A Casual Mention of 9/11 by the Chicago Tribune

Unlike the Kennedy assassination, which came as such a stunning shock to the nation, at a time when Americans were far less cynical about their government, at a time when there were three broadcast networks and no Internet where people could collect contemporaneous reporting and then form timelines, like that of Paul Thompson, 9/11 and the surrounding events have been recorded and a simple presentation of what we do know for sure can only lead to the conclusion that those responsible for 9/11 are not all in the borderland of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There were not just a few warnings. There were hundreds of them. George Tenet was running around with his "hair on fire," asking for special meetings with Condi Rice, which he and Richard Clarke received, yet nothing was done.

Condi Rice is a proven liar when she says no one could have imagined that anyone would use planes as flying bombs. There was already one such plot that was busted up by the Clinton administration, coming from the Pacific. There were also a warning, from the government of Egypt about Al Qaeda wanting to hit the G-8 conference in Genoa in June of 2001 with a plane. She had to have known about that warning since Bush and the American delegation slept on a U.S. naval vessel off the coast of Italy for the duration of the conference, so why could she not imagine such a scenario?

Admittedly some of the statements and ramblings of the 9/11 truth movement are so far out there as to make anyone who doesn't believe the official conspiracy theory seem like a nutcase. That is, exactly, what some of it is designed to do.

You can count on it. Every time there is public doubt emerging about the official story of some big event or the other, there are the 'disinformationists" who put out stories and scenarios that hardly anyone would believe, when the truth is far more simple, but every bit as criminal.

When one studies Thompson's timeline and, the 9/11 Commission report, there are far to many coincidences and too many unanswered questions for the official story to be true. Just ask any ordinary detective on any police force in America how he or she feels about coincidences and unanswered questions, and then consider that there are ennough of both in the 9/11 investigation to choak a goat.

Many people in our government knew that Osama and his merry band of religious nutcases were planning to hit the U.S.. Some took full advantage of that knowledge and not only allowed it to happen, but probably encouraged it with intel provided to Al Qaeda, either through a certain CIA agent whom the French claim visited Osama in his hospital suite, at the American hospital in Dubai in July of 2001, after there was a "presidential finding" on his head or, perhaps, through FBI agents who knew about several of the hijackers, who were residing in the U.S, long before 9/11. That Intel may have included the fact that there were going to be airforce exercises on 9/11/01, so that no one could tell what was real and what was just part of the exercise. There would be confusion all around on such a day.

Of course, the biggest coincidence of all is found in the words of the PNAC document. After having spelled out the Neocon vision of re-making the middle east in great detail, the authors lamented the fact that their goals would take a very long time to acomplish, unless there was some catalysing event, a new Pearl Harbor, for example.

We now know, that there already existed plans for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq long before 9/11/01. We also know that the very first cabinet meeting was almost completely consumed with the "need for regime change in Iraq. Bush said, OK. just find me a way to do it." Well, someone did just that, with the aid of the ever helpful Osama bin Laden.

Did Bush know? Probably not, in a formal way. No one said to the president or sent a memo stating that there was going to be an attack on the U.S. and that all security would be stood down in order to allow it to happen. Plausible deniability is a concept well known to the Bushes, both 41 and 42. Did he realize what had happened on the morning of the Pet Goat? Probably. He is no where near as stupid as he would have us believe.

Did Cheney know? I believe that he did. As a matter of fact, I believe that that was what he was doing all those months before 9/11/01. He was the man Bush put in charge of counter-terrorism and yet not one meeting was held about that until days before 9/11. Instead, he was busy, I believe, with terrorism.

Is there any other V.P. in history who had his own foreign policy and Intel/National Security staff, rivaling that of the president? And they were in place long before 9/11. Dick Cheney was in no way ignorant of the warnings coming from all over the place, all summer long.

The people of NYC, those in the Pentagon, which were very few, and the people aboard those planes are collateral damage in the Global War on Terror. Without their horrific deaths there would be no war. Almost nothing that has happened since 9/11 would have been possible without it. Not the war, not the whole-sale gutting of the constitution, not the imperial presidency and a rapidly growing police state, not even a second Bush term would have been possible were it not for 9/11 and that other terrorist activity called the anthrax attacks, which goes little mentioned, while it probably made more ordinary people fear for their personal safety than the events of 9/11 did.

Is this administration complicit in the events of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks? I believe that some members of it are. Others who are complicit are far from known household names. They are probably ex-Intel types or rogue Intel and Military people, but there are very few of them...VERY FEW, and some may not have known what the others were doing, until it was too late. There is no way of knowing how many of them are still alive. As I said, they are anonymous and no one, except their family and friends, would care much about their untimely demises, let alone connect their deaths to 9/11.

Will it ever be proven? I believe it just may, this time. Before the Bush/Cheney disaster is over, Americans may have good motives not to just look the other way and pretend that our government is just not capable of such a dastardly act, even though we all know that such dastardly acts have been committed in the past.

by Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher of Buzz Flash

May 12, 2008

As we take a reprieve from the 2008 elections for a day, we wanted to take note of a Chicago Tribune editorial that repeats the story of how Dick Cheney approved the shooting down of United Flight 93 on 9/11:

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, after planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Vice President Dick Cheney was in the White House bunker and had to make a momentous recommendation to President Bush, who was in flight aboard Air Force One: that Bush authorize the military to shoot down any civilian airliners that might be hijacked and headed for other targets.

Bush concurred—and shortly after, the moment of truth arrived. A military aide approached Cheney: "There is a plane 80 miles out," he said. "There is a fighter in the area. Should we engage?" Cheney had thought through the complex implications of that question, had discussed it with his boss, and didn't hesitate to answer: "Yes." That plane was United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania before fighter jets could reach it.

The account originally appeared in the Washington Post years ago and came up in other stories about the post 9/11 frenzy, but nothing much was made of it. (Although whether Bush really had any role in the decision remains open to question.) The mainstream media accepted the White House account that United Flight 93 crashed before it was shot down, even though once Cheney gave his approval to shoot it down, it would probably only take a brief time before it was executed.

We're not passing judgment upon whether Flight 93 should have been shot down or not. That is, indeed, a very difficult decision. But BuzzFlash was watching contemporaneous reports come in at the time, and the first wire service stories strongly indicated that it had been shot down based on witnesses in the area and the details that they provided.

It was only later that a heroic narrative emerged that included a line that became part of the standard Bush "American Spirit" of battle theme: "Let's roll."

BuzzFlash can't say conclusively that Flight 93 was shot down, as Cheney had directed, but it certainly looks that way.

We have often taken issue with the 9/11 Truth Movement because it takes the fact that there are many unanswered questions about 9/11 and tries to answer them with often bizarre speculation. 9/11 was not an inside job, but it was something that probably could have been prevented in August of 2001 if Bush and Rice had listened to a CIA warning about Al-Qaeda preparing hijackings in the U.S. But Bush and Rice did nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to put airports on a heightened security alert.

The reality is that the Bush White House covered up much about 9/11, including its own incompetence. How much we don't know. But we do know that -- if you recall -- Bush would only be interviewed by the 9/11 Commission (which was stacked with white-washers) with Cheney at his side, and with no notes or minutes taken, and with their not being sworn in under oath, and with the "interview" occurring in the Oval Office. That sort of scenario does not inspire a great deal of credibility.

The entire reign of manipulated fear that we have been living under since 9/11 goes back to George W. Bush's cavalier indifference (along with Rice's malfeasance) to clear alarms in 2001 about Al-Qaeda coming our way.

We bring this up today because the item about United Flight 93 emerged so casually in a Chicago Tribune May 12th editorial about the need for Vice Presidents who can stand the heat. (Of course, Bush was off in a Florida elementary school classroom for a long time reading "My Pet Goat" and waiting for his handlers, including Cheney and Rove, to tell him what to do.)

Like the JFK assassination, we may never know the truth about the circumstances surrounding 9/11. The shredders have long since done their work.

But the Tribune editorial reminded us that the likelihood that Flight 93 was shot down, given the first reports and the account of Cheney ordering it shot down, is quite high. Any U.S. government, whether Democratic or Republican, would probably not want to admit that it was responsible for blowing a commercial airliner with U.S. citizens aboard out of the sky.

So a heroic narrative was, it appears, crafted to cover up the reality of what happened. At the time, we speculated that Flight 93 may have been headed for the infamous Three-Mile Island nuclear plant, just a short air distance away from where it went down. Or it may have indeed been flying back with terrorist plans to crash the plane into Congress or the White House.

We'll never know.

But on a scale of 1 to 10, BuzzFlash would put it at an 8 likelihood that Flight 93 was indeed downed by an American missile.

This is one decision, probably the only one, that we can't begrudge Dick Cheney. (If the plane had crashed into Three-Mile Island and set off a nuclear reaction, the death toll could have been catastrophic.)

But perhaps from the next president, we can be treated as adults and told the truth.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Freakin', Arrogant, Sicko Bastards Can't Help Themselves.

As a student of history, just for the fun of it, and a psychologist by career choice, it always amazed me that the Nazis left so many documents for their enemies to find, knowing, as they must have toward the end, that that were going down to defeat.

Was it was their version of O.J.'s "If I Did It." Yes, in a way it was.

Again I was shocked the first time I read the PNAC Document on the WEB.

Damn!

It was as good as an admission of guilt of, at least, complicity regarding 9/11, yet there it was, over a year after 9/11, on the WWW for all to see.

People get way to hung up on towers imploding and Tow missiles flying into he Pentagon. Forget all that BS for a moment and think.

The hardest thing of all to believe is that the PNACers stated the need for a new Pearl Harbor, catalyzing event in order to carry our their plan for a Pax Americana, worldwide, beginning with the re-ordering of the middle east.

Then, low and behold, it happens. What a coincidence! Indeed!

One would think the NeoCons would be building monuments to Osama bin Laden. (That would be little too much, I imagine.) Allowing him his freedom is enough for now.

Still, Americans, in large part, refuse to see the obvious. Why? (For one reason, the very thought that our government would allow such a thing, just for the glory of an ideology, is terrifying. Secondly, once an American actually believes such a thing, something must be done about it. That's a scary damn thought as well.)

But, just think about it.

How likely is it that a powerful group of huge, fragmented egos like the NeoCons at the AEI and their temporary off-shoot of loons, crazier than even they are, the Project For The New American Century crowd, actually wrote about the need for a New Pearl Harbor and then, 9 mos. into the Bush administration, have just such an event happen.? ( They even tried to sell it to Clinton, but he wasn't buying (perhaps because he couldn't with Ken Starr in his pants all the time or perhaps because he isn't freakin' NUTZ). ) I would simply love for a odds-maker from Vegas to give us the odds on something like that happening....without inside help.

They put this insanity on the Internet for all to see.

Well, of course they did. They see the PNAC Document as proof positive of their superiority and briliance, just as the Nazis saw every piece of paper as documenting their Aryan superiority. One day, these documents would be read by an admiring public, one appreciative of the very genius of the Nazis, PNACers, whomever.

Adolph Hitler never saw himself as evil. Neither does Dick Cheney or George W Bush. Evil never sees itself in the mirror, only in the face of its enemy.

This is what I learned from my years of fascination with the unmitigated nerve of the Nazis. Arrogant, imperialist, sicko SOBs just can't help themselves. They just know that sooner or later they will be admired by all, so they must document, document, document. Of course, they have their moments of sanity, when they keep their shredders smokin' all night, but those moments are rare.

Published on Saturday, October 20, 2007 by TomDispatch.com

Bush’s Pentagon Papers
The Urge to Confess

by Tom Engelhardt

They can’t help themselves. They want to confess.

How else to explain the torture memorandums that continue to flow out of the inner sancta of this administration, the most recent of which were evidently leaked to the New York Times. Those two, from the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department, were written in 2005 and recommitted the administration to the torture techniques it had been pushing for years. As the Times noted, the first of those memorandums, from February of that year, was “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.” The second “secret opinion” was issued as Congress moved to outlaw “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” treatment (not that such acts weren’t already against U.S. and international law). It brazenly “declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard”; and, the Times assured us, “the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums.”

All of these memorandums, in turn, were written years after John Yoo’s infamous “torture memo” of August 2002 and a host of other grim documents on detention, torture, and interrogation had already been leaked to the public, along with graphic FBI emailed observations of torture and abuse at Guantanamo, those “screen savers” from Abu Ghraib, and so much other incriminating evidence. In other words, in early 2005 when that endorsement of “the harshest interrogation techniques” was being written, its authors could hardly have avoided knowing that it, too, would someday become part of the public record.

But, it seems, they couldn’t help themselves. Torture, along with repetitious, pretzled “legal” justifications for doing so, were bones that administration officials — from the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense on down — just couldn’t resist gnawing on again and again. So, what we’re dealing with is an obsession, a fantasy of empowerment, utterly irrational in its intensity, that’s gripped this administration. None of the predictable we’re shocked! we’re shocked! editorial responses to the Times latest revelations begin to account for this.

Torture as the Royal Road to Commander-in-Chief Power

So let’s back up a moment and consider the nature of the torture controversy in these last years. In a sense, the Bush administration has confronted a strange policy conundrum. Its compulsive urge to possess the power to detain without oversight and to wield torture as a tool of interrogation has led it, however unexpectedly, into what can only be called a confessional stance. The result has been what it feared most: the creation of an exhausting, if not exhaustive, public record of the criminal inner thinking of the most secretive administration in our history.

Let’s recall that, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the administration’s top officials had an overpowering urge to “take the gloves off” (instructions sent from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s office directly to the Afghan battlefield), to “unshackle” the CIA. They were in a rush to release a commander-in-chief “unitary executive,” untrammeled by the restrictions they associated with the fall of President Richard Nixon and with the Watergate era. They wanted to abrogate the Geneva Conventions (parts of which Alberto Gonzales, then White House Council and companion-in-arms to the President, declared “quaint” and “obsolete” in 2002). They were eager to develop their own categories of imprisonment that freed them from all legal constraints, as well as their own secret, offshore prison system in which their power would be total. All of this went to the heart of their sense of entitlement, their belief that such powers were their political birthright. The last thing they wanted to do was have this all happen in secret and with full deniability. Thus, Guantanamo.

That prison complex was to be the public face of their right to do anything. Perched on an American base in Cuba just beyond the reach of The Law — American-leased but not court-overseen soil — the new prison was to be the proud symbol of their expansive power. It was also to be the public face of a new, secret regime of punishment that would quickly spread around the world — into the torture chambers of despotic regimes in places like Egypt and Syria, onto American bases like the island fastness of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, onto U.S. Navy and other ships floating in who knew which waters, into the former prisons of the old Soviet Empire, and into a growing network of American detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So, when those first shots of prisoners, in orange jumpsuits, manacled and blindfolded, entering Guantanamo were released, no one officially howled (though the grim, leaked shots of those prisoners being transported to Guantanamo were another matter). After all, they wanted the world to know just how powerful this administration was — powerful enough to redefine the terms of detention, imprisonment, and interrogation to the point of committing acts that traditionally were abhorred and ruled illegal by humanity and by U.S. law (even if sometimes committed anyway).

Though certain administration officials undoubtedly believed that “harsh interrogation techniques” would produce reliable information, this can’t account for the absolute fascination with torture that gripped them, as well as assorted pundits and talking heads (and then, through “24″ and other TV shows and movies, Americans in general). In search of a world where they could do anything, they reached instinctively for torture as a symbol. After all, was there any more striking way to remove those “gloves” or “unshackle” a presidency? If you could stake a claim the right to torture, then you could stake a claim to do just about anything.

Think of it this way: If Freud believed that dreams were the royal road to the individual unconscious, then the top officials of the Bush administration believed torture to be the royal road to their ultimate dream of unconstrained power, what John Yoo in his “torture memo” referred to as “the Commander-in-Chief Power.”

It was via Guantanamo that they meant to announce the arrival of this power on planet Earth. They were proud of it. And that prison complex was to function as their bragging rights. Their message was clear enough: In this world of ours, democracy would indeed run rampant and a vote of one would, in every case, be considered a majority.

The Crimes Are in the Definitions

This, then, was one form of confession — a much desired one. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their subordinates (with few exceptions) wished to affirm their position as directors of the planet’s “sole superpower,” intent as they were on creating a Pentagon-led Pax Americana abroad and a Rovian Pax Republicana at home. But there was another, seldom noted form of confession at work.

As if to fit their expansive sense of their own potential powers, it seems that these officials, and the corps of lawyers that accompanied them, had expansive, gnawing fears. Given this cast of characters, you can’t talk about a collective “guilty conscience,” but there was certainly an ongoing awareness that what they were doing contravened normal American and global standards of legality; that their acts, when it came to detention and torture, might be judged illegal; and that those who committed — or ordered — such acts might someday, somehow, actually be brought before a court of law to account for them. These fears, by the way, were usually pinned on low-level operatives and interrogators, who were indeed fearful of the obvious: that they had no legal leg to stand on when it came to kidnapping terror suspects, disappearing them, and subjecting them to a remarkably wide range of acts of torture and abuse, often in deadly combination over long periods of time.

Out-sized egos, bound to fragment under the right kind of pressure, are always the downfall of the evil ones. The problem is, it could take years...decades.)

Perhaps Bush’s men (and women) feared that even a triumphantly successful commander-in-chief presidency might — à la the Pinochet regime in Chile — have its limits in time. Perhaps they simply sensed an essential contradiction that lay at the very heart of their position: The urge to take pride in their “accomplishments,” to assert their powers, and to claim bragging rights for redefining what was legal could also be seen as the urge to confess (if matters took a wrong turn as, in the case of the Bush administration, they always have). And so, along with the pride, along with the kidnappings, the new-style imprisonment, the acts of torture (and, in some cases, murder), the pretzled documents began to pour out of the administration — each a tortured extremity of bizarre legalisms (as with Yoo’s August 2002 document, which essentially managed to reposition torture as something that existed mainly in the mind of, and could only be defined by, the torturer himself); each was but another example of legalisms following upon and directed by desire. (Yoo himself was reportedly known by Attorney General John Ashcroft as Dr. Yes, “for his seeming eagerness to give the White House whatever legal justifications it desired.”) Each, in the end, might also be read as a confession of wrongdoing.

What made all this so strange was not just the “tortured” nature of the “torture memo” (just rejected by the new attorney general nominee as “worse than a sin, it was a mistake”), but the repetitious nature of these dismantling documents which, with the help of an army of leakers inside the government, have been making their way into public view for years. Or how about the strange situation of an American president, who has, in so many backhanded ways, admitted to being deeply involved in the issues of detainment and torture — as, for instance, in a February 7, 2002 memorandum to his top officials in which he signed off on his power to “suspend [the] Geneva [Conventions] as between the United States and Afghanistan” (which he then declined to do “at this time”) and his right to wipe out the Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War when it came to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That document began with the following: “Our recent extensive discussions regarding the status of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees confirm…”

“Our recent extensive discussions…” You won’t find that often in previous presidential documents about the abrogation of international and domestic law. It wasn’t, of course, that the U.S. had never imprisoned anyone abroad and certainly not that the U.S. had never used torture abroad. Water-boarding, for instance, was first employed by U.S. soldiers in the Philippine Insurrection at the dawn of the previous century; torture was widely used and taught by CIA and other American operatives in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and elsewhere. But American presidents didn’t then see the bragging rights in such acts, any more than a previous American president would have sent his vice president to Capitol Hill to lobby openly for torture (however labeled). Past presidents held on to the considerable benefits of deniability (and perhaps the psychological benefits of not knowing too much themselves). They didn’t regularly and repeatedly commit to paper their “extensive discussions” on distasteful and illegal subjects.

Nor did they get up in public, against all news, all reason (but based on the fantastic redefinitions of torture created to fulfill a presidential desire to use “harsh interrogation techniques”) to deny repeatedly that their administrations ever tortured. Here is an exchange on the subject from Bush’s most recent press conference:

“Q What’s your definition of the word ‘torture’?

“THE PRESIDENT: Of what?

“Q The word ‘torture.’ What’s your definition?

“THE PRESIDENT: That’s defined in U.S. law, and we don’t torture.

“Q Can you give me your version of it, sir?

“THE PRESIDENT: Whatever the law says.”

After a while, this, too, becomes a form of confession — that, among other things, the President has never rejected John Yoo’s definition of torture in that 2002 memorandum. Combine that with the admission of “extensive discussions” on detention matters and, minimally, you have a President, who has proven himself deeply engaged in such subjects. A President who makes such no-torture claims repeatedly cannot also claim to be in the dark on the subject. In other words, you’re already moving from the Clintonesque parsing of definitions (”It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’”) into unfathomable realms of presidential definitional darkness.

On the Record

Of course, plumbing the psychology of a single individual while in office — of a President or a Vice President — is a nearly impossible task. Plumbing the psychology of an administration? Who can do it? And yet, sometimes officials may essentially do it for you. They may leave bureaucratic clues everywhere and then, as if seized by an impulsion, return again and again to what can only be termed the scene of the crime. Documents they just couldn’t not write. Acts they just couldn’t not take. Think of these as the Freudian slips of officials under pressure. Think of them as small, repeated confessions granted under the interrogation of reality and history, under the fearful pressure of the future, and granted in the best way possible: willingly, without opposition, and not under torture.

Sometimes, it’s just a matter of refocusing to see the documents, the statements, the acts for what they are. Such is the case with the torture memos that continue to emerge. Never has an administration — and hardly has a torturing regime anywhere — had so many of its secret documents aired while it was still in the act. Seldom has a ruling group made such an open case for its own crimes.

We’re talking, of course, about the most secretive administration in American history — so secretive, in fact, that Congressional representatives considering classified portions of an intelligence bill, have to go to “a secret, secure room in the Capitol, turn in their Blackberrys and cellphones, and read the document without help from any staff members.” Such briefings are given to Congressional representatives, but under ground rules in which “participants are prohibited from future discussions of the information — even if it is subsequently revealed in the media…” So representatives who are briefed are also effectively prohibited from discussing what they have learned in Congress.

And yet, none of this mattered when it came to the administration establishing its own record of illegality — and exhibiting its own outsized fears of future prosecution. Let’s just take one labor intensive — and exceedingly strange, if now largely forgotten — example of these fears in action. In 2002, a new tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC), was established in the Hague to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. “[T]hen-Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton nullified the U.S. signature on the International Criminal Court treaty one month into President Bush’s first term” and Congress subsequently passed the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act which prohibited “certain types of military aid to countries that have signed on to the International Criminal Court but have not signed a separate accord with the United States, called an Article 98 agreement.” The Bush administration, opposed to international “fora” of all sorts, then proceeded to go individually, repeatedly, and over years, to more than 100 countries, demanding that the representatives of each sign such an agreement “not to surrender American citizens to the international court without the consent of officials in Washington.”

In other words, they put the sort of effort that might normally have gone into establishing an international agreement into threatening weak countries with the loss of U.S. aid in order to give themselves — and of course those lower-level soldiers and operatives on whom so much is blamed — a free pass for crimes yet to be committed (but which they obviously felt they would commit). We’re talking here about small, impoverished lands like Cambodia, still attempting to bring its own war criminals of the Pol Pot era to justice.

In the process of twisting arms, the administration suspended over $47 million in military aid “to 35 countries that ha[d] not signed deals to grant American soldiers immunity from prosecution for war crimes.” In this attempt to get every country on the planet aboard the American no-war-crimes-prosecution train before it left the station, you can sense once again the administration’s obsessional intensity on this subject (especially since experts agreed that the realistic possibility of the ICC bringing Americans up on war crimes was essentially nil).

The Bush administration regularly reached for its dictionaries to redefine reality, even before it reached for its guns. It not only wrote its own rules and its own “law,” but when problems nonetheless emerged from its secret world of detention and pain and wouldn’t go away — at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere — it proceeded to investigate itself with the expectable results. For Bush’s officials, this should have seemed like a perfect way to maintain a no-fault system that would never reach up any chain of command. Indeed, as Mark Danner has commented, such practices plunged us into an age of “frozen scandals” in which, as with the latest torture memos, the shocked-shocked effect repeats itself but nothing follows. As he has written: “One of the most painful principles of our age is that scandals are doomed to be revealed — and to remain stinking there before us, unexcised, unpunished, unfinished.”

How true. And yet, looked at another way, the administration — with outsized help from outraged government officials who knew crimes when they saw them and were willing to take chances to reveal them — has already created a remarkable record of its own criminal activity, which can now be purchased in any bookstore in the land.

Back in the early fall of 2004, when the first collection of such documents arrived in the bookstores, Mark Danner’s Torture and Truth, America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, it was already more than 600 pages long. In early 2005, when Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, and Josh Dratel, the civilian defense attorney for Guantanamo detainee David Hicks, released their monumental The Torture Papers, The Road to Abu Ghraib, another collection of secret memoranda, official investigations of Abu Ghraib, and the like, it was already an oversized book of more than 1,200 pages — a doorstopper large enough to keep a massive prison gate open. And, of course, even it couldn’t hold all the documents. A later Greenberg book, The Torture Debate in America, for instance, has military documents not included in the first volume.

Then, there were the two-years worth of FBI memos and emails about Guantanamo that the ACLU pried loose from the government and released on line, also in 2005. This material was damning indeed, including direct reports from FBI agents witnessing — and protesting as well as pointing fingers at — military interrogators at the prison, as in an August 2, 2004 report that said: “On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water…Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more.” Or a Jan. 21, 2004 email in which an FBI agent complained that the technique of a military interrogator impersonating an FBI agent “and all of those used in these scenarios, was approved by the DepSecDef,” a reference to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz.

Other paperback volumes have also been published that include selections from these and other documents like Crimes of War: Iraq by Richard Falk, Irene Gendzier, and Robert Jay Lifton and In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond by Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler, and Brendan Smith. If all of these documents, including the latest ones evidently in the hands of the New York Times, were collected, you would have a little library of volumes — all functionally confessional — for a future prosecutor. (And there are undoubtedly scads more documents where these came from, including perhaps a John Yoo “torture memo,” rumored to exist, that preceded the August 2002 one.)

What an archive, then, is already available in our world. It’s as if, to offer a Vietnam comparison, the contents of The Pentagon Papers had simply slipped out into the light of day, one by one, without a Daniel Ellsberg in sight, without anyone quite realizing it had happened.

The urge of any criminal regime — to ditch, burn, or destroy incriminating documents, or erase emails — has, in a sense, already been obviated. So much of the Bush/Cheney “record” is on the record. As Karen J. Greenberg wrote, back in December 2006, “What more could a prosecutor want than a trail of implicit confessions, consistent with one another, increasingly brazen over time, and leading right into the Oval Office?”

Looking back on these last years, it turns out that the President, Vice President, their aides, and the other top officials of this administration were always in the confessional booth. There’s no exit now.

Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture’s crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Copyright 2007 Tom Engelhardt

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

If there Is One Thing GWB Knows, It's CYA

“All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”

As my vacation winds down tonight, what more appropriate way to say goodbye to carefree relaxation for another year than to reflect on what would turn out to be the most costly, most ill-timed and catastrophic vacation in American politics (until 2005)?

It had come out a year ago when Ron Suskind had published his landmark book, The One Percent Doctrine, that when Bush was vacationing in Crawford, Texas in August of 2001, the CIA had sent him a memo entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside US.” After having phoned it in, we can only surmise the reaction, or lack thereof, that necessitated a face to face meeting with someone whom, after barely more than six months on the job, people were already beginning to view as a failed president. According to Suskind’s source, when Bush had gotten the personal briefing from panicky CIA analysts, the nonplussed Chief Executive was quoted as saying, “All right, you’ve covered your ass now.”

As if doing one’s part to apprise the President of the United States of an impending attack on a massive scale by a major terrorist organization is a mere middle management affair motivated by nothing more than a desire to cover one’s ass.

That, as we all now know, took place on August 6th, 2001, six years ago today.

Ripley at Zencabin, as I’d previously said, thought enough of me to email me recently to contribute to his/her blogswarm on August 6th. With catching up on backed-up email and the news, the bridge in Minnesota collapsing, Congress caving in to Bush’s bullying over the FISA renewal and otherwise settling back in after my vacation in the Berkshires, I felt obligated as a liberal blogger to add my tiny flame to what hopefully would be a blazing torch. Yet, I didn’t have any ideas, anything new to add to a story that has been legion across the Internet for six years now.

OK, the CIA tried to warn Bush during his vacation that bin Laden wanted to hit us using our own planes and Bush didn’t think enough about the warnings to do his part over the next five weeks to stave off the attacks. We all know this. There’s no sense in beating a dead horse.

Then, thinking about it some more I thought again of how history is about more than names, dates and events. The lifeblood of history, what makes it so fascinating to people like me is what gives it its significance: Cause and Effect. Sometimes a story has to be given added context by subsequent events before we can fully appreciate its significance and impact.

What happened between Bush and Congress this past week over the FISA renewal will be a case study in political science classes for decades to come, although I imagine a growing number of poli sci students will be asking themselves, “What in God’s name were the Democrats thinking when they caved in to this lunatic?” Indeed, given how toxic Bush has proved to be for his own party, the same students may even be so bold as to ask what the Republicans were thinking when they sought to make legal what for six years had been illegal.

But the sheer unmitigated gall of George Bush preemptively charging Democrats with caring more about their vacation than national security just adds an extra dimension and hardly any more luster to the story that began six years ago of a so-called President who did just that then somehow, with an inexplicable, evil political agility that had to be engineered by Satan himself, turned America’s darkest day into his brightest, shiniest hour of triumph.

It’s been said for years many times, in many ways by better writers and thinkers than me that September 11th, 2001 was our Gulf of Tonkin, the attack for which bottled spiders like William Kristol in PNAC were quivering with anticipation like a 15 year-old in his first whorehouse. It provided us with our whole rationale for invading Iraq because not nearly enough people in Congress, on the street or in the fourth estate bothered to ask what possible connection that Saddam Hussein had to either 9/11 or al Qaida.

When the final chapter of this administration is written thousands of years from now, when everything that we spent hundreds of thousands of hours every month writing will be dissolved into an undecipherable electronic soup, it will be said that George Bush’s seeming incuriousness regarding that August 6th, 2001 presidential daily briefing, presented to him by the same agency that had armed Osama bin Laden under Reagan of whom they were then warning him, was merely mirroring our own incuriousness.

Because after September 11th, when George W. Bush’s own popularity had soared to stratospheric heights, asking sweaty uncomfortable questions such as, “What does Iraq have to do with 9/11 and al Qaida?” were then deemed to be unpatriotic, subversive and even professionally suicidal (Phil Donahue can tell you all about that).

But the plain fact remains that while Bush’s interest in Osama bin Laden continually flags and is only revived once every couple of years when a new video comes out, his interest in indefinitely occupying Iraq and getting his grubby hands on those oil deposits has never waned. He’s never taken his eyes off the prize and still insists that Saddam’s past threat to his people (once again, enabled by Ronald Reagan) alone justifies an eternal presence that thus far has killed going on 3700 US troops and close to a million Iraqis, if human rights organizations' estimates are reasonably accurate.

And it’s all but been admitted by George Bush himself that it’s all about the oil. In the summer of 2005, he told us if we don’t get our hands that that sweet, sweet light crude from Iraq’s oil fields, well, the terrorists will get it. But terrorists aren’t interested in grabbing oil. They’re not in the oil business. George Bush and Dick Cheney were (are?). Their interest in anyone’s oil is to sabotage their pipelines (as with al Qaida’s attempts in Saudi Arabia of late) and cause economic upheaval.

Bush’s seeming lack of interest in the August 6th, 2001 PDB may have had a rationale behind it. Perhaps he, like PNAC, was waiting for another Pearl Harbor, waiting for his own Gulf of Tonkin and the political invulnerability that his closest aides told him he’d inherit as a result. And it can’t be mere coincidence or an act of innocent incompetence that the only people who have benefited from Iraq’s invasion and occupation are the oil cartels and oil services giants such as his Vice President’s former company Halliburton and KBR. Them and at one point over 400 private contractors working in Iraq. Private security, it came out in Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater, in their heyday, gobbled up about a third of Iraq’s reconstruction budget, which helped condemn 25,000,000 baffled and furious people to live without hospitals, schools, in poverty, in the dark and near open sewers.

If nothing else, the best thing that George W. Bush can give the United States is not an upper hand in the war on terror, not economic prosperity, not a strengthening transportation or military infrastructure but an ongoing object lesson in the fatal consequence of incuriousness, in not questioning authority regardless of the might of its political capital, in defiance of the zeitgeist.

Let Bush be a lesson of the perilous folly of timorousness and incuriousness, and the value of speaking truth to power. Or, if bankrupt of the truth as we were in early 2003, to wring the truth from it.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Is Bush Delusional or just a run-of-the-mill Sociopath?

I keep hearing pundits say that Bush really believes in what he is doing; that he does have some kind of messianic delusion about his War on Turr and really believes what he says.

I heard Lindsay Graham say an odd thing to John Dean when Dean testified before the Judiciary Committee. Graham was clearly agitated and red-in-the-face angry with Dean. He asked him if he believed that Bush, Cheney and their co-religionists in the "Cult of Neo-Conservatism" (not his words; mine) believed in what they were saying, that they really believed in what they are doing? Dean said he believed that they probably did. I know Dean has some pretty good inside sources. I doubt he has any, who really know, what George Bush really believes.

From everything I have heard, he does not reveal his mind, directly, to any but a small clique of people. We have had some indicators from insider reports, if they can be trusted. The Bush White House gang are some of the most clever leakers I have ever seen. (Oh yes, they have been caught a number of times, but it sure hasn't really hurt them until last November. They have been able, thanks to the American media and a GOP Congress, to keep this delusion going in the minds of enough Americans for long enough, so they would vote for Bush, in enough numbers to, at least, keep the vote close enough to flip with voting machine chicarnery and out- and-out vote suppression of minorities and others, whom they believed would to be more likely to vote for Democrats) .

They may be falling apart a little now. Sure seems like it.

I am to a point where I do not trust anonymous sources out of the administration, unless what they say rings true with that which I know to be true, because of bipartism evidence. The first book I read about this president was the first Woodward Book and the second was the Paul O'Neil book, by Ron Ruskind, for example.

Number 1: If that it is true, and the guy is really is delusional to the degree he would have to be, at this point, he needs to be out of the White House, yesterday. We do have a 25th amendment, which speaks to what needs to happen if, for any reason, a president is incapacitated, for any length of time at all (I'm not sure if there is a specific length of time mentioned, or if they left it kinda loose, as they usually do, when an amendment it wiritten about anyone's power.) If I am not mistaken, the amendment is a gift from the Eisenhower administration, I think, but I shall have to look it up, to be certain. (Wouldn't it be odd if the last really good Republican president we have had in my lifetime, who warned us implicitly, about the Military/Industrial Complex (the beast which must be fed, and is currently on a freakin' feeding frinzy, if that old General/president has gifted us with a relatively fast answer to our national nightmare).

The delusion would either have to be fully shared by those in his cabinet, or it is their reponsibility to ask for a 25th amendment hearing. I think that if that is the case, that Bush is delusional, his cabinet should be held accountable, with an iron mallet if they have allowed a truly delusional man to sit in the White House.

Number 2:

I have a hard time believing that he is delusional. I have even a harder time believing that we are dealing with a well developed, shared delusion in this situation, no matter how many times "group think" has been blamed for Iraq. No doubt there has been group think. Where can one find a group of authoritarians where there is not group think? Group think is not the same as delusion.

A president who is determined to keep diggin now, that he is 40 feet down into the 5th hell realm of foreign policy, and has heard, loud and clear, from enough dissent to break the windows right out of the White House, were it acted upon in a violent fashion, is either so delusional his cabinet could not miss it, or he is a sociopath, who is willing to sacrifice more lives, blood and treasure, both of Americans and Iraqis, for political reasons, both here at home and in the middle east. This is as much about Saudi Arabia as it is Israel, and it is about both.

Hell yes, it's about the oil. How could anyone ever have doubted that for a minute. But it was more about keeping supplies down, controlling the flow of oil, than it was about cheap oil. What oilman in his right mind would want cheap oil prices. Nor would any American oil man want to be paying Euros for oil. Talk about a kick to the solar plexus of the dollar.

I watch one delaying tactic after another. Every investigation report, is delayed until after one election or another. Why, for God's sake? Shouldn't we hear what the report says before we vote? But No! Reports are delayed for months, or just killed off. To say that reports from important investigations of any branch of our government, can't be released in an election year, because it would just be politics and confusing to the people, is an insult to the American people.

Is this guy just kicking this war of his down the road like a tin can, hoping the entire middle-east doesn't blow up on his watch, or is he determined to make it blow?

His history would lead me to believe that he, at least, would like to drop a huge mess in the lap of his replacement and disappear from sight.

Other than going into Iran, there is no way to get people's attention of the quagmire in Iraq.

Unless.....God forbid....there is another " new pearl harbor," on American soil or one of our naval vessels is sunk, in the Persian Gulf, a more heinous Gulf of Tonkin, one could say.

Someone needs to have a talk with Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. They need to know, that we are already highly suspicious of the "new Pearl Harbor." A "new Gulf of Tonkin" would leave us with a fair certainty about the NeoCon agenda and just how it was all made possible. much to our everlasting regret.

In other words, Bush-critters, don't even think about it! Be warned!

If you try to keep pushing this failed, immoral policy down our throats, there will be a Constitutional confrontation. Count on it.