Webster Tarpley on "Guns and Butter"

Webster Griffin Tarpley speaks about "Synthetic Terror" on KPFA's Guns and Butter

Audio part I | part II | Transcript part I | part II | Transcribed by reprehensor | posted November 27 & December 3, 20005

Bonnie Faulkner (BF): I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Webster Tarpley. Webster Tarpley is an author and lecturer based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of ‘Against Oligarchy: A Collection of Essays and Speeches from 1970 to 1996’, ‘Surviving the Cataclysm: A Study of the World Financial Crisis’ and co-author of the critical study, ‘George Bush: the Unauthorized Biography’.

His latest book, ‘911 Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA’, debunks the official 9/11 story and exposes the fraud of the war on terror.

Webster Tarpley, welcome.

Webster Griffin Tarpley (WT): Thank you so much, it’s always a pleasure to be here.

BF: Webster, I see you have a new book out titled, ‘9/11 Synthetic Terror’. What do you mean by the term ‘synthetic terror’?

WT: Well, I think there are two ideas involved putting ‘synthetic’ into the title… I thought these were important. One is the notion that it’s artificial. It’s something that would not occur in the normal course of affairs. It’s not a sociological phenomenon; it’s not spontaneously generated by social conditions, no matter how horrendous, but rather, something that’s created by the deliberate intervention of intelligence agencies, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, British intelligence, MI5, MI6… and so forth. So, ‘synthetic’ in the sense that it’s fake, fictitious.

The other aspect is ‘synthesis’, meaning ‘drawing things together’ like bringing elements together that are disparate and don’t seem to belong together, but really do.

And that’s the conceptual framework I offer in there, and some charts on the back, and at various points in the book. The question of the moles, patsies, the professional killers, and the command center which coordinates all of that within the framework of a brainwashed world of controlled corporate media.

In particular I try to show, in the case of the patsies, leaning on some research by Daniel Hopsicker, who has been delving around in Florida for some years, that in the case of Atta and some of the other pilots training at the airport in Venice, Florida, they are the products of the precise airports that were being used by Oliver North and Secord, and Felix Rodriguez in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, for gun running into Central America and bringing back crack cocaine and heroin and other lethal narcotics into the United States.

That’s what Atta comes from and it’s very interesting that the 9/11 patsies are so closely connected to the Iran/Contra infrastructure. These are the kinds of elements of continuity that I try to show in the book.

These patsies, as Hopsicker shows, Atta is a psychotic, he’s a cat torturer, he is a cocaine addict, he frequents prostitutes, he is apparently living with a prostitute, he’s not an Islamic fundamentalist, he is a drunk also. Can’t be an Islamic fundamentalist, he’s rather some kind of a double-agent or fanatic, or something of this sort. The main thing about him is, no matter how great his criminal intent may be, he and his alleged team, (for whom of course there is no proof), but the alleged 19 could not in any case have ever created the physical events that you can see. They can’t fly planes into buildings, they can’t bring down buildings, they can’t do what happens at the Pentagon where there’s nothing left of any plane so there is no plane at the Pentagon.

The people who can do that, are members of the ‘secret team’. The professionals, the trained killers, the ice-cold technocrats of death, the CIA old boys, highly trained, highly equipped, but, not ideological in the sense of wanting to blab, or get noticed in the way that the patsies do, but simply content to operate behind the scenes.

The ‘moles’ of course are the government officials who allow all this to happen, they make sure the warnings are disregarded, they make sure the Minneapolis memo is disregarded, the Phoenix warnings, all the government warnings coming in from overseas, simply make sure that that does not get anywhere, that the patsies are not interfered with in any way, because if the patsies had all been arrested, the event could hardly have taken place because if we don’t have the patsies running around free, you can’t blame them, or at least it’s a little bit harder, so therefore the patsies have got to be left out in the open, and (that’s) the task of the moles, and we see some moles on the cover; I label Wolfowitz, Cheney, Tony Blair, Rumsfeld, these are moles, these are selected top moles but there are quite a few more that are mentioned in the text, people in the FAA, in the CIA, in the FBI, that are labeled as moles, these are people who are in one way or another loyal to the network that’s carrying this out.

And then we have the question of the command center. Some authors recently have alleged that Cheney was the one who’s directing this entire thing from the White House bunker and I would say that’s not technically feasible, and there’s no reason to run those risks when you can simply have one of those private military firms, the ones that we’ve heard so much about in Iraq… I won’t name some of them because I don’t really want to accuse any specific ones but we all know the names of these people that have been sending mercenaries into Iraq.

These are companies that claim that they can do nuclear strategy if necessary, that they can do nuclear war fighting. So they certainly have the ability to set up a command center in some private office which means that they’ll be free from kinds of surveillance that would be routine really in any government bureau. So that’s the conceptual framework, and that’s the synthesis that the book offers.

BF: Then since you characterize 9/11 as ‘synthetic terror’, would you then consider the ‘war on terror’ a phony war?

WT: Yes, absolutely. It’s a fictitious war, I mean it’s real enough in terms of killing people but the alleged motivation is fake. One of my chapters is ‘Al Qaeda is the CIA Arab Legion’. And this is historical fact. Al Qaeda was created by the CIA in Afghanistan, and it has been maintained by the CIA as a kind of military capability in the Arab and Islamic world. Look at the history of Al Qaeda, they have attacked countries like Bosnia, when the US was attacking Bosnia, Al Qaeda attacked Bosnia. When the US was attacking Libya, Al Qaeda attacked Libya [1] and tried to kill Qaddafi, the dictator of Libya.

The US in attempting to bust up the Russian Federation, Al Qaeda provides terrorists for Chechnya, so, the target list for US imperialism and the target list for Al Qaeda are exactly the same.

I also show that in the CIA, there’s a remarkable phenomenon, there’s a Bin Laden fan club, and I have a couple of documents on this, one is a guy called Michael Scheuer, who wrote a book called ‘Imperial Hubris’ which came out during 2004. And the interesting thing is when he wrote this book; he was a serving CIA official, the person who had run at a previous time the Bin Laden station. And what’s his thesis about Bin Laden?

He says that Bin Laden is the greatest political genius of the 21st century he actually compares him to Abraham Lincoln. He defends him against criticism, because I think the obvious thing is Bin Laden is a bungler, a dreamer, an ideologue, he’s probably somebody who couldn’t find his way around without a CIA covert operation to help him. The person who actually makes the decisions looks like Zawahiri, who was part of the Sadat assassination, who then lived in England for a long time, even thought the Egyptians had arrest warrants out for him killing a head of state, Zawahiri looks like an agent of MI5 or MI6, the British intelligence agencies.

Most impartial observers would say that Zawahiri runs the show and that Bin Laden is simply somebody that they bring out to babble at certain times, if he exists at all. But what you can see is what the CIA wants to do is build up Bin Laden. Why would the CIA want to build up Bin Laden?

They want Bin Laden to be the political leader of the Arab world. Because if Bin Laden is the political leader of the Arab world, the Arab world is doomed. Bin Laden’s line is, if you’re a real believer, and you meet a non-believer, you have to kill the infidel. Think what that means, if you’re an Arab country, in today’s world you need to find some kind of an ally against the British and the US, you need to find Russia, or China, or Pakistan, or South Africa, or Japan or somebody and all of them, or most of them are likely to be non-Muslim. So if you cut yourself out of those types of alliances, you’re guaranteed to be absolutely isolated, and very, very easy prey for the British and the US.

So this guy Scheuer, who came out of the closet in the last couple of months, after writing the book and getting the book published while he was still in the CIA, a remarkable situation, comes on as somebody who wants to defend Bin Laden. We also have the case of ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, another top CIA official. He just retired as the executive director of the CIA. Buzzy Krongard’s name also comes up in regard to the stock trading on the eve of 9/11, he was part of the investment bank that carried out some of these ‘put’ options on the eve of 9/11 in regards to United Airlines, AmericanAirlines and some others.

Buzzy Krongard after leaving the CIA, comes out and says I hope Bin Laden is never captured… Well, why do you? Well, he says, because then we might have to face more radical figures, if he weren’t there. So it’s just so evident that the CIA loves Bin Laden and would like nothing better to have all opposition forces in the Arab and Islamic world gathered under the banner of Bin Laden because if they do that, they’re sure to be defeated.

The only way these countries could ever get anywhere is by making deals say with Europe or with some of these other countries I’ve mentioned. If they follow Bin Laden, they never will.

BF: A couple of qualifications, Webster, what is the name of the CIA agent who made the remarks that you’re quoting, and was Bin Laden actually quoted as telling Arabs to kill infidels?

WT: Yes, as far as I can see that’s what Bin Laden says in his various writings, now of course Bin Laden, we try to show in the book various pictures of Bin Laden, sometimes he’s skinny, sometimes he’s fat, sometimes he’s a little bit taller… Bin Laden is some kind of a clone, he’s a palimpsest of these different things that come together, whether he exists at all is anybody’s guess.

But the one thing is that the CIA is determined to build the image of this guy… the first one is ‘Anonymous’, the author of ‘Imperial Hubris’, later revealed to be Michael Scheuer… and Buzzy Krongard, former executive director of the CIA.

BF: Webster, I see that Thierry Meyssan has written a very nice forward for your book ‘9/11 Synthetic Terror’…

WT: Yes, it’s very kind of him to do that. Meyssan of course is the world leader in 9/11 research in the sense that it was just 10 days after the events that he came out with the thesis that no commercial aircraft of any size had hit the Pentagon. Probably no commercial aircraft of any size at all. That affirmation has stood the test of time, against all kinds of people who have come forward, especially recently, saying that it was a commercial aircraft and so forth.

There are some people who try to make the notion of some kind of airliner hitting the Pentagon some kind of ‘required credential’ before you can be taken seriously as a researcher in this field, which I think is absolutely absurd. And I would just take this opportunity to say we don’t need ‘gatekeepers’ ‘border guards’ ‘Thought Police’ or whatever, in this debate we need, rather, an open debate in which it’s perfectly legitimate to attack people for their ideas, but this kind of ad hominem stuff.

Meyssan writes in his introduction that my work is a new genre, it’s a new track of investigation into this, and what he says is that I try to show, and this is true, I try to show at least the continuity of the methods used in 9/11, with the methods used by the British and US intelligence agencies in the decades before.

Maybe I can say a couple of words about this, one side of it is, the invisible government. Who has the technical ability and the motivation to bring about events on this scale? Think back to Iran/Contra, think back to Senator Inouye making a remark in the course of those hearings in the middle of the 80’s, that there was in the United States an invisible government with its own Pentagon, its own State Dept. its own Treasury, its own foreign policy its own military line, and its own notion of how world affairs ought to be shaped. [2]

You can call that the invisible government, the secret government, the parallel government, the secret team… it’s clear if you look at recent US history that there is something infesting the Federal government at the level of top CIA officials, Generals, State Dept. officials, or, members of the Federal executive service, such as Richard Clarke. The man who ran the US government on 9/11, and was the first one to come into the White House at about 9 o’clock in the morning, based on no evidence whatsoever, saying ‘this is Bin Laden, this is Al Qaeda’. This is the same Richard Clarke who became the darling of some very misguided family members at those hearings about a year ago, when he came forward to say, ‘I failed you and your government failed you’. Yes he did fail, and his biggest failure, which I think was a consciously deliberate one, was to come in and say, ‘this is Bin Laden, this is Al Qaeda’, he is the main launcher of this crazy myth.

These are the kinds of people who seem to march to the tune of an invisible government network, that would be a private network that cuts across the executive departments and the agencies transversely, where some people are witting, some people are semi-witting of what’s going on, others simply don’t know and are told what to do, and the net result is the kind of thing that we see. So, this has been around for a while, the Kennedy assassination, the U2, the Bay of Pigs, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Vietnam War, Iran/Contra, the impeachment of Clinton.

A lot of these things come together in the shape of a permanent insurrection, if you like, against the Constitution, inside these institutions that goes on and on. The other element of continuity that I try to show is that I would view 9/11 through the lens of NATO spheres of influence, terrorism or geo-political terrorism, especially in central Europe in the 1970’s and 1980’s. What I’m talking about here just to make it simpler maybe is; the Baader-Meinhof Group in Germany, the so-called ‘Red Army Faction’ and the Italian ‘Red Brigades’, although I talk also about some terrorist groups in Greece and some other countries.

The common denominator between all of those is that NATO had a ‘stay-behind’ capability. The cover story on this was, well if the Soviets invade we need terrorist groups with weapons and training and communications to be able to launch guerilla warfare against the Soviets once the Soviets are here. But then of course they seem to have said, well, why wait for the Soviets to get here, why don’t we do things before they get here to make sure that they don’t get here, like making sure the Italian Communist Party doesn’t enter the governments in the 1970’s. Of course, it’s absurd to think that the Italian Communist Party entering the government would have meant the Soviets took over Italy, it’s absolutely crazy, but that does seem to be the way these people saw it. Probably Henry Kissinger was part of this worldview.

My background is having studied the Italian ‘Red Brigades’, the Morrow case is a good example maybe, Moro was somebody who wanted to bring the Italian Communist Party into the government. He was threatened by a top US official, some have identified this as Kissinger, and he didn’t stop, he was kidnapped and murdered by the ‘Red Brigades’ and now, as the years go on, more and more comes out that the ‘Red Brigades’ were a wholly owned or largely owned subsidiary of the CIA. There was even a special organization called ‘Gladio’ which was this ‘stay-behind’ network in the Italian case about which quite a bit is known.

And there are some books about the Secret Armies of NATO that are now coming out on this kind of stuff, so I think 9/11 fits into that kind of continuity. That’s how you have to see 9/11. It’s not completely new; it’s really, a tradition.

BF: So are you making a connection then, between a present-day state terrorism and what you have been describing I understand, is sometimes referred to as ‘the strategy of tension’?

WT: Yes, exactly. One of the people I quote in here is Gianfranco Sanguinetti who is an Italian expert on precisely this, although he’s written other things that I wouldn’t agree with, but he was one of the people in December, 1969 when this first big bombing attack took place in Milan, it was an interesting situation, it was the biggest post-war strike wave in Italy that might have indeed brought the Communist Party into the government. And at the height of the strike wave, bombs went off in a bank in Milan killing about 20 people, which today would not seem like a very big deal, but in those days it was considered horrendous.

And this then led to a partial state of Martial Law where the trade unions and the left wing parties were essentially knocked onto the defensive, and people were terrified by police state measures going on, and that seems to have been the goal, and in retrospect it looks like those bombs came out of the NATO offices in north-east Italy, in Verona, Piecenza, and places like this. So yes, I think the strategy of tension is exactly the kind of thing you have to think of as being the tradition where 9/11 fits in.

BF: Now, when you reference NATO, are you referring more specifically to certain governments within NATO?

WT: Well, on the cover of the book we have some things that the people of our country have never seen, the seal of MI6, which is the British equivalent of the CIA… or MI5 which would be the equivalent of the FBI. One of the things I show in here is these agencies, between the US and the British, are the dominant forces in NATO intelligence. They, (in particular MI5), had a policy in Northern Ireland of deliberate murder. And this is a deliberate policy which seems to have been accepted by the leaders of MI5, all the way up to Thatcher, in Number 10 Downing St.

This is the Finucane murder story, and the details are in the book, that MI5 according to an official report that was issued by a blue ribbon panel of the British government, MI5 deliberately sent out agent provocateurs to murder leading Catholic activists as a means of trying to manage the situation in Northern Ireland and prevent things from getting out of British control.

So there we have a case of absolutely documented state-sponsored false-flag terrorism conspiracy, that no amount of wishing can get out of the world.

BF: Also though, with regard to the strategy of tension and the bombings, particularly in Europe which are post World War II bombings, you do think that the US government was very much involved, don’t you? Or even more so than the British?

WT: Yes, absolutely, NATO intelligence is essentially the British and the US acting together, so that’s the way all this was done. By the way, a guy that I knew in Italy at the time, I write about him in the introduction, one of the members of the Italian government actually pointed out at the time of the Moro assassination, De Gaulle kicked NATO out of France in 1966, and the French have been relatively free, relatively free, of the kind of terrorism that you have in Germany and Italy… and Greece where the NATO infrastructure was very strong. So what he was suggesting was that if you kick out NATO, you won’t have a terrorist problem. Meaning, terrorism comes from NATO intelligence, and I think that this is exactly correct.

BF: I didn’t know that De Gaulle had kicked NATO out of France.

WT: Sure, I think it was the speech in 1964 or 65 in which he said the NATO headquarters which had been located near Paris, had to leave. And they moved it to Mons in Belgium, near Brussels, and it’s stayed there until the present time. Plenty of terrorism in Belgium, too. But France got off relatively easy, they didn’t have the kind of spectacular stuff, the Moro assassination or the various things that went on in Germany with planes and Mogadishu and things of this sort. So, again, this is the historical continuity that you have to look at.

BF: That’s interesting. I see you have a chart here in one of your chapters called ‘One Coup Per Year. USA, 1998 – 2005’.

WT: Yeah, we’re in a very, very unstable situation, because of the collapse of the world economy, because of the threatened collapse of the dollar, this terminal crisis of the Anglo-American imperialist system and their striving for world domination against China and Russia, we’re extremely unstable. And one of the forms that takes is what I would call ‘Weimar Politics’ it looks increasingly like Germany in the early 1930’s. You have to think about what that means, you know, Hitler coming in 1933—we may be a certain number of years from that, what I try to show here, I’ll tick them off if I can remember them, in 1998 you have the impeachment of Clinton which is a coup. It’s a ‘cold coup’. In 1999 there’s an attempt to convict Clinton and throw him out of office which fails because of popular support, interestingly, because not all coups succeed.

Later on in 1999 there’s another coup from a different quarter you might say, the Principals Committee, this would be Gore, Albright, Coen, General Shelton and that famous Richard Clarke that we can’t forget. Ordering the bombing of Serbia.

That is a proxy war against Russia. I mean, people need to remember, World War I started when Russia tried to defend Serbia. You bomb Serbia, and it’s like bombing Russia, and that’s exactly how that was understood in Russia at the time. So that was really done not by Clinton but by this Principals Committee. Clinton basically had no power left he had mortgaged his soul to avoid being ousted from the presidency.

In 2000 of course, you’ve got the first stolen election by Bush. In 2001, you have the really big one, the 9/11 terror coup, in 2002 you have a coup against the Constitution which is this War Powers transfer much denounced by Senator Byrd at the time, which essentially violates the Constitution, saying the President can declare war any time he wants. The Congress has essentially transferred the power to declare war to the President. That’s not what the Constitution says, you can’t do that by statute.

Then in 2003, the inevitable fruit of that… Bush uses those powers to attack Iraq. 2004, (I have an afterward about this), this you could probably call ‘Life Under the Invisible Government’. What does electoral politics look like in a country that is so completely run by invisible government intelligence agencies… the stolen election. My title there is, ‘Not an Election but a CIA Covert Operation’ and I try to show how this is pretty much the Bush Family tradition, but this time much more blatant, the stealing of the election in Ohio, in Florida, the so-called ‘red shift’ the massive difference between the exit polls and the recorded results which is essentially attributable to vote fraud, which is in favor of Bush, by a colossal mechanism, which I try to at least sketch, and now here we are in 2005. What’s gonna be the coup this year?

Well, you can imagine a wider war, the extension of the war into Iran, the US is already practically at war with Iran with drones and airplanes flying over, secret teams on the ground killing people and spying. Maybe it’s Syria, where we have to assume the same thing is going on, the US is attempting to interfere in Lebanon, we’ve got CIA ‘people-power’ revolutions, the ‘Cedar Revolution’ in Lebanon, the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine, it’s exactly the same thing, I’m afraid, despite whatever people may think, Georgia… the Roses, so that’s one possibility is a war coup.

The other possibility is the so-called ‘nuclear option’ which would be a radical change in the rules of the Senate, to outlaw the filibuster on judges, and once it’s judges, probably anything else, making the Senate into a rubber-stamp of the Republican Party bosses in the same way that the house already is, this is what Senator Byrd’s talked about when he came out and compared the Republican leadership of the Senate to Hitler, saying… that Hitler knew the value of maintaining legality, that the Republicans were doing the same thing, that they were essentially trying to turn the law upside down and against itself, so that they can simply ram things through without the traditional debate which is such an important part of what the Senate is supposed to do, it’s supposed to be that part of the government that says ‘Wait a minute, let’s see if wiser heads can prevail’ that would be another possible coup for 2005, or, of course, ever lurking in the background, atomic, bacteriological, chemical, radiological, terrorism of the kind that they seem to be talking about now in February or March (2005) much more than they did in November, December or January. So that’s always there as a possibility to provide a pretext for new police state measures.

This by the way, just in terms of theory, this is pure Leo Strauss and Carl Schmidt, this is exactly what the Neocons write about, Carl Schmidt essentially says, ‘sovereignty means the ability to declare the state of siege and have a coup’. So what we’re doing is we’re getting it kind of on the ‘installment plan’ but you can see these different steps, and it’s getting to be more and more of a suffocating grip on the government.

BF: If people wanted to reference Senator Inouye’s remarks with regard to the secret government, where could they find copies of those remarks?

WT: Well, the key quote is right in my book, so you get my book and it’s the epigraph of the first chapter in the book.

BF: Now, you have a section called ‘Angel is next.’ What do you mean by ‘Angel is next.’?

WT: Look, this is a forgotten clue of 9/11, which seems to me is the most important, because this is when the invisible government speaks. You may remember that at one point during the morning, 10:00 probably on 9/11, a death threat against Bush came into the Secret Service, saying, Angel is next. It essentially means, Air Force One will be shot down as the next step in these developments.

There’s no doubt that this telephone call took place, it was confirmed by Cheney indirectly, Condoleeza Rice very directly, many other Republicans directly, then later on it was denied. ‘Oh it was a confused or garbled message that came in.’

At the beginning it seemed to serve Bush, because it seemed to explain why he had gone from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska. Why he had been running across the country, scurrying away, instead of taking up his position in Washington, but as time went on, that became less important, and what became more important was that with this little message, you are opening up the world of the secret government which otherwise hardly appears to the superficial observer.

‘Angel is next.’ Implies the top-secret codename or codeword for the Presidential aircraft, Air Force One. I go into intelligence agency reports, now let me just make a parenthesis, (9/11 didn’t occur in a vacuum, it occurs in a world in which there are others watching. Who’s watching? Well, Russia’s watching, Israel’s watching very much, the French are watching, there’s Germans, Japan…), what I found is 3 separate reports, one is the Réseau Voltaire which is obviously benefiting from leaks from French intelligence. The Réseau Voltaire version, which came out September 20th (or) 25th, says that the ‘Angel is next.’ phone call came complete with top secret codewords, across a variety of agencies, suggesting that the people that were behind the attacks were a powerful faction inside the US intelligence community and government in general.

And that secondly, they had the nuclear launch codes in their possession. This report goes on to say that the Bush team thought during most of the day, that they were the target of a military coup. And it was only somehow later in the day that the situation was recomposed. Now what would it mean?

Essentially it means that the invisible government force behind 9/11 tells Bush that he must respond by stating that its Bin Laden, Al Q'aeda, the Arabs, the Islamic world, and that what’s gonna happen is the invasion of Afghanistan, and above all the beginning of the ‘war of civilizations’ that Samuel Huntington writes about. An open-ended aggression of the United States against the Arab and Islamic world.

The implication seems to be, in the Réseau Voltaire report, that if Bush doesn’t do this, that this group is capable of starting that same war, using not conventional forces but nuclear missiles. Simply ordering the launch of missiles toward, well, Afghanistan perhaps, but maybe Baghdad, maybe Damascus, maybe Tehran, maybe Cairo, maybe Islamabad, Rabat, Tunisia, Kuala Lumpur, you name it. Any place in the Arab or Islamic world that would then start the war of civilizations with a vengeance.

The Debka, Debka is an internet service that generally reflects the views of the Israeli Mossad, and they are even more emphatic that this telephone call came complete with multiple codewords indicating that the invisible government force behind the attack which stretched through numerous Federal agencies and executive departments. They knew a whole selection of codewords that they seemed to have included with this phone call.

Finally there’s the Soviets, in this case Russia, it’s called Namakon, a very shadowy group. You can’t just call them up. But they speak from time to time, these are KGB old boys. And this appeared in the Russophile newspaper Zaftra, it’s a group that’s seeking confrontation, they have this nuclear launch capability, and they’re interested in nuclear confrontation also with Russia. Because, if it ever had come to this, in the middle of 9/11, if missiles had ever gone up, as soon as missiles are launched, Russia and China and others, see it, and they don’t know where those missiles are going. In the initial phase it’s not clear what the target is, so it takes a while to figure out where the missile is actually headed. It’s important to remember Russia was on a very high level of strategic alert on 9/11 because it had been carrying out strategic bomber maneuvers over the North Pole. (Of course the only conceivable target is Canada and the United States), and if you read Richard Clarke’s book, he says that the State Dept. had to call the Soviets and ask them to call off their strategic bomber maneuvers, and essentially the Soviets were asked not to go to a higher level of defense readiness, because the US had raised the DEFCON level to a sub-war level, but a very high level, in response to the 9/11 attacks. It’s also important to remember that one of the main events of 9/11 that nobody writes about, is the call between Putin and Bush, if you look at the big timeline that’s just been published about 9/11 it seems to have absolutely no reference to this, and it’s really one of the huge developments on 9/11, that Bush and Putin get on the phone and it starts a kind of a honeymoon. I would call it a Hitler/Stalin pact disguised as a honeymoon.

And Putin says, sure, send your forces into Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgizia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, all you want. Invade Afghanistan, all you want. Some have described it as a breathtaking turn by Putin, vis a vis the United States. I think it’s simply Putin saying, ‘…madmen are now ruling the United States, I will not get in their way now, I will let them disperse their forces across the world: make war against Afghanistan, make war against Iraq, they’ll become weaker, I’ll become stronger, I’m building missiles, I’m getting ready, this is not the time, I know they’re crazy but I’m putting on my smiley face as strategic deception…’ and I think that has become more and more clear as time has one on, so this is probably another aspect of my book, we haven’t rendered the concept quite as clear as it might be, but it is complicated.

I try to put 9/11 in the context of the world in which we live, and that is one in which the superpower tensions between the US and Russia, the main nuclear powers in the world remain extremely strong. They were strong as a result of the bombing of Serbia in 1999, there was talk of the 3rd World War then, which the American media completely blacked out, and right now we’re in a… new cold war situation, where that honeymoon seems to have ended. I think the 9/11 events also have to be seen within the thermonuclear balance of terror in the world, this is now “real” terror, this is the kind of thing where you could have had a thermonuclear exchange.

BF: How do we know about the phone call between Putin and Bush?

WT: That’s extremely well documented, that’s been written about in all kinds of academic journals, that’s readouts by the Kremlin, readouts by the White House that there’d been this wonderful, friendly telephone call between the two, and I quote some academics who wrote about this thing, that this was the most breathtaking pro-western turn by any Russian leader in the entire history of the country, despite the fact that there was a very strong anti-US feeling in Russia as a result of that bombing of Serbia, Putin did this.

And again, I think he’s saying, ‘I’m playing for time, Bush will make the US weaker, he’ll attack other countries before he attacks me, I will become stronger, I will conserve my forces, and if Bush decides to attack me later on, (and the Neocons), they will be spread out across the world, and I will be more ready than they are.’

Again, the Hitler/Stalin pact, I don’t want to try and make a one-to-one comparison between Bush and Hitler, (although you can do that), and Putin and Stalin, but something of that nature is going on behind the scenes in this world. The tensions are much, much greater than you think, and 9/11 was a moment when they seemed to be disappearing, but really were boiling behind the scenes.

BF: Your chapter goes on to speak about ‘Barksdale’ and ‘Nightwatch’. What about that?

WT: Well, what I’m trying to do here is make some sense of the erratic movements of Bush across the country. So he takes off from the area of Sarasota, Florida he then goes to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, then Offutt AFB, Nebraska. What explained this?

At the time it attracted a great deal of criticism, because Bush was accused of running like a rabbit, scurrying away, fleeing, and so forth. I try to make sense of this with the help of those 3 intelligence reports, the Réseau Voltaire, the Debka, and the Namakon KGB old boys report. Réseau Voltaire is very emphatic about this, according to Réseau Voltaire, Bush is concerned, or the traveling party with him, perhaps the traveling party back in the White House, are concerned that the coup group which has carried out 9/11 now, and is demanding the war of civilizations, we must assume, might use launch codes which they have indicated that they may well have, to launch nuclear missiles, to begin the war of civilizations on a nuclear plane, so how could Bush counteract that?

The Réseau Voltaire argument, and that’s French intelligence talking in some degree, is that Bush has to physically go to nuclear command centers to somehow be able to countermand orders with his physical presence. If some call comes in using the launch codes, Bush can be there and say, ‘no it’s not coming from me, I’m here’ so he goes to Barksdale, Louisiana. Now what is that?

That happens to be the secondary nuclear war fighting bunker of the United States, (already quite interesting), other than that it is the base of a series of Boeing 747’s known as ‘Nightwatch’ planes. This is a system of flying command centers, used to be known as ‘Looking Glass’ and what these are is Boeing 747’s which take off, can be fueled in the air, have these long trailing antennas which can communicate with thermonuclear submarines around the word, and a whole system of communications, and they can stay in the air for a week to ten days, each one of them, and essentially become the command center for fighting a thermonuclear war, so Bush goes to where they are located.

Then he makes his statement, I believe the peculiarity of that statement is that he doesn’t say anything about terrorism, that has somehow disappeared from his statement. And he then goes off to Offutt base in Nebraska which is an even more complex bunker system, the primary nuclear war bunker, it used to be the SAC, the Strategic Air Command and now it’s this STRATCOM, is what they call it now, and he stays there until the afternoon.

Now the issue about the embarrassment of this, the embarrassment is real enough, and at a certain point Cheney begins leaking and Karl Rove begins leaking the story that the threat has come in ‘Angel is next.’ Fine. These are scoundrels, these are liars, if it were only them saying this I would be extremely skeptical, but again it’s the French, Israeli, and Russian intelligence consensus that seems to indicate that there was a phone call and it did contain codeword.

So, Safire is the one who puts that out, Bush in the bunker, and I also quote Condoleeza Rice in a television interview saying, ‘yes they came in with these codeword’ and then she’s asked by I guess Tony Snow, ‘do we have moles in the government? How would they know these things?’ and Rice starts babbling, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know’. What they’re finding is that although this story seems to work as a cover story for Bush, it’s opening the fact that there’s an invisible government, in other words, some faction, which is not located in a cave or a tent or a desert, but rather right in the executive departments of the US is somehow behind this, so, I think that’s extremely important. That’s a dimension that has tended to get completely forgotten, which I try to make the centerpiece of an entire chapter.

Then of course later in the day you get this conversation between Bush and Putin… which seems also to be an attempt to manage the fact that madmen have taken over the US, probably at some point late in the day, Bush makes clear that’s he’s absolutely willing to do what this group demands, go on television, talk about Bin Laden, talk about Al Qaeda, there’s also somewhere in the Réseau Voltaire report that Tony Blair is somehow instrumental in convincing Bush that he’s got to talk about Al Qaeda and Bin Laden.

Now, this is more complex than the apparent surface version of events, I’m not arguing that anybody should have anything but the most absolute contempt for Bush, the hatred of Bush is one of the healthiest emotions you have in this population, and I hope my own anti-Bush dynasty credentials are fairly strong after writing this book in 1992, and having it on the internet since 1996, but if you want to realize what’s going on, it’s something more widespread than just Bush, or just Cheney. It’s an entire invisible government network including a very aggressive group that simply takes action and the elected officials have to pretty much fall into line, and get on the party line very fast, because there’s also an implication that if they don’t, they’ll get their heads blown off.

So, we are now living in that kind of lawless universe, the de facto dictatorship of the invisible government, which is a gangster faction as bad as any that we’ve seen in recent years, in the 20th century, I mean, in the world.

BF: ...so you would then include Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice, along with George W. Bush as possibly having been ‘out of the loop’ on this.

WT: It’s hard to say because… here we’re in areas of political judgment, and to some degree speculation. You’d say it’s clear that Cheney seems more on top of events than Bush. Rice is certainly a willing tool of the invisible government, probably was before… how much they’ve been told in advance it’s impossible to know, they were probably told that ‘something’ will happen, they better be ready for it, they better be receptive, they’d better be willing to go along, but exactly how that works we just don’t know. Hopefully the archives will be opened or indeed the tribunal will take place one day with subpoena power if it comes to that, again, the notion that Cheney ran the whole thing from a console in the White House, I think would be foolish to organize things that way, because suppose somebody walks in who’s not witting, who’s not a part of this?

And you can see this in the government, the Colleen Rowleys, the people in Phoenix, the people at other levels, they’re not all witting participants, there are some of them who might be against it, and you never know. The next person who walks through the door in the White House might be somebody who is not a part of this, and who might be indignant about it. Whereas if you’re in a private, completely controlled environment, where you absolutely determine who gets in and who doesn’t then you’re much safer. So I’d think a ‘putsch’ faction, a coup faction would have to think in those terms.

BF: That’s very interesting. Is there anything else that you wanted to add about the invisible government?

WT: Well, the other thing is, this is all an act of incredible folly. I try to point that out at least in passing. When you have a large state apparatus, that chooses to go down the path of terrorism, you have essentially burned a lot of important bridges, and you have gone into a realm of lawlessness. An intelligent oligarchy would have said, ‘No. Don’t do this.’ But that didn’t happen, and now it’s been done and so the die is cast. We now have a situation where the basis of the entire US government, the Republican Party, the Bush administration, the Democratic Party equally, or perhaps even more so, really the entire social order, property relations, just about the whole society is now based on the fraud of terrorism, the myth of 9/11.

This is not wise. Intelligent oligarchs would have said, ‘This is an adventure of incalculable folly, we don’t want any part of it.’ What it indicates to me is there’s a breakdown in the ruling oligarchy of the US, which I saw already during the impeachment. There was nobody in the oligarchy to come forward to these scurrilous types like Tom DeLay and Gingrich and the impeachment crew, and tell them, ‘Stop rocking the boat. This is a system which has made us wealthy and powerful and we’re gonna keep it. The illusion of legitimacy that this government has, is our most precious possession, and we don’t intend to lose it because of the lust for power of Tom DeLay.’

That didn’t happen, the impeachment was pretty much played out. The same thing with 9/11, it has occurred, so we get the impression that the whole oligarchy is in disarray, that they have no consensus, they’re going in different directions, they’re probably prey to manipulations from abroad, from Britain, from other countries. So I think it’s a very dangerous situation.

BF: You mentioned in passing William Safire’s column and the fact that… I guess he was told that the codes, the secret codes for Air Force One had been known or leaked for this phone call to come in? How did he know about this?

WT: The quote I have here is, Safire says, the secret service told me that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts. (Bush) In light of this incredible threat it was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort.

Except, this is another important feature, when Bush took off from Florida, he had no fighter escort. And Air Force One was constantly receiving messages saying ‘There’s an aircraft headed your way, watch out.’

There’s another report that Bush’s home in Crawford, TX was somehow under attack, or surveillance, or something along these lines, so you can imagine these messages coming into the mind of the terrified Bush. So, the other thing of course, I have to cite somebody that I don’t always agree with but Daniel Hopsicker has gone into Florida over the years and has done meticulous research about the activities of the patsies.

Again, I call them patsies, he thinks they carried out the 9/11 attacks, this is where we part company, but Atta was psychotic, a cat torturer… frequenting all kinds of bars and strip joints and so forth. And all of this in the infrastructure of the Iran/Contra affair. But what Hopsicker dug up, was that when Bush was spending the night between the 10th and 11th of September on Longboat Key, I think it is, in that Sarasota area, on the morning of 9/11, there was something that looked suspiciously like an assassination attempt against Bush. Which is a group of Arabs drive up and say, we’re a camera crew, we have an appointment to interview Bush, please let us in, secret service turns them away. (Longboat Observer, Sept. 26, 2001).

Maybe that was some kind of a warning, perhaps that was communicated to Bush, so I’m simply trying to point to the complexity of the situation, and the fact that there’s an agency operating which you can’t simply boil down to Bush and Cheney, the people in the visible government. There’s some kind of very aggressive, very adventurous and violent secret team that’s lurking there in the background, and they have left these tracks across the media, and of course most of this stuff is completely ignored.

There’s also the question why was Bush kept in the school for so long? When it was clear that the country was under attack, and his whereabouts were known. Why was he kept there? Some secret service agents tried to say we’ve got to get out of here right away, but it never happened, what was going on? Was Bush being hung out to dry? Was he being ‘security stripped’?

But again, all of these things, (and not to generate sympathy for Bush), but to show how he capitulated, and turned over the government to this secret team that had successfully carried off most of the elements of 9/11, perhaps not all of the things that they might have wanted, but a good number of them.

BF: Right, assuming that he was unaware of what was going to happen beforehand.

WT: Right, and that gets us into the theory of the modern presidency. I have a couple of pages here where I simply try to indicate that since the time of FDR, the oligarchy has been adamant that they don’t want a real President, they don’t want somebody who’s mentally capable of carrying out the inherent Constitutional powers of the presidency, they want puppets. Because they’re an oligarchy and they don’t intend to be bossed around by a President. Which a real President would be able to do. So we find Presidents that are chosen because they have mental impairment, because they’re dotards, (in the case of Reagan), or they’ve been through nervous breakdowns in the case of Carter, they’re ‘born again’ or whatever it is.

Or they’re thought to be sex maniacs like Kennedy was thought to be, or Clinton later on. So the oligarchy likes to pick Presidents who are inherently flawed, weak, blackmail-able and so forth, and there’s no real reason to think that Bush is anything more than such a puppet President, and therefore expendable, we’ve got Cheney and if you don’t have Cheney, you’ve got Hastert and so on down the line. So, there are always possible replacements and if you’re gonna do a terror action of this scale, the assassination of a President could not present insuperable problems to a group like this.

BF: Not at all, since we’ve seen that in the past.

WT: Yes, exactly, the whole thesis is that there is an invisible government, that they killed Kennedy, and they’re ready to kill again if it comes to that. In the case of Bush it’s clearly not necessary, but who knows?

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?

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 Louisiana [3], 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? Thirty cents? Thirty-five cents? 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 South. 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 South 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 South 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 Kursk, 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.

=======
NOTES
=======

1: Via the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

2: “There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” – Senator Daniel K. Inouye during the Iran-contra scandal.

3: Iowa, actually.

Copyright 2005 Guns and Butter (transcript with hyperlinks and footnotes added by reprehensor.)