| Stan Goff Interview
posted Nov.5.2001 A deeper look at Events from Sept 11th to the War and the hidden agenda by Stan Goff. Goff worked at Jungle Operations, Counter-Terrorist Operations, Nuclear Weapons Protection and other Special Operatons. His insight gives us a frightening view of America and our future. The following is a transcript of an interview conducted with Stan Goff on October 24, 2001 regarding his article "The So-Called Evidence is a Farce".- Mike McCormick - talkingsticktv@yahoo.com * The original article The So-Called Evidence Is a Farce is below the interview. for more work in the same vein see
Mike McCormick: I was hoping you could go through
and reiterate everything or a lot of what you had covered in your article
"The So-Called Evidence is a Farce".
Stan Goff: Yeah, let me kind of preface
that a bit because the way that thing got started was that I was participating
in a list and I sent that to the discussion list and someone from the discussion
list forwarded to someone and then it got forwarded to someone else and
now the thing is showing up like in Pravda and places like that, it took
off. It wasn't really meant for public consumption but I still stand by
everything I said. I think that while it's important to emphasize that
there's a lack of credibility sort of built into the structure of the official
story on this and there's a deep lack of credibility related or not to
whether this is a pre-existing agenda which I think that it's pretty clear
that it was, I don't want people to think that I'm trying to advance some
specific conspiracy theory. I think that's really important to say at the
outset. I don't know what happened on Sept. 11th and I think it's important
to know, but it's even more important to know what is this agenda that's
being pursued because I think it's an extremely dangerous agenda and I
think it can be traced all the way back to as early as 1973 in the first
oil shock with the OPEC embargo. So that's my preface.
MM: Ok. So I think some of the strength
of your, if I can call it an article now since its...
SG: Yeah it's sort of turned into one.
MM: Part of that came from your experience
with the military, that you are in fact what many would call an authority
and I'm wondering if you could give us a brief bio of your experience with
the military.
SG: Well, I retired in February 1996. I
went into the Army in January 1970, did a tour in Vietnam, came back and
did a tour in the 82nd Airborne Division. Took a little break in service.
Went back in again. Worked as a Cav Scout for a while then went to work
at 2nd Ranger Battalion. That was the first of three Ranger assignments.
Went to work at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama. Went to
and the worked at the Counter-Terrorist Outfit that's sort of popularly
known as Delta. Left there and went to work as a military science instructor
at West Point for three semesters. Had another short break where I instructed
SWAT teams as a training captain at the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Facility in
Oak Ridge Tennessee. Went back in the Army on active duty again from a
reserve status and ran a Ranger platoon of First Ranger Battalion in Savannah
Georgia. Went from there to Special Forces qualification course, entered
Seventh Special Forces. Did a good deal of work in Latin America with them.
After Seventh Group I returned back working for the Regimental staff at
75th Ranger Regiment, participated in the Somalia Operation. Came back
from there, was promoted sort of out of that position and back into 3rd
Special Forces where I participated in the Haiti Operation. Overall that
stuff, there were eight conflict areas with a great deal of concentration
for a while there in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also some experience
elsewhere in Africa and Asia and so forth. But primarily that work was
in the Special Operations field which as you know, they're busy boys right
now. They're doing most of the heavy lifting from what I can gleam in Afghanistan
right now. In fact, one of the big commanders out there, Frank Tony, if
I've heard correctly, was B Company Commander in 2nd Ranger Battalion in
1979-80 when I was stationed there with A Company, right next door. He
wasn't very well thought of then, he was thought as an inveterate brown-noser
and it's just the same old folks showing up, they've just been promoted.
MM: And from what little we can get from
the media currently, do you think they are accurately portraying what is
happening with...?
SG: (laughter) The media has never accurately
portrayed a military operation as long as I've been involved with this
stuff. I've never seen an accurate portrayal to this day, not one. But
then again I've never seen an accurate portrayal by the military public
affairs officers either. The public is kept pretty much in the dark about
how military operations are really conducted and what may be going on now
and I think we are all being kept deeply in the dark about Afghanistan
right now. I strongly suspect that the collateral damage as they call it
is far worse than they are going to allow anyone to know. And it's a dumb
operation. It's just not a very smart operation in a lot of ways. I think
it's comparable in many respects to Somalia.
MM: How so? How's it similar?
SG: Well, I'll have to give you a little
background on this. When I was with Special Forces, we were part of a foreign
policy doctrine called IDAD, which is Internal Defense and Development.
Special Forces basically had four primary kind of missions. Some of them
were combat missions but a lot of them were advice and assistance kinds
of missions. That's changed. There's a much stronger doctrinal and technological
emphasis now on something called OOTW or Operations Other Than War and
that's got some sinister implications for us at home because it really
is part of this whole sort of merger between police and military forces.
The problem in Somalia and the problem here is related to a military that's
still predicated on a structure that was developed out of the Cold War
where we were facing off against the Warsaw Pact. Everything was designed
to stop the Russians at the Fulda Gap. Afghanistan is a far different reality.
When I went with the task force to capture Mohammed Fara Aidid, we had
all these gadgets, the most technologically sophisticated Special Operations
Force probably ever assembled up to that time and that's why people were
stunned in the United States when all of a sudden that task force comes
home with its dead and wounded and its tail between its legs and its been
defeated by this feudal warlord. There's been all kinds of nonsense written
about why this happened, how this happened, you know there sort of this
perennial claim that politicians keep soldiers from exerting the necessary
force to get the job done. It's the same thing they said about Vietnam.
It's really a military rationalization, it's not real. Military success
is not a function of force, or force alone. It's not a function of geography
and weather alone. It's not a function of technology alone. It's not a
function of intelligence alone. It's not a function of political context
alone. You see it's a combination of all these things. Then you throw into
the equation a host of all sorts of other uncontrollable variables, just
accidents and there's no shortage of fools in the military. It's a bureaucracy
and so it sort of breeds these folks. They have a real strong vested interest
in mystifying military operations for the public because they want the
public to leave it to the experts and ignore their dishonesty, their corruption
and accept their little BS excuses for their failures. It's a very contagious
thing and I think it's actually infected George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld
and all these other would-be generalissimos that are running the United
States right now. What they think they can do is they think they can win
in Afghanistan but again going back to Somalia, Afghanistan is similar
in the following ways. Afghanistan is backward, it's tribalistic. It's
coherent as a nation only because they've got a boundary around it that
says this is a political geographic definition but within that geographic
definition there is nothing that resembles a nation. The Taliban is one
of many many groups, made in the USA by the way. But there's not one singular
cogent military force for the U.S. to focus its efforts against and that's
a violation of a principle of war called objective. There's a host of factions.
They're all very well armed thanks to the United States because they armed
them to topple a socialist regime there years ago and they change alliances
down there like you and I change underwear. Its a country that physically
divided by some very forbidding and mountainous terrain. There is no infrastructure.
You can't attack a society's infrastructure if it doesn't exist and so
it nullifies the kind of strategy they used against Iraq for instance.
So there's no clear enemy and without a clear enemy there's no clear decisive
objective. I'm speaking strictly in a morally neutral way here. A military
task force can't conquer a nation if there's not really a nation there.
So you take this situation and you got all these different warlords and
factions and you can introduce a couple dozen Stinger missiles or 500 assault
rifles or like in Somalia 200 RPGs and what that does, the introduction
of a comparatively small amount of hardware, can instantly shift the entire
balance of power in a region and completely change the character of the
battlefield. Our military is not versatile or agile enough to respond to
that and moreover there's still no clearly defined objectives. So just
from the point of view of the military it's crazy. The Taliban, they claim
they have 10,000 or there about Afghani Arabs which are not Afghanis at
all. Bin Laden for instance is a Saudi. His daddy is a big construction
magnate with connections to the Bush family back in Saudi Arabia. 38% of
Afghanistan is Pashtun and even the Pashtun ethnicity is subdivided between
the Ghilazi and Durrani and 25% of Afghanistan are Tajiks. Their loyalties
are divided between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Then the Hazara who are
Shites constitute 19% and they are kind of prone to favor the Iranians
and then there are Uzbeks. Then you've got a Sunni majority among the Muslims
but you've got a Shite minority that's fairly significant. Most of the
folks there speak a form of Farsi called Dari. That's a Pashtun dialect
but you have Turkic dialects, there's about 30 minor languages alone. Then
they say they are going to make an alliance with this Northern Alliance,
it's not even an alliance. The only thing that those people are allied
around
is their opposition to the Taliban. When they're not allied against the
Taliban then they spend as much time blood letting among themselves as
they do doing anything else and in fact they've been very opposed to Pashtun
nationalism in the past and the Pashtun have a much closer ties to Pakistan...
You see what I'm saying? This is extremely complex and it's dynamic. It
changes from day to day and there's no way that a great power, unquote,
like the United States can go in there and achieve some sort of a military
resolution to the problem. Journalists have called it a quagmire, you know
mission creep and all that stuff. To me it's like if anybody remembers
their youth and Uncle Remus stories I think about tar babies. That's what's
going on there. This is going to be far more problematic than Vietnam from
a military standpoint.
MM: So you mentioned earlier that some
of the real reasons that what we're doing in Afghanistan date back to 1973.
Could you go into that?
SG: Well I think that first of all we just
have to be clear that this is about oil. When you look at the question
of oil it becomes historically kind of complex but I'll simplify it as
much as I can sort of what I've found out studying this in detail. Now
you've got to look at oil production first of all as something that's finite.
The Neo-Malthusians now are making some very good points and I don't necessarily
agree with their analysis at a political level but certainly from a physical
level they are saying that oil is about to run out and I think that's demonstrable
with the data that's available. Oil as an extractable resource follows
something called a Hubbert curve. Once it peaks in production then it begins
a very precipitous decline, forever, because it's a finite, it's a physically
finite resource. But it doesn't peak in production in all the same regions,
so you've got aggregate world production peaking at one point and then
you have different regions peaking at different points along the way. This
really changes the kind of power dynamics that exist between these different
regions. In 1973 we got hammered by an oil embargo that was primarily the
work of the Gulf States through OPEC but the Gulf States to this day still
have the largest repository of recoverable oil. Especially Saudi Arabia
but also Iran and also Iraq and now some people believe and some people
doubt but there's a fair amount in the Caspian basin in Turkmenistan and
Kazakhstan and around there. Right now the world is consuming somewhere
around 75 million barrels a day. World oil production as an aggregate is
peaking sometime between now and next year and then it'll begin a permanent
decline aggregate worldwide. The problem is demand is going up so that
around 2010 our demand is going to be 100 million barrels a day which means
the demand is going to go up 25 million barrels a day between now and the
end of this particular decade and the problem is even if everything that
they're trying to do right now in increasing the recovery of oil in the
Gulf States and the Caspian has a potential only with the introduction
of around a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure would recover only
around 15 additional million barrels a day which means they still have
a 10 million barrel deficit in terms of what their demand is and what's
actually available. Now that's not the real trick. The real trick here
is if you divide the world up, just for the sake of argument into OPEC
which is primarily Gulf States. Venezuela is also a member but we're just
talking about Gulf States and we'll call them OPEC. Then you look at all
the non-OPEC and I just call them NOPEC for the sake of argument. NOPEC
production peaked years ago. It peaked in the last decade. It's on the
way down so NOPEC is losing its relative power to control the market and
NOPEC is something that the United States was very heavily invested in
for the purpose of offsetting the potential power of the Gulf States as
oil producers. But now OPEC is on the rise until 2010, so between now and
2010, OPEC, every day that goes by gains more power to control the market,
the world market for petroleum. The only thing that attenuates that problem
for the U.S. right now is that after 1973 they began a very aggressive
program of offering all sorts of perquisites to the Saudis and convinced
them to invest their petroleum money in U.S. financial instruments and
so the dollar became the petrodollar you see. But when the dollar became
the petrodollar it also became the foundation currency for world trade
and that's one reason the dollar has maintained its strength is because
it's what's oil is traded in. The Saudi regime that protects our interests
there, right now, and some of the other regimes in the region who would
potentially protect our interests are in a lot of trouble. There's a great
deal of social unrest and when you look at them attacking Osama Bin Laden
in a place like Afghanistan you have to wonder since Osama Bin Laden represents
right now and I think represents very well strictly from the point of view
of whether they have influence or not, this not Islam but Islamism, the
radical fundamentalism that's taken root in really a sea of declining social
conditions over there. Because the Saudi standard of living and the standard
of living throughout the region as oil profits have gone down and as corruption
has rooted itself further and further in these regimes has created again
this ocean of potentially 100 million people whose lives are getting worse
all the time and this is really fertile ground for something like this
Islamism, this radical fundamentalism to take root. So Osama Bin Laden
in a sense is really the potential opposition in a place like Saudi Arabia
and Saudi Arabia is the prize. It is the prize. Whoever controls Saudi
Arabia controls oil worldwide and Bin Laden said himself a couple of years
ago at a public interview that he was going to raise the price of oil to
$144 a barrel. Now I don't know where that number came from or why it was
that arbitrary and specific but at $50 a barrel U.S. power dissolves. Our
stock market crashes. So they've got some real concerns and they also have
some very specific concerns as individuals or the members of this administration
do because their also heavily invested in oil, most of them. This trillion
dollars of potential infrastructure going into the Middle East, North Africa
and Central Asia is something that Halliburton Oil, Dick Cheney's old company
very well may be contracted to construct. I've got about six inches deep
worth of research over here and I don't want to bore listeners with all
the details but there's more here than meets the eye.
MM: I don't think you're boring us at all
with the details. So can you make the connection to potentially the benefits
of getting Afghanistan under control for the extraction of oil?
SG: I think it's a pipe dream. I don't
think they can get Afghanistan under control. What I've come to believe
is that really the U.S.'s ability to dominate the entire planet is unraveling.
This is just part of a historical evolution that is at some point inevitable
and I think it's about to happen. I think what they're doing now is not
something they're doing out of a position of strength but out of a position
of desperation and panic. These are very panicked kind of moves in a sort
of broad overall view of things which makes them exceedingly dangerous.
I think historically we can go back and see that when big capital gets
in trouble and the market's not working for them anymore they have to find
a way, cause right now there is a worldwide production over-capacity that's
created a recession that's about to go deep and about to go long and one
of the ways that they've traditionally gotten themselves out of that is
to liquidate a bunch of that capital and the best way to liquidate capital
real fast is war. That's the way they correct the problem they use non-market
mechanisms to correct for a fallen rate of profit within a market economy.
And I think what's even more dangerous is we are looking at this huge imperial
power that's the United States right now and they're trying to control
everything at once and their empire is beginning to unravel on them and
I think what is particularly dangerous for people like me and probably
people like y'all and a lot of your listeners is that in the process of
doing this they're going to have to exercise more and more despotic measures
at home to step on resistance and so I think we're really in very serious
and immediate danger of an emergence of a form of fascism in the United
States. And I think John Ashcroft at the helm of the Justice Dept. is not
a particularly great thing and I think if people take a close look at the
kinds of initiatives he's involved in right now in this bizarre Orwellian
sounding The Office of Homeland Security with Tom Ridge of all people.
These are very disturbing developments. I think one of the reactions that
the public had to the events of Sept. 11th and it's a very sensible and
understandable reaction is this incredible sense of a loss of security
and a sense of endangerment. That's being sort of demagogically played
out by this opportunistic administration but I think what people need to
understand and if we are going to appeal to the public at large about what
their interests are I think that what's going on right now, the policies
that are being pursued by the de facto Bush administration are policies
that are contrary to our security and in fact a threat to our long term
security and it's just an attempt to consolidate a citadel of power for
a handful of the elite in this country at the expense of everyone else
and it's only a matter of time before they turn on us too. Because this
is not a crisis that can be overcome. Oil is running out in the long term
and we have 6 to 7 billion people living on the planet right now that thoroughly
depend on this one resource that's not just a regular commodity. It's the
life blood of the entire global capitalist system and it's going to be
cut off and it's going to be cut off by nature it's not going to be cut
off by us but in the process I think again that you'll see a retrenchment
of power and it's that retrenchment that I think is extremely dangerous.
MM: Can you go into some more specifics
of how the current policies that the Bush administration is following are
a threat to our security?
SG: Oh my goodness, well start with the
notion of going over what I think is really the beginning of a war of extermination
among a 100 million Muslim people. That don't strike me as something very
secure. If they wanted to find a good way to go out there and manufacture
new terrorists they're going about it exactly the right way. This unilateralism
and this willingness to go over there and drop bombs on Afghani civilians
which they are doing. That's exactly why they've cut the media off. But
I think there's also some real geostrategic issues. They are introducing
a much higher level of tension now between the Pakistanis and the Indians
who've been on the brink of nuclear war with one another already. And I
think within a couple of years when they begin what's gonna be inevitably
the attempt to break up Uzbekistan and Turkminestan and to pull them away
from the orbit of the Russians I think that's going to create another problem.
The Russians are working with us right now but that's short term. And I
think domestically and again I go back to this doctrine of Operations Other
Than War (OOTW), worldwide this recession is going to kick in and create
problems in the center, in the industrialized nations, but also in the
periphery. And I think they've been very alarmed by the growth of this
anti-globalization movement you know that people have seen most recently
in Genoa but before that in Quebec and Seattle. These things are very disturbing
I think to the power elite right now and I think, we've seen it already
over time, there's this closer and closer relationship and blurring of
the lines between the military and police and I mean I participated in
this. In the early eighties I was actually involved as an active duty military
in training the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. They were just "Woofo" SWAT,
Washington Field Office SWAT, at the time, so we were militarizing them
and at the same time they started doing operations with Special Forces
and the Marines augmenting the Border Patrol. So there was already in progress
this developmental trajectory that was beginning to merge the roles of
the police and the military. And I think what we're seeing is worldwide
especially under the influence of the United States. I think there is an
hallucination, out there, of the Pax Americana, you know, and what they're
developing now, is a military and police doctrine for urban civil war.
And for us that means in the short term that they are developing a doctrine
for severe population control. I don't know about any one else, but that
don't make me feel anymore secure. (chuckles). That makes me feel very
insecure. Because it's only a short step before people start getting thrown
in jail for what they believe in again. I think we're moving toward the
reintroduction of something similar to the Smith Act in this country right
now.
MM: What was that?
SG: The Smith Act was finally declared
unconstitutional, but only after people spent like a decade in jail. That's
back in the Post WWII. That's part of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon.
They introduced something called the Smith Act. Ah, rounded up people who
belong to socialist organizations threw them all in jail, for the crime
of thinking. They did absolutely nothing wrong, and they just put them
in jail for their beliefs. I don't think we are but a hop skip and a jump
away from that right now.
MM: Well especially with this week where
I believe the FBI is now seeking changing the laws so they will be allowed
to torture people.
SG: Yeah. Did you see that? Or if they
can't torture them here, they'll ship them overseas to someone who can.
You know, the people need to be paying attention. Stop waving that flag
for about five minutes and go take a real close look at what's going on
because this has nothing to do with patriotism. I care about my country.
Heck, I was born and raised here, you know. Members of my family are American
citizens. So it's not a question of this thing trying to equate the notion
of caring about your country with supporting the asinine, dangerous, opportunistic
policies of an illegitimate administration. I don't buy it. It's not the
same thing. I will never support the Bush Administration. I don't care
what they do, because first of all they weren't elected. People seemed
to have forgotten that. And that's why I say, man, you know, what's the
ol' saying, cui bono, who benefits?
MM: Go into that some more if you would
cause again in your email that you sent out that somehow turned into, through
a mass circulation, turned into a somewhat famous article now. You talked
about how many people in the current Bush Administration have connections
to oil.
SG: Oh my goodness, (chuckles), Okay, well
you know. Start with Bush. Start with the de facto president right now.
He was the CEO of Harken Energy. That is his own little company, you know.
As it turns out, he wasn't very good at it. You know, his dad, was an oil
man. So you've got two generations in oil right there. Okay. And his dad
was also you know the former President, the former Vice-President, the
director of Central Intelligence. George Herbert Walker Bush is on the
board of Carlyle Group. Carlyle Group is right now a $12 billion dollar
equity company, but it's heavily invested in all kinds of things, including
oil and it's also I think 11th or 12th whatever, biggest defense contractors
in the country right now. It's getting very incestuous. And in fact, Carlyle
put Bush junior on the board of one of its subsidiaries, which is Cater
Air. A little shuttle service, a little puddle jumper service. Sort of
as a sop to dad. The new ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert Jordan, is
a Dallas lawyer and an old Bush booster. Jordan works for a Baker Botts.
That's a firm with offices in Riyadh. And Baker Botts represents Carlyle
Group over there. And the Baker in Baker Botts is James Baker, who was
Secretary of State for George Herbert Walker Bush, but he is also the guy
that engineered the whole Florida coup d'etat, in the 2000 election. He
was the midwife of that little venture. Some of the other folks
in Carlyle, Fidel Ramos, former Chief of the Philippines. Park Tae Joon
of South Korea. John Major. Everybody remember John Shalikashvili, former
chairman of the Joint Chiefs? And you can go back with the Bush family.
Prescott Bush, Rockefellers, Duponts, Standard Oil, Morgans, Fords, all
these other folks were anti-Semites and anti-Communists way back. They
also actually financed the rise to power of Adolph Hitler. They financed
it. I mean, that's a historical fact. It's irrefutable. And Prescott Bush
did business with the Nazis all the way up to 1942 until he was censured
by the United States under the Trading with the Enemy Act. And after the
War, he turned right around and ran for Congress in Connecticut and won.
This is an interesting family. Anyway, Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton
Oil. Got $34 million before he took office in stock options from Halliburton.
As the CEO, Cheney, and I'm looking at my notes, oversaw $23.8 billion
dollars in oil industry contracts to Iraq alone. Now this is interesting,
because Cheney found the loopholes in the embargo on Iraq. Now the attack
on Iraq was done when Cheney was the Secretary of Defense. He stepped down
as Secretary of Defense and turned right around and became the CEO of Halliburton,
took advantage of the loopholes and went back there and made $23.8 billion
dollars in Iraq by rebuilding the infrastructure that we bombed out of
existence. Halliburton is also involved with the Russian mob. They've got
sort of two things going on. One is oil and the other is drug trafficking.
Halliburton is a story all by itself. Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
This man has no diplomatic credentials. He was the former chairman of Joint
Chiefs of Staff and all of sudden he is in charge of the entire diplomatic
corps of the United States. That's interesting just by itself. He has cash
holdings or stock holdings in a number of defense contractors. Tony Prinicipi,
Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Lockheed Martin, defense contractor. The
biggest defense contractor in the world. Andrew Card, Chief of Staff. .
General Motors. Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England. General Dynamics.
Secretary of the Airforce, James Roche, Northrup Grummond.. Secretary of
the Army, General Thomas White retired. Enron Energy. These folks are (chuckles)
all defense contractors or oil people. The whole bunch of them are. Donald
Rumsfeld is Secretary of Defense. What people don't realize is he is also
the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. They get big defense contracts.
But he is also with General Signal Corporation, a defense contractor. And
interestingly enough, he is also heavily invested in biotech, which is
probably gonna make a killing here pretty soon with whatever Anthrax vaccines.
Cheney and I've got a picture of Cheney and Rumsfeld in May 2000 at the
Russian-American Business Leaders Forum together. Arms around each other,
and smiling. Dick Armitage. Deputy Secretary of Defense, he's a guy like
me, he's a former special ops guy, Seal. He had to leave the Reagan Administration
because he was up to his neck in Iran contra drug problems. And now he's
working directly with the Russian Mafia. And he is also a board member
of Carlyle. Remember that? Chief of Carlyle is Mr. Carlucci, who is also
with the Middle East Policy Council, you see how this stuff intersects?
Commerce Secretary is Donald Evans who owns Colorado Oil Company. You have
to take a very close look at this cabinet, which I think was constructed
in a very systematic way to figure out what their foreign policy priorities
are.
MM: Let me also ask you about the actual
if we could go into the actual events on September 11th. Because again,
in your email that went out you had some...you raised some very good questions
that I think were on a lot of peoples' minds as to the exact timing of
different incidents.
SG: Well, and again, and I don't want to
imply that there's a conspiracy, it might just be incompetence, but it
strikes me as very odd. And I'm sort of looking at my notes here. First
of all, every fifteen seconds they would show on the TV these planes blowing-up
into the World Trade Center, over and over. It was like we were trying
to be hypnotized by that-by that image. Almost as if they didn't want us
to think about well how did this come to pass, you know. Well, it came
to pass in a situation that was unprecedented in the history of the world.
Four, simultaneous hijackings inside the United States. That's never happened.
Never ever, ever. And hijacked in a span of twenty-five minutes. 7:45-8:10am.
Eastern daylight. And all these planes are on FAA radar. You fly around
the United States, you are on FAA radar. You've got four hijackings, and
nobody notifies the President. The President, he is going to this visit
to an elementary school down in Florida. By 8:15, somebody should know
something is wrong because these planes have deviated from their flight
plans, but nothing happens. The President, he's skinin and grinin' with
the teachers and doing his photo op thing. 8:45: American Airlines flight
11 hits the World Trade Center. Okay, 8:45. Now Bush, he's at Booker Elementary.
You've got four planes hijacked and one of them has just crashed into the
World Trade Center and still nobody is notifying the Commander in Chief.
No one has scrambled a single Air Force air-to-air attack missile er airplane.
There are no Air Force inceptors in the air. 9:03 United flight 175 hits
the other building in the World Trade Center. 9:05 Andrew Card finally
bends over to the President and whispers something in his ear, okay. Did
the President stop and convene the meeting? Hun-ah. He goes back to reading
with second graders. Now they've tracked American Airlines flight 77. It's
over Ohio headed west, conducts a point turn unscheduled and off the flight
plan over Ohio and turns around and starts making a beeLine for Washington
D.C. Has Andrew Card been told to scramble the Air Force? No! Twenty-five
minutes later, still the President finally gives a public statement telling
people that there has been some hijacked planes flown into the World Trade
Center. By this time, we've all seen it live on TV. And, in meantime, there's
this plane that is still headed to D.C. Air Force has still not been scrambled.
9:30 The President makes his announcement. Flight 77 is still ten minutes
from the Pentagon. Actually over ten minutes. The Administration later
on tells people that they didn't know the Pentagon was the target and they
thought it was the White House, but in fact, this was on FAA radar and
it's shown that it had already flown south past the White House no-fly
zone and was headed to Alexandria. 9:35 This plane conducts another turn.
This is very strange turn. It's at altitude, it conducts a 360 degree turn
and begins a maneuver. A tight spinning descent, a tight spiral descent.
This is something that is supposedly, you know, this pilot that was trained
at this Florida puddle jumper school, where they teach you how to fly a
Cesna has conducted this spiral turn, descends 7,000 feet in 2 and 1/2
minutes. Brings the plane up, stable, flat, flies it in so low that it
knocks the electric lines down across the street from the Pentagon and
with pinpoint accuracy slams into the building going 460 knots. Later on,
you know, people saying wait a minute, how in the hell did someone learn
how to fly a plane that well and this little ol' school down in Florida?
And the people turn around and start add on to the story. Well, they went
to a flight simulator. And what I said in my little post was its like saying
you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush hour by
buying her a video driving game. This don't make any sense. Now, what happened?
I don't know, you know. I just don't know, but at a very bare minimum and
this is what was said that apparently resonated with people, we've either
got a criminal conspiracy or we've got criminal negligence on the part
of this Administration. But in either case, there are parts of this thing
that could have been prevented but nobody did a thing. You know, that's
what it looks like from where I'm sitting.
MM: To me, that was one of the things that,
so many things in your letter, your article really resonated with me, but
that was one of the things that really stuck out as well was because I
think a lot of us still have questions about that, and none of the media,
no one is asking these questions.
SG: But, you have to remember that they
are also invested in defense companies and oil companies. Westinghouse
and GE are some of the biggest defense contractors around. All of them
got oil stocks. It's not like a big conspiracy. You know what I saw in
El Salvador. A lot of the reporters down there would hangout at the Camino
Real Hotel, which is right down the street from the Embassy. And they would
not dare say anything that would piss off anyone at the Embassy, because
then the Embassy would cut them off from their scoops. You see they would
loose their contacts. So they really have to nurture relationships with
these power holders and if they do anything without clearing it with them,
then they are subject to be squeezed out, and eventually throws their career
off track. So it doesn't work like from the top down, it's very systemic.
MM: Well I guess I could understand it
with the, you know, with the corporate media not doing that, they're pretty
much following a pattern, but even amongst, let's say the alternative media
there's been very little questioning of the incidents themselves.
SG: Well, yeah, I think that's part of,
what I consider, an intellectual malaise on the Left in the United States.
They've deserted their roots, you know, and they have forgotten how to
do analysis. They get involved in this moral score keeping. It's almost
reminiscent of Vietnam, you know, who has a bigger body count, so people
on the Left say well the Americans have the bigger body count so they're
worse. It doesn't tell us a thing about motives. It doesn't tell us a thing
about the trajectory of the system. It doesn't tell us a thing about the
historical development of the situation. It doesn't tell us any of that
stuff. And, I think, what the Left has really done itself a disservice
in getting involved in this tit-for-tat competition for the moral high
ground with the Right, when they need to be subjecting the situation to
some intense analysis and getting people the information they need to begin
to ask the right questions. So you know I hold , I sort of hold progressives
accountable on that too. I think we've failed in a lot of ways. It's important
to say that politics is hypocritical, but most of us already know that.
That's just the nature of politics. It's not designed to be morally consistent.
What they tell you is a story to legitimatize an action that has a motive
that they can't expose to the public, otherwise, they'll lose their support.
I think our job is to expose those motives to the public, and not just
...you know, well, the United States did bad things too. First of
all, in a deeply racialized society, like ours, it doesn't fly. Most people
in this country don't care that we're bombing Afghani children. They don't
care. Because there's already a predominant racist ideology in this country
that says if you're not white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, in some cases, that
you're less than human, that your life has less value. Or if you get into
this jingo patriotism it's like I don't care if we kill a million of them
as long as we save one American life. So, we're not going to gain anyone's
ear by comparing moralities, I don't think. Some people you will, some
people will be called to account on that. But I think we have to appeal
to the self-interest too and what's going on right now is going to be very
bad for most Americans in a very short period of time.
MM: One other question specific to the
actual incidents on September 11th, would it be fair to say that the area
around the White House is probably the most secure, or the most watched
airspace worldwide? Can you think of anything that would have higher security?
SG: I have no idea.
MM: Okay, well could you think anything
that would have higher security in terms of airspace than the White House?
SG: It'd be difficult. It'd be difficult.
It's a pretty high priority I would expect. I wouldn't presume to say that
it's the highest because I just don't know. But yeah, you have the most
powerful Air Force in the world and the Chief of State's residence in that
same country, I think you've got a pretty strong assumption right there
that it should be pretty well covered. That airspace should be very well
covered.
MM: All right. What do you see that we
need to start focusing on as a country if we are going to get our country
back, basically?
SG: Oh gosh, I'm not qualified to speak
for ... I know what I'm doing. I'm getting involved in the organizing.
Where I am, there's sort of two different pieces going on. I think the
broader forces need to be brought together in an anti-war movement to create
something for people to plug into as they begin to be disillusioned as
they inevitably will be with this foreign policy. That they've got a movement
to plug into. The same as an anti-war movement back during the Vietnam
era that finally stopped all that nonsense. And then for people who are
more consciously Left or consciously progressive, I think it's really important
for us to begin articulating, not just articulating but beginning to do
the organizing around the issue of developing some sort of a nucleus of
an anti-fascist movement inside this country. I think it's been coming
for a long time, it's not just something that happened September 11th.
It began with the popular acceptance of books like the Bell Curve and things
like that. But I think it has much more urgency now, so I'm involved in
anti-war organizing with my colleagues around here and friends. We're also
beginning to talk about what we can do to ensure that we are not subjected
to the same thing that Germany was subjected to because it only took them
a couple of years to tumble into barbarism. It won't take us nearly as
long, because we're much closer to start with.
MM: When anyone questions the current direction
that our Administration, our government is taking right now, they are called
unpatriotic. Would you address that?
SG: You know, they're wrong. But that's
the way this works. It's a creation of an atmosphere of intimidation. I
have seen and talked to a number of people who have begun displaying flags
as a form of self-protection, especially Muslim folks. And folks from the
Middle East around here started hanging flags all over everything they
own just as a way to protect themselves. I've seen a lot of people in my
African-American colleague's and friend's whose neighborhoods now are sprouting
American flags like mushrooms after a four-day rain. These aren't folks
who are really caught up in this whole patriotic thing, and in fact have
some serious reservations about hanging that flag out there when the flag
was the one that also flew over slavery and Jim Crow and so forth, but
that atmosphere of intimidation is out there. And I think there is only
one way to overcome that and that's for the people who do understand what's
going on to be kind of bold and step out. You've got to be up front. People
have to be aggressive about defending their positions. You have to demonstrate
to other people that you don't have to be afraid. Because if we do back
away now, that's going to allow this tendency to strengthen and that's
what we can't do. I think we have to fight fascism before it emerges, not
afterwards. And to continue to construct a counter-narrative to all this
stuff that is official propaganda. To give people information and give
it to them, not necessarily in a real confrontational way. I don't think
I've ever changed anyone's mind by preaching to them, but if you present
them with some alternative information and they have some time to sit down
and process that then a lot of times they'll come around. A lot of work
to do. A lot of work to do.
MM: What are some good sources that you'd
recommend for alternative information?
SG: Well for people who have computer access,
there's a number of good websites: Alternet.org, Indymedia.com, Globalcircle.com,
Emperors-Clothes. Those are all websites. Dieoff.org is a very good one
to read about petroleum. But also alternative newspapers...depends on where
you are. There's some close by somewhere. And, there are some books out
there too. Some of the stuff like William Blum and folks like that written
in the last few years. You know it doesn't hurt to get a hold of South
End, Common Courage Press, and see what's on their lists. And get a few
of their books. There are some analytical and well-documented books out
there that talk about historical development of the situation that we find
ourselves in right now. And you know listening to shows like this on the
radio don't hurt. (chuckles) A lot of people listen to the radio and that's
what I do when I'm stuck in traffic, I listen to the radio. You know you
all have a powerful medium and I appreciate someone using it for the right
thing.
(Transcript co-produced by Kurt Grela).
The So-Called Evidence Is a Farce
'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. That
doesn't cut much for
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