(replaced at the last minute by "Dust in the wind: Are we farming ourselves to death?", a review of Fatal Harvest)
The War On Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked, September 11th, 2001, by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed (Tree of Life Publications, 2002)
Did the Bush Administration allow or even instigate the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
It's a question I've heard more and more people asking, as our leaders use the tragedy of 9/11 to justify everything from suspending Constitutional protections, to pre-emptively nuking and assassinating foreign leaders, to expanding their power to spy on citizens while cloaking themselves in secrecy ... in short, to administer a year's worth of almost daily body blows to traditional notions of world peace and domestic freedom in the name of the War on Terror.
Till now, even tentative answers to that question have been hard to find -- on American bookshelves, at least. Several months ago, when I heard that a book called Frightening Fraud was a best-seller in France, I asked the folks at Malaprop's to help me try to find it. All I knew about it was that it claimed the attack on the Pentagon was part of a U.S. government conspiracy. An equally interested clerk at the bookstore searched diligently through the store's suppliers' list, but was surprised (and a little suspicious) to discover that she couldn't find it anywhere. Since then, I've found the book's Web site, and learned that it makes the sensationalistic but highly dubious assertion that the crash never even happened.
Now there's a far-better book asking the crucial question about complicity, and this one you can get through local bookstores. The War On Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked, September 11th, 2001 has just been published by British scholar Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, a political scientist and executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, a human-rights think tank in Brighton, UK. In a fascinating and convincing way, Ahmed has brought together reams of published analysis, evidence and reportage from government, press and academic sources (the 400-page book numbers 734 footnotes). He -- or rather, he and his sources -- shine a powerful light on what appear to be the real actions and motivations of the oil and military-industrial executives who acquired the White House two years ago.
A heartfelt concern for lost American lives looks to be pretty low on the list, for example, for a Commander in Chief and government officials who -- in flagrant violation of military Standard Operating Procedure -- appear to have, for up to an hour-and-a-half after air-traffic controllers notified military officials of the hijackings, neglected or prevented the scrambling of jets to intercept any of the four hijacked passenger airliners. By the time Air Force jets did show up -- from bases that were unaccountably far away from Washington and New York -- the third plane of the four had already crashed into the Pentagon.
The President, you may recall, was notified immediately after each of the first two planes struck the World Trade Center, but instead of calling an emergency meeting or issuing timely Executive authorization to shoot down the other planes before they reached their targets, he blandly continued reading stories with a class of Florida schoolchildren.
You'll stop wondering how Osama bin Laden miraculously escaped from a manhunt that managed to kill twice as many people in Afghanistan as died in the World Trade Center when you learn how many times the Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations stepped in to prevent the investigation or arrest of Osama and several other bin Laden brothers we knew were involved in blowing up American bases and ships -- because they were scions of an extremely wealthy, conservative and well-connected Saudi Arabian construction dynasty. John J. O'Neill, a renowned FBI counter-terrorism expert who investigated these bombings and the 1993 bombing of the WTC, complained bitterly to a French intelligence analyst that the oil lobby who make up Bush Jr.'s entourage compelled the State Dept. to prevent him from obtaining the evidence in Yemen that would have clearly tied Osama bin Laden to the USS Cole bombing -- and justified apprehending him and dismantling his organization. (This is the #4 most-censored news story of 2001-'02, according to Project Censored.)
O'Neill resigned from the FBI in frustration in Aug. 2001 -- and took a job as head of security at the WTC, where he died on Sept. 11.
The War on Freedom reveals that George W. Bush made his first million thanks to the bin Laden family, which largely funded his still-controversial Harken Oil Company venture 20 years ago. Until shortly after Sept. 11, the bin Ladens had a sizable investment in George Bush Sr.'s Carlyle Group, an Enron-style buyer-up of defense companies that now stands to make a killing from the permanent state of war the ex-President's son has declared.
Another bin Laden investment is in a joint venture with a subsidiary of the huge Halliburton Corporation for one of the many pipelines to be built through Afghanistan from the oil-rich former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Halliburton, the oil-services company that Vice President Cheney headed until the 2000 elections, is also profiting immensely from any war the Bush Administration declares -- it is, after all, the world's fifth-largest defense contractor.
Those Afghani pipelines, the book's sources assert, are the principal reason why Bush Administration officials had warned the Taliban that the renegade religious extremists -- whose notorious underground cave complex, by the way, Osama bin Laden had built with U.S. funding during the Soviet invasion -- could expect a "carpet of bombs" if they continued opposing them. Privately, says Ahmed (citing sources including Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth by French intelligence analysts Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié), U.S. officials made plans well before Sept. 11 to start the Afghan war in October 2001.
"In examining any crime, a central question must be 'who benefits'?" Ahmed quotes investigative journalist Patrick Martin. "The 11th September attacks," Ahmed continues (in a chapter titled 'The New War: Power and Profit, at Home and Abroad'), "provided the crucial pretext the Bush administration needed to consolidate its power and pursue a drastic, unlimited militarisation of foreign policy on a massive and unprecedented scale required by long-standing elite planning, while crushing domestic dissent and criminalising legitimate protest. What happened on 11th September constituted exactly what the Bush administration needed, to expand and consolidate America's 'global primacy' as the 'truly last superpower' by invading Afghanistan, which is a foothold to unrivalled control of Central Asia, and thus Eurasia."
The questions Ahmed and his sources raise are especially critical now, as the Bush Administration tries to convince us to go to war against Iraq. Especially chilling to anyone who kept a sharp eye on the news in mid-July were two simultaneous announcements: Top U.S. officials warned that Saddam and al Qaeda are prepared to "deter" our invasion with bombings and biowarfare in major U.S. cities -- and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) began taking contractor bids for massive "temporary cities" as refugee camps in preparation for Iraqi counterattacks on the U.S. (to be readied by January, 2003). In early August, Attorney General John Ashcroft quietly announced plans for concentration camps in which U.S. citizens designated as "enemy combatants" will be held indefinitely.
If you want to find out why even the Europeans now hate us -- or rather, our leaders -- The War on Freedom is a good primer, even if you remain reluctant to accept its conclusions. Since Americans' own loyalty to this administration's agenda may be only flag-deep, as Mountain Xpress' poll of Asheville residents (reported in this issue) suggests, the bombshells contained in Ahmed's book could do much to encourage that "informed public" the Founders insisted was essential to the preservation of democracy.
The War on Freedom is available locally at Malaprop's Bookstore. Call 254-6734 for more information.