As happens with mind-numbing regularity every week on Fox Television’s hit show 24, torture has once again worked to save us all from the terror of a ticking bomb, affirming for millions of loyal viewers that torture is a necessary weapon in George Bush’s war on terror.

Just days before the fifth anniversary of 9/11, President Bush himself appeared live from the East Room before an audience of handpicked 9/11 families for a dramatic announcement that mimed, with eerie precision, the ticking-bomb logic of 24, which is wildly popular among Washington’s neoconservatives.

With clipped, secret-agent diction reminiscent of the show’s Emmy Award-winning star, Kiefer Sutherland, Bush said he was transferring fourteen top Al Qaeda captives, including the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, from long-secret CIA prisons to Guantánamo Bay.

At once both repudiating and legitimating past abuses, Bush denied that he had ever authorized “torture.”

Simultaneously, he defended the CIA’s effort to coerce “vital information” from these “dangerous” captives with what the President called an “alternative set of procedures”—a euphemism transparent to any viewer of 24.   more »

The orgy of flag-waving patriotism encouraged by the government and the media in the aftermath of the attacks—described by the Times editorial as a “sense of community and purpose”—was designed to prepare public opinion for wars aimed not at defending the American people from terrorism, but militarily conquering oil-rich and geo-strategically important sections of the globe.

It also served to distract attention from the fact that in the wake of the most catastrophic intelligence and security failure in US history, not a single government official suffered so much as a demotion.

The media, with the Times leading the pack, worked deliberately to suppress any critical analysis of the 9/11 attacks, promote militarism, and portray George W. Bush—whose own actions on September 11 did not bear close scrutiny—as a determined and masterful leader.

The shameless brown-nosing of the Times editorialists—who spinelessly acquiesced to the frontal assault on democratic rights and the assumption of unprecedented powers by the White House—is almost embarrassing to recall.   more »

The waraholics' latest binge, after a long quiet period following a major bender in Vietnam, started five years ago -- on Sept. 11, 2001. Using a tragic event as an excuse to fall off the wagon is classic addict's tactic.

So a horrific attack, designed and executed by a band of crazies who had been rejected by their own families, all major Islamic leaders and most governments were elevated to a new status.

Instead of classifying them as the fringe, cultish wackos they were, the waraholics declared war. But since this was not a state-sponsored attack, it had to be a "war on," not a "war with." And as any fool should know, "war-ons" are for morons.

For the leading waraholics -- Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney -- this was not their first "war on." In their first jobs together, they ran the "War on Poverty" for Richard Nixon.   more »

To a large extent, the war on terror is a shabby promotional scheme designed to mobilize the nation for a permanent state of war while curtailing civil liberties.

There’s nothing original in this analysis, but it does explain the importance of media as a vehicle for Bush’s public relations campaign.

It also explains why high-ranking officials in the administration are still provided unlimited air-time to reiterate the same bland bromides over and over again without being challenged.

To commemorate the 5th year anniversary of 9-11, the political talk-shows have again given Cheney, Rice and Bush an open forum to make their claim that “America is safer” and that “we are winning the war on terror”.   more »

"The war we fight today is more than a military conflict," said President Bush to the American Legion. "It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century."

But if the ideology of our enemy is "Islamofascism," what is the ideology of George W. Bush? According to James Montanye, writing in The Independent Review, it is "democratic fundamentalism." Montanye borrows Joseph Schumpeter's depiction of Marxism to describe it.

Like Marxism, he writes, democratic fundamentalism "presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions.

"And, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. … It belongs to that subgroup [of 'isms'] which promises paradise this side of the grave."   more »

13 SEPTEMBER

Will Disney Invest in a Virtual Iraq Theme Park?

Maureen Dowd: Vice Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work

What Sickens Me Most Is the Anti-Arab/Muslim Racism on the Left

9/11 Anniversary Coverage: Propaganda Disguised as Journalism

Pakistan Turns Its Back on Bush - Supporting Al Qaeda & the Taliban

'Thought Crimes' in Britain's Authoritarian State