The one big topic that Moore evades in F-911 is the principle role of the pro-Israel lobby within the United States.



Here is a quick backgrounder….



The events of 9/11 are documented for all time. Yet, even so, how many of you have googled “Emma Booker 911 video” and downloaded the entire 7 minute video of Bush at Emma Booker Elementary on the morning of 9/11? Michael Moore's film gives a heavily edited and editorialised version of the video.



I know that a split screen would have been dramatically more impactful. One half of the screen showing the mayhem and terror in New York, and the other half showing Bush sitting calmly, smiling, listening to the children ponderously stagger through their galley slave recitation of My Pet Goat. At the end of the reading he then joked with the children. He asked them if they watch too much TV. He chatted casually with the teacher.

Meanwhile in Manhattan millions of New Yorkers were trying to get the hell out of the city, while others stood ashen faced in disbelief and horror, staring up at the flames and smoke gushing out of the World Trade Center towers.



Bush was at Emma Booker to promote his education reform package. The event was stage managed by the White House for the media. There were dozens of reporters there, extra electricity had to be lined-in for all the cameras and lights. There were satellite trucks outside. The Secret Service had arrived days earlier to secure the site and begin preparations. This was big. Because of the view the camera gives us we only think of Bush sitting with the little kids. Not so. Even the backdrop behind Bush featuring the message "Reading makes a country great" was created by White House staff and installed in the library for the President's visit.



Bush was scheduled to make a live TV speech at 9:30 am. And nothing was going to stop that live feed going out at precisely 9:30. The time was booked. Can’t upset the advertisers. And so, at 9:30 the networks opened up their air to the scheduled event. The President mumbled his few feeble words about the attacks, and that was that. He was gone.



The rest of the day for President Bush was spent flying from air base to air base as Vice President Cheney warned him not to return to Washington. So, who was running the country?



That same week the head of Pakistan's secret intelligence service, the ISI, was meeting in Washington. He was there for the entire week. Why? When was the last time the head of Canada's CSIS went to Washington?



Before 9/11 Indian media made much of the ISI chief's visit to Washington . Because the last time an ISI head had travelled to America, Pakistan subsequently changed hands in a coup d'etat.



It is well documented by international media that the ISI created the Taliban. That the CIA spent billions on funding Islamic extremists. That the head of ISI shortly before 9/11 wired thousands of dollars to Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 9/11 attacks.



A logical and sober person would say, "Sure, one or two stories here and there are probably just the rumour mill on overdrive. It's journalists trying to make their rent, and they're coming up with outlandish stories. Take it with a grain of salt."



And that's exactly what I did. Until my doctor said, "Paul, you have to cut down on the salt. Your blood pressure is through the roof."



So, the Saudi, Pakistan, CIA, Al Qa'ida, Bush, Bin Ladin connection can be drawn up on paper. No smoking gun, but maybe that's becuse the gun is hidden by all the smoke. And mirrors.



But Iraq is a different story. Completely different.



And though 9/11 paralleled the Reichstag Fire, the USS Maine incident, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the decision to invade Iraq was made long before 2001.



In 1996 Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Meyrav Wurmser authored a policy paper for Israel's Benyamin Netanyahu. This document is a smoking gun, and is widely available on the Internet. Called "A Clean Break: New Strategies for Securing the Realm" Perle et al outlined a strategic platform for Israel's dominance in the region.

The key to the plan was the removal of Saddam Hussein. Not because Iraq posed any particular threat, but because once Iraq was "taken out" then a strategic hinge would be created whereby pressure could be exerted on Syria and Iran.



Fast forward to the current Bush Administration, and we see that Richard Perle was appointed the chair of the Pentagon Defense Policy Board, a civilian think-tank of sorts, but Perle had an office down the hall from the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Douglas Feith became Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, and David Wurmser landed a top job in the State Department.



We know now, thanks to the investigative journalism of Seymour Hersh, and the revelations of former Pentagon insider Lt. Col Karen Kwiatkowski, that pro-Israel neo-conservatives within the administration created inside the Pentagon the Office of Special Plans. In that shadow world the case against Iraq was born.



All the so-called intelligence for the invasion came out of the OSP. Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski was a career officer, and an analyst at the Pentagon when she was seconded to the OSP. She has written in Salon.com, and in numerous interviews available on the Internet that she was shocked to see such a pro-Israel bias within what was ostensibly an un-biased intelligence-gathering unit. She claims that she was told by a co-worker that if she wanted to get along within the office to be sure never to say anything positive about the Palestinians. Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski comments that this remark struck her as extremely peculiar, but it raised her antenna to be on the look out for other things that might also seem unusual.



Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski provides a first hand account of an encounter with neo-conservatives. Her insider’s view dovetails eerily well with Professor Shadia Drury’s 1997 book Leo Strauss and the American Right. Professor Drury details the rise of the neo-conservative movement in the United States. She explains the operating philosophy behind the neo-cons; she describes their methods, and she predicts their future. When read today, this 1997 book seems like a chilling crystal ball manifesto for everything that has happened since 9/11. And in light of Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski’s first hand testimony of her own experiences, spot on.



Remember that Saudi Arabia did not support the US invasion of Iraq. Although Saudi was glad to get rid of the US military bases there that had fuelled Al Qa’ida’s hatred for so long.



The only country in the region that rejoiced in the invasion was Israel. And now we know, thanks again to Seymour Hersh and Janes Defense Weekly, that Israeli Shin Bet and Mossad agents are currently at work in Iraq, both as contractors to the US military and as independent operators for Israel.



Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 conveniently leaves out this most important part of the puzzle of the United States determination to invade Iraq.



Oil is running out, Israel needs security, and the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (The Iron Triangle) needs perpetual war. All three problems were dealt with in the invasion of Iraq.



A new book, Imperial Hubris, due out this month, is the first book written by an active CIA officer to slam the Bush Administration. It will detail the failings of the CIA to crush Al Qa’ida, and it’s author will allege that Al Qa’ida will give George Bush a “present” of a domestic terrorist attack to ensure his re-election.



Chilling thoughts. But in the world of false-flag operations, and double-agents anything and everything is possible.



For Michael Moore to paint the Saudi Royal family as the only villains in this story once again shifts the focus off Israel and potentially inflames public sentiment against Arabs, specifically Saudis. That is wrong.



I remember my one major criticism of Bowling for Columbine was that Israel was not mentioned as a major recipient of US weapons. Weapons which are used, in violation of the treaties under which they are supplied, to attack civilians. An American officer is on the record stating that an Apache attack helicopter was not really designed for crowd control.



Currently the AIPAC lobby has a stranglehold on Congress, the Senate, and the White House. Until that grip is broken the claims made by Ralph Nader, and Thomas Freidman will stand; that Ariel Sharon has Arafat under house arrest in Ramallah, and George Bush under house arrest in the White House.



Saudi Arabia has a multitude of problems. Ever since T. E Lawrence teamed up with the House of Saud during the First World War, that family has had a stranglehold on power. The American oil companies that opened up Saudi in the 1920’s didn’t realize that they were playing with fire. To have a people happily living in the time of the Prophet (clocks and calendars stopped at about 600AD) suddenly given masses of money and modern ideas created lots of problems. Just look at Alberta and the results from the last election.



While the decadent Saudi Royals teeter atop a seething cauldron of discontent within their borders they deny to the West that there is anything out of the ordinary going on. However, analysts have predicted that even a small team of dedicated fighters could significantly damage or even destroy Saudi Arabia’s oil system. A frightening thought for the United States.



Oil Industry analysts call the time we are currently living in the “Peak Oil Period”. Oil has peaked. There is no new oil out there. The industry can continue to tap existing reserves, but that isn’t discovering new fields. The industry can search for new deposits, but the problem becomes one of accessibility. All the easy oil is gone. Now remains the bottom of oceans, or inhospitable regions where transport and production may be impossible. Even the much-touted Caspian basin may take years to bring on-line, and even then the deposits are so deep that thermal cracking may have reduced the oil to natural gas. Currently, Shell Oil has under gone a massive shake up after revelations that the company had been over inflating it’s predicted reserves by as much as 20%, putting it’s current estimate at eleven years. Eleven years, people. Break out the flying cars. Oh, right, there aren’t any flying cars. Shit.





A friend of mine suggests that we just give the Americans all the oil left in the world. Use it all up. But make sure that a portion of the money received from oil sales goes into developing a global alternative energy source. So, when the US finally finishes off all the oil, the rest of us will already be on to something better. A fanciful notion.



Here’s a last thought. In 2000 Iraq was allowed by the UN to go off the US dollar and go onto the Euro for it’s oil sales. This was a threat to the United States. If all oil-producers went off the US dollar it would crash. And the US is already one of the great debtor nations. As Chalmers Johnson notes in his latest book "Sorrows of Empire", it’s tough to be both an Empire and a debtor at the same time. Immediately after the invasion Bush signed an executive order putting Iraq’s oil sales back onto the US dollar.



Another reason for invasion is that the “oil-for-food” sanctions were working too well. There was increasing pressure from the international community to lift the sanctions. If that was done, and Iraq was once more open for business, which two countries would most probably have been last in line for any contracts? Probably the two countries that inflicted the most damage on Iraq in the last twelve years, the United States and Great Britain. And so they did an end-run around the lifting of the sanctions; the UK and US invaded. Immediately, and in gross violation of International Law, the Americans tore up all of Iraq’s contracts with other nations. Now it was going to be the United States doling out the contracts. Added to which billions of dollars of Iraq’s UN oil money has vanished from the bank where it is held in New York. Plus, since the invasion, tens of billions more of Iraq’s oil revenues have disappeared.



These are the facts, the facts that Fahrenheit 9/11 failed to face. Why?



To quote Joe Peschi in JFK, “It’s fun and games… Don’t you get it?”



Two vastly superior documentaries can be found on line

please google these titles:


BREAKING THE SILENCE : truth and lies in the war on terror - John Pilger
(ITV/Carlton UK 2003)

THE BUSH FAMILY FORTUNES - Greg Palast ( BBC3 UK 2003)

Please also listen to daily, and archived, programmes of alternative news at

www.democracynow.org

for the best news round up on the net:

www.informationclearinghouse.info


America's PBS network has an excellent documentary series available for viewing on line
Once at the main PBS site navigate to FRONTLINE and select to watch any one of several dozen excellent current events documentaries.

www.pbs.org



sincerely,



Paul Kincaid Jamieson