Our new world was brought out into the open with the shock of the Twin Towers falling, falling endlessly on repeat loop on 24-hour news outlets. Our remaining liberties were removed overnight, with the US Patriot Act and similar laws quickly approved in most western countries.
Our right to privacy, free speech, protest and the presumption of innocence went up in smoke. Foreigners could be deemed terrorists with no evidence and summarily executed. Even nationals could be treated the same way, whisked off to torture chambers to languish for decades without charges levelled against them. Habeas corpus was consigned to history.
The other 9/11, the one we do not remember, is the one in which, on September 11 1973, President Salvador Allende, Chile's first democratically elected socialist, was trapped in La Moneda, Chile’s Presidential Palace, after a coup was orchestrated by the US, specifically by Henry Kissinger - the same Kissinger of the Nobel Peace Prize (you could not make this up). Allende died and General Augusto Pinochet took power in Chile. Recognised victims of the state terrorism practiced by the Pinochet regime number some 40,000. Over 3,000 were murdered or disappeared. Victims were tortured in all sorts of ways, given electric shocks, sexually abused with rats, forced to have sex with close family members, repeatedly raped... Margaret Thatcher felt a great admiration for Pinochet and later on became a close friend.
But, going back to the second 9/11, the one you remember, by coincidence a National Reconnaissance Office drill was being conducted on September 11, 2001. In a simulated event, a small aircraft would crash into one of the towers of the agency's headquarters after experiencing a mechanical failure. The NRO is the branch of the Department of Defense in charge of spy satellites. According to its spokesman Art Haubold: "No actual plane was to be involved - to simulate the damage from the crash, some stairwells and exits were to be closed off, forcing employees to find other ways to evacuate the building."
He further explained: "It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility." As a result, the real-life planes flying over New York were not recognised as a threat and stopped.
Four years later on 7 July 2005, at exactly the same time as the London bomb attacks, a fictional “scenario” of multiple bomb attacks on the London underground took place.
Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, a private firm on contract to the London Metropolitan Police, described in a BBC interview how he had organized and conducted the anti-terror drill, on behalf of an unnamed business client. The fictional scenario was based on simultaneous bombs going off at exactly the same time at the underground stations where the real attacks were occurring:
POWER: "At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now."
In actual fact, the stooges who had been sent to do the drill had missed their train and had not been where they were supposed to be, which put in jeopardy the official version that bombs had been in the trains and not on the tracks. No doubt very shocked that they had been sent on a drill to precisely the locations where the bombs went off, they tried to reach the UK press at Canary Wharf but were shot dead just before they arrived.
The Madrid bombs on 11 March 2004 - 911 days after 9/11 - killed 193 people and injured around 2,000. Purportedly al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, but 4 of the alleged perpetrators died, having committed suicide (no judge, no jury), and the others claimed they were not guilty but had been set up. Some had been under police surveillance since 2001. However, in this case, the right-wing PP government, which had taken Spain into Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq, despite massive anti-war demonstrations, lost the election and the more moderate opposition party gained power.
And now, we have the coronavirus scare, which promises to reconfigure our western world like nothing we have experienced up to now. Just before CV-19 appeared, the exclusive Event 201 was held, hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on 18 October 2019 in New York, with a very select and limited group of attendees. The subject of the event was a pandemic scenario arising from a coronavirus, and the conclusion was that "the next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering."
Luckily the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a key participant, gave us the following recommendation:
"Media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including through the use of technology."
There are, in fact, many coincidences happening in these dark times. Which are no doubt coincidental.
It is extremely lucky that our rulers are so prescient.
