Elliot D. Cohen: How Do You Spell “DICTATOR”?
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 3:44pm. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/715The majority of Americans are clearly against escalating the war in Iraq; Bush was advised against it by the military generals; the Democrats in the Democratically-controlled Congress are unified against it, and now even Republicans have begun to express their opposition; the troops have already been spent and their morale is low. But despite all these indisputable facts, Bush has gone ahead with his plan to deploy more than twenty-one thousand additional troops to Iraq anyway. The most shocking fact of all, however, is not Bush's arrogant disregard for the will of the American people. It is rather that it could well have been predicted in light of the facts surrounding his administration. These facts paint a dismal, coherent picture of a burgeoning dictatorship in America. Unfortunately, this story (but for a piecemeal, fragmented, censored version) never saw the light of day in the mainstream media.
This alarming story is of a "president" who has made "the facts fit the policy" in cajoling and deceiving his nation into going to war in the first place; who has abused the constitutional authority of Congress by getting it to transfer its war-declaring power to him under false pretenses (the false promise that war would be a last resort while all along the war plans were on his desk); who has dishonored the Fourth Amendment by systematically engaging without a court warrant in wire tapping of American citizens' e-mail and phone messages while at the same time publicly denying that any such warrant-less wiretapping was being done; who has acquired the private phone records of every American citizen from the major telecom companies (which corporations themselves having been in the pocket of the Bush administration); who has successfully backed a move by the FCC to foreclose common carriage over the Internet pipes, portending the potential, future downfall of the free Internet (see Web of Deceit); who has invaded personal and confidential banking records; who has cancelled the right of habeas corpus for "unlawful enemy combatants" while defining the latter as virtually anyone whom he deems "hostile" to the interests of the United States; who keeps an "Enemies List" that includes journalists who oppose his policies; who has threatened journalists who publish leaked information with prosecution for treason; whose high officials (apparently with his permission) have outted covert CIA operative Valerie Plame in order to get even with her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for exposing falsified intelligence that Saddam had attempted to acquire uranium "yellowcake" from Niger in order to build nuclear weapons; who has sanctioned infiltrating peaceful, citizen, anti-war groups and blocking freedom of speech of anti-war demonstrators; who has sanctioned martial law and the doing away with Posse Comitatus (legal prohibition against use of military for domestic law enforcement) in order to deal with natural disasters; who has paid journalists like Armstrong Williams to tout the administration's "no child left behind" policy, and who has hired PR companies to seamlessly inject phony news about the successes of the war effort, among other hot button topics, into network affiliate news; who has disregarded the Geneva Conventions, setting himself up instead as the arbiter of the meaning of torture; who has issued signing statements exempting himself from legislation forbidding cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners; who has knowingly permitted (and may well have ordered) the abuses at Abu Ghraib; who was installed (not elected) by the Supreme Court in 2000, and, by all indications of exit polling, was never truly elected to office in 2004. This is a man who, on at least three different occasions, had announced that dictatorship would be easier than democracy as long as HE was the dictator; who along with his cronies, such as Tom DeLay, have struck out at "activist" judges for not toeing the administration line, prompting former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to warn about the impending danger of lapsing into dictatorship.
The larger picture into which all this fits becomes clearer when viewed in the context of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). (See Bush's Global Mission.) This is a group of neoconservatives, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who anticipated 9-11 by claiming in 2000 that it would take a "catalytic" and "catastrophic" event to transition the United States into its role as the preeminent world power; and who, in the same year, defined the 'axis of evil," and a couple years earlier sponsored legislation to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This is a group, backed by the oil and weapons industries, whose aim has been to use military force to overthrow any "regime" that opposes American corporate interests (in particular, Iran and Iraq), and to send in its behemoth corporate partners like Halliburton to take control of their natural resources (oil). Put bluntly, the goal of Bush and company is to rule the world. This spells "Dictatorship"--with a capital "D." Yet the average American knows little or nothing about PNAC. The mainstream media never covered the story!
True, the corporate media have recently begun to say more than they have in the past six years, probably because the public tide has turned against the Bush administration and these companies cannot afford to disenfranchise the majority of Americans who are tired of listening to White House white washings. While Fox continues to trot with the Bush administration; while O'Reilly continues to propagate the myth of a democratic White House--furiously fiddling while Rome burns--some of the unprincipled media chameleons such as MSNBC's Chris Matthews have only recently begun to speak out against Bush's war effort. Only one Network anchor, namely MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann, has been a trail blazer.
The mainstream, corporate media need collectively to set the record straight if only for the sake of their own survival. (Behemoth corporations like GE and Time Warner have deep pockets but no inherent moral conscience.) Under their watch, a dictator has risen to power. These news organizations have betrayed their constitutional charge as "Fourth Estate" during a time when checks and balances were so direly needed. They now need to come clean with the American people. They need to make abundantly clear that symbolic, toothless gestures of congressional dissent are not sufficient measures to counter the unconscionable efforts of a dictator to spend hundreds of thousands of lives--American and Iraqi alike--to build a global empire designed to fill the pockets of oil barons (Bush/Cheney and company) with the spoils of war.
Bush wants to establish a permanent American presence in Iraq. This is what the PNAC plan calls for, and the next probable target is Iran. Already an American attack has in fact been launched on the Iranian Embassy in Iraq. And Secretary of Defense Gates, following the lead from Bush, is now calling for an increase of at least ninety-two thousand more American troops in Iraq over the next five years. There is therefore nothing "temporary" about this "surge." It is a war without any foreseeable end, and it will predictably spread beyond Iraq unless Congress does its job, and does it now.
The Vietnam War ended during the Nixon administration when Congress took measures to cut off appropriations. But politics might well have overtaken prudence had it not been for a mainstream media vigilant in its coverage of widespread anti-war protests along with vivid footage of the body bags of young Americans struck down in the jungles of South East Asia. Like Bush, Nixon warned against the "enemy" attacking our homeland unless it was defeated on its home turf. Like Bush, Nixon resolved to "surge" rather than to back down. And like Bush, Nixon believed he was above the law. But Nixon resigned in disgrace rather than face being thrown out. The Democratic Congress has the ability to affect a similar end to the present dictatorial reign, but already it has pledged not to impeach, and what it now proposes to do is express toothless disapproval like children playing make-believe.
The media needs to fulfill its sacred trust by exposing the inept docility of Congress by once and for all giving a coherent and honest account of all of the facts surrounding this presidency. It needs to tell the American people the truth, in no uncertain terms, about what the stakes are in permitting a dictator to continue to thrive. Armed with the facts, Americans then need to pressure their representatives in Congress to do their jobs as though the survival of the free world depends on it, because it most assuredly does. The days are numbered, and the prospects grow dimmer the more emboldened this dictator gets.
Elliot D. Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. He is the 2007 first-place recipient of the Project Censored Award for his Buzzflash article, Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story. His forthcoming book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are Turning America into a Dictatorship (Prometheus Books, April 2007).
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