Ignorance is Strength, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength

by MICHAEL CARMICHAEL

Prior to Bush’s war in Iraq, the carcinoma of terror was confined to the vastness of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now the cancer has metastasized into a global movement.26 September 2006--It’s official. Sixteen US government security agencies agree. The experts conclude that Bush’s war against Iraq is the major force driving the global growth of Islamic terror, but their dire finding was supposed to be a state secret and perpetually concealed from the American people.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the US had Al-Qaida cornered in Afghanistan and Pakistan, marginalized, ostracized and corralled into a finite ghetto for mad Mullahs only. Today, after three and a half years of war, five hundred billion dollars of squandered treasure, nearly three thousand dead American soldiers and at least one hundred thousand dead Iraqi civilians we have done nothing more than make matters worse--infinitely worse. Bush’s Iraq adventure has been the most counterproductive policy in American history.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was compiled in April, but its release was suppressed when the White House learned of its contents. Worse, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Madame Secretary Condoleezza Rice continued to lie about the results of their failed policy. Now that the NIE report, titled “Trends in Global Terrorism,” has been leaked, we know that they have been lying, and they have been lying the big, big lie.

This pathetic regime has been unmasked as the spitting image of the dystopian tyranny in George Orwell’s prophetic novel, 1984, a fascist dictatorship organized under three sacred dictums:

Ignorance is strength.

War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

By realizing the first two principles of Orwell's Oceania--the dual exaltations of public ignorance and perpetual war--the Bush regime need hardly bother about verifying their subservience to the third--the sanctification of poverty.By realizing the first two principles of Oceania--the dual exaltations of public ignorance and perpetual war--the Bush regime need hardly bother about verifying their subservience to the third--the sanctification of poverty. In Bush’s America, where the rich get the tax cuts and the poor get the below-the-poverty-level minimum wage, there was never any doubt about the fact of perennial pauperization. In Bush’s America, freedom is definitely slavery; always was; always will be.

Who leaked the NIE report? A true-blue patriotic American if the truth be known. Senator Ted Kennedy was the first off the mark to sense that it condemned Bush and Cheney’s war to the rubbish bin of history. But, we do not know who blew this particular whistle.

In the relatively recent past, Bush’s America has been blessed with a few outstanding whistleblowers modelled on Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower par excellence--who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam Era and brought the presidency of Richard Nixon to its premature close.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, two outstanding women, FBI Agent Colleen Rowley and Intelligence Analyst Sibel Edmonds, blew their whistles. Agent Rowley revealed that the FBI had failed to heed intelligence about the activities of Zacharias Moussaoui--intelligence that would have alerted the agency to the impending threat of a massive terrorist attack on US soil. Colleen Rowley is now a Democratic congressional candidate in Minnesota.

A Turkish language expert, Sibel Edmonds was hired after the attack on the World Trade Center to analyze pre-9/11 intel. What Edmonds found shocked her. She blew the whistle on the fact that--prior to 9/11--the US was holding explosive intelligence that indicated an eminent attack on a major US target. When Sibel Edmonds blew the whistle, her bosses forced her head under the bureaucratic guillotine. They fired her. Today, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Edmonds’ is suing her former employers for sacking her because she told the truth to the American people.

In Britain, Katherine Gun, an employee of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), blew the whistle when she learned of a secret US espionage program to spy on UN delegates in New York in the run-up to the launch of the war against Iraq. First she was terminated--then she was vindicated in court.

An anonymous patriot leaked the Downing Street memo. Written by John Scarlett, the secret Downing Street “Eyes Only” document detailed the sharp shift in American policy in 2002, when British officials detected a new level of intensity in Bush’s policy vis à vis Iraq. Instead of planning for a diplomatic settlement to what was then being hyped as the Iraq crisis, the Brits noticed that we had entered a hall of mirrors--a twilight zone where diplomacy was a mere charade and all policies were being “fixed” around the inevitable axis of impending war.

We owe a great debt of gratitude to whistleblowers. It is comforting to know that even in the age of western fascism, we still have patriotic supporters of democracy and the people’s right to know in positions--if not of power--then of intelligence.We--the citizens of Oceania--owe a great debt of gratitude to the whistleblowers. With Ellsberg as the paragon of the species, it is comforting to know that even in the age of western fascism, we still have patriotic supporters of democracy and the people’s right to know in positions--if not of power--then of intelligence.

In the meantime, Bush laments the inescapable fact that the war in Iraq is imposing a psychic strain on the mind of America. In official statements, he laments that Osama Bin Laden has been successful in driving a wedge between the American people and their government. Bush adamantly refuses to recognize that the wedge between the people and their government was not of Bin Laden’s making. Forged by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, Bush drove that poisonous wedge deeply into the body politic of America himself when he acquiesced to neoconservative fantasies of imperialist hegemony, a new American century through military conquest and colonial domination leading to dictatorial control of the world’s oil reserves in perpeteum.

The historical record is now perfectly clear. According to our own intelligence analysis, Bush’s war in Iraq has triggered an explosion of Islamic terrorism. Prior to this fateful turning point, the carcinoma of terror was confined to the vastness of Afghanistan and Pakistan. With the launch of the war in Iraq, the cancer of terror metastasized into a global movement predicated on the destruction of America and its front-line client, Israel.

For this tragic outcome, Bush has nobody to blame but himself.

In our immediate future, we can expect more of the same. The Bush-Cheney White House and its minions will eternally repeat their totalitarian mantras:

Ignorance is most assuredly strength;

War is indubitably peace, and

Freedom really and truly is slavery.

And so they shall always be in Brother Bush’s America.