From the UK, historian Michael Carmichael talks about the Orwellian state that we've become here over the last 5-6 years, and how important the acts of whistleblowing from folks like Daniel Elsberg, Colleen Rowley, and Sibel Edmonds have been to help us keep what's left of our democracy from sucumbing to the neocon's obsession with totalitarian rule.
http://baltimorechronicle.com/2006/092706CARMICHAEL.shtmlCommentary from Abroad
Ignorance is Strength
by MICHAEL CARMICHAEL
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.
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was compiled in April, but its release was suppressed when the White House learned of its contents. Worse, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Madame Secretary Condoleezza Rice continued to lie about the results of their failed policy. Now that the NIE report, titled “Trends in Global Terrorism,” has been leaked, we know that they have been lying, and they have been lying the big, big lie.
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.
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