BOOK REVIEW:
The War on Freedom
How and Why America was Attacked on September 11, 2001
by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

reviewed by Gregory Ellison

As long as there have been governments, powerful men have conspired to gain and extend governmental power for their own purposes. Throughout most of history, this self-evident fact has not been questioned. In fact, much of the history that we possess is the record of powerful factions and families vying for power and control, with behind-the-scenes court intrigues and secret alliances forming much of the backdrop for world events.

Yet for some reason, the current popular belief is that such things don’t happen anymore. In the struggle for power in this “enlightened age,” the shape and movement of world events is thought to be just what it appears to be on the surface level, and those few who believe otherwise are quickly dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” - a term which has become virtually synonymous with “crackpots” or “wierdos.”

In The War on Freedom, internationally respected scholar Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development (a U.K.-based human rights and world policy think tank) brings a sane and responsible perspective to the awareness that now, no less than at any other time in history, world events are often created and manipulated from behind the scenes by powerful vested interests. Such events are frequently not at all what they appear to be from the surface-level explanations of leaders and the reports of news media.

The event Ahmed focuses on to demonstrate this point is the most dramatic event of recent times: the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States’ World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Exhaustively documented and dispassionately reasoned, The War on Freedom presents the case for viewing this calamitous event as one that was clearly anticipated and allowed to happen by rogue elements acting through and within the United States’ power structure, in support of a hidden agenda to expand the power that could be wielded by those elements. The desired expansion of power is said to include:

1. domestic suspension of civil liberties and constitutional rights, uncurbed surveillance of the American people, and a vast expansion of federal police powers operating under a blanket of secrecy without judicial oversight or public accountability, and
   
   
2. globalist expansion of military power aimed at world hegemony in the guise of a new “Pax Americana” - a unilateral global empire under the “benevolent” leadership of a corporate-military-industrial-financial conglomeration of special interests.

Especially for spiritually-minded folks who hope for progress toward world peace built on freedom, equality, compassion and justice for all, the implications of this conclusion, if true, are staggering.

Step by step, Ahmed reveals the background and underpinnings leading up to the 9/11 attack and the ways in which it has been used since to further the ends of a powerful group of special interests. (For the sake of brevity I’ll just refer to this clique of powerful special interests as the “military-industrial establishment,” or just “the establishment,” but it certainly includes elements from the corporate, financial and intelligence communities as well.)

Drawing extensively on public documents, news reports of the mainstream media, well-documented statements by national leaders, and analysis by respected scholars and institutions, Ahmed details the history of the Afghanistan conflict and the role of covert U.S./CIA interests in its recent history. He establishes bin Laden’s role as a CIA asset, trained and supported by the CIA in building his terrorist organization to overthrow the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He outlines the American establishment’s aims to build oil pipelines through Afghanistan to the Caspian region’s vast oil and gas reserves - and the Taliban’s growing resistance to those plans. He presents evidence showing that in response to this resistance, the Bush administration had already drawn up detailed plans to attack Afghanistan.

Indeed there is a long and well-documented record of in-depth strategic planning behind the invasion of Afghanistan, much of which is publicly available in a 1997 study by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinsky, who discusses in detail U.S. plans to gain hegemony over Central Asia as a means to control Eurasia and thereby expand and consolidate global U.S. hegemony, unhindered by potential rivals such as Russia and China.

Ahmed shows clearly that the American-led war in Afghanistan proceeded precisely according to plans that predated 9/11, and thus, were not truly in “response” to that tragedy as the public has been led to believe. Since that time, plans for the trans-Caspian pipeline are indeed back on track and moving swiftly forward.

Against this background, Ahmed shows convincingly that in the years leading up to the attack, the intelligence community was in receipt of numerous credible warnings of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. That information specified the hijacking of civilian airplanes to be flown into key U.S. buildings in Washington, D.C., and New York City, and further specified that the attacks would occur between early and mid-September of 2001.

Yet the administration not only failed to act on those warnings, it deliberately blocked and suppressed them, according to the sworn testimony of several FBI agents who have subsequently sought whistleblower protection. In some cases the agents were threatened with dismissal or disciplinary action if they did not drop their investigations.

Moving next to the events on the day of the attack itself, Ahmed cites official sources and public records to show that the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Air Force systematically failed to adhere to Standard Operating Procedures long established for dealing with emergency situations, including hijackings. As a result, there was a total absence of defensive response to the attacks. Since then, various official government accounts and statements have been issued, many with contradictory messages, attempting to deflect public attention away from the collapse of the response systems during the attacks and thus deny that reality.

Ahmed argues convincingly that this systematic violation of Standard Operating Procedures could only have occurred through the complicity of key military and government officials. His conclusion is supported by evidence that both President Bush and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard B. Myers displayed utter indifference to notifications they received of the commencement of an attack on the World Trade Center, despite the fact that it was their direct responsibility to ensure the security of the American nation at such time. President Bush, who was making a public relations visit to an elementary school at the time, nodded grimly when informed by an adviser, then resumed chatting about goats and other farm animals with school children for another 15 minutes!

But what would be served by allowing such a tragedy to happen? Who would stand to gain, and how?

Much of the remainder of the book is spent answering those questions. The War on Freedom meticulously documents a number of longstanding financial, diplomatic, military and intelligence ties between various members of the establishment and figures directly linked to Osama bin Laden (and bin Laden himself), including:

• The Bush and bin Laden families were both major investors in the Carlyle Group, a consortium of defense contractors, which directly benefits financially from the attack on Afghanistan and subsequent U.S. military actions and spending.
  
  
• The senior (former President) Bush was at the time employed by Carlyle, and has on at least two documented occasions flown to Saudi Arabia to meet with the bin Laden family on business!
  
  
• Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act include correspondence on Carlyle Group letterhead between former Defense Secretaries Frank Carlucci and William Perry (both of whom are now Carlyle employees) and current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, discussing a potential restructuring of the Defense Department.

In other words, a corporation in which the bin Laden family is a major investor and George Bush is an employee is wired into the administration thoroughly enough to have a direct impact on the structure of the Defense Department!

This is only the tip of the iceberg and the connections get even more ominous as the story unfolds, but I won’t spoil the book for you with a blow-by-blow account. With flawless logic and overwhelming documentation, Ahmed weaves together the revelation of financial and commercial interests working hand-in-hand with strategic military and intelligence interests to the end of consolidating ultimate global power and wealth in the hands of a relatively small group of dominant establishment insiders.

He shows how and why these ambitious ends brought about the tragedy of 9/11, and how the shock and fear engendered by that tragedy has been used to advance the establishment’s grip on the lives and freedoms of Americans, thus furthering the aim of world domination and control by an “American” hegemony.

This establishment, Ahmed makes clear, is international in scope. While acting in the NAME of America, it is in reality a consortium of money and power interests on a global scale: international bankers, multinational corporations, transnational weapons merchants, and a worldwide intelligence community more dedicated to exercising the craft of power than to serving individual nations.

The purpose of the book is not to promote fear or hatred toward that shadowy and amorphous establishment, about whom we still know very little, even with the wealth of carefully documented research in The War on Freedom. Rather, the book serves its purpose as a first step toward awareness that such a “conspiracy” against humanity does exist, for until we are aware of it we cannot resist it. The rush to war and the ready acceptance of curbs on our treasured freedoms is ample evidence of our inability to resist without awareness. We must now look at everything that happens, everything we are told, every surface-gloss of what is going on in the world, with newly questioning eyes ... and when our questions are not answered, we must withhold our support until they are.

Otherwise, the effects of this roller-coaster ride we have been on since the events of 9/11 will ultimately coalesce in the final realization of the dream shared by the architects of State Communism, Nazism and Fascism: a worldwide totalitarianism that will leave no room for the human spirit in the gray twilight of global servitude to the iron hand of the elite controllers.

The War on Freedom closes with this prophetic statement anonymously attributed to one of the earliest “ancestors” of the current establishment:

“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch, and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need to seize the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar.”

This War on Freedom will not stop until we stop it. And we CAN stop it, because we do create our own reality by means of what we are willing to believe and support. But it will take both love and courage. Love of life, of freedom and of humanity - to refuse to allow our fellow human beings to come to such harm - and courage to stand up to those who tell us we must accept the chains that are offered us as the price of security. In the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, “Just say no!”