The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [90]
Yet after 9/11 occurred, did this “transformation” take place? Did we reduce the size of the National Guard? Reduce spending on aircraft carriers? Remove carrier groups from the Gulf? Institute a global missile defense system? No. In fact, in some cases, 9/11 actually scuttled these very plans. Condoleezza Rice, for instance, was scheduled on 9/11 to give a speech at Johns Hopkins outlining the need for missile defense—but the speech was postponed. A year later, Rice finally gave her Johns Hopkins speech, but this time only mentioned missile defense, which by then had fallen off the Washington radar completely, in passing. If PNAC and its neocon villains bombed the Trade Center in order to institute a missile defense system, they sure gave up on their dreams pretty quickly.
Moreover, the actual sentence so frequently referenced in the document is taken completely out of context. If you read the entire passage, you’ll find that it says that the “transformation” is probably going to take a long time. “Domestic politics and industrial policy will shape the pace and content of transformation as much as the requirements of current missions,” it reads. “This report advocates a two-stage process of change—transition and transformation—over the coming decades.” They then go on to outline “transition” and “transformation.”
Does this sound like the work of a group of people planning the “next Pearl Harbor”? Or was this laborious outlining of the decades-long two-stage process just a clever cover story, designed to throw readers off the trail of the senselessly candid admission about a “new Pearl Harbor” made two sentences previously? Any way you look at this, it’s lunacy.
But beyond that…what the fuck? Only a generation born and raised on the Internet could possibly believe that the motive for a political mass killing would be paraded openly in a document like “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” Who would think that the likes of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz would openly confess their motives for a monstrous criminal conspiracy in a position paper? How could anyone think such a thing would even get into print? Did Dick Cheney sidle up to report authors Thomas Donnelly, Don Kagan, and Gary Schmitt after a meeting and mumble something like, “You know, I think this World Trade Center thing is a go. Write us up a paper saying that the only thing we need to transform the military is a new Pearl Harbor or something.”
Or was it the other way? Did Donnelly, Kagan, and Schmitt write their paper first, only to have Cheney/Wolfowitz/Bush read it later and think, Dangit, they’re right! We do need a new Pearl Harbor! And then immediately start hitting the phones, calling their munitions people, arranging fake passports and stick-on beards, etc.
Because if you seriously believe that this paper is evidence of motive, it has to be one or the other. Either they used the release of this policy paper as an occasion to confess spontaneously to their own criminal conspiracy for absolutely no reason whatsoever, or they first published it and then were suddenly and innocently inspired by their own literature to a previously unimagined plan that less than a year later would turn out to be the most monstrous—and most seamlessly executed—crime in American history. No other explanation makes sense.
“Rebuilding America’s Defenses” is cited everywhere in the 9/11 Truth world. It was mentioned prominently in the seminal Internet documentary Loose Change. It’s been referenced by all the major priests of the movement: Alex Jones, John Pilger…Hell, leading 9/11 “scholar” David Griffin even named his 9/11 conspiracy book The New Pearl Harbor. Yet not once anywhere do any of these people explain why a group of extremely rich and powerful people bent on murdering thousands of innocent Americans would decide to voluntarily shine a light on their evil plan in a publicly circulated document a year before the attack.
But this kind of thing is all over the 9/11 Truth Movement. The movement is really distinguished by a kind of defiant