America's Betrayal Confirmed. Elias Davidsson
(7) Building up Osama bin Laden as a global threat
The promotion of an Islamic terrorist threat began massively in 1998 with the building of the icon of villain Osama bin Laden, who had relocated from Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996. Since 1998 he was presented by Western media as a serious international threat, whose opinions were worth analyzing and commenting upon, as if he were a leader of a super-power. Eminent journalists were sent to interview him at his retreat in Afghanistan. Describing him as a threat to Western interests bore no relation to reality, since he had no army, planes, missiles, tanks, submarines, banks, or mass media. He relied on Western technology for his communications with the outside world and on Western media to promote his views. Apart from his verbal exhortations, he had nothing with which to threaten any state, let alone the national security of the United States. By the time 9/11 occurred, the public mind had already been prepared to regard him as the most probable suspect.
As 9/11 approached, the alleged bin Laden threats became increasingly shrill, as if to prepare the American public for the coming attack. The press agency UPI, for example, disseminated the following scare dispatch to its subscribers on 6 April 2001 (byline Richard Sale):
The threat of attack by terrorists linked to Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden Friday caused the United States to close three of its embassies in South America, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The embassies closed were in the capitals of Uruguay, Paraguay and Ecuador. A U.S. intelligence official said, “It's best to take the worst case scenario.”
Another U.S. government official said; “There was a certain level of huffing and puffing” being intercepted between cells of known and suspected bin Laden operatives, and U.S. security specialists had the “feeling we should take certain precautions.”
According to a source, the tip on bin Laden came from Argentine intelligence. “Of all the groups in the area, Argentina is most dedicated to fighting terrorism,” he said.
The tri-border area between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil has been described as a bin Laden terrorist “nerve center,” according to one expert U.S. government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It's a tremendous network, and there were indications it was being activated for something specific,” he said.
Bin Laden operatives had arrived “over a period of time” apparently for the purpose of carrying out special missions. Local Shiite Muslims put up the operatives in their homes, helped them move around, furnished them with maps and diagrams of various target areas, he said.
In the three years leading to 9/11, I found Osama bin Laden mentioned in more than 600 English-language news reports every month on the average. According to one study, CBS and NBC News published significantly more stories mentioning Bin Laden in 2000 than those mentioning Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair and Germany’s Prime Minister Gerhard Schröder. Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden was mentioned more often in American media than the U.S. President himself.
Yet, after 9/11 the U.S. leadership lost interest in the man. At a press conference held on 19 September 2001, President George W. Bush was asked: “Do you to your mind have irrefutable evidence that links al Qaeda, and specifically Osama bin Laden to these attacks?” He answered: “When we take action, we will take action because we believe -- because we know we'll be on the right. And I want to remind people that there have been terrorist activities on America in the past, as well [...] This is a war not against a specific individual, nor will it be a war against solely one organization.” In President Bush’s Address to the Nation of 7 October 2001, he did not even mention Bin Laden or any nexus between Afghanistan and 9/11. In President Bush’s Press Conference of 13 March 2002, a journalist asked: “Mr. President, in your speeches now you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that?” The President’s answer: “Deep in my heart I know the man is on the run, if he’s alive at all. Who knows if he’s hiding in some cave or not; we haven’t heard from him in a long time [...] So I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you.”{62}
As can be ascertained on the website of the FBI, Osama bin Laden was neither accused nor charged by the U.S. authorities for 9/11. He finished serving his role as the poster-boy of international terrorism.
(8) The need for a traumatic event
In order to unite the population behind a pro-active foreign policy, which the United States sought to pursue, it was not sufficient for U.S. leaders to promote a threat that does not bite: a real, traumatic and catalyzing event was necessary. This necessity was recognized early on by leading U.S. strategists, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Brzezinski, foreign policy advisor to several U.S. presidents, recognized in the 1990s the difficulty for a democratic regime to mobilize its population behind imperial policies except after a sudden and shocking event. In his often-quoted book The Grand Chessboard, he wrote:
Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilization…[T]he pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.{63} The public supported America’s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.{64}
The authors of a report titled “Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century,” published in September 2000 by the “Project For a New American Century (PNAC),“ also referred to Pearl Harbor as a “catastrophic and catalyzing event,” necessary to accelerate the process of transforming U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs.”{65}
In the 1950s the CIA conducted psychological experiments on unsuspecting citizens designed to control their behavior through exotic drugs, electro-shock, radiation and other means.{66} Eighty institutions were involved in the program, dubbed MKUltra, including forty-four universities and twelve hospitals.”{67} The effect of these experiments was to cause among the subjects a state of dis- orientation, regression and dependency upon the examiner. A general shock doctrine was later developed by economist Milton Friedman and applied on an entire nation, Chile, in 1973. The economic shock doctrine included a drastic reduction of living standards accompanied by overt and ruthless political repression against anyone resisting this shock doctrine. The extent and brutality of this repression led to their designation as crimes against humanity. The method was later copied to other countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Indonesia, in order to serve corporate interests. In Indonesia the killings reached genocidal proportions.
In her book called The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein correctly highlights the similarity of the shock doctrine, as applied to entire nations, to the process of torture. The shock doctrine achieves “on a mass scale what torture does one on one in the interrogation cell. The clearest example was the shock of 11 September, which, for millions of people [...] opened up a period of deep disorientation and regression that the Bush administration expertly exploited.”{68} Although the author claimed in her book, published in 2007, that the corporate world “does not deliberately scheme to create the cataclysms on which it feeds,”{69} the facts filling her book provide evidence to the contrary, namely that certain shocks are indeed planned before they occur, particularly where they serve foreseeable benefits.
Philip D. Zelikow, who later became the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, and his co-authors Ash Carter and John M. Deutsch, designated catastrophic terrorism in a paper they published in 1998 as the “new danger” facing America. They also spelled out its implications and consequences, as if they already had it all planned:
Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after. The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens,