It wasn’t a case of George W Bush responding inappropriately to 9/11 by invading Afghanistan and Iraq (editorial, April 26). It was a case of 9/11 enabling GWB to implement a programme of aggression that was already in place. Indeed, 9/11 was eagerly anticipated by the neocons, who stated in Project for the New American Century that their hopes would be difficult to realise “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor”.

According to General Wesley Clark, former commander of Nato forces in Europe, the plan was to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran”. Give or take one or two countries, and one or two changes in their order, that programme is still in place.

It’s too early to speculate about the aim of those behind the Boston bombings. Suffice it to say that there is no shortage of anomalies in the official narrative. Some of these become apparent in a frame-by-frame scrutiny of a film of events at one of the crime scenes, which initially shows no blood — despite what purports to be a severe injury.

Another interesting feature of the Boston bombings is that, as in the case of 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London, a terror drill “coincidentally” scheduled for the same place at the same time, and “coincidentally” constructing the same scenario, somehow managed to go live. (Letter ends here.)

Note the confidence with which Acting Editor Rob Mitchell says the “masterminds [of 9/11] lived beyond America’s borders”. He evidently hasn’t read what Nicholas Rockefeller said to Aaron Russo in 2000 — 11 months before 9/11:

There’s gonna be an event, and out of that event we’re gonna invade Afghanistan to run pipelines from the Caspian Sea. We’re going to invade Iraq to take the oilfields and establish a base in the Middle East, and to make it all part of the New World Order…”

After quoting Rockefeller, Russo says: “In my relationships with some of these people, I can tell you, that’s as evil as it really gets.” So, Mr Mitchell, who are the real “bad guys”?

Sources: At the time of writing, Russo can be heard speaking (to Alex Jones) here. See also Prison Planet.

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I didn’t have any qualms about the legality [of Afghanistan]. It was absolutely legal. But it was also just the knowledge that Afghanistan as it was had been a failed state and, in failed states, very bad things can happen, including what are obviously terror groups like al Qaeda being able to move around with impunity.

Watkins continues: “She is comfortable she can look the families of all our combat casualties in the eye in the belief New Zealand did the right thing.”

I would say that without hesitation. Just as I would say to families who lost loved ones in World War II, the cause was right.

MY NOTE: So if a country is a “failed state” (as defined by us), it’s okay to invade it, and kill thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of people? And no doubt, like the criminal Tony Blair, she’d “do it all again”. See Helen Clark on Afghanistan in 2001 at hardcaw.com.

Above: My letter of April 6, 2013, to the editor of the Manawatu Standard. The two doctors mentioned above were Charles Noble and David Chrisp. They deserve to be named and shamed. (Their names were in my original letter, but were removed by the editor.) Below: The 1978 Manawatu Standard article by then-editor John Harvey. During the next few years, he and tobacco industry groups tried to turn the “right to smoke” almost everywhere into a civil rights issue.