The Snowman

We are in a country governed by spin. We are whirling in a Category 5 hurricane of lies, fabrications and disinformation and reported by the mainstream media as truths. In 1964 LBJ ordered the bombing of North Vietnam after Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which gave the President authority to repel any attack against U.S. forces. Congress passed the resolution because it was believed and reported that Vietnamese gunboats had fired upon American destroyers in the Gulf not once but twice, an obviously aggressive act. But in reality there was no second attack simply because there was no first attack. The supposed truth was that we, that is to say, South Vietnamese gunboats secretly operating under our direction had fired on North Vietnam coastal islands as part of an intelligence gathering operation. It was then that the Pentagon concocted the distortion that North Vietnam PT boats had fired on us a second time. Following that, LBJ went on TV and spun us into war, calling for bombing of North Vietnam. We were “retaliating” for a North Vietnam torpedoing that never occurred. The media picked up the story, continued the spin and lauded the President for his firm stand. The American people once more were spun into war based on official lies and disinformation spread very effectively by the American press and TV pundits.

According to Norman Solomon, later at the Senate Foreign Relations committee hearings, Secretary of Defense McNamara continued the fabrication. He maintained that our destroyers had fired back at the North Vietnam gunboats after the attack. When asked by the committee whether the North VN had “initiated” the attack, McNamara lied and said, “Yes.” The General sitting next to him replied, “That’s correct.” At that time Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon was on the committee and he had received from an anonymous Pentagon source the information that one of our destroyers, the Maddux, had played a role in the South Vietnam raids. When he asked McNamara about this, McNamara lied once more saying that our Navy had played no role in any such action if it had occurred at all. He ended his testimony by emphatically declaring: “I say this flatly. This is a fact.” On the other hand, Daniel Ellsberg revealed later that the Tonkin Gulf events were “entirely U.S. operations.” The South Vietnamese were involved in a very limited way. The U.S. owned the boats, hired the crews and controlled the whole operation. The CIA and the Navy trained the crews.

In May of 1962 McNamara had just returned from Vietnam and he reported that the Vietnam operation was progressing extremely well and the future looked excellent. By 1964 Daniel Ellsberg, compiler of the Pentagon Papers, was working as a special assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense, McNaughton. Ellsberg was therefore privy to all Defense Dept secrets. In Oct 1966 McNamara had again returned from Vietnam and at a press conference described the extensive progress being made in Vietnam. Ellsberg, on the other hand, said that McNamara made this statement to the press just a few minutes after he had told Ellsberg in confidence that things were much worse that the year before. This kind of deception continued from LBJ down. The President himself frequently stated publicly that peace was near. So the American people were victims of ceaseless spin. Not even the mainstream media saw through the duplicity. They reported whatever they were told.

Unfortunately the American public because of their political naiveté suffer like the Swiss from amnesia. But the Swiss amnesia is based on greed. The American amnesia is based on ignorance of the facts and possibly a false optimism. As one observer pointed out, “Despite how many times in the past we have been lied to, we still think that the present government will tell us the truth.”

Now let’s fast forward to approximately 40 years in the future to the meeting of the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. It was in that month that Colin Powell, our Secty of State gave a speech in support of a war against Iraq that should have won him an Academy Award for his snow job par excellence. Powell was originally presented to us as a man of character, i.e. honest, trustworthy and dependable. The press had crowned him with a halo and never questioned or challenged his statements. He was in a secure bubble protected from the mainstream media. So in his speech he was able to fabricate, invent and hyperbolize. For example, taped phone calls in Arabic were exaggerated as to their intention. He further referred in detail to Hussein Kamel, who was in charge of the development of chemical and biological weapons under Saddam. He defected in 1995 and told the CIA and British Intelligence that those weapons had been destroyed after the Gulf War. Powell chose in his speech to ignore that fact. It happened that Kamel was Saddam’s son-in-law and was well versed in the Iraqi weapons program. Powell further maintained that Iraq was a serious threat to the Middle East but in fact no Arabic country made such a complaint. The only aggressive act that Iraq had taken was the invasion of Kuwait 12 years prior and at that time Saddam was given the go ahead by our Ambassador to Iraq under instructions from Secretary of State Baker. Our attitude was that we do not get involved in Arab to Arab hostility. Powell also mentioned Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against Iran but ignored the fact that we had provided intelligence and financial and military assistance to Iraq to carry out those attacks. None of these statements were challenged by the media. In fact the media fell all over themselves in support of the speech. Even the liberal columnists were convinced by his speech that war was an absolute necessity. But only in the U.S. was this so. In Britain the speech “went over like a lead balloon.” British journalists did not buy his allegations and proceeded to tear apart his arguments.

Another argument used in support of the Iraqi War was the relevance of the U.N. If the U.N. did not support the war it became irrelevant. The logic of that position implies that the U.N. is relevant only to the extent that it supports what ever the U.S. wants. In that regard it is a defeat if the U.S. doesn’t get its way. But there are many political and economic favors that the most powerful country in the world can employ to convince small countries to support our position. For example, before the Gulf War began Yemen voted against the resolution to attack. Three days later the U.S. punished Yemen severely for that negative vote by stopping financial aid in the amount of $70 million. Yemen happens to be one of the poorest countries in the world. The World Bank and the IMF also put economic pressure on Yemen. And to make matters even worse thousands of Yemeni workers were banished from Saudi Arabia.

Later it was revealed that the U.S. was spying on certain UN Security Council delegations in order to gain support for the Iraqi war. We were engaged in surveillance operations, e.g. tapping phones and intercepting e-mails of UN delegates. This operation was directed specifically toward six delegations that were crucial in gaining votes for the Iraqi war. It happens that the information was in a secret memo that was leaked by a British newspaper and caused acute embarrassment to the Bush administration. The news circulated world-wide except in the U.S. Another example of our main stream media’s refusal to challenge the duplicitous policies of the Bush administration.

After 9/11 the President did not have a clue as to why anyone would want to attack us. He asked, why do they hate us? It must be our way of life, our democracy that they hate. It never would occur to him or the media that it might be our foreign policy that enrages most of the third world countries. If they have oil or other natural resources, we want to control those resources. We do that by building military bases in their country. We control and dominate their country by suppressing popular uprisings and in the process violate their human rights. When they persist in misbehaving, we send in the World Bank and the IMF to warp their economy and invite the corporate investors to assume control of the economic resources. Once we have control we remain there and we call it “democracy building.”

Gore Vidal believes that the “war on terrorism” is nonsense. He says it’s like declaring “war on dandruff.” Any government should protect its citizens from terrorism but why call it a war. The reason is simple. It is in wartime that the president has maximum power and can ignore the checks and balances of the Constitution, as well as ignoring the Bill of Rights. 9/11 was committed by well organized individual extremists not a nation. Wars are fought by nations not zealots who are willing to die for their cause. So this administration has established war time powers but there is no war. We are flooded with lies to support this fallacy.

Thus, the war on terrorism becomes essentially spin to convince the American public that all other possibilities, e.g. international negotiations, have been tried when in actual fact nothing else has been considered. According to the administration, war on terrorism is meant to protect our way of life and since it is, as Rumsfeld stated, open-ended, it meant that the U.S. is “waging virtually perpetual war.” And we can’t win it. Suicidal bombing is a response to the occupation of a national homeland. And the only solution is withdrawal.

References:
Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets. Viking, 2002.
Solomon, Norman. War Made Easy. Wiley, 2005.
Vidal, Gore. Imperial America. Avalon, 2004.