Tag: pentagon

9/11: Whodunnit? and Why It Matters to the Peace Movement

“I have chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace . . .”— PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, JUNE 10, 1963

Sixty years later it behooves us more than ever to penetrate the tenacious ignorance of which Kennedy spoke. To honor my friend and colleague, TRANSCEND member Prof. Graeme MacQueen, who passed away in April, this editorial addresses topics he was passionate about, namely peace, justice and truth, in particular 9/11 truth.

If we’re not willing to open our minds to the abundant evidence refuting the narrative, fed to us mere minutes after the heinous crimes of 9/11 unfolded before our eyes, that a band of foreign militants from the Middle East was solely responsible for those crimes, then we risk continuing to fall prey to propaganda leading to unending wars and suffering.

Johan Galtung introduced me to Graeme at a 2011 TRANSCEND symposium in North Carolina. 9/11 was not on the formal agenda, but came up in side conversations as the 10-year anniversary approached. Galtung has always promoted open dialog on challenging topics, bucking the penchant of academic institutions and major media platforms to ignore dissenting views on 9/11 and dismiss them as crazy conspiracy theories. He thus proposed adding a session on 9/11 to the symposium and opening it to the general public. Three of us presented our views, followed by Q and A.

Galtung accepted the official narrative that 9/11 was perpetrated by foreign Muslim extremists, viewing it as blow-back from the many injustices the US had inflicted on the Middle East. He called it a public execution of 3 buildings (World Trade Center 1 and 2, and the Pentagon) that symbolized the US military-financial complex. 

Graeme and I enumerated unexplained anomalies pointing to complicity of key agents within the US Government and cast doubt on the culpability of Al-Qaeda operatives. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of 9/11, confessed involvement only after being subjected to prolonged torture via waterboarding, while videos of Osama bin Laden claiming credit for the attacks look suspiciously fake.

We all agreed, however, along with most peace activists, that the US response to the events of 9/11 was reprehensible: declaring the unending war on terror, fomenting widespread Islamophobia, curtailing civil liberties, decades-long military incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq that ruined both countries and cost countless lives. The US leadership justified its violent response by the fear, outrage and desire for revenge that swept across much of the nation, horrified at the shock and awe it had witnessed that fateful day. How could that have been prevented?

Imagine what our world might look like if the propaganda machine set in motion the morning of 9/11 had failed. What if most journalists, commentators, engineers, pilots, firefighters, police, and politicians on mainstream media had pressed for answers to valid questions, like:

How could damage and fires on the upper floors have caused both twin towers to explode and disappear into their footprints? How could World Trade Center 7, a third skyscraper not hit by a plane, have imploded symmetrically at free fall speed? How could an alleged hijacker who flunked flight school on small planes have executed a harrowing maneuver to ram a passenger jet into the Pentagon going 500 mph at ground level? How did the US, with its hundreds of billions in defense spending, fail to defend the nerve center of its military headquarters in the nation’s capital? 

Once it was announced hijacked planes were crashing into buildings, why did Secret Service agents allow President Bush to remain in a Florida classroom with children, leaving them vulnerable to attack? Who made money on a significant increase in stock market betting right before 9/11 that prices of American and United Airline stocks would drop? 

What if honest eye-witness journalists, who in the morning had reported explosions both before and during the destruction of the towers, had continued to develop that thread and ask deeper questions throughout the day and following days, rather than being diverted by select experts and pundits who silenced the “explosion” theme, supplanting it with unproven assertions that Osama bin Laden did it.

Had these questions — many raised also by 9/11 victims’ family members — been relentlessly pursued, the flimsy tale of Muslim extremists from remote parts of the world with no ties to any government being the lone perpetrators of this apocalyptic theatrical display would have soon disintegrated.

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Boeing Charges Pentagon $52,000 For Trash Can Previously Priced At $300

As Democrat and Republican members of the executive and legislative branches trip over each other trying to see who can jack up the Pentagon’s budget more, an investigation by Responsible Statecraft has uncovered some glaring examples of Department of Defense contractors raising the price of their products by astronomical multiples. 

Boeing used to charge about $300 for trash receptacles used aboard E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes, which use the chassis of a Boeing 707 airliner. After that aircraft vanished from civilian fleets, the trash can lost its status as a “commercial” item, freeing Boeing to stick it to American taxpayers. 

How badly? “In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four of the trash cans, translating to roughly $51,606 per unit,” reports Responsible Statecraft’s Connor Echols. The next year brought an apparent volume discount: In 2021, the Pentagon bought 11 trash cans at “only” $36,640 each. Together, the price on the two years of purchases represented a whopping $600,000 markup over previous prices.  

Boeing isn’t the only one sticking it to taxpayers. For starters:

  • In 2022, New York-based Jamaica Bearings Company sold the Pentagon 13 radio filters. While it had previously priced them at $350 each, this time Jamaica Bearings charged $49,000 each.
  • Lockheed Martin jacked up the price of an electrical conduit for the P-3 Orion anti-submarine and maritime surveillance plane by upwards of 1400%, raking in an extra $133,000 from 2008 to 2015. 

In the wake of a May 60 Minutes investigation into defense contractor price-gouging, five senators sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asking for the Pentagon to perform its own follow-on inquiry.

“These companies have abused the trust government has placed in them, exploiting their position as sole suppliers for certain items to increase prices far above inflation or any reasonable profit margin,” wrote Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Mike Braun (R-IN) and Ron Wyden (D-OR).  

Consolidation of the defense industry is one factor feeding the price-gouging. “In the 1990s, there were more than 50 ‘prime’ DoD contractors capable of competing for major contracts. Now, there are only five,” writes Echols. 

Per the latest iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act, the federal government will spend over $850 billion on “defense” in the 2023 fiscal year, roughly half of which will be devoured by contractors.

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Pentagon accounting error provides extra $6.2 billion for Ukraine military aid

The Pentagon said Tuesday that it overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past two years — about double early estimates — resulting in a surplus that will be used for future security packages.

Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said a detailed review of the accounting error found that the military services used replacement costs rather than the book value of equipment that was pulled from Pentagon stocks and sent to Ukraine. She said final calculations show there was an error of $3.6 billion in the current fiscal year and $2.6 billion in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended last Sept. 30.

As a result, the department now has additional money in its coffers to use to support Ukraine as it pursues its counteroffensive against Russia. And it come as the fiscal year is wrapping up and congressional funding was beginning to dwindle.

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Pentagon Personnel Did Not Appropriately Track Weapons Transferred to Ukraine

A report from the Department of Defense Inspector General found Pentagon employees in Poland failed to follow procedures to account for military equipment being transferred to Ukraine. In the shipments of weapons monitored by the office, Pentagon employees failed to properly track the weapons in three of five shipments.

“DoD personnel did not have the required accountability of the thousands of defense items that they received and transferred at Jasionka, [Poland],” it stated. “We observed that DoD personnel did not fully implement their standard operating procedures to account for defense items and could not confirm the quantities of defense items received against the quantity of items shipped for three of five shipments we observed.”

The Pentagon does not “have reasonable assurance that their database of all defense items transferred to the [Ukraine] via air transport in Jasionka was accurate or complete.” The report added, “14 The DoD may risk providing more or less equipment than authorized by [President Joe Biden], and may not be able to verify the quantity of all defense items before they are transferred to [Ukraine].”

One example in the inspector general report explains how weapons are shipped without a manifest. “One shipment containing thousands of small arms, night vision optics devices, and various types of cold weather gear did not include an air manifest.” The report continues, “DoD personnel opened crates to identify the types of defense items contained within the crates, but even then the personnel could not verify whether the number of items they identified represented the true number shipped.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Washington has shipped tens of billions in weapons to Ukraine, including advanced platforms. The Pentagon inspector general report examined arms shipped to Ukraine directly from American stockpiles. 

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Pentagon Readies New $2B Military Aid Package for Ukraine

The Pentagon is set to announce another military aid package for Ukraine valued at more than $2 billion, according to a report.

The new package would come about a week after the Pentagon announced a $300 million package for Ukraine on May 31.

Bloomberg News reported Friday morning that the Pentagon could announce as early as Friday that the package would include air defense munitions.

The package will reportedly be awarded under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which funds new purchases of weapons, versus using presidential drawdown authority, which has been used to authorize the transfer of U.S. military equipment to Ukraine.

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EXPOSED: DISTURBING DETAILS OF NEW PENTAGON “PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT OFFICE”

Ken Klippenstein, an investigative journalist at The Intercept, has exposed how the Pentagon very quietly launched a new internal division, dubbed the “Influence and Perception Management Office” (IPMO), in March.

Its existence is not strictly secret, although there has been no official announcement of its launch, let alone an explanation from Department of Defense (DoD) officials as to its raison d’être or modus operandi. Its budget likewise remains a mystery but purportedly runs into the “multimillions.”

Pentagon financial documents from 2022 offer a laconic and largely impenetrable description of IPMO. The Office, it is said, “will serve as the senior advisor” to Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security, Ronald S. Moultrie, on “strategic and operational influence and perception management (reveal and conceal) matters”:

It will develop broad thematic influence guidance focused on key adversaries; promulgate competitive influence strategies focused on specific defense issues, which direct subordinate planning efforts for the conduct of influence-related activities; and fill existing gaps in policy, oversight, governance, and integration related to influence and perception management matters. [IPMO]…provides necessary support to National Defense Strategy…to address the current strategic environment of great power competition.”

Nonetheless, references to “reveal and conceal” and “influence and perception management” are tantalizing in the extreme. So too, is IPMO’s position within the U.S. national security structure and the Office’s acting director being intimately tied to the Pentagon’s spookiest operations.

Despite its low-key rollout, IPMO looks set to be a hugely influential new DoD agency in the future, waging ceaseless information warfare at home and abroad. What makes the new venture all the more sinister is that such capabilities are nothing new; the Pentagon has managed multiple similar, if not identical, operations in the past and continues to do so, despite significant controversy and public backlash.

Indeed, the DoD’s official dictionary has a dedicated definition of “perception management”, linking the practice to “psychological operations,” which are defined as actions intended to influence the “emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior” of target governments, organizations, groups, and individuals:

Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.”

This, of course, begs the question of why a new incarnation of what came before and never went away is now being inaugurated by the U.S. defense establishment. As we shall see, no reassuring answers are forthcoming.

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Pentagon says there is no proof ‘to date’ of top secret UFO retrieval program that whistleblower claims has discovered ‘a number’ of ‘non human’ aircraft – but vows to follow investigation ‘wherever it leads’

The Pentagon today said it had no proof to date of the top-secret UFOs retrieval program that a military whistleblower claims has discovered ‘a number’ of aircraft and ‘non human’ pilots, but that it will follow the investigation ‘wherever it leads.’

On Monday night, David Charles Grusch, an Air Force veteran and former member of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, made the astonishing, on-air claims  that the US and other nations are engaged in a top-secret arms race to ‘reverse-engineer’ alien technology, and that the US has recovered ‘quite a number’ of UFOs. 

The House Oversight Committee has launched an investigation and intends to hold a hearing about the topic. 

Grusch claims the government has been lying about the program for decades. 

Today, the Pentagon denied knowing about such a program, but said it would follow the ‘data’. 

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Pentagon Now Actively Hunting For UFOs With Purpose-Built Sensors

Only between 2% and 5% of the 800 cases currently being investigated by the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) “display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous,” the head of that office testified during a NASA hearing Wednesday. But while the majority of those cases “demonstrate mundane characteristics of readily explainable sources,” a “large number” of those sightings are “technically unresolved…primarily due to a lack of data associated with those cases,” AARO Director Sean M. Kirkpatrick testified. That’s a key reason, he said, why AARO has been developing its own “purpose-built sensors” to detect, track and characterize objects in suspected hot spots.

“Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution,” Kirkpatrick said at NASA’s UAP Independent Study Team hearing Wednesday. UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena, is the new term for UFOs.

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Pentagon Has Lost ‘Hundreds of Thousands’ of F-35 Parts Worldwide

It was billed as the ultimate joint-fighter project that promised to make all other combat jets redundant. However, two decades on, the Pentagon still can’t managed to pull it together in any coherent fashion. 

By now, the grounding F-35 planes has become a regular feature in defense news and analysis, as experts continue to commiserate over the constant stream of technical and logistical errors which have plagued the multibillion dollar program.

Whether its the future engine choice resulting delays in production, the lack of operable engines, subsystem design flaws, or perhaps incidents involving the jet’s propulsion and thermal management systems, its onboard oxygen system, its custom helmet-mounted display, and even its susceptibility to lighting strikes – the bloated F-35 boondoggle is still struggling to make sense.

Now we have a global failure in the Pentagon’s supply chains and logistics resulting in loss of money and delays…

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Entertainment or propaganda? Washington’s insidious grip on the arts

AN EVIL dictator is on the brink of making a nuclear bomb at a secret facility carved deep inside the Zagros mountains. With no option, the American military deploys jets and, against all odds, destroys the factory — then flies home to the strains of [Highway to the] Danger Zone.

An evil dictator is on the brink of using a nuclear bomb. With no option, the American military deploys secret agents and, against all odds, triggers a democratic revolution by blowing up the dictator in his helicopter to the strains of Katy Perry’s Firework.

I‘ve just outlined the plots of Top Gun: Maverick starring Tom Cruise and The Interview starring Seth Rogan.

But it also describes real world aspirations — here towards Iran and North Korea — from top policymakers across Nato.

These parallels are no coincidence. Because each film was actually subject to script changes imposed by Washington. In the documentary Theaters of War, we show how the CIA and Defence Department have exercised editorial control over thousands of films and TV shows in exchange for lending equipment like helicopters to producers to use on screen.

Such films reflect and construct the paranoid fantasies of our imperial masters, most of them with direct script input: Iran taking Western hostages in Ben Affleck’s Argo; kindly marines unjustly slaughtered for handing out grain to hungry Africans in Black Hawk Down; US politicians too innocent to realise that arming Islamic terrorists will lead to 9/11 in the Julia Roberts hit Charlie Wilson’s War, and the Gerard Butler film Kandahar in which an evil dictator is on the brink of manufacturing a nuclear bomb at a secret facility carved deep inside a mountain. With no option and against all odds…

Is it any wonder that 30 per cent of Americans in a poll said they want to bomb Agrabah, the capital city in Disney’s Aladdin?

Is it any wonder that our politicians, as though clutching rosary beads, prefigure Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the word “illegal” with no sense of irony and “unprovoked” with no sense of history? When was the last thing you saw depicting Russia which didn’t have it crawling with tyrants? Red Dawn? Rambo; Air Force One; Hunter Killer; James Bond; Jack Ryan; 24; Homeland; Stranger Things…the 6 O’Clock News?

The US government has suppressed scripts — but on others it has overturned their original messages. In the Iron Man screenplay, Robert Downey Jr’s hero was opposed to his father’s arms business. After rewrites he became the ultimate evangelist for a bloodless industry: “Peace means having a bigger stick than the other guy.”

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