archived: 11 - 17 Apr, 2004 Back Next
JUNKIE EDITOR MICHAEL CARMICHAEL
(“Fried
Rice”)
Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor to the President, finally submitted to public cross examination about her knowledge of the events leading up to 9-11. This appearance came after a very long preamble. Rice persistently resisted the open invitation of the 9-11 Commission to testify in public, until the clamour for her testimony began to drive the President’s poll numbers down and to threaten both his chances of winning the election and hers of being reappointed to her post. Cast as the “fat lady” destined to sing the grand finale in the opera that is emerging around the 9-11 Commission, Condoleezza Rice spent the final days prior to her public interrogation engaged in intensive briefings and training sessions in order to present the best possible case before the hungry eyes and ears of the global audience.
In closed sessions in the days preceding her appearance, Rice rehearsed the crucial soprano lines: “strategic thinking”, “structural problem” and “no silver bullet”, which she draped around her like armour in her defence before the Commission. These lines might tend to confuse the illiterate who are incapable of reading the transcript of her testimony, which contains the explosive confirmations that the president knew well in advance of 9-11 that Al-Qaida would hijack airliners to use as guided missiles against the WTC and the Pentagon. Knowing all of this in advance, Rice, America’s National Security Advisor, did nothing directly to assist Richard Clarke, George Tenet or Louis Freeh to coordinate their findings and to focus on averting a terrorist catastrophe.
Seated at the President’s elbow and purporting to function as his National Security Advisor, Rice stated to the Commission that there was a “structural problem” in pre-9-11 America that did not allow the CIA and the FBI to coordinate via cooperation and information sharing. That confession is an extraordinary statement to make for the person who is serving as the National Security Advisor, whose job it is to coordinate intelligence from the various national security agencies to defend the people she serves. Structural problem, indeed! Rice embodies the problem in pre-9-11 America, a national security apparatus that failed to focus on the immediate threat of terror even after it had been warned repeatedly by the CIA, FBI and Richard Clarke.
Not only have the president’s poll numbers been driven steadily down through the erosion of public confidence in his ability to deal with national security crises, but also through events on the ground in Iraq. Condoleezza Rice’s crucial testimony was played out against a thundering backdrop of the massive guerrilla revolt in the deserts of Iraq against American policy. In the days immediately preceding Rice’s dramatic appearance, American forces had completely lost control of at least three cities in Iraq: Kut, Kufa and Najaf, that had fallen to the popular uprising commanded by the Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, who is the new cultural hero of post-Saddam Iraq.
The first American response to the Shia uprising had been to attempt to put down the revolt through the use of overwhelming force. Gun ships were moved into position and two five hundred pound bombs were dropped on a Mosque, killing all of its occupants, including over one dozen women and children. Named Operation Vigilant Resolve, more American soldiers had died in the days immediately preceding Rice’s moment in the limelight than at any time since the cessation of hostilities was prematurely announced from the deck of the aircraft carrier, Lincoln, on the first of May last year.
With the skies of Iraq blackening with the smoke of burning flesh, burning mosques and burning children, the darkness descended over Washington, as Rice reluctantly mounted the stage finally cornered into submission by her inquisitors. Former Senator Bob Kerrey, a member of the 9-11 Commission, made some pointed comments about the military mistakes being made by the Bush White House when he questioned Rice. Kerrey delivered some of the most incisive questioning on the Commission.
Although weeks ago, Rice had publicly stated that she longed to testify in open session, she had done so disingenuously and only as a means of arguing that she could not comply with the commission’s invitation to appear in one of its open sessions in order to preserve the constitutional safeguards of executive privilege and the separation of powers. These were exactly the same arguments used by Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis thirty years ago, when he refused to cooperate with the Ervin Committee. Unlike the Watergate investigation, the 9-11 Commission is not an investigative body. It is only empowered to find facts, to explore events and to compile a report that will be referred to the White House prior to its publication in the Federal Register.
Allegations of incompetence in the Bush White House have been swirling for months. The Bush White House was preoccupied with the weaponization of space, and the feckless reorganization of the US military around its peculiar plans to install strategic weapons in outer space. Lips had curled at the thought of a Bush White House more concerned about threats to our national security arising from alien civilizations in outer space or from a massive Cold War era missile strike than from the insidious nature of modern terrorism. The Clinton White House had no such pretensions for they had sought to neutralize the terrorists, and they had no grand plans for the weaponization of space. There was much to answer for from a National Security Advisor who had presided over the most atrocious act of terrorism in American history. Especially since this administration placed the vast majority of its emphasis on the military and its principal product - national security.
Schooled, groomed and prepped to the hilt for her stagy appearance, Rice made a totally gratuitous opening statement – that took up a considerable amount of very valuable time. After this deeply disingenuous prelude, she submitted to cross examination.
The Commission consists of both Republican and Democratic members. Predictably, the questioning broke down along party lines. The Republicans helplessly attempted to defend the Bush-Rice White House, and the Democrats capably attacked her rhetorical posturing. She fought back with her personality, with her command of the facts and with her considerable abilities of prevarication bolstered by adroitly disingenuous remarks honed through her academic career and her obstinate opposition to affirmative action, a legal concept of which she is the single most visible beneficiary. One must never forget that Rice has done exceedingly well for herself as the token harpy for the extremist right. She did her level best to defend the Bush White House, but the facts rained down upon her in a relentless cascade and, in the end, her regime lay in waste before her in tatters and in shards, in missed opportunities and in open disarray. Watch the numbers plummet in the next wave of polling.
After insisting that the Bush White House was focused on “strategic solutions” rather than “tactical” ones, which is a confession that they were incapable of defending America against a terrorist attack even if they knew that one was planned, Rice employed a broad array of rhetorical tactics to defend her tarnished record. She accused the Clinton administration of “swatting flies”, her way of belittling the attempts of the previous administration to control Bin Laden. She insisted that the Bush White House was tired of “swatting flies,” and they sought to end the threat of terrorism once and for all. Bob Kerrey pursued her on this point; by pointedly asking her what flies had she swatted prior to 9-11.
In her tear-drenched finale, Rice prevaricated. Rice was disingenuous. The intelligence flooding her desk that incriminated Bin Laden and Al-Qaida and alerted her to the potential of a major terrorist strike against the WTC and the Pentagon via hijacked airliners was not specific enough for her or the president to take any action to prevent. Why so? Rice retorted that “structural problems” had taken root in the national security apparatus that she and the president presided over, and these legal and cultural barriers to cooperation prevented America from defending itself during its hour of ultimate crisis on 9-11. In a rhetorical riposte against her questioners who urged her to make the entire contents of the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) of the 6th of August, 2001 public she argued that there had been “no silver bullet” that could have prevented the attacks – had even more specific intelligence been available. This PDB, invisible to most but not to her, would become the Banquo’s ghost of this horrible banquet for Rice.
Richard Ben Veniste beseeched her to make the title of the crucial PDB public, but she refused. She made a pointed comment that he had enjoyed exceptional access to the crucial document, a thinly veiled allusion to the fact that some of its explosive contents have already been leaked. Unimpressed, Ben Veniste pursued her. After receiving the PDB had the President discussed its contents with the Director of the FBI or the Attorney General? Rice revealed the explosive fact that after receipt of the crucial PDB, Bush did precisely nothing. She stated, “The president knew that the FBI was pursuing this issue. The President knew that the director of Central Intelligence was pursuing this issue. And there was no new threat information in this document to pursue.”
There it is. The President did nothing. This statement may ultimately seal the historical fate of the Bush White House for it condemns them to eternal incompetence in the face of the threat of Al-Qaida scarcely one month before the attack.
In her testimony, Rice confirmed the stunning concatenation of events that follow in this paragraph:
Bush had been told these things, and he had been retold these things on over one dozen separate occasions prior to 9-11. Rice, too, knew of these specific threats to the national security of America, yet on 9-11, she was preparing remarks to ballyhoo the Bush White House’s vision of the Star Wars-Strategic Defence Initiative for she had totally disregarded every single solitary syllable of these manifold reports about the imminent threat of Bin Laden aspiring to hijack airliners to use as guided missiles against targets from the WTC in New York to the Pentagon in Washington. Exactly one week before 9-11, Richard Clarke had written her a letter beseeching her to take action against terrorism, but she did not do one constructive thing about it. Nothing. Nada. Zip.
Cross-examined by Richard Ben Veniste and Bob Kerrey, Condoleezza Rice confirmed many of the darkest suspicions hovering over the Bush White House. She did so while reluctantly testifying to the contents of the fateful Presidential Daily Brief of the 6th of August, 2001. Ben Veniste had implored Rice to make the title of the classified document public, but she would not in the open session. However, the title of the document is now known: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike into US”. More damning, the document stated explicitly that Bin Laden was planning to hijack commercial airliners to strike against the US. Here was the “silver bullet” that Rice repeatedly denied existed. Bush received a briefing on this specific threat while on his annual extended vacation to his private residence, Prairie Chapel Ranch near Crawford, Texas.
After seeing the memo, or being given an oral report about the memo, but surely not reading the memo, the Commander-in-Chief returned to his holiday preoccupation of clearing brush and repairing fences on his fake ranch, and he forgot about the threat that was menacing America. A few days after the crucial briefing, the FBI and CIA learned that a group of suspicious subjects including three of the 9-11 hijackers were attending flight schools and taking lessons to fly airliners. Bush knew this, and Bush did nothing. Rice knew this, and Rice did nothing. Even after learning of this direct threat to homeland security, the two continued to prepare the nation to expend trillions of dollars on SDI, to protect us from phantom swarms of incoming ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads as well as to ward off any conceivable threat arising from extra-terrestrial civilizations that were hostile to the American way of life, liberty and the pursuit of junk food, SUVs, faith-based prisons and our peculiar forms of happiness.
The architecture of Rice’s testimony reveals some likely answers to some questions lingering over the extremely disaffected behaviour of Bush on 9-11. Why did he continue reading the story about the goat to the school children when he had been told that a plane had crashed into the WTC? He had forgotten the memo, or he wanted to forget the memo. Why did he say to himself, “That’s one terrible pilot,” when he allegedly saw the image of the plane crashing into the WTC. The official line is he was suffering from a mistaken recollection. Mistaken recollection, indeed. He was either incompetent or asleep at the wheel, which is the most charitable interpretation of the facts now available, or he is a partial amnesiac. For my part, I fear the latter (more in a later essay).
After encountering an explosive backlash in Iraq and the shockwave of incredulity surrounding the testimony of Rice, the US military has suspended its Operation Vigilant Resolve. US policy in Iraq is now in near total disarray, and I predict that Bush numbers will plummet in the next wave of polling.
Last week, a very brave woman, Sibel Edmonds, who had been a translator for the FBI told the Commission that Condoleezza Rice’s denial of prior warnings of 9-11 were an “outrageous lie.” In her coloratura performance of disingenuous prevarication, Rice did not disappoint those who were aware of Edmonds’ testimony.
Rice prevaricated. Rice was extremely disingenuous. Rice confessed to presidential incompetence. Rice fried.
JERRY LOBDILL
(“Krugman’s Globalization”)
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Paul Krugman’s op ed piece which Lobdill analyzes should be read first by clicking on this hyperlink: -- “One Good Month”
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True to form, Paul Krugman exhibits the most irritating and illogical aspect of his theory of economics in his April 9 Op-Ed piece, "One Good Month" in the New York Times.
Krugman consistently preaches the virtues of globalization from the point of view of a moralist. He really believes that we need to export US-generated capital, out-source our jobs to third world nations, and import products free of tariffs made by our out-sourced capital in order to raise the living standards of the poor in the third world. This philosophy, of course, was the hallmark of Clinton's presidency and the continuing mantra of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which Clinton founded.
The DLC today and the Clinton campaigns of the past were, in large measure, financed by large global corporate interests whose plunder is enabled by these globalist governmental policies. The motivations and the strategy of these interests have nothing to do with raising the third world's poor out of poverty, and, in fact, they only improve the lot of these unfortunates in the same degree and manner that the plantation system of the old South benefited the negro slaves. In fact, all the cost of this exploitation is borne by the US consumers and middle class labor force.
Krugman stubbornly refuses to see this obvious situation. Oddly, though, on other aspects of economics he is, in my opinion, an excellent analyst.
In his April 9 Op-Ed piece he indulges in an odd smoke and mirrors approach to avoid having to re-examine his views on globalization. He says that, yes, the creation of 308,000 jobs in March was a good thing, but that it wasn't good enough to warrant the crowing that is coming from Bush administration apologists and spinmeisters. Krugman invokes job creation statistics of the Clinton regime and points out that one month of good numbers in a long sequence of bad ones does not a recovery make--and far from it when you consider other factors.
But Krugman ignores one feature of the March 2004 data that is extremely significant. The jobs created were primarily in the service sector in nursing services. The best jobs have always been in the manufacturing sector, and in March, there were no new jobs created in manufacturing. The loss of manufacturing sector jobs over the last twelve years has been the cause of our present (unadmitted) depression. Krugman ignores the fact that the service sector cannot and will not become a new source of well-paying jobs that will get the US economy out of our depression and rebuild the middle class. In fact, Krugman adopts the Republican notion that a job is a job. This is a handy smoke and mirrors story that camouflages the ongoing Republican Party transformation of our society from one with the largest middle class in history to one which resembles 19th century America with a small middle class.
As much as Krugman disagrees with the Republican Party's view of the future of America he just can't shed himself of his idealistic and unrealistic notion that we have the excess resources and power to lift up all poor peoples of the world through unleashing the profit driven agenda of transnational corporations and globalization. The only way out of this economic disaster is to put an end to the globalists' dreams, be they high-minded and moralistic or based in simple greed.
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Jerry Lobdill is a retired research and development physicist who has spent the last 15 years studying economics and politics in an attempt to explain the economic disasters that have befallen the US since the 1980s. He has recently been a political organizer for the Howard Dean campaign and has written many letters-to-the-editor on political and economic issues which have appeared in many national papers. As a delegate to the Texas State Democratic Party Convention in 2004 Jerry will be a Howard Dean delegate for John Kerry.
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CATHY MOORE
(“Tell Dr. Jonas”)
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Cathy Moore is responding to Dr. Steven Jonas’ comments in Junkies Up(date) entitled, “On George Bush and Religion.” Jonas made an observation that Bush appoints officials based upon their Christian beliefs.
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Other appointments [demonstrating Bush’s Christian criteria] include Condi Rice, who leads prayer sessions and bible study on Air Force 1 and in the White House, & John Ashcroft, who clothes naked statues.
Other examples supporting theory are George's use of the word "Crusade" in his post 9/11 speech to Congress; and that Tony Blair is also a "born again.”
I believe that the stated goal of bringing "Western Democracy" to Iraq and the region is Newspeak for "Christianity."
Last Update: 03/23/2006