Backbone > Panet Waves

No Ordinary Lie
By Eric Francis . Illustration by Emil Alzamora

Imagine a storm blows through your town: a hurricane, tornado, flood, or whatever is common to your region of the country. People in your community are killed and many homes are destroyed. You and your neighbors are in shock. You know your lives will never be the same. You hear on the news that the president has declared a federal disaster area and that you’ll be eligible for low-interest federal loans to help you rebuild your shattered life. Your home has been destroyed; you’re staying at a motel. Early the next morning you go home to sort things out, and shortly after you arrive, two men pull up in a slightly dated car, well dressed and with federal id tags on their suits.

They introduce themselves as officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) and ask if you have a few minutes to talk, regarding the guaranteed disaster loans you just heard about on the news. Of course you agree. The men are friendly, polite, and understanding; they see these kinds of disasters all the time and are reassuringly professional. It’s a sane moment in the midst of great pain and chaos. You sit down at a table in the garage (the last remaining vestige of your life). They present you with forms to fill out that, in the typical federal style, are rather detailed—but they’re what you need to file to get your loan. Like other loan applications, they require the usual bank references with account numbers, your Social Security number, and a variety of other personal details, all of which you provide, scavenging through your destroyed home for the records. You sign several documents, grateful the process has begun so fast. The men thank you and drive off. Your money will arrive within 90 days.

Later that same week you go to the bank to make a large withdrawal to deal with the damage to your property, but to your shock, you’re told you have no money in your account. Just a week ago you had tens of thousands of dollars in savings and haven’t spent a dime. Now you’re both broke and homeless. At least that fema loan is coming! Then it takes you until the evening of the next day to make the connection between the “fema” agents and your empty bank account, and it comes with a sickening feeling in your stomach, like you’re accusing your best friend of stealing $20 from your kitchen table. Your next reaction is shame. They duped you. It can’t be. Emotionally you’re very confused; the men were so kind and helpful. They really cared. And they drained your bank account? It’s impossible. But they did it. But they couldn’t have.

This is called fraud. Monetary fraud is the most commonly recognized version of this crime; everyone has heard of it, and many people have experienced it, even if it was just losing twenty bucks at a three-card monte game.
Fraud goes a lot further than this. Black’s Law Dictionary devotes a page to the numerous definitions of fraud, beginning with, “An intentional perversion of truth for the purpose of inducing another in reliance upon it to part with some valuable thing belonging to him, or to surrender a legal right.” Fraud is, in a sense, a crime against the truth.

Black’s says it is a term “embracing all multifarious means which human ingenuity can devise, and which are resorted to by one individual to get advantage of another by false suggestions or by suppression of truth, and includes all surprise, trick, cunning, dissembling, and any unfair way by which another is cheated.”
Fraud has a few distinct markings. First of all, it is always based on trust. It is a direct abuse of trust. Second, it is never an accident. It is an intentional and premeditated act. Third, it is engineered to conceal itself, and must do so. This makes it very difficult to crack. It can often take years for even the first facts constituting a fraud to be known to a person who is its victim, and often it was perpetrated by someone completely unsuspected. Fourth, it’s often so complicated that nobody understands it. People who commit fraud frequently depend on the complexity and cleverness of their crime for its effectiveness and its difficulty in prosecuting. In truth, fraud is more than most people can imagine. It confuses the police, judges, juries, and journalists every day.

Fraud is not always a monetary crime; often there are other elements. For example, there is something called scientific fraud. We rarely hear of this today, but in 1978 it was very big news. A company called Industrial Bio-Test Labs of Northbrook, Illinois, was found to be in the business of selling chemical corporations customized falsified safety studies intended to protect their profits. These studies covered active ingredients for products used in soap, deodorant, household cleaners, and thousands of other products. In congressional hearings, it came out that “anyone who washes” was a victim of this rampant and far-reaching fraud by ibt Labs and, it worked out, many other testing labs. ibt company officials were convicted and sent to jail after one of the longest criminal trials in us history.

Monsanto was the manufacturer of highly toxic chemicals called pcbs, which it touted as safety equipment and as perfectly harmless. In fact, it knew pcbs were extremely toxic as far back as 1938, and by the ‘70s the truth was coming out. In order to maintain its claim stated in 1971 that “pcbs are not and cannot be classified as highly toxic,” Monsanto engaged Industrial Bio-Test Labs to do safety studies on its Aroclor pcb products.
While fraud on the pcb tests was not raised in the ibt trial, it is strongly suggested by memos and letters that came to light in later civil lawsuits. Several of these show how, at Monsanto’s request, ibt Labs customized its studies. “In two instances, the previous conclusion of ‘slightly tumorigenic’ was changed to ‘non-carcinogenic’,” Monsanto wrote to ibt Labs in July 1975. “The latter phrase is preferable. May we request that the Aroclor 1254 report be amended to say ‘does not appear to be carcinogenic.’”

Two weeks later, Joseph Calandra, ibt’s president, responded in a letter to Monsanto: “We will amend our statement in the last paragraph on page 2 of the Aroclor 1254 report to read, ‘does not appear to be carcinogenic’ in place of ‘slightly tumorigenic’ as requested.” How slight was slightly tumorigenic? Testimony about the ibt Labs scandal in a Texas lawsuit against Monsanto indicates that ibt was aware that pcbs caused extremely high numbers of tumors in test rats, with 82 percent developing tumors when fed Aroclor 1254 at 10 parts per million and 100 percent at 100 parts per million. Yet with a stroke of a pen, ibt Labs certified pcbs a noncarcinogen. ibt’s studies were given to Congress to delay banning the chemicals. Congressmen trusted both Monsanto and ibt. To this day, pcbs are often referred to in the media as a “suspected carcinogen,” not anything that killed every single rat in the study with cancer.

On September 11, 2001, we witnessed one of the most heartbreaking, terrifying, and shocking disasters of modern history as passenger jets were crashed into the World Trade Center. Thousands of people lost their lives and millions have been exposed to toxic dust that covered Manhattan and traveled for miles.

Two years later, we now know that the federal government received dozens of warnings, from foreign governments and from its own agents, that terrorists were planning the attacks and, in August 2001, that attacks were imminent. The administration has said that it failed to “connect the dots” leading up to the attacks and that it was caught by surprise. The president and his top advisors claim they didn’t know anything; only their cia and fbi agents did.
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the attacks, two wars were launched against foreign countries, bombing civilians and involving more than 130,000 us troops plus foreign troops who are being exposed to depleted uranium as well as injured and killed. The Patriot Act was passed, allowing wiretaps, arrests, and detentions of citizens without warrants or charges being filed, and numerous other provisions that deprive people of their civil liberties in the interest of security. A domestic “alert system” was created which gives the federal government the authority to declare martial law, shutting down business and taking over the highways under red alert.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent, mainly given to us corporations, both to rebuild the destroyed countries and to provide supplies and weapons to the military. There have, we’re told, been no real improvements to airline safety. But the United States has come closer to getting control over some of the biggest oil supplies in the world.

Bernard Weiner writes in The Crisis Papers: “We know that a cabal of ideologically motivated Bush officials, on the rightwing fringe of the Republican Party, were calling for a military takeover of Iraq as early as 1991. This elite group included Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Woolsey, Bolton, Khalizad, and others, all of whom are now located in positions of power in the Pentagon and State Department.

“They helped found the Project for The New American Century [pnac] in 1997; among their recommendations: ‘preemptively’ attacking other countries devoid of imminent danger to the us, abrogating agreed-upon treaties when they conflict with us goals, making sure no other country (or organization, such as the United Nations) can ever achieve parity with the us, installing us-friendly governments to do America’s will, using tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. In short, as they put it, the goal is ‘benevolent global hegemony.’” Hegemony is another word for world domination.

The pnac statement predicted that the shift would come about slowly, unless there were “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.”

It is, perhaps, challenging for some people to see this whole scenario as fraud, but fraud is precisely what it is. If the president’s official agents know something about a probable or possible attack, for example, fraud law says that he has an obligation to know. If there are dots to be connected that would warn of an impending terrorist attack, then the president and his advisors “knew or should have known,” in the words of the federal fraud statute, that there was a reasonable risk of an outcome.

There are precedents to this effect being established in cases that deal directly with the September 11 attacks. Ruling in a lawsuit against United and American Airlines, Boeing, and the Port Authority, us District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein said last September 9 that “airlines reasonably could foresee that crashes causing death and destruction on the ground was a hazard that would arise should hijackers take control of a plane.” Hellerstein understands that the duty to be informed and take action is legally the same as actually having that information and not taking action.

He added, “The intrusion by terrorists into the cockpit, coupled with the volatility of a hijacking situation, creates a foreseeable risk that hijacked airplanes might crash, jeopardizing innocent lives on the ground as well as in the airplane. In order to be considered foreseeable, the precise manner in which the harm was inflicted need not be perfectly predicted.”

Could the president and his administration have allowed the September 11 attacks to occur so they could fulfill their plan to dominate the world? But we trusted them. They seemed like such nice guys.