- They still refer to George Bush's popularity. I don't
think so. The dwindling number of folk who tell the pollsters they think
he's doing a good job are probably worried they'll get investigated by
Ashcroft if they don't. Imagine you're back in the Soviet Union in 1941,
right after Hitler's attack. "Good morning, Tovaritsch. It's the People's
Mass Observation Bureau. In your frank estimation, comrade, is the General
Secretary doing (a) a wonderful job, (b) a good job (c) only so-so?"
Just my point. This isn't the Soviet Union, but people are wary.
-
- For your average citizen it's been a disillusioning year,
starting with the commander in chief fleeing down a missile silo in Nebraska.
The guardians of the 401Ks turned out to be scoundrels; the guardians of
our spiritual morals, the bishops and the parish priests, were exposed
as child molesters; the guardians of our safety, the security agencies,
turned out to be either useless.
-
- Disasters usually bring out the worst in authority and
the best in ordinary people. Andrew Greeley put it really well in his column
this week in the Chicago Sun Times.
-
- "On Sept. 11 last year, up to 1 million people were
evacuated from Lower Manhattan by water . . . It was an American Dunkirk,
like the epic rescue of the British army at Dunkirk in 1940 by an armada
of similar craft.
-
- "Yet you most likely never saw this astonishing
event, reported last month by Professor Kathleen Tierney at the annual
meeting of the American Sociological Association, on television and never
read about it in the print media. It would have made for spectacular TV
imagery; yet, as an example of calm and sensible and spontaneous action,
it did not fit the media image of panic . . .
-
- "Tierney, director of the Disaster Research Center
at the University of Delaware, argued that the reaction of people at the
World Trade Center was what one might have expected from the research literature
of the last 50 years on behavior in disaster situations. 'Social bonds
remained intact and the sense of responsibility to others--family members,
friends, fellow workers, neighbors and even total strangers remains strong
. . .. People sought information from one another, made inquiries and spoke
with loved ones via cell phones, engaged in collective decision-making
and helped one another to safety. When the towers were evacuated, the evacuation
was carried out in a calm and orderly manner.'Note that most of the positive
social behavior that saved so many lives was not organized by any formal
agency, much less by any command-and-control mechanism. People saved themselves.
Other people converged from all over the city to help.
-
- "As Tierney says, 'The response to the Sept. 11
tragedy was so effective precisely because it was not centrally directed
and controlled. Instead it was flexible, adaptive and focused on handling
problems as they emerged.'...Says Tierney: 'When Sept. 11 demonstrated
the enormous resilience in our civil society, why is disaster response
now being characterized in militaristic terms?'
-
- "Perhaps because those who are determined to control
everything don't understand that even in military situations, it's the
second lieutenants and the sergeants who win battles, as, for example,
in the Omaha Beach chaos at Normandy. The media got the story all wrong
because the panic paradigm is still pervasive and because no one in the
media had read the disaster-research literature. They thus reinforced the
propensity of those running the country not to trust the good sense and
social concern of ordinary folk. Rather, they want to control everything
with such ditsy ideas as the proposed Homeland Security Department."
-
- The Most Dangerous Man in Washington
-
- AT 2.40 PM, September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld was commanding his aides to get "best info fast. Judge whether
good enough hit S.H."--meaning Saddam Hussein--"at same time.
Not only UBL"--the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden. "Go
massive." Notes taken by these aides quote him as saying. "Sweep
it all up. Things related and not." We can thank David Martin of CBS
for getting hold of these notes and disclosing them last Wednesday.
-
- This was our Donald, thinking fast as he paced about
the National Military Command Center, seeking to turn the attack into a
rationale for all sort of unrelated revenges and settlings of accounts.
For Rumsfeld, as for his boss, as for so many, it was a turning point in
his career as a cabinet member in the Bush II presidency. The year had
not been a happy one for this veteran of the Nixon and Ford eras, the man
who gave Dick Cheney his start in the upper tiers. Rumsfeld speedily became
the target of Pentagon leaks about his abject failure to take control of
the vast Pentagon pork barrel, last best trough in the US economy.
-
- In the wake of the attacks Rumsfeld swiftly learned to
revel in his role as America's top exponent of bully-boy bluster. And he's
kept it up, running rings around Colin Powell, whose pals are now leaking
stories that Powell may throw in the towel at the end of Bush's present
term.
-
- Small wonder. Rumsfeld has humiliated Powell, reaching
a peak in effrontery when, a few weeks ago, he contradicted decades-worth
of formal US foreign policy and declared that Israel had every right and
every reason to occupy the West Bank and have settlements there.
-
- The specter of military government here in the US lurks
eternally in the imagination of fearful constitutionalists, right or left.
There's a lot more reason for these fears today, particularly after the
Patriot Act shot through Congress.
-
- Today the FBI can spy on political and religious meetings
even when there's no suspicion that a crime has been committed. Dissidents
can get labelled "domestic terrorists" and be the target of every
form of snooping.
-
- The PATRIOT Act allows "black bag" searches
for every sort of record that might shed light on suspects, including the
books they get out of a library. Computers and personal papers can be confiscated
and not returned even if an indictment is never lodged against the suspect.
Such secret searches can take place even in cases unrelated to terrorism.
-
- The Justice Department argued in two federal cases that
the president has the power to indefinitely detain without any charges
any person, including any U.S. citizen, designated as an "enemy combatant."
Furthermore the administration argues that the president's conduct of the
war on terrorism can't be challenged and that civilian courts have no authority
over the detentions.
-
- The Justice Department argues that people designated
"enemy combatants," can be put behind bars, held incommunicado
and denied counsel. If the detainee does get a lawyer, their conversations
can be bugged.
-
- In such manner we are saying goodbye to the First, Fourth
and Sixth Amendments.
-
- Back to Rumsfeld. The Defense Secretary is currently
trying to get the Pentagon greater authority to carry out covert ops. He
also wants Congress to agree to have a new undersecretary of defense, responsible
for all intelligence matters.
-
- Now blend these proposals in with the erosions of the
Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the US military to have any role in
domestic law enforcement. Shake the blender vigorously and you have the
Rumsfeld cocktail, with an Ashcroft cherry. A defense under-secretary may
soon b able to target YOU, (or the antiwar couple in the apartment next
door), bug your phone and computer, burglarize the place, grab you, stick
you in prison and let you rot.
-
- All legally. That's what we call military government,
the way we teach the Latin American officers mustered for training at Fort
Benning to do things in their countries, plus hanging electrodes on the
testicles and nipples of those slow to confide who their teammates were
in the anti-war group mentioned above. Remember, there's a strong lobby
here for torture too.
-
- Try holding a placard up, when George Bush is driving
by. Kevin O'Neill had a good column last Thursday in the Pittsburgh Post
Gazette describing what happened when demonstrators against President Bush
being herded inside a fence at Neville Island for his Labor Day visit.
-
- "Police called this enclosure the designated free-speech
area, though anyone who had signs praising the president was evidently
OK to line the island's main street for the motorcade.
-
- "The mini-Guantanamo on the Ohio was set up strictly
for security reasons, of course. Those who pose a genuine threat to the
president are expected to carry signs identifying themselves as such, as
a courtesy. Hence the erection of the Not-OK Corral.
-
- "Bill Neel of Butler just doesn't get it, though.
He's 65 and can remember a time when our entire country was a free-speech
zone. So when he refused to get inside the fence with his sign, he was
arrested, cuffed and detained in the best place for inflammatory rhetoric,
the fire hall.
-
- "Neel's confiscated sign said, "The Bushes
must truly love the poor -- they've made so many of us." For holding
this contrary opinion in the censored speech zone, Neel was given a summons
for disorderly conduct."
-
- Battle Terrorism, Go To Prison. It's The Law
-
- On September 10, 2002, 23 people who committed the crime
of demonstrating against the terror methods imparted in Fort Benning reported
to federal prison convicted of trespass, with sentences ranging from six
months probation to six months in federal prison and $5,000 in fines. Judge
G. Mallon Faircloth is notorious for giving the maximum sentence for a
misdemeanor to nonviolent opponents of the School of the Americas.
-
- Seventy-one people, School of the Americas Watch tells
us, have served a total of over forty years in prison for engaging in nonviolent
resistance in the long campaign to close the school. Last year Dorothy
Hennessey, an 88 year-old Franciscan nun, was sentenced to six months in
federal prison. "It's ironic," says Sister Hennessey, "that
at a time when the country is reflecting on how terrorism has impacted
our lives, dedicated people who took direct action to stop terrorism throughout
the Americas are on their way into prison."
-
- Back to Rumsfeld once more. He's dangerous because he's
brimful of arrogance, surrounded by fanatics like DoD undersecretary Paul
Wolfowitz and has successfully occupied the vacant territory known as George
Bush's brain. For an equivalently troubling figure you have to go all the
way back to Defense Secretary James Forrestal, whose own brain finally
exploded under the weight of his own paranoia. Early in 1949 He resigned
his post as DoD secretary and not long thereafter threw himself to his
death out of a window in the Bethesda Naval Hospital. There's no chance
of Rumsfeld taking such a step. He's way too pleased with himself.
-
- Unimaginable
-
- "About one-fourth of the individuals who have contributed
to McKinney's campaigns over the past five years have names that appear
to be Arab-American or Muslim, according to an informal study of Federal
Election Commission records by the Journal- Constitution." Can you
imagine a similar story appearing about the Jewish financial contributors
to the campaign of Denise Majette, who recently defeated Cynthia McKinney
in the Democratic primary in Georgia's Fourth District. The Journal-Constitution
loathed McKinney.
-
- Many liberal Democrats resolutely averted their gaze
from McKinney's campaign and disdained her appeals for help, even though
Majette's preference for president in 2000 was, if we believe her endorsement,
the black, anti-choice Republican, Alan Keyes.
-
- Dullness Hailed
-
- "Barr, McKinney and Traficant were colorful at the
expense
- of the institution of which they were a part," said
Thomas
- E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
- "They knew the shock value of their utterances and
its
- capacity to attract a lot of press attention." These
dreary sentiments came in a New York Times piece by Carl Hulse piece in
about the departure of colorful reps and senators from Congress.
-
- Mann is one of those rent-a-quote guys the press loves.
Call him up and he'll spit out a couple of sentences like a popcorn machine.
In fact the those three reps were all in their separate ways testimonies
to the fine judgement of their constituents in putting them in office.
The Republican Barr, also defeated in a Georgia primary, was as valiant
a defender of constitutional freedoms as McKinney, and particularly distinguished
himself in the frail congressional resistance to the Patriot Act. Traficant
was a glorious symbol of citizen contempt for prosecutorial rampages.
-
- Hulse evidently searched out quotes to buttress his thesis-of-the-day,
that boisterous and turbulent behavior, not to mention, principled views,
are out of popular favor.
- "Analysts believe," he wrote, " there
could be a larger message in the muting of some Congressional voices, particularly
in the case of the two Georgians, Mr. Barr and Ms. McKinney. In tense times,
the analysts said, the public wants the combative rhetoric softened.
-
- "They liked to take strong, uncompromising stands
on very controversial issues, and that is what makes them newsworthy,"
said Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University in
Atlanta. "But they just state opinions and positions rather than engaging
in any kind of dialogue, and in the wake of 9/11, when we are at war, they
are not viewed as solving problems."
-
- Moral: submerge yourself in the gray mass of conformity,
and you'll do just fine. It's all balls of course. The public relishes
stand-up people. Look at the career of Ron Paul, the great libertarian
from Texas, one of just three (another Republican plus Dennis Kucinich,
a Democrat,) who recently voted against life sentences for hackers. Traficant
was never abandoned by his constituents. H went down because the jury,
possibly confused, voted him guilty and Congress threw him out. I'm not
sure about Barr but McKinney was the victim of a well hatched plots. She
actually got more votes than in 2000, when she was reelected. But outside
money for Majette, much of its from Jewish donors, plus a big Republican
crossover in the open primary, did her in.
-
- The Best Political Mind in Washington?
-
- Cal Thomas recently called Paul Weyrich "one of
the best political minds in Washington" and asked him what should
the GOP focus on upcoming elections. The finely honed political mind of
Weyrich duly disgorged the following as looming issues: immigration, homosexuals
in the boy
- scouts, & the Pledge.
-
- The Salt Lake City Tribune, which carries Thomas's dreary
syndicated column, duly carried a letter-to-the-editor, monitored by CounterPuncher
Christine TenBarge and running as follows: "The only consistency I
can find in these issues is 1. They are asinine; 2. They are divisive;
3. They are easy to present to a fourth grader". The writer went on
to list real issues, like proposed war with Iraq, corporate corruption,
campaign finance reform, etc. hoping that issues that make a difference
will actually be debated by candidates. He ended with "Oh no...I just
had a thought. What if Cal Thomas is right and Paul Weyrich is one of the
best political minds in Washington?"
-
-
-
- http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn0911.html
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