The Reality Behind Conspiracy Theory

The Reality Behind Conspiracy Theories and Domestic Terrorism

Directed by Matthew Ehret (2022)

Film Review

The main premises Ehret presents in this short film are

1. The current oligarchy controlling the US government (and the world) came to power via a coup launched through a series of 1961-68  assassinations (Malcom X, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King among others).

2. All Western elected leaders support the current global oligarchy.

3. Throughout history, powerful rulers have acted to criminalize dissent. In the US, this includes individuals who disagree with the official version of the JFK assassination and 9-11, as well as the Covid narrative and the current war on the fascist leaders the CIA installed in Ukraine in 2014. In Ehret’s view, massive censorship (with government support) by Google, YouTube, Facebook and other big tech companies has essentially cancelled free speech guaranteed by the first amendment to the US Constitution.

Most of the film concerns two decades of efforts by the US oligarchy to suppress dissent by labeling it “conspiracy theory.”

It starts by exploring the work of legal scholars Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. The pair predicted the blanket censorship of dissent that has occurred in 2022 in their 2008 working paper Conspiracy Theories.

It advocated for greater government control of human behavior via the following strategies:

1. Government “cognitive infiltration” of so-called “extremist groups.”

2. A government ban on “conspiracy theories.”

3. A government tax on people who disseminate “conspiracy theories.”

4. An organized government strategy to engage in “counter speech” (contradicting “conspiracy theories”) or to pay or “encourage” private parties to engage in “counter speech.”

In other writings and speeches, Sunstein promoted the view that unlike other animals, human beings are fundamentally irrational and must be controlled by “enlightened” elites maintaining the illusion of democracy. This was also the fundamental view of George Soros’s mentor Karl Popper.

Obama’s science czar John Holdren, who supported similar views, went so far as to propose a global regime supported by a scientific priesthood with ultimate control over all global populations, resources and environmental management.

According to Ehret, the fatal flaw in the work of Sunstein, Vermeule, Popper, Holdren (and Soros) is their view of human beings as machines under the total control of their genes All five men have totally rejected the notion that human beings can be motivated by metaphysical beliefs (such as conscience, truth, intention, soul, honor, God, justice, patriotism, dignity and inequality) independent of their genes and their bodily functions. Throughout history, many dissidents strongly identified with what they view as “inalienable rights” have been willing to sacrifice popularity, physical comfort and even their lives to defend them. (Ehret gives Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King as examples).

Such individuals have always been extremely sensitive to false narratives presented as truth, and the example they set is always extremely contagious.

According to Ehret, modern historians tell you that history is driven by purely random events. The historical record suggests otherwise, that it is shaped by the ideas and intentions (ie conspiracies both for good and for evil) of powerful elites and the truth seekers who oppose them.

War Games: Why NORAD Failed to Stop the 911 Hijackers

9/11 War Games

Directed by James Corbett (2018)

Film Review

This documentary presents a well-produced investigation into the multiple war games the Pentagon coincidentally scheduled simultaneous with the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In conjunction with the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration), NORAD (North American Aerospace Command have a well established protocol of using Air Force jets to intercept hijacked airliners and either forcing them to land or shooting them down. On 9-11, the protocol failed – no fighters jets were scrambled to intercept the three planes that reportedly crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. All available evidence suggests that four Air Force war games (three involving simulating hijackings) created so much confusion for air traffic controllers and FAA and NORAD officials that they paralyzed their ability to respond to the real hijackings.

The film is based on research by the late Michael Ruppert, archived audio recordings of air traffic controllers and FAA and NORAD, and testimony to the 9-11 Commission.

Much detailed information about these simulated attacks remains classified. However the names of four of the simulation exercises are known:

• Northern Vigilance – an exercise which sent most of the US fighter jets on duty to northern Canada and Alaska for the day.
• Vigilant Guardian and Tripod 2 – exercises which inserted numerous false radar blips on air traffic controller screens to test their ability to respond to them.
• Vigilant Warrior – an exercise consisting of numerous “live fly” hijack drills, in which military personnel dressed as civilians would board civilian flights and simulate fake hijackings.

FAA/NORAD officials confronted with 22 possible hijackings had only eight fighter jets available to respond to them  most were in Canada participating in Northern Vigilance). In three instances (Delta 1989, United Airlines 177 and Continental 321), fighter jets intercepted “simulated” hijackings and forced airliners to land.

 

911 Whistleblowers (Review)

911 Whistleblowers

By James Corbett (2019)

Film Review

This well-produced documentary introduces us to each of the primary 9-11 whistleblowers, while simultaneously telling the story of the mysterious explosions in Buildings 1,2 and 7 – which according to The 911 Commission Report never occurred. The whistleblowers featured include

• Kevin Ryan – former employee of EHL, the Indiana subsidiary of Underwriters Laboratories (UL). The latter had certified the floor assemblies of the World Trade Center buildings as fire resistant for two hours and the steel columns for three hours. After the government’s National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) failed to respond to his letter questioning how jet fuel fire could cause the columns to collapse in less than an hour, he made his evidence available to David Griffin (author of the New Pearl Harbor), Catherine Austin Fitts (who helped found the 9-11 Truth movement) and tens of thousands of others via a website he created. When he refused to take his website down, UL fired him.
• Cate Jenkins – the EPA scientist who exposed the agency lies regarding the safety testing of the smoke and dust that covered lower Manhattan when the Twin Towers collapsed. The federal agency repeatedly reassured first responders and rescue and clean up workers that they didn’t need respiratory masks – when the dust actually contained hazardous levels of sulfur dioxide, PCBs, dioixins, and particulates. When her supervisors failed to respond to her concerns, she shared her evidence with the FBI, state of New York officials, media, Congress and lawyers representing the 9-11 families. Despite two efforts by the EPA to dismiss her, they were ordered to reinstate her with full back pay (2010-2018) last year. By that time, 10,000 people were ill (or dead) from the toxic effects of 9-11 dust exposure.
• Barry Jennings – New York City employee who became trapped in Building 7 around 9 am after a series of explosions destroyed the stairwell and lobby. It took firemen until 1 pm to release him. His job was threatened after two journalists produced a video about his ordeal, and he subsequently died under mysterious circumstances.
• Michael Springman – 20 year State Department employee who wrote a book (Visas for Al Qaeda) about aUS consulate in Jeddah Saudi Arabia that was ordered to issue US visas for 12 of the 16 alleged 9-11 hijackers – despite visa applications that were incomplete erroneous and/or based on fraudulent documents. He was punished for his whislteblowing by being blacklisted from future work in the public or private sector.
• William Rodriguez – janitor honored by George W Bush for his heroic efforts in assisting firemen in rescuing victims prior to the Twin Towers’ collapse. Rodriguez widely reported feeling an explosion in the sub-basement of the North Tower before the first plane hit it. He also reported multiple explosions in the elevators and elsewhere prior to the building’s collapse.
• Six of the nine members of the 9-11 Commission appointed by George W Bush blew the whistle on the Commission process. Their book Without Precedent reveals how they were systematically stymied in bring out the truth about the true events on 9-11.

9-11 Whistleblower: Ground Zero Eyewitness Testimony

Ground Zero 9/11: Blueprint for Terror Part I

Guns and Butter (2005)

This is a remarkable 2005 radio interview with a 9-11 whistleblower who spent four days as a rescue worker at Ground Zero. It provides important eyewitness evidence to the dire health hazards of the toxic particulate matter rescue workers and nearby residents were exposed to.

Indira Singh, who worked on Wall Street as a risk consultant for J P Morgan Chase, lived a few blocks from the Twin Towers. In her spare time she was a mountaineer and a certified (volunteer) Emergency Medical Technician (EMT).

Highlights from the interview:

10.45 When the first attack occurred, she returned to her apartment, changed into her EMT uniform and reported to an ad hoc triage center near World Trade Center Building 7. There was no coordinated civil defense rescue operation, in part because much of the police/fire department leadership were killed when the buildings collapsed. Compared to most rescue operations (earthquakes, etc), Ground Zero was unique, in part, because firefighters were unable to extinguish the burning ruble for four months, and, in part, due to the thick cloud of toxic particulate dust that persisted even longer.

11.45 Between 12 and 1 pm firefighters told Singh and her fellow rescue workers to move their triage station because “Building 7 is coming down.”

17.00 According to Singh, rescue workers labored round the clock for 48 hours pulling survivors from the rubble, stabilizing their injuries and summoning ambulances to take them to the hospital. They received no support (food, water, etc) from city, state or federal officials and had to break into nearby retail outlets to find food. After four days, they ceased to find living survivors and all were becoming increasing ill from the toxic fog. Singh was forced to leave the rescue effort due to increasing heart palpitations and difficulty breathing. When the EPA refused to declare the air around Ground Zero unsafe, she began organizing her friends to go door-to-door checking on the welfare of her neighbors.

25.00 By Nov 1, several neighborhoods were holding regular community meetings to pressure city, state and federal officials to address the growing health issues of rescue workers and residents adjacent to Ground Zero. Those who could afford to left lower Manhattan at this point to seek housing elsewhere.

27.00 Singh describes the total media blackout regarding the growing health crisis in lower Manhattan, including 11 anthrax scares and health department “spraying for cholera.”

29.00 Singh describes in detail the health symptoms of rescue workers and nearby residents, which were strangely reminiscent of radiation sickness: pervasive skin sores, loss of hair and teeth, palpitation, asthma, chronic cough, neurological dysfunction. Accessing treatment was virtually impossible because many victims had lost their jobs and health insurance.

33.00 After extensive lobbying, Mt Sinai Medical Center finally received a federal grant in December to do baseline monitoring (pulmonary/cardiac function, heavy metals screening) on rescue workers only. Residents experiencing health issues were excluded and no treatment was offered. All baseline medical screening results mysteriously vanished.

35.00 Singh contacted the CDC when many of her elderly and disabled neighbors – and illegal immigrants banks and other corporations hired to clean up their office buildings – started dying

 

 

Pipelinestan: The Taliban, Unocal and 9-11

Taliban Oil

Al Jazeera (2015)

Film Review

Taliban Oil is a documentary about secret negotiations between Unocal and the Taliban to build a pipeline transporting natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India – via Afghanistan. It features interviews with the former president of Unocal (who entertained Taliban leaders in his home in Sugarland Texas), a female Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) operative who lost her security clearance for a report warning the Clinton administration for a against US collaboration with the Taliban.

This film contradicts the conventional wisdom that the US invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban refused to build the Unocal pipeline. Filmmakers maintain it was Unocal who canceled the pipeline project. Already by the late nineties, Afghanistan was suffering the ravages of a 20-years of civil war – the Taliban were extremely keen to use the $400 million/year transit fees for reconstruction. The Clinton administration was also heavily promoting the pipeline deal, arranging for Taliban leaders to meet with the State Department, CIA and NSA.

Unocal reportedly withdrew from the deal in 1998, after suicide bombers blew up US embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania. Clinton blamed the suicide bombing on Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, who was operating jihadist training camps in Afghanistan.

In addition to attacking various training camps with cruise missiles, Clinton made 30 separate requests for the Taliban to extradite bin Laden to the US. Although supreme Taliban leader Mullah Omar opposed the training camps, bin Laden was a national hero for his role in expelling the Soviets. It would have brought great shame on the Taliban leadership to hand him over to the Americans. .

In 2001 George W Bush and Dick Cheney reiterated the requests for bin Laden’s extradition, while simultaneously making deals for their own petroleum companies to build the pipeline.

Rejecting the Taliban’s offer to expel bin Laden to a third country, in summer 2001 the Bush administration made plans to invade Afghanistan in mid-autumn. One source* quoted in the film states the jihadists were aware of the impending attack and decided to launch a preemptive strike on the Twin Towers.

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*For documentation filmmakers provide an old YouTube clip from Adam Gaddan, the Jewish-born “American” al-Qaeda spokesperson. Gaddan has long been suspected of either Israeli or US intelligence links.

911 Trillions: Follow the Money

In this documentary, James Corbett approaches the mystery of 9-11 by tracing money flows rather than physical evidence – ie he identifies individuals and companies that plainly had foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks and used it to reap windfall profits.

The three main ways people profited from 9-11 were insurance scams, insider trading and fraudulent electronic transactions. Ironically the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 9-11 Commission and FBI identified some of the same scam artists as Corbett and other private researchers. Bizarrely they declined to indict them owing to “no known ties to al Qaeda.”

Insurance Scams

Key suspects: Larry Silverstein, GMAC (the finance arm of General Motors) and real estate developers Lloyd Goldstein and Joseph Kerr. GMAC, Goldman and Kerr helped finance Silverstein purchase of the Twin towers from the New York Port Authority in July 2001. Immediately on taking possession, Silverstein doubled the insurance coverage from $1.5 billion (the buildings’ assessed value was $1.2 billion) to $3.55 billion. In addition, following the attacks, the Port Authority repaid Silverstein 80% of the original lease. In total, Silverstein netted a $4.5 billion profit from 9-11.

Insider Trading

On Sept 10 2001, the SEC identified a 90% increase in “put options”* for companies whose stocks would tank the week after 9-11:

• United Airlines
• American Airlines
• Morgan Stanley (one of two major tenants in Twin Towers)
• Marsh & McLennan (one of two major tenants in Twin Towers)
• Boeing
• Citigroup
• Axa
• Merrill Lynch
• J P Morgan
• various reinsurers

The SEC also noted a six-fold increase in “call options” on defense contractor Raytheon (manufactured missiles subsequently used in attack on Afghanistan) in the weeks prior to the attacks.

Three of the most prominent insider traders were Mrs and Mrs Wirt D Walker III (distant relatives of George Herbert Walker Bush and business partners with Marvin Bush with links to the Carlyle Group***) and Deutsche Bank, Alex Brown Division, run by to Buzzy Krongard, former consultant to former CIA director James Woolsey Jr.

Fraudulent Electronic Transactions

Marsh & McLannan was responsible for developing Silverstream, an innovative method of paperless electronic transactions. A team of March & McLannan auditors were investigating $100 million in suspicious transactions involving AIG and Deutsche Bank. All were killed in the 9-11 attacks – their data sets conveniently destroyed. A German company Convar was able to reconstruct most of these transactions from hard drives recovered at Ground Zero.

Attack on the Pentagon

The attack on the Pentagon killed the Department of Defense team investigating the $2.3 trillion that went missing from the DOD 2000-2001 budget – and destroyed all their data.

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*A put option lets the option owner sell a stock at its original price when the share price falls – pocket the difference.

**A call option lets the option owner buy a stock at its original price when a share price increases – and pocket the difference.

***Carlyle Group – a global equity management group, closely linked with George H. W. Bush and the bin Laden family.

Trump: Expanding the Parameters of Permissible Debate

Lies Wars and Empire

By Michael Parenti (2007)

In this presentation, Michael Parenti focuses on the science of media manipulation and mass indoctrination. He makes his most important point at the end: mass indoctrination never works perfectly. Spontaneous skepticism tends to be a natural outcome of a steady diet of media propaganda. I suspect this healthy skepticism is a major reason why Trump’s attacks on the corporate media have been so popular – and why counterattacks by US intelligence and the mainstream media have been so savage.

Trump is the highest profile politician to ever publicly challenge the official version of 9-11, the job-killing effects of free trade treaties such as TPP and NAFTA, the threats to democratic process posed by investing power in a private central bank (the Federal Reserve) and the long term safety of America’s multiple vaccination regime in children.

Parenti begins with an explanation why, in most cases, peoples’ beliefs are totally impervious to facts. He reminds us that our perceptions are shaped by a number of factors beyond our control, particularly income, status, background assumptions and disinformation.

He maintains that what passes for objectivity in the mainstream media is really conformity of bias – nearly always in favor of corporate capitalism and the status quo. Owing to this emphasis on conformity, expressing a dissenting viewpoint viewed as a radical activity, mainly because it helps expose and expands the boundaries of permissible debate. Because the corporate media only allows an extremely narrow range of debate, you will never see a open discussion of evidence implicating the government in 9-11 or  the JFK, Robert Kennedy or Martin Luther King assassinations.

This lecture examines numerous world events deliberately censored or distorted by the corporate media:

• The war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic (who died under suspicious circumstances in prison in 2006).
• The stolen 2004 election (in which election fraud in Ohio, New Mexico, Florida and Arizona wrongly awarded the electoral vote to Bush).*
• The repeated claim that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 – the Afghan government requested assistance from the Soviets to restore order in the face of a major CIA destablization campaign.
• Saddam Hussein’s 40-year role as a CIA asset in the coup overthrowing Iraqi prime minister Abd al-Karim Qasim and declaring war on Iran.

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*See Stolen Elections

What Really Happened at Waco?

Waco: The Rules of Engagement

Directed by William Gazecki (1997)

Film Review

Waco is a long but well-made documentary about what was essentially an FBI coverup of an unlawful military assault on innocent civilians. What immediately struck me about the film are the obvious parallels between the military assault at Waco, the 1975 incident at Pine Ridge in which Leonard Peltier and other AIM activists were arrested for resisting an armed FBI assault and the FBI/Philadelphia police decision to bomb the MOVE compound in 1985 (see The Day Philadelphia Police Dropped a Bomb on 61 Families).

The documentary is anchored around a 1995 Congressional investigation which, unlike the whitewash of the JFK assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9-11, successfully unearthed most of the sordid facts about the government’s illegal (and unconstitutional) military assault in Waco. Predictably the corporate media buried the investigation and its findings. Thus the systematic disinformation the Clinton administration disseminated about David, Koresh and the Branch Davidians is what remains uppermost in the public mind.

What surprised me most about the film was learning that the Branch Davidians weren’t a cult, that the Mount Carmel church where they lived wasn’t a bunker and that David Koresh himself wasn’t a deranged psychopath who buffaloed his followers into a virtual suicide pact.

The Branch Davidians were actually an old offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church which relocated from Los Angeles to the Mount Carmel center at Waco in the 1930s. Koresh (born Vernon Howell) was raised there and eventually selected as the group’s spiritual leader.

Testimony given during the Congressional hearings establishes quite clearly that the initial ATF assault (in which the Branch Davidians defended themselves and killed four ATF agents) was a public relations stunt aimed at influencing upcoming ATF appropriations hearings.

The supposed justification for the assault was the presence of illegal weapons on the premises. As good Texans, the Branch Davidians visited a lot of gun shows and bought and sold weapons as a source of revenue. The search warrant accused them of illegally modifying automatic weapons – which Koresh denied. He invited the ATF to come and inspect their guns in mid-1992. The ATF declined to do so.

Most of the media attention (and the search warrant itself) focused on the fact that Koresh had multiple wives, included several who were underage teenagers. While both polygamy and child rape are illegal under Texas law, they in no way justify a full scale military assault that kills innocent civilians, including the rape victims themselves.

The FBI would follow up the failed ATF operation with a full scale military siege (with tanks) that lasted 51 days.

The evidence presented during the hearings includes intriguing clips from a video camera FBI negotiators gave the Branch Davidians to talk about themselves and their beliefs and infrared footage showing the FBI, Janet Reno and Bill Clinton lied through their teeth about not firing on the Branch Davidians and David Koresh deliberately starting the fire that destroyed the compound.

It also comes out that the FBI deliberately destroyed the crime scene (as Bush would later do at Ground Zero), as well as systematically obstructing efforts by the local medical examiner and the Texas Rangers to conduct independent investigations.

The Neocon Myths Behind Afghanistan and Iraq

The Power of Nightmares

Directed by Adam Curtis

BBC (2003)

Part 3 Shadows in the Cave

Film Review

Part 3 concerns the mythology the neoconservatives created around international terrorism to justify the US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US Invents al Qaeda

The final video starts with the car bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. These were the first attacks Bin Laden and Zawahiri organized against US interests as part of their new international jihad (see How the CIA Funds Jihad). They recruited four bombers from training camps Abdullah Azzam started during the Soviet occupation.

Contrary to the myth promoted by the neocons, these camps were exclusively dedicated to training Muslims to conduct jihad in their own countries (e.g. Uzbekistan and Chechnya). Their leaders wanted absolutely nothing to do with international terrorism or Bin Laden’s jihad against the US. They allowed Zawahiri and Bin Laden to recruit from these camps because he was financing them. Nevertheless, even members of Islamic Jihad opposed what they were doing.

In Jan 2001 the US government brought the embassy bombers to trial in the US. They also tried Bin Laden in absentia. To charge him under existing US law, federal prosecutors had to prove an organized group he commanded carried out the bombings. Because no such group existed, they invented one. The name al Qaeda came from a paid FBI informant.

9-11

Immediately following his election George W Bush, like his father, totally rejected the neoconservative’s insistence that the US should invade other nations and “dictate how to run their countries.”

9-11 would change all this, propelling Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld to international power with four terrifying myths:

1. That Bin Laden was responsible for the 9-11 attacks (according to official FBI accounts, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was responsible for the “plane operations).”*
2. That “al Qaeda,” a phantom organization the neocons latched onto for propaganda purposes, was a genuine international entity running sleeper cells in 50-60 countries.
3. That “al Qaeda’s” ultimate goal was to force the US to live under Islamic fundamentalism.
4. That the invasion of Afghanistan was essential to destroy the heart of “al Qaeda.”

During the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the US and NATO allied themselves with the Afghan Northern Alliance. The latter hated the foreign Muslims who came to came to Afghanistan for training and received a generous bounty for handing them over to US troops. Nearly all of them ended up in Guantanomo, despite having no connection with bin Laden or international terrorism.

The Role of Hollywood

Following the US invasion, the neocons invested two new myths. The first was that bin Laden was hiding out in a sophisticated bunker built into the Torah Borah caves on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The second was that the US was harboring a vast network of terrorist sleeper cells preparing a new attack on US soil. Although both were totally discredited by mid-2003, these myths would be solidified in the public mind by dozens of TV dramas about hidden terrorist sleeper cells in major US cities.

A popular theme of these dramas was the dirty bomb*, which according to actual DD tests was unlikely to kill anyone because the radiation produced by a dirty bomb was so dispersed.

So-called “dirty bombs** featured prominently in most of these productions, despite numerous Pentagon tests demonstrating dirty bomb radiation is too widely dispersed to kill anyone.

World Leaders Rush to Sign On

Inspired by the immense power this ideology of fear gave political leaders, other western leaders quickly signed on to the terror agenda. When the neocons began circulating the new mythology in mid-2002 that Saddam Hussein was linked to al Qaeda and 9-11, British Prime Minister Tony Blair became one of its most vocal proponents. Despite knowing from the outside that the war on Iraq was based on fabricated evidence.

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*This video was produced in 2003, when it was still widely believed that 19 Muslim hijackers were responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers. This version of events is now totally discredited.
**A dirty bomb is an explosive device made from nuclear waste combined with conventional explosives – with the intent of spreading radioactive material over a widely populated area
***This revelation is all the more remarkable given that Curtis made this documentary prior to Dr David Kelly’s so-called “suicide” in 2003. Kelly worked for the British Ministry of Defense and was a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq. He came to public attention in July 2003, when a BBC journalist published an-off-the record discussion about the British role in fabricating evidence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. He died under extremely suspicious circumstances in later that month. A group of British doctors is demanding a fresh investigation into Kelly’s death: Doctors Claim Cover Upl

http://vimeo.com/84421510

How the CIA Funds Jihad

The Power of Nightmares

Directed by Adam Curtis

BBC (2003)

Part 2 The Phantom Victory

Film Review

Part 2 focuses on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 – and how the CIA funded and trained the Islamist Mujahideen to combat the occupation.

Both Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and the neoconservatives claim credit for the hare-brained and incredibly short sighted scheme to recruit, fund and train a jihadist army in Afghanistan. In addition to providing sophisticated weaponry, the CIA trained the Mujahideen in terror techniques, such as assassination, car bombs and improvised explosive devices (IDEs).

Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian who led the Mujahideen, put out a call for all Muslims to join Afghanistan’s holy war. He believed that victory in Afghanistan would inspire foreign fighters to return to their homelands and overthrow corrupt secular dictators the US was propping up.

One Saudi who answered this call was a phenomenally wealthy construction contractor named Osama bin Laden. He, too, provided funding for the Mujahideen.

Arab governments, recognizing a unique opportunity to expel their own jihadist troublemakers, opened their jails and exiled their Islamic extremists to Afhanistan. Egypt released Islamic Jihad founder Dr Zawahiri and his followers.

Gorbachov Orders Soviet Withdrawal

In 1987 when Gorbachov came to power, the Soviet Union was on the brink of economic collapse. Believing he could still save it through political reform, Gorby quickly commenced Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also reached out to the Bush senior administration to help install a stable government in Kabul. He warned that failure to do so would allow the Mujahideen to install an Islamic dictatorship. The neoconservatives who ran the Pentagon and State Department refused. With Pakistani support, the Mujahideen (renamed the Taliban) took control of Afghanistan and installed a brutal fundamentalist regime.

Both the neoconservatives and the Taliban/Mujahideen would claim sole credit for victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan. Both groups (and Zbigniew Brzezinski) would also credit US intervention in Afghanistan for the demise of the Soviet Union. In reality the USSR collapsed due to gross economic mismanagement and internal decay.

The Split Between Azzam and Zawahiri

Following the Soviet withdrawal, a major rift occurred between Zawahiri and Azzam. As it turned out, torture also radicalized Zawahiri. Who now proclaimed that politicians who were in bed with the Americans – and their civilian supporters – were legitimate targets for assassination.

Azzam, in contrast, compelled Islamic freedom fighters to swear an oath not to kill innocent civilians. Osama Bin Laden, former deputy to Azzam, joined forces with Zawahiri shortly before the latter’s assassination in 1989.

By the early nineties, powerful movements the Islamic Jihad (and related groups) had built in Egypt and Algeria were on track to win national elections. Aided by the US and France, the Algerian military launched a coup and cancelled the Algerian elections. Egypt, in turn, banned the Muslim Brotherhood and arrested and tortured their leadership.

Islamic Jihad responded by attempting to launch violent jihad in both countries. Owing to their failure to attract a mass following, in May 1998 Zawahuri and Bin Laden would announce a new strategy: taking jihad to their real enemies: the US and Israel.

Meanwhile Back in Washington

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the neoconservatives were more committed than ever to promoting the myth that the US was the sole force for good in a world of evil regimes. Fingering Saddam Hussein as the next satan to be overthrown, in 1990 they put immense pressure on Bush senior to overthrow the Iraqi government during the first Gulf War. Bush wisely took the sage advice of Pentagon advisers who warned that a full scale invasion of Iraq would result in a hopeless quagmire.

Mainstream Republicans Back Clinton

In 1992, mainstream Republicans, frightened by the religious fundamentalism that had overtaken the Republican Party, voted for Clinton in droves. The neocons, in turn, latched onto Clinton as the new evil. They began a vicious propaganda campaign against him, spearheaded by the conservative American Spectator. The campaign widely disseminated spurious allegations that the Clintons had committed financial fraud in Whitewater*, murdered their friend Vince Foster and participated in drug smuggling at the Mena Airport in Arkansas.**

Under immense pressure, Clinton agreed to appoint Kenneth Starr as special prosecutor to investigate these allegations. Starr couldn’t find any evidence of Clinton wrongdoing until he stumbled onto the President’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Following their failure to impeach Clinton, the neocons became as marginalized in the US as Bin Laden, Zawahiri and their ragtag followers in the Arab world.

All this would change with 9-11, which would propel both the Islamists and the neocons.

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*The Whitewater controversy involved a questionable real estate deal Clinton engaged in while he was attorney general of Arkansas. The Whitewater investigations would result in criminal convictions for several of Clinton’s associates. Although there was insufficient evidence to file criminal charges against the President, his conduct was clearly unethical: see Whitewater Scandal

**While there’s no evidence Governor Clinton was directly involved in cocaine smuggling, he was unresponsive to strong grassroots demand that he investigate the CIA’a drug-gun smuggling operation at the Mena Airport – and to Ross Perot’s (presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996) request that Clinton back the Internal Revenue’s investigation of Menta.