Donald Rumsfeld & Porter Goss say we should be very afraid… and we should
In spite of the secret war that has raged for years between the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency — a war that the Pentagon won — the CIA’s new PR chief (since they are now out of the intelligence business) Porter Goss and Pentagon tzar Donald Rumsfeld are singing off the same sheet of music the last few days. Both of them are telling us that there are vaguely defined but terrrifying threats out there.
When two Bush appointees are this well harmonized, you can bet your bippie that things are going badly again in Washington DC. Or they are expected to.
With March and the second anniversary of their little Mesopotamian misadventure right around the corner, and the anti-war movement finally untying that anchor attached to its ass — the Democratic Party and it’s impersonation of an electoral opposition — the neocons need some breathing space to accelerate their failing agenda in Southwest Asia. So they are turning up the volume on good old Amerikan paranoid xenophobia.
Crazy dark people are burying weapons underground to pull out and throw at us, so we need atomic bunker-busters. Crazy dark people are planning a second 9/11. Amazing how crazy and yet how devilishly clever those dark people are!
With satellites that can read your birth certificate through a cumulo-nimbus, that wacky Kim Jong-il managed to secretly build nuclear weapons, but he is too dumb to realize that using them against a US target would trigger his nation’s annihilation?
Go figure.
There’s obviously only one explanation for this co-evolution of technological brillance and flatline stupidity. It’s the explanation provided by film script conventions here in happy-happy SUV-Amerika. This is, after all, where a preppy turd like Bush, who has never experienced a day’s anxiety in his life about paying a bill, can pass himself off as an Everyman, and an Austrian steroid stallion is elected Governor of California. We are a simple people, and we need simple explanations.
The explanation is… they are not stupid, they are evil. The capitals of nations all over the world are being taken over by Hannibal fucken Lecter.
Ward Churchill got into a lot of trouble for saying that the 9/11 attacks were not the product of evil — no matter the terrible consequences — but an outgrowth of real grievances and a real geopolitical system. Not some transcendent contest between Good & Evil.
Ward Churchill got into trouble precisely because he said the Emperor has no clothes.
Well, now we can all get into trouble with him. Let the red-baiting and patriot-baiting begin! And it will. It already has with Churchill and Lynne Stewart, but it’s only just begun. I’ll make a substantial bet right now that everyone who opposes the administration’s agenda is in for increased surveillance and ultra-increased mudslinging. (Scaramouche liberals will join in the flogging like they always do, like they are already doing with Churchill.)
Rumsfeld and Goss are trying to frighten the bejeezuz out of us at the same time that a McCarthy-like attack is being mounted against the left in the United States. Is this because — in the words of Donald Rumsfeld when he was arguing with the Joint Chiefs in 2001 about whether to attack Afghanistan or Iraq — there aren’t any other good targets?
They are losing the war in Iraq — even if the press is doing a yeoman’s task of concealing it — the Chinese just bypassed them as a consumer market for raw materials, Venezuela boasted 17% growth in the wake of last year’s US-promoted attempted coup, the deficit is at record levels along with US personal and public debt loads, the French, Germans, Russians, and now even the Indians are telliing them — in oh so diplomatic ways — to go piss up a rope, and the Iranians just won the southern Iraq elections. They are still running from the Valerie Plame scandal (I think Scooter Libby did it), from tens of billions that ‘disappeared’ on the watch of the Coalition Provisional Authority, from their failure to prosceute Custer Battles, the (Republican) kleptomercenaries running Baghdad International, Fallujah is being revealed as a kind of My Lai writ large, and prison abuse scandals keep cropping up.
Be very afraid, they are saying, because Osama’s gonna getcha mama.
Here’s the irony.
It’s true. The very agenda they are trying to protect with this chicanery will vastly increase the probability of some form of attack. Here’s the other irony. Neither bunker busters nor neo-McCarthyism can stop it.
Anyone who wants to mount a big attack on the United States, can. But if the administration tells you where the real targets are, they jeapordize profits. That’s because they have no intention of shutting down Duke Power or Monsanto.
There are 104 licensed and operating nuclear power facilities in the United States, each with a spent fuel pool full of gamma-emitting isotopes that will burn if exposed to air and drift downwind — wherever that may be on a given day — not only killing those trapped in the panic-stricken traffic snarls, but leaving huge areas radiologically contaminated for millenia.
Gordon Thompson once referred to these plants as “pre-deployed radiological weapons waiting for activiation by an enemy.”
There are 3,000 chemical facilities in the US that are within a danger radius of at least 10, 000 people, 700 plants that would endanger 100,000 or more people, and 123 that could hit more than a million residents. There is transportation sabotage, water suppply sabotage (imagine 20 gallons of LSD), coal fired power plants, internet disruption,… in many ways, when you think about it, the targets selected for 9/11 were not mad mass destruction targets but targets selected carefully for their strategic and symbolic import — a major global financial center (where Unocal and the CIA had offices), the Pentagon, and (according to some) the Capital. Financial, military, and political decapitation.
I hate to break it to those who fantasize that OBL, or whomever, was out to create the worst imaginable havoc out of pure antisocial evil, but if that were the case, the target in New York would not have been the WTC; it would have been the Indan Point nuclear reactor.
Based on the immense wealth the United States as accumulated through its dominaton and exploitation of the rest of the world — including, by the way, it’s imperial allies — we are now captured in a giant net of potentially lethal and highly vulnerable technomass. Anyone that wants the US bad enough, can get it… only all of us are stuck here in “it.”
So the logical conclusion would be, at least in my tiny brain, the US should remove any motive for waging such an attack by backing away from policies directed at large populations that are exploitative. provocative, and plain destructive. I know that’s not very macho, ‘backing down’ and all that. But the correspondence between machismo and stupidity in my experience has been at or near 100%.
Moreover, the United States government, if it was smart, whould encourage the development of stable, central states that give them some institution with which to engage in conflict resolution and to hold accountable.
Seeking stable central governments is particularly important even from the perspective of the militarists. Imperial militaries are credible threats only when their doctrines can be directed agasint some decisive and strategic target. If the state as an institution is destroyed, as it was in Iraq and Afghanistan, then the difficulty of gaining stategic military leverage over one’s enemy becomes harder by orders of magnitude. One becomes Sherman with no Atlanta.
So what are the neocons anticipating now? Why, to topple the governments of Iran and Syria, of course.
So the question remains… what is the scare-mongering for right now? What do Don and Porter want?
Ask Ward Churchill and Lynne Stewart.
GEORGE:
LOVE YOUS STUFF STAN YOU SAY IT LOUD AND CLEAR JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT YOU KEEP IT UP!
19 February 2005, 1:59 pmJ. C. Dahl:
Didn’t George Bush make the statement ” you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists” ? What the HELL does that mean? Does that mean if I disagree with the war in Iraq, I must be a terrorist??? Where do these people come from? What’s happening to my country, or, more specifically,.. this government? Maybe we should be afraid ,… of these powerhungry demons posing as human beings.
23 June 2005, 1:55 amOracle:
I hate to say, but President Bush was re-elected for a second term by American voters.
I just read on Google News that (May 5th, 2006 is today) that Porter Gross just resigned. I have also heard that the level of secreacy & sense of malaise within the White House is at it’s highest since Nixon’s time in office.
As my father is originally from Miami, I do have compassion for Americans who have the sense not to live in ignorance & question thier leaders motives…but boy, am I happy that I am a Canadian.
You guys down there will likely be targeted again soon, unless the Bush administration stops behaving like such an international bully & self-righteous fool.
One book that I do highly recommend though (on a positve note) is: Cosmos and Psyche, Intimations of a New World View, by Richard Tarnas.
5 May 2006, 3:50 pmIt’s absolutely incredible, and a must read.