| The War On Terror As Big Lie
On September 11, 2002, USA Today published a remarkable story
in which it revealed that the decision to go to war with Iraq had already been made-within weeks of 9/11-and that the decision had been made "by osmosis" :
Iraq course set from tight White House circle
By John Diamond, Judy Keen, Dave Moniz, Susan Page and Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY WASHINGTON - President Bush's determination to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision. Before the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, Bush will make his case for "regime change" in detail and in public for the first time. But he decided that Saddam must go more than 10 months ago; the debate within the administration since then has been about the means to accomplish that end. How did Bush make the decision, perhaps the most consequential of his presidency? USA TODAY interviewed officials at the White House, State Department, Pentagon, intelligence agencies, Congress and elsewhere to explore what factors were weighed and whose voices were heard. The process underscores Bush's confidence in his own judgment and his hard-line policy instincts. It shows his reliance on a tight circle of aides, his penchant for secrecy and his preference for unilateral action. And it illustrates how his approach has complicated his efforts now to win support from allies and members of Congress who felt they weren't adequately consulted before. Among the key findings: The decision to target Saddam "kind of evolved, but it's not clear and neat," a senior administration official says, calling it "policymaking by osmosis." "There wasn't a flash moment. There's no decision meeting," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. "But Iraq had been on the radar screen - that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually ... before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem." Members of Congress weren't consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren't fully aired until afterward. The White House still has not requested that the CIA and other intelligence agencies produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a formal document that would compile all the intelligence data into a single analysis. An intelligence official says that's because the White House doesn't want to detail the uncertainties that persist about Iraq's arsenal and Saddam's intentions. A senior administration official says such an assessment simply wasn't seen as helpful. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls that "stunning." "If we are about to make a decision that could risk American lives, we need full and accurate information on which to base that decision," he says in a letter sent Tuesday to leaders of the committee and CIA Director George Tenet.
It's remarkable that five years after that story broke, all of Versailles persists in pretending that it doesn't exist, even though much more damning details-placing the decision to invade Iraq months before 9/11-have since come to light. And yet, within a period of several weeks, I and several other writers all wrote even more extensive accounts of how the so-called "war on terrorism" was actually a war for global dominance that had been years in the making. Several of us traced it back to a 1992 "Draft Defense Policy Guidance" that was disavowed when parts of it were leaked to the press, but which clearly foreshadowed later documents, most notably the September 2000 PNAC report, Rebuiding America's Defenses.
On September 27, Richard W. Behan updated the story, placing it squarely inside the "Big Lie" frame. Here's how it began:
"The Mega-Lie Called the 'War on Terror': A Masterpiece of Propaganda"
By Richard W. Behan, AlterNet. Posted September 27, 2007.
The fraudulence of the "War on Terror" is clearly revealed by looking at the pattern of actions that preceded and followed its launch.
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie ... The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state." --Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the administration of George W. Bush has told and repeated a lie that is "big enough" to confirm Joseph Goebbels' testimony. It is a mega-lie, and the American people have come to believe it. It is the "War on Terror."
The Bush administration endlessly recites its mantra of deceit: The War on Terror was launched in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It is intended to enhance our national security at home and to spread democracy in the Middle East. This is the struggle of our lifetime; we are defending our way of life from an enemy intent on destroying our freedoms. We must fight the enemy in the Middle East, or we will fight him in our cities.
This is classic propaganda. In Goebbels' terms, it is the "state" speaking its lie, but the political, economic, and military consequences of the Bush administration lie are coming into view, and they are all catastrophic. If truth is the enemy of both the lie and George Bush's "state," then the American people need to know the truth.
The military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were not done in retaliation for 9/11. The Bush administration had them clearly in mind upon taking office, and they were set in motion as early as Feb. 3, 2001. That was seven months prior to the attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon, and the objectives of the wars had nothing to do with terrorism.
This is beyond dispute. The mainstream press has ignored the story, but the administration's congenital belligerence is fully documented in book-length treatments and in the limitless information pool of the internet. (See my earlier work, for example.)
Invading a sovereign nation unprovoked, however, directly violates the charter of the United Nations. It is an international crime. Before the Bush administration could attack either Afghanistan or Iraq, it would need a politically and diplomatically credible reason for doing so.
The terrorist violence of Sept. 11, 2001, provided a spectacular opportunity. In the cacophony of outrage and confusion, the administration could conceal its intentions, disguise the true nature of its premeditated wars, and launch them. The opportunity was exploited in a heartbeat.
Within hours of the attacks, President Bush declared the United States "… would take the fight directly to the terrorists," and "… he announced to the world the United States would make no distinction between the terrorists and the states that harbor them." Thus the "War on Terror" was born.
The fraudulence of the "War on Terror," however, is clearly revealed in the pattern of subsequent facts:
? In Afghanistan the state was overthrown instead of apprehending the terrorist. Offers by the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden were ignored, and he remains at large to this day.
? In Iraq, when the United States invaded, there were no al Qaeda terrorists at all.
? Both states have been supplied with puppet governments, and both are dotted with permanent U.S. military bases in strategic proximity to their hydrocarbon assets.
? The U.S. embassy nearing completion in Baghdad is comprised of 21 multistory buildings on 104 acres of land. It will house 5,500 diplomats, staff and families. It is ten times larger than any other U.S. embassy in the world, but we have yet to be told why.
? A 2006 National Intelligence Estimate shows the war in Iraq has exacerbated, not diminished, the threat of terrorism since 9/11. If the "War on Terror" is not a deception, it is a disastrously counterproductive failure.
? Today two American and two British oil companies are poised to claim immense profits from 81 percent of Iraq's undeveloped crude oil reserves. They cannot proceed, however, until the Iraqi Parliament enacts a statute known as the "hydrocarbon framework law."
? The features of postwar oil policy so heavily favoring the oil companies were crafted by the Bush administration State Department in 2002, a year before the invasion.
? Drafting of the law itself was begun during Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, with the invited participation of a number of major oil companies. The law was written in English and translated into Arabic only when it was due for Iraqi approval.
? President Bush made passage of the hydrocarbon law a mandatory "benchmark" when he announced the troop surge in January of 2007.
When it took office, the Bush administration brushed aside warnings about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Their anxiety to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq was based on other factors.
Later in his article, Behan makes a key point, which is also universally overlooked:
Other nations have suffered criminal acts of terrorism, but there is no precedent for conflating the terrorists with the states that harbor them, declaring a "war" and seeking with military force to overthrow a sovereign government. Victimized nations have always relied successfully on international law enforcement and police action to bring terrorists to justice.
But the Bush administration needed more than this. War plans were in the files. They needed to justify invasions. Only by targeting the "harboring states," as well as the terrorists, did they stand a chance of doing so.
This really should be the final nail in the coffin for any remaining doubts that the "War on Terror(ism)" is a put-up job. And once you admit that, what's really going on becomes painfully obvious, painfully fast, as in Bill Maher notes:
New Rule: Stop Saying Iraq is Another Vietnam, it's Another Enron
Iraq is Enron, and President Bush is Ken Lay. He's fighting a war with phony accounting tricks. The Bush administration fudged the numbers to get us into Iraq, and cooked the books to keep us there.... just like with Enron, the good men and women who are blowing the whistle on Iraq contractor fraud are being vilified, fired, demoted, and those are the lucky ones.
Last Friday morning the Senate Democratic Policy Committee held a hearing entitled "The Mistreatment of Iraq Contracting Whistleblowers," just in time to make the Friday news dump. According to the committee more than $10 billion dollars in Iraq reconstruction and military support contracts is unaccounted for. In other words, for every six dollars spent in Iraq one dollar is in question....
Donald Vance, a Navy veteran, was working for an Iraqi-owned outfit called the Shield Group Security Company. Vance said he witnessed Shield Group selling guns, land mines, and rocket-launchers to Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry workers. Vance described Shield Groups as "a Wal-Mart for guns." Vance reported this to the FBI, and instead of a pat on the back, he got 97 days at Camp Cropper, a military prison outside of Baghdad. In fact, Saddam's Hussein's old crib. Vance was placed in solitary confinement, subjected to head-banging music blaring from dawn to dusk, and interrogators screaming the same questions over and over again in his face.
Also testifying at the hearing along with Vance was Barry Godfrey, a former KBR employee (KBR+Halliburton=Cheney) who claimed that he was fired after complaining to his supervisors about fraudulent overcharges.
Also testifying was Bunnatine Greenhouse. Greenhouse is the former highest-ranking civilian contracting official at the Army Corps of Engineers, so I'll dispense with the "Greenhouse having gas" joke. But Greenhouse was removed from her position when she tried to crack down on "casual and clubby contracting practices" at the Army Corps of Engineers....
Meanwhile the Bush administration has not litigated a single case against a contractor alleged to have defrauded the US Government in Iraq. Apparently, like terrorism, this isn't a law enforcement issue either.
But this is just one piece of the puzzle. In her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein lays out the case that what we are seeing in Iraq is just one facet of a sustained war against mixed economies that benefit all members of society on behalf of what she calls a "corporatist" economic order that produces fabulous wealth for a tiny few inside the bubble, and a Hobbesian existence for those outside. The method of choice for waging the war is where her title comes from-democratic majorities would never agree to such changes, which is why they are imposed when societies are in a state of shock, whether due to military coup, invasion, or natural disaster. And the reason for this is quite simple: in the wake of the Great Depression mixed economies were almost universally embraced as the common-sense way to ensure economic and political stability. No more 1929s and no more Hitlers, please!
If September 11, 2001 was a tremendously effective way to shock America, just as September 11, 1973 had shocked Chile, then Klein provides a way to frame that shock as part of a largr pattern, and in doing so, to step outside it, and begin constructing a larger counter-narrative. In doing so, Klein also strongly suggests that terror(ism) is very much what is being fought for, not against. |
