At The Turning Of The Tide
 By William Rivers
Pitt
 t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 Thursday 1 May 2003


 One of my earliest memories of childhood is of sitting in front of
the television watching a baseball game with my mother in our apartment outside
Boston. The year was 1975, and the Cincinnati Reds were playing the Red Sox in
what has gone down in history as one of the most remarkable World Series
matchups ever. The Reds were winning the game I was watching that day, and I
turned to my mother and told her I was rooting for them.  I wanted to be on
the winning side, and even at that tender age I could sense the aura of
inevitable doom that cloaked our hometown team.

 You can’t do that,
she said.  The Red Sox are your team. It is wrong to bail out on them
because they are losing.  You stand with your team no matter what. 
Besides, she finished, some day they will actually win this thing, and you’ll
miss out on the celebration if you discarded them before that happens.


 I’ve been a die-hard Red Sox fan ever since.  I remember
Bucky Dent the way some people remember Sirhan Sirhan.  I was watching the
World Series in a basement in Newton in 1986 when that ball skipped nimbly
through the legs of Bill Buckner, and my friend was so outraged that he punched
the low-hanging ceiling hard enough to dent the linoleum floor of the kitchen
above us.  I just sat there, numb and dumb, with ceiling tile dust in my
hair and a sinking feeling in my gut.  Later that night we were walking
back from the store when we were accosted by an abysmally inebriated Sox fan
whose whole world had been destroyed. He made us do pushups on the greasy
blacktop of a gas station to offer some sort of atonement to a universe that
had, once again, reached out to crush us. We were young and small, he was huge
and drunk, and as my nose lifted and fell off that oil-soaked pavement I
thought, somehow, that it all made sense.

 In George W. Bush’s
America, being even moderately liberal these days is like being a Red Sox
fan.  You know what needs to happen, you know what is right, and yet some
cosmic force akin to the lingering shade of Babe Ruth always manages to ascend
from purgatory and batter you into dust right at the moment when something good
and great is within your grasp.  If you do manage to get your lineup
together – home run issues, grand slam arguments, All Star players – you will
get completely outspent by the damned Yankees who are sitting in your division
with more money than God and the will to use it. Baseball, like politics, has no
spending limits.

 And then, of course, there are the umpires. 
In baseball they wear blue and there is no appealing their decisions, even when
a call is clearly wrong. I remember with writhing specificity the 1999 ALCS
between the Yankees and Red Sox. A Sox player was charging for second base and
Chuck Knoblauch swung a tag at him midway down the line.  Knoblaugh missed
the tag by a full three feet – there was a barnload of visible daylight between
his glove and the Sox player – and the umpire called the Sox player out. No
recourse, no appeal, and the Sox lost the series.  The Yankees went on to
annihilate the Atlanta Braves for their 216,339,102nd World Series title.


 In George W. Bush’s America, the umpires sit in front of
television cameras and work for major news networks.  They look and speak
like fashion models instead of journalists.  They draw their paychecks from
General Electric, Viacom, Disney, AOL/TimeWarner and Rupert Murdoch.  There
is no appealing the calls they make day after day and night after night, even
when there is a barnload of visible daylight between their interpretation and
the actual facts at hand.  The people running this administration miss the
tag with dreary regularity, and yet the media umpires seldom fail to pump their
fists and yell, “You’re out!” They hide behind their masks, and all the shouting
and dirt-kicking accomplishes exactly nothing.

 Baseball is, of
course, only a game.  There is an annual celebration of shock, heartbreak,
rage and woe in Boston at the conclusion of every season.  The lights go
off at Fenway,  the bags are packed and the bats put in storage. Red Sox
Nation shrugs its shoulders and turns its collective focus to Foxboro Stadium,
where a football team recently learned how to overcome the generational curse of
assured failure. There is always some other team to turn to when Nomar and Manny
and Pedro disembark for points south until April.  Life goes on.  No
one is dead or broken or sick. No true damage is done.

 This is not
the case in George W. Bush’s America. The season never ends here, and the dead
bodies are piling up in grisly snowdrifts.  The lies are constant, and the
ranks of the broken and the abused swell inexorably towards some awful critical
mass.  The war in Iraq – treated like a sporting event with bullets instead
of baseballs – has cost us the lives of well over a hundred American soldiers,
with more coming every day.  The war cost all of humanity several thousand
civilians, who were killed in their homes and their beds and on their
streets.  More come every day, mowed down by nervous troops or blown to
pieces by unexploded cluster bomb ordnance that was scattered across Baghdad
like malignant pixie dust.

 The war has set in motion the creation
of a fundamentalist Shiite regime in Iraq, akin to the one currently in control
of Iran.  The Bush administration is shocked, shocked that a clear majority
of Iraqis prefer this form of government to the quasi-democracy we promised
them, and are working overtime to prevent it. Thus, the irony: Bush spent blood
and treasure to “liberate” the Iraqi people, and now that they have a form of
it, Bush is bending over backwards to deny them the most elemental aspect of
liberty – the right to self-determination and self-rule. 


 Never mind that the original cause for war, clarioned time and
again by the administration, was the existence in Iraq of mobile chemical
laboratories, drones fitted with poison sprays, 15 to 20 Scud missile launchers,
5,000 gallons of anthrax, several tons of VX nerve gas agent, 100 to 500 tons of
other toxins including botulinum, mustard gas, ricin, sarin, and let’s not
forget the 30,000+ illegal munitions. None of these terrors have been unearthed
in Iraq after months of UN inspections, weeks of war, and more weeks filled with
swarming American investigators tasked to locate the stuff. 


 American forces have interrogated dozens of Iraq scientists and
officials as to the location of all this, and none of those interrogated seem to
be able to point the way.  In fact, they are denying any of the stuff is
there at all. Now that Saddam Hussein, principle motivation for any obfuscation
on their part, has been removed, what reason now do they have to lie about this?


 But wait. Of course, it is all in Syria.  Somehow the vast
network of spy satellites that can read the time from space on a wris*censored*ch of a
man sitting in Central Park failed to see the massive convoy that would have
been required to move all of this hastily across the border. That’s it. I get it
now.

 Has anyone heard the media umpires claim that Bush has missed
the tag here? I haven’t.

 Perhaps this sounds too gloomy.  Are
things really this bad?  Is the state of the game so awful?  Are we
really being lied to this profoundly?  Are the media umpires blowing it
this conspicuously?

 A writer named Kelly Kramer recently compiled
a ‘resume’ for George W. Bush.  In it, she listed his central
accomplishments.  Among them are:

• Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history;
  
  
  
• Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed
  in any 12 month period;
  
  
• Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of
  the stock market;
  
  
• First year in office set the all-time record for most
  days on vacation by any president in US history;
  
  
• After taking the entire month of August off for vacation,
  presided over the worst security failure in US history;
  
  
• In his first two years in office over 2 million Americans
  lost their jobs;
  
  
• Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans
  than any president in US history;
  
  
• Appointed more convicted criminals to administration
  positions than any president in US history;
  
  
• Signed more laws and executive orders amending the
  Constitution than any president in US history;
  
  
• Presided over the biggest energy crises in US history and
  refused to intervene when corruption was revealed;
  
  
• Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans;
  

• Set the all-time record for most people worldwide to
  simultaneously take to the streets to protest a sitting American President,
  shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of
  mankind;

• Dissolved more international treaties than any president
  in US history;

• First president in US history to have all 50 states of
  the Union simultaneously go bankrupt;

• Presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of
  any market in any country in the history of the world;

• First president in US history to order a US attack and
  military occupation of a sovereign nation;

• Created the largest government department bureaucracy in
  the history of the United States;

• Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget
  spending increases, more than any president in US history;
  

• First president in US history to have the United Nations
  remove the US from the human rights commission;

• First president in US history to have the United Nations
  remove the US from the elections monitoring board;

• All-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate
  campaign donations;

• Biggest life-time campaign contributor presided over one
  of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay,
  former CEO of Enron Corporation);

• Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any
  president in US history;

• First president to run and hide when the US came under
  attack (and then lied saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1);
  

• Took the biggest world sympathy for the US after 911, and
  in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world
  (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history);
  

• With a policy of ‘disengagement’ created the most hostile
  Israeli-Palestine relations in at least 30 years;

• First US president
  in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view his
  presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability;
  

• First US president in history to have the people of South
  Korea more threatened by the US than their immediate neighbor, North Korea;
  

• Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be
  awarded government contracts;

• Set all-time record for number of administration
  appointees who violated US law by not selling huge investments in corporations
  bidding for government contracts;

• Failed to fulfill his pledge to get Osama Bin Laden ‘dead
  or alive’;  

• Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder
  the leaders of our country at the United States Capitol building. After 18
  months he has no leads and zero suspects;

• In the 18 months following the 911 attacks he
  successfully prevented any public investigation into the biggest security
  failure in the history of the United States;

• Removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans
  than any other president in US history;

• Entered office with the strongest economy in US history
  and in less than two years turned every single economic category straight
  down.

 If you can believe it, this is an
edited list.  So it goes.

 What does any of this have to do
with baseball?  This is serious stuff, as serious as anything this nation
has faced in its history.  With all of this happening, and with no apparent
way to reverse or blunt this course, wouldn’t it just be easier to give
up?  Where do I get off making trite sports analogies in such a
situation? 

 I do it because it is instructive when
considering the next step.  The issue here is a simple matter of volume,
and of hope.  The list above is abridged, and grows exponentially longer by
the hour.  People of good conscience cannot surrender the struggle against
this rising tide with all that is at stake.

 You have to capture
the mentality of the Red Sox fan, as I have.  You start every season and
every game almost completely sure that you will be beaten soundly.  You
lick your wounds and dust yourself off and maybe cry a little into your
pillow.  But you always, always think to yourself – even after the Bucky
Dents and the Bill Bukners and the missed calls and the fact that you are being
outspent by your arch-rivals and the umpires are not doing their jobs – you
always think to yourself, “This could be it.  This could be the year.”


 You do it because you want to be there at the turning of the
tide.  The Boston Red Sox have not won a championship in 85 years, and
there is no sense today that they have a prayer of winning one any time
soon.  Yet the stands in Fenway Park are filled, night after night, to
capacity.  The crowd cheers and hoots and prays and comes back again and
again.  In its own small way, this is the very definition of hope. 
When that day does dawn, when some October night in a time to come absorbs the
victory roar of people who have watched great-grandfathers and grandfathers and
fathers live entire lives and die unfulfilled, when the Boston Red Sox finally
win that championship, it will have been worth every moment of pain and
disappointment.

 That’s just baseball.  This is America. 
Keep your head in the game.

William Rivers Pitt
is a New York Times best-selling author of two books – “War On
Iraq” available now from Context Books, and “The Greatest Sedition is Silence,”
now available at http://www.silenceissedition.com/
from Pluto Press. Scott Lowery contributed research to this report.

Folks,

This is a very interesting story.

You’re probably familiar, by now, with Michael Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications. They’re the ones who produced the video “Truth and Lies of 9-11″ (which is a very interesting piece that I highly recommend).

Through a contributor, they were recently able to publish an ad in the Washington Post, to make their points heard. The story about how it ran, and the effects that it had, is almost as interesting as the substance of their ad. Check it out. I would like to hope, with the authors, that this will set a precedent to motivate political action groups who care to preserve our liberties and throw these evildoers out of office.

Subscriber Buys FTW Full Page Ad
in The Washington Post

–C

Then read the below. It’s clear
that anyone who questions the host of contradictory stories that
the Bush administration has been feeding us better be wearing a
flak jacket.

–C "http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&ci968793972154">
Barbs aside, 9/11 questions aren’t going away

MICHELE LANDSBERG

I was just listening to the latest CIA transmissions through the
fillings in my molars last week when I accidentally intercepted a
secret internal memo from the National Post.

It went something like this: “Post readership hits bottom,
journalistic integrity under question, editor dumped, columnists
fleeing sinking ship — attack Toronto Star writer at
once!”

Seriously, if I may be serious for a moment about the National
Post, it was not so surprising to find myself the subject of a
hostile editorial in that paper after I wrote about my unanswered
9/11 questions. The Post is a staunch voice for Bush America and
brooks no dissenting voices. In tabloid fashion, it headed its
editorial "http://www.nationalpost.com/search/site/story.asp?id=D7FDBD3D-B5A8-457B-8389-BE8BC3A20BC1">
“Michele Landsberg Loses It.”

I fully expected to be labelled a “conspiracy theorist” after
interviewing Vision TV’s Barrie Zwicker and writing about his
challenges to the official version of what happened at the World
Trade Center. But I was surprised by the nature of the ensuing
attacks. The Post, and the dozen or so readers who were similarly
enraged by my column, didn’t come up with a single argument or
documented fact. It was all quivering jowls, wild insults and
expostulations.

The Post’s entire argument, once I filtered out the verbiage
(“crock”, “nonsense,” “comical,” “embarrassing” and, that good old
standby, “blinding hatred of the United States”) came down to this:
captured Al Qaeda commanders have confessed to the 9/11 crimes. End
of story.

Except that what I was asking was a little different. Few of us
doubt that murderous Saudi Arabian terrorists executed this
massacre. But I wanted to know more. Why did the U.S. military,
with the most powerful arsenal in world history, fail to prevent or
at least try to stop a series of hijackings and crashes that went
on for nearly two hours? Where was the Air Force?

If President Bush and his cabinet were not, at this very moment,
still trying to censor, suppress and delay the publication of the
Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, if there had been honest
disclosure and straight stories from the beginning, perhaps all
these “dark questions,” as the Post puts it, would never have
arisen.

The great majority of people, sickened and overwhelmed by the
horror of the attacks, unquestioningly accepts the White House
version. Many thousands, however, are patiently stitching together
the documented evidence and noting the huge holes in the fabric of
that official story.

Just ask yourself how the United States, with its vast intelligence
establishment and spy power, could have been caught unawares in
such a drastic state of unpreparedness on Sept. 11.

President Bush, or, as he delights to call himself, the
commander-in-chief, must certainly have been briefed about the
ominous drumbeat of terrorist threats that were accumulating over
the spring and summer of 2001. According to the report by Eleanor
Hill, staff director for the Joint Inquiry, there had been “an
unprecedented rise in threat” during that summer. U.S. government
agencies had been warned by the intelligence community that there
was a high probability of “spectacular” terrorist attacks by Al
Qaeda “designed to inflict mass casualties. … Attacks will occur
with little or no warning.”

The warnings included the possibility that airplanes would be used
as weapons. There was even an April, 2001, intelligence report that
terrorists planned “a spectacular and traumatic attack” like the
first World Trade Center bombing, as well as an earlier report a
group of Arabs planned to fly a plane into the World Trade Center
or CIA headquarters.

According to Hill, these warnings went to “senior government
officials” whom she was not allowed to name.

On that fateful morning, the first pictures of the burning tower
were broadcast at 8:48 a.m. By then, according to a carefully
documented timeline at http://www.cooperativeresearch.net , the
Federal Aviation Administration, NORAD (joint U.S.-Canada air
defence), the Pentagon, the White House and the Secret Service all
knew that three commercial passenger jets had been hijacked.

Here begin the obfuscation and deceit, in small matters and large,
that permeate the official narrative.

Disinformation was spewing all over the place that week after
Sept.11. Serious newspapers actually reported that one hijacker’s
passport fluttered down from the roaring inferno to be found in the
rubble by sharp-eyed intelligence officers.

The key question to me was one of air defence. There are, after
all, standard procedures in the event of airplane emergencies. The
FAA and NORAD have clear rules about any plane that suddenly loses
radio contact with the tower or veers more than 15 degrees from its
course.

Once the air traffic controller detects an emergency, he or she
must inform aviation officials who alert NORAD. Fighter jets are
then sent up to check out the straying plane, signal to it with
dipped wings, escort it back on course or even force it down.

“We scramble aircraft to respond to any potential threat,” said
Marine Corps Maj. Mike Snyder, a NORAD spokesman, in an interview
with the Boston Globe.

But it didn’t happen that way on Sept. 11. The first reports from
authoritative sources (NORAD’s Snyder, Vice-President Dick Cheney
and, most significantly, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers) all
stated that no jets took off until it was too late.

Just two days after the catastrophe, on Sept. 13, Gen. Myers was
confirmed as the new chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On that
day, he told the Senate Armed Forces Committee that no Air Force
jets got into the air until after the attack on the Pentagon.

On Sept. 15, The Boston Globe reported on a strange contradiction.
The Globe quoted NORAD spokesman Snyder, who insisted that “the
command did not immediately scramble any fighters even though it
was alerted to a hijacking 10 minutes before the first plane …
slammed into the World Trade Center.” He said the fighters remained
on the ground until after the Pentagon was hit at 9:40 a.m. But The
Globe also expressed puzzlement over the new official story that
had just emerged. Now Americans were being told that fighter jets
roared up from Cape Cod and from Virginia, but just didn’t make it
in time.

Furthermore, no explanation was ever offered for the bizarre fact
that Andrews Air Force base, whose job it is to defend the U.S.
capital just 19 kilometres away, had no fighter jets ready to go
into action — despite the months of serious warnings of
impending terrorist attacks.

And these are the people we’re to trust with a missile defence
system? They can’t even get their stories straight, let alone
defend their air space.

According to The Post and to some of their hot-eyed followers, to
ask these questions is to indulge in “poisonous delusions … that
do not belong in a mainstream newspaper.” I’m not sure they’re the
proper arbiters of mainstream journalism, but I’m willing to be
“unintentionally comical” in pursuit of understanding.

And Nostradamus rocks!

Just kidding.

Michele Landsberg ‘s column usually appears in the
Star Saturday and Sunday. Her e-mail address is
mlandsb@thestar.ca

Additional articles by Michele Landsberg

Folks,

An alert reader has kindly forwarded a Word doc version of this, instead of
that awful unusable PDF format link I sent around earlier.

This is difficult reading, and long, I know. I’m having a hard time getting
through it myself. But it’s very good to hear “from the horse’s mouth”…and
it is truly frightening. I cannot believe the boldness of this impending
legislation. We may as well kiss the Bill of Rights goodbye.

Patriot Act II (draft) (Word document, 418K)

–C