Subject: Off Topic Former Special Forces Srgt. Stan
Goff on september 11
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 goat, and continues
this banality even as American
Airlines Flight
77conducts 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 scape-
goated 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
Strongly recommend,
for anyone who wants to find further background material on the issues herein
check out the websites
at
www.dieoff.org,
www.emperors-clothes.com,
www.globalcircle.com.
==
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