Author: Sam Koritz

According to polls, tens of millions of Americans believe that the government was behind the 9/11 attacks. But 2 more conspiracy theories were pretty well debunked recently.

(1) That the government shot down United Flight 93.

(2) That the air force was ordered to “stand down” on 9/11.

Michael Bronner, a producer of the movie United 93, asked for the NORAD 9/11/01 transcripts, & published excerpts in Vanity Fair. He actually provides sound clips — here.

It seems that NORAD was unable to track or intercept any of the planes before they crashed. At one point they believed that the White House was targeted, and, incredibly, the air force planes were unable to find the White House:

Nasypany: “Goddammit! I can’t even protect my N.C.A. [National Capital Area].”

[A] dramatic chase towards the White House continues. Two more problems emerge: the controllers can’t find the White House on their dated equipment, and they have trouble communicating with the Langley fighters.

CITINO: 15 miles. One-five … noise level please … It’s got to be low. Quit 2-6, when able say altitude of the aircraft.… Did we get a Z-track [coordinates] up for the White House?
HUCKABONE: They’re workin’ on it.
CITINO: Okay. Hey, what’s this Bravo 0-0-5 [unidentified target]?
FOX: We’re trying to get the Z-point. We’re trying to find it.
HUCKABONE: I don’t even know where the White House is.

Conspiracy theorists still have some material to work with, though. On 9/11/01 there was a NORAD hijacking exercise, which seems to have caused some confusion when the real hijackings occurred:

BOSTON CENTER: Hi. Boston Center T.M.U. [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here. We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to, we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.
POWELL: Is this real-world or exercise?
BOSTON CENTER: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

WATSON: What?
DOOLEY: Whoa!
WATSON: What was that?
ROUNTREE: Is that real-world?
DOOLEY: Real-world hijack.
WATSON: Cool!

FOX: I’ve never seen so much real-world stuff happen during an exercise.
NASYPANY: This is what I got. Possible news that a 737 just hit the World Trade Center. This is a real-world.

—Is this explosion part of that that we’re lookin’ at now on TV?
—Yes.
—Jesus …
—And there’s a possible second hijack also—a United Airlines …
—Two planes?…
—Get the f*ck out …
—I think this is a damn input, to be honest.

The last line — “I think this is a damn input” — is a reference to the exercise, meaning a simulations input.

Also surprising is (1) that the terrorists knew to turn off the planes’ transponders, and (2) that this succeeded in making the planes invisible to NORAD. The Vanity Fair article suggests that civilian air traffic controllers had a better understanding of what was going on than did NORAD; even talking to each-other on the phone might have cleared up the confusion, but this didn’t happen.

No conspiracy theory is necessary to make the anti-imperial argument: ethics aside, a government that can’t find the president’s house during an attack shouldn’t be abroad shaking up hornets’ nests.

(Readers might be interested in checking out the Peace section of my science blog.)

I just finished reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography — one of two he’s written, I think — In the Arena. Unlike some of my friends, I don’t mind his guns rights work nor his anti-Ice T Cop Killer agitation. I wanted to know more about two of my favorite dystopian movies, Planet of the Apes & Soylent Green. Why did a right-wing hawk make an antiwar film (based on a French sci-fi novel) during the Vietnam War? I also liked Touch of Evil. Turns out Heston was in a bunch of other movies that I haven’t seen, & some plays. He marched for civil rights but hates affirmative action racial preferences.

In my unscientific sample, Heston’s book is better than sleeping pills when recited to very pregnant person.

Heston was stationed in Alaska during WWII & just when he was about to go help invade Japan, the nukes fell, & Heston got to go home. So it’s sorta understandable that he would be in favor the mass destruction. It saved a million Japanese lives, blah blah blah. Fine. But then he comes back to it chapters later & it’s rah-rah-rah for Enola Gay. Here’s the real deal on Hiroshima, a p.o.v. that Heston doesn’t even mention: http://antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=9443. Regardless, Heston’s ends-justify-the-means enthusiastic support for the destruction of cities full of civilians is terroristic.

So that was enough reading of every word for me. I skipped forward to the parts I was interested in. And he never did explain the whole Apes thing.

~ Sam

Frank Rich notes (“The Peculiar Disappearance of the War in Iraq“) that the Iraq occupation has been going so badly for so long that Americans are tired of hearing about it:

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 20 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won’t catch anyone saying it’s Day 1,230 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60% between 2003 and this spring.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined.

President Bush at last started counting those Iraqi bodies publicly — with an estimate of 30,000 — some seven months ago. (More recently, The Los Angeles Times put the figure at, conservatively, 50,000.)

Niall Ferguson is one of the few supporters of the Iraq invasion whose writing is worth reading. He argues that a US-led classical liberal empire should dominate the world, as the British Empire once did.

Back in 2003 Ferguson participated in a fascinating debate on “The British Empire and Globalization,” in which he concluded that “British rule was on balance conducive to economic growth.” Evidence includes the British Empire’s encouragement of free trade, British institutions’ wealth-creation record, and the failure of post-colonial economies to match Britain’s economic growth rate. Ferguson sites Jeffrey D. Sachs and A. M. Warner’s 1995 paper, “Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration,” [pdf file here], which found that among poor countries in the ’70s and ’80s, “the open economies grew at 4.49% per year, and the closed countries grew at 0.69% per year.” Since economic openness encouraged economic growth in the ’70s and ’80s, it probably did the same in earlier times, and since the British Empire enforced economic openness it probably encouraged economic growth.

Ferguson and his critics agree that the “white dominions” (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), the United States, and Britain itself — nations founded on British institutions and predominantly peopled by the British and their descendants — are some of the world’s most economically successful nations.

Continue reading “Some Thoughts about Colonialism on Day 1,230 of the Iraq Occupation”

From “Murky Goings-On” in this week’s Economist:

WHO provided the early finance for Fininvest, the parent company of Silvio Berlusconi’s business empire? Prosecutors hope to find an answer during appeal proceedings that have just begun in Palermo, in a case involving Marcello Dell’Utri, a close associate of Mr Berlusconi and one of the founders of his Forza Italia political party. Mr Dell’Utri, who was returned to parliament again in April’s election, is appealing against a nine-year prison sentence for association with the Mafia that was handed down in December 2004. …

Part of that new evidence is testimony given in 2004 and 2005 during inquiries in Rome into the murder in June 1982 of Roberto Calvi, Banco Ambrosiano’s chairman, just before the bank’s collapse. The prosecutors in Palermo want to ascertain if Mr Calvi, whom they describe as having been a beneficiary of substantial Mafia financing, made any investment in Fininvest in the first half of the 1970s.

The prosecutors note that a senior official from the Bank of Italy, Francesco Giuffrida, who was seconded to help the magistrates in Rome with their investigations, had uncovered various foreign operations. One of these involved Capitalfin International, which set up a subsidiary called Fininvest Limited-Gran Cayman in 1974. Capitalfin International, in which the Banco Ambrosiano group later acquired a big stake, had links to the P2 masonic lodge, of which both Mr Calvi and Mr Berlusconi became members.

[A]fter examining Mr Giuffrida in 2002, the prosecutors drew the court’s attention to a number of attempts that might have been made to intimidate him.

The Economist‘s description of P2 is inadequate.

According to Wikipedia:

In the mid 1960s it [P2] only had 14 permanent members, but when Licio Gelli took over in the 1960s and 1970s, he rapidly expanded the membership to over 1000 (most of whom were prominent and elite Italians) within a year. The expansion was almost certainly illegal, as Italian civil servants are generally forbidden from joining secret societies.

In 1976, Masonic authorities withdrew the lodge’s charter and expelled Gelli from Freemasonry.

And P2 was:

…involved in Gladio’s strategy of tension – Gladio was the name of the secret “stay-behind” NATO paramilitary organizations. Between 1965 and 1981, it tried to condition the Italian political process through the penetration of persons of confidence to the inside of the magistracy, the Parliament, the army and the press. Beside Italy, P2 was also active in Uruguay, Brazil and especially in Argentina’s “Dirty War”….

The term [“strategy of tension”] was coined in Italy during the trials that followed the 1970s and 1980s terror attacks and murders committed by neofascist terrorists…. The terrorists were backed by intelligence agencies, P2 masonic lodge and Gladio, a NATO secret “stay-behind” army set up to perform guerilla and resistance activities should Italy be successfully invaded by the Soviet bloc (there were equivalent armies in most Western states), which due to its clandestine nature was largely unmonitored and so unchecked by civilian agencies and began to pursue its own right wing, anti-communist agenda using the rather violent means at its disposal, including false flag terrorist attacks. …

[F]ormer CIA agent Richard Brenneke …, claims to have met Licio Gelli in Paris in October 1980, in relationship to the “October surprise.” According to him, William Casey, who would later become head of the CIA but was at that time manager of the Reagan-Bush campaign, was present….

In 2000, a Parliamentary report from the Olive Tree coalition concluded that the strategy of tension followed by Gladio had been supported by the United States….

Also in this week’s Economist: “Data Security“:

THE sheer volume of data passing through the SWIFT network daily is mind-boggling: up to 12.7m messages about money transfers, bouncing between more than 7,800 banks and financial firms in over 200 countries. It is the broadest system of its kind for sending financial messages around the world quickly and securely. As one might expect, the data include the names and account numbers of those sending and receiving funds.

Hence this week’s outcry at the revelation that American government agencies have been tracking messages sent via SWIFT for several years….

Interational banks are already required to file reports on suspicious activity….

An industry representative suggests the Americans may have been forced to go to SWIFT after banks turned down their requests for information. “This is a delicate issue,” he says. “There is a degree of cloak and dagger and hush-hush involved.”

James Bovard wrote about this delicate issue for The Baltimore Sun (“Surveillance of financial transactions goes too far“):

A U.N. report on terrorist financing released in May 2002 noted that a “suspicious transaction report” had been filed with the U.S. government over a $69,985 wire transfer that Mohamed Atta, leader of the hijackers, received from the United Arab Emirates. The report noted that “this particular transaction was not noticed quickly enough because the report was just one of a very large number and was not distinguishable from those related to other financial crimes.”

One of the key federal agencies vacuuming the financial information long has snubbed the terrorist threat. As of 2004, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control had 10 times as many agents assigned to track violators of the U.S. embargo on Cuba as it had tracking Osama bin Laden’s money.

And writing in The American Conservative (“Power of the Pen“) Bovard suggests why little has been done about the widely-reported fraud and waste of the Iraq occupation:

After Congress created an inspector general in late 2003 to look into the Coalition Provisional Authority, Bush decreed, “The CPA IG shall refrain from initiating, carrying out, or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing a subpoena, which requires access to sensitive operation plans, intelligence matters, counterintelligence matters, ongoing criminal investigations by other administrative units of the Department of Defense related to national security, or other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security.”

~ Sam

 

I just finished reading, and recommend, Robert Dreyfuss’s Devil’s Game.

Of course I already knew that — in the words of Cheryl Benard (RAND expert, and Zalmay Khalilzad’s wife) —  in the ’80s the CIA, Saudis, and Pakistanis funded the “worst crazies” in Afghanistan and that, “the reason we don’t have moderate leaders in Afghanistan today is because we let the nuts kill them all.”

But I didn’t know that:

During the U.S.-Taliban era of cooperation from 1994 to 1998 … a key Unocal consultant was a University of Nebraska academic named Thomas Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies there. During and after the Afghan jihad, Gouttierre’s center secured more than $60 million in federal grants for “educational” programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although the funding for Gouttierre’s work was funneled through the State Department’s Agency for International Development, the CIA was its sponsor. And it turned out that Gouttierre’s education program consisted of blatant Islamist propaganda, including the creation of children’s textbooks in which young Afghanis were taught to count by enumerating dead Russian soldiers and adding up Kalashnikov rifles, all of it imbued with Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric. The Taliban liked Gouttierre’s work so much that they continued to use the textbooks he created, and when a delegation of Taliban officials visited the United States in 1997 they made a special stop in Omaha to pay homage to Gouttierre. In 1999, another Taliban delegation, which included military commanders with ties to bin Laden and Al Qaeda, was escorted by Gouttierre on a tour of Mount Rushmore.

You can see how confusing it must be for government officials. A year later, other known Al Qaeda associates arrived in the U.S., and while they weren’t treated like VIPs, they also weren’t treated like dangerous enemies.

~ Sam

Excerpts from “Roads to somewhere,” The Economist

…[H]ighways began expanding rapidly after President Dwight Eisenhower, 50 years ago this month, signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 which committed the government to invest heavily in a national network of interstates.

…[T]he network that he authorised was often referred to as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The generals thought that better roads would make it easier to move military convoys around in case of attack, as well as to evacuate big cities in a hurry. The overpasses were made high enough so that ballistic missiles could be transported beneath them. Though the atom bombs and invaders never came, life in America would never again be the same.

The interstates replaced social interaction and serendipity with speed and efficiency, and some have lamented the change ever since. By 1962 John Steinbeck was writing about the disappearance of antique stores, factory outlets and “roadside stands selling squash juice.” He complained that the new roads would make it “possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”

The interstates paved the way for fast food chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which set up shop near the access ramps. Besides changing the way that motorists eat, the new highways also transformed the ways in which companies moved their goods. One reason that Wal-Mart became a cost-cutting behemoth was because it exploited the logistical advantages of the new system faster than its competitors did.

Besides linking distant places to each other, the system has encircled many urban areas with “beltways,” which let motorists move between surrounding suburbs without having to bother with the cities. Once commuters began whizzing (on a good day) around those beltways, centrifugal force did the rest, propelling office space, staff and tax revenues away from the centre.

The big question now is whether Americans are willing to keep spending more than $80 billion a year of their tax money to maintain and upgrade the system. Clifford Winston, at the Brookings Institution, has tried to measure the benefits reaped from improved logistics. Although this is clearly an imprecise exercise, he reckons that government-financed highway investments have run into steeply diminishing returns since the 1980s.

…[D]rivers are also taxpayers and voters. And growing numbers of them are turned off by the corruption that goes with pork-barrel spending. Highway bills are a notorious source of rancid pork.

Some state governments — which face tighter fiscal constraints than the federal one — are toying with ideas for letting the private sector take over stretches of highway. Now that the interstate network is built, the challenge is to maintain it. For $3.8 billion, Indiana agreed this year to lease its toll road, which is part of I-80 and I-90, to an Australian-Spanish consortium for the next 75 years. The consortium will maintain the highway and keep the tolls; and it will no doubt face public pressure to do a good job. But it will not be selling squash juice from roadside stalls.

~ Sam