GW Bush on 9/11
Conspiracy Theories
by Robert Lederman
(718) 743-3722
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
November 23, 2001
"We must speak the truth about terror.
Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories
concerning the attacks of September the 11th,
malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame
away from the terrorists themselves,
away from the guilty."
GW Bush speaking before
the UN GeGeneral Assembly 11/10/2001
When President Bush spoke of
"outrageous conspiracy theories"
he was for the first
time acknowledging
something of great significance.
There are informed viewpoints completely missing
from the propaganda war being relentlessly waged on
Americans about 9/11 and its aftermath,
viewpoints which are as opposite from the official story
as it is possible to get.
The Bush administrations' official story
has three basic premises. To briefly summarize,
the first is that Islamic terrorists
based in Afghanistan who hate American freedom
plotted and executed an attack on America -
an attack which the U.S. government had
no prior knowledge of nor any connection to.
The second premise is that in order to wage and win
a war on terrorism we must invade Afghanistan
and every other nation harboring, funding
or otherwise supporting terrorists and that
a simultaneous suspension of domestic civil liberties
is necessary for internal security.
The third basic premise is that our government
is all good while theirs is the very personification
of evil,
the "evil-doers" as President Bush likes to call them.
The "conspiracy theories"
Bush is referring to similarly have
three basic premises & many divergent subsets.
The first is that the attack was known about
(and possibly, planned) by various elements of
the U.S. government before 9/11 and was allowed
to take place in order to bring about certain conditions,
including the suspension of our guaranteed civil liberties.
The second premise is that even
if bin Laden and the al Queda network
based in Afghanistan were immediately responsible for the
attack
that those supporting, funding and protecting them
are not for the most part based in Afghanistan
but are in fact closely connected to
the Bush administration and to the allies
President Bush has taken such efforts
to rally to our side.
The third premise is that a U.S. built oil pipeline
through Afghanistan which has been in
the planning stages for more than a decade
is the real goal of the war
and that a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan
was in the works long before September 11th.
What
makes these alternative viewpoints,
"conspiracy theories"?
It certainly isn't a lack of evidence.
In the American criminal justice system
there are three basic kinds of evidence;
direct, circumstantial and exculpatory.
Direct evidence of a crime might include
a confession, fingerprints, DNA samples,
credible witnesses or a surveillance tape
proving guilt beyond any reasonable doubt.
Circumstantial evidence is anything that lends credence to
a defendant being guilty but in itself is not sufficient
to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Exculpatory evidence on the other hand disproves
a defendants' guilt or contradicts other evidence
proving their guilt. In a recent NYC case
involving exculpatory evidence, a homeless man
charged with a vicious sidewalk assault on a tourist
was found to be on a store surveillance tape
recorded at the same time the assault took place.
In the American system of criminal law
prosecutors are required to share
all exculpatory evidence with the defense.
The official story as told
by the Bush administration & the U.S. corporate media
is constructed of "evidence" the government frankly admits
would not be admissible in any court of law.
If anything,
the Bush administrations'
version of events
is itself a very weakly constructed
"conspiracy theory"
challenged at every turn
by an enormous amount of exculpatory evidence,
much of it from the Bush administration itself.
No wonder Bush
insists on trials by military tribunals
for suspected terrorists, trials in which
virtually none of the evidence will be
revealed to the defendants or their
Bush-appointed defense attorneys.
It's absurd to claim that such trials will have
any similarity to those at Nuremburg after WWII.
The accused Nazis were given every opportunity
to mount a full defense and were directly confronted
by hundreds of witnesses for the prosecution
who they were able to fully cross-examine.
There is one very striking similarity
to Nuremberg however.
Like today's accused terrorists,
the Nazis were funded and supplied
by some of Americas' wealthiest businessmen
including GW Bush's grandfathers
who operated Wall Street banks,
shipping companies and other businesses
as fronts for the Nazis [1].
Osama bin Laden, the Taliban
and the largest sources of financing for terrorism
are also intimately connected to the Bush family
and to Wall Street, to some of Americas'
leading corporations and to members
of both Bush administrations.
The need for complete control of all information
and media coverage along with a 24 hour
a day propaganda effort to depict support
for the Bush administration as a patriotic duty
becomes obvious once one has even briefly
considered the exculpatory evidence.
Not only might it be difficult to convict
the so-called terrorists
in a legitimate court of law
but support for either the war
or the Bush administration
would be virtually impossible
once the full facts were known.
Nevertheless, being a loyal American
I must support the Presidents' position
in the war on terrorism with one additional point.
The American people should hold President Bush to
his own professed standard: White House called
The Bush Doctrine.
"If you harbor terrorists, you are terrorists.
If you train or arm a terrorist, you are a terrorist.
If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist,
you're a terrorist, & you will be held accountable
by the United States and our friends."
In other words, the President,
the CIA, his father, and many of their
business partners, cabinet appointees
and so-called allies are -
based on the President's own words -
terrorists.
Only by bringing them to justice
can we ever hope to win the war on terrorism.
BOSTON GLOBE
4/23/2001
TRIUMPHS, TROUBLES SHAPE GENERATIONS
PRESCOTT BUSH PAVED MODERATE
PATH FOR SON AND GRANDSON;
WOUNDED BY FRIEND'S BETRAYAL,
HE PUT HIGH PRICE ON LOYALTY
AN AMERICAN DYNASTY
Prescott Bush was surely aghast at a sensational
article
the New York Herald Tribune splashed on its front page
in July 1942. "Hitler's Angel Has 3 Million in US Bank,"
read the headline above a story reporting that
Adolf Hitler's financier had stowed the
fortune in Union Banking Corp.,
possibly to be held for "Nazi bigwigs."
Bush knew all about the New York bank:
He was one of its seven directors.
If the Nazi tie became known,
it would be a potential "embarrassment,"
Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman worried,
explaining to government regulators that their position
was merely an unpaid courtesy for a client.
The situation grew more serious when the
government seized Union's assets under the
Trading with the Enemy Act,
the sort of action that could have
ruined Bush's political dreams.
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
11/11/2000
John Loftus, former US Justice Dept.
Nazi War Crimes investigator and
President of the Florida Holocaust Museum,
is quoted as saying:
"The Bush family fortune came
from the Third Reich."
Hermann Goering, Hitler's #2 Man:
ãWhy of course the people don't want war.
Why should some poor slob on a farm want
to risk his life in a war when the best he can get
out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?
Naturally the common people don't want war:
neither in Russia, nor in England,
nor for that matter in Germany.
That is understood. But, after all, it is the
leaders of the country who determine the policy
and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along,
whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship,
or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be
brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them
they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers
for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
It works the same in any country.ä
George Orwell
In a time of universal deceit,
TELLING THE TRUTH
is a revolutionary act.
Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson,
The Supreme Court In the American
System of Government (1955)
I cannot say that our country could have no central police
without becoming totalitarian,
but I can say with great conviction that
it cannot be totalitarian without a
centralized national police.
A national police will have enough on enough people,
even if it does not elect to prosecute them,
so that it will find no opposition to its policies.
(Author's note: After its founding following WWII,
the CIA was initially staffed with thousands of former Nazis
who were experts in propaganda, biological warfare,
eugenics and social control as recently
admitted by the CIA itself.
For excellent published works on
the CIA/Nazi connection read:
Trading With The Enemy
by Charles Higham,
The Secret War Against the Jews
by Loftus and Arrons
and
Blowback
by Christopher Simpson.
UPI 9/20/2000
CIA says Nazi general was
intelligence
source
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 20 (UPI) --
The Central Intelligence Agency has for the first time
confirmed that a high-ranking Nazi general
placed his anti-Soviet spy ring at the disposal
of the United States during the early days of the Cold War.
The National Archives said in a release Wednesday
that the CIA had filed an affidavit in U.S. District Court
"acknowledging an intelligence relationship with
German General Reinhard Gehlen
that it has kept secret for 50 years...
The CIA's announcement marks
the first acknowledgement by that agency
that it had any relationship with Gehlen
and opens the way for declassification of
records about the relationship,"
the National Archives said Gehlen was
Hitler's senior intelligence officer on the Eastern Front
during the war and transferred his expertise
and contacts to the U.S. as
World War II reached its climax.
While Gehlen's relationship with U.S. intelligence
during the 1940s and 1950s has been the topic of
some five books over the years,
the eventual release of CIA documents pertaining to
the development of his European spy ring
could shed new light on the origins of the
Cold War and early U.S. espionage efforts against Moscow.
Gehlen's network of agents in Europe -
including many with Nazi backgrounds
who were bailed out of prisoner of war camps
by U.S. intelligence officers -
was known as the Gehlen Organization
and received millions of dollars in funding
from the U.S. until 1956.
The CIA's acknowledgement of its dealings with Gehlen
came in a response to an appeal of a Freedom of Information
Act
request by researcher Carl Oglesby, the National Archives
said.
The agency pledged to release its records on the general
in
accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
San Francisco Bay Guardian May 7, 2001
"Honest and idealist ... enjoys good food and wine ...
unprejudiced mind ...
"That's how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency
assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg,
an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute,
the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution.
Augsburg's SS unit performed "special duties,"
a euphemism for exterminating Jews
and other "undesirables" during the Second World War.
Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes,
Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA,
which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet
affairs.
Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was
among a
rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence
shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.
Washington Post Sunday,
March 18, 2001
By George Lardner Jr.,
Staff Writer / Page A04
CIA Declassifies Its Records
On Dealings With Ex-Nazis
Documents May Give Clues About Obstacles
in Hunt for War Criminals
The CIA is finally getting around to declassifying the records
of its dealings with former Nazi spies after World War II.
It says it has found 251 boxes and 2,901 file
folders of potentially relevant documents -
- apparently more than 250,000 pages --
and that it will take about two years
to complete work on them.
Daily News 4/28/2001
Secret Files Show U.S. Used Nazis
...The documents show that high-ranking Nazis-
-including death doctor Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann-
-were coddled by American and Soviet spymasters
as World War II ended.
"The real winners of the Cold War were Nazi criminals,"
Justice Department official Eli Rosenbaum said.
"East and West became so rapidly focused on challenging each
other
that they lost their will to pursue Nazi perpetrators.
They even deemed some of the criminals to be useful allies."
Excerpt from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf:
The function of propaganda
does not lie in the scientific training of the individual,
but in calling the masses' attention
to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc.,
whose significance is thus for the first time
placed within their field of vision.
The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully
that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real,
the process necessary, the necessity correct, etc.
But since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in
itself,
since its function, like the poster, consists in attracting
the attention
of the crowd, and not in educating those who are already
educated or who are striving after
education and knowledge,
its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions
and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect...
The more modest its intellectual ballast,
the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions
of the masses, the more effective it will be...
"The art of propaganda lies in understanding
the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding,
through a psychologically correct form,
the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad
masses.
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited,
their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting
is enormous.
In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda
must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these
slogans
until the last member of the public understands what you
want
him to understand [or believe]...
"The war propaganda of the English
and Americans were psychologically sound.
By representing the Germans to their own people
as barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual soldier
for the terrors of war, and thus helped
to preserve him from disappointments.
After this, the most terrible weapon that was used against
him
seemed only to confirm what his propagandists had told him;
it likewise reinforce his faith in the truth of his government's
assertions,
while on the other hand it increased his rage and hatred
against the vile enemy For the cruel effects of the weapon,
whose use by the enemy he now came to know,
gradually came to confirm for him the 'Hunnish'
brutality of the barbarous enemy,
which he had heard all about;
and it never dawned on him for a moment that
his own weapons possibly, if not probably,
might be even more terrible in their effects...
"The function of propaganda is, for example,
not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people,
but exclusively to emphasize the one right
which it has set out to argue for.
Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth,
in so far as it favors the enemy,
and then set it before the masses with academic fairness;
its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly...
The broad mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats,
or even professors of political law, or even individuals
capable of forming a rational opinion;
it consists of plain mortals,
wavering and inclined to doubt and uncertainty.
As soon as our own propaganda admits so much as
a glimmer of right on the other side,
the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid.
The masses are then in no position to distinguish
where foreign injustice ends and our own begins."
Frederick Douglas (1857)
Find out just what the people will submit to,
and you have found out the exact amount
of injustice and wrong which
will be imposed upon them;
and these will continue until
they are resisted with either
words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by
the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Daily
News 11/14/2001
Bush OKs Secrecy
In Terror Trials
President Bush signed an order yesterday
that could allow accused Al Qaeda operatives
and other foreign terrorists to stand trial
before secretive military commissions similar
to the tribunals used to prosecute Nazis in World War II.
The order gives Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
authority to establish the tribunals, White House officials
said.
"Given the danger to the safety of the United States ...
I find ... that it is not practicable to apply ...
the principles of law and the rules of evidence
generally recognized in the trial
of criminal cases in the United States,"
Bush's order said.
DRUDGE REPORT
SUN NOV 11, 2001
BIG MEDIA FLORIDA RECOUNT:
GORE TOPPED BUSH IF ALL
UNDER/OVER VOTES COUNTED;
LEGAL STRATEGY DESTROYED CHANCES
A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida
presidential election commissioned by the nation's
main media outlets shows Al Gore edged ahead of George
W. Bush
"under all the scenarios for counting
all undervotes and overvotes statewide.
"If this were a dictatorship,
it'd be a heck of a lot easier,
just so long as I'm the dictator."
GW Bush during a photo-op
with Congressional leaders
on 12/18/2000.
As broadcast on CNN
and available in transcript on their website.