The elements which we now have at our disposal allow us to think that the 11 September attacks were commissioned from inside the American state apparatus. Nevertheless, this conclusion upsets us, as we have gotten used to the legend of the "bin Laden plot" and because it is painful for us to envision Americans who could have cynically sacrificed nearly 3000 of their compatriots. Nevertheless, in the past, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff planned – but never carried out – a terror campaign against their own population. We need to take a look back into history here.
In 1958, in Cuba, guerrilla operations carried out by Cols. Fidel and Raul Castro, Che Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos overthrow the puppet régime of Fulgencio Batista. The new government, which is no longer communist, puts an end to the well-ordered exploitation of the island which a group of US multinational corporations (Standard Oil, GM, ITT, GE, Sheraton, Hilton, United Fruit, East Indian Co.) has been carrying out for the last six years. Back home, these corporations convince President Eisenhower to overthrow the Castroites.
On 17 March 1960, President Eisenhower approves a "Program of Covert Operations Against The Castro Regime," comparable to George Tenet's "Matrix," although limited just to Cuba. Its goal is to "replace the Castro regime with another one, more faithful to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the United States, by means which avoid any appearance of US intervention." [Declassified CIA document dated 16 April 1960.]
On 17 April 1961, a brigade of Cuban exiles and mercenaries, more or less quietly trained by the CIA, attempts an invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The operation turns into a fiasco. President Kennedy, who just took office, refuses to send in the USAF to support the mercenaries. 1500 men are taken prisoner by Cuban authorities. Kennedy disavows the operation and dismisses CIA director Allen Dulles, adjunct director Charles Cabell, and stay-behind director Richard Bissell. He orders an internal investigation from his military advisor, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, but it's not followed up by any concrete measures. Kennedy wonders about the attitude of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who approved of the operation even though they knew it was doomed to failure [The Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Willard J. Webb and Ronald H. Cole, DOD, 1989. Swords and Plowshares, Maxwell Taylor, 1972].
Everything seems to have happened as if those generals had been trying to implicate the US in an open war against Cuba.
If President Kennedy disapproved of the CIA's methods and failures, he didn't bring into question the hostile politics of Washington toward the power in place at Havana. He creates a "Special Group (Augmented)" whose mission is to plan and carry out the anti-Castro struggle. This group is composed of his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy; his military advisor, Maxwell Taylor; National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy; Secretary of State Dean Rusk, assisted by an advisor, Alexis Johnson; Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, assisted by an advisor, Roswell Gilpatric; the new CIA director John McCone; and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer.
This "Special Group" plans a collection of secret actions assembled under the generic title "Operation Mongoose." In order to carry them out, operational coordination between the Dept of State, the DOD, and the CIA is assigned to Gen. Edward Lansdale (assistant to Secretary of Defense in charge of special operations, and under this title, director of the NSA). Meanwhile, at the CIA, an ad hoc group is put together, "Group W," led by William Harvey.
In April 1961, the US Army is faced with a serious crisis: Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, who created the Little Rock race riots before taking command of the infantry in Germany, is dismissed by President Kennedy [See our study "Secret Special Forces," in Les notes d'information du réseau Voltaire 235. For further details, see Edwin A. Walker and the Right Wing in Dallas, by Chris Cravens, South Texas State University, 1993]. He is accused of having developed a system of right-wing proselytization in the armed forces. He himself is a member of the John Birch Society and the True Knights of the KKK.
The Senate Foreign Affairs Committee opens an inquiry into the military far right. Hearings are held by Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), father of the future American VP. The senators suspect the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Lemnitzer, of taking part in the "Walker plot." [Since the end of the Korean War, Maj. Gen. Walker was convinced that the US government was engaging in a policy of giving up in the face of Communist progress. After having been relieved of his duties by Secretary of Defense McNamara, and having received a reprimand, he fomented a riot at the University of Mississippi to protest the hiring of a black professor. He was then pursued by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and arrested for seditious conspiracy, insurrection, and rebellion. Benefitting from the support of the conservative press, who designated him "The Kennedys' Political Prisoner," he was freed after he paid a $5000 fine. He was later to be found financing an OAS plot to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, then driving "Committee 8F" which is suspected in the JFK assassination.] Gore knows that Lemnitzer is a specialist in covert ops: in 1943, he personally ran the negotiations for bringing Italy back into the Allied fold against the Reich, then, in 1944, he and Allen Dulles conducted the secret negotiations with the Nazis at Ascona, Switzerland, preparing the surrender (Operation Sunrise) [The Secret Surrender, Allen Dulles, 1967]. He participated in the creation of the NATO stay-behind network, turning Nazi agents into spies against the USSR, and in the exfiltration of human-rights criminals in Latin America. But Gore did not manage to prove his responsibility in current events.
Secret correspondence of Gen. Lemnitzer, recently made public, shows that he conspired with the commander of US forces in Europe, Gen. Lauris Norstad, and other high-ranking officers, to sabotage Kennedy's policies.
Military extremists denounce Kennedy's refusal to intervene militarily in Cuba. They hold civilians at the CIA responsible for the bad planning of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and consider Kennedy a coward for having refused air support. To unfreeze the situation, they plan to give Kennedy a political pretext for military intervention. This plan, called "Operation Northwoods," gives rise to studies which are formalized by Brig. Gen. William H. Craig. It's presented to the "Special Group (Augmented)" by Gen. Lemnitzer himself on 13 March 1962. The meeting is held at the Pentagon, in the Secretary of Defense's office, from 2:30 to 7:30 pm. It goes very badly: McNamara rejects the plan outright, at which Gen. Lemnitzer becomes threatening. Six months of permanent hostility between the Kennedy administration and the Joint Chiefs of Staff follow, then Lemnitzer's dismissal and his nomination as head of US forces in Europe. Before leaving, the general gives the order to destroy all traces of the Northwoods project, but McNamara keeps a copy of the memo which had been given to him (see Appendix).
[The Operation Northwoods documents were first published in Australia by Jon Elliston (Psy War on Cuba: The Declassified History of US Anti-Castro Propaganda, Ocean Press, 1999) with no reaction at all from the US. They were used again by ABC News journalist James Bamford in his history of the NSA (Body of Secrets, Doubleday, 2001), arousing a lively commotion among historians.]
Operation Northwoods was supposed to convince the international community that Castro was irresponsible to the point of posing a threat to peace in the West. In order to do this, it was planned to orchestrate, then blame Cuba for, major damages suffered by the US. Here are some of the planned provocations:
One provocation was even more carefully looked into:
To carry out these operations would necessarily entail the death of numerous American citizens, both civilians and military. But it's precisely that human cost that would make them worthwhile actions to manipulate public opinion.
To John F. Kennedy, Lemnitzer is a hysterical anti-commie propped up by unscrupulous multinational corporations. The new president understands the warning sounded by his predecessor, Eisenhower, one year before, in his farewell address:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
[Eisenhower's Farewell Address, http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm]
For sure, John F. Kennedy resists Gens. Walker and Lemnitzer and their friends, and refuses to get American involved too far in a war of attrition against communism, in Cuba, in Laos, in Viet Nam, or elsewhere. He is assassinated on 22 November 1963 [JFK, Autopsy of a State Crime, William Reymond, Flammarion, 1998].
Gen. Lemnitzer retires in 1969. But in 1975, while the Senate opens investigations into the CIA's exact role in the Nixon administration, Gerald Ford, who has held the interim presidency since the Watergate scandal, asks Lemnitzer to participate in this investigation. After he had helped him bury the controversy, Ford comes to him once again, to ask him to take over the CPD (Committee on the Present Danger). This group is a CIA creation (the CIA director at the time was George Bush père). The CPD runs anti-Soviet campaigns. Among its administrators, one finds various CIA officials as well as Paul D. Wolfowitz (current adjunct Secretary of Defense, in charge of operations in Afghanistan). In parallel, Ford names Brig. Gen. William Craig, who conducted the initial studies for Operation Northwoods, as NSA Director. Gen. Lemnitzer dies on 12 November 1988.
In 1992, American public opinion on the Kennedy assassination is re-sparked after the release of the Oliver Stone film which showed the incoherencies of the official version. President Clinton orders that very numerous archives from the Kennedy era be declassified. In Defense Secretary McNamara's papers, the only surviving copy of the Northwoods project plan comes to light.
This historical precedent reminds us that an internal US plot, with plans to sacrifice American nationals within the scope of a terror campaign, is sadly not impossible. In 1962, JFK resisted his Chiefs of Staff's delirium. He probably paid for it with his life. We do not know what George W. Bush's reaction would have been had he been faced with the same situation.
Recent US history shows us that internal terrorism is an ongoing practise. Since 1996, the FBI has been publishing an annual report on internal acts of terror [Terrorism in US, FBI. See http://www.fbi.gov/publications/terror/terroris.pdf, also terr97.pdf, terror98.pdf, terror99.pdf]. They report four in 1995, eight in 1996, 25 in 1997, 17 in 1998, and 19 in 1999. They have mostly been carried out by military and paramilitary far-right groups.
The existence of a conspiracy within the US armed forces to carry out the 11 September attacks is attested to by the deposition of Lt. Delmart Edward Vreeland before the Canadian Supreme Court in Toronto. [This affair was the subject of four articles by Nick Pron in the Toronto Star: Did This Man Predict Sept. 11? (23 October); US Looks Into Inmate's Story, Jail Man Says He Tried To Warn About Attacks (25 October); Plot To Murder Judge May Never Have Existed (31 October); Was Embassy Worker Poisoned? (21 January 2002). The third of these also refers to testimony on the planned assassination of a magistrate. The police's turning around in this other affair seems to have been used to discredit Vreeland. Besides, Michael Ruppert, editor of From The Wilderness, who is in contact with Vreeland's attorneys, has posted several articles on this affair at http://www.cpovcia.com.]
Arrested for bank-card fraud, Lt. Vreeland defended himself by citing his belonging to US Naval Intelligence. He told the police that he had been to Russia collecting information about the assassination of Marc Bastien, a computer worker at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, and about the preparations for attacks in New York. After being assured that Marc Bastien hadn't been assassinated, but was dead of an overdose of antidepressants that he had taken while inebriated, the police dismissed Vreeland's statements as a pathetic attempt at excuses. He was put in jail.
On 12 August 2001, Vreeland sent a sealed note to prison authorities containing his testimony on the attacks which were to come. Canadian authorities did not consider it important. On 14 September, they opened the envelope and found a precise description of the attacks which had happened three days before in New York. Immediately contacting the Pentagon, they learned that Delmart "Mike" Vreeland had left the US Navy in 1986, because of his mediocre performance, and had never been involved with Naval Intelligence. The federal prosecutor dismissed Vreeland's statements, exclaiming in front of the Toronto Supreme Court: "Is this story possible? I wouldn't go so far as to say it's impossible, just that it is implausible."
The first new development: medical examiner Line Duchesne reviews diplomat Marc Bastien's cause of death and concludes that he was assassinated. Vreeland's statements regain credibility. The second new development, in front of a public session of the Toronto Supreme Court, 25 January 2002: Lt. Vreeland's lawyers, Rocco Galati and Paul Dlansky, make a phone call, with a speaker phone, to the Pentagon switchboard. In front of magistrates who were listening to the conversation, they obtain confirmation that their client was currently on active duty in the Navy. Besides that, when they ask to speak to his superiors, the operator connects them on a direct line to Naval Intelligence.
So, these attacks were known about by five intelligence services (German, Egyptian, French, Israeli, and Russian), by a Naval Intelligence officer like Vreeland, anonymous senders of warning messages to Odigo, to say nothing of the insider trading going on in the stock market. How far will the leaks spread? Where will the implications lead to?
Bruce Hoffman, VP of Rand Corporation, declared during his hearing in the House of Representatives that, by their magnitude, the attacks were "unimaginable." [http://www.rand.org/publications/CT/CT182/CT182.pdf] That's the indisputable opinion of the most-quoted expert. With an annual budget of $160 million, the Rand Corporation is the most important private research center for military strategy and organization in the world. It is the prestigious voice of the American military-industrial lobby. Presided over by James Thomson, among its administrators are Ann McLaughlin Korologos (former president of the Aspen Institute) and Frank Carlucci (president of the Carlyle Group). Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld were formerly administrators, as much as their official functions permitted. Zalmay Khalilzad was an analyst there.
Now, Bruce Hoffman is lying: in a conference at the US Air Force Academy last March (that is, six months before the attacks), he envisaged precisely that "unimaginable" scenario of 11 September [21st Century Terrorism, in The Terrorism Threat and US Government Response: Operational and Organizational Factors, USAF Academy, Institute for National Security Studies, March 2001. Hoffman's remarks are at http://www.usafa.af.mil/inss/foreword.htm]. Addressing an audience of high-ranking Air Force officers, he noted that "we are trying to prepare our forces against Al-Qaeda, the organization – or perhaps the movement – associated with bin Laden… Think for a moment about the bomb attack at the WTC in 1993. Now, consider that it is possible to bring down the North Tower onto the South Tower, killing 60,000 people… They will find other weapons, other tactics, and other means to destroy their targets. They have an obvious choice of weapons, drones [that is, remote-controlled aircraft]."
What prescience, right?
In order to calm the Republican Party's bellicose ardor, the Democrats accept, voting on the 2000 finance law, the setting up of a commission to assess US national security space management and organization. The commission delivers its report [Report of the Commission to Assess US National Security Space Management and Organization, http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/space20010111.html] on 11 January 2001, several days before its president, the Hon. Donald Rumsfeld, becomes the Bush administration's Secretary of Defense and leaves his seat on the Rand Corporation's board of directors. Eight of its twelve members are retired generals. All are partisans of the "missile defense shield," such that the 32 days of the commission's work weren't given over to an audit of the situation, but were instead used to look into arguments justifying a posteriori the common convictions of its members.
For the "Rumsfeld Commission," outer space is a military domain comparable to earth, sky, and sea. It ought to have its own branch of the military, the same as the Army, Air Force, and Navy. The US must occupy this territory and prevent any other power from establishing itself there. Thanks to this asymmetry of means, their military supremacy will be incontestable and unlimited.
The Rumsfeld Commission released ten propositions:
Besides going against the 1972 ABM treaty, this ambitious space-militarization program entails such reforms of American organization and strategy as to seem unworkable. That's why the Rumsfeld commission writes: "History is full of situations where we ignored the warnings and resisted change until an outside event, heretofore deemed 'improbable,' came along to force the hand of reticent bureaucracies. The question here is whether the US will have the wisdom to act responsibly and to reduce, as quickly as possible, its spatial vulnerability. Or whether, as has already been the case in the past, the only event capable of galvanizing the energies of the nation and forcing the US government to act, will be a destructive attack against the country and its populace, an 'outer-space Pearl Harbor.' We have been warned, but we are not on the alert."
For Rumsfeld and the Air Force generals, the events of 11 September constitute, in a way, a "divine surprise," to use the expression that the French fascists used when their defeat allowed them to reverse "The Beggar" and to grant full powers to Marshal Pétain.
On 11 September at 6:42 pm, Rumsfeld held a press conference at the Pentagon [DOD News Briefing on Pentagon Attack, http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Sep2001/t09112001_t0911sd.html]. To manifest American unity at this difficult moment, the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee joined him. There was no news from President Bush, and the world nervously awaited the US response. Now, in the middle of the conference, right in front of the international press, Rumsfeld took Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) to task:
Rumsfeld: Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress have voiced fear that you simply don't have enough money for the large increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for missile defense, and you fear that you'll have to dip into the Social Security funds to pay for it. Does this sort of thing convince you that an emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending, to dip into Social Security, if necessary, to pay for defense spending -- increase defense spending?
A fit of rage which could be interpreted as a confession.
[[END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN]]
[[END OF PART THREE]]
[[This document is part of the English translation of
"L'effroyable imposture."
[[ (c) 2002, Christopher Schroen.
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