for them add to the thesis that the US is losing in Iraq because
of infiltration of weapons, supplies, and foreign fighters through the
famously porous borders of Syria and Iran. This amounts to a psychotic
flight forward, in which the neocons hope to escape from the problem
of military defeat and the breakdown of the US land forces by courting
a larger military defeat and the accelerated disintegration of US land
forces.
The attitude of Russia and to some extent of China towards a US
invasion of Iran represents a giant question mark. There is every
reason to think that, since the fall of the Shah, the USSR and then
Russia have been determined to prevent the US occupation of Iran,
especially northern Iran and the Caspian Sea coast, the possession of
which would give London and Washington the opportunity to project
their meddling deep into new areas of central Asia. In his Carter-era
study entitled Hostage to Khomeini (New York: Benjamin Franklin House,
c. 1980), Mother Jones columnist Robert Dreyfuss wrote that the
decisive factor in blocking the US special forces action at Desert One
in April 1980 was a massive show of force over that site by the Soviet
Air Force. According to one version cited by Dreyfuss, it was Soviet
bombs, and not an accidental collision, which caused the conflagration
that ended that mission. Today there are teams of Russian technicians
at Bushehr, and Russia has reportedly installed a mobile system of
ground to air missiles to defend the reaction from possible US or
Israeli strikes. The implementation of CONPLAN 8022-22 would almost
certainly cause fatalities among the Russian personnel involved in
these activities. Will Russia prove more willing to tolerate a US
presence in Iran, or the deaths of her citizens, than the USSR had
been? We may soon find out, and they results may be anything but
edifying.
IN SEARCH OF A PRETEXT FOR WAR
In order to wage war, the Anglo-Americans must have a pretext that
will allow the controlled corporate media to portray them as the
aggrieved parties, the victims of aggression. The model is the USS
Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin, or Hitler's Gleiwitz radio station
massacre, which provided the cover story for his September 1, 1939
attack. After six months of sending special forces teams and aircraft
into Iran, this is of course a hard case to argue, but the American
people generally do not know about the illegal incursions, and no lie
is too big for the media.
A duo of military madmen have come forward with one approach to
destroying Iran as a modern state. They are Lt. General Thomas
McInerney, assistant vice chief of staff of the Air Force and director
for the Defense Performance Review, and Army Maj. General Paul
Vallely, former deputy commanding general, Pacific. Vallely also bills
himself as the senior military commentator of Fox News. In their book
<http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0895260662>Endgame:
The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror, these two develop the
following lunatic scenario for dealing with Iran:
"The United States must prepare to approach the UN Security Council
with a draft resolution for a total economic embargo on Iran, the
seizing of Iranian assets (to be held in trust for future Iranian
government), and a strict naval quarantine in the Persian Gulf and the
Strait of Hormuz. The United Nations would lift the embargo only when
the Iran government dismantles its nuclear weapons program under the
supervision of international inspections. Libya (and before Libya,
South Africa) has given Iran an example to follow on how to dismantle
a nuclear weapons program in a way that meets international standards
of verification. Iran would be required to surrender or destroy all
equipment needed to produce fissionable materials (highly enriched
uranium and plutonium), all long-range ballistic missiles, and all
cruise missiles; release all documents related to its nuclear weapons
program; and expel all foreign scientists, technicians, and engineers
involved in nuclear weapons design, development, and production.
Because the French or Russians are likely to veto " or, at least,
threaten to veto " such a Security Council resolution, the United
States should be ready to impose these conditions on Iran with a
coalition of our own." (As excerpted in National Review.)
The method is the same as Iraq use the UN as a fig leaf for acts of
war if possible, otherwise repudiate any notion of international law
and act unilaterally, using a group of petty states as a cloak. The
proposed closing of the Straits of Hormuz would of course represent a
major act of war, and would be seen clearly as such by Europe, Japan,
and China, who depend on Persian Gulf oil. Clearly some other approach
will be required.
TERRORISM UNDER THE COVER OF EXERCISES AND DRILLS
That approach is to create a pretext for war using state sponsored,
false flag synthetic terrorism on a scale larger the previous exercise
of this type on September 11, 2001. Giraldi states above that Cheney's
planning includes "another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United
States." Since the ruling clique manifestly wants war, they are not
going to leave such an attack to chance; they are going to furnish
themselves, with their own guaranteed apparatus. One variant, already
the object of numerous rumors and chatter around Washington, is a "new
9/11" attack against several major US cities, including New York and
Washington. A possible occasion might be the anniversary day of
September 11, 2005. To be fully effective, the attacks would have to
be attributable to an Iranian-backed grouping, most likely Hezbollah,
which is considered by the US an Iranian asset. Hezbollah, a mass
political party in Lebanon, is big enough to allow a considerable
number of patsies and double agents to be housed or at least
sheep-dipped there.
The synthetic terror event required by the Bush-Cheney clique and its
masters is likely to be conducted through the US military and
intelligence apparatus under the cover of a terror drill or a war
exercise. Since even those parts of the 9/11 truth movement who have
talked the most about military drills have not sufficiently clarified
this matter, a word of explanation is required.
If we catalogue each coup d,etat, high-level political assassination,
destabilization, war provocation, and spectacular terrorist event on a
world scale over the past 50 years, we will find that almost all of
them have been conducted or conduited in whole or in part through the
military/intelligence apparatus of the state involved. In many cases,
the cover story which has allowed this to be done has taken the form
of a military or terrorism maneuver or exercise which closely
resembled the actual event which followed, but which masqueraded as a
mere drill up to the very last moment. For example, the US Operation
Mongoose, which on the surface had to do with the assassination of
Fidel Castro, appears to have functioned as a cover story for
operations leading to the assassination of President Kennedy. On the
day after John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to assassinate President Reagan,
there was scheduled a presidential succession exercise, presumably one
of the Nine Lives series. This is discussed in my book, George Bush:
The Unauthorized Biography (Washington DC: EIR, 1992; reprinted Joshua
Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2004).
9/11 itself offers the greatest density of war drills and terror
drills seen so far. These included Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant
Warrior, Northern Vigilance, Northern Guardian, Tripod II, and a
National Reconnaissance office drill. The publication of William M.
Arkin's Code Names (Hanover NH: Steerforth Press, 2005) has added
Global Guardian to this list. Global Guardian is important since it
establishes beyond doubt what I argued in 9/11 Synthetic Terror:
namely that one of the main ingredients of the 9/11 plot was an option
for a thermonuclear confrontation with Russia and possibly other
states. A recent posting on cooperativeresearch.org notes that Global
Guardian also had included some simulation of a rogue network
interfering in the command and control of strategic assets a kind of
nuclear coup:
A 1998 Defense Department newsletter reported that for several years
Stratcom had been incorporating a computer network attack (CNA) into
Global Guardian. The attack involved Stratcom "red team" members and
other organizations acting as enemy agents, and included attempts to
penetrate the Command using the Internet and a "bad" insider who had
access to a key command and control system. The attackers "war dialed"
the phones to tie them up and sent faxes to numerous fax machines
throughout the Command. They also claimed they were able to shut down
Stratcom's systems. Reportedly, Stratcom planned to increase the level
of computer network attack in future Global Guardian exercises.,
[<http://www.iwar.org.uk/infocon/dtic-ia/Vol2_No1.pdf>IAnewsletter,
6/98]
The bad" insider points towards the invisible government's 9/11 threat
to launch the war of civilizations in the nuclear dimension should
Bush refuse to unleash it on the conventional plane. Details about
these exercises are found in my 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in USA
(Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2005) As I try to show, some of
these maneuvers involved sending US Air Force fighter interceptors to
Alaska and Northern Canada so as to reduce the probability that these
planes would be able to prevent the aircraft or other flying objects
from hitting the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. These maneuvers also
sowed confusion, with fake blips inserted on radar screens manned by
loyal officers, and military and commercial aircraft masquerading as
hijacked planes. This use of maneuvers on 9/11 is consistent with the
LIHOP (Let It Happen on Purpose) or perhaps HIHOP (Helped It Happen on
Purpose) interpretation of 9/11 which has been ably defended by
Michael Ruppert. These maneuvers can be compared to the Fletcher
Prouty character being sent to the South Pole just at the time of the
Kennedy assassination in Oliver Stone's JFK.
But, when we come to Global Guardian, Amalgam Virgo, the plane
hijacking exercise under whose overall aegis 9/11 was manifestly
prepared over a period of months and years, and to such specific
exercises as the 9/11 National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) drill
involving a hijacked aircraft hitting that agency's own headquarters,
the terror drill mimics the actual attacks so closely that the drill
must be seen as the deliberate camouflage of the attack. Modern
military and security bureaucracies involve officers sitting in front
of consoles in war rooms and situation rooms for hours on end. If
there is to be state sponsored terrorism, some of the terror
operations have to be prepared using those very consoles. Some of the
officers present may support the coup, assassination, provocation, or
terror plot. Some may be indifferent or simply unwitting. Some might
actively oppose the plot and sabotage it if they knew what was coming.
Outside agencies of unknown orientation may also be watching. Thus, a
drill designed so as to be practically congruent with the terror
attack tremendously facilitates the work of the plotters, faction. If
a loyal officer asks the coup plotter sitting next to him what he is
doing, the coup plotter can cite the code name of the drill, and also
note that the loyal officer does not possess the proper security
clearance needed to know any more. In other words, war drills and
terror drills are the keys to making the terror attacks happen on
purpose through the state apparatus of the relevant country. They are
one key reason why any explanation of 9/11 short of invisible
government MIHOP (i.e., that the US invisible government made 9/11
happen on purpose) is inadequate.
These basic facts were illustrated once again in London on July 7,
2005. Scotland Yard knew in advance that these attacks were coming, as
shown through the warnings to Netanyahu and, presumably, other
visiting bigwigs. The long-range preparation of the London explosions
was carried out under the aegis of a trio of exercises: Atlantic Blue
for the UK, Topoff 3 for the US, and Triple Play for Canada. These
dealt with bomb attacks on the London Underground system at the same
time that an important international conference was taking place in
the UK in this case, the meeting of the G-8 in Gleneagles, Scotland.
The drill apparently included a biowar attack on the conference, a
detail that seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor. The
immediate cover for the London 7/7 events was by all accounts the
simulation being conducted by Peter Power and Visor Consultants, which
involved bombs going off at pretty much the same stations at the same
times that the explosions actually occurred. The Visor Consultants
drill may well have involved personnel on the ground who thought they
were participating in a legally sanctioned simulation, but who were
really performing actions which led to the explosions. In this way,
drills can help to produce the destructive effects associated with the
terror attack. They can also transform unwitting employees into
patsies, some of whom can pay for their naivete with their lives.
These may or may not be the same persons as the patsies who are
ultimately accused of being responsible.
CASE STUDY: SUDDEN RESPONSE 05
With these facts in mind, let us turn to the following two items. The
first is an article from the Winston-Salem Journal of March 18, 2005.
The second is a press release from the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM)
issued June 29, 2005. Both have to do with operation Sudden Response
05, a nuclear terrorism drill which began August 17, 2005.
http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=
WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MG
Article&cid=1031781660453
Winston-Salem Journal
Friday, March 18, 2005
N.C. sites to be part of summer terrorism drill
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SHALLOTTE - The largest terrorism drill in North Carolina history is
being planned for August and will include a mock attack on the Sunny
Point Military Ocean Terminal in Brunswick County.
Officials said Wednesday the drill will stretch from Fort Bragg to
Morehead City in the state's central coast area to Brunswick County on
the southeastern coast.
Emergency and law-enforcement units from Virginia to South Carolina
have been invited to participate, as have those from the seven
counties that surround Fort Bragg. Participation by military personnel
and equipment will hinge on their availability.
The exercise is thought to be the first to test the new National
Response Plan that takes effect next month and requires coordination
among local, state and federal officials in terrorism and emergency
response.
The idea came from Fort Bragg and the FBI, said Andy Albright, an
exercise facilitator and civilian employee of the Coast Guard in
Wilmington. Other military bases and state and local agencies were
invited to join.
Planning for the drill has been going on for a year, Albright said.
The exercise is to begin with a weapons of mass destruction drill at
Fort Bragg with some of the perpetrators escaping. Other events will
occur over the next three days at or near other military bases in
eastern North Carolina, at the State Port in Morehead City and in the
Pamlico Sound.
There will be a May 17 workshop in Morehead City to help prepare those
who will participate and a July exercise to test communications before
the August events, Albright said.
Randy Thompson, Brunswick County's emergency services director, said
it has been 31/2 years since local emergency management has tested its
response to a situation at Sunny Point.
The last time was when a boat loaded with munitions caught fire and
burned at the terminal, the largest military munitions shipping point
in the United States.
http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.
showstory&storyid=C9BFBBAC-F3CA-BD2E-008C7B34AFE33114
NorthCom Press Release
Exercise to focus on nuclear terror scenario
Posted Jun 29, 2005 at 1:00:PM MDT
FORT MONROE, Va. -- Here's the scenarioA seafaring vessel transporting
a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead makes its way into a port off the coast
of Charleston, S.C. Terrorists aboard the ship attempt to smuggle the
warhead off the ship to detonate it. Is this really a possibility?
Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) here is planning its next
exercise on the premise that this crisis is indeed plausible.
Sudden Response 05 will take place this August on Fort Monroe and will
be carried out as an internal command post exercise. The exercise is
intended to train the JTF-CS staff to plan and execute Consequence
Management operations in support of Federal Emergency Management
Agency Region IV's response to a nuclear detonation.
Some of this year's objectives for SR05 are to refine nuclear incident
Concept of Operations, produce a CM Operation Order, refine command
post set-up procedures and maintain situational awareness of multiple
CM incidents.
The Sudden Response exercise has been held at Quantico, Va., in the
past, but has been moved to Fort Monroe to maximize command post
training time. The senior leadership felt that it was more important
to accomplish training instead of losing up to a day and a half in
travel time, said Paul Deflueri, J7 Lead Exercise Planner. "This will
allow us to still meet our training objectives," he said.
Some external participants may work with JTF-CS during the exercise.
"We,re trying to get representatives from FEMA Region IV as well as
representatives from South Carolina Emergency Management Division and
active duty soldiers from the (Chemical, Biological, Radiological,
Nuclear and Explosive) Consequence Management Response Force to play
the role of task force units," Defluri said. "Each time we do one of
these internal exercises, we try to make it more robust and try to add
in fidelity," Defluri said. "That's what we,re trying to do for SR05:
create a good scenario and be able to replicate the effects as best we
can. That way we can give the command a really good CM exercise."
In the related exercise Operation Orbit Comet, held at Fort Bragg,
North Carolina, under the command of Maj. Gen. Virgil Packett, the
drill involved military response to the taking of several US
Congressmen as hostages by terrorists. Congressmen Bob Etheridge and
Mike McIntyre volunteered to play the victims in this exercise, which
had some of the features of a dry run for a coup. This exercise was
also slated to include a raid on a safe house, the detonation of a
large explosive device on a ferry, and a simulated commercial oil
spill at Morehead City.
Without attempting a line-by-line exegesis, it ought to be clear that
an exercise of this type would lend itself to transformation into an
actual nuclear terrorist incident, including the detonation of some
kind of nuclear device. This is especially true given the presence of
Fort Bragg, home of the US special forces, founded by General Edward
Lansdale, who was an integral part of the Allen Dulles-Lyman Lemnizter
clique which has been key to secret government operations since the
Kennedy-LBJ era. We cannot be reassured by the intent of the
organizers to make these proceedings "more robust and try to add in
fidelity," since the maximum of fidelity would be to include a nuclear
device or nuclear detonation.
We should also bear in mind that, before they settled on the nuclear
test site of Alamogordo, New Mexico, US World War II nuclear planners
had considered setting up their nuclear proving ground on the coastal
islands of North Carolina. The advantage was seen in the fact that the
nuclear fallout from a detonation along the North Carolina coast would
tend to drift directly out over the Atlantic Ocean, instead of falling
on populated areas, as the New Mexico fallout always threatened to do.
This means that the rogue network could organize a quite spectacular
nuclear 9/11 along the Carolina coast without also doing commensurate
damage to their already rickety war machine.
CITIZENS MOBILIZE TO STOP TERROR DRILLS
It is possible to fight back. The mobilization that started at a
Sunday, July 24 morning workshop at the Washington DC Truth
Convergence has perhaps disrupted the hidden agenda of Sudden Response
05. A mobilization by a number of websites especially
www.total411.info -- and email blasters starting on July 28 identified
the obvious subversive potential of Sudden Response 05, and urged
vigilance by world public opinion and local citizens. On August 15,
the website of the Charleston Post and Courier published a strange
article which apparently represented the attempt of this paper to
respond to widespread fears in the region that the planned drill was
going to culminate in an actual nuclear detonation. Here we read:
Still, this chatter has stirred up folks all over the Lowcountry,
worried that nuclear fallout could seriously ruin their weekend.
Officials with Charleston County, the state's emergency management
personnel and even the Department of Defense have gotten worried calls
from folks scanning the skies for mushroom clouds over Fort Sumter.
Trouble is, as with most conspiracy theories, the facts often get in
the way. Locals officials say no drills are planned this week, and the
state Ports Authority says no plans have been made to detonate any
nuclear weapons in the harbor.Other details, such as why Iran would
blow up Charleston, are not explained in these theories.
https://www.charleston.net/stories/?newsID=36369§ion=localnews ]
Of course, the web sites calling attention to this suspicious drill
never implied that Iran would have anything to do with the possible
explosion, which was always clearly attributed to the rogue network
inside the US command structure. Otherwise, the denials respecting
activity in the Charleston area was pure lying. Here was a case where
the cockroaches of the invisible government may have wilted in the
bright glare of publicity. Perhaps as a result of this negative
publicity, the start of the drill was postponed from the scheduled
August 17 to August 18 at 3:30 in the afternoon. In the afternoon of
August 18 it became apparent that the drill was going to be postponed
a second time, probably to Monday, August 22, or perhaps definitively.
Soon NORTHCOM announced that this dangerous drill was over. If local
citizens can work to prevent terror drills from erupting into
provocations, the task of the terrorist controllers and coup plotters
will become complicated beyond measure. At the same time, the American
people may finally break through to awareness about the crimes plotted
within their own government, and shut those criminals down for good.
Another highly dangerous drill series is the so-called Urban
Dispersion Program, being held in New York City between August 6 and
26. (<http://urbandispersion.pnl.gov/>http://urbandispersion.pnl.gov/)
As Salon reported, "Government scientists released colorless, harmless
gas at four Manhattan locations Monday as part of an effort to find
out how fast and far a toxic substance could spread if released in the
city. According to this article, this program "aims to produce a
computerized model of air flow patterns that could help authorities
decide how to evacuate people after a chemical or biological attack."
Another round of gas dispersion is scheduled to take place in the
spring of 2006. This type of drill poses the obvious threat that a
single rogue network official might be able to replace the harmless
gas with some far more toxic substance.
(http://www.salon.com/wire/ap/archive.html?wire=D8BRQSO80.html)
The basic interest of New Yorkers is to have this pernicious drill
series shut down as soon as possible.
We should stress that there are numerous war drills and terror
maneuvers going on, and all of them require vigilant scrutiny followed
by timely denunciation and exposure as necessary. On August 18, a
"multi-agency command and control tabletop exercise" was scheduled to
be held on the University of California Maritime Campus with the
participation of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the most sinister of the
private military firms, involving the hypothesis of port-related
terrorism in and around San Francisco Bay. 200 people were involved as
"participants, evaluators, controllers, or observers." On Friday,
August 19, a mysterious explosion, later ascribed to a defective
transformer, took place in San Francisco. Were these events connected?
Or again: from August 15 to August 19, NORTHCOM held Alaska
Shield/Northern Edge, with an array of "simulated natural disasters
and terrorist events in 21 communities." Incessant terror drills offer
the rogue network multiple opportunities to go live with the
provocation they are seeking, and also function as a kind of mass
brainwashing. With these drills, the secret government is waging war
on the people. One basic demand for activists is therefore that these
sinister and suspicious drills be called off, since they represent a
threat to the American people and to world peace.
ANTI-NEOCON GENERAL OUSTED
As noted above, the command center for operation Sudden Response 05 is
Fortress Monroe, located near where the James River meets Chesapeake
Bay, not far from the scene of the 1862 Monitor-Merrimac battle. The
fort features a cell where Confederate leader Jefferson Davis was held
prisoner after the Civil War on charges of high treason, and it is
evident that some top military officers ought to be occupying that
cell block today.
One of these is General Peter J. Schoomaker, presently the US Army
Chief of Staff, who is part of a utopian/irrationalist clique in the
Pentagon which has been fostered by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
Schoomaker was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command
in 1994-1996, commander of the US Army Special Operations Command in
1994-1996, and commander in chief of the United States Special
Operations Command in 1997-2000. Schoomaker was brought back from
undistinguished retirement to head the Army after the firing of Gen.
Shinseki, who had questioned the utopian recipes for the conquest of
Iraq. He also took part in the aggressions against Grenada, Panama,
Iraq, and Haiti. Schoomaker was an integral part of the failed hostage
rescue mission at Desert One in April, 1980, which once again prods us
to ponder the high incidence of fascist outlooks among defeated
military officers. Schoomaker may be usefully compared to Field
Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's military yes-man.
On August 9, 2005 Schoomaker fired General Kevin P. Byrnes, one of the
army's dozen or so four-star generals, from his post as leader of the
Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). The ouster of such a
high-ranking officer was a rarity, and the reason given was the
transparent cover story of an extra-marital affair with a civilian
woman. What makes this relevant to our purposes is that the Army's
TRADOC plays a key role in maneuvers. In fact, the headquarters for
Sudden Response 05 was located at Fort Monroe, placing the entire
operation under Byrnes, command. Byrnes was replaced by Lt. Gen.
William S. Wallace. (Washington Post, August 10, 2005) What was the
goal of cashiering Byrnes, just as the Cheney drive for nuclear
terrorism and nuclear attack on Iran went into overdrive?
The utopian-terrorist faction of the US military loves to wage war on
the cheap. More traditionalist views stress logistics and force
structure. Byrne had reportedly clashed in 2002 with the Pentagon's
utopian intelligence boss, Stephen Cambone (the keystone of the
Cambone-Boykin-Miller clique responsible for Guantanamo and Abu
Ghraib) over troop strength cuts. According to one version, Byrnes,
command had been ordered to prepare for the influx of 50,000 raw
recruits into Fort Rucker, Alabama possibly in the context of a
reinstituted military draft. TRADOC had also been told to prepare to
accept recruits with no education, with criminals records, with no
ability to speak English practically penal divisions. Army retirees
were also slated to be dragooned back into service. Byrnes would thus
emerge as the leading figure of a military opposition of sorts against
the crackpot aggressive planning of the Bush-Cheney-neocon regime.
Byrnes was also said to be associated with a group of generals linked
to the US Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.
(www.waynemadsenreport.com, August 10, 2005) Carlisle Barracks is the
home of Jeffrey Record, who is the author of a decidedly down-beat
evaluation of the first Gulf War of 1990-91. Analysts associated with
the War College have also been exceptionally blunt in their criticism
of the current Iraq war. Record wrote in January 2004 that the Iraq
war had been a "strategic error," and was being waged with a strategy
that "promises more than it can deliver." The intriguing question
remains as to whether Byrnes was also disinclined to have drills and
exercises in which TRADOC was involved used as covers for
state-sponsored terrorism.
The events of 9/11 were prepared by a scenario film, The Lone Gunmen,
which depicted an airplane coming under the control of a terrorist
faction of the US government who used a sophisticated remote control
system to attempt to crash a passenger airliner into one of the Twin
Towers of the World Trade Center. Sudden Response 05 also corresponds
to a terror scenario. This one was called Special Bulletin, and it
revolved around terrorists seizing a nuclear weapon aboard a ship in
the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina and preparing to detonate it.
US security forces attempt to disarm the bomb, but it blows up despite
their efforts, causing a hecatomb. This film was shown on television
in 1983, and was directed by Edward Zwick and written by Marshall
Hersokovitz. It starred David Rasche, Michael Madsen, and Lane Smith.
Its showing caused considerable uneasiness in the Charleston area.
If these variations should not prove viable, there is always the
possibility of staging a more traditional Gulf of Tonkin incident in
the Persian Gulf or somewhere nearby, blaming it on Iran. The sinking
of a US warship could easily be carried out by a third country UK,
Israel, Australia, or any of the Echelon powers to reduce the
possibility of exposure.
MILITARY TAKEOVER
Given the collapse of US middle class support for Bush and his neocon
war adventures signaled by the resounding success of the Cindy Sheehan
anti-war vigils on August 17, it might be expected that the new 9/11
followed by the Iran or North Korean attacks might cause protests and
chaos inside the US. For such an eventuality, the neocons as disciples
of Hitler's main legal adviser Carl Schmitt have the remedy:
police-state, military dictatorship. At the end of the first week of
August it became known that the US Army Northern Command (in other
words, the madman Schoomaker and his cabal. Planners in Colorado
Springs, including Admiral Timothy J. Keating, Northcom commander, and
Major General Richard J. Rowe, chief operations officer, were said to
be contemplating a total of 15 crisis scenarios presupposing multiple
simultaneous terror attacks in the US. These mobilization plans were
drawn up in CONPLAN 2002, a 1,000 page overall guide to a military
takeover, and in CONPLAN 0500, which addresses the specifics of the 15
scenarios. Both CONPLANS were said to be well on their way to becoming
OPLANS, or operational plans. These activities are manifestly a
continuation of the Pentagon's 1968 Operation Garden Plot, the
original plan for a military seizure of this country. (9/11 Synthetic
Terror, p. 377)
The outcry against this thinly veiled plan for a military dictatorship
in the traditional civil liberties community was decidedly muted. In
fact, the most vociferous protest came from Homeland Security boss
Chertoff, who complained in effect that the coming police state had to
be organized under his own Department of Homeland Security, and not
under the military.
TERROR POTBOILERS
An entire new scurrilous literary genre has grown up around the neocon
campaign to attack Iran. This new vogue resembles the pre-1914 German
attack scenario novels published in Great Britain, but at least those
were clearly labeled as fiction. A recent tome in the new genre is
Kenneth R. Timmerman's Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear
Showdown with Iran. Timmerman tries to pin the 9/11 attacks on Iran,
in the same way Laurie Mylroie and Judith Miller tried to pin them on
Iran. His black propaganda technique is too much even for the
Washington Post, whose reviewer commented: "The reader gets the
impression that Timmerman would rather not bother with facts precisely
because they undermine his conspiracy theory. A persistent problem
with this book is its absence of credible evidence." Another author
who writes out of the attack Iran bag is Jerome Corsi, who was part of
the Swift boat slanders against Kerry and has also founded the Iran
Freedom Foundation the US domestic arm of the Mujaheddin e Khalq.
Corsi responded to the leak of the NIE on Iran by warning that: "The
atomic 9-11 plot is in full swing as you are reading these words. The
attack could happen any day." Corsi's book is entitled Atomic Iran:
How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians; it
is dismissed as "irresponsible" by the Washington Post, which notes
that both Timmerman and Corsi "present their ideology as self-evident
verity and their assumptions as incontrovertible facts. Still in the
bookstalls is Paul L. Williams with his lurid Osama's Revenge: The
Next 9/11, full of last year's stories about the suitcase bombs that
are allegedly already inside the US. All of these figures are at home
on Fox News, and also on the 9 PM to 1 AM John Bachelor Show on the
ABC Radio Network, a kind of radio shock theater for practitioners of
extreme neocon gothic. Among other key black propaganda conduits are
Joseph Farah's World Net Daily and G2 Bulletin. Here we can read such
elucubrations as these: "WND and G2 Bulletin previously reported,
based on captured al-Qaida leaders and documents, that the terrorist
group has a plan called American Hiroshima, involving the multiple
detonation of nuclear weapons already smuggled into the U.S. over the
Mexican border with the help of the MS-13 street gang and other
organized crime groups. (WorldNetDaily.com, August 8, 2005)
INTELLIGENCE WARFARE IN WASHINGTON DC
In the first half of August, Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania,
whose intelligence contacts make him something of an unpredictable
gadfly, came forward with allegations that a special military
intelligence unit code-named Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta,
the chief 9/11 patsy, as part of an al Qaeda cell in the United
States. According to Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who said he had worked
with Able Danger, the military intelligence people wanted to alert the
FBI, but were prevented from doing so by lawyers. Shaffer also alleged
that, after 9/11, he had informed Philip Zelikow, the highly suspect
staff director of the Kean-Hamilton commission and a partner of
Condoleezza Rice, about Able Danger's awareness of Atta's presence in
the US prior to the World Trade Center attacks. The final 9/11
commission report had no mention of this matter. The 9/11 commission
responded to this allegation with a chaotic series of denials, finally
coming to rest with the assertion that Shaffer's story was not
"historically significant." Since the report about Atta to the FBI had
been blocked during the Clinton administration, Weldon and the
right-wing radio demagogues appeared eager to exploit this story for
partisan advantage, be it only to eclipse Cindy Sheehan. Weldon also
appeared interested in attacking the Kean-Hamilton investigation. The
reality was clearly that those who prevented the FBI from being
alerted to Atta if this ever really happened -- were by all odds moles
cooperating in the invisible government's 9/11 project. As far as
Zelikow's role in suppressing vital evidence, this incident would take
its place in a long catalogue of such sabotage developed over the past
year by the 9/11 truth movement. At the same time, it cannot be
excluded that the entire affair was a dog and pony show staged in the
context of the intelligence warfare of August 2005, not of summer
2000. The information about Atta was allegedly generated by the U.S.
Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, and this is not
a reliable source. Reacting to the Able Danger story Kristen
Breitweiser of the Jersey Girls called the Kean-Hamilton 9/11
commission results "an utterly hollow report," and called for the
creation of a new and independent investigation. Indeed: the only
adequate answer to this new round of allegations is a real examination
of 9/11 by an independent, international truth commission not
controlled by Washington insiders.
Opposition to the Cheney war plan was also in evidence in the broader
civilian Washington bureaucracy, where full-scale intelligence warfare
was raging among the various factions. On August 1, the CIA issued its
long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. The main
thrust of this document was to undercut the neocon hysteria according
to which Iran was quickly approaching the point of no return at which
it would join North Korea in possessing at least one nuclear device.
According to the NIE, Iran, although determined to acquire nuclear
weapons, was about ten years away from being able to do so about
double the 5 years cited in February 2005 by Defense Intelligence
Agency Director Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby in testimony to the
Congress. CIA veteran Ray McGovern pointed out that the leaking of the
NIE had been designed to undercut Cheney, Bolton, and their circle.
However, noted McGovern, "Cheney does not feel at all bound by US
intelligence." (TomPaine.com, August 3, 2005)
A few days later, on August 4, additional indictments were forthcoming
in the case of former Pentagon Larry Franklin, part of the Feith-Luti
neocon shop, accused of traducing Pentagon secrets to Israel. Two FBI
raids of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over
the previous months had led to widespread anticipation of further
indictments . Indicted on this occasion were Steven Rosen, former
AIPAC Director of Foreign Policy issues and a former CIA and RAND
Corporation employee who held top security clearances, along with
Keith Weissman, AIPAC's former Senior Middle East Analyst. Nor was
this all. It was later reported that Rosen was meeting with David M.
Satterfield, former US Ambassador to Lebanon and currently the deputy
to neocon Zalmay Khalilzad at the US Embassy in Baghdad. According to
the article, Rosen obtained classified information from Satterfield
and sent it out in a memo to AIPAC employees, and then disclosed it to
"a foreign national." (New York Times, August 18, 2005) Satterfield
had been a loud protagonist of the Bush administration campaign to
eject Syria from Lebanon; in February 2005 Satterfield had gone to
Lebanon with neocon Paul Wolfowitz in an attempt to organize a US
"people power" coup in that country. At that time, signs observed in
Beirut street demonstrations read: "Satterfield Get out of Lebanon!"
AIPAC was a significant target because it was a headquarters for so
much of the neocon agitation for war with Iran: on May 24, Richard
Perle had addressed the AIPAC annual convention with a call for war
with Iran, ranting: "If Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon, I
think we will have no choice but to take decisive action."
Another useful indictment was that of Jack Abramoff on August 11;
Abramoff, in addition to being a gangster who served as money bags for
Tom Delay and other Congressional Republicans, was also a pro-war
ideologue in his own right. But at the same time it was clear that if
the intent really was to stop the threatening conflagration, more and
better indictments would be needed. Leading neocons were now at the
confluence of a series of investigations: the Pentagon leaks to
Israel, the Valery Plame matter, the forged Niger yellowcake
documents, and the Achmed Chalabi leaks to Iran. Caught in the
crossfire were such figures as Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Michael
Ledeen, Douglas Feith, etc. Unconfirmed reports from the Chicago grand
juries working with independent counsel Fitzgerald asserted that
sealed indictments had already been returned against the top figures
of the Bush administration, but there was no way to verify this in the
short term.
Underlying the entire Iran nuclear question is the hypocrisy of the
double standards applied by the US. Just a few weeks earlier, the US
had granted India various forms of nuclear assistance, despite India's
active nuclear bomb program. Brazil was getting ready to export
nuclear fuel, and yet was not targeted in the same way as Iran. The
lesson is clear: countries the US is seeking to cultivate are not
harassed, but critics of US policy are put through the wringer.
Britain, France, and Germany, to some degree caught up in the
distorted US view, offered to guarantee Iran that they would not start
a nuclear attack on Teheran, but they could not offer any real
assurances about what the US, Israel, India, Pakistan, or others might
do. It must finally be recalled that the Bush regime's threats of
preventive nuclear attack against non-nuclear states as embodied in
the September 2002 national security statement, along with its efforts
to develop new forms of mini-nukes to use in such sneak attacks,
effectively destroy the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in its very
foundations. No sovereign state could accept such infringements on its
sovereignty as are now being demanded from Iran.
THE ISRAELI ANGLE
Another factor tending to heighten the adventurism of the US-UK-Israel
grouping is the fact that Israeli society has been brought to the edge
of civil war by the efforts of Sharon to dismantle Israeli settlements
in the Gaza strip and to abandon that area as a Palestinian Bantustan
or "living tomb" in the framework of a longer-term strategy to tighten
the Israeli grip on Jerusalem and the West Bank. According to former
Prime Minister Barak, Sharon's Likud Party is on the verge of collapse
over this matter. Without going into the details, it is clear that the
activism of these vociferous and violent Israeli right-wing fanatics
makes an assassination of Sharon a distinct possibility. In the wake
of such an assassination, even if it were carried out by Jewish
terrorists, an Israeli attack on Iran would surely be more likely.
This might be done in ostensible disregard of US wishes, according to
the decades-old Breakaway Ally Scenario, which was embraced by Cheney
on the morning of January 20, 2005. According to this, Israel strikes
first, and then leaves the US to deal with the consequences. According
to a pro-Israeli website, the war plan for Iran was presented to
Sharon in 2004 under the title of "Project Daniel: Israel's Strategic
Future," which was largely a recipe for Israeli pre-emptive action.
Co-author Yoash Tsiddon-Chatto, a former Knesset member and the former
chief of planning for the Israeli Air Force, told WND military action
should include "striking all known Iran nuclear facilities, including
hidden facilities, underground tunnels, covert operations, such as the
killing of scientists ... whatever is necessary." (Aaron Klein,
WorldNetDaily.com, May 4, 2005)
THE SHAME OF THE LEFT GATEKEEPERS
The present crisis would not be possible if the overall lesson of
September 11, 2001 had been learned by a significant minority of the
US population, and if that minority had an institution through which
to act. Here the responsibility of the Democratic Party is very grave,
since the Democrats have continued to portray themselves as the True
Believers of the 9/11 Myth, the most faithful devotees of blaming 9/11
on al Qaeda, Bin Laden, the laptop, the cave, Atta, and the rest.
Especially along the left extremity of the Democratic Party, we find a
line of foundation-funded opinion leaders and commentators whom we can
only define as left gatekeepers. These gatekeepers have stubbornly
denied, mocked, vilified, censored, blacked out and embargoed any
suggestion that 9/11 was a provocation by a US military-intelligence
network, which it so manifestly was. So much so that if we ask why the
US population would still believe the Bush administration on 9/11 and
the imminent terror attacks of 2005 when they would not believe Bush
about any other issue the answer must be that the left gatekeepers are
responsible. If the American people do not finally move out of their
present credulous gullibility and realize that the large-scale
international terrorism of our time is overwhelmingly state sponsored,
false flag synthetic terrorism, they will continue to be an easy mark
for the unscrupulous factions who do not hesitate to employ terror as
a means to power.
HILEX 75: ROGUE DRILLS CAN BE STOPPED
Finally, no one should give up in despair before the imminent danger
of a new round of state sponsored terrorism designed to lead to war
with Iran and/or North Korea. These plans can be defeated, and the key
to defeating them is to produce a shock wave of publicity, of
denunciation, of indignation, and of outrage. Such plans have been
defeated before. Back in the late fall of 1975, the Anglo-American
finance oligarchs and their secret team military operatives were
reeling from the recent rout the previous spring in Vietnam. Some of
them, including James Rodney Schlesinger, had held a meeting on Easter
Monday, just after the fall of Saigon, to discuss desperate military
expedients to prevent the possible collapse of the entire US-UK world
strategic position. The method chosen was a possible nuclear
confrontation with the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Typically, this
secret and illegal plan was built into a military staff exercise, in
this case HILEX 75. HILEX (high level exercise) 75 was designed as a
staff exercise, a headquarters drill, involving top government
officials and simulating a strategic confrontation with Moscow. But in
this case the staff exercise contained and concealed a real
confrontation, to be set off over some appropriate pretext. What
pretext? We do not know, since the world thankfully never got that
far. A group of activists in the main NATO countries embarked on a
campaign of denunciation and exposure weeks in advance, flooding
newspaper, radio, and television offices, elected officials at all
levels, key academics, and others with word of what was looming. On
Christmas Eve 1975, I passed out leaflets with a half-dozen friends on
the steps of the Milan cathedral in Piazza Duomo spelling out exactly
what was planned. This was a part of a mobilization across western
Europe, the US, and Canada. Somehow, the confrontation variant hidden
within the HILEX 75 drill was allowed to lapse. We must now do the
same thing with Sudden Response 05 and similar terror drills and war
exercises. As the astounding success of the Cindy Sheehan operation
suggests, support for the Bush regime is now evaporating with
breathtaking speed. In a climate marked by the radical rejection of
Bush and everything he stands for, the 9/11 myth for which Bush was
the leading salesman may also disintegrate, making a new 9/11 and a
widening of the war that much more difficult.
WHAT YOU CAN DO
The organizing committee for the Independent International Truth
Commission on the September 11, 2001 Events on July 24 set up a
Monitoring Group to attempt to apply prospectively, into the future,
the lessons about terrorism that had been learned from the intensive
study of 9/11 and earlier cases. The IITC Monitoring Group is
accordingly checking the public affairs departments of the official
websites of NORAD, the Department of Defense and its subdivisions,
FEMA, Homeland Security, the British Ministry of Defense and Home
Office, NATO Headquarters, and similar sites in Russia, China and the
OECD countries generally. The goal is to identify in advance those
drills, maneuvers and exercises which lend themselves to cloaking acts
of state sponsored synthetic terrorism, and to expose and denounce in
advance the dangers that are thus identified. The cooperation of all
persons of good will in this vital work is actively requested; send
emails to tarpley@tarpley.net. This essay would not have been possible
without the first fruits of this monitoring activity.
The methodology used here was presented to the IITC workshop at the
Truth Convergence held at American University, Washington DC on July
24, 2005. The basic analysis presented in this article was posted in
interview form on CloakandDagger.de on July 28, 2005, and in
subsequent programs on August 7, August 11, and August 18. It was
presented to the McClendon study group at the National Press Club in
Washington DC on August 3, 2005, on the Meria
Heller internet radio program on August 17, 2005, and with Sally
O,Brien on WBAI New York on August 21 and August 25, 2005..
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| Title: Re: Heading for Nuke rendevous |
27 Aug 2005 05:14:27 PM |
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Oh what a long waffle just to say the Neocons want to humiliate Iran in
a military sense, sort of draw the line after that Shah/Ayotollah
fiasco.
Too long, too one sided, and basically already known.
No dates exactly or outcomes?
Many a slip twixt cup and lip.
LB
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