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Truth is our Trench

Stones the Builder Rejected: Sander Hicks’ The Big Wedding

Since gonzo legend and 9/11 skeptic Hunter S. Thompson died, journalism hasn’t been the same. These days, very few journalists have the guts to tell the truth, or the talent to tell it in searing, crackling prose. Few have the vision to seamlessly weld fearless truth-telling, an awareness of the loathsome absurdities of our current social arrangements, and sharp-edged yet entertaining writing into a work of literary art disguised as journalism.
Sander Hicks is an exception. Hicks’ new book The Big Wedding joins Daniel Hopsicker’s Welcome to Terrorland and Mike Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon as the most important book-length journalism of the new millennium. Hopsicker and Ruppert, as you may recall, have blown the official story of 9/11 completely out of the water with their hard-hitting independent reporting. Based on years of investigation in Florida, Hopsicker established that key 9/11 “hijackers” were not practicing Muslims at all, much less the extremists the official story portrayed. Instead, they were intelligence agents who trained at US military bases and CIA drug-import airfields for their real mission--impersonating Muslim extremists and serving as 9/11 patsies.
 
Ruppert, for his part, has established that multiple war games, including at least one live-fly jetliner-hijack exercise, were transpiring on the morning of 9/11/01 in order to impeded the air-defense standard operating procedure that could and should have easily stopped the 9/11 attacks. Those multiple war games and hijack/disaster exercises also presumably served as a cover for those who organized the attacks from within the US military-intelligence establishment. Ruppert shows that the “maestro” of those war games was none other than Richard Cheney, whose activities and unconstitutional de facto Commander-in-Chief status on the morning of 9/11/01 were the subject of a ludicrously transparent coverup by the official 9/11 Commission. Ruppert’s book could and should serve as a brief for indicting Cheney, who, according to sworn testimony by Treasury Secretary Norman Mineta, gave what can only have been a stand-down order allowing the attack on the Pentagon to proceed unmolested by US air defense.

The collective achievement of Hopsicker and Ruppert is monumental. But while Hicks is only about half their age, and his book is half as long, in some ways it outshines theirs as a work of journalistic art.
This is more a matter of form than of content. Ruppert’s sprawling indictment of Cheney, and Hopsicker’s rambling narrative of what he learned in Florida, are brilliant but somewhat formless; their shape is dominated by the truths they tell more than by an overarching artistic purpose.

More than Ruppert and Hopsicker, Hicks is an artist as well as a first-rate journalist. He weaves together the stories of his 9/11 whisteblowers like Mozart weaving identifying music for opera characters. The result is a work of beauty united by a profound, almost Shakespearian insight into human nature in general, and the American mind-control system in particular: The stone that the builders rejected is the foundation upon which our castles of truth and illusion are built.

Hicks shows that his rogue’s gallery of 9/11 whistleblowers has been ignored, and the truths they tell suppressed, on the basis of ad hominem attacks unleashed by the coverup artists and picked up on by an uncritical and naïve media. That shouldn’t surprise us; after all, the defenders of the official story have only one argument—the hurling of ad-hominem insults against anybody who questions their demonstrably ludicrous narrative. But Hicks shows that the covert operators and coverup specialists actually set the ad hominem mechanisms in place as part of their secrecy strategy. The spooks go out of their way to choose “flawed” individuals to carry out their operations. They hire contract operators with a skeleton in their closets—and when the skeletons don’t already exist, they are manufactured. That way, if the operator should ever attempt to reveal compromising information, he can be easily discredited—and any journalist or media outlet that publicizes the information can be discredited as well. This strategy has for the most part totally silenced the media on such sensitive topics as W’s history as a draft-dodging, then AWOL cocaine arrestee, the CIA’s continuing history as the planet’s largest cocaine and heroin dealer, and of course the 9/11 covert operation mounted by the Bush crime family and its CIA drug empire partner, according to the instructions of PNAC-linked neocons, the intellectual authors of the 9/11 New Pearl Harbor.

Hicks begins his tale of rejected stones with Jim Hatfield, the unfortunate author of Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President. Hatfield blew the whistle on Bush’s 1972 cocaine arrest in the book, before both he and the cocaine arrest story were conveniently suicided and buried. It turns out that the controlled demolition of both Hatfield and the Bush cocaine bust story was conducted by none other than Karl Rove, Bush’s slime-exuding Svengali of spin. In August of 1999, mainstream journalists were sniffing around the Bush coke bust story, which would have ended W’s presidential aspirations had it been revealed in a credible way. Rove, in a sort of pre-emptive strike, proceeded to leak the story to Hatfield, who, as Rove and Bush’s Texas team knew, had a criminal history dating back to his misspent youth—very much like W himself, except that Hatfield went straight, while Bush’s crime career was still accelerating toward the acts of mass murder, high treason, human rights violations, and international aggression for which he is now infamous.

Hatfield published his book and was invited onto CBS’s 60 Minutes on the false pretenses that his book would be the topic. There he was ambushed and destroyed, as the show focused on his own criminal history, not that of George W. Bush. St. Martin’s Press recalled all 100,000 copies of Fortunate Son and burned them. “They’re heat! They’re furnace fodder!” crowed St. Martin’s trade division president Sallie Richardson. Sander Hicks, reading Richardson’s quote on page 14 of the New York Times, decided to protest the book-burning by publishing Fortunate Son under his own imprint. But despite the fact that the book was well-researched and well-written, and the coke bust story authenticated by none other than Rove, Bush’s close friend Clay Johnson, and Bush’s minister James Mayfield, the media continued to abuse and/or ignore Jim Hatfield, whose death of a vodka-barbituates overdose in July, 2001 was ruled a suicide. Thanks to Rove’s demolition of Hatfield, any mention of the Bush coke bust would be career suicide for mainstream journalists, who would be judged guilty by association and subjected to the same kind of ad-hominem vituperation that destroyed Hatfield if they showed any interest in the story. By the irrational mechanism of ad-hominem attack and threat, the truth was rendered unspeakable—in much the same way that the truth of 9/11 has been rendered unspeakable by the mindless drumbeat of ad-hominem attacks on “conspiracy theorists.”

After apostrophizing Hatfield in his intro, Hicks moves on to the next stone the builders rejected: ex-jewel-thief turned crack FBI informant Randy Glass, “the Jewish Joe Pesci.” The smart, smooth-talking Glass was adept at posing as a big-time weapons dealer, and managed to set up various dicey-looking people who were looking for lethal weapons, up to and including WMDs. Among them was a Pakistani with ISI (hence CIA) connections named Rajaa Gulum Abbas. In 1999, Glass was dining with Abbas in Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Grill just north of the World Trade Center, when Abbas pointed out the window at the Twin Towers and said, “Those towers are coming down.” During the following year, disturbed by further forewarnings of 9/11, Glass made inquiries among his FBI and ATF colleagues, one of whom directed him to an anti-terror player “in the loop,” Francis X. “Frank” Taylor, ex-Air Force intelligence op and then State Department Assistant Secretary for Security who would be promoted to Coordinator of Counterrorism shortly before 9/11. Glass called up Taylor in summer 2001 and decided to bluff him, saying “Listen, I already know about the World Trade Center.” At that time, Glass did not know that the attack would involve airplanes. But his bluff elicited the following remark from Taylor: “Randy, listen, you cannot mention any of these things, especially airplanes being used to fly into the World Trade Center.” Taylor explained that the planes-into-WTC plot had to remain secret for geostrategic reasons, and added: “Look, Randy, we know you’re a straight guy, so we’re going to give you some information. You cannot do two things: You cannot go to the media under any circumstances. This is—we’re playing in a nuclear minefield now. Secondly, you can’t tell the agents that you’re working with now because they’re out of the loop. They know nothing.” (Hicks, 13)

Is Glass telling the truth? Or—as the endlessly-rehashed ad hominem argument against 9/11 truth would have it—is he just a smooth-talking con man, a guy with a criminal record? Hicks offers many reasons to accept the truth of Glass’s testimony. For one thing, it is a matter of record that Glass repeatedly contacted the office of Florida Senator Bob Graham in the summer of 2001 in a failed attempt to stop the impending destruction of the Twin Towers. And Glass’s former law enforcement colleagues vouch for his veracity. Even the mainstream media, including Dateline NBC, has found him credible—though thus far no mainstream outlet has seen fit to publish or broadcast his description of the conversation with Francis X. Taylor, who was promoted after 9/11 and remains in a high-level anti-terrorism job!

After the Glass material, Hicks takes a two-chapter detour through Daniel Hopsicker’s revelations about the unsavory characters connected to Huffman Aviation, the CIA drug import airstrip and pseudo-flight-school in Venice, Florida where the so-called hijackers pretended to train. The chapters suggest that the CIA, in such criminal enterprises as drug dealing and terrorist attacks against its own country, employs such dubious characters as the boozing kitten-disembowling cokehead Mohammed Atta and the sexual-harassment perp and apparent fraudster Rudi Dekkers as a deliberate strategy—nobody would believe such people if they ever decided to ‘fess up, now, would they?

Hicks then moves on to his next stone the builders rejected, Delmart Vreeland, an insider who, like Glass, knew 9/11 was coming and tried to prevent it. Vreeland, whose letter describing the upcoming 9/11 attacks was written and sealed in a Canadian jail in summer 2001, is also the subject of a chapter in Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon. Like Ruppert, Hicks concludes that Vreeland is for real—and that his odd behavior and criminal record are not signs that he did not work for US intelligence, but signs that he did. According to Hicks, Vreeland may be the product of an MK-Ultra style mind control program involving childhood sexual abuse and other techniques designed to produce programmable alternate personalities and a biography that allows the agent to be discredited if necessary. Whether or not this is the case, it seems well-established that Vreeland was an intelligence agent who attempted to stop the 9/11 attacks and, frustrated by the non-response from US authorities, wrote and sealed a letter describing the upcoming attacks from a Canadian jail cell. The unsealing of that letter by Canadian authorities set off a colorful saga of dramatic courtroom calls and dead cats left on lawyers’ porches. Hicks adds to the basic story, already well known by readers of Mike Ruppert, by getting to know Vreeland and discovering that he seems almost as bizarre and dicey as his story. Yet it is people with criminal records like Vreeland and Randy Glass, not the Bushes and Francis X. Taylors of the world, who had the heart to try to stop 9/11. Hicks aptly quotes Ruppert: “None of us are saints, but all of us have moments in which we try to do the right thing, and that’s when we need to be supported. This is not over yet” (Hicks 73).

After meeting attempted-murder conspirator Jim Hatfield, jewel thief turned FBI snitch Randy Glass, and criminal-history-toting apparent pedophile Delmart Vreeland—all of whom came a hair’s breadth from preventing 9/11 in one way or another, and thus ought to be regarded as flawed but heroic figures—Hicks takes us to meet some truly insalubrious individuals: The members of the Zelikow-directed 9/11 Coverup Commission. Every member was deeply compromised. Philip Zelikow is a member of Bush’s shadow cabinet, an-ex-member of Bush’s intelligence advisory board (i.e. a 9/11 suspect himself), a close associate of Condi Rice, and a member of a British-intelligence sponsored think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Thomas Kean is director for the oil giant Amerada Hess, meaning he is thick as thieves with the criminal BCCI/BushBoyz wing of the oil industry. Lee Hamilton had chaired the House Iran-Contra Committee and the October Surprise Task Force, choosing to keep Bush the elder out of jail in the teeth of the evidence, at the promptings of fellow Wyoming congressman Dick Cheney, because justice would not be “good for the country.” John Lehman, a protégé of war criminal Henry Kissinger, covered up a Navy pedophilia scandal in 1982. Bob Kerry, another noted war criminal who personally slaughtered unarmed women and children in Vietnam, is a card-carrying neocon and PNAC associate. In 1989, Kerry covered up the Bush White House callboys scandal as part of his duties as Governor of Nebraska. Richard Ben-Veniste, as Hicks points out, “has direct connections to murky underworld figures” and gained notoriety as the lawyer for CIA drug runner Barry Seal, who was machine-gunned to death at a stoplight in Baton Rouge after apparently attempting to blackmail Ben-Veniste. Jamie Gorelick works for the world’s biggest drug-smuggling outfit, the CIA, where she is a member of the their National Security Advisory Panel; upon accepting her post with the 9/11 Coverup Commission, she was handed a plum job with the Washington Law Firm Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering, which was defending top Saudi officials against a lawsuit by 9/11 victims’ families. James Thompson and Slade Gorton, like Ben-Veniste and Gorlick, are well-connected creatures of unsavory big law firms. Fred Fielding worked for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, and is suspected of involvement in Watergate and Iran/Contra. After summing up the nefarious careers of this gallery of rogues, Hicks turns to Timothy Roemer, “the clean one. Sort of. Well certainly he’s the young one.” After the sudden departure of the one potentially honest member of the 9/11 Commission, Max Cleland, who huffed that he would not be part of another Warren Commission coverup and resigned to take a plum post offered by the Bush Administration, Roemer did look relatively clean—like a guy who’s just spattered with mud while his colleagues are wallowing in pig manure. Hicks summarizes the work of this pathetic, criminally negligent commission: “The 9/11 Commission Report has topped the Warren Report...as the greatest cover-up of all time...God willing, a day is coming when the parties responsible will be tried in a high court” (83).

Hicks actually goes to meet Ben-Veniste, taping a TV interview with him and asking a couple of real questions about 9/11—and Ben Veniste loses it and calls him a whackjob. Once again, we see the ad-hominem attack principle at work: The slimiest, craziest, evilest people in the world perpetrate the greatest outrage in history—and proceed to defame the characters and reputations of anyone who dares to question them. Yet a loose association of brave individuals, collectively known as the 9/11 truth movement, has arisen to ask those hard questions, and brave the “tinfoil hat” jibes of the small cohort of perps and their brainwashed legions of drooling idiots. (If you haven’t noticed, I’m employing the ad hominem principle in reverse. If you want sweet reason, read David Griffin and Nafeez Ahmed.)

In his eighth chapter, Hicks surveys the 9/11 truth landscape and finds it good. His argument that the various “no planes” theories (a misnomer, since most of these theories merely cast doubt on the identity, not the existence, of the planes or planelike objects that hit the WTC and the Pentagon) are a distraction, and that the 9/11 truth movement is often “dismissed by its most outlandish theory,” is developed sensibly and convincingly. Hicks writes: “If there’s once theory out there that is obviously false, the masses can be kept in intellectual submission, because the official story will represent safety, validation, and freedom from ridicule...the architects of disinformation take it for granted that people fear ridicule” (107). Personally, I do not find the arguments against Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon “obviously false” nor do I fear ridicule for saying so; after two years of 9/11 activism I have grown a fairly thick skin. I think it is possible that technologies of deception were employed that generated apparently contradictory evidence, making the Pentagon event a sort of Rorsach inkblot designed to create true believers in both the truth and falsity of the official story and set them at odds with each other, generating a smokescreen of confusion. Thus I think that 9/11 skeptics should unite—for unity is everything in this kind of movement—behind an “agreement to disagree” on Flight 77, and to cite the strongest, most intellectually and emotionally compelling evidence first, second, and last: The obvious controlled demolition of WTC Building 7, and the nationally-televised confession that it was “pulled” by insurance-fraudster Larry Silverstein, who made 6 billion dollars on his paltry two month investment in the newly-privatized World Trade Center. The growing national consciousness of the obvious demolition of Building 7 will bear out Hicks’ optimistic message: “Once this 9/11 Truth movement works out a few kinks, it’s going to be unstoppable” (109).

After his upbeat assessment of the 9/11 Truth movement, Hicks delivers his weakest chapter, titled “Muslim Brotherhood, Team B, PNAC, and the New International Fascist Agenda”. The problem is his lumping of the Muslim Brotherhood, a very broad-based group that represents the main democratic opposition to brutal dictatorships in Egypt and other countries, with the actual fascists, namely Team B and PNAC. As readers of Nafeez Ahmed’s The War on Truth know, Western intelligence services sometimes cherry-pick vulnerable individuals with Islamist leanings for such bogus, false-flag terror groups as Al-Qaida. That does not mean, however, that the Islamist groups and movements are themselves fascist. On the contrary, they often represent a populist, democratic anti-fascist opposition to fascist governments. Fascism is defined as the merging of the corporations, the state, and the military into one all-powerful juggernaut organized on hierarchichal lines, and ruling through deception and autocracy. That is an excellent description of the US system post-9/11, and a fairly accurate description of various Western-sponsored regimes in the Islamic world. Islamists usually represent the main domestic opposition to local and foreign fascism, and the vast majority of them work peacefully and gradually toward their goals, which involve a decentralized, religiously-based society.

Islamists oppose the banks and corporations, and generally want the state and the military to have less control over the lives of the people, which they believe should be organized on religious principles according to the dictates of individual believers and families first, and then the informal, non-coercive decisions of religious scholars, and finally, and only as a last resort, through state-sanctioned religious authority. Radical Islamists often want to overthrow or at least weaken the state, the corporations, and the military, which they view as the foreign impositions of Western colonizers, and return to a more decentralized, non-statist, religion-based form of social organization insofar as possible. In short, Islamism is more likely to be anti-fascist than fascist; indeed, it is the chief threat to the corporate-globalist New World Order, which is why the fascists at PNAC and Team B are using manipulated, false-flag terrorist attacks to discredit it. By obscuring that reality, and inadvertently lending support to the disinformation about “islamo-facism” Hicks makes his only serious blunder. Thus in calling Bush’s Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff “terror’s defender” in a posited alliance of the neocons and the Muslim Brotherhood, Hicks takes it for granted that Chertoff’s client, Bin Laden financier Dr. Magdy Elamir, was a real “Islamic terrorist.” But as Nafeez Ahmed makes clear in The War on Truth, much if not all of Al-Qaeda is a front for Western intelligence agencies. Most of its leadership, including all the alleged key players in 9/11, sport grotesquely un-Islamic lifestyles and spy agency connections revealing them to be intelligence assets, not Islamists. No wonder Chertoff sprang “terrorist” Elamir from jail!

Despite his misconceptions about Islamism—an understandable confusion given the chaos of the times and the layers of deception that surround the subject—Hicks has produced a lively and perceptive work of journalism that doubles as a work of art. A suggestive character study revealing how flaws make us human (in the case of the whistleblowers) or inhuman (in the case of the perps and coverup team), Hicks’ book urges us to overcome our fears and pursue the truth. In this his voice joins with the voices of the wisdom teachers of all ages and traditions, including the great Islamic truthtellers, the Sufi saints and pious jurists who spoke truth to power and thereby showed that they did not care about anyone’s opinion except God’s. If we are to speak 9/11 truth to power, we must overcome our worries about what others think of us, and speak the truth as we see it, whatever the consequences. Fears that our imperfections will be revealed, that speaking an unpopular opinion will unveil us as freaks, must be overcome. Many of today’s Muslims, who so often huddle together like sheep for fear that wandering off from the herd means destruction, could take a lesson in real piety from the brave and devoted left-anarchist Catholic, Sander Hicks.

Kevin Barrett
http://www.mujca.com