That in 2001, the man placed on the “surface” of the American State (as oppose to its “depth”) is George W. Bush, is highly significant. “If you had said to me: ‘name 25 million people who would maybe be president of the United States’, he would probably not be in that category”, said David Rubinstein, founder of the Carlyle Group, of George W. Bush, whom he had integrated on the board as a favor to his father. How had a man so notoriously superficial and ignorant been elected head of the most powerful country in the world? One obvious answer is that he was the son of George H. W. Bush, who left a legacy of a rather reasonable Republican president. Being the son of a President is not unlike being a Vice-President: he is granted more confidence through connections than any other candidate in the running. Voters could even assume that Bush Junior would have been advised by his father, which of course proved to be far from the truth: Bush Jr. did nothing like his father. To the journalist Bob Woodward, who wanted to know if he ever asked his father for advice, he said in 2004: “Well, no... He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. […] There's a higher Father that I appeal to”. This profile of born-again Christian redeemed from a life of debauchery: is it sincere, or only a storytelling number taught to Bush Jr. by his communication adviser Karl Rove, often called “Bush’s Brain”? Opinions are divided, but the fact that the evangelist Billy Graham, to whom Bush Jr. credits his conversion, has no memory of the event, demands the second hypothesis. In any case, Bush Jr.’s most significant conversion took place on September 11th 2001: “He became president, but he didn’t know why, and on September 11, he discovered why”, as famously said neoconservative Michael Ledeen. It was then that Bush Jr., who had so far spent about 40% of his time as President on vacation, found his true calling: “My administration has a job to do and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of the evil-doers” (Sept. 16); “I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that says, ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’” (September 17).



Close behind President Bush stood Vice-President Dick Cheney, who had chosen himself for the position after leading the victorious Bush campaign. He made the Vice-Presidency into a Presidency in disguise. According to Bruce Fein, a former Assistant Attorney General: “Dick Cheney exercises all the power of the Presidency. That has never happened. Ever”. According to his biographers Lou Dubose and Jake Bernstein (Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, 2006), Dick Cheney “[had] become the most powerful vice president ever to occupy the office, exercising authority that often subsumes the President’s”. Cheney was not only the most powerful but also the most secretive: he has successfully resisted against all requests for transparency under the pretext that the Vice-Presidency is not implicated under the Freedom of Information Act because it is not really a branch of the executive.



Charged by Bush Jr. to compose the transition team, Cheney began by placing his mentor Donald Rumsfeld as head the Department of Defense. Rumsfeld and Cheney had been inseparable since the 1970s. They belong to the most hawkish wing of the Republican party, systematically demanding a stronger army, a unilateralist approach and a disregard for international law. It was Gerald Ford who had first introduced them to the White House, entrusting Rumsfeld as his Chief of Staff, who made Cheney his Deputy. Having inspired Ford in the cabinet reshuffle which became known journalistically as the “Halloween Massacre”, Rumsfeld then seized the position of Secretary of Defense, while Cheney took his place as Chief of Staff. Thus there appeared for the first time the explosive combination of Rumsfeld at Defense, Cheney in the White House. Then, with the help of one of the most powerful lobbies ever made, the Committee on the Present Danger, funded by arms industrialists such as David Packard, Rumsfeld and Cheney persuaded President Ford and his new CIA director George H. W. Bush to appoint an independent committee, known as Team B, to revise upward CIA estimates on the Soviet threat, deemed too reassuring. Team B was composed of twelve experts chosen from among the most fanatical cold-warriors, such as General Lyman Lemnitzer (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs fired by Kennedy) and Paul Nitze (the principal author of the NSC-68 document in 1950). The committee would produce a terrifying report that claimed Moscow to be in possession of not only a large and sophisticated arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, but also the desire to dominate all of Europe and the Middle East, and the readiness to start a nuclear confrontation. Pointing to a “window of vulnerability” in the U.S. defense system, Team B’s report advocated a broad and urgent increase in the defense budget, which began under Carter and then accelerated under Reagan. Today, historians agree that the assessments of Team B were maliciously alarming: in reality, the USSR was already lagging behind militarily, and had no intent to expand its sphere of influence.



From their comeback under Bush Jr.’s Presidency, Cheney and Rumsfeld reserved powers for themselves that would prove decisive for their control of the September 11th operation. May 8th, 2001, President Bush announced the creation of the Office of National Preparedness (ONP), subject to FEMA but placed directly under the control of the Vice-President, who would be responsible for coordinating the government’s response to the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Then in an order on June 1st, 2001 issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the responsibility for ordering the destruction of a hijacked and/or menacing airplane was given solely to the Secretary of Defense. On September 11th, 2001, the Rumsfeld-Cheney tandem alone had the power to hinder any intervention against the attacks.



The Pentagon is not only the nerve center of the deep state; it is also at the heart of the military-industrial complex. September 10th, 2001, the day before the attacks, Donald Rumsfeld publicly announced that $2.3 trillion was missing from the accounts of the Department of Defense for the 2000 year (25% of its budget), in addition to $1.1 trillion missing for 1999: just for comparison, these figures equal more than one thousand times the colossal losses of Enron, which triggered a chain of bankruptcies that same year. The mystery of these trillions that just evaporated into thin air is an issue that must be resolved by financial analysts at Resource Services Washington (RSW). Unfortunately, their offices were destroyed by “al-Qaeda” the following morning. According to the trajectory of Flight AA77 provided by the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB), the “hijackers”, rather than hitting the command center on the eastern side of the Pentagon, preferred to attempt an impossible downward spiral at 180° in order to hit the west side of the building precisely at the location of the accounting offices. The 34 experts at RSW perished in their offices, together with 12 other financial analysts, as is noted in the biography of the team leader Robert Russell for the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial: “The weekend before his death, his entire office attended a crab feast at the Russell home. They were celebrating the end of the fiscal-year budget completion. Tragically, every person that attended that party was involved in the Pentagon explosion, and are currently missing”.



Behind Rusmfeld and Cheney — or below, if following the “depth” metaphor — are the group of neoconservatives, mainly from PNAC. Rumsfeld and Cheney maintained symbiotic relationship with many of these individuals since the 70s: the neoconservatives pumped their ideology through their many think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) or the Hudson Institute, while Rumsfeld and Cheney put the concepts into action through the political machinery. It was to Richard Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz, protégés of Richard Perle, that Rumsfeld and Cheney had entrusted the management of Team B. After the Carter period, neoconservatives played a major role in the election of Ronald Reagan, who reciprocally named a dozen of them into positions involving National Security and Foreign Policy: Richard Perle and Douglas Feith to the Department of Defense, Richard Pipes to the National Security Council, and Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Michael Ledeen to the State Department. Once ascended to Presidency, Bush Sr. would try to limit the influence of those he called “the crazies”, but he would be forced to give the post of Defense Secretary to Dick Cheney, who naturally brought along Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby. The latter two are the authors of a secret report, Defense Planning Guidance, leaked by the New York Times March 7th, 1992, which advocated imperialism, unilateralism and, if necessary, pre-emptive war “for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role”. With the help of a new Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, co-chaired by Richard Perle, neoconservatives would argue — without success this time — for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein after Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait.



During the Clinton Presidency, neoconservatives consolidated their alliance with Rumsfeld and Cheney by creating the think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC), officially founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997. Then, in 2000, Cheney and Rumsfeld brought a new wave of powerful neoconservatives into the U.S. government: Cheney made Scooter Libby Chief of Staff; David Frum, a friend to Richard Perle, became the President’s principal speech writer; and Ari Fleischer became White House Press Secretary. Cheney could not oppose the appointment of Colin Powell as Secretary of State, but rather put him in tandem with John Bolton, a right-leaning Republican supported by the neoconservative David Wurmser. Cheney appointed Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor, who was not, strictly speaking a neoconservative, but had been for years under the spell of one of the most aggressive neoconservatives, Philip Zelikow, who became her consultant for the Middle East and terrorism (Rice specializing only in the Soviet Union); as advisors to Rice were also recruited William Luti and Elliot Abrams (both simultaneously assistants to the President), while Eliot Cohen would be brought in to assist when Rice would replace Powell in the State Department in 2007. It is, however, in the Department of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld, that the three most influential neoconservatives would be in the position to shape foreign policy: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, the latter occupying the crucial position of Director of the Defense Policy Board, responsible for defining military strategy. And it was thus that these neoconservatives found themselves in the positions they’d hoped, as councilors and brokers for the President and his ministers.



The indictment of Saudi Arabia, which seems written into the script of September 11th, is like a neoconservative signature. Since the attacks of September 11th, it would be David Wurmser who would open the hostilities in the Weekly Standard with an article entitled “The Saudi Connection” claiming that the royal family was behind the attack. The Hudson Institute, a bastion for neoconservative doctrine, has long had a virulent campaign demonizing the Saudi dynasty, led by its co-founder Max Singer (now director of research at the Institute for Zionist Strategies in Jerusalem). In June 2002, the Institute sponsored a seminar entitled “Discourses on Democracy: Saudi Arabia, Friend or Foe?” Where all the presentations suggest that foe is the correct answer. A special event welcomes the release of the book Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism, written by the Israeli author Dore Gold, who has served as an advisor to Netanyahu and Sharon and as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. On July 10th, 2002, the Franco-American neoconservative Laurent Murawiec, a member of the Hudson Institute and the Committee on the Present Danger, appeared before Richard Perle’s Defense Policy Board to explain that Saudi Arabia is “the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent” and recommend that the United States invade, occupy and fragment the state. He summarized his “Grand Strategy for the Middle East” with these words: “Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, Egypt the prize”. Murawiec is the author of several books demonizing Saud, such as Princes of Darkness: the Saudi Assault on the West (2005).



Although virtually omnipresent in the Bush administration, the neoconservatives are, in fact, the main instigators of the soft “conspiracy theory” on the September 11 attacks, which admits responsibility of Al-Qaeda but focuses its accusations on the connections between Bush, the Saudis and bin Laden. In their book published in 2003, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, Richard Perle and David Frum argue that “the Saudis qualify for their own membership in the axis of evil”, and implored President Bush to “tell the truth about Saudi Arabia”, namely that the Saudi princes finance al-Qaeda.



To understand the inanity of such an accusation, it is enough to know that the Saudis stripped Osama bin Laden of his citizenship in April 1994, exasperated by his incessant accusations against the U.S. military presence on the holy place of Islam since the first Gulf War. In his Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, released in 1996, bin Laden called for the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy, and in 1998, he admitted his role in the November 13th 1995 attack against the headquarters of the National Guard in Riyadh. Osama bin Laden is the sworn enemy of the Saudis. It is unimaginable that the Saudis conspired with Osama bin Laden against the United States; however, it is plausible that they conspired against bin Laden with the Bushes, by pegging him in a false attack to get the U.S. Army on his heels, while liquidating the Taliban regime for UNOCAL’s Afghanistan interests.

In conclusion, everything points to President Bush’s involvement in the conspiracy, but only at a lower level, unknowing of the wider agenda of the neoconservative masterminds. Since then, Bush continues to serve as a sort of human shield for the neocons, whose objectives go far beyond bin Laden, Afghanistan and oil. The situation in which the President found himself at the time of the attacks — reading The Pet Goat to a group of young students at a primary school in Florida — dramatically illustrates how he was distanced from direct control of what were then ongoing operations. His ensuing arraignment alongside the Saudis indicates that he was held hostage by his co-conspirators. And what did they get it through their blackmail? The invasion of Iraq.