This is a transcript of Part Two of Webster Griffin Tarpley’s interview on KPFA’s Guns and Butter radio program.

9/11 Synthetic Terror, Part Two, Wednesday, April 20th, 2005.
Real Media stream

Bonnie Faulkner (BF): You have, an entire chapter I believe, on Anthrax. Now, what do you address in that chapter, do you talk about bio-warfare? What is that about?

Webster Griffin Tarpley (WT): The thing about the anthrax is that 9/11, the Pentagon and the WTC Towers are far away from rural America, the Midwest… there are large parts of the US where people could say, ‘As long as it’s skyscrapers, there’s no skyscraper here…’ and there were tens of millions of people who felt that they were not on the hook.

But of course the one thing that just about everybody does is go to a Post Office box or a mail slot at home, or your mailbox, and get out your daily mail. And as you remember, when you did this, you’re always thinking, how many anthrax spores are in this envelope and every unidentified piece of junk mail you opened up you wondered if you were gonna get white powder in it.

So this was very effective psy-war, it was also used, very consciously by the FBI to take investigators, who were supposedly looking into 9/11 and to divert them to something completely different. It’s very interesting that the FBI has never solved this crime. I think it’s a key to the bankruptcy of their investigative procedures in general, if that were still needed. The one thing that’s clear is that the anthrax spores that are involved here come from US military labs.

Now, there was a big attempt to point out the inevitable ‘lone assassin’ in this case. A man by the name of Hatfill was widely targeted, not so much by name but by profile. And the notion that he was some kind of disgruntled loner who had been in Rhodesia, I guess and probably racist… and a lot of bad things that could be said about this guy.

But, as soon as we get the disgruntled loner, we immediately have to be suspicious because this is the ‘Oswald’ profile; this is what we’ve seen again and again and again, when the scope of the operation requires a network. And I would therefore say that what’s behind the anthrax is a network of highly witting intelligence officials with the biological warfare capabilities who simply make this happen. And they leave some false trails that lead to this man Hatfill, and then they put on a kind of a show… they go up to Frederick, Maryland and start draining ponds in the summer of 2003 I guess it is, if not earlier to try to find where he assembled these things under water so he wouldn’t get the spores on him.

It’s all crazy… it’s all a kind of a dog and pony show, a spectacle that’s put on, and we’re left with the certitude that these spores come from a US government lab. So, I think that speaks volumes about the whole thing. And the guy that they’ve targeted seems to me a scapegoat or a patsy, or somehow somebody who could not have done it, didn’t have the physical technical ability to bring it about, in the same way that Oswald couldn’t have done it, in the same way that Atta couldn’t have done it, (however monstrous his criminal intent), could not have done it. Didn’t have the ability.

BF: Didn’t they trace the anthrax right up to the gates of Fort Detrick?

WT: Right, that’s the one. Fort Detrick, Maryland and Frederick, that’s where it was. The other thing about it is at a certain point in the investigation, the FBI authorizes the destruction of a bank of anthrax samples held at a university in the south, I think in Louisiana¹, right in the middle of the whole thing, and we’re asked to believe that the poor FBI agents are overworked and overwhelmed and they don’t really know enough about biological warfare so they thought it was fine to destroy all the samples that would have made it even more specific in terms of exactly who had the spores in their hands.

So this was fundamental as an element of the cover-up, and of course moles carry out the cover-up.

BF: I believe that destruction took place right before the investigation traced it there, and wasn’t it Ames strain?

WT: Yes, I guess that’s the one, and I have the details in (the book) but I think the main political point here is it comes from a US government lab, and the FBI is on the scene actively destroying evidence. We have so many references to the FBI confiscating evidence, destroying evidence, intimidating witnesses, that the FBI becomes the black hole of 9/11 evidence and you can judge the Kean-Hamilton Commission, Governor Kean said at one point the FBI failed and failed and failed and failed and failed… but he failed to recommend the breakup of the FBI which would have been the only conceivable response for a failure of this magnitude.

He didn’t do that, so that’s his notion of ‘intelligence reform’.

BF: Let’s talk a little about economics, I know you have a whole chapter called the catastrophe of globalization… you’ve written quite a bit in this book about a looming global economic crisis, isn’t that right?

WT: Yes, absolutely. Here I have an interesting chart, I’ve tried to summarize the financial crisis and panics with the capability of bringing on systemic breakdown. In other words the collapse of the world banking system, and capital flows.

Since 1987… I have 21 of them… all during the 1990’s as globalization was being carried out; you have two things going on. One is, if all the energy of this system has to be devoted to overcoming these systemic crises, dollar crises, the Mexican bankruptcy, the Japanese banking crisis, the Southeast Asia crisis- Indonesia on the brink, and then, perhaps most significant, September 23, 1998, the long-term capital management crisis, which was a product of the Russian state bankruptcy, this brought the entire world banking system to the verge of breakdown.

The clearinghouse interbank system in New York jammed up, they couldn’t settle among the banks at the end of the day, similar things were going on in London, and that’s when Greenspan had to come in with a kind of a backdoor bailout.

Argentina going to default, the JPMorganChase derivatives monster growing and then imploding, this is an amazing catalog of instability. So we’ve got a completely unstable world monetary system, it just doesn’t work. This privatized central baking and everything else.

At the same time, the evisceration of the world is growing. My estimate would be 2 billion people under a dollar a day, you’ve got 40,000 people dieing per day of starvation and diseases like diarrhea that can be cured, or malaria that can be treated at least, or prevented with mosquito nets, very cheap things… 40,000 per day die of this. Really the headline of every newspaper in the world ought to be, “40,000 People Died Needlessly Yesterday” and this is going on every day.

And you can go on. 60% of the people of the world have never made a phone call ever in their lives, a billion people are unemployed, hundreds of millions don’t have housing or clean water, and so forth.

So globalization has simply been a disaster. Now, where we get to the 9/11 connection I guess, is the Dollar and the Euro. Maybe you followed me into this…

Monetary matters, monetary reform, the world monetary system is a much-neglected topic but I think an important one. The Dollar has the status of being a residual reserve currency. It was under Bretton Woods, and it still is. The posted price of oil and other raw materials is in Dollars. The main IMF-World Bank lending institutions work in Dollars. Most of world trade, or at least a lot of it is still financed through Dollar bills of exchange through the London Eurodollar market, so the Dollar is the thing, but it’s losing out because of the inherent bankruptcy of the US system.

Here you have the Dollar, it’s supposed to be a world currency, and you’re running a 500 or 600 or 750 billion dollar budget deficit… you’ve also got, probably more serious, a 750 billion dollar per year trade deficit. That’s with the outside world, that you can’t control. On the internal front it’s bad, but you can probably control it, but it’s the international trade deficit that’s really hurting.

So the Dollar is reaching the end of the line. There are right now 11 trillion dollars in outstanding dollar obligations in this world. And there’s nothing backing them up.

As Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia says repeatedly, and I quote him, “The US dollar has no visible means of support except the illusion people have that it’s worth something.” Because there’s no production backing it up, the number of industrial workers in the United States is now below 10 million, for the first time since the 19th century, and this year, 2005; it’s taking another dive because the textile industry is being wrapped up.

It had been protected by some residual kinds of protectionist measures, import quotas, those have now been lifted, so the whole US textile industry is disappearing week by week as we go through 2005.

This country has lost all connection to the production of anything in the real world.

Financial services won’t hack it. Public Relations, Hollywood films… I’m sorry, these do not add up, you gotta produce real things, real physical commodities and the US is pretty much out of that business.

Now what’s gonna happen? Saddam’s crime was of course that he had dumped the dollar. He had switched from dollars to Euros, back in 2000, and he had been followed by N. Korea, they did it too as a political gesture. As of right now, to bring it up to date, the information we have is that Iran is planning to dump the Dollar in the coming months, and to set up an oil commodity exchange, denominated in Euros.

That would mean that the Dollar would no longer be usable to buy Iranian oil, only Euros, and that Bourse, that Comex of oil that the Iranians would presumably set up could be used by countries from all over the world, it would become an alternative to London and New York, denominated in Euros. That’s one.

The second one is Russia. Russia has been negotiating with Germany and the European Union now for a couple of years to do something very simple. In the trade of oil, when Russia sells oil to the EU, why does the EU have to pay with Dollars? They should pay with Euros. Better for Russia, the Euro is worth more, at least it’s more stable it doesn’t dwindle in value the way the Dollar has been doing.

And you can multiply this… I go basically through all the main oil producers, Venezuela is moving in a similar direction, Indonesia, similar kinds of debate going on, very strong desires to get out of the Dollar and into the Euro, maybe in some cases the Yen, too, that’s always possible.

If this happens, this is a cataclysmic event… the British Pound Sterling used to be the world reserve currency, from the time of Napoleon to the 1930’s, and it had a kind of residual half-life like the Dollar has today, into the 1950’s.

The end for the Pound came when Saudi Arabia said to the British, “No more Pounds, we want Dollars.” That was then. Now it’s gonna be, “No more Dollars, we want Euros.” And when that happens, there’ll be a stampede of countries desiring to do so. If that goes through, every Central Bank in the world will have to take its reserve holdings, and quickly get out of the Dollar and into the Euro. That will probably reduce the value of the Dollar to some fraction of what it is today.

A quarter? .30? .35? I don’t know, but some small fraction of what it is. It will also mean that those 11 trillion dollars in dollar holdings, stocks, bonds, equities and all that, those will be devalued by 75% to 70% or whatever it is, and it will reveal that the world is much poorer than anybody ever thought it was because all those Dollar things were not worth anything anyway. It’ll be a kind of a bankruptcy of the world.

The other aspect is though, that it will lead to colossal social dislocations in this country, because right now… the US is importing 750 billion dollars a year, and paying for it with green pieces of paper. Every other country in the world, more or less, has to earn foreign exchange to pay for imports. You wanna import, you gotta produce something that somebody wants to buy, and export it. You gotta get currency or gold or something and use that to buy your imports. The US has been exempt.

Now that is not good for us, it’s not desirable, that’s one of the reasons we have sinking standards of living, cut in half over 30 years, would be my finding, with a buyer of last resort, but that’s why everybody’s unemployed, that’s why you have a low wage economy, ‘cause there’s no imperative to produce something here, that you could sell, to buy your imports.

What happens when the world says, “No, we don’t want those green pieces of paper, pay us in Euros, earn some Euros, sell something in Euros, and then use those Euros to pay us. Get some gold and pay us with that, or something real, not Dollars.”

That will mean instead of being able to import 2 billion dollars a day of free goods, in effect, sending out the green pieces of paper, that flow will dry up to a significant degree. How much you can’t tell, but a lot.

At that point you will a tremendous economic and social crisis. And ultimately US foreign policy, this policy of threats and aggression and blackmail that we see is designed to convince anybody like Iran, that if they dare to dump the Dollar for the Euro, they’re gonna be defined as a ‘terra-ist’. And they’re gonna be on the hit list of the ‘War on Terror’. So, I think that’s the present situation in a nutshell.

BF: I wanted to ask you about the Dollar, now, since so many other countries have so many dollars, it ties everything all together, and it’s like a big tent that’s going to be pulled down… if the US is pulled down, isn’t it gonna pull everyone else down with it?

WT: Sure.

BF: Now even recently just in the paper the other day I was reading an article in the business section about S. Korea, and they had made some statement to the effect that they were gonna start increasing their holdings in Euros or some other currency, and they had to back off of that because suddenly it created a drop in the value of the Dollar, which created a drop in the value of their holdings because they’re holding so many Dollars, so they had to back off of that, right?

WT: I describe the phenomenon that you just mentioned in this book with a quote from this infamous Larry Summers, the woman hater at Harvard. And that guy is a gangster and a thug, needless to say, but he’s called that the ‘Financial Balance of Terror’, it simply means that the US says to China and Japan, and many other countries, ‘You already have 10’s of billions of Dollars as reserves, if you dump the Dollar, your reserves will become worthless and you’ll lose all that money so keep buying Dollars.’

Except, that cannot work over the long term. Ultimately the Japanese and the Chinese and the others are saying, ‘…every time we do this we are simply adding to our risk, we’re essentially becoming slaves of this worthless Dollar, if we continue to take it…’ At a certain point rational calculation would be, “Cut your losses”. Don’t take more Dollars, try to get rid of the ones you have.

The Central Banks all over the world have most of the time in the last 2 years let’s say… the Dollar went into a Bear market in 2003, as I list in here, Central Banks have been lightening up on Dollars as much as they can. It used to be that 90% or 80% of the world reserves were in Dollars, now we’re back to 60-70% and it’s going down. It’s going down gradually, but at a certain point the rush to the exits will begin. And at that point it becomes uncontrollable.

Naturally, we know that the world is full of conspiracies but there’s also reality, and the reality is you gotta get outta this somehow. So, the instance that you mention is precisely the model, it’s a little rehearsal or a little harbinger of what’s on the agenda.

Head of the S. Korean Central Bank we’d like to get as much out of the Dollar as we can, the Dollar tanks, NYSE collapses, Plunge Protection in NY tries to run in and keep the market up by buying stocks with Federal Reserve money, citizen’s money, and they save the day for a day or two. But it shows that this system is cataclysmically unstable.

And if that S. Korean Central Bank had said, ‘Well, we’re sticking to our guns and we’re selling dollars, the bottom would fall out.’ Now of course the blackmail there is it’s clear the US has manufactured a crisis with N. Korea precisely to blackmail S. Korea, saying ‘If you don’t keep taking Dollars, we’ll feed you to Kim Jong Il’. That’s the kind of world we’re now in.

So, it’s extremely unstable, everybody is trying to get out of the dollar, but, it’s a question of who’s gonna take the first plunge, and as soon as somebody does, there’s gonna be a mad rush to the exits, in which, some will get trampled. But what will also get trampled is the world economy as we’ve known it.

I would recommend something like a monetary reform, you now have 3 main currencies, the Dollar, the Euro and the Yen, you’ve gotta get back to fixed parities among those, dictated by governments not by markets, (Bretton Woods), you gotta have some medium of settling, like gold, and then above all you’ve gotta have the commitment that a monetary system has to have the goal of world economic development, of raised living standards, of doing something for those 2 billion people who are below a dollar a day, and the 40,000 that are dying every day. That’s gotta be the goal.

So, some kind of world economic development program with jobs, housing, health care, schools, infrastructure, and so forth and all of that has got to be produced somehow, and that I think ought to be the content of it.

If I may go on for a second? This peak oil question, a lot of agitation about peak oil, I find it’s a dangerous reductionism to say that this is a ‘peak oil’ crisis. There are severe problems with oil supply, mainly due I think, at this moment… to 30 years of non-investment in oil.

Iraq for example, the US has conquered Iraq, Iraq has not been surveyed for new oil in many, many decades, and there are similar problems around the world. That’s no surprise, the steel industry has collapsed over the past 30 years (in the US especially) many other industries have collapsed more or less, because of this lack of a world monetary system. So it’s not surprising that oil should share that problem.

The issue though, is what’s going on today?

I assert that it’s a crisis of Imperialism, essentially the entire US/British Imperial system that’s been in place for 300 years, the capital structures that have been in place for 300 years, that are now crashing down. And when they lash out with 9/11 it’s to save that. There’s also the other related question of world military superiority, that is strategic domination in the military sphere that’s at stake.

But, oil can be procured at the present time, but here’s the thing, we just described what happens when they start to dump the Dollar abroad, there’ll be tremendous shortages here. The regime at that point, is gonna say… they’re not gonna say, ‘the Wall St. gang has blown it again…’ ‘Wall St. lays an egg…’ and that’s why you’re in such a terrible situation, they’re gonna blame, an oil crisis.

As they did in 1973 and 1979, and those were fake, fictitious, hoked up, oil crises.

And that’s what they’ll do again. So they’ll come forward saying, ‘we didn’t do it, that’s just peak oil, that’s something that we can’t control’ and at that point I think you have to decide… what’s your slogan? What’s your political approach to dealing with the US after the crash of the Dollar?

Some people would say, consume less energy and reduce the population. I would say that’s not the right way to go, I would say your slogan ought to be, ‘Fight the finance oligarchs, the Wall St. parasites who have brought this about with their mismanagement.’

And reform the system in that way, by essentially lopping them off in a way that would prevent them from ever doing this again.

The question therefore is, ‘who is the enemy?’ Is the enemy the average person who wants to consume some energy to maintain a standard of living or is it the finance oligarch who has essentially ruined the world with economic globalization?

I think the definition of this question, whether you see it as a Dollar crisis and crisis of Imperialism, or whether you see it is as a geologically determined oil crisis, this means everything in terms of the way you react to it, and maybe it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of difference between the two. There’s also the case that the oil business is subsumed by the Dollar and Imperialism question. Here’s the other one.

If you look at the beginning of WWII, you’ll see that there’s an oil grab going on. Hitler is going where? Hitler is attacking the Soviet Union, where are the Panzer divisions pointed? They’re going to Bachu, they’re going to Stalingrad. What is Stalingrad?

Stalingrad is a point on the Volga River. What’s the Volga River?

The Volga River is the oil aorta of the Soviet Union, it brings the oil from the Caspian Sea up into Russia to the fighting front. So he’s trying to cut the Soviet oil aorta.

Stalin has his own plan, in 1941, which is to attack Ploesti, Romania, which is the German oil source. Japan is concerned mainly to take the Dutch East Indies, their quarrel is not really with the US or the British it’s the desire to get that oil in what is today Indonesia, but they feel they’ve gotta eliminate the US fleet and the British fleet on the way.

Now if you look at that you could say these powers are clearly trying to get oil for themselves and deny it to others. Would you say that WWII was started because of an oil shortage? No.

The oil shortage, when you see Great Powers grabbing oil, the first conclusion you have to draw is that you may be on the eve of a new World War. And I think that is the conclusion that we have to draw today, that the oil grab of the US and the British, Iraq and then perhaps Iran later on, is not so much that there’s a geological lack of oil, but that these two powers in order to maintain themselves feel that they have got to grab the oil resources. For example, if you grab the Middle East, who can you blackmail? Europe and Japan. And you can dictate policy to them. And I think that’s what’s going on.

So it’s aggressive imperialism that’s your problem, and not a geological problem, and that would dictate the way you respond to this.

BF: With regard to 9/11, was there a slow buildup to that? We just talked about a global economic crisis, do you see that as the main impetus behind 9/11, did 9/11 come out of the blue?

How did 9/11 come about historically, in your view?

WT: I think there are a number of currents that kind of lead into it. One of them clearly, is this notion of using military force to maintain the Dollar as a currency and attempting to maintain this financial economic system.

But then there’s always the question of world strategic superiority, military domination.

Wolfowitz in 1992 wrote a paper at the Pentagon which I quote at some length, in which he says ‘it’s important now that the US is the only superpower’ he alleges, ‘that no rival or challenger ever be allowed to emerge’, now this would indicate preemptive action anytime a regional power like China or the EU might attempt to raise itself up to the level of a ‘world power’. And he says in particular, ‘we’ve got to make sure that no combination ever emerges’ but Russia always gets top attention because they’re the only ones who can blow us up.

Later on in the decade Samuel Huntington comes with his ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, an article in Foreign Affairs and then a book, in there he says, ‘who challenges anglo-American supremacy in the world today?’ He says there are 2 challenger civilizations, one is the Arabic and Islamic world, the challenge being rapid population growth. Then there’s China, the challenge there is rapid economic growth. 10, 12, 15% a year.

And I guess he’s got his eye on Russia too ultimately, in the back. It seems to me that the targets are: Arab and Islamic world, China, and Russia. This is where the Neocons will take you, if you go with them. Now let’s see how it looks on the ground.

Clinton, they don’t like, because in my opinion he’s understood the lesson of Vietnam, and he realizes that military action is either futile or self-destructive. So he’s always, (whatever his corruption and his failure as a President), he’s always got this idea that he wants to avoid military action.

However, it’s sometimes forced on him. In 1999, the Principals Committee… decide that they want to bomb Serbia. Russian Prime Minister Primakov is flying across the Atlantic to try and mediate a peaceful solution, which Russia could have done, except for the fact that Gore, kind of usurping Clinton’s power, gives the order to begin bombing Serbia, with the support of Tony Blair.

Bombing Serbia is like bombing Russia. WWI began because Russia was determined to protect Serbia against Austria and Germany. And in the course of this, you get the bombing going on for a couple of months, the bridges over the Danube are destroyed, militarily it doesn’t work, the Serbian Army is intact.

Tony Blair begins agitating for a ground invasion, land war against Serbia. There are 3 times that the WWIII question emerges during these years. The first one is when Boris Yeltsin, President of Russia, rouses himself to say, if NATO launches the land attack on Serbia, they will get a general European war, and most likely WWIII. Documented.

Clinton, much to his credit, refuses to have the land invasion, so the bombing goes on, and ultimately Russia is able to procure a peaceful solution. You’ve gotta remember that someone like Richard Holbrook is way up front in the bombing, somebody who Kerry probably would have made Sec. Of State.

At the end of this war, the Russians say, we want a zone of Serbia for us to occupy. NATO says no. US says no, you’re not gonna get it. So the Russians get some tanks and they drive them to the Pristina Airport in Northern Kosovo province, and they seize the airport. And at this point Gen. Wesley Clark, Michael Moore’s favorite candidate for President, I must add, and many other people in the Democratic Party seem to think that he was a good idea for President, Wesley Clark goes nuts, and he orders Lt. Gen. Sir Michael Jackson of the British Army to go and kick the Russians off the airfield.

The classic answer from Sir Michael Jackson is, “I’m not starting WWIII for you.”

In the summer of 2000, the most modern nuclear submarine of the Russian Navy, the Korsk, is destroyed in the Berents Sea. The Russians come out and say, ‘This was a deliberate destruction of the submarine by a NATO submarine, most likely British.’ They don’t know how it happened, but that’s who they accuse of doing it.

The Western media concentrates on the alleged ineptitude of the Russians, that they can’t save the people, that they don’t have a diving bell, and all the rest of this, but PRAVDA says, ‘WWIII ALMOST STARTED ON SATURDAY’. The 3rd mention of WWIII in some sort of authoritative or semi-authoritative way during this period, so what do you have?

Imagine the invisible government, these war-mongering types, military, CIA, Special Forces, they see that China is developing at 12 or 15% a year, the Arabs are not dominated, necessarily, some are, some aren’t, and Russia is beginning to rearm in some ways, they’re building the Topol missile, the Sunburn missile, other kinds of military technology…

What you begin to see is this restless desire for decisive military action. Percolating up from the invisible government, through the Neocons who are their spokesmen and participants, and then you get 9/11. So you can see that it starts going…

Just a couple of things, the US did not become hated in the world as a result of the Iraq War. The US became universally hated as a result of the bombing of Serbia. Then Russia went wild.

And when the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, China also participated in this, this is the beginning of a lot of that hatred. The American media never put that picture together, I’ve tried to do it. So we see that 9/11 is the result of a kind of an escalation, and the superpower tensions connected to 9/11, it seems to me, are closely related to the process that builds up. And that’s also what this Namakon source says.

BF: I remember all that stuff about Serbia, it was just so unbelievable, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy and all of that…

WT: This was a big deal. This killed 10 times more people than 9/11, and it’s all based on fraud… the genocide against the Albanians or Kosovars never occurred. It never occurred. This was simply a ‘big lie’ campaign of the Western media, to try to whip up some support for going and bombing Serbia. They bombed the bridges on the Danube and cut ship traffic on the most important waterway in Eastern and Central Europe. And it took years before they got them going again, the bridges and the barges.

BF: Also, didn’t they drop Depleted Uranium on these people?

WT: It goes without saying, that’s what they did.

BF: NATO’s occupying the whole place as we speak, aren’t they?

WT: The outcome is that there’s a NATO peacekeeping force. This is also important because you can see how it reaches up into the present day. In 1999 NATO bombed Serbia. It’s the first time NATO ever went to war as an alliance. And it had to do with Madeleine Albright, who made this possible.

In the year 2000 they’re able to kidnap Milosevic, illegally, in flagrant violation of Serbian law, and drag him to this kangaroo court in the Hague. Now, obviously, this person, he’s a villain and I tried to organize against him as much as I could when he was actually carrying out genocide campaigns in Croatia and in Bosnia, so I have no love for Milosevic. But the kind of illegal actions that were taken is an overwhelmingly bad idea.

And then in 2001, you get the classic CIA ‘people power’ revolution in Belgrade. And that worked so well that the experts, the cadre of case officers who carried out the people power revolution in Belgrade, have now gone on to Georgia, to Ukraine, to Beirut and so forth.

And how do they do this? It’s a media spectacle, what you do is you go into the Capitol, say Belgrade, you put up some tents, you get large amounts of narcotics, you allow orgies to take place in the tents, you get a lot of booze and you get some consumer goods, the money comes from the National Endowment for Democracy, project democracy, the thing that Oliver North worked for.

Interestingly Chairman Hamilton of the Kean-Hamilton Commission, who covered up 9/11, well, he’s also on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. So this is not ‘democratic’.

These are destabilizations. The recipe is again, the CIA ‘people power’ revolution, (I think Newsweek had a short time ago the cover was, ‘People Power Comes to Beirut’), so you gotta have a catchy slogan, the same people who run the mass manipulation in the American elections, this same group along Connecticut Avenue in Washington D.C., are sent in order to somehow play on the ignorance and prejudice of these people and get some kind of desired response.

But the whole thing is done as a complete fraudulent spectacle on television, and this is now what they’re doing. So this is essentially a way to overthrow these governments.

In Lebanon, even though there was this ‘Cedar Revolution’ spectacle going on in the public square, when Hezbollah decided to have a demonstration, they absolutely dwarfed anything that the ‘people power’ crowd was able to put up.

So, I think it’s fraudulent to put it mildly… you send in the NED with 20 or 30 million dollars, you’re interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and that’s not a good idea. And experience shows that it leads to complications and perhaps a war.

BF: You also examine something called “The 9/11 Myth: Collective Schizophrenia”. What do you mean by that?

WT: Well, one of the questions involved here is why do people believe this? What’s the basis for the mass acceptance of the myth? In the first chapter I go into the genesis of the myth. The genesis of the myth is, in a few words, that Richard Clarke and George Tenet put out the line “It’s Al Qaeda, it’s bin Laden”.

Bush repeated it, and then the rest of the people in the Bush regime. But the problem is, many Americans don’t believe Bush on Iraq… but they continue to believe him on 9/11.

What can explain the tenacity of the myth? Given the fact that the myth is absurd, and there’s a large amount of stuff in the public domain that would tend to show you that the myth is false, that it’s hoked up.

Part of this has to do then with the negative changes that have occurred in the intellectual life in this country and in the kind of mentality of average people. I went and found for example, Dr. Justin Frank. As far as Bush is concerned… his conclusion is that Bush is a paranoid schizophrenic, and I think this is important because even though Bush is not the planner or indeed not really important in the carrying out of 9/11, (at least until he starts, making speeches), Bush is the salesman of the 9/11 myth and what you have to see is Bush as a schizophrenic personality, radiating schizophrenia and autism out into the world.

Perhaps a word on what these definitions mean… schizophrenia, if you ask the average person, ‘it’s a split personality’, and that’s fine as far as it goes, I’m not a psychiatrist but I have tried to read up on these things, the notion is developed by Sylvano Adiati the main authority on schizophrenia, is that it’s the dissociation of the mental faculties so they can’t work together, that would be the split. Perception and cognition don’t work together, feeling goes in another direction and it’s all dissociated.

But then there’s another dissociation which is that the schizophrenic personality has a very weak relation to reality.

Now, that’s Bush. Weak relation to reality, dreamworld, ideological construct world, things of this sort. So he’s a perfect salesman. And if you see for example an epidemic of autism in this country, it seems to me there’s something to be said for the idea that Bush and his schizophrenia, is a factor in this.

Now let’s look at the people. There’s a French psychoanalyst by the name of Joseph Gabel, who in the mid of the 1970’s more or less wrote a book on ‘reification’. Reification or political alienation. What he does is go to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Communist Russia, and try to show how regime propaganda depends on what he describes as a schizophrenic world outlook. And he refines that to call it the ‘police concept of history’, or the ‘police theory’ of history.

I would call it the CIA theory of history, or maybe the intelligence community theory of history. And what does this involve?

It means first of all that history is not real. There are no real processes going in history.

So what about things that happened? Things that happened are either miraculous, wonderful events, or they’re catastrophes. The world is, then, (this is still the propaganda world of the Nazis and Communists), the world is divided between a privileged system, (US), in which everything is by definition, ‘perfect’, then there’s the non-privileged system, (today, the Arab and Islamic world), where things are necessarily ALL BAD.

And the problem arises then, the critical moment arises when a catastrophe occurs inside the privileged system. And the response to that catastrophe is, since the privileged system is by definition, ‘perfect’, the only way such a thing could happen is by the evil, aggressive, activities of the outside group you’re targeting.

And that is pretty much 9/11.

Outside, outside, outside. The causes have to be looked for OUTSIDE.

I was interested to find that Gerhard Wisnewski in his book on 9/11 in German, wrote that every aspect of the 9/11 myth screams, ‘outside, outside, outside’. So, Gabel wrote this 30 years ago. And what you find is an uncanny resemblance to his study of Soviet and Nazi propaganda as the expression of political alienation and of schizophrenia and autism, in mass psychology… and the way that this 9/11 myth has been put together.

Certainly the question of fear. It sounds needless to repeat it, maybe, but the goal of terrorism… is terror. Fear. One of the things that fear is relied upon to do is somehow paralyze reason, or rationality, cognition, and things like this, so that you believe things, you’re put into a kind of infantile state where you’re willing to believe things that otherwise you would not believe.

And you have to also remember, as guess as people can, that this was a tremendous shock, it was a mental trauma from which it was hard to recover, for quite a number of months or weeks. And I hope now that the years have gone by, people are able to snap out of it. I certainly hope so.

And that’s one of the goals of the 9/11 Truth movement, which I think is growing, the issue is more relevant than ever. The issue won’t go away. 9/11 won’t go away as long as we’re living under this invisible government regime that fixes elections, starts revolutions in foreign countries, and above all, prepares new wars.

BF: One other thing, you have a section here called ‘Islamic Fundamentalism, Fostered by US Foreign Policy’…

WT: Well, what I try to show here is that if you look at the history of the Arab states and the Islamic states, but particularly the Arab states, the ones that were part of the Turkish or Ottoman Empire, those were places that were a kind of suspended political and economic development under the Ottoman Empire and in some cases it was Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt that got things going in some of these places in terms of ferment or modernization.

But, by the time of the 20th century, these places had begun to produce nationalists who were reformers, who were modernizers. It’s useful to remember a figure like Attaturk, in Turkey, I think he’s pretty much the model for the Middle East in the 20th century, though you can find similar things in Egypt going back even further. Attaturk is somebody who comes in with a modernization program, he lifts the Sharia, he outlaws the veil, the Harem, the Fez… demands the Roman alphabet, comes in with 5-year plans of economic development… it’s interesting that Turkey is the only loser in WWI that does not go fascist in the 1920’s or 30’s. Practically all of the other losers did go fascist, so this is a person I think of historical significance.

You can look at some of these other countries, think of Nasser in Egypt nationalizing the Suez Canal, wanting to use the money for the Aswan high dam, for the economic and agricultural development of Egypt, industrialization, Arab socialism, pan-Arabism. You have to say these are mixed figures, there’s a lot of demagogy, there’s a lot of rhetorical excess… how did the West treat somebody like Attaturk, or somebody like Nasser?

Did they welcome the presence of a modernizing, secular, nationalist who was not based on Islam in any sense? Not against it necessarily, or not determined to wipe it out… but, what did the West do?

These figures were opposed, the West did everything to destroy them, to humiliate them, to attack them, to isolate them, to remove them from the picture. And what I do in that chapter is I go through Iraq. Who was a positive figure in the history of Iraq? You don’t like Saddam Hussein, that’s fine, who was positive?

Gen. Kassem in the 1950’s. He was somebody who brought in a very interesting republican constitution tried to get economic development going, what happened to him? Foreign support for a coup, he’s murdered. Saddam Hussein is one of his opponents, that’s part of the pedigree of Saddam Hussein.

You look at Ali Bhutto in Pakistan, he wants to develop Pakistan including nuclear energy, what happens to him? Kissinger arranges for Zia ul-Haq to come in and have a coup and Ali Bhutto is hanged.

You go through the rest of these countries, I try to do Afghanistan, I try to do as many as I can, to show that the Western powers did everything they could to destroy real nationalists who were modernizers and secularists. In a sense they’ve also done everything possible to bring forward what I would have to consider to be relatively benighted or backward versions of prevalent religion in these countries, people who were hostile to technology and science who wanted women in a degraded position, who didn’t like education, who were social reactionaries in just about every way, and also who were incapable of making alliances with Europe or other power in the world, that might have helped these countries to get somewhere. So what you have is self-isolating figures, in a way, that are promoted.

Maybe the case of the Shah of Iran is also relevant, here the positive figure was Mossadeq in the early 1950’s, here’s a secular reformer, secular nationalist, he nationalizes the oil companies, and at that point, the British and the US… do everything they can to destroy him. Then you get the Shah, the Shah of course in many ways is a monster, and he’s incapable of developing a political alternative, but he does have a very ambitious economic development program, and he’s pushing this through, and at a certain point Zbigniew Brzezinski decides that Islamic fundamentalism is the bulwark against the Soviets in the Middle East and the gulf, and according to my findings, Brzezinski essentially masterminds the overthrow of the Shah, and then demands that Khomeni be brought in as the leader of Iran.

Now, the world has turned over a couple of times since then but that’s the origin of the current regime, now, I’m not trying to use that as an argument for an attack on Iran, anything but.

But that’s ultimately how things got to be the way they are, this process of constant meddling. Brzezinski is maybe the clearest case, he says Islamic fundamentalism is the bulwark against the Soviets, we will support it. So there I think you have it in a nutshell. The current situation in these countries is the product of having deliberately and systematically destroyed the many positive alternatives that were there on the way.

And I’m not despairing, I’ve been to, for example, Sudan, (well, once), and talked to Hassan Turabi who is considered to be one the most hard-line, or consistent of the Islamic fundamentalists and I found that these people are reasonable enough, if you could offer them forms of cooperation that they could recognize, it seems to me that cooperation could be had.

But the whole policy of the British and the US, and of course the Israelis, is to go against that and to harden things into these useless, absurd, conflictual relationships which don’t get anybody anywhere.

If you don’t like the present situation, you have to blame not the Arabs or the Muslims, but all these decades of Imperialist meddling in their countries.

BF: Webster Tarpley, thank you.

WT: Thank you so much.

¹ Iowa, actually.

Copyright 2005 Guns and Butter (hyperlinks and footnotes added.)