I have no doubt they’re out there. Terrorists. A couple of years ago I reported a story on a guy named Randy Glass who went undercover with the ATF to bust some Pakistanis who were trying to buy black market missiles and—something they got really excited about—heavy water. The tapes were chilling.
But what was even more chilling was that some of these guys wound up doing hardly any time in jail, just a few years; and one of them, Rajaa Gulum Abbas, was able to escape back to Pakistan, although the U.S. government had been informed by the ATF of his shopping around for things that go boom.
What was even more chilling than that was that the solid, career ATF guys who conducted the investigation told me they couldn’t understand why Washington had seemed so uninterested and had offered them so little support.
(They also said, for the 9/11 heads out there, that while they backed up former con man-turned informant Glass on everything else, they couldn’t back him up on his claim that these particular terrorists had forewarned him of the attack on the World Trade Center. Glass has never shared his alleged, recorded proof of this aspect of his story.)
So who’s zooming who, here? The ever-vigilant Bill O’Reilly writes in his column today, lambasting the voters of Connecticut who nixed pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman’s re-election bid, that “Geopolitics is complicated, it requires a sophisticated knowledge of how the world works.”
How true that is. “How the world works” is indeed the question here. Not whether there are terrorists, or whether their plots of destruction should be stopped, but what connections the United States government cultivates with terrorists, and whether it uses terrorists and "the war on terror” to further its own domestic and military agendas and the agendas of its corporate sponsors—namely, the oil companies, the weapons manufacturers, and myriad others (Halliburton, Bechtel, et al) that are reaping profits from the war in Iraq as the coffers of this country are siphoned off like so much over-priced gas, and young American soldiers are killed.
Take, for example, the case of just one terrorist, the scariest-looking dude in the line-up: Mohammed Atta. The U.S. government had so many warnings about this guy even Inspector Clouseau could have figured out he was up to no good. And yet Atta traveled in and out of the U.S. unheeded, took flight lessons, went to strip bars (so much for his alleged religious fanaticism), had weird conversations with all kinds of people who got very, very alarmed and reported his ass, but to no avail.
Operation Able Danger, a secret military intelligence program created by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1999 to monitor Al Qaeda, reportedly identified Atta and three of the other 9/11 hijackers, as well as their plans, prior to the September 11 attacks. Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer, an Army intelligence officer, says that when he and others involved in Able Danger decided to alert the FBI of their findings, they were blocked from doing so by the Army’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
Information on Operation Able Danger is nowhere to be found in the 9/11 Commission Report—the U.S. government’s official accounting of what happened on September 11, produced at taxpayers’ expense. After the existence of the operation was uncovered last year, 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean—a former Republican Governor of New Jersey and close George Bush ally—admitted that the commission had been aware of the program, and had in fact obtained information about it from the Department of Defense, but didn’t see anything in it to warrant mentioning it.
You have to be pretty “sophisticated” to get your mind around all this, I guess, but not too sophisticated for the American people. That’s why the polls show support for Bush and the Iraq war at dismal, angry lows. And that’s why a lot of people I talked to today take a sidelong view of this latest “shampoo plot” coming out of England.
Here’s what the New York Times had to say: “Officials said the plot—of which few concrete details were made known—bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda and involved links to plotters in Pakistan.”
But why can't we know which “officials"? And when will more “concrete details” be “made known"? And what, if anything, did the timing of the bust have to do with the upcoming election in the United States, and the defeat of terror hawk and Bush busser Joe Lieberman? [See this story, reported by NBC on August 12, the day after this blog was posted: "Source: U.S., U.K. at odds over timing of arrests; British wanted to continue surveillance on terror suspects, official says," at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14320452.]
It made me recall a conversation I had in May with Korey Rowe, the producer of the 9/11 documentary Loose Change (which you can watch at www.loosechange911.com; my full interview with Rowe is in Rosebud #4). When I asked him what he thought the United States’ next move in “the war on terror" would be, he said:
“What I see them doing next is they’ll actually thwart an attack. They’ll show some huge, massive attack, probably a nuclear weapon, and show how they were able to stop it because of the new procedures that they implemented. Although they do incrementally take away our liberties, it’s still O.K. because we were able to thwart an enemy terrorist attack. That’s what I see happening next.”
Call it conspiracy theory, or an educated guess. We're all sophisticated enough about the way the world works to have noticed this Bush government is waging its war on terror not only with guns and bombs abroad but with fear and propaganda at home.
Dick Cheney actually said yesterday that the people who voted out Joe Lieberman were giving consolation and inspiration to “Al Qaeda types.” I don’t like it when Dick Cheney says things like “Al Qaeda types” because it makes me wonder—hey, does that mean me? You never really know with this vice-president; he just might think that anyone who doesn’t support his view of how to run this country into the ground is a terrorist.
But let’s think about some other things that might be fueling the fire of the real “Al Qaeda types”—starting with the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Or how about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Or Guantanamo Bay. Or Abu Ghraib. Or Dick Cheney.
Or George W. Bush. Or Donald Rumsfeld. Or Condoleeza Rice.
Probably most of these things would appear somewhere on an “Al Qaeda type’s” list of “Why I Am An Al Qaeda Type”—but probably not the people who voted for Ned Lamont.
Ned La-who? That would have been the question just a few weeks ago; but now, lo and behold, the people of Connecticut say “no” to a pro-war Joe Lieberman—to the perplexed surprise of many of his fellow Democrats, who long ago moved to the far away Planet Loser—and Ned Lamont suddenly has a name.
“This is going to make the terrorists think we don't have resolve!” chimed in the talking heads, who call themselves "journalists."
Lieberman—a squashed tomato of a man—also had the misfortune of being a Jew running for office at the same time that Israel began pounding away like—well, like the United States in Iraq—at a sovereign nation, and Mel Gibson was careening along the Pacific Coast Highway spitting “Jews start all the wars in the world!” into the face of a Jewish police officer—the very polite Officer Mee.
What got to me about the whole Mel Gibson affair was not the boring, obvious hatefest (nothing very original going on with Mel since Mad Max), it was Officer Mee.
Officer Mee, who is Jewish, responded to Mel’s drunken rant by saying, “What I had hoped out of this is that he would think twice before he gets behind the wheel of a car and was drinking… I don't want to ruin his career, I don't want to defame him in any way or hurt him.”
It was very classy, very Gregory Peck, and very Jewish, in the true sense of the word.
It would be all too easy for Americans to let Israel’s most recent paroxysm of militarism to turn them against the idea and the reality of Jews; but we the people voted out Joe Lieberman not because he’s Jewish, but because he supports an unjust war. We the people aren’t “we the anti-Semites,” or “we the afraid of Al Qaeda types,” but we the lovers of truth and justice for all—the true American religion. We the people that gave the world Superman, created by two Jewish Americans.
I’m a Jew—technically a Jewish convert, although my father was a Jew who loved Christmas and shiksas. I’m married to an Episcopal priest, whose commitment to the underdog and dogged activism and political scrappiness all makes me think of him as very Jewish. He says he's trying to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. We have a picture of Jesus on our wall, painted by a Cuban communist. He’s—Jesus is—holding his palms up as if to say, “What do you want from me?” or “Is that the best you can do?”—which, to me, looks very Jewish. When I can’t decide what to do sometimes, I consult our hot pink Jesus “eight-ball” (a plastic statue with a rolling answer cube in the base). When I asked him (Him?) today if I should write about anti-Semitism, he replied, “Resist the devil.”
But who is this devil of which my eight-ball speaks? Jews aren’t supposed to believe in “The Devil,” per se, but I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of him around lately. Scary guy. I saw him there on the TV, shooting missiles into Lebanon, shooting missiles back into Israel. There he was again, blowing up American soldiers in Iraq, raining terror on innocent Iraqis. But hey, that wasn’t the devil at all. That was a bunch of people who think they have God on their side. Then I saw Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell on TV, saying the end is near and all the Jews and Muslims are going to hell.
I'm a Jew—a so-called "Jew by choice," a phrase I've never liked, because it sounds unnecessarily emphatic—because the Jews say that you shouldn’t eat before you feed your animals. Because they say you should be indulgent toward children, not strict and dictatorial. I’m a Jew because Jews liken destroying one leaf off a tree to destroying all of God’s creation. I’m a Jew because Jews liken gossip to murder. It’s the path toward which I came to name what I know in my heart is right and wrong. And if I had to boil it down to one word, what my Jewish education has taught me, I believe it would be “kindness.” Not violence, never hatred.
I’m a Jew who admires Jesus, a girl who loves Jesus the radical, the badass, the rock star—because fighting the man is, was, and always will be the hippest thing of all.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” he said, “for they shall be called sons of God.” (Matthew 5:9)