by Michael Arvey
"Jim said bees wouldn't sting idiots; but I didn't believe that, because I have tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn't sting me." Huckleberry Finn
"It is easier to claim that a person's viewpoint is stemmed from irrational hatred than to dispute an obvious truth." Randy Lavello
The 56th Annual Conference on World Affairs convened this April 5-9 on the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The conference is a week-long gabfest that traditionally vets a panoply of topics including politics, war, film, music, education, drugs and many others. Each year its mainstream speakers--conservative, moderate and progressive alike--converge on Boulder from around the country and the world. This year's overarching theme was, "Divided We Stand."
One of the panels I attended was entitled "Wagging the Dog: Will Osama be Captured in September or October?", alluding to Ronald Reagan's October Surprise in 1980. October Surprise is the allegation that representatives of the 1980 Ronald Reagan presidential campaign arranged the Iran-Contra deal well in advance of the 1980 election when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. One of the four panelists, David Bernknopf, a founding employee of Cable News Network (CNN), playfully polled the audience with this question (paraphrased): How many of you believe that Osama will be captured, or already has been captured, in time for the 2004 election? Nearly all the audience raised their hands. Bernknopf quipped that we were all nuts. The other panelists readily agreed, chuckling as if "conspiracy theories" are the vacuous stuff of fruitcakery (my coinage).
Panelist Janet Breslin-Smith, a faculty member at the National War College in Washington D.C., remarked that we should realistically acknowledge that "things just happen." From that koan-like utterance on happenstance, I realized the true nature of effulgent politics and power--that the huge events shaping our lives and world are merely coincidental, and therefore beyond legitimate criticism.
Hence, in the spirit of that awakening, I would like to proffer a few nutty things that have happened in the last three years:
1. President Bush captured the U.S. presidency upon his party's specious election activities in 2000, and upon the Supreme Court's decision to eschew a Florida vote recount.
Vote fraud, Supreme Courts and Presidents just happen.
2. Despite intelligence warnings, attack simulations and an Air Force calibrated with Standard Operating Procedures to intercept wayward aircraft over American airspace, 19 hijackers on 9-11 were able to bring down skyscrapers constructed to withstand plane crashes and intense fires. A few of the purported hijackers turned out to be alive and well in the Middle East.
Mistakes just happen.
3. In 1962, the U.S. military concocted Project Northwoods, a scheme to fake attacks against the U.S. by Cuba to incite support for a U.S. war against Cuba, thus demonstrating that such deceit is not beyond the realm of possibility.1
In the end, Project Northwoods was a scheme that didn't happen.
4. In 2003, Iraq apparently had the most heinous weapons of mass destruction on the planet, or so said the Bushmen of the Beltway, and then Iraq didn't have them.
Cooked intelligence just happens.
5. From the moment the Bush administration took over the White House, secrecy has become policy.
Deceit just happens.
5. Four soldiers from the New York Army National Guard who were serving in Iraq arrived stateside, contaminated with depleted uranium poisoning. According to Democracy Now, April 5,2004, "Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News has found four of nine soldiers of the 442nd Military Police Company of the New York Army National Guard returning from Iraq tested positive for depleted uranium contamination. They are the first confirmed cases of inhaled depleted uranium exposure from the current Iraq conflict." Moreover, hundreds of Iraqis have been killed and wounded in recent conflicts in Fallujah, including over 40 U.S. dead.
War just happens, especially when it is promoted by conspiratorial
lies.
6. The 9-11 Commission cut a deal with the White House not to call more high level officials to testify if National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice showed up under oath. This came after two years of stonewalling by the Bush administration, which initially opposed an investigation, and only relented under public pressure. Paul Sherry writes from www.antiwar.com, "The fine print of the deal takes the chance of the commission taking sworn public testimony from any other White House official - including Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley, Bush's political adviser Karl Rove, President Bush himself or Vice President Dick Cheney - completely off the table. It also precludes the panel from having the option of calling Rice, who's made media statements contradicting evidence and sworn statements by other officials, back to testify." 2
And, according to the Washington Post, April 8, 2004, the 9-11 Commission recently discovered that the Bush administration withheld Clinton era counter-terror documents from investigators, which included references to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The Post wrote, "The administration had not notified the panel about the records."3 Why not? The question is a moot one anyway. If the Commission, a hand-picked investigatory group of White House insiders, is amenable to striking deals, then what does that say to its pursuance of the light of truth?
Cover-ups are not conspiracies. Deals just happen.
7. In 2002, the Pentagon, striving to influence U.S. foreign policy, set up the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) to deliberately plant false stories to the press. The following is excerpted from a FAIR report, 11/27/2002: "The Federation of American Scientists has pointed to a startling revelation by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that mainstream media have missed: In remarks during a recent press briefing, Rumsfeld suggested that though the controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) no longer exists in name, its programs are still being carried out (FAS Secrecy News, 11/27/02, http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2002/11/112702.html ).
"The OSI came under scrutiny last February, when the New York Times reported (2/19/02) that the new Pentagon group was 'developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations.' The news was met with outrage, and within a week the Pentagon had closed down the OSI, saying that negative attention had damaged the office's reputation so much 'that it could not operate effectively' (AP, 2/26/02)."4
Propaganda just happens.
8. The Bush administration's patterns over the past two years have sustained attacks on civil and legal rights, women's and workers' rights, and the environment. It has thumbed its nose at the U.N., and has trampled on international laws and treaties. It has blatantly advanced its horrific and reactionary agenda on the backs of 9-11, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
Mistrust just happens.
9. A March 16, 2004 New York Times editorial opined, "Richard Foster, on the government's foremost Medicare experts, says he was ordered not to provide requested information to Congress last fall when doubts were being raised about the drug benefit's cost." He had estimated the cost to be $600 billion, not "the Congressional Budget Office figure of $400 billion over 10 years."5
Credibility just happens.
10. According to Matt Bivens, "Bush's Poisons", The Nation, (8/25/03), the Environmental Protection Agency, after being convinced by the White House to "add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones" in the EPA Inspector General's report, insisted the air around the fallen WTC towers was safe to breathe. In other words, the White House conspired to cover up a serious health issue affecting New Yorkers.6
Conspiracies just happen.
Things do just happen, certainly--we live in a big, fast, often chaotic and perplexing world--but to dismiss legitimate avenues of inquiry and skepticism as being nothing more than conspiracy mush is a dangerous way to conduct affairs. Real conspirators, to deflect attention from themselves, will do all they can to ensure that those who wonder and speculate out loud will be summarily dismissed without even the slightest of hearings. And they will do so with trickle-down coincidence theories.
Notes
1. http://www.antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=2209
2. (http://www.nara.gov, http://emperors-clothes.com/images/north-i.htm)
3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59534-2004Apr7.html
4. http://www.fair.org/press-releases/osi-followup-html
5. http://nytimes.com/2004/03/16/opinion/16TUE2.html
6. http://www.thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?pid=910
Michael Arvey (marvey@email.com) writes from Colorado.
