Greenspan's 9/11 skepticism
Oct. 23, 2009
I wrote something on this when Greenspan's memoir The Age of Turbulence was published in 2007. He didn't alter his words for the updated version that discussed the first phase of last year's financial crises.
In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, said former Fed chief Alan Greenspan, "There was no bigger question in Washington than, Why no second attack?" (Page 227)
He wrote:
We should add that Greenspan does not challenge the authenticity of the purported bin Laden statement, but then, he doesn't need to. If the statement is authentic, his question follows. If it isn't, then why did the Bush bunch vouch for it?
Neither does he question the FBI's decision to treat the anthrax attacks as unrelated to the events of 9/11. Once a Pentagon role was discovered in the anthrax case, the FBI quickly nixed the theory that it was part of a single terrorist campaign. But, because that position became the official stance, Greenspan's question stands.
You won't find information like this on Fox news -- though it was widely reported that Greenspan had little use for the official tale of what was behind the Iraq war.
Greenspan argued that regional instability posed a threat to oil supplies, spurring U.S. and British action, "whatever their publicized angst about 'weapons of mass destruction'."
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
We also learn that Greenspan, a market fundamentalist, was surprised that the market's "counter-party surveillance" provided insufficient self-regulation to avert the subprime crash.
He expressed alarm at global warming and said he was concerned that political dithering would prevent realistic countermeasures. Nevertheless, he backed a tax on gasoline in order to force America to wean itself from dependence on oil. He argued that the economy could well handle a tax that pushed gas up to $5 a gallon. Of course, this was written before the wild financial meltdown of last autumn.
GOP insider: 9/11 fit White House plan
April 12, 2007
The attacks of 9/11 fit in very well with the already planned war to topple Saddam, says a former speechwriter for the first President Bush in a scathing denunciation of the current Bush presidency.
In his book Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy Rollers and Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP [Sourcebooks, 2007], Victor Gold says the neo-conservatives around the current President Bush were highly motivated to arrange a pretext for war.
Gold writes, "Had it not been for 9/11, the Bush White House, determined to go to war, would no doubt have seized on some synthetic provocation, on the order of the one LBJ used to push through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965," adding that a number of elder neocons were at the time Johnson Democrats.
The expansion of the war to include North Vietnam and to justify major troop deployments was based on a murky incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in which North Vietnamese coast guardsmen may have fired on a U.S. destroyer.
Citing a 1998 neocon letter to President Clinton urging "regime change" in Iraq, Gold says that once Bush gained office war was a foregone conclusion. "There would be regime change in Iraq. All that the Neo-Con war hawks, in the Bush administration and out, needed to bring it about was an excuse to invade. Looking back a half-decade and knowing what we now know, who could doubt that if al Qaeda hadn't obliged the Neo-Cons with 9/11, the Kristolites would have torn a page out of history and, with Rupert Murdoch playing the role of William Randolph Hearst, given us a reprise of the sinking of the Maine?"
Bill Kristol, editor of the Murdoch-published Weekly Standard, is a leading neocon. In 1898, the battleship Maine inexplicably blew up in Havana Harbor and the Hearst press led a cry for war against Spain, though Spain's complicity in the incident was unlikely.
Gold said that, even with 9/11, war against Iraq was a hard sell, and the WMD deception was necessary. He takes pains to point out the holes in the official WMD line and has some acerbic comments about Israel's low-profile responses to this alleged threat.
Gold is a Goldwater conservative, having served as press aide to Goldwater and later to Spiro Agnew. In the 1980s, Gold was a senior adviser to President George H.W. Bush and co-wrote a book with him. Gold also describes himself as a friend of the Bush family.
Gold applauds Goldwater's response to Jerry Falwell as someone the GOP should have kicked in the pants and laments the influence of "theo-cons" in the GOP. An oustpoken faction of the religious right, especially those with TV access, have promoted a strong backing of the state of Israel based on certain interpretations of scripture.
Gold's stinging rebuke of the current state of GOP affairs is part of a growing chorus of noted Republicans who express severe dissatisfaction with the younger Bush. However, Democrats are in no mood to begin impeachment proceedings, seeing little partisan gain. Thus, unless more GOP critics are more forthright about 9/11 suspicions, impeachment or forced resignation seems unlikely.
Ellsberg scorns official 9/11 probes
July 21, 2006
Daniel Ellsberg, the man who exposed government deception about the Vietnam War by leaking the "Pentagon Papers," says that "very serious questions" concerning possible government complicity in the 9/11 attacks requires a new "hard-hitting investigation of a kind we've not seen."
Ellsberg, an intellectual once employed by the RAND Corp. think tank, said that the Bush administration was "capable, humanly and psychologically, of engineering such a provocation."
Ellsberg detonated a national firestorm by leaking the "Pentagon Papers" to the press. Those secret documents showed a pattern of official deception concerning the Vietnam war.
Ellsberg told an interviewer that though he found much of the inside job theorizing "very implausible," other criticisms are "quite solid, and there's no question in my mind that there's enough evidence there to justify a very comprehensive and hard-hitting investigation of a kind that we've not seen, with subpoenas, general questioning of people, and raising the release of a lot of documents."
Ellsberg continued that "there's no question" that "very serious questions have been raised about how much they [government officials] knew beforehand and how much involvement there may have been."
Ellsberg, who worked as an analyst in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, said he was familiar with the use of provocations, noting that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as a pretext for hostilities, potentially could have resulted in numerous American casualties.
Ellsberg warned that another 9/11-type attack could result in a "Reichstag fire" decree that ends liberty altogether.
These comments come from a transcript of an interview with Ellsberg in Infowars. The Infowars article is dated July 19, 2006.
The page is no longer on the Infowars site.
Oct. 23, 2009
I wrote something on this when Greenspan's memoir The Age of Turbulence was published in 2007. He didn't alter his words for the updated version that discussed the first phase of last year's financial crises.
In the days following Sept. 11, 2001, said former Fed chief Alan Greenspan, "There was no bigger question in Washington than, Why no second attack?" (Page 227)
He wrote:
If al Qaeda's intent was to disrupt the U.S. economy, as bin Laden had declared, the attacks had to continue. Our society was open, our borders porous, and our ability to detect weapons and bombs was weak. I asked this question of a lot of people at the highest levels of government, and no one seemed to have a convincing response.In other words, Greenspan thought there was something fishy about the attacks and the war on terror. Greenspan, who describes himself as a libertarian Republican, makes it clear that he was disturbed by the threats to individual liberty that arose after the attacks. And, Greenspan was candid about having little respect for Bush and a number of his aides.
We should add that Greenspan does not challenge the authenticity of the purported bin Laden statement, but then, he doesn't need to. If the statement is authentic, his question follows. If it isn't, then why did the Bush bunch vouch for it?
Neither does he question the FBI's decision to treat the anthrax attacks as unrelated to the events of 9/11. Once a Pentagon role was discovered in the anthrax case, the FBI quickly nixed the theory that it was part of a single terrorist campaign. But, because that position became the official stance, Greenspan's question stands.
You won't find information like this on Fox news -- though it was widely reported that Greenspan had little use for the official tale of what was behind the Iraq war.
Greenspan argued that regional instability posed a threat to oil supplies, spurring U.S. and British action, "whatever their publicized angst about 'weapons of mass destruction'."
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
We also learn that Greenspan, a market fundamentalist, was surprised that the market's "counter-party surveillance" provided insufficient self-regulation to avert the subprime crash.
He expressed alarm at global warming and said he was concerned that political dithering would prevent realistic countermeasures. Nevertheless, he backed a tax on gasoline in order to force America to wean itself from dependence on oil. He argued that the economy could well handle a tax that pushed gas up to $5 a gallon. Of course, this was written before the wild financial meltdown of last autumn.
GOP insider: 9/11 fit White House plan
April 12, 2007
The attacks of 9/11 fit in very well with the already planned war to topple Saddam, says a former speechwriter for the first President Bush in a scathing denunciation of the current Bush presidency.
In his book Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy Rollers and Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP [Sourcebooks, 2007], Victor Gold says the neo-conservatives around the current President Bush were highly motivated to arrange a pretext for war.
Gold writes, "Had it not been for 9/11, the Bush White House, determined to go to war, would no doubt have seized on some synthetic provocation, on the order of the one LBJ used to push through the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965," adding that a number of elder neocons were at the time Johnson Democrats.
The expansion of the war to include North Vietnam and to justify major troop deployments was based on a murky incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in which North Vietnamese coast guardsmen may have fired on a U.S. destroyer.
Citing a 1998 neocon letter to President Clinton urging "regime change" in Iraq, Gold says that once Bush gained office war was a foregone conclusion. "There would be regime change in Iraq. All that the Neo-Con war hawks, in the Bush administration and out, needed to bring it about was an excuse to invade. Looking back a half-decade and knowing what we now know, who could doubt that if al Qaeda hadn't obliged the Neo-Cons with 9/11, the Kristolites would have torn a page out of history and, with Rupert Murdoch playing the role of William Randolph Hearst, given us a reprise of the sinking of the Maine?"
Bill Kristol, editor of the Murdoch-published Weekly Standard, is a leading neocon. In 1898, the battleship Maine inexplicably blew up in Havana Harbor and the Hearst press led a cry for war against Spain, though Spain's complicity in the incident was unlikely.
Gold said that, even with 9/11, war against Iraq was a hard sell, and the WMD deception was necessary. He takes pains to point out the holes in the official WMD line and has some acerbic comments about Israel's low-profile responses to this alleged threat.
Gold is a Goldwater conservative, having served as press aide to Goldwater and later to Spiro Agnew. In the 1980s, Gold was a senior adviser to President George H.W. Bush and co-wrote a book with him. Gold also describes himself as a friend of the Bush family.
Gold applauds Goldwater's response to Jerry Falwell as someone the GOP should have kicked in the pants and laments the influence of "theo-cons" in the GOP. An oustpoken faction of the religious right, especially those with TV access, have promoted a strong backing of the state of Israel based on certain interpretations of scripture.
Gold's stinging rebuke of the current state of GOP affairs is part of a growing chorus of noted Republicans who express severe dissatisfaction with the younger Bush. However, Democrats are in no mood to begin impeachment proceedings, seeing little partisan gain. Thus, unless more GOP critics are more forthright about 9/11 suspicions, impeachment or forced resignation seems unlikely.
Ellsberg scorns official 9/11 probes
July 21, 2006
Daniel Ellsberg, the man who exposed government deception about the Vietnam War by leaking the "Pentagon Papers," says that "very serious questions" concerning possible government complicity in the 9/11 attacks requires a new "hard-hitting investigation of a kind we've not seen."
Ellsberg, an intellectual once employed by the RAND Corp. think tank, said that the Bush administration was "capable, humanly and psychologically, of engineering such a provocation."
Ellsberg detonated a national firestorm by leaking the "Pentagon Papers" to the press. Those secret documents showed a pattern of official deception concerning the Vietnam war.
Ellsberg told an interviewer that though he found much of the inside job theorizing "very implausible," other criticisms are "quite solid, and there's no question in my mind that there's enough evidence there to justify a very comprehensive and hard-hitting investigation of a kind that we've not seen, with subpoenas, general questioning of people, and raising the release of a lot of documents."
Ellsberg continued that "there's no question" that "very serious questions have been raised about how much they [government officials] knew beforehand and how much involvement there may have been."
Ellsberg, who worked as an analyst in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, said he was familiar with the use of provocations, noting that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as a pretext for hostilities, potentially could have resulted in numerous American casualties.
Ellsberg warned that another 9/11-type attack could result in a "Reichstag fire" decree that ends liberty altogether.
These comments come from a transcript of an interview with Ellsberg in Infowars. The Infowars article is dated July 19, 2006.
The page is no longer on the Infowars site.
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