September 16, 2004
Imagination Versus Reality in 2004
Hilton vs the Bush Regime
The most fascinating thing I've run across in the last couple of days was the bit about Stanley Hilton. I posted a blurb last night. But this thing deserves more attention. Let's take a closer look. Here's last night's blurb to recap:
Global Gulag -- Stanley Hilton, former chief of staff for Bob Dole (!), is bringing a lawsuit against the US Government charging involvement in carrying out the 9/11 attacks. Hilton has deposed high-ranking military officials who assert that members of the government were complicit in the attacks. According to Alex Jones, "[Hilton] was a senior advisor for Bob Dole, counsel for Bob Dole and others in the Republican Party. He’s an expert on government-sponsored terrorism and has written a book about it, throughout history. And he now has new revelations never before revealed from his depositions of witnesses involved in and around 9/11. He represents over 400 of the victims of 9/11’s families and he has been given almost no attention." Do yourself a favor, take a taste of this. Open your mind wide. See if you are strong enough to really read it. If not, ask yourself why. Listen to Alex Jones interview him at Prison Planet. An MP3 of the interview is available here. The transcript of a March 11, 2003, interview is at Prison Planet. A September 10, 2004, interview is at Incunabula.org. Also check out Stanley Hilton's Website.
What a strange world we have run into in 2004. According to a Zogby poll, half of New Yorkers said they believed members of the Bush administration knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act." That's a huge number to believe something that is patently denied by the establishment politicians and media.
The Bush regime has already pushed the world far beyond the perimeters of what was ever possible before, there is no denying it. They have pushed the envelope of the possible in human affairs far more extremely in an accelerated fashion than anyone for a very long time in world history. Comparisons with Adolf Hitler are unavoidable -- sorry anyone who is offended by the comparison. It is actually very similar in some very specific, tangible ways. Anyone who needs to be persuaded of this needs to go back to Civics I and brush up a bit before rejoining the human race. What may be in disagreement is whether the radical change has been good or bad, or for whom. For the vast majority it has been extremely negative. Remember, there have been many who thought Nazism was a great thing. In fact, there are many now who emulate that regime. Authoritarianism has arguably become the dominant trend in modern politics worldwide. Whether of the Chinese, the Americans, the Russians, the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia etc, military dictatorships has been the trend of world politics since the Bush Neocon regime took power in the U.S. and turned the post Cold War world into the Neocon vision of the New World Order.
That story can go on forever, but now let's bring in the Stanley Hilton character. This guy's background is as a lawyer and advisor to Bob Dole, not exactly a background that one would expect to produce a left-winger. Whatever that means anymore -- I am so annoyed with people being hypnotized into false divisions over illusory concepts like that. We are not in a Democrat-Republican party dialectic anymore. We have burst through the cosmic eggshell onto a vaster order of being. The challenges are much greater now. To remain in a hypnotic state of hallucinating a world that has ceased to be is to play into the hands of those who would destroy you. It's not about Democrats and Republicans anymore. Or more pertinently, those words and concepts have to be redefined and the constituencies need to be clearly identified. The Bushes have destroyed both liberal and conservative values in America, have hurt nearly every constituency. Their policies are solely determined by pragmatism on the playing field of superpower. Their policies are designed to benefit certain very elite constituencies that pay them off for their favors -- pure and simple. It's not a hidden process, it's just about how it is defined. It's bribery of the most foul kind, but it is not referred to that way in the polite societies of the media culture.
The policies benefit a specific few by design. The rich, powerful corporations pay for the politicians, why shouldn't they get what they want? And they do. But a policy designed on the basis of a balance sheet of money and power ultimately leads to chaos on a massive scale. This is where we are now. But if they can just succeed in keeping the dimensions of the catastrophe out of sight for two more months they can secure power for an indefinite period of time. Of course the "law" says four years, but when did the Bush family ever let something so lowly as a law get in the way of their drive for ever greater power?
So here we are on the verge of catastrophe no one dares to pretend he can comprehend or anticipate. September 11 only shows how minor that catastrophe was to what might be. What has played out in Iraq has already dwarfed 9/11 in human carnage and destruction. It's a pea to a watermelon. And very few are willing to entertain the notion that the world has changed very profoundly, and that the people who stopped the vote counting in 2000 to make sure they didn't get voted out, will not let the laws and traditions of Constitutional America get in their way.
At this point, these gangsters are desperate. They have been engaged in so much illegal activity for so long on so many levels, it is absolutely impossible for them to submit to the power of a legal civil society. If the law were be allowed to take its course, these men would end up in prison, as Nixon would have if Ford hadn't pardoned him and stopped those legal processes from taking their inevitable course. They are like thrill killers on the run. They cannot accept defeat or surrender. They must prevail or bring down the whole temple on everyone's head.
So here, in a time when scores people who have never made a public political gesture in their lives are coming out for ousting Bush, we now see a former Dole team player coming out with one of the most radical indictments of the Bush regime of anyone.
Most theories of 9/11 that have received much currency in the mass media have been the official version (an outrageous conspiracy theory about a handful of Arabs with box cutters) and some various compromises between that and the unvanquishable feeling that these evil Bushies might in fact be what they appear to be: the ones with the power, with the stated motive, and with the most likelihood of having pulled off the dazzling, mind-shattering 9/11 attacks.
But the thought that that one fairly obvious leap of logic might be true -- and that the very people we entrust to be our leaders and protectors are in fact bent on dominating us and destroying us if we defy their wishes -- is just too much to even contemplate.
And right there you have the wall in your thinking that will kill you. If in fact this is one of those very aberrant moments in history when some monster like a Hitler comes along and provides a vehicle for those who wish to invoke those very ancient kinds of tyrannies that have no beginning in history, and perhaps no end -- then we are sitting ducks, unwitting victims of this round of treachery in human history.
Having studied the Bushes for years and been exposed to John Judge when Bush senior was still the reigning mad dog, I thought of them first when saw the towers burning from my office window. I couldn't shake the feeling that they were the most likely ones to pull off such a stunt, but at first I went along with the news reports. Like nearly everyone, I was shook and needed a sense of solidarity in the broadest sense, I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to those who -- for whatever illegitimate reasons -- are the designated leaders. But evidence of complicity in the catastrophe by high government officials began to pile very quickly and is now far to high to ever sweep under the rug.
Still we want to maintain politeness, even when dealing with violent savages. Maybe, just maybe they didn't really do anything so bad, please God don't let them have done that... And we wish to be accepted by our peer group, whom we perceive as being much more rational than we and not likely to entertain such radically paranoid thoughts. So we dare not suggest it as an actual possibility that the president of the United States (who ascended to power by the most blatantly unethical, illegal means ever) could actually be capable of sacrificing the lives of Americans to enhance his own power.
But the truth is not what we want it to be, what is most comforting to us, what is most logical, most just. Because a theory survives a test of logic does not mean it is the truth. The truth is only what happened, not what is most logical or preferable. Who could ever try to make the case that only what is most logical happens, or that only that which makes sense happens? Holding to such rigid concepts in a time of upheaval is suicide.
The truth is not a polite compromise between what they say happened and what what may appear to have happened. People who feel that the official story of the government is not true, tend to still use it as a starting point and only pull back from it so far, compromising with the dominant view. Then they end up with a logical compromise between two positions, but not necessarily anything to do with what actually happened.
Hilton doesn't compromise, but just states a rarely heard, but widely held view: "Our case," he said in the September 10, 2004, interview is at Incunabula.org, "is alleging that Bush and his puppets Rice and Cheney and Mueller and Rumsfeld and so forth, Tenet, were all involved not only in aiding and abetting and allowing 9/11 to happen but in actually ordering it to happen.
This is characteristic of a rigorous legal logic. The concept of Best Evidence is that you use the evidence that is most reliable, you don't compromise between the opposing evidence. Hilton is an all-or-nothing man. It's not: Well, we'll go light on them because, jeez, he is the President, after all, and you can't just say he's a criminal... It's just: this is the evidence; this is the conclusion I draw from it. You may not like it. I may not like it. But this is what it is.
Hilton, even more strangely, says he went to school with Paul Wolfowitz. "At the University of Chicago, in the late '60s with Wolfowitz and Feith and several of the others," he said, "and so I know these people personally. And we used to talk about this stuff all of the time. And I did my senior thesis on this very subject – how to turn the U.S. into a presidential dictatorship by manufacturing a bogus Pearl Harbor event. So, technically this has been in the planning at least 35 years."
It is said we live in a time when communications are more pervasive and powerful than ever, and that gives us potentials that have never existed. But the ability to control and mislead millions of people has never been nearly as sophisticated as it is now. If -- just imagine for a moment -- we really are at one of those moments when someone has pulled a great fraud and has used deceit to seize power and brutalize vast numbers of people in the pursuit of a radical agenda, then it will all come out in the wash for historians to sort out when, as Bush so delicately puts it, we will all be dead. But wouldn't it be nice if we could use this tremendously accelerated and powerful communications media to tell this sordid tale now when it can still matter, when the knowledge can still make a difference, can still save some from dying in what is rapidly building into a major global catastrophe?
The story, the reality, is right there in front of us. Most refuse to even entertain the notion that those in power may not share their own sense of ethics and may not use their power responsibly. This is an existential moment in human history of unexceeded magnitude. If Americans, in a sense the leaders of the world, give George W. Bush a pass to power after the lies he has told, the people he has killed and the damage he has done, then the people themselves will have earned the detestation the Bush administration has so assiduously earned. And then God help us, whichever God you recognize. Then the words of "Anonymous", who is supposedly senior CIA terrorism analyst Michael Scheuer, become deathly chiling: "The war has the potential to last beyond our children's lifetimes and be fought mostly on U.S. soil." (See Toronto Sun's Eric Margolis for more on Michael Scheuer.)
Hilton says the military was doing drills of the scenario that actually happened: planes being flown into the World Trade Center. That's why the military stood down, they thought it was another drill. But Condi Rice and **ck Cheney said "no one" had ever imagined people flying planes into buildings before. Why that particular lie? It's so obviously bogus now that there has been time to check it out. Hilton has depositions from many military officers, he says, to support his case. It's time to hear it.