By Edward S. Herman
http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Oct2003/herman1003.html
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One of the remarkable phenomena in this crazy political environment has been the Republican administration’s success in getting President George Bush portrayed as the person who the citizenry can rely on to protect their security interests. This is amazing, given the Bush record and plans. I will argue that he has been a calamitous failure on security issues up to now and that he is busily engaged in sowing the seeds for security disasters in the future. In saying this I am using security in the narrow sense, concerned only with threats of terrorist and military attack. If we extend the concept to encompass the security of the U.S. citizenry from threats of unemployment, pension loss, lack of medical insurance, street crime, security state abuses of civil liberties, breakdowns in electrical, water, or transportation service, or damage to health resulting from environmental degradation, the Bush threat to security is overwhelming.
Bush has gotten away with this image of security-savior by stoking fears, stirring up patriotic ardor, manufacturing wars—or rather invasions of small and virtually defenseless countries—and strutting about looking very grave, pronouncing momentous words attempting to evoke Churchillian grandeur (“I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people”), and acting his part in frequent photo-ops that portray the erstwhile draft-dodger as an active warrior chieftain (his jet-landing in Air Force garb on the USS Abraham Lincoln).
But he couldn’t have done this without an ultra-compliant media that followed his agenda, featured virtually without comment his photo-ops, serial misrepresentations of fact, promoted scares, and refused to challenge their leader, serving him much in the manner of the media of a totalitarian state. Professor Lance Bennett refers to this media performance as a “near-perfect journalistic participation in government propaganda operations.” The large right-wing segment of the media have functioned as literal press agents and cheerleaders for the Bush administration, setting the tone and helping cow the “liberal” sector of the corporate media into similar, if less vocal, subservience to the government (although most of them didn’t need to be cowed). At a deeper level, this reflects the fact that the corporate community is very pleased with the Bush administration, which has been brazenly aggressive in providing business tax breaks, resource giveaways, reductions in environmental controls, cutbacks in the welfare state, and impediments to labor organization. Such service to the needs of the powerful feeds into the performance of the corporate and advertiser-funded media, which treats a Bush much differently than a Clinton, Gore, or any other politician who may try hard to placate business, but is not prepared for 100 percent corporate service.
The 9/11 Security Failure
The Bush administration was directly responsible for the 9/11 security failure, one of the greatest and most inexcusable in U.S. history. The Administration had been warned by the outgoing Clinton team of the al Qaeda threat and essentially ignored that warning in its eight months in office before 9/11. The Administration failed to take any action based on a host of subsequent warning signals, including information on the flight training of suspicious individuals and explicit advisories of a threatened “spectacular” terrorist action provided by the intelligence agencies of half-a-dozen allied countries. Bush’s August 6, 2001 intelligence briefing included an item, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” which noted the “FBI judgment about pattern of activity consistent with preparation for hijackings and other types of attack.” The Bush administration did nothing in response to these warnings in the way of checking out threatening “patterns of activity” like flight training or trying to strengthen airport security. On September 10, 2001, Attorney-General John Ashcroft submitted a Justice Department budget that reduced by $58 million FBI requests that would have provided for 149 counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts, and 54 translators; and he proposed a $65 million cut for state and local governments for counterterrorism supplies, including radios and decontamination equipment. Ashcroft’s priorities did not include terrorism; they featured “securing the rights of victims of crimes,” immigration control, dealing with drug trafficking, and the threat of prostitutes in Louisiana.
The failure to deal with the al Qaeda terror threat may well have been connected to the relationships between the Bush family, friends, and oil interests and the Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, some of whom were allowed to leave the country in the immediate wake of 9/11 with White House approval—while large numbers of Arabs with no known connections to bin Laden or al Qaeda were quickly rounded up for questioning, frequent mistreatment, and open-ended incarceration. The Bush administration went to great pains to impede and delay an investigation of the 9/11 security failure, refusing access to Condaleeza Rice, many CIA and other personnel, as well as executive documents and, in the end, insisting on keeping from public scrutiny the 28 pages of the long-delayed report on the reasons for the security failure that dealt with the Saudi connection.
It is an amazing testimony to the power of the right wing that the Bush administration was able to get away with delaying and then successfully censoring the joint congressional committee’s 9/11 report and without ever suffering any serious condemnation. Clearly 9/11 has been considered an event of overwhelming importance, with almost 3,000 U.S. dead, generating vast publicity and expressions of grief and anger, and providing the basis for an open-ended “war on terror.” Recall also that some of the 19 plane hijackers had even trained in aircraft management in the United States, had coordinated this operation on U.S. soil without any interference from a security apparatus costing the taxpayers an estimated $30 billion a year. Then there is the record of warnings and evidence of Bush administration disinterest, possibly influenced by the Saudi-oil connection. Then there is the failure of the U.S. alert system to respond to the hijacking, and the evidence that leader George Bush became conspicuous by his absence following his hearing of the Twin Towers hits.
Many of the 9/11 victims’ families have been appalled at the security failure cover-up and some have even pursued the issue with a great deal of energy (Gail Sheehy, “Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush,” New York Observer, August 21, 2003). But the media have been exceedingly quiet and from 9/11 to the present they have exerted little pressure on the Administration to explain their failure and they have not suggested that this dereliction of duty constitutes criminal and impeachable negligence. At the height of the disclosures of Bush’s intelligence failures, in May 2002, the New York Times editorial stress was on the inability to assemble data and to act as a “chronic” problem and the need to focus on “what really matters, which is preventing another assault” by bin Laden, rather than blame assessment (ed., “Distractions and Diversions,” May 21, 2002). In fact, the media have hardly admitted 9/11 to be a Bush failure at all—the Philadelphia Inquirer made 9/11 something that might taint Clinton’s legacy, without even mentioning any possible Bush responsibility (Dick Polman, “Sept. 11 may tarnish Clinton’s legacy,” January 14, 2002).
I would submit that if Clinton had been in office and displayed the same record of non- and mal-performance the media would have been unrelenting, their investigative efforts would have been frenzied, and the security failure would have been pinned on Clinton along with his immediate subordinates. (Dick Cheney, for example, was presented as Bush’s “point man on domestic terrorism” in May 2001, but he hadn’t lifted a finger in dealing with this responsibility by 9/11.) If Clinton was impeached for lies associated with the Lewinsky scandal, can there be any doubt that he would have been impeached—and convicted and removed from office—for this much more serious crime? But he was not protected by the right wing and “liberal media,” as is George Bush, the more aggres- sive servant of the corporate community.
http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Oct2003/herman1003.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the remarkable phenomena in this crazy political environment has been the Republican administration’s success in getting President George Bush portrayed as the person who the citizenry can rely on to protect their security interests. This is amazing, given the Bush record and plans. I will argue that he has been a calamitous failure on security issues up to now and that he is busily engaged in sowing the seeds for security disasters in the future. In saying this I am using security in the narrow sense, concerned only with threats of terrorist and military attack. If we extend the concept to encompass the security of the U.S. citizenry from threats of unemployment, pension loss, lack of medical insurance, street crime, security state abuses of civil liberties, breakdowns in electrical, water, or transportation service, or damage to health resulting from environmental degradation, the Bush threat to security is overwhelming.
Bush has gotten away with this image of security-savior by stoking fears, stirring up patriotic ardor, manufacturing wars—or rather invasions of small and virtually defenseless countries—and strutting about looking very grave, pronouncing momentous words attempting to evoke Churchillian grandeur (“I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people”), and acting his part in frequent photo-ops that portray the erstwhile draft-dodger as an active warrior chieftain (his jet-landing in Air Force garb on the USS Abraham Lincoln).
But he couldn’t have done this without an ultra-compliant media that followed his agenda, featured virtually without comment his photo-ops, serial misrepresentations of fact, promoted scares, and refused to challenge their leader, serving him much in the manner of the media of a totalitarian state. Professor Lance Bennett refers to this media performance as a “near-perfect journalistic participation in government propaganda operations.” The large right-wing segment of the media have functioned as literal press agents and cheerleaders for the Bush administration, setting the tone and helping cow the “liberal” sector of the corporate media into similar, if less vocal, subservience to the government (although most of them didn’t need to be cowed). At a deeper level, this reflects the fact that the corporate community is very pleased with the Bush administration, which has been brazenly aggressive in providing business tax breaks, resource giveaways, reductions in environmental controls, cutbacks in the welfare state, and impediments to labor organization. Such service to the needs of the powerful feeds into the performance of the corporate and advertiser-funded media, which treats a Bush much differently than a Clinton, Gore, or any other politician who may try hard to placate business, but is not prepared for 100 percent corporate service.
The 9/11 Security Failure
The Bush administration was directly responsible for the 9/11 security failure, one of the greatest and most inexcusable in U.S. history. The Administration had been warned by the outgoing Clinton team of the al Qaeda threat and essentially ignored that warning in its eight months in office before 9/11. The Administration failed to take any action based on a host of subsequent warning signals, including information on the flight training of suspicious individuals and explicit advisories of a threatened “spectacular” terrorist action provided by the intelligence agencies of half-a-dozen allied countries. Bush’s August 6, 2001 intelligence briefing included an item, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” which noted the “FBI judgment about pattern of activity consistent with preparation for hijackings and other types of attack.” The Bush administration did nothing in response to these warnings in the way of checking out threatening “patterns of activity” like flight training or trying to strengthen airport security. On September 10, 2001, Attorney-General John Ashcroft submitted a Justice Department budget that reduced by $58 million FBI requests that would have provided for 149 counterterrorism field agents, 200 intelligence analysts, and 54 translators; and he proposed a $65 million cut for state and local governments for counterterrorism supplies, including radios and decontamination equipment. Ashcroft’s priorities did not include terrorism; they featured “securing the rights of victims of crimes,” immigration control, dealing with drug trafficking, and the threat of prostitutes in Louisiana.
The failure to deal with the al Qaeda terror threat may well have been connected to the relationships between the Bush family, friends, and oil interests and the Saudis, including members of the bin Laden family, some of whom were allowed to leave the country in the immediate wake of 9/11 with White House approval—while large numbers of Arabs with no known connections to bin Laden or al Qaeda were quickly rounded up for questioning, frequent mistreatment, and open-ended incarceration. The Bush administration went to great pains to impede and delay an investigation of the 9/11 security failure, refusing access to Condaleeza Rice, many CIA and other personnel, as well as executive documents and, in the end, insisting on keeping from public scrutiny the 28 pages of the long-delayed report on the reasons for the security failure that dealt with the Saudi connection.
It is an amazing testimony to the power of the right wing that the Bush administration was able to get away with delaying and then successfully censoring the joint congressional committee’s 9/11 report and without ever suffering any serious condemnation. Clearly 9/11 has been considered an event of overwhelming importance, with almost 3,000 U.S. dead, generating vast publicity and expressions of grief and anger, and providing the basis for an open-ended “war on terror.” Recall also that some of the 19 plane hijackers had even trained in aircraft management in the United States, had coordinated this operation on U.S. soil without any interference from a security apparatus costing the taxpayers an estimated $30 billion a year. Then there is the record of warnings and evidence of Bush administration disinterest, possibly influenced by the Saudi-oil connection. Then there is the failure of the U.S. alert system to respond to the hijacking, and the evidence that leader George Bush became conspicuous by his absence following his hearing of the Twin Towers hits.
Many of the 9/11 victims’ families have been appalled at the security failure cover-up and some have even pursued the issue with a great deal of energy (Gail Sheehy, “Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush,” New York Observer, August 21, 2003). But the media have been exceedingly quiet and from 9/11 to the present they have exerted little pressure on the Administration to explain their failure and they have not suggested that this dereliction of duty constitutes criminal and impeachable negligence. At the height of the disclosures of Bush’s intelligence failures, in May 2002, the New York Times editorial stress was on the inability to assemble data and to act as a “chronic” problem and the need to focus on “what really matters, which is preventing another assault” by bin Laden, rather than blame assessment (ed., “Distractions and Diversions,” May 21, 2002). In fact, the media have hardly admitted 9/11 to be a Bush failure at all—the Philadelphia Inquirer made 9/11 something that might taint Clinton’s legacy, without even mentioning any possible Bush responsibility (Dick Polman, “Sept. 11 may tarnish Clinton’s legacy,” January 14, 2002).
I would submit that if Clinton had been in office and displayed the same record of non- and mal-performance the media would have been unrelenting, their investigative efforts would have been frenzied, and the security failure would have been pinned on Clinton along with his immediate subordinates. (Dick Cheney, for example, was presented as Bush’s “point man on domestic terrorism” in May 2001, but he hadn’t lifted a finger in dealing with this responsibility by 9/11.) If Clinton was impeached for lies associated with the Lewinsky scandal, can there be any doubt that he would have been impeached—and convicted and removed from office—for this much more serious crime? But he was not protected by the right wing and “liberal media,” as is George Bush, the more aggres- sive servant of the corporate community.