Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11
America's most controversial novelist calls for an investigation into whether
the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks to happen.
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Talk Gore Vidal on Bush
Observer Worldview
Terrorism crisis Observer special
Sunder Katwala
Sunday October 27, 2002
The Observer
America's most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing
attack to date on George W Bush's Presidency, calling for an investigation
into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration
deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda's plans.
Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' -
published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he
calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a
pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties
at home.
Vidal writes 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous
Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil
libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of
Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a
mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in
5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas
Bush-Cheney junta.'
Vidal argues that the real motive for the Afghanistan war was to control the
gateway to Eurasia and Central Asia's energy riches. He quotes extensively
from a 1997 analysis of the region by Zgibniew Brzezinski, formerly national
security adviser to President Carter, in support of this theory. But, Vidal
argues, US administrations, both Democrat and Republican, were aware that the
American public would resist any war in Afghanistan without a truly massive
and widely perceived external threat.
'Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our
long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan ... [because] the
administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can
deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable, lone, crazed killer
(this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause
he hates us because we're rich 'n free 'n he's not.' Vidal also attacks the
American media's failure to discuss 11 September and its consequences
'Apparently, "conspiracy stuff" is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.'
'It is an article of faith that there are no conspiracies in American life.
Yet, a year or so ago, who would have thought that most of corporate America
had been conspiring with accountants to cook their books since - well, at
least the bright dawn of the era of Reagan and deregulation.'
At the heart of the essay are questions about the events of 9/11 itself and
the two hours after the planes were hijacked. Vidal writes that 'astonished
military experts cannot fathom why the government's "automatic standard order
of procedure in the event of a hijacking" was not followed'.
These procedures, says Vidal, determine that fighter planes should
automatically be sent aloft as soon as a plane has deviated from its flight
plan. Presidential authority is not required until a plane is to be shot
down. But, on 11 September, no decision to start launching planes was taken
until 9.40am, eighty minutes after air controllers first knew that Flight 11
had been hijacked and fifty minutes after the first plane had struck the
North Tower.
'By law, the fighters should have been up at around 8.15. If they had, all
the hijacked planes might have been diverted and shot down.'
Vidal asks why Bush, as Commander-in-Chief, stayed in a Florida classroom as
news of the attacks broke 'The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September
certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.' He also attacks the
'nonchalance' of General Richard B Myers, acting Joint Chief of Staff, in
failing to respond until the planes had crashed into the twin towers.
Asking whether these failures to act expeditiously were down to conspiracy,
coincidence or error, Vidal notes that incompetence would usually lead to
reprimands for those responsible, writing that 'It is interesting how often
in our history, when disaster strikes, incompetence is considered a better
alibi than .... Well, yes, there are worse things.'
Vidal draws comparisons with another 'day of infamy' in American history,
writing that 'The truth about Pearl Harbour is obscured to this day. But it
has been much studied. 11 September, it is plain, is never going to be
investigated if Bush has anything to say about it.' He quotes CNN reports
that Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to limit
Congressional investigation of the day itself, ostensibly on grounds of not
diverting resources from the anti-terror campaign.
Vidal calls bin Laden an 'Islamic zealot' and 'evil doer' but argues that
'war' cannot be waged on the abstraction of 'terrorism'. He says that 'Every
nation knows how - if it has the means and will - to protect itself from
thugs of the sort that brought us 9/11 ... You put a price on their heads and
hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing that with the Sicilian
Mafia; and no-one has suggested bombing Palermo.'
Vidal also highlights the role of American and Pakistani intelligence in
creating the fundamentalist terrorist threat 'Apparently, Pakistan did do it
- or some of it' but with American support. "From 1979, the largest covert
operation in the history of the CIA was launched in response to the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan ... the CIA covertly trained and sponsored these
warriors.'
Vidal also quotes the highly respected defence journal Jane's Defence Weekly
on how this support for Islamic fundamentalism continued after the emergence
of bin Laden 'In 1988, with US knowledge, bin Laden created Al-Qaeda (The
Base); a conglomerate of quasi-independent Islamic terrorist cells spread
across 26 or so countries. Washington turned a blind eye to Al-Qaeda.'
Vidal, 77, and internationally renowned for his award-winning novels and
plays, has long been a ferocious, and often isolated, critic of the Bush
administration at home and abroad. He now lives in Italy. In Vidal's most
recent book, The Last Empire, he argued that 'Americans have no idea of the
extent of their government's mischief ... the number of military strikes we
have made unprovoked, against other countries, since 1947 is more than 250.'
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
Gore VIdal Bio
http//www.sbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/gorevidal.html
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