1999 A jury in Memphis, Tennessee, returns a verdict in a civil trial brought by Martin Luther King's family concluding that King was killed not by James Earl Ray, but by a conspiracy involving agencies of the U.S. government and the Memphis police.
2000 September. The Project for the New American Century releases a position paper, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," stating that the United States will not be able to enforce its will on Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan and maintain a Pax Americana "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." The paper introduces a new word to refer to the United States of America -- "the homeland."
2000 November. George W. Bush is elected president after a disputed ballot count and the intervention of the Supreme Court. Dick Cheney becomes vice-president and Donald Rumsfeld is named Secretary of Defense.
2001 May 1. George W. Bush gives a major foreign-policy speech at the National Defense University and says that the U.S.A. must be willing to "rethink the unthinkable," giving public notice that the U.S. planned to withdraw from the ABM treaty. He warns against "weapons of mass destruction" and "weapons of terror" in the hands of rogue actors. The speech closely follows the reasoning of the PNAC paper of the previous year in urging an aggressive foreign policy. Cheney and Rumsfeld are in the audience.
2001 June 22-23 Exercise Dark Winter takes place at Andrews Air Force base. The scenario involves anonymous threatening letters sent to mainstream media. The letters threaten more letters to come with anthrax. Judith Miller, author of Germs, and a notoriously deceptive Iraq war hawk for The New York Times, participates, playing Judith Miller of the New York Times.
2001 September 11. The terrorist attacks in NYC and Washington, D.C. occur. The media immediately starts referring to them as another Pearl Harbor, a new Pearl Harbor. CBS News reports that before going to bed at night George W. Bush wrote in his diary, "The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today." The site of the Twin Towers is first referred to as "ground zero," a nuclear-war term, by Mark Walsh, identified as a freelancer for Fox News by the Fox News interviewer on the street of lower Manhattan. Presciently anticipating the official explanation for the buildings collapse, Walsh adds that the towers obviously collapsed "mostly due to structural failure since the fires were too intense."
2001 September 12. The New York Times headlines a story: "Personal Accounts of a Morning Rush that Became the Unthinkable." Another headline under the byline of future editor Bill Keller, Iraq war hawk, reads, "America's Emergency Line: 9/11." The endless emergency and war on terror begin. Henceforth, for the first time in American history, a very important day is referred to by numbers, not by name -- an emergency phone number.
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