For America to assert that its position is the only justified position masks the need for our government to find the primary causes that turn people into terrorists against America. “The Path to 9/11” avoids any discussion, any action, any hypothetical exploration of alternative causes for terrorism other than “they hate America’s freedoms.” That vapid and meaningless phrase has evolved into a mantra for the Bush administration. Yet, ironically, the pseudo-documentary carries another message, an imbedded cause that can only be voiced by the arch terrorists and thus made irrelevant, America’s unconditional support for Israeli genocidal action against the Palestinians causes Arabs from different nations around the world to take actions against America. Neo-Cons cannot let that cause rise to the surface. Americans cannot know that their safety and security are threatened by Israel as an ally. Yet that is exactly the conclusion the 9/11 Commission heard as a primary cause but failed to include in its report, as Kean and Hamilton’s recent book notes.

What are the consequences of this deception? Since Bush entered office, Israel has set forth on a unilateral eradication of a Palestinian state by a series of calculated illegal actions that have resulted in reducing the land owned by the Palestinians to approximately 22% of the original land area; Sharon introduced the barbaric practice of extra-judicial executions, a means of eliminating targeted individuals without recourse to law – arrest, conviction, trial and judgment by peers – thus becoming a one man judge, jury and executioner, a practice that denies individual rights; and, in a more savage action, Israel has constructed the largest prison wall ever erected, a wall declared illegal and inhumane by the International Court of Justice, but proclaimed a legitimate security barrier by the US Congress and the President; and, finally, in this abbreviated litany of crimes against humanity, the President and the Congress and Senate, acting on a resolution written by the American Israeli Political Action Committee, approved the Israeli invasion and devastation of Lebanon, a crime witnessed and condemned by the entire world. What sane person would be able to assert, after this heinous list of inhumane actions by the Israeli state with full approval of the US government, that the Arab world, nay, the free world, has a right and a duty to condemn America for its inhumane support of this terrorist state? Are we not witnessing here the actions of those who have denied the existence of evil except as that word can be used to influence others to destroy the lives and property of innocent people? Are we not witnessing the action of a state that wantonly destroys human life with impunity and without remorse?

Having noted the Bush deception regarding Israel, what can be said of his deceptions to the American people when his cabal determined that they would invade Iraq? On March 13, 2003, days before the bombing of Baghdad, I wrote an article that appeared in Counterpunch, “When Logics Die: Rage against the Regime.” This passage seems pertinent here: “I saw this born-again Christian president order American boys and girls to ‘take up the cross’ in defense of their homeland: to defend America against those who have inflicted no harm on America; who have in 12 years not molested any nation; who have claimed they possess no WMD and no nuclear capability verified by international inspectors to be the case; who occupy no other people’s lands; who have been subjugated to eleven years of deprivation by a coalition of nations that deprive them of basic medical, sanitation, health and economic necessities; who live in daily fear of American and British war planes that arbitrarily destroy their defenses and kill innocent civilians; and who are surrounded by the greatest massed force of destruction ever assembled in the history of humankind. This president claims he will bring freedom to the Iraqi people, not America’s gift of freedom, but God’s! This president will liberate the Iraqi people even as he slaughters an inestimable number of innocents…”   

That article goes on to record the deceptions Bush hurled at the American people including the lie recently confirmed as a lie by the FBI, that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. The Neo-Cons reaction to that FBI notice was to dismiss it as “old news.” How many soldiers died, how many Iraqis died for that lie? Does it matter to the Neo-Cons who dismiss such death as “stuff happens,” and move on to their next slaughter? After all, they have evolved technology far beyond the machetes that hacked the inoculated arms off of those children that Kurtz describes; they have the means to sear the skin black with white phosphorus, to suck the air out of lungs to suffocate the innocent, to scatter deadly pellets that explode upon touch to maim or kill the children, or to hurl screaming missiles into buildings with war heads that burst upon impact spreading depleted uranium into the air that ensures a long and painful death for both the living and those yet to be born. These are the actions of our government done in our name visible to the people of the world as America’s gift to the mid-east. These are the actions of a group gone mad, arrested in their mental development by the arrogance of dementia, a state that obliterates reason in favor of power, unencumbered by morality, driven by a sick sense of superiority, ultimately racism masquerading as intelligence.

By reducing to a meaningless mantra the complexity of American global involvement– its military presence in over 140 nations throughout the world, its clandestine interference in the internal governments of other nations as it did in Iran and Chile to name only two, its control and coercion of nations by economic force through the IMF and the World Bank, its imposition of policies that negate internal laws through international trade as controlled by transnational corporations, its exploitation of residents that become employees protected by no personnel safety regulations, receive no medical coverage and no retirement, its willingness to abscond with the natural resources of other nations while supporting dictators, and, most of all, its annual multi billion dollar support of the Israeli military as it inflicts illegal occupation on the Palestinians including land theft, imprisonment, torture, starvation, and psychological suffocation with its physical isolation of the people behind their wall of shame – it prevents government actions that could address the real causes of terrorism and end the terrorism that plagues the country.

Thus we return to this mini-series that exalts the abuse of power by asserting that a dictator’s absolute control can best protect the security of the people even as it destroys the very freedoms it claims to protect. This dual deception hides the true causes of America’s agony while it imbues the people with the need to hold tight to the deception because they are provided no alternatives; their fate rests in the hands of those who manipulate them, and that is the fate of those who have relinquished their conscience to leaders mad with power. 

=================
 
William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Depception: Bush's Mideast Policy

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