May 5, 2006
Note: This
essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Trinity Episcopal Church
of Santa Barbara, Saturday, March 25, 2006; a DVD of this presentation
will be available at the end of May.
In this essay, I
offer a Christian critique of the American empire in light of 9/11, and
of 9/11 in light of the American empire. Such a critique, of course,
presupposes a discussion of 9/11 itself, especially the question of who
was responsible for the attacks. The official theory is that the
attacks were planned and carried out entirely by Arab Muslims. The main
alternative theory is that 9/11 was a "false flag" operation,
orchestrated by forces within the US government who made it appear to
be the work of Arab Muslims.
Originally, a false flag attack was one in which the
attackers, perhaps in ships, literally showed the flag of an enemy
country, so that it would be blamed. But the expression has come to be
used for any attack made to appear to be the work of some country,
party, or group other than that to which the attackers themselves
belong.
I will argue that the attacks of 9/11 were
false flag attacks, orchestrated to marshal support for a so-called war
on terror against Muslim and Arab states as the next stage in creating
a global Pax Americana, an all-inclusive empire. I will
conclude this essay with its main question: How should Christians in
America respond to the realization that we are living in an empire
similar to the Roman empire at the time of Jesus, which put him to
death for resistance against it.
1. False Flag Operations
The evidence that 9/11 was a false flag operation is very strong. Many Americans, however, reject this idea on a priori grounds, thereby refusing even to look at the evidence. The main a priori
assumption is that America's political and military leaders simply
would not commit such a heinous act. This assumption is undermined,
however, once we know something about the history of false flag
operations.
False Flag Operations by Other Countries
Far from being rare in the history of warfare,
false flag operations are very common. They have been especially
popular with imperial powers wanting to expand their empires.
In 1931, Japan, which had been exploiting
Manchuria for resources, decided to take over the whole province. To
have a pretext, the Japanese army blew up the tracks of its own railway
near the Chinese military base in Mukden, then blamed the sabotage on
Chinese solders. This "Mukden incident" occurred almost exactly 70
years prior to 9/11, on September 18, 1931. It is, in fact, referred to
by the Chinese as "9/18."1
A year and a half later, the Nazis, less than a
month after taking power, started a fire in the German Reichstag, then
blamed it on Communists. Their proof that Communists were responsible
was the "discovery" on the site of a feeble-minded left-wing radical,
who had been brought there by the Nazis themselves.2 They
then used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to arrest thousands of
Communists and Social Democrats, shut down unfriendly newspapers, and
annul civil rights.3
That was 1933. Six years later, Hitler wanted a
pretext to attack Poland. The solution, known as "Operation Himmler,"
was to have Germans dressed as Poles stage 21 raids on the
Polish-German border. In some cases, as in the raid on the Gleiwitz
radio station, a dead German convict dressed as a Pole was left at the
scene. The next day, Hitler, referring to these 21 "border incidents,"
presented the attack on Poland as a defensive necessity.4
More germane to the question of 9/11, of course, is whether American leaders would do such things.
U.S. Wars Based on False Charges of Enemy Aggression
In 1846, President James Polk, anxious to expand
the American empire, had the U.S. army build a fort on the Rio Grande,
some 150 miles south of the commonly accepted border between Texas and
Mexico. After 16 US soldiers died in a skirmish, Polk told Congress
that Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil." This
claim was called "the sheerest deception" by a congressman named
Abraham Lincoln.5 Nevertheless, the Mexican-American war was
on and in 1848, Mexico, being out-gunned, signed a peace treaty ceding
away half of its country, including California, for a paltry sum.6
In 1898, the United States falsely accused Spain
of blowing up a battleship, the USS Maine, which President McKinley had
sent, uninvited, to Havana Harbor. This accusation, which led to the
chant "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain," was used as a pretext
to start the Spanish-American war, through which America took control
of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In the latter case, the
United States, after helping the Filipinos defeat the Spanish, went to
war against the Filipinos, claiming that they had fired on
American soldiers. A quarter of a million Filipinos died in the
resulting slaughter, which provoked the usually ironic William James to
say: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles."7 Many years later, General Arthur MacArthur admitted that American troops had fired first to start a pre-arranged battle.8
In 1964, a false account of an incident in the
Tonkin Gulf was used to start the full-scale war in Vietnam, which
brought about the deaths of over 58,000 Americans and some two million
Vietnamese.9
Of course, we might be tempted to reply,
although Americans have done such things to enemy nations ("All's fair
in love and war"), they would never deliberately kill citizens of
friendly countries for political reasons. That assumption, however, is
undermined in a recent book, NATO's Secret Armies, by Swiss
historian Daniele Ganser. This book demonstrates that during the Cold
War, the United States sponsored false flag operations in many
countries of Western Europe in order to discredit Communists and other
leftists to prevent them from coming to power through elections.10
Italy suffered a wave of deadly terrorist
attacks in the 1970s, including a massive explosion at the Bologna
railway station that killed 85 people.11 Between 1983 and
'85, Belgium suffered a series of attacks, known as the "Brabant
massacres," in which hooded men opened fire on people in shopping
centers, "reduc[ing] Belgium to a state of panic." At the time, all
these attacks in Italy, Belgium, and other countries were blamed on
Communists and other leftists, often by virtue of planted evidence.12
In the 1990s, however, it was discovered that
the attacks were really carried out by right-wing organizations that
were coordinated by a secret unit within NATO, which was guided by the
CIA and the Pentagon.13 A former member of the organization
that carried out the massacres in Belgium, which was funded by the
Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, explained that the plan was to
"make the population believe that these terrorist attacks were done by
the Left."14 The former head of Italian
counter-intelligence, in explaining the motivation behind the attacks
in Italy, said: "The CIA wanted to create an Italian nationalism
capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left." To achieve this
goal, he added, it seemed that "the Americans would do anything."15
Operation Northwoods
If Americans would do anything to achieve their
political goals in Europe, would they do similar things within America
itself? Early in 1962, which was shortly after Fidel Castro had
overthrown the pro-American dictator Batista, the Joint Chiefs of Staff
presented President Kennedy with a plan, called Operation Northwoods.
This plan described "pretexts which would provide justification for US
military intervention in Cuba," partly "by developing the international
image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an
alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western
Hemisphere." Possible actions to create this image included a
"Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area . . . and . . .
Washington" and a "Remember the Maine" incident, in which: "We could
blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba." Although
President Kennedy did not approve this plan, it had been endorsed by
all the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.16
2. The Probable Motive for 9/11
US political and military leaders, as these examples
show, have been fully capable of orchestrating false flag operations
that would kill innocent people, including American citizens, to
achieve political goals. The political goal during the Cold War was to
prevent and overthrow left-leaning governments. But what motive could
US leaders have had for orchestrating the attacks of 9/11, a decade
after the Cold War had ended? Actually, it was precisely the end of the
Cold War that provided the likely motive: the desire to create a global
Pax Americana.
Whereas the world during the Cold War was
bipolar, the demise of the Soviet Union created in some minds---the
minds of that group known as neoconservatives, or neocons---the
prospect of a unipolar world. In 1989, Charles Krauthammer published a
piece entitled "Universal Dominion," in which he argued that America
should work for "a qualitatively new outcome---a unipolar world."17
A year later, he said the United States, as the "unchallenged
superpower," should act unilaterally, "unashamedly laying down the
rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them."18
The most important neocon has been Dick Cheney.
In 1992, the last year of his tenure as secretary of defense, he had
two of his assistants, Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, write
a draft of the Pentagon's "Defense Planning Guidance," which said
America's "first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new
rival."19 Andrew Bacevich, who is a conservative but not a neoconservative, has called this draft "a blueprint for permanent American global hegemony."20 An article in Harper's calls it an early version of Cheney's "Plan . . . to rule the world."21
During the rest of the 1990s, while the
Republicans were out of White House, the unipolar dream kept growing.
In 1996, Robert Kagan said the United States should use its military
strength "to maintain a world order which both supports and rests upon
American hegemony."22
In the following year, William Kristol, the son
of neocon godfather Irving Kristol, founded a unipolarist think tank
called the Project for the New American Century, often called PNAC. Its
members included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby, and many other
neocons who would become central members of the Bush administration in
2001. In September of 2000, PNAC published a document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses.
Reaffirming "the basic tenets" of the Cheney-Wolfowitz draft of 1992,
this document said that "America's grand strategy should aim to
preserve and extend [its present] advantageous position" and thereby
"to preserve and enhance [the] 'American peace.'"23
What would it take, according to these neocons, to preserve and enhance the Pax Americana? Basically five things. First, control of the world's oil. As Robert Dreyfuss, a critic of the neocons, says, "who[ever] controls oil controls the world."24
For the neocons, this meant bringing about regime change in several
oil-rich countries, especially Iraq. Some neocons, including Cheney and
Rumsfeld, had wanted the first President Bush to take out Saddam in
1990.25 They continued to advocate this policy throughout
the 1990s, with PNAC even writing a letter to President Clinton in
1998, urging him to use military force to "remov[e] Saddam's regime
from power."26 After the Bush-Cheney administration took
office, attacking Iraq was the main item on its agenda. The only real
question, reports former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, was "finding
a way to do it."27
A second necessary condition for the envisaged Pax Americana was a transformation of the military
in the light of the "revolution in military affairs"---RMA for
short---made possible by information technology. At the center of this
RMA transformation is the military use of space.28 Although
the term "missile defense" implies that this use of space is to be
purely defensive, one neocon, Lawrence Kaplan, has candidly stated
otherwise, saying: "Missile defense isn't really meant to protect
America. It's a tool for global domination."29
In any case, implementing this transformation will be very expensive, which brings us to a third requirement: an increase in military spending.
The end of the Cold War made this requirement challenging, because most
Americans assumed that, since we no longer had to defend the world
against global Communism, we could drastically reduce military spending, thereby having a "peace dividend" to spend on health, education, and the environment.
A fourth neocon requirement for a Pax Americana
was a modification of the doctrine of preemptive attack. Traditionally,
a country has had the right to launch a preemptive attack against
another country if an attack from that country was imminent---too
imminent to take the matter to the UN Security Council. But neocons
wanted the United States to act to preclude threats that might arise in
the more or less distant future.30
These four developments would require a fifth
thing: an event that would make the American people ready to accept
these imperialistic policies. This point had been made in The Grand Chessboard,
a 1997 book by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Jimmy Carter's national
security advisor. Brzezinski is not a neocon but he shares their
concern with American primacy (as indicated by the subtitle of his
book: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives).
Portraying Central Asia, with its vast oil reserves, as the key to
world power, Brzezinski argued that America must get control of this
region. However, Brzezinski counseled, Americans, with their democratic
instincts, are reluctant to authorize the military spending and human
sacrifices necessary for "imperial mobilization," and this reluctance
"limits the use of America's power, especially its capacity for
military intimidation."31 But this impediment could be overcome, he added, if there were "a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."32
The American people were, for example, willing to enter World War II
after "the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor."33
This same idea was suggested in PNAC's document of 2000, Rebuilding America's Defenses.
Referring to the goal of transforming the military, it said that this
"process of transformation . . . is likely to be a long one, absent
some catastrophic and catalyzing event---like a new Pearl Harbor."34
3. Opportunities Created by the New Pearl Harbor
When the attacks of 9/11 occurred, they were treated
like a new Pearl Harbor. President Bush reportedly wrote in his diary
on that night: "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today."35 Many commentators, from Robert Kagan to Henry Kissinger to a writer for Time
magazine, said that America should respond to the attacks of 9/11 in
the same way it had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor.36
Rumsfeld said that 9/11 created "the kind of opportunities that World
War II offered, to refashion the world." President Bush and Condoleezza
Rice also spoke of 9/11 as creating opportunities.37
And it did, in fact, create opportunities to
fulfill what the neocons had considered the other necessary conditions
for bringing about a Pax Americana. With regard to oil, the
Bush administration had, during the summer of 2001, developed a plan to
attack Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with a puppet regime, thereby
allowing UNOCAL to build its proposed pipeline from the Caspian Sea and
the US military to build bases in the region.
The official story of 9/11, according to which
it was carried out by members of al-Qaeda under the direction of Osama
bin Laden in Afghanistan, provided the needed pretext for this
operation. In 2004, Rumsfeld told the 9/11 Commission that prior to
9/11, the president could not have convinced Congress that the United
States needed to "invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban." 38
9/11 also provided a necessary condition for the attack on Iraq. It did not provide a sufficient
condition. The administration still had to wage a propaganda offensive
to convince the public that Saddam was involved in 9/11, was connected
to al-Qaeda, and illegally possessed weapons of mass destruction. But
9/11 was a necessary condition. As neocon Kenneth Adelman has said: "At
the beginning of the administration people were talking about Iraq but
it wasn't doable. . . . That changed with September 11."39 Historian Stephen Sniegoski, explaining why 9/11 made the attack on Iraq possible, says:
The 9/11 attacks made the American people angry and
fearful. Ordinary Americans wanted to strike back at the terrorist
enemy, even though they weren't exactly sure who that enemy was. . . .
Moreover, they were fearful of more attacks and were susceptible to the
administration's propaganda that the United States had to strike Iraq
before Iraq somehow struck the United States.40
Sniegoski's view is supported by Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker. Lemann says that he was told by a senior official of the Bush administration that, in Lemann's paraphrase,
the reason September 11th appears to have been "a
transformative moment" is not so much that it revealed the existence of
a threat of which officials had previously been unaware as that it
drastically reduced the American public's usual resistance to American
military involvement overseas.41
The new Pearl Harbor also opened the way for the
revolution in military affairs. Prior to 9/11, Bacevich reports,
"military transformation appeared to be dead in the water." But the
"war on terror" after 9/11 "created an opening for RMA advocates to
make their case."42
9/11 also allowed for great increases in
military spending, including spending for space weapons. On the evening
of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld held a news briefing at the Pentagon. Senator
Carl Levin, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was
asked:
Senator Levin, you and other Democrats in Congress
have voiced fear that you simply don't have enough money for the large
increase in defense that the Pentagon is seeking, especially for
missile defense. . . . Does this sort of thing convince you that an
emergency exists in this country to increase defense spending?43
Congress immediately appropriated an additional $40 billion for the Pentagon and much more later.
The new Pearl Harbor also paved the way for the
new doctrine of preemptive warfare. "The events of 9/11," observes
Bacevich, "provided the tailor-made opportunity to break free of the
fetters restricting the exercise of American power."44 Bush alluded to this new doctrine at West Point the following June.45 It was then fully articulated in the administration's 2002 version of the National Security Strategy. The president's covering letter said that America will "act against . . . emerging threats before they are fully formed."46 The document itself said:
Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the
United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in
the past. . . . We cannot let our enemies strike first. . . . [T]he
United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.47
4. 9/11 as a False Flag Operation
If 9/11 provided the "tailor-made opportunity" for
enunciating this new doctrine, as Bacevich has observed, it equally
provided the opportunity to realize all the other things that Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other neocons had been dreaming about during
the previous decade. Should not this fact lead us to suspect that 9/11
was not simply a godsend? In any criminal investigation, the first
question is always cui bono—who benefits? Why should we not
apply this principle to 9/11? Let us now look at some evidence, to see
if it supports the view that 9/11 was a false flag operation,
orchestrated to produce precisely the effects that it did in fact
produce.
The Alleged Hijackers
The official account of 9/11, by blaming the
attacks on Arab Muslims, provided a basis for the attacks on
Afghanistan and Iraq wars---not a legal basis, but an emotional basis
sufficient to marshal support from a the American people and Congress.
But there are many problems with this official story.
For one thing, the alleged hijackers are
portrayed as devout Muslims, ready to meet their maker. Mohamed Atta,
called the ringleader, is said by the 9/11 Commission to have become
very religious, even "fanatically so."48 But some
journalists found that he loved cocaine, alcohol, gambling, pork, and
lap dances. Several of the other alleged hijackers reportedly had
similar tastes.49
Also, the flight manifests that have been released for the four flights have no Arab names on them.50
It appears, moreover, that evidence was planted.
Authorities allegedly found two of Atta's bags at the Boston airport.
These bags contained Atta's passport and his will along with various
types of incriminating evidence. But why would Atta have planned to
take his will on a plane that he planned to fly into the World Trade
Center?51
The Legend of Osama bin Laden
There are also many problems in the official
story about Osama bin Laden. In June of 2001, when he was already
America's "most wanted" criminal, bin Laden reportedly spent two weeks
in the American Hospital in Dubai, where he was visited by the local
CIA agent.52
Also, after 9/11, when America was supposedly
trying to get bin Laden "dead or alive," the U.S. military evidently
allowed him to escape on at least four occasions, the last one being
the "battle of Tora Bora," which the London Telegraph labeled "a grand charade."53
Moreover, although the Bush administration
promised that Secretary of State Colin Powell would provide a white
paper with proof that the attacks had been planned by bin Laden, this
paper was never produced. And although the Taliban said that it would
hand bin Laden over if the United States presented evidence of his
involvement in 9/11, the Bush administration refused.54
Finally, although this administration claims
that bin Laden admitted responsibility for the attacks in a video
allegedly found in Afghanistan, the man in this video has darker skin,
fuller cheeks, and a broader nose than the Osama bin Laden of all the
other videos. We again seem to have planted evidence. Indeed, within
the 9/11 truth movement, this video is known as "the fake bin Laden
video."55
Reasons to believe that 9/11 was a false flag
operation are also provided by various features of the attacks that
could not have been accomplished by the alleged hijackers. One of these
is the destruction of the World Trade Center.
5. The Destruction of the World Trade Center
According to the official explanation, the Twin
Towers and Building 7 collapsed primarily from their fires---plus, in
the case of the Twin Towers, the impact of the airplanes. But this
explanation faces several formidable problems.
First, many people have been led to believe
that the steel in these steel-frame buildings was melted by the fires.
But steel does not begin to melt until 2800 degrees F, whereas open
fires burning hydrocarbons such as kerosene---which is what jet fuel
is---can in the most ideal circumstances rise only as high as 1700
degrees.
Second, the fires in these three buildings
were not very big, very hot, or very long-lasting, compared with fires
in some steel-frame high-rises that did not collapse. A fire in
Philadelphia in 1991 burned 18 hours; a fire in Caracas in 2004 burned
17 hours. But neither of these fires resulted in even a partial
collapse.56 By contrast, the north and south towers burned
only 102 and 56 minutes, respectively, before they collapsed. Building
7, which was not hit by a plane, had fires on only a few floors,
according to all the photographic evidence57 and several witnesses.58
The collapse of Building 7 has been recognized
as especially difficult to explain. The FEMA report said that the most
likely scenario had "only a low probability of occurrence."59 The collapse of building 7 was not even mention in the 571 pages of The 9/11 Commission Report,
even though this collapse was, according to the official account, a
historic event: the first time a steel-frame high-rise had ever
collapsed from fire alone. The latest official report, put out by the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, has claimed that the
Twin Towers collapsed because the airplanes knocked the fire-proofing
off the steel,60 but it has yet to explain why Building 7, which was not hit by a plane, also collapsed.
A third problem with the official account is
that total collapses of steel-frame high-rise buildings have never,
either before or after 9/11, been brought about by fire alone, or fire
combined with externally produced structural damage. All such collapses
have been caused by explosives in the procedure known as "controlled
demolition."
A fourth problem is that the collapses of
these three buildings all manifested many standard features of
controlled demolition. I will mention six:
1. The collapses began suddenly.
Steel, if weakened by fire, would gradually begin to sag. But if you
look at videos available on the Web, you will see that the buildings
are perfectly motionless up to the moment they begin to collapse.61
2. These huge buildings collapsed straight down,
instead of toppling over, which would have caused enormous death and
destruction. This straight-down collapse is the whole point of the type
of controlled demolition known as implosion, which only a few companies
in the world are qualified to perform.62
3. All three buildings collapsed at virtually free-fall speed, which means that the lower floors, with all their steel and concrete, were offering no resistance to the upper floors.
4. The collapses were total collapses,
resulting in piles of rubble no more than a few stories high. This
means that the enormous steel columns in the core of each building had
to be broken into rather short segments---which is what explosives do.
5. Fifth, great quantities of molten steel
were produced, which means that the steel had been heated up to several
thousand degrees. Witnesses during the clean-up reported, moreover,
that sometimes when a piece of steel was lifted out of the rubble,
molten metal would be dripping from the end.63
6. Dozens of people, including journalists,
police officers, WTC employees, emergency medical workers, and
firefighters, reported that explosions went off prior to and during the
collapses of the north and south towers. For example, Fire Captain
Dennis Tardio said: "I hear an explosion and I look up. It is as if the
building is being imploded, from the top floor down, one after another,
boom, boom, boom."64 Firefighter Richard Banaciski said: "It
seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It
seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these
explosions."65
One more feature of the collapses of the Twin
Towers was that virtually everything except the steel---all the desks,
computers, and concrete---was pulverized into tiny dust particles.66
The official theory cannot explain one, let
alone all, of these seven features---at least, as physicist Steven
Jones has pointed out, without violating several basic laws of physics.67 But the theory of controlled demolition easily explains all of them.
This evidence for controlled demolition
contradicts the idea that al-Qaeda terrorists were responsible. They
could not have obtained access to the buildings for all the hours
needed to plant the explosives. Agents of the Bush-Cheney
administration, by contrast, could have gotten such access,
given the fact that Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III---the president's
brother and cousin, respectively---were principals of the company in
charge of security for the WTC.68 Al-Qaeda terrorists would
also probably not have had the courtesy to ensure that these huge
buildings came straight down, rather than falling over onto other
buildings. They also would not have had the necessary expertise.
Another relevant fact is that evidence was
destroyed. An examination of the buildings' steel columns could have
shown whether explosives had been used to slice them. But virtually all
of the steel was quickly sold to scrap dealers, trucked away, and sent
to Asia to be melted down. It is usually a federal offense to remove anything
from a crime scene. But this removal of thousands of tons of steel, the
biggest destruction of evidence in history, was allowed by federal
officials.
Evidence was also apparently planted. The
passport of one of the hijackers on Flight 11 was allegedly found in
the rubble, having survived not only the fire but also whatever caused
everything in the north tower except its steel to be pulverized into
dust.69
6. The Strike on the Pentagon
The official account of the strike on the
Pentagon is equally problematic. According to this account, the
Pentagon was struck by American Airlines Flight 77, under the control
of al-Qaeda hijacker Hani Hanjour. But this claim is challenged by many
facts.
First, Flight 77 allegedly, after making a U-turn in the
mid-west, flew back to Washington undetected for 40 minutes. And yet
the US military, which by then would have known that hijacked airliners
were being used as weapons, has the best radar systems in the world,
one of which, it brags, "does not miss anything occurring in North
American airspace."70
Second, the aircraft, in order to hit the west wing,
reportedly executed a 270-degree downward spiral, which some pilots
have said, would have been difficult if not impossible for a Boeing 757
even with an expert pilot. Hani Hanjour, moreover, was known as a
terrible pilot, who could not safely fly even a small plane.71
Third, terrorists brilliant enough to get
through the U.S. military's defense system would not have struck the
Pentagon's west wing, for many reasons: It had been reinforced, so the
damage was less severe than a strike anywhere else would have been. The
west wing was still being renovated, so relatively few people were
there; a strike anywhere else would have killed thousands of people,
rather than 125. And the secretary of defense and all the top brass,
whom terrorists would presumably have wanted to kill, were in the east
wing. Why would an al-Qaeda pilot have executed a very difficult
maneuver to hit the west wing when he could have simply crashed into
the roof of the east wing?
Fourth, there is considerable evidence that
the aircraft that struck the Pentagon was not even a Boeing 757, which
is what Flight 77 was. For one thing, unlike the strikes on the Twin
Towers, the strike on the Pentagon did not create a detectable seismic
signal.72 Also, the kind of damage and debris that would
have been produced by the impact of a Boeing 757 were not produced by
the strike on the Pentagon, according to both photographs73 and eyewitnesses.
Former pilot Ralph Omholt, discussing the photographic evidence, writes:
There is no viable evidence of burning jet fuel. . .
. The pre-collapse Pentagon section showed no "forward-moving" damage.
. . . There was no particular physical evidence of the expected
"wreckage." There was no tail, no wings; no damage consistent with a
B-757 "crash."74
CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre, reporting live from the
Pentagon on 9/11, said: "From my close-up inspection, there's no
evidence of a plane having crashed anywhere near the Pentagon."75 Karen Kwiatkowski, who at the time was an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel working at the Pentagon, has written:
I would think that if a 100-plus-ton aircraft . . .
going several hundred miles an hour were to hit the Pentagon, it would
cause a great deal of possibly superficial but visible damage to the .
. . entire area of impact. But I did not see this kind of damage.76
Fifth, evidence was again destroyed. Shortly after the strike, government agents picked up debris and carried it off.77 Shortly thereafter the entire lawn was covered with dirt and gravel, so that any remaining forensic evidence was literally covered up.78
Finally, the videos from security cameras on the nearby gas station and
nearby hotels, which would show what really hit the Pentagon, were
immediately confiscated by agents of the FBI, and the Department of
Justice has subsequently refused to released them.79
Evidence again appears to have been fabricated.
For example, proof that Flight 77 was hijacked and heading back towards
Washington was allegedly provided in a phone call from passenger
Barbara Olson to her husband, attorney Ted Olson. But no evidence from
telephone records has been provided to confirm that this call occurred.
The only evidence that has been submitted is the claim of Ted Olson,
who works for the Bush-Cheney administration.
These are only a few of the many reasons, which I
have discussed in my books, for concluding that 9/11 was simply one of
the latest examples of false flag terrorism.
7. How Should Christians Respond?
I come now to the main question of this essay:
How should Christians respond to this realization? The key
consideration in answering this question, I suggest, is the evidence
that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out for the sake of preserving
and extending the American empire. This means that there is a two-way
relation between 9/11 and this empire. On the one hand, understanding
the ideas driving the present phase of US empire-building enables us to
understand why 9/11 occurred. On the other hand, 9/11 serves as a
revelation of the nature of the American empire---an empire that has
been in the making, on a bipartisan basis, for a long time. 9/11
reveals the nature of the values that have underlay this
empire-building project for over a century, especially the past 60
years.
Evil Empire?
If so, then we must ask whether the term "evil,"
which US leaders have used so freely to describe other nations, must be
applied to our own. There can be no doubt about the application of this
term to 9/11. We can here quote President Bush himself, who on the
evening of 9/11 said: ""Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil,
despicable acts of terror. . . . Today, our nation saw evil, the very
worst of human nature."80 No explanation of why the attacks
were despicable was necessary. The proposition was self-evident. This
proposition is even more self-evident, of course, if the attacks were
orchestrated by our own government.
Accordingly, if we accept 9/11 as a revelation
of the American empire---of the basic values it embodies---must we not
conclude that this empire is itself evil?
This suggestion, of course, runs directly
counter to our deeply inculcated self-image, which has embodied the
notion of "American exceptionalism."81 According to this
view, America is qualitatively different from other countries, hence
its empire is qualitatively different from all prior empires. Americans
in the 19th century said that whereas other empires were self-seeking,
greedy, and brutal, the United States had an "empire of liberty," an
"empire of right."82
Neoconservatives have recently revived this
idea. According to Ben Wattenberg, "The American empire is not like
earlier European imperialisms. We have sought neither wealth nor
territory. Ours is an imperium of values."83 Robert Kagan calls the United States "The Benevolent Empire."84 Dinesh D'Souza describe America "the most magnanimous imperial power ever."85
Max Boot says: "America isn't like the empires of old. It does not seek
to enslave other peoples and steal their lands. It spreads freedom and
opportunity."86 Charles Krauthammer says that America's claim to being a benign power is verified by its "track record."87
But many other commentators, who base their
views on an actual examination of this track record, have come to
opposite conclusions. Andrew Bacevich, in his book American Empire,
rejects the claim "that the promotion of peace, democracy, and human
rights . . . --not the pursuit of self-interest--[has] defined the
essence of American diplomacy." Against those who justify American
interventions on the grounds that America's foreign policy is to
promote democracy, Bacevich points out that in previous countries in
which America has intervened, "democracy [did not] flower as a result."88
Many other intellectuals have similar views.
Chalmers Johnson, who like Bacevich was once a conservative who
believed that American foreign policy aimed at promoting freedom and
democracy, now describes the United States as "a military juggernaut
intent on world domination."89 A recent book by Noam Chomsky is subtitled America's Quest for Global Dominance.90 Richard Falk has written of the Bush administration's "global domination project," which poses the threat of "global fascism."91
Bacevich sums up the nature of the American
empire by employing the statement, made in 1939 by the famous historian
Charles Beard, that "America is not to be Rome."92 In the
1990s, Bacevich says, most Americans "still comforted themselves with
the belief that as the sole superpower the United States was nothing like Rome." But, he says: "The reality that Beard feared has come to pass: like it or not, America today is Rome."93
This comparison is helpful. To begin answering
the question how those of us who are Christians should respond to the
realization that we are living in the new Rome, we can ask how Jesus
responded to the original Rome.
Jesus and the Roman Empire
This question has been treated by New Testament historian Richard Horsley in his book Jesus and Empire.
Horsley's short answer is that Jesus preached an "anti-imperial
gospel," which called for the reign of Caesar to be replaced by a reign
of God.94
To understand why this would have been central, we need to understand something about Rome and its occupation of Palestine.
Rome was not nice. Although Rome's rulers spoke of Pax Romana, with one of its emperors even calling himself the "Pacifier of the World,"95
this pacification was achieved by means of Rome's overwhelming military
might, which it used ruthlessly. As a Caledonian chieftain put it, the
Romans "rob, butcher, plunder, and call it 'empire'; and where they
make desolation, they call it 'peace.'"96
By the time of Jesus, Palestine had been under Roman domination for almost a century.97
Rome ruled through puppets—first Herod the Great, then Herod Antipas in
Galilee and Pontius Pilate in Judea--and this rule was devastating.
Roman legions killed tens of thousands of
people and enslaved many more. One traumatic attack was the burning of
Sepphoris, only a few miles from Nazareth, near the time of Jesus'
birth.98 Some 2,000 rebels were crucified at about the same time.99
Besides killing and enslaving the Palestinians,
the Romans taxed them severely, pushing many of them permanently into
debt. By the time of Jesus, there was "a crisis of debt and
dispossession that touched and transformed the lives of nearly every
peasant family in Galilee."100
Jesus' anti-imperial gospel is apparent in what
we call "the Lord's Prayer," which is a modification of the Kaddish,
the Jewish prayer for the establishment of God's kingdom. The central
phrase of Jesus' prayer was, therefore, "thy kingdom come"--an
abbreviation of the Kaddish's petition, "May God establish his kingdom
in your lifetime." That Jesus was not talking about some exclusively
otherworldly realm is shown by the next line: "thy will be done, on
earth as it is in heaven." Thus, says Horsley, "God's activity was
political and Jesus' preaching of that activity was political--with
obvious implications for the 'imperial situation' then prevailing in
Palestine." The reign of the Roman emperors was to be replaced by the
reign of God, which would transform "the social-economic-political
substance of human relations."101
The centrality of the economic issue is shown by
two other elements in this prayer: the petition for "our daily bread"
and the idea that we should "forgive our debtors"—an allusion to the
fact that unjust and unforgiven debt regularly forced peasants into
servitude to rich landlords (as reflected in the parable of the wicked
tenants).102
That Jesus opposed Roman rule even more directly
is suggested by evidence that Jesus challenged the payment of the
Temple tax and the tribute to Rome103 and that he protested the Temple's system of collecting money.104
That Jesus was regarded as a rebel
against the empire is implied by the very fact that he was crucified.
The death penalty could be authorized only by the Romans, and
crucifixion was an exclusively Roman manner of execution, used
primarily for those regarded as challengers to Roman authority. "That
Jesus was crucified by the Roman governor," says Horsley, "stands as a vivid symbol of his historical relationship with the Roman imperial order."105
One dimension of the Roman imperial order that
particularly offended Jesus and his fellow Jews was Rome's claim that
its empire was divinely authorized.106 Early Christians had
a very different view, as shown by the final book of the New Testament,
which portrays Rome as a dragon, symbolizing Satan.107 For the early Christians, Horsley says,
Rome was the Beast, the Harlot, the Dragon, Babylon,
the Great Satan. They knew that Rome's empire was made possible not by
divine order but by the acquisition of vast territories through the
deadly violence of the Roman legions.108
America as the New Rome
Is Bacevich right to say that today America is
Rome? One way to answer this question is in terms of four commonly
accepted features of the Roman empire.109 First, it
portrayed itself, as we have seen, as guided by divine providence.
Americans have said the same about their own empire. In 1850, an
American editor wrote: "We have a destiny to perform, a 'manifest
destiny' over . . . South America, . . . the Chinese empire . . . and
the . . . Japanese. . . . The eagle of the republic shall poise itself
over [the rest of the world] and a successor of Washington ascend the
chair of universal empire!110 The Christmas card sent out by
Dick and Lynne Cheney in 2003 asked, rhetorically: "[I]f a sparrow
cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an
empire can rise without His aid?"111
A second feature of the Roman empire was the
development and employment of overwhelming military power. Bacevich,
summing up this feature of our own empire, says that the present aim of
the U.S. military is "to achieve something approaching omnipotence:
'Full Spectrum Dominance.'"111
A third feature of the Roman empire was rule
through puppets, such as Herod, backed up by the empire's pervasive
military presence. Some of the most notorious US puppets have been
Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, Trujillo in the Dominican
Republic, Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Marcos in the
Philippines, Diem in Vietnam, and Suharto in Indonesia. More recently,
America has installed a puppet regime in Afghanistan and has been
trying to do the same in Iraq.
A fourth feature of the Roman empire was that
through its imposition of exorbitant taxes, it impoverished the
countries it dominated. America's taxation is more indirect, being
exercised through the global economy enforced by the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. But it
impoverishes just as effectively.
An increasing number of commentators have come
to speak of "global apartheid," thereby pointing to the fact that the
world as a whole reflects the same kind of systemic inequality that
characterized South Africa under apartheid. In a 1992 book on global
apartheid, Titus Alexander said:
Three-quarters of the land [in apartheid South
Africa] and all its natural resources could only be owned by whites, a
sixth of the population. The West also has a sixth of the world's
population and commands over three-quarters of global resources. . . .
[In South Africa,] democracy for a few meant oppression for the many.
So it is for most people in the global economy. . . . Free trade and
consumer choice for a few means low incomes, long hours and a struggle
for subsistence among the many.113
The only difference between the two systems is
that---as Gernot Köhler, who coined the term, put it--"global apartheid
is even more severe than South African apartheid."114
What is the relevance of this to the nature of the American empire? This question can be answered in three points.
First, global apartheid did not exist three centuries ago but is a product of European colonialism.115
Second, since the end of World War II, when the
United States replaced Britain as the leader of the global capitalist
economy, it has become increasingly responsible for the state of this
economy.
Third, during this period, the gap between the
rich and the poor has become much greater. As John Cobb has pointed
out: "The disparity in per capita income between the US and the
undeveloped nations is estimated as having been about thirteen to one
in 1947. In 1989, . . . the disparity had reached around sixty to one."116 According to the Human Development Report
of 2005, moreover, the situation is now still worse, with the richest
10 percent of the world's population receiving 54 percent of the
world's income and the poorest 40 percent---meaning 2.5 billion
people---receiving only 5 percent of the total income.117
The poverty in which billions of God's children
on this earth live has dire consequences. Every year, starvation and
other poverty-related causes take the lives of about 18 million people,
11 million of whom are children under the age of 5. This means that
about 180 million people are dying from poverty-related causes every
decade.118
We have rightly considered the Nazi and
Stalinist regimes evil, in large part because each one was responsible
for the deaths of some 60 million people. But then what term do we use
for an empire that is ultimately responsible for three times that many
deaths each decade?
Part of the reason we call the Nazi and
Stalinist regimes evil, of course, is that many of their victims were
killed deliberately. Do American leaders realize what they are doing?
There is evidence that they do. For example,
in 1947, George Kennan, who was Director of the Policy Planning Staff
in the U.S. State Department, said in a "top secret" memo:
We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only
6.3% of its population. . . . In this situation, we cannot fail to be
the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period
is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to
maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our
national security.119
A more recent example showing that our leaders know
what they are doing is provided by a 1997 document of the US Space
Command entitled "Vision for 2020." This document, explaining why the
United States needs to dominate space so as to have "full spectrum
dominance," says: "The globalization of the world economy . . . will
continue with a widening between 'haves' and 'have-nots.'"120
In other words, as the United States and its rich allies become still
richer while the rest of the world becomes still poorer, the United
States will need to be able to attack from space to keep the have-nots
in line. In 2005, the head of the US Space Command said that by putting
weapons in space, the United States will have the ability to destroy
things "anywhere in the world. . . in 45 minutes."121
As these parallels between Roman and American
imperialism show, we can speak of the latter as evil without even
bringing 9/11 into the picture. But the awareness that the attacks of
9/11 were carried out to further America's global domination project,
and hence increase global apartheid, helps us, as I have suggested
elsewhere, to "fully grasp the extent to which this project is
propelled by fanaticism based on a deeply perverted value system."122
9/11 can thereby serve as a wake-up call to Christians in America,
forcing us to ask how to respond to the realization that we are
citizens of the new Rome.
Christians and the New Rome
Any attempt to answer that question would be
very long. I will here simply suggest a first step: the formation of an
anti-imperial church movement, in which the rejection of America's
imperial project is considered a necessary implication of Christian
faith. Such a movement would be analogous to the movement of
"Confessing Christians" formed in Germany in 1934, a year after the
Nazis had come to power. This movement, two leaders of which were
theologians Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, opposed the movement
known as the "German Christians," which treated Hitler as a new messiah
who would bring Germany the greatness it deserved. In their famous
Barmen Declaration, the Confessing Christians said that support for
National Socialism violated basic principles of the Christian faith.
One had to choose either Christian faith or National Socialism. One
could not affirm both.123
Later in the century, some Christian bodies
decided that rejection of the system of apartheid in South Africa was a
necessary implication of Christian faith. In 1977, the Lutheran World
Federation declared that although with regard to most political
questions, "Christians may have different opinions," the system of
apartheid in South Africa was "so perverted and oppressive" that it
"constitute[d] a status confessionis"—a confessional
situation. The Christian faith, these Lutherans declared, required that
"churches would publicly and unequivocally reject the existing
apartheid system."124
An analogous question before churches in America
today is whether the American empire, with its imperialism and global
apartheid, is "so perverted and oppressive" that the public rejection
of it should be regarded as an implication of fidelity to God as
revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, who died on a Roman cross.
NOTES
1. On the Mukden incident, see Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Religions throughout History (New York: Norton, 1997), 164-66; Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 40; and "Mukden Incident," Encyclopedia Britannica, 2006 (http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9054193 ).
2. The question of responsibility for the Reichstag
fire had long remained controversial. But the dominant view, that the
fire was set by the Nazis themselves, was confirmed in 2001 with the
publication of Der Reichstagbrand: Wie Geschichte Gemacht Wird,
by Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel (Berlin: Edition Q, 2001). This
book presents ample evidence of Nazi responsibility, including the
testimony of a member of the SA, who said that he was in the
subterranean passageway that night and saw other SA members bringing
explosive liquids to the Reichstag. Bahar and Kugel have, accordingly,
substantiated the position contained in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 191-93.
3. Wilhelm Klein, "The Reichstag Fire, 68 Years On" (review of Alexander Bahar and Wilfried Kugel, Der Reichstagbrand), World Socialist Website, July 5, 2001 (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jul2001/reic-j05.shtml ).
4. See "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Vol. II: Criminality of Groups and Organizations" (http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/nca-02/nca-02-15-criminality-06-05.html ); Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936-45: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2001), 221; and "Gleiwitz Incident," Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident#References ).
5. Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980; New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), 150. Richard Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (1960; New York, Norton, 1974), 143.
6. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire, 146.
7. Quoted in Zinn, A People's History, 307.
8. Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 57-62.
9. George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How American Became Involved in Vietnam (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987),220; Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 119.
10. Daniele Ganser, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 53-54.
11. Ibid., 5.
12. Ibid., 138-39.
13. Ibid., 9-11, 27-29, 241-43.
14. Ibid., 142-43, 146.
15. Ibid., 82, 120. On the evidence linking NATO and the United States to the Bologna massacre, see ibid., 25, 81.
16. This memorandum can be found at the National Security Archive, April 30, 2001 (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430 ). It was revealed to US readers by James Bamford in Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-secret National Security Agency (2001: New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 82-91.
17. Charles Krauthammer, "Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World," National Interest, Winter 1989: 47-49.
18. Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign Affairs, 1990.
19. Department of Defense, "Defense Planning
Guidance," February 18, 1992. It might be thought, incidentally, that
Dick Cheney cannot be called a neoconservative because he (a) was never
a liberal and (b) is not Jewish. But although the term
"neoconservative" originally referred to people who had moved to the
right after having been on the left, the second- and third-generation
neocons, as Gary Dorrien points out, "had never been progressives of
any kind" (Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 16. Also, as Dorrien points out, from the
beginning of the movement "a significant number of prominent neocons
were not Jews" (ibid., 15). As former neocon Michael Lind says:
"[N]eoconservatism is an ideology, . . . and [Donald] Rumsfeld and Dick
. . . Cheney are full-fledged neocons, . . . even though they are not
Jewish and were never liberals or leftists" (Michael Lind, "A Tragedy
of Errors," The Nation, Feb. 23, 2004, online; quoted in
Justin Raimondo, "A Real Hijacking: The Neoconservative Fifth Column
and the War in Iraq," in D. L. O'Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe,
eds., Neoconned Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq [Vienna, Va.: IHS Press, 2005], 112-24, at 123.
20. Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 44.
21. David Armstrong, "Dick Cheney's Song of America," Harper's, October, 2002.
22. Robert Kagan, "American Power: A Guide for the Perplexed," Commentary 101 (April 1996).
23. PNAC (Project for the New American Century), Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, September 2000 (www.newamericancentury.org), iv.
24. Robert Dreyfuss, "Oil-Control Formula," July 18, 2005 (http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050718/oilcontrol_formula.php ).
25.
Stephen J. Sniegoski, "Neoconservatives, Israel, and 9/11: The Origins
of the U.S. War on Iraq." In D. L. O'Huallachain and J. Forrest Sharpe,
eds., Neoconned Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq (Vienna, Va.: IHS Press, 2005), 81-109, at 86-87, citing Arnold Beichman, "How the Divide over Iraq Strategies Began," Washington Times, Nov. 27, 2002.
26. PNAC, Letter to President Clinton on Iraq, January 26, 1998 (http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm ).
27. O'Neill is quoted to this effect in Ron Susskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). O'Neill repeated this point in
an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" in January of 2004. Susskind, whose
book also draws on interviews with other officials, said that in its
first weeks the Bush administration was discussing the occupation of
Iraq and the question of how to divide up its oil (www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml ).
28. PNAC, Rebuilding America's Defenses, iv, 6, 50, 51, 59.
29. Lawrence Kaplan, New Republic 224 (March 12, 2001), cover text; quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, 223.
30. PNAC's letter to Clinton in 1998, for example,
urged him to "undertake military action" to eliminate "the possibility
that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass
destruction."
31. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 35-36.
32. Ibid., 212.
33. Ibid., 212, 24-25.
34. Ibid., 51.
35. This according to the Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2002.
36. Robert Kagan, "We Must Fight This War," Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2001; Henry Kissinger, "Destroy the Network," Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2001 (http://washingtonpost.com ); Lance Morrow, "The Case for Rage and Retribution," Time, Sept. 11, 2001.
37. "Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with the New York Times," New York Times,
October 12, 2001. On Rice, see Nicholas Lemann, "The Next World Order:
The Bush Administration May Have a Brand-New Doctrine of Power," New Yorker, April 1, 2002 (http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/020401fa_FACT1 ), and Rice, "Remarks by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Terrorism and Foreign Policy," April 29, 2002 (www.whitehouse.gov ); on Bush, see "Bush Vows to 'Whip Terrorism,'" Reuters, Sept. 14, 2001, and Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 32.