The Bush Family Coup

James Ridgeway in the Village Voice:

The 9-11 attacks provided the rationale for what amounts to a Bush family coup against the Constitution. From the outset, President George Bush used 9-11 to reorganize the federal government and increase its reach far beyond any existing law to delve into the lives of innocent, ordinary people. The new powers allowed the government to arrest them at will and to subject them to endless incarceration without judicial review. Some people were sent abroad to be tortured for crimes they had nothing to do with. Who knows how many people have been tortured in American jails? When government employees within the intelligence community sought to protest, the government fired them and made sure they could never get another job in their areas of expertise. This extraordinary program of spying on Americans, much of which was carried out in fishing expeditions under the Patriot Act, has the makings of a consistent and long-range policy to wreck constitutional government.

snip

The failures of the FBI and CIA in 9-11 were not because of any wall. These agencies failed because they weren't doing their jobs right. The congressional investigation found the CIA couldn't penetrate Al Qaeda—an especially odd claim since we had helped to create and finance Al Qaeda as an instrument to win the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. John Walker Lindh and other Americans walked right into Al Qaeda and were greeted by its high officials. How come the CIA couldn't do the same? No wall kept the CIA from getting Osama bin Laden. They just couldn't find him. As for how the hijackers got into the U.S., it's hardly a mystery. An FBI informant among the Muslim community in San Diego socialized with two hijackers and rented a room to one of them. When Congress tried to figure out how this happened, the bureau covered it up, refusing to allow the informant to testify. Again, there was no wall here—just plain incompetence made worse by a deliberate cover-up. The FBI reportedly was informed in April 2001 by a longtime reliable asset of an impending attack using airliners as missiles. It did nothing. An operation known as Able Danger reportedly turned up information on and tracked hijacker Mohammed Atta as far back as 1998, but the Pentagon wouldn't tell the FBI what it knew. Even now, the Bush administration is fighting to prevent the Able Danger officials from testifying before Congress about what they knew and when they knew it. When it comes to intelligence, the only thing worse than the FBI's record is the CIA's.

I don't agree that the CIA and FBI were simply incompetent with regard to the hijackers-- in fact, the simple incompetence explanation flies in the face of the article's premise that the Bush administration is deliberately staging a coup on constitutional government. This sort of reasoning-- that certain events such as 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing were the result of incompetence by the CIA and/or FBI-- permeates the media. But this reasoning is simply absurd, when these events:
1) help the party in power
2) have clear involvement by intelligence agencies
3) are covered-up by the government after the fact.

Why is it so hard for so many people to imagine that the US government is capable of facilitating (if not outright creating) terrorism? Isn't what the US government has done to Afghanis and Iraqis in the past few years a form of terrorism? Isn't it clear that terrorism is a powerful political tool? I am still amazed (and frankly disgusted) by people who see the overall perfidy of the Bush administration yet refuse to confront the idea that 9/11 was an inside job.

In any case, the article is worth a read, even though it ends with a ridiculous assertion: "Given all that's happened, the only explanation for the Bush domestic spying is that it's political. There are no crimes involved here."

What the???