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Reviews
The
Shell Game It seems a Herculean
task to write a �best-selling author� novel about the �next 9/11, the end of
oil, and deception of a nation,� and make it double as a Hollywood doomsday
blockbuster. But Steve Alten, who has written eight fiction thrillers and has
Tinsel Town experience, has tried to do both with The Shell Game. I guess it�s laudable for a successful novelist to
take a crack at raising consciousness, perhaps risk a career. Though Alten
gives us a rasher of truth, I found an unsettling number of missing pieces in
his novel. One major missing
piece is that there is no specific mention of Israel and the Mossad as serious
players in 9/11, not necessarily in the good guy�s corner. That is, from dual
citizen government neocons to WTC lessee
Larry Silverstein to the dancing
Israelis. Also, there is no mention of Israel�s whistleblower, Mordechai
Vanunu, nuclear technician, who exposed Israel�s nuclear installation at
Dimona, where he worked from 1976 to 1985. The facility, by the way, contained
an underground plutonium separation plant that operated in complete secrecy. Also missing is that
Israel was and is a nuclear player, first in secret, then post October 5, 1986,
when the London Times revealed Vanunu�s story. The story was that his nation
was in possession of 200 to 300 nuclear warheads of
advanced design. (PS: Vanunu did 18 years in solitary for that and is now under
house arrest. See Israel�s
double nuclear standard is no standard at all.) It would seem to me that
anyone writing a highly detailed, 512-page novel about the next 9/11, et al,
which includes a nuclear conflagration on America and Iran, might mention these
facts to give a more balanced picture. Alten might also have
mentioned in his detailed history of Iran�s rocky dealings with the West that
Iran�s anger was fueled by the overthrow of its first democratically elected
president, Mohammad
Mosaddeq, in the early '50s. Mosaddeq�s government suffered a coup d�etat in 1953
led by Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA. Mosaddeq had the audacity to want to nationalize his nation�s oil and
redistribute the land and wealth from the Shah�s ruling class to the poor and
working classes. This fact is the clincher that oil was at the root of Mosaddeq�s removal. John Foster Dulles labeled
him �that madman Mosaddeq,� who
consequently spent the rest of his days in prison. This as the young Shah was
brought back to rule. The return of the Shah led inevitably to revolution in
Iran, ultimately to his departure, and the return of the Ayatollah
Khomeini who had been exiled in Paris.
This revolt led to the famous, 444-day, Iran hostage crisis
at the American Embassy in 1979. This release of those
hostages led eventually to the Iran-Contra Affair,
with the Reagan/Bush presidential team bargaining with Iran behind the back of
the standing president, Jimmy Carter, (an act of treason) to withhold the
release of the hostages until after their election. This in exchange for more
money, guns, and plane parts than Carter was willing to part with. It�s amazing
that none of this comes up in The Shell
Game, because Iran-Contra was one of America�s most amazing shell games
ever in pursuit of oil. As Wikipedia reports
�The
affair links quite disparate matters: on one hand were the arms sales to Iran,
and on the other, funding of Contra militants in Nicaragua. Direct funding of
the Nicaraguan rebels had been made illegal through the Boland
Amendment. The affair emerged when a Lebanese newspaper reported that the
U.S. sold arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages by Hezbollah. �Letters sent by Oliver North to John
Poindexter support this. However, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. claims
that the reason was to establish links with elements of the military in Iran.
It is also noteworthy that the Contras did not receive all of their finances
from arms sales, but also through drug trafficking of
which the US was found to be aware. This is delineated in the 'Drug money' section below.� Given the enormity of the scandal and the players, including Hezbollah, it
might warrant a discussion in a sprawling novel genuinely concerned with oil
and recent Middle Eastern history, especially that which led to the present
Iran-American tensions which are so key to The
Shell Game�s story.Absent this
information to round out Iran�s history, a reader or audience might have an
incomplete notion of Iran�s actions, including the edgy outpourings of its
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinijad. That said, The Shell Game is a
very well written piece, ready for screenplay transformation, generally well
researched, with the exception of those major holes in key information. Again,
it poses Israel unqualifiedly as our right-hand ally uber alles, with not a
question of doubt that there was any double-crossing going on, or wrong-doing
on its part against the people of the US. Here�s another for-instance . . . Shorting the backstoryon PROMIS As I wrote in The PROMIS of
9/11 and beyond, �PROMIS
software (originally Prosecutor Management Intelligence System) appeared in the
early 1980s. It was developed by a small Washington, DC, company, Inslaw Inc.,
and proved to be the perfect intelligence tool. �Though
designed for the Department of Justice to help prosecutors in case management,
it hooked the attention of corrupt officials and Israeli intelligence. Subsequently
stolen from Inslaw, the software was hacked and given a �trap door.� [Italics
mine]This Trojan gave it the power to retrieve info for the US and
Israel from the very foreign intelligence services and banks it had been sold
to in some 40 countries.� That theft was major. Israel was involved. �The
software helped the US win the Cold War against the Soviets, but also helped
the Russian mafia, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden & Company and any number
of spies and crooks. �In 1985 Mossad spy and British
media tycoon Robert Maxwell [Itaicls mine] opened the �trap door� secret to
Chinese Military Intelligence (PLA-2), at the same time selling them a copy of
PROMIS for $9 million, turning it against the US. Unfortunately, in the
mid-1990s, PLA-2 hacked the databases of Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories to
cop US nuclear secrets.� This seems like an unseemly thing for an ally to do. �The KGB
also bought PROMIS from Maxwell, and also received the back door Trojan to
plant in a tender part of the FBI. Yes there is no honor among thieves. We also
provided PROMIS to Russia and China to backdoor their intelligence, figuring
the 64 federal agencies they could expose did not outweigh the many other
look-sees PROMIS provided the US. �Actually,
using the same PROMIS bought from Russia, Saddam and his regime shifted major
money through the banking system. Some of these funds still feed Iraqi
anti-coalition and resistance fighters.� To hear
Alten tell it, the hero of his novel, Ace Futrell is handed PROMIS like a
chart-busting CD from Britney Spears, with the added capacity to move all
illegal monies from bad guy accounts and shift them to good guy accounts by
insertion in a computer in a few minutes. This is
Hollywood oversimplification, to say the least. It reduces the real complexity
of the actual 9/11 event, PROMIS, and the skill of its perpetrators, to a
somewhat contrived scene in The Shell
Game that takes place in the Saudi National Commercial Bank in Riyadh. In this
scene, Futrell puts a bank exec he�s meeting with to sleep with some drug-laced
chewing gum. Ouch. That�s so Ace can insert the PROMIS CD in the bank exec�s
computer and turn the financial world around in a matter of minutes. That seems
a bit reductive, especially given what Michael Ruppert went through just to
report the truth about PROMIS. It seems to me that a hefty chunk of the real
technical information that formed the basis of the 9/11 Truth movement is
passed over in monkey business like this. Also we
have the theatrics of the next (2012) President McKuen (sounds like McCain) and
his dastardly administration preparing to create a nuclear conflagration on
American soil in order to nuke Iran. This story plays more like a standard
Hollywood disaster movie than painful historical fact. What end does this
serve? Including the blockbuster explosion scene, the kind that movie execs
salivate over, or the aftermath scene of the dead in Iran? Another classic. 9/11 is not the stuff of pop
culture Are we
parsing 9/11 Truth now with popcorn clich�s to make a fast-read airport novel
and/or another Escape From New York,Aliens,28 Days Later, doomsday flick? Sorry, guys, in the name of expanding our audience and raising
consciousness, is that educating the populace or is it hypnotizing them, which
is where we find them now, looking at Flight
93, the movie, on an HBO loop. For what
education The Shell Game provides,
background data on the FBI, abdication of its duties, conflicting statements
and outright lies by Bush and Cheney, copious political quotes and many other
facts, I laud Alten. Truly, hats off to him! Nevertheless, even in its
revelation of the two Middle East patsies involved in the 2012 �American
nuclear disaster,� I find the portrayal of them falls short of illuminating the
debauchery and US training of the 19 patsies of the first 9/11. Does a �made-up
story� really reflect the depth of what really
happened? Though
Alten seems brave and well-intentioned, his instincts as a writer of pop
fiction and fantasy seem to get in the way of laying down a consistently
hard-edged, believable story. Alten comes closest to that kind of truth in a
book manuscript of Ace�s wife, Kelli Doyle, which Ace Futrell discovers after
her death at an assassin�s hand. Its narrative speaks with a certain
authenticity missing in much Alten's book. Also, Ace
Futrell reminds me more of an aging Bruce Willis doing his thing (including
meeting a slinky, sympathetic, semi-clad Saudi beauty as he�s being tortured)
than a heroic, mild-mannered David Ray Griffin who happened to turn the 9/11
myth on its ear with his theologian�s power of logic -- clear and fearless
logic -- in his 200-page The New Pearl
Harbor. In all
fairness, I know that Michael Ruppert, author of the voluminous and amazing Crossing the Rubicon, had his From the Wilderness quarters broken into
by US thugs, his computers destroyed, and he forced to disappear fast for
awhile. But then the brave Ruppert spent a lifetime challenging the LAPD, the
CIA, and even 9/11 conspiracy deniers. Bottom
line, if I sound like too harsh a critic of Alten or his boosters, it�s only
because 9/11 was an incredibly harsh, brutal thing for �you know who� to do to
America, to New York, New Yorkers, and to the people of the world. Our response
to that has to as honed, as fearsome, as terrifyingly true, and relentlessly
real as the event itself. We owe the victims and ourselves nothing less. Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal Email Online Journal Editor |
