This blog has been silent for a week because I have been looking at environmental and fair trade projects around Ghana. It does mean that I was not here to say “I told you so”, now it is admitted Blair’s Iran maritime boundary map was a fake. But in my absence I was delighted that the Mail on Sunday published my article about an even bigger deception, the war in Afghanistan:
DYING TO PROTECT THE DRUGS BARONS
This week the 64th British soldier to die in Afghanistan, Corporal Mike Gilyeat, was buried. All the right things were said about this brave soldier, just as, on current trends, they will be said about one or more of his colleagues who follow him next week.
The alarming escalation of the casualty rate among British soldiers in Afghanistan ‘ up to ten per cent ‘ led to discussion this week on whether it could be fairly compared to casualty rates in the Second World War.
But the key question is this: what are our servicemen dying for? There are glib answers to that: bringing democracy and development to Afghanistan, supporting the government of President Hamid Karzai in its attempt to establish order in the country, fighting the Taliban and preventing the further spread of radical Islam into Pakistan.
But do these answers stand up to close analysis?
There has been too easy an acceptance of the lazy notion that the war in Afghanistan is the ‘good’ war, while the war in Iraq is the ‘bad’ war, the blunder. The origins of this view are not irrational. There was a logic to attacking Afghanistan after 9/11.
Afghanistan was indeed the headquarters of Osama Bin Laden and his organisation, who had been installed and financed there by the CIA to fight the Soviets from 1979 until 1989. By comparison, the attack on Iraq ‘ which was an enemy of Al Qaeda and no threat to us ‘ was plainly irrational in terms of the official justification.
So the attack on Afghanistan has enjoyed a much greater sense of public legitimacy. But the operation to remove Bin Laden was one thing. Six years of occupation are clearly another.
Few seem to turn a hair at the officially expressed view that our occupation of Afghanistan may last for decades.
Lib Dem leader Menzies Campbell has declared, fatuously, that the Afghan war is ‘winnable’.
Afghanistan was not militarily winnable by the British Empire at the height of its supremacy. It was not winnable by Darius or Alexander, by Shah, Tsar or Great Moghul. It could not be subdued by 240,000 Soviet troops. But what, precisely, are we trying to win?
In six years, the occupation has wrought one massive transformation in Afghanistan, a development so huge that it has increased Afghan GDP by 66 per cent and constitutes 40 per cent of the entire economy. That is a startling achievement, by any standards. Yet we are not trumpeting it. Why not?
The answer is this. The achievement is the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.
The Taliban had reduced the opium crop to precisely nil. I would not advocate their methods for doing this, which involved lopping bits, often vital bits, off people. The Taliban were a bunch of mad and deeply unpleasant religious fanatics. But one of the things they were vehemently against was opium.
That is an inconvenient truth that our spin has managed to obscure. Nobody has denied the sincerity of the Taliban’s crazy religious zeal, and they were as unlikely to sell you heroin as a bottle of Johnnie Walker.
They stamped out the opium trade, and impoverished and drove out the drug warlords whose warring and rapacity had ruined what was left of the country after the Soviet war.
That is about the only good thing you can say about the Taliban; there are plenty of very bad things to say about them. But their suppression of the opium trade and the drug barons is undeniable fact.
Now we are occupying the country, that has changed. According to the United Nations, 2006 was the biggest opium harvest in history, smashing the previous record by 60 per cent. This year will be even bigger.
Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and ‘value-added’ operations.
It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.
How can this have happened, and on this scale? The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government ‘ the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.
When we attacked Afghanistan, America bombed from the air while the CIA paid, armed and equipped the dispirited warlord drug barons ‘ especially those grouped in the Northern Alliance ‘ to do the ground occupation. We bombed the Taliban and their allies into submission, while the warlords moved in to claim the spoils. Then we made them ministers.
President Karzai is a good man. He has never had an opponent killed, which may not sound like much but is highly unusual in this region and possibly unique in an Afghan leader. But nobody really believes he is running the country. He asked America to stop its recent bombing campaign in the south because it was leading to an increase in support for the Taliban. The United States simply ignored him. Above all, he has no control at all over the warlords among his ministers and governors, each of whom runs his own kingdom and whose primary concern is self-enrichment through heroin.
My knowledge of all this comes from my time as British Ambassador in neighbouring Uzbekistan from 2002 until 2004. I stood at the Friendship Bridge at Termez in 2003 and watched the Jeeps with blacked-out windows bringing the heroin through from Afghanistan, en route to Europe.
I watched the tankers of chemicals roaring into Afghanistan.
Yet I could not persuade my country to do anything about it. Alexander Litvinenko ‘ the former agent of the KGB, now the FSB, who died in London last November after being poisoned with polonium 210 ‘ had suffered the same frustration over the same topic.
There are a number of theories as to why Litvinenko had to flee Russia. The most popular blames his support for the theory that FSB agents planted bombs in Russian apartment blocks to stir up anti-Chechen feeling.
But the truth is that his discoveries about the heroin trade were what put his life in danger. Litvinenko was working for the KGB in St Petersburg in 2001 and 2002. He became concerned at the vast amounts of heroin coming from Afghanistan, in particular from the fiefdom of the (now) Head of the Afghan armed forces, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, in north and east Afghanistan.
Dostum is an Uzbek, and the heroin passes over the Friendship Bridge from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan, where it is taken over by President Islam Karimov’s people. It is then shipped up the railway line, in bales of cotton, to St Petersburg and Riga.
The heroin Jeeps run from General Dostum to President Karimov. The UK, United States and Germany have all invested large sums in donating the most sophisticated detection and screening equipment to the Uzbek customs centre at Termez to stop the heroin coming through.
But the convoys of Jeeps running between Dostum and Karimov are simply waved around the side of the facility.
Litvinenko uncovered the St Petersburg end and was stunned by the involvement of the city authorities, local police and security services at the most senior levels. He reported in detail to President Vladimir Putin. Putin is, of course, from St Petersburg, and the people Litvinenko named were among Putin’s closest political allies. That is why Litvinenko, having miscalculated badly, had to flee Russia.
I had as little luck as Litvinenko in trying to get official action against this heroin trade. At the St Petersburg end he found those involved had the top protection. In Afghanistan, General Dostum is vital to Karzai’s coalition, and to the West’s pretence of a stable, democratic government.
Opium is produced all over Afghanistan, but especially in the north and north-east ‘ Dostum’s territory. Again, our Government’s spin doctors have tried hard to obscure this fact and make out that the bulk of the heroin is produced in the tiny areas of the south under Taliban control. But these are the most desolate, infertile rocky areas. It is a physical impossibility to produce the bulk of the vast opium harvest there.
That General Dostum is head of the Afghan armed forces and Deputy Minister of Defence is in itself a symbol of the bankruptcy of our policy. Dostum is known for tying opponents to tank tracks and running them over. He crammed prisoners into metal containers in the searing sun, causing scores to die of heat and thirst.
Since we brought ‘democracy’ to Afghanistan, Dostum ordered an MP who annoyed him to be pinned down while he attacked him. The sad thing is that Dostum is probably not the worst of those comprising the Karzai government, or the biggest drug smuggler among them.
Our Afghan policy is still victim to Tony Blair’s simplistic world view and his childish division of all conflicts into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’. The truth is that there are seldom any good guys among those vying for power in a country such as Afghanistan. To characterise the Karzai government as good guys is sheer nonsense.
Why then do we continue to send our soldiers to die in Afghanistan? Our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is the greatest recruiting sergeant for Islamic militants. As the great diplomat, soldier and adventurer Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Alexander Burnes pointed out before his death in the First Afghan War in 1841, there is no point in a military campaign in Afghanistan as every time you beat them, you just swell their numbers. Our only real achievement to date is falling street prices for heroin in London.
Remember this article next time you hear a politician calling for more troops to go into Afghanistan. And when you hear of another brave British life wasted there, remember you can add to the casualty figures all the young lives ruined, made miserable or ended by heroin in the UK.
They, too, are casualties of our Afghan policy.
I think this is perhaps the most important thing I have published. It is also worth noting that the Mail was the only mainstream paper which would carry at the time my article exposing the fake maritime boundaries map. The Guardian and Independent refused to stand against the “patriotic” flood of lying propaganda. The Mail has since been totally vindicated. I think they deserve full credit for continuing to take challenging material which contradicts the official story.
Craig
You're a brick. That's one compelling piece of reporting which deserves wide coverage in the MSM but which I seriously doubt will get it. I already had the bones of it sussed, but this post will now be filed as one of my primary references.
Thank you.
The moment I realised Blair was a liar was when he declared that one of the reasons for going to war against the Taliban was to stop the drugs trade. It was already well known – in fact the US State Department had acknowledged it – that the Taliban had almost wiped out opium production in Afghanistan.
Even then I gave Blair the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was misinformed or simply misspoke? Well no, he repeated the same thing a couple of weeks later. He knew it was a lie and yet he managed to say it with that sincere "trust me" look he has.
Now the question should be: is the return to the opium trade an intended or unintended consequence of the invasion of Afghanistan? Drug money is a very useful tool in the hands of certain quasi-governement agencies: witness the CIA's cocaine dealings in the Iran-Contra affair.
Straightforward, apolitical reporting of fact is so rare. If the Guardian and Independant were the papers which they pretend to be, reporting on the matters which their readership expects from them, they would be falling over themselves to print an article like this. All of the papers seem to be largely fixed up. Great as it is that this article has made it into the Daily Mail, i fear it may just get baulked over by most of its readers, since when i've taken the time to check the DM, i've found it full of overdramatised spinning angles, some of which make me really queasy.
Drumcondra,
"Now the question should be: is the return to the opium trade an intended or unintended consequence of the invasion of Afghanistan?"
The way i see it these days, is that top strategic agencies must exist to check huge military plans. I dont believe Afghanastan or Iraq is a mess to such agencies, the situations should be largely proceeding as secretly planned.
The most powerful people in the world seem intent on perpetuating enormous difficulties to rule over. They seem psychotic and untouchable by conscientious peoples.
I wonder what type of movement could hope to purge the havoc makers, it would be an evolutionary advance, something as unexpected as the invention of fire.
Thanks Craig, for another excellent article.
I would just like to add that the image of fighting the Taliban is just as pliable a concept as the name Taliban itself is when used by American or Nato forces. After all, one doubts that many of those who fight against the occupation, inspired by their own outrage at one injustice or another, would identify themselves as Taliban. The name, though, is an excellent basis for all kinds of propaganda.
The politicians bravado about destroying the Taliban is an equally fluid concept. Fluid, in the sense that when the centre of the pool is depleted, it is filled with fluid from the sides. Just as you can not empty the centre of the pool without emptying it entirely, the only way to destroy an ill-defined segment of a population is to destroy the population itself.
Further to Raven's post, time and again we see reports on both Iraq and Iran that coalition forces killed xxx 'Insurgents' or 'Suspected Militants' or 'Taleban' or 'Suspected Taleban' as though being a suspected ((Pick your perjorative)) were self-evidently sufficient to warrant killing them or, more often calling in air strikes that, as often as not kill CLEARLY innocent civilians. I found this report from Reuters headed "Dozens of Afghan civilians die in air raids" particularly revealing ( http://tinyurl.com/2euxae ). QUOTE: British forces spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Charlie Mayo said: "Because the Taliban don't wear uniforms like us, as soon as they are killed, they are called civilians, the key is are they male or female and if they are male, what age are they?" – And that's our senior military talking.
Not much of a stretch to start defining all males of fighting age as 'Taliban' is it?
We are getting more and more like the eighteenth century. Then they used Gin to keep the plebs quiet and mindless (One penny's worth – drunk. Two pennies worth – dead drunk and straw to lie on). Now they use heroin.
Great reporting, Craig. I'd never heard Litvenenko's connection to the St Petersburg end of the trade. Its a pity you didn't bring it up a couple of months ago when we were discussing him – I'd have maybe viewed things differently.
Meanwhile the lie machine grinds on about Iran and its supplying the Taliban with weapons. Tom Coghlan – presumably an off-pod of Con Coglan, the Telegraph's resident neo-con pedlar of untruths – reports on an American C130 flying over South Western Afghanistan almost being brought down by a heat-seeking missile. Presumably they could tell it was an Iranian one because they read the coding on the side as it flashed past.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessi…
Shameful reporting. And such a contrast to yours. Who'd a thought the "Mail" would end up as the beacon of truth in these times.
You MUST get the story of Afghan heroin into the MSM
Beyond Craigs compelling account of Afgan government involvement in the drugs trade, Drumcondra makes a good point. There are vast sums involved and a fundamental lack of accountability through the legitimate economy makes them useful in the conduct of covert operations. In fact Catherine Austin Fitts goes much further. Consider this snippet from her article 'Narco-Dollars for Beginners' :
"Indeed, what a history of narcotics trafficking and piracy and various other forms of organized crime over the last five hundred years show is that our leaders have been in a double bind for centuries. The only thing more dangerous than getting caught doing organized crime, is not being in control of the reinvested cash flows from it. This is why monarchs played footsie with pirates in Elizabethan times and no doubt have been doing so ever since. After taxation, organized crime is a society's way of forming lots of pools of low cost cash capital. Organized crime is a banking and venture capital business. So the reality is that if you want to control the cash flow and capital that controls the overworld, you've got to control the cash flows getting generated by the underworld. Indeed, you've got to have an underworld. If it does not exist, you need to outlaw some things to get one going."
Full article is a real eye-opener, I promise. It's at: http://tinyurl.com/yrgscz
"I think this is perhaps the most important thing I have published."
I agree
"The Mail… deserve full credit for continuing to take challenging material which contradicts the official story."
I also agree. There has been no analysis whatsoever of what is going on in Afghanistan. Sir Ming's "winnable" -fatuous says it all – win what? for who? The Guardian deserves vilification and The Indie should get a smacked botty.
I do find the Mail's attitude fascinating – and admirable. They were against the Iraq Invasion from the kick-off. At first I put it down to merely opposing Blair – just as I put down Hitchen's initial opposition to it as an attempt to out-contrarian his brother – but they've stuck to it.
I ask why. It might be partly straightforward decency and morality. But we are talking about newspapers. The Mail has always been very good at positioning itself. Perhaps it senses its readers better than others. The middle ground. And we are, I believe, going through a sea change in British politicis, with old alignments and alliances dissolving.
I always go back to the 30's and Appeasement for a similar re-alignment. Then leftish papers such as the News Chronicle and Manchester Guardian opposed it, but so did parts of the Daily Telegraph (which again seems split) and solidly Tory papers like the (then far more important) Yorkshire Post. Papers like The Times and the Mail and the Express were notoriously for it.
Then there was a metropolitan (pro-appeasement)/provincial (anti) divide, perhaps it is similar now. The Murdoch papers and the Guardian and the Indie all strike me as essentially metropolitan. As does part of the Telegraph. Perhaps papers like The Mail have to sense a far broader and provincial swathe of public opinion to survive.
Also, Paul Dacre is meant to be extremely close to Gordon Brown. Is he preparing the way?
Even though to Europeans the Taliban may seem extreme, they brought two things to Afghanistan that NATO, etc could never and will never bring: security and an end to opium production. People could go about their daily business without fear of being robbed or raped which was what happened after the Russians were driven out. To me that is effective governance. All we ever hear and see on the mainstream media (incl. movies, TV, newspapers) is vilification and demonisation of them.
I'd like to see what Afghans think of the Talban.
The fact is Afghanistan is a very conservative tribal-based land. The western media never stopped showing images of downtrodden Burqa-clad women when the Taliban were in power. Guess what? They're still 2nd class citizens and theyre still wearing Burqas, shock horror. That's not a Taliban thing, that's an Afghan thing and it's their country! A national movement like the Taliban can unite the nation and make it stronger in the LONG TERM. I think this is what really frightens the 'divide and rule' Brits/Americans and their Euro lackeys. On the evidence of neighbouring Iran's development for example, a seemingly violent repressive Islamic force in 1979 has radically changed and liberalised and at the same time strengthened the country and turned it into a regional superpower. Why couldnt this happen with Afghanistan? But regardless of which group takes power within the next 10-20 years, it certainly won't be American puppets like Karzai. The country is a graveyard for all foreign invaders, the sooner we Europeans realise that, we can get out and leave the Drugs-R-Us Americans to their doomed fate there.
I agree with most of your latest article, Craig, but agree more with the more recent comments regarding The Taliban.
I remember reading about how awful they were earlier in 2001, how women were mistreated, and how they were destroying ancient relgious symbols like the Giant Buddha. I thought it surprising that Western media were making such a fuss about a Buddha – when have they cared before! And the fact that Afghan women had always lived much that way wasn't really factored in. Nothing much was said about the reduced opium traffic to the West, although I do remember at least one news article.
However, after 9/11, in the aftermath, it was obvious from Bush & co.'s posturing that "someone was gonna get it", and the Taliban were a convenient scapegoat. Other countries that could have been in the firing line proabaly breathed a sign of relief, ands kept quiet about the injustice that was about to unvelop.
What I couldn't understand was that the UN didn't block the insane targetting of a very, very poor country by Bush, just because there were terrorist training camps somewhere in the mountains (and mostly NOT for Afghans at all). I'm sure the IRA would have had training camps in Ireland, and I'm sure the IRA would have caused much greater destruction if they had the means to, but no-one suggested bombing that country to bits when the London bombings started in the early 70s.
IMHO, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was monstrous, the media & Internet vilification of Afghan shepherds was disgusting. OK, Osama Bin Laden lived there. That was all. It didn't provide any public legitimacy for war.
There was an awful lot of protest about it in the UK at the time, and many vigils around the country for the poor Afghan people who had done nothing to anyone. Despite the propaganda that has poured out of both New Labour and Conservative politicians, according to the opinion polls a significant majority of UK citizens want British troops all out, and all out now!
Craig. I have to ask:
Why do you not reject the official 9-11 conspiracy to which there is now even forensic evidence of an inside job, yet you believe in a conspiracy to kill you, with no evidence at all. In this article you are paying credence to Osama and Al-Qaeda doing it.
I listened to you on Talksport radio being interviewed by George Galloway. {It was a great program – two heroes on at the same time}. George also instantly believed it was a conspiracy too without any evidence and GG similarly does not entertain that 9-11 was an inside job.
Other than the non-questioning of the 19 Arabs theory, your article here is fantastic. I hope other Brits begin to realize what their Govt is up to. Please keep up the superb work.
To "perdix" I'd be cautious of stories that FARC is aiding the drugs trade. They may be, I can't be sure, but It's far more likely that its the friends of the US which are doing such things. A common tactic is to accuse your opponents of the ditty things you and your allies are doing.
A reading of Gary Webb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb
and
Mike Ruppert
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ruppert
will also help get a bigger picture of what's happening.
I've seen it said. CIA = Cocaine Import Agency. I think this and the heroin from Afghanistan needs be to addressed more seriously, but then TPTB police themselves, nothing is likely to change.
Tonys Akiller,
A bit of a non-sequitur, but anyway…
I think you exagerrate my degree of certainty on both events. There was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, an attempt to run my car off a mountain road in Uzbekistan. That was the Uzbek government – I wouldn't particularly use the word "conspiracy" for that.
After I was removed from my post in summer 2003, I won a very long, gruelling and extremely public battle to clear my name of false allegations with which the government was trying to frame me. But I did win, and returned to Tashkent in something approaching triumph. The very day I got back, I developed multiple blood clots in both lungs, and very nearly died.
Returned to St Thomas hospital I was unconscious for several days. While I was unconscious, the Drs at St Thomas Hospital, London, themselves suspected poisoning (I had no input, I was unconscious) and ran all their toxicology tests but found nothing. What happened remains a mystery.
On balance, it seems to me not unlikely that those who would try to get me out of Tashkent by framing me with criminal allegations, would be prepared to try and kill me if that didn't work. But I don't know what happened. It could have been the Uzbek government again. It could have been my own government or the CIA. And bear in mind that there had been specific warning from our Ambassador in Tajikistan that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan had sent people specifically to kill me. It could have been a freak illness, but the timing is remarkable. Certain, I am not.
I have to say that I regard those who deny the existence at all of Islamic religous-motivated terrorism as borderline nuts.
I have no doubt that 9/11 included action by those believing they were doing it for their religious faith. I have seen too much skullduggery in my life to rule out the possibility of other factors also being involved, especially agents provocateurs. And I remain very unconvinced as to what happened at the Pentagon, where a very large plane not only disappeared but as invisible in the first place. But I would need a lot more convincing that the whole thing was masterminded by Dick Cheney.
I just don't think that there are enough senior Americans prepared to engage in a conspiracy to kill their own people. And a demolition contractor would take at least a year to bring down the twin towers, with scores of men and many miles of cabling. Six people could not set up the charges in a couple of nights.
I certainly didn't mean for any break in logic Craig, and I don't think there is. You said "There was a logic to attacking Afghanistan after 9/11." therefore if 9-11 was a lie, or severely manipulated, then the basis for the war is bankrupt! So it's reasonable to see if 9-11 was a ploy. I believe there is evidence that puts 9-11 beyond any reasonable doubt that it was either assisted or even invented – by forces that operate within the US.
It is surely unquestionable that if standard procedures were in place and the hijackers were operating under the radar of the intelligence services, then these standard procedures would have either prevented 9-11 or made it a much less catastrophic act of terrorism.
We know from people like Peter Lance (author of Triple Cross) and Sibel Edmonds and other intelligence agents/whistleblowers that the standard procedures were deliberately blocked. We also have investigations of the Israeli 'art students' that were shadowing Atta. We know the Pakistani ISI wired money to Atta. We know the stocks were sold short. We know the floors provided no resistance when WTC 1&2 collapsed. We know WTC7 showed perfect symmetric collapse a feat almost impossible without the pre-planned use of explosives. It is irrelevant that we can't imagine HOW the explosives got there. Failure of imagine should not block what the evidence suggests. That's the bread and butter of investigation.
9-11 staged therefore Afghanistan war not valid. Even If one plays the extreme devils advocate and accepts bin Laden and his purported gang did 9-11 entirely on their own, it is still totally wrong and utterly savage to go to visit death upon the people of Afghanistan and the Taliban who had nothing to do with it. In fact, lets not forget, the Taliban said if the US gave them proof, they'd hand bin Laden over. The US refused. – Of course it did. We know why.
The conspiracy I had in mind was the blood clot one. If it is a mystery, then you prove my point that there is no evidence as this attempt on your life. Almost being forced off the road is different and I think anyone should take your word for it, that this was an assassination attempt as you have proven to be an honest and decent man, a rose amongst thorns.
But I can't imagine any real Islamic group wanting to kill you, if your position on torture and support for the oppressed in Uzbekistan was known. You may equally well have been informed about, in reality a US sponsored group out to cause you some bovver, or maintaining the illusion. But if your distancing from the UK official was unknown then I can imagine that these groups would want to target you.
IF there are Islamic terror / militant groups out there (perhaps there are, but certainly NOT on the scale that were being force-fed by the Government and the mainstream media) we must ask why. Why do they want to kill their opponents? The answer is simple, because of the oppression they dish out every day. But even then, the amount of 'kill 'em!' types is surely so low as to be utterly trivial. Death from licking cane toads may well be more serious.
I don't know anyone who does dismisses all "Islamic" terror groups. I am not saying that. But I believe there hand of the great Satan is in there somewhere. The recent history of the US and big corporations are well known already. Read Steven Kinzers "Overthrow", Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States". Or Peter Lances' "Triple cross"
"I just don't think that there are enough senior Americans prepared to engage in a conspiracy to kill their own people." – Even with compartmentalization of knowledge? To do such a horrendous act you only need a handful of people who know the plans true intent. You disguise the machinations of your goal in exercises. Look here…
– – – – – – — –
Webster Tarpley: The 9/11 Issue: Key to stopping World War III
2 hr 1 min – Aug 31, 2006 – No ratings yet (83 ratings)
New York City, January 15, 2005…Webster Tarpley
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-33907330…
– – – – – – — –
Pearl Harbor is now believed to have been 'allowed' to happen. No doubt only a few knew about that. Look at 'operation gladio'.
– – – – – – — –
Operation Gladio
"One of the most secret programs that ever existed"
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=16921
– – – – – – — –
How many Italians knew about that? How many Italians died?
Look at Ryazan, the hexogen potential false-flag that you yourself suggest Litvinenko may well have intel about. How many Russins would have known about that? See: http://cryptome.org/putin-bomb5.htm and http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=871266446…
I don't think it's healthy to underestimate the ease at which the plutocrats sacrifice pawns in the maintenance of their power. Blair was willing to sacrifice the lives of British soldiers based on his lies about Iraq. The British casualties could have been in their thousands. Also never underestimate the power of small covert agents to one day bump into you and mention how your actions inspire then to torture your loved ones, or how you can collect some air miles going to some unknown holiday camps in Syria, Egypt or Poland or Afghanistan.
So you can see why I don't think my question was a non-sequitur. I know not everyone will accept what I have come to accept, although of course, I hope they would. In any case, you are still a light bearer against the darkness that is used by many countries across the globe. For that I thank you immensely.
TA
I think it probably a fruitless undertaking to debate the 9/11 attacks here. There are a number of very good sites where the issues are aired exhaustively.
However, there are clearly just four main possibilities:
1. They did't see it coming (The original official narrative)
2. They had some intelligence but – confusion, incompetence etc etc – failed to stop it (The current official narrative)
3. They let it happen.
4. It was facilitated as the 'new Pearl Harbour' that PNAC clearly documented 18 months earlier as necessary for their military, world hegemony program to be expedited.
After studying it intensively for at least 4 years now, my own position is similar to that of Andreas von Buelow (former German minister): Some variation of item 4.
The Google video linked near the top of my somewhat redundant site at: http://tinyurl.com/26ry5t is a good intoduction.
The problem for anyone (Craig ??? :-)) needing to court a measure of acceptability by 'the Establishment', even as token idiot or court jester, is that to even broach the subject of US Official involvement in 9/11 seriously will put you totally beyond the pale. A bit like Gallileo having the temerity to suggest that the world revolved around the Sun. Anyone who seriously and effectively threatens the prevailing official narrative -especially when there is so much at stake- must be dealt with accordingly.
Because the case is still very stigmatised, i agree campaigners such as Craig shouldn't marginalise themselves by getting into it. I was sorry to see George Monbiot loose his composure over it.
I think the smartest investigation site is: http://911research.wtc7.net/
But the debate is probably not worth the time and attention which it takes to resolve at the minute. Revealing the definite truth is up to computer modellers now. In a few more years open source modelling software will be powerfull enough to enable individuals to re-simulate the events (in a VR-world), and see if the towers could have collapsed so energetically, and if wtc7 could/should have collapsed so symmetrically, 20 mins after BBC & CNN announced it just had done -"due to cock up". Amazingly, no proper engineering models of the collapses have been demonstrated yet. Official engineering reports admit that none have been made that work.
Aye, time will eventually tell, and it may turn out to be an extremely enlightening experience for a lot of people.
Wish I shared your confidence. We still don't know who killed William Rufus, let alome JFK.
But a huge difference is that these assasinations were not large physical events with plentyful "sensory data" recorded (tv footage & seismic records). In the same way as astrophysicists examine enthusiasticaly every unusual phenomenon they come across in space (often with very sparse sensory data), by supposing and refining and testing models, the 911 collapses can be examined with much more securely worked out and checked physics engines.
The truth of the 911 collapses need not be a matter of historical investigation then, but of secure computational investigation that has barely been touched on yet. Basic models of the collapses do indicate that they seemed to occur in an improbable manner.
Advanced models will be authoritative by being calibrated and checked against other known events and experiments. They are under general developement to check structural performance of building, boat, airplane, spaceship design etc.
My confidence here is in the progression of processing technology.
If capable models verify the collapse modes as unassisted, my own curiosity will be satisfied, speculation about organisation of attacks may continue fwiw and there will always be uncertainty about that, but if physics engines (developed for general industrial & scientific application) can not duplicate the collapse modes, the game will be up, no uncertainty.
I expect 3 to 6 years for such technology to become publicly available, but believe a university computer department could make a good go of an adequate simulation already. That would take some balls though!