The Economy Will Not Recover Until the Economic Criminals are Prosecuted, and There Are Real Investigations Into 9/11 and Other Government Failures

George Washington's picture

Washington’s Blog

Trust in Government is Necessary for a Stable Economy


Trust ... plays a key role in economic exchange and politics. In the absence of trust among trading partners, market transactions break down.
In the absence of trust in a country's institutions and leaders,
political legitimacy breaks down. Much recent evidence indicates that
trust contributes to economic, political and social success.

Forbes wrote an article in 2006 entitled "The Economics of Trust". The article summarizes the importance of trust in creating a healthy economy:

going to the corner store to buy a carton of milk, only to find that
the refrigerator is locked. When you've persuaded the shopkeeper to
retrieve the milk, you then end up arguing over whether you're going to
hand the money over first, or whether he is going to hand over the
milk. Finally you manage to arrange an elaborate simultaneous exchange.
A little taste of life in a world without trust--now imagine trying to
arrange a mortgage.


Being able to trust people might seem like a
pleasant luxury, but economists are starting to believe that it's
rather more important than that. Trust is about more than whether you
can leave your house unlocked; it is responsible for the difference
between the richest countries and the poorest.


"If you take a
broad enough definition of trust, then it would explain basically all
the difference between the per capita income of the United States and
Somalia," ventures Steve Knack, a senior economist at the World Bank
who has been studying the economics of trust for over a decade. That
suggests that trust is worth $12.4 trillion dollars a year to the U.S.,
which, in case you are wondering, is 99.5% of this country's income. ***


Above all, trust enables people to do business with each other. Doing business is what creates wealth. ***


distinguish between the personal, informal trust that comes from being
friendly with your neighbors and the impersonal, institutionalized
trust that lets you give your credit card number out over the Internet.

Similarly, market psychologists Richard L. Peterson M.D. and Frank Murtha, Ph.D. wrote in October:

Trust is the oil in the engine of capitalism, without it, the engine seizes up.

Confidence is like the gasoline, without it the machine won't move.

is gone: there is no longer trust between counterparties in the
financial system. Furthermore, confidence is at a low. Investors have
lost their confidence in the ability of shares to provide decent returns
(since they haven't).

Two professors of finance write:

drop in trust, we believe, is a major factor behind the deteriorating
economic conditions. To demonstrate its importance, we launched the
Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index. Our first set of
data—based on interviews conducted at the end of December 2008—shows
that between September and December, 52 percent of Americans lost trust
in the banks. Similarly, 65 percent lost trust in the stock market. A
BBB/Gallup poll that surveyed a similar sample of Americans last April
confirms this dramatic drop. At that time, 42 percent of Americans
trusted financial institutions, versus 34 percent in our survey today,
while 53 percent said they trusted U.S. companies, versus just 12
percent today.


As trust declines, so does Americans’ willingness
to invest their money in the financial system. Our data show that
trust in the stock market affects people’s intention to buy stocks,
even after accounting for expectations of future stock-market
performance. Similarly, a person’s trust in banks predicts the
likelihood that he will make a run on his bank in a moment of crisis:
25 percent of those who don’t trust banks withdrew their deposits and
stored them as cash last fall, compared with only 3 percent of those
who said they still trusted the banks. Thus, trust in financial
institutions is a key factor for the smooth functioning of capital
markets and, by extension, the economy. Changes in trust matter.

They quote a Nobel laureate economist on the subject:

every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust,”
writes economist Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel laureate. When we deposit money
in a bank, we trust that it’s safe. When a company orders goods, it
trusts its counterpart to deliver them in good faith. Trust facilitates
transactions because it saves the costs of monitoring and screening; it
is an essential lubricant that greases the wheels of the economic

And a distinguished international group of
economists (Giancarlo Corsetti, Michael P. Devereux, Luigi Guiso, John
Hassler, Gilles Saint-Paul, Hans-Werner Sinn, Jan-Egbert Sturm and
Xavier Vives) have written a brief essay arguing:

Public distrust of bankers and financial markets has risen dramatically with the financial crisis. This column argues that this loss
of trust in the financial system played a critical role in the
collapse of economic activity that followed. To undo the damage,
financial regulation needs to focus on restoring that trust.

They note:

is crucial in many transactions and certainly in those involving
financial exchanges. The massive drop in trust associated with this
crisis will therefore have important implications for the future of
financial markets. Data show that in the late 1970s, the percentage of
people who reported having full trust in banks, brokers, mutual funds or
the stock market was around 40%; it had sunk to around 30% just before
the crisis hit, and collapsed to barely 5% afterwards. It is now even
lower than the trust people have in other people (randomly selected of

Time Magazine notes:

Traditionally, gold has been a store of value when citizens do not trust their government politically or economically.

In other words, the government's political actions affect investments, such as gold, and thus the broader economy.

Trust Is At An All-Time Low

Unfortunately, the public's trust in government as a whole (and see this and this), the justice system, bankers, and the corporate media are at all-time lows.


Partly because the government has been repeatedly caught lying.

government repeatedly said about the subprime crisis, banking crisis,
debt crisis, mortgage crisis, and other economic crises:

  • "It's contained"
  • "We've got it under control"


  • "We're going to fix it".

It wasn't, and they didn't ... and so people have lost trust in the government.

But it's not just the economy. The government also got caught making false claims that:

  • That the government doesn't spy on Americans (it did even before 9/11), Americans don't torture, etc.

there's another important reason for Americans' lack of trust in our
government and our economy: the failure to prosecute the criminals.

Prosecuting the Criminals and Launching REAL Investigations Is Necessary to Restore Trust

One of the leading business schools in America - the Wharton School of Business - has written an essay
on the psychological causes and solutions to the economic crisis.
trust cannot be restored until wrongdoers are held accountable:

crisis today is not one of confidence, but one of trust. "Abusive
financial practices were unchecked by personal moral controls that
Madoff, and by complex financial manipulations, as in the case of AIG."
trauma of loss similar to that after 9/11.
"Normal expectations of what is safe and dependable were abruptly
shattered," Sachs noted. "As is typical of post-traumatic states,
planning for the future could not be based on old assumptions about
gratified occurred."


They have trouble trusting promises from the government because they
feel the government has let them down.


He framed his argument
"She felt betrayed because she and her husband had invested
conservatively and were double-crossed by dishonest, greedy businessmen,
and now she distrusted the government that had failed to protect them
things turning around soon enough to enable her and her husband to
accomplish their previous goals.


"By no means a sophisticated
economist, she knew ... that some people had become fantastically
wealthy by misusing other people's money -- hers included," Sachs said.

"In short, John and Betty had done everything right and were being
punished, while the dishonest people were going unpunished."


an individual recover from a traumatic experience provides a useful
analogy for understanding how to help the economy recover from its own
traumatic experience, Sachs pointed out. The public will need to "hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again." In addition, the public will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again, he argued.

Note that Sachs urges "hold[ing] the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible." In other words, just "looking forward" and promising to do things differently isn't enough.

Many high-level economists agree.

Economists such as William Black and James Galbraith have repeatedly said that we cannot solve the economic crisis unless we throw the criminals who committed fraud in jail.

Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated
that failure to punish white collar criminals - and instead bailing
them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further
destruction of the economy in the future. See this, this and this.

Nobel prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and George Akerlof agree.

Indeed, polls show that:

  • Americans want those who committed financial fraud to be prosecuted

Remember, distrust in the political actions
of those in Washington D.C. undermines the economy. Therefore, the
economy will not recover until the economic criminals are prosecuted,
and there are real investigations into 9/11 (even the 9/11 Commissioners
themselves think there should be more investigation: see this and this), the Iraq war, torture, spying on Americans and other government failures.

Comment viewing options

tony bonn's picture

unfortunately ms betty public is not going to see satisfaction since the government is owned by the sociopaths who caused the financial titanic. you should have seen the smug assholes on jesse ventura's show as they explained that until the system is changed they would continue to exploit it. the arrogance and hautiness of those punks was breath taking. thugs are taking taxpayer supplied bonuses even when their company stole money through the backdoor of aig to save their grossly mismanaged company. and one of the punks argued that blankenfein's pay was justified because some major league baseball was paid 35 million usd.

yes the entire financial imbroglio is related to enron which is related to 9/11....asshole david rockefeller can preen about grandpa and his baptist religion but any religious pimp can don sheep's clothing just as jim and tammy faye baker proved. they are the puppet masters of the fed and bailout nation. until the 9/11 fraud is exposed the financial fraud will persist. just as the jfk fraud lives.

too big to fail is tyranny.

ps. i loved the smarmy answer from the goldman sachs squid who responded, "no comment" when governor ventura asked if the building in front of which they were standing was goldman sach's new headquarters. 2.3 billion usd worth of headquarters.

Money 4 Nothing's picture

"Buzzy" Crongaurd.. only thing you have to know about 9-11. Corruption make me sick. What you find out is that there was alot of people that knew it was comming and either didn't say anything about it, profited or both. It was the advent for DHS and they have nothng to do with outside intellegence, only inside.


 Conspiracy scientist..

CitizenPete's picture

Great Post GW - as usual I agree with you.  You say what I believe to be common sense for anyone with half a brain.


I thought the Lame Stream Media coverage of the 9/11 truth campaign was a key moment in reaching sheople who watch Faux news.  What did you think about it?



When the people fear government, you have TYRANNY

When the government fears the people, you have LIBERTY

celticgold's picture

 trust this....All the wars , they will be fought again...

ShankyS's picture

Thanks GW. Great post as always. Keep the full court press on 'em.

Cammy Le Flage's picture

What government can anyone trust? These conversations are getting boring. I don't know if there is a government in existence today that can be trusted anywhere. It is obviously human nature to create such nastiness. Yawn.

InsanePonziClown's picture

here's a new old one, local news, local convenience gas stations are now putting charges on your ccard for shit you didn't buy, ie, snacks, coffee, crackers, etc.............that use to be a crime stealing, now it's standard practice, from large supposedly reputable companies

Anal Picnic's picture

Jesus will come back and set the tables straight. Says so in the Bible.

weinerdog43's picture

Ba'al says that he is going to kick Jeebus' ass.

dizzyfingers's picture

He's been changing, evolving. Probably because he has kids? Kid?

dizzyfingers's picture

Found these video clips at « There Are No Words To Describe The Following Part II »


If you're pressed for time, start watching at the 3-minute mark.  Alan Grayson questions Elizabeth Coleman, Inspector General of the Federal Reserve.

Editor's Note:  Until the day Bernanke is indicted for crimes against humanity, all we can do is create awareness. 

The most effective strategy is an email campaign.


"Of course we're not going to pay back the Chinese: Honesty from Peter Schiff:



trav7777's picture

Complete bullshit.  GW, don't post crap like this.

Enough of the fking 911 conspiracy BS and there is NO connection between it and the economy which is being driven by contractionary forces due to oil peak.

the economy WILL NOT RECOVER no matter how many fucking jackasses we put in jail, no matter how many "truth commissions" we found, no matter how much money is printed.

It's time to ACCEPT that we have entered a NEW era where aggregate contraction is the norm.  Any article that does not admit this a priori is a waste of time.

CONFIDENCE does not power cars or melt steel.

dizzyfingers's picture

Dear trav:

I used to think the same as you regarding the unconnectedness of things, but not anymore -- and not just because of one or two articles but because I've thought deeply about many things I've been reading with an open mind. Oddly, things do fit together, not in a conspiratorial way as meant today, but in a sort of horrible cascade of logic if one keeps track long enough. I also feel frustrated depressed and angry but I think it's important to keep our wits about us and know everything we can because I believe we're going to have to fight for our lives, one way or another. dz

More articles (sorry):


by Peter Dale Scott   Global Research, July 5, 2008  

Global Research recently published my essay entitled  9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics (appended below at *&*) In this article, I argue that 9/11 should be analyzed as a deep event (an event not fully aired or understood because of its intelligence connections) and above all as one of a series of deep events which from time to time have frustrated peace initiatives or become pretexts for war.The War Conspiracy. As The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, it is due to be published by the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press in August 2008.

I wish to summarize again the first striking similarity between 11/22/63 and of 9/11/01: the dubious detective work on those two days. Less than fifteen minutes after the President’s assassination, the height and weight of Kennedy’s alleged killer was posted.

1 Before the last of the hijacked planes crashed on 9/11, the FBI told Richard Clarke that they had a list of alleged hijackers.2

In the case of Oswald, within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, Inspector Sawyer of the Dallas police put out on the police radio network, and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – "About 30, 5’10", 165 pounds."

3 As noted, this height and weight exactly matched the measurements attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald in Oswald’s FBI file, and also in CIA documents about him.4

The announced height and weight were however different from Oswald’s actual measurements, as recorded by the Dallas police after his arrest: 5’9 1/2", 131 pounds.

5 More importantly, there is no credible source for the posted measurements from any witness in Dallas. (The witness said to have spotted him, Howard Brennan, failed to identify Oswald in a line-up.)6 This leaves the possibility that the measurements were taken from existing files on Oswald, rather than from any observations in Dallas on November 22. If so, someone with access to those files may have already designated Oswald as the culprit, before there was any evidence to connect him to the crime.

A similar situation pertains to the alleged hijackers on 9/11. For example, shortly afterwards men in Saudi Arabia complained that "the hijackers' `personal details’" released by the FBI -- "including name, place, date of birth and occupation -- matched their own."

7 One of them, Saeed al-Ghamdi, claimed further that an alleged photograph shown on CNN (of an alleged Flight 93 hijacker with the same name) was in fact a photograph of himself. He speculated "that CNN had probably got the picture from the Flight Safety flying school he attended in Florida."8

If the above information is accurate, then the details posted by the FBI and CNN about the alleged hijackers cannot have derived from the events of 9/11, with which the survivors in Saudi Arabia would appear to have been uninvolved. Once again this leaves the strong possibility that the details were taken from existing files, rather than from empirical observations on September 11.


And some of the hijackers, like Lee Harvey Oswald, may have been in CIA files for a special reason: because the CIA had an operational interest in them.

Internal CIA Evidence of Operational Interest in Oswald and the Hijackers

I have speculated that Oswald, like the al-Qaeda trainer Ali Mohamed, might have been a double agent reporting to the FBI about the terrorist group (Alpha 66) with which some law enforcement officers associated him.

I would like now to discuss more unequivocal evidence, from internal CIA records, about an operational

CIA interest in first Oswald and later two of the alleged al-Qaeda hijackers, Nawaz al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar. In 2001 as in 1963 the CIA inexplicably withheld information about the subjects from the FBI, which ought categorically to have received it. The anomalies are extreme.

This is now easy to show in the case of Oswald. On October 10, 1963, six

weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, CIA Headquarters sent out two messages about Oswald, a teletype to the FBI, State, and Navy, and a cable to the chief of the CIA’s Mexico City station. Both messages contained false and mutually contradictory statements, and also withheld known facts of great potential importance.

10 The teletype to the FBI withheld the obviously significant information that Oswald had reportedly met in Mexico City with a Soviet Vice-Consul, Valeriy Kostikov, who was believed by CIA officers to be an officer of the KGB.11

One CIA officer, Jane Roman, helped draft both messages. In 1995 she was confronted by two interviewers with irrefutable evidence that she had signed off on erroneous information about Oswald in the CIA cable to Mexico City. After much questioning, she finally admitted, "I’m signing off on something I know isn’t true." One of the interviewers, John Newman, then asked her, "‘Is this indicative of some sort of operational interest in Oswald’s file?’ ‘Yes,’ Roman replied. ‘To me it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need-to-know basis.’" She later repeated, "I would think there was definitely some operational reason to withhold it [the information at CIA headquarters on Oswald], if it was not sheer administrative error, when you see all the people who signed off on it."


Other CIA officers withheld important information from the FBI in January 2000, with respect to Khalid al-Mihdar, who would later be identified as one of the al-Qaeda hijackers on September 11, 2001. The NSA overheard on a Yemeni telephone about a meeting in Malaysia which al-Mihdar would attend, along with Tewfiq bin Attash, the mastermind of the fatal attack on the USS Cole.

13 It notified the CIA but not the FBI. In consequence

[Khalid al-Mihdar’s] Saudi passport – which contained a visa for travel to the United States – was photocopied [in Qatar] and forwarded to CIA headquarters. The information was not shared with FBI headquarters until August 2001. An FBI agent detailed to the Bin Ladin unit at the CIA attempted to share this information with colleagues at FBI Headquarters. A CIA desk officer instructed him not to send the cable with this information. Several hours later, this same desk officer drafted a cable distributed solely within CIA alleging that the visa documents had been shared with the FBI.


Lawrence Wright, reviewing this and other significant anomalies, reported in

The Looming Tower the belief among FBI agents following bin Laden "that the agency was protecting Mihdar and [his companion, the alleged 9/11 hijacker Nawaz al-] Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them," or alternatively that "the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence" using al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.15 Wright himself speculated in a companion essay he wrote for The New Yorker that "The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it."16


The Consequences of the CIA’s Withholding of Evidence

As just noted, the CIA, in its teletype to the FBI of October 10, 1963, withheld the information that Oswald had reportedly met with a KGB officer, Valeriy Kostikov. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that this failure to inform the FBI was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.

17 In other words, the withholding enabled Oswald to play whatever role he played on that fateful day, even if it was only to become a designated patsy.

FBI officials are even more bitter about the consequences of the withholding of information about al-Mihdar:

They didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business – that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI….They purposely hid from the FBI, purposely refused to tell the bureau that they were following a man in Malaysia who had a visa to come to America….And that’s why September 11 happened. That is why it happened….They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands.


But the CIA withheld information from the FBI about bin Attash (already the subject of a criminal investigation) as well, even when asked by an FBI agent, Ali Soufan, about bin Attash and the Malaysia meeting. According to Wright,

The agency did not respond to his clearly stated request. The fact that the CIA withheld information about the mastermind of the

Cole bombing and the meeting in Malaysia, when directly asked by the FBI, amounted to obstruction of justice in the death of the seventeen American sailors."19

In late August 2001, only days before 9/11, FBI agent Steve Bongardt, complaining about the CIA’s withholding of information about al-Mihdar, correctly predicted in an angry email to the CIA’s bin Laden unit that "someday someone will die."



The CIA’s Dishonest Efforts to Cover-Up

From the moment Congress, in the 1970s, began to evince an interest in the Kennedy assassination, former CIA officer David Phillips became a vigorous defender of the CIA’s performance. With respect to false information about Oswald in CIA cables both to and from Mexico City (where Phillips was in charge of Cuban affairs for the CIA station), Phillips’s first response was to dismiss Oswald as "a blip" of no interest.


A similar defense of the CIA’s failure to act on al-Mihdar was offered to the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 by the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black: "I think that month we watchlisted about 150 people."

22 The same defense was offered by Dale Watson, the FBI’s former counterterrorism chief:

There were a lot of red flags prior to 9/11….So it’s a mass of information and it’s a sea of threats, and it’s like working against a maze. If you know where the end point of a maze is, it’s certainly easier to work your way back to the starting point than trying to go through the maze and sort out all the red flags.


The problem with this excuse is that both Oswald and al-Mihdar were singled out for special CIA attention, not left floating in a sea of red flags. The cable to Mexico City which Jane Roman signed off on was not handled routinely, it was sent for signature to the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, Thomas Karamessines. And in the case of al-Mihdar in Malaysia, back in 2000

CIA leaders were so convinced about the potential significance of the al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, they not only set up surveillance of it, but provided regular updates to the FBI director [Louis Freeh], the head of the CIA [George Tenet], and the national security advisor [Samuel Berger].


That Freeh and Berger were being notified at the top about the Malaysia meeting (at the same time that the regular FBI bureaucracy was being cut out) is confirmed in accounts by Terry McDermott and Philip Shenon.


CIA officials testified falsely to congressional committees with respect to both Oswald and al-Mihdar. James Angleton was asked by the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations about a memoir written by the CIA’s station chief in Mexico City, Win Scott, and later personally retrieved for the Agency after Scott’s death by Angleton himself. Angleton testified that Scott’s "manuscript was fictional and did not include a chapter on Oswald." In fact, according to Jefferson Morley, "The only surviving manuscript is clearly nonfictional and does have a chapter on Oswald."


Both George Tenet and Cofer Black testified before the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI

had been granted access to the information linking al-Mihdar and Tewfiq bin Attash (alias Khallad), the mastermind of the Cole bombing. The 9/11 Commission, after a lengthy review of the matter, concluded "this was not the case."27


The CIA, Oswald, and Al-Mihdar: Suppression of Vital Records

That the CIA regards its relationship to the suspects Oswald and al-Mihdar as sensitive is further illustrated by its suppression of vital evidence with respect to both. Although in the 1990s all government agencies were required by law to submit their Oswald-related documents to the Assassination Records Review Board, the CIA has been vigorously resisting pressure to do this in the case of former CIA officer George Joannides. In 1963 Joannides was the case officer for AMSPELL, the CIA’s operation in support of the Cuban exile group DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil). In August 1963 the DRE was in contact with Oswald and participated with him in a radio broadcast which was later distributed with CIA help throughout Latin America.


According to Jefferson Morley, "four decades after the fact, the most important AMSPELL records are missing from CIA archives – perhaps intentionally." Monthly reports on DRE activities were filed by CIA case officers Ross Crozier and William Kent, and these records were declassified by the ARRB for the periods September 1960-November 1962 and after May 1964.

But the board was unable to locate any monthly AMSPELL reports from December 1962 to April 1964. There was a seventeen-month gap in the AMSPELL records, which coincided exactly with the period in which George Joannides handled the group.


With respect to 9/11, all that is known about suppression so far has to do with the public record. Here it is striking that the Report of the Joint Inquiry by Congress into 9/11 has one glaring redaction of twenty-eight pages, dealing with "sources of foreign support for some of the September 11

th hijackers while they were in the United States." Press reports have specified that this refers to Saudi money which reached al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi in 2000 while they were in San Diego. According to committee cochair Senator Bob Graham,

The draft contained a twenty-eight page passage that detailed evidence that Saudis in the United States – Saudi government "spies," Graham called them – had provided financial and logistical support to [al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi] while they lived in Southern California.


Similarly the 9/11 Commission failed to deal with the information on an FBI "hijacker timeline" that al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi were met at the airport on their first arrival in the United States by Omar al-Bayoumi, the transmitter of the Saudi funds, whom Graham claimed was obviously "a low-ranking Saudi intelligence agent."

31 The FBI findings were leaked in an early story in Newsweek:

At the airport, they were swept up by a gregarious fellow Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who had been living in the United States for several years. Al-Bayoumi drove the two men to San Diego, threw a welcoming party and arranged for the visitors to get an apartment next to his. He guaranteed the lease, and plunked down $1,550 in cash to cover the first two months' rent.


One month later, "In January 2003, Graham and the other members of the committee were …the focus of a criminal investigation by the FBI into whether someone on the panel had leaked classified information."


The 9/11 Commission avoided this sensitive area. It cited the FBI Chronology a total of 52 times in its footnotes, for example at 493n55, concerning al-Mihdar’s travel from Yemen to the Malaysian meeting. But it suppressed the FBI’s report that al-Bayoumi met al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi on their arrival; and it substituted what Shenon calls an "improbable tale" supplied by al-Bayoumi himself: namely, that he had run into the two men two weeks later by accident "at a halal food restaurant" near Los Angeles.


It is clear that two members of the 9/11 Commission staff who redacted this part of the report – Dietrich Snell and Philip Zelikow – were concerned to tone down what junior staffers considered to be "explosive material" on the Saudis.

35 Shenon tells how this section of the 9/11 report was rewritten by Snell and Zelikow, until the text "removed all of the most serious allegations against the Saudis."36

But Snell and Zelikow may have been protecting the CIA as well as the Saudis. We have already noted how Lawrence Wright, looking at the extraordinary CIA record on withholding information about al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi, concluded, "It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence."




It is clear, as everyone who has studied these matters closely and impartially concurs, that there have been cover-ups of the CIA’s relationships to first Oswald and later al-Mihdar – cover-ups which in both cases have not yet been adequately resolved.

A reasonable conclusion from the available evidence is that the cover-ups were in order to conceal prior CIA operational interest in the designated subjects, just as in the case of Ali Mohamed in the early 1990s. It could of course be a coincidence that people of operational interest to the CIA became designated subjects in the deep events of JFK and 9/11. Another, more disturbing possibility is that those responsible for these events knew of the CIA’s operational interest, and exploited it in such a way as to ensure that the government would be embarrassed into covering up what really happened on those days.

A lot of books about 9/11, including my own, have focused on the roles played by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on that day. But it is clear that 9/11 involved a USG connection to at least one figure (Ali Mohamed) so sensitive that it had been covered up from the time of the Nosair murder in 1990 and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It is probable that Oswald’s covert USG connections also dated back to the time of his strange release from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959, enabling him to travel to the Soviet Union.


In short there is a substratum of covert operations underlying both events that antedates the presidencies in which they occurred. Thus one should not expect the cover-up of 9/11 in the G.W. Bush administration to dissipate simply because the Democrats take over the White House, just as the Johnson administration’s cover-up of the Kennedy assassination did not dissipate with the election of Richard Nixon.


This is said not out of despair, but out of belief in the ultimate resilience and good sense of the American people. The analysis in this book is that America’s involvement in two disastrous wars – first Vietnam and later Iraq – was not an outcome of the people’s will, but rather in large part because of deep events that were used to manipulate that will. Thus this analysis is not an attack on America, but on that manipulative mindset that has twice succeeded in maneuvering America into war.

This dominant mindset is not restricted to intelligence agencies, though it is largely rooted there. Over time it has spread into other parts of government, and has also corrupted large sections of the media and even universities. That the mindset is widespread does not however make it either omnipotent or invincible.

It is important to identify the dominant mindset clearly, if we are ever going to displace it. It is important also to recognize that the dark topics discussed in this book are not representative of America as a whole. In the half century since the CIA’s first adventures in Burma and Laos, America has continued to be, as in the two centuries before it, a source of life-enhancing innovations, such as the computer and the internet.

As Amy Chua has written in her book

Day of Empire,

If America can rediscover the path that has been the secret to its success since its founding and avoid the temptations of empire building, it could remain the world’s hyperpower in the decades to come – not a hyperpower of coercion and military force, but a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism, and moral force.


I have tried to suggest in this book that the key to this rediscovery is the

identification and displacement of the manipulative forces that have maneuvered America, almost unsuspectingly, into two unnecessary and disastrous wars.

If there is any merit to my analysis, then, to isolate those forces, we must press for the truth about both the Kennedy assassination and 9/11.



Transcript of Dallas Police Channel Two, 12:44 PM; cf. Channel One 12:45 PM,; Warren Report 5, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 397, 23 Warren Commission Hearings 916.


Clarke, Against All Enemies, 13-14. The list of 19 names, accepted without question by the 9/11 Commission Report, was given by the FBI to the press on September 14, 2001 (Daily Telegraph, September 15, 2001,




E.g. Dallas FBI Report from John Fain, May 12, 1960, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 704, NARA #157-10006-10213 ("Height: 5’10" Weight: 165 lbs." [inaccurate description supplied by Marguerite Oswald]); CIA HQ Cable DIR 74830 to Mexico City, 10 Oct 1963, NARA #104-10015-10048, reproduced in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), 512 ("five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty five pounds").


Fingerprint card dated "11-25-63," 17 Warren Commission Hearings 308.


Warren Report 5, 144; Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact (Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2006), 10-13, 78n. After seeing Oswald twice on television, Brennan picked out Oswald in a second lineup (Warren Report, 143).


Daily Telegraph, September 23, 2001,


Guardian, September 21 2001, :" Abdulaziz

Al-Omari has also come forward to say he was not on the flight from Boston that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre. An electrical engineer who works in Saudi Arabia, Mr Al-Omari said he was a student in Denver during the mid-1990s, and that his passport and other papers were stolen in a burglary in the US five years ago. … `The name is my name and the birth date is the same as mine,’ he told Asharq al-Aswat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. `But I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Centre in New York.’"


Daily Telegraph, September 23, 2001,


On October 4, 2001, the FBI issued a press release showing what appeared to be photos from surveillance videotape of two hijackers, Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz Al-Omari, entering Portland Jetport on the morning of September 11, 2001 (FBI Press Release, October 4, 2001, ). If valid, these would constitute evidence from the event itself. However the photos are anomalous, in that they show two time superimposed stamps, one showing 5:45, the other showing 5:53. The photos are not cited as evidence in the 9/11 Commission Report. On July 22, 2004, the date of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, CNN aired what they said was surveillance videotape of two hijackers, Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdar. entering "at one of the security screening points at Dulles International" (CNN, ). The authenticity of the videotape has been challenged, however, because it lacks the time and date and location identification normally burned into a surveillance video image (Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall,

9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions [New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005], 117-19).


I have argued that the conflicting messages were part of a so-called "marked card" or "barium meal" test to determine if and where leaks of sensitive information were occurring. This was a familiar technique, and was the responsibility of the CI/SIG or Counterintelligence Special Intelligence Group which drafted the two cables. See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files,1994-1999 (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007), 17-18, 92; also Peter Dale Scott, "Oswald and the Hunt for Popov's Mole," The Fourth Decade, III, 3 (March 1996), 3;


Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.


Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 196-98. See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.




9/11 Commission Report, 502n44.


Wright, The Looming Tower, 312, 313.








Wright, The Looming Tower, 329. In his New Yorker story (p. 70), Wright wrote that "By withholding the picture of Khallad [bin Attash]…the C.I.A. may in effect have allowed the September 11th plot to proceed."


9/11 Commission Report, 271; Wright, The Looming Tower, 353-54.


David Atlee Phillips, Nightwatch, 139; quoted in Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 184. Morley observes that in the 1970s Phillips offered a total of "four not entirely consistent versions of the story of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City."


J. Cofer Black testimony before 9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry, 107th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 24, 2003.


Dale Watson testimony before Joint Inquiry, 107th Cong., 2nd Sess., September 26, 2002.


Amy B. Zegart, Flying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007), 117.


Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why TheyDid It (New York: HarperCollins, 20050, 294n45; Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2008), 141.


Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 7, 294.


9/11 Commission Report, 267.


Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 81-86; Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 170-77.


Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 177.


Shenon, The Commission, 50-51.


Larisa Alexandrovna, "FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report," RawStory, February 28, 2008, (met at the airport); Shenon, The Commission, 52 (al-Bayoumi). Al-Bayoumi "apparently did work for Dallah Avco, an aviation-services company with extensive contracts with the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, headed by Prince Sultan, the father of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar" ("The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002,


"The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002. The FBI "hijacker timeline" was released by the FBI on February 4, 2008. See Larisa Alexandrovna, "FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report,, February 28, 2008,


Shenon, The Commission, 54.


9/11 Commission Report, 217; Shenon, The Commission, 52-53.


Shenon, The Commission, 398.


Shenon, The Commission, 398.


Wright, The Looming Tower, 313. Looking at the same evidence, Christopher Ketcham has raised an alternative possibility, that "the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent operation on U.S. soil…. When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA's domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence

was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn't reject it out of hand" (Christopher Ketcham, "Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies: What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?" CounterPunch, February 7, 2007, ).


Oswald requested a dependency discharge from the Marines in August 1959, "on the ground that his mother needed his support" (Warren Report, 688). Accordingly Marine Lt. A.G. Ayers, Jr. signed a document for Oswald’s release to inactive duty on September 11, 1959 (19 WH 679, cf. 17 WH 762) "by reason of hardship (19 WH 678). However Lt. Ayers should have known that Oswald had no intention of staying in Texas to support his mother; he had already, on September 4, 1959, signed an affidavit in support of Oswald’s passport application "to attend the College of A. Schweitzer, Chur, Switzerland and the Univ of Turku, Turku, Finland" (22 WH 77-79). (It is a sign of some covert intrigue that the language of instruction at the University of Turku was Finnish, a language Oswald did not know.)


A significant symptom of this enduring substratum has been the Bush Administration’s protection of Samuel Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor. Berger pleaded guilty in April 2005 to having stolen 9/11 documents from the National Archives (Shenon, The Commission, 414). A condition of his plea bargain was to submit to a Justice Department polygraph test, to determine what documents had been stolen. Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a long-time critic of CIA operations in Afghanistan, revealed to the House in February 2008 that he had written to the Bush Justice Department, demanding that it administer the polygraph test, and that the Justice Department had rejected his demand (Congressional Record, February 26, 2008, House, pp. H1065-H1072). We have already seen that Berger when in office was receiving regular reports from the CIA about the presence of al-Mihdar and al-Hamzi at the Kuala Lumpur meeting (Zegart, Flying Blind, 117). It is possible that these were the reports he was stealing from the Archives, and that the Justice Department refusal to administer the polygraph test is part of a cover-up to protect the CIA’s relationship to the two Saudis.




Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of the forthcoming The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, due in August 2008. This previously unpublished essay is the concluding section of the new book, which can be ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press by clicking here at His website is



*&* addendum:


The Deep State and 9/11

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott Global Research, June 11, 2008




Still to be explained is the suppressed anomalous fact that al-Qaeda’s top trainer on airplane hijackings, Ali Mohamed, was simultaneously a double-agent reporting to the FBI, and almost certainly still maintained a connection to the CIA which had used him as an agent and helped bring him to this country in the 1980s.8 It is not disputed that Ali Mohamed organized the Embassy bombing in Kenya; and that he did so after the RCMP, who had detained him in Vancouver in the presence of another known terrorist, released Mohamed on instructions from the FBI.9


Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish-American who was formerly an FBI translator, has publicly linked both al-Qaeda and American officials to the Turkish heroin trafficking that underlies the Turkish deep state. Although she has been prevented from speaking directly by an extraordinary court order,10 her allegations have been summarized by Daniel Ellsberg:




In 2003 Italian journalist Maurizio Blondet published a book entitled 11 settembre: colpo di stato (September 11th: A Coup d’Etat, [Milan, Effedieffe, 2002]).13 Over the years the view of 9/11 as a "coup d’état" has been endorsed by a number of observers, including Gore Vidal.14 In May 2008 a Google search for "coup d’état + 9/11" yielded 297,000 hits. One of the most recent hits, from Ed Encho, has suggested that the heart of the coup may have been the introduction on 9/11, without debate or even notice, of so-called "Continuity of Government" (COG) orders – secret orders still unknown but with constitutional implications.15 Unquestionably, as the 9/11 Commission Report states, COG, the fruit of two decades of secret Cheney-Rumsfeld collaboration, was implemented on 9/11.16 As we shall see, it is not clear just what this implied, either then or today. But journalists have claimed that earlier versions of COG plans involved suspension of the constitution.17







By late June, [U.S. Secretary of State Dean] Acheson and Truman were the only high officials still balking at a defense of the ROC [the "Republic of China," the KMT Chinese Nationalist remnant on Taiwan]….Sir John Pratt, an Englishman with four decades of experience in the China consular service and the Far Eastern Office, wrote the following in 1951: "The Peking Government planned to liberate Formosa on July 15 and, in the middle of June, news reached the State Department that the Syngman Rhee government in South Korea was disintegrating. The politicians on both sides of the thirty-eighth parallel were preparing a plan to throw Syngman Rhee out of office and set up a unified government for all Korea."….Thus the only way out, for Chiang [Kai-shek, the KMT leader], was for Rhee to attack the North, which ultimately made Acheson yield and defend Nationalist China [on Taiwan].20

Meanwhile, in South Korea,

an Australian embassy representative sent in daily reports in late June, saying that "patrols were going in from the South to the North, endeavouring to attract the North back in pursuit. Plimsoll warned that this could lead to war and it was clear that there was some degree of American involvement as well." [According to former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam,] "The evidence was sufficiently strong for the Australian Prime Minister to authorize a cable to Washington urging that no encouragement be given to the South Korean government."21


Anyone who has read this text closely to this point, and does not believe that Willoughby, Chiang, [Chiang’s emissary to Seoul, General] Wu Tieh Cheng, Yi P?m-s?k, [Syngman] Rhee, Kim S?k-won, Tiger Kim, and their ilk were capable of a conspiracy to provoke a war, cannot be convinced by any evidence.

He adds that anti-conspiratorialist Americans "are prey to what might be called the fallacy of insufficient cynicism" -- a charge that may be revived, if it can ever be shown that 9/11 also was "a conspiracy to provoke a war."23

9/11, Tonkin Gulf, and the JFK Assassination




We now know from a recently declassified in-house NSA history that on August 4, 1964, NSA possessed 122 pieces of SIGINT (signals intelligence) which taken together indicated clearly that there was no second North Vietnamese attack on August 4: "Hanoi’s navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August." But of these 122 pieces, the White House was supplied with only fifteen – "only SIGINT that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers."26



Of more than passing interest is the fact that the CIA in the 1960s still had senior officers who believed that sooner or later a showdown with the Chinese Communists was inevitable, and had renewed General Chennault’s old proposal for a large-scale landing by Chiang on the Chinese mainland.28 This seems to explain a series of manipulative escalatory moves in Laos, shortly before the Tonkin Gulf incidents, with a similar momentum towards expanding the U.S. war beyond South Vietnam. In 1963-64 one notes again, as in 1950, the intriguing of local KMT elements, in this case forces directly involved in the opium traffic.29


As I describe in the forthcoming expanded reissue of my book The War Conspiracy, this culpable withholding of crucial evidence from the FBI by the CIA closely parallels the CIA’s withholding from the FBI of important information about Lee Harvey Oswald in October 1963. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that this withholding was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.32 Without these withholdings, in other words,










Jack Goldsmith, a former Assistant Attorney General in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, has reported that, inside the White House, Cheney’s legal advisor David Addington frequently argued that "the Constitution empowers the President to exercise prerogative powers to do what is necessary in an emergency to save the country."39 Goldsmith concluded that "The presidency in the age of terrorism – the Terror Presidency – suffers from many of the vices of [Nixon’s] Imperial Presidency."40






This means that the current threat to constitutional rights does not derive from the deep state alone. As I have written elsewhere, the problem is a global dominance mindset that prevails not only inside the Washington Beltway but also in the mainstream media and even in the universities, one which has come to accept recent inroads on constitutional liberties, and stigmatizes, or at least responds with silence to, those who are alarmed by them.45 Just as acceptance of bureaucratic groupthink is a necessary condition for advancement within the state, so acceptance of this mindset’s notions of decorum has increasingly become a condition for participation in mainstream public life.




According to a survey of Lexis Nexis, the New York Times did not report Attorney General Gonzalez’ newsworthy claim that "There is no expressed grant of habeas corpus in the Constitution." (The Washington Post reported it, without comment, in a story of 197 words.)50 And on the question of torture even a liberal Harvard University professor, Michael Ignatieff, has argued in a University Press book from an even-handed starting point – "A democracy is committed to both the security of the majority and the rights of the individual" -- to an alarming defense of "coercive questioning."51


Deep Events as Intrigues within the Global Dominance Consensus


Many critics of American foreign policy on the left tend to stress its substantial coherence over time, from the War-Peace Studies for post-war planning of the Council on Foreign Relations in the 1940s, to Defense Secretary Charles Wilson’s plans in the 1950s for a "permanent war economy," to Clinton’s declaration to the United Nations in 1993 that the U.S. will act "multilaterally when possible, but unilaterally when necessary."52



Many have followed Michael Klare in defining the conflict as one, even within the Council on Foreign Relations, between "traders" and warrior "Prussians."55 Since the rise to eminence of the so-called "Vulcans" – notably Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz, backed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – the struggle has frequently been described as a struggle between the multilateralists of the status quo and the unilateralists seeking indisputable American hegemony.56














9/11, the Threat to Constitutional Rights, and Congress
















Furthermore, the 110th Congress took no action to ensure that all government agencies will collaborate with the National Archives, in fulfillment of the 9/11 Commission’s commitment to release its supporting records to the public in 2009.78 A law to ensure this is badly needed.

The FBI has been declassifying documents cooperatively with respect to this commitment, and recently the CIA has begun to cooperate as well.79 But some federal agencies, notably the FAA and Pentagon, are not collaborating with the 9/11 Commission’s commitment at all. It may take a law to get them to do so. Both the FAA and the Pentagon declined to release important records to the 9/11 Commission, despite its statutory powers, until required to do so by judicial subpoena.80 But the law which created the 9/11 Commission in 2002 made no legal determination for the future of its records.81



9/11, the Public, and Internet Politics




b) unequivocally outlaw torture;











3 Gareth Jenkins, "Susurluk and the Legacy of Turkey’s Dirty War," Terrorism Monitor, May 1, 2008,

4 Nicholas Birch, Irish Times, November 26, 2005,
Former Turkish president and prime minister Suleyman Demirel later commented on this incident that "It is fundamental principle that there is one state. In our country there are two….There is one deep state and one other state ….The state that should be real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one." (Jon Gorvett, "Turkey’s `Deep State’ Surfaces in Former President’s Words, Deeds in Kurdish Town," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2006, ).







11 Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, 8/26/06,




14 Interview with Alex Jones, November 2, 2006,








22 Cumings, Origins, II, 527.

23 Cumings, Origins, II, 600, 601. Yi P?m-s?k was a pro-Chiang advocate in Seoul of attacking North Korea. Kim S?k-won was a Korean commander who had previously attacked North Korea. Tiger Kim was a Korean veteran of the Japanese army close to Rhee, and a war criminal.






29 Scott, War Conspiracy (2008), 88, 93-103.











40 Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency, 183


42 Schwarz and Huq, Unchecked and Unbalanced, 174.



45 Scott, War Conspiracy, 10, 383, 395.














59 Prouty, The Secret Team (1997), Chapter II.


61 Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 11.

62 Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996),





67 See "The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002.



Cf. President’s Radio Address, December 15, 2005, :



72 White House Notice of September 20, 2007,

73 Jerome Corsi, "Bush makes power grab," WorldNetDaily, May 23, 2007, \


75 Washington Post, May 10, 2007.





FBI Decisions:


Declassified, but needs referral elsewhere


Sanitized and needs referral elsewhere

Withheld in full



The CIA subsequently resolved to review relevant records.

80 John Farmer, " ‘United 93’: The Real Picture," Washington Post, April 30, 2006. Cf. Kean and Hamilton, Without Precedent, 87: "The staff front office suggested that the NORAD situation bordered on willful concealment."


82 Amerrican Freedom Agenda,; American Freedom Campaign,


Peter Dale Scott,
a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He is the author of the forthcoming book (reissued and much enlarged) The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, due in August 2008. It can be pre-ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press at Scott’s website is

: 4 documents (15 pages)

: 170 documents (1,067 pages)

: 100 documents (400 pages)

: 31 documents (132 pages)

: 98 documents (241 pages)






Cistercian's picture

 Junk for not just posting a link.

  Why take up so much space on the ZH servers?

 Not cool...and I believe WB7 told you this yesterday.

Uncle Remus's picture

CONFIDENCE does not power cars or melt steel.

But lack of trust goes a long way towards preventing a society from addressing the problems it faces. Pavlovian saliva slinging because someone injected 9/11 into a broader discussion of the lack of trust our society has in it's government (and a host of other institutions as well) isn't helping either.

Lack of trust is palpable. The inability to trust, rampant disinformation and outright theft of public monies are  themselves deterrents to our society coming to terms with our finite energy situation, over-population and our omni-directional fuckedness.

You can't expect a society that was intentionally educated to not develop critical thought and bombarded 24x7x365 with malicious and contradictory half-truths to actually know a fact when they see one much less wrap their minds around it and process it at least semi-objectively.

Seems to me that hard-earned, well-placed trust would be the cornerstone of fixing the situation.


DosZap's picture

As this thing unravels, we will see more and more of this, the fuse is lit, and if the Congress cannot get it fixed properly, then they best resign, while their ahead...............

GoingLoonie's picture

Good job GW!  Next time put in a plug for my guillotine factory.  The French did it correctly.

William F. Dulle's picture

Restoring trust in this system is like restoring trust in a shell game after the marks have figured out the operator is palming the pea, and that the game, if honest, would go bust after a couple of rounds.

You'd either need new marks (read globalization), or exceptionally stupid marks (read congress).

Anal Picnic's picture

There are some serious whack jobs on this site. You'd think the entire managerial class of the USA was engaged in a giant conspiracy to rip off their fellow citizens. It's not a conspiracy fellow munchers. It's called capitalism. 

Clapham Junction's picture

Curious post from someone whose first name is "Anal."

Can't you be named after a train station, or something else more normal?

What were your parents thinking?!

GoingLoonie's picture

I would suggest that with the change in political power imposed by rigged elections in Florida 10 years ago, the word was put out to all levels of government and big business that no one would be held accountable.  Some examples were quickly presented through the press, and voila!  The word is, "anything goes."  Ten years later here we are.  Only us, small people and small business are held accountable.

ebworthen's picture

The 9/11 and Anthrax stuff strays into tin-foil hat territory, and damages the rest of your key point about Trust.

anonnn's picture

Here's the nut:

 The art of monetary policy consists in keeping the relationship between the value of money and the value of the other commodities as steady as possible.

To test the usefullness, apply this definition to a specific problem, say,

Stealing and diluting the savings of wage-earners.

The failure to control the value of money needs to be remedied. Thus trace the source of this failure fix it. The problem disappears.

Note; The source of the problem is always the act, or failure to act, of real persons. How the persons are handled may be direct [correction, removal, punishment, etc] or indirect [disable the mechanisms by which the antisocial acts are committed, such as nontransparency, pseudo-regulation and no-regulation, pseudo-accounting, computer-overwhelm of exchange operations, 2Big2Fail and 2Big2Prosecute myths, etc.].





LeBalance's picture

"If we don't prosecute the criminals, our economy will NEVER recover"

GW is buying into ownership of the Matrix.

>There is no spoon.<

fallst's picture

The bullies will keep taking your lunch money until you stand up to them and then they crawl back into their expensive holes.

Happened before, will happen again.

Bernard Marx's picture

If in fact it is a decline in trust rather than a loss of confidence that is partly responsible for the economic malaise affecting our economies then things will be getting much worse.  The government and business have diagnosed the problem as one of confidence and will stop at nothing to rebuild it.  However, in doing so they lie and obfuscate.  Actions that lead to a further decline in trust.  So trust declines even more which leads to bigger lies.  Talk about the mother of all death spirals.

Shell Game's picture

Another great post, GW. I have to agree with WB7 on not lumping 9/11 in with this aspect of reform. 

"Trust in Government is Necessary for a Stable Economy"

I'd add to that by saying, a trustworthy government is a tightly controlled government with de-centralized power - both financial and beurocratic.  The exact opposite of this current, highly controlling government..

infotechsailor's picture

The incoming republicans will maintain their neocon (hijacked republican party) agenda so long as the right wing of the electorate believes that arabs took out three buildings with 2 planes.

the ignorance of the public (with help from the mainstream media, sure) is what allows the expansion of the police state, the ridiculous homeland security expenditures, and the erosion of 4th amendment and other civil liberties.

I would say the two events (9/11 lie, and MBS/zombie bank meltdown lie) go hand in hand with restoring sanity to the federal govt, and America as a whole.

In any case, I see niether investigations (much less prosecutions) having much likelihood of actually occuring, so ill continue my plans for emigration to hong kong.

americanspirit's picture

Unfortunately we don't prosecute the really big criminals - just the small fry like Bernie Madoff. As an example, the cigarette industry kills 400,000 people a year just in the US, and millions more worldwide. You can debate the actual numbers but it is mass murder any way you look at it. Have there ever been criminal prosecutions of this industry, under RICO or otherwise? Of course not, and there never will be. Ditto with other manufacturers and institutions who maim and kill, who poison the earth, air and water, and who cheat and steal from millions of hog-tied victims. The system is rigged, totally, and I don't see it changing no matter how many Americans choose to exercise their second amendment rights - which will be way too late to have any effect anyway, if it ever happens.

Atomizer's picture

This event is all playbook & by design. Central Bankers are protecting their children banking subsidiaries. Think about a romper room episode of 'Mirror, mirror on the wall'.

The multi nationalist are going to claim they can produce candy. Have a watch.

Meanwhile back in the US, the candy has run out.

Social Insecurity


Temporalist's picture

A simple analogy, when playing a game with blatant and obvious cheaters does one continue to play the game?  Even children know better than to play with cheaters.

"Mr Greenspan said the major lesson from the financial crisis is that US banks need more capital to survive shocks.

Banks operated with less capital because of an assumption they would be rescued by the government, he said. Lehman Brothers would not have failed with adequate capital, he said.

“Rampant fraud” was also an issue, Mr Greenspan said.

“Fraud creates very considerable instability in competitive markets,” he said. “If you cannot trust your counterparties, it would not work.” Bloomberg

TDoS's picture

Great article, and an extremely interesting concept.  Our society is so unbelievably corrupt, so thoroughly criminal to it's very core, that there isn't enough honesty left for the crooks to even mark.

All we have now are crooks scamming other crooks.  The center is eaten away, and the whole shit taco is going to collapse on itself very soon.

Bob's picture

The cynic in me completely agrees with your assessment.  But the surviving "romantic" at the core of that cynicism longs to see it proven wrong.

There is no question about this being the watershed moment of the matter, however.  What becomes of the banksters will be the indelibly definitive answer. 

Hulk's picture

As a federal whistleblower, I can tell you firsthand that the level of fraud and corruption in the system is stunning... The system investigating itself will never work. We need to get the Bill Blacks and Harry Markos empowered and indemnified. No way that the PTB will ever allow this to happen, therefore collapse and reset...

High Plains Drifter's picture

I saw one of these in a gun shop back in 2005. He wanted 6000 for it. Now they are about 8500. Damn I knew I should have put that on my plastic. Ha ha ha. Oh well shows you were my head is at on this Sunday morning.

Sweet. real sweet.

surfsup's picture



Ex Post Facto Law:



Very important point here in why the Originators of the Constitution wrote this section into the document which serves as a FIRE WALL for the tendencies of greed which appear to accompany the ascent to power of most any person.   Instead of trying to ignore or forcefully do away with these tendencies, the founders realized that more often than not, such inclinations will arise within the average personality once they are elected -- and thus it was about creating a BARRIER to such wrong action -- wrong action in relation to the Common Good...

At the time even allegedly "representational" parliamentary systems were basically bicameral constructs of synarchistic design -- meaning there were controllable by a concealed and deceptive "syncing" of both sides through a minority within which on the surface appeared as divergent leftocrats and rightocrats. Since the construct was manipulated via Nobility wishing to merely perpetuate control, many unlawful actions which were taken against a people which clearly violated laws of the land were taken up in these bodies and just dealt with by changing the law "ex post facto."    ex: A man comes along and steals Jane's ice cream cone, which is against the law.  The police man sees this and arrests the thief.  Thief calls his attorney who then tries to change the law allowing theft of ice cream cones under certain conditions.  Thief walks free and is now duly enabled to continue stealing ice cream cones..."

The founders could only work with what they were given and this was based upon the "average consciousness" of individuals at the time.  A bicameral system could in fact be continued in the Young America but would be ruled over by a Constitutional Set of Principles which would supersede in such cases of abuse and such games...

As the orchestrated affairs of the current times play out, indeed the same attempt might be going on:  

The legislation is already being drafted under the interstate commerce clause to ratify MERS and everything it did retroactively.


As has been the case, this attempt will be wrapped deep within some bill which has nothing on the surface which alerts people to such changes in CONTRACT LAW -- such being explicitly banned by the United States Constitution.   The average person is best to "hone up" on the US Constitution to keep things simple and clearly targeted.  As a FIRE WALL it is an EXCELLENT Design and will serve the Populist Movement in many ways:

1.   It keeps things non reactionary or fringe group like.  The media cannot paint someone as "outside the system" or as "militant revolutionaries" when they hold close and are specifically versed in the US Constitution.  In fact to hold GROUND on this is to actually be CLOSER to the NATION than any argument of a departure from the principles there in.  The founders gave us a great tool -- its all already in writing and no matter how far out the crimes and synarchies get, a working knowledge of that document will serve to Harmonize the core intentions of True Americans going forward.   

2.  There is no way in a court of law (that is not corrupt) that such arguments can be made to successfully defend many of the crimes already undertaken against the American People in the Context of Constitutional Law.  That is a huge point -- meaning -- any defense of these acts of fraud can only attempt a defense which twists something -- twists some law -- twists some procedural occurrence in order to defend the fraud.   It cannot be defended FRONT ON.   Meaning:  every effort should be made to foster transparent legal proceedings as close to a jury based format as possible.  When the average person is given the facts they will see truth, and as such the power of Right action over that of Wrong Action wins everytime -- over time perhaps -- and with great sacrifice -- but inexorably wins.  

The Founders went the extra mile America, will you?

Know the Firewall -->



Fearless Rick's picture

@ surfsup: Thanks, dude! But here's my take. Let the congress go ahead and retroactively validate MERS and try to go into courts and use the "new" law to prosecute.

First, the howls from legal scholars will be louder than anything you've ever heard before. I don't doubt that some justices - a good number of them - will recuse themselves from foreclosure or property cases involving MERS or any of the big banks.

Most, sadly, will just go along, but the appeals will tie courts in knots for at least a decade. Maybe that's their point, but when it gets to SCOTUS, if those jackals don't do the right thing, then there's no choice. It's march and surround time, complete overthrow of the government, which, in a lot of other nations, I believe already would have occurred.

Americans are pretty tolerant as a group, but piss off enough of them and there's going to be hell to pay. This government is right on the edge of that and they know it and that might be just what they want. You know, guys like Alex Jones have been saying that for years.

They've done enough damage already and the country is probably screwed for the next 20 years or more anyhow, so how much of a stretch is it for most people to jump from, "I'm really pissed" to "i'm in the street" throwing bricks at cops and dodging tear gas canisters?

Not far, I'd say. Could be the big hit of next summer.

With the constitution at the core of any argument against legal standing of MERS, I'd make sure the jack-ass sitting up front understands that he's dealing with MY constitutional rights, and that if I prevail HE or SHE will bear the consequences.

I'm so sick of authoritarians hiding behind bogus law I want to smack a few judges around just for the good feeling I'll get from it.

But, I'll refrain, and let my brain do the fighting mostly. But things aren't getting any prettier, and that cant continue.

Husk-Erzulie's picture

Nice post. "know the firewall", nice keeper catchphrase.

Paul Bogdanich's picture

Obama was paid to rob a bank and whilst he keeps "looking forward" the statute of limitiations on all the financial and other crimes expires behind him.  Thomas Furgerson had an interesting observation lately when he said:


Thomas Ferguson: 2008 had all the earmarks of a classic realigning election, as my old colleague Walter Dean Burnham describes them. In the wake of the financial collapse, it looked for all the world like voters were ready for, even demanding, major reforms. They had elected a Democratic president on a promise of "Change," with both houses of Congress solidly Democratic. That's why many people were thinking that Obama was going give us a modern New Deal. They really believed him when he promised change. Instead, Obama's failure on the economy has discredited the whole idea of the activist state. The dimensions of this failure were spectacular: He didn't move aggressively to combat unemployment, the economic stimulus was half as large as it needed to be, and he didn't deal with the mortgage crisis. So unemployment stayed way up, and many people remain in danger of losing their homes or are underwater on their mortgages, with the whole housing sector stalling out. To make matters worse, the administration lavished aid on the financial sector. The spectacle of the government aiding bankers, who turned around and paid themselves record bonuses, has just been unbearable for millions of people.

Dapper Dan's picture

Would this be a conspiracy?

Yemen?  what the hell  is in Yemen?

 Most occcur at the 10 km range

mrhonkytonk1948's picture

Excellent post!  At some point in the utopian future of my imagination, Economics will take its rightful place as a minor specialty in the field of Psychology.  The main  reason Americans were willing to consume (rather than save) over so many post WW2 years was trust that the "system" worked, things always got "better" and any problems were temporary and/or personal rather than systemic.  Like respect, once trust is lost it can take an eternity to regain.  Well done, GW.

InsanePonziClown's picture

we should bring back the good old days of defense fraud, 1,000 dollar hammers and tenk toilets, at least it was contained, now it's 200k homes for 400k

CrackSmokeRepublican's picture

 Burn the Jewish Talmud that Greenspan and Bernanke follow, and which condones lying-swindling to Gentile "Goyim" ... or better yet just the throw all Bankrupt Scamming Madoff Jews out of America.... and you'll see trust rise. --CSR


Israel Did 9/11 and Jews at Benador did the Anthrax attacks:


Get the Scammers out and you'll see trust come back for a lot of things...





Randall Cabot's picture

Don't forget the "dancing Israelis" who were set up across the river to film the planes hitting the WTC towers as it happened. They were Mossad agents and released back to Israel without charges.

Vendetta's picture

Not to mention the unending attempts to manipulate whatever trust still exists

InsanePonziClown's picture

Losing trust, let me count the ways???


When what happens generally and globally meets up with real world experiences slow deterioation takes place.

A. Who has not sat in a meeting and contractual obgligations were thrown out the window because no one asked for fullfillment, or had asked yet, even though dozens of promises were made.  Managers want margins or savings and will, as everyone else, leave it too the next guy.

B. Cell phone bills, small thing, yet in my informal survey who has not recieved a bill with an extra hundred or two with no logical explantion on the bill, or from the company when u talk to them, usually this can be resolved in your favor if you our aggresive enough, yet, u know dozens of folks don't call until it happens 3 times to them.

C. Stupidity abounds in corporations.  I moved in August, cancelled cable inet on Aug. 15th on the phone, had an agreed upon price.  My intentions were too pay complete bill first week of September.  Since July bill was now overdue got the calls, okay called back and said fine, I'd pay the agreed upon price right now on the phone........Nope, somewhere somehow, the prior agreed upon price and cancellation notice were not recorded somewhere, BS I called, and got two steps above on managers.  After 45 of total BS by them, I told them a dozen times, take price now, or you'll never get paid.  Now the difference was fifty bucks.  Take 250 now, or never see 300, and I'll feel good and use you again.  Note, I'd been a customer for ten years, always paid.  For some reason the could not grasp the total complexity of something so simple.

Will I pay them, yeah, fifty bucks here and there and never use them again.  So, now we all lose trust, me the 3 phone reps and the corporation. 


Now, I had a similar experience with my gas company on change over for the new folks.  I explained I did not want the new people to not have gas for a week, so I said let me know when it's changed over.  Rather than call back we agreed based on historical averages bill should be X.  I said, that's reasonable, let me pay that now and we agreed they'd send me a check for the difference in the mail.  Got my check last week.

Time Warner, I will never buy your stock or use u again.  Atmos Energy, I'm in love, lol.