Britain, standing shoulder to shoulder with America, is, we are told, locked in a lethal struggle with murderous terror conducted by 'Islamic Fundamentalists' belonging to a formidable, efficient and fanatical organisation called 'Al Qaeda', led by Messaianic 'super-terrorist' Osama bin Laden. True or false? That is the question.

The answer, which it is the purpose of this article to suggest, is that this whole story is possibly the biggest heap of outrageous, bare-faced balderdash with which the ruling powers of our contemporary world have ever tried to insult our intelligence.

There is, of course, no doubt of the reality of the terrorist acts that have occurred, including, obviously, the onslaught on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Madrid railway bombings and the occasional attacks on American and other 'Western interests' in various corners of the world both before and after 11th September 2001. What is in doubt is their true authors and the 'real' agenda they have been designed to serve – as opposed to what we have been officially told.

By way of introduction, it may be said that 'conspiracy theories', i.e. views of events contrary to those disseminated by the Government and established authorities, have long been the butt of mainstream writers and publicists in our mass media and academe, who largely tend, from whatever motives, mental laziness or otherwise, narrowly to echo the official line on any tragic and momentous incident. Anyone who radically questions what these 'authorities' tell us is liable instantly to be stigmatised by these gentry as a crank, misfit or extremist.

But we nationalists more than anybody should be the very first to ask why the official line on anything of this kind should be given any privileged status whatsoever. This is particularly so where careful scrutiny shows the official version of any event to be grossly deficient. Why on earth should we give our present masters, who have wrought such ruin on our land and people, the tiniest smidgen of credibility? Surely, almost the whole of our métier is to dispel the smokescreen of lies behind which they have worked such destruction. And we know, of course, that they lie regularly.

As to whether we are to accept 'conspiracy theories', the sole criterion should be whether they stand up to rational scrutiny or not, as compared with official 'truth'. Before being rejected out of hand they should be tested according to the Sherlock Holmes maxim: "Once you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

As far as the accepted 'truth' about the September 11th attacks and the Bush/Blair 'war on terror' is concerned, this is taking even harder knocks with the passage of time. Dramatically, Channel Four TV felt driven to air a documentary on 9th September which went far to vindicate even the most radical sceptics.

One of the most vilified of these has been former television sports commentator and 'new-age' writer on global conspiracy, David Icke: Icke's analysis of the WTC and Pentagon attacks, is whatever one may think of some of his more outré-sounding propositions on other matters, the most comprehensive, no-holds-barred critique of official claims about these events to be published to date. Nationalists are strongly recommended to read his Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Centre Disaster: Why the Official Story of 9/11 is a Monumental Lie (Bridge of Love Publications, U.S.A., October 2002. £16.00. Available from the 'New-Age' section of most major bookshops). At the very least, the book is a wonderful riposte to George W. Bush's strange outburst in the aftermath of the catastrophe: "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attack of September 11th" " surely the watchword of every powerful figure with a guilty secret but hardly the sort of thing to be blurted out so soon after the event. It has more than a slight ring of the President protesting too much.

Questions not welcome

Icke's book is perhaps best begun at Chapter Seven. From this point the author describes the unfolding of the attacks on the day blow by blow, so far as the facts can be ascertained, US officialdom at the FBI, the Federal Aviation Authority – FAA, and the airlines whose planes were snatched did not, to put it mildly, welcome Icke's probing questions about the anomalies, implausibilities, contradictions and "economies with the actualité" of the official version. In fact, by his account he met a panicky-seeming stonewall.

They want us to believe that the September 11th outrages were the unaided work of Osama bin Laden & Co. But this is clearly hokum. It simply is not possible to hijack planes in US air space and then fly them around unchallenged for an hour or so more, on September 11th 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 was in the air for over 50 minutes from the loss of its transponder signal before striking the Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 93 for perhaps even longer before crashing or being shot down in Pennsylvania – both were allowed to continue flying way off course and incommunicado, even though the World Trade Centre had been hit quite a while earlier &150; not possible, that is, unless someone is allowing you to do it.

Even without transponder contact, it is no big deal for aircraft to be tracked by ordinary radar, so it is simply out of the question that the airliners were ever irrecoverably lost from sight by US ground control and surveillance agencies.

Supposedly ironclad procedures are in place to provide for the scrambling of military aircraft to intercept any plane losing ground contact, as each of the four airliners did in turn when their transponders went down. In such an event FAA regulations make it absolutely clear that air traffic controllers must never take chances. Icke quotes on page 220 standing instructions, stating in clear black and white that...

'... if there is an unexpected loss of radar or radio communication, as on September 11th, they must consider that an emergency exists... and if... you are in doubt that a situation constitutes an emergency or potential emergency, handle it as if it were an emergency.'

The next step is for the ultra-hi-tech North American Defence Command, NORAD, to be contacted without delay so that an intercept can be made. NORAD, charged with the defence of US and Canadian air space against any eventuality, including obviously a hijack, is capable of achieving this in a matter of a few minutes. Although American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, which both took off from Logan Airport, Boston, before striking the World Trade Centre, were in the air for a considerably shorter time than the other two aircraft, the disposition of fighter bases in the North Eastern United States is still such as to have allowed fast-flying interceptors to arrive in their vicinity well in time to stop the attacks - provided of course that the FAA and NORAD had been performing their minimum routine functions.

Slow reaction

As it turned out, fighters were tardily scrambled but appear, strangely, to have flown towards their RV with the airliners at subsonic speeds, guaranteeing that they would not make it before the latter crashed into the WTC. With similar tardiness, interceptors were launched against Flight 77. Oddly, these were dispatched not from Andrews Air base, eight or nine miles as the crow flies from the Pentagon and specifically sited for the defence of Washington DC, but from Langley Air Base, Virginia, some 130 miles away! See Alice in Wonderland, pp. 229-230. This must have helped to ensure, similarly, that the attack would get through.

During 2000 alone NORAD had managed to meet the type of situation in which ground control-cockpit contact had been lost, and/or aircraft had wandered off course (exactly as happened to Flights 11, 175, 77 and 93) with perfect efficiency no less than 125 times (Alice in Wonderland, p.219), as it is required to do when "anything inexplicable is happening." Any sensible explanation has so far been refused as to why it failed to do so four times in one morning on September 11th 2001.

We have just now been regaled by a US congressional commission of enquiry, perhaps sinisterly headed by a member of the Rockefeller clan, with the proposition that '9/11' happened because "America was asleep." Icke warned in his book that the establishment would claim 'incompetence' as the cause of what happened if put under pressure to explain itself. But it should be painfully obvious from all that has been said here that neither America, nor probably any other advanced country with sophisticated air traffic control and air defence systems, could possibly be 'asleep' in the way they are trying to tell us. These systems function with pre-determined machine-like precision; they simply cannot "go to sleep."

This fatuous explanation illuminates nothing, and is very likely intended as obfuscation. It is the considered opinion of knowledgeable people, such as ex-German Federal Government Defence Minister Andreas von Bülow, quoted by Icke, p.308, that the crucial non-functioning of these key agencies, along with the apparent 'failures' of America's external and internal security organs, the CIA and FBI, was something that could only have been procured from a very high level in the 'intelligence' command structure. Viewing the crime rationally in terms of means, opportunity and motive, it can hardly be in doubt that the people with the first two of these things at their disposal were, and are, to be found a good bit closer to home than the legendary lair of Osama bin Laden!

Veteran US 'Security and Special Operations' specialist Colonel Leroy Fletcher Prouty is one man who ought to know. His experience in the US intelligence community goes back over 40 years to the era of J. F. Kennedy's killing, and he has written about CIA involvement in that episode. Says Prouty: "No one has to direct an assassination; it happens. The active role is played secretly by permitting it to happen.This is the greatest single clue. Who has the power to call off or reduce the usual security precautions" [writer's emphasis]. Does this not apply in detail and a fortiori [by analogy and to a greater degree] to the WTC and Pentagon attacks?

'Compelling' evidence

No wonder that the Channel Four documentary reported that it is now, to quote the Daily Mail's TV critic Christopher Matthew on Friday, the 10th September 2004, "a widely held theory that the US Government conspired to make 9/11 happen – and indeed may have engineered it." The evidence offered by the programme, he added, "was compelling, and the people who supported it were clearly no fantasists."

No wonder too that Mrs. Ellen Mariani, whose husband died on Flight 175 when it ploughed into the South Tower of the World Trade Centre, is using racketeering laws to get the Bush administration prosecuted for deliberately standing down America's air defences in the full knowledge that the attacks were about to happen. Writes Matthew: "How was it, she asks, that every one of the 67 passenger planes that had veered off course before 9/11 had been intercepted by fighter planes, but not on this occasion?"

Which brings us to motive. Here too, the Channel Four documentary was enlightening. It made reference to the 'Project for a New American Century', the neo-conservative manifesto whose drafting was supervised by some of the 'usual suspects' one associates with the Bush régime. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush were names. The likes of Charles Krauthammer, Michael Ledeen, Bernard Lewis and Richard Perle, all of whom, along with Wolfowitz, have 'something else' in common, might have been added. All are significant 'think-tankers' who have contributed vastly to the formulation of the 'neo-con' weltanschauung [view of world].

The document (sometimes mentioned, not too widely read) was quoted to the effect that, if America were to become "tomorrow's dominant force," this would be a long business "unless there is a catastrophic and catalysing event, like Pearl Harbour." Clairvoyance? Or did these gentlemen know something the rest of us did not?

Doctrines of 'counter-terrorism'

Like bad pennies, a few of these neo-conservative names turned up in 'The Terrorist Professors', an enlightening article by Kevin Toolis in the New Statesman on 14th June 2004. America's new-found spirit of military aggression is ideologically driven, suggests Toolis, by what he calls the doctrine of 'counter-terrorism'. Rooted in the Cold War era and long pre-dating 9/11, this held that 'The West' was beset with terrorist threats sponsored by the Soviet Union. It was urged that any insurrection anywhere was the work of Soviet subversion and, by implication, that any state faced with such an insurrection must necessarily be "a strategic asset of the West."

Above all, this model was held to apply to Israel in its relations with the Palestinians, and it was Israel and its international support network who led the world in promoting it. All Palestinian resistance to Jewish occupation was 'terrorism', an idea that, once firmly planted in the minds of America's policy makers, survived the Cold War to re-emerge in the present day.

Hence the sprouting of incestuously related academic centres in Britain and America where 'terrorism studies', says Toolis, "are the new, new thing, and graduate programmes are springing up like an intifada across the western world." It is often difficult, he adds, to disentangle these "supposed academic institutes" from the "web of private corporations and guns-for-hire contractors that have sprung up to service the post-11th September era," and which give them profitable subsidies. Most of all, they are inseparable from "explicitly neo-conservative Israeli or Washington think-tanks."

"As an academic discipline," comments Toolis, "counter-terrorism is still exclusively devoted to sub-state groups... ignoring state terror." Thus if a Palestinian kills Israelis with a crude home-made suicide bomb on behalf of Hamas or Hezbollah that is 'terrorism'. But if the Israeli Defence Force wipes out several times as many Palestinians with state-of-the-art American-supplied missiles that is "legitimate self-defence against terrorism."

Meanwhile, within this intellectual framework Palestinian national aspirations and the Palestinians as a people are simply subsumed under the rubric of 'terror' as, to quote Toolis, "an entity to be crushed by military force, not a people to be negotiated with."

Israeli link

"Almost all western counter-terrorist academic centres," remarks Toolis, "are closely linked to Israeli institutions such as the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism." The executive director of this establishment is one Boaz Ganor, who turns out to be "a close political ally" of former Israeli Likud Premier Binyamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu is credited by Toolis with two achievements. The first was, when he was Prime Minister, to make counter-terrorism "the ideology of the Israeli State," of which it remains the model with its "targeted killings, pre-emptive bombings and all-encompassing security checks." The second, dating from the 1970s, was Netanyahu's role "as a vivid, brilliant propagandist and player on the Washington diplomatic circuit," to convince American conservatives that "the sectional interests of the Israeli State were identical to those of the western democracies," a matter over which, to be sure, Netanyahu was pushing on an open door.

To promote 'counter-terrorist' ideas, Netanyahu had founded the 'Jonathan Institute'. As Toolis states, many of the contributors at the second of its conferences, held in Washington in 1984, "re-appear as neo-conservatives in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War." Thus one may say that America's current lethal phase of conquest was tripped by power-wielders mentally in the grip of Zionism in its most psychotic and murderous form. After September 11th 2001, says Toolis, "American neo-conservatives such as Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle incorporated the Israeli counter-terrorist model into US foreign policy." Thereby not only are Israel's immediate geopolitical interests to be secured but, not for the first time in history, the whole world is to be shaped to an arrogant all-embracing Zionist-Jewish mould, as globalism marches, in a 'counter-terrorist' guise, behind American tanks and bombers.

Of course, you can't quite justify setting up any counter-terrorist régime, let alone one of global reach, without the existence of actual terrorists! The key question here is whether the people alleged to have carried out the September 11th and other terrorist mayhem were actually the people we have been told carried it out.

The US 'security' services were supposedly so incompetent that they had no idea that America was about to be attacked right up till September 11th 2001 – a downright lie if 'conspiracy theorists' are to be believed. Icke describes how the long-standing investigations of low-level FBI operatives into potential suicide attacks using aircraft were deliberately quashed by their superiors. In addition, Israeli Mossad agents masquerading as 'art students' were closely shadowing all the Arab immigrants later fingered as 'culprits', so Israel knew but said nothing. As Matthew relates in his Mail piece describing one theory, this was because its "government wanted to ensure the world was hostile to Arabs."

Yet by September 12th these agencies had suddenly become so efficient that they not only 'knew' that Al Qaida was responsible but were able to produce the names of "nineteen hijackers." As for this alleged "super-terrorist" organisation, let us read what Toolis says of it: "This amorphous global Islamic conspiracy" portrayed as busily besieging not only the "US super-power" but the whole of the western world had, "11th September aside." managed to kill the princely total of "just over a hundred American citizens in terrorist incidents spread over a decade."

Al Qaida 'miniscule'

Toolis describes Al Qaida as "a minuscule organisation." Not very convincing credentials for the star role the authorities evidently want it to play in the public imagination!

As for Mr. bin Laden himself, even Tony Blair was forced to admit in Parliament in the aftermath of the attacks that no evidence of his guilt existed that would stand up in any court. As Icke points out, Osama bin Laden has largely been convicted of the crime on the strength of repetition rather than evidence.

Is it not far more probable that, like Lee Harvey Oswald in the Kennedy assassination, and maybe Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma bombing, Osama bin Laden is the 'patsy' in an establishment 'sting' operation, a type of figure that, as Icke says, is crucially needed on such occasions? (Alice in Wonderland, pp. 17-18.) By these means, notes Icke, our masters "can so manipulate the public mind that people will... allow [them] to introduce what in normal circumstances they would vehemently oppose, including illegitimate, unnecessary and unjustified wars of conquest abroad and oppressive legislation at home." Hence the 'Patriot Act', pushed through the US Congress with indecent haste on a wave of post-9/11 hysteria and, here in Britain, David Blunkett's Civil Contingencies Bill, with its proposals for denying 'terror' suspects due process. No doubt, as time goes by, what constitutes 'terrorism' will prove endlessly re-interpretable at the whim of the authorities.

In this country since 2001 we have had terrorist scares rather than terrorist acts. But fear would serve such an agenda as we are looking at almost as well as facts, and fear is something our intelligence services have always been especially expert in generating for this purpose. Moreover they are set up so as to have a vested interest in promoting it! Thus a container full of "poisonous white chemical powder" was recently 'discovered' in a Heathrow warehouse, a plot to "bomb Manchester United football ground" was unmasked, a "nuclear dirty bomb conspiracy" has been foiled, all in the last few months.

As James Rusbridger remarked in his book The Intelligence Game (Bodley Head, 1989), nobody can ever prove one way or the other whether these claims are true, since MI5, MI6 and their ilk can always evade public scrutiny by pleading 'national security' considerations. Suffice it to say, he went on, that "neither terrorism nor espionage are as widespread or important as the security services would have us believe in the exaggerated stories they continually leak to the media, nor are they particularly good at preventing either" (op cit., p. 2).

Imaginary intelligence

Secret service charlatanism materially serves the projects of the powerful in very important ways. Says Rusbridger of the 'spooks': "All they need to do is find out what their particular politicians want to hear and then tailor the information they provide to please them. The most important form of intelligence for pleasing politicians is imaginary intelligence [Imaginint]."

This was written in Cold War days. Today the only novel thing about the great Whitehall farce, Iraq's 'Weapons of mass destruction' (starring Anthony Blair, Alastair Campbell and John Scarlett of MI6 and the Joint Intelligence Committee) was that the players got caught doing it in public!