Post from a year ago, has anything changed?

[Fire Walk With Me]

Twenty Things We Now Know Four Years After 9/11

August 30, 2005
By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

In a few days, it will be four years since the awful
events symbolized by the date "9/11." Time for our
annual list of what we've learned from that tragedy
and what followed from it.

Much new information has been revealed this year, with
corroborating documents verifying aspects of the story
we only surmised previously. So without further ado,
below are the twenty things we now know four years
after 9/11, based mainly on documented evidence found
in the Bush-friendly mainstream media.

A general assessment before we begin the numbered
list: there now is a widely-accepted foreign and
domestic judgment that the Bush Administration is
composed of bumbling, dangerous, close-minded
ideologues. You can see it in the polls (as I write
this, Bush's approval ratings are at his all-time low,
at or below 40%) and, particularly, in how many
conservative/traditional Republicans and former
military officers are expressing remorse at having
supported this guy in the 2004 election.

Bush these days still has his true-believer base of
about 30%, but he's extremely vulnerable politically,
which is why Rove and his minions are so desperate
right now and are ratcheting up the rhetoric and
smear-tactics against their political enemies. And the
desperation helps us understand why Bush keeps
returning to 9/11, the one talisman that he thinks
still may work for him, that singular moment in his
history when many Americans thought he looked good.

1. THE 9/11 ATTACK & COVERUP

We know that 9/11, regardless of the degree of
complicity you believe the Bush Administration was
guilty of, was seized on by Bush & Co. as the event
that would be used to justify all that would follow
domestically and in foreign/military affairs. The
evidence indicates that, at the least, the highest
circles in the White House knew a spectacular attack
was in the works in the days and weeks preceding 9/11
- warnings were coming into the White House from a
host of foreign leaders and intelligence agencies -
but chose to do nothing, presumably to make use of
those events in the service of their hidden agenda.

Similarly, nothing was done as a result of the
government's own intelligence warnings. The August 6,
2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, entitled "Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S.," talked about al-Qaida
wanting to hit the nation's capital, preparations for
airline hijackings, casing of buildings in New York,
and terrorists in the U.S. with explosives. Bush went
to ground in Texas, the FBI told Ashcroft to stop
flying commercial jets. The attacks finally came about
a month later, and the Bush forces were ready to make
their moves.

The key neo-con leaders in charge of U.S.
foreign/military policy (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Bolton, Perle, Khalizad, et al.) were founders of, and
affiliated with, The Project for The New American
Century; in one of their key reports, they noted that
the far-right should expect their revolution to take a
long time, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing
event - like a new Pearl Harbor." Enter 9/11. (See "A
PNAC primer" )

The neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous
patriotic support during wartime, but when the war
ends, those leaders lose their compelling luster, as
was the case with Bush #1. Ergo, Bush #2 would become
a PERMANENT wartime president, and those who opposed
him could then be tarred forever with the
"unpatriotic" brush, and their political opposition
marginalized. And it worked: the Democrats cowered and
gave Bush virtually everything he wanted, up until
relatively recently, when occasionally they remember
they have spines in their bodies and stand up and
fight as an opposition party should.

2. OIL & THE POLITICS OF PNAC

We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the
entire country along with him when he launched an
attack on Al Qaida and its Taliban-government
supporters in Afghanistan. But there's no oil in that
destitute country - and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not
much worth bombing - and thus no lessons could be
drawn by Middle East leaders from the U.S. attack.
But, as Cheney's secret energy panel was aware, there
was another country in the region that did have oil,
and lots of it, and could be taken easily by U.S.
forces; thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other
autocratic leaders in the Middle East: if you do not
do our bidding, prepare to accept a massive dose of
"shock & awe": You will be overthrown, replaced by
democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S.


The neo-cons - most from PNAC and similar
organizations, such as the American Enterprise
Institute - had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein
in 1998, but he demurred, seeing a mostly contained
dictator there, whereas Osama bin Laden, and those
terrorists like him, actually were successfully
attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad.

But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply
toppling a brutal dictator. Among their other
recommendations: "pre-emptively" attacking countries
devoid of imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating
agreed-upon treaties when they conflict with U.S.
goals, making sure no other nation (or organization,
such as the United Nations) can ever achieve
power-parity with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly
governments to do America's will, using tactical
nuclear weapons, and so on. All of these extreme PNAC
suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined
in 2002 as official U.S. policy in the National
Security Strategy of the United States of America.

3. SEXING UP THE INTEL

We know that given the extreme nature of the neo-con
agenda, the Bush Administration had its work cut out
for them in fomenting support for an invasion and
occupation of Iraq. Therefore, among the first move by
Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect
Saddam to the terror attacks. The various intelligence
agencies reported to Rumsfeld that there was no Iraq
connection to 9/11, that it was an al-Qaida operation,
but that was merely a bothersome impediment. Since the
CIA and the other intelligence agencies would not, or
could not, supply the intelligence needed to justify a
war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own rump intelligence
agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with
political appointees of the PNAC persuasion, and soon
was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel straight to
Cheney and others in the White House. And Cheney, Rice
and others in the White House Iraq Group started the
non-existent melding of Saddam Hussein with the events
of 9/11.

Based on this sexed-up and phony intelligence, Cheney,
Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and the others began warning
about mushroom clouds over the U.S., drone planes
dropping biological agents over the East Coast, huge
stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq, etc. Secretary
of State Colin Powell, the most believable of the
bunch, was dispatched to the United Nations to make
the case, which he did, reluctantly, by presenting an
embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and concocted
facts. The world didn't buy it, and the opposition to
the U.S. war plan was palpable and huge: 10 million
citizens throughout the world hit the streets to
protest, former allies publicly criticized Bush. Only
Tony Blair in England eagerly hitched his wagon to the
Bush war-plan with large numbers of troops dispatched
- as it turned out, over the legal, moral and
political objections of many of his closest aides and
advisers.

4. THE DOWNING STREET REVELATIONS

We know that those advisers warned Blair that he was
about to involve the U.K. in an illegal, immoral and
probably unwinnable war - which would put U.K. and
U.S. troops in great danger from potential insurgent
forces. How do we know about these inner workings of
the Blair government? Because a few months ago,
someone from inside that body leaked the top-secret
minutes from those war-cabinet meetings, the so-called
Downing Street Memos.

We also learned from those minutes that Bush and Blair
agreed to make war on Iraq as early as the Spring of
2002 - the intelligence, they decided, would be "fixed
around the policy" to go to war - despite their
telling their legislative bodies and their citizens
that no decisions had been made. In fact, the Bush
Administration had decided to go to war a year before
the invasion. "Fuck Saddam," Bush told three U.S.
Senators in March of 2002. "We're taking him out."

5. BUSH RACES TO WAR

We know that many of Blair's most senior advisors
thought the WMD argument rested on shaky ground, and
that the legality of the war was in question without
specific authorization from the United Nations
Security Council. But the Bush Administration rushed
to war anyway - in haste because the U.N. inspectors
on the ground in Iraq were not finding any WMD
stockpiles - without proper planning and with no
workable plan to secure the peace and reconstruct the
country after the major fighting.

6. THE BIG LIE TECHNIQUE ON WMD

We know (thanks to the Downing Street Memos) that both
the U.S. and U.K. were well aware that Iraq was a
military paper tiger, with no significant WMD
stockpiles or link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks.
Nevertheless, the major thrust of Bush & Co.'s
justification for going to war was based on these
non-existent weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie
Technique - repeating the same falsehoods over and
over and over - drummed those lies into our heads day
after day, month after month, with little if any
skeptical analysis by the corporate mainstream media,
which marched mostly in lockstep with Bush policy and
thinking. Wolfowitz admitted later that they chose WMD
as the primary reason for making war because they
couldn't agree on anything else the citizenry would
accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear
weapons, mushroom clouds, toxins delivered by drone
airplanes and the like would work like a charm. And so
they did, convincing the American people and Congress
that an attack was justified. It wasn't.

7. PUSHING IRAQ TOWARDS IRAN

We know that the real reasons for invading Iraq had
precious little to do with WMD, Islamic extremism and
terrorists coming from inside that country, installing
democracy, and the like; there were no WMD to speak
of, and Saddam, an especially vicious dictator, did
not tolerate religious or political zealotry of any
stripe. No, the reasons had more to do with American
geopolitical goals in the region involving oil,
control, support for its ally Israel, hardened
military bases and keeping Iran from having free rein
in the region.

As it turned out, by invading and occupying Iraq, it
pushed that country and Iran into a far closer
religious and political alliance than would have been
the case if Saddam had been permitted to remain in
power. Bush may have sacrificed thousands of American
dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, and more
than 100,000 Iraqis as "collateral damage" - with the
result being that Bush & Co. quietly is willing to
accept an Islamist government more attuned to Teheran
than to Washington, one with precious little regard
for human rights, especially involving women. That is
one royal FUBAR.

8. IRAQ AS A DISASTER ZONE

We know that Bush's war been a thorough disaster -
built on a foundation of lies, and incompetently
managed from the start. As a result, the Occupation
has provided a magnet for jihadists from other
countries, billions have been wasted or lost in the
corrupt system of organized corporate looting that
ostensibly is designed to speed up Iraq's
"reconstruction," etc. Indeed, so much has Bush's war
been botched that the "realists" in the Administration
know they must get out as quickly as possible if they
are to have any hope of exercising their considerable
muscle elsewhere in the Middle East.

9. WHERE WILL THE BODIES COME FROM?

We know that Bush's Middle East agenda also is
suffering because the U.S. military is spread way thin
over Afghanistan and Iraq, the desertion rates are
high, soldiers are not re-upping at the usual clip,
recruitment isn't working and illegal scams are taken
to lure youngsters into signing up - in short, there
are no military forces to spare on the ground. Either
a military draft will be instituted or all future
attacks will have to come from air power or from
missiles, which will merely deliver a message, making
the bombed populations even angrier at America, and
with no guarantee of success in forging U.S.-friendly
"democratic" governments in Iran, Syria, et al. In
short, we are witnessing the limits of imperial power
in the modern world.

10. HIDING THE TRUTH FROM THE PUBLIC

We know that Bush & Co. made sure that there would be
no full-scale, independent investigations of their
role in using and abusing the intelligence that led to
war on Iraq.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Republican
Pat Roberts, held hearings on the failures lower down
the chain, namely at the CIA and FBI level, and
promised there would be followup hearings on any White
House manipulation of intelligence. But, election
over, Roberts says no purpose would be served to begin
such an investigation.

Likewise, the 9/11 Commission did not delve deeply
into how the Bush Administration misused its pre-9/11
knowledge. Bush sent an October 5, 2001 memo to
Rumsfeld, Powell, O'Neill, Ashcroft, and the heads of
the CIA and the FBI restricting their talking to
Congress about 9/11 and other "national-security"
matters; the only Democrats who could receive these
"sensitive" briefings - meaning they were forbidden to
make them public - were the Senate and House Minority
Leaders, and the ranking members of the Intelligence
Committees. Nobody else was to be in the loop.

In short, this secretive administration made sure that
everything was done to head off at the pass any
investigations whatsoever. Cheney and Bush told the
minority and majority leaders in Congress that there
should be no 9/11 hearings, for "national security"
reasons. Bush & Co. fought tooth and nail against an
independent 9/11 Commission, and against the families
who pushed for it.

11. THE ROAD TO DICTATORSHIP

We know that Bush has no great love of legitimate
democratic processes, certainly not inside the United
States. He much prefers to rule as an oligarch, but to
do that, he had to invent legal justifications that
granted him the requisite power. So he had his
longtime lawyer-toady, Alberto Gonzales, devise a
legal philosophy that permits Bush to do pretty much
what he wants - ignore laws on the books, disappear
U.S. citizens into military prisons, authorize
torture, etc. - whenever Bush says he's acting as
"commander-in-chief" during "wartime."

And, since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on
terrorism," from which there is no end, Bush is home
free. There always will be terrorists trying to do
anti-U.S. damage somewhere around the globe, or inside
America, and the "commander-in-chief" will need to
respond. Ergo, goes this logic, Bush is above the law,
untouchable, in perpetuity. (Bush & Co. also made sure
that U.S. officials and military troops would not be
subject to indictment by any international court or
war-crimes tribunal.)

Neither Gonzales, nor Bush, has disavowed this legal
philosophy of a dictator-like President being beyond
the reach of the law. No doubt, the issue ultimately
will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Bush
has nominated Judge John Roberts, who would be the key
swing vote. Roberts, as author Chris Floyd has noted,
recently upheld Bush's sovereign right to dispose of
"enemy combatants" any way he pleases. In a chilling
decision, the appeals panel, of which Roberts was a
member, ruled that the commander-in-chief's
arbitrarily-designated "enemies" are non-persons, with
no legal rights. Bush now feels free to subject anyone
he likes to the "military tribunal" system he has
concocted.

The fact that Roberts did not recuse himself from
ruling on this issue while he was in the process of
being interviewed for the Supreme Court appointment by
the employer being sued in the case, would seem to be
an open-and-shut case of conflict-of-interest. If the
Democrats have any balls, this egregious ethical lapse
should serve as an "extraordinary" reason for a
filibuster of his nomination.

12. TORTURE AS OFFICIAL STATE POLICY

We know that Gonzales, then Bush's White House
Counsel, and Pentagon lawyers beholden to Rumsfeld,
devised legal rationales that make torture of suspects
official state policy. These Bush-loyalist lawyers
also greatly widened the definition of what is
acceptable interrogation practice - basically anything
this side of death or terminally abusing internal
organs. They also authorized the sending of key
suspects to countries specializing in extreme torture.
After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld professed shock -
shock! - that those under their command would wind up
torturing, abusing and humiliating prisoners in U.S.
care. But the Administration made sure to stop all
inquiries into higher-up responsibility for the
endemic torture. The buck never stops on Bush's desk -
if something goes wrong (and he never will admit to
mistakes), it's always someone else's fault.

13. MAKING THE BILL OF RIGHTS "QUAINT"

We know that the Bush Administration has been able to
obtain whatever legislation it needs in its
self-proclaimed "war on terror" by utilizing, and
hyping, the understandable fright of the American
people. The so-called Patriot Act - composed of many
honorable initiatives, and many clearly
unconstitutional provisions, cobbled together from
those submitted over the years by GOP hardliners and
rejected as too extreme by Congress - was presented
almost immediately to a House and Senate frightened by
the 9/11 attacks and by the anthrax introduced into
their chambers by someone still not discovered. Ridge
and Ashcroft emerged periodically to manipulate the
public's fright by announcing another "terror" threat,
based on "credible" but unverified evidence; Ridge,
who has since resigned, recently admitted that there
were no good reasons for many of those supposed
"alerts." Meanwhile, Congress (shame on you,
Democrats!) recently made most of the Patriot Act laws
permanent! Unless those can be repealed, that vote
will be a nail into the coffin housing the remains of
the Bill of Rights.

14. THE OUTING OF COVERT AGENTS

The Bush Administration, for its own crass political
reasons, compromised American national security by
outing two key intelligence operatives - one, CIA
agent Valerie Plame, who had important contacts in the
shadowy world of weapons of mass destruction (outed by
two "senior Administration officials," apparently in
retaliation for her husband's political comments);
revealing the identity of a CIA agent can be a felony.
The other, apparently to show off how successful they
were in their anti-terrorism hunt, was a high-ranking
mole close to bin Laden's inner circle, who could have
kept the U.S. informed as to ongoing and future plans
of al-Qaida. That's our war-on-terrorism government at
work.

It's now clear who at least two of the "senior
administration officials" were who leaked Plame's
identity: Karl Rove, Bush's guru, now deputy chief of
staff, and I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.
Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is expected to
unseal indictments in this case sometime this fall
that either could focus narrowly on perjury involving
Plame's outing, or could be expanded to the broader
issue of the manipulative lies emanating from the
machinations of the White House Iraq Group
(Cheney/Libby, Rove, Card, Rice, Hadley, Hughes,
Matalin, et al.) in taking this nation to war. It is
possible that Bush and Cheney and Bolton, among
others, could be charged or listed an unindicted
co-conspirators.

15. PROTECTING THE VOTE

We know that America's voting-machine system - and
more importantly, vote-counting system - is
corruptible and likely has been corrupted.
Sophisticated statistical analysis along with
wide-scale exit-polling, suggests strongly that the
2004 election results were fiddled with by the private
companies that tally the votes. These companies are
owned by far-right Republican supporters. But the same
objection would be lodged if Democrats owned the
companies. There are no good reasons to "outsource"
vote-counting to private corporations - who refuse to
permit inspection of their proprietary software, and
whose technicians have behaved suspiciously on
election nights in 2000 in Florida, in 2002 in
Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004. This doesn't
even mention the GOP dirty-tricks department whose
function has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the
number of potential Democrat voters, especially
minority voters. Note: Unless the vote-counting system
can be changed soon - and the vote-tallying scandal
will not be adequately dealt with by voter-verified
receipts - the integrity of our elections will be
suspect into the far future.

16. NO ECONOMIC PLAN

We know that the Bush Administration paid off its
backers (and itself) by giving humongous tax breaks,
for 10 years out, to the already wealthy and to large
corporations. In addition, corporate tax-evasion was
made easier vis offshore listings. All this was done
at a time when the U.S. economy was in recessionary
doldrums and when the treasury deficit from those
tax-breaks was growing even larger from Iraq war
costs. So far as we know, the Bush Administration has
no plans for how to retire that debt and no real plan
(other than the discredited "trickle-down" theory) for
restarting the economy and creating well-paying jobs
for skilled workers, so many of whom have had their
positions outsourced to foreign lands.

17. STARVING THE GOVERNMENT

We know that the Hard-Right conservatives who control
Bush policy don't really care what kind of debt and
deficits their policies cause; in some ways, the more
the better. They want to decimate and starve popular
social programs from the New Deal/Great Society eras,
including, most visibly, Head Start, Social Security,
Medicare (and real drug coverage for seniors), student
loans, welfare assistance, public education, etc.
(Especially egregious is the education scam known as
"No Child Left Behind.")

Since these programs are so well-approved by the
public, the destruction will be carried out stealthily
with the magic words of "privatization,"
"deregulation," "choice" and so on, and by going to
the public and saying that they'd love to keep the
programs intact but they have no alternative but to
cut them, given the deficit, weak economy and
"anti-terrorist" wars abroad. Bush's whirlwind tour
trying to sell his Social Security "reform" plan has
backfired badly, but he's still pushing a good many of
those ideas, just in case he can slip it in somewhere,
maybe by tying it somehow to Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

18. THE ENVIRONMENTAL GIVEAWAY

We know that Bush environmental policy - dealing with
air and water pollution, mineral extraction, national
parks, and so on - is an unmitigated disaster, more or
less giving free rein to corporations whose bottom
line does better when they don't have to pay attention
to the public interest.

19. THE GREED OF POLITICAL POWER

We know from "insider" memoirs and reports by former
Bush Administration officials - Joseph DeIulio, Paul
O'Neill, Richard Clarke, et al. - that the public
interest plays little role in the formulation of
policy inside the Bush Administration. The motivating
factors are mainly greed and control and remaining in
political power. Further, they say, there is little or
no curiosity to think outside the political box, or
even to hear other opinions.

20. FAITH- OR REALITY-BASED PROGRAMS

We know that this attitude ("my mind is made up, don't
bother me with the facts") shows up most openly in how
science is disregarded by the Bush Administration
(good example: global warming) in favor of faith-based
thinking. Some of this non-curiosity about reality may
be based in fundamentalist religious, even
apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of Bush's bashing of
science is designed as payback to his fundamentalist
base, but the scary part is that a good share of the
time he actually believes what he's saying, about
evolution vs. intelligent-design, stem-cell research,
abstinence education, censoring the rewriting of
government scientific reports that differ from the
Bush party line, cutbacks in research & development
grants for the National Science Foundation, etc., ad
nauseum. This closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a
deeper level, why things aren't working out in Iraq.

AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30s?

Finally (although we could continue forever detailing
the crimes and misdemeanors of this corrupt,
incompetent Administration), we know that more and
more, the permanent-war policy abroad and police-state
tactics at home (the shredding of Constitutional
rights designed to protect citizens from a potential
repressive government) are taking us into a kind of
American fascism domestically and an imperial foreign
policy overseas. All aspects of the American polity
are infected with the militarist know-nothingism
emanating from the top, with governmental and
vigilante-type crackdowns on protesters, dissent, free
speech, freedom of assembly, etc. happening regularly
on both the local and federal levels. More and more,
America is resembling Germany in the early 1930s,
group pitted against group while the central
government amasses more and more power and control of
its put-upon citizens.

Bush has had a rough first year of his second term.
It's as if the public blinders are starting to come
off, and the true nature of this man and his regime
are finally starting to hit home and he is seen for
what he is: an insecure, arrogant, dangerous,
dry-drunk bully who is endangering U.S. national
interests abroad with his reckless war in Iraq, his
wrecking of the U.S. economy at home, and with his
over-reaching in all areas.

If a Democratic president and vice president had
behaved similarly to Bush and Cheney, they'd have been
in the impeachment dock in a minute. If the Plame-Iraq
indictments come down as expected, a momentum for
impeachment of Bush and Cheney will be generated.

Our job now is to keep that political momentum
building to get rid of these guys, while we try to
organize a pro-democracy, anti-imperialist movement
for change in this country that is inclusive,
non-dogmatic, and capable of winning elections. That
may or may not involve the Democratic Party.


Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international
relations, has taught at various universities, worked
as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle,
and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers. For
comments, write [e-mail].

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[Fire Walk With Me]

1. If anything, read the last three paragraphs.