Ola Tunander (born in Stockholm, Sewden in 1948)is a senior research fellow and professor at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo. His 1989 dissertation was on geopolitics and US maritime strategy. He has written and edited 12 books and a number of articles on security politics, naval strategy, submarine operations, geopolitics, dual state, psychological operations (PSYOP) and Cold War history and has initiated East-Eest dialogue conferences (see:
http://www.danieleganser.ch/911_and_American_Empire_Intellectuals_Speak_Out_1211528412.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ola_Tunander ).
Professor Ola Tunander contributed to “9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out”, edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, Olive Branch Press, 2006. Contributors include Richard Falk, Daniele Ganser, David Ray Griffin, Steven E. Jones, Karin Kwiatkowski, John McMurtry, Peter Phillips, Morgan Reynolds, Kevin Ryan, Peter Dale Scott, Ola Tunander (see: http://www.amazon.com/11-American-Empire-Intellectuals-Speak/dp/1566566592 ).
Practically from the moment the dust settled in New York and Washington after the attacks of September 11, a movement has grown of survivors, witnesses, and skeptics who have never quite been able to accept the official story. When theologian David Ray Griffin turned his attention to this topic in his book The New Pearl Harbor (2003), he helped give voice to a disquieting rumble of critiques and questions from many Americans and people around the world about the events of that day. Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about such a possibility? In short, how could so much go wrong at once, in the world's strongest and most technologically sophisticated country?
Both the government and the mainstream media have since tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" able to find an outlet for their ideas only on the internet. This volume, with essays by intellectuals from Europe and North America, shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that the official story about 9/11 is a huge deception manufactured to extend imperial control at home and abroad.
Contributors include Richard Falk, Daniele Ganser, David Ray Griffin, Steven E. Jones, Karin Kwiatkowski, John McMurtry, Peter Phillips, Morgan Reynolds, Kevin Ryan, Peter Dale Scott, Ola Tunander.
Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. His next book is entitled The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. A poet, he was a winner in 2002 of the Lannan Poetry Award.” [1].
Professor Ola Tunander on 9-11 as an excuse for war and hegemony (2004): “In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, US forces used terrorism as an instrument to control European domestic politics – the Strategy of Tension – to establish a US hegemony, and former ministers like von Bülow and as many as 20% of the Germans seem to believe that the same process is going on today, but instead of using ultra-leftist groups the Americans prefer to use radical Islamists. Von Bülow points to a large amount of evidence supporting this hypothesis, and similar to the US Cold War terrorist campaign in Europe, today’s terrorism justifies US interventions as a protector, while other states are made into ‘protectorates’ under US supervision...Von Bülow as well as the British MP Michael Meacher argues that a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ like the September 11 attack was not just perceived by US leaders as a strategic necessity. The US leadership actively facilitated or contributed to such an event. One problem concerns the ‘creation’ of Osama bin Laden and his mujahideen. During the 1980s, bin Laden’s forces were supported and trained by the CIA, the Saudis and the Pakistani military intelligence service ISI. They all kept regular contact with his forces at least up to 2001. Bin Laden’s mujahideen collaborated with the Americans in Bosnia in early and mid-1990s, in Kosovo in late 1990s and in Macedonia in 2001. While Osama bin Laden was turned into a major US enemy, his al-Qaeda forces were still integrated in the US supported KLA in Kosovo, and they received modern US equipment for their operations in Macedonia as late as in Spring 2001. In Afghanistan in late 1990s, al-Qaeda had established a symbiotic relation to the Taliban, and the Taliban was nothing but an instrument of the US special ally, the ISI, with Pakistanis acting as military advisers and as ‘Taliban’ officials responsible for its diplomatic correspondence. Despite intelligence information about al-Qaeda ties, hijackers received US visas. 15 of the 19 hijackers received their visas at US consular office in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The head of this office in late 1980s, Michael Springman, stated that he wanted to turn down this kind of applications but he was forced to issue the visas after direct intervention by high level US officials. He says that we brought about hundred ‘recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA’.Several of the WTC hijackers were later trained at US military installations as if these hijackers had high level US support. At the same time, in the spring and summer 2001, a large amount of detailed and documented warnings were given to the US leadership, but no measures were taken. FBI and CIA field agents and a number of foreign intelligence services, presidents and prime ministers informed the US leadership of an upcoming al-Qaeda attack with airliners against US targets – some were specific about time and the World Trade Center – but the US leadership did never ask for further information. Within sections of the FBI, the identity of some of the hijackers as well as the information about the upcoming ‘air attack on lower Manhattan’ was common knowledge, but no measures were taken.
Von Bülow and other critiques also point to hundreds of other arguments for US complicity. On September 10, a number of Pentagon officials cancelled their air trips because of ‘security concerns’, and the San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown received a phone call from his security section eight hours before the hijacking. He was advised not to travel by air. Von Bülow also questions why the air defence authorities (NORAD) on September 11 did not follow standard operating procedures to intercept airplanes immediately when diverting from their given course. In year 2000-2001, this happened several times a week. The fact that this did not happen on September 11 (until it was too late) has been described as remarkable. They also argue that the World Trade Center complex could never have been brought down by the aircraft, and the New York Fire Department reported a number of explosions inside the World Trade Center buildings, which are confirmed by videos. Each building collapsed vertically in almost ten seconds (close to free fall) as if they were brought down by controlled demolition, not by the aircraft and the fire. Construction engineers and physical scientists argue that the fires from the aircraft would never have had enough impact to force the towers to collapse. The fact that World Trade Center 7 collapsed cannot be explained by the airplanes. Someone seems to have given the ‘hijackers’ and helping hand. To von Bülow and others this is a strong indication of a US military operation or intelligence operation. Such a catastrophic event was believed in every respect to be very useful to the Bush Government. It radically increased the support for the President. It was followed by a radical military build-up as a pre-condition for a Pax Americana, and it made it possible for the US Administration to take ‘the battle to the enemy’ before a nuclear terrorist attack would kill ‘hundreds of thousands’ or even ‘millions’, to quote Rumsfeld.” [2].
[1]. “9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out”, edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, Olive Branch Press, 2006 (see: http://www.amazon.com/11-American-Empire-Intellectuals-Speak/dp/1566566592 ).
[2]. Ola Tunander, “The use of terrorism to construct world order”, paper presented at the Fifth Pan-European International Relations Conference (Panel 28 Geopolitics) Netherlands Congress Centre, The Hague, 9-11 September 2004: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:The_use_of_terrorism_to_construct_world_order .