This week’s False Flag Weekly News featuring John Friend (watch it above) opened by citing Kevin Ryan’s tribute to the late Graeme MacQueen, one of the finest scholars, and people, of the 9/11 truth movement. Though Professor MacQueen did critically important work on several key areas of the 9/11-anthrax false flag, two of his contributions especially stand out: He became the leading expert on the more than 156 eyewitness testimonies to explosives going off during the demolition of the Twin Towers and WTC-7; and he wrote the best book on the anthrax component of the 9/11-anthrax operation. Above is the radio show, and below is the write-up and full transcript of my interview with him on the occasion of the publication of The 2001 Anthrax Deception in September 2014.
Canadian professor Graeme MacQueen has just released a terrific new book on the anthrax case – and ripped the lid off the lies and deceptions, proving that it was the neocon 9/11 perps (not Saddam, Osama, or Bruce Ivins) who did it.
The book, THE 2001 ANTHRAX DECEPTION: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, may one day stand beside David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor as one of the rare books that changes history. Why? The anthrax case offers slam-dunk proof of a neocon conspiracy – and has even been officially deemed a false flag. Like the blatant, broad-daylight demolition of WTC-7, the perps’ anthrax screw-up represents a monumental achilles heel in the official story of 9/11-anthrax. Grab this thread and pull, and the whole thing will unravel. Please give this book to your congressional reps and tell them that if they don’t read it and do something about it, they are worthless ineffectual cowards simpering through a meaningless charade.
In this interview, we discuss the copious evidence of official foreknowledge of the fall 2001 anthrax attacks, including the June 2001 Dark Winter bioterror exercise that almost perfectly mimicked the attacks three months later. We also roll our eyeballs at the ludicrous and doomed neocon propaganda campaign – obviously coordinated by the anthrax perps – to blame anthrax (and 9/11) on the dual perpetrator “Saddam + al-Qaeda.” And we conclude that the 9/11-anthrax operation was designed to fulfill the neocon dream of overthrowing American democracy and installing an executive branch dictatorship under a state of perpetual war.
For more information on this topic, check out last week’s interview with journalist and anthrax expert Barry Kissin.
Transcript
Kevin Barrett: Welcome to Truth Jihad Radio. I'm your host, Kevin Barrett, bringing you fascinating interviews on a regular basis with the best guests who have the most to say about what's really going on in the world: all the things that you're not supposed to know, apparently. And there are more and more critically important issues that are utterly covered up or misreported. It seems to be getting worse all the time. And I think the best way to peel back the illusion and take a look at the reality is to identify the key places where the official version just completely falls apart, and anybody who takes a serious look at it can see that. And one of those areas is the anthrax case — or should we say the anthrax component of the 9/11 operation, because that's basically what it appears to be, especially in light of this great new book by Professor Graeme MacQueen. Professor MacQueen teaches Buddhist studies. He's done work in a whole lot of areas. And his brand new book is called The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy. And it looks like an airtight case to me. What do you think, Graeme?
Graeme Macqueen: Absolutely airtight, Kevin. I have no special interest in saying that, of course. (laughter)
Kevin Barrett: It's it's interesting that the authorities, the media, the established institutions all admit that the anthrax case was a false flag, apparently designed to incriminate Muslims, by a domestic germ warfare scientist. But they haven't quite connected the dots. They haven't quite got the right scientist or scientists, and they haven't quite gone all the way to the top, where it appears that this thing was part of the 9/11 operation. I think your book really fills in the blanks here. I'm not sure where to start. There's so much great information in this book, including some stuff that was new to me. Maybe we could set the stage by doing the run-up to anthrax even before 9/11. There was a very interesting bioterror exercise and other events that you have found to be related to the anthrax attacks.
Graeme Macqueen: Well, one of the giveaways about the anthrax attacks is the extent of the foreknowledge of these attacks. Now, the most dramatic and clear foreknowledge occurs between 9/11 and the identification of the first victim who was diagnosed on October 3rd. Between those two points, nobody is supposed to have known — except the perpetrators — that anthrax was in the works. That is, there were letters with anthrax sent out postmarked September 18th. But nobody's supposed to have known about those letters as they made their way through the mail and so on. And yet there was a tremendous amount of knowledge! There was a run on the antibiotic used for anthrax, and so on. So I try and sort through that foreknowledge. But what you're asking about now is in a way even more interesting. And that is the indications, even before 9/11, that bioterrorism was going to be a big issue soon, and that Americans might be struck by anthrax. And, of course, this was all presented to us as really good intelligence — state of the art intelligence — from the US intelligence community, which was, you know, reliably and patriotically passed on to the public by the news media. And so, in other words, everyone was supposed to be worried about it for valid reasons. As it turned out, of course, none of those reasons were valid. It wasn't accurate intelligence, it wasn't accurately passed on. It was all fabrication. And that means that it's very fishy.
Kevin Barrett: That's one way of putting it.
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah. Like, who was transmitting all this misinformation — this disinformation — in advance? Now, you made reference to an exercise that occurred before 9/11. This is one example. It's one of the more dramatic examples. It was an exercise called Dark Winter, and it took place in June. So about three months before the the actual anthrax attacks happened, we have a military training exercise in which various players are going to simulate a bioterrorist attack on the United States, one involving mainly smallpox, though the exercise also included threats of anthrax. And so I look at that Dark Winter exercise in sufficient detail — it's not a major focus of the book, but it's an example of something that's very peculiar happening a few months before 9/11. Here we have an exercise in which it's gradually revealed as the exercise goes on that bin Laden may be involved. And it's gradually revealed that bin Laden couldn't have this sophisticated bioterrorist material on his own. How would he be able to develop it? And so there must be a state behind him somewhere. He's got a state sponsor. Then there's a list of possible state sponsors. And then by the end of the exercise, it's narrowed down to Iraq. So by the end of this exercise in June, we're told that a major (in the training exercise) bioterrorist attack happens in the United States, causing huge numbers of deaths. It's done by a double perpetrator, al Qaeda — (though) it's not called al Qaeda in the exercise — but it's bin Laden's name that's given and it's called a terrorist group based in Afghanistan that is supported by Iraq. And that's who's done it. And now we know, of course, there are all kinds of other parallels as well.
Kevin Barrett: And that's exactly what happened with anthrax: They tried to blame it on this double perpetrator, al Qaeda plus Iraq. And in fact (we heard) from Richard Clarke (about) the seven countries in five years targeted for regime change after 9/11.
Graeme Macqueen: Right.
Kevin Barrett: It seems that that was also part of this double perpetrator plan. Wolfowitz and his people were all trying to say that it was al Qaeda plus Iraq.
Graeme Macqueen: Yes, that's right. And thanks for mentioning that. Because, of course, people know in general very little about the anthrax attacks. Now, they've been kind of hurried down the memory hole. So people may have a vague idea that some US scientist was eventually found guilty of the crime. But they they often forget that this double perpetrator, that is to say, al Qaeda and Iraq, were strenuously blamed for the anthrax attacks when they first happened, and that a lot of the work done in October by the US executive branch was really meant to do that. It was meant to to tell us "that's who did it." And of course, that was setting setting things up for an attack on Afghanistan, followed by an attack on Iraq, both of which happened.
So in the book, I was really careful not to immediately start talking about Bruce Ivins. That's the FBI's current choice as anthrax perpetrator. You can get bogged down in that. I don't think Ivins had anything to do with it, and I give reasons for that. But we have to remember that Ivins was nowhere on the scene, except for offering to help because he was an anthrax specialist, but he wasn't accused for years. In the immediate time of the attacks, it was al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Kevin Barrett: Very interesting stuff. So basically, the real anthrax attacks in many respects perfectly mimicked the bioterror exercise, Dark Winter, that ran three months earlier.
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah. And initially you might say, oh, well, that's the point of an exercise. It uses the very best US intelligence. We're talking about a US exercise and it tries to create plausible scenarios and so on. But of course now we know that it wasn't valid intelligence. Iraq had no anthrax. Al Qaeda had no access to anthrax. They did not work together in any case, and so on. So it was all fiction. And it was the same fiction pushed on people in June in the fake — in the simulated — attacks. And then a few months later with the actual anthrax, the same fiction comes forward. And the more I looked at that, the more I got a feeling of vertigo. You you lose your bearings. You start asking, is it really a case of a simulation and then reality? Or is the line between simulation and reality being blurred so much that it becomes difficult to know one where one leaves off and the other begins? And another reason I say that is because in this exercise in June, as I say in the book, several of the people participating in the simulation were later crucial in the actual attacks.
Kevin Barrett: Shades of the pilot who allegedly flew the plane into the Pentagon having run a drill simulating flying a plane into the Pentagon one year earlier. You really can't make this stuff up.
Graeme Macqueen: No, no, you couldn't. We really need to think about it. I mean, I was sufficiently interested in that, that I gave a paper at an annual meeting of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, which is basically an academic peace studies association. I gave the talk, a year ago or so, on the issue of really what is a simulation. Were the anthrax attacks themselves an example of a kind of simulation, a lethal simulation?
Kevin Barrett: Like 9/11 itself was too.
Graeme Macqueen: Well, exactly. I mean, they're a little bit like, I guess, a snuff film, which I've never watched. I never intend to. But apparently real people are killed as part of the film. And so I've often wondered whether 9/11 and the anthrax attacks are kind of a snuff film. They're certainly lethal.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah. You know, I think there's a reason, which may not be quite so apparent at first glance, why they do this and blur the lines between reality and fiction in this way. It's a way of inducing learned helplessness by confusing illusion and reality or confusing fiction and reality. And in fact, there's a great book, Coercion, by Douglas Rushkoff, which goes into the fact that all mind control is based on the same process, which is disorienting the subject, and then regressing the subject to an infantile state and then stepping in as the substitute parent figure or authority figure. And that process of disorientation, Rushkoff explains, often involves blurring the lines between imagination and reality. A classic example he gives is the car salesman who takes you for a drive, and he looks at you very carefully. And just when you have a little bit of a space-out moment, he pops the question, "Is this the kind of car you can see yourself driving?" And of course you are actually driving the car. And he's asking if you can imagine yourself driving the car that you actually, in reality, are driving, and that causes the eyes to glaze over. Car salesmen all know that there's a serious chance of an accident at that moment. And then he takes over and becomes your substitute parent figure: "Okay! Let's do it. Drive back!" He gets you back to the dealership. Serves coffee. Doesn't ask whether you want coffee. Says "do you take your coffee black or with cream?" And he just takes over and you walk out with a car not knowing why you bought it.
Kevin Barrett: And so I think that they're inducing learned helplessness by consciously engineering these events that blur fiction and reality. And even in the truth movement, we're getting disinformation from the same kind of sources that are blurring the truth about these conspiracies with various fictional forms.
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah, well, that's very plausible to me. So thanks for for raising that. Certainly the whole issue of authority and parental figures and so on forces itself upon us again and again. When we look at 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, I made no attempt to do an analysis of that sort. But you'll see it implied in the book. In other words, the whole idea of the unthinkable — the anthrax attacks are called unthinkable. You and I, we're not supposed to think about them. It's beyond our ability to imagine.
Kevin Barrett: Only the neocons are allowed to think the unthinkable.
Graeme Macqueen: Exactly. So you as an American citizen are supposed to throw yourself into the arms of the executive, the US government — in the case George W Bush, Cheney, and the cloud of neocons, some of them in government, some of them out of government, that surrounded them: "These are the people that will take care of you. They will drop nuclear bombs on dangerous Muslims if necessary. You don't have to worry about that. They will take care of bioweapons by setting up elaborate defenses against them" and so on and so forth. So there is that.
Kevin Barrett: Infantilisation — wasn't that what Susan Sontag called it? She took all kinds of heat right after 9/11 (when) she said, "they've infantilized us!" And all of the usual suspects just ganged up on her.
Graeme Macqueen: Interesting. I didn't know that. But that's definitely part of what was going on in the fall of 2001. And it infantilized and intimidated citizens, as well as the members of Congress who passed the Patriot Act. And again, as I looked into that, I knew that in general, the anthrax attacks had been supposedly used to pass the Patriot Act. But it wasn't until I forced myself to sit down and look at it in detail that I saw how astonishing it all was. You know, members of Congress being warned not to identify themselves as members of Congress. They might get killed, couldn't wear their little congressional pin, were supposed to not use their special license plates. So they're all kind of in hiding. They flee town. The House of Representatives was...deceived and intimidated during that period, just when the Patriot Act was coming before them. And the FBI issued the biggest warning since 9/11, on the very day that the Senate was going to be considering the Patriot Act. And that evening, late in that evening, they passed it. So there's just one thing after another. You have to have the patience to go through the timeline to see it. But it seems to me really clear.
Kevin Barrett: So your book does a great job of following that timeline, and in particular making the case even stronger that the anthrax attacks, especially the letters sent to Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, were clearly part of an operation to force the Patriot Act through Congress. Maybe you could go over some of those details about who Daschle and Leahy were and the timeline, because it is astonishing how obvious this is.
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah, I was thinking about it today and I thought, well, gee, I can't give a lot of specific dates because people listening to this won't remember them and they'll get confused. But I'll kind of go through some of the high points here and you can guide me as to at what point I'm getting too detailed.
First: The first question I had — and you have to remember, I'm coming at this as somebody who doesn't pretend to any expertise on the US Senate and Congress. I'm a Canadian, for one thing. So I thought to myself, okay, I've heard that Leahy and Daschle were targeted with anthrax. Why Leahy and Daschle? I mean, obviously, they're Democrats and you have a Republican government, and high members of it want to get this bill through. So the first thing you have to realize is that there was no point intimidating the House of Representatives because the Republicans had a big majority there. If they wanted the Patriot Act to go through there, it was going to go through. But in the Senate, the Democrats had a majority of one and in theory could have blocked the whole thing because it needed to be passed by the both Senate and the House of Representatives. So getting the Senate, the Democratic Senate, to accept the Patriot Act was was going to be a challenge.
And there were two Democratic senators that were potentially in a good position to block it. So Tom Daschle was Senate majority leader, and the majority leader has a very powerful position. He or she is expected to set a timeline for the debate of the bill, is expected not to be too partisan. So he or she is supposed to consult with the other party, the minority party, and with the government. So the Senate majority leader, Daschle, therefore, has a lot of power, potentially. So that's Tom Daschle. And then Patrick Leahy was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is one of several committees that would be expected to look at a new bill like the Patriot Act. But it's arguably the most important because it's the committee that looks at any bill that influences or has implications for the human rights and the civil rights of US citizens, which obviously this one did.
So Daschle and Leahy both took their jobs seriously. That doesn't mean, as I say in the book, that they were radically opposed to the Patriot Act and were standing up and doing all kinds of obstreperous things.
They actually were successfully fooled by 9/11 and the anthrax attacks initially, although ultimately Leahy said he doesn't believe the FBI's solution. But at the time they were fooled, and they said they supported the need for a Patriot Act and supported the need to have it passed quickly. And, in fact, they seem so supportive and so directly implicated in the whole process that for a while I was confused. And my initial draft of the book actually didn't say much about this, because I thought, who would need to send anthrax letters to these two senators? They were completely on board. Why would you need to intimidate them? But then as I looked more closely, I saw that it wasn't really true — that Leahy especially said, wait a minute, you know, we're going to pass this, but I'm not just going to rubber stamp it. It's got to take its time. It's got to go through my committee. We have to make sure that we've got our ducks in a row here. We don't want to shred the Constitution. That's the expression he used. He said if we shred the Constitution, the terrorists win. So he was slowing down the process a little. It was actually him more than Daschle.
He was slowing it down. And he was arguing with Ashcroft and saying, "sorry, but that's not what you promised me. We made a we made an agreement and now you've broken it." Because they consulted almost daily with Ashcroft, head of the Department of Justice who was pushing a Patriot Act like mad, and Leahy, who he had to debate with he had to compromise with. They're consulting all the time. And Leahy puts his foot down at one point. And it comes to a head on October the 2nd of 2001, when Leahy says, "wait a minute, we're going to have to put a stop on this. This is not going to go through as quickly as you thought, because I don't like what's happening." And on the same day, October 2nd, his colleague, Senate Majority Leader Leader Daschle, supported Leahy and said, "yes, that's clear. We need to do more work on this." And the reason this is really significant is because it was on that day, October 2nd, when they put their foot down, that it became clear that a particular deadline was not going to be met: the deadline of October 5th. Dick Cheney made it really clear he wanted this legislation passed by October 5th.
Kevin Barrett: You don't want to mess with Cheney in these situations. That's what Paul Wellstone found out to his serious misfortune a few years later when Cheney gave him that order to "stop what you're doing or there will be the most serious consequences for the state of Minnesota and for you personally." And ten days later, Wellstone, his wife, his daughter and his campaign staff were murdered in a rigged plane crash.
Graeme Macqueen: Well, yeah. And Daschle, of course, was a close friend of Wellstone. And Daschle says in his autobiography — and I must say, between you and me, I have no idea what's really going on in the heads of the people in Congress — Daschle makes a little comment to the effect of "Wellstone's death was creepy" or spooky or something like that. Well, spell it out, Tom!
Kevin Barrett: I wish he would, but you know why he won't. Have you heard about Barbara Boxer's statement about that?
Graeme Macqueen: I don't believe.
Kevin Barrett: The book American Assassination The Strange Death of Paul Wellstone was co-authored by Four Arrows (Don Jacobs) who has a close friend who works on Barbara Boxer's staff. After that book came out, Boxer said to the friend of Four Arrows', her staff member: "Tell your friend Four Arrows (who had just written the book saying that Cheney killed Wellstone) that he doesn't know how right he is." But she added "this is private. And if you state publicly what I just said, I will deny having said it." And she said "Wellstone's murder was, quote, 'a message to us all.' That is, a message to Congress.
Graeme Macqueen: Well, that makes perfect sense to me, and makes sense of Daschle's comment and the rest of it. I don't know how they can remain members of Congress knowing such things, or whether they go through most of the days kind of denying it to themselves.
Kevin Barrett: It must be a depressing job.
Graeme Macqueen: It must be it must be horrible. We all, at various times in our life, deny certain things. It's part of how the human psyche works. And maybe these guys are so busy playing the game and getting elected and making deals that they're able to push this to the back of their consciousness most of the time. I don't know. I'm just putting this out there.
But in any case, Cheney sets the deadline of October 5th. "This is when I want this passed, Leahy and Daschle" he said very explicitly on October 2nd (in the Washington Post). And they're the only Democratic senators mentioned. It's not like there's a whole bunch of...
Leahy and Daschle have decided to hold up the legislation. And therefore, it looks like Cheney's deadline won't be met. So the deadline goes by: October 5th, the legislation isn't passed. And somewhere between October 6th and 9th, two anthrax letters are put in the mail, one for Daschle and one for Leahy. That's the kind of timeline we're talking about here. You know, if somebody gives you that kind of deadline and you make sure it isn't met, you're in trouble. And so this highly lethal anthrax goes out to these two senators. And Daschle's is opened on October 15th. Again, more coincidences: The Washington newspaper Roll Call, which reports what happens on Capitol Hill, had a big headline October 15th: "Hill Braces for Anthrax Threat." Later, the same day, Daschle received the anthrax.
Kevin Barrett: They sure did brace for it at the right time, didn't they?
Graeme Macqueen: They did. And you get used to these so-called coincidences when you're studying the anthrax texts. They're all over the place. And so, obviously, I don't think it is a coincidence. I think that we're all being forced, again, into this absurd position where we're supposed to turn off that ability in our mind that recognizes patterns. And we're supposed to turn it off. We'll just accept anything as a coincidence. The very day — the closest we can tell (to the day) that the anthrax letters are being put in the mail — there's an article in The Washington Post saying, oh, gee, anthrax is a big threat. You know, we have to worry about this. This is mid-September. And and, gee, you know, if the spores were dispersed somewhere, we might not know for a while because it would just give people flu-like symptoms and they wouldn't diagnose it properly. Of course, all that was happening. They were being put in the mail. People within the next week or two, various people, began getting cutaneous anthrax and later pulmonary anthrax. The symptoms were not recognized. It was not immediately diagnosed. It was all happening together. We're supposed to believe that's all coincidence, you and I.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it's amazing. You know, this reminds me — this "coincidence" of The Washington Post saying "Congress braces for anthrax" just as the first letter was arriving — it reminds me of that amazing interview footage from JFK's last speech he did in Dallas before he got in the motorcade, in which the TV correspondent was saying something like "and the president has just finished his speech. As you can see, he has no protection. It would be incredibly easy for a lone nut to assassinate him."
Graeme Macqueen: Really?
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, That's in a terrific compilation of found footage called "Evidence of Revision." It's just mind boggling.
Graeme Macqueen: That one I have missed. So please send it to me.
Kevin Barrett: Okay. Or else you can just look for Evidence of Revision. I believe it's in the first of many episodes of that compilation.
Graeme Macqueen: Okay. Well, there are lots of examples in the JFK thing where we're supposed to accept things as coincidence. And one of them I had missed till I was reading, I think it was Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment the other day. Maybe it was one of the other ones, Weisberg or Sylvia Meagher. It was one of those that pointed this out. So I looked, because I saved on my computer somewhere the assassination of Oswald. But I had never noticed this before: There's a car in the basement of the building that Oswald has been in. You can't see it, but you hear a loud honk of the horn as Oswald makes his appearance. Now, meanwhile, Jack Ruby is standing with his gun unseen off to one side. So a loud honk takes place as Oswald comes down on the elevator. And then just before Ruby rushes forward, there's another honk. Honk, honk. Ruby comes forward and kills the alleged assassin of the president in the presence of over 70 Dallas police officers, many of whom — most of whom — knew Jack Ruby well.
Kevin Barrett: Because he was the mob conduit to the corrupt officers of the force.
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah, he was.
Kevin Barrett: Allegedly a hitman.
Graeme Macqueen: He was a terrible guy. He was also apparently connected to CIA gunrunning connected to the anti-Castro Cuban community. And he was just a very interesting figure. But anyway, the point is we're supposed to not notice any of that. And of course, you and I are stereotyped as conspiracy theorists. And one of the things that's supposed to mean is that we see patterns where there is no pattern, right?
Kevin Barrett: So when the notorious hitman who runs the mob wing of the Dallas PD steps through a sea of Dallas police officers with his gun drawn, gets no opposition, and shoots dead on live television the alleged lone nut who just killed the president, anybody who even notices that this has happened is a crazy conspiracy theorist.
Graeme Macqueen: That's right. And I noticed on a TV program the other day, there's a theme that keeps coming up: "Oh, well, those people who think that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't do this or didn't do that, those people who, you know," — and they'll use terms like "grassy knoll" to evoke that. You and I are "grassy knoll people." Well, I am a grassy knoll person.
Kevin Barrett: Well, the grassy knoll people are "the reality-based community," as Karl Rove said.
Graeme Macqueen: That's right. At the scene, there were actually more than 40 who clearly say they thought the shot came from west of the Texas School Book Depository, meaning in all likelihood, the grassy knoll. You're insane, basically, as a researcher if you ignore that.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And the thing is, when they do these these over-the-top, crazy, covert op deception operations, they're often not particularly smooth about it. And your book has plenty of examples of this. I mean, I think Ruby shooting Oswald was was pretty, you know, obvious. Talk about not being a smooth operation, having to do that!
For (another) example, you talk about the way the anthrax letters had scrawled on the envelopes: "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." And other pidjin-Muslim-speak kinds of messages. You said it's as if they were trying to frame Native Americans by scribbling "white man in heap big trouble."
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah, that's right. "You die fast. You betcha." Yeah.
Kevin Barrett: You can't make this stuff up. And how about Mohamed Atta the drama queen? This guy who's such a smooth operator that he's able to sneak into America with all these hijackers and mount this incredible operation that destroys three skyscrapers with two planes and damages the Pentagon, America's most heavily defended building. Wow, what a what a covert operative he is. It turns out he's this drama queen who's running around staging scenes where he's yammering about bin Laden and doing insane things right in front of government officials.
Graeme Macqueen: That's right.
Kevin Barrett: It's unbelievable.
Graeme Macqueen: (Atta) threatens to cut the throat of a US government official. This is months before 9/11. He gets pulled over by the cops and for driving without a license and then fails to show up in court. He gets bitten by a dog and the cops get called. He visits crop duster locations and annoys the guys there so much that they begin contacting the cops. It goes on and on. He abandons a plane he's training on, a plane he's supposed to fly, on the runway, and just walks away. And and on and on. So, yeah, that's — I call him a drama queen. I think everybody understands what that means. This is a guy who is making all these grand gestures and getting angry and making threats and making mistakes, and we're supposed to believe that at the same time, that this guy pulled off the biggest crime in American history on American soil effectively with his colleagues.
Kevin Barrett: Let's talk about that crop duster angle a little bit, because that's fascinating. Atta stages numerous incidents in which he essentially announces, "hi, I'm an al Qaeda terrorist working for bin Laden and I need to get my hands on a crop duster so I can drop anthrax or another biological weapon on Washington, D.C.."
Graeme Macqueen: Right.
Kevin Barrett: He does this over and over while he's supposedly on a secret mission before 9/11.
Graeme Macqueen: Exactly. Exactly. That's what he does. And not only does he say "I want a crop duster," he says, "I have engineering training, so I want to actually get a government loan," something like $650,000, which he expects to walk out of the office with (cash) in his pocket. "I want a government loan so that I can build a plane and modify it to become the mother of all crop dusters."
Kevin Barrett: The mother of all crop dusters!
Graeme Macqueen: So it will hold so much material — he doesn't say what it is — in this big tank so that I won't have to do what most crop dusters do. They have to land, you know, and...
Kevin Barrett: And then he sees an aerial photo of Washington, D.C., behind the desk of this woman he's demanding the loan from: "I must have that photo!"
Graeme Macqueen: Exactly.
Kevin Barrett: "I will not leave this office until I have this photo and I have the cash in hand!"
Graeme Macqueen: That's right. He begins throwing cash on the desk. He points out the Pentagon. He says in one of the accounts, which I didn't quote in my book, but in one of the accounts of this interview with Janelle Bryant, he says, "How would you like it if somebody came and destroyed your buildings from the air" and so on and so forth? So in other words, yeah, "Mohamed Atta Seeks a Loan" is what I called that particular tale. And it's one of the most grotesque... I mean, we have "Mohamed Atta Visits Prague" and we have "Mohamed Atta Gets Bitten by a Dog" and we have all these tales. But "Mohamed Atta Seeks a Loan" is really the most absurd. At one point in the book, I had the whole thing in an appendix to the book, but I thought, No, it's okay, I'll just give the link. People can go and look at it by themselves, and the whole thing is reported in detail by ABC News: The same people and same reporter that falsely claimed that there was bentonite in the anthrax, which is a substance only Iraq used to weaponize its anthrax. So again, ABC News was allowing itself to be used in the most blatant way to push these false stories directly implicated in the whole thing.
Kevin Barrett: And it's kind of interesting, isn't it, how it looks like 9/11-anthrax was set up by neocons who were planning the "destroy seven countries in five years" plan that Clark referred to. And they were doing this with their double perpetrator hypothesis, that is, trying to blame Iraq-and-al-Qaeda. But it seems that something went wrong with this with regard to the anthrax, specifically where they ended up not even being able to pin it on either al Qaeda or Iraq because it was so heavily weaponized using such advanced techniques that they couldn't blame al-Qaeda. And there was also no evidence for Iraq. But with the 9/11 aspect (of 9/11-anthrax) it kind of worked the same way in that they were trying to blame the double perpetrators, al Qaeda and Iraq, but then it ended up with Iraq sort of falling out of it. Though they kept trying, and they got their war on Iraq, they couldn't plausibly blame Iraq (for either aspect of 9/11-anthrax).
Graeme Macqueen: That's right. Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right on several points here. First of all, in calling this the 9/11-anthrax attacks. And I guess when we write it, we'd have a hyphen in there. I was thinking about that the other day, and thinking maybe we're going to have to push fairly hard in our movement to get people used to using that expression, the 9/11-anthrax attacks — in other words, accept that this was one operation. Because once you see that it's one operation, and once you see how radically the anthrax operation fell apart to the point where the FBI and Department of Homeland Security admit that "Iraq and al Qaeda were framed, it came from within the US military community." They don't want to go too far with that. But that basic fact, they admit. Once you see that, and once you see that it was part of the same operation as 9/11, then of course, you can't protect the 9/11 operation anymore. And that's what they've been trying to do. That's what the FBI and other agencies have been trying to do for years. So here's how it goes (just so I get a chance to say this): While the anthrax attacks were taking place, a major attempt was being made by (let's call them for now) the neocons to say that this was a one-two punch by extremist Muslims.
First they do 9/11. And then before people have a chance to recover properly, they hit them with anthrax. So the two are connected. And considerable effort is made to show us the connections. And as October goes on — it begins in September, but especially in October 2001, these connections are being gradually revealed to the newspapers. "Oh, look, the hijackers who did 9/11 lived in these particular locations, which were also centers of the anthrax attacks. And oh, look at this interesting connection."
Kevin Barrett: Now they want us to be conspiracy theorists rather than coincidence theorists.
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah, exactly. At that point, everyone is supposed to have pattern recognition abilities. They can see, for example, that if the same real estate agent was a real estate agent for two of the 9/11 hijackers, and at the same time, for the first person to die from anthrax, Robert Stephens: Holy shit! (You can cut that out if you need to.)
I mean, my gosh, what is that? That can't be coincidence. And of course, they don't want us to think it's coincidence. The main people pushing this want people to have pattern recognition abilities. They want them to see that 9/11 and anthrax are connected. They want it to be a one-two punch.
Kevin Barrett: One of the most extreme examples of the campaign to make us believe that 9/11 and anthrax were both done by the same double perpetrator, al-Qaeda and Iraq, is this bizarre, fake story that the neocons apparently planted in the New York Times claiming that one of the bodies of the alleged hijackers from Flight 93 had a black leg lesion. I mean, where do they come up with this stuff? Nobody's ever found the plane or the bodies from Flight 93! They told us it went into a little 15 foot diameter hole in the ground. They claim that somehow enough of the bodies were excavated to do DNA testing on everybody except for the alleged hijackers. Not one shred of DNA evidence has ever been (attritubed to) any of the hijackers, But they claim they got pieces of the passengers bodies. Yet there's no evidence whatsoever that any excavation of this plane ever happened. So what's this black leg lesion on a hijacker from Flight 93?
Graeme Macqueen: Well, let me correct something there, although it may be you're right. But I think those are two separate attempts to connect... First of all, you're right that on the one hand, they do claim at one point that anthrax is detected in the remnants of 93. And for all the reasons you point out, that's kind of hilarious. And on the other hand... But I think the black lesion is a separate story.
Kevin Barrett: Okay.
Graeme Macqueen: So the black lesion is that there are a couple of of the hijackers, I forget which ones. "Now we'll go to the doctor."
Kevin Barrett: Oh, yeah, you're right.
Graeme Macqueen: And one of them has this really prominent black lesion on his leg, and the doctor doesn't know what it is. He prescribes an antibiotic or something, and off they go. And it's later that and several doctors, including those scientists who are colluding with this Dark Winter thing, come out and say, "aha, that was cutaneous anthrax. That's exactly what cutaneous anthrax looks like. It's a black scab." That's what anthrax means. It means coal because the scab looks really black. And they say, "my God, that's an example of where one of the hijackers had anthrax before 9/11. Why? Because they were working with anthrax, preparing it!" So what you've given as one incident is actually two separate incidents, both of which were clearly originally designed to make us think the same people did 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. So what my book is trying to do, just to finish this argument, is to remind people of those connections, because the FBI has spent years now burying those connections because, of course, what once looked like a good idea — "Let's show people they were connected" — became a very bad idea as soon as the anthrax operation fell apart. As soon as it became clear it was a domestic operation, you had to make it clear it had nothing to do with 9/11. "9/11 was real extremist Muslims killing Americans. The anthrax attacks were fake extremist Muslims killing Americans. Keep that straight! Nothing to see here, folks. Just please keep walking."
And yeah, so I really try in the book to say no, it really was a one-two punch by the same perpetrators. They just weren't extremist Muslims, that's all. They were neocons.
Kevin Barrett: And that's left us in an interesting position, since the anthrax case fell apart and has become the weak link of the 9/11-anthrax operation.
Graeme Macqueen: Right, right. And I listened to the show you did with Barry Kissin the other day, and you said at one point that the anthrax attacks might be the thread that if we pull on it, the fabric will come undone. That's exactly why I wrote the book that we have this, if you like, woven fabric called the global war on terror. And we could start picking it apart just about anywhere. We could go to 9/11, we could go to the Boston Marathon, we could go to the London bombings. We could go to the underwear bomber. And they're all worth looking at. They're all worth studying. But I thought to myself, you know what? I think maybe the anthrax attacks are the thread that I want to pull on here. And when I decided to do that initially, I hadn't done much research and I didn't know exactly what I'd find. So it was an experiment. I said, let's look into it and see, because this might be the one. Once we begin taking this apart, the whole thing will come undone. And whether or not that proves to be the case, I don't know. But that's what I'm trying to do here.
Kevin Barrett: Well, I think one of the reasons that it just might work, at least in the medium term, if not the long term, is that Congress was targeted in such an over-the-top way. Congress is one of those institutions that could blow this thing wide open — maybe not while the bad guys are still totally in control. But at some point down the line, Congress might wake up and say, "wait a minute, what's this business of people in our own government with an allegiance to a foreign government hitting us with biological weapons, shutting down the Congress, overthrowing democracy? You know, maybe we need to go back and do something about this."
Graeme Macqueen: Well, that would be an ideal scenario. I don't know enough about who's in Congress and who has enough spine to do this and whether they would ever, ever be willing even to read the book that I've written. And we have a wonderful thing on video. You can find it on YouTube: Patrick Leahy, who was, after all, one of the targets of the anthrax attacks, saying when when the Bruce Ivins solution was being proposed by the FBI, Leahy says quite angrily, "I do not believe for one moment that this is the only man who is responsible for this. I believe there are others, and I believe they could be charged with murder."
And I think to myself, okay, okay. Hopefully he still has that view. And is it possible to reach people like him with this kind of material? I don't know.
Kevin Barrett: Well, I've given Russ Feingold, the former senator from Wisconsin, who was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act, copies of two of David Ray Griffin's books. Actually it was his first two books, The New Pearl Harbor and The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. And he accepted it gracefully, and I got a thank-you letter saying that he was not allowed to personally accept books, but he would put them in the library he has at his office for the edification of the public.
Graeme Macqueen: Well, that's good. I hope I hope somebody can get him a copy of this one for his library, too.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, well, he's retired now.
Graeme Macqueen: Okay, well, he was kind of a hero.
Kevin Barrett: On this one. He and Wellstone were the two biggest heroes, and they're both Jewish. A lot of people say the neocons did this largely for Israel and start making it into an ethnic thing, which it isn't precisely. It's a philosophical thing.
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah, I don't use the term Jew or Judaism or Jewish or anything...
Kevin Barrett: Though there are an awful lot of Jewish names popping up in the bad guys list that you mentioned.
Graeme Macqueen: Well, sure, sure, Stein and Richard Cohen and so on and so forth. And part of me couldn't care less. They could all be named Rory, or they could have been named by the same names as my ancestors, which are Duncan McQueen and Alexander Chisholm and all these — I don't care. Let them be Scottish. Let them be English. Let them be whatever. I don't care. It's not my point. I don't think this is about ethnicity. I don't think it's about religion.
Kevin Barrett: Well, it partly is, Graham. I mean, part of the problem is that there are these psycho neocons who are traumatized by the Holocaust and ready to go the whole nine yards, do anything for Israel. But then there are plenty of Jewish people like Wellstone and Feingold, who are honorable, decent people who are doing their job for for America as well. So it's a relevant factor. We just have to be honest about it and comprehensive about it when we talk about it that way.
Graeme Macqueen: Well, I agree with that. Certainly. My point is that the category that I found useful was "neoconservative." It was not the category "Jewish." When we look at a term like Jew and Judaism, different terms, but obviously we find this is contested territory. And it's a fascinating moment in history when there's a struggle within, broadly speaking, that community worldwide as to what it's going to mean to be a Jew and what Judaism is and what Israel is and all these things. And so, for example, in Canada — I don't remember what it's called in the US, Jewish Voices for Peace or something — in Canada there's a group called Independent Jewish Voices, which is extremely critical of Israel. And it's often made fun of by the more mainstream Jewish community. But as you know, it's small, but it's actually really significant in my opinion.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah, it's going mainstream here in the US too.
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah, it has.
There's a whole generation of young Jews in North America that are becoming disillusioned with Israel. I'm not sure they ever were fastened on Israel the way their parents and grandparents were. They just don't accept that Israel should be allowed to do whatever it wants. And that somehow, if it isn't given free rein to break every rule in human existence, then somehow Jews everywhere are under threat. They don't believe that. And they're right. They're right to see that it's not that way at all — that, in fact, Jews are under threat to a large extent, to the extent that Israel is going on this incredible rampage, and to the extent to which the Zionists in power in Israel have the power to define what it means to be a Jew.
And so this is contested territory. I remember seeing a good speech by an Orthodox Jewish rabbi not long ago in which he says, "we have been subjected to identity theft." He said: Imagine it as somebody breaking into your house, taking your wallet, your credit cards and everything, and then claiming that the real Kevin Barrett is now the thief,the other one's not the Kevin Barrett. He said that's what's happened to us. He said, I know what Judaism means. I know what it means to be a Jew and how long our tradition, our religion has lasted and why it's lasted so long and what our values are. I have a pretty good idea of that. And I can tell you it's not the same as Zionism and it's not the same as what the state of Israel is doing right now. Our identity is being stolen and we're not happy about it.
So both conservative and, if you like, young progressive Jews in North America are getting upset about this. They're contesting the identity. And, of course, they're quite right that many of the leading Zionists never were religious Jews. They have no interest, for the most part, in the religion. And so, of course, this contestation, this contest about what it means to be this or that, is going on in other religious communities as well. I'm sure it's going on in Islam. You would know more about that than I. It's going on in Buddhism. You have fascist Buddhist monks in Burma promoting killing. Well, sorry, the whole Buddhist community is not going to accept that. There's a movement of socially engaged Buddhists that speaks out against it. You have the same thing in Hinduism. To me, this is a good thing. The fact that people in these communities are standing up and saying, We challenge your definition of what it means to be a Buddhist or a Jew or a Muslim. We challenge it publicly. We say we we reject your interpretation. I think this is so important. It's so easy for, let's say, a Christian or a Muslim to criticize Jews as not having this or that interpretation. But when within the Jewish community that questioning goes on and that challenge takes place, there's a whole different dynamic. Sorry, I know this may seem like a long rant...
Kevin Barrett: No, I think that's a great point, and very timely. We just had The New York Times published this op ed, The End of Liberal Zionism. And there have been all kinds of, people like Max Blumenthal, a very well-connected young American Jew who just published the book Goliath.
Graeme Macqueen: He's great. I just attended a talk he gave in my own town here. And he's a really good representative of that younger Jewish community in North America.
Kevin Barrett: Well, I hope they'll take up this 9/11 anthrax thing, because that would be the best way to have it broken wide open. If it ends up being suppressed to the point that people get so angry at Israel, they get angry at Jews, and end up being the ones who who stage a coup d'etat or riots or whatever — and it's getting close to that point in France, from what I hear — that has a lot of potential downsides. If we had more brave Jews like like Wellstone and Feingold actually standing up doing something about 9/11 and the larger issue of Zionism, this whole problem could get solved relatively peacefully.
Graeme Macqueen: I'm completely I'm completely behind that. I actually I gave a talk on 9/11 in New York some years ago, and I apparently arrived just after you had given your talk. So that's why we never met. This was at the church in the Bowery. Anyway, what was my point?
Kevin Barrett: Sorry I missed meeting you.
Graeme Macqueen: Yeah, that was too bad. But I'm trying to remember what my point was there. Oh, yes. I met a lot of fascinating people at that conference because I hung around for a few days in Manhattan. And one of them was an older Jewish woman from New York who was an artist. And she took a couple of us on a tour of a couple of big art museums and art galleries in New York and gave us a guided tour. But she was at the 9/11 conference. She's completely on board with that. And she said to me at one point, as a Jew, I'm really worried, because look what they did to us in World War Two when we had done nothing to merit any kind of bad stuff. And now, she said, I'm sure you've looked at the list of who the leading neocons are and how many of them are Jewish, and when it becomes clear what they've done, that they were involved in 9/11 and they're involved in all kinds of lies and deception, she said. I'm very worried about what may come down on the heads of my community.
Kevin Barrett: I don't blame her. That's what Sandra Lubarsky also talks about a bit in her essay in the book I co-edited, 9/11 and American Empire, Volume Two. And hats off to her for having the courage to come right out and say that. Well, you know, we're about at the end of the interview, Graeme. Do you have a website where people should go to get the book or read about it?
Graeme Macqueen: Just Google clarity press and then you'll find the book. At the moment it's listed under forthcoming, but it's going to be officially published very shortly. And in any case, you'll find it. Click on that and you'll get a web page dedicated to the book. It will give a synopsis of it. It will give some of the reviews by other people, and it will give you a button whereby you can press it and buy the book.
Kevin Barrett: All right. Clarity Press, putting out some of the very best books available today, including this fantastic new book on the anthrax case. Thank you, Graeme MacQueen. I appreciate it. I'll link all that stuff at TruthJihad.com. Look forward to another conversation before too long.
Graeme Macqueen: Thank you very much.
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