Dear 9/11 truth activists and concerned citizens,

Dear 9/11 truth activists and concerned citizens,

First I want to apologize to all those who attempted to make a donation
for the new David Ray Griffin DVD, only to discover that our website was
down the entire weekend! Please accept our apologies. Strangely, our
server had two hard drive failures simultaneously, and many good people
spent the whole weekend without sleeping in order to fix the problem!

In any case, the website is now up again, and we still have available the
new, 1-hour DVD of David Ray Griffin, Professor and author of The New
Pearl Harbor, speaking in Santa Rosa, California, about his newest book,
The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions. We will ship it to
you within a few days for a donation of $20 or more. Here's the link for
more details:

http://www.septembereleventh.org/donations.php

Again, this video is one of the best introductions to the topic of 9/11
truth currently available. It's an excellent gift to give friends and
family new to the issue. And if any of you doubt whether 9/11 truth is
still relevant, please read the following article by Catherine Austin
Fitts of www.solari.com. While many of our efforts to gain legal justice
for 9/11 have failed, there is also much more we can do. Indeed, as
Catherine so eloquently describes, we haven't yet played our trump card.
The truth about 9/11 may yet lead to the transformation we are hoping for.
How? Please read on.

Towards peace and truth,

Emanuel Sferios
Webmaster, SeptemberEleventh.org

WILL THE REAL ECONOMIC HIT MEN PLEASE STAND UP?
Meditations on 9/11 Truth
by Catherine Austin Fitts
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/members/010705_economic_hitmen.shtml

Economic Hit Men
A "limited hangout" is a partial confession, a mea culpa, if you will,
that leaves the essence of a crime or covert reality hidden. "The
publicizing of a limited hang-out … acts like a release of a pressure
valve, satisfying some skeptics, maintaining the appearance of ongoing
investigation, and allaying building suspicions - while legitimating the
system that initiated the cover-up in the first place, and letting those
most responsible off the hook.''1

If you want to see an excellent limited hang out at work, pick up a copy
of the John Perkins' bestselling Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. In
his limited hangout confession, Perkins describes his career from 1971 to
1981 as a highly paid professional who helped defraud Third World
countries by helping syndicates make uneconomic loans as a means to
facilitate the eventual takeover of those economies by elite and corporate
interests.

Greg Palast, Anne Williamson and other first-rate investigative
journalists have brilliantly documented instances of such economic warfare
against sovereign governments and national economies - where nations are
taken over with their own money, in much the same way as a corporate
raider takes over a company through leveraged buy-out. I have documented a
similar process in US communities and mortgage markets. In writing about
this process, I use the concept of an "economic tapeworm" to explain the
negative return on investment financial system that operates globally and
relies on economic and military warfare to finance and subsidize itself.2

The phenomenon that Perkins writes about is well known. But his personal
"how to" account of an economic hit pertains to an apparently cold case,
far in the financial past. While this story is very instructive for those
who have not yet dealt with professional fraudsters or been targeted by
economic warfare3 (whether in the Third World or in the First World
nations) it is even more instructive for its omissions - and for its
timing as an apologia intended, we are led to believe, somehow to assuage
guilt for harm done: it relates to events occurring twenty-five or thirty
years ago, involving players who are, for the most part, dead or retired
from the business of economic warfare and companies that have morphed into
later incarnations.

In the process of providing a colorful account of a 1970s whodunit
(complete with low tech strategies devoid of the dazzling technology
toolkit that is now an essential part of the economic hit man's weaponry
of economic warfare), Perkins delivers to readers the "big lie": he
reveals the secret that there is no greater conspiracy. This is simply
globalization run amok, he would have us believe. Somehow, this particular
conspiracy theory seems charmingly credible as part of a "confession."
Perkins admits to what is known and then uses the credibility created by
his "limited hangout" to further obscure the reality of who's who in the
real governance of global investment and risk management. We are to
presume that the investment networks in and around the Harvard
Corporation, the City of London, the Vatican and investment managers and
bankers for the proceeds of transnational organized crime are simply
good-hearted fellows who let things get out of hand.

Nowhere does Perkins introduce the notion that cartels in a "New World
Order" (the phrase coined and promoted by George H. W. Bush) use covert
manipulation of the global financial system to centralize and concentrate
economic and political power. Assassinations by "jackals" aside, Perkins
barely hints that for fifty years the US military-industrial complex has
been developing and testing powerful black budget technology, satellite
and other invisible weaponry and surveillance technology and
insider-trading tools behind the veil of national security secrets.
Indeed, it was the need for a means of financing black budget operations
and weaponry outside the view and control of Congress and the
appropriations process - rather than the mere pursuit of corporate profits
- that provided the political air cover for Perkins to do what he did as
his covert counterparts marketed drugs in American and Third World
communities alike.

It's an old rule of economics. Sources and uses need to be in one
integrated financial statement to understand an enterprise. In Perkins'
world, we are never quite clear who got what cash and in what amounts when
all was said and done. Which means someone gets to keep the money and
remain socially acceptable - and we remain clueless as to who was really
running things two decades ago.

Economic Warfare in the 21st Century
The power of Perkins' book as a limited hangout can be understood by
observing the sales, support and kudos in mainstream media it has achieved
while the leading books on 9/114, arguably the most significant economic
hit in US history,5 have had a much harder time garnering attention. The
message seems to be that economic warfare is something that the corporate
mainstream will acknowledge, but only so long as it is low tech, long ago,
and far away.

Understanding and facing the economic warfare responsible for slowly
poisoning us and our families and wiping out our retirement savings is a
complex and very scary undertaking in comparison to Perkins' concerned
confessions. Perhaps we prefer to disassociate from our present
circumstances, live in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance, and
focus on the study of yesteryear.

Complex and scary as it may seem, the growing body of evidence makes a
compelling case that officials of the US government, its contractors and
the military abetted the 9/11 attacks. With the help and complicity of the
US Congress and corporate media, they are engaged in the most profitable
war and enforcement profiteering in history. This is a terrifying picture
to contemplate.

Look how tough it has been for New Yorkers, the constituency most
adversely affected by the 9/11 tragedy. A recent Zogby poll indicates that
49.3 percent of residents of New York City hold the opinion that officials
"knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11,
2001, and that they consciously failed to act." Yet, despite this
widespread conviction and the mounting evidence that sustains it, no
serious support has developed for the November 2004 citizens' complaint
requesting that Elliot Spitzer, the Attorney General of New York, finally
open a criminal investigation into the tragedy.

Although fifteen NYC legislators have also called for such an inquiry,
there has as yet been no effort locally to hold the New York Senate and
Congressional delegations accountable for failing to hold the executive
branch responsible for its failure to perform, or for its potential
complicity. While the New York firemen booing Hillary Clinton off the
stage at the 911 Concert was a start, the sentiment expressed has not
translated into political action or market action. How many New Yorkers
have cut off their subscriptions to, ads in or investments in the stock of
the New York Times when the Times helped to facilitate the 9/11 cover-up
by failing to ask probative questions or hold officials accountable?

The problem the average New Yorker has is the same that we all face - our
complicity is deep. We have an entire economy and culture financially
dependent upon too many things that harm people and the environment. This
is not new. Only the possibility that the war machine is blowing up
thousands of middle class Americans in American office buildings in broad
daylight is new.

The fact that the Bushes and the Clintons are on the same team - and have
been since their alleged Iran-Contra partnership in an airport operation
in Mena, Arkansas involving the transshipment of cocaine destined for the
streets of America - is not something that most Americans have yet
incorporated into our political equation.

The fact that current financial and commodity markets "clear" not through
the operation of changes in price generated by the legitimate free market
expression of supply and demand but rather by blowing up American office
buildings and the people and legal documents in them is not something that
most Americans saving for retirement or financing a home have incorporated
as risks in developing an investment strategy.

We cannot fathom that economic warfare is now conducted using high tech
software weaponry to silently invade the privacy of our banking and
purchasing relationships, our comings and goings, and the details of our
work and home lives. Nor have we incorporated this realization into our
decisions about who we share our lives with and what we say and do behind
closed doors.

The illumination of the truth of 9/11, however, could change most
Americans' paradigms and transactions in powerful ways. It could certainly
fuel an increase in demand for precious metals, alternative energy and
local self-sufficiency.

The Strong Dollar Policy
In the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration, led by an economic team
comprised of Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Franklin Raines,
instituted something called the "strong dollar policy." This policy was
maintained by the Bush Administration, which held over in the first term
many of the key players in policymaking positions, including George Tenet,
Jerry Hawke (Comptroller of the Currency 1998 - 2004) and Charles Rossotti
(45th Commissioner of the IRS).

The smoothness of the transition between administrations ostensibly led by
political parties in opposition to each other belies the ruse and
underscores the strategic nature of the centralization of economic and
politic power under way.

While the game of trying to figure out what in the world the strong dollar
policy really is has gotten increasingly Orwellian,6 the basics are pretty
simple. We have kept the dollar's value high relative to other currencies
- and far above what fundamental economics would warrant - by asking the
consumer and taxpayer to shoulder extraordinary and rising levels of debt
financed by increasing amounts of dirty money. This has enabled elites to
move off shore and into private hands virtually all the real financial
equity in the country. The US is not alone in experiencing "disappearing
equity" - it is part of a global equity-centralizing and asset-control
process.

The strong dollar policy was characterized by a series of financial and
market manipulations:

Four Secretaries of the Treasury refused to produce audited financial
statements and reported a total of $4 trillion in "undocumentable
adjustments";7

The Clinton and Bush Administrations rejected policies that would build
American productivity and employment8 in the face of the plan to move
employment abroad while permitting the growth of debt and immigration
quotas at home;

The Clinton and Bush Administrations promoted federal credit policies that
turned American homes into ATM machines and led to a mortgage market
characterized by increasing levels of fraud;

The Clinton and Bush Administrations in concert with the central banks
(most notably the Federal Reserve) and bullion banks (including JP
Morgan-Chase, Citibank and Goldman Sachs) manipulated the gold and silver
markets to suppress the price of precious metals while large inventories
were moved out of governments and central bank accounts worldwide and into
private hands;

US pension funds and 401k and IRA retirement savings accounts lost value
by waves of accounting and other financial frauds at widely held
corporations (such as Enron, Worldcom and Tyco);

US Congress and regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange
Commission adopted corporate controls, ostensibly to protect investors
from further acts of corporate fraud, that operate as a subtle form of
capital control, limiting the ability of entrepreneurs on Main Street to
raise capital in financial markets;

Military force was used to ensure that global investors would continue to
purchase US Treasury and mortgage agency securities and the US dollar
would prevail as the currency of international choice;

The federal budget, federal credit, and federal contracting were operated
to favor corporate profit making at the cost of small business and labor
productivity;

US Treasury and Federal Reserve market intervention was used to ensure low
cost of capital for favored global corporations; and,

The types and amounts of outstanding financial derivatives exploded, far
beyond the ability of most public and private leaders to understand or
explain.

No one has made a count of the deaths that resulted worldwide from these
various financial manipulations. The death toll from the pincer movement
of military warfare and economic warfare is far greater than is generally
understood.

9/11: Strong Dollar Policy Steroids?
While floating the global dollar economy on a sea of debt and easy money
worked well for the economic hit men and women through the end of the
1990s, by the summer of 2001 the game seemed to have run its course.
Defense appropriations had stalled that summer. Members of the media were
asking questions about $3.3 trillion missing from HUD and DOD. Shortly
before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld admitted that DOD could not account for
trillions of taxpayer dollars. On September 9, 2001, From the Wilderness
issued an economic alert warning that the global financial system ran the
risk of meltdown.9

With the events of 9/11, however, the US government was able to garner
support for the extraordinary financial market interventions necessary to
continue the strong dollar policy and for keeping the lid on the various
financial frauds and manipulations. America and the global financial
system have stayed afloat for another three years.

The answer to the question Cui Bono? ("Who benefits?") from the strong
dollar policy suggests that allegations that members of the Bush
Administration fully expected, welcomed and even facilitated 9/11 should
be taken seriously. Trillions of dollars have been moved out of the US
economy under the umbrella of the strong dollar policy - much of it in
what appear to be criminal ways. The 9/11 tragedy conveniently
necessitated a sudden, centralized control over government and theretofore
private activities in the name of protecting national security interests
and addressing the threat o