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U.S. Ministry of Peace Proposal

Published by marco on

The Register has published Dubya calls for US Gestapo, covering Bush’s speech late last week. He called for a new cabinet-level position to be created, effectively legitimizing the Office of Homeland Security. “The stated purpose here is to provide a second layer of insurance against the intelligence and communications failures affecting both the CIA and FBI, which Congress is now investigating.” But, the proposal calls for the CIA and FBI to create reports of information and hand it over to the new agency, so it is difficult to see how that agency will be able to detect and information oversights. Instead, “The real purpose, clearly, is data acquisition, mining and manipulation on a gargantuan scale.”

This proposal is just the natural outgrowth of the “more information is better” school of thought, without any consideration for the massive organizational and computing demands that come with exponential growth in information. Since “current Congressional hearings on the CIA/FBI intel failures indicate not that the agencies lacked the raw data they needed, but rather that they were unable to distinguish the signal from the noise”, we see that the government already knows that too much information can be counterproductive. So creating a new agency that will have even more information from even more sources is hardly likely to make anything better. Rather, as is usually the case, it’s likely to make things worse. Therefore, the seasoned empire-watcher will begin to look for the real reason for making this new department.

This is likely more politicking, since the “Democrats in Congress have been demanding that Dubya do precisely what he’s just proposed to do.” But, creating another agency that further entrenches the new focus on domestic security is good, too. With a cabinet-level department, there will be no talk of reneging any of the gains against civil rights or revoking any of the tools for controlling the rabble that have been made in recent months.

Mark Morford of the SFGate writes Is It OK To Hate Bush?… asks how likely is it that such a carefully managed President will ever be criticized heavily in the mainstream press?

“Or rather, you can criticize if you like, but Bush’s image is now being so carefully controlled you feel a little ashamed and slightly guilty doing so, like that feeling you’d get if you teased, say, a quadriplegic. Or a child. And this is exactly how they want you to feel.”

As Dan Rather said in an interview with Larry King, “Mr. President, whatever decision you make in this very difficult matter I will support it because you’re the president and I’m a patriot and that’s that”. So, you can see where the mainstream press stands in regard to President Bush. At this point, he’s to be forgiven pretty much anything, with any possible gaffe, that had it been committed by anyone else would have merited in-depth investigation, being forgiven, suppressed or ignored.

In fact, Bush feels so comfortable that he can actually verbalize what has been U.S. policy for decades, all in the name of domestic security. The New York Newsday published Bush Planning New Strike First Military Policy. In it, Bush details that the U.S. will now strike first against countries deemed dangerous, rather than their age-old policy of laying back and letting peace and good-will ooze from every pore.

“During the Cold War we were able to manage the threats with arms control agreements and a policy of deterrence,” Cheney said in a speech to the Democrat Union Conference, a coalition of conservative Christian Democratic center and right center political parties.”

…which is pretty much the only crowd to which you could deliver a line like that without being either burned at the stake or gut-laughed out of the room.

On a side, note, it’s important to note that Morford’s mention of the “Do you have blacks, too?” (as written in Der Spiegel in Do you have blacks in Brazil? (English translation)) question Bush supposedly asked of Brazil’s President Cardoso, is likely not true.

On the surface, it implies three basic facts. One, as has been numerously documented and emphatically supported by the White House, the President knows practically nothing about the world outside of Texas. Two, he considers blacks to be a special subspecies which may or may not be present in other countries, but whose existence it is important enough to ascertain that he will interrupt a high-level international meeting to determine it. Three, his racism is so ingrained that he didn’t even consider whether that would be a bad question to ask.

Now, this may all be true, but the quote is dubious, at best. A quick urban legend check on Snopes.com shows Black Tuesday as “Status: Undetermined” and the issue “…boils down to … a non-specific, single-source item”, so it’s veracity is to be doubted.

Finally, if you missed Bush’s speech, the White House has a press statement by Bush, Statement by the president on future homeland securitizing and the reorganizationing of the intelligenciary, in which he summarized his intentions:

“As you know, it’s been going on nine months since we were attacked by the Godless Arabiac hordes, and I want everyone to know just one thing − the military and intelligenciary apparatus that was in place on September 11th was entirely Bill Clinton’s creation. … I am proposing a major reorganizationing of the intelligenciary that will combine dozens of smaller, marginally effective bureaucracies into one hopelessly obese, utterly sedentary bureaucracy, which itself will still be totally dependent on information provided by the FBI and CIA. ”

Comments

#1 − Morford on strike first policy

marco

Mark Morford of the SFGate also has Let Us Now Crush Everybody… which is a wonderful rant about the ridiculousness (ludicrosity?) of the U.S. strike-first policy recently announced.

“Crush through mostly violent means any sign of anti- Americanism, no matter the cause, no matter that we can’t actually pinpoint the source, no matter that we claim to be the most peaceful and progressive and intellectually advanced superpower on Earth. Be pre- emptive and destructive and bomb-happy, or be a tree-hugging traitorous liberal commie sympathizer. There is no in-between. ”

However, he misinterprets the true irony because he says the Bush administrations plans “…to turn America from a place of nonpanicky relatively calm defense…”, which, quite plainly, it hasn’t been for at least the last 100 years, if you’ve read any unbiased history. The true irony is not that the policy is going into effect, it’s that it’s been in effect, but it’s now finally safe to announce it because the American people, in their fear, will wholeheartedly embrace it.

He closes with a summation of our new policy:

“And as the saying goes, if you don’t like the way America drives, stay off the damn sidewalk.”