Village Voice, September 4-10, 2002

Americans cherish nothing more than a good conspiracy thriller — especially when the leader of the free world is fingered as the prime suspect in the crime. But to read and believe that our own bumbling Dubya conspired with others to attack his own country on 9-11 is, for most Americans, a lot to swallow. As throngs of conspiracy theorists race to get books into stores by the 9-11 anniversary, the writer stealing much of the attention this summer is leftist Frenchman Thierry Meyssan, whose September 11, 2001: The Big Lie makes the far-fetched contentions that the jetliners were steered into the World Trade Center by remote control as part of a secret U.S. military coup, and that the Pentagon was struck not by plane but by a U.S. missile. The French creamed over Meyssan’s fanciful report, putting the book onto their bestseller lists for weeks.

One of the more persuasive strategists, at least on this side of the Atlantic, is Len Bracken. By day, he’s a humble copy editor in Washington; by night, a novelist, biographer, amateur historian, translator, and underground essayist treasured in conspiracy circles, a man who never shows his face to his readers. His latest endeavor, Shadow Government (adventuresunlimitedpress.com), is a poorly titled but highly illuminating, no-nonsense piece of seditious history — that is, if you’re willing to digest some backwoods sourcing. In Shadow, Bracken attempts to explain, in prose by turns elegant and overwrought, why Bush White House and Pentagon officials plotted to kill thousands in an “indirect defense attack” on September 11 — and how they plan to profit off such monstrous self-sabotage: a potential $15 billion in insider stock trades (the SEC, Bracken notes, has refused to reveal the names of those who made windfalls on that Tuesday); the expected construction of a lucrative, Houston-sponsored pipeline across Afghanistan; and the passage of pro-policing bills like the USA Patriot Act, among other nefarious objectives.

Proof? “We don’t have proof of anything,” Bracken tells the Voice, “only circumstantial evidence.” To build his case, he draws on a range of sources — some specious, like home-brewed Web site Unansweredquestions.org, others more reliable, like The New York Times — and attempts to connect the mysterious dots linking big business and Bush to the 9-11 crime scene. Some highlights:

1) Mohammed Atta’s flying passport. Bracken wonders: How did Atta, emcee of terror, usher a jumbo jet into one of the tallest buildings in the world, reduce it to a pile of dust, then have his passport land unscathed in the ruins of the towers, to be conveniently found later by investigators? It’s a puzzler, but Bracken’s claim may not be entirely true. A passport was found near the towers on September 15 (according to various news reports), but Atta’s passport, at least his Saudi one, was found in a rental car — in Boston.

2) Amerithrax. In efforts to prevent terrorism after 9-11, GOP hard-liners tried to pass the draconian Patriot Act. Why then, at the same time, did the two top agenda-setting Democratic senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, receive envelopes filled with the highest grades of “amerithrax”?

3) The Enron-Bush-CIA-bin Laden Connection. Bracken suggests that Enron, the Bush family’s biggest donor, was secretly employing more than 20 CIA agents to pay off Taliban and bin Laden operatives to keep an oil pipeline project in Afghanistan alive. That’s a sinister connection to establish, and Bracken cites on-the-record quotes from an anonymous FBI source; too bad he got the quotes from The National Enquirer.

Speculation? Hogwash? Bona fide conspiracy? “Clues were left behind like a child’s game of hide-and-seek, which were to be followed,” Bracken quotes Andreas Von Bülow, a former German secretary of defense, as saying. Von Bülow, the author of an exposé of the CIA’s criminal activities, is convinced 9-11 was an inside job.

Unlike most speculators who present a conspiracy as the consequence of a lone smoking gun, Bracken attempts to protect himself against skeptics by coating his theories with an academic veneer. He centers his hypothesis around a classic sociohistorical argument: namely, that all societies and governments have used terrorism to unite splintered populations — by instigating war, instilling fear, or both. “The history of humanity is a history of covert operations,” Bracken says. “To ignore such evidence is naive.” He cites Herodotus, Plutarch, Machiavelli, Churchill, Hitler, and assorted despots, offering brief accounts of their questionable aggressions throughout history. Junior’s war on terrorism, he argues, follows a similar logic: In the absence of the Cold War, the current administration has created a new scapegoat — the Terrorist — which it can use to rally the public around the flag and covertly accomplish its militant goals.

Bracken cites Sun Tzu: “He who wishes to snatch advantage takes a devious and distant route.” In doing so, he attempts to connect the 2000 year-old strategy to that of Bush’s war hawks. Sun Tzu continues, “He turns misfortune to his advantage. He deceives and fools the enemy to make him dilatory and lax, and then marches on speedily.” In the case of 9-11, the real enemy, Bracken contends, is the American people who’ve been fleeced by such tactical play.

However, if we’re talking war tactics, it’s important to note that Bracken’s indictment of the Bushies for mass murder could self-destruct. By fingering Dubya and his corporate flunkies as his enemy, Bracken fails to convert readers who aren’t already bad-to-the-bone Bush whackers; ultimately, in an ironic twist, Bracken himself becomes the Conspirator, offering unorthodox sources like the Enquirer to prove his version of history true.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that most of them are wrong. Still, if the turbulent, age-old story of statesmen conspiring to use terrorism to control their own populations can be believed, as Bracken successfully argues, then Shadow’s thesis raises more chilling questions than it answers. Why should 9-11 be anomalous? As Twain once remarked, history never repeats itself — but it does rhyme.

www.adventuresunlimitedpress.com

Review by Joan d’Arc, Paranoia

“The dangerous schemes our statesmen use to obtain what they by no means deserve prevent us, for the moment, from relaxing or writing about men and women who set good examples.”

A new book from Adventures Unlimited, The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror, is an astute political thesis on state-orchestrated terror. Taking the reader on a tour of three continents, spanning a century of terrorist events, political historian Len Bracken finally lands in the present day to examine whether the state “attacked itself” on September 11.

Exploring numerous historical precedents for such a bold assumption, Bracken winds a treacherous tale of travesty and incomprehensible malfeasance on the part of governments worldwide and throughout history. Be prepared to go on an historical journey from Caesar to George W. Bush, and from Pearl Harbor to the Oklahoma City bombing to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and up to the September 11 horror and the following anthrax mailings, all of which, according to Bracken, fall under the CIA nomenclature, “false flag” operations.

As Kenn Thomas writes in the foreword to Shadow Government, “of all conspiracy theories put forth since 9-11, the state terror thesis is the simplest, most elegant and most easily followed.” In this case, ‘elegant’ means, ‘damn, how’d I not see this till now?’ Bracken’s analysis has the precision of a watchmaker, but his watch piece is a time machine. His distinctive genre is the first to combine progressive anarchist philosophy and history with conspiracy journalism to bring the reader to an exceptionally broad and heightened state of awareness. This is the first of its kind. Anarchy has finally joined conspiracy and has realized we’re all hammering away at the same wall.

Rather than zooming in on the one smoking gun we’re all looking for, Bracken steps back, way back, and allows us to see the guns of revolution firing all over the place, but incredulously the guns belong to an increasingly huge conspiracy of elite global controllers with factions vying for their own place. With wide-sweeping historicity, Bracken paints a picture of endemic political crimes of the state, and on that canvas we the people are pawns on a great chessboard.

Bracken defines defensive terrorism as “direct use of terrorism by the state, that is, open displays of violence by the state or paramilitary organizations acting on its behalf [to] terrorize the public into subordination.” Outlining the historical baiting of anarchists by countries such as Italy, Bracken asks a question we should all be asking: are we dealing with a fringe group or a state? Are we being led to point a finger at ‘fringe groups’ and ‘rogue nations’ rather than our own Shadow Gestapo? In one Italian example, Bracken shows how defensive terrorism is accomplished in a “false flag” covert operation in a way that is “designed to make citizens feel more dependent on the state.” Is this beginning to sound a little too familiar?

As has become clear since 9-11, the state used international operatives, anarchists, radical militia members and CIA rogues to do their dirty work in the Oklahoma City bombing, the World Trade Center bombing, and on 9-11. These are the activities of the state that breed all social violence as the children learn to emulate the father: a depraved state that would sicken even Machiavelli. One may ask, are we talking about the “state” or a rogue faction of international intelligence operatives? That’s an important question. If our elected representatives and appointed judges can’t uncover the obvious, and when they do are thwarted from opening the Pandora’s Box by a nefarious political artifact known as “national security,” then what we would normally consider “the state” is both doppelganger and driver for this rogue international hit man and should be considered part of it and wholly under its spell. Conspiracists intuitively know the state as trickster; perhaps we can even say it’s the least argued common ground between anarchists and conspiracists.

Bracken asserts that “the massacres in New York and Virginia were engendered or facilitated by statesmen in order to silence opposition, consolidate power, and rally the population behind a war favorable to military and oil industries.” As proof, Bracken points to “the way terrorists and their financiers were repeatedly protected and the way statesmen deceived us.” It is downright ridiculous that the government had no idea that terrorists would use skyjacked planes as missiles, considering that the idea was mentioned in reports and memos, and used in video games and in a Tom Clancy novel, Debt of Honor. Was the FBI simply inept, as has been admitted by the media’s limited disclosure, known as “limited hangout” by the CIA? This is only possible in the universe of the terminally naïve.

With his sweeping timeline in the back of the book, which begins with the sinking of the USS Maine in Cuban waters on February 15, 1898 and carries us to June 13, 2002, we graduate from the playpen into the real world. The blinders are gone. We realize the truth of Bracken’s words: “Terrorism, which fails as a long term strategy for small groups with big demands, can be an effective if messy tactic when used defensively by states.” We can no longer afford to be naïve. As Bracken writes, “Self-inflicted wounds, or what amount to them, become the rationale for expanded roles and funding for agencies that routinely dissimulate and deploy ruses on civilians, namely the CIA, FBI, and military intelligence.” For instance, we now know that J. Edgar Hoover withheld information from the White House regarding Japanese plans to attack the Naval base at Pearl Harbor. And as Canadian political prisoner Vreeland claimed he saw on a memo before 9-11: “Let one happen, stop the rest!”

Conspiracy theories are today marginalized by an elite-owned and state-aligned press that tells you not to believe anything you read on the Internet, since they have yet to figure out how to control the information contained there. At the moment, the only way they can control it is to disparage it. However, as Bracken points out, the conspiratorial view is perhaps the oldest political critique on the planet. The first conspiracy in history, he points out, is noted in the first chapter of Histories by Herodotus. Smart man. As Bracken also points out, all contemporary covert ops would be considered conspiracies by Prince Machiavelli, whom Bracken quotes as saying: “Many more princes have lost their lives and their states in this way than by open war.”

We would do well to ponder, then, why historians and media alike are discouraged from holding this maligned point of view, and why, therefore, Bracken and Smith must offer a semi-apology: “Merely by broaching the subject of the state indirectly attacking or allowing an attack on citizens it should defend, we stand accused of being conspiracy theorists, a label we neither accept nor reject because we are independent historians and strategic theorists who do not share the widespread academic prejudice against conspiracies.”

Yet, as Bracken points out, 9-11 plane hijacker Moussaoui is on trial on conspiracy charges, so the system somehow “recognizes the event for what it was” although it “may limit the scope to protect the state.” Aha! Will the concept of “national security” win again? Whose alleged security is that anyway? In the end, it won’t be ours. It will be “theirs”; but forgive me for saying there’s an “us and them.” What was I thinking?

To read Bracken is to realize the political strategizing behind 9-11, although we are unable to see it as such, was actually nothing new in history. It is merely a new type of colonizing venture disguised as terrorism. It is the state terrorizing itself so that it can gain the political expediency to attack a land that contains the natural resources it wants! Bracken believes the 9-11 acts were a pretext for war over oil in Afghanistan, and were facilitated by the states of U.S., Britain, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

If you have been unable to take that great stride into conspiracy territory to see for yourself whether this could be possible, begin by paying attention to trends. But look both ways before you cross the divide: that is, to the future and to the past. In the first case, pay attention to current events. Try to make predictions on what will happen next. Once your antennae are up you’ll feel political events being controlled from some sort of invisible backdrop. Write down all your predictions and thoughts. In the second case, look back in history and see if this trend of hidden manipulation spreads into the past. Lucky for you, Bracken has provided you with the tools for the second experiment, and his hindsight is 20/20.

War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, from our point of view. But for the elite global rulers the world is but a chessboard and we are the pawns. Read carefully as Bracken, also an economist, points out: “History shows that the costs for infrastructure and security to colonize a country can exceed the riches gained by the empire in raw materials. For example, costs associated with the September 11 attacks and the US response should be added to the defense budget because they were at many levels the consequences of US troops being stationed in Saudi Arabia and US military support for Israel. While the masses pay back war debts, the elite almost always profit from the extraordinary military consumption that feeds our rulers’ greed and lust for dominion.”

Len Bracken would rather be relaxing, or writing about “men and women who set good examples.” We are grateful that he felt compelled to write this book and hopeful that when he’s old and gray he will have many more principled men and women to write about in the next generation. It is the only real hope we have left.

Joan d’Arc is co-publisher of Paranoia: The Conspiracy Reader and may be reached at www.paranoiamagazine.com or joandarc@compuserve.com

In The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror recently published by Adventures Unlimited Press we are given ample opportunity to study the sordid and manifold intrigues of various terrorist states as embodied not only in the ersatz Bush administration, but in Caesar’s Rome, Churchill’s England and elsewhere. Len Bracken and Andrew Smith conjoin their talents, with obvious political sophistication, to remind us that not all acts of terrorism originate from marginal realms as the global media Moloch would like us to believe. The authors provide an impressive historical overview of state sponsored terrorism, backing up their Machiavellian claims that violence on a grand scale is often used to further preserve/promote the bottom line agendas of the ruling class.

Citing incidences such as the sinking of the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Oklahoma City Bombing(s) and of course the premiere act of terrorism of recent times: 9-11, it is most encouraging that these conspiracy researchers are dedicated to exposing the ongoing, high level transgressions perpetrated by the state. Such a command of historical facts as well as a facile talent for weaving cohesive, potentially indicting arguments together makes this book a worthwhile read indeed. I’ll be amazed if the publisher isn’t ordered by the feds to shred all existing copies of The Shadow Government because of the ultimately incriminating data within. Just imagine members of the Supreme Court being handed copies of this potentially incendiary book by some courageous renegade lawyer and watch how much trouble the almighty nine have glossing over administrative crimes with their glib rhetoric. The knees of the shadow government itself may start buckling if this important book starts to get the mainstream scrutiny it deserves.