Karl: Attacking people as conspiracy theorists is a form of political correctness. It is a rhetorical device by which rational debate is precluded from discourse. Once one is labelled a conspiracy theorist it is believed that the person can be summarily dismissed. The point is that conspiracies are instituted by the bourgeoisie. To suggest that there has been a conspiracy in a particular case does not make one a conspiracy theorist.
The attack on the WTC/Pentagon may not have been directly organised and executed by the state. It may have been facilitated or allowed happen by elements deep within the state --elements within the FBI etc. There are enough reactionary elements available only too prepared to launch an attack on the scale of the WTC/Pentagon attack. The state's intelligence network needs to do nothing. It merely makes no real effort to engage in preventative action to prevent the occurrence of any such attack. At most it may only have to plant agent provocateurs inside these groups to incite them to engage in certain actions --not that they need much encouragement. The biggest problem facing the state is that these often incompetent groups don't screw it. Probably the better the terrorist group the more suitable it is for the job --assuming the state does not want it botched. Bush himself may not even have known of this conspiracy. Most of Bush's administration may not have known of it. Had they known of it some of its senior officials might have even vehemently opposed it. They may now have their own suspicions and feel revulsion. But that is neither here nor there. Who is to say that Bin Laden is not an agent of the CIA. They may want him dead because of what he knows about the CIA etc. Washington may want the secret military courts established to prevent Bin Laden and others from making available to the public evidence that might uncover the real enemy of the working class --the US state. US intelligence may now want Bin Laden dead to silence him. He has served his purpose. Immediately the act took place Bin Laden was presented as the culprit by the mainstream media. This was extraordinary. How come they were so uniformly instantaneous in their response as to where responsibility lay? Highly suspicious. If they were that prompt and even certain as to where the blame lay then how come they were not able to attempt to prevent the attack from taking place. If the intelligence was so good as to pinpoint Bin Laden as the culprit then how come it was not good enough to stymie it. It just gets curiousier and curiosier. The whole thing smells. Who would have ever thought the Pentagon could have been ever attacked so easily. Surely they has radar and other electronic surveillance installed together with a defence system ready to take out an oncoming likely hostile object. I want to make it clear that I am not necessarily saying that the state was complicit in the attack. I am just saying it has to be considered as a distinct possibility. Whether the elements deep inside the state were complicit does not really matter. The point is that it was an event that benefited Washington in many ways. It is only a claim. It is a claim that I have been making from the first moment the attack took place. My initial postings on the subject are evidence of this. If my claim has truth it may forms a pattern with other events. The attempt to politically assassinate President Clinton through the device of scandal and rumour mongering. It was hoped by a coterie of far right Republicans that it would lead to his being forced to resign --assassination by a different route to the assassination of President Kennedy. Even if he failed to resign it was hoped that his effectiveness would be consequently reduced. Indeed it may have been hoped that in circumstances in which he did not resign he might he forced to adopt a position more compliant towards the demands and specific interests of the far right Republicans. It was hoped that he become their prisoner. The far right hoped to turn the President of the United States of American into its prisoner. The attack on Clinton by the far right was intended to adversely affect Vice President Gore's ratings thereby ensuring that he would not be elected to the Presidency. Since the far right could not get their way, democratically, they were going to get their way by undemocratic conspiratorial means. When they failed to even get the Presidential election by democratic means they proceeded to undemocratically steal it. Bush was not democratically elected. He stole the Presidency from Al Gore. Now the next step in the game plan was to be the war on terror. The pretext was the WTC/Pentagon attack. This war was meant as a cover for the unprecedented expansion of military spending, cut backs in civil liberties and massive attacks on the living standards and working conditions of the working masses. It was also a cover for the enormous extension of US imperialist hegemony geopolitically through Washington's increasing oppression of other countries. In short I have in very general terms provided a sketchy outline of the programme of the far right. Organisations such as Hamas also play an interesting role. Their politics is ambiguous. They exploit the despair and anger of young Palestinians to engage in a reactionary strategy of suicide bombings that are obviously designed to prevent a Middle East agreement from being realised. Their actions are not based on their rejection of the restricted nature of the Oslo Accords. Even if Arafat was a radical socialist and had extracted a much more radical Oslo agreement from the Israeli government that gave a genuine state to the Palestinians etc Hamas and Islamic Jihad would be all the more resolute in their efforts to scupper it. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are among the best allies of Sharon and the far right in the Middle East. One might be forgiven for wondering have they been funded and supported by elements that want instability to persist. These extreme reactionary nature of these organisations must be highlighted at all times. They are no friends of the working class. The Taliban and Bin Laden play similar roles. Professional bourgeois journalism has, on the whole, steadfastly refused to conduct investigations to establish whether there are links joining the various elements together to form an orchestrated attempt to maintain and increase the oppression of the working class. The savage attack on Salman Rushdie's famous book forms part of this pattern. The attack on Robert Fisk probably fits into the pattern too --silence him. I could go on...... Regards Karl Carlile (Communist Global Group) Be free to join our communism mailing list at http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/ Macdonald:Because it goes beyond the Afghan Clerics into every pore of the very planet Earth. I know little of who did what and do not claim to say otherwise. But Lou's piece is missing several things that would make me forget all this "conspiracy" stuff. First off, most of us- and here I think a few others on this list would have to count themselves in this bracket- who believe in a "staging" go way beyond Afghanistan. Further, very few people are putting forward the notion that a bunch of CIA operatives pulled anything off. There is no legitimate need for the sleight of hand of going from A: They knew it was going to happen- to B: the CIA did it themselves. The costs that Lou ascribes to the economy are easily cancelled out by the benefits to the Oil giants who will now be able to fly their own planes as far as the foreseeable future. With reserves diminishing as they are, beyond the point of reforming the actually existing pre -9.11 agreements, a gauntlet needed to be dropped. The US and their bourgeois bosses needed a new regime, not in Afghanistan but over and above OPEC and all things politically and geographically included.
