‘The 9/11 Files’: Tucker Carlson treads cautiously in earnest attempt to spark new investigation

In December 2024 — just days after the overthrow of the Syrian government by Western-backed, Al Qaeda-linked jihadists and one month before Donald Trump’s return to the White House — Tucker Carlson interviewed Professor Jeffrey Sachs about America’s disastrous post-9/11 foreign policy. Carlson’s unstated but clear purpose was to convince Trump to chart a more peaceful path than his predecessors. It quickly became one of his most watched videos, drawing over 36 million views on X.

In our analysis, published a few days after that interview, we praised Sachs and Carlson for their critique of America’s forever wars and its malignant deep state. But we also lamented that they stopped just short of confronting the fundamental question of whether 9/11, like so many other events used to launch wars throughout history, was a false flag. We concluded by imploring them to take the next step, suggesting that they too — and not just the incoming president — had the power to change the course of history with their influence.

In short order, Carlson did just that (whether he had read our piece or not). In late December, we asked a mutual contact to pitch him on interviewing former US congressman Curt Weldon, who had just launched an effort with Firefighters for 9/11 Truth and other groups to get President Trump to form a new 9/11 commission. Carlson agreed and three months later flew Weldon to his home in Florida to interview him.

Carlson’s conversation with Weldon quickly became another one of his most watched and talked about videos. By any objective reading, it signified that the so-called “Overton Window,” or “sphere of legitimate controversy,” had finally and firmly opened wide enough to admit the once-taboo subject of 9/11 truth. The interview not only inspired Carlson’s documentary series but also prompted Senator Ron Johnson, chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, to announce his intention to hold hearings on 9/11.

In turn, this surge of momentum led to the Turning the Tide conference in September (organized by our organization, the International Center for 9/11 Justice, together with five partner groups). The three-day event in Washington, DC, brought Johnson, Weldon, Dennis Kucinich, and several other more mainstream figures to the stage alongside many leading voices in the 9/11 truth movement. Carlson was scheduled to appear via livestream but withdrew following the assassination of his friend Charlie Kirk just hours before the conference began.

Rather suddenly — though built on a gradual uptick that started with public skepticism of the Covid narrative and grew with Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza — the 9/11 truth movement reached an unprecedented level of acceptance in the mainstream. This development understandably raised questions, most notably and pointedly from writer and podcaster James Corbett, about how long-time activists should respond to the sudden embrace of 9/11 truth by prominent commentators who had once ignored or ridiculed them.

Corbett’s widely read first piece on this question urged vigilance about the risk that growing skepticism of 9/11 could be diverted toward a “limited hangout.” His more recent piece, by contrast, encouraged a “Yes, and” approach: Rather than reflexively dismissing late-arriving critics like Tucker Carlson or Ron Johnson for not going deep enough, we should welcome their contributions and expand on them with our own knowledge.

It is in the spirit of both approaches — vigilance and “Yes, and” — that we reflect on the important five-part series Carlson has released over the past month.

The starting point for The 9/11 Files is that the US government has been lying to the American people about 9/11. The question then is what exactly are they lying about? As we shall discuss, a central theme that courses through the series is the tension between several competing explanations for 9/11 (besides the one promoted by the 9/11 Commission). They can be delineated as follows:

1. That colossal failure on the part of the US government allowed the attacks to happen. Here, the untold truth is that a level of incompetence amounting to criminal negligence has been kept hidden from the American public. A popular addition to this explanation is that Saudi officials — all the way up to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the US and friend of the Bush family — aided the alleged hijackers without the knowledge of US authorities.
2. That elements within the US government and allied foreign governments knew Al Qaeda was going to carry out an attack on the US and decided to “let it happen” — the so-called LIHOP (let it happen on purpose) explanation.
3. That elements within the US government and allied foreign governments knew Al Qaeda was going to carry out an attack on the US, decided to let it happen, and additionally took active steps to ensure it did happen. This explanation can be understood as one version of the so-called MIHOP (make it happen on purpose) theory. The late professor of peace studies Graeme MacQueen referred to this type of scenario as a “managed war trigger.”
4. That elements within the US government and allied foreign governments planned and orchestrated the attack and blamed it on Al Qaeda — the so-called “false flag” thesis. This thesis also fits the MIHOP categorization but clearly goes one step further than the third explanation by postulating that the entire attack was staged. MacQueen referred to this scenario as a “manufactured war trigger.”

For clarity, we will refer to these explanations, respectively, as the “incompetence,” “LIHOP” and “MIHOP” explanations. LIHOP and MIHOP obviously involve varying degrees of intentionality and indeed conspiracy.

How does the series navigate these competing explanations, which Carlson claims in his interviews to have no position on? Much to the disappointment of many in the 9/11 truth movement, the series decidedly errs on the side of incompetence — even though the facts presented weigh very much in the direction of intentionality and even though Carlson, as evidenced by the questions he poses at the end of the final two episodes, clearly suspects something far more deliberate. The net result is the impression that Carlson has chosen to tread very cautiously, defaulting to a politically safe narrative of incompetence while at the same time providing just enough information to open viewers’ minds to the possibility of the LIHOP and MIHOP explanations.

Despite the series predominately favoring incompetence, we suspect Carlson actually leans toward believing that 9/11 was an inside job — a remarkable transformation given his infamous attacks on truth advocates two decades ago — and that he genuinely hopes to bring about a new investigation, a goal we share. Therefore, we think the series should ultimately be judged by how much it actually contributes to that end.

With that criterion in mind, we will offer our take on what the series does and what impact it is likely to have.

Episodes 1, 2, 3 & 5: Incompetence versus Intentionality

There is little doubt that a good deal of the material shown in the series will be eye-opening for the millions of people who have given little thought to the veracity of the official story, which claims that the US was the victim of an unpreventable surprise attack by Al Qaeda. See one example below from noted British journalist Jonathan Cook, who historically has been hesitant to engage with 9/11 truth:

“Episode 1: The CIA’s Secret Mission Gone Wrong” focuses on events prior to 9/11 and devotes significant airtime to Mark Rossini, an FBI agent who worked in the Osama bin Laden Unit, also known as Alec Station, based at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Viewers learn that the CIA knew about and were following at least two of the alleged hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, while working hard to prevent the FBI from learning too much about them. The two men obtained visas to enter the US at the American Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and, according to one FBI agent quoted in a Guantanamo court filing that surfaced in 2023, these visas were issued “to facilitate the operation run by the Saudi’s GID [General Intelligence Presidency] and the CIA team at UBL [Osama bin Laden] station.” Viewers also discover that a Saudi intelligence operative, Omar al-Bayoumi, was in contact with both of these individuals, supplying them with finances and other support, and that he was connected to the aforementioned Bandar bin Sultan, who in turn was close to the Bush family (earning him the nickname Bandar Bush). In fact, it was Bandar’s wife whose bank accounts were used to funnel money to al-Bayoumi. The linkage between the alleged hijackers, the CIA, and a close US ally should disabuse anyone who still believed going into the series that 9/11 was somehow unpreventable or a complete surprise to US authorities.

“Episode 2: The Cover-Up Commission,” which turns to the post-9/11 investigations, encourages further questioning. Here, the series presents damning evidence showing that the 9/11 Commission was established with extreme reluctance by the Bush administration. The administration’s initial attempt to install Henry Kissinger as chairman folded after it emerged that he had conflicts of interest stemming from his business with the bin Laden family. Kristen Breitweiser, one of the “Jersey Girls”(the informal name given to the group of four 9/11 widows who courageously pushed for the investigation) recounts how when one of them confronted Kissinger about these conflicts at a meeting in his office, he spilled his coffee seemingly on purpose, dodged the question, and resigned the next day. He was replaced by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean and former US representative Lee Hamilton, who as chair of the 1987 House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran played a central role in preventing accountability for the Iran-Contra affair.

The commission’s executive director was a Bush administration insider, Philip Zelikow, who, as Episode 2 makes clear, maintained tight control over what was allowed to be investigated and tried to exploit the commission to build the case for the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. In an investigation “set up to fail,” as the commission co-chairs later wrote, Zelikow was the chief orchestrator of its corruption. By the end of the episode, viewers are left in no doubt that the US government had something — probably an awful lot — to hide.

“Episode 3: They Could Have Stopped It” documents how, time after time, both the Clinton and Bush administrations blocked plans to “take out” bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization. Michael Scheuer, chief of Alec Station from 1996 to 1999, recounts how he was instructed by CIA Director George Tenet to stop requesting information from John Brennan (CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) about bin Laden’s background. Scheuer then muses:

Just because I was the chief of operations on Osama bin Laden didn’t mean there wasn’t somebody else working on the same issue in the opposite direction. And as it turned out, the opposite direction carried the day, with the approval of presidents.

According to Scheuer, there were no less than ten opportunities during his time at Alec Station to either capture or kill bin Laden. The pattern of missed opportunities and inaction carried through to the summer of 2001, when multiple warnings and briefings were issued about an imminent attack.

This fact pattern inevitably paints a picture that is highly suspicious. CIA contact with the alleged hijackers, repeated inaction when the opportunity arose to take out the Al Qaeda network, and a demonstrably compromised investigation all point toward nefarious goings-on and ill intent. Even in the most conservative estimation, these facts must surely open the minds of many viewers to believing either a LIHOP scenario, in which elements within the US government knew about an imminent attack and looked the other way, or the “managed war trigger” version of the MIHOP explanation, in which elements within the US government took active steps to facilitate the attack.

However, the framing of these episodes, whether through their titles, or through Carlson’s narration, or through comments by the interview subjects, tends to avoid these avenues of thought. Instead, the audience is directed toward the idea that all of this might just represent one vast and epic blunder by US authorities and, in particular, the CIA. For instance, Mark Rossini is shown in Episode 1 angrily attributing blame to the CIA for bringing alleged hijackers Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar into the US in order to try and recruit them as sources. Another FBI source is quoted as saying that “the CIA’s operation may have spun out of control.” Kristen Breitweiser­ (to take nothing away from her monumental efforts while grieving the loss of her husband) refers to Dick Cheney’s “failures that day” and the perceived need to protect Bush’s reputation during his re-election campaign. Meanwhile, the perpetually thwarted Alec Station chief Michael Scheuer is left saying “to me it’s a mystery” when reflecting on repeated missed opportunities to “take out” bin Laden.

“Episode 5: From Tragedy to Tyranny,” which primarily features former high-ranking CIA official John Kiriakou, mostly reinforces the incompetence theme. The one exception is Carlson’s closing monologue, in which he asks a series of hard-hitting questions that a new 9/11 commission should seek to answer — all of which imply suspicion of intentionality. But most of the final episode is devoted to detailing the expansion of domestic surveillance (via the PATRIOT Act and PRISM) and the use of torture following 9/11. The tone is critical, of course, and the episode rightly emphasizes that the case against KSM, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, rests on evidence obtained through torture — making it entirely unreliable. However, the episode largely orbits around Kiriakou’s narrative that the attacks happened as alleged by the US government, with incompetence largely being the only vice on display. That Episode 5 mostly reverts to this narrative is unfortunate given where Episode 4 had just gone.

Episode 4: Evidence of Conspiracy

In “Episode 4: From Cover-up to Conspiracy,” the series departs from its default narrative of incompetence to explore a limited sampling of evidence that points more unambiguously toward the LIHOP and MIHOP explanations.

Carlson starts the episode by saying “If you wanted conspiracy theories to flourish after the 9/11 attacks, here’s what you’d do” and he goes on to list a series of actions that the US government actually took after 9/11 (for example, preventing a real investigation, immediately shipping rubble from Ground Zero overseas, and invading a country with no connection to the attack). It’s a clever and appropriately scornful way of saying that the public’s suspicions about 9/11 are entirely understandable — and perhaps even on the money — in light of the government’s actions.

Next, Carlson makes a seemingly related but actually quite separate point. He posits that officials may have wanted “conspiracy theories” to thrive in order to distract from more obvious truths, citing “directed energy weapons” as one such “far out” theory. Although actions such as destroying crime scene evidence clearly weren’t taken for the specific purpose of feeding far-fetched “conspiracy theories,” there is no doubt that certain theories have been disseminated to misguide the public.

Carlson then goes on to claim that the obvious truths being overshadowed by these misleading theories are “the government’s central role in facilitating the attacks” — no problem there — and “the extreme levels of incompetence that made it possible for bin Laden . . . to pull off the most sophisticated terror attacks in history.” This is an unfortunate assertion on Carlson’s part and the only time he makes it in the entire series. It’s also puzzling given that earlier this year he mocked the idea of bin Laden planning 9/11. It is as if he wants to make absolutely clear this is where he stands before he delves into more conspiracy-oriented territory.

Sure enough, despite having all but affirmed the official story seconds earlier, Carlson then opines, “On the other hand, not all of the wildest theories about 9/11 are crazy. Some of them raise legitimate questions about what happened” (questions which, when correctly answered, undermine the narrative that bin Laden planned 9/11).

The focus then turns to the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, where we spend fifteen minutes of the half-hour episode (a sizeable ten percent of the entire series). Although Carlson has only enough time to skim the surface and although he injects an unwarranted level of uncertainty about the cause of the collapse (see below), we must commend him for addressing Building 7 at all. Although the demolition of Building 7 has become more widely recognized in recent years, Carlson’s willingness to go there will undoubtedly bring the issue to millions more people and at the same time signal to those already aware that the topic is now fair game for public discussion.

Among the strengths of the Building 7 section is Carlson’s emphasis on the rapid removal and destruction of the debris, which made it impossible to conduct a proper investigation. One might suggest this was done out of incompetence or recklessness, but the record shows that investigators and victims’ family members urged the City of New York early on and repeatedly to stop recycling the steel, to no avail. The only logical inference is that there was intent to prevent the steel from being examined.

Carlson also does a good job of concisely explaining the collapse scenario put forward by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and asking why, if the collapse initiated with the failure of a single column, the building would fall so symmetrically. He cites the computer modeling study by civil engineering professor Leroy Hulsey at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which found that fires could not have caused the collapse, as well as the 2009 paper published in the Open Chemical Physics Journal documenting the discovery of unreacted nano-thermitic material in four independently gathered samples of World Trade Center dust. He also ends the section with what has proven to be one of the most salient arguments for the general public: the BBC reporting the collapse of Building 7 a full twenty-three minutes before it happened.

Notwithstanding the huge service the series does by covering Building 7, there are two key shortcomings where a “Yes, and” response is called for.

The first is that Carlson seems to go so far out of his way to avoid committing fully to the controlled demolition hypothesis that he invents a reason to question it. After laying out the case for controlled demolition in a reasonably fair and cogent way, he claims:

One issue with the controlled demolition hypothesis is that the widely circulated video of the building coming down is selectively edited. In fact, the building did not exactly collapse all at once. It came down in two stages. What you’re seeing now is the full video of the collapse. It shows the penthouse collapsing first and then very quickly the rest of the building going. The unedited video leaves more questions than answers. It calls into question the official NIST narrative, but it doesn’t conclusively show a controlled demolition either.

This is a grave misstep on Carlson’s part. First of all, the engineers and scientists who have studied Building 7’s collapse are certainly aware of — and pay considerable attention to — the collapse of the east penthouse. Second, the fact there were two stages to the collapse is not in any way inconsistent with controlled demolition. To the contrary, demolitions often involve taking down different parts of a building in sequence.

In the case of Building 7, the fact that the collapse of the east penthouse and the global collapse occurred eight seconds apart without any visible collapse or deformation of the structure between those two events strongly supports the controlled demolition hypothesis. Indeed, NIST’s own computer model (shown below) demonstrates that if the column underneath the east penthouse had failed low in the building, per NIST’s scenario, and set off a progressive collapse of the entire structure, it would have caused massive visible deformation of the exterior before the entire building began to come down. The only thing that can account for the clean two-stage collapse is the isolated removal of the columns below the east penthouse — probably high in the building, thus limiting the internal damage and stresses to a few upper floors — followed by the synchronized removal of the rest of the columns eight seconds later.

This scenario is corroborated by audio evidence of explosions a split second before the east penthouse begins to fall as well as by two seismic events that correspond perfectly with the start of the east penthouse collapse and the start of the global collapse, respectively (see Section 5 of “The Instantaneous Free Fall of World Trade Center Building 7 and NIST’s Attempt to Hide It”).

NIST attributes the first seismic event (at 17:20:42 in the table below) to the alleged cascade of floor failures in the northeast corner of the building, from the 13^th floor to down to the 5^th floor, that purportedly allowed the column below the east penthouse to buckle and precipitated the east penthouse’s collapse (see NIST’s computer model animations below):

However, it is preposterous to suggest that several floor sections falling onto a floor that is five stories above ground could transmit enough energy to the ground to generate seismic activity that would travel 34 kilometers to the nearest seismic station. Highlighting the absurdity of this claim, NIST makes the opposite claim for the seismic activity that accompanied the Twin Towers’ destruction, saying “a seismic signal . . . is not generated until a substantial portion of the building debris hits the ground.” (See Appendix B of NIST’s NCSTAR 1-9.) Similarly, it makes no sense that the second seismic event (at 17:20:50 in the table below) would occur at the start of the global collapse rather than later in the collapse when more of the debris began to hit the ground — unless, of course, it was caused by explosions.

This misstep might have been avoided had Carlson and his team drawn on the knowledge of experts who have advanced the controlled demolition hypothesis. They also could have benefitted from advice regarding NIST’s dubious arguments surrounding the supposed lack of explosion sounds and the amount of thermite required to destroy the building, both of which the series presents uncritically. In fact, there is strong audio, seismic, and eyewitness evidence of explosions (not only earlier in the day, as reported by Barry Jennings and Michael Hess, but during the collapse). With regard to the amount of thermite needed, thermite cutting devices could have been used to weaken key points in the building without the need to apply 100 pounds of thermite around a single column, as NIST claimed.

It appears that Carlson and his team sought to come off as balanced and ultimately undecided on whether Building 7 was demolished, and so they injected an unwarranted level of uncertainty when the evidence strongly points in one direction. In an interview with Saagar Enjeti, Carlson acknowledged that his team concluded fire did not bring down Building 7. It seems likely, then, that they opted for a more cautious presentation in the documentary for strategic reasons.

The other notable shortcoming is Carlson’s avoidance of the Twin Towers’ destruction. This omission is underscored by his emphasis on the removal of debris, the majority of which came from the Twin Towers, and by the fact that he references the aforementioned paper documenting the discovery of nano-thermitic material in four World Trade Center dust samples. As he narrates, one of those samples was collected just minutes after the second tower went down, meaning it could not have come from Building 7. Another originated from an apartment south of the World Trade Center complex whose windows were blown in when the South Tower came down, filling the space with copious amounts of dust that almost certainly made up most of the sample. In all likelihood, most or all of the dust in the four samples came from the Twin Towers, making Carlson’s reference to the nano-thermite paper in connection with Building 7 misplaced. Given that he has cited the nano-thermite paper widely, we would encourage him to use it to begin discussing the demolition of the Twin Towers.

Putting aside his misapplication of the nano-thermite paper, the omission of the Twin Towers is unfortunate since the evidence for their demolition is just as strong as the evidence for Building 7’s demolition. Moreover, it was through this act that the perpetrators murdered the great majority of the victims and traumatized hundreds of millions of people watching on live television. A Tucker Carlson Network email blast announcing the release of Episode 4 asked the question, “Could whatever caused [Building 7’s] demise also be responsible for the more famous implosions hours earlier?” Regrettably, Carlson chose not to explore this question — perhaps deciding that a more gradual approach, outside the confines of the series, was the way to go.

The other two issues Carlson examines in any depth are the “Dancing Israelis” and the irregular spike in put options on airlines and other companies impacted by the attack. The former concerns the fact that five Israeli intelligence-linked men were seen celebrating as the Twin Towers burned and were then arrested and held in custody for 71 days before being quietly deported back to Israel. The latter concerns the fact that known individuals, whose identities remain secret, placed an unusually high volume of trading bets prior to 9/11 that the stocks of United Airlines and American Airlines would go down. Both of these matters are important, of course, but take us little beyond the LIHOP explanation (though the purchasers of the put options, if publicly revealed and investigated, could prove to be connected to the conspiracy or at least provide valuable information about it). Moreover, it is possible to see both of these examples of foreknowledge as compatible with the incompetence explanation. Specifically, Israeli agents and traders might have had foreknowledge of an event that US officials and intelligence agencies missed because of their incompetence, thus exonerating the US from complicity.

Other, stronger evidence for the MIHOP explanations comes from studying the actual events of that day and, in particular, what happened in the skies: the implausibility of the hijacking narrative, the demonstrably inauthentic phone calls describing the purported hijacking events, highly challenging flight maneuvers ostensibly being performed by amateur pilots, and “coincidental” military exercises, which evidently served to disrupt US air defenses on 9/11. In addition, the actions and behaviors of senior US officials, which indicate their involvement in coordinating or enabling the events of that day, provide powerful support for MIHOP explanations. Unfortunately, Carlson does not address these evidence areas, other than making a brief comment about the piloting of the planes, where he asks: “How hard, by the way, would it be for amateur pilots with only basic aviation training and no experience flying jumbo jets to navigate to lower Manhattan and crash into a building?” A very good question — and one we encourage him to explore based on the evidence being produced by our flight simulator study.

Expanding the ‘Sphere of Legitimate 9/11 Controversy’

Overall, then, owing to Carlson’s unique stature and position in the present political landscape — arguably standing at the borderline between legitimate and illegitimate discourse — The 9/11 Files serves to expand what might be called the “sphere of legitimate 9/11 controversy” further than ever before. However, because of his caution, perhaps calibrated to land the series where he sees the current boundaries of legitimate controversy lying, Carlson defines the boundary as a place where fact patterns consistent with intentionality still need to be packaged in a narrative of incompetence (Episodes 1, 2, 3 and 5), where ambiguous evidence regarding the LIHOP explanation is foregrounded (“Dancing Israelis” and put options), and where evidence pointing clearly to MIHOP must be undercut by an unwarranted level of uncertainty (Building 7) or left entirely unaddressed.

Working from the assumption that Carlson believes 9/11 was an inside job and that he sincerely wants to bring about a new investigation, it may well be that he has made the right calculation: In the long run, presenting a fact pattern consistent with intentionality together with evidence of Building 7’s demolition may be enough to push most of his viewers who aren’t already there into contemplating MIHOP explanations without alienating them or subjecting himself to being called a “conspiracy theorist.”

However, the risk, at least in the short term, is that by setting the boundary where he has Carlson either (1) creates a boundary that his peers are inclined to remain within, (2) leaves them confused about his central argument, or (3) simply underwhelms them. After all, how outraged can we really get 24 years later about 9/11 happening due to incompetence? This is one reason we suspect that Carlson’s personal position goes much further — for would he really go to the trouble of making this documentary and demanding a new investigation simply to expose incompetence? It may be that by exercising such caution and not presenting what he actually thinks — at least for now — he has not given his peers enough reason to be sufficiently outraged that they will join him in calling for a new investigation.

Indeed, we see evidence of all of the above in the interviews Carlson has done about his series — and, not incidentally, in the interviews we have done about his series.

For instance, in an interview with Glenn Greenwald, he and Greenwald dance gingerly around the frequency with which governments cover up mere incompetence versus more sinister acts. Carlson tries to make the case, though very gently and almost timidly, that the latter does happen. Also, in both the Greenwald and Enjeti interviews, Carlson boils down the core finding of his series to foreknowledge, which seems to be the midway point between the predominate narrative of the series and where he probably personally stands. Enjeti, already sympathetic to 9/11 truth from his youth, seems to sense where Carlson has set the boundary and goes with it. Meanwhile, Greenwald seems to exhibit all three responses: taking Carlson’s cue on where the boundary lies, being unsure about where Carlson actually stands, and seeming underwhelmed by the topic compared to the intensity he often exudes about issues of the day.

Meanwhile, one of us (Piers Robinson) has given two interviews about the series since its release — one with Jackson Hinkle and one with Jamarl Thomas. With Hinkle, who was already sympathetic to 9/11 truth, the effect of the series was straightforward: its very existence gave him a reason to speak more openly about 9/11 truth, which he had only rarely done before. With Thomas, the shift was more striking. In a previous interview with Robinson, he had resisted the issue, even interrupting to make clear his disagreement with Robinson’s comments on 9/11. This time, however, he reacted with openness and astonishment — both at the incompetence suggested in the early episodes and at the possibility of MIHOP. As Carlson seems to have intended, Thomas emerged with a new sense that something was profoundly wrong about 9/11 — and for the first time he was willing to put MIHOP on the table.

Therefore, on the whole, we should be encouraged by Carlson’s series and hopeful about its impact — in particular on people who are only beginning to question 9/11. It is worth remembering that the process of discovering the truth about 9/11 can be an arduous and painful journey, perhaps even more so for those who have resisted questioning it for so long. It may be that Carlson’s approach is exactly what was needed for the largest share of his audience to take the biggest step forward.

Perhaps Carlson’s most valuable contribution is simply his emphatic insistence that getting to the bottom of 9/11 still matters — and remains possible if the political will exists. He closes his final episode by saying:

It’s been more than 20 years now and we still don’t know the simple truth about 9/11. But we can know. A new commission could find out — an honest commission, a non-partisan commission, a commission dedicated to protecting the United States could find out. . . . The American people have a right, an absolute right to those answers. They should be outraged by the lying, and they should demand to know what actually happened on September 11^th.

Amid the never-ending frenzy of discourse on social media regarding more current topics and given the notable lack of interest in 9/11 from journalists and political figures whom you would expect to be the most concerned, Carlson’s message that 9/11 remains central to our society is urgently needed.

With Carlson having expanded the sphere of legitimate 9/11 controversy further than ever before, we find ourselves back where we were last year in December: once again urging him — and anyone with a platform, no matter how small or large — to take the next step.

As the 25^th anniversary nears, it is time to dispense with the boundaries entirely and to discuss openly and honestly whether elements within the US government and its allies planned and orchestrated 9/11.

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Dr. Piers Robinson is research director of the International Center for 9/11 Justice. Ted Walter is executive director of the International Center for 9/11 Justice.

This article was originally published on Madhava Setty’s Substack, “An Insult to Intuition.” Setty is the science advisor to the International Center for 9/11 Justice. If you appreciate Setty’s perspective, please subscribe to his Substack.

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For the last week I have been obsessed with learning more about the assassination of the young conservative influencer and head of the organization Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk.

I was in Washington DC last week to emcee the first day of the “Turning The Tide” symposium hosted by the International Center for 9/11 Justice and other 9/11 truth organizations. It was being live-streamed by the popular independent media platform, REDACTED.

There was a lot of excitement around the event. In recent months and years the 24 year old truth movement had finally caught the attention of powerful influencers like Clayton Morris, Candace Owens, Russell Brand and even Tucker Carlson who was planning on appearing on the livestream on day 2.

We also had strong support from former Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Curt Weldon. And, for the first time, a sitting US Senator, Ron Johnson had met with point persons in the truth movement earlier in the afternoon of September 10. Senator Johnson agreed to appear at our event as well.

Was this going to be the event that would catalyze a massive change in national conversation about the events of 9/11 that we have been envisioning for so long? I certainly thought so.

As I was preparing to take the podium to kick off the three day event we learned that Charlie Kirk had been shot. By the end of my 18 minute long commentary (most of which was not streamed for some reason) we learned that Kirk was confirmed dead.

Strangely, it wasn’t American news organizations who broke the news. It was the PM of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu on X:

I certainly didn’t know much about Charlie Kirk and the huge influence he had over millions of conservative youth. Personally, I regard conservatism vs liberalism as a dichotomy that actually serves to avert attention from the real battle: a growing authoritarian state against a population that is willingly surrendering their rights in exchange for a sense of security.

One of the points I made in my commentary centered around the rapidly changing attitude around openly challenging the official 9/11 story:

“I distinctly remember that just five years ago challenging the fantasy we were told about 9/11 relegated you to remote corners of discussion on social media. You couldn’t bring it up in polite conversation.

Now, openly supporting the official narrative invites serious questions about your credibility. Today one’s take on 9/11 is the best litmus test of one’s own sensibility as it applies to nearly every other contentious issue.”

This is the context through which I had formed my opinion about Charlie Kirk. What did Charlie Kirk know about the events of 9/11? Nothing outside of the fantasy our government told us.

In this exchange a veteran probes Kirk’s understanding of 9/11. The veteran and “9/11 Truther” is animated while Kirk remains composed. Kirk is bombarded with a gish-gallop of “alternative” viewpoints about all wars, CIA/Israeli ties and the twin tower destruction. Unfortunately the veteran quickly veers into antisemitic tropes.

Nevertheless

• Kirk wasn’t aware of the passport of the alleged Saudi hijacker “miraculously” found close to ground zero days after three skyscrapers were blown apart.
• Neither was he aware of all the evidence that points to controlled demolition or
• the scarcely believable piloting demonstrated by these supposed hijackers flying multi-engined jet planes for the first time in their lives nor
• the infamous “Operation Northwoods” proposal that bears uncanny resemblance to a more cohesive story around the events of 9/11

That’s okay. Kirk was like most people, intelligent or otherwise who have never heard a cogent counter argument to governmental propaganda about 9/11. In other words, I never paid attention to what this young man was saying before he was unalived.

The murder of this young man, a husband and father, was a tragedy and, particularly untimely. National attention was diverted to this quickly unfolding story and not the one we were attempting to bring to the public.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk and how it was being spun bears a striking similarity to the psyop which was unleashed upon a stunned public after September 11, 2001…

Less than an hour after the second tower fell, the world was told exactly what had happened and why. The three dozen news sources which all reported massive explosions during the collapse of our iconic twin towers never mentioned them again.

The new “facts” were offered by former Israeli PM Ehud Barak who coincidentally happened to be nearby to BBC studios when it was all coming down:

There was no question what this attack was about, according to Barak. It was an attack by terrorist organizations and the countries who harbor them upon not just America but on Israel and Democracy itself. The world would be forever different he predicted. He was right.

The misdirection was taking hold before anyone could know what really happened.

In my speech I reminded the audience of how, in our effort to protect Democracy from Al Qaeda, we had to accept that extraordinary rendition was necessary, that confessions obtained through torture at CIA black sites would be admissible in court and that incarceration on mere suspicion alone would be okay.

All these attacks on the Constitution of the United States were neatly spelled out in the Patriot Act, ironically.

Somehow Barak knew exactly what happened and why seven hours before another giant skyscraper dropped to the ground in classic controlled demolition style at the WTC complex. Unfortunately for Barak and the spin doctors, Building 7 was not hit by a plane.

He was also unaware of another inconvenient incident uncovered that morning:

A woman in Jersey City (across the Hudson River from the twin towers) noticed a group of five Arab appearing men filming the destruction of the twin towers. They were dancing in celebration.

They were taken into custody. They weren’t Arab. They were Israeli. They confessed that they were there to “document” the event. After finding several thousands of dollars in cash and passports from a number of different countries on their person, our FBI did what we would expect under the circumstances: quietly release them to Israeli authorities some weeks later.

Were they Mossad agents? Where are they now? Who knows? However all can agree on two important points:

They must have had foreknowledge of the 9/11 tragedy and

They were celebrating.

Most of the public is still unaware of these inconvenient details.

Fast forward 24 years to the heartfelt tweet from another Israeli PM, Netanyahu, for his slain young friend, Charlie Kirk.

“Charlie Kirk was murdered for speaking truth and defending freedom”

What truths was he speaking? Who murdered him, Prime Minister?

Netanyahu answers the latter in his interview on Fox a day after the assassination:

“The radical Islamists and their union with the ultra-progressives—they often speak about ‘human rights,’ they speak about ‘free speech’—but they use violence to try to take down their enemies.”

Radical Islamists are at it again! This time in cahoots with ultra-progressives.

What was Kirk saying that was so provocative to the “ultra-progressives”? Of course he held beliefs that didn’t resonate with ultra-progressives. He was a Christian conservative who was a “lion hearted friend to Israel”. That has always been the case. So why was he murdered now??

If you have not been following this story, Kirk had been changing his tune, not about his Christian faith but about his feelings on Israel.

Max Blumenthal, Editor-in-Chief of The Grayzone lays out the evidence for Kirk’s change of heart here.

• Kirk openly questioned whether the IDF was given a “stand down” order on October 7th.
• Kirk felt that the state of Israel was going too far in Gaza.
• Kirk had turned down the Prime Minister’s invitation to visit Israel two weeks before his murder—a detail Netanyahu declined to mention in his tweet or since.
• Bibi also didn’t mention that Kirk turned down “donations” which, according to some sources, amounted to tens of millions of dollars.
• Kirk had also faced ire from pro-Israeli donors to Turning Point USA for showcasing Dave Smith, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson at recent events. All three can be fairly judged as “America First”, i.e., Israel second.

Granted, though suspicious, all this could be coincidental. If we want hard facts we really ought to drop our speculation and listen to the authorities who, solved the crime “33 hours” later.

It was Tyler Robinson, a 22 yo Utah resident who took matters into his own hands. It was Kirk’s preaching of traditional values that drove Tyler to silence him with a round to the neck (Robinson was in love with his transitioning roommate, a biological male).

The FBI released communications between Robinson and his roommate. The BBC published them here.

In this rambling and sometimes poignant exchange, Robinson confesses to the murder and strangely drops precise details of his motivation and means by which he offed Charlie Kirk on September 10:

Robinson: If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence. Going to attempt to retrieve it again, hopefully they have moved on. I haven’t seen anything about them finding it.

Roommate: How long have you been planning this?

Robinson: a bit over a week I believe. I can get close to it but there is a squad car parked right by it. I think they already swept that spot, but I don’t wanna chance it

Robinson: I’m wishing I had circled back and grabbed it as soon as I got to my vehicle…. I’m worried what my old man would do if I didn’t bring back grandpas rifle … idek if it had a serial number, but it wouldn’t trace to me. I worry about prints I had to leave it in a bush where I changed outfits. didn’t have the ability or time to bring it with…. I might have to abandon it and hope they don’t find prints. how the [expletive] will I explain losing it to my old man….

only thing I left was the rifle wrapped in a towel….

remember how I was engraving bullets? The [expletive] messages are mostly a big meme, if I see “notices bulge uwu” on fox new I might have a stroke alright im gonna have to leave it, that really [expletive] sucks…. judging from today I’d say grandpas gun does just fine idk. I think that was a $2k scope;-;

Robinson: delete this exchange

Robinson: my dad wants photos of the rifle … he says grandpa wants to know who has what, the feds released a photo of the rifle, and it is very unique. Hes calling me rn, not answering.

Robinson: since trump got into office [my dad] has been pretty diehard maga.

Robinson: Im gonna turn myself in willingly, one of my neighbors here is a deputy for the sheriff.

Robinson: you are all I worry about love

Roommate: I’m much more worried about you

Robinson: don’t talk to the media please. don’t take any interviews or make any comments. … if any police ask you questions ask for a lawyer and stay silent

And there it is. We have the entire story now. Thank you Tyler for filling in all the details for us! We now know, thanks to the crack detective work by the Feds in pulling this from a chat on Discord that:

• He had planning it for a week.
• He probably would have gotten away with it if he wasn’t forced to drop the (assembled) rifle in the woods.
• He left it in a bush. Wrapped in a towel. Where, incidentally he changed clothes (in case anyone was wondering)
• It’s a very unique weapon.
• He didn’t know if it had a serial number on it. If it did, it couldn’t be traced to him because it was his grandpa’s.
• He’s being pressed by his “old man” who has been pretty diehard MAGA (a fact that his romantic interest probably was unaware of or forgotten)
• He left his fingerprints on the weapon
• The bullet was engraved with a message
• He’s going to turn himself in for murder in the first degree of a major political figure, but he is worried about what his father will say about losing the rifle.

Every loose end has been tied, just like those teen mystery novels I used to read when I was 12.

Except for a few details:

• Since when do 22 year olds text things like “grab it unseen”, “attempt to retrieve it”, “squad car”? And a few other minor things like…
• Where is the ballistics report?
• Where is the bullet?
• What did the autopsy report show?
• Video footage shows a Kirk was bleeding from a large wound from the front of his neck which is more indicative of an exit wound.
• Where is the footage from the camera mounted behind Kirk when he was shot?
• How did Tyler Robinson disassemble the weapon in a matter of seconds and put it in a backpack before leaping from the roof?
• Why did he reassemble the weapon before hiding it in a bush?
• And who was George Zinn, the “crazy old man” who after the shot was fired screamed that he had done it and implored the security to shoot him?

Should these questions be answered before “allowing” Utah Valley University to pave over the courtyard where Kirk was assassinated?

Don’t be silly. After all, there was no reason to examine any physical evidence at ground zero after the twin towers were blown to bits. What’s the point of looking for more clues if we already know happened? Get it out of here and let the healing begin!

Conclusion

Is the public going to trust the authorities on this con job again? I don’t think so. Unlike 24 years ago, we now have a public that is deeply suspicious of legacy media and their handlers, the “special interests” which control Federal government. Independent voices that command audiences which dwarf those of legacy media have already been clamoring for accountability and transparency.

I was anticipating writing a lot about the proceedings of the Turning the Tide event in DC. There were so many important scientific presentations by researchers and analysts. Powerful speeches for unity and transparency from former and sitting legislators. Heartfelt messages from family members of the victims who have been waiting decades for transparency and resolution.

However the story right now is about another psyop to which the public is being subjected. One doesn’t have to agree with the values Charlie Kirk espoused to grieve his death. One doesn’t have to identify with his political leanings to acknowledge that this 31 year old was doing something different. He was taking his position to hostile settings and inviting all comers to prove him wrong.

Dialogue between factions is the most dangerous thing to interests that exert their influence by keeping us from speaking to each other. Is this why he was killed? Or were there other reasons?

24 years ago the public was fooled into surrendering key Constitutional rights before a single war was waged to protect them. And today as Charlie Kirk is widely memorialized as fierce defender of free speech Attorney General Pam Bondi believes she has a mandate to crack down on “hate speech”.

That’s how they do it.

Will this be the real “Turning Point” for the USA?

There is a grim inevitability about the developing war aimed at overthrowing the Iranian government. It might not seem this way for the millions of Westerners who have become indoctrinated through propaganda to believe that all events in the world have nothing to do with “us.” I suspect that our legacy media (formerly known as the mainstream or corporate media) will naively present current events as some kind of reasonable military action aimed at deterring Iranian nuclear capability. It was always, of course, about much more than that and, most importantly, the ongoing conflagrations are the direct result of “our” geo-political machinations.

What follows is an antidote to the propaganda, and one that might fall on more open minds now that the harsh geopolitical realities of Western imperial belligerence are once again in the spotlight.

During the 1990s, flushed with the perceived victory over the Soviet Union, power blocs within the West sought to exploit its military advantage to shore up Western hegemony. The former Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO, Wesley Clark, recalled a conversation with Paul Wolfowitz from 1991 — just after US forces had defeated Iraq in the first Gulf War:

And he said, but one thing we did learn, he said, we learned that we can use our military in the region in the Middle East and the Soviets won’t stop us. He said, and we have got about five or ten years to clean up those all Soviet client regimes; Syria, Iran, Iraq, – before the next great super power comes along to challenge us . . . (quoted in Mondoweiss).

The planning and organisation for a fresh round of imperial belligerence manifested itself in the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a cohort of ideological extremists determined to exploit US military capabilities in order to secure strategic dominance in the 21st century (see for example Scott’s The Road to 9/11 and Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor).

In 1996, the strategy paper titled “A Clean Break: A Strategy for Securing the Realm,” written by several PNAC members and published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies for the incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, recommended an aggressive posture toward Syria and Iran and aligning US and Israeli security policies more tightly, particularly around pre-emptive action.

In 1998, Philip Zelikow, who later served on President George W. Bush’s transition team and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) and then as his hand-picked executive director of the 9/11 Commission, co-authored the suspiciously prescient 1998 Foreign Affairs paper describing a possible “catastrophic” act of terrorism that would create a “watershed event in American History.” Was Zelikow’s paper a conceptual roadmap for neoconservatives planning the next paradigm shift away from a strategy of containment? In 2000, the PNAC report Rebuilding America’s Defenses warned (one year before the 2001 event) that the necessary transformations in US capabilities would likely be slow “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

As if on cue, 9/11 provided precisely that, with what was presented as a staggeringly brazen terror attack carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Publics were urged to accept the narrative that a group of young Muslim men (inexperienced pilots) from a terror group called Al Qaeda had taken over four US airliners and used them to conduct kamikaze attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings in New York and the Pentagon, bringing down both WTC towers (designed to withstand such impacts) and a third tower, Building 7, which was not hit by a plane.

Among rational scientists, scholars and other concerned citizens who demand empirical evidence for claims of truth, there is no doubt that 9/11 was a false flag event orchestrated by elements within the US so-called “deep state,” in co-operation with a range of allies that likely includes Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Britain and Israel. An exhaustive body of work over the last 20-plus years has clarified the patent falsity of the official narrative and highlighted, in particular, overwhelming evidence that confirms the buildings in New York could not have collapsed due to the impacts of two airliners and were, in fact, deliberately demolished. Beyond the impossibility that three skyscrapers in New York City could have each defied the laws of physical motion described by Isaac Newton, citizens cite the mountains of testimonial evidence that contradict the official report as well as various other unacceptable absurdities.

Taking advantage of the shock and awe created by the 9/11 event, the US and its allies implemented their “regime change” war policy immediately. Even before the day had ended, the US government was declaring a “war on terror” and noted countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan and Iran as being culpable for what had transpired in New York and at the Pentagon (see Ryan and Robinson, 2024). Wesley Clark famously revealed in 2007 having been informed during a visit to the Pentagon days after 9/11 that a plan was being implemented to attack seven countries in five years. He identified Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran as the countries targeted for “regime change.” Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell) states unequivocally that these plans to attack multiple countries were in place prior to 9/11. Documents published as part of the UK Chilcot Inquiry revealed communications between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush shortly after 9/11 in which they discussed phases one and two of a “war on terror,” including when to “hit” Iran, Syria and Iraq (see Robinson, 2017).   

Started by the big lie about what happened on 9/11, the ensuing wars were to be accompanied by a familiar pattern of propaganda campaigns and strategic deceptions. A bogus intelligence assessment, the Taylor Report, was delivered to NATO countries weeks after 9/11 in order to legitimate the attack on Afghanistan. The attack swiftly followed and, in the coming months, led to the overthrow of the Taliban and the start of the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates the death toll, conservatively, at around 176,000.

By 2002/3, sights were set on attacking Iraq, and the now notorious lies regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were used to sell that invasion to Western publics. No such weapons ever existed and the ensuing conflict in Iraq is estimated to have killed at least 300,000 people.

In 2011, the opportunity to attack two further competitor nations, Libya and Syria, emerged. In the former case, NATO attacked Libyan forces under the deceptive auspices of a “humanitarian intervention,” based in part on deceptive propaganda claiming that Libyan forces were attacking civilians. The government of Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown and the country descended into a long period of conflict and chaos. The war against Syria took longer. The14-year destruction of that country, involving the largest ever covert CIA operation, Timber Sycamore, working alongside an alliance of belligerents — UK, France, Israel, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia — ultimately led to the overthrow of the Assad government in 2024 and the installation of an al Qaeda-linked force led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani. Throughout, Western publics were propagandised by lies about Syrian chemical weapons use and, during the years of conflict, at least 269,000 people were killed. The West and its allies enabled the rise of brutal and extremist groups such as Al-Nusra Front and ISIS. During this period the war against Yemen, prosecuted largely by the West’s regional ally Saudi Arabia, killed more than 100,000 people.

It should not be forgotten that whilst the power projection by way of war impacted the lives and fate of the peoples of West Asia, the US’s parallel strategy of increasing pressure on its former Cold War adversary, largely through the unjustified eastward expansion of NATO and the proxy war in Ukraine, has brought the West to the brink of war with the Russian Federation.

And now, this belligerent policy of creative destruction, designed to keep at bay the reality of a changing world in which the West no longer dominates, has possibly arrived at its end point, the destruction of the existing Iranian government. Talk of preventing Iranian nuclear capability is simply another variation of the deceptions used over Iraq (WMDs) and Syria (chemical weapons). The concern is not with whether Iran has the bomb, the concern is with removing a government that opposes the regional hegemonic ambitions of Israel and the global hegemonic objectives of the West.

Where this all goes from here is unknown. Will the Iranian government stand or fall? How will the major global players, especially Russia and China, respond? Will Israel stand or fall? Are we faced with a regional war or World War III? Will Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people continue?

Whatever happens, Western publics should be under no illusion as to how this situation has come to be. The conflicts are the direct consequence of our governments and their associated military industrial complexes pursuing policies of war and, to do so, engaging in covert actions and major deceptions, which include the 9/11 false flag as well as the utilisation of brutal extremist groups in countries such as Syia. The death toll from these conflicts runs well into the millions while the misery is incalculable.

Propaganda, deception and lies, all in the name of war, are becoming firmly established as the parting legacy of the Western empire.

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Dr. Piers Robinson is research director of the International Center for 9/11 Justice, co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, and co-editor of Propaganda in Focus. This article is co-published with Propaganda in Focus.

Editor’s Note: Following the release this week of thousands of previously redacted or undisclosed government files related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we at IC911 would like to share this piece by longtime JFK assassination scholar Marty Schotz. It is a transcript of a talk he gave one year ago to Boston 9/11 Truth, originally published at ratical.org.

Schotz is currently a member of the JFK Peace Speech Committee, whose goal is to make President Kennedy’s 1963 American University speech, titled “A Strategy of Peace,” known throughout the US. In May 2024, we were delighted to have him as a panelist at the Boston screening of IC911’s film Peace, War and 9/11.

Schotz takes a critical view of the need for more file releases related to JFK and 9/11 — and even a critical view of the need for further research of these events, which he cautions can feed the false idea that there is a lasting mystery surrounding them. The concept of the “false mystery” was originally developed by Schotz’s colleague and prominent JFK assassination scholar Vincent Salandria, whose writings about the concept are contained in the 2017 volume False Mystery.

While we at IC911 take a different view of the potential of further research to help achieve our goal of a 9/11 awakening and justice — even as we embrace Schotz and Salandria’s “false mystery” critique — we nonetheless think that Schotz’s piece provides some valuable insights and recommendations for the 9/11 truth movement.

– Ted Walter

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I want to thank Sue Serpa and Alfred Magaletta for this invitation to talk with Boston 9/11 Truth and to see if the struggles some of us have gone through with JFK’s assassination can be of help in your efforts. I think the JFK assassination is particularly relevant to your efforts, because in the JFK assassination and in 9/11 we have two crimes that were carried out by the US warfare state, crimes against peace and in the service of war.

Some highlights from the struggle against President Kennedy’s assassination

Let me begin by recounting some of my experiences in the struggle against the President’s assassination. In 1996 I self-published a book called History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, Public Denial, and the Murder of President Kennedy and the complete book is available free online.

I self-published it, because when I showed it to a couple of publishers, they responded that they weren’t sure this was what people would want to read. And when I told them, “I can absolutely assure you that this is not what people want to read,” they said, “Well publishing things people don’t want to read is not really our thing.”

I was able to write this book because I was part of a committee of correspondence that was organized by Vincent Salandria in which people shared various documents and analyses that they thought were relevant to understanding who had killed President Kennedy and why. Salandria was a Philadelphia lawyer who very early on proved without a shadow of doubt that there had been a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. He did this by taking the Warren Commission’s Report, and using only the Commission’s own evidence, he was able to demonstrate absolute proof of a conspiracy.

• The Warren Report Analysis of Shots, Trajectories, and Wounds: A Lawyer’s Dissenting View, The Legal Intelligencer, 2 Nov 1964
• A Philadelphia Lawyer Analyzes the Shots, Trajectories, and Wounds, Liberation  Jan 1965

Over the years I had tired of talking to people who pretended to want to know, but really didn’t want to. So I decided to write the book and tell anyone who said they were interested, “Here’s the book. It provides you with everything you need to know. Read it and come to your own conclusions.” And I stopped talking to people about the case.

Then one day about two years later my son, Sy, who was about 10 years old asked me, “Hey Dad, what’s all this stuff about the Warren Report?” I couldn’t very well tell him to read the book, so I told him, “Well when President Kennedy was killed the government investigated what happened and published a report called “The Warren Report.” And in the report they said that this bullet had gone into Kennedy’s back and came out his throat, and then had gone into Governor Connally’s back and out his chest and smashed through his wrist…” At which point Sy broke in and said, “Come on, Dad, They didn’t say that. That’s ridiculous! No one would believe that!”

So what we have is The Emperor’s New Clothes in real life. A 10-year-old can see that the Warren Report is ridiculous, but our entire political establishment acts as if the report has substance. No history department in any college or university can say, “The Warren Report is a fraud.” What is going on?

In his book, 1984, George Orwell speaks of something he calls “Crimestop.” Quoting Orwell:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

But this “Crimestop” or protective stupidity is greatly aided by a certain means of mind control, which goes on in our society through orchestrated debates. How does this work? It is important to understand that debates are always based on premises or assumptions which are either explicit or implicit and are not subject to debate. For instance if you are willing to participate in a debate as to whether the US will or won’t be able to bring democracy to Vietnam by prosecuting the Vietnam war, you have implicitly accepted the premise the US is trying to bring democracy to Vietnam. If you engage in a debate over whether there was or wasn’t a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, you are accepting the premise that there is uncertainty, that we aren’t sure if there was a conspiracy. You wouldn’t debate whether the president was assassinated, because you know this as a fact. If anyone doubted he had been assassinated, you would simply tell them to look at the film of the murder.

So the powers-that-be, through their mass media, fill our society with certain questions that they want the public to debate and disagree on. The powers-that-be don’t care which side of the debate you take as long as you buy into the debate. It is the premise underlying the debate that they want instilled in everyone.

And it turned out that this was the main means by which our society participated in the cover up concerning President Kennedy’s assassination. The main means of cover-up was not the story of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin, but the debate over this story. Did he do it or didn’t he? Was there a lone assassin or a conspiracy? Did the Warren Commission miss an assassin here or there? Did the Mafia or did the Cubans do it? All these questions are thrown out there by our media with the intention that the public agree to the premise that we don’t know for sure. You can have a “theory,” a belief, but you can’t say you know. You are a “conspiracy theorist,” if you don’t accept the Warren Report. All of these supposed questions and uncertainties are designed to convince people that all we have are beliefs, not knowledge. This has been going on for more than half a century. To this day we have people signing up to websites that are supposedly trying to throw significant light on the president’s assassination. I discussed this matter in a talk in 1998, “The Waters of Knowledge versus the Waters of Uncertainty: Mass Denial in the Assassination of President Kennedy.”

So let’s be clear. What I am saying is not a theory of a conspiracy. It was easy to establish from the beginning the fact of a conspiracy. Once having done that, you look at Oswald’s history, and it is clear that he was a low-level US intelligence agent.

Furthermore, we know from reports by historian Theodore H. White and the president’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, that there were communications between Washington and Air Force One and Washington and the cabinet plane on their flights back to Washington on the afternoon of the assassination. On the afternoon of the assassination Air Force One was informed Oswald was the assassin and there was no conspiracy. This not the activity of an innocent government.

There is no “conspiracy theory” here. We know President Kennedy was murdered by agents of our own government. He was murdered because he had made a radical turn against the Cold War, toward peaceful co-existence with the Soviet Union and toward a step-by-step process toward complete conventional and nuclear disarmament. This is highlighted in the president’s American University commencement address on June 10, 1963.

There is nothing to debate. There is no need for more investigations. No need for the release of more secret files.

The president of the United States was murdered in broad daylight. And the Congress of the United States was captured by “Crimestop.” All the major media were captured by “Crimestop.” Being captured by “Crimestop” in many instances they helped to cover up the crime without being aware they were doing so. And if you try to point this out to them, you are viewed as paranoid and crazy. This is the mental reality of the established institutions of our society for more than half a century. As distinct from this mental reality is the true reality. The true reality is that a criminal conspiracy by a militarist wing of our national security state prevented President Kennedy from moving our country onto the path of world peace, and it has never been called to account. Most people don’t want to face up to this and prefer protective stupidity.

Implications for the 9/11 truth movement

What light might this shed on your efforts? First of all I would say the fact that the buildings were blown up on 9/11 is absolutely clear. The 9/11 truth movement has proven this beyond any reasonable doubt in its investigations, through the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, in books such as those by David Ray Griffin, and in a film such as the documentary film on Building “Seven.” As far as I am concerned there is nothing to debate here. Anyone who looks at what your movement has produced and can’t see this obvious fact, such a person is operating with “Crimestop.” You don’t need more investigations. You don’t need more debates. You can just refer anyone who claims to want to know, to what you have already done.

So if we agree that there is no debating that the buildings were blown up, we next must ask who had the means and motive to rig these buildings with explosives? There is only one answer: a militarist element in the national security state in the heart of the US government.

For anyone who thinks such an idea is wild, let us recall something else from President Kennedy’s administration, Operation Northwoods. Operation Northwoods was developed by the US military. It was a plot to murder US citizens and blame it on Cuba in order to serve as a justification for a military invasion of Cuba and the overthrow of the Cuban government. US military officials presented the plan to President Kennedy asking for his approval. And it was not the only plan of its kind. There were others over the years involving elements of the CIA and the US military.

In other words, although President Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods out of hand, projects like Operation Northwoods have been standard operating procedure when it comes to the certain elements within the CIA and the US military. If this is the case, do you think Dick Cheney would have rejected “Project 9/11” when it was presented to him, Let’s remember that the neocon “Project for a New American Century,” a neocon project for US world domination, came into being after the collapse of the Soviet Union and explicitly stated that a “new Pearl Harbor” would be necessary to organize the US public for war and to carry out the project.

What are we to do?

So what do we do? Here I want to talk about the best book on President Kennedy’s assassination, James Douglass’, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.

This is the best book for two reasons. First, up until Douglass’ book, all fully truthful accounts of the assassination were marginalized. But Douglass was able to capture the truth in such a way that the truth began to make its way out of the margins of our society. Not only does Douglass truthfully detail what happened and why, he does something else quite extraordinary. In his book Douglass resurrects President Kennedy in the reader and challenges his reader to carry forward the struggle for which JFK died, the struggle for world peace.

While JFK was killed, his ideas about world peace and how to achieve it live on in his extraordinary American University speech of June 10, 1963. I think it is impossible to overstate the importance of this speech, and if you are not familiar with it, I highly recommend that you study it carefully. In this speech the president of the United States laid out a very sophisticated analysis of the principles of world peace and how it might gradually be achieved. He said explicitly that there is no simple key to the process, no grand solution. He said the struggle for world peace must be dynamic not static, changing with the times. Nevertheless I believe the principles he lays out are universal and eternal.

I am a member of the JFK Peace Speech Committee, the goal of which is to have this speech known throughout the nation. This is one thing we are doing to struggle against the assassination of the president. The committee has also developed a paper “Ten Principles in President Kennedy’s Vision of World Peace.”

What about the 9/11 movement? You have exposed the fact that there is a militarist wing of the US national security state that is not only a danger to the rest of the world, but also a great danger to the people of the United States as well. You have shown that the US Congress as well as the corporate mass media will not challenge the crimes of this militarist wing of the US national security state, if the crime is big enough. If a way is to be found to counter events such as 9/11 the people of the United States must seek out a way of defending themselves. Given the success of “Project 9/11” there is no reason to believe that it won’t be repeated. I must say that I am not well informed on the various activities of the 9/11 truth movement. One question I would pose is whether it is possible for the 9/11 truth movement to announce the formation a people’s investigative body that is independent of the government and the corporate media, that is prepared to investigate any attack on the United States that the powers-that-be want to use as a cause for the US going to war.

In my book, History Will Not Absolve Us, I suggested that JFK was “a de Klerk without an ANC.” I was referring to the roles of F.W. de Klerk, the president of South Africa, and the African National Congress in the dismantling of apartheid. President de Klerk was able to lead the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, because one way or the other the African National Congress with its Freedom Charter was organizing a mass movement to get rid of the apartheid regime, a mass movement that had both national and international support. The white power structure of South Africa was confronted with a choice—do it de Klerk’s way or do it the ANC’s way. Under those circumstances the white power structure agree to de Klerk’s plan.

President Kennedy was trying to move against the US warfare state, but he didn’t have an organized movement that was going to dismantle the US warfare state one way or the other. Just as the South Africans needed an African National Congress with its Freedom Charter organizing a mass movement to disassemble the oppressive system of apartheid, so the people of the United States need an American National Congress with a Freedom from Militarism Charter that will organize a mass movement to disassemble our warfare state. Could the 9/11 truth movement contribute to a convention of peace groups which aimed to found such an organization?

I would like to leave you with the words of A. Philip Randolph, the famous African American labor leader: “At the banquet table of nature there are no reserved seats. What you can’t take, you can’t have. And what you can’t hold, you can’t keep. And no one can take anything without organization.”

In a major interview this week with Tucker Carlson, Professor Jeffrey Sachs spelled out in unambiguous terms the nature and reality of the current seismic shifts occurring in the Middle East.

Back in 2018, in a remarkable MSNBC interview, Sachs wrong-footed his interviewers by revealing the US’s covert involvement in the war in Syria. In a debate framed around the question of whether the US should intervene in Syria, Sachs shocked the table of talking heads by informing them it was already intervening via a covert and completely illegal “regime change” operation, called Timber Sycamore, aimed at overthrowing the Syrian government. Finally, a little bit of truth about US policy in Syria had been brought to the attention of MSNBC’s viewers.

In this week’s interview with Tucker, with the world trying to make sense of the rapid collapse of the Syrian government and its takeover by the extremist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Sachs goes even further. He places events in Syria in the proper context of the post-9/11 “global war on terror” and its associated “regime change” war policy. Citing Wesley Clark’s famous 2007 claim on Democracy Now, Sachs informs Tucker of the US plan to overthrow seven countries in five years and identifies the targeted countries as Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finally, Iran. Others besides Clark have testified to the existence of such plans, and documented communications between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in which multiple “regime change” wars were discussed, have been in the public domain since 2016.

If there is one point of difference we have with Sachs, it is that he describes these “regime change” wars as “Netanyahu’s wars,” fought by the US “on behalf of Israel.” We regard them as being as much about US imperialism, or “primacy” — a concept referred to and decried by Sachs in the interview — as about Israeli primacy in the region (aka “Greater Israel”).

Notwithstanding Sachs’ take on the driving force behind these wars, the kind of clarity and context he provides is absolutely essential. The Syrian government did not fall just like that. It was destroyed as part of the “regime change” war policy that was implemented in the wake of 9/11 and that has led to massive suffering and death as the US-led campaign has moved through its target states: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Lebanon. Sachs did not mention Afghanistan in the list of “regime change” wars, but the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was undoubtedly such a war, toppling the Taliban government while Osama bin Laden and thousands of Al-Qaeda fighters, ostensibly the target of the US and its allies’ operations, were allowed safe passage into Pakistan. Thus, the “regime change” campaign really began in 2001.

The context offered by Sachs is also essential because it provides an opportunity for Tucker’s audience to start to make sense of the remarkable fact that the group now in charge in Syria and its leader, Mohammed al-Jolani, are designated as wanted terrorists by the US government. Jolani was previously a key player in the terror groups Al-Nusra front in Syria and, prior to that, Al-Qaeda in Iraq. A purported “global war on terror” against non-state group “Al-Qaeda” leads to the destruction of multiple countries and ends up placing an Al-Qaeda-linked group in charge of Syria. The contradictions are glaring, and obvious questions are begged: Was Al-Qaeda, in fact, always on “our side,” and what would be the implications of that for understanding what actually happened on 9/11?       

Later in the interview, the opportunity arises to provide an answer. Tucker asks Sachs if he expects classified documents on 9/11 to be released by the incoming Trump administration. Having just warned of how perilously close we are to nuclear war because of repeated US provocations — “we are trying to survive at a time of maximum global peril” — Sachs declares that massive disclosures have the power to change everything about our current course. “If it could only be, this would change so much,” Sachs exclaims.

The door is wide open at this point in the interview to address the proverbial elephant in the room: Was there an alliance between the US and Al-Qaeda, and was 9/11 actually a surprise attack on the US by Islamic terrorists? Tucker, unfortunately, makes a noticeable misstep at this point by suggesting that large-scale declassification might reveal why Al-Qaeda decided to attack the US. This falling back by Tucker takes the viewer straight back to a thesis, articulated by Noam Chomsky in 2001, that 9/11 was a case of “blowback,” prompted by decades of unjust and violent US foreign policy. This thesis has been particularly effective over the years at setting the boundaries of acceptable criticism and debate when it comes to 9/11.

Fortunately, Sachs takes his answer in a different direction and, instead, emphasizes the long history of covert CIA operations, only ever scrutinized once during the Church Committee in 1975. He points out that when that single instance of partial scrutiny occurred, it revealed “evil,” such as multiple assassination plots and the Project MKULTRA mind control program. He testifies to being aware of further “secretive operations” since then, to having experienced US-sponsored coups, and to the fact that the US has repeatedly gone to war on “false pretenses.” In a remarkable statement, which we at IC911 endorse unreservedly, Sachs tells Tucker:

Whether any of this is ever found, I don’t know. But if it is, it would change the course of America back to a true republic. Because what happened in this country is that we were overtaken by the security state, and we became a system of confidentiality and unaccountability. And it’s a big, massive machine, and a lot of people are paid to keep quiet or to salute whatever the military industrial complex or the intelligence agencies are doing without asking questions. Because when you have one-and-a-half trillion dollars a year spent on that, you’re a pretty big business. And it has affected the universities, the think tanks — of course, the Congress, which asks no questions of any serious kind. And so, major, major events of fundamental significance for our insecurity take place without any truth-telling at all.

He then notes that the most important thing Trump can do is to embark on a policy of wide-ranging declassification.

At this point it seems clear that the conversation is on the very cusp of acknowledging what is, for the mainstream bubble, a still unthinkable thought: that 9/11 itself was a self-inflicted wound, a so-called “false flag” or “manufactured war trigger.” But neither Sachs nor Tucker seem able to go to there. They fall at the last hurdle.

We are inclined to view this interview, now seen by over 30 million people on X, as a moment when a potentially revolutionary truth was almost delivered to a large swath of the American public. It is the truth that the deep state is out of control, as departing US President Eisenhower warned in 1961; that a string of assassinations, including the CIA’s murder of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, has determined the course of US history; and that all of America’s wars have been fought on lies. What Sachs left out is that 9/11, the very catalyst for the series of “regime change” wars he described, was no exception to the rule. Indeed, it was a brazen deception that America was attacked on 9/11 by a band of young Muslim men who remarkably succeeded in hijacking four airliners, evading US air defenses, and bringing down three skyscrapers in New York.

This truth, if known by enough of the American people soon enough, would indeed change the course of history. And, as Sachs hints, this may very well be necessary in order to avoid a catastrophic global conflict.

In the final analysis, people in positions of influence, as Sachs and Tucker undoubtedly are, need to go that extra mile and spell out the true nature of 9/11, what has happened to the world since, and what this means for our safety and security and that of future generations. The boy who cried out that the emperor had no clothes needed to actually say it, otherwise the spell could not be broken.

If Sachs and Tucker still need to find the requisite courage and knowledge, they could perhaps look to the life and work of the late Professor Graeme MacQueen, documented in our film Peace, War and 9/11.

For the truth to finally set us free, we need more from the likes of Sachs and Tucker. They and many others have done much in recent years to enhance public understanding and raise awareness. They must now find the courage within themselves to take that final step.

It is not just in Trump’s hands. Prominent voices amplified by the independent media of today also have the power, if properly harnessed, to change the course of history.

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Dr. Piers Robinson is research director of the International Center for 9/11 Justice. Ted Walter is executive director of the International Center for 9/11 Justice.

Last week Dr. Madhava Setty published an article on his Substack recapping IC911’s recent symposium, where he was one of four featured speakers. (The image above is the cover slide of his presentation.)

We encourage you to read the article, “Uniting the 9/11 Truth and Medical Freedom Movements,” and to watch his stimulating presentation at the symposium if you haven’t done so yet.

A few days later, Dr. Setty published another piece about 9/11, this one entitled “Got 30 seconds? Watch the video which explains everything.” We encourage you to check out that one as well!

A topic that is virtually never allowed to be addressed within the hallowed halls of academia is any suggestion that the official narrative of 9/11 may not be entirely true. Self-respecting professors will not only avoid this topic like the plague, but will also prohibit anyone from discussing it in their presence, as if fearing they could be stigmatized as a “conspiracy theorist” by association. Whenever I raised pesky questions about 9/11 with my ex-husband, a scientist and professor at a top-ranked university, his curt reply, “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories,” ended the conversation. Kind of a bizarre thing to say, coming from a scientist, isn’t it?

But if inquiring minds persist, what should a principled professor do? What would Johan Galtung do?

On February 17 this year, the visionary mediator, writer, researcher and father of Peace Studies, Johan Galtung, transitioned to the ancestors, prompting heartfelt accolades from many whose minds he ignited and lives he touched, including this one by my adopted Burmese brother, Zarni, who recently joined Galtung as another worthy nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Galtung’s consistent goal was positive peace, not just the absence of war but presence of dignity, uplift and self-determination for all people, where inevitable conflicts can be transformed creatively and nonviolently. Always practical, he issued these five commandments for conflict transformation:

1. Try to see a conflict from above: the actors, their goals, their pursuits, their clashes. Including you. You may need outside help.
2. Try to be evenhanded. Try to see yourself or the other side of yourself as clearly as you see the others. Again, you may need help.
3. The legitimacy test: be judgmental about goals and pursuits, ends and means, including your own. What is legitimate—legal, compatible with human rights, with basic human needs—what is not?
4. Look at all those legitimate goals and pursuits and put your joint creativity to work: what are the minimum changes needed for a compelling vision, with maximum accommodation of all legitimate goals?
5. Enact that vision. And if it does not work, back to No. 1. Try again. And again…and again… Perseverance is the key.

Schooled in mathematics, he loved enumerating his key points. Here are five more:

1. To improve, compete with yourself, not with others. Don’t contribute to a society of winners and losers.
2. Focus on the positive. The focus, positive or negative, is your choice.
3. Use dialogue for the joint search for sustainable solutions. Ask: what does the family, school, country, region look like that you want to be a part of? Was it better before? Where did it go wrong? What is the worst thing that has happened? The worst that can happen?
4. Be constructive, creative, concrete.
5. With conflict-hygiene we can go a long way. Doctors have shared knowledge about washing hands and brushing teeth as hygiene; the time is ripe for conflict-hygiene. Teaching people to take care of their own health has brought us further than advanced drugs and surgical procedures.

Galtung understood that the media play a major role in mitigating or exacerbating conflict, which is why he initiated TRANSCEND Media Service, a solutions-oriented peace journalism outlet offering information and analyses that are often marginalized or censored by the mainstream, but are crucial for understanding and addressing the root causes of today’s crises.

Which leads me back to taboo topics and 9/11. Galtung didn’t actually question the dominant narrative about 9/11 himself, but he was always open to listening to other points of view. He also firmly believed that a university should be an obvious setting for controversial topics to be publicly discussed.

At a 2011 TRANSCEND symposium on alternatives to NAFTA and how Canada, the US and Mexico could better promote positive peace, hosted by the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, some sidebar conversations during breaks between formal sessions turned to the topic of 9/11, perhaps because the tenth anniversary of that infamous day was approaching.

Galtung saw an opportunity to daylight the discussion and jumped on it, arranging for a panel presentation on 9/11 to be added, open not only to symposium participants but to the whole campus community and the general public. He even gave lopsided weight to the “taboo” dissident view, naming as panelists, along with himself, two 9/11 skeptics — the late acclaimed researcher Graeme MacQueen and myself.

Galtung in later years acknowledged that there was something fishy about the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7, but never fully examined the abundant evidence disproving the official story of who was behind 9/11. His analysis saw the events of the day as blowback by a handful of Middle Eastern perpetrators who enacted a public execution of the economic (World Trade Center) and military (Pentagon) nerve centers of the formidable US Empire that had wreaked such havoc on their home region. And he roundly condemned the US’ knee-jerk, bellicose response that caused many times more death and destruction while refusing any attempt to actually resolve underlying conflicts.

Graeme and I enumerated many problems with the official narrative, familiar to those in the 9/11 truth movement, that point to US government insiders’ complicity, including air defense failures; the President’s behavior; evidence for pre-planted explosives bringing down WTC 1, 2 and 7; incompetence of the alleged hijackers as pilots; confessions under torture; treatment of dissenters and whistleblowers; reluctance to form a 9/11 commission and more. We pointed out the “shock and awe” impact of events unfolding on live TV, designed to render the public vulnerable to believing whatever explanations those in authority might offer.

Graeme further elucidated the double-whammy of the false flag anthrax attacks, about which he wrote a whole book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy. He was a prolific 9/11 researcher motivated by love of humanity and a relentless search for truth. The online volume The Pentagon’s B Movie: Looking Closely at the September 11 Attacks includes a broad compendium of his writings on the topic.

All three of us — Galtung, Graeme and I — concurred that the US response to the 9/11 crimes — waging an unending “war on terror” aimed at solidifying US control in a unipolar world — was atrocious. We urged cooler heads to pay more attention to addressing the festering conflicts between the forces of empire and the rest of humanity.

The audience was attentive and the ensuing Q and A was lively. Many expressed appreciation at our airing the topic and welcoming all voices.

This piece pays homage to my friend and mentor, Professor Johan Galtung, who left us in February, as well as to my friend and mentor, Professor Graeme MacQueen, who left us one year ago.

To honor their legacy, I invite all of you who are involved in academia to open the floodgates on taboo topics, be it challenging orthodoxies on 9/11, Covid, Russia, or the Middle East. Don’t let yourselves be muzzled or intimidated, and join those courageous academics who have risked their careers to speak up. Honor the inherent purpose of institutions of higher learning, namely to expand our knowledge, consciousness and ways of looking at the world.

In order for humanity as a whole to reclaim the inordinate power and wealth currently held by those who constitute the super-rich, we must use the study of the devastating, and devastatingly fraudulent, crimes of 9/11 to shift global priorities from arming and harming to healing, while creating new realities based on equality, inclusion and solidarity.

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Dr. Atif Kubursi is a professor emeritus of economics at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. In 1982, he joined the United Nations Industrial Organization as Senior Development Officer. In 2006, he was appointed Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UN-ESCWA). He has published extensively in the areas of macroeconomics, economic development strategies, international trade, impact analysis, and regional planning.

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For over three months now the Israeli army has repeatedly attacked Palestinian civilian communities in both Gaza and the West Bank. Indeed, the U.N. has warned the international community about “a genocide” in the making.¹ The Palestinian death toll has likely reached over 20,000 with about 50,000 wounded and where 70% of the casualties are women and children. Many thousands more are feared lost in the rubble or beyond the reach of ambulances. As of now, over 60% of the housing infrastructure has been so far destroyed and so are scores of hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, cultural sites, businesses and UN offices. The bloodletting and destruction perpetrated by the IDF is mounting as the US has blocked even a UNSCR vote for a cease fire, and Israel is refusing to heed the UN General Assembly call for a cease fire where 153 countries have voted for the resolution and only 10 countries voted against it on December 11, 2023.

Though Israel and her supporters have framed the offense as a war against Hamas, many knowledgeable observers throughout the Middle East and beyond don’t accept this characterization. They believe other interests are behind the violence. A few other factors are believed to be at play here including oil and gas, particularly those in the eastern Mediterranean, the Ben Gurion’s Canal and the new trade route connecting India to Europe through Israel that the US is hoping to replace the Chinese Silk Road. These critical economic mega projects appear to be equally likely fundamental reasons behind this carnage. They are by no means the only objectives of the Israelis, but they constitute a credible set of reasons that explain the targeting the emptying of Gaza.

John Mearsheimer on December 12, 2013 has documented that the objective of the Israeli invasion of Gaza is to make it uninhabitable. He noted that the New York Times has reports that “it is part of normal Israeli discourse to call for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased,” or “destroyed.””² He even quoted one retired IDF general to have proclaimed that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,”³ Going even further, a minister in the Israeli government suggested dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza.⁴ These statements are not being made by isolated extremists, but by senior members of Israel’s government.

One wonders how would killing children and women increase the security of Israel and protect Israelis against future violent episodes. Why would starving Gazans and transferring large populations from one place into another ever build a better peaceful future for the Israelis? Why has Israel sought driving Gazans into Sinai? It is increasingly becoming apparent that pushing Gazans into Sinai and making Gaza unlivable are key Israeli objectives. But the real question is why will driving 2.2 million Gazans away from Gaza bring peace and security for Israel? If this is not the real objective from this transfer, then what are the real objectives of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza?  

Critics have raised questions about the real objectives of the campaign right from its outset and have deemed that the scale of destruction and murder of civilians to be inconsistent with the declared objectives; there is a nagging concern here that there are other undeclared objectives and future plans for Gaza.⁵ Surely establishing Israel as a pure Jewish state free from any other group has always been a critical objective of the Zionists. But this does not mean that there are no other objectives driving this violent campaign.

In what follows a few possible objectives and explanations are flagged out as alternative driving forces that could explain better why and what is happening in Gaza. There are a few serious economic projects on the drawing board and some actual new lucrative economic returns being currently reaped from the new discoveries of oil and gas and the new envisaged trade routes that are potentially driving the genocide and the objective of driving Gazans from where they are now. 

These objectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive of other declared military and political objectives such as destroying Hamas, eliminating its military and political leadership, ethnically cleansing Palestinians to create a pure Jewish state and grabbing more Palestinian land. The argument here is simple and direct; the economic returns of the “mega projects” that depend on emptying and controlling Gaza are certainly credible and perhaps as substantive as the declared objectives, if not more credible.

The Levant Basin

Among the most important new recent economic developments is the great discovery of large deposits of gas and oil in the Eastern Mediterranean. These deposits have gained notoriety and value as Russian gas and oil supplies became less available and accessible by Europe, particularly after Nord-Stream II was blown out last year as the Ukraine-Russian war raged in intensity. 

Map 1. Location of the three assessment units in the Levant Basin Province
in the Eastern Mediterranean

Source: USGS https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3014/pdf/FS10-3014.pdf. This map is not an official United Nations map, it is shown only for illustration purpose.

The Levant Basin Province encompasses approximately 83,000 square kilometers of the eastern Mediterranean area (see Map 1). The area is bounded to the east by the Levant Transform Zone bounded by Cyprus, to the north by the Tartus Fault in Syria, to the northwest by the Eratosthenes Seamount, to the west and southwest by the Nile Delta Cone Province boundary in Egypt, and to the south by the limit of compressional structures in the Sinai.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimated a mean (average) of 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and a mean of 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas in the Levant Basin Province.⁶ This makes this basin as one of the most important gas resources in the world. These resources do not coincide with political borders. Several defining characteristics of oil and gas separate them from other natural resources. First, they do not obey political borders and can therefore straddle many national borders. Second, they take several thousand years to accumulate underground such that the current owners are either not necessarily the true or only owners. Third, both of these resources can be stored at zero cost for decades, centuries and even millennia. Typically, their optimum exploitation depends, in part, on current interest rates and the expected price increase.  Fourth, they may be part of the global commons where efficiency and equity considerations require unitization and common exploitation, otherwise a vicious zero-sum game will emerge where one party is able to benefit at the expense of other parties. Fifth, both oil and gas are non-renewable resources, any exploitation of which reduces what is available for others or for future generations. This fact adds vertical, intergenerational, equity constraints to the horizontal, intra-generational, equity issues. Sixth, the gap between potential and realized values of oil and gas exploitation that is manifest in most “normal” and “stable” jurisdictions is further exacerbated in the OPT by the lack of clear demarcation of property rights. Seventh, gas is fugitive and can seep from reservoir into another which makes it difficult to contain in one place and to be exploited by one party.

The new discoveries of oil and gas in the Levant Basin to the tune of 122 trillion cubic ft. of gas at a net value of US$453 billion and 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil at a net value of about US$71 billion, offer an opportunity to distribute and share a total of US$524 billion among the different parties in addition to many intangible but substantive advantages of energy security and potential cooperation among old belligerents. It can also be, as is now the situation, a source of potential conflict if individual parties exploit these resources without due regard to the fair share of others.

With the escalation of energy prices triggered by the Ukraine-Russia war, the values of these deposits in the Levant basin have measurably increased. It is estimated that these deposits are now worth $2 trillion. Only Israel is currently exploiting these reserves. 

The experience of the US in dealing with the shared oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma is relevant here. These fields were unitized in order to raise the collective profits that any independent and individual exploitation could diminish. The superiority of unitization stemmed as an implication of the “Coase Theorem” which suggested that collective profits and higher efficiency necessitate the separation of utilization of a common resource from property rights.⁷ These fields could be unitized and their development could be undertaken on behalf of all parties whose property rights would be ascertained prior to exploitation. The economic principle of efficiency dictates this unitization, but this cannot be assured unless the parties agree to a fair sharing formula and whose transaction and monitoring costs are limited and low. The Palestinians have a major stake not only in the fields under their land but in all the common reserves in this Basin for no other reason than the fact that these resources are common and do not obey political boundaries.⁸

Geologists and natural resources economists have confirmed that the Occupied Palestinian Territory lies above sizable reservoirs of oil and natural gas wealth, in Area C of the occupied West Bank and the Mediterranean coast off the Gaza Strip. However, occupation continues to prevent Palestinians from developing their energy fields so as to exploit and benefit from such assets. As such, the Palestinian people have been denied the benefits of using this natural resource to finance socioeconomic development and meet their need for energy. The accumulated losses are estimated in the billions of dollars. The longer Israel prevents Palestinians from exploiting their own oil and natural gas reserves, the greater the opportunity costs and the greater the total costs of the occupation borne by Palestinians become.

Gaza’s Gas Fields and Meged Oil Field in the West Bank⁹

In November 1999, the PNA signed a twenty-five year contract for gas exploration with the British Gas Group (BG). Earlier that year BG discovered a large gas field, which it named Gaza Marine, at a distance of 17 to 21 nautical miles from the Gaza coast. In 2000, BG drilled two wells in the field and carried out feasibility studies with good results.

The Oslo Accords, specifically the 1994 Gaza-Jericho Agreement, confirmed by the 1995 ‘‘Oslo II’’ interim agreement had given the PNA maritime jurisdiction over its waters up to 20 nautical miles (23 statute miles) from the coast.¹⁰ This Agreement (Oslo II) allows fishing, recreational, and presumably, other economic activities such as drilling. Plans for the development of the gas fields did not go unchallenged. It was met with Israeli resistance in both business and political circles. Companies in the Israeli Yam Thetis consortium, which was set up to operate in adjacent Israeli gas fields and made its first discovery in 1999, petitioned the Israeli government to forbid BG from drilling off Gaza; the reason given was that the PNA is not sovereign government and therefore cannot benefit from the Law of the Sea Treaty.¹¹

Nevertheless, in July 2000 the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, granted BG security authorization to drill the first well, Marine-1, as part of a political (but not legally binding) recognition by Israel that the well was under PNA jurisdiction.¹² BG began drilling the second well, Marine-2, in November 2000, in order to assess the gas’s quantity and quality. 

On 27 September 2000, literally on the eve of the second intifada, the head of the PNA, President Arafat, accompanied by Palestinian (Lebanese) businessmen from Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) and the media, lit the flame proving the presence of gas at the BG offshore exploration platform.¹³  In a recoded speech Arafat declared that the gas was ‘‘a gift from God to us, to our people, to our children. This will provide a solid foundation for our economy, for establishing an independent state with holy Jerusalem as its capital.’’¹⁴ The president of BG asserted that the gas was of good quality and of sufficient quantity to satisfy Palestinian demand and provide for exports. The reserves were estimated at 1 trillion cubic feet (tcf).¹⁵ Barak’s authorization to drill the second well, and the successful gas strikes at both, seemed to promise a potential windfall for the Palestinian people, enhancing the viability of their economy as well as their quest for justice and sovereignty.

The contract signed in 1999 divided the ownership between the parties involved; giving BG 90 per cent of the license shares and the PNA 10 per cent until gas production would begin. Subsequently, the PNA’s share was slated to increase to 40 per cent, of which 30 per cent would have been held by the Consolidated Contractors Company developing the project. The PNA approved BG’s development plan, which included the construction of a pipeline linking the fields to Gaza at an estimated cost of $150 million, in July 2000.¹⁶

The PNA-BG-CCC agreement included field development and the construction of a gas pipeline.¹⁷ The BG   licence covers the entire Gaza offshore marine area, which is contiguous to several Israeli offshore gas facilities (See Maps 1, 2 & 3). It should be noted that 60 per cent of the gas reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to Palestine.¹⁸

Negotiations between BG, the PNA, and the Israeli government were launched in summer 2000 within the Oslo narrative of economic cooperation. Israel needed gas, and the PNA could offer it, so a deal was seen as constituting a good fit between Israeli energy need and Palestinian supply. The New York Times noted in September 2000, ‘‘Palestinians and Israelis will both profit if they can work together in a high-stakes partnership. They need each other for the efficient development of these offshore reserves.’’¹⁹ This failed to mention that efficiency is necessary but not sufficient for cooperation. Far more important are the terms of cooperation and the respective shares in the distribution of rent from the realized efficiencies. 

Thus in June 2000, BG proposed to supply gas from Egypt, Gaza, and Israel (the fields off Ashkelon) to the state-owned Israel Electric Corporation (IEC). At the same time, two other groups were also proposing long term supply contracts to Israel. One of these was Yam Thetis, a consortium of three Israeli companies and one U.S. firm (Samedan), which, as mentioned above, had opposed Israel’s granting drilling rights in Palestinian waters. The other was East Mediterranean Gas (EMG), a partnership between the Israeli firm, Merhav, the Egyptian National Oil Company, and an Egyptian businessman, which had been established to export Egyptian gas to Israel.²⁰

The IEC refused to buy gas from Gaza, declaring that it was more expensive than Egyptian gas. Subsequent Israeli media reports told a different story arguing that the main reason for the refusal was political and was on account of the Israel’s newly elected (as of spring 2001) Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, vetoing any purchase of Palestinian gas.²¹ Yet this veto was lifted at least partly in May 2002 at the urging of British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who believed that such projects could help advance a peace process severely strained by the intifada.²²

Sharon accepted to negotiate an agreement for the annual supply of 0.05 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of Palestinian gas for a period of ten to fifteen years.²³ But in summer 2003 he reversed his position once again and refused to allow funds to flow to the PNA claiming that they could be used to support “terrorism”. This latter explanation is also open to question given that Israel had already announced that Palestinian gas revenues would be transferred to a special account—the same account, consolidated under the PNA finance minister. This is the same account that was being used for international aid and tax clearance revenues remitted by Israel. 

Some political observers claimed that conditions were more favorable to the negotiations following the death of Arafat in November 2004. They based their claim on a presumed new climate that have emerged from a combination of developments that included the election of Mahmud Abbas as PNA president in January 2005; a PNA reform cycle satisfactory to the international community; and Ariel Sharon’s replacement by Ehud Olmert as Prime Minister of Israel in January 2006.

On 29 April 2007, the Israeli cabinet approved Olmert’s proposal to authorize renewed discussions with BG. In May, terms of a contract were officially revealed: Israel would purchase 0.05 tcf of Palestinian gas for $4 billion annually starting in 2009.²⁴ Under this plan, gas would be piped to Ashkelon for liquefaction in Israel and thence to supply the Israeli market and cover Gaza’s limited needs. This, it was argued, would generate mutual benefits as well as mutual dependency deemed to ‘‘foster a good atmosphere for peace.’’²⁵

But the political context once again changed. On 14 June 2007, under a new government; Gaza Strip split politically and administratively from the West Bank. The new government in Gaza declared that it would change the terms of the contract, particularly with regards to the Palestinian share (10 per cent). ‘‘If the contract is changed, the economic consequences on the Palestinian society would be tangible … The Palestinians would be depending on their resources rather than international aid,’’ it argued.²⁶ Nonetheless, negotiations between Israel and the PNA, which controls the West Bank, continued for a time, bypassing the governing authority in Gaza.

In September 2007, the then Israeli chief of staff strongly advised the Israeli government not to conclude an agreement with BG: ‘‘Clearly, Israel needs additional gas sources, while the Palestinian people sorely need new sources of revenue. However, with Gaza currently a radical Islamic stronghold, and the West Bank in danger of becoming the next one, Israel’s funneling a billion dollars into local or international bank accounts on behalf of the Palestinian Authority would be tantamount to Israel’s bankrolling terror against itself.’’²⁷

The Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 had several implications related to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves. In the wake of the operation, Palestinian gas fields were effectively brought under Israeli control with no regard to international law. The issue of sovereignty over Gaza’s gas fields is crucial. From a legal standpoint, the gas reserves belong to Palestine.

Subsequent to the death of Yasser Arafat, the separation of the West Bank and Gaza and the three Israeli military operations in Gaza, Israel established de facto control over Gaza’s offshore gas reserves. The BG has been dealing with the Tel Aviv government.²⁸  In turn, the de facto authority in Gaza has been bypassed in regards to exploration and development rights over the gas fields.

As mentioned above, in May 2007, the Israeli Cabinet approved a proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “to buy gas from the Palestinian Authority.” The proposed contract was for $4 billion, with profits in the order of $2 billion, of which one billion was to go the Palestinians. Tel Aviv, however, had different plans for sharing the revenues with Palestine. An Israeli team of negotiators was set up by the Israeli Cabinet to thrash out a deal with the BG Group, bypassing both the Hamas government and the PNA: “Israeli defense authorities want the Palestinians to be paid in goods and services and insist that no money go to the Hamas-controlled Government.” The effect was essentially to nullify the contract signed in 1999 between the BG and the Palestinian National Authority.²⁹

Under the proposed 2007 agreement with BG, Palestinian gas from Gaza’s offshore wells was to be channeled by an undersea pipeline to the Israeli seaport of Ashkelon, thereby transferring control over the sale of the natural gas to Israel. The deal fell through. The negotiations were suspended:  “Mossad Chief opposed the transaction on security grounds, that the proceeds would fund terror”.³⁰ 

Israeli actions in effect foreclosed the possibility that royalties be paid to the Palestinians. In December 2007, the BG withdrew from the negotiations with Israel and in January 2008 it closed its office in Israel. Plans for the Israeli military strike in Gaza were set in motion six months, or more, before it was carried out in December 2008.  According to Israeli military sources: “Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago [June or before June], even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.³¹

That very same month (June 2008), the Israeli authorities contacted British Gas, with a view to resuming crucial negotiations pertaining to the purchase of Gaza’s natural gas: “Both Ministry of Finance director general Yarom Ariav and Ministry of National Infrastructures director general Hezi Kugler agreed to inform BG of Israel’s wish to renew the talks. The sources added that BG has not yet officially responded to Israel’s request, but that company executives would probably come to Israel in a few weeks to hold talks with government officials.”³² 

The decision to speed up negotiations with the BG coincided, chronologically, as argued by Michel Choussodvsky (2006) with the planning for the military strike on Gaza initiated in June. It would appear that Israel was anxious to reach an agreement with the BG prior to the strike, which was already in an advanced planning stage.³³

Moreover, the Israeli government, with the knowledge that a military invasion was on the drawing board, conducted these negotiations with British Gas. Apparently, the Israeli government was also contemplating a new “post war” political-territorial arrangement for the Gaza strip. In fact, negotiations between British Gas and Israeli officials were ongoing in October 2008, 2-3 months prior to the commencement of the military strike on December 27^th, 2008.

In November 2008, the Israeli Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of National Infrastructures instructed the IEC to enter into negotiations with British Gas on the purchase of natural gas from the BG’s offshore concession in Gaza.³⁴ “Ministry of Finance director general Yarom Ariav and Ministry of National Infrastructures director general Hezi Kugler wrote to IEC CEO Amos Lasker recently, informing him of the government’s decision to allow negotiations to go forward, in line with the framework proposal it approved earlier this year. The IEC board, headed by Chairman Moti Friedman, approved the principles of the framework proposal a few weeks ago. The talks with BG will begin once the board approves the exemption from a tender.”³⁵ 

A new territorial arrangement emerged subsequent to the Israeli military operation in Gaza in December, 2008, including the militarization of the entire Gaza coastline and the confiscation of Palestinian gas fields under Israeli sovereignty over Gaza’s maritime areas. As such, the Gaza gas fields have been de facto integrated into Israel’s offshore installations in contravention of International Law, which are contiguous to those of the Gaza Strip. (See Maps 2 & 3).³⁶

Map 2. Israel and Areas of Palestinian Authority

Source: Michel Chossudovsky. War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza’s Offshore Gas Fields. Global Research, August 10, 2014. This map is not an official United Nations map, it is shown only for illustration purpose.

These various offshore installations are also linked up to Israel’s energy transport corridor, extending from the port of Eilat, which is an oil pipeline terminal, on the Red Sea to the seaport – pipeline terminal at Ashkelon, and northwards to Haifa, and potentially linking up through a proposed Israeli-Turkish pipeline with the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Ceyhan is the terminal of the Baku, Tblisi Ceyhan (BTC)  Trans Caspian pipeline. “What is envisaged is to link the BTC pipeline to the Trans-Israel Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, also known as Israel’s Tipline.”^{37 38}

Map 3. The Area Covered by the BG licence and the Gas Fields in Egypt and Lebanon

Source: Michel Chossudovsky. War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza’s Offshore Gas Fields. Global Research, August 10, 2014. This map is not an official United Nations map, it is shown only for illustration purpose.

It is now twenty five years (2023) since the drilling of Marine 1 and Marine 2. Since the PNA has not been able to exploit these fields, the accumulated losses are in the billions of dollars. Accordingly, the Palestinian people have been denied the benefits of using this natural resource to finance socioeconomic development and meet their need for energy over this entire period and counting.   

The disputes and tensions involving oil and natural gas cannot be separated from the political context that surrounds them, and the fact that the period when the natural gas discoveries were made coincided with a number of important political developments in the region. The political context intersects at many crucial junctures with the oil and natural gas resource developments and thus complicates an already complex political situation. Ignoring these complexities can only rob the analysis of many crucial determinants. 

The exploitation of Palestinian natural resources, including oil and natural gas, by the occupying Power imposes on the Palestinian people enormous costs that continue to escalate as the occupation remains in effect. This is not only contrary to international law, but also in violation of natural justice and moral law. To date, the real and opportunity costs of the occupation exclusively in the area of oil and natural gas have accumulated to tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars. 

The Ben Gurion Canal

Recently, thanks to the war, the idea of the Ben Gurion Canal project has been revived. A few articles in the media about it have appeared.³⁹ The canal would connect the Gulf of Aqaba (Eilat) in the Red Sea with the Mediterranean Sea and would pass through Israel and end in or near the Gaza Strip (Ashkelon). It has been touted as an Israeli alternative to the Suez Canal that was conceived in the 1960s after Nasser’s nationalization of Suez.

Actually, the first ideas about connecting the Red and Mediterranean seas appeared in the middle of the 19th century by the British who wanted to connect the three seas: Red, Dead and Mediterranean. But given that the Dead Sea is 430.5 meters below sea level; this idea was deemed not feasible.⁴⁰ The project was laid to rest but came to life following Nasser’s nationalization of Suez. The Americans became interested in the new alternative for several reasons as will be documented here. 

In July 1963, H. D. Maccabee of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, under contract to the US Department of Energy, wrote a memorandum exploring the possibility of using 520 underground nuclear explosions to help dig about 250 kilometers of canals through the Negev desert.⁴¹ The document was classified as secret until 1993. “Such a canal would be a strategically valuable alternative to the current Suez Canal and would probably greatly contribute to the economic development of the surrounding area,” the declassified document states.⁴²

The idea of the Ben Gurion Canal came to life again at the moment when the so-called Abrahamic Accords between Israel and UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan was announced. On October 20, 2020, the unthinkable happened – the Israeli state-owned company Europe Asia Pipeline Company (EAPC) and the Emirati pipeline company – MED-RED Land Bridge – signed an agreement on the use of the Eilat-Ashkelon oil pipeline to transport oil from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.⁴³

On April 2, 2021, Israel announced that work on the Ben Gurion Canal was expected to begin by June 2021. However, this did not happen given the status of Gaza as a Palestinian enclave ruled by Hamas. Many analysts interpret the current Israeli re-occupation of the Gaza Strip as something that many Israeli politicians have been waiting for in order to revive the old project.⁴⁴ The project was named after the first prime minister of Israel, the “founding father of the State of Israel”, David Ben-Gurion.

When the planned route is considered in more detail, it can be seen that the canal starts at the southern edge of the Gulf of Aqaba, from the port city of Eilat near the Israeli-Jordanian border and continues through the Arabah Valley for about 100 km between the Negev Mountains and the Jordanian highlands. It then turns west before the Dead Sea, continues through a valley in the Negev mountain range, and then turns north again to bypass the Gaza Strip and join the Mediterranean Sea in the Ashkelon region. This is not the shortest distance, however, nor is in the optimum geological structure away from the sandy terrain of Negev. Going into Gaza, guarantees the shortest distance advantage as well as the rocky terrain.  These advantages are being cited as crucial reasons for the current genocide Israel is perpetrating in Gaza.

The Suez Canal

The importance of the Suez Canal for the world economy cannot be exaggerated. The Suez Canal was opened in 1867 and made it possible to shorten the shipping route between Europe, Africa and Asia, by at least three weeks.⁴⁵ Instead of sailing around the southern coast of Africa (Cape of Good Hope), ships can use the Suez Canal as a faster and more economical route. The canal is crucial for transporting oil and gas from the Middle East region to European and Far Eastern markets and grain, industrial products and equipment from European and Far Eastern markets to the Middle East and North Africa. 

About 18,000 ships pass through Suez annually and transport 12% of world trade. Maritime transport through Suez plays a key role in the world economy as it supports international supply chains and stimulates economic growth in connected continents. The Suez Canal is Egypt’s most valuable economic project, which in the fiscal year 2022-23, achieved record revenues of an estimated $9.4 billion (US dollars) or about 2% of Egypt’s GDP.

The New Channel Characteristics

Although a third longer than the Suez Canal, the Ben-Gurion Canal would be more efficient because, in addition to being able to accommodate a larger number of ships, it would enable the simultaneous two-way navigation of large ships through the design of two canal arms. Unlike the Suez Canal, which is located along sandy shores, the Israeli canal would have rocky walls that require very little maintenance. Israel is planning to build small towns and tourist hubs, hotels, restaurants and cafes along the canal.

Each proposed branch of the canal would have a depth of 50 meters and a width of about 200 meters. It would be 10 meters deeper than Suez. Large ships with a length of 300 meters and a width of 110 meters, which is the current size of the world’s largest ships, could pass through the new canal.

The construction of the canal would take 5 years and involve 300,000 engineers and technicians from all over the world. The estimated cost of construction is put between $16 and $55 billion dollars. Israel should earn $6 billion dollars annually. Whoever controls the canal, and apparently it can only be Israel and its allies (primarily the USA and Great Britain), will have a huge influence on the international supply chains of oil, gas, grains, but also on world trade in general.⁴⁶

The Importance of the Gaza Strip for the Canal

The original plan for Ben Gurion Canal did not involve cutting through the Gaza Strip, but if Gaza were to be razed to the ground and the Palestinians displaced, a scenario that Israel is implementing now, it would help Israeli planners cut costs, shorten the route of the canal and ensure it is constructed within the rocky terrains of Gaza. But even if the canal would not end in the Gaza Strip itself, it is hard to believe that the Israelis would build it near a Palestinian territory such as Ashkelon. The canal’s distance of only a few tens of kilometers from the Gaza Strip would make it very vulnerable and subject to Palestinian rockets, howitzers, drones and other devices. That is why a basic prerequisite for the construction of the canal is the Israeli military control of the Gaza area. Given these basic reasons it is difficult to dismiss this Israeli objective as a serious factor in what is driving Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Israel has had strong motivations to dig its own canal between the Red and Mediterranean seas because it has been denied the use of the Suez Canal by Egypt on a number of occasions. Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the defeat of the Arab states in the First Israeli-Arab War of 1948-1949 until the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Straits of Tiran and the Suez Canal remained closed to Israeli shipping. The Suez Canal was closed in 1956-1957 due to the Second Israeli-Arab War and the nationalization of the canal, which was successfully carried out by President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Although the Suez Canal opened in 1957, Egypt continued to block Israeli ships because it did not recognize the State of Israel. During the ten years from 1957 to 1967, only one Israeli-flagged ship and four foreign-flagged ships arrived at the port of Eilat each month. Between 1967-1975 due to the Second, Third and Fourth Israeli-Arab wars as well as the consequent Arab oil embargo, Suez was closed again. Then Israel’s ability to trade with Africa and Asia (especially importing oil from the Persian Gulf) was severely hampered.

This situation was dramatically changed under President Sadat who signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979 and later on by President el Sisi yielding Egypt’s sovereignty and then reversing the decision over the two islands of the straits that control passage to the Gulf of Aqaba. In either case Israel has been guaranteed full passage through the straits. The question now for Egypt how would react to the Israeli plans to replace the Suez Canal. 

President el-Sisi may soon regret putting his trust in Israel and Western governments above the well-being of the two million Palestinians in Gaza. Egypt, apart from formally condemning the mass crimes committed by Israeli forces against the civilian Palestinian population, has done little to prevent Israeli wrongdoing. Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly expressed support for the idea of the canal along with the idea of building a high-speed railway from Eilat to Beersheba and other Israeli locations and a land bridge connecting Dubai to Israeli main cities.⁴⁷

The Economic Motives of the West for Creating an Alternative to the Suez Canal

The new Canal has the backing of the Western powers, the USA and the European Union. The Western motives to create alternatives to Suez are not much different than Israel’s. First, the channel is narrow and shallow and can become blocked very easily. In March 2021, the Suez Canal was blocked for six days due to the container ship Ever Given, which got stuck in the middle of the waterway due to strong gusts of wind and thus blocked traffic. The blockade of one of the world’s busiest trade routes has significantly slowed trade between Europe, Asia and the Middle East. At least 369 ships were waiting in line to pass through the canal with goods worth $9.6 billion. Ports, shippers, freight forwarders, factories, supermarkets, governments and other stakeholders have suffered huge losses. Technical problems; however, are less important than the geopolitical and strategic objectives, particularly those that have come up following the Ukraine-Russian war and tensions with China.

The West does not want to depend on a channel controlled by Egypt, with some ties to the Russian Federation and China, which the West consider them major security threats. Earlier this year, Egypt is slated to become a full member of BRICS from January 1st 2024. The West does not want Egypt directly, nor Russia and China indirectly, to have exclusive control over world trade.

The Silk Road and the New Indo-Saudi Trade Route to Bypass Iran

The Americans and their partners have treated with suspicion and disapproval the Chinese New Silk Road megaproject, in which Egypt has an important role. In 2014, Beijing and Cairo signed the “Strategic Partnership Agreement”, agreeing to cooperate in the fields of defense, technology, economy, the fight against terrorism and cybercrime. Actually, during Xi Jinping’s visit to Egypt in 2016, another 21 agreements were signed, including a contract for 15 billion dollars of Chinese investment in various projects. Infrastructure projects in Egyptian cities have attracted the special attention of Chinese investors. According to China’s ambassador to Cairo, Liao Liqiang, the New Silk Road is closely linked to Egypt’s Vision 2030 – the ambitious development plan launched by President el-Sisi. From 2017 to 2022, Chinese investment in Egypt increased by 317%. During the same period, US investment in Egypt decreased by 31%. Trade between the two countries is about 20 billion dollars.⁴⁸

The US has brought Saudi Arabia together with India, UAE and Israel to develop a trade route between the Arabian Gulf and South Asia, a rival to a similar project that involves Iran and China. US and her partners are planning a massive infrastructure deal that could reconfigure the landscape of trade in the Eurasia region, linking Middle Eastern countries by a network of railways and connecting to India through shipping lanes, bypassing Iran, Lebanon, Turkey in trade routes from Asia to Europe through Israel. 

Also included in this project is the United Arab Emirates and Europe where the plans for sweeping, multi-national ports, road bridges and rail links are being made that would potentially counter China’s growing influence through the Belt and Road global initiative.President Biden went to the G20 meetings in India recently where he pitched Washington as an alternative partner and investor in developing countries, especially in the Indo-Pacific region. According to The Brookings Institution, “China’s growing role in the Middle East is positioning the rising superpower in direct confrontation with shifting US interests in the domains of energy security, Israel, and Iran.”⁴⁹

The new project is seen as a part of the Biden administration’s mega deal that would have Saudi Arabia recognize Israel. The strategic concept of the “Indo-Abrahamic Alliance” has laid the framework for the formation of the I2U2 group, a grouping of India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.⁵⁰

The main objective from this deal for the US is the realization of the potential deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia after the administration of then-President Donald Trump reached similar agreements between Israel and Morocco, Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

The US is touting the advantages of the project which could reduce shipping times, costs, the use of diesel and make trade faster and cheaper, potentially making Iran redundant in the transit of goods in the region as the main lure for advancing this project. On the superficial level this project is touted as a trade creation project among the lured group of countries that the US is bringing together under its wings to counter the Chinese Silk Road project. In essence it is shaping up as a trade diversion project that is trying to position India as an alternative to China and to promote “normalizing” the relations of Israel with Saudi Arabia side stepping Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. The core objectives of the project are political that seek the deepening of the chasm between India and China, normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia and further isolating and even punishing Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey.   

On the other hand, Iran and China together with Russia are trying to undo this project with a measure of success. The Gaza war and the indiscriminate bombing and destruction used by Israel as well as the stalemate in the Ukraine-Russia war are undermining the Biden’s administration plans and desires. In an article last year in Tehran’s Time Iran has suggestedthat the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “despite its grave consequences for many countries, has presented Iran with a golden opportunity to realize the long-awaited goal of becoming the global transit hub it once was,” referring to the Silk Road, an ancient network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century that span over 6,400 kilometers (about 3976.78 mi). The war in Gaza has also made it difficult for Arab countries that normalized relations with Israel to pursue further normalization steps if not scrapping these agreements altogether. All this, of course, is a thorn in the side of American policymakers who are looking for alternative ways to block China and normalize Israeli-Arab relations.

Conclusion

The events on October 7, 2023 may have been a “surprise” to Israel’s political and military officials, it should not have been unexpected. Eruptions of violence have well-known causes; they are no secret. Human rights organizations (Israeli, Palestinian, American and international) and UN officials, parliamentarians and governments around the world have long warned that Israel’s long standing denial of freedom and equality for Palestinians would continue sparking cycles of violence.⁵¹

More than 2 million Palestinians are in Gaza, locked into an open-air prison. The international community has done nothing to stop Israel’s blockade or to stop the most recent extremist government’s annexation of Palestinian land and turning a blind eye to 600 events of settler violence against native Palestinian villages in the West Bank so far this year (2023). Israeli ministers made daily provocative statements about Al Aqsa mosque and Israeli soldiers attacked worshipers praying there. Generations of Palestinians, 80 percent of them refugees, have grown up in the teeming, impoverished Gaza Strip, one of the most crowded pieces of land on Earth. Since Israel besieged Gaza in 2007, most of them have never been allowed to leave the walled-in, military-guarded Strip, have never glimpsed the West Bank or Jerusalem, let alone 1948 Israel, and certainly not the wider world. Unemployment rates are astronomical and work permits are hard to find and even humanitarian and medical visits are denied.⁵² 

It is also not surprising that Israel would seek to make Gaza uninhabitable or unlivable space, the economic stakes in gas, the new Canal and the new trade route are too high not to attract Israeli interests and designs. Colonial exploitation of the colonized nations is well documented and no one should be surprised given the Israeli record of commandeering Palestinian resources and markets. The illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine has been very profitable for Israel so much so that it is not at all surprising to argue that this war is about gas, oil, trade routes and colonial economic advantages and exploitation.⁵³ It is calling into question international inaction and the neglect of a just solution to the Palestinian Question that are further alienating the peoples of the Middle East from their governments and from the complicit west. The guns may lay silent soon but the reverberations of this war will last for a long time to come.    

References

1. Yessina Funes.“This Genocide is about Oil.”Atmos. November 29, 2023. https://atmos.earth/this-genocide-is-about-oil/
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-war rhetoric.html.
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/israel-gaza-genocide-war.html, and https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/influential-israeli-national-security-leader-makes-the-case-for-genocide-in-gaza/,
4. https://www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-minister-says-nuking-gaza-an-option-pm-suspends-him-from-cabinet-meetings.
5. Yvonne Ridely. An alternative to the Suez Canal is central to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Middle East Monitor. November 5, 2023.
6. Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources of the Levant Basin Province, Eastern Mediterranean https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2010/3014/pdf/FS10-3014.pdf
7. R. H. Coase. 1960. The problem of social cost. Journal of Law and Economics.1:1-44. Ronald Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1991 for this theorem.
8. This fact also applies to Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Cyprus.
9. This section is taken from Atif Kubursi. 2019. “Occupation and the Economic Cost of the Unrealized Palestinian Oil and Gas Potential.” Geneva: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. 
10. Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no.2, (Winter 1996), Pp: 123-40.
11. Anais Antreasyan. Gas Finds in the Eastern Mediterranean: Gaza, Israel, and Other Conflicts. Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. XLII, no. 3 (Spring 2013). A good part of this section is extensively based on this article.
12. “Israel Waives Right to Drill Gas in Gesture to Palestinians on the Eve of the Summit.” Ma’ariv July 7, 2000. 
13. Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC) owned by Lebanon’s Sabbagh and Koury families.
14. November 27, 2000. Associated Press News Archive, http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2000/Arafat-Natural-Gas-Good-for-Economy/id-428946bb0fle30805e3cb3bdeb51e031.
15. http://www.bg-group.com/OurBusiness/WhereWeOperate/PagesAreasofPalestinianAuthority.aspx.
16. Lior Baron. “British Gas Meets PA on Deal with Israel.” Globes (Israel),  April 11, 2007.   
17. Middle East Economic Digest, Jan 5, 2001.
18. Lior Baron. “British Gas Meets PA on Deal with Israel.” Globes (Israel),  April 11, 2007.   
19. William Orme. New York Times September 15, 2000.  https://events.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/000915qodfriday.htm.
20. David Hayoun. “British Gas Offered IEC Lower Price than Egypt in 2000,” Globes (Israel) July 27, 2004.
21. David Hayoun. Ibid. 
22. Lior Greenbaum and David Hayoun. “British Gas. We won’t Develop Gaza Field Without Israeli Contracts.” May 23, 2002.
23. Ibid.,
24. Lior Baron. “British Gas Meets PA on Deal with Israel,” Globes (Israel). April 11, 2007.
25. Marian Houk. “Six Months of Negotiations May Open Way to Long Term Israeli Deal to Buy Gaza Gas.” Al-Mubadara May 26, 2007. 
26. Xinhua General News Service. “Hamas to Change British Gas Contract over Gaza Gas.” June 26, 2007. 
27. Lior Baron. “Yaalon: Cancel British Gas Deal. It Might Finance Terrorism.” Globes (Israel), September 21, 2007. 
28. Marian Houk. “Six Months of Negotiations May Open Way to Long Term Israeli Deal to Buy Gaza Gas.” Al-Mubadara May 26, 2007. 
29. Ibid.
30. Member of Knesset Gilad Erdan, Address to the Knesset on “The Intention of Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Purchase Gas from the Palestinians When Payment Will Serve Hamas,” March 1, 2006, quoted in Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Yaalon, “Does the Prospective Purchase of British Gas from Gaza’s Coastal Waters Threaten Israel’s National Security?”  Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, October, 2007. 
31. “Barak Ravid, Operation “Cast Lead”: Israeli Air Force strike followed months of planning, Haaretz, December 27, 2008.
32. Globes (Israel) online- Israel’s Business Arena, June 23, 2008.
33. Michel Chossudovsky. “The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil,” Global Research, July 23, 2006 and Felicity Arbuthnot, Israel: Gas, Oil and Trouble in the Levant. Global Research, December 30, 2013.
34. Globes (Israel), November 13, 2008.
35. Globes Nov. 13, 2008. 
36. Michel Chossudovsky. “The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil,” Global Research, July 23, 2006 and Felicity Arbuthnot, Israel: Gas, Oil and Trouble in the Levant. Global Research, December 30, 2013.
37. Michel Chossudovsky. “The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil,”  Global Research, July 23, 2006. And Michel Chossudovsky.War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza’s Offshore Gas Fields. Global Research, August 10, 2014
38. Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. The BTC pipeline is an oil pipeline, which opened in June 2005, and runs through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. Oil giant BP is the lead member of the BTC consortium.https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan_(BTC)_pipeline
39. Matija Seric. “The Ben Gurion Canal: Israel’s Revolutionary Alternative to Suez-Analysis.” Eurasia. November 29. 2023. https://www.eurasiareview.com/17112023-the-ben-gurion-canal-israels-potential-revolutionary-alternative-to-Suez-analysis. and Sargon, Naram (28 March 2021). “السفينة الانتحارية ومحاولة اغتيال قناة السويس .. الرومانسية الناصرية والحلم الساداتي” [The suicide ship and the Suez Canal assassination attempt … Nasserist romance and the Sadatian dream]. serjoonn.com. “Ship crisis revives Russian, Israeli talk of alternatives to Suez Canal”. The Arab Weekly. March 30, 2021. Retrieved November 9, 2023. 
40. Ibid., 
41. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare and also https://www.businessinsider.com/us-planned-suez-canal-alternative-israel-blast-with-nuclear-bombs-1960s-2021-3.
42. Ibid.,
43. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN275151/, but was later shut down by Israel and https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/israels-environment-ministry-blocks-oil-pipeline-deal-with-uae-2021-12-16/ 
44. Yvonne Ridely in an article in the Middle East Monitor and a few other analysts have raise the question that the Israelis knew about Hamas plans on October 7, 2023 but allowed them to happen in order to mount their re-occupation plan. Yvonne Ridely. An alternative to the Suez Canal is central to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Middle East Monitor. November 5, 2023.  
45. The distance from Mumbai, India to London around Africa cover 10,702 nautical miles, whereas it is only 6,279 nautical miles through the Suez Canal (sea-distances.org). 
46. Matija Seric. “The Ben Gurion Canal: Israel’s Revolutionary Alternative to Suez-Analysis.” Eurasia. November 29. 2023. https://www.eurasiareview.com/17112023-the-ben-gurion-canal-israels-potential- 
47. Matija Seric. Ibid. 
48. Matija Seric. Ibid. 
49. Ghazal Vaisi. “Belt and Road Initiative, China’s Great Game.” January 23, 2022. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202201234628
50. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202309083583
51. Phyllis Beenis. 2023. October 7 2023 and its aftermath. Unpublished
52. Phyllis Beenis. 2023. Ibid.
53. Several recent UNCTAD studies in 2014, 2015 and 2019 have documented this fact. United Nations General Assembly. Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. A/70/35, October 6, 2015 and United Nations General Assembly. (2016). Economic Costs of the Israeli Occupation for the Palestinian People. A/71/174, July 21, 2016.

Frequently articulated expressions derive from the Greek terms logos and eros, but who has heard of thumos? Why are the root words of logical reasoning and erotic love so familiar while one that drives us to principled action is virtually unknown?

In her introductory remarks to the first annual David Ray Griffin lecture on 3 December, 2023, writer and researcher Elizabeth Woodworth highlighted the concept of thumos, which she defined as the inability to tolerate injustice without taking action. She ascribed the term to the late David Ray Griffin, one of the premier intellectuals and courageous truth seekers of our time, whose death a year ago went wholly ignored by major media. She suggested that those who exert imperial control would prefer we not pay too much attention to thumos or those who exhibit it.

The machinations of empire were put on display by that day’s featured lecturer: Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, author of USA: The Ruthless Empire. Ganser asserted that wars and deception go hand in hand, that it’s not enough for the peace movement to be anti-war, it must also confront the lies that trigger wars, so that underlying root causes can be addressed nonviolently. He gave several examples, including the lies of the official 9/11 story that set the United States’ deadly war on terror in motion with merciless attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

For publicly pointing out in 2006 that World Trade Center Building 7 must have been brought down by controlled demolition that fateful day, thus indicating a major cover-up at minimum, Ganser had to either muzzle himself or leave his fledgling career in establishment academia. He resolutely chose the latter and to this day has not shied away from controversy in the pursuit of peace and justice. Ganser’s expression of thumos is evident in the three core values he strives to live by: courage, truth and love.

Frequent TMS contributor and former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine Richard Falk also participated in the David Ray Griffin lecture program and discussion. Falk has repeatedly documented and exposed Israeli apartheid, crimes against humanity and genocidal intent in defiance of international humanitarian law and with consistent backing by the US.

We are seeing extraordinary thumos in Palestinians who resist occupation and refuse to be driven from their homes in a second Nakba that is being unleashed on them with unparalleled ferocity primarily in Gaza but also in the West Bank. They deserve our support and solidarity in their struggle for survival, fairness and self-determination.

To those who cry out: ‘But what about Hamas’ brutal attack’? historian Ilan Pappé wisely asserts one can condemn the violent acts of 7 October without invalidating the justice of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Israel meanwhile uses this incident to absolve itself of all responsibility for past oppressions and provide a pretext for more atrocities. Pappé was forced out of an academic career in his native Israel many years ago for bravely speaking the truth.

Thumos exists in all of us, and although imperial powers go to great lengths to suppress it, gaslighting some and assassinating others like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., who embody it and spread it, they cannot extinguish it completely. So we must recognize it and re-kindle it wherever we can.

Recall the determination of the founding Swiss fathers who gathered in 1291 in the forest clearing of Rütli, swearing a solemn oath to free themselves from the tyranny of the Hapsburg Empire. Five hundred years later German poet, playwright and historian Friedrich Schiller beautifully and powerfully memorialized that story in Wilhelm Tell, the last play he wrote before his untimely death at age 46 at the dawn of the 19^th century following revolutionary fervor in the US and France. Irene Eckert has offered evidence to suggest Schiller was murdered for his subversive writings which reminded people of his day that empires are not invincible.

The Haitian revolution also broke out at that time. In 1791 Haitians convened their own version of Rütli, when enslaved people gathered in the forest of Bois Caiman in the north of what was still called Saint Domingue, determined to free themselves from slavery and colonialism, establishing the first free republic in the Western Hemisphere in 1804.

Imperial powers have been sabotaging the fulfillment of the Haitian revolution ever since, including US military interventions over the past hundred years. The US and its allies are currently propping up an illegitimate and repressive regime in Haiti, and this small island nation is home to one of the largest US embassies in the world.

I’ve been to Haiti several times since the 2004 US-backed coup d’état, learning from and supporting local grassroots movements there, and have experienced the fierce determination of Haitian people to continue the fight for their freedom and dignity.

I’m often asked, why does the US care so much about controlling Haiti? Sure, keeping Haitians poor and destitute ensures a steady supply of cheap sweatshop labor, and Haiti also has abundant mineral and oil resources. But the real threat to the US Empire is the proliferation of thumos, that deeply ingrained, spirited love of truth, justice and freedom that Haitians tasted over 200 years ago and refuse to give up.

The Haitian Kreyol term for thumos is gouté sel, or tasting salt, originating from the literacy campaigns of the early Lavalas movement of the 1980’s. In Haitian mythology zombies are the walking dead manipulated into passive submission, but when given a taste of salt, they awaken to the deeper stirrings of their truth and freedom-loving humanity. The watchword of the Lavalas movement in Haiti is tout moun se moun, or every person is a human being, recognizing we are all valued members of the human family, deserving of dignity and respect.

David Ray Griffin, Daniele Ganser, Richard Falk, Ilan Pappé, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., the founding Swiss fathers, Friedrich Schiller and the people of Haiti and Palestine are just a very small sample of people valiantly displaying the inability to tolerate injustice without taking action.

Recognize and nurture thumos wherever you can. Fan the fire in your own belly and give people around you that taste of salt. Support brave resisters, peacemakers and truth tellers. Join with them wherever you can. It’s not always easy and there are risks. There is strength in numbers, and as more and more speak out and take principled action together, the risks diminish while the potential benefit for the human family increases.

May you be fueled by courage, truth and love.

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This article was first published on Transcend Media Service on December 18, 2023.

Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (photographer unknown).

Note: Daniele Ganser will be the featured speaker at the First Annual David Ray Griffin Lecture on Sunday, December 3, where he will discuss this book and related current topics. The lecture is hosted by the International Center for 9/11 Justice and UK Column. More information is available here.

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If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .

If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .

If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .

. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.

USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book.

Ganser takes us on a tour of meticulously documented historical events that would be shocking to anyone committed to fairness and basic human decency. His intention is to strengthen the peace movement, which encompasses people all over the world — including in the US — who reject war as well as the lies and propaganda used to initiate and perpetuate wars. Throughout the book, he emphasizes three key pillars to the peace movement: the United Nations ban on any kind of violence or aggression, mindfulness (allowing one to recognize and see through war propaganda and lies), and viewing all people as members of the human family.

Before delving into history, Ganser sets the stage in Chapter 1, “The USA Poses the Greatest Threat to World Peace.” He backs up this assertion with a dizzying array of figures about how many countries the US has bombed since 1945 (at least 23), how many military bases it has in foreign countries (more than 700), the US world record on military spending (now approaching $1 trillion annually), the number of US troops abroad (over 200,000), and the US status as the only country to have deployed nuclear weapons. He shares results of a Gallup poll of 67,000 people in 65 countries that asked, “Which country poses the greatest threat to world peace today?” to which 24% named the US, while between 5% and 9% named one of six other countries and less than 5% named one of twelve other countries.

Chapter 2, “The USA Is an Oligarchy,” spotlights an ominous manifestation of empire: the astronomical disparities in wealth and income (540 billionaires vs. over 100 million living in poverty, not to mention impacts around the world) resulting from an oligarchy of super-rich running the empire and manipulating information flows with little meaningful influence by voters.

Chapters 3 and 4 describe key precursors to empire both before and after the new US republic established its independence from Britain in the late 18^th century — namely, the mass murder and displacement of Native Americans and the importation and exploitation of slave labor from Africa in much of the new nation.

Chapter 5 covers the overt launch of imperial actions in the mid and late 19^th century, when the US initiated wars based on lies and often false flag incidents to annex half of Mexico and conquer former Spanish colonies either as outright possessions (Puerto Rico and Guam) or with nominal autonomy but under tight US control (Cuba and the Philippines). The Kingdom of Hawaii was captured and annexed under threat of violence.

Chapter 6, devoted to World War I, elaborates on how, even prior to the US entering combat in 1917, US-based war profiteers flourished. J.P. Morgan & Co. was financing England and France, and US corporations sold arms to Europe. Hence, vested US interests in intentionally prolonging the war cost millions of avoidable deaths. War propaganda thrived, with Germans — who had done nothing to the US — being severely vilified. Hamburgers became “Liberty Steak” and sauerkraut “Liberty Cabbage.” (Remember how in 2003, when France hesitated to join in the war on Iraq, the US Senate cafeteria sold “Freedom Fries”?) The Espionage Act was passed to prosecute pacifists (including Eugene Debs) and deny free speech — and is still being used today to persecute Julian Assange for exposing US war crimes in Iraq.

Chapter 7 scrutinizes the US role in World War II, unravelling its carefully cultivated image of fighting honorably on the side of righteousness, and exposes both belligerent proclivities and mixed loyalties. Ganser reminds us that US companies were allowed to sell oil to Nazi Germany both before and well into the war. Without that fuel supply, the Nazi threat may have dissipated prior to some of the worst atrocities being committed. Again, the war was unnecessarily prolonged. 

Though officially allies of the Soviet Union, the US and Great Britain were pleased to see Hitler taking action against communist Russia, and they avoided opening a western front until mid-1944, when it looked like the Soviet Union (which lost 27 million citizens in World War II) would be the sole victor over the Nazis. Ganser unearthed this remarkable June 1941 quote by then-US Senator and later President Harry Truman: “If we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany. And that way let them kill as many as possible, although I certainly don’t want Hitler to win in the end.” Divide et impera — divide and conquer.

Truman, as US president, ordered the first and only deployment of nuclear weapons in history so far, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and terrorizing many more at a time when Japan was already prepared to surrender. Ganser documents how, in order to gain popular support for the US entering the war, it intentionally goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, providing the desired casus belli. The infamous December 7, 1941, attack was no surprise to President Franklin Roosevelt, who let it happen, sacrificing thousands of US servicemembers. As will become relevant to Chapter 12 on the September 11 attacks, Ganser notes that a Hollywood movie, “Pearl Harbor,” parroting the surprise attack myth, was released in May 2001, priming the public subliminally for what was to follow a few months later on September 11.

Chapter 8, “Covert Warfare,” tells us how the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Council were born in the post-war years. It includes a laundry list of how the US used them to perpetrate multiple coups d’état (Iran, Guatemala, Chile), assassinations (Lumumba in Congo, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Diem in Vietnam, Che Guevarra in Bolivia), assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961. President Kennedy ultimately became so outraged by these illegal operations that he fired CIA director Allan Dulles. 

Note that Ganser devoted an entire previous book, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, to numerous additional covert operations involving the US, via NATO and the CIA, that are not covered in the present volume. These include false flag assassinations, bombing of civilians (blamed on communists), and fixing elections in much of Western Europe throughout the Cold War.

Chapter 9 focuses on the Kennedy assassination, summarizing evidence exonerating Lee Harvey Oswald and implicating Allan Dulles in a conspiracy to commit this heinous murder. After District Attorney Jim Garrison of New Orleans brought much of the evidence to light in 1967, questioning the validity of the Warren Commission Report (authored by Dulles), the CIA created and widely publicized the notion of “conspiracy theorist” as a derogatory term for anyone who challenged the official narrative. Interestingly, Ganser notes that in 1979 the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations “saw a high probability that two men had shot Kennedy. . . . The Committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The Committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” This report was conveniently obscured by the media, and few are aware of it today.

Chapter 10, on the Vietnam War — which rapidly escalated after Kennedy’s murder — is a painful reminder to those readers who lived through it of the needless suffering inflicted on millions of Vietnamese and on tens of thousands of US soldiers and the peripheral damage to neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia. The latter two countries were bombed by the US without provocation, inciting the brutality of Khmer Rouge communists, whom the US could demonize to deflect from its own role in the bloodshed. Ganser reminds us of the false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 that was used to provoke a dramatic escalation of the war in Vietnam. While we were repeatedly warned of the propagandistic “domino theory,” there was in fact no chain reaction of neighboring countries turning communist after Vietnam prevailed and defeated the US in 1975 — hence all that death and destruction was in vain, other than benefitting war profiteers.

In Chapter 11 on the Iran-Contra Affair, Ganser elucidates another example of the US pitting two of its adversaries against each other when it supported Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s war against Iran while simultaneously and covertly selling weapons to Iran and secretly using the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan Contras, who supported the dictatorial Somoza regime. Ganser further shows how the CIA hypocritically engaged secretly in the cocaine trade to finance its covert operations.  How many people’s lives have been upended by those operations abroad and in drug-infested US cities?

In Chapters 12 and 13 on 9/11 and the War on Terror, respectively, the US empire ushers in the 21^st century with an overwhelming display of shock and awe. The first sub-heading is prescient: “A New Pearl Harbor” refers to a prophetic statement in the year 2000 by the neocon Project for a New American Century, noting that it would be difficult to get the US population to accept massive military spending and upgrades for fighting multiple wars simultaneously “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Ganser offers three ways of evaluating the events of September 11, 2001: (1) Surprise attack catching everyone in the US, including top leadership and intelligence services, completely off guard; (2) LIHOP (let it happen on purpose), implying foreknowledge by key players of what was going to happen but intentionally failing to stop it; and (3) MIHOP (made it happen on purpose), involving direct complicity of certain players within the US military-intelligence apparatus and their agents. He disproves (1) and points to (2) and (3) as much more plausible, leaning toward (3).

Abundant research has been conducted debunking the official 9/11 story that 19 Muslim hijackers and a few men in a cave in Afghanistan were solely responsible for the death and destruction that day, and Ganser includes references to much of it in his footnotes. Bringing us to the present day, the author of this review refers readers to the International Center for 9/11 Justice for an up-to-date collection of relevant 9/11 research.  

In this volume, Ganser touches on a handful of key anomalies: obvious fallacies of the official 9/11 Commission report authored by Philip Zelikow, a Bush administration insider; the utter failure of the multi-billion dollar US defense system to prevent an attack, including on its own heavily fortified headquarters; the millions in profits made by unnamed individuals who invested heavily in put options in the days before September 11, 2001 (betting that United and American airlines stocks would soon plummet), indicating specific foreknowledge; the clear evidence that World Trade Center Building 7 was destroyed later that day by controlled demolition and the refusal of US authorities or media to even entertain that possibility; and the evidence for the use of explosives in the destruction of the Twin Towers.

With the fall of the Soviet Union ten years before, the US empire had been searching for a new major enemy, and the crimes of 9/11 offered an “ideal” replacement: the never-ending and amorphous “War on Terror,” which could be and has been used to justify numerous military incursions and the proliferation of US bases anywhere “terrorists” are deemed to be lurking.  Ganser details the US role in illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq (initiated by spreading lies about alleged weapons of mass destruction), and Syria, all of which left millions dead in their wake, not to mention the horrendous abuses of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

On a note of optimism, Ganser points out how the blatant injustice of the wars in the Middle East — like the injustice of the Vietnam War before them — energized the peace movement in the US, prompting massive demonstrations and civil disobedience in opposition, indicating vast numbers who denounce war and empire and seek peaceful coexistence with all peoples. Beyond famous peace movement leaders like Jeannette Rankin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi, he highlights the role of everyday citizens affirming their commitment to all people as members of the human family and rejecting attempts by the elites to divide and conquer. He also points out how the rise of alternative media has played a role in allowing for dissemination of information that counters the mainstream lies and war propaganda. The explosion of the internet and social media can be a two-edged sword, however, as Ganser points out in Chapter 14, “The Digital Empire,” with consolidation and monopolization of technology and information flows by such digital giants as Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia. 

The 15^th and final chapter, called “The Fight for Eurasia,” details the US role in the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine — which was a catalyst for ensuing violence that has now escalated exponentially — as well as the relentless eastward expansion of NATO, contrary to US assurances in 1991 that this would not happen, which is another key causative factor in the havoc being wreaked there today. The original German edition was written two years prior to Russia’s 2022 “special military operation” in Ukraine. This new English edition does add a few paragraphs condemning Russia’s invasion as a violation of the UN Charter, while noting the provocations by NATO and Ukraine that fueled this proxy war between the US and Russia.

The book likewise does not include the up-to-the-minute status of the US relationship with China, but does note in the last chapter that China’s humiliation by the British Empire during the 19^th century Opium Wars has prompted caution in its current relations with the West. We learn about China’s 2013 announcement of the “New Silk Road” in the form of a massive transcontinental infrastructure project also known as the Belt and Road Initiative, now well underway, designed not as an imperial land and resource grab but rather to mutually benefit all participating nations, allowing them to respect each other’s sovereignty and reducing tensions among them.

In his conclusion, Ganser notes that “the peace movement must trust that a world without war is possible.” He is “convinced that a fundamental exit from the spiral of violence is possible. The decisive factor is whether we really want inner and outer peace. If this will is strong enough, we can orient ourselves according to the following three principles: the human family, the UN ban on violence, and mindfulness.” These three principles, he notes, can be applied to overcome polarization, profiteering, and propaganda. A key tool of empire is dividing people into those who are favored and those who are demonized, pitting them against each other while enabling elites to generate profits for the few from the fighting of the many. Mindfulness can help people “wake up and quicky realize that war and lies always go hand in hand.” Those who practice mindfulness can no longer be so easily deceived by psychological operations.

In the words of President John F. Kennedy, invoked by Ganser in the introduction to the book, “Our problems are man-made. Therefore, they can be solved by men.”

USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Daniele Ganser
Skyhorse Publishing, 2023
ISBN: 97815107768

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Marilyn Langlois is a volunteer community organizer and peace activist based in Richmond, California. She is a guest editorialist for TRANSCEND Media Service and a member of Daniele Ganser’s online peacemaker community. She serves on the board of the International Center for 9/11 Justice.

Image courtesy of Benjamin Zinevich.