In the past decade, Washington has killed, maimed, dislocated, and made widows and orphans millions of Muslims in six countries, all in the name of the “war on terror.” Washington’s attacks on the countries constitute naked aggression and impact primarily civilian populations and infrastructure and, thereby, constitute war crimes under law. Nazis were executed precisely for what Washington is doing today.
Moreover the wars and military attacks have cost American taxpayers in out-of-pocket and already-incurred future costs at least $4,000 billion dollars—one third of the accumulated public debt—resulting in a US deficit crisis that threatens the social safety net and the value of the US dollar and its reserve currency role while enriching beyond all previous history the military/security complex and its apologists.
Perhaps the highest cost of Washington’s “war on terror” has been paid by the US Constitution and civil liberties. Any US citizen that Washington accuses is deprived of all legal and constitutional rights. The Bush-Cheney-Obama regimes have overturned humanity’s greatest achievement—the accountability of government to law.
If we look around for the terror that the police state and a decade of war has allegedly protected us from, the terror is hard to find. Except for 9/11 itself, assuming we accept the government’s improbable conspiracy theory explanation, there have been no terror attacks on the US. Indeed, as RT pointed out on August 23, 2011, an investigative program at the University of California discovered that the domestic “terror plots” hyped in the media were plotted by FBI agents.
FBI undercover agents now number 15,000, ten times their number during the protests against the Vietnam War, when protesters were suspected of communist sympathies. As there apparently are no real terror plots for this huge workforce to uncover, the FBI justifies its budget, terror alerts, and invasive searches of American citizens by thinking up “terror plots” and finding some deranged individuals to ensnare. For example, the Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York City subway plot, and the plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago were all FBI brainchilds organized and managed by FBI agents.
RT reports that only three plots might have been independent of the FBI, but as none of the three worked, they obviously were not the work of such a professional terror organization as al-Qaeda is purported to be. The Times Square car bomb didn’t blow up, and apparently could not have.
The latest FBI sting ensnared a Boston man, Rezwan Ferdaus, who is accused of planning to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes packed with C-4 explosives. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz assured Americans that they were never in danger, because the FBI’s undercover agents were in control of the plot.
Ferdaus’ FBI-organized plot to blow up the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes has produced charges that he provided “material support to a terrorist organization” and plotted to destroy federal buildings—the most serious charge which carries 20 imprisoned years for each targeted building.
What is the terrorist organization that Ferdaus is serving? Surely not al-Qaeda, which allegedly outwitted all 16 US intelligence services, all intelligence services of America’s NATO and Israeli allies, NORAD, the National Security Council, Air Traffic Control, Dick Cheney, and US airport security four times in one hour on the same morning. Such a highly capable terror organization would not be involved in such nonsense as a plot to blow up the Pentagon with a model airplane.
As an American who was in public service for a number of years and who has always stood up for the Constitution, a patriot’s duty, I must hope that the question has already popped into readers’ minds why we are expected to believe that a tiny model airplane is capable of blowing up the Pentagon when a 757 airliner loaded with jet fuel was incapable of doing the job, merely making a hole not big enough for an airliner.
When I observe the gullibility of my fellow citizens at the absurd “terror plots” that the US government manufactures, it causes me to realize that fear is the most powerful weapon any government has for advancing an undeclared agenda. If Ferdaus is brought to trial, no doubt a jury will convict him of a plot to blow up the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes. Most likely he will be tortured or coerced into a plea bargain.
Apparently, Americans, or most of them, are so ruled by fear that they suffer no remorse from “their” government’s murder and dislocation of millions of innocent people. In the American mind, one billion “towel-heads” have been reduced to terrorists who deserve to be exterminated. The US is on its way to a holocaust that makes the terrors Jews faced from National Socialism into a mere precursor.
Think about this: Are not you amazed that after a decade (2.5 times the length of WW II) of killing Muslims and destroying families and their prospects in six countries, there are no real terrorist events in the US?
Think for a minute how easy terrorism would be in the US if there were any terrorists. Would an al-Qaeda terrorist from the organization that allegedly pulled off 9/11—the most humiliating defeat ever suffered by a Western power, much less “the world’s only superpower”—still in the face of all the screening be trying to hijack an airliner or to blow one up?
Surely not when there are so many totally soft targets. If America were really infected with a “terrorist threat,” a terrorist would merely get in the massive lines awaiting to clear airport “security” and set off his bomb. It would kill far more people than could be achieved by blowing up an airliner, and it would make it completely clear that “airport security” meant no one was safe.
It would be child’s play for terrorists to blow up electric sub-stations as no one is there, nothing but a chain link fence. It would be easy for terrorists to blow up shopping centers. It would be easy for terrorists to dump boxes of roofing nails on congested streets and freeways during rush hours, tying up main transportation arteries for days.
Before, dear reader, you accuse me of giving terrorists ideas, do you really think that these ideas would not already have occurred to terrorists capable of pulling off 9/11?
But nothing happens. So the FBI arrests a guy for planning to blow up America with a model airplane. It is really depressing how many Americans will believe this.
Consider also that American neoconservatives, who have orchestrated the “war on terror,” have no protection whatsoever and that the Secret Service protection of Bush and Cheney is minimal. If America really faced a terrorist threat, especially one so professional to have brought off 9/11, every neoconservative along with Bush and Cheney could be assassinated within one hour on one morning or one evening.
The fact that neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, William Kristol, Libby, Addington, et. al., live unprotected and free of fear is proof that America faces no terrorist threat.
Think now about the airliner shoe-bomb plot, the shampoo-bottled water plot, and the underwear-bomb plot. Experts, other than the whores hired by the US government, say that these plots are nonsensical. The “shoe bomb” and “underwear bomb” were colored fireworks powders incapable of blowing up a tin can. The liquid bomb, allegedly mixed up in an airliner toilet room, has been dismissed by experts as fantasy.
What is the purpose of these fake plots? And remember, all reports confirm that the “underwear bomber” was walked onto the airliner by an official, despite the fact that the “underwear bomber” had no passport. No investigation was ever conducted by the FBI, CIA, or anyone into why a passenger without a passport was allowed on an international flight.
The purpose of these make-believe plots is to raise the fear level and to create the opportunity for former Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff to make a fortune selling porno-scanners to the TSA.
The result of these hyped “terrorist plots” is that every American citizen, even those with high government positions and security clearances, cannot board a commercial airline flight without taking off his shoes, his jacket, his belt, submitting to a porno-scanner, or being sexually groped. Nothing could make it plainer that “airport security” cannot tell a Muslim terrorist from a gung-ho American patriot, a US Senator, a US Marine general, or a CIA operative.
If a passenger requires for health or other reasons quantities of liquids and creams beyond the limits imposed on toothpaste, shampoo, food, or medications, the passenger must obtain prior approval from TSA, which seldom works. One of America’s finest moments is the case, documented on YouTube, of a dying woman in a wheelchair, who requires special food, having her food thrown away by the gestapo TSA despite the written approval from the Transportation Safety Administration, her daughter arrested for protesting, and the dying woman in the wheelchair left alone in the airport.
This is Amerika today. These assaults on innocent citizens are justified by the mindless right-wing as “protecting us against terrorism,” a “threat” that all evidence shows is nonexistent.
No American is secure today. I am a former staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee. I required high security clearances as I had access to information pertaining to all US weapons programs. As chief economist of the House Budget Committee I had information pertaining to the US military and security budgets. As Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, I was provided every morning with the CIA’s briefing of the President as well as with endless security information.
When I left the Treasury, President Reagan appointed me to a super-secret committee to investigate the CIA’s assessment of Soviet capability. Afterwards, I was a consult to the Pentagon. I had every kind of security clearance.
Despite my record of highest security clearances and US government confidence in me, including confirmation by the US Senate in a presidential appointment, the airline police cannot tell me from a terrorist.
If I were into model airplanes or attending anti-war demonstrations, little doubt I, too, would be arrested.
After my public service in the last quarter of the 20th century, I experienced during the first decade of the 21st century all of America’s achievements, despite their blemishes, being erased. In their place was erected a monstrous desire for hegemony and highly concentrated wealth. Most of my friends and my fellow citizens in general are incapable of recognizing America’s transformation into a warmonger police state that has the worst income distribution of any developed country.
It is extraordinary that so many Americans, citizens of the world’s only superpower, actually believe that they are threatened by Muslim peoples who have no unity, no navy, no air force, no nuclear weapons, no missiles capable of reaching across the oceans.
Indeed, large percentages of these “threat populations,” especially among the young, are enamored of the sexual freedom that exists in America. Even the Iranian dupes of the CIA-orchestrated “Green Revolution” have forgotten Washington’s overthrow of their elected government in the 1950s. Despite America’s decade-long abusive military actions against Muslim peoples, many Muslims still look to America for their salvation.
Their “leaders” are simply bought off with large sums of money.
With the “terrorist threat” and al-Qaeda deflated with President Obama’s alleged assassination of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was left unprotected and unarmed by his “world-wide terrorist organization,” Washington has come up with a new bogeyman—the Haqqanis.
According to John Glaser and anonymous CIA officials, US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mike Mullen “exaggerated” the case against the Haqqani insurgent group when he claimed, setting up a US invasion of Pakistan, that the Haqqanis were an operating arm of the Pakistan government’s secret service, the ISI. Adm. Mullen is now running from his “exaggeration,” a euphemism for a lie. His aid Captain John Kirby said that Mullen’s “accusations were designed to influence the Pakistanis to crack down on the Haqqani Network.” In other words, the Pakistanis should kill more of their own people to save the Americans the trouble.
If you don’t know what the Haqqani Network is, don’t be surprised. You never heard of al-Qaeda prior to 9/11. The US government creates whatever new bogeymen and incidents are necessary to further the neoconservative agenda of world hegemony and higher profits for the armaments industry.
For ten years, the “superpower” American population has sat there, being terrified by the government’s lies. While Americans sit in fear of non-existent “terrorists” sucking their thumbs, millions of people in six countries have had their lives destroyed. As far as any evidence exists, the vast majority of Americans are unperturbed by the wanton murder of others in countries that they are incapable of locating on maps.
Truly, Amerika is a light unto the world, an example for all.
The first I heard of al-Qaeda was in their failed attack in Yemen back when Bush41 was about to hand over the reins to Clinton (December 1992), and that was quite some time ago. And did you honestly say bin Laden’s “alleged” assassination? Are you drunk?
Even from someone from the Reagan years, that is pretty crazy. Still, you are spot on with the point that there has been no true attacks since 9/11, at least over here, and we have killed tens of thousands of innocent people (and some guilty ones) which will only come back to haunt us – again.
There’s no proof that anyone assassinated Osama bin Laden, Bobbo.
Your “memory” of al Qaeda is as much a fabrication as what PCR recounts above. You’re lying, to bolster your own point. Your memory is flawed.
Liars get away with much in America 2011, so you probably feel emboldened in your mendacious rhetoric. The real question is, how willing are you to doubt what you’re told, or what you believe?
From where I sit, the answer is: completely unwilling.
Hey Bob ‘effing’, i would level a similar question to you… are you on DXM? are you robo-tripping? the Reason i ask such a pointed question is that to not insult your intelligence i would have to assume you were on a high level of diss associative anesthetic drugs to believe our extremely untrustworthy government’s word that ‘seal team 6’ ‘assassinated’ bin laden in a stealth maneuver with absolutely no proof whatsoever (not a shred). I’ll just comfortably assume for now you were on so much psychedelic chemicals that your brain literally shut down.
With unemployment at 15%, I know that if I lose my job as a government agent, I will not be able to find any real job, as I have no skills, no mind of my own to think and research. I take orders, like a dog, and that’s all I am capable of doing. My boss wants us to find suckers, and lure them into attempting to carry out our terrorist plots, so we can thwart those plots, and be praised as heroes and rewarded with more funds for our agency, guaranteeing my position at this agency for at least another decade.
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What does America want to do with the 15% unemployment rate? How are they going to resolve this serious issue?
I believe that when it comes to money and politics nothing happens by chance. And what could be more about money and politics than war.
It would appear therefore that the global war on terror (a war without limits) was designed to bring about a third world war. After all what is the point of having something if you cannot use it and so it is with the American war machine on which trillions have been spent.
The name is also partly apt because the war on terror is already spreading hatred, fear and terror around the world for I gather that the scene is already being set for Syria to be the next country to be attacked
I stopped reading your BS after your; we’ve killed innocent people drivel …..do you mention anywhere in your babbling that these terrorist cowards hide amongst and shield themselves with the innocent?
William is the real coward. He’s unable to face reality, thus he takes it on the messenger.
Question and answer time.
Question:
Is the War On Terror a Hoax?
Answer:
Yes
Really great article. Our country is now known for pointless wars against “terrorists” more than anything else. It’s a very sad time to be an american.
I am sure Mr Roberts wrote this excellent and timely article in the hope that it might achieve something. But the extraordinary thing is we have been conditioned to accept war and the lies that go with it as a normal fact of life. How else could the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia(?)and Libya be allowed to continue for so long without even a whimper from those who have the power to stop it.
It is alsolutely certain that if this madness is allowed to continue we will sleepwalk into another world war because of the chaos created by those who deny us our absolute right to the truth, life and ownership of property. If these three simple thing were guaranteed, as they were for thousands of years, then these wars would not be taking place.
its always has been a hoax what about had we tried a war on intolerance a war on bigotry a war on poverty a war on drug and alcohol abuse a war to protect women and children from abuse a war t6o improve the lives of many rather than make them worse a war to remove the WMDS mainly produced by the US a war to let consenting adults marry whoever they love a war to keep the separation of church and state and definately a war to compell aspiring politicians to take an IQ test and declare their finances
Americans need to wake up and see what is being done in their name.
Ordinary Germans took a long time to wake up and fully appreciate what their Nazi leaders were doing in their name. They trusted their leaders, lapped up Goebbels’ propaganda megaphoned through their media and embraced patriotism. They kept their heads down so they didn’t really see what was going on – until it was too late and they became objects of anger and scorn from the rest of the world.
Many white South Africans (not all) similarly kept their heads down and bought the propaganda broadcast by their media. They turned a blind eye to the torture and waterboarding in apartheid prisons, even as the rest of the world begged them to wake up, face reality and restore human rights.
Americans need to decide at what point they should take a long, objective look at what they are doing and how their policies (war, remote controlled assassination, water-boarding, lies and crude anti-Semitism against semitic muslim people) are increasingly being perceived by good people around the world.
Trust, once lost, is hard to win back.
People don’t like being lied to. Once lied to, people tend to turn away. You can’t always get them back.
Mr Roberts or can I say Paul,
I read your articles since some time and I am always pleased, also surprised that someone who has served Reagan administration has the kind of ideas you have.
I like your view about Europe: Germany being occupied since 60 years by the US, Sarkozy being put in power by the US, etc…
Your opinion in this article regarding terrorism and 9/11 is really frightening, since it is based exactly on the same reasoning I made. It is not difficult to understand that a terrorist act in the US can be easily realized without no complicated means and without any financial support.
Therefore, I also feel very connected in your dissapointment that the propaganda works, that friends and nearby fellows do not seem to get the point and on the contrary consider one as not realistic when certain subjects come along side.
Angry about main stream media manipulation I made some cartoons regarding the Libyan war, which might please you, as well as some of your readers:
http://www.bloggen.be/patrodtartd/
Keep going on with your ideas!
Best regards,
Patrodtartd
I agree with Dr Roberts that the War on Terror has been a great hoax. But the War of Terror is a reality, the reality of American imperialism and its incessant crimes against humanity. The proof lies in the death and destruction of millions of people and there is no end in sight.
As far as America and American are concerned, we can safely say that the warmongers of the military-industrial complex have reaped huge dividends but ordinary Americans have lost and are losing everyday.
Is Afghanistan better off today than it was on September 10, 2001? By many measures, it is. The same holds true for Iraq. It is easy to forget the oppressive dictatorships that ruled both nations prior to the intervention of the United States and its allies.
Somalia cannot be laid at the feet of the War on Terror. The country became dysfunctional long before the War, George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Libya was also a dictatorship, and provided assistance to terrorists before this year. Mr. Robert’s former boss, Ronald Reagan, attacked the country. It remains to be seen what the future holds for the Libyans but they do have an opportunity they did not have.
Yemen is another mess that cannot be blamed on the immediate past. It has been in a state of revolt of one sort or another for decades, since the forced assimilation of Aden. If you want to blame anyone, a great case can be made for the Saudis.
Indeed, one could make an argument that Mr. Roberts is, in part, responsible for many of these messes given his roles within government over the years. Much of the Patriot Act, for example, is based on actions that Treasury investigators had been legally able to take in civil cases for decades.
And, as for the Haqqani Network. This family was a friend of the United States until they failed to receive the graft and power that they believed they were due. So they turned coat and became an enemy. It is not news nor is it invented. Mr. Roberts should know all this because he was “in the know” as Reagan supported the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance.
“Is Afghanistan better off today than it was on September 10, 2001? By many measures, it is. The same holds true for Iraq. …. Libya was also a dictatorship, and provided assistance to terrorists before this year.”
Is this “better off” only true for Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya or can the rest of the world expect regime change for their own good?
Chuck – you need to quantify exactly why you think Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries are better off since American boots landed on their soil and Predator drones started flying over their sovereign territories. Many an Iraqi and Afghan mother who’s lost a child would not agree with you.
The British Imperialists, shouldering the White Man’s Burden, also proclaimed the colonies were better off after the British arrived to ‘sort the brown people out’.
Rather than justify Americans spreading ‘democracy’ (ie market capitalism and America-centric resource control) via its military machine, you perhaps need to pay attention to the growing perception around the world that America is on a hiding to nowhere.
Good Americans need to pause and take stock, before their ‘good will’ is lost forever. Good will is dependent on perceptions, as we all know.
The perception in many corners of the world is that the ‘war on terror’ is a fraudulent concept. People also perceive that Americans are in thrall to a corporate media that offers them a very narrow window on the world.
Paul Craig Roberts is brave to take the bull by the horns on this subject and to call it out exactly as he sees it. He reminds many of us of the true spirit of America that’s been overshadowed for the last decade.
Look end of the day if america and Uk never prodded their finger in any/EVERY other country in the beginning, then the world CERTAINLY wouldnt be in the mess its in today
they need to stop policing countries and should help and look after american citizens…. look who put these dictators and puppets of rulers in charge in the first place….take a guess!!!
Its a very nice post, very informative and educative. Thanks for sharing.