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CounterPunch
September
11, 2002
American Journal
Bush: Still Popular a Year Later?
Don't Believe It
by Alexander Cockburn
They still refer to George Bush's popularity.
I don't think so. The dwindling number of folk who tell the pollsters
they think he's doing a good job are probably worried they'll
get investigated by Ashcroft if they don't. Imagine you're back
in the Soviet Union in 1941, right after Hitler's attack. "Good
morning, Tovaritsch. It's the People's Mass Observation Bureau.
In your frank estimation, comrade, is the General Secretary doing
(a) a wonderful job, (b) a good job (c) only so-so?" Just
my point. This isn't the Soviet Union, but people are wary.
For your average citizen it's been a
disillusioning year, starting with the commander in chief fleeing
down a missile silo in Nebraska. The guardians of the 401Ks turned
out to be scoundrels; the guardians of our spiritual morals,
the bishops and the parish priests, were exposed as child molesters;
the guardians of our safety, the security agencies, turned out
to be either useless.
Disasters usually bring out the worst
in authority and the best in  ordinary people. Andrew Greeley
put it really well in his column this week in the Chicago Sun
Times.
"On Sept. 11 last year, up to 1
million people were evacuated from Lower Manhattan by water .
. . It was an American Dunkirk, like the epic rescue of the British
army at Dunkirk in 1940 by an armada of similar craft.
"Yet you most likely never saw this
astonishing event, reported last month by Professor Kathleen
Tierney at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association,
on television and never read about it in the print media. It
would have made for spectacular TV imagery; yet, as an example
of calm and sensible and spontaneous action, it did not fit the
media image of panic . . .
"Tierney, director of the Disaster
Research Center at the University of Delaware, argued that the
reaction of people at the World Trade Center was what one might
have expected from the research literature of the last 50 years
on behavior in disaster situations. 'Social bonds remained intact
and the sense of responsibility to others--family members, friends,
fellow workers, neighbors and even total strangers remains strong
. . .. People sought information from one another, made inquiries
and spoke with loved ones via cell phones, engaged in collective
decision-making and helped one another to safety. When the towers
were evacuated, the evacuation was carried out in a calm and
orderly manner.'Note that most of the positive social behavior
that saved so many lives was not organized by any formal agency,
much less by any command-and-control mechanism. People saved
themselves. Other people converged from all over the city to
help.
"As Tierney says, 'The response
to the Sept. 11 tragedy was so effective precisely because it
was not centrally directed and controlled. Instead it was flexible,
adaptive and focused on handling problems as they emerged.'...Says
Tierney: 'When Sept. 11 demonstrated the enormous resilience
in our civil society, why is disaster response now being characterized
in militaristic terms?'
"Perhaps because those who are determined
to control everything don't understand that even in military
situations, it's the second lieutenants and the sergeants who
win battles, as, for example, in the Omaha Beach chaos at Normandy.
The media got the story all wrong because the panic paradigm
is still pervasive and because no one in the media had read the
disaster-research literature. They thus reinforced the propensity
of those running the country not to trust the good sense and
social concern of ordinary folk. Rather, they want to control
everything with such ditsy ideas as the proposed Homeland Security
Department."
The Most Dangerous
Man in Washington
AT 2.40 PM, September 11, 2001, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was commanding his aides to get "best
info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H."--meaning
Saddam Hussein--"at same time. Not only UBL"--the initials
used to identify Osama bin Laden. "Go massive." Notes
taken by these aides quote him as saying. "Sweep it all
up. Things related and not." We can thank David Martin of
CBS for getting hold of these notes and disclosing them last
Wednesday.
This was our Donald, thinking fast as
he paced about the National Military Command Center, seeking
to turn the attack into a rationale for all sort of unrelated
revenges and settlings of accounts. For Rumsfeld, as for his
boss, as for so many, it was a turning point in his career as
a cabinet member in the Bush II presidency. The year had not
been a happy one for this veteran of the Nixon and Ford eras,
the man who gave Dick Cheney his start in the upper tiers. Rumsfeld
speedily became the target of Pentagon leaks about his abject
failure to take control of the vast Pentagon pork barrel, last
best trough in the US economy.
In the wake of the attacks Rumsfeld swiftly
learned to revel in his role as America's top exponent of bully-boy
bluster. And he's kept it up, running rings around Colin Powell,
whose pals are now leaking stories that Powell may throw in the
towel at the end of Bush's present term.
Small wonder. Rumsfeld has humiliated
Powell, reaching a peak in effrontery when, a few weeks ago,
he contradicted decades-worth of formal US foreign policy and
declared that Israel had every right and every reason to occupy
the West Bank and have settlements there.
The specter of military government here
in the US lurks eternally in the imagination of fearful constitutionalists,
right or left. There's a lot more reason for these fears today,
particularly after the Patriot Act shot through Congress.
Today the FBI can spy on political and
religious meetings even when there's no suspicion that a crime
has been committed. Dissidents can get labelled "domestic
terrorists" and be the target of every form of snooping.
The PATRIOT Act allows "black bag"
searches for every sort of record that might shed light on suspects,
including the books they get out of a library. Computers and
personal papers can be confiscated and not returned even if an
indictment is never lodged against the suspect. Such secret searches
can take place even in cases unrelated to terrorism.
The Justice Department argued in two
federal cases that the president has the power to indefinitely
detain without any charges any person, including any U.S. citizen,
designated as an "enemy combatant." Furthermore the
administration argues that the president's conduct of the war
on terrorism can't be challenged and that civilian courts have
no authority over the detentions.
The Justice Department argues that people
designated "enemy combatants," can be put behind bars,
held incommunicado and denied counsel. If the detainee does get
a lawyer, their conversations can be bugged.
In such manner we are saying goodbye
to the First, Fourth and Sixth Amendments.
Back to Rumsfeld. The Defense Secretary
is currently trying to get the Pentagon greater authority to
carry out covert ops. He also wants Congress to agree to have
a new undersecretary of defense, responsible for all intelligence
matters.
Now blend these proposals in with the
erosions of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the US military
to have any role in domestic law enforcement. Shake the blender
vigorously and you have the Rumsfeld cocktail, with an Ashcroft
cherry. A defense under-secretary may soon b able to target YOU,
(or the antiwar couple in the apartment next door), bug your
phone and computer, burglarize the place, grab you, stick you
in prison and let you rot.
All legally. That's what we call military
government, the way we teach the Latin American officers mustered
for training at Fort Benning to do things in their countries,
plus hanging electrodes on the testicles and nipples of those
slow to confide who their teammates were in the anti-war group
mentioned above. Remember, there's a strong lobby here for torture
too.
Try holding a placard up, when George
Bush is driving by. Kevin O'Neill had a good column last Thursday
in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette describing what happened when
demonstrators against President Bush being herded inside a fence
at Neville Island for his Labor Day visit.
"Police called this enclosure the
designated free-speech area, though anyone who had signs praising
the president was evidently OK to line the island's main street
for the motorcade.
"The mini-Guantanamo on the Ohio
was set up strictly for security reasons, of course. Those who
pose a genuine threat to the president are expected to carry
signs identifying themselves as such, as a courtesy. Hence the
erection of the Not-OK Corral.
"Bill Neel of Butler just doesn't
get it, though. He's 65 and can remember a time when our entire
country was a free-speech zone. So when he refused to get inside
the fence with his sign, he was arrested, cuffed and detained
in the best place for inflammatory rhetoric, the fire hall.
"Neel's confiscated sign said, "The
Bushes must truly love the poor -- they've made so many of us."
For holding this contrary opinion in the censored speech zone,
Neel was given a summons for disorderly conduct."
Battle Terrorism,
Go To Prison. It's The Law
On September 10, 2002, 23 people who
committed the crime of demonstrating against the terror methods
imparted in Fort Benning reported to federal prison convicted
of trespass, with sentences ranging from six months probation
to six months in federal prison and $5,000 in fines. Judge G.
Mallon Faircloth is notorious for giving the maximum sentence
for a misdemeanor to nonviolent opponents of the School of the
Americas.
Seventy-one people, School of the Americas
Watch tells us, have served a total of over forty years in prison
for engaging in nonviolent resistance in the long campaign to
close the school. Last year Dorothy Hennessey, an 88 year-old
Franciscan nun, was sentenced to six months in federal prison.
"It's ironic," says Sister Hennessey, "that at
a time when the country is reflecting on how terrorism has impacted
our lives, dedicated people who took direct action to stop terrorism
throughout the Americas are on their way into prison."
Back to Rumsfeld once more. He's dangerous because he's brimful
of arrogance, surrounded by fanatics like DoD undersecretary
Paul Wolfowitz and has successfully occupied the vacant territory
known as George Bush's brain. For an equivalently troubling figure
you have to go all the way back to Defense Secretary James Forrestal,
whose own brain finally exploded under the weight of his own
paranoia. Early in 1949 He resigned his post as DoD secretary
and not long thereafter threw himself to his death out of a window
in the Bethesda Naval Hospital. There's no chance of Rumsfeld
taking such a step. He's way too pleased with himself.
Unimaginable
"About one-fourth of the individuals
who have contributed to McKinney's campaigns over the past five
years have names that appear to be Arab-American or Muslim, according
to an informal study of Federal Election Commission records by
the Journal- Constitution." Can you imagine a similar story
appearing about the Jewish financial contributors to the campaign
of Denise Majette, who recently defeated Cynthia McKinney in
the Democratic primary in Georgia's Fourth District. The Journal-Constitution
loathed McKinney.
Many liberal Democrats resolutely averted
their gaze from McKinney's campaign and disdained her appeals
for help, even though Majette's preference for president in 2000
was, if we believe her endorsement, the black, anti-choice Republican,
Alan Keyes.
Dullness Hailed
"Barr, McKinney and Traficant were
colorful at the expense
of the institution of which they were a part," said Thomas
E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
"They knew the shock value of their utterances and its
capacity to attract a lot of press attention." These dreary
sentiments came in a New York Times piece by Carl Hulse piece
in about the departure of colorful reps and senators from Congress.
Mann is one of those rent-a-quote guys
the press loves. Call him up and he'll spit out a couple of sentences
like a popcorn machine. In fact the those three reps were all
in their separate ways testimonies to the fine judgement of their
constituents in putting them in office. The Republican Barr,
also defeated in a Georgia primary, was as valiant a defender
of constitutional freedoms as McKinney, and particularly distinguished
himself in the frail congressional resistance to the Patriot
Act. Traficant was a glorious symbol of citizen contempt for
prosecutorial rampages.
Hulse evidently searched out quotes to
buttress his thesis-of-the-day, that boisterous and turbulent
behavior, not to mention, principled views, are out of popular
favor.
"Analysts believe," he wrote, " there could be
a larger message in the muting of some Congressional voices,
particularly in the case of the two Georgians, Mr. Barr and Ms.
McKinney. In tense times, the analysts said, the public wants
the combative rhetoric softened.
"They liked to take strong, uncompromising
stands on very controversial issues, and that is what makes them
newsworthy," said Merle Black, a political science professor
at Emory University in Atlanta. "But they just state opinions
and positions rather than engaging in any kind of dialogue, and
in the wake of 9/11, when we are at war, they are not viewed
as solving problems."
Moral: submerge yourself in the gray
mass of conformity, and you'll do just fine. It's all balls of
course. The public relishes stand-up people. Look at the career
of Ron Paul, the great libertarian from Texas, one of just three
(another Republican plus Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat,) who recently
voted against life sentences for hackers. Traficant was never
abandoned by his constituents. H went down because the jury,
possibly confused, voted him guilty and Congress threw him out.
I'm not sure about Barr but McKinney was the victim of a well
hatched plots. She actually got more votes than in 2000, when
she was reelected. But outside money for Majette, much of its
from Jewish donors, plus a big Republican crossover in the open
primary, did her in.
The Best Political
Mind in Washington?
Cal Thomas recently called Paul Weyrich
"one of the best political minds in Washington" and
asked him what should the GOP focus on upcoming elections. The
finely honed political mind of Weyrich duly disgorged the following
as looming issues: immigration, homosexuals in the boy
scouts, & the Pledge.
The Salt Lake City Tribune, which carries
Thomas's dreary syndicated column, duly carried a letter-to-the-editor,
monitored by CounterPuncher Christine TenBarge and running as
follows: "The only consistency I can find in these issues
is 1. They are asinine; 2. They are divisive; 3. They are easy
to present to a fourth grader". The writer went on to list
real issues, like proposed war with Iraq, corporate corruption,
campaign finance reform, etc. hoping that issues that make a
difference will actually be debated by candidates. He ended with
"Oh no...I just had a thought. What if Cal Thomas is right
and Paul Weyrich is one of the best political minds in Washington?"
Today's Features
Anis Shivani
How to
Survive in Ashcroft's America
Pierre Tristam
Abusing
the Sorrows of 9/11
David Krieger
Resisting
Bush's
"Relentless War"
Jerre Skog
9/11 One
Year Later:
Remember the Others, Too
Dave Marsh
Illegal
Music?
A Sampler's Delight
Norm Dixon
How the
Warmongers Have Exploited 9/11
home / subscribe
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CounterPunch Special Report:
9/11 One Year After
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- War Talk As White Noise:
Anything to Get Harken and Halliburton
Out of the Headlines;
- First Hilliard, Then
McKinney: Jewish
Groups Target Blacks Brave Enough to Talk About Justice in the
Middle East; Intimidation
is the Name of the Game; Smearing
"Insane" McKinney As Muslims' Pawn;
- The Missing Terrorist?
Calling Scotland
Yard: "Where's Atif?"
- They Never Booed Dylan!:
Tape Transcript Shows
Famed Newport Folkfest Dissing of Electric Dylan Not True. The Catcalls were for Peter
Yarrow!
- New Shame from the Liffey
Shrike
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