Truth(s) About 9/11? (Happy 9/11!)

Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com provides a logical starting point on this heavy-monickered (word preference from the clown world) day with the before and after version of 9/11's truth(s).

The "official" 9/11 narrative doesn't make sense

These are quite a bit different from the official fairy tale of 19 cavemen (apologies to GEICO for stealing their innuendo) who are competent enough to fool the mightiest military power (by measureable fire power) in the history of the world, fly across the frequency barriers while NORAD is "otherwise engaged" and plunge the world into a New Depression (mainly with box cutters and Faux News propaganda). Alan Sabrosky details the Treason, Betrayal and Deceit: 9/11 and Beyond for us on this increasingly trivialized eighth anniversary. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

A significant development in the 1990s was the formation of the neo-conservative think tank known as PNAC (Project for a New American Century), whose members prepared position papers for the Israeli government and for a future US Administration sharing their views. That happened in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush, and a contemporary writer summarized the tip of the neo-conservative iceberg in his first Administration this way:

The "outsiders" from PNAC were now powerful "insiders," placed in important positions from which they could exert maximum pressure on US policy . . . PNAC had a lock on military policy-creation in the Bush Administration.

Especially significant in terms of subsequent events was the acknowledgement in one of PNAC's own documents that their program for America (and Israel) would not readily be accepted by the American people. What this meant, PNAC opined in 2000, was that "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."

Professor David Ray Griffin (The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report About 9/11 Is Unscientific and False) is interviewed by Michel Chossudovsky here, and he and Jacques Marcille of Montreal 911 Truth have an almost unbelievable amount of detail to add to this increasingly suspect dish (best served cold). Jacques Marcille also provides insights on 911 Truth and media disinformation. View this incredibly fantastic video of the World Trade Center buildings perfectly imploding into themselves, lit up only by two rather small airplanes with their somewhat depleted fuel supply and some dynamite infrastructure. (Not to mention Building 7 which must have collapsed from the sympathy it felt for the other two as it was neither hit by an airplane nor suffered fire damage from the jet fuel.) Tom Engelhardt at the TomDispatch has Rebecca Solnit's complete essay on How 9/11 Should Be Remembered - The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People, which I recommend to all who would like to be able to see any positive side to this concocted nightmare event.

One 9/11 widow has a new outlook.

In the days and months that followed, I worked tirelessly to find out the rest of what happened. My questions started small - Which tower? What floor? - and became thornier. Why did this happen? What was the government's involvement? What were the last minutes of his life like?

. . . After all these years of painful blank spaces - after government mishandling, after grievous disappointment, after 9/11 conspiracy theories and 9/11 commissions and 9/11 fictions fused with fact - I would have what I wanted. I would have answers.

Would that we all did.

Do yourself a favor and read through these articles at your leisure. It's impossible to read them all in the same sitting: your mind will be boggled. Alert the EMS! Suzan

(Note: Even if these theories are proved to have "holes," they aren't in the ballpark of the whoppers in the official story.) _________________________

We Rule - You Don't. Get Over It! (And Get Ready for the Little Ones)

Heard in the public library. "He knows his Mama don't play."

Of course, to put this in perspective, we now live in a thoroughly ramped-up atmosphere in which "American national security" — defined to include just about anything unsettling that occurs anywhere on Earth — is the eternal preoccupation of a vast national security bureaucracy. Its bread and butter increasingly seems to be worst-case scenarios (perfect for our 24/7 media to pounce on) in which something truly catastrophic is always about to happen to us, and every "situation" is a "crisis." In the hothouse atmosphere of Washington, the result can be a feeding frenzy in which doomsday scenarios pour out. Though we don’t recognize it as such, this is a kind of everyday extremism.

Tom Engelhardt, author and founder of TomDispatch relates that what we have here is a failure to communicate (an "Empathy Gap"). As one of the best writers on foreign policy today, he is a source of information that I have trusted for many years without any regrets. I think you also will want to bookmark his site. (Emphasis marks were added - Ed.)

A front-page New York Times headline last week put the matter politely indeed: "In Pakistan, U.S. Courts Leader of Opposition." And nobody thought it was strange at all. In fact, it’s the sort of thing you can read just about any time when it comes to American policy in Pakistan or, for that matter, Afghanistan. It’s just the norm on a planet on which it’s assumed that American civilian and military leaders can issue pronunciamentos about what other countries must do; publicly demand various actions of ruling groups; opt for specific leaders, and then, when they disappoint, attempt to replace them; and use what was once called "foreign aid," now taxpayer dollars largely funneled through the Pentagon, to bribe those who are hard to convince. Last week as well, in a prime-time news conference, President Obama said of Pakistan: "We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state." To the extent that this statement was commented on, it was praised here for its restraint and good sense. Yet, thought about a moment, what the president actually said went something like this: When it comes to U.S. respect for Pakistan’s sovereignty, this country has more important fish to fry. A look at the historical record indicates that Washington has, in fact, been frying those "fish" for at least the last four decades without particular regard for Pakistani sensibilities. In a week in which the presidents of both Pakistan and Afghanistan have, like two satraps, dutifully trekked to the U.S. capital to be called on the carpet by Obama and his national security team, Washington officials have been issuing one shrill statement after another about what U.S. media reports regularly term the "dire situation" in Pakistan. Of course, to put this in perspective, we now live in a thoroughly ramped-up atmosphere in which "American national security" — defined to include just about anything unsettling that occurs anywhere on Earth — is the eternal preoccupation of a vast national security bureaucracy. Its bread and butter increasingly seems to be worst-case scenarios (perfect for our 24/7 media to pounce on) in which something truly catastrophic is always about to happen to us, and every "situation" is a "crisis." In the hothouse atmosphere of Washington, the result can be a feeding frenzy in which doomsday scenarios pour out. Though we don’t recognize it as such, this is a kind of everyday extremism. Being Hysterical in Washington As the recent release of more Justice Department torture memos (which were also, in effect, torture manuals) reminds us, we’ve just passed through eight years of such obvious extremism that the present everyday extremity of Washington and its national security mindset seems almost a relief. We naturally grasp the extremity of the Taliban — those floggings, beheadings, school burnings, bans on music, the medieval attitude toward women’s role in the world — but our own extremity is in no way evident to us. So Obama’s statement on Pakistani sovereignty is reported as the height of sobriety, even when what lies behind it is an expanding "covert" air war and assassination campaign by unmanned aerial drones over the Pakistani tribal lands, which has reportedly killed hundreds of bystanders and helped unsettle the region. Let’s stop here and consider another bit of news that few of us seem to find strange. Mark Lander and Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times offered this tidbit out of an overheated Washington last week: "President Obama and his top advisers have been meeting almost daily to discuss options for helping the Pakistani government and military repel the [Taliban] offensive." Imagine that. Almost daily. It’s this kind of atmosphere that naturally produces the bureaucratic equivalent of mass hysteria. In fact, other reports indicate that Obama’s national security team has been convening regular "crisis" meetings and having "nearly nonstop discussions" at the White House, not to mention issuing alarming and alarmist statements of all sorts about the devolving situation in Pakistan, the dangers to Islamabad, our fears for the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, and so on. In fact, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landy of McClatchy news service quote "a senior U.S. intelligence official" (from among the legion of anonymous officials who populate our nation’s capital) saying: "The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse, and no one has any idea about how to reverse it. I don’t think ‘panic’ is too strong a word to describe the mood here." Now, if it were the economic meltdown, the Chrysler bankruptcy, the bank stress tests, the potential flu pandemic, or any number of close-to-home issues pressing in on the administration, perhaps this would make some sense. But everyday discussions of Pakistan? You know, that offensive in the Lower Dir Valley. That’s near the Buner District. You remember, right next to the Swat Valley and, in case you’re still not completely keyed in, geographically speaking, close to the Malakand Division. I mean, if the Pakistani government were in crisis over the deteriorating situation in Fargo, North Dakota, we would consider it material for late night jokesters. And yet, in the strange American world we inhabit, nobody finds these practically Cuban-Missile-Crisis-style, round-the-clock meetings the least bit strange, not after eight years of post-9/11 national security fears, not after living with worst-case scenarios in which jihadi atomic bombs regularly are imagined going off in American cities. Keep in mind a certain irony here: We essentially know what those crisis meetings will result in. After all, the U.S. government has been embroiled with Pakistan for at least 40 years and for just that long, its top officials have regularly come to the same policy conclusions — to support Pakistani military dictatorships or, in periods when civilian rule returns, pour yet more money (and support) into the Pakistani military. That military has long been a power unto itself in the country, a state within a state. And in moments like this, part of our weird extremism is that, having spent decades undermining Pakistani democracy, we bemoan its "fragility" in the face of threats and proceed to put even more of our hopes and dollars into its military. (As Strobel and Landy report, "Some U.S. officials say Pakistan’s only hope, and Washington’s, too, at this stage may be the country’s army. That, another senior official acknowledged Wednesday, ‘means another coup.’") In the Bush years, this support added up to at least $10 billion, with next to no idea what the military was doing with it. Another $100 million went into making that country’s nuclear-weapons program, about which there is now such panic, safer from theft or other intrusion, again with next to no idea of what was actually done with those dollars. And now the Obama administration is rushing to create a new Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund that will be controlled by General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command. If Congress agrees — and in this panic atmosphere, how could it not? — there will be an initial rushed down payment of $400 million to train the Pakistani military, probably outside that country, in counterinsurgency warfare. ("The fund would be similar to those used to train and equip Iraqi and Afghan soldiers and police, Petraeus said.") Doomsday Scenarios Oh, and speaking of extremism, the ur-extreme statement of the last few weeks came from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and was treated like the most ho-hum news here. In congressional testimony, she insisted that the situation in Pakistan — that Taliban thrust into Swat and the lower Dir Valley — "poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world." Umm… Okay, the situation is unnerving — certainly for the Pakistanis, the large majority of whom have not the slightest love for the Taliban, have opted for democracy and against military dictatorship with a passion, and yet strongly oppose the destabilizing American air war in their borderlands. It could even result in the fall of the elected government or of democracy itself — not exactly a rare event in the annals of recent Pakistani history. It’s undoubtedly unnerving as well for the American military, intent on fighting a war in Afghanistan that has spilled disastrously across the open border. (As Pakistan expert Anatol Lieven wrote recently: "The danger to Pakistan is not of a Taliban revolution, but rather of creeping destabilization and terrorism, making any Pakistani help to the U.S. against the Afghan Taliban even less likely than it is at present.") In other words, it’s not a pretty picture. If you happen to live in the tribal borderlands, or Swat, or the Dir Valley, squeezed between the Taliban, the Pakistani Army, whose attacks cause great civilian harm, and those drones cruising overhead, you may be in trouble, if not in flight — or you may simply support the Taliban, as most of the rest of Pakistan does not. If you happen to live in India, you might start working up a sweat over what the future holds on the other side of the border. But all of this is unlikely to be a "mortal threat" even to Islamabad, the Pakistani military, or that nuclear arsenal American national security managers spend so much time fretting about. It is certainly not a "mortal threat to the security and safety of our country." So here’s a little common sense. If Pakistan poses a mortal threat to you in New York, Toledo, or El Paso, well then, get in line. Believe me, it will be a long one and you’ll be toward the back. Despite constant reports that lightly armed Taliban militants are only 60 miles from the "doorstep" of Islamabad, Pakistan’s national capital, and increasing inside-the-Beltway invocations of Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution in Iran, you’re unlikely to see a Taliban government in Islamabad anytime soon, or probably ever. As one unnamed expert commented recently in the insider Washington newsletter, the Nelson Report, "I find it troubling that we are hyping the ’security situation’ in Pakistan. Pakistan is not being taken over, the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas] is. This has been happening since 2004." Mind you, when Vice President Joe Biden said something extreme about flu precautions — don’t take the subway! — the media didn’t hesitate to laugh him off stage. When Hillary Clinton said what should be considered the equivalent about Pakistan, everyone treated it as part of a sober national-security conversation. Of course, when it comes to hysteria, nothing helps like a nuclear arsenal, and in recent weeks nuclear doomsday scenarios have broken out like a swine flu pandemic, even though a victorious Taliban regime in Islamabad with a nuclear arsenal would undoubtedly still find the difficulties of planting and detonating such devices in American cities close to insurmountable. By the way, for all our kindly talk about how the poor Pakistanis just can’t get it together democracy-wise, the U.S. has a terrible record when it comes not just to promoting democracy in that country, but to really giving much of a damn about its people. In fact, not to put too kindly a point on things, Washington has, over the past decades, done few favors for ordinary Pakistanis. Having played our version of the imperial Great Game first vis-a-vis the Soviets and, more recently, a bunch of jihadist warriors, we are now waging a most unpopular and destabilizing air war without mercy in parts of that country, and another deeply unpopular war just across its mountainous, porous border. And this brings us to perhaps the most extreme aspect of the mentality of our national security managers — what might be called their empathy gap. They are, it seems, incapable of seeing the situations they deal through the eyes of those being dealt with. They lack, that is, all empathy, which means, in the end, that they lack understanding. They take it for granted that America’s destiny is to "engineer" the fates of peoples half a world away and are incapable of imagining that the United States could, in almost any situation, be part of the problem, not a major part of its solution. This is surely folly of the first order and, year after year, has only made the "situation" in Pakistan worse. . . . To complete our picture of this over-the-top moment, we have to leave the heated confines of Washington and head for California’s China Lake. That’s where the U.S. military tests some of its advanced weapons. On April 20th, Peter Pae of the Los Angeles Times reported the following: "A 5-pound missile the size of a loaf of French bread is being quietly tested in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles as the military searches for more deadly and far more precise robotic weapons for modern warfare." This tiny missile called the Spike will someday replace the 100-pound Hellfire missiles mounted on our Predator and more advanced Reaper unmanned aerial drones flying those assassination missions over the tribal lands of Pakistan. New weaponry like this is invariably promoted as being more "precise," and so capable of causing less "collateral damage," than whatever we’ve been using; that is, as an advance for humanity. But in this case, up to 12 of these powerful micro-weapons will someday replace the two Hellfires now capable of being mounted on a Predator, which means a future drone will have to come home far less often as it cruises the badlands of the planet looking for targets. According to Pae, this new development is considered a "milestone" in weaponizing robot planes. Chillingly, he quotes Steven Zaloga, a military analyst with the Teal Group Corporation as saying, "We’re sort of at the same stage as we were in 1914 when we began to arm airplanes." Not only that but the Spike may someday soon be mounted on a new generation of more deadly drones, one of which, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ Avenger or Predator C, is already being tested. It will be able to fly 50% faster than the Reaper and at up to 60,000 feet for 20 hours before returning to base. In other words, the decisions to be made in future panicky "crisis" meetings in Washington, when "American security" once again faces a "mortal threat," are already being predetermined in the Mojave desert and elsewhere. In the Pentagon’s eternal arms race of one, a major vote is being cast at China Lake for future Terminator wars. In a crisis mood of desperation, we tend to fall back on what we know. This, too, plays into Washington’s national-security extremism. By now it should be obvious enough that the military approaches to Afghanistan and Pakistan (or the newly merged Af-Pak battlefield) have been in the process of failing for years. Take just our drone wars: they are not only killing significant numbers of civilians, but also destabilizing Pakistan’s tribal lands — military and civilian officials there have long begged us to ground them — and so creating an anti-American atmosphere throughout that country. Recently, former advisor to Gen. David Petraeus and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen told Congress: "We need to call off the drones… Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior al-Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism… The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population." Sage advice. If President Obama temporarily suspended the Bush-era drone war, which his administration has recently escalated, it would represent a start down a different path, one not already strewn with the skeletons of failed policies. And while he’s at it — and here’s a little touch of extremism by American standards — why not declare a six-month moratorium on all drone research of any sort, a brief period to reconsider whether we really want to pursue such "solutions" ad infinitum? Why not, in fact, call for a six-month moratorium on all weapons research? A long Pentagon holiday. Militarily, the U.S. is in no danger of losing significant military ground globally by shutting down its R&D machine for a time, while reconsidering whether it actually wants to lead the planet into a future filled with Spikes and Avengers. If, however, nothing else was done, at least the president should order his national security team to calm down, skip those crisis meetings on Pakistan, tamp down the doomsday scenarios, and try to take a few minutes to imagine what the world looks like if you’re not in Washington or the skies over our planet. Are there really no solutions anywhere that don’t need to be engineered first in our national capital? [Note: You could easily drown in the tsunami of recent semi-hysterical pieces about the Pakistan or Af-Pak situation. Fortunately, I have Juan Cole's Informed Comment, Paul Woodward's The War in Context, and Antiwar.com to depend on to help me sort through the crucial reportage of this moment. What would I do without them?]

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. He is the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, as well as a collection of his Tomdispatch interviews, Mission Unaccomplished. Each spring he is a Teaching Fellow at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Thanks to Blue Gal for the link to one of the best antiwar essays I've read recently. Allison Krause's sister, Laurie, has written a totally amazing memorial at her blog about her sister's murder at Kent State which is a subject dear to my heart. I lost my waitressing job in college over the black armband I insisted on wearing after the massacre at Kent State. That night after joining a group who were trying to determine the proper response to the national events, I was recruited to be one of the leaders on the first bus (paid for by the widow of the poet Randall Jarrell) to travel from my NC campus to D.C. to protest this state police action against peacefully marching antiwar students, and to plead with Congressional representatives to stop funding the war in Vietnam. I'll never forget Senator Fritz Hollings (SC) (who was instrumental in desegregating Clemson University (my Father's alma mater) as Governor when others in the South were fighting desperately to remain as all-white institutions) telling me how sorry he was and his personal thoughts about the people who ran the national guards. Fritz later spoke about his "Cambodian moment" that turned him against the war on Iraq. Thank you, Blue Gal. It was wonderful to read Laurie's healing words. In light of the first essay, I thought you might be interested in reading José Miguel Alonso Trabanco's essay in which he attempts to increase our awareness about the "Prospects of a New Cold War" with Russia. And whom do you think would benefit most from that course of action? It's the same group of "the best and the brightest" folks!

"We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new Cold War, but we don’t want one" - Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev In his 1997 book entitled The Grand Chessboard American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that if Russia ever attempted to launch its own defense pact, it would include, "at most", Belarus and Tajikistan . . . . Twelve years later, his list turned out to be incomplete. Moreover, the attempts being made in order to enhance the Russian-led CSTO's actual power projection capabilities and the efforts undertaken to bring the organization's members closer together is something Brzezinski failed to anticipate and it seems that the latest developments concerning CSTO demonstrate that his triumphalism was premature.

Isn't almost all triumphalism? Suzan ____________________

The Deification of "W" & "The End of a Subprime Administration" - Tomdispatch

Tom Engelhardt is my god of political estimation and judgment. He spares no adjectives in describing the "legacy debacle" of George W. Bush. He judges "Bush's Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse, kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated only with South America dictatorships and military juntas)" as his real legacy. Although I agree with almost every syllable gliding from Tom's tongue, please let me make an estimate of how much money our "boy lollipop" will receive from the "talk circuit" game: Zero. Right. Zero. Because no one ever really wanted to hear what he had to say in the first place. And who would gather to hear his mangled thoughts and prose without a personal payoff? Right. He could phone it in for the fundraisers. You can quote me. Also, I found the coverage that Oliver Stone gives him in his movie "W" shameful. What a suck up he has turned out to be. He reminds me of the Rethugs who gathered close to the BushLeagueCheneGang only as long as it lined their coffers. Say it again. Shame! Read the whole essay here.

And what a debacle the Bush Doctrine proved to be. What a legacy the legacy President and his pals are leaving behind. A wrecked economy, deflated global stock markets, collapsing banks and financial institutions, soaring unemployment, a smashed Republican Party, a bloated Pentagon overseeing a strained, overstretched military, enmired in an incoherent set of still-expanding wars gone sour, a network of secret prisons, as well as Guantanamo, that "jewel in the crown" of Bush's Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse, kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated only with South America dictatorships and military juntas). They headed a government that couldn't shoot straight or plan ahead or do anything halfway effectively, an administration that emphasized "defense" - or "homeland security" as it came to be called in their years - above all else; yet they were always readying themselves for the last battle, and so were caught utterly, embarrassingly unready for 19 terrorists with box cutters, a hurricane named Katrina, and an arcane set of Wall Street derivatives heading south. As the supposed party of small government, they succeeded mainly in strangling civilian services, privatizing government operations into the hands of crony corporations, and bulking up state power in a massive way - making an already vast intelligence apparatus yet larger and more labyrinthine, expanding spying and surveillance of every kind, raising secrecy to a first principle, establishing a new U.S. military command for North America, endorsing a massive Pentagon build-up, establishing a second Defense Department labeled the Department of Homeland Security with its own mini-homeland-security-industrial complex, evading checks and powers in the Constitution whenever possible, and claiming new powers for a "unitary executive" commander-in-chief presidency. No summary can quite do justice to what the administration "accomplished" in these years. If there was, however, a single quote from the world of George W. Bush that caught the deepest nature of the president and his core followers, it was offered by an "unnamed administration official" - often assumed to be Karl Rove - to journalist Ron Suskind back in October 2004:

"He] said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

"We create our own reality . . . . We're history's actors." It must for years have seemed that way and everything about the lives they lived only reinforced that impression. After all, the President himself, as so many wrote, lived in a literal bubble world. Those who met him were carefully vetted; audiences were screened so that no one who didn't fawn over him got near him; and when he traveled through foreign cities, they were cleared of life, turned into the equivalent of Potemkin villages, while he and his many armored cars and Blackhawk helicopters, his huge contingent of Secret Service agents and White House aides, his sniffer dogs and military sharpshooters, his chefs and who knows what else passed through. Of course, the President had been in a close race with the reality principle (which, in his case, was the principle of failure) all his life - and whenever reality nipped at his heels, his father's boys stepped in and whisked him off stage. He got by at his prep school, Andover, and then at Yale, a c-level legacy student and, appropriately enough when it came to sports, a cheerleader and, at Yale, a party animal as well as the president of the hardest drinking fraternity on campus. He was there in the first place only because of who he wasn't (or rather who his relations were). . . . Nonetheless, let's remember one other theme of his previous life. Whatever his failures, Bush always walked away from disastrous dealings enriched, while others were left holding the bag. Don't imagine for a second that the equivalent isn't about to repeat itself. He will leave a country functionally under the gun of foreclosure, a world far more aflame and dangerous than the one he faced on entering the Oval Office. But he won't suffer. He will have his new house in Dallas (not to speak of the "ranch" in Crawford) and his more than $200 million presidential "library" and "freedom institute" at Southern Methodist University; and then there's always that 20% of America - they know who they are - who think his presidency was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Believe me, 20% of America is more than enough to pony up spectacular sums, once Bush takes to the talk circuit. As the president himself put it enthusiastically,"'I'll give some speeches, just to replenish the ol' coffers.' With assets that have been estimated as high as nearly $21 million, Mr. Bush added, 'I don't know what my dad gets - it's more than 50-75' thousand dollars a speech, and 'Clinton's making a lot of money.'" This is how a legacy-student-turned-president fails upward. Every disaster leaves him better off. The same can't be said for the country or the world, saddled with his "legacy." Still, his administration has been foreclosed. Perhaps there's ignominy in that. Now, the rest of us need to get out the brooms and start sweeping the stables. - - - - - - - - Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years, has recently been published.

Suzan

Life Among the Continuing Ruins of 9/11

Tom* of the famous Dispatch wrote recently that we are 'Living in the Ruins,' and despite the mounting evidence, no one in the media wants to admit it. (Emphasis marks and some editing are mine - Ed.)

Among my somewhat over-the-hill crowd - I'm 64 - there's one thing friends have said to me repeatedly since the stock market started to tumble, the global economic system began to melt down, and Iceland went from bank haven to bankrupt. They say, "I'm just not looking. I don't want to know." And they're not referring to the world situation, they're talking about their pension plans, or 401(k)s, or IRAs, or whatever they put their money into, so much of which is melting away in plain sight even as Iceland freezes up. I've said it myself. Think of it as a pragmatic acknowledgement of reality at an extreme moment, but also as a statement of denial and despair. The point is: Why look? The news is going to be worse than you think, and it's way too late anyway. This is what crosses your mind when the ground under you starts to crumble. Don't look, not yet, not when the life you know, the one you took for granted, is vanishing, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.

He continues with commentary about how the media are treating this story as though it doesn't affect them or anyone they know personally; it's just another story. I was thinking about that today as the market continued its swan dive (just ahead of the long-expected Dick Cheney (retirement-necessitating) "heart pains," treated at a D.C. hospital story), wiping out nearly all the recent gains coming after the big losses it had suffered last week, and the media continue to cover it like it's just one of those things that will straighten itself out soon and then they can go back to breathlessly talking about Paris Hilton's sex videos and who shot whom on the freeway, convincing me once again that they (and Tom agrees):

are there largely because they didn't have the faintest idea that anything like this might happen. Whether they're reporting on, or opining about, the latest market nosedives, panic selling, chaotic bailouts, arcane derivatives, AIG facials, or bank and stock-exchange closures, it still always sounds like someone else's story. I guess that's the nature of the media.

The idea of trillion-dollar losses roll off their tongues just as easily as thousand-dollar losses (or no losses at all - it's just a script after all).

It's professional for reporters and pundits to write or talk about the pain of others, not their own. Normally, you just assume that's the case. So, for instance, when Frank Bruni, in a front page New York Times piece on the second presidential debate, writes, "Now the situation looks gloomier still, with markets in other continents tumbling - with a world of hurt at hand," it really doesn't cross your mind that he might be including Frank Bruni in that description. Here's a rock-you-to-your-socks fact I happened to read in a news report the afternoon of the day that Barack Obama and John McCain had their town hall meeting with 80 uncommitted voters and moderator Tom Brokaw. In the last 15 months, according to the Associated Press, Americans lost $2 trillion from their retirement plans. Now, that's a world of hurt and you could feel it the moment Brokaw first called on an audience member. Allen Shaffer rose and asked: "With the economy on the downturn and retired and older citizens and workers losing their incomes, what's the fastest, most positive solution to bail these people out of the economic ruin?" I have no idea what Shaffer's situation is, but I'll tell you this, his didn't sound like a reporter's question. It sounded close to the bone. It sounded like a world of hurt. Not surprisingly, neither presidential candidate actually responded, in part, undoubtedly, because to be close to the truth either would have had to say something like: "Hey, how the hell do I know?" At this point, despite the onslaught of news about how bad things are, dotted with portrayals of Americans in trouble, I suspect there's quite a gap between the world as reported and the world as felt by most Americans. Let me give you a simple example. In the news these days, it's common to hear that we are at the edge of a real recession . . . the cusp of a global recession or even the verge of a deep recession. Recently, the word "Depression" has finally made it onto the scene. Little wonder, as even more financial institutions totter, while, for the first time in memory, the initials GM and the word "bankruptcy" repeatedly end up in the same headlines . . . . a recent CNN poll indicates that nearly 60% of Americans think an actual Depression, even a Great Depression - not a situation bad enough to compare to one - is "likely." To many of us, it's already starting to feel that way and that's no small thing. When you see a Wall Street Journal headline like last Friday's - "Market's 7-Day Rout Leaves U.S. Reeling" - don't you feel like you're in a different world, however the experts care to define it? The edge of panic in the voice of a friend telling me about the 401(k) she's not looking at catches the story for me. It's visceral and scary and, let's face it, whether this is the half-forgotten past coming back to bite us or the future kneecapping us, it's depressing as hell.

A friend of Tom's emailed him what millions must be thinking: "I'm given to gloomy thoughts . . . . You really get the sense that things are on the verge of spinning out of control." Tom told another friend that he "found it staggering to turn a corner, bump into History, and discover that He's unbelievably gargantuan."

Oh, and there's one fundamentalist character I've left out of the mix, someone who definitely bows down to force. Call everything that's happened these last few years Osama's dream. It's hard not to think of William Butler Yeats' poem, 'The Second Coming,' and then wonder: 'And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?' Today, on a visit to lower Manhattan, there would be no smoldering fires, no smoke, no raw throats, no gaping holes, no smashed buildings, no ruins, and yet, as you walked those streets, you would almost certainly be strolling among the ruins, amid the shards of American financial, political, and even military superpowerdom. Think of it as Bush's hubris and bin Laden's revenge. You would be facing the results, however unseen, of the real 9/11, which is still taking place in relative slow motion seven years later. It should scare us all.

I'm terrified, but it's not like it's something I haven't been reporting on for oh, the last seven plus years. And I'm not heartened much by the Dick Cheney fake-heart-pangs hospital episode either. As both you and I know he would have had to buy a heart first. Suzan

*Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has recently been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years. You can listen to a podcast of Tom Engelhardt discussing this piece by clicking here.

Military-Industrial Complex - A Bunch of Good-Time(s) Guys?

I read Tom Engelhardt's TomDispatch on a regular basis and have begun to wonder why I hadn't given more attention (at least initially) to the essay he published by Chalmers Johnson on July 27, 2008 (and I recommend reading the entire essay as it is excellent). Maybe my reluctance to dive in was because it reiterates a number of facts about our government's policies (and history of such) that are unpleasant to think about for too long. It hits me where I live (in enjoying the exposing of what's behind political realities) - ouch! - and yet, I just didn't want to revisit those emotions (and his essay is not surprising in its conclusions to anyone who has been paying attention). Should the CIA be abolished? Is it causing more problems than it was set up to solve? (Are you joshing me? Is that a serious question? Did you see The Good Shepherd?) But - back to serious commentary - upon reading it (this time carefully), the following paragraphs (and much, much more) from both Tom's intro and Chalmers' essay stand out as eminently important, worthy of consideration by as many people as we can lasso into doing such as it exponentially increases one's comprehension of the dangers inherent in the so-called post-9/11 world (and what a country governed by a Constitution that heretofore has limited the actions of the executive, legislative and judicial branches with a working set of "checks and balances" will lose with the (s)election of John "BushLeagueCheneGang" McCain): Tom begins:

To offer a bit of context for Chalmers Johnson's latest post on the privatization of U.S. intelligence, it's important to know just how lucrative that intelligence "business" has become. According to the latest estimate, the cumulative 2009 intelligence budget for the 16 agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community will be more than $55 billion. However, it's possible that the real figure in the deeply classified budget may soar over $66 billion, which would mean that the U.S. budget for spooks has more than doubled in less than a decade. And as Robert Dreyfuss points out at his invaluable blog at the Nation, even more spectacularly (and wastefully), much of that money will end up in the hands of the "private contractors" who, by now, make up a mini intelligence-industrial complex of their own. Chalmers Johnson, who once consulted for the CIA and more recently, in his book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, the third volume of his Blowback Trilogy, called for the Agency to be shut down, knows a thing or two about the world of American intelligence. As he has written, "An incompetent or unscrupulous intelligence agency can be as great a threat to national security as not having one at all." Now consider, with Johnson, just how incompetent and unscrupulous a thoroughly privatized intelligence "community" can turn out to be.

Chalmers argues (from The Military-Industrial Complex - It's Much Later Than You Think):

Most Americans have a rough idea what the term "military-industrial complex" means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. "Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime," he said, "or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." Although Eisenhower's reference to the military-industrial complex is, by now, well-known, his warning against its "unwarranted influence" has, I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional structure of checks and balances. From its origins in the early 1940s, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was building up his "arsenal of democracy," down to the present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it involved more or less equitable relations -- often termed a "partnership" -- between the high command and civilian overlords of the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit manufacturing and service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the time they first emerged, these relations were never equitable. In the formative years of the military-industrial complex, the public still deeply distrusted privately owned industrial firms because of the way they had contributed to the Great Depression. Thus, the leading role in the newly emerging relationship was played by the official governmental sector. A deeply popular, charismatic president, FDR sponsored these public-private relationships. They gained further legitimacy because their purpose was to rearm the country, as well as allied nations around the world, against the gathering forces of fascism. The private sector was eager to go along with this largely as a way to regain public trust and disguise its wartime profit-making.

It's a long essay, but very worth your time. Read the rest here. As a note says at the bottom of this essay, this "focuses on the new book by Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008). Other books noted: Eugene Jarecki's The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril (New York: Free Press, 2008); Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008); and Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)." I believe that this essay is one that the whole country would benefit from reading before election day, and that enough citizens doing so might be enough to save our endangered Constitutional form of government for our grandchildren to enjoy as well. Thank you Chalmers Johnson and Tom Engelhardt. Suzan ____________________________________