[1189] in peace2
enlightening interview
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Saurabh Asthana)
Sun Nov 4 18:26:20 2001
Message-Id: <200111042320.fA4NKWX17669@chaos11.bwh.harvard.edu>
To: peace-list@mit.edu
Reply-to: rednblack@alum.mit.edu
Date: Sun, 04 Nov 2001 18:20:32 -0500
From: Saurabh Asthana <angrymob@chaos11.bwh.harvard.edu>
This is an interview with Stan Goff, a lefty ex-Special Forces Master
Sergeant, on his views re: the war. The transcription is a bit choppy
(not much in the way of punctuation to break up sentence clauses),
but it's fecking cooh. You MUST read it! (well, not Must, but you
oughter)
Saurabh
------
"Everywhere the building of a prison is the first step in the organization of
a civilized state." - B. Traven, 'Government'
More after "Evidence is a farce". (english)
Interview with Stan Goff
The following is a transcript of an interview I conducted
with Stan Goff on October
24, 2001 regarding his article "The So-Called Evidence is a
Farce".- Mike
McCormick - talkingsticktv@yahoo.com
Mike McCormick: I was hoping you could go through and reiterate
everything or a lot of what you had covered in your article "The
So-Called Evidence is a Farce".
Stan Goff: Yeah, let me kind of preface that a bit because the way
that thing got started was that I was participating in a list and I
sent that to the discussion list and someone from the discussion list
forwarded to someone and then it got forwarded to someone else and now
the thing is showing up like in Pravda and places like that, it took
off. It wasn't really meant for public consumption but I still stand
by everything I said. I think that while it's important to emphasize
that there's a lack of credibility sort of built into the structure of
the official story on this and there's a deep lack of credibility
related or not to whether this is a pre-existing agenda which I think
that it's pretty clear that it was, I don't want people to think that
I'm trying to advance some specific conspiracy theory. I think that's
really important to say at the outset. I don't know what happened on
Sept. 11th and I think it's important to know, but it's even more
important to know what is this agenda that's being pursued because I
think it's an extremely dangerous agenda and I think it can be traced
all the way back to as early as 1973 in the first oil shock with the
OPEC embargo. So that's my preface.
MM: Ok. So I think some of the strength of your, if I can call it an
article now since its...
SG: Yeah it's sort of turned into one.
MM: Part of that came from your experience with the military, that you
are in fact what many would call an authority and I'm wondering if you
could give us a brief bio of your experience with the military.
SG: Well, I retired in February 1996. I went into the Army in January
1970, did a tour in Vietnam, came back and did a tour in the 82nd
Airborne Division. Took a little break in service. Went back in again.
Worked as a Cav Scout for a while then went to work at 2nd Ranger
Battalion. That was the first of three Ranger assignments. Went to
work at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama. Went to and
the worked at the Counter-Terrorist Outfit that's sort of popularly
known as Delta. Left there and went to work as a military science
instructor at West Point for three semesters. Had another short break
where I instructed SWAT teams as a training captain at the Y-12
Nuclear Weapons Facility in Oak Ridge Tennessee. Went back in the Army
on active duty again from a reserve status and ran a Ranger platoon of
First Ranger Battalion in Savannah Georgia. Went from there to Special
Forces qualification course, entered Seventh Special Forces. Did a
good deal of work in Latin America with them. After Seventh Group I
returned back working for the Regimental staff at 75th Ranger
Regiment, participated in the Somalia Operation. Came back from there,
was promoted sort of out of that position and back into 3rd Special
Forces where I participated in the Haiti Operation. Overall that
stuff, there were eight conflict areas with a great deal of
concentration for a while there in Latin America and the Caribbean,
but also some experience elsewhere in Africa and Asia and so
forth. But primarily that work was in the Special Operations field
which as you know, they're busy boys right now. They're doing most of
the heavy lifting from what I can gleam in Afghanistan right now. In
fact, one of the big commanders out there, Frank Tony, if I've heard
correctly, was B Company Commander in 2nd Ranger Battalion in 1979-80
when I was stationed there with A Company, right next door. He wasn't
very well thought of then, he was thought as an inveterate brown-noser
and it's just the same old folks showing up, they've just been
promoted.
MM: And from what little we can get from the media currently, do you
think they are accurately portraying what is happening with...?
SG: (laughter) The media has never accurately portrayed a military
operation as long as I've been involved with this stuff. I've never
seen an accurate portrayal to this day, not one. But then again I've
never seen an accurate portrayal by the military public affairs
officers either. The public is kept pretty much in the dark about how
military operations are really conducted and what may be going on now
and I think we are all being kept deeply in the dark about Afghanistan
right now. I strongly suspect that the collateral damage as they call
it is far worse than they are going to allow anyone to know. And it's
a dumb operation. It's just not a very smart operation in a lot of
ways. I think it's comparable in many respects to Somalia.
MM: How so? How's it similar?
SG: Well, I'll have to give you a little background on this. When I
was with Special Forces, we were part of a foreign policy doctrine
called IDAD, which is Internal Defense and Development. Special Forces
basically had four primary kind of missions. Some of them were combat
missions but a lot of them were advice and assistance kinds of
missions. That's changed. There's a much stronger doctrinal and
technological emphasis now on something called OOTW or Operations
Other Than War and that's got some sinister implications for us at
home because it really is part of this whole sort of merger between
police and military forces. The problem in Somalia and the problem
here is related to a military that's still predicated on a structure
that was developed out of the Cold War where we were facing off
against the Warsaw Pact. Everything was designed to stop the Russians
at the Fulda Gap. Afghanistan is a far different reality. When I went
with the task force to capture Mohammed Fara Aidid, we had all these
gadgets, the most technologically sophisticated Special Operations
Force probably ever assembled up to that time and that's why people
were stunned in the United States when all of a sudden that task force
comes home with its dead and wounded and its tail between its legs and
its been defeated by this feudal warlord. There's been all kinds of
nonsense written about why this happened, how this happened, you know
there sort of this perennial claim that politicians keep soldiers from
exerting the necessary force to get the job done. It's the same thing
they said about Vietnam. It's really a military rationalization, it's
not real. Military success is not a function of force, or force
alone. It's not a function of geography and weather alone. It's not a
function of technology alone. It's not a function of intelligence
alone. It's not a function of political context alone. You see it's a
combination of all these things. Then you throw into the equation a
host of all sorts of other uncontrollable variables, just accidents
and there's no shortage of fools in the military. It's a bureaucracy
and so it sort of breeds these folks. They have a real strong vested
interest in mystifying military operations for the public because they
want the public to leave it to the experts and ignore their
dishonesty, their corruption and accept their little BS excuses for
their failures. It's a very contagious thing and I think it's actually
infected George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and all these other would-be
generalissimos that are running the United States right now. What they
think they can do is they think they can win in Afghanistan but again
going back to Somalia, Afghanistan is similar in the following
ways. Afghanistan is backward, it's tribalistic. It's coherent as a
nation only because they've got a boundary around it that says this is
a political geographic definition but within that geographic
definition there is nothing that resembles a nation. The Taliban is
one of many many groups, made in the USA by the way. But there's not
one singular cogent military force for the U.S. to focus its efforts
against and that's a violation of a principle of war called
objective. There's a host of factions. They're all very well armed
thanks to the United States because they armed them to topple a
socialist regime there years ago and they change alliances down there
like you and I change underwear. Its a country that physically divided
by some very forbidding and mountainous terrain. There is no
infrastructure. You can't attack a society's infrastructure if it
doesn't exist and so it nullifies the kind of strategy they used
against Iraq for instance. So there's no clear enemy and without a
clear enemy there's no clear decisive objective. I'm speaking strictly
in a morally neutral way here. A military task force can't conquer a
nation if there's not really a nation there. So you take this
situation and you got all these different warlords and factions and
you can introduce a couple dozen Stinger missiles or 500 assault
rifles or like in Somalia 200 RPGs and what that does, the
introduction of a comparatively small amount of hardware, can
instantly shift the entire balance of power in a region and completely
change the character of the battlefield. Our military is not versatile
or agile enough to respond to that and moreover there's still no
clearly defined objectives. So just from the point of view of the
military it's crazy. The Taliban, they claim they have 10,000 or there
about Afghani Arabs which are not Afghanis at all. Bin Laden for
instance is a Saudi. His daddy is a big construction magnate with
connections to the Bush family back in Saudi Arabia. 38% of
Afghanistan is Pashtun and even the Pashtun ethnicity is subdivided
between the Ghilazi and Durrani and 25% of Afghanistan are
Tajiks. Their loyalties are divided between Afghanistan and
Tajikistan. Then the Hazara who are Shites constitute 19% and they are
kind of prone to favor the Iranians and then there are Uzbeks. Then
you've got a Sunni majority among the Muslims but you've got a Shite
minority that's fairly significant. Most of the folks there speak a
form of Farsi called Dari. That's a Pashtun dialect but you have
Turkic dialects, there's about 30 minor languages alone. Then they say
they are going to make an alliance with this Northern Alliance, it's
not even an alliance. The only thing that those people are allied
around is their opposition to the Taliban. When they're not allied
against the Taliban then they spend as much time blood letting among
themselves as they do doing anything else and in fact they've been
very opposed to Pashtun nationalism in the past and the Pashtun have a
much closer ties to Pakistan... You see what I'm saying? This is
extremely complex and it's dynamic. It changes from day to day and
there's no way that a great power, unquote, like the United States can
go in there and achieve some sort of a military resolution to the
problem. Journalists have called it a quagmire, you know mission creep
and all that stuff. To me it's like if anybody remembers their youth
and Uncle Remus stories I think about tar babies. That's what's going
on there. This is going to be far more problematic than Vietnam from a
military standpoint.
MM: So you mentioned earlier that some of the real reasons that what
we're doing in Afghanistan date back to 1973. Could you go into that?
SG: Well I think that first of all we just have to be clear that this
is about oil. When you look at the question of oil it becomes
historically kind of complex but I'll simplify it as much as I can
sort of what I've found out studying this in detail. Now you've got to
look at oil production first of all as something that's finite. The
Neo-Malthusians now are making some very good points and I don't
necessarily agree with their analysis at a political level but
certainly from a physical level they are saying that oil is about to
run out and I think that's demonstrable with the data that's
available. Oil as an extractable resource follows something called a
Hubbert curve. Once it peaks in production then it begins a very
precipitous decline, forever, because it's a finite, it's a physically
finite resource. But it doesn't peak in production in all the same
regions, so you've got aggregate world production peaking at one point
and then you have different regions peaking at different points along
the way. This really changes the kind of power dynamics that exist
between these different regions. In 1973 we got hammered by an oil
embargo that was primarily the work of the Gulf States through OPEC
but the Gulf States to this day still have the largest repository of
recoverable oil. Especially Saudi Arabia but also Iran and also Iraq
and now some people believe and some people doubt but there's a fair
amount in the Caspian basin in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan and around
there. Right now the world is consuming somewhere around 75 million
barrels a day. World oil production as an aggregate is peaking
sometime between now and next year and then it'll begin a permanent
decline aggregate worldwide. The problem is demand is going up so that
around 2010 our demand is going to be 100 million barrels a day which
means the demand is going to go up 25 million barrels a day between
now and the end of this particular decade and the problem is even if
everything that they're trying to do right now in increasing the
recovery of oil in the Gulf States and the Caspian has a potential
only with the introduction of around a trillion dollars worth of
infrastructure would recover only around 15 additional million barrels
a day which means they still have a 10 million barrel deficit in terms
of what their demand is and what's actually available. Now that's not
the real trick. The real trick here is if you divide the world up,
just for the sake of argument into OPEC which is primarily Gulf
States. Venezuela is also a member but we're just talking about Gulf
States and we'll call them OPEC. Then you look at all the non-OPEC and
I just call them NOPEC for the sake of argument. NOPEC production
peaked years ago. It peaked in the last decade. It's on the way down
so NOPEC is losing its relative power to control the market and NOPEC
is something that the United States was very heavily invested in for
the purpose of offsetting the potential power of the Gulf States as
oil producers. But now OPEC is on the rise until 2010, so between now
and 2010, OPEC, every day that goes by gains more power to control the
market, the world market for petroleum. The only thing that attenuates
that problem for the U.S. right now is that after 1973 they began a
very aggressive program of offering all sorts of perquisites to the
Saudis and convinced them to invest their petroleum money in
U.S. financial instruments and so the dollar became the petrodollar
you see. But when the dollar became the petrodollar it also became the
foundation currency for world trade and that's one reason the dollar
has maintained its strength is because it's what's oil is traded
in. The Saudi regime that protects our interests there, right now, and
some of the other regimes in the region who would potentially protect
our interests are in a lot of trouble. There's a great deal of social
unrest and when you look at them attacking Osama Bin Laden in a place
like Afghanistan you have to wonder since Osama Bin Laden represents
right now and I think represents very well strictly from the point of
view of whether they have influence or not, this not Islam but
Islamism, the radical fundamentalism that's taken root in really a sea
of declining social conditions over there. Because the Saudi standard
of living and the standard of living throughout the region as oil
profits have gone down and as corruption has rooted itself further and
further in these regimes has created again this ocean of potentially
100 million people whose lives are getting worse all the time and this
is really fertile ground for something like this Islamism, this
radical fundamentalism to take root. So Osama Bin Laden in a sense is
really the potential opposition in a place like Saudi Arabia and Saudi
Arabia is the prize. It is the prize. Whoever controls Saudi Arabia
controls oil worldwide and Bin Laden said himself a couple of years
ago at a public interview that he was going to raise the price of oil
to $144 a barrel. Now I don't know where that number came from or why
it was that arbitrary and specific but at $50 a barrel U.S. power
dissolves. Our stock market crashes. So they've got some real concerns
and they also have some very specific concerns as individuals or the
members of this administration do because their also heavily invested
in oil, most of them. This trillion dollars of potential
infrastructure going into the Middle East, North Africa and Central
Asia is something that Halliburton Oil, Dick Cheney's old company very
well may be contracted to construct. I've got about six inches deep
worth of research over here and I don't want to bore listeners with
all the details but there's more here than meets the eye.
MM: I don't think you're boring us at all with the details. So can you
make the connection to potentially the benefits of getting Afghanistan
under control for the extraction of oil?
SG: I think it's a pipe dream. I don't think they can get Afghanistan
under control. What I've come to believe is that really the U.S.'s
ability to dominate the entire planet is unraveling. This is just part
of a historical evolution that is at some point inevitable and I think
it's about to happen. I think what they're doing now is not something
they're doing out of a position of strength but out of a position of
desperation and panic. These are very panicked kind of moves in a
sort of broad overall view of things which makes them exceedingly
dangerous. I think historically we can go back and see that when big
capital gets in trouble and the market's not working for them anymore
they have to find a way, cause right now there is a worldwide
production over-capacity that's created a recession that's about to go
deep and about to go long and one of the ways that they've
traditionally gotten themselves out of that is to liquidate a bunch of
that capital and the best way to liquidate capital real fast is
war. That's the way they correct the problem they use non-market
mechanisms to correct for a fallen rate of profit within a market
economy. And I think what's even more dangerous is we are looking at
this huge imperial power that's the United States right now and
they're trying to control everything at once and their empire is
beginning to unravel on them and I think what is particularly
dangerous for people like me and probably people like y'all and a lot
of your listeners is that in the process of doing this they're going
to have to exercise more and more despotic measures at home to step on
resistance and so I think we're really in very serious and immediate
danger of an emergence of a form of fascism in the United States. And
I think John Ashcroft at the helm of the Justice Dept. is not a
particularly great thing and I think if people take a close look at
the kinds of initiatives he's involved in right now in this bizarre
Orwellian sounding The Office of Homeland Security with Tom Ridge of
all people. These are very disturbing developments. I think one of the
reactions that the public had to the events of Sept. 11th and it's a
very sensible and understandable reaction is this incredible sense of
a loss of security and a sense of endangerment. That's being sort of
demagogically played out by this opportunistic administration but I
think what people need to understand and if we are going to appeal to
the public at large about what their interests are I think that what's
going on right now, the policies that are being pursued by the de
facto Bush administration are policies that are contrary to our
security and in fact a threat to our long term security and it's just
an attempt to consolidate a citadel of power for a handful of the
elite in this country at the expense of everyone else and it's only a
matter of time before they turn on us too. Because this is not a
crisis that can be overcome. Oil is running out in the long term and
we have 6 to 7 billion people living on the planet right now that
thoroughly depend on this one resource that's not just a regular
commodity. It's the life blood of the entire global capitalist system
and it's going to be cut off and it's going to be cut off by nature
it's not going to be cut off by us but in the process I think again
that you'll see a retrenchment of power and it's that retrenchment
that I think is extremely dangerous.
MM: Can you go into some more specifics of how the current policies
that the Bush administration is following are a threat to our
security?
SG: Oh my goodness, well start with the notion of going over what I
think is really the beginning of a war of extermination among a 100
million Muslim people. That don't strike me as something very
secure. If they wanted to find a good way to go out there and
manufacture new terrorists they're going about it exactly the right
way. This unilateralism and this willingness to go over there and drop
bombs on Afghani civilians which they are doing. That's exactly why
they've cut the media off. But I think there's also some real
geostrategic issues. They are introducing a much higher level of
tension now between the Pakistanis and the Indians who've been on the
brink of nuclear war with one another already. And I think within a
couple of years when they begin what's gonna be inevitably the attempt
to break up Uzbekistan and Turkminestan and to pull them away from the
orbit of the Russians I think that's going to create another
problem. The Russians are working with us right now but that's short
term. And I think domestically and again I go back to this doctrine of
Operations Other Than War (OOTW), worldwide this recession is going to
kick in and create problems in the center, in the industrialized
nations, but also in the periphery. And I think they've been very
alarmed by the growth of this anti-globalization movement you know
that people have seen most recently in Genoa but before that in Quebec
and Seattle. These things are very disturbing I think to the power
elite right now and I think, we've seen it already over time, there's
this closer and closer relationship and blurring of the lines between
the military and police and I mean I participated in this. In the
early eighties I was actually involved as an active duty military in
training the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. They were just "Woofo" SWAT,
Washington Field Office SWAT, at the time, so we were militarizing
them and at the same time they started doing operations with Special
Forces and the Marines augmenting the Border Patrol. So there was
already in progress this developmental trajectory that was beginning
to merge the roles of the police and the military. And I think what
we're seeing is worldwide especially under the influence of the United
States. I think there is an hallucination, out there, of the Pax
Americana, you know, and what they're developing now, is a military
and police doctrine for urban civil war. And for us that means in the
short term that they are developing a doctrine for severe population
control. I don't know about any one else, but that don't make me feel
anymore secure. (chuckles). That makes me feel very insecure. Because
it's only a short step before people start getting thrown in jail for
what they believe in again. I think we're moving toward the
reintroduction of something similar to the Smith Act in this country
right now.
MM: What was that?
SG: The Smith Act was finally declared unconstitutional, but only
after people spent like a decade in jail. That's back in the Post
WWII. That's part of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon. They introduced
something called the Smith Act. Ah, rounded up people who belong to
socialist organizations threw them all in jail, for the crime of
thinking. They did absolutely nothing wrong, and they just put them in
jail for their beliefs. I don't think we are but a hop skip and a jump
away from that right now.
MM: Well especially with this week where I believe the FBI is now
seeking changing the laws so they will be allowed to torture people.
SG: Yeah. Did you see that? Or if they can't torture them here,
they'll ship them overseas to someone who can. You know, the people
need to be paying attention. Stop waving that flag for about five
minutes and go take a real close look at what's going on because this
has nothing to do with patriotism. I care about my country. Heck, I
was born and raised here, you know. Members of my family are American
citizens. So it's not a question of this thing trying to equate the
notion of caring about your country with supporting the asinine,
dangerous, opportunistic policies of an illegitimate administration. I
don't buy it. It's not the same thing. I will never support the Bush
Administration. I don't care what they do, because first of all they
weren't elected. People seemed to have forgotten that. And that's why
I say, man, you know, what's the ol' saying, cui bono, who benefits?
MM: Go into that some more if you would cause again in your email that
you sent out that somehow turned into, through a mass circulation,
turned into a somewhat famous article now. You talked about how many
people in the current Bush Administration have connections to oil.
SG: Oh my goodness, (chuckles), Okay, well you know. Start with
Bush. Start with the de facto president right now. He was the CEO of
Harken Energy. That is his own little company, you know. As it turns
out, he wasn't very good at it. You know, his dad, was an oil man. So
you've got two generations in oil right there. Okay. And his dad was
also you know the former President, the former Vice-President, the
director of Central Intelligence. George Herbert Walker Bush is on the
board of Carlyle Group. Carlyle Group is right now a $12 billion
dollar equity company, but it's heavily invested in all kinds of
things, including oil and it's also I think 11th or 12th whatever,
biggest defense contractors in the country right now. It's getting
very incestuous. And in fact, Carlyle put Bush junior on the board of
one of its subsidiaries, which is Cater Air. A little shuttle
service, a little puddle jumper service. Sort of as a sop to dad. The
new ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert Jordan, is a Dallas lawyer and
an old Bush booster. Jordan works for a Baker Botts. That's a firm
with offices in Riyadh. And Baker Botts represents Carlyle Group over
there. And the Baker in Baker Botts is James Baker, who was Secretary
of State for George Herbert Walker Bush, but he is also the guy that
engineered the whole Florida coup d'etat, in the 2000 election. He was
the midwife of that little venture. Some of the other folks in
Carlyle, Fidel Ramos, former Chief of the Philippines. Park Tae Joon
of South Korea. John Major. Everybody remember John Shalikashvili,
former chairman of the Joint Chiefs? And you can go back with the Bush
family. Prescott Bush, Rockefellers, Duponts, Standard Oil, Morgans,
Fords, all these other folks were anti-Semites and anti-Communists way
back. They also actually financed the rise to power of Adolph
Hitler. They financed it. I mean, that's a historical fact. It's
irrefutable. And Prescott Bush did business with the Nazis all the way
up to 1942 until he was censured by the United States under the
Trading with the Enemy Act. And after the War, he turned right around
and ran for Congress in Connecticut and won. This is an interesting
family. Anyway, Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton Oil. Got $34 million
before he took office in stock options from Halliburton. As the CEO,
Cheney, and I'm looking at my notes, oversaw $23.8 billion dollars in
oil industry contracts to Iraq alone. Now this is interesting, because
Cheney found the loopholes in the embargo on Iraq. Now the attack on
Iraq was done when Cheney was the Secretary of Defense. He stepped
down as Secretary of Defense and turned right around and became the
CEO of Halliburton, took advantage of the loopholes and went back
there and made $23.8 billion dollars in Iraq by rebuilding the
infrastructure that we bombed out of existence. Halliburton is also
involved with the Russian mob. They've got sort of two things going
on. One is oil and the other is drug trafficking. Halliburton is a
story all by itself. Secretary of State, Colin Powell. This man has no
diplomatic credentials. He was the former chairman of Joint Chiefs of
Staff and all of sudden he is in charge of the entire diplomatic corps
of the United States. That's interesting just by itself. He has cash
holdings or stock holdings in a number of defense contractors. Tony
Prinicipi, Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Lockheed Martin, defense
contractor. The biggest defense contractor in the world. Andrew Card,
Chief of Staff. . General Motors. Secretary of the Navy, Gordon
England. General Dynamics. Secretary of the Airforce, James Roche,
Northrup Grummond.. Secretary of the Army, General Thomas White
retired. Enron Energy. These folks are (chuckles) all defense
contractors or oil people. The whole bunch of them are. Donald
Rumsfeld is Secretary of Defense. What people don't realize is he is
also the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. They get big defense
contracts. But he is also with General Signal Corporation, a defense
contractor. And interestingly enough, he is also heavily invested in
biotech, which is probably gonna make a killing here pretty soon with
whatever Anthrax vaccines. Cheney and I've got a picture of Cheney and
Rumsfeld in May 2000 at the Russian-American Business Leaders Forum
together. Arms around each other, and smiling. Dick Armitage. Deputy
Secretary of Defense, he's a guy like me, he's a former special ops
guy, Seal. He had to leave the Reagan Administration because he was up
to his neck in Iran contra drug problems. And now he's working
directly with the Russian Mafia. And he is also a board member of
Carlyle. Remember that? Chief of Carlyle is Mr. Carlucci, who is also
with the Middle East Policy Council, you see how this stuff
intersects? Commerce Secretary is Donald Evans who owns Colorado Oil
Company. You have to take a very close look at this cabinet, which I
think was constructed in a very systematic way to figure out what
their foreign policy priorities are.
MM: Let me also ask you about the actual if we could go into the
actual events on September 11th. Because again, in your email that
went out you had some...you raised some very good questions that I
think were on a lot of peoples' minds as to the exact timing of
different incidents.
SG: Well, and again, and I don't want to imply that there's a
conspiracy, it might just be incompetence, but it strikes me as very
odd. And I'm sort of looking at my notes here. First of all, every
fifteen seconds they would show on the TV these planes blowing-up into
the World Trade Center, over and over. It was like we were trying to
be hypnotized by that-by that image. Almost as if they didn't want us
to think about well how did this come to pass, you know. Well, it came
to pass in a situation that was unprecedented in the history of the
world. Four, simultaneous hijackings inside the United States. That's
never happened. Never ever, ever. And hijacked in a span of
twenty-five minutes. 7:45-8:10am. Eastern daylight. And all these
planes are on FAA radar. You fly around the United States, you are on
FAA radar. You've got four hijackings, and nobody notifies the
President. The President, he is going to this visit to an elementary
school down in Florida. By 8:15, somebody should know something is
wrong because these planes have deviated from their flight plans, but
nothing happens. The President, he's skinin and grinin' with the
teachers and doing his photo op thing. 8:45: American Airlines flight
11 hits the World Trade Center. Okay, 8:45. Now Bush, he's at Booker
Elementary. You've got four planes hijacked and one of them has just
crashed into the World Trade Center and still nobody is notifying the
Commander in Chief. No one has scrambled a single Air Force air-to-air
attack missile er airplane. There are no Air Force inceptors in the
air. 9:03 United flight 175 hits the other building in the World Trade
Center. 9:05 Andrew Card finally bends over to the President and
whispers something in his ear, okay. Did the President stop and
convene the meeting? Hun-ah. He goes back to reading with second
graders. Now they've tracked American Airlines flight 77. It's over
Ohio headed west, conducts a point turn unscheduled and off the flight
plan over Ohio and turns around and starts making a beeLine for
Washington D.C. Has Andrew Card been told to scramble the Air Force?
No! Twenty-five minutes later, still the President finally gives a
public statement telling people that there has been some hijacked
planes flown into the World Trade Center. By this time, we've all seen
it live on TV. And, in meantime, there's this plane that is still
headed to D.C. Air Force has still not been scrambled. 9:30 The
President makes his announcement. Flight 77 is still ten minutes from
the Pentagon. Actually over ten minutes. The Administration later on
tells people that they didn't know the Pentagon was the target and
they thought it was the White House, but in fact, this was on FAA
radar and it's shown that it had already flown south past the White
House no-fly zone and was headed to Alexandria. 9:35 This plane
conducts another turn. This is very strange turn. It's at altitude, it
conducts a 360 degree turn and begins a maneuver. A tight spinning
descent, a tight spiral descent. This is something that is supposedly,
you know, this pilot that was trained at this Florida puddle jumper
school, where they teach you how to fly a Cesna has conducted this
spiral turn, descends 7,000 feet in 2 and 1/2 minutes. Brings the
plane up, stable, flat, flies it in so low that it knocks the electric
lines down across the street from the Pentagon and with pinpoint
accuracy slams into the building going 460 knots. Later on, you know,
people saying wait a minute, how in the hell did someone learn how to
fly a plane that well and this little ol' school down in Florida? And
the people turn around and start add on to the story. Well, they went
to a flight simulator. And what I said in my little post was its like
saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush
hour by buying her a video driving game. This don't make any
sense. Now, what happened? I don't know, you know. I just don't know,
but at a very bare minimum and this is what was said that apparently
resonated with people, we've either got a criminal conspiracy or we've
got criminal negligence on the part of this Administration. But in
either case, there are parts of this thing that could have been
prevented but nobody did a thing. You know, that's what it looks like
from where I'm sitting.
MM: To me, that was one of the things that, so many things in your
letter, your article really resonated with me, but that was one of the
things that really stuck out as well was because I think a lot of us
still have questions about that, and none of the media, no one is
asking these questions.
SG: But, you have to remember that they are also invested in defense
companies and oil companies. Westinghouse and GE are some of the
biggest defense contractors around. All of them got oil stocks. It's
not like a big conspiracy. You know what I saw in El Salvador. A lot
of the reporters down there would hangout at the Camino Real Hotel,
which is right down the street from the Embassy. And they would not
dare say anything that would piss off anyone at the Embassy, because
then the Embassy would cut them off from their scoops. You see they
would loose their contacts. So they really have to nurture
relationships with these power holders and if they do anything without
clearing it with them, then they are subject to be squeezed out, and
eventually throws their career off track. So it doesn't work like from
the top down, it's very systemic.
MM: Well I guess I could understand it with the, you know, with the
corporate media not doing that, they're pretty much following a
pattern, but even amongst, let's say the alternative media there's
been very little questioning of the incidents themselves.
SG: Well, yeah, I think that's part of, what I consider, an
intellectual malaise on the Left in the United States. They've
deserted their roots, you know, and they have forgotten how to do
analysis. They get involved in this moral score keeping. It's almost
reminiscent of Vietnam, you know, who has a bigger body count, so
people on the Left say well the Americans have the bigger body count
so they're worse. It doesn't tell us a thing about motives. It doesn't
tell us a thing about the trajectory of the system. It doesn't tell us
a thing about the historical development of the situation. It doesn't
tell us any of that stuff. And, I think, what the Left has really done
itself a disservice in getting involved in this tit-for-tat
competition for the moral high ground with the Right, when they need
to be subjecting the situation to some intense analysis and getting
people the information they need to begin to ask the right
questions. So you know I hold , I sort of hold progressives
accountable on that too. I think we've failed in a lot of ways. It's
important to say that politics is hypocritical, but most of us already
know that. That's just the nature of politics. It's not designed to be
morally consistent. What they tell you is a story to legitimatize an
action that has a motive that they can't expose to the public,
otherwise, they'll lose their support. I think our job is to expose
those motives to the public, and not just ...you know, well, the
United States did bad things too. First of all, in a deeply
racialized society, like ours, it doesn't fly. Most people in this
country don't care that we're bombing Afghani children. They don't
care. Because there's already a predominant racist ideology in this
country that says if you're not white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, in some
cases, that you're less than human, that your life has less value. Or
if you get into this jingo patriotism it's like I don't care if we
kill a million of them as long as we save one American life. So, we're
not going to gain anyone's ear by comparing moralities, I don't
think. Some people you will, some people will be called to account on
that. But I think we have to appeal to the self-interest too and
what's going on right now is going to be very bad for most Americans
in a very short period of time.
MM: One other question specific to the actual incidents on September
11th, would it be fair to say that the area around the White House is
probably the most secure, or the most watched airspace worldwide? Can
you think of anything that would have higher security?
SG: I have no idea.
MM: Okay, well could you think anything that would have higher
security in terms of airspace than the White House?
SG: It'd be difficult. It'd be difficult. It's a pretty high priority
I would expect. I wouldn't presume to say that it's the highest
because I just don't know. But yeah, you have the most powerful Air
Force in the world and the Chief of State's residence in that same
country, I think you've got a pretty strong assumption right there
that it should be pretty well covered. That airspace should be very
well covered.
MM: All right. What do you see that we need to start focusing on as a
country if we are going to get our country back, basically?
SG: Oh gosh, I'm not qualified to speak for ... I know what I'm
doing. I'm getting involved in the organizing. Where I am, there's
sort of two different pieces going on. I think the broader forces need
to be brought together in an anti-war movement to create something for
people to plug into as they begin to be disillusioned as they
inevitably will be with this foreign policy. That they've got a
movement to plug into. The same as an anti-war movement back during
the Vietnam era that finally stopped all that nonsense. And then for
people who are more consciously Left or consciously progressive, I
think it's really important for us to begin articulating, not just
articulating but beginning to do the organizing around the issue of
developing some sort of a nucleus of an anti-fascist movement inside
this country. I think it's been coming for a long time, it's not just
something that happened September 11th. It began with the popular
acceptance of books like the Bell Curve and things like that. But I
think it has much more urgency now, so I'm involved in anti-war
organizing with my colleagues around here and friends. We're also
beginning to talk about what we can do to ensure that we are not
subjected to the same thing that Germany was subjected to because it
only took them a couple of years to tumble into barbarism. It won't
take us nearly as long, because we're much closer to start with.
MM: When anyone questions the current direction that our
Administration, our government is taking right now, they are called
unpatriotic. Would you address that?
SG: You know, they're wrong. But that's the way this works. It's a
creation of an atmosphere of intimidation. I have seen and talked to
a number of people who have begun displaying flags as a form of
self-protection, especially Muslim folks. And folks from the Middle
East around here started hanging flags all over everything they own
just as a way to protect themselves. I've seen a lot of people in my
African-American colleague's and friend's whose neighborhoods now are
sprouting American flags like mushrooms after a four-day rain. These
aren't folks who are really caught up in this whole patriotic thing,
and in fact have some serious reservations about hanging that flag out
there when the flag was the one that also flew over slavery and Jim
Crow and so forth, but that atmosphere of intimidation is out
there. And I think there is only one way to overcome that and that's
for the people who do understand what's going on to be kind of bold
and step out. You've got to be up front. People have to be aggressive
about defending their positions. You have to demonstrate to other
people that you don't have to be afraid. Because if we do back away
now, that's going to allow this tendency to strengthen and that's what
we can't do. I think we have to fight fascism before it emerges, not
afterwards. And to continue to construct a counter-narrative to all
this stuff that is official propaganda. To give people information and
give it to them, not necessarily in a real confrontational way. I
don't think I've ever changed anyone's mind by preaching to them, but
if you present them with some alternative information and they have
some time to sit down and process that then a lot of times they'll
come around. A lot of work to do. A lot of work to do.
MM: What are some good sources that you'd recommend for alternative
information?
SG: Well for people who have computer access, there's a number of good
websites: Alternet.org, Indymedia.com, Globalcircle.com,
Emperors-Clothes. Those are all websites. Dieoff.org is a very good
one to read about petroleum. But also alternative newspapers...depends
on where you are. There's some close by somewhere. And, there are some
books out there too. Some of the stuff like William Blum and folks
like that written in the last few years. You know it doesn't hurt to
get a hold of South End, Common Courage Press, and see what's on their
lists. And get a few of their books. There are some analytical and
well-documented books out there that talk about historical development
of the situation that we find ourselves in right now. And you know
listening to shows like this on the radio don't hurt. (chuckles) A lot
of people listen to the radio and that's what I do when I'm stuck in
traffic, I listen to the radio. You know you all have a powerful
medium and I appreciate someone using it for the right thing.
(Transcript co-produced by Kurt Grela).
