May Day Revisited

Five years ago, while we were dumbfounded and distracted by Mr. Bush putting on a costume and posing and bragging on a floating stage, Seymour Hersh put before us what was perhaps the most important story the American people have ever missed: that the intelligence that brought the United States into Iraq had been supplied via consciously duplicitous machinations within the new Office of Special Plans, under Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky, both former students at the University of Chicago of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, the Father of Neoconservatism.

In his New Yorker article "Selective Intelligence", posted online that first week in May 2003, Hersh revealed to us that many of the political appointees within the Defense Department were guided by Strauss’s underlying principle that "deception is the norm in political life":

"Robert Pippin, the chairman of the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago and a critic of Strauss, told me, 'Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgment and must rely on an inner circle. The person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King. If you have that talent, what you do or say in public cannot be held accountable in the same way.' Another Strauss critic, Stephen Holmes, a law professor at New York University, put the Straussians’ position this way: 'They believe that your enemy is deceiving you, and you have to pretend to agree, but secretly you follow your own views.' Holmes added, 'The whole story is complicated by Strauss’s idea—actually Plato’s—that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.'"

Did you catch that? "NOBLE LIES".

Because we can't handle the truth -- or they can't handle us knowing the truth.

Strauss, uncomfortable with people, believed it was necessary for the elite group of statesmen to maintain their leadership and control the masses.

And he taught that the greatest tool for control is FEAR. He also taught a simple, specific structure for that Fear.

First, there must be an Enemy - an Enemy that's big, and Enemy that's getting bigger and more dangerous -- in fact, the best is an Enemy that presents a build up to the great battle between Good and Evil.

Then, the people must be guided into structures that provide identity and rules of behavior, as well as insure obedience and loyalty: RELIGION and PATRIOTISM.

With those tools, the people are too busy wallowing in paranoia, self-righteousness, and the bipolar condition of outer arrogance and inner doubt, to ever see clearly what is actually happening in their world.

When there is also a media working with the same influences, owned by fewer and fewer entities, all fighting for greater audience share, ownership and power, then the leaders can proceed to further entrench their long-term dominance, both at home and abroad.

Which leads full-circle back to May Day 2003, when Americans took the bait, and celebrated the "Mission Accomplished". We just didn’t understand at the time that the Mission that was accomplished was not ending the threatening power of Saddam Hussein. It was getting us to swallow that bait: that we were the very good guys going after the very bad guys and saving the world -- in the name of God and Country.

When in fact, we were just the foolish puppets of arrogant and greedy liars.

Now, in 2008, we bear the consequences -- with polluted imports, wasteful contractors, impossible debt, lost jobs and homes, shameful dishonor, and a future of yet more kharma to come.

While the written word, carefully explaining in depth the truth that should have made us rise up and stop these Masters of Greed and Destruction, remains quietly shelved in Archives.

Now what?

Now that you know, we know, I know, we have a responsibility to pay attention.

We must study recent history, acknowledge mistakes, demand accountability, and respond strongly to the newest Ignoble lies - that Iran is a threat, that the primaries are going smoothly and our votes are counted, and that we will soon be rid of Mr. Bush and his ilk--

Listen, read, and talk about it – with any and every one, every day. Because it matters.

Then we May live to celebrate a better May Day.

***

Cartoon by Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune, 05/03/07.

Rocky's Activism Created by a Tethered Press and Uninvolved Citizenry

by Barbara Bellows-TerraNova, PDA/Utah
Posted by Progressive Democrats of America

Ross C. (Rocky) Anderson left office Monday January 7, 2008 as his second four-year term as mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, expired. He plans to move his activism into the private arena--Rocky joined the PDA advisory board in September 2007--and has plans to start a non-profit organization serving humanity. PDA extends our hearfelt appreciation to former Mayor Anderson for his courageous stand against the Iraq war and occupation and his leadership on impeachment.

Rocky Anderson's last day as mayor of Salt Lake City included his signature, as well as the signatures of Mimi Kennedy, Tim Carpenter, Ralph Nader, Daniel Ellsberg, Harry Belafonte, and other noted activists, on a letter delivered to Congressman John Conyers, Jr., Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, urging him to investigate the abuse of power by the Bush/Cheney administration.

It was the cherry on the sundae that has been Rocky's double duty as mayor and U.S. citizen/activist. While many in Salt Lake have responded enthusiastically to Rocky's call to protest Mr. Bush's visits to the city, others have been annoyed and have encouraged phone campaigns against the activist mayor.

If these people in Salt Lake are displeased with Rocky Anderson's involvement in protests against the Bush administration and the impeachment movement, they should look to the poor job done by a press that was held back by a few newly-consolidated owners receiving favors from that same administration. Either it was the press-or a public that didn't care to pay attention.

Things would surely have turned out differently if Americans had known, for example, about:

-the dismissal of the 1991 insider-trading investigation by the Security Exchange Commission, whose Chairman was old family friend and Bush Sr. appointee, Richard Breedan, into George Bush's sudden dumping of his Harken Oil stock for $848,000 before informing shareholders about the company's financial losses;

-the lack of an investigation into Cheney's insider-trading when he cashed out his stock options at Halliburton for $20 million before the stockholders were informed of the asbestos-injury lawsuits that came with Cheney's arrangement of the company's buyout of Dresser Industries;

-the fact that the riot that shut down the vote recount in Dade County, Florida, on November 22, 2000, was actually manned by Republican aides and operatives flown down from D.C. in Enron and Halliburton jets, whose success was celebrated at a Thanksgiving banquet where they were serenaded by Wayne Newton;

-the 2003 report by the EPA Inspector General stating that the White House altered the wording of the post-9/11 EPA statement on the air safety in Manhattan to completely change its meaning, resulting in the horrendous, debilitating medical problems, suffering and deaths of the courageous first responders, EMTs, cleanup crew, and other workers and residents of New York City;

-the sell-out of every federal agency's purpose with the appointments of industry lobbyists throughout;

-the Office of Special Plans, where appointees from the militarily aggressive Project of the New American Century (whose University of Chicago professor/mentor, Leo Strauss, taught that it was best to subdue the public with "Noble Lies") cherry-picked through discredited intelligence data to build up a threatening Saddam Hussein;

-the multi-level, vast series of irregularities in the 2004 election, which were immediately exposed in the December hearings in Ohio by Congressman John Conyers, Jr., and the Democratic minority, culminating in the January 6, 2005, objection by Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and Senator Barbara Boxer to the certification of the election. Conyers' report was inserted into the Congressional Record;

-the largest, record-breaking, donations to the 2005 Bush inauguration by the home-loan industry, whose unregulated business is now wreaking havoc across the world economy;

And that's just off the top of my head. I know. I picked up a book, and another, and another, watched PBS's "Now with Bill Moyers and David Brancaccio", did some Googling, and discovered that the Bush administration was not compassionate, was not conservative, and did not act according to moral values. Surely, this was not the President most Republicans thought they'd elected.

For me, that meant I was moved to begin emailing "Know Bush Facts" and performing Know Bush: Launching Facts That Shock and Awe, A One Person Patriot Act in October 2004 at the main downtown Salt Lake City library.

For Rocky, it meant a call for protest when George W. Bush came to town, giving extremely informative speeches about the specific wrongdoings of the administration, and, ultimately, the detailed development of the legal basis for impeachment of an administration which overstepped both the Constitution and international law and destroyed the moral ground of democracy and human rights the United States once maintained-thus making us all considerably less safe in this world.

If we do not have a free press which informs us, we must have citizens who care enough to pay attention to what our leaders do in our name. If we are unwilling to listen to those citizens who do speak up, then it takes citizens who have greater clout-such as the Mayor of a noted conservative city-to stand up and point out what we desperately need to know.

I, for one, am very grateful to Rocky and am proud that we, as a community, were invited by him to engage in a meaningful response to the kind of power-usurping, questionably elected executive officer that our Founders intended us to stop from ruining our country.

Thank you, sir, for taking it on, and taking the flack. I, for one, will continue to pay attention to your efforts, and I recommend that others do the same. I'm setting up a "Google Alert" today so I can keep up.

Know Bush Facts #23 A and #23B

Based on the belief that the truth shall set you free:

Know Bush Fact #23 A

Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld received a letter from Amnesty International dated JANUARY 10, 2002 (with copies also sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell, FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director George Tenet, and Commander in Chief General Tommy Franks), expressing concern over photographs showing Al-Qaeda suspects hooded while under guard by US troops, and pointing out that the United Nations Committee against Torture had condemned the hooding of suspects, and that such treatment is also covered by the Geneva Convention.

To research/verify, Google "Rumsfeld +hooding."

And #23 B

On September 11, 2001, Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was not in Washington D.C. He was out of the country with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and William Luti, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Plans and Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, and four other like-minded advisors. They were "busy on unrelated missions in Europe and the Middle East."

Upon their return, Donald Rumsfeld commissioned a team, headed by that same Douglas Feith and William Luti, to scan and sort already-analyzed documents from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies to consider possible interpretations and angles of analysis that these agencies may have missed. Much of the information scanned had already been deemed "not credible" by the experienced intelligence agencies.

Eventually Rumsfeld’s team came to be named The Office of Special Plans.

Staffed by a tight group of like-minded neo-conservatives who advocated regime change in Iraq, the Office of Special Plans displaced the CIA and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency as Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al-Qaeda.

It was "the stovepipe" - a means of funneling upward directly to the White House and National Security Advisor selectively chosen intelligence to serve the ideological ends of the "neo-cons" in the Bush administration.

"They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together,"

wrote retired Pentagon Middle East specialist, Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office of Undersecretary for Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

She found the work of the Office of Special Plans to be "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the Congress."
Which resulted in Congress giving Bush the authority to use military force against Iraq.

To research/verify, Google "Rumsfeld +Office of Special Plans".

- May 9, 2004