Document:How They Get Away With It

The mechanics of a cover-up

 essay  by Michael B Green dated 2006-06-28

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Subjects: 9-11/Commission, Norman Mineta, Lee Hamilton
Source: 9-11 Research (Link)
Version: 1.2

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How They Get Away With It

This article will not attempt to prove that 911 is a USGIC (USG Intelligence Community) domestic covert operation, but it will show how such operations are covered up and disguised from their immediate victims, the people of the United States.

I will rehearse Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's crucial testimony before the 911 Commission and offer both a brief and an extended analysis of it below, with several purposes in mind. First, the testimony and analysis are the kind of evidence that everyone can understand and take home; it is money in the bank. Secord, such is the kind of evidence that I have long been recommending that the 911-truth movement emphasize, namely evidence that is clear and compelling rather than evidence that is doubtful or dubious. Third, the example offered here begins to illustrate the kind of mass mind control that the Central Intelligence Agency has accomplished through its control of the media: the most damning facts can be right out there on the table in front of people, but most people cannot see them, or if they can see them they cannot reason from them clearly and productively. The natural cognitive and affective vulnerabilities of the masses against seeing unpleasant truths have been enhanced and refined by the establishment media shaping not only what they know through disinformation, but also how they think about what little they do know. ^[1] (Illuminating the public mind control is too vast a project for this essay.)

What Norman Mineta Said

Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta testified before the 911 Commission on May 23, 2003 and offered an interesting account of Vice President Cheney’s behavior as Flight 77 approached the Pentagon. ^[2] The essential testimony is in boldface.

MR. HAMILTON: We thank you for that. I wanted to focus just a moment on the Presidential Emergency Operating Center. You were there for a good part of the day. I think you were there with the vice president. And when you had that order given, I think it was by the president, that authorized the shooting down of commercial aircraft that were suspected to be controlled by terrorists, were you there when that order was given?

MR. MINETA: No, I was not. I was made aware of it during the time that the airplane [was] coming into the Pentagon. There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?" And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant. And --

MR. HAMILTON: The flight you're referring to is the --

MR. MINETA: The flight that came into the Pentagon.

MR. HAMILTON: The Pentagon, yeah.

MR. MINETA: And so I was not aware that that discussion had already taken place. But in listening to the conversation between the young man and the vice president, then at the time I didn't really recognize the significance of that.

And then later I heard of the fact that the airplanes had been scrambled from Langley to come up to DC, but those planes were still about 10 minutes away. And so then, at the time we heard about the airplane that went into Pennsylvania, then I thought, "Oh, my God, did we shoot it down?" And then we had to, with the vice president, go through the Pentagon to check that out.

MR. HAMILTON: Let me see if I understand. The plane that was headed toward the Pentagon and was some miles away, there was an order to shoot that plane down.

MR. MINETA: Well, I don't know that specifically, but I do know that the airplanes were scrambled from Langley or from Norfolk, the Norfolk area. But I did not know about the orders specifically other than listening to that other conversation.

MR. HAMILTON: But there very clearly was an order to shoot commercial aircraft down.

MR. MINETA: Subsequently I found that out. …

My own brief analysis of Cheney’s remarks is straightforward:

"The repeated questioning of Cheney by the young man whether "the orders still stand" had to be about whether the order NOT to destroy the approaching plane still stood. Given the two prior attacks against the Twin Towers using the commercial airliners as weapons, an order to destroy the plane approaching the Pentagon would be the only order to give and would not be subject to question by the young man as the plane approached. Furthermore, had Cheney's order been to fire on the plane approaching the Pentagon (which first came near the White House), the anti-aircraft capacity of the Pentagon (or White House), would have sufficed to take out that plane, and certainly to have attempted to take out that plane. Since the Langley/Norfolk jets are at least 10 minutes away and out of range, Cheney’s order is about the on-site Pentagon or White House defenses. Neither a shoot-down nor an attempted shoot-down occurred, and since Mineta does not speak of a last-second change in orders by Cheney, the only supportable conclusion is that Cheney's order was NOT to defend the Pentagon, an order so contrary to both common sense and military defense that it, and it alone, explains the repeated questioning by the young man."

There are several reasons why Cheney’s behavior matters, but first and foremost is that Vice President Dick Cheney is in the command position in defending the Pentagon as the airliner approaches. To appreciate the significance of this fact it helps to return to the basics of producing 911 as a USG Intelligence Community domestic covert operation. One essential component of the plan is to gain control of the commercial airliners and to have a reliable means of guiding them to their targets. ^[3] Another essential component is to make sure that nothing interferes with the airliners reaching their targets.

Michael Ruppert has done a first-rate job in Crossing the Rubicon to explain how the chain of command was quietly changed June 1, 2001 in anticipation of 911, probably to put Dick Cheney in charge of the NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) response that day, but he cannot quite find the direct evidence he wants to confirm Cheney’s command role. Ruppert has also recounted how as many as five simultaneous war games were running the morning of 911 so that even individuals not complicit with the 911 plot would be precluded from effective response. These war games involved live flight of actual airliners posing as hijacked planes, introduction of dummy hijacked planes into the radar screens of FAA comptrollers and phantom data into the independent radar systems of the military, an evacuation in the wake of a simulated crash of an airliner into the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), and the defense against a foreign invader. These games took NORAD jets normally available for interception far from their usual bases, and made directing the few remaining jets to their targets difficult if not impossible because of the problem of sorting genuine hijackings from phantom hijacking. Thus, whoever organized the war games to coincide with 911, and whoever coordinated them that day, but especially whoever assumed command of the NORAD response once the 911 attack began is a key operational player of 911. ^[4] The USGIC controlled media has buried the crucial 911 war games story to disguise USGIC complicity.

But wait, even disabling NORAD leaves the very pesky problem that the White House and Pentagon are equipped with their own anti-aircraft surface-to-air missile defenses that are adequate to down an approaching Boeing. What is needed is an inside man to make sure that the Pentagon does not shoot down the approaching plane. Did anyone say, “Dick Cheney”? Which is why Norman Mineta’s testimony matters so much: it is the very kind of direct evidence needed to understand 911 and gives strong independent support to Ruppert’s claim that Cheney commanded the overall USA “defense” against the 911 attacks. (And, of course, Cheney being in charge also explains why Bush was sidelined at Booker Elementary listening to “My Pet Goat.” Bush could not be trusted to perform publicly in a high-pressure domestic covert operation and was probably informed of it after-the-fact with a sly wink about “plausible deniability.”)

If Dick Cheney Was In On 911, Why Did Norman Mineta Say What He Did?

The question posed by this chapter title is a good one, but it has a simple answer. Mineta was not an operative in 911, he did not understand the significance of his testimony, and so he did not simply answer Lee Hamilton’s question, but elaborated on the general theme of orders to shoot down planes on 911. ^[5] Had the 911 Commission been interested in the truth rather than in covering up the truth, Hamilton & Co. would have pursued Mineta’s revelation with great diligence, extracting every relevant detail and putting it into context. Instead, Mineta’s embarrassing elaboration prompted both Commissioners Lee Hamilton and Tim Roemer to do their best to shut him down and up, and to blur and blunt and smother its significance. Such intervention by Hamilton and Roemer is by itself sufficient to establish the 911 Commission as committed to cover-up.

USGIC domestic covert operations succeed in part by appointing “investigative” panels or commissions that function as a profound tribal ritual intended to produce consensus; the greater the ceremony, the more compelling the conclusions seem. Key members whose principal purpose is to conceal the guilty actions of the culpable parties always control such “investigations”. The following discussion of Mineta’s testimony is intended as a civics lesson for the uninitiated, who are invited to assess its accuracy by examining the original in full 9-11Commission_Hearing_2003-05-23.htm here .

Mineta begins his testimony with an account of how he learned of the airliners crashing into the Twin Tower, and then states that he was summoned to the White House to operate out of that location. Mineta states that the White House was being evacuated when he arrived, that he met briefly with Richard Clarke, who had no new news, and “then the Secret Service escorted me down to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, otherwise known as the PEOC [the bunker].” Norman Mineta’s account of where he is, and when, dovetails perfectly with that of Richard Clarke, who states, “…Mineta called in from his car and I asked him to come directly to the Situation Room. He had two sons who were pilots for United. He did not know where they were that day. I suggested he join the Vice President [who Clarke advised has already been evacuated to the PEOC].” Clarke next greets his deputy Roger Cressey, then has a teleconference exchange with Acting Joint Chief of Staff Richard Myers about which jets had been scrambled from where. Myers tells Clarke that it will take fifteen minutes to establish a CAP (Combat Air Patrol) over Washington, D.C., and it is already 9:28 a.m. ^[6] Thus, by that time Norman Mineta is ensconced in the PEOC with Vice President Dick Cheney, nine minutes before the Pentagon crash at 9:37 a.m.

Mineta describes his efforts, operating from the PEOC, to monitor and restrict air traffic, and says innocuously, “Within a few minutes, American Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.” Mineta describes his response to the prior attacks on the Twin Towers and to ongoing hijackings without ever mentioning VP Cheney, with whom Mineta has been sharing the PEOC bunker.

Commissioner Lee Hamilton then intervenes. Not wanting it to appear as though the executive leadership did nothing to stop the hijackers, Hamilton tries to lead Mineta to say that he witnessed Cheney give an order to shoot down the hijacked planes. Hamilton is thinking of Flight 93, and perhaps a later general order, but Mineta knows nothing of this and has said he will testify only to what he personally observed. Mineta then associates to Cheney’s telling the young man that the “orders still stand.” An essential point to understanding Cheney’s reference is that since the scrambled jets from Langley are 10 minutes away, and the approaching airliner is only 10 miles away (less than 2 minutes), Cheney’s order to shoot or not shoot refers to the White House or the Pentagon’s in situ defenses, not to the scrambled jets. One of the great hoaxes of the 911 Commission report is its deliberate refusal to discuss clearly, let alone acknowledge, the White House and the Pentagon’s anti-aircraft defenses.

I call this Commission’s failure to mention the Pentagon’s defenses a hoax with some caution. I have not read the report at length, but I have word-and-phrase searched its text in Adobe without results; if someone knows better I will stand corrected on this point. My bet is that the 911 Commission cover-up has put itself over a barrel: it cannot admit that the Pentagon had anti-aircraft defenses because that raises the question of who was in charge of them and why they were not used, nor can it deny that there were anti-aircraft defenses and recommend installing them because doing so would draw attention to the issue from too many loyal military who would see the red flag. ^[7] I will bet the same with respect to the House-Senate Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. Of course the Pentagon was quick to announce its helplessness the very day of the attack in USA Today, though with remarkable ambiguity:

The attacks also will unquestionably prompt a review of security procedures at Washington institutions such as the White House, Pentagon and State Department.

Among the questions being asked here: How could the Pentagon, the center of the U.S. defense establishment, not be prepared to defend itself against an attack by an airplane?

Spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said the Pentagon has no anti-aircraft defense system that he is aware of. The White House is assumed to have surface-to-air missiles available for protection. The problem, according to past and present government officials, is who makes a decision to fire a missile at an incoming airplane in the midst of downtown Washington. (Emphasis added) - From USA Today

Fortunately, Mineta’s testimony answers who made that decision on 911: Dick Cheney. The White House defenses were beefed up to shoot down incoming aircraft after a plane landed on its lawn in 1994; we are entitled to believe the same of the Pentagon's defenses on general principles. Indeed, it is preposterous to think that the Pentagon did not have anti-aircraft defenses on 911. As said facetiously by John Judge, whose mother was a career employee of the Pentagon:

“Beyond all the FAA and NORAD radar tracking it [Flight 77], there is separate and special radar on 24/7 in the P-56 restricted area around DC and even radar on the roof of the Pentagon that was pointed out to me in 1998 as "watching the skies to make sure they don't fly a plane in here". The "they" referred to "Muslims" who had been calling in death threats daily, supposedly. ^[8], ^[9]

Needless to say, such special efforts with radar defenses and fears of a plane being used to attack the Pentagon go hand-in-hand with on-site anti-aircraft defenses that are intended for use, not decoration. On June 25, 2006 I personally asked Lt. Colonel Robert M. Bowman, former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the U.S. Air Force in the Ford and Carter administrations, whether the Pentagon had anti-aircraft defenses. Colonel Bowman said that they did, and that he knew because he had been told that the Pentagon had them. Additionally, the young man who kept interrupting Cheney as the plane approached the Pentagon did so because something could be done about it, and not by the scrambled jets that were out of range, but by these on-site Pentagon anti-aircraft defenses. ^[10]

Hamilton never had any intention of bringing to the forefront that Cheney was in command of the defense of the Pentagon, let alone that he had ordered NOT to shoot down the approaching plane. Hamilton is fortunate that Mineta seems to have been advised that Cheney had given a shoot-down order after-the-fact – “Subsequently I found that out” – rather than the interpretation given here. Hamilton then tries to salvage something by urging Mineta to say that Cheney had ordered the Pentagon plane shot down. “Let me see if I understand. The plane that was headed toward the Pentagon and was some miles away, there was an order to shoot that plane down.” Mineta resists this pressure, so Hamilton re-applies it, “But there very clearly was an order to shoot commercial aircraft down,” but again strikes out, and then changes the subject.

Following a single distracting question by Commissioner Kean about how to improve security generally, Commissioner Tim Roemer (House Intelligence Committee) enters the ring to do damage control. Roemer underscores that Mineta was not present when the shoot down order was given, and once having established Mineta’s absence, whittles away at Mineta’s belief that the “order” in question was about shooting down the approaching plane. “Why did you infer that that was a shoot-down?” he asks, intimidating Mineta into saying that his belief was merely “an intuitive reaction to certain statements being made” and warning Mineta away from his most reasonable belief. But Roemer goes further by coaching Mineta, from whom he is supposed to be eliciting information, what he expects Mineta to say, fortunately in vain. Roemer almost testifies for Mineta instead of learning from him, which is almost a certain sign of an “investigator” trying to put the “official story” in place through coercive coaching rather than permitting the truth to emerge. Upon learning that Richard Clarke was in the Situation Room, questions and answers proceed as follows:

MR. ROEMER: So there was the Situation Room making decisions about what was going to happen on shoot downs --

MR. MINETA: I don't believe they were --

MR. ROEMER: — as well as the PEOC?

MR. MINETA: I don't believe they were making any decisions. I think they were more information-gathering from various agencies.

MR. ROEMER: Could it have been in the Situation Room where somebody in the Situation Room recommended the shoot-down and the vice president agreed to that?

MR. MINETA: Commissioner Roemer, I would assume that a decision of that nature would have had to be made at a much higher level than the people who were in the Situation Room.

MR. ROEMER: So take me through that. The Situation Room is monitoring the daily minute-by-minute events and they find out that Flight 77 is headed to the Pentagon. Somebody's got to be getting that information. The Situation Room is then communicating with the PEOC and saying, "We've got another flight that's on its way toward the Pentagon. Here are the options." Then the vice president talks to the president and says, "Here are the options; we have a shoot-down recommendation. Do you agree, Mr. President?" Is that what happens?

MR. MINETA: Again, that would be speculation on my part as to what was happening on that day, so I just wouldn't be able to really answer that — on that inquiry.

Roemer ends with a finesse that has not been appreciated. Mineta may well have thought that Cheney had ordered the Pentagon to fire at the approaching plane, but Roemer needs to disguise the fact that the Pentagon has such defenses and that Cheney was in charge of their use. Roemer does so cunningly in the following exchange by focusing exclusively on the possibility of a scrambled jet shoot-down. If Mineta had the Pentagon defenses in mind, he was warned off mentioning them, and he ends by “testifying” to what he was told, i.e., the official story that Flight 93 was not shot down over Pennsylvania.

MR. ROEMER: I'm just trying to figure out how the Situation Room, which was gathering the minute-by-minute evidence and information and talking probably to a host of different people, and how they're interacting with the PEOC and then how the PEOC is interacting with the president, who is at that point on Air Force One, how a decision is made to shoot down a commercial airliner.

And then would you say — let's say we're trying to put that part of the puzzle together. Then would your inference be that they scrambled the jets to shoot down the commercial airliner, it failed, and the commercial airliner therefore crashed into the Pentagon, the jets were not able to get there in time to succeed in a mission that they'd been tasked to do?

MR. MINETA: I'm not sure that the aircraft that were scrambled to come up to the DC area from Norfolk were under orders to shoot the airplane down. As I said, I just --

MR. ROEMER: But it was an inference on your part.

MR. MINETA: It was an inference, without a doubt. And that's why, in thinking about the United plane that went down in Pennsylvania, the question that arose in my mind --

MR. ROEMER: Right away was "Was that shot down?" And did you ever get an answer to that?

MR. MINETA: Yes, sir. The vice president and I talked about that. We then made the inquiry of the Department of Defense. They then got back to us saying, "No, it was not our aircraft."

MR. ROEMER: No shots were fired and no effort was made to shoot that down.

MR. MINETA: That's correct.

So by the time Roemer is through with him, Mineta is reduced to having no more than an “inference” about what the order in question was, based only upon his “intuitive reaction.” Roemer has tried very hard to make the obvious seem doubtful and dubious.

Roemer is not the least bit serious about “trying to figure out how the Situation Room which was gathering the minute-by-minute evidence ... is interacting with the PEOC [where Cheney was].” Such remarks are pure theater, sheer farce inflicted upon its unthinking audience. Richard Clarke was in charge of the Situation Room on 911, but when he testifies the Honorable Tim Roemer does not ask Clarke about how he communicated with the PEOC where Cheney was in command. Indeed, Roemer does not ask, and Clarke does not tell, so we have a carefully crafted and orchestrated ballet unfolding openly before us. The cover-up is done in front of our eyes, in plain sight, and succeeds because the public cannot think “So why didn’t Roemer ask Clarke what Roemer said he wanted to know?” Nonetheless, for titillation, and to produce the illusion of much profounder differences than are to be found amongst the factions warring for control of this country, Clarke provides that answer in his book:

I picked up the open line to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, only to find that once again it had a dial tone. When I punched the PEOC button, the person answering the line grunted and passed the phone to Major Fenzel. “Who is the asshole answering the phone for you, Mike?” I asked. “That would be the Vice President, Dick. And he’d like you to come over.” …[Upon his arrival in the PEOC, Clarke] could see the Situation Room. I grabbed Mike Fenzel. “How’s it going over here?” I asked. “It’s fine,” Major Fenzel whispered, “but I can’t hear the crisis conference because Mrs. Cheney keeps turning down the volume on you so she can hear CNN... and the Vice President keeps hanging up the open line to you.” ^[11]

Cheney’s order not to shoot down the incoming airliner does not depend upon any information he is receiving from Clarke in the Situation Room – he does not need such information, he knows his job that day without it. Roemer’s role is to perform a cover-up that is transparent for any who wish to see through it. Indeed, what interpretation of Cheney’s orders to the young man does Roemer wish us to entertain? Perhaps, for example, a hungry Vice President Cheney had ordered a pastrami on rye, hold the mustard, plenty of mayo, with a side of what were then still French fries; perhaps the young man, knowing the passion of the Vice President for beef yet aware of the impending crisis, was persistently asking because there was a chance convergence of the increasing readiness of the sandwich and the impending attack so that the attentive young man was merely asking whether under even these pressured circumstances the Vice President still wanted his food orders filled. And Cheney, not a man to be trifled with nor insulted by suggesting a Gerald Ford-like inability to do two things at the same time, whipped his neck around and snapped testily, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"

I am not simply trying to be funny. I am making the point that aside from a wildly facetious interpretation, Cheney was doing just what it appears to us that he was doing, namely ordering the Pentagon anti-aircraft defenses NOT to fire. ^[12] But two points are in order, one about Norman Mineta, and the other about Lee Hamilton.

Mineta: Transportation Secretary Mineta is at least as well placed as we, and his very troublesome testimony seems sincere, yet he came in believing that Cheney’s order was to shoot down the plane, and in the exchange with Roemer Mineta voices the opinion that the shoot-down was to be by the scrambled jets, not by resident Pentagon defenses. I will offer an opinion, not a firm conclusion. Mineta is a member of the power elite, but he is not privy to the operational details of 911 and genuinely does not understand 911 as we do, viz., as a USGIC domestic covert operation. Mineta genuinely failed to integrate that the scrambled jets were too far out to shoot down the approaching airliner, and he assumed falsely that the Vice President was trying to prevent the attack rather than facilitate it. Covert operations are a large conspiracy, but not a vast one, and knowledge is segmented down the line on a need-to-know basis. Mineta genuinely did not grasp 911 at the time of his testimony; whether he has since is beyond our ken.

Hamilton: There is little in the limited exchange between Hamilton and Mineta to show Hamilton’s role in the larger cover-up. But major covert operations cannot be disguised without controlling the “investigative” committees by packing them with operatives loyal to the perpetrator, or at least loyal to the system of secret government covert operations. Hamilton is loyal to both.

USGIC domestic covert operations do not come from nothing. They have a history, and Lee Hamilton has a history of covering them up. To be brief, and regrettably cryptic through summary: the 1980s were rocked by a series of gargantuan scandals about activities whose underlying purpose was in part the consolidation of power by the factions responsible for 911. These included: 1) October Surprise, the secret deal cut between the Bush-Reagan team to have the Ayatollah hold the Iranian Embassy hostages until after the November 1980 election, to assure a Bush-Reagan victory over Carter, in return for US arms delivered to Iran via Israel. Principals directly involved included George Casey, Donald Gregg, and George H. W. Bush; 2) Inslaw, the theft by the USGIC of William Hamilton’s PROMIS software, and its enormously profitable privatization by Bush41 cronies, to facilitate world-wide economic spying on competitive and allied countries. PROMIS and its successors also serves as the software foundation for the data integration of the growing police state, Poindexter’s TIA, and its privatized versions in Florida using the Matrix software provided by Seisint, a company founded after 911by Hank Asher and since sold to Lexis-Nexis for $750,000,000. Asher also founded DBT (Database Technologies), the company that rigged the 2000 presidential election for Jeb Bush in Florida on behalf of his brother by scrubbing eligible Democratic voters from the voter rolls. Hank Asher by his own admission spent the early 1980s flying cocaine and marijuana to and from South American but dismissed this major felony as due to “a hunger for adventure” and remarked of it “I didn't feel like I had done a crime.” The only persons I know of who do not feel that their participation in international drug running is a crime are CIA sponsored and protected drug-runners. ^[13] 3) The Savings & Loan scandal, a deliberate scheme to de-regulate the thrifts so that the CIA, the Mafia and their friends in high places could buy up such institutions, commit gross fraud free from government regulation, and pass on the nearly trillion dollar costs to the taxpayer. ^[14] 4) Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a CIA/military controlled bank that channeled S&L lucre as well as laundered drug and arms profits into covert operations throughout the world. 5) Iran-Contra, a keystone in the destruction of the Congress as an autonomous political body. The Secret Government, in which Bush41 played a major direct operational role during Iran-Contra, deliberately and flagrantly ignoring both versions of the Boland Amendment in funding the Contras by setting up secret training sites for the Contras in the United States and in Mexico outside the regular chain of military command. These sites trained privatized armies for covert military and para-military actions that were outside regular command structure but that had access to support and supplies from the US military, i.e., a privatized off-books department of covert operations. Financing was through CIA drug running, and the sale of illegal arms often obtained from military storehouses though such figures as Generals John K. Singlaub and Richard Secord. Dick Cheney (ranking House Republican in Iran-Contra) played a key role working directly with Lee Hamilton (who chaired the Iran-Contra panel) to make certain that Bush41 did not have to testify before Congress, and was rewarded accordingly. (The “Iran” part of the scandal was a separate operation that was put into the mix to confuse the public by pretending that a patriotic motive of freeing the Lebanon hostages was involved; it wasn’t.) And, most importantly, recall that just before Bush41 left office, he issued a Christmas Eve blanket pardon to all his Iran-Contra co-conspirators, on the grounds of their “patriotism,” whose upcoming trials threatened to expose Bush’s central role in the operation. ^[15]

Lee Hamilton played key roles in covering up two of these inter-connected scandals, October Surprise and Iran-Contra. Defrauding America provides an excellent account of Hamilton’s role in the October Surprise Committee, which he chaired, links particular players amongst all these scandals, and documents in detail Hamilton’s refusal to allow relevant testimony from whistle-blower CIA operatives, and concluded that October Surprise never occurred. As summarized by FAA whistle-blower Rodney Stich, whose offer to facilitate testimony of eyewitness participants in Iran-Contra was refused despite a long personal letter to Lee Hamilton detailing the evidence:

In July 1992, the Hamilton committee released an interim report stating there was no evidence that Bush was in Paris [to clinch the October Surprise deal] or that there was any support for the October Surprise charges. The Hamilton Committee didn’t obtain testimony of any of the parties willing to testify that would prove the existence of the scheme and Bush’s presence at the Paris meetings. ^[16]

Though short on specifics, Michael Ruppert writes of Hamilton’s role in Iran-Contra:

Iran-Contra was effectively “managed” by Lee Hamilton in the House and John Kerry (among others) in the Senate throughout the late 1980s to conceal the greatest crimes of the era, crimes committed by a litany of well-known government operations. At the time, Hamilton was the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Ruppert quotes famed investigative reporter Sarah McClendon regarding October Surprise:

Congressman Hyde elicited and obtained a promise from Chairman Lee Hamilton, D., Ind. Of the House Task Force on October Surprise, that the group would clear President Bush of going to Paris to cinch a deal of weapons for Iran in exchange for retaining American hostages to be delivered to President Ronald Reagan and not to outgoing President Carter. …Hamilton held a press conference to clear Bush before the investigation into the deal between the Reagan-Bush candidates for presidential office and the Iranians had even started. Hamilton then admitted he had not interrogated witnesses or talked with his special attorney hired to investigate the matter.

Perhaps the best line, though short, is that Hamilton declared himself “satisfied” with the testimony of Lt. Colonel Oliver North in the Iran-Contra hearings. ^[17]

There Must Be A Perfectly Reasonable Explanation For What Dick Cheney Said

Even if the reader of this essay is not afflicted with the “reasonable explanation” meme of the chapter title, it is useful to know that most Americans are, both by natural bent and by CIA media-influenced control of the popular consciousness, inclined to accept such things at face value and not go much further. Although many folk have written about Mineta’s testimony, I am not aware of anyone who has taken the obvious next step – as we are doing here – of following up on it. That’s where the fun is.

I apologize to the reader for making this essay a shaggy dog story instead of a sound bite, but there is a larger picture that is easy to miss in the forensics of 911. Since I began with a promise of evidence of a cover-up that you could take to the bank, let me now deliver it. Again, the simple interpretation of Cheney’s remarks offered here is the best: The attack on the Pentagon was required to mobilize the U.S. military that were not complicit in 911 to the cause of the specious War on Terror. An inside man in charge was needed to make certain that the Pentagon and/or White House did not use their anti-aircraft defenses to down the attacking American Flight 77. That man was Dick Cheney, as Norman Mineta inadvertently revealed in his elaborative association to Lee Hamilton’s question.

So, how do we test our interpretation supposedly spun out of idle paranoid suspicions and conspiracy-mongering ignorance? We do the obvious: we examine what the 911 Commission report made of it. We look to see our paranoid suspicions rebutted by the hard facts, laid to rest by a simple, plain, and full in-context explanation of what Norman Mineta heard Dick Cheney say. We look for the testimony of the Young Man or even the Vice President about what the order was that Norman Mineta so inconveniently mentioned. And there is an answer:

Though Still Preserved on the Official National Commission Website Under “Full Testimony” Norman Mineta’s Contribution Has Otherwise Been Air-Brushed or Photo-Shopped Into the Dust Bin of History,

Let’s have some laughs even though it is gallows humor. What did you expect? What Mineta said was too hot to handle except by the “pastrami on rye” interpretation, and that would not fly, so it was as so many countries discovered of their political dissidents who were victims of CIA-backed dirty wars, “disappeared.” In fact, Mineta’s entire account of his being in the PEOC with Dick Cheney, or even of Dick Cheney being in the PEOC before the Pentagon was hit, was “disappeared” not only from the report, but also from his official published statement of what he knows from his personal observations happened on 911. ^[18] Mineta himself has been disappeared from the 911 Commission Report with the exception of a solitary mention on p. 326 that Mineta was part of a group that met with Bush at the end of September 11 to review the events of the day.

What does the Report say? Amongst other things, it confirms that Mineta heard what he claimed about the fact that the Langley fighters were out of range to shoot down the approaching airliner. “The Pentagon had been struck by American 77 at 9:37:46. The Langley fighters were about 150 miles away.” (p.27)

And where was Dick “the orders still stand” Cheney at the time the Pentagon was struck? Down in the PEOC with Norman saying that the orders still stand? Well, no, that would be embarrassing. Thus, the Report first advises us that though there were teleconferences, nobody on the teleconferences knew that an airliner was approaching the Pentagon.

The FAA, the White House [Cheney], and the Defense Department each initiated a multiagency teleconference before 9:30. Because none of these teleconferences—at least before 10:00—included the right officials from both the FAA and Defense Department, none succeeded in meaningfully coordinating the military and FAA response to the hijackings. …

At the White House, the video teleconference was conducted from the Situation Room by Richard Clarke [whom Roemer had unsuccessfully pressured Mineta to testify was in charge]… Logs indicate that it began at 9:25 and included the CIA; the FBI; the departments of State, Justice, and Defense; the FAA; and the White House Shelter [PEOC]. The FAA and CIA joined at 9:40. The first topic addressed in the White House video teleconference—at about 9:40—was the physical security of the President, the White House, and federal agencies. Immediately thereafter it was reported that a plane had hit the Pentagon. We found no evidence that video teleconference participants had any prior information that American 77 had been hijacked and was heading directly toward Washington. Indeed, it is not clear to us that the video teleconference was finally under way before 9:37, when the Pentagon was struck. (p.36) (Italics added.) [COMMENT: So much “investigation,” so few facts, and the key reported facts are false. This final italicized sentence, by itself, also suffices to reveal the entire 911 Commission as a cruel hoax. After all this grand ritual, the Commission does not even know whether or not a video teleconference had started before the Pentagon was hit! The reader who does not immediately and instinctively draw the conclusion that the Commission is a sham should reflect upon such a failure as a palpable example of the mass mind control. The 911 Commission is full of such cruel jokes. ^[19]]

So what has become of the Dick Cheney that Norman Mineta described, the man with whom he shared the PEOC bunker and heard giving command orders during the final minutes of Flight 77’s approach while coordinating with Richard Clarke who was in the Situation Room? Well, according to the Report, Cheney was never in the PEOC until after Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Additionally, rather than being at the center of things, Cheney was demoted to the status of a precious but passive piece of furniture that had to be protected.

At 9:33, the tower supervisor at Reagan National Airport picked up a hotline to the Secret Service and told the Service’s operations center that “an aircraft [is] coming at you and not talking with us.” This was the first specific report to the Secret Service of a direct threat to the White House. No move was made to evaluate the Vice President at this time. As the officer who took the call explained, “[I was] about to push the alert button when the tower advised that the aircraft was turning south and approaching Reagan National Airport.

American 77 began turning south, away from the White House, at 9:34. It continued heading south for roughly a minute, before turning west and beginning to circle back. This news prompted the Secret Service to order the immediate evacuation of the Vice President just before 9:36. Agents propelled him out of his chair and told him he had to get to the bunker. The Vice President entered the underground tunnel leading to the shelter at 9:37.

Once inside, Vice President Cheney and the agents paused in an area of the tunnel that had a secure phone, a bench, and television. …He learned in the tunnel that the Pentagon had been hit, and he saw television coverage of smoke coming from the building. (pp.39-40) [COMMENT: And, presumably, was then served his pastrami on rye sandwich by the discreet young man.] (Italics added)

So, dear reader, the plausible explanation for what Norman Mineta heard Dick Cheney say down in the PEOC is that Mineta hallucinated the whole thing. The 911 Report as much as says so. You can take this part of the cover-up, and what it disguises, to the bank.

Final Refusal To See What Is In Front of One’s Eyes

Still, dear reader, you may be inclined to protest, “But wait! Even if you are right that Dick Cheney gave the order you said, all that shows is that he made a tough call that day under great pressure – maybe he did not want to shoot down a plane over a crowded metropolitan area – and who’s to say it was the wrong call?” Alas, such a protest is the last stand of

There Must Be A Perfectly Reasonable Explanation for What Dick Cheney Did

(Even Though There Is A Carefully Orchestrated Conspiracy To Cover It Up)

There is no answer to such a protest except to suggest reading carefully footnote 7 in this essay, and keeping in mind the other facts in this essay that effectively rule out this interpretation, and learning many more such facts besides. Such a protest is the desperate child of compartmentalization and denial that follow in the train of a prolonged primitive tribal ritual that pronounces the official 911 consensus of and for its members. These defenses work to ward off facing the great horror that sits before us plain as day, plain as the cover-up of Norman Mineta’s testimony. It is not easy to recognize that the rulers of the United States are cold-blooded mass murderers of the very people they are pretending to protect from their own terror by a process of systematic control and incremental construction and implementation of the infrastructure of a fascist state. It is so much easier to remain blinkered, since doing so makes what I am suggesting here seem like a mere phantasm, a novelist’s imaginary nightmare, as one’s daily life so far proceeds largely unperturbed except for the prices at the pump and those seemingly irrelevant declarations of dictatorial powers by the deranged fool that a faction of the rulers have seated in the presidency. ^[20]

The last time fascism had a real chance of gaining sway in the United States was in the 1930s, before the US entry into WWII put it on a permanent wartime economy, when the brutal poverty of the Great Depression was an impetus to organize the people against the ruling classes. The rulers prepared a fascist counter-revolutionary response for that contingency. ^[21] The current preparation of a police state infrastructure is endorsed by all factions of the ruling class in anticipation of the need to regulate and control a deprived, hostile, and potentially organized population whose basic needs the rulers have little or no interest in meeting as the civilized world faces an initially gradual but then profound derogation in the face of an unavoidable energy shortage. ^[22] The imminent gap between world energy resources and the needs of growing national economies explains both the increasing bellicosity of US imperialism that is supported by both parties of the rulers and the domestic installation of a proto-fascist police state. The ruling class has understood the advantage of putting the fascist infrastructure into place before it is urgently needed, and most importantly, not only promoting the appearance of an external enemy as in Orwell’s 1984, but also keeping the oppression itself quiet and all but invisible until it is time to put it into fuller service.

The 911 Commission is the Warren Commission redux. The Warren Commission report was released just shy of the anniversary of JFK’s murder to thunderous applause by the media about how thorough, exhaustive, painstaking, definitive, etc. it was, ad nauseam. The Warren Commission was in fact an elaborate cover-up. The 26 volumes of evidence were released several weeks later, quietly. The evidence itself was biased, corrupted, selective, and distorted, but those shortcomings aside, its cumulative weight in many compelling details that could not be excised or sanitized, supported just the opposite of the Commission’s conclusion, viz., that JFK was murdered by a conspiracy involving at least two shooters, neither of whom was Oswald.

Representing the Eastern Establishment that had participated in the murder of JFK, ^[23] Allen Dulles, senior partner in the premiere Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, and also the former director of the CIA whom Kennedy had fired because Dulles had deceived him about the Bay of Pigs invasion’s chances for success without direct US military support, served on the Warren Commission. Dulles masterminded the JFK cover-up with John McCloy, ^[24] who like Dulles was a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and also former legal counsel to the pro-Nazi I.G. Farben, former President of the World Bank, former High Commission for Germany, and Chairman of both the Rockefeller controlled Chase Manhattan Bank and the Ford Foundation. Dulles, speaking in confidence to his co-Commissioners on July 9, 1964, was unconcerned that the Report was grossly at odds with the evidence. Alluding to the discrepancy, he assured them “But nobody reads. Don’t believe people read in this country. There will be a few professors that will read the record. …the public will read very little.” ^[25] Dulles might have added, “and think even less.”

Does the assassination of President Kennedy still matter today? The persons most passionate about exposing JFK’s killers understood fully that democracy itself was on the line and that democracy did not have a chance to survive unless the festering boil of a state murder were lanced and the power structure of the US Government remade. Kennedy was killed by the covert action end of the secret government that members of the CFR tricked President Truman into signing into law with the National Security Act of 1947. Such CFR members as Dean Acheson and Clark Clifford had pitched the NSA to Truman as necessary to avoid another Pearl Harbor by centralizing intelligence gathering, but these lawyerly men had included a deftly worded term of art in the legislation that also allowed the CIA to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” This loophole was used to create, inter alia, a private mercenary force that undermined, toppled or assassinated leaders of foreign regimes who refused to bend their knee to U.S. imperialism. ^[26]

Truman had been duped. A mere 30 days after Kennedy’s murder, Truman sounded the alarm in the Washington Post that he was “disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.” ^[27] Truman’s forceful June 10, 1964 letter to William B. Arthur of Look made clear how he had been deceived:

Thank you, for the copy of LOOK with the article on the Central Intelligence Agency. It is, I regret to say, not true to the facts in many respects.

The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities. ^[28]

Kennedy was the last U.S. president who intervened vigorously and effectively to constrain the power and ambitions of our modern-day robber barons, war profiteers, and empire builders. Although Kennedy was both a capitalist and an imperialist, he nonetheless fell outside the very narrow parameters of foreign policy and domestic economic policy acceptable to the ruling classes, and was murdered in a cooperative venture by both the faction that filled his administration (CFR) and those who hated and despised him (e.g., the far right, the military). There is no need to recapitulate the boundaries that Kennedy transgressed, which has been ably done by others, ^[29] but we should remember Malcolm X’s trenchant remark about his death that “the chickens have come home to roost.” Malcolm meant that it is impossible to create a secret para-military force that destroys and murders political opponents abroad without using it at home as well. Nor, we add, to create such a secret force without expanding its power and scope.

With their murder of John F. Kennedy, the factions of the American ruling class committed themselves to the selective use of violent criminal means to accomplish their domestic political agendas. What is the point of possessing such enormous power if not to use it to advance one’s ends against all enemies, foreign or domestic? They proceeded with the assassinations of all the potent political leaders of the 1960s who, whatever their vast differences, shared a fundamental concept of the “common good” for which they all fought in vital and concrete ways, and to whose causes they were able to mobilize masses of people: JFK, X, MLK, RFK. Each murder and cover-up of these men is extraordinarily well documented as a murder of state, although invisible as such to most of the people whose leaders have been take from them. Finally, with the demise of the Soviet Union as a ubiquitous external enemy, and with the approaching urgency of Peak Oil, the grim decline of world hydrocarbon reserves at a time of burgeoning world need, the rulers have systematically infiltrated, supported and come to control terrorist groups whom they use as the fall guys or patsies for the major acts of domestic terrorism that they have themselves planned and implemented: World Trade Center 1993, Oklahoma City, and 9/11. ^[30]

George Orwell ends his prophetic novel, 1984, with an “Appendix” devoted to the long-term bureaucratic task of reshaping the English language into “Newspeak” so that by 2050 the tyrants who ruled Oceania would have accomplished a sort of “voluntary” thought control by preventing its people from having even the capacity to formulate, let alone understand, potentially disruptive humanizing concepts that were once commonplace. In the United States this process was put into place in the early 1950s far more subtly and persuasively than even Orwell could have imagined by the Psychology Strategy Board, whose mandate remains classified. Whereas Newspeak deprived those who used it of virtually any conceptual sophistication or nuance, the current rulers of our world have managed to keep intact the capacity for nuance and subtle concept formation, but to selectively deprive those whose welfare is most affected by certain concepts of the capacity to understand their meaning. “Class warfare” is one of those concepts. The ruling class, by contrast, understands perfectly well what this concept means, and wages it ceaselessly.

References

1. ^  After producing endless proofs that JFK was murdered by conspiracy that largely fell upon deaf ears, JFK researcher Vincent J. Salandria had by 1971 appreciated that USGIC domestic covert operations are invariably “transparent conspiracies” revealed by the evidence for any who wish to see them, hence are a declaration of power; see his False Mystery, Chpt. “A Model of Explanation,” Square Deal Press, 2004. Salandria’s close friend, psychiatrist E. Martin Schotz, explored the mass denial that refuses to recognize these transparent conspiracies, adopting Orwell’s analysis with an added emphasis on existential responsibility; History Will Not Absolve Us, Kurtz, Ulmer, & DeLucia Book Publishers, 1996.
2. ^  I am not trying to beg any questions about what hit the Pentagon, though I remain on record that it most likely was a Boeing. I have long held that this question is a destructive tar baby designed by the perpetrators of 911 to embroil the 911 Truth Movement in endless infighting that keeps it from using the indisputable evidence at its disposal, and to discredit it amongst the military-D.C. population who witnessed the Boeing crash, and all their friends and associates.
3. ^  Those of us who believe that WTC 1, 2, & 7 were brought down by pre-planted explosives as part of a dramatic chest-thumping “shock and awe” PSYOPS put special emphasis on the “reliable means of guidance” because there are few faux pas more embarrassing than to leave standing a tall building rigged with explosives in the wake of a covert operation that pretends that the collapse of that or another building was due to other causes (e.g., McVeigh’s truck-bomb, the crashed commercial airliners and fires). For this reason, amongst others, it is highly likely that remote pilot or on-board autopilot controlled the planes in order to eliminate human error or indecision, especially the likely human error of the poorly trained pilots who supposedly flew them. It is also always worth reminding ourselves that for producing and managing the dramatic crises associated with domestic covert operations, the media already is under the direct operational control of the USGIC through a skein of ownership, asset placement, and class allegiance that is loose on the periphery (so some genuine news gets out but is then forgotten and not integrated into a continuing truthful narrative) but tight at the center (so that the primary goal of confusing and misinforming the populace is accomplished). Also, the USGIC does learn from their mistakes. Alex Jones’s DVD The Road to Tyranny contains a dozen contemporaneous on-the-scene local TV station reports from Oklahoma City in the aftermath of its 1995 USGIC domestic covert terrorism operation that report the presence of very powerful unexploded bombs within the Murrah Federal Building. The massive explosions of the WTC buildings eliminated any such remaining evidence. It is plausible that Flight 93 failed to hit its intended target of WTC7, which had to be taken down by the pre-planted charges in order to avoid detection of its being rigged with explosives. The OKC bombings ushered in the Effective Anti-Terrorist Act that began implementing a frank police state; 911 has brought us the Patriot Acts and the open declaration of dictatorial powers by the President for the President and the ruling class interests he represents.
4. ^  When Crossing the Rubicon was published, Ruppert was not aware of Norman Mineta’s testimony even though it had occurred over a year earlier. Ruppert’s understanding was that there was merely a web-spit rumor afloat of a “cryptic statement” by Dick Cheney that some liked to interpret for idiosyncratic reasons as a “stand down” order. See Rubicon, pp. 336-337.
5. ^  A deeper interpretation of Mineta’s performance is possible in which it is a deliberate attempt to embarrass and threaten Cheney for the disastrous foreign policy he is pursing, but support for that interpretation would require additional facts and will not be pursued here. If that interpretation is true, then Mineta is wittingly working on the side of the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations)/CIA “Old Guard” who were profoundly opposed to the invasion of Iraq, the reshaping of the Middle East by brute force, ignoring the need for cost-sharing and the fig-leaf of legitimacy that a United Nations coalition could provide, gutting the US economy, and embracing a foreign policy that approaches an open declaration to obey US demands or to face annihilation. Its core members include such notables as David Rockefeller, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, George H. W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, and its better known operatives include Joseph Wilson, Patrick Fitzgerald and Richard A. Clarke. The “Old Guard” was complicit in 911 but was betrayed by the Neo-conservative faction and its allies.
6. ^  Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies, Free Press, first paperback edition, 2004, pp. 2-5.
7. ^  Covering up domestic covert operations requires generating various “legends,” or plausible cover stories. The content of these cover stories varies with their audience. The general public is lead not to think about why the Pentagon did not use its anti-aircraft defenses by being told in USA Today that there were none to use. The military that are not complicit in 911 and might take actions against its perpetrators if they understood 911, and who know of the Pentagon’s anti-aircraft defenses, are given another legend, e.g., that a decision was made to “take it on the chin” from the terrorists rather than be forced to “take the rap” of shooting down a commercial airliner over a densely populated urban area and to save our response for the “payback” phase of operations. The military mind often does not probe too deeply into the plausibility of such explanations.
8. ^  John Judge, “Flight of Fantasy: Flight 77 Didn't Hit the Pentagon,” http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/f77FoF.html
9. ^  Richard Clarke and the 911 Report create an atmosphere of deliberate ambiguity about what anti-aircraft defenses were in place where that entitles the reasonable inference that they are deceiving us or outright lying. Both address “air defenses” only for the White House and the Capital, not the Pentagon. The Report does so on p. 364 where it states that Clarke got his ideas of a possible air attack only from “Tom Clancy novels” rather than any intelligence agencies, and that “He did not, or could not, press the government to …strengthen …air defenses against suicide hijackings.” Clarke’s March 24, 2004 testimony states that after improvising air defenses for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics “We then tried to institutionalize that for Washington, to protect the Capitol and the White House. And that system would have been run by the Secret Service. It would have involved missiles, anti-aircraft guns, radar, helicopters. Secret Service developed all the plans for that. Secret Service was a big advocate for it. But they were unable to get the Treasury Department, in which they were then located, to approve it, and I was unable to get the Office of Management and Budget [OMB] to fund it. … I thought I had made a persuasive case that we needed an air defense system, as well as an airport system, not just to stop hijackers at baggage inspection, but to deal with them if they got through that and were able to hijack an aircraft. I thought we needed an air defense system. And we got a little of that air defense system implemented, but only a little.” Clarke does not tell us what the “little” bit was. On p.131 of his book, Clarke states that “We succeeded only in getting Secret Service the permission to continue to examine air defense options…” even though a plane had landed on the White House lawn in 1994. It is likely that Clarke’s testimony was simply false because pp 128-9 of his book describes him asking for a billion dollars in additional security measures right after the Olympics from Leon Panetta, then Chief of Staff but also former head of OMB, who rammed it through OMB without a word of dispute.
10. ^  It would be nice to be so confident as say, David Ray Griffin, who states without hesitation in "9/11 and the American Empire" that the Pentagon “is ringed by anti-missile batteries, which are programmed to destroy any aircraft entering the Pentagon’s airspace except for any aircraft with a US military transponder,” but his source is Thierry Meyssan in The Big Lie, whom I consider unreliable, here especially Meyssan's poison pill suggestion that a commercial airliner approaching nearby Reagan Airport but lacking a military transponder signal would automatically be shot down. http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/articles/47 Griffin's The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, Olive Branch Press, 2005, is a scholarly, exhaustive and definitive rebuttal of the 911 Commission Report that reveals it to be a magnificent work of fiction, i.e., USG propaganda to cover its complicity in 911. Griffin's book is a major contribution to the 911 Truth Movement and the best popular introduction to the subject for those who do not already understand the nature of USGIC domestic covert operations.
11. ^  Clarke, Against All Enemies, pp. 17-18. Clarke is not being either candid or courageous; he is engaging in internecine warfare against the other faction of the Ruling Class that has betrayed his. That is a larger story for another time. Clarke’s historical account of US foreign policy and the rise of terrorism, especially in the Middle East, is as propagandized a fiction as is the 911 Commission Report itself, but the principal split in the ruling class is adumbrated on pp. 61-62, though through a lying lens larded with Vaseline.
12. ^  One non-facetious possibility occurs, namely that Cheney had ordered the scrambled jets to stay away from the D.C. area. This interpretation is not quite plausible because it does not explain the urgency of the young man’s plaint to Cheney, but it is in the same spirit and does not require separate analysis.
13. ^  http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/noplacetohide/ transcript.html. The website promotes No Place to Hide, a Free Press book by Robert O’Harrow, Jr., published in 2000. I have also had the privilege of reading three drafts of Professor Steve Freeman’s forthcoming book, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count". I hope that Steve will forgive me for giving away the grim bottom line. The election was stolen; Kerry won the popular vote by approximately 6,000,000. The only honest count, the only count that matched the exit polls, were the 10% of the votes nation-wide that were cast on paper ballots and counted by hand. The mechanisms of rigging the count were likely wide and varied.
14. ^  See The Mafia, CIA & George Bush, Pete Brewton, SPI Books, 1992.
15. ^  wsws.org and iran-pardon.html?_r=1&oref=slogin NY Times
16. ^  Rodney Stich, Defrauding America, 3rd edition, 1998, Diablo Western Press, Inc., p. 185. Due to the deliberate confusion strewn by all covert operations, Stich may be mistaken in some particulars such as whether Bush attended the Paris meetings, but the operation itself, and Hamilton’s role in the cover-up are well documented. Stich also wrote Hamilton directly outlining particulars of October Surprise and offering to provide eyewitnesses. For the operation itself, see Barbara Honegger, October Surprise, Tudor Publishing Company, 1989; Honegger is a former Reagan staffer who claims to have resigned in a protest of conscience. See also a book sharing the same title by Carter National Security Council staffer Gary Sick, Times Books, 1991. Do not necessarily think of either Honegger or Sick as well intentioned courageous whistle-blowers. Focusing on October Surprise itself was a limited hang-out to distract from the CIA’s role in overthrowing the Shah when he challenged USA-Great Britain energy policy in the Middle East, and then installing the Ayatollah and engineering the taking of the hostages by giving the Shah refuge in the USA after being warned that doing so would lead to seizure of the Embassy. It is very likely that the CIA was also working with some of the Iranians who seized the U.S. Embassy.
17. ^  Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon, pp. 452-454.
18. ^  Statement of Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States May 23, 2003.
19. ^  I offer just one more example, from the 12th and final public hearing, since it bears directly on the central point of this article. Commissioner John F. Lehman questions Acting Joint Chief of Staff General Myers about who was in charge of defending the USA on 911:
    MR. LEHMAN: General Myers, we're particularly pleased to have you here because your service from '98 to 2000 commanding NORAD gives you particular authority in talking about this. I think what disturbs us most with regard to NORAD is not so much that this was an unprecedented threat … — So [much as] the problems of command and control — let's start at the top. Who was in charge on 9/11? Was it NORAD commander? Was it you? Was it NMCC? Was it SecDef? Was it FAA? With all the exercising that had been done in the past, clearly somebody should have been in charge. But we have been unable to find out who it was. And also, for all of my questions, if you could also say what's been done to change it and what's the situation today.
    GEN. MYERS: That's a lot. In terms of national command authorities, you've interviewed the president and the vice president, and I'm not privy to that interview so I can't comment on that. I do know that the next person in the chain of command, Secretary Rumsfeld, was in contact with the president several times during that morning and through the rest of the day, to include — I believe it's at least two video teleconferences we had with the president — I may be wrong; it may have been only one — but lots of conversations with the vice president --
    MR. LEHMAN: No, but I'm talking about operationally, the minute-by-minute -
    GEN. MYERS: And operationally, General Eberhart was on duty and at his duty station, as was General Arnold. In fact, the first call I got when I left Capitol Hill after a meeting with Senator Cleland was from General Eberhart saying, "We've had these crashes and we're going to take certain actions." And it was shortly thereafter that the Pentagon was hit as we were on our way back to the Pentagon.
    So as you know, I'm not in the chain of command. I'm a military adviser to the chain of command and to the National Security Council. So I went back to my duty station, and what we started doing at that time was to say, "Okay, we've had these attacks. Obviously they're hostile acts.” [Myers continues with more obscurantism.]
    COMMENT: Thus, on the final day of the 911 hearings, Commissioner Lehman conveys that he still has no idea who was in minute-to-minute operational charge of the US “defense” on 911. Myers reminds Lehman that the Commission has already talked to Cheney & Bush in private session, so that if Lehman does not know from them (that Cheney was in charge), Myers isn’t going to tell him either. And that’s that. “Who was in charge on 911?” is none of the 911 Commission’s business, and certainly none of ours. Still, no alarm goes off. What clearer example of mind control of the general population, deracinated citizens, could there be?
20. ^  A very valuable essay on important differences between the USA and the Weimar Republic that explains the rulers’ success in implementing their controls is “Inverted Totalitarianism” by Sheldon Wolin, The Nation, May 19, 2003.
21. ^  See A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, The Peril of Fascism, International Publishers, Inc., 1938; George Seldes, 1000 Americans, Boni & Gaer, New York, 1947; Albert E. Kahn, High Treason, The Hour Publishers, New York, 1950, pp. 196-204; Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House, Hawthorne Books, Inc., New York, 1973. Unlike most of the people from the Left who know something about history, I believe that Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not save capitalism from a revolution, but if anything he spared a dilatory working class from the imposition of retributive fascism as spelled out by R. Palme Dutt in Fascism and Social Revolution, International Publishers, New York, 1935.
22. ^  http://www.hubbertpeak.com
23. ^  The Eastern Establishment controlled most if not all of the major media when JFK was killed, and immediately set in motion the pre-planned propagandized cover-up that was part of its role in the state murder, but that story is too large for these pages. A vivid and damning example of the Establishment’s involvement at the operational level in the assassination is provided by McGeorge Bundy, who like Richard Clarke was in control of the White House Situation Room, confidently assuring both Air Force One and Air Force Two of what could not possibly be known at the time, viz., that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin and that he acted alone. This thinly veiled “in plain sight” message from Bundy was appreciated by those on the flights, but was lost on all other persons except an attorney in Philadelphia. See Vincent Salandria, “The Tale Told by Two Tapes” at http://www.jfklancer.com/upfront/2tapes.html.
24. ^  Donald Gibson, The Kennedy Assassination Cover-Up, Kroshka Books, 2000, Chpt. “The McCloy-Dulles Commission.”
25. ^  Mark Lane, Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK?, Thunder Mouth’s Press, p.53.
26. ^  The National Security Act or 1947 created not only the CIA, but also the National Security Council as its administrative overseer, and the (CIA dominated) U.S. Air Force as a separate branch of the U.S. military.
27. ^  Quoted in E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us, Kurtz, Ulmer, & DeLucia Book Publishers, 1996, pp.237-239. The Washington Post, the cynosure of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird to take over the key assets in the US media to control the public consciousness, pulled Truman’s statement from its afternoon edition and the entire media made it disappear from sight. Frank Wisner, one of the CIA’s founding members, recruited Philip Graham into Mockingbird.
28. ^  Terry Reed & John Cummings, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, Shapolsky Publishers, Inc., unnumbered front pages. The covert action end of the USGIC currently extends far beyond the CIA and is often largely privatized via Executive Order 12333 that George H. W. Bush had Reagan sign in 1981.
29. ^  Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency, Sheridan Square Press, 1994. E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us, Kurtz, Ulmer, & DeLucia Book Publishers, 1996. Michael Calder, JFK vs. CIA: The Central Intelligence Agency’s Assassination of the President, West LA Publishers, 1998.
30. ^  Lee Harvey Oswald was a mid-level CIA agent who kept his cover but identified the role that he had come to realize only after the assassination was his when he said, “I am the patsy.” For a compelling account of Oswald’s CIA bona fides see Philip Melanson, Spy Saga, Praeger, 1990. Oswald was secondarily an FBI and US Customs informant. For WTC93 the best single account is Ralph Schoenman, “Who Bombed the World Trade Center 1993?” at www.takingaim.info. Charles Key, a three-term Oklahoma state congressman who lost friends in the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal building refused to yield to great pressure to stop his investigation. Key was smeared in the media and beaten in the primaries by opponents richly funded by foes wanting to keep the lid on OKC. Timothy McVeigh was the patsy, and did not even have an ammonium nitrate bomb in his Ryder truck – a more reliable military explosive had been substituted; the building was taken down by internal charges. See Final Report, published by The Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, 2001. Key’s book is even less reviewed than Michael Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon. I had to contact Mr. Key at his home to purchase a hardback copy. For the best detailed account of how the CIA and its Italian counterpart P2 successfully infiltrated, took over, and controlled radical and even violent political opposition, and directed these groups to the use of violence in order to stabilize and secure power for the very state that these groups were trying to overthrow, and without their knowledge of being used! – Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, Author’s Choice Press, 1991, 2002.