Friday, March 1, 2019

Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert

Illuminating historical reflection centering US neocons' market domination...

Crossing the Rubicon (an excerpt)
by Michael Ruppert

The why and the how

    It is my belief that sometime during the period between late 1998 and early 2000, as certain elites became aware of the pending calamity of Peak Oil, they looked at the first highly confidential exploration and drilling results from the Caspian Basin and shuddered. The economy had already been milked close to collapse, and the Caspian results could not be kept secret forever. The data would surely come out, and what would happen to the markets then? What if some of the major oil companies had been inflating Caspian numbers and hyping up hopes of a bonanza in order to pump their stock value? What if all the inflated reserve estimates revealed themselves to be bogus all at once?

    A major economic collapse was imminent in the fall of 2001. I issued the first of only two economic bulletins from FTW, warning of an imminent market collapse, on September 9th. 1 The only other economic alert I ever issued came just before the massive collapse of the Dow Jones in 2002. Remember that? The one where your 401(k) got wiped out? The one that wiped out trillions of dollars in shareholder equity?

    It is likely that some of those early Caspian drilling reports came from companies like ExxonMobil, where Condoleezza Rice sat on the board. She was an expert on Kazakhstan. The elites began to grasp that the hoped for Caspian reserves would not even offer a short reprieve from the onslaught of Peak Oil. Through declassified CIA reports we know that the CIA was aware that US oil production had peaked in 1970 and that the Agency was tracking Soviet oil production in the hopes of predicting a Russian peak in 1977. 2 The CIA is Wall Street. Even if the oil had been there, it could not be monetized, because there was no safe route or pipeline to get it out. Alarms started going off.

    It was time for the major players to cash out, and that's what some 20 giant corporations from Enron to WorldCom, to Merck, to Halliburton did, as those in the know pumped and dumped their stocks, sucking the wealth out of pension funds, small investors, and mutual funds from 2000 to 2002. For the most part only the smaller investors and funds were hurt. The people on top cashed out and moved "their" money elsewhere.

    Dick Cheney and the neocons stepped up with a plan. That was probably more than Al Gore and the neo-liberals had to offer in light of the emergency now building. Any plan was better than no plan. Obviously, the first objective for Dick Cheney and the neocons had been to secure control of the White House in the 2000 election so that the rest of the plan could be implemented if necessary. That is why, I noted in a January 2001 FTW essay titled "Empire," that the Bush cabinet was a war cabinet and that a major conflict was coming.

    Their next task was to find out how much time there was before things started collapsing behind high energy prices and dwindling supply. How bad was it really? Who could say? The oil books were as cooked as the Enron books. How much oil was there really? Where was it? Who owned it? How long before the wheels started coming off? It was time to find all of it out accurately and quickly, but in secret. As the election of 2000 passed, the Caspian results grew continually more disappointing.

    Summation: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury 573

    This would explain the urgency with which the Bush administration convened the National Energy Policy Development Group -- under Dick Cheney -- immediately after taking office in January. What do we do now? That was the bottom line. I believe that this was where the basic motive for 9/11 was fully articulated, understood, and accepted. Even though preparations for the attacks had been underway for years, the moment of truth about whether to execute them did not arrive until Cheney's group had a hard look at the numbers. This would explain why the administration fought all the way to the US Supreme Court to hide those records, and why Dick Cheney felt it necessary to take Justice Antonin Scalia duck hunting in a desperate effort to keep the records secret.

    Scalia and the other "Supremes" delivered for him. On July 2, 2004, in a little noticed 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the administration to keep the NEPDG's records secret from the American people. I was not at all surprised. Nothing surprised me after the Supreme Court's ruling in the 2000 election.

    After the NEPDG concluded its work in late April 2001, I think an irrevocable decision had been made to cross the Rubicon, that bloody line between an ailing republic and the empire that irreversibly supervened. In May 2001 President Bush placed Dick Cheney in charge of all planning for a terror attack, effectively giving him complete control over FEMA, the military, everything. In June 2001 the NORAD scramble protocols that had worked efficiently since 1976 were rewritten to take most decision-making power out of the hands of Air Force field commanders. Although minor exceptions in those protocols still allowed commanders to act on their own in certain cases, as General Arnold did, the change itself provided deniability for elements of the confusion that Dick Cheney was going to deliberately engineer and control.

    From their perspective, the Republican neocons were faced with a choice of massive panic and collapse on the financial markets; a loss of public faith in the political system; and the loss of most of their own power and wealth if the truth were known.

    To borrow a metaphor from Professor Peter Dale Scott, both the neo-libs and the neo-cons were players at a very lucrative crap game. Though they often played viciously against each other, their prime objective was to keep the game going at all costs. Whenever the game was threatened -- as is the case with 9/11 -- they quickly closed ranks to protect it while the turf over which they continued to fight among themselves grew smaller and smaller and the contests more heated and bloody.

    Within their own mindset and within the parameters of an economic and governmental system that functioned (as it continues to function) in the mode of organized crime -- incapable of transparency, riddled with corruption and cooked books, based upon the destruction of life for the sake of net profits and supremacy -- these men, led by Dick Cheney, chose what they thought was their only logical option. I believe it seemed to them the "right" thing to do; after all, it was only a few thousand lives. Other rulers have made similar choices in the past. Butas all empires learn, once the river is crossed there is no turning back. In front of that decision there lay a continuum of ever more vicious bloodletting, decline, and collapse.

    The pie was shrinking, and any political diversity remaining in the system was heading for extinction as rapidly as are thousands of species on this afflicted planet. Perhaps mankind, too, is on nature's endangered species list, as we ironically and half-heartedly lament the white rhino and the California condor, the Bengal tiger and the black bear.

    The imminent energy crisis was going to be both apocalyptic and unavoidable, and it was going to arrive sooner than expected. Like any "well-planned" government operation, the planning and initial preparations for what became 9/11 had begun in the Clinton administration as a contingency plan. That's when the 19 so-called hijackers (and/or their handlers) began establishing their legends. But the Caspian news would account for the absolutely unfathomable number of mistakes that were made in both the plan's execution and the subsequent cover-up. It was a rush job. Quickly, any number of classified or once-classified contingency plans for a staged attack on the US -- like Operation Northwoods -- came down off the shelf. As Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard shows, the need for such an event had already been acknowledged in 1997 -- conveniently, just as al Qaeda and the Taliban were emerging as world and regional players. Operation Northwoods, declassified in the late 1990s, had been planned in 1962.

    Since the end of the cold war there had been plenty of time to put a new potential enemy in place, and September 11 th was not a new idea.

    As Zbigniew Brzezinski had written in 1997, the "immediate" task was to develop and simultaneously control a "direct external threat" to manufacture an attack "like a new Pearl Harbor." That required a credible (at least in the public mind) and well-developed enemy. The need for the same kind of attack was mentioned by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in its September 2000 report Rebuilding America's Defenses. Such an attack would then provide a pretext for massive sequential military intervention to secure the energy supplies of the Middle

    East and the lesser (but terribly important) oil-bearing regions including West Africa, Venezuela, Colombia, certain portions of the Southwest Pacific, and any other region with smaller but more readily accessible reserves. The essential thing would be that terrorists or their "allies" must conveniently turn up in each needed area, on schedule.

    No problem! That's what the CIA, Mossad, MI6, and every other major intelligence agency does for a living.

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