Immediately following publication of the interview, the unexpected happened. Congress scheduled hearings to investigate the contrived stories of Private Jessica Lynch and Specialist Pat Tillman, hearings conducted this week, which provided damning evidence of a military engaged in propaganda. As the Iconoclast noted April 11, following the publication of Captain May’s Battle of Baghdad and nuclear warhead claims, Al Jazeera ran an interview with Iraqi General Al-Rawi, who was in command of Iraqi forces at Baghdad Airport. Al-Rawi confirmed May’s statements about the Battle of Baghdad, and the U.S. use of a neutron bomb at Baghdad Airport.

In a time when both military intelligence and public affairs officers seem to be masters of the art of not saying the truth, Captain May, who is a specialist in both areas, is a refreshing breath of candor. In the interview below, the Iconoclast continues to ask probing questions of this former officer, who consistently predicted a disaster if we attacked Iraq from 1992 on, then later, on a mission of conscience, exposed the cover-ups that hid the predicted disaster from the American people.

As a unique way to acknowledge and honor the fallen — and unacknowledged — soldiers in the Battle of Baghdad, Captain May formed Ghost Troop, an independent military cyber-cavalry unit aimed at fighting governmental propaganda — a/k/a info-war. Commanded by Captain May, Ghost Troop consists of current and past high-level military professionals and police veterans with expertise in reading government strategies. As a former member of the "propaganda machine" himself, Captain May has expressed grave concern that the mainstream media, now owned by corporations that are part of the military/industrial complex, are selling the American people a bill of goods about the realities of the Iraq war.

The interview:

ICONOCLAST: How does it feel to be vindicated in your claims about Jessica Lynch and the Battle of Baghdad?

MAY: I’m ambivalent about it all. During the last four years, I’ve been ridiculed, abused and threatened by just about every level of the military structure, and my sanity has even been questioned — all of this for making the very assertions that are now becoming transparent. I think it’s like the German philosopher Schopenhauer said: In the case of any radical idea, first they ridicule it, then they abuse it, and finally, when it has been proved, they just say, "No big deal," and act like they’ve known all along.

On the one hand, I’m glad that the wall of lies protecting the Bush administration is crumbling; but on the other hand, I’m saddened that it has taken so long, and that there is yet so much left to do. I can’t but wonder how many lives — American and Iraqi — have been unnecessarily lost because the truth of an unnecessary, illegal war has been concealed, and I wonder how many more lives will be lost before the full truth of things is revealed.

ICONOCLAST: What do you think of General David Petraeus, the new commander of our forces in Iraq, who, just this week defended Administration Iraq war plans to Congress?

MAY: Frankly, based on his trying to sell Congress and the American people a bill of goods about a possible favorable outcome in Iraq, I don’t like him. I also don’t like his background. When Petraeus was a two-star, a major general, he was in charge of training Iraqi forces. Remember what a boondoggle that turned out to be! My God, when he was in charge, more flavors of lies were being told about the size and status of Iraqi forces than even the U.S. media could rationalize! But what was clear was that a lot of money was being made by U.S. corporations involved in the training process, and that Petraeus was going along for the ride.

He is, at best, just another Bush puppet general — and at worst, he is a Bush hatchet man.

ICONOCLAST: What do you mean?

MAY: There was a West Point professor of ethics, Colonel Ted Westhusing, who in 2005 volunteered to serve in Iraq. He was posted under Petraeus’ command and was assigned duties as an oversight and quality control officer in the Iraqi training program. One of the specific companies he oversaw was USIS. Before long Col. Westhusing began to make reports that there was widespread corruption in the program, that the mission wasn’t being achieved, and that all that seemed to be happening was that money was being flushed around. He said it was illegal and immoral and he wouldn’t put up with it. He was told to shut up and stand down by Petraeus and others in his chain of command. A devout Catholic man, with a wife and a family back home, he began to write letters to them saying that he couldn’t tell the whole story of corruption now, but would when he returned from Iraq.

Petraeus ordered Col. Westhusing to accompany him to USIS company headquarters at Baghdad Airport a few weeks before the colonel was to return home. It was a final showdown, and ominously Westhusing’s bodyguard had been dismissed. The colonel had written and carried a letter that said, "death before dishonor" and he was sticking to his guns, he wasn’t going to back down. He spent the morning in a very heated argument with the USIS people about their corruption, with Petraeus there, and refused to budge from his principles. In my opinion, Col. Westhusing epitomized everything admirable about a good West Point officer, one who had learned from his Academy days that he would neither lie, cheat, nor steal, nor tolerate those who did. Around noon, the meeting broke up for lunch, and Col. Westhusing went into another office. The next thing we know he is dead from a bullet through the head, with the USIS security chief’s fingerprints all over the gun, and the dubious excuse that the security chief had heard the shot, found the pistol, then picked the pistol up to make sure nobody else got hurt by it.

Every detail of that most suspicious story was brought out in the LA Times, but no one else in the U.S. media did any further investigation into it. Smelling a rat, another cover-up, a la Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman, I called the West Point and Department of the Army public affairs offices, and both asserted that Westhusing’s death had been a "suicide," because the Army had conducted a "psychological autopsy." I requested the credentials of the officer who had done the psychological autopsy, and was surprised to find that the officer in question was a reserve major who had no psychology credentials whatsoever. They refused to let me interview her. In other words, a rubber stamp report was written by a rubber stamp officer. These are the kinds of cover-ups the military has been conducting since 9/11, in one case after another.

It’s as if George Orwell has been writing everything in the U.S. media for the last five years. Nowadays, people are "suicided." Suicide is supposed to be a noun, but it has become a verb, as in the phrase: "Write the wrong thing and we will suicide you, just like we suicided Col. Westhusing." The Westhusing family doesn’t believe the colonel’s death was a suicide, though, and neither do I. I think the Army killed a man of conscience, then added ultimate insult to ultimate injury by labeling him, a devout Catholic, a suicide.

The people who are fabricating and repeating lies now are the kind I used to serve with when I was on general staff, train with when I was in military intelligence, or work with when I was in the U.S. media. I know that all of them have enough sense to know what’s going on. There’s not an absence of sense, but of courage in this crop of military and media professionals. Everyone has toed the line, and gone along with the official story — and that is the story of the entire Iraq war.

Petraeus is emblematic of everything wrong with the U.S. military. He will do anything, no matter how corrupt, to serve his political masters. He should never have been appointed to lead our forces in Iraq without first answering serious questions about what happened to Col. Westhusing.

ICONOCLAST: What do you see as the future of the Iraq war?

MAY: Iraq looks in two directions: it looks backward to 9/11, which is its prologue; and it looks forward to Iran, which is its epilogue. That’s the Bush presidency: two years to set up a war, four years of a war disaster, then two more years to escalate things into a bigger war. The crucial question is: Will Bush attack Iran, and thereby likely start World War III?

ICONOCLAST: Do you think he will attack Iran? Do you think he can?

MAY: Well, a better question might be do I think he can avoid doing it. More and more people are breaking the code of silence on the 9/11 treason and it’s catching up with the Bush administration. A couple of months ago Congressman Dennis Kucinich, in a Washington D.C. peace rally, said that the truth about 9/11 must come out to the American people. Shortly afterward, Rosie O’Donnell accused Bush of "treason" on ABC’s "The ‘View," then specified the nature of the treason charge a few days later by saying that the government had perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. media can’t continue to cover up the facts of 9/11 forever. One damning fact is that Bush only reluctantly showed up for a one-hour testimony with the 9/11 Commission, refused to let anybody leave the room with notes, refused to take an oath before he testified, and insisted that the vice president come along to coach him. It’s very hard not to smell a rat on the 9/11 matter. It’s really not much of a stretch at this point to say that the Bush people were complicit in 9/11, which they used to catapult us into a Middle East war that they had prepared for from the day they came to power. In order for Bush to continue with the war, he needs another 9/11, another false flag attack, carried out by our own government, then blamed on "Islamic terrorists" to mobilize the U.S. Without another 9/11, he won’t be able to continue with the war, nor with the cover-up of the original 9/11.

In Ghost Troop we call this next contrived attack 911-2B, the "911-to-be" that the U.S. media keeps preparing us for not as a matter of IF, but of WHEN. Television programs like "24" and "Jericho" have been setting up the premise that a nuclear attack on America is emminent. If Bush is to go war against Iran, he must first have that false flag attack. Without another 9/11, I don’t think he can go to war against Iran. The Army and Marines are broken because of Iraq. They’re taking lower mental and physical categories into their ranks to make up for their falling enlistment numbers, and even that isn’t working. The officer corps is depleted, and a good part of the equipment can no longer roll out. This has been a military disaster, a fiasco, a leap-before-you-look plunge, head-first, into quicksand.

ICONOCLAST: Would a reason not to go into Iran be that our military is broken, at least the ground forces?

MAY: Yes. If we hit Iran it’s going to have to be a strategic air strike. That’s why Bush keeps sending carrier groups out to the Persian Gulf, to practice for an air war, and has made a Navy aviator, Admiral William Fallen, the new CENTCOM commander.

ICONOCLAST: But we couldn’t win in Iran by air power alone, could we?

MAY: Not without going nuclear, but the next 9/11 is supposed to be nuclear, remember? If we had a nuclear 9/11, then we’d have a nuclear war against Iran. If we had another conventional 9/11, then we’d have a conventional war against Iran. What’s certain is that we are going to blame Iran for whatever kind of false flag attack we construct and carry out against ourselves. You see, the false flag terror attack is the catalyst that determines the outcome. If we want a nuclear war against Iran then we have to have a nuclear 9/11 to warrant a nuclear response — and a nuclear 9/11 is what the U.S. media is setting up to blame on Al Qaeda, probably "sponsored" by Iran. It doesn’t stand up to close inspection, though. In Ghost Troop we don’t even talk about "Al Qaeda," we talk about Al CIA-duh. What the mainstream media pretends is the Al Qaeda record, we in Ghost Troop understand is really just the Al CIA-duh script.

ICONOCLAST: So with your background in military intelligence, do you stand by these Al Qaeda scripts as contrivances by the U.S. government?

MAY: You can even forget about my miltiary intelligence background. Just think like a playwright, and imagine you’re writing a play called World War III. You’ve tricked the American people into sending their volunteer forces to the Middle East by staging the 9/11 attacks, but now you’re bogged down and you’re stalled out. You need a full mobilization — with the draft — to finish the play. Well, just write your own script from there, which is what our media is doing with the pending nuclear 9/11. It is collaborating to set up this nuclear 9/11 script just as it collaborated to set up the original 9/11 script and the Iraq war script. This whole strategy of lies is what we in Ghost Troop call info-war, in which Al Qaeda equals Al CIA-duh.

Reflect back on this week’s Congressional war budget debates and you’ll recall that the only people quoting Bin Laden were the Republicans. Everybody who wants to keep the war going quotes him. Bin Laden says, "Iraq is the central front in the global war" — which is exactly what Bush says. Bin Laden says, "If we can achieve victory in Iraq we can rule the world" — which is exactly what Bush says. Bin Laden says, "America is losing its resolve" — which, again, is exactly what Bush says. You could almost call him "Bush Laden." The entire Bin Laden/Al Qaeda script is a contrivance, written to support the "global war on terror," which is a transparent euphanism for World War III. You see, without worldwide terror, personified by Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Bush can’t have the world war into which he is leading us.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think Bin Laden and Al Qaeda even exist?

MAY: Well, there was an Osama Bin Laden, connected with the CIA, who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan back in the ’80s, but he isn’t the arch-villain and leader of "Al Qaeda" that the administration and media make him out to be. This contrived, "official" Bin Laden credited with the 9/11 attacks is pure fiction, kind of like Santa Claus, and Al Qaeda is like Santa’s little helpers, the elves. It’s all role playing, a con game. People "in the know" conspire to portray Santa Claus as a real being. They assign him a mythical place, the North Pole. You can’t find Santa Claus, but he sure can find you! He can come down the chimney! He knows everything!

You’ll find that the media reports the Santa story and adults repeat it. I even remember when I was a kid how we’d be getting Christmas Eve reports on the radio about how the Air Force had sighted Santa Claus flying over Canada, on his way to the United States. The myth worked perfectly — until you grew up and learned the facts of life. Well, Bin Laden is a lot like that, he’s a Santa Claus myth.

ICONOCLAST: What about Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has been getting a lot of media attention lately? Do you think that’s a myth, too?

MAY: Have you noticed that the attempt to prop up Al Qaeda as a major player in the Iraq war has become more emphatic since the Democratic Congress began its attempt to impose time limits on the Iraq war? The Bush adminstration and its embedded media pals hoaxed up a story that Saddam Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda to get us into the Iraq war, and now they are trying to hoax up a story that Al Qaeda is a dominant force in the Iraq war to keep us there. Every time we lose a helicopter, every time we lose 10 soldiers or Marines, every time the Green Zone takes mortar fire, the military labels the attackers "Al Qaeda." The media swallows the story, then regurgitates it to the American people, as if we were children.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think the American people will grow up and see the truth, or will we remain children?

MAY: I think we’re growing up in a hurry, through cynical experience. The only people who are really pushing the Al Qaeda line now are the Bush people. Any time you hear the Republicans talk about why we have to be in Iraq, they say it’s because Muslim madmen like Bin Laden are going to kill us at home if we don’t fight them in Iraq. The big problem with this lie is that it requires credibility, and Bush’s credibility is just about gone. His poll numbers are down to 30 percent, and if there were another attack like 9/11, how many people would rally to Bush, and how many others would immediately say that Bush did it? Last summer, nearly 40 percent of the American people believed that Bush was complicit in 9/11. The Bin Laden story is wearing mighty thin, exactly the way the Santa Claus story wears thin. How many years do you hear about Santa Claus and believe it? When you’re four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine, but not much longer than that. You believe about five or six years of Santa Claus, then you figure it all out.

ICONOCLAST: That’s about how many years the war has been under way.

MAY: Go back to the 9/11 ruse and you’ve got almost six years. That’s long enough to raise a skeptical generation.

ICONOCLAST: If, as you say, Bush needs another 9/11, a "911-2B," then when and where do you see the most danger?

MAY: As to the when, I think that there is a great danger during the Congressional recess this summer. When Congress is away the executive branch can act with the least oversight, and this summer may be the last opportunity for a repeat of false flag treason, before growing public awareness of the original 9/11 treason makes a repetition of it impossible. If Bush can stage an "Al Qaeda" attack this summer, he can shove the nation into an expanded war, full mobilization, and draft by ordering a "retaliatory" strike against Iran, which will be blamed for aiding Al Qaeda. Congress may be playing along with the 911-2B scenario, since, under pressure from the Israel Lobby, they have removed language from the pending Iraq war budget that insisted that Bush consult Congress before entering into war with Iran.

As to the where, Ghost Troop has been very active in following Homeland Security/Department of Defense domestic anti-terror exercises. These exercises, officially explained as efforts to protect us from the next 9/11, are actually rehearsals for perpetrating the next 9/11 against us. The most likely target area in the United States continues to be the Houston metropolitan area, specifically the British Petroleum refinery in Texas City, Texas, and the Exxon-Mobil refinery in Baytown, Texas. I’ve published in The Iconoclast our shocking record of being able to predict the date and location of Houston-area petrochemical explosions, and was not at all surprised to read recently that the two targeted refineries — British Petroleum, Texas City, and Exxon-Mobil, Baytown — were recently labeled the two most contaminated refineries in the United States by the EPA. Again, it didn’t surprise me, since it simply offers that much more explanation of why these companies would help the Bush administration set themselves up for false flag attacks.

The second most-likely target area, according to our research and experience, is downtown Chicago, specifically the Sears Tower. We believe we interdicted an attempt to carry out a false flag attack in Chicago May 2-4, 2006, when Homeland Security was carrying out WMD "training exercises" in downtown Chicago as Mayor Daley was conveniently tucked away with Israeli security forces in Israel. That whole situation had many echoes of the original 9/11 attack. You may recall that about a month afterwards, the FBI made a claim that they had arrested an "Al Qaeda wannabe group" in Florida that was planning to attack the Sears Tower. This was their way of attempting to assuage the widespread Internet reports, originating from Ghost Troop, blowing the whistle on them and other Federal agencies for their attempt on Chicago.

Ghost Troop has always focused on two primary missions. One of them is exposing the Battle of Baghdad Cover-up (BOBCUP), and you’ve seen in the last month how accurate our assessment of BOBCUP has been. The other mission is alerting the American people to 911-2B. I urge your readers to consider our credibility in the BOBCUP mission before dismissing us in the 911-2B mission. Anyone who wants to know the details, as they went down, of our interdiction missions to protect the Houston Metro and Chicago target areas should simply refer to my article of July 2006, published in the Iconoclast shortly after the false flag attack in Mumbai on 7/11 (2006): "9/11, 3/11, 7/11 — Is There A Code?"

ICONOCLAST: Aside from General Petraeus, what do you think of our American generals?

MAY: We have puppet generals. You constantly hear propaganda about how the White House "defers" to the generals. "We’re going to do what the generals tell us to do," they say, when it’s obvious that the generals do exactly what the White House tells them to do. These officers advanced to the highest ranks by screaming that they were all about kicking ass, but, at present, they are really all about kissing ass. This has been the biggest bunch of kiss-ass generals that has ever led our armed forces. They have utterly lied to the public, and anything they have said has been published in the media without scrutiny and without question.

ICONOCLAST: What about generals of yesteryear, like Patton and MacArthur?

MAY: When I think of those generals I think of some memorable clashes with their administrations. Clearly General Patton was focused on the military, not political, aspects of the second world war. There were several times he got his chain jerked for pushing too hard in the Western European offensives of 1944. General MacArthur actually got pulled out of Korea because he disagreed with the administration. I don’t see any generals today commensurate with Patton or MacArthur. We have Vietnam generals, Westmoreland generals, and they have covered our profession in shame. Remember the six generals who came out last spring and criticized Bush for the fiasco of Iraq? Have no others awakened to the debacle? Where is the opposition? Where are the outspoken resignations?

ICONOCLAST: Was there ever such a thing as a coherent statement of the United States strategy in Iraq?

MAY: It’s easier to identify our objectives than our strategy for gaining those objectives, and the objectives were summed up by Washington insiders, though never revealed to the public, as O-I-L. "O" stood for oil, the geostrategic resource that would allow us to dictate the tempo at which the rest of the world — China and India included — could industrialize. "I" stood for Israel, whose geopolitical dilemma of being surrounded by hostile Muslem nations could be resolved through a victory over Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party in Iraq. "L" stood for logistics, meaning that by taking control of Iraq, the center of the Middle East, we would have the perfect advanced position from which to influence, threaten, or attack surrounding countries like Iran and Syria.

The early, naive, "strategy," was to dash up the Euphrates Valley, storm Baghdad, and remove Hussein. It supposed that we would prostrate our old enemies by shock and awe, or win over new friends by western democratization. Clearly, that strategy failed utterly.

Today, the contradictions and crosscurrents in our Iraq policy can’t even be called a semblance of a strategy. Our current "strategy" seems to be to remain in a war with Iraq until we can escalate it into a war with Iran. The whole Iraq war, so to speak, will be called a typo, a spelling error, in which the Bush administration, its puppet generals, and its media mouthpieces will all say: "The objective shouldn’t have been I-R-A-Q — but I-R-A-N!"