A possible scenario for what is in store over the next few weeks could well include a nuclear detonation under US military auspices on the coast of the Carolinas under the cover of the anti-terrorism exercise Sudden Response 05, but blamed on Hezbollah or some other alleged Iranian asset, followed by US atomic bombing of Iranian military bases, nuclear sites, and other strategic targets, using nuclear devices of various yields. US confrontation with Russia, China, and the other powers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization would not be far behind. With that, the nuclear genie would be out of the bottle, and we would not see him confined again in our lifetimes.

With these new threats from Bush, so reminiscent of his 2002-2003 demagogy in advance of the invasion of Iraq, there could be no rational doubt that the US regime was in headlong flight forward towards war with Iran. Bush and Cheney, and their masters in the US secret government, appeared determined to repeat, on a grand scale, the fiasco of the April 1980 Operation Eagle Claw the attempt to extract the US hostages from Iran which left 8 US dead among a field of burning aircraft at the Iranian site labeled Desert One. This time, the toll would be many orders of magnitude greater.

GERMANY: "EXTREMELY DANGEROUS" "UNCONTROLLED ESCALATION"

That Bush's threats were no mere throw-away lines was shown by the blunt response just a few hours later by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who in August 2002 had been the first NATO head of government to repudiate the then-imminent Iraq war. "Take the military options off the table, since we,ve seen that they are worthless," said Schroeder in a campaign speech in Hanover. He told the newspaper Bild am Sonntag: "I consider the military option extremely dangerousI can definitely exclude that under my leadership this government would be a part of it." Instead, Schroeder spoke in favor of "patient diplomacy," and also of German-Russian reconciliation. Schroeder pointed to the evident limits of the much-touted US "superpower," noting that "in the United States, one should realize that the US might, unilaterally, win wars, but cannot win peace, as we have seen in Afghanistan, and even more so in Iraq." (BamS, August 14, 2005) German Foreign Minister Fischer warned that military operations against Iran would always bring the risk of uncontrollable escalation. (DPA, August 13)

In an irony of history, Schroeder's prompt stand against a wider war has increased the penalty for the aggression now being planned by the Bush-Cheney regime and its backers. If the US attacks Iran before the September 18 German elections, Schroeder might be swept back into office, given the clear inability of his feckless opposition to resist US dictation. When Wolfgang Schaeubele, one of Schroeder's key opponents, visited Bush, Bush told him that "his greatest concern is Iran." However, Bush reassured his guest that there would be no US attack on Iran before the German vote on September 18. (Frankfurter Rundschau, August 18)

The British Foreign Office was compelled to align itself with Schroeder's critique. The Foreign Office spokesman stated: "Our position is clear and has been made very, very clear by the Foreign Secretary. We do not think there are any circumstances where military action would be justified against Iran. It does not form part of British foreign policy." (Sunday Times, August 14, 2005) Thus, according to all present indications, the US would go into Iran utterly alone, without even the window dressing of a sham coalition of the bribed and the blackmailed.

PUTIN: DON,T LOWER THE NUCLEAR THRESHOLD

Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his own response to Bush from the deck of the Russian battle cruiser Peter the Great in the Barents Sea. Putin's warning addressed the Cheney-Rumsfeld reliance on low-yield nuclear weapons as a key component of US strategy. "I think that lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear arms is a dangerous trend, because somebody may feel tempted to use nuclear weapons," Putin told journalists. "If that happens, the next step can be taken -- more powerful nuclear arms can be used, which may lead to a nuclear conflict. This extremely dangerous trend is in the back of the mind of some politicians and military officials," the president said. (Interfax, August 17) This can be read as a nuclear counterthreat in response to Bush's "all options are on the table." The threatening overtone took on consistency over the following hours. Putin flew in a Tupolev-160 strategic bomber with Major General Anatoly Zhikharev, deputy commander of the Russian strategic air force. With Putin on board, this plane was one of two which successfully flight-tested what Russia described as "a new, high-precision, long-range cruise missile." Putin had his picture taken in a flight helmet and, in contrast to Bush's ludicrous "Mission Accomplished" bluster, announced that the cruise missiles had hit their target. A new Russian RSM-54 ICBM, called SS-N-23 Skiff by NATO, was fired from the submerged nuclear sub Yekaterinburg in the Barents Sea and also hit its target on the Kura testing range on the Kamchatka peninsula. All this was in the context of maneuvers by the surface warships and subs of the Russian Northern Fleet.

Russia was also joining with China in Peace Mission 05, an unprecedented joint exercise in the Far East between August 18 and August 26, evidently directed against US-UK meddling in the region. The political basis of this cooperation against hegemonism had been outlined in the July 15 Russo-Chinese joint statement on the world strategic situation. At the same time, intelligence agencies of Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus held a drill involving the prevention of terror attacks on energy assets. Between August 22 and August 30 the combined air defense forces of the Commonwealth of Independent States will drill warding off air attacks around Astrakhan at the northern end of the Caspian Sea. The hypothetical aggressor was, once again, clearly the United States. Russian military sources indicated that the US and NATO had so far not mounted military exercises on this scale in multiple regions. The message of all this is that Russia's military comeback has succeeded to a remarkable degree, with more to come: Putin also announced a 22% increase in the Russian military budget, which is still dwarfed overall by the US. Russia, however, has been able to maintain substantial superiority in a limited number of strategically decisive categories. As the US has grown weaker under catastrophic neocon misleadership, Putin has grown more assertive: On August 17, Putin met with King Abdullah of Jordan in Sochi and called for a fixed timetable for the gradual departure of foreign forces from Iraq the theme Bush sees as taboo. Putin also called for the convocation before the end of the year of an international conference to stabilize Iraq another Bush bugaboo. US intentions in the Far East had been made clear by attack dog Zbigniew Brzezinski in a July 29 article in the Moscow Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which boasted that the Russian presence in that region was about to collapse. During August, Pakistan was holding Tri-Service maneuvers along its border with Iran, thus possibly creating a diversion to complicate Iran's situation.

WAR PSYCHOSIS IN WASHINGTON

For weeks, top US officials foolishly ignoring rumblings from many quarters around the world -- have given free rein to their obsession with Iran. When a few days after the London 7/7 attacks, a bomb in Israel claimed the lives of two victims, Rumsfeld placed the blame on Hezbollah and Iran. On August 9, Rumsfeld and outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers complained that Iran was responsible for the availability in Iraq of new types of shaped charge explosive devices, which had played a key roll in the heavy US losses of early August. Press accounts alleged that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards had created a special terror unit for anti-US operations inside Iraq, featuring the use of sophisticated and deadly shaped charges which were capable of easily knocking out the US Abrams tanks. According to one version, the Iranian commander of this irregular warfare group is a certain Abu Mustafa al Sheibani, who leads a score of teams of Iraqi Shiites and Hezbollah fighters who are expert in using the shaped charges. The overall commander of the effort is identified as Brigadier General Qassim Sullaimani. (Michael Wane, "Inside Iran's Secret War for Iraq," Time, August 21, 2005) The propaganda value of such stories for whipping up an anti-Iran war psychosis is obvious.

In an article appearing August 1, Rumsfeld went far towards declaring Moslems in general as inferior beings against which crusades could and should be waged. According to Rumsfeld, the terrorists "seek to destroy things they could never build in 1,000 years and kill people they could never persuade." (London Financial Times, August 1, 2005) These statements were accompanied by a campaign of warmongering hysteria in the reactionary and neofascist media. Arnaud de Borchgrave, the Belgian count who runs United Press International, wrote on August 16 that Iran is responsible for having made Iraq "hell for the US," and that the current Jaafari regime represents a step towards a "greater Iranian Shiite empire." In de Borchgrave's view, the "military option for air strikes is on the table." (UPI, August 16, 2005)

THE GIRALDI SIGNAL PIECE

The acute danger of a US nuclear sneak attack on Iran had been indicated by a signal piece contributed by CIA veteran Philip Giraldi to the magazine The American Conservative. Giraldi is the partner of retired CIA operations man Vince Cannistraro, and can be presumed to be drawing on high-level leaks by those opposed to the Bush-Cheney war scenario. Giraldi wrote:

"The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections." (The American Conservative, August 1, 2005; reprinted by Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, July 25, 2005)

The notion of a massive nuclear and conventional attack on Iran which is so graphically evoked here should not obscure the other, more immediately important, element of this warning: Cheney is counting on "another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." It is evident that such a determined warmonger as Cheney is hardly likely to leave the coming of that indispensable terrorist provocation to chance: the terror event that provides the pretext for war must be an integral part of the plan being pushed through the US bureaucracy by the secret government, their spokesmen Bush and Cheney, and the neocon faction in general. We are dealing in short with state sponsored terrorism.

As for the military side, US nuclear sneak attack plans have been in the works for some years under the supervision of the utopian Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. In the summer of 2004, Rumsfeld promulgated an "Interim Global Strike Alert Order." "Global strike" is Pentagon jargon for pre-emptive attack or, in plain English, a sneak attack. Under this order, the US STRATCOM (Strategic Command, corresponding to the Cold War Strategic Air Command) in Nebraska revamped its posture to be ready to deliver nuclear and conventional attacks on states alleged to be developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The plans to deal with an alleged threat from North Korea and/or Iran go under the designation CONPLAN (or contingency plan) 8022-22. This planning was ordered by Bush in a January 2003 secret directive in order to provide a "full-spectrum" global strike, including notably "a capability to deliver rapid, extended range, precision kinetic (nuclear and conventional) and non-kinetic (elements of space and information operations) effects in support of theater and national objectives." A centerpiece of CONPLAN 8022-22 is the so-called bunker-busting nuclear projectile, a specially configured earth-penetrating bomb designed to destroy deeply buried facilities, command bunkers, and the like. The entire package was foreshadowed in the pre-emptive war clauses of Bush's National Security Strategy published in September 2002, supposedly in response to the 9/11 events. In December 2002, the Pentagon's quadrennial Nuclear Posture Review ordered STRATCOM to prepare for greater flexibility in nuclear attack options against Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria and China quite an enemies, list.

According to Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force, his fleet of B-2 and B-52 bombers had been reorganized to be able to carry out such short-notice pre-emptive attacks. "We're now at the point where we are essentially on alert," Carlson said in an interview. "We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes." Carlson boasted that his headquarters was the U.S. Strategic Command's "focal point for global strike" and were ready to execute an attack "in half a day or less." In July 2004, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised the progress made on CONPLAN 8022-22, gloating that "the president charged you to 'be ready to strike at any moment's notice in any dark corner of the world' [and] that's exactly what you've done." The May 15, 2005 Washington Post article by William Arkin detailing CONPLAN 8022-22 was an important signal piece and would take an important place in a chronology of the current escalation.

CONPLAN 8022-22 appears to ignore the messy experience of defeat in Iraq and rather chooses to harken back to a mythologized version of the Afghan campaign of 2001-2002. It calls for nuclear and conventional air strikes, with limited use of Special Forces teams: the result is practically no "boots on the ground" or "follow-on ground operations," according to published reports. Afghanistan was subdued in 2001-2002 by means of air power to enforce deals made on the ground by CIA negotiators with local warlords and druglords. Something similar involving bribery of Iraqi generals was tried on the way to the bloody morass of present-day Iraq. The CONPLAN 8022-22 strategy is utopian enough to enrage any military traditionalist concerned about logistics, depth, and political factors. It is Blitzkrieg, with the utopian elements accentuated.

Wayne Madsen reports information he describes as coming from the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German foreign intelligence service, according to which the nuclear and conventional bombing campaigns already detailed will be supplemented by infrastructure sabotage and other acts of terrorism by the People's Mujaheddin (Mujaheddin e Khalq, MEK), US Special Operations units, and other marauders. (Despite recent talk of a US "war on terror," the Pentagon is not reticent about using the MEK, who are still on the State Department list of terrorist organizations, as auxiliaries. In fact, some of the MEK personnel have been personally rehabilitated by none other than General Geoffrey Miller, one of the principal felons of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.) The goals of the US operations include inciting a rebellion in the Khuzestan province of southwestern Iran, the site of many of Iran's oil fields and refineries, most probably including the critical Kharg Island tanker terminal. The majority of this area's population are Shiite Arabs. According to one scenario, the US would intervene in response to an appeal from the phantomatic Al Ahwaz Popular Democratic Front, whose program would include secession from Iran and the declaration of an independent Arab state calling itself Ahwaz. This simulacrum of Ahwaz corresponds to the new state called simply "Arabistan" in the standard Bernard Lewis Plan for the Balkanization of the Middle East. (see map). Also in correspondence with the Bernard Lewis Plan, the CIA is agitating among Kurds and Turkmen along the border with Iraq and Turkey and among Baluchis along the border with Pakistan by promising them their own balkanized homelands. The Persians, according to this report, would be relegated to an oil-poor "Irani triangle" (or "Iranistan," in classic Bernard Lewis Plan terminology) around Teheran, Isfahan, and Qom. According to the BND, the US Navy is tapping Iranian undersea cables, while US Task Force 121 covert action teams are swarming over sensitive points inside Iran. The presence of US special forces teams on Iranian territory has been an open secret since the beginning of 2005, along with numerous violations of US airspace by US military aircraft. (See <http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/>http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/, August 10, 2005)

US WAR AIMS: THE BERNARD LEWIS PLAN

To clarify these points, a map reflecting the Bernard Lewis Plan for the Balkanization of the Middle East is included with this article. This map is based on one published in Linda de Hoyos, Derivative Assassination: Who Killed Indira Ghandi? (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985), with some changes. Bernard Lewis served during World War II as an agent of the British Arab Bureau, the imperialist agency charged with keeping the Arab world weak so as to preserve London's domination. Bernard Lewis is associated with two principal ideas about the Moslem and Arab world. The first is that the real basis of Islam is not at all to be found in the luminous Baghdad Renaissance of the Caliph Haroun al Rashid around 800 AD, in its time the most advanced civilization in the world, but is to be sought rather in the benighted irrationalism of al Ghazali and his Destruction of Philosophy the world of dervishes, sheikhs, and necromancers. Over more than a century, the British have sought to control the Arab and Islamic sense of identity by finding, publicizing, and glorifying the most backward and self-destructive tendencies in one and a half millennia of Moslem history, attempting to accredit these as the true essence of Islam. Bernard Lewis, glorification of Moslem irrationalism thus prepares the way for the ideology attributed to al Qaeda. Lewis, second idea is that the existing Arab countries are illegitimate, and need to be carved up into a crazy quilt of ridiculous petty states who will be unable to threaten any important interest of Anglo-American imperialism. In a 1992 Foreign Affairs article in which he surveyed the region in the aftermath of the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, Lewis offered the following prophecy of the coming Lebanization of the entire Middle East on the lines of the post-1975 Lebanese civil war:

"The eclipse of pan-Arabism has left Islamic fundamentalism as the most attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be something better, truer and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside... The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates"as happened in Lebanon"into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."

Of course, Bernard Lewis only repeats with his usual arid banality the geopolitical nostrums which his British imperialist predecessors had expressed with far greater panache. T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia"), for example, who was a far more colorful operative than Lewis, developed similar ideas in an October 29, 1918 meeting with Lord Cecil, Lord Curzon, Lord Balfour, General Smuts, and Mark Sykes of the Foreign Office, who helped draw up the map of the modern Middle East in the infamous Sykes-Picot deal. At that time the British effort was to break up and balkanize a Caliphate that actually existed, with its center in Constantinople. Lawrence stated:

"If the Sultan of Turkey were to disappear, then the Caliphate by the common consent of Islam would fall to the family of the prophet, the present representative of which is Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca. Hussein's activities seem beneficial to us, because it marches with our immediate aims, the breakup of the Islamic bloc and the disruption of the Ottoman Empire, and because the states he would set up to succeed the Turks would be as harmless to ourselves as Turkey was. If properly handled the Arab states would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and yet always ready to combine against an outside force."

In other words, the eternal British mantra of divide and conquer, now embraced with giddy enthusiasm by fanatical parvenu neocons, greedy barbarian Bushmen, and cost-plus arrivistes along the Potomac.

The Bernard Lewis Plan represents the real US-UK war aims in the Middle East. This map is what Appalachian poor whites, no-future rural youth, and black and Hispanic ghetto victims are dying for in Iraq. The hogwash spouted by neocons about democracy, or Bush's pledge to bring reform and modernization to Arab societies, are cynical subterfuges to achieve this goal. In the light of this analysis, the basic purpose of Bush's Iraq invasion was quite simply the destruction of that society, and the deliberate provoking of a three-way civil war. This is, after all, what we are observing empirically. Maybe it is now clear why, despite an alleged $20 billion in reconstruction funds available, there is so little electricity in Baghdad.

THE WAR PLANS FOR IRAN

According to one high-ranking retired US military officer, a warning has been issued inside the Pentagon about a large-scale terrorist attack in the US around the fourth anniversary of 9/11 on September 11, 2005. (EIR, August 16, 2005) According to this source, US CENTCOM (Central Command), SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and STRATCOM (Strategic Command) were asked what their capabilities against Iran would be. CENTCOM reported that it was bogged down in Iraq and had nothing to spare. SOCOM replied that it could mount raids inside Iran, but these would not be sufficient to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program, and might include losses so heavy as to be politically unacceptable. STRATCOM offered a target list for nuclear attack. According to this source, the reluctance of the US military to cross the nuclear threshold with a sneak attack was great, with key generals "highly resistant" to such a move. This source implied that the center of support for US nuclear aggression against Iran was in INSCOM, the Intelligence and Security Command, the home of utopian psychological warfare strategists and assorted Strangeloves. (EIR, August 16, 2005) Generally speaking, INSCOM and SOCOM, with their old boy networks and interfaces with CIA, DIA, NSA, etc., are the prime suspects in the terror provocations now looming.

The US campaign which thus shapes up has many of the characteristics of a punitive expedition, The US would bomb the bases of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, along with the nuclear facilities at Bushehr, Isfahan, and related locations. But published reports also indicate that the Pentagon utopians feel that they will also need to seize control of the areas where the laboratories, research facilities, factories, universities, and reactors are located, in order to ensure their complete destruction. The utter devastation of these areas might require as much as one month. After this, the US forces would leave most of Iran immediately, except perhaps for some advisers attached to the Ahwaz forces and other rebels. It will thus will be a campaign of pure vandalism and destruction, designed to push Iran back into the Stone Age. It will aim at the destruction of modern civilization. This will be the main thrust, and not any neocon slogans about democracy, modernization, women's rights or other Orwellian lies.

The war party in Washington was shocked by the July 8 demand of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that the US establish a firm timetable for vacating the Uzbek and Kyrgyz bases in central Asia which were extorted by Bush from Putin on September 11, 2001. On July 29, President Karimov of Uzbekistan had given the US an ultimatum to get out of his country within 180 days, meaning by January 29, 2006. As Sovietologist Stephen Cohen noted on WTOP radio in Washington DC soon afterwards, this represented the first rollback of US-UK expansionism into the former Soviet sphere since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. On August 2, the Russian government newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta suggested that, once the US left, Russia would take over this key airbase. It was also clear that the US was shopping all over the region for bases from which to attack Iran and other states. In this connection, a Russian newspaper suggested that Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, who shares a border with Iran, was ready to grant the US a base or perhaps even two. But Aliyev's top international affairs adviser denied it, and indicated that his country was not interested in joining US moves against Iran. Central Asia is beginning to resemble the Balkans of the pre-1914 or 1939-41 phases, with the great powers jostling each other for advantage as hostilities loom closer.

Despite the limited ground forces which the Pentagon utopians imagine they will need to vandalize Iran, the US forces in neighboring Iraq will nevertheless require reinforcement during the time of operations in Iran. There may be insurrections among the Iraqis, counterattacks across the border by the Iranians, and the like. The most probably means to accomplish a buildup of 20,000 to 30,000 US troops in Iraq will be available in the time between October 15 and December 15. Anecdotal reports of individual servicemen having their leaves cancelled for this approximate time frame have been received. US military spokesmen have already referred to their plans for a "plus-up" of their numerical strength during this period, allegedly because of the need to protect the October 15 constitutional referendum and the December 15 national elections. But that will be a pretext, a deception. Indeed, all such US troop strength projections are based on nothing but deception, as in the case of Rumsfeld's July 27 visit to Iraq to promise some form of troop reduction during 2006. These statements are calculated to deceive US voters in advance of the (scheduled) November 2006 US Congressional election, but above all to deceive the Iranian leadership. They are also designed to fool US soldiers, giving them the mirage of light at the end of the tunnel in their personal predicament. Their truth content is equivalent to that of certain protestations of mutual friendship made during May and early June of 1941 by Hitler and Stalin. The US government and mass media are currently operating in a total wartime propaganda mode. At the New York Times, for example, the despicable tradition of Judith Miller, Iraq war stenographer for the neocon regime, showed itself alive and well, as Richard Bernstein attempted to write off the German warnings as a mere election ploy by Schroeder. "No country, including the United States, is making serious military threats against Iran," wrote the mendacious Bernstein in the face of all reality. (NYT, August 16, 2005)

MEDIA BLACKOUT

An example of the US covert buildup with active press complicity and lying came in the August 18 edition of The Washington Post. Here we are informed by staff writer Bradley Graham that 700 members of the 1st battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division will be going to Iraq soon. The deployment will be "to bolster prison operations," wrote Graham, who also cited Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Venable as saying that "The basic fact driving this deployment is the steady rise of the prison population. There need to be some additional resources devoted to this." Elsewhere in the article we read that the troops will "not necessarily provide prison guards but rather engage in a number of detention-related operations, such as securing the area around a prison compound or transporting detainees from one prison to another." To see the absurdity of this cover story, we need only recall that paratroopers are by definition among the most highly trained elite shock troops, whose main purpose is to carry out offensive operations behind the lines of an enemy. To use them for defensive operations is a waste. Unless the Pentagon generals have gone mad as hatters on the tactical plane as well as the strategic one, they would know that the many hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to train a paratrooper will be quickly lost if that trooper is required to act for any length of time as a prison guard, detainee convoy escort, or garrison soldier around a prison. Paratroopers must train as paratroopers or they soon cease to be paratroopers and become useless. These paratroopers and others being shipped to Iraq are earmarked for use in the upcoming attack on Iran, the only possible offensive use for such troops at the present time. The US press is now full of falsifications of this puerile character.

Pentagon planners are aware that Iran would respond to a foreign invasion with an array of asymmetrical warfare techniques. But they may not realize how aggressive Iran might be when facing attack. The US has no monopoly on preventive attacks. The Taliban had few opportunities for preventive attacks. Saddam Hussein, possibly because of his long-standing ties to the US, never undertook preventive action during Operation Desert Shield in late 1990, when US forces in northern Saudi Arabia were very weak, and his passivity probably continues to disorient US planners to this very day. Iranian officials have proclaimed repeatedly that they are not Iraq, and will not resign themselves to an exclusively defensive posture if hostilities are imminent. And since the US has already committed multiple acts of war against Iran with teams on the ground and overflights, international law will be on the Iranian side.

IRANIAN COUNTERMEASURES

How might Iran respond to a US attack? An obvious measure would be to step up the flow of bombs, guns, and fighters into Iraq. But the main Iranian card is that country's long Persian Gulf coast. This narrow seaway is of course the oil aorta of the world, and Iran would have many operations to sever it. Iran is thought to possess an array of missiles ranging from obsolete Chinese Silkworms to ultra-modern Russian 3M-82 Moskit (called SS-N-Sunburn by NATO) and even the SS-NX-26 Yakhonts sea-skimming cruise missiles. The Sunburn, for example, has been designed for the express purpose of sinking US aircraft carriers, and could also destroy supertankers. Even artillery pieces and tank cannon could become interdicting factors when deployed in the rough territory along the northern coast of the Gulf. A few hulks scuttled in the Straits of Hormuz could block all traffic as totally as did the freighters sunk by Nasser in the Suez canal in 1956. And then there are mines. A few Iranian mines set adrift in the Gulf in 1987 caused the maritime insurance premiums for tankers to rise so sharply that the Emir of Kuwait was forced to re-flag his ships under US registry so as to procure US escorts and minesweepers. Deliveries destined mainly for Europe, Japan and China would be cut off, and the economies of these countries would be severely curtailed. The oil price would rise into the ionosphere, with the mythical Hubbert's peak nowhere in sight. The US would view the results with some Schadenfreude, since powerful economic and strategic rivals would be dealt stunning blows, even as a wholly artificial demand for dollars would emerge as nations scrambled to pay their imported oil bills. But the constriction of Gulf oil traffic would be a prelude to the thermodynamic collapse of the world economy.

Finally, there is no guarantee that Iran would imitate the restraint shown by Saddam Hussein, who never so far as is known contemplated attacks on targets located on US territory.

As for the US forces engaged in Iran, they might quickly find themselves in an extraordinarily critical situation, somewhat along the lines of Mogadishu in 1993, or like the British at Saratoga. If the Iranian human wave assaults of the Iran-Iraq war are any indication, significant parts of the Iranian population may prove willing to wage a form of people's war against the invaders. At worst, the US forces might face a fate similar to that of the German army in Romania in the closing months of 1944 annihilation. Responsible US military leaders must act now to prevent such a needless catastrophe.

The Pentagon has a trick of flying dying soldiers out of theatre and not counting them in the Iraq casualty statistics even if they expire a few moments after their airplane has left the ground. Some reckonings of actual US deaths as a result of Iraq operations range between 7,000 and 9,000, with part of the discrepancy due to this practice. (Brian Harring, The Harring Report, TBRNews.org) US deserters must be approaching 6,000, with many of them taking the last available chance to make a run for it when their planes land at Shannon Airport in Ireland for refueling. Cases of documented fragging have now surfaced. These factors, plus the difficulty of attracting recruits to be sent into the Iraqi shooting gallery, add up to the collapse of US land forces Army and Marines by early 2006 at the latest.

ZARQAWI: A CLASSIC FALSE FLAG COUNTERGANG

Inside Iraq, the US-UK coalition has been cynically employing terrorism as a counterinsurgency tactic. These operations have been developed in accordance with the British colonial doctrine of General Frank Kitson, the author of such classics as Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace Keeping and Gangs and Counter-Gangs. These speak to the heart of false flag operational doctrine. When Kitson found anti-British nationalism developing in Kenya during the time of the Mau-Mau, he deliberately created false flag units which, presenting themselves as Mau-Mau, committed the most unspeakable atrocities. The effect was to discredit the nationalists and slow down the country's progress towards independence. As I noted in 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism, the Zarqawi operation in Iraq is a US-UK asset. Zarqawi is manifestly a false flag countergang, tasked to carry kidnappings and grisly murders as necessary for the purpose of discrediting and demonizing the opposition to continued occupation.

The average person around the world might well be astounded that the neocon administration in Washington, who never learned the lesson of Vietnam, have also been unable to learn the lesson of Iraq. The neocons would assert that they are acting on the lessons of Iraq, which for them add to the thesis that the US is losing in Iraq because of infiltration of weapons, supplies, and foreign fighters through the famously porous borders of Syria and Iran. This amounts to a psychotic flight forward, in which the neocons hope to escape from the problem of military defeat and the breakdown of the US land forces by courting a larger military defeat and the accelerated disintegration of US land forces.

The attitude of Russia and to some extent of China towards a US invasion of Iran represents a giant question mark.

There is every reason to think that, since the fall of the Shah, the USSR and then Russia have been determined to prevent the US occupation of Iran, especially northern Iran and the Caspian Sea coast, the possession of which would give London and Washington the opportunity to project their meddling deep into new areas of central Asia. In his Carter-era study entitled Hostage to Khomeini (New York: Benjamin Franklin House, c. 1980), Mother Jones columnist Robert Dreyfuss wrote that the decisive factor in blocking the US special forces action at Desert One in April 1980 was a massive show of force over that site by the Soviet Air Force. According to one version cited by Dreyfuss, it was Soviet bombs, and not an accidental collision, which caused the conflagration that ended that mission. Today there are teams of Russian technicians at Bushehr, and Russia has reportedly installed a mobile system of ground to air missiles to defend the reaction from possible US or Israeli strikes. The implementation of CONPLAN 8022-22 would almost certainly cause fatalities among the Russian personnel involved in these activities. Will Russia prove more willing to tolerate a US presence in Iran, or the deaths of her citizens, than the USSR had been? We may soon find out, and they results may be anything but edifying.

IN SEARCH OF A PRETEXT FOR WAR

In order to wage war, the Anglo-Americans must have a pretext that will allow the controlled corporate media to portray them as the aggrieved parties, the victims of aggression. The model is the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin, or Hitler's Gleiwitz radio station massacre, which provided the cover story for his September 1, 1939 attack. After six months of sending special forces teams and aircraft into Iran, this is of course a hard case to argue, but the American people generally do not know about the illegal incursions, and no lie is too big for the media.

A duo of military madmen have come forward with one approach to destroying Iran as a modern state. They are Lt. General Thomas McInerney, assistant vice chief of staff of the Air Force and director for the Defense Performance Review, and Army Maj. General Paul Vallely, former deputy commanding general, Pacific. Vallely also bills himself as the senior military commentator of Fox News. In their book <http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0895260662>Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror, these two develop the following lunatic scenario for dealing with Iran:

"The United States must prepare to approach the UN Security Council with a draft resolution for a total economic embargo on Iran, the seizing of Iranian assets (to be held in trust for future Iranian government), and a strict naval quarantine in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The United Nations would lift the embargo only when the Iran government dismantles its nuclear weapons program under the supervision of international inspections. Libya (and before Libya, South Africa) has given Iran an example to follow on how to dismantle a nuclear weapons program in a way that meets international standards of verification. Iran would be required to surrender or destroy all equipment needed to produce fissionable materials (highly enriched uranium and plutonium), all long-range ballistic missiles, and all cruise missiles; release all documents related to its nuclear weapons program; and expel all foreign scientists, technicians, and engineers involved in nuclear weapons design, development, and production. Because the French or Russians are likely to veto " or, at least, threaten to veto " such a Security Council resolution, the United States should be ready to impose these conditions on Iran with a coalition of our own." (As excerpted in National Review.)

The method is the same as Iraq use the UN as a fig leaf for acts of war if possible, otherwise repudiate any notion of international law and act unilaterally, using a group of petty states as a cloak. The proposed closing of the Straits of Hormuz would of course represent a major act of war, and would be seen clearly as such by Europe, Japan, and China, who depend on Persian Gulf oil. Clearly some other approach will be required.

TERRORISM UNDER THE COVER OF EXERCISES AND DRILLS

That approach is to create a pretext for war using state sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism on a scale larger the previous exercise of this type on September 11, 2001. Giraldi states above that Cheney's planning includes "another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." Since the ruling clique manifestly wants war, they are not going to leave such an attack to chance; they are going to furnish themselves, with their own guaranteed apparatus. One variant, already the object of numerous rumors and chatter around Washington, is a "new 9/11" attack against several major US cities, including New York and Washington. A possible occasion might be the anniversary day of September 11, 2005. To be fully effective, the attacks would have to be attributable to an Iranian-backed grouping, most likely Hezbollah, which is considered by the US an Iranian asset. Hezbollah, a mass political party in Lebanon, is big enough to allow a considerable number of patsies and double agents to be housed or at least sheep-dipped there.

The synthetic terror event required by the Bush-Cheney clique and its masters is likely to be conducted through the US military and intelligence apparatus under the cover of a terror drill or a war exercise. Since even those parts of the 9/11 truth movement who have talked the most about military drills have not sufficiently clarified this matter, a word of explanation is required.

If we catalogue each coup d,etat, high-level political assassination, destabilization, war provocation, and spectacular terrorist event on a world scale over the past 50 years, we will find that almost all of them have been conducted or conduited in whole or in part through the military/intelligence apparatus of the state involved. In many cases, the cover story which has allowed this to be done has taken the form of a military or terrorism maneuver or exercise which closely resembled the actual event which followed, but which masqueraded as a mere drill up to the very last moment. For example, the US Operation Mongoose, which on the surface had to do with the assassination of Fidel Castro, appears to have functioned as a cover story for operations leading to the assassination of President Kennedy. On the day after John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to assassinate President Reagan, there was scheduled a presidential succession exercise, presumably one of the Nine Lives series. This is discussed in my book, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (Washington DC: EIR, 1992; reprinted Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2004).

9/11 itself offers the greatest density of war drills and terror drills seen so far. These included Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Vigilance, Northern Guardian, Tripod II, and a National Reconnaissance office drill. The publication of William M. Arkin's Code Names (Hanover NH: Steerforth Press, 2005) has added Global Guardian to this list. Global Guardian is important since it establishes beyond doubt what I argued in 9/11 Synthetic Terror: namely that one of the main ingredients of the 9/11 plot was an option for a thermonuclear confrontation with Russia and possibly other states. A recent posting on cooperativeresearch.org notes that Global Guardian also had included some simulation of a rogue network interfering in the command and control of strategic assets a kind of nuclear coup:

A 1998 Defense Department newsletter reported that for several years Stratcom had been incorporating a computer network attack (CNA) into Global Guardian. The attack involved Stratcom "red team" members and other organizations acting as enemy agents, and included attempts to penetrate the Command using the Internet and a "bad" insider who had access to a key command and control system. The attackers "war dialed" the phones to tie them up and sent faxes to numerous fax machines throughout the Command. They also claimed they were able to shut down Stratcom's systems. Reportedly, Stratcom planned to increase the level of computer network attack in future Global Guardian exercises., [<http://www.iwar.org.uk/infocon/dtic-ia/Vol2_No1.pdf>IAnewsletter, 6/98]

The bad" insider points towards the invisible government's 9/11 threat to launch the war of civilizations in the nuclear dimension should Bush refuse to unleash it on the conventional plane. Details about these exercises are found in my 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism: Made in USA (Joshua Tree CA: Progressive Press, 2005) As I try to show, some of these maneuvers involved sending US Air Force fighter interceptors to Alaska and Northern Canada so as to reduce the probability that these planes would be able to prevent the aircraft or other flying objects from hitting the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. These maneuvers also sowed confusion, with fake blips inserted on radar screens manned by loyal officers, and military and commercial aircraft masquerading as hijacked planes. This use of maneuvers on 9/11 is consistent with the LIHOP (Let It Happen on Purpose) or perhaps HIHOP (Helped It Happen on Purpose) interpretation of 9/11 which has been ably defended by Michael Ruppert. These maneuvers can be compared to the Fletcher Prouty character being sent to the South Pole just at the time of the Kennedy assassination in Oliver Stone's JFK.

But, when we come to Global Guardian, Amalgam Virgo, the plane hijacking exercise under whose overall aegis 9/11 was manifestly prepared over a period of months and years, and to such specific exercises as the 9/11 National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) drill involving a hijacked aircraft hitting that agency's own headquarters, the terror drill mimics the actual attacks so closely that the drill must be seen as the deliberate camouflage of the attack. Modern military and security bureaucracies involve officers sitting in front of consoles in war rooms and situation rooms for hours on end. If there is to be state sponsored terrorism, some of the terror operations have to be prepared using those very consoles. Some of the officers present may support the coup, assassination, provocation, or terror plot. Some may be indifferent or simply unwitting. Some might actively oppose the plot and sabotage it if they knew what was coming. Outside agencies of unknown orientation may also be watching. Thus, a drill designed so as to be practically congruent with the terror attack tremendously facilitates the work of the plotters, faction. If a loyal officer asks the coup plotter sitting next to him what he is doing, the coup plotter can cite the code name of the drill, and also note that the loyal officer does not possess the proper security clearance needed to know any more. In other words, war drills and terror drills are the keys to making the terror attacks happen on purpose through the state apparatus of the relevant country. They are one key reason why any explanation of 9/11 short of invisible government MIHOP (i.e., that the US invisible government made 9/11 happen on purpose) is inadequate.

These basic facts were illustrated once again in London on July 7, 2005. Scotland Yard knew in advance that these attacks were coming, as shown through the warnings to Netanyahu and, presumably, other visiting bigwigs. The long-range preparation of the London explosions was carried out under the aegis of a trio of exercises: Atlantic Blue for the UK, Topoff 3 for the US, and Triple Play for Canada. These dealt with bomb attacks on the London Underground system at the same time that an important international conference was taking place in the UK in this case, the meeting of the G-8 in Gleneagles, Scotland. The drill apparently included a biowar attack on the conference, a detail that seems to have ended up on the cutting room floor. The immediate cover for the London 7/7 events was by all accounts the simulation being conducted by Peter Power and Visor Consultants, which involved bombs going off at pretty much the same stations at the same times that the explosions actually occurred. The Visor Consultants drill may well have involved personnel on the ground who thought they were participating in a legally sanctioned simulation, but who were really performing actions which led to the explosions. In this way, drills can help to produce the destructive effects associated with the terror attack. They can also transform unwitting employees into patsies, some of whom can pay for their naivete with their lives. These may or may not be the same persons as the patsies who are ultimately accused of being responsible.

CASE STUDY: SUDDEN RESPONSE 05

With these facts in mind, let us turn to the following two items. The first is an article from the Winston-Salem Journal of March 18, 2005. The second is a press release from the US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) issued June 29, 2005. Both have to do with operation Sudden Response 05, a nuclear terrorism drill which began August 17, 2005.

http://www.journalnow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=WSJ%2FMGArticle%2FWSJ_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031781660453

Winston-Salem Journal

Friday, March 18, 2005

N.C. sites to be part of summer terrorism drill

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SHALLOTTE - The largest terrorism drill in North Carolina history is being planned for August and will include a mock attack on the Sunny Point Military Ocean Terminal in Brunswick County.

Officials said Wednesday the drill will stretch from Fort Bragg to Morehead City in the state's central coast area to Brunswick County on the southeastern coast.

Emergency and law-enforcement units from Virginia to South Carolina have been invited to participate, as have those from the seven counties that surround Fort Bragg. Participation by military personnel and equipment will hinge on their availability.

The exercise is thought to be the first to test the new National Response Plan that takes effect next month and requires coordination among local, state and federal officials in terrorism and emergency response.

The idea came from Fort Bragg and the FBI, said Andy Albright, an exercise facilitator and civilian employee of the Coast Guard in Wilmington. Other military bases and state and local agencies were invited to join.

Planning for the drill has been going on for a year, Albright said.

The exercise is to begin with a weapons of mass destruction drill at Fort Bragg with some of the perpetrators escaping. Other events will occur over the next three days at or near other military bases in eastern North Carolina, at the State Port in Morehead City and in the Pamlico Sound.

There will be a May 17 workshop in Morehead City to help prepare those who will participate and a July exercise to test communications before the August events, Albright said.

Randy Thompson, Brunswick County's emergency services director, said it has been 31/2 years since local emergency management has tested its response to a situation at Sunny Point.

The last time was when a boat loaded with munitions caught fire and burned at the terminal, the largest military munitions shipping point in the United States.

http://www.northcom.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.showstory&storyid=C9BFBBAC-F3CA-BD2E-008C7B34AFE33114

NorthCom Press Release

Exercise to focus on nuclear terror scenario

Posted Jun 29, 2005 at 1:00:PM MDT

FORT MONROE, Va. -- Here's the scenarioA seafaring vessel transporting a 10-kiloton nuclear warhead makes its way into a port off the coast of Charleston, S.C. Terrorists aboard the ship attempt to smuggle the warhead off the ship to detonate it. Is this really a possibility?

Joint Task Force Civil Support (JTF-CS) here is planning its next exercise on the premise that this crisis is indeed plausible.

Sudden Response 05 will take place this August on Fort Monroe and will be carried out as an internal command post exercise. The exercise is intended to train the JTF-CS staff to plan and execute Consequence Management operations in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency Region IV's response to a nuclear detonation.

Some of this year's objectives for SR05 are to refine nuclear incident Concept of Operations, produce a CM Operation Order, refine command post set-up procedures and maintain situational awareness of multiple CM incidents.

The Sudden Response exercise has been held at Quantico, Va., in the past, but has been moved to Fort Monroe to maximize command post training time. The senior leadership felt that it was more important to accomplish training instead of losing up to a day and a half in travel time, said Paul Deflueri, J7 Lead Exercise Planner. "This will allow us to still meet our training objectives," he said.

Some external participants may work with JTF-CS during the exercise.

"We,re trying to get representatives from FEMA Region IV as well as representatives from South Carolina Emergency Management Division and active duty soldiers from the (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive) Consequence Management Response Force to play the role of task force units," Defluri said. "Each time we do one of these internal exercises, we try to make it more robust and try to add in fidelity," Defluri said. "That's what we,re trying to do for SR05: create a good scenario and be able to replicate the effects as best we can. That way we can give the command a really good CM exercise."

In the related exercise Operation Orbit Comet, held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, under the command of Maj. Gen. Virgil Packett, the drill involved military response to the taking of several US Congressmen as hostages by terrorists. Congressmen Bob Etheridge and Mike McIntyre volunteered to play the victims in this exercise, which had some of the features of a dry run for a coup. This exercise was also slated to include a raid on a safe house, the detonation of a large explosive device on a ferry, and a simulated commercial oil spill at Morehead City.

Without attempting a line-by-line exegesis, it ought to be clear that an exercise of this type would lend itself to transformation into an actual nuclear terrorist incident, including the detonation of some kind of nuclear device. This is especially true given the presence of Fort Bragg, home of the US special forces, founded by General Edward Lansdale, who was an integral part of the Allen Dulles-Lyman Lemnizter clique which has been key to secret government operations since the Kennedy-LBJ era. We cannot be reassured by the intent of the organizers to make these proceedings "more robust and try to add in fidelity," since the maximum of fidelity would be to include a nuclear device or nuclear detonation.

We should also bear in mind that, before they settled on the nuclear test site of Alamogordo, New Mexico, US World War II nuclear planners had considered setting up their nuclear proving ground on the coastal islands of North Carolina. The advantage was seen in the fact that the nuclear fallout from a detonation along the North Carolina coast would tend to drift directly out over the Atlantic Ocean, instead of falling on populated areas, as the New Mexico fallout always threatened to do. This means that the rogue network could organize a quite spectacular nuclear 9/11 along the Carolina coast without also doing commensurate damage to their already rickety war machine.

CITIZENS MOBILIZE TO STOP TERROR DRILLS

It is possible to fight back. The mobilization that started at a Sunday, July 24 morning workshop at the Washington DC Truth Convergence has perhaps disrupted the hidden agenda of Sudden Response 05. A mobilization by a number of websites especially www.total411.info -- and email blasters starting on July 28 identified the obvious subversive potential of Sudden Response 05, and urged vigilance by world public opinion and local citizens. On August 15, the website of the Charleston Post and Courier published a strange article which apparently represented the attempt of this paper to respond to widespread fears in the region that the planned drill was going to culminate in an actual nuclear detonation. Here we read:

Still, this chatter has stirred up folks all over the Lowcountry, worried that nuclear fallout could seriously ruin their weekend. Officials with Charleston County, the state's emergency management personnel and even the Department of Defense have gotten worried calls from folks scanning the skies for mushroom clouds over Fort Sumter. Trouble is, as with most conspiracy theories, the facts often get in the way. Locals officials say no drills are planned this week, and the state Ports Authority says no plans have been made to detonate any nuclear weapons in the harbor.Other details, such as why Iran would blow up Charleston, are not explained in these theories.

https://www.charleston.net/stories/?newsID=36369&section=localnews ]

Of course, the web sites calling attention to this suspicious drill never implied that Iran would have anything to do with the possible explosion, which was always clearly attributed to the rogue network inside the US command structure. Otherwise, the denials respecting activity in the Charleston area was pure lying. Here was a case where the cockroaches of the invisible government may have wilted in the bright glare of publicity. Perhaps as a result of this negative publicity, the start of the drill was postponed from the scheduled August 17 to August 18 at 3:30 in the afternoon. In the afternoon of August 18 it became apparent that the drill was going to be postponed a second time, probably to Monday, August 22, or perhaps definitively. Soon NORTHCOM announced that this dangerous drill was over. If local citizens can work to prevent terror drills from erupting into provocations, the task of the terrorist controllers and coup plotters will become complicated beyond measure. At the same time, the American people may finally break through to awareness about the crimes plotted within their own government, and shut those criminals down for good.

Another highly dangerous drill series is the so-called Urban Dispersion Program, being held in New York City between August 6 and 26. (<http://urbandispersion.pnl.gov/>http://urbandispersion.pnl.gov/) As Salon reported, "Government scientists released colorless, harmless gas at four Manhattan locations Monday as part of an effort to find out how fast and far a toxic substance could spread if released in the city. According to this article, this program "aims to produce a computerized model of air flow patterns that could help authorities decide how to evacuate people after a chemical or biological attack." Another round of gas dispersion is scheduled to take place in the spring of 2006. This type of drill poses the obvious threat that a single rogue network official might be able to replace the harmless gas with some far more toxic substance.

The basic interest of New Yorkers is to have this pernicious drill series shut down as soon as possible.

We should stress that there are numerous war drills and terror maneuvers going on, and all of them require vigilant scrutiny followed by timely denunciation and exposure as necessary. On August 18, a "multi-agency command and control tabletop exercise" was scheduled to be held on the University of California Maritime Campus with the participation of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the most sinister of the private military firms, involving the hypothesis of port-related terrorism in and around San Francisco Bay. 200 people were involved as "participants, evaluators, controllers, or observers." On Friday, August 19, a mysterious explosion, later ascribed to a defective transformer, took place in San Francisco. Were these events connected? Or again: from August 15 to August 19, NORTHCOM held Alaska Shield/Northern Edge, with an array of "simulated natural disasters and terrorist events in 21 communities." Incessant terror drills offer the rogue network multiple opportunities to go live with the provocation they are seeking, and also function as a kind of mass brainwashing. With these drills, the secret government is waging war on the people. One basic demand for activists is therefore that these sinister and suspicious drills be called off, since they represent a threat to the American people and to world peace.

As noted above, the command center for operation Sudden Response 05 is Fortress Monroe, located near where the James River meets Chesapeake Bay, not far from the scene of the 1862 Monitor-Merrimac battle. The fort features a cell where Confederate leader Jefferson Davis was held prisoner after the Civil War on charges of high treason, and it is evident that some top military officers ought to be occupying that cell block today.

One of these is General Peter J. Schoomaker, presently the US Army Chief of Staff, who is part of a utopian/irrationalist clique in the Pentagon which has been fostered by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Schoomaker was the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command in 1994-1996, commander of the US Army Special Operations Command in 1994-1996, and commander in chief of the United States Special Operations Command in 1997-2000. Schoomaker was brought back from undistinguished retirement to head the Army after the firing of Gen. Shinseki, who had questioned the utopian recipes for the conquest of Iraq. He also took part in the aggressions against Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Haiti. Schoomaker was an integral part of the failed hostage rescue mission at Desert One in April, 1980, which once again prods us to ponder the high incidence of fascist outlooks among defeated military officers. Schoomaker may be usefully compared to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler's military yes-man.

On August 9, 2005 Schoomaker fired General Kevin P. Byrnes, one of the army's dozen or so four-star generals, from his post as leader of the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). The ouster of such a high-ranking officer was a rarity, and the reason given was the transparent cover story of an extra-marital affair with a civilian woman. What makes this relevant to our purposes is that the Army's TRADOC plays a key role in maneuvers. In fact, the headquarters for Sudden Response 05 was located at Fort Monroe, placing the entire operation under Byrnes, command. Byrnes was replaced by Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace. (Washington Post, August 10, 2005) What was the goal of cashiering Byrnes, just as the Cheney drive for nuclear terrorism and nuclear attack on Iran went into overdrive?

The utopian-terrorist faction of the US military loves to wage war on the cheap. More traditionalist views stress logistics and force structure. Byrne had reportedly clashed in 2002 with the Pentagon's utopian intelligence boss, Stephen Cambone (the keystone of the Cambone-Boykin-Miller clique responsible for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib) over troop strength cuts. According to one version, Byrnes, command had been ordered to prepare for the influx of 50,000 raw recruits into Fort Rucker, Alabama possibly in the context of a reinstituted military draft. TRADOC had also been told to prepare to accept recruits with no education, with criminals records, with no ability to speak English practically penal divisions. Army retirees were also slated to be dragooned back into service. Byrnes would thus emerge as the leading figure of a military opposition of sorts against the crackpot aggressive planning of the Bush-Cheney-neocon regime. Byrnes was also said to be associated with a group of generals linked to the US Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. (www.waynemadsenreport.com, August 10, 2005) Carlisle Barracks is the home of Jeffrey Record, who is the author of a decidedly down-beat evaluation of the first Gulf War of 1990-91. Analysts associated with the War College have also been exceptionally blunt in their criticism of the current Iraq war. Record wrote in January 2004 that the Iraq war had been a "strategic error," and was being waged with a strategy that "promises more than it can deliver." The intriguing question remains as to whether Byrnes was also disinclined to have drills and exercises in which TRADOC was involved used as covers for state-sponsored terrorism.

The events of 9/11 were prepared by a scenario film, The Lone Gunmen, which depicted an airplane coming under the control of a terrorist faction of the US government who used a sophisticated remote control system to attempt to crash a passenger airliner into one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Sudden Response 05 also corresponds to a terror scenario. This one was called Special Bulletin, and it revolved around terrorists seizing a nuclear weapon aboard a ship in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina and preparing to detonate it. US security forces attempt to disarm the bomb, but it blows up despite their efforts, causing a hecatomb. This film was shown on television in 1983, and was directed by Edward Zwick and written by Marshall Hersokovitz. It starred David Rasche, Michael Madsen, and Lane Smith. Its showing caused considerable uneasiness in the Charleston area.

If these variations should not prove viable, there is always the possibility of staging a more traditional Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Persian Gulf or somewhere nearby, blaming it on Iran. The sinking of a US warship could easily be carried out by a third country UK, Israel, Australia, or any of the Echelon powers to reduce the possibility of exposure.

MILITARY TAKEOVER

Given the collapse of US middle class support for Bush and his neocon war adventures signaled by the resounding success of the Cindy Sheehan anti-war vigils on August 17, it might be expected that the new 9/11 followed by the Iran or North Korean attacks might cause protests and chaos inside the US. For such an eventuality, the neocons as disciples of Hitler's main legal adviser Carl Schmitt have the remedy: police-state, military dictatorship. At the end of the first week of August it became known that the US Army Northern Command (in other words, the madman Schoomaker and his cabal. Planners in Colorado Springs, including Admiral Timothy J. Keating, Northcom commander, and Major General Richard J. Rowe, chief operations officer, were said to be contemplating a total of 15 crisis scenarios presupposing multiple simultaneous terror attacks in the US. These mobilization plans were drawn up in CONPLAN 2002, a 1,000 page overall guide to a military takeover, and in CONPLAN 0500, which addresses the specifics of the 15 scenarios. Both CONPLANS were said to be well on their way to becoming OPLANS, or operational plans. These activities are manifestly a continuation of the Pentagon's 1968 Operation Garden Plot, the original plan for a military seizure of this country. (9/11 Synthetic Terror, p. 377)

The outcry against this thinly veiled plan for a military dictatorship in the traditional civil liberties community was decidedly muted. In fact, the most vociferous protest came from Homeland Security boss Chertoff, who complained in effect that the coming police state had to be organized under his own Department of Homeland Security, and not under the military.

TERROR POTBOILERS

An entire new scurrilous literary genre has grown up around the neocon campaign to attack Iran. This new vogue resembles the pre-1914 German attack scenario novels published in Great Britain, but at least those were clearly labeled as fiction. A recent tome in the new genre is Kenneth R. Timmerman's Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. Timmerman tries to pin the 9/11 attacks on Iran, in the same way Laurie Mylroie and Judith Miller tried to pin them on Iran. His black propaganda technique is too much even for the Washington Post, whose reviewer commented: "The reader gets the impression that Timmerman would rather not bother with facts precisely because they undermine his conspiracy theory. A persistent problem with this book is its absence of credible evidence." Another author who writes out of the attack Iran bag is Jerome Corsi, who was part of the Swift boat slanders against Kerry and has also founded the Iran Freedom Foundation the US domestic arm of the Mujaheddin e Khalq. Corsi responded to the leak of the NIE on Iran by warning that: "The atomic 9-11 plot is in full swing as you are reading these words. The attack could happen any day." Corsi's book is entitled Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians; it is dismissed as "irresponsible" by the Washington Post, which notes that both Timmerman and Corsi "present their ideology as self-evident verity and their assumptions as incontrovertible facts. Still in the bookstalls is Paul L. Williams with his lurid Osama's Revenge: The Next 9/11, full of last year's stories about the suitcase bombs that are allegedly already inside the US. All of these figures are at home on Fox News, and also on the 9 PM to 1 AM John Bachelor Show on the ABC Radio Network, a kind of radio shock theater for practitioners of extreme neocon gothic. Among other key black propaganda conduits are Joseph Farah's World Net Daily and G2 Bulletin. Here we can read such elucubrations as these: "WND and G2 Bulletin previously reported, based on captured al-Qaida leaders and documents, that the terrorist group has a plan called American Hiroshima, involving the multiple detonation of nuclear weapons already smuggled into the U.S. over the Mexican border with the help of the MS-13 street gang and other organized crime groups. (WorldNetDaily.com, August 8, 2005)

INTELLIGENCE WARFARE IN WASHINGTON DC

In the first half of August, Congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, whose intelligence contacts make him something of an unpredictable gadfly, came forward with allegations that a special military intelligence unit code-named Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta, the chief 9/11 patsy, as part of an al Qaeda cell in the United States. According to Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who said he had worked with Able Danger, the military intelligence people wanted to alert the FBI, but were prevented from doing so by lawyers. Shaffer also alleged that, after 9/11, he had informed Philip Zelikow, the highly suspect staff director of the Kean-Hamilton commission and a partner of Condoleezza Rice, about Able Danger's awareness of Atta's presence in the US prior to the World Trade Center attacks. The final 9/11 commission report had no mention of this matter. The 9/11 commission responded to this allegation with a chaotic series of denials, finally coming to rest with the assertion that Shaffer's story was not "historically significant." Since the report about Atta to the FBI had been blocked during the Clinton administration, Weldon and the right-wing radio demagogues appeared eager to exploit this story for partisan advantage, be it only to eclipse Cindy Sheehan. Weldon also appeared interested in attacking the Kean-Hamilton investigation. The reality was clearly that those who prevented the FBI from being alerted to Atta if this ever really happened -- were by all odds moles cooperating in the invisible government's 9/11 project. As far as Zelikow's role in suppressing vital evidence, this incident would take its place in a long catalogue of such sabotage developed over the past year by the 9/11 truth movement. At the same time, it cannot be excluded that the entire affair was a dog and pony show staged in the context of the intelligence warfare of August 2005, not of summer 2000. The information about Atta was allegedly generated by the U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, and this is not a reliable source. Reacting to the Able Danger story Kristen Breitweiser of the Jersey Girls called the Kean-Hamilton 9/11 commission results "an utterly hollow report," and called for the creation of a new and independent investigation. Indeed: the only adequate answer to this new round of allegations is a real examination of 9/11 by an independent, international truth commission not controlled by Washington insiders.

Opposition to the Cheney war plan was also in evidence in the broader civilian Washington bureaucracy, where full-scale intelligence warfare was raging among the various factions. On August 1, the CIA issued its long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. The main thrust of this document was to undercut the neocon hysteria according to which Iran was quickly approaching the point of no return at which it would join North Korea in possessing at least one nuclear device. According to the NIE, Iran, although determined to acquire nuclear weapons, was about ten years away from being able to do so about double the 5 years cited in February 2005 by Defense Intelligence Agency Director Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby in testimony to the Congress. CIA veteran Ray McGovern pointed out that the leaking of the NIE had been designed to undercut Cheney, Bolton, and their circle. However, noted McGovern, "Cheney does not feel at all bound by US intelligence." (TomPaine.com, August 3, 2005)

A few days later, on August 4, additional indictments were forthcoming in the case of former Pentagon Larry Franklin, part of the Feith-Luti neocon shop, accused of traducing Pentagon secrets to Israel. Two FBI raids of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over the previous months had led to widespread anticipation of further indictments . Indicted on this occasion were Steven Rosen, former AIPAC Director of Foreign Policy issues and a former CIA and RAND Corporation employee who held top security clearances, along with Keith Weissman, AIPAC's former Senior Middle East Analyst. Nor was this all. It was later reported that Rosen was meeting with David M. Satterfield, former US Ambassador to Lebanon and currently the deputy to neocon Zalmay Khalilzad at the US Embassy in Baghdad. According to the article, Rosen obtained classified information from Satterfield and sent it out in a memo to AIPAC employees, and then disclosed it to "a foreign national." (New York Times, August 18, 2005) Satterfield had been a loud protagonist of the Bush administration campaign to eject Syria from Lebanon; in February 2005 Satterfield had gone to Lebanon with neocon Paul Wolfowitz in an attempt to organize a US "people power" coup in that country. At that time, signs observed in Beirut street demonstrations read: "Satterfield Get out of Lebanon!" AIPAC was a significant target because it was a headquarters for so much of the neocon agitation for war with Iran: on May 24, Richard Perle had addressed the AIPAC annual convention with a call for war with Iran, ranting: "If Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon, I think we will have no choice but to take decisive action."

Another useful indictment was that of Jack Abramoff on August 11; Abramoff, in addition to being a gangster who served as money bags for Tom Delay and other Congressional Republicans, was also a pro-war ideologue in his own right. But at the same time it was clear that if the intent really was to stop the threatening conflagration, more and better indictments would be needed. Leading neocons were now at the confluence of a series of investigations: the Pentagon leaks to Israel, the Valery Plame matter, the forged Niger yellowcake documents, and the Achmed Chalabi leaks to Iran. Caught in the crossfire were such figures as Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Michael Ledeen, Douglas Feith, etc. Unconfirmed reports from the Chicago grand juries working with independent counsel Fitzgerald asserted that sealed indictments had already been returned against the top figures of the Bush administration, but there was no way to verify this in the short term.

Underlying the entire Iran nuclear question is the hypocrisy of the double standards applied by the US. Just a few weeks earlier, the US had granted India various forms of nuclear assistance, despite India's active nuclear bomb program. Brazil was getting ready to export nuclear fuel, and yet was not targeted in the same way as Iran. The lesson is clear: countries the US is seeking to cultivate are not harassed, but critics of US policy are put through the wringer. Britain, France, and Germany, to some degree caught up in the distorted US view, offered to guarantee Iran that they would not start a nuclear attack on Teheran, but they could not offer any real assurances about what the US, Israel, India, Pakistan, or others might do. It must finally be recalled that the Bush regime's threats of preventive nuclear attack against non-nuclear states as embodied in the September 2002 national security statement, along with its efforts to develop new forms of mini-nukes to use in such sneak attacks, effectively destroy the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in its very foundations. No sovereign state could accept such infringements on its sovereignty as are now being demanded from Iran.

THE ISRAELI ANGLE

Another factor tending to heighten the adventurism of the US-UK-Israel grouping is the fact that Israeli society has been brought to the edge of civil war by the efforts of Sharon to dismantle Israeli settlements in the Gaza strip and to abandon that area as a Palestinian Bantustan or "living tomb" in the framework of a longer-term strategy to tighten the Israeli grip on Jerusalem and the West Bank. According to former Prime Minister Barak, Sharon's Likud Party is on the verge of collapse over this matter. Without going into the details, it is clear that the activism of these vociferous and violent Israeli right-wing fanatics makes an assassination of Sharon a distinct possibility. In the wake of such an assassination, even if it were carried out by Jewish terrorists, an Israeli attack on Iran would surely be more likely. This might be done in ostensible disregard of US wishes, according to the decades-old Breakaway Ally Scenario, which was embraced by Cheney on the morning of January 20, 2005. According to this, Israel strikes first, and then leaves the US to deal with the consequences. According to a pro-Israeli website, the war plan for Iran was presented to Sharon in 2004 under the title of "Project Daniel: Israel's Strategic Future," which was largely a recipe for Israeli pre-emptive action. Co-author Yoash Tsiddon-Chatto, a former Knesset member and the former chief of planning for the Israeli Air Force, told WND military action should include "striking all known Iran nuclear facilities, including hidden facilities, underground tunnels, covert operations, such as the killing of scientists ... whatever is necessary." (Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily.com, May 4, 2005)

THE SHAME OF THE LEFT GATEKEEPERS

The present crisis would not be possible if the overall lesson of September 11, 2001 had been learned by a significant minority of the US population, and if that minority had an institution through which to act. Here the responsibility of the Democratic Party is very grave, since the Democrats have continued to portray themselves as the True Believers of the 9/11 Myth, the most faithful devotees of blaming 9/11 on al Qaeda, Bin Laden, the laptop, the cave, Atta, and the rest. Especially along the left extremity of the Democratic Party, we find a line of foundation-funded opinion leaders and commentators whom we can only define as left gatekeepers. These gatekeepers have stubbornly denied, mocked, vilified, censored, blacked out and embargoed any suggestion that 9/11 was a provocation by a US military-intelligence network, which it so manifestly was. So much so that if we ask why the US population would still believe the Bush administration on 9/11 and the imminent terror attacks of 2005 when they would not believe Bush about any other issue the answer must be that the left gatekeepers are responsible. If the American people do not finally move out of their present credulous gullibility and realize that the large-scale international terrorism of our time is overwhelmingly state sponsored, false flag synthetic terrorism, they will continue to be an easy mark for the unscrupulous factions who do not hesitate to employ terror as a means to power.

HILEX 75: ROGUE DRILLS CAN BE STOPPED

Finally, no one should give up in despair before the imminent danger of a new round of state sponsored terrorism designed to lead to war with Iran and/or North Korea. These plans can be defeated, and the key to defeating them is to produce a shock wave of publicity, of denunciation, of indignation, and of outrage. Such plans have been defeated before. Back in the late fall of 1975, the Anglo-American finance oligarchs and their secret team military operatives were reeling from the recent rout the previous spring in Vietnam. Some of them, including James Rodney Schlesinger, had held a meeting on Easter Monday, just after the fall of Saigon, to discuss desperate military expedients to prevent the possible collapse of the entire US-UK world strategic position. The method chosen was a possible nuclear confrontation with the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Typically, this secret and illegal plan was built into a military staff exercise, in this case HILEX 75. HILEX (high level exercise) 75 was designed as a staff exercise, a headquarters drill, involving top government officials and simulating a strategic confrontation with Moscow. But in this case the staff exercise contained and concealed a real confrontation, to be set off over some appropriate pretext. What pretext? We do not know, since the world thankfully never got that far. A group of activists in the main NATO countries embarked on a campaign of denunciation and exposure weeks in advance, flooding newspaper, radio, and television offices, elected officials at all levels, key academics, and others with word of what was looming. On Christmas Eve 1975, I passed out leaflets with a half-dozen friends on the steps of the Milan cathedral in Piazza Duomo spelling out exactly what was planned. This was a part of a mobilization across western Europe, the US, and Canada. Somehow, the confrontation variant hidden within the HILEX 75 drill was allowed to lapse. We must now do the same thing with Sudden Response 05 and similar terror drills and war exercises. As the astounding success of the Cindy Sheehan operation suggests, support for the Bush regime is now evaporating with breathtaking speed. In a climate marked by the radical rejection of Bush and everything he stands for, the 9/11 myth for which Bush was the leading salesman may also disintegrate, making a new 9/11 and a widening of the war that much more difficult.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

The organizing committee for the Independent International Truth Commission on the September 11, 2001 Events on July 24 set up a Monitoring Group to attempt to apply prospectively, into the future, the lessons about terrorism that had been learned from the intensive study of 9/11 and earlier cases. The IITC Monitoring Group is accordingly checking the public affairs departments of the official websites of NORAD, the Department of Defense and its subdivisions, FEMA, Homeland Security, the British Ministry of Defense and Home Office, NATO Headquarters, and similar sites in Russia, China and the OECD countries generally. The goal is to identify in advance those drills, maneuvers and exercises which lend themselves to cloaking acts of state sponsored synthetic terrorism, and to expose and denounce in advance the dangers that are thus identified. The cooperation of all persons of good will in this vital work is actively requested; send emails to tarpley@tarpley.net. This essay would not have been possible without the first fruits of this monitoring activity.

The methodology used here was presented to the IITC workshop at the Truth Convergence held at American University, Washington DC on July 24, 2005. The basic analysis presented in this article was posted in interview form on CloakandDagger.de on July 28, 2005, and in subsequent programs on August 7, August 11, and August 18. It was presented to the McClendon study group at the National Press Club in Washington DC on August 3, 2005, on the Meria

Heller internet radio program on August 17, 2005, and with Sally O,Brien on WBAI New York on August 21 and August 25, 2005..