Lest we forget the big picture

excerpts from No Such Thing as Paranoia
25 March 2004, Gary Indiana, The Villiage Voice

From Part 3

Economist Loretta Napoleoni provides an exhaustively researched account of one recent conspiracy in her book Modern Jihad:

Just as Worldcom was able to use accountancy techniques to tamper with its books, bin Laden's associates succeeded in utilizing sophisticated insider trading instruments to speculate on the stock market prior to September 11.


. . . [O]n 6 September . . . around 32 million British Airways shares changed hands in London, about three times the normal level. On 7 September, 2,184 put options on British Airways were traded on the LIFFE (London Futures and Options market), about five times the normal amount of daily trading. Across the Atlantic, on Monday, 10 September, the number of put options on American Airlines in the Chicago Board Options Exchange jumped 60 times the daily average. In the three days prior to the attack, the volume of put options in the U.S. surged 285 times the average trading level. . . . Ironically, in attacking one of the symbols of Western capitalism, bin Laden may have masterminded the biggest insider trading operation ever accomplished.

According to The Independent on Sunday of October 14, 2001, "To the embarrassment of investigators, it has also emerged that the firm used to buy many of the 'put' options—where a trader in effect bets on a share price fall—on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by 'Buzzy' Krongard, . . . the executive director of the CIA. . . . There is no suggestion that Mr Krongard had advance knowledge of the attacks."



This information isn't "secret," but indicates a more coherent motive for the September 11 attacks than the conjuration of insane Islamists who "hate our democratic freedoms," and who can therefore serve as pretexts for a "war on terror" that has so far done little to protect American citizens but has grossly enriched the corporate sponsors of the Bush administration, such as Halliburton, Bechtel, and myriad other interests whose emissaries revel round the campfire every summer at Bohemian Grove. And because it reveals what modern conspiracies are really all about, you are likely to find some garbled, discrediting version of it on page B-27 of your daily newspaper rather than above the fold on page 1.




From Part I

Our mass media, its ownership consolidated among a handful of billionaires whose interests are identical with those of corporate cronies (globalized "free trade" for the wealthy nations, peonage for the third world, Chomsky's "manufacture of consent" via a constant torrent of propaganda for the status quo), reflexively dismiss the most obvious or credible explanations for ugly phenomena as the perfervid fantasy of "conspiracy cranks"—for instance, the idea that successive "preemptive" wars might be launched against demonized enemies in order to award reconstruction contracts to corporations formerly helmed by, say, the vice president of the United States and other exalted government employees, or that the strategic purpose of one such war might be the economic colonization of former Soviet republics rich in oil and mineral resources, and to guarantee a secure pipeline for the exploitation of said resources. Instead, the altruism and democracy-spreading goodness of the American power elite are portrayed as self-evident, taking all other motives off the media table.

The necessary proof of such a conspiracy, if we choose to call it that, often turns up 25 or 50 years after the fact, when the release of classified documents churns up no public outcry or indictments. Such was the recent case with the declassified revelation that the late Connecticut senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of the current president, along with his law partner W. Averill Harriman, a former governor of New York, managed a number of concerns on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen. These included the Union Banking Corporation, seized under the Trading With the Enemy Act on October 20, 1942 (Office of Alien Property Custodian, Vesting Order No. 248), Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (Vesting Order No. 259), and the Holland-American Trading Corporation (Vesting Order No. 261).

The Union Banking Corporation financed Hitler after his electoral losses in 1932; the other Bush-managed concerns have been characterized as "a shipping line which imported German spies; an energy company that supplied the Luftwaffe with high-ethyl fuel; and a steel company that employed Jewish slave labour from the Auschwitz concentration camp." Fuller details are documented in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, by Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin; in Kevin Phillips's American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush; as well as in the colorful, conspiracist history Fleshing Out Skull & Bones, by Anthony Sutton et al., and further confirmed by John Loftus, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department's Nazi War Crimes Unit. Since only the Nazi partners in the Bush-Harriman interests were permanently deprived of their frozen stock, Prescott Bush and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, waltzed off with $1.5 million when the Union Banking Corp. was liquidated in 1951. (This was, in effect, the foundation of the Bush family fortune: once a Snopes, always a Snopes.) Briefly picked up by the Associated Press and buried deep in the pages of American newspapers, this half-century-late disclosure led to no media follow-up and left no impression on the potential electorate for the 2004 U.S. presidential contest.

Contingency theorists would declare that the activities of one Bush 50-some years ago have nothing to do with those of subsequent Bushes. Yet the story confirms a pattern of corrupt profiteering through abuse of power that runs continuously through the Bush family dynasty. They would likewise find nothing "conspiratorial" about the duck-hunting trip Vice President Cheney took with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia during the week of January 4, 2004, "three weeks after the court agreed to take up the vice president's appeal in lawsuits over his handling of the administration's energy task force" (Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2004). "I do not think my impartiality could reasonably be questioned," Scalia hilariously told reporters, perhaps believing they had already forgotten his sordid role in fixing the 2000 presidential election for George W. Bush. Perhaps the brazen lack of ethics and truthfulness displayed by everyone in or associated with the Bush administration shouldn't be characterized as "conspiratorial," since this implies a secrecy that Cheney et al. believe unnecessary, given the monumental apathy and programmed ignorance of at least half the American public. (Cheney may not want to release transcripts of who said what, but that isn't a secret—it's a crime in defiance of American jurisprudence. There are no secrets, only things we know about that we don't know all the little details of.)






just in case there's anyone out there who didn't know.

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