How America Was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Welfare State (22 page)

The CIA director’s warning of future terrorist attacks, followed by a suspect “Al Qaeda” threat of the same, suggests that if the American public continues to lose its enthusiasm for the government’s open-ended wars, which are conducted at the expense of the US budget deficit, the dollar’s exchange value, inflation, Social Security, Medicare, income support programs, jobs, recovery, and so forth, “Al Qaeda” will again outwit all 16 US intelligence agencies, those of our allies, NORAD, airport security, Air Traffic Control, etc. etc., and inflict the world’s only superpower with another humiliating defeat that will invigorate American support for “the war on terror.”

I believe that “Al Qaeda” could blow up the White House or Congress or both and that the majority of Americans would fall for the story, just as the Germans, a better educated and more intelligent population, fell for the Reichstag Fire—as did a number of historians.

The reason I say this is that Americans have succumbed to propaganda that has conditioned them to believe that they are under attack by practically omnipotent adversaries. Proof of this is broadcast every day. For example, on March 9, I heard over National Public Radio in Atlanta that Emory University, a private university of some distinction, treated its 3,500 graduating class to a commencement address by Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security.

This is the agency that has goons feeling the genitals of young children and adults and which has announced that it intends to expand this practice from air travelers to shopping malls, bus and train stations. That a serious university invited such a low-lifer, who clearly has no respect for American civil liberty and is devoid of any sort of sense of what is appropriate, to address a graduating class of southern elite is a clear indication that the Ministry of Truth has prevailed. Americans are living in George Orwell’s
1984
.

For those who haven’t read Orwell’s classic prediction of our time, Big Brother, the government, could tell the “citizens” any lie and it was accepted unquestioningly. As a perceptive reader pointed out to me, we Americans, with our “free press,” are at this point today: “What is really alarming is the increasingly arrogant sloppiness of these lies, as though the government has become so profoundly confident of its ability to deceive people that they make virtually no effort to even appear credible.”

THE WEST IS TRAPPED IN ITS OWN PROPAGANDA

May 12, 2011

One of the wishes that readers often express to me came true today (May 11). I was on the mainstream media. It was a program with a worldwide reach—the BBC World Service. There were others on the program as well, and the topic was Hillary Clinton’s remarks (May 10) about the lack of democracy and human rights in China.

I startled the program’s host when I compared Hillary’s remarks to the pot calling the kettle black. I was somewhat taken aback myself by the British BBC program host’s rush to America’s defense and wondered about it as the program continued. Surely, he had heard about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo detainees, CIA secret torture prisons sprinkled around the world, invasion and destruction of Iraq on the basis of lies and deceptions, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. Surely, he was aware of Hillary’s hypocrisy as she demonized China but turned a blind eye to Israel, Mubarak, Bahrain and the Saudis. China’s record is not perfect, but is it this bad? Why wasn’t the Chinese Minister for Foreign Affairs criticizing America’s human rights abuses and rigged elections? How come China minds its own business and we don’t?

These questions didn’t go down well. None of the other interviewees or guests thought that Hillary had made a good decision, but even the Chinese guests were not free of the common mindset that frames every issue: that the West’s standard is the one by which the rest of the world is judged. By pointing out our own shortcomings, I was challenging that standard. The host and other guests could not escape from the restraints imposed on thought by the role of the West as world standard.

What has happened to the West is that it can see itself and others only through the eyes of its own propaganda. There was a great deal of talk about China’s lack of democracy. As the BBC program was being broadcast, the news intruded that Greeks had again taken to the streets to protest the costs of the bailout of the banks and Wall Street—the rich—being imposed on ordinary people at the expense of their lives and aspirations. The Irish government announced that it was going to confiscate with a tax part of the Irish people’s pension accumulations. It simply did not occur to the host and other guests that these are not democratic outcomes.

It is a strange form of democracy that produces political outcomes that reward the few and punish the many, despite the energetic protests of the many. Political scientists understand that US electoral outcomes are determined by powerful monied interests that finance the political campaigns and that the bills Congress passes and the President signs are written by these interest groups to serve their narrow interests. Such conclusions are dismissed as cynicism and do not alter the mindset. While the program’s host and guests were indulging in the West’s democratic and human rights superiority, the American Civil Liberties Union was sending out a bulletin urging its members to oppose legislation now before Congress that would give the current and future presidents of the United States expanded war authority to use, on their own initiative, military force anywhere in the world independently of the restraints imposed by the US Constitution and international law.

CREATING THE BIN LADEN “REALITY”

May 14, 2011

I have heard one dozen times today (May 13) from media that the US killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. I heard it three times from National Public Radio, twice from the BBC, and from every TV and radio station I encountered, even those stations that play the rock and roll music of the 1950s and 1960s. The killing of bin Laden has now entered the legends of our time and, no doubt, the history books.

So...the US government that told us that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and “Al Qaeda connections” and that Iran has nuclear missiles that require the US to ring Russia with anti-ballistic missile systems, finally told us the truth for once? Obama found Osama and had him murdered, apparently unarmed in his underwear, defended not by Al Qaeda, “the best trained, most dangerous vicious killers on the planet,” but by two unarmed women.

As I offered previously, if you believe this, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I can let you have for a cheap price.

The government has created another reality for us proles. We won again. Us white hats got the black hat, just like in the western movie. Fantasy is better than fact, and us good guys are on a roll. It makes everybody happy, even those who have lost their jobs, their houses, their pensions.

So, who’s the next black hat? The military/security complex cannot do without a bad guy, or the budget could be cut and billions of dollars in profits would go missing. Without someone for Americans to hate, the show can’t go on.

Homeland Security says the next black hat will be “domestic extremists.” The CIA says it will be the next Al Qaeda leader, bin Laden’s replacement, who will terrorize us white hats for killing bin Laden. The neocon brownshirts say it is Pakistan, who hid bin Laden from us, thus protecting him from justice being done. Hillary says it is China, and as the US economy continues its collapse, more and more fingers will point at China.

Airport Security will pat down more babies, feel more genitals, and radiate more air travelers.

But without bin Laden, we will feel safer and more secure, which is counterproductive for the military/security complex. Obama has made a fundamental mistake. He has killed Emanuel Goldstein (bin Laden), the hate figure who justified the trillions of dollars we have blown trying to get him.

Once Homeland Security, the CIA, and the White House decide who the new hate figure is to be, we will be off and running again.

It took 10 years to get bin Laden. This proves that all those security experts who say that the war will last for 30 years might be underestimating the necessary commitment. If it takes 10 years each to find and murder the next two leaders, we are faced with conflict that lasts across generations.

As I wrote previously, bin Laden’s killing serves so many different agendas that even those who don’t believe the story have hooked their wagon to it. Al Qaeda itself can no longer take credit for acts of terrorism without declaring that it was to avenge bin Laden.

The bin Laden story is now set in stone, immune from fact. Global Research has provided us with bin Laden’s last known interview, which appeared in a Pakistan newspaper on September 28, 2001 and was translated and made available to the West by the BBC World Monitoring Service on September 29, 2001.

In the interview, bin Laden says: “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States ... Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks the common American people have been killed ... The Western media is unleashing such a baseless propaganda, which makes us surprised, but it reflects on what is in their hearts and gradually they themselves become captive of this propaganda ... Terror is the most dreaded weapon in the modern age and the Western media is mercilessly using it against its own people.”

But who in the West would believe a demonized bin Laden when to do so requires them to disbelieve George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the Western media?

We all know, don’t we, that in America the government always has the best interest of ordinary people at heart and always tells them the truth? If you don’t believe this, you are anti-American.

THE ONGOING BIN LADEN SAGA

May 16, 2011

“ The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

The ever-changing, ever-growing bin Laden story becomes ever more preposterous. The cowardly bin Laden is now the vain bin Laden, the terror mastermind who has nothing to do but to sit and watch videos of himself.

Washington released a video of an alleged bin Laden indulging in self- admiration, but there is no sound. Why? Was the video made without sound? Did Washington delete the audio? The video seems to show the alleged bin Laden speaking to someone in the room. Is the voice not bin Laden’s? Is the alleged bin Laden referring to the image on the screen in the third person, as not himself? Why would bin Laden have a video made of himself watching videos of himself? Why is a video of bin Laden watching bin Laden a headline story? Is it meant to substitute for the absence of a corpse?

As one reader put it, “The government is playing with us, experimenting to see if there is any tall tale we won’t believe.”

The story keeps changing as to whether “bin Laden’s compound,” no longer a million dollar luxury mansion, had Internet and communications or relied on couriers. The latest installment is that bin Laden was online. Washington says that the raid delivered into its hands bin Laden’s emails and diary, which, Washington claims, show an active bin Laden directing his terror network to carry out more plots. If bin Laden was online, why did Obama have to find him by trailing a courier?

Somehow the SEALs grabbed bin Laden’s diary and emails, but left all sorts of other documents that allegedly have fallen into Pakistani hands. These left-behind documents now serve as a pretext for more disputes with Pakistan and another excuse for ignoring Pakistan’s protests about the military operations the US carries out in Pakistan, violating the sovereignty of the country.

Why would the SEALs leave behind so many precious documents? First they kill for no reason the mastermind who could have revealed the world of terror; then they depart, leaving terror records behind. Some will say that this is typical US government incompetence. So how did such an incompetent government find bin Laden?

Any documents left behind were most likely carried in by the SEALs as plants.

Has anyone independent of Washington examined the alleged bin Laden diary and confirmed that it was in bin Laden’s handwriting? These kinds of questions are the kind the media, back when we had one, used to ask.

The bin Laden story is now such a fable with so many contradictory bits that people can pick and choose to suit the telling.
Time
magazine likes it all, except the part about an all-powerful bin Laden, still in control, rejecting an underling’s proposal “to fit a tractor with rotating blades to use to ‘mow down the enemies of Allah.’”
Time
prefers a bin Laden who was unsettled by his realization that he had lost his “historic significance” prior to losing his life to the US Navy SEALs.

If bin Laden had lost his significance, why did Obama get such a boost in the polls from his claim that he found bin Laden and had him killed?

The American Empire cannot do without bin Laden. Maybe the next installment of the fable will be that bin Laden escaped, leaving behind a double, and is abroad carrying out more terror plots.

As the fable continues, try to rescue from the Memory Hole the fact that we were presented with a death without a corpse and that Washington has no explanation for why an unarmed, undefended, frail man, who was a font of terrorist information, was murdered and not captured.

THE STRAUSS-KAHN FRAME-UP:

THE AMERICAN POLICE STATE STRIDES FORWARD

May 18, 2011

The International Monetary Fund’s director, Dominique Strauss- Kahn, was arrested last Sunday in New York City on the allegation of an immigrant hotel maid that he attempted to rape her in his hotel room. A New York judge has denied Strauss-Kahn bail on the grounds that he might flee to France.