AFTERWORD: 2004: NOT AN ELECTION, BUT A CIA COVERT OPERATION
The Bush operation in Iowa had all the smell of a CIA covert operation. ... Strange aspects of the Iowa operation [included] a long, slow count and then the computers broke down at a very convenient point, with Bush having a six point bulge. ... Manchester Union Leader, February 24, 1980. (Tarpley and Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, p. 343.)
Do you think that the electoral system in the United States is without flaws? Need I remind you of how their elections were held in the United States? -- Vladimir Putin, December 23, 2004.
The November 2004 election was the first presidential contest to be held in the US after 9/11. The rogue networks of the US invisible government, whose power had been enormously enhanced by their successful execution of the 9/11 crimes, were not inclined to tolerate any changes in the White House which might dilute their power, however minimally. Those who had presided over 9/11 and the subsequent cover-up had to remain in power, partly as a guarantee that no September criminals would be thrown to the wolves, and partly to ensure that the neocon attempt to organize the world through a war of civilizations would not be de-emphasized, but escalated.
Other countries expressed their consternation over the cold coup that gave Bush a second term not so much by protesting the blatant vote suppression and vote fraud, but rather by dumping the US dollar, provoking a dollar crisis which made it clear to all that it was the last days of Pompeii for the moribund US currency. As the dollar reached 1.35 to the euro, the handwriting on the wall presaged the jettisoning of the greenback as the residual reserve currency of the world. This 1.35 figure was also a powerful argument that the entire neocon effort to shore up the US imperial position after 9/11 had been a failure. Since the dollar (including the London eurodollar and the various xenodollars) was the nerve and fist of Anglo-American world domination, the response of the US-UK finance oligarchs and of the intelligence agencies which they control was a sudden frenzy to increase the looting rate of the world economy in a bid to give the US currency some hope for survival.
One feature of this financier frenzy was the attempt to inflict yet another strategic humiliation on the Russian Federation, this time by orchestrating a pro-NATO "people power" coup on the streets of Kiev in the Ukraine. This effort to extend the claws of NATO so far into the Russian defensive glacis revealed US intentions as openly hostile, with blunt warnings and inflammatory propaganda campaigns on both sides. (Glacis: a smooth slope or apron of a fortification.)
After their attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and after blustering their war threats all through 2004 against Iran and Syria, the neocon fascist madmen were evidently contemplating the absolute zenith of suicidal folly: a confrontation with the Russian Federation, a thermonuclear power which, as Wolfowitz, Brzezinski, and their cliques were well aware, was the only one which retained the unquestioned ability to annihilate the United States and most of its people within a few hours. Every previous case of neocon lunacy was eclipsed by this new outburst of insanity. These events were indicative of what life would henceforth be like in the US under the rule of the 9/11 invisible government networks.
NOT AN ELECTION, BUT A CIA COVERT OPERATION
By all indications, if an honest vote count had occurred, Bush would have lost the Electoral College and very likely the popular vote as well. Every device of vote suppression, voter intimidation, vote fraud, ballot-box stuffing, e-tampering, electronic hacking, and vote stealing was cynically thrown into action by the CIA-Bush machine. Kerry had repeatedly promised his supporters that he would fight to guarantee that every vote be counted. In the hours after the polls had closed, Edwards was sent out with a short speech saying that Kerry would not capitulate, and that "every vote would be counted." But the Kerry campaign crassly reneged on this promise by conceding the election on Wednesday, November 3.
A serious candidate would have announced comprehensive legal actions to seize and impound the electronic, punch card, and optical scan voting machines which had so obviously been rigged in favor of Bush with a view to proving in court that they had been tampered with. Instead, Kerry rushed to surrender, and it was left up to the Green party and the Libertarian Party to demand an Ohio recount and pay for it with $125,000 of their own money. Kerry, in spite of his war record, proved to be a coward. He had won the election, but he would not fight to save the country from four more years of the Bush gang.
On the Thursday after the vote, Greg Palast contributed a useful article entitled "Kerry Won," which published at TomPaine.com. Here Palast argued that Kerry was the rightful winner in Ohio and New Mexico, among other states. The limitation of Palast's argument was his preponderant stress on "spoilage," the factor which causes about 3% of all votes cast in the US to be thrown out or otherwise invalidated. Spoilage is of course concentrated in low-income, black, and Hispanic polling places which usually vote heavily Democratic. All of this is of course true as far as it goes, although Palast too exclusively focused on these traditional, structural, forms of vote fraud, which have been typical over the past 40 years since William Rehnquist got his start harassing Hispanic voters. But 2004 was not your father's vote fraud. It was a very modern, hi-tech version which could not have been carried out without the full involvement of secret intelligence agencies. In other words, the 2004 vote was stolen by a conspiracy involving the Bush machine and the intelligence community, and it is this question of a grand offensive conspiracy involving spooks which appears to be, as usual, the sticking point for Palast.
During the afternoon of election day, anti-Bush sentiment was buoyed by leaks of exit polls showing that Bush was losing. Exit polling was conducted by Edison Media Research in cooperation with Mitofsky International on behalf of the National Election Pool, the name currently given to the consortium of television networks and the Associated Press which in the past has been called News Election Service, Voter News Service, etc. According to one press report, "the major networks and the Associated Press began receiving exit-poll data in the early afternoon but pledged in advance not to use it until all the polls had closed in a particular state -- even though such information, which is hardly conclusive, routinely leaks out on the Internet. Slate.com and the Drudge Report touted in mid-afternoon early exit polls showing Kerry with a one-percentage point lead in Florida and Ohio as well as significant leads in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. ... NBC's Tim Russert noted that Kerry was winning six in 10 independent voters in Ohio. CBS's Ed Bradley noted that Kerry "won women, he won men, he won first-time voters and he won the independents in New Jersey." (Washington Post, November 3, 2004)
As these reports were transmitted through the blogosphere, the impression grew that Bush was on his way to defeat. In an article written in the late evening after the polls closed we read that "according to National Election Poll interviews of voters leaving the polls, Bush appeared to be in a real fight to hold his presidency and avoid joining his father in being swept out of office after a single term. President George H. W. Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992 to Bill Clinton, and the current president systematically sought to avoid the mistakes he believed cost his father that election. But judging from exit polls yesterday, he had not expanded his coalition in any significant ways from four years ago, leading to the fight that was unfolding last night." (Washington Post, November 3, 2004)
This is also what Bush and his entourage were thinking. Bush started his day in Crawford, Texas, where he voted. He then proceeded to a rally in Ohio. Here, according to some reports, he met personally with J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Secretary of State of Ohio, the rabidly partisan black Republican who was on the one hand the head of Bush's re-election drive in that state, and at the same time the state official overseeing the voting. Bush then flew to Washington. According to one version, "It was on the plane that strategist Karl Rove started calling around to get the results of early exit polls. But the line kept breaking down. The only information that came through as the plane descended was a BlackBerry message from an aide that simply read: "Not good." Not long afterward, Rove got a more detailed picture and told the President and senior aides the bad news. Florida Governor Jeb Bush had been saying the state was looking good, and the Bush team had expected to be ahead in Ohio. But Kerry was leading everywhere. "I wanted to throw up," said an aide onboard. ... On the ground in Arlington, Va. , that afternoon, chief strategist Matthew Dowd was walking around Bush campaign headquarters looking like a "scientist whose formulas were all wrong," said a top Bush staff member. Dowd had designed the strategy for targeting voters, and the exit polls were undermining his every theory. It would take him six long hours to crack the code. When the actual vote counts started coming in at 8 p.m., Dowd noticed that in South Carolina, Virginia and Florida the numbers were what the Republicans expected them to be; the President was outperforming the exit polls. "We've got to go talk to the press. The exit polls are wrong," Dowd said. (Time, November 15,2004, emphasis added)
The gloom had been deep in the Bush camp that afternoon. "Discouraging exit polls had poured into Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters in Arlington, with Bush strategists privately describing the early picture as cataclysmic. ... When the networks initially decreed that Virginia was too close to call, Bill Kristol of Fox News said: "That can't be good for President Bush. ..But they started reminding reporters and top supporters that those polls had been wrong in 2000, and they asserted that Bush was doing better than the figures suggested. Bush invited reporters into the White House residence around 9:37 PM in an attempt to steady his troops. 'We are very upbeat, thank you. I believe I will win, thank you very much.' The setting was designed to project confidence after a grim day around the White House." (Washington Post, November 3, 2004, emphasis added)
Another account corroborates these events: "I saw this look on [Rove's] face and then the phone died," said White House communications director Dan Bartlett. "He said, 'Not good.' It was, Bartlett added, 'like a punch in the gut.' 'I was sick,' Rove said in an interview as he talked about those moments on the president's plane. 'But then I got angry when I started seeing the numbers. None of them made any sense.' Those exit polls, of course, turned out to be wrong, as many inside the Bush headquarters believed once they began to examine them in detail, and today Rove is celebrated by none other than the president as 'the architect' of the reelection victory." (Washington Post, November 7, 2004) But the exit polls were not wrong. The exit polls were by every indication an accurate barometer of the votes the citizens thought they had cast. The difference between the exit polls and the final reported results represents the margin of vote fraud.
Electronic-cybernetic vote fraud of the type practiced by the CIA-Bush machine habitually includes a computer breakdown in the thick of the action, as the 1980 comment from William Loeb reminds us. In 2002, "a computer meltdown resulted in no release of data on Election Day. On Tuesday [November 2, 2004], new problems surfaced: a 2.5 hour data blackout and samples that at one point or another included too many women, too few Westerners, not enough Republicans and a lead for Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry in the national survey that persisted until late in the evening. In two instances on election night -- the results for Virginia and South Carolina -- the networks held off projecting a winner when voting ended because exit polls showed the races were too close to call, only to see President Bush win easily in both states," wrote one journalist. "Successive waves of the national exit poll in the afternoon and evening reported that Kerry had had a two or three-percentage point lead over Bush nationally and in several key states, including Ohio. Preliminary exit poll results had leaked throughout the day and were posted on a number of websites, including the widely viewed Drudge Report site, which added to the confusion and fanned the media frenzy."
Then came the indispensable computer breakdown, which is generally used as a cover to cook the existing data: "To compound the problem further, a server at Edison/Mitofsky malfunctioned shortly before 11 p.m. The glitch prevented access to any exit poll results until the technicians got a backup system operational at 1 :33 AM yesterday. The crash occurred barely minutes before the consortium was to update its exit polling with the results of later interviewing that found Bush with a one-point lead. Instead, journalists were left relying on preliminary exit poll results released at 8: 15 PM, which still showed Kerry ahead by three percentage points." (Washington Post, November 4, 2004) Bush was officially awarded Iowa on the Friday after the election. It had been too close to call, "but with Bush holding a 12,000-vote advantage, Iowa officials determined yesterday that there were not enough absentee votes for Kerry to overcome Bush's lead." (Washington Post, November 6, 2004)
OHIO OUTRAGES
Bush was saved by a "red shift" of about 3% to 5% in a number of key states between the exit polls and the reported results. These discrepancies, it should be noted, were always in favor of Bush, and never to his detriment. The red shift was attributable to vote fraud. A full analysis of vote fraud in the 2004 elections goes beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that Bush's forces used every known device to falsify the results of the elections. The mechanisms of vote fraud in the key battleground state of Ohio have been documented by Robert Fitrakis and his friends at http://www.freepress.org, and need not be repeated in detail here. A typical case of electronic vote fraud was the following:
The vote counting was marred in several places by computer glitches. The most serious appears to be in Ohio, which provided Bush with his decisive margin. Election officials in Franklin County, in the Columbus area, said yesterday that a computer error gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct. Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct out of 638 votes cast, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told the Columbus Dispatch. It was not clear whether Ohio experienced any other problems with electronic ballots. About 30 percent of the voters in the state voted electronically. (Washington Post, November 6, 2004)
In Ohio, vote suppression had been meticulously prepared. Blackwell had seen to it that lists of registered voters had been purged of numerous Democratic voters just before the election, using the favorite GOP pretext that these black, Hispanic, and poor people were actually convicted felons. By the time many of those purged realized what had happened, it was too late for them to be reinstated. Blackwell outdid himself in inventing technical pretexts for rejecting new registrations, and for denying and disallowing absentee ballots for voters suspected of being Democrats. Newly registered Democratic voters received threatening letters informing them that their registrations were being challenged by the Republican Party. They could bring a lawyer and witnesses to their hearings, these letters ominously added. Phantom leaflets alleged that voting had been extended through Wednesday. Other leaflets announced that would-be voters who had unpaid parking tickets, unpaid child support payments, or overdue library books would be dragged from the polls and put in prison.
Imposters placed telephone calls to likely Democratic voters telling them that their polling places had been changed -- a fraud which was revealed in many cases only after would-be voters had waited for several hours in the rain to cast their ballots, and were told to start from scratch at their original polling places. Many polling places in black, Hispanic, and low-income areas opened late. When they did open, many of them had no pencils for paper ballots, and above all far fewer electronic voting machines than in previous years, since the Blackwell machine had arranged to transfer these voting machines to affluent Republican suburbs. The lack of voting machines resulted in long lines on a rainy day, and many of the frailer voters simply gave up. Many Republican employers threatened their hourly and other workers with firing if they tarried too long at the polls, and not a few. were actually fired. Innumerable votes were lost in this way.
In the days before the election, Blackwell had demanded for the Republican Party the right to place "challengers" inside each polling place. These anti-voter vigilantes were in effect racist and fascist goons whose function was to intimidate and eject likely Democratic voters, whose names were recorded on "caging lists." These challengers had been ruled illegal by the federal district court, but this decision had been overturned by the federal circuit court in the wee hours of election day morning. The US Supreme Court had refused to hear an appeal to this outrageous decision. The knowledge that GOP goons would be running wild in the polling places doubtless convinced many other citizens to stay home. In many polling places, black voters were automatically challenged by the GOP goons and therefore given a provisional paper ballot. The provisional ballot became a new form of second class citizenship, a new Jim Crow system for the 21st century.
There were reports of boxes of provisional ballots being loaded onto mysterious privately owned trucks without any official supervision and disappearing into the night. Hispanic voters were challenged to produce proof of citizenship, including forms of identification that were not prescribed by Ohio law. This made it much harder for Hispanics to cast a ballot. Those who did get to vote had to deal with touch-screen voting machines which did not generate a voter-verifiable paper trail. Many machines persistently registered votes for Bush despite repeated efforts to vote for Kerry or others. All across the US, electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold, Election Systems and Software, and Sequoia did yeoman service for the Bush campaign, falsifying countless votes. Bush was alleged to have won Ohio by 136,000 votes. When Kerry capitulated, over 155,000 provisional ballots and over 92,000 "spoiled" ballots, most of them from heavily Democratic polling places, had not been counted. All in all, it was a blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act, and a colossal constitutional crisis. But had not the neocon judge Scalia in December 2000 denied that US citizens had any constitutional right to vote?
The grim result of the Bush-Rove vote fraud and the capitulation of the Kerry campaign was yet another step towards domestic anarchy in the United States. The rogue networks of the invisible government were for the moment the masters of the situation. Bush was no president, but an illegitimate ruler a lawless usurper leading a rogue state, a bandit regime. The "political capital" which Bush claimed he had earned in his post-election press conference was counterfeit. His alleged mandate was as worthless as a rubber check.
After more or less successful coups in 1998 (impeachment), 1999 (bombing Serbia), 2000 (the stolen election), 2001 (the 9/11 attacks), 2002 (the illegal grant of war powers to Bush), 2003 (the Iraq war), and 2004 (another stolen presidential election), the invisible government was already planning its inevitable successor coup for 2005. One form which this may take is a further radical reduction in the powers of the Congress. Senator Frist of Tennessee, the Republican Majority Leader in the Senate, announced that the Democrats' practice of using the filibuster to prevent the confirmation of a handful of right-wing extremists to the federal appellate bench was intolerable, and must come to an end.
Frist's "nuclear option" was unilaterally to re-write the Senate rules by a coup de main, a power grab making a filibuster against judicial nominations impossible. Such a measure would reduce the Senate to a one-party fiefdom along the lines of the current House of Representatives, and weaken the Constitutional system of checks and balances by making it far more difficult for the Senate to check a president determined to put racists and fascists into the federal judiciary. The few Republican traditionalists were uneasy over this extremist proposal, and Democratic leaders threatened to paralyze the Senate with parliamentary obstructionism, but whether these forces could stop the Frist coup was not clear.
Naturally, the November 2004 coup could not have gone as smoothly as it did without the willingness of Senator Kerry to capitulate. For some, Kerry's refusal to contest manifest vote fraud was simply the consequence of his Skull & Bones pedigree. These observers imagine that Kerry received a call from Skull & Bones headquarters instructing him to throw in the towel, which he promptly did. The view here is rather that Kerry (and his wife) was an oligarchical specimen, somewhat above the average in intelligence for those circles, but unable to imagine anything other than oligarchical rule and oligarchical methods. The world of the foundations inhabited by Mrs. Kerry is in particular one of the decisive centers of oligarchical influence on American life, and there is every indication that the candidate felt at home here. It is thus Kerry's oligarchical mentality which predisposed him to surrender. Concerning the specific dynamics of the hoisting of the white flag on the day after the elections, Kerry appears to have been convinced to capitulate by Bob Shrum, who had wrecked the early phases of his campaign, and by Mary Beth Cahill, that the provisional ballots plus the absentee ballots in Ohio were not enough to surmount Bush's alleged lead.
Did Kerry have an alternative? He did: from the defeat of the Kapp putsch in Berlin in March 1920 to the defeat of the Aznar putsch in Madrid in March 2004, the successful model for resistance to an attempted coup d'etat by a clique of reactionaries has been an open-ended general strike by the labor movement, progressive political parties, students and youth, women's organizations, and their allies. This is what prevented Aznar from setting up a dictatorship in the wake of the Spanish train bombings.
In the United States in November 2004, this would have taken the form of a general strike in favor of constitutional government called out by the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO, environmentalists, women, progressives, students, and the like. The goal would have been to shut the country down until an accurate vote count had been carried out, which would unquestionably result in the defeat of Bush. Jesse Jackson proposed something along these lines to Gore in 2000, but the idea was refused. It is a rare oligarch who is willing to detonate mass action in the streets, and Kerry too proved no exception. As for the Democratic Party, it feared alienating its plutocratic financial backers far more than the loss of any single election, and was therefore structurally incapable of mass action. If Nader contributed nothing else, he contributed an apt characterization of the Democratic Party as gutless, spineless, feckless, and clueless.
The Democrats were even afraid of taking their stand on the US Constitution. Article XIV, passed by Congress on June 13, 1866 and ratified on July 9, 1868 in response to post-Confederate election chicanery against freedmen, included provisions precisely tailored to activities of the Bush machine in Ohio, Florida, and several other states. Here we read in Section 2:
But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
References to male voters in this amendment would of course be expanded to include all voters in the light of the XIX Amendment. Here was at least a minimal response to Bush's vote fraud coup: cut the basis of representation in the House and Senate in the vote fraud states, thereby diminishing the number of their electors in the Electoral College as well as in the two chambers.
THE 9/11 ISSUE WAS INDEED DECISIVE
Starting in November 2003, I had argued that the 9/11 issue would be the dominant one in the 2004 elections. This thesis recognized first of all that a party re-alignment was due in 2004 in which some new pattern of dominance in the Electoral College was likely to replace the post-1968 pattern of Republican hegemony based on the racist Southern Strategy developed by Kevin Phillips for Nixon. Such a party re-alignment would continue the pattern which has held true since the inception of the current US federal Constitution in 1788, and which has included similar re-alignments in 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932, as well as 1968. My point was that, if the 9/11 myth had been dismantled, the 2004 election would probably lead to a progressive party re-alignment. If, however, the 9/11 myth were to survive intact, there was an acute danger that the party realignment would produce some form of fascist rule. Unfortunately, this second variant may now be on its way to fulfillment, although it may still be too early to say.
For those seriously committed to defeating the 9/11 myth, the most promising approach was represented by the Independent International Truth Commission, modeled more or less on the Russell-Sartre Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal of 1966-67. The failure of the 9/11 truth movement to convene the IITC prior to November 2004 constituted the single most important defeat of the 9/11 truth movement -- a defeat which all the other successes of this movement were not sufficient to counterbalance. The IITC was the adequate forum to demolish the 9/11 myth among intellectuals and opinion leaders internationally as well as to erode it nationally in the US. Instead, the initiatives which were carried out succeeded only in the regional attrition of the myth within the US, which unfortunately turned out not to be enough.
The Bush campaign presented the 9/11 myth as a new compulsory pagan civic mystery cult of which their candidate was the high priest. Bush unwaveringly built his entire campaign on the demagogic ethos of 9/11 and its related chauvinistic and racist themes. 9/11 was evoked in the majority of the most widely used Bush-Cheney television ads. The entire Republican National Convention was organized around the 9/11 motif. 9/11 was conjured up by Bush, Cheney, and their surrogates in every speech. Bush spoke about 9/11 in the televised debates, and returned to stress 9/11 in his campaign crescendo at the end of October. 9/11 was Bush's chief alibi, his pretext, his escape clause; when Bush found that his back was to the wall, he invariably reached for 9/11. The weak and vacillating Kerry allowed Bush to use the 9/11 fiasco, in reality the moment of his greatest malfeasance, as a positive credential.
The veteran Democratic Party consultant (and habitual loser) Bob Shrum argued that, after 9/11, the American people would not tolerate divisive campaigning, and would only reward a positive and upbeat campaigner. Shrum therefore prohibited the obvious attack line against Bush -- that he was the Nero of 9/11, the man who fiddled or otherwise dithered while New York burned. This, Shrum held, would represent sacrilege to the 9/11 myth and the oligarchical consensus that stood behind it. Kerry allowed himself to be dominated by Shrum until after the Republican convention, when it was already too late. These events presaged Kerry's final surrender.
Even so, the 9/11 myth came under significant attack. Howard Dean noted in December 2003 that many thought the Bush administration knew about 9/11 in advance, and objected to the phony terror alert designed to step on Kerry's convention bounce. However, Kerry and Edwards failed to hold Bush systematically accountable for his passivity before 9/11, and for freezing that day.
Former Senator Bob Kerrey, himself a 9/11 commission member, announced some days after the vote that he no longer felt bound by the non-partisan pledge sworn by all the commissioners, and outlined how the 9/11 issue could in his opinion have been turned against Bush. In Kerrey's view, this could have been done by stressing Bush's inertia, passivity, and failure to act in any way in response to the many warnings the White House was receiving about the imminence of major attacks -- the Nero of 9/11 argument. This would have amounted to an attempt to spin the 9/11 story against Bush from within the confines of the myth, and it can be debated whether such a strategy would have proven effective, but Democratic candidate Kerry was not even capable of this. This approach was also illustrated in the cover story by Benjamin DeMott in the October 2004 issue of Harper's Magazine; here the 9/11 commission report a "whitewash," a "cheat and a fraud."
There's little mystery about why the Commission is tongue-tied. It can't call a liar a liar. The most momentous subject before the 9/11 commission was: What did President Bush know about the Al Qaeda threat to the United States, when did he know it, and if he knew little, why so?.. Facing his questioners in April 2004, the President said he had not been informed that terrorists were in this country. Conceivably it was at or near the moment when Bush took this position that the members of the Commission who heard him grasped that casting useful light on the relation between official conduct and national unpreparedness would be impossible. The reason? The President's claim was untrue. It was a lie, and the Commissioners realized that they couldn't allow it to be seen as a lie. Numberless officials had ... provided circumstantial detail about their attempts ... to educate Bush as candidate, then as president-elect, then as commander in chief, about the threat from terrorists on our shores. The news these officials brought was spelled out in pithy papers both short and long; the documentation supplied was in every respect impressive. Nevertheless, the chief executive, seated before the Commission, declared: Nobody told me. And challenging the chief executive as a liar entailed an unthinkable cost -- the possible rending of the nation's social and political fabric. (Harper's, October 2004)
DeMott reviewed the much-touted Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, 2001, the gambit employed by Richard Clarke, which was declassified in April 2004 as a result of the fracas generated by the 9/11 commission hearings. This document, it will be remembered, was entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," and contained the notation that "the FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related." This is juxtaposed by DeMott with the 9/11 commission's summary of Bush's private testimony on this issue: "The President told us the August 6 report was historical in nature."
DeMott's article should have been used as a briefing paper for a series of attacks by Kerry which would have focused on Bush's evident failure as a leader during the days and weeks leading up to 9/11, when no extraordinary meetings were held, no cabinet officers tasked, no agency heads instructed, no inter-agency process established, and in short nothing done to respond to so many urgent warnings from "clandestine, foreign government, and media reports" about imminent terrorism. This could have been done without challenging the central features of the 9/11 myth itself; it would have relied on what the non-witting part of the government, in other words the various Colleen Rowleys, was reporting about the invisible government rogue networks.
In Apri1 2004, the Washington Post had carried a cartoon (repeated in "The Year in Cartoons" on December 19, 2004) which shows a tin man Cheney, a cowardly lion FBI, a scarecrow CIA, and a "Dorothy" Bush watching while a witch flies across the sky, tracing this message: "Surrender Dorothy! Or I'll fly planes into buildings. -- Osama." The FBI lion comments: "What's it mean?" 'It's too vague!" complains the CIA scarecrow. "Yeah ... and who is this 'Dorothy' character?" adds Bush. Seconded by the ever-scowling Miss Rice, Bush acted as if measures to foil the 9/11 plot were some kind of debutante cotillion which he would never dream of attending unless he had received an engraved invitation with his name calligraphically embossed upon it. That Kerry was incapable of even addressing this mass of empirical evidence of Bush's unfitness for office is a damning commentary on the Democratic challenger's lack of intellectual courage; granted, he owed his candidacy to Dean's immolation by the media on the 9/11 issue.
There would have been an adequate demographic base for an attack on the 9/11 myth. A Zogby International poll commissioned by Jimmy Walter in late August showed that just under 50% of New York City residents did not believe the official version, and thought the US had foreknowledge of the attacks; slightly fewer in New York state agreed.
A Pentagon flash animation on the Internet debunking the government contention that a Boeing 757-200 hit the Defense Department headquarters attracted a mass audience, forcing an article on this subject in the Washington Post. For the highbrow, BBC-2 television in October broadcast "The Power of Nightmares," a documentary which contended that al Qaeda simply does not exist, except as a "myth" and "dark illusion." This myth had been created by failed politicians whose slogans no longer work, and who were desperate to keep their power, this program argued. For the lowbrow, Howard Stern hosted spokesmen for the 9/11 truth movement and told his 13 million listeners that he did not believe a commercial airliner hit the Pentagon; a cruise missile, he said, was a far more plausible explanation.
To this must be added the collective impact of scores of websites, plus conferences in Berlin, Lucerne, San Francisco, and Toronto, -- all multiplied through innumerable Internet radios, alternative television, videocassettes, DVDs, books, blogs and streaming web postings. The September 11 rally at Manhattan Center in New York City was advertised in the main newspapers of the metropolitan area, and was attended by some 1,300 people. The Los Angeles Citizens' Grand Jury, which met at the Bob Hope Patriotic Hall on October 24, was a people's initiative in which ordinary citizens went far beyond the unanswered questions to roundly condemn several key features of the official myth as physically impossible, while specifying that a rogue network inside the US government were the prime suspects in the case.
Towards the end of October, one hundred left liberal notables and 9/11 researchers including Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Ralph Nader, and Howard Zinn demanded the re-opening of the 9/11 investigation and petitioned New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to undertake this task. But, like all purely legal tactics, the Spitzer complaint ceded the initiative and the timetable to the lawyers, rather than keeping politics in command. Whatever chances this tactic may have had were sharply diminished when Spitzer announced that he was running for governor of New York State; Spitzer was hardly likely to compromise his gubernatorial prospects by becoming the Jim Garrison of the 9/11 cover-up scandal. It is also worth noting that Ralph Nader, in the several C-SPAN press conferences this writer was able to monitor, never brought up 9/11 as one of his core issues, and in fact almost never mentioned 9/11 at all.
The 9/11 truth movement was hobbled by those who persisted in making the "unanswered questions" theme their central issue. One could imagine that, come judgment day, when Gabriel sounds his horn to announce the resurrection, some misguided activists will jump out of their graves to repeat their still unanswered questions. Three years and more after 9/11, it was time to develop some answers.
Another weakness of the 9/11 truth movement was the tendency of some to rely on bereaved family members for their moral and political authority. The 9/11 families represented a broad spectrum; some were models of irenic humanitarianism in the quest for world peace and atonement. Others appeared to be xenophobes and even racists. Some supported Kerry, some supported Bush. One group, obsessed with what it called "intelligence reform," agitated above all to enact the recommendations of the 9/11 commission, some of which amounted to Patriot Act II on the installment plan, and all of which left the actual September criminals untouched. It was in any case a tragic waste to devote the two or three hours the 9/11 truth movement had on C-SPAN to pointless testimonials by family members. For those seriously committed to defeating the 9/11 myth, the only road remained the Independent International Truth Commission.
For the moment, the CIA-Bush machine may appear to have jammed a crowbar into the wheels of history. But it is also worth recalling that the 36-year cycles are only approximations which have held true since the aftermath of the Civil War; in earlier years we can observe a 40-year cycle (1788-1828) and a 32 year cycle (1828-1860). This means that while some profound change in the ruling regime is now unquestionably overdue, this cannot be calculated with chronometric precision. The 1788-1828 cycle almost ended in 1824, when a disputed election thrown into the House of Representatives ended with the victory of John Quincy Adams, with the backing of Henry Clay, over Andrew Jackson. This outcome had the positive effect of prolonging the first 36-year cycle for four more years under Adams, before the disasters of the Jackson presidency. Something of this sort may have happened in 2004 to produce Bush's second term, but in a disastrous and negative key.
There is of course also the more sinister possibility that the long-running era of US constitutional government is simply coming to its natural or unnatural end, and that the Bush cold coup of 2004 is a harbinger of that grim fact. And indeed, the general tendency of the recent machinations of the US shadow government appears as the incessant weakening of the US power base of empire -- as a result of foolhardy actions which are supposed to be shoring it up.
Of course, it is only in the world of cable television schizophrenic make-believe that George Bush has been re-elected as president of the United States. Bush is a legitimate president only in the eyes of those well-paid commentators who spent the days after the election inventing fantastic stories about the triumph of moral values (in the person of the alcohol and cocaine-ravaged George W. Bush!) as the true key to the 2004 election. In the real world Bush was defeated by virtue of majority opposition in the country to his misrule, and that majority opposition, although demoralized and disoriented by Kerry's craven capitulation, can only remain and grow.
Normally a failed politician like Bush would have departed after one term, as his notorious father did, taking with him all the hatred, resentment, scandals, and vendettas of a wretched first term. In particular, the rustication of Bush to Crawford, Texas, would have tended to defuse such latent scandals as the exposure of Valerie Plame, the traducing of US state secrets to neocon darling Ahmed Chalabi, the counterfeiting of the Niger yellowcake documents, and the Israeli mole in the Pentagon. As it is, all these scandals, like the Watergate break-in of 1972, remain to haunt the second Bush term. And to these must be added the far greater scandals first of the 9/11 attacks themselves, and now of the massive vote fraud of 2004. Here is a mass of scandal material more than sufficient to blow Bush II into interplanetary space.
But now G. W. Bush wants to prolong his hold on the White House for four more years. The conflicts which were suppressed by voter intimidation and vote fraud are still boiling in the cauldron of a US society tormented by war and depression, and these conflicts will necessarily find ways to explode in Bush's face. One way that this may happen is through conflict inside the Republican Party. In the weeks before the election I had argued that the Republicans might not survive relegation to the opposition. This was true enough, but it now would appear that they may not be able to survive their current monopoly of the entire US federal government either. Since the GOP dominates the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches, we can expect that conflicts in the broader society will also take the form of conflicts within the Republican Party. The rush to the exits of Powell, Ashcroft, Ridge, and other cabinet secretaries in the weeks after the election was not a good omen for Bush. Then Bush attempted to nominate former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, a stooge and creature of Rudolph Giuliani, to be the new Secretary of Homeland Security. The result was an avalanche of derogatory revelations about Kerik which speedily terminated his candidacy.
Then, in the wake of a question from a soldier about the failure of the Pentagon to provide armored vehicles for the troops in Iraq, there followed a wave of vehement attacks against Rumsfeld. This time the glib rhetoric of the Pentagon boss was not effective. Republican senators like McCain, Hagel, and others proclaimed they had no confidence in the Defense Secretary. William Kristol joined the yelping pack to call for Rumsfeld's ouster, showing that there is no loyalty among neocons (or at least no loyalty to one who is not a professed disciple of Leo Strauss).
All of this took place before Bush's second term had even begun. Eisenhower's second term was marred by the scandal of White House chief of staff Sherman Adams and his vicuna coats. Nixon's second term was cut short by the Watergate affair. Reagan could easily have been impeached over the Iran-Contra affair of his second term, had Lee Hamilton not been on the scene to protect the invisible government. Clinton was of course impeached in his second term, although over trifles in comparison to what is hanging around Bush's neck. There is therefore good reason to see Bush as vulnerable to second-term problems of much greater magnitude.
This will no doubt be exacerbated by Bush's characteristic megalomania; his announced determination is to privatize the Social Security system. Wall Street financiers know that, in addition to the problems generated by the weakness of the dollar, they also face a demographic problem: by about 2007, the first cohorts of the postwar baby boom generation will begin to retire. At this point they will stop being net buyers of stocks and mutual funds, and will become net sellers of those instruments. This means that the current updraft in the stock market will be replaced by a powerful downdraft, potentially leading to a crash. The finance oligarchs have therefore been concerned to find a way to pump US government funds directly into the stock market, in the hopes of maintaining the bloated speculative prices that still prevail. Their preferred solution is to batten on to the Social Security payroll tax for that purpose. This amounts to the destruction of the last surviving component of the Franklin D. Roosevelt New Deal. Bush may well find that his efforts to loot Social Security for the benefit of the Wall Street financiers will unleash forms of social and political resistance which it will be difficult for him to withstand.