Bully_Pulpit
New member
Another excerpt:
2 + 2 = 4
In the classic dystopian novel 1984 George Orwell wrote, “Freedom is the freedom
to say two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.” The totalitarian
power of Orwell’s nightmare state couldn’t be maintained without the
successful eradication of precisely this freedom.
In May 1999 I had an experience that crystallized something I had known for
a long time, but had never seen so clearly. At a sparsely attended and self-congratulatory
“People’s Tribunal,” I witnessed the burial rite for an important issue that,
had it been fully pursued, might have prevented the attacks of September 11,
2001. The subject of the tribunal, being held on a Saturday at the University of
Southern California, was the drug war and the CIA’s connections to the drug
trade. Two and a half years earlier, the nation had been aflame after Pulitzer Prizewinning
journalist Gary Webb reported on incendiary documents and witnesses
linking the Agency directly to the crack cocaine epidemic that devastated America’s
inner cities during the 1980s.
What happened to Webb and his stories remains an object lesson for researchers
and activists in the post-9/11 world. Members of Congress such as Maxine Waters
16 crossing the rubicon
of California, who had once vowed to make the issue her “life’s work,” presided over
the demise of the story. Webb, pilloried by the media and punished by his employer
the San Jose Mercury News, had in 1997 and 1998 been thoroughly vindicated
by Congressional investigations. Webb’s greatest vindication of all came in the form
of a CIA Inspector General (IG) report released in a declassified version by CIA
Director George Tenet on October 8, 1998 — one hour after Congressman Henry
Hyde’s House Judiciary Committee had voted out articles of impeachment against
William Jefferson Clinton.11
Something got lost in the news that day. The cover letters and the summaries of
the IG report, which is still on the CIA website, said that the exhaustive investigation
had found no evidence that the CIA had done anything seriously wrong. Those
who actually read the entire report, however, found devastating and damning admissions
of criminal behavior on the part of the CIA and Vice President George Herbert
Walker Bush. We have seen that pattern repeated over and over since 9/11.
Webb was an “Enemy of the State” in the minds of most Americans. He had
challenged their sacred beliefs. Representative Waters, however, had seen her president
safely through the impeachment and then gone strangely silent about a
report that could have toppled a government and changed the world. The truth
often gets traded too cheaply, and the victim of such trades is always the future.
I had been through similar experiences during the Iran-Contra scandal. I had
read about, and later interviewed, others who had the same experiences in the case
of POWs and MIAs abandoned in Southeast Asia after the Vietnam War. I had
studied how the investigation into the murder of President John F. Kennedy had
been controlled. I had also acquired personally painful and verifiable knowledge
that the murder of John’s brother Robert was a CIA operation. All the goodwill
and energy of the researcher-activists in each of these cases was deliberately and
meticulously sabotaged by interested parties and their allies in the dominant political
class.12
By May of 1999 what should have been hundreds of thousands of people in
the street and a massive government scandal had dwindled to about a hundred or
so apparatchiks who would wave the People’s Tribunal as evidence of their leadership.
I laughed with pity as they returned to the beltway to ask for larger grants
from their patrons, major foundations and other institutionally compromised
entities. The people who ran the tribunals were ultimately beholden to the same
powers that had created the problem in the first place. Experts with compromised
wallets had staged a controlled burn of brief outrage, cooling rapidly to insouciance.
The inconsistencies were soon forgotten.
There’s an old saying that in a ham and eggs breakfast, the chicken is involved,
but the pig is committed. None of us who were convinced of the urgency of the
CIA-drug story and who were heartbroken by its burial doubted that unless people
found the courage to deal with the problem, something much worse —
something as bad as 9/11 — was certain to happen.
Introduction 17
Yet one speaker at the USC event, retired San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara,
gave me something powerful to take away. He said: “When Richard Nixon started
the War on Drugs in 1972 the federal budget allocation for the war on drugs
was $101 million. Today the federal budget allocation is $20 billion. And yet today
there are more drugs in this country, they are less expensive, and they are of better
quality than they were in 1972.”
Pigs listen harder than chickens do. There were only two plausible ways to
interpret that amazing fact. One could assume that a twenty-seven-year failure,
despite a budget almost 200 times greater than when it began, and despite the
application of the best minds in politics and law enforcement, was somehow the
result of a collective and contagious stupidity. Not only had these people been negligent
and incompetent, their budgets had been increased as a reward. This is
exactly what we are being asked to accept about the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Even in the arguably less urgent matter of illicit drug proliferation, a sane person
should have demanded a total restructuring of the contaminated government entities,
mass firings, and a serious strategy review. It was our money, the product of
our labor, and our children’s lives that these failures had wasted.
On the other hand, one could infer that this state of affairs — having been
managed by the most educated and influential elite in the country — reflected
exactly what was intended: a global drug economy that generated an estimated
$600 - $700 billion a year in liquid cash profits from which someone was deriving
great benefit. Who?
Occam’s Razor (a principle of reasoning associated with medieval thinker
William of Ockham, 1288 - 1327) recommends choosing the simplest workable
explanation for a phenomenon. In that moment of clarity I had a vision of the
degree of reality-twisting, pretzel-bending logic in which the “experts” had
engaged. They had orchestrated the destruction and marginalization of people
who held mirrors up to their irrationality. In the post-9/11 world, we live with the
ultimate insanity that this thinking has produced.
When a flock of birds suddenly changes direction, simultaneously and uniformly,
is it a conspiracy? Or is it just an instant recognition by every member of the flock
where their collective interests lie?
It was at USC that I began to understand that the people shielding the system,
and the knowingly guilty perpetrators within it, were hiding a truth that threatened
all of them, the way psychologically sick families sometimes hide the sexual
violation of their own children by a relative. I remembered the words of psychiatrist
Carl Jung: “The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience
legitimate suffering.”
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