The new book by Bob Woodward, State of Denial, contains
the devastating information that Condolezza Rice, while
National Security Advisor, was told by CIA Director George
Tenet and Defense Department counterterrorism chief J.
Cofer Black that an al Qaeda attack on the United States
was imminent--a month before it happened.
None of the three parties testified to this effect before
the 911 Commission, and Rice specifically stated that there
was no warning.
Add to this the fact that the administration classified 11
warnings transmitted to the National Security Council by the
FAA prior to 911 that US aircraft were liable to be
attacked, AND that Dr. Rice never mentioned these warnings
during her testimony either, and a very dark picture emerges.
Either Condoleeza Rice is spectacularly incompetent, or the
warnings were being intentionally ignored. There is no third
possibility. No national security advisor would fail to
transmit warnings such as that delivered by Tenet and Black
to the whole council for discussion, at the very least. It
would normally have been transmitted to the president, also.
The FAA warnings are at a lower level, but they should have
only added to a sense of alarm that simply was not there.
I have just finished reading Jim Marrs's new book,
The
Terror Conspiracy, which does an expert job of making the
case that the administration not only ignored warnings, but
actively participated in the orchestration of the attack.
Could such a thing be possible? Well, before I had my close
encounters of the third kind, I would have said no, of
course not, it's just conspiracy theory.
Now that I have seen up close and personal just how good
the United States is at keeping secrets, and the deep,
profoundly evil consequences of some of those secrets, I no
longer think of it as a healthy institution or even a good
institution gone wrong.
It has a dark heart, and that heart is devoted to one thing:
the eradication of human freedom through the destruction of
the American Republic. Increasingly, at the highest levels
of government, we find people who are unable or unwilling to
resist whatever it is hiding within.
I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do not know what is there,
but I do know this: something is. It acted first with the
assassination of JFK. The fact that it got away with this
enabled it to embed itself in our government, where it has
been acting with more or less freedom ever since.
At present, it has more freedom than it has ever had before,
and when, over the summer of 2001, the president's approval
ratings were plummeting, I think a decision was made to
simply sit back and wait, and let the terrorists do their
thing.
It worked: by October, the president was at an all time high
in popularity, and the United States Congress was so
frightened that it was willing to throw away our freedoms by
passing a largely unread Patriot Act.
In addition, it has acted to insure its place by striking
directly at the place that counts the most: the ballot box.
Princeton University researchers have shown that
Diebold
electronic voting machines have been designed so that votes
cast on them can easily be changed without leaving a trace.
Whether this is incompetence or intention is unknown, but
the fact remains that 10% of the voting machines in the
United States are now suspect. And it must not be forgotten
that the president of Diebold is a strong supporter of
George W. Bush. He calls himself a Republican, but I do not
think of people who support the president as Republicans at
all. My guess is that 10% of voting machines will turn
election after election to the president's supporter,
wherever the races are close enough to make that possible,
or the machines prevalent enough.
In November, again and again, we'll see surprises: actual
votes differing from exit poll results, and Bush supporters
winning by a hair.
Republicans stand for freedom and free enterprise, not for
curtailing our freedoms and crushing the life out of small
business and enterpreneurship. Those goals are as far as you
can get from the Republican tradition almost as is possible.
In fact, the last place you can find them is in the policies
of National Socialism.
Almost the first thing that Adolf Hitler did upon his
appointment as chancellor was to draw up legislation
essentially ending freedom in Germany. Parts of it even read
a good bit like the Patriot Act. And his system concentrated
power in the hands of large corporations at the expense of
small business. By 1938, the small manufacturing enterprise
had been virtually eliminated in Germany, mostly via forced
sales of companies to Nazi sympathizers, who then merged
them into the larger corporations that had financed the
sales in the first place.
No, what we have in Washington now is not Republicanism. It
is a slightly more user friendly version of National
Socialism, and at its dark heart is an irrevocable belief
that the insiders know better how to run the country than
the people.
Oddly enough, the reason republics work so well, fight so
little and last so long is that the opposite is,
historically, the truth: the people are very good at
governing themselves, wise about hiring and firing leaders,
intelligent about where they want policy to go.
Ideology can never be complex enough to respond correctly in
all situations, and the more rigid the ideology, the less
competent to govern it is. This is why Nazism and communism
failed, and why European socialism works poorly. Socialism
survives only because it is somewhat more flexible than
communism, which attempts to impose its noble ideals on that
most ignoble of creatures, us, the ordinary folk, who know
what actually matters--home, family and a decent, peaceful
life--far more than the deluded dreamers who concoct
ideologies.
The president operates according to a rigid ideology, and so
do his primary advisors, Rice, Rumsfeld and Cheney. And, I
guess I must now add, that sinister old fool Henry
Kissinger, who guided America to defeat 30 years ago and is
apparently back again, doing the same thing.
Kennedy was going to get us out of Vietnam because he knew
that central forces cannot win wars against guerillas. He
knew this because he knew his American
history. George Washington's Continental Army was a guerilla
organization. The Minutemen were our Viet Cong...and our
Madhi Army, for that matter.
Henry Kissinger brings to the table a profoundly European
worldview. It was the inability of the European imperial
organzations to cope with guerilla movements that lost them
their empires. Try as it might, the British Army could not
defeat the Mau Mau any more than we will defeat the Iraqi
insurgents or the Taliban. Fighting such battles with
organized military structures is impossible. Defeat is
always certain.
The moment that I heard that Kissinger was in the
background, advising the administration, I knew that we were
doomed not just to some sort of stalemate in Iraq and
Afghanistan, but to absolute defeat on both fronts.
Armies cannot fight ideas. It's that simple. NATO forces in
Afghanistan brag that they have 'rooted out' hundreds of
Taliban fighters every week or so. But the numbers never
diminish, any more than the numbers of Viet Cong did. This is
because this is not a battle between military forces. The
other side doesn't exist as a military force. The other side
is concealed in the minds of people hoping for a better
life, longing for purity of spirit and excellence in their
days, and willing to give their lives for a dream.
This is not something an army can defeat. How ironic that
Henry Kissinger is so oddly indicted by the philosopher
George Santayana's warning that those who would ignore
history are condemned to repeat it. Kissinger has condemned
us all to repeat history that he himself created, by
ignoring it.
But, then, what can defeat the Taliban, what can defeat al
Qaeda, what can defeat the Iraqi insurgency?
Or is that even the question? One of the deepest of all
Republican traditions has been unfairly called
'isolationism,' which conjures up notions of moronic hicks
hiding their heads in the sand in order to avoid the Hitlers
of the world.
The desire to look to one's own national condition first is
a much more accurate way to describe the policies of such
Republicans as Robert Taft, and it is a policy that
our present gang of ideological adventurers would do well to
consider.
It is argued by the administration that terror is bred in
'failed states' like Afghanistan, Sudan and Iraq. But
Afghanistan was not a failed state at all, it was simply an
extremely unpleasant one. It did not harbor al Qaeda, it
wanted to get rid of al Qaeda. The Taliban knew perfectly
well that an al Qaeda attack on the United States would be a
death sentence for them. They were not psychotics at all,
but politicians with a silly, nasty ideology that, frankly,
is none of our business. We are not the keepers of the
Afghans any more than we are the 'liberators' of the Iraqis.
We need people in office who can rationally and objectively
rethink the way our nation addresses itself to the rest of
the world. All we have managed to do over the past seven
terrible years is create a pool of potential terrorists who
were not there before we started, run up a national debt
that will make our children curse the day the were born, and
reveal for all to see the fact that our army is not an
effective weapon in the modern world, because it is not the
right weapon.
So this is what that dark entity, that has been trying to
run this country unfettered since it murdered Kennedy, has
finally accomplished: the same thing that the Nazis
accomplished, and for exactly the same reason: ideology
cannot be imposed on reality. It is always too simple to
succeed in the subtle and complex arena of human affairs.
In 1895, Tsar Nicholas II ridiculed Bolshevik notions of
reform as "senseless dreams." He might well have been
talking to all of the dreamers of the next hundred years,
the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the American religious and
economic ideologues of both the left and the right, all of
them.
Nearly half a billion lives were lost over the attempts by
the communists and the Nazis to impose their senseless
dreams on others. Now, it's our turn. So far, we have lost
only a few thousand in terms of human lives. There has as
yet been no mass slaughter, no epochal disaster. But the
foolish adventurism of the administration has made it more
possible than ever that a really gigantic terrorist attack
will be mounted.
If so, the result could easily be the ruin of our republic,
and if, God forbid, it involves the sudden destruction of
Washington, a turning point in American history so
catastrophic that it is almost impossible to imagine.
This is where these corporate adventurers, religious
extremists and their political cronies have taken us. Senseless
dreams, for sure.
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