States have used terrorism in various ways to advance their own interests for hundreds of years.

Click banner for more info

9-11 was an Indirect Defensive Attack – Len Bracken

States have used terrorism in various ways to advance their own interests for hundreds of years, including the use of terrorist attacks as a means to justify acts of war, crackdowns and Draconian laws such as the US Patriot Act.

Continue

According to research on the matter by Len Bracken who granted an interview to the VOR, there are different types of state sponsored terrorist attacks which he has classified and that have been used by NATO, the US and other states in the past.
 Mr. Bracken is a specialist on the attacks of 9-11 and has done extensive research and interviewed witnesses including police who knew about Anthrax being stored by "Israeli Agents" in the US who were allowed to go free.

Robles: Hello, this is John Robles. I'm speaking with Mr. Len Bracken. He is the author of six books including The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror, he is also a specialist in international affairs and international relations and an accredited journalist. This is part one.

Robles: Hello, sir.

Bracken: How do you do? Thank you for having me.

Robles: And thanks for agreeing to speak with us. It's a pleasure. My first question is regarding the motivations for your book The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror – can you give us a little bit of background: why you wrote it, what led you to write it?

Bracken: Well, when 9-11 happened I was in Riga, Latvia for an activist event to sort of protest consumerism. It took place throughout the entire city.

On the day of the event I knew better than to jump to any conclusions and I was very reluctant of course to say one way or the other who had done it. But after about six-months time and looking at some of the evidence and of course this was the same year that Jame Bamford published Body of Secrets that contained the information and reproductions of documents about Operation Northwoods.

For your listeners who may not know – Operation Northwoods was proposed in the early 60s prior to the beginning of the Vietnam War and Gulf of Tonkin just before that.

Robles: That was the one, I'm sorry, that was the one to blow up a done civilian aircraft and start a war with Cuba, right?

Bracken: Exactly, right.

Robles: Tell us about that plan. It was actually turned down for the extreme quality of it, but…

Bracken: Yes, sure. It was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer who proposed the plan to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. And so the idea was to have a covert attack upon America. So the idea that they would attack America and this would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.

I guess that they had planned some bombings in Miami and Washington DC and blowing up an American ship in Cuban waters. That was what the plan had as sort of its stratagems. The kind of a tactics that would be used to provoke an attack. I have a theory that I have developed, it's not just my theory but I've advanced it somewhat and we call this the "Indirect Attack". You know, this is always an attack pretending be someone else.

So the idea was that the attack would be staged and would make it look like the Cubans had done it and that would justify the attack. We can see throughout history that this has taken place. You had Cuba in fact, you have the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 to get the United States into the Spanish American War, and then in 1915 you have the sinking of Lusitania to bring the United States into WWI, in 1939 you have the provocation by Hitler, he staged the raid on the Gleiwitz radio station to begin war with Poland. And of course Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Operation Northwoods was in 1962, then in 1964 was the Gulf of Tonkin.

So at the same time the assassinations, and of course were coming up, the anniversary of Kennedy assassination – these events were well-known and were accepted as having involvement of the States. These other things were also taking place and of course these two now are becoming increasingly more accepted.

Robles: You just mentioned Pearl Harbor as being a false-flag attack. Can you give us little background on why you are saying that was a false-flag?

Bracken: You can look into some of the books that have come out- the one that I drawn a great deal is called Others Unknown, it's by Stephen Jones. I think that the evidence has come out that there was advanced knowledge on the part of the US military and the US Administration, at the time the Administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And the idea was that they would send out the newer ships so that the older ships would be blown up and it would look like the Japanese had in fact attacked us without our knowledge when in fact there was advanced knowledge and the people on the ground in Hawaii were denied the information that was being held in Washington.

There are some documents that were missing from the archives that point to this, it's the implication.

One of the things about the book which is The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror in addition to some detailed synopsis of these events we also have a chronology.

Robles: I recently wrote an article regarding 9-11 etc. And I found a mention of your book, I was researching actually something that I had read years ago from the project for New American Century.

It was very interesting that when I started researching this, the project for New American Century website was up and within like 5 hours of my beginning digging there, this site went down and disappeared and it has not come back up.

Regarding 9/11 state terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism and in particular the Project for New American Century – can you give us some background?

Bracken: Sure. I'm also the author of the first biography in any language on the French theoretician and filmmaker named Guy Debord. He was part of what was called the Situationist International– the radical Marxist group that went from 1956 into the early 70s. And he stayed together with one of the members of the group whose name Gianfranco Sanguinetti and the two of them developed a theory of terrorism – sort of offensive-defensive theory of terrorism, saying there is offensive terrorism,, there is defensive terrorism, and it can be either direct or indirect.

And I have been working with that theory. I'm trying to develop and trying to advance it because, as I said, I wrote the biography on Debord and I also translated a book by Sanguinetti. Sanguinetti's book is called On Terrorism and the State and this is where this theory was presented for the first time.

So with my book what we set out to do initially was to prove what we called the State Terror Thesis. And this is to recount many of the instances in which it's well known or fairly well-known and there is some reasonable evidence to support the idea that states use terror.

The big thing that influenced me in writing the book was the fact that in 2001 Jim Bamford published Body of Secrets about the NSA and other things which talked about the Operation Northwoods.A more recent example was actually spoken of by Zbignew Brzhinsky in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in February 2007 in which he referenced a leaked document that said that George W. Bush had considered shooting down a UN plane in order to justify attacking Iraq.

So there is a lot of instances of this, with regard to Sanguinetti and his theory on Terrorism and the State. This involves the assassination in May of 1978 of Aldo Moro, who was the Christian Democratic Party leader, who was trying to reconcile some of the different political factions in his country.

And of course Sanguinetti's book was published in the next year 1979 and then again in 1980 they had the Bologna railway bombing which killed a lot of people. And a lot of the evidence has pointed back to, I hate to say this, but it pointed back to NATO and this Operation Gladio, it's called.

And there are several books published in Europe that have gone to great detail. One is by Philip Willan it's called Puppet Masters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, another one is called NATO's Secret Armies by Daniel Ganser. Of course, there are books in French and Italian on the subject.

In fact the European Parliament has tried to go back to NATO and say:"What is the chain of command on this? How could you have justified these attacks, pretending to be the Red Brigades in Italy and yet having infiltrated these groups?" And NATO refused to respond.

Robles: What was the purpose of Gladio?

Bracken: The original idea of Gladio was these were going to be stay-behind armies that after WWII the US and NATO would leave caches of weapons in countries such as Greece and Italy and Turkey and set up networks that could be used in the event of a Soviet invasion or Soviet takeover or Communist Party takeover and then invitation of the Soviets, any eventuality.



That was the purported idea behind these "stay-behind" armies but in the end they ended up being engaged in provocations and according to Philip Willan, a lot of it goes back to the CIA base in Paris, the Hyperion Language School and that a lot of the people who were the Red Brigades who were doing the liaison, the sort of "fake" Red Brigades, they were doing the liaison with the CIA at the Hyperion Language School in Paris at that time. In any case, that is sort of briefly.

It turns out that the man who was most suspected of having pulled the trigger on Aldo Moro is free at this time. He did some prison time but he is actually a free man right now.

Robles: I see. Back to your book The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror, what were the motivations behind your book?

Bracken: People knew about my work in developing a chronology for The Strategy of Tension, this is called The Strategy of Tension in Italy, the idea would be that they would create so much social tension that masses would want to have the state protect them and it would justify any kind of police actions, it would justify a crackdown on the left, for example.

I've done a lot of work on that, I worked out the chronology of the Situationist International in Italy and of The Strategy of Tension in Italy – it's in my book called The Arch Conspirator, it's a collection of essays, and in fact I associated it with an open letter to the citizens of Poland in which I warn them that if they were to join NATO, that they would potentially have some negative repercussions along these lines, of course it turned out to be different, they were used more as these kind of "rendition centers" if my understanding of that is correct.

Robles: The "Black Sites"?

Bracken: Yeah, exactly.

So the idea is that you could have Direct Defensive Terrorism. So this goes back to the terror of the French Revolution.

So that the terror was used by the revolutionary regime to defend itself. And this was done directly, they said: "Ok, we are going to go out, we are going to have a 'Scorched Earth Policy', we are going to just terrorize everyone and they will fall in line with our revolutionary dictate". That would be a Direct Defensive Attack.

And then you have a Direct Offensive Attack. So these categories are a little but muddy -the example used by Sanguinetti would be the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. But of course we know that there were probably infiltrators there and that this is not so clean.

But just this whole idea that you could have the IRA, the PLO these groups would be involved in Direct Offensive Attacks against the established power, a minor group against the state. So then you come to the category of the Indirect Defensive attack and this is the example that we could use from Italy where the Red Brigades are infiltrated, they are militarized and a Defensive Attack is staged. But it's done indirectly in order to justify the established power going on the offensive or for other reason.

So basically it allows a Draconian crackdown or it allows the Patriot Act for example in the case of the United States. And then there is a forth category which is the Indirect Offensive Attack which has not been developed by Sanguinetti and I've done some unpublished work in that area.

But consider for example that maybe the British were caught in Iraq dressed as Muslims and carrying bombs and that kind of thing. So this would be an Indirect Offensive Attack, they are pretending to be someone else but they are doing it in a foreign country in an Offensive Attack.

Robles: There were reports out of Libya when all that was going on, there has been reports out of Syria as well, of officers being caught with British accents and Turkish accents and foreign languages being spoken.

Bracken: It could very well be this forth category –this Indirect Offensive Attack is where everything is gone since 9-11 which was an Indirect Defensive Attack although it was never really purely an Indirect Defensive attack because you probably had Israeli and Saudi involvement as well.

So it wasn't just the United States, there were other regimes.

Robles: Recently Prince Bandar, or "Bandar Bush", as he is commonly called, threatened President Putin and the Russian Federation with terrorist attacks during the Olympic Games if Russia didn't pull its support for Syria. He also admitted that they control Chechen terrorist groups, they control AL Qaeda in Syria. What can you tell us about that - the Saudi connection to Syria, to 9-11, to the Bush family etc. if you could?

Bracken: With regard to 9-11 I can say that there was the report of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence – this is joint inquiry into intelligence agency activities before and after the terrorist attacks in September 11th, 2001.

This was released in December 2002. And quite often when you get a report like this, that is conducted right after the fact it's going to be much more accurate than the 9-11 Commission Report, which we understand was more novelistic than historical.

So with regard to the Senate report they are missing I believe 24-28 pages and our understanding is that Senator Robert Graham has indicated in his novels and in other places, he sort of implied, that these missing pages relate to Saudi involvement in 9-11. Of course there was a plane that ushered out, when all other flights were halted, the Saudis were escorted out of the country.We understand that there was also a plane maybe even before the Saudi plane that ushered out Israeli nationals.

Robles: And the Bin Laden family…

Bracken: But the most damming evidence in my opinion goes to the Israelis, because, I have made the trip to Weehawken New Jersey where they had Urban Moving Systems and the only people arrested on the day of 9-11 were Israeli citizens, some of them tied to Mossad.

We know that with regard to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that the "Safe House" in New Jersey at that time was run by a Mossad Agent, probably working with the United States. In 2001 Urban Moving Systems, they had the white vans, the vans that Dan Rather said: "Hey the police have stopped a white van on the George Washington Bridge" and it had thousands of pounds of explosives and of course the people were arrested, there was a massive "Spy Dragnet" but they were all allowed to go back to Israel.

And our understanding is that the person who was running the operation in Weehawken, at Urban Moving Systems is back in the United States and is actually living here now.

What the law enforcement officials that we spoke to, we went back to Weehawken years after the attack, they said that they were livid because they knew what was in there, there were bombs, there were detonators and there was even supposedly Anthrax there! Is what they told us.

This is John Robles. You are listening to an interview to Len Bracken. He is the author of several novels including The Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror. That was Part 1 of an interview in progress, you can find the rest of this interview in our website at Voiseofrussia.com.