Why the blueprint for maintaining US pre-eminence failed

Why the blueprint for maintaining US pre-eminence (PNAC) failed

Interrogating 9/11 Five Years On…

By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

It has been half a decade since the United States came under an unprecedented coordinated terrorist attack on some of its most prominent symbols of power. First the North, then the South, Towers of the World Trade Centre (WTC) in New York were hit by civilian airplanes. Then even the heart of the US military, the Pentagon, was struck, and finally a civilian plane, apparently destined for the White House, ended up crashing in Pennsylvania.

Most of us remember watching the TV screens in absolute shock and horror, as first one, then the other, WTC towers collapsed in on themselves in a cloud of smoke and debris. Some of us experienced unbearable grief as we witnessed or later learned that our own loved ones were among those thousands of people who were brutally, gruesomely slain.

Since then, there have been many other terrorist attacks on Western targets in Indonesia, Turkey, Spain, Britain, and elsewhere. And, we are told, there have been countless other attempted terrorist attacks foiled by the authorities. The enemy is not always easy to identify - but their broad contours, our leaders say, are well-known.

"The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organisations known as al Qaeda," declared US President George W. Bush after the September 11, 2001 attacks…

Al Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime. But its goal is not making money; its goal is remaking the world - and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere… This group and its leader - a person named Osama bin Laden - are linked to many other organisations in different countries… There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries. They are recruited from their own nations and neighbourhoods and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror. They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction.

And thereafter was officially launched the "War on Terror," an unlimited war against an amorphous network of Islamist extremists who could strike out at any time, in any place, without warning, and without mercy, in order to pursue their ultimate goal of global domination.

Cold War Pentagon Memo Confirms
State-Sponsored Self Terrorism

For those well-versed in the history of Western covert operations, the official narrative of 9/11 could not simply be accepted at face value. Questions were perfectly legitimate. But the 9/11 truth movement has largely missed the value of one of the biggest "covert operation smoking guns" of 20th century history: Operation Gladio, perhaps the only instance of successfully completed state-sponsored self-terrorism that is fully and directly confirmed by declassified secret documents, European Parliamentary inquiries, and confessions from intelligence operatives.

The most authoritative study of this ?'Strategy of Tension', NATO's Secret Armies, was released last year, and authored by Dr. Daniele Ganser, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Security Studies in the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich.

His groundbreaking book shows that it is now a matter of historical record that during the Cold War, high-level sections of the American, British and western European secret services participated in a sophisticated NATO-backed operation to engineer domestic terrorist attacks to be blamed on the Soviet Union. The objective was to mobilise drastic anti-Communist policies at home and abroad, and to legitimise interventionism against nationalist independence movements throughout the "Third World."1

In July 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the establishment of a secret army to "set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy held territory."2 By 4 October 1945, the British Chiefs of Staff and the Special Operations branch of MI6 directed the creation of a "skeleton network" capable of expansion either in war or to service clandestine operations abroad.3

In the ensuing years, Col. Gubbins' Special Operations branch of MI6 cooperated closely with Frank Wisner's CIA covert action department Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) on White House orders, and in turn coordinated US and UK Special Forces, to establish stay-behind secret armies across western Europe.4

The programme soon developed into a dangerous conglomerate of unaccountable covert operations controlled by clandestine structures operating as parallel sub-sections of the main intelligence services. Dr. Ganser does us the greatest service in unearthing the only smoking gun Pentagon memo which proves that state-sponsored self-terrorism is standard strategy for elements of Western military-intelligence services: classified Field Manual 30-31, with appendices FM 30-31A and FM 30-31B, authored by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

As Ganser observes: "FM 30-31 instructs the secret soldiers to carry out acts of violence in times of peace and then blame them on the Communist enemy in order to create a situation of fear and alertness. Alternatively, the secret soldiers are instructed to infiltrate the left-wing movements and then urge them to use violence." In the manual's own words:

There may be times when Host Country Governments show passivity or indecision in the face of Communist subversion and according to the interpretation of the US secret services do not react with sufficient effectiveness… US army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger. To reach this aim US army intelligence should seek to penetrate the insurgency by means of agents on special assignment, with the task of forming special action groups among the most radical elements of the insurgency… In case it has not been possible to successfully infiltrate such agents into the leadership of the rebels it can be useful to instrumentalise extreme leftist organisations for one's own ends in order to achieve the above described targets… These special operations must remain strictly secret.5

In this way, US and UK intelligence services orchestrated devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, and throughout western Europe.

Reasonable Doubt…

But why suspect that the same thing is happening now in the new "War on Terror"? The answer lies in what almost amounts to a signed confession in the form of the "Rebuilding America's Defenses" document published one year prior to 9/11 by the neo-conservative think-tank, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The document was sponsored by all the leading lights of the Bush Cabinet, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, among many others.6 It advocates a "blueprint for maintaining global US pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests."

The US military is described as "the cavalry on the new American frontier," whose "core mission" is to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars" to preserve what is candidly portrayed as a "global Pax Americana." But the most significant revelation is on pages 62-63, stating that:

Any serious effort at transformation must occur within the larger framework of US national security strategy, military missions and defense budgets.… Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalysing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.7

The PNAC blueprint echoed the strategic concerns about legitimising US military expansionism expressed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to President Carter, made three years earlier:

The attitude of the American public toward the external projection of American power has been much more ambivalent. The public supported America's engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor… As America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.8

Immediately, it becomes clear that interrogating the US government's relationship to 9/11 is absolutely essential. It seems that in the preceding years, senior US policymakers had seriously contemplated the usefulness of a Pearl Harbor-scale attack to mobilise domestic populations in support of US military power projection. As Daniel Ellsberg, Special Assistant to the Assistant Defense Secretary of the United States during the Vietnam War, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers, asked in June this year:

Is this administration capable, humanly and psychologically of engineering such a provocation [as 9/11]? Yes, I would say that, I worked for such an administration myself, Johnson, ah, President Johnson put destroyers in harm's way in the Tonkin Gulf not only once, but several times, with the, with a lot of his people hoping that it would lead to a confrontation and claiming that it had. And could have resulted in the loss of many lives in the course of it.9

9/11 Commission:
Denounced by the 9/11 Families

Thankfully, not everyone bought into the official narrative of 9/11 so easily. Least of all the bereaved families of the 9/11 victims, many of whom struggled and lobbied despite their own mourning for an independent public inquiry into the terrorist attacks, an inquiry that might resolve the numerous questions that hung over almost every single dimension of the government's explanation for what had happened that Tuesday morning.

The 9/11 families' courageous struggle, supported by a loose association of researchers, organisations and activists around the United States and the world, forced the US government to hold first the Joint Inquiry by the House and Senate, and finally to instate the National Commission to Investigate the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, in Washington DC. But despite both processes making public some valuable new information about the attacks and raising a few important questions, they were ultimately pitiful failures in the task of genuinely, impartially interrogating the 9/11 attacks.

Last year on 22 July, I had the honour of testifying as an expert at a special all-day Congressional hearing in Washington sponsored by Hon. Rep. Cynthia McKinney and Hon. Rep. Raul Grijalva, "The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizen's Response - Did They Get it Right?"

I was joined by a host of academic experts, journalists, and former senior US intelligence officers, all of them questioning the official 9/11 narrative from their own perspectives. But by far the most powerful address was from the 9/11 families who came to support and inform the meeting, including Robert McIlvaine, father of 9/11 victim and member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows; Marilyn Rosenthal, mother of 9/11 victim, and professor at University of Michigan; and especially Lauri von Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Monica Gabrielle representing the 911 Family Steering Committee.

"This report was supposed to provide the definitive account of what had transpired on September 11, 2001," said von Auken in her opening address at the hearing. "We hoped that our thousands of unanswered questions would be addressed and answered. Yet, incredibly, we have found that the Commission's definitive final report has actually yielded more questions than answers." She indicted the 9/11 Commission Report as just "some statements that truly insulted the intelligence of the American people, violated our loved ones' memories, and might end up hurting us one day soon."10

Her characterisation of the Commission Report was the most damning condemnation that the 9/11 Families Steering Committee had ever made about the official inquiry process. Yet it was met with resounding silence from the American media, which refused to report the hearing in general, and ignored von Auken's heart-rending testimony on behalf of the 9/11 families.

Whither the Movement?

Five years on from 9/11, the "truth movement" that has emerged in the vacuum of legitimate answers to the countless questions about the terrorist attacks remains in a state of internal disarray, despite significant progress and achievements. The movement is plagued with accusations and counter-accusations between researchers based on their theoretical preferences about what happened on 9/11.

With an almost religious zeal, activists hurl outraged condemnations and paranoid allegations at each other. Splits in the movement are innumerable, mutual suspicions that other parties are "disinformation agents" are rife, and fruitless regressive arguments and counter-arguments continue on the most speculative minutiae of the attacks, without any clear resolution in sight.

Perhaps one of the most obvious splits worth noting here is the apparent gulf between "physical evidence" theorists, who emphasise discrepancies in official accounts of the collapse of the WTC buildings, the movements of the planes that hit the buildings, and the Pentagon crash, among other things; and "covert operations" theorists, who emphasise the role of intelligence operations in liaising with terrorist networks, the extent of prior advanced warnings of the attacks, and the manipulation of "terrorist threats" to justify the pursuit of US geostrategic interests on the pretext of fighting the "War on Terror."

Even within these particular "schools," there are vitriolic disputes between "9/11-truthers," some advocating that there were no planes on 9/11, others that the planes were military aircraft, some that there were no hijackers, others that the hijackers were patsies, and so on and so forth. Most of these quite specific disagreements about how to interpret the available data remain unresolved on the whole, despite individual opinions.

To some extent, the disputes have manifested in the form of seemingly hostile exchanges between various camps, such as the recent observations made by Michael C. Ruppert to the effect that the 9/11 movement has virtually killed itself by getting obsessed with physical evidence, and the responses that followed suggesting physical evidence provides the most convincing case.

As readers familiar with my work will know, I myself prefer to engage in the kind of research loosely categorised here as belonging to the "covert operations" camp, but this has nothing to do with my view of the value of the evidence at hand. On the contrary, it is largely to do with my own expertise in international relations and conflict analysis, and my lack of familiarity with the relevant scientific disciplines.

Having said that, the overemphasis on particular kinds of 9/11 research at the expense of others, for the movement as a whole, must be dropped. The fact of the matter is that both kinds of research are essential to develop a full and accurate understanding of what happened on 9/11, how and why. An impartial inspection of the relevant data in these two seemingly opposed areas of analysis firstly shows that there is a great deal we do know about what happened, and secondly opens up new avenues of inquiry about what we still don't know.

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