because it was a coup d’etat, 9/11

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/14/legendary_author_gore_vidal_on_the

But he wants to show off: ‘I’m a wartime president! I’m a wartime president!’ He goes yap, yap, yap. He’s like a crazed terrier. And look where he got us.


I didn’t realize—I think I’ve always had a good idea about my native land, but I didn’t think that institutionally we were so easy to overthrow, because it was a coup d’etat, 9/11. The whole went crashing. And when we got rid of—when they got rid of Magna Carta, I

...

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, Gore Vidal, when you say you think what happened after 9/11 was a coup?


GORE VIDAL: Well, it was. The first move they made at the time when Timothy McVeigh decided to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City—he started to write me letters, and I wrote him back, and he’s a brilliant kid, very interested in law, would have made a good constitutional lawyer, and a patriot. He’s a professional soldier. But he has to be depicted as a monster, because who else would blow up little children?


But he didn’t know he was blowing up any little children. He was acting out of a fit of rage at what had happened at Waco, when that whole religious community was set fire to by the Army. And as a soldier, he thought to himself, you see, the one thing that divides our country from being another military or militarized republic, it is not only due process of law, but it is also the Posse Comitatus Act of 1875, which the Army may not be used in any action against the citizens of the United States. And they just wandered—bang! bang!—they set fire to the place, burned down more children and mothers and so on than ever Mr. McVeigh did.


So, at that time, it happened during the—must have been what’s-her-name, Janet Reno, when she was Attorney General. It was during Clinton’s watch, which was a sloppy one. And they got some panicky legislation, because they thought, and with some reason, that there was a group of people, many of them ex-soldiers, who were ready to overthrow the government. And they were anti-Semites, they were—I mean, anything you can think of, they were that. They were in rebellion against this country.


And I wrote about it in warning terms. I went so far as to write Mr. Mueller, who was the new director of the FBI. And I saw he was never going to follow up. They did all these interviews with various guys living in the woods around Fort Hood. I said, “They’re going to be trouble one day, and you don’t even follow up on them? Yet you go on inventing stuff about McVeigh which isn’t true.” They tried to pretend he was a crazy and this and that. Well, he got the Silver Star, I think it was.


AMY GOODMAN: Persian Gulf War.


GORE VIDAL: Yeah. So the coup d’etat comes out of this.

[Bolo Boffin]

1. Oh, Timothy McVeigh didn't KNOW there were kids in that building.

Well, I'm sure the parents of those children feel all better knowing that. Thanks, Mr. Vidal.

[SDuderstadt]

2. It's also stupid to claim that the US Army set fire to the compound...

when the cult members are clearly heard talking about setting the place on fire.

[CJCRANE]

3. It's obvious 9/11 was designed as a coup.

The destruction of the WTC provided the "shock and awe", the hit at the Pentagon provided the casus belli for the eternal "war on terror"...but the final plane didn't reach its target thus depriving the neocons of their Reichstag Fire.

So instead they had to rely on anthrax and intimidation.

[vincent_vega_lives]

4. Lots of obvious things happened on 9-11

aparently. :crazy:

[CJCRANE]

5. Ok

why don't you tell me who financed the attacks...and then whether they were more closely associated with the Bush administration or Saddam Hussein? Then we'll see what's obvious.

:shrug:

[LARED]

6. What kind of logic are you using?

Do you somehow think there is a relationship between the closeness of association between the Bush administration or Hussein with the perps of the 9/11 attacks, and the mythical coup d’état. How does that work exactly?

[CJCRANE]

7. The old-fashioned kind of logic

used in a court of law. You look at the motive, means and opportunity of the perpetrators. We know the hijackers were hired hands. They were operatives selected for a mission (look at what Buzzy Krongard says about Al-Qaeda financing) they may have known very little about at the onset.

So the question arises as to who financed the attacks (that's the means) and what were the motives (of the financiers)? The other question is how did the opportunities arise for the training of the operatives, their free movement within the continental US and the (mostly) successful completion of their mission?

If the motive of the financiers was in fact to do all the things that Zelikow mentions about the "searing, molding event", i.e. to unleash draconian measures and justify the use of force abroad, then that to me satisfies the definition of a coup. Particularly if they were expecting the dome of the Capitol to be destroyed...that's about as close to a Reichstag Fire in America that you can get.

(If you also look at the precedent Business Plot of the 30's and the Republican double-dealing with terrorists and rogue nations of Iran/Contra it doesn't seem so far-fetched).

[LeftofU]

8. The coup was the 2000 election

911 was about consolidating power.