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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1265652,00.html
Running scared

Bin Laden was captured long ago, Reagan's death was hushed up and the coming
election has been fixed. Jonathan Raban on how the White House's obsession
with secrecy has turned America into a nation of conspiracy theorists

Wednesday July 21, 2004
The Guardian

Dinnertime is the hour of the conspiracy theory here in Seattle. I've lost
count of the times I've been told - always on excellent, but unnameable
authority - that Osama bin Laden is already in American hands and that the
Bush administration is waiting for the right moment to announce his capture.
Ronald Reagan's body was on ice for many months, and his death was only
announced when it became necessary to drive Abu Ghraib off the front page.
Everybody knows, or thinks they know, that the administration will
manipulate the intricate bells and whistles of homeland security to ensure
the president's re-election. If terrorists don't strike in the run-up to
November 2 (as most people assume they will) the level of alert will be
jigged up to red, arrests will be made, the country will be declared saved
from an evil plot and mass casualties, and Bush will storm past Kerry in the
polls.
The latest theory comes hot from the mouths of anonymous agents in the
Pakistan security service: the White House is putting immense pressure on
the Musharraf regime to deliver "high-value targets", in the shape of Bin
Laden and Mullah Omar, on July 26, 27, or 28, to spectacularly eclipse the
opening of the Democratic party convention in Boston. Or, if that's too tall
an order, they must be caught before polling day. My informant tells me that
a senior Pakistani general, recently on a visit to DC, said: "If we don't
find these guys by the election, they're going to stick this whole nuclear
mess up our asshole."

Much the most interesting thing about this last story is the character of my
informant - not, as usual, Jack talking from the barbecue pit, but the sober
and conservative New Republic, a magazine fiercely pro-Israel, which
enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq. A respected senior editor,
John B Judis, is one of the three authors of the July Surprise? piece in the
July 19 issue. Conspiracy theorising is coming out of the internet closet
and going mainstream. Or, to put it another way, conspiracy theorising is
fast becoming a legitimate means of reporting on a government so secretive
that unnamed Pakistani security types may well be the best informed sources
on the Bush administration's domestic policies and strategems.

Even before September 11, secrecy was this administration's hallmark, as
when it invoked the principle of executive privilege to conceal from public
view the proceedings of vice-president Cheney's energy taskforce. After
9/11, secrecy was advanced, proudly, as a guiding principle for a nation at
war. In his address to the joint session of Congress on September 20 2001,
Bush spoke of a new kind of war, "unlike any other we have ever known", that
would include "covert operations, secret even in success." Donald Rumsfeld
quoted Winston Churchill to the effect that in war "truth must be protected
with a bodyguard of lies". Dick Cheney talked of a war to be fought "in the
shadows: This is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business. We have to
operate in that arena". The great fear, shared by people not customarily
given to paranoia, is that the Bush administration has taken these tactics
for conducting a secret, asymmetric war and applied them wholesale to the
day-to-day governance of the US.

To live in America now - at least to live in a port city like Seattle - is
to be surrounded by the machinery and rhetoric of covert war, in which
everyone must be treated as a potential enemy until they can prove
themselves a friend. Surveillance and security devices are everywhere: the
spreading epidemic of razor wire, the warnings in public libraries that the
FBI can demand to know what books you're borrowing, the Humvee laden with
troops in combat fatigues, the Coast Guard gunboats patrolling the bay, the
pat-down searches and x-ray machines, the nondescript grey boxes, equipped
with radio antennae, that are meant to sniff out pathogens in the air. It's
difficult to leave the house now without encountering at least one of these
reminders that we are being watched and that we live in deadly peril -
though in peril of quite what is hard to say.

On May 26 - a black day for sallow-skinned grocers and news vendors - the
attorney general, John Ashcroft, flanked by FBI director, Robert S Mueller,
called a press conference to tell the nation of some "disturbing
intelligence" that he'd recently received: preparations for an attack on the
mainland US were 90% complete; likely targets included the upcoming G8
summit in Georgia, July 4 celebrations, and the Democratic and Republican
conventions in Boston and New York. Al-Qaida intended to "hit America hard".
Mueller produced seven mugshots - six were of men of, as they say, Middle
Eastern appearance - and told us to keep a sharp lookout for these "armed
and dangerous" characters. For a few hours, the country shivered in
anticipation of the horror about to descend on it, and phone lines to the
FBI were jammed with excited descriptions of neighbourhood news vendors and
grocers.

Yet the colour-coded alert system remained at yellow, and within the next
couple of days it became clear that Ashcroft's disturbing new intelligence
was many weeks old, and that much of it came from a discredited source - an
Islamist propaganda site on the internet well known to journalists for its
daily stream of bloodcurdling boasts. Because Ashcroft had trespassed on the
turf of homeland security chief Tom Ridge, and his freelance terror warning
wasn't supported by the rest of the administration, we caught a rare glimpse
of government Wizard-of-Ozzery at work. Ashcroft, it turned out, knew no
more than the rest of us. Like us, he or his flunkies passed their time
surfing the net. When he told us that evidence for his grim warning had been
"corroborated on a variety of levels", did he mean anything more than that
it could be found on more than one website?

Ashcroft's performance confirmed the suspicion held by many that the Bush
administration is in the cynical business of spreading generalised,
promiscuous anxiety through the American populace, a sense of imminent but
inexact catastrophe, for reasons that may have little to do with national
security and much to do with political advantage. In the past three years,
in the name of homeland security, a vast, coast-to-coast, combined
surveillance and people-scaring apparatus has been assembled, on a scale,
and with an intimate reach, never before seen in a democracy. The
administration appears to be still learning to play this marvellous
instrument, and wrong notes, such as those struck by Ashcroft, are common.
But practice makes perfect.

Obsession with secrecy is a contagion directly transmitted from government
to people. Just as the administration now moves in Cheney's arena of
shadows, so masses of ordinary Americans are seeing themselves as
self-appointed master-spies, keeping watch on their government in the same
covert way that the government supposedly keeps watch on al-Qaida. The
backyard barbecue sounds like a convention of spooks. "Chatter" has been
heard, though its source can't be revealed ... In such talk, Bush, Cheney &
co are held to be as scheming, devious and hard to catch as Bin Laden
himself.

The same tone is to be heard in current American journalism. On July 15, the
solemnly judicious New York Times began a front-page story with the
sentence, "In the annals of Washington conspiracy theories, the latest one,
about vice-president Dick Cheney's future on the Republican ticket, is as
ingenious as it is far-fetched." Buttering its bread lavishly on both sides,
the paper went on to expend 40 serious column inches on the far-fetched
story. Since we can no longer get real news of the administration, we now
get intelligence, which is something altogether different.

This accounts for liberal America's ready embrace of Fahrenheit 9/11,
Michael Moore's slapdash confection of strong documentary footage and
connect-the-dots paranoia. Whenever Moore puts himself in the centre of the
picture, he's pure Barbecue Man, brimming with "intel" that sounds even
older and less reliable than that of Ashcroft. But Moore has rightly gauged
the mood of his audience. People are hungry for classified information on
their rulers, in part because their rulers are so busy collecting classified
information on them, and Fahrenheit 9/11 promotes the happy illusion that,
for once, the magnetometers and security cameras have been turned on the
president and his gang.

This is an extraordinary moment in American history. Half the country -
including all the people I know best - believes it is trembling on the very
lip of outright tyranny, while the other half believes that only the Bush
administration stands between it and national collapse into atheism,
socialism, black helicopters, and gay marriage. November 2 looms as a date
of dreadful consequence. A bumper sticker, popular among the sort of people
I hang out with, reads: Bush-Cheney '04 - The Last Vote You'll Ever Have To
Cast. That's funny, but it belongs to the genre of humour in which the laugh
is likely to die in your throat - and none of the people who sport the
sticker on their cars are smiling. They are too busy airing conspiracy
theories, which may or may not turn out to be theories.






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www.ctrl.org
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substanceâ??not soap-boxingâ??please!   These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'â??with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright fraudsâ??is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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