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January 27, 2006
Check Point Propaganda And Bush’s Mega State of War
“War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.” - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Voice of America’s Washington DC based bureau daily radio broadcast promotes President Bush’s State of the Union battle cry for global democracy and freedom as the altruistic war weapon against terrorism just as the Central Intelligence Agency broadcasted to Soviet occupied European countries during the Cold War.
Such shortwave radio propaganda is symbolic of the highly paradoxical conventional wisdom in our geopolitical relationship with warmongering, in actu and peacemaking, in posse the White House actions of which continue to be kept secret during Bush’s mega State of War.
VOA also reported that, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, is restructuring the U.N.’s Human Rights program, claiming it is fraudulent and ineffective, most likely so Bush can eliminate international whistle-blowers on his excessive executive policy violations of human rights with alleged terrorist detainees. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is touting saber rattling brinkmanship to justify another unilateral preemptive military strike, this time upon the alleged rogue-state Iran for reopening the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant and two others. And President Bush continues to conduct his knee-jerk legislation from the Oval Office, professing in the vein of Richard Nixon that as Commander in Chief he has the right to subvert constitutional law for the sake of national security. Freedom and liberty spoken from the mouths of Republicans has become the synonym for War.
“The apotheosis of State power is war. War creates a hell on earth.”1
The calculation of prosperity for the lavish lifestyles of a Republican congressional majority; empowered by a $2.5 trillion federal-state-local conglomerate cash cow – with an estimated $2 trillion dollar investment in the Iraq war2 -- supplying 50 percent of all weapons for sale on the world market – a 2.1 billion dollar a year K Street Project launched by former majority House of Representatives leader, Tom Delay -- is wholly separate from that of the common people’s interests of sovereignty.
By instituting an ersatz “state of war” the Bush-Cheney vanity has gained unprecedented unipolar power by conscripting patriotic American wage earners under the control of its unitary executive doctrine enhanced by promoting emotion-charged irrelevancies in the media, which is as formidable even in the absence of military conquest, e.g. War on Christmas. The insatiable assembly-line demand and tolerance for violence by America, buffered by the luxurious bubble of continental isolationism from the horrors inflicted on billions of innocent humans outside its borders, has smeared the hands of its citizenry with blood.
The dark sordid ambitious high-stakes payoff for war profits is good enough for Republicans to enact a hostile take over of democracy, who discount cold-blooded killing of innocent lives as a necessary sacrifice in exchange for corporate exploitation.
"Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war." ~Donald Rumsfeld
The falsified dangers of national security breaches in the Bush-Cheney administration era have encouraged the Republican Congress and its bribing-for-votes special interest allies to look for more trumped-up emergencies and moral equivalents for war to rally the citizenry and persuade them to give up more of their liberty and their constitutional rights to the State’s body politic. Because of a fatal lack of solidarity to the democratic system by the American people, Republicans have shifted majority partisanship into a pedigree of totalitarian government.
All of it is a deliberate deception to mislead with “Swiftboating” ambiguousness by aiming at the common people’s anxieties to seduce them into the “national effort”: Republican belittling of the rule of law. “The most egregious example is the conduct of the war in Iraq,” reports Elizabeth Holtzman in “The Impeachment of George W. Bush.”3
“We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history.”4
The list of recent abrogation’s of constitutional law duly enacted by the tyranny of Republicans broadening their despotism continue in a laundry list of a drudged through scandal after scandal with no constitutional accountability to its subversions. The president’s testimony on his own controversial actions is never impartial, often dangerous, and always useful, for it reveals the mind of the man if not the truth of the matter.
- Bush to criminalize protesters under Patriot Act as “disruptors” that violates civil rights.5
- Bush nullifies the anti-torture McCain Amendment with wavier right to use torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct when he sees fit. ''The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach ''will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks." This was reinforced by Vice President Dick Cheney who said, “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it…” By asserting constitutional authority in violation of the statute where it would assist the war on terrorism, Bush as re-opened the torture loophole.6
- President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.7
- Bush issued warrantless wiretapping on Americans prior to 9/11.8 The National Security Administration’s eavesdropping policy shows the extent to which Bush’s corruption has spurred the intelligence community to flout legal conventions domestically and internationally where the most covert tools of national-security policy have been misused.9
- Bush advocates he is above the rule of law under the Theory of Unitary Executive10, endorsed by Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito11 that undermines our constitutional legislative and judicial branches of government. Bush specifically claims that his executive authority outweighs the province of duty of the judicial department to interpret legislation.12
“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.” -- Edward R Murrow
There is a call to arms among us in the midst of this constitutional crisis. The need for mental alertness and dedication to clear critical thinking as rules of political engagement to checkpoint propaganda – a constant exercise of democratic judgment in discriminating and exposing propaganda for what it is - the deception of the Bush-Cheney regime to herd people into lock-step docility, and exhibit proof, the business of equality that American democracy was founded upon. Democratic constitutions are not designed to confirm the predominance of any elite interest, but to prevent it by upholding the permanent reign of rule of law against arbitrary partisan opinion.
As Dahr Jamail pointed out in “US Propaganda vs. Iraqi Reality” another his bullet point look at foreign media outlets yields the following developments that continue to be ignored or under-reported in the US: All told, over two hundred noncombatant Iraqis died in a three day period.
Moreover, from Dahr Jamail’s dispatch, “Freedom in action” I can concur with his anonymous friend’s comment in the email sent to Mr. Jamail from Iraq. “The Iraqis now get frightened from the local police and military as they exhibit a very high level of misconduct and abuse of the authority that they now have.”
This morning my exchange with a middle-aged Iraqi citizen in Baghdad was guarded but explicit about his living conditions. He had not slept in 48 hours, remaining alert to the unstable conditions outside on the streets. Fearful of harassment by the U.S. military patrols or Iraqi Police, he prefers to stay hidden in his house. In a desperate attempt to make light of his confining situation, he says he wants to fly to my country, where it’s safe to be outside.
In “‘Democracy’ Brings Bleak Days,” written by Dahr Jamail and Arkan Hamed for the Inter Press Service, the fear of national security forces stems from no impunity for their abuses and violations of the new Iraqi constitution, a constitution that sanctifies a police state rather than an open society. The similarities to Saddam Hussein’s regime are frightfully parallel.
“People have no recourse to law any more. "We are not living in a proper way," restaurant owner Qassim Abdul Hamed told IPS. "We are suffering at the hands of those who come in their vehicles just to have meals free of charge." The restaurant has to go on serving free meals to the Iraqi police, he said. "We can't say a word because they have guns."
Thus is the complimentary acrimonious style of George W. Bush’s arbitrary executive policy that has crept into the homes of Americans.
"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious" - 1984 - George Orwell
Ask a Republican if they are more willing to kill “over there” in cold blood, and they will blindly vote to wage war as the ideal harvest of an elitist democracy; the pure pugnacity of love glory that triggers the salivating appetite for foreign plunder of an unrestrained oligarchy. This kind of reckless Republican ego inflation has been enforced upon the egalitarian general welfare just as the Iraqis experience the brutal iron heel of oppression by the Pentagon’s military-industrialized complex.
“The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.”13
Obviously no substitutes have been offered, even after George H. W. Bush Sr. wrote, “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam.”14 I paraphrase his Time magazine article:
“Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we have been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and perhaps barren – outcome.”
Of three intellectual perceptions on Bush’s utopian despotism; Kevin Phillips’, “plutocracy”; Bertram Gross’ “friendly fascism” and Robert Kaplan’s Athenian oligarchies, I side with Kaplan. “The powerful exact what they can,” said the Athenians, “and the weak grant what they must.” American politics in the 21st century is a democracy in theory, and an oligarchy in practice. For as the Athenians learned, partisan corruption has a better chance of slipping through the fingers of justice in a democracy for all things are done by dint of money.
Just as the Bush administration has fundamentally divided the working class by race, creating a massive geoeconomic quadrant beyond the reach of “We the People,” these illicit strategies have been executed upon the Iraqi people as the greatest fallacies of far-fetched foreign policies in preserving national security.
Chris Floyd writes, “This was vividly demonstrated in one of the most revolting scenes in recent U.S. history: Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003, delivered to Congress and televised nationwide during the final frenzy of war-drum beating before the assault on Iraq. Trumpeting his successes in the war on terror, Bush claimed that "more than 3,000 suspected terrorists" had been arrested worldwide -- "and many others have met a different fate." His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: "Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem.””15
The Bush-Cheney regime has established War as America’s reason for existence, not liberty and freedom; it is a new brand of democracy in extremis, propagated by an egomaniacal Unitary Executive Power: The Mega State of War to established a never ending global dictatorship.
1 The State of War, Chapter 9; Libertarianism, by David Boaz http://www.libertarianism.org/ex-11.html
2 Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes estimate the cost of the Iraq war to be between $1-2 trillion.
3 Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman served four terms in Congress, where she played a key role in House impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060130/holtzman
4 The Moral Equivalent of War by William James, 1906 http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm
5 ACLU Opposes Patriot Act Provision http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/12/AR2005121201448.html
6 Bush Could Bypass New Torture Ban, by Charlie Savage
7 President Signs H.R. 3402, the "Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005" http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060105-3.html
8 Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11 by Jason Leopold http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011306Z.shtml
9 State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration by James Risen http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743270665/ref=ase_bookstorenow57-20/002-5594253-0312050?n=283155&tagActionCode=bookstorenow57-20
10 View of the George W. Bush Administration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_Executive_theory
11 The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2006, p.1
12 Scholar says Bush has used obscure doctrine to extend power 94 times, by Jennifer Van Bergen, The Raw Story; http://rawstory.com/news/2005/CanExecutive_Branch_Decide_0923.html
13 The Moral Equivalent of War by William James, 1906 http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm
14 Time (2 March 1998) http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm
15 Sacred Terror: Bush's "Universal Death Squad" By Chris Floyd, December 10, 2005; Bush Watch http://bushwatch.com/floyd.htm
Posted by Paul_Kamen at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)
Interview with Karen Kwiatkowski
In July, 2003, Karen Kwiatkowski retired as a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force, having served since 1978. From May, 2002, to February, 2003, Karen Kwiatkowski served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia directorate (NESA). Dr. Kwiatkowski presently teaches at James Madison University, and writes regularly for MilitaryWeek.com.
Interviewed by Omar Khan for www.dahrjamailiraq.com, read the interview of Dr. Kwiatkowski's blistering and revealing comments about the neo-conservatives, Bolsheviks, fascism and the Bush Administration agenda in Iraq and beyond.
OK: Could you say something about your reasons for joining the Air Force some 20 years ago?
KK: Basically, they gave me a full ROTC scholarship, and I needed money to go to college. That was the deal. I was happy to do it actually. I had applied for navy and army, and the one that I got was Air Force.
My dad had served in the navy for 4 years in, I guess, the late 50s. And he used to always talk about how great the military was. So we were pretty disposed to the military, but I joined the Air Force because they’re the ones that coughed up the money for college.
OK: So military service has been a tradition in your family for at least two generations.
KK: It’s definitely looked highly upon in my family. Actually, I have two brothers, both—one was for his career in the navy, just retired. The other was in the marines for about seven or eight years.
OK: What do you mean when you’ve elsewhere referred to the military as an apolitical institution?
KK: When I refer to the military as apolitical, that’s because, as an institution, it’s supposed to be. But it’s kind of political in the sense that if you’re what’s called a conservative—usually you’re in good company when you’re in the military. You’re around a lot of people that care about some of those basic things. So there’s that aspect. But technically apolitical.
We swear an oath to the constitution—to defend it against enemies, both foreign and domestic. They’re words, but every time you get promoted you have to retake the oath. So it does make you think about the constitution. You’re reminded of it in a way that other people in other jobs are not reminded of it. So we have this constant idea—it’s kind of reinforced to us throughout our careers: what we’re supposed to be doing, what we’re all about.
OK: How did you see whistleblowing in terms of these values?
KK: You’re oath is not to a political party, it’s not to an institution, but to an idea: to a constitutional republic. So we have a president who serves for 4-8 years.
And he has—according to the constitution—limited duties that he takes care of. We have a legislature; and a judiciary. So if you care about those things, and you’re out to preserve that balance—to respect that balance rather than persons—you don’t think of it as whistleblowing, you think of it as, you know, my loyalty is to what is right, to how these things are supposed to work. I was working pretty closely with those who lied to the American people into buying an unnecessary war, an illegal war, I think. But my loyalty is not to those people—whether those people are the president, Republican or Democrat, whether those people political appointees, whether those people are civil servants. The loyalty is to the system, and the system is set up in such a way to prevent stupid things from happening in foreign policy.
OK: What do you mean when you characterize neoconservatism as a dead philosophy of anticommunism?
KK: In 2002, before I was actually working with people doing Near East policy and seeing and meeting these neoconservatives—I didn’t even know what a neoconservative was. I began to look at who these individuals were, what they were doing before in our government, and what they cared about politically. These are the same guys that are responsible for Iran-Contra. They don’t care about the law. They are liberals at home—very much not a traditional conservative political perspective domestically, but closer to the more Social Democratic approach, somewhat like our Democratic party used to be, domestically; but, in terms of foreign policy, very hawkish, extremely hawkish, extremely aggressive—black and white, murder, death, kill basically. I hate to say that, but that’s what it is: they have to die so we can live. Intervention oriented foreign policy, which is not conservative either. This is kind of the political home of neoconservatives.
The Cold War was perfect for this crowd; and this crowd made their political bones during that time. These guys were the hardcore anticommunists even within the Reagan administration. Richard Perle actually left the administration in 1986 based on Reagan’s overtures and receptivity to Gorbachev. Perle, Wolfowitz, Armitage, Rumsfeld, Cheney—all these guys, though not always in the exact same way, had a place in the Reagan administration as hardline hawks, even though many of them were not Republicans. In fact Richard Perle to this day is a registered Democrat.
OK: What is your view of the legacy to which the neocons are heirs?
KK: The intellectual fathers of neoconservatism—what shapes their approach internationally—are the Bolsheviks. International revolution, international change—radical change, global revolution. And these same terms, these same ideas—of international change, revolution, transformation—these are the words of Michael Ledeen and some of the other articulators of neoconservatism. And the actual people, and they’re not ashamed to really say this, but guys like Irving Crystal and other intellectuals of the 30s had actually been Bolsheviks.
One of the characterizations of neocons today is that they are neo-Jacobins—philosophically, this idea that people are the same, all want the same thing, and should have the same thing. That ‘same thing’ in a modern neoconservative view is this idea of ‘democracy.’ But is it really democracy that they want, or is democracy simply a trojan horse. Certainly for Iraq, George Bush has been left with one story as to why we went in
If they had democracy, they’d take a vote, and we’d be kicked out of there immediately.
Certainly we don’t want them to have democracy, because then they’ll make us leave. So it’s unclear that democracy is a goal, but that’s what they talk about: the God of Democracy. So it’s not like Trotskyism in the sense that they’re not advocating global communism but they are advocating universal, radical—and in effect, catastrophic—change. And this is kind of a clear thread for many years.
So the neoconservatives are not new; during the Reagan era, the ‘Cold War’ was their vehicle for credibility—this evil enemy that we must face, or else the end of the world is coming. They cannot work without this global enemy, almost a kind of class warfare. You can’t just have a mere enemy; it has to be a monstrous enemy, something that can destroy us. They’ve found that in, or rather cultivated it, in what is called ‘Islamic Fascism.’ Unfortunately this doesn’t exist. No one advocates it. No one articulates it. In the 1930s, Hitler had fascism and he talked about it. Islamic Fascism is a made up thing. . But it doesn’t matter: what matters is that it’s useful in generating fear, and serves that same larger purpose—providing a platform from which to operate.
Now you can follow the money too. The neocon philosophy provides a construct within which we can—‘we,’ being the establishment, corporatism—can move. So you have this construct that talks of ‘fear’ ‘protection,’ ‘security.’ Which are used to advocate intervention—intervention for security, what Iraq was effectively sold as: ‘intervention for American security.’
OK: Please say a little bit about your experience in the Pentagon.
KK: I worked four and a half years for the Pentagon. Between May of 2002 and March of 2003, I worked in Near East South Asia (NESA) bureau in the Pentagon, which worked alongside The Office of Special Plans (OSP)—a group of twenty-five people or so in August 2002—under Bill Luti. It was dissolved in August 2003—about four months after the invasion and the mission accomplished declaration by the president.
Its job had been done.
The whole idea with Iraq was to destroy Iraq. It was not to rebuild it, turn it into a democracy. It was simply to take a country that had no navy, no airforce, and a very small—you know—fourth rate army and turn it into a country with no navy, no airforce, and no army. We did this, and OSP did its part in promoting that. Once it was done there was no need for OSP.
One of the amenities with which we were provided as staff officers were talking points—Saddam Hussein, WMD, and terrorism. If there is anything that you’d need to research on Iraq, you’d only need to take verbatim from the latest version of what OSP had produced on any one of these talking points. These same bullet points would of course be in presidential speeches. I can only assume—since they were producing them for us, on a very routine basis—I can only assume that OSP was the creative entity here in doing that.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had a staff of 6 or 7 people dedicated intelligence people who had no other job than to support our boss, Bill Luti (Deputy under NESA and OSP). Their only job was to answer Bill Luti’s questions and provide Bill Luti with the intelligence that the intelligence community had, particularly DIA intelligence. So the means by which a policy receives its information was perverted. It may have been perverted before then, but I know that it was perverted in the time that I was there, from May 2002 to March 2003. The DIA people were told: ‘no this is not what I want to hear, go back and do a better job’
This is what I saw as an observer. Not as a person inside DIA. But I can tell you, I talked to these guys—who’d come over to brief the lower level people on a routine basis:
They were always under pressure. OSP saying, ‘I don’t need that, give me what I need,’ and DIA saying, ‘I can’t give you something that doesn’t exist.’
I actually explained this to the Senate staffers during the Phase I investigation of intelligence. They were like: oh, whatever. Basically unwilling to entertain the possibility. But there was clearly a huge contempt for information; what they did, instead was to ask for exactly what they wanted to hear, probably about 95% of which was entirely false.
Anyone who talked of sanctions and continual bombing of Iraq over a dozen years, or said that there’s no evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Pentagon in 2002 was going to be told: I don’t want to hear that, go back and find me something I can use. And if you didn’t do that, like in the case of the DIA guy, who went back and looked and couldn’t find anything, he was then disinvited from meetings. Bill Luti had one briefing on Weapons of Mass Destruction, supposed to be prepared by the DIA—had been historically prepared by the DIA guy, had been historically prepared by the DIA guy. He didn’t like the way the DIA guy had done it, so transferred the responsibility to a policy office, that of course exaggerated, presented a threat that didn’t exist. But this made everybody happy, since Americans were getting excited for war. A noble lie taken as far as it can go.
OK: How does this fit into what you’ve called ‘grand plans’ that today ‘walk the corridors of the Pentagon’?
KK: This global enemy—‘Islamic fascism,’ ‘Islamic terrorism,’ or whatever it is—enables war in the Mideast. So the ‘grand plan’ is a Mideast transformation plan, which guys like Michael Ledeen have been talking about for a long time. Since we have this apocalyptic enemy, it’s either us or them. So in Iraq: the money goes for ‘security’— American bases, and police power to defend those bases. The things we’ve destroyed we have not rebuilt or fixed. The things that we have protected have been the Oil Ministry and the Finance Ministry. This is from the very beginning. Those bases in Iraq will be how we deal with (intimidate) the rest of the Middle East. Keep those other countries in line—politically, economically, and in every other way. This is clearly articulated, for example, in “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” actually written for Netanyahu: Iraq must first be changed, and from there we will be able to deal with our enemies—primarily, Syrians and Iranians. But this has nothing to do with America, or with American interests—in my opinion, anyway. Who benefits from this kind of foreign policy? This needs to become a topic that can be publicly discussed. If we can’t talk about it, then we shouldn’t be paying for it. What are they forecasting: something like 2 trillion dollars, or something, for this war? This is not an insignificant amount of money. So this question—Who benefits from this kind of foreign policy?—needs to become a topic that can be publicly discussed.
Posted by Dahr_Jamail at 02:08 AM | Comments (0)