Wars are not waged by those who have to fight them. Those who fight wars know too well their terrible costs. Wars are waged by those who profit from them with minimal or no risk to themselves. War is big business and it is immensely profitable for a select few who are insulated from the effects of war’s environmental impacts and social costs. War never serves the interest of working class people. They are the result of menacing forces of greed and power masquerading as benevolent government, insulating us from contrived acts of terror. They are in fact anything but munificent.
Never is the trait of deceit more treacherous than when it leads to the loss of precious innocent life. It was obvious from the outset that George Bush lied about the pretext for war with Iraq. His man servant, Colin Powell, sold the idea to the world in his infamous speech before the United Nations. It was widely known that Saddam Hussein had little war making capabilities; and he certainly did not pose a credible threat to the United States, Israel, or any Middle Eastern Country. U.N. weapons inspectors such as Scott Ritter made this fact known long before the invasion began. Saddam Hussein was the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Boogey Man necessary to sell the American people on Bush’s illegitimate invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Likewise, Osama Bin Laden was on the C.I.A. payroll. And like Saddam Hussein, he was another Boogey Man created to sell the American people on the invasion of Afghanistan. Based upon the evidence, it is unlikely that Bin Laden or any other Muslim had anything to do with the events of September 11. That, too, was in all probability another cruel hoax perpetrated on the American people by those who stood to make billions of dollars by plundering Afghanistan and Iraq. It also explains why so little effort has been spent finding Bin Laden, the supposed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
The events of 9/11 were, I contend, an inside job. The findings of the 9/11 truth commission defy the laws of physics and ignore the most relevant physical evidence. They are a work of phantasmagoric fiction that requires us to believe the fantastic—that tall buildings can fall at free fall speed within their own footprint, for example. Or that small fires can melt steel pillars and cause massive sky scrapers to collapse. But that is another story.
What is beyond dispute, however, is that the events of 9/11 set off a chain reaction of cause and effect in the Middle East. Soon after the U.S. bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, Unocal (recently merged with Chevron) had established a major oil pipeline through Afghanistan—a territory ruled by war lords hostile to U.S. imperialism. Soon the money from the plunder of Afghanistan was filling the corporate coffers with black gold. What is the loss of a few thousand innocent civilians when there is money to be made? Let them live in the Stone Age we have created for them.
I fully understand what a profound and potentially shocking statement that is to those who have been deceived by the ‘official’ history of the United States. It would require that members of the Bush regime were knowingly complicit in the murder of thousands of innocent U.S. citizens. It might even require that they actually orchestrated those events as a pretext to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, even though neither country had anything to do with 9/11. As testimony to the commercial media’s proficiency at deception, forty-two percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Never mind that there isn’t a shred of evidence to substantiate that claim. It is a matter of faith. When Bush and his minions repeat those stale lies over and over and the media repeatedly broadcasts them, the ill informed can be made to believe anything. The bigger the lie, the more readily it is believed. The official version of the events of 9/11 could not take root in the public conscience without the complicity of the corporate media. Make no mistake: the commercial media is a vital and potent component of the Pentagon’s superb propaganda machine.
In reality, the neocon agenda of global domination is the blueprint for the events of 9/11, as revealed in the ‘Project for the New American Century’ and ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’. Both of these revealing documents are online for public perusal. Reading them is imperative to understanding not only America’s veiled history, but also current events. They offer considerable insight into future military interventions. It is no irony that these documents, which call for regime change in Iraq and a host of other countries was authored by the very same people who are serving in the current Bush regime. They are the same people who stand to benefit financially and politically from the plunder and occupation of Iraq, as well as the rest of the world.
Subsequent to the events of 9/11, the neocon brain trust declared that a catalyzing event was needed to galvanize the American people to back a plan of U.S. global domination—a New Pearl Harbor. On the morning of September 12, 2001, Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, called for an immediate attack on Iraq, and Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney repeatedly referred to the events of 9/11 as “an opportunity.” George Bush declared that he “hit the trifecta.” The Bush people could hardly contain their glee. These statements of fact reveal much about the kind of people who are running the country. It should also make clear that in America there is no separation of commercial media and state—the two are as inseparable as newlyweds on a honeymoon.
As unthinkable as it be to some, the wanton murder of American citizens by the government is not without precedent. America’s dark history is brimming with examples. Two well documented cases illustrate my point. In 2000 Robert Stinnett published a book entitled ‘Day of Deceit: the Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor.’ In his book Stinnett paints an ugly picture that lead up to the American entrance into World War Two. Citing extensively from thousands of previously classified documents, Stinnett demonstrates that Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew about the invasion of Pearl Harbor a year before it happened. The newly declassified Pentagon documents reveal that U.S. naval ships and air craft were ordered to stand by and allow the attack to happen. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was provoked by a popular American president who allowed American military personnel to be slaughtered by foreign invaders. Roosevelt’s tactic was wildly successful. The day before the attack only sixteen percent of Americans polled favored entry into the war. The following day, more than a million men signed up for the military. In effect, as commander-in chief, Roosevelt presided over a treasonous act of murder against his own military. But, like so many other events in American history, none of this is revealed in the ‘official’ version of written history. These events bear an uncanny similarity to the events of 9/11.
More recently, in the prelude to the U.S. entrance into the Viet Nam war, a phantom attack on two U.S. destroyers cruising the Gulf of Tonkin was staged by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. The bogus attack occurred early in August, 1964. That evening President Lyndon Johnson went on television giving the grim details of the non-attack. Later, however, it was revealed that navy commander James Stockdale flew cover over the Gulf of Tonkin that night. Stockdale disclosed that U.S. ships were firing at phantom targets—targets that didn’t exist. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident that drew the U.S. into the quagmire of Viet Nam simply didn’t happen. Johnson, as presidents so often do, lied to the American people. The result was the rapid passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was the sole legal basis for the Viet Nam War. As a result of Johnson’s lie, three million Vietnamese people and fifty eight thousand U.S. soldiers died.
The neocons, with their corporate handlers and their equally complicit counterparts, the neoliberals, are in fact a shadow government that runs America. They have names like Bush, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice, Kristol, Dulles, Kennedy and Rockefeller; Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, General Electric, Unocal, Shell Oil and Boeing. Democracy, freedom, liberty, organized labor, peace, and social justice are their avowed enemies. Their crooked, talonous fingers dig deep into the profits of war, while simultaneously clutching the broken spines of the moldering corpses they produce. They are the grim reapers of unrepentant capitalism run amok.
George Bush got his anxiously awaited war on Iraq. Halliburton, Bechtel, and other corporations are raking in billions. It is easy money for the war profiteers who risk nothing and gain everything. It is our tax money that is subsidizing their obscene profits. Layers of our civil liberties were quietly repealed. It is our sons and daughters who die for the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Halliburton and Bechtel. They are America’s shadow government—the unseen hands pulling the strings of atrocity. Someone has to tell our children what they are dying for. This is George Bush’s noble cause.
Unless we stop them, their grim work is not done. It will never be done until there is nothing left to defile. There will be countless millions more corpses, broken lives and torn families to follow. Even more ghastly attacks on unwitting American citizens will be fabricated; and fools will play along with them. The flags will come out and Nationalism will spread like a lethal virus across the land. Dissenters will be denounced and imprisoned. These acts of contrived terrorism will be the pretext for the invasion and occupation of other sovereign nations. They will be the pretext for feeding the war machine the blood and the bones of our babies. You see, there are terrorists lurking in high places. They are in the Whitehouse. They are the enablers in Congress who serve the corporate interest, rather than justice. They are hidden behind the beckoning smiles of news anchor men and anchor women. They operate in the dark smoky recesses of corporate board rooms, out of public view. Their tentacles reach into every aspect of our lives. They lie concealed in the stinking breath of the Rush Limbaughs of this world in their awful ability to persuade. They are not on our side.
We must resist them at all cost. We must inform ourselves. Speak truth to power. Let them know that we see through their masks. Do not accept this. Organize. Organize. Organize.
Charles Sullivan is a furniture maker, photographer, and free lance writer residing in the eastern panhandle of West Virgina. He welcomes your comments at [email protected]
