In my local public library today I saw a copy of Paul Waldman’s the library. I’d rather leave it there and let one of the mythic “undecided” voters check it out and perhaps help them make up their mind.
I wonder, though, whoever does check it out, do they risk having their library records monitored by the FBI (perfectly legal and even encouraged by the PATRIOT Act).
As Salon recently reminded readers, September 24th marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Warren Commission Report, the official government document that announced that the assassination of JFK was the work of a lone gunman–Lee Harvey Oswald–and that he worked alone. In other words, there was no conspiracy.
Salon reports that many current and former high-ranking government officials, including Presidents Johnson and Nixon, doubted the Warren Commission’s conclusions, suspecting that there was indeed a conspiracy against Kennedy, and even more insidious, a successful conspiracy to coverup the first conspiracy.
If you’ve never had a chance to read the report, rush out now and do so. (Or just stay online and read it at the National Archives). It’s fascinating, but even more fascinating–and astounding–are the 26 volumes of materials from the Warren Commission Hearings. These 26 volumes include every word of testimony from Oswald’s wife, mother, and brother, as well as testimony from a wide assortment of government and law enforcement officials. The last 10 volumes of the hearings are devoted entirely to artifacts used as exhibits during the hearings, including a clip of Lee Harvey Oswald’s hair, his “historic diary” (as he called it), and even a copy of Oswald’s school records from the first grade (so there is a “permanent record”!). These 26 volumes were boiled down into the more portable
The amount of material dredged up for the hearings, the depth of research into one man’s life is astonishing and nearly a work of art. In
That pretty much sums up the Warren Commission. More fiction than fact, a modernist extravaganza.
Yesterday marked the moment when the death toll for American soldiers in Iraq surpassed a 1,000 dead. This figure doesn’t count the severely injured and maimed, the deaths of American civilians, and the deaths of untold innocent Iraqi citizens.
Bush supporters seem willing to forgive all of this death and destruction. They are willing to overlook the fact that Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11 (and therefore revenge against Iraq is not justified, even if one is the vengeful type). They are willing to ignore the countless violations of human rights at Abu Ghraib, the systematic and presidentially-sanctioned humiliation and torture of prisoners of war. They are willing to close their eyes to the creeping, chilling loss of rights and freedoms here in their own country.
Even if they acknowledge these realities they insist that Bush deserves reelection because despite all this other “propaganda” he will still lower our taxes.
My jaw drops.
Bush lowered taxes, yes. He euphemistically called his tax changes “tax relief,” as if taxes were like gas or indigestion. Unlike indigestion, though, our taxes actually do provide benefits: schools, roads, public health measures, and of course, the military. But cutting taxes means cutting these government programs (or running a record $422 billion deficit).
Bush lowered, taxes, yes, but for whom? His “tax relief” disproportionately benefited only the very wealthy, the richest 1 to 2 percent of all Americans. I don’t know about you, but none of my friends or family are in the top 1 percent. Bush, on the other hand, has a lot of friends and family in this group. “The haves and have-mores,” Bush calls these wealthy supporters, who are getting back tens of thousands–and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars, while I get back $300. Now that’s what I call compassionate conservatism.
The Washington Post reports today that Vice President Dick Cheney “warned on Tuesday that if John F. Kerry is elected, ‘the danger is that we’ll get hit again’ by terrorists.”
Cheney and Bush are trafficking in the politics of fear, attempting to frighten American voters into supporting Bush, whose record against terrorism, it really needs to be pointed out, is abysmal. And as Bush squanders more resources in Iraq, al Qaeda is regrouping, becoming an even more elusive, rhizomatic network.
The truth is, if terrorists do strike again, much of the blame can be laid upon the current administration, whose foreign policies alienate allies in much of the world and foster hate in the rest of the world, whose domestic policies are trashing constitutionally-granted civil liberties and transforming America into a fear-driven self-censored police-state, and whose election strategy seems simply to be to reduce Americans into a cowering lot of obedient sheep who would be lost without their protector and shepherd, George W. Bush.
Months ago, even before John Kerry emerged as the Democratic frontrunner in the race for president, I predicted that if Osama bin Laden was captured before the November vote Bush would win reelection. And if Osama was not captured by then, Bush would lose.
And what do we have on the heels of the Republican convention, but a high-ranking state department official stating that America is close to finding the elusive terrorist. Joseph Cofer Black told journalists, “If he [bin Laden] has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking. He will be caught.” What clock is that? The November elections, of course. Despite the fact that U.S. and Pakistan forces have no new information regarding bin Laden’s whereabouts, the state department made it sound as if counter-terrorist forces were minutes away from capturing bin Laden. So once again, we have Bush’s White House using fear (and the promise to resolve that fear) as a primary campaign strategy.
Bin Laden has become the boogeyman, the big bad wolf, which is funny, because for months Bush seemed to forget that as he squandered tens of billions of dollars of resources in Iraq. I wonder, if we had focused solely on al Qaeda would bin Laden be captured by now?
And even more unsettling: would it even matter if he were captured? As events in Iraq demonstrate, there is no one single bad guy. Saddam Hussein is gone but death and destruction continue. Most experts say that al Qaeda is such a decentralized network that it will carry on quite effectively with or without bin Laden.
So, Mr. Bush, make all the promises you want, but it’s all just politicking.
I too had thought that Lewis was fairly off-base, that “it couldn’t happen here,” until recently. Surely America is still a democracy? Even after the Florida debacle of 2000 I kept my faith. Now, after seeing this latest headline–“U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack”–I am thinking Lewis was incredibly prescient. The Bush administration, in short, is taking legal steps to postpone the constitutionally-mandated November presidential elections. His excuse: just in case terrorists attack. But this is a really a power-grab, one more instance of the Bush network seeking to extend and prolong its power illegally and with no regard for the American values of free and public debate (which includes, Mr. President, free and fair and regularly scheduled elections in which the incumbent is finally held accountable to the American people).
How’s this for a tautology: “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”
This is what Bush explained to reporters this afternoon. Oh, if saying it could only make it so, Bush would have had Saddam himself piloting the plane into the Pentagon. Unfortunately, no matter how many times Bush makes his wish, it doesn’t come true: Saddam and bin Laden had nothing to do with each other. And Saddam had nothing to do with September 11, 2001.
Bush concedes that the attacks were not orchestrated by Saddam Hussein. But there were, Bush argues wishes pleads “numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.”
By this logic, we should be going after Dick Cheney because of his “numerous contacts” with the illustrious Halliburton corporation, who seems to be the primary beneficiary of the war in Iraq, what with the kickbacks, overcharging, and awesome food service.
If my saying it would only make it so…
I have been rereading the late Edward Said‘s incisive book
“It takes very little for a non-American to accept as a starting point that most, if not all, political assassinations are conspiracies, because that is the way the world is. But a chorus of American sages takes acres of print to deny that conspiracies exist in America, since ‘we’ represent a new, and better, and more innocent world.”
Said wrote this in the early nineties, before The X-Files made the phrase “conspiracy theory” so commonplace. Nonetheless, I do think Said’s point remains valid (in fact his entire project seems more relevant today than ever before).
The United States government and the mass media readily and insistently deny that conspiracies occur in America. Meanwhile in the rest of the world it is taken for granted that a conspiracy exists behind every political assassination. Assassinations (and their failed attempts) in America–JFK, MLK, George Wallace, Reagan–are, in the final analysis, attributed to the now archetypal “lone gunman.” This killer is characterized as an unstable, deranged, marginal figure. He is an isolated incident, and the larger community has no role in or responsibility for his actions. According to the nation’s official narrative, then, a sort of rabid madness drives assassinations in America.
What does this say about America, that this is how many would prefer we see ourselves?
It’s not a pretty picture, this vision of a stark raving madman, lurking on the fringes. Which explains the proliferation of conspiracy-laced counter-narratives, in which a cabal of reasonable middle-aged white men in smoky rooms pull the strings of history.
In either case, you or I can abdicate responsibility. It’s either a bloodthirsty lunatic or an inaccessible shadowy group who’s at fault. Both fables release American citizens at-large from any culpability, and both, therefore, are retrograde ideologies which severely limit our political imaginations.
Lately I’ve been exploring They Rule, an interactive database of the largest American corporations and their interwoven boards of directors. The site is an example of what creator Josh On (from the Futurefarmers collective) calls “database visualization.”
They Rule opens with these words:
They sit on boards of the largest companies in America
Many sit on government committees
They make decisions that affect our lives
They rule
Quite simply, the site allows you to map connections between various corporations, using members of their boards as nodes, or relay points. It’s Six Degrees of Separation for multinational corporations. One popular map, for example, documents the connections between Halliburton and major media outlets. Aylwin B. Lewis, we find, is on Halliburton’s board of directors and Disney’s board too. Meanwhile William R. Howell sits on the boards of Halliburton and Pfizer. On Pfizer’s board is William H. Gray, III, who in turn is also on Viacom’s board. There is a direct line, then, from a war-profiteering energy conglomerate to the owner of MTV and CBS news.
They Rule makes no claim that there is a grand cabal among Halliburton directors, controlling the mass media. There is no conspiracy here. Nonetheless, it is unsettling to see so much corporate power concentrated in the hands of so few individuals. It seems that above the daily lives of most Americans there is a free-floating network of corporate entities and wealthy individuals to which we have no access. They, in turn, have little accountability to us. Their chief loyalties are to each other.
Another revealing map is Why Citicorp Really Rules, which shows a diverse group of banks, government institutions, media outlets, and consumer retailers, at the center of which is Citigroup, the world’s largest bank. (Not far behind is JP Morgan Chase and Bank One, who will soon be merging into one bank.)
The best part of They Rule is that you or I can create and save our own database visualizations for others to see. That is, we can archive these connections, print the maps, or email them to others. Some of these user-created maps can be truly informative, like the maps I refer to above. Others can be misleading, such Time Warner Has Their Hands in Everything. This map shows how members of Time Warner’s board also sit on the boards of companies like Dell, Chevron, or FedEx. This much is true, of course. What is misleading is the map’s title. Time Warner the company doesn’t have its hands in everything. Its people do. It’s essential to remember that behind every faceless corporate entity there are people. This is at once discouraging and liberating. Discouraging, because you begin to realize that there exists a class of people who seem untouchable, a world unto themselves, making decisions based on bottom lines rather than less tangible motivations, like dignity and sustainability. Liberating, because you begin to realize that power, whenever it is held by mortals, is fluid and transformable. There is space for resistance whenever humans are involved.
They Rule is one front of this resistance.
Right now I’m reading Tim O’Brien’s 1978 novel
The novel won the National Book Award in 1979, and it’s easy to see why. Twenty-five years later the novel is still fresh, humming with vibrant writing and the power of imagination. And now in the midst of another war that some have compared to Vietnam, the novel seems more relevant than ever before.
I’m not saying Iraq is like Vietnam. But I’m not saying it’s not. There are some striking differences, but when I read the following paragraph from Going after Cacciato, I was left wondering how much of this description could apply to the United States’ current war. Here we step inside the soldiers’ minds, who have been patrolling for months in the Quang Ngai province of Vietnam:
bq. They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite…. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know. They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai–tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer–but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.
– Tim O’Brien, Going after Cacciato (New York: Delacorte, 1978) 272-273.
Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld must despise and I mean really, truly, despise Seymour Hersh, the journalist whose New Yorker exposé of the sadistic conditions at the Abu Ghraib prison has rocked the world.
Hersh has been a thorn in the side of the U.S. government since 1969, when he was the first journalist to report on the atrocities of My Lai, where the Charley Company of the U.S. Army massacred every man, woman, and child of a small South Vietnamese village. All told, nearly 500 civilians were shot dead that morning of March 16, 1968.
Hersh continued his investigative work in the seventies. In a front page New York Times article on May 25, 1975, Hersh reported that the U.S. Navy was running extremely risky nuclear submarine missions inside Soviet waters. Not only did these missions threaten the detente of the thawing Cold War, they had resulted in several accidents, including at least two direct collisions with Soviet submarines. You can bet the hawks in the White House were outraged by Hersh and his revelations. 
In fact, several memos passed between Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, in which they considered their options. (To the left is the second page of one of these memos, dated May 30, 1975. Click for a larger version.)
Should they sue the Times for publishing government secrets? Should they pressure the press through “private discussions with publishers, etc.”? Should they investigate the origin of the leak and prosecute that person? And most importantly to Cheney and Rumsfeld, should they continue the hazardous submarine operations?
The language Cheney uses in this memo bleeds with euphemism. Exactly what is the “etc.” that follows “private discussions”? An offer the newspaper can’t refuse? And what “action” is Cheney proposing they take “against those responsible for N.Y. TIMES story”?
I wish I could say I’m surprised that nearly 30 years later, similar secret shenanigans by the same secretive hooligans are taking place within the halls of power. But I’m not surprised, and I would even be disappointed if Cheney and Rumsfeld weren’t abusing the power of their offices. I’m not even surprised at their hypocrisy in wanting to “enforce laws against unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” when the current Bush administration most certainly illegally leaked classified information, like the name of a CIA operative in order to exact revenge on that agent’s husband, a vocal critic of the current war in Iraq.
I wonder what memos are flying around the White House now, especially after Hersh’s latest article in the New Yorker, in which he elaborates on his first exposé and describes how nearly everyone in the chain of command at the Department of Defense attempted to cover-up the abuses at Abu Ghraib. “Secrecy and wishful thinking,” Hersh relates, “are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.”
We are seeing evidence of that secrecy and wishful thinking every day now, and there seems to be no end in sight.
On Saturday Vice President Dick Cheney said that “Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States ever had.” How modest Cheney is, considering that he himself was a secretary of defense under the original President Bush. If we take Cheney’s fawning words at face value (something I would rarely recommend), does that mean that Cheney was simply a more or less adequate secretary? And would this automatically make Rumsfeld a better one, or even “the best”?
Come to think of it, there is something distinctly incestuous about the job of defense secretary. Cheney had it, and now Rummy has it. It would seem that Rummy had sloppy seconds, but don’t forget that Rumsfeld was secretary of defense once before, way back under President Ford. Twenty years ago, Rumsfeld was in D.C., swaggering just as much as he does today.
It is a known known what Rumsfeld’s preoccupations are today, but what was he concerned about his first time around as secretary of defense?
Just take a look at this recently declassified memo, detailing a top-secret 1976 conversation between President Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, NSA Director Brent Scowcroft, and Rumsfeld (See the larger image). The document is interesting not so much because of what is being said, but simply because it illustrates what a dinosaur Rumsfeld is. His Cold War mentality shines through, especially when he frets that militarily, America has “been slipping since the ’60s from superiority to equivalence, and if we don’t stop now, we’ll be behind.”
But back to Cheney’s statement from yesterday…
Cheney also said, “People ought to get off his case and let him do his job.” Cheney sounds a little too overprotective of his buddy, and more to the point, snidely unimpressed with the magnitude and ramifications of the Iraqi abuse scandal. Cheney demonstrates that his secure undisclosed location is as much metaphorical as literal–Cheney is out touch and not willing for a second to put himself in the place of Iraqi citizens who see these horrendous images of torture perpetrated by their so-called liberators.
The point, Mr. Cheney, is that Rumsfeld didn’t do his job. Had he done it, American forces overseas would be abiding by the rules of the Geneva Convention. These rules, to which the U.S. is a signatory, were broken, and they were broken routinely and systematically, and they continued to be broken long after Rumsfeld found out about the violations.
If this lack of leadership defines the “best” secretary of defense this nation can muster, then the ones that weren’t the best must have really been pitiful.
Thinking more about Bush’s lovely dog in yesterday’s post, I remembered famous lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice
Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
Well, “remembered” is not quite what happened. I knew that the phrase “dogs of war” came from Shakespeare, but I had to look it up in the excellent Open Source Shakespeare concordance to find the exact quote. This is a dramatic monologue Mark Antony delivers after bargaining with Caesar’s murderers(Brutus and Cassius), and in it he predicts nothing but war and destruction in the wake of Caesar’s death.
Using the concordance I discovered that there’s only one other place in all of Shakespeare that the words “dogs” and “war” appear in such close proximity. It’s from Richard II and I think it’s worth quoting (thinking again of Bush’s dog):
O villains, vipers, damn’d without redemption!
Dogs, easily won to fawn on any man!
Snakes, in my heart-blood warm’d, that sting my heart!
Three Judases, each one thrice worse than Judas!
Would they make peace? terrible hell make war
Upon their spotted souls for this offence!
The “Judases” to whom King Richard refers are traitors, and he likens them to both “snakes” and “dogs.” But what I really want to focus on is Shakespeare’s characterization of dogs: they are “easily won” and “fawn on any man”–any man that feeds them.
Who feeds Bush’s dog? Who feeds Bush’s dogs of war?
Hypocrisy comes from the Latin hypocrisis, which in turn derives from the Greek 
And it was on a stage yesterday in Maumee, Ohio, that our Dear Leader
told an adoring crowd of pancake eaters–who might as well have been lotus eaters–that he has “vision” and a “plan to win the war on terror.” That plan, the White House just announced, will require another $25 billion. And this is in addition to the $160 billion Bush has already asked for (and received).
About Iraq, Bush said that “because we acted, torture chambers are closed.” It seems to me utterly heartless and cruelly hypocritical to make such a statement at the same time the top story in the world news is the systematic abuse, torture, and murder of Iraqi prisoners of war at the hands of U.S. soldiers.
The president is fumbling around for explanations and excuses today, but what was the White House saying about this issue yesterday? Running a search yesterday for official photographs of the administration, thinking I’d find an engaging close-up of an “annoyed” Bush scolding Rummy, I instead found only two photographs on the White House website. Both were of “Barney,” the president’s Scottish Terrier playing with a golf ball on the South Lawn.
The dog’s golf ball is an issue of national importance, of course, and I can absolutely understand why Americans need to see their White House at work. Nonetheless, I wonder if there might be the teensiest bit of politicking behind this photograph. As if it could somehow be an antidote to the disturbing images of Iraqi soldiers, hooded and naked, forced to pile themselves into a pyramid, while behind them two smiling American soldiers pose for the camera. (See the Memory Hole for some of these photographs, but be forewarned they are graphic and unsettling.)
Meanwhile Bush can continue telling his supporters that “Either Iraq will be a camp for terror and tyranny, or Iraq will be a model for freedom and democracy…” The latter will certainly not happen on his watch.
True or False: the following headline exemplifies the concept of irony: