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Gandalf Grey
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Twenty-Two Things We Now Know Six Years After 9/11
By Bernard Weiner
Created Sep 4 2007 - 10:32am
By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers
Each year around the anniversary of 9/11, I summarize what we ordinary
citizens have learned since that awful day in 2001. This is the sixth annual
look backwards, an update based on new information about those horrific
events and what followed.
What we now more fully understand is how the CheneyBush Administration
utilized the murderous terrorism of 9/11 as the one-size-fits-all
justification for their unfolding domestic and foreign agenda.
By and large, one can sum up that overall agenda as: Amass and control power
in the U.S. and much of the world, and, in cahoots with their corporate
supporters, loot the treasury. All this was to be carried out secretly, with
no accountability.
9/11 AND "THE WAR ON TERROR"
1. Iraq Plan Preceeded 9/11. Let's remember the chronology of how we got
here: The Administration's far-right domestic agenda was bogged down in 2001
after Jim Jeffords left the Republican caucus and joined the now-majority
Democratic one in the Senate. 9/11, and the mysterious anthrax attacks that
followed, had the side effect of providing the CheneyBush Administration
pretty much a free ride in putting police-state tactics in place (symbolized
by the so-called "Patriot Act"), overriding Constitutional protections, and
greasing the wheels for all sorts of domestic legislation that otherwise
might have been bottled up forever.
Planning for an attack on Iraq, as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later
told us, already had begun at the first cabinet meetings after Inauguration
Day in early 2001; after 9/11, those plans proceeded apace, even when the
intelligence indicated that it was not an Iraq operation but an al-Qaida
terrorist attack, out of Afghanistan.
It appeared that the U.S. military over time would capture or kill Osama bin
Laden in Afghanistan and effectively destroy al-Qaida forces that had
attacked America on 9/11. But CheneyBush abruptly pulled the U.S. forces
from Afghanistan and headed them for Iraq, a country that was no real danger
to the U.S. and its allies. (Late Flash: The resurgent Taliban allies of
al-Qaida now control a good share of Afghanistan; if the U.S. had stayed in
that country and taken care of business, today's reality there might well
have been significantly different.)
2. Unanswered 9/11 Questions. There still are unanswered questions about the
horrific events of September 11, 2001, mainly centered around: A. Why Bush
sat there for seven minutes reading the "Pet Goat" book after he'd been
informed of the plane hitting the second tower ("America is under attack,"
his chief of staff whispered to him), and why the Secret Service, as they
are trained to do when the President is believed to be in danger, didn't
surround him and get him the hell out of that classroom (the clear
implication is that a delay-operation was in progress). B. Why NORAD didn't
scramble its fighters in time to do anything (same implication). C. Whether
World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7 collapsed into their footprints as a
result of fire/structural damage or from pre-set demolition charges (there
are reputable scientists on both sides of that one). D. How to explain all
the "put" options on American Airlines and United Airlines stocks just prior
to the attacks, clearly suggesting someone knew which airlines were going to
be hijacked and was trying to profit from the pending attacks?
But regardless of whether CheneyBush were complicit in any degree in the
deaths and destruction that day -- and there is no proof that they were --
what we do know is that in the months, weeks and days prior to 9/11, red-hot
warnings about a planned terrorist attack, using planes as weapons aimed at
buildings in New York and Washington, were coming into the White House from
a wide variety of other countries.
At the very least then, CheneyBush and a few other key insiders knew that a
"spectacular" attack was coming and did absolutely nothing. Even after Bush
was briefed on August 6 with a report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to
Attack Inside the U.S." -- which talked about preparations for hijackings,
suspected terrorists surveilling federal buildings in New York, teams of
terrorists being inside the U.S. with explosives -- there was no heightening
of awareness, no alerting airlines, no sending out photos of al-Qaida
suspects to be on the lookout for, no calling an urgent meeting of
counter-terrorism experts inside the White House to coordinate either a way
of minimizing the damage or dealing with a post-attack response. Nothing.
Again, if the above is true, one is left with two alternative explanations.
A: These CheneyBush guys in charge were (and remain) totally over their
heads in terms of governance. They simply didn't have a clue what was about
to happen and what to do about it. Administration actions during the past
six and a half years supply more than enough evidence that Bush and his crew
are total ****ups. It's a reverse-Midas syndrome: everything they touch
turns to excrement. Total bumblers, screwups, incompetent dolts.
B: They knew something major was about to go down (although 3000 deaths may
have been way beyond what they imagined) in order to use those attacks as a
rallying point to amass power and push their agenda through a Congress that
otherwise was antagonistic to them.
3. The Facts of 9/11. We know that the Bush Administration didn't want the
public to learn much, if anything, about the events of that day six years
ago. Bush&Co. had to be dragged kicking and screaming into agreeing to the
appointment of the official 9/11 Commission, and they named as the executive
director one of their made men, Philip Zelikow (now an Administration
official).
As it turned out, the Administration wasn't all that cooperative in
furnishing documents, Bush would not testify under oath and would deign to
appear only with Cheney by his side, (here's my imagined transcript of that
testimony) ( www.crisispapers.org/essays/911-testimony.htm [1] ) and we
later learned that the commission was so angered by the constantly-shifting
stories told by the Pentagon/NORAD that they were ready to urge that legal
charges be filed. (
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080101300.html
[2] ) In short, the 9/11 Commision's probe was not exhaustive, leaving many
areas of investigation unplumbed, and many questions still unsatisfactorally
unanswered.
4. PNAC & the Neo-Cons. We know that a FarRight segment of the conservative
movement was dedicated to using America's sole superpower status to move
aggressively in the world while, they believed, no other country or
international force could put up much resistance. The key neo-con leaders in
charge of U.S. foreign/military policy (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton,
Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were founders of, and affiliated with, The Project
for The New American Century (PNAC).
The neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous patriotic support
during wartime, but when the war ends, those leaders lose their compelling
luster, as was the case with Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2 would become a PERMANENT
wartime president, and those who opposed him could then be tarred forever
with the smear of "unpatriotic" and "hating America," thus marginalizing
their political impact. And it worked: the Democrats cowered and gave Bush
virtually everything he wanted, up until relatively recently, when
occasionally they remember they have spines in their bodies and stand up and
fight as an opposition party should.
We know that Bush&Co. saw, in Condi Rice's apt term at the time, the
"opportunity" offered by the 9/11 attacks to move quickly and forcefully
with the Administration's foreign and domestic agenda. PNAC talked about its
Pax Americana plan for global "benevolent hegemony" using a retooled
military; this military transformation would take forever to implement, a
PNAC report said, unless a "new Pearl Harbor" changed the equation in the
public mind. 9/11 came along and was used as that "new Pearl Harbor." (See
"How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer.") (
www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/PNAC-Primer.htm [3] )
We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the entire country along with
him when he launched an attack on al-Qaida and its Taliban-government
supporters in Afghanistan. But there's no oil in that destitute country,
and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much worth bombing. Thus, no lessons could
be drawn by Middle East leaders from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's
secret energy panel was aware, there was another country in the region that
did have oil, and lots of it, and which could be taken easily by U.S.
forces. Thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other autocratic leaders in
the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iran. If you do not do our bidding,
prepare to accept a massive dose of "shock&awe"; you will be removed,
replaced by democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S. Control
of Iraq's oil has been at the forefront of U.S. occupation policies in Iraq,
and remains so.
The neo-cons -- most of whom were members of PNAC and similar organizations,
such as the American Enterprise Institute and Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies -- had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998. But he
demurred, seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas Osama bin Laden
in Afghanistan, and those terrorists like him, actually were successfully
attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad.
But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply toppling a brutal Iraqi
dictator. Among their other recommendations: "pre-emptively" attacking
countries that were of no imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating treaties
when they conflicted with U.S. goals, making sure no other nation (or
organization, such as the United Nations) could ever achieve power-parity
with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will,
expressing a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. All of
these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in
2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United
States of America and were renewed in Bush's 2004's National Security
Strategy.
THE IRAQ INVASION AND OCCUPATION
5. Sexing Up the Intel. We know that given the extreme nature of the neo-con
agenda in fomenting support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, Bush&Co.
had their work cut out for them. Therefore, among the first moves by
Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect Saddam to the terror
attacks. The various intelligence agencies reported to Rumsfeld that there
was no Iraq connection to 9/11, and that it was an al-Qaida operation, but
those findings were merely bothersome impediments. Since the CIA and the
other intelligence agencies would not, or could not, supply the intelligence
needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own rump "intelligence"
agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with political appointees of
the PNAC persuasion and soon was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel, much
of it untrue from self-interested Iraqi exiles, straight to Cheney and
others in the White House. Shortly thereafter, the White House Iraq Group --
the in-house marketing cabal, with such major players as Libby, Rove, Card,
Rice, Hadley, Hughes, Matalin, et al. -- went big-time with the WMD and
mushroom-cloud scares and the suspect melding of Saddam Hussein with the
events of 9/11.
Based on this sexed-up and phony intelligence, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld
and the others began warning about mushroom clouds over the U.S., drone
planes dropping biological agents over the East Coast (phony photos were
shown to members of Congress), huge stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq,
etc. Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as the most believable of the
bunch, was dispatched to the United Nations to make the case, which he did,
reluctantly, by presenting an embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and
concocted allegations. While the U.S. corporate media was unanimous in its
opinion that Powell had cinched the case, the world didn't buy it (Powell,
who resigned in 2004, has since lamented his role in this charade), and the
opposition to the U.S. war plan was palpable and huge: 10 million citizens
throughout the world hit the streets to protest, and former allies publicly
criticized Bush. Only Tony Blair in England eagerly hitched his wagon to the
Bush war-plan with large numbers of troops dispatched, as it turned out over
the objections of many of his closest aides and advisers.
6. The Big Lie & the Downing Street Revelations. We know that those advisers
warned Blair that he was about to involve the U.K. in an illegal, immoral
and probably unwinnable war that would put U.K. and U.S. troops in great
danger from potential insurgent forces. How do we know about these inner
workings of the Blair government? Because someone from inside that body
leaked the top-secret minutes from those war-Cabinet meetings, the so-called
Downing Street Memos.
We also learned from those minutes that Bush & Blair agreed to make war on
Iraq as early as the Spring of 2002. The intelligence, they decided, would
be "fixed around the policy" to go to war, despite their telling their
legislative bodies, the mass media, and their citizens that no decisions had
been made. In fact, the Bush Administration had decided to attack Iraq a
year before the invasion. "**** Saddam," Bush told three U.S. Senators in
March of 2002. "We're taking him out."
We know that many of Blair's most senior advisors thought the WMD argument
rested on shaky ground, and that without specific authorization from the
United Nations Security Council, the legality of the war was doubtful. But
the Bush Administration rushed to war anyway, because the U.N. inspectors on
the ground in Iraq were not finding any WMD stockpiles. The rush to war was
accomplished without proper planning and with no workable plan to secure the
peace and reconstruct the country after the major fighting. Some weeks
later, Bush prematurely declared, under a "Mission Accomplished" banner,
that the U.S. had "prevailed" in the Iraq war. The Iraqi "insurgency" was
about to blow up in their faces.
The Downing Street Memos make clear that both the U.S. and U.K. were well
aware that Iraq was a paper tiger, with no significant WMD stockpiles or
link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, the major thrust of
Bush&Co.'s justification for going to war was based on these non-existent
weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie Technique, repeating the same falsehoods
over and over and over, drummed those lies into Americans' heads day after
day, month after month, with little if any skeptical analysis by the
corporate mainstream media, which marched mostly in lockstep with Bush
policy and thinking. Wolfowitz admitted later that they chose WMD as the
primary reason for making war because they couldn't agree on anything else
the citizenry would accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear
weapons, mushroom clouds, toxins delivered by drone airplanes and the like
would work like a charm. And so they did, convincing the American people and
Congress that an attack was justified. It wasn't.
7. Iran Is Beneficiary of U.S. Policy. We know that the real reasons for
invading Iraq had precious little to do with WMD, with Islamist terrorists
inside that country, with installing democracy, and the like. There were no
WMD to speak of, and Saddam, an especially vicious dictator, did not
tolerate religious or political zealots of any stripe. No, the reasons had
more to do with American geopolitical goals in the region involving oil,
control, support for its ally Israel, hardened military bases and keeping
Iran from having free rein in the region.
However, as it turned out, the invasion and brutal occupation of Iraq
removed the one major buffer against the expansion of Iran's political and
military power in the region. In addition, because the U.S. Occupation was
so incompetently carried out, it pushed Iraq and Iran into a far closer
religious and political alliance than would have been the case if Saddam had
been permitted to remain in power. CheneyBush may have sacrificed thousands
of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, and hundreds of
thousands Iraqis as "collateral damage" -- and now the Administration, which
has constantly downsized its definition of "victory," is quietly willing to
accept a stable Islamic government that may well turn out to be more attuned
to Teheran than to Washington.
8. Iraq As a Disaster Zone. We know that Bush's war has been a thorough
disaster, built on a foundation of lies, and bungled from the start. For
most of its residents (those still remaining in Iraq), Iraq in 2007 is a
manifestation of Hell on earth. As a result, the Occupation has provided a
magnet for jihadists from other countries, billions have been wasted or lost
in the corrupt system of organized corporate looting that ostensibly is
designed to speed up Iraq's "reconstruction," etc. Indeed, so much has
Bush's war been botched that the "realists" in the Administration know the
U.S. must get out as quickly as possible if they are to have any hope of
exercising their considerable muscle elsewhere in the Middle East. But, so
far, the neo-con strategy still rules, and "stay-the-course" remains the
operating principle. Hence, the last-minute attempt for a military do-over:
CheneyBush's "surge" escalation, which they are trying to extend, in
six-months chunks, through the November 2008 election.
9. The Stretched-Thin Military. We know that Bush's Middle East agenda also
is suffering because the U.S. military is spread way thin in Afghanistan and
Iraq, the desertion and suicide rates are high, soldiers are not
re-enlisting at the usual clip, recruitment isn't working and deceptive
scams are being used to lure youngsters into signing up. In short, there are
no forces to spare on the ground. Either a military draft will be
instituted -- which would be only as a last resort for CheneyBush -- or all
future attacks will have to come from air power or from missiles, which will
merely deliver a message about U.S. superiority in the air but with no
successful follow-up possible on the ground. The air attacks will result in
making the citizens of those countries even angrier at America, and with
little likelihood of success in forging U.S.-friendly "democratic"
governments in Iran, Syria, et al., since the bombed populations will
support their existing governments. In short, America's failure in Iraq and
Israel's failure in Lebanon demonstrate the limits of muscle-bound,
high-tech armies in the modern, nationalist-guerrillas world.
10. Hiding Facts from the Public. We know that Bush&Co. made sure that there
would be no full-scale, independent probes of their role in using and
abusing the intelligence that led to war on Iraq. This is the most secretive
Administration in American history, and they want no investigations (
www.oldamericancentury.org/blocked_investigations.htm [4] ) of any of their
mistakes or corruptions of the democratic process.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Republican Pat Roberts, held
hearings on the failures lower down the chain, namely at the CIA and FBI
level, and promised there would be followup hearings on any White House
manipulation of intelligence. But, following the 2004 election, Roberts said
no purpose would be served in launching such an investigation. Likewise, the
9/11 Commission did not delve deeply into how the Bush Administration
misused its pre-9/11 knowledge. In short, this secretive administration made
sure that everything was done to head off at the pass any investigations
whatsoever. And we've not learned much more about this topic now that the
Democrats are in control in Congress.
THE TURN TO TYRANNY AT HOME
11. Perilously Close to Dictatorship. We know that Bush has no great love
for democratic processes, certainly not inside the United States. (On at
least three occasions, he has "jokingly" expressed his preference for
dictatorship, as long, he said, as he can be the dictator.) He much prefers
to rule as an oligarch, but to do that, he had to invent legal
justifications that he could claim granted him the requisite power. So he
had longtime lawyer-toady Alberto Gonzales, and Cheney's now-chief-of-staff
David Addington, devise a legal philosophy that permits Bush to do pretty
much what he wants -- ignore laws on the books, disappear U.S. citizens into
military prisons, authorize torture, spy on citizens' phone calls and
emails, declare martial law and rule by decree, etc. -- whenever Bush says
he's acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime."
And, since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on terror," from which there is
no end, Bush is home free. There always will be terrorists trying to do
anti-U.S. damage somewhere around the globe, or inside America, and the
"commander-in-chief" will need to respond. Ergo, goes this logic, Bush (and
any successor) is above the law, untouchable, in perpetuity. Bush&Co. also
made sure that U.S. officials and military troops would not be subject to
indictment by any international court or war-crimes tribunal.
No doubt the issue of unstoppable executive power ultimately will be heard
by the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Bush has appointed ultra-conservative
Judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito. In a chilling decision, the appeals
panel, of which Roberts was a member prior to his ascension to the Supremes,
ruled that the Commander-in-Chief's arbitrarily-designated "enemies" are
non-persons, with no legal rights. Bush now feels free to subject anyone he
likes to the "military tribunal" system he has concocted; even the Court's
recent objections to the tribunal system has had little effect on day-to-day
violations of detainees' rights, as Bush&Co. always manage to postpone and
delay implementation or find ways around the court rulings.
12. Torture As Official U.S. Policy. We know that Gonzales, Addington and
Pentagon lawyers beholden to Rumsfeld devised legal rationales that make
torture of suspects official state policy. These Bush-loyalist lawyers also
greatly widened the definition of what is acceptable interrogation
practice -- basically anything this side of death or terminally abusing
internal organs. They also authorized the "rendering" of key suspects to
countries specializing in extreme torture. After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld
professed shock, shock!, that those under their command would wind up
torturing, abusing and humiliating prisoners in U.S. care. But the
Administration made sure to stop all inquiries into higher-up responsibility
for the endemic torture. The buck never stops on CheneyBush's desk -- if
something goes wrong (and they never will admit to mistakes), it's always
someone else's fault. If and when Iraq "falls," the names of scapegoats are
being prepared: al-Maliki, Democrats, the "liberal media" and bloggers, Bill
Clinton, Gen. Petraeus, et al. Never Cheney, never Bush.
13. The Bill of Rights Goes "Quaint." We know that the Bush Administration
has been able to obtain whatever legislation it needs in its self-proclaimed
"war on terror" by utilizing, and hyping, the understandable fright of the
American people. John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge emerged periodically to
manipulate the public's fright by announcing yet another "terror" threat,
based on "credible but unverified" evidence. As he departed from his
directorate of the Homeland Security Department, Ridge admitted (
www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-10-ridge-alerts_x.htm [5]) that he
was required to issue many of those "terror" warnings when there was no
justifiable reason for doing so; it has been demonstrated (
www.youtube.com/watch?v=az7yl-UnsQQ [6] ) that those warnings were activated
usually when the Administration was facing an election or when they were
having an especially bad-news day -- a new scandal, especially discouraging
reports from Iraq, etc. Meanwhile, Congress (shame on you, Democrats!)
recently made most of the Patriot Act laws permanent. Unless those can be
repealed, and the tradition of habeas corpus re-introduced into American
jurisprudence, that vote will be a nail into the coffin housing the remains
of the Bill of Rights.
14. Outing CIA Agents for Political Reasons. The Bush Administration, for
its own crass political reasons, compromised American national security by
revealing the identity of two key intelligence operatives. The first was CIA
agent Valerie Plame, who had important contacts in the shadowy world of
weapons of mass destruction, especially in dealing with Iran's nuclear
capabilities. Wherever the leak originated, it is clear that Cheney (through
Libby) and Rove disclosed Plame's covert identity in an attempt to punish
her husband for explosing Bush's lie to the nation that Saddam was seeking
supplies of uranium from central Africa. Revealing the identity of a covert
CIA agent is a felony. The other outing of a CIA operative, by Condi Rice,
apparently to show off how successful the Administration was in its
anti-terrorism hunt, was that of a high-ranking mole close to bin Laden's
inner circle . This operative could have kept the U.S. informed as to
ongoing and future plans of al-Qaida. That's Bush's "war-on-terrorism" at
work.
15. Do You Know If Your Vote Is Counted? We know that America's
vote-counting system is corrupted. Sophisticated statistical analysis along
with wide-scale exit-polling, suggests strongly that the 2004 election
results were fiddled with by the private companies that tally the votes. (
www.scoop.co.nz/stories/print.html?path=HL0706/S00165.htm [7] ) These
companies are owned by far-right Republican supporters, but the same
objection would be lodged if Democrats owned the companies.
There are no good reasons to "outsource" vote-counting to private
corporations. These are the same companies who make and program the voting
machines, who refuse to permit inspection of their software, and whose
technicians have behaved suspiciously on election nights in 2000 in Florida,
in 2002 in Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004.
And we haven't even mentioned Rove's dirty-tricks department whose function
has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the number of potential Democrat
voters, especially minority voters; a favorite tactic is to purge hundreds
of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the voting rolls in advance in
key states such as Florida and Ohio. There are signs in 2007 that various
states are concerned enough about computer-voting to make some significant
changes in equipment. But because the same companies control the secret
counting of the votes, unless the vote-tabulating system can be changed
soon, the integrity of our elections will be suspect into the far future.
Even if all the other reforms were implemented for next year's federal
election, they would mean nothing without the guarantee of honest
tabulation.
16. No Privacy Anymore.We also now know that shortly after 9/11, CheneyBush
authorized massive data-mining of Americans' phone calls and emails, along
with other domestic spying operations, many of them in clear violation of
the FISA law establishing a separate, secret court to rule on requests for
eavesdropping warrants.
17. Purging the Body Politic. We now know that CheneyBush, angered by the
unwillingness of the intelligence analysts at the CIA and State Department
to cook the intel books for political reasons, conducted purges of
recalcitrant analysts at CIA and State.
There also were purges in the Justice Department in an attempt to have only
"loyal Bushies" (their term) in place, those who would do the bidding of the
White House without opposition or questioning. And so the DOJ, under Bush
toady Alberto Gonzales, fired Bush-appointed U.S. Attorneys around the
country and replaced them with their own guys. They tried to pretend that
the firings were the result of poor performance ratings, but that wasn't the
case. It was simply partisan, to help guarantee GOP control of the election
and indicting process through which the Democratic Party and it supporters
could be legally hassled in court or likely Democratic voters kept from the
polls. A side-effect of Bush&Co. putting their own U.S. Attorneys in power
would be protection for themselves and their supporters from criminal
charges.
18. There Is No Real Economic Plan. We know that the Bush Administration
paid off its backers (and itself) by giving humongous tax breaks, for the
next 10 years, to the already wealthy and to large corporations. In
addition, corporate tax-evasion was made easier via offshore listings and by
laying off thousands of IRS auditors of high-end returns. All this was done
at a time when the U.S. economy was in a sorry state and when the treasury
deficit from those tax-breaks was growing even larger from
Iraq/Afghanistan/"war-on-terror" costs. (Those war costs are now closing in
on a TRILLION dollars! and Congress is about to vote on Bush's requests for
several hundred billion more). So far as we know, the Bush Administration
has no plans for how to retire that debt and no real plan (other than the
discredited "trickle-down" theory) for restarting the economy and creating
well-paying jobs for skilled workers, many of whom have had their positions
outsourced to foreign lands.
19. Drowning Government In a Bathtub. We know that the HardRight
conservatives who control Bush policy don't really care what kind of debt
and deficits their policies cause; in some ways, the more the better since,
as GOP honcho Grover Norquist has admitted, they want to shrink government
"down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." They want to
decimate and starve popular social programs from the New Deal/Great Society
eras, including, most visibly, Head Start, Social Security, Medicare (and
real drug coverage for seniors), student loans, welfare assistance, public
education, etc. (The IRS is going to hire private tax collectors!) Bush's
plan to privatize a huge chunk of the Social Security System is still out
there as a goal, though Republicans are keeping quiet about it.
20. Privatizing Government Functions. We know that in addition to trying to
privatize Social Security and other government programs, CheneyBush have
begun privatizing the military, partially through its all-volunteer army and
by employing mercenaries ("independent contractors") to carry out numerous
national-security functions, such as intelligence-gathering. (It's estimated
that about 130,000 such mercenaries are on the ground in Iraq, close to the
same number as official U.S. military forces.) The corporate army known as
Blackwater is used not only in Iraq but was used domestically as well, to
police New Orleans after Katrina. Private corporations built and presumably
will run internment centers around the U.S. in the event of a natural or
terrorist disaster. Under the ambiguous provisions of martial-law, it is
possible that those who too actively oppose government policy could be
classified as aiding and comforting "terrorists" and be housed in those
camps.
21. Who Cares What You Drink or Breathe? We know that Bush environmental
policy (dealing with air and water pollution, mineral extraction, national
parks, and so on) is an unmitigated disaster, giving pretty much free rein
to corporations whose bottom lines do better when they don't have to pay
attention to the public interest. It's the worst sort of
grab-the-money-and-run scenario. Perhaps the best worst example of the
Administration's attitude toward protecting the public's health can be seen
in the EPA giving the green light for residents and workers to safely return
to their homes and jobs in Lower Manhattan shortly after the WTC Towers fell
six years ago, even though EPA scientists had determined that the air was
grossly polluted and dangerous.
22. It's Faith Over Science, Myth Over Reality. We know that this attitude
("my mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts") shows up most openly
in how science is disregarded by the Bush Administration in favor of
faith-based thinking. A good example would be the issue of global warming.
Some of this non-curiosity about reality may be based in fundamentalist
religious, even Apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of Bush's bashing of science is
designed as payback to his fundamentalist base, but the scary part is that a
good share of the time he actually seems to believe what he's saying, about
evolution vs. creationism, stem-cell research, abstinence education,
censoring the rewriting of government scientific reports that differ from
the Bush party line, cutbacks in R&D grants for the National Science
Foundation, etc., ad nauseum. This closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a
deeper level, why things aren't working out in Iraq, or anywhere else for
that matter. Reality, to them, is an annoyance that is best ignored.
AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30s?
In sum, we know that permanent-war policy abroad and police-state tactics at
home are taking us into a kind of American fascism domestically and an
imperial foreign policy overseas. All aspects of the American polity are
infected with the militarist Know-Nothingism emanating from the top, with
governmental and vigilante-type crackdowns on protesters, dissent, free
speech, freedom of assembly happening regularly on both the local and
federal levels. More and more, America is resembling Germany in the early
1930s, with group pitted against group while the central government amasses
more and more power and control of its put-upon citizens, and criticizing
The Leader's policies is denounced as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
The good news is that after suffering through six-plus years of the
CheneyBush presidency, and despite the Bush-compliant corporate mass-media
that often disgraces the journalistic profession, the public's blinders are
falling off. The Republicans can count on no more than 30% of the voting
population for support. The 2006 defeat of the Republicans in the House and
Senate and Tom DeLay's fall from power are good symbols of this, and the
true nature of these men and their regime is finally starting to hit home.
Cheney is acknowledged as the true power behind the throne, and Bush is seen
for what he is: an insecure, uncurious, arrogant, dangerous, dry-drunk bully
who is endangering U.S. national interests abroad with his reckless and
incompetently-managed wars, his wrecking of the U.S. economy at home, and
with his over-reaching in all areas.
If a Democratic president and vice president had behaved similarly to Bush
and Cheney, they'd have been in the impeachment dock in a minute.
Given all these scandals and more, and the loss of public support for the
Iraq war and Republican policies in general, it would seem that the
Democrats are in an enviable position to take back the White House in 2008.
DEMS DOING "BUSINESS AS USUAL"
But the Democrats, who were given the majority in Congress by voters anxious
and desperate for major change, seem content to fritter away their political
advantage by nibbling around the edges of CheneyBush policy but rarely
attacking them frontally, especially on the continuing war in Iraq and the
attack on Iran coming down the pike, and on impeachment. It's more or less
business as usual in the nation's capitol.
It's possible that the Democratic leadership believes that because the war
is so unpopular and the scandal-ridden GOP is self-destructing from within,
the Dems should just keep their heads down and coast to a victory in 2008.
But a lot can happen between now and November 2008 that could prove
disastrous for Democratic chances. For example, if the Dems nominate the
wrong candidate for President, or continue to demonstrate their cowardice
and timidity on the major issues of our time, the disenchanted progressive,
anti-war wing of the party could decide to sit on their hands in November or
join with the Greens for a third-party bid. A U.S. attack on Iran
potentially could change the political chemistry, as could a Mushareff fall
in Pakistan, or a bad recession or depression in the U.S. and world economy.
The Democrats are not politically pure, to be sure. Too many are beholden to
the same interests that have corrupted the Republicans during the CheneyBush
years. However, in enough instances that matter -- and assuming their base
could force them to move forward aggressively from a more activist,
ideological position -- the Democrats would be different enough to start to
turn the ship of state away from its reckless, dangerous extremism and back
more toward the center and maybe even, on some issues, in the direction of
progressive liberalism. #
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at
universitites in Wasington and California, worked as a writer/editor with
the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently co-edits The
Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org [8]) . To comment:
crisispapers@comcast.net
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
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political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Bernard Weiner
Created Sep 4 2007 - 10:32am
By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers
Each year around the anniversary of 9/11, I summarize what we ordinary
citizens have learned since that awful day in 2001. This is the sixth annual
look backwards, an update based on new information about those horrific
events and what followed.
What we now more fully understand is how the CheneyBush Administration
utilized the murderous terrorism of 9/11 as the one-size-fits-all
justification for their unfolding domestic and foreign agenda.
By and large, one can sum up that overall agenda as: Amass and control power
in the U.S. and much of the world, and, in cahoots with their corporate
supporters, loot the treasury. All this was to be carried out secretly, with
no accountability.
9/11 AND "THE WAR ON TERROR"
1. Iraq Plan Preceeded 9/11. Let's remember the chronology of how we got
here: The Administration's far-right domestic agenda was bogged down in 2001
after Jim Jeffords left the Republican caucus and joined the now-majority
Democratic one in the Senate. 9/11, and the mysterious anthrax attacks that
followed, had the side effect of providing the CheneyBush Administration
pretty much a free ride in putting police-state tactics in place (symbolized
by the so-called "Patriot Act"), overriding Constitutional protections, and
greasing the wheels for all sorts of domestic legislation that otherwise
might have been bottled up forever.
Planning for an attack on Iraq, as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill later
told us, already had begun at the first cabinet meetings after Inauguration
Day in early 2001; after 9/11, those plans proceeded apace, even when the
intelligence indicated that it was not an Iraq operation but an al-Qaida
terrorist attack, out of Afghanistan.
It appeared that the U.S. military over time would capture or kill Osama bin
Laden in Afghanistan and effectively destroy al-Qaida forces that had
attacked America on 9/11. But CheneyBush abruptly pulled the U.S. forces
from Afghanistan and headed them for Iraq, a country that was no real danger
to the U.S. and its allies. (Late Flash: The resurgent Taliban allies of
al-Qaida now control a good share of Afghanistan; if the U.S. had stayed in
that country and taken care of business, today's reality there might well
have been significantly different.)
2. Unanswered 9/11 Questions. There still are unanswered questions about the
horrific events of September 11, 2001, mainly centered around: A. Why Bush
sat there for seven minutes reading the "Pet Goat" book after he'd been
informed of the plane hitting the second tower ("America is under attack,"
his chief of staff whispered to him), and why the Secret Service, as they
are trained to do when the President is believed to be in danger, didn't
surround him and get him the hell out of that classroom (the clear
implication is that a delay-operation was in progress). B. Why NORAD didn't
scramble its fighters in time to do anything (same implication). C. Whether
World Trade Center Towers 1, 2 and 7 collapsed into their footprints as a
result of fire/structural damage or from pre-set demolition charges (there
are reputable scientists on both sides of that one). D. How to explain all
the "put" options on American Airlines and United Airlines stocks just prior
to the attacks, clearly suggesting someone knew which airlines were going to
be hijacked and was trying to profit from the pending attacks?
But regardless of whether CheneyBush were complicit in any degree in the
deaths and destruction that day -- and there is no proof that they were --
what we do know is that in the months, weeks and days prior to 9/11, red-hot
warnings about a planned terrorist attack, using planes as weapons aimed at
buildings in New York and Washington, were coming into the White House from
a wide variety of other countries.
At the very least then, CheneyBush and a few other key insiders knew that a
"spectacular" attack was coming and did absolutely nothing. Even after Bush
was briefed on August 6 with a report entitled "Bin Laden Determined to
Attack Inside the U.S." -- which talked about preparations for hijackings,
suspected terrorists surveilling federal buildings in New York, teams of
terrorists being inside the U.S. with explosives -- there was no heightening
of awareness, no alerting airlines, no sending out photos of al-Qaida
suspects to be on the lookout for, no calling an urgent meeting of
counter-terrorism experts inside the White House to coordinate either a way
of minimizing the damage or dealing with a post-attack response. Nothing.
Again, if the above is true, one is left with two alternative explanations.
A: These CheneyBush guys in charge were (and remain) totally over their
heads in terms of governance. They simply didn't have a clue what was about
to happen and what to do about it. Administration actions during the past
six and a half years supply more than enough evidence that Bush and his crew
are total ****ups. It's a reverse-Midas syndrome: everything they touch
turns to excrement. Total bumblers, screwups, incompetent dolts.
B: They knew something major was about to go down (although 3000 deaths may
have been way beyond what they imagined) in order to use those attacks as a
rallying point to amass power and push their agenda through a Congress that
otherwise was antagonistic to them.
3. The Facts of 9/11. We know that the Bush Administration didn't want the
public to learn much, if anything, about the events of that day six years
ago. Bush&Co. had to be dragged kicking and screaming into agreeing to the
appointment of the official 9/11 Commission, and they named as the executive
director one of their made men, Philip Zelikow (now an Administration
official).
As it turned out, the Administration wasn't all that cooperative in
furnishing documents, Bush would not testify under oath and would deign to
appear only with Cheney by his side, (here's my imagined transcript of that
testimony) ( www.crisispapers.org/essays/911-testimony.htm [1] ) and we
later learned that the commission was so angered by the constantly-shifting
stories told by the Pentagon/NORAD that they were ready to urge that legal
charges be filed. (
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080101300.html
[2] ) In short, the 9/11 Commision's probe was not exhaustive, leaving many
areas of investigation unplumbed, and many questions still unsatisfactorally
unanswered.
4. PNAC & the Neo-Cons. We know that a FarRight segment of the conservative
movement was dedicated to using America's sole superpower status to move
aggressively in the world while, they believed, no other country or
international force could put up much resistance. The key neo-con leaders in
charge of U.S. foreign/military policy (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton,
Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were founders of, and affiliated with, The Project
for The New American Century (PNAC).
The neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous patriotic support
during wartime, but when the war ends, those leaders lose their compelling
luster, as was the case with Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2 would become a PERMANENT
wartime president, and those who opposed him could then be tarred forever
with the smear of "unpatriotic" and "hating America," thus marginalizing
their political impact. And it worked: the Democrats cowered and gave Bush
virtually everything he wanted, up until relatively recently, when
occasionally they remember they have spines in their bodies and stand up and
fight as an opposition party should.
We know that Bush&Co. saw, in Condi Rice's apt term at the time, the
"opportunity" offered by the 9/11 attacks to move quickly and forcefully
with the Administration's foreign and domestic agenda. PNAC talked about its
Pax Americana plan for global "benevolent hegemony" using a retooled
military; this military transformation would take forever to implement, a
PNAC report said, unless a "new Pearl Harbor" changed the equation in the
public mind. 9/11 came along and was used as that "new Pearl Harbor." (See
"How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer.") (
www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/PNAC-Primer.htm [3] )
We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the entire country along with
him when he launched an attack on al-Qaida and its Taliban-government
supporters in Afghanistan. But there's no oil in that destitute country,
and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much worth bombing. Thus, no lessons could
be drawn by Middle East leaders from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's
secret energy panel was aware, there was another country in the region that
did have oil, and lots of it, and which could be taken easily by U.S.
forces. Thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other autocratic leaders in
the Middle East, especially in Syria and Iran. If you do not do our bidding,
prepare to accept a massive dose of "shock&awe"; you will be removed,
replaced by democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S. Control
of Iraq's oil has been at the forefront of U.S. occupation policies in Iraq,
and remains so.
The neo-cons -- most of whom were members of PNAC and similar organizations,
such as the American Enterprise Institute and Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies -- had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998. But he
demurred, seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas Osama bin Laden
in Afghanistan, and those terrorists like him, actually were successfully
attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad.
But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply toppling a brutal Iraqi
dictator. Among their other recommendations: "pre-emptively" attacking
countries that were of no imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating treaties
when they conflicted with U.S. goals, making sure no other nation (or
organization, such as the United Nations) could ever achieve power-parity
with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will,
expressing a willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. All of
these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in
2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United
States of America and were renewed in Bush's 2004's National Security
Strategy.
THE IRAQ INVASION AND OCCUPATION
5. Sexing Up the Intel. We know that given the extreme nature of the neo-con
agenda in fomenting support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, Bush&Co.
had their work cut out for them. Therefore, among the first moves by
Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect Saddam to the terror
attacks. The various intelligence agencies reported to Rumsfeld that there
was no Iraq connection to 9/11, and that it was an al-Qaida operation, but
those findings were merely bothersome impediments. Since the CIA and the
other intelligence agencies would not, or could not, supply the intelligence
needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own rump "intelligence"
agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with political appointees of
the PNAC persuasion and soon was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel, much
of it untrue from self-interested Iraqi exiles, straight to Cheney and
others in the White House. Shortly thereafter, the White House Iraq Group --
the in-house marketing cabal, with such major players as Libby, Rove, Card,
Rice, Hadley, Hughes, Matalin, et al. -- went big-time with the WMD and
mushroom-cloud scares and the suspect melding of Saddam Hussein with the
events of 9/11.
Based on this sexed-up and phony intelligence, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld
and the others began warning about mushroom clouds over the U.S., drone
planes dropping biological agents over the East Coast (phony photos were
shown to members of Congress), huge stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq,
etc. Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as the most believable of the
bunch, was dispatched to the United Nations to make the case, which he did,
reluctantly, by presenting an embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and
concocted allegations. While the U.S. corporate media was unanimous in its
opinion that Powell had cinched the case, the world didn't buy it (Powell,
who resigned in 2004, has since lamented his role in this charade), and the
opposition to the U.S. war plan was palpable and huge: 10 million citizens
throughout the world hit the streets to protest, and former allies publicly
criticized Bush. Only Tony Blair in England eagerly hitched his wagon to the
Bush war-plan with large numbers of troops dispatched, as it turned out over
the objections of many of his closest aides and advisers.
6. The Big Lie & the Downing Street Revelations. We know that those advisers
warned Blair that he was about to involve the U.K. in an illegal, immoral
and probably unwinnable war that would put U.K. and U.S. troops in great
danger from potential insurgent forces. How do we know about these inner
workings of the Blair government? Because someone from inside that body
leaked the top-secret minutes from those war-Cabinet meetings, the so-called
Downing Street Memos.
We also learned from those minutes that Bush & Blair agreed to make war on
Iraq as early as the Spring of 2002. The intelligence, they decided, would
be "fixed around the policy" to go to war, despite their telling their
legislative bodies, the mass media, and their citizens that no decisions had
been made. In fact, the Bush Administration had decided to attack Iraq a
year before the invasion. "**** Saddam," Bush told three U.S. Senators in
March of 2002. "We're taking him out."
We know that many of Blair's most senior advisors thought the WMD argument
rested on shaky ground, and that without specific authorization from the
United Nations Security Council, the legality of the war was doubtful. But
the Bush Administration rushed to war anyway, because the U.N. inspectors on
the ground in Iraq were not finding any WMD stockpiles. The rush to war was
accomplished without proper planning and with no workable plan to secure the
peace and reconstruct the country after the major fighting. Some weeks
later, Bush prematurely declared, under a "Mission Accomplished" banner,
that the U.S. had "prevailed" in the Iraq war. The Iraqi "insurgency" was
about to blow up in their faces.
The Downing Street Memos make clear that both the U.S. and U.K. were well
aware that Iraq was a paper tiger, with no significant WMD stockpiles or
link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, the major thrust of
Bush&Co.'s justification for going to war was based on these non-existent
weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie Technique, repeating the same falsehoods
over and over and over, drummed those lies into Americans' heads day after
day, month after month, with little if any skeptical analysis by the
corporate mainstream media, which marched mostly in lockstep with Bush
policy and thinking. Wolfowitz admitted later that they chose WMD as the
primary reason for making war because they couldn't agree on anything else
the citizenry would accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear
weapons, mushroom clouds, toxins delivered by drone airplanes and the like
would work like a charm. And so they did, convincing the American people and
Congress that an attack was justified. It wasn't.
7. Iran Is Beneficiary of U.S. Policy. We know that the real reasons for
invading Iraq had precious little to do with WMD, with Islamist terrorists
inside that country, with installing democracy, and the like. There were no
WMD to speak of, and Saddam, an especially vicious dictator, did not
tolerate religious or political zealots of any stripe. No, the reasons had
more to do with American geopolitical goals in the region involving oil,
control, support for its ally Israel, hardened military bases and keeping
Iran from having free rein in the region.
However, as it turned out, the invasion and brutal occupation of Iraq
removed the one major buffer against the expansion of Iran's political and
military power in the region. In addition, because the U.S. Occupation was
so incompetently carried out, it pushed Iraq and Iran into a far closer
religious and political alliance than would have been the case if Saddam had
been permitted to remain in power. CheneyBush may have sacrificed thousands
of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, and hundreds of
thousands Iraqis as "collateral damage" -- and now the Administration, which
has constantly downsized its definition of "victory," is quietly willing to
accept a stable Islamic government that may well turn out to be more attuned
to Teheran than to Washington.
8. Iraq As a Disaster Zone. We know that Bush's war has been a thorough
disaster, built on a foundation of lies, and bungled from the start. For
most of its residents (those still remaining in Iraq), Iraq in 2007 is a
manifestation of Hell on earth. As a result, the Occupation has provided a
magnet for jihadists from other countries, billions have been wasted or lost
in the corrupt system of organized corporate looting that ostensibly is
designed to speed up Iraq's "reconstruction," etc. Indeed, so much has
Bush's war been botched that the "realists" in the Administration know the
U.S. must get out as quickly as possible if they are to have any hope of
exercising their considerable muscle elsewhere in the Middle East. But, so
far, the neo-con strategy still rules, and "stay-the-course" remains the
operating principle. Hence, the last-minute attempt for a military do-over:
CheneyBush's "surge" escalation, which they are trying to extend, in
six-months chunks, through the November 2008 election.
9. The Stretched-Thin Military. We know that Bush's Middle East agenda also
is suffering because the U.S. military is spread way thin in Afghanistan and
Iraq, the desertion and suicide rates are high, soldiers are not
re-enlisting at the usual clip, recruitment isn't working and deceptive
scams are being used to lure youngsters into signing up. In short, there are
no forces to spare on the ground. Either a military draft will be
instituted -- which would be only as a last resort for CheneyBush -- or all
future attacks will have to come from air power or from missiles, which will
merely deliver a message about U.S. superiority in the air but with no
successful follow-up possible on the ground. The air attacks will result in
making the citizens of those countries even angrier at America, and with
little likelihood of success in forging U.S.-friendly "democratic"
governments in Iran, Syria, et al., since the bombed populations will
support their existing governments. In short, America's failure in Iraq and
Israel's failure in Lebanon demonstrate the limits of muscle-bound,
high-tech armies in the modern, nationalist-guerrillas world.
10. Hiding Facts from the Public. We know that Bush&Co. made sure that there
would be no full-scale, independent probes of their role in using and
abusing the intelligence that led to war on Iraq. This is the most secretive
Administration in American history, and they want no investigations (
www.oldamericancentury.org/blocked_investigations.htm [4] ) of any of their
mistakes or corruptions of the democratic process.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, then led by Republican Pat Roberts, held
hearings on the failures lower down the chain, namely at the CIA and FBI
level, and promised there would be followup hearings on any White House
manipulation of intelligence. But, following the 2004 election, Roberts said
no purpose would be served in launching such an investigation. Likewise, the
9/11 Commission did not delve deeply into how the Bush Administration
misused its pre-9/11 knowledge. In short, this secretive administration made
sure that everything was done to head off at the pass any investigations
whatsoever. And we've not learned much more about this topic now that the
Democrats are in control in Congress.
THE TURN TO TYRANNY AT HOME
11. Perilously Close to Dictatorship. We know that Bush has no great love
for democratic processes, certainly not inside the United States. (On at
least three occasions, he has "jokingly" expressed his preference for
dictatorship, as long, he said, as he can be the dictator.) He much prefers
to rule as an oligarch, but to do that, he had to invent legal
justifications that he could claim granted him the requisite power. So he
had longtime lawyer-toady Alberto Gonzales, and Cheney's now-chief-of-staff
David Addington, devise a legal philosophy that permits Bush to do pretty
much what he wants -- ignore laws on the books, disappear U.S. citizens into
military prisons, authorize torture, spy on citizens' phone calls and
emails, declare martial law and rule by decree, etc. -- whenever Bush says
he's acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime."
And, since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on terror," from which there is
no end, Bush is home free. There always will be terrorists trying to do
anti-U.S. damage somewhere around the globe, or inside America, and the
"commander-in-chief" will need to respond. Ergo, goes this logic, Bush (and
any successor) is above the law, untouchable, in perpetuity. Bush&Co. also
made sure that U.S. officials and military troops would not be subject to
indictment by any international court or war-crimes tribunal.
No doubt the issue of unstoppable executive power ultimately will be heard
by the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Bush has appointed ultra-conservative
Judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito. In a chilling decision, the appeals
panel, of which Roberts was a member prior to his ascension to the Supremes,
ruled that the Commander-in-Chief's arbitrarily-designated "enemies" are
non-persons, with no legal rights. Bush now feels free to subject anyone he
likes to the "military tribunal" system he has concocted; even the Court's
recent objections to the tribunal system has had little effect on day-to-day
violations of detainees' rights, as Bush&Co. always manage to postpone and
delay implementation or find ways around the court rulings.
12. Torture As Official U.S. Policy. We know that Gonzales, Addington and
Pentagon lawyers beholden to Rumsfeld devised legal rationales that make
torture of suspects official state policy. These Bush-loyalist lawyers also
greatly widened the definition of what is acceptable interrogation
practice -- basically anything this side of death or terminally abusing
internal organs. They also authorized the "rendering" of key suspects to
countries specializing in extreme torture. After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld
professed shock, shock!, that those under their command would wind up
torturing, abusing and humiliating prisoners in U.S. care. But the
Administration made sure to stop all inquiries into higher-up responsibility
for the endemic torture. The buck never stops on CheneyBush's desk -- if
something goes wrong (and they never will admit to mistakes), it's always
someone else's fault. If and when Iraq "falls," the names of scapegoats are
being prepared: al-Maliki, Democrats, the "liberal media" and bloggers, Bill
Clinton, Gen. Petraeus, et al. Never Cheney, never Bush.
13. The Bill of Rights Goes "Quaint." We know that the Bush Administration
has been able to obtain whatever legislation it needs in its self-proclaimed
"war on terror" by utilizing, and hyping, the understandable fright of the
American people. John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge emerged periodically to
manipulate the public's fright by announcing yet another "terror" threat,
based on "credible but unverified" evidence. As he departed from his
directorate of the Homeland Security Department, Ridge admitted (
www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-10-ridge-alerts_x.htm [5]) that he
was required to issue many of those "terror" warnings when there was no
justifiable reason for doing so; it has been demonstrated (
www.youtube.com/watch?v=az7yl-UnsQQ [6] ) that those warnings were activated
usually when the Administration was facing an election or when they were
having an especially bad-news day -- a new scandal, especially discouraging
reports from Iraq, etc. Meanwhile, Congress (shame on you, Democrats!)
recently made most of the Patriot Act laws permanent. Unless those can be
repealed, and the tradition of habeas corpus re-introduced into American
jurisprudence, that vote will be a nail into the coffin housing the remains
of the Bill of Rights.
14. Outing CIA Agents for Political Reasons. The Bush Administration, for
its own crass political reasons, compromised American national security by
revealing the identity of two key intelligence operatives. The first was CIA
agent Valerie Plame, who had important contacts in the shadowy world of
weapons of mass destruction, especially in dealing with Iran's nuclear
capabilities. Wherever the leak originated, it is clear that Cheney (through
Libby) and Rove disclosed Plame's covert identity in an attempt to punish
her husband for explosing Bush's lie to the nation that Saddam was seeking
supplies of uranium from central Africa. Revealing the identity of a covert
CIA agent is a felony. The other outing of a CIA operative, by Condi Rice,
apparently to show off how successful the Administration was in its
anti-terrorism hunt, was that of a high-ranking mole close to bin Laden's
inner circle . This operative could have kept the U.S. informed as to
ongoing and future plans of al-Qaida. That's Bush's "war-on-terrorism" at
work.
15. Do You Know If Your Vote Is Counted? We know that America's
vote-counting system is corrupted. Sophisticated statistical analysis along
with wide-scale exit-polling, suggests strongly that the 2004 election
results were fiddled with by the private companies that tally the votes. (
www.scoop.co.nz/stories/print.html?path=HL0706/S00165.htm [7] ) These
companies are owned by far-right Republican supporters, but the same
objection would be lodged if Democrats owned the companies.
There are no good reasons to "outsource" vote-counting to private
corporations. These are the same companies who make and program the voting
machines, who refuse to permit inspection of their software, and whose
technicians have behaved suspiciously on election nights in 2000 in Florida,
in 2002 in Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004.
And we haven't even mentioned Rove's dirty-tricks department whose function
has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the number of potential Democrat
voters, especially minority voters; a favorite tactic is to purge hundreds
of thousands of likely Democratic voters from the voting rolls in advance in
key states such as Florida and Ohio. There are signs in 2007 that various
states are concerned enough about computer-voting to make some significant
changes in equipment. But because the same companies control the secret
counting of the votes, unless the vote-tabulating system can be changed
soon, the integrity of our elections will be suspect into the far future.
Even if all the other reforms were implemented for next year's federal
election, they would mean nothing without the guarantee of honest
tabulation.
16. No Privacy Anymore.We also now know that shortly after 9/11, CheneyBush
authorized massive data-mining of Americans' phone calls and emails, along
with other domestic spying operations, many of them in clear violation of
the FISA law establishing a separate, secret court to rule on requests for
eavesdropping warrants.
17. Purging the Body Politic. We now know that CheneyBush, angered by the
unwillingness of the intelligence analysts at the CIA and State Department
to cook the intel books for political reasons, conducted purges of
recalcitrant analysts at CIA and State.
There also were purges in the Justice Department in an attempt to have only
"loyal Bushies" (their term) in place, those who would do the bidding of the
White House without opposition or questioning. And so the DOJ, under Bush
toady Alberto Gonzales, fired Bush-appointed U.S. Attorneys around the
country and replaced them with their own guys. They tried to pretend that
the firings were the result of poor performance ratings, but that wasn't the
case. It was simply partisan, to help guarantee GOP control of the election
and indicting process through which the Democratic Party and it supporters
could be legally hassled in court or likely Democratic voters kept from the
polls. A side-effect of Bush&Co. putting their own U.S. Attorneys in power
would be protection for themselves and their supporters from criminal
charges.
18. There Is No Real Economic Plan. We know that the Bush Administration
paid off its backers (and itself) by giving humongous tax breaks, for the
next 10 years, to the already wealthy and to large corporations. In
addition, corporate tax-evasion was made easier via offshore listings and by
laying off thousands of IRS auditors of high-end returns. All this was done
at a time when the U.S. economy was in a sorry state and when the treasury
deficit from those tax-breaks was growing even larger from
Iraq/Afghanistan/"war-on-terror" costs. (Those war costs are now closing in
on a TRILLION dollars! and Congress is about to vote on Bush's requests for
several hundred billion more). So far as we know, the Bush Administration
has no plans for how to retire that debt and no real plan (other than the
discredited "trickle-down" theory) for restarting the economy and creating
well-paying jobs for skilled workers, many of whom have had their positions
outsourced to foreign lands.
19. Drowning Government In a Bathtub. We know that the HardRight
conservatives who control Bush policy don't really care what kind of debt
and deficits their policies cause; in some ways, the more the better since,
as GOP honcho Grover Norquist has admitted, they want to shrink government
"down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." They want to
decimate and starve popular social programs from the New Deal/Great Society
eras, including, most visibly, Head Start, Social Security, Medicare (and
real drug coverage for seniors), student loans, welfare assistance, public
education, etc. (The IRS is going to hire private tax collectors!) Bush's
plan to privatize a huge chunk of the Social Security System is still out
there as a goal, though Republicans are keeping quiet about it.
20. Privatizing Government Functions. We know that in addition to trying to
privatize Social Security and other government programs, CheneyBush have
begun privatizing the military, partially through its all-volunteer army and
by employing mercenaries ("independent contractors") to carry out numerous
national-security functions, such as intelligence-gathering. (It's estimated
that about 130,000 such mercenaries are on the ground in Iraq, close to the
same number as official U.S. military forces.) The corporate army known as
Blackwater is used not only in Iraq but was used domestically as well, to
police New Orleans after Katrina. Private corporations built and presumably
will run internment centers around the U.S. in the event of a natural or
terrorist disaster. Under the ambiguous provisions of martial-law, it is
possible that those who too actively oppose government policy could be
classified as aiding and comforting "terrorists" and be housed in those
camps.
21. Who Cares What You Drink or Breathe? We know that Bush environmental
policy (dealing with air and water pollution, mineral extraction, national
parks, and so on) is an unmitigated disaster, giving pretty much free rein
to corporations whose bottom lines do better when they don't have to pay
attention to the public interest. It's the worst sort of
grab-the-money-and-run scenario. Perhaps the best worst example of the
Administration's attitude toward protecting the public's health can be seen
in the EPA giving the green light for residents and workers to safely return
to their homes and jobs in Lower Manhattan shortly after the WTC Towers fell
six years ago, even though EPA scientists had determined that the air was
grossly polluted and dangerous.
22. It's Faith Over Science, Myth Over Reality. We know that this attitude
("my mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts") shows up most openly
in how science is disregarded by the Bush Administration in favor of
faith-based thinking. A good example would be the issue of global warming.
Some of this non-curiosity about reality may be based in fundamentalist
religious, even Apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of Bush's bashing of science is
designed as payback to his fundamentalist base, but the scary part is that a
good share of the time he actually seems to believe what he's saying, about
evolution vs. creationism, stem-cell research, abstinence education,
censoring the rewriting of government scientific reports that differ from
the Bush party line, cutbacks in R&D grants for the National Science
Foundation, etc., ad nauseum. This closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a
deeper level, why things aren't working out in Iraq, or anywhere else for
that matter. Reality, to them, is an annoyance that is best ignored.
AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30s?
In sum, we know that permanent-war policy abroad and police-state tactics at
home are taking us into a kind of American fascism domestically and an
imperial foreign policy overseas. All aspects of the American polity are
infected with the militarist Know-Nothingism emanating from the top, with
governmental and vigilante-type crackdowns on protesters, dissent, free
speech, freedom of assembly happening regularly on both the local and
federal levels. More and more, America is resembling Germany in the early
1930s, with group pitted against group while the central government amasses
more and more power and control of its put-upon citizens, and criticizing
The Leader's policies is denounced as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
The good news is that after suffering through six-plus years of the
CheneyBush presidency, and despite the Bush-compliant corporate mass-media
that often disgraces the journalistic profession, the public's blinders are
falling off. The Republicans can count on no more than 30% of the voting
population for support. The 2006 defeat of the Republicans in the House and
Senate and Tom DeLay's fall from power are good symbols of this, and the
true nature of these men and their regime is finally starting to hit home.
Cheney is acknowledged as the true power behind the throne, and Bush is seen
for what he is: an insecure, uncurious, arrogant, dangerous, dry-drunk bully
who is endangering U.S. national interests abroad with his reckless and
incompetently-managed wars, his wrecking of the U.S. economy at home, and
with his over-reaching in all areas.
If a Democratic president and vice president had behaved similarly to Bush
and Cheney, they'd have been in the impeachment dock in a minute.
Given all these scandals and more, and the loss of public support for the
Iraq war and Republican policies in general, it would seem that the
Democrats are in an enviable position to take back the White House in 2008.
DEMS DOING "BUSINESS AS USUAL"
But the Democrats, who were given the majority in Congress by voters anxious
and desperate for major change, seem content to fritter away their political
advantage by nibbling around the edges of CheneyBush policy but rarely
attacking them frontally, especially on the continuing war in Iraq and the
attack on Iran coming down the pike, and on impeachment. It's more or less
business as usual in the nation's capitol.
It's possible that the Democratic leadership believes that because the war
is so unpopular and the scandal-ridden GOP is self-destructing from within,
the Dems should just keep their heads down and coast to a victory in 2008.
But a lot can happen between now and November 2008 that could prove
disastrous for Democratic chances. For example, if the Dems nominate the
wrong candidate for President, or continue to demonstrate their cowardice
and timidity on the major issues of our time, the disenchanted progressive,
anti-war wing of the party could decide to sit on their hands in November or
join with the Greens for a third-party bid. A U.S. attack on Iran
potentially could change the political chemistry, as could a Mushareff fall
in Pakistan, or a bad recession or depression in the U.S. and world economy.
The Democrats are not politically pure, to be sure. Too many are beholden to
the same interests that have corrupted the Republicans during the CheneyBush
years. However, in enough instances that matter -- and assuming their base
could force them to move forward aggressively from a more activist,
ideological position -- the Democrats would be different enough to start to
turn the ship of state away from its reckless, dangerous extremism and back
more toward the center and maybe even, on some issues, in the direction of
progressive liberalism. #
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D., has taught government & international relations at
universitites in Wasington and California, worked as a writer/editor with
the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently co-edits The
Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org [8]) . To comment:
crisispapers@comcast.net
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson