IBERO-AMERICA TURNS TO LAROUCHE

Dennis Small: Let me set the stage for this part of the discussion by taking you back 20 years, almost to the day, to August 1982, which was the month when Lyndon LaRouche issued a book-length document called Operation Juarez. It was a result of, or sequel to, a series of meetings that he'd held in Mexico in particular. In May 1982, LaRouche had met with the then-President of Mexico, Jose Lopez Portillo, and had laid out to him the total existential crisis that the global economic and financial system was facing, and had laid out what the alternatives would be. As a result of subsequent discussions in Mexico, and requests coming to him directly, Lyn wrote Operation Juarez, which laid out exactly what this picture was.

The central point that LaRouche made there, was echoed in a writing of a few years later, a special introduction to the 1986 book Ibero-American Integration. I want to read you this quote, because it lays out exactly where we stood then, and today. LaRouche wrote:

“The governments of Ibero-America will be soon confronted with saving their nations from the chaos which a collapse of the international banking system will bring. When the imminent banking collapse occurs, those governments will be confronted with political decisions which must be made within days.

There will be no time available for scholarly commissions to spend weeks or even months in constructing long-winded academic treatises. Governments must act immediately, within days, in decisions which have revolutionary impact on existing banking institutions and monetary agreements, decisions of broad and profound scope, and of great pungency and substance.”

What LaRouche referred to then, as “soon,” is today. I want to draw your attention to the case of Argentina, in particular, which, over the course of the last eight months--the eight months of 2023--starting from a position of being one of the most developed countries in Ibero-America for sure, and among all developing sector nations, one of the most advanced--in the sense of its industrial capabilities, skill levels of its workforce, education levels, health levels, basic potential for actual economic development, this country has been destroyed. It is a country once known as the land of the pampas, of wheat and beef, and so forth. Now poverty has spread across the country. There is starvation occurring. There is indigence, extreme poverty, total destruction.

It's a stunning process. I was just in Argentina in May of this year; people from Argentina now tell me, “Oh, no; May was good! You should see it today!” And comparing Argentina in May of 2023, to the Argentina which I knew over the 1980s: it's an absolutely shocking situation. Imagine yourself as being in an elevator free-fall. That's what Argentina is like. People have lost their sense of mooring, and the country is disintegrating.

Argentina is a very good example. Because there, as globally--as in every country that LaRouche ticked off earlier today, and every country around the world--either we will have a New Bretton Woods, which will be organized around LaRouche's proposals; or we will have, because we are now already having, a New Dark Age.

The IMF policy which is bringing this about--exactly as in the case of NSSM-200, as Jeff was describing--is intentional. It's crazy; it's lunatic; but it's exactly what they intend. They intend the war; they intend genocide. And as Thomas Malthus would have been very quick to admit, perhaps the best way to bring about genocide and population reduction, is not even so much by war, but by means of economics.

This region, of course, is an area of tremendous economic potential, of which I will also try to give you a sense.

Lopez Portillo's Call to Action

LaRouche met with Lopez Portillo in May of 1982. The attack on Mexico, which LaRouche warned him of, occurred over the ensuing months. In October of 1982--in fact, on Oct. 1, 1982--Lopez Portillo addressed the United Nations General Assembly, and delivered a historic speech. In the early part of that speech, he said, “We cannot continue in this vicious circle, since it could well be the start of regression to the Dark Ages, with no possibility of a Renaissance.”

As you can see, 20 years ago, some people “got it,” when LaRouche talked about the nature of the crisis.

Now, in that same speech, Lopez Portillo went on to issue a call to action. I want to show you a video clip, about three minutes long. It's in Spanish, and I'll translate for you as he speaks.

“Today, Mexico and many other countries of the Third World are unable to comply with the period of payment agreed upon under conditions quite different from those that now prevail.

Payment suspension is to no one's advantage and no one wants it. But whether or not this will happen is beyond the responsibility of the debtors. Everyone must negotiate seriously, carefully, and realistically. The international financial system consists of several parts: lenders, borrowers, and guarantors; and it is connected with those who produce and those who consume, those who buy and those who sell. It is everyone's responsibility and it must be assumed by everyone. Common situations produce similar positions, with no need for conspiracies or intrigues.

We developing countries do not want to become vassals. We cannot paralyze our economies or plunge our peoples into greater misery in order to pay a debt on which servicing tripled without our participation or responsibility, and with terms that are imposed on us. We countries of the South are about to run out of playing chips, and if we cannot stay in the game, this will end in defeat for everyone.

I want to be emphatic: We countries of the South have not sinned against the world economy. Our efforts to grow in order to overcome hunger, disease, ignorance, and dependency have not caused the international crisis....

Global negotiations should begin immediately and should be conducted seriously and with every intention of reaching agreement. World peace and security are threatened today more than ever. We must safeguard them at any cost. Any solution or any concession is preferable to the alternative. We cannot fail. There is cause to be alarmist. Not only is the heritage of civilization at stake, but also the very survival of our children, of future generations, and of mankind.

Let us make what is reasonable, possible. Let us recall the tragic conditions in which this [United Nations] Organization was created and the hopes that were placed in it. The place is here, and the time is now.”

Lopez Portillo was saying that what humanity was facing, was exactly the alternatives that LaRouche is talking about today.

Almost 20 years later, in December 1999, the same Jose Lopez Portillo shared a podium in Mexico City with Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and here is what he said:

“When we would go to the international bodies, they disdainfully did not take into account, either our political problems, or our social problems; and by dint of their rejection of the values of our revolution, we became accustomed to disdain it, and even to forget it....

Dona Helga--and here, I wish to congratulate her husband, Lyndon LaRouche. It is now necessary for the world to listen to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche. Now, it is through the voice of his wife, as we have had the privilege of hearing.”

Now, it will not surprise you that Lyndon LaRouche was invited, earlier this month, to a conference in Guadalajara, Mexico organized by the MSIA, the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement, and he was there scheduled to share the speakers' platform with Lopez Portillo. Lopez Portillo was unable to go because of ill health. LaRouche was unable to go, because he was denied security by Mexican officials, on orders of a standing imposition from the United States State Department, that, after what LaRouche did in 1982 in Mexico, he would never again be allowed into Mexico--as LaRouche characterized it in a public statement. You can probably imagine what that meeting in Guadalajara might have meant.

That is what the State Department's intention is. We'll see about that.

Argentina Dying of Dollarization

Now, on the Argentina case. There are probably no better words to summarize the emotional impact of what is happening in Argentina, than those of retired Maj. Adrian Romero Mundani of [retired Col. Mohamed Ali] Seineldin's movement. These are his words when he shared a platform with LaRouche in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at a recent meeting there on economic integration [see EIR, June 28, 2023]. He was referring to what Lyn has been telling people for two decades, at least:

“Everything we have heard from Mr. Lyndon LaRouche and his collaborators for so many years, is no longer the theory of a thinker, which one could subscribe to or not. Today, this is reality.... We Argentines have had the sad privilege of being the tip of the iceberg--of an implosion, of a catastrophe toward which we are advancing, and we think there is time, but there is no time.

We Argentines woke up one day, and we had lost ... everything.... Argentina is dying.”

What was he referring to? In Figure 1, the upper curve there is the real foreign debt of Argentina. The three points represent different time periods. The first is 1990. Then we jump to the year 2023. And the next one is just 6-8 months later, in mid-2002. You can see that the debt has been rising.

But the other thing that has been rising is the light-colored bar, which is poverty. In the last year alone, the percentage of the population of Argentina which is officially impoverished, has jumped from 35% to 53% of the population today. Official unemployment, which is the dark-shaded bar, has jumped from 18% to 25% of the labor force in approximately eight months.

On this issue of poverty, 53% is the national average. In the northwest of the country, 73% of the population is impoverished. Of the impoverished, half are considered indigent. Poverty means that they don't have the minimum income required, to purchase the minimum market basket of consumption. Indigent, or extremely poor, means they don't have the money required to buy food. So, one-half of that 53%--about 26% of the Argentine population--is hungry. Of the youth, 14 years and under, 70% are considered impoverished. Seventeen thousand people per day become poor in Argentina.

The situation with inflation is reflected in the cost of basic items: In the first quarter of this year, the market basket cost rose by 42%. Medicine rose, so far in 2023, by 200%.

What has happened in Argentina, is that people have taken to picking over garbage heaps for food. Remember: this is Argentina. This is the land of cattle, and the pampas, and grain. Argentina today produces 2 tons of grain per capita per year. With 1 ton of grain per capita, you can feed a person excellently well--about 3,000 calories per day. So, it's not a problem of production. Argentina produces twice as much [grain as it needs], but it is a country that is starving. And the question, of course, is why?

What's happening on these garbage heaps? The issue being debated in the Argentine press today, is, how many more people are having to pick over the garbage heaps each week. And the discussion is that, unfortunately, today, there is not enough garbage to go around!

Major Romero Mundani tells a story, also reported in the Argentine press, of children dying of starvation, and the case of one young girl who, in her mother's arms as she was dying, said, “Mama, is there food in Heaven?”

The Moment Argentina Could Have Been Saved

Why is this happening? It's happening because the bankers, who are trying to collect the debt, cost what it may, are hell-bent on doing this, and they are imposing genocide. Take a look at the next slide (Figure 2) to get an idea of how this works. This is “bankers' arithmetic,” as we've seen in other forms. Argentina's debt has become progressively dollarized over the course of the last decade. Today, 99% of the public debt of Argentina is dollar-denominated. What does that mean? When there is a devaluation of the currency, you had better watch out (Figure 3). From December 2023 until August 2023--in eight months' time--the Argentine peso has been devalued by 73%.

What does this mean for Argentina's foreign indebtedness? Well, since they're so heavily dollarized, as you can see in the next slide (Figure 4), their debt, in pesos, has skyrocketted. That's the upper line. The lower line is the dollar debt. What Argentines have to pay, of course, is what the debt is valued at in their own currency, which comes from their own economy. In the twinkling of an eye, that amount changed, such that the $242 billion debt (which was worth 242 billion pesos only one year ago) is now equivalent to 905 billion pesos, in their local-currency equivalent.

Some people would say, with a certain tone of pessimism, “Well, this was in the cards for Argentina; there was really no way around this, it was bound to be.” This is not true. In December 2023, when Argentina was teetering on the brink, when it was in that phase-change that LaRouche described in the quote I read at the outset--that period of a few short weeks and days at most, when people can make decisions to change the course of history--some very interesting things happened. I want to show you what happened when Adolfo Rodriguez Saa was inaugurated President of Argentina, sworn in on Dec. 23, 2023. He gave a speech in the Congress--it must have been midnight at the time--in which he addressed what he was going to do in the country.

“We are going to take the bull by the horns: We are going to speak of the foreign debt. First, I announce that the Argentine state will suspend payment on the foreign debt.”

Now watch what happened with the Congress. The entire place went crazy. They all rose to their feet cheering, and then started chanting, “Argentina! Argentina!” Rodriguez Saa himself was stunned by what he had unleashed.

But he was out of office within a week. Death threats, and he was sent packing. But under those circumstances, it was, in fact, a real possibility that Argentina might have stuck to that policy course. And--to answer your question in advance--yes, people close to Rodriguez Saa, in his immediate environs of family, friends, and advisers, were, and are, subscribers to Executive Intelligence Review.

The same type of situation as I've described, briefly, for Argentina, prevails in Mexico, in Brazil, in every single country of Ibero-America. We can document that in greater detail in the discussion, as may be necessary.

The Case of Fujimori's Peru

But what I want to do at this point, is to give you an idea of what the potential is for actual development and growth in this area. Because the irony of all of this--the thing that is so infuriating--is that none of this is necessary; not just in Argentina, or in Ibero-America; nowhere in the world is this type of poverty and destruction required.

I want to quote for you what Alberto Fujimori, then President of Peru, said on Sept. 1, 2000, in a speech that he gave at a summit meeting of South American Presidents in Brasilia, Brazil:

“Seen from a satellite, the South American subcontinent is enormous, more than 20 million square kilometers which contain resources which make us, united, the number-one mining, fishing, oil, and forestry power in the world.

However, there below, in that so generously endowed portion of the planet, we also see great areas of coca or poppy cultivation, immense belts of urban misery, unemployment, endemic diseases, precarious education, terrorist violence, etc., etc.

And, as if this were not enough--and this is not detected by satellite--we have to add to this already somber panorama a sizable and heavy foreign debt weighing upon the shoulders of our peoples, and whose principal, according to conservative data, has been paid several times, over the course of these last 25 years.

We are 450 million South Americans, but 200 million of our people live in poverty, in precarious living conditions, reminiscent of centuries past. Something has gone wrong; we are not on the right path, and perhaps it is necessary to rectify this.|...

We South Americans are no less capable than other peoples of the world, who are achieving progress. Therefore, our goals must be audacious and our actions sufficiently efficient to turn our dreams into reality.

It is for that reason that, perhaps ingenuously, or as a dreamer, I would like to think that this first meeting, convoked by [Brazilian] President [Fernando Henrique] Cardoso, would become the birth certificate of the United States of South America.”

Now that was Sept. 1, 2000. A week later, Fujimori spoke at the United Nations, and talked about the terrible weight of the debt, and how it had been paid many times over, and how something had to be done about this. Shades of Lopez Portillo, 18 years earlier.

However, one week after that, Fujimori was driven out of power. He was forced to call new elections. He was overthrown by the State Department, Project Democracy, and so on. On Sept. 16, two weeks after he had given this speech in Brasilia, he called for new elections. And then, on Nov. 20, he actually resigned.

Was it due to the speech that he gave in Brasilia? Yes; but there was something else. On Aug. 31, the day before he gave the speech in Brasilia, the Los Angeles Times wrote the following about Fujimori: “The Fujimori regime has hardened its tone with anti-U.S. diatribes and a strange affinity for the far-right ramblings of the U.S.-based Lyndon LaRouche movement.... His regime could become the model for a trend.”

Now, the time has come to report something which is known to only a few people here. At the time that this article was written in the Los Angeles Times, and at the time that Fujimori gave his speech, there were plans under way for Lyndon LaRouche to visit Peru. He was scheduled to be there in October of that year [2000], and although I have no intention of going into any of the details about that, let me simply say that it was going to be a fairly spectacular visit, given what was happening in Peru at that time--and in particular, with Peruvian-Brazilian activity towards integration around a common project of development. Not only was LaRouche scheduled to speak; one of his speeches was going to be broadcast by video-conference across the entire country.

So as you can see, this prohibition against LaRouche--because “the guy is too dangerous”--is not something that applies only to Mexico. This is something that they intend to make apply around the world, in places such as Peru.

Infrastructure and the Noösphere

The final point that I think needs to be addressed, to open the discussion period around this, is that the issue of development is not simply a question of resources, as has been made clear a number of times in the course of today's proceedings. We're not talking simply about the fact that Ibero-America is very wealthy in natural resources, and so on; nor, what Lyn was describing in terms of the Central Asian region. The crucial question here is the deliberate, intentional intervention of mankind to transform that natural wealth.

That is to say, wealth is a question of that aspect of the created universe which corresponds to the Noösphere, in terms that Vernadsky would have described it. It is that specific aspect--the noëtic aspect, the human creative aspect--which is what gives value to economic activity. And it is the way that infrastructure inter-relates with an existing physical geography, to make those circumstances adequate to receive and to spread creative advances, that is the crucial question here.

The transparency  will show us the same map that I think Lyn showed, which gives you a picture of the world land-bridge. The black are rail lines that already exist. The light lines are the ones that don't exist, that have to be built. I think the whole idea of the Noösphere is very nicely communicated by the next map (Figure 6), which shows the exact same thing, but from a polar view.

You can see that way that, if developed by man, the entire land-mass of the Earth is one, of the entire globe. Some of it's over the edge of the horizon of this view--but you could, in fact, building this world land-bridge, not only take a train from Tokyo to Rotterdam in a much shorter time than it now takes to get there by ocean (by rail, it's a mere 13,600 kilometers); you could also take a train from Buenos Aires to Berlin--going past the Darien Gap, going across the Bering Straits, cutting across the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and making it to Berlin, perhaps for an opera performance that weekend! And that's only 20,000 kilometers.

I think this view--I really like this, because it gives you a sense of the way man can take the entirety of the Noösphere under his control. And this in fact, raises the whole question of metric and measurement in an economy. Rather than this crazy idea of “net value added”--you know, GNP is supposed to be [the sum of the] net value added at each stage along the way--I think we should talk about “noetic value added,” not “net value added.” That, at least, poses the right question, a very challenging question of how you, in fact, do account in an economy. And it puts the focus in exactly the right place.

My concluding point is best shown by the video clip which shows a little bit about what can happen in the southern part of South America with this approach. This is a joint rocket launch of Brazil and China.

GROWING RESISTANCE TO WAR

Jeffrey Steinberg:  I would like to welcome the audience and those people who are participating via the Internet in this conference. I encourage both to participate by submitting questions.

The theme of this evening's panel is international organizing; specifically, our international organizing to stop the war, and to stop the ongoing genocide, particularly the genocide taking place in this hemisphere. I will be one of the two, brief, presenters this evening, along with Dennis Small, who is the Ibero-America editor of EIR, and a member of the National Executive Committee and the Ibero-American Executive Committee of the International Caucus of Labor Committees. We wish to dedicate this evening's panel to the memory and life's work of our colleague, Carlos Cota, who passed away in March of this year. He was a member of the Executive of the Ibero-American organization, and made lasting contributions to our organizing, and to the overall work on the Latin American integration policies, which are now, more than ever, needed.

The title for my brief presentation is, “Growing Resistance to the Iraq War.” I would propose to change that title to, “How To Stop a War That Has Already Started.” Obviously, right now, everyone is immediately focussed on the imminent danger of the Bush Administration, against all sane international advice, launching a new war against Iraq. And a great deal of what you see and hear in the television news, and in the newspapers every day--the debate that's going on--is centered around the question of whether there will be a new war starting in Iraq.

That war would have already been under way--and it would not have been an Iraq war; it would have been a full-scale “Thirty Years' War,” beginning in the Middle East, but rapidly spreading to every corner of the globe--and the only reason that that war has not already started, is the initiative of this international political movement beginning about five weeks ago. (I didn't think anyone suspected that Brent Scowcroft and James Baker III would be the guys responsible for stopping this war.)

About five weeks ago, Lyndon LaRouche launched an initiative, which everyone in this room has played a role in carrying out. That initiative [announced on a July 27 radio broadcast by LaRouche] was to get out 5 million leaflets all over the United States. There was an initial leaflet which zeroed on [Iraq war-party Senators] Lieberman and McCain; but then the leaflet, of which the last 4 million copies were distributed, was entitled, “The Electable LaRouche”; and it discussed all of the critical issues in a very short couple of pages--what the issues of American history are, and the importance of the institution of the Presidency; the fakery and the lying about LaRouche not being electable, when his enemies have spent billions to prevent his election. Their ability to continue to function that way is rapidly running out; they're losing their money, and it's emerging as a moment when everyone is turning to LaRouche and his policies as the solution to the crisis.

Middle East War Since 1974

Were it not for the fact that we took to the streets of the United States, and began a mass political dialogue with the American people, on the issues of war and genocide, this war would have already been under way.

This evening, we'll go through it a bit more, to make sure that everyone has a really sharp edge--because the next phase of our campaign is going to be even more intensive, a larger mobilization on the street between now and November. And if we all do our job right, we will defeat this war.

For starters, I want to talk about the actual war that we're fighting to stop.

As I said, it is a war that has already begun; and it is not about Iraq; it's not about Saddam Hussein. So forget everything that's being talked about in any of the media, whether it's pro- or anti-war. It's irrelevant to the issue, as we have to understand it, and as we have to go out of this room prepared to organized to defeat those people pushing this war.

The war that I'm talking about--the war that LaRouche is talking about--you could say that it began in 1974. A number of things happened that year, that were indispensable towards launching the ongoing, the “perpetual war” that has hit the entire Middle East region and beyond for more than 25 years.

1974 was the year that Henry Kissinger promulgated National Security Study Memorandum 200, which was signed a year later by President Gerald Ford, and has been the underlying national security doctrine of the United States ever since. The basic thrust of NSSM-200 is that economic development and population growth in the developing world is a national security threat to the United States, and must be stopped at all costs. The argument was, simply, that the entire strategic raw-material resources of the entire planet are urgently required on behalf of the national security interests of the United States. This was during the Cold War, and obviously, everything was couched in terms of the struggle between the West and the Soviet empire.

But basically, Kissinger's concept--a classic Malthusian, genocidal idea--was that the United States and its English-speaking allies must control all of the strategic raw-material wealth of Africa; all the strategic raw-material wealth of Ibero-America; all the strategic petroleum and natural-gas reserves of the Persian Gulf; and at all costs, no modern nation-states could be allowed to come into existence, or continue to exist, in any of these areas of the world.

The Middle East was particularly important for two reasons: Number one, the petroleum wealth of the region, which is a very particular, vital raw material for the energy supply for the world economy. Second, the Middle East is a major crossroad between Europe and Asia, and between Eurasia and Africa; and therefore, creating a perpetual war in that part of the world, assures that there can be no effective economic development throughout Eurasia and Africa.

The second thing that happened in 1974, is that the British oligarchy deployed one of its senior Arab Bureau intelligence officers--Bernard Lewis--to the United States to run the policy; basically to administer, as a kind of colonial gauleiter, the national security policies of the United States. Remember, that years later, in 1982, at a conference in London, Henry Kissinger would boast that everything he did, he did on behalf of the British monarchy and British intelligence, and that he was never loyal to anything about the United States--particularly, not to the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt. Kissinger, a British agent, promulgated a policy that goes back to the days of the East India Company; and the senior British Arabist, Dr. Bernard Lewis, was sent to the United States, set up shop in Princeton, New Jersey, and became the principal foreign policy and national security adviser to the Zbigniew Brzezinski government, when it came into power in 1977.

The ‘Crescent of Crisis'

Lewis developed a policy that came to be known, in the late 1970s, as the Bernard Lewis Plan, which was otherwise memorialized on the cover of Time magazine in January 1979, as the “Crescent of Crisis.” What Bernard Lewis basically said, is that we are going to destabilize the entire Muslim world, the entire Persian Gulf region, because it borders along the south of the Soviet Union. We are going to create an Islamic mess, a chaos, insurgency of wars, along the southern tier of the Soviet Union; and this is how we're going to destroy the Soviet Union.

So in typical British and Anglo-American fashion, the very first American ally who was turned upon, overthrown and betrayed, in 1979, was the Shah of Iran. The net effect of that was that the stage was set for an eight-year war in the Persian Gulf. The Khomeini regime came into power in Tehran; and within months, Iran and Iraq were engaged in a war that would go on for eight years.

Now, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a private discussion with the Shah of Iran, shortly before or shortly after he was removed from power, presented NSSM-200 in a very candid fashion. He simply said to the Shah, “There will be no new Japans in the Persian Gulf, and there will no new Japans south of the Rio Grande River.” The policy was very clear: perpetual war, chaos, destruction.

As part of the eight-year war that was manipulated between Iran and Iraq, we're told that there was a standing committee inside the U.S. government, that basically modulated the supplies of weapons to both sides, to make sure that the war was perpetuated as long as possible; and particularly, that Iraq, which was a country that had already emerged as a nation with a modern industrial economy, a highly skilled labor force, a top-flight education system, and with the ability to disprove the Kissinger-Brzezinski thesis about no new Japans in the Arab world or the Persian Gulf, was decimated. The purpose of this eight-year war was to decimate Iraq and decimate Iran. And so, we had the famous Ollie North Iran-Contra arms pipeline, and all sorts of other things that people are quite familiar with.

The purpose of that war was to wreak genocide and havoc on the entire region.

It happened that Iraq had a very substantial disadvantage in the war, in that Iran had a far larger population. And so, among the things that were done, by the United States, Britain, and Israel, in order to “level the playing field” to keep the war going as long as possible, was that Saddam Hussein was provided with chemical and biological weapons, by the United States; by successive U.S. administrations. So there's something a little strange here, when President Bush, and Vice President Cheney, stand up and say, “We have a mandate to go to war against Iraq, because Iraq has chemical and biological weapons.” Where did they get them from? Not only are they no longer there; but to the extent they were there, they were provided by the United States, by Britain, and by Israel, to further this perpetual war.

The next phase of the same war, was the Afghanistan war [against the Soviet Union], another part of the Bernard Lewis Plan. It began in 1979 under Brzezinski's direction, and continued for more than a decade. And during the course of that war, tens of thousands of young, desperately poor men--really boys--from throughout the Muslim world--North Africa, the Middle East, parts of Asia, the Philippines, Brooklyn, you name it--were recruited to be cannon-fodder in this mujahideen operation that was financed by the United States, Britain, and Israel, building up a massive opium and heroin trade coming out of Afghanistan and the extended area into Pakistan.

So, again, the policy was a succession of wars that were never to end. And if you look at the situation in Afghanistan today, that's precisely what's going on, as Lyndon LaRouche uniquely warned of this, both on Sept. 11 and repeatedly in the immediate days and weeks after the bombing started in Afghanistan--that this is not a winnable war.

Lewis' First ‘Clash of Civilizations' Call

So this is the war that we are dealing with. Now, everybody talks about al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the so-called Muslim fundamentalist threat, as another rationale for the war that people in and around the Bush Administration are promoting to start against Iraq. Israel wanted it to start last Spring; there are people pushing for it to start tomorrow morning, and it could very well happen. But the argument is as false as the argument about other kinds of justifications for genocide that come out of the mouths of these people. The fact of the matter is that the Clash of Civilizations war, which is being promoted right now, was first called for by Dr. Bernard Lewis in 1990, in an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” This is three years before Huntington wrote his article in Foreign Affairs calling for a war against Islam and against the Confucian world as well. So he [Huntington] wants war against 1.4 billion Muslims, and about 1.5 billion Chinese, at the same time. You get the idea, that these people are really out of their minds.

So it was 1990 that that call for the Clash of Civilizations war was put out. Back in 1990, Osama bin Laden was widely known, in British and American intelligence circles, as the “Tom Marriott of Peshawar.” He was working for us, and he was basically running a hospitality suite for all of the recruits--the 15- and 16-year-old kids who were being recruited around the world, and sent into Afghanistan for this perpetual war there: on our payroll, basically using his family's money to set up, literally, a hospitality suite for the arriving troops.

So, a year later, in 1991, we had the Persian Gulf war; and, again, it's Bernard Lewis who comes out, in early 1992, in an article in Foreign Affairs, and says, that the main purpose of the Persian Gulf war, was to bring an end, once and for all, to any concept of nation-state and nationhood and nationalism in the Arab and Muslim world. It's over. We manipulated Syria, and other Arab countries to go to war in alliance with the United States, against Iraq. Arab nationalism is dead. The only thing left on the scene, is going to be this new, virulent form of fundamentalism coming out of all of these people now streaming home from the American-, British-, and Israeli-sponsored war in Afghanistan, to set up operations to destabilize the governments in their own countries.

So now, out of Afghanistan, we had the spreading of this perpetual war policy into North Africa, the Philippines, and into every country in the Middle East. A complete disaster.

We've now reached the point where, particularly following the events of the 1997-98 full-scale breakout of disintegration in the post-Bretton Woods international monetary system, we're moving into the new phase of the war.

The new phase is motivated by two things. Number one: After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, at the point that Bernard Lewis made his initial announcement about the launching of the Clash of Civilizations, there was no longer a competing empire capable of challenging the Anglo-American empire for total world domination. During the Cold War, it was a little bit more difficult to move full steam ahead to implement National Security Study Memorandum 200. With the Soviet Union out of the way, that was the green light to go all out. And so the new name for NSSM-200 was Bernard Lewis' Clash of Civilizations.

So beginning in 1990, we've had the succession of wars in the region, starting with the Persian Gulf War--Operation Desert Storm--and now the preparations to launch a far more dramatic and deadly “Thirty Years' War”-type phenomenon in the Middle East region, to finish the process of crushing the nation-state. Or, as Henry Kissinger said in a book published a little over a year ago, to bring a permanent end to the Treaty of Westphalia system; the system of nation-states.

An Unqualified U.S. President

This is the war that we're up against. It's got nothing to do with Saddam Hussein. It's got nothing to do with Iraq; it has everything to do with the fact that a bunch of lunatics in the United States, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere, are out to provoke this Clash of Civilizations.

They see that, particularly in the period since 1997-98, there has been substantial progress towards organizing leading political circles throughout Eurasia, into endorsing and moving to implement parts of Lyndon LaRouche's call for the Eurasian Land-Bridge. The drive for war was made all the more urgent towards the end of 1998, when the then-Prime Minister of Russia, Yevgeni Primakov went to New Delhi and announced that he was supporting the idea of a strategic partnership among Russia, China, and India. This was a buzzword for major governments of Eurasia beginning to move behind Lyndon LaRouche's call for this Eurasian Land-Bridge, or “New Silk Road.”

So this area of the world, even more emphatically, had to be targetted for total destruction through perpetual war.

The other thing made very clear to the people promoting this Clash of Civilizations policy, was that they had to ensure, in the 2000 Presidential elections in the United States, first, that none of these ideas were actually brought to the American people to be debated; and number two, that the next President of the United States would be distinct in only one way--namely, totally unqualified for the job. That was it. There was only one question on the exam. It was delivered by Jim Lehrer at the first debate between Gore and Bush: “What would you do in the event of a financial meltdown?” And they both read the same teleprompter, and said, “We would turn to Wall Street and Alan Greenspan to tell us what to do.”

“OK, either one of you qualifies for the job.”

This means that we're facing a very difficult challenge. We're not in a situation, as we were in 1993 onward, when you had a genuine patriot in the office of the Presidency. We've got to clean house in the White House, in the Oval Office, and carry out what LaRouche has been discussing in recent weeks as a constitutional coup in the United States. We need a strong institution of the Presidency, and this bunch of bickering lunatics, who are the advisers to the President right now, are going to have to go. We're going to have to break the blackmail leverage over the President, and turn the United States upside down to create the preconditions for LaRouche's policy, and the personality of Lyndon LaRouche, to be part of the inner circle around this President. We have to seize the teleprompter, and survive what's otherwise an unsurvivable next two-year period.

When LaRouche first announced this policy of getting out 5 million leaflets, people asked him all sorts of questions: Should we target Washington?--all sorts of ideas. He said, “Look. It doesn't matter where they go out. The act of putting thousands of people on the street every day, to engage the American people in a discussion that they've been dying for--namely, a discussion about the real issues, the depression, the war, that kind of thing--will create a political ruckus.”

And I can tell you that Washington is reeling from this. We get feedback all the time. There is no other political figure in the United States capable of doing this. A very prominent Democratic Party official said, “LaRouche should declare himself the front-runner; because there's not another clown in the bunch who could get thousands of people on the street, not to mention having the literacy level even to write something like ‘The Electable LaRouche.'|”

The recruitment, mass organizing, engaging the American population in a very tough Socratic dialogue, is the way we stop the war.

If you've had the experience of dealing with Lyndon LaRouche, you know that one of the most important aspects of a Socratic dialogue, is humor. In Washington, D.C., you have a severe problem with the quality of the air, because most people walking around Washington are very self-inflated, and it's mostly very hot air. John McCain is walking around with electrodes sticking out all over the place; the combination of this crazy air, and John McCain ready to go into an electrical storm on a moment's notice--especially since this leaflet started going out--is probably the reason we've had such wretchedly bad weather in Washington for the past two months.

The Chickenhawks

The issue is: Don't go after these people as if they were all-knowing and all-seeing and possess all power. It's not like that. Back in the 1950s, there was a concept, among grammar-school-age kids--I don't know if it persisted in later generations--a phenomenon called “cooties.” Anybody that you were told had “cooties,” was someone you really wanted to stay away from. One of the things we want to do, is give a whole bunch of the people in the war party a good case of the “cooties,” to where they walk down the street and see people crossing over to the other side to not be seen remotely associated with them. And as with all of LaRouche's enemies--to use a slightly modified version of his stronger language--”All of my enemies are sleezeballs.”

In particular, among the leading proponents of a perpetual war in the Middle East, are a group of officials of the Bush Administration, referred to before the election as the Vulcans; after the election they were known as the Perle-Wolfowitz cabal. There's a really interesting thing about these guys. Whereas all of the top-level U.S. military have come down strongly against this proposed next phase of the perpetual war--from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to General [Anthony] Zinni, who was the head of the Central Command until a year ago, and is now a policy adviser to Colin Powell; Powell, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; [Gen. Brent] Scowcroft--all of these people oppose the war, because they know it's going to unleash this kind of religious war, Clash of Civilizations, that's going to lead to a Dark Age. It's not a winnable war.

And all of the people who are pronouncing themselves to be the warhawks, have never had a moment in their lives of military experience. Now, some other people, off the intervention that we've made against McCain, Lieberman, this whole war party apparatus, got the idea that there's an element of humor that's a very powerful weapon.

So what began surfacing a few weeks back, was the idea that if you carefully look at the career records--the curriculum vitae--of all of these top Pentagon officials, State Department officials, national security advisers, even Vice President Dick Cheney: Not one of them served a moment in uniformed service. And so they have been collectively renamed--no longer the Vulcans, nor the Wolfowitz-Perle cabal--they're now referred to as the “Chickenhawks.”

Let's look at a couple of these guys. Paul Wolfowitz: Deputy Secretary of Defense; one of the leading wannabe imperialists; received a series of university exemptions, and never served a day in the military. Richard Perle, the “Prince of Darkness,” self-styled Israeli spy, friend of Ariel Sharon; received a succession of draft deferments, and never served in the military. Doug Feith: interesting guy; his father was one of the founders of the Jabotinsky movement; Feith is a second-generation radical Likudnik, a real warhawk, but never served in the military. David Wurmser: now in the State Department working under John Bolton; another one of the super-warhawks and super-Likudniks; also, never served a day on active duty, and knows nothing about warfare. This is his wife, Meyrav Wurmser. She may have been in the Israeli Defense Forces; we don't have a complete enough biography of her. But she just recently received her Ph.D. from George Washington University, for a laudatory biographical profile of Vladimir Jabotinsky. So, she puts herself in the camp of self-professed fascist. Even Vice-President Cheney got a series of university deferments, and never served in the military.

We've already drawn blood on the Lieberman-McCain front. We've reached the point where Lieberman and McCain no longer hold hands, walking down the corridors of the Senate office building. They've become liabilities to each other because of what we've done, with the leaflets and the mass distribution of the succession of EIR offprints. We knew that they were bad news; that they were warmongers; that they were under the thumb of organized crime. But we really underestimated it until we put a team together to really look into it.

John McCain did serve in the military. And his military career is probably one of the most controversial issues around today. He was a POW in North Vietnam for a number of years. There are many different stories about what actually happened there. What we do know, is that he came back and was recognized, by his colleagues in the House, and later in the Senate, as the guy who really is the Manchurian Candidate. He's not all there; he's got electrodes where there ought to be brain cells.

Sept. 11-Type Threat

The idea is to ridicule these guys.

I'll tell you a secret. I was going to college during the Vietnam War period; and when the jackpot lottery took place in 1969, I was not unhappy that I drew a low number, and was not going to be drafted. On the other hand, I would not pretend to stand before you here, and claim to be the greatest military strategist and tactician since Douglas MacArthur--this is the kind of lunacy that these guys push. If you had a serious medical condition, you'd probably prefer to go to a doctor, rather than a charlatan; and that's what we're dealing with here.

This bunch of lunatics are intent on creating a war that is unwinnable and unstoppable. That's the kind of war that they want. And they, themselves, are not competent even to understand that issue; but the people who are promoting and deploying them, are.

This is where we stand. We may be facing, imminently, a new 9/11 terrorist attack; not coming from a bat-cave in Afghanistan, but from the same people who perpetrated the first Sept. 11; people within the black world of our own U.S. military establishment. There is the ever-present question, of exactly what the role was, of all of those Israeli “art students” running around the United States, before, at the time, and then subsequent to Sept. 11. There's very good reason to believe that Ariel Sharon is currently planning some kind of a false-flag terrorist attack inside the United States, or against a U.S. target, where there would be a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to somewhere in the suburbs of Baghdad. This, to force whatever remaining resistance there is, inside the Bush Administration, to erode altogether, and to get this war started within hours, days, or weeks.

We have a task cut out for us. But as Mr. LaRouche indicated, we're going to be continuing this mobilization, during the period between now and November when every politician in the United States running for office, is, in a sense, in a captive position. They want to win; they're going to be out there on the campaign trail; and we are going to be there, getting this material out, continuing the exposes. That is the only factor that stands in the way of this war moving into its next, and most deadly phase. What we've seen, between 1974 and now, has been the preparatory phases. These people are insane and desperate enough right now, to go for broke, and to go for the full-scale Clash of Civilizations “Thirty Years' War.”

We can stop it. But the only weapon in our hands is the mass-organizing process, here in the United States and around the world. If we do it, we'll not only stop the war; we will send this whole crew of chickenhawks back to the universities and think-tanks with their tails between their legs, completely discredited. And then we're in a position to put a different team of people in and around this administration, to make sure that the LaRouche agenda, rather than the Bernard Lewis agenda, is what is pursued.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Q: Earlier, you had spoken about Saddam Hussein, and housing 15- and 16-year-olds to help build an oligarchical drug trade [in Afghanistan]. Do you think there could be a connection to the children missing in the early 1980s and 1990s, trained and lured away by the CIA to take into Afghanistan to build these [drug] routes?

Steinberg: That's exactly what happened. We know from eyewitness and other accounts, that--first of all, Brzezinski, a couple of years ago, gave an interview to one of the French daily newspapers. He said that most people think that the whole Afghanistan conflict began, and was provoked by the Soviets, when they invaded Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, on Christmas Eve, 1979. But he said, “No, no, it didn't work that way. I got an Executive Order signed by Jimmy Carter in the early Spring of 1979, and we began conducting covert operations on the ground, inside the country, before the Soviets ever sent any troops in. We induced them into walking into a Vietnam trap.”

Now, what actually happened, beginning under Brzezinski, and then picked up during the Reagan-Bush period, is that literally tens of thousands of desperately poor people were recruited throughout the Muslim world. They were told--their families were told--your kids are going to die anyway, of starvation, poverty, violence; let them volunteer to be great, heroic freedom fighters in the war against the Great Satan, the Soviet Union, in Afghanistan. Furthermore, if you allow your sons to be recruited into this operation, there'll be a lucrative financial reward for you; and in fact, you will see more money than you could hope to earn in your entire life.

And so tens of thousands of young people, who, in many cases, had ne ver even studied the Koran, because they did not know how to read--they had some minimal amount of religious training, but really had no understanding whatsoever--were brought to training camps in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. They were put through military training. And in many cases, they spent the next ten years fighting against the Soviet Union. They weren't taught anything about Islam. They were told that if you die killing the Great Satan, you will go to Heaven and have a harem of hundreds of wives forever. It was a completely syncretic, phony-baloney thing; and to give some credibility to it, the U.S. government went to the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and a number of other Arab countries, and said, “You've got all of these firebrand young Muslim Brotherhood people in jail. Let them out. Ship them off to Afghanistan. They'll be the spiritual leaders of this whole movement, and along the way, all of these people are going to be killed off.”

So many of the names that you read about in the newspapers today, like Ayman al-Zawahiri, who's the so-called chief operations guy for al-Qaeda, was in jail in Egypt until the United States went to the President of Egypt--at that time, it was still Anwar Sadat--and asked for him to be let out of jail so that he could be part of this U.S.-British-Israeli-sponsored war.

A Giant Narco-Terror Operation

Congress allocated billions of dollars a year to keep this war going. But the best estimates that we've got, is that all of the money provided, in combination, by the U.S. Congress--U.S. taxpayers' money--matching funds that were set up by the government of Saudi Arabia and some other Persian Gulf governments, covered about 10% of the costs of the war. The bulk of the expenses of this war came out of the international drug trade. And in the areas that became controlled areas of this mujahideen apparatus, on the ground inside Afghanistan, you had a flourishing opium trade. You had pre-existing opium warlords in the area; but in terms of international opium production, and conversion and sale on the streets of Europe and the United States as heroin, the main supply areas had been Southeast Asia, not Southwest Asia. All of that changed, beginning in 1979.

And it was well known that the very same camps and centers of training that were running this operation, were also the secured locations where you had heroin laboratories. And they had their very own bank. The BCCI bank [Bank of Credit and Commerce International] was the opium war bank for the 1980s project in Afghanistan, that was part of this overall NSSM-200 Clash of Civilizations policy.

So, it was a narco-terrorist insurgency, and that's what you're dealing with here. Many of the people, after the end of the Afghanistan War per se, when the Soviets withdrew in 1990, were simply left behind. The United States said, “Thanks a lot.” British intelligence, being a little bit more experienced in these kinds of things, created an open house in London, so that all of the people who were veterans of this mujahadeen apparatus were basically told, “You have safe haven in Britain. You'll be given political asylum and protection.” And in fact, most of the major so-called Islamic terrorist incidents that occurred over the past decade, were organized and deployed out of London.

We asked Madeleine Albright to place the British government on the list of state sponsors of terrorism; and believe it or not, we never even got a response to our letter. But that's the reality of it. Osama bin Laden has a house in Wembley, England. I don't think he's visited it recently, but I wouldn't even be surprised to find that he had.

So that is the nature of this thing; it's dirty, it's drug wars. There's not a terrorist operation in the world today that wasn't created by an intelligence service, and isn't financed because they are international drug traffickers, from the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] in Colombia, to Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path in Peru], to all of these Afghansi groups. One great big narco-terrorist operation, which accounts for about a trillion dollars per year in illegal drugs all over the planet. Why do you think Richard Grasso, from the New York Stock Exchange, went down to the jungles in Colombia, to embrace the head of the FARC, and say, “This is a guy we can do business with”? Because they're desperate for the narco-dollars.

That's what was created. And there are people at the top who know, that this is exactly what was done. We defeated Ollie North in 1994 because he was so overexposed on this issue. This is, again, one of their vulnerable heels, that we've got to exploit.

Economic Collapse Kills More Than War

Q: I have an observation. It seems to me that, given the theme of the conference--Global Financial Crash of 2023--and using your example of Argentina, which you so eloquently presented tonight, that part of the practicum of Kissinger's memorandum NSSM-200 is to put countries into financial debt that is so insurmountable, that at some point, they'll just be able to pull the plug, when devaluation goes high enough and they can't possibly pay back; and then the countries go into starvation, and it's exacerbated by war; then they don't really have to unleash, necessarily, atomic bombs. They have debt bombs that will cause starvation worldwide, and genocide in that fashion. So it seems as though this is just part of that whole NSSM memorandum.

Small: Exactly. Parson Malthus was someone who argued exactly that case. That is to say, that economic conditions can be used for precisely the purpose of population reduction, which is inefficient in the case of direct killing by warfare. But rather, if you unleash the conditions under which not only starvation, but disease, in particular, run rampant.... This is exactly what happened in the 14th Century.

There is a reason that LaRouche is talking about this 14th-Century parallel. There are two reasons, as I see this. One is that what is being done by the banking crowd, then and now, is exactly the same thing. The Lombard bankers of Genoa, Florence, had actually built up a bubble that was of such proportions, that the insistence on collection of that debt unleashed conditions in the actual physical economy, which had lawful consequences leading to the conditions under which the Black Death spread like wildfire throughout the entirety of Europe. The same boats were coming in, with the same rats, which had the same fleas on them, with the same bubonic plague, as had been happening for decades and centuries earlier. But under conditions of physical economic breakdown, what had been a bad problem, became something that was wildfire, completely out of control. And that's exactly what's happening under these conditions as well. And it's intentional.

The second point of the parallel here, which is why I think it's important to keep coming back to this 14th-Century question, is that humanity did get out of the 14th-Century problem. And the way it happened was a Renaissance. Nothing less than a Renaissance worked then, and nothing less than a Renaissance is going to work right now. You are not going to solve this with minor palliative solutions. You're going to have to go to the actual root of the problem, and reverse that. And part of that is to recognize the absolutely intentional quality and nature of what the oligarchy is unleashing, both on the side of wars--as Jeff demonstrated--and also, in terms of economy policy.

This is a constant battle that we have in organizing people in Ibero-America, or in any other countries in the Third World.... People turn to you and say, “But don't they understand what they're doing? Don't they understand we won't be able to pay? This is crazy. They're stupid.” Yes, they're crazy. No, they're not so stupid. They're doing this as an intentional policy, in which they are succeeding. This is success, unleashing an unending war, is success as far as they are concerned, not a failure.

So, yes, these are two prongs, as you're pointing out, of a global policy which is the enemy we're combatting. And again, the only thing that is actually going to function today--and this is why it takes someone like LaRouche--is the degree to which we unleash the same type of Renaissance in every single area of human endeavor, as occurred in the period of the late 14th, 15th and 16th Centuries.

Steinberg: Let me just add a footnote. Lord Bertrand Russell, whom LaRouche has described as “the most evil man of the 20th Century,” wrote a book called The Impact of Science on Society. And in it, he said that wars have really not done a very good job of population reduction; the 20th Century has seen two world wars, but population growth continued on a fairly steady basis throughout that period; perhaps, he said, we can come up with something better. What if we were able to produce a Black Plague once in every generation? Then the right kind of people would be able to procreate freely, without worrying about overpopulation. He says that this is, perhaps, a bit of an extreme solution, but he thinks it's a viable one. That's 1951. It just tells you, that this is an absolutely self-conscious policy, that unless you can unleash all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, wars alone won't cut it.

Sharon, Sept. 11, and War on Iraq

Q: This is a question for you, Jeff. About a year ago, maybe in July of 2023, you wrote an article in EIR that had a title something like, “Sharon War Plans Exposed.” And in that, you said that they had the plans [for war] pretty well laid out, but one hitch was that they had to do something to convince Bush to go along with it. And that that would probably be some kind of a massive terrorist attack against a target inside the United States. In September--I believe Sept. 10, in fact--the Washington Times carried an article about a Defense Department, or U.S. Army War College study, that showed the capabilities of the Israeli Mossad to carry out terrorist acts, and then make it seem as though Arabs actually perpetrated those acts.

My question is: Tonight, in your presentation, you expanded on what you wrote more than a year ago; and then, at the end of it, you actually predicted, again, another terrorist attack against a U.S. target. And I would just hope that you could elaborate more on that. What do you think really happened with 9/11? What do you think was the actual Israeli involvement? What do you think, for the future, that involvement could entail?

Steinberg: Let me start by saying something fairly obvious, that needs to be said anyway, to shape what's said afterwards.

This is a very, very sensitive question: the possible involvement, alleged involvement of the Israeli spy networks in the actual events of Sept. 11. We've been very careful, if you notice, in the past year, in not saying anything about this issue, that we are not absolutely certain of. This is why we have not said that Ariel Sharon was behind the Sept. 11, 2023 attack. The current issue of New Federalist, dated Sept. 2, has an article I wrote on the front page, asking the question, “Is Sharon planning another Sept. 11-type of attack in the United States?”

This is an issue that's come up in discussions that we've had with leading intelligence contacts, sources, in the United States, in some Arab countries, and interestingly, inside Israel. People are concerned about the obvious prospects of another Sept. 11 attack.

It's clear that there are some people in the United States who, for whatever limited reasons, don't want this Iraq war to take place right now. You've seen, particularly in the last three or four weeks, an interesting surfacing of many people very closely associated with former President George Bush. You had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Brent Scowcroft, the retired general who was the National Security Adviser under George Bush. James Baker III came out, about a week ago, with a very similar article. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf came out, warning against an Iraq war at this point.

All of this began to surface immediately after George W. Bush began his Summer vacation, about three weeks ago, and went up to Kennebunkport and spent a couple of days with his parents. What I surmise from this, is that even Bush, Sr. got scared by what he saw; and that he concluded that G.W. has more than one screw loose on this issue of going to war--a war that will not only provoke this Dark Age Clash of Civilizations, but will isolate the United States completely from the rest of the world.

So, you've got some people who really are very much concerned. Now, one of the big problems of this particular war; when you have, basically, a child as President, and inadequate supervision--it's a daycare center that's been taken over by the kids--it's not exactly the kind of leadership that engenders confidence that this is going to be able to be handled well. This issue of well-management was historically a point of obsession with Bush, Sr. Think about how well he managed the coalition for the 1991 Gulf War, and even managed to convince Israel to stay on the sidelines. What do you think the odds are, that George W. Bush is going to be able to keep this Nazi, Ariel Sharon, on the sidelines? What do you think the chances are, that an Iraq war will not trigger Sharon's attempt at the mass expulsion of what they say are about 3-3.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? Other people believe that the combined Arab population of Israel proper, the West Bank, and Gaza is probably closer to 4-6 million.

Israeli Spy Scandal

So there's an issue here, of whether or not this particular government in Washington could control anything, once they start dropping the bombs on Iraq. And so you've got a fight that's broken out publicly. As I said at the beginning, this fight never would have happened if we had not successfully executed this strategic flank that LaRouche called for, in timely fashion. We got out about 5 million leaflets in five weeks in the run-up to this conference. It completely changed the political environment in the United States.

We created a different situation, in which people suddenly realized that LaRouche had something to say here, and in their own limited fashion, decided to try to do something to slow down the timetable.

Now, Sharon happens to have a timetable that demands that this war start yesterday. He wanted it to start in June, and people said, well, it's a little hot in June in the Mideast, and nobody can survive in a tank in a desert in the Summer. These were not considerations on Sharon's plate. The Israeli economy is shattered. The high-tech sector is an adjunct of Silicon Valley, so you can imagine what's going on there. By the end of this year, a million Jews will have emigrated out of Israel, because they know that the place has been turned into an insane asylum under Sharon. It's the upper middle class, the most educated and cultured section of the population. Their kids are gone, their money is gone, and they're packing their bags and leaving.

So now, finally, you're beginning to get somewhat of a reaction, that it's not necessarily a good idea for the survival of Israel, for the assassins of Rabin to be in power. In the last few weeks, you've seen the surfacing of this former military commander, General Mitzna. Not much of an impressive military track record, but he's the mayor of Haifa, and he's emerging as somebody who wishes to carry forward the mantle of the Rabin policy, going back to the Oslo peace process. In the last few weeks, the polls in Israel are showing that people want, perhaps, to get rid of Sharon.

So Sharon is personally becoming desperate. He's been a war criminal for as long as we've been able to trace his military career, back to 1948. We've published on this in EIR.... He was installed in power, to do what he's done for the past 50 years; namely, carry out murder and genocide. But now, some people inside Israel are beginning to think that maybe this was not a smart idea. And so, Sharon could be gone. You could have a vote of no-confidence tomorrow morning, because they haven't been able to pass their budget, and he could be out of there.

So Sharon is driven to more and more desperate circumstances. We're getting words of concern fed back to us, from people in better positions, perhaps, than we are, to know certain operational details. They're saying that Sharon is putting teams in place to carry out a 9/11-type terrorist attack inside the United States, with all the breadcrumb trails leading back to Baghdad, to get this war going immediately. It could happen.

One thing we are going to do, to make sure it doesn't happen, is raise the roof over the issue of the Israeli spy scandal. I can't say that there was a direct, witting Israeli government involvement in the actions of Sept. 11. It's not unusual when you have a sophisticated military covert operation like Sept. 11--LaRouche diagnosed it correctly moments after it happened, as it was still unfolding--this took years of preparation, detailed inside knowledge of the security vulnerabilities of the United States. And they were massive; but not necessarily generally known to the public.

There were unquestionably internal American factors involved in organizing and executing the operation. In the same way that we know what the nature was of the Kennedy assassination, but don't know the name, rank, and serial number of the shooters in Dallas, the same is true of Sept. 11.... It was a government-level military operation, heavily penetrated within the United States.

Do the Israelis represent capabilities that fit the general description? Yes. Do we have proof that we would go out publicly with, saying that the Israelis did it? No, we don't. So we've got to point to what we do know. We know that there was a massive Israeli military-intelligence espionage going on all over the United States, targetting military facilities, Federal buildings, law enforcement, drug enforcement. We know it was going on from no later than January of 2000. And we know that it continued well after the events of Sept. 11. We know that there were at least 125 Israelis detained by U.S. authorities for spying inside the United States between January 2000 and July of 2023. They were on the ground, operating here prior to the Sept. 11 events. And we also know that about 75-80 others were detained after Sept. 11, and that the operation continued.

One of the most recent incidents is that two Israelis were stopped nearby a naval station in Oregon; they were driving a rental truck where they found traces of plastic explosives and TNT. There was a major effort to cover up that incident. We know from talking with some of the people there, at that naval facility, that the military guys considered this a deadly serious attempted penetration for some reason. There was a particular incident that raised a lot of alarm bells, which occurred in Hoboken, New Jersey on Sept. 11; where a group of five or six Israelis were arrested by local police for very suspicious behavior. They were on the roof of a moving company warehouse that they worked for, looking across at the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, and they were very obviously happy about it. Neighbors saw it, called the police; they were held for three or four months; and ultimately, it turned out that the company itself was a Mossad front, which shortly afterwards, disappeared, with the owner going back to Israel.

Stop Ashcroft, and You Stop Sharon

These are all things that we do know. And we know that John Ashcroft has ordered a massive cover-up of this operation. And that's intolerable. If you want to stop Sharon from moving ahead with whatever he's planning, in conjunction with his skunk friends in the United States--these chickenhawks, and others who have a more sophisticated capability--then we've got to blow the lid on the cover-up of this Israeli spy operation. Put it out! Let people know. Have Congressional hearings. Let's find out what it was that these people were doing. All we have is, a 60-page report was leaked out of the Drug Enforcement Administration, that was basically an incident grid, that describes a lot of interesting things, but is not even an evaluation. It just lists incidents and says here's the guys who were involved, and here's what their [Israeli] military training was--demolition, electronic surveillance, primarily.

Ashcroft covered it up. And many of the people in Federal law enforcement who were involved in the investigation, and trying to get to the bottom of what this Israeli business was all about, were demoted, changed to different assignments, and this is all part of a war going on under the surface and behind the scenes. Some of these people have gone to the Senate Judiciary Committee to complain about what Ashcroft is doing.

We're going to blow the lid on this. The article that's already on the websites, and is in New Federalist, puts some of these issues on the table. We're going to be publishing additional material on the whole nature of this Israeli spy operation. But the main issue is that this wannabe Nazi--probably too stupid to pass the mental exam, but certainly desires to be a replay of the Nazis--John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, is running a massive cover-up of this operation, and that's got to stop. He's one of these loony Christian Zionists, so you can understand why he would want to do that; but this is intolerable: To be carrying out a cover-up, when it may very well give Sharon the sense of confidence that he can carry out some kind of 9/11-type attack in the United States. This is treason.

There are people in both the House and the Senate, who have a certain sense that the Constitution has been taken into a back room and ripped up and burned, by Ashcroft and company--with the so-called Patriot Act, and all of these other anti-terror measures. People are beginning to whimper about it; not stand up and fight, but whimper. We've got to create the climate where they develop the courage to demand this.

We know that the Senate Judiciary Committee has all the information they need to blow the lid on the Ashcroft cover-up, so we've got to make sure it happens. It's the only thing that we can do at this point, to stop Sharon from doing whatever he's planning. And the same goes for his cohorts inside the United States.

-30-

Return to the Home Page
Top