Transcript of Sue Supriano interviewing Michael C. Ruppert

 

Babylon is everywhere.  It's the ism's and schisms both in the system and within ourselves.  Let's unify, stand aligned and step out of Babylon 

 

Supriano:  Hi everybody, my name's Sue Supriano and I'm really excited to be talking today to Mike Ruppert.  Mike, I'm so happy to see you, I haven't seen you for a while and it was you I first heard a couple of years ago talking about all kinds of things that really opened my eyes to levels of corruption and connections that I never had any idea even though I thought I was so radical and so smart.  Anyway, and the reason that you were speaking at that time that I came anyway was to hear about 9/11 - it was after September 11th, and we're coming up on September 11th real soon here - this is the beginning of September.  I'm really happy to talk to you and I that your book Crossing the Rubicon is going to be coming out any minute and you're here in San Francisco to speak to the Commonwealth Club.

 

Ruppert:  Yes, isn't that amazing.  Isn't that amazing.

 

Supriano:  It's very amazing, yes, because I know that you've been censored and kept off stations that consider themselves much more to the left, in much more, you know, into supposedly the truth.  So I wonder what you make of this and we could start off talking about the media right off.

 

Ruppert:  Well, insofar as the Commonwealth Club, of course, it's one of if not the most prestigious clubs for speakers in the state of California.  I mean, their recent speakers include former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, two members of the Kean Commission, they've had John Kerry, John Edwards, Al Sharpton, members of both political parties, King Abdullah of Jordan, Al Franken - major world figures speak at this club and I, you know, quite frankly, I'm not sure how it happened.  All I know is that we got a call several months ago and asked if I would be interested in doing that and of course I immediately said, "Yes!"  And there was some lobbying by a couple members to do it, but all I know is I'm here and we're doing it tonight, so I don't know that this represents a breakthrough in the major media... I think what it does represent is the fact that the work that I have done has achieved a degree of credibility not only because of the number of people who are paying close attention to it, but also because of the factual research that has stood well the test of time.

 

Supriano:  Well, I'm really interested to hear about that factual research and before that I neglected to tell people that you have an organization called From the Wilderness that puts out a newsletter on the internet and in print, and that many members of Congress read it and that you used to be, quite a long time ago now, a narcotics cop for the LA Police, and you exposed the bringing in of cocaine...

 

Ruppert:  It got strange on that one, yes, yes.

 

Supriano:  ...into Los Angeles...

 

Ruppert:  ...by the CIA, definitely.  Yeah, From the Wilderness now is about six and a half years old.  We've just passed 15,000 subscribers in about 40 countries.  We don't have many members of Congress - we have between 35 and 40 members of Congress who are known subscribers.  There's a lot of others who come and visit the website on a regular basis.  We have two committees, the Intelligence committees of both the Senate and that House who read it, as well as a lot of professors, and again we've stood the test of time because of our dedication to providing verifiable documented source information to support everything that we say.  And of course we've also stood the test of time because we've been pretty much accurate in describing not only what happened on September the 11th but in predicting the shape of the world that we would be in today, which is not a pretty picture.

 

Supriano:  It's sure not, and I know you have been often really attacked.  In fact I was just reading a very old email last night talking about how you never had any facts, it was all supposition, and I thought well that's really not my experience, but let's get into now about your book Crossing the Rubicon.  First of all when's it coming out and what's the title mean?

 

Ruppert:  Well, the full title is Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil.  We should have copies for sale by mid-September at the From the Wilderness website.  The book will be in national release through all major outlets both on the net and in bookstores by mid-October at the latest.  It's 600 pages long with a 1000 footnotes.  For those who say that I don't document my research you've got a thousand citations and I've always encouraged people as you know if you've ever seen one of my Powerpoint presentations - I always put the evidence right up there on the screen.  I have kept the contents of the book a little bit secret because I am making some devastating revelations in the book.  Particularly, that on the morning of September the 11th there were four and as many as five separate war-game exercises being run all except for one were being run by the US Air Force and NORAD involving live-fly and other kinds of command post exercise hijack drills which inserted false radar blips onto the radar screens of the FAA and the Northeast Air Defense sector.  This is all extremely well-documented now.  Others involved actual remote-control flying of airliners posing as hijacked airlines which effectively paralyzed fighter response on the day of 9/11.  The war-game exercises had various names ranging from Northern Vigilance, Northern Guardian, Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Guardian -- those are some of the ones we've identified.  This was also preceded by one war-game exercise: Northern Vigilance, which re-deployed essential fighter aircraft resources out of the region on September the 11th to Canada, northern Canada, and Alaska, which took the Air Force's fighter strength away on the precise day of the attack, and at the same time when the attacks began air traffic controllers were dealing with as many as 22 possible hijacks, so they had no idea where to send any fighter aircraft, and that in effect explains the delay in fighter response. 

 

Supriano:  And I understand that the person who was in charge of NORAD that, that was his very first day on the job.  He got replaced - the usual person got replaced just for a few hours.  Is that true?

 

Ruppert:  No, it wasn't NORAD.  There were actually two guys with their first day on the job, one is Ben Sliney who was the FAA's hijack coordinator.  He was at Herndon, Virginia.  He doesn't that much of a central role.  There is in the National Military Command Center which is the Pentagon's, if you will, Situation Room, we had a sudden replacement, General Winfield, Montague Winfield, left suddenly and left a Navy captain named Leidig in command just as the attacks began, and I will discuss that in my book because the other thing that I will show which is equally explosive is that Vice President Dick Cheney, on the day of September the 11th as he was supposedly rushed to the bunker was running a completely separate, parallel and superior command, control and communication system out of the presidential emergency operation center, and that's where the attacks were coordinated from, and that's what superseded everything taking place.  And I have placed that absolutely proven that Dick Cheney was in complete command and control, running a completely separate system that day.

 

Supriano:  Well, I'm surprised you're not surrounded by bodyguards, Mike. 

 

Ruppert:  That's alright, I have all of my fans and supporters and I'm fine with that, but this is a record now that cannot be refuted and of course I submit it now at 600-some pages with a 1000 footnotes and I encourage anybody to try and pull it apart but I think they're going to have a very hard time with it.

 

Supriano:  Wow, well, I haven't heard that part of the story before.

 

Ruppert:  We kept it secret until now.

 

Supriano:  You wanted to get your facts all together.

 

Ruppert:  Well, we also wanted to make the book have the maximum possible impact because in the past as I've done my research on 9/11 and if we talk prematurely before we get something done you find a whole lot of people out there trying to place a counter-spin on it even before I get there and get the chance to make my best case.  Now, with Crossing the Rubicon going into print and coming out everybody will have a chance to see the best case themselves and then anyone who after having seen that wants to take a shot at it... well, feel free.  It is for a day or two yet still a free country.

 

Supriano:  Right.  Well, the yet part in the free country.  Do you want to say more about what got coordinated on 9/11, expand on that and then we'll talk about the free country issue. 

 

Ruppert:  Well, briefly what had to happen on the day of 9/11 was that we know from the Associated Press that in that calendar year prior to June 1st of 2001 US Air Force, National Guard, NORAD aircraft were scrambled 67 times perfectly in the case of just simply off-course commercial aircraft and they were flying beside those aircraft within a matter of minutes.  We have huge gaps, in some cases 40-50 minutes, an hour, on September the 11th where nothing happened.  We have a whole body of conflicting, and I have to say this clearly, the conduct of the so-called independent Kean Commission into 9/11 is abhorrent, it's shameful, it involves a destruction of evidence, tampering of evidence just before their final report.  They released a whole new timeline that had absolutely no connection to anything that had been submitted to the commission under oath from either NORAD, the FAA, or any other entity.  The conflicts of interest on the 9/11 commission are abhorrent, these people should never have been placed in a position of trust, specifically the chairman Tom Kean, the vice chairman Lee Hamilton who was the prime architect of the Iran-Contra and BCCI and the October Surprise cover-ups, Jamie Gorelick, enormous conflicts of interest; Phillip Zelikow, the executive director, my God, he was a terrorism adviser, he's a close friend of Condoleezza Rice, wrote a book with her, and was advising the incoming Bush Administration - this man should have been a witness rather than the executive director.  Their report is absolutely shameful and I'll be talking about that tonight at the Commonwealth Club.  But the task on 9/11 was to effectively but plausibly, deniably, paralyze fighter response and that was accomplished by this multitude of war-games which at first left the FAA controllers going, we have a number of quotes, "Is this part of the drill?  Which is the real hijack?  We have 11... We don't know which one is which... We have maybe 22... We only have four pairs of fighters to scramble in the entire Northeast Air Defense sector," that's a matter of record, which means you could only tackle four out of eleven or twenty-two or however many there were of possible hijacks, and the Air Force would not send fighters to what might have been the wrong place.  And that's what accounts for the paralysis and lack of response and it's also something that we had published some stories in From the Wilderness and on the day of the last hearing a great young writer from New York, Michael Kane, was a young activist on a >From the Wilderness assignment approached NORAD commander General Ralph Eberhart. and said, "What about these other war-games?"  And the only comment he was able to get was, "No comment."  And yet these are a matter of record which the Commission never looked into.

 

Supriano:  Well, what else happened and what are the motives.  I mean, you're making some huge allegations here.

 

Ruppert:  The motives are exactly the same that I've said since I gave my first lecture on the Truth and Lies of 9/11.  Again with the first time I started talking about it people said, "Oh, Peak Oil, there's nothing to it, there's nothing to it," but now here we are in 2004 having seen cover stories on the National Geographic, having seen it acknowledged on BBC, some of the largest press organizations in the world.  We are witnessing all of the issues that I said we would be about supply, demand, diminishing supplies, no elasticity, the fact that Saudi Arabia is incapable apparently of increasing production -- so this is Peak Oil and that was the primary motive for September the 11th.  That's why I was so able to so successfully predict where the conflicts would go within a couple of months after the attacks, and I said this a, this war, that Dick Cheney calls it, that will not end in our lifetimes is a sequential war to control the last remaining oil reserves on the planet.  West Africa is exploding, we have recent stories about Sir Mark Thatcher coup in Equatorial Guinea, we have stories about Nigeria, Liberia, coups in Sao Toma e Prancipe, six US warships going to the Nigerian navy, NATO announcing it was moving to West Africa, the tensions in Venezula - this is all stuff we predicted.  So the motive is Peak Oil.  The world is beginning to run out of oil, it is now causing blackouts and economic hardship and shutdown in Shanghai, Hong Kong - they're having mandatory blackouts.  Same thing in Thailand, Australia's doing emergency studies, Scotland, England -- this is Peak Oil.  That was the motive.  To quote Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose book I brought to world attention in 1997, he said in three places in his book that without an attack on the order of Pearl Harbor the American people would never support the "imperial mobilization", that's his term, necessary to justify sending US military forces all over the world.  Here we are.

 

Supriano:  Here we are, that's for sure, and this whole issue of knocking conspiracy theory, I mean people oftentimes think that well how come there aren't more people speaking out, you know, so many people would have to know it, and so I'll ask you these questions Mike Ruppert since I'm sure other people are thinking of it, I talk to so many people about it...

 

Ruppert:  Well, first of all these people who are saying this have had no experience ever with a covert operation.  I on the other hand have, and it's very well documented.  I've been studying covert operations for 26 years.  I've spoken to a great many CIA case officers, who I know, who know me, who acknowledge knowing me.  I have been to some very interesting places and my record and experience on that can't be challenged, so that's a strawman argument that a hundred thousand people would have to know and nobody, I mean, the United States successfully kept secret the Manhattan Project that created the atom bomb, and the F-117A stealth fighter which involved many many more thousands than would have been necessary to perpetrate or control, orchestrate, facilitate the attacks of 9/11 from within the US Government.  I name a great many of the suspects in the book.  I show how the structure was laid out and you see that it would not have required thousands of people, 20, 30, just in the right places, each knowing what they were supposed to do and only a few knowing the overall plan.

 

Supriano:  What do you think is going to happen with the media now, or you know if you'd like to share with the audience your experience with the media so far.

 

Ruppert:  Well...

 

Supriano:  ...and it's role in the cover-up.

 

Ruppert:   Well, we live in an economic paradigm, ecosystem which runs and operates like organized crime.  I talk about that a great deal in the book.  Six hundred billion dollars a year in drug money has to funnel through Wall Street, through the financial markets, the stock markets, American banks to keep a teetering American economy functional.  I talk about the dramatic explosion in heroin production or opium production in Afghanistan since our occupation in November 2001.  The major media is criminally complicit because they don't dare shoot the system that keeps their stock prices up, but what's interesting now is that with the timing of the release of this book and this something that my agent, publicist and I have discussed for a long time, is that we are in the middle of a presidential election that before we vote, regardless of who counts the votes or how they're counted, on November 2nd this will degenerate into one of the bloodiest, bitterest bar-room brawls in American history, and we deliberately want this book to come out at this point in time so that it will receive the maximum amount of attention because the political system is not behaving very sanely right now.

 

Supriano:  Well, and as we speak the Republican National Convention is going on in New York, I wonder if you would comment on that.

 

Ruppert:  I'm glad I'm not there.  Umm, well, this is theater and I try not to get too caught up in theater.  I am glad to see that there's a lot of opposition, but... I'm going to have a lot to say about Rudolph Giuliani in my book.  He and others knew that Flight 175 was on its way to the World Trade Center to strike the south tower for 20 minutes and yet nobody lifted a finger to warn the people.  In my book I document how one military officer had to leave his post, pick up a standard telephone and call his brother who was working in the World Trade Center and tell him to get out of the building because nobody else in the system was taking any action, and I include Rudolph Giuliani in that.  The issue is not so much the convention right now - I'm not worried about that.  The issue is the campaign issues and 9/11 remains a campaign issue and it will probably become moreso even up to the day of the final election, and that's the wave that we want to ride with this book.

 

Supriano:  Well in the using of the fear and just feeding fear, feeding fear, feeding fear all based on 9/11, it's the excuse for our civil liberties going away, really, and excuse for just about everything, you know, killing people all over the world.

 

Ruppert:  Well, those techniques and tactics worked extremely successfully in Germany in the 1930's didn't they?  And they seem to be working to some extent now, although in this country with all kinds of situations deteriorating, economic, political, others on other fronts, there is an awakening taking place and I'd like to light a fire under that if I can.

 

Supriano:  That's your experience in traveling around, that there's an awakening taking place?

 

Ruppert:  Well, yeah, it's all over the world, of course, you know I've lectured, given more than 40 lectures now in eight countries since 9/11 and clearly if you go outside of America the balance of people who believe versus those who don't believe is flipped.  I mean, you go outside of America everybody understands about 9/11, everybody understands about oil, everybody understands that America behaving like an empire, ruthlessly, and also that some extremely bad decisions are being made.  One of which is the Bush Administration's suggestion that it's going to go after Iran next when we're getting our butts kicked in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We don't have the military power to do that and of course one of the things that we've said very strongly at From the Wilderness is we can expect the draft to return in 2005.  I stand by that one.  That's just a matter of simple arithmetic.

 

Supriano:  Yeah, I talked to the people from different parts of the world and interview them and people are always, say the same thing you just said - they understand about 9/11 and they also are shocked that the US media is among the least free, if not the least, among the least free open media in the world which is very different impression that most Americans have.

 

Ruppert:  That's why it's a little bit different now, in that the way you start a media frenzy, and I've had a lot of experience around the major media, you know I've been a press spokesman for presidential campaign in Los Angeles county in 1992, I've been in a number of major media outlets, I've been interviewed extensively, and I've also written, I wrote for the LA Times years ago.  The way you start a media frenzy is first of all you get to a climate like the 2004 presidential election, then as certain issues hit the forefront you drop major bombshells into that, in the middle where everybody's looking for a stories about the presidential campaign and what the issues are, and when the major media suddenly, the reporters, the producers, all see Pulizter Prizes dropping from the sky like raindrops that's when you start getting the media frenzy when they realize there's enough for everybody and if I don't do this story then somebody else will, and we're starting to see that, and that's what I hope to see get much stronger because these are clearly desperate times and this election, arguably, is probably the most important American political election since the election of 1860.

 

Supriano:  Well, I'll be happy if it happens and if it's not fixed.

 

Ruppert:  Well, yeah, but I mean, I also take the position that there is not a tremendous amount of difference between either candidate although I do think that Neo-Cons just by virtue of their, the Bush Administration, by virtue of their brutality, their arrogance, their mean-spirited nature, and demonstrated incompetence are a tad more dangerous right now.  But we should not look under for a President Kerry to turn off the tap of American imperial conquest, military mobilization, or anything else.  He represents the same basic interests and the same economic paradigm that's governing things right now.

 

Supriano:  Mike Ruppert, I would like you to comment about, because I know some people who have been researching 9/11 are going to wonder what you think about the buildings being exploded from inside...

 

Ruppert:  I have not gone to scientific evidence and the reason is not because I don't think it's a valid point.  The people twist this all the time.  I spent a lot of time in court when I was a policeman, when I was working detectives and I spent a lot of time on the stand as an expert witness.  When you start to develop "expert" evidence in a court, in a trial, what happens is you take a simple matter out of the realm of a layperson's understanding.  For example if I were to look at you and was talking to you on a homicide case and I would say, "Where were you on Thursday night at 2am?"  And you would say, "I was at Joe's bar."  It's a very simple matter for me to drive to Joe's bar, talk to witnesses and either find out that you were or that you were not there, that doesn't require any scientific analysis whatsoever.  It is a point that lodges in public's consciousness.  When you come to a legal procedure like a courtroom, if I were to say, however, that you were under the influence of heroin, and or cocaine or opiates and describe to you based on my experience with the symptoms that were consistent with that - constricted pupils, etc., all the things that I would testify about.  The defense then can bring in three, four, five medical doctors who will say anything under oath for the right fee, and that's the problem you get to with scientific evidence.  I do not and I have never believed that the World Trade Center towers collapsed perfectly on their own as they did, especially World Trade Center 7, and I do talk about WTC-7 because that plays a central role in how 9/11 was carried out.  The Secret Service was there and I believe that the two aircraft that struck the World Trade Center were flown by remote control, and there's abundant evidence for that and I believe that the mechanisms to accomplish that task, the flying of those airplanes, were in WTC-7.  That building had to be destroyed - you couldn't get the equipment out.  I've never believed any of those things but it's something I have chosen not to argue for the simple reason that let's say I ever got to the place where I would be speaking at the Commonwealth Club, which is where I am today, and if the press were concerned about what I was saying they could easily produce three or four PhDs or somebody working for the government who would refute my evidence and the public, not able to discern for themselves, having to rely upon the experts, would just shut down.  But what cannot be argued with, and this where I've hung my hat since 9/11, what cannot be argued with is an evidentiary record of what the suspects have stated as they have been "interrogated" by us, the major media, as they've made their comments under oath and in the press and I can prove those statements are lies and I can prove to some degree what those suspects were doing instead - requires no scientific analysis.  And that's what I've always said, if 9/11was going to be broken, that's how you do it.  You have to think of detective Andy Sipowicz getting a guy in a room and making him trip all over himself, and that's what we've done with 9/11. The rule in police work is you never take your eyes off the suspect and I haven't done that since the attacks happened.

 

Supriano:  Well, I don't know if these suspects are keeping their eye on you because we haven't had a chance to talk about really too much [of] the repression and police-state that's in place pretty much the Patriot Act and all kinds of things that people have heard about.  We don't have much time here left, Mike Ruppert, but I think that it's certainly going to be up to the people, right?

 

Ruppert:  Well, I think it's going to be up to the people and I think that for those who want some real solid information on which to evaluate 9/11 and the world that we live in since, that Crossing the Rubicon will be a handbook for them with it's thousand footnotes and all of the research so that they can get a much better picture of where we are.  You're right, these are not pretty times.

 

Supriano:  Your website is http://www.fromthewilderness.com  Okay, and the whole title of your book and just real quick why you named it that.

 

Ruppert:  Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil.  I got the term "Crossing the Rubicon" from the fact that in 49BC Julius Caesar having just won a battle in northern Italy took his legions and crossed a stream called the Rubicon, and under the Constitution of the Roman Republic the military was forbidden from entering the capital city, but as soon as Julius Caesar took his legions into Rome the Roman Republic died and the Roman Empire was born.

 

Supriano:  Thank-you very much Mike Ruppert and I know that the listeners are probably reeling around here, you know you might have to listen to this more than once to let it sink in, and for sure get Mike Ruppert's book coming out the middle of September.

 

Ruppert:  You can mark it up, read it over and over again and you'll find out it's all there.

 

Supriano:  Well thank-you so much for this interview and for your work, Michael Ruppert.

 

Ruppert:  Thank-you, Sue.