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The
Bush War Cabinet is invoking the memory of 9/11 as justification for
their systematic shredding of constitutional and human rights.
President Bush is now on a national speaking tour to make Americans
believe they need to constantly be in fear, and should not question the
Administration's policies. Instilling fear into Americans,
unfortunately, has worked before, and this War President believes it'll
continue to work
Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and the rest of the gang that thinks
they’re a war cabinet supporting the man who thinks he’s a war president used
the fifth anniversary of 9/11 to tell the world how great they are.
In
speech after speech, all meant to boost their neocon candidates’ chances for
re-election in two months, they dominated the news media to proclaim that under
their watch there have been no more attacks on American soil. They looked
directly into the cameras and told us that because Americans are fighting in
Iraq, the terrorists aren’t in
New York City. For their part, the establishment
media willingly disseminated the PR.
What
wasn’t stated in the rah-rah political boosterism was that the massive babbling
was nothing more than sleight-of-hand distortion. The sleeping Bush–Cheney
administration before 9/11 had begun to reduce the effectiveness of FEMA, cut
back funding for the FBI counterterrorism operations, failed to act upon a
number of FBI warnings about potential terrorists already in the
United States,
and disregarded substantial and significant warnings of the impending attack.
Even one month before 9/11, President Bush apparently didn’t do much with a
Presidential Daily Brief that was entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside
U.S.,” and then stood flat-footed when first told about the 9/11 attacks. But
then his advisory council, largely composed of his father’s advisors, regrouped
and led him into at least the appearance of being presidential.
To
strike the terrorist base camps, Bush ordered troops into
Afghanistan to tear down the
Taliban regime that protected the al-Qaeda terrorists, and vowed to capture
Osama bin Laden. Five years later, the Department of Defense, the CIA, and the
“Big Ear” NSA have admitted that the trail to bin Laden is cold. But, there are
about 15,000 troops in
Afghanistan,
which under American control again leads the world in growing opium.
In
Iraq are about 150,000 American
troops because the war president and his war cabinet wanted to invade
Iraq,
and lied to the American people. Even knowing substantial evidence to the
contrary, they blatantly told us that Saddam Hussein had ties to 9/11 and
al-Qaeda. They said
Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction. The establishment media unquestioningly channeled
the message.
The
non-combatant “White House Warriors” who planned to “shock and awe” the world
with a swift military strike, claimed American troops would be welcomed by the
Iraqis who would give them joyful praise and even flowers, much like the liberated
French gave conquering Americans in World War II. They claimed the war, which
has now cost Americans about than $440 billion, would be financed by oil
revenue. What they didn’t tell Americans is that there are no oil revenues, and
that American oil-based corporations have had massive windfall profits to be
added to millions of taxpayer-provided dollars that have either been misplaced,
unaccounted for, or can’t be traced.
Because
of diversion of funds, equipment, and supplies into the
Iraq war, combined with the placement of the
National Guard and their materiel in
Iraq,
America
is less protected against hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and other natural
disasters.
For
his part, Donald Rumsfeld refused to allow the military to plan for a post-war
occupation. “In his own mind, he thought we could go in and fight and take out
the regime and come out,” Brig. Gen.
Mark Scheid, who was in charge of the Logistics War Plans Division, told Orin
Kerr of the Hampton Roads (Va.) Daily Press this month. Rumsfeld “said
we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think
we are going over there for a long war,” and threatened to fire anyone who argued
for post-war planning, said Gen. Scheid.
The
military weren’t the only ones threatened. In Bush Speak, enhanced by almost
every talk-show mouth and right-wing politician, and led by the draft-dodging
Dick Cheney, refusal to buy into the Bush–Cheney propaganda was equated with
refusal to “Support the Troops.” Those who questioned the Bush–Cheney
administration were branded “cut and run cowards”; they were called unpatriotic,
even treasonous, accused of “aiding the enemy.”
It
was those “unpatriotic traitors” who questioned why the Bush–Cheney
administration was methodically shredding the Constitution. They opposed the
excesses of the USA PATRIOT Act, opposed renditions, opposed torture of
prisoners, challenged the suppression of First Amendment rights of free speech,
spoke out against the Administration’s quashing of Fourth Amendment rights of
privacy, and the Fifth and Sixth amendment rights of due process, and the eighth
amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment.
The
war in
Iraq
has now cost more than 3,000 American lives, caused more than 20,000 injuries,
thousands of them permanent. At least 41,600 civilians and others in the combat
zones have been killed, according to the nonpartisan estimates of Iraq Body
Count, which keeps detailed data on all deaths in
Iraq.
To
continue to instill fear into Americans, the Bush–Cheney Administration has
used the fifth year anniversary of 9/11 to tout the $20 billion spent on
airport security, but hasn’t acknowledged the vulnerability of the nation’s
ports, railway or bus systems. While praising the new multimillion dollar
counterterrorism building and all the agencies working within it, it hasn’t
acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security has become a bungling
bureaucratic nightmare. And, underneath all of the blustering and braggadocio
is still a domestic reality—health care, the environment, and protection of all
Americans against workforce exploitation and poverty is of secondary importance
to this Administration.
Two days after his election in 2004, George W. Bush told
America
he “earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to
spend it. It is my style.” He said, “That’s what happened in the—after the 2000
election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election—and I’m
going to spend it.”
For
several months after 9/11, Americans were united in their grief. Almost the
entire world, including countries with a majority of its population Muslim, was
America’s
ally. President Bush and his war cabinet squandered that good will by their
arrogant jingoistic deceitfulness and stupidity, and are now on a nationwide
tour to invoke the memory of 9/11 and try to hammer-lock the nation into
believing that they needed to give up some Constitutional and fundamental
rights in order to be safe. The President has spent all of his political
capital and has put
America
into debt.
America is divided, more so than during the
Vietnam War.
The Bush–Cheney legacy won’t be that they stopped terrorism, but that they
played upon fear to promote a political agenda that fractured a country almost
as much as the Civil War ever did.
Walter
Brasch’s current books are America’s
Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government’s Violation of Constitutional and
Civil Rights and ‘Unacceptable’: The
Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina. Both are available through
amazon.com and other on-line sources. You may contact Dr. Brasch at
brasch@bloomu.edu
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