No other nation on the
face of the earth uses the words "Life, Liberty, and
the Pursuit of Happiness" as the premise for their
foundation in government.
America does, and scads of Constitutional law have been
written and re-written, debated and considered, because a
long time ago the Founders decided to base everything
upon the absolute necessity of those three concepts.
America is and has always been a nation of immigrants,
because the promise of these simple ideals has lured
millions of people from every corner of the globe to
these shores.
These words are the basis of the American Dream, a
concept so simple and yet so huge that it is difficult to
define. How does one encapsulate the concept of "the
pursuit of happiness" in so diverse a nation? The
answer to that question lies in the interpretation of the
word that comes before it, "liberty." Above
all, and first in line, is "life." Americans
have the right to be alive, free, and to pursue
fulfillment in whatever way suits them, so long as that
pursuit does not grossly interfere with the life, freedom
and happiness of a neighbor.
The American Dream has come to mean a variety of things
pertaining to ownership. Having your own home is part of
the American Dream, as is owning a car, having a job, and
the pursuit of monetary wealth. This is all well and
good, for we live in a capitalist society so large that
it would make Adam Smith faint dead away. Through it all,
however, runs the pulsing heartbeat of those three simple
concepts.
Of course, we have never achieved the lofty goals set by
the Founders in this regard; liberty is still denied to
many, and the pursuit of happiness is impossible for
citizens treated unequally. Yet the American Dream, at
bottom, is bent towards the creation of that more perfect
union, where wrongs are made right and happiness is well
within reach.
This is the American Dream we speak of openly, in
daylight, when the children gather to learn about the
land they call home. This is what we tell the immigrants
when they raise their hands to take the pledge and become
citizens. This is what we tell ourselves when we feel the
need to be convinced that this nation is indeed good and
great.
There is another American Dream which lurks in shadow,
and speaks only in whispers of its designs. This other
American Dream runs dark and silent, on rails lubricated
by oil, blood and power. It works at all hours of the day
and night to achieve its goals. It does not sleep. The
existence of this other American Dream places the first
one, the real one, the true one, in terrible peril. If
this other American Dream is allowed to blossom into its
intended potential, the American Dream we speak of to our
children will cease completely to exist.
The proponents of this other American Dream look at the
world in terms of empire. They seek to achieve hegemony
over great swaths of strategically-important territory,
and will do whatever is necessary to gain this control.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, they see America
as the first truly global superpower. With the use of
economic and military might, they seek to gain absolute
dominion in the space opened by the fall of our former
rival. The term "Globalization" encapsulates
only a fraction of the plan.
For many years, the proponents of this other American
Dream lingered in neo-conservative think tanks, like the
Committee on the Present Danger, where they could only
snipe from the fringes. With the rise to power of George
W. Bush, in an election that denied him even the pretense
of a mandate, these neo-conservative strategists suddenly
found themselves walking the halls of power, because Bush
was forced in the absence of a mandate to fall back upon
his neo-conservative base for support. The other American
Dream, alive for so long only in white papers within
these think tanks, has become the central framework of
American policy.
One proponent of this strategy is Richard Perle, a former
Defense Department official within the Reagan
administration. Perle is now chairman of the powerful
Defense Policy Board, which carries great weight within
the Pentagon. Recently, this board listened with avid
attention to a policy briefing proffered by other hard-right
think tankers that proposed a "Grand Strategy for
the Middle East." The final slide of their
presentation offered "Iraq as the tactical pivot,
Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot (and) Egypt as the
prize" in an effort to extend American hegemony over
the entire Middle East. Such plans cast into deep shade
the reasons put forth by the Bush administration to
defend war against Iraq. There is far more on the table
here than the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
The framework for this other American Dream has other
champions in positions of great influence within the Bush
administration. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and
his assistant Paul Wolfowitz, spring from the same neo-conservative
think-tank roots as Richard Perle. From their places high
in government, these fringe elements have gained the
required position to push forward with their plans.
This other American Dream is not solely a creation of
Bush administration officials, nor has it just recently
come to fruition, nor is it fixated solely upon the
Middle East. The bloody history of Afghanistan represents
a clear example of the kind of geopolitical gamesmanship
that characterizes the plans these people have for
America. Afghanistan in 1978 was ruled by a Communist
puppet regime called the People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA). To foster a destabilization of that
regime, so as to counter the growing Soviet influence in
that strategically vital region, America began arming and
training Afghan mujeheddin warriors, with Pakistan's
assistance, in an effort to undermine the PDPA.
This effort, however, had more in mind than the overthrow
of the PDPA. Elie Krakowski, in a study written for the
Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in
April of 2000, described Afghanistan's importance as
going far beyond the dictates of the Cold War:
"(Afghanistan) owes its importance to its location
at the confluence of major routes. A boundary between
land power and sea power, it is the meeting point between
opposing forces larger than itself. With the collapse of
the Soviet Union, it has become an important potential
opening to the sea for the landlocked new states of
Central Asia. The presence of large oil and gas deposits
in that area has attracted countries and multinational
corporations. Because Afghanistan is a major strategic
pivot, what happens there affects the world."
This places American aid to the mujeheddin in 1978 in a
broader perspective. Our actions were not simply about
attacking communism. In attempting to destabilize the
PDPA, we were hoping to tempt the wrath of the Soviet
Union. It worked: The USSR invaded and eventually
destroyed its ability to extend influence into the region
against the unyielding rock of Afghanistan, eliminating a
strategic enemy and opening the region to broadening
American hegemony.
Zbignew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor for
President Carter during this period, bluntly confirmed
this in 1998. "We did not push the Russians into
invading," said Brzezinski, "but we knowingly
increased the probability that they would. The secret
operation was an excellent idea. The effect was to draw
the Russians into the Afghan trap."
Brzezinski's brag is revelatory, for it describes the
lengths to which the proponents of this other American
Dream will go to achieve this goal. Afghanistan was
utterly destroyed by the Soviet invasion in 1979, by the
ten-year war fought by Afghan warriors to remove them,
and by the ravaging civil war that descended in the
aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal. In that span was born
the Taliban, trained to fight, and to propound their
deadly interpretation of Islam, in Pakistani religious
schools funded and supported by the American CIA.
Brzezinski's "Afghan trap" gave birth, as well,
to Osama bin Laden, whose reputation as a heroic anti-Soviet
mujeheddin warrior made him a demigod within Afghanistan.
None of this - the Soviet invasion, the Taliban, Osama
bin Laden, the wretchedness of life in Afghanistan -
would have come into existence without the forces behind
the other American Dream playing out geopolitical
strategies designed to augment American control in the
world.
This other American Dream was codified by Brzezinski in
1998, who authored in 1998 a study for the Council on
Foreign Relations entitled, "The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives."
The study describes in detail the importance of
Afghanistan and the entire Central Asian region, which is
described in its entirety as "Eurasia."
According to the study, America must gain military and
economic control of the region to stave off competition
from China, Russia and Europe. The guts of the study are
quoted below:
"But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more
important as a potential economic prize: an enormous
concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located
in the region, in addition to important minerals
including gold...It is imperative that no Eurasian
challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and
thus of also challenging America...A power that dominates
Eurasia would control two of the world's three most
advanced and economically productive regions.
"To put it in terminology that harkens back to the
more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand
imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent
collusion and maintain security dependence among the
vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to
keep the barbarians from coming together."
Profoundly disquieting are the conclusions reached by
Brzezinski regarding the means by which the American
populace could be directed into supporting the actions
required to achieve control in that region. "As
America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it
may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on
foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a
truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."
The danger is clear. This geopolitical strategy of
dominion in Central Asia, begun in 1978 with the "Afghan
trap," put in motion a series of events that
ultimately led to the creation of the Taliban, the
empowerment of Osama bin Laden, and the attacks of
September 11th. The plans described to Richard Perle's
Defense Policy Board that target not only Iraq, but
Egypt, Saudi Arabia and indeed the entire Middle East,
were born from the same strategic imperatives.
This is the other American Dream. Already, the blowback
from its dictates have dealt a terrible blow to the true
dream we wish to live by. We live in fear now of mega-terrorism
that was spawned by our actions in Central Asia and the
Middle East, and by our desire for economic control of
those regions and their resources. Because of the
terrorism we have already endured, many of our essential
liberties have been taken away in the blasphemous guise
of protecting freedom. Because of the terrorism we have
already endured, the fundamental right of life was taken
from thousands of our citizens. The three pillars of our
society have been shattered.
The proponents of this other American Dream control the
military, economic and strategic policy that governs this
nation. Their power was greatly increased by a terrorist
attack put in motion by the activities of other American
officials acting with the same strategy of hegemony and
dominion in mind. They continue their work, right now, at
this moment. One dream works feverishly, while the other
withers and dies.
William
Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. His new book, 'The
Greatest Sedition is Silence,' will be published soon by Pluto
Press. William is a contributing writer for Liberal Slant. He is
also on the writing staff at www.truthout.com. E-mail him at: williamriverspitt@hotmail.com or visit his
website: http://www.willpitt.com/
"We Are Not
The Enemy!"
The Battle of Portland
The image is chilling.
A middle-aged woman, plainly dressed, with a puff of
auburn hair, is clutched in a hammer-lock by a Portland
police officer dressed in full riot gear. His riot baton
is jammed high under her chin. Around her, three more
armor-clad police officers swarm in, face-masks down. The
woman's face is contorted in terror. In her hand is a
sign protesting George W. Bush.
This was the scene on the streets of Portland, OR, on the
evening of August 22nd as captured by a photographer for
the Associated Press. Thousands of peaceful protesters
had descended upon the Hilton Hotel where Mr. Bush was
attending a political fundraiser for Senator Gordon Smith.
They held signs reading, "Drop Bush, not Bombs,"
and other similar slogans. Among the protesters were
pregnant women, parents with infants and small children,
elderly citizens, and citizens in wheelchairs
According to a report by CBS News, the protest became
unruly when some of the fundraiser attendees were "jostled"
as they moved through the crowd towards the entrance to
the hotel. At that point, the riot police swarmed in,
swinging clubs and dousing the crowd with pepper spray.
Rubber bullets were also fired into the crowd, and
snipers were seen on the roofs surrounding the scene. The
protesters responded by hammering on the hoods of police
cars and screaming, "We are not the enemy!"
A man named Randy, who attended the protest, reports the
sequence of events as follows:
"I was between 5th and 6th on the sidewalk. Maybe
the ones in front were warned to move, but I didn't hear
any warning. It had been a peaceful protest. Suddenly the
police came forward spraying pepper spray. A man nearby
with an infant in a backpack got hit real good. The
baby's face was so red I thought it had quit breathing.
From the other direction came cop cars through the crowd
and rubber bullets were fired at those closest to the
cars. I kept retreating but the cops kept spraying. Lots
of people were sprayed, including the cameraman from
Channel 2 KATU."
Other eyewitness accounts from the streets of Portland
similarly describe what appears to have been a
terrifyingly violent response from the police to a
peaceful protest by assembled American citizens.
This is a profoundly disturbing turn of events. Mr. Bush
is protested wherever he goes these days, and the crowds
which attend them are growing. These are not black-clad
anarchists kicking in windows, however. The woman who was
attacked by the police looked as ordinary as any small-town
librarian, and anarchists are smart enough to leave their
children at home if there is a riot in the offing. The
streets of Portland were filled on August 22nd by average
American citizens seeking to inform the President of
their disfavor regarding the manner in which he is
governing their country. They were rewarded with the
business end of a billy club, a face-full of pepper
spray, and the jarring impact of a rubber bullet.
If America needed one more example of the cancer that has
been chewing through the guts of our most basic freedoms
since Mr. Bush assumed office, they can look to Portland.
The right to freely assemble and petition the government
for a redress of grievances has been rescinded at the
point of a gun.
The imperative is clear. Such violence by the authorities
cannot go unchallenged. The next time Mr. Bush appears in
public, there must be even more concerned Americans to
greet him. They must face the baton and the pepper spray,
they must stare into the shielded faces of the police,
and they must stand in non-violent disobedience of the
idea that they are not allowed to be there. The men and
women who faced the brunt of police fury in Portland are
to be lauded as American patriots, and their actions must
be duplicated by us all. The groups which organized this
protest, and the ones to come, deserve our praise.
The media, which spent much of the evening reporting that
only a few hundred protesters were in attendance, must be
browbeaten into reporting the facts from both sides -
from the police, who reportedly detained people like the
woman in the picture "for their own safety,"
and from the protesters who took a savage beating for
daring to stand against Mr. Bush. If the battle of
Portland is allowed to cast even more fear into the
hearts and minds of Americans, we have lost yet another
swath of freedoms. Stand and be counted if you can.
The whole world is watching.
Hell
to Pay
"Depend upon it, Sir,
when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind
wonderfully."
- Samuel Johnson
Some time
just before January 7th, 2002, an asteroid capable of pulverizing a good-sized
nation flashed through the void, passing perilously
close to Earth. Had it struck our planet, the impact would have had global
consequences. The energy of the strike would have been equivalent to the explosion
of a number of large atomic weapons. From the media perspective, it would
have been the biggest story since the extinction of the dinosaurs.
At some point
in the next six months, a small, darkened corner of George W. Bush's consciousness
will wish the thing had hit us. The apocalypse he and his fundamentalist buddies
have been waiting for would have been at hand, and a number of potentially
calamitous questions about to be put to his administration would have been
avoided.
Sadly for
him, the planet spins on. Beneath the unpierced stratosphere, the electronic
beams of news agencies like CNN and the Associated Press have begun to spread
like a widow's web from city to city and house to house. Carried on this invisible
wind are rumors of doom, negligence and greed. Each and every one of these
rumors lead inexorably back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which will soon be
issuing significant numbers of visitor passes to lawyers if the pattern holds
much longer.
Whichever
part of the nation that never heard of the energy giant Enron Corporation
has recently been introduced to the company in odious context. The story thus
far is nothing less than astounding: Enron, a company valued in the billions
on Wall Street, suddenly filed for the largest bankruptcy claim in the history
of the known universe. 4,000 employees were abruptly shown the door after
having been barred from dumping the company stock, meant to fund their retirement,
while it was worth something. Meanwhile, Enron executives in the know were
able to dump the stock, back when it was the gold standard on the Street,
for a cool $1 billion.
Apparently,
Enron was ailing for quite a long time. The aforementioned executives were
able to maintain the mirage of financial viability by stuffing the debt into
what are called 'off-balance-sheet partnerships.' In essence, each of the
executives built personal banking bunkers and hid what has been revealed to
be staggering Enron debts within them, keeping fact that the company was hemorrhaging
money off the publicly displayed balance sheets. This maintained the company's
credit rating, and allowed it to continue doing business.
This went
on for four years, which means several things. It means most of the Enron
executives were aware of and/or actively participating in this highly criminal
and irresponsible activity. It means the stockholders, including 4,000 loyal
Enron employees, were lied to. It probably means that the executives knew
the stock value was doomed when they bailed out and cashed in several months
ago. It means they let their employees lose the retirement funds they believed
were growing within their Enron stock portfolios. It means a lot of people
got screwed by a pack of sharp operators who didn't give a damn about anyone
but themselves.
All this
could simply be chalked up as yet another story of corporate greed run amok,
until the umbilical political and financial connections
between Bush and Enron are illuminated. Enron's capo, Kenneth Lay, was
perhaps the best financial friend George W. Bush has ever known. Lay and a
number of Enron employees essentially bankrolled Bush's 2000 Presidential
campaign, going so far as to lend Bush an Enron corporate jet for trips between
whistle stops. Before Bush got White House stars in his eyes, he worked very
closely with Enron on energy policy in Texas.
This close
connection led to the Bush administration's hiring of a number of influential
individuals within Enron's orbit for important government positions:
- Thomas
E. White, Bush's Secretary of the Army, was once Vice-Chairman of Enron Energy
Service, and held millions in Enron stock;
- Presidential
Advisor Karl Rove owned as much as $250,000 in Enron stock;
- Economic
adviser Larry Lindsay leapt straight from Enron to his current White House
job;
- Federal
Trade Representative Robert B. Zoellick did the same;
- SEC Chairman
Harvey Pitts was hand-picked by Kenneth Lay for the position, due to his notorious
aversion to governmental regulation of any kind.
There are
some thirty one Bush administration officials who had a line
item for Enron in their stock portfolio, including Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. It is fair to say that the woebegone corporation held, and continues
to hold, enormous influence over the day-to-day machinations of Federal government
policy. One wonders if Bush's recent gutting
of the Clean Air Act, a decision designed to improve the fortunes of companies
like Enron, was the brainchild of people with deep connections to the energy
industry.
The trail
of influence left by Enron leads also to the scabrous heart ventricles of
Vice President Dick Cheney, who admitted recently to six
separate meetings with Enron executives while formulating the Bush administration's
energy policy. Cheney, a former executive of the Halliburton Petroleum interest,
was in charge of creating this policy. For reasons soon to be exposed by subpoena,
Cheney refused to detail the specifics of the creation of this policy, which
included the multiple Enron meetings.
The General
Accounting Office was preparing to sue Cheney to reveal this information when
the September 11th attacks took place. Those subpoenas may be dusted off and
mailed
within a month. In the meantime, the Justice Department is preparing a
serious criminal
investigation into the collapse of Enron. The Democratically-controlled
Senate is planning hearings on the matter as well. Columnist Robert Scheer
has referred to the Bush administration's involvement in the Enron debacle
as "Whitewater in spades."
One wonders if "Watergate" would be a more appropriate comparison.
Bush's own
dealings within the energy industry carry a disturbingly
familiar echo to the Enron situation: once upon a time, he was a high-ranking
officer of a petroleum interest called Harken Oil. On June 22, 1990, Bush
sold his Harken stock and made $848,560, earning him a 200% profit. One week
later, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and its
stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of its value over the next six months.
Bush made a bundle while the other investors lost millions. Harken was Enron
in miniature, and might have served as a warning to the American people if
the press had chosen to pay any attention to it during the 2000 Presidential
campaign.
There is
a school of thought, espoused primarily by Republicans, that any investigation
into potentially dishonorable or illegal actions by the Bush administration
is tantamount to treason. We are at war, undeclared though it may be, and
Bush must be free to prosecute this war vigorously, so as to defend our freedom
and bring the murderers of American civilians to justice. If reports recently
aired on CNN
have any credence, however, Bush and his people may well have to answer for
actions that make the Enron catastrophe look like a jaywalking offense, actions
that led directly to the incredible carnage in New York and Washington, D.C.
In 1998,
during the Clinton administration, the U.S.-based energy concern Unocal canceled
plans to exploit massive natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan. They had
planned to run a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, where the natural
gas could have been processed for Asian and Western energy markets. The idea
was scuttled after Clinton ordered the cruise missile bombing of Afghanistan
in response to a terrorist attack upon U.S. embassies in Africa which were
planned and executed by Osama bin Laden. The pipeline would have had to pass
through Afghanistan, and Unocal was given the message in Technicolor by Clinton's
people that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan was not to be given any sort of
financial boon.
Apparently,
the Bush administration found no moral dilemma in dealing with the Taliban
to get to the gas. Immediately upon their arrival in Washington, a vigorous
courtship of the Taliban was undertaken by Bush's people. In fact, if
former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler is to be believed, the Bush administration
had a vested interest in strengthening and stabilizing the Taliban regime,
because a stable regime would compel investors to revive the Turkmenistan
natural gas pipeline deal. The Taliban, demon of the moment, was the Bush
administration's idea of a 'stable' government. Stable enough, anyway, to
see the pipeline through.
The connections
between Bush and the Taliban became so close that the Taliban went so far
as to hire an expert on U.S. public relations named Laila Helms, so as to
smooth the way between the two regimes. Meetings between the two nations continued
at a high level, the last of which occurred in August, scant weeks before
the September 11th attacks. All of these actions were taken to exploit the
vast energy reserves in Turkmenistan for the benefit of American energy corporations.
The cozy
relationship between Bush and the Taliban frustrated the investigative efforts
of former Deputy Director of the FBI John O'Neill. O'Neill was the FBI's
chief bin Laden hunter, in charge of the investigations into the bin Laden-connected
bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, the destruction of an American
troop barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the African embassy bombings in 1998,
and the attack upon the U.S.S. Cole in 2000.
O'Neill quit
the FBI in protest two weeks before the destruction of the World Trade Center
towers. He did so because his investigation was hindered by the Bush administration's
connections to the Taliban, and by the interests of American petroleum companies.
O'Neill was quoted as stating, "The main obstacles to investigating Islamic
terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests, and the role played by Saudi
Arabia in it." After leaving the FBI, O'Neill took a position as head of security
for the World Trade Center. He died on September 11th, 2001, trying to save
people trapped by the attack, when the towers came down on top of him. The
irony in this, simply, is horrifying.
In essence,
the Federal agent who knew more about bin Laden than any living American was
kept from investigating terrorist threats against this country. He was hindered
because the Bush administration was desperate to cultivate the favor of the
Taliban, who held terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in great esteem, so
as to gain access to lucrative natural gas deposits in Turkmenistan.
If these
allegations prove true, Bush and his friends allowed this affinity to hamstring
investigations that could have thwarted bin Laden's September plans. If these
allegations prove true, everything since September 11th has been a massive
cover-up operation in which American soldiers and thousands
of Afghan civilians have died. If these allegations prove true, the Bush
administration has the blood of thousands of American civilians on its hands.
If these
allegations carry even the faintest whiff of credibility, George W. Bush and
members of his administration stand in taint of high treason and murder.
On November
7th, 2000, a clear majority of Americans came to the conclusion that George
W. Bush was unfit to govern this nation. For a variety of dark and controversial
reasons, that conclusion was thrown over. Sometime soon, if the media's electronic
web continues to carry these sordid stories of corruption, greed and death,
the American people will come to fully understand the consequences of that
failed election.
It is one
thing to coddle and court a corrupt energy company for political and financial
gain. It is quite another to coddle and court a murderous terrorist-supporting
regime, hindering anti-terrorism investigations in the process, for the purpose
of exploiting valuable natural resources. The former cost a number of people
their retirement funds. The latter has cost thousands of people their lives.
One is criminal. The other is abominable. George W. Bush is deeply implicated
in both. There will be hell to pay.
email correspondence is welcome at w_pitt@hotmail.com.
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