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July
31, 2004
All
Slam and No Dunk
All
Blame and No Responsibility
By
BRIAN CLOUGHLEY
The late great Claud Cockburn once said
words to the effect that he never believed anything until he
read an official denial of it, and in few periods in history
can there have been more justification for his observation than
at present. Governments and their accessories of all complexions
have always told lies, of course, but the brazenness with which
the current bunch of charlatans in the US and Britain have been
bamboozling their unfortunate citizens is without precedent in
democracies in modern times. It isn't that the number of lies
has exceeded the norm : it is rather that the fabrications are
bolder, their originators are more bombastically self-righteous,
and the outcome of their deceit has been irreversibly disastrous.
To be sure, Anthony Eden misled
Britain to war on Egypt in 1956 with the same crusading fervor
as silly little Tony Blair did in 2003 regarding Iraq, and LBJ
manipulated Congress and the American people outrageously in
the Sixties over Vietnam, just as Bush quite cynically duped
and hoodwinked the House and the Senate in his immature macho
aspiration to be regarded as a "war president'. (Wouldn't
it be nice, just for once, to have a Peace President?) And just
as Eden and Johnson splashed into the gutters of history because
of their illegal wars (in spite of their positive achievements,
which were many), so we must hope that Bush and Blair will do
likewise. But while the result of the war on North Vietnam was
only intensified distrust of the US in its dealings with Asia,
and that of Eden's Suez adventure was extinction of already-waning
British influence in the Middle East, the Bush-Blair war on Iraq
has brought the plagues of hell upon the world for decades to
come. They decided on war, and the entire world is suffering
from their arrogant deceit. They were all slam, and no dunk.
Recent official inquiries into
the Bush-Blair manufactured justifications for war, into the
9/11 debacle, and into the scandals of Pentagon-endorsed torture
and murder of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan have revealed
a great deal, but, of course, failed to apportion responsibility
for incompetence or evil on the part of individuals at the highest
level. It has been left to those without power to do that, but
we would rather have the great and good inquirers, who are more
clever than the rest of us, actually point out who was to blame.
Why else would they have been asked to inquire, after all?
What a silly question. The
inquirers were carefully selected by the self-same people into
whose actions they were to inquire. Their terms of reference
were written specifically to prevent them from pursuing embarrassing
lines of investigation, even had they been inclined to do that.
And they were appointed because those who chose them knew without
doubt that they would not point a finger of culpability at anyone
important. They would merely poke an intellectual middle digit
at the rest of us. The concept is simple, and is along the lines
of "We report ; And you must accept what we decide because
you have no alternative".
If a private corporation made
a major decision that affected profits to the point that its
share price fell in the same ratio as international trust in
Bush and Blair has collapsed, there would be a major drama followed
by an independent investigation of its senior executives' mismanagement
and chicanery. The inquiry would speedily result in people at
the top being given the most energetic heave-ho, accompanied
by a blunt and unaffectionate warning to avoid the handle of
the rapidly-closing door just after it hit their departing and
sadly chastened butts. There might even be prosecution and imprisonment
of those who failed to cover their tracks.
Not in politics. Not any more,
and perhaps never again. And this is dangerous, because the precedent
has been set for officially-blessed evasion of responsibility.
The desperate hounding of Bill Clinton by the Starr Chamber over
so many years has been discredited, certainly : but the final
outcome has been far from satisfactory. The squalid and remorseless
(and unsuccessful) party political attempts to associate Clinton
with chicanery resulted in widespread distaste that has been
used very cleverly by the Bush administration to maneuver public
opinion against blaming their man in the White House for anything
atall. And this no-blame culture extends to the president's minions,
unless, of course, they are out of favor with his Inner Circle.
So slam-dunk Tenet had to go. But the man was almost a Democrat
anyway, so what the hell. We can be sure there will be no more
sacrifices ; no more falling on swords ; because to fire even
the most outrageously intellectually corrupt and bizarrely off-the-wall
fundamentalist members of the Bush coterie (yes, Wolfowitz, it's
you), would be tantamount to admission of presidential imperfection.
This cannot be allowed because at all costs the illusion of omniscient
infallibility must be maintained amongst the Bush faithful, most
of whom are misguided patriotic dupes of the Cheney-Rove propaganda
machine who believe what is reported by supposedly objective
and impartial people.
The 9/11 Commission has done
as reasonable a job as it could in the circumstances, because
the five Republican members of the ten-person group reporting
on their president could not be expected to rock the boat of
loyalty. Some of their factual statements are (if coded) condemnatory
to the extent that would have caused honorable men to have resigned
from public life a few moments after the report's publication.
But it cannot be expected that such liars as Cheney could possibly
abide by the tenets (pun intended) of decency and conscience.
Where the Report's authors test our credibility beyond reason
is in their non-committal yet lapdog-trusting description of
that seven minutes Bush dallied indecisively in a Florida schoolroom.
Their report states, with palpable deference, that
"The President was seated
in a classroom when, at 9:05, Andrew Card whispered to him :
"A second plane hit the second tower, America is under attack."
The President told us [the Committee, in front of which he made
a brief private appearance with his vice-president] his instinct
was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction
at a moment of crisis. The press was standing behind the children;
he saw their phones and pagers start to ring. The President felt
he should project strength and calm until he could better understand
what was happening."
Of all the baloney that has
been written about Bush, this adulatory self-serving crap takes
the cake. A novice trial lawyer could have torn him to ribbons
in a heartbeat. But the patriotic deference factor set in. George
Bush told the senators what he says he believes he said, and
nobody on that Commission was going to take issue with him.
Does nobody remember what Bush
said publicly about that period when he failed so utterly to
give leadership to the American people? Here he is, as recorded
by CNN, December 4, 2001 (<www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0112/04/se.04.html>)
:
"Well Jordan [first name
of child] you're not going to believe what state I was in when
I heard about the terrorist attack. I was in Florida. And my
chief of staff, Andy Card, actually I was in a classroom talking
about a reading program that works. And I was sitting outside
the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the
tower, the TV was obviously on, and I use to fly myself, and
I said, "There's one terrible pilot." And I said, "It
must have been a horrible accident." But I was whisked off
there, I didn't have much time to think about it, and I was sitting
in the classroom, and Andy Card, my chief who was sitting over
here walked in and said, "A second plane has hit the tower.
America's under attack."
Let's take this dire garbage
from the top : the current president of the United States was
"sitting outside the classroom, waiting to go in"?
Since when did any President of the United States wait until
things were ready for him? Things are ready, but READY, for the
President of the United States, no matter where he is and what
he is doing. If he is scheduled to arrive at a venue at 09:00
he arrives at that instant and immediately starts the program
that has been decided to the last tiny detail. Forget anything
about Bush waiting outside a classroom until the tiny tots were
ready to receive him.
Then the President of the United
States said : "I saw an airplane hit the tower, the TV was
obviously on."
Let's get this right, once
for all: NOBODY IN THE WHOLE WORLD SAW THE VIDEO OF THE FIRST
PLANE'S ATTACK UNTIL LATER THAT DAY. George W Bush is a fantasist.
He told a downright lie. What he said is demonstrably untrue.
There is no doubt about it. Yet the 9/11 Commission failed to
put the question that would have publicly exposed GW Bush as
a liar. All they needed to ask, with every due deference to his
office, was : "Mr President : You are on record as saying
you "saw an airplane hit the tower' on television just before
9 in the morning of September 11. Then you say you were told
about a second plane hitting the second tower at 9:05. Nobody
else in the world saw on television the first plane hit a tower
at that time. Could you please explain to us why you said that?"
The 9/11 Commission acted rather
like a puppy dog in a forest : they sniffed every tree but wouldn't
raise a leg on the big ones. Their task was to "prepare
a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding
the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks," but they didn't
do that. Take another example of shying away from responsibility
: the failure to comprehensively rebut the frequent allegations
by the vice-president of the United States to the effect that
there was a link between the 9/11 atrocities and Saddam Hussein,
via al Qaeda.
In an interview on 17 June
this year with Gloria Borger on CNBC's "Capital Report'
[<www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/>] Cheney told a lie about
his pronouncement that an al Qaeda 9/11 plotter, Mohammad Atta,
had met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001.
Borger said to Cheney :
"You have said in the
past that [the meeting] was, quote, "pretty well confirmed."
Cheney: No, I never said that.
Borger: OK. Cheney: I never said that. Borger: I think that is
. . . . Cheney: Absolutely not.
There could not be a more flat
denial that Cheney ever said that the supposed meeting was "pretty
well confirmed". The world was told, publicly, on the record,
without a blush, that the vice-president of the United States
did not say what was attributed to him in describing a most important
piece of evidence about Iraq's involvement with al Qaeda and
thus the evil of 9/11.
But on December 9, 2001, on
"Meet the Press' Cheney had stated equally flatly that "It's
been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and
he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence
service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the
[9/11] attack."
Now, if you were amongst those
instructed to "prepare a full and complete account of the
circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks"
on your country, would you not think it important to follow up
the statement of the vice-president of your country that it had
"been pretty well confirmed" that a terrorist deeply
involved in planning the 9/11 terrorist attack had met with a
representative of Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency? This
was not throwaway lightweight nonsense by Rush Limbaugh or Fox
News, after all : it was a major statement by the vice-president
of the United States of America concerning a plotter against
his country. The Commission did (down in the depths of the Report)
record that the claim was nonsense ; but not the fact that the
Vice-president of the United States had made that claim.
It would have been appropriate
if the 9/11 Commission had asked Cheney, publicly and on the
record, for all of us to hear : "Mr Vice-president, you
have stated that it was "pretty well confirmed" that
a meeting between a 9/11 terrorist and a Saddam Hussein intelligence
operative took place in April 2001. You maintain that this was
so. Would you please tell us why you continue to tell the American
public that this meeting took place?"
That is a simple question.
Cheney couldn't have wriggled out of that one, and even he would
not have dared, publicly, to tell them to get lost (or whatever),
as he did in a pathetically vulgar way to one of their Honorable
colleagues. But they didn't ask the right questions, because
Cheney is just another arrogant example of "I decide ; they
report ; you believe, because you have no alternative."
This is the hallmark, the leitmotif, the very ethos of the Bush
administration.
But there are some alternatives
presenting themselves to the American people. John Kerry will
not be the ideal president, but then nobody could be. He appears
pretty flaky on some issues, but this is in the main because
his policy pronouncements are ignored by those who should be
reporting on them objectively, and, as Paul Krugman pointed out
in the New York Times on Friday, the print and electronic media
are taking their cue from the Bush propaganda apparatus. They
refer to the "millionaire' Kerry but never to "millionaire'
Bush, for example, which is pretty smart, because the essence
of propaganda is to implant a nasty feeling in the public about
your opponent while maintaining, quite correctly, that what you
are saying is the exact truth.
The Bush camp ploy is to describe
John Kerry as a millionaire (true), thus implying he cares nothing
for the poor and the struggling middle class, in spite of the
fact that his (largely unreported) program will benefit them
enormously at little cost to any but the tacky and amoral super-rich
such as Cheney. And concurrently George W Bush is referred to
as "President' (true), but without the derisive and contemptuous
"millionaire' description. Therefore, by subliminal definition,
Bush MUST care about ALL Americans in spite of the fact he quite
blatantly favors the rich and cares not a fig for the poor and
nothing, but nothing, for the fiscally-penalized and increasingly
desperate middle class. It's amazing that the press and television
have been suckered by this sort of hocus pocus, but that's the
way it goes. And when even the US Army tries to pull the wool
over the eyes of the American public it's time to seriously examine
the blind acceptance of : "We report ; And you gotta believe
what we report because we're fighting for our commander-in-chief".
Coincidentally, on the same
day as the release of the 9/11 Commission's report (and announcement
of a few other interesting events and revelations round the world
that were deliberately buried on that day ; surprise, surprise),
there came the US military's official explanation of why its
soldiers tortured and murdered some hundred prisoners in Afghanistan
and Iraq.
To digress (or perhaps expand)
for a moment, while we are reflecting on coincidences, did anyone
notice that the final day of the Democrats' shindig in Boston
was also the day on which it was disclosed that Pakistan had
been interrogating an alleged king-pin al Qaeda figure who was
arrested without fanfare five days before? Supposedly he planned
the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which, amazingly,
might give the American public some interest in his appearance
in the headlines. And was it noticed that the final day of the
Democrats' confab was the day, too, on which Secretary Powell
paid a sudden and headline-intensive visit to Iraq? And the day
on which Homeland Security Fiasco Tom Ridge announced he might
retire? It was also the day on which a main domestic New York
Times' headline was "As Democratic Gathering Wraps Up, Bush
Is Raring to Go". Oh well, it's all fair and balanced stuff
; which brings me back to the US Army.
And it brings me back to the
New York Times which did have the decency to state that the Army's
brutality in Afghanistan and Iraq was indeed very naughty in
the course of the "volatile and dangerous mission of rounding
up and detaining 50,000 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan over
the last two and a half years". To be fair on the Times,
it did record that the International Red Cross and the entire
civilized world had identified "ill treatment" in "a
systematic way" by the US military, and that the army's
pariah, Major General Taguba (who seems to be the only honorable
senior officer in the whole damn lot) had stated in his report
about torture that there was "systemic and illegal abuse
of detainees." But it didn't go as far as the Washington
Post did, bless its little cotton socks.
The Post said bluntly that
the Army's report into murder and torture by its soldiers was
"implausible and unacceptable" and that "If the
reputation and integrity of the Army are to be restored, some
other authority will need to do better." But, for so long
as GW Bush is military commander-in-chief, the US Army and the
entire American armed forces cannot possibly have any Authority
who can or will or want to do better.
The Army told lies in its report
about murder and torture, but it was following the example of
the Bush administration and its horrible appointees. The Army
blamed its most junior and stupid and defenseless (and also appallingly
evil) members for the atrocities against its captives. (Of whom,
in Iraq, the Red Cross stated categorically in November last
year there were 70 to 90 per cent innocent civilians, as has
been shown by the Army's precipitate and unconditional release
of thousands of them from Abu Ghraib and other lesser-known hell-holes.)
But by blaming those who cannot answer back, rather than the
generals who were actually responsible for the atrocities, the
Army's Inquiry was simply following the example of the honorable
Senators and all the other Good and Great Members of the western
world's Establishment who will never, like that dog sniffing
in the forest, lift a leg on the biggest trees.
The US Army apportioned blame
and lacked the guts to identify ultimate responsibility. Like
the 9/11 Commission, and all the other inquiries into official
incompetence, lying, deceit, dishonor and systemic malevolence,
it was all slam, and no dunk.
Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs.
He can be reached through his website www.briancloughley.com
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