09/11: A Dark Theory Behind Black Tuesday

Mainstream news coverage of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center has left little room for speculation about the true identities and intentions of its masterminds. As television monitors around the world broadcast recurring images of the once mighty Manhattan skyline, now reduced into a smoldering pile of dust and rubble, forces are gathering to inflict what is sure to be one of the most brutal retaliatory strikes in the history of modern combat. And, despite the lessons learned from Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, and Oklahoma City, both the U.S. Congress and the American public have been pushed to the brink of entering a long and difficult battle against an indistinguishable foe in a heretofore unconquerable land.

But do we know all the facts of the story? Are there alternative theories to explain the events that transpired with such dramatic choreography before the horrified eyes of an entire nation? We believe there are. In this first installment of GNN's CounterIntelligence, Stephen Marshall discusses the attack with former LAPD narcotics detective and author Michael Ruppert, best known for exposing elements of the CIA's drug smuggling operation in Central America during the 1980s. With surgical detail, Ruppert examines the possibility of an imminent global financial meltdown and how the terrorist strikes may be part of a larger, much more complex network of interests than the mainstream media is telling you about.
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Stephen Marshall: Hello Mike. First question I guess… what was your initial reaction to the images being broadcast from New York on Tuesday and what were your first thoughts regarding the coverage.

Michael Ruppert: From the moment it happened we began hearing the name Osama bin Laden and there is an enormous body of evidence building already that Osama bin Laden is not and was not capable of pulling this off by himself. Period.
Historically, it is extremely well documented that Osama bin Laden is and was a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980's when he joined with Mujahedeen Freedom fighters in Afghanistan. He worked with Gulbadin Hekmatyar who was running six heroin factories under CIA protection in Pakistan and Afghanistan. As recently as 1996, the U.S. government had secret agreements with the government of Sudan to allow him sanctuary there for the purposes of monitoring him. In 1997-1998 after the cruise missile attacks on the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory, which were absolute disasters for the U.S. because no weapons were made there. The U.S. intelligence community had ample ability to know and to track his movements. I have just learned that from 1998, Reuters is reporting, that a green light was given for covert operations against bin Laden and when you couple this with the fact that we know now, from European reports from Germany, France and Israel, that advance warning had been given to the U.S. government of an imminent attack, the current U.S. government position on this is really not sustainable.

SM: So let me get this straight. Because you have been really clear in our past conversations about the murky world of intelligence communities and the whole business of war. And you have discussed the fact that there is always some group or faction that benefits directly from an armed conflict. But are you saying that, even in this case, with the horrific damage done not only to the financial center of New York and the United States, but also to the psychological well-being of the American population, that some faction of the U.S. government had foreknowledge of these attacks?

MR: I absolutely believe, at this moment, that the United States government had foreknowledge of the attacks and allowed them to occur.

SM: OK. So then please explain who would have directly benefited from his tragedy and how will the ensuing domino effect of military escalation play into the hands or interests of those people?

MR: First of all, just two days before the attack, on September 9, I issued an urgent bulletin to all of my subscribers indicating a pending economic collapse of unbelievable proportions. Based upon what I had already predicted and what was already occurring, a rapid deflation of the Dow, having lost 900 points in three weeks before the attack. And two other factors, one of which is an artificially suppressed gold price which is, according to a suit filed in Boston by GATA - the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee - a design by the U.S. Treasury and major banks to keep gold prices low so that investor confidence would stay high but also because gold, physical gold, had been leveraged forward in multiples to an amount many times greater on paper than there is gold in actual existence. This is a suit that was threatening to come to the surface. Historically, investor confidence is gauged, is pegged to gold because if gold prices remain low, investors will assume no inflation and healthy markets. The minute gold prices rise, investor confidence sinks. And this has been an artificial ploy by the U.S. government which surfaced actually and was exposed in 1998 with the collapse of a company called Long Term Capital Management which almost toppled the U.S. economy and forced the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury to intervene, exposing artificial manipulation of gold prices.

The second economic bomb that was ready to go off and which I warned about on Sept 9 was a 30 trillion dollar derivatives bubble spearheaded by JP Morgan-Chase (JPM) and 30 trillion would have collapsed the economy. Basically, the simplest form of derivative is a stock option where you can buy an option to purchase a share of stock trading at $80 for $1 and you can tie up trillions of dollars with little amounts of money. But if the economy fails you then become liable for the trillions of dollars that you have tied up. Excellent posts on this issue were placed at a website called lemetropolecafe.com that I strongly recommend people look at. And what I had said on September 9 was, 'look, this is going down and we're all going to burn.' And that was two days before the attack.

Now, given the fact that the economic indicators were for a recession, if not depression, by the end of October (for which the US government and Wall Street would have had to have taken responsibility), the now certain global recession that will follow the World Trade Center attacks, now has someone convenient to blame it on.

SM: Right. Got it. Now I wanted to push this over to another focus of emphasis, namely the Bush Administration and his stacked line-up of advisors who are veterans of the business of war. Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and even Condoleezza Rice. This seems to be a very professionally managed media campaign. In fact, many of the first people to appear on the networks after the attack were right out of George Bush Sr.'s cabinet.
What kind of public consensus are they trying to mould? What do you see as their next course of action and how will that alleviate the imminent economic collapse you have described?

MR: Well, to answer the last question first, most Americans who subscribe to the government line will believe that the economic impacts of this were the result of someone else's wrongdoing rather than wrongdoing that originated in the United States and on Wall Street and in Washington. So, there is somebody to blame. It will focus attention. It will, in a sense, psychologically condition people to hardships that are very certain to come. And I can not emphasize strongly enough that the American people have not even begun to grasp the economic impacts of what is happening.

SM: Do you mean economic impacts that are a direct result of the attack on the World Trade Center or those that were already being felt as tremors in the markets over the past few months?

MR:I mean the attacks. The markets of the world are going to respond to this. America will never be viewed as a safe haven for capital again. At least, as safe as it was. In addition, if there are subsequent attacks, which I consider to be likely at this point. I give a 51% probability that there will be additional terrorist attacks. Confidence in the United States as a safe place to put capital will be further diminished, which will result in capital flight. But there is a domino cascade effect from this in that the international markets which were already in recession if not depression - Japan being the first that comes to mind, having reached new lows in their stock market prior to the bombing - were looking to the United States for continued orders of consumer imports to sustain their economies. Consumer confidence in the U.S. is wiped out. Wall Street, before the bombings was pointing to consumer confidence as the one thing that would keep Wall Street from absolutely tanking. Well, that whole issue has been turned upside down. So I think that in the short term you'll see massive movements by central banks around the world to make everything look normal.

You will see gold prices eventually soar. You will see investments in U.S. markets diminish and the other markets around the world who are over, if not at the precipice, will definitely be way over it now.

SM:OK. Let me change tack again and ask you this. For most of the people watching the news and following all of the intelligence coming out of the Pentagon, this attack was the product of a deep hatred for Americans by so-called religious zealot. Who acts on behalf of a foreign people who live in a distant land and who have different values than us. That's the official story. But you are here telling us that it is actually all linked to an imminent economic collapse. How do we reconcile these two explanations? Do we have to extend our understanding of this to a broader perspective that is a nexus of the two or are we being fed this line about the attacks being a product of the jihad or religious war?

How would you explain it to a classroom of students who might ask, what does this economic collapse have to do with a bunch of religious fanatics living in Afghanistan?

MR:Let's take a look at one historical model that we absolutely know. Anyone who's watched the History Channel in the last year as seen the revelations that the United States had broken the Japanese code and knew that the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor well before it occurred. The historical paradigm prior to that is in the 20's and 30's, the U.S. and the British had been closing Japan off from its access to oil from Indonesia, Malaysia, South East Asia and everything else. In other words, economically, Japan had been backed into a corner. We knew that the Japanese were going to attack - and the History Channel has eyeball witnesses and US government documents, this is out of the bag now - and yet because it suited political and economic and social purposes to bring the US into World War II, we allowed it to happen. And I think we need to learn from that lesson.

And I need to make something else very clear here. I'm an ex-cop, and you know that. I watched the firemen and the policemen in New York and I wept. Because that is who I am and what I am and that's America. What America is not is what has been done around the world to cause enormous anger at the United States, whether it be the genocide of 2 million people in Rwanda for U.S. economic interest. The attacks in Kosovo which have left large portions of that landscape radioactive for a million years. The radioactivity and D.U. and leukemia in Iraq that is there from ten times the amount of depleted uranium. The million displaced persons in Colombia, the genocides in East Timor. All of these are related to U.S. foreign and economic policy and there are a lot of people in the world who do not like us and, you know what, they have good reason. And that's not to justify these attacks.

You know, we create the enemies and, in this particular case I suspect investigation by my self and others will bear this out, the United States government knew about these attacks well in advance and may have even encouraged them quietly or from acts of silence.

SM: Two quickies. How would you characterize the media coverage thus far and how do you expect it to run as this thing expands into a large-scale conflict?

RM: The media coverage is in lock-step with Desert Storm and every other major government operation of the last two decades. I've seen little critical thinking on the part of the major media. Most of the critical thinking is coming from… and we are having an impact from the alternative media in terms of influencing some of the stuff that's getting on the air; questioning bin Laden's roots, connections to the CIA and so forth.

There's a lot more stuff that the major media could be doing that they are not.

SM: OK. Last question. This may verge a bit onto the side of conspiracy theory but here goes: As I watched the initial broadcasts after the attack and saw the steady stream of Bush advisors, and his cabinet members... they just seem so at home with it all. And then I stopped for a second and tried to visualize Gore in the middle of this. And I couldn't. It's like he was never meant to get to this point. And then I thought back to the election and all of that. I guess what I am saying is that this whole thing just smacks of a certain character, a very Bush-like international terrorism, middle-east-crisis type thing. You know what I am getting at?

RM: Well my take on it is that this economic crisis would have been here no matter who was President. I think that what we're seeing, though, is a trademark Bush conservative war-oriented approach which is the way that the Bush faction would traditionally respond to this crisis.

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