[Nettime-bold] Important! Retired Special Forces Master Sergeant:'What We Can Least Afford Are Denial And Timidity'

["Steve McAlexander" <mcalexander@veriomail.com>]

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Sent: Monday, November 26, 2001 1:03 PM
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                    The OFFICIAL PARTY LINE
                               and the TRUTH

                                  by Stan Goff

I'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. That doesn't cut much
for those who will only accept the opinions of former officers on
military matters, since we enlisted swine are assumed to be incapable
of grasping the nuances of doctrine.

But I wasn't just in the army, I studied and taught military science
and doctrine. I was a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations
Training Center in Panama, and I taught Military Science at West
Point. And contrary to the popular image of what Special Forces does,
SF's mission is to teach. We offer advice and assistance to foreign
forces. That's everything from teaching marksmanship to a private to
instructing a Battalion staff on how to coordinate effective air
operations with a sister service.

Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated conflict
areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have to say that the story we hear on
the news and read in the newspapers is simply not believable. The
most
cursory glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and after
September 11th, does 'not' support the official line or conform to
the
current actions of the United States government.

But the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept
its underlying premises. I'm not at all surprised about the
Republican
and Democratic Parties repeating these premises. They are simply two
factions within a single dominant political class, and both are
financed by the same economic powerhouses. My biggest 
disappointment, as
someone who identifies himself with the left, has been the tacit
acceptance
of those premises by others on the left, sometimes naively,and
sometimes to
score some morality points. Those premises are twofold. One, there is
the
premise that what this de facto
administration is doing now is a "response" to September 11th. Two,
there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center and
the
Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion,
neither of these is sound.

To put this in perspective we have to go back not to September 11th,
but to last year or further.

A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush, with nothing more than
his
name and the behind-the-scenes pressure of his powerful father-a
former
President, ex-director of Central Intelligence, and an oil
man-is systematically constructed as a candidate, at tremendous cost.

Across the country, subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms are put into
place
to disfranchise a significant fraction of the Democrat's
African-American voter base. This doesn't come out until Florida
becomes a battleground for Electoral College votes, and the magnitude
of the
story has been suppressed by the corporate media to this day.

In a decision so lacking in legitimacy, the Supreme Court will
neither
by-line the author of the decision nor allow the decision to ever be
used as a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards the presidency of the United
States to a man who loses the popular vote in Florida and loses the
national popular vote by over 600,000.

This de facto regime then organizes a very interesting cabinet. The
Vice President is an oil executive and the former Secretary of
Defense. The National Security Advisor is a director on the board of
a
transnational oil corporation and a Russia scholar. The Secretary of
State is a man with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, and the
former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other interesting
appointment is Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is
the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. He and Cheney were featured
as
speakers at the May, 2000, Russian-American Business Leaders Forum.
So the
consistent currents in this cabinet are petroleum, the former Soviet
Union,
and the military.

Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his guises, and the general
trajectory of US foreign policy as far back as the Carter
Administration, I feel I can reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern
and South Asian fossil fuels are one of their major preoccupations.

Not just because this klavern has some very direct financial
interests
in fossil fuel, but because they surely know that worldwide oil
production is peaking as we speak, and will soon begin a permanent
and
precipitous decline that will completely change the character of
civilization as we know it within 20 years. Even the left seems to be
in deep denial about this, but the math is available. And, no,
alternative energies and energy technologies will not save us. All
the
alternatives in the world can not begin to provide more than a tiny
fraction of the energy base now provided by oil. This makes it more
than a resource, and the drive to control what's left more than an
economic competition.

I further conclude that the economic colonization of the former
Soviet
Union is probably high on that agenda, and in fact has a powerful
synergy with the issue of petroleum. Russia not only holds vast
untapped resources that beckon to imperialism in crisis, it remains a
credible military and nuclear challenger in the region.

( We have not one, but three members of the Bush de facto cabinet
with
military credentials, which makes the cabinet look quite a lot like a
military General Staff). All this way 'before September 11th.
Then there's the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
NATO might have expected consignment to the dustbin of the Cold War
after
the Eastern Bloc shattered in 1991. Peace dividend and all that.
But it didn't. It expanded directly into the former states of the
Eastern Bloc toward the former Soviet Union, and contributed
significant forces to the devastation of Iraq-a key country in the
world oil market, over which control translates into the ability to
manipulate oil prices.

NATO is a military formation, and the United States exerts the
controlling interest in it. It seemed like a form without a function,
but it remedied that pretty quickly.

Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International
Monetary Fund, the US and Germany began a systematic campaign of
destabilization there, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan
in that campaign. NATO became the military arm of that agenda-the
break-up of Yugoslavia into compliant statelets, the further
containment of the former Soviet Union, and the future pipeline
easement for Caspain Sea oil to Western European markets through
Kosovo.

You see, 'this is important to understand', and people-even those
against the war talk-'are tending to overlook the significance of
it'.
NATO is not a guarantor of international law, and it is not a
humanitarian organization. 'It is a military alliance' with one very
dominant partner. And it can no longer claim to be a defensive
alliance against European socialists. 'It is an instrument of
military
aggression'.

NATO is the organization that is now going to thrust further along
the
40th parallel from the Balkans through the Southern Asian Republics
of the
former Soviet Union. The US military has already taken control of
a base in Uzbekistan. No one is talking about how what we are doing
seems to be a very logical extension of a strategy that was already
in
motion, and has been in motion for two decades. Once we recognize the
pattern of activity designed to simultaneously consolidate control
over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and colonize the
former Soviet Union, Afghanistan is exactly where they need to go to
pursue that agenda.

Afghanistan borders Iran, India, and even China but, more
importantly,
the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. These border Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan
borders Russia. Turkmenistan sits on the Southeastern quadrant of the
Caspian Sea, whose oil the Bush Administration dearly covets.
Afghanistan is necessary for two things: as a base of operations to
begin the process of destabilizing, breaking off, and establishing
control over the South Asian Republics, which will begin within the
next 18-24 months in my opinion, and constructing a pipeline through
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to the
Asian market.

The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign
Secretary, that
senior American officials were warning them as early as mid-July that
military action for mid-October was being planned for
Afghanistan. In 1996, the Department of Energy was issuing reports on
the
desirability of a pipeline through Afghanistan, and in 1998,
Unocal testified before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the
Pacific that
this pipeline was crucial to transport Caspian Basin oil to the
Indian
Ocean.

Given this evidence that a military operation to secure at least a
portion of Afghanistan has been on the table, possibly as early as
five years ago, I can't help but conclude that the actions we are
seeing put into motion now are part of a pre-September 11th agenda.
I'm absolutely sure of that, in fact. The planning alone for
operations, of this scale, that are now taking shape, would take many
months. And we are seeing them take shape in mere weeks.

It defies common sense. This administration is lying about this whole
thing being a "reaction" to September 11th. That leads me, in short
order, to be very suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided evidence
that
someone in Afghanistan is responsible. It's just too damn convenient.
Which also leads me to wonder-just for the sake of knowing-what
actually did happen on September 11th, and who actually is
responsible.

The so-called evidence is a farce. The US presented Tony Blair's
puppet government with the evidence, and of the 70 so-called points
of
evidence, only nine even referred to the attacks on the World Trade
Center, and those points were conjectural. This is a bullshit story
from beginning to end. Presented with the available facts, any
16-year
old with a liking for courtroom dramas could tear this story apart
like a two-dollar shirt. But our corporate press regurgitates it
uncritically. But then, as we should know by now, their role is to
legitimize.

This cartoon heavy they've turned bin Laden into makes no sense, when
you
begin to appreciate the complexity and synchronicity of the
attacks. As a former military person who's been involved in the
development of countless operations orders over the years, I can tell
you that this was a very sophisticated and costly enterprise that
would have left what we call a huge "signature".

In other words, it would be very hard to effectively conceal.
So there's a real question about why there was no warning of this.
That can be a question about the efficacy of the government's
intelligence apparatus. That can be a question about various policies
in the various agencies that had to be duped to orchestrate this
action. And it can also be a question about whether or not there was
foreknowledge of the event, and that foreknowledge is being covered
up. To dismiss this concern out of hand as the rantings of conspiracy
nuts is premature. And there is a history of this kind of thing being
done by national political bosses, including the darling of liberals,
Franklin Roosevelt. The evidence is very compelling that the
Roosevelt
Administration deliberately failed to act to stop Pearl Harbor in
order to mobilize enough national anger to enter the World War II.
I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions
about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks.
Follow along:

Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all the
while on FAA radar. The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10
AM Eastern Daylight Time.
Who is notified?

This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is
not notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear
children
read.

By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is
terribly wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers.
By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World
Trade
Center, Bush is settling in with children for his photo ops at Booker
Elementary. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously,
an
event never before seen in history, and one has just dived into the
worlds
best know twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal
Commander in
Chief.

No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either.
At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining World Trade
Center building. At 9:05, Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of
Staff
whispers to George W. Bush. Bush "briefly turns somber" according to
reporters.

Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No.
He resumes listening to second graders read about a little girl's pet
fucking goat, and continues this banality even as American Airlines
Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in
the direction of Washington DC.

Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air Force? No.
An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public
statement telling the United States what they already have figured
out; that there's been an attack by hijacked planes on the World
Trade
Center.

There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air
Force
been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.
At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American Flight 77 is still
ten minutes from its target, the Pentagon.

The Administration will later claim they had no way of knowing that
the Pentagon might be a target, and that they thought Flight 77 was
headed to the White House, but the fact is that the plane has already
flown South and past the White House no-fly zone, and is in fact
tearing through the sky at over 400 nauts.

At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the
Pentagon,
all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is
not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force
in the sky over Alexandria and DC.

Now, the real kicker. A pilot they want us to believe was trained at
a
Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a
well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in
two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it
clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and
flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460
nauts.

When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper
school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further
training on a flight simulator.

This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on
I-40 at rush hour by buying her a video driving game. It's horse
shit!
There is a story being constructed about these events. My crystal
ball
is not working today, so I can't say why.

But at the least, this so-called Commander-in-Chief and his staff
that
we are all supposed to follow blindly into some ill-defined war on
terrorism is criminally negligent or unspeakably stupid. And at the
worst, if more is known or was known, and there is an effort to
conceal the facts, there is a criminal conspiracy going on.
Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was facing a confluence
of
crises from which they were temporarily rescued by this event.
Whether they
played a sinister role or not, there is little doubt that they
have at the very least opportunistically pounced on this attack to
overcome their lack of legitimacy, to shift the blame for the
encroaching recession from capitalism to the September 11th terror
attack, to legitimize their pre-existing foreign policy agenda, and
to
establish and consolidate repressive measures domestically and
silence
dissent. In many ways, September 11th pulled the Bush cookies out of
the fire.

And given them the green light to begin constructing a long-term
scenario within which to establish fascistic control measures at home
and abroad as a citadel for the ruling class in the catastrophic
conjuncture that we are entering based on the end of oil.

This elephant in the living room is being studiously ignored. In
fact,
the domestic repression has already begun, officially and
unofficially. It's kind of a latter day McCarthyism. I participated
in
a teach-in at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on the 17th of September,
and though not a single person on the panel excused or justified the
attacks, and every person there offered either condolences and
prayers
for the victims, we were excoriated within two days as "enemies of
America." Yesterday an op-ed called for my deportation (to where, one
can
only guess). Now Herr Ashcroft is fast tracking the biggest
abrogation of US civil liberties since the so-called anti-terrorism
legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing-which by the way hasn't
resulted in anti-terrorism but in the acceleration of the application
of the racist death penalty. The FBI has defined terrorist groups not
by whether any given group has ever acted as terrorists, but by their
beliefs. Some socialists and anti-globalization groups have already
been identified by name as terrorist groups, even though there is not
a single shred of evidence that they have ever participated in any
criminal activity. It reminds me of the Smith Act that was finally
declared unconstitutional, but only after a hell of a lot of people
served a hell of a long time in jail for the crime of thinking.

I think this also points to yet another huge problems that the Bush
regime was facing. Worldwide resistance to the whole so-called
neoliberal agenda, which is a prettied up term for debt-leverage
imperialism. While debt and the threat of sanctions has been used to
coerce nations in the periphery, we have to understand that the final
guarantor of compliance remains military action. For a global
economic
agenda, there is always a corresponding political and military
agenda.

The focal point of these actions in the short term is Southern Asia,
but they have already scripted this as a worldwide and protracted
fight against terrorism. It's far better than drug wars as a
rationalization, and the drug war thing was being discredited in any
case. Leftists are regaining power and popularity in Venezuela, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic,
Haiti,
Brazil, and Argentina. Cuba has gained immense prestige over the last
few
years. The empire is beginning to unravel. We can hardly justify
intervention in these places by saying they are not towing the
economic line by allowing the absolute domination of their societies
by transnational corporations. That exposes the agenda. So we simply
claim they are supporting terrorism.

It's for all these reasons I say the left has missed the boat on this
one, by allowing them to get away with rushing past the question of
who did what on September 11th. If the official story is a lie, and I
think the circumstantial case is strong enough to stay with this
question, then we really do need to know what happened. And we need
to
understand concretely what the motives of this administration are.
And we need to understand more than just their immediate motives, but
where
the larger social forces that underwrite our situation right now are
headed.
I do not think this administration is engaged in the
deliberative process of a political grouping that is on top of their
game. They are putting together some very deliberative technical
solutions in response to a larger situation that it slipping rapidly
out of their control. Like clear cutting. There's a very smart
technology being employed to do a very dumb thing.

What they are responding to is not September 11th, but the beginning
of a permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production,
the beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the
unraveling of the empire.

This brings me to a point about what all this means for Americans'
security, which they are perfectly justified to worry about. The
actions being prepared by this administration will not only not
enhance our security, it will significantly degrade it. Military
action against many groups across the globe, which is what the
administration is telling us quite openly they are planning to do,
will put a lot of backs against the wall. That can't be very secure.
The concept of war being touted here is a violation of the principles
of war on several counts, and will inevitably lead to military
catastrophes, if you're inclined to view this from a position of
moral
and political neutrality.

And the people who are now in possession of half the world's
remaining oil
reserves are subject to destabilization for which we can't even
pretend to
predict the consequences-but loss of access to critical
energy supplies is certainly within the realm of possibility. Worst
of all,
we will be destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power in an active
conflict with its neighbor, and we will be provoking Russia, another
nuclear power. The security stakes don't get any higher, and
Americans can
ill afford to ignore nukes.

And I think that this domestic agenda is a tremendous threat to the
security of anyone who is critical of the government or their
corporate financiers, and we already know that the real threats are
against populations that can easily be scapegoated as the domestic
crisis deepens. There is a very real threat right now of creeping
fascism in
this country, and that phenomenon requires its domestic enemies.
Historically those enemies have included leftists, trade
unionists, and racially and nationally oppressed sectors. This whole
"state of emergency" mentality is already being used to quiet the
public discourses of anti-racism, of feminism, of environmentalism,
and of both socialism and anarchism. And while there is token
resistance by officials to anti-Muslim xenophobia, the stereotypical
images
have saturated the media, and the government is already beginning to
openly
re-instate racial profiling. It is only a short
step from there to go after other groups. We have long been prepared
by the
ideologies of overt and covert racism, and racism as both institution
and
corresponding psychology in the United States is nearly intractable.

It's for all these reason, I say emphatically that we can not accept
anything from this administration; not their policies nor their
bullshit stories. What they are doing is very, very dangerous, and
the
time to fight back against them, openly, is right now, before they
can
consolidate their power and their agenda. Once they have done that,
our job becomes much more difficult.

The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its
oblivion,
needs to understand its critical roles here. We have to play the role
of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a broader
peace-movement. We have to study, synthesize, and describe our
current
historical conjuncture. And we have to prepare leadership for the
decisive conflict that will emerge to first defeat fascism then take
political power.

Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than ever right now. We are not
faced with
a choice between socialism and capitalism, but socialism or
barbarism. And what we can least afford are denial and timidity.

Stan Goff
   _________________________________________________________________

Stan is right about this and he is not the only one to have this
sense
of foreboding about what the ruling classes always say publicly,i.e,
- -
the OFFICIAL PARTY LINE - and the "real" objectives of the New World
disorder Order administration (started by George Bush, Sr). Bush was
elevated to the highest office by the Supreme Court specifically for
this war in Afghanistan and war for oil. This war was PRE-DESTINED
and
orchestrated by these people.

TheGolem

Linkname: WAR for OIL profits
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