More after "Evidence is a farce"

- Why this war is unwinnable
- History: oil, Saudis, Bin Laden
- Administration desperate to control Afghanistan for oil
     (recession, fascistic controls)
- Bush admininstration is a threat to our security
- Thoughtcrimes (the Smith Act)
- Legalizing torture
- Bush administration's oil connections outlined
- The unanswered questions about 9/11
- Why no analysis of these questions from the Left?
- Getting our country back
- "Unpatriotic": countering the fascism
- Alternative information sources

The following is a transcript of an interview I conducted with Stan Goff on October 24, 2001 regarding his article "The So-Called Evidence is a Farce"
- - Mike McCormick - talkingsticktv@yahoo.com  

Mike McCormick: I was hoping you could go through and reiterate everything or a lot of what you had covered in your article "The So-Called Evidence is a Farce".

Stan Goff: Yeah, let me kind of preface that a bit because the way that thing got started was that I was participating in a list and I sent that to the discussion list and someone from the discussion list forwarded to someone and then it got forwarded to someone else and now the thing is showing up like in Pravda and places like that, it took off. It wasn't really meant for public consumption but I still stand by everything I said. I think that while it's important to emphasize that there's a lack of credibility sort of built into the structure of the official story on this and there's a deep lack of credibility related or not to whether this is a pre-existing agenda which I think that it's pretty clear that it was, I don't want people to think that I'm trying to advance some specific conspiracy theory. I think that's really important to say at the outset. I don't know what happened on Sept. 11th and I think it's important to know, but it's even more important to know what is this agenda that's being pursued because I think it's an extremely dangerous agenda and I think it can be traced all the way back to as early as 1973 in the first oil shock with the OPEC embargo. So that's my preface.

MM: Ok. So I think some of the strength of your, if I can call it an article now since its...

SG: Yeah it's sort of turned into one.

MM: Part of that came from your experience with the military, that you are in fact what many would call an authority and I'm wondering if you could give us a brief bio of your experience with the military.

SG: Well, I retired in February 1996. I went into the Army in January 1970, did a tour in Vietnam, came back and did a tour in the 82nd Airborne Division. Took a little break in service. Went back in again. Worked as a Cav Scout for a while then went to work at 2nd Ranger Battalion. That was the first of three Ranger assignments. Went to work at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama. Went to and then worked at the Counter-Terrorist Outfit that's sort of popularly known as Delta. Left there and went to work as a military science instructor at West Point for three semesters. Had another short break where I instructed SWAT teams as a training captain at the Y-12 Nuclear Weapons Facility in Oak Ridge Tennessee. Went back in the Army on active duty again from a reserve status and ran a Ranger platoon of First Ranger Battalion in Savannah Georgia. Went from there to Special Forces qualification course, entered Seventh Special Forces. Did a good deal of work in Latin America with them. After Seventh Group I returned back working for the Regimental staff at 75th Ranger Regiment, participated in the Somalia Operation. Came back from there, was promoted sort of out of that position and back into 3rd Special Forces where I participated in the Haiti Operation.

Overall that stuff, there were eight conflict areas with a great deal of concentration for a while there in Latin America and the Caribbean, but also some experience elsewhere in Africa and Asia and so forth. But primarily that work was in the Special Operations field which as you know, they're busy boys right now. They're doing most of the heavy lifting from what I can glean in Afghanistan right now. In fact, one of the big commanders out there, Frank Tony, if I've heard correctly, was B Company Commander in 2nd Ranger Battalion in 1979-80 when I was stationed there with A Company, right next door. He wasn't very well thought of then, he was thought as an inveterate brown-noser and it's just the same old folks showing up, they've just been promoted.

MM: And from what little we can get from the media currently, do you think they are accurately portraying what is happening with...?

SG: (laughter) The media has never accurately portrayed a military operation as long as I've been involved with this stuff. I've never seen an accurate portrayal to this day, not one. But then again I've never seen an accurate portrayal by the military public affairs officers either. The public is kept pretty much in the dark about how military operations are really conducted and what may be going on now and I think we are all being kept deeply in the dark about Afghanistan right now. I strongly suspect that the collateral damage as they call it is far worse than they are going to allow anyone to know. And it's a dumb operation. It's just not a very smart operation in a lot of ways. I think it's comparable in many respects to Somalia.

MM: How so? How's it similar?

SG: Well, I'll have to give you a little background on this. When I was with Special Forces, we were part of a foreign policy doctrine called IDAD, which is Internal Defense and Development. Special Forces basically had four primary kind of missions. Some of them were combat missions but a lot of them were advice and assistance kinds of missions. That's changed. There's a much stronger doctrinal and technological emphasis now on something called OOTW or Operations Other Than War and that's got some sinister implications for us at home because it really is part of this whole sort of merger between police and military forces.

The problem in Somalia and the problem here is related to a military that's still predicated on a structure that was developed out of the Cold War where we were facing off against the Warsaw Pact. Everything was designed to stop the Russians at the Fulda Gap.

Afghanistan is a far different reality. When I went with the task force to capture Mohammed Fara Aidid, we had all these gadgets, the most technologically sophisticated Special Operations Force probably ever assembled up to that time and that's why people were stunned in the United States when all of a sudden that task force comes home with its dead and wounded and its tail between its legs and its been defeated by this feudal warlord. There's been all kinds of nonsense written about why this happened, how this happened, you know there's sort of this perennial claim that politicians keep soldiers from exerting the necessary force to get the job done. It's the same thing they said about Vietnam. It's really a military rationalization, it's not real. Military success is not a function of force, or force alone. It's not a function of geography and weather alone. It's not a function of technology alone. It's not a function of intelligence alone. It's not a function of political context alone. You see it's a combination of all these things. Then you throw into the equation a host of all sorts of other uncontrollable variables, just accidents and there's no shortage of fools in the military. It's a bureaucracy and so it sort of breeds these folks. They have a real strong vested interest in mystifying military operations for the public because they want the public to leave it to the experts and ignore their dishonesty, their corruption and accept their little BS excuses for their failures. It's a very contagious thing and I think it's actually infected George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and all these other would-be generalissimos that are running the United States right now.

What they think they can do is they think they can win in Afghanistan but again going back to Somalia, Afghanistan is similar in the following ways. Afghanistan is backward, it's tribalistic. It's coherent as a nation only because they've got a boundary around it that says this is a political geographic definition but within that geographic definition there is nothing that resembles a nation.

The Taliban is one of many many groups, made in the USA by the way. But there's not one singular cogent military force for the U.S. to focus its efforts against and that's a violation of a principle of war called objective. There's a host of factions. They're all very well armed thanks to the United States because they armed them to topple a socialist regime there years ago and they change alliances down there like you and I change underwear.

It's a country that's physically divided by some very forbidding and mountainous terrain. There is no infrastructure. You can't attack a society's infrastructure if it doesn't exist and so it nullifies the kind of strategy they used against Iraq for instance. So there's no clear enemy and without a clear enemy there's no clear decisive objective. I'm speaking strictly in a morally neutral way here. A military task force can't conquer a nation if there's not really a nation there.

So you take this situation and you got all these different warlords and factions and you can introduce a couple dozen Stinger missiles or 500 assault rifles or like in Somalia 200 RPGs and what that does, the introduction of a comparatively small amount of hardware, can instantly shift the entire balance of power in a region and completely change the character of the battlefield. Our military is not versatile or agile enough to respond to that and moreover there's still no clearly defined objectives. So just from the point of view of the military it's crazy. The Taliban, they claim they have 10,000 or there about Afghani Arabs which are not Afghanis at all. Bin Laden for instance is a Saudi. His daddy is a big construction magnate with connections to the Bush family back in Saudi Arabia. 38% of Afghanistan is Pashtun and even the Pashtun ethnicity is subdivided between the Ghilazi and Durrani and 25% of Afghanistan are Tajiks. Their loyalties are divided between Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Then the Hazara who are Shites constitute 19% and they are kind of prone to favor the Iranians and then there are Uzbeks. Then you've got a Sunni majority among the Muslims but you've got a Shite minority that's fairly significant. Most of the folks there speak a form of Farsi called Dari. That's a Pashtun dialect but you have Turkic dialects, there's about 30 minor languages alone.

Then they say they are going to make an alliance with this Northern Alliance, it's not even an alliance. The only thing that those people are allied around is their opposition to the Taliban. When they're not allied against the Taliban then they spend as much time blood letting among themselves as they do doing anything else and in fact they've been very opposed to Pashtun nationalism in the past and the Pashtun have a much closer ties to Pakistan...

You see what I'm saying? This is extremely complex and it's dynamic. It changes from day to day and there's no way that a great power, unquote, like the United States can go in there and achieve some sort of a military resolution to the problem. Journalists have called it a quagmire, you know mission creep and all that stuff. To me it's like if anybody remembers their youth and Uncle Remus stories I think about tar babies. That's what's going on there. This is going to be far more problematic than Vietnam from a military standpoint.

MM: So you mentioned earlier that some of the real reasons that what we're doing in Afghanistan date back to 1973. Could you go into that?

SG: Well I think that first of all we just have to be clear that this is about oil. When you look at the question of oil it becomes historically kind of complex but I'll simplify it as much as I can sort of what I've found out studying this in detail. Now you've got to look at oil production first of all as something that's finite. The Neo-Malthusians now are making some very good points and I don't necessarily agree with their analysis at a political level but certainly from a physical level they are saying that oil is about to run out and I think that's demonstrable with the data that's available.

Oil as an extractable resource follows something called a Hubbert curve. Once it peaks in production then it begins a very precipitous decline, forever, because it's a finite, it's a physically finite resource. But it doesn't peak in production in all the same regions, so you've got aggregate world production peaking at one point and then you have different regions peaking at different points along the way. This really changes the kind of power dynamics that exist between these different regions.

In 1973 we got hammered by an oil embargo that was primarily the work of the Gulf States through OPEC but the Gulf States to this day still have the largest repository of recoverable oil. Especially Saudi Arabia but also Iran and also Iraq and now some people believe and some people doubt but there's a fair amount in the Caspian basin in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan and around there.

Right now the world is consuming somewhere around 75 million barrels a day. World oil production as an aggregate is peaking sometime between now and next year and then it'll begin a permanent decline aggregate worldwide. The problem is demand is going up so that around 2010 our demand is going to be 100 million barrels a day which means the demand is going to go up 25 million barrels a day between now and the end of this particular decade and the problem is even if everything that they're trying to do right now in increasing the recovery of oil in the Gulf States and the Caspian has a potential only with the introduction of around a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure would recover only around 15 additional million barrels a day which means they still have a 10 million barrel deficit in terms of what their demand is and what's actually available.

Now that's not the real trick. The real trick here is if you divide the world up, just for the sake of argument into OPEC which is primarily Gulf States. Venezuela is also a member but we're just talking about Gulf States and we'll call them OPEC. Then you look at all the non-OPEC and I just call them NOPEC for the sake of argument. NOPEC production peaked years ago. It peaked in the last decade. It's on the way down so NOPEC is losing its relative power to control the market and NOPEC is something that the United States was very heavily invested in for the purpose of offsetting the potential power of the Gulf States as oil producers. But now OPEC is on the rise until 2010, so between now and 2010, OPEC, every day that goes by gains more power to control the market, the world market for petroleum.

The only thing that attenuates that problem for the U.S. right now is that after 1973 they began a very aggressive program of offering all sorts of perquisites to the Saudis and convinced them to invest their petroleum money in U.S. financial instruments and so the dollar became the petrodollar you see. But when the dollar became the petrodollar it also became the foundation currency for world trade and that's one reason the dollar has maintained its strength is because it's what's oil is traded in.

The Saudi regime that protects our interests there, right now, and some of the other regimes in the region who would potentially protect our interests are in a lot of trouble. There's a great deal of social unrest and when you look at them attacking Osama Bin Laden in a place like Afghanistan you have to wonder since Osama Bin Laden represents right now and I think represents very well strictly from the point of view of whether they have influence or not, this not Islam but Islamism, the radical fundamentalism that's taken root in really a sea of declining social conditions over there. Because the Saudi standard of living and the standard of living throughout the region as oil profits have gone down and as corruption has rooted itself further and further in these regimes has created again this ocean of potentially 100 million people whose lives are getting worse all the time and this is really fertile ground for something like this Islamism, this radical fundamentalism to take root.

So Osama Bin Laden in a sense is really the potential opposition in a place like Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia is the prize. It is the prize. Whoever controls Saudi Arabia controls oil worldwide and Bin Laden said himself a couple of years ago at a public interview that he was going to raise the price of oil to $144 a barrel. Now I don't know where that number came from or why it was that arbitrary and specific but at $50 a barrel U.S. power dissolves. Our stock market crashes. So they've got some real concerns and they also have some very specific concerns as individuals or the members of this administration do because they're also heavily invested in oil, most of them. This trillion dollars of potential infrastructure going into the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia is something that Halliburton Oil, Dick Cheney's old company very well may be contracted to construct. I've got about six inches deep worth of research over here and I don't want to bore listeners with all the details but there's more here than meets the eye.

MM: I don't think you're boring us at all with the details. So can you make the connection to potentially the benefits of getting Afghanistan under control for the extraction of oil?

SG: I think it's a pipe dream. I don't think they can get Afghanistan under control. What I've come to believe is that really the U.S.'s ability to dominate the entire planet is unraveling. This is just part of a historical evolution that is at some point inevitable and I think it's about to happen. I think what they're doing now is not something they're doing out of a position of strength but out of a position of desperation and panic. These are very panicked kind of moves in a sort of broad overall view of things which makes them exceedingly dangerous.

I think historically we can go back and see that when big capital gets in trouble and the market's not working for them anymore they have to find a way, cause right now there is a worldwide production over-capacity that's created a recession that's about to go deep and about to go long and one of the ways that they've traditionally gotten themselves out of that is to liquidate a bunch of that capital and the best way to liquidate capital real fast is war.

That's the way they correct the problem they use non-market mechanisms to correct for a fallen rate of profit within a market economy. And I think what's even more dangerous is we are looking at this huge imperial power that's the United States right now and they're trying to control everything at once and their empire is beginning to unravel on them and I think what is particularly dangerous for people like me and probably people like y'all and a lot of your listeners is that in the process of doing this they're going to have to exercise more and more despotic measures at home to step on resistance and so I think we're really in very serious and immediate danger of an emergence of a form of fascism in the United States.

And I think John Ashcroft at the helm of the Justice Dept. is not a particularly great thing and I think if people take a close look at the kinds of initiatives he's involved in right now in this bizarre Orwellian sounding The Office of Homeland Security with Tom Ridge of all people. These are very disturbing developments.

I think one of the reactions that the public had to the events of Sept. 11th and it's a very sensible and understandable reaction is this incredible sense of a loss of security and a sense of endangerment. That's being sort of demagogically played out by this opportunistic administration but I think what people need to understand and if we are going to appeal to the public at large about what their interests are I think that what's going on right now, the policies that are being pursued by the de facto Bush administration are policies that are contrary to our security and in fact a threat to our long term security and it's just an attempt to consolidate a citadel of power for a handful of the elite in this country at the expense of everyone else and it's only a matter of time before they turn on us too.

Because this is not a crisis that can be overcome. Oil is running out in the long term and we have 6 to 7 billion people living on the planet right now that thoroughly depend on this one resource that's not just a regular commodity. It's the life blood of the entire global capitalist system and it's going to be cut off and it's going to be cut off by nature, it's not going to be cut off by us but in the process I think again that you'll see a retrenchment of power and it's that retrenchment that I think is extremely dangerous.

MM: Can you go into some more specifics of how the current policies that the Bush administration is following are a threat to our security?

SG: Oh my goodness, well start with the notion of going over what I think is really the beginning of a war of extermination among a 100 million Muslim people. That don't strike me as something very secure. If they wanted to find a good way to go out there and manufacture new terrorists they're going about it exactly the right way. This unilateralism and this willingness to go over there and drop bombs on Afghani civilians which they are doing. That's exactly why they've cut the media off.

But I think there's also some real geostrategic issues. They are introducing a much higher level of tension now between the Pakistanis and the Indians who've been on the brink of nuclear war with one another already. And I think within a couple of years when they begin what's gonna be inevitably the attempt to break up Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and to pull them away from the orbit of the Russians I think that's going to create another problem.

The Russians are working with us right now but that's short term. And I think domestically and again I go back to this doctrine of Operations Other Than War (OOTW), worldwide this recession is going to kick in and create problems in the center, in the industrialized nations, but also in the periphery.

And I think they've been very alarmed by the growth of this anti-globalization movement you know that people have seen most recently in Genoa but before that in Quebec and Seattle. These things are very disturbing I think to the power elite right now and I think, we've seen it already over time, there's this closer and closer relationship and blurring of the lines between the military and police and I mean I participated in this.

In the early eighties I was actually involved as an active duty military in training the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. They were just "Woofo" SWAT, Washington Field Office SWAT, at the time, so we were militarizing them and at the same time they started doing operations with Special Forces and the Marines augmenting the Border Patrol. So there was already in progress this developmental trajectory that was beginning to merge the roles of the police and the military. And I think what we're seeing is worldwide especially under the influence of the United States.

I think there is an hallucination, out there, of the Pax Americana, you know, and what they're developing now, is a military and police doctrine for urban civil war. And for us that means in the short term that they are developing a doctrine for severe population control. I don't know about any one else, but that don't make me feel anymore secure. (chuckles). That makes me feel very insecure. Because it's only a short step before people start getting thrown in jail for what they believe in again. I think we're moving toward the reintroduction of something similar to the Smith Act in this country right now.

MM: What was that?

SG: The Smith Act was finally declared unconstitutional, but only after people spent like a decade in jail. That's back in the Post WWII. That's part of the whole McCarthyist phenomenon. They introduced something called the Smith Act. Ah, rounded up people who belong to socialist organizations threw them all in jail, for the crime of thinking. They did absolutely nothing wrong, and they just put them in jail for their beliefs. I don't think we are but a hop skip and a jump away from that right now.

MM: Well especially with this week where I believe the FBI is now seeking changing the laws so they will be allowed to torture people.

SG: Yeah. Did you see that? Or if they can't torture them here, they'll ship them overseas to someone who can. You know, the people need to be paying attention. Stop waving that flag for about five minutes and go take a real close look at what's going on because this has nothing to do with patriotism. I care about my country. Heck, I was born and raised here, you know. Members of my family are American citizens.

So it's not a question of this thing trying to equate the notion of caring about your country with supporting the asinine, dangerous, opportunistic policies of an illegitimate administration. I don't buy it. It's not the same thing. I will never support the Bush Administration. I don't care what they do, because first of all they weren't elected. People seemed to have forgotten that. And that's why I say, man, you know, what's the ol' saying, cui bono, who benefits?

MM: Go into that some more if you would cause again in your email that you sent out that somehow turned into, through a mass circulation, turned into a somewhat famous article now. You talked about how many people in the current Bush Administration have connections to oil.

SG: Oh my goodness, (chuckles), Okay, well you know. Start with Bush. Start with the de facto president right now. He was the CEO of Harken Energy. That is his own little company, you know. As it turns out, he wasn't very good at it. You know, his dad, was an oil man. So you've got two generations in oil right there. Okay. And his dad was also you know the former President, the former Vice-President, the director of Central Intelligence.

George Herbert Walker Bush is on the board of Carlyle Group. Carlyle Group is right now a $12 billion dollar equity company, but it's heavily invested in all kinds of things, including oil and it's also I think 11th or 12th whatever, biggest defense contractors in the country right now. It's getting very incestuous. And in fact, Carlyle put Bush junior on the board of one of its subsidiaries, which is Cater Air. A little shuttle service, a little puddle jumper service. Sort of as a sop to dad.

The new ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Robert Jordan, is a Dallas lawyer and an old Bush booster. Jordan works for a Baker Botts. That's a firm with offices in Riyadh. And Baker Botts represents Carlyle Group over there. And the Baker in Baker Botts is James Baker, who was Secretary of State for George Herbert Walker Bush, but he is also the guy that engineered the whole Florida coup d'etat, in the 2000 election. He was the midwife of that little venture.

Some of the other folks in Carlyle, Fidel Ramos, former Chief of the Philippines. Park Tae Joon of South Korea. John Major. Everybody remember John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs? And you can go back with the Bush family. Prescott Bush, Rockefellers, Duponts, Standard Oil, Morgans, Fords, all these other folks were anti-Semites and anti-Communists way back. They also actually financed the rise to power of Adolph Hitler. They financed it. I mean, that's a historical fact. It's irrefutable. And Prescott Bush did business with the Nazis all the way up to 1942 until he was censured by the United States under the Trading with the Enemy Act. And after the War, he turned right around and ran for Congress in Connecticut and won. This is an interesting family.

Anyway, Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton Oil. Got $34 million before he took office in stock options from Halliburton. As the CEO, Cheney, and I'm looking at my notes, oversaw $23.8 billion dollars in oil industry contracts to Iraq alone. Now this is interesting, because Cheney found the loopholes in the embargo on Iraq. Now the attack on Iraq was done when Cheney was the Secretary of Defense. He stepped down as Secretary of Defense and turned right around and became the CEO of Halliburton, took advantage of the loopholes and went back there and made $23.8 billion dollars in Iraq by rebuilding the infrastructure that we bombed out of existence. Halliburton is also involved with the Russian mob. They've got sort of two things going on. One is oil and the other is drug trafficking. Halliburton is a story all by itself.

Secretary of State, Colin Powell. This man has no diplomatic credentials. He was the former chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff and all of sudden he is in charge of the entire diplomatic corps of the United States. That's interesting just by itself. He has cash holdings or stock holdings in a number of defense contractors.

Tony Prinicipi, Secretary of Foreign Affairs. Lockheed Martin, defense contractor. The biggest defense contractor in the world. Andrew Card, Chief of Staff. . General Motors. Secretary of the Navy, Gordon England. General Dynamics. Secretary of the Airforce, James Roche, Northrup Grummond.. Secretary of the Army, General Thomas White retired. Enron Energy. These folks are (chuckles) all defense contractors or oil people. The whole bunch of them are.

Donald Rumsfeld is Secretary of Defense. What people don't realize is he is also the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. They get big defense contracts. But he is also with General Signal Corporation, a defense contractor. And interestingly enough, he is also heavily invested in biotech, which is probably gonna make a killing here pretty soon with whatever Anthrax vaccines. Cheney and I've got a picture of Cheney and Rumsfeld in May 2000 at the Russian-American Business Leaders Forum together. Arms around each other, and smiling.

Dick Armitage. Deputy Secretary of Defense, he's a guy like me, he's a former special ops guy, Seal. He had to leave the Reagan Administration because he was up to his neck in Iran contra drug problems. And now he's working directly with the Russian Mafia. And he is also a board member of Carlyle. Remember that?

Chief of Carlyle is Mr. Carlucci, who is also with the Middle East Policy Council, you see how this stuff intersects?

Commerce Secretary is Donald Evans who owns Colorado Oil Company. You have to take a very close look at this cabinet, which I think was constructed in a very systematic way to figure out what their foreign policy priorities are.

MM: Let me also ask you about the actual if we could go into the actual events on September 11th. Because again, in your email that went out you had some...you raised some very good questions that I think were on a lot of peoples' minds as to the exact timing of different incidents.

SG: Well, and again, and I don't want to imply that there's a conspiracy, it might just be incompetence, but it strikes me as very odd. And I'm sort of looking at my notes here. First of all, every fifteen seconds they would show on the TV these planes blowing-up into the World Trade Center, over and over. It was like we were trying to be hypnotized by that-by that image. Almost as if they didn't want us to think about well how did this come to pass, you know.

Well, it came to pass in a situation that was unprecedented in the history of the world. Four simultaneous hijackings inside the United States. That's never happened. Never ever, ever. And hijacked in a span of twenty-five minutes. 7:45-8:10am. Eastern daylight. And all these planes are on FAA radar. You fly around the United States, you are on FAA radar.

You've got four hijackings, and nobody notifies the President. The President, he is going to this visit to an elementary school down in Florida. By 8:15, somebody should know something is wrong because these planes have deviated from their flight plans, but nothing happens. The President, he's skinin and grinin' with the teachers and doing his photo op thing.

8:45: American Airlines flight 11 hits the World Trade Center. Okay, 8:45. Now Bush, he's at Booker Elementary. You've got four planes hijacked and one of them has just crashed into the World Trade Center and still nobody is notifying the Commander in Chief. No one has scrambled a single Air Force air-to-air attack missile er airplane. There are no Air Force inceptors in the air.

9:03 United flight 175 hits the other building in the World Trade Center. 9:05 Andrew Card finally bends over to the President and whispers something in his ear, okay. Did the President stop and convene the meeting? Hun-ah. He goes back to reading with second graders.

Now they've tracked American Airlines flight 77. It's over Ohio headed west, conducts a point turn unscheduled and off the flight plan over Ohio and turns around and starts making a beeLine for Washington D.C. Has Andrew Card been told to scramble the Air Force? No!

Twenty-five minutes later still, the President finally gives a public statement telling people that there has been some hijacked planes flown into the World Trade Center. By this time, we've all seen it live on TV. And, in meantime, there's this plane that is still headed to D.C. Air Force has still not been scrambled.

9:30 The President makes his announcement. Flight 77 is still ten minutes from the Pentagon. Actually over ten minutes. The Administration later on tells people that they didn't know the Pentagon was the target and they thought it was the White House, but in fact, this was on FAA radar and it's shown that it had already flown south past the White House no-fly zone and was headed to Alexandria.

9:35 This plane conducts another turn. This is very strange turn. It's at altitude, it conducts a 360 degree turn and begins a maneuver. A tight spinning descent, a tight spiral descent. This is something that is supposedly -- you know, this pilot that was trained at this Florida puddle jumper school, where they teach you how to fly a Cessna has conducted this spiral turn -- descends 7,000 feet in 2 and 1/2 minutes. Brings the plane up, stable, flat, flies it in so low that it knocks the electric lines down across the street from the Pentagon and with pinpoint accuracy slams into the building going 460 knots.

Later on, you know, people saying wait a minute, how in the hell did someone learn how to fly a plane that well and this little ol' school down in Florida? And the people turn around and start add on to the story. Well, they went to a flight simulator. And what I said in my little post was it's like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush hour by buying her a video driving game. This don't make any sense.

Now, what happened? I don't know, you know. I just don't know, but at a very bare minimum, and this is what was said that apparently resonated with people, we've either got a criminal conspiracy or we've got criminal negligence on the part of this Administration. But in either case, there are parts of this thing that could have been prevented but nobody did a thing. You know, that's what it looks like from where I'm sitting.

MM: To me, that was one of the things that, so many things in your letter, your article really resonated with me, but that was one of the things that really stuck out as well was because I think a lot of us still have questions about that, and none of the media, no one is asking these questions.

SG: But, you have to remember that they are also invested in defense companies and oil companies. Westinghouse and GE are some of the biggest defense contractors around. All of them got oil stocks. It's not like a big conspiracy. You know what I saw in El Salvador. A lot of the reporters down there would hangout at the Camino Real Hotel, which is right down the street from the Embassy. And they would not dare say anything that would piss off anyone at the Embassy, because then the Embassy would cut them off from their scoops. You see they would loose their contacts. So they really have to nurture relationships with these power holders and if they do anything without clearing it with them, then they are subject to be squeezed out, and eventually throws their career off track. So it doesn't work like from the top down, it's very systemic.

MM: Well I guess I could understand it with the, you know, with the corporate media not doing that, they're pretty much following a pattern, but even amongst, let's say the alternative media there's been very little questioning of the incidents themselves.

SG: Well, yeah, I think that's part of, what I consider, an intellectual malaise on the Left in the United States. They've deserted their roots, you know, and they have forgotten how to do analysis. They get involved in this moral score keeping. It's almost reminiscent of Vietnam, you know, who has a bigger body count, so people on the Left say well the Americans have the bigger body count so they're worse. It doesn't tell us a thing about motives. It doesn't tell us a thing about the trajectory of the system. It doesn't tell us a thing about the historical development of the situation. It doesn't tell us any of that stuff.

And, I think, what the Left has really done itself a disservice in getting involved in this tit-for-tat competition for the moral high ground with the Right, when they need to be subjecting the situation to some intense analysis and getting people the information they need to begin to ask the right questions.

So you know I hold , I sort of hold progressives accountable on that too. I think we've failed in a lot of ways. It's important to say that politics is hypocritical, but most of us already know that. That's just the nature of politics. It's not designed to be morally consistent. What they tell you is a story to legitimatize an action that has a motive that they can't expose to the public, otherwise, they'll lose their support. I think our job is to expose those motives to the public, and not just ...you know, well, the United States did bad things too.

First of all, in a deeply racialized society, like ours, it doesn't fly. Most people in this country don't care that we're bombing Afghani children. They don't care. Because there's already a predominant racist ideology in this country that says if you're not white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, in some cases, that you're less than human, that your life has less value. Or if you get into this jingo patriotism it's like I don't care if we kill a million of them as long as we save one American life. So, we're not going to gain anyone's ear by comparing moralities, I don't think. Some people you will, some people will be called to account on that. But I think we have to appeal to the self-interest too and what's going on right now is going to be very bad for most Americans in a very short period of time.

MM: One other question specific to the actual incidents on September 11th, would it be fair to say that the area around the White House is probably the most secure, or the most watched airspace worldwide? Can you think of anything that would have higher security?

SG: I have no idea.

MM: Okay, well could you think anything that would have higher security in terms of airspace than the White House?

SG: It'd be difficult. It'd be difficult. It's a pretty high priority I would expect. I wouldn't presume to say that it's the highest because I just don't know. But yeah, you have the most powerful Air Force in the world and the Chief of State's residence in that same country, I think you've got a pretty strong assumption right there that it should be pretty well covered. That airspace should be very well covered.

MM: All right. What do you see that we need to start focusing on as a country if we are going to get our country back, basically?

SG: Oh gosh, I'm not qualified to speak for ... I know what I'm doing. I'm getting involved in the organizing. Where I am, there's sort of two different pieces going on. I think the broader forces need to be brought together in an anti-war movement to create something for people to plug into as they begin to be disillusioned as they inevitably will be with this foreign policy. That they've got a movement to plug into. The same as an anti-war movement back during the Vietnam era that finally stopped all that nonsense.

And then for people who are more consciously Left or consciously progressive, I think it's really important for us to begin articulating, not just articulating but beginning to do the organizing around the issue of developing some sort of a nucleus of an anti-fascist movement inside this country. I think it's been coming for a long time, it's not just something that happened September 11th. It began with the popular acceptance of books like the Bell Curve and things like that. But I think it has much more urgency now, so I'm involved in anti-war organizing with my colleagues around here and friends.

We're also beginning to talk about what we can do to ensure that we are not subjected to the same thing that Germany was subjected to because it only took them a couple of years to tumble into barbarism. It won't take us nearly as long, because we're much closer to start with.

MM: When anyone questions the current direction that our Administration, our government is taking right now, they are called unpatriotic. Would you address that?

SG: You know, they're wrong. But that's the way this works. It's a creation of an atmosphere of intimidation. I have seen and talked to a number of people who have begun displaying flags as a form of self-protection, especially Muslim folks. And folks from the Middle East around here started hanging flags all over everything they own just as a way to protect themselves. I've seen a lot of people in my African-American colleague's and friend's whose neighborhoods now are sprouting American flags like mushrooms after a four-day rain. These aren't folks who are really caught up in this whole patriotic thing, and in fact have some serious reservations about hanging that flag out there when the flag was the one that also flew over slavery and Jim Crow and so forth, but that atmosphere of intimidation is out there.

And I think there is only one way to overcome that and that's for the people who do understand what's going on to be kind of bold and step out. You've got to be up front. People have to be aggressive about defending their positions. You have to demonstrate to other people that you don't have to be afraid. Because if we do back away now, that's going to allow this tendency to strengthen and that's what we can't do. I think we have to fight fascism before it emerges, not afterwards. And to continue to construct a counter-narrative to all this stuff that is official propaganda. To give people information and give it to them, not necessarily in a real confrontational way. I don't think I've ever changed anyone's mind by preaching to them, but if you present them with some alternative information and they have some time to sit down and process that then a lot of times they'll come around. A lot of work to do. A lot of work to do.

MM: What are some good sources that you'd recommend for alternative information?

SG: Well for people who have computer access, there's a number of good websites: Alternet.org, Indymedia.com, Globalcircle.com, Emperors-Clothes. Those are all websites. Dieoff.org is a very good one to read about petroleum. But also alternative newspapers...depends on where you are. There's some close by somewhere. And, there are some books out there too. Some of the stuff like William Blum and folks like that written in the last few years. You know it doesn't hurt to get a hold of South End, Common Courage Press, and see what's on their lists. And get a few of their books. There are some analytical and well-documented books out there that talk about historical development of the situation that we find ourselves in right now. And you know listening to shows like this on the radio don't hurt. (chuckles) A lot of people listen to the radio and that's what I do when I'm stuck in traffic, I listen to the radio. You know you all have a powerful medium and I appreciate someone using it for the right thing.

(Transcript co-produced by Kurt Grela).