“Fear! Fear!”: Birth of the War on Terror
As soon as it came out that the apparent “new 9-11” airliner threat
between the US and UK had been thwarted with the help of Pakistani
Intelligence Services (ISI), it also became clear that it was a
political tool for further legitimizing the lucrative “war on terror.”
After all, the ISI with Saudi financing and covert CIA training had
created al-Qaeda in the first place,[1] to counter another “threat”:
Soviet communist “enslavement.”
In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed a handful of Wall Street lawyers and investors to posts in his administration, including James Conant, James Forrestal, and Paul Nitze. Upon Roosevelt’s death (and the coinciding fall of the Third Reich), this influential group began an attempt to fill the trade vacuum left in postwar Europe. While Europeans, Soviets, and many US officials would have preferred a neutralist trade environment, these few State Department officials in the final years of the 1940s sought US trade supremacy,[2] and thus set about creating a Soviet “communist threat” that ran counter to the CIA’s own National Intelligence Estimates.[3]
By 1951, this group had formed the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which by March of that year successfully motivated Congress and the public to buy into the “threat of communist enslavement” through fear-based rhetoric in the media, setting in motion the Cold War and a US economy driven by conflict.
As CPD members moved from administration to administration regardless of party affiliation, the Cold War policy of “containment militarism” ran strong through the late 1960s. In the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, according to Richard Falk, a split between foreign policy elites emerged: Imperialists, who sought to remilitarize the US for global conquest still using the fear-inciting Soviet “communist threat”; and managers (Trilateralists), who attempted to rally the corporate spheres of Europe, East Asia, and the US to adopt a new era of interdependent international trade.
In 1976, this split led to the first CPD-free administration in the office of President Carter, though CPD quickly regrouped to kill détente, oust Carter, and reestablish itself in the Reagan administration, using “Soviet-backed international terrorism” as the new fear factor.
Around June of 1979, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The United States launched a covert operation to bolster anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan at least six months before the 1979 Soviet invasion of that country. We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”[4]
The US had actively recruited Afghan warlords to form terrorist groups along the northern border, forcing the USSR to conduct a full-scale invasion in December 1979 to counter the US destabilization program. Among the methods used by the US in this program was the production and distribution of textbooks to schools (madrassas), promoting the war-values of murder and fanaticism, and fostering a generation steeped in violence.
Upon taking office in January 1981, Reagan outlined his new foreign policy in a speech by Alexander Haig, which boiled down to: “International terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern.”[5] Thus, the 1979 US destabilization program using terrorist groups to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan was used by the US to call the Soviet invasion “terrorism” and to point to that invasion as a model for the newly invented phenomenon of “Soviet-backed terrorism” around the world.
This cemented the CPD’s original hegemonic goal of a fear-based structure. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and its “communist threat,” this structure still prevails, requiring new external threats to maintain today’s US-global trade supremacy. Absent the old communist threat, the degree of deceit necessary to sway public opinion increasingly grew, ultimately employing first strikes against Western assets both to satisfy this demand for public acceptance and acquiescence, and to serve as pretexts for the placement of US forces in geostrategic regions. The US currently has 750,000 troops in 135 countries.[6]
What we are left with is simply “international terrorism,” a perpetual “threat” straight out of the plotline of the film V for Vendetta, and one that satisfies most corporate executives and serves to cover such inconvenient truths as climate change-imperialism’s product and archenemy-the raging and disproportionate conflict in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and the criminal invasion of Iraq (not to mention that this particular “thwarted 9-11” was a timely boost for the pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman).
Immediately after 9-11, Vladimir Putin promised support for George Bush’s “war on terror,” with the caveat that NATO cease its eastward push. Bush agreed, and just as immediately set about pushing NATO eastward. Professor Stephen Cohen of NYU points out that with the US today openly stating that Georgia and Ukraine are to become NATO partners-and with Putin having drawn the line with Ukraine, as Russia subsidizes much of Ukraine’s economy-a new and very real tension has risen between the two largest possessors of nuclear arms. In fact, a US warship and 200 Marines were recently chased out of the Russian province of Crimea by a group of protesters.[7]
The heightened illusion of what Bush calls a “global war against Islamic fascists” also serves to back Putin into a corner, as Putin must be perceived as even-handed toward Russia’s 25 million Muslims.
Most people would find all of this easy to digest had they the time to read two excellent books on US post-World War II and post-Cold War imperialism respectively: Peddlers of Crisis, by Jerry Sanders, and The War on Truth, by Nafeez Ahmed. Unfortunately, few will take the time to do so, and thus the rush of fear derived from such an event as just occurred means a near total success for maintaining the Conflict Incorporated status quo.
In other words, in the last 25 years the US created the threat and, through the resultant fear, the worldwide authoritarian means to pretend to deal with it while exercising the full scope of its imperial ambitions, with friends and puppets tagging along. Moreover, that the US (and apparently now the UK) knowingly harbored al-Qaeda cells throughout the 1990s and up to and beyond 9-11 lends a new perspective to President Bush’s post-9-11 promise to “make no distinction between those who committed these terrible acts and those who harbor them.”
Who gained? The ruling elite (the minority). Who lost? The majority, everywhere. Who were the “terrorists”? Patsies. The need for a new and real (fully allowed to unfold) 9-11 has been forestalled for the moment as one waits for the other shoe to drop: the linking of Syria and Iran and whomever else to the current “investigation.”
Funny how Bush administration officials denied any foreknowledge that planes could be used as weapons after 9-11, particularly when the same officials are saying that they recognized this new plot because of its similarities to one carried out by Ramzi Yousef in 1995. What a fine spin.
Predictably, US news outlets called the 24 suspects “Pakistanis,” failing to mention that most if not all are British citizens, born and raised.
“If ever there was a verification that there is a war on terror, this was it,” said one reporter-and that is precisely what it was intended to be. And so much for the so-called “national threat level,” which apparently stays low during months of intensely high threat levels and rises after a threat is “thwarted.” Why not call it the “desired national fear level”?
The state of global affairs from the US perspective can be summed up in one statement from a lengthy essay, Constant Conflict, by Major Ralph Peters: “There will be no peace. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy, and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.”[8]
Where once they shouted “Hear! Hear!” toward progress in public chambers, one can almost catch the resonant echoes of some Western leaders happily whispering in private “Fear! Fear!” while their profits soar and their people tremble. Somebody should be checking market “put options” every time such “threats” are “foiled” or “succeed.”
On ABC’s Nightline, Monday, August 14, former hostage Jill Carroll recounted how the Iraqi insurgency was “like a family affair… what are you gonna do, arrest them all, kill them all?”
At that moment over on C-SPAN, President Bush, in the State Department’s Treaty Room, was giving the answer:
Yes.
In the very next segment on C-SPAN, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu each delivered their own declarations of war in the Knesset. All three leaders, in the US and in Israel, pointed to Syria and Iran as the new front in the “war on terror.”
This during a “cease-fire.”
“America has never been guided by territorial ambitions,” Bush declared. “The lesson of the past week is that there’s still a war on terror going on and there’s still individuals that would like to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives.”
Let’s examine this assertion. The reasons for the use of the long-standing instruments of fear and militarism in the cause of navigating the contours and undulations of the Cold War are revealed in the context of the post-Cold War “war on terror,” which employs the same rhetoric and means of manipulation.
Such revelations are not limited to identical methods, but also spring forth from statements voiced by the manipulators themselves. A recent example came from the wife of Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, cofounder of a plethora of single-minded think tanks ranging from the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
In a 2004 Los Angeles interview, Decter stated, “We’re not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’re there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil.”[9]
Statements like these surface after years, even decades, of manipulations that use very different and far more publicly palatable rhetoric to arrive at the tipping point when pretexts “to get” what manipulators want are achieved and exploited.
Though the precise reasons have somewhat varied between the end of World War II and today, they have in common the convergent interests of influential groups with likeminded groups outside the US, who together stood to gain from imperial ambitions pursued under the cloak of American projection of force as a response to the well-fashioned threats of “communist enslavement” and “international terrorism” respectively.
All of this is and has been about control of Central Asia and counteracting or inhibiting Russian and Chinese moves to control its resources. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observes, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy.” Importantly, he adds, “Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat,”[10] a statement that should be understood in the context of one made earlier in his book: “The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”[11]
Between July 2 and July 5, 1979, in Nafeez Ahmed’s words from The War on Truth, citing Philip Paull’s brilliant 1982 thesis on the organized reinvention of international terrorism,
“a group of powerful elites from various countries gathered at an international conference in Jerusalem to promote and exploit the idea of ‘international terrorism.’ The (Jerusalem) conference (on International Terrorism, or JCIT) established the ideological foundations for the ‘war on terror.’ JCIT’s defining theme was that international terrorism constituted an organized political movement whose ultimate origin was in the Soviet Union. All terrorist groups were ultimately products of, and could be traced back to, this single source, which-according to the JCIT-provided financial, military, and logistical assistance to disparate terrorist movements around the globe. The mortal danger to Western security and democracy posed by the worldwide scope of this international terrorist movement required an appropriate worldwide anti-terrorism offensive, consisting of the mutual coordination of Western military intelligence services.”[12]
The nonexistent target of this antiterrorist program leads us to ask what the real target was.
According to former State Department official Richard Barnet, the inflation of Soviet-sponsored ‘international terrorism’ was useful precisely for demonizing threats to the prevailing US-dominated capitalist economic system.[13]
It is crucial to identify the architects of the JCIT’s terrorism project. Thanks to Philip Paull, we know they were, “present and former members of the Israeli and United States governments, new right politicians, high-ranking former United States and Israeli intelligence officers, the anti-détente, pro-Cold War group associated with the policies of Senator Henry M. Jackson-a group of neoconservative journalists and intellectuals-and reactionary British and French politicians and publicists.” (The aforementioned anti-détente, pro-Cold War group associated with the policies of Senator Henry Jackson are well known to be Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan, Charles Horner, and James Woolsey, to name a few.)[14]
Importantly, Paull’s thesis includes the entire list of the JCIT participants, many of them intimately connected to the 1976 “Team B” assault on National Intelligence Estimates and to CPD. Participants from the United States at this conference, arranged by Benjamin Netanyahu and George Bush Sr., were neoconservative organizers Norman Podhoretz (CPD) and his wife Midge Decter (CPD), Senator John Danforth, Professor Joseph Bishop (CPD), General George Keegan (Team B), Ray Cline (CPD, former CIA deputy director who had assisted with Operation Northwoods, and director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies), Jack Kemp (CPD), Lane Kirkland (CPD’s connection to the AFL-CIO), journalist George Will, nuclear physicist and staunch Cold War hawk Edward Teller (CPD), Richard Pipes (Team B, CPD), Bayard Rustin (CPD’s connection to the A. Philip Randolph Institute), Professor Thomas Schelling (RAND), Ben Wattenberg (CPD), Claire Sterling, and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Participants also came from Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, West Germany, Canada, Ireland, and the largest contingency was comprised of Israeli military, government, and intelligence service personnel. The bulk of the international representatives not from Israel and the US were media propagandists long connected to covert operations.[15]
In 1981, some of the conference attendees published books, including Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s International Terrorism Challenge and Response: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, asserting the existence of this Soviet-backed threat.
For a decade or more, the United States government, like the governments of most Western powers, was largely silent on the question of Soviet complicity in international terrorism. Beginning in about 1979, and culminating in 1981 with the publication of Claire Sterling’s book, The Terror Network, the evidence that the Soviet Union had provided substantial supplies and training to a broad spectrum of terrorist organizations became so compelling that it was difficult to deny it.[16]
In 1982, within just a few years of this conference, Philip Paull, the masters degree student at San Francisco State University, used his thesis to demonstrate that the JCIT’s literature and source documentation was profoundly flawed, with authors citing each other and altering official documents. JCIT’s assertion that there was a ten-fold increase in international terrorism between 1968 and 1978 had been deliberately fabricated, and contradicted CIA data showing a decline.
According to Ahmed: “It also routinely relied on techniques of blatant disinformation, misquoting and misrepresenting Western intelligence reports, as well as recycling government sponsored disinformation published in the mainstream media. Paull thus concludes that the 1979 JCIT was:
… a successful propaganda operation… the entire notion of ‘international terrorism’ as promoted by the Jerusalem Conference rests on a faulty, dishonest, and ultimately corrupt information base…. The issue of international terrorism has little to do with fact, or with any objective legal definition. The issue, as promoted by the JCIT and used by the Reagan administration, is an ideological and instrumental issue. It is the ideology, rather than the reality, that dominates US foreign policy today.”
Nevertheless, Ahmed continues,
The new ideology of ‘international terrorism’ justified the Reagan administration’s shift to ‘a renewed interventionist foreign policy,’ and legitimized a ‘new alliance between right-wing dictatorships everywhere’ and the government. Thus, the administration had moved to ‘legitimate their politics of state terrorism and repression,’ while also alleviating pressure for the reform of the intelligence community and opening the door for ‘aggressive and sometimes illegal intelligence action,’ in the course of fighting the international terrorist threat.[17]
In other words, this plan was an effort to fan Cold War flames and produce stronger intelligence community cover for continued and further imperial projections, which was the primary purpose of the US-USSR Cold War in the first place, as University of Chicago professor of history Bruce Cumings and East Asia expert and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson assert.
Following the departure of Soviet forces in 1989, Afghanistan experienced heavy conflict between various factions; among the most brutal of these was the Northern Alliance (whose portrayal in US media after 9-11 was anything but brutal). By the mid 1990s, several factions joined to form the Taliban movement, which captured Kabul and took power in 1996, reportedly orchestrated by Pakistani intelligence and the oil company Unocal,[18] and approved by the CIA, to provide “easier” oil pipeline negotiations and the greater chance of its successful construction through Afghanistan.
These negotiations occurred during the mid to late 1990s between the Taliban and current US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad (then a Unocal advisor). The negotiations involved Condoleeza Rice (then an advisor for Chevron), current President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai (then an advisor for Unocal), and Enron, which paid $750,000 for the pipeline survey using a grant funded by US taxpayers.[19] However, the negotiations deteriorated in the year prior to 9-11, leading to a major US invasion plan,[20] for which wargames were conducted in January 2001.[21] From February to May 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney gathered executives from the world’s major energy corporations for his Energy Task Force meetings. Maps acquired by Judicial Watch show the carving up among these corporations of Iraq’s oilfields and much of its other infrastructural assets.[22]
The US had at last put its reinvented (post-Cold War) international terrorist threat to work, as envisioned by the JCIT back in 1979, again, invented and then reinvented not to counter Soviet actions, but “useful for demonizing threats to the prevailing US-dominated capitalist economic system,” knowingly paving the path to the “war on terror” well before it began.
The military agenda was perfect for those who longed for a new Pearl Harbor for economic gain at the hands of “international terrorists.” The groundwork was complete; the evil mastermind created, and all that was needed to pursue the Unocal pipeline and myriad corporate ambitions was a legitimate excuse for taking control of the region. The CIA was still negotiating the pipeline deal in August 2001 with troops already positioned in surrounding states. Thus, the next step was a trigger, a pretext to galvanize public opinion.
The crux of Philip Paull’s thesis is that the JCIT represented a precisely coordinated and globally oriented propaganda network for the purposes of selling pretexts for war. This is what the so-called “war on terror” really is, and Americans would not have accepted it without a massive media propaganda campaign accompanying an “attack” against the United States, or with the kind of enlightenment about such tyrannical behavior that a truly competent education system should provide.
Therefore, Bush’s two statements, that “America has never been guided by territorial ambitions,” and “The lesson of the past week is that there’s still a war on terror going on and there’s still individuals that would like to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives,” are utterly false and tragically true respectively. One, America has always been guided by imperialist expansion and requires constant covers for so doing; and two, individuals do wish to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives-individuals in Bush’s own administration and individuals who will continue to bribe officials in any administration to achieve the same objectives of lucrative power over the common people.
That said, people of the world everywhere, prepare yourselves for Bush’s “freedom agenda,” his “forward strategy of freedom,” and the “unstoppable power of freedom.”
Prepare yourselves, because “freedom” in Bushwellian and the language of American foreign policy means war: hot war, with Predators and bullets for all.
A human rights activist for 45 years, Brian Bogart is the first graduate student in Peace Studies from the University of Oregon. He can be reached at bdbogart@gmail.com
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[1] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), p. 10.
[2] Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 54-55. This trade or “dollar gap” was of deep concern to influential US defense industry executives, who were severely impacted by the postwar economic downturn in the period from 1946 to 1950, and many of whom had during this time lobbied top officials in Washington’s military circles. A turnaround occurred in 1948 and profoundly so after the adoption of NSC-68’s recommendations in December 1950. For further insight, see Frank Kofsky’s Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948.
[3] Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency 2001; CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1999: ORE 22-48, April 1948, Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1948; ORE 22-48, September 1948, (Addendum) Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1948-49; ORE 46-49, May 1949, Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1949.
[4] Cited by Agence France Press, 14 January 1998. See also Greg Guma, “Cracks in the Covert Iceberg,” Toward Freedom, May 1998, p. 2; Leslie Fienberg, “Brzezinski brags, blows cover: US intervened in Afghanistan first,” Workers World, 12 March 1998; Corroborated by former DCI Robert Gates in his memoirs, From the Shadows.
[5] “Excerpts from Haig’s Remarks at First News Conference as Secretary of State,” New York Times, 19 January 1981, p. 1. Haig’s subsequent ouster from the administration as it took a far sharper turn to the right is equated (by Jerry Sanders in Peddlers of Crisis, p. 341) with George Kennan’s ouster from the Truman administration, both of which have in common the rise in stature of Paul Nitze.
[6] Chalmers Johnson interview, Why We Fight, film directed by Eugene Jarecki (Sony Pictures Classics, 2005).
[7] Stephen Cohen, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose Show, Public Broadcasting System, “The New American Cold War,” 28 June 2006.
[8] Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict: a look behind the philosophy and practice of the US push for domination of the world’s economy and culture.” (US Army War College: Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14). At the time he wrote this article, Major Ralph Peters was assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he was responsible for future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. Peters is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College, and holds a masters degree in international relations. Over the past several years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge.
[9] Midge Decter interview, The Warren Olney Show, Los Angeles, 21 May 2004.
[10] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), pp. 338-339.
[11] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 24-25. Some nations have regrettably studied and adopted methods or perspectives of defeated powers (e.g., Paul Nitze’s fascination with Albert Speer’s 1946 statement-in a personal interview with Nitze-asserting that Germany would have won World War II had it suffered a Pearl Harbor at the outset to galvanize the public; and France’s use of torture in Vietnam and Algeria). Indeed, former Nazis and Japanese counterparts were employed by the US following the war for the purposes of espionage in the affairs of the Soviet Union and Korea and to extract a greater understanding of barbaric methods used in warfare.
[12] Ibid., p. 3.
[13] Ibid., p. 4.
[14] All are members of the Project for the New American Century and are current or former Bush administration officials or advisors. Charles Horner, along with other PNAC members Daniel Pipes, Stephen Hadley, Kenneth Adelman, and Peter Rodman, and CPD members Kenneth Jensen, John Moore, and Robert Turner-as well as Caspar Weinberger and many other pro-interventionists-created and/or serve or have served on the board of the United States Institute of Peace. (Hadley, Pipes, and Adelman are also CPD members.) This compelled me to design an independent peace studies program, as USIP funds the majority of peace and conflict studies graduate programs in the US, and sends out annual surveys to its recipients.
[15] Philip Paull, “International Terrorism”: The Propaganda War, San Francisco State University, California, June 1982. Other JCIT participants cited by Paull (info circa 1982): Canada-David Barrett (former premier of British Columbia); France-Professor Annie Kriegel (University of Paris, Nanterre), Jacques Soustelle (correspondent for l’Aurore, former governor of Algeria 1955-6, charged with subversion for attempted OAS coup 1962, 1962-8 in exile, author of La longue marche d’Israel 1968); Ireland-Frank Cluskey (Irish Labour Party); Israel-Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Professor Mordechai Abir, Major-General Meir Amit (Knesset member and business executive, former chief Mossad 1963-8, director Al Aman military intelligence 1961-3), Mordechai Ben-Ari (president El-Al Airlines 1967-77, former commanding officer Haganah 1948, active in Alliyah “B” Austria and Eastern Europe 1948-50), Asher Ben-Natan (special advisor to Ministry of Defense 1976-8, ambassador to France 1970-5 and West Germany 1965-9, director general of Ministry of Defense 1965), Vladmir Bukovsky (author and Soviet émigré), Ambassador Walter Eytan, Ambassador Michael Comay, Major-General Shlomo Gazit (director Al Aman military intelligence 1973-9, director Department of Military Intelligence and Coordinator of Activities in Occupied Territories 1967-74, Intelligence Branch IDF 1964-7), General Chaim Herzog (business executive and lawyer, permanent representative to the United Nations 1975-8, first governor of the West Bank 1967, director Al Aman military intelligence 1948-50 1959-62, chief Security Department of Jewish Agency 1947-8, media expert), Yitzak Navon (president of Israel 1978-[83], former chair Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, chairman World Zionist Council 1973-8), Gideon Rafael (ambassador to United Kingdom 1973-8, senior political advisor to Foreign Ministry 1972-3, former United Nations ambassador, intelligence service Foreign Ministry), Brigadier-General Meir Shamgar (justice of the Supreme Court 1975-[95], military advocate general and legal advisor to Ministry of Defense 1968-75), Major-General Aharon Yariv (director Center for Strategic Studies Tel-Aviv University 1977-?, minister of information 1974-5, special advisior to prime minister 1972-3, director Al Aman military intelligence); Italy-Manlio Brosio (former secretary general NATO), Piero Luigi Vigna (attorney general Florence); Netherlands-Harry Van Den Bergh (member of parliament), Edward Van Theyjn (deputy leader Socialist Party), Joop Den Uyl (prime minister 1973-77); United Kingdom-Lord Chalfont (Arthur Gwynne Jones, director IBM-UK 1973, foreign editor New Statesman 1970-1, minister of state Foreign Commonwealth Office 1964-70, British Army staff and intelligence appointments 1940-61, Russian expert), Brian R. Crozier (cofounder and director Institute for the Study of Conflict 1970-?, chairman Forum World Features 1965-74, editor Conflict Studies 1970-5, former publisher Economist Foreign Report, correspondent for National Review), Michael Elkins (BBC correspondent, Israel), Rt. Hon. Hugh Fraser (conservative MP, minister of defense for RAF 1964, Special Air Service World War II), Paul B. Johnson (journalist and broadcaster, New Statesman 1955-70, author of Enemies of Society 1977), Robert Moss (coauthor of The Spike 1980, former editor of confidential Economist Foreign Report, author of new book Death Beam […”this spy-vs-spy thriller reveals how an unknowing world reaches the brink of total war ‘when the Soviets perfect an incomparably powerful death beam…and point it at the United States'”–PP], now with Heritage Foundation), Rt. Hon. Merlyn Rees (home secretary 1976-9, secretary of state for Northern Ireland 1974-6, undersecretary Ministry of Defense 1965-8); West Germany-Eric Blumenfeld (member of Bundestag), Hans Joseph Horchem (Hamburg Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), Gerard Loewenthal (journalist). Use Google.com for comprehensive up-to-date information on all names in these notes and this paper.
[16] James Q. Wilson, “Thinking About Terrorism,” July 1981.
[17] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), p. 4.
[18] Unocal headquarters are located in Sugarland, Texas; Tom DeLay’s congressional base.
[19] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), p. 20.
[20] Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 119, 121-123.
[21] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), pp. 28-29.
[22] Oilfields and assets maps from Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task Force meetings, released by Judicial Watch, 17 July 2003. See also “The Struggle for Iraq: The New Looting,” 28 May 2004 (and previous New York Times articles on the looting of Iraq).
In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed a handful of Wall Street lawyers and investors to posts in his administration, including James Conant, James Forrestal, and Paul Nitze. Upon Roosevelt’s death (and the coinciding fall of the Third Reich), this influential group began an attempt to fill the trade vacuum left in postwar Europe. While Europeans, Soviets, and many US officials would have preferred a neutralist trade environment, these few State Department officials in the final years of the 1940s sought US trade supremacy,[2] and thus set about creating a Soviet “communist threat” that ran counter to the CIA’s own National Intelligence Estimates.[3]
By 1951, this group had formed the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), which by March of that year successfully motivated Congress and the public to buy into the “threat of communist enslavement” through fear-based rhetoric in the media, setting in motion the Cold War and a US economy driven by conflict.
As CPD members moved from administration to administration regardless of party affiliation, the Cold War policy of “containment militarism” ran strong through the late 1960s. In the wake of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, according to Richard Falk, a split between foreign policy elites emerged: Imperialists, who sought to remilitarize the US for global conquest still using the fear-inciting Soviet “communist threat”; and managers (Trilateralists), who attempted to rally the corporate spheres of Europe, East Asia, and the US to adopt a new era of interdependent international trade.
In 1976, this split led to the first CPD-free administration in the office of President Carter, though CPD quickly regrouped to kill détente, oust Carter, and reestablish itself in the Reagan administration, using “Soviet-backed international terrorism” as the new fear factor.
Around June of 1979, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The United States launched a covert operation to bolster anticommunist guerrillas in Afghanistan at least six months before the 1979 Soviet invasion of that country. We did not push the Russians into invading, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.”[4]
The US had actively recruited Afghan warlords to form terrorist groups along the northern border, forcing the USSR to conduct a full-scale invasion in December 1979 to counter the US destabilization program. Among the methods used by the US in this program was the production and distribution of textbooks to schools (madrassas), promoting the war-values of murder and fanaticism, and fostering a generation steeped in violence.
Upon taking office in January 1981, Reagan outlined his new foreign policy in a speech by Alexander Haig, which boiled down to: “International terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern.”[5] Thus, the 1979 US destabilization program using terrorist groups to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan was used by the US to call the Soviet invasion “terrorism” and to point to that invasion as a model for the newly invented phenomenon of “Soviet-backed terrorism” around the world.
This cemented the CPD’s original hegemonic goal of a fear-based structure. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and its “communist threat,” this structure still prevails, requiring new external threats to maintain today’s US-global trade supremacy. Absent the old communist threat, the degree of deceit necessary to sway public opinion increasingly grew, ultimately employing first strikes against Western assets both to satisfy this demand for public acceptance and acquiescence, and to serve as pretexts for the placement of US forces in geostrategic regions. The US currently has 750,000 troops in 135 countries.[6]
What we are left with is simply “international terrorism,” a perpetual “threat” straight out of the plotline of the film V for Vendetta, and one that satisfies most corporate executives and serves to cover such inconvenient truths as climate change-imperialism’s product and archenemy-the raging and disproportionate conflict in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, and the criminal invasion of Iraq (not to mention that this particular “thwarted 9-11” was a timely boost for the pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman).
Immediately after 9-11, Vladimir Putin promised support for George Bush’s “war on terror,” with the caveat that NATO cease its eastward push. Bush agreed, and just as immediately set about pushing NATO eastward. Professor Stephen Cohen of NYU points out that with the US today openly stating that Georgia and Ukraine are to become NATO partners-and with Putin having drawn the line with Ukraine, as Russia subsidizes much of Ukraine’s economy-a new and very real tension has risen between the two largest possessors of nuclear arms. In fact, a US warship and 200 Marines were recently chased out of the Russian province of Crimea by a group of protesters.[7]
The heightened illusion of what Bush calls a “global war against Islamic fascists” also serves to back Putin into a corner, as Putin must be perceived as even-handed toward Russia’s 25 million Muslims.
Most people would find all of this easy to digest had they the time to read two excellent books on US post-World War II and post-Cold War imperialism respectively: Peddlers of Crisis, by Jerry Sanders, and The War on Truth, by Nafeez Ahmed. Unfortunately, few will take the time to do so, and thus the rush of fear derived from such an event as just occurred means a near total success for maintaining the Conflict Incorporated status quo.
In other words, in the last 25 years the US created the threat and, through the resultant fear, the worldwide authoritarian means to pretend to deal with it while exercising the full scope of its imperial ambitions, with friends and puppets tagging along. Moreover, that the US (and apparently now the UK) knowingly harbored al-Qaeda cells throughout the 1990s and up to and beyond 9-11 lends a new perspective to President Bush’s post-9-11 promise to “make no distinction between those who committed these terrible acts and those who harbor them.”
Who gained? The ruling elite (the minority). Who lost? The majority, everywhere. Who were the “terrorists”? Patsies. The need for a new and real (fully allowed to unfold) 9-11 has been forestalled for the moment as one waits for the other shoe to drop: the linking of Syria and Iran and whomever else to the current “investigation.”
Funny how Bush administration officials denied any foreknowledge that planes could be used as weapons after 9-11, particularly when the same officials are saying that they recognized this new plot because of its similarities to one carried out by Ramzi Yousef in 1995. What a fine spin.
Predictably, US news outlets called the 24 suspects “Pakistanis,” failing to mention that most if not all are British citizens, born and raised.
“If ever there was a verification that there is a war on terror, this was it,” said one reporter-and that is precisely what it was intended to be. And so much for the so-called “national threat level,” which apparently stays low during months of intensely high threat levels and rises after a threat is “thwarted.” Why not call it the “desired national fear level”?
The state of global affairs from the US perspective can be summed up in one statement from a lengthy essay, Constant Conflict, by Major Ralph Peters: “There will be no peace. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy, and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.”[8]
Where once they shouted “Hear! Hear!” toward progress in public chambers, one can almost catch the resonant echoes of some Western leaders happily whispering in private “Fear! Fear!” while their profits soar and their people tremble. Somebody should be checking market “put options” every time such “threats” are “foiled” or “succeed.”
On ABC’s Nightline, Monday, August 14, former hostage Jill Carroll recounted how the Iraqi insurgency was “like a family affair… what are you gonna do, arrest them all, kill them all?”
At that moment over on C-SPAN, President Bush, in the State Department’s Treaty Room, was giving the answer:
Yes.
In the very next segment on C-SPAN, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu each delivered their own declarations of war in the Knesset. All three leaders, in the US and in Israel, pointed to Syria and Iran as the new front in the “war on terror.”
This during a “cease-fire.”
“America has never been guided by territorial ambitions,” Bush declared. “The lesson of the past week is that there’s still a war on terror going on and there’s still individuals that would like to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives.”
Let’s examine this assertion. The reasons for the use of the long-standing instruments of fear and militarism in the cause of navigating the contours and undulations of the Cold War are revealed in the context of the post-Cold War “war on terror,” which employs the same rhetoric and means of manipulation.
Such revelations are not limited to identical methods, but also spring forth from statements voiced by the manipulators themselves. A recent example came from the wife of Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, cofounder of a plethora of single-minded think tanks ranging from the second incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger, Hudson Institute, Heritage Foundation, Coalition for a Democratic Majority, to the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
In a 2004 Los Angeles interview, Decter stated, “We’re not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’re there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil.”[9]
Statements like these surface after years, even decades, of manipulations that use very different and far more publicly palatable rhetoric to arrive at the tipping point when pretexts “to get” what manipulators want are achieved and exploited.
Though the precise reasons have somewhat varied between the end of World War II and today, they have in common the convergent interests of influential groups with likeminded groups outside the US, who together stood to gain from imperial ambitions pursued under the cloak of American projection of force as a response to the well-fashioned threats of “communist enslavement” and “international terrorism” respectively.
All of this is and has been about control of Central Asia and counteracting or inhibiting Russian and Chinese moves to control its resources. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observes, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America’s primacy.” Importantly, he adds, “Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat,”[10] a statement that should be understood in the context of one made earlier in his book: “The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.”[11]
Between July 2 and July 5, 1979, in Nafeez Ahmed’s words from The War on Truth, citing Philip Paull’s brilliant 1982 thesis on the organized reinvention of international terrorism,
“a group of powerful elites from various countries gathered at an international conference in Jerusalem to promote and exploit the idea of ‘international terrorism.’ The (Jerusalem) conference (on International Terrorism, or JCIT) established the ideological foundations for the ‘war on terror.’ JCIT’s defining theme was that international terrorism constituted an organized political movement whose ultimate origin was in the Soviet Union. All terrorist groups were ultimately products of, and could be traced back to, this single source, which-according to the JCIT-provided financial, military, and logistical assistance to disparate terrorist movements around the globe. The mortal danger to Western security and democracy posed by the worldwide scope of this international terrorist movement required an appropriate worldwide anti-terrorism offensive, consisting of the mutual coordination of Western military intelligence services.”[12]
The nonexistent target of this antiterrorist program leads us to ask what the real target was.
According to former State Department official Richard Barnet, the inflation of Soviet-sponsored ‘international terrorism’ was useful precisely for demonizing threats to the prevailing US-dominated capitalist economic system.[13]
It is crucial to identify the architects of the JCIT’s terrorism project. Thanks to Philip Paull, we know they were, “present and former members of the Israeli and United States governments, new right politicians, high-ranking former United States and Israeli intelligence officers, the anti-détente, pro-Cold War group associated with the policies of Senator Henry M. Jackson-a group of neoconservative journalists and intellectuals-and reactionary British and French politicians and publicists.” (The aforementioned anti-détente, pro-Cold War group associated with the policies of Senator Henry Jackson are well known to be Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, Douglas Feith, Robert Kagan, Charles Horner, and James Woolsey, to name a few.)[14]
Importantly, Paull’s thesis includes the entire list of the JCIT participants, many of them intimately connected to the 1976 “Team B” assault on National Intelligence Estimates and to CPD. Participants from the United States at this conference, arranged by Benjamin Netanyahu and George Bush Sr., were neoconservative organizers Norman Podhoretz (CPD) and his wife Midge Decter (CPD), Senator John Danforth, Professor Joseph Bishop (CPD), General George Keegan (Team B), Ray Cline (CPD, former CIA deputy director who had assisted with Operation Northwoods, and director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies), Jack Kemp (CPD), Lane Kirkland (CPD’s connection to the AFL-CIO), journalist George Will, nuclear physicist and staunch Cold War hawk Edward Teller (CPD), Richard Pipes (Team B, CPD), Bayard Rustin (CPD’s connection to the A. Philip Randolph Institute), Professor Thomas Schelling (RAND), Ben Wattenberg (CPD), Claire Sterling, and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Participants also came from Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, West Germany, Canada, Ireland, and the largest contingency was comprised of Israeli military, government, and intelligence service personnel. The bulk of the international representatives not from Israel and the US were media propagandists long connected to covert operations.[15]
In 1981, some of the conference attendees published books, including Claire Sterling’s The Terror Network, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s International Terrorism Challenge and Response: Proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, asserting the existence of this Soviet-backed threat.
For a decade or more, the United States government, like the governments of most Western powers, was largely silent on the question of Soviet complicity in international terrorism. Beginning in about 1979, and culminating in 1981 with the publication of Claire Sterling’s book, The Terror Network, the evidence that the Soviet Union had provided substantial supplies and training to a broad spectrum of terrorist organizations became so compelling that it was difficult to deny it.[16]
In 1982, within just a few years of this conference, Philip Paull, the masters degree student at San Francisco State University, used his thesis to demonstrate that the JCIT’s literature and source documentation was profoundly flawed, with authors citing each other and altering official documents. JCIT’s assertion that there was a ten-fold increase in international terrorism between 1968 and 1978 had been deliberately fabricated, and contradicted CIA data showing a decline.
According to Ahmed: “It also routinely relied on techniques of blatant disinformation, misquoting and misrepresenting Western intelligence reports, as well as recycling government sponsored disinformation published in the mainstream media. Paull thus concludes that the 1979 JCIT was:
… a successful propaganda operation… the entire notion of ‘international terrorism’ as promoted by the Jerusalem Conference rests on a faulty, dishonest, and ultimately corrupt information base…. The issue of international terrorism has little to do with fact, or with any objective legal definition. The issue, as promoted by the JCIT and used by the Reagan administration, is an ideological and instrumental issue. It is the ideology, rather than the reality, that dominates US foreign policy today.”
Nevertheless, Ahmed continues,
The new ideology of ‘international terrorism’ justified the Reagan administration’s shift to ‘a renewed interventionist foreign policy,’ and legitimized a ‘new alliance between right-wing dictatorships everywhere’ and the government. Thus, the administration had moved to ‘legitimate their politics of state terrorism and repression,’ while also alleviating pressure for the reform of the intelligence community and opening the door for ‘aggressive and sometimes illegal intelligence action,’ in the course of fighting the international terrorist threat.[17]
In other words, this plan was an effort to fan Cold War flames and produce stronger intelligence community cover for continued and further imperial projections, which was the primary purpose of the US-USSR Cold War in the first place, as University of Chicago professor of history Bruce Cumings and East Asia expert and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson assert.
Following the departure of Soviet forces in 1989, Afghanistan experienced heavy conflict between various factions; among the most brutal of these was the Northern Alliance (whose portrayal in US media after 9-11 was anything but brutal). By the mid 1990s, several factions joined to form the Taliban movement, which captured Kabul and took power in 1996, reportedly orchestrated by Pakistani intelligence and the oil company Unocal,[18] and approved by the CIA, to provide “easier” oil pipeline negotiations and the greater chance of its successful construction through Afghanistan.
These negotiations occurred during the mid to late 1990s between the Taliban and current US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad (then a Unocal advisor). The negotiations involved Condoleeza Rice (then an advisor for Chevron), current President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai (then an advisor for Unocal), and Enron, which paid $750,000 for the pipeline survey using a grant funded by US taxpayers.[19] However, the negotiations deteriorated in the year prior to 9-11, leading to a major US invasion plan,[20] for which wargames were conducted in January 2001.[21] From February to May 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney gathered executives from the world’s major energy corporations for his Energy Task Force meetings. Maps acquired by Judicial Watch show the carving up among these corporations of Iraq’s oilfields and much of its other infrastructural assets.[22]
The US had at last put its reinvented (post-Cold War) international terrorist threat to work, as envisioned by the JCIT back in 1979, again, invented and then reinvented not to counter Soviet actions, but “useful for demonizing threats to the prevailing US-dominated capitalist economic system,” knowingly paving the path to the “war on terror” well before it began.
The military agenda was perfect for those who longed for a new Pearl Harbor for economic gain at the hands of “international terrorists.” The groundwork was complete; the evil mastermind created, and all that was needed to pursue the Unocal pipeline and myriad corporate ambitions was a legitimate excuse for taking control of the region. The CIA was still negotiating the pipeline deal in August 2001 with troops already positioned in surrounding states. Thus, the next step was a trigger, a pretext to galvanize public opinion.
The crux of Philip Paull’s thesis is that the JCIT represented a precisely coordinated and globally oriented propaganda network for the purposes of selling pretexts for war. This is what the so-called “war on terror” really is, and Americans would not have accepted it without a massive media propaganda campaign accompanying an “attack” against the United States, or with the kind of enlightenment about such tyrannical behavior that a truly competent education system should provide.
Therefore, Bush’s two statements, that “America has never been guided by territorial ambitions,” and “The lesson of the past week is that there’s still a war on terror going on and there’s still individuals that would like to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives,” are utterly false and tragically true respectively. One, America has always been guided by imperialist expansion and requires constant covers for so doing; and two, individuals do wish to kill innocent Americans to achieve political objectives-individuals in Bush’s own administration and individuals who will continue to bribe officials in any administration to achieve the same objectives of lucrative power over the common people.
That said, people of the world everywhere, prepare yourselves for Bush’s “freedom agenda,” his “forward strategy of freedom,” and the “unstoppable power of freedom.”
Prepare yourselves, because “freedom” in Bushwellian and the language of American foreign policy means war: hot war, with Predators and bullets for all.
A human rights activist for 45 years, Brian Bogart is the first graduate student in Peace Studies from the University of Oregon. He can be reached at bdbogart@gmail.com
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[1] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), p. 10.
[2] Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis (Boston: South End Press, 1983), pp. 54-55. This trade or “dollar gap” was of deep concern to influential US defense industry executives, who were severely impacted by the postwar economic downturn in the period from 1946 to 1950, and many of whom had during this time lobbied top officials in Washington’s military circles. A turnaround occurred in 1948 and profoundly so after the adoption of NSC-68’s recommendations in December 1950. For further insight, see Frank Kofsky’s Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948.
[3] Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency 2001; CIA’s Analysis of the Soviet Union, 1947-1999: ORE 22-48, April 1948, Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1948; ORE 22-48, September 1948, (Addendum) Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1948-49; ORE 46-49, May 1949, Possibility of Direct Soviet Military Action During 1949.
[4] Cited by Agence France Press, 14 January 1998. See also Greg Guma, “Cracks in the Covert Iceberg,” Toward Freedom, May 1998, p. 2; Leslie Fienberg, “Brzezinski brags, blows cover: US intervened in Afghanistan first,” Workers World, 12 March 1998; Corroborated by former DCI Robert Gates in his memoirs, From the Shadows.
[5] “Excerpts from Haig’s Remarks at First News Conference as Secretary of State,” New York Times, 19 January 1981, p. 1. Haig’s subsequent ouster from the administration as it took a far sharper turn to the right is equated (by Jerry Sanders in Peddlers of Crisis, p. 341) with George Kennan’s ouster from the Truman administration, both of which have in common the rise in stature of Paul Nitze.
[6] Chalmers Johnson interview, Why We Fight, film directed by Eugene Jarecki (Sony Pictures Classics, 2005).
[7] Stephen Cohen, interview by Charlie Rose, Charlie Rose Show, Public Broadcasting System, “The New American Cold War,” 28 June 2006.
[8] Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict: a look behind the philosophy and practice of the US push for domination of the world’s economy and culture.” (US Army War College: Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14). At the time he wrote this article, Major Ralph Peters was assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he was responsible for future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. Peters is a graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College, and holds a masters degree in international relations. Over the past several years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge.
[9] Midge Decter interview, The Warren Olney Show, Los Angeles, 21 May 2004.
[10] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), pp. 338-339.
[11] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 24-25. Some nations have regrettably studied and adopted methods or perspectives of defeated powers (e.g., Paul Nitze’s fascination with Albert Speer’s 1946 statement-in a personal interview with Nitze-asserting that Germany would have won World War II had it suffered a Pearl Harbor at the outset to galvanize the public; and France’s use of torture in Vietnam and Algeria). Indeed, former Nazis and Japanese counterparts were employed by the US following the war for the purposes of espionage in the affairs of the Soviet Union and Korea and to extract a greater understanding of barbaric methods used in warfare.
[12] Ibid., p. 3.
[13] Ibid., p. 4.
[14] All are members of the Project for the New American Century and are current or former Bush administration officials or advisors. Charles Horner, along with other PNAC members Daniel Pipes, Stephen Hadley, Kenneth Adelman, and Peter Rodman, and CPD members Kenneth Jensen, John Moore, and Robert Turner-as well as Caspar Weinberger and many other pro-interventionists-created and/or serve or have served on the board of the United States Institute of Peace. (Hadley, Pipes, and Adelman are also CPD members.) This compelled me to design an independent peace studies program, as USIP funds the majority of peace and conflict studies graduate programs in the US, and sends out annual surveys to its recipients.
[15] Philip Paull, “International Terrorism”: The Propaganda War, San Francisco State University, California, June 1982. Other JCIT participants cited by Paull (info circa 1982): Canada-David Barrett (former premier of British Columbia); France-Professor Annie Kriegel (University of Paris, Nanterre), Jacques Soustelle (correspondent for l’Aurore, former governor of Algeria 1955-6, charged with subversion for attempted OAS coup 1962, 1962-8 in exile, author of La longue marche d’Israel 1968); Ireland-Frank Cluskey (Irish Labour Party); Israel-Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, Professor Mordechai Abir, Major-General Meir Amit (Knesset member and business executive, former chief Mossad 1963-8, director Al Aman military intelligence 1961-3), Mordechai Ben-Ari (president El-Al Airlines 1967-77, former commanding officer Haganah 1948, active in Alliyah “B” Austria and Eastern Europe 1948-50), Asher Ben-Natan (special advisor to Ministry of Defense 1976-8, ambassador to France 1970-5 and West Germany 1965-9, director general of Ministry of Defense 1965), Vladmir Bukovsky (author and Soviet émigré), Ambassador Walter Eytan, Ambassador Michael Comay, Major-General Shlomo Gazit (director Al Aman military intelligence 1973-9, director Department of Military Intelligence and Coordinator of Activities in Occupied Territories 1967-74, Intelligence Branch IDF 1964-7), General Chaim Herzog (business executive and lawyer, permanent representative to the United Nations 1975-8, first governor of the West Bank 1967, director Al Aman military intelligence 1948-50 1959-62, chief Security Department of Jewish Agency 1947-8, media expert), Yitzak Navon (president of Israel 1978-[83], former chair Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, chairman World Zionist Council 1973-8), Gideon Rafael (ambassador to United Kingdom 1973-8, senior political advisor to Foreign Ministry 1972-3, former United Nations ambassador, intelligence service Foreign Ministry), Brigadier-General Meir Shamgar (justice of the Supreme Court 1975-[95], military advocate general and legal advisor to Ministry of Defense 1968-75), Major-General Aharon Yariv (director Center for Strategic Studies Tel-Aviv University 1977-?, minister of information 1974-5, special advisior to prime minister 1972-3, director Al Aman military intelligence); Italy-Manlio Brosio (former secretary general NATO), Piero Luigi Vigna (attorney general Florence); Netherlands-Harry Van Den Bergh (member of parliament), Edward Van Theyjn (deputy leader Socialist Party), Joop Den Uyl (prime minister 1973-77); United Kingdom-Lord Chalfont (Arthur Gwynne Jones, director IBM-UK 1973, foreign editor New Statesman 1970-1, minister of state Foreign Commonwealth Office 1964-70, British Army staff and intelligence appointments 1940-61, Russian expert), Brian R. Crozier (cofounder and director Institute for the Study of Conflict 1970-?, chairman Forum World Features 1965-74, editor Conflict Studies 1970-5, former publisher Economist Foreign Report, correspondent for National Review), Michael Elkins (BBC correspondent, Israel), Rt. Hon. Hugh Fraser (conservative MP, minister of defense for RAF 1964, Special Air Service World War II), Paul B. Johnson (journalist and broadcaster, New Statesman 1955-70, author of Enemies of Society 1977), Robert Moss (coauthor of The Spike 1980, former editor of confidential Economist Foreign Report, author of new book Death Beam […”this spy-vs-spy thriller reveals how an unknowing world reaches the brink of total war ‘when the Soviets perfect an incomparably powerful death beam…and point it at the United States'”–PP], now with Heritage Foundation), Rt. Hon. Merlyn Rees (home secretary 1976-9, secretary of state for Northern Ireland 1974-6, undersecretary Ministry of Defense 1965-8); West Germany-Eric Blumenfeld (member of Bundestag), Hans Joseph Horchem (Hamburg Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), Gerard Loewenthal (journalist). Use Google.com for comprehensive up-to-date information on all names in these notes and this paper.
[16] James Q. Wilson, “Thinking About Terrorism,” July 1981.
[17] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), p. 4.
[18] Unocal headquarters are located in Sugarland, Texas; Tom DeLay’s congressional base.
[19] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), p. 20.
[20] Paul Thompson, The Terror Timeline (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 119, 121-123.
[21] Nafeez Ahmed, The War on Truth (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2005), pp. 28-29.
[22] Oilfields and assets maps from Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task Force meetings, released by Judicial Watch, 17 July 2003. See also “The Struggle for Iraq: The New Looting,” 28 May 2004 (and previous New York Times articles on the looting of Iraq).