Loose Change

Loose Change
directed by Dylan Avery

Shortly — at the most around 1000 days, at the time of this writing — the era of George Bush will finally drag to an end. How many more bodies will pile up, how many more indictments will occur between now and then, nobody knows. The “war” — in quotes, because for many reasons, we are not a nation at war — the war will continue, of course. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

No, we don’t know how this will end. But we all, far too painfully, remember exactly how it started. As we’ve been bellowed at constantly, the “the world changed on 9/11!” Indeed it did. That was the day the powers that be, tired of waiting for circumstances to align themselves into a “perfect storm” — or PNAC’s “new Pearl Harbor” — decided to jumpstart the future by slaughtering its own citizens. By graphically illustrating how America was vulnerable to attack, thus needing to be protected, the Patriot Act, two wars, and scores of other grotesque injustices were allowed with hardly a whiff of protest. Anyone questioning the party line was deemed un-American.

Distorted Morality

Distorted Morality
Noam Chomsky
Silent Films

To some, MIT linguist Noam Chomsky is an American-hating demon; to others he is a fact spouting god. This DVD, which consists of a talk given at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard during February of 2002, will provide either viewpoint with more ammunition by which to denigrate or praise.

The talk was entitled “America’s War On Terror?“, and being a linguist, Chomsky quickly dismisses the concept as being so illogical, language-wise, that intelligent people should rightly balk at the term. Much like the equally ineffective “War On Drugs,” terror is not a person, place or thing that can be identified and fought — and without a clear enemy, how can victory ever be proclaimed? It cannot, nor, as Chomsky points out, will it ever be. It is in the best interests of the state to have such “wars” continue forever. That is what states do.

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Greg Palast
Plume Publishing

It is very difficult to read this book without clenching your teeth. Journalist Greg Palast has documented, in painful detail, some of the more repulsive events of the last few years. From the stealing of the Florida election to the real causes of the crash of the Exxon Valdez. The stories told here are generally examples not of random misfortune, but rather systematic, premeditated attempts (in most cases, successful) to subvert the law and societies norms for money.

And make no mistake, it is all for money. From Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris cooking the voting rolls in Florida to Pat Robertson’s “holy” shenanigans, the reporting adage of “follow the money” is the divine principle here. The blackmailing of California and Britain’s energy customers by Enron and the Southern Company is a prime example; freed from regulation, they promised limitless energy at a 20% savings. They then paid off a few legislators and promptly held consumers hostage, raising rates as much as 1000% in a single day, using stage-managed “blackouts” to increase need. Exxon/Mobil’s board sat in a meeting months before the spill in Alaska and acknowledged (only to themselves, of course) that such an event was likely to occur. And that they didn’t have the material or crew to contain it if it did. The Valdez hit the rocks not because of a drunken captain, as we were led to believe–he was asleep below, and not at the bridge. However, an expensive bit of radar gear in disrepair was turned off and had been for over a year. But hey, Exxon/Mobil made a profit, so everything is fine, right? Tell that to the people who have to live there, and have seen their livelihood ruined because the area is now a toxic waste dump. Tell it to the thousands of animals that smothered to death in oil, or who can’t reproduce because of chemicals in their systems.

Steve Earle: Jerusalem

Jerusalem
Steve Earle
E-Squared / Artemis

patriot: One who loves, supports, and defends one’s country.

treason: 1: Violation of allegiance toward one’s country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one’s country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies. 2: A betrayal of trust or confidence.

Steve Earle, patriot? Yes. Steve Earle, treasonous? Many people are saying so. By having the audacity to challenge the (War) party line, one of America’s last protest singers has flown in the face of popular sentiment and actually dared to ask the questions that we as a nation are seemingly too blinded by fear or cowed by an oppressive government to voice. With the song “John Walker’s Blues,” Earle became the focus of talk radio airheads and generated reams of print frothing denouncing the song as a “treasonous” act simply because it appears on first glance to take the side of the “American Taliban,” John Walker. No matter that the song simply depicts Earle’s concept of what might have been going through the mind of a confused, disillusioned youth “…raised on MTV,” and the forces that possibly brought him to feel that “…and the first thing I heard that made sense was the word of Mohammed, peace be upon him.” No “America sucks.” No “death to the infidels.” Speaking a viewpoint — asking a question — is not treasonous. As much as some people would like to forget or negate the fact, each story has at least two sides.

Ignorance is Not Bliss

Ignorance is Not Bliss

Watching the clouds of smoke billow over New York and Washington was a sobering sight. Although I personally haven’t learned of anyone I knew that is missing after the attacks, due to the sheer number of people in the World Trade Center, a macabre version of “six degrees of separation” will undoubtedly find everyone in this country connected in someway to one of the lost. Of course, in a larger sense, we are all only one degree away — any attack on an American is an attack on us all, any affront to a human being is an affront to all. Many outcomes of this aggression are being bandied about, from US strikes on “those who harbor terrorists” (which would include most of the civilized world), to “bomb them back to the stone age” (they are already there, thanks in large part to Soviets a few years back). Closer to home, Attorney General John Ashcroft wants greater powers to conduct intelligence, including the expanded use of wiretapping and surveillance. And according to many polls, most Americans are just fine with whatever the powers that be deem necessary to keep this from happening again. They rush from prayer vigil to candlelight service, bedecked in Old Navy T-shirts with the American flag proudly displayed, the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the wind from the antenna of their gas-guzzling SUV. The world has a new Hitler in Osama bin Laden, the Taliban function quite well as Nazis.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11
Michael Moore
Lion’s Gate Films

Daniel Ellsberg, in his book Secrets, paints a compelling picture of a person who recognizes an injustice, and comes to realize that he is in a unique position to make a difference. In Ellsberg’s case, as a Rand Corporation analyst and advisor to the Defense Department, he had first hand knowledge of the duplicity of our government, spanning multiple administrations, about the war in Vietnam. By releasing the McNamara Report, known as the Pentagon Papers, he exposed the decades of lies that led us into, and kept us for years in an unwinnable war. He came to believe that no matter the personal cost he had to attempt to alert the world to the facts that he knew. To not do so would be, ultimately, to aide and abet evil.

It is apparent that filmmaker Michael Moore feels much the same drive. Like many Americans, he saw that his government had lied to him, but unlike most of us, Moore had the ability and means to do something about it. The result, the blistering indictment of the Bush administration Fahrenheit 9/11, is a compelling, intelligent and extremely emotional look at the utter contempt our government holds for the truth, it’s own citizens, and the world. The trademark “Moore-isms” are held to a minimum. The only moment you laugh out of humor rather than chuckle in irony is when Moore rides around Congress in an ice cream truck reading the Patriot Act. Undoubtedly sensitive to the criticisms of Bowling for Columbine’s numerous shadings and distortions, Moore has made sure that this film is as accurate as he can make it. Does that mean that the film is even-handed and objective? No. Not at all. And frankly, after 4 years of White House lies and Fox News warmongering, having someone present an opposing viewpoint is little more than an attempt at equal time. By seemingly limiting the film to only those items that are unimpeachably true, Moore has had to exercise an amount of restraint that both his fans and foes will find surprising. There is nothing in this film that can be called “liberal propaganda” or “conspiracy stuff”. When Moore quotes the Washington Post’s statement that prior to 9/11 Bush spent 42% of his time on vacation, it doesn’t distort Bush’s record, it merely states it. When it shows how the White House altered Bush’s service record by blacking out the name James Bath, who served with Bush in the Air National Guard and went on to be a bagman for bin Laden family, it simply presents this fact and asks the viewer to ponder the reasons behind it. At best, Bush is depicted as an incompetent, inarticulate boob. And while this might be easy to swallow, the notion that he and his administration (and family) are in the pocket of Saudi Arabia, have waged war purely for financial reasons, and are indifferent to the pain and suffering that their actions have caused is harder to watch and accept, but no less believable.

Crossing The Rubicon

Crossing The Rubicon
Michael C. Ruppert
New Society Publishers

Now Bush and his minions have been returned to office. One can’t say “elected” since our current system of voting is a bewildering mish-mash of invisible, untraceable systems that can’t (by design) be verified. Thus leading to charges, most likely accurate, that the system is rigged. But whatever, the most dangerous, primitive man ever to take the oath has been returned to power. What this means, both for our nation and the world, is yet to be seen, although it doesn’t bode well for those who cherish liberty, justice, and security. Bush has taken every occasion to firmly resist any attempts to make our county safer or to advance the cause of liberty. Either here, or on the killing fields of the Middle East.

No, it is impossible to guess just how much damage Bush will do in the next four years (provided he makes it that long). But it is possible to look back on his first term and examine the what’s and the why’s. Something that his supporters steadfastly refuse to do. When polled, 40% of Bush voters believed that Iraq had a hand in 9/11. Despite years of proof showing that this wasn’t true, despite denials from Bush, Cheney et al, four out of ten people persist in holding dear this fallacy. They do so in order to justify the war in Iraq and their own bloodlust. And it must take some amount of effort to do so. Since outside of Fox News and right-wing message boards, no one else takes such statements as anything but a lie floated to make our power grab in Iraq seem necessary.

We’re not allowed to forget that if we remove one element of our recent history we wouldn’t be discussing a second Bush term. That event, of course, is 9/11. In a single day a bumbling, disinterested man became a statesman of sorts. From that day forward, he has “led the fight” against terrorism, and vowed to bring those responsible to justice. There are only two problems with that scenario. First, he has done nothing to fight terrorism, using it instead as a smokescreen behind which he has started two wars of conquest, not defense.

And secondly?

Oh yeah. He knew 9/11 was going to occur. And not in a “read the briefing, increased threat level sort of way“, either. Those 7 minutes he sat in a Florida classroom, after he heard of the second plane hitting the towers? It was either the reaction of a ill-advised idiot, or that of a man who knew that he, and the people around him, were not at risk. Since the president is one of the most advised people on earth, it can’t be the former, which leaves us with the scenario that this brilliant and vital book, Crossing The Rubicon illustrates.

9-11, The Big Lie / Pentagate

9-11, The Big Lie / Pentagate
Thierry Meyssan
Carnot Publishing Ltd.

Where’s the plane?

Your reaction to the above question is insightful as to how you view the events of 9.11 and the subsequent year. If you are presented with the images showing the destruction of the Pentagon and listen to the explanations given (almost entirely by our military) and you accept them as gospel, then it can be said that most likely you believe and trust what our government has told us about the events of that horrible day. You dismiss as a “conspiracy theory” any questioning of the official version of the events. In the most media and information saturated society in the history of the world, any attempts at debate on this subject is trivialized, and the questioner is branded as traitorous for even asking the question.

This is the same reaction that occurred after the publication of the Warren Commission’s report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. At that time the world was supposed to accept without question that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone (with his “magic bullet”) shot and killed the president of the United States. The only person who could have shed light on this, Oswald himself, was murdered while in police protection, and 27 volumes later, the world was given the “documentation” that answered the question that seemingly had been already answered on the day of his arrest. People after that point have made a career of challenging the Warren Report, and they too were branded as loonies or traitors for suggesting that perhaps the government, in its report, was lying to us. Some amount of vindication was achieved in 1975 when the House Committee on Assassinations found cause, via the evidence, to call the death of a sitting president a conspiracy, by finding that Oswald did not fire all the shots that day. They did not, however, attempt to name who else was involved, and we as a nation may never know. The majority of the public, 40 years or so past the event, doesn’t care who killed Kennedy. It is old news. No matter that the murder of a president is a rather singular event in our history, no matter that his death may well have signaled a shift in America’s policy toward Vietnam, and allowed the war to grow to the point that Nixon and Kissinger gave serious thought to using nuclear weapons on the citizens of Laos. No matter. It’s old news, and who cares?

Speaking of “old news”, it is generally accepted that Franklin Roosevelt knew of the pending attack on Pearl Harbor and allowed it to occur. While on the one hand swearing to an American public that the war in Europe was none of our concern, he on the other hand was working in lockstep with Churchill to aid the side of the Allies against Hitler and Japan. When the world looks at the aftermath of the Second World War, they generally see it as a horrible, but necessary, chain of events, events that led to the downfall of Hitler, Stalin and a threatening Japan. So what if FDR knew of, and perhaps stage-managed, the attack on Pearl Harbor? In the end, peace and democracy triumphed, and the world is a better place for it. The ends justify the means.

Let’s look ahead 50 or 60 years from the events of 9/11/2001. Let us imagine a time without “terrorism”, or at least our government’s definition of the term. No bin-Laden, no Hussein, no more living under the threat of random acts of violence against the greatest nation on earth. Our “way of life” (which in this case means the reliance on Middle Eastern oil) is preserved, by the simple fact that a long, expensive war has left Arab nations unable to survive without our assistance (and domination), much like Germany after the war. So what if in the years that have passed we have learned that George Bush knew of the attacks beforehand, that he was acting primarily out of a fiduciary interest to his friends in the energy industry? We licked terrorism, didn’t we? The world is a safer place, and thus all is well.

Thierry Meyssan, a French journalist, finds this notion disquieting. And in two books he has given those of us with an open mind the beginnings of a movement, a movement to unravel the official “sweater” that our benevolent government has attempted (and in large part, succeeded) in wrapping a terrified population in. By examining one aspect of the events of 9/11, the supposed crash of a jet into the Pentagon, he has pointed up that the story we as a world have been given by our “leaders” is most likely a lie. The evidence simply does not support the idea of a large passenger jet striking the heart of the American defense establishment. We are to believe that the plane, upon impact, ignited and burned to the extent that all traces of it were vaporized, but that this intense heat somehow managed to not engulf the rest of the Pentagon in flames. We are to believe that this plane slammed into the outer wall of the Pentagon, traveled through three of the five wings of the structure, leaving a perfectly round exit hole- but no debris of itself at all. No bodies recovered, no small scraps of metal from the plane, nothing. Only the black boxes, found days later, that yielded no important information.

This, of course, is preposterous. Putting aside for a moment that any examination of the pictures and statements from that day don’t make sense, we are supposed to believe that something — a plane, a missile, whatever, was able to penetrate military airspace and strike its target without anything being launched in its way. Modern aircraft such as the type we are supposed to believe hit the Pentagon are equipped with a device known as a “transponder” that constantly signals air control as to the type and location of the plane. The instant a planes signal is lost, a defined procedure is in place to deal with it, which includes scrambling of fighter jets to visually locate the plane, attempt to make contact, and if no response is received, shoot it down, since the loss of transponder signal cannot occur without the deliberate action of the pilot. The plane in question turned off its transponder signal somewhere in Ohio, turned around, and flew over 500 miles unimpeded by anyone, and crashed into the Pentagon. The official statement? “We lost the plane”. Either our air defense system is substandard, or someone is lying. As these books document, the only way anything could get that close to the Pentagon without “tripping” the alarms is if the plane was considered by the computers to be a “friendly”. Planes are equipped with devices that send a signal designating them as “friendly”, so that they won’t be shot down in a wartime battle. Whatever hit the Pentagon was allowed to do so in some way because the system thought it was friendly.

Forbidden Truth

Forbidden Truth
Jean-Charles Brisard & Gullaume Dasquie
Thunder’s Mouth Press

Much like the Kennedy assassination or the events of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, we may never know the entire story behind the scenes of September 11. The questions of who knew what, and when, and why no action was taken will remain unanswered for all time, quite possibly because the answers are too dangerous to the powers that be to ever be uttered. Theories abound, from the “Bush knew, and didn’t stop it” to the equally ludicrous “they attacked us because they are jealous of our freedoms” con job being floated.

What can be known, with great certainty, are the facts behind the relationships between the United States and Osama bin Laden in the years and months before 9/11, and the role of his homeland, Saudi Arabia, in the world oil market. And make no mistake — this story is the story of oil, and the profits derived from it. If the only question were securing enough oil to drive our cars and light our factories, then things would be so much simpler. We would just find the best price and purchase enough oil to get us to the next day (which is currently about 1.7 billion gallons a day from Saudi Arabia alone). But that is not the question. When George Bush the elder stated that Desert Storm was a war to “protect our way of life,” he wasn’t lying, or speaking rhetorically — but he wasn’t saying what people heard. Most of the nation took his statement to mean big cars and warm houses in the winter. A much smaller, but far more powerful group of listeners understood to what Bush referred. Their way of life — the immense profits reaped from oil, the twisted spiders web of international banking, and the use of our military and intelligence communities as hired guns to keep the peace (i.e. the profits) in an increasingly hazardous world — that was the way of life that Bush swore to send American troops to protect. And seemingly, so did Clinton and George Jr.

This engrossing book, written by two French journalists, recounts in exhaustive detail the links between the Taliban, bin Laden, and the United States. In order to make sure the Russians didn’t take over Afghanistan, the United States backed the Taliban, one of the more viable forces aligned against the Communist threat in the region. Once the Soviets backed away, our interest in the region didn’t end. The possibility of running a massive pipeline through Afghanistan and tapping into new supplies of oil proved alluring enough to American (business) interests that we overlooked the Taliban’s deplorable human rights stance, their anti-American statements, and bin Laden’s declaration of a jihad against the United States. In fact, so precious was the region to our pocketbooks that we for the most part overlooked the bombing of the U.S.S Cole (masterminded by bin Laden) — it took the nation of Libya to actually file a warrant for his arrest with Interpol. We looked the other way when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist statues, ignored intelligence reports pointing to terrorists in our country — we did nothing to possibly jeopardize capitalizing on our greed.

So the question returns of who knew what, and why did the attack happen? Although this book gives no definitive set of reasons, it does relate an episode between U.S and Taliban officials, meeting in an attempt to get bin Laden into American hands, and the region stabilized enough that construction could begin on the pipeline. At some point during the discussions, the following statement — a statement that reeks of America — was made. “Either you accept our carpet of gold, or we’ll carpet you with bombs.” As events have proven since 9/11, this was no idle threat. No one knows if this statement — and others like it — was the straw that broke the camel’s back and sent the planes into the World Trade Center, but it certainly couldn’t have helped.

The world that these events occur in is one so far removed from our day-to-day existence that most of us have nothing to compare it to. The notion that the Carlyle group, an association of arms dealers that includes George Bush Sr. as well as his son’s cronies, would engage in business with people who avowed in no uncertain terms their hatred for our country is repellant. The idea that Dick Cheney, our Vice President, would do business with Iraq after the Gulf War — and then compound his shame by lying about it over and over, is an affront to those who died attempting to secure that region, for whatever reason they were told to do so. The alarming swiftness that our President and his minions have stripped our country of the very things that the rest of the world supposedly covets — our Constitution, our civil liberties, and what little moral high ground we had managed to maintain over the years, is shocking. Particularly shocking when you accept the fact that he did business with these very people not too long ago, and now he calls them “the axis of evil.” The idea that the greed of a handful of people might have brought about America’s darkest day is a slap in the face to the families of those still left unfound beneath the rubble of 9/11. If these despicable people are considered human, then there is no way I am. You owe it to yourself, your children, and your country to read books such as Forbidden Truth. Because as the Boss once said — and recent events have surely proven — blind faith in anyone, or anything, can get you killed.

Originally published Ink 19, 2002