Transcript of a speech by Senator Mike Gravel
[See accompanying video on the home page of this site]
From the forum: “A New Path to Peace and Prosperity”
May 11, 2011 • Oakland, California
I want to approach the problem less dramatically because I want to deal with solutions. We’ve amply heard the nature of the problem – and I mean amply heard on all facets of it, both 9/11 and the broader spectrum that Bob Bowman presented to you about the state of affairs with the American government and the American empire. So I’ll take two approaches.
One, I’ll take the immediate approach, which is the 9/11 problem. I personally feel in my heart of hearts that if we can expose the dishonesty, the criminality that existed on 9/11 – if we can expose that what will happen is we can change the American psyche and maybe for once people will begin to question authority. That’s possible.
Now, how do we get to that one facet of it? And I’ll deal with another facet, which is a broader solution to our global problems. And that is real simple. You’re not going to get an investigation from the Congress, from the Obama administration. It’s just not going to happen. And if it did it would be another cover-up. So that’s a red herring. We don’t’ even want to go there.
So when you look at the body politic, you say, “Well, how can we bring something about?” Well, we’re fortunate enough, as a result of the courageous leadership of politicians and progressives 100 years ago, to have 24 states that have initiative laws, where people can make laws. California is one of them. I came up with this suggestion in New York at a conference on 9/11, saying that what we ought to do is write an initiative that would set up a commission that would have subpoena powers or grand jury powers to go ahead and investigate what happened leading up to 9/11, what happened on 9/11 and the aftermath of 9/11, which is three wars – one of them, which is totally ridiculous, the war on terror, which is no more than the economic underpinning for the continuation of the appropriations for the military-industrial complex. That’s all that is.
And so now, if we could get an investigation to pursue that with some independent powers – well, my bluff was called – or not so much a bluff but my idea was called and said, “Well, would you help out and do something?”
Well, we did. I came to – first I had to ascertain – I had my own take on 9/11. It was more political than technical. I just knew from my intelligence background that this was not a go. It doesn’t take 18 months to set in motion an investigation, and a fraudulent investigation at that, which is admitted to by the investigators. And so – but I didn’t act on it. I was busy doing this other area with respect to the national initiative.
So after coming up with this idea I made a tour of California and came to a conclusion that the 9/11 truth movement is much, much larger than I had anticipated. And it’s really coming into its own with this – as of what’s going to take place of ten years next September. And as it’s coming into its own it can be plumbed for support to create a legitimate commission.
Now, I also found out that this is not only the United States. In Germany a reputable poll was taken and it showed that 86 percent of the people do not believe the story about 9/11. They feel it was a false flag operation. Well, they know a little bit history than most Americans know because we have a great, great historic tradition of false flag, starting with the Mexican War in 1848, going on to the Spanish American War, going on to the First World War, going on to parts of the Second World War and also in Vietnam , with respect to the Gulf of Tonkin. So this is very much in character for our defense mechanisms, our secret – I want to wedge this in. Do you realize that the president of the United States has the largest secret army in the world? It is totally funded with black box monies, appropriations. The Congress doesn’t even know where the money’s going and that is that the beck and call of the president of the United States. So when they talk about having pure power, this is the Praetorian Guard of the American Empire, and it’s at his beck and call.
So now, when you look at the possibilities of action you can say, well, supposing we write an initiative that says that we’re forming a commission. We take this commission and we take the initiative and we do it in Oregon, we do it in Massachusetts, we do it in Maine, we do it in Washington State, we do it in Alaska, we do it across the country, at least ten states. It develops a character, a national character, because we don’t have anything like that at the federal level, and I’ll address that in a moment.
What would happen? Well, with the young attorney and the law in California where you can go to the state legislative counsel and they have to help you draft legislation, we drafted this legislation and it passed muster. We have it on the stationary of the legislative council of the State of California.
Now, going into California with an initiative is quite an undertaking. We’re talking about $2 million from the get-go to really just get it to the campaign stage, get the signatures involved.
Now, if we go into other states – and plus, we have to amend the constitution of California because of the way we’re appointing the members of the commission. This is the biggest problem we have. If we let an initiative go forward and do not set up the mechanism to appoint the membership of the committee, what happens, it’ll be appointed by the various governors and we’re back at square one where they appoint their cronies and you’ve got not a citizen’s commission but you’ve got a government commission that will proceed with the continued cover-up that we’ve experienced.
So after looking at the California draft that we have, which we have in the bank, so to speak, I went to Alaska, met with the legislative council up there and looked at their constitution and law. Did the same thing with the State of Oregon.
Now, Alaska – you’ll laugh as Californians – all we need are 30,000 signatures to get something on the ballot in Alaska. Well, that is chump change for an undertaking of this kind.
Secondly, we had the same – and there’s no requirements with respect to appointing somebody to go ahead and appoint the commission when it comes into being. There’s no constitutional barrier to that.
Secondly, we have the same situation in the state of Oregon where it takes a little less than 100,000 signatures to get it on the ballot. So obviously, what we need to do is to get it passed in those two states, which is sort of a freebie, and then work on the rest of the nation. And since we would have the corpus of this initiative, which is basically a joint powers agreement – and so other states could latch on. They could pass an initiative that doesn’t have to contain the same language. All they’ve got to do is pass an initiative saying that they will join the joint powers agreement that’s passed in Alaska or Oregon.
Now, there’s another feature of those joint powers. Not only can states latch onto this joint powers agreement, but also cities can. And so you have the anomaly where Texas, which has no statewide initiative but has over 50 cities that do have the initiative, that these 50 cities could tie on to this joint powers agreement and, I’ll tell you, George Bush, who can’t go to Europe anymore, won’t even be able to get out of Crawford.
Now, the rub of that – and we had Ken Jenkins, who’s our communications officer, director who’s been helping us on a daily basis. Secondly, Byron Belitsos – yes, a hand for Ken. [Applause]. And Byron Belitsos, who’s been with the 9/11 truthers from the get-go, he obviously cannot give up his day job to take this on. I don’t particularly have substantial resources at all. In fact, I have no net worth and my first wife has my Senate retirement so thank God I’ve got a second wife who loves me.
And so we’re without resources. Now, just this last week I formed a corporation. The name of the corporation is called the Citizens 9-11 Commission. The purpose of this is to go out and draft the initiative legislation for Alaska, Oregon and all the other states that we’re go into put it in, including – well, we’ve already got California but we would change it a little bit. And then from that – in fact, when I went up to Alaska I had almost as large a gathering of this, overnight, of people that even with my experience in Alaska I didn’t even know they’re all truthers and they were all committed to do something. And so we’re going to be moving ahead in those two areas.
In addition to forming a corporation we’re going to have a PayPal account and an account with Wells Fargo wherein people can donate money. We’ve been working for the last two or three months to try and see if we could find some angel that could plunk down a million dollars and get us off the ground. It hasn’t happened. And it may but what we’re going to do if we’re going to succeed, we have to rely on you on an ongoing basis.
And Richard Gage has proved that you can do this. He’s raised the money to do all of this as he’s going forward and melding together these architects and engineers. So if Richard can do this – and he’s been very gracious saying that anybody who wants to donate to our cause can donate it to his c3 and he would funnel it to us. But we have to be able to go directly and that’s what we’re doing with this corporation. So if those of you that want to write down, it’s Citizens911commission dot com.
We’re working this weekend on the web site and we’ll have a contingent of people on the East Coast and of course others on the West Coast, and the first thing we’ll do is with our monies is be able to hire staff that will work on a permanent basis discarding their day jobs so they can get this job done.
And again, let me repeat: If we can get it done in one state we can get it done in several states. And this is what will energize the American people. This will also, because we’ll be out there collecting signatures, getting qualified — this is what’s going to now take the marginalization done buy the fourth estate, the media, and really stick it in their nose that we are succeeding and we’re moving forward. That will change their attitude.
Now, if we can get it on the ballot for 2012 we will be able to make this a presidential campaign wedge issue [applause] and it will be, “Do you support a commission, Barack Obama?”, or Mitt Romney or anybody else that makes it in and every member of Congress. And so you will have the body politic at your mercy. You know when you’ve got them at your mercy? When they want something, they want to get elected. So they want to go to you and say, “Hey, vote for me.” Well, then you can meet them right in your district – not in Washington, because you don’t get any time there. Meet them in their district and get them to commit one way or the other and suffer the consequences if they don’t commit to a commission. But not to do it through the Congress but to do it through the methodology that we’ve established.
Having said that, let me now touch something that’s a broader gauge. And we could do this within 30 days with about $30,000 if we had in place a national initiative. That is, an initiative where people could be able to make laws in every governed jurisdiction of the United States, most importantly, the national government.
Now, to presage that concept to you let me try to give you, and it’s not as dramatic, but a little bit of a lecture about how we are the way we are in the mess that we’re in. And the mess that we’re in is because our forebears, after the Age of Enlightenment, settled on representative government. Well, representative government under our Constitution is really not what it’s cracked up to be. If you analyze it, interestingly, you realize that it’s no more than the tribal system of governments. And that is, each tribe sends a delegate to a central location and that delegate has to fight, whether with knives or spears or what have you – has to fight for the wealth of the collectivity of all the tribes. Now, isn’t that an interesting concept. You elect the person to go to Washington and his job is to steal money from every other state he can get his hands on and bring it home to you. That’s bringing home the bacon.
Now, to show you how convoluted this becomes, and touching on a little bit what Bob was talking about when you talk about American empire, the reason why the empire is there is for the outreach and the (0:16:20.7 s/l hegemon) goal of controlling energy, oil and gas. That’s our foreign policy. Now, keep in mind, you have very little to say on foreign policy. You don’t have much to say even on domestic policy. On election day, all you do is give your votes away and the sovereignty that you had now resides, with respect to foreign policy, in the office of president of the United States. And it’s sustained by the congress.
Most people look at the president. The Congress is worse – much, much worse. In 1989 they passed a law. It’s called the Silk Road Plan. And that is that everything from China to Europe, the underbelly of the Eurasian continent, was declared by an Act of Congress our vital interest. And then from that you can see how the bases were set up right across this whole continental area, and then of course, the other bases that we have in Asia, particularly Guam, which is no more than an armed aircraft carrier and the Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. It is appalling.
But what’s appalling is that we buy into it. You know why? Because if you cut the defense budget you’re going to have a lot of unemployment. That’s the problem we have right now. So we’re in a quandary. Every member of Congress —and this is not by accident that every congressional district has a little bit of the honey bucket, the honey jar, in their district – jobs. And so if they don’t vote right they’re threatened with that. They will move the manufacturing of this airplane over to this state away from your state. I lived through this with Alan Cranston and the issues in southern California and it’s a conundrum.
It’s totally soluble. You know? It’s really so simple. Close the factories down but keep paying the people. [applause]. What’s so – you’re going to spend the money anyway. You’re going to spend the money anyway on weapons that do nobody any good. So you’re going to cause an unemployment problem? Hell, give them two, three years of full salary. And there’s a psychological aspect to this. That is, the people will go find other jobs within that period of time. People just don’t want to be unproductive. That’s part of our psychological id. And so that’s the problem that we face in the United States that is not soluble within the context of representative government.
Now, let me describe to you how we got to this mess structurally because the problem is representative government. There’s two venues for change: One is the government, wherein the problem exists; the other’s the people. But the people have to have a tool to be able to do something. There’s nothing that drives me up the wall more than great, great authors – and I include my friend, Noam Chomsky – where I say, “Well, here, Noam. You can describe the problem but what’s the solution?” “Oh, the people should and the government should.” Well, that and $1.75 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. No more than that. And that’s the tragedy of it that we don’t realize that the solution is a lot more apparent than we’ve been led to believe.
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