Read How America Was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Welfare State Online
Authors: Paul Craig Roberts
If we look around for the terror that the police state and a decade of war has allegedly protected us from, the terror is hard to find. Except for 9/11 itself, assuming we accept the government’s improbable conspiracy theory explanation, there have been no terror attacks on the US. Indeed, as RT
pointed out
on August 23, 2011, an investigative program at the University of California discovered that the domestic “terror plots” hyped in the media were plotted by FBI agents.
FBI undercover agents now number 15,000, ten times their number during the protests against the Vietnam War when protesters were suspected of communist sympathies. As there apparently are no real terror plots for this huge workforce to uncover, the FBI justifies its budget, terror alerts, and invasive searches of American citizens by thinking up “terror plots” and finding some deranged individuals to ensnare. For example, the Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York City subway plot, and the plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago were all FBI brainchilds organized and managed by FBI agents.
RT reports that only three plots might have been independent of the FBI, but as none of the three worked, they obviously were not the work of such a professional terror organization as Al Qaeda is purported to be. The Times Square car bomb didn’t blow up, and apparently could not have.
The
latest FBI sting
ensnared a Boston man, Rezwan Ferdaus, who is accused of planning to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes packed with C-4 explosives. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz assured Americans that they were never in danger, because the FBI’s undercover agents were in control of the plot.
Ferdaus’ FBI-organized plot to blow up the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes has produced charges that he provided “material support to a terrorist organization” and plotted to destroy federal buildings—the most serious charge which carries 20 imprisoned years for each targeted building.
What is the terrorist organization that Ferdaus is serving? Surely not Al Qaeda, which allegedly outwitted all 16 US intelligence services, all intelligence services of America’s NATO and Israeli allies, NORAD, the National Security Council, Air Traffic Control, Dick Cheney, and US airport security four times in one hour on the same morning. Such a highly capable terror organization would not be involved in such nonsense as a plot to blow up the Pentagon with a model airplane.
As an American who was in public service for a number of years and who has always stood up for the Constitution, a patriot’s duty, I must hope that the question has already popped into readers’ minds: Why are we expected to believe that a tiny model airplane is capable of blowing up the Pentagon when the purported 757 airliner loaded with jet fuel was incapable of doing the job, merely making a hole not big enough for an airliner?
When I observe the gullibility of my fellow citizens at the absurd “terror plots” that the US government manufactures, it causes me to realize that fear is the most powerful weapon any government has for advancing an undeclared agenda. If Ferdaus is brought to trial, no doubt a jury will convict him of a plot to blow up the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes. Most likely he will be tortured or coerced into a plea bargain.
Apparently, Americans, or most of them, are so ruled by fear that they suffer no remorse from “their” government’s murder and dislocation of millions of innocent people. In the American mind, one billion “towel-heads” have been reduced to terrorists who deserve to be exterminated. The US is on its way to a holocaust that makes the terrors Jews faced from National Socialism into a mere precursor.
Think about this: Are not you amazed that after a decade (2.5 times the length of WW II) of killing Muslims and destroying families and their prospects in six countries there are no real terrorist events in the US?
Think for a minute how easy terrorism would be in the US if there were any terrorists. Would an Al Qaeda terrorist from the organization that allegedly pulled off 9/11—the most humiliating defeat ever suffered by a Western power, much less “the world’s only superpower”—still in the face of all the screening be trying to hijack an airliner or to blow one up?
Surely not, when there are so many totally soft targets. If America were really infected with a “terrorist threat,” a terrorist could merely get in the massive lines waiting to clear airport “security” and set off his bomb. It would kill far more people than could be achieved by blowing up an airliner, and make it completely clear that “airport security” is unachievable.
It would be child’s play for terrorists to blow up electric sub-stations as no one is there, nothing but a chain link fence. It would be easy for terrorists to blow up shopping centers. It would be easy for terrorists to dump boxes of roofing nails on congested streets and freeways during rush hours, tying up main transportation arteries for days.
Before, dear reader, you accuse me of giving terrorists ideas, do you really think that these kinds of ideas would not already have occurred to terrorists capable of pulling off 9/11?
But nothing happens. So the FBI arrests a guy for planning to blow up America with a model airplane. It is really depressing how many Americans will believe this.
Consider also that American neoconservatives, who have orchestrated the “war on terror,” have no protection whatsoever and that the Secret Service protection of Bush and Cheney is minimal. If America really faced a terrorist threat, especially one so professional as to have brought off 9/11, every neoconservative along with Bush and Cheney could be assassinated within one hour on one morning or one evening.
The fact that neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, William Kristol, Libby, Addington,
et. al
., live unprotected and free of fear is proof that America faces no terrorist threat.
Think now about the airliner shoe-bomb plot, the shampoo-bottled water plot, and the underwear-bomb plot. Experts, other than the whores hired by the US government, say that these plots are nonsensical. The “shoe bomb” and “underwear bomb” were colored fireworks powders incapable of blowing up a tin can. The liquid bomb, allegedly mixed up in an airliner toilet room, has been dismissed by experts as fantasy.
What is the purpose of these fake plots? And remember, all reports confirm that the “underwear bomber” was walked onto the airliner by an official, despite the fact that the “underwear bomber” had no passport. No investigation was ever conducted by the FBI, CIA, or anyone into why a passenger without a passport was allowed onto an international flight.
The purpose of these make-believe plots is to raise the fear level and to create the opportunity for former Homeland Security czar, Michael Chertoff, to make a fortune selling porno-scanners to the TSA.
The result of these hyped “terrorist plots” is that every American citizen, even those with high government positions and security clearances, cannot board a commercial airline flight without taking off his shoes, his jacket, his belt, submitting to a porno-scanner, or being sexually groped. Nothing could make it plainer that “airport security” cannot tell a Muslim terrorist from a gung-ho American patriot, a US Senator, a US Marine general, or a CIA operative.
If a passenger requires, for health or other reasons, quantities of liquids and creams beyond the limits imposed on toothpaste, shampoo, food, or medications, the passenger must obtain prior approval from TSA, which seldom works. One of America’s finest moments is the case, documented on YouTube, of a dying woman in a wheelchair, who required special food, having her food thrown away by the gestapo TSA despite the written approval from the Transportation Safety Administration, her daughter arrested for protesting, and the dying woman in the wheelchair left alone in the airport.
This is America today. These assaults on innocent citizens are justified by the mindless right-wing as “protecting us against terrorism,” a “threat” that all evidence shows is nonexistent.
No American is secure today. I am a former staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee. I required high security clearances as I had access to information pertaining to all US weapons programs. As chief economist of the House Budget Committee I had information pertaining to the US military and security budgets. As Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, I was provided every morning with the CIA’s briefing of the President as well as with endless security information.
When I left the Treasury, President Reagan appointed me to a super- secret committee to investigate the CIA’s assessment of Soviet capability. Afterwards I was a consultant to the Pentagon. I had every kind of security clearance.
Despite my record of highest security clearances and US government confidence in me including confirmation by the US Senate in a presidential appointment, the airline police cannot tell me from a terrorist.
If I were into model airplanes or attending anti-war demonstrations, there is little doubt I, too, would be arrested.
After my public service in the last quarter of the 20th century, I experienced, during the first decade of the 21st century, all of America’s achievements, despite their blemishes, being erased. In their place was erected a monstrous desire for hegemony and highly concentrated wealth. Most of my friends and my fellow citizens in general are incapable of recognizing America’s transformation into a warmonger police state that has the worst income distribution of any developed country.
It is extraordinary that so many Americans, citizens of the world’s only superpower, actually believe that they are threatened by Muslim peoples who have no unity, no navy, no air force, no nuclear weapons, no missiles capable of reaching across the oceans.
Indeed, large percentages of these “threat populations,” especially among the young, are enamored of the sexual freedom that exists in America. Even the Iranian dupes of the CIA-orchestrated “Green Revolution” have forgotten Washington’s overthrow of their elected government in the 1950s. Despite America’s decade-long abusive military actions against Muslim peoples, many Muslims still look to America for their salvation.
Many of their “leaders” are simply bought off with large sums of money.
With the “terrorist threat” and Al Qaeda deflated with President Obama’s alleged assassination of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was left unprotected and unarmed by his “world-wide terrorist organization,” Washington has come up with a new bogyman—the Haqqanis.
According to John Glaser and anonymous CIA officials, US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen “exaggerated” the case against the Haqqani insurgent group when he claimed, setting up a US invasion of Pakistan, that the Haqqanis were an operating arm of the Pakistan government’s secret service, the ISI. Adm. Mullen is now running from his “exaggeration,” a euphemism for a lie. His aid, Captain John Kirby, said that Mullen’s “accusations were designed to influence the Pakistanis to crack down on the Haqqani Network.” In other words, the Pakistanis should kill more of their own people to save the Americans the trouble.
If you don’t know what the Haqqani Network is, don’t be surprised. You never heard of Al Qaeda prior to 9/11. The US government creates whatever new bogymen and incidents are necessary to further the neoconservative agenda of world hegemony and higher profits for the armaments industry.
For ten years, the “superpower” American population has been immobilized, terrified by the government’s lies. While Americans sit sucking their thumbs in fear of non-existent “terrorists”, millions of people in six countries have had their lives destroyed. As far as any evidence exists, the vast majority of Americans are unperturbed by the wanton murder of others in countries that they are incapable of locating on maps.
THE DAY AMERICA DIED
October 2, 2011
September 30, 2011 was the day America was assassinated.
Some of us have watched this day approach and have warned of its coming, only to be greeted with boos and hisses from “patriots” who have come to regard the US Constitution as a device that coddles criminals and terrorists and gets in the way of the President who needs to act to keep us safe.
In our book,
The Tyranny of Good Intentions
, Lawrence Stratton and I showed that long before 9/11 US law had ceased to be a shield of the people and had been turned into a weapon in the hands of the government. The event known as 9/11 was used to raise the executive branch above the law. As long as the president sanctions an illegal act, executive branch employees are no longer accountable to the law that prohibits the illegal act. On the president’s authority, the executive branch can violate US laws against spying on Americans without warrants, indefinite detention, and torture and suffer no consequences.
Many expected President Obama to re-establish the accountability of government to law. Instead, he went further than Bush/Cheney and asserted the unconstitutional power not only to hold American citizens indefinitely in prison without bringing charges, but also to take their lives without convicting them in a court of law. Obama asserts that the US Constitution notwithstanding, he has the authority to assassinate US citizens, whom he deems to be a “threat,” without due process of law.
In other words, any American citizen who is moved into the threat category has no rights and can be executed without trial or evidence.
On September 30 Obama used this asserted new power of the president and had two American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, murdered. Khan was a wacky character associated with
Inspire Magazine
and does not readily come to mind as a serious threat.
Al-Awlaki was a moderate American Muslim cleric who served as an advisor to the US government after 9/11 on ways to counter Muslim extremism. Al-Awlaki was gradually radicalized by Washington’s use of lies to justify military attacks on Muslim countries. He became a critic of the US government and told Muslims that they did not have to passively accept American aggression and had the right to resist and to fight back. As a result al-Awlaki was demonized and became a threat.