Freedom and Democracy is Dying

By Jason Miller

27 June, 2007

Original Source: www.countercurrents.org/miller270607.htm

"Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them."

--Sigmund Freud

Frightening as it may be, the Earth’s fate rests in the hands of children. With incredibly formidable military firepower at its disposal, the United States could catalyze Armageddon at any time. And while they may be adults chronologically, our sociopolitical structure is dominated by emotional infants.

Nietzsche once pronounced God dead. In the United States, we have a more readily demonstrable (and perhaps related) problem. Our collective id has rendered its governing superego impotent, and perhaps dead. Our prevailing moral standards, as inconsequential as they have become, are of the Jerry Falwell variety. They are mean-spirited, self-serving, judgmental, narrow-minded, selfish, and belligerent. As far as US Americans are concerned, Christ may as well have preached the Sermon on the Mount from the lowest recesses of Death Valley.

Recall that our basic drives such as libido, hunger, and aggression flow from the infantile dimension of our psyche known as the id. In terms of psychodynamics, the superego’s role is to counter-balance the irresponsible, amoral, and essentially sociopathic nature of the id with a healthy degree of conscience and guilt. Yet in the United States, we are inculcated with a deep sense of our exceptionalism and entitlement from the moment we emerge from the birth canal, thus crippling our ability to empathize and seriously impeding the development of our superego.

Consequently, conscience, guilt, personal discipline, and delaying gratification are barely extant in the toxic cesspool of our sociocultural environment.

Let’s examine some of the spiritually corrosive social forces which have molded our malleable natures in such a way that our behavior as a nation closely resembles that of a depraved miscreant:

While counseling and therapy are essential tools to heal from psychic wounds, emotional disorders, and mental illnesses, many mental health professionals offer their patients palliative “ego strokes” rather than the remedial brutal honesty and tough love they truly need. Instead of giving their clients the tools they need to heal themselves, they enable their ids to continue running rampant, unfettered by that “nasty old superego” and its “toxic guilt.”

Even those who don’t seek professional help are absolved of the pangs of conscience by the high priests and priestesses of the corporate media. Prostitutes to the establishment like Oprah pat them on the head, reassure them that their pathological self-absorption is wonderful, and tell them to further immerse their minds in pernicious idiocy by reading instruction manuals on narcissism like The Secret.

Commit a crime? No problem. We have a legal system, not a justice system. If you have money enough to hire a shrewd attorney, you are unlikely to face the consequences you deserve, regardless of the egregiousness of your crime. Unfortunately, if you don’t have money, you will face the equivalent of electrocution for stealing a loaf of bread, which means several brutal, dehumanizing years in the most populous prison industrial complex in the world for “crimes” like self-medicating to escape your already miserable circumstances.

Lack the cash to buy the $2,000.00 flat screen you “have to have” to watch the obscenely commercialized and over-hyped Super Bowl? No problem. In the advanced stages of our savage economic system, finance capital reigns supreme. There are untold thousands of lenders prepared to let you use their money, provided you agree to pay their usurious interest rates.

Want it yesterday? Not to worry. We have fast food, one hour photo, instant credit approval, movies on demand, pills to chase the blues and blue pills to give you an erection, instant coffee, microwave meals, zero down loans, and a host of other means to satisfy the relentlessly impatient demands of our ids.

Feeling bored, lonely, or depressed? Turn on the television. Fill your mind with inanity, brain candy, infotainment, and potent affirmations that your tenacious adherence to the reprehensible "American Way” is justified, patriotic, and admirable.

Need a career, training, money for college, the indoctrinated belief that you are risking your life for a noble cause, and the false security that your government will support you once they are done with you? “Join the people who have joined the Army” (or Marines, Navy, or Air Force). Our moneyed elite (desperately) need willing pawns to wage their wholesale terror operations in Iraq and elsewhere.

While it may sound a bit conspiratorial, before we go dismissing the notion that the erosion of our moral restraint (superego) has been intentionally engineered and orchestrated, let’s consider the question, “Cui bono?”

Having stunted, retarded, corralled, or in some cases, disabled the superegos of the “unwashed masses,” there is almost no end to the malevolence our sociopathic plutocracy, upper level military careerists, “religious” leaders, AIPAC, and reactionaries can commit in our names (with our overt or tacit approval) to further enrich and empower themselves.

Consider but a few examples of abominations for which we, as a nation, are responsible:

We have committed war crimes analogous to those of Nazi Germany through our pre-emptive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. How many hundred thousand or million civilians must die before we realize that “collateral damage” is an Orwellian euphemism for mass murder?

We have long been complicit in the brutal oppression of the Palestinians. When the final Palestinian is imprisoned, obliterated, or driven out of Gaza and the West Bank will we then recognize that we facilitated an ethnic cleansing?

We employ economic tyranny and manipulation to make de facto colonies of developing nations, harvesting and consuming 25% of the world’s resources to “sustain” 5% of the world’s population. Isn’t gluttony one of the Seven Deadly Sins?

We listened to the likes of Ronald Reagan (a reactionary who never met a socially redeeming policy, law or public initiative he didn’t want to eliminate) when he moronically asserted that enacting universal health care would undoubtedly lead to “Godless Communism.” So we continue embracing a system enabling cynical wealthy elites and amoral corporations to generate outrageous profits derived from the administration of health care. As a result, there are 50 million uninsured US Americans, we have the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world, we are 37th in the world in health care quality, HMO’s and managed care entities often refuse to provide necessary medical procedures, insurance companies routinely deny claims based on technicalities, and hospitals dump indigent patients on Skid Row rather than treating them.

On the subject of indigents, how is it that a nation awash in prosperity has over a million homeless human beings on any given night? Or that cities like Orlando and Las Vegas have made homelessness a crime? How can a significant percentage of those condemned to sleep under bridges and eat from dumpsters be veterans who fought for our country? Could it be that chicken hawk ruling elites like Dick Cheney used them as cannon fodder in their wars necessitated by capitalism’s endless demand for new markets, cheaper labor, and more resources, and then disposed of them like so much rubbish when they came home?

We strong-arm developing countries into implementing neoliberal economic policies and free trade, deepening the impoverishment of their citizens to further enrich ourselves. This leaves them little choice but to migrate here, where virtually all of the money and resources are flowing. Now that 12 million “illegals” have established residence in the US, we are arrogantly preparing to perpetuate their employers’ capacity to exploit them or to implement a draconian plan to rip their families and lives apart, imprison them, and eventually send them back to the abject poverty we created.

Climate Change? We simply deny we bear an ounce of responsibility and rev up our gas-guzzling SUVs, pick-ups, and Hummers.

Yes, in spite of the extreme moral poverty reflected in the myriad wounds we continue to inflict upon the Earth and its sentient inhabitants, we have the audacity to call ourselves a Christian nation. Whether it is conscious or not, we organize our existences around the abhorrent beliefs that “it’s all about me,” “get them before they get me,” “he who dies with the most toys wins,” and “blessed are the rich, the joyous, the well-fed, the aggressive, the merciless, the heartless, and the warmongers,” thus manifesting the virtual antithesis of Christ’s teachings.

But what can you expect from a nation of unsupervised ids?

Jason Miller is a wage slave of the American Empire who has freed himself intellectually and spiritually. He is Cyrano's Journal Online's associate editor ( http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas Paine's Corner within Cyrano's at http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at JMiller@bestcyrano.com

By Paul Craig Roberts - June 25, 2007

“We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” --John Winthrop

America is being destroyed. Many Americans are unaware, others are indifferent, and some intend it.

The destruction is across the board: the political and constitutional system, the economy, social institutions including the family itself, citizenship, and the character and morality of the American people.

Those who rely on the Internet for information are aware that the Bush regime has successfully assaulted the separation of powers and civil liberty. Both Bush and Cheney claim that they are not bound by laws that impinge on their freedom of action or that interfere with their ideas of the power of their offices. Bush has issued presidential directives that permit him to make himself a dictator by declaring a national emergency. Cheney asserts that his handling of secret documents is not subject to oversight or investigation or bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information.

The foundation of social organization -- marriage, family, and parental control over children -- is disintegrating.

Mass unassimilated and illegal immigration has destroyed the meaning of American citizenship and forced large numbers of Americans into unemployment. For example, Steve Camarota at the Center for Immigration Studies reported on June 20 that state employment data show that in the first six years of the 21st century 218,000 high school graduates in the state of Georgia have been employment- displaced by immigrants. [Employment Down Among Natives In Georgia] Moreover, wages have stagnated, putting the lie to the claim that there is a shortage of workers. If there were a labor shortage, wages would be bid up and rising.

Many Americans are unconcerned that the US government in behalf of an undeclared agenda has invaded two countries, killed hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians, produced 4 million Iraqi refugees, rejected the Geneva Conventions and reverted to medieval torture dungeons. It does not trouble them that their government blocked ceasefires and UN resolutions so that Israel could bomb and murder Lebanese civilians and destroy the country’s infrastructure.

Americans, whose ethical behavior toward others was once reinforced by having to look oneself in the mirror, now have a different ethos. Many cannot look themselves in the mirror unless they have pulled a fast one and advanced themselves at someone else’s expense. It is not only crooked prosecutors, such as Michael Nifong, who get their jollies from destroying their fellow citizens.

A Google search will call up enough information to make the case for these points many times over. However, the destruction of the US economy, though far advanced, is still largely unknown. It is to this subject that we turn.

For a number of years Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services and I have documented from BLS nonfarm payroll jobs data that the US economy in the 21st century no longer creates net new jobs in tradable goods and services. In the 21st century, job growth in “the world’s only superpower” has a definite third world flavor. US job growth has been limited to domestic services that cannot be moved offshore, such as waitresses and bartenders and health and social services.

These are not jobs that comprise ladders of upward mobility. Income inequality is worsening, and education is no longer the answer.

The problem is that middle class jobs, both in manufacturing and in professional occupations such as engineering, are being offshored as corporations replace their American workforces with foreigners. I have called jobs offshoring “virtual immigration.”

The latest bombshell is that even those professional jobs that remain located in America are not safe. There is a vast industry of immigration law firms that enable American corporations to replace their American workers with foreigners brought in on work visas.

For years Americans have been told that work visas are only issued in cases where there are no Americans with the necessary skills to fill the jobs. Americans have been reassured that safeguards are in place to prevent US companies from using the work visas to replace their American employees with foreigners paid below the prevailing US wage. Now, thanks to a video placed on “YouTube” by a US law firm, Cohen & Grigsby, marketing its services, we now know that it is easy for US companies to legally evade the “safeguards” and to replace their American employees with lower paid foreigners.

The video shows Lawrence Lebowitz, [send him mail] vice president for Marketing for the law firm of Cohen & Grigsby, together with a panel of the law firm’s attorneys, explaining to an audience of employers how to use loopholes in the laws governing the work visas to hire foreign workers in place of Americans. Lebowitz says, “our goal is clearly, not to find a qualified and interested US worker.”

Cohen & Grigsby’s legal experts describe the strategy for ensuring that no American firm has to hire an American. The advertising requirements can be met by advertising the job in obscure or ethnic newspapers in locations where there are no likely job candidates. If a qualified American candidate turns up, “have the manager of that specific position step in and . . . go through the whole process to find a legal basis to disqualify them for this position -- in most cases there doesn’t seem to be a problem.”

The “prevailing wage” requirement is evaded, for example, by making the offered salary and raises contingent on receipt of the green card, usually three or four years away, or by disguising the job by understating the job requirements. For example, a job requiring an advanced degree can be listed as requiring a bachelor’s degree, but filled with a foreigner with a higher degree. As the higher degree is not listed as a job requirement, the employer is able to secure the foreign employee below the prevailing wage.

University of California computer science professor Norman Matloff has an excellent presentation available at his online site about the lack of impediments to the ability of US firms to replace their American employees with foreigners. Matloff says to keep in mind that Cohen & Grigsby “is NOT a rogue law firm.” The advice provided by Cohen & Grigsby is the standard advice given by the hoards of immigration attorneys who are personally cleaning up by putting Americans out of work.

Except for Lou Dobbs on CNN, the US TV and print media have so far ignored the astounding story. Where are the headlines: “US Jobs: No American Need Apply”?

Chances are high that economists will ignore the story also. Economists have made fools of themselves with their hyped claims that jobs offshoring is a great benefit to America and that any attempt to stop it would bring hardship, failed companies, and lost American jobs. When a profession gets egg all over its face, it closes ranks and goes into denial.

Unlike the post-depression generation of US economists, recent generations of economists have been indoctrinated with confidence in business. They believe that business knows best and that the free market will prevent or correct any mistakes. Many economists today are well-paid shills for special interests. Others, simply careless, have assumed that statistical measures of high rates of US productivity and GDP growth were indications of the benefits that offshoring was bringing to Americans.

Only a few economists, such as myself and Charles McMillion, noticed the inconsistency between alleged high rates of productivity and GDP growth on one hand and stagnant real median incomes and rising income inequality on the other. Somehow the US economy was having GDP and productivity growth that was not showing up in growth in the incomes of Americans.

Thanks to economist Susan N. Houseman and the March 22 issue of Business Week, we now know, as I reported in the print edition of CounterPunch (June 1-15, 2007) and online at VDARE.com and Online Journal, that much of the growth in US productivity and GDP was an illusion created by statistics that mistakenly attributed productivity gains achieved abroad to the US economy.

With the ladders of upward mobility for Americans dismantled by offshoring and work visas, with the very real problems in mortgage and housing markets, with the very real stress put on the US dollar’s reserve currency role by Bush’s trillion dollar war that is financed by foreigners, with the downward revisions in US GDP and productivity growth that are now mandatory, and with a variety of other problems that I haven’t the space to deal with, the fabled US economy is a thing of the past.

Just like America’s prestige. Just like the world’s goodwill toward America. Just like American liberty.

The eyes of all peoples are still upon us, only for different reasons. Whom will we attack next? When will we be bankrupt? What good is the American consumer market when the mass of the people are employed in third world jobs? How much longer will those trillions of dollars held by foreign governments be worth anything? How long before Americans will be knocking on European doors claiming political asylum?

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Original Source: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070510_the_good_ame...

Posted on May 10, 2007

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By Robert Fisk

23 June, 2007
The Independent

I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beirut when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was going to create "Palestine". I checked the date - no, it was not 1 April - but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being "our" Middle East envoy.

Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle Eastern hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he has a role in the region - he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to absolutely no avail - is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world's last colonial war is simply overwhelming.

Of course, he'll be in touch with Mahmoud Abbas, will try to marginalise Hamas, will talk endlessly about "moderates"; and we'll have to listen to him pontificating about morality, how he's absolutely and completely confident that he's doing the right thing (and this, remember, is the same man who postponed a ceasefire in Lebanon last year in order to share George Bush's ridiculous hope of an Israeli victory over Hizbollah) in bringing peace to the Middle East...

Not once - ever - has he apologised. Not once has he said he was sorry for what he did in our name. Yet Lord Blair actually believes - in what must be a record act of self-indulgence for a man who cooked up the fake evidence of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" - that he can do good in the Middle East.

For here is a man who is totally discredited in the region - a politician who has signally failed in everything he ever tried to do in the Middle East - now believing that he is the right man to lead the Quartet to patch up "Palestine".

In the hunt for quislings to do our bidding - ie accept even less of Mandate Palestine than Arafat would stomach - I suppose Blair has his uses. His unique blend of ruthlessness and dishonesty will no doubt go down quite well with our local Arab dictators.

And I have a suspicion - always assuming this extraordinary story is not untrue - that Blair will be able to tour around Damascus, even Tehran, in his hunt for "peace", thus paving the way for an American exit strategy in Iraq. But "Palestine"?

The Palestinians held elections - real, copper-bottomed ones, the democratic variety - and Hamas won. But Blair will presumably not be able to talk to Hamas. He'll need to talk only to Abbas's flunkies, to negotiate with an administration described so accurately this week by my old colleague Rami Khoury as a "government of the imagination".

The Americans are talking - and here I am quoting the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack - about an envoy who can work "with the Palestinians in the Palestinian system" to develop institutions for a "well-governed state". Oh yes, I can see how that would appeal to Lord Blair. He likes well-governed states, lots of "terror laws", plenty of security - though I'm still a bit puzzled about what the "Palestinian system" is meant to be.

It was James Wolfensohn who was originally "our" Middle East envoy, a former World Bank president who left in frustration because he could neither reconstruct Gaza nor work with a "peace process" that was being eroded with every new Jewish settlement and every Qassam rocket fired into Israel. Does Blair think he can do better? What honeyed words will we hear?

I bet he doesn't mention the Israeli wall which is taking so much extra land from the Palestinians. It will be a "security barrier" or a "fence" (like the famous Berlin "fence" which was actually called a "security barrier" by those generous East German Vopo cops of the time).

There will be appeals for restraint "on all sides", endless calls for "moderation", none at all for justice (which is all the people of the Middle East have been pleading for over the past 100 years).

And Israel likes Lord Blair. Indeed, Blair's slippery use of language is likely to appeal to Ehud Olmert, whose government continues to take Arab land for Jews and Jews only as he waits to discover a Palestinian with whom he can "negotiate", Mahmoud Abbas now having the prestige of a rabbit after his forces were crushed in Gaza.

Which of "Palestine"'s two prime ministers will Blair talk to? Why, the one with a collar and tie, of course, who works for Mr Abbas, who will demand more "security", tougher laws, less democracy.

I have never been able to figure out why the Middle East draws the Balfours and the Sykeses and the Blairs into its maw. Once, our favourite trouble-shooter was James Baker - who worked for George W's father until the Israelis got tired of him - and before that we had a whole list of UN Secretary Generals who visited the region, frowned and warned of serious consequences if peace did not soon come.

I recall another man with Blair's pomposity, a certain Kurt Waldheim, who - no longer the UN's boss - actually believed he could be an "envoy" for peace in the Middle East, despite his little wartime career as an intelligence officer for the Wehrmacht's Army Group "E".

His visits - especially to the late King Hussein - came to nothing, of course. But Waldheim's ability to draw a curtain over his wartime past does have one thing in common with Blair. For Waldheim steadfastly, pointedly, repeatedly, refused to acknowledge - ever - that he had ever done anything wrong. Now who does that remind you of?

A report from the man who broke the original story...

Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2666406.ece 

Published: 17 June 2007

From the moment I knocked on the front door of Daoud Mousa al-Maliki's home in Basra, I knew something had gone terribly wrong in the British Army in southern Iraq.

I had seen British military brutality in Northern Ireland - I had even been threatened by British officers in Belfast - but I somehow thought that things had changed, that a new, more disciplined army had emerged from the dark, sinister days of the Irish conflict. But I was wrong. Baha Mousa, Daoud's son, had died from the injuries he received in British custody, a young, decent man whose father was a cop, who did nothing worse than work as a receptionist in a Basra hotel.

Then I went to see Kifah Taha, who had been so badly beaten by British troops in the presence of Baha Mousa that he had terrible wounds in the groin. He told me how the soldiers would call their Iraqi prisoners by the names of football stars - Beckham was one name they used - before kicking them around the detention headquarters in Basra. There were stories of Iraqi prisoners being forced to kneel on sharp stones, of being kicked and punched in the groin, the kidneys, the back, shoulders, forced to sit with their heads down lavatory holes.

All this is among the evidence which ex-prisoners - and Baha Mousa's father - are taking to the High Court, now that the courts martial which followed Mousa's death have produced just one solitary conviction, a soldier jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army for "mistreating" prisoners.

There's an old rule of thumb which I always apply to armies in the field. If you find out about one abuse, you can bet there were a hundred others that will never be revealed. New stories of "forced disappearances", hostage-taking and torture in British custody are emerging from Basra. US troops are still being questioned about unlawful killings and torture in Iraq. If one girl is raped and murdered and her family slaughtered by a US unit south of Baghdad - all of which is true - how many others have died in circumstances we shall never discover?

The My Lai atrocity in Vietnam was revealed relatively soon after it occurred. But it was more than 40 years after the Korean War that we learned US soldiers had fired into thousands of unarmed Korean civilian refugees, because they feared troops were hiding among them. How many air strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq kill the innocent yet go unrecorded, because journalists are no longer safe to travel in these remote, dangerous areas?

Looking back, I found out about Baha Mousa only because it was still safe - just - to move around in Basra in 2004, to knock on front doors, visit hospitals, interview grieving relatives without the fear of being kidnapped or having my throat cut. Baha Mousa's young wife had died only a few months before him - from a tumour of the brain - and his two small children sat devastated in their home, staring at me as if I were a war criminal. His father, Daoud, said to me then, as he says in his latest affidavit: "As for me, Baha was not just my son, he was my friend."

His indignation at the failure of the British courts martial to convict anyone for Baha's murder rings through his affidavit, a moving cry for justice from a good man in Iraq who expected British troops to protect his family, not kill his son. He even believed an officer who promised to look after Baha, two days before Daoud was invited to inspect and identify his broken body.

How have we failed these people! What culture created these young men who treated their civilian prisoners with such contempt, cursing them and - if the documents are accurate - calling them "shit" and treating them like animals? Did it come from Glasgow or Cardiff or London or from some prison - yes, quite a lot of British soldiers are ex-prisoners themselves, former guests of Her Majesty who know all about prison rules and prison abuse.

How come the Americans tortured men at Abu Ghraib - officially permitted to do so, as we now know - without realising that they were breaking the rules of ordinary humanity? Is this the result, perhaps, of all those violent, virtual reality worlds so shockingly documented by Tim Guest in his new book, Second Lives, where pain no longer hurts, where lives are only "virtual", where killing is easy?

Yes, I know the old saw, that our chaps are up against it, risking their lives in the front line, occasionally running over the traces amid the fear and drama of battle, a few rotten apples, etc. That's what we said about the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment when they killed 14 innocent Catholic civilians in Derry in 1972. First Para? Salt of the earth. Maybe they just broke after so much abuse and danger - except that 1st Para were a reserve battalion at the time, largely confined to Palace Barracks outside Belfast.

And the soldiers in Basra? They were beating their prisoners in the comfort of their barracks - "Chemical Ali's" old jail, of course - in the comparative safety of Basra in the immediate post-invasion months.

It's all up now, of course. Iraq is a hell-disaster and the old clichés about "hearts and minds" are as dry as the sand on the desert floor. Maybe there are hearts and minds to be maintained inside the Green Zone in Baghdad or any of the other "green zones" around the Middle East where our Western forces shelter from their enemies in their modern versions of the Crusader castles that once littered the Holy Land. But the moral high ground - if ever it could have existed after Tony Blair and George Bush's illegal invasion - has long ago been abandoned.

We will leave Iraq with all our dreams in pieces, and it will be left to Iraqis themselves - men like Daoud Mousa, carrying the grief of his son's death with him for ever - to create a new country out of the pain and sorrow we leave behind for them.

By Steve Rendall

And Giuliani walks on. He walks from his bunker, up Barclay Street and went on television. Went on and announced his heroism and then came back every hour or so until he became a star, a great figure, a national hero, the mayor who saved New York. Most of this comes from these dazed Pekingese of the Press. . . . Giuliani was a hero with these news people.—Columnist Jimmy Breslin (Newsday, 3/7/04)
 

On September 11, 2001, with George W. Bush in hiding for much of the day, mainstream journalists were desperately looking for a man on horseback. For many, that man would be New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter began his September 24, 2001 column:

At 9:05 p.m. last Wednesday, Rudy Giuliani finally broke. Exactly 36 hours after he first rushed to the World Trade Center, the mayor’s neo-Churchillian reputation was already secure. He had just escaped injury or death in The Attack, calmly led a terrifying retreat uptown, then inhabited the role of wartime leader with a fine mixture of brisk compassion and gritty command presence.

Alter dubbed Giuliani “the new Mayor of America,” which soon morphed to “America’s Mayor,” a moniker used by journalists as if it were a matter of public acclamation rather than a symptom of press corps hero worship. Time (12/31/01– 1/7/02), crediting Giuliani with teaching Americans how to cope with tragedy, awarded him an even higher honorary office:

For leading that lesson, for having more faith in us than we had in ourselves, for being brave when required and rude where appropriate and tender without being trite, for not sleeping and not quitting and not shrinking from the pain all around him, Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of the World, is Time’s 2001 Person of the Year.

Newsweek and Time set an adoring theme for coverage that would be echoed by many mainstream outlets over the next six years, pushing Giuliani to a lead in national presidential polls.

More recently, Alter (3/12/07) seemed to have second thoughts about his earlier devotion, explaining that perhaps he’d fallen “too hard” for Giuliani. Even as he made the admission, though, he reverted to fawning language, remembering Giuliani’s countenance at firefighter funerals: “Up close, his compassion and calm command were every bit as impressive as advertised.”

Whatever misgivings the Newsweek columnist may have developed about his own Giuliani worship, the same can’t be said about many other journalists.

Time’s latest profile of the prospective candidate, “Why Is Rudy Smiling?” (3/21/07), called him “‘America’s mayor,’ the rock of 9/11, crime fighter and tax cutter,” adding that “New York City’s worst catastrophe was Giuliani’s finest hour.”

Time’s David Von Drehle did worry that the prospective candidate’s views on gun control, gay rights and abortion might wander too far from the conservative GOP mainstream, and fretted over Giuliani’s personal life: “What makes his bid for the White House so tricky is . . . the blue-state mores in the red-state party”—a reference to Giuliani’s fickle marital history, although divorce rates generally run higher in Republican-leaning states.

But, the profile concluded, Giuliani’s prospects still looked good, because the “rule book” that says “a pro-choice former New York City mayor married to wife No. 3 cannot possibly win the Republican presidential nomination . . . has been stuffed into a shredder this year.”

Blast from the past

Newsweek’s latest cover story on Giuliani, “Master of Disaster” (3/12/07), included some unflattering material about Giuliani’s private life and family, but when it came to the candidate’s public record as mayor, the story read like something from a time capsule, with language echoing Time’s “Person of the Year” story more than five years earlier:

On 9/11, with the president hidden from view, “America’s Mayor” steeled the country by speaking the terrible truth: “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear.” Now, with the war in Iraq in chaos and Al-Qaeda still unvanquished, he is pitching himself to Republican primary voters as the man destined to steady the party and the nation in a time of trial. . . . But when the vast majority of Americans look back on 9/11, they will, for the ages, think of Giuliani walking through ash and soot. He was honest, sad and strong; he was heroic. Alone that night, before going to bed, he read Churchill’s May 1940 speech to the House of Commons: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. 

Elsewhere in the magazine, senior editor Howard Fineman reinforced the mantra, calling Giuliani “a man with near-total name ID, a 9/11 hero’s aura—and, most valuable in these post-Katrina days, a reputation for administrative competence.”

Newsweek on Giuliani read as if almost nothing had changed, as if the intervening years had yielded no new information that might alter the image of Giuliani as the unmitigated hero of September 11.
But much had changed. Several official reports and two enterprising investigative reporters had uncovered facts that squarely challenged Giuliani’s reputation for “administrative competence.”

What’s more, Newsweek was well aware when it published its “Master of Disaster” paean that Giuliani was nothing of the sort, but chose not to tell its readers.

Cutting room floor

In 2006, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett and CBS’s Dan Collins coauthored Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, an investigative tour de force that raised grave questions about Giuliani and September 11. According to Barrett, in preparation for the “Master of Disaster” profile, Newsweek reporters interviewed him for an hour-and-a-half about Giuliani.

However, Barrett told Extra!, “None of the material about the Giuliani administration’s disastrous performance on 9/11 made it into the story; they only quoted me about Giuliani’s father.” Summarizing the points he’d covered with Newsweek reporters, Barrett told Extra!, “Giuliani almost certainly made the 9/11 tragedy worse.”

For instance, Barrett told us, Giuliani’s personal insistence that the city’s Emergency Operations Center be located in the World Trade Center’s Building 7 was “a disastrous decision with deadly consequences,” because once the building was damaged (it eventually collapsed), it “left no functioning command center” for emergency agencies to coordinate their work.

This decision was especially puzzling, said Barrett, because the World Trade Center (WTC) had already been the target of a 1993 terrorist attack. This was a key reason why top Giuliani officials, including his police chief and emergency management director, argued, against the mayor’s insistence, not to locate the headquarters in Lower Manhattan.
Ironically, the blunder that left the city without a unified command post and drove Giuliani into the city’s media-populated streets for a good part of the day was a major factor in cementing his image as the take-charge hero of September 11.

Failure of coordination

The loss of a fixed, unified command center was especially crucial, Barrett explained, because of other Giuliani administration failures: One, the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), an agency founded by Giuliani in 1996 to deal with crises demanding multi-agency coordination, utterly failed to coordinate fire, police and other emergency agencies on the day of the attacks.

On September 11, according to the 9/11 Commission, Giuliani’s OEM was not able to “overcome” a situation in which the FDNY and NYPD considered themselves “operationally autonomous.” The failure of the administration to bridge differences in the two often contentious departments, said the Commission, meant “the city’s police and fire rescue workers were not fully prepared to coordinate their work when terrorists struck the World Trade Center.”

But when Giuliani testified before the 9/11 Commission, he told the panel:

Part of my job description was to coordinate and supervise emergencies. The agencies that were the primary responders were all agencies that worked for the mayor. We had a format for how we did it, and part of that included my being there, so that I could coordinate and make sure everybody was working together.

The command situation was further compromised by the city administration’s failure to provide the firefighters with radios that worked properly and could communicate with police radios. The inadequate fire department radios were no secret; they had been publicly discussed for years, especially after they failed to perform properly during the 1993 WTC attack, shortly before Giuliani came into office. The 9/11 Commission noted this fact, while Barrett and Collins named names, fingering the Giuliani administration’s negligence of the long-standing security issue.

The faulty radios were so critical in 2001 because information available to police could not be communicated to firefighters. According to Barrett, unnecessary deaths resulted when firefighters were not privy to police warnings, based on information from police helicopters, that the towers were in danger of partial collapse. Unaware, firefighters continued their efforts in the towers instead of immediately evacuating. Similarly uninformed, according to Barrett, 911 emergency telephone operators were telling people in the towers to stay put, well after police warnings of possible collapse had been issued.

A fatal decision

But problems with the command center, the radios and interagency coordination might have been mitigated, said Barrett, but for another faulty Giuliani management decision on the day of the attacks.

With his command center out of commission, Giuliani took to the streets with top police commanders. At one point the mayor’s entourage traveled to a nearby location on West Street, near the Hudson River shore, where fire department brass had set up a temporary command post.

So far, so good: With police and fire department commanders together in one place, interagency communications problems could be managed. If the police and fire department brass had remained together, either on West Street or at another location, the tragedy might have been mitigated because, with police and fire department radios in the same place, the latest information could be relayed between the two departments.

But Giuliani made the fatal decision to go to another location, taking police brass with him and splitting the command centers. This left no way to communicate the latest information to the firefighters, who, making up the majority of the rescuers, would perish in far greater numbers than workers from other emergency agencies.

When Extra! asked why Barrett thought Newsweek and other reporters resisted citing his work, he was quick to say, “It’s not important whether they cite us,” pointing out “there are official reports calling the Giuliani myth into question.”

In addition to the 9/11 Commission report, citing administration failures from the incompetent OEM to the faulty fire department radios to the unwise decision to separate police and fire department commanders, Barrett said, “there are at least two other official reports available to reporters and the public.”

Barrett pointed to the McKinsey Report (2002), commissioned by the New York Fire Department to review the department’s response to the 9/11 attacks, and to a 2005 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The McKinsey Report was the first official inquiry to criticize Giuliani’s placing the emergency operations center at the troubled site that would become known as Ground Zero, and the failure of police and fire department command coordination.

NIST found that the collapse of WTC 7 likely originated on the building’s fifth floor, where the distribution system for diesel fuel reservoirs was housed. At least one of the fuel reservoirs had been built into WTC 7 to run Giuliani’s emergency command center, over the objections of fire department officials.

The mainstream media ideal

Giuliani’s appeal to mainstream pundits goes beyond media perceptions of him as a September 11 hero. The fact that Giuliani’s stated views tend to run conservative on “national security” and economic issues, and more centrist on so-called social issues like abortion and gay rights, makes him an ideal candidate to a like-minded pundit class (Extra!, 7–8/98).

Is it this bias that makes journalists turn a blind eye to the exemplary work of colleagues at another outlet, or even to ignore official sources, which they often rely on to a fault?

Or is it that after all these years they are just too invested in the myth, and correcting the record would be too embarrassing? Whatever might motivate journalists who know his record and refuse to let voters in on it, Barrett has some words of advice for reporters of good faith, now that Rudolph Giuliani has entered the national stage:

When the 9/11 Commission report came out, journalists, somewhat understandably, focused on what was said about George Bush. Now that Giuliani may be the next Bush, may be the next president of the United States, journalists should look at the reports from the 9/11 Commission, NIST and McKinsey with fresh eyes.

By Paul Craig Roberts

12 June, 2007

Countercurrents.org

The Bush/Cheney White House, which told the American people in 2003 that the Iraqi invasion would be a three to six week affair, now tells us that the US occupation is permanent. Forever.

Attentive Americans of which, alas, there are so few, had already concluded that the occupation was permanent. Permanence is the obvious message from the massive and fortified US embassy under construction in Iraq and from the large permanent military bases that the Bush regime is building in Iraq.

Bush regime propagandists have created a false analogy with ìthe Korean modelî in their effort to sell the permanent occupation of Iraq as necessary for Iraqís security. More than one half century after the close of the Korean war, US troops continue to be based in Korea, as they are in Germany more than six decades after the end of World War II.

The rationale for the US troops in S. Korea is to remind N. Korea that an attack on S. Korea is an attack on the US itself. The rationale for US troops in Germany disappeared when Reagan and Gorbachev brought the cold war to an end.

There is, of course, no similarity between Iraq and Korea. There was no insurgency in Korea and no attacks on US troops based in S. Korea once the fighting stopped. The presence of US troops in S. Korea has produced many protest demonstrations by South Koreans, but the US troops in S. Korea have had no exposure to combat since the war ended in 1953.

In contrast, the insurgency in Iraq continues to rage and could expand dramatically if Shiíites were to join the Sunnis in attacks on US forces. Most American military leaders no longer believe the insurgency can be defeated. Permanent occupation means permanent insurgency. Indeed, an attempt at permanent occupation could possibly unify the Arabs in a joint effort to expel the Americans.

The absurd analogy with Korea is so far-fetched that it raises the question whether the Bush/Cheney regime has entered a new, higher level of delusion. Bush cannot keep troops in Iraq permanently unless he intends to remain permanently in the White House. Even some Republicans in Congress are talking about beginning withdrawals of US troops in September. Republicans believe that if withdrawals do not begin, their party will be wiped out in the 2008 election.

The wild card is the neoconservatives and their long-standing alliance with Israeli Zionists. The neoconservatives still have a death grip on the discredited Bush regime. Jim Lobe (http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/) describes the extensive international organization that the neoconservatives have put into place for the purpose of orchestrating an attack on Iran.

A sane reader might wonder why neoconservatives would want to expand a conflict in which the US has failed. Surely, even delusional ìcakewalkî neoconservatives must realize that attacking Iran would greatly increase the threat to US troops in Iraq and perhaps bring missile attacks on oil facilities and US bases throughout the Middle East. An attack on Iran would further radicalize Muslims and further undermine US puppets in the Middle East. It could bring war to the entire region.

The point is that the neoconservatives do realize this. Their defeat in Iraq and Israelís defeat in Lebanon has taught the neoconservatives that the US cannot prevail in the Middle East by conventional military means. As I have previously explained, the neoconservativesí plan is to escape the failure of their Iraq plan by orchestrating a war with Iran in which the US can prevail only by using nuclear weapons. As previously reported, the neoconservatives believe that the use of nuclear weapons against Iran will convince Muslims that they must accept US hegemony.

The neoconservatives have put the elements of their plan in place. They have powerful naval forces on station off Iranís coast. They have convinced President Bush that only by attacking Iran can he prevail in Iraq.

The neoconservatives have rewritten US war doctrine to permit preemptive US nuclear attack on non-nuclear countries (http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hirsch.php?articleid=8263). They have demonized Iran as the greatest threat since Hitler. Neoconservatives have invented ìIslamofascism,î something that exists only in the neoconservative propaganda used to instill in Americans hatred of Muslims. The neoconservatives have dehumanized Muslims as monsters who must be destroyed at all costs. Recent statements by neoconservative leaders such as Norman Podhoretz read like the ravings of ignorant lunatics. Podhoretz has written Muslims out of the human race. He demands that their culture be deracinated.

Neoconservatives, convinced that a nuclear attack will bring Muslims to heel, are ignoring the likely blowback and unintended consequences of an attack on Iran, just as they ignored the likely consequences of their attack on Iraq. If the neoconservatives are mistaken in their assumption that nuclear weapons will cause Muslims to submit to the US, the consequences will be unmanageable.

The neoconservative Bush regime has got away with more than I thought possible, perhaps because most of Congress and the American public cannot imagine the degree of insanity that lies behind the Bush administration. Most Americans who have turned against the regime think that the administration is incompetent, that it jumped to wrong conclusions about Iraq, and that it mismanaged the war and will not admit its mistakes. As every reason Bush gave for the war has proven to be false, people see no point in continuing the struggle.

If Americans understood the enormity of the deception behind the invasion of Iraq (and Afghanistan) and the pending attack on Iran, Bush and Cheney would be impeached and turned over to the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, and AIPAC would be forced to register as a foreign agent.

Just as Goebbels said, some lies are too big to be disbelieved. It is this disbelief that is so dangerous. The inability of Americans to see through the Big Lie to the secret agenda allows the neoconservatives to escape accountability and to continue with their plot.

The neoconservatives also believe that nuclear attack on Iran will isolate America in the world and, thereby, give the government control over the American people. The denunciations that will be hurled at Americans from every quarter will force the country to wrap itself in the flag and to treat domestic critics as foreign enemies. Not only free speech but also truth itself will disappear along with every civil liberty.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review.

By Paul Craig Roberts - 09 June, 2007

Countercurrents.org

American soldiers have been fighting and dying in Iraq since 2003, and Americans do not know why.

All the reasons President Bush gave us for his war are false. Bush said he invaded Iraq “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.”

We now know that these were false claims. Disinformation about Iraq was produced by a special unit within the Pentagon run by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith. The unit operated outside the normal intelligence channels of the CIA and DIA. Its purpose was to create false intelligence to enable Bush to initiate war with Iraq.

Did President Bush know that the claims put into his speeches by his speechwriters was false?

Who instructed Bush’s speechwriters to incorporate known lies into the President’s speeches?

Why did Vice President Cheney, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of Defense all lie to the American people and to the entire world?

What is the real agenda?

Millions of Americans have come to their own conclusions about the reasons for Bush’s invasion: (1) Oil: the US government wants to hold on to power by expanding its control over oil, and Bush and Cheney want to reward their oil company cronies. (2) Military-security complex: Police agencies favor war as a means of expanding their power, and military industries favor war as a means of expanding their profits. (3) Neoconservative ideology: Neocons’ believe in “American exceptionalism” and claim that America’s virtue gives the US government the right and the obligation to impose US hegemony on the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East where independent Muslim states object to Israel’s theft of Palestine. (4) Karl Rove: Rove used the “war president” role to rescue Bush from attack by Democrats as an illegitimate president elected by one vote of the US Supreme Court. (5) American self-righteousness over 9/11 and lust for revenge.

All of these reasons came together to make a cruel war on an innocent people.

There may be other reasons about which we know not.

As it is now recognized that every reason for the war is false or illegitimate, the question is: why does Bush insist on persisting with a costly war, the express reasons for which are now known to be mistakes? There were no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to al Qaeda, and Bush has installed a puppet Iraqi government that cannot venture outside the heavily fortified and US protected “green zone.” The Iraqi government governs nothing.

War without cause is murder, not war.

That Bush persists with a war for which he can provide no legitimate reason indicates that there is a secret agenda that has not been shared with the American people. Are we experiencing the privatization of the US government by police agencies, the military-security complex, and the Israel Lobby?

That the American people and their elected representatives continue to tolerate a war that has killed and maimed thousands of their own soldiers, destroyed the infrastructure of a country, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and created 4 million refugees for no known reason raises serious questions about the morals of the American people.

Is the impotence of the peace movement due to the power of the Israel Lobby or have Americans become morally degenerate as commentators increasingly assert?

One indication would be the response of presidential candidates to the gratuitous and failed war. What we saw at the Republican presidential candidates’ debate on June 5 is inconsistent with the self-esteem of the American people. All of the leading Republican presidential candidates openly and nonchalantly endorsed using nuclear weapons against Iran unless Iran abandons its right to enrich uranium under the non-proliferation treaty, to which Iran is a signatory (unlike nuclear-armed Israel, India, and US puppet Pakistan).

What is moral degeneracy if it is not using nuclear weapons to murder masses of innocent civilians and spread deadly radioactivity over vast areas merely in order to force a country to do as we order? If this isn’t barbarism, what is barbarism?

Do the American people realize that the frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination are monsters who want to murder people who have done us no harm?

After five years of war that has achieved no noble purpose, no valid aim, indeed, no aim at all except perhaps Osama bin Laden’s aim of stirring up uncontrollable strife in the Middle East, how can Republicans cheer for candidates who preach a wider war and the use of nuclear weapons against defenseless people?

Is the approval lavished on Republican presidential candidates, who are willing to use nuclear weapons as means of terrorizing Muslim peoples, an indication that the American people have morphed into inhuman monsters?

If not, what does it indicate? Ignorant fanaticism? Paranoia? Blind hatred? The belief that no one is of any value but Americans?

For six and one-half years the Bush Regime has relied on coercion, intimidation, war, and threats of war. Diplomacy and good will have been shunned. The regime’s blatant warmongering has resurrected the nuclear arms race. China and Russia regard America’s drive for world hegemony with great alarm. China has put nuclear ICBMs on mobile platforms to increase their survivability in event of an American attack. Russia has developed new multi-warhead ICBMs, which can penetrate any known missile defense, and new cruise missiles that Putin says will be targeted on Europe if the US persists in its aggressive military encirclement of Russia.

An administration that resurrects the threat of nuclear Armageddon so that its cronies in the military-security complex can become still richer is evil beyond compare.

Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press).