This book provides an urgent answer to the failure of the US intelligence agencies, Congress, the 9-11 Commission and the media to discover the basic facts in the September 2001 terror attacks.
The author starts from the official myth of 9-11 – 19 Arab hijackers, al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, the laptop in the cave in Afghanistan – and shows how it was fabricated in the days after 9-11 by media leaks from George Tenet, Richard Clarke, Colin Powell, and Bush’s September 20 address to Congress. Each of these figures has been repeatedly caught blatantly lying about Iraq and countless other subjects. It is high time to expose their 9-11 lies as well.
After a reality check to establish that no proof for the official account of 9-11 has ever been forthcoming, the author explains international terrorism based on major cases from modern history like the Kennedy assassination, the Red Brigades, and the Baader-Meinhof group. Tarpley showed that these two ostensibly left-wing terrorist groups were in fact extensions of clandestine “stay-behind” cells, officially created within NATO after WWII to resist an eventual communist takeover.
International terrorism – including 9-11 – is overwhelmingly the product of intelligence agencies, he argues, pointing out the roles of patsies and fall- guys, of networks of moles inside the government and the media, of anonymous professionals who actually carry out the atrocities the public sees, and of secret command cells in privatized paramilitary settings.
Tarpley next analyzes a score of points at which the official account of 9-11 is absurd, contradictory, highly suspect, or just physically impossible. Answering objections, the author shows that such vital ideas in American history as the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s House Divided Speech, and the 1860 Republican Party platform would be classified as conspiracy theories by the self-appointed neocon guardians of orthodoxy today.
Tarpley outlines the long history of terrorism as a tool to manipulate public opinion in favor of war and dictatorship, from Guy Fawkes to the Maine to Operation Northwoods. Through his famous spot resolutions which rejected the Polk administration’s account of the outbreak of the Mexican War, the figure of Abraham Lincoln emerges to exemplify the classical American demand for truth and rejection of government manipulation.
The book concludes with a survey of the November 2004 presidential election in the U.S. and the geopolitical struggle between U.S. expansionist neo-cons and the Russian federation, placing 9-11 within an ongoing Cold War context.
Webster Griffin Tarpley is the world’s most incisive critic in English of Anglo-American hegemony, and an activist historian best known for his George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (1992), a masterpiece of research which is still must reading. A decades-long expert on international terrorism, he directed the study Chi ha ucciso Aldo Moro? (Who Killed Aldo Moro?), commissioned by an Italian parliamentarian and published in Rome in 1978. It broke open the ownership of the “Red Brigades” by NATO’s clandestine “stay- behind” networks and the super-elite neofascist Italian “Masonic lodge P2.”