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.
Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For information, go to: WarMadeEasy.com.
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