9/11 truth goes pop culture?
By Jerry Mazza
Apr 21, 2008, 00:12
The Shell Game
By Steve Alten
Sweetwater Books
ISBN: 1599550946
512 pages, $26.95
It seems a Herculean task to write a “best-selling author” novel about the
“next 9/11, the end
of oil, and deception of a nation,” and make it double as a Hollywood
doomsday blockbuster. But
Steve Alten, who has written eight fiction thrillers and has Tinsel Town
experience, has tried
to do both with The Shell Game. I guess it’s laudable for a successful
novelist to take a crack
at raising consciousness, perhaps risk a career. Though Alten gives us a
rasher of truth, I
found an unsettling number of missing pieces in his novel.
One major missing piece is that there is no specific mention of Israel and
the Mossad as
serious players in 9/11, not necessarily in the good guy’s corner. That
is, from dual citizen
government neocons to WTC lessee Larry Silverstein to the dancing
Israelis. Also, there is no
mention of Israel’s whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu, nuclear technician,
who exposed Israel’s
nuclear installation at Dimona, where he worked from 1976 to 1985. The
facility, by the way,
contained an underground plutonium separation plant that operated in
complete secrecy.
Also missing is that Israel was and is a nuclear player, first in secret,
then post October 5,
1986, when the London Times revealed Vanunu’s story. The story was that
his nation was in
possession of 200 to 300 nuclear warheads of advanced design. (PS: Vanunu
did 18 years in
solitary for that and is now under house arrest. See Israel’s double
nuclear standard is no
standard at all.) It would seem to me that anyone writing a highly
detailed, 512-page novel
about the next 9/11, et al, which includes a nuclear conflagration on
America and Iran, might
mention these facts to give a more balanced picture.
Alten might also have mentioned in his detailed history of Iran’s rocky
dealings with the West
that Iran’s anger was fueled by the overthrow of its first democratically
elected president,
Mohammad Mosaddeq, in the early '50s. Mosaddeq’s government suffered a
coup d’etat in 1953 led
by Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA. Mosaddeq had the audacity to want to
nationalize his nation’s
oil and redistribute the land and wealth from the Shah’s ruling class to
the poor and working
classes. This fact is the clincher that oil was at the root of Mosaddeq’s
removal.
John Foster Dulles labeled him “that madman Mosaddeq,” who consequently
spent the rest of his
days in prison. This as the young Shah was brought back to rule. The
return of the Shah led
inevitably to revolution in Iran, ultimately to his departure, and the
return of the Ayatollah
Khomeini who had been exiled in Paris. This revolt led to the famous,
444-day, Iran hostage
crisis at the American Embassy in 1979.
This release of those hostages led eventually to the Iran-Contra Affair,
with the Reagan/Bush
presidential team bargaining with Iran behind the back of the standing
president, Jimmy Carter,
(an act of treason) to withhold the release of the hostages until after
their election. This in
exchange for more money, guns, and plane parts than Carter was willing to
part with. It’s
amazing that none of this comes up in The Shell Game, because Iran-Contra
was one of America’s
most amazing shell games ever in pursuit of oil.
As Wikipedia re****ts “The affair links quite disparate matters: on one
hand were the arms sales
to Iran, and on the other, funding of Contra militants in Nicaragua.
Direct funding of the
Nicaraguan rebels had been made illegal through the Boland Amendment. The
affair emerged when a
Lebanese newspaper re****ted that the U.S. sold arms to Iran in exchange
for the release of
hostages by Hezbollah.
“Letters sent by Oliver North to John Poindexter sup****t this. However,
the Israeli ambassador
to the U.S. claims that the reason was to establish links with elements of
the military in
Iran. It is also noteworthy that the Contras did not receive all of their
finances from arms
sales, but also through drug trafficking of which the US was found to be
aware. This is
delineated in the 'Drug money' section below.”
Given the enormity of the scandal and the players, including Hezbollah, it
might warrant a
discussion in a sprawling novel genuinely concerned with oil and recent
Middle Eastern history,
especially that which led to the present Iran-American tensions which are
so key to The Shell
Game’s story.Absent this information to round out Iran’s history, a reader
or audience might
have an incomplete notion of Iran’s actions, including the edgy
outpourings of its president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinijad.
That said, The Shell Game is a very well written piece, ready for
screenplay transformation,
generally well researched, with the exception of those major holes in key
information. Again,
it poses Israel unqualifiedly as our right-hand ally uber alles, with not
a question of doubt
that there was any double-crossing going on, or wrong-doing on its part
against the people of
the US. Here’s another for-instance . . .
Shorting the backstoryon PROMIS
As I wrote in The PROMIS of 9/11 and beyond, “PROMIS software (originally
Prosecutor Management
Intelligence System) appeared in the early 1980s. It was developed by a
small Wa****ngton, DC,
company, Inslaw Inc., and proved to be the perfect intelligence tool.
“Though designed for the Department of Justice to help prosecutors in case
management, it
hooked the attention of corrupt officials and Israeli intelligence.
Subsequently stolen from
Inslaw, the software was hacked and given a ‘trap door.’ [Italics
mine]This Trojan gave it the
power to retrieve info for the US and Israel from the very foreign
intelligence services and
banks it had been sold to in some 40 countries.” That theft was major.
Israel was involved.
“The software helped the US win the Cold War against the Soviets, but also
helped the Russian
mafia, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden & Company and any number of spies
and crooks.
“In 1985 Mossad spy and British media tycoon Robert Maxwell [Itaicls mine]
opened the ‘trap
door’ secret to Chinese Military Intelligence (PLA-2), at the same time
selling them a copy of
PROMIS for $9 million, turning it against the US. Unfortunately, in the
mid-1990s, PLA-2 hacked
the databases of Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories to cop US nuclear
secrets.” This seems like
an unseemly thing for an ally to do.
“The KGB also bought PROMIS from Maxwell, and also received the back door
Trojan to plant in a
tender part of the FBI. Yes there is no honor among thieves. We also
provided PROMIS to Russia
and China to backdoor their intelligence, figuring the 64 federal agencies
they could expose
did not outweigh the many other look-sees PROMIS provided the US.
“Actually, using the same PROMIS bought from Russia, Saddam and his regime
****fted major money
through the banking system. Some of these funds still feed Iraqi
anti-coalition and resistance
fighters.”
To hear Alten tell it, the hero of his novel, Ace Futrell is handed PROMIS
like a chart-busting
CD from Britney Spears, with the added capacity to move all illegal monies
from bad guy
accounts and ****ft them to good guy accounts by insertion in a computer in
a few minutes.
This is Hollywood oversimplification, to say the least. It reduces the
real complexity of the
actual 9/11 event, PROMIS, and the skill of its perpetrators, to a
somewhat contrived scene in
The Shell Game that takes place in the Saudi National Commercial Bank in
Riyadh.
In this scene, Futrell puts a bank exec he’s meeting with to sleep with
some drug-laced chewing
gum. Ouch. That’s so Ace can insert the PROMIS CD in the bank exec’s
computer and turn the
financial world around in a matter of minutes. That seems a bit reductive,
especially given
what Michael Ruppert went through just to re****t the truth about PROMIS.
It seems to me that a
hefty chunk of the real technical information that formed the basis of the
9/11 Truth movement
is passed over in monkey business like this.
Also we have the theatrics of the next (2012) President McKuen (sounds
like McCain) and his
dastardly administration preparing to create a nuclear conflagration on
American soil in order
to nuke Iran. This story plays more like a standard Hollywood disaster
movie than painful
historical fact. What end does this serve? Including the blockbuster
explosion scene, the kind
that movie execs salivate over, or the aftermath scene of the dead in
Iran? Another classic.
9/11 is not the stuff of pop culture
Are we parsing 9/11 Truth now with popcorn clichés to make a fast-read
air****t novel and/or
another Escape From New York,Aliens,28 Days Later, doomsday flick? Sorry,
guys, in the name of
expanding our audience and raising consciousness, is that educating the
populace or is it
hypnotizing them, which is where we find them now, looking at Flight 93,
the movie, on an HBO loop.
For what education The Shell Game provides, background data on the FBI,
abdication of its
duties, conflicting statements and outright lies by Bush and Cheney,
copious political quotes
and many other facts, I laud Alten. Truly, hats off to him! Nevertheless,
even in its
revelation of the two Middle East patsies involved in the 2012 “American
nuclear disaster,” I
find the ****trayal of them falls short of illuminating the debauchery and
US training of the 19
patsies of the first 9/11. Does a “made-up story” really reflect the depth
of what really happened?
Though Alten seems brave and well-intentioned, his instincts as a writer
of pop fiction and
fantasy seem to get in the way of laying down a consistently hard-edged,
believable story.
Alten comes closest to that kind of truth in a book manuscript of Ace’s
wife, Kelli Doyle,
which Ace Futrell discovers after her death at an assassin’s hand. Its
narrative speaks with a
certain authenticity missing in much Alten's book.
Also, Ace Futrell reminds me more of an aging Bruce Willis doing his thing
(including meeting a
slinky, sympathetic, semi-clad Saudi beauty as he’s being tortured) than a
heroic,
mild-mannered David Ray Griffin who happened to turn the 9/11 myth on its
ear with his
theologian’s power of logic -- clear and fearless logic -- in his 200-page
The New Pearl Harbor.
In all fairness, I know that Michael Ruppert, author of the voluminous and
amazing Crossing the
Rubicon, had his From the Wilderness quarters broken into by US thugs, his
computers destroyed,
and he forced to disappear fast for awhile. But then the brave Ruppert
spent a lifetime
challenging the LAPD, the CIA, and even 9/11 conspiracy deniers.
Bottom line, if I sound like too harsh a critic of Alten or his boosters,
it’s only because
9/11 was an incredibly harsh, brutal thing for “you know who” to do to
America, to New York,
New Yorkers, and to the people of the world. Our response to that has to
as honed, as fearsome,
as terrifyingly true, and relentlessly real as the event itself. We owe
the victims and
ourselves nothing less.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York.
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3195.shtml
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