American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (22 page)

Ever heard of an army project called Able Danger? It was established in 1999 as part of the Defense Department's Special Operations Command (SOCOM). According to Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a leading member of the team with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA): “Able Danger was an offensive counter-terrorism project which was designed to take and kill—the military term is reduce—senior al-Qaeda leadership.”
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It wasn't long before the Able Danger squad uncovered al-Qaeda cells in the New York City area, one of whose members was Mohamed Atta. At least six witnesses later recalled seeing Atta's picture on a chart they'd drawn up back in January 2000. Turns out three more of the alleged hijackers had been ID'ed by Able Danger before 9/11, as well.
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Colonel Shaffer worked closely with navy captain Scott Phillpott, and says he attempted to set up a meeting between Phillpott's superior officer and FBI counterterrorism agents in D.C., so they could work together on following these cells. But three times the SOCOM lawyers kept a meeting from happening. Soon after that, Shaffer got transferred to a DIA project in Latin America.
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Then, after 9/11, he and Phillpott tried to bring the story forward to Congress and the 9/11 Commission. In June 2005, a reporter for a small-town Pennsylvania paper wrote a piece that opened with: “Two years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, US intelligence officials linked Mohamed Atta to al-Qaida, and discovered he and two others were in Brooklyn.” You might think the national media would have jumped all over that, but they didn't. Eventually, the
New York Times
did a few stories. But when the 9/11 Commission came up with reasons for leaving Able Danger out of its report, the media nodded off again. Chairman Thomas Keen went so far as to say that “the recollections of the intelligence officers cannot be verified by any document.” Hence, it didn't happen. And the Pentagon wouldn't let Shaffer or anyone else testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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We talked to Shaffer while putting together this chapter. In his opinion, both the Clinton and Bush administrations were covering up their incompetence. “The Department of Defense does not want to get blamed for making bad decisions, which resulted in information not being passed to the FBI, and therefore being a material factor in why 9/11 happened,” he told us. “That's why you had DOD coming after me because I blew the whistle. DOD has admitted there are 10,000-plus Able Danger documents, but they won't release a single one. To me that's bizarre, because most of the targeting information was done on the open Internet and completely unclassified. It does cause you to wonder.”

9/11 expert David Ray Griffin concluded that the commission and the Pentagon were “covering up dangerous information—information that suggested Atta was being protected. When we combine this observation with other things we have learned about the alleged hijackers—including the money reportedly sent to Atta by the CIA-created [Pakistani] ISI—the Able Danger evidence provides additional reason to suspect that the ‘hijackers' were really paid assets.”
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A think tank called the Project for the New American Century, composed mainly of right-wing ideologues, wrote a report pre-9/11 titled
Building America's Defenses
. The document contains this line: “The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

We all know the results of 9/11: two unending wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964? We were told that American ships were attacked by the North Vietnamese. Now we know that the incident was manufactured by the Pentagon in order to gain support for escalating the Vietnam War. If the United States government was prepared to stage such a gargantuan event in leading our nation to war then, why would they refrain from doing so again today? Might we look at this as a trend, going into these wars under false pretenses?

Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism at the time, wrote in 2009 that Iraq was “a move that many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.... While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad.... Despite being repeatedly told that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney could not abandon the idea.”
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The 9/11 Commission Report states that “the Bush Administration had repeatedly tied the Iraq War to September 11th.... The panel finds no al-Qaeda-Iraq tie.” Bush then did some backpedaling, saying: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam [Hussein] and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts....” Meetings, it turned out, between bin Laden and Iraqi Intelligence that took place in Sudan back in the mid-1990s! But one prisoner, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, was tortured in 2002 until he'd agree to say that al-Qaeda was linked to Saddam (he died suddenly after being transferred from Egypt to another prison in Libya).

The 9/11 Commission was a whitewash from the front, after Bush and Cheney had stonewalled an investigation for more than a year. The fellow named as the first commission chairman was none other than Henry Kissinger, who said no thank you on December 13, 2002, when told that he'd have to disclose his list of private business clients (Kissinger was also busy advising the Bush Administration on how best to go into Iraq). The commission's executive director ended up being Philip Zelikow, who got a jump on the game by putting together a detailed outline of the final report just as they were starting to investigate! The outline was kept secret from others on the 80-member staff.
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Zelikow decided everything. After all, back in 1998 he'd co-written an essay on “catastrophic terrorism,” which he foresaw “would be a watershed event in American history.... Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force.”
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Sound familiar?

Zelikow had also been principal author of a paper aimed at justifying a preemptive strike on Iraq. And he tried, without success, to insert a sentence into the report suggesting repeated communication between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
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Zelikow happened to leave off his resumé the fact that, at Condi Rice's request, he'd been part of the Bush transition team. But then, he'd coauthored a book with Rice, too. Zelikow engaged in “surreptitious” communications with Karl Rove in the course of the investigation.
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With Zelikow running the show, “there was no hope that the commission would carry out an impartial investigation.”
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It recently came out that there were “minders” from Bush's team sitting there with the witnesses, answering questions for them and positioning themselves physically in an intimidating manner.
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The 9/11 Commission politely informs us that “conspiracy theories play a peculiar role in American discourse. Whenever there is a particularly surprising, traumatic, and influential moment in our history, people are left with unsettling questions.” As an example, they go on to cite “conspiracy theorists [who] propagate outrageous notions that Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA or some shadowy secret society of the rich and powerful.”

Outrageous notions? I find it outrageous that yet another government-appointed commission allows itself to become part of the cover-up. Especially when they knew damned well that's what they were doing. “The 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission.”
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The 9/11 Commission's Chairman Thomas Kean, and Vice Chair Lee Hamilton, have since come out and said: “... the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotape interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes—and did not tell us about them—obstructed our investigation.”
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Now we know from the new book by senior counsel John Farmer that almost every person involved in the official version of 9/11 lied about the events of that day.

Our country has changed since 9/11. We've been frightened into half the people saying torture's okay now, if it prevents terrorism. Americans are marching in the streets to try to stop someone who's sick from going to the doctor, but where is the outcry now that it's been proven that the whole Iraq War was trumped up? Maybe something stopped in us all on 9/11, and we're stuck back there collectively and can't truly move forward until we have a new, independent investigation to get to the bottom of what really happened.

The 9/11 Truth Movement has a growing number of groups—Political Leaders, Architects and Engineers, Firefighters, Lawyers, Medical Professionals, Pilots, Religious Leaders, Scholars, Scientists, Journalists and Other Media, and Veterans. Check them out online, get involved as I have. But if you challenge the status quo, be prepared for retaliation. That's what seems to have happened to Charles Lewis, the man with whom we began this chapter's revelations. After he noticed another lapse at LAX as a Quality Control Manager—this time observing a Saudi Airlines 747 disembark a host of passengers into the cargo area—his security clearance got revoked. He's currently unemployed.

“Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses.”

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1895
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If you're surprised to find what's been happening to our economy in a book on American conspiracies, you shouldn't be. This may be the granddaddy of all plots, one that's been going on for almost a century (although I'm not one who blames all our national woes on the Trilateral-Bilderberg-Bohemian-Grove crowd). Before diving into what I've been learning about the big financial institutions and their cronies in government and at the Federal Reserve, let me suggest you quickly review the earlier chapter about the Wall Street plot to overthrow FDR and the insights of Professor Carroll Quigley.

The economy, and how it got into its current mess, is a complicated, tangled tale, and I certainly don't claim to be an expert about it. But you can learn a great deal from some thoughtful reading. Let's face it, capitalism isn't always fair. So if you're looking to bring fairness to life, you have to take steps more toward socialism. Which then causes a conflict of interest, because socialism means you're going to be even more controlled in your decisionmaking by the Establishment. Then again, is that what's required to keep an equal balance? Do you have to go that way to ensure that the middle class survives? What I really see leaving is the American Dream. The destruction of the middle class means you're no longer going to have that dream, which is that a young person can achieve anything if you put your mind to it because the opportunities are there. Now are they still? Yes. But are they more difficult? Yes. I see many more obstacles in the way of the American Dream today, and a great deal of it is caused by greed. It's understood that a certain amount of wealthy people are going to control the majority of the money, but when it's moving so drastically that you've got 5 percent of the people having 90 percent of the money, that can't be healthy.

Deregulated “free market” capitalism sure hasn't benefited the American people. We've had a revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, which led to a Wild West mentality on “the Street.” For awhile the whole casino seemed to be doing just fine, but really the financial sector was completely out of control—“running on a perverse set of incentives that made it incredibly profitable to essentially throw caution to the wind and take on incomprehensible amounts of risk.”
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Don't let them fool you into thinking it was reckless borrowers and subprime loans that built the house of cards. In this chapter, I'm going to particularly zero in on the greed and excesses of two companies—banking giant Goldman Sachs and insurance behemoth American International Group, better known as AIG. They're atop the pyramid of the “too big to let fail” crowd, and their execs are still getting richer while the home foreclosures increase and the unemployment numbers keep rising.

Until it received the largest government subsidy that any corporation ever has (about $170 billion in bailouts, the tab being picked up by us the taxpayers), AIG was the biggest private insurance company in the world. It had more than 100,000 employees globally and $1 trillion in assets.
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Their history is worth looking into. AIG started out selling insurance to the Chinese in 1919, based in Shanghai where it was then called American Asiatic Underwriters. The company was founded by Cornelius Vander Starr, the uncle of Ken Starr, future special prosecutor of Bill Clinton. Starr moved his headquarters to New York twenty years later, but kept his Asian branch going. Soon after World War II began, General “Wild Bill” Donovan of the OSS started using his contacts to create a deep-cover intel network over there. Files were finally declassified in 2000, showing how the OSS set up an ultra-secret insurance unit through Starr, which perused records on the Japanese to find blueprints of possible targets. As victory against the Nazis approached, U.S. intelligence began examining “ways the Nazis would try to use insurance to hide and launder their assets so they could be used to rebuild the war machine.... Starr sent insurance agents into Asia and Europe even before the bombs stopped falling and built what eventually became AIG, which today has its world headquarters in the same downtown New York building where the tiny OSS unit toiled in the deepest secrecy.”
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After the CIA was founded in 1947, AIG was tied into figures like Paul Helliwell, who ran air transport companies with connections to the drug trade. Helliwell was legal counsel for Starr's insurance interests.
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Drugs come up again forty years later, when in 1987, AIG made a deal with Goldman Sachs and the Arkansas Development Financial Authority (ADFA) to found an offshore reinsurer in Barbados called Coral Re. The ADFA allegedly helped launder drug money for Barry Seal, the Contras, and the Medellin cartel out of Mena, Arkansas.
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In 2000, AIG's annual report announced its fleet of 494 fullsized jets was “the world's most modern fleet of aircraft,” including leasing still more planes “to a number of established customers” in Latin America.
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It helps to have friends in high places with deep pockets.

“Hank” Greenberg had been appointed as director of AIG's North American operations in 1962. After Starr died six years later, Greenberg became chairman of AIG, C.V. Starr & Company, and today's Starr International, which is an offshore company, incorporated in Panama with a Bermuda headquarters, and still the biggest shareholder in AIG.
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Seems rather incestuous, but that's the way it is. AIG became the biggest foreign insurance company in Japan, and more than one third of its $40 billion in revenues in 1999 “came from the Far East Theatre Starr helped carpet bomb and liberate.”
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Greenberg let AIG be used by the CIA for placing many of its Asian officers, and continued to keep tabs for “the company” on places like China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The company's massive database in San Francisco was also made available to the CIA. In 1995, Greenberg was one of the candidates to become the next CIA director.
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It's a small, tight-knit world, and they don't call AIG's favorite trading partner “Government Sachs” for nothing. Treasury secretaries under the two previous presidents—Robert Rubin with Clinton and Hank Paulson with Bush-II—went from running Goldman Sachs into the most powerful financial position in the administrations. That's just for openers. The company pretty much had a lock on high-level jobs at the treasury. Neel Kashkari—pronounced Cash-Carry—started out as a low-level Goldman investment banker, and now runs the bailout under the government Office of Financial Stability. Are we surprised that AIG and Goldman became the biggest beneficiaries in the bailout?

Goldman Sachs's history has some intrigue in it, too. This company was founded back in 1869 by Marcus Goldman, a German immigrant who slowly built it up with his son-in-law, Samuel Sachs. They made a killing off the 1929 stock market crash, and applied that knowledge later to the dot-com and housing booms. The formula of the most influential investment bank on the planet has been described like this: “Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased.”
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To get a grasp on what's lately been going on, we also need to take a look at our central bank, otherwise known as the Federal Reserve. The Fed controls our monetary policy. By changing the supply of dollars in circulation, they have influence over interest rates, mortgage payments, whether the financial markets boom or collapse, and basically whether our economy expands or stumbles. But the Fed is only partly an institution of government. The stockholders in a dozen different Federal Reserve banks in different regions of the country are the big private banks.

The Federal Reserve was created by Congress in 1913, after a financial panic that led to a secret meeting at banker J.P. Morgan's private resort, off the coast of Georgia at a place called Jekyll Island. (I'm not sure if Hyde was present). “Those who attended represented the great financial institutions of Wall Street, and, indirectly, Europe as well. The reason for secrecy was simple. Had it been known that rival factions of the banking community had joined together, the public would have been alerted to the possibility that the bankers were plotting an agreement in restraint of trade—which, of course, is exactly what they were doing. What emerged was a cartel agreement with five objectives: stop the growing competition from the nation's newer banks; obtain a franchise to create money out of nothing for the purpose of lending; get control of the reserves of all banks so that the more reckless ones would not be exposed to currency drains and bank runs; get the taxpayer to pick up the cartel's inevitable losses; and convince Congress that the purpose was to protect the public. It was realized that the bankers would have to become partners with the politicians and that the structure of the cartel would have to be a central bank.”
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These are some of the same players who wanted to take down FDR during the Great Depression. During his last year in office, JFK made an attempt to strip the Federal Reserve of its power to loan money to the government at interest. Executive Order No. 11110 gave the treasury back the power to issue currency, and not have to go through the Federal Reserve. Kennedy put nearly $4.3 billion into circulation of U.S. notes backed by silver certificates, whereas the Federal Reserve's notes aren't backed by anything. The handwriting was on the wall: They could be soon out of business. But guess what? After JFK was assassinated only five months later, there weren't any more silver certificates issued. The Executive Order has never been repealed, but not a single president since has chosen to utilize it.
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Dare I say it—Will my life be at risk?—I'd like to see us back on some type of standard where our money truly has value. My big problem with the Federal Reserve is, why does the government allow this monopoly that's in bed with the banking industry to make basically all of our country's financial decisions? Those people aren't elected. We form these other entities that are permitted to make policy, when in reality they're unconstitutional. The public has to be involved in the process, our Constitution says. Here, whoever controls the money has the power. So the Federal Reserve is really more powerful than the government—and we don't elect them.

Once Reagan and the free-market ideologues came to power in 1980, FDR's and JFK's legacies were like a distant memory. Alan Greenspan, named as Fed chairman by Reagan, backed up my previous point, writing: “The Federal Reserve is an independent agency, and that means basically that there is no other agency of government which can overrule actions that we take.”
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Does that sound like democracy or something else?

The new era of deregulation resulted in a boom time for the rich getting richer. Reagan opened wide the door for companies to gamble with taxpayers' money—or loot it outright, as in the savings-and-loan scandal and bailout. The New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending went by the boards, which eventually led to the foreclosure crisis.
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In 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed by a “bipartisan” Congress during Clinton's last year, and a real free-for-all began. You might not know how important this legislation was. It was passed in 1933 to keep separate the low-risk commercial banks where we put our deposits, and the brokerage banks that engage in high-risk speculative investments. This worked just fine for more than 50 years. During the Reagan years, the lobbyists for the finance, insurance, and real estate outfits started pushing to dump the law. Rubin and Greenspan got behind them. When this law got wiped off the books, the rules of the game changed totally. Mergers and commercial/investment partnerships skyrocketed. Now commercial banks like Citigroup could start taking multiple home mortgage loans and turning them into securities to trade on Wall Street. They could all gamble like crazy with billions raised from predatory lending practices, and with very little regulation.
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