LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE JURY…One thing that no one can dispute is that the attacks of September 11, 2001,
were a homicide. Of all police investigations, none is more thoroughly and
precisely investigated than the taking of human life as the result of the actions of
another. As almost every text for homicide detectives has taught us, the certainty
that murders will be thoroughly and fairly investigated according to uniform standards
is among the core requirements of human civilization. While these attacks
were arguably one of the most serious homicides ever committed, the investigation
and “prosecution” of that case by means other than Dick Cheney’s “war that will
not end in our lifetimes” has never even approached the legal and logical standards
governing all such investigations. No real case has ever been made that would pass
first muster of even a junior assistant district attorney.
Without such a court process, we are forced to employ analogies and metaphors.
But there remains to us the most successful, fundamental strategy for the prosecution
of criminal behavior: demonstrating that a suspect did, or did not, have the
means, motive, and opportunity to commit the crime.
With respect to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, that critical litmus test for any
murder prosecution — means, motive, and opportunity — has never been fully
applied. In a capital case each of these components would require demonstration
“beyond a shadow of doubt.” Regardless of whom the suspect(s) turns out to be,
these are the basic questions every homicide investigator must seek to answer in
the course of the investigation. This book will attempt to do that. In the end the
only “suspects” found to meet all of these criteria will not be al Qaeda and Osama
bin Laden. They will instead be a group of people operating within certain government
agencies, including the White House, for the benefit of major financial
interests within the United States and in other countries. This group will specifically
include parts of the administration of George W. Bush and, before it, the
administration of William Jefferson Clinton. However, the only possible unifying
thread will be the intelligence community and, in particular, the United States Secret
Service and the Central Intelligence Agency. I realize that this is a frightening statement.
I submit that by the end of this book it will be the only statement that
encompasses and reasonably explains the facts as documented.
A word about conspiraciesI am an investigator and a journalist. It is not my business to speculate, and my
reasoning is not theoretical. As a detective it is my job to gather evidence, consider
its authenticity, posit a hypothesis, and test that hypothesis against the larger
pattern of facts. So much for “theory.” As for the word “conspiracy,” it’s among the
most common terms in the rigorous legal language of American jurisprudence. A
conspiracy is generally defined as two or more people who plan to commit an illegal
act and who then take one or more specific actions in furtherance of that plan.
Conspiracy is a very real term for tens of thousands of minority men and women
in the United States who are serving sentences of — in some cases — more than
twenty years in federal penitentiaries like Leavenworth for “no-drug conspiracies.”
In many of those cases someone talked about acquiring drugs and someone else
made a phone call asking if someone else had the drugs (in many cases only in very
small amounts), and that’s all it took to throw away the lives of these non-violent
offenders.
One of the most trumpeted themes in the post-9/11 world has been a blanket
assertion that such a large conspiracy (if conducted within the US government)
could never be concealed from the American people or the people of the world
before the crime was committed. It has been sounded by the likes of David Corn
at The Nation and former National Security Counterterrorism Chief Richard
Clarke. Clarke wrote in his 2004 bestseller Against All Enemies,
Conspiracy theorists simultaneously hold two contrary beliefs: a) that
the US government is so incompetent that it can miss explanations
that the theorists can uncover, and b) that the US government can
keep a big and juicy secret. The first belief has some validity. The second
idea is pure fantasy.1
Richard Clarke misled you here. He also informed, in some very surprising
ways. In fact, as I will show you later, he misled in many places in his book. From
the Manhattan Project to the Stealth fighter, the US government has successfully
kept secrets involving thousands of people. Secondly, in order to execute a conspiracy
of the size and type I am suggesting, it is not necessary that thousands of
people see the whole picture. The success of the US in maintaining the secrecy
around the atom bomb and the Stealth fighter, or in any classified operation, lies
in compartmentalization. A technician in Tennessee refining uranium ore in 1943
would have had no knowledge of its intended use, or any moral culpability in any
deaths that occurred as a result of it. Another technician in Ohio, mixing a polymer
resin in 1985, would have had no knowledge of what an F117A looked like
or what it was intended to do.
The government routinely protects itself against disclosure by compelling millions
of employees to sign security agreements and secrecy oaths which would
make them subject to immediate incarceration or loss of benefits if they talked,
2 crossing the rubicon
even about criminal behavior. Perpetrating the murders of 9/11 required only a
few people inside a small circle who did indeed “need to know” the entire plan, or
most of the plan, in order to complete their tasks. For reasons of physical safety,
freedom from legal sanction, and job security, participants would be motivated —
and therefore, guaranteed — not to inform on one another.
This was one of many lessons I learned painfully with my first exposure to
covert operations in 1976. In this book I will introduce you to several people who,
I believe, had to have known enough to understand that the US government was
planning for 9/11 to be successful ahead of time. I make no claim that these are
the only ones involved at such a level, nor do I claim to know how many other
such people might exist. My investigation will, however, demonstrate how easy it
is in practice to conceal a broad conspiratorial agenda when the suspects control
information flow and operational procedures inside the government. After two
and a half years of investigation my estimate is that the number of people with
complete foreknowledge of the attacks of September 11th would likely not exceed
two dozen, all of them bound to silence by Draconian secrecy oaths. The actions
of some I will name in connection with 9/11, however, certainly place them on a
list of possible suspects who need to be thoroughly questioned in a public forum
that includes consequences for dishonesty.
For many of you, the facts I present will be things you have never heard of or
even considered. I guarantee that they will be fully documented in academic style
footnotes so that you — members of the jury — may take them into your own
rooms and evaluate them as you would “people’s exhibits” in a murder trial. I ask
you to accept nothing that I tell you at face value. Rather I demand of you that
you make full use of the footnotes by examining the primary sources to which
they refer. Examine them as you would a shell casing, a photo of a bloody footprint,
a bank statement, or witness testimony. That is your obligation, your
sacred duty.
Given that September 11th was a homicide, it was absurd that pronouncements
of guilt were made within hours of the attacks, even before interrogation of material
witnesses (including key members of the US government and the bin Laden
family) or the collection and analysis of physical evidence could take place. Much
of the physical evidence was destroyed without examination. That in itself is a key
anomaly suggesting guilty knowledge on the part of whoever directed the destruction
of evidence at a crime scene. In the case of the World Trade Center, a detective
would demand an answer from the Department of Justice and the FBI.
To date, the case that 9/11 was perpetrated solely by Osama bin Laden and al
Qaeda has never been proved, even to the most rudimentary standards. In fact,
some 35 months after the attacks there has not been a single successful 9/11 prosecution
anywhere in the world. The only conviction that had been secured, a
German prosecution against Mounir el Motassadeq, charged with aiding the socalled
Hamburg cell of Mohammed Atta, was overturned in 2004 because the US
government refused to produce key witnesses and evidence relevant to the
charges.2 Every defendant in a Western criminal case has the right to examine the
evidence used against him and to cross-examine witnesses.
That fact raises another set of critical questions.
The rulesNothing changes the obligation to follow the investigative procedures used by any
police detective, procedures which have been established by hundreds of years of
precedent as the means of finding facts and then reconciling contradictory facts
with each other in a way that establishes guilt or innocence. The law is also intended
to remove, as thoroughly as possible, any personal interest on the part of
witnesses giving testimony, or of persons involved in the prosecution of the case.
The fact that someone has what may be a prejudicial point of view is not disqualifying
per se. In a trial these facts are presented to a jury who then weights the
testimony according to their assessment of how much or how little the testimony
is tainted. What is almost always unethical or disqualifying is a failure to disclose
or conceal prejudice or a conflict of interest. The legal assumption is that concealment
presumes that the material presented has been knowingly and unfairly biased
toward one side or the other. Arguably, someone starting with an acknowledged
bias who still claims that a case can be made according to proper evidentiary standards
will have to meet an even higher standard than someone who can claim to
have no bias at all.
With regard to 9/11, there are no unbiased parties anywhere. Some are psychologically
fearful of admitting that the US, and especially the world economy, could
possibly be as corrupt as I am going to establish. Some are afraid of losing jobs or
suffering economically if what I present is true. Many will be afraid to look at their
own complicity in the systemic corruption which helped to create the motive for
9/11 and which would prompt them instead to instantly believe in America’s guilt,
or Israeli guilt, or Muslim guilt without ever examining a single piece of evidence.
I will disclose and overcome my own bias by adhering to strict standards of
investigation and presenting facts. I insist that each reader look inside and do the
same with their own biases, fears and preconceptions and that they continue to do
so with every page they turn.
Full disclosureEverything I am about to tell you is abundantly documented at <www.fromthewilderness.
com> in the section titled “About Michael C. Ruppert.”
Many years ago, I was trained and worked as a police detective. Although my
career as a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department was in its relative
youth when it ended, I had been “loaned” into detective positions on a number of
occasions. This was standard procedure to groom those who had demonstrated the
ability and were going to follow that career path. I had spent a mere four weeks on
4 crossing the rubicon
loan to Wilshire Division’s Team 5 homicide table to work with a seasoned detective
named Mel Kissinger in 1976. I had previously also worked a combined total
of about three months as a detective assigned to handle first auto theft and then
burglary cases. Most importantly I had been loaned for a cumulative total of
almost four months to work as a detective in Wilshire Division’s narcotics unit
and, aside from that, had been regularly pulled from uniformed field assignments
to assist in narcotics investigations. I had shown such a knack for drug cases that
in 1976 I was specially chosen and approved, over many senior candidates, to
attend a two-week special narcotics investigation program run by the Drug
Enforcement Administration. I had taken and passed the written civil service promotional
examination for detective and had been given an oral examination score
above 90 percent as evaluated by a panel of senior officers.
In July of 1977 I struggled to make sense of a world gone mad. In a last-ditch
effort to salvage a relationship with my fiancée, a CIA contract agent named
Nordica Theodora D’Orsay (Teddy), I had traveled to find her in New Orleans.
Aside from having an enormous number of contacts in both law enforcement and
organized crime, she was also a lifelong friend of a niece of the Shah of Iran
(Minou Hagstrom) with whom she had attended grade school and junior high in
California. Through Teddy I had met members of the royal family (Prince Shariar)
and watched as letters came from and went to Tehran (where Minou was living)
and Los Angeles. On a hastily arranged vacation, secured with the blessing of my
Commanding Officer, Captain Jesse Brewer of LAPD, I had gone on my own, and
unofficially, to avoid the scrutiny of LAPD’s Organized Crime Intelligence
Division (OCID).
Starting in the late spring of 1976 Teddy had wanted me to join her operations
from within the ranks of LAPD. But her operations — from what little I had
learned — always involved firearms leaving the country and drugs entering the
country. Having specialized in drug cases, and looking forward to a career as a narcotics
detective, I had steadfastly refused to get involved with drugs in any way.
Everything she mentioned in her “terrorist” cases involved either heroin or
cocaine, and firearms. Her stock response to my concerns was that “her people”
were not interested in drugs. The director of the CIA at the time was George
Herbert Walker Bush. I told her that I would never get involved in anything that
overlooked narcotics.
Although officially on staff at the LAPD Academy, I had been unofficially
loaned to OCID since shortly after January 1977 when Teddy, announcing the start
of a new operation, had suddenly disappeared. She left many people, including
me, baffled and twisting in the breeze. I became the regular recipient of harassing
phone calls, burglaries, surveillances, and threats. The OCID detectives had been
pressuring me hard for information about her and her activities. It was information
I couldn’t have given them even if I had known it. Hoping against hope that
I would find some way to understand her involvement with the CIA, the LAPD,
Introduction 5
the royal family of Iran, the Mafia, and drugs, I set out alone into eight days of
Dantean revelations that have determined the course of my life ever since.
Arriving in New Orleans I found her living in an apartment across the river
in Gretna. Equipped with a scrambler phone and night vision devices, and working
from sealed communiqués delivered by naval and air force personnel from
nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station, she was involved in something truly ugly.
She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving
for Iran. The ships were owned by a company that is today a subsidiary of
Halliburton — Brown and Root. She was working with Mafia associates of New
Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats
that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city. The boats arrived regularly
at Marcello-controlled docks, unmolested by the New Orleans police she
introduced me to. Through her I also met hard-hat divers, military men, Brown
and Root employees, former Green Berets, and CIA personnel.
The service boats were retrieving heroin from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico,
and international waters, oil rigs built and serviced by Brown and Root. More than
once during the eight days I spent in New Orleans, I met and ate at restaurants
with Brown and Root employees who were boarding those ships and leaving for
Iran within days. Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the wrong
question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off. It was not the last time I was
to be shot at, nor was it the last punishment I would ever suffer for asking questions.
Disgusted and heartbroken at witnessing my fiancée and my government smuggling
drugs, I ended the relationship. Then I returned to Los Angeles and reported
all the activity I had seen — including the connections between Brown and Root
and the CIA — to LAPD intelligence officers. They promptly told me that I was
crazy and needed to see a psychiatrist they would gladly provide.
One of the smartest things I ever did was to avoid the offered “friendly”
psychiatrist and find my own while securing a much needed rest at an LA-area
psychiatric hospital. The psychiatrist there correctly diagnosed me with combat
fatigue and reported that I was not crazy, just battered. Aside from a dozen tests
which all showed that I was both sane and stable, the opinion of one psychiatrist
was heavily influenced by a secret tape recording I had made of my fiancée discussing
her operations. Upon learning of that tape, OCID promptly seized and
destroyed it. Only the integrity of the psychiatrist in a written record saved me
when he reported that I had played the tape for him.
I was returned to full duty, without restrictions, in the late fall of 1977. In my
remaining fourteen months with LAPD I earned the highest rating reports possible,
was certified for promotion to detective and assigned to a month-long school
for those about to be promoted. As far as LAPD was concerned I could walk on
water. More importantly, as a result of a meticulous paper trail I had compiled with
the help of my attorney, Tim Callahan, the City of Los Angeles ultimately ruled
that my hospital time had “Injured on Duty” status: it had arisen from what the
6 crossing the rubicon
OCID detectives had subjected me to, and wh at they had asked me to do. I had
been following orders and not acting on my own.
The impending fall of the Shah of Iran in the late autumn of 1978 prompted
me to renew my efforts to find out what had happened to my life. Forced out of
LAPD under threat of death at the end of 1978, with no pending disciplinary
actions, and just days away from promotion, I resigned and made complaints to
LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division and to the LA office of the FBI. My decision to
resign had been made for me when, after delivering a tape-recorded death threat
to an aide to Chief Daryl F. Gates and asking for a meeting, I was told, “The Chief
is busy. He can give you five or ten minutes in a week to ten days if you’re still
alive.”
I, and my attorney, wrote to politicians; we wrote to the Department of Justice
and the CIA; we contacted the LA Times. The result was less than satisfactory.
Both the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, then under the command of the Special
Agent in Charge (SAC) Ted Gunderson, and the LAPD subsequently made official
statements that I was crazy. History has come to my defense in spades.
According to a 1981 two-part feature story in the Los Angeles Herald Examine,
it was revealed that the FBI in New Orleans had taken my ex-fiancée into custody
and then released her before classifying their investigation without further action.
Former New Orleans Crime Commissioner Aaron Cohen told reporter Randall
Sullivan that he found my description of events perfectly plausible after his 30
years of studying Louisiana’s organized crime operations and their intelligence
connections.
To this day a 1986 CIA report prepared as a result of my complaint remains
classified and exempt from release, pursuant to Executive Order of the President
in the interests of national security, and because it would reveal the identities of
CIA agents. I filed a Freedom of Information Act appeal for its release, without
success. A copy of the Agency’s letter of refusal is posted on my website.
On October 26, 1981, while in the basement of the West Wing of the White
House, I reported what I had seen in New Orleans to my then friend and UCLA
classmate Craig Fuller, who was serving as Assistant to President Reagan for
Cabinet Affairs. Again there was no substantive official response. Fuller went on
to become chief of staff to Vice President Bush from 1981 to 1985.
In 1982, then UCLA political science professor Paul Jabber filled in many of
the pieces in my quest. He was qualified to do so because he had served as a CIA
and State Department consultant for the Carter administration. Jabber explained
that, after a 1975 treaty between the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein (The
Treaty of Algiers), the Shah had cut off all overt military support for Kurdish rebels
fighting Saddam from the north of Iraq. In exchange the Shah had gained access
to the Shat al-Arab waterway so that he could multiply his oil exports and income.
Not wanting to lose a long-term valuable asset in the Kurds, the CIA had then
used Brown and Root, which operated in both countries and maintained port
facilities in the Persian Gulf and near Shat al-Arab, to rearm the Kurds. The whole
operation had been financed with heroin, which the Kurdish partisans had smuggled
for decades. Jabber was matter-of-fact about it. Brown and Root had also
worked with the CIA for decades.
In 1983 Paul Jabber left UCLA to become a vice president of Banker’s Trust
and chairman of the Middle East Department of the Council on Foreign
Relations.
Those wishing to learn more of this history may view the documentary record
of events at <www.fromthewilderness.com/about.html>.
I have, then, a history of civic and personal frustration at the inaction of the
United States government when confronted with ethically urgent constructive criticism.
I forthrightly acknowledge that this history predisposes me to distrust my
government, of which I am highly critical in these pages. But the grounds of my
distrust are the same deeds of violence and deception I report here. To take civic
issues personally is to take them seriously.
Edges of the foundationEvents in the five-year period that began on September 11, 2001 will determine
the course of human history for several centuries to come. The fall of the World
8 crossing the rubicon
Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon attack were not isolated events. They
were one predictable outcome of an economic system whose pressures necessitated
murder in the judgment of those who perpetrated it. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn
once wrote, “Men, in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing
is good.” History is full of similar events, such as the attacks on Pearl Harbor, the
sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, and the fictitious “attacks” by North
Vietnamese torpedo boats on US ships off the Vietnamese coast in the Gulf of
Tonkin in 1964. What have these events in common?
It’s become increasingly clear that the Franklin Roosevelt administration had
already broken the Japanese codes prior to the Pearl Harbor attacks and knew the
attacks were coming. Yet the government took no precautions, other than to make
sure that US aircraft carriers were safely out to sea on December 7, 1941.
Roosevelt needed those attacks to stir a stridently isolationist American populace
into frenzied support for entry into World War II and Britain’s salvation.3 History
has also enshrined the notions that the sinking of the Maine and the Gulf of
Tonkin incident were unprovoked attacks against innocent and noble Americans.4
As a result the Vietnam War became an economic boondoggle for US defense contractors
and resulted in an explosion in the heroin trade under CIA control from
neighboring Laos.
For those who insist that such horrible actions on the part of the American
government are inconceivable and dismiss them outright, I offer declassified top
secret documents published by author James Bamford in his 2001 book Body of
Secrets describing Operation Northwoods. (See Appendix A.) The Northwoods
plan called for the downing of American aircraft and attacks on American facilities
that were to then be blamed on the government of Fidel Castro as a pretext
for war with Cuba.5 Therefore it is not possible to dismiss the charges on the
grounds that they are inconceivable. The Northwoods document constitutes a
concrete historical precedent.
As I watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11th,
I recognized that the biggest challenge was to prevent the enshrining of a “legend”
that was completely unsupported by legal or academic standards, both of which
require dispassionate, critical thinking. A detective’s job is to first determine all
available and relevant facts connected to a case, and then, through a process of
elimination, reconcile those facts. It is a process of observation and deductive
judgment.
The rule in homicide investigations is that if someone is lying, you have more
work to do: figure what the lie is and why it was told. This demands a logical winnowing
of irreconcilable claims; when two apparent “facts” conflict, one of them
is usually eliminated when you examine their relationships to the rest of the case.
I’ve researched and investigated 9/11 since it happened. There are so many of these
conflicts that a multi-volume encyclopedia would be needed just to catalogue
them all. Consider the following two examples.
“No idea that planes could be used as weapons”Shortly after September 11th both National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
and Press Secretary Ari Fleischer stated unequivocally that no one in government
had any idea that planes could be used as weapons to attack buildings. I’ll discuss
some of the many proofs that refute this claim. But for the moment we need only
look at one piece of contradictory evidence to give our homicide detective a clue,
something that his job requires that he reconcile before closing the case.
In his April 13, 2004 televised press conference, a disoriented President George
W. Bush again made almost the exact same statement using the exact same words.
“But there was a — nobody in our government, at least, and I don’t think the prior
government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive
scale.” The words “massive scale” stood in contradiction to the earlier pronouncements.
If Bush meant that he or others had indeed realized before the attacks that
one airplane could be crashed into a building, but that nobody thought of four of
them — then he had just, in effect, called his National Security Advisor a liar.
Worse, in the same press conference Bush made fleeting reference to the G-8
Summit in Genoa, Italy. That summit required extraordinary security measures —
closed airspace, anti-aircraft guns — precisely to defend George W. Bush from a
possible airplane attack upon his own hotel.
Consider that on the website of the US Army’s Military District of Washington
(which labels itself “the Guardian of the Nation’s Capital”) a November 3, 2000,
story reported on “Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise,” a contingency drill practicing
for the crashing of a passenger plane into the Pentagon resulting in 341 deaths.
A terrorism context was made clear by the following sentences in the story:
The Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise, as the crash was called, was just
one of several scenarios that emergency response teams were exposed to
Oct. 24-26 in the Office of the Secretaries of Defense conference room.
On Oct. 24, there was a mock terrorist incident at the Pentagon
Metro stop and a construction accident to name just some of the scenarios
that were practiced to better prepare local agencies for real
incidents.6
I chose to use this example, which was extant before 9/11, to illustrate the evidence
that I and others worked with right after the attacks, rather than much more
damning evidence which is available today. We were soundly criticized at the time
for using this procedure although it has proved to be the same procedure used by
the mainstream media since we literally led them, or in some cases, embarrassed
them into it. For example, in July of 2003 the Village Voice’s James Ridgeway documented
36 instances catalogued in the 2003 Joint House-Senate Intelligence
Review of 9/11 where specific warnings had been received indicating that the designated
suspects, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, had planned to crash aircraft into
buildings. Many of these warnings included New York and Washington as targets.7
10 crossing the rubicon
Before we move on, consider another salient demonstration that Condi Rice
and the President were lying: On August 21, 2002, the Associated Press published
the following story, so shocking in the context of the administration’s claims that
I’ll quote it at length:
(AP)-(Washington)-In what the government describes as a bizarre
coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise
last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft crashed into one of its buildings.
But the cause wasn’t terrorism — it was to be a simulated
accident. Officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissance
Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate
jet crashed into one of the four towers at the agency’s
headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure. The
agency is about four miles from the runways of Washington-Dulles
International Airport.
Agency chiefs came up with the scenario to test employees’ ability
to respond to a disaster, said spokesman Art Haubold. To simulate the
damage from the plane, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off,
forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building. ‘It was
just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft
crashing into our facility,’ Haubold said. ‘As soon as the real world
events began, we canceled the exercise.’
Adding to the coincidence, American Airlines Flight 77 — the
Boeing 767 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon — took
off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 50 minutes before the exercise
was to begin. It struck the Pentagon around 9:40 a.m., killing 64
aboard the plane and 125 on the ground. The National Reconnaissance
Office operates many of the nation’s spy satellites. It draws its personnel
from the military and the CIA.
An announcement for an upcoming homeland security conference
in Chicago first noted the exercise: In a promotion for speaker John
Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO’s strategic gaming division,
the announcement says, ‘On the morning of September 11th
2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation
to explore the emergency response issues that would be created
if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario
would come true in a dramatic way that day.’
The running of such an exercise is an excellent method of confusing emergency
response personnel (for instance, pilots) who are trying to do their jobs.
They expect a drill of a specific but utterly unlikely scenario; the scenario
begins to unfold as expected, but then they’re told it’s not a drill — is it a drill,
or not?
The intelligence/criminal wallOne of the hottest themes in the well-watched hearings of the so-called independent
9/11 commission in April of 2004 was that there was an alleged wall
between law enforcement activities at the FBI and other agencies and the intelligence
side of the FBI and the CIA which prohibited the sharing of information
that might have prevented the attacks. This theme was sung like choir practice by
virtually every witness who testified during the week from Condoleezza Rice, to
Janet Reno, to John Ashcroft, to Louis Freeh, to Robert Mueller.
How does that reconcile with the following statement from a RAND
Corporation study on terrorism from 2001? The RAND Corporation was formed
as a think tank by the CIA and the US Air Force in the 1950s.
Finally, it is important to note that efforts to prevent or disrupt terrorist
action frequently are successful, and these activities have reduced the
number of terrorist incidents that would have occurred in the absence
of these activities:
Disruption of terrorist events by working with foreign intelligence
and law enforcement services has proved profitable; U.S. intelligence
agencies prevented Osama bin Laden’s organization from carrying out
at least seven vehicle bomb attacks on U.S. facilities since August
1998 (Kelly, 1999, p.1A), and U.S. intelligence has conducted successful
disruption operations in as many as 10 countries in the six
months up to March 1999 (Associated Press, 1999).
In actual operations and special events, agencies generally coordinated
their activities. For example, we examined several overseas
counterterrorist operations and found that agencies generally followed
the draft interagency International Guidelines. DoD, the FBI, and the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) performed their respective roles in
military planning, law enforcement and intelligence gathering under
the oversight of the State Department (e.g., the ambassador). Minor
interagency tensions or conflicts during these operations were resolved
and did not appear to have posed risk to the mission.
In a similar vein, FBI data on terrorism in the United States suggest
a reasonably high degree of success in terrorism prevention
activities at home — only a small annual number of actual terrorist
incidents occurred in recent years, and more preventions of terrorist
incidents than actual incidents.8
A detective’s strategy, a lawyer’s thinking, a political warAt a crime scene the detective’s job includes many tasks. He or she first determines
that a crime has been committed. After that the priorities are to collect physical
12 crossing the rubicon
evidence and preserve it for scientific analysis, interview witnesses and evaluate
possible suspects, attempt to reconstruct the crime and establish guilt.
Most of a detective’s work involves the interviewing of witnesses and the interrogation
of suspects. Anyone who has ever watched a crime drama has seen this
(my favorite is Detective Andy Sipowicz of NYPD Blue). There’s a reason why
these dramatic dialogues are so important. Statements made by witnesses and suspects
to detectives are considered direct evidence in court. Any other dialogue
usually amounts to hearsay that is almost always inadmissible. Many 9/11 activists
are still arguing with each other — as are JFK assassination researchers 40 years
later — over pieces of physical evidence. Courts will not listen to such dialogue or
debate between people who are not directly involved in the case. Absent a real
court to control the debate, arguments about physical evidence stand an even
smaller chance of compelling admissible revelations of guilt. They have done nothing
to change the political landscape of the United States.
Let me say quite clearly that I have no other objective than to do just that:
change the political landscape of the United States. In the matter of 9/11, I consider
all other standards vain and irrelevant.
Another reason why the statements of suspects and witnesses are valuable is
because they are usually verifiable without any reliance upon expert testimony or
scientific analysis. For example, “I was at Joe’s bar until 2 a.m.” This statement can
be checked quickly; if the check falsifies it, everyone can understand its significance.
Scientific evidence is more troublesome. It tends to make little or no sense to a
layperson until it’s explained by an expert. And that necessary mediation introduces
a potential for distortion, misleading emphasis, or outright deception. Courts have
procedures for deciding who may and who may not give expert testimony, and nonexpert
opinions count for very little. In most cases they are not even admissible.
So the investigation of statements from suspects and witnesses has been my
steadfast approach to 9/11 and its greater context. It was through this strategy, I
believed, that the trial in the public media might ultimately compel a real one.
I have testified as an expert 27 times in narcotics cases, sometimes in jury trials.
After having been questioned by attorneys for both sides (and sometimes even
the judge) I was permitted to offer an expert opinion under oath. What I observed
was that, depending upon the amount of money the defendant had, the number
of experts that could be called upon to refute me and contest the scientific/physical
evidence was limitless. In many cases, experts with a half-dozen academic
degrees literally prostituted themselves for generous fees. The case of 9/11, now
being tried in our metaphorical court of the corporate media and public perception,
leaves no doubt as to who could produce more expert witness testimony or
present them in the most impressive manner.
Prosecutors and investigators usually want to avoid this kind of courtroom
debate because of its numbing effect on the jury’s mind and its ultimate lack of
clarity. Fingerprints are one thing. It is something else to analyze the temperature
at which steel is weakened and determining whether or not an unproven amount
of burning jet fuel, in unspecified concentrations and unknown locations could
have weakened steel supports in the World Trade Center to the point where an
unspecified amount of weight might cause them to buckle. Backtracking that
avenue of inquiry was also made impossible by the immediate removal and
destruction of debris right after the attacks — before it had been examined by law
enforcement personnel. Such a debate would be useless anyway, unless and until a
legal proceeding — the second trial — had been initiated in a real courtroom.
Experience has also taught me that in major cases the court system is extremely
vulnerable to manipulation and corruption.
The quickest way to make the case of 9/11 would be to force the suspects, in
this case the Bush administration and the intelligence community, to engage in a
sort of proxy interrogation where their answers could be checked against a known
record. That is, in effect, the strategy I chose to pursue from the day of the attacks.
It would be much different, however, from television’s Andy Sipowicz and a suspect
sitting alone in an interrogation room. It would involve the publication of
articles, activism, public and political pressure to the point where the suspects
would have to say something in public in response. The 9/11 movement as a whole
has been remarkably effective in making that happen.
Almost every major question about the government’s activities before, during,
and after 9/11 was first posed by my newsletter From The Wilderness. So this simple
strategy has proven effective, and has met with considerable understanding and emulation.
Many of these unanswered questions still reverberate in the pages of the New
York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the major TV networks, TIME,
Newsweek, and CNN. Of necessity, then, the struggle to find the truth and lies of 9/11
has been a political and public relations struggle as well as an investigative one,
requiring a completely different set of talents and skills from those needed by a detective.
These were skills I acquired as a political activist and, among other things, as the
Los Angeles County press spokesman for the 1992 Perot presidential campaign.9
Most homicides are solved within 72 hours of the crime. The bogus cover story
appeared almost immediately.10 But a huge collective effort has kept 9/11 in the
public eye, expanding the window of opportunity for a real resolution. That window
is now closing rapidly, and once the “official” inquiries into 9/11 are declared
complete, it may be too late for any successful change in the American political
landscape. Nor am I referring specifically to the particular portions of the political
landscape directly affected by the attacks — say, aviation, intelligence reform, or
greater accountability in agencies like the NSA. No, the entire continuum of public
and private life in the United States has been transformed by 9/11, the lengthy
preparations for it, the ensuing cover-up, and the massive consolidation of authoritarian
policies and institutions achieved in its wake. In short, I maintain that unless
this phenomenon is exposed at its roots, the fundamental changes it has wrought
will become permanent. That would constitute the death of the American republic.
14 crossing the rubicon
A context on the way to a motiveBenito Mussolini once said, “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism,
since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” In fact, during the 1920s and
1930s “fascism” and “corporatism” were often used interchangeably in public discourse.
In his January 2003 State of the Union speech, George W. Bush referred to
the evils of the twentieth century as “Hitlerism, Communism, and Militarism.” He
could not bring himself to say “fascism,” because he is — by definition — a fascist.
The interchangeability of the terms “corporatism” and “fascism” has long been
established by traditionally progressive critics who document the amazingly large
scale of American corporate welfare and the impact of corporate lobbyists on public
policy. This represents an institutionalized and ongoing attack on democracy,
where the benefits of national wealth are privatized while the costs are socialized;
the public pays for its own victimization through waste, fraud, and abuse; and the
government sells to the highest bidder its capacity to protect the general population.
That’s been clear for a long time, and though it’s a very important discourse,
I am not repeating it here.
American fascism is something different now (and while I admire much of the
work of these progressives, I am not one of them). It’s not just private, elite control
over the legal system, nor private evasion of the rule of law. It’s a crisis-induced
transition from a society with a deeply compromised legal system to a society
where force and surveillance completely supplant that system. Although the apparent
crisis is about terrorism, the real one is about energy scarcity. At the beginning
of this book I document both the reality and the catastrophic implications of this
epochal energy crisis. Because it’s so central to the emergent new order of things in
the United States (which determines US action abroad), an incisive account of the
energy issue also explains the real functioning of the world’s economy — and who
controls it, and how this shapes so much of our daily lives. I begin the book with
that story because without it, 9/11 seems like little more than a particularly horrible
episode of mass murder (in a word, terrorism). But on this larger explanatory
foundation, the evidence will inexorably prove our case: that the United States
government not only had complete foreknowledge of the attacks of September 11,
it also needed them and deliberately facilitated them, and even helped plan and
execute them using techniques long understood in the world of covert operations.
Once you understand the economic and financial forces governing the global
economy, then the overwhelming evidence of the guilt of both the Bush and
Clinton administrations, instead of being hard to believe, will suddenly appear to
be unavoidable. That’s a large statement, and nobody should take it on trust.
Knowing what we all now know about the deceptions used to “sell” the occupation
of Iraq, can we afford to not question the multitude of contradictions, lies,
falsehoods, and cover-ups surrounding the events of 9/11? It is in the examination
of those lies that we uncover the real State of the Union. At this point in history
no one can rationally say that the Bush administration is incapable of lying.
Since January 2001, my newsletter From The Wilderness (FTW) has correctly
predicted or reported historical developments, sometimes as much as a year before
they happened. Our working model has continually produced a navigable, accurate
map of the near future. The methodology is like the protocols followed by a
detective when developing a case. “Okay,” one says to oneself, “if Bill’s wife really
did hire a hit man to kill him, there should be some record connecting a flow of
money from her to the shooter.” Finding the connection strengthens the working
model. Failing to find it either doesn’t help the model or weakens it. In more than
100 separate articles and all of my investigations since 9/11 I have found nothing
to weaken my working model, only facts which have strengthened it. And I adhere
to the same ethical standards a detective must adhere to. If I find something that
exonerates my suspect then I must report it. For many detectives, the kind that I
worked with and wanted to become, this is a matter of honor.
Sometimes, however, the problem is not with the facts.
We can look at a road map and say that if we are headed eastbound on
Interstate 10 in southeastern New Mexico, then the next major city is El Paso. In
the same way, we can look at a map of how the world works, determine our position
and direction, and know what is likely to come next. One obstacle that must
be overcome, however, is the inherent unwillingness of the human race to honestly
admit where they really are. It is useless, while sitting in Chicago, to start driving
east with a wishful expectation of getting to El Paso. And yet, millions of
Americans are doing just that when they insist that the United States is a great and
free nation; that it didn’t do anything wrong; that its economy is the best, the
healthiest, and the cleanest in the world; and that it never victimizes other nations.
2 + 2 = 4In the classic dystopian novel 1984 George Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom
to say two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The totalitarian
power of Orwell’s nightmare state couldn’t be maintained without the
successful eradication of precisely this freedom.
In May 1999 I had an experience that crystallized something I had known for
a long time, but had never seen so clearly. At a sparsely attended and self-congratulatory
“People’s Tribunal,” I witnessed the burial rite for an important issue that,
had it been fully pursued, might have prevented the attacks of September 11,
2001. The subject of the tribunal, being held on a Saturday at the University of
Southern California, was the drug war and the CIA’s connections to the drug
trade. Two and a half years earlier, the nation had been aflame after Pulitzer Prizewinning
journalist Gary Webb reported on incendiary documents and witnesses
linking the Agency directly to the crack cocaine epidemic that devastated America’s
inner cities during the 1980s.
What happened to Webb and his stories remains an object lesson for researchers
and activists in the post-9/11 world. Members of Congress such as Maxine Waters
16 crossing the rubicon
of California, who had once vowed to make the issue her “life’s work,” presided over
the demise of the story. Webb, pilloried by the media and punished by his employer
the San Jose Mercury News, had in 1997 and 1998 been thoroughly vindicated
by Congressional investigations. Webb’s greatest vindication of all came in the form
of a CIA Inspector General (IG) report released in a declassified version by CIA
Director George Tenet on October 8, 1998 — one hour after Congressman Henry
Hyde’s House Judiciary Committee had voted out articles of impeachment against
William Jefferson Clinton.11
Something got lost in the news that day. The cover letters and the summaries of
the IG report, which is still on the CIA website, said that the exhaustive investigation
had found no evidence that the CIA had done anything seriously wrong. Those
who actually read the entire report, however, found devastating and damning admissions
of criminal behavior on the part of the CIA and Vice President George Herbert
Walker Bush. We have seen that pattern repeated over and over since 9/11.
Webb was an “Enemy of the State” in the minds of most Americans. He had
challenged their sacred beliefs. Representative Waters, however, had seen her president
safely through the impeachment and then gone strangely silent about a
report that could have toppled a government and changed the world. The truth
often gets traded too cheaply, and the victim of such trades is always the future.
I had been through similar experiences during the Iran-Contra scandal. I had
read about, and later interviewed, others who had the same experiences in the case
of POWs and MIAs abandoned in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. I had
studied how the investigation into the murder of President John F. Kennedy had
been controlled. I had also acquired personally painful and verifiable knowledge
that the murder of John’s brother Robert was a CIA operation. All the goodwill
and energy of the researcher-activists in each of these cases was deliberately and
meticulously sabotaged by interested parties and their allies in the dominant political
class.12
By May of 1999 what should have been hundreds of thousands of people in
the street and a massive government scandal had dwindled to about a hundred or
so apparatchiks who would wave the People’s Tribunal as evidence of their leadership.
I laughed with pity as they returned to the beltway to ask for larger grants
from their patrons, major foundations and other institutionally compromised
entities. The people who ran the tribunals were ultimately beholden to the same
powers that had created the problem in the first place. Experts with compromised
wallets had staged a controlled burn of brief outrage, cooling rapidly to insouciance.
The inconsistencies were soon forgotten.
There’s an old saying that in a ham and eggs breakfast, the chicken is involved,
but the pig is committed. None of us who were convinced of the urgency of the
CIA-drug story and who were heartbroken by its burial doubted that unless people
found the courage to deal with the problem, something much worse —
something as bad as 9/11 — was certain to happen.
Yet one speaker at the USC event, retired San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara,
gave me something powerful to take away. He said: “When Richard Nixon started
the War on Drugs in 1972 the federal budget allocation for the war on drugs
was $101 million. Today the federal budget allocation is $20 billion. And yet today
there are more drugs in this country, they are less expensive, and they are of better
quality than they were in 1972.”
Pigs listen harder than chickens do. There were only two plausible ways to
interpret that amazing fact. One could assume that a twenty-seven-year failure,
despite a budget almost 200 times greater than when it began, and despite the
application of the best minds in politics and law enforcement, was somehow the
result of a collective and contagious stupidity. Not only had these people been negligent
and incompetent, their budgets had been increased as a reward. This is
exactly what we are being asked to accept about the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Even in the arguably less urgent matter of illicit drug proliferation, a sane person
should have demanded a total restructuring of the contaminated government entities,
mass firings, and a serious strategy review. It was our money, the product of
our labor, and our children’s lives that these failures had wasted.
On the other hand, one could infer that this state of affairs — having been
managed by the most educated and influential elite in the country — reflected
exactly what was intended: a global drug economy that generated an estimated
$600 - $700 billion a year in liquid cash profits from which someone was deriving
great benefit. Who?
Occam’s Razor (a principle of reasoning associated with medieval thinker
William of Ockham, 1288 - 1327) recommends choosing the simplest workable
explanation for a phenomenon. In that moment of clarity I had a vision of the
degree of reality-twisting, pretzel-bending logic in which the “experts” had
engaged. They had orchestrated the destruction and marginalization of people
who held mirrors up to their irrationality. In the post-9/11 world, we live with the
ultimate insanity that this thinking has produced.
When a flock of birds suddenly changes direction, simultaneously and uniformly,
is it a conspiracy? Or is it just an instant recognition by every member of the flock
where their collective interests lie?
It was at USC that I began to understand that the people shielding the system,
and the knowingly guilty perpetrators within it, were hiding a truth that threatened
all of them, the way psychologically sick families sometimes hide the sexual
violation of their own children by a relative. I remembered the words of psychiatrist
Carl Jung: “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience
legitimate suffering.”
2+2 = OilToday we have an empire that is defined by nothing but limits: limits on the available
territory for occupation and expansion, limits on nonrenewable resources, and
18 crossing the rubicon
above all, limits on the one resource that has propelled the human race to overexpand
and upon which the species is now dependent: hydrocarbon energy. Much
more than any other industrialized society, contemporary America is an empire in
deep trouble. Most of us know something about the colossal debt, the unprecedented
trade imbalance, the dollar’s precarious position, steep income
polarization, endemic militarism, imperial overstretch, and a host of other woes
that can still be repaired with sufficient resolve. But there is something waiting in
the darkness, close enough that our civilization can already feel its presence, even
if that feeling is only slowly forcing its way into conscious awareness. Just outside
our ability to cope with upsetting information, an increasingly rapid stream of
data and experience is ushering in what may be the most significant event in
human history: the end of the age of oil.
In 100 years mankind has used up one-half (if not more) of all the oil on the
planet.13 The key is not the “half ”. Oil is not water in a glass. It’s hard to get, and
it gets harder to pump as reservoirs dry up; the biggest fields run dry, and newer
fields are both smaller and harder to exploit. Once the midpoint is reached, oil
production inevitably diminishes forever. If the midpoint is reached while demand
soars, conflict is inevitable.
A simple exerciseTake a 20-dollar bill out of your wallet and set it in front of you. Now take a glass
of water and set it next to the cash. Pretend that the glass represents a barrel of oil.
Look at them both for second. Then ask yourself a question: What do they represent?
If you keep distilling your answers down to their purest essence, you will see
that the money and the oil both represent the same thing: the ability to do work.
Both are useless if there is nothing to buy, drive or eat.
And yet our economic system, what we call capitalism but which is really something
else, is predicated on debt, fractional reserve banking, derivative financing,
and fiat currency. Therefore it requires that there must be limitless growth into
infinity for it to survive. Growth is not possible without energy.
Now look at the barrel of oil and realize that the earth is a closed sphere, and
that without the oil and natural gas, the financial system is doomed. There is nothing
on our horizon — other than wishful thinking — that can completely replace
hydrocarbon energy. The surest way to see this is to realize that, as the human race
starts down the inevitable slope of shrinking oil and gas supplies, we have seen no
hydrogen powered F 18 Hornets or M1 Abrams tanks. We have seen no vegetable
oil-powered Bradley fighting vehicles or solar powered guided missile frigates.
There are many factors that the rulers of the American empire now have to
manage as they read their own delusional map of the world. They have to:
• Apportion dwindling resources among competitors, some of whom possess
nuclear weapons;
• Maintain and expand their control over enough of the oil and gas
remaining to ensure their global dominance and maintain order among
the citizens of the Empire;
• Simultaneously manage a global economic system, made possible by
hydrocarbon energy, that is collapsing and in which the growing population
is demanding more things that can only be supplied by using still
more hydrocarbon energy;
• Acknowledge that they cannot save their own economy without selling
more of these products;
• Control the exploding demand for oil and gas through engineered recessions
and wars that break national economies;
• Hide the evidence that they are systematically looting the wealth of all
the people on the planet — even their own people — in order to maintain
control;
• Maintain a secret revenue stream to provide enough off-the-books capital
for the purposes of providing themselves a distinct economic and
military advantage, improving their technological posture, and funding
covert operations;
• Repress any dissent and head off any exposure of their actions;
• Convince the population that they are honorable;
• Kill off enough of the world’s population so that they can maintain control
after oil supplies have dwindled to the point of energy starvation.
In the case of the War on Drugs, I infer that the result of some 30 years of effort,
fueled by billions of dollars and managed by the “best and the brightest,” is exactly
what was intended. This is the premise from which I began looking at the events
of September 11, 2001, as I watched the second airliner hit the World Trade Center.
I do not claim to have presented or reconciled every fact. That rarely happens
in a complicated homicide investigation. The tasks of the investigator are to produce
a reasonable explanation based upon evidence that establishes probability,
and to eliminate reasonable doubt that a crime was committed and that the guilty
have been successfully identified.
If I can make a case in this book that explains these events, identifies the suspects,
and makes more sense than any other interpretation of the available and
demonstrable facts; if I can then get it out in a way that further empowers our collective
learning; if that helps to break down the destructively false paradigm that
governs so much of our life today — then I have contributed something that is
hope-giving for all of us. Otherwise, the future looks pretty grim.
This is a race against time.
Michael C. Ruppert
April 21, 2004
