Gwynne Dyer’s “Future Tense: The Coming World Order” is a brilliantly lucid analysis of what America is in for, where it is headed and pushing the world to but still ignorant of the dangers ahead. The book is a small window which presents a scene much wider, deeper and real in expanse and scope than its size. The scene, naturally, is neither alluring nor pleasing. At best it is scary, dangerous, and suicidal. But it demands understanding and calls for thought and action. What I don’t agree with is his saying is that the neo-conservatives who dominated the Bush administration must have planned the 9/11 attack is believed only by Arabs and other Muslims. “This conspiracy theory is unworthy of further consideration ...,” he writes. It is the mother of “evil axis” and cannot be dismissed so lightly.
Not just the Arabs and the Muslims, but Americans -themselves — scientists, engineers, explosives and structural experts and researchers, have been demanding an impartial study into the incident.
Many claim that the Bush administration has tried to cover-up the evidence and that the 9/11 Commission failed to address the major evidence which contradicts the official version. They find numerous holes in the government story.
Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D, who was chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush’s first term and who also served as director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis headquartered in Dallas, Texas, believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is ‘bogus.’ According to Reynolds, it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7. “If demolition destroyed three steel skyscrapers at the World Trade Center on 9/11, then the case for an ‘inside job’ and a government attack on America would be compelling,” he is reported as saying. Reynolds also believes it’s “next to impossible” that 19 Arab terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty US military. He said that the scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11. But such study is rendered next to impossible as explosives and structural experts have been intimidated in their analyzes, and the establishment media is no help in the matter.
It denies, denigrates and discourages any talk of an impartial study.
“It is hard to exaggerate the importance of a scientific debate over the cause(s) of the collapse of the twin towers and building 7,” said Reynolds “If the official wisdom on the collapses is wrong, as I believe it is, then policy based on such erroneous engineering analysis is not likely to be correct either.
The government’s collapse theory is highly vulnerable on its own terms. Only professional demolition appears to account for the full range of facts associated with the collapse of the three buildings,” he said. Fire Department New York, (FDNY) fire fighters still remain under a tight government gag order not to discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw.
Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) personnel are also under a similar 9/11 gag order. Even the flawed 9/11 Commission Report acknowledges that “none of the (fire) chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible.” WTC-5 and WTC-6 had raging fires but did not collapse despite much thinner steel beams. Even though the criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be kept for forensic analysis, structural steel was quickly removed from the site.
The statements of William Rodriguez, who represented family members of 9/11 victims and testified to the 9/11 Commission that bombs were in the north tower, were completely omitted from the official record.
Many have wondered, and still do in the Arab and the non-Arab world, how the plane hitting the WTC got filmed and was shown on TV all over the world again and again and continues to be shown to this day? It was not a chance filming by an amateur on his video recorder as no channel acknowledged that.
It looked absolutely professional — no shaking, no going out of frame, no ‘out of focus,’ and so on as generally happens in scenes captured by amateurs.
One can recollect scenes of tsunami by amateurs and compare the quality with the plane hitting the WTC.
Moreover, on October 11, a single-engine plane crashed into a high-rise in Manhattan, where, unlike the Wall Street, location of the WTC, almost all TV channels have offices not far from the building that the small plane crashed into. No footage of that was shown.
Past was not perfect, present is not peaceful and the future is tense. That is the message of the thoughtpacked little (212-page) book. The world was not born yesterday. From laymen to leaders, all are aware of the spins and the sins of the House, and 10 Downing.
They are rushing in where angels fear to tread, and in the event, pushing the world to the brink of a Third World War.
George is nothing like Bush Sr., who did in Iraq what the United Nations Security Council had authorized him to do, “and not a bit more.” His son, as Dyer notes, “violated the sovereignty of Iraq and invaded and occupied the whole country without plausible provocation, legal justification, or Security Council approval.” Under the façade of the “war on terror,” there is much method in madness.
As Dyer explains, “Terrorism is a technique, not an ideology or a country. It is a technique that any group can pick up and use, without distinction of ideology, creed, or cause, and the people wielding it can as easily be fanatical anti-government Americans, Trotskyist Germans, or separatist Tamils as Islamist Arabs.” “It was never about Iraq. It is not really about terrorism either, although the terrorists are still there.
It is about the whole way we run the world,” writes Dyer.
A 15-country survey, conducted six months after the invasion of Iraq, showed that half of the European Union’s citizens see the United States as a danger to world peace rather than a force for good.
It is appropriate to quote here what Will Rogers once said: “If we ever pass out as a great nation we aught to put on our tombstone ‘America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership.’” “Iraqis are not the passive, helpless people whose allotted role in the neo-conservative fantasy was to stand cheering by the side of the road while the US army liberated them and then to receive ‘freedom’ and democracy gratefully from American hands,” writes Dyer. He goes on to highlight that Iraq used to be the most literate of Arab countries, and in the 1970s, before Saddam’s wars impoverished the country, it was the most developed and prosperous of the Arab states. “It can be all of those things again and democratic to boot — and it does not need American tutelage to get there,” he adds.
It is well-known that pride goes before a fall. The pride in what once was America, the principles and values it really stood for and which the world admired and tried to emulate is long gone. The fall will follow in due course.
The harbinger of that is the American economy.
As Eric Alterman said in “Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Policies,” “History is replete with examples of empires mounting impressive military campaigns on the cusp of their impending economic collapse.” And, as Gore Vidal noted: “On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.” Writes Dyer: “The feet of clay beneath the US economy today are the huge foreign trade deficit and the equally huge budget deficit, ... It is the combination of the two deficits that creates such an unstable and dangerous situation, and they only came into being after the younger Bush administration came into office.” He explained that foreigners go on investing because the US economy is strong, and it remains strong only because they continue to invest. “What if one day the huge budget deficit caused the confidence of foreign investors to falter?” asks Dyer and adds, “It would suddenly become clear that the emperor was wearing no clothes — and the sky would fall.”