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The Bush administration's desperation is showing by Bev Conover – Online Journal Editor & Publisher August 2, 2003—With the baring of each lie the administration told about Iraq and the revelations still to come about its foreknowledge or complicity in the events of Sept. 11, 2001, that cost some 3,000 Americans their lives, in addition to an economy in tatters, the destruction of the US's paltry social safety net and deficits future generations will have to cope with, the Bushies' desperation level has reached a crescendo. Despite the efforts of George W. and his minions to allay or ignore the questions finally being tossed at them, they just won't go away. What to do? What to do? Create a diversion. Diversions, though, have a shelf life. Afghanistan provided some short relief, but quickly went sour when that little "war," which had less to do with getting Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and ousting the Taliban than grabbing land for construction of an oil pipeline to the Caspian region, didn't go exactly as planned—plans that were drawn prior to 9/11. George wound up looking silly because his crack troops, who had laid waste to what was left of the country, couldn't find a six-foot, five-inch scrawny bearded guy. George might have looked sillier if they had captured his former ally. Moving along . . . Iraq became the next big diversion. Saddam Hussein had to be taken out because—take your pick: – He had weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical biological). – He was about to unleash those WMD on the US and who knows what other countries; he "gassed" his own people. It's funny that the Reagan/Bush administration never raised an eyebrow about the gassing when the hapless Kurds happened to get caught between Iraq's and Iran's troops, in a war financed by the US when Iran was the "evil one" du jour. – He tried to buy uranium yellow cake from Niger. – He was in bed with al Qaeda, a creation of the CIA, and was, therefore responsible for 9/11. – He was a brutal dictator that had his own people tortured and killed. Are there kind dictators, compassionate dictators? – We had to "liberate" the Iraqi people and help them set up a "democracy." No one denies Saddam was brutal, but the Iraqi people are not "liberated," their country is occupied, and democracy is not on the horizon even if they want it. The rest is all lies, not "misstatements," "inaccuracies," or any of the other euphemistic terms the corporate media have called these outrageous whoppers. Again, though, things haven't gone according to plan. Instead of greeting the conquering heroes with kisses and flowers, the Iraqis greeted them with bullets and grenades, which creates a sticky wicket for the oil companies that covet Iraq's black gold and the corporations paid billions to rebuild what the Bushies had destroyed. Moreover, the plans to establish Iraq, Inc., have been stymied. If things had gone the way War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's not-so-intelligent "intelligence" cabal in the Pentagon envisioned, George W. could have had his next diversion: an invasion of Syria or Iran, or maybe nuking North Korea. Worse, his "coalition of the willing" has been shown to be as fraudulent as everything else. He is even hard-pressed to bribe or coerce other nations into lending him a hand in cleaning up the messes he made in Afghanistan and Iraq. In an attempt to hide the truth from the bulk of the American people who are captive to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Fox, the Bushies have come up with "terror alerts" to keep the people on edge while stripping them of their freedoms. In between the yellow and orange alerts have been smaller diversions to keep the people from noticing that the biggest corporate crooks are either still walking free, enjoying their ill-gotten gains, or have received taps on the wrist. One of those distractions was Martha Stewart who, with the aid of the corporate media, was portrayed as a bigger crook than Kenny Boy Lay of Enron fame. So far, Martha has only served as hot news for a short period. The arrest of Kobe Bryant on a rape charge turned out to suck up more "news" time than either Martha and her woes or Laci Peterson's murder. George then threw his good friend Tony "The Poodle" Blair to the wolves over the lies about Saddam trying to buy uranium from Niger and the fabricated documents used to back up those lies. But while Blair seeks to tough out his predicament in the UK, especially in light of the alleged suicide of David Kelly who spilled the beans, so to speak, to the BBC, the US corporate media brought its coverage up short, rather than risk the Bush-Blair lies sink too deeply into the American psyche. Even the White House outing of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA operative—a clearly criminal act—got short shrift from the networks. (Wilson is the one who, upon his return from Niger, told the administration that the story was a crock.) To quell the above, it was suddenly announced that Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, had allegedly been killed in a six-hour battle with US troops and that the hunt for Saddam was on. The icing on the cake was supposed to be that with Uday and Qusay out of the picture, and the US hot on the trail of their daddy, the Iraqi people would finally hail their "liberators" and stop killing US soldiers. When the kisses and flowers still didn't come, and even more US troops were killed, it was back to the distraction of pedophiliac priests. Uday and Qusay may very well be dead—murdered by the US military—but to any halfway thinking person the tale about the shootout rings as phony as the original tale about the "heroic saving" of Private Lynch. Think about it: Two brothers who didn't even like each other holed up with a teenager and one bodyguard in a house completely in the open—a house owned by an enemy of their father—armed only with AK-47s, yet they held off all the military might the US could throw at them over a period of six hours? And while eye witnesses can be notoriously unreliable, could they all have been wrong in saying that the bodies removed from that house were charred beyond recognition, while the bodies shamelessly photographed and later cleaned and fixed up to be displayed to the media showed relatively little damage, considering the fire power they allegedly had been subjected to? To top off the administration's woes, last week the joint congressional report on 9/11 was released. Despite it being a whitewash in the best tradition of the Warren Commission, 28 blank pages that allegedly pertain to Saudi Arabia—pages that the White House refuses to declassify—set off another brouhaha. Add that to the furor caused by a Pentagon plan, cooked up under Iran-contra felon John Poindexter, to create a futures market for wagering on death and destruction. No paltry, short-lived diversion would do here. A biggie was needed. And out of the administration's box of tricks popped a terror alert to put all previous terror alerts to shame, despite staying at "code yellow: for now: a third Pearl Harbor to be carried out by al Qaeda, who may or may not hijack planes in order to use them as weapons of mass destruction on targets in the US, Europe (Old Europe, to be sure), Australia or another planet, sometime between now and October—maybe or maybe not. The ever-cooperative corporate media dutifully ran with it and are still running with it—from discussions on the state of fatherland security to local preparations for "The Worst." Will this one play until or through October? If not, do the Bushies have something more lethal up their sleeves to get our attention? And if all passes without incident, then what? Is the administration inclined to rely on the corporate-controlled voting equipment to keep it in office or is it planning a really, really big "October Surprise" for 2004? A Plan B, you might say, in case its corporate buddies decide its time to put a fresh wrapper on the package. Extracted 09/01/03 from The Online Journal
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