Network, released in 1976, is a prescient and extremely witty news media satire. The leading actor Peter Finch, playing Howard Beale, was the first man to win an posthumous Oscar for his performance, recently seconded by Heath Ledger. The film shows Beale, a loyal network newsman, being fired due to poor ratings. He then has an emotional breakdown, leading to a pair of ascerbic rants live on air, resulting in incredible ratings and audience numbers. The flagging network then turn him into a cult one-man show, making use of his stark ravings for commercial gain.
In one of several subplots, an ambitious young female producer played by the exceptional Faye Dunaway sets up a reality TV show based around a group of terrorists. As she sells it, America has been battered by inflation, the depression, the oil crisis, Vietnam, Watergate and so on and needed to express their rage. Beale is one part of that, but 'Joseph Stalin and his merry band of Bolsheviks' is another. They are symbols, and therefore vents, for America's anger and unhappiness. Modern reality TV whereby contestants are removed at the behest of the public vote are just one manifestation of the vision offered by Dunaway's producer in Network.
This allows for the drawing up of broad factions - identities and ideologies from which people derive very real, physical behaviours. As 'predicted' by the UK Ministry of Defence's Development, Concepts and Doctrines Centre (DCDC) as part of their Strategic Trends project, such factions will become more important as countries (and therefore national identities) dissolve into supernational goverments over the next decades. Their report describes a rise in people identifying with other not because of shared place of birth, culture, or tastes but because of shared beliefs, principles and ideas.
Changing Values.
Secularism and materialism are likely to grow in significance in an increasingly competitive, inter-connected world, reflecting trends that are already well established in the more developed regions. Meanwhile, cultural mixing, the pace of change and a rapid confluence of modern ideas and traditional values are likely to increase the trend towards moral relativism and increasingly pragmatic values. These developments will trigger responses from complex, traditionally defined communities, as well as among significant minorities, which will seek the sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism. - Strategic Trends Report, DCDC
This poses a potential threat to the ruling superclass in that the fall of national identities (and their concomitant narratives and ideologies) will provoke a desire for the 'sanctuary' provided by 'more rigid belief systems', though the report does say that the desired mass belief of moral relativism wrapped up as pragmatism is also likely to increase. So, as some of the global population become easier to control, others will pursue ideas and ideals that threaten the New World Order envisaged by the Ministry of Defence. To try and ensure that the factions are drawn up in a way conducive to the continuation of established powers they dominate the airwaves. It is presumably to this end that the MOD has its own youtube channel.
It is also to this end that we involve ourselves so extensively with (some) terrorists. While we don't make reality TV shows about them no doubt if we did they would be immensely popular. Take 9/11 for instance - a great many people on the Left saw that attack as 'America getting what was coming to it' after years of the US visiting arbitrary and horrific violence on peoples all over the world. They were in some respects sated by the attack, they could say 'I told you so' and advance a view of the event whereby 9/11 was payback, or their preferred term, 'blowback' for military misadventures. This is the broad view advanced by Noam Chomsky, George Monbiot and Amy Goodman, some of the leading lights of the popular left intelligentsia. It is also the view advanced by Ron Paul, as shown during the Republican party debates.
While it's true that some terrorism is motivated by military interventions and globalist economic policies, this ultimately maintains the same logic as those on the right, such as Rudy Giuliani in the above video, or Shimon Peres at the JCIT in 1979.
"Terror is an expression of virulence and extremism based upon a hope that the weaker side, the victim, will give in to its lack of logic and restraint. You cannot bring an end to terror around a negotiating table, because the motive of terror is to exact a surrender by terrorising the other side." - Peres, Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism
The logic in both positions is of an us and a them who are mutually implacable, a binary opposition. The implication even of the Left/progressives is that unless we change our ways, the motivation for terrorism will continue, which is essentially no different to saying negotiation is futile.
According to this narrative of 9/11, our funding and otherwise aiding of the mujahideen in Afghanistan from 1979 onwards came back to haunt us as the monster we'd created inspired the most devastating attack on civilians the US has ever seen. As explained by an article in Counterpunch, after the Afghan-Soviet war had ended we apparently broke off our involvement and lost control of dangerous people:
Preoccupied with establishing an empire, U.S. leaders lost interest in al-Qaeda. - Counterpunch
Likewise, from The Nation:
The pattern has become all too familiar. Osama bin Laden, the leading suspect as mastermind behind the carnage of September 11, is no more (or less) "evil" than his fellow creations of our CIA: Manuel Noriega, former commander of the Panama Defense Forces until George Bush pere in late 1989 invaded his country and kidnapped him, or Iraq's Saddam Hussein, whom we armed and backed so long as he was at war with Khomeini's Iran and whose people we have bombed and starved for a decade in an incompetent effort to get rid of him. These men were once listed as "assets" of our clandestine services organization. - The Nation
What's interesting to see is that just as Rudy Giuliani reacted strongly against the notion that US interventions invited the attack, some of those advancing the blowback narrative are very critical of more conspiratorial explanations and theories. Speaking in 2004, Chomsky reacted dismissively to the suggestion that the US government was somehow complicit in the attacks.
While acknowledging just how useful such crises are to authoritarian governments, Chomsky offers unintelligent and ignorant reasons as to why he considers it 'extremely' unlikely that there was some kind of inside job. Firstly, he says that it would have leaked, offering the same view as Richard Clarke, former counter-terrorism tsar under Bill Clinton in the BBC's Conspiracy Files episode on 9/11. As Operation Gladio and the Manhattan Project demonstrate, things can successfully be kept secret for years or even decades. Besides which, this is an argument from ignorance, saying that because in Chomsky's view nothing has leaked that there cannot be a secret plan behind 9/11. The absence of evidence in this case is used as the evidence of absence.
Chomsky goes on to say that 'anyone who knows anything about the sciences' would instantly discount the evidence presented by those suggesting a wider conspiracy. Chomsky, with all due respect, doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Even overlooking the 9/11 investigative work of scientists, architects etc. old Noam himself can't tell the difference between scientific and unscientific arguments. Popperian logic shows that no number of corroborative examples an confirm a theory, scientifically speaking. The claim that all crows are black isn't proven right by the observations of millions of black crows, because it's always possible a white crow might show up. The theory has to be falsifiable, has to accept the possibility of white crows, to be a scientific theory. Applied to Chomsky's narrative, no number of leaks about possible conspiracies proves the theory that all conspiracies leak, because it only takes one not to leak to prove the theory wrong. That some conspiracies have not leaked, at least not for decades in some cases, scientifically refutes this theory, this way of thinking.
Chomsky goes on to show his true role of what Webster Tarpley and Barrie Zwicker refer to as 'gatekeepers' of the Left, saying that such questions and theories about 9/11 distract people from important issues. "Even if it were true, who cares? It doesn't have any significance." Drawing a comparison with the JFK assassination he reiterates, "Who cares?" and says that it takes energy away from "serious issues." Essentially the same view was put forth by George Monbiot, the UK's answer to Noam Chomsky. Two articles of his appeared in the Guardian in early 2007, the first largely consists of deferrence to those whose specific job it had been to try to discredit conspiracy theories, such as NIST and Popular Mechanics.
The second shows that at least Monbiot had got on the internet and looked about and seen the Chomsky video. After outlining his Leftist credentials in a self-congratulatory response to criticism by readers of his first article he states:
But none of this is sufficient. To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile while persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane...
...Why do I bother with these morons? Because they are destroying the movements some of us have spent a long time trying to build. Those of us who believe that the crucial global issues - climate change, the Iraq war, nuclear proliferation, inequality - are insufficiently debated in parliament or congress, that corporate power stands too heavily on democracy, that war criminals, cheats and liars are not being held to account, have invested our efforts in movements outside the mainstream political process. These, we are now discovering, are peculiarly susceptible to this epidemic of gibberish. - Monbiot, the Guardian
Had Monbiot done the research his self-espoused credentials imply he has then he'd have found two distinct possible answers to the question of how dozens (not hundreds) of witnesses thought they saw a passenger plane hit the Pentagon. The first is offered by the makers of The Pentacon, who suggest a plane flew low and just over the Pentagon timed with an explosion. The other is provided by the US Air Force, who for a while had details on their Air University website of plans for an 'Airbourne Holographic Projector' for the purpose of 'psychological operations and strategic perception management.'
I'm not saying that either of these is definitely the case, but the point is this is far from magic, except in the sense of either theory involving a conjuring trick of sorts. However, some argue that by ignoring those truly culpable for 9/11 one allows the criminal cabals to remain in power and that it isn't a question of corporate power 'leaning too heavily on democracy', but of private groups that cross both the corporate and government world. This came up in an interview with author and retired professor Peter Dale Scott, the man who coined the term 'deep politics'.
Chomsky, Monbiot and the rest conceive of terrorism as an irrational act, typically in response to the rational, systematic violence of the enlightened modern West. They hurt us because we've hurt them. No doubt some terrorism is produced by such things, but not all, and particular not what we call Al Qaeda. Likewise, the left gatekeepers consider it impossible for the West to engineer terrorist attacks against itself because this is (in their view) an irrational thing to do, or as Chomsky puts it, 'insane'.
One recent case illustrates the folly of this way of thinking. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb announced that they'd killed a British hostage, Edwin Dyer, after the government had refused to meet their demands. They had initially demanded a ransom, and then the release of Jordanian Abu Qatada. However, it appears that the motivation may not have been an Islamic rebellion against US-led imperialism but the more mercenary issue of money.
"Some of them are radical Islamists but most of them are doing it for money," said a diplomat who follows the region. - Reuters
Far from being 'gibberish', the question of who committed an act of violence, and why, is crucial to understanding the difference between real and manufactured threats, and therefore where we should focus our energies.
Returning to the story of our involvement with the mujahideen in the Balkans, the Dutch NIOD report in the massacre at Sbrenica contains an entire section (Appendix II) devoted to the question of intelligence ties to the conflicts on the ground. Professor Richard Aldrich wrote a summary of the report's finding for the Guardian:
Now we have the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims - some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in "the war against terrorism"...
...The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah...
...Arms purchased by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia made their way by night from the Middle East. Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft...
...Rather than the CIA, the Pentagon's own secret service was the hidden force behind these operations...
...Weapons flown in during the spring of 1995 were to turn up only a fortnight later in the besieged and demilitarised enclave at Srebrenica. When these shipments were noticed, Americans pressured UNPROFOR to rewrite reports, and when Norwegian officials protested about the flights, they were reportedly threatened into silence. - Aldrich, Guardian
However, there are connections beyond the military/intelligence apparatus, setting dangerous precedents that saw echoes some years later in Iraq. Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) is a private military services firm, founded shortly before the end of the Cold War. Unlike Blackwater, they don't offer large-scale manpower but instead sell training services and consultancy. Whether you're looking to rent-a-general or train the police force of a newly installed regime, MPRI are the company for you.
From 1993 to 1995 arms and money flooded into Bosnia not only from the US but also from various other contributors including the Saudis. While this happened many officials looked on, including turning a blind eye to weapons being smuggled in from Iran. One such official was Michael Hayden, head of US military intelligence in the region. A former Air Force man and member of the CFR, Hayden went on to become Director of the National Security Agency and then Director of the CIA. The Afghanistan operation was not an isolated incident where, as Counterpunch would have it, we created a monster, let if off the leash and then wandered away. It was largely repeated in the Balkans, and Hayden got promoted for watching it happen.
However, the aim in Afghanistan was to entrench the Soviets in an unwinnable war, a 'Vietnam', causing a painful humiliation. In the Balkans the idea was different. By fostering ethnic rivalry between largely Christian Serbs and Muslim Bosnians, and by pitching the states against one another, they accelerated the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, preventing any country from dominating the region. They also ensured that war was inevitable, which paved the way for permanent NATO/UN involvement in the region, under the guise of peacekeeping operations. A strategy of tension? You bet.
MPRI were deeply involved. In the Bosnian conflict they were primarily responsible for modernising and training the Croat army in preparation for Operation Storm. That operation saw the Serbs expelled from Krajina, an area that had declared itself a separate state from Croatia the previous year. Bilderberg member and former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt called it 'the most efficient ethnic cleansing we've seen in the Balkans'. MPRI then set to work training the Bosnian army.
Richard Perle, a member of the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the American Enterprise Institute, JINSA, AIPAC and PNAC, at that time headed up the Acquisition Support Institute, who hired MPRI as part of the US State Department's Train and Equip program. Even though a declassified memo, one of a group of relevant documents on Intelwire, shows concern that the T&E program was destabilising the region, the mission pressed on.
By 1996 the main theatre of conflict was Kosovo, a province where the ethnic Albanians were seeking secession from Serbia. The Yugoslav Serbian forces were primarily fighting against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), who had developed out of the Bosnian Muslim army, who developed out of the Afghan mujahideen. The British SAS and US Special Forces joined MPRI in providing training and support to the Kosovo guerillas, largely working over the border in Albania much as Pakistan was the base for the Afghan operation the previous decade.
When the Bosnian Muslim army were caught smuggling weapons to the KLA the State Department temporarily suspended the MPRI contract, and the CIA exercised its influence over the project to help keep things quiet. Some of the KLA's military leaders were veterans of Operation Storm, and some among the KLA leadership had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clarke, the NATO commander.
All this despite reports that the KLA were in part funded by Afghan heroin, and with money from Osama Bin Laden. Indeed, according to Ralf Mutschke of Interpol, Bin Laden sent one of his top military commanders to lead a KLA unit during the Kosovo war. According to Yosef Bodansky, former director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare:
"The role of the Albanian Mafia, which is tightly connected to the KLA, is laundering money, providing technology, safe houses, and other support to terrorists within this country...
...This isn't to say that the Albanians themselves would carry out the actual terrorist operations. But there are undoubtedly 'sleeper' agents within the Albanian networks, and they can rely upon those networks to provide them with support. In any case, a serious investigation of the Albanian mob isn't going to happen, because they're 'our boys' -- they're protected." - Bodansky
According to research by Michel Chossudovsky, the Defence Intelligence Agency approached MI6 about a training program for the KLA, who sub-contracted the job to two private British security firms, who themselves enlisted the help of former SAS men. This was in the period 1998-99, prior to the NATO bombing campaign which helped topple Milosevic. At the same time at this was going on the DIA were running a data-mining program codenamed Able Danger. The program was initially focussed on Bosnia and China, but was reset in 1999 to target Al Qaeda. They then identified Mohammed Atta and many of the other alleged hijackers on 9/11, but were repeatedly thwarted in their attempts to effect any sort of arrest or deterral. So, we have the DIA in Europe getting MI6 to help train and equip the KLA, as MPRI are doing the same, and at the same time the DIA in the US are being held back from doing anything about suspected Al Qaeda operatives.
Once again, tensions escalated, NATO stepped in, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs were 'ethnically cleansed'. Milosevic was eventually forced to resign, before dying about five years later during his trial for war crimes. The West portrayed itself the hero, after spending years officially sitting back and watching, and unofficially engendering the rise in hostility. We weren't finished.
Around 2000, the KLA became the NLA, or National Liberation Army. The NLA was founded by a former KLA leader, Ali Ahmeti, the uniforms and symbols were virtually identical.
Again, ethnic conflicts were exploited - the majority Macedonian population backed by the government, the minority Albanians backed by the NLA. Through most of 2001, both before 9/11 and after, the Macedonian army were being dragged around the countryside being forced to engage the NLA guerillas on their terms. This time MPRI were training and equipping the Macedonian army, against the very same people they'd helped militarise a year before.
One incident in particular illustrates how deeply this connection ran. In late June 2001, the NLA had captured the town of Aracinovo near Kopje. Within days the Macedonian forces had them surrounded, and could have done with them as they pleased had NATO not intervened, promising to disarm them, return the town's status to peaceful and deliver the prisoners to internment camps in Kosovo. The Macedonians withdrew, NATO shipped the 500 or so guerillas out of the town on buses, gave them back their weapons and sent them on their way. The principal motive behind this move appears to be to keep secret the identities of 17 Americans among the guerilla force - MPRI instructors.
In Iraq it was somewhat different again, because the invading forces had already codded up some bullshit to excuse their initial presence. However, in terms of establishing an excuse for staying there they needed something else. Enter Blackwater, Erinys and a rainbow of other private military contractors. Jeremy Scahill's book on Blackwater is particularly good. Founded by a Christian fundamentalist in 1997, they were originally a training and consultancy firm much like MPRI, but around the time of 9/11 started hiring and training on a large scale, realising that the imminent mobilisation of US military resources would provide an abundant source of contracting work. Blackwater employed, among others, officers trained at the School of the Americas who served under General Pinochet. There were hardened men, accustomed to brutalising innocents.
The man in charge of managing Iraq at that time, effectively a short term dictator installed by the Americans, was Paul Bremer. A protege of Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, Bremer was one of the first people on 9/11 to say Bin Laden was the culprit. In only the second order issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army along with the rest of the intelligence and security infrastructure. This not only put hundreds of thousands out of work, it created a power vacuum and rendered many old military installations ripe for looters. This didn't stop Erinys, a British private security firm, from hiring thousands of these former Iraqi army soldiers to work on contracts then handed out by the Bremer/Bush administration.
Around a year later Bremer put into effect order 17, which granted immunity to contractors in Iraq from Iraqi laws and justice systems. At the same time, as private contractors they weren't subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice in the US, and as most of them weren't US citizens they weren't subject to regular US laws either. In effect, they existed and operated without oversight or regulation. A series of horrific incidents followed, largely resulting in dead Iraqi civilians, and ultimately in Blackwater being kicked out the country. By this time it was September 2007, four and a half years after the invasion, and the damage was done. Every aspect of Iraqi security - institutional, civil, religious, cultural, had been smashed or usurped, and hundreds of thousands lay dead.
During the subsequent State Department investigation it emerged that one of the officials in charge of looking into the company, Howard Krongard, had a brother on the advisory board of Blackwater. Howard, known as 'Cookie' recused himself from the investigation, claiming he didn't know about his brother's job. Alvin 'Buzzy' Krongard claimed he had told his brother about his role with Blackwater. Buzzy was executive director (effective number 3) of the CIA on 9/11, having joined in 1998 as counsel to director George Tenet. Before that he was vice-chairman of A.B. Brown, a Wall Street investment bank, and oversaw its merger with Bankers Trust. This hybrid was then acquired by Bilderberg-connected giant Deutsche Bank who went on to be centrally involved in insider trading in the run-up to and on the morning of 9/11.
When Hearst Artist Frederic Remington, cabled from Cuba in 1897 that "there will be no war," William Randolph Hearst cabled back: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." - Time
Near permanent war is possible only through such elaborate deceptions, proxy forces, private armies, covert mercenaries, and a pliant, willing mass media who will happily print that the same group that six months ago were terrorists are now our allies and that don't worry about the details, good will ultimately prevail, which is us. If the US-led empire were bold enough to actually take the credit for all its interventions, provocations and manipulations then no one would be in any doubt who are the true warmongering rogues of this world. They'd be mad as hell.
To finish this time, a presentation by Jeremy Scahill on Blackwater, connections to the CIA, the rise of the neoconservatives in the Republican party and the privatisation of war.
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