When Lying Pays Off

America’s manipulative neo-conservatives, who support unending aggression against any country that does not succumb to United States political, economic, and military control and who, themselves, seized power in Washington through electoral malfeasance, are taking a page from Nazi Germany’s leaders in their quest for world domination. It is no coincidence that the neo-cons are worried about comparisons between their policies and those of Hitler. Ed Gernon, the Canadian executive producer of the upcoming CBS miniseries, “Hitler: The Rise of Evil,” was fired when he suggested similarities between the methods used by both Hitler and Bush to wipe away civil liberties by playing on popular fear. The Nazi-like campaign against Gernon was launched by the New York Post and TV Guide, both owned by proto-fascist Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

After being caught lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to prove their flimsy case that Iraq was a world class threat, the neo-cons now are planting fabricated documents in the rubble of Iraqi intelligence and secret police facilities. Through a media laundering process, “discovered” documents are handed over to right-wing outlets owned by such slash and burn media moguls as Murdoch, Conrad Black, and Sun Myung Moon.

We are now being fed information that captured Iraqi intelligence documents “prove” that France assisted escaping members of Saddam Hussein’s government by handing them French passports in Syria. This follows repeated allegations that other “documents” proved French (and Russian and German) intelligence cooperation with Iraq’s intelligence service before the war. Syria has been accused of accepting Iraq’s phony weapons of mass destruction. Iran is accused of helping Al Qaeda (its most bitter enemy). Hitler used false evidence and phony rhetoric to justify his invasions of Danzig, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. American ambassadors in New Zealand, Norway, Turkey, Greece, Canada, Mexico, Barbados, Jamaica, Brazil, Belgium, Chile, and Luxembourg have acted like Nazi German Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop’s bellicose ambassadors in bullying nations that failed to support the U.S. war on Iraq. France is being faced with being kicked out of NATO military planning meetings, Germany with a loss of U.S. military bases, Belgium with the loss of NATO’s headquarters, and Canada, Chile, and Mexico with trade sanctions.

There are lies, damned lies, and Ahmad Chalabi. The leader of the Iraqi National Congress, stooge of the neo-cons, and a convicted bank embezzler is now aiming his wrath at Jordan. Chalabi, who bilked the American taxpayer out of millions of dollars from State Department and CIA budgets in order to fight his self-styled struggle against Saddam from the restaurants of London’s Mayfair District and the clothiers of Savile Row, now claims that recently “found” documents implicate Jordan’s Royal Family in Saddam’s spider’s web. Of course, it was a Jordanian court that found Chalabi guilty of stealing $300 million from the country’s Petra Bank and which sentenced him to over 20 years at hard labor. It is surprising that it took this Gollum-like sycophantic creature so long to accuse the Jordanians of being in bed with Saddam. Of course, Chalabi will not admit that while he was a math professor at the American University of Beirut during the 1970s, he served as an agent for the Shah of Iran’s feared SAVAK secret police. So much for Chalabi’s “democratic” credentials and his support for using Iraq as a base for the United States to attack Iran and install the son of the Shah upon a resurrected Peacock Throne.

Chalabi fits in well with the other congenital liars who now lead the United States government. Chief among them are those who prevaricated at every turn about why the United States went to war against Iraq. They first said the war was to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical, and biological. When no nuclear weapons were found and after a document purporting that Iraq purchased uranium from the West African nation of Niger was shown to be fake, the list of reasons for the war was pared down to the chem-bio weapons. When that story was shown to be untrue, the story changed to: “We had to liberate the Iraqi people from a ruthless tyrant.” The chief truth manipulators were President George Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumfeld, his obedient “Igor,” Paul Wolfowitz, and think tank denizens and administration consultants Richard Perle Newt Gingrich, and Michael Ledeen.

Why does the Bush administration lie so much? It is mainly because Bush’s Svengali-like political adviser, Karl Rove, has taken to heart the advice of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Rove has lived by this tenet throughout his political career. During the 2000 GOP primary campaign, it was the hand of Rove that was behind vicious rumors about Senator John McCain’s prisoner of war record, his adopted daughter, his marital fidelity, and even his sexual orientation. Rove’s guns were then turned on Vice President Al Gore in the general election with similar lies about the Vice President’s Vietnam service and Senate voting record.

A true symbiotic relationship exists between Rove and the neo-cons. Rove provides for them a nurturing host – the Pentagon — in which to operate, procreate politically, and periodically ejaculate disinformation. No sooner had the fake Iraqi intelligence documents “exposing” links between Saddam on one hand and Germany, Russia, France, and British Labor Party Member of Parliament George Galloway on the other been “revealed,” other “documents” fingered former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, Washington Democratic Representative Jim McDermott, former House Democratic Whip David Bonior, Michigan’s anti-war Representative John Conyers, Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin, and the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign as similarly being linked to Saddam. It is fitting and timely that the Senate recently disclosed files from the hearings of the disgraced Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. He also emulated Goebbels in using the “big lie” tactic. Rove and the neo-cons relish in the big lie tactic. It is their lifeblood. Without it they would be impotent. The neo-con’s obsessive use of the lie means that whatever they state, the opposite is true. They are the liars. Those who call them on their lies are the truth sayers. The neo-cons now say that 170,000 priceless ancient artifacts were not stolen from Iraq’s National Museum. They say Saddam and his henchmen stole them. The artifacts were stolen by thieves under the watchful eye of American troops. That is the truth. The neo-cons are lying. It is simply as binary an equation as that. All the lies of the neo-cons should be viewed in the same binary manner.

Sadly, the big lie may soon be turned on Secretary of State Colin Powell. After Powell’s deputy Richard Armitage counterattacked after New Gingrich used the neo-con fortress, the American Enterprise Institute, to launch a broadside against Powell and the State Department, the neo-cons are getting ready to again use their big lie weapon, a virtual “weapon of crass destruction.” The Washington rumor circuit is rife with speculation that one of the many right-wing muck mills will soon “reveal” an extra-marital affair involving Powell. These days, it does not matter whether such rumors are based on fact or not. Rove prefers the politics of personal destruction and Powell is currently target number one for the neo-cons and their White House nurturers.

Lying and character assassination have paid off handsomely for the neo-cons. Another Nazi leader provided the neo-cons with a blueprint for the strategy seen in their repeated attacks on those who dare question the party line. Their targets range from the Dixie Chicks, Senator Robert Byrd, Bill Maher, and Michael Moore, to Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, to ABC News anchor Peter Jennings and MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield. Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, before committing suicide at the Nuremberg Trials, appeared to be advising the future neo-cons: “Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

A little advice for the neo-cons and your nurturers. Every day you are creating more and more enemies within the United States and abroad. Governments, non-governmental organizations, political parties and social movements, labor unions and business interests, and religious organizations and student groups are talking to each other and are realizing they have a common purpose. That purpose is to drive the neo-con threat away from the power centers of the world. They are beginning to understand intermeshing dependencies and are connecting the dots: Enron, Hollinger, UNOCAL, Halliburton, Carlyle Group, Trireme, L-3, SAIC, etc. Your aggressive policies are upsetting the global balance of power, destroying economies, threatening international trade, and first and foremost, killing innocent people. Like the Nazis in Nuremberg, you will, one day, face an accounting for your crimes. As with the Nazis who stood in the docket in Nuremberg, few, if anyone, will be in the mood to grant you clemency or mercy.

WAYNE MADSEN is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth. He is the co-author, with John Stanton, of the forthcoming book, “America’s Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II.”

Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com