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mp3 links and transcript link on this page:
http://portland.indymedia.org/archive/features/2002/04/2002-04.html#3438
transcript link:
http://portland.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=9569&group=webcast
transcript:
9.11 investigation: indymedia interviews Mike Ruppert in Eugene
by Barbara + Jeremy 12:01am Fri Apr 19 '02 (Modified on 10:59am Fri Apr 19 '02)
On 14 April 2002, in Eugene, Oregon, portland indymedia reporters
interviewed independent journalist Mike Ruppert, who is currently on a
9.11 muckraking tour. This is an edited transcript of their conversation.
The scene: The Eugene Hilton restaurant. Ruppert is exhausted and hungry,
having spoken in Portland on Friday and Saturday nights at the First
Congregational Church to audiences of 400-500, and that afternoon at the
Eugene Hilton, to about 275 people, for over three hours. We ask him if
he's too tired for an interview, but he insists on meeting with us anyway.
"I love Indymedia," he said. "You guys are changing the world."
Mike Ruppert: Please, when you call me "Mr. Ruppert" I think you're an
FBI agent here to arrest me or somebody asking for money. Call me "Mike",
please. [Laughter all around.]
Jeremy: What level do you think someone has to rise to before they become
a target [of the establishment]?
Mike: That's a good question. I guess the basic answer is the "7%
solution". When you get to a point that you have reached 7% of the
population, you become a threat. Right now, I'm too big to kill in one
sense. 20 members of congress, 3000 subscribers in 30 countries [receive
my newsletter], fairly well known now, the name is recognized. If
something happened, that would be an affirmation that I was right, and it
would cause more trouble than it would solve. I'm certainly not at the
level of Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King, so I'm nowhere near that.
But that's a good question. I don't know. I hope I don't have to answer
it. [Using a funny voice:] "Yeah, okay I'm at the point where they have
to kill you now. I just found out because they killed me an hour ago."
Anyway, I don't know.
I think that when, individual, as a person, you become a threat to the
establishment, imminently able to threaten the order to take it down, and
you are not replaceable. You see the deal with Bobby Kennedy and Martin
Luther King was that they were wonderful human beings. And I know Bobby
was a CIA hit from start to finish -- there's information about my
experience with that on the website. I'd ask you to read that. But they
were personalities. One of my aims, and part of my insurance policy, is
not to be a personality here. My aim is to teach the method of research
and argument that takes the personality out of it. I hope that's working.
Barbara: Where is bin Laden right now? Is our government protecting him?
Mike: [With deadpan sarcasm.] I think he's getting his nails done in
Switzerland. Maybe a little time in a spa in Geneva. Maybe a facelift.
Someone says he looks like Gene Simmons from KISS, so maybe he's actually
on tour with KISS, wearing the make-up.
Jeremy: [Playing along.] Could be. That would be a great cover.
Mike: The U.S. has no interest in finding Osama bin Laden. Never has. I
don't think he will ever surface. I think that his family is influential
enough. Look at this from the organized crime model; he might be like the
head of the Patriarcha family or the Colombo family, maybe not important
enough to kill, but certainly it would result in a Mafia war if the Bushes
took him out. So they don't want to go to that length. That's my guess
at this point. Who knows how much he knew? The CIA runs terrorist groups
all the time without them having any clue that CIA is setting them up and
funding them. So who knows where he is. He's probably having a good
time.
Jeremy: I understand there were leftist organizations in the late 60's
that were funded by the government and had no idea. Sometimes people are
plants without even knowing it.
Mike: I almost got shot once when I told some people that I tracked CIA
supplying weapons to M19 guerilla group in South America and there were
some M19s in the room. I said, "hey guys, you don't even have to know
that the CIA is getting you those guns".
Jeremy: That brings me around to the whole Dave Corn thing. He didn't
take on your evidence. He was, I think, just trying to be dismissive of
you in a snide way. But one thing that you didn't quite address when you
wrote to him was that his doubts were based on the idea that the
government was incapable of pulling off something like this. He said
there'd have to be hundreds of people involved who would know.
Mike: That's stupid. Utterly stupid. First of all, he's saying the CIA,
and FBI and all the intelligence agencies and the military are too
incompetent to have pulled off this attack. But Osama bin Laden in a cave
was capable of doing it? I mean, that's patently absurd, on it's face.
In terms of keeping a secret, you know I keep telling everybody in the
audience, people are speaking out. Mike Vreeland is speaking out. He
knew about it. He was trying to get people to listen. There are some FBI
agents filing suit. Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch -- that's a right
wing group -- has actually filed a formal complaint on behalf of at least
one known agent who supposedly knows a lot more. So people were talking
about it.
Barbara: Peter Jennings recently appeared on the Larry King show. He said
he was surprised that more Americans "don't take to the streets in more
vigorous ways than they do", that is, protest.
Mike: Wow, really? When was that?
Barbara: A couple of nights ago.
Mike: That's amazing.
Barbara: Yeah. So, do you think that he or other journalists know about
9.11? And if so, does that make them complicit?
Mike: Yes, I think he does, and that would make him complicit.
Barbara: When did you start wondering about 9.11? Did you know something
right away?
Mike: I was on the air that day, within hours of the attacks, saying that
there's no way that second plane could hit unless the government wanted it
to hit. This is a Pearl Harbor scenario, whatever was happening was
intended to happen. That I knew as much as I told you in the lecture
today -- absolutely not. But see, what I had was 25 years of studying
covert operations, familiarity with the Bush clan, and the CIA so I knew
immediately where to start looking. Which is why I have a leg up on
almost all the breaking stories.
Barbara: What does your family think about what you're talking about?
Mike: What family? I have a father. He watches it, he's 78 years old,
he's saying I'm glad I'm not going to be around when all this works itself
out. He doesn't get it and he's at a point where he's, "why should I have
to get it? I only have a few years to live anyway." I have no other
family. I'm divorced, I have no children. No brothers and sisters. So.
There's just me and the people who work for me, and everybody else I hang
out with.
Barbara: They're your family.
Mike: Yeah, you're my family.
Barbara: What is the one most compelling and believable argument that most
people would buy?
Mike: I hate that question. [Everyone laughs.] I hate that question. You
know why I hate that question? People who have tried to attack me, they
say, "what's the best piece of evidence?" I give them the best piece of
evidence and they say "well, that doesn't prove anything," and they walk
away. And I say "wait a minute". A lawyer in a trial presents 150
exhibits. You just asked me to produce one piece of evidence and rest my
whole case on the one. You can't try a murder trial on one piece of
evidence. It's not fair.
Barbara: That's understandable, but if you could at least open the door
for people, what would you open the door with?
Mike: I'm going to give you three answers. Listen. The fact that the
fighters were not scrambled in direct contravention of established
procedure, in a way that could only have happened if the national command
authority had intervened to prevent that from happening. Second is the
insider trading, which is so damning that the government has clamped down
on and suppressed ruthlessly. And probably third would be the $100,000
wired to Mohammed Atta from the head of Pakistani intelligence. Those are
three. But see, you answer that question, and the Sophist will back you
into a corner and say, "He's listed his best three and they don't prove
anything." And they walk away...
Jeremy: Leading off of that question, a lot of people just have difficulty
-- regardless of any specific pieces of evidence -- imagining that the
government is capable. That is, that it would be involved in something
like this.
Mike: Right. Those are the same people who would doubt that Adolf Hitler
could have killed six million Jews. They lived in Germany, you know, and
they didn't believe until they were forced to march through the camps
themselves at the end of the war. Which the 101st Airborne did. There
were people who did not, do not believe a lot of that stuff. That's their
state of mental illness for which I'm not responsible. It can't happen
here, it is happening here. I don't argue with that . I don't chase
that. If they want to live in denial, that's fine. There are some people
who you can get to with the facts and you can present them with the
evidence on the fighters, on the insider trading, on the advance warnings
that were much more specific than people get. And you can begin to see
them go through this tribulation, this birth panging and all that. Those
people I chase. But the ones who say, "The government would never do
that," I say, "Fine".
Jeremy: I was immediately skeptical of that myself. After September 11,
there were a set of emergency activist meetings in Portland, where I was
living at the time, about "what are we going to do?" and "how are we going
to respond to this war?" Someone came up to me and was like, "Here's why
it happened and here's how the government was behind it", and I was like,
"You know, that might be true but I can't even think about that right now.
I just think we need to stop the bombs from falling. And I don't think
anyone else is ever going to buy that, either." But --
Mike: Well you were wrong there! [Everybody laughs.]
Jeremy: Yeah. Well I've since come to reconsider. I'm not sure what the
breakthrough was.
Friend of L.A. Indymedia, who is also at dinner: I'd be really interested
to know what your breakthrough was because that's where all of Los Angeles
is right now.
Jeremy: Well let's send Barbara down there. She's really the one who -- I
think it takes a personal connection for people. Someone they know.
[Pause while food comes out, etc.]
Jeremy: I was really fascinated when you said they infiltrate the left
wing, not the right wing.
Mike: Oh yeah. This is not [new]. This has been going on for thousands
of years. You infiltrate the opposition and always makes the attacks come
from the opposition against itself. Nichola Machievelli wrote about it
very well.
Barbara: I'm curious about the article from the LA Herald Examiner that
you put on your website --
Mike: 1981. Randall Sullivan. Who now writes for Rolling Stone, by the
way.
Barbara: Well, it reads like a cheap novel. Is that why you put it up
there, because that's how it reads?
Mike: What it shows is that 21 years ago, I was on the front page of a
major newspaper then. Because I've been accused of being a CIA plant.
Okay? So I say, "Look, 21 years ago, the front page of the Herald
Examiner, two Sundays in a row, they wrote about me being homeless,
threatened, shot at, called crazy, forced into bankruptcy, and gone
through all this. So yeah, you're right, I went through twenty years of
trying to set up a cover just so I could fool you now. I was homeless 21
years ago just so I could be a CIA guy now and fool you. That's right."
You know, and if people want to believe that, it's fine.
Jeremy: Well, that's brilliant, Mike! [Everybody laughs.]
Mike: But also he verified that I was not fired. There's an internal
Pacifica memo in LA says I was fired on psychiatric grounds, which is
absolutely not true. I had the highest ratings reports possible, etc.,
etc.. So that paper alone establishes that I was earning the highest
ratings reports possible, had a squeaky-clean record, and that was printed
21 years ago. So it's kind of hard to shoot that down.
Jeremy: You talked a little about India and Pakistan and how, with
Pakistani intelligence, their person who's in charge of it there has to be
vetted by our intelligence first --
Mike: Yes. Has to be approved, actually. Can't take the job. Michel
Chossudovsky at the University of Ottawa has it on his site,
globalresearch.ca.
Jeremy: There was that attack on the Indian Parliament Building last fall
--
Mike: Right.
Jeremy: -- which had sort of a similar smell as 9.11 to it when it
happened. I felt like it was something else that was planned.
Mike: There's other stuff going on. The world was ratcheted to the brink
of hysteria shortly after 9.11 over India and Pakistan getting their nukes
ready to go to war. They're doing that to us now again with Israel and
Palestine, which is a form of psychological warfare directed at us, to
keep us so tense, so wound up. It's a very effective way to control
Middle America, to make them so preoccupied. It's the game of
brinkmanship. I told you before what I think is going on is that Sharon
is blackmailing the heck out of Bush because the Israelis know damn well
that the Americans opened the door wide and said, "Come attack", if not
worse.
Isn't it strange that the International Policy Institute for
Counter-Terrorism, which is Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency,
comparable to the CIA] connected, released the insider-trading? And
historically that's very important. During Iran-Contra, Ollie North was
trying to blame all the weapons smuggling on Israel: "Oh it was those
dirty Jews. It was those rotten Israelis. They did the trades with
Iran." And finally they got tired of it and they leaked a whole bunch of
documents that eventually got Oliver North convicted of perjury. And I
think the Israelis were letting it be clearly known immediately after the
attacks, "Hey boys, we know what you did. You know that we know what you
did." And it was a very subtle message. Because I read that report and I
said, "Alex Brown [Alexander Brown Deutschebank, a bank], the trades were
placed through Alex Brown! Oh my god, that's Buzzy Krongard [former CIA
Director]. The Israelis are telling everybody they know the CIA let these
attacks happen. If not worse, and profited from them." My suspicion is --
and I haven't printed this, it's just my suspicion -- is that most of the
insider trades were made by the guys at the high level of CIA, you know,
the traders who knew it was coming and just decided to make a few extra
millions for themselves on the side as a result.
Jeremy: That would be fairly typical.
Mike: Yeah. [Imitating a CIA person:] "You know, I could place some put
options, get that house in the Hamptons, no one will notice..."
Barbara: Then there's the passenger lists. The numbers don't add up.
Mike: Not only do the numbers not add up, but none of the hijackers are on
the passenger lists.
Barbara: Right.
Jeremy: But they wouldn't be, would they? Wouldn't they be under
different names somehow?
Mike: You have to have a drivers' license to get on to any airplane. That
was there before 9.11.
Jeremy: Yeah, okay.
Mike: That's one of those areas that, as a journalist, it's a
nonproductive area, meaning that I could spend a lot of time chasing the
anomalies, but what does it prove? I was talking to Peter Dale Scott, of
Berkeley, who I love to pieces, and there's more work coming up shortly.
Some of the hijackers who were named are actually still very much alive.
But there are tons of these anomalies, and again, my search as a
journalist, is that I can only work 100 hours a week, is to find those
stories that stick like a dart in the American consciousness when you
throw it out there. And I stay away from these other things that even
sound like conspiracy theories. This is all stuff that we'll piece
together. We already know who committed the crime, at least, I know who
committed the crime. We've proved that they're lying. Now, the exact
methods of how the dance steps were carried out can be added at a later
date as far as I'm concerned. If we have a later date.
Barbara: Was there anyone on the planes who knew what was going on?
Mike: I don't know. I don't know.
Jeremy: Well there was that cell phone call --
Barbara: Now they're saying that cell phone call didn't even happen --
Mike: Again, you'll never come out of that alive as a journalist.
Jeremy: On September 11, I remember that during the coverage, they started
showing Osama bin Laden's face right away. They would show a plane
crashing into a tower, people falling from the tower, and then an Arab's
face -- it was bin Laden. And they did this over and over again, all day.
But it strikes me, and maybe your memory is better than mine, that it
seemed like the media brought up his name before anyone in the government
said that he was a suspect.
Mike: I believe that to be the case also. This goes back to the John
Kennedy case where Fletcher Prouty was coming back from the South Pole and
he lands in New Zealand, and John Kennedy's only been dead for three hours
and here's a full five page story in the New Zealand newspaper with
Oswald's photograph already there. They had a five page story with all
the reports written that had to have been researched before the event.
None of that surprises me. But again, that's not anything you can throw
out to the public as proof of anything. It's just a "how come?" "How
come" 15 microbiologists have died? That's a big "how come" for me.
Barbara: Yeah, really big.
Mike: I'm really concerned about that. [Click here for more on the
microbiologists story, at copvcia.com.]
Jeremy: I looked at the model legislation for the Emergency Health Powers
Act . It's really bad, but I know that different states are watering it
down. [Click here for a PDF of the legislation.]
Mike: I think you have to understand that it's not getting passed the way
the big bad boys want. Which is why they're going to need another
terrorist attack to get the end result that they want. That's more scary
to me.
Jeremy: It passed the House in Wisconsin, but then the session was over
before it could go to the Senate. Activists I spoke to were skeptical
that it would pass there, but that's under the current circumstances.
Mike: But you never know!
Barbara: So might that legislation have been in place, as well as the
PATRIOT Act? I mean, the PATRIOT Act is a big, big document. How was
that written so quickly?
Mike: We don't know. But I've been around the Hill and I've watched
legislation move, and they have pieces of bills that were written and
researched on the shelf for long periods of time, for different
circumstances. That's what legislative analysts do on Congressmen's
staffs. So it's not sinister to me at all that somebody would have said,
post-9.11, "Give me the most draconian money-laundering stuff we have
written." House leadership looks at it, party leadership, signs off on it,
etc. There were other parts of the PATRIOT act, clearly the stuff with
civil liberties and wiretapping, but that was the easiest stuff to write.
But I'm not surprised if that was written and drafted and sitting on
somebody's shelf for a long time. So you can assemble a bill like that
fairly quickly. But it's the selection of the component parts that makes
the PATRIOT act so devastating, so venal, and so evil. All that assembled
into one bill. And that's not the first time when a bill was passed with
members of Congress weren't even allowed to read it. The crime bill of
1994 was the same way. They were adding new sections to the act written
on cocktail napkins, on the House floor, as the members were voting. So,
that style of legislation has been around for awhile... Ron Paul read the
whole thing, and I think that's to his credit. Cynthia [McKinney] did
too, but she has to pick and choose her battles. She can only afford to
risk being crucified once, and so that's why she waited until now to come
out. This is her shot. This is what she's willing to stake her future
on. And she has. God bless her.
Barbara: There was an interesting newswire item on indymedia: someone
encouraging everyone to wear masks because they felt like it wasn't safe
to be out dissenting in the streets and have your face shown. We made
this item into a feature because there were so many people adding to it.
Some people felt like, yes, masks are very important, and other people
felt like, no, I'm going to be out there with the truth, and I have
nothing to hide and no reason to hide. There's a lot of fear right now
among people who are dissenting.
Mike: You want to know what my opinion on that is?
Barbara: Yes.
Mike: The people who were suggesting that you wear masks are probably
government COINTELPRO, and I'll tell you why. Two reasons. First of all,
they're teaching you to be afraid. They're teaching you to operate from a
standpoint of fear. Already that's a psychological warfare game that
you've surrendered to the moment you put on the mask. But secondly, they
know, if you're filmed and on the nightly news and mainstream America sees
a bunch of people wearing masks, they associate you with terrorism.
Barbara: And that's an argument that was posted there. Someone also said
that the surveillance equipment that the FBI has would be able to get
through the mask, identify your movements, etc., and they'd be able to
figure it out anyway. So a mask certainly isn't going to hide your
identity.
Jeremy: Mike, those people who are suggesting that we wear masks, they
might not necessarily be COINTELPRO themselves, but there are these ideas
that get dropped in by COINTELPRO, I believe --
Mike: These are susceptible people, gullible people, who really don't
understand how it works, and they have no real compass. So it's like,
"Oh, did you hear that rumour?" and they go this way until they hear the
next rumour, and then they're going that way. Those people are what we
call in the intelligence world, or as a journalist, "dilettantes".
They're dangerous. They're very dangerous. Especially when they get in
over their head.
Jeremy: Some people have said about the PATRIOT Act, "Oh well, you know,
they always do that during wars, and then it always goes away and we
always get our freedoms back." That was one thing that was said to me when
I was complaining about the PATRIOT Act. I wasn't quite sure how to
respond to that one.
Mike: My only answer is: "You can believe that if you want to, buddy. I
sure don't." How do we know what freedoms we've gotten back? When the
temperature of the water is being turned up so slowly, we don't realize
we're being cooked.
I don't care! When you take away amendments to the Bill of Rights and the
Constitution, that's not viable, that's a line that you've crossed. You
show me the argument where, yeah, in World War II, they interned the
Japanese, but they didn't enshrine it in the Bill of Rights as law. They
took the action. But now it's a law. Now it's written down.
Jeremy: So you see that as being a real difference between then and now?
Mike: It's huge. It's monstrous. There is no sunset clause. It reads,
"Provisions of these acts will expire on January something, 2005, except
in cases where the terrorist investigations were commenced prior to that
date." So all you have to do is say that you started the terrorist
investigation in 2004, and there is no sunset clause. It's the ultimate
release from that. There is no sunset clause. Period.
Barbara: Why is there so much apathy with the American people? I know
lots of people who believe that our government is corrupt, but they say,
"Well, they've already won". So they're staying at home and not doing
anything about it.
Mike: They will think that until somebody seizes their house or people
start dying around them or until the level of corruption gets [worse], or
until their 401k disappears, or until they're unemployed and they lose
their medical benefits. Then they'll start to say, "I'm affected".
Again, I don't worry about those people. Let them be apathetic. It's a
form of denial. Let them pull the wool covers back over their heads.
That's fine. Let 'em try. I shake them when I can, and I reach them.
Not just me; everybody else, too. There's a lot of good people doing
this.
The point is, we are making a difference. The apathetic ones? Let them
stay apathetic. They can resist as long as they want to. There's an old
saying in the Twelve Step recovery program for alcoholics, that you can't
drag a drunk off a bar stool while he's drinking. So you let 'em drink.
And you wait for the moment when they're weak and having a hangover, and
that's when you hit 'em with the recovery.
I don't feel bad at all. I see this changing. I can feel it changing.
Jeremy: As you travel around the country you mean?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely.
Barbara: So, I hear you saying that you feel pretty safe with what you're
doing, speaking with people. But I'm concerned about Cynthia McKinney --
Mike: You mean, physically safe?
Barbara: Yes.
Mike: My attitude -- and I'm tired so I'm going to tell you the
honest-to-god's truth -- if they want to kill me, I don't give a shit.
Okay? There's nothing they can do to me, that they haven't done to me,
that would hurt me any worse than I've been hurt in my life. And I have
not detailed everything that I've been through. You see this in the black
ghetto all the time; you see a black man who has no place to go, no hope:
"Go ahead, shoot me! Go ahead!" And you know he means it. I crossed that
line. And that's a liberating line. In Japan, in Eastern culture, that's
a very liberating line. There was a point in time, and I won't discuss
the date or the circumstance, back in 1996, when I crossed the line
completely. I was a dead man. So every day that I have had since is a
gift. I don't care. I'll quote Sadat: "I will not die one minute before
God has decided." I cannot worry about it. So I don't care.
McKinney, I don't think she's worried about death. She's a black woman,
for god's sake. She worries about losing her seat, she worries about
harming her constituents, she worries about not living up to her
responsibilities to try to make a better world. That's what she worries
about, and that's what I worry about. And that's all I worry about.
There's nothing else to worry about.
Barbara: What do you think would happen if, tomorrow, by some stroke of
magick, everyone in America woke up and realized what was going on?
Mike: That's a good question. That's a very good question. In France,
they had the Reign of Terror, for about 14 years, with guillotines. "Off
with their head, off with their head, off with their head!" and sometimes
without reason. It was a venting of pent-up rage; a cultural, social
pent-up rage that operated without reason. And without justice. The
longer we forestall the accounting, the greater that rage -- when it
erupts -- is going to be. It'll be messy, too.
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