| ||||||||||||||
|
Local News & Opinion
Ref. : Local Newsbriefs Travel
Letters
Ref. : Letters to the editor Open Letters:
03.05 Open Letter to Congressman Bart Stupak Health & Environment
Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries 03.20 The Death of American Populism 03.18 Pressure Drop: Brave Sir Dennis Ran Away 03.12 Slick Barry and the $100-Billion Medicaid/Medicare Fraud Claim 03.09 Kill Bill: Death to Obamacare! 03.09 Obama’s Rhetoric May Be “Fiery,” But His Health Care Reform Is Still Lukewarm Media Watching
03.17 CNN Scrapes Bottom of Right-Wing Barrel With Erickson Hire 03.16 WPost Blames Obama First, on Israel 03.16 Letter to the New York Times' Editor: Stovepiping To Persia 03.12 Cud and Complicity: Burying the Alternatives to Empire's Dominion 03.11 NYT and the ACORN Hoax 03.05 Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq 03.03 It's Snow News 03.03 The Woeful Washington Post Ref. : The Daily Howler Legal Matters
02.26 America's Supremes: Court Over Constitution US Politics, Policy & Culture
03.11 Power Rangers: Policing the System With the "Fightin' Progressives" 03.09 Thinking About Countings 03.07 Unnatural Acts: Breaking the Fever of Militarism 02.25 Future Shock: A Better World Beyond the Imperium High Crimes?
03.19 Israel's Troubling Tilt Toward Apartheid 03.18 The Lawfare Project's Anti-Democratic Agenda 03.16 America's Secret Prisons 03.13 Palestinian Dispossession in East Jerusalem 03.12 Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue 03.11 Brutalizing Palestinian Children 03.08 The Russell Tribunal on Palestine: Barcelona Session 03.05 Targeting Israeli Apartheid 03.01 America's Permanent War Agenda 02.25 Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
03.19 The Growing Movement For Publicly-Owned Banks 03.19 America's "Houdini Recovery" under IMF-Type Austerity 03.14 The Crisis in America's Telecommunications Network 03.09 The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource 03.05 Is the Recovery Real? 03.04 IMF-Style Austerity Measures come to America: What “Fiscal Responsibility” Means To You 03.04 Barry C. Lynn's "Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and Economics of Destruction" 03.01 Thinking About Fees International
03.15 Peace Process Hypocrisy: Stillborn from Inception 03.03 Muslim Disunity 03.02 Funding Israeli Militarism, Belligerence and Occupation 02.26 Iran Captures a 'Good' Terrorist We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
|
COMMENTARY FROM ABROAD:Ignorance is StrengthPrior to Bush’s war in Iraq, the carcinoma of terror was confined to the vastness of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now the cancer has metastasized into a global movement.
26 September 2006--It’s official. Sixteen US government security agencies agree. The experts conclude that Bush’s war against Iraq is the major force driving the global growth of Islamic terror, but their dire finding was supposed to be a state secret and perpetually concealed from the American people.Before the invasion of Iraq, the US had Al-Qaida cornered in Afghanistan and Pakistan, marginalized, ostracized and corralled into a finite ghetto for mad Mullahs only. Today, after three and a half years of war, five hundred billion dollars of squandered treasure, nearly three thousand dead American soldiers and at least one hundred thousand dead Iraqi civilians we have done nothing more than make matters worse--infinitely worse. Bush’s Iraq adventure has been the most counterproductive policy in American history. This pathetic regime has been unmasked as the spitting image of the dystopian tyranny in George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984, a fascist dictatorship organized under three sacred dictums: Ignorance is strength. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. By realizing the first two principles of Orwell's Oceania--the dual exaltations of public ignorance and perpetual war--the Bush regime need hardly bother about verifying their subservience to the third--the sanctification of poverty.
By realizing the first two principles of Oceania--the dual exaltations of public ignorance and perpetual war--the Bush regime need hardly bother about verifying their subservience to the third--the sanctification of poverty. In Bush’s America, where the rich get the tax cuts and the poor get the below-the-poverty-level minimum wage, there was never any doubt about the fact of perennial pauperization. In Bush’s America, freedom is definitely slavery; always was; always will be.Who leaked the NIE report? A true-blue patriotic American if the truth be known. Senator Ted Kennedy was the first off the mark to sense that it condemned Bush and Cheney’s war to the rubbish bin of history. But, we do not know who blew this particular whistle. In the relatively recent past, Bush’s America has been blessed with a few outstanding whistleblowers modelled on Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower par excellence--who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam Era and brought the presidency of Richard Nixon to its premature close. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, two outstanding women, FBI Agent Colleen Rowley and Intelligence Analyst Sibel Edmonds, blew their whistles. Agent Rowley revealed that the FBI had failed to heed intelligence about the activities of Zacharias Moussaoui--intelligence that would have alerted the agency to the impending threat of a massive terrorist attack on US soil. Colleen Rowley is now a Democratic congressional candidate in Minnesota. A Turkish language expert, Sibel Edmonds was hired after the attack on the World Trade Center to analyze pre-9/11 intel. What Edmonds found shocked her. She blew the whistle on the fact that--prior to 9/11--the US was holding explosive intelligence that indicated an eminent attack on a major US target. When Sibel Edmonds blew the whistle, her bosses forced her head under the bureaucratic guillotine. They fired her. Today, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Edmonds’ is suing her former employers for sacking her because she told the truth to the American people. In Britain, Katherine Gun, an employee of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), blew the whistle when she learned of a secret US espionage program to spy on UN delegates in New York in the run-up to the launch of the war against Iraq. First she was terminated--then she was vindicated in court. An anonymous patriot leaked the Downing Street memo. Written by John Scarlett, the secret Downing Street “Eyes Only” document detailed the sharp shift in American policy in 2002, when British officials detected a new level of intensity in Bush’s policy vis à vis Iraq. Instead of planning for a diplomatic settlement to what was then being hyped as the Iraq crisis, the Brits noticed that we had entered a hall of mirrors--a twilight zone where diplomacy was a mere charade and all policies were being “fixed” around the inevitable axis of impending war. We owe a great debt of gratitude to whistleblowers. It is comforting to know that even in the age of western fascism, we still have patriotic supporters of democracy and the people’s right to know in positions--if not of power--then of intelligence.
We--the citizens of Oceania--owe a great debt of gratitude to the whistleblowers. With Ellsberg as the paragon of the species, it is comforting to know that even in the age of western fascism, we still have patriotic supporters of democracy and the people’s right to know in positions--if not of power--then of intelligence.In the meantime, Bush laments the inescapable fact that the war in Iraq is imposing a psychic strain on the mind of America. In official statements, he laments that Osama Bin Laden has been successful in driving a wedge between the American people and their government. Bush adamantly refuses to recognize that the wedge between the people and their government was not of Bin Laden’s making. Forged by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Bush drove that poisonous wedge deeply into the body politic of America himself when he acquiesced to neoconservative fantasies of imperialist hegemony, a new American century through military conquest and colonial domination leading to dictatorial control of the world’s oil reserves in perpeteum. The historical record is now perfectly clear. According to our own intelligence analysis, Bush’s war in Iraq has triggered an explosion of Islamic terrorism. Prior to this fateful turning point, the carcinoma of terror was confined to the vastness of Afghanistan and Pakistan. With the launch of the war in Iraq, the cancer of terror metastasized into a global movement predicated on the destruction of America and its front-line client, Israel. For this tragic outcome, Bush has nobody to blame but himself. In our immediate future, we can expect more of the same. The Bush-Cheney White House and its minions will eternally repeat their totalitarian mantras: Ignorance is most assuredly strength; War is indubitably peace, and Freedom really and truly is slavery. And so they shall always be in Brother Bush’s America. Michael Carmichael is a historian and author based in Oxford, England, UK. He is the founder and chief executive officer of planetarymovement.org. This article is republished in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author. In the web site's "who we are" section, the following is posted:
Established in 2003 the Planetary Movement Limited (PlanetaryTM) is on a mission to inform governments, media and the public about crucial issues related to the expansion and healthy growth of democracy and freedom. References:
Copyright © 2006 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on September 27, 2006. |
| ||||||||||||