Published on The Smirking Chimp (http://www.smirkingchimp.com)

9/11's Dark Window to the Future
By Robert Parry
Created Sep 12 2006 - 9:14am
As the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks unfolds, it has come to look
less like a sad remembrance of the past and more like a troubling glimpse
into the future, a window to a new-age totalitarianism that looms before the
United States, where a powerful right-wing government tells lies aided and
abetted by friendly media corporations.

So, even as the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee finally
acknowledge some of the many Iraq War falsehoods told by George W. Bush and
his senior advisers, Bush's misfeasance and malfeasance are obscured by
Disney's ABC-TV "docu-drama" pinning most of the blame for the 9/11
catastrophe not on Bush, but on Democrats.

With Disney's selection of a right-wing director and with the secrecy that
surrounded the project - that gave Democrats little time to react - "The
Path to 9/11" also had the sickening feel of a collaboration between a giant
corporation and the Republican government in power.

So, less than two months before a pivotal national election, with Americans
increasingly wondering how the nation got into the mess it faces today, this
joint project of Disney and pro-Bush operatives provides a narrative that
focuses not on Bush blowing off CIA warnings of an impending attacks in 2001
but on events dating back to 1993.

"The Path to 9/11," which ABC touted as a public service shown "with no
commercial interruptions," makes some of its right-wing judgments with
sneering asides from characters, such as wondering if Attorney General Janet
Reno had "any balls," and others by mixing real and fabricated events to put
Democrats in the worst possible light.

When the mysterious project finally was unveiled to mainstream media
reviewers and when Democrats started complaining about fabricated scenes,
the right-wing media responded with a counter-attack accusing the protesting
Democrats of threatening the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

In other words, at a time when Republicans control the White House, the
Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and increasingly the American media, the
Democrats still get transformed into the ones threatening free speech, for
protesting their harsh and at times false depiction in events that led to
the deaths of almost 3,000 people.

Looking Forward

Media manipulation also appears likely to play a major part in the
Republican strategy for beating back Democratic challenges in the Nov. 7
election. In the eight weeks ahead, Republicans can be expected to exploit
their financial and media advantages to wage personal attacks against
Democratic challengers, district by district, state by state.

About four months ago, a Republican political operative told me about this
strategy to "disqualify" Democratic candidates through a combination of
negative research, called "oppo," and the timely dissemination of attack
lines to conservative allies in the local and national media. [See
Consortiumnews.com's "Why Democrats Lose [1]."]

The pattern first surfaced in a special congressional election near San
Diego, where Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham had resigned over a
lobbying-bribery scandal and gone to prison.

To succeed Cunningham, the Republicans boldly put up a professional
lobbyist, Brian Bilbray, while Democrats chose Francine Busby, who was
counseled by Democratic consultants to avoid controversial Democratic
positions in a traditionally Republican district. Democrats felt that
Cunningham's disgrace would be enough to guarantee success.

Indeed, despite a lackluster campaign, Busby appeared headed for victory.
But then she blurted out to a mostly Latino audience that "you don't need
papers for voting," hastily clarifying her meaning to say "you don't need to
be a registered voter to help."

Conservative radio and TV talk show hosts across southern California seized
on Busby's verbal slip and began accusing her of urging illegal immigrants
to vote. Busby then spent the last several days of the campaign apologizing
and backtracking before losing by about four percentage points. [Washington
Post, June 7, 2006]

In explaining Busby's defeat, some Democratic activists raised suspicions
that the election had been stolen by Republican vote fraud (though no hard
evidence materialized). National Democratic consultants also pointed to the
fact that the Republican Congressional Committee pumped more than $4.5
million into the district.

But whatever the truth, the Republicans had tested out their 2006 model for
victory - and for continued one-party rule in Washington. They would exploit
their advantages in finances, media and campaign tactics to prevent the
Democrats from achieving a majority in either the House or Senate.

'Defining' Democrats

In a front-page article on Sept. 10, 2006, the Washington Post added more
details about this Republican strategy: "Republicans are planning to spend
the vast majority of their sizable financial war chest over the final 60
days of the campaign attacking Democratic House and Senate candidates over
personal issues and local controversies, GOP officials said."

The Post reported that the National Republican Congressional Committee had
earmarked more than 90 percent of its $50 million-plus advertising budget to
negative advertising that would disseminate the findings of researchers who
have been combing through tax and legal records searching for exploitable
themes against Democrats.

"The hope is that a vigorous effort to 'define' opponents, in the parlance
of GOP operatives, can help Republicans shift the midterm debate away from
Iraq and limit losses this fall," the Post wrote.

An early example of the strategy has been a Republican ad directed against
physician Steve Kagen, a Democratic congressional candidate in Wisconsin who
is being labeled "Dr. Millionaire" because over the years his allergy clinic
has sued 80 patients, mostly for unpaid bills.

Against inexperienced or little-known Democratic candidates, "it will take
one or two punches to fold them up like a cheap suit," Republican strategist
Matt Keelen told the Post. [Washington Post, Sept. 19, 2006]

The Republicans also have a huge advantage because their negative themes
reverberate through a giant right-wing media megaphone that extends from the
national level down to the states and districts, where Republicans have
identified specific hosts on local right-wing radio stations and friendly
newspaper editors.

I was told that Republican operatives have an apparatus to electronically
communicate instantaneous talking points to these local media outlets,
promoting "bad votes" or exploitable quotes from individual Democratic
candidates. Republicans will be putting negative spins on Democratic
candidates before the Democrats can even reach a microphone.

The Left's Failure

By contrast, the Democratic response mechanism - concentrated mostly on
personal Internet sites and under-funded Air America Radio stations - is
amateurish and relatively slow. Much of it depends on volunteers with day
jobs finding time to do a little blogging.

While the Right has built up its media machinery over three decades,
spending billions of dollars and integrating its media with its political
operations, the Left has invested sparingly on media and focused mostly on
"grassroots organizing."

In effect, the Left counted on the mainstream news media to provide the
necessary information and thus ceded control of the national narrative,
while the Right created its own narrative and aggressively pressured the
mainstream media to go along, labeling any out-of-step journalists as
"liberal."

The consequences of these two competing strategies cannot be overstated.
Beyond enabling the Right to build a political following with consistent
messages day in and day out, its media machine gives the Right enormous
advantages at key moments, such as during a run-up to war or in the weeks
before an election.

Increasingly, too, the mainstream media finds itself under the influence of
the Right's narrative and under pressure to accept the Right's "facts."
Individual journalists may first bend their coverage to the Right to avoid
the career-threatening "liberal" label but often even that doesn't work.

Eventually, targeted news personalities, such as Dan Rather, get weeded out
and replaced with unthreatening ciphers, like Katie Couric, who, in turn,
put opinion segments on the CBS Evening News that range from Thomas L.
Friedman, an Iraq War hawk with some second thoughts, to Rush Limbaugh, an
Iraq War hawk with no second thoughts.

In another sign of the times, Disney, which has faced right-wing attacks for
supposed tolerance of homosexuality and for some executives who have
contributed to Democrats, turned to a Limbaugh friend, Cyrus Nowrasteh, to
direct its docu-drama on 9/11.

Disney saw little downside in promoting a favorite right-wing theme -
blaming the 9/11 attacks on Democratic President Bill Clinton - despite the
evidence that Clinton took the al-Qaeda threat much more seriously than did
Bush, who famously brushed aside warnings from the CIA and downplayed
terrorism in his first eight months in office.

As another favor to the Right - and as proof that the motive wasn't
financial - Disney's ABC-TV presented its anti-Clinton mini-series without
commercial breaks. It is inconceivable that Disney or any media corporation
would give similar treatment to a TV special that worked as hard to put Bush
in an unfavorable light.

Fake Testimony

On a smaller scale but also instructive, right-wing operatives continue to
spread a disinformation campaign that has doctored Iran-Contra testimony to
have former White House aide Oliver North prophetically describing his
concerns about terrorist Osama bin Laden in 1987 - while Democrats,
supposedly including then-Sen. Al Gore, behave cluelessly.

Over the past five years, I have been asked about this supposed North
testimony at least a dozen times. Heading into the 9/11 anniversary, the
North "testimony" was circulating again, distributed widely across the
Internet as further "evidence" of Republican farsightedness and Democratic
fecklessness.

But North did not cite concerns about bin Laden in 1987, when bin Laden was
actually a U.S. ally receiving military assistance from the Reagan
administration to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. North's concerns were
about another terrorist, named Abu Nidal. Sen. Gore also wasn't on the
Iran-Contra committee.

Yet, this bogus history - much like the Disney docu-drama and Bush's
longstanding lies about Iraq - are combining in big ways and small to create
an Orwellian future for the American people.

Internationally, Bush has outlined an endless war against the vague concept
of "Islamic fascists" with the underlying reality that the United States is
committing itself to a bloody "World War III" against many of the world's
one billion Muslims.

At home, Karl Rove and other Republican strategists project what effectively
will be a one-party state, with the Republicans controlling all branches of
government, using the federal courts to redefine the Constitution and
keeping Democrats around as foils and boogey men to stir up the conservative
base with warnings about the enemy within.

On this fifth anniversary of 9/11, President Bush and his Republican
supporters are trying hard to revive the lost sentimental unity that
followed the attacks. But the saddest legacy of that tragic day may be that
it marked the path toward the end of the noble American Republic and the
start of a new totalitarianism.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson