9/11 SYNTHETIC TERRORISM MADE IN USA

CHAPTER IV: NETWORKS OF INTEREST

... no one can be called a good man who, in order to support himself, takes up a profession that obliges him at all times to be rapacious, fraudulent, and cruel, as of course must be all of those -- no matter what their rank -- who make a trade of war.

--Niccolo Machiavelli, The Art of war.

The neocons are an intensely ideological faction, and we are therefore on firm ground if we examine their ideology as a guide to their conduct. We must only remember that the neocons make a rigid separation between the elite truths that they tell each other -- their esoteric doctrine -- and the belief structure they offer for the edification of the masses -- the exoteric doctrine. The esoteric doctrine is often transmitted verbally, rather than by published writings. Still, the published writings allow us to see the basic neocon outlook clearly enough. What we find is an embrace of war, violence, hatred, coups, martial law, and, most important for our present purposes, terrorism.

The supreme neocon guru is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught politics for many years at the University of Chicago, and later at St. John's of Annapolis. Strauss was a Marburg Kantian of the Herman Cohen school who did his doctorate with the irrationalist Ernst Cassirer. Strauss studied for two years with grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, which he procured with the help of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Among Strauss's students were Alan Bloom, the author of the Closing of the American Mind, and Harvey Mansfield of Harvard. The Straussian-neocon network is now extensive, and stretches over three generations. Neocons are famous for helping one another up the career ladder, and for teaching courses based only on neocon texts. They are narrow-minded, sectarian, and essentially ignorant of philosophy and history. They are an ideological faction, often a fanatical faction. We are talking about Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Luti, Schulsky, Scooter Libby, Cambone, Hadley and others who run the Bush administration. Neocons outside of government include Perle, Woolsey, Irving and William Kristol, Norman and John Podhoretz, Saul and Adam Bellow, and so forth. The older generation of neocons were often Trotskyist communists; they have retained Trotskyite theories like the notion of competing elites; the neocons see a battle between the liberal elite and themselves as central to the political process.

LEO STRAUSS'S NIHILIST REVOLUTION: AN APOLOGY FOR TERROR

At the heart of Leo Strauss's political thought is an open apology for terrorism. This idea is illuminated in Strauss's exchange of comments with Alexandre Kojeve, a neo-Hegelian official of the French finance ministry, in the 1950s. At the heart of this debate is the question of the universal and homogenous state, and how philosophers should react to its existence. The universal homogenous state means something like a world where war and underdevelopment have been eliminated, and in which leisure time and well-being are rising. For most people, the universal homogenous state would look like a world of peace, progress, and prosperity.

But for Strauss and Kojeve, peace, progress, and prosperity mean the end of history because they wipe out the higher human values, which depend upon politics, and thus upon war. (Implicit also is the idea that peace, progress, and prosperity are bad for oligarchical domination, a cause dear to Strauss and Kojeve.) Strauss sums it up thus: "This end of History would be most exhilarating, but for the fact that, according to Kojeve, it is the participation in bloody political struggles as well as in real work or, generally expressed, the negating action, which raises man above the brutes." (Strauss 208)

For Strauss and Kojeve, "unlimited technological progress and its accompaniment, which are indispensable conditions of the universal and homogeneous state, are destructive of humanity. It is perhaps possible to say that the universal and homogeneous state is fated to come. But it is certainly impossible to say that man can reasonably be satisfied with it." (Strauss 208) This view of technology is that of the Greek historian called the Old Oligarch (who did not like the long walls and the Athenian navy), and is certainly not that of Plato. For Strauss, Greek philosophy is a screen upon which he projects his own ignorant opinions.

Not caring about what Plato really thought, Strauss advances towards his terrible conclusion: "If the universal and homogeneous state is the goal of History, History is absolutely 'tragic. ' Its completion will reveal that the human problem, and hence in particular the problem of the relation of philosophy and politics, is insoluble." (Strauss 208)

In Strauss's view, the imminent coming of the universal homogeneous state means that all progress accomplished by mankind to date has been worthless: "For centuries and centuries men have unconsciously done nothing but work their way through infinite labors and struggles and agonies, yet ever again catching hope, toward the universal and homogeneous state, and as soon as they have arrived at the end of their journey, they realize that through arriving at it they have destroyed their humanity, and thus returned, as in a cycle, to the prehuman beginnings of History." (Strauss 209)

This raises the question of the violent revolt against the universal homogeneous state, which is what Strauss regards as inevitable and desirable: "Yet there is no reason for despair as long as human nature has not been conquered completely, i.e., as long as sun and man still generate man. There will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action or of great deeds." (Strauss 209)

When the real men revolt against too much peace, progress, and prosperity, what will be their program? Strauss: "They may be forced into a mere negation of the universal and homogeneous state, into a negation not enlightened by any positive goal, into a nihilistic negation. While perhaps doomed to failure, that nihilist revolution may be the only great and noble deed that is possible once the universal and homogeneous state has become inevitable. But no one can know whether it will fail of succeed. (Strauss 209, emphasis added)

What can be understood by nihilistic negation and nihilist revolution? In the nineteenth century, nihilism was an ideology of terrorism; the crazed bomb-throwers who assassinated statesmen and rulers across Europe and America (including President McKinley) were atheists, anarchists and nihilists. In the twentieth century, the nihilist revolution was synonymous with some of the most extreme factions of fascism and Nazis. "Long live death!" was a slogan of some of them. With these lines, Strauss has opened the door to fascism, murder, mayhem, war, genocide, and most emphatically to terrorism. And he is not shy about spelling this out.

LEO STRAUSS: BACK TO THE STONE AGE

What will the nihilist revolution look like? Strauss writes: "Someone may object that the successful revolt against the universal and homogeneous state could have no other effect than that the identical historical process which led from the primitive horde to the final state will be repeated." (Strauss 209, emphasis added) The primitive horde or primal horde refers to the human communities of the Paleolithic hunting and gathering societies, to the foragers and cave people of the Old Stone Age. Strauss is endorsing a nihilistic revolt that will have the effect of destroying as much as 10,000 years of progress in civilization, and in hurling humanity back to its wretched predicament in the Paleolithic. Here Strauss finds a momentary common ground with Rousseau, who also had a liking for the Paleolithic; here we are close to the ideas which animated the reign of terror in the French Revolution.

Strauss comes as a Job's comforter to those who have been thrown back into the Old Stone Age: "But would such a repetition of the process -- a new lease on life for man and humanity -- not be preferable to the indefinite continuation of the inhuman end? Do we not enjoy every spring although we know the cycle of the seasons, although we know that winter will come again?" (Strauss 209) Springtime for Leo Strauss has thus acquired the idiosyncratic meaning of a return to the horrors of the Old Stone Age.

Short of turning back the clock to the Paleolithic, Strauss sees one promising possibility latent in Kojeve's universal homogeneous state. This concerns the opportunity for political violence, yet another form of terrorism: "Kojeve does seem to leave an outlet for action in the universal and homogeneous state. In that state the risk of violent death is still involved in the struggle for political leadership .... But the opportunity for action can exist only for a tiny minority. And besides, is this not a hideous prospect: a state in which the last refuge of man's humanity is political assassination in the particularly sordid form of the palace revolution?" (Strauss 209) Such sporadic and limited violence is not enough for Strauss.

Marx and Engels had written about the realm of freedom which would result from higher stages of economic development in the form of a communist utopia. Strauss transforms their communist slogan into an invective against middle class progress and middle class values in general when he concludes this passage with the call: "Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of the 'realm of freedom.' Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, the 'realm of necessity."' (Strauss 209) Putting aside the superficial polemic against communist utopia, Strauss's goal here is to argue that peace, progress, and prosperity are destructive to oligarchy, and anything must be preferred to such an outcome.

Here we have a blanket endorsement of forms of violence and mayhem, including terrorism and war, in doses large enough to send world civilization back to the Stone Age. This implies genocide on a scale far beyond Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Today's world population is about 6.25 billion, and barely subsists on the basis of realized technological and industrial progress. But under hunting and gathering conditions, the demographic carrying capacity of the earth would be reduced to 25-50 million. If implemented today, Strauss's program for dismantling the universal homogeneous state would mean a genocide of something approaching 6 billion victims, two whole orders of magnitude beyond Hitler.

And even this must be put into perspective. Strauss notoriously feared to write what he really believed; the public could never face the full truth of his doctrines. Therefore, what we find written in On Tyranny is very likely a somewhat diluted view of his real views. So if Strauss lite, the exoteric version that he felt comfortable publishing at the height of his career, spells up to 6 billion victims, God save us from the full fury of Strauss's esoteric version as it may be transmitted among the neocons infesting and controlling the United States government under the Bush regime.

The most urgent anti-terrorist measure of them all would thus appear to be a purge of neocons from all branches of government (including the Carl Schmitt disciples Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas on the Supreme Court), and a general quarantine of neocons as what they really are, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis.

NEOCONS PREFER WAR TO PEACE

When Strauss talks about the universal and homogenous state, as we have seen, he is referring to something which the ordinary person might identify as peace, progress, and prosperity, with a good measure of equality and of international pacification. For most people, such a situation might seem to be almost ideal, but for the self-styled neocon intellectual, it represents the abolition of all human values and of everything that makes life worth living. The US Constitution mandates that the government pursue the General Welfare, but for the neocons this is anathema, since among other things it threatens their most cherished principle -- oligarchy. In particular, the neocons were not happy with the subsiding of the Cold War, and viewed the 1993 Oslo peace accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as the Good Friday agreement regarding Northern Ireland in 1998 -- which the world warmly welcomed -- with great consternation. These aspects of neocon thought are derived most prominently from the proto-fascist Nietzsche, but also from the card-carrying Nazis Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, and of course from their chief guru, the neo-fascist professor Leo Strauss. Since the neocon rejection of some of the greatest goods of civilization is likely to be incomprehensible to many readers, we need to pause to illustrate it.

In May 2004 the Washington Post carried an article by Corey Robin, assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College in the City University of New York. Robin had carried out interviews with some well-known neocons and fellow travelers in the late summer of 2001, just before synthetic terrorism transformed the scene. Here we can sample the deep discontent and restless desire for conflict which prevailed among these circles at that time.

Robin heard from Irving Kristol, the father of William Kristol, the central figure of the warmongering Project for a New American Century, whose web site was vainly calling for full-scale war with Iraq during Clinton's second term. Kristol lamented that the US was too focused on economic prosperity, and was not sufficiently aggressive in the defense of its global hegemony. "It's too bad," complained Kristol. "I think it would be natural for the United States ... to play a far more dominant role in world affairs ... to command and give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world where an authority willing to use troops can make ... a healthy difference." Kristol reserved particular scorn for any concern about the health or well-being of the population in general, which he scorned as a matter for accountants. "I think it's disgusting that ... presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people."

Robin found that the neocons prized "mystery and vitality over calculation and technology," and even over money and markets. Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, one of the schemers who brought us the Iraq war, commented that "the cult of peace and prosperity found expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy," which had made it easier for Bin Laden to run wild. Robin commented further: "Though conservatives reputedly favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine, they disdained Clinton for his very pursuit of these virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society that lost its depth and political meaning." And again: "Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives argued, betrayed an unwillingness to take on a world of power and violence, of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtue, qualities many conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity."

The neocons, according to Robin, see 9/11 as an opportunity to exalt their "political virtues such as heroism and struggle" over "the numbing politics of affluence" because of their new-found ability to go to the public with "calls for sacrifice and destiny." The neocons were afflicted by a self-righteous and hypocritical megalomania: they fervently believed that the United States, with its $500 billion yearly trade deficit and its hollow army of ten divisions could "govern events -- and determine the outcome of history." Based on this evidence, it is fair to say that at the turn of the millennium, the neocon faction was searching for new opportunities for conflict and violence. When those opportunities arrived, the neocons rejoiced and rushed into their favorite enterprise of sending other people's children into useless wars. (Washington Post, May 2, 2004)

NEOCONS: CUCKOLDS OF MARS

Catholic traditionalist Patrick Buchanan showed some awareness of this same restlessness and desire for new conflicts among the neocons during the 1999-2000 presidential campaign, when he commented that he was alarmed by the clique around candidate G. W. Bush -- a reference to the neocon group that pretentiously and ignorantly called itself the "Vulcans." In a speech about foreign policy, Buchanan noted that he had worked with some of these neocons in previous administrations, and that he now found them consumed by nostalgia for the Cold War, and therefore very likely to pursue "conflict," "intervention," "confrontation," and "bullying." Buchanan ridiculed the "little magazines" of the neocon cabal, where they had been developing their concept of the US as a "benevolent global hegemon" -- a role which many other states could be counted upon to reject. Buchanan added that, while the Clinton crowd had at least been canny enough to pick fights with smaller powers like Serbia, the Bush clique was determined to promote confrontation with larger powers who had the capability of inflicting great harm on the United States. The great exemplar of all these trends, said Buchanan, was Wolfowitz, who at that time thought he was on the way to being secretary of state.

Vulcan, or Hephaestos, was of course the Graeco-Roman god of volcanoes, fire, and the smithy. He was married to Venus, but she betrayed him in favor of Mars, the god of war. So Vulcan was a  cuckold of Mars, as our ignorant and pretentious Vulcans seem to have forgotten. But Mars has come back to make them cuckolds too, in Iraq and shortly in Afghanistan as well.

David Brooks had written in Newsweek that, during the 1990s, Americans had "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, jacuzzis, and gas grills." Leaving aside the arid banality of Brooks' class-distorted view of the world, we must recall that for most Americans there was no peace dividend worth mentioning at the end of the Cold War. (Washington Post, May 2, 2004) And the pre-9/11 world was in reality no idyll, but rather a world of growing financial breakdown and military tension, as we have shown elsewhere in this book.

CARL SCHMITT: POISON GAS ON GERMAN CITIES

Leo Strauss was the product of three main intellectual and political influences. First among these was the proto-Nazi Friedrich Nietzsche, who was designated by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg as one of the four precursors of Hitlerism (the others were the operatic composer Richard Wagner, the anti-Semitic LaGarde, and the racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain). A second was the card-carrying Nazi Martin Heidegger, who praised Hitler in his inaugural speech as rector of the University of Freiburg. Finally, there is the card-carrying Nazi Cart Schmitt, the main legal theorist of the Third Reich.

Schmitt's ideas have directly contributed to the shattering of the US political consensus under the Bush regime. For Schmitt, politics comes down to the distinction between friend and foe. Starting from this extremely meager reduction of human motivation, he goes on to equate politics with warfare: if there is no warfare or conflict, then politics is dead, and life is no longer worth living. Schmitt therefore wants politics to be the monopoly of a strong state, and he does not like the idea that the state or the government could be influenced by the citizens. Schmitt's thought is thus revealed as authoritarian, dictatorial, fascistic. It is from Schmitt that Samuel Huntington got his idea that an enemy image is absolutely necessary for the cohesion of any society. In reality, however, it is primarily an oligarchical society which requires an enemy image, because that society is based on an irrational principle of domination which cannot stand the kind of scrutiny it would receive in peacetime. George Orwell understood this aspect well when he suggested in 1984 that the endless war among Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia was really a war waged by each of these states against its own population, for the purpose of perpetuating a hierarchical society.

The card-carrying Nazi Schmitt was also a bitter opponent, not just of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, but of international law and international treaties in general. Like his neocon descendants of today, he was an ardent unilateralist. Here are some of Schmitt's typical comments about international law: "We are talking again about basic rights, about the basic rights of peoples and of states, and especially about the basic rights of those states who have, mindful of their own race, gotten themselves into the proper domestic order. Such a state is the national socialist state, which has led the German people back to an awareness of itself and its race. We proceed from the most self-evident of all basic rights, the right to one's own existence. This is an inalienable, eternal basic right, in which the right to self-determination, self-defense, and to the means of self-defense is included ... From our solid standpoint we can see through that world of legalistic argumentation and that huge apparatus of treaties and pacts, and assign this tower of Babel to its rightful place in the history of international law."

Schmitt was the author of Article 48 of the 1919 Constitution of the Weimar Republic, which was the clause that allowed the Reich President to declare an emergency or state of siege and thereafter rule by decree. Schmitt's activity during the 1920s was largely devoted to agitating in favor of the dissolution or marginalization of the Reichstag (parliament) and the institution of a dictatorship of the President of the Reich. One of Schmitt's favorite sayings was that sovereignty meant the ability to declare a state of emergency. If you can find what organ of government has the ability to call out the state of siege, suspend the legislature, and impose martial law, Schmitt reasoned, you have found the place where sovereignty is actually located.

For Schmitt, the concept of emergency rule is a totally lawless realm; under it, the ruling authority can do literally anything it wants, without regard to law, separation of powers, constitutional freedoms, equity, or anything else. In one of his essays Schmitt approvingly quotes a speech by the Reich Justice Minister Schiffer to the Reichstag on March 3, 1920, in which Schiffer points out that under Article 48, the Reich President can attack "German cities with poison gas, if that is, in the concrete case, the necessary measure for the re-establishment of law and order." (Schmitt, Die Diktatur, 201) Schmitt was adamant that the emergency provisions of the Weimar constitution were theoretically and practically unlimited, and could be used to justify the greatest imaginable atrocities. We see here a tradition of thought, alive in the Schmittian-Straussian neocons of today, which would have no trouble in accommodating a crime on the scope of 9/11.

In July, 1932 the Nazis and their allies carried out a cold coup against the minority Social Democratic caretaker government in Prussia, the largest political subdivision of Germany. The pro-Nazi government in Prussia then became the springboard for Hitler's seizure of power via a legal coup in January 1933. Carl Schmitt was the lawyer for the coup forces in the German supreme court in Leipzig. (The parallels of this action to the Schwarzenegger/Warren Buffet oligarchical coup in California in 2003 are more than suggestive, since California is the largest US political subdivision in the same way that Prussia was in Germany.) Schmitt also provided legal services for Hitler's seizure of power in January, 1933.

Carl Schmitt wrote articles for the gutter-level anti-Semitic tabloid Der Sturmer, edited by Julius Streicher. In 1934, when Hitler massacred the brown-shirted SA leader Ernst Rohm and his faction for supporting a second revolution against the financiers, industrialists, and the army, Schmitt quickly emerged as one of Hitler's most shameless apologists. In his scurrilous pamphlet, "Der Fuhrer Schutz das Recht" ("The Fuhrer defends the law"), Schmitt endorsed the Byzantine theory according to which law is a successful act of strength by the stronger party against the weaker. Schmitt wrote that the primary task of the Fuehrer was "to distinguish friend from enemy ... The Fuhrer takes the warnings of German history seriously. That gives him the right and the power to found a new state and a new order ... The Fuhrer protects the law from the worst abuse, when he -- in the moment of danger -- through the power of his leadership as supreme judge, directly creates law. His role as supreme judge flows from his role as supreme leader. Anyone who wants to separate one of these from the other is trying to unhinge the state with the help of the justice system .... the Fuhrer himself determines the content and scope of a crime." (Schmitt 200) This opens the door to every arbitrary outrage under color of law. While these ideas, so dear to today's ruling neocons, have been applied to Abu Ghraib, it is also clear that they are equally applicable to 9/11.

STRAUSS AND NIETZSCHE

As a young man, Strauss was an enthusiastic devotee of Nietzsche. Strauss wrote: "I can only say that Nietzsche so dominated and bewitched me between my 22nd and 30th years, that I literally believed everything that I understood of him ..."(Strauss to Karl Lowith, 23 June 1935, in Strauss, Leo and Karl Lowith, "Correspondence," Independent Journal of Philosophy, vol. 516, 1988, pp. 177-192.) For the young Strauss, Nietzsche was an idol, and the main vehicle of his youthful protests: "... the young Strauss, after a day of reading at the Prussian State Library, would go to a cafe on Unter den Linden and pronounce the name 'Nietzsche' loud enough to be heard at the other tables." (See Leo Strauss, "An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John's," Interpretation, vol. 7, no. 31-2; cited by Michael Platt in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective [Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1987], 23.) According to Straussian scholars, "In Nietzsche, Strauss certainly discovered the immoderation of philosophy, but in Nietzsche, especially the late Nietzsche, he also met the love of his life." (Deutsch and Soffer, 23)

As the neocons never tire of reminding us, ideas have consequences. If Strauss is based to such an extraordinary degree on Nietzsche, then we may be permitted to take a minute to see which Nietzsche it was that Strauss admired so much. The guess here is that it was Nietzsche as the glorifier of hierarchy, slavery, violence, war, and terrorism. In some of the notes that Nietzsche made during the time he was writing his Genealogy of Morals, we read: "Which way? We need a new terrorism." ("Das Problem wohin? Es bedarf eines neuen Terrorismus.") (Nietzsche vol. XIV, p. 334, emphasis added.)

Or, in the section of Ecce Homo entitled "Why I am a fate," we find the following: "I know my fate. My name will be linked someday to the memory of something monstrous -- to a crisis whose like never existed on earth, to the deepest clash of conscience, to a decision conjured up against everything which had been believed, promoted, held sacred up to then. I am not a man, I am dynamite." ("Ich kenne mein Los. Es wird sich einmal an meinem Namen die Erinnerung an etwas Ungeheures AnknUpfen, -an eine Krisis, wie es keine aufErden gab, an die tiefste Gewissens- ollision, an eine Entscheidung, heraufbeschworen gegen alles, was bis dahin geglaubt, gefordert, geheiligt worden war. Ich bin kein Mensch, ich bin Dynamit.") (Nietzsche vol. VII p. 317, emphasis added.) This passage was a favorite of the German neocon Armin Mohler, the author of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932.

Nietzsche was full of contempt and hatred for the middle class, family life, and the quest for economic security, which he always saw in connection with the inferior "last men." Nietzsche is the great glorifier of war, conflict, violence, and cruelty, which he regards not just as unavoidable but also as positive goods: "We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and deviltry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species 'man' as much as its opposite does." (Beyond Good and Evil 54-55) It is from Nietzsche that today's neocons derive their endless fascination with warfare and bloodshed: "You should always be such men as are always looking for an enemy -- for your enemy. And with some of you there is hate at first sight. You should seek your enemy and wage your war -- a war for your opinions. ... You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long. I do not exhort you to work but to battle. I do not exhort you to peace, but to victory. May your work be a battle, may your peace be a victory! ... You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity .... Are you ugly? Very well, my brothers! Take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly." (Zarathustra 74)

Bush's supporters among the Christian fundamentalists and Christian Zionists would perhaps be surprised to know what neocons (to whom Bush has turned over the government) think about Christ and Christianity. Nietzsche referred to Christ as an "idiot," (Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist 202). In addition to his famous proposition that God is dead, Nietzsche also proclaimed a special role for himself: "I am ... the Anti-Christ" (Ecce Homo III 2) Nietzsche, like Strauss after him, was an exponent of European atheist nihilism, and this remains the underlying -- esoteric -- outlook of the neocons who are ruling the US. At one point Nietzsche asks himself, "What does nihilism mean?" His answer "That the highest values are devalued. The goal is missing: the answer to 'why?' is missing." (Lukacs, Von Nietzsche zu Hitler [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1966], 69) If God is dead, all crimes are allowed.

Thus the neocon publicist Robert Kaplan, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force, wrote in his recent Warrior Politics that a pagan ethos of war and cruelty is necessary to face the great crises of this age. For Kaplan, the philosophical and social content of Christianity is a great obstacle to inculcating the proper attitude in the US ruling class. Among other things, Kaplan finds that the Roman Emperor Tiberius (under whose rule the crucifixion of Christ took place) has been treated unfairly by historians, and deserves to be rehabilitated. Similarly, one of neocon Paul Wolfowitz's favorite quips is reportedly the infamous "Oderint dum metuant" -- let them hate me, as long as they fear me -- a line from the Latin writer Accius later popularized by the infamous Emperor Caligula.

Strauss is well aware that Nietzsche is a genocidalist, but this does not disturb his admiration for the sage of Turin. As Strauss wrote in What is Political Philosophy (1959): "Being certain of the tameness of modern western man, [Nietzsche] preached the sacred right of 'merciless extinction' of large masses of men. He used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of passionate and fascinating speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialism and communism, but conservatism, nationalism, and democracy as well. After having taken upon himself this great political responsibility, he could not show his readers a way to political responsibility. [I.e., he could not seize power, WGT] He left them no choice except that between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus prepared a regime which, as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy look again like a golden age. He tried to articulate his understanding both of the modem situation and of human life as such by his doctrine of the will to power." In other words, Strauss knows very well that Nietzsche was a precursor of Hitler, but supports him anyway as a philosopher for today.

A storm cellar for neocons and failed pols in the Rumsfeld Pentagon has been the Defense Policy Board, Chaired by Richard Perle, the virulent neocon warmonger whom British Labour Party Foreign Secretary Dennis Healey dubbed the "prince of darkness" back in the 1980s. On September 19, 2001, Perle used the Defense Policy Board as the springboard for the neocon war drive against Iraq that produced an unprovoked and aggressive war in March 2003. Other members of the Defense Policy Board included: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Fred Ikle, James Schlesinger, Dan Quayle, Harold Brown, James Woolsey, and Newt Gingrich. Perle was eventually forced to resign, in part because of corruption charges against him stemming from Trireme Corp, and his relation with Hollinger Corp. boss Lord Conrad Black. This board of unelected and unaccountable extremist ideologues, known as the Wolfowitz cabal, needs to be urgently and permanently dissolved.

In a 19-hour meeting on September 19-20, 2001 Perle, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey, and Wolfowitz pushed hard for an immediate operation against Iraq. Wolfowitz's plan was to have the U.S. take over southern Iraq militarily as an opposition beachhead and use the Basra oil revenues to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Perle wanted Saddam Hussein's "regime ...overthrown quickly with military force." This was too much for Powell, at least in that phase. (October 12, 2001)

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: IT WILL HAPPEN HERE

Samuel Huntington, in his 1981 study entitled American Politics, described the periodic explosions of the "American Creed," which he saw as a mixture of liberty, equality, individualism, and democracy." He viewed American history as punctuated by a series of periods of heightened political awareness and activity which he called "creedal passion periods." His forecast was that "if the periodicity of the past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century." Huntington included the Great Awakening religious movement of the 1740s, the Revolution of 1776, the Great Revival c. 1800, the Jacksonian movement, the abolitionism of the 1850s, the Progressives, the 1968 student and antiwar movements, etc. However, Huntington blurred his attempt to look into the future by excluding from consideration social and economic upheavals like the Populists of the 1890s and the mass strikes of the 1930s. If these are included, what Huntington might call a creedal passion period might occur during the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century, i.e., between 2005 and 2010. The Carl Schmitt disciple Huntington associated this with a coming turn toward an authoritarian or fascist regime. In the next creedal ferment explosion, he wrote, "the oscillations among the responses could intensify in such a way as to threaten to destroy both ideals and institutions" in this country. This might include "the replacement of the weakened and ineffective institutions by more authoritarian structures more effectively designed to meet historical needs."

ARMAGEDDON AND APOCALYPSE IN THE US MILITARY

Although the neocons are an obvious focus of danger in the American society of today, they by no means represent the only threat. We must also pay attention to those self- styled religious factions which cultivate notions of the approaching end of the world and the return of the Messiah. These are the groups which propagate notions of the end of historical time through the apocalypse, and embellish this with the imminence of Armageddon, the mythical last battle before the end of the world. Those who profess these doctrines blatantly disregard the advice of St. Augustine, the greatest father of the Latin church, who warned Christians that it was "ridiculous" to become obsessed with the date and time of the end of the world. The modern irrationalists who camouflage themselves as Christians have left traditional Christianity behind, and have reduced the content of their religion to the cynical support of such figures as Bush and Ariel Sharon, both regarded, and perhaps accurately, as harbingers of the apocalypse.

The presence of a large mass of apocalyptic Armageddon thinkers in American life is a serious problem, since some versions of this belief structure call upon the individual to act in ways which are thought to accelerate the end time towards world catastrophe, thus speeding the return of the Messiah. The popular novels of the "Left Behind" series, which deal with life after the so-called rapture, or in-gathering of the saved elect, have fostered mass delusions on precisely this point.

Apocalyptic and Armageddon thinkers in the high ranks of the military services represent an even more serious problem than they do in the society in general. How can we let a self-styled "evangelical Christian" close to a nuclear button, when that person's demented belief structure may dictate that the launching of a rogue missile attack on Russia, China or some Arab state would bring with it the beneficial by-product of the end of the world and the creation of the kingdom of God on earth? The various fellowships and chaplaincies of evangelical-Pentecostal stamp in the US military, which are often under the influence of British or Israeli intelligence agencies, therefore represent a grave threat to US national security. Is the US officer corps reliable? Under present conditions of pervasive apocalypse-Armageddon network penetration, their reliability is open to grave doubt.

In December 2001, a senior European diplomatic source observed that the current situation in the Middle East contained the danger of a world war even before the end of that year. "If this goes much further," said the source, "we in the West will be coming closer, to a general conflict with 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. And never forget the 'Armageddon Factor,' the powerful Christian fundamentalist elements in the United States, who are applying massive pressure on the American Administration, to give full backing to the Israelis, so that the fundamentalists can achieve their Armageddon aims." (EIR, December 4, 2001)

To sample the mentality of these networks, let us hear now from General Albion Knight, US Army retired, who was the 1992 vice-presidential candidate for the US Taxpayer Party, and thus the running mate of Howard Philips on that ticket that year. We cite from Gen. Knight's essay, "Old Testament Parallels to Our Times," which was published in early 1990s by the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor:

Our current military leadership are a bunch of wimps! ... The final -- and probably the most important part of my analysis -- is following through on the implications of the claim that I (and a growing number of others) make that there is a close similarity between the conditions described in the Old Testament about the two Jewish nations, Israel and Judah, between 750 B.C. and 586 B.C. and those we see in America today. They were rotting from within at the same time they faced major external danger. Therefore, the Lord removed His protection from them, allowed them to be defeated, taken in exile and screened out to find the solid remnant of 10% which He used to rebuild. I was drawn into an intensive study of the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Joel and Habakkuk. It was like reading today's newspaper they were so startlingly descriptive of today's conditions in America. From this study, I am strongly convinced that God has removed His protection from America and we shall very soon experience a series of sudden and violent crises which will shake us to our roots. They will drive us to our knees -- either in despair or prayer. I am afraid that there will be more of the despair than of the prayer. The solution given to God to those two nations was, "Stop doing the evil that you are doing and turn back to Me and I will heal your land. If not, you will have disaster on your hands." That is our message, too. Now my own attitude, from these analyses, I was put into a mood of deep despair. Yet, the Bible study also reminded me that God uses a few strong men who know who they are, whose they are, and what they ought to do. I must also admit that the words of Winston Churchill, "Never, Never, Never, Never Give up!" rang in my ear. Also the example of Howard Phillips who takes a realistic but optimistic view -- We must be prepared in case God finds use for us in His plan. So I am not throwing in the towel. (emphasis added)

Here the General expresses the common contempt for the current political and military leadership of this country, along with the idea that future US catastrophes will present well-deserved punishment for the monstrous excesses of this country. One senses that the sort of outlook would regard such cataclysmic events as 9/11 with a grim satisfaction, as proof of the efficacy of God's will and God's retribution.

In May 2000, we find another fragment, "America Betrayed," which is expressive of General Knight's views towards the close of the Clinton administration. Here we find that the Republican impeachment agitation has indeed resonated deeply among religious irrationalists of this type, and has in effect pushed Gen. Knight and his associates very far down the road of rebellion against the elected government. Gen. Knight writes: "Sex and perjury were the wrong impeachment offenses. It should have been on his [President Clinton's] treachery and failure to live up to his oath of office." Gen. Knight went on to recount that, during the Reagan years, he had been asked to draw up a program of what actions a crypto-communist American president might take if he got into power. "We concluded that a Marxist and/or communist president, if he ever came to power, would focus on the transfer of national sovereignty at every opportunity to international organizations. He or she would also weaken the armed forces physically, mentally and spiritually. The 'dumbing down' of our public school educational system would also accelerate. Furthermore, we decided that a Marxist president would assist all or most of America's enemies -- Russia, China, Cuba, radical Islam, North Korea and others. He would disregard the Constitution at every opportunity and rule by decree, meaning executive orders would earmark such an administration. Bogus arms control agreements, buying-off or intimidating Congress by stealing the FBI files of its members, controlling the media and trying to stop all alternative media would also be major goals."

Inevitably, Gen. Knight concluded that Clinton had carried out the crypto-Marxist program in full: "What has Clinton done in this regard?  He has hit everyone of the above actions and more .... Clinton has helped Marxists and terrorists and their 'world revolution' at every opportunity. Cultural Marxism is also a key Clinton goal. He has been giving us a bad example that it is all right to lie, cheat, steal, threaten and even rape women if it is done in high office. There is a steady movement toward a Gestapo-like control over the people. There is today in the U.S. a total lack of any sense of nation and its protection as required by his oath-of-office. Furthermore, Clinton has been selling and giving our nuclear and other high technology secrets to communist China and giving Russia the money to re-arm at U.S. taxpayers' expense." (Anthony LoBaido, WorldNetDaily.com, May 6, 2000.)

When. General Edwin Walker gave speeches of this type to his troops in Germany in the early 1960s, he was given the sack, and Senator Fulbright denounced him as a harbinger of a threatened military coup in this country. Now active duty officers are presumably more discreet, but there are obviously many active duty officers of high rank who believe what Gen. Knight feels free to talk about. Here if anywhere was an area for the 9/11 commission to probe, but it did not do so.

These considerations lead us back to the self-styled patriot militias of the 1990s, who were so often led by retired officers with military intelligence connections. In those days, the foreign intelligence agency that was most active in fomenting militia activity was unquestionably Britain's MI-6. Today the media emphasis is on al Qaeda, and the militias are seldom heard of: But in the real world of secret intelligence operations, things move more slowly. The patriot militia networks are still there with their anti-government, right- wing anarchist, and white supremacist-xenophobic programs.

After Oklahoma City, the potential of the right-wing anti-government evangelical fanatics for terrorism and violence was re-affirmed by an armed standoff between police and "Republic of Texas" activists demanding the secession of Texas in April 1997. This insurrection was led by Richard Otto, alias "White Eagle," who put out a call inviting members of militias around the country to come to the site, armed for a shootout. The agent provocateur Otto turned out to have been "trained and set into motion by an Air Force officer who toured the world practicing New Age pagan rituals, in consultation with senior British intelligence drug-rock-sex gurus such as Gregory Bateson." Otto finally surrendered on May 3, 1997. (Tony Chaitkin, "The Militias and Pentecostalism")

Another anti-government agitator with impeccable military credentials was a certain Jim Ammerman. Ammerman was a charismatic Pentecostal who controlled various networks of chaplains in the US armed forces, in federal prisons, and in the FBI. He claimed to possess supernatural prophetic powers, and preached the imminent end of the world. According to Ammerman, the US government was illegal; in his view, Clinton deserved to be executed. During the April 1997 siege, Ammerman was brought in to mediate between the Texas separatist fanatics and the FBI. Ammerman exemplifies one of several apocalyptic networks within the US military.

A videotape popular among militia groups in the 1990s was "The Imminent Military Takeover of the United States," a speech by the Reverend Colonel Ammerman to the Prophecy Club of Topeka, Kansas. Here Ammerman warned that President Clinton, aided by masses of foreign troops he claimed were already on American soil, would soon put the nation under martial law -- if God did not end the world before the current President can act. Ammerman proclaimed that President Bill Clinton should long ago have been executed for avoiding the Vietnam draft. Ammerman, who retired in 1977 as a U .S. Army colonel and chaplain, was described by the Prophecy Club as a former Green Beret and "CIA official" with 26 years in the military and a top-secret security clearance. He was the leader of some 200 chaplains serving in the U.S. Armed Forces under the aegis of the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches. He and his chaplains were accustomed to speak in tongues and perform supernatural cures. Ammennan boasted to his audiences in those years that his chaplains were providing him with inside information about military activities ordered by what he claimed was the illegal dictatorship of the US President. ("The Militias and Pentecostalism")

In an interview granted on May 22, 1997, Colonel Ammerman stated: "There is a network of colonels and above, throughout the military, who would stand by the Constitution and against the President. They know who they are, and they are in close communication with each other. They could control the country if they need to." ("The Militias and Pentecostalism," emphasis added)

Ammerman spoke frequently in this context of the "multi-jurisdictional task force," a repeated theme in his exhortations to the militias. The military was allegedly combined, under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with other departments of the Federal government and with local governments. When the President tried to use this overreaching military against the people, Ammerman claimed, the "good" military officers would side with armed citizens against the President. Ammerman's own organization was created at the request of an Army officer, Gen. Ralph E. Haines, Jr., General Haines had been vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army in 1967-68, and at that time was in charge of counterinsurgency preparations in the continental United States. He worked with the full resources of the Army under him, including military intelligence capabilities, to plan to cope with black ghetto riots and civil disturbances during the Vietnam War. Haines deployed combat units to Detroit and Washington, D.C., during rioting after Martin Luther King's assassination. General Haines went public in an April 11, 1968 press conference, describing his "Operation Garden Plot." He had planned and directed the military arrangements for the takeover of every single American city, and arranged the linkages between the military and Justice Department, local police, and state governments. Haines "said that detailed military planning for the summer began in February. The 'garden plot' preparations were national, he said, including 'every city you can think of.' Many officers who were to be assigned to specific cities in a military mobilization visited them in mufti [civilian clothes] to familiarize themselves with the terrain, the social and economic problems of potential riot areas, and the police with whom they would work if called, the general said." (New York Times, April 14, 1968) An admirer of the Haines-Ammerman project was the same Gen. Albion Knight, an apocalyptic co-thinker from whom we have already heard.

Militia units under the direction of military intelligence controllers have never hesitated to attack military facilities in the same way the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11. Just one example: during July 1997, a certain Bradley P. Glover and six other persons were rounded up for plotting to bomb U.S. military bases, beginning with Fort Hood, Texas. The FBI said that Glover and an associate were arrested on July 4 near Fort Hood, in possession of various weapons; others in on the alleged plot were charged with possession of pipe bombs and machine guns. The arrests allegedly resulted from Missouri state police infiltration of paramilitary groups. Glover was featured in the Wichita Eagle on April 30, 1995, as the pre-eminent Kansas militia leader. He was said to control about 1,000 armed men in the southern half of the state. In a 1995 interview, Glover said that he had initiated the militia movement in Kansas in November 1994. Glover also said he was a former Naval Intelligence officer. ("The Militias and Pentecostalism")

PRIVATE MILITARY FIRMS

Machiavelli warned the Italian princes of his day in his Arte della Guerra that unemployed mercenaries and professional soldiers would inevitably stir up coups and conflicts in order to procure jobs and glory for themselves. This warning became highly relevant at the end of the Cold War. A little later the story of Wallenstein's camp in the Thirty Years War shows that certain kinds of military activities can become self-perpetuating and totally disconnected from their original political purpose.

After Vietnam, the US military exhibited the pathologies of a defeated army. These recalled the sociological developments among the defeated or embittered forces of Germany and Italy after the First World War, when defeated veterans became one of the initial constituencies of fascism. When the Cold War ended, many of these same defeated officers became unemployed or in fear of becoming so. Defeated and unemployed military officers represent a dangerous phenomenon in any society, and today this problem is compounded by the issue of a mercenary (or all-volunteer) force. Machiavelli wrote about precisely this problem in his 1521 Art of War, in which he drew on his parallel study of the ancient world and or the events of his own tumultuous times. His conclusion was a warning which we would do well to bear in mind today:

I say ... that ... governments should fear those persons who make war their only business ... And if a prince has not enough power over his infantry to make them disband and return cheerfully to their former occupations when a war is over, he is on the road to being ruined. For no infantry can be so dangerous as that which is composed of men who make war their only calling, because a prince either must keep them continually engaged in war, or must constantly keep them paid in peacetime, or must run the risk of their stripping him of his kingdom. But it is impossible to keep them forever engaged in war, or forever paid when war is over; therefore, a prince must run no small risk of losing his kingdom. (Machiavelli 19-20)

Retired US military officers are notoriously venal; they feel that they have missed out on the chance for wealth which civilians have enjoyed. How many such military officers lost their retirement investments or were otherwise financially ruined by the crash of the NASDAQ after the spring of 2000? Probably quite a few, and here is where an acute observer like Machiavelli might start looking for desperate men, ruined by debt, with superb martial skills, who might be recruitable as mercenaries for a desperate enterprise.

Private military firms received a massive round of public attention in relation to the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal of May, 2004. According to press accounts at the time, employees of CACI in Arlington, Virginia as well as those of Titan Corporation of San Diego worked in that infamous Iraqi jail. CACI's website announced that it had taken up the task of helping US intelligence agencies worldwide in gathering information for the war on terrorism, and in analyzing and managing that information. Titan claimed that it only provided translators for Abu Ghraib, not torturers. CACI has 7,600 employees and a turnover of $845 million per year. It provided what it called interrogation specialists for places as distant as Afghanistan and Kosovo. A CACI instructor was fired at Abu Ghraib for urging military police to carry out interrogations using illegal techniques.

In the spring of 2004, there were 25,000 employees of private military firms in Iraq. In addition to the inevitable Halliburtons and Bechtels, these mercenaries included employees of Vinnell Corporation, who received the task of training the new Iraqi army. Dyncorp, a competitor of Vinnell, received the contract for training the new Iraqi police. Olive Security of the UK protected television camera crews during the war, and later turned to providing security for the construction projects of Bechtel. The leader of this security detachment was Harry Legge- Bourke, who had gone skiing with Prince Charles. Also active in Iraq was the American security firm Kroll Associates. The security firm Blackwater provided snipers who flew over Baghdad, killing Iraqis without benefit of judicial process. It was the killing of some Blackwater employees in Fallujah which provoked the epic April-May 2004 battle for that town which ended in a US defeat. The firm Custer Battles provided security along the road leading to the Baghdad Airport, a shooting gallery for passing occupation vehicles. There were other private military firms: Centurion, Global Risk, and the Stone Foundation, to name just a few. Northrop Grumman, Halliburton, and other companies developed or acquired private military firms as their corporate subsidiaries.

According to the German newsmagazine Spiegel, private military firms claim competence in all departments of warfare, including "nuclear planning." Most of the employees of the private military firms come from the retirees of the US Navy Seals, the US Army Delta Force and Rangers, and the British SAS. The vogue of the private military firm began in grand style in 1992, when then-Pentagon boss Dick Cheney awarded a contract to Brown & Root, a pillar of the US establishment and today Kellogg, Brown and Root, to determine which military jobs could best be outsourced to private firms. (Spiegel, "Die Folterer von Baghdad," May 3, 2004)

US and British intelligence operations have been in the process of privatization since the 1970s. This process was more advanced in Britain, and was given an additional impetus in the US by Reagan's Executive Order 12333, which opened the door to the privatization of virtually everything. One of the mothers of British private defense firms is the Special Air Services (SAS), the commando operation long commanded by Colonel David Stirling. The SAS are traditionally heavily Scottish, and one of their traditions is that they allegedly take no prisoners. In other words, they execute prisoners in flagrant violation of the laws of war. One is reminded of the Private Eye cover of a few years back, which appeared after a particularly blatant SAS assassination of a suspect. One SAS trooper asks the other: "Why did you shoot him 43 times?" The answer: "I ran out of bullets."

The privatized SAS system illustrates the many advantages of the private military or security firm for maintaining plausible denial in covert operations, while at the same time reducing or eliminating the oversight powers of government. The SAS has over the years spun off a series of private security and mercenary recruitment firms led by its retired or reserve-status officers. Among the first and most infamous of these was Keenie Meenie Services (KMS), whose name was taken from the Swahili term for the motion of a snake in the grass. During its heyday in the 1980s, KMS shared offices with Saladin Security, another SAS firm, next door to the 22nd SAS Regimental HQ in London. The firms were run by Maj. David Walker, an SAS South American specialist; Maj. Andrew Nightingale of SAS Group Intelligence; and Detective Ray Tucker, a former Arab affairs specialist at Scotland Yard.

Other SAS spin-off firms have included Kilo Alpha Services (KAS), directed by former SAS, Counter-Terrorism Warfare team leader Lt. Col. Ian Crooke; Control Risks, run by former SAS squadron leader Maj. Arish Turtle; and J. Donne Holdings, run by SAS counterespionage specialist H.M.P.D. Harclerode, whose firm later provided bodyguards and commando training for Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.

SAS operations under the KMS label were important during Iran- contra: in 1983, Lt. Col. Oliver North hired KMS to train the Afghan mujahideen, to mine Managua harbor in Nicaragua, and to train the Nicaraguan Contras. At the same time, KMS provided personal security for the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar, a close associate of Bush 41 and Bush 43. KMS has a long history in the Arab and Muslim world. One of its first known assignments in the 1970s, was to aid Oman in repressing a revolt in its province of Dhofar. Oman remains a de facto British colony; its officer corps is dominated by retired British officers. KMS has also worked in Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, all of which include numerous former SAS officers in their security apparatus. The security chief in Bahrain, Ian Henderson, for example, was an SAS officer in Kenya during the Mau Mau period. The Omani chief of security was a former SAS officer, as was the case in Dubai, the home of KMS official Fiona Fraser, a Stirling relative.

The relations of these SAS firms with the Iran-Contra narcotics trafficking emerged dramatically in August 1989, when reports surfaced in the British and Italian press that the Colombian Cali Cartel, historically most closely tied to the George Bush machine, had hired SAS veterans to assassinate Pablo Escobar of the rival Medellin Cartel. On Aug. 16, 1989, three days after the story broke, Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, an opponent of the drug trade, was assassinated. Some in the Colombian government said British mercenaries were involved. Among those reportedly working for the Cali Cartel were Col. Peter McAleese, a former SAS officer in Malaysia; Alex Lenox, a former member of the SAS Counter-Terrorism Warfare task force; and David Tomkins, a veteran of Afghanistan. Among other British private military firms are also the London- based Defence Systems Ltd. and Executive Outcomes, both of which were active over a number of years in destabilizing the peace process in Angola. (Joe Brewda, "The SAS: Prince Philip's Manager of Terrorism," EIR, October 13, 1995)

Another private military firm is Aegis Defense Services Ltd., which in the summer of 2004 was awarded a $293 million contract to provide security for the US Project and Contracting Office in Iraq, the entity which is tasked with distributing $18.4 billion of US largesse there. The chief executive of Aegis is Tim Spicer, a former lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guards who has a past history of involvement in British colonial atrocities in Northern Ireland. Two soldiers under Spicer's command were convicted of murder in the 1992 shooting death of Belfast teenager Peter McBride. Spicer stubbornly defended the two murderers, despite their conviction which was confirmed on appeal in the British courts. Irish-American civil rights groups protested the awarding of the lucrative Iraq contract to Spicer. Paul O'Connor of the Pat Finucane Centre (named after the victim of an MI-5 terrorist provocateur) pointed out that Spicer evidently believed that his troops were above the law. Rev. Sean McManus of the Irish National Caucus told a reporter, "President Bush should tear up this contract immediately out of decency and respect." During the 1990s, Spicer worked for Sandline International in Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone. In 1999 a British parliamentary inquiry found that Sandline had shipped arms into Sierra Leone in violation of a UN arms embargo. Sandline also fought a dirty war against rebels in Papua New Guinea in 1997. (Washington Post, August 9, 2004)

RAND CORPORATION NUCLEAR PLANNERS

The imagination which produced 9/11 was evidently an imagination that did not hesitate to sacrifice thousands of lives. But intellectuals ready to sacrifice not thousands but tens or even hundreds of millions of lives to the imperatives of imperial hegemony have been influential in and around the United States government for more than half a century. These are the "defense intellectuals," the nuclear planners of the RAND Corporation. These are the Strangeloves who have been studying charts marked "World Targets in Megadeaths" for many years.

One of the most influential of these was Albert Wohlstetter, who died in January, 1997 at the age of 83. According to his admirers, Wohlstetter was more influential in national affairs than Henry Kissinger, even though the later is more bombastic and more infamous. From 1960 to 1990, Wohlstetter was the premier US strategic thinker. Among his disciples, he counted leading neocons like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. At his death, Wohlstetter was lionized by Robert L. Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal and, as a participant in the Olson salon, one of the prime movers in the impeachment of Clinton. Every editorial on America's geopolitical strategy that appeared in The Wall Street Journal during the previous 25 years was said to have been the product of Wohlstetter. Neocons saw Henry Kissinger as the leader of the "dove team" in foreign policy over much of this period, stressing diplomatic strategems, while in this perspective Wohlstetter was the undisputed leader of the "hawk team," which stressed military moves of breathtaking creativity and imagination.

One of Wohlstetter's best-known and most typical works was his article, "The Delicate Balance of Terror," which appeared in Foreign Affairs in January 1959. The main thesis here was that the US was very vulnerable to a Soviet first strike; an adequate US retaliation to a surprise attack was not at all assured. Wohlstetter urged his readers to support "maintaining the delicate balance of terror" with measures involving sacrifice, and to develop "a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent danger." Wohlstetter's pessimistic finale: "It is by no means certain that we shall meet the task. " (Kaplan 171 ) This is the eternal neocon refrain, from Wohlstetter to the bomber gap/missile gap to Team B and the window of vulnerability to the terrorism experts of today.

Early exponents of this school were Bernard Brodie, author of The Absolute Weapon (1946), who advocated US nuclear first use against the Soviets, and John von Neumann, the game theorist. In the intelligence unit of Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command there were Stefan Possony, a right- wing extremist from Hungary, and General George Keegan. Another Hungarian was Leo Szilard, an early theoretician of mutually assured destruction, or deterrence theory. Then there was Herman Kahn, the author of On Thermonuclear War (1960), who advocated nuclear first strike capabilities, limited nuclear war, fallout shelters, and generally thinking the unthinkable. The review of this book in Scientific American read: "This is a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it." (Kaplan 228)

RAND nuclear war scenarios from around 1960 called for -- depending on the kind of strategy used -- 150 million Americans dead and 60% of US industry destroyed, with 40 million Soviets dead and 40% of Soviet industry destroyed; or else 110 million Americans dead and 50% of US industry destroyed, with 75 million Soviets dead and 50% of Soviet industry gone. (Kaplan 228) A mind that could imagine this would have no trouble imagining 9/11. Fortunately, the RAND Strangeloves never got the chance to test their crackpot theories in a confrontation with the USSR. The Cuban missile crisis, the world's greatest thermonuclear confrontation, was conducted by President Kennedy in complete disregard of RAND, and of aggressive leaders like Dean Acheson and generals like Curtis Lemay and Lyman Lemnitzer, the Northwoods terrorist planner who chaired the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. The one place where RAND ideas were used was Vietnam, where a conventional version of the RAND counterforce doctrine was attempted in the form of Operation Rolling Thunder, a shock and awe exercise involving massive B-52 carpet bombing. But the utopian strategy of the RAND crackpots proved a complete failure. As Fred Kaplan wrote, "Vietnam brought out the dark side of nearly everyone inside America's national security machine. And it exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the defense intellectuals. It revealed that the concept of force underlying all their formulations was an abstraction, practically useless as a guide to action." (Kaplan 336) This mood of military defeat and intellectual bankruptcy is the starting point for today's neocon cabal, since this is the world toward which the Wohlstetter proteges Wolfowitz and Perle gravitated in precisely those years.

The RAND Corporation remains a sinister threat, but it also provided a rollicking farce in the run- p to the Iraq war. A special briefing on the nefarious nature of Saudi Arabia before the Defense Policy Board was ordered up by Perle, who could find no better orator than Laurent Murawiec, an undistinguished former member of my own staff in the EIR bureau in Wiesbaden, Germany during the 1980s. Despite the fact that he was by no stretch of the imagination an area specialist, Murawiec was tapped in the summer of 2002 by Perle to give a delirious PowerPoint presentation on Saudi Arabia as "the focus of evil" in the modern world. Even the Bush administration was embarrassed.

YODA: ANDREW MARSHAL, RUMSFELD'S FUTUROLOGIST

Andrew Marshal was one of Albert Wohlstetter's whiz kids at the RAND Corporation back in the 1950s. He has worked for the Defense Department for more than forty years, and is one of the last survivors of the original RAND kindergarten run by Wohlstetter. Born in 1921, the octogenarian heads up Rumsefeld's Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon. Marshal is able to count among his proteges such figures as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. Marshal was a strong backer of Bush 41's Team B alternative estimates group in 1976, which was the way that Wolfowitz and other neocons prepared for their leading roles in the Reagan Administration. Marshal was also close to the ultra-right Committee on the Present Danger, where General Lyman Lemnizter, the author of Operation Northwoods, was also an activist. Lemnitzer had been encouraged to work with CPD by President Gerald Ford. Here is an important element of continuity between the Operation Northwoods clique and today's Pentagon. Marshal is no conservative; his profile is rather that of a radical right-wing reformer and Utopian thinker. He is one of many bureaucrats who has never been called to account over 9/11.

An exchange from a recent interview is typical: "Q: What's the next radical change the US will reveal on the battlefield? Marshal: One future intelligence problem: knowing what drugs the other side is on .... People who are connected with neural pharmacology say that new classes of drugs will be available relatively certainly within the decade. These drugs are just like chemicals inside people, only with behavior-modifying, performance-enhancing characteristics. [This leads to] jokes that a future intelligence problem is going to be knowing what drugs the other guys are on."

Marshal is an apostle of shock and awe: "There are ways of psychologically influencing the leadership of another state. I don't mean information warfare, but some demonstration of awesome effects, like being able to set off impressive explosions in the sky. Like, let us show you what we could do to you. Just visually impressing the person." Are we safer? Marshal opines: "A friend of mine, Yale economist Martin Shubik, says an important way to think about the world is a curve of the number of people 10 determined men can kill before they are put down themselves. That has varied over time. His claim is that it wasn't very many for a long time, and now it's going up. It's not just the US. All the world is getting less safe."

A very revealing question is this one: "Q: Did 9/11 change your mind about anything? Marshal: Not much. It was obvious that we were wide open to attack." (Douglas McGray, "The Marshal Plan," Wired Magazine, November 2002) A rather cavalier statement, since Marshal's job was supposed to be using his imagination to devise possible futuristic modes of attack against this country, and recommending timely measures to ward off such peril. If the 9/11 catastrophe was due to a failure of imagination, Marshal's Office of Net Assessment comes as close as anything to being the US government's imagination bureau. But Marshal wants no part of the responsibility for 9/11, despite having been an influential leader in the Pentagon for more than four decades.

Marshal is also associated with the view of China as a bellicose and hegemony-seeking power destined to clash with the US during the 21st century. Marshal is not surprisingly the darling of many neocon think tanks like Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, one of the nerve centers of the neocon warmonger elite in Washington. "He's as Delphic as they come -- days may go by before he utters a word," says a former member of Marshal's Office of Net Assessment. Says another: "He's hard to draw a bead on because he spends his time coming up with every conceivable future scenario that could threaten the US." Everyone except 9/11, it would seem. According to Jonathan Pollack of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Marshal "is not very interested in the here and now, but is primarily interested in hypothesizing futures that cut against the grain, and you can argue that we really do need someone like that. His interest is to take events as they are understood and find a way to turn them on their head, to conflate understanding, and look for patterns or possibilities that could be studied. And he often comes up with quirk results. It's like he thinks of the world as a bell curve and is only interested in the tails of distribution. [He is] a worrywart." But not overly worried about 9/11, as we have seen. (Jason Vest, "The Dubious Genius of Andrew Marshal," The American Prospect Online, February 15, 2001)

The official version of 9/11 says that the attacks came out of a distant cave in Afghanistan. But it might make more sense to explore network and agencies which have means, motive, and opportunity, as well as a track record of advocating and promoting large-scale violence. Who knows what capabilities are being prepared even now in an isolated branch office of some private military firm, Armageddon network, public relations firm, or Utopian-reactionary think tank?

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