On the morning of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded that the US attack Iraq. According to Woodward, Rumsfeld told a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be ‘a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism’. Iraq was temporarily spared only because Colin Powell, the secretary of state, persuaded Bush that ‘public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible’. Afghanistan was chosen as the softer option. If Jonathan Steele's estimate in the Guardian is correct, some 20,000 people in Afghanistan paid the price of this debate with their lives.
Time and again, 11 September is described as an ‘opportunity’. In last April’s New Yorker, the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote that Bush’s most senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had called together senior members of the National Security Council and asked them ‘to think about how do you capitalise on these opportunities’, which she compared with those of ‘1945 to 1947’: the start of the cold war.
Since 11 September, America has established bases at the gateways to all the major sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The Unocal oil company is to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions of the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. He has said he will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states ‘if necessary’. Under cover of propaganda about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime is developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.
In the Los Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a secret army set up by Donald Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This ‘super-intelligence support activity’ will bring together the ‘CIA and military covert action, information warfare, and deception’. According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known by its Orwellian moniker as the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, will provoke terrorist attacks which would then require ‘counter-attack’ by the United States on countries ‘harbouring the terrorists’.
In other words, innocent people will be killed by the United States. This is reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy by his military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaign – complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans – as justification for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was assassinated a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but with resources undreamt of in 1963 and with no global rival to invite caution.
You have to keep reminding yourself this is not fantasy: that truly dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have power. The thread running through their ruminations is the importance of the media: ‘the prioritised task of bringing on board journalists of repute to accept our position’.
‘Our position’ is code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have never known official lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh at the vacuities in Tony Blair’s ‘Iraq dossier’ and Jack Straw’s inept lie that Iraq has developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to ‘explain’). But the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked attack on Iraq and linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in every Tube station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news; they are black propaganda.
This corruption makes journalists and broadcasters mere ventriloquists’ dummies. An attack on a nation of 22 million suffering people is discussed by liberal commentators as if it were a subject at an academic seminar, at which pieces can be pushed around a map, as the old imperialists used to do.
The issue for these humanitarians is not primarily the brutality of modern imperial domination, but how ‘bad’ Saddam Hussein is. There is no admission that their decision to join the war party further seals the fate of perhaps thousands of innocent Iraqis condemned to wait on America’s international death row. Their doublethink will not work. You cannot support murderous piracy in the name of humanitarianism. Moreover, the extremes of American fundamentalism that we now face have been staring at us for too long for those of good heart and sense not to recognise them. John Pilger, article December 2002, ‘Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush said what America needed was ‘a new Pearl Harbor’. Its published aims have come alarmingly true’
26 days after the first diagnosed case of anthrax, widely reported as a possible 2nd wave of terrorism, October 31st 2001, Robert Kagan appears on C-Span … ‘Are we going to create people who are angry as a result of our bombing? Yes.’ A Very Heavy Agenda I: A Catalyzing Event, 2015
‘It could well require the use of American military power in multiple places simultaneously. It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid.’ ibid. Robert Kagan newspaper article
President Bush eventually called the anthrax mailings ‘terrorism’, which caused the media to speculate on a link to 9/11. ibid.
A handful of influential and loyal Neo-Conservatives surrounding the administration took on the task of speculating publicly. In frequent media appearances, Bush’s Neo-Conservative allies continued to assert connections between 9/11, Iraq and the anthrax mailings. ibid.
August 6 2008: The FBI announces that the anthrax letters originated from a US bioweapons lab in Maryland. ibid.
PNAC: ‘The elimination of state like Iraq features prominently in this grand vision’. ibid. Rebuilding America’s Defenses
‘Absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event … like a new Pearl Habor.’ ibid.
Robert Kagan is chosen by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her Foreign Affairs Policy Board. ibid.
‘I will devote myself to an American century.’ ibid. Mitt Romney
Obama promised to usher in a major change from the old ways of the Bush administration: no more cowboy diplomacy, no more pre-emptive war or secret prisons, no more illegal domestic spying without a warrant … Unfortunately, Obama ended up carrying over most of Bush’s policies in regards to fighting the logically problematic war on terror. Obama even increased the use of illegally dubious methods of stemming terrorists such as targeted drone assassinations and domestic digital surveillance dragnets. A Very Heavy Agenda II: How We Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Neo-Cons
George W Bush’s Neo-Con colleagues praised Obama’s foreign policy actions during his first term as president. ibid.
Project for the New American Century: The think tank that served as the blueprint for the Bush foreign policy closed and reopened under a new name – the Foreign Policy Initiative. ibid.
Did the warmakers find the War on Terror not useful any more? Did we need a new enemy, but really an old enemy? ibid.
The PNAC Neo-Cons were invited on television to plead for more NATO posturing, stronger sanctions, more aggressive rhetoric and essentially all the ingredients for having a confrontation with Russia either by proxy or directly. ibid.
Why did there seem to be so little dissenting voices from the new Cold War rhetoric in the American media landscape if we indeed had a free and independent press? ibid.
Only three days after the 9/11 attacks, Congress held a vote for Bill titled The Authorization to Use Military Force. This Bill was designed as retaliation for the 9/11 attacks and allowed the US not only the power to wage war in Afghanistan, but also endless war in the Middle East, essentially what was labelled the War on Terror. A Very Heavy Agenda III: Maintaining the World Order
The Project for the American Century had been associated with the failures of the Iraq War. ibid.
Kagan received [Nicaraguan/Iran] dirty money funnelled inside the US State Department to fund these propaganda campaigns. ibid.
‘When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families.’ ibid. Donald Trump
‘I would bomb the shit out of ’em.’ ibid.
‘Donald Rumsfeld – he’s like the devil – he always appears at the scene of any great crime. The Corbett Report, 89 Meet Donald Rumsfeld, James Corbett online 2009, Alex Jones
‘He is seething with dark gulps of power … This guy is a monster.’ ibid.
Donald Rumsfeld is indeed little more than an imperial legate for the New World Order. ibid.
The crimes of Donald Rumsfled continue to haunt us like a ghost coming back from the grave. ibid.
John McCain: A warmongering neocon hawk; he’s also a senile bag of bones that shouldn’t be serving in office at 78 years old! Abby Martin, Breaking the Set, RT 07.02.15
A racist scumbag war-criminal. Abby Martin cited Breaking the Set: One Last Time, RT 28.02.15
But the confirmed presence of spies was all that bullet-head Neo-Cons needed to ignite a domestic red scare. Rich Hall’s Red Menace, BBC 2019
Neo-conservatives built a new global economic order and they tried to create a new political reality. The Truth Illusion, Al Jazeera Investigates 2022
Why is it Americans tolerate their reality being manipulated? ibid.
In the new reality, the majority are encouraged to vote for politicians who serve a wealthy minority. ibid.
‘The bullshitter is more dangerous than the liar.’ ibid.