NEW YORK - In David Cronenberg's awesome
Cosmopolis (France/Canada, 2012), based on
the homonymous novel by Don DeLillo, young
billionaire Eric Packer (Robert Pattison) slowly
cruises New York in his white limo, installed in a
cushy leather throne with incrusted screens.
He feels … nothing; he essentially sucks
up the world into his own inertia. Outside his
moving silent chamber, it's total chaos, with
activists spraying rats in posh restaurants and a
tense threat of imminent apocalypse.
This
is the world morphing into, or being gobbled up
by, dematerialized ultra-capitalism; a world in a
state of crisis, driven
by violence, and with
violence as the only possible horizon. As a
libidinous art dealer (Juliette Binoche) tells
Packer: "It's cyber-capital that creates the
future."
A walk in the dead of a New York
night to Ground Zero offers extra context to
Cosmopolis. This is where our
post-apocalyptic modernity began, 11 years go -
and where cyber-capital still creates at least
some of the future. As Cosmopolis shows,
turbo-capitalism is not only in crisis;
turbo-capitalism, in shorthand, IS crisis.
Ground Zero remains an eerie sight deep in
the dead of night. There's the memorial. There's
the new unfinished glass tower. And there remain
holes the size of Ground Zero all over the
official narrative.
This week, 11 years
after 9/11, the talk of the (crisis) town is a
Navy SEAL "hero" trading his anonymity for the
proverbial fistful of dollars, telling it like it
is - "it" being the snuffing out of "Geronimo",
aka Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of
9/11, the whole spectacle packaged as a
celebratory "bringing him to justice". [1]
Yet the snuffing out of "Geronimo" brought
no closure; what it did was to hurl a batch of
inconvenient truths to the bottom of the Arabian
Sea. Over three years ago, the indispensable Sibel
Edmonds was certifying how Osama was "one of our
bastards" right up to 9/11. [2] And Richard Behan
earlier delivered a succinct deconstruction of the
road to 9/11 once again exposing the fallacy of
the "war on terror". [3]
When I
interviewed the Lion of the Panjshir, Ahmad Shah
Masoud, in late August 2001 - only two weeks
before his assassination on September 9, the green
light for 9/11 - he was convinced the US would not
invade Afghanistan to snatch "Geronimo". (See Masoud:
From warrior to statesman, Asia Times Online,
September 12, 2001.)
What Masoud didn't
know by then was what had taken place on August 2
in Islamabad, when US State Department negotiator
Christine Rocca for the last time reiterated to
Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef
in no uncertain terms: "Either you accept our
offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a
carpet of bombs." The offer was all about
Pipelineistan - "golden" transit rights for the
Taliban for the construction by UNOCAL of the TAP
(Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan) pipeline.
Yet even before Rocca's final offer, the
George W Bush administration - at the Group of
Eight meeting in Genoa, Italy, in July - had
already secretly informed the Europeans, plus
Pakistan and India, that Washington would start
bombing Afghanistan by October. That was several
weeks before the neo-cons' so much cherished
"Pearl Harbor" was sent by Providence in the form
of 9/11.
Freedom fighter
fix Eleven years later, the proverbial
stenographers of Empire are now eagerly promoting
... al-Qaeda (what else is new?). The Barack Obama
administration - shelving the "war on terror"
terminology and Orwellianizing its methods -
worked side by side with the al-Qaeda-linked
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group to overthrow Muammar
Gaddafi in Libya; and, side by side with the House
of Saud, supports a rosary of Salafi-jihadis of
the al-Qaeda variety to topple the Bashar al-Assad
regime in Syria. [4]
We all remember the
mujahideen in the photo side-by-side with Ronald
Reagan; they were cherished as "freedom fighters".
Blowback was inevitable in Afghanistan - as it
will be in Libya and northern Africa, and Syria
and the Middle East.
Meanwhile, all those
myriad questions will remain unanswered. Among
them:
Why "Geronimo" was never formally indicted by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation as responsible
for 9/11? How could the alleged 19 Muslim
perpetrators have been identified in less than 72
hours - without even a crime-scene investigation?
Who pocketed the eight indestructible black
boxes on those four 9/11 flights? How easy was it
for all those elaborate Pentagon defense systems
to be disabled? Why was the DC Air National Guard
in Washington AWOL?
How come a huge number of reputed architects
and engineers are adamant that the official
narrative simply does not explain the largest
structural collapse in recorded history (the Twin
Towers) as well as the collapse of WTC building 7,
which was not even hit by a jet?
Why did New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani
instantly authorize the shipment of WTC rubble to
China and India for recycling?
Why was metallic debris found no less than
eight miles from the crash site of the plane that
went down in Pennsylvania - suggesting the plane
may have been shot down under Dick Cheney's
orders?
Who inside the Pakistani Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) transferred US$100,000 to
Mohammed Atta in the summer of 2001 - under orders
of ISI head Lt Gen Ahmad himself, as Indian
intelligence insists? Was it really ISI asset Omar
Sheikh, Osama bin Laden's information technology
specialist who later organized the slaying of
journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi? Was Pakistani
intelligence directly involved in 9/11?
And was "Geronimo" admitted at the American
hospital in Dubai on July 4, 2001, after flying
from Quetta, Pakistan, and staying for treatment
until July 11? We will never know. And "Geronimo"
isn't talking. What we do know is that
cyber-capital creates the future; the "war on
terror" was - is - a monumental scam; and
Washington elites couldn't care less about a bunch
of "towel heads"; it's the Middle Kingdom that
fills them with dread.
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