| Number 130 | November 2, 2001 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, Welcome to all the new readers this week! In case you are wondering if this is a "typical" Nygaard Notes, I don't think there is such a thing. Like me, you'll just have to sit back and see what happens from one week to the next. (Unlike me, you don't need to worry about it until you see it!) I very much appreciate getting feedback from all you readers out there. Thanks in particular to those of you who have sent me the various reports and bits of information that you have run across—much of it I had not seen, and it was very useful. Thank you! I hope readers aren't worried that I have completely lost all sense of perspective and proportion in the weeks since September 11th. I am aware that there are many issues besides our current war that need attention. Still, when the most powerful nation in the world goes to war, threatening the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent people and sparking protests in dozens of cities around the world, I think it is "worth a little ink," as we say in the journalism business. Even though, for most of you, there is no ink involved. I guess it's worth a few electrons. There are many strange and inexplicable things coming into view in the wake of the September 11th attacks on the United States. While I don't pretend to have the answers (I said they were inexplicable, remember) I will point to some of them as we go along and attempt to draw some lessons from the machinations of the wartime propaganda machine. Until next week, Nygaard |
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Long-time readers of Nygaard Notes will know that I am fairly contemptuous of conspiracy theories. It's not that I don't think conspiracies take place—of course they do. It's just that I think the damage done by organized conspiracies is insignificant when measured against the damage done by institutional forces that "just happen" without the need for any conspiracy. For example, the international financial system is set up in such a way that the world's impoverished countries paid about $1.6 trillion dollars to the world's wealthy countries between 1980 and 1992 in the form of interest on the loans that they had been forced to take out in order to survive. The money hemorrhage from poor to rich countries continues today, at a rate of billions of dollars each year, essentially guaranteeing that the global rich (including not just Bill Gates, but myself and most Americans) will remain rich, and the global poor will remain poor. One cannot imagine a conspiracy elaborate enough to carry out a crime of that magnitude. Operation Northwoods Having said that, I must say that I am aware that the United States government is not above conspiring. Consider the case of "Operation Northwoods." If you've heard of it, good for you. If not, join the overwhelming majority of Americans. The essentials of Operation Northwoods are laid out in a very interesting document entitled "Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba" (Top Secret planning document "JCS 1969/321," recently declassified). This document, provided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, describes an elaborate plan which included: staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States; developing a fake "Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," including "sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated);" faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner; and concocting a "Remember the Maine" incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. All of this fake terror (the document goes into some vivid detail) was supposed to "place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances." Then, the planners believed, "world opinion, and the United Nations forum would be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere." This would then "become pretext for US military intervention in Cuba" which "will lead to a political decision which then would lead to military action." Over the intervening forty years, Cuba has shown itself to be no serious threat to the United States, as many of us have always stated. Yet the recently-revealed Operation Northwoods illustrates that some very powerful people wanted to attack that country regardless, most likely because Cuba had committed the intolerable offense of considering itself independent of U.S. power in the hemisphere. And our government wanted to attack so badly that they considered manufacturing a crisis in order to create an environment in which they could generate public consent to carry out a plan for which there would otherwise not be sufficient support. They knew their most powerful weapon in the battle for the hearts and minds of the domestic population was fear. Read JCS 1969/321 in its amazing entirety at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/. A headline in the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of October 23rd stated, "Cynicism is Out, Trust in Government is In." With the President's popularity officially running at around 90 percent, the headline seems accurate, at least for the moment. Perhaps we could benefit from a little cynicism, targeted at the most deserving among us. As in 1962, So in 2001? What I would like to suggest is the possibility that the same sort of thinking that motivated Operation Northwoods in 1962 may be at play during the current crisis. Don't get me wrong—I don't think the attacks of September 11th were part of a massive government conspiracy. But it does appear to me that this U.S. administration is manipulating the genuine terror felt by so many Americans in the wake of the September 11th attacks in order to manufacture consent to some actions and policies for which there would otherwise not be sufficient support among the American people. In 1962 our government considered manufacturing a crisis which they could then manipulate. In 2001 a crisis presented itself, and our government is proceeding to manipulate it. They know that their most powerful weapon in the battle for the hearts and minds of the domestic population is still fear. One doesn't need to postulate a conspiracy to be a little skeptical of the information being presented to us by our government during a time of national fear. What "actions and policies" are we being asked to consent to in the wake of September 11th? Well, some of the things I'm thinking of are: a major attack on our civil liberties, including the recently-passed "Anti-Terrorism" Bill (now being called the "USA Act"); the widely-expected increases in the budgets for the military and intelligence branches, and the further erosion of what remains of any regard for international law and the authority of the United Nations. The war-time mantra of "unity" is even being used to blunt whatever slight opposition there might be in the Congress to the ongoing tax scams being engineered on behalf of corporations and the wealthy. If someone you trust starts jumping up and down and pointing at something, then you'll want to look at the thing they are pointing at. On the other hand, if someone you do not trust starts jumping up and down and pointing, you might want to ask if there might be something somewhere else that they don't want you to see. Right now our government is jumping up and down and pointing at Osama bin Laden. More on that subject next week. |
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The local daily newspaper the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) is not very influential on the national level, but it is the "newspaper of record" for the upper Midwest. A database search of the Star Trib for the phrase "holy war" over the past couple of months reveals 68 articles. I probably don't need to point out that each of the articles refers to a "holy war" carried out against the United States, as opposed to one carried out by the United States. On the other hand, a search of the same newspaper database for the phrase "U.S. war" resulted in exactly zero articles. I looked for "American war" and had to go back five years to find just 12 citations. While none of them used the phrase to refer to our current war against Afghanistan, one article did refer to the Congress giving unlimited war-making powers to the President last month, and pointed out that "Although the Constitution grants Congress the power to declare war, presidents have resisted the notion that they are required to seek congressional approval before dispatching troops." The result, as we see in the current case, is that our country can go to war when and where we want and the Free Press will not call it a war, so no one notices that the constitution has been violated and that the President is guilty. The only other article that was at all current was a hysterical piece from a professor at the National War College, calling for the United States to go to war against somebody-or-other, not even mentioning Afghanistan (it was written before the bombs started falling). The good professor ended with the comment that "If all this sounds like the awkward logic of empire, so be it." The "empire" he was approving he referred to as "an empire of democracies," a complete oxymoron. Other newspapers around the country are much less shy about referring to an "American War," but that is not to say that they are telling us anything about the conduct of that war. In Nygaard Notes #128 I wrote a piece called "This is What Propaganda Looks Like." I still look every day for news reports that cite anyone other than people who are a party to the conflict or "anonymous." No success yet, although I feel as though I am getting to know Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Secretary of War ("Defense") pretty well. At the beginning of the U.S. war, many commentators pointed out that, due to its extreme poverty and years of war, there was almost nothing left to destroy in Afghanistan. When asked if this meant that the U.S. was "running out of targets" to bomb, the Star Tribune reported that Rumsfeld "quipped" that "We're not running out of targets; Afghanistan is." MSNBC reported that this comment was met with "gales of laughter" in the briefing room. It was not reported whether any reporter pointed out that Afghanistan has never attacked the United States. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") ran an article on October 22nd about the denizens of that briefing room, entitled "Reporters Want More Access, But Are Careful to Ask Nicely." The Times reported that "Although pressing for maximum access, reporters are modulating their requests. Some journalists want to avoid the appearance of being intemperate, which could endanger their chances for access." Consider that "access" for the media is any opportunity to get near the actual battle fronts, the only position from which the citizens of the United States might hope to receive any independent confirmation of the "spin" given to this war by our leaders. In their defense, the Times points out that "News organizations have pressed, politely, for a mutual understanding about accompanying troops since shortly after September 11th." However, the ombudsman for the Washington Post points out in the same article that "the policy of keeping news organizations away from the fight or the fighters is likely to continue until pressure is exerted on the news media's behalf from high-ranking government officials." I can't think of any obvious candidates for media advocate in this administration, since talking to the media at all seems to be a burden to most of these folks. When pressed, they will agree to talk to the media, but make no pretense of telling them anything, as the following exchange illustrates (and I quote here directly from the Times):
With such a jovial quipster running these briefings, it's not surprising that the Pentagon press corps may occasionally forget that this man's actions may result in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. |