9/11 and the case for reality (Part 2): The right-wing worldview has long coupled delusions with lies, not least in matters of "national security"

Has anyone every been less entitled to a say in our national security?

by Ken

Last night I announced an overall subject for that post and tonight's, "9/11 and the case for reality." Part 1 dealt with reality checks "In the world of science, and in the life and work of Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth," and at the end I suggested that I couldn't imagine more suitable material for a 9/11 post" today than a pair of Tom Engelhardt's TomGrams -- a new one from Jeremiah Goulka, "Confessions of a Former Republican," and one from 2010 to which Jeremiah G harks back, Andrew Bacevich's "How Washington Rules."

In the meantime, our friend John Puma added a comment with a link to a NYT op-ed, "The Deafness Before the Storm," by former NYT reporter and current Vanity Fair contributing editor Kurt Eichenwald, based on his new book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, which is exactly on topic. As it happens, I heard Eichenwald this morning on NPR's Morning Edition, and what he has to say is a good deal more disturbing than what we already knew about the Bush regime's cavalier dismissal, from the time it took office right up to 9/11/2001, of warnings about the threat to the U.S. posed by Osama bin Laden.

We've known for ages about the famous August 6 daily intelligence briefing delivered to Chimpy the Prez with what Eichenwald describes as "the now-infamous heading: 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'” Let's pick up the story here, from his op-ed piece:

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief -- and only that daily brief -- in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document's significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda'’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration's reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that "a group presently in the United States" was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be "imminent," although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

Nonsense, said the geniuses who had assumed positions of authority in the Bush regime's National Insecurity regime. "An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration" told Eichenwald that the neocon imbeciles (well, that's my word) though bin Laden was bluffing, trying to distract their genius selves from the real threat, Saddam Hussein. The CIA, it appears, did everything in its power to persuade the geniuses -- and the nincompoop president -- that they were wrong.

We know how that worked out. No matter how much information the CIA produced, and no matter how much detail it included, the neocon geniuses not only ignored it but attempted to discredit the people who were trying to penetrate that wall of arrogance and ignorance. And then, after 9/11 happened, those people, whose first instinct apparently is always to lie, lied their corrupt, criminal heads off.

The neocons came into power dead set on war with Iraq, and nothing was going to stop them. So the CIA found itself under sustained assault from "Big Dick" Cheney, who was not only the most corrupt, arrogant, and dishonest person ever to set foot in the White House but the stupidest, forcing its analysts to spew lies that supported, or at least didn't contradict, its lies. By rights, perhaps allowing a decent interval after the 9/11 attacks, "Big Dick" should have gone on TV, accompanied by some of the other architects of U.S. unpreparedness, and they should all have blown their useless brains out.

MAYBE "CONSERVATISM" WAS ONCE AN IDEOLOGY. NOW
IT'S A COMBINATION OF PSYCHOSIS, DELUSION, AND SCAM

Since Andrew Bacevich's repurposed work has been focused on national-security issues, his conversion concerns us more directly tonight. He came to his awakening at age 41, following a couple of decades of military service. As he explained in the introduction to his 2010 book The Unmaking of a Company Man: An Education Begun in the Shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, which Tom Engelhardt reprinted as Andrew B's TomGram:

By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had become a deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly, to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high -- whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops -- is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor.

I came to these obvious points embarrassingly late in life. “Nothing is so astonishing in education,” the historian Henry Adams once wrote, “as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Until that moment I had too often confused education with accumulating and cataloging facts. In Berlin, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, I began to realize that I had been a naïf. And so, at age 41, I set out, in a halting and haphazard fashion, to acquire a genuine education.

For Andrew B, it was seeing the reality of the former East Germany, totally at odds with what he had been led to believe, that began opening his eyes.

Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble.

That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation’s enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not -- to me, at least -- in any way contradict America’s aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United States had amassed an arsenal of over 31,000 nuclear weapons, some small number of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with our belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats to life and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an arsenal and maintain it in readiness for instant use.

He has a lot more to say on the subject, but for tonight I think we get the idea. Jeremiah Goulka's awakening from his former life as "a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented" covers a lot more than national security, and we'll come back to that tomorrow, but his original political orientation clearly includes the right-wing mindset:

Lots of Republicans grow up hawks. I certainly did. My sense of what it meant to be an American was linked to my belief that from 1776 to WWII, and even from the 1991 Gulf War to Kosovo and Afghanistan, the American military had been dedicated to birthing freedom and democracy in the world, while dispensing a tough and precise global justice.

What both men are talking about are the lies and delusions that lay at the heart of foreign policy -- in the name of "national security" -- in the Bush regime. And today is the anniversary of what should be its eternal shame.

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