A great presentation by one of the best writers and journalists around.

I, and others here, have been bleating on about the forthcoming end of the American Empire for many years - and particularly as a consequence of the forthcoming collapse of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency (already happening btw) - that Hedges also addresses.

With the US Fed unable to repatriate foreign owned dollars back to the US to service the ever growing national debt ($21 trillion and growing rapidly), the US will be forced to repudiate its debts that are no longer able to be serviced. That will spell the end of the Pentagon as a major force in the world.

It's only a matter of time and when it comes it's likely to come very fast. Personally, I can't wait. The world needs a period without permanent war and strife.

He's losing it.

Quote:Will the war in Syria never end? Will the international proxy war and stand-off between Russia, the United States, Iran, and Israel simply continue to drift on, fueling Syria's fires for yet more years to come? It appears so according to an exclusive Washington Post report which says that President Trump has expressed a desire for complete 180 policy shift on Syria. Only months ago the president expressed a desire "to get out" and pull the over 2,000 publicly acknowledged American military personnel from the country; but now, the new report finds, Trump has approved "an indefinite military and diplomatic effort in Syria".

The radical departure from Trump's prior outspokenness against militarily pursuing Syrian regime change, both on the campaign trail and during his first year in the White House, reportedly involves "a new strategy for an indefinitely extended military, diplomatic and economic effort there, according to senior State Department officials".
This even though one of the Pentagon's main justifications for being on Syrian soil in the first place the destruction of ISIS has already essentially happened as the terror group now holds no significant territory and has been driven completely underground.
But most worrisome about the Post report is that sources said to be close to White House policy planning on Syria suggest that Trump has made a commitment to pursuing regime change as a final goal.
Crucially, the report describes that "the administration has redefined its goals to include the exit of all Iranian military and proxy forces from Syria, and establishment of a stable, nonthreatening government acceptable to all Syrians and the international community."
Of course, there's the glaringly obvious issue of the fact that the most powerful top competing "alternatives" to the current government in Damascus include groups like Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, which currently holds Idlib and is under direct allegiance to al-Qaeda chief Ayman al Zawahiri (as recently confirmed in the US State Department's own words).

[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump"]Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
[/URL]
[URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1036740691211284480"]
[/URL]


President Bashar al-Assad of Syria must not recklessly attack Idlib Province. The Russians and Iranians would be making a grave humanitarian mistake to take part in this potential human tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of people could be killed. Don't let that happen!
3:20 PM - Sep 3, 2018

• [URL="https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=1036740691211284480"]
  87.2K[/URL]
  
• [URL="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1036740691211284480"]
  43K people are talking about this[/URL]
  

Twitter Ads info and privacy







The shift stems from the White House's re-prioritizing the long held US desire for the complete removal of Iranian forces from Syria. There's reportedly increased frustration that Russia is not actually interested in seeing Iran withdraw, despite prior pledges as part of US-Russia largely back channel diplomacy on Syria.
However, the Post report quotes a top Pompeo-appointed official, James Jeffrey, who is currently "representative for Syria engagement" at the State Department, to say that U.S. policy is not that "Assad must go" but that immense pressure will be brought to bear, and in terms of future US troop exit, "we are not in a hurry".
"The new policy is we're no longer pulling out by the end of the year," Jeffrey said while noting the mission would largely shirt ensuring Iranian departure. He also indicated to that Trump is likely "on board" on signing off on "a more active approach" should there be direct confrontation with either Iran or Russia.
It goes without saying that such a significant policy shift makes the possibilities of just such a confrontation or perhaps "provocation" over Idlib all the more dangerous considering it now appears Trump may now be looking for an excuse to act, which would provide the usual convenient distraction from problems at home.

Deleted !

AS could easily be predicted, the last great battle for Syria, the Idlib enclave, is about to start properly. The US, UK and French are getting ready to militarily respond again - but apparently far more viciously - should a new chemical weapon / gas attack occur. The West has already pinned the blame firmly on the Assad government for this event that is yet to happen. And happen it almost certainly will.

According to the Russians a a British military contractor, Olive Group, has been training Jihadists in Idlib to perpetrate a chemical/gas attack, with the White Helmets standing ready to publicise it to the Anglo-American-French camp waiting to pounce. People can read about Olive Group HERE. This entity almost certainly is a SIS/MI6 critter, which may be why the redoubtable Alastair Crooke in his recent article on the coming events at Idlib avoids mentioning their name. Crook used to be a senior officer of MI6. Crooke's article is HERE. It is a worrying analysis of what could be.

Elsewhere the Middle Eastern expert, Elijah Magnier has penned his recent piece on the same subject HERE. Former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford has also let loose on the madness being prepared to be unleashed, In his article he likens this last (hopefully) major battle in Syria to be akin to the Suez crisis of 1956 - which saw the end of the British Empire, followed shortly after, by the British Pound Sterling relinquishing its reserve currency status (circa 1960's), primarily because of the crippling debts it had incurred fighting WWII - that we now know (thanks to, for example, Guido Preparata), Britain had been craftily engineering since WWI (which the Brits also engineered in it's divide & conquer strategy for the Continent). Ford's piece is HERE.

In rounding off, for the time being, the writers/bloggers I tend to favour, is former Green Beret Colonel and later CIA guy, Pat Lang HERE. It is worth taking the time to read the comments section of Lang's blog, as there are some very informed people posting there - including our very own Lauren Johnson.

Not least, Caitlin Johnstone, "rogue journalist" and an admirably feisty one at that, has shredded Nikki Haley's recent pronouncements in the UN on the planned false flag event. No one deserves shredding than Nikki Haley in my opinion. I wouldn't let my grandkids near her in daylight let alone on a dark night. On the other hand if one had an ample supply of wooden stakes and garlic, others may well wish to meet her on a dark night. Not I though. Caitlin Johnstone's article is well worth reading and her many links worth checking out too. The one she has for a declassified CIA report from 1986 in which the CIA are blame-storming on ways to cause an uprising in Syria (HERE).

She also links to one of my favourite Youtube clips (below) that I regularly show people who argue that the Western narrative on Assad and Syria is true (yes, there are millions and millions who still believe what the western media still say. Sadly. But then no one claims that being born with grey matter inside one's skull automatically translates to having a functioning brain did they...)

If oner thing should be widely seen on the nasty, sad and awful years of war in Syria, it is this video:



In closing I wonder if the Idlib battle is the US Neocon's last great effort to save their neoliberal dollar from eventually going belly-up thereby buggle-ing the Last Post to the end to their global hegemony?

I sincerely hope so. The world could do with peace for a change.

Global Research, September 04, 2018

Quote:
Just after September 11th 2001, many governments began investigations into possible insider trading related to the terrorist attacks of that day. Such investigations were initiated by the governments of Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, and others. Although the investigators were clearly concerned about insider trading, and considerable evidence did exist, none of the investigations resulted in a single indictment. That's because the people identified as having been involved in the suspicious trades were seen as unlikely to have been associated with those alleged to have committed the 9/11 crimes.

This is an example of the circular logic often used by those who created the official explanations for 9/11. The reasoning goes like this: if we assume that we know who the perpetrators were (i.e. the popular version of "al Qaeda") and those who were involved in the trades did not appear to be connected to those assumed perpetrators, then insider trading did not occur.

That's basically what the 9/11 Commission told us. The Commission concluded that "exhaustive investigations" by the SEC and the FBI "uncovered no evidence that anyone with advance knowledge of the attacks profited through securities transactions." What they meant was that someone did profit through securities transactions but, based on the Commission's assumptions of guilt, those who profited were not associated with those who were guilty of conducting the attacks. In a footnote, the Commission report acknowledged "highly suspicious trading on its face," but said that this trading on United Airlines was traced back to "A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda."[1]

With respect to insider trading, or what is more technically called informed trading, the Commission report was itself suspect for several reasons. First, the informed trades relating to 9/11 covered far more than just airline company stock. The stocks of financial and reinsurance companies, as well as other financial vehicles, were identified as being associated with suspicious trades. Huge credit card transactions, completed just before the attacks, were also involved. The Commission ultimately tried to frame all of this highly suspicious trading in terms of a series of misunderstandings. However, the possibility that so many leading financial experts were so completely wrong is doubtful at best and, if true, would constitute another unbelievable scenario in the already highly improbable sequence of events represented by the official story of 9/11.

In the last few years, new evidence has come to light on these matters. In 2006 and 2010, financial experts at a number of universities have established new evidence, through statistical analyses, that informed trades did occur with respect to the 9/11 attacks. Additionally, in 2007, the 911 Commission released a memorandum summary of the FBI investigations on which its report was based.[2] A careful review of this memorandum indicates that some of the people who were briefly investigated by the FBI, and then acquitted without due diligence, had links to al Qaeda and to US intelligence agencies. Although the elapsed time between the informed trades and these new confirmations might prevent legal action against the guilty, the facts of the matter can help lead us to the truth about 9/11.

Early signs

Within a week of the attacks, Germany's stock market regulator, BAWe, began looking into claims of suspicious trading.[3] That same week, Italy's foreign minister, Antonio Martino, made it clear that he had concerns by issuing this public statement:

"I think that there are terrorist states and organisations behind speculation on the international markets."[4]

Within two weeks of the attacks, CNN reported that regulators were seeing "ever-clearer signs" that someone "manipulated financial markets ahead of the terror attack in the hope of profiting from it." Belgian Finance Minister, Didier Reynders, said that there were strong suspicions that British markets were used for transactions.[5] The CIA was reported to have asked the British regulators to investigate some of the trades.[6] Unfortunately, the British regulator, The Financial Services Authority, wrote off its investigation by simply clearing "bin Laden and his henchmen of insider trading."[7]

Conversely, German central bank president, Ernst Welteke, said his bank conducted a study that strongly indicated "terrorism insider trading" associated with 9/11. He stated that his researchers had found "almost irrefutable proof of insider trading."[8] Welteke suggested that the insider trading occurred not only in shares of companies affected by the attacks, such as airlines and insurance companies, but also in gold and oil. [9]

The extent of the 9/11-related informed trading was unprecedented. An ABC News Consultant, Jonathan Winer, said,

"it's absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan to the US to North America to Europe."[10]

By October 2001, the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the four other options exchanges in the US had joined forces with the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate a list of 38 stocks, as well as multiple options and Treasury bonds, that were flagged in relation to potential informed trades. SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt gave testimony to the House Financial Services Committee at the time, saying,

"We will do everything in our power to track those people down and bring them to justice."[11]

Mary Bender, chief regulatory officer at the CBOE, stated

"We've never really had anything like this, [the option exchanges are] using the same investigative tools as we would in an insider-trading case. The point is to find people who are connected to these heinous crimes."

The people ultimately found included an unnamed customer of Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown (DBAB). This involved a trade on United Airlines (UAL) stock consisting of a 2,500-contract order that was, for some reason, split into chunks of 500 contracts each and then directed to multiple exchanges around the country simultaneously.[12] When the 9/11 Commission report pointed to a "single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda," it was referring to either DBAB or its customer in that questionable trade.

The late Michael Ruppert had written about DBAB, noting that the company had previously been a financier of The Carlyle Group and also of Brown Brothers Harriman, both of which are companies closely related to the Bush family. Ruppert also noted that Alex. Brown, the company purchased by Deutsche Bank to become DBAB, was managed by A.B. (Buzzy) Krongard, who left the firm in 1998 to join the CIA as counsel to directorGeorge Tenet.[13] Krongard had been a consultant to CIA director James Woolsey in the mid 1990s and, on September 11th, he was the Executive Director of the CIA, the third highest position in the agency.

Stock and Treasury bonds traded

In 2002, investigator Kyle Hence wrote about the stocks involved in the SEC's target list. Those that had the highest examples of trade volume over the average were UAL [285 times over average], Marsh & McLennan (Marsh) [93 times over average], American Airlines (AMR) [60 times over average], and Citigroup [45 times over average].[14] Other stocks flagged included financial firms, defense-related companies, and the reinsurance firms Munich Re, Swiss Re and the AXA Group. Put options for these reinsurance firms, or bets that the stock would drop, were placed at double the normal levels in the few days before the attacks. Regulators were concerned about "large block trades" on these stocks because the three firms were liable for billions in insurance payouts due to the damage inflicted on 9/11.[15]

The four highest-volume suspect stocks UAL, Marsh, AMR and Citigroup were closely linked to the attacks of 9/11. The two airline companies each had two planes hijacked and destroyed. Marsh was located in the exact 8 floors out of 110 in the north tower of the WTC where Flight 11 impacted and the fires occurred. Citigroup was the parent of Travelers Insurance, which was expected to see $500 million in claims, and also Salomon Smith Barney, which occupied all but ten floors in World Trade Center (WTC) building 7. Oddly enough, Salomon Smith Barney had both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney on its advisory board until January 2001.

Marsh occupied a number of floors in the south tower as well. This is where the office of Marsh executive, L. Paul Bremer, was located. Bremer was a former managing director at Kissinger Associates and had just completed leading a national terrorism commission in 2000. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that Bremer was a source of early claims that rich Arabs were financing Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. In an article on the 9/11 informed trades, the Chronicle reported that

"The former chairman of the State Department's National Commission on Terrorism, L. Paul Bremer, said he obtained classified government analyses early last year of bin Laden's finances confirming the assistance of affluent Middle Easterners."[16]

On the day of 9/11, Bremer was interviewed by NBC News and stated that he believed Osama bin Laden was responsible and that possibly Iraq and Iran were involved too, and he called for the most severe military response possible. For unknown reasons, Google removed the interview video from its servers three times, and blocked it once.[17]

Thetrading of Treasury bonds just before 9/11 was also flagged as being suspicious. Reporters from The Wall street Journal wrote that the

"U.S. Secret Service contacted a number of bond traders regarding large purchases of five-year Treasury notes before the attacks, according to people familiar with the probe. The investigators, acting on a tip from traders, are examining whether terrorists, or people affiliated with terrorist organizations, bought five-year notes, including a single $5 billion trade."[18]

Some reports claimed that the 9/11 informed trades were such that millions of dollars were made, and some of that went unclaimed. [19] Others suggested that the trades resulted in the winning of billions of dollars in profits. One such suggestion was made by the former German Minister of Technology,Andreas von Buelow, who said that the value of the informed trades was on the order of $15 billion.[20]

The FBI Investigations

In May 2007, a 9/11 Commission document that summarized the FBI investigations into potential 9/11-related informed trading was declassified. [21] This document was redacted to remove the names of two FBI agents from the New York office, and to remove the names of select suspects in the informed trading investigations. The names of other FBI agents and suspects were left in. Regardless, some information can be gleaned from the document to help reveal the trades and traders investigated.

On September 21, 2001, the SEC referred two specific transactions to the FBI for criminal investigation as potential informed trades. One of those trades was a September 6, 2001 purchase of 56,000 shares of a company called Stratesec, which in the few years before 9/11 was a security contractor for several of the facilities that were compromised on 9/11. These facilities included the WTC buildings, Dulles airport, where American Airlines Flight 77 took off, and also United Airlines, which owned two of the other three ill-fated planes.

The affected 56,000 shares of Stratesec stock were purchased by a director of the company, Wirt D. Walker III, and his wife Sally Walker. This is clear from the memorandum generated to record the FBI summary of the trades investigated.[22] The Stratesec stock that the Walkers purchased doubled in value in the one trading day between September 11th and when the stock market reopened on September 17th. The Commission memorandum suggests that the trade generated a profit of $50,000 for the Walkers. Unfortunately, the FBI did not interview either of the Walkers and they were both cleared of any wrongdoing because they were said to have "no ties to terrorism or other negative information." [23]

However, Wirt Walker was connected to people who had connections to al Qaeda. For example, Stratesec director James Abrahamson was the business partner of Mansoor Ijaz, who claimed on several occasions to be able to contact Osama bin Laden.[24] Additionally, Walker hired a number of Stratesec employees away from a subsidiary of The Carlyle Group called BDM International, which ran secret (black) projects for government agencies. The Carlyle Group was partly financed by members of the bin Laden family.[25] Mr. Walker ran a number of suspicious companies that went bankrupt, including Stratesec, some of which were underwritten by a company run by a first cousin of former CIA director (and President) George H.W. Bush. Additionally, Walker was the child of a CIA employee and his first job was at an investment firm run by former US intelligence guru, James "Russ" Forgan, where he worked with another former CIA director, William Casey.[26] Of course, Osama bin Ladenhad links to the CIA as well.[27]

Another trade investigated by the FBI, on request from the SEC, focused on Amir Ibrahim Elgindy, an Egyptian-born, San Diego stock advisor who on the day before 9/11 had allegedly attempted to liquidate $300,000 in assets through his broker at Salomon Smith Barney. During the attempted liquidation, Elgindy was said to have "predicted that the Dow Jones industrial average, which at the time stood at about 9,600, would soon crash to below 3,000."[28]

The 9/11 Commission memorandum suggests that the FBI never interviewed Mr. Elgindy either, and had planned to exonerate him because there was "no evidence he was seeking to establish a position whereby he would profit from the terrorist attacks." Apparently, the prediction of a precipitous drop in the stock market, centered on the events of 9/11, was not sufficient cause for the FBI to interview the suspect.

In late May 2002, Elgindy was arrested along with four others, including an FBI agent and a former FBI agent, and charged with conspiracy to manipulate stock prices and extort money from companies. The FBI agents, Jeffrey A Royer and Lynn Wingate, were said to have "used their access to F.B.I. databases to monitor the progress of the criminal investigation against Mr. Elgindy."[29] A federal prosecutor later accused Elgindy, who also went by several aliases, of having prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. Although the judge in that case did not agree with the prosecutor on the 9/11 informed trading accusation, Mr. Elgindy was eventually convicted, in 2005, of multiple crimes including racketeering, securities fraud, and making false statements.

The Boston office of the FBI investigated stock trades related to two companies. The first was Viisage Technologies, a facial recognition company that stood to benefit from an increase in terrorism legislation. The Viisage purchase, made by a former employee of the Saudi American Bank, "revealed no connection with 9/11." However, the Saudi American Bank was named in a lawsuit brought by the 9/11 victims' families due to the bank having "financed development projects in Sudan benefiting bin Laden in the early 1990s."[30]

The second company investigated by the Boston FBI office was Wellington Management, a company that allegedly held a large account for Osama bin Laden. The FBI found that Wellington Management maintained an account for "members of the bin Laden family" but dropped the investigation because it could not link this to "Osama, al Qaeda, or terrorism."[31]

Although the connections to al Qaeda in three of these cases (Walker, the Viisage trader, and Wellington Management) can be seen as circumstantial, the amount of such evidence is considerable. The quality of the FBI investigations, considering the suspects were not even interviewed, was therefore much less than "exhaustive", as the 9/11 Commission characterized it.

The summary of FBI investigations released by the 9/11 Commission also described how the Commission questioned the FBI about damaged computer hard drives that might have been recovered from the WTC. This questioning was the result of "press reports [contending] that large volumes of suspicious transactions flowed through the computers housed in the WTC on the morning of 9/11 as part of some illicit but ill-defined effort to profit from the attacks."[32] The Commission came to the conclusion that no such activity occurred because "the assembled agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive recovery effort" and "everything at the WTC was pulverized to near powder, making it extremely unlikely that any hard-drives survived.

"The truth, however, is that many such hard-drives were recovered from the WTC and were sent to specialist companies to be cleaned and have data recovered. A German company named Convar did a good deal of the recovery work.In December 2001, Reuters reported that

"Convar has recovered information from 32 computers that support assumptions of dirty doomsday dealings."

Richard Wagner, a data retrieval expert at Convar, testified that

"There is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time of the plane crashes in order to move out amounts exceeding $100 million. They thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed."

Director of Convar, Peter Henschel, said that it was "not only the volume, but the size of the transactions [that] was far higher than usual for a day like that."[33]

By late December 2001, Convar had completed processing 39 out of 81 drives, and expected to receive 20 more WTC hard drives the next month. Obviously, the 911 Commission memorandum drafted in August 2003 was not particularly reliable considering it reported that the FBI and the 911 Commission had no knowledge of any of this.

Statistical confirmations

Considering that the FBI and 9/11 Commission overlooked the suspicious connections of informed trading suspects like Wirt Walker, and also claimed in 2003 to have no knowledge of hard drive recoveries publicly reported in 2001, we must assume that they did a poor job of investigating. Today, however, we know that several peer-reviewed academic papers have reported solid evidence that informed trades did occur. That is, the conclusions reached by the official investigations have now been shown, through scientific analysis, to be quite wrong.

In 2006, a professor of Finance from the University of Illinois named Allen Poteshman published an analysis of the airline stock option trades preceding the attacks. This study came to the conclusion that an indicator of long put volume was "unusually high which is consistent with informed investors having traded in the option market in advance of the attacks."[34] Long puts are bets that a stock or option will fall in price.

The unusually high volume of long puts, purchased on UAL and AMR stock before these stocks declined dramatically due to the 9/11 attacks, are evidence that the traders knew that the stocks would decline. Using statistical techniques to evaluate conditional and unconditional distributions of historical stock option activity, Professor Poteshman showed that the data indicate that informed trading did occur.

In January 2010, a team of financial experts from Switzerland published evidence for at least thirteen informed trades in which the investors appeared to have had foreknowledge of the attacks. This study focused again on a limited number of companies but, of those, the informed trades centered on five airline companies and four financial companies. The airline companies were American Airlines, United Airlines and Boeing. Three of the financial companies involved were located in the WTC towers and the fourth was Citigroup, which stood to lose doubly as the parent of both Travelers Insurance and the WTC 7 tenant, Salomon Smith Barney.[35]

More recently, in April 2010, an international team of experts examined trading activities of options on the Standard & Poors 500 index, as well as a volatility index of the CBOE called VIX. These researchers showed that there was a significant abnormal increase in trading volume in the option market just before the 9/11 attacks, and they demonstrated that this was in contrast to the absence of abnormal trading volume over periods long before the attacks. The study also showed that the relevant abnormal increase in trading volume was not simply due to a declining market.[36] Their findings were "consistent with insiders anticipating the 9-11 attacks."
Conclusion

In the early days just after 9/11, financial regulators around the world gave testimony to unprecedented evidence for informed trading related to the terrorist attacks of that day. One central bank president (Welteke) said there was irrefutable proof of such trading. This evidence led US regulators to vow, in Congressional testimony, to bring those responsible to justice. Those vows were not fulfilled, as the people in charge of the investigations let the suspects off the hook by conducting weak inquiries and concluding that informed trading could not have occurred if it was not done directly by Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda.

The "exhaustive investigations" conducted by the FBI, on which the 9/11 Commission report was based, were clearly bogus. The FBI did not interview the suspects and did not appear to compare notes with the 9/11 Commission to help make a determination if any of the people being investigated might have had ties to al Qaeda. The Commission's memorandum summary suggests that the FBI simply made decisions on its own regarding the possible connections of the suspects and the alleged terrorist organizations. Those unilateral decisions were not appropriate, as at least three of the suspected informed trades (those of Walker, the Viisage trader, and Wellington Management) involved reasonably suspicious links to Osama bin Laden or his family. Another suspect (Elgindy) was a soon-to-be convicted criminal who had direct links to FBI employees who were later arrested for securities-related crimes.

The FBI also claimed in August 2003 that it had no knowledge of hard drives recovered from the WTC, which were publicly reported in 2001. According to the people who retrieved the associated data, the hard drives gave evidence for "dirty doomsday dealings.

"The evidence for informed trading on 9/11 includes many financial vehicles, from stock options to Treasury bonds to credit card transactions made at the WTC just before it was destroyed. Today we know that financial experts from around the world have provided strong evidence, through established and reliable statistical techniques, that the early expert suspicions were correct, and that 9/11 informed trading did occur.

People knew in advance about the crimes of 9/11, and they profited from that knowledge. Those people are among us today, and our families and communities are at risk of future terrorist attacks and further criminal profiteering if we do not respond to the evidence. It is time for an independent, international investigation into the informed trades and the traders who benefited from the terrorist acts of September 11th.

*Kevin Ryan is a frequent contributor to Global Research. This article was originally published on Foreign Policy Journal.
Notes[1] National Commission on the Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, July 2004, p 172, and Chapter 5, footnote 130, http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf
[2] 9/11 Commission memorandum entitled "FBI Briefing on Trading", prepared by Doug Greenburg, 18 August 2003, http://media.nara.gov/9-11/MFR/t-0148-911MFR-00269.pdf
[3] Dave Carpenter, Exchange examines odd jump: Before attack: Many put options of hijacked planes' parent companies purchased , The Associated Press, 18 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...djump.html
[4] BBC News, Bin Laden share gains' probe, 18 September 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1548118.stm
[5] Tom Bogdanowicz and Brooks Jackson, Probes into suspicious' trading, CNN, 24 September 2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20011114023845/http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/09/24/gen.europe.shortselling/
[6] James Doran, Insider Trading Apparently Based on Foreknowledge of 9/11 Attacks, The London Times, 18 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...ading.html
[7] David Brancaccio, Marketplace Public Radio: News Archives, 17 October 2001, http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows...7_mpp.html
[8] Paul Thompson and The Center for Cooperative Research, Terror Timeline: Year by Year, Day by Day, Minute by Minute: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11 and America's Response, Harper Collins, 2004. Also found at History Commons, Complete 9/11 Timeline, Insider Trading and Other Foreknowledgehttp://www.historycommons.org/timeline.j...dertrading
[9] Associated Press, EU Searches for Suspicious Trading , 22 September 2001, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,34910,00.html
[10] World News Tonight, 20 September 2001
[11] Erin E. Arvedlund, Follow The Money: Terrorist Conspirators Could Have Profited More From Fall Of Entire Market Than Single Stocks, Barron's (Dow Jones and Company), 6 October 2001
[12] Ibid
[13] Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: the decline of the American empire at the end of the age of oil, New Society Publishers, 2004
[14] Kyle F. Hence, Massive pre-attack insider trading' offer authorities hottest trail to accomplices, Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), 21 April 2002, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HEN204B.html
[15] Grant Ringshaw, Profits of doom, The London Telegraph, 23 September 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...fdoom.html
[16] Christian Berthelsen and Scott Winokur, Suspicious profits sit uncollected: Airline investors seem to be lying low, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 September 2001, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...z14XPGwh6e
[17] Lewis Paul Bremer III on Washington, DC, NBC4 TV, 11 September 2001, Vehmgericht http://vehme.blogspot.com/2007/08/lewis-paul-bremer-iii-on-washington-dc.html
[18] Charles Gasparino and Gregory Zuckerman, Treasury Bonds Enter Purview of U.S. Inquiry Into Attack Gains, The Wall Street Journal, 2 October 2001, http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/wallstreetjournal100201.html
[19] Christian Berthelsen and Scott Winokur
[20] Tagesspiegel, Former German Cabinet Minister Attacks Official Brainwashing On September 11 Issue Points at "Mad Dog" Zbig and Huntington, 13 January 2002, http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/VonBuelow.html
[21] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[22] The 9/11 Commission memorandum that summarized the FBI investigations refers to the traders involved in the Stratesec purchase. From the references in the document, we can make out that the two people had the same last name and were related. This fits the description of Wirt and Sally Walker, who are known to be stock holders in Stratesec. Additionally, one (Wirt) was a director at the company, a director at a publicly traded company in Oklahoma (Aviation General), and chairman of an investment firm in Washington, DC (Kuwam Corp).
[23] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[24] Sourcewatch, Mansoor Ijaz/Sudan, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?tit...Ijaz/Sudan
[25] History Commons, Complete 911 Timeline, Bin Laden Family, http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.j...1_timeline
[26] Kevin R. Ryan, The History of Wirt Dexter Walker: Russell & Co, the CIA and 9/11, 911blogger.com, 3 September 2010, http://911blogger.com/news/2010-09-03/hi...ia-and-911
[27] Michael Moran, Bin Laden comes home to roost : His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story, MSNBC, 24 August 1998, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101
[28] Alex Berenson, U.S. Suggests, Without Proof, Stock Adviser Knew of 9/11, The New York Times, 25 May 2002, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E4DB143BF936A15756C0A9649C8B63
[29] Alex Berenson, Five, Including F.B.I. Agents, Are Named In a Conspiracy, The New York Times, 23 May 2002
[30] History Commons, Complete 911 Timeline, Saudi American Bank,http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp...rican_bank
[31] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[32] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[33] Erik Kirschbaum, German Firm Probes Final World Trade Center Deals, Reuters, 16 December 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...rives.html
[34] Allen M. Poteshman, Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, The Journal of Business, 2006, vol. 79, no. 4, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/503645
[35] Marc Chesney, et al, Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the Options Markets, Social Sciences Research Network, 13 January 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1522157
[36] Wing-Keung Wong, et al, Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September 11 Attacks?, Social Sciences Research Network, April 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=15885231 Commission memorandum
[32] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[33] Erik Kirschbaum, German Firm Probes Final World Trade Center Deals, Reuters, 16 December 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...rives.html
[34] Allen M. Poteshman, Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, The Journal of Business, 2006, vol. 79, no. 4, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/503645
[35] Marc Chesney, et al, Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the Options Markets, Social Sciences Research Network, 13 January 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1522157
[36] Wing-Keung Wong, et al, Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September 11 Attacks?, Social Sciences Research Network, April 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1588523/11 Commission memorandum
[32] 9/11 Commission memorandum
[33] Erik Kirschbaum, German Firm Probes Final World Trade Center Deals, Reuters, 16 December 2001, http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/sept11...rives.html
[34] Allen M. Poteshman, Unusual Option Market Activity and the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, The Journal of Business, 2006, vol. 79, no. 4, http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/503645
[35] Marc Chesney, et al, Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the Options Markets, Social Sciences Research Network, 13 January 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1522157
[36] Wing-Keung Wong, et al, Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September 11 Attacks?, Social Sciences Research Network, April 2010, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1588523

Video at: [video]https://www.bitchute.com/video/xcke2K_odLw/[/video]

Their website is https://lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org

One can download their petition for convening of a Federal Grand Jury on the website.

Attached Files

  00001 LC First Amended Petition to Report Crime to Special Grand Jury 073018.pdf (Size: 486.65 KB / Downloads: 1)

I've spent the past few months researching the early days of the neocons, up into the 1990's. John Trumpbour's volume HOW HARVARD RULES has a fascinating chapter on Harvard, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Cold War, which goes a good distance in possibly explaining why so many neocon figures and anti detente folk have been circling around that milieu for a few decades now. As an example, Zelikow and his former NSA boss Robert Blackwill were working there throughout the 90's. The Trumpbour book also makes it clear that the Carter era Team B group, and the Committee on the Present Danger, were heavily connected to Harvard.

Simultaneously, William Hartung's PROPHETS OF WAR has fresh information about the role Lockheed Martin played in promoting the Project for a New American Century, and supporting the neoconservative movement in various ways. In 1999, former Lockheed head Norman Augustine co-wrote a book (on Shakespeare) with Donald Rumsfeld's Ford-era assistant, Kenneth Adelman. The Project for a New American Century's former deputy director Thomas Donnelly later became the director of strategic communications and initiatives at Lockheed, and Bruce Jackson - working at the Office of the Secretary of Defense under Cheney, Wolfowitz and Richard Perle - became Vice President at Lockheed, and remained so from 1993 till 2002.

So, all that said, it was mighty peculiar when I stumbled across the following article. This piece was written by Lockheed CEO Norman Augustine shortly after he took over the company. I'm reprinting the entire piece below, but I highly recommend following the link here to its original source, so you can see that the article was indeed written and published in late 1995 for the Harvard Business Review. I've read the piece a couple of times now, and still have a hard time believing it.

https://hbr.org/1995/11/managing-the-cri...to-prevent

The piece seems to be written with more than one readership in mind, with an extra layer of meaning for knowledgeable insiders. Augustine mentions concerns about the US military budget, notes the newsworthiness of airline crashes, and mentions building collapses. He urges any groups involved in highly secretive planning to restrict discussions to a chosen few, and suggests that they should put out false information to protect against possible leaks. He recommends that groups looking to profit from a large crisis should carefully manage public perceptions. He suggests that key team members should carefully test their communication networks in advance. He invokes Pearl Harbor, and suggests that the Commander in Chief should visit the scene of a catastrophe after the event to settle an upset public. Augustine finishes with a reminder that a large crisis can be very profitable. It's all very suggestive stuff, and there's another evocative comment within the text that I'll let readers encounter for themselves.

Quote:MANAGING THE CRISIS YOU TRIED TO PREVENT

By Norman R. Augustine, HBR, Nov-Dec 1995

There is a tide in the affairs of men,/ Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries. - William Shakespeare
[FONT=&amp]
From this incisive passage in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare shows himself to be not only a brilliant poet and dramatist but also an excellent businessperson. For as regular as the tide are headlines announcing that yet another business has stumbled into a crisisoften without warning and sometimes through no direct fault of its management. Earlier this year, a single day's copy of the Washington Post reported the almost unprecedented series of crashes suffered by American Eagle Airlines; the possible connection between some of the crashes and aircraft built by the French company Avions de Transport Regional; the bankruptcy of Orange County, California, stemming from speculation in leveraged derivatives; and Intel's travails with its Pentium microprocessor. All in all, a good day for bad news. Business as usual, some might say.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
The airline, financial securities, and computer industries are, of course, not alone in facing crises. And the tribulations of 1995 are hardly unique. Throughout history, there has been no shortage of business crises. In 1637, speculation in Dutch tulip bulbs peaked at today's equivalent of more than $1,000 per bulb and the market collapsed under its own weight, presenting financially wrenching crises for speculators and their backers. In 1861, the infant Pony Express met its sudden demise when Western Union inaugurated the first transcontinental telegraph. In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake devastated the city and its banking communityexcept for A.P. Giannini, whose small Bank of America continued making loans during the crisis and went on to become one of the world's largest banks. In 1959, the Food and Drug Administration seized a tiny part of the nation's cranberry crop because it contained a small residue of weed killer, causing the bottom to drop out of the cranberry market right in the midst of the Thanksgiving season. In the 1970s, a number of large insurance companies faced possible bankruptcy as a result of the Equity Funding scandal when they discovered that they had been paying off large sums to nonexistent policyholders. In the past few years, a trusted manufacturer of baby food admitted that its "apple juice" was actually flavored sugar water; syringes inexplicably turned up in the cans of a popular cola brand; and a major oil company's obsolete drilling rig became a rallying point for a radical environmental group.

[/FONT][FONT=&amp]Almost every crisis contains within itself the seeds of success as well as the roots of failure. Finding, cultivating, and harvesting that potential success is the essence of crisis management. And the essence of crisis mismanagement is the propensity to take a bad situation and make it worse. Many would argue, for example, that President Richard Nixon's cover-up of the Watergate break-in created a bigger crisis than the original transgression alone would have produced.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
[/FONT][FONT=&amp]It is reasonable to ask at this point, What qualifies Norm Augustine to talk about crisis management? Did he take courses in the subject? Does he have an advanced degree in crisis management? Has he published scholarly papers on how to contain crises successfully?[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
[/FONT][FONT=&amp]Regrettably, the answer to all those questions is no. No diplomas hang in my office effusively declaring in Latin my expertise in "crisisology." When it comes to crisis management, I am a graduate only of the school of hard knocks. But I have acquired quite a bit of scar tissue over the years as a result of an impeccable sense of timing that has often put me in exactly the wrong place at precisely the right time. Consider that I:[/FONT][FONT=&amp]
[/FONT]

• began my engineering career somewhat inauspiciously by witnessing the first rocket for which I had any responsibility explode ignominiously after a 250-millisecond flighta mere 240,000 miles short of the moon!
  
• joined the secretary of defense's staff in the Pentagon just as the Vietnam War engulfed the nation;
  

• joined the mammoth LTV Corporation during the very week in which the founder and CEO, James Ling, was ousted and bankruptcy suddenly loomed on the horizon;
  
• rejoined the government as a presidential appointee just in time to witness the resignation of the president of the United States;
  
• was confirmed as assistant secretary of the army just one month before a war erupted in the Middle East and right before the government of South Vietnam collapsed;
  
• served as under secretary of the army during a variety of crises such as the "tree cutting" confrontation in the Korean demilitarized zone, when some believed that the U.S. response would likely trigger World War III;
  
• assumed responsibility for the largest operating unit of Martin Marietta just as the corporation was confronted with a hostile takeover attempt;
  
• joined the board of a major bank just before the nation's banking industry imploded;
  
• joined the board of a major petroleum company just before one of its processing facilities exploded;
  
• became CEO of the largest defense R&D contractor in the nation shortly before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent free fall of the U.S. defense budget;
  
• assumed the chairmanship of the American Red Cross just as a series of once-a-century natural disasters struck the nationincluding earthquakes, floods, fires, and hurricanesand at a time when military conflicts were breaking out all over the world and unfounded concerns were arising that the nation's blood supply had been contaminated with HIV.
  

[FONT=&amp]As a result of this flawless sense of timing, I have assembled ample evidence that there is no magical 9-1-1 number you can call to extricate yourself from such predicaments. You get into a fix; you get yourself out of it. It's that simple. There is no way to run the sausage machine backward and get pigs out of the other end. After all, if the solution were easy, it wouldn't be a crisis.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
[/FONT][FONT=&amp]In business as in life, crises come in as many strains as the common cold. The spectrum is so wide that it is impossible to list each type. Product-related crises alone range from sudden outright failures (the collapsed walkways in the newly built Hyatt hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1981) to unanticipated side effects (lung diseases associated with asbestos) to gradual obsolescence (gas lamps, slide rules, citizens band radios, mimeographs, and buggy whips). Some product crises are completely beyond the control of management. Consider the experience of a major brewing company when a bottle of its premium beer purchased in Florida was found to contain a dead mouse. This rodent became more famous than Mickey until it was determined to be uniquely a native of Florida whereas the beer had been bottled in Colorado.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Another category of business crisis results from accidents, such as airplane and train mishaps, that result in loss of life and erode public confidence. These incidents often attract negative publicity out of proportion even to their tragic consequences. For example, it would take two 747 crashes per week to equal the number of people killed on U.S. highways in the same period, but automobile crashes rarely make headlines the way airplane crashes do. One category of accident, which we might call technologically charged, involves the failure of advanced technologies that the public had come to believe were foolproof. This category includes the 1967 Apollo spacecraft fire, in which three astronauts died, the 1979 "incident" at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, and the 1986 Challenger space shuttle tragedy.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
[/FONT][FONT=&amp]In this era of burgeoning technology, crises stemming from engineering failures will continue. I vividly recall, in the agonizing hours after the Challenger explosion, poring over the initial flight data when it appeared that Martin Marietta's hardware had caused the failure. As it turned out, our external fuel tank was not the culprit. But the soul-searching we endured was not an experience any of us soon forgot.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
[/FONT][FONT=&amp]There also are crises that arise from labor disputes, such as those confronted by Kohler, International Harvester, Caterpillar, major-league baseball, and the U.S. air-traffic-control system. And there are crises that stem from financial difficultiesa sudden lack of cashsuch as those encountered by Chrysler in the 1970s, the savings and loan associations in the 1980s, and a number of department store chains in the 1990s. Finally, there is the mother of all business crises, one that Martin Marietta experienced at close range: the hostile takeover attempt.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
[/FONT][FONT=&amp]In analyzing the gamut of business crises, we can distinguish six stages of crisis management.[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Stage 1: Avoiding the Crisis[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]Next week there can't be any crisis. My schedule is already full. Henry Kissinger while secretary of state[/FONT][FONT=&amp]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The first stage, not surprisingly, is prevention. Amazingly, it is usually skipped altogether, even though it is the least costly and the simplest way to control a potential crisis. The problem may be that crises are accepted by many executives as an unavoidable condition of everyday existence.[/FONT]

[FONT=&amp]This chronic carelessness stems from a blind spot common among business executivesand especially chief executive officers: They actually believe that they are in control of their companies' fortunes. The one redeeming virtue of this blind spot is its ultimately positive effect on the executive's humility. Remember when the chairman of New York's Consolidated Edison, Charles Luce, reassuringly announced during a television interview in July 1977, "The Con Ed system is in the best shape in 15 years, and there's no problem about the summer." Three days later, the entire New York metropolitan area was plunged into 24 hours of darkness in the legendary "Blackout of '77."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Perhaps the best place to begin the search for prevention is suggested in one of my newer laws, which I discovered after my book of laws was published: Tornadoes are caused by trailer parks. Although this may at first seem a dubious proposition, there is empirical evidence to back it up.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Survey the landscape continuously for "trailer parks." That is, make a list of everything that could attract troubles to the business, consider the possible consequences, and estimate the cost of prevention. This exercise is, of course, not much fun, which probably explains why relatively few businesspeople carry it out. Obviously, some of the items on the list will prove to be outside a CEO's controlbut the response to those items is very much within it. Lacking control over the origin of a problem does not exempt you from living with its consequences.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Why do major corporations encounter so many crises? It is useful to point out that General Motors has about the same number of employees as San Francisco has citizens; that AT&T is about the same size as Buffalo, New York; and that Lockheed Martin is the size of Spokane, Washington. Executives must keep in mind that almost any one of thousands of employees can plunge an entire corporation into a crisis through either misdeed or oversight, as the recent collapse of the venerable Barings Bank made abundantly clear. This type of employee is addressed in my Law of the Cross-eyed Discus Thrower: He seldom wins any prizes, but he sure keeps the crowd on its toes.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Discretion and privacy can be critical to avoiding some kinds of crises, such as those that result from leaks during a sensitive negotiation. Although Lockheed Martin and its predecessors have been credited with an uncanny ability to keep plans private when they need to, even these organizations have almost always fallen short of perfection. In the case of Martin Marietta's $3 billion purchase of General Electric Aerospace in 1993, secrecy was maintained for 27 high-pressure days, only to have the news break into the media two hours before the planned announcement. As for Martin Marietta's and Lockheed's negotiations with each other, the companies stayed out of the newspapers for five and a half months but suffered a leak at midnight before the planned 8 a.m. announcement. And even those relative successes were not without their unsettling moments.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]For example, during the discussions between GE and Martin Marietta, officials met mostly in a special work area on the fifty-third floor of an office building in Rockefeller Center. Nearly 100 people who came to be known as the "hole in the wall gang" were hidden away there, pursuing the legal, financial, operational, and personnel aspects of the dealhoping they would not be noticed in the everyday activity of Manhattan. Work continued virtually around the clock, with meals served at all hours right in the work area. You can perhaps imagine the collective chagrin when the chief financial officer of GE walked out of the building into the virtually empty streets of New York at about 3 a.m. to be greeted by a man who suddenly erupted from a manhole and remarked, "Oh, the meeting up on 53 must be over," and then disappeared into the manhole just as quickly as he had appeared. To this day, his identity is not known.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]If you need to maintain secrecy, limit involvement to as few people as possible and certainly only to those whose discretion can be trusted absolutely. Each participant should be required to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Negotiations should be conducted as quickly as is practicable. Finally, as much apparent uncertainty as possibleengineers would say "noise"should be inserted into the process so that any accurate leak will be drowned in a sea of false leads. Even so, you should expect everything to leak anyway. You will seldom be disappointed.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Managements thus lead highly precarious existences, but they can minimize their organization's exposure to risk by making clear to employees what behavior is expected of them. The challenge is to be clear in our own minds what we truly want from employees. We usually cannot seek revenue growth without also expecting increases in expenses; we cannot encourage risk taking and then be surprised if some of the risks result in greater exposure. In the preventive phase, an executive must try to minimize risks and to be certain that those that must be taken are commensurate with the returns expected. The risks that cannot be avoided must be properly hedged. The real problem, however, is that perfect prevention is perfectly unattainable.

[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Stage 2: Preparing to Manage the Crisis
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Today my stockbroker tried to get me to buy some 10-year bonds. I told him, "Young man, at this point I don't even buy green bananas." the late congressman Chet Holifield, when he was getting on in years
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Most executives, preoccupied with the market pressures of the present quarter, are not inclined to pay much attention to planning for future crises. This brings us to the second stage of crisis management: preparing for that circumstance when prevention doesn't workthat is, making a plan to deal with a variety of undesirable outcomes if disaster does strike. It is instructive here to recall that Noah started building the ark before it began to rain.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Steven Fink, a prominent management consultant, wrote in his book Crisis Management that everyone in a position of authority "should view and plan for the inevitability of a crisis in much the same way [one] views and plans for the inevitability of death and taxes: not out of weakness or fear, but out of the strength that comes from knowing you are prepared to…play the hand that fate deals you." His survey of the Fortune 500's CEOs found that senior managers may suffer from a severe lack of crisis preparedness but certainly not from a lack of confidence that they can handle a crisis. Eighty-nine percent of those who responded said that crises in business are as inevitable as death and taxes, yet 50% said they did not have a plan for dealing with crises. Nevertheless, fully 97% felt confident that they would respond well if a crisis occurred. These CEOs are generally the sort who hide their own Easter eggs. They remind me of my young son many years ago at the start of his soccer season, who arrived in uniform at the breakfast table to announce, "We're really gonna get 'em this year. Last year, we were too overconfident."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]We must make plans for dealing with crises: action plans, communication plans, fire drills, essential relationships. Most airlines have crisis teams at the ready, along with special telecommunications and detailed contingency plans. Almost all companies today have a back-up computer system in case a natural disaster or other catastrophe disrupts their primary system. At Lockheed Martin, we maintain at a central location all the supplies we need to communicate in writing with every member of each key constituency group. A letter can arrive at the home of each of 170,000 employees or 45,000 shareholders within two or three days. As it happens, Martin Marietta used this system on a number of occasions.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Elizabeth Dole, president of the American Red Crossan organization whose very purpose is to deal with crisespoints out another important advantage of anticipating and planning for crises. She recently told me, "The midst of a disaster is the poorest possible time to establish new relationships and to introduce ourselves to new organizations… When you have taken the time to build rapport, then you can make a call at 2 a.m. when the river's rising and expect to launch a well-planned, smoothly conducted response."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]And practice counts when planning for the unavoidable. In August 1989, a 1,000-member joint federal-state emergency disaster team tested an earthquake-reaction plan in San Francisco. A scant six weeks later, the powerful Loma Prieta earthquake struck the city, collapsing buildings and starting fires. It is likely that many lives were saved as a result of the relatively smooth handling of evacuations and medical emergencies.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]One of the darkest moments of my own career occurred because we did not prepare an adequate contingency plan. Martin Marietta was on the verge of closing the General Electric Aerospace deala deal that had been put together on a handshake with Jack Welch of GE and that moved forward quickly. In a midnight meeting a few days before the sale was to take place, evidence suddenly appeared that the Justice Department might not approve pivotal elements of the transaction because of alleged antitrust concerns. Had the transaction cratered at that point, it is likely that GE and Martin Marietta stockholders would have lost overnight approximately $2 billion in market value that they had gained when the combination originally was announced. As Casey Stengel once said, "I've had no experience with that sort of thing, and all of it has been bad."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]At that midnight hour, Martin Marietta's top two executivesboth engineerslearned to their chagrin that the definition of high probability is highly subjective. To the dozen or so lawyers from some of the nation's most prestigiousor, at least, most expensivefirms, high probability meant considerably more than fifty-fifty, perhaps even a 70% chance of success. To the engineers, it meant more like 99% or better.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Thus the leadership of each company suddenly found itself plunged into a predicament that it had considered extremely remote until that moment. Fortunately, we were able to put together the evidence needed to resolve the Justice Department's questions and thereby save the deal. When the merger finally won approval, both companies' executives empathized with Winston Churchill's remark, "Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]In preparing for crises, it pays to search for subtletiesthe second-order effects. I once asked the legendary aviator General Jimmy Doolittle to name the greatest hazard that pilots faced in the pioneering days of aviation. His answer was unexpected but no doubt accurate. "Starvation," he replied. Drills like the one in San Francisco help identify these second-order effects because the devil is in the details and the cost of overlooking them can be high. For example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the telephone companies discovered that one of the principal shortages in southern Florida was not poles, wires, or switches but day care centers. Many of the phone companies' field-operations employees had children and relied on day care. When the centers were destroyed by the hurricane, someone had to stay home to take care of the childrenthereby reducing the workforce at the moment when it was needed the most. The problem eventually was solved by soliciting retirees to tend ad hoc day care centers, thereby freeing working parents to assist in restoring the telephone network.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Experience suggests a number of useful preparations for dealing with an upheaval: establishing a crisis center, making contingency plans, selecting in advance the members of the crisis team, providing ready and redundant communications, andmost importanttesting those communications. As the United States government has learned in circumstances ranging from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the capture of the Pueblo by North Korea, the best-laid plans are worthless if they cannot be communicated.

[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Stage 3: Recognizing the Crisis
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation. humorist Jean Kerr
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]This stage of crisis management is often the most challenging: recognizing that, in fact, there is a crisis. Executives who refuse to face reality should be mindful of the bright if inexperienced chemistry student who warned, "When you smell an odorless gas, it's probably carbon monoxide." In general, you need to understand how others will perceive an issue and to challenge your own assumptions.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Companies sometimes misclassify a problem, focusing on the technical aspects and ignoring issues of perception. But it is often the public perception that causes the crisis. In the case of Intel Corporation's tribulations with its Pentium microprocessor in late 1994, the college professor who first discovered that the chip had trouble performing complex mathematical calculations precisely contacted Intel to report the anomaly he had observed. So confident was the company in its product that it reportedly gave the professor a polite brush-off. Turning to the Internet to see if others could confirm the problem he had encountered, he triggered an avalanche of some 10,000 messages, including such scathing jokes as "Why didn't Intel call the Pentium the 586? Answer: Because they added 486 and 100 on the first Pentium and got 585.999983605."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The root cause of the crisis was that Intel had reacted to a technical problem when it really had a public relations problem. The ensuing media coverage was devastating, featuring such headlines as "Intel…the Exxon of the Chip Industry," "Firm Reverses Itself on Pentium Policy," "Humble Pie," and "Intel to Replace Its Pentium Chips." CEO Andrew Grove later said, "To some people, [our policy] seemed arrogant and uncaring. We apologize for that." Shortly thereafter, the company was reported to have taken a $475 million charge against earnings. Meanwhile, the millions of Internet users had been treated to such derisive jokes as "It's close enough. We say so" and "You don't need to know what's inside." Ironically, once the company did offer to replace the chip, few users accepted. Only an estimated 1% to 3% of individual consumers (who constitute two-thirds of the purchasers of computers with Pentium chips) took up the offer. It wasn't that people wanted a new chip; it was just that they wanted to know that they could get a new chip if they wanted one. As everyone knows, banks don't want borrowers to pay off their loans; they just want to know that borrowers can pay off their loans.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The problem in this stage of crisis management is that perception truly does become reality. We saw this principle at work last summer in the seemingly straightforward plan of Royal Dutch/Shell Group to dispose of the Brent Star oil-storage rig by sinking it in a deep area of the Atlantic Ocean. Despite the approval of the relevant governments and the blessing of many environmentalists, the plan was suddenly thrown into disarray when Greenpeace protesters attempted to land a helicopter on the oil rig's deck. The company responded by trying to keep the helicopter away with water cannons. As the Wall Street Journal reported the controversy, "Shell had made a strategic error. In a world of sound bites…one image was left with many viewers: A huge multinational oil company was mustering all its might to bully what was portrayed as a brave but determined band." Whatever the reality of the situation, Shell found its plan foundering on the shoals of worldwide media perception.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]A variation on this theme is a syndrome that I call crisis creep. We experienced it at Martin Marietta last year in a particularly embarrassing incident. We were castigated by a media outlet that accused one of our major plants of charging the government for the cost of a Smokey Robinson concert for its employees. That's not how the company would have characterized the situation, but it's pretty much the way it was coming across in the local media. Soon the national media began to pick up the story, and several members of Congress threatened to hold hearings.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]As the situation was explained to me, our company's employees voluntarily contribute some 10 million hours of unpaid overtime each year, a donation that primarily benefits customersin this case, the government. As a token of appreciation, the company had over many years developed the custom of occasionally doing something special for employees: giving their children tickets to the Shriners' Circus, holding a family picnic, or taking groups to see the local baseball team in action. Company accountants had assured management that the practice of including such events in the cost of products was altogether legal, fully disclosed, and fairly common as a commercial practice. Further, it constituted only about one one-hundredth of 1% of the cost of the products being soldan amount greatly offset by the overtime the employees contribute.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]As the explanations continued, I couldn't help but think of Groucho Marx's penetrating question "Are you going to believe what you see or what I'm telling you?" A reasonable question to ask my earnest colleagues was, If we are so thoroughly in the right, why is it that in a city with a population of more than 1 million we can't find one person who doesn't think we are dead wrong? Somehow, without realizing it, the company had crossed the threshold from family picnics to Smokey Robinson concerts and, in so doing, offended the public's sensibilities. We quickly issued a public apology for our lack of sensitivity, indicated that all the costs incurred would be taken out of the corporation's profits, and promised that we would never again make the same error of judgment. Once those steps had been taken, the drumbeat of criticism ceased almost overnight.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]But sometimes even stronger warnings of impending crisis go unheeded. For example, nearly a decade before the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, two different tests conducted by the manufacturer of the telescope's primary mirror indicated that something was wrong with the precision of its surface. Shortly after the launch, the "Trouble with Hubble" began publicly when the spacecraft was discovered to suffer from nearsightedness. The mirror manufacturer's engineers had been so confident in their design that they simply had disregarded the test results. Similarly, before the failure of the Challenger, a series of memorandums to the solid rocket motor company's management from various of its engineers contained such impassioned pleas, highly unusual for technical documents, as "Help! The seal task force is constantly being delayed by every possible means." Another memo implored, "If we do not take immediate action to…solve the problem with the field joint…we stand in jeopardy of losing a flight along with all the launchpad facilities." As history records, those calls went unheeded. The words of Demosthenes seem to apply: "Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]There are, of course, positive examples of management's recognizing crises as they develop and moving effectively to resolve them. Procter & Gamble's response to the early fears that Rely tampons might be causing toxic shock syndrome is such a case. Most observers give high grades to P&G for stopping production and withdrawing the product from the market based on the relatively tenuous but disconcerting evidence becoming available. The management's quick and courageous actions to protect the health of those who use P&G productsand, not incidentally, the company's reputationproved far more important over the long term than the hundreds of millions of dollars that the decision must have cost over the short term. The company avoided long-term damage by putting into practice a principle generally embraced by business executives but all too often overlooked during a crisis: The interests of the customer must come first. Obviously, when it came to their health and safety, P&G's customers' greatest concern was whether they truly could trust the company whose products they had been using for years. P&G put trust and open communication with customers above all other corporate concerns and emerged a long-term winner.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Experience suggests that we listen to people throughout the organization when looking for information about a crisis. In the words of Bellcore CEO George Heilmeier, "The natives have the maps." Thus the phrase We have had an incident, when spoken by the head of any operating entity, should be one of the most recognizable alarms in a CEO's repertoire. Similarly, when an engineer reports, "We have experienced an anomaly," he or she usually means that there has been a collision between a space rocket and a commercial jetliner and the debris has landed on a nuclear power plant.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]In the recognition stage, independent investigators, as well as insiders, are needed to assist in understanding the situation. Asking the people who were responsible for preventing a problem whether or not there is a problem is like delivering lettuce by rabbit. There are, of course, costs associated with using independent experts, but, as the old adage goes, if you think an expert is expensive, try hiring an amateur.

[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Stage 4: Containing the Crisis
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Yogi Berra
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]This stage of crisis management requires triage: stopping the hemorrhaging. This is the phase in which the tough decisions have to be made and made fast. For example, should the area surrounding the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor be evacuated, with the almost certain chaos that such an action would entail, or should people be told to remain where they are and be put at risk? When deaths occurred in Chicago, should Johnson & Johnson promptly recall all Tylenol capsules, at great cost, or wait for more conclusive evidence of a nationwide threat? In this phase, decisiveness is criticaland the timeless advice of Yogi Berra is sound: Some reasonable, decisive action is almost always better than no action at all.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The problem in this stage is that usually you don't know what you don't know. There may be too little information or there may be far too much, with no way to sift out what is important. The report of the Kemeny Commission, which investigated the Three Mile Island "incident," included the following statement: "During the first few minutes of the accident, more than 100 alarms went off, and there was no system for suppressing the unimportant signals so that operators could concentrate on the significant alarms. Information was not presented in a clear and sufficiently understandable form."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Unfortunately, the demand for the CEO to clarify a murky situation might well describe the early phase of most crises. Crisis situations tend to be accompanied by conflicting advicewith the legal department warning, "Tell 'em nothin' and tell 'em slow," the public relations department appealing for an immediate press conference, the shareholder relations department terrified of doing anything, and the engineers all wanting to disappear into their labs for a few years to conduct confirmatory experiments. My experience has been that it is preferable to err on the side of overdisclosure, even at the risk of harming one's legal position. Credibility is far more important than legal positioning.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]In the Exxon Valdez incident, the lawyers advised against admitting any guilt in order to be better able to defend the company's position. In the end, the company suffered a multibillion-dollar jury verdict and a tarnished reputation. Sometimes a CEO must override the lawyers. And the truth is that even in the face of contradictory evidence and confusing advice, one cannot simply remain silent. James Lukaszewski, a specialist in communications, counsels, "Say something. If you aren't prepared to talk…reporters will find someone who is." "No comment" is an unacceptable response in today's fast-forward world of telecommunications. So, too, is "We haven't read the complaint" or "A mistake was made." My son tumbled to the concept of detached responsibility at the age of four when he dismissed the question of how shoe polish had gotten all over the living-room wall with a polite "Sometimes that happens."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Perplexed over the issue of how much to say and when, I sought the advice of one of America's greatest businesspeople: Warren Buffett. His advice, as you might expect, was both pragmatic and brilliant. "First," he said, "state clearly that you do not know all the facts. Then promptly state the facts you do know. One's objective should be to get it right, get it quick, get it out, and get it over. You see, your problem won't improve with age." This, needless to say, is exactly how he dealt with the crisis at Salomon Brothers a few years ago.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]And what is the principal message you wish to convey? It has been wisely said that the world is not interested in the storms you encountered but in whether you brought the ship in safely. As a senior executive, you must call on your own conscience. You must set aside for a few minutes the voices of trusted advisers and, in as calm and dispassionate a manner as possible, evaluate in human terms the real issues and the real messages. By so doing, you at least have the comfort of defending a position that you believe to be correct. As far as I know, Charles Barkley of the Phoenix Suns is the only person who ever got away with claiming that he had been misquoted in his autobiography.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Organizations that have thought through what they stand for well in advance of a crisis are those that manage crises best. When all seems to be crashing down around them, they have principles to fall back on. Johnson & Johnson has said of its highly regarded response to the Tylenol deaths that its actions had been preordained by its widely heralded corporate credo; that is, no other response could even have been contemplated.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Another conclusion from the crises I have studied is the value of immediately dispatching the senior responsible individual to the scene of the problemusually the CEO. The CEO may know less about the details of the situation than the local management, but his or her physical presence sends two important messages: I care, and I am accountable. The CEO of Union Carbide took this approach during the Bhopal tragedy, when some 2,000 people died as a result of a chemical leak at the company's Indian subsidiary. Although the immediate result was that the CEO found himself in jail, traveling to India had been the proper course. In business, "good" decisions do not necessarily guarantee good outcomes.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]One bit of caution about the dispatch-the-CEO theory comes from former secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger. "Don't call on the court of last resort until you are at your last resort," he counseled me. For example, if the CEO enters into a union negotiation with the head of the local, the CEO is not likely to be effective with the head of the national union if an impasse arises later. But in situations that truly threaten one's reputation or existence, the CEO belongs in the front lines.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]My experiences in the triage stage have taught me four other lessons. First, it is wise to have a dedicated group of individuals working full-time to contain the crisis; others still have a business to operate. That is, a "fire wall" should be built between the crisis management team, led by the CEO, and the business management team, led by an appropriate senior operating person. Too many executives seem to have forgotten the words spoken so generously by Casey Stengel when his New York Yankees won the 1958 World Series: "I couldn'a done it without my players."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Second, a single individual should be identified as the company spokesperson, the one who makes all public comments. This lesson stems from another of my laws: If enough layers of management are superimposed on top of one another, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Third, a company's own constituenciesits customers, owners, employees, suppliers, and communitiesshould not be left to ferret out information from the public media. With all the pressures on management to respond to news reporters, one must not neglect those who have a special need for information.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]And fourth, a devil's advocate should be part of the crisis management teamsomeone who can tell the emperor in no uncertain terms when he is wearing no clothes.

[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Stage 5: Resolving the Crisis
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. Will Rogers
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]In this stage, speed is of the essence. A crisis simply will not wait. It's like wrestling a gorilla: You rest when the gorilla wants to rest. John Lowenstein of the Baltimore Orioles once was asked what could be changed to improve the game of baseball. He answered, "They should move first base back a step to eliminate all the close plays." Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way in baseball or in crises.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Three years ago, the supermarket chain Food Lion suddenly found itself thrust into the public spotlight when it was accused by ABC-TV's Prime Time Live of selling spoiled meat. The company's stock plummeted, bottoming out at slightly greater than half its precrisis value. But Food Lion acted quickly, offering public tours of stores, putting large windows in meat-preparation areas, improving lighting, putting workers in new uniforms, expanding employee training, and offering large discounts to draw customers back into stores. The company eventually earned an "excellent" rating from the Food and Drug Administration, and in locations where it had previously been well established, sales soon returned to normal.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Similarly, when accusations were made that the electromagnetic fields generated by cellular telephones caused brain tumors, the manufacturers quickly sought out independent experts who took the facts directly to the public, and the concerns promptly subsided. Pepsi-Cola used a similar approach when syringes were found in cans of its soft drinks. The company promptly and publicly demonstrated that the foreign objects must have been planted by the purchaser. Once again, the furor quickly passed.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Perhaps the most challenging crisis in the history of Martin Marietta occurred in the summer of 1982, when the company suddenly became the target of a hostile takeover attempt by the Bendix Corporation. The laws governing a company's actions in a takeover attempt are complex and impose specific time limits. By striking first and without warning, Bendix achieved an early tactical advantage. However, Martin Marietta, under CEO Tom Pownall's leadership, fought back by issuing a counter-tender offer for the shares of Bendixa tactic that has become known as the Pac Man defense and that was intended to result in Martin Marietta's gaining effective control of a majority of Bendix's shares, including a large block administered by Bendix's own employee stock-ownership plan. The result was that each company acquired a majority of the other's shares.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]In the short space of a month, Martin Marietta alone hired 14 law firms and was litigating in 11 federal district courts, three federal courts of appeals, and three state courts, including the Supreme Court of Delaware. One judge, perplexed by the legal issues involved, invoked the words of Shakespeare, saying to the lawyers of the two parties, "A pox on both your houses!"
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The impasse was resolved by intensive negotiation. Allied Corporation, following discussions with Martin Marietta, agreed to step in and merge with Bendix and then swap some of the Martin Marietta stock that Bendix held for the Bendix stock that Martin Marietta held. In the end, Martin Marietta retained its independence.

[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Stage 6: Profiting from the Crisis
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Oscar Wilde
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The final stage in crisis management is making lemonade from the abundance of available lemons. If a company has handled the previous steps flawlessly (that is, has not somehow managed to make the crisis even worse), the sixth stage offers an opportunity to recoup some losses at least partially and begin to repair the dislocations. One example is the U.S. Army's adroit handling of a highly volatile situation that arose in 1993. Munitions left from the World War I era were found buried in what is now the residential community of Spring Valley in the District of Columbia. A number of homes had to be evacuated, and, understandably, emotions in the community ran high. The army general having overall responsibility in the area personally took charge of the situation, meeting with local citizens in a community forum each evening throughout the crisis. The media always were invited, and questions were answered willingly and candidly. When the crisis had subsided, the local citizenry named a street in their community in the general's honor.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]But the canonical example of turning around an emotionally charged crisis is Johnson & Johnson's handling of the Tylenol case. Responding to the series of deaths that resulted from cyanide adulteration of Tylenol capsules, then CEO Jim Burke reasoned that forceful measures were needed to ensure public safety and restore trust in the company's top-selling product. With full-page ads and television spots announcing its intentions, the company pulled 31 million capsules from store shelves and home medicine cabinets around the nation, redesigned the packaging, and within three months regained 95% of its precrisis market share. This feat was not accomplished without cost, but the cost of repurchasing a reputation that otherwise would have been severely tarnished would have been infinitely greater.[/FONT][FONT=&amp]
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]From a business perspective, the result of the Tylenol crisis was that Johnson & Johnson demonstrated both its concern for its customers and its commitment to the corporation's ethical standards. Although this was a tragic episode, the company clearly was regarded even more highly after the episode than before.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]I asked Burke what he would add to this account, and he said he would emphasize two points. First, he cited the axiom that many senior executives seem to overlook: "If you run a public company, you cannot ignore the public." Second, "Institutional trust is a lot more important than most people realize. The operative word is trust…and whether people will take one's word when one badly needs them to do so will depend on how much confidence has been built in the organization over the years before the crisis occurs."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]This is, of course, not particularly good news for U.S. business as a whole. A recent Gallup Poll ranked the American public's confidence in big business at 26%, placing it only slightly ahead of Congress and about equal with newspapers. But, as is often the case, there is a silver lining to be found even in this cloud. When, for example, two spacecraft that had been built by another company failed just after Martin Marietta's purchase of that business, Martin Marietta publicly took full responsibility and voluntarily returned $22 million of profit to the customer. To Martin Marietta's utter surprise, it was given great accolades by the public and the media. Apparently, expectations for business are so low that a company is given effusive credit simply for doing what is right.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Doing what is right and following the recommendations for each of the six stages, however, do not guarantee the desired outcome. There is one other important ingredient that affects all crisis managers from time to time: luck.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Borrowing once again from Martin Marietta's experiences, bad luck was working for years to develop a new dye for blue jeans that absolutely would not fade. The successful result of this technological tour de force, known as Martin Blue, arrived on the market at precisely the moment when a sudden shift in consumer demand occurredto prefaded jeans! As John Chalsty, who runs Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, once said of an experience at his own company, presumably with appropriate apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We had built the perfect mousetrap. Trouble was, that mouse was already dead."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]My favorite example of simple, dumb good luck relates to the activities of Christopher Boyce, the Russian spy of Cold War infamy and, sadly, the son of a business associate of mine. The young Boyce was then working for TRW in Los Angeles. Or, more accurately, he was working for TRW in somewhat the same way that Premier Nikita Khrushchev must have had in mind when, at the height of the Cold War, he greeted then CIA director Allen Dulles with the remark "You know, you and I have some of the same people working for each other."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Boyce eventually was sentenced to more than 60 years in prison for his actions on behalf of the Soviet Union. While reading The Falcon and the Snowman, Robert Lindsey's book chronicling Boyce's escapades, I was stunned to discover that Boyce had solicited a position at Martin Marietta's plant in Denver. At that very moment, I was the general manager in charge of Martin Marietta's plant in Denver! Racing ahead in the text, I learned how executive brilliance had enabled the company to escape this momentous crisis. Boyce, quoted in the book, expressed great chagrin over the fact that he had applied not once but twice for a position at the Denver plant and on both occasions the ever vigilant personnel department had lost his application.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]Of course, business executives cannot rely on luck to see them through the crises that inevitably strike at the most inconvenient moments. I know of no board of directors that will contentedly accept as the explanation for major corporate difficulties, "Oh, it was just bad luck." In such instances, I have found, they are likely to agree with legendary baseball manager Branch Rickey that "luck is the residue of design."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]In this regard, I have always found compelling the argument of business writer Robert Heller, who said, "The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill." I came to a similar conclusion in my own book Augustine's Lawsa conclusion captured by Law Number 29, which states, "Executives who do not produce successful results hold on to their jobs only about five years. Those who produce effective results hang on about half a decade."
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]The notion that one person, sitting atop a corporate hierarchy, can regularly and successfully guide the daily actions of tens of thousands of individual employees is a pleasant confection created, some would suggest, by academics and certain business leaders. Only the truly brave or the truly foolish would make this claim. However, the one aspect of business in which a chief executive's influence is measurable is crisis management. Indeed, the very future of an enterprise often depends on how expertly he or she handles the challenge. Crises tend to be highly formative experienceswatershed experiences, sometimes even life-threatening experiencesfor a business. Nowhere else is the leadership of a chief executive more apparent or more critical to the long-term prospects of an enterprise.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]So by all means avoid involving your business in a crisis. But once you're in one, accept it, manage it, and try to keep your vision focused on the long term. The bottom line of my own experience with crises can be summarized in just seven words: Tell the truth and tell it fast.
[/FONT]
[FONT=&amp]A version of this article appeared in the NovemberDecember 1995 issue of Harvard Business Review. Norman R. Augustine is chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation, a global, diversified technology company based in Bethesda, Maryland, that was formed in 1995 by the merger of Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta Corporation. Augustine, who served as CEO of Martin Marietta for seven years, is the author of Augustine's Laws (Viking Penguin, 1986). His last HBR article was "Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent"[/FONT]

This has been online for a while, but I'd missed it up till now. Professor Richard Ellefritz wrote a 300 page University thesis on the 9/11 truth movement and its interactions with various prominent debunkers. Refreshingly, Ellefritz calls a spade a spade and gives the exponents of 9/11 truth a decent amount of time. The whole thesis is online here -

https://911inacademia.files.wordpress.co...thesis.pdf

And a very recent interview with Ellefritz is here -

https://youtu.be/eRxCG8R5gbI

Well, who would've thunk?

Given a hundred years of relentless and artful lies and propaganda in order to camouflage the actual truth and to place the real blame, Great Britain is still seen as the victim of WWI and WWII -- instead of the arch evil Moriarty nation that actively caused these mammoth world wars that lead to the death and suffering of untold millions. And all to keep her empire for their ever so tiny elite and aristo's.

Not that Hitler and his atrocious gang of Nazis can by any means be considered the innocent party. But the fact is they never would have come to power but for the machinations of the British elite.

World history is upside down.

The following links to the article by Guido Preparata and is a free to download .pdf format article titled: The Incubation of Nazism: Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. It is a synopsis of his fantastic book Conjuring Hitler (which is also freely available in a .pdf format document via search engines)

I thought the caption, as bulky as it is, to be more immediately descriptive than Guido Preparata's below excellent two-part essay "The Transphobic Bus".

I have, for many years, wondered about (what I considered to be) the media promotion of non-standard sexuality (apologies if this description offends anyone, it's certainly not intended, but the topic is fraught with unthought of dangers and difficult describe at the best of times). I had concluded, without much consideration, that this was basically a media thing -- because my experience is that there are many in the media who are LBGT -- and it made sense to me that they would indulge their own predilections. Not to mention the possibility that there might, perhaps, be an underlying motive to "shove it" down the throats of those who adhere to bisexual relationships, due to the appalling social black-sheeping they have suffered over the ages due to their sexuality.

The fact is that I had noted this was happening but couldn't really get past this observation in order to manufacture a theory about who was pushing the agenda or why. Or even what the underlying agenda was. All I could intellectually muster was that there was an agenda at work.

It took a Preparata to bring this subject into focus for me.

Quote:

"Transphobic Bus" (Part I): the Sex Toys of the Power Elite & Feminism

A close friend from Bilbao was relating to me a few weeks ago that the hottest topicin Spain at the time was the magical mystery tour of a peculiar "bus," which was docking at every major Spanish city. On its side, the bus displayed the lettering "Los niños tienen pene. Las niñas tienen vulva. Que no te engañen" ("Boys have penises. Girls have vaginas. Make no mistake"). The ride of Spain's transphobicbus is said to have sent shock-waves in the cultural ether.


Stories such as these have now become ordinary media fare. They follow a rigid script. On one side, we have the organizers of the tour. They come to impersonate the token homophobic, transphobic hate-mongering fundamentalist Christians (Catholics, in Spain). On the other side in this tale of "two Spains," which do not mix, like agua y aceite,stand tall Spain's indigenous shock troopers of "gender" orthodoxy," who voraciously bit the bait. The transphobic bus has thereupon been ambushed and thwarted at every turn, and acrimoniously booed by these "progressives." So now they are, once more, at each other's' throats and the rest of us are, yet again, "invited" thereby to watch and take sides in this all-important clash on "gender." As if nothing else mattered.


Not to disappoint the audience, some sinister background info is de rigueur. Reputedly, the cabal behind the transphobic campaign whose slogan is "Hazte oir"("Make yourself heard") is a secret organizationout of Mexico (all roads lead to America…) called El Yunque("The Anvil"). Spains's bien pensantslook upon the Anvil as some kind of Neo-fascist Spectre with nasty fingers in every vital pie of the planet.


For her part, the Churchappeared to have been supportive of the bus at first. But, possibly, wary of being caught between the Mexican Anvil and the Pink hammer, she eventually sounded the retreat. And all her battalions withdrew all of them, that is, except the token "integralist" brigade of the todopoderoso ("almighty") Opus Dei.


Ah, the game. Il gioco delle parti, as the Italians say ("the game of role-playing").




Of course, this was no "Hispanic" idea. These days, nobody in Europe, or anywhere else for that matter, comes up with an idea, good or ill. The forge is always in the United States, for better or worse. There already was a "hate bus" in America, itself the product of another US organization: NOM, the National Association for Marriage. It too was "vandalized."
Now, let us be serious.


They want us to believe that America's (& Europe's) elites for there is bigmoneybehind this massive campaign for diversity have been losing sleep, tossing and turning in their beds, for years, waking up, drenched in sweat and anguished to the gills, from a tormenting nightmare. The nightmare that the "diverse others" be they women, people of color, gays, or transsexuals might be living an unbearably harsh life, despised as they are by the ugly machos of the world, who look upon them, with hatred, as diseased weaklings.


They want us to believe, in other words, that the potentates of the first world, i.e., people who, with unparalleled tenacity, have risen through the ranks of a system thoroughly exploitative, predatory, sexist, and racist; a system, to this day, thoroughly ruled by (unscrupulous, war-mongering) men, which is to say, still very much a "patriarchal" apparatus whose sole organizing principle is political management; they want us to believe, as if nothing else mattered, that these cynics are ready to lay down their lives, as it were, in order to give "the diverse others" and today that means prevalently gays and transsexuals "their rights."


Really?


Unsurprisingly, the underprivileged people that are blandished by all these campaigns in the name of diversity cannot help but to be flattered, vindicated, and valorized by what they see as the progressive, unstoppable result of years of struggle. A struggle waged from the ground up in order to emerge, victorious and dignified, out of a situation that was unquestionably discriminatory.


But these persons, these groups delude themselves. They are being used.


There is no denying that the System perforce oppresses and patronizes what its leaders see as "the weak." That is the direct outcome of the predatory mindset of the elite itself. I have explained this in my first post. The governing mindset was and still is very much that of the macho: viz., the world ruler is a white, money-conscious, weapon-wielding, technology-savvy, puritan colonizer. In his realm, women, homosexuals (i.e., "feminized males"), and technique-inept "savages" are all bundled together as sub-humans. This is how ruling whites thought and that is how they still think. Any concessions they make to the "sub-human" lot is never made for the lot's sake, but exclusively for the sake of their own rule.


Now, how does the elite manage this issue? A vast portion, if not the vast majority of a society's population sees no issue whatsoever with a person's sexual inclinations, tastes, and proclivities, so long as they do not interfere with those of others. The sexual mores of others are ultimately a matter of indifference. In this sense, the institutionalization of same-sex marriagesshould present no controversy whatsoever. Yet, clearly, there is also a portion of society that abhors homosexuality. And that is for a variety of ingrained reasons and phobias, not least of which, in my view, is, within the "hater," a deep sexual repression/obsession and/or a deeply suppressed bi/homo-sexuality, which, in Puritancountries, he experiences internally with suffocating angst.


The System leverages this contorted phobia.


Homosexuals and transsexuals are an exiguous minorityof the population. And even among the homophobic faction, those that may be expected to take (energetic) action against a public campaign in favor of homo- & trans-sexual rights, should the State decide to launch one, are extremely few. In any event, it is nowhere near any number that could possibly intimidate a State supposedly bent on "doing good." Which is to say that if western governments had been sincere in wanting to make life easier and dignified for gays, they could have easily outflanked the homophobic barrier by passing an appropriate bill, swiftly and discreetly, through their preferentiallegislativechannels. Then, for the State, it would have been a simple matter of weathering impassibly an eventual public outcry on the part of the homophobic Right-wingers.


But the System did not do this; that was never the objective. The apparatus wanted the (propagandistic) confrontation to take center stage, and to be long and as contentious as possible the design being to discredit, to destroy in the realm of "public opinion"a particular idea, a particular cultural mainstay which had theretofore held sway. I will explain.




In terms of "gender" transformation, they started in the 1970s with feminism.


Notice how the strategy is always cleverly conducted.


The grievance in this case, as in the others, is real. Before "empowerment," women were indeed losing their marbles on the kitchen linoleum within the confined space of "the home" where hallucinated animism (viz. engaging pets and stuffed animals in a never-ending psycho-dramatic dialogue) kept them going for as long as the "professional success" of the male allowed them. Obviously, women have to be out in world and create. But what were they given instead? The same stressful, mind-deadening jobs as their husbands' (for less pay, for both, in the end), and it is moot whether, in the long-run, they have spiritually gained thereby.


The reason why, forty years ago, the System unleashed a major feminist campaign pitting the neo-suffragettes against the traditionalist bastion was not to champion woman's emancipatory getaway from the stifling strictures of the paternal manor, but rather to add her to the laborrosters of the Machine. The propagandistic fight was to discredit, and eventually eject from the technocratic console, that faction which, doubtless, was obnoxiously hyper-conservative, though paternalisticenough to advocate for the (male) bread-winner a stable (middle-class) income sufficient to feed comfortably a family of four.


No longer: both, men and women, now compete against each other, having to work for a pay that is considerably lessthan what their fathers (as baby-boomers) earned (at the very least, a quarter less income and 40 percent less wealth), with no prospects of security.


So much for "female empowerment."



***

"Transphobic Bus" (Part II): LBGT, Elagabalus & Termites

Thus, Feminism ultimately appears to have been a ploy to harness, via labor,the other, theretofore "idle," half of society to the soulless routines of the Structure. Thereupon, Hispanic nannies were to look after the children of working mothers (& fathers).


This was yesterday. Today, the maneuver has been ratcheted up one more notch: there is now talk of "feminization." In other words, in their ceaseless and unctuous adulation of "Woman," the elites are diffusing the suggestion that increased female influence on political affairswould pacify society. It would allegedly take the edge off the insufferably barbarous bluster of the alpha male, whose deportment is predominantly guided by invidious emulation, upmanship, and truculent swagger. This would appear a captivating suggestion were it not for the fact that, betraying their ulterior motives from the outset, its promoters ultimately wield feminization as a mere pretext for recommending increased contraception.


The feminizing contention, as advanced by a Harvard psychology professor, argues that woman's "direct political empowerment, the deflation of manly honor, the promotion of marriage on women's terms, the right of girls to be born, and women's control over their own reproduction" would all contribute to a general decline of violence. This would seem especially true for the access to contraception, which, says the psychologist, would make populations "less distended by a thick slab of young people at the bottom." By which he means admittedly, in a not particularly feminized and nurturing phraseology that criminals are the unwanted sons of mothers industrially impregnated by phallocratic cads.


Criminologists know this to be untrue. And as for the putative sweeteningof society as a result of more women in position of political responsibility a (hypocritical) plank so tremendously in vogue these days, there is no evidence whatsoever that it has taken place. To the contrary, we now have abundant evidence that, once they conquer top corporate seats, women act just as abjectly as the men that have co-opted them into their System. And these female VIPs keep breeding sons, and daughters, likely to behave just as abjectly and exploitatively as themselves (and their domineering, but politically correct, husbands).


In terms of peace and social justice, our hyper-modern world is certainly none the better for the larger quotas of women in positions of command. Sex is manifestly not the critical factor. The psyche, the "heart," the particular mentality with which one tackles issues of justice obviously is.


Solemnly, the Harvard academic seals his paean for feminization by calling respectful attention to the experience of Tsutomu Yamaguchi a survivor of both nuclear strikes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who, before, dying at 93, offered a prescription for peace in the nuclear age: "The only people who should be allowed to govern countries with nuclear weapons are mothers," he sentenced, "those who are still breast-feeding their babies."


I cannot think of a more repulsive image.


Yamaguchi's thinking is all wrong. A conceptual monstrosity such as the one he uttered before departing is the result of spiritual exhaustion; it is an unconditional surrender of the heart before the new titanic deployment of the Techno-Structure. It is a lamentable act of pessimistic, enfeebled resignation.


How could one even contemplate commending such objects of death to the care of a breast-feeding mother? As if, moreover, a young, "lactating" Madeleine Albright would think twice before pushing the button, should she be given the wonderful opportunity to do so.


A world entrusted to almae matres(nurturing mothers) is a world where the mere notion of nuclear warhead is itself unthinkable.





Why the insistence on contraception? Clearly, most couples nowadays, at the going levels of remuneration and job availability, can hardly afford to offer a "good life" (high-level education, cultural travel, and wholesome nutrition) to a single childwithout going into debt. Decorated academics are, at one level or another, the representatives of the apparatus in which they are vested. As such, as in this instance, they are positing the problem from the vantage point of the apparatus, for which, clearly, the dynamics of breeding, and subsequently ("after the eggs have hatched") those of function(who is to do what?), are matters of the highest importance. So important, in fact, that they cannot be entrusted to the individual discretion of the parents. The putative correlation between contraception and female empowerment is merely an alibi with which to cover the State's prioritized distribution of resourceswithin the economy. Which is not to say that women should not procreate as they fit, but rather that the System, given the centralization of credit and its particular (& highly uneven) class structure, sees to it at all times that they curb their fertility, especially if they are poor.


And that is all the more cogent as the Structure also expects women to thicken the ranks of the military. No wonder the greater inflow of laboring females has not sweetened society: so much for the deflating of "manly honor." And this brings us to the late transgendercontroversy the latest instalment in the post-modern saga of techno-propaganda.
The so-called "Pentagon's gender revolution" of the 1990s has initiated a de-sexualization of the armed forces, including the jet fighting squads, which are charged with one of the most skilled, devastating, and cowardlytechniques for mass murder (viz. bombing, through stealth, from on high). The late plethora of transgender items on the discursive space of public consumption viz. the pink news; the incessant fluttering of rainbow banners; the vehemence and the acrimony; the diatribe surrounding "females entrapped in a man's body" seeking shelter in the ladies' room; and the TV shows and movies scripted to suggest the inexistence of sexes and the need to replace the male-female compound with a homogenizing notion of gendering sex, liable to being expressed in a multitude of bodily configurations and intercourses all such items, compacted in this torrential flow of "gender erasure," are not diffused to "ease" the body of society, which is unaccustomed to them, into "understanding," and thus empathizing with transsexuals. (What interest could a cynical, hyper-modern apparatus possibly have in a group of individuals whose numbers are so marginal and whose "difference," in terms of political economy, is so irrelevant?). All such "discourse" is promoted in profusion in order to erase, by way of repeated suggestion, the notion that the familial nucleus and its two constitutive, and sexually differentiated genitorial components, are merely a construct. The Structure does no longer need families and their patres.


What would the System gain by this mental erasure? It would gain the perspective of tightening its managerial grip over society by organizing it ever more like a collective of insects, like a termitary. Termites, which form by all accounts a formidable organism, are known for having the power to derive out of base larvae whatever sexual and functional type they so desire by way of special nutritional arrangements. In their morphological realm, they also dispose of a very specialized caste of warriors, whose enormous mandibular protuberance is such that they can be only ("lovingly") fed, mouth-to-mouth as it were, by worker-termites.


It appears that hyper-modern Structures desire to reduce us all to insects, to sexually interchangeable creatures that are workers (& engineers), consumers, and warriors all rolled into one. Less than a year ago, in fact, the Pentagon lifted the banthat prevented transsexuals from serving in the military.







Hypermodern times are quite a (sorry) spectacle: it is something else to watch these white males in charge of the Structure burning themselves in effigyin the (now disposable) guise of the "ugly machos" via these postmodern rituals of depersonalized guiltenacted before stupefied (and manipulated) crowds of "diverse others." The days of machismo are over. With technique, with power loads & computerized machines, "everybody" can commit genocide, everybody can do the job, even those formerly categorized as "sub-humans." Tis time to take them all in, and put them to work, for longer hours and less pay and/or to enlist them.


They have got everybody fooled. One can only guess what other sex toy they will be brandishing next in order to have their termitary 1.0 pronto. All one can say at this juncture, is that, aesthetically speaking, all this techno-propagandistic endeavor, though crafty, is, for all that, the drab (& plastified) work of icy, unimaginative Puritans. In that other compartment, the aesthetic one, they actually fool nobody. It's all old hat, and done without a shred of true artistry. For in such things, to carry them out properly, what is required is authentic depravity, sovereign libido, bloody abandon, and a form of erotic dissipation whose drift is the polar obverse of the authoritarian conservatism pursued by the techno-games of our era. Yes, this is a tale we have heard before.


Rome, in fact, had had a sensational rainbow season when the gods bestowed upon her a Syrian teenager as emperor. This was the legendary Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, aka "Elagabalus" (218-222 A.D.): a fabulous protagonist in his own way a "crowned anarchist" said of him French playwright Antonin Artaud. Elagabalus was a woman in a man's body, who, among the myriad "outrages" he is said to have committed, married men, twice, on a legal contractual basis, and women, six times. He called himself the Great Mother or alternatively Dionysus, and was fond of cosmetics. With sacrificial effusion, he worshipped the Sun (whose symbol was a black meteorite phallus) and, in Rome, wished to fuse its cult with that of the Judeans, to the great chagrin of the patriciate.


"Hewas the only one of all the emperors under whom a woman attended the senate like a man, just as though she belonged to the senatorial order. He also established a senaculum, or women's senate, on the Quirinal Hill, which, under the influence [of his grandmother], enacted [all kinds] of absurd decrees concerning rules to be applied to matrons, [on clothing and etiquette]. […] He would harness women of the greatest beauty to a wheel-barrow in fours, in twos, or in threes or even more, and would drive them about, usually naked himself, as were also the women who were pulling him."


(I wonder, while driving his naked-lady chariot, how Rome's flamboyant hermaphrodite emperor would have reacted had a transphobic bus crossed his imperial path).
Praetorians cut his throat in a latrine in 222 AD. He was eighteen.