Gore Vidal Claims 'Bush Junta' Complicit in 9/11
America's most controversial novelist calls for an investigation into whether the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks to happen
America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the
most scathing attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency,
calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover
whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on
warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans.
Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy
Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today -
argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist
attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade
Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.
Vidal writes: 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that
infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain
to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of
our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of
government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year
when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and
replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas
Bush-Cheney junta.'
Vidal argues that the real motive for the Afghanistan war was to
control the gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia's energy riches.
He quotes extensively from a 1997 analysis of the region by
Zgibniew Brzezinski, formerly national security adviser to
President Carter, in support of this theory. But, Vidal argues, US
administrations, both Democrat and Republican, were aware
that the American public would resist any war in Afghanistan
without a truly massive and widely perceived external threat.
'Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening
logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of
Afghanistan ... [because] the administration is convinced that
Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no
scenario more complex than the venerable, lone, crazed killer
(this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it
'cause he hates us because we're rich 'n free 'n he's not.' Vidal
also attacks the American media's failure to discuss 11
September and its consequences: 'Apparently, "conspiracy
stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.'
'It is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American
life. Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of
corporate America had been conspiring with accountants to
cook their books since - well, at least the bright dawn of the era
of Reagan and deregulation.'
At the heart of the essay are questions about the events of 9/11
itself and the two hours after the planes were hijacked. Vidal
writes that 'astonished military experts cannot fathom why the
government's "automatic standard order of procedure in the
event of a hijacking" was not followed'.
These procedures, says Vidal, determine that fighter planes
should automatically be sent aloft as soon as a plane has
deviated from its flight plan. Presidential authority is not required
until a plane is to be shot down. But, on 11 September, no
decision to start launching planes was taken until 9.40am,
eighty minutes after air controllers first knew that Flight 11 had
been hijacked and fifty minutes after the first plane had struck
the North Tower.
'By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8.15. If they
had, all the hijacked planes might have been diverted and shot
down.'
Vidal asks why Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, stayed in a
Florida classroom as news of the attacks broke: 'The behaviour
of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not
unnatural suspicions.' He also attacks the 'nonchalance' of
General Richard B Myers, acting Joint Chief of Staff, in failing to
respond until the planes had crashed into the twin towers.
Asking whether these failures to act expeditiously were down to
conspiracy, coincidence or error, Vidal notes that incompetence
would usually lead to reprimands for those responsible, writing
that 'It is interesting how often in our history, when disaster
strikes, incompetence is considered a better alibi than .... Well,
yes, there are worse things.'
Vidal draws comparisons with another 'day of infamy' in
American history, writing that 'The truth about Pearl Harbour is
obscured to this day. But it has been much studied. 11
September, it is plain, is never going to be investigated if Bush
has anything to say about it.' He quotes CNN reports that Bush
personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit
Congressional investigation of the day itself, ostensibly on
grounds of not diverting resources from the anti-terror campaign.
Vidal calls bin Laden an 'Islamic zealot' and 'evil doer' but argues
that 'war' cannot be waged on the abstraction of 'terrorism'. He
says that 'Every nation knows how - if it has the means and will
- to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us 9/11 ...
You put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent
years, Italy has been doing that with the Sicilian Mafia; and
no-one has suggested bombing Palermo.'
Vidal also highlights the role of American and Pakistani
intelligence in creating the fundamentalist terrorist threat:
'Apparently, Pakistan did do it - or some of it' but with American
support. "From 1979, the largest covert operation in the history
of the CIA was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan ... the CIA covertly trained and sponsored these
warriors.'
Vidal also quotes the highly respected defence journal Jane's
Defence Weekly on how this support for Islamic fundamentalism
continued after the emergence of bin Laden: 'In 1988, with US
knowledge, bin Laden created Al-Qaeda (The Base); a
conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread
across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to
Al-Qaeda.'
Vidal, 77, and internationally renowned for his award-winning
novels and plays, has long been a ferocious, and often isolated,
critic of the Bush administration at home and abroad. He now
lives in Italy. In Vidal's most recent book, The Last Empire, he
argued that 'Americans have no idea of the extent of their
government's mischief ... the number of military strikes we have
made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more
than 250.'
observer.co.uk |
