-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: January 13, 2007 10:50:48 AM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Can You Spell DICTATOR?
How Do You Spell “DICTATOR”?
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/715
by Elliot D. Cohen
The majority of Americans are clearly against escalating the war in
Iraq; Bush was advised against it by the military generals; the
Democrats in the Democratically-controlled Congress are unified
against it, and now even Republicans have begun to express their
opposition; the troops have already been spent and their morale is
low. But despite all these indisputable facts, Bush has gone ahead
with his plan to deploy more than twenty-one thousand additional
troops to Iraq anyway. The most shocking fact of all, however, is
not Bush's arrogant disregard for the will of the American people.
It is rather that it could well have been predicted in light of the
facts surrounding his administration. These facts paint a dismal,
coherent picture of a burgeoning dictatorship in America.
Unfortunately, this story (but for a piecemeal, fragmented,
censored version) never saw the light of day in the mainstream media.
This alarming story is of a "president" who has made "the facts fit
the policy" in cajoling and deceiving his nation into going to war
in the first place; who has abused the constitutional authority of
Congress by getting it to transfer its war-declaring power to him
under false pretenses (the false promise that war would be a last
resort while all along the war plans were on his desk); who has
dishonored the Fourth Amendment by systematically engaging without
a court warrant in wire tapping of American citizens' e-mail and
phone messages while at the same time publicly denying that any
such warrant-less wiretapping was being done; who has acquired the
private phone records of every American citizen from the major
telecom companies (which corporations themselves having been in the
pocket of the Bush administration); who has successfully backed a
move by the FCC to foreclose common carriage over the Internet
pipes, portending the potential, future downfall of the free
Internet (see Web of Deceit); who has invaded personal and
confidential banking records; who has cancelled the right of habeas
corpus for "unlawful enemy combatants" while defining the latter as
virtually anyone whom he deems "hostile" to the interests of the
United States; who keeps an "Enemies List" that includes
journalists who oppose his policies; who has threatened journalists
who publish leaked information with prosecution for treason; whose
high officials (apparently with his permission) have outted covert
CIA operative Valerie Plame in order to get even with her husband,
Ambassador Joe Wilson, for exposing falsified intelligence that
Saddam had attempted to acquire uranium "yellowcake" from Niger in
order to build nuclear weapons; who has sanctioned infiltrating
peaceful, citizen, anti-war groups and blocking freedom of speech
of anti-war demonstrators; who has sanctioned martial law and the
doing away with Posse Comitatus (legal prohibition against use of
military for domestic law enforcement) in order to deal with
natural disasters; who has paid journalists like Armstrong Williams
to tout the administration's "no child left behind" policy, and who
has hired PR companies to seamlessly inject phony news about the
successes of the war effort, among other hot button topics, into
network affiliate news; who has disregarded the Geneva Conventions,
setting himself up instead as the arbiter of the meaning of
torture; who has issued signing statements exempting himself from
legislation forbidding cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners;
who has knowingly permitted (and may well have ordered) the abuses
at Abu Ghraib; who was installed (not elected) by the Supreme Court
in 2000, and, by all indications of exit polling, was never truly
elected to office in 2004. This is a man who, on at least three
different occasions, had announced that dictatorship would be
easier than democracy as long as HE was the dictator; who along
with his cronies, such as Tom DeLay, have struck out at "activist"
judges for not toeing the administration line, prompting former
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to warn about the
impending danger of lapsing into dictatorship.
The larger picture into which all this fits becomes clearer when
viewed in the context of the Project for a New American Century
(PNAC). (See Bush's Global Mission.) This is a group of
neoconservatives, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who
anticipated 9-11 by claiming in 2000 that it would take a
"catalytic" and "catastrophic" event to transition the United
States into its role as the preeminent world power; and who, in the
same year, defined the 'axis of evil," and a couple years earlier
sponsored legislation to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
This is a group, backed by the oil and weapons industries, whose
aim has been to use military force to overthrow any "regime" that
opposes American corporate interests (in particular, Iran and
Iraq), and to send in its behemoth corporate partners like
Halliburton to take control of their natural resources (oil).
Put bluntly, the goal of Bush and company is to rule the world.
This spells "Dictatorship"--with a capital "D." Yet the average
American knows little or nothing about PNAC. The mainstream media
never covered the story!
True, the corporate media have recently begun to say more than they
have in the past six years, probably because the public tide has
turned against the Bush administration and these companies cannot
afford to disenfranchise the majority of Americans who are tired of
listening to White House white washings. While Fox continues to
trot with the Bush administration; while O'Reilly continues to
propagate the myth of a democratic White House --furiously fiddling
while Rome burns-- some of the unprincipled media chameleons such
as MSNBC's Chris Matthews have only recently begun to speak out
against Bush's war effort. Only one Network anchor, namely MSNBC
Countdown host Keith Olbermann, has been a trail blazer.
The mainstream, corporate media need collectively to set the record
straight if only for the sake of their own survival. (Behemoth
corporations like GE and Time Warner have deep pockets but no
inherent moral conscience.) Under their watch, a dictator has risen
to power. These news organizations have betrayed their
constitutional charge as "Fourth Estate" during a time when checks
and balances were so direly needed. They now need to come clean
with the American people. They need to make abundantly clear that
symbolic, toothless gestures of congressional dissent are not
sufficient measures to counter the unconscionable efforts of a
dictator to spend hundreds of thousands of lives --American and
Iraqi alike-- to build a global empire designed to fill the pockets
of oil barons (Bush/Cheney and company) with the spoils of war.
Bush wants to establish a permanent American presence in Iraq. This
is what the PNAC plan calls for, and the next probable target is
Iran. Already an American attack has in fact been launched on the
Iranian Embassy in Iraq. And Secretary of Defense Gates, following
the lead from Bush, is now calling for an increase of at least
ninety-two thousand more American troops in Iraq over the next five
years. There is therefore nothing "temporary" about this "surge."
It is a war without any foreseeable end, and it will predictably
spread beyond Iraq unless Congress does its job, and does it now.
The Vietnam War ended during the Nixon administration when Congress
took measures to cut off appropriations. But politics might well
have overtaken prudence had it not been for a mainstream media
vigilant in its coverage of widespread anti-war protests along with
vivid footage of the body bags of young Americans struck down in
the jungles of South East Asia. Like Bush, Nixon warned against the
"enemy" attacking our homeland unless it was defeated on its home
turf. Like Bush, Nixon resolved to "surge" rather than to back
down. And like Bush, Nixon believed he was above the law. But Nixon
resigned in disgrace rather than face being thrown out. The
Democratic Congress has the ability to affect a similar end to the
present dictatorial reign, but already it has pledged not to
impeach, and what it now proposes to do is express toothless
disapproval like children playing make-believe.
The media needs to fulfill its sacred trust by exposing the inept
docility of Congress by once and for all giving a coherent and
honest account of all of the facts surrounding this presidency. It
needs to tell the American people the truth, in no uncertain terms,
about what the stakes are in permitting a dictator to continue to
thrive. Armed with the facts, Americans then need to pressure their
representatives in Congress to do their jobs as though the survival
of the free world depends on it, because it most assuredly does.
The days are numbered, and the prospects grow dimmer the more
emboldened this dictator gets.
Elliot D. Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and
articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. He is the
2007 first-place recipient of the Project Censored Award for his
Buzzflash article, Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the
Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story. His
forthcoming book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and
Power-Hungry Government are Turning America into a Dictatorship
(Prometheus Books, April 2007).
www.ctrl.org
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