Thread by @drbairdonline

Ashton Carter, John Deutch & Philip Zelikow in 1999 article in CFR's Foreign Affairs asked us to imagine that "catastrophic terrorism" - "long part of the Hollywood and Tom Clancy repertory of nightmarish scenarios" - could happen "next month"
Thread
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https://twitter.com/drbairdonline/status/1180929101294526465

How prescient were Carter, Deutch & Zelikow, that when "catastrophic terrorism" did finally come to the US less than three years later on 9/11, so many would think it looked "like a movie" or "like right out of a Tom Clancy novel"!
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foreignaffairs.com/articles/unite…

NBC's Katie Couric 15 min after "collapse" of WTC2 says "It looks like a movie frankly. It combines the horror of the TWA Flight 800 bombing and the Murrah Federal Building because it’s both of these incidents coming together in the most horrific way."
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In line with her combination TWA 800-OKC theory, NBC's Couric @ 1028 ET explained "You are looking at live pictures of [WTC1] collapsing as a result of the crash of an airplane into its side." WTC1 "has now fallen to the ground and collapsed."
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Two hours later NBC's Couric asked Gen Norman Schwarzkopf if he had ever heard concerns about hijackers using a plane as "a flying bomb." He replied Tom Clancy wrote a book about crashing a 747 into the US Capitol "so it’s not something that’s new."
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It's unclear whether NBC's Couric was unfamiliar with Clancy or just didn't know generals took him literally but CNN's Judy Woodruff reported "People in our newsroom have been saying today that what is happening is like right out of a Tom Clancy novel."
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archive.org/details/911/da…

What people remembered was Tom Clancy's 1994 bestseller Debt of Honor which ended with a Japanese kamikaze pilot crashing a fueled Boeing 747 into the US Capitol dome during a joint session of Congress, killing the President & most of Congress & totally destroying the Capitol
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Incredibly Clancy told CNN's Woodruff he couldn't imagine "something like this" - even though he wrote about a kamikaze - b/c he doesn't think it credible "to have four separate people decide to commit suicide in the same way in the same morning"!
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archive.org/details/911/da…

CNN's Washington studio interview w/Clancy was briefly interrupted by the "collapse" of WTC7 @ 1720 ET
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archive.org/details/911/da…

A little after midnight NBC's Tom Brokaw interviewed Tom Clancy by phone. Referring to Debt of Honor, Brokaw said "Tom, it turns out the truth is much stranger and much more devastating than fiction." Clancy responded "Well, Tom, it always is."
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Clancy amazingly repeats for Brokaw that he wouldn't have written what happened with the hijacked planes into a novel b/c it's "hard to wrap your mind around" "four people willing to give their lives up for their cause in a period of a few hours"
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After Brokaw curiously compliments 9/11 as a very efficient, sophisticated & complex operation, Clancy goes further saying "it was a beautifully planned operation" achieving "the objective of the perpetrators" just like Pearl Harbor achieved the objective of the Japanese navy
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Of all the seemingly endless Pearl Harbor references on 9/11, Tom Clancy calling 9/11 "a beautifully planned operation" that achieved "the objective of the perpetrators" like Pearl Harbor has to be the strangest! Imagine an American complimenting the Japanese on Dec 7, 1941!
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Indeed Clancy's entire demeanor on 9/11 - no different than the way he always acted in many TV appearances in the 1990s on CNN or Charlie Rose - suggests he wasn't at all troubled about what he had seen or heard that day.
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Maybe Tom Clancy wasn't upset because he knew this "new Pearl Harbor" was a GODSEND for the "national security community"? This act of #CatastrophicTerrorism would provide the carte blanche that Carter, Deutch & Zelikow said we needed to fight "catastrophic terrorism"!
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Surely Clancy also knew claim in PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses (Sep 2000) "The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic & catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor"
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web.archive.org/web/2013081712…

Clancy's untroubled demeanor could also mean that he had some foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, perhaps the kind of #LIHOP foreknowledge that the late Robert Stinnett, author of Day of Deceit (1999), showed US officials had before the original Pearl Harbor
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Or possibly, as one of the world's greatest writers of novels about terrorism and well capable of thinking outside the box, could Tom Clancy have actually been a part of a #MIHOP 9/11 scriptwriting team?
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Whatever foreknowledge Clancy may have had, he certainly seems part of the effort we see on all the network to push the "official" “collapse” of the Twin Towers due to “flying bombs" storyline. Having researched "flying bombs" for Debt of Honor, he should know!
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Indeed the ONLY part of the "official" story Clancy says he couldn't have conceived is the idea of getting FOUR "terrorists" to commit suicide at the same time. Now why does he have a problem w/the one part of the story w/which most Americans would have had the LEAST trouble?
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To explain why he thinks the possibility of suicide pilots was "not a credible threat", Tom Clancy uses the most ridiculous logic.

#1 "Because ending your own life is not something the average person does" (Huh? The average person isn't a terrorist!)

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archive.org/details/911/da…

#2 " Everyone is assuming these are Islamic terrorists. If so, they have defiled their own religion. Islam does not permit suicide. It says you go to hell if do you something like this." (So how does Clancy explain the numerous reports of Muslim suicide bombers before 9/11?)
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#3 In N Ireland, we saw Catholics & Protestants "acting like savages. So now we have a few who call themselves Muslims acting like savages. It happens. It's not because of their religion. It's because they are fools." (So why couldn't Clancy have imagined this before 9/11?)
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The fact that suicide attacks have occurred throughout history and as for suicide pilots all one has to recall are the the Japanese kamikaze pilots during WWII.
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Perhaps what we have here is simply Clancy's failure to imagine b/c the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen TV series filmed in 2000 & aired in March 2001 on Fox TV has a very dramatic scene in which a jetliner is REMOTELY HIJACKED & flown into the WTC.
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Fortunately the airline "pilot" - thanks to the Lone Gunmen & the Octium IV chip! - is able to regain control of the 727 at the last second & only clips an aviation light on WTC2 so - unlike 9/11 & Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor - no one actually dies in The Lone Gunmen "pilot"!
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13.2 million Americans watched what Ed Martin, writing in the influential Myers Report in Jun 2002, described as "some of the most deeply disturbing images ever created for a scripted entertainment program” when The Lone Gunmen pilot aired 4 March 2001
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web.archive.org/web/2006050521…

BEFORE 9/11 these images were hardly "disturbing" at all as NONE of the published reviews of The Lone Gunmen even mentioned any plot line involving terrorists attempting to crash a commercial jet into the WTC
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variety.com/2001/tv/review…

AFTER 9/11, while pundits raved about Tom Clancy's prescience, those "deeply disturbing images" from The Lone Gunmen pilot - apart from brief mention by AP & Knight Ridder article - hardly registered at all, what Ed Martin would call an amazing example of "collective amnesia"
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Part of the reason why MSM ignored The Lone Gunmen may have been because the "terrorists" trying to crash the jetliner into the WTC weren’t Muslims but actually a “small faction” in the US govt who w/the Cold War over needed to create an enemy in order to increase arms sales!
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Obviously BEFORE 9/11 neither Tom Clancy nor The Lone Gunmen writers had prepared Americans to - as Carter, Deutch & Zelikow put it - imagine "the transforming event” of #CatastrophicTerrorism" since EVERYBODY (except the perpetrators?) was SHOCKED by what they saw on 9/11
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AFTER "the [admittedly] transforming event" of 9/11, Carter, Deutch & Zelikow overnight became much more prescient & pundits/govt officials all suddenly started talking over & over about our FAILURE OF IMAGINATION - our inability to imagine 9/11 BEFORE it happened
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Kevin Fagan (SF Chronicle reporter): "In the days after Sept. 11, critics on Capitol Hill & elsewhere made much of their belief that America's vulnerability to the aerial broadsides was less a failure of intelligence than a failure of imagination."
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sfgate.com/news/article/T…

Fortunately for US govt officials, “failure of imagination” is not a crime & would not cause anyone to lose their job (let along go to jail!) over 9/11 and, indeed, a lot of those failed imaginations would be promoted & continue to this day to play an active role in US govt!
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Immediately AFTER 9/11 - following Carter, Deutch & Zelikow - US govt officials started looking to the “nightmarish scenarios” of Tom Clancy & Hollywood to help them "imagine" the next case of #CatastrophicTerrorism BEFORE it happened
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sfgate.com/news/article/T…

I don't think the imaginative X-Files “What if the ‘terrorists' were actually a SECRET CABAL in the US govt?” team who created The Lone Gunmen (Chris Carter, Vince Gilligan, John Shiban, Frank Spotnitz) were ever invited to any of these imagination think tanks!
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After George W Bush declared "Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories" the only kind of imagination the Washington was interested in was figuring out the next Al-Qaeda attack now that they’ve done their “flying bomb” thing
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In the months after 9/11 we start seeing reports like this from PBS Frontline of many "warning signs" that US intelligence & law enforcement agencies failed to spot. But as to WHY they failed, the ULTIMATE answer comes down to a FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
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pbs.org/wgbh/pages/fro…

When asked why these missed warning signs shouldn't be seen as intelligence failure, Nat Sec Advisor Condoleeza Rice 16 May 2002 said "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people...would try to use...a hijacked airplane as a missile"
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web.archive.org/web/2002080616…

AP's Paul Haven refuted Dr Rice's claim that no could have predicted 9/11 b/c clues filtering in from overseas since at least 1994 foreshadowed bin Laden's plans to attack US & in the months before 9/11 reports warned terrorist strike might be imminent
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myplainview.com/news/article/C…

Larry Johnson, dep dir State Dept Office of Counterterrorism 1989-93, criticized Dr Rice:

"Intelligence analysts are paid to IMAGINE THE UNIMAGINABLE. That info was in their files & if they weren't imagining it, that is a failure of intelligence and a FAILURE OF IMAGINATION"
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NY Times' Thomas L Friedman: "The failure to prevent Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination. It was a FAILURE OF IMAGINATION." No one could've connected all the signals b/c they couldn't IMAGINE evil on the scale that bin Laden did
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nytimes.com/2002/05/19/opi…

AP's Calvin Woodward reports same FAILURE OF IMAGINATION preceded both 9/11 & Pearl Harbor, 1946 House-Senate panel said US officials had "unusually significant & vital intelligence" but failed to "employ the necessary IMAGINATION" to put it together
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products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2002/0…

Frank Spotnitz, first of The Lone Gunmen team to be interviewed (TV Guide, Jun 2002), was "disturbed" to learn on 9/11 - as Carter, Deutch & Zelikow had predicted - that "a fiction writer" could imagine "disaster scenarios" that govt officials couldn't
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tvguide.com/news/sept-11-p…

What is left unstated is that TLG's Frank Spotnitz does not question the "official" story of 9/11 at all. He can IMAGINE a jetliner crashing into WTC & so BELIEVES it could happen. He can IMAGINE a govt cabal behind all this but somehow he CAN'T believe it could happen.
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The kind of people who COULD believe a govt cabal behind 9/11 were FANS of The X-Files who saw govt conspiracies every week. After 9/11 they started passing around bootlegs of the Gunmen pilot at UFO conventions and asking uncomfortable questions.
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911conspiracy.tv/Lone_Gunmen_Pi…

Christopher Bollyn in Oct 2003 articles in American Free Press (print & web) and Rumor Mill News was the first reporter to seriously question where The Lone Gunmen pilot writers got their ideas, so eerily like 9/11
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web.archive.org/web/2003120310…

Bollyn, who had been reporting on Israeli complicity in 9/11 since almost day one, strongly suspected that media mogul & arch-Zionist Rupert Murdoch - whose Fox News network had broadcast the Gunmen & had been actively trying to smear Bollyn as an "anti-Semite" - was the key
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Bollyn reports “A Murdoch-owned company called Canadian Millennium Productions, Ltd. (News Corp. owns 83%), produced the pilot episode in Vancouver & NYC from March 20 to April 7, 2000”. Bollyn does not reveal his source for this rather startling info.
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archives.globalresearch.ca/articles/BOL31…

While one can make the case that Fox News has been way ahead of other networks in pushing the "official" 9/11 story, it is not clear at all from Bollyn's 2003 articles (or later work) WHY Murdoch would have wanted to make a pilot "predictive" of 9/11
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https://twitter.com/drbairdonline/status/1180976180133892096

Whatever Murdoch's role in The Lone Gunmen pilot, there is plenty of evidence both before & after 9/11 to suggest a strong Zionist involvement in drafting what would become the "official" 9/11 script, especially when we turn to Philip D. Zelikow.
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James Corbett in his 5-minute video classic "9/11: A Conspiracy Theory" captures as well as anybody the ridiculousness of the "official" story as laid out by Philip Zelikow in "his" 9/11 Commission Report.
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But for Corbett the fact that Zelikow "had in fact written about 9/11 & its eventual aftermath in 1998" combined w/"his own self-described expertise in the creation & management of 'public myth'" suggests Zelikow has to be considered a top 9/11 suspect
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If you don't know much about Philip Zelikow other than that he was Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, please check out his quite extensive, fully sourced "9/11 Timeline" for the years 1995-2008 at History Commons
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historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?t…

His 9/11 timeline shows Zelikow pushed Likudnik line as member of #PFIAB 2001-3 writing "The National Security Strategy of the United States" that Bush submitted to Congress Sep 2002 laying out doctrines of "preemptive war", "a military beyond challenge" & "War on Terrorism"
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Zelikow in Sep 2002 speech strongly backed attacking Iraq but admitted prime motive "to eliminate threat to Israel" (nuclear/biological WMDs, Hamas ties), "the threat that dare not speak its name" b/c Europeans didn't care & not "a popular sell" in US
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web.archive.org/web/2004060603…

Sam Francis wrote April 2004 almost every critic of Iraq War knew it was a war for Israel but "immediately denounced as 'unpatriotic,' 'conspiracy freaks' and, most of all, 'anti-Semites'" yet Zelikow could get away with it b/c supported war & Jewish
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vdare.com/articles/phili…

Bollyn wrote Dec 2006 "the architects of 9/11" like Netanyahu working on US public opinion since 1980s to prepare political/media elites for catastrophic terror attack on US soil & how US should respond, helped by "agents" like Carter, Deutch & Zelikow
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bollyn.com/the-zionist-ne…

Comparing Carter, Deutch & Zelikow’s [CDZ] “Catastrophic Terrorism” (1998) w/Zelikow's 9/11 Commission Report (2004) we see both focus on IMAGINATION, in the case of the latter imagining the use of "aircraft as weapons"
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govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911…

In Chap 11 titled “Foresight and Hindsight,” Zelikow writes “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management" but says failure to anticipate the use of "aircraft as weapons" was NOT a "failure of imagination"
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Indeed Zelikow writes it actually pretty easy to IMAGINE "aircraft as weapons" "Indeed, since al Qaeda and other groups had already used suicide vehicles, namely truck bombs, the leap to the use of other vehicles such as boats (the Cole attack) or planes is not far-fetched."
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Zelikow writes "the possibility was IMAGINABLE, and IMAGINED" noting pre-9/11 efforts of Richard Clarke, Natl Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection & Counter-terrorism (1998-2003) who was concerned about the danger posed by aircraft since 1996 Atlanta Olympics
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Clarke highlighted difficulties of trying to press govt to protect against aircraft used as weapons, warning of possible al-Qaeda suicide hijacking would have been just one speculative theory in sea of hundreds of thousands of warnings of al Qaeda & other terrorist threats
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Zelikow in 9/11 Commission Report concluded problem not imagining per se but the failure to routinize & bureaucratize "the exercise of IMAGINATION" "Doing so requires more than finding an expert who can imagine that aircraft could be used as weapons"
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If CIA's CTC had studied "aircraft as weapons" would have "spotlighted a critical constraint for the terrorists - finding a suicide operative able to fly large jet aircraft" & developed "a set of telltale indicators" to detect e.g. possible terrorists pursuing flight training
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Richard Clarke added he owed his awareness of the danger posed by aircraft "more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community" & other 9/11 commissioners also mentioned Clancy as precedent
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wsj.com/articles/SB108…

Despite references to Tom Clancy, what nobody raises at the 9/11 hearings is a scenario in which a jetliner utterly DESTROYS a skyscraper, in stark contrast to day of 9/11 from minute of destruction of WTC2 talked about as INEVITABLE on all networks
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https://twitter.com/drbairdonline/status/1180976194927222785

What, if anything, makes Tom Clancy prescient about 9/11 was NOT the idea of a kamikaze pilot crashing into a building but his DESCRIPTION of the utter destruction wreaked by 300 tons of aircraft & fuel striking the east face of the Capitol at a speed of 300 knots
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Clancy's description - the aircraft disintegrating on impact, its speed & mass fragmenting columns, roof falling down, 100 tons of jet fuel igniting, immense fireball, volcanic flames forcing pressure wave even to basement, mushrooming cloud - was just like we "saw" on 9/11!
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Clancy mentions that "the Capitol has no structural steel" but he seemed to have no qualms on 9/11 with the "official" story that fuel-filled 767s destroyed the 110-story Twin Towers - maybe taking 1-2 hours longer than the Capitol to "collapse"
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