Synthetic Terror Part II

The second chapter of the book is obviously the inspiration for a good part of Terrorstorm. Which is to say that it doesn't have a whole lot to do with 9-11, but a lot to do with "False Flag" operations and Operation Gladio and the like. But Tarpley is a little more cautious than Alex Jones. Note how he establishes the supposed link betwee the US and Operation Gladio:



"Information came into the public domain that...." That is a very curious and passive way of avoiding telling us who put that information into the public domain. But that's a research project for another time; for the moment it is sufficient that Operation Gladio does not tell us a lot about 9/11/01. That false flag attacks may have happened in the past does not mean that every attack is false flag, unless Tarpley wants us to believe that the French bombed Pearl Harbor.

Tarpley goes on to tell us about patsies and moles and it seems pretty tangential to 9-11 but he does get back on track with the discussion of the Phoenix memo and the efforts by Minneapolis FBI to get a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer. But where most of us see the failure of that warrant to be issued as a sad mistake by an FBI paranoid about violating rights, Tarpley is convinced that the special agent who blocked the warrant must have been one of his "moles".

Sibel Edmonds gets a long mention; she has some interesting claims but she's the usual CT "whistleblower"; she blew the whistle after she was fired, so it's an open question as to what is sour grapes and what is legitimate. I have noted in the past that Edmonds' claims as revealed on 60 Minutes were relatively tame; it's only in recent years that she has embellished them to include supposed 9-11 foreknowledge (even though she herself was hired after 9-11).

Tarpley goes on to Operation Northwoods and at this point my eyes are glazing over. You can't imagine how tedious it is to wade through this all over again, in pursuit of a claim that the US government's willingness to create an incident in which no Americans would actually die indicates their willingness to create an incident in which thousands of Americans would die.

Tarpley does a few side jaunts into British government involvement in Northern Ireland terrorism, something I may be interested in looking at in the future and Israeli involvment in Al Qaeda in the Gaza Strip. Again, mildly interesting but not related to 9-11 except in the usual, "If X government would do A, then why wouldn't Y government do B?" sense.

Tarpley also dedicates an entire page to a rundown of the way the US oligarchy controlled all the presidents after FDR. Jimmy Carter, for example, supposedly had a nervous breakdown after "being ousted as Governor of Georgia." But in fact, Carter was prohibited from serving a second term; under his successor, George Busbee, Georgia amended its constitution to allow two consecutive terms.

General comments: As noted in the discussion of the prior chapter, Tarpley does not organize his thoughts well, so we get a mishmash of stuff that is probably recycled from Tarpley's writing for Executive Intelligence Review, Lyndon LaRouche's magazine. His main point in this section appears to be that there are no real outside terror groups or if there are, they are patsies for the governments they nominally oppose.