TruemorsThis is a transcript of Part Two of Webster Griffin Tarpley’s interview on KPFA’s Guns and Butter radio program.
9/11 Synthetic Terror, Part Two, Wednesday, April 20th, 2005.
Real Media stream
Bonnie Faulkner (BF):
You have, an entire chapter I believe, on Anthrax. Now, what do you
address in that chapter, do you talk about bio-warfare? What is that
about?
Webster Griffin Tarpley (WT): The
thing about the anthrax is that 9/11, the Pentagon and the WTC Towers
are far away from rural America, the Midwest… there are large parts of
the US where people could say, ‘As long as it’s skyscrapers, there’s no
skyscraper here…’ and there were tens of millions of people who felt
that they were not on the hook.
But of course the one thing
that just about everybody does is go to a Post Office box or a mail
slot at home, or your mailbox, and get out your daily mail. And as you
remember, when you did this, you’re always thinking, how many anthrax spores are in this envelope and every unidentified piece of junk mail you opened up you wondered if you were gonna get white powder in it.
So
this was very effective psy-war, it was also used, very consciously by
the FBI to take investigators, who were supposedly looking into 9/11
and to divert them to something completely different. It’s very
interesting that the FBI has never solved this crime. I think it’s a
key to the bankruptcy of their investigative procedures in general, if
that were still needed. The one thing that’s clear is that the anthrax
spores that are involved here come from US military labs.
Now,
there was a big attempt to point out the inevitable ‘lone assassin’ in
this case. A man by the name of Hatfill was widely targeted, not so
much by name but by profile. And the notion that he was some kind of
disgruntled loner who had been in Rhodesia, I guess and probably
racist… and a lot of bad things that could be said about this guy.
But,
as soon as we get the disgruntled loner, we immediately have to be
suspicious because this is the ‘Oswald’ profile; this is what we’ve
seen again and again and again, when the scope of the operation
requires a network. And I would therefore say that what’s behind the
anthrax is a network of highly witting intelligence officials with the
biological warfare capabilities who simply make this happen. And they
leave some false trails that lead to this man Hatfill, and then they
put on a kind of a show… they go up to Frederick, Maryland and start
draining ponds in the summer of 2003 I guess it is, if not earlier to
try to find where he assembled these things under water so he wouldn’t
get the spores on him.
It’s all crazy… it’s all a kind of a
dog and pony show, a spectacle that’s put on, and we’re left with the
certitude that these spores come from a US government lab.
So, I think that speaks volumes about the whole thing. And the guy that
they’ve targeted seems to me a scapegoat or a patsy, or somehow
somebody who could not have done it, didn’t have the physical technical
ability to bring it about, in the same way that Oswald couldn’t have
done it, in the same way that Atta couldn’t have done it, (however
monstrous his criminal intent), could not have done it. Didn’t have the
ability.
BF: Didn’t they trace the anthrax right up to the gates of Fort Detrick?
WT:
Right, that’s the one. Fort Detrick, Maryland and Frederick, that’s
where it was. The other thing about it is at a certain point in the
investigation, the FBI authorizes the destruction of a bank of anthrax
samples held at a university in the south, I think in Louisiana1,
right in the middle of the whole thing, and we’re asked to believe that
the poor FBI agents are overworked and overwhelmed and they don’t
really know enough about biological warfare so they thought it was fine
to destroy all the samples that would have made it even more specific
in terms of exactly who had the spores in their hands.
So this was fundamental as an element of the cover-up, and of course moles carry out the cover-up.
BF: I believe that destruction took place right before the investigation traced it there, and wasn’t it Ames strain?
WT:
Yes, I guess that’s the one, and I have the details in (the book) but I
think the main political point here is it comes from a US government
lab, and the FBI is on the scene actively destroying evidence. We have
so many references to the FBI confiscating evidence, destroying
evidence, intimidating witnesses, that the FBI becomes the black hole
of 9/11 evidence and you can judge the Kean-Hamilton Commission,
Governor Kean said at one point the FBI failed and failed and failed
and failed and failed… but he failed to recommend the breakup of the
FBI which would have been the only conceivable response for a failure
of this magnitude.
He didn’t do that, so that’s his notion of ‘intelligence reform’.
BF:
Let’s talk a little about economics, I know you have a whole chapter
called the catastrophe of globalization… you’ve written quite a bit in
this book about a looming global economic crisis, isn’t that right?
WT:
Yes, absolutely. Here I have an interesting chart, I’ve tried to
summarize the financial crisis and panics with the capability of
bringing on systemic breakdown. In other words the collapse of the
world banking system, and capital flows.
Since 1987… I have
21 of them… all during the 1990’s as globalization was being carried
out; you have two things going on. One is, if all the energy of this
system has to be devoted to overcoming these systemic crises, dollar
crises, the Mexican bankruptcy, the Japanese banking crisis, the
Southeast Asia crisis- Indonesia on the brink, and then, perhaps most
significant, September 23, 1998, the long-term capital management
crisis, which was a product of the Russian state bankruptcy, this
brought the entire world banking system to the verge of breakdown.
The
clearinghouse interbank system in New York jammed up, they couldn’t
settle among the banks at the end of the day, similar things were going
on in London, and that’s when Greenspan had to come in with a kind of a
backdoor bailout.
Argentina going to default, the
JPMorganChase derivatives monster growing and then imploding, this is
an amazing catalog of instability. So we’ve got a completely unstable
world monetary system, it just doesn’t work. This privatized central
baking and everything else.
At the same time, the
evisceration of the world is growing. My estimate would be 2 billion
people under a dollar a day, you’ve got 40,000 people dieing per day of
starvation and diseases like diarrhea that can be cured, or malaria
that can be treated at least, or prevented with mosquito nets, very
cheap things… 40,000 per day die of this. Really the headline of every
newspaper in the world ought to be, “40,000 People Died Needlessly
Yesterday” and this is going on every day.
And you can go
on. 60% of the people of the world have never made a phone call ever in
their lives, a billion people are unemployed, hundreds of millions
don’t have housing or clean water, and so forth.
So globalization has simply been a disaster. Now, where we get to the 9/11 connection I guess, is the Dollar and the Euro. Maybe you followed me into this…
Monetary
matters, monetary reform, the world monetary system is a much-neglected
topic but I think an important one. The Dollar has the status of being
a residual reserve currency. It was under Bretton Woods, and it still
is. The posted price of oil and other raw materials is in Dollars. The
main IMF-World Bank lending institutions work in Dollars. Most of world
trade, or at least a lot of it is still financed through Dollar bills
of exchange through the London Eurodollar market, so the Dollar is the
thing, but it’s losing out because of the inherent bankruptcy of the US
system.
Here you have the Dollar, it’s supposed to be a
world currency, and you’re running a 500 or 600 or 750 billion dollar
budget deficit… you’ve also got, probably more serious, a 750 billion
dollar per year trade deficit. That’s with the outside world, that you
can’t control. On the internal front it’s bad, but you can probably
control it, but it’s the international trade deficit that’s really
hurting.
So the Dollar is reaching the end of the line.
There are right now 11 trillion dollars in outstanding dollar
obligations in this world. And there’s nothing backing them up.
As
Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia says repeatedly, and I quote him, “The US
dollar has no visible means of support except the illusion people have
that it’s worth something.” Because there’s no production backing it
up, the number of industrial workers in the United States is now below
10 million, for the first time since the 19th century, and this year,
2005; it’s taking another dive because the textile industry is being
wrapped up.
It had been protected by some residual kinds of
protectionist measures, import quotas, those have now been lifted, so
the whole US textile industry is disappearing week by week as we go
through 2005.
This country has lost all connection to the production of anything in the real world.
Financial
services won’t hack it. Public Relations, Hollywood films… I’m sorry,
these do not add up, you gotta produce real things, real physical
commodities and the US is pretty much out of that business.
Now
what’s gonna happen? Saddam’s crime was of course that he had dumped
the dollar. He had switched from dollars to Euros, back in 2000, and he
had been followed by N. Korea, they did it too as a political gesture.
As of right now, to bring it up to date, the information we have is
that Iran is planning to dump the Dollar in the coming months, and to
set up an oil commodity exchange, denominated in Euros.
That would mean that the Dollar would no longer be usable to buy Iranian oil, only Euros, and that Bourse,
that Comex of oil that the Iranians would presumably set up could be
used by countries from all over the world, it would become an
alternative to London and New York, denominated in Euros. That’s one.
The
second one is Russia. Russia has been negotiating with Germany and the
European Union now for a couple of years to do something very simple.
In the trade of oil, when Russia sells oil to the EU, why does the EU
have to pay with Dollars? They should pay with Euros. Better for
Russia, the Euro is worth more, at least it’s more stable it doesn’t
dwindle in value the way the Dollar has been doing.
And you
can multiply this… I go basically through all the main oil producers,
Venezuela is moving in a similar direction, Indonesia, similar kinds of
debate going on, very strong desires to get out of the Dollar and into
the Euro, maybe in some cases the Yen, too, that’s always possible.
If
this happens, this is a cataclysmic event… the British Pound Sterling
used to be the world reserve currency, from the time of Napoleon to the
1930’s, and it had a kind of residual half-life like the Dollar has
today, into the 1950’s.
The end for the Pound came when
Saudi Arabia said to the British, “No more Pounds, we want Dollars.”
That was then. Now it’s gonna be, “No more Dollars, we want Euros.” And
when that happens, there’ll be a stampede of countries desiring to do
so. If that goes through, every Central Bank in the world will have to
take its reserve holdings, and quickly get out of the Dollar and into
the Euro. That will probably reduce the value of the Dollar to some
fraction of what it is today.
A quarter? .30? .35? I don’t
know, but some small fraction of what it is. It will also mean that
those 11 trillion dollars in dollar holdings, stocks, bonds, equities
and all that, those will be devalued by 75% to 70% or whatever it is,
and it will reveal that the world is much poorer than anybody ever
thought it was because all those Dollar things were not worth anything
anyway. It’ll be a kind of a bankruptcy of the world.
The
other aspect is though, that it will lead to colossal social
dislocations in this country, because right now… the US is importing
750 billion dollars a year, and paying for it with green pieces of
paper. Every other country in the world, more or less, has to earn
foreign exchange to pay for imports. You wanna import, you gotta
produce something that somebody wants to buy, and export it. You gotta
get currency or gold or something and use that to buy your imports. The
US has been exempt.
Now that is not good for us, it’s not
desirable, that’s one of the reasons we have sinking standards of
living, cut in half over 30 years, would be my finding, with a buyer of
last resort, but that’s why everybody’s unemployed, that’s why you have
a low wage economy, ‘cause there’s no imperative to produce something
here, that you could sell, to buy your imports.
What happens
when the world says, “No, we don’t want those green pieces of paper,
pay us in Euros, earn some Euros, sell something in Euros, and then use
those Euros to pay us. Get some gold and pay us with that, or something
real, not Dollars.”
That will mean instead of being able to
import 2 billion dollars a day of free goods, in effect, sending out
the green pieces of paper, that flow will dry up to a significant
degree. How much you can’t tell, but a lot.
At that point
you will a tremendous economic and social crisis. And ultimately US
foreign policy, this policy of threats and aggression and blackmail
that we see is designed to convince anybody like Iran, that if they
dare to dump the Dollar for the Euro, they’re gonna be defined as a
‘terra-ist’. And they’re gonna be on the hit list of the ‘War on
Terror’. So, I think that’s the present situation in a nutshell.
BF:
I wanted to ask you about the Dollar, now, since so many other
countries have so many dollars, it ties everything all together, and
it’s like a big tent that’s going to be pulled down… if the US is
pulled down, isn’t it gonna pull everyone else down with it?
WT: Sure.
BF:
Now even recently just in the paper the other day I was reading an
article in the business section about S. Korea, and they had made some
statement to the effect that they were gonna start increasing their
holdings in Euros or some other currency, and they had to back off of
that because suddenly it created a drop in the value of the Dollar,
which created a drop in the value of their holdings because they’re
holding so many Dollars, so they had to back off of that, right?
WT:
I describe the phenomenon that you just mentioned in this book with a
quote from this infamous Larry Summers, the woman hater at Harvard. And
that guy is a gangster and a thug, needless to say, but he’s called
that the ‘Financial Balance of Terror’, it simply means that the US
says to China and Japan, and many other countries, ‘You already have
10’s of billions of Dollars as reserves, if you dump the Dollar, your
reserves will become worthless and you’ll lose all that money so keep
buying Dollars.’
Except, that cannot work over the long
term. Ultimately the Japanese and the Chinese and the others are
saying, ‘…every time we do this we are simply adding to our risk, we’re
essentially becoming slaves of this worthless Dollar, if we continue to
take it…’ At a certain point rational calculation would be, “Cut your
losses”. Don’t take more Dollars, try to get rid of the ones you have.
The
Central Banks all over the world have most of the time in the last 2
years let’s say… the Dollar went into a Bear market in 2003, as I list
in here, Central Banks have been lightening up on Dollars as much as
they can. It used to be that 90% or 80% of the world reserves were in
Dollars, now we’re back to 60-70% and it’s going down. It’s going down
gradually, but at a certain point the rush to the exits will begin. And
at that point it becomes uncontrollable.
Naturally, we know
that the world is full of conspiracies but there’s also reality, and
the reality is you gotta get outta this somehow. So, the instance that
you mention is precisely the model, it’s a little rehearsal or a little
harbinger of what’s on the agenda.
Head of the S. Korean
Central Bank we’d like to get as much out of the Dollar as we can, the
Dollar tanks, NYSE collapses, Plunge Protection in NY tries to run in
and keep the market up by buying stocks with Federal Reserve money,
citizen’s money, and they save the day for a day or two. But it shows
that this system is cataclysmically unstable.
And if that S.
Korean Central Bank had said, ‘Well, we’re sticking to our guns and
we’re selling dollars, the bottom would fall out.’ Now of course the
blackmail there is it’s clear the US has manufactured a crisis with N.
Korea precisely to blackmail S. Korea, saying ‘If you don’t keep taking
Dollars, we’ll feed you to Kim Jong Il’. That’s the kind of world we’re
now in.
So, it’s extremely unstable, everybody is trying to
get out of the dollar, but, it’s a question of who’s gonna take the
first plunge, and as soon as somebody does, there’s gonna be a mad rush
to the exits, in which, some will get trampled. But what will also get
trampled is the world economy as we’ve known it.
I would
recommend something like a monetary reform, you now have 3 main
currencies, the Dollar, the Euro and the Yen, you’ve gotta get back to
fixed parities among those, dictated by governments not by markets,
(Bretton Woods), you gotta have some medium of settling, like gold, and
then above all you’ve gotta have the commitment that a monetary system
has to have the goal of world economic development, of raised living
standards, of doing something for those 2 billion people who are below
a dollar a day, and the 40,000 that are dying every day. That’s gotta
be the goal.
So, some kind of world economic development
program with jobs, housing, health care, schools, infrastructure, and
so forth and all of that has got to be produced somehow, and that I
think ought to be the content of it.
If I may go on for a
second? This peak oil question, a lot of agitation about peak oil, I
find it’s a dangerous reductionism to say that this is a ‘peak oil’
crisis. There are severe problems with oil supply, mainly due I think,
at this moment… to 30 years of non-investment in oil.
Iraq
for example, the US has conquered Iraq, Iraq has not been surveyed for
new oil in many, many decades, and there are similar problems around
the world. That’s no surprise, the steel industry has collapsed over
the past 30 years (in the US especially) many other industries have
collapsed more or less, because of this lack of a world monetary
system. So it’s not surprising that oil should share that problem.
The issue though, is what’s going on today?
I
assert that it’s a crisis of Imperialism, essentially the entire
US/British Imperial system that’s been in place for 300 years, the
capital structures that have been in place for 300 years, that are now
crashing down. And when they lash out with 9/11 it’s to save that.
There’s also the other related question of world military superiority,
that is strategic domination in the military sphere that’s at stake.
But,
oil can be procured at the present time, but here’s the thing, we just
described what happens when they start to dump the Dollar abroad,
there’ll be tremendous shortages here. The regime at that point, is
gonna say… they’re not gonna say, ‘the Wall St. gang has blown it
again…’ ‘Wall St. lays an egg…’ and that’s why you’re in such a
terrible situation, they’re gonna blame, an oil crisis.
As they did in 1973 and 1979, and those were fake, fictitious, hoked up, oil crises.
And
that’s what they’ll do again. So they’ll come forward saying, ‘we
didn’t do it, that’s just peak oil, that’s something that we can’t
control’ and at that point I think you have to decide… what’s your
slogan? What’s your political approach to dealing with the US after the
crash of the Dollar?
Some people would say, consume less
energy and reduce the population. I would say that’s not the right way
to go, I would say your slogan ought to be, ‘Fight the finance
oligarchs, the Wall St. parasites who have brought this about with
their mismanagement.’
And reform the system in that way, by essentially lopping them off in a way that would prevent them from ever doing this again.
The
question therefore is, ‘who is the enemy?’ Is the enemy the average
person who wants to consume some energy to maintain a standard of
living or is it the finance oligarch who has essentially ruined the
world with economic globalization?
I think the definition of
this question, whether you see it as a Dollar crisis and crisis of
Imperialism, or whether you see it is as a geologically determined oil
crisis, this means everything in terms of the way you react to it, and
maybe it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of difference between the two.
There’s also the case that the oil business is subsumed by the Dollar
and Imperialism question. Here’s the other one.
If you look
at the beginning of WWII, you’ll see that there’s an oil grab going on.
Hitler is going where? Hitler is attacking the Soviet Union, where are
the Panzer divisions pointed? They’re going to Bachu, they’re going to
Stalingrad. What is Stalingrad?
Stalingrad is a point on the Volga River. What’s the Volga River?
The
Volga River is the oil aorta of the Soviet Union, it brings the oil
from the Caspian Sea up into Russia to the fighting front. So he’s
trying to cut the Soviet oil aorta.
Stalin has his own plan,
in 1941, which is to attack Ploesti, Romania, which is the German oil
source. Japan is concerned mainly to take the Dutch East Indies, their
quarrel is not really with the US or the British it’s the desire to get
that oil in what is today Indonesia, but they feel they’ve gotta
eliminate the US fleet and the British fleet on the way.
Now
if you look at that you could say these powers are clearly trying to
get oil for themselves and deny it to others. Would you say that WWII
was started because of an oil shortage? No.
The oil
shortage, when you see Great Powers grabbing oil, the first conclusion
you have to draw is that you may be on the eve of a new World War. And
I think that is the conclusion that we have to draw today, that the oil
grab of the US and the British, Iraq and then perhaps Iran later on, is
not so much that there’s a geological lack of oil, but that these two
powers in order to maintain themselves feel that they have got to grab
the oil resources. For example, if you grab the Middle East, who can
you blackmail? Europe and Japan. And you can dictate policy to them.
And I think that’s what’s going on.
So it’s aggressive
imperialism that’s your problem, and not a geological problem, and that
would dictate the way you respond to this.
BF:
With regard to 9/11, was there a slow buildup to that? We just talked
about a global economic crisis, do you see that as the main impetus
behind 9/11, did 9/11 come out of the blue?
How did 9/11 come about historically, in your view?
WT:
I think there are a number of currents that kind of lead into it. One
of them clearly, is this notion of using military force to maintain the
Dollar as a currency and attempting to maintain this financial economic
system.
But then there’s always the question of world strategic superiority, military domination.
Wolfowitz
in 1992 wrote a paper at the Pentagon which I quote at some length, in
which he says ‘it’s important now that the US is the only superpower’
he alleges, ‘that no rival or challenger ever be allowed to emerge’,
now this would indicate preemptive action anytime a regional power like
China or the EU might attempt to raise itself up to the level of a
‘world power’. And he says in particular, ‘we’ve got to make sure that
no combination ever emerges’ but Russia always gets top attention
because they’re the only ones who can blow us up.
Later on
in the decade Samuel Huntington comes with his ‘clash of civilizations’
thesis, an article in Foreign Affairs and then a book, in there he
says, ‘who challenges anglo-American supremacy in the world today?’ He
says there are 2 challenger civilizations, one is the Arabic and
Islamic world, the challenge being rapid population growth. Then
there’s China, the challenge there is rapid economic growth. 10, 12,
15% a year.
And I guess he’s got his eye on Russia too
ultimately, in the back. It seems to me that the targets are: Arab and
Islamic world, China, and Russia. This is where the Neocons will take
you, if you go with them. Now let’s see how it looks on the ground.
Clinton,
they don’t like, because in my opinion he’s understood the lesson of
Vietnam, and he realizes that military action is either futile or
self-destructive. So he’s always, (whatever his corruption and his
failure as a President), he’s always got this idea that he wants to
avoid military action.
However, it’s sometimes forced on
him. In 1999, the Principals Committee… decide that they want to bomb
Serbia. Russian Prime Minister Primakov is flying across the Atlantic
to try and mediate a peaceful solution, which Russia could have done,
except for the fact that Gore, kind of usurping Clinton’s power, gives
the order to begin bombing Serbia, with the support of Tony Blair.
Bombing
Serbia is like bombing Russia. WWI began because Russia was determined
to protect Serbia against Austria and Germany. And in the course of
this, you get the bombing going on for a couple of months, the bridges
over the Danube are destroyed, militarily it doesn’t work, the Serbian
Army is intact.
Tony Blair begins agitating for a ground
invasion, land war against Serbia. There are 3 times that the WWIII
question emerges during these years. The first one is when Boris
Yeltsin, President of Russia, rouses himself to say, if NATO launches
the land attack on Serbia, they will get a general European war, and
most likely WWIII. Documented.
Clinton, much to his credit,
refuses to have the land invasion, so the bombing goes on, and
ultimately Russia is able to procure a peaceful solution. You’ve gotta
remember that someone like Richard Holbrook is way up front in the
bombing, somebody who Kerry probably would have made Sec. Of State.
At
the end of this war, the Russians say, we want a zone of Serbia for us
to occupy. NATO says no. US says no, you’re not gonna get it. So the
Russians get some tanks and they drive them to the Pristina Airport in
Northern Kosovo province, and they seize the airport. And at this point
Gen. Wesley Clark, Michael Moore’s favorite candidate for President, I
must add, and many other people in the Democratic Party seem to think
that he was a good idea for President, Wesley Clark goes nuts, and he
orders Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson of the British Army to go and kick
the Russians off the airfield.
The classic answer from Sir Michael Jackson is, “I’m not starting WWIII for you.”
In
the summer of 2000, the most modern nuclear submarine of the Russian
Navy, the Korsk, is destroyed in the Berents Sea. The Russians come out
and say, ‘This was a deliberate destruction of the submarine by a NATO
submarine, most likely British.’ They don’t know how it happened, but
that’s who they accuse of doing it.
The Western media
concentrates on the alleged ineptitude of the Russians, that they can’t
save the people, that they don’t have a diving bell, and all the rest
of this, but PRAVDA says, ‘WWIII ALMOST STARTED ON SATURDAY’. The 3rd
mention of WWIII in some sort of authoritative or semi-authoritative
way during this period, so what do you have?
Imagine the
invisible government, these war-mongering types, military, CIA, Special
Forces, they see that China is developing at 12 or 15% a year, the
Arabs are not dominated, necessarily, some are, some aren’t, and Russia
is beginning to rearm in some ways, they’re building the Topol missile,
the Sunburn missile, other kinds of military technology…
What
you begin to see is this restless desire for decisive military action.
Percolating up from the invisible government, through the Neocons who
are their spokesmen and participants, and then you get 9/11. So you can
see that it starts going…
Just a couple of things, the US
did not become hated in the world as a result of the Iraq War. The US
became universally hated as a result of the bombing of Serbia. Then
Russia went wild.
And when the US bombed the Chinese embassy
in Belgrade, China also participated in this, this is the beginning of
a lot of that hatred. The American media never put that picture
together, I’ve tried to do it. So we see that 9/11 is the result of a
kind of an escalation, and the superpower tensions connected to 9/11,
it seems to me, are closely related to the process that builds up. And
that’s also what this Namakon source says.
BF: I remember all that stuff about Serbia, it was just so unbelievable, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy and all of that…
WT:
This was a big deal. This killed 10 times more people than 9/11, and
it’s all based on fraud… the genocide against the Albanians or Kosovars
never occurred. It never occurred. This was simply a ‘big lie’ campaign
of the Western media, to try to whip up some support for going and
bombing Serbia. They bombed the bridges on the Danube and cut ship
traffic on the most important waterway in Eastern and Central Europe.
And it took years before they got them going again, the bridges and the
barges.
BF: Also, didn’t they drop Depleted Uranium on these people?
WT: It goes without saying, that’s what they did.
BF: NATO’s occupying the whole place as we speak, aren’t they?
WT:
The outcome is that there’s a NATO peacekeeping force. This is also
important because you can see how it reaches up into the present day.
In 1999 NATO bombed Serbia. It’s the first time NATO ever went to war
as an alliance. And it had to do with Madeleine Albright, who made this
possible.
In the year 2000 they’re able to kidnap Milosevic,
illegally, in flagrant violation of Serbian law, and drag him to this
kangaroo court in the Hague. Now, obviously, this person, he’s a
villain and I tried to organize against him as much as I could when he
was actually carrying out genocide campaigns in Croatia and in Bosnia,
so I have no love for Milosevic. But the kind of illegal actions that
were taken is an overwhelmingly bad idea.
And then in 2001,
you get the classic CIA ‘people power’ revolution in Belgrade. And that
worked so well that the experts, the cadre of case officers who carried
out the people power revolution in Belgrade, have now gone on to
Georgia, to Ukraine, to Beirut and so forth.
And how do they
do this? It’s a media spectacle, what you do is you go into the
Capitol, say Belgrade, you put up some tents, you get large amounts of
narcotics, you allow orgies to take place in the tents, you get a lot
of booze and you get some consumer goods, the money comes from the
National Endowment for Democracy, project democracy, the thing that
Oliver North worked for.
Interestingly Chairman Hamilton of
the Kean-Hamilton Commission, who covered up 9/11, well, he’s also on
the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. So this is not
‘democratic’.
These are destabilizations. The recipe is
again, the CIA ‘people power’ revolution, (I think Newsweek had a short
time ago the cover was, ‘People Power Comes to Beirut’), so you gotta
have a catchy slogan, the same people who run the mass manipulation in
the American elections, this same group along Connecticut Avenue in
Washington D.C., are sent in order to somehow play on the ignorance and
prejudice of these people and get some kind of desired response.
But
the whole thing is done as a complete fraudulent spectacle on
television, and this is now what they’re doing. So this is essentially
a way to overthrow these governments.
In Lebanon, even
though there was this ‘Cedar Revolution’ spectacle going on in the
public square, when Hezbollah decided to have a demonstration, they
absolutely dwarfed anything that the ‘people power’ crowd was able to
put up.
So, I think it’s fraudulent to put it mildly… you
send in the NED with 20 or 30 million dollars, you’re interfering in
the internal affairs of sovereign states, and that’s not a good idea.
And experience shows that it leads to complications and perhaps a war.
BF: You also examine something called “The 9/11 Myth: Collective Schizophrenia”. What do you mean by that?
WT:
Well, one of the questions involved here is why do people believe this?
What’s the basis for the mass acceptance of the myth? In the first
chapter I go into the genesis of the myth. The genesis of the myth is,
in a few words, that Richard Clarke and George Tenet put out the line
“It’s Al Qaeda, it’s bin Laden”.
Bush repeated it, and then
the rest of the people in the Bush regime. But the problem is, many
Americans don’t believe Bush on Iraq… but they continue to believe him
on 9/11.
What can explain the tenacity of the myth? Given
the fact that the myth is absurd, and there’s a large amount of stuff
in the public domain that would tend to show you that the myth is
false, that it’s hoked up.
Part of this has to do then with
the negative changes that have occurred in the intellectual life in
this country and in the kind of mentality of average people. I went and
found for example, Dr. Justin Frank. As far as Bush is concerned… his
conclusion is that Bush is a paranoid schizophrenic, and I think this
is important because even though Bush is not the planner or indeed not
really important in the carrying out of 9/11, (at least until he
starts, making speeches), Bush is the salesman of the 9/11 myth and
what you have to see is Bush as a schizophrenic personality, radiating
schizophrenia and autism out into the world.
Perhaps a word
on what these definitions mean… schizophrenia, if you ask the average
person, ‘it’s a split personality’, and that’s fine as far as it goes,
I’m not a psychiatrist but I have tried to read up on these things, the
notion is developed by Sylvano Adiati the main authority on
schizophrenia, is that it’s the dissociation of the mental faculties so
they can’t work together, that would be the split. Perception and
cognition don’t work together, feeling goes in another direction and
it’s all dissociated.
But then there’s another dissociation which is that the schizophrenic personality has a very weak relation to reality.
Now,
that’s Bush. Weak relation to reality, dreamworld, ideological
construct world, things of this sort. So he’s a perfect salesman. And
if you see for example an epidemic of autism in this country, it seems
to me there’s something to be said for the idea that Bush and his
schizophrenia, is a factor in this.
Now let’s look at the
people. There’s a French psychoanalyst by the name of Joseph Gabel, who
in the mid of the 1970’s more or less wrote a book on ‘reification’.
Reification or political alienation. What he does is go to Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia, Communist Russia, and try to show how regime
propaganda depends on what he describes as a schizophrenic world
outlook. And he refines that to call it the ‘police concept of
history’, or the ‘police theory’ of history.
I would call it the CIA theory of history, or maybe the intelligence community theory of history. And what does this involve?
It means first of all that history is not real. There are no real processes going in history.
So
what about things that happened? Things that happened are either
miraculous, wonderful events, or they’re catastrophes. The world is,
then, (this is still the propaganda world of the Nazis and Communists),
the world is divided between a privileged system, (US), in which
everything is by definition, ‘perfect’, then there’s the non-privileged
system, (today, the Arab and Islamic world), where things are
necessarily ALL BAD.
And the problem arises then, the
critical moment arises when a catastrophe occurs inside the privileged
system. And the response to that catastrophe is, since the privileged
system is by definition, ‘perfect’, the only way such a thing could
happen is by the evil, aggressive, activities of the outside group
you’re targeting.
And that is pretty much 9/11.
Outside, outside, outside. The causes have to be looked for OUTSIDE.
I
was interested to find that Gerhard Wisnewski in his book on 9/11 in
German, wrote that every aspect of the 9/11 myth screams, ‘outside,
outside, outside’. So, Gabel wrote this 30 years ago. And what you find
is an uncanny resemblance to his study of Soviet and Nazi propaganda as
the expression of political alienation and of schizophrenia and autism,
in mass psychology… and the way that this 9/11 myth has been put
together.
Certainly the question of fear. It sounds needless
to repeat it, maybe, but the goal of terrorism… is terror. Fear. One of
the things that fear is relied upon to do is somehow paralyze reason,
or rationality, cognition, and things like this, so that you believe
things, you’re put into a kind of infantile state where you’re willing
to believe things that otherwise you would not believe.
And
you have to also remember, as guess as people can, that this was a
tremendous shock, it was a mental trauma from which it was hard to
recover, for quite a number of months or weeks. And I hope now that the
years have gone by, people are able to snap out of it. I certainly hope
so.
And that’s one of the goals of the 9/11 Truth movement,
which I think is growing, the issue is more relevant than ever. The
issue won’t go away. 9/11 won’t go away as long as we’re living under
this invisible government regime that fixes elections, starts
revolutions in foreign countries, and above all, prepares new wars.
BF: One other thing, you have a section here called ‘Islamic Fundamentalism, Fostered by US Foreign Policy’…
WT:
Well, what I try to show here is that if you look at the history of the
Arab states and the Islamic states, but particularly the Arab states,
the ones that were part of the Turkish or Ottoman Empire, those were
places that were a kind of suspended political and economic development
under the Ottoman Empire and in some cases it was Napoleon’s invasion
of Egypt that got things going in some of these places in terms of
ferment or modernization.
But, by the time of the 20th
century, these places had begun to produce nationalists who were
reformers, who were modernizers. It’s useful to remember a figure like
Attaturk, in Turkey, I think he’s pretty much the model for the Middle
East in the 20th century, though you can find similar things in Egypt
going back even further. Attaturk is somebody who comes in with a
modernization program, he lifts the Sharia, he outlaws the veil, the
Harem, the Fez… demands the Roman alphabet, comes in with 5-year plans
of economic development… it’s interesting that Turkey is the only loser
in WWI that does not go fascist in the 1920’s or 30’s. Practically all
of the other losers did go fascist, so this is a person I think of
historical significance.
You can look at some of these other
countries, think of Nasser in Egypt nationalizing the Suez Canal,
wanting to use the money for the Aswan high dam, for the economic and
agricultural development of Egypt, industrialization, Arab socialism,
pan-Arabism. You have to say these are mixed figures, there’s a lot of
demagogy, there’s a lot of rhetorical excess… how did the West treat
somebody like Attaturk, or somebody like Nasser?
Did they
welcome the presence of a modernizing, secular, nationalist who was not
based on Islam in any sense? Not against it necessarily, or not
determined to wipe it out… but, what did the West do?
These
figures were opposed, the West did everything to destroy them, to
humiliate them, to attack them, to isolate them, to remove them from
the picture. And what I do in that chapter is I go through Iraq. Who
was a positive figure in the history of Iraq? You don’t like Saddam
Hussein, that’s fine, who was positive?
Gen. Kassem in the
1950’s. He was somebody who brought in a very interesting republican
constitution tried to get economic development going, what happened to
him? Foreign support for a coup, he’s murdered. Saddam Hussein is one
of his opponents, that’s part of the pedigree of Saddam Hussein.
You
look at Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, he wants to develop Pakistan including
nuclear energy, what happens to him? Kissinger arranges for Zia ul-Haq
to come in and have a coup and Ali Bhutto is hanged.
You go
through the rest of these countries, I try to do Afghanistan, I try to
do as many as I can, to show that the Western powers did everything
they could to destroy real nationalists who were modernizers and
secularists. In a sense they’ve also done everything possible to bring
forward what I would have to consider to be relatively benighted or
backward versions of prevalent religion in these countries, people who
were hostile to technology and science who wanted women in a degraded
position, who didn’t like education, who were social reactionaries in
just about every way, and also who were incapable of making alliances
with Europe or other power in the world, that might have helped these
countries to get somewhere. So what you have is self-isolating figures,
in a way, that are promoted.
Maybe the case of the Shah of Iran
is also relevant, here the positive figure was Mossadeq in the early
1950’s, here’s a secular reformer, secular nationalist, he nationalizes
the oil companies, and at that point, the British and the US… do
everything they can to destroy him. Then you get the Shah, the Shah of
course in many ways is a monster, and he’s incapable of developing a
political alternative, but he does have a very ambitious economic
development program, and he’s pushing this through, and at a certain
point Zbigniew Brzezinski decides that Islamic fundamentalism is the
bulwark against the Soviets in the Middle East and the gulf, and
according to my findings, Brzezinski essentially masterminds the
overthrow of the Shah, and then demands that Khomeni be brought in as
the leader of Iran.
Now, the world has turned over a couple
of times since then but that’s the origin of the current regime, now,
I’m not trying to use that as an argument for an attack on Iran,
anything but.
But that’s ultimately how things got to be the
way they are, this process of constant meddling. Brzezinski is maybe
the clearest case, he says Islamic fundamentalism is the bulwark
against the Soviets, we will support it. So there I think you have it
in a nutshell. The current situation in these countries is the product
of having deliberately and systematically destroyed the many positive
alternatives that were there on the way.
And I’m not
despairing, I’ve been to, for example, Sudan, (well, once), and talked
to Hassan Turabi who is considered to be one the most hard-line, or
consistent of the Islamic fundamentalists and I found that these people
are reasonable enough, if you could offer them forms of cooperation
that they could recognize, it seems to me that cooperation could be had.
But
the whole policy of the British and the US, and of course the Israelis,
is to go against that and to harden things into these useless, absurd,
conflictual relationships which don’t get anybody anywhere.
If
you don’t like the present situation, you have to blame not the Arabs
or the Muslims, but all these decades of Imperialist meddling in their
countries.
BF: Webster Tarpley, thank you.
WT: Thank you so much.
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