How America Was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Welfare State Page 17

  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 maste
rmind 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.

  President Bill Clinton survived his sexual escapades, because he was a servant to the system, not a threat. But Strauss-Kahn, like former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, was a threat to the system, and, like Eliot Spitzer, Strass-Kahn has been deleted from the power ranks.

  Strauss-Kahn was the first IMF director in my lifetime, if memory serves, who disavowed the traditional IMF policy of imposing on the poor and ordinary people the cost of bailing out Wall Street and the Western banks. Strauss-Kahn said that regulation had to be reimposed on the greed-driven, fraud-prone financial sector, which, unregulated, destroyed the lives of ordinary people. Strauss-Kahn listened to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, one of a handful of economists who has a social conscience.

  Perhaps the most dangerous black mark in Strauss-Kahn’s book is that he was far ahead of America’s French puppet, President Sarkozy, in the upcoming French elections. Strauss-Kahn simply had to be eliminated.

  It is possible that Strauss-Kahn eliminated himself and saved Washington the trouble. However, as a well-travelled person who has often stayed in New York hotels and in hotels in cities around the world, I have never experienced a maid entering unannounced into my room, much less when I was in the shower.

  In the spun story, Strauss-Kahn is portrayed as so deprived of sex that he attempted to rape a hotel maid. Anyone who ever served on the staff of a powerful public figure knows that this is unlikely. On a senator’s staff on which I served, there were two aides whose job was to make certain that no woman, with the exception of his wife, was ever alone with the senator. This was done to protect the senator both from female power groupies, who lust after celebrities and powerful men, and from women sent by a rival on missions to compromise an opponent. A powerful man such as Strauss-Kahn would not have been starved for women, and as a multi-millionaire he could certainly afford to make his own discreet arrangements.

  As Henry Kissinger said, “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” In politics, sex is handed out as favors and payoffs, and it is used as a honey trap. Some Americans will remember that Senator Packwood’s long career (1969- 1995) was destroyed by a female lobbyist, suspected, according to rumors, of sexual conquests of Senators, who charged that Packwood propositioned her in his office. Perhaps what inspired the charge was that Packwood was in the way of her employer’s legislative agenda.

  Even those who exercise care can be framed by allegations of an event to which there are no witnesses. On May 16 the British Daily Mail reported that prior to Strauss-Kahn’s fateful departure for New York, the French newspaper, Liberation, published comments he made while discussing his plans to challenge Sarkozy for the presidency of France. Strauss-Kahn said that as he was the clear favorite to beat Sarkozy, he would be subjected to a smear campaign by Sarkozy and his interior minister, Glaude Gueant. Strauss-Kahn predicted that a woman would be offered between 500,000 and 1,000,000 euros (more than $1,000,000) to make up a story that he raped her.

  The Daily Mail reports that Strauss-Kahn’s suspicions are supported by the fact that the first person to break the news of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest was an activist in Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party—who apparently knew about the scandal before it happened. Jonathan Pinet, a politics student, tweeted the news just before the New York Police Department made it public, although he said that he simply had a ‘friend’ working at the Sofitel where the attack was said to have happened. The first person to re-tweet Mr Pinet was Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor who had previously publicized details of multi-millionaire Strauss-Kahn’s luxurious lifestyle in a bid to dent his left wing credentials.

  Strauss-Kahn could just as easily have been set up by rivals inside the IMF, as well as by rivals within the French political establishment.

  Michelle Sabban, a senior councilor for the greater Paris region and a Strauss-Kahn loyalist, said: “I am convinced it is an international conspiracy.”

  She added: “It’s the IMF they wanted to decapitate, not so much the Socialist primary candidate. It’s not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That’s how they got him.”

  Even some of Strauss-Kahn’s rivals said they could not believe the news. “It is totally hallucinatory,” said centrist Dominique Paille.

  “ If it is true, this would be a historic moment, but in the negative sense, for French political life. I hope that everyone respects the presumption of innocence. I cannot manag
e to believe this affair.”

  And Henri de Raincourt, minister for overseas co-operation in President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, added: “We cannot rule out the thought of a trap.”

  Michelle Sabban is on to something when she says the IMF was the target. Strauss-Kahn is the first IMF director who is not lined up on the side of the rich against the poor. Strauss-Kahn’s suspicions were of Sarkozy, but Wall Street and the US government also had strong reasons to eliminate him. Wall Street is terrified by the prospect of regulation, and Washington was embarrassed by the recent IMF report that China’s economy would surpass the US economy within five years. An international conspiracy is not out of the question.

  Indeed, the plot is unfolding as a conspiracy. Authorities have produced a French woman who claims she was a near rape victim of Strauss- Kahn a decade ago. It would be interesting to know whether this allegation is the result of a threat or a bribe. As in the case of Julian Assange, there are now two women to accuse Strauss-Kahn. Once the prosecutors get the odds of two females against one male, they win in the media.

  It has not been revealed how the authorities knew Strauss-Kahn was on a flight to France. However, by arresting him aboard his scheduled flight just as it was to depart, the authorities created the image of a man fleeing from a crime.

  The way American justice (sic) works is that prosecutors in about 96 percent of the cases get a plea bargain. US prosecutors are permitted by judges and the public to pay for testimony against the defendant and to put sufficient pressure on innocent defendants to coerce them into making a guilty plea in exchange for lesser charges and a lighter sentence. Unless the hotel maid has a spell of bad conscience and admits she was paid to lie, or gets cold feet about perjuring herself, Strauss-Kahn is likely to find that American criminal justice (sic) is organized to produce conviction regardless of innocence or guilt.