Sunday, August 27, 2006

The "War on Terror" Is a Fraud

We should admit that the "War on Terror" is a fraud and act consistently with that admission. Unless we admit that the "War on Terror" is simply a fraud, a con game, a scam, and that we were initially taken in by it, we are not likely to muster the nerve to impeach George Bush and Dick Cheney - as we must if we are to reacquire our integrity and reconstruct even the modicum of peace we had in the 1990s.

Whatever happened on September 11, 2001, it was a major crime. After initially calling the suicide-murder a crime, the Bush administration realized that logic would then demand that it should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. However, Bush didn't want to ratify the court's charter because he didn't want U.S. officials to be subject to prosecution for their various crimes, past or future. So he renamed the September 11 act an "act of war" and stopped mentioning its criminality.

A war, however, has to be a war against an entity that can sue for peace, and "Terror," being an abstract noun, cannot do that. The "War on Terror" is not a war. It is 1) a blank check for aggression, 2) an excuse to circumvent constitutional restrictions on executive power, 3) a rhetorical device to evade international law, 4) a means by which the Pentagon can go back to a funding level even higher than it enjoyed during the Cold War, and with far less justification, and 5) a means of insuring the dominance of oil companies.

How convenient to be able to make war at will without Congressional authorization, to cheat us of our civil liberties, and to pressure all the governments of the world to make their intelligence agencies give
information to U.S. intelligence agencies! How convenient for the Pentagon and military contractors to have money poured all over them! How convenient for Big Oil to get military policing of the entire Middle East!

Internationally, the "War on Terror" is an assault on the sovereignty of all other nations, for when the Bush administration asserts, "If you are not with us, you are against us," all national leaders understand the meaning: "If you try to be neutral, we might attack you."

This is no war, just a gross and deceitful usurpation of power from everyone else on earth - including the American people - in a sleazy effort to escape from the need for international law, and from our own Constitution.