Webster Griffin Tarpley's book adds to the literature exposing the fraudulent basis of the so-called "War on Terror," by revealing the official account of 9/11 to be a flimsy tissue of illusions and evasions. For the 49.3% of New York City residents who, according to a Zogby 2004 poll, believe our leaders "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act," this book will provide proof that their beliefs are closer to the truth than the official fairy tale peddled by the 9/11 Commission and the corporate-controlled media.
Tarpley, an activist and historian, is the author of George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992), and Against Oligarchy, among other books. By "Synthetic Terror," he suggests that the events of 9/11 did not happen in the normal course of events. They were not acts of crazed Arabs who "hate our freedom," nor were they "blowback" from victims of America's criminal foreign policy. A few patsies from oppressed groups may have been used by the intelligence network, because "false flag" operations require patsies to be effective, but they were incapable of pulling off an attack of this sophistication by themselves. Nowhere is that made more clear than in the forensic evidence surrounding the inexplicable collapse of three steel-framed buildings, WTC 1, 2 and 7.
Tarpley devotes a chapter to the controlled-demolition hypothesis, suggesting that the collapse of two steel-framed high-rise buildings from the impact of the planes and subsequent fires was physically impossible. Moreover, he documents not only the many eyewitness reports, from firefighters, reporters, and others on the scene, of numerous secondary explosions in the towers, but squibs - puffs of smoke and debris coming out of the building - well below the place of impact, and other telltale signs of controlled demolition.
In more than a century of the existence of these kinds of high-rise structures, with hundreds of documented fires, sometimes burning for many hours, there had never been a single instance of a building collapsing - until 9/11, when three such buildings collapsed, one of which had had not even been hit by a plane (WTC 7). But, like the many other anomalies on and around that day, we are supposed to accept it on faith, trusting in the good will of our leaders. This is why the credulous response many leftists to 9/11 is so baffling. Many who would never believe Bush or the FBI on matters of far less import were, inexplicably, willing to accept the entire official story this time around.
David Ray Griffin and others have already revealed the logical contradictions among the various versions of the official narrative. While acknowledging the contribution made to 9/11 research by Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor, Tarpley faults the book for "listing as suspects only identifiable institutions, such as the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, and the White House. It is not the visible, elected government, acting as a totality, that plots terrorism, but a "network or faction of like-minded plotters which cuts across institutions transversally." The footprints of the parallel government can be seen in events like the U-2 crisis, the Bay of Pigs, the JFK assassination, parts of Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the anthrax attacks.
Thus, while for political reasons Bush must be held accountable, for he has undoubtedly led the cover-up of the truth about 9/11, he was certainly not the leader of the plot. This is an important point, because Tarpley believes the modern president is more a figurehead than a chief executive, reduced to ratifying decisions made behind the scenes, either within the federal bureaucracy or the parallel government. While it is politically astute and reasonably accurate to blame Bush for 9/11, it can be misleading if one sees Bush as the originator or director of the 9/11 conspiracy.
For Tarpley, Cheney was probably central to the plot; and Bush's culpability stems from his capitulation to the 9/11 planners in the parallel government, and for leading the cover-up. Tarpley goes to great lengths to establish his case that Bush was out of the loop until the day of September 11 itself, devoting a whole chapter to the alleged threats against the president on September 10th and 11th. However, it is more probable that these purported "threats" to Bush were part of the theater of the day, designed to exculpate the president in the event the plot went wrong; for example, if one of the planes were recovered, equipped with a Global Hawk remote-guidance system.
Tarpley recounts the CIA's long and illustrious relationship with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the group which the CIA created to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1979 and supported throughout the 1990s, indeed, supported right up through July 2001, when a CIA case officer, reportedly met with bin Laden at a hospital in Dubai. The CIA, of course, denied the story, but RFI
and Le Figaro have stood by their story.
He quotes Michael Springmann, former head of the US visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from 1987 to 1989, who told the BBC in 2001 that he was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to applicants who not only were unqualified, but also were known terrorists, recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come to the U.S. for training in the war in Afghanistan against the then-Soviets.
Tracing the roots of 9/11 to a severe and increasing instability in the global financial system during the 1990s and the threatened end of dollar hegemony, Tarpley summarizes some twenty-one crises and panics since 1987 that had the capacity of causing global financial meltdown. He believes the US oligarchy reached a consensus on the need for terrorism during the 1990s, to maintain its hegemonic system under conditions of growing fiscal and economic disintegration.
"The role of the dollar in the posted price for Gulf crude is the central symbol of the world domination of the dollar. And the dollar is the nerve and fist of US world domination." Because prices for the world's main raw materials, particularly oil, are quoted in US dollars, there is a large global demand for a currency which otherwise might find few buyers, since after three decades of deindustrialization, the US produces little to sell. "This allows the US-UK banking community to skim 5-10% off all world trade by providing import-export financing; this used to be called invisible earnings."
In 2000, Iraq stopped accepting dollars for oil, opting for the euro instead. In September 2002, the government of Iran also suggested it was considering switching over to the euro for crude oil sales. The European Union, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia have all made similar suggestions in recent years.
"...The arrival of US military forces next door [to Iran] was doubtless designed to dissuade the Iranians from such thoughts." Terrorism would "serve as a well to prevent threatened defections from the dollar zone, and shore up the battered greenback as the world's residual currency." It would also be used to undermine economic nationalist or pro-development regimes in the developing world and to strengthen US-UK control over oil, strategic metals, and other vital raw materials.
US policymakers fear that a stampede of countries will switch over to the euro as the prime currency for purchasing oil and other vital international commodities. If that happens, the net effect will likely diminish the value of the dollar to perhaps a quarter or a third of its current value. It will also cause profound dislocations throughout the global economy.
Another chapter examines whether the alleged hijackers - at least four of whom have turned out to be still alive - were capable of flying airliners into World Trade Center 1, 2 and the Pentagon. We learn from two experienced German pilots, speaking on a September 12 prime time broadcast in Germany, both veterans of many hours flying 757s and 767s, that the skills demonstrated by the supposed 9/11 hijackers could only be acquired from practice flying such an airliner, which none of the alleged hijackers had.
Among the more improbable coincidences of September 11 was the fact that several war games were being conducted that day, including Amalgam Virgo and Vigilant Guardian, which involved hijacked airliners used as weapons, a cruise missile, and other unmanned aerial vehicles. Tarpley speculates that Amalgam Virtue gave the plotters cover while channeling the actual live-fly components of the 9/11 operation through a largely unwitting military bureaucracy. "Under the cover of this confusion, the most palpably subversive actions could be made to appear in the harmless and even beneficial guise of a drill."
This book is a veritable encyclopedia of 9/11, covering matters as diverse as insider trading, anomalous cell phone calls, the anthrax attacks, the anomaly in the official account of what hit the Pentagon, the stolen presidential election of 2004, the unacknowledged ongoing Cold War with Russia, Islamic fundamentalism as a tool of US foreign policy, and much more. Until citizens have the courage to question the inconsistencies and physical impossibilities of the official story of what happened on September 11, 2001, we will never be able to effectively resist the systematic undermining of our constitutional rights, the ongoing consolidation of a totalitarian apparatus of domestic spying, or the disastrous wars that have been and will be based on this monstrous myth. 9/11 Synthetic Terror is essential reading to expose the "Myth of the 21st Century" and reclaim our democracy from the vicious tyrants who have usurped it.
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Luc REYNAERT
The neocon death warrant for civilization, all human values
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 17, 2006
