Posted May 25, 2002

Foreign Aid

It is painful to see the [Future of] Freedom Foundation's articles featured on Antiwar.com. I urge you to consider avoiding their work in the future. I personally think opposition to foreign aid is misguided, since the best way to obtain a more peaceful world is to promote the success of our neighbors; still, I can understand that there are reasons to improve it or curtail it.

In today's piece ["America’s Pro-Terrorism Foreign Aid Program" by James Bovard] as in others I have read from the Freedom Foundation, however, their case is stated in overblown rhetoric, with little or no substantive evidence. Foreign aid helps "terrorists." Uzbekistan has a poor civil rights record. Hey, have these guys been to an Indian reservation lately? And would not one of the aims of foreign aid be to promote human rights? Will that get accomplished by only giving to rich countries with impeccable civil rights records? Does anyone know any of those? Britain seems to arrest IRA suspects and torture them. France seems to burn down synagogues, Germany immigrant apartment houses.

But even beyond that, how do the authors of this piece justify stating that, if the U.S. should give any aid to a country with a poor civil rights record, the foreign aid is helping support terrorism?

This is bloviating if ever there was any.

~ Michael Meo

Buddy System

The revelation of Washington's foreknowledge of the events of 9/11 have once again led to another investigative avenue to be revisited. I continue to find it rather intriguing that, after all the hype and after all the research into stock market transactions which had been made immediately prior to the attack, no one has been found to have profited? Oh, please! What is our government hiding here; a bunch of American rather than Arab names? Who are the traitors who used this imminent calamity to further feather their own already-comfy nests? I refuse to believe the investigation came up negative but rather find it totally credible that this is another cover-up as well; the buddy system working in its full glory.

~ CJW, Florida

Professional Politician-ism

The core of today's evils is "professional politician-ism" supported and corrupted by professional lobbyism. Term limits seem to be the only answer aimed at the heart of the beast.

If we will have "1 man - 1 term" situation, the corruption will lose its foundation. The country will be represented by normal people, as the Founding Fathers intended. They may pass less laws, but they will be loyal to the country and its taxpayers, not to their lobbyist handlers.

The political class was not able to withstand the corruption and must go away.

The Second American Revolution will be, once again -- against "taxation without representation".

~ Alex Chaihorsky, Reno, Nevada

Nasty Theories

It's too bad Earl Warren is dead; he'd do a swell job putting all those nasty "unwarranted conspiracy theories to rest." But we've still got Arlen Specter. If he can't work out some convoluted hypothesis to tie up all those loose ends, nobody can.

~ Kevin C.

Glimpse

Doesn't it seem rather odd that a year after that Chandra Levy's park had been massively searched should just now have her clothes and bones strewn throughout a large swath? One would think that search dogs would have been able to find those along time ago.

I cannot help but wonder if the timing of this discovery is more than a coincidence, with the rising tide of skepticism and impending scandal about POTUS foreknowledge of 911. One could argue that the extra warnings of inevitable terror attacks and the discovery of Chandra are just the latest distractions for the ADD-burdened American who otherwise might just happen to notice that something is seriously amiss.

...We cannot help but be viscerally aware that there are numerous large-scale operations of commercial and political intrigue (Enron, Arthur Anderson, Unocal, Carlyle, BioPort, Chandra, McVeigh, Israeli art students, India/Pakistan); not only are the scandals and conflicts illuminating, but the sequencing and rhythm of the revelations seems to be significant in their own right.

It almost feels as if the announcement process itself of every scandal's latest details has developed its own choreography, ... as if a larger series of battles is being waged with regard to the nature and timing of the disclosures.

I cannot say I yet have a specific hypothesis of what the contending sides stand for, or which forces are allied with whom. Nonetheless, I still have a sense that a PR war is being waged and more and more of the stops are being removed each day.

There may really be a serious crisis among powerful factions within the Empire. We tend to view the constant encroachments against liberty advanced by the powerful as a monolithic movement. But it seems like there may be some value in understanding what are the bases for the schisms among the powerful which is letting us get more of a glimpse behind the wizards' curtain.

~ Joel B.

Liberty

...The US may have liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban, but so far the "liberty" has meant little more than a return to banditry, with tribal warlords each ruling their own little fiefdoms as they please, and to hell with the rest of the tribes and country -- the situation that brought the Taliban to power in the first place.

Yet you'll hear this war described as a great victory for the US, and the casualties and the consequences will mainly be ignored -- they were other people's children in a faraway country with a different culture and customs.

So Americans as a whole will wave their flags and say "God bless America," as their leaders look for the next small Third World nation to wage war on. And the Lord will fill America's cup of iniquity a little fuller, and her judgments will draw a little closer. God is not mocked. Whatever a person or a nation sows, that will they receive at the hands of a righteous! The "war on terrorism" has been very beneficial for the US military, enabling them to go places and do things they've never done before, not to mention producing weapons they've never been able to afford before. I'm not minimizing the fact that the events of September 11 were a terrible tragedy -- just bringing out the fact that they're also being manipulated and used by the American government and military to achieve their own ends.

That's one reason the "war on terrorism" will continue -- possibly "for decades" according to Bush and the Pentagon -- because it provides an excuse for America to do things it always wanted to do and never had a good reason to do before! World awash in stolen nuclear material?

~ Ted R., California

First Rule of Journalism

According to Justin Raimondo ("America Awakes From its Post-9/11 Sleep," May 20, 2002) he "still can confidently state that, in spite of the new revelations, Cynthia McKinney's leftoid conspiracy theory -- Bush knew, and let 9/11 happen in order to enrich his friends in the Carlyle Group (and, incidentally, start a world war) -- is pure hokum." And how can he be so confident? Well, judging from the following statements -- "Bush and his subordinates are telling the truth -- of course they didn't know when and where the attack would come. The question is: who was in a position to know? Certainly not the incompetents in Washington" -- it would appear that it is simply an article of faith for him. The "incompetents" in the White House were competent enough to reveal the identities of the supposed hijackers within 24 hours of the attack, but evidently hadn't a clue when it came to knowing what the alleged perpetrators were up to, despite numerous warnings that Raimondo himself cites earlier in the article.

Is Raimondo not familiar with the "strategy of tension" developed by Prince Borghessi, Licio Gelli and the P-2 lodge, that used terrorism, blamed on the "left," to destabilize the government of Italy in the 70s and 80s? Has he not read the postings in Antiwar.com on the Operation Northwoods scenario of the early 60s? Does he need a refresher course on the "surprise" attack on Pearl Harbor?

Okay, on to essentially uncontroversial facts. It has been clearly established, as Emperor's Clothes pointed out, that Bush knew of the first attack before he left his hotel room on Sept. 11. Vice President Cheney disclosed a few days after the attack that by 8:25 that morning, the FAA had an open line to the Secret Service, and that the air corridor from Cleveland to Washington, DC had been closed. The Secret Service testified to Congress a few years ago that their biggest fear in protecting the President was the possibility that a terrorist would hijack a plane from a nearby international airport and fly it into a building where the President was known to be.

Given all this, does the President change his plans, which were published in national newspapers well in advance? No. Does the Secret Service have the FAA close Sarasota International Airport, a few miles from the school where he was going to be? No. Does the Florida Air National Guard, or the local military, scramble jets in case of an incident? Again, no.

Does someone in a position of power hate the President enough to deliberately put him in harm's way, and convince him that the "manly" thing to do is to go on with his plans as though nothing had happened? It would seem unlikely. Does he know perfectly well that he's in no danger whatsoever, and therefore need take no precautions for his personal safety? It would seem that one or the other of these last two questions must be answered in the affirmative, or else you have to posit an administration so somnolent that it is only by the most extraordinary luck that the President doesn't get accidentally shot in a drive-by.

Let's turn to what's simultaneously going down in Washington, keeping in mind that even before the first tower was struck, the authorities apparently knew that four planes had been hijacked simultaneously, an act without precedence. With one of the hijacked planes flying down a closed air corridor toward Washington, DC, and two symbols of capitalism and the imperial West already struck; with previous testimony that high-level officials feared the Pentagon was a likely target for terrorists; and with Andrews Air Force Base, whose official duties include the protection of the nation's capital, less than a dozen miles away, did Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Myers, or even a subordinate, send a jet aloft to investigate and intercept the hijacked plane?

No, Cheney was busy meeting with Bush Senior in the White House bunker, and, although an ex-secretary of defense, he apparently did not know that the military exists to protect the population in situations such as that of 9-11. Rumsfeld "had some phone calls to make," according to reports, and Myers, who evidently has neither a beeper nor a personal secretary -- you know how those cutbacks in the Pentagon budget have squeezed these little perks -- was meeting with a member of Congress behind closed doors to discuss … terrorism.

Pardon my skepticism, surely a product of my "leftoid" paranoia, but this scenario does not strike me as particularly plausible. Further, as has been pointed out in Backtalk ("Foreknowledge," by Edward H.), the attack on Afghanistan took a good deal longer to prepare than the time that elapsed between Sept.11 and Oct. 7. Thus, even discounting the revelations of the Pakistani foreign minister that he had been told in June that the US would be bombing Afghanistan by October, it is clear that the attack was long in coming, and therefore unrelated to 9-11. [...]

We still really know next to nothing about what happened last September. And in the face of this impenetrable fog, Justin Raimondo knows "confidently" that even though Carlyle Group made a bundle off the New World War, and even though it transformed Dubya from a reviled clown into a vastly-loved and trusted, world-class, Churchillian statesman (as the stenographers and scriveners of the tightly owned "popular" media would have it), even so, "of course" Bush and company were caught with their trousers down, and knew nothing of what was happening. Such faith in the fundamental integrity of the cabal that repealed the Constitution by executive fiat, and that includes the man Henry Kissinger, no less, called the "most ruthless" man he had ever worked with ("Rummy," in the affectionate parlance of the White House press courtiers), is rather touching -- or to quote the arch-demon Lenin, "would be touching in a child, but is repellent in a man of mature years."

As "leftoid" Izzy Stone noted, the first rule of journalism is that governments lie. All governments, including the one that took office after losing the popular vote by a margin equivalent to the entire population of Alaska or Boston. They lie habitually, indeed constantly. Rather than carrying their water, one would hope a principled libertarian like Raimondo would be shooting at the bucket.

~ Ron Reed, Alaska