It’s Code Orange at the Target. Beautiful day, sunny light breezes. Bored clerks are marking down a made-in-China Christmas while the panicky patrons scurry by, shopping between their two jobs, you know–fear and greed.
Last week, I climbed toward my own little Code Red, starting when General Tommy Franks said “a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event [will occur] somewhere in the Western world. It may be in the United States of America that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event.”
The threat was elevated by Ritt Goldstein’s recent series in the Sydney Morning Herald on the institution of the U.S. martial state. Betcha haven’t heard about the robust program to rebuild and construct anew the same sorts of facilities that illegally interred Japanese-Americans during World War II, huh? Didn’t think so. Think Camp X-Ray, only larger–much, much larger. Turns out the oft derided X-Files FEMA kooks have something you can sink your teeth into.
But it was the New Jersey Courier Post‘s story about that state’s martial law plan–curfews, no one allowed on the streets, all of that–that put me over the top.
Things are better today via, first, a shred of clarity on the “official” explanation of how it was that the Gang that Couldn’t Fly Straight flummoxed the most elaborate intelligence/defense system ever erected–the events that started this whole scary slide toward the Fourth Reich. Second, the U.S. Court of Appeals in California issuing a “blistering” opinion assailing the Gulag (for now) about the secret trials of Jose Padilla and others–a few short statements some of y’all might have missed, it being Christmas at Neverland and all that. Two years and Bushco’s NuAmerika(tm) is finally starting to unravel.
“This was not something that had to happen,” said Thomas Kean, the Republican head of the official Sept. 11 commission. “There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time, because they failed,” Kean said in a CBS News piece that got scant attention. “They simply failed.”
“The President wants to learn everything possible about what happened,” gushed deputy spokeswoman Claire Buchan–odd reaction considering the greasy engine blocks and decayed railroad ties the Bush Cosa Nostra has been dumping in the path of the Kean commission ever since day uno. Sure, Claire. I can’t wait for Santa either.
And the relevations are just beginning. In the coming months “we are going to have some disturbing conclusions,” commission spokesman Alvin Felzenberg said. I’m beginning to think some of the vipers might actually be dragged wigglin’ out of their dusty holes. I love snake country. It’s like Nixon all over.
OK. So I lost a week in the closet wearing a tinfoil hat waiting for the heavy thump of the black choppers and kinda got behind on my shopping. Now–whoo-hoooo. Hat’s off and I’m back to Orange, humming a tune, hunting Christmas lights and observing the holidays in Chicken George’s America. I don’t believe the 9/11 fable and I never believed it. My own mother (not the type to go out on a limb, bless her heart), thought it, like the Kennedy job, “stank.” The Bush administration is going to have to demonstrate some really fancy footwork for me to accept that they, as much as I’d like to believe it, are as big a bunch of fuck-ups as they claim. It would be sooooo much easier than the ugly truth. The lying, cocky, medacious creeps; from Bush gabbling and cracking jokes about some stupid goat to a bunch of shirttail young ‘uns at a school for 30 minutes after the first of four hijacked jetliners (a first) full of hostages started smacking and exploding into skyscrapers (another first); space-alien Condi Rice later quavering, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile,” a lie that has been dissected quite throroughly, thenk yew.
The White House’s response? “Never did I dream we’d have the Trifecta,” the Prezzydint guffawed.
While nearly 3,000 shredded humans were still smoldering in the WTC pit? OK, like, where’s the joke? I understand this sort of humor in the rarified, snotty world from whence the li’l tyrant sprang–but what does “the trifecta” mean? Maybe something about the other part of the quote: “… because we are at war, we’re recovering, our economy is recovering, and we’ve had a national emergency.” The “emergency” part? He’d already said “a dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier.” Maybe that’s the joke. Death, thievery and totalitarianism–har har.
“A s America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat.”–Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard.
“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor…” —Rebuilding America’s Defenses, The Project for the New American Century.
You read ’em. A blockhead like Franks wouldn’t have said what he did if it weren’t the lingua franca of the circles he runs in. The PNAC and Brzezinski need no preface. When those guys say something, you can take it to the bank (the Chase, preferably). And if a genuine “event” fails to materialize, by golly, there are still some things we manufacture in this great land: Consensus! And we’ll leave the day-we-will-not-mention and focus on the U.S.S. Maine! No, the Lusitania–um–Pearl Harbor? The Gulf of Tonkin incident! No. stick with Pearl Harbor. That’s old news, but when you couple the above quotes with the 2001 exoneration of Pearl Harbor Navy Commander Edward Kimmel, it starts to work–a chain they can jerk any old time they want. Code Orange–Boogidee boogidee boogidee.
But what’s really galling is that we get an airweight as our little Caligula instead of, say, Christopher Walken. It’s humiliating that the Antichrist turns out to be a dumb drunk, chicken-shit coke honkin’ deserter, couldn’t run a business, snot-nose fratty-bagger who got elected the only way he ever got anything–by cheating. Pathetic, truly pathetic. (And I didn’t come up with the “A” word, that was the Vatican Press. I want to see some class in the Antichrist–say trafficking in souls, not swiping Christmas wreaths.)
Don’ matter. More old news: The police state has been in the works for a long time, Wilson (Lincoln, really) on through Truman, Nixon, Clinton, Reagan–all of them.
But regardless whether the coming attack is a genuine external threat or one made right here in the good ole USA, the result will be the same. What this means is, y’all better buckle your seatbelts. It’s like that scene in Blazing Saddles–the country holding itself hostage.
Code Red in Newark. Yike. They have to do something. Not like they don’t have back-up. If the 2000 Florida hustle doesn’t work, there are always the Diebold voting machines, and if that doesn’t pan out, hey, nothing like another “failure.” Bam. Code Red. No election. And don’t think it can’t happen. They have to do something–the Bush bunch is bogged down in the wrong, ruinously expensive quagmire over what? WMDs? Then the Moussaoui case fell apart, the secret detentions got smacked down and now the Kean statement. They have to be getting nervous.
But with the apathy of the populous and the complicity of the media, the big day might not even be written in the sky, but will sneak up on us like a kitten. Like, anyone catch the big news on Dec. 13–PATRIOT II being signed in to law on a Saturday? Didn’t think so. You were probably busy watching ol’-what’s-his-name’s capture.
“We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years.” –David Rockefeller, Trilateral Commission, in June 1991. These guys are good– sleight of hand artists have to be. 
See for yourself
Think I’m makin’ this stuff up?
Here are many of the sources on which this column is based:
