This system is too loud. I'll talk quietly. How's that?
Okay. Hi, I'm Ken Jenkins. I'm one of the co-founders of the group putting on this event.
And I'm producer of this event today. And I'm introducing two very short films,
which are edited from longer films, and also want to speak very briefly about the fact that we're
showing a number of films that have been edited at this festival. I think seven out of the eleven
were showing or have been edited in some way. Adam mentioned, I think, his own film.
And this is, of course, with permission of the filmmakers. And we do it for various reasons.
In the case of what we're about to see, it's because we wanted to show something about the theme
of this year's film festival, which is, you know, why 9-Eleven True Still Matters.
And 16 years later, there are 16-year-olds that, you know, weren't even born.
And they think this is normal, how things are. And those of us that are older realize,
no, things changed radically that day, and they've still gotten, they're still changed,
and we're still at war, and so forth.
So I suggested that we show the opening part of the Architects and Engineers film Explosive Evidence,
Experts Speak Out, where they explain quite specifically in text why it still matters.
And so I edited that from that film and added some graphics. We'll be seeing that first,
and then after that, we'll be seeing another excerpt from a longer talk by General Wesley Clark,
where he talks about the plans to invade seven countries in five years.
And so we just want you to know that we are showing edited films, and we're editing them for reasons.
In this case, it's just to make the point about our theme, and enjoy these two short films.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
What happened in 9-11 is we didn't have a strategy, we didn't have bipartisan agreement,
we didn't have American understanding of it, and we had instead a policy coup in this country,
a coup, a policy coup. Some hard-nosed people took over the direction of American policy,
and they never bothered to inform the rest of us.
I went through the Pentagon ten days after 9-11. I couldn't stay away from Mother Army.
I went back there to see Don Rumsfeld. I'd worked for him as a White House fellow in the 1970s.
All this is in the book. And I said, am I doing okay on CNN?
He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. He said, I'm thinking about it.
He says, I read your book, and he said, this is a book that talks about the Kosovo campaign.
And he said, I just want to tell you, nobody's going to tell us where or when we can bomb.
Nobody. He said, I'm thinking of calling this a floating coalition.
What do you think about that? I said, well, sir, thanks for reading my book.
And, well, he said, thanks, that's all the time I've got. Really?
And I went downstairs, I was leaving the Pentagon, and an officer from the joint staff called me into his office
and said, I want you to know, he said, sir, we're going to attack Iraq.
And I said, why? He said, we don't know.
He said, I said, well, did they tie Saddam to 9-11?
He said, no. He said, but I guess it's, they don't know what to do about terrorism.
And so the, they think, but they can attack states and they want to look strong.
And so I guess they think if they take down a state, it will intimidate the terrorists.
And, you know, it's like that old saying, he said, if the only two of you have is a hammer, then every problem has to be a nail.
Well, I walked out of there pretty upset.
And then we attacked Afghanistan. I was pretty happy about that. We should have.
And then I came back to the Pentagon about six weeks later, I saw the same officer.
I said, why, why haven't we attacked Iraq? We're still going to attack Iraq.
He said, oh, sir, he says it's worse than that.
He said, he pulled up a piece of paper off his desk.
He said, I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense's office that says we're going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years.
We're going to start with Iraq and then we're going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Seven countries in five years.
I said, is that a classified memo?
He said, yes, sir. I said, well, don't show it to me. He was about to show it to me because I want to talk about it.
And I sat on this information for a long time for about six or eight months.
I was so stunned by this, I couldn't begin to talk about it.
And I couldn't believe it would really be true, but that's actually what happened.
These people took control of the policy in the United States.
And I realized then it came back to me, a 1991 meeting I had with Paul Wolfowitz.
You know, in 2001, he was Deputy Secretary of Defense, but in 1991, he was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.
It's the number three position in the Pentagon.
And I had gone to see him when I was a one-star general.
I was commanding the National Training Center.
I had met him one time.
He said, if you ever get to Washington, come look me up.
They always say that.
Well, I was there in Washington. It was a Friday afternoon, I'd visited Coal and Powell. He'd given me five minutes of his precious time
and sent me on my way.
And I was bored in the Pentagon.
And I thought, I'll just go, who can I see?
I think I'll see Wolfowitz.
So I called and up there he was available.
Scooter Libby came to the door.
I met Scooter for the first time and he brought me in.
And I said to Paul, and this is 1991, I said, Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm.
And he said, well, yeah, he said, but not really.
He said, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and we didn't.
And this was just after the Shia uprising in March of 1991, which we had provoked.
And then we kept our troops on the sidelines and didn't intervene.
And he said, but one thing we did learn, he said, we learned that we can use our military in the region in the Middle East and the Soviets won't stop us.
He said, and we've got about five or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes, Syria, Iran, Iraq, before the next great superpower comes on to challenges.
And it was like, you know, I'm coming out of the Mojave Desert.
I've been training troops.
I haven't been thinking geo strategy for some time.
And suddenly a guy just sort of shoves this nugget at you.
Well, you remember it.
It was a pretty stunning thing.
I mean, the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments.
It's not to sort of deter conflict.
We're going to invade countries and, you know, my mind was spinning.
And I put that aside.
It was like a nugget that you hold on to.
This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup, wolf wits and Cheney and Rumsfeld.
And you could name a half dozen other collaborators from the project for a new American century.
They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.
It went back to those comments in 1991.
Now, did anybody ever tell you that?
Was there a national dialogue on this?
Did senators and congressmen stand up and denounce this plan?
Was there a full fledged American debate on it?
Absolutely not.
There still isn't.
