Webster G. Tarpley
http://www.infowars.com/
November 15, 2009
In the wake of the massacre at Fort Hood Texas , two principal theories have emerged to explain the conduct of the accused shooter, identified by the U.S. Army as Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist of Jordanian-Palestinian ancestry. One of these theories is embraced by left liberals and other supporters and acolytes of the Obama regime, and argues that Major Hasan is a sincere and devout Muslim who was the victim of a tragic contradiction between his religious faith and the logic of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both the heritage of the odious Bush-Cheney regime. According to this version, Hasan must be viewed as a troubled and tormented individual who “snapped,” breaking down psychologically under the stress of his awful predicament. Here is how Obama summed up this approach: “Even within the extraordinary military that we have — and I think everybody understands how outstanding the young men and women in uniform are under the most severe stress — there are going to be instances in which an individual cracks.” (New York Times, 10 Nov and ember 2009) Calling Major Hasan a terrorist amounts, in this view, to racism and vindictive prejudice.
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| There remains the question of whether Major Hasan’s psychosis has been artificially produced through a program of brainwashing and heavy-duty “Clockwork Orange” psychological manipulation. | |
The other theory is the one advocated by assorted neocons, reactionaries, Islamophobes and others generally hostile to Obama. This account maintains that Major Hasan was a homegrown, self-starting Islamic terrorist, trumpeting his devotion to jihad and suicide bombing, seeking to make contact with “Al Qaeda,” and generally filled with hate for America , for freedom, and for his fellow soldiers. In this view, it is only the pervasive political correctness and multicultural obsession of the subversive-riddled and soft on terrorism Obama regime that prevented Major Hasan from being neutralized before he could act, and which prevents Obama and his Democratic allies from telling the truth after the fact.
These views are both superficial, naïve, and inadequate.[1] They amount to two prongs of an articulated campaign of media hysteria and mass manipulation designed on the one hand to prod the dithering Wall Street puppet Obama who is having second thoughts about his own political survival — into an early decision in favor of massive escalation of the war in Afghanistan for the purpose of hastening the breakup of Pakistan, and thus threatening China. On the other hand, the delirium of Islamophobic hatred being ginned up against Major Hasan by the usual cast of reactionary radio ogres (Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Levin) seeks to accentuate and strengthen the racist and xenophobic elements in the militant anti-Obama opposition, in particular among the Tea Party movement. The decision to put the infamous Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confreres on trail in New York City, plus the recent government seizure of numerous US mosques and other buildings on the grounds that they are Iranian assets, also contribute to a growing mood of anti-Moslem hysteria. This atmosphere is accentuated by the reckless and irresponsible actions of some Moslem groups which happen to be foundation-funded, and must thus be considered as part of the apparatus of US domestic social control.
The media narrative which is now being consolidated a week after the shootings is full of contradictions, embarrassed silences, and absurdities. A third and distinct approach to this case is therefore required, one which regards Major Hasan as a manipulated patsy in the context of a relatively sophisticated operation mounted by forces within the US intelligence community, using methods and assets which by now ought to have become familiar. Major Hasan can be seen as a mixture of Lee Harvey Oswald, legendary 9/11 “suicide pilot” Mohammed Atta, and Cho Seung-Hui (the alleged April 2007 Virginia Tech shooter). He also has elements of reputed Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan, and of John Hinckley Jr., who was involved in an attempt to kill President Reagan both of whom survived the operations in which they were implicated. He thus represents a new cocktail of patsy ingredients. Until now, Islamic terrorists had come in collectivist groups, and not alone. Major Hasan by contrast is a troubled loner in the tradition of Oswald, at the same time that he embodies the religious fanaticism of Atta, along with some of his peccadilloes. Major Hasan is that novelty, a troubled Islamic fundamentalist loner, even though this is something of a contradiction in terms. Like Cho, Major Hasan emerges from the psychiatric clinic, in his case as a practicing psychiatrist, but as a shrink with egregious symptoms of his own. Like all patsies, Major Hasan combines the flamboyant and bombastic proclamation of his personal creed with a seeming immunity from bureaucratic countermeasures which would normally be automatic in shutting him down. Hasan is revealed as a fanatic, a misfit, and a quasi-psychotic or psychotic mental case in his own right who could not subsist without protectors in high places of the US intelligence community.
In my 2005 book 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism, I argued that 9/11 and other recent terrorist attacks represented provocations cynically orchestrated by privately controlled rogue networks operating within the US intelligence agencies for purposes of mass political manipulation. Starting from an overview of terrorist actions from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 through 9/11, I developed a method of analysis of state-sponsored false flag terrorism which distinguished the roles of fanatical, duped, or psychotic patsies like Oswald, of subversive moles ensconced as officials within government agencies, and of technicians or professional killers who actually create the observed effects, all commanded and coordinated from outside of government, and all operating within the atmosphere of mass brainwashing provided by the Wall Street media. I also highlighted the role of drills and exercises which are hijacked and turned into real-world terror attacks. In order to understand the Fort Hood massacre, it is indispensable to apply this method here as well.
TROOPS THOUGHT IT WAS A DRILL DID MAJOR HASAN THINK SO TOO?
In investigations like this, it is generally a great mistake to fixate on the scapegoat dished up by the mass media. The more we focus on the Oswald of the day, the less we understand of what actually happened. Let us turn away from the TV pundits, and listen instead to the eyewitness testimony of the troops who were present at the shootings. Many of them are on record agreeing that the events of November 5 were initially interpreted by those on the scene as an exercise, as a drill. Emphasis will be added to bring out this central fact.
From ABC News we get the following testimony: Solider Keara Bono ‘told “Good Morning America” today that she initially thought the scene of Hasan standing up, praising Allah and starting to fire was a drill. She didn’t believe it was real even when she felt her own blood, she said. “Then I looked to my left and right and I saw people that were bleeding,” she said. That’s when Bono realized that Hasan’s rampage wasn’t a drill.’ (ABC News GMA)[2]
In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of 9 November 2009 we find: “Pfc. Amber Bahr of Random Lake [ Wisconsin ] heard someone yelling and ducked at the sound of gunfire, but she said she thought supervisors at Fort Hood were holding a drill last Thursday. She didn’t know she was under live fire until she heard people screaming.”[3] This story was based on an interview given to NBC’s Today show.
CBS News reported: “Two days after narrowly escaping death at Fort Hood and just hours after his release from the hospital, Corporal Nathan Hewitt still can’t believe what happened was real. The survivor spoke to CBS News Correspondent Don Teague about those fateful minutes. Even after being shot, Hewitt didn’t believe what was happening. He thought the gunfire was a training exercise and that he’d been hit by a rubber bullet. He says other victims thought the same thing.”[4]
ABC newsman Bob Woodruff found further corroboration of this general impression when he was allowed to interview shooting victims who were recovering in the hospital: “For many of the 43 people wounded when an Army psychiatrist allegedly went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, the scene was unreal — it seemed like something out of a movie. Maybe it was a drill. .Capt. Dorrie Carskadon, a combat stress specialist from Wisconsin , who was at Fort Hood training for a deployment to Afghanistan , said she initially thought the shooting was a drill.”[5] Notice that this testimony comes from a field grade officer, a captain.
The Austin television station KXAN provides the following evidence: ‘Spc. Scott Hamrick and First Sergeant James McLeod made it out of the Soldier Readiness Processing Center alive after some maneuvering to get away from the suspect, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. “My initial thought is that it was a drill,” said Hamrick. “Because you know you’re always getting drilled for situations.” However, what Hamrick thought was a drill turned out to be something closer to war at home.’[6]
The Miami Herald furnished this account: ‘For Skip Blancett, the senior pastor at the First United Methodist Church of Killeen, news of the shooting left him anguishing for hours because his daughter, Hollye Davis, was at a building next door to where the gunman started firing. She and others were in lockdown for hours. Without a cellphone, she couldn’t call home. “They had no idea what was going on; everyone thought it was a drill at first,” Blancett said.’[7]
The idea that the shooting was part of a drill or exercise was so widespread that it had to be expressly countered in the first emergency announcement posted on the Fort Hood web site, which read: “Effective immediately. Fort Hood is closed. Organizations/units are instructed to execute a 100 per cent accountability of all personnel. This is not a drill. It is an emergency situation.”[8]
Based on this testimony, it seems clear that unannounced, surprise terror drills are standard operating procedure at Fort Hood and probably other military bases as well. They are frequent enough to be the first thing many soldiers, including at least one officer, thought was happening. Drills are designed to be as realistic as possible. But the acme of realism is reality real killing, which can occur through small but decisive changes in the unfolding of the drill. We may therefore be dealing here with a drill which has been taken live or flipped live, as so often happens in terror incidents.[9]
This array of evidence allows us to pose the following question: If so many of the Army personnel on the scene thought at first that the incident was a drill, did Major Hasan also think he was attending a drill? Did he imagine that he was going to be an actor playing the assigned role of a member of the terrorist red team in a realistic exercise? In other words, was this inept, troubled and quasi-psychotic individual somehow under the impression that he was attending an officially sanctioned exercise of some routine type, until real bullets began to be fired by other more qualified shooters, thus taking the drill live? This might also help us to account for the extraordinary intensity of firing at the scene well over 100 rounds. For this working hypothesis to stand up, we would have to show that there were other gunmen firing gunmen who knew that the drill was turning into a real massacre. The additional shooters would according to the classification referred to above represent the technicians in this action the trained killers who have the ability to do the things that the patsy is accused of doing. Interestingly enough, extra gunmen are exactly what we find.
