Fighting Terror with Terror: Bush and Cheney's War on the World

In the 1997 movie, Men in Black, agents J (Will Smith) and K (Tommy Lee Jones) work for the secret agency MIB that monitors, polices and directs alien activity on Planet Earth. Whenever humans saw something that they aren't supposed to know about, the MIB agents used a special device shaped like a pen that would flash brightly and wipe people's memories clean of what they had just seen.

Bush and Cheney have been using a similar device, in this instance, named "GWOT": the global war on terror. All they have to do is brandish it, say the words "national security," and the Democratic Party, along with virtually the entire media (with only a handful of individual journalistic exceptions), instantly forget all of the horrible things that Bush and Cheney have done. They fall over backwards amongst each other to prove that they are no shrinking violets when it comes to standing up to the terrible terrorist threats. On one level, it's quite a hilarious sight, but on another, it's a terrible spectacle because of what has been done, is being done, and will be done in the name of the GWOT.

As I argue in the following article "Fighting Terror with Terror: Bush and Cheney's War on the World," posted on December 2, 2007 at Project Censored: "The stakes involved and the need for intellectual and emotional clarity could hardly be greater."

Since the GOP, the Democratic Party and the media are all unable to see clearly when the words "national security," "9/11,"and "terrorism" are invoked, rather like a magical spell cast by evil sorcerers in the White House, it is up to the rest of us to penetrate through the fog and expose this lie - a cover for tyranny, reaction, bigotry and a war on the world.

It is appropriate for Project Censored, which is dedicated to popularizing stories that have been buried or underplayed, to be the first to publish this essay. I tried unsuccessfully to get Harper's, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Salon.com, Huffington Post, the New York Review of Books, and Logos Journal to publish it. I will let you - dear reader - be the judge of its merits or demerits. I hope to hear from people about it and hope that it will be reposted at many other sites and sent to as many people as possible to read and debate.

P.S. There's a footnote that I inadvertently left out of the version of my article posted at Project Censored. The footnote belongs on page 3 as a citation for the fact that more than a million Iraqis have died as a result of our invasion. It should read:

Opinion Research Business, a British polling organization, reported in September 2007 that it arrived at a figure of 1.2 million Iraqis killed based on an Iraqi households survey. Just Foreign Policy also projects a similar figure using the Lancet study as its baseline and adding to it from the Iraq Body Count tally provided by western media. See Robert Naiman, “UK Poll Consistent with 1 Million Extrapolation of Lancet Death Toll,” September 14, 2007, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/uk-poll-consistent-with-1_b_64475.html.