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by Maureen Farrell

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Nearly thirty years ago, the Church Committee opened America's eyes to some of our government's smarmier activities. There were CIA ties to the Mafia and alliances with Nazis and the messy matter of kidnapping the less fortunate and feeding them LSD [LINK]. Assorted coups and assassinations were also unearthed -- as was the "other" September 11, in 1973, when a U.S.-led coup toppled Chile's democratically-elected Salvador Allende. "Like Caesar peering into the colonies from distant Rome, Nixon said the choice of government by the Chileans was unacceptable to the president of the United States," Sen. Frank Church remarked. "The attitude in the White House seemed to be, "If in the wake of Vietnam I can no longer send in the Marines, then I will send in the CIA."

George W. Bush didn't need to send in the CIA. He openly declared war and bullied others into following, while distorting intelligence to do so. "Fu*k Saddam, we're taking him out," he said in March, 2002. "I made up my mind, that Saddam needs to go," he said, one month later. This was well before Congress bought the administration's yellow-caked, aluminum-tubed, "Saddam-hearts-Osama" bill of goods, mind you, and gave George Bush permission to waste thousands of lives and a billion dollars a week. "Never before in my 40 years of experience in this town has intelligence been used in so cynical and so orchestrated a way," former CIA analyst and supervisor Raymond McGovern told CBS News [LINK], vindicating those who tried to warn us early on.

"The President of the United States will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war," Congressman Jim McDermott said, in the fall of 2002, drawing swift response from the Republican National Committee [LINK] and dittoheads nationwide. But even as propagandists recite "16 words" like dutiful zombies [LINK], now that the enriched uranium tip of Bush's dissembling is making headlines, accusing "Baghdad Jim" and other whistleblowers of being "anti-American" and "un-patriotic" no longer flies.

The Guardian's Simon Tisdall was also on to Bush's ruse early on. "Since when has it been the proper function of an American president to scare the children?" he asked [LINK], regarding fibs unfurled in Bush's Oct. 7 address. But now that America's mainstream media are finally addressing this gross deception, long overlooked issues are at long last being raised. Emphasizing that this isn't merely about now or 5 years from now, but how Bush's preventative foray will influence U.S. relations for the next 50 years, Senator Jay Rockefeller discussed Yellowcakegate on a recent Hardball:

CHRIS MATTHEWS: "Senator, don't you find it strange that [The White House] won't even honestly retract what they found to be bogus, that somebody anonymous has to do it?

ROCKEFELLER: I find that strange. I find that scary. And I find that very dangerous for the future. I mean, they-if you're talking about weapons of mass destruction, obviously of which nuclear is the most important of all, if that's the case that you take to the American people to say, look, we've got to go in there under the doctrine of preemption, then you darn well better be sure that your facts are right. And the intelligence community was skeptical on this, and, you know, the international agency, atomic energy group, they completely dismissed it. It was a fraud. People knew it. They went ahead with it. It had to be put in, I think, for the purpose of-I say this just from my personal point of view-of manipulating public opinion, and that's very dangerous. . . . .

MATTHEWS: What do you do if you found out the president knew about this and put it in bogusly?

ROCKEFELLER: Then I think there [are] very serious questions for the president, and enormously serious questions for the next 50 years of this nation in terms of the foreign policy. [LINK]

Then, too, those who defend Bush's lies by contending that this war will make the world safer, obviously haven't seen the latest study issued by the University of Reading, which reports, among other things, that: 1) "The invasion of Iraq has exacerbated, not mitigated, international terrorism. . . " 2) "The frequency and reach of al-Qaeda attacks will continue to increase. . . " and 3) "Al-Qaeda cannot be defeated without a change in U.S. counterterrorism strategy." [LINK] And as Dick Cheney's Halliburton and George Bush's Carlyle Group grow richer and Americans become more vulnerable, one major question arises: How on earth did this happen?

"Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object," Abraham Lincoln noted, knowing that the founders took great pains to insure Americans would not succumb to a similar fate. "It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress," James Wilson warned, in anticipation of a president who one day might simply say "I made up my mind." At some point, however, even Kansas stopped being in Kansas, and if you're not feeling a little uneasy, you're simply not paying attention. But, in the interest of inoculating "we the people" against aiding and abetting even more government-issued B.S., consider the following:

I: The Secret Government

"The enormous gap between what U.S. leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology." -- Michael Parenti

Years ago, Bill Moyers lent a credible voice to those warning about America's "secret government" [LINK]. Tracing the advent of our secretive and often grossly unethical national security state to the National Security Act of 1947, Moyers made it clear that Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy lied to the American public about foreign policy, just as Nixon did, showing that any attempt to define this as a liberal versus conservative or Democrat versus Republican issue is well beside the point.

The real dangers to our society aren't our philosophical differences (which actually make us stronger), but the government's secret blowback-inciting activities. When any attempt to tell the truth or unearth agendas is considered unpatriotic, however, or deemed a matter of blind Bush hatred or Democratic political maneuvering, duped citizens become distracted and carp at each other while ignoring ways our Bill of Rights is being dismantled, our coffers are being pilfered and our children's futures are being jeopardized. Most Americans, regardless of their feelings towards this war, care when our soldiers are misused [LINK] and perhaps now fellow citizens who yelled "Support our troops!" might see that's exactly what anti-war activists were doing.

But as more of us become aware of unseemly events forged in the shadow of unsupervised power, perhaps we'll be less likely to point fingers at each other -- and more likely to hold our government accountable. Between the Dulles brothers' handiwork in Guatemala, the U.S. coup in Iran, Operation Phoenix in Vietnam and the CIA's 40-year partnership with Saddam Hussein, our hidden history has wrought crisis, disaster and war. "Can we have the permanent warfare state and democracy, too?" Moyers asked. "How do the people cry fowl when their liberties are imperiled if public officials can break the rules, lie to us about it and wave the wand of national security to silence us?," he wondered. Saying that "the apparatus of secret power remains intact," he warned, in 1987, that "this is a system easily corrupted as the public grows indifferent again and the press is seduced or distracted. So one day, sadly, we are likely to discover, once again, that while freedom does have enemies in the world, it can also be undermined here at home, in the dark, by those posing as its friends."

II. The Secret Government Revisited: The Iron Veil Descends

"I have not seen such executive arrogance and secrecy since the Nixon administration, and we all know what happened to that group." - Senator Robert Byrd, on the Bush administration

As it turns out, the usurpation Moyers warned against arrived right about the time the Bush administration barreled into power. Revisiting "the Secret Government" in 2002, Moyers reported on how Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney worked to thwart the Freedom of Information Act in 1974 and renewed their efforts following the 2001 attacks. Using Sept. 11 and "national security" as a backdrop, President Bush's first Executive Order effectively repealed access to presidential records -- along with the public's right to know. [LINK]

"This Executive Order is the first time that Vice Presidents have ever been given their own executive privilege, separate from the President," Thomas Blanton, the Executive Director of the National Security Archive explained. "And I don't think it's exactly coincidence that the first Vice President who gets to use this new privilege is George W. Bush's father, from his tenure under Reagan." In other words, unless various lawsuits to nullify this Executive Order are successful, we'll not know why George Bush was "out of the loop" during the Iran-Contra affair, when the secret government blatantly circumvented Congress and the Constitution and made a mockery of our democracy. Nor we know why many Iran-Contra criminals now hold high-ranking positions in the Bush administration.

Since Sept. 11, there have been more than 300 rollbacks in the Freedom of Information Act, and the disclosure rules in the Homeland Security Act represent, as Sen. Patrick J. Leahy remarked, "the most severe weakening of the Freedom of Information Act in its 36-year history." Meanwhile Cheney's attempts to thwart investigations into both Sept.11 and his energy task force, is, as Moyers noted, "potentially a bigger scandal than the heist of Teapot Dome that rocked the Harding Administration," which, he added, also "involved vast amounts of oil." [LINK] Now that we know that task force documents contained maps of Iraq's oil wells and a list of "foreign suitors for Iraqi oilfield contracts" and that the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy recommended that Cheney's task force consider "a 'military' option in dealing with Iraq," five months before the Sept. 11 attacks [LINK], perhaps Moyers will be proven right once again.

III. Greetings from the Bushy Knoll

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." - President Theodore Roosevelt

In 1999, after the Sacramento Bee's Suzanne Bohan reported that former president Bush and George W. Bush were among those attending the annual Bohemian Grove all-male bash in Sonoma, CA, [LINK], one of G.W.'s campaign managers promptly called her, denied Bush's participation, and demanded a retraction. And though Bush Sr. has attended Bohemian Grove festivities (as has every Republican president since Calvin Coolidge [LINK]), the Bush campaign wanted to keep G. W.'s hands clean.

That same year, presidential candidate Bush gave what is being referred to as his "king-making speech" before the Council for National Policy, the group ABC News referred to as "the most powerful conservative group you've never heard of." Soon afterwards, it was decided that "the allegedly moderate younger Bush fit for the mantle of Republican leadership." [LINK] Others took it from there. "When George Bush was running for president, he essentially went to school," Newsweek's Evan Thomas told PBS. "And various great and worthy men trooped down to Austin to teach George Bush about the world. And by and large, they told him that Iraq was unfinished. . . And if George W. Bush was elected president, he may end up having to do what his father didn't do or couldn't do, and that is killing off Saddam Hussein." [LINK]

And though Bush dons a Regular Guy persona and scoffs at "the elite," according to author Alexandra Robbins, he's actually "a loyal and particularly active member" of Yale's highly secretive and highly selective Skull and Bones society. [LINK] How does this translate to public service? Bush is "practically turning the government into a secret society," and doing "almost all he can to promote a level of secrecy in government not seen since the Nixon administration," Robbins wrote in USA Today. [LINK]

IV. Uncle Sam Meets Freddy Krueger

"Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that The State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." - Arthur Miller

Nearly six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans learned we had a secret bunker government -- even though most members of Congress had not yet been informed. There have been schemes to turn some neighbors into Stasi thugs and plans to strip others of citizenship. The government can now delve into your personal life in ways that would make J. Edgar Hoover beam and Gitmo may become a death camp some time in the future. Throw in the U.S. PATRIOT Act, the proposed Patriot Act II, John Poindexter's Information Awareness Project, military tribunals, secret detentions, Dick Cheney's basement bunker, election irregularities [LINK], futuristic plans to alter soldiers' brains [LINK] and you've just grazed the many ways Uncle Sam is getting downright creepy.

Revelations about Niger and nukes aside, 9/11 oddities eroded some people's confidence early on. "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". . . would never have arisen, the Toronto Star's Michele Landsberg wrote. [LINK] Questions began as early as November, 2001. "There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government," an American source told BBC's Newsnight [LINK], and more and more, that seems to be the case. [LINK]

When Supervisory Special Agent Michael Maltbie, the FBI official accused of thwarting field agents' attempts to obtain a warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer, was promoted [LINK] and Marion "Spike" Bowman, the deputy general counsel in charge of the FBI's National Security Law Unit, was likewise rewarded, Senator Charles Grassley wanted to know why.

"Incredibly, SSA Maltbie removed certain information before making a presentation of questionable accuracy and length to the National Security Law Unit," Grassley wrote to FBI Director Robert Mueller. "In light of the consequences of the decision not to even attempt to seek the FISA warrant, and Mr. Bowman's concurrence with that, it is shocking then that you gave Mr. Bowman the award known as the "Presidential Rank of Meritorious Service." [LINK] Even more incredibly, not only were the people responsible for hindering the investigation rewarded, but we now learn that the Justice Department has, according to the Washington Post, "refused to produce a key witness in the case against Zacarias Moussaoui, defying a federal court order and acknowledging that the judge will likely dismiss the indictment against the only person charged in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." [LINK]. What's wrong with this picture?

V. High Anxiety

"No administration before George W. Bush's ever claimed such sweeping powers for an enterprise as vaguely defined as the "war against terrorism" and the "axis of evil." Nor has one begun to consume such an enormous amount of the nation's resources for a mission whose end would be difficult to recognize even if achieved." -- Sheldon S. Wolin, emeritus professor of politics at Princeton University

Though pundits scream that this is not another Vietnam, the guerilla war we're now facing reminds us of yet another time when Americans were lied to and boys came home in body bags. And though it's fairly obvious that the Project for a New American Century's 2000 report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses" became the blueprint for George Bush's preemptive military strategy [LINK], we are left to wonder about other coincidences as well. Is it a mere chance, for example, that right when PNAC decided that "America's 'core mission,' was "to fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars" (and that U.S. forces would become "the cavalry on the new American frontier"), various states started linking driver's license applications to selective service registration? [LINK] And could the "joint removals of deportees," mentioned in the U.S./Canadian "Smart Border Declaration," [LINK] prevent future draft dodgers from seeking refuge in the great white north?

"It's very hard to imagine a military operation on the scale of 'Desert Storm," former deputy assistant of defense Kurt Campbell told ABC News one week after the Sept. 11 attacks. "The real challenge for us is to avoid situations where we would need to use large numbers of people in a large, on-the-ground effort." And though Campbell was unaware of Don Rumsfeld's plans for Iraq, the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon admitted, in the same Sept. 18, 2001 report, that "even if one imagines a major ground war against Iraq or Afghanistan, these are the sorts of things that we've been planning to do with our active duty force for a long time." [LINK].

In addition to Sept. 11 inconsistencies and wartime whoppers, reports of "dark actors playing games" [LINK], and the post-9/11 rash of mysterious deaths [LINK] have helped to make skittishness part of our national character. And the anthrax killer aside, what ever happened to the investigation into why White House officials were taking Cipro, before the anthrax even hit the U.S. mail? [LINK].

These questions might very well fall into the realm of pure paranoia, yet as Bruce Springsteen recently said, "The forthrightness of our government during the buildup to Iraq" is "not a Democratic question or a Republican question" but "an American question that is our responsibility to ask." It's also our responsibility to demand accountability. We deserve to know exactly what we are funding and why our sons are dying. Truth is the only antidote to the uneasiness many of us now feel.

The marble logo at the entrance of CIA headquarters bears the inscription: 'You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.' Some day, maybe the truth will out. One thing's for certain, however. Without it, future generations will be bogged down by perpetual war, runaway deficits and the taunting ghosts of civil liberties lost. And if we don't demand the truth, our children will most certainly become enslaved.