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| ISBN-13: | 9781634240826 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Trine Day |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
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Black 9/11
Money, Motive & Technology
By Mark H. Gaffney
Trine Day LLC
Copyright © 2016 Mark H. GaffneyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63424-082-6
CHAPTER 1
Forewarnings
For many years, bankrupt Cold War policies have crippled our nation's capacity to play a positive role on the world stage. Many foreigners no longer view the United States with admiration and respect, but increasingly with fear and loathing. But here, US elites seem oblivious to such concerns. They do not care, and they are quite candid about what they view as the CIA's pragmatic "need" to associate with unsavory individuals and criminals in the interest of furthering US foreign-policy goals. Their true colors can be identified between the lines of the policy papers.
Take, for instance, a 1996 intelligence report prepared by AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg for the Council on Foreign Relations, which earned Greenberg a nomination to replace John Deutch as director of the CIA. Greenberg states that the capability to undertake covert operations "constitutes an important national security tool." In a section titled "Intelligence and Law Enforcement," he is clear about the subordinate place of law enforcement under realpolitik:
Foreign policy ought to take precedence over law enforcement when it comes to overseas operations. The bulk of US intelligence efforts overseas is devoted to traditional national security concerns; as a result, law enforcement must ordinarily be a secondary concern. FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency agents operating abroad should not be allowed to act independently of either the ambassador or the CIA lest pursuit of evidence or individuals for prosecution cause major foreign policy problems or complicate ongoing intelligence and diplomatic activities.
This of course means that when criminals are judged to be intelligence assets they are to be granted protection from prosecution for narcotrafficking, money laundering, extortion, rape, even terrorism and murder. Such has been our de facto policy since at least the final days of World War II. And in 1982, the CIA and the US Department of Justice apparently even worked out a secret agreement to this effect. The deal exempted the CIA from having to report drug trafficking by CIA assets, which made a mockery of then-presidential wife Nancy Reagan's much ballyhooed "just say no" anti-drug campaign.
At the time, most Americans trusted Ronald Reagan and believed that his administration was serious about the so-called War on Drugs. But hindsight shows clearly that the Reagan White House badly abused the public's good faith.
The foreign policy outlined by Maurice Greenberg is in large part responsible for the drug-related violence on the streets of our cities, and for the epidemic of drug addiction among our children – sacrificed to the false god of national security. Nor is the social carnage limited to the United States. Drug addiction in Muslim Iraq was almost unknown prior to the US invasion in 2003; it has since become a major problem. A similar explosion of heroin use has occurred in Iran, right next door to Afghanistan, where the poppies are grown with the blessing of the CIA.
Such foreign policies are evil, a scourge upon the planet, yet are intimately associated with US empire building. Time and again, the same historic pattern has played out: US military intervention, whether in Southeast Asia, Central America or, since 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq, has been accompanied by a sharp increase in narcotrafficking, with all of the attendant evils.
Quite simply, a US power elite has followed in the footsteps of the British and French, who in their day also exploited the immensely profitable opium and heroin trade.
The CIA's secret collusion with/domination of the Department of Justice gave it veto power over law enforcement, effectively blunting the capacity of US law-enforcement agencies to interdict the flow of illegal drugs into the US. The timing seems no accident. The deal of 1982 coincided with the start of the CIA's Contra war in Central America, and would explain why, in 1983, the Drug Enforcement Agency under pressure from the Pentagon closed its office in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
The flow of drugs through Honduras had not diminished, just the opposite. For years, the country had been a transfer point for illegal drug smuggling into the US, a reality that Contra leaders readily exploited to finance their war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and they did so with the full knowledge and approval of the CIA. For many years after, a CIA veto blocked legitimate efforts by US law enforcement to curb the illicit drug trade.
Meanwhile, the American people were kept in the dark about the policy and its effects at every point in the chain, from the formulation of the policy, to its implementation, to its phony packaging for mass consumption. In fact, our knowledge about this corruption is primarily thanks to a courageous journalist named Gary Webb. In 1996, Webb produced a series of groundbreaking articles for the San Jose Mercury News exposing Contra links and CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that had ravaged the black communities of Los Angeles in the 1980s.
The series, appropriately titled "Dark Alliance," was one of the first big news stories to be carried on the Internet. Later, Webb expanded it into an important book by the same name, in which he laid out the voluminous evidence in stark detail. But it was Webb's series of articles in 1996 that initially focused media attention on CIA complicity in the drug trade and compelled Agency director John Deutch to announce an internal investigation. Meanwhile, the CIA also simultaneously launched a disinformation campaign to discredit Webb, whom it viewed as a serious threat.
The campaign against Gary Webb has been called "one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist's competence in living memory." The mainstream press, seemingly always eager to do the bidding of authorities, appeared to take pleasure in savaging the messenger, even while tacitly conceding that his facts were basically correct.
One of the low points occurred on live TV on November 15, 1996, when NBC's Andrea Mitchell, wife of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, referred to Webb's exhaustively documented expose as "a conspiracy theory," the kiss of death for any serious journalist. At this same time, of course, Greenspan was busily (dare we say "conspiratorially"?) engineering the deregulation of Wall Street, setting the stage for the eventual financial meltdown of the global economy. As we will see, this deregulation may have also had a part in 9/11 itself.
CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz led the Agency's internal probe, and even though his conclusions later confirmed Webb's main thesis, the CIA suppressed Hitz's report, even while leaking a denial of the allegations. The CIA's minions in the press corps did the rest. On December 19, 1997, an article by Tim Weiner in the New York Times and another by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post cited "unnamed sources," who insisted that Hitz had found no "direct or indirect" links between the CIA and cocaine traffickers. This was a blatant lie, indeed a breathtaking example of CIA deception. But it had its intended effect: neither reporter bothered to ask why Hitz's report was still under wraps.
How could the mainstream press fumble so badly? Probably because in the 1990s the issue of CIA complicity in the drug trade was politically out of bounds, simply unthinkable, beyond the realm of the possible. Today, things are a little different.
After the onset of the war in Afghanistan, the CIA's support for Afghan drug lords moved out of the closet. By 2009, even the major US papers were reporting on it. However, the political climate of the 1990s simply would not allow an honest airing of the CIA-drug issue, much as a real investigation of 9/11 remains taboo, to this day. Webb's newspaper publisher ultimately caved under pressure and threw his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter under the bus, even as Webb was turning up fresh evidence that indicated he had, if anything, understated the case against the CIA.
When CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz finally testified before the House Intelligence Committee, in March 1998, he admitted it was all true: "Let me be frank about what we are finding. There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity."
On hearing this, Congressman Norman Dicks of Washington button-holed Hitz with the obvious next question: "Did any of these allegations involve trafficking in the United States?"
"Yes," Hitz replied, and went on to discuss the CIA's secret arrangement with the Department of Justice. According to Webb, who was in attendance, at that point a murmur swept through a shocked hearing room as the meaning of Hitz's testimony sank in.
Of course, by this time Webb's career as a journalist had been destroyed. The CIA's vilification campaign had achieved the intended result, and the next day, the Washington Post buried its story about Hitz's testimony deep inside the paper, along with its own culpability in helping to trash the reputation of one of America's finest investigative journalists.
Gary Webb was marginalized at the San Jose Mercury News, which he left to write his award-winning book, Dark Alliance. It appeared in 1999, to both acclaim and, predictably, still more press bashing. Webb subsequently worked as an investigator for the California legislature, and later took a position (at a steep pay cut) for the Sacramento News and Review. But the press attacks, his unemployability as an investigative writer, and deepening financial troubles took a toll on Webb, who had always been prone to bouts of depression. By 2004 the writer was in a downward spiral that was quite apparent to his friends and family.
His body was discovered on December 10, 2004, along with a note and other evidence of suicide. Because Webb had been shot twice in the head — evidently not as rare in suicide as might be presumed — many skeptics continue to believe that he was murdered. But even if Webb died by his own tragic hand, and the evidence indicates he did, does that exonerate those who drove him to it?
How can such a miscarriage happen in a nation that prides itself on being a free and open society? The answer is that complicity with narcotrafficking has exerted an insidious corrupting influence on our government, just as it did in the cases of Britain and France during their colonial periods, indeed as it did in the days of Rome. Government officials are not immune to the temptations of the drug trade, which is now the most profitable business on the planet by a wide margin. Arms smuggling, by comparison, comes in a distant second.
The outcome of a secret policy of complicity was entirely predictable: the possibilities for abuse are as unlimited as the criminal imagination. But I must admit to shock at learning just how far up the food chain the rot extends.
CHAPTER 2A Walk on the Dark Side
On September 10, 2001, the eve of the worst terrorist attack in US history, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged during a press conference that the Department of Defense could not account for $2.3 trillion of the massive Pentagon budget. At the time, I thought this number so large as to be almost incomprehensible.
But in the course of my 9/11 research, as you will see, I have had to comprehend even larger sums. For example, merely the gold of a secret treasure hoard falling, albeit incomplete and piecemeal, into the "unofficial" coffers of the US geopolitical establishment would be worth well over $5 trillion with gold at a "mere" $1000 per ounce, a price it has been far above recently. That mind-boggling hoard also included diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, etc.; platinum and other strategic metals; as well as "priceless" art and artifacts; all collected by looting various Asian nations over a fifty year period. Most of the treasure was carefully inventoried.
The piracy was then carefully covered up by agents of the US government, for reasons that may have seemed sound in the aftermath of World War II, but which cannot be justified, today. For, indeed, the legacies of these initiatives currently threaten our system of representative democracy.
According to the late Chalmers Johnson, a longtime expert on Japan, East Asia and US foreign policy, as much as 40% of the Pentagon budget is "black," meaning hidden from public scrutiny. If his figure is even approximately correct, and I believe it is, this means that democratic oversight of US military research and development has become all but impossible. In which case, our democratic values and way of life are now at risk: not from without — no foreign enemy can subvert the US Constitution — but from within.
At 9:38 a.m. on the morning after Rumsfeld's press conference, the nascent investigation of the missing money was derailed even before it could get underway, when the west wing of the Pentagon exploded in flames and smoke, the target of a terrorist strike. And with the attack also died any remaining hope that the US military might still get its budgetary house in order. Curiously, the exact point of impact was the Department of Defense accounting offices on the first floor.
The odds against this being a coincidence, given the Pentagon's enormous size, prompted skeptics of the official story to read a dark design into the attack. The surgical destruction of the Department of Defense's records and staff, nearly all of whom died in the rubble, leads to important questions about who benefited from 9/11. The answers suggest that Deep Throat's famous dictum during the Watergate revelations — "follow the money" — may be no less important to a deep understanding of 9/11.
Was the destruction of the Pentagon accounting office one of the diabolical objectives of the attack? And if so, why would anti-American Islamic jihadists pick such a target over others that surely had much greater military significance?
Without question, the Pentagon's west wing presented a much more challenging target than the east wing. Targeting the west wing required a difficult approach over the Arlington skyline. The final approach was especially dicey and amounted to a downhill obstacle course, skirting apartments and a large complex of buildings about a quarter-mile from the Pentagon known as the Naval Annex, which sits atop a hill rising from the flat ground along the Potomac River.
In April 2008, I interviewed Army Brigadier General Clyde Vaughn, a credible witness to the events of that morning. Vaughn explained over the telephone that on 9/11 he was on his way to work at the Pentagon via the Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway (I395) when the strike occurred. The general told me the hijacked aircraft (presumably American Airlines Flight 77) just missed the Naval Annex and that it would have hit the 270-feet-tall US Air Force memorial presently occupying the site. The new memorial was constructed and dedicated in 2006.
Why did the terrorists not take the easy approach up the Potomac River? The river approach would have afforded a reasonably good chance to crash the offices of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which were located on the opposite side of the building, in the middle of the outer "E" ring. The location of their offices was no secret. Surely terrorists would have been more interested in decapitating the command structure of the US war machine than going after a bunch of accounting clerks.
There were other striking anomalies that morning. The crash of American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. should also have raised red flags, because the point of impact at the 95th and 96th floors was another remarkable happenstance. Both floors were occupied by Marsh & McLennan, one of the world's largest insurance brokerages, with ties to the private intelligence firm Kroll Associates, which held the security contract at the World Trade Center. Indeed, the network of corporate ties here is so entangled that tracing all the links would fill this entire volume, but the most salient connections can be enumerated.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black 9/11 by Mark H. Gaffney. Copyright © 2016 Mark H. Gaffney. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Cover,Black 9/11,
Copyright page,
Publisher's Foreword,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Two-page letter from the National Transportation Safety Board,
Plausibility of 9/11 Aircraft Attacks Generated by GPS-Guided Aircraft Autopilot Systems,
9/11 HYPOTHESIS BASED ON EVIDENCE FOR PRECISE NAVIGATION,
AUGMENTED GPS,
PERFORMANCE BASED NAVIGATION VIA WAYPOINTS,
The Day that Changed Everything,
1) Forewarnings,
A Walk on the Dark Side,
Insiders Trade,
American International Group,
Collateral Damage,
Black Gold,
The Cocke Deposition,
Rise of the National Security State,
BoNY and the Fed,
Remote-Control 9/11,
Key Evidence Suppressed,
The Fate of United Flight 93,
Correcting the Record,
Incident at Camp David,
The NRO Shutdown,
The Future is Up For Grabs ...,
Plausibility of 9/11 Aircraft Attacks Generated by GPS-Guided Aircraft Autopilot Systems Part Two,
Appendices,
Index,
Contents,
Landmarks,