A confession? Wolfowitz's speech at West Point June, 2001

In what either must be a heck of a prediction, a damn good guess or a thinly veiled confession before the fact, the video below shows noted PNAC Neo-Con, former Deputy Defense Secretary, architect of the Bush's Iraq invasion and current President of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz delivering the commencement speech at West Point on June 2, 2001. His topic: "'surprise' and 'courage.'"

"This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of a military disaster whose name has become synonymous with surprise—the attack on Pearl Harbor. Interestingly, that "surprise attack" was preceded by an astonishing number of unheeded warnings and missed signals. Intelligence reports warned of "a surprise move in any direction," but this made the Army commander in Honolulu think of sabotage, not attack. People were reading newspapers in Hawaii that cited promising reports about intensive Japanese diplomatic efforts, unaware that these were merely a charade. An ultra-secret code-breaking operation, one of the most remarkable achievements in American intelligence history, an operation called "Magic," had unlocked the most private Japanese communications, but the operation was considered so secret and so vulnerable to compromise that the distribution of its product was restricted to the point that our field commanders didn’t make the "need-to-know" list. And at 7 a.m. on December 7th, at Opana radar station, two privates detected what they called "something completely out of the ordinary." In fact, it was so out of the ordinary that the inexperienced watch officer assumed it must be friendly airplanes and told them to just forget about it.

"Yet military history is full of surprises, even if few are as dramatic or as memorable as Pearl Harbor. Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re still surprised by it. Very few of these surprises are the product of simple blindness or simple stupidity. Almost always there have been warnings and signals that have been missed--sometimes because there were just too many warnings to pick the right one out, sometimes because of what one scholar of Pearl Harbor called "a poverty of expectations"—a routine obsession with a few familiar dangers.

"This expectation of the familiar has gotten whole governments, sometimes whole societies, into trouble. At the beginning of the last century, the British economist Norman Angell published a runaway best seller that must have drawn the attention of professors and cadets of West Point at that time. Angell argued that the idea that nations could profit from war was obsolete. It had become, as he titled his book, The Great Illusion. International finance, he argued, had become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that it had rendered war unprofitable.

"One of Angell's disciples, David Starr Jordan, the President of an institution on the West Coast called Stanford University, argued that war in Europe, though much threatened, would never come. "The bankers," he said, "will not find the money for such a fight; the industries will not maintain it; the statesmen cannot. There will be no general war." Unfortunately for him, he made that prediction in 1913. One year later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand fell to an assassin’s bullet, plunging Europe into a war more terrible than any that had come before it. The notion of the Great Illusion yielded to the reality of the Great War.

"One hundred years later, we live, once again, in a time of great hopes for world peace and prosperity. Our chances of realizing those hopes will be greater if we use the benefit of hindsight to replace a poverty of expectations with an anticipation of the unfamiliar and the unlikely."

I know it isn't popular with many of the leading figures in American anarchy to entertain conspiracy theories about 9/11 other than the one supported by the government, but I have generally found the evidence compelling that the attacks of that day must have involved government and private organizations and individuals in the US. Would such a conspiracy have gone as high as a Deputy Secretary of Defense? It doesn't seem necessary, but neither does it seem impossible.

Some may say that it doesn't matter which conspiracy it is, the problem is the system (capitalism, the state, empire and hierarchies in general). And I would agree. '9/11 Truth' as a movement does not contain the systematic critiques necessary to develop into the kind of revolutionary movement that most anarchists would be sympathetic with. The 9/11 Truth movement, like Arizona's so-called libertarians that crow constantly for the closing of the border and the wider regulation of non-white labor, certainly seems to be participating in a dialectic that leads not to more freedom, as they claim to desire, but rather to substantially less. Bill Weinberg of the excellent World War 3 Report has written on this phenomenon, and, although I disagree with his position on the 9/11 attacks, I find his critique of that movement to be insightful and generally right on. Of course, anarchists should be careful not to write off a group's ideas simply because of the people who believe them. After all, I've met my share of anarchist weirdos and nutjobs.

But I've written about my position previously ('The Ruling Class Loves Terrorism So Much They Married It'), so I won't rehash old arguments, save to say that regardless of what one thinks about the real nature of 9/11, false flag terrorism does in fact exist, and lots of governments, including the US, Britain, Italy, Pakistan and Russia, have engaged in it at various times. Those who are in what I will call the 'Al-Qaeda did it on it's own' camp would do well not to forget that state sponsored terrorism, directed under false pretense by intelligence agencies within their home countries in order to obtain specific domestic political goals, certainly fits well with the post-9/11 landscape of fear and distrust and, as such, will certainly be manipulated by authorities in the future for the purpose of controlling their populations, especially as the political and economic situation grows steadily worse - as it surely will.

Nevertheless, I present the video of Wolfowitz's speech here for entertainment purposes if nothing else. Although, perhaps there's more there than we might like to admit. Try this link if the video doesn't play below.