The Lead

Humiliation, and Resurrection

by Dennis Speed (EIRNS) — Sep. 10, 2026

Today, 25 years after “9/11,” the United States, and its still-extant—but not intact—Presidential system, must be viewed from above its vicissitudes, including the nearly successful attempt to destroy it on September 11, 2001. That attempt was carried out by forces operating from inside and outside the nation. The American Presidential system must also be viewed from above the personalities that have occupied the White House in the last generation, in order to understand what our pathway out of perpetual war, and thermonuclear war, might now be. So, from the mountaintop, not of 25 years, or the nation’s 250 years, but the 2620 years that have elapsed from the time of the Constitution of Solon of Athens in 594 B.C. until now, let us consider one essential, but now-omitted-from-memory aspect of what happened that day.

Economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, who was on the Jack Stockwell radio broadcast as the World Trade Center attack unfolded that day, pointed out, one year later, on January 24, 2002, that “there was an escalation, a security alert, which went up automatically on the basis of these attacks, especially the attack on the Pentagon. When somebody attacks the Pentagon in that fashion, which threatens to wipe out the military command in Washington, that is the alarm signal which automatically guarantees that the United States goes on a full-scale thermonuclear alert. That’s the only thing that happens.

“Now, that did happen. It was referred to by President Bush on several occasions later, including his address in Crawford, Texas, where Putin was standing beside him: stating that while he was on the phone to a thermonuclear second strike base, Offutt, in Nebraska, that he had a conversation with President Putin of Russia, and that President Putin in effect said to him, ‘I know you’re in trouble. I know the United States has put up its thermonuclear alert service system. I’m taking down ours’—that is, the Russians’, which was doing a practice alert—‘in order to help you get out of this mess.’

“So the President, of course, in that circumstance, under these kinds of conditions, was the only person who had the authority to shut down, or order the shut down, of the alert. And he was alive and able to do it. That prevented the crisis from going totally out of control.”

To be clear: on September 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, ordered a DEFCON 3 level mobilization of the United States’ thermonuclear forces, with a standby to go to DEFCON 2–the exact level of nuclear alert of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Is that remembered by the two-thirds of Americans who were witnesses to those events? Was it ever known to them? Do the 100 million Americans either not born or too young to have understood 9/11 even know about that nuclear alert?

President Vladimir Putin, who was there then, and is now, remembers it. Is it even imaginable to today’s America that Vladimir Putin would have, two months after September 11, 2001, appeared together with President G. W. Bush, in person, at a high school in Crawford, Texas? On that occasion, Bush said, “It’s my honor also to introduce President Putin to Crawford. I bet a lot of folks here, particularly the older folks, never dreamt that an American President would be bringing the Russian President to Crawford, Texas. (Laughter.) A lot of people never really dreamt that an American President and a Russian President could have established the friendship that we have.

“We were enemies for a long period of time. When I was in high school, Russia was an enemy. Now the high school students can know Russia as a friend; that we’re working together to break the old ties, to establish a new spirit of cooperation and trust so that we can work together to make the world more peaceful.” Now, think: if such an incident, “a new 9/11,” occurred today, would the necessary trust exist between the United States and Russia, or the United States and China such that a de-escalation from the brink of world destruction could even be averted? We cannot doubt the apparent answer at this time. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has recently expressed it thus: “the relations with [the West] that existed before February, 2022 will never again exist.”

The importance of the “Appeal to Pope Leo XIV To Organize a Global Leaders Summit To Address the Questions of Peace and Nuclear Disarmament” now being circulated by the International Peace Coalition and many other organizations is that it must be a means of going outside of the failures of the American Presidential system at this moment, to attempt to establish a dialogue of civilizations, and a culture not only of survival, but of progress. In an address made yesterday to the First West Africa Youth Day gathering, the Pope observed, “One of the challenges you face is that of walking together to help bring about positive change in your societies.” Walking together means ensuring that no one is marginalized, isolated, excluded or rejected.  Be builders of bridges between peoples, cultures and religions. Today’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Manhattan by the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus, plus orchestra and soloists seeks to do just that. “Beethoven’s Ninth: A Pathway Out of War” invokes the “mountaintop” standpoint from which all future world diplomacy that would be successful must proceed. The dignity of humanity, whatever the delusions of the AI mythologists may be, is the currency of human interaction that must rule the world, or there will be no more world.

This is, of course, the function of the Executive Intelligence Review and its Daily Alert. It supplies the kind of briefing that President John Quincy Adams, a consummate diplomat, Greek and Latin scholar, and opponent of slavery and colonialism, would have appreciated. Adams not only knew who Solon of Athens was; he knew why the United States was the continuation of Solon’s Athenian tradition—not the tradition of Sparta, and of Lycurgus, the tradition that dominates the United States today.

“Intelligence, Not Information” has long been our intention, standard, and product. “Current history, not current events” is another way to put it. Competent strategic thinking demands that the current of history of 2620 years of statecraft be the vantage point from which free citizens around the world must make judgments as to what is to be done by us, each day, in a world of 8 billion teetering on the verge of a worldwide Renaissance or thermonuclear extinction. Making the decision to end perpetual war and perpetual surveillance, on this 25th anniversary, in the 250th year of America’s Independence from colonialism, when viewed from the mountaintop of Solon’s constitutional revolution, is a human strategy that must supersede the doomed pragmatism of geopolitics.

Contents

LaRouche movement

Collapsing Imperial System

New World Paradigm

Strategic War Danger

Harley Schlanger Update

Watch The Daily Update with Harley Schlanger, a short video update available every weekday morning from The LaRouche Organization.

In-Depth