Peak Oil and 9/11: Part 1
Michael C. Ruppert
February 25, 2005



From an August 31, 2004 address before the San Francisco Commonwealth Club

Global climate change is undeniable but is there a link between vanishing oil reserves, the 9/11 attack and the US occupation of Iraq?
A Matter of Planetary Survival

My appearance here tonight no doubt marks a departure for the club. With today's remarks I intend to establish a whole new definition of "conflicting viewpoint." I applaud the club's record and am mindful that, had it not been for the dangerous and epochal historical events taking place around us, I would never have been afforded such an opportunity as this.

I have always said that, if given the chance, I would walk into the lion's den or the devil's bedroom to make my case and that is what I intend to do today. This is as close as I have come thus far to either.

A spiritual teacher once told me that my problem was not that I thought highly of myself; not that I thought lowly of myself; but that I thought constantly of myself. Let us all tonight try to think of issues larger than ourselves, our personal interests, our wants, or our fears. Viewed from almost any perspective; be it geopolitics, economics, climate, spreading warfare that threatens to unleash a global orgy of bloodletting, rising energy prices, documented energy shortages, fresh water shortages, biological warfare, the repression of civil liberties at home and abroad, or any of a dozen other issues; planet Earth and all of its inhabitants are in great danger. This is not a time to think of national security. It is a time to think of planetary security -- indeed, of planetary survival.

This is no time to be shy. This is not a time when men and women of good conscience can afford to be politically correct or be guided by anything except a willingness to discard every "cherished" belief or opinion which stands in the way of an accurate and fearless appraisal of the world around us.

This all began for me some 27 years ago when, as a young policeman, I discovered that the CIA was deeply involved in the drug trade. The purpose of that involvement led me to discover -- and prove using US Senate Hearing records and documents from the CIA itself -- that an essential ingredient -- perhaps the essential ingredient -- in US economic supremacy was the maintenance of a flow of as much as $600 billion a year in drug profits through US financial markets and institutions.

What we are witnessing now is a collision: a collision of a financial system (relying on fractional reserve banking, debt-financed growth, and a fiat currency system) with a planet and energy resources that are finite, limited, and running out. Infinite growth is battling with finite energy. One is not possible without the other and I have absolutely no doubt as to which side will win.

As I have said so many times in the last three years while delivering more than 40 lectures on the truth and lies of 9/11 and peak oil, in eight countries: the events in the five years following the attacks of September 11th will determine the course of human history for the next 500 years or more. I can only assume that the record of my lectures and writingsÂ… had something to do with how the board of governors reached its decision to extend this invitation.

I am known as a man who does not expect people to take his word on faith but who asks -- and even expects -- people to challenge his research, evaluate it, and reach their own conclusions.
Almost everything I present to you today will be fully documented -- by means of approximately 1,000 endnotes -- in my soon-to-be-released book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (New Society Publishers, 696 pages).

Michael C. Ruppert
Born in the USA
Both here in the US and around the world, I am not alone in believing that the attacks of September 11th were facilitated, orchestrated and executed by the United States government. However, there is a great deal of misunderstanding and conclusion-jumping about these assessments that is not supported by the evidence. I was trained as a police officer and detective, and for many years now, I have been an effective investigative journalist because I have adhered to strict evidentiary and investigative standards.

The 9/11 attacks were the result of deliberate planning and orchestrated efforts by identifiable leaders within the US Government, and the energy and financial sectors, to see a Pearl Harbor-like attack which would provide the American Empire with a pretext for war, invasion and the sequential confiscation of oil and natural gas reserves, or the key transportation routes through which they pass.

9-11 was a premeditated murder and in my book -- and here tonight -- I will name some of the suspects who committed the crime. I will show you overwhelming evidence of their guilt, which I would be proud and confident to place either before a district attorney or a jury.

The assertion that the United States government would orchestrate an attack upon American interests has ample precedent. Former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski described the need for such an event in several places in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. The Project for a New American Century made reference to the need for such an attack in its 2000 report "Rebuilding America's Defenses."

Declassified top secret documents disclosed by author James Bamford in his book, Body of Secrets, tell us that, in 1962, the Joint Chiefs approved a plan called "Operation Northwoods," which was a covert operation that would shoot down American aircraft and stage attacks on American military facilities with the intent of blaming those attacks on Fidel Castro and prompting the subsequent US invasion and occupation of Cuba.

From the sinking of the battleship Maine, to the Gulf of Tonkin, and indeed, even to Pearl Harbor itself, history provides us with abundant documentation of US Government complicity in varying degrees in similar attacks. The book Day of Deceit and records from the National Archives have shown us that the Roosevelt Administration had broken the Japanese codes well before December 7, and that a conscious decision was made to allow the attack on Pearl Harbor to take place... to provide the necessary impetus for US entry into the Second World War.

The Peak Oil Crisis and 9/11
Simply defined, peak oil is that moment in time when global oil -- and natural gas -- production begins an irreversible decline that will not give way regardless of how much money and effort is spent trying to change it.

With demand still accelerating rapidly in both the US and the industrialized and developing world, the arrival of peak oil literally describes a point of overshoot in which economic and ecological stasis -- let alone growth -- becomes unsustainable.

It is my belief that planet Earth is -- plus or minus one year -- at the all-time peak of hydrocarbon energy production. Simply put, we have used half of all the oil placed on this planet, and every drop, every barrel extracted from the ground from now on will become progressively more expensive, of lesser quality, and much harder to obtain. We have picked the low-hanging fruit.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were the pretext for the American (and to a lesser extent, the British and Israeli empires) to begin seizing, by force, those energy supplies needed to sustain their power, hegemony (whether regional or global) and their teetering economies.

The attacks of 9/11 were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Former National Security Aide and Counter-terror Advisor Richard Clarke has postulated that such a conspiracy could never be kept a secret. Too many people would have been involved, he said. On this point I disagree with Clarke completely and point to the fact that the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, and the Stealth fighter project were both successfully kept secret.

Why Didn't the 9/11 Commission Report a Conspiracy?
Chairman Thomas Kean is a director (and shareholder) of Amerada Hess Corporation, which is involved in the Hess-Delta joint venture with Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, owned by the [Khalid] bin Mahfouz and al-amoudi clans. This company was involved in the initial planning for a Trans-Afghan oil pipeline just before September 11.

The former governor of New Jersey is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Thomas Kean also sits as co-chairman of the Homeland Security Project under the auspices of the Century Foundation. In this capacity, Kean played a key role in the draft recommendations [that] partially laid the groundwork of the Department of Homeland Security legislation.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported how one US Senator, Mark Dayton of Minnesota, found some egregious inconsistencies in the final report of the Kean Commission: "Dayton told leaders of the Sept. 11 Commission that, based on the commission's report, a NORAD chronology made public a week after the attacks was grossly misleading. The chronology said the FAA notified the military's Emergency Air Command of three of the hijackings while those jetliners were still airborne.

"Dayton cited commission findings that the FAA failed to inform NORAD about three of the planes until after they had crashed. And, he said, a squadron of NORAD fighter planes that was scrambled was sent east over the Atlantic Ocean and was 150 miles from Washington, DC, when the third plane struck the Pentagon -- 'farther than they were before they took off.'

"Dayton said NORAD officials 'lied to the American people, they lied to congress and they lied to your 9/11 Commission to create a false impression of competence, communication and protection of the American people.' He told Kean and Hamilton that if the commission's report is correct, President Bush 'should fire whoever at FAA, at NORAD ... Betrayed their public trust by not telling us the truth.'"

What Senator Dayton did not fully focus on was that, just a few short weeks before releasing its final report, the Kean Commission unilaterally changed the times of certain key events, negating and overruling testimony and evidence presented under oath. The commission inexplicably introduced, at the last minute, a completely new timeline of events surrounding the responses of the FAA, NORAD and the Pentagon on 9/11 in direct contradiction to previously sworn testimony and exhibits from these commands.

To the general public as well as to the 9/11 research community, the mysterious and inexplicable failure of the nation's air defenses that day remains the most glaring and gaping hole in the Kean Commission's account and in the government's version of events. Scrambling fighter aircraft was a routine occurrence for years before 9/11.

The Associated Press has told us that fighter aircraft were scrambled and flying beside errant commercial and private air traffic within minutes of the slightest deviation some 67 times in the calendar year preceding June 1, 2001. This is one of many areas where the Kean Commission not only failed to look but actually altered evidence in the preparation of its final report.

Mike Ruppert, a former Los Angeles Police Department narcotics investigator, is the Publisher/Editor of From the Wilderness, a newsletter read by more than 16,000 subscribers in 40 countries. Ruppert is widely known for his groundbreaking stories on US involvement in the drug trade, Peak Oil and 9/11. Ruppert's web site (www.fromthewilderness.com) averages more than 12,000 visitors a day.

A PDF file of the complete speech is downloadable at
www.fromthewilderness.com/PDF/Commonwealth.pdf

See Part 2: Dick Cheney's Mysterious War-Games

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