http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091105Z.shtml
9/11 and Manipulation of the USA
By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Sunday 11 September 2005
Traveling from New York City in late September 2001, on a
pre-scheduled book tour, author Joan Didion spoke with audiences in
several cities on the West Coast. In the wake of 9/11, she later
wrote, "these people to whom I was listening - in San Francisco and
Los Angeles and Portland and Seattle - were making connections I had
not yet in my numbed condition thought to make: connections between
[the American] political process and what had happened on September
11, connections between our political life and the shape our reaction
would take and was in fact already taking. These people recognized
that even then, within days after the planes hit, there was a good
deal of opportunistic ground being seized under cover of the clearly
urgent need for increased security. These people recognized even
then, with flames still visible in lower Manhattan, that the words
'bipartisanship' and 'national unity' had come to mean acquiescence
to the administration's preexisting agenda..."
A lot of media coverage was glorifying people who died and/or showed
courage on September 11, 2001. "In fact," Didion contended, "it was
in the reflexive repetition of the word 'hero' that we began to hear
what would become in the year that followed an entrenched preference
for ignoring the meaning of the event in favor of an impenetrably
flattening celebration of its victims, and a troublingly belligerent
idealization of historical ignorance."
To observe the political manipulation of 9/11 after the towers
collapsed was to witness a multidimensional power grab exercised
largely via mass media. By the end of 2002, Didion concisely and
incisively described what occurred: "We had seen, most importantly,
the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of
America's correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging
virtually perpetual war." Instead of, even in theory, being a war to
end all wars, the new war for America would be a war to end peace.
Like many of his colleagues in the upper reaches of the Bush
administration, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went out of his way
to stress that this war - with no single nation to defeat and no
finite enemy to vanquish - would be open-ended. On September 27,
2001, a New York Times op-ed piece under Rumsfeld's byline emphasized
the theme: "Some believe the first casualty of any war is the truth.
But in this war, the first victory must be to tell the truth. And the
truth is, this will be a war like none other our nation has faced."
Written two weeks after 9/11, the short Rumsfeld essay was an
indicative clarion call. And, from the outset, the trumpet was
sounding inside a tent pitched large enough to accommodate any number
of configurations: "This war will not be waged by a grand alliance
united for the single purpose of defeating an axis of hostile powers.
Instead, it will involve floating coalitions of countries, which may
change and evolve."
Purporting to be no-nonsense, the message from the Pentagon's
civilian head was expansive to the point of limitlessness: "Forget
about 'exit strategies'; we're looking at a sustained engagement that
carries no deadlines." If the concepts of deadlines and exit
strategies were suddenly obsolete, so too was the idea that
disfavored historical contexts should or could matter a heck of a lot.
At once, the proclaimed war on terrorism was to be unending, and
impervious to information or analysis that might encourage critical
scrutiny. As soon as the basic premises of the ongoing war were
accepted, the irrelevance of any inconvenient part of the historical
record was a given.
And so, when Rumsfeld's essay in the New York Times told a
still-shocked nation in late September 2001 that it was embarking on
"a war against terrorism's attack on our way of life" - an attack
coming from foes "committed to denying free people the opportunity to
live as they choose" - some questions were off limits. Such as:
Perhaps the attack was more against our foreign policy than against
our domestic "way of life" or our opportunity to live as we choose?
(Scandinavian countries, for instance, were not notably different in
the extent or character of their freedoms compared to the United
States, yet those nations did not seem to be in much danger of an Al
Qaeda attack.) Explorations along that line were out of bounds.
"By accepting the facile cliche that the battle under way against
terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who
fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to acknowledge our
own culpability," journalist Chris Hedges has observed. "We ignore
real injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to
their rage and despair."
Numerous reporters seemed content to provide stenographic services
for official U.S. sources under the guise of journalism. During a
September 17, 2001, appearance on David Letterman's show, the CBS
news anchor Dan Rather laid it on the line. "George Bush is the
president," Rather said, "he makes the decisions." Speaking as "one
American," the newsman added: "Wherever he wants me to line up, just
tell me where. And he'll make the call."
Cokie Roberts, well known as a reporter-pundit for NPR and ABC,
appearing on the Letterman show a few weeks later, gushed: "I am, I
will just confess to you, a total sucker for the guys who stand up
with all the ribbons on and stuff, and they say it's true and I'm
ready to believe it. We had General Shelton on the show the last day
he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and I couldn't lift that
jacket with all the ribbons and medals. And so when they say stuff, I
tend to believe it."
Long after September 11, 2001, most U.S. reporting seemed to be
locked into a zone that excluded unauthorized ironies. It simply
accepted that the U.S. government could keep making war on "terror"
by using high-tech weapons that inevitably terrorized large numbers
of people. According to routine news accounts, just about any
measures deemed appropriate by Washington fit snugly under the rubric
of an ongoing war that might never end in any of our lifetimes.
A year after 9/11, Nicholas Lemann wrote in the New Yorker, the "war
on terror" was a phrase that "has entered the language so fully, and
framed the way people think about how the United States is reacting
to the September 11 attacks so completely, that the idea that
declaring and waging war on terror was not the sole, inevitable,
logical consequence of the attacks just isn't in circulation." In
late November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, told
C-SPAN viewers: "Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated.
It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night
attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to
win the war on terrorism. And it does whip up fear. Acts of terror
have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have
closed a few."
Variations on a simple dualism - we're good and people who don't like
us are bad - had never been far from mainstream American politics.
But 9/11 concentrated such proclivities with great intensity and
narrowed the range of publicly acceptable questioning. "Inquiry into
the nature of the enemy we faced, in other words, was to be
interpreted as sympathy for that enemy," Didion wrote. "The final
allowable word on those who attacked us was to be that they were
'evildoers,' or 'wrongdoers,' peculiar constructions which served to
suggest that those who used them were transmitting messages from some
ultimate authority." On the say-so of those in charge of the
government, we were encouraged to believe that their worldviews
defined the appropriate limits of discourse.
Four years after 9/11, those limits are less narrow than they were.
But mass media and politicians still facilitate the destructive
policies of the Bush administration. From Baghdad to New Orleans to
cities and towns that will never make headlines in the national
press, the dominant corporate priorities have made a killing. Those
priorities hold sway not only for the Iraq war but also for the
entire "war on terrorism."
While military spending zooms upward, a downward slide continues for
education, health care, housing, environmental protection, emergency
preparedness and a wide array of other essentials. Across the United
States, communities are suffering grim consequences. "Now it should
be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the
integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war,"
Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967. The same statement is profoundly
true in 2005.
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