American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (25 page)

• Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act and wall off commercial banking from investment bank gambling, and require strict leverage limits.
  
• Insulate the federally insured depositors from reckless investment schemes with no social utility whatsoever like these “credit default swaps” that are entered into by entities that don't own the underlying bonds.
  
• Withdraw the massive handouts and taxpayer-backed guarantees given to prop up specific banks and financial institutions, and use these funds to instead support the struggling homeowners and defaulting borrowers who form the root of this crisis. This will reduce the record rate of foreclosures and put a floor under asset prices at a sustainable level, which will in turn stabilize financial institutions that are still hemorrhaging from increasing foreclosures and loan defaults. In other words, bottoms-up, not topdown economic support.
  
• Let the already-insolvent banks go bankrupt and begin removing the bad debt from the system. We need a sound banking system, but there is no reason we need the specific banks we have now. There are plenty of regional and community banks in this country which avoided exposure to risky mortgage and credit derivatives, and which would gladly replace the market share held by the too-bloated-to-fail banks for loans issued to small businesses and consumers, if they were able to compete in a truly free market against these subsidized behemoths. In short, why doesn't the public demand a financial system that serves the people rather than enslaves us to a treadmill of debt?
  

The national debt is basically what the government owes from years of borrowing money to pay off the yearly deficits (the amount by which spending exceeds revenue from taxes and the like). Back in 1791, our national debt was $75 million; today it rises by that amount every hour or so.
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During the years of Bush-II, the national debt increased by over 65 percent to nearly $10 trillion! Now there's talk among some of our creditors (like China, which as of November 2007 held $390 billion of our debt) about replacing the dollar as the world's reserve currency.
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But we keep right on spending money we don't really have, to players who don't deserve it. A Congressional Oversight Panel report early in 2009 said the Bush Administration had overpaid the banks by tens of billions for stocks and other assets in the bailout.
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Our economy has been captured by an alien power—not the Klingons, but the Kleptos. We can't go on like this. A much worse disaster than we faced in 2008 is in the wind, without something real being done about this mess that the government-Wall Street conspiracy created.

Can we still heed the words of Andrew Jackson, when he said to a delegation of bankers in 1832: “Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the bread-stuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out....”

I'm ready to see a rout that restores our Republic to the principles of Jefferson and Jackson. How about you?

“With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information.... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”

—Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States, 1944

What transpired during the Bush-II years has been coming out in dribs and drabs, so as not to unduly alarm the populace. President Obama wants to look forward and put all that behind us, but when our own government has sanctioned torture and even murder in the name of “national security,” I don't see how we can. We need accountability from our government, and if that means even a Cheney or Rumsfeld standing trial for war crimes, so be it.

The Senate Armed Services Committee came out with a report in April 2009 that said: “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”
¹

I was waterboarded during my navy training at SERE (Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion) School, to know what it's like in case we ever became POWs, and it
is
a method of torture. Cheney's word for it is “enhanced interrogation.” Well, you give me Dick Cheney and a waterboard for an hour, and I'll have him confessing to the Sharon Tate murders. Not too long ago, the ACLU managed to pry loose government documents including a CIA manual about what they call “extraordinary rendition.” It describes the “capture shock” that happened before a detainee got put on the flight to some overseas prison. Little techniques like being shackled, and bound up in blindfolds and hoods so you couldn't see or hear. After which you'd get stripped down and shaved and have your picture taken. Not to mention “walling,” defined as slamming somebody's head against the wall but with certain “protective measures” so they don't die.
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You get the picture.

We all remember the gruesome images of Abu Ghraib, but the CIA admits having destroyed hundreds of hours of “coercive interrogation” videotapes that took place in secret prisons.
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Don't you find it pretty sadistic that they'd even want to make movies of all this? These are measures I've always associated with the KGB or the Nazis. Come to find out from a Senate Armed Services Committee report on prisoner abuse that they even created an experimental “battle lab” for the torture program at Guantánamo, in a throwback to MK-ULTRA.
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What galls me more than anything is how they used torture in pursuit of lies to justify their actions. First of all, Bush and Cheney pressured lawyers at the Department of Justice to produce memos authorizing them do whatever they wanted and call it legal.
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Then, in the weeks just before we invaded Iraq and the first couple months of our occupation, there turned out to be major spikes in the harshest torture techniques. It was all part of an attempt to link Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. Major Paul Burney, who was part of the Guantánamo interrogation team, told investigators: “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link, there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”
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After Ibn Al-Shaykh Al-Libi was captured, the CIA “rendered” him to Egypt (the term reminds me of what we do to slabs of beef). There he was tortured into making a false confession that Saddam had gotten information about use of chemical and biological weapons from a couple of al-Qaeda operatives. Al-Libi was a supposed suicide in a Libyan jail in May 2009.
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Speaking of al-Qaeda, I recently came across this point: “Should the members of the 9/11 Presidential Commission not have been informed that two of the ‘key witnesses' upon whom their report was based had provided the information to the report's conclusions only after being waterboarded a total of 266 times?”
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How low would these guys stoop? We've learned since Bush left office of a meeting he had with Tony Blair to talk about how the United Nations inspectors weren't going to find any Weapons of Mass Destruction, but why not go ahead anyway? A memo written early in 2003 has Bush telling Blair of a U.S. plan “to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in U.N. colors over Iraq with fighter cover.” If Saddam fired at them, he'd be in violation of the U.N. resolutions and that would be ample justification to invade.
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Sounds like a transplant of Operation Northwoods to me.

We may never know how many detainees died in our custody in secret prisons. We do have fresh evidence, though, of an “executive assassination ring” that was revealed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in March 2009. Hersh spoke of an independent special wing called Joint Special Operations Command that reported directly to Cheney's office. Word was that a three-star admiral eventually ordered it stopped because so many “collateral deaths” were happening. It pains me to say that among the unit's trainees were young men from the Navy SEALS.
¹⁰

By the summer of '09, word was out about a clandestine CIA program to assassinate al-Qaeda members. The private company enlisted was identified as Blackwater,
¹¹
which started out protecting our brass in Iraq. Today, even though the Iraqi government has kicked them out, they're still under contract to our own government for “black ops.” I read a chilling book about Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill that I highly recommend. They're in the vanguard of privatization of our armed forces. It's astounding to consider that we have more private soldiers (74,000) than uniformed troops (57,000) in Afghanistan, as of summer 2009.
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Blackwater—which recently changed its name to the more innocuous-sounding Xe Services—is run by Erik Prince, who one former employee says “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.”
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After getting some bad press for mowing down 17 Iraqi civilians on a crowded street in 2007,
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the company set about to clean up its image. They don't call themselves mercenaries anymore, but “global stabilization professionals.” Their Web site claims a corporate vision “guided by integrity, innovation, and a desire for a safer world.” They sponsor NASCAR events and have performed dramatic parachute landings at college football games. Blackwater, as Erik Prince puts it, “is going to be more of a full spectrum” operation.
¹⁵

Hmmmm, wonder what “full spectrum” means. One arm of Blackwater is called Total Intelligence Solutions, run by J. Cofer Black, who used to head up the CIA's counter-terrorism branch. The company has bid for a $15 billion Pentagon contract to “fight terrorists with drugtrade ties.” They've got an offshore affiliate, Greystone Ltd., in Barbados. And, while Iraqi civilians are suing Blackwater for murders and other war crimes, the Obama Administration has replaced them with a new outfit called Triple Canopy, giving the company a billion-dollar contract to provide private security services in Iraq. Not only did they hire some of Blackwater's finest, but some company employees have claimed Triple Canopy has used stolen cars and weapons taken from Iraqis to lift their profits on certain contracts to more than 40 percent.
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Meantime, Blackwater also remains on our government payroll to arm drone aircraft in Afghanistan, among other lucrative missions.
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After Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, Blackwater got itself a mission there, too. About 150 of its mercs fanned out around the city in full battle gear, carrying automatic assault weapons and with guns strapped to their legs. When Jeremy Scahill talked to four of the men, they described their work as “securing neighborhoods” and “confronting criminals,” on behalf of Homeland Security.
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I find it so disturbing that our country is allowing professional mercenaries to take over protection of our nation. If that's the case, what do we need the military for at all? In Iraq, Ambassador Bremer went over and absolved them of anything they did. They could literally commit murder and just walk away. If, because of terrorism, laws don't matter anymore, then we're no better than the terrorists. We can't just have the law when it's convenient.

But this is only one of a host of assaults on our Constitution and the Bill of Rights since the events of 9/11. We would do well to review elements of the USA Patriot Act, passed by Congress a month after the attacks. Among other things, the new law made it a crime for anybody to contribute money or material support for a group that appeared on the Terror Watch List. It allowed the FBI to monitor and tape-record conversations between attorneys and clients, once considered privileged. It let the FBI order librarians to turn over information about people's reading habits. And it opened the door for government surveillance on our e-mails and snail-mails.
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So it's no surprise that the Bush Administration soon embarked on an illegal wiretapping program, a story that the
New York Times
sat on for a year before finally publishing it. The National Security Agency (NSA) set up a secret room in downtown San Francisco under the auspices of AT&T, where the NSA could tap into the telcom giant's fiber-optic cables. These weren't just part of AT&T, but connected their network to Sprint, Global Crossing, and other companies (including Qwest, which had refused to play ball). According to former AT&T technician Mark Klein, the result was “a complete copy of the data stream.” It all went through NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, ten miles outside D.C., where the agency has a “colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the ‘Black Widow.'” (Don't you love all these “black” designations?) This supercomputer is capable of scanning “millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails per hour . . . performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, [it] searches through and reassembles keywords and patterns, across many languages.”
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They targeted certain journalists and basically vacuumed in all the domestic communications of Americans, including faxes, phone calls, and Internet traffic.
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Code-named Pinwale, the NSA's secret database even scooped up the private e-mails of former President Clinton.
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What's truly outrageous is that all this was legalized when Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). That's right, Congress gave the NSA still more power to ferret out supposed terrorist patterns in our private communications. “This gives AT&T, Verizon, and the rest a hearty signal to go on pimping for the government.” After writing that column, Nat Hentoff, who'd been with the
Village Voice
since it started in the mid-1950s, got laid off.

Snooping through our telecoms was only the beginning. Even after Congress held back funding for the “Suspicionless Surveillance” program developed by a new Total Information Awareness department (don't you just love the labels?), Bush apparently kept it going anyway. This was broader than the warrantless wiretaps, giving law enforcement the right to inspect our credit cards and bank transactions on the off-chance we might be tied in to terrorists.
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In shooting an episode called “Big Brother” for my TV series, my son Ty and I came to Minneapolis to film a little B-roll. We went downtown to First and Washington Avenue. There wasn't one camera, there were four—on every single street corner! A middle-aged guy came by on a bike and I stopped him to ask if he'd ever noticed this. He said, “No, what are they filming?” I told him, “I don't know, but obviously they're watching us, they've got every direction covered.”

I found out that private corporations provide the money to buy the cameras. The city says, “Great, it doesn't cost us a thing,” and the taxpayers say, “Great, my taxes don't go up.” But are the corporations doing this out of the goodness of their heart, to make a safer America? The cameras are all run by computer. One thing that automatically triggers them is when four or more people are together: “Must be up to something, let's film them.” We were all outraged and stunned when we read George Orwell's
1984
in school. But I'm afraid he was a prophet. Big Brother
is
watching, and it's happening in subtle ways.