Thursday, April 07, 2005

San Francisco Bay Guardian News: We're all paranoid

San Francisco Bay Guardian News

A pair of Texas oilmen become president and vice president in 2000, thanks to support from the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and neoconservative ideologues determined to have the United States retain its dominance as the last remaining superpower.

Those political leaders and strategists believe the key to continued U.S. economic and military supremacy – indeed, the American way of life – is control of Eurasia and its vast oil reserves. It's a belief they've openly expressed in lectures, papers, and books. And their meetings with top energy officials confirm that the United States will need to have that control sooner than later, despite rising anti-Americanism in an area that also happens to be the center of the Islamic world.

They know the American people won't support such crude empire building without some trigger, some "new Pearl Harbor," as Dick Cheney's Project for the New American Century called it in a paper it put out in 2000. So when they start getting intelligence briefings with titles like "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.," they either simply do nothing, or maybe some faction of them actively facilitates this attack by the former Central Intelligence Agency asset's terrorist group.

To believe this theory, you have to believe U.S. officials are willing to allow the deaths of thousands of innocent people – and to perpetuate a vast set of lies and cover-ups – in order to further what they consider to be vital U.S. strategic and economic interests. Put another way, you have to believe the attacks of 9/11 could have been another in a long line of appalling events in U.S. history that were manipulated and, in some cases, entirely fabricated as a pretext for war – from the sinking of the Maine to the Gulf of Tonkin incident.