Tue 29 Nov 2005
Michael C Ruppert is like the Shaft of the consipiracy theory world. He’s a bloody legend. I got onto him because in 2002, someone gave me an MP3 of one of his lectures. He’s been doing lecture tours around the world since 2001 as well as maintaining the fromthewilderness.com web site. This book is in part, several extracts from that web site’s manifestos over the past 3 years.
Speculation is not his thing and he proudly starts a lecture proclaiming that the FBI or CIA have never formally denied any of his claims. If that wasn’t enough, he tells you that he’s an ex LAPD who was well on the way to making rank as detective. Early on he tells you how he was shot at by drug running CIA operatives who worked for Cheney’s Brown and Root in the late 70s.
What this book is specifically about is Peak Oil. Or more so, the fact that oil production peaked many, many years ago. Which puts us, the humans in a really fuck off bad place. Because, as he points out, oil just doesn’t power your car, it powers the powerpoints and makes the plastics that virtually everything is made from - or wrapped in. So with so little oil left (and the remaining oil being so bloody hard to get to. Very, very hard in fact).
Now, all we need is an evil tyrant to take control of what’s left and throttle it out. Oh, and wouldn’t it be helpful if we killed off a shit tin of people so there’d be more oil to go around? Bonzer! Enter George Bush’s Empire. Tyranising the world, through it’s oil fields and keeping it inline with terror.
Invariably, this will get typecast as a 911 book. But it doens’t talk about missiles hitting the Pentagon and other salient theories. What this book does is establish a case against the Bush Administration for having a LOT to gain from such attacks taking place. This includes, and is not limited to:
- getting to loot social security funds in the advent of an emergency (eg a terrorist attack)
- putting military bases where oil fields exist and/or pipelines are requried, so long as the oil field owners look like terrorists and evildoers. And who woulda thunk the oil fields all belong to ‘terrorists’! wow!
- advancing their own corporate profiteering interests (Halliburton, Carlyle Group, Brown and Root, all who have MASSIVE Department of Defense contracts).
From the get go, Ruppert spells out this book takes the approach of a detective preparing a court case and the final chapter takes the “ladies and gentleman of the jury. . .” tack. He himself has had an interesting life and met some ne’er do wells in the making of the book. It was written over about 2 years (2002-2004). So much so that the last chapters revisit what he’d written two years ago.
Perhaps the most provocative topic explored is that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were VERY much in control and directing the events that had happened on 911, Rummy in particular. Cheney had setup several war game excercises to distract and confuse NORAD and the armed forces that day. He also points out the high probability that the planes were actually remote controlled on the day and even identifies a company that could’ve supplied the technology to do so.
Let it be said, this book covers a LOT of ground and goes into a lot of extracts from his newsletter and at times can be very verbose. There’s sections on where the oil is now and what the US is doing to get it, the Patriot Act, the death of several world class microbioligists all working on germ warfare and vaccines, you name it. It can get quite overwhelming.
Ruppert puts forward a pretty compelling case in this 600 page manifesto. Whilst I question a lot of it, such as his claims about Promis software, quite a lot more is definitely plausible. One thing that really sticks out is that his theory about the Saudis in particular is that their plan is to scare them out of town, leaving their lucre in the bank. As Michael Moore points out in Farenheit 911, they own a huge chunk of the US ecomony, I think some 7%.
Anyway, back to the Shaft thing, Ruppert is very unpretentious and modest, though he makes some audacious claims. There’s a lot to take in here, and it may even be worth two reads, but you really feel up to date once you’ve read it. Almost enlightened. Well worth a read- in fact a must read.