By Bernard Weiner
OpEdNews.Com
The Silicon Valley scientist-friend who introduced me to "B.S.
Away" several months ago* invited me to visit again for a second
tryout of his new truth-spray invention. After watching Condoleezza Rice's
slip-and-slide performance before the 9/11 Commission, and the U.S.
military spin on the unraveling events
in Iraq, I couldn't resist.
"Your spray worked like magic last time," I said. "I know
before your patent is granted that you're not allowed to tell me too much
about how it works,
but, just between you and me, how does it work?"
"Quit kidding around and just use the stuff," he replied, and
handed me a little spray bottle. I raced home to try it again, on Rice and
Iraq-spin and
Ashcroft.
I found a re-broadcast of Condi's testimony and spritzed the "B.S.
Away" on the TV. Here's what I got:
CONDI'S MASK SLIPS AWAY
"Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I had rehearsed for three days how to spin
and filibuster your questions about the Administration's pre-9/11
knowledge -- you
know, the structural reforms of the intelligence bureaucracies weren't yet
in place, we were doing everything we could to prepare our Al Qaida
offensive, we
didn't know what was about to happen, the FBI and CIA dropped the ball and
didn't connect the dots, and anyway whatever went wrong wasn't our fault.
But then I just decided to come in and tell it like it was.
"When we first moved into the White House, we were kind of fixated on
larger issues, such as how we could transform Islam in the Middle East and
control
the stability of the oil flow in a world fast running out of petroleum
reserves, and how we could get a military foothold in Iraq to assert our
dominance in the area. Besides, we were suspicious: the outgoing
Administration was warning us so much about the dangers posed by Osama Bin
Laden and Al Qaida that we thought the Clintons were trying to set us up,
so we stayed away from their recommendations like the plague. We didn't
ignore terrorism, but we weren't
focusing on it either. We left that concern to Dick Clarke to obsess about
and made sure to keep him away from the wielders of power. We had a
different agenda in preparation.
"Because of Sen. Jeffords' defection from the GOP, we were stymied in
our domestic program in Congress, and our long-range foreign/military
policies were being tied up in diplomatic complexities abroad. We needed
something big, a catalyzing event, that would alter the chemistry of our
political prospects.
"In the summer of 2001, things started to materialize for us along
those lines: We got all those warnings about a spectacular Al Qaida attack
that was
planned for inside the U.S., probably by airplane and aimed at unspecified
but guessable icon targets in New York and Washington, D.C. (We even ran a
test run on such a disaster at the Pentagon, a drill that assumed a large
plane had crashed into it.) Bush hightailed it out of Washington and went
to ground in Texas for a month; Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial
jets; somebody was buying huge amounts of airline stock 'puts' on the
assumption the price would plummet, and so on.
"We'd been briefed and were getting direct calls from various
countries' intelligence services passing on anxious warnings, so we sure
as hell knew
something major was about to go down, even if we didn't know the exact
date and targets. So, we decided simply to look the other way about the
imminent Al Qaida attack, whenever and whatever it turned out to be --
and, like Pearl Harbor in 1941, to use the ensuing tragedy to wake up the
country to our new situation in the world.
"After the attacks, we cobbled together a lot of old bills that the
Congress had refused to pass in previous years because of civil-liberties
problems,
wrapped them inside a few genuine national-security measures that everyone
could agree on, and rushed the Patriot Act through a frightened Congress
still
reeling from 9/11 and the anthrax scare. Passage of the Patriot Act made
it easier to get things done domestically without having constantly to
deal with
Constitutional prohibitions. We began moving more assertively abroad,
without having to worry about anyone stopping us -- or being restrained
by, or having to share power with, the United Nations or any other group
-- since we were the only superpower left standing.
"I guess we thought and hoped the Al Qaida attack would involve only
some localized bombings and maybe one plane that might get hijacked and
crashed into an out-of-the-way government structure or a military base or
something like that; lots of death and destruction but a small price to
pay for the freedom to move on our important work. We never wanted to
believe that a whole fleet of commercial jets could be taken over and used
as fuel-laden missiles against huge skyscrapers and major government
centers of power, and that 3000 people would die.
"But once our doing-nothing deed was done, we had to keep going, and
the coverup began. A few savvy liberal and internet analysts sussed out
the truth
pretty early -- and later our secret made its way into the mainstream
press; after the essence of the August 6, 2001 PDB was revealed, we were
horrified at that huge headline May 16, 2002 in the New York Post:
"HE KNEW!" But the country was still too scared to think those
thoughts in that early period. Instead,
just as we hoped would happen, the citizenry rallied around the President
and, when we invaded Afghanistan, around the flag as well.
"There were calls for an early investigation of how 9/11 happened,
but Cheney went to Gephardt and Daschle and headed off any Congressional
probes --
'national security,' you know. So we had a free ride up until relatively
recently, when we had to cave in to the victims' families and OK an
'independent' 9/11
commission. We thought, given the veteran insiders we appointed, that
they'd skim over the surface of the facts -- especially when we didn't
provide them
many. We delayed and delayed and postponed and postponed, but the public
pressure was getting so intense, we had to give them some documents we
would have preferred to keep secret.
"Anyway, to sum up: Our 9/11 crime was looking the other way for our
own purposes; power-hunger will do that to good people sometimes. Our
long-range
intentions seemed honorable to us at the time. I apologize to all the
families who suffered due to our incompetence and hunger for control. We
can't bring your loved ones back. We can't guarantee that there won't be
another major terrorist attack. But we as leaders, and we as a country,
this time can try to cut
those chances to an absolute minimum. I ask for your understanding and
forgiveness. And I hereby tender my resignation."
RUMMY'S RUMINATIONS
Next, I listened to Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and the military
chiefs trying to downplay the unraveling of U.S. control over the
situation in Iraq
and the beginnings of a countrywide intifada. Out with the "B.S.
Away," and in with a more truthful version:
Said Rumsfeld: "We're in a devil of a fix. Because the whole premise
of the war was based on lies and deceptions -- we built up Saddam as a mad
monster, with huge stockpiles of WMD, and believed that the Iraqis, so
happy to be liberated, eagerly would work with us to establish the kind of
system we wanted for them -- we weren't able to deal with, or even to
appreciate, the situation as it really was.
"We understood neither Iraqi nor tribal culture, nor the religious
complexities, nor the strength of nationalist feelings. And, even though
we weren't
guarding the armament dumps around Iraq, we did not anticipate the
swiftness with which large elements of the Iraqi population could generate
an insurgent
response to our occupation. In short, we did very well with Plan A -- our
'shock-and-awe' military phase that overthrew the Saddam regime -- but we
had no Plan B ready to go for the post-war restructuring of Iraqi society,
in a hostile environment.
"We rushed way too fast into our initial military attack (so as to
make the war a fait accompli before the U.N. or the American people could
put roadblocks
in our way), and then tried to nation-build with the soldiers who had just
destroyed so much of the country; naturally, we ran into problems. We
hand-picked malleable Iraqis and put them into power as an interim
governing body, and then were surprised that so many Iraqis regarded them
as our puppets.
"Rove and Cheney and Bush want our troops out of the main killing
areas by June 30, because of the American election campaign, but, given
the level of
violence right now -- and the scary signs of possible mergers between Shia
and Sunni forces -- we may not even make it to June 30. And even if we do,
to whom do we turn over the supposed domestic 'sovereignty' of the
country? And will this stop the growing strength of the intifada?"
Wolfowitz, misted with some "B.S. Away," said: "I don't
know what we should do. We're between a rock and a hard place. None of
this complexity was taught
at the Neoconservative institutes and organizations like AIE and PNAC.
That was all theory. Now we're in reality -- and it's ugly and messy and
total chaos.
We totally wanted to believe what Chalabi and his Iraqi exile-friends were
telling us, and we're paying the price for our ideological blinders.
"Yes, we were wrong about trying to do these wars on the cheap,
counting on our technological might to frighten populations and leaders
into submission.
One way we could move would be to bring in a hundred thousand more troops
to try to quell the nationalist insurgency and to deal with Sadr's
fundamentalist army. But if we do that, it'll really look like Vietnam all
over again, constantly sending in more and more troops -- who will be
forced to treat all Iraqis as potential enemies, which will make us more
hated and reviled -- and then having to negotiate for an ignominious exit
down the road. The Democrats would eat us alive.
"Or we could can go hat in hand to the United Nations and offer them
shared, or even full, authority if they'll come in with an international
peacekeeping force -- if they would even consider something like that,
given how we humiliated them before we launched our war, and how things
are falling apart there. If they decide not to come in and help out,
preferring that we stew in our own juices, we're back to square one.
"Or we could cut our losses, declare victory in ridding the country
of a tyrant and setting up rudimentary democratic institutions, and simply
leave. In which case, not only would there be hell to pay electorally for
our policy debacle and all the deaths we caused for nothing, but the
radical, anti-American Islamists woul gain control, and we would have to
abandon our entire Middle East strategy of altering and modernizing the
face of Islam and maintaining control of that oil-rich area.
"My guess is that Rove-Cheney-Bush will decide to pour more troops
into the battle, if only to prolong the inevitable withdrawal until after
Election Day in November. Use the American troops as our electoral shield,
as it were. If we lose the war after we win the election, we'll deal with
the unfolding situation at that time, even if we have to make it up as we
go along. If we lose the election, let the Democrats handle that hot
potato. Damn those neocon theorists! Wait a minute, I'm one of the main
ones. My bad."
ASHCROFT'S PLEA
Attorney General John Ashcroft wants to expand the Patriot Act -- because,
he claims, it doesn't give him enough police powers to go after terrorists
-- even though more than 200 cities and states have approved resolutions
against the worst aspects of that hastily-passed law.
I took the bottle and sprayed a number of his speeches, and here's what
Ashcroft said:
"Well, yes, we didn't pay that much attention to combatting Al Qaida,
neither before nor after 9/11. We needed the terrorists (and still need
them) for our
own purposes -- they are a positively frightening, murderous group -- just
as the terrorists need us as the Great Satan to energize their radical
Islamic
hordes.
"Without their terror, we wouldn't have been able to get the Patriot
Act OKd and all the other extraconstitutional measures passed or
authorized by me or
Bush. Sure, we probably need those measures to help in our hunt for
terrorists, but we only catch one or two real bad guys that way. The real
pleasure for me is using our police powers to scare folks from dissenting,
and in reining in immoral behavior. It's amazing: I can accomplish this
simply by invoking
politically-magic phrases -- 'national security' and 'the war on
terrorism'. Is America a great country or what?
"I have to testify before the 9/11 Commission soon. They're going to
ask me all sorts of questions about why my September 10, 2001 request for
budget
increases covered 68 programs but none of them related to
counter-terrorism, and why my memorandum to heads of all departments at
Justice stating my seven priorities didn't include counter-terrorism, and
why I turned down an FBI request for hundreds of agents to be assigned to
tracking terrorist threats. I'm going to have to lie and spin like crazy
to get out of those corners. I wonder if they'll believe me when I say I
never saw the famous August 6, 2001 PDB memo about Al Qaida's plans for
domestic terrorism.
"But Condi was a good role model: No matter what question they ask
you, stick to your talking points -- hindsight is 20-20, we were actively
engaged in
anti-terrorism programs, national security was our prime concern, we had
no specific information, we didn't know anything that we could operate on,
those
beneath me didn't connect the dots, it's their fault, the dog at my
homework, and so on.
"I'm rehearsing the Ashcroft Glare for those times when they get too
close to 'national security' matters -- meaning, of course, too close to
embarrassing
revelations -- and I'll firmly suggest that to question my actions and
those of the President in such a forum is to give aid and comfort to our
enemies. But
that may not work as well this time out. It's a different climate than
right after 9/11, and I'm not sure we can totally count on all of our
Republican appointees to the commission to toe the line.
"Oh well, if worse comes to worst, we'll take the hit from their
report that's due out in July, and spin like crazy. Besides, the election
isn't until November and the American people are notoriously forgetful and
intolerant of 'old news.' Besides, I can 100% guarantee that we'll be able
to distract their attention from our gross failures. We'll get through
this, and, after victory in November -- or if the election has to be
postponed because of terrorism -- we'll take care of those who tried to do
us in. A whole lot of people are going to be 'vacationing' in Git-- "
Blank.
I tried to give another spray to Ashcroft to hear the rest of that threat,
but the bottle was dry. Oh well, I'd heard enough anyway for today. You
don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the B.S. is blowing.#
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D, has taught government & international relations
at various universities, worked as a writer/editor for the San Francisco
Chronicle
for 19 years, and currently co-edits the progressive website The Crisis
Papers ( www.crisispapers.org ).
*To read about the first experiment, "B. S. Away!" --
The Miracle Truth-Spray," go to: www.crisispapers.org/essays/bs-away.htm
.
