F. William Engdahl -- September 11, 2001

F. William Engdahl -- September 11, 2001

Excerpt of Chapter TEN from the book ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’

The call by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others immediately after September 11, 2001 to launch a military assault on Iraq, rather than go after the alleged mastermind, Osama bin Laden, led many astute investigators to ask whether the attacks of September 11, 2001 were in fact the “new Pearl Harbor” the authors of the PNAC report had been praying for.

A growing number of critical citizens began to question the accusations against an elusive Osama bin Laden as mastermind of 19 Arabicspeaking terrorists. The idea that they could commandeer, with only primitive boxcutters, four sophisticated Boeing commercial jets and redirect three of them, successfully, as apparently poorly-trained amateur pilots in air maneuvers which seasoned pilots claimed were near impossible, was creating growing disbelief among ordinary Americans in the official US Government version of the events.

What became clearer in the months after 9-11 was that the attack was clearly used immediately by the Bush Administration, at the very least, as the pretext to launch a war on Islam under the name of a ‘War on Terror,’ the ‘Clash of Civilizations,’ which Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington outlined in the early 1990’s.

Many senior international intelligence experts began to put forward the possibility that the attacks of September 11, 2001 had been a “False Flag” operation.

Eckehardt Werthebach, former president of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, BundesVerfassungsschutz, told the press just after 9/11 that, “the deathly precision and the magnitude of planning behind the attacks would have needed years of planning.”

Such a sophisticated operation, Werthebach said, would require the “fixed frame” of a state intelligence organization, something not found in a “loose group” of terrorists like the one allegedly led by Mohammed Atta while he studied in Hamburg.

Many people would have been involved in the planning of such an operation and Werthebach pointed to the absence of leaks as further indication that the attacks were “state organized actions.” 46

Andreas von Bülow served on a German Parliamentary Commission which oversaw the three branches of the German secret service while a member of the Bundestag or German parliament from 1969 to 1994. Von Bülow told American Free Press he believed that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, and the CIA were behind the 9/11 terror attacks. 47

He believed the planners used corrupt “guns for hire” such as Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist who von Bülow called “an instrument of Mossad,” high-ranking Stasi (former East German secret service) operatives, or Libyan agents who organize terror attacks using dedicated people, for example Palestinian and Arab “freedom fighters.” 48

Both Werthebach and von Bülow said the lack of an open and official investigation, like Congressional hearings, into the events of September 11 was incomprehensible. US Vice President Cheney dismissed calls for Yoda’s ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ 207 such an independent inquiry, insisting it would ‘detract’ from the War on Terror.

Only in 2002, a full year later, did Congress, and not the White House, establish an official inquiry to investigate the events surrounding September 11, 2001. The two co-chairmen of the “joint oversight hearings,” however were Florida Senator Bob Graham, and Florida Congressman Porter Goss, a former CIA agent who was later to become George W. Bush’s handpicked choice to head CIA. Graham and Goss, chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, respectively, chose to conduct their inquiry “behind closed doors.” 49

There was little reason to expect anything approaching a neutral or honest investigation from an inquiry headed by Graham and Goss. As one Canadian researcher noted, its final report, issued in July 2003, omitted crucial links between the alleged Al Qaeda hijackers and the Pakistan ISI secret intelligence services, which enjoyed intimate ties to both Taliban and Al Qaeda forces. According to the Washington Post:

On the morning of September 11, Goss and Graham were having breakfast with a Pakistani general named Mahmud Ahmed — the soon-to-be-sacked head of Pakistan’s intelligence service. Ahmed ran a spy agency notoriously close to Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.50 (Washington Post, 18 May 2002).

Canadian award-winning researcher, Michel Chossudovsky observed:

While the Joint inquiry has collected mountains of intelligence material, through careful omission, the numerous press and intelligence reports in the public domain (mainstream media, alternative media, etc), which confirm that key members of the Bush Administration were involved in acts of political camouflage, have been carefully removed from the Joint inquiry's hearings.51

German Minister of Justice, Horst Ehmke, PhD had coordinated the German secret services directly under Prime Minister Willy Brandt in the 1970s. When Ehmke saw the televised images from September 11, he said it looked like a “Hollywood production…Terrorists could not have carried out such an operation with four hijacked planes without the support of a secret service.”52 Ehmke did not want to point to any particular agency.

Even starker in his assessment of the events of September 11 in the United States was one of the most senior of Russian military figures, a veteran of Cold War methods, General Leonid Ivashov. In a speech delivered in an international conference in Brussels in early 2006, Ivashov declared:

…[T]errorism is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its "godfather". The main target of the world elite is the historical, cultural, traditional and natural reality; the existing system of relations among states; the world national and state order of human civilization and national identity….

Terrorism is the weapon used in a new type of war. At the same time, international terrorism, in complicity with the media, becomes the manager of global processes. It is precisely the symbiosis between media and terror, which allows modifying international politics and the exiting reality.

The Russian terrorism expert went on to look at the details of 9/11:

In this context, if we analyze what happened on September 11, 2001, in the United States, we can arrive at the following conclusions: 1. The organizers of those attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the world order and who had the means necessary to finance the operation. The political conception of this action matured there where tensions emerged in the administration of financial and other types of resources. We have to look for the reasons of the attacks in the coincidence of interests of the big capital at global and transnational levels, in the circles that were not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its direction. Unlike traditional wars, whose conception is determined by generals and politicians, the oligarchs and politicians submitted to the former were the ones who did it this time.

2. Only secret services and their current chiefs ­ or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations ­ have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude... Planning and carrying out an operation on this scale is extremely complex….

3. Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation.

The September 11 operation modified the course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the planet's natural resources, the world information network and the financial flows. This operation also favored the US economic and political elite that also seeks world dominance.53

In Ivashov’s view, the use of the term ‘international terrorism’ had the following goals:

Hiding the real objectives of the forces deployed all over the world in the struggle for dominance and control; Turning the people to a struggle of undefined goals against an invisible enemy;

Destroying basic international norms and changing concepts such as: aggression, state terror, dictatorship or movement of national liberation;

Depriving peoples of their legitimate right to fight against aggressions and to reject the work of foreign intelligence services;

 Solving economic problems through a tough military rule using the war on terror as a pretext.54

Some held George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld directly responsible for September 11. Stanley Hilton, the former Chief of Staff of Senator Bob Dole, a Washington attorney, represented families of victims of September 11. He sued President George Bush for involvement in 9/11. In a September 10, 2004 radio interview on the Alex Jones Radio Show, Hilton stated:

…[W]e are suing Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, (FBI chief) Mueller for complicity in personally not only allowing 9/11 to happen, but in ordering it…more evidence that I have been adducing over a year and a half has made it so obvious to me that this is now without any doubt a government operation and that it amounts to the biggest act of treason and mass murder in American history.

Hilton was convinced that the four attack planes were “controlled by remote control.” He explained further:

As I stated previously a year and a half ago, there’s a system called Cyclops. There is a computer chip in the nose of the plane and it enables the ground control to disable the pilot’s control of the plane and to control it and to fly it directly into those towers.55

 Attorney Hilton would never win his case, and the world would likely never obtain the necessary evidence — especially since the Bush Administration vehemently refused to name a truly independent commission of inquiry into 9/11 and had allowed most of the vital evidence, including especially the steel pillars of the World Trade Center towers, to be immediately shipped overseas for scrap. Bush’s ally, the media-anointed “Hero of 9/11,” New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, even issued orders prohibiting New York Firefighters from attempting to recover the remains of their dead colleagues from the rubble, arresting several firemen who defied the order.

A ‘New Pearl Harbor’?

Hours after the attacks on the New York World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 President George W. Bush told the world, “We have been attacked like we haven’t since Pearl Harbor.” The White House quickly dropped further reference to Pearl Harbor. In the context of the World Trade Center attacks, Bush’s comment provoked serious journalists to go back to the September, 2000 Project for a New American Century report, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” In that report, the authors — including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — had argued for a major transformation of America’s defense posture. Such a “transformation,” they wrote, “is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.” [Emphasis added, w.e.].

The reference to Pearl Harbor was a poor use of words by the President that led to too many embarrassing questions about how much the Bush Administration knew prior to September 11.

Whoever ultimately was responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks, the undeniable result was a military hysteria and defense mobilization not seen in the United States since the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 that brought the United States into World War II against Germany, Japan and Italy.

That original bombing attack by Japan at Pearl Harbor, as 1946 classified US Congressional Hearings established, was known well in advance by President Roosevelt and a handful of top US military officials, days before the US fleet was bombed. It could have been avoided, and thousands of American lives saved. Roosevelt cold-bloodedly decided to “let it happen” to bring the United States into a war that he and his top planners had calculated they would win. It was the beginning shot in a war to establish what Henry Luce immediately termed “The American Century.”

In 1946, at the end of the War, a Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack of the US Congress, chaired by Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, heard a report from the US Army’s Pearl Harbor Board. It was classified “Top Secret” and only declassified decades later. 56

The report was a bombshell indictment of the Roosevelt Administration, Roosevelt himself and General MacArthur, the great Army “hero” of the Pacific war. The attacks on Pearl Harbor and on the US Army Air Force bomber fleet by Japan in 1941 cost 2,403 American dead, 1,178 wounded, as well as the loss of 18 battleships and 188 airplanes. As early as November 26, two weeks before the attack, Roosevelt had been urgently and personally alerted to an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt responded by stripping the fleet at Pearl Harbor of air defenses, to insure Japanese success. Churchill’s November 26 message to Roosevelt was the only document in their correspondence which has to this day never been made public on grounds of “national security.”

The devastating attack on Pearl Harbor gave Roosevelt the cause to wage the war he so urgently sought. It was a war to create a new American Empire. The American military machine lost no time in responding to the attack of September 11, 2001 as a “new Pearl Harbor.” It was as if a dream came true for the American military industrial complex and its backers within the Administration and Congress.57

The attacks of September 11, 2001 laid the ground for what the Bush Administration solemnly declared would be a Global War on Terror, an amorphous, undefined war against potential “enemies” in every land, every village, every area of potential combat from cyberspace to sea lanes. It was a made-to-order argument or pretext for a massive scale-up of military spending and a global projection of the Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance.

Whatever the ultimate truth about the events of 9/11, the American power elite clearly intended to use its global military dominance to extend the bounds of its power and influence to the entire planet after September 2001, much as the blueprint of the PNAC’s September 2000 report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, had demanded. It was to be an increasingly desperate bid to prop up a crumbling empire that, like ancient Rome, the Ottoman Empire, Czarist Russia and the British Empire before it, had already rotted far too deeply from within. 

Endnotes:

46 Christopher Bollyn, Intel Expert Says 9-11 Looks Like A Hollywood Show, 22 March 2004, accessed in www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BOL403A.html.

47 Christopher Bollyn, “Euro Intel Experts Dismiss ‘War on Terrorism’ as Deception,” American Free Press, December 4, 2001 (http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/911deception.html)

48 Ibid.

49 James Risen, “Trace of Terror: The Congressional Hearings; Rifts Plentiful as 9/11 Inquiry Begins Today,” The New York Times, June 4, 2002. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/us/trace-terror-congressional-hearings-rifts-plentiful-9-11-inquiry-begins-today.html

50 Richard Leiby, “A Cloak But No Dagger,” Washington Post, May 18, 2002. http://www.takeoverworld.info/Goss,_Ahmad-WAPO__A_Cloak_But_No_Dagger.htm

51 Michel Chossudovsky, The 9/11 Joint Inquiry chairmen are in "conflict of interest: Mysterious September 11 Breakfast Meeting on Capitol Hill, August 4, 2003, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO308C.html.

52 Christopher Bollyn, “The German Secret Service Speaks of 9/11,” OpEdNews, June 15, 2007 https://www.opednews.com/populum/page.php?f=20genera_christop_070612_the_german_secret_se.htm

53 Leonid Ivashov (General, ret.), International Terrorism does not exist, Axis for Peace Conference, Brussels, January17, 2006, in  http://physics911.net/ivashov/

54 Ibid.

55 Stanley Hilton, Transcript: Alex Jones Interviews Stanley Hilton, The Alex Jones Show, September 13, 2004, in http://www.serendipity.li/wot/hilton_interview.htm

56 Alben W. Barkley, Senator, et al, Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Report of the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, 79th Congress, 2nd Session, US Senate, Document No. 244, US Government Printing Office, July, 1946. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/congress/Vol40.pdf

57 Mark E. Willey, Pearl Harbor: Mother of All Conspiracies