<h3>A State of Terror Too</h3>

George W. Bush's State of Dreaming

For the innermost decision | That we cannot but obey | For what's left of our religion | I lift my voice and pray: | May the lights in The Land of Plenty | Shine on the truth some day.

Leonard Cohen | Land of Plenty

...the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.

Rebuilding America's Defenses | Project for a New American Century

South Africans, schooled in the politics of state-sponsored terror, the "divide and rule" stratagem, and fortified by healthy doses of pragmatism and skeptism, remained unmoved by sentiment surrounding 9-11 commemorations this past Thursday. The Bush regime's despicable program of acquiring oil and other resources by invasion and occupation has ensured the evaporation of goodwill towards the United States and the growth of a rampant and vituperative anti-Americanism.

Thursday's ceremonies, replete with the nauseating schlock that shrouded the air like dust from the fallen towers throughout the year following their collapse, carried with it the requisite contrived hype designed to move a veritable library of recently-published books, documentaries and films. Among the latter, we find the dubious DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, designed to fit President George W. Bush's campaign for re-election in 2004.

Many people, however, opted for contemplation this year. Such quiet reflection evinces a dawning realization of the exploitation of the event, the shameless promotion of a global reign of terror and an ad hoc hegemony by a cynical state apparatus. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's statement did little to undermine this view: "Let this day always be a reminder ... why we must fight and win this global war on terror."

The U.S.A.'s grip on that elusive commodity, corporeal security, is absolute. It has never been in doubt. With the largest defense budget the world has known, the ability to blow the globe apart many times over, and a globally pervasive surveillance and policing capacity, the United States cannot be defeated militarily or by random acts of terror.

Yet, since September 11, 2001, the Bush regime has unstintingly, fallaciously, and for its own selfish ends, linked its future to national security concerns.

9-11 was a tragic, spectacular event, an attack on American life and property by, in the main, Saudi nationals. There is, however, no evidence to suggest a sustained terror campaign being waged against the American people or their government. Much as a single advertisement promoting a product in a magazine is a costly and wasteful exercise, a single attack on American soil would constitute a campaign destined to collapse at the outset. Two years ago, the only things to collapse were the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Nor was the country's grip on material security loosened by 9-11. Any stated weakness is mythic, in keeping with the scripted charade we are watching play itself out wherever Bechtel, Halliburton, multinational oil companies and vested-interest groups and think tanks have an interest.

In terms of lives lost, it can be argued that 9-11 was not the most devastating terror attack carried out on American soil. The April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, killed 168 people. 2,800 people died in New York, Washington D.C. and in a Pennsylvanian field on September 11, 2001. Man for man, the nineteen hijackers aboard the four airliners each accounted for 147 lives, falling far short of the indivdual tally of the American from Oklahoma City, still the most lethal terrorist the United States has ever known.

We who live elsewhere know this. But body bags and statistics mean as little to us as they do to our political leaders. The symbolism of the event counted for more than the lives extinguished. It is that symbolism that is being abused. Just as we do not trust statistics, we know that the Bush regime's ability to "fool all the people all the time" is overrated. There are as yet no real and imminent external threats to U.S. hegemony. Where the United States' leaders would have us see "terrorists", we see only the administration of George W. Bush.

Bearing in mind Shakespeare's observation "Security gives way to conspiracy" (Julius Caesar), attention needs to be paid to demands for full, open investigations into 9-11, anthrax, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the duplicity of America's military-industrial leaders. The maxim, "The enemy is never without, always within", holds good. There is an author behind every scripted tragedy. More, to sustain a myth, one needs a director. It is he and all those supporting him who must be shown to be making executive decisions that kill Americans and tens of thousands of non-U.S. citizens.

America's actions following 9-11 have elevated to center stage something far greater than material security. Security, in name, has given way to conspiracy in shameless practice. Since his injection into the White House by the United States Supreme Court, George W. Bush has built his presidency on conspiracy in the name of national security. Until he is shown up for the fraud he is, he and his cohorts will continue to exert inordinate influence on U.S. foreign policy for decades to come, whether in or out of office (with or without the help of 'revolving door' friends such as the Carlyle Group and Halliburton).

If the congressional report into the 9-11 massacre denies its readers access to information spelling out a U.S.-Saudi plot devised and implemented by the National Security Council, it delivers enough to hang minor players, the U.S. security apparatus. Given detailed briefings by 11 countries and having tracked many of the operatives as they went about their training over two years in the United States on visas issued in Saudi Arabia, the FBI had all the information needed to stop the operation, first proposed in 1996.

The DoD had more than adequate opportunity to scotch its execution from the same Andrews AFB where, to now, as many as 1,325 wounded U.S. troops en route to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington or the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda have been stretchered from C-17 transports. (A further 4,500 have been shipped back from Iraq suffering mental and physical ill health.)

Even with excisions, it should be apparent to all but the willfully blind that George W. Bush and his cohorts had all the intelligence they needed to appreciate just how their allowing of such an attack (the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon) could profit them and, by extension, the United States in the long term.

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney sums up the administration's approach to adversity: "...the Good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would normally not choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

For financial gain (which equates to power), the American security edifice (subject to extraordinary bureaucratic frustration in the months preceding the hit), was ordered to stand down for a day and 2,800 people were sacrificed at the slippery altar of untold millions of barrels of oil by avaricious, unscrupulous representatives of a military industrial complex gone mad.

Later that day, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, scribbling furiously in his notebook, made a point of including Saddam Hussein's name among those destined to find themselves on the receiving end of long-planned terror offensives. George W. Bush, a glove-puppet operative, then tucked his treason into his Bible and implemented the Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) Plan A.

This blueprint for global domination first saw the light of day as Rebuilding America's Defenses (download) and had been bubbling on a backburner since 2000, waiting to be lent luster by the imperious National Security Strategy of 2002.



Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there facin' the hill. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Bob Dylan | License to Kill

While Bush Inc. does not have the wherewithal to impose outdated notions of empire on the world, it does have the will and the deterrent power of its formidable arsenal to destabilize key states and regions.

Presently, as European countries scrabble for oil in the Libyan desert, the Bush Gang fights Russia for supremacy in the Caspian Basin and more established Middle Eastern oil markets. Traditional business partners Saudi Arabia are playing both off against each other. They need to. Backed by a myopic electorate, Bush is plunging Iraq into a designed chaos and permanent occupation, setting it up as a future oil supplier and springboard for a Saudi takeover.

Increasing tension between the two former allies in terror has been exacerbated by the Saudis exploiting Bush's increasingly desperate, poorly crafted attempts to quash evidence of U.S. complicity in 9-11 and its leading role in the acts of mass terror following it, i.e. the illegal invasions and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Having seen the Taliban pay for their refusal to accept U.S. conditions for piping oil from former CIS states and the Caspian Basin to the Indian Ocean (an attack sketched by the Clinton administration, fleshed out by Bush's team and placed on his desk four days before the Twin Tower attack), the Saudis need all the leverage they can lay their hands on.

With a potential U.S. occupation force already in place in their country and 130,000 troops across their northern border, the desert-kingdom co-conspirators behind 9-11 need the attentions of the U.S. and its president's father, George H. Bush (Saudi and South Korean bagman for the Carlyle Group), like they need a hole in the head. The Russians offer them an air of respectability George Bush Sr. does not possess.

The groundwork for PNAC Plan B, a fallback, was already well under way on September 11, 2001. United Sates oil companies cling to the West African coast like maggots to a cadaver, the vanguard of earth movers gouging the earth for gold, diamonds, uranium, timber and coltan. Pillaging African oil from Equatorial Guinea, the Niger Delta (where they are well-placed to head off the southern surge of Islam), Gabon and Angola (where 90 percent of the country's oil is pumped from the secessionist Cabinda enclave), U.S. interests effectively divide a world charted by the Pentagon's New Map.

The United States all but has West Africa in its pocket. Should the Middle East fall to the U.S. military, Bush's successors will hold East Africa and European interests in North Africa in a vise. The notable exclusion of South Africa from the Oil Belt (or The Gap, as the war-makers choose to call it) makes it increasingly likely it will see a return to its colonial roots as a victualling station for armies on the move northwards and to the Chain of Steel strung across the East.

The dollar, controlling global oil, will hold sway over the Euro and the Yen.

Millions are in little doubt that George W. Bush was aware of the attacks planned for 9-11. Nine months after his injection into the White House through the manipulation of the democratic process, the presidency of George Bush Senior's son was moribund. Osama bin Laden, the scion of a family extremely close to the Bushes, allegedly gave George's career as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces a shot in the arm.

A desperate Taliban, urged by circumstance and the US security services, were offered a Saudi hit squad of convenience and the opportunity to make a statement. Earlier in the year, U.S. government representatives had threatened, "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." Facing occupation, they opted for the pre-emptive strike.

Whether or not bin Laden was working for Western, Saudi or Taliban interests, remains to be seen. While hundreds have been incarcerated at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, bin Laden and Mullah Omar (identified as the masterminds behind the attack in less time than it took George W. Bush to respond to news of it) have deliberately not been brought to book with the lightning speed that characterized the identification and arrest of minor players remaining alive after September 11, 2001.

Today, looking remarkably relaxed and towards the future, bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, stroll among the flower bedecked mountains of Northern Pakistan, issuing hollow threats. In New York, Baghdad, Kabul and hundreds of cities and towns around the world, grieving families mourn their dead.

If, over two years, anything has been demonstrated beyond doubt, it is the selective ability of the U.S. security apparatus to apprehend those they purport to seek. In this instance, those arrested were the minions, the 9-11 fall guys. All had been under intense surveillance for years. None were arrested before completing their mission. Members of the British SAS at Tora Bora, having trapped Osama bin Laden, experienced first-hand the obfuscatory meddling of politicians who allowed bin Laden and Mullah Omar to slip to sanctuary in much the same way Saddam Hussein has done.



Goodness hides behind its gates | But even the president of the United States | Sometimes must have | To stand naked.

Bob Dylan | It's Alright Ma

Despite overwhelming evidence of a negligence transcending the criminal, the Bush regime's hold on the reins of global power has never been tighter.

Indulging a childlike petulance, U.S. citizens remain under a spell cast by a corrupt and belligerent leadership while they came to terms with the graphic symbolism inherent in an unknown force pulling down of the pillars of the temple. In a tragic, ironic twist, and much like the white supporters of the apartheid state (see A State of Terror), Americans seem incapable of accepting their leaders' complicity in terror. Much like those who bolstered the apartheid regime, American citizens have more to fear from their leadership cabal, an elite that benefits from perpetuating their fear of inadequate security, than anyone or anything else.

The threat this elite poses to American security is as real as the fear it has sown among the American people.

9-11 has been unashamedly abused to further the arguments, agendas and portfolios of all who attach to it any meaning beyond that evident in the tragedy itself. In keeping with PNAC policy dictats, draconian 'pre-emptive' security legislation designed to prevent the possibility of such attacks recurring, allow far more devastating, unprovoked attacks on states or persons deemed enemies by American politicians interpreting intelligence as they wish.

Is it any wonder the world chooses to despise the United States rather than empathize with it?

Such legislation, contradicting the spirit of the Constitution of the United States, directly affects American citizens and all those living outside the country's borders. The outsourcing of torture, detention without trial, invasive surveillance by electronic, digital and other means, an increase in 'visible policing', never-ending war, the dissemination of misinformation through a pliant media, and the perpetuation of a mythic threat show Americans to be perhaps more insecure today than at any time in their country's history.

That Americans fail to see through the so-called War on Terrorism continues to amaze South Africans. We watch agog as Bush's opportunistic inhumanity, driven by his Global Transaction Strategy, deprives people around the world of their human rights in the name of, you guessed it, security. Tin pot dictators, smaller in stature than the U.S. president only by virtue of his obscene war-making budget, are stepping up campaigns of terror against their own people. Hundreds of thousands are dying as a direct result of the Bush Doctrine.

Through pre-emptive war, a blatant disregard of international peace and law-enforcement agencies, the suspension of fundamental human rights, the trashing of democratic values and processes, conspiracy and disinformation, security legislation and a manufactured state of domestic terror, criminal negligence and perhaps treason, the United States government has turned a spectacular, extraordinary tragedy into an iconic fallibility of convenience it continues to use to its financial, strategic and treacherous advantage.

We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.

National Security Council | The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

[First posted at Open Source Politics]