Some of us will come out of the shock sooner than others. Some of us will acknowledge the fear and the hurt sooner than others. Sooner or later we all will feel the pain. But the unfolding of events following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will wait for none of us. I do not rely on the fifteen or so times that I have seen the term "World War III" used by major publications like the New York Times. I rely on my knowledge of how the U.S. military, intelligence and economic infrastructure will respond to a given set of circumstances. In this case, the relevant context for these tragedies had developed long before last Tuesday's events.

Only a few, as yet, grasp the dynamics already in motion that will almost certainly produce a long and protracted war, as well as huge economic and perhaps physical dislocations in the United States and around the world. Additional attacks on Americans are almost a certainty, even -- as I am about to describe -- a necessity. The rhetoric from President Bush and his Administration contains messages for the American people, which they do not yet grasp, and for terrorist organizations, which they most certainly do. "This is a war and it will not be a short war." "This will not be over quickly." "We have a war plan that will work, over whatever period of time it requires." "There will be many casualties. The military is prepared for that." "This is not just an effort to get bin Laden. This is a war to wipe out terrorism all over the world." "We are not thinking just in terms of a few air strikes. Ground troops will be involved. And some of them will die." "We will go after terrorism wherever terrorism threatens the United States." "Americans need to be prepared for more sacrifices and more casualties." "Just removing bin Laden won't suffice. We are going after terrorism in all of the countries where it resides."

The last statement is the first great lie of this war. As the U.S. government has announced its partnership with the drug-financed government of Pakistan, which has supported terrorist groups from the Middle East to the Balkans, to China, to Southeast Asia, the deception begins. Indeed, after Afghanistan, Pakistan should have been the first great enemy in this war. It's long support of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan ended only as the Taliban destroyed most of that nation's opium crop in February of this year. As in every conflict since World War II, the drug trade will now see a new day of freedom.

And I guarantee that terrorist groups are well aware of one fact that we, as Americans, have not yet grasped. George W. Bush carries on his shoulder the political memory of a father who waged a war against Sadam Hussein and then left him in power. He can afford no such image in the current context and the military he commands must become engaged in a do or die battle. They too, will accept no less.

That said, the terrorist groups in or from Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Sudan, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Somalia, Turkey, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Germany, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Albania, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Mexico know that they are now in a "use it or lose it" position. For, not knowing where and when the industrialized nations may strike, they now realize that almost any action against any political group will go unchallenged in the world press. Even separatist groups not posing an immediate threat can be conveniently eliminated in the months and perhaps years to come. As evidenced by the almost immediate admission of China into the World Trade Organization, after 15 years of unsuccessful attempts, the warp drive for globalization - unfettered by any need to respond to public opinion - has now been engaged. The most cynical part of me hopes that the headline for this war will not be, "The G-8 Wipes Out Poverty." In this model I must say that the long discussed, but rarely acknowledged, alleged plans for massive global population reduction are no longer a "back burner" issue.

Therefore, in this context, the American people must expect additional attacks that may even include biological warfare or nuclear devices on American soil. And these attacks, already being hinted at by the Administration, will serve an additional purpose. Two days after the attacks every street and highway was a sea of American flags. Now, a week after the attacks - at least in Los Angeles - they are hard to find. Whether we admit it or not, what the vast majority of the American people really want is for this to go away. Only sustained attacks on the American people will provide George W. Bush with the political mandate to wage the war he has committed to fight - to the bitter end. As the economic impact sinks in, and as Americans feel the pain in their wallets, the willingness of American citizens to experience the carnage that has been raging around the world for decades - in the name of prosperity and for the benefit of the G-8's largest corporations - is, in my opinion, a big question mark. Do not expect a quick recovery in the stock market based upon emotion. As we describe in this issue, the fundamental weaknesses in the U.S. economy were not blown up with these attacks. And the markets, if they can still be called that, are driven by one 800 pound guerilla above all others - earnings. With the exception of defense contractors, there is absolutely nothing hopeful to report and I, for one, cannot and refuse to be an advocate for investing in the destruction of the planet.

The United States has many enemies. It is the economic enemies that warrant the most scrutiny now because the perception that America is the safest place in the world in which to invest foreign capital has been dealt a huge blow. Further blows will come with further attacks and this exposes the fine line that the Administration must walk. Without more attacks at home, the bold gambit of George Bush, et al will fail for lack of political support. With them, the world may eventually conclude that the United States is economically expendable as nations look to their own interests. Too much economic blood in the water will start a feeding frenzy.

In the major media, in the alternative media, in Congress and around the world the context now provides the opportunity for great lights with courageous souls to emerge and to lead. We are walking a fine line on a precipice that may lead to Armageddon or, please God, something better. The Bush Administration is not equipped with a repertoire of responses sufficient to navigate the long term perils. We must dig and find something better within ourselves.

We are living in a whole New World. We just don't know what it looks like yet. ___

The U.S. Had Advance Warning And Could Have Acted --This Was Not An Intelligence "Failure"

To grasp the meaning of the events of 9-11-01, it is critical to go past the widely acknowledged reports that the U.S. had general warnings of a terrorist attack and to look for evidence that the U.S. government had specific warnings of attacks on airports and aircraft. Further, the task is to look for any warnings that signaled the size and scope of the attack and went beyond the vagaries that we have become used to. These will provide the clues needed to understand that the devastating attacks of Sept. 11 served a distinct purpose for the Bush Administration and those in control of the U.S. economy. Given this year's revelations on The History Channel -- including classified documents and the on-camera testimony of intelligence officers -- that the U.S. knew the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and allowed it to happen in order to bring the country into World War II, we cannot be so blind as to overlook evidence that it has happened again.

Leaving aside the intelligence reports that are still secret and will likely remain so, and remembering the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had undercover informants working hand in glove with those who perpetrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a preliminary review of solid information showing that this attack could have been prevented is only the beginning of what must remain an essential line of inquiry.

It is premature to jump to conclusions about the rapidity with which the FBI has gathered essential information. I used the word information, instead of intelligence or evidence. Evidence is gathered for the court room. Intelligence is the results of a process done at CIA to evaluate information from various sources. Understanding the differences between work done by the FBI and the CIA is a key to understanding the US counterterrorist work. Hence, use end-result thinking to interpret any counterterrorist discussion and effort.

Any notice of a potential or alleged terrorist act has a well established procedure for its handling. According to a reliable source, the United States government, especially the intelligence community in the early 1980's, had established a clearly defined procedure for handling notices of threat. The State Department was the lead coordinator and member intelligence community agencies participated in evaluations. The key is that everyone understood that the information might be untrue. That is, the information was still circulated and disseminated to the community so that protective measures might be considered if justified. That last word considered was deferred to the agency involved.

However, one thing is certain, based upon what is now known. By itself, neither the CIA nor the FBI can claim that a lack of resources or human intelligence prevented them from predicting this attack. Indeed, there is credible but preliminary and circumstantial information, that certain segments of Wall Street and the U.S. financial community did know of the pending attack. There is also evidence that the U.S. government already had the technical expertise to know what was coming and was likely using it at the time the attacks occurred.

The Cayman Islands - MS-NBC reported on September 14 that a caller to a radio talk show made several warnings of an imminent attack by Osama bin Laden against American Airlines.

Germany - On September 14, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported that "U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals at least three months ago that Middle eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture."

According to a report filed by the Post-Newsweek information service, "The FAZ, quoting unnamed German Intelligence sources, said that the Echelon spy network was being used to collect information about the terrorist threats, and that U.K. intelligence services apparently also had advance warning. The FAZ, one of Germany's most respected dailies, said that even as far back as six months ago, western and near-east press services were receiving information that such attacks were being planned.

"Within the American intelligence community, the warnings were taken seriously and surveillance intensified"

NOTE: Echelon is a highly secret technical intelligence gathering system used to monitor worldwide communications and coordinated in the U.S. by the National Security Agency. Participating countries, who eavesdrop on the citizens of the other member countries -- to avoid civil restrictions preventing governments from spying on their own citizens -- then pool and share their information. Participating countries include the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain and Germany. The eavesdropping covers both telephone and email communications.

According to a Feb 13, 2001 UPI story detailing Echelon's use against bin Laden and other terrorist organizations, "The targets of Echelon center on the penetration of the major components of most of the world's telephone and telecommunications systems. This could cover conversations NSA targets. Also included are all the telexes carried over the world's telecommunications networks, along with financial dealings: money transfers, airline destinations, stock information, data on demonstrations or international conferences and much more."

Germany - The German news agency "online.ie" reported on September 14, "German police have confirmed an Iranian man phoned U.S. police from his deportation cell to warn of the planned attack on the World Trade Center. The Lower Saxony Justice Ministry has confirmed the man warned of impending series of terrorist attacks, but had not been believed. Spokesman Frank Woesthoff said the man phoned America 'several times', but refused to give further details. He said the U.S. Secret Service had not told the ministry about the calls received from the Langehagen prison until after the attacks. 'I cannot say anything about the man and the ministry does not know the content of the conversations,' he added. The Hanover daily Neue Presse reported the 29 year-old was dismissed as mentally unstable when he gave the warning of the terrorist attack to occur this week. The ministry would not reveal when the calls had been made."

France - On September 13, Reuters reported, "The FBI arrested an Islamic militant in Boston last month and received French intelligence reports linking him to Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden but apparently did not act on them, a French radio station said on Thursday.

"Europe 1 radio reported that U.S. police arrested a man with dual French and Algerian nationality who had several passports, technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals.

"The man had been taking flying lessons, it added.

"Asked for information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, French security services provided a dossier clearly identifying him as an Islamic militant working with bin Laden."

Russia - A former CIA officer told FTW that, according to a Russian newspaper article, Russian intelligence had notified the U.S. government of the attacks. They even stated that they were aware that 25 pilots had been specifically trained for the suicide missions.

Russia - On September 15, Russian president Valdimir Putin told interviewers on MS-NBC that the Russian government had been warning the U.S. of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings in the strongest possible terms for weeks.

The United States - A criminal case proceeding in New York courts at the time of the attacks contradicts the position of conservative news site WorldNetDaily.com which has taken the position that the Clinton Administration had provided bin Laden's terrorists with encryption technology so advanced that the National Security Agency was unable to penetrate bin Laden's most secure communications.

A February 13, 2001 story by UPI terrorism correspondent Richard Sale described Echelon's effectiveness against the bin Laden organization in an active case against him in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. That case, wrote Sale, "is based mainly on National Security Agency intercepts of phone calls between bin Laden and his operatives around the world - Afghanistan to London, from Kenya to the United States."

The UPI story stated that the technology had been used since at least 1995 and Ben Venzke, director of intelligence and special projects for iDefense, a Virginia information warfare firm, was quoted in a key paragraph of that story.

"Since Bin Laden started to encrypt certain calls in 1995, why would they now be part of a court record? 'Codes were broken,' US officials said, and Venzke added that you don't use your highest levels of secure communications all the time. It's too burdensome and it exposes it to other types of exploitation.'"

The UPI story made it clear that much of the evidence in the case had been obtained in Echelon intercepts subsequent to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and were presumably still effective at the time of the New York attacks.

The United States - Several press reports confirm the writing of veteran journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair in their Sept. 14 issue of Counterpunch. "Reports kept coming in to us of advanced warnings that an attack of some sort was eminent [sic]. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was booked to fly from the Bay area to New York City on the morning of September 11. But Brown says that late Monday evening, a full 8 hours prior to the attack, he received a call from a person brown described as his airport security man telling him that he should be extra cautious about air travel on September 11."

The Financial Markets - Cockburn and St. Clair report, "In addition to what we have previously reported about heightened security at the World trade center itself in the weeks leading to the attack and at the Picatinny Arsenal in Rockaway, New Jersey, Counterpunch has also learned that internal memo was sent around Goldman Sachs in Tokyo on September 10 advising all employees of a possible terrorist attack. It recommended all employees to avoid any American government buildings."

Morgan Stanley, the largest tenant of the WTC complex lost none of its 3500 employees occupying some 50 floors according to The Washington Post. Neither did Oppenheimer Funds.

FTW has also verified that at least one Goldman Sachs Vice President had taken the day off to go surfing. This may or may not be a lucky coincidence.

A Word About Promis Software

In the Sept, 2000 issue of FTW (Vol III, No 7) we described recent developments in the decades-long saga of the legendary Promis software and this writer's interaction with members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's national security section over its current use by various intelligence agencies. Promis (Prosecutor's Management Information System) was specifically reengineered and mated with artificial intelligence during the 1980s for the purpose of tracking terrorists. One of its main strengths was its ability to integrate diverse pieces of data and predict the movement of terrorists based upon financial (e.g. credit card transactions), entries through various border checkpoints, car rentals and airline ticket purchases. This special software, refined and enhanced many times since then, is capable of integrating and coordinating precisely the kind of information described above and then setting off warning bells. We have confirmed many times over that Promis' unique abilities have also been specifically targeted at financial markets to track sudden shifts in currency and stock speculation as well as the laundering of money.

That being said, we find it extremely disturbing that the UPI and the Swedish daily newspaper Aftonbladet both published September 14 reports indicating that Osama Bin Laden had possibly engaged in large scale stock speculation in the U.S. and Europe just before the attacks. Both stories suggested that Bin Laden had bought large amounts of "shorts.' Taking a short position means that an investor, betting that a stock's price will go down, places a large number of shares up for sale at a given price usually just at or below the current market price. If a stock is in short supply, buyers will purchase the stock rapidly and the "short seller" then has a given period of time to produce the actual shares which he or she is not required to own at the time of the sale.

The future sale of the stock at a given price is a fixed contract that cannot be altered. The seller pockets the money before he has to go out and buy the shares. Therefore, if the seller agrees to sell 10,000 shares of XYZ company at $100 each and enters into a contract at that price, and if the stock price falls to $60 the following day, he can make a quick profit of $400,000 when he buys the stock to complete the contract.

It is inconceivable that such movements were not detected before the WTC attacks.

Given all of the above, which is only the beginning of what will be revealed as time passes, only a cretin would believe that the United States government could not and did not know that these attacks were coming, and then chose to remain silent. Given these tiny bits of knowledge that are now public how much more was available to the intelligence community? How could they have apparently ignored it?

Dissenters will say, "Yes but the CIA has been hamstrung and prevented from taking pre-emptive action by those liberal do-gooders in Congress." Not so. A September 14 Reuters story reported accurately, "The CIA has been authorized since 1998 to use covert means to disrupt and pre-empt terror operations allegedly planned abroad by Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden, The Washington Post reported Friday.

"The newspaper said the directive, signed by President Clinton and reaffirmed by his successor, George W. Bush, adhered to a legal ban on the assassination of foreign leaders but sanctioned the use of lethal force in self-defense.

"Quoting government sources, the paper said the CIA had used such force several times to stop armed groups before they initiated attacks."

A final question: Why, in light of all the information we now know the government had about imminent attacks, did the Bush Administration gift the Taliban with $43 million in May of this year? The move by the White House, sorely criticized by columnist Robert Scheer in the May 22, 2001 Los Angeles Times, was an alleged reward by the U.S. for the Taliban's destruction of Afghan opium crops in February. Now, the U.S. government is rushing to mate with a Pakistani regime that sustains itself by, and derives liquid currency from, the drug trade. The result of that is that opium production will surely blossom again in Afghanistan - under U.S./CIA control. The obvious suggestion here is that the U.S., directly or indirectly, helped to fund the WTC attacks.

It took 60 years for The History Channel, this year, to disclose to us through U.S. government documents and the statements of intelligence personnel who participated in it, that the highest levels of both government and finance knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. And they kept silent about it. Historically, the key fact that made the attack suspicious was that all five aircraft carriers of the Pacific Fleet were conveniently and safely out to sea when the attacks occurred. In 2001, it appears that the aircraft carriers of American finance enjoyed the same advantage, one that was not afforded to those who died in New York, or even to members of the U.S. Congress. That should tell us where the real power lies. ___

Osama bin Laden's Bush family Business Connections

Alliance With Pakistan Will Stimulate Drug Trade, Bring Revenues Under U.S. Control - Colombian Opium Production Will Soar

The Taliban's Biggest Economic Attack on the U.S. Came in February With The Destruction of Its Opium Crop

FTW - Money connections between Bush Republicans and Osama bin Laden go way back and the political and economic connections have remained unbroken for 20 years. And what appears to be a "new" alliance with Pakistan is merely a new manifestation of a decades-long partnership in the heroin trade.

Conveniently ignored in all of the press coverage since the tragic events of Sept. 11 is the fact that on May 17 Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a gift of $43 million to the Taliban as a purported reward for its eradication of Afghanistan's opium crop this February. That, in effect, made the U.S. the Taliban's largest financial benefactor according to syndicated columnist Robert Scheer writing in The Los Angeles times on May 22. But -- as we described in FTW's March 2001 issue -- the Taliban's destruction of that crop was apparently the single most important act of economic warfare against U.S. economic interests that the Taliban had ever committed. So why the gift?

Critics of the Gulf War well recall how, just prior to Sadam's invasion of Kuwait, President Bush (Sr.) dispatched Ambassador April Glaspie to visit Sadam with a letter and a "wink and a nod" telling the Iraqi leader that it was OK to invade his smaller neighbor. The May gift from Uncle Sam could well have been sending the same kind of message, along with necessary funds to complete the attacks. Drugs and terrorism go hand in hand.

Until February, Afghanistan had been the world's largest producer of opium/heroin, claiming close to 70% of the world's total production. That opium, consumed largely in Western Europe and smuggled through the Balkans, was a direct source of cash deposits in Western financial institutions and markets.

I specifically commented on this at an economic crisis conference in Moscow, Russia on March 7. In my formal statement to the Russian conference I said,

"Just before coming to this conference I read in the Associated Press, Agence France Press and other reliable sources that the Taliban has recently eradicated most of its 3000 ton opium crop in Afghanistan. If true, I view this as a form of economic warfare against Russia [and the U.S.] because it would drive opium production more into Southeast Asia and Colombia. However, I now suspect that this will result in a shift of opium production to the Caucasus under the Kurds which will see an increase in smuggling through Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. I should note that both Vice President Richard Cheney and the designated Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage are members of the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. Such a move would have the effect of drastically shortening smuggling routes and costs into Western Europe and of bypassing unstable areas of the Balkans.

I have received additional reports that Uzbekistan is now awash in the opium poppy and, as in the US with the CIA, that Russian military and intelligence agencies facilitate the trade as a means of protecting access to hard currency. The point here is not that the US it totally evil or the only country doing these things. But the US is far and away the most advanced nation when it comes to the use of such methods to achieve superiority. As [Russian economist Michael] Khazin has noted, the US and Britain and Germany started the conflict in Kosovo in 1999 to stave off a collapse of western markets following the Asian collapse of 1997-8. Now Colombia is a last-ditch effort to protect the US markets and European opposition is jeopardizing that plan."

The Taliban's actions this year severed the ruling military junta in Pakistan from its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden and the Taliban completely expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani government. It also cut off billions of dollars in revenues that had been previously laundered through western banks and Russian financial institutions connected to them.

Now as US military action will replace the Taliban government and fresh crops will be planted in Afghanistan, the slack in cash flow will assuredly be replaced by dramatically increased opium production in Colombia; the revenues from that effort being needed to maintain the revenue streams into Wall Street. Prior to the WTC attacks, credible sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and the U.S. Senate placed the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S. banks at around $250-$300 billion a year.

In that context, the real history of Osama bin Laden, as America's useful terrorist-du-jour reveals a long and continuous history, interwoven with the drug trade and the Bush family, of supporting conflicts that have benefited U.S. military and economic interests.

bin Laden

There are direct historical links between Osama bin Laden's business interests and those of the Bush family. On September 15 I received the following message from FTW subscriber, Professor John Metzger of Michigan State University:

"We should revisit the history of BCCI, a bank used by the legendary Palestinian terrorist known as Abu Nidal. BCCI was closely tied to American and Pakistan intelligence. Its clients included the Afghan rebels, and the father of Osama bin Laden. The father of bin Laden named Houston investment broker James R. Bath as his business representative in Texas, right after George W. Bush's father became CIA director in 1976. By 1977, Bath invested $50,000 into junior's first business, Arbusto Energy, while Osama bin Laden would soon become a CIA asset. George W. Bush's FBI director Robert Mueller was part of the Justice Department's questionable investigation of BCCI. (On BCCI, the bin Ladens, and the Bushes, see the books, The Outlaw Bank, A Full Service Bank, and Fortunate Son)." Further details of the business and financial relationships between the Bush and bin Laden family are found in Peter Brewton's 1992 book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. BCCI, incidentally, was founded by a Pakistani.

Economics Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa has just completed a detailed history of bin Laden's career detailing his secret funding and logistical support to terrorist organizations beginning from his early CIA-supported roots in the 1980s as a "freedom fighter" through to the present day. Chossudovsky's compelling and well documented article, Who Is Osama Bin Laden? dated Sept 12, 2001 can be found on the Internet at: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html.

Bin Laden's role has not just been as a practitioner of terrorist acts but as a trainer and supplier of terrorist organizations around the world. Included in bin Laden's coterie are terrorist groups linked to the Balkans, Albania, the KLA (a U.S. ally), and rebel groups leading the insurrection against Russia in Chechnya.

As FTW described in 1998, and as confirmed by Chossudovsky, the key to understanding U.S. support of bin Laden is to grasp that he has always been controlled by a cutout, the Pakistani government and its intelligence service the ISI. In this manner there has been virtually no direct contact between bin Laden and the CIA. This has served the dual purpose of maintaining his apparent "purity" with his followers and providing plausible deniability for the CIA. The whole underlying pretext for this relationship evaporated with the Taliban's destruction of the opium crop in February.

Chossudovsky writes:

"The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. In this regard [Professor] Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, 'the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 per sent of the U.S. demand

"With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 -- coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics -- reached a record high of 4600 metric tons. Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes.

"The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic "jihad" out of Pakistan"

" The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In the last few months there is evidence that Mujhideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of the KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia

" With regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan's ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war.

"Russia's main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin."

The oil and drug connections were the subject of FTW's story, The Bush-Cheney drug Empire in October, 2000. That story is online at http://www.copvcia.com/stories/previous/bush-cheney-drugs.html. Both Bush and Cheney are oil men.

George Bush, Sr. was Vice President and, by virtue of executive Order 12333, in charge of all U.S. intelligence and narcotics operations from 1981 through 1989. As President from 1989 through 1993, he continued and expanded his control in these areas. Thus, it was Bush (the elder) who directly nourished and nurtured bin Laden's evolution.

Dramatic Confirmation From Indian Government

The web site of the Indian Embassy in Washington contains dramatic confirmation for these positions. On September 4, 2000, B. Raman, Director of India's Institute for Topical Studies wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress entitled Pakistan's Noriega's. That eight-page article exposed the depth of Pakistani government involvement in the drug trade. It may be viewed at www.indianembassy.org/int_media/saag_september_04_2000.html.

The letter said, in part:

"For more than a decade, the people of India have been living in a state of half-war and half-peace due to the depredations of a large number of terrorists, outrageously called jehadists, who have been trained, armed and funded and infiltrated into the State of Jammu & Kashmir and other parts of India by Pakistan in order to make the people of India and its security forces bleed in the name of religion.

"More people belonging to different religions -- Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and others -- have been killed in India by these mercenary-terrorists sponsored by the State of Pakistan than by any other terrorist groups anywhere else in the world"

"Many other States have suffered and have been suffering due to the depredations of terrorists, made in and exported from Pakistan and the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan -- [these include] Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Central Asian Republics, the Chechnya and Dagestan areas of Russia, the Xinjiang province of China, Bangladesh, the Arakan area of Burma and the southern Philippines..."

"After his [1993] removal, [as official head of Pakistani intelligence, trusted advisor to Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf] Lt. Gen. Nasir traveled to Somalia, Chechnya, Dagestan, the Central Asian Republics, China, and the Southern Philippines as a preacher and helped Islamic organizations, including the group which killed U.S. troops in Somalia."

"It was he, who, during his tenure as the DG [Director General] of the ISI has entered into an agreement with the LTTE of Sri Lanka [which secured] LTTE's assistance in smuggling Afghanistan produced heroin in its ships to West Europe, the USA and Canada"

"Another reason for the ISI's helping the LTTE, despite its anti-Muslim policies, was to use it for smuggling heroin to West Europe, the U.S. and Canada. During Zia-ul-Haq's regime in the 1980s, heroin had become a major source of extra revenue not only for the State of Pakistan, especially the ISI and Pakistan's nuclear and missile establishment, but also to many senior officers of the Pakistan Army, including [Musharraf et al]"

"The way Mr. Sharif before October 1999 and Gen. Musharraf since then have been using the heroin money to prevent the Pakistani economy from collapsing has not received due attention in the U.S. ..."

"If one goes purely by economic indicators, Pakistan's must be in as bad a shape as that of Russia, or even worse, since Russia has been in receipt of Western and IMF assistance"

"Where does the money come from? From the smuggling of heroin to West Europe, the U.S. and Canada. The U.S. Government might have stopped economic assistance from the taxpayers' money. But why should the Noriegas of Pakistan be worried when they get billions of dollars from the heroin sale in the U.S.? "

Vice President Dick Cheney's recent comment that the CIA needs to get in bed with "unsavory characters" is a joke. That's a bed that the CIA has never left. And it's a marriage vow that President Bush has just reaffirmed for all the world to see. ___

An Economic Conspiracy?

FTW - [Expanded from an initial report dated 9-13-01] - On Sept. 11, 2001 the two most visible symbols of American economic and military power -- the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon -- were simultaneously hit in a well-planned and well financed attack that will have enormous and permanent impact on the world economy and American culture. Just a day after the attacks, which brought the planet to a halt, both CNN and Reuters - after interviewing many financial experts - reported the likelihood of a worldwide recession. This prediction has apparently been confirmed with the reopening of U.S. markets as the Dow Jones Industrial average lost 684 points or 7% of its value on Monday September, 17th. Americans have not yet grasped the implications for their jobs, pensions plans, home equity or future income.

As major central banks have acted swiftly, with as much as $70 billion in instant cash infusions to stem immediate spikes in oil and gold prices, their subsequent actions in multilateral agreements between the Federal Reserve, British banks and the European Central Bank, indicate that this policy will continue. But it cannot last forever and its long-term effectiveness is in question.

Just two days before the attacks we had issued an urgent electronic bulletin warning that, as a result of many years of manipulation of gold prices by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury and major investment banks, and a $30 trillion derivatives bubble on the verge of bursting, the U.S. economy was in peril of an immediate and cataclysmic crash. That crash now has a convenient -- if untrue -- explanation.

It is then, perhaps, coincidental that on 9-11, the day of the attack, there was a meeting in Basel Switzerland at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The BIS is known as the bank for world's central bankers - is also the world "policeman" of the gold trade. All G-10 central banks were represented on the day of the attack. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was there, safely out of harm's way. Another telling coincidence is that a critical hearing in a suit brought by the Gold Anti Trust Action Committee (GATA) -- which alleges BIS collusion in the rigging of gold prices was scheduled to be heard in U.S. District court in Boston on October 9th.

In another coincidence, the headquarters of Comex, the precious metals trading exchange, was destroyed in the attacks, along with whatever records were kept there. The central banks of many nations also had WTC offices and some also had vaults in the basement. Estimates of the amount of gold stored in the WTC range from a low of $100 million to a high of $16 billion. The status of the gold is unknown at this time. What is known is that there are futures options on gold amounting to roughly five times the actual amount of physical gold in existence.

The destruction of records in the attacks was not limited to banking records. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) maintained investigative offices at the WTC. At the time of the attack the SEC was investigating, among others, Credit Suisse -- a major player in the gold trade -- for massive irregularities connected to the Wall Street Bubble. The Wall Street Journal on September 13 reported the destruction of the regional enforcement office of the SEC, located in 7 World Trade Center:

"The collapse of [building] No. 7 on Tuesday took with it documents and computer records focused on hundreds of investigations, as well as records related to broker-dealers. The New York office is well-known for handling numerous insider-trading cases, as well as small-company stock manipulation cases involving organized-crime families."

"According to an unnamed Journal source, there are off-site copies of some of these records, but 'other material is lost forever, including many raw notes taken by SEC lawyers during their investigations and audiotaped evidence that was not shared with the U.S. Attorney's office or other government investigators.' The SEC believes all staff was evacuated, but the regional director said, 'It's going to be a monumental task getting back in operation.'"

bin Laden, et al

In a number of media appearances beginning on the evening of September 11, former CIA Director James Woolsey has now begun pointing the finger at "state sponsorship," - the prime suspect being Iraq. FTW strongly suspects eventual finger pointing and military action at the one Arab country known to sponsor terrorism that has not been mentioned in any press reports - Libya. Militarily, it is an easily conquered enemy with shores on the Mediterranean and its oil reserves would quickly lower pressures on the U.S. markets.

Continuing revelations as to the complexity of the attacks continues to suggest logistical, intelligence and financial resources beyond bin Laden's known abilities. In addition, bin Laden's lineage, as a protégé of the CIA from the Afghan conflict of the 1980s, threatens to raise serious questions which the American government might not want answered.

As some American news outlets, including MS-NBC and the Houston Chronicle demonstrate great courage by looking into bin Laden's past links to CIA and the Bushes, the most compelling leads are the flight training schools attended by many of the pilots involved in the attacks. FTW has begun a major investigation into links between these schools and U.S. interests and even Newsweek has issued a report on Sept. 14 showing that some of the pilots may have received training at U.S. military installations.

Dispelling One Rumor

As speculation ran rampant in the first hours after the attacks, reports that explosives had been placed in the World Trade Center spread rapidly. We quickly concluded, based upon expert opinions and a BBC report, that this was not a plausible theory. Jet fuel, burning at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, some 400 degree hotter than the temperature required to melt steel, cascaded quickly down elevator shafts and engulfed critical support pillars placed in the center of the building. A BBC diagram of the building showed that the main elevator banks and air shafts were centrally located. This would explain why the building seemed to collapse inward as the interior columns melted.

This opinion was shared by retired Air Force General Ben Partin who has spent his career studying the destruction of various structures by military attack. Additionally, the placement of explosives in the building could only have been carried out before the air attacks and that would have run counter to known procedures for covert operations. WTC employees had experienced a bomb in 1993 and were conditioned to look for explosives. So many explosives would have been required that the likelihood of discovery before the plane crashes would have increased. And evacuation of the buildings before the attack would have greatly diminished their symbolic victory.

Quo Vadis?

World confidence in the security of US markets and the economy has been shattered. FTW correspondents in Moscow report a divergence between public and official government reaction. Three people reported from Moscow on Wednesday, an immediate move by Russian citizens to sell US dollars - the most common form of savings in the economically battered country - resulting in a dramatic plunge in public exchange rates from 29:1 to as low as 15:1 overnight. However a Russian government source told FTW on Thursday that rates on MICEX (The Moscow International Currency Exchange) have remained stable. In early trading the Russian stock exchange lost 5% of its value.

Of a certainty, consumer confidence -- recently touted as the savior of the US economy -- has been demolished around the globe. Asian economies, already venturing deeper into recession, had been looking for increased US orders, based upon consumer confidence, to boost exports as a life preserver. That life preserver has evaporated. A CNN story today quoted Asian financial expert Andy Xie of Morgan Stanley as saying that consumer confidence had "tipped over."

"We are going down to the bottom," Xie said. "no one knows where that is."

Reuters quoted a Chief Economist at Wells Fargo as saying, "A full-blown global recession is highly likely."

It is interesting to note that the plan for globalization of the world's economy has been greatly aided by recent events. On September 17, 2001 the World Trade Organization (WTO) announced that China would be immediately admitted as a member country. If announced at any other time this move would have drawn widespread criticism and perhaps large scale demonstration's.

A fine line is called for in the walk between panic and precaution, especially in a New World that has not been defined and needs to be explored even as it reveals itself to us. The very real possibility of a global conflict that will claim millions of lives, perhaps more, is before us. At the moment my best recommendation is buying physical gold - even in the form of jewelry - and keeping extremely vigilant. And we can pray that a free press will find its strength and purpose, and that people all over the globe will find the will to keep the madmen from driving the planet off a cliff. ___

FTW's Warning - Two Days Before The Attack

On September 9, just two days before the World Trade Center attack FTW issued an electronic subscriber bulletin, warning of an imminent economic collapse. That collapse was to have been triggered by a huge bubble on Wall Street that was already bursting, a huge manipulation in world gold prices and the overselling of gold by central banks, and an estimated $20-30 trillion derivatives bubble that was also on the verge of an immediate implosion. We attached a shocking economic expose with that bulletin which had been published on the website www.lemetropolecafe.com. We regret that space limitations prevent us from placing that article here. To obtain a better understand of the gold issue, previously covered in FTW we also strongly recommend that you visit www.gata.org .

[As published on Sept. 9, 2001] I cannot overstate the importance of this post in helping to understand the economic precipice on which we are all perched. More importantly, there is also a huge socio-political precipice that is just as dangerous because of the fact that trust in government institutions is at an all time low. Every time there is a police shooting these days, whether as corrupt as those revealed in Miami recently; as indicative of bad judgement and poor training as the one in Santa Clarita; or as justified as those in Indiana; the "automatic" reaction of many now is that the cops are always wrong. This "barometer" of public trust indicates that average people are beginning to have a first reaction that government and major institutions are "the enemy" rather than that they should be trusted. Right or wrong, the implications for society as a whole are ominous when emotion overrides reason.

"Let them eat cake."

It is this mix of economic and socio/political nitroglycerin that scares me. I am joined by many "thinkers" now in sensing the possibility of a "Reign of Terror," or mindless bloodletting. It would have nothing to do with justice, good and evil, right or wrong and it would not subside until the fear and revenge quotients just below the surface of the collective consciousness have spent themselves. This is especially true for the nations of the world whose populations have suffered under US economic bullying and globalization for many decades.

The sooner corrective action is taken the better. The more it is postponed, the more certain is the bloody abyss, as emotional and rational "account balancings" occur at the same time as the economic ones.

Read this posting carefully and then consider two points: Since the 1998 Russian economic collapse was triggered by the "looting" by Harvard and Goldman Sachs and THAT in turn triggered the collapse of LTCM [Long Term Capital Management], were we looking at a system of greed out of control where competing pyramids fight each other for diminishing capital streams? Would Goldman and Harvard wage war against LTCM or JPMorganChase knowing that it could destroy the world economy and create a global depression? If true, that implies a pending financial and economic donnybrook, that could "Hiroshima" the economy of the entire planet. The lunatics are officially running the asylum now. As the DOW plummets - and I expect that it may be in the 8,000s or below by the end of October - I have now come to the conclusion that it is POSSIBLE, IF NOT LIKELY - that the Bowers shootdown in Peru this Spring was an intentional move. Reason: the immediate and total suspension of drug interdiction flights -- an apparent easy capitulation by the CIA -- that has since allowed drug smuggling to multiply in the intervening months. I have read some estimates indicating that cocaine smuggling to the US is up 30% this year as a result. Add to that the fact that the eradication efforts in Colombia have not reduced coca production but have instead, increased it by 15-20% or more. What better way to pour additional billions in drug money into markets on the brink of collapse while trying to maintain a public image that fewer and fewer people are buying anyway?

There's a reason why people in this country no longer get motivated by individual cries for justice or any single human interest story, whether the victim lost a house or $250 million. In the panic of a fire in a crowded movie theater, no one gives a shit. We're all going to burn.

Mike Ruppert

"From The Wilderness" www.copvcia.com