By Chris Floyd - The Moscow Times April 19, 2003.
"How best to govern the state? First rectify the language." -- Confucius
"The rule of law is dead.
" In the new America, a feckless
multimillionaire takes control of a democracy despite losing
the popular vote and proclaims, without shame or subterfuge,
that he has the right not only to arrest and detain
indefinitely any citizen of that democracy -or the world-
without any legal charges, but also to have them murdered by
his secret services, on his sole authority, outside all
judicial review or restraint
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Last week we learned that the
U.S. administration lied about the extent of Halliburton Corp.'s
involvement in the "reconstruction" of Iraq. Officials in the
administration of U.S. President George W. Bush initially claimed
that Halliburton -- the oil and defense services conglomerate once
headed by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who still receives an
estimated $1 million annually from the company in "deferred
compensation" -- had been awarded a relatively small contract to
repair Iraqi oilfields.
But in fact, as the Washington
Post reports, Halliburton is now pumping and distributing Iraq's
vast oil reserves -- a privilege potentially worth billions of
dollars. The Bush camp freely admits that this was part of
Halliburton's no-bid, open-ended contract all along; they
deliberately "failed to mention it" in their first official notices.
It was not publicly disclosed until a congressman read the fine
print of the contract and began asking questions.
To recap: a firm that pays the
vice president of the United States a million dollars a year has now
taken over operation of Iraq's oil wealth. There have been times in
U.S. history when such an arrangement would have been called by its
true name: "corruption." But these are not such times.
Similar pranks are being played
by members of the Defense Policy Board, a highly influential group
of outside "experts" handpicked by Pentagon boss Donald Rumsfeld to
proffer "strategic advice" on military matters. They function
largely as an echo chamber for the aggressive views of Rumsfeld and
his acolytes in government, consistently pressing for the most
extreme measures, including the relentless expansion of the "war on
terrorism" at home and abroad.
Last week, the Center for
Public Integrity revealed that nine of the board's members are
"embedded," as we now say, with arms merchants and military
contractors. These DPB-connected firms have been awarded more than
$76 billion in government contracts over the last two years. DFB
members such as Richard Perle and former-CIA head James Woolsey have
openly parlayed their Pentagon service -- which includes classified
briefings from top government officials -- into lucrative
investments in new "security" and "defense" enterprises whose
profits depend directly on the continuation of the present cycle of
war and terrorism.
This activity -- now known as
"entrepreneurship" -- was also once called by a different name: "war
profiteering." In ages past, this was considered a heinous crime,
worthy of punishment by death and eternal damnation thereafter. But
these are not such times.
Indeed, the U.S. administration
revealed last month that it intends to "embed" such activity
throughout American life. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security
Gordon England told the nation's top business leaders that "security
measures will, over time, likely become embedded in the fabric of
our society," the conservative National Journal reports,
approvingly. This suffusion of surveillance, secrecy and control
into every aspect of existence "will make some businesses more
desirable than others in terms of investors and employees and
insurance," England said. The government, he says, will impose
little or no regulation on these for-profit curtailments of liberty,
while providing taxpayer-backed "economic incentives" to make the
security industries more appealing.
This policy dovetails nicely
with DPB players such as Woolsey, whose private equity firm, Paladin
Capital, set up shop a few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks. Woolsey and Paladin told investors that the instantaneous
murder of 3,000 innocent people on American soil was a "business
opportunity" that "offers substantial promise for homeland security
investment," the Guardian reports. Paladin has raised almost $300
million in speculative capital for its security and defense ventures
so far.
In another time, in another
America, such "business opportunities" would have been given a more
accurate name: "blood money."
But this is not such a time,
and such an America no longer exists. Today, in the new America,
leaders are paid millions by corporations who are then given the
fruits of aggressive wars launched by those same leaders. In the new
America, a feckless multimillionaire takes control of a democracy
despite losing the popular vote and proclaims, without shame or
subterfuge, that he has the right not only to arrest and detain
indefinitely any citizen of that democracy -- indeed, any citizen of
the world -- without any legal charges, but also to have them
murdered by his secret services, on his sole authority, outside all
judicial review or restraint. Men have already been killed by this
order, as the president himself boasted in a national address last
January; men -- and children -- have already been imprisoned (or
"disappeared," as they say in other tinhorn military dictatorships)
under this dread edict. Yet this arouses no concern among the public
-- whose lives and liberty are now forfeit to the ruler's whim -- no
outcry in the media, no resistance from the opposition party. It's
as if no one knows how to describe this extraordinary situation --
although in ages past, its name would be glaringly clear: "tyranny."
Examples like these are now
legion; they metastasize like an aggressive cancer of the blood,
sending outcroppings of pestilent mutation to the farthest reaches
of the body. But it seems we have no words left to convey the full
measure of the extremist agenda now engulfing America. We can no
longer call things by their right names. Our shopworn language,
clappped out by the virulent cliches of advertising, propaganda,
professional jargon and, yes, journalism, has become too degraded to
describe the political reality -- a reality that has itself become
degraded, even hallucinatory, to an almost unfathomable, almost
unbearable degree.
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