CounterPunch Special Report: 9/11 One Year After
A Year Later: It's Happening Here
Milestones on the Road to a Military Government in the United States
by Bill Christison*
former CIA political analyst
September 7, 2002
"We have a war going on."
counterpunch.org
<<...How many hundreds of times in the past year have you heard this tired excuse, mouthed as often by Democrats as Republicans to avoid serious debate? The speaker, generally self-righteous, always believes or at least pretends that he is supporting some policy vital to the fight against evil, either abroad or in the fatherland. The Bush administration itself chose to initiate open-ended, lengthy, and large-scale wars rather than treat the events of September 11 as a crime, and that opened the door. Since most U.S. citizens liked calling it war, our leaders then began using the "fact" of war to justify any other actions they wanted to take. At the same time they refused even to consider changing any of Washington's own provocative and hate-inducing foreign policies.
What happened first was that the U.S. military, taking few casualties itself, used its high-tech aerial firepower to kill many innocents in Afghanistan. Most of the bloodshed never appeared on U.S. boob-tubes. Because, one supposes, this first war continues and someone at a high level has decided that much of the information about it cannot yet be declassified, U.S. officials have publicly avoided even estimating the amount of this collateral bloodshed (although they do claim it is small). But no one in the U.S. considers the number killed in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to be small, and the number of innocents who died in Afghanistan from U.S. actions may well be higher.
Recently, the president and his handlers have been expanding their efforts to begin a second war, without bothering much to tie the expansion to terrorism. If they have their way, other wars will follow, and for years to come the U.S. will unless somehow the lunacy can be stopped spend untold billions beefing up the already bloated armed forces, the dozen or so redundant U.S. intelligence agencies, and the nation's flawed internal security organs. Deep deficits and an expanding national debt will surely result, but the Bush administration will accept them because "a war is going on". Washington will almost certainly pay no more than lip service to the poverty, health, water, food, and environmental problems facing both the global and the U.S. domestic economies, and in any case will allot only tiny resources to deal with them. As for future collateral bloodshed, the administration is unlikely to demonstrate any more concern than it has to date. And to date that concern has been almost wholly propagandistic...>>
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*Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit. His wife Kathy also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. |
