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Today's
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February
5, 2004
Benjamin
Shepard
Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free
Zone
Khury
Petersen-Smith
A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA"
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003
Teresa
Josette
The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right
David Krieger
Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq
Christopher
Brauchli
Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools
Norman
Solomon
The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Presenting President Edwards!
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
Mark
Gaffney
Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel
Judith
Brown
Palestine and the Media
Frederick
B. Hudson
Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's
Junta?
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating
the Spooks
M.
Junaid Alam
Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract
Fran Shor
Whose Boob Tube?
Kevin
Cooper
This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan
Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10, Morris
0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's Revelations
and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the Mafia
|
February
6, 2004
Horror Non-Fiction
The
Perle and Frum H
By KURT NIMMO
I
admit not buying or reading the screed written by Richard Perle and
David Frum, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War On Terror."
I don't want to encourage the neocon duo, although I am certain thousands
of people are snapping up the book like hotcakes fresh off the griddle,
and a considerable number are buying into the crackpot ideas of the
Neocon Duo.
I
found a bunch of quotes from the book published on the InfoShop website.
Most of the quotes deal with domestic repression, neocon suggestions
for putting the thumbscrews to Muslims, and the US relationship with
other countries.
The quotes on domestic issues are interesting because Perle usually
talks about blowing up small third world countries -- or on really bad
hair days, France -- and usually says little about the neocon plan for
America.
Let's
begin with the neocon vision for America. As to be expected, F &
P -- as I'll call them from hereupon, for the sake of brevity -- envision
an authoritarian America, a nation of "zero tolerance" toward
foreigners, outsiders, and those who do not embrace the predominant
culture.
For
instance, victimless crime begets larger, more serious crime. "We
ought to learn a lesson from the most effective anticrime program the
United States has ever seen: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's crack down in
New York," the pair write.
Giuliani's
core insight was this: People who break one law will break other laws.
You want to catch a guy who's skipped out on a manslaughter arrest
warrant? Stop every turnstile jumper and inspect his ID. You want
to find the killer who left his fingerprints on a knife that stabbed
a kid to death yesterday? Scan the fingerprints of everybody you catch
smoking marijuana in the park today.
Notice
how effortlessly F & P associate marijuana use with murder -- not
simply garden-variety murder but rather heinous child murder. The assumption
here is that people who smoke pot are more than likely guilty of other,
far more serious crimes.
I
wonder if F & P believe Al Gore's son, who was busted for smoking
pot recently, is a potential murderer. Or Bill Clinton.
Following
the logic presented here, smoking pot but not inhaling, as Clinton admitted,
leads to mass murder. After all, under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed
non-stop for 78 days, resulting in the death of around 500 innocent
civilians, according to Human Rights Watch.
Of
course, F & P are not really interested in pot smokers, that is
unless they are from Iran or Somalia. It's mostly Arabs, Afghans, Iranians,
and Northern Africans the Bushites want to kick around.
The
Giuliani approach to crime resulted in an increase in the distrust of
the police by African-Americans and other minorities in New York, especially
after the police killed an unarmed Guinean man, Amadou Bailo Diallo.
Of course, since Diallo was from a third world country, his death is
meaningless, especially for F & P who mistrust the "dark side"
(see below) of humanity.
In
addition to Arabs, Muslims, and Africans with visas, the neocon duo
believe antiwar demonstrators are dangerous. In fact, if I read these
guys correctly, the First Amendment itself is dangerous.
We
may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight
of the difference between dissent and subversion.
Eager to protect, in other words eager to follow the Constitution.
Once
upon a time, the First Amendment ensured Americans the right to peacefully
assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. But
according to F & P, this is an excuse for subversion.
This
is nothing new. Early on the Adams administration had a bone to pick
with subversives -- more accurately, people who disagreed with the government
-- and so they created the Sedition Act, also called the Alien and Sedition
Laws. Ever since, in fits and starts, the government has had it out
for aliens, outsiders, minorities (African-Americans, Irish, Italians,
Native Americans, etc.), labor organizers, socialists, anarchists, civil
rights marchers, and antiwar demonstrators, to name but a few. For Adams,
the Constitution was an impediment. Same for our neocon authors.
F
& P want to continue this legacy. Instead of going after "reds"
like one of Ashcroft's predecessors, A. Mitchell Palmer (AG under Woodrow
Wilson), they want the government to go after "terrorists,"
that is anybody who disagrees with them on US foreign policy.
Nor
should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin
to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far
Left and far Right. Especially those on the Left, since F & P
occupy the extreme Right.
Interesting
they believe progressives will make "common cause" with Osama
bin Laden. I have yet to speak with a progressive who agrees with the
wacky political and religious ideas of Osama and Omar.
In
fact, the political allies of F & P -- the Christian Coalition and
Christian Zionist types -- are far closer philosophically to Osama than
Noam Chomsky will ever be. Osama is a social reactionary, just like
Pat Robertson. Osama hears the voice of God, as does the current resident
of the White House.
As F & P see it, anybody who disagrees with the neocon plan to invade
the Arab Middle East, and impose the political will of the Zionists
and Wall Street neoliberals on 350 million people, is a "subversive."
But
even a nation of laws must understand the limits of legalism. Between
1861 and 1865, the government of the United States took tens of thousands
of American citizens prisoner and detained them for years without
letting any one of them see a lawyer.
In
other words, it is acceptable to lock up your critics because Lincoln
did it during the Civil War. "Lincoln defined a 'saboteur' as virtually
anyone who disagreed with his politics and policies and subsequently
ordered the military to arrest literally tens of thousands of Northern
political opponents, including dozens of opposition newspaper editors,"
writes historian Thomas J. DiLorenzo. "[D]on't be surprised to
see articles in the near future from the Claremont Institute, AEI, National
Review, The Weekly Standard, and other neocon organs urging President
Bush to be more 'Lincolnesque' in his treatment of the war opponents
in Congress."
Even
the slightest deviation from the neocon line is viewed by F & P
as subversion. As for throwing people in prison or camps like Gitmo
without access to legal representation, no problem. Lincoln did it,
so why not the neocons? It's a Republican thing, after all.
People
who live next door to a storefront mosque in Brooklyn, New York, will
almost certainly observe more things of interest to counterterrorism
officials than will people who live next door to a Christian Science
church in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Nonsense.
I live about fifty yards from a mosque. I never observe "things
of interest," that is unless you consider Muslims going to worship
on Friday afternoon interesting. I'd say it is about as interesting
as the Baptists or Hindus going to their places of worship.
Maybe
the Muslims should begin observing "things of interest" at
Protestant fundamentalist churches where Christian Zionists support
Bush's war against Muslims and fork over millions in donations to Zionist
organizations determined to erase Palestinian Arabs, or at least move
them en masse from the land the Judeo-Christian God supposedly gave
to the Jews, according to a book written by Jews.
F
& P obviously consider all Muslims terrorists, as do their ideological
taskmasters, the Zionists. F & P easily mix political dogmatism
with racism, an explosive blend that resulted, in the not too distant
past, in genocide and a war claiming nearly 50 million lives.
The
CIA is blinded, too, by the squeamishness that many liberal-minded
people feel about noticing the dark side of third world cultures.
I
guess the CIA was "blinded" when it engineered coups in Iran,
Chile, Indonesia, Iraq (ultimately resulting in the dictatorship of
Saddam Hussein) and elsewhere; trained and financed death squads in
Haiti, El Salvador, Angola, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the
Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Nicaragua,
the Philippines, Syria, Turkey, and Vietnam.
It
is curious F & P use the term "dark side" when referring
to the third world. Most of the world is "dark" -- that is,
most people in the world have darker melanin than F & P. It is only
"squeamishness" standing in the way of invading their "dark"
countries, stealing their natural resources, and imposing "white"
Judeo-Christian culture on them.
In
fact, the xenophobia of F & P is quite remarkable in its outspokenness.
If a nation or people do not share the presuppositions of Judeo-Christian
culture -- most notably predatory capitalism and the "right"
of "free markets" to exploit humanity and natural resources
-- they are corrupted by the "dark side," that is to say their
own cultures. Thus reduced to a vile abstraction, it is easier to bomb
them and spread around DU to make sure they suffer cancer for the next
few generations.
Not
mentioned by F & P is the fact many of the problems in the third
world are directly related to the legacy of colonialism. If F &
P sincerely wanted to correct many of the social problems in the third
world -- incessant poverty, illiteracy, disease, violent fundamentalism
-- they would instead advocate debt cancellation and address the unregulated
plunder of shareholder capital in the third world.
As
Bush has demonstrated, the only response to the "dark side"
is to bomb their cities, destroy their civilian infrastructure, and
occupy their countries. Only "squeamish" "liberal-minded
people" find this criminal and insane.
As
AG Ashcroft noted shortly after 9/11, "liberal-mind people"
and others who are critical of the wholesale dismantling of the Constitution
"scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty"
and "only aid terrorists."
Iran
is itself a terrorist state, the world's worst. North Korea has committed
terrorist atrocities, too [...] Both regimes are nightmarishly repressive;
both regimes present intolerable threats to American security. We
must move boldly against them both and against all other sponsors
of terrorism as well: Syria, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. And we don't
have much time.
For
F & P, Iran is a "terrorist state" for two reasons, both
unmentioned. First, it supports Hezbollah, a Lebanese "terrorist"
organization -- national groups resisting invasion and occupation are
invariably considered "terrorist" organizations -- formed
when Israel invaded southern Lebanon. Not only did Hezbollah manage
to expel Israel, but it continues to successfully resist Israeli aggression
in southern Lebanon. Second, Iran is considered "terrorist"
by F & P and the neocons because it is a large Muslim nation with
an Islamic government opposed to Israeli domination in the region. Iran
also has a lot of oil.
F
& P say "we don't have much time" to kill a whole lot
of Muslims and Koreans, the latter who sell sophisticated weapons to
untrustworthy Muslims, a fact that disturbs the neocons because well-armed
adversaries make it more difficult to invade and occupy their countries.
The neocons prefer defenseless countries like Iraq, weakened by more
than a decade of sanctions.
Bush
has but one term left in office -- unless he completely trashes the
Constitution and becomes dictator-for-life, a distinct possibility.
The neocons are painfully aware that after Bush's second term they will
be sent back to their think tanks and foundations to spin their devious
wheels for naught. So they are pushing their agenda hard and fast as
possible and want to get things done -- invade Syria, Iran, blockade
North Korea, militarily intimidate all nations not going along (or maligning
them like France), sort of like a global mafia. All of this has to be
accomplished in the next five years.
The
reason our policy towards Saudi Arabia has been so abject for so long
is not mere error. No, of course not. Our policy toward Saudi Arabia
has everything to do with the largest reserve of readily accessible
oil on the planet.
But
it's a new dawn for F & P and their fellow travellers -- according
to the neocons, Saudi Arabia is no better than Iran or Syria -- in fact,
worse: they have a lot of money and support fundamentalist Muslims,
an unpardonable sin, that is unless those enraged Muslims support US
foreign policy objectives (as they did in Afghanistan).
<blockquote>In
the last chapter, we argued that we should apply every possible pressure
to halt Saudi Arabia's campaign to spread its murderous version of Islam
-- including, if necessary, encouraging the secession of the kingdom's
oil-producing Eastern Province.</blockquote>
Strange
how Saudi Arabia's "murderous version of Islam" was not considered
a problem when the US exported it to Afghanistan, beginning with Jimmy
Carter. Between 1980-85 the CIA funded the recruitment and training
of thousands of volunteers from three dozen Muslim countries. Saudi
Arabia gave the Mujahideen millions of dollars and eagerly imported
Wahabbi fundamentalism. In fact, the CIA considers the Soviet defeat
in Afghanistan its most successful operation. F & P, of course,
have convenient amnesia when it comes to this sort of things.
We
can train Iraqi soldiers to combat insurgencies while respecting human
rights, as we have trained armies in the Philippines and Latin America.
This
quote is a prime example of neocon historical revisionism in action.
The US and the CIA did not train armies in Latin America and the Philippines
to respect human rights. In fact, they did just the opposite.
"The
CIA created, structured and trained secret police in South Korea, Iran,
Chile and Uruguay, and elsewhere -- organizations responsible for untold
thousands of tortures, disappearances, and deaths," writes Ralph
McGehee, an ex-CIA operative. "It is important to point out that
the use of death squads has been a strategy of US counterinsurgency
doctrine," notes David Kirsh. "For example, the CIA's 'Phoenix
Program' was responsible for the 'neutralization' of over 40,000 Vietnamese
suspected of working with the National Liberation Front."
"The
CIA has gone beyond its original mission of gathering intelligence and
was conducting Mafia-type operations not only in its own territory but
against foreign governments and their leaders," writes Roland G.
Simbulan of the Manila Studies Program at the University of the Philippines.
"The CIA in the Philippines has engaged in countless covert operations
for intervention and dirty tricks particularly in Philippine domestic
politics."
In
Latin America, the US government and the CIA engineered the murder of
a democratically elected leader, Chile's Salvador Allende, supported
the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, trained sadistic tortures in El
Salvador and Honduras, financed and armed the contras in Nicaragua,
and engaged in other interventions and covert operations too numerous
to mention here.
"All
of this in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what
cold warriors convinced themselves and the American people, was the
existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact
never existed, evil or not," explains William Blum, a former State
Department employee, in the Guardian.
We
had come to Iraq to liberate it from Baathism.
No,
they came to steal their oil and rearrange the geopolitical landscape
of the Middle East, as envisioned by Likudite fanatics in Israel.
Once
again, the neocons ignore historical fact. The CIA installed the Ba'athist
regime in Iraq. "We came to power on a CIA train," bragged
Ali Saleh, minister of interior of the Ba'athist regime that replaced
president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963. "Many meetings
were held between the Ba'ath party and American intelligence,"
King Hussain of Jordan later admitted. The CIA "relayed to those
carrying out the coup the names and addresses of communists there, so
they could be seized and executed."
I'm
certain that if I read the entire book, I'd discover even more chilling
quotes. Reading the quotes on the InfoShop website, not all included
here, is frankly more than enough for one sitting.
Suffice
it to say "An End to Evil: How to Win the War On Terror" is
a primer for what's to come if Bush is awarded with a second term. As
it now stands, unless something happens to upset the GOP apple cart,
Bush is more or less a shoo-in. Kerry is not going to make it to the
White House, that is if the neocons and their Republican allies have
anything to say about it, even if it takes another "terrorist incident"
or Supreme Court fiat. Not with computerized voting machines that do
not produce a paper trail, have proprietary software, and are owned
by Republicans.
The
Frum and Perle worldview and its likely course of action should not
be surprising. The neocons have broadcast their intentions for years,
in fact for more than a decade. If you need more details, surf over
to the PNAC website and read the documents there, beginning with "Rebuilding
America's Defenses," written the year before Bush stole the White
House.
I
promise it is scarier than the latest Stephen King novel.
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