GW Bush on
9/11 Conspiracy Theories
by Robert Lederman
(718) 743-3722
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
November 23, 2001
"We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never
tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the
attacks of September the 11th, malicious lies that
attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists
themselves, away from the guilty."
GW Bush speaking before the UN GeGeneral Assembly
11/10/2001
When President Bush spoke of "outrageous conspiracy
theories" he was for the first time acknowledging
something of great significance. There are informed
viewpoints completely missing from the propaganda war
being relentlessly waged on Americans about 9/11 and
its aftermath, viewpoints which are as opposite from
the official story as it is possible to get.
The Bush administrations' official story has three
basic premises. To briefly summarize, the first is
that Islamic terrorists based in Afghanistan who hate
American freedom plotted and executed an attack on
America - an attack which the U.S. government had no
prior knowledge of nor any connection to. The second
premise is that in order to wage and win a war on
terrorism we must invade Afghanistan and every other
nation harboring, funding or otherwise supporting
terrorists and that a simultaneous suspension of
domestic civil liberties is necessary for internal
security. The third basic premise is that our
government is all good while theirs is the very
personification of evil, the "evil-doers" as President
Bush likes to call them.
The "conspiracy theories" Bush is referring to
similarly have three basic premises and many divergent
subsets. The first is that the attack was known about
(and possibly, planned) by various elements of the
U.S. government before 9/11 and was allowed to take
place in order to bring about certain conditions,
including the suspension of our guaranteed civil
liberties. The second premise is that even if bin
Laden and the al Queda network based in Afghanistan
were immediately responsible for the attack that those
supporting, funding and protecting them are not for
the most part based in Afghanistan but are in fact
closely connected to the Bush administration and to
the allies President Bush has taken such efforts to
rally to our side. The third premise is that a U.S.
built oil pipeline through Afghanistan which has been
in the planning stages for more than a decade is the
real goal of the war and that a U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan was in the works long before September
11th.
[Click Here for earlier Essay associated with this
topic.].
What makes these alternative viewpoints, "conspiracy
theories"? It certainly isn't a lack of evidence.
In the American criminal justice system there are
three basic kinds of evidence; direct, circumstantial
and exculpatory.
Direct evidence of a crime might include a confession,
fingerprints, DNA samples, credible witnesses or a
surveillance tape proving guilt beyond any reasonable
doubt. Circumstantial evidence is anything that lends
credence to a defendant being guilty but in itself is
not sufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable
doubt. Exculpatory evidence on the other hand
disproves a defendants' guilt or contradicts other
evidence proving their guilt. In a recent NYC case
involving exculpatory evidence, a homeless man charged
with a vicious sidewalk assault on a tourist was found
to be on a store surveillance tape recorded at the
same time the assault took place. In the American
system of criminal law prosecutors are required to
share all exculpatory evidence with the defense.
The official story as told by the Bush administration
and the U.S. corporate media is constructed of
"evidence" the government frankly admits would not be
admissible in any court of law. If anything, the Bush
administrations' version of events is itself a very
weakly constructed "conspiracy theory" challenged at
every turn by an enormous amount of exculpatory
evidence, much of it from the Bush administration
itself. No wonder Bush insists on trials by military
tribunals for suspected terrorists, trials in which
virtually none of the evidence will be revealed to the
defendants or their Bush-appointed defense attorneys.
It's absurd to claim that such trials will have any
similarity to those at Nuremburg after WWII. The
accused Nazis were given every opportunity to mount a
full defense and were directly confronted by hundreds
of witnesses for the prosecution who they were able to
fully cross-examine.
There is one very striking similarity to Nuremberg
however. Like today's accused terrorists, the Nazis
were funded and supplied by some of Americas'
wealthiest businessmen including GW Bush's
grandfathers who operated Wall Street banks, shipping
companies and other businesses as fronts for the Nazis
[1].
Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and the largest sources
of financing for terrorism are also intimately
connected to the Bush family and to Wall Street, to
some of Americas' leading corporations and to members
of both Bush administrations.
The need for complete control of all information and
media coverage along with a 24 hour a day propaganda
effort to depict support for the Bush administration
as a patriotic duty becomes obvious once one has even
briefly considered the exculpatory evidence. Not only
might it be difficult to convict the so-called
terrorists in a legitimate court of law but support
for either the war or the Bush administration would be
virtually impossible once the full facts were known.
Nevertheless, being a loyal American I must support
the Presidents' position in the war on terrorism with
one additional point. The American people should hold
President Bush to his own professed standard as
explained in the following quote.
In his remarks, the president again laid out what the
White House called the Bush Doctrine.
"If you harbor terrorists, you are terrorists. If you
train or arm a terrorist, you are a terrorist. If you
feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you're a
terrorist, and you will be held accountable by the
United States and our friends."
NY TIMES 11/22/2001 Bush Says War May Go Beyond Afghan
Border
In other words, the President, the CIA, his father and
many of their business partners, cabinet appointees
and so-called allies are - based on the President's
own words - terrorists.
Only by bringing them to justice can we ever hope to
win the war on terrorism.
[1]
BOSTON GLOBE 4/23/2001
TRIUMPHS, TROUBLES SHAPE GENERATIONS
PRESCOTT BUSH PAVED MODERATE
PATH FOR SON AND GRANDSON;
WOUNDED BY FRIEND'S BETRAYAL,
HE PUT HIGH PRICE ON LOYALTY
Page: A1 Section: National/Foreign
AN AMERICAN DYNASTY
Prescott Bush was surely aghast at a sensational
article the New York Herald Tribune splashed on its
front page in July 1942. "Hitler's Angel Has 3 Million
in US Bank,"read the headline above a story reporting
that Adolf Hitler's financier had stowed the fortune
in Union Banking Corp., possibly to be held for "Nazi
bigwigs." Bush knew all about the New York bank: He
was one of its seven directors. If the Nazi tie became
known, it would be a potential "embarrassment," Bush
and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman worried,
explaining to government regulators that their
position was merely an unpaid courtesy for a client.
The situation grew more serious when the government
seized Union's assets under the Trading with the Enemy
Act, the sort of action that could have ruined Bush's
political dreams.
Sarasota Herald-Tribune 11/11/2000
John Loftus, former US Justice Dept. Nazi War Crimes
investigator and President of the Florida Holocaust
Museum, is quoted as saying:
"The Bush family fortune came from the Third Reich."
(Click Here for original story)
Hermann Goering, Hitler's #2 Man:
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should
some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a
war when the best he can get out of it is to come back
to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people
don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor
for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But,
after all, it is the leaders of the country who
determine the policy and it is always a simple matter
to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy,
or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a
communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people
can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.
That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are
being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack
of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It
works the same in any country.
George Orwell
In a time of universal deceit, TELLING THE TRUTH is a
revolutionary act.
Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson,
The Supreme Court In the American System of Government
(1955)
I cannot say that our country could have no central
police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say
with great conviction that it cannot be totalitarian
without a centralized national police.
A national police will have enough on enough people,
even if it does not elect to prosecute them, so that
it will find no opposition to its policies.
(Author's note: After its founding following WWII, the
CIA was initially staffed with thousands of former
Nazis who were experts in propaganda, biological
warfare, eugenics and social control as recently
admitted by the CIA itself.
For excellent published works on the CIA/Nazi
connection read: Trading With The Enemy by Charles
Higham, The Secret War Against the Jews by Loftus and
Arrons and Blowback by Christopher Simpson.
UPI 9/20/2000
CIA says Nazi general was
intelligence source
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 20 (UPI) --
The Central Intelligence Agency has for the first time
confirmed that a high-ranking Nazi general placed his
anti-Soviet spy ring at the disposal of the United
States during the early days of the Cold War. The
National Archives said in a release Wednesday that the
CIA had filed an affidavit in U.S. District Court
"acknowledging an intelligence relationship with
German General Reinhard Gehlen that it has kept secret
for 50 years...The CIA's announcement marks the first
acknowledgement by that agency that it had any
relationship with Gehlen and opens the way for
declassification of records about the relationship,"
the National Archives said Gehlen was Hitler's senior
intelligence officer on the Eastern Front during the
war and transferred his expertise and contacts to the
U.S. as World War II reached its climax. While
Gehlen's relationship with U.S. intelligence during
the 1940s and 1950s has been the topic of some five
books over the years, the eventual release of CIA
documents pertaining to the development of his
European spy ring could shed new light on the origins
of the Cold War and early U.S. espionage efforts
against Moscow. Gehlen's network of agents in Europe -
including many with Nazi backgrounds who were bailed
out of prisoner of war camps by U.S. intelligence
officers - was known as the Gehlen Organization and
received millions of dollars in funding from the U.S.
until 1956. The CIA's acknowledgement of its dealings
with Gehlen came in a response to an appeal of a
Freedom of Information Act request by researcher Carl
Oglesby, the National Archives said. The agency
pledged to release its records on the general in
accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.
San Francisco Bay Guardian May 7, 2001
"Honest and idealist ... enjoys good food and wine
...unprejudiced mind ..."That's how a 1952 Central
Intelligence Agency assessment described Nazi
ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous
Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in
planning the Final Solution. Augsburg's SS unit
performed "special duties," a euphemism for
exterminating Jews and other "undesirables" during the
Second World War. Although he was wanted in Poland for
war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself
with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late
1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently
released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among
a rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by
U.S. intelligence shortly after Germany surrendered to
the Allies.
Washington Post Sunday, March 18, 2001
By George Lardner Jr., Staff Writer
Page A04
CIA Declassifies Its Records
On Dealings With Ex-Nazis
Documents May Give Clues About Obstacles in Hunt for
War Criminals
The CIA is finally getting around to declassifying the
records of its dealings with former Nazi spies after
World War II. It says it has found 251 boxes and 2,901
file folders of potentially relevant documents --
apparently more than 250,000 pages -- and that it will
take about two years to complete work on them.
Daily News 4/28/2001
Secret Files Show U.S. Used Nazis
...The documents show that high-ranking
Nazis--including death doctor Josef Mengele and Adolf
Eichmann--were coddled by American and Soviet
spymasters as World War II ended. "The real winners of
the Cold War were Nazi criminals," Justice Department
official Eli Rosenbaum said. "East and West became so
rapidly focused on challenging each other that they
lost their will to pursue Nazi perpetrators. They even
deemed some of the criminals to be useful allies."
Excerpt from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf:
The function of propaganda does not lie in the
scientific training of the individual, but in calling
the masses' attention to certain facts, processes,
necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the
first time placed within their field of vision. The
whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that
everyone will be convinced that the fact is real, the
process necessary, the necessity correct, etc. But
since propaganda is not and cannot be the necessity in
itself, since its function, like the poster, consists
in attracting the attention of the crowd, and not in
educating those who are already educated or who are
striving after education and knowledge, its effect for
the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only
to a very limited degree at the so-called
intellect...The more modest its intellectual ballast,
the more exclusively it takes into consideration the
emotions of the masses, the more effective it will
be..."The art of propaganda lies in understanding the
emotional ideas of the great masses and finding,
through a psychologically correct form, the way to the
attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited,
their intelligence is small, but their power of
forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts,
all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few
points and must harp on these slogans until the last
member of the public understands what you want him to
understand [or believe]..."The war propaganda of the
English and Americans were psychologically sound. By
representing the Germans to their own people as
barbarians and Huns, they prepared the individual
soldier for the terrors of war, and thus helped to
preserve him from disappointments. After this, the
most terrible weapon that was used against him seemed
only to confirm what his propagandists had told him;
it likewise reinforced his faith in the truth of his
government's assertions, while on the other hand it
increased his rage and hatred against the vile enemy
For the cruel effects of the weapon, whose use by the
enemy he now came to know, gradually came to confirm
for him the 'Hunnish' brutality of the barbarous
enemy, which he had heard all about; and it never
dawned on him for a moment that his own weapons
possibly, if not probably, might be even more terrible
in their effects..."The function of propaganda is, for
example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of
different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one
right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is
not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far
as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the
masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve
our own right, always and unflinchingly...The broad
mass of a nation does not consist of diplomats, or
even professors of political law, or even individuals
capable of forming a rational opinion; it consists of
plain mortals, wavering and inclined to doubt and
uncertainty. As soon as our own propaganda admits so
much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the
foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid.
The masses are then in no position to distinguish
where foreign injustice ends and our own begins."
Frederick Douglas (1857)
Find out just what the people will submit to, and you
have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong
which will be imposed upon them; and these will
continue until they are resisted with either words or
blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they
oppress.
Daily News 11/14/2001
Bush OKs Secrecy In Terror Trials
President Bush signed an order yesterday that could
allow accused Al Qaeda operatives and other foreign
terrorists to stand trial before secretive military
commissions similar to the tribunals used to prosecute
Nazis in World War II. The order gives Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld authority to establish the
tribunals, White House officials said. "Given the
danger to the safety of the United States ... I find
... that it is not practicable to apply ... the
principles of law and the rules of evidence generally
recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the
United States," Bush's order said."
DRUDGE REPORT SUN NOV 11, 2001
BIG MEDIA FLORIDA RECOUNT: GORE TOPPED BUSH IF ALL
UNDER/OVER VOTES COUNTED; LEGAL STRATEGY DESTROYED
CHANCES
A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000
Florida presidential election commissioned by the
nation's main media outlets shows Al Gore edged ahead
of George W. Bush "under all the scenarios for
counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide.
"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot
easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
GW Bush during a photo-op with Congressional leaders
on 12/18/2000. As broadcast on CNN and available in
transcript on their website.
(Click Here for transcript)
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Robert Lederman is an artist, a regular columnist for
the Greenwich Village Gazette [See:
http://www.gvny.com/ for an extensive archive of
Lederman columns] The Shadow, The African Sun Times,
The Vigo-Examiner [see:
http://www.vigo-examiner.com/archive.htm] and Street
News, and is the author of hundreds of published
essays concerning Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Lederman has
been falsely arrested 41 times to date for his
anti-Giuliani activities and has never been convicted
of any of the charges. He is best known for creating
hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler
like dictator.
Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
(718) 743-3722