September 11th and the Israelization of America By Genevieve Cora Fraser

September 11th and the Israelization of America

By Genevieve Cora Fraser

Al-Jazeerah, September 27, 2006

Just in time for the 5th anniversary of al Qaeda’s September 11th attack, Hollywood’s master conspiracy theory director Oliver Stone produced the movie, “World Trade Center,” which conspiracy theorists hoped would be equal to his provocative movie about the Kennedy assassination, “JFK.”

Goodness knows there have been lots of questions surrounding the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and the downing of United 93, which is the title of another 5th anniversary film. I wondered if Stone’s movie would go back to the lead-up to the attacks, and decided to refresh my memory on details leading up to that tragic event.

Some have compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire rumored to have been staged by Hitler to confirm Nazi claims of a pending Communist revolution. And what about the Israel-First, Neo Conservatives that serve in the Bush/Cheney administration? Following 9/11 all eyes were on Israel to lend us a hand in learning, as they have, how to combat terrorism. However, the real question is does Israel know how to combat terrorism or create it.

The NeoCon’s Policy for a New American Century (PNAC) report “Rebuilding America's Defenses” refers to the possibility of a “catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.” Were they hinting at an event similar to September 11th to establish American (and its ally Israel’s) dominance in the world? Written in 2000, the report outlines an aggressive policy towards Iraq. "…while the unresolved conflict in Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein," the PNAC report states.

“Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region,” the PNAC report claimed. Yes, the Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse for war was a hoax as well as invading Iraq under the pretext of a War on Terrorism. All had been pre-arranged and some believe staged. But would Oliver Stone have the guts to hint at this in his version of events in the “World Trade Center?”

I clearly recall President Bush’s statement from December 18, 2000, shortly before he was inaugurated. "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator,” according to a CNN report. And in late July, only weeks prior to the 9/11 attacks, Bush was widely quoted as saying, "A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it,” according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, to name one source. Was he thinking of the “to-be-written” 342 page Patriot Act that astonishingly was foisted upon Congress soon after the attacks?

Shortly after George W. Bush lost the popular vote and was selected by the Supreme Court to become the 43rd President of the United States, disquieting articles began to appear about his father, George H. W. Bush, the 41st President, former Vice President to Ronald Reagan, and former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. “Poppy,” as Dubya calls his father, was revealed to be a major player in the Carlyle Group.

Two months after his son’s Inauguration, New York Times correspondent Leslie Wayne reported, “Mr. Bush (the father) and Mr. Baker (his former Secretary of State) were using their extensive government contacts to further their business interests as representatives of the Carlyle Group, a $12 billion private equity firm based in Washington that has parlayed a roster of former top-level government officials, largely from the Bush and Reagan administrations, into a moneymaking machine.”

“Over the last decade, the Carlyle empire has grown to span three continents and include investments in most corners of the world. It owns so many companies that it is now in effect one of the nation's biggest defense contractors and a force in global telecommunications,” the New York Times article continued. “In getting business for Carlyle, Mr. Bush has been impressive.”

Impressive indeed, Bush senior had a vested interest in war as some have noted over the past five years.

Though the Saudi Binladen Group was also tied in with Carlyle, busily investing in aerospace companies along with a myriad of other ventures, following September 11th they claimed they had broken family ties with their infamous brother, Osama.

A deeper understanding of the relationship can be found in a transcript from a Democracy Now interview conducted on March 6, 2003 between Amy Goodman and Dan Briody, author of “The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group.”

“DAN BRIODY: The Carlyle group has had a relationship with the Bin Laden family since the mid 1990's. They have extensive business interests in Saudi Arabia. They used to own the company called Vinell which was recently bombed in Riyadh, and was also operating as a C.I.A. cover up operation--

AMY GOODMAN: --and has just been given the contract to--here it goes from training basically the private militia of a despotic regime in Saudi Arabia for the last 25 years--now got the contract to train the Iraqi military.

DAN BRIODY: That's right. This is a very controversial company. Carlyle no longer owns them. They sold them to T.R.W. a ways back and I believe T.R.W. is part of the Northrop Grumman now, but they did own them back in 1995 when there was another car bomb attack on the same company in Riyadh. So they had an extensive presence in Saudi Arabia and they wanted to increase that presence. And one of the families that they met through the royal family was the Bin laden family, which of course owns a very large construction concern in Saudi Arabia called the Saudi Bin Laden group, a $5 billion company. And that relationship proved to be very fruitful for Carlyle as the Bin Ladens became investors in some of Carlyle's funds. And one of the most significant funds that they invested in was a fund called Carlyle Partners II which is a very large defense oriented fund that the Bin Laden family was invested in, and up until just after September 11th when it became appallingly clear to everyone that the Bin Laden family, because they were invested in this defense fund, stood to gain financially from the war on terrorism which was being waged against their own brother, Osama, so at that point the criticism in the press on Carlyle became too great and they divested themselves from the Bin Laden family.

AMY GOODMAN: And they were together on September 10, September 11.

DAN BRIODY: That's right. The Carlyle group annual investor conference was taking place in Washington D.C. at the Ritz Carlton on the morning of September 11th, so you had all of these incredibly connected, powerful and wealthy ex-politicians, like James Baker III, like George H.W. Bush, like Frank Carluchi and the like, all together with Shafik Bin Laden looking after his family's investment in the Carlyle group, watching the events of September 11th unfold together. Quite a scene.

AMY GOODMAN: Bush that morning, George Bush senior, flying out and caught on a plane at that time.

DAN BRIODY: That's right.”

Though Poppy only admits to meeting with the family on two occasions – once in 1998 and again in 2000 (Judicial Watch, 9/28/01), Osama himself was trained and funded by the CIA to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, according to Michel Chossudovsky, professor of Economics, University of Ottawa in an article entitled: Who is Osama Bin Laden?

“Prime suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by the FBI as an "international terrorist" for his role in the African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Osama bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders". 1

“In 1979 "the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA" was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.” 2:

“With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.” 3

“The Islamic "jihad" was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade:...,” Professor Chossudovsky wrote.

Today the headquarters compound of the Central Intelligence Agency located in Langley, Virginia, is known as the "George Bush Center for Intelligence." (I kid you not.) Former President George Bush was Director of Central Intelligence and head of the Central Intelligence Agency from January 1976 to January 1977. Obviously he had long standing ties to the top-secret spy organization; otherwise he would never have been named as the chief executive. His father, Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush also had ties to the CIA. He had been a close business associate with Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles was a key player in the upstart of the Cold War National Security policy which resulted in the arms race, including the nuclear arms build-up. Under Dulles’ leadership, the CIA also established the MK-Ultra, a top-secret mind control research project.

According to the Guardian Unlimited (November 1, 2001), “Two months before September 11 Osama bin Laden flew to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by the local CIA agent, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro. The disclosures are known to come from French intelligence which is keen to reveal the ambiguous role of the CIA, and to restrain Washington from extending the war (in Afghanistan) to Iraq and elsewhere.”

“Bin Laden is reported to have arrived in Dubai on July 4 (2001) from Quetta in Pakistan with his own personal doctor, nurse and four bodyguards, to be treated in the urology department. While there he was visited by several members of his family and Saudi personalities, and the CIA,” Guardian correspondent Anthony Sampson wrote. “Intelligence sources say that another CIA agent was also present; and that Bin Laden was also visited by Prince Turki al Faisal, then head of Saudi intelligence, who had long had links with the Taliban, and Bin Laden. Soon afterwards Turki resigned…” At that time, Bin Laden’s illness was so severe he was expected to live no longer than two years.

On the morning of September 11, 2001 as I prepared to leave for work, a friend dropped by with his daughter and son-in-law. Several months earlier, Chet and I had visited his family in New York City. His daughter was working in a lawyer’s office next to the Twin Towers. Her husband was a Dominican, a musician and head of a Merengue band at night who parked cars in the Trade Center parking garage during the day. They lived in a tiny Manhattan apartment with their young son.

Chet had begged them to leave the city, settle in rural Massachusetts where we lived, where their lives might be less exciting but the air was fresh and children are able to play free in the great outdoors. As we spoke of their decision to leave NYC, I remember the sound of an approaching plane. I looked up to see a commercial jetliner, an airbus that seemed closer than usual turning in a south-easterly direction.

When I arrived at work (a bit late) the Criminal Justice professor in the office next to mine burst into my office saying something about a plane – New York City and one of the towers. I later learned that one flight controller said the plane was hijacked over Gardner, Massachusetts, less than 50 miles west of Boston. The state college I worked for at the time was in Gardner. My home was about 5 miles from the town line.

Now, five years later, as I sat in the movie theater waiting to watch the Oliver Stone rendition of events, I flashed back to a phone call I made to a childhood friend on 9/11 once I closed my office door, shaken to the core. Bernie is a sometime Broadway producer who lives in Washington Square, near Greenwich Village, and shares an office not far from the site of the World Trade Center. Fortunately, he had stayed home and his phone was still working. He rushed to the roof top to see what was going on and narrated that one tower was still standing. Moments later he yelled that the tower was collapsing into rubble.

Later a colleague ducked her head into my office to say she had heard a radio report that the Pentagon was under attack. I rushed into the ladies room to mask my trauma. I believed the nation was at war and unconfirmed reports claimed the United States Capitol building had been bombed, Congress was under attack. I needed to remain calm, to appear professional. I looked in the mirror. My blood pressure was so high blood vessels had burst in my eyes. My eyeballs were bright red and grotesque.

An hour passed where students, faculty and staff wandered about watching televisions scattered around the campus. Finally, a college-wide announcement was made that the governor had ordered an evacuation of all government buildings and we were ordered to leave. Days later, when we returned, we were warned about phones possibly triggering bombs that might be hidden anywhere in the building. There were periodic “sweeps” and evacuations as campus police were joined by city police and fire fighters. As faculty and staff at a state institution, we attended meetings to prepare for attacks that fortunately never came.

And here we are, five years since the events of 9/11, no longer in mourning but hardly reassured. I braced myself as the opening credits of the movie rolled over shots of New York City reacting as the planes slammed into the towers. These were familiar scenes broadcast over and over again but still my eyes brimmed with tears. So much has happened since September 11th. So much has changed. America has lost her innocence and too much of the Arab and Muslim world is in ruins because of us – our minds still clouded by the dust and debris spewed from the wreckage.

Since 9/11 we have drawn so close to Israel that our policies seem to be identical at times. Our support for the “Zionist Entity,” as Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calls Israel is unconditional. Yet, the men responsible for Shock and Awe and over 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths pretend to see no correlation between the constant brutalization of nations and their people and those who stand up to resist American-Israeli despotism – a resistance that for the most part is not terrorism but self-defense. Instead they rant about Islamofascism akin to Hitler and Lenin as they seek to terrorize and subjugate Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and Iran and Syria if they can manage the trick. Insanity, I thought and sat back to watch the film.

Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center” follows the “real-life story of two Port Authority police officers, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Pena), who survive the collapse of the towers only to find themselves caught amid the steel and concrete of the remains,” film critic Michael Phillips wrote for the Chicago Tribune.

If I were a film critic I would write: Though the film’s heroes rush toward the towers to help, there are no heroics here; instead they are trapped as debris begins to fall and end up helping no one, least of all themselves. Officer McLoughlin rushes his crew into an elevator, believing it is the only structurally safe place in the building. Then all hell breaks loose and the buildings fall as the narration moves from the injured and dying to the wives and families waiting for news. Finally, film director Stone jumps into the counter-point, the real hero of the melodrama, an ex-Marine named Dave Karnes.

Dave lives and works in nearby Connecticut. Here, the action gets jumpy. There is a cut to Dave, presumably at work. The camera follows Dave and his colleagues watching televised reports and reacting to events. Dave, as a man who served in Iraq in 1991, knows what’s happening. The nation’s at war, he declares. A co-worker claims he heard that Israel has been laid waste by the terrorists. (In real life, I don’t recall anyone saying anything about Israel being under attack – only something about an Israeli Mossad team that set up cameras by the Hudson and trained them on the Twin Towers and later appeared to be celebrating the event, i.e. the “dancing Israelis.”)

Next, Dave is in a chapel with someone next to him - perhaps a minister? They stare long and hard at an extremely large, dark brown, wooden cross as they confer about the unfolding events. Dave prays and resolves to go where he is needed – to the World Trade Center to do what only a Marine can do best – serve his country and God. The camera pans again to the Christian cross and remains there for quite some time – perhaps to imbue us with righteous indignation at what the godless Islamofascist are up to.

As you might expect, the ex-Marine leads a lonely charge up the hill of rubble as dusk falls and others have given up the search. He is followed by a medic and together they hear the clanking for help from Will Jimeno as he pulls on a copper water pipe to sound an alert – a call for help. Jimeno is so far gone as he lies beneath the weight of concrete slabs that he hallucinates Jesus has arrived with a water bottle to save him. As Jimeno and his buddy John McLoughlin are hauled to safety, rescuers cheer and ex-Marine Dave Karnes delivers the final dramatic punch with the line, “We're gonna need some good men out there to avenge this!”

The end credits reveal that Karnes went on to enlist for two tours of Iraq duty, presumably to fight the evil doers who were responsible for 9/11, as Bush would have us believe.

(I suspect no one will be asking me to write a film review anytime soon, not based on the above account.)

On September 5th, in a lead-up to the 5th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, the White House released a strategy paper asserting the nation has made progress in the war on terror but that al-Qaida has adjusted to U.S. defenses and "we are not yet safe."

"The terrorists who attacked us on September the 11th, 2001, are men without conscience, but they're not madmen," Bush stated. "They kill in the name of a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs that are evil but not insane." Perhaps the same might be said of George, Dick, Donald, their NeoCon, Israel-First cronies and a Congress that blindly supports a preemptive policy that strikes first and asks questions later – despite international laws to the contrary.

As for Osama Bin Laden, according to an article published on Independence Day, July 4th of this year, unnamed intelligence sources claim a CIA unit that hunted for Osama bin Laden and his top deputies for a decade has been disbanded. The New York Times reported, “The unit, known as ‘Alec Station,’ was shut down late last year. The decision to close the unit, which predated the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, was first reported Monday by National Public Radio. The officials told the Times that the change reflects a view that al-Qaida's hierarchy has changed, and terrorist attacks inspired by the group are now being carried out independently of bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.”

“The CIA said hunting bin Laden remains a priority, but resources needed to be directed toward other people and groups likely to initiate new attacks.”

What I’d like to know is - what does the CIA know that they’re not telling? Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri appear on videos periodically, as if on cue, to make statements such as the latest foolishness about all of us converting to Islam or else – and then blend back into the woodworks. Are the tapes doctored? Who knows? If Adolph Hitler had somehow survived and gone into hiding, would the world have retreated from locating him even though he continued to make inflammatory statements on radio and in news reels?

Though the tragic events of September 11th were horrific and served to galvanize the nation – to what end? I suspect Oliver Stone’s real message is hidden within the symbols embedded in the film. The key to Bush’s strategy is to create fear that Israel and the US are targets – follow a militant Christian cross – and save the world through a bloodied sword. Onward Christian Soldiers. It’s US against THEM – the Judeo-Christians in all our power and might vs. (preferably) unarmed Islamic nations - a 21st century Crusade. Divide and conquer, that’s the stuff, dehumanize and demonize.

There has got to be a better way. The United States’ intent at world domination and control creates enemies – so too does Israel’s non-stop land grabs, wars and torture and killing of the indigenous people of the region.

Despite the militancy of Zionist Christians, I seem to recall Christ saying something about “loving thy enemy” and “turning the other cheek.” Of course, the Bush administration and Congress seem to be most concerned with the question, what’s in it for me? The answer - a world at peace built on the foundation of equal rights and mutual respect. That is the lesson we should have learned from 9/11. Sure we needed to get the bad guys, if only to protect society from further attacks. But the next step should have been to work with Arab and Muslim nations to stabilize (not rape and pillage) the region. Through economic, agricultural, and public works projects, a build-up of educational opportunities and mutual commerce, together we can build a better world.

Endnotes

1. Hugh Davies, International: `Informers' point the finger at bin Laden; Washington on alert for suicide bombers, The Daily Telegraph, London, 24 August 1998.

2. See Fred Halliday, "The Un-great game: the Country that lost the Cold War, Afghanistan, New Republic, 25 March 1996):

3. Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban: Exporting Extremism, Foreign Affairs, November-December 1999.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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