By Michael Hudson, first posted at Unz Review and Expanded for The Saker Blog
President Biden put a popular flag-waving wrapping for at America’s forced withdrawal from Afghanistan in his 4 PM speech on Monday. It was as if all this was following Biden’s own intentions, not a demonstration of the totally incompetent assurances by the CIA and State Department as recently as last Friday that the Taliban was over a month away from being able to enter Kabul. Instead of saying that the massive public support for the Taliban replacing the United States showed the incompetent hubris of U.S. intelligence agencies – which itself would have justified Biden’s agreement to complete the withdrawal with all haste – he doubled down on his defense of the Deep State and its mythology.
The effect was to show how drastic his own misconceptions are, and how he will continue to defend neocon adventurism. What seemed for an hour or so as a public relations recovery is turning into a denouement of how U.S. fantasy is still trying to threaten Asia and the Near East.
By throwing all his weight behind the propaganda that has guided U.S. policy since George W. Bush decided to invade after 9/11, Biden blew his greatest chance to burst the myths that led to his own bad decisions to trust U.S. military and state officials (and their campaign contributors).
His first pretense was that we invaded Afghanistan to retaliate against “its” attack on America on 9/11. This is the founding lie of U.S. presence in the Near East. Afghanistan did not attack us. Saudi Arabia did.
Biden tried to confuse the issue by saying that “we” went into Afghanistan to deal with (assassinate) Osama Bin Laden – and after this “victory,” we then then decided to stay on and “build democracy,” a euphemism for creating a U.S. client state. (Any such state is called a “democracy,” which means simply pro-American in today’s diplomatic vocabulary.)
Hardly anyone asks how the U.S. ever got in. Jimmy Carter was suckered by the Polish Russia-hater Brzezinski and created Al Qaeda to act as America’s foreign legion, subsequently expanded to include ISIS and other terrorist armies against countries where U.S. diplomacy seeks regime change. Carter’s alternative to Soviet Communism was Wahabi fanaticism, solidifying America’s alliance with Saudi Arabia. Carter memorably said that at least these Muslims believed in God, just like Christians. But the Wahabi fundamentalism army was sponsored by Saudi Arabia, which paid for arming Al Qaeda to fight against Sunni Moslems and, early on, the Russian-backed Afghan government.
What is so typical of America’s aggressive Cold War mindset is that it could have much more easily (and at much lower cost) won Afghanistan by honey, by having so much more to offer economically than did Russia. Documents released from Soviet archives show that:
None of the Soviet documents list terrorists going into the USSR as a concern in 1979. The Soviet worry was the incompetence and worse of their Afghan Communist clients, the declining Soviet influence (much less control) in the country, and the possibility of Afghanistan going over to the Americans.
Soviet Politburo documents that first became available in the 1990s show the real Soviet fear was that the head of the Afghan Communist regime, Hafizullah Amin, was about to go over to the Americans. (Egyptian president Anwar Sadat famously flipped in 1972, ejected thousands of Soviet advisers, and became the second largest recipient, after Israel, of U.S. foreign aid.)[1]
This policy predates President Carter, of course. It was endemic in America’s Cold War force-oriented strategy since the 1950s. Over 60 years ago, for instance, I sat in on a meeting with Fidel Castro’s representatives trying to get support from the Democratic Party and Kennedy for their overthrow of the Batista regime. Imagining that it was the Republicans and the Dulles brothers that were the hardliners, they expected that the incoming Democratic Party diplomacy would find their self-interest in giving economic support to help Cuba’s economy recover from the corrupt dictatorship. My father warned them that the Democrats would be just as force-oriented.
On my visits to Cuba, it was obvious that the population and even many government officials would have welcomed a deal whereby the loosened their Castroite economic policy in exchange for U.S. aid. The United States has never tried to use this tactic in the Caribbean or Latin America, any more than it has done in Afghanistan. That is the neocon mentality: “Do it by force, don’t give any other country a choice.”
A “market-based” tradeoff of aid for economic policy acquiescence is not U.S. policy. Offering a carrot still leaves the choice to America’s designated adversary. The only way to make sure that a country will obey is to confront it with brute force. That is the mentality behind U.S. support for Maidan and the neo-Nazi Bandaristas opposing Russia instead of simply trying to help reform Ukraine.
And so it has gone in Afghanistan. After Carter, George W. Bush and Barack Obama funded Al Qaeda (largely with the gold looted from destroying Libya) to fight for U.S. geopolitical aims and oil in Iraq and Syria. The Taliban for its part fought against Al Quaeda. The real U.S. fear therefore is not that they may back America’s Wahabi foreign legion, but that they will make a deal with Russia, China and Syria to serve as a trade link from Iran westward.
Biden’s second myth was to blame the victim by claiming that the Afghan army would not fight for “their country,” despite his assurances by the proxies whom the U.S. installed that they would use U.S. money to build the economy. He also said that the army did not fight, which became obvious over the weekend.
The police force also did not fight. Nobody fought the Taliban to “defend their country,” because the U.S. occupation regime was not “their country.” Again and again, Biden repeated that the United States could not save a country that would not “defend itself.” But the “itself” was the corrupt regime that was simply pocketing U.S. “aid” money.
The situation was much like what was expressed in the old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto finding themselves surrounded by Indians. “What are we going to do, Tonto,” asked the Lone Ranger.
“What do you mean, ‘We,’ white man?” Tonto replied. That was the reply of the Afghan army to U.S. demands that they fight for the corrupt occupation force that they had installed. Their aim is to survive in a new country, while in Doha the Taliban leadership negotiates with China, Russia and even the United States to achieve a modus vivendi.
So all that Biden’s message meant to most Americans was that we would not waste any more lives and money fighting wars for an ungrateful population that wanted the U.S. to do all the fighting for it.
President Biden could have come out and washed away the blame by saying: “Just before the weekend, I was told by my army generals and national security advisors that it would take months for the Taliban to conquer Afghanistan, and certainly to take control of Kabul, which supposedly would be a bloody fight.” He could have announced that he is removing the incompetent leadership engrained for many years, and creating a more reality-based group.
But of course, he could not do that, because the group is the unreality-based neocon Deep State. He was not about to explain how “It’s obvious that I and Congress have been misinformed, and that the intelligence agencies had no clue about the country that they were reporting on for the last two decades.”
He could have acknowledged that the Afghans welcomed the Taliban into Kabul without a fight. The army stood aside, and the police stood aside. There seemed to be a party celebrating the American withdrawal. Restaurants and markets were open, and Kabul seemed to be enjoying normal life – except for the turmoil at the airport.
Suppose that Biden had said the following: “Given this acquiescence in support for the Taliban, I was obviously correct in withdrawing the American occupation forces. Contrary to what Congress and the Executive Branch was told, there was no support by the Afghans for the Americans. I now realize that to the Afghan population, the government officials that America installed simply took the money we gave them and put it into their own bank accounts instead of paying the army, police and other parts of civic society.”
Instead, President Biden spoke about having made four trips to Afghanistan and how much he knew and trusted the proxies that U.S. agencies had installed. That made him seem gullible. Even Donald Trump said publicly that he didn’t trust the briefings that he was given, and wanted to spend money at home, into the hands of his own campaign contributors instead of abroad.
Biden could have picked up on this point by saying, “At least there’s a silver lining: We won’t be spending any more than the $3 trillion that we’ve already sunk over there. We can now afford to use the money to build up domestic U.S. infrastructure instead.”
But instead President Biden doubled down on what his neocon advisors had told him, and what they were repeating on the TV news channels all day: The Afghan army had refused to fight “for their country,” meaning the U.S.-supported occupation force, as if this was really Afghan self-government.
The media are showing pictures of the Afghan palace and one of the warlord’s office. I did a double-take, because the plush, wretched-excess furnishings looked just like Obama’s $12 million McMansion furnishings in Martha’s Vineyard.
Obama officials are being trotted out by the news spinners. On MSNBC, John Brennan warned Andrea Mitchell at noon that the Taliban might now back Al Qaeda in new destabilization and even use Afghanistan to mount new attacks on the United States. The message was almost word for word what Americans were told in 1964: “If we don’t fight the Vietcong in their country, we’ll have to fight them over here.” As if any country has an armed force large enough to conquer any industrial nation in today’s world.
The whole cast of America’s “humanitarian bombing” squad was there, including its harridan arm, the Democratic Party’s front organizations created to co-opt feminists to urging that Afghanistan be bombed until it treats women better. One can only imagine how the image of Samantha Power, Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, Susan and Condoleezza Rice, not to mention Indira Gandhi and Golda Maier, will make the Taliban want to create its own generation of ambitious educated women like these.
President Biden might have protected himself from Republican criticism by reminding his TV audience that Donald Trump had urged withdrawal from Afghanistan already last spring –and now, in retrospect, that the Deep State was wrong to advise against this but that Donald was right. That is what his order for withdrawal was acknowledging, after all. This might have detoothed at least some Trumpian criticism.
Instead, Mr. Brennan and the generals trotted in front of the TV cameras criticized Biden for not prolonging the occupation until the fall, when cold weather would deter the Taliban from fighting. Brennan stated on Andrea Mitchell’s newscast that Biden should have taken a ploy out of his “The Art of Breaking the Deal” by breaking the former president’s promise to withdraw last spring.
Delay, delay, delay. That is always the stance of grabitizers refusing to see the resistance building up, hoping to take what they can get for as long as they can – with the “they” being the military-industrial complex, the suppliers of mercenary forces and other recipients of the money that Mr. Biden curiously says that we spent “in Afghanistan.”
The reality is that not much of the notorious $3 trillion actually was spent in Afghanistan. It was spent on Raytheon, Boeing and other military hardware suppliers, on the mercenary forces, and placed in the accounts of the Afghan proxies for the U.S. maneuvering to use Afghanistan to destabilize Central Asia on Russia’s southern flank and western China.
It looks like most of the world will quickly recognize the Afghan government, leaving the U.S., Israel, Britain, India and perhaps Samoa isolated as a recalcitrant block living like the post-World War I royal families still clinging to their titles of dukes, princes and other vestiges of a world that had passed.
Biden’s political mistake was to blame the victim and depict the Taliban victory as a defeat of a cowardly army not willing to fight for its paymasters. He seems to imagine that the army actually had been paid, provided with food, clothing and weapons in recent months simply because U.S. officials gave their local proconsuls and supporters cash for this purpose. I understand that there is no real accounting of just what the $3 trillion U.S. cost was actually spent on, who got it the shrink-wrapped bundles of hundred-dollar bills passed down through America’s occupation bureaucracy. (I bet the serial numbers were not recorded. Imagine if that were done and the U.S. could announce these C-notes demonetized!)
The U.S. is now (20 years after the time it should have begun) trying to formulate a Plan B. Its strategists probably hope to achieve in Afghanistan what occurred after the Americans left Saigon: An economic free-for-all that U.S. companies can co-opt by offering business opportunities.
On the other hand, there are reports that Afghanistan may sue the United States for reparations for the illegal occupation and destruction still going on as the country is being bombed in Biden’s flurry of B-52 anger. Such a claim, of course, would open the floodgates for similar suits by Iraq and Syria – and the Hague in Holland has shown itself to be a NATO kangaroo court. But I would expect Afghanistan’s new friends in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to back such a suit in a new international court, if only to block any hopes by U.S. companies of achieving by financial leverage what the State Department, CIA and Pentagon could not achieve militarily.
In any case, Biden’s parting shot of nasty bombing of Taliban centers can only convince the new leadership to solidify its negotiations with its nearest regional neighbors with their promise to help save Afghanistan from any American, British or NATO attempt to try and come back in and “restore democracy.” The world has seen enough of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s “rules based order” and President Biden’s pretended history on whose mythology U.S. policy will continue to be based.
Add: It is not an accident that the politicians backed by the United States are so corrupt, ruling corrupt bureaucracies that increasingly alienate local populations. There is a deliberate thought-out reason why American diplomats choose to work with such opportunistic grabitizers as clients whom they place in control. It is precisely such people whom the U.S. sponsors can trust.
Suppose that you have some truly democratic idealists whose aim is to develop their country. The problem is that such individuals cannot be trusted to follow U.S. diplomatic aims. They may act on their own – and go their own way, independently of U.S. direction. That is a risk that U.S. diplomats never choose to take.
The result is much like corporate bureaucracy, where opportunistic CEOs choose yes-men (or yes-women if they seek protective coloration by posturing as more woke). Such subordinates will support the boss in his own maneuvering, not serve the welfare of the firm. That is why Boeing preferred financial managers to engineers, whose logic might not be that of the increasingly financialized company.
The aim of U.S. “aid” is not to help the country – or even to help “America” – but to help U.S. arms exporters, contractors, big engineering firms, and neocon ideologues in the CIA and State Department, along with ambitious generals in the military seeking a path to promotion and retirement on the board of directors of the military-industrial complex. All this was expressed crisply by Zbigniew Brzezinski in famous advice for U.S. hegemonic strategy on the Eurasian continent: Its aim should be “to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together.”
What kind of local leader indeed could one expect to implement such policy?
- National Security Archive, January 29, 2019. Declassified Documents Show Moscow’s Fear of an Afghan Flip, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/afghanistan-russia-programs/2019-01-29/soviet-invasion-afghanistan-1979-not-trumps-terrorists-nor-zbigs-warm-water-ports, Johnson’s Russia List, August 17, 2021, #14. ↑
I read this yesterday and what an eloquent indictment of everything. I don’t see any pulled punches. Great article.
Dr. Michael Hudson’s disdain is well-founded. The World has grown tired of the US Hegemony whose only motive is to invade nation after nation; subvert their politicians by buying them off, thusly allowing US corporations/banks and the Deep State to go in and plunder. Your time is up, American elites and US military/Deep State machinations.
Leave us be from your filthy, corrupt methods for more profits and manic-aggression. Your time is up!
Who’s next on the list: Taiwan, or more Latin American countries? The sooner, the better.
Well said , the administration always control by neocons who think they can subdue a nation or population by bombing them to the ground , you know they are going to get back to you and fight you like hell , you cannot occupy population no matter how hard you try or how much a power you have , as soon you blink or turn your eyes , you are done .
It seems they never learn , simply because they are ignorant, stupid , arrogant and misinformed.
Thanks for the article .
I hope they get out of Syria and stop stealing the oil , wheat and destroying the land .
“It seems they never learn , simply because they are ignorant, stupid , arrogant and misinformed.”
Or perhaps they have learnt but don’t care because its still payday for them and they’re going to retire to Patagonia anyway. A better policy for America might mean less money for the people with most power.
America’s exit from Afghanistan is long over due. No one can blame Joe Bob for the timing. Trump set the ball in motion. Biden has to bare the responsibility of execution. This is the staggering problem. Contengence planning is one of the presidents primary duties if he claims the be the commander of the US Armed Forces. This is implicit in his duties. You can not fault Joe Bob for timing. His execution is another matter.
To The Saker
Bo Bidens body lies a-moldering in the grave
Bo Bidens body lies a-moldering in the grave
Bo Bidens body lies a-moldering in the grave
But his soul goes marching on
The stars above in Heaven are looking kindly down
The stars above in Heaven are looking kindly down
The stars above in Heaven are looking kindly down
On the grave of old Bo Biden
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah
His soul goes marching on
He captured The Afgan Ferry with his nineteen men so true
He frightened old Kabul till she trembled through and through
They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew
But his soul goes marching on
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah
His soul goes marching on
Excellent article by Dr. Hudson. I agree completely that there will never be an audit trail to show where all that money went (3 trillion). In the US audits are verboten. The Pentagon has not yet produced a clean audit even though for each of the last twenty years, it has been required by law, to do so. Upwards of 23 trillion dollars can not be properly accounted for! How about the 17 trillion printed up and given to Wall Street Banks and other corporations in the 2008 crisis? Where’s the money? From Trump through Biden another 6 trillion has printed and bequeathed to our corporate overlords. Again no audit trail. Many of the giveaways are just that, subsides that do not have to be paid back. The tens of billions given to the airline industry are an example. Of course this is a Govt of the rich by the rich and for the rich. The rich own it lock stock and barrel. There will be no audits and there will be no accountability. For the middle class and the poor however, there will be more pain and suffering.
And to think it was only in mid-June that Biden went on his “America Is Back!!” tour.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
But the USA are back!
Look at the pictures ….. they are definitively back.
The „Saigon-moment“….
Planes do look more modern – and so do the helis.
But they are back. No need to travel to Vietnam to deliver that message, Kamala.
The Viets know already. They have seen it in the TV …..
Mr Saker is it really true?
Everytime America decideds to spread its pylosophy its recipients are the Victor’s after much suffering. I notice there are exceptions to this rule. I think that it is a matter of proximity. The the closer you are to America. The more intense the pain. As you see. Haiti very close very bad. Germany well not bad. China oh further away much better. Afghanistan the world is much smaller and the taliban can’t avoid it. I think they have a chance to do well. Small people can be small. Hopefully not.
Saudi Arabia did not attack USA on 9/11. israel did.
https://www.pinterest.se/acesandeights91/israel-did-911/
The master minds always leave clues as to their real intent.
For example, in the Project for a New American Century the neocons, who later became the Bush Jr administration, called for a new Pearl Harbor event to speed up their agenda of world domination using the US military, by destroying seven countries in the Middle East according to General Wesley Clark.
Back in the seventies I used to drive North on I-95 in New Jersey, and I would look over to the right and marvel at the sight of the twin towers in lower Manhattan.
Larry the Lamb had a convenient doctor appointment that day; he was tipped off by Benny in one of their weekly telephone conversations about buying adequate insurance cover.
Dr. Hudson should avoid linking 9/11 with anybody else if not the US Deep State: a historical endeavour outsourced to Israelis & the Brits; the Sunni faces are extras, mooks, playing to the galleries, a sacrificial providing of the Saudis.
The tinpot-gangster al Saud clan ruling Arabia attacked the US on 11/9/01, Michael? Really?
An odd glitch in an otherwise excellent article. Be advised that the best hypothesis – according to actual realworld evidence – is that 11/9 was the long-nurtured brain-child of elements within the ruling ‘elite’ of zionistan-in-Palestine (ziP), with willing treacherous collusion from elements within the US ruling ‘elite’. The al Saud thugs were only marginally involved; barely at all.
Even amongst the community of truth-seekers about 11/9, the zionistanista origin of the 11/9 atrocities is not widely accepted, perhaps. But Chris Bollyn – at Bollyn.com – still seems to me to offer the most convincing account of how, and where, the conspiracy was originated. It was always a ziP baby. Thus do the supremely treacherous ziPper ‘elite’ reward their chief benefactors, the US tax-payers.
Nobody knows where 911 originated from, it could just as easily been from some guy who cut down a couple sequoia trees.
So wrong, someone knows exactly what happened that day, the planners know. And there was nothing easy about it. Disabling the strongest, mightiest, most glorious army the planet, no, the universe has ever seen….nothing worse than a sequoia stuck in the eye. Just look at all the military demotions for direliction of duty that occured that day, opps, they was all promoted. Surely you heard. Even the pilots who flew bravely to intercept the ‘planes’ got medal’s for intercepting…….what? Promoted men, don’t talk.
Cheers, M
@Rhisiart, it’s not a glitch, it’s a shark jump moment………like any great easy on any great subject that ends with a bit about the authors belief in say, UFOs, Sasquatch, fairies or leprechauns, it spoils all the good. Like that one rotten apple in the barrel, or an aces and eights nod the controllers that one still follows the party line thus one’s job/life stays intact. Why add that, unknown, to an otherwise good, well writen article? What/who did that serve?
Cheers, M
Magnificent piece; kudos to the author.
”So all that Biden’s message meant to most Americans was that we would not waste any more lives and money fighting wars for an ungrateful population that wanted the U.S. to do all the fighting for it.”
To top it off, the ungrateful Afghans could — just for the fun of it — celebrate the 20th anniversary of 911 by noisily wailing and weeping in front of the TV cameras holding placards and banners saying COME BACK AMERICA AND HELP US FIGHT AL QAEDA and, better still: 3000 HOLY LIVES IN NEW YORK CITY WERE TAKEN BY THE MURDEROUS TALIBAN NOW IN CHARGE. That would cause some serious trouble to the senile buffoon in the White House in front of the moronic US majority population, LOL.
”One can only imagine how the image of Samantha Power, Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton, Susan and Condoleezza Rice, not to mention Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, will make the Taliban want to create its own generation of ambitious educated women like these.”
Exactly. And slightly less educated women like the scum in the US and Israeli Armies torturing children and prisoners of war.
The book “Ground Zero Model” by Heinz Pommer a physicist analysing all phenomena occurring on 9/11 clearly pointing to a nuclear event. What must be made clear is that this should put to bed any assertion that 9/11 was anything but a false flag attack and the criminal elements imbedded within the power structure spanning into several countries is the underlying problem.
One has to look at this like a disease and get to the root cause otherwise nothing will ever change.
Exactly right. Everything going on now traces its roots back to that seminal event.
I think Ol’ Joe was just following orders here. He’s totally expendable at this stage of his miserable existence, as I’m sure his handlers remind him everyday. Someone had to be the fall guy and he got the job. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving stooge.
“Afghanistan did not attack us. Saudi Arabia did.”
Anyone who persists in propagating this nonsense does not deserve to be taken seriously. I have worked in Saudi Arabia. I speak Arabic. They are totally incompetent. In Yemen, they are using mercenaries and still losing.
I am also a civil engineer. It is obvious to me that these 3 gigantic buildings (three not two) were blown up in an operation prepared over many months. Israel and the Deep State were clearly responsible. The two larger buildings were blown up by tactical nuclear weapons. Anyone who watches the videos will see massive girders and beams flying upwards. Where did the energy come from? Office furniture?
The Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile of some sort. The target was the area where an audit was being carried out to find out where 2 trillion dollars had disappeared. It is all so very obvious.
I suggest that Michael Hudson sticks to economics. He is well outside his depth here. Thank you.
So what was i looking at as i sat in my living room watching the news in realtime and saw the second jet blast through the tower?
Don’t be daft. The jets were the diversion from the real action going on within. A classic magic trick, nothing more.
You were watching a video image of a plane hitting the second tower, disappearing into the building constructed from steel girders and steel reinforced concrete, with the nose cone coming out the opposite side. This is of course impossible since a plane that is essentially a flimsy aluminum tube would have been crushed on impact.
At 08:46 American Airlines flight 11 hit WTC 1 at a speed of 430 knots (495 MPH).
At 09:03 United Flight 175 hit WTC 2 at a speed of 510 knots (587 MPH).
The speeds were very accurately measured by radar. A few other answers here have said it’s impossible for a Boeing 767 to fly at those speeds near the ground and they’re almost right. The correct statement is that it’s impossible for an unmodified Boeing 767 to fly at those speeds at low level.
Besides the problem with the aircraft even getting to those speeds there is the problem of control. Aircraft flying at high speed in the dense air at low level would be very difficult to control. A slight movement of the controls would have a huge effect on the direction and attitude of the aircraft. That makes the 100% hit result even more miraculous.
The speeds of the two computer generated aircraft were supposedly measured from the radar blips inserted on radar screens or just figments of someone’s imagination. If a Boeing 767 flew at 587 mph at an altitude of 1,000 feet the wings would have been torn off.
The engines of these planes were made from several tons of almost indestructible super alloys were never found in the building debris. Neither were the black boxes.
Absolutely.
They ca not fly those speeds but that is the official narrative.
So there are only two options.
First they have been switched in mid air with modified airplanes, let us not forget that both planes flew
loops and were in the air for quite some time. Those modified planes would have been flown remotely.
Planes can be taken over remotely in the air and flown to wherever they want they but technology like that
in Boeings. They could have flown the original planes to some secret facility.
Second option there were no planes which I find a bit hard to believe. But some images could still have been
doctored to throw people off.
According to Heinz Pommer they had to open up the building to create a vent otherwise they buildings would
have blown out sideways with the underground nukes that were used, with no outlet of the energy travelling up
the building.
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This is off-topic. Please take further discussion on this subject to the MFC. Thanx. The Mod.
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Alfred, you’re absolutely right. The MSM is still operating by the fable that Osama bin Laden and his merry band of 19 hijackers were the perps of 9/11. We were told this was the case within hours of the attacks, with pictures of all of them plastered all across the MSM. This was way before any evidence-based investigation could possibly have been done. 9/11 has been the phony pretext for all the wars of this century, all for Israel. Every American president since 9/11 has had to dance around this horrible truth.
The twin towers did not collapse, they disintegrated to fine grey dust that covered lower Manhattan and also blew southwards in the wind.
Fifty times normal background levels of Tritium were found in the basement water of the twin towers, evidence of a nuclear fusion reaction. Tritium is an isotope of the hydrogen atom, but with two neutrons in its nucleus.
The alleged Saudi hijackers were hired by the CIA sent for flying lessons in the US to be used as patsies to lay a false trail. The FBI stumbled upon them, but were warned off, before they could be arrested. There is no photographic evidence of any Saudis boarding passenger jets at Newark or Boston airports that day.
Military exercises were conducted on 911 inserting false radar blips on the screens of the jet fighter pilots sent up from Washington to intercept the non existent hijackers. It was an exercise in futility with the US pilots heading up to Alaska and out into the Atlantic ocean.
Dick Cheney was put in charge of NORAD for several weeks before and after the event to prevent any dissent to the official narrative.
The twin memorial pools at ground zero fit exactly the floor plans of the twin towers. They act as a wastewater treatment plant with drains at their center to remove the ongoing heat generated by continuously pumping water into and back out of them to the River Hudson to then flow into the Atlantic.
Michael Hudson is just being very careful by using the now official narrative about nein eleven.
He is too well known and a potential target for retaliation, if he steps too far over the thin red line.
Even when he criticizes the banks, he shrouds his comments with esoteric words like endogenous and exogenous money, that few people understand.
“His first pretense was that we invaded Afghanistan to retaliate against “its” attack on America on 9/11. This is the founding lie of U.S. presence in the Near East. Afghanistan did not attack us. Saudi Arabia did.”
Perhaps partially. But only in an ancillary sense. Israel is more guilty, so why shy away from saying it?
@Depth Charge
How can Israel be more guilty? To my knowledge, no Israeli passport was found in the rubble 😂. What’s interesting about the ”Dancing Israelis” is to contemplate what some dancing Russians would have had to endure. By 2001, Russia was a into the Putin era.
Rumours on Twitter and some sites that British Spec Ops and Paras have staged a break out of Kabul airport.
Official news from the Twitter account of the UK Embassador in Kabul airport seems to support this too.
Apparently the Taliban did not fire upon the armoured vehicles nor even try to stop them as they drove trough at least 2 checkpoints in the city centre.
Anyone got any info on this? – could be huge if true.
It also appears the American are under so much pressure they too are looking at trying a break out from the airport. The US currently have ground attack aircraft circling the airport so this could be on (if the Taliban dont act).
If the US makes a mess of this planned breakout it could result in the massacre of 1000’s (by both sides).
The British breakout was less than 100 men who caught the Taliban with thier pants down as crowd choas and protests were kicked off together to overwhelm them.
This could be a huge story if the Americans and British decide to put targets back on thier backs and then fail to breakout and take key possitions.
These “leaks” about the British driving around kabul have been traced to a couple of guys aggregating Twitter posts.
There does appear to be some truth in it, but I am unsure if the Paras “broke out” or were from the Embassy guard which was already outside the fence at the airport at the time.
Either way, for a time the British Paras and Spec Ops were outside the airport scooping people up.
This is the Twitter feed from one of the guys who have been most prolific with the posts:
https://twitter.com/james_durso/status/1428147803407192072
“But the Wahabi fundamentalism army was sponsored by Saudi Arabia, which paid for arming Al Qaeda to fight against Sunni Moslems and, early on, the Russian-backed Afghan government.”
Do you mean to say: “to fight against Shia Moslems”? Saudis believe they are threatened by Iran, which is predominantly Shia.
> The aim of U.S. “aid” is not to help the country – or even to help “America” – but to help U.S. arms exporters, contractors, big engineering firms, and neocon ideologues in the CIA and State Department, along with ambitious generals in the military seeking a path to promotion and retirement on the board of directors of the military-industrial complex. All this was expressed crisply by Zbigniew Brzezinski in famous advice for U.S. hegemonic strategy on the Eurasian continent: Its aim should be “to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and keep the barbarians from coming together.”
While both sentences here convey important insights, the latter doesn’t quite follow from the former. A competent imperial policy and “hegemonic strategy” apparatus _would_ heed Zbig’s advice. For example, it would try to keep the main “barbarian” tribes–China and Russia and Iran–from coming together. It would keep a tight lid on Germany, Mexican, Korean sovereignty. Of course, the NS+FP establishment is not competent in this way, and it failed spectacularly at these goals. Brzezinski was among the last of the competent imperialists within the establishment. The Empire, as a living organism, is dead (like Saker, I would put the death date in early 2020, roughly Soleimani’s assassination).
What lives in its place? A feudal constellation of post-imperial bureaucracies, which are aptly described by the first quoted sentence (Zionism included in “neocon ideologues”). And, recognizing the death of the Empire, they are all in _individual_ survival mode.
Sinophobic/russophobic sentiment is the brittle glue keeping the narrow interests of the post-imperial constellation in line. If this sentiment is undermined, say, by economic pressure from China, the constellation will shatter into a full-blown internal crisis, if not civil war, of NATO. This is exceedingly likely to occur at some point in the next 5 years. Most of the constellation is already two-faced: publicly, they bash China, but privately, they have considerably economic interests in China. This contradiction will only grow in intensity. In my opinion, this breaking point is likely to occur in either Germany or Brazil, in the context of their upcoming elections (Sept 2021 and Oct 2022 respectively).
Ode to Zbigniew Brzezinski (Melody: Oh Tannenbaum)
Excellent article by Michael Hudson, thanks.
This the cherry on the pie imho:
“It looks like most of the world will quickly recognize the Afghan government, leaving the U.S., Israel, Britain, India and perhaps Samoa isolated as a recalcitrant block living like the post-World War I royal families still clinging to their titles of dukes, princes and other vestiges of a world that had passed.”
We may even skip the term ‘royal’, but for the ‘families’ involved with their wanted ‘privileges’ and ‘delusional grandeur’ it may also apply.
To add to the point of trillions ‘gone up in smoke’, I remembered a short clip on the (busy) Telegram-channel of RT:
https://t.me/rtintl_chat/469192
Unfortunately it will open only in a Telegram environment (Might be something to gain here, Mrs. Margarita Simonyan or anybody of her employees reading here? Just a thought…). It is a short clip of Julian Assange from 2011, saying essentially this:
“The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”
It wasted a lot of lives too. Not that the decision takers care for a second about that. ‘People’ are just numbers in a spreadsheet.
Cheers, Rob
The 20th anniversary of 911 is approaching. Will Israel have the balls and/or impudence to strike the US again? Some evil-doer’s passport should of course be part of the plot.
“Some evil-doer’s passport should of course be part of the plot”. LOL
Funny how those pristine passports were found amid the rubble of pulverized concrete and melted girders. This and a host of absolute impossibles are all easily breezily dismissed by reigning coincidence theorists.
I would add “only” that as long as nations, including Russia and, amazingly to me, China continue to accept printed-out-of-thin-air USD as payment for REAL stuff, the US will likewise continue to do what it is doing.
It is not so bad to accept USD as payment (medium of exchange), as it can, for now, readily be changed into other forms.
It’s a bad idea to use USD as a store of value. China is not accumulating more USD reserves even as their economy grows rapidly.
It’s a terrible idea to have your store of value held by a foreign power, even one that you are on good terms with. Things like gold and Treasury bills have a way of disappearing, becoming inaccessible for decades, or to be used for purposes that weaken your government.
Michael; as regards the 9/11 minefield there’s a simple and principled way to sidestep the issue. Some think the Al Qaida did it, others think it was Mossad (as I do). But we don’t KNOW. We don’t know because there never was a proper judicial investigation into the matter as there always is in murder cases – or usually. This one surely qualifies. If you murder 3000 some people or just one the cops get involved and the detectives get to work. But not in Manhattan. In Manhattan, evidently, New Yorkers decided that the testimony of unnamed ‘sources’ within the government was good enough to close the case and even start a war. Gotta love them New Yorkers. Innovative, you know? Again, what happened on 9/11 was the hijacking of the American system of open public investigations with the aim of establishing evidence, the kind that will stand up in a court of law, attended by a jury of ordinary citizens, on matters of criminality. I will add that every step along the way since this date have been reiterations of this subversion of due process. The deep state you rightly denounce is always telling us: ‘trust me’. Obama: ‘trust the intelligence agencies’. Once again the main point: this line that 9/11 was Bin Ladin’s doing remains unsubstantiated. By going along with the government’s line on this we implicitly acquiesce in the more serious matter of suspending due process. Otherwise an excellent essay. I always look forwards to your commentaries, on whatever subjects you aim to address.
”Again, what happened on 9/11 was the hijacking of the American system of open public investigations with the aim of establishing evidence, the kind that will stand up in a court of law, attended by a jury of ordinary citizens, on matters of criminality.”
Hardly. If anything, 911 was a crucial test event. Just like Europe’s inbred Royal swine and scum of colonial genocidalists in the early 20th century, the Zionazis wanted to see for themselves that their ”home populations” wouldn’t stir up any problems to their sick and evil conspiracies, even at the expense of some exceptional, indispensable folks at the WTC and the Pentagon. Worked like a charm. If the Pindos had greeted the ”fireworks” with a massive Serves you right! and Too bad the Offal Office survived, does anyone believe that the Zionazis would have dared unleash their premeditated carnage in West Asia?
Brilliantly nailed, Dr Hudson. Self evident, insightful analysis that CIA-captured MSM are now working so furiously to obfuscate. May they fail in that as spectacularly as they fail in almost all their Machiavellian machinations. What will the the intelligence (sic) mafia do now that its neo-opium-war has failed?