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Today's
Stories
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
The Real Failure of Intelligence
Our
Own!
By NIRANJAN
RAMAKRISHNAN
There
is an old Indian joke about two country yokels on their first visit
to the city. Coming out of the railway station, they are dazzled by
all the skyscrapers around them. As they stand admiring the skyline,
a city slicker walks up to them and demands, "Quick, which floor
were you looking at?"
The first countryman, after a quick count, replies timidly, "The
21st..."
"That'll
be 210 rupees", says the slicker, and collects the money.
"And
you?", he turns to the second villager.
"7th
floor", the latter replies quickly, handing over 70 rupees.
After the cheat pockets the money and departs, the second yokel whispers
proudly to the first, "You were an idiot --I was actually looking
at the 30th floor. You've got to learn to think on your feet, when you
are in the City!"
Here
is an administration which has lied wholesale to the American people,
and prosecuted a war which has taken thousands of lives, overseen the
looting of some of Mankind's most precious treasures (the Baghdad Museum),
and spat on the face of the American people, and all we can hear Messrs.
Kerry, Edwards, Clark and others is ... "Intelligence Failure"?
That's
right. "Failure of Intelligence" is the phrase de-jour. And
not too inaccurate either, when you think about it. It has been a failure
of intelligence --ours, as a nation.
We
watched as the illegal and fraudulent war was proposed, pushed, planned
and perpetrated. Some of us got busy deconstructing every distracting
ball of wool the fraudsters threw our way, never asking the basic question.
Every other country saw through the sham, but not us. A majority of
the American people 'supported the war'. To paraphrase Churchill, "Never
before, in the history of American politics, have so many been hoodwinked,
so openly, for so long".
Give
Bush and Co. their due: they had read the American public better than
their adversaries. They relied on public ignorance, gullibility and
apathy, and drew handsome rewards. Their faith in the above qualities
of the American people was not misplaced; it was based on a few years
of 'product-testing'.
They had
their prototype with 'The Silence of the Lambs (see Feb 2001 article
below)', the mute national response to the thwarting of an accurate
recount in Florida. They pushed through a lopsided tax cut, with Greenspan's
mendacious nod. No national outrage was forthcoming. 9-11 was followed
by the institution of the most draconian provisions and the subsequent
conflation of Al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussain. This too did pass.
Then came
the October 2002 campaign, with charges of treachery cunningly leveled
upon anyone questioning the hurry towards Iraq (and the egregiouis castigation
of the war-crippled Max Cleland as soft on national security). The Democrats
scurried for cover, afraid to call the Lie a Lie. And throughout Bush's
Presidency, the heaping of all manner of benefits on the rich while
starving public programs was met with a widespread fatalism that would
shock even the worst cynics.
Every
such successful action has given the Bushites greater assurance. To
be sure, people have written about it, some have spoken out, but isn't
it imbecilic that, even after David Kay's 'revelations' (which, remember,
is exactly what UN Inspectors Blix and Baradei said way back last year),
not one Democratic candidate has used the word 'lie' or 'fraud', preferring
instead the ambiguous, 'intelligence failure'? The word, 'Impeachment',
seems to have been lost to the Democratic lexicon.
Of course,
leadership matters. Articulation is vital. Leaders who can pose issues
in proper perspective, and both involve and educate the public, are
the so-called geniuses of communication --surely a commodity not much
in evidence in recent years, Bill Clinton notwithstanding ( Clinton's
impact on popular political philosophy practically non-existent). Is
is not unbelievable, yet true enough, that a president like George W.
Bush, with a record of mendacity and failure quite unequalled in recent
memory, can still garner the favorable ratings in the polls and is spoken
of as the 'man to beat'? It is all very well to criticize the dandy
for dressing up in combat gear and landing on the aircraft carrier,
but what does it say about the population he hopes to impress with such
antics?
The founder
of the Indian National Congress, Allen Octavian Hume, wrote that every
people gets the kind of government it deserves. Here in America, Benjamin
Franklin made the famous reply, when he was asked by a lady what kind
of government the Constitutional Convention had fashioned, "A republic,
if you can keep it". The national outrage that Watergate sparked
has not been matched in a quarter century; Nixon's deception of the
American public, however, has been routinely excelled by his successors,
most markedly the current incumbent. In Iran-Contra, the President deliberatly
broke a law Congress had passed. They named an airport after him. George
W. Bush sent his Secretary of State to the UN to lie to the world. I'm
sure they'll name an aircraft carrier after him...
Where
has all the outrage gone?
The American
Republic is threatened (and will continue to be) by the true WMD's (Weapons
of Mass Distraction), more pervasive and more effective than Saddam's
non-existent armory. One is Television. When one reads of the presidential
campaigns of the 60's or 70's, barnstorming the country and holding
public meetings was the chief way of campaigning. There was time to
listen to a candidate outlining the party platform and his own position.
This has been replaced by TV. Most Americans still use the TV as their
chief source of news, the Internet notwithstanding. This means, effectively,
that you will only hear pieces of the what any political leader has
to say, and that too only those sections that the network thinks fit
to present. News and discourse, presented through TV, puts an effective
and near-complete filter on what you learn. The shrinking of TV station
ownership in fewer and fewer hands means further filtering. The last
point has been quite dramatically captured in Chomsky's Manufacturing
Consent. The more general point, of what TV has done to public discourse
in America, is the subject of a prescient 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves
to Death, by Neil Postman, who died a few months ago.
But that
still leaves open the question --why would a free people willingly surrender
their right to know (or let it atrophy)? I think the answer lies in
a second aspect of the above WMD's --Consumerism. It is the Universal
Religion. Go to Costco on Saturday afternoons. This is the only church
where you will find them all --people from every ethnic group, people
from every religious background, the young and the old, the fit and
the wheelchair-bound. At the pulpit of the checkout counter, you will
find Orthodox Jews in yarmulkes standing in line with Muslim women in
burqas (shopping evidently is an equal right under Islam). If Marx were
to return from the dead, he would probably revise the old saw about
religion being the opiate of the masses --today it is consumerism.
Cheap goods, please, at any cost (including my own job). What's a little
more intrusion into my library habits (probably non-existent), so long
as my right to buy is preserved? Even President Bush, in one of his
early pronouncements about freedom, emphasized only the freedom to shop
(see my article: Open
your Wallets, not your Mouths).
Bush was
not being dumb. He knew what he was appealing to. And if Kerry or Dean
or anyone else is serious about changing the politics of the country,
they will have to address America's consumption addiction. That means
catching us between our favorite TV shows and our visits to the Mall,
and slowly but steadily drawing --and focusing --our attention to
the loss of our sovereignty, both political and economic.
The
Silence of the Lambs
Written February 2001
By Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Conventional
wisdom holds that the exact moment at which Michael Dukakis lost the
1988 election was the instant he gave a calm response to a debate question,
"How would you view the death penalty if your wife were raped?"
He answered that that he would still oppose it, on principle. What kind
of man gives a dispassionate reply to a visceral question like that,
the talking heads asked ruefully, leaving no doubt that this bloodless
one was not the brave leader of the Free World we would want. The nation
nodded in agreement.
Now, Dukakis
seems prophetic --more in tune with the country than it realized. Twelve
years later, regard the complete ‘calm’ with which the country
has greeted the molestation of its most sacred process.
Predictably, this has been a week of paeans to ‘orderly transition’
--Bush himself mentioning it in his inaugural address. Like Mr. Dick
of David Copperfield, he has an unerring knack of putting his finger
on the nub of the matter. To have accomplished a coup without raising
any commotion --and without needing any overt enforcement --surely such
is a peace deserving of note!
Individuals
across the land will continue to wonder if they are alone in being beset
by a continuing sense of unreality. From election night to Gore’s
capitulation, outrage was the only emotion that provided some assurance
that one had not fallen through the Looking Glass. In fine Goebbelsian
tradition, George W. Bush & Co. kept speaking of ‘recount
after recount after recount’, all the while blocking even the
first count of the votes in question, through a mix of mob action and
legal maneuvering which might have won plaudits from Palermo. But was
the outraged shared? We watched with a helpless mystification as the
news media and the Democratic Party let their untruths pass without
challenge. "That’s a lie", we waited for them to thunder
--and in vain did we hope. Finally we had the spectacle of Al Gore having
to plead for time from the Democratic elite, to fight for what, after
all, was ostensibly a common ideal --a genuine electoral outcome.
I grew up in India, a country routinely described in the media as made
up of a fatalistic, often quiescent, generally supine, populace, where
extraordinary political transgressions might be countenanced with stoic
acceptance. I remember, as a student, hearing the judgment of the Supreme
Court of India, upholding a retroactive law passed by a rubber-stamp
parliament, changing the rules after the election of Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi had been vacated by a lower court. Then too, a handpicked
Chief Justice delivered, abetted by three other cronies, overriding
a brave, lone, dissenting judge.
The shocked
silence that followed the midnight ‘constitutional’ coup
on June 26, 1975, was used by Indira Gandhi to exult: the fact that
the country was calm, she claimed, showed that the people were behind
her. But India did not go quietly into that night --censorship had been
clamped, and over 100000 people put behind bars.
That was
then. But could it happen today --with the Internet and email everywhere?
Looking at the recent American elections, one has to conclude that it
can and it has, that technology is no automatic friend of democracy;
that television and Internet may, in good measure, have helped turn
‘people’ into ‘audiences’. Terms like quiescent,
fatalistic, stoic and supine may now apply as much to the American populace
as to those of other countries whose pretensions to the democratic spirit
are so frequently debunked in the American media with some preening.
Continuing prosperity and the appurtenances of modern consumption only
seem to have made the people less interested --let alone involved --in the political process. How else to explain the lack of participation,
the absence of vehement protest, belying the polls even?
Corazon
Aquino, Boris Yeltsin and Lech Walesa all made their careers leading
popular demonstrations to prevent subversions of democracy in their
countries. True, the perpetrators of those heists were more clearly
identifiable. Is the need for genuine political leadership any less
because the popular mandate was manipulated in solemn robes, inside
august buildings, under high-minded etchings? The peace so widely extolled
by the political elite, including Al Gore (gracious and cautious to
the bitter end) is one born of indifference, helplessness, or both.
So much
for the leadership. What about the people? Mahatma Gandhi, who could
be presumed to know a thing or two about popular upheaval, foresaw this
complacency --asked if he would advocate civil disobedience against
a national government as he did against foreign rule, his reply was
an emphatic Yes, "Real (freedom) will come, not by the acquisition
of authority by the few, but by the acquisition of the capacity by all
to resist authority when abused."
Historians
of the future will be struck by how smoothly the country rolled along
its path through it all. Presently we hear our media pundits and politicians
hail this equanimity with words like ‘the strength of our democracy’,
‘bi-partisanship’, and ‘the closing of ranks’.
But then maybe there is something to celebrate too in the resilience
of a family, where the battered wife daubs some rouge under her black
eye and goes to work as usual.
The true
revelations of this election lie not so much in the evidence found as
in the evidence missing. As Sherlock Holmes might say, "The dog
was silent at the nighttime --that was the curious incident". Or,
if you prefer the modern, "The Silence of the Lambs", fits
too. At his inaugural, with the trademark squint that accompanies his
most acute observations, George W. Bush declared, "Citizens, not
spectators". ‘Prudently’, he had saved this catechism
for after the swearing-in. He need scarcely have worried. After fifty-some
years of the-news-as-entertainment, the American people have no doubt
that what is asked of them is not their views, but their viewership.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West
Coast. His writings can be found on http://www.indogram.com.
He can be reached at njn_2003@yahoo.com.
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