Terror Manual - but no US state terror EVER.

Two words you will not find here ... Bologna, Gladio!!

No. 01 Aug 03 -- A Military Guide to Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century

DISTRIBUTION RESTRICTION: Approved for public release; distribution unlimited.

U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command

Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence

Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence – Threats

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas 66027

TRADOC DCSINT Handbook.

Unless this publication states otherwise, masculine nouns or pronouns do not refer exclusively to men.

[Amazing inside knowledge:]

Red Army Brigade Ambush

Alfred Herrhausen, 30 November 1989

The Red Army Brigade, primarily a German domestic terrorist group, targeted politicians and influential businessmen for murder. As head of Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, Alfred Herrhausen was the most influential businessman in the country. The Red Army Brigade vowed to kill Herrhausen by the end of November 1989

Herrhausen was chauffeured to work each morning in an armored Mercedes, with bodyguards in a lead and a follow car. The Red Army Brigade learned his routine, which was to take substantially the same route to and from work at approximately the same time each day. That route went through a park, which made for an excellent surveillance and attack site. RAB members, in workers’ clothes, dug a small hole across the road, set up an infrared beam on one side and a reflector on the other. On 30 November 1989, Alfred Herrhausen headed for work in his usual motorcade, along his usual route, at his usual time. A RAB lookout signaled the triggerman that Herrhausen’s motorcade was approaching the kill zone. The triggerman allowed the first car through, then activated the infrared beam. When Herrhausen’s car broke the beam, a timer delay caused a plate charge hidden on the back of a bicycle to detonate, sending it through the rear door of Herrhausen’s armored car. It severed his legs and he bled to death.

SOURCE (Blackwater is a private, unaccountable murder mercenary corporation)
http://www.blackwaterusa.com/btw2004/articles/terror.pdf

Saddlebags or Schoolbag?
http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/assets/pdf/pogt/Part 4_Chronology.pdf


Other interesting paragraphs:

USA Governmental or “State” terror: Sometimes referred to as “terror from above”, where a government terrorizes its own population to control or repress them. These actions usually constitute the acknowledged policy of the government, and make use of official institutions such as the judiciary, police, military, and other government agencies. Changes to legal codes permit or encourage torture, killing, or property destruction in pursuit of government policy. After assuming power, official Nazi policy was aimed at the deliberate destruction of “state enemies” and the resulting intimidation of the rest of the population.


US State involvement in terror: These are activities where government personnel carry out operations using terror tactics. These activities may be directed against other nations’ interests, its own population, or private groups or individuals viewed as dangerous to the state. In many cases, these activities are terrorism under official sanction, although such authorization is rarely acknowledged openly.


Another type of these activities is “death squads” or “war veterans”: unofficial actions taken by officials or functionaries of a regime (such as members of police or intelligence organizations) against their own population to repress or intimidate. While these officials will not claim such activities, and disguise their participation, it is often made clear that they are acting for the state. Keeping such activities “unofficial” permits the authorities deniability and avoids the necessity of changing legal and judicial processes to justify oppression. This is different than “pro-state” terror, which is conducted by groups or persons with no official standing and without official encouragement. While pro-state terror may result in positive outcomes for the authorities, their employment of criminal methods and lack of official standing can result in disavowal and punishment of the terrorists, depending on the morality of the regime in question.


USA State sponsorship of terrorism: Also known as “state supported” terrorism, when governments provide supplies, training, and other forms of support to non-state terrorist organizations. One of the most valuable types of this support is the provision of safe haven or physical basing for the terrorists’ organization. Another crucial service a state sponsor can provide is false documentation, not only for personal identification (passports, internal identification documents), but also for financial transactions and weapons purchases. Other means of support are access to training facilities and expertise not readily available to groups without extensive resources. Finally, the extension of diplomatic protections and services, such as immunity from extradition, diplomatic passports, use of embassies and other protected grounds, and diplomatic pouches to transport weapons or explosives have been significant to some groups.


Terror in Antiquity: 1st -14th Century AD The earliest known organization that exhibited aspects of a modern terrorist organization was the Zealots of Judea. Known to the Romans as sicarii, or dagger-men29, they carried on an underground campaign of assassination of Roman occupation forces, as well as any Jews they felt had collaborated with the Romans. Their motive was an uncompromising belief that they could not remain faithful to the dictates of Judaism while living as Roman subjects. Eventually, the Zealot revolt became open, and they were finally besieged and committed mass suicide at the fortification of Masada.

The French Revolution provided the first uses of the words “Terrorist” and “Terrorism”. Use of the word "terrorism" began in 1795 in reference to the Reign of Terror initiated by the Revolutionary government. The agents of the Committee of Public Safety and the National Convention that enforced the policies of “The Terror” were referred to as ‘Terrorists”.



Key Thinkers in the Development of Revolutionary Theory

Karl Marx – Prolific author and theorist who’s “Communist Manifesto” laid out the ideas of struggle between economic classes for control of the means of production, and thus control of the state. He predicted a revolutionary force composed of a mass of urban industrial workers. A key for future terrorists was his “materialistic theory of history”. It claims scientific justification for the assertion that capitalism will inevitably fail and be replaced by utopian communism. This “scientific” proof is used as justification for actions, including terrorism, that hasten the destruction of the capitalist order.

Mikhail Bakunin – Aristocrat and former officer of the Russian Imperial Guard, Bakunin developed an anarchist theory that viewed all forms of authority as ultimately oppressive, including religious concepts such as gods. Since all authority systems were inherently oppressive, they are therefore legitimate targets for destruction. Such destruction, he argued, must be prosecuted with no scruples. Exiled to Siberia, he escaped and eventually made his way to Switzerland, where he published pamphlets and works such as “God and the State”.

Johann Most – A late 19th century anarchist who explicitly advocated terrorism in the pamphlet “Revolutionary War Science”. Fascinated by the new technology of powerful, compact explosives such as dynamite, Most saw bombs made from these explosives as “equalizers” between the individual anarchist and the forces of the established order. Expelled from various European countries, he eventually made his way to the United States, and became a significant influence on American anarchists. Most later repudiated violence, and subsequently lost his influence over the anarchist movement.

Vladimir Lenin – Leader of the Bolshevik party that seized power in Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Lenin, unlike the Anarchists, believed that terrorism could not provoke a revolution, and organization was necessary. The small size of the industrial proletariat in Russia precluded a true Marxist class insurrection, so Lenin conceived the idea of a small disciplined political party to achieve the revolution, and then develop the conditions for the communist utopia. Many modern terrorists have used this concept to justify their lack of popular support among those they claim to represent. “If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.” - Lenin

Leon Trotsky – Peoples Commissar for War in the Bolshevik Revolutionary government. Conceived the internationalization of the Revolution, which meant continual efforts worldwide to initiate revolution, including terrorist activities. Eventually purged from the Party, he fled overseas, and after surviving multiple assassination attempts, was killed by a Soviet sponsored agent in Mexico in 1940.

Mao Zedong – Leader of the Chinese Communist insurgency and eventual Chairman of the Party. Mao wrote primarily on the use of guerilla warfare in the political struggle. His chief contribution to modern terrorist thought is the application of revolutionary theory to rural, rather than urban environments. Carlos Marighella – A Brazilian politician who opposed the military government of the 1960s, he wrote the Mini-manual of the Urban Guerilla. This work brought guerilla war into an urban context, and because of the nature of such an urban campaign, used terrorism exclusively.



As the US national governments fail, their ruling elites frequently criminalize the nation itself, lending their sovereignty to smuggling, money laundering, piracy, or other illicit activities.


This interpenetration of a criminal element into the US government while US government officials are “seeping” down to the terrorists’ level is the result of governments feeling that legality, in the international sense, is a luxury they cannot afford, and perhaps do not need. They lack the resources to adhere to “legalistic” notions, and thus sink into criminality. The better-funded substate organizations (terrorist, criminal, etc.) infiltrate or supplant the US government.

The next conflicts will be between cultures. -- Samuel Huntington,“The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs (Summer 1993)

Why the towers fell: Two theories

By William Rice --Posted March 1, 2007

Having worked on structural steel buildings as a civil engineer in the era when the Twin Towers were designed and constructed, I found some disturbing discrepancies and omissions concerning their collapse on 9/11.

I was particularly interested in the two PBS documentaries that explained the prevailing theories as determined by two government agencies, FEMA and NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology). The first (2002) PBS documentary, Why the Towers Fell, discussed how the floor truss connectors failed and caused a “progressive pancake collapse.”

The subsequent 2006 repackaged documentary Building on Ground Zero explained that the connectors held, but that the columns failed, which is also unlikely. Without mentioning the word “concrete,” the latter documentary compared the three-second collapse of the concrete Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building with that of the Twin Towers that were of structural steel. The collapse of a concrete-framed building cannot be compared with that of a structural steel-framed building.

Since neither documentary addressed many of the pertinent facts, I took the time to review available material, combine it with scientific and historic facts, and submit the following two theories for consideration.

The prevailing theory

The prevailing theory for the collapse of the 110-story, award-winning Twin Towers is that when jetliners flew into the 95th and 80th floors of the North and South Towers respectively, they severed several of each building’s columns and weakened other columns with the burning of jet fuel/kerosene (and office combustibles).

However, unlike concrete buildings, structural steel buildings redistribute the stress when several columns are removed and the undamaged structural framework acts as a truss network to bridge over the missing columns.

After the 1993 car bomb explosion destroyed columns in the North Tower, John Skilling, the head structural engineer for the Twin Towers, was asked about an airplane strike. He explained that the Twin Towers were originally designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707 (similar in size to the Boeing 767). He went on to say that there would be a horrendous fire from the jet fuel, but “the building structure would still be there.”

The 10,000 gallons of jet fuel (half capacity) in each jetliner did cause horrendous fires over several floors, but it would not cause the steel members to melt or even lose sufficient strength to cause a collapse. This is because the short-duration jet fuel fires and office combustible fires cannot create (or transmit to the steel) temperatures hot enough. If a structural steel building could collapse because of fire, it would do so slowly as the various steel members gradually relinquished their structural strength. However, in the 100-year history of structural-steel framed buildings, there is no evidence of any structural steel framed building having collapsed because of fire.

Let’s assume the unlikelihood that these fires could weaken all of the columns to the same degree of heat intensity and thus remove their structural strength equally over the entire floor, or floors, in order to cause the top 30-floor building segment (South Tower WTC #2) to drop vertically and evenly onto the supporting 79th floor. The 30 floors from above would then combine with the 79th floor and fall onto the next level down (78th floor) crushing its columns evenly and so on down into the seven levels below the street level.

The interesting fact is that each of these 110-story Twin Towers fell upon itself in about ten seconds at nearly free-fall speed. This violates Newton’s Law of Conservation of Momentum that would require that as the stationary inertia of each floor is overcome by being hit, the mass (weight) increases and the free-fall speed decreases.

Even if Newton’s Law is ignored, the prevailing theory would have us believe that each of the Twin Towers inexplicably collapsed upon itself crushing all 287 massive columns on each floor while maintaining a free-fall speed as if the 100,000, or more, tons of supporting structural-steel framework underneath didn’t exist.

The politically unthinkable theory

Controlled demolition is so politically unthinkable that the media not only demeans the messenger but also ridicules and “debunks” the message rather than provide investigative reporting. Curiously, it took 441 days for the president’s 9/11 Commission to start an “investigation” into a tragedy where more than 2,500 WTC lives were taken. The Commission’s investigation also didn’t include the possibility of controlled-demolition, nor did it include an investigation into the “unusual and unprecedented” manner in which WTC Building #7 collapsed.

The media has basically kept the collapse of WTC Building #7 hidden from public view. However, instead of the Twin Towers, let’s consider this building now. Building #7 was a 47-story structural steel World Trade Center Building that also collapsed onto itself at free-fall speed on 9/11. This structural steel building was not hit by a jetliner, and collapsed seven hours after the Twin Towers collapsed and five hours after the firemen had been ordered to vacate the building and a collapse safety zone had been cordoned off. Both of the landmark buildings on either side received relatively little structural damage and both continue in use today.

Contrary to the sudden collapse of the World Trade Centre Towers and Building #7, the four other smaller World Trade Center buildings #3, #4, #5, and #6, which were severely damaged and engulfed in flames on 9/11, still remained standing. There were no reports of multiple explosions. The buildings had no pools of molten metal (a byproduct of explosives) at the base of their elevator shafts. They created no huge caustic concrete/cement and asbestos dust clouds (only explosives will pulverize concrete into a fine dust cloud), and they propelled no heavy steel beams horizontally for three hundred feet or more.

The collapse of WTC building #7, which housed the offices of the CIA, the Secret Service, and the Department of Defense, among others, was omitted from the government’s 9/11 Commission Report, and its collapse has yet to be investigated.

Perhaps it is time for these and other unanswered questions surrounding 9/11 to be thoroughly investigated. Let’s start by contacting our congressional delegation.

William Rice, P.E., is a registered professional civil engineer who worked on structural steel (and concrete) buildings in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. He was also a professor at Vermont Technical College where he taught engineering materials, structures lab, and other building related courses.

DO NOT READ THIS (Mass murder manifesto)

You have been warned.

This is the sick and horrible MANIFESTO of a mass murderer.

YES, it is about the VIRGINIA SCHOOL SHOOTING.

Gun-laws

The United States Constitution » second amendment

A well regulated (arms are locked away in peace-time) militia, being necessary to the security of a free state (not neccessary today, security is not under threat), the
right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

In other words:

The right to bear arms is infringed (i.e. possessing arms is FORBIDDEN), because of the following requirements are not met (unless you want to be a rabulist).

• well regulated militia (i.e. not single persons)
• necessary for security of a free state (i.e. state, not neighborhood defense)

Q.E.D.

Intentional creation of a hostile society

In his very watchable film, The Trap, Adam Curtis rams our noses in the pathological plan that the corporations have enacted on our societies. In a nutshell, the Cold-War game theory was applied to keep us in negative freedom.

I have a dream: Imagine what a wonderful world of fun we would inhabit if the organising principle was Free Money instead of capitalist usury and debt slavery. Just imagine the explosion of the arts, the durable, beautiful architecture, the communal turkish bath houses and youth centers on every street corner, free public transport, electric cars and so on.

Back to reality:

HERE ARE THE GRUESOME PICTURES OF A PRODUCT OF HOLLYWOOD AND CORPORATIONS MAKING WAR RESPECTABLE.

"War is so reputable still, because of Hollywood that George Bush can say ‘I am a war president’. That’s like saying ‘I am a syphilis president’. Kurt Vonnegut

Oh the happiness I could have had mingling among you hedonists, being counted as one of you, only you didn't f*ck the living sh*t out of me. You could have been great. I could have been great. Ask yourself what you did to me to have me clean the slate. All the sh*t you have given me, right back at you with hollow points (open kogels) Don't you wish you finished me off when you had the chance? Dont you just wish you killed me? Number of the Anti-Terrorist You wanna rape us John Mark Karrs? You wanna rape us Debra LaFaves? F*ck you. Are you happy now that you have destroyed my life? Now that you have stolen everything you could from me? Now that you have gone a 9/11 like f*cking Osama. Now that you have f*cked your own life, lick fucking Kim Jong- II. Now that you have gone on a human safari like f*cking Bush? Are you happy now? Let the revolution begin. You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people. "Like Moses, I split the sea and freed my people, the weak, the defenseless, the innocent children of all ages." Do you know what it feels to be spit on your face and to have trash shoved down your throat? Do you know what it feels like to dig your own grave? Do you know what it feels like to have throat slashed from ear to ear? Do you know what it feels like to be torched alive? Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can? You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything. ======== Here are some more quotes from him. "Like Moses, I split the sea and freed my people. The weak, the defenseless, the innocent children of all ages."- Cho Seung Hui "You just loved crucifying me."- Cho Seung-Hui "Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross and left to bleed to death for your amusement?"- Cho Seung-Hui "Thanks to you, I died, like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."- Cho Seung-Hui (except that Jesus died not die. They did not break his legs! He survived the crucifiction and this was the cause celebre to found a religion on.) Because his parents are members of the Christian Church and because of his references to Jesus and how they are crucifying him(Cho), his beliefs were most likely of Christianity and the words "Ismail Ax" were probably taken from the Old Testament. You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people. Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? You have never felt a single ounce of pain your whole life. Did you want to inject as much misery in our lives as you can just because you can?

Ismail Ax and the North Korean President

SCROLL DOWN FOR UPDATES AND A NOTE

I. “Campus Shooting at Virginia Tech“
II. “Massacre at Virginia Tech: The Victims.“
III. (related) “Making sense of losses: Guest blog by Kathryn Casey.”

To be fair, blogger Pamela Geller Oshrey of Atlas Shrugs may have noticed the following strangeness first. She has yet to explore it further. I guess that’s up to obsessive insomniacs like me.

Virginia Tech spree killer Seung Hui Cho, age 23, was found with a peculiar name written on his arm: Ismail Ax.

As Cho may have worked very hard to erase a good deal of his identity, the web-searching frenzy sparked by that mysterious name and Cho’s other known writings has so far been fruitless.

Still, if you slog through all the hits from Google’s Blog Search on “Ismail Ax,” you eventually reach this result:

Americans Kidnap South Korean Boy 1971 12 Apr 2007 by war

… young boy went missing in 1971, the people searched for the boy by word of mouth; the Asian Intelligence Agency (AIA) put a stop on all media and threatened to kill anyone who continued to pursue the issue of the missing boy. ismail Ax.

The North Korean President - http://presidentryan.blogspot.com/index.html

The blog, presidentryan.blogspot.com, is no longer online, is not in the Wayback Machine, and I could find no hits in Google’s cache…

I decided to take my search to Technorati:

The North Korean President.

On the off-chance the information is one day deleted from Technorati, I also made a screen cap of the results. You can click on the thumbnail on the left to see the image.

Google’s blog search and Technorati captured results from this blog at different times. Here is the Technorati snippet from the entry first found in Google Blogsearch hits:

Americans Kidnap South Korean Boy 1982
The North Korean President · 5 days ago · No blogs link here yet

The Americans controlled everything in South Korea, and when a young boy went missing in 1982, the people searched for the boy by word of mouth; the Asian Intelligence Agency (AIA) put a stop on all media and threatened to kill anyone who continued to pursue the issue of the missing boy…

It appears that on April 12, “war” posted that Americans had kidnapped a South Korean boy in ‘71. War apparently ended the entry with the tantalizing non-sequitur of a name, Ismail Ax — a name that would not be known to the public until April 17, after it was connected to the worst shooting spree in American history. Then 5 days ago, according to Technorati (that would have been April 13), the entry was edited, 1971 changed to 1982, and the name “Ismail Ax” deleted.

The same day, “war” apparently posted a new entry, titled “The American Connection.” Here is the portion of that entry captured by Technorati:

It was generally assumed that Kim Il-Sung would die and Kim John-Il would succeed the President, and when the time came in 1994, the Americans had another plan to dispose of the Kim family and put a South Korean trained agent as the next North Korean President…

Seung Cho bought his first handgun on March 13. According to this ABC News online article, Cho bought his second weapon on or around April 13 — about 5 days ago.

So far, this is intriguing and a little chilling, but there are flies in the ointment. For one, Technorati indicated that the weblog was last updated 16 hours ago — a full day after Seung Cho died at the end of his rampage across the Virginia Tech campus. Around 11 a.m. on Tuesday, April 17th would have been the time the blog was updated. Was that when it was deleted? If so, who deleted it?

Any doubt that the owner might have wanted to associate the weblog with Seung Cho was erased by this Technorati result:

Cho Seung Hui AIA Agent
The North Korean President 16 hours ago

But there is again that pesky timing element, and the question of how search engines determine the time stamps of results. Do some search algorithms rely on the stamp on the blog entry, which can be manipulated by the user? It appears that Google’s Web search does not, but it’s harder to tell with the blog search.

I did another search using blogsearch.google.com, this time of the URL for the blogspot blog.

Again the results were chilling, and slightly different from Technorati (click the thumbnail if you are reading this after the search results have either changed or vanished). The entry titled “Cho Seung Hui AIA Agent” contained text in Google’s result. A single sentence:

Cho Seung Hui AIA Agent
It’s election time.
The North Korean President

I guess at this point I am left with a couple of questions.

The “1971″ version of the “Americans Kidnap South Korean Boy” entry was stamped April 12. The spooky “AIA Agent” entry above appeared to have been made or at least altered somehow yesterday. So: did Seung Cho have a blog, and rig it to self-destruct or have an accomplice alter it for him? Or did another hoaxster decided to play around with an attempt at Internet Infamy, a la WaniusMaximus? Could a family member, appalled and ashamed of what transpired at Virginia Tech, have gotten into Cho’s accounts and deleted anything incriminating, or simply insane?

I wouldn’t have spent as much time as I have on this if it were not for the open question of how long this blog has existed, and whether or not it was edited prior to Seung Cho’s killing spree. The presence of the name Ismail Ax, the strong anti-American paranoia expressed, the delusion inherent in calling himself an AIA Agent — all might fit the emerging portrait of the man. But hoaxsters aren’t always idiots, either. Some of them are subtle enough strike the right notes in an effort to fool their intended audience.

Yet if this blog was created in the last two days as a hoax, why was it then deleted? What would be the point?

I don’t know. If the search engines essentially agreeing on the age of the 5 to 6 day old entries are not the result of a blogger trying to game results with a timestamp, then I’m very inclined to believe that presidentryan.blogspot.com was Seung-Hui Cho’s weblog, and that he attempted to get rid of it, just as he did many other aspects of is identity.

Do your own poking around. What do you think?

Updates will be posted below.

UPDATE 1, 4:29 a.m. ET

A Technorati result that steers me further towards thinking this is a hoax:

Technorati Search: Americans Kidnap South Korean Boy.

The “Ismail Ax” result is time-stamped 12 hours ago.

UPDATE 2, 2:05 p.m. ET

Mike Clyne, writing in Bangkokker, has the best, most logical explanation yet for the origin of the name “Ismail Ax” that I’ve seen. Rather than quote, I’ll let the reader check out Mike’s entry in its entirety and judge for themselves. I still wonder if Cho just thought “Ismail (or Ismale, or Ismael) Ax” sounded cool. He was a writer, after all, and many writer’s minds, be they sane or insane, tend to work that way — they just like the sounds of words, especially if they are able to find some resonance in the words later.

I do not think Seung Cho’s crime was remotely related to organized terrorism. In his mind, perhaps Cho was an agent of similar chaos, but the personality being revealed through numerous accounts in the media is not that of a man who would have joined any kind of group for long, much less a terrorist cell. Taking any muslim references from Cho too seriously is just part of an attempt to manipulate this hideous crime for political gain. I’m with the Governor of Virginia on that score — to somehow use the VA Tech massacre for political purposes is loathsome.

UPDATE 3, 3:51 p.m. ET

I am a bad crime historian. Damn. MSNBC has been mentioning on-air the Bath School disaster. I had read at length about this tragedy in the past, but it didn’t occur to me to write about it in the wake of the VT massacre.

The Bath School event was actually the worst mass murder on a campus in American history, and it happened on May 18, 1927. It wasn’t a shooting, though — a school board member named Andrew Kehoe dynamited the building. His grievance? A property tax levied by Bath Township (MI) drained Kehoe’s funds and was forcing his farm into foreclosure.

The bombing killed 45 and injured 58, according to Wikipedia. As it was a bombing, it might first seem more akin to an act of domestic terrorism similar to the bombing of the Murrah building by Tim McVeigh and others, but it seems to me that other than using explosives, Kehoe was similar in outlook to shooters. His grievance was personal, and based in anger, hatred, and perhaps paranoia.

The majority of victims killed in Bath Township that day in May were elementary school-aged children.

UPDATE 4, 4:27 p.m. ET

Keep an eye on any NBC news outlet. The network has become a part of the investigation, thanks to Seung Cho. Apparently NBC received a packet of images and rambling notes from the killer, which they turned over to the investigators. This from an announcement made on MSNBC at 4:25 p.m. ET.

UPDATE 5, 7:20 p.m. ET

One thing is becoming clear — the first victims of the massacre apparently didn’t know Cho. Early reports from the University filtered through the mainstream media made it appear as though Ryan Clark and Emily Hilscher may have known their attacker, and then a number of bloggers followed suit, even adding in finer details.

The following is from TimesCommunity.com, an article published on April 17, 2007:

Hilscher, a Woodville resident, was apparently the first victim of the shooting as the gunman opened fire in a dorm before continuing his rampage at an engineering classroom located on the Virginia Tech campus.

Rappahannock County Administrator John McCarthy said it appears that Hilscher was an innocent bystander. “From what I understand, she was standing in the hall when the shooter approached,” he said.

(…)

Currently there is no information that indicates Hilscher had a relationship with the shooter. One student from Rappahannock County High School stated that her current boyfriend was Karl Thornhill, also a graduate of RCHS and her prom date last year.

Although Thornhill reportedly was under investigation by law enforcement officials, the Virginia State Police has released a statement clearing any suggestion that Thornhill had any involvement in the shooting.

Why Cho chose to do any of what he did is beyond the grasp of rational people. What is clear now is that from the very beginning, the massacre was the ultimate “random act of violence.”

Committed by a completely delusional, narcissistic, insane young man. NBC Nightly News’s Brian Williams said it best when he termed Cho a “uniquely sick” person.

UPDATE 6, 4/19/07, 12:39 a.m. ET

Viewing MSNBC’s slideshow of pages 1, 2, 5, and 11 from the “Manifesto” NBC received from Seung Cho on Wednesday, April 19, I was particularly struck by page 2. Here is part of the text Cho wrote:

Are you happy now that you have destroyed my life? Now that you have stolen everything you could from me? Now that you have gone on a 9/11 on my life like [redacted] Osama. Now that you have [redacted] your own people like Kim Jong-Il…

In the original blog entry above I quoted text found on the blog that once existed at presidentryan.blogspot.com. The blogger, whose screen name was apparently “war,” had posted the following in an entry titled “The American Connection”:

It was generally assumed that Kim Il-Sung would die and Kim John-Il would succeed the President, and when the time came in 1994, the Americans had another plan to dispose of the Kim family and put a South Korean trained agent as the next North Korean President…

Coincidences in instances like this are certainly possible. I remain much more skeptical of the deleted “North Korean President” weblog than not (see the note in bold below), but the portions of the manifesto NBC has made available already have me wondering.

NOTE: For the moment, I am of the opinion that presidentryan.blogspot.com is a hoax. presidentax.blogspot.com (see comments on this entry) is most assuredly a hoax — it says so on the blog. I also strongly object to criticism for making note of The North Korean President (”president ryan”). Anyone who thinks I’ve focused unduly on the killer’s mind has not read the first two entries on this weblog about this atrocity. Additionally, while it was worth some exploration, the entry above was anything but uncritical or lacking in skepticism.

Comments

Dr. ISMAIL AK is a Professor of Psychiatry at a university in Turkey. His research interests include the following:

Personal Disorders, Agresivve behavior and self-mutilation, ECT, Substance-related disorders, Sexual Disorders, Forensic Psychiatry, Sleep Disorders

From the Turkish Association of Psychopharmacology website:

President-elect:
Professor Ismail AK, M.D. Head, Department of Psychiatry, KTU School of Medicine, Trabzon, Turkey
Ismail AK is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Head, Department of Psychiatry, KTU School of Medicine, Trabzon, Turkey
He is an experienced on clinical psychopharmacology of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.

Dr. Ismail Ak is one of the authors of an article about patients with mental disorders, psychotic features, etc.:

As regards pharmacotherapies, 354 (50.2%) were given antidepressants. . . . Among antidepressants, Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were 72.8%. . . .

This is an abstract of an article co-written by Dr. ISMAIL AK:

Even though all psychiatric disorders do not have the same potential with regard to committing a crime, the number of individuals having psychiatric disorders is gradually going up depending on the increase of crimes and violent behaviors committed in a society. . . . The relation between existence of psychiatric disorder and crime behavior has been significantly emphasized in several earlier studies. In conclusion, it is notable that the rates of committing crime for the individuals with psychiatric disorders are on the rise.

Dr. Ismail Ak is apparently one of the world's leading experts on the psychiatry of antisocial and suicidal behavior, psychotic and bipolar disorders, psychopharmacological therapy, etc.

The young man had been noticed to be disturbed and had been referred to counseling. Dr. Ismail Ak is an expert and author in the particular field most directly related to the guy's disorder.

Software Gitmo by Microsoft

Land of the free, home of the War on Terrorism by William Blum == killinghope.org

"They told us this was one of the world's worst terrorists, and he got the sentence of a drunken driver," said Ben Wizner, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to David Hicks, a 31-year-old Australian who in a plea bargain with a US military court will serve nine months in prison, largely in Australia. That's after five years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba without being charged with a crime, without a trial, without a conviction. Under the deal, Hicks agreed not to talk to reporters for one year (a slap in the face of free speech), to forever waive any profit from telling his story (a slap -- mon Dieu! -- in the face of free enterprise), to submit to US interrogation and testify at future US trials or international tribunals (an open invitation to the US government to hound the young man for the rest of his life), to renounce any claims of mistreatment or unlawful detention (a requirement which would be unconstitutional in a civilian US court). "If the United States were not ashamed of its conduct, it wouldn't hide behind a gag order," said Wizner.)[1] Like so many other "terrorists" held by the United States in recent years, Hicks had been "sold" to the American military for a bounty offered by the US, a phenomenon repeated frequently in Afghanistan and Pakistan. US officials had to know that once they offered payments to a very poor area to turn in bodies that almost anyone was fair game. Other "terrorists" have been turned in as reprisals for all sorts of personal hatreds and feuds. Many others -- abroad and in the United States -- have been incarcerated by the United States simply for working for, or merely contributing money to, charitable organizations with alleged or real ties to a "terrorist organization", as determined by a list kept by the State Department, a list conspicuously political. It was recently disclosed that an Iraqi resident of Britain is being released from Guantánamo after four years. His crime? He refused to work as an informer for the CIA and MI5, the British security service. His business partner is still being held in Guantánamo, for the same crime.[2] Finally, there are those many other poor souls who have been picked up simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Most of these guys weren't fighting. They were running," General Martin Lucenti, former deputy commander of Guantánamo, has pointed out.[3] Thousands of people thrown into hell on earth for no earthly good reason. The world media has been overflowing with their individual tales of horror and sadness for five very long years. Said Guantánamo's former commander, General Jay Hood: "Sometimes we just didn't get the right folks."[4] Not that the torture they were put through would be justified if they were in fact "the right folks". Hicks was taken into custody in Afghanistan in 2001. He was a convert to Islam and like many others from many countries had gone to Afghanistan for religious reasons, had wound up on the side of the Taliban in the civil war that had been going on since the early 1990s, and had received military training at a Taliban camp. The United States has insisted on calling such camps "terrorist training camps", or "anti-American terrorist training camps", or "al-Qaeda terrorist training camps". Almost every individual or group not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wants to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there's a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American imperialism while being a member of al Qaeda and retaliating against American imperialism while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit into your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month. It should be noted that for nearly half a century much of southern Florida has been one big training camp for anti-Castro terrorists. None of their groups -- which have carried out many hundreds of serious terrorist acts in the US as well as abroad, including bombing a passenger airplane in flight -- are on the State Department list. Nor were the Contras of Nicaragua in the 1980s, heavily supported by the United States, about whom former CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified: "I believe it is irrefutable that a number of the Contras' actions have to be characterized as terrorism, as State-supported terrorism."[5] The same applies to groups in Kosovo and Bosnia, with close ties to al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, in the recent past, but which have allied themselves with Washington's agenda in the former Yugoslavia since the 1990s. Now we learn of US support for a Pakistani group, called Jundullah and led by a Taliban, which has taken responsibility for the recent kidnapings and deaths and of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials in cross-border attacks.[6] Do not hold your breath waiting for the name Jundallah to appear on the State Department list of terrorist organizations; nor any of the several other ethnic militias being supported by the CIA to carry out terrorist bombing and assassination attacks in Iran.[7] The same political selectivity applies to many of the groups which are on the list, particularly those opposed to American or Israeli policies. Amid growing pressure from their home countries and international human rights advocates, scores of Guantánamo detainees have been quietly repatriated in the past three years. Now, a new analysis by lawyers who have represented detainees at this 21st century Devil's Island says this policy undermines Washington's own claims about the threat posed by many of the prison camp's residents. The report, based on US government case files for Saudi detainees sent home over the past three years, shows inmates being systematically freed from custody within weeks of their return. In half the cases studied, the detainees had been turned over to US forces by Pakistani police or troops in return for financial rewards. Many others were accused of terrorism connections in part because their Arab nicknames matched those found in a computer database of al-Qaeda members, documents show. In December, a survey by the Associated Press found that 84 percent of released detainees -- 205 out of 245 individuals whose cases could be tracked -- were set free after being released to the custody of their native countries. "There are certainly bad people in Guantánamo Bay, but there are also other cases where it's hard to understand why the people are still there," said Anant Raut, co-author of the report, who has visited the detention camp three times. "We were struggling to find some rationality, something to comfort us that it wasn't just random. But we didn't find it." The report states that many of the US attempts to link the detainees to terrorism groups were based on evidence the authors describe as circumstantial and "highly questionable", such as the travel routes the detainees had followed in flying commercially from one Middle East country to another. American officials have associated certain travel routes with al Qaeda, when in fact, says the report, the routes "involve ordinary connecting flights in major international airports." With regard to accusations based on similar names, the report states: "This accusation appears to be based upon little more than similarities in the transliterations of a detainee's name and a name found on one of the hard drives." Raut said he was most struck by the high percentage of Saudi detainees who had been captured and turned over by Pakistani forces. In effect, he said, for at least half of the group in the study, the United States "had no first-hand knowledge of their activities" in Afghanistan before their capture and imprisonment.[8] When Michael Scheuer, former CIA officer who headed the Agency's Osama bin Laden unit, was told that the largest group in Guantánamo came from custody in Pakistan, he said: "We absolutely got the wrong people."[9] Never mind. They were all treated equally. All thrown into solitary confinement. Shackled, blindfolded, excruciating physical contortions for long periods, denied medicine. Sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation. And two dozen other methods of torture which American officials do not call torture. (If you torture these officials, they might admit that it "torture lite".) "The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment," a senior American defense official said in 2003, "so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited."[10] When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country, without their country attacking or threatening the US, become completely discredited? When will the use of depleted uranium and cluster bombs and CIA torture renditions become things that even men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld will be too embarrassed to defend? Australian/British journalist John Pilger has noted that in George Orwell's 1984 "three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Today's slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism." Throwing the earth on the mercy of the market Al Gore appeared before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on global warming on March 21. The star of "An Inconvenient Truth" was told by Cong. Joe Barton of Texas: "You're not just off a little -- you're totally wrong." In the afternoon Gore testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, during which the former vice president was told by Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma: "You've been so extreme in some of your expressions that you're losing some of your own people."[11] These members of Congress know the facts of economic life in the United States. Fighting global warming is a threat to the principal human generator of it -- corporations -- who avail themselves of the best congress members money can buy to keep government regulations as weak as can be. Does Al Gore know the same facts of American economic life? Of course, but you would have a hard time discerning that from his film. It's as cowardly in dealing with the corporations as Gore was in fighting the theft of the 2000 election. In the film's hour and a half, the words "corporations" or "profit" are not heard. The closest he comes to ascribing a link between the rape of the environment and the incessant corporate drive to optimize profits is a single passing mention of American automakers' reluctance to increase car gas mileage. He discusses the link between tobacco and lung cancer, as an example of how we have to "connect the dots" on environmental issues, with no mention of the tobacco corporations or their gross and deliberate deception of the American people. He states at another point that we must choose the environment over the economy, without any elucidation at all. Otherwise, the film's message is that it's up to the individual to change his habits, to campaign for renewable energy, and to write his congress member about this or that. In summary, the basic problem, he tells us, is that we're lacking "political will". It would be most interesting if Al Gore were the president to see how tough he'd get with the corporations, which every day, around the clock, are faced with choices: one method of operation available being the least harmful to the environment, another method being the least harmful to the bottom line. Of course, Gore was vice-president for eight years and was in a fantastic and enviable position to pressure the corporations to mend their ways and Congress to enact tougher regulations; as well as to educate the public on more than their own bad habits. But what exactly did he do? Can any readers enlighten me as to what extent the man used his position and his power then in a manner consistent with the image and the word of his new film? But could Gore be elected without corporate money? And how much of that money would reach his pocket if he advocated (choke, gasp!) free government-paid public transportation -- rail, bus, ferry, etc.? That would give birth to a breathtaking -- or rather, breath enhancing -- reduction in automobile pollution; easily paid for by ceasing America's imperialist wars. Microsoft and the National Security Agency I have long felt that the American media's gravest shortcoming is its errors of omission, rather than its errors of commission. It's what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. In January the Washington Post reported that Microsoft had announced that its new operating system, Vista, was being brought to us with the assistance of the National Security Agency. The NSA said it helped to protect the operating system from worms, Trojan horses and other insidious computer attackers. "Our intention is to help everyone with security," said the NSA's chief of vulnerability analysis and operations group. The spy agency, which provided its service free, said it was Microsoft's idea to acknowledge NSA's role, although the software giant declined to be specific about NSA's contributions to Vista.[12] What the Post -- and most likely the entirety of mainstream American media -- do not remind us of is what came out in 1999 and 2000, although it's all over the Internet. In September 1999, leading European investigative reporter Duncan Campbell revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special "keys" into Windows operating systems, beginning with Windows 95. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun -- Microsoft's developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called "KEY". The other was called "NSAKEY". Fernandez presented his finding at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users' knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA's "back door" in the world's most commonly used operating system makes it "orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer."[13] In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report, "it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration." The report stated that there had been a "strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumours about the existence of spy programmes on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates' development teams." Microsoft categorically denied all the charges and the French Defense Ministry said that it did not necessarily stand by the report, which was written by "outside experts".[14] In case the above disturbs your image of Bill Gates and his buddies as a bunch of long-haired, liberal, peacenik computer geeks, and the company as one of the non-military-oriented halfway decent corporations, the DAS report states that the Pentagon at the time was Microsoft's biggest client in the world. The Israeli military has also been an important client. In 2002, the company erected enormous billboards in Israel which bore the Microsoft logo under the text "From the depth of our heart -- thanks to The Israeli Defense Forces", with the Israeli national flag in the background.[15] The Myth of the Good War Readers of this report will be aware that one of the points I try very hard to convey is that the reason so many Americans support US atrocities abroad is that they're convinced that no matter how bad things may look, the government means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable. Of that most Americans are certain. And one of the foundation stones for this edifice of patriotic faith is the Second World War, an historical saga that all Americans are taught about from childhood on. We all know what its real name is: "The Good War". Which leads me to recommend a book, "The Myth of the Good War", by Jacques Pauwels, published in 2002. It's very well done, well argued and documented, an easy read. I particularly like the sections dealing with the closing months of the European campaign, during which the United States and Great Britain contemplated stabbing their Soviet ally in the back with maneuvers like a separate peace with Germany, using German troops to fight the Russians, and sabotaging legal attempts by various Communist Parties and other elements of the European left to share in (highly earned) political power after the war. This last piece of sabotage was of course very effectively realized. Stalin learned enough about these schemes to at least partially explain his post-war suspicious manner toward his "allies". In the West we called it "paranoia".[16] NOTES [1] Seattle Times, March 31, 2007 [2] Washington Post, March 30, 2007, p.11 [3] Financial Times (London), Oct 4, 2004 [4] Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2005 [5] Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, April 16, 1985 [6] ABC News, April 3, 2007 [7] Sunday Telegraph (London), February 25, 2007 [8] Washington Post, March 18, 2007 [9] Richard Ackland, "Innocence ignored at Guantanamo", Sydney Morning Herald, February 24, 2006. [10] New York Times, January 17, 2003, p.10 [11] Washington Post, March 22, 2007, p.2 [12] Washington Post, January 9, 2007. p.D1 [13] Duncan Campbell's article of September 3, 1999 can be found on the website of TechWeb: http://www.techweb.com/wire/29110640 [14] Agence France Presse, February 18 and 21, 2000 [15] To see one of the billboards: www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-news-0022.html [16] http://www.alys.be/pauwels/2publi_the_myth.htm Available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch editions William Blum is the author of: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2 Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Global Research Articles by William Blum

Right Wing Hate PR against Chomsky

The USA has a free press, free to publish slanted smears.

Corporate mind f*ck, just like the 911 inside job ... read FURTHER BELOW

Writer Viewed As Holocaust Denial Sympathizer Visits School

Noam Chomsky Speaks At Newton School

POSTED: 12:17 pm EDT April 11, 2007

UPDATED: 5:34 pm EDT April 11, 2007

NEWTON, Mass. -- Parents and students at a local high school said they are outraged that an author who is viewed as sympathizing with people who deny that the Holocaust took place was invited to speak at the school. NewsCenter 5's Amalia Barreda reported that Noam Chomsky spoke at Newton South High School on Wednesday. Stephan Ross, a survivor of 10 Nazi concentration camps, approached Newton South High School to demand an apology from the controversial writer and philosopher, but police officers kept him from entering.
"It is very painful when you know that a Jewish man would go and, maybe he doesn't say much about the Holocaust, but he does protect deniers," Ross said. "Hitler had his favorite Jew. And I think the tyrants of the world have their favorite Jew and it happens to be Chomsky," said parent Richard Salter. Chomsky's appearance at Newton South attracted a small group of protesters that were all kept across the street from the school by police. Members of the school's Social Awareness Club who invited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor said it was their intent to have a respectful discussion with him about U.S. policy in Iraq. "We didn't invite him here because he had ideas we agreed with or didn't agree with.
We invited him here because we wanted to hear what an expert on the war had to say," said David Fisher of the Social Awareness Club. "We didn't want it to become an arena event and to become a big circus and have people yelling things or being disrespectful. We really wanted it to be an intimate discussion," said Ashley Norman of the Social Awareness Club.
"I think it is horrible that Mr. Chomsky would be invited to speak unopposed. And I find it also horrible that he is a huge proponent of the freedom of the press and speech and his speech is taking place behind closed doors. This is horrible. This is hypocritical," said Student Senate President Dan Groob. In a telephone interview with Barreda, Chomsky shrugged off the criticism."Most everything I said was in accord with the overwhelming majority of what Americans think. It people are upset about it, that's their problem," he said. About 150 students and parents were allowed to enter the lecture hall where Chomsky spoke. "We need to trust that the children can take in information, process it and form their own opinions, like they do every day in every classroom," Principal Brian Salzer said. In response to charges that he sympathizes with Holocaust deniers, Chomsky said he has taken one of the strongest positions in condemning those who deny the Holocaust happened. He said people who believe the opposite have probably never seen a word he has written, but have been exposed to mass propaganda about him.

TheBostonChannel

9/11 Was a Hoax: How and When I Knew It

Do you know the name "Tom Clancy"? Are you familiar with his work? He writes novels. His first book was called "The Hunt For Red October". Have you read that? Have you ever seen the movie? Sean Connery is in it, and so is Alec Baldwin. Does any of this ring a bell?

In my opinion it was a great book, much better than the movie. It's about a Soviet sub commander, played by Connery, who either decides to defect or launches a sneak solo attack against America. The Americans can't tell what he's up to at first. All they know is that he is headed for the East Coast of the USA, in a nuclear-missile submarine, and against orders. A really good read, and like all of Clancy's work, notable for the accuracy of its descriptions of both American and Russian military equipment, procedures, and nomenclature.

It is so accurate, in fact, that shortly after "Red October" was published, Clancy was summoned to the White House. Ronald Reagan lived there at the time, and he had read the book. Everyone in the White House had read the book, it seemed, and they had called Clancy in to find out how he had learned all the details which he had put into his novel. According to the story that came from that meeting, they were amazed to find out that everything he had written was based on material that was available in the public domain! Yes, it was all out there, tools, tactics and jargon: it was all public knowledge if you knew where and how to look. Clancy, who had spent many years playing and developing table-top war-simulation games, knew where to look, and he told them so.

After that, his books kept getting better and better, and the White House kept reading them. Clancy is the perfect author as far as those guys are concerned; all his stories paint the US military as Good Guys in a fight against Evil, and they always win, eventually. I wouldn't be surprised if the White House offered Clancy the same deal the Pentagon offers Hollywood: Say nice things about us and we will give you virtually unlimited assistance! But I am not sure about this part. I'm only speculating on that one, even though it makes a lot of sense. And I want to be careful about speculation because I want to keep this article as factual as possible.

Clancy's masterpiece, in my opinion, was a tale of global warfare called "Red Storm Rising", in which he demonstrates a knowledge of the Soviet Union which rivals or exceeds anything I have ever read elsewhere. And I have been reading American and Soviet history for a long time. But that's another story -- maybe later.

In 1996, Clancy published a novel called "Executive Orders", which by the way is dedicated to Ronald Reagan, whom Clancy calls "the man who won the war". The main plot line of "Executive Orders" concerns a terrorist attack, using biological weapons, in which the USA triumphs over evil again, after many close calls, of course. But then ... in the climactic scene of that novel, a demented JAL pilot kills his co-pilot and takes control of his passenger plane, which is full of fuel, of course, and he crashes it into the Capitol building, killing all the members of both Houses of Congress, who are assembled there for a joint session, waiting to hear a speech from the President. Fortunately for the President, he and his wife escape death by a scant few feet; they are just about to emerge from an underground tunnel as the plane strikes. The President sees the flash and goes back into the tunnel, his life is spared by a matter of seconds! Wow! What a finish! What a book!

The CIA has long had a policy of reading every book that ever gets published. Fact or fiction, English or foreign languages, they read everything. They say they are looking for new ideas, new techniques, new ways to commit a crime. They say they don't want to be surprised by a case where life imitates art. That's what they say. They are possibly using the ideas for other purposes, of course, so I don't know how much to believe. But I do believe that they are reading everything they can get their hands on. And even if they are not reading absolutely everything that gets published nowadays, with the so-called information explosion happening everywhere, they are certainly reading Clancy.

As well they should. He's a master of suspense, a gifted storyteller, and his knowledge is first-rate. Hell, I read Clancy. I read "Executive Orders" in 1999, when it finally came along in deleted paperback for only $7, rather than the $35 or so that it cost for the hardcover edition.

Now: What did I see on September 11, 2001? Here's my story. I usually sleep late. We usually don't turn on the TV until late in the day. And so we knew nothing until about 10:00 AM (Eastern Time). The phone rang, my wife answered it, and after only a few seconds she yelled "Come quick! Something's happening! Turn on the TV!"

So I turned it on and started flipping through the channels. But it didn't matter where I went because every station was showing the same thing.

They were running the same short clips over and over again: a passenger jet hits the WTC, sending up a big fireball. Then a tower collapses. Over and over.

At some point we heard about the attack on the Pentagon. At some point we saw video of the second tower collapsing. I had started rolling a videotape within seconds of turning on the television, and I watched that tape a bit, later. Unfortunately, I didn't keep the tape. I thought it was too morbid, too scary, too awful to keep. I wish I still had that tape today. All I have is my memory... But I have a pretty good memory.

What did I think when I saw those clips? The first thought that came into my mind was "Message from bin Laden: 'Ignore us at your peril'" ... and the next thought that came to me was "But how? How could this happen? They know about him. Hell, if I know about him then surely they do! And how could hijacked airplanes fly freely in the most heavily defended airspace on the planet?"

All this came to me within 10 seconds after I turned on the television. Then my wife's voice came to me -- virtually disembodied, and seemingly from a great distance. She was saying: "What's happening? Is this World War Three?" I said: "I dunno." But I was thinking: "Oh yeah".

I spent parts of the day watching TV, looking at all the major networks as well as the local coverage out of NYC. The rest of the day I spent pacing and thinking and trying very hard not to lose my marbles completely. Eventually all the action seemed to have stopped, and no more planes were in the air, so no further hijackings were possible. And it seemed that everyone had suddenly become so completely stupid that nobody could imagine that terrorists could possibly attack in any other way, which of course they could. But they didn't, so we all started to relax, and after a while the networks shifted into something that approximated 'analysis'.

And I began to notice something strange: all the major networks were bringing in scads of talking heads and many of them were former or current national security dweebs. I know that current and former national security dweebs do not give interviews. So I was curious to see so many of them, seemingly everywhere, and all at the same time.

And I paid close attention to what they were saying, particularly Henry Kissinger, who said, as did all the others, "Well of course it's a tremendous tragedy, but we have to remember that this was an attack not just on America but on the entire world, and the whole world needs to work together to eliminate international terrorism."

Maybe this is not the exact wording of Kissinger's message, but it is very close. It is very close to what they all said. They may have used slightly different words, but they were all saying exactly the same thing. And as I paced around and tried to hold onto my marbles, I started to realize some of the implications of what I had just seen.

On 9/11 we saw all kinds of different reactions from all kinds of different people, and all of them were just bowled over by the event: the magnitude, the ferocity, the skill and knowledge that must have gone into the planning. And I began to wonder: How could it be that during this completely unexpected, completely unprecedented, completely new kind of event, an event so startling that many people on the ground in Manhattan said they felt as though they were watching a movie rather than reality, all these national security dweebs were not only taking it all in stride, but also, and even more tellingly, all saying essentially the same thing about it? How could this happen? I kept pacing, holding tight to my marbles, and asking myself some very tough questions.

Later in the afternoon, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a short briefing in which he said (I'm paraphrasing again) "We had no idea that something like this could be possible. We could never have imagined terrorists using passenger planes as weapons, crashing them into buildings; this is just so outrageous that nobody could have imagined anything like this, let alone prepared for it or defended against it."

To me it sounded as if Rumsfeld had just said "We don't read Tom Clancy".

National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice appeared on TV that day too, and she said essentially the same thing. The official White House transcript of Rice's 9/11 press conference gives her words as: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."

Maybe she really could not have predicted what "these people" [whoever they were] would do. But then again, maybe her sentence was deliberately structured in such a way as to make it impossible to disprove.

But to me it sounded as if Condoleeza Rice had just said "We don't read Tom Clancy".

Clancy is an expert on the Soviet military. Rice is a Soviet specialist too. And she doesn't read him? She had no idea that anyone "would try to use an airplane as a missile"? Yeah, right.

So ... I have been suspicious of the 'official story' ever since 9/11. Or perhaps I should rephrase that. Suppose Rumsfeld had come on TV and said "You have just witnessed a military coup d'etat. We are in control now. No further dissent will be tolerated. That is all." If he had said that instead of what he did say, I would not have been surprised. Let's put it that way.

I kept watching the video of the WTC towers falling. They sure looked like controlled demolitions to me. I kept thinking about what Rumsfeld and Rice had said that day. It made no sense either ... except if they were hiding something.

But then denial kicked in. I didn't want to believe what my eyes had seen, what my ears had heard, what my brain told me it all meant. And so I didn't accept the obvious truth of the matter right away. But I kept my eyes and ears open.

Over the next few days and weeks I began to see more holes in the story, more impossible coincidences, more utterly unbelievable aspects to the tale. Eventually I was able to convince my sentimental heart that what my brain had figured out on the afternoon of 9/11 was indeed true.

It was an inside job. They knew it was going to happen, and it coincided with their secret agenda completely, and they took full advantage of it. Or maybe rather than sitting back and allowing it to happen, they actively made it happen. It doesn't really matter how you phrase it; these are two ways of saying the same thing. In an event of this nature, allowing it to happen is the same as making it happen.

I did a lot of pacing and wondering during the week of the tragedy. And I paid close attention to everything. Some of the things that happened after 9/11, happened so soon after 9/11, that it's impossible to imagine they happened in response to the event. But I am getting ahead of myself here.

At some point, early in the afternoon, I believe, the talking heads on all the TV stations started to talk about Osama bin Laden, although they were spelling his first name "Usama" back then, and eventually it was reported that bin Laden was holed up in Afghanistan, and by suppertime we had most of the details that we would ever get: names and grainy photos of the hijackers, news of a rented car found abandoned at Logan with a flight manual in the back seat -- written in Arabic! And news that among the zillions of tons of toxic grey dust that covered Manhattan, someone had managed to recover an alleged hijacker's passport -- and it was intact, although it was singed around the edges, of course. By the end of the day the outline of the story was out -- and by the end of the next day the 'whole story' was out: 19 hijackers had taken control of four planes and done all this damage. And the leader of this whole evil bunch was a guy by the name of Osama bin Laden, who just happened to be hanging out in Afghanistan.

It seemed strange that they didn't have any idea what was happening or who was doing it at 9:00 in the morning but by 9:00 at night the whole complicated plot had been solved. Very strange indeed. It seemed strange that the national security wonks came on TV at the same time and said the same thing. It seemed strange that Rice and Rumsfeld both said "this could not have been expected". All these things made no sense... except if it was a 'black op'.

In black ops -- clandestine operations -- the 'official story' is called a 'legend'. In a classic black op, the legend is carefully constructed and documented long before the crime is committed, and then the details are slowly leaked to the stunned public. The same thing happened when JFK was killed. At 2:00 in the afternoon, JFK was dead but we didn't know anything else. By midnight the whole story was out: the crime had been committed by a communist sympathizer acting alone, who had already been arrested and charged. Everyone was safe, the nation was told. And the 'case' was 'closed'.

But in the week or so after 9/11, I spent a lot of time thinking about the term 'legend' and reflecting on how, if this were a black op, the legend had been disseminated. It all seemed too pat. It all seemed too conclusive. It all smelled so fishy. And I thought: Maybe the reason why it smells so fishy is because it's fish! In other words, you're watching a legend develop.

Late on the night of 9/11, there were huge vigils in Manhattan. People had brought pictures of their lost loved ones, whom they called 'missing'. There were flowers and candles all over the place, people sitting quietly holding hands or just staring into the tiny flames of the candles. It was a heartbreaking scene, repeated over and over all over lower Manhattan. At many points it was too painful to watch.

But at one point when I was watching, the TV camera found and zoomed in on something that looked very out of place. There amid the flowers and the candles, among all the weeping silent people, there was a hand-painted sign, which, if I remember correctly, said "President Bush: Bomb Afghanistan Tonight". Ever since that night, I have wondered who painted that sign, who planted it in the midst of those grieving people, and who pointed it out to the TV cameraman.

I didn't sleep that night. I didn't sleep much for the next week or two. Maybe it was a month; I can't really remember. But it doesn't make any difference.

I kept listening to the radio and watching TV, looking for clues to what had happened on that horrible Tuesday morning. Items drifted in, large and small. I videotaped some more TV coverage, and I got a copy of the "fireman video", the French crew's accidental shot of the first plane crashing into the first tower. I got piles and piles of footage of the towers falling, and I noticed that it was all the same footage. Every network seemed to have the same cut-and-pasted sequence showing 'highlights' of the day's events. Crash, burn, crumble. So the scene of the second plane crashing into the second tower was everywhere too, and the more I looked at the footage of the two planes, the more suspicious I got.

The two collisions, the two planes themselves, looked very different. Much more so than could be explained by the difference in cameras and the difference in camera angles, and so on. It looked like there were two very different kinds of planes! Two very different kinds of impacts, too. And I remembered hearing early eyewitness reports saying that the impact with the first tower involved a 'small, military-type aircraft'. This report got buried in the avalanche of legend-building, but I always wondered whether it might have been true.

Eventually, I began to hear other news of the day. Some of it came from European radio broadcasts. One such item concerned an 'emergency preparedness drill' that had been scheduled for the morning of 9/11. The drill involved a disabled airplane crashing into a CIA building in Virginia. And the story came out through the CIA's own website. I heard about it on the radio. And that was the last straw. I could no longer trust my sentimental heart. My brain had been right all along. We'd been duped.

The people we trust to protect us couldn't have predicted an event such as a plane flying into an office building, and in fact they were so completely unable to predict such an event that they were preparing to run a drill -- that very day -- based on that very scenario. Oh yeah. Yeah, right! Either that, or our government had been infiltrated, at the highest level, by murderous traitors. I knew that one of these two was impossible. But as far as I knew, everyone else had bought into 'the legend'.

I've known for a long time that there are a lot of kooks publishing kooky stuff on the internet. I had seen for myself many examples of web pages containing blatant falsehoods. And I have never trusted anything I have found on the net, at least not without extensive checking.

But please note: I have not mentioned anything here that came from the internet. Everything -- every single thing -- that made me suspicious of the 9/11 legend came from the mainstream North American and European media. None of these details were presented as refuting the legend, of course. But for those who were paying attention, the refutation was there, right along with the legend.

I've read a lot of analysis since that day. Some of it seems like disinformation to me; some of it seems like it might be accurate. I don't think we will ever know which parts are real and which parts are not. I don't think we will ever know the complete story of what happened on 9/11. But then again I don't think it matters very much. We have seen enough now to know that the legend was false. And that's enough for me.

I can't explain it any better than this quote from Fletcher Prouty:
A conspiracy is a plan, usually an evil or unlawful plan. It involves two or more people. The denial of the fact of a conspiracy, i.e. the cover story, is like a bubble. Once any part of it is proved to be false, it bursts and the cover story is exposed. Like a balloon, it is not necessary to burst a cover story with ten or fifteen pins. It collapses with only one bit of circumstantial evidence that is undeniable.

In retrospect I can see so many parallels between the JFK assassination and the 9/11 attacks that I find myself wondering whether these two national tragedies are all part of the same event: a gradual coup d'etat that has turned America from a more-or-less peaceful liberal democracy into a raging war-mongering tyranny. I don't have any answers, but I sure do have a lot of questions.