The attacks on September 11, 2001 have been a defining moment for America. Although the losses were not great in terms of urban slaughter during WWII, the political and psychological impact on Americans of a concerted and visible attack in America were enormous -- indeed, it is an interesting "coincidence" that the attacks occurred on the one day of the year whose mention reinforces a public sense here of danger and emergency: 9-1-1.
With remarkably little reflection or concern with details and evidence, Americans accepted sweeping restrictions on civil liberties, torture as an instrument of government policy, and waged wars first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, presumably punishing those who attacked America then or might do so in the future. A similar if less enthusiastic drama is unfolding today, as many of the same parties who brought us 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq are edging America into confrontation and war with Iran.
Like most Americans, I take a dim view of a fixation on conspiracies. I am also conscious of a remark by a French colleague some years ago to the effect that Europeans saw conspiracies everywhere, but Americans never saw them anywhere, and both were wrong. I am even less enthusiastic about presumed coincidences with global consequences driving policy, or superficial explanations of physical catastrophes that fly in the face of both logic and physical realities. With one war waning today, another getting hotter and a third "in the oven," it is high time to look hard at what brought us to this place.
Prelude to 9/11
Most of the world (but not Americans) understood for decades that American Middle East policy was weighted heavily towards Israel. Eisenhower could compel Israel to withdraw from the Sinai, but the last US President who forcefully opposed Israeli regional and nuclear ambitions was John F. Kennedy. His assassination brought Lyndon Johnson into the White House, so much a friend of Israel that he disregarded the deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 war, in which over 200 US sailors and Marines were killed or wounded.
Shortly thereafter, pilgrimages to Israel and laudatory appearances before AIPAC (the powerful Jewish lobby in Washington) became effectively obligatory for Presidents and serious aspirants for the White House alike, with the Congress (both houses, both parties) being even more supportive – something commonly understood in Washington, but almost unknown elsewhere in the country.
A significant development in the 1990s was the formation of the neo-conservative think tank known as PNAC (Project for a New American Century), whose members prepared position papers for the Israeli government and for a future US Administration sharing their views. That happened in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush, and a contemporary writer summarized the tip of the neo-conservative iceberg in his first Administration this way:
The "outsiders" from PNAC were now powerful "insiders," placed in important positions from which they could exert maximum pressure on U.S. policy: Cheney is Vice President, Rumsfeld is Defense Secretary, Wolfowitz is Deputy Defense Secretary, I. Lewis Libby is Cheney's Chief of Staff, Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council, Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department, John Bolton is Undersecretary of State, Richard Perle is chair of the Defense Policy advisory board at the Pentagon, former CIA director James Woolsey is on that panel as well, etc. etc. (PNAC's chairman, Bill Kristol, is the editor of The Weekly Standard.) In short, PNAC had a lock on military policy-creation in the Bush Administration.
The presence of so many people from PNAC in key positions definitely sent a signal that US Middle East policy would henceforth be that of Israel, something that brought no joy to any other countries in the region, much less the long-suffering Palestinians. Mutterings about a supposed "Road Map" to some type of peace arrangement in such circumstances were utterly meaningless, and almost everyone except the American public understood this fact of life.
Far more significant in terms of subsequent events was the acknowledgement in one of PNAC's own documents that their program for America (and Israel) would not readily be accepted by the American people. What this meant, PNAC opined in 2000, was that "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."
9/11 Reconsidered
On September 11, 2001, the PNAC people in and out of government -- and by extension AIPAC and Israel -- "coincidentally" got the event they needed, barely eight months after coming into office. Most people are familiar with the basic details of that day -- two commercial aircrafts crashing into the two tallest buildings in New York City's World Trade Center (WTC), a third striking the Pentagon, and a fourth ending up in a Pennsylvania field. Few people will forget the images of the burning buildings, their collapse, the casualties, and the sense of shock and tragedy that ensued. Few should forget the passage of emergency legislation (the misnamed "Patriot Act"), the rush to attack Afghanistan for harboring the source of the attackers, or the later rush to attack Iraq to forestall "mushroom clouds" from its apocryphal "weapons of mass destruction."
The official 9/11 Commission's work and report were at best an incomplete exercise. Many people dismiss the findings of the Commission, and that includes its co-chairs. Many others who utterly distrust the 9/11 Commission report, dismiss the US Government’s explanation of it, and point to both an official cover-up and an “inside job,” include veteran fighter pilots, EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) (EMT interview), air defense experts, experienced commercial pilots, demolition experts, architects and civil engineers – none of them professions that inherently attract and retain the gullible and credulous.
Errors abound in the report. Among the more catastrophic is the collapse of a third WTC building (the 47-story WTC7) which was not hit by a plane, and fell in what appears to be a controlled demolition, but has essentially been sidestepped by the mainstream media (MSM). And this video interview (Interview) with a demolitions expert overseas explains clearly and succinctly what happened to WTC7, with the shock and chaos accompanying the impact of the aircraft serving to distract attention and conceal what happened overall. The overlay of the World Trade Center below shows the layout of the affected buildings:
Even more unbelievable is the "coincidental" salvage of an intact passport presumably belonging to one of the hijackers inside the plane that hit WTC2 -- and this was how the official 9/11 Commission report described it:
The passport was recovered by NYPD Detective Yuk H. Chin from a male passerby in a business suit, about 30 years old. The passerby left before being identified, while debris was falling from WTC 2. The tower collapsed shortly afterwards. The detective then gave the passport to the FBI on 9/11.
Reflections
Several things are very clear to me from a careful assessment of both official and critical evaluations of the 9/11 attacks. First, the striking aircraft alone simply could not have brought down either of the two buildings in the manner in which they fell, much less a third building which was not hit by a plane (I expect the one intended to do that as a "cover" had ended up in that Pennsylvania field), given the available physical evidence and a wealth of expert testimony. This means the attackers had assistance on the ground, and it had to have been active before the attacks occurred: preparing buildings for controlled demolition is not something done haphazardly in the midst of chaos.
Second, only two intelligence agencies had the expertise, assets, access and political protection to execute 9/11 in the air and on the ground: our CIA and Israel's Mossad. Only one had the incentive, using the “who benefits” principle: Mossad. And that incentive dovetailed perfectly with the neo-con’s agenda and explicitly expressed need for a catalytic event to mobilize the American public for their wars, using American military power to destroy Israel’s enemies. Only the unexpected strength of the Iraqi resistance kept Syria and Iran from being attacked in the second Bush Administration. Thus, the evidential trail for 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq run from PNAC, AIPAC and their cohorts; through the mostly Jewish neo-cons in the Bush Administration; and back to the Israeli government. None of the denials and political machinations can alter that essential reality. Terms such as treason, betrayal and deceit do not overstate the case against them.
Finally, we need to take a hard look at why the mainstream media (MSM) have paid more attention to Sarah Palin’s wardrobe than they have to dissecting blatant falsehoods, discrepancies and inconsistencies in the US Government’s treatment of 9/11 and its aftermath. And the reason is that on this issue, all are on the same side, and the official line is the one they all prefer – “all” meaning the PNAC alumni who took over the Bush Administration’s national security apparatus and their counterparts in the Obama administration, AIPAC and the rest of the numerous Jewish PACs, the MSM owners and Israel. The depiction of the media management in America in 2002 is especially informative, and has not changed significantly since then:
| Freeze Frame the U.S. Media – mid 2002 |
| CEOs and Directors of companies change as often as Boards of Directors vote. But if we could “freeze frame” the CEOs of the largest U.S. Media companies in mid 2002, we would find that ten Jewish American men ran the vast majority of U.S. television networks and other media companies including movies, radio, and publishing at that time. Not much has changed today. |
| CEO | Media Company | Ranking | TV Networks, Movie Companies & Publishers |
| Gerald Levin | AOL Time Warner | Largest media conglomerate in the U.S. | HBO, TNT, TBS, CNN, TCM, Warner Brothers, Time Inc. |
| Michael Eisner | Walt Disney Company | 2nd largest media conglomerate | ABC, ESPN, A&E, Lifetime, Miramax Films, Caravan Pictures, Touchstone Pictures |
| Summer Redstone | Viacom Inc. | 3rd largest media conglomerate | CBS, Paramount, MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, Country Music Television, Nashville Network Cable, Infinity Broadcasting (radio), Pocket Books, Free Press, Scribner, Simon & Schuster |
| Edgar Bronfman, Sr Edgar Bronfman, Jr. | Vivendi Universal | 4th largest media conglomerate | Universal Studios, USA Networks, Houghton Mifflin Publishers |
| Robert Murdoch | Murdoch’s News Corporation | 5th largest media conglomerate | Fox Television Network, 20th Century Fox Films, Fox 2000, New York Post, TV Guide |
| Robert Perelman | New World Entertainment | Premier independent TV program producer in the US | |
| David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg | DreamWorks SKG | | |
Looking Ahead
Today we are getting the same line on Iran, from the same type of people -- Obama himself tries to be more independent, but most of the key staff and national security people in his Administration do not differ greatly on Israel and the Middle East from those of his predecessor. And the Congress has shown itself to be even more of AIPAC's lap-dog than the preceding Congress, an exercise in self-serving cowardice that admittedly has taken some doing. This is not a simple anti-Jewish canard or mindless prejudice, both of which are juvenile and self-defeating sentiments. They are a factual depiction of specific people in specific positions advocating specific policies and stonewalling specific attempts to elicit specific information about specific lies, misrepresentations and deceit.
AIPAC and company are riding a tiger in America, and if they ever slip, the resulting convulsion will be catastrophic for them and for Israel. The open unfolding of the 9/11 tragedy and its ensuing wars that is now occurring can be that slip. The human cost to America to date is some 60,000 people, military and civilian, killed or wounded on 9/11 and in Iraq and Afghanistan together, with more to come once we go to war with Iran (or get dragged into it following an Israeli attack on Iran). Much of the deliberately misdirected rage that followed 9/11 has given way to endurance and grief, captured all too well in the following picture of a military funeral here:
But grief is a close cousin to rage, and an enraged America is not pretty, as anyone familiar with our history can appreciate. Americans are often deceptive without meaning to be. To much of the world, they often come across as naive, bumbling innocents in the world of global politics. And on a day-to-day basis, there is much truth to that.
But an enraged America is a very different character. You have only to look at what happened in WWII to German and Japanese cities, towns and villages, where America slaughtered literally millions of German and Japanese civilians -- most of them women and children -- knew it was doing it, and cared nothing at all. The goal was to crush, and restraint was not a word used much at all.
If these Americans and those like them ever fully understand just how much of their suffering -- and the suffering we have inflicted on others -- is properly laid on the doorsteps of Israel and its advocates in America, they will sweep aside those in politics, the press and the pulpits alike whose lies and disloyalty brought this about and concealed it from them. They may well leave Israel looking like Carthage after the Romans finished with it. It will be Israel’s own great fault.
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Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is a writer and consultant specializing in national and international security affairs. In December 1988, he received the Superior Civilian Service Award after more than five years of service at the U.S. Army War College as Director of Studies, Strategic Studies Institute, and holder of the General of the Army Douglas MacArthur Chair of Research. He is listed in WHO'S WHO IN THE EAST (23rd ed.). A Marine Corps Vietnam veteran and a 1986 graduate of the U.S. Army War College, Dr. Sabrosky's teaching and research appointments have included the United States Military Academy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Middlebury College and Catholic University; while in government service, he held concurrent adjunct professorships at Georgetown University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Dr. Sabrosky has lectured widely on defense and foreign affairs in the United States and abroad. You can email Dr. Alan Sabrosky at: docbrosk@comcast.net
Personal background on Dr. Sabrosky can be found here.
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