Is it time for Bush to press the panic button?
"Gee, if this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot
easier...just as long as I am the dictator." -- G W Bush
I imagine that on Inauguration day, 2001, it must have looked easy. By
March of 2001, when the US Government started quietly informing other
governments that Afghanistan was to be invaded in October, it must
have seemed as if the long-laid plans to conquer the Mideast's oil
were moving along smoothly, unseen by an American public distracted by
stories of Gary Condit and Chandra Levy. Cheney's Energy Task Force
was pouring over maps of Iraq's oil fields, and the long-awaited
pipeline into the Caspian Sea was ready to start construction as soon
as there was a new government in soon-to-be-conquered Afghanistan.
Then came 9-11, right on time to anger the American people into
supporting a war against, well, nobody really knew, but danged there
was sure a lot of evidence left around to find that pointed to Arabs
as the culprits. Evidence that pointed in another direction was
classified by the US Government and the war was on, spurred on by
letters written to look like they came from semi-literate Arabs, but
containing Anthrax from a US Government lab.
But the first rumblings were already starting that the public was
doubting the rationale for the war. The case was far from made that
Afghanistan had anything to do with 9-11, especially since the named
hijackers came from other countries. And right on cue, a video tape of
Osama confessing showed up to put the doubts to rest. Except that the
tape turned out to be a fraud, and mistranslated at that.
At this point, the prudent man would have paid careful attention to
the anti-war protests thronging the streets of the world, and reasoned
that public support for the war was already dwindling, because faith
in the official story was already dwindling. But Bush must have been
getting some bad info. Bush himself has admitted that he does not read
newspapers, relying totally on his advisors to tell him what is
happening in the world. And those advisors, some of them veterans of
the first Bush Presidency, probably were seeing the world as they
wanted it to be, rather than as it really was.
History will probably record that the greatest single error the Bush
war machine made was to underestimate the impact of the internet. They
didn't understand the internet, or the internet culture, its
sociology, and most important, how access to the internet transformed
Americans from mere accepters of broadcast information into active and
critical participants in the information process. No doubt there was a
tendency to dismiss internet news sources as just hobbies run by
computer geeks for other computer geeks. Certainly nothing to worry
about. Blogs were not mainstream media, according to the mainstream
media. Bush and the NeoCons didn't really know what to do about the
internet, so wishful thinking made it unimportant. That was their
critical error, because while the polls kept showing more people were
still getting their news from the TV set than from computers, the
margin kept getting smaller. And, the polls didn't reflect the fact
that people watching the TV sets were not as mentally involved with
the information flow as internet users were. While fewer in numbers,
people who were getting their news from the internet were more
involved with that news... and they were talking to people they knew
who did not have internet feeds.
Thus it was that after the fall of Afghanistan, blogs carried the news
that the new puppet-President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and the US
special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, had both been part of
the special oil company working group which had gone before Congress
in 1998 recommending a change in the government of Afghanistan in
order to facilitate the construction of a pipeline. The US mainstream
media never made the connection. The blogs did, and word began to get
out. And as Americans began to learn that there were things happening
in the world that the TV set was not telling them, they started to
ignore the TV set and pay more attention to the internet news sources.
The government and mainstream media struck back against the blogs in
predictable fashion, warning parents that the internet was a haven for
child molesters and suggesting that only unfit parents would ever
consider the internet a trustworthy news source. Paid public relations
operatives were hired to dump obvious disinformation onto the net with
which to tar it, but a strange thing happened. Unlike TV, where those
who have contradictory facts are successfully isolated from all the
other viewers, the internet allowed readers who recognized the false
information for what it was to immediately present the facts to the
entire world. Unlike the tame and manicured lawn of TV, the internet
became a jungle where only facts survived for very long. The
government had no more luck controlling the internet than the old USSR
had controlling the Samizdat; the network of FAX machines that allowed
Soviet Citizens to learn the truth of what their government was doing.
All of a sudden, the ages-old mechanism of "what government says, the
people think" was broken. The mainstream TV networks had lost their
monopoly on the flow of information. The public was able to decide for
itself what was newsworthy. The high ground in the war for the minds
of America had shifted to the internet, and the US Government was
losing that war.
The internet gave the country a collective memory outside government
control. When Fox News ran a story blowing the lid off the largest spy
ring ever found in the US, run by Israel, pressure from Israeli
supporters forced Fox News to remove the story from their own web
site. This did not have the desired effect of erasing the story,
because the story was already on dozens of blogs on the net. Worse,
the Fox News removal underscored the dangerous degree to which Israel
was influencing the US mainstream media, forcing into the public
awareness what had previously been hidden.
Other stories, downplayed by the mainstream media, or in many cases
outright ignored, came to world attention on the internet. Typical was
the news that the very first people arrested on 9-11 were not Arab
terrorists, but 5 Israelis, later revealed to be Mossad agents,
covered as employees of a moving company whose owner abandoned his
business and fled to Israel. Americans began to realize that Israel
still had a massive spy ring across America, and more alarmingly, the
US Government was unable to do anything about it. As was admitted in
the Fox News story, evidence that linked the arrested Mossad agents to
9-11 was being classified by the United States Government. Banished
from the mainstream media, this information lives on by way of the
internet.
In the last several weeks, a strange phenomenon has started to happen.
Mainstream news sources have become aware that they can no longer
avoid reporting the unpleasant news stories, without their avoidance
itself becoming news on the blogs. As a result, blogs now drive the
mainstream news. The mainstream media have been maneuvered into having
to make a choice between continuing to support the agenda of their
owners/handlers, or saving what is left of their credibility by
running the stories that the public will be aware of anyway through
the internet.
While some media companies are still toeing the line, such as the
Sinclair Group that ordered its ABC Affiliates not to run the
Nightline Program listing the war dead, other mainstream media
outlets, including Nightline and "60 minutes II" are running stories,
such as the abuse of Iraqi POWs, which are clearly damaging to the
administration's war efforts.
Bush and the NeoCons are in a corner. The time when they can count on
the media to promote their particular point of view is fast running
out. The time when the media could successfully sell a particular
point of view is fast running out.
Bush may be thinking about hitting the "panic button".
What I refer to is, of course, a last ditch attempt to prop up his
sagging poll numbers and revive support for the wars of conquest by
staging yet another phony "terror" attack, framing it on the intended
invadee. Planes crashing into buildings is now passé, and repeating
that stunt would only underscore the utter uselessness of the millions
of dollars spent on increased airport security. So, scratch that one.
Maybe a truck with a bomb in it on the Golden Gate Bridge? Those San
Franciscans got lots of other bridges anyway and there are lots of
great places for the news crews to shoot from at the Presidio. Ah, but
maybe that's not scary enough. Not every city has a bridge, and Tacoma
survived the collapse of "Galloping Gerty" without major trauma.
Soooooooooo, mebbe a suitcase nuke welded to the keel of a cargo ship?
Not scary enough; most of the nation is landlocked. They don't worry
about cargo ships coming into town from far away. So, that leaves us
with everyone's favorite boogeyman, BIOLOGICAL TERROR!
If you are out to scare the crap out of people in order to enslave
them, germs make a great tool. But, you don't want to use a germ that
might possibly race out of control and kill off more of your gross
domestic product than the despot's plan allowed for. Things like that
look bad on a resume. That's where Anthrax comes in. Anthrax has a low
secondary communicability. That is, the spores will infect people, but
infected people will not infect other people easily. Anthrax is not
actually a terror weapon, it is a battlefield weapon, specifically
chosen to render an army ill but NOT to easily escape into the
surrounding population. Real terrorists, of course, would choose a
pathogen with a high degree of secondary communicability so that the
target population does the work of spreading it around. Fake
terrorists choose a pathogen that won't spread beyond its intended
target.
Anthrax has, of course, been bannered around by the mainstream media
as the "most likely terror weapon" for years now. Shots for it have
been mandated for the military, making the vaccine company rich, but
in truth, how does the US know that this one pathogen, out of dozens
that a real terrorist might use, is the one to protect the military
against? Let me repeat that: Out of all the pathogens available (and
more useful) to real terrorists, how does the US Government know that
Anthrax is the one pathogen the troops need protection from?
Makes you think, doesn't it?
And as the recent exposures of fake terrorism in Macedonia, coupled
with the admission that at least two of the Madrid bombers were
actually informants, it is clear that we all live in an age where
governments manufacture terror with which to try to control their
populations.
So, let's look at this from the NeoCon point of view. Their wars are
stalled, the world knows the wars are based on lies and deceptions,
and Americans are starting to resent spending their money and
children's blood to conquer the Mideast for the NeoCon's masters. They
NEED an event that will scare the people of the United States into
accepting whatever dictates they are handed. For the scare to work to
that extent, especially in a nation of skeptical taxpayers, the threat
must be seen as immediate, threatening them personally. A germ is such
a fear-maker because it cannot be seen. The population cannot know for
certain that it isn't present in the air around them. They cannot know
they are not breathing it in at that very moment.
Therefore, when Bush hits his panic button, look for a staged terror
attack involving a biological threat, possibly Anthrax (of which the
US has the largest stockpile in the world) to hit several cities at
once coast to coast. Bush and the NeoCons will announce an immediate
state of emergency, requiring suspension of all civil rights while
house to house searches are made for the "terrorists", who are "known"
to be in possession of more of these ampoules of germs. And because
the "terrorists" are using the internet to coordinate the attacks,
look for the government to shut down all parts of the internet that
are not running a commercial for some corporation.
I hope I am wrong. And frankly, if I am right I am not sure how Bush
and the NeoCons can make this work if the mainstream media has started
to split away from the PNAC agenda. But the Bush Administration has
shown a blind optimism as to what is really going on, preferring to
see the world as they want it to be rather than it is, and I would not
be surprised if a last act of desperation is forthcoming from this
President.
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