Webster Tarpley On the Depression of the 1990s

The third chapter of Tarpley's book, Synthetic Terror, is clearly drawn from his days as a LaRouchie. As discussed in numerous posts on FactNet.org, LaRouche was constantly selling "doom and gloom":

Ah, housing and Larouche, a real winning combination. A track record like every other prediction of economic collapse.

In the 1970's we would warn people of a Rockefeller take over and tell people to sell their houses and give the money to the US Labor Party before everything collapses.

Now, you know how it is; you can always predict that bad times are around the corner because the corner has not arrived yet. Tarpley tries to do something quite a bit harder; he tries to convince people that the 1990s were the bad old days.

This of course will come as news to anybody who was alive those days. The US economy purred on all cylinders during the 1990s by any measure. The economy added almost 20 million jobs during the decade. The stock market soared, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rocketing from 2,750 to 10,800.

But of course, to Tarpley, the US economy spent the entire decade teetering on the brink of collapse, a situation that Tarpley blames on Globalization. He does bring in some legitimate concerns (like the Russian financial crisis of 1998) which did have some impact on the economy, but which turned out to be like a blemish on Jessica Simpson; overall still pretty darn good.

Then he gets into the dollar debate. Is the greenback about to implode in faster than free fall speed? Tarpley sure believes it. We are led to assume that the OPEC nations are all headed to the Euro; that has not happened. He compares the US economy to Weimar, Germany. I know I haven't yet headed out to the market with a wheelbarrow full of money the way the Germans did back then. Even more bizarre, Tarpley claims that the "neocons" are actually pushing this comparison. Brooks' Law states that when somebody who's not a neocon uses the word in a sentence, you can usually bet that the rest of the sentence will be false, and this is no exception. I have yet to hear a prominent neocon (say Bill Kristol) compare the US economy to the Weimar Republic.

Then we get into Tarpley's analysis of the 1998 Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski/Impeachment imbroglio. Tarpley describes it as a "coup" attempt, which may win him some brief fans among the Clinton defenders. However, he goes on to claim that the Navy brass were considering deposing Clinton and replacing him with Ross Perot, a notion that is sheer tinfoil hattery.

It just goes on and on, with Tarpley giving his unique take on Kosovo, and the Neocons war of words with China. And absolutely nothing in here seems to have anything to do with the events of 9-11.

Now I see why people tell me to debunk Synthetic Terror. It's because there's almost nothing there that ties to 9-11 so that at the end of reading another chapter, I've done nothing to debunk the Deniers.

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.

Tarpley Part I

His first chapter is mostly a love letter to the 9-11 Denial Movement, but as usual with the Deniers we find that his objective is not about 9-11 but something else:



Get on board the 9-11 Denial train, because 9-11 Denial will end the Republicans, once and for all!

But of course, hoping to be on the winning side of the Democrats, Tarpley can't resist poking hardest at two fellows that usually get a pass from the 9-11 kooks: Richard Clarke and George Tenet. But since Clarke was around in the Clinton Administration, he comes in for some special scorn:



Update: A commenter claimed that I said here that Tarpley was catering to the Democrats. To clarify, what I meant is that Tarpley sees 9-11 Denial resulting in the destruction of the Republicans, and that would allow the Democratic party to split in two segments--the Lieberman Democrats and the Kennedy Democrats. Since Tarpley finds "there is hope" that the split will go "in a progressive direction", I assume that he aligns himself more with the Kennedy faction, and thus he criticizes moderates.

Tarpley's point here seems to be that these guys convinced the media that 9-11 was a Muslim job.

Tarpley does come down firm on the number of 9-11 hijackers who are still alive: 7. Of course, given that he appears to buy into the "patsy" theory of the hijackers it's hard to see what he buys with this, other than the usual chance for his readers to say, "Woo!"

We get a whole section on Bush's supposed lying. Of course this is the usual "if he would lie about A, then why not about B? Non-evidence in other words.

Then we get the bit about the "Colin Powell promised us a White Paper!" Like these folks would be satisified with a report. We've seen how this goes over. But of course the fact that Powell's State Department did not prepare one after all "proves" that 9-11 was an inside job.

An aside here. Tarpley does not do a very good job of assembling his arguments. His point with this whole chapter seems to be that the 9-11 story was sold by the administration and the press. So why not say that and then present your case. Instead this almost reads like settling old scores:



Let me say here that although my politics are Republican, the notion that a magazine like the Nation, which is fairly hard left, is helping out the Bush Administration is ... well, nutty. It sort of defines fringe, like when my conservative friends insist that Bush is involved in some plot to turn the country over to Mexico.

But there is a hero in this story according to Tarpley, and you are probably not going to believe who it is:



Of course, Tarpley and Torricelli are wrong here; New Jersey did not suffer the most victims of any state; New York had 1747 victims compared to the Garden State's 697. You can guess where Tarpley goes with this; that Torricelli was forced out of his reelection run in 2002 not because he accepted expensive "gifts" from a campaign but because the "inside jobbers" needed him out of the way.

Tarpley follows with a recital of a bunch of foreigners who suspect 9-11 was a US operation. Interesting, but hardly evidence.

General comments: Tarpley doesn't organize his book very well; it flits from place to place with no apparent rhyme or reason. He could also have benefited from a good editor; for starters it's Bob Kerrey, not Bob Kerry.