-          Ralph Nader

American President Barack Obama

Uncle Tom is the title character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852. Tom was a Christian slave on a Kentucky plantation. Throughout the novel Tom remained loyal to his master, refusing to physically resist the abuse and torment that he and his fellow slaves were forced to endure.  It was Tom’s belief that their captivity was the destiny that God had chosen for them, therefore must be accepted.

In modern times, the term “Uncle Tom” was adopted by African-Americans as a pejorative to condemn fellow African-Americans whom they accused of “selling out” to Caucasian-Americans.  An Uncle Tom is now understood to be a black person “who is perceived as behaving in a subservient manner to white authority figures, or as seeking ingratiation with them by way of unnecessary accommodation.”

On November 4, 2008, when it became obvious that Barack Obama had won the Presidential election, Ralph Nader was interviewed by FOX News Anchor Shepard Smith.

The following exchange is the FOX interview:

Smith: “Guess who’s here? The Independent party candidate, Ralph Nader. This is his second run for the Presidency since he played spoiler in the close 2000 contest. This year he was on the ballot in 45 states plus D.C. This year he was polling about 1-percent. Ralph, you spoke to Fox News Radio’s Houston affiliate today, and said this:

‘To put it very simply, he is our first African American president; or he will be. And we wish him well. But his choice, basically, is whether he’s going to be Uncle Sam for the people of this country, or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations.’

Smith: “Really. Ralph Nader – what was that?”

Nader: “It’s very simple. He has gone along with corporate power from the moment he entered politics in the State Senate; voted for the Wall Street bailout; supports expanding [the] military budget that is desired by the military industrial complex, and doesn’t really have a tax reform thing for the ordinary fellow in this country.  [He] apposes single-payer full Medicare for all, because the giant HMOs AETNA and SIGNA do.  [He] doesn’t have a living wage; he’s supposed to be respectful of the poor [but] hardly mentions them in his speeches – it’s all the middle class. He doesn’t have a comprehensive program…”

(Interrupted by Smith)

Smith: “And you utter the words ‘Uncle Tom’? Are you kidding me?”

Nader: “Yeah. That’s the question he’s gotta face.”

Smith: “He didn’t have to face it until it came out of your mouth! I mean, I just wonder if you don’t realize that you had a number of supporters out there. You were running a percentage this year, you were reduced to irrelevant, and I just wonder now if that’s what you want your legacy to be – the man who, on the night that the first African American President in the history of this nation was elected, you ask if he’s going to be Uncle Sam or Uncle Tom.”

Nader: “Yeah, of course. He’s turned his back on a hundred-million poor people in this country – African Americans and Latinos and poor Whites, and we’re gonna hold them to a higher standard. It’s just not an unprecedented career move, ya know, in the White House. We expect more of Barack Obama…”

(Interrupted by Smith)

Smith: “You were reduced to complete irrelevance here. You weren’t able to play spoiler. Will you run again?”

Nader: “Look, I don’t like bullies like you. I can’t see you. You can pull the plug on me. I’m lookin’ at a dark camera…”

(Interrupted by Smith)

Smith: “You said “Uncle Tom”. I didn’t say it, sir. With respect, I did not say it.”

Nader: “I said that’s the question HE has to answer. He can become a great President, or he can become a toady for the corporate powers that have brought both parties to their knees against working people in this country and have allowed our country to be hijacked by global corporations who have no allegiance to this country other than to ship its jobs and industries to fascist and communist dictators abroad who know how to keep their workers in their place. This is reality here. This is not show business. It’s not celebrity politics. There are people suffering in this country, and we expect a great Presidency from Barack Obama, and we’re gonna try to hold his feet to the fire…”

(Interrupted by Smith)

Smith: “I just wonder if, in hindsight, you wish you’d used a phrase other than Uncle Tom.”

Nader: “Not at all. Do you know what the historic…”

(Interrupted by Smith)

Smith: “Fair enough. Thanks very much. We’ll have a response from our panel in just a moment.”

Public Activist Ralph Nader

For several days afterward, the media was awash with stories claiming that Ralph Nader had called Barack Obama an “Uncle Tom”, even though he hadn’t.  As well, none of this coverage addressed the issues that Nader had highlighted in his interview with Shepard Smith.

These follow-up stories invariably portrayed Nader as the “spoiler” from the 2000 presidential election, depicting him as a bitter, “also-ran” candidate who was reduced to name calling and invective out of personal spite. Whatever the intent behind this universally biased coverage, the result was a pillorying of Nader, and by inference a pillorying of the substance behind the issues that Nader attempted to address before the American public.

Amidst the media euphoria of this historic election, it was understandable that few people cared to listen to Ralph Nader’s reservations regarding the president-elect and his intentions after assuming office, but it was also disheartening that these legitimate concerns could not be seriously addressed in the public forum. The United States had entered into a period of economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression of 1929, and it was entirely reasonable for Nader to ask where Obama’s loyalties lay – with the country’s wealthy minority or with the citizen majority who voted for him.

FDR’s domestic reforms: a historical precedent for Obama

Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s momentous election victory of 1932 and the Democratic Party’s simultaneous sweep of the congressional elections, every presidential administration since has been scrutinized in the media by the decisive standard of legislative action taken during the first hundred days of FDR’s first presidential administration. In the wake of catastrophic economic upheavals fuelled by decades of political corruption and corporate patronage, the people of the United States had voted overwhelmingly for a change in the political tradition that dominated their federal government.  They would not be disappointed.

Upon accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination for president, Roosevelt proclaimed: “Throughout the nation men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government, look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth… I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.”

With this mandate, the President introduced the “New Deal”, its policies focusing on what historians call the 3 Rs: relief, reform and recovery.  Financial relief was provided for the unemployed and poor, while economic reforms of the monetary system were introduced to curtail usury by banks and irresponsible speculation by investors. In his inaugural address, Roosevelt declared: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men . . . The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Among FDR’s early reforms was the Banking Act of 1933, commonly known as the Glass–Steagall Act, which effectively barred banks, brokerages and insurance companies from entering one another’s’ industries, and separated investment banking from commercial banking. The law was enacted to control corruption and manipulation of the market by giant banks that had organized huge corporate mergers for their own profit, a primary factor behind the stock market collapse of 1929.  By doing so, the administration had established a series of restraints on private financiers with the intent of tempering the impact of future economic downturns on the American economy; no longer would those with control over America’s finances be allowed to put all of the country’s economic eggs into one corporate basket.

These reforms arose in reaction to the unrestrained free market capitalism evolved by the “unscrupulous money changers” of American business.

History repeats itself

It was in reaction to another series of catastrophic economic upheavals fuelled by political corruption and corporate malfeasance that America’s voters again provided the Democratic Party with an overwhelming mandate for change.  In November of 2008 Barack Obama was elected to the presidency, and the Democrats held majority control in both houses of Congress.  Obama had campaigned on the slogans “It’s time for change” and “Change we can believe in.”  Once again it was clear that Americans had voted for a change in the status quo pervading their government’s policies; conducting “business as usual” would not be acceptable.

Now that the excitement and emotion of the 2008 election has waned, and Barack Obama’s administration has almost completed its second year, it is much easier for the casual observer to be more thoughtful in assessing Obama as a leader – of both his party and the country.  It is also far easier now to evaluate whether or not Ralph Nader’s concerns on the eve of Obama’s election were justified.

As with Roosevelt, the first 100 days of Obama’s administration would be marked by swift domestic policy initiatives, although not those anticipated by rank-and-file Democrats.  Wall Street and the global corporations would be the President’s primary concern.

Obama’s domestic policies

On November 4, 2008, Ralph Nader was critical of Obama because he voted for the Wall Street bailout initiated by the Bush administration. The first priority of the new administration’s fiscal policy was to “increase financial support” (more bailouts) for private sector institutions already receiving government aid through the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). In February of 2009 an additional 700 billion dollars was allocated to the program, but depending on one’s source of information this number varies; no absolute accounting of government spending has ever been attempted.  Estimates of how much money will be eventually repaid to the government also vary.

The consensus among economic pundits featured in the mainstream media was that these measures, however poorly implemented, were absolutely necessary in order to avoid an even greater financial catastrophe.  An economic “domino effect” ending in universal bankruptcy was imagined for America without this massive government bailout. It was never made clear, however, why a handful of huge financial corporations were chosen as the recipients of this prodigious outpouring of public largesse while smaller regional institutions and individual citizens were excluded, other than to describe the giant firms as “too large too fail”.

Interdependency now exists among the country’s largest banks, brokers and insurance providers.  Conglomerates are currently allowed to provide any financial service through divisions and subsidiaries, essentially utilizing the assets of one as collateral to underwrite the liabilities of another.

Dismantling the checks and balances

The provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act had been gradually eroded until the passing of the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, or Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which finally allowed commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to consolidate.  This Act was the successful culmination of decades of corporate lobbying for deregulation of the financial sector of the American economy. Once again, those with control over America’s finances put all of their economic eggs into one corporate basket. Financial institutions were allowed to grow beyond the economy’s ability to absorb individual bankruptcies without disrupting the entire system.

Throwing caution to the wind

Just as disturbing was the increase in new “financial products” created for the benefit of speculators during this period of dismantling federal regulation.  The primary feature of these new products was the expanded underwriting of risk in order to promote the sale of derivatives, securities and investment funds. Significant short-term profits provided the enticement for investors, but simultaneously they were exposed to long-term liabilities and asset devaluation should there be a downturn in the market.  These products, especially hedge funds, found enthusiastic buyers in the guise of institutional investors (corporate executives), who both borrowed and invested other people’s money, and who realized huge commissions for themselves by returning short-term profits on paper.

Compounding the inherent risks of these financial products was the fact that speculators employed by most of the world’s major conglomerates had invested in the same high-risk products. This network of interdependency was built upon a foundation of non-existent assets, and would be exposed as such during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2006.

In the decade prior to the crisis, the vast majority of U.S. mortgages were issued to subprime borrowers accepting adjustable-rate mortgages. After U.S. housing prices peaked in mid-2006 and began a steep decline thereafter, refinancing became more difficult. Adjustable-rate mortgages were renewed at significantly higher rates, forcing homeowners to default and foreclosures to soar. As a result, securities and hedge funds backed by subprime mortgages lost most of their value, which cascaded as losses into other sectors of the world’s financial investment markets.

These mortgage-backed securities (MBS), with their initially high returns, had enticed investors from around the world to invest in the U.S. securities market. As housing prices declined, financial institutions that had borrowed and invested heavily in subprime MBS reported significant losses. As a result, defaults and losses on other loan types also increased and the crisis expanded from the housing market to other parts of the economy.

Effects on global stock markets due to the crisis were dramatic. Between January and October 2008, owners of stocks in U.S. corporations had suffered about 8 trillion dollars in losses, with holdings declining in value from 20 trillion to 12 trillion dollars.   The financial institutions Goldman Sachs, AIG, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo were not be able to honour their debts as a result, and would have forfeited without government intervention.

Subsidizing the rich

Rather than allow the defaulting American-based companies to declare bankruptcy then liquidate their remaining assets as dictated by law, the federal government of the United States borrowed money at the public’s expense to rescue them from bankruptcy – the American Government (American taxpayer) paid their debts, much of which involved payments to overseas institutions. This bailout was justified as an attempt to “stabilize the world’s economic markets” (maintain the status quo). Other governments would follow America’s lead.  Underwriting the debt of these wayward institutions transformed their private sector liabilities into global public debt, while allowing them to continue their domination of world economic markets as they had before the crisis.

Those who had caused the crisis were bailed out at the expense of taxpayers around the world, without public oversight or a call for accountability, and without a commitment to market reforms that would insure that such a crisis could not happen again.  A return to the Glass–Steagall Act was never a consideration.

What came instead was the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, another massive piece of legislation that includes the consolidation of regulatory agencies, consumer reforms and “tools” to deal with future financial reforms.

The Act is categorized into sixteen titles.  According to the law firm of DavisPolk, it will require regulators to create “243 rules, conduct 67 studies and issue 22 reports” before the legislation is clarified, providing ample opportunity for lobbyists to provide their opinion before legal interpretations of the Act are established.

Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor

“I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. … You are a den of vipers and thieves.”

-          President Andrew Jackson

As early as February of 2009, Bloomberg.com was pointing out that the American government’s financial commitment to these corporations was “enough to pay off more than 90 percent of the nation’s home mortgages.”  A bailout of private corporations was unnecessary. There was no economic reason for the U.S. government to bail out the country’s largest financial corporations rather than individual mortgage holders, if the intention was simply to “stabilize the world’s economic markets.”

In fact, directly underwriting individual debtors in the American housing market would have been more cost effective for the U.S. government, since this would have eliminated the “middle man” corporations and their huge operating expenses and shareholder dividends, including executives who awarded themselves hundreds of millions of dollars in unearned fees and bonuses paid for by the American taxpayer – even after the economic meltdown.

No opportunities for renegotiated individual mortgages or subsidies for small investors were ever entertained by either the Republicans or Democrats in their colossal bailout packages.

Yet a handful of America’s largest corporate investors and institutional speculators received unconditional public grants and loans in order to sustain their ongoing operations, while individual subprime mortgage holders and small banks who had been enticed by these same institutions into making dubious financial investments were allowed to forfeit everything they owned.  Through the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, some critics feared that the Treasury Department was setting the stage for a consolidation of the financial industry by arbitrarily deciding which companies would receive bailout funds; the selection criteria remained a “closely guarded secret.”  Some lawmakers were upset that this capitalization program, which the government described as a way to jump-start lending, would end up culling banks in their districts.  Rather than lending the money, the recipients of bailout funds hoarded the cash as a means of “shoring up the buffer that insulates depositors in the event of a failure.”

As feared, smaller regional banks, starved of funding, have been closing.  Since 2008, there have been 216 bank failures in the U.S., with many more expected.

Greenwich Associates predicts that “within one year, up to 10 percent of U.S. banks will either close [their] doors or be taken over by larger institutions. Within five years, most of the banks with less than $1 billion in assets will no longer exist, as they will either be bought out or fade away. Overall, the number of firms in the U.S. banking sector is predicted to shrink by 20 percent compared to 2007 … Banks will curtail lending activities, the number of mergers will balloon, and the government will put even more banks under receivership. Only a few mega-banks such as Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. will control the industry, and large foreign banks will gain a foothold in the U.S. market.”

As a Senator, Barack Obama had condemned the irresponsible and avaricious conduct of the corporate executives who precipitated the financial crisis, but still voted in favour of President Bush’s TARP bailout.  As President, he continued to condemn their amoral business ethics, yet provided them with additional subsidies that surpassed those of his predecessor.

Senator Obama fulminates

Private sector executives establish government policy

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

- John Maynard Keynes

The Federal Reserve System (FED) was also to blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis.  Various analysts have accused the FED of generating market distortions by maintaining artificially low interest rates since the 1990s.  This policy was intended to encourage more borrowing, thereby increasing economic activity that would sustain growth in the world’s markets, and the profits realized by the major corporate investors as a consequence. A frenzy of excessive capital investment in unsound ventures ensued. Coupled with Federal government assurances that their investments were protected from forfeiture, an environment of moral hazard was established in the world’s speculative investment markets.

Artificially low interest rates are a key component of what is called the “Bernanke Doctrine”. As a Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 20, 2004, Ben Bernanke gave a speech: The Great Moderation, where he postulated that “we are in a new era, where economic volatility has been permanently eliminated”.  Ben Bernanke was appointed by President Bush as Chairman of the FED in February of 2006.  President Obama nominated Bernanke to a second term which was confirmed in January of 2010.

FED Chairman Ben Bernanke

By virtue of his chairmanship, Bernanke sits on the Financial Stability Oversight Board that oversees the Troubled Asset Relief Program.  Under Bernanke, the FED refused to name the financial firms it lent more than 1.2 trillion dollars to, the amounts they received, or the assets put up as collateral until forced to do so by order of Manhattan Chief U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska.

The largest recipients of government aid were AIG and Goldman Sachs.  These companies are also one another’s largest trading partner. Treasury secretaries under the previous two presidents, Robert Rubin under Bill Clinton and Hank Paulson under George W. Bush, were Chief Executive Officers of Goldman Sachs before entering government.  Obama’s current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is the former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and was an Under Secretary of the Treasury for Robert Rubin.

Robert Rubin

Hank Paulson was still the CEO of Goldman Sachs in 2004, when he successfully petitioned the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to relax lending restrictions on investment banks.

Henry "Hank" Paulson

Mary Schapiro was then a senior executive at the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), the industry’s supposed watchdog of market integrity. Previously, she had served as an SEC commissioner, appointed by Ronald Reagan and reappointed by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Her opinion was that the securities industry needed “a more flexible regulatory paradigm” and that consolidated supervision of securities firms was not “necessary or appropriate.” Schapiro has been made the SEC Chairman by President Obama.

Mary Shapiro

Both Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke were criticized for their handling of the financial crisis as it unfolded in September of 2008; Lehman Brothers Holdings was allowed to file for bankruptcy on Monday September 15, while on the evening of September 16, the FED’s Board of Governors announced that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, headed by Geithner, had been authorized to create a “24-month credit-liquidity facility” from which AIG could draw up to $85 billion in credit.  At the time this was the largest government bailout of a private company in U.S. history. Bernanke was subsequently accused of covering up “the fact that his staff [at the FED] recommended he not bailout AIG”, raising questions about whether bailing out AIG was necessary at all.  Coincidentally, prior to the financial crisis Lehman Brothers had been AIG’s largest competitor.

In November 2009, Neil Barofsky, the Treasury Department Inspector General responsible for oversight of TARP funds, issued a report critical of the use of more than 62 billion dollars of government funds to redeem derivative contracts held by several large banks which AIG had insured against losses. The banks received face value for the contracts although their market value at the time was much lower. In his report, Barofsky said the payments “provided [the banks] with tens of billions of dollars they likely would have not otherwise received”. Terms for use of the funds had been negotiated with the New York Federal Reserve Bank while Geithner was its president.

Neil Barofsky

Beginning in 2005, AIG became embroiled in a series of fraud investigations conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S. Justice Department, and New York State Attorney General’s Office. The New York Attorney General’s investigation led to a $1.6 billion fine for AIG and criminal charges involving some of its executives. In July of 2010, Goldman Sachs agreed to pay $550 million in fines to settle fraud charges of its own.

More friends in high places

On October 6, 2008, Neel Kashkari, a former investment banker for Goldman Sachs, had been put in charge of the Office of Financial Stability by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and was responsible for distributing additional bailout funds to worthy recipients.  Kashkari joined the Treasury Department in July of 2006 as Senior Advisor to Paulson.  President Obama asked Kashkari to remain with Treasury after his inauguration for a limited period to assist in the transition. On December 7, 2009, it was announced that Kashkari was joining the Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) as Managing Director in charge of new investment initiatives.  PIMCO runs the “Total Return” fund, the world’s largest mutual fund, and is also a beneficiary of the TARP bailout.  As of this writing, no issues regarding a conflict of interests concerning Kashkari during his tenure with the government have been raised.

Lawrence Summers was appointed by President Obama in 2009 as Director of the National Economic Council (NEC).  The NEC was created in 1993 to “coordinate the economic policy making process,” provide policy advice to the President and to ensure that the implementation of programs are consistent with the President’s stated goals.  Summers was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan from 1982-1983, served as Chief Economist for the World Bank until 1993, and then joined the Clinton administration that same year.

NEC Chairman Lawrence Summers

As World Bank Chief Economist, Summers stated in an interview: “The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.”  In December of 1991, he wrote a memo on trade liberalization that was leaked to the press. It included a section that promoted dumping toxic waste in third-world countries for economic reasons.  The memo stated that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that . . .”

Summers was a leading voice within the Clinton Administration arguing against greenhouse gas reductions, and according to internal documents made public in 2009 opposed U.S. participation in the Kyoto Protocol.

In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury.

As such, he advocated a policy of “privatization, stabilization, and liberalization.”  Summers was a supporter of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, which lifted banking restrictions, established by FDR in 1933. “Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century,” he said. “This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allowed for the creation of “giant financial supermarkets” that could own investment banks, commercial banks and insurance firms, something banned since the Great Depression but advocated by Summers.  While campaigning for the Presidency, Obama argued that “this [Act] led to deregulation that helped cause the crisis,” but now he wants Summers to coordinate his administration’s economic policy-making process and to provide him with policy advice.

From left: Geithner, Obama and Summers

It is painfully obvious that Obama’s administration is replete with financial industry insiders, whose ultimate loyalties lay with their private sector peers.  Allowing these amoral bureaucrats to wield so much power over the nation’s economic policy will only result in further damage to the country and by extension, the world.  Barack Obama “has gone along with corporate power” from the moment he entered the White House, just as Ralph Nader warned he might.

Illusory financial reform

Overshadowed by all of this high level manoeuvring of federal policy makers in the media is the fact that the fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis and related defaults continues to grow.  Millions of additional delinquent borrowers still face foreclosure, while the stability of the country’s banks and the entire financial system remain in doubt.  Lending by banks has not increased as was predicted, markets have not been stabilized by the bailouts as promised, and unemployment continues to rise.

Financial reforms were promised, resulting in the Dodd-Frank Act being signed into law on July 21, 2010.  As cited earlier, however, the Act is a labyrinthine maze accessible only to those initiated in economic legalese.  Before the Act can be effectively implemented, regulators must first make rulings based upon dozens of studies interpreting the Act’s wording in order to clarify its legal intent, allowing ample opportunity for corporations to lobby for additions or omissions beyond the public’s notice.  The reform bill is 2,319 pages long.  Compare this to the law creating the Federal Trade Commission, which was 8 pages long, the Social Security Act, which was 28 pages long and the Glass-Steagall Act, which was 35 pages long.

In the July 12, 2010 edition of Time Magazine, the featured cover story was entitled, “On Sale: your government. Why Lobbying is Washington’s best bargain”, by Steven Brill.  In his article, Brill reveals that there are “1,900 firms with 11,000 lobbyists registered to work on behalf of banks, mortgage lenders, stockbrokers, private-equity funds and derivative traders” in order to influence the decisions of policy makers (p.28).  The federal government is comprised of 435 members in the House of Representatives, and 100 members in the Senate. There are more than 20 financial industry lobbyists alone for every elected official on Capitol Hill.  During 2009, corporations spent 3.49 billion dollars lobbying the federal government. Among the largest of these corporate lobbyists is Capital Tax Partners. Co-founder of Capital Tax Lindsay Hooper says that her company primarily provides “input and technical advice on various tax matters” to clients, including Goldman Sachs (p.30).

It is difficult to believe that private sector interests would spend so much money every year trying to influence government policy if it was not paying off.

The online journal of The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank, considers the Act no more than a “bailout bill”, since according to them it allows future governments to “put cash directly into a failing firm or guarantee its debt,” allowing the same existing environment of moral hazard to be perpetuated.

While this may be true, one must question why these think tank “experts” are pointing it out now after remaining silent for so long.  Several members of AEI served under the Bush administration on various panels and commissions and have retained their positions under the current federal government. After ignoring the dangers of deregulation promoted under Bush, AEI “experts” have now become critical of similar legislation promoted by a Democrat – crafted with the help of these same AEI members, no less.

Partisan politics does not acknowledge its own hypocrisy. The welfare of the country is not a primary consideration – only the acquisition of power is important.  Both Republican and Democratic members of Congress pander to the same corporate interests in order to finance their election, and criticize one another for doing the same.  Once in office, the policies of elected officials reflect the interests of their corporate sponsors, regardless of the party in power.  These private sector sponsors intentionally pit representatives of both parties against one another, knowing that they are guaranteed a dominant voice in creating government policy regardless of who wins.  The inevitable ire of voters who have been disappointed by their elected representatives is directed towards the politicians themselves by the corporate controlled media, thereby disguising the true source of public disaffection – corporate control of the electoral process.

Under these circumstances, it is hard to imagine how any real reforms can be enacted.

More spending, less revenue

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), was also passed into law by the end of February of 2009. President Obama declared its purpose was to stimulate investment, consumer spending, and the creation of jobs.

When passed, the ARRA package was nominally worth more than 799 billion dollars, if one includes potential tax breaks of 480.5 billion dollars.  Only 318.7 billion dollars of actual spending is projected. The tax breaks were in addition to those granted under the previous federal administration for eligible corporations, along with the TARP bailout funding they have been receiving.

Details of the ARRA stimulus plan have been posted by the online organization ProPublica.com and are organized by category of spending provisions.  It is difficult to say how effective a stimulus the money being spent will be based on this document, but when given close scrutiny, a trend appears in the Act’s spending provisions; federal social programs and departments that have been chronically underfunded by past governments are given some supplementary funds, while other government programs and departments already well funded are given even more.

For example, under the category of “Transportation and infrastructure”, more than 23.9 billion dollars is allocated to the Department of Defense (DOD) alone, even though it received about 713 billion dollars from the national budget in 2009. What the DOD will do with the few pennies more this amount represents as part of its overall budget is anyone’s guess, since there is no effective oversight of DOD spending.  On September 10, 2001, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was forced to admit to a congressional oversight committee “we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,” attributing this failure to “the Pentagon bureaucracy.”  During the September 11, 2001, attacks attributed to foreign terrorists, the Pentagon building sustained significant damage which resulted in the loss of most of the DOD’s financial records, as well as the deaths of several forensic accountants investigating the unaccounted for expenditures.  Since the 911 attacks, there has been no attempt to renew the audit of the DOD, or to publicly review its internal accounting practices.

Bush's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

No significant proposal for directly subsidizing small businesses were included in ARRA, even though there is ample evidence that small firms are the most important source of job creation in the U.S. economy.   In response to public criticism for this omission, a separate bill was passed by the Senate in September of 2010, with expectation that the House of Representatives will follow suit before elections in November.  The sums involved, however, are paltry when compared to TARP and ARRA: a 30 billion dollar lending program is anticipated, with provisions for 12 billion dollars in additional tax breaks, including “more generous write-offs for equipment purchases”.

Also absent from ARRA were renegotiated individual mortgages and unconditional income tax breaks for low and moderate income private citizens, which raises the question: how is consumer spending being promoted by ARRA if the majority of consumers realize no additional disposable income as a result of the program?

Just as Ralph Nader pointed out on the eve of Obama’s election, the President “doesn’t have a tax reform thing for the ordinary fellow in this country”.

Parasitic capitalism condoned

Particularly galling is the recent revelation online at Alternet.org describing how America’s major banks, who are already being subsidized by the American taxpayer through TARP, have found another way to make quick profits from picking over the bones of homeowners who have fallen behind on paying their property taxes.  They have been investing hundreds of millions of dollars into purchasing businesses that collect property tax debts. They have been tacking on fees in addition to the taxes in arrears, and foreclosing on the homes of those who fail to pay:

“The Wall Street investors, which include Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co., have purchased from local governments the right to collect delinquent taxes on several hundred thousand properties, many in distressed housing markets,” the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found.  “In many cases, the banks and hedge funds created new companies to do their bidding. They gave the companies obscure, even whimsical names and used post office boxes as their addresses, masking Wall Street’s dominant new role as a surrogate tax collector.”

Adding insult to injury, “Some banks also are packaging tax liens as securities – in a similar way to how unpaid home loans are securitized – and selling them to investors. If mortgage holders fail to pay overdue taxes, an investor could waltz off with a home worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for the price of paying the owner’s tax bill.”

As appalling as this corporate malfeasance is, more appalling still is the fact that it is taking place and being allowed to continue under the administration of President Barack Obama, the Democrat’s candidate for President in 2008 – he who campaigned on the slogan, “Change we can believe in.”  The fact is that the federal government’s relationship with the country’s largest corporations has not changed at all; some of the faces have changed, but the arrangements remain the same.

Health care “reform”

Among President Obama’s other campaign promises was a pledge to reform the country’s health care service.  The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was passed in March of 2010 after prolonged debate and negotiated amendments in Congress.

Obama consults Health Care workers prior to passing the PPACA

Some critics do not consider the bill as real health care reform at all, because most health care insurance coverage will continue to be provided by private sector health maintenance organizations (HMOs), as it was before the PPACA.  A single payer health care system has been talked about for decades by third party candidate Ralph Nader, as is true of many of his Democratic contemporaries on the campaign trail. The public’s obvious desire for a single payer system has been established through many different opinion polls sponsored by mainstream media sources such as CBS, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post.

However, a single payer health care system was never considered as an option by those who crafted the reform bill.  Despite having majority control of both Houses of Congress as well as the Presidency, the Democrats failed to fulfill this fundamental goal embraced by New Deal Democrats for sixty years.

Compromise and concession

The Act’s intention is to extend health care insurance to all Americans while lowering insurance costs for the middle class.  The most important elements are a future capping of specific fees charged by HMOs, and mandatory participation in government subsidized coverage for individuals currently without health care insurance (the poor and citizens refused coverage by the HMOs).

Citizens with pre-existing conditions that the HMOs will not currently insure are eligible to join a temporary, “high-risk pool” covered by the federal government.  In other words, a single payer public option is now available for those individuals deemed unprofitable to private sector health care service providers.  The HMOs will continue to collect insurance premiums from healthy Americans, while citizens requiring expensive medical attention are the responsibility of the federal government.

Under the PPACA, HMOs will not be allowed to drop policy holders when they get sick, a practice that has been so common that it defies credulity how it could have gone on for so long, unless one is reminded that HMOs are corporations expected to return a profit for their shareholders – they are not in the business of providing a public service.  The PPACA also includes an appeals process for HMOs to contest payouts to policy holders, however, and provisions for “supplementary compensation” to HMOs who take on policy holders with pre-existing conditions as of 2014.

It is feared that the bill may encourage “unfair profit taking” practices by HMOs who accept government sponsored policy holders, treating them as cash cows and thereby increasing the cost of healthcare, rather than reducing it.  Some people are afraid that the federal government will be subject to over billing and fraud by these private sector service providers without a transparent, public review of spending. Considering past practices of this corporate sector, it’s hard to believe otherwise. No system of oversight for PPACA spending has yet been established, and health care costs in general are expected to increase before caps can be implemented on programs regardless.

The PPACA is a leviathan of bureaucratic terminology and legalese, inaccessible to casual scrutiny by the layman, and it remains to be seen what effect this legislation will ultimately have.  Various provisions are phased in and do not come into effect until 2016.  This affords ample opportunity for the Act’s opponents to lobby in favour of discreet changes, and the addition of loop holes through which the largest HMOs may continue to derive obscene profits at the expense of the average citizen.

All of this anticipated backroom manoeuvring will no doubt contribute to ever greater complexity in the Act, excessive red tape to disguise the potential unfairness of additional amendments, and a burgeoning government bureaucracy responsible for addressing the public’s health care issues.  More public money will be spent to promote public health, but a smaller percentage of that spending will be towards actual health care delivery.

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care plan.”

- Barack Obama.

Universal health care has been a fundamental service provided by democratic societies for decades, and single-payer funding has proven to be the most cost effective way to do it.  The term “single-payer” refers to financing the cost of universal health care through a single government source. Medical fees are collected from contributors (individuals, employers and government bodies), and services are paid for through a government supervised pool of funds. In this way, the cost of expensive health care that an individual contributor requires but cannot afford is diffused throughout the pool of funding, so that no one in need is denied necessary health care. The principal is the same as any other government service that benefits our communities as a whole: everyone pays taxes for schools, public works, police services and fire departments, even though they may not have children in need of education, a vehicle in need of a road, a reason to call 911, or a house fire to be extinguished.  It is in everyone’s interest to have these services available at any time, and they are only sustainable when everyone contributes to their maintenance.

HMOs are private corporations whose only legal purpose is to generate profits for their corporate shareholders, not providing health care coverage for policy holders. The corporate executives of HMOs are rewarded for denying services to policy holders, because this practice reduces corporate expenditures and maximizes profits.  The largest of these HMOs, Aetna and Cigna, (or Signa), have been notorious for reneging on their obligations to policy holders for decades.

In 2003, Barack Obama spoke at an AFL - CIO Conference on Civil, Human and Women’s Rights, and was filmed by a member of the audience.  A clip of Obama from this video, in which he addresses health care issues in America, was posted on YouTube.com under the title, “Obama on single payer health insurance”:

“The question is, how do we get the federal government to take care of its business?  I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care plan.  I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, is spending fourteen per cent, fourteen per cent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody.  And that’s what Jim’s talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out; a single payer health care plan, universal health care plan.  That’s what I would like to see, but as all of you know, we may not get there immediately because first we gotta take back the White House and we gotta take back the Senate and we gotta take back the House [of Representatives].”

Barack Obama emotes

Five years later, the Democrats would achieve majority control in both houses of Congress, and were almost assured that their party’s candidate would be elected as president, regardless of who their candidate was.  The opportunity for real change appeared imminent.  By that time, however, Senator Obama’s public opinion on health care reform had become more conservative, while being inclusive of the industry’s HMOs.

During the 2008 Democratic candidates’ debate televised on CNN, Obama stated: “I never said that we should try to go ahead and get single payer; what I said was that if I was starting from scratch, if, if we didn’t have a system in which employers had typically provided health care, I would probably go with a single payer system.”

The time may soon arrive when capital flight, unemployment, and rising rates of illness render Americans incapable of paying the HMOs what they demand in order to be “insured”.  Through the PPACA, Obama may yet realize the goal of a single payer system of sorts – by declaring the giant HMOs as too big to fail and then bailing them out as well, effectively making America’s taxpayers the majority owner of the HMOs, as Obama did with General Motors.  What this would not do, however, is lower health care costs or unethical profit taking by HMOs.

Military objectives direct Obama’s foreign policy

Somewhere between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion dollars will be allocated to military spending in the fiscal year 2010.  This represents up to 3.5 billion dollars per day. As early as 2008, Barack Obama had been candid in expressing his belief that the military should be a priority in any future government’s planning.

In a 2008 collection of his campaign speeches and policy positions entitled “Change we can believe in: Barack Obama’s plan to renew America’s promise,” the war waged against Iraq in 2003 is described as a “misguided invasion” by President Bush, who “misjudged the nature of the threats facing the United States” (p.108).

Rather than condemning the Bush regime for waging a blatant war of aggression, Obama was forgiving him.  By 2008 it was already publicly established that members of both the Bush and Blair administrations had forged evidence to support their accusations that Iraq possessed illegal weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and had a connection to al-Qaeda terrorists.  These accusations were the justification for invading Iraq on March 20, 2003, without the approval or cooperation of the United Nations.  The subsequent occupation of Iraq by the “coalition of the willing” unearthed no WMD and no proof of connections to al-Qaeda.  By 2008 the media’s attention had shifted from WMD, al-Qaeda and Iraq to waterboarding as the preferred form of torture endorsed by President Bush.  Eventually, this too would become just another factoid assimilated into the media panoply of combat news, celebrity scandal, and one-after-the-other environmental crisis.

As President-elect on November 11, 2008, Barack Obama pledged to move swiftly and close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp “as soon as he takes office”.  Upon taking office in January of 2009, President Obama said he intended to shut down Guantanamo “within a year”. As of March, 2010, the White House has indicated that “there is no specific date for closing Guantanamo.”

Obama has made good on his campaign pledge to deploy additional American Troops to Afghanistan (p.109), and to strengthen the Department of Homeland Security (p.115).  He has committed to a long range rebuilding plan intended to “increase the size of American ground forces,” “preserve America’s global reach in the air,” and “maintain American naval dominance” around the globe (p.119).

The United States is the richest, most powerful nation on earth. These strengths make it the world’s leader in effecting democratic change in humanity’s affairs. Its leaders have consistently espoused this ideal, but have consistently disappointed the world community. Having an American President whose skin is dark, and whose name is not European in origin would have helped to dispel the prevalent distrust of America’s intentions throughout the world, if a sincerely altruistic foreign policy had been adopted by President Obama.  Instead, a military build up has become the centre piece of his foreign policy.

The obstruction to legitimate reforms has come from within the Democratic Party itself. The Democrats have lost the confidence of the American people as a result, and with it their majority control of Congress in 2010. Corporate manipulation of the legislative process continues through members of both political parties. The result so far has been indecisive reforms, a continuing environmental decline, an undermining of liberty at home and a predatory foreign policy backed by the military intended to exploit the weaknesses of other peoples solely for corporate profit. Avaricious executives and shareholders are not just killing democracy, they are killing the planet. The global ecosystem that sustains all life is being strained beyond its capacity to recover, for no other reason than to generate additional profits for the richest 1% of the population.

No change to federal environmental policy

Global warming and climate change are the elephants in the room; these unavoidable forces of nature will dictate the conditions under which future generations exist, yet are essentially being ignored. The nation’s escalating social, economic and environmental concerns will not be effectively addressed if corporate profits continue to dictate the government’s legislative priorities.  While candidate Obama condemned the federal government for failing to enforce environmental legislation, and promised to “get tough” on corporate polluters if elected, he has adopted a conciliatory position now that he is the incumbent.  No new funding has been provided to the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce existing laws, and no new laws have been established in preparation for the inevitable environmental crisis of the 21^st century.

The President has lifted the moratorium on deep water oil drilling and exploration as of October 2010.  British Petroleum (BP), through BP America, the largest producer of oil and gas in the United States, will now resume industrial activity in the Gulf of Mexico.  BP is responsible for the largest marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.  In recent U.S. incidents, BP was found guilty of hazardous waste dumping in Alaska from 1993 through 1995, and causing the avoidable Prudhoe Bay oil spill in 2006.  Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon spill, the BP Texas City refinery illegally released an estimated 530,000 pounds of carcinogenic chemicals into the atmosphere over a period of forty days.  The refinery’s system for trapping noxious gases broke down, but company officials chose to secretly continue production rather than suspend operations.

Yet BP remains the largest fuel supplier to America’s Defence Department, being awarded 2.2 billion dollars in contracts by the Pentagon in 2009.  That same year, BP reported a net profit of more than 16.5 billion dollars, while spending more than 16 million dollars lobbying American politicians.  In 2009, seven of the 10 largest corporations in the world were oil companies.  Since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the American federal government has granted thirty three exemptions from environmental-impact studies to oil companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico.

President Obama’s stimulus package makes a paltry provision of six billion dollars in loan guarantees for eligible renewable energy projects.

In 2009, Obama chose to bailout GM and Chrysler for almost twenty billion dollars. In his stimulus package, he committed another twenty six billion dollars to highway infrastructure alone, while committing a meagre eight billion dollars over 10 years to the research and development of high speed rail technology. Spreading money around appears to be the President’s solution for appeasing most factions, but a token expenditure towards developing a mass transit alternative to the car, while simultaneously subsidizing the auto industry is far from acceptable.  While the President tries to have it both ways, resources are dwindling, pollution is increasing, and environmental degradation continues unabated. If our water is undrinkable, the air toxic and the soil beyond cultivation, the political state of the union will not matter.

The President pitches in

If anything, Ralph Nader’s statements on FOX News to Anchor Shepard Smith on November 04, 2008, seem more relevant now, two years later:

“[Barack Obama’s] choice, basically, is whether he’s going to be Uncle Sam for the people of this country, or Uncle Tom for the giant corporations … He has gone along with corporate power from the moment he entered politics in the State Senate; voted for the Wall Street bailout; supports expanding [the] military budget that is desired by the military industrial complex, and doesn’t really have a tax reform thing for the ordinary fellow in this country.  [He] apposes single-payer full Medicare for all, because the giant HMOs AETNA and SIGNA do.”

On the Eve of Obama’s election victory, Nader clearly defined what was at stake:

“He can become a great President, or he can become a toady for the corporate powers that have brought both parties to their knees against working people in this country, and have allowed our country to be hijacked by global corporations who have no allegiance to this country other than to ship its jobs and industries to fascist and communist dictators abroad who know how to keep their workers in their place. This is reality here. This is not show business. It’s not celebrity politics. There are people suffering in this country, and we expect a great Presidency from Barack Obama.”

In the two years since Nader made these statements, it has become clear that Barack Obama has not been a great President.  Unless you’re a recipient of major tax cuts or bailout funds, this administration has been a complete disappointment.

Barack Obama’s failure to effect real change as promised makes him an easy target for criticism now that he is the incumbent, but the record is clear – he has tried to appease opponents who rejected his call for institutional change, condescended to advocates of maintaining the status quo in monetary policy and security concerns, and acquiesced to the global corporate agenda for sustaining economic growth regardless of the environmental consequences.

President-elect Barack Obama looks on as President George W. Bush speaks

The Democrat’s social welfare policies and advocacy on behalf of protecting the environment did not survive the party’s transition to power.  As a result, voters expressed both their disappointment and anger with Obama during the midterm elections, so now the Democrats’ majority control of Congress has evaporated, along with any chance for real reform.

Fox News eviscerated Ralph Nader in 2008 for daring to suggest that Barack Obama might not be the reformer he postured as during the election.  Since then, the pro-Republican network has done nothing but eviscerate Obama at every opportunity.

Members of both the Republicans and Democrats are divided along money lines, not ideologies.  Money brings power. President Obama has chosen to follow the money. More than 750 million dollars was raised in his campaign for the White House – far more than the 504 million raised by Bush and Kerry combined in 2004.  He has prostrated himself before the corporate money machine, unabashedly seeking ingratiation by way of unnecessary accommodation.  He has turned his back on the suffering of 100 million poor Americans while facilitating the economic destruction of the country’s middle class.

Vice President Joe Biden congratulates President Obama

Meet the new Uncle Tom.

- Arthur Conan Doyle.

I had originally begun to question the American government’s explanation for the events surrounding the successful terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, after reading articles published in the New York Times and the Washington Post.  These stories made it clear to me that the full truth of what happened that day has not been revealed to the public.

On May 6, 2004, the Times reported that an official of the Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] had destroyed audio recordings made by “at least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked planes … without anyone making a transcript or even listening [to their contents]”.  Inspector General Kenneth M. Mead of the Federal Aviation Administration attributed the destruction of the recordings to “poor judgment” on the part of the FAA official involved, who was not identified “for reasons of privacy”.

Inspector General Kenneth M. Mead

On August 2, 2006, two years after the 9/11 Commission’s final report was released, the Post revealed that the North American Aerospace Defense Command [NORAD] had provided “inaccurate information” to the commission, leading “some staff members and commissioners” to conclude that “the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public.”  “We to this day don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission.  “It was just so far from the truth…It’s one of the loose ends that never got tied.”

9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean

On December 22, 2007, the Times disclosed that the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] had destroyed videotapes which documented the 2002 interrogations of alleged Al Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri without sharing them with 9/11 investigators.

According to a CIA spokesman, the existence of the tapes was never revealed because “commission staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos”.  During December of 2003, commission staff members had sought permission to interview these prisoners directly, but were refused.  Instead they were instructed to provide questions to CIA interrogators, who then posed their questions to the detainees.

Just months after the attacks it was revealed that the White House did not want a public inquiry into 9/11.  On January 22, 2002, CNN reported that President Bush had tried to “limit the congressional investigation” into the attacks by assigning the inquiry to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.  If limited to the Committee, the findings of this investigation would be classified and not subject to congressional oversight or public scrutiny.  Under public pressure to convene a public inquiry, the White House eventually relented.

Once the 9/11 commission was eventually established on November 27, 2002, a meagre 3 million dollars was allotted to financing its operations. President Bush then refused 9/11 Commission Chair Thomas Kean’s request for an additional 11 million dollars.  Kean had sought the funding as part of a 75 billion dollar supplemental spending bill that the president had requested from congress to pay for the war with Iraq.

During the investigation, the White House refused to share “classified” documents with the commission.  In the Washington Times on October 27, 2003, an “administration official” who spoke “on the condition of anonymity” stated, “There are documents we do not feel it is appropriate to make available.”

President Bush was reluctant to testify before the commission.  Initially he refused entirely, then consented to “meet only with the panel’s top two officials”, Chairman Kean and Vice Chairman Hamilton, allowing them “a single hour of questioning.”  This was unacceptable to the commission. Eventually he did meet with all ten commissioners, but with conditions attached. The President and Vice President were interviewed together at the White House and would not testify under oath. An audiotape of the questioning was not permitted, a transcript of the exchange was not allowed and White House lawyer Alberto Gonzales was present with two staff members to provide legal counsel for the President and Vice President.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney

When considered together, these piecemeal revelations in the public record suggested a larger pattern of obstruction of justice.  The FAA, NORAD, the CIA and the White House had all withheld or destroyed evidence during the public inquiry into the September 11 attacks.  It appeared as if these agencies had intentionally hindered the commission’s investigation.

These facts came from newspapers and media outlets ranked among the most respected in the United States.  For that reason, I considered the implications of their reports seriously.  The information in these reports did not necessarily constitute evidence of a criminal conspiracy, but it was obvious from the documented facts that people within the American government were hiding something and no one in authority was asking why.

Why did an unidentified FAA manager destroy physical evidence crucial to understanding the events of 9/11?  Why did NORAD lie about its actions on September 11?  Why did the CIA destroy physical evidence and deny commission investigators access to material witnesses?  Why did the Bush administration try to block a public inquiry into the attacks, withhold funding from the investigation, and then withhold information from the inquiry while insuring that both the President and Vice President would not testify under oath?

Why did the United States Congress not pursue these unanswered questions?

Regardless of their motivation, a crime was committed by those who obstructed the investigation into the September 11 attacks.

It may have been incompetence or negligence that government officials had clumsily concealed.  A fantastic, coincidental convergence of mutual interests may have taken place, with many people in various government departments having something to hide simultaneously.  For example, FAA managers may have failed to inform the military of the hijackings in a timely manner, contrary to established protocols, so they destroyed evidence of their negligence; NORAD commanders may have mishandled their fighter response when they tried to intercept the hijacked flights, so they concealed the fact that they had blundered; the CIA may have been torturing prisoners and did not want these crimes to be exposed; the Bush administration may have ignored warnings of an imminent terrorist attack because they did not consider the threat credible, then avoided political catastrophe by suppressing the truth.

Any one of these scenarios is a plausible explanation for a corrupted government department to protect its own interests, but it did not seem credible to me that every employee in every department would cover up for others who had made mistakes or were derelict in their duties.  By doing so they would become accessories after the fact.  An independent investigation was going to identify the individuals who “screwed up”; it was only a matter of time. It seemed more reasonable that professional bureaucrats concerned with their own careers would be quick to expose those who were culpable, thereby avoiding personal responsibility while earning accolades for themselves.

Even if opportunists did not come forward, there must have been honest government employees working that day who shared their experiences with commission investigators. If mistakes had been made then concealed, there must have been someone somewhere who came forward with information that would clarify the anomalies extant in the public record – unless they were coerced into silence, or their testimony was suppressed.

An independent investigation was going to expose the individuals who screwed up; it was only a matter of time.  As it turned out however, no government agency or its employees would ever be held accountable in any way for failing to stop any of the attacks.  In the preface to the 9/11 Commission’s final report published in 2004, it was stated: “Our aim has not been to assign individual blame.” (xvi)

Nowhere in the commission’s report was it acknowledged that various departments of the federal government had obstructed their investigation.

In 2006, Commission Chair Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chair Lee H. Hamilton co-authored a book entitled, “Without precedent: the inside story of the 9/11 Commission”, in which this obstruction of justice by government officials was discussed:

“Fog of war could explain why some people were confused on the day of 9/11, but it could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations, and public testimony by FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue.” (261)

Nor could the “fog of war” explain the commission’s inaction after discovering that they had been lied to.

Kean stated that “the issue was presented to the commission in May 2004” and that they had a “reporting date” of July 22.  “At that point, we did not have time to launch a separate investigation into why the FAA and NORAD had presented inaccurate information in public, nor was that question clearly under the commission’s mandate.” (262)

Once the 9/11 commission chose not to pursue their investigation further, it became the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] to resolve these allegations.  The FBI serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency for the United States Department of Justice.  Despite these widely publicized incidents of wrongdoing and the subsequent public demand for answers, no investigation was ever initiated by the Bureau.

The failure of Congress, the 9/11 Commission and the FBI to respond to revelations of possible government malfeasance was inexplicable to me; the mainstream media’s failure to discuss the significance of their inaction while “objectively” reporting the facts was both distressing and alarming.  Surely every editor and reporter who read a daily newspaper, listened to the radio, watched television or accessed the internet would be aware of the same facts that I was.  If so, wouldn’t they have similar questions and reservations regarding the official rendition of events?  Instead, each perceived case of government “mismanagement” was considered individually and superficially in the media’s coverage.  No one was speculating that there might be a connection between these randomly reported events. No analysis was ever provided that discussed the possibility that the events being reported were anything other than part of one huge “snafu”.

Even the 9/11 commission chairman Thomas Kean had voiced his concerns publicly. Former Senator Max Cleland had resigned from the 9/11 commission after accusing the Bush administration of “stonewalling” the investigation.  Cleland publicly accused the White House of “trying to undermine the work of the commission and of ‘Nixonian’ efforts to conceal important evidence”. He and many others had called for a new inquiry.  Regrettably, there would be no modern equivalent of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s dogged coverage of the Watergate scandal to sustain public demands for further investigation.

Then I read the story of FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley.  In an open letter sent to Bureau Director Robert Mueller that was published by Time magazine, Rowley publicly revealed that FBI Headquarters personnel in Washington, D.C. had failed to take action on information provided by the Minneapolis, Minnesota Field Office regarding its investigation of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.  She accused Mueller and others at the highest levels of FBI management of “skewing the facts” in the Moussaoui investigation during the 9/11 inquiry. Rowley expressed her belief that certain facts had been “omitted, downplayed, [or] glossed over … in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons”.

Zacarias Moussaoui is the only person to have been convicted of conspiring to kill citizens of the United States as part of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  From February 26 to May 29, 2001, Moussaoui attended flight training courses at Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma.  This school was also visited by Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the terrorists who piloted planes into the towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Clarence Prevost, the flight instructor assigned to Moussaoui, began to have suspicions about his student and convinced his supervisors to contact the FBI.  On August 16, 2001, Moussaoui, a French citizen, was arrested by the FBI in Minnesota and charged with an immigration violation.  After his arrest, Moussaoui refused to cooperate with the FBI during questioning.  Within days of his arrest the French Intelligence Service confirmed Moussaoui’s affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden.  French authorities had been monitoring Moussaoui since 1996.

For Coleen Rowley this information confirmed the Minneapolis FBI agents’ suspicions and provided probable cause on which to request a criminal search warrant to access Moussaoui’s apartment and personal belongings – specifically his computer.  In order to do so, however, they needed FBI Headquarters [FBIHQ] to authorize and arrange contact with the United States Attorney’s Office in Minnesota.  According to Rowley, “Prior to and even after receipt of information provided by the French, FBIHQ personnel disputed with the Minneapolis agents the existence of probable cause to believe that a criminal violation had occurred [or] was occurring.”  The request for arranging a search warrant was refused by the FBIHQ, not once but several times over the following weeks.  Permission to obtain a search warrant was finally granted on the morning of September 11, 2001, after the attacks had begun.

FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley

Information obtained through the eventual search of Moussaoui’s belongings was allegedly used in his conviction on six felony charges, yet no evidence directly linking Moussaoui to the 9/11 attacks has ever been publicly released.

FBI Director Robert Mueller had testified that the Bureau had no advance knowledge of possible terrorist attacks on the United States.  During the same period in which the FBIHQ was refusing to authorize its agents’ repeated requests for a search warrant however, it was already in possession of what is called The Phoenix Memo.  The Phoenix memo is a letter that was sent to FBI headquarters on July 10, 2001, by FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams, stationed in Phoenix, Arizona.  At the time Williams was investigating students enrolled at various flight schools in the United States for possible terrorist links.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller

In his memo Williams stated: “The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by USAMA BIN LADEN (UBL) to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges.  Phoenix has observed an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest who are attending or have attended civil aviation universities and colleges in the State of Arizona.”  Williams explained that this activity “gives reason to believe that a coordinated effort is underway to establish a cadre of individuals who will one day be working in the civil aviation community … These individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets.”  Zacarias Moussaoui’s flight school training obviously profiled him as one of these individuals.

FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams

Williams recommended that FBI field offices with these types of schools in their jurisdictions “establish appropriate liaison” with them and that “the FBIHQ should discuss this matter with other elements of the U.S. intelligence community” in order to obtain “any information that supports Phoenix’s suspicions.”

The memo was addressed to several FBI Agents who specialized in antiterrorism intelligence, including Dave Frasca, chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at FBI headquarters and Rodney Middleton, acting chief of the Usama bin Laden Unit.

Page 1 of the "Phoenix Memo"

Apparently Williams’ concerns were ignored.  The existence of the memo also makes it difficult to understand how FBI Director Mueller could testify that the Bureau had no advance knowledge of possible terrorist attacks on the United States.

The memo was entitled, “Zakaria Mustapha Soubra; IT-OTHER (ISLAMIC ARMY OF THE CAUCUSUS)”.  The FBI had identified Soubra as a radical Muslim fundamentalist hostile to the United States.  He had been enrolled at the Embry Riddle University [ERU] in Prescott, Arizona, as an Aeronautical Engineering student taking courses on “international security” relating to aviation.  Several of Soubra’s Sunni Muslim associates were identified as having arrived at ERU around the same time as him.  Williams states that these associates came from “Kenya, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, India, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.”  He goes on to name eight of them, but in the text made available to the public their names are blacked out.  Throughout the memo there are several large sections of text that are blacked out, making it impossible to glean the significance of information which has been withheld.

Page 3 of the "Phoenix Memo"

Coleen Rowley and Kenneth Williams were not the only FBI employees to expose superiors exercising “poor judgement”.

Sibel Deniz Edmonds was a translator for the FBI.  Edmonds alleges that she reported breaches of national security and intentional blocking of intelligence which had involved her supervisor Mike Feghali.  She also claims that the FBI received information during April of 2001 indicating that “Osama bin Laden was planning attacks on four or five American cities with planes”, that “some of his people were already in the country” at that time, and that “the attacks would happen within a few months”. When her superiors failed to act on this information, she took her concerns to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility. After the September 11 attacks, Edmonds was told to “keep quiet” regarding this issue. Instead, she addressed her complaints to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General. Edmonds was fired from her position on March 22, 2002.

Sibel Edmonds

Her firing prompted Edmonds to make public her experiences and to sue the FBI for wrongful dismissal under the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989.  Since that time, publication of court proceedings on her whistleblower claim has been blocked by the assertion of State Secrets Privilege.

Still another story came to my attention that suggested military malfeasance.  On August 17, 2005, U.S. army intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer went public with claims that a secret military intelligence unit, codenamed Able Danger, had identified Mohammed Atta and three other al-Qaeda members as a potential threat a year before they carried out the September 11 attacks.  Shaffer said that the unit had been prevented from sharing its information with the FBI by Pentagon lawyers who were “concerned that the military should not be involved in surveillance of suspects inside the US”.

Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer

Shaffer claims that he was eventually able to set up meetings three times between the FBI’s Washington field office and officials from Able Danger who believed the information about Atta should be shared with domestic law enforcement.  Michael Mason, head of the FBI field office, said “it’s possible the meetings were arranged, but that cannot be verified.”  Shaffer also said that each of the meetings was cancelled on short notice – by members of his special operations command.

The 9/11 commission did not mention Able Danger in its final report, despite having been briefed on its work by Colonel Shaffer in October of 2003. A statement from the commission said that three of its staff attended the briefing but none, including Executive Director Philip Zelikow, remembers Shaffer mentioning Mohammed Atta.  The other three terrorists Shaffer discussed were Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi and  Marwan al-Shehhi, all of whom participated in the September 11 attacks.

Phillip Zelikow

The 9/11 commission “determined in its report that intelligence agencies did not learn of Atta until after the attacks happened”, but Navy Captain Scott Phillpott came forward to support Shaffer’s statements, telling FOX News on August 22, 2005, that “Atta was identified by Able Danger in January/February 2000.”

In a statement to FOX News, Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita said he was “not certain” the Pentagon could substantiate the claims made by the officers, since the information collected by Able Danger no longer existed.  Major Eric Kleinsmith, who was with Army intelligence until February 2001, testified that he was ordered to destroy Able Danger’s information. “I deleted the data,” he said. “There were two sets, classified and unclassified … plus charts we’d produced.”

On August 26, 2005, yet another person came forward to endorse Shaffer’s statements.  James D. Smith was a defense contractor who worked on the technical side of the Able Danger unit.  “I am absolutely positive that he [Atta] was on our chart among other pictures and ties that we were doing mainly based upon [terror] cells in New York City,” Smith said.

After learning of Able Danger, I could no longer seriously entertain the possibility that government officials were simply covering up incompetence among their ranks.  Yet this theory was the only relatively “benign” explanation I could imagine for why so many government sources had withheld information from the public.  As preposterous as it was, I had to accept the very real possibility that a cabal of powerful individuals controlling strategic elements of the American federal government had allowed the attacks of September 11 to succeed for reasons of their own.

The highest leadership within the FAA, NORAD, the CIA, the White House, the FBI and the Pentagon had all been exposed publicly as having acted inappropriately, if not illegally.  Ostensibly, members of these agencies had obstructed justice and committed perjury.  During the 9/11 inquiry evidence had been destroyed or withheld, investigators were lied to and testimony was suppressed. Why was no one in a position of authority trying to find out why? The 9/11 commission chose to stop short of answering some very disturbing questions and Congress had also chosen not to pursue the matter any further.  If Congress would not police the Police, then who would?  Not the mainstream media, that was certain.  They accepted without reservation every story provided to them by their “official sources”.

No government official was ever held accountable in any way for their actions or inaction.  Unlike the inquiry into the attack on Pearl Harbor, in which Major General Walter C. Short and Admiral Husband E. Kimmel were accused of being unprepared and charged with dereliction of duty, not a single scapegoat was offered to appease the public following the 9/11 debacle.

General Ralph Edward Eberhart, Commander in Chief of NORAD during the 9/11 attacks, was subsequently given the added responsibility of the U.S. Space Command in April, 2002, then promoted to command of the United States Northern Command [USNORTHCOM] in October of 2002.

General Ralph E. Eberhart

General Richard Bowman Myers was the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from March 2000 to September 2001.  He was the acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [CJCS] during the September 11 attacks; at the time, CJCS Henry Hugh Shelton was on a plane to London, England.  On October 1, 2001, General Myers was promoted to CJCS.

General Richard B. Myers

As the commission stated in the preface to its final report, the purpose of the investigation was not to assign individual blame.

While the mainstream media failed to question the omissions and distortions of the 9/11 commission’s final report, the alternative media has continued to vigorously pursue answers that might explain the inconsistencies of the government’s official story. That government authorities have chosen to ignore so many salient facts is now part of the story itself.

The conspiracy theory propounded by the commission explaining the successful attacks of September 11 was badly flawed and incomplete. To learn more, I was forced to consider alternative theories and their interpretation of the facts.  To my dismay, I found them to be quite credible.

- Charles Erwin Wilson

Charles Wilson became the president of General Motors (GM) in 1941 and during World War II was the director of America’s War Production Board.  After the war, Wilson advocated for a “permanent war economy” in the United States, ostensibly to avoid a return to the economic conditions that prevailed during the Great Depression.  He was still the head of GM in January of 1953 when President Eisenhower selected him as Secretary of Defense.

Wilson’s nomination would be controversial because of his large holdings in GM. He did not intend to sell his stock, which was valued at more than 2.5 million dollars, and this was seen by many as a potential conflict of interest. During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, when asked if he could make a decision adverse to the interests of General Motors if required, Wilson answered yes, but elaborated that he could not imagine such a situation occurring “because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” Later this statement was often misquoted, suggesting that Wilson had simply said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”

It was not unreasonable to be concerned that a potential conflict of interest may arise between Wilson’s public sector responsibilities as Secretary of Defense and his private sector allegiance to General Motors.  The company had conducted more than 12 billion dollars worth of business with the American government during the war and was still a major supplier to the United States military; as Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson would be in a position to further enrich both himself and GM by awarding additional government contracts to the corporation.  A “permanent war economy” would prove to be a boon to GM’s profit margin.

Charles E. Wilson

Now more than fifty-five years later, another potential conflict of interest has arisen with General Motors.  Politicians are being forced to ask themselves a related question: “Is subsidizing General Motors good for our country?”  For the first time since 1910, the possibility of General Motors declaring bankruptcy is a serious consideration, and many analysts consider it as inevitable.

The last thirty years have been witness to a profound reversal in the fortunes of GM. The corporation has been losing money and market share for several years, along with Ford and Chrysler.  The “Big Three” American automakers combined are several hundreds of billions of dollars in debt.  They now appear to be casualties of globalization, unable to compete profitably even within their traditional markets of North America, and while the world’s current economic recession is not responsible for the Big Three’s competitive decline, it will be the determining factor in what the immediate future holds for North America’s auto industry.  Chrysler is now bankrupt and has joined GM in successfully soliciting various governments for tens of billions of dollars in loans and grants to remain in business.  While Ford has not asked for any immediate funding, it also doesn’t want its competition to get the upper hand thanks to their government bailouts, so instead requested that a nine billion dollar line of credit from the U.S. government be made available if required. These automakers have already been the beneficiaries of extensive public largesse for several years and observers are now questioning the efficacy of continuing financial support for what already appears to be a lost cause.

As stated in its 2008 Annual Report, GM directly employs 243,000 people around the world.  It manufactures vehicles in 34 countries, and sold about 8.4 million vehicles in 2008 – down from 9.4 million in 2007.  The bankruptcy of a company the size of GM would have a significant impact on the economies of all countries in which it operates – particularly Canada, the United States and Mexico, where approximately 173,000 people are directly employed.

While the complete disappearance of General Motors is not expected, even if or when it declares bankruptcy, analysts have estimated that a total shutdown of the top U.S. automakers would lead to nearly three million jobs lost, directly and indirectly, with the American government losing about 60 billion dollars in revenue during the first year after such an event.  In Canada, a study by the Centre for Spatial Economics estimated that the loss of the Big Three producers would cost 600,000 jobs in Canada, reduce the country’s gross domestic product by 4.4 per cent and deprive the government of $13 billion in taxes.

General Motors’ failure to remain profitable is no surprise.  The corporation’s history of disreputable business practices, the questionable quality of some of its products, the complacent performance of its managers and the apathy of unionized hourly wage earners have all been factors contributing to the company’s current crisis.  Yet it is the members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) who are receiving the brunt of negative media attention.  The common theme has been to blame the corporation’s insolvency on its “lack of competitiveness” caused by excessive wage and benefit packages negotiated with unionized labour.

A December, 2008, internet article by Fox News Channel commentator Cal Thomas is a typical example of how anti-union media sources have taken advantage of this opportunity to pillory organized labour, regardless of the facts.  Thomas contends that General Motors’ insolvency “is the result of increasing UAW demands, strikes and threats of strikes unless health care and pension benefits were regularly increased”.  “According to the Wall Street Journal in September of 2006,” he stated, “on average, GM [paid] $81.18 an hour in wages and benefits to its U.S. hourly workers. Those increased costs, including the cost of health care, were passed along to consumers, adding $1,600 to the price of every vehicle GM produced.”  While Thomas acknowledged that recent concessions by auto workers had reduced that additional cost, he cites the Center for Automotive Research, a think tank that receives funding from GM, Ford and other auto sector companies, as estimating that the average wage including benefits for current GM workers had only dropped to “$78.21 an hour”.  He then adds:

“Contrast this with non-union Toyota, whose total hourly U.S. labour costs,   with benefits, are $35 per hour. Those lower labour costs mean Toyota enjoys a cost advantage over U.S. automakers of about $1,000 per vehicle. Is it any wonder that Toyota is outselling American automakers and from plants that have been built on U.S. soil? According to James Sherk of The Heritage Foundation, Japanese car companies provide their employees with good jobs at good wages: ‘The typical hourly employee at a Toyota, Honda or Nissan plant in America makes almost $100,000 a year in wages and benefits, before overtime.’”

However authoritative these statements may sound, they are misleading.  We are told that Toyota employees earn “with benefits, $35 per hour”.  In a 40-week year with 40-hour weeks, this amounts to an annual wage and benefit package totalling $56,000 per year.  James Sherk is then quoted in the same paragraph as saying that Toyota employees earn “almost $100,000 a year in wages and benefits.”  This amounts to $62.50 per hour over the same 40-week year, not $35.

As of May 03, 2009, the median hourly rate for a UAW Assembler was $26.96.  Wages vary for skilled-trade workers; the median wage for a Millwright at GM, for example, is $31.76; for an Electrician Journeyman it is $32.16.  Additionally, an employee’s years of service are also rewarded with incrementally higher wages and benefits. The “average wage, including benefits”, is not $78.21 for a UAW member working for General Motors.

The labour cost figures cited by the auto companies include overtime, shift premiums and other expenses associated with having a person on their payroll. This includes statutory costs, which employers are required to pay by law, such as federal contributions for Social Security and Medicare in the U.S., and state payments to workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance funds. It also includes the costs of negotiated benefits such as health care, pensions, education, training and prepaid legal services.

GM’s Hourly Pension Plan has been in effect since 1950 and is funded entirely by General Motors. There are no employee contributions to the Plan. As of Dec. 31, 2006, almost 357,000 hourly retirees and surviving spouses were receiving pension benefits.  Nearly 65,700 of those recipients were age 80 or older and 155 of that group were age 100 or older.

Having been the largest employer in the auto industry for so many years, these “legacy costs” as they are euphemistically called are higher for General Motors than for any other auto manufacturer, making the company’s overall labour cost per hour higher.  In this context, it is understandable how GM may have labour costs of $78 per hour and Toyota $62; Toyota’s manufacturing operations in North America are relatively new and much smaller, with no retirees to compensate (GM has been negotiating additional concessions from the UAW and legacy costs are assumed to have been reduced further at the time of this writing).

Frederick "Fritz" Henderson

In the April 27, 2009, issue of The New Yorker magazine, General Motors’ new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Fritz Henderson acknowledged how more than thirty years ago, GM began to alienate car buyers by selling “automobiles that were shoddily made and aesthetically wanting”.  “We saw some less than noble efforts,” Henderson admitted.  He also expressed his belief that today it is the burden of union legacy costs that have crippled the company’s profitability in a “shrunken marketplace” with “greater competition”.  Henderson explained: “We [have] invested more than a hundred billion dollars … to provide resources for both U.S. pension funds and U.S. post-retirement health care.  That is a staggering number and the burden of that, basically, has been borne by our balance sheet. … it means those resources weren’t invested elsewhere…or didn’t provide liquidity in the balance sheet for us to make investments or for us to withstand a moment like this.” (p.52-53)

Henderson’s statement seems rather disingenuous if one considers the recipients of this funding.  It is true that the company has been subjected to escalating pension and healthcare obligations, but this has been for all current and retired workers, salaried executives as well as UAW employees.  It is also true that management retirees are being subjected to pension rollbacks along with unionized workers.  GM announced the elimination of lifetime health care benefits for 100,000 white-collar retirees in its ongoing effort to reduce legacy costs.

Also consider that General Motors was already more than 300 billion dollars in debt by the end of 2004, with another 120 billion dollars of liabilities in the form of outstanding bonds.  The company has been losing money ever since and lost an additional 30.9 billion dollars in 2008 alone.  It is doubtful that depriving the employee pension fund of capital would have made a significant difference in helping GM remain solvent.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported in December of 2003 that GM was actually using its pension fund to make money: “In the third quarter, GM shovelled $13.5 billion into its pension plans, bringing its total contributions for the year to $14.4 billion. Because the company assumes that the pension assets will return 9% over the next year, the move automatically guarantees the auto maker a $1.3 billion boost to its bottom line over the next year. Not only that, but GM can deduct the entire contribution, which will shave $5 billion from its taxes. Combined, the effective guaranteed return in the first year is 44%.”  Since then, the company’s pension fund has performed so well that in April of 2007 the Washington Post reported it to be 17.1 billion dollars overfunded.

It would appear that legacy costs were not a pivotal consideration in the corporation’s daily operations until sales fell precipitously during the recent global recession and caused the company’s profitability to completely evaporate, along with the profits of every other auto manufacturer, foreign and domestic.

In March of 2009, it was revealed that Toyota, GM’s biggest rival, was trying to borrow over $2 billion from the state-backed Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC).  Toyota expected to lose $3.9 billion this year and was just the latest Japanese automaker to ask for government assistance. Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors also “signalled their intent” to ask for loans from the Development Bank of Japan.  Nissan cut production in January by 60% and Honda cut production by 23% that same month.  Toyota’s losses, however, have been far worse than expected.  On May 8, Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe announced a projected net loss of $5.5 billion for the fiscal year.  This announcement comes “despite Herculean cost-cutting efforts that could save around $8 billion.” North American sales fell by 21% in 2008 and are projected to fall and additional 20% in 2009.  An association of European automakers is also asking for $52 billion of low-interest loans and incentives from the European Union.

On July 15, 2008, GM announced plans to save 15 billion dollars annually by eliminating employees in the U.S. and Canada.  Twenty eight percent of its salaried employees, or 9,000 workers, were offered early retirement incentives. By doing so GM hopes to achieve “a 20 percent reduction in cash costs for salaried workers [that] will save $10 billion.”  In order to achieve the other $5 billion in savings, “53,000 union workers have been persuaded to accept buyouts or early retirement, and the company plans to close more than a dozen North American plants.”  It is tempting to speculate on how much more money GM might have saved if it had offered early retirement incentives to more white collar workers, and sooner.

Foreign investment in Mexico‘s auto industry has been increasing, averaging about $2 billion per year since the 1990s.  Mexico’s auto exports grew by almost 68 percent between 2004 and 2007, with most units going to the United States.  Yet Mexican auto workers’ wages are also being cut, with savings to corporations that are negligible.  Starting wages at some plants have been reduced to $1.50 per hour from $1.95.  General Motors said it will stop using “relatively high-wage workers” at its plant in the city of Toluca where, it is estimated, some workers earn about $6 per hour, an extremely high rate by Mexican auto industry standards.

No significant savings can be achieved by cutting already meagre Mexican wages, but given the chance manufacturers seem happy to do so just because they can.  The corporate savings is almost intangible, but the loss of income for Mexican labourers is profound.  This cynical gouging of workers’ wages and treating them as if they were disposable machine parts is reminiscent of the corporate mentality that dominated the industry early in the twentieth century and was the catalyst for the auto sector’s unionization in the U.S. to begin with.

Below is a partial list of General Motors products recalled in recent years because of manufacturing defects:

In 2001, about 156,000 passenger vehicles, light duty trucks, sport utility vehicles and mini vans were recalled due to faulty seat belt assemblies that, in the event of a vehicle crash, would not properly restrain the occupant.

In 2002, General Motors recalled approximately 570,000 pickups and sport utility vehicles.  The air bag sensing and diagnostic modules installed in these vehicles could interfere with the timing and sequence of air bag deployment signals, which could result in the non-deployment of driver and passenger side air bags during frontal collisions.

In 2003, about 1.77 million pickups, sport utility vehicles and vans were recalled in order to replace front windshield wiper circuit boards and motor covers. Vehicles repaired in an earlier wiper recall were not included in this new program.

In 2004, GM recalled about 4 million pickups worldwide to replace dangerous tailgate support cables that would corrode unnecessarily and fracture.

In 2005, GM initiated six recalls on more than two million vehicles for fuel leaks, overheating fuel pump wires, parking brake failures, brake pushrod and pedal arm failures, faulty ignition relays and seat belt anchors that did not comply with U.S and Canadian safety standards.

In 2006, 30,000 Corvettes were recalled because their roof could potentially separate from the vehicle.  900,000 pickups worldwide were also recalled in 2006 to fix tailgate cables that would corrode unnecessarily and break when loads were placed on them.

In 2007, 13,000 Acadias were recalled because the sensing and diagnostic modules of front air bags did not operate properly, possibly resulting in the non-deployment of air bags during a frontal collision.  Another 313,000 passenger cars and crossover vehicles were recalled to fix a fluid leak that could lead to the driver losing control of the vehicle.

On August 30, 2008, GM announced a recall of 944,000 sedans, sport-utility vehicles and pickup trucks worldwide because of a potential short circuit in a system that heats windshield-wiper fluid and could cause a fire. The recall affected 16 vehicle models that have the system. Of the vehicles, 857,735 were sold in the US.

Most recently and most inopportunely, on April 13, 2009, CBS announced that GM was recalling 1.5 million vehicles of various models because of possible engine fires that could be caused by leaking oil. Another 277,000 vehicles of various models had already been recalled in 2009 because of a potential defect in the shift lever that could cause a vehicle to roll away.

Could anything undermine General Motors’ credibility more than regular recalls?  In 1970, GM held 50 percent of the US auto market, 32 percent in 1995 and 25 percent in 2005. Today its share hovers at 18 percent.  Is it rational to make further investments in a company that continues to lose market share through a lack of consumer confidence while being exposed to “greater competition” within a “shrunken marketplace”?

G. Richard Wagoner

In March of 2009, CEO Rick Wagoner, 30 years with GM, was forced out and replaced by Fritz Henderson. In 2008 his base salary was 2.2 million dollars.  Wagoner took with him a financial package worth an estimated $23 million.  According to GM’s latest annual report, he will also receive an additional $367,000 in stock awards and about $535,000 in deferred compensation.

As CEO, Wagoner’s focus was on achieving short-term gains through the manufacture of highly profitable, fuel-inefficient products such as sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and light trucks.  The Camaro “muscle car” was also reintroduced into GM’s 2006 product line after a four year hiatus.  Superfluous and wasteful, this machine is a stellar example of the vision leading the decisions of GM’s leadership.

It was Wagoner who was responsible for the cancellation of the EV1 electric car, a controversial move critics claim was done to intentionally discourage the development of alternative energy vehicles.  This allegation was explored in the 2006 documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”   The film examines the roles of automobile manufacturers and the oil industry in conspiring to limit the development and adoption of this new technology.

The problem of escalating executive pay has been growing for the past 25 years. In the 1980s, the gap between the highest paid executive of an American company and the average worker was about 40 to 1. Today, it is 364 to 1.

Excessive financial rewards for top managers based on quarterly earnings promotes a very short-term outlook, encouraging CEOs to do whatever it takes to boost their company’s share price for the next quarter. It provides a disincentive for long-term company health.

The arrogance and sense of entitlement endemic in America’s corporate leadership was amply illustrated in November of 2008 by the spectacle of the Big Three’s CEOs flying to Washington in separate corporate jets in order to appear before Congress.  Despite their apparent desperation and the immediacy of the crisis, none among them had the foresight to even prepare a proposal for restructuring, or a simple business plan to justify their multi-billion dollar bailout request.  They were sent away with instructions to return with a plan for “viability and accountability” in order to secure future funding.

Left to Right : Ford Motor company CEO Alan Mulally, Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli GM CEO G. Richard Wagoner Jr.

After Wagoner was replaced by Henderson, President Obama was quoted in the April 13, 2009, issue of Time Magazine: “This [removal] is not meant as a condemnation of Mr. Wagoner, who has devoted his life to this company.  Rather, it’s recognition that it will take a new vision and new direction to create the GM of the future.” (p.20)

It is hard to imagine how this single change in leadership will affect that new vision, considering that executives such as Robert Lutz remain in key leadership roles. On April 1, 2009, he was named Vice Chairman and Senior Advisor.  His company biography explains that “In this capacity, he will provide strategic input into GM’s global design and key product initiatives.”  Lutz has a storied career in the auto industry, beginning his career with GM in 1963, then moving to BMW, Ford and Chrysler before rejoining General Motors in 2001 as Vice Chairman of Global Product Development.  During his career, Lutz has overseen the development of the Dodge Viper, Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac GTO “muscle cars”, as well as the Ford Explorer SUV.

Robert A. Lutz

During a 2008 “closed-door session” with journalists before giving a presentation to GM dealers in Dallas, Lutz candidly expressed his opinion that global warming is a “total crock of shit”, Toyota’s hybrid cars “make no economic sense” and that GM should be promoting stylish, “design-driven” vehicles such as the Cadillac CTS luxury car in order to increase its market share.  While he also expressed support for developing and marketing the Chevy Volt, at the age of 76 Lutz’s vision seems to be focused in his rear-view mirror on past achievements instead of finding that “new direction” the President spoke of.  No doubt some observers were thankful when Lutz announced that he would retire at the end of 2009.

It cannot be denied that for decades GM’s workers, white-collar and blue-collar alike, have been indulged by a corporate culture of entitlement that has fostered complacency and apathy among them. They really do seem to take for granted that what’s good for General Motors must be good for the country, since it is so large that the financial well being of its suppliers, lending institutions and the entire economies of local communities are dependant upon GM’s continuing operations.  It has been assumed that this lattice of economic interdependence makes General Motors “too big to fail”.  More to the point, it has been correctly assumed that politicians would not have the courage to allow GM to fail, presumably because they fear the political fallout that would result from a dramatic rise in unemployment and the potential for further exacerbating the current economic recession.

As of February of 2009, GM has received $13.4 billion from the U.S. government and has asked for as much as $16.6 billion more, with the final amount yet to be determined. The company’s Canadian subsidiary is seeking more than $7 billion (Canadian) from provincial and federal governments combined.

“Leaner and meaner” is the catchphrase for envisioned corporate reforms whereby tens of thousands of additional auto workers must be let go and debt worth tens of billions of dollars must be forgiven by creditors if GM is to qualify for additional government funding.  What is the point of funding General Motors if not to preserve employment and promote economic activity?  Why subsidize auto manufacturers and their employees if no one is buying their product in a depressed market, regardless of how efficiently they are produced or how cheaply they are sold?

We should remind ourselves that the governments of Canada and the United States are borrowing billions of dollars to finance this bailout in the name of their taxpayers, who will be liable for this additional debt regardless of the results, without any guarantees for a return on their “investment”.  This is being done without even tacit approval from the public for such drastic measures.  In fact, most Americans oppose more auto industry bailouts, according to polls conducted by the New York Times and CBS News.  Nearly 70 percent of Americans believe “struggling automotive companies, which are seeking billions of dollars in additional loans from the government and which are shedding tens of thousands of workers, should not receive any more taxpayer money to help them survive.”  According to a recent poll in Canada, “barely 15 per cent of Canadians support government efforts to finance the North American car industry out of its predicament. In Ontario, the ground zero of the debacle, the proportion that agrees with a multi-billion dollars bailout stands at a miserly 17 per cent.”

Why not simply allow General Motors to declare bankruptcy without government interference and let it restructure in accordance with existing laws?  It is not likely that the company will disappear entirely, but it will downsize – just as it is currently downsizing under the auspices of a government funded restructuring programme.  Who benefits from the ongoing government funding of General Motors?  Certainly not wage labourers who can anticipate unemployment with or without government intervention, and certainly not the private taxpayer incurring additional personal debt against his or her professed wishes.

If the North American public does not feel that General Motors is too big to fail, then perhaps it is the corporate lobbyists and their political counterparts who do.  With bankruptcy appearing imminent, additional infusions of public money will only benefit the corporation’s shareholders and debt holders, to whom further bailout money is already being funnelled.

New York Stock Exchange

Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter has expressed his concerns regarding unethical bondholders to radio host Lou Dobbs and others.  McCotter fears that some will try to benefit twofold through GM’s bankruptcy by claiming credit-default swaps, insuring them against losses through GM’s bankruptcy.  He is urging Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner to disclose which GM bondholders have default swaps from the American International Group (AIG), the insurance company that was bailed out by the government.  “It would be unconscionable to use [more] taxpayer money to help people benefit from the bankruptcy of General Motors,” McCotter said.

“It’s time for change” was Barack Obama’s campaign platform during the 2008 presidential election.  What better time for the President to introduce dramatic reforms in the auto sector than while his party has control in both houses of Congress, the Big Three have come begging with hat-in-hand and the public is against allowing these corporations to carry on their business as usual?

Can Washington retool Detroit? The answer is resoundingly yes, but not by giving cash unconditionally to corporate executives.  The world’s recent economic crisis should be viewed as a unique opportunity for the U.S. government to overcome the atrophy of corporate leadership, starting in the auto sector.

Detroit needs to literally retool, but will not cooperate if short-term profits are sacrificed by doing so.  They cannot be allowed to maintain the status quo of their industry by continuing to produce vehicles with conventional internal combustion engines and catering to niche markets for high performance cars, rather than committing their resources and public funding to the development of zero emission vehicles.  Throwing money at the Big Three to finance their “restructuring” while the world waits anxiously for the next surge in auto sales is a formula for further disaster.

The Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry should be laying foundations now for the future of the nation’s transportation system, public and private, rather than pandering to interest groups lobbying for concessions behind the scenes.

The Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry

Government funding to the auto industry should be contingent upon their commitment to the development and production of hybrid and electric vehicles, or any vehicle powered by an acceptable zero emission energy source.

The members of NAFTA should establish a binding deadline (the sooner the better) after which all new vehicles built or sold within their jurisdictions must be hybrids, or have a zero emission energy source.

A rebate incentive should be offered to anyone modifying their older vehicles to make them more fuel efficient, furthering the cause of clean air, reducing oil consumption and creating several new cottage industries for the economy. Existing cars could be operated until they needed to be replaced, protecting the intrinsic value of the nation’s current fleet of vehicles while ensuring that existing dealership inventories would eventually be sold.

Twelve million cars in North America are replaced every year according the April 13, 2009, issue of Time Magazine (p22) but in 2008 only nine million were built to replace them. In two more years 35 million cars will be at least ten years old and need replacing.  There are more than 245 million cars on the road in the U.S. today (p24). There is a market for new transportation technology.  If we act decisively, perhaps fifteen years from now the majority of cars on the road will be powered by zero emission technology, mass transit will be more accessible and the conversion process itself would have been a new source of revenue, not an added expense.

The nation’s filling stations will also require subsidies to make the infrastructure conversions necessary for “filling up” on alternative fuels as easily as getting gas is today.  A special status and funding for owner-operators of independent stations would reduce the costs for small entrepreneurs even further.

Unemployed auto workers should be retrained and given jobs at GM plants retooled to produce Light Rail Transit (LRT) systems, subsidized by the federal government as part of a larger urban renewal programme.  Rather than bailing out GM and its creditors, the federal government should be preparing plans for the long-term funding of public transportation in all of the country’s major urban centres, with the auto industry an active partner in this project.

It is a bitter irony that GM is now in a position to offer excess production capacity for the manufacture of LRT systems. During the 1920s and 1930s, General Motors helped create Greyhound bus lines, and then replaced intercity train transport with buses. GM also established subsidiary companies to buy out streetcar companies and replace the electric rail-based services of American cities with buses. This became known as The Great American streetcar scandal.  Between 1936 and 1950, more than 100 electric mass transit systems in 45 cities were bought out and shut down through illegal means. A number of prominent companies colluded with General Motors, including Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and Phillips Petroleum.

Pacific Electric Railway streetcars stacked at junkyard, 1956.

These proposed regulations should not be dismissed as outrageous and unacceptable. The same debate over how independent the free market should be goes back to the automobile’s very inception.  Through several generations we have created traffic laws, established speed limits, mandated seatbelts and airbags, and instituted fuel-efficiency and emission standards for vehicles.  All of these initiatives were at one time branded as outrageous or too expensive by their opponents, until their application proved to be a benefit to our society’s long-term health and productivity.

The contemporary automobile is an extremely wasteful product, not just in its fuel consumption but in its component parts.  Much of the product cannot be reused or recycled because these are not design considerations manufacturers are obliged to consider by law.  Tires, synthetic polymers and exotic epoxies end up in waste disposal sites, becoming health hazards when their chemical compounds break down and leach into surrounding environments and ground water.  In 1990 alone, approximately 240 million tires were discarded in the United States.  This does not include the 33.5 million tires that were retreaded. Almost 78 percent went to landfills, were stockpiled or illegally dumped.  It was also estimated in 1990 that that scrap tire stockpiles in the U.S. contained between 2.5 and 3 billion tires.  By 2002, it was estimated that over 250 million scrap tires were being disposed of in North America every year.  The automotive industry consumes about 80% of the world’s rubber production.  On a global basis between 700 million and 1 billion new tires are manufactured each year.  The total mass of tires currently being recycled is less than 7% of annual production. No one in the industry seems to be spending significant time or money on research to develop an alternative to conventional tires. No doubt a solution to this problem will also require further government regulation and funding.

Rubber recycling outside of fuel applications is still very low volume.  Burning of rubber for fuel (incineration) is currently the most common way to recycle rubber. Many people and companies advocate incineration as the only viable means to reduce the stockpile of scrap tires and to keep pace with the multitude of tires discarded annually – without considering the long-term air quality issues or greenhouse gas emissions that result.

Spontaneous tire fires are now common, and represent a threat more dangerous than forest fires because of the toxic fumes and chemicals released into the environment.  A single tire contains about the equivalent of two U.S. gallons of oil.

People living where consumerism has taken hold have appetites that far exceed their needs.  It seems as if hundreds of thousands of people in the Western World are driving cars every day simply because they can.  They have been conditioned through sophisticated marketing campaigns to enjoy driving for the sake of driving, with social status and speed being the integral selling points; “zoom, zoom, zoom” is Mazda Motor’s mantra for promoting its products. Many car buyers have also been enticed by easy financing terms on loans offered by auto makers, to purchase vehicles they don’t need and cannot afford.

Conspicuous consumption drives our Western economies to expand with no recognition that there are limits to our growth. We cannot continue to allow the depletion of our biosphere‘s limited resources simply for the sake of self-indulgence. Governments should be implementing solutions to discourage this type of economic activity, rather than tolerating it for the sake of increasing the gross national product.

In the preface of “Unsafe at any Speed”, a 1965 condemnation of car manufacturers by Ralph Nader, the author states: “The time has not come to discipline the automobile for safety; that time came over four decades ago. But that is not cause to delay any longer what should have been accomplished in the nineteen-twenties.”  Forty years removed from Nader’s original crusade, vested interests still delay the mass production of electric cars, vehicles whose genesis predates the first Model-T Ford of 1908 by decades.

Ralph Nader's polemic Unsafe At Any Speed

At the turn of the twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt led the Industrial Commission in its Trust-busting efforts to end monopoly control of the nation’s railroads. The railroad owners essentially controlled the nation’s economy by controlling its largest transportation system.  In collusion with one another, they decided who they would do business with and for how much.  Roosevelt declared that “The Government must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the railways engaged in interstate commerce.” Inaction was a danger, he argued: “Such increased supervision is the only alternative to an increase of the present evils on the one hand or a still more radical policy on the other.” More than a century later, we are still trying to end the arbitrary control exercised over our economies and transportation systems by huge corporations.

Our current generation of politicians must accept their responsibility to further regulate the automobile industry.  If General Motors is too big to fail, then perhaps it has been allowed to grow too big, as were the railroad monopolies of the past century.  We cannot move forward while anxiously hoping that the business of GM may be good for the country.  We cannot continue to have faith in a corporate system that ignores the welfare of the communities in which it operates.  Most of all, we cannot continue providing charity to those who are not grateful.  What is good for the country should not depend on what is good for General Motors.

“If it isn’t a conspiracy, they’re doing their best to make it appear like one.”

- Peter C. Newman

Two years after the 9/11 Commission published its final report investigating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was revealed that officials from the Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] and the North American Aerospace Defense Command [NORAD] had lied to the commission during the course of its investigation.

The story was published in the Washington Post on Wednesday August 2, 2006, under the title, “9/11 Panel suspected deception by Pentagon“. For more than two years after the attacks, officials from NORAD and the FAA had provided “inaccurate information” regarding their response to the hijackings that saw two commercial airliners flown into the World Trade Center‘s twin towers in New York City, and another into The Pentagon building in Arlington County, Virginia. Their statements had “suggested that U.S. Air Defenses had reacted quickly” to the hijackings and that “fighters were prepared to shoot down [any aircraft] if it threatened Washington.”  The inaccuracy of these statements “did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, had obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD”.  According to the commission, “the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights”.

“I was shocked at how different the truth was,” said John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into the events of September 11.  “The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.”

John Farmer

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor and Chairman of the 9/11 Commission.  “It was just so far from the truth…It’s one of the loose ends that never got tied.”

Chairman Thomas H. Kean

According to “sources involved”, it was assumed that false statements were made “hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings”, and that this lack of transparency “may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public.”

In a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in the summer of 2004, the 10-member commission debated whether or not to refer the matter to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation.  They decided not to.

In 2006, Chairman Kean co-authored “Without precedent: the inside story of the 9/11 Commission”, in which he rationalized why a criminal investigation of NORAD personnel was never pursued: “The issue was presented to the commission in May 2004″, just as the commissioners had begun to finalize their report to congress. The commission had a “reporting date” of July 22; “At that point, we did not have time to launch a separate investigation into why the FAA and NORAD had presented inaccurate information,” Kean explained (262).

The only reason for having created the commission at all was to try to reveal the whole truth of what had happened.  To achieve this, the commissioners should have insisted on more time to investigate these “loose ends”, otherwise withhold their final report.  Apparently it was more important to the commission and its sponsors that the report be released on schedule, rather than thoroughly researching the facts relevant to its conclusions.

In the 9/11 Commission’s final report of 2004, it was stated: “Our aim has not been to assign individual blame.  Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.” (Preface, xvi)  The government officials who knowingly presented “inaccurate information” while under oath before the commission were never called to account for their actions.

I did not understand how the commissioners expected to provide the “fullest possible account” of what had happened without investigating all of the available leads.  How could they seriously make recommendations for reforms without being sure that they had all of the facts, knowing as they did that people within the FAA and NORAD had lied to them and that additional information may have been withheld?

If bureaucratic incompetence was the explanation for a “bungled response” to the 9/11 hijackings, as suggested by a commission insider, shouldn’t the incompetent bunglers at NORAD and in the FAA be identified then weeded out?  How could this be done if the commission was not going to “assign individual blame”?

On the surface, it appeared to me as if the commission had uncovered a conspiracy that originated from within the FAA and NORAD: false statements were made under oath in order to fabricate a positive cover story intended to disguise their mutual ineffectiveness during the attacks. If true, this conspiracy would have been entered into by FAA and NORAD officials as an attempt to avoid accusations of personal negligence or incompetence and the repercussions that would ensue. By failing to act on this information, however, the commission exposed itself to the accusation of being in collusion with the conspirators as an accessory after the fact.

In turn, the 9/11 commissioners’ complacent response to the revelation of an internal government conspiracy was mimicked both by Congress and the White House. The commission’s final report was accepted as presented, despite the knowledge that investigators “did not have time to launch a separate investigation into why the FAA and NORAD had presented inaccurate information” to the commission. It seemed to me that a speedy conclusion to the investigation was welcomed by those in control of the federal government regardless of the circumstances, perhaps for “national security” reasons beyond the appreciation of the general public.  Before it was released by the commission, the final public report was screened for any potentially classified information and edited “as necessary”.

On November 21, 2003, former senator and commission member Max Cleland expressed his frustration at the lack of cooperation forthcoming from the FAA, NORAD, and the White House in their failure to provide documentation requested by the commission: “We’ve had to subpoena the FAA.  We’ve now had to subpoena documents from NORAD, which they have not given us. I for one think we ought to subpoena the White House.”  Cleland did not feel a thorough investigation could be completed within the six months remaining of the time allotted for the commission to complete its task. The commission had yet to review all of the documents it had so far received, and was still waiting for more. “This is a three- or four-year project, it really is,” he stated.  Cleland resigned in protest from the commission in December 2003.  During an interview the following spring, he said: “The commission had to subpoena the FAA for documents, had to subpoena NORAD for documents and they will never get the full story. That is one of the tragedies. One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9/11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up.”

Max Cleland

Cleland believed that the President had been warned of Al-Qaeda’s intention to carry out a major attack within the United States, but did nothing to protect the nation. It was his contention that the Bush Administration had been incompetent, if not criminally negligent, in its failure to act on numerous warnings of an imminent attack provided by the intelligence community, and was now concealing this fact by refusing to turn over damning documents to the commission.

In October of 2003, Senator Joseph Lieberman, co-sponsor of the bill creating the 9/11 Commission, urged the commissioners to subpoena the White House if necessary. “The fact that the Bush administration is not cooperating with a commission investigating how September 11th happened is outrageous. What are they hiding? What’s on the line here is finding out everything we can about how September 11th happened so we can make sure we do everything to see that it never happens again.”

Joseph Lieberman

White House spokesman Brian Besanceney was quoted in the Washington Times as saying that the administration was cooperating in an “unprecedented” manner with the inquiry. “We have turned over more than 2 million pages of documents,” he said.  No doubt the commission’s investigators would have preferred more time to sift through the documents; charged with the task of reviewing so much material while facing an imminent deadline must have been unprecedented indeed.  I could only wonder if anything of relevance was ever found among these documents.  If the White House had been trying to bury information, what better place than under a mountain of paperwork?  Regardless, access to certain highly classified national security documents, including presidential daily briefings, was not forthcoming.  Another “administration official” who spoke to the Times “on the condition of anonymity” stated, “There are documents we do not feel it is appropriate to make available.”

Brian Besanceney

No White House documents would ever be subpoenaed.

This lack of thoroughness on the part of the 9/11 commissioners exposed them to criticism that questioned both their integrity and the validity of their report’s conclusions.  As political appointees, it is plausible that individual commissioners avoided opportunities to uncover information that could be potentially embarrassing to the Bush Administration and its supporters.  More disturbing is the possibility that the 9/11 commissioners were coerced into restricting their investigation for other, more nefarious, reasons.  There is a plethora of information available that examines this possibility in detail.  This research has been casually dismissed in mainstream media as having originated with “conspiracy theorists” whose personal agendas have nothing to do with discovering the truth.  The two prevalent themes in alternative media accuse the Bush Administration of having prior knowledge of the coming terrorist attacks yet allowing them to succeed, or having participated in engineering the attacks as part of a “false flag” operation.  In both scenarios, the conspirators’ motivation was to gain the support of congress and the public for legislating unconstitutional laws, transferring public wealth to private elites, and the waging of wars intended to expand America’s geopolitical influence throughout the resource rich regions of southern Eurasia.  Since a veil of secrecy continues to surround the full circumstances of the events of September 11 as well as the subsequent investigation, none of these possibilities, however preposterous they may appear on the surface, can be entirely discounted.  The lack of transparency on the part of America’s government has only fueled distrust and provided a foundation for further speculation.

Whatever the reasons, the 9/11 Commission failed to fulfill its mandate.  Through their inaction, the commissioners had rendered the entire investigation a farce – no more than a panacea to assuage public concerns.

As a result, it was understandable that skeptics would speculate on ulterior motives for the Bush Administration’s lack of cooperation with the 9/11 investigation.

On January 22, 2002, CNN reported that Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was asked personally by President Bush during a private meeting to “limit the congressional investigation” into 9/11.  The President had initially wanted to confine the investigation to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, citing national security concerns.  This investigation would be in secret, without congressional oversight or public scrutiny.  Daschle was also contacted personally by Vice President Dick Cheney, who “worried a wide-reaching inquiry could distract from the government’s war on terrorism.”

Tom Daschle

In September of 2002, Bush acquiesced to public pressure generated by family members of the 9/11 victims to establish an “independent” 9/11 Commission.  It would be comprised of 5 Republican and 5 Democrat congressmen.  By October 11, however, hours after Congressional Republicans and Democrats announced that they had agreed on the terms of an independent commission to investigate the attacks, the White House raised fresh objections. According to a CNN report on November 15, 2002, “The White House was threatening to create the commission by executive order.” The 9/11 Commission would be created without congressional participation if Congress did not acquiesce to specific White House demands. Congress complied and a final agreement was announced on November 27, 2002. Among the concessions made to the White House: limiting the investigation to 18 months, limiting the commission’s subpoena power, and allowing the President the right to choose the commission’s Chairperson.

"The Jersey Girls", widows of 9/11 victims and instrumental in the creation of the 9/11 Commission. From left to right: Patty Casazza, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Kristen Breitweiser.

President Bush allotted a meager 3 million dollars to financing the investigation, then refused Commission Chair Thomas Kean’s request for an additional 11 million dollars. Kean had sought the funding as part of a 75 billion dollar supplemental spending bill that the president had requested from congress to pay for the war with Iraq!  Nine million dollars of additional funding was eventually granted, but again, only through public pressure generated by family members of the 9/11 victims.

In comparison, a March 2003 article in the Los Angeles Times cited the cost of investigating the crash of TWA Flight 800, a 747 that exploded after takeoff from New York in 1996, as officially being 35 million dollars, not including FBI efforts that ruled out terrorism as the cause.

Roughly $175 million was spent to investigate the 1986 Challenger explosion.

The investigation into the 2003 Columbia disaster was allotted $50 million just to begin, with a final cost estimated to be over half a billion dollars.  No fixed budget was ever set for the Columbia investigation.  Bernard Loeb, former head of aviation safety at the National Transportation Safety Board, was quoted as saying that “There is an expectation that these investigations are going to go to the end of the world to determine what happened.”

The events of September 11, 2001, have been characterized as the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor. Considering the cost of these other federal investigations and the billions of dollars being spent waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to imagine any legitimate reason for limiting the 9/11 Commission’s funding to a meager 12 million dollars.

Yet the investigation’s funding was limited to this miniscule amount, and without a significant protest from the House of Representatives, the Senate, or any national media.

President Bush was also reluctant to testify before the commission.  Initially he refused, then consented to “meet only with the panel’s top two officials”, Chairman Kean and Vice Chairman Hamilton, and would “submit to only a single hour of questioning.”  Bush finally agreed to meet with all of the 9/11 commissioners to answer their questions, but with conditions attached. The President and Vice President were interviewed together in the Oval Office of the White House and would not testify under oath. An audiotape of the questioning was not permitted, and there was no transcript kept of the exchange. White House lawyer Alberto Gonzales was also in attendance to provide counsel for the president, along with two members of his staff.

Alberto Gonzales

No reporters or photographers were allowed to watch any part of the session. Bush spoke to the media shortly afterwards, telling them that his testimony before the ten commissioners was “a good discussion.” Bush also stated, “I enjoyed it,” and observed that the commissioners “had a lot of good questions.”  The president had just given testimony in the murder investigation of more than three thousand people, yet he spoke as if he had just come from addressing a meeting of corporate shareholders.  His incongruous statements were inexplicable to me.

President Bush addresses the Press on White House lawn; April 29, 2004.

When it was suggested by a reporter that he and the vice president may have wanted to testify together in order to present a consistent story in their testimony, Bush responded: “Look, if we had something to hide we wouldn’t have met with them in the first place.” He also told the reporters, “I was never advised by my counsel not to answer anything. I answered every question they asked.”  With nothing to hide and no official record of his testimony being kept, why did the president need his lawyer present at all, and what question if asked would the president have refused to answer?

President Bush responds to questions from the Press on White House lawn; April 29, 2004.

These unusual circumstances surrounding their testimony posed another question that was never addressed: might the vice president have had reasons of his own to avoid questioning without the benefit of the president and his White House counsel being in attendance?

Former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore also testified in closed session before the 9/11 commissioners but appeared separately, while being recorded.

On December 22, 2007, the New York Times published an article that only served to reinforce suspicions of a conspiracy among federal officials to conceal information relevant to the attacks of September 11, 2001.  The Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] had also withheld information from 9/11 investigators.  It was disclosed that the CIA had destroyed at least two videotapes in November of 2005 which documented the interrogation of alleged Al Qaeda operatives held in custody.

During 2003 and 2004, the commission had made “repeated and detailed requests” for “documents and other information” from the CIA concerning the interrogation of alleged Al Qaeda operatives.  Investigators were told by “a top C.I.A. official” that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had been requested.  According to the Times article, “A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes, but that commission staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos.”

This statement was contradicted by the Chair and Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission. During a December 2003 meeting between Commission Chair Thomas Kean, Vice Chair Lee Hamilton and CIA Director George J. Tenet, Hamilton had asked Tenet to provide the commission with “all relevant documents even if the commission had not specifically asked for them.”  To consider interrogation videos as not being relevant documents in the investigation of 9/11 is inconceivable. The director’s noncompliance convinced both Kean and Hamilton that “The agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.”

CIA Director George Tenet

“Intelligence officials” said that the tapes documented hundreds of hours of interrogations during 2002 of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two Al Qaeda suspects who were taken into CIA custody that year.  In December of 2003, commission staff members sought permission to interview these prisoners directly, but were refused.  Instead they were instructed to provide questions to CIA interrogators, who then posed their questions to the detainees.

Abu Zubaydah

Why were 9/11 investigators denied access to these prisoners and the videotapes? It is possible that the CIA was using torture as part of its interrogation techniques and wanted to hide this fact.  It may have been trying to conceal the identities of its interrogators who were using torture in order to shield them from prosecution under the United Nations convention against torture.  The convention was adapted by the United States in 1984.  Torture is an extraditable offense, and it is conceivable (though unlikely) that the United States would be faced with demands to surrender the CIA torturers of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri to Saudi Arabia, the homeland of both prisoners.

Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri

This reasoning loses its credibility however, when considering that the CIA officially inquired with the Office of Legal Counsel [OLC] after the September 11 attacks into whether it could “aggressively interrogate” suspected high-ranking Al-Qaeda members captured outside the United States.  In August of 2002, Assistant Attorney General for the OLC, Jay S. Bybee, authored the controversial Bybee memo on detainee interrogation, a Justice Department memo interpreting the statutory term of “torture”.  Bybee ruled that even though an act may be “cruel, inhuman, or degrading,” it does not necessarily constitute torture, and “thus does not subject an interrogator to criminal prosecution.”  This ruling provided the CIA with “legal” permission to use torture, and justification for the American government to ignore extradition requests, however improbable, from its close ally Saudi Arabia.

President Bush and Saudi Prince Abdullah

Why 9/11 investigators were denied access to these prisoners was never satisfactorily explained.  Public criticism has done little to curtail the CIA’s unorthodox activities in the past and it is an open secret that dubious interrogation techniques have been employed by the agency for decades – so it made no sense to me that media observers would assume that the agency was trying to avoid a public relations fiasco by hiding the fact that suspected Al-Qaeda detainees were routinely tortured.  As implausible as these circumstances may seem, however, the public cannot be sure of any explanation, since the truth has been intentionally kept secret by government authorities for reasons unknown.

The CIA could have been lying to the commission about what was learned during these hundreds of hours of interrogations, or they may have selectively chosen the information they considered appropriate to share, as did the White House. Even if the CIA had been completely forthright, information derived through torture is notoriously unreliable; victims will tell their tormentors anything to end their pain. Perhaps the prisoners knew nothing at all, or perhaps they told a story of September 11 that was entirely different from the official conclusions – a story that the CIA did not want publicly known.

This flagrant refusal to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission by the very agencies that the investigation depended upon for information was not just distressing to me – it was alarming. The media had documented multiple examples of obstruction of justice by the FAA, NORAD, the White House and the CIA, yet no effort was made by the commission to expose the individuals responsible, or to discover why they had withheld evidence.

Most disturbing for me was the failure of the United States Congress to respond, even after these facts became public knowledge.

This display of impotence by “the people’s representatives” demonstrated once again the unspoken truth of America’s federal government that continues to be ignored – political power in the United States is wielded by an influential elite, “special interests” that exert their influence anonymously, beyond the public’s scrutiny.  I had no doubt that elements from within this oligarchy of powerful politicians, bureaucrats and their sponsors conspired to conceal the facts of what really happened on September 11 by not allowing a thorough investigation to be conducted.  It was their motivation that remained unclear.

In the aftermath of 9/11, we have been assured that the same “mistakes” can never happen again, and it is inferred that to prosecute those responsible for allowing the “mistakes” to happen would serve no useful purpose. Airport security has been improved, intelligence between government agencies is said to be shared more readily and the Department of Homeland Security has been established.

As distasteful as the possibility may be, a vast conspiracy among government officials to conceal evidence of misconduct or negligence may be the only benign explanation behind why so many federal agencies failed to cooperate with the investigation.  If true, the federal government’s dysfunctional condition should be viewed with as much alarm as if the perpetrators of this heinous crime came from within the government itself. Letting such pervasive corruption continue unchecked and allowing the guilty to go unpunished is just as likely to end constitutional democracy in America as an armed insurrection or a coup d’etat.

Alternative explanations for the attacks accuse government officials of treason.  These accusations are based upon information still available to anyone who is interested in judging for themselves.  Much of this information, including the testimony of survivors, eyewitnesses, intelligence agents and military personnel was not addressed in the commission’s final report at all.  It was simply dismissed or ignored without explanation.

Trying to understand the reason for these omissions led me to ask myself many more questions.  My curiosity demanded answers, and once I had found them it was reminiscent of the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box – as much as I may have wanted to, it was too late to put the lid back on and pretend that I didn’t see what had been revealed.

- Guy Storms

Now that he has officially won the presidential election, it’s tempting to jump on the Barack Obama bandwagon, along with the rest of his supporters. Their excitement is infectious. The President elect does possess a genuine charisma that has attracted voters, and campaign contributions, in record numbers. Obama appears to be an honestly likable man, as were Democratic Presidents Kennedy, Carter and Clinton in their time. His message, as theirs, sounds truly sincere and has inspired a new generation of voters. The world is also watching, and there is a general impression of hopeful optimism for the future success of this coming administration.

I thought that the media focus during this campaign was primarily on the candidates’ personalities and character. As in the past, very little attention was paid to their positions on the salient issues. Obama supporters I’ve talked to possess a faith in the man that assumes his convictions to be similar to their own, despite a lack of evidence to support their belief. Does Barack Obama believe in a woman’s unconditional right to have an abortion? Does he support Gay marriage? Does Obama have a plan to rewrite the laws regulating financial markets and corporate activity? Does he intend to introduce education reform or gun control? What will he do to stem the deterioration of the United States’ crumbling infrastructure, social security and health care? What are his thoughts on the environment and alternative energy sources? Is he sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians? Will he stop the carnage in Iraq, close any of America’s more than 700 military bases around the world, or reduce military spending?

I’m not really sure. I don’t really know what the Republican candidate John McCain’s beliefs were either. Both candidates were vague as to their intentions if elected. I also found media stories on their positions to be both ambiguous and contradictory, depending on when it was published or reported, and by whom. I do know the beliefs of presidential candidate Ralph Nader on the above issues, however, since he discussed them at length during his entire campaign.

I do know that I like Barack Obama.

Obfuscation is not unusual in politics; it’s the norm. A candidate must appeal to as many people as possible in order to be elected. Politicians risk alienating voters if they disagree with them on passionate and personal grounds. I think that most politicians try to be all things to all people whenever they can simply to be elected. This doesn’t make them bad people, or impugn their integrity necessarily, but it does make it virtually impossible for the electorate to make an informed decision when they vote, guarantying that the candidate will disappoint at least some supporters by not performing as expected.

As of January 20, 2009, the Democratic Party will control the Presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate of the United States of America. Members of the Democratic Party who hold elected office have been given a unique opportunity to validate the faith of their followers by putting into practice everything they claim to believe in – not just for the people of the United States, but for people everywhere who have a stake in the political and economic well being of America.

Obstruction of legitimate reform can now only come from within the Democratic Party itself. There is no excuse for failure. If Barack Obama is to keep the confidence of the American people and institute real change, corporate manipulation of the legislative process must begin to be curtailed during this administration. Through its insidiously covert influence, Big Business has bastardized the American political system to the point where it is hardly recognizable as being democratic. The result has been an undermining of liberty and the pursuit of happiness at home, and a predatory foreign policy intended to exploit the weaknesses of other peoples solely for corporate profit. Avaricious executives and shareholders are not just killing democracy, they are killing the planet. The global ecosystem that sustains all life is being strained beyond its capacity to recover – all for a fist full of dollars.

Social, economic and environmental concerns will not be effectively addressed if corporate profits continue to dictate the government’s legislative priorities. President Obama has been given a chance to salvage America’s constitutional democracy. At this juncture in history, another betrayal of the public’s trust could have a calamitous outcome lasting for generations to come. If he fails, there may never be another opportunity.

If our water is undrinkable, the air toxic and the soil beyond cultivation, then the political state of the union will no longer matter. We will have failed as a species.

I don’t think that there’s much time left to salvage our situation. At this point in human history, the United States is the richest, most powerful nation on earth. These strengths make it the most influential agent available for effecting positive change in human affairs. As America goes, so goes the world. Having an American President whose skin is dark and whose name is not European in origin will help to dispel the prevalent distrust of America’s intentions throughout the world, but only a sincerely altruistic foreign policy will gain the support and cooperation of other nations in turning back the forces that are destroying us.

I want President Obama to succeed. I really do. I think he’s a good man and I fervently hope that he’ll be a great president. More importantly, the world needs him to be a great president.

Now that would be real change.

- Arthur Conan Doyle

It was not until 2006 that I began to research in earnest the facts surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. By then, I had become familiar with The 9/11 Commission Report, released in 2004, as well as many of the accusations that “conspiracy theorists” had publicized refuting the conclusions of the Commission. The 9/11 Commission’s report was intended to explain what had happened on September 11, 2001, while making recommendations on how to avoid a similar catastrophe in the future.

During 2006, the war in Iraq was constantly in the news and I had not intended to pursue the story of the 9/11 attacks beyond what I already knew. Then I came across a story published by the Washington Post, on Wednesday August 2, 2006, entitled, “9/11 Panel suspected deception by Pentagon”.

According to the Post’s story, for more than two years after the attacks officials from NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] and the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] had provided “inaccurate information” regarding their response to the hijackings. Some staff members and commissioners “concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public.”

This revelation did not become clear until the 9/11 Commission obtained audiotapes from NORAD and the FAA that were recorded on September 11. In fact, the commission was “forced to use subpoenas” in order to secure the tapes due to “the agencies’ reluctance to release the tapes.”

“I was shocked at how different the truth was,” said John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into the events of September 11. “The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.”

It was thought that the available evidence “provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and the commission.” In a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in the summer of 2004, the 10-member commission debated whether or not to refer the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. They decided not to. “We to this day don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth…It’s one of the loose ends that never got tied.” According to “sources involved in the debate”, it was assumed that false statements were made “hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings.”

9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean

I found it hard to believe what I was reading. Investigators of the most heinous attack ever perpetrated against American citizens had discovered in the course of their inquiry that employees of the federal government and the military, material witnesses in the crime’s investigation, had lied to them and withheld evidence, yet no effort was made to find out why. The Commission Chairman, Thomas Kean, dismissed this fact as “one of the loose ends that never got tied.”

This was not revealed to the public until two years after the 9/11 Commission had concluded its investigation.

I asked myself the obvious question – why did they not investigate further? If I had been a member of the 9/11 Commission, I would want to know why I was being lied to and why senior administrators were shielding the liars. What did they have to hide?

People who conceal evidence and falsify statements during a criminal investigation have something to hide.

In the 9/11 Commission’s final report of 2004, it was stated: “Our aim has not been to assign individual blame. Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.” (Preface, xvi)

How could the commission provide the “fullest possible account” of what had happened without investigating all available leads? How could they make recommendations for reforms without possessing all of the facts, knowing as they did that people within their own government had misled them and that additional information may have been withheld?

If bureaucratic incompetence was the explanation for a “bungled response” to the 9/11 hijackings, as suggested by a commission insider, how could the incompetent bunglers at NORAD and in the FAA be identified then weeded out of these agencies if the commission was not going to “assign individual blame”?

Under no circumstances could I imagine myself leaving any “loose ends” during an investigation into the murder of more than three thousand human beings.

In 2006, Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chair Lee H. Hamilton co-authored a book entitled, “Without precedent: the inside story of the 9/11 Commission”, in which this obstruction of justice by government officials is discussed:

“Fog of war could explain why some people were confused on the day of 9/11, but it could not explain why all of the after-action reports, accident investigations, and public testimony by FAA and NORAD officials advanced an account of 9/11 that was untrue.” (261)

Despite this knowledge, no action was taken. Kean explains that “the issue was presented to the commission in May 2004” and that they had a “reporting date” of July 22. “At that point, we did not have time to launch a separate investigation into why the FAA and NORAD had presented inaccurate information in public, nor was that question clearly under the commission’s mandate.” (262)

I did not find this explanation at all convincing, particularly since Kean himself stated earlier in the book, “We had an exceedingly broad mandate.” (14) He went on to explain, “our inquiry would stretch across the entire U.S. government, and even into the private sector, in an attempt to understand an event that was unprecedented in the destruction it had wrought on the American homeland, and appalling even within the catalogue of human brutality.” (15)

Kean and Hamilton during the 9/11 Public Hearings of 2004

Yet despite the unprecedented nature of this appalling crime, and the commission’s exceedingly broad mandate allowing it to pursue lines of inquiry across the entire U.S. government and even into the private sector to understand what had happened, the commission chose not to take the time to try and find out why they had been lied to by members of the FAA and NORAD, and why these same agencies had withheld physical evidence from the investigation.

By this time I no longer considered The 9/11 Commission Report a credible source of information for explaining the events of September 11, 2001. The commissioners had abrogated their responsibility to the American public and the world by not conducting a thorough investigation. There must have been a compelling reason to explain why they failed to do so. Unlike the Commission Chairman, however, I would not be content to leave this question as just one of the loose ends that never got tied.

“I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

- Arthur Conan Doyle

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, we were on vacation. My wife woke me before 9 am, just in time to watch live television coverage of an aircraft flying into the New York World Trade Center’s Tower 2, at 9:03 am. Initially, we had no idea of what it was that we were seeing and now, seven years later, I’m still not sure.

Ostensibly, a terrorist attack had taken place, but who was responsible and why they did it were not so obvious. In less than two hours, four commercial jet airliners were hijacked and intentionally crashed. Two of the airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were flown into the World Trade Center Towers in New York City, one plane into each tower. The hijackers crashed a third airliner, American Airlines Flight 77, into the Pentagon, near Washington, D.C. The fourth aircraft, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed into a field near the town of Shanksville in rural Pennsylvania.

By the end of that day, the media was attributing responsibility for the attacks to the multi-millionaire religious extremist Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization he sponsors. Nineteen alleged members of Al-Qaeda were assumed to be the suicidal murderers on board the hijacked aircraft.

On September 13, the White House announced that there was “overwhelming evidence” that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks. On September 16, bin Laden denied any involvement through a statement to Al Jazeera television. Speaking from Afghanistan, bin Laden said, “I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks”.

In an Address to a Joint session of Congress and the American People on September 20, 2001, President Bush declared that “the evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al Qaeda … This group and its leader – a person named Osama bin Laden – are linked to many other organizations in different countries … The leadership of al Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country…And tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban: Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al Qaeda who hide in your land…These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion. The Taliban must act, and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.”

President Bush, September 20, 2001

Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar refused to do so. On October 7, the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan. On December 17, 2002, the Northern Alliance defeated Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces in the battle of Tora Bora, effectively ending the Afghan war. Most of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters involved escaped into tribally controlled areas of Pakistan in the south and the east. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden were never found. As of September 2008, their whereabouts remain unknown.

To my surprise, Osama bin Laden did not remain the focus of America’s anger and its government’s demands for retribution for very much longer. As early as March 13, 2002, when asked about the hunt for bin Laden and where he might be during a White House press conference, President Bush replied, “Terror is bigger than one person. And he’s just – he’s a person who’s now been marginalized…I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him…I truly am not that concerned about him.”

President Bush, March 13, 2002

Osama bin Laden has been indicted in United States federal court for his alleged involvement in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, and is on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. In response to the 1998 United States embassy bombings, President Bill Clinton ordered a freeze on assets that could be linked to bin Laden and signed an executive order authorizing his arrest or assassination. The October 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole is said to have been organized and directed by Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist organization.

It is believed that the first bombing attack involving bin Laden was the December 29, 1992, bombing of the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden in which two people were killed. In the 1990s bin Laden’s al-Qaeda assisted Mujahideen causes financially and militarily in Algeria, Egypt and Afghanistan. On February 26, 1993, a car bomb was detonated below Tower One of the World Trade Center in New York City. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a member of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda organization, provided financing for the bombing and according to the 9/11 Commission Report he was “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks”.

So, when I considered Osama bin Laden’s many crimes against the people of the United States as well as other countries, his connections to other terrorist organizations, his influence with them and the vast financial resources he made available to them and may provide in the future, I found it almost incomprehensible that America’s President would state, “I truly am not that concerned about him.”

Osama bin Laden

Throughout 2002, conspiracy theories began appearing in the media accusing elements of the American government of complicity in the attacks. Most of the speculation I dismissed out of hand because it seemed so far fetched, and until the 9/11 Commission released its final report in 2004, stories appearing in the mainstream media were often contradictory, which only added to the general atmosphere of confusion.

I don’t recall when I first began to question the official government explanation for the successful terrorist attacks of September 11, but I do recall my growing skepticism as I read one article after another that reported on the reluctance of the Bush Administration to endorse, fund and participate in a full investigation of the attacks. Over time I began taking notice of media stories that revealed information about 9/11 and subsequent events that did not coincide with the official theory being propounded.

Two stories published years apart finally convinced me that something somewhere was terribly wrong, and compelled me to pursue the facts of 9/11 in greater detail.

The first story was entitled, “F.A.A. Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers’ Statements”, published on Thursday, May 6, 2004, in the New York Times [reproduced at the end of this Blog entry].

Inspector General Kenneth M. Mead of the Federal Aviation Administration revealed to the 9/11 Commission that a tape recording made of “at least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners…was destroyed without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it.”

An F.A.A. official described as a “quality-assurance manager” told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because “he thought making it was contrary to F.A.A. policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping.” Mead explained, “The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers.”

However, the recollections of “about 16 people” working at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, were recorded that morning, not just air traffic controllers. The taping had begun before noon on September 11, 2001.

The quality-assurance manager had destroyed the tape “between December 2001 and February 2002,” despite having received an email instructing him that “if a question arises whether or not you should retain data, RETAIN IT.” Just as inexplicable was the method by which the manager was reported to have destroyed the tape. According to the Inspector General’s report, the manager “crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building.”

The Inspector General attributed the tape’s destruction to “poor judgment.”

FAA Inspector General Kenneth M. Mead

F.A.A. spokesman Greg Martin stated his belief that the tape “would not have added in any way to the information…already…provided to the investigators and the members of the 9/11 Commission.” Nonetheless, Mr. Martin said that the F.A.A. had “taken appropriate disciplinary action” against the quality-assurance manager. For “privacy reasons”, however, Martin could not say what those actions were, or identify the employees involved.

The entire story was almost too bizarre to be believable, and left me asking myself many questions which would never be answered.

I was perplexed by the almost casual indifference of F.A.A. officials to what had happened, and could not accept Greg Martin’s statement that due to “privacy reasons” the public was not entitled to know what “disciplinary action” was taken.

I wanted to know what the 9/11 Commission’s response was to these revelations. Were the Commission members provided with the identities of all of the employees involved? Did they investigate further and conduct their own interviews, or resolve to accept the Inspector General’s report as it was presented?

What possessed the quality-assurance manager to destroy the tape the way he did and why could he not be more specific as to when it was destroyed? After all, according to his own explanation he intended to destroy the tape recording after it was “superseded by written statements from the controllers”, which would have been a matter of days at most, not months.

I wanted to know why the other employees aside from the air traffic controllers had been recorded in the first place. Why record them if statements were only required from the controllers? Did these other employees eventually provide written statements, as did the controllers? How could an F.A.A. spokesman know that the destroyed tape recording “would not have added in any way” to the information already provided to the Commission when it was “destroyed without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it”?

I was both angry and indignant as time went by and no follow-up to this report appeared anywhere in the media.

The other story that finally convinced me to question the conventional wisdom was published by the Washington Post, on Wednesday, August 2, 2006, entitled, “9/11 Panel suspected deception by Pentagon” [also reproduced below].

According to the Post’s story, for more than two years after the attacks officials from NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] and the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] provided “inaccurate information” regarding their response to the hijackings. Some staff members and commissioners “concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public.”

This did not become clear until the 9/11 Commission obtained audiotapes from NORAD and the FAA that were recorded on September 11. In fact, the commission was “forced to use subpoenas” in order to secure the tapes due to “the agencies’ reluctance to release the tapes.”

“I was shocked at how different the truth was,” said John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on September 11. “The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.”

It was thought that the available evidence “provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and the commission.” In a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in the summer of 2004, the 10-member commission debated whether or not to refer the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. In the end they decided not to, turning over the allegations to the Inspectors General for the Defense and Transportation departments. Spokeswoman Laura Brown said she “could not comment” on FAA Inspector General Kenneth M. Mead’s inquiry into the matter.

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth…It’s one of the loose ends that never got tied.”

9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas H. Keans

According to “sources involved in the debate”, it was assumed that false statements were made “hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings.” Republican John F. Lehman, commission member and former Secretary of the Navy, said that he believed the panel may have been lied to, but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral. “My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don’t know, but in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn’t seem to make sense to me.”

Portrait of John Lehman as Secretary of the Navy, 1982

I found it hard to believe what I was reading. Investigators of the most heinous attack ever perpetrated against Americans had discovered in the course of their inquiry that witnesses had lied to them and withheld evidence, yet no effort was made to find out why. The 9/11 Commission Chairman, Thomas Kean, dismissed this fact as “one of the loose ends that never got tied.”

Officials representing the FAA and NORAD refused to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission, forcing the commission “to use subpoenas” to obtain physical evidence, yet commission member John Lehman suggested this may have been “just the fog of stupid bureaucrats”. In his estimation, trying to find out who had “misled the commission” and why “didn’t seem to make sense.”

It was the reaction of the commission itself that did not make sense to me.

It was also the same FAA Inspector General, Kenneth M. Mead, investigating this potential obstruction of justice case in 2004 that concluded the willful destruction of physical evidence by an unidentified FAA manager in 2002 was simply due to “poor judgment”. I have been unable to find any published results of Mead’s inquiry on the FAA website or elsewhere, and so have been left wondering if his concerns were as great as my own.

Among the witnesses who testified before the 9/11 Commission were career military officers. These included then acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers, General Ralph E. Eberhart, commander of NORAD during the September 11 attacks, Rear Admiral Charles Leidig, then acting Deputy Director for Operations, National Military Command Center, and Major General Larry K. Arnold, commander of the 1^st Air Force, Air Combat Command.

These officers were called to testify under oath before the 9/11 Commission during the Twelfth Public Hearing on the morning of Thursday, June 17, 2004. They were responsible for establishing the military’s official rendition of events that was subsequently determined to be inaccurate.

Left to right: General Richard Myers, Admiral Charles Leidig, General Ralph Eberhart and General Larry Arnold (retired)

The only documented reference to the subpoenaed audiotapes came during questioning of General Arnold (retired), by Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste. Arnold was simply asked to confirm testimony made earlier to the Commission in which he said that he had no knowledge of the recordings.

Mr. Arnold stated, “the Northeast Air Defense Sector apparently had a tape that we were unaware of at the time. And your – to the best of my knowledge, what I’ve been told by your staff is that they were unable to make that tape run. But they were later able to – your staff was able, through a contractor, to get that tape to run. And so, to the best of my knowledge, that was an accurate statement in May that I did not know of any tape recordings. If I had had them available to me, I certainly would have been able to give you more accurate information.”

No follow-up questions were asked. No public inquiry was made into determining how subordinates could keep the country’s top military leaders misinformed for more than two years. The individuals responsible for making false statements to the commission were never identified and why the tapes needed to be subpoenaed after their existence was uncovered was never explained.

Why the Commission’s staff was “unable to make the tape run” when they first took possession of it also remains unexplained.

To the best of my knowledge, no one employed by NORAD or the United States military has ever been punished, reprimanded, demoted or fired for having committed any kind of professional misconduct or dereliction of duty. No individual employed by the federal government has ever been identified publicly and accused of negligence or subjected to criminal charges for their actions, or inactions, relating to the events of September 11, 2001.

In the 9/11 Commission’s final report of 2004, it was stated in the introduction: “Our aim has not been to assign individual blame. Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.” (Preface, xvi) “We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management.” (11. Foresight – and Hindsight, 339)

I could not accept the Commission’s official conclusions and was compelled to learn more. It would not be long before I discovered just how much more there was to learn.

——————————————————————-

F.A.A. Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers’ Statements

By MATTHEW L. WALD

New York Times

Published: May 6, 2004

WASHINGTON, May 6 — At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said in a report today.

The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as “the Bat Cave” and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events a few hours earlier.

But officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape’s existence, and it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. official described in the report as a quality-assurance manager there. That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.

The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers, according to the inspector general’s report. But the quality-assurance manager asserted that making the tape had itself been a violation of accident procedures at the Federal Aviation Administration, the report said.

The inspector general, Kenneth M. Mead, said that the officials’ keeping the existence of the tape a secret and the decision by one to destroy it had not served “the interests of the F.A.A., the department or the public” and could foster suspicions among the public.

Mr. Mead had been asked by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, to look into how well the aviation agency had cooperated with what is widely known as the 9/11 commission, a bipartisan, independent panel investigating the terror attacks.

On the tape, the controllers, some of whom had spoken by radio to people on the planes and some who had tracked the aircraft on radar gave statements of 5 to 10 minutes each, according to the report.

The tape’s value was not clear, Mr. Mead said, because no one was sure what was on it, although the written statements given later by five of the controllers were broadly consistent with “sketchy” notes taken at the time by people in the Bat Cave. (The sixth controller who spoke on the tape did not give a written statement, apparently because that controller had not spoken to either of the planes or observed it on radar.)

One of the central questions about the events of that morning is how the F.A.A. responded to emerging clues that four planes had been hijacked. A tape made within hours of the events, as well as written statements given later, could help establish that.

A spokesman for the 9/11 commission, Al Felzenberg, said that Mr. Mead’s report was “meticulous” and “came through the efforts of a very conscientious senator.” He said the commission would not comment now on the content of the report but that it “does speak to some of the issues we’re interested in.”

The tape was made because the manager of the center believed that the standard post-crash procedure would be too slow for an event of the magnitude of 9/11. After an accident or other significant incident, according to officials of the union and the F.A.A., the controllers involved are relieved of duty and often go home; eventually they review the radar tapes and voice transmissions and give a written statement of what they had seen, heard and done.

People in the Ronkonkoma center at midday on Sept. 11 concluded that that procedure would take many hours, and that the controllers’ shift was ending and after a traumatic morning, they wanted to go home.

The center manager’s idea was to have the tape available overnight, in case the F.B.I. wanted something before the controllers returned to work the next day, according to people involved.

“It was never meant as a permanent record,” said Mark DiPalmo, the president of the local chapter of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, who made the deal with the center manager.

He said the session was informal, and that sometimes more than one person at a time was speaking. “We sat everyone in a room, went around the room, said, `what do you remember?” Mr. DiPalmo said in an interview.

Mr. Mead’s report said that it was conceivable that without that deal, the tape would not have been made at all.

The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to F.A.A. policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers “were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping” because of the stress of the day, Mr. Mead reported.

Neither the center manager nor the quality-assurance manager disclosed the tape’s existence to their superiors at the F.A.A. region that covers New York, nor to the agency’s Washington headquarters, according to the report, which identified none of the officials or controllers by name.

Other tapes were preserved; including conversations on the radio frequencies used by the planes that day, and the radar tapes. In addition, the controllers later made written statements to the F.A.A., per standard procedure, and in this case, to the F.B.I. as well.

The quality-assurance manager destroyed the tape between December 2001 and February 2002. By that time, he and the center manager had received an e-mail message sent by the F.A.A. instructing officials to safeguard all records and adding, “If a question arises whether or not you should retain data, RETAIN IT.”

The inspector general attributed the tape’s destruction to “poor judgment.”

“The destruction of evidence in the government’s possession, in this case an audiotape particularly during times of a national crisis, has the effect of fostering an appearance that information is being withheld from the public,” the inspector general’s report said. “We do not ascribe motivations to the managers in this case of attempting to cover up, and we have no indication that there was anything on the tape that would lead anyone to conclude that they had something to hide or that the controllers did not carry out their duties.”

The inspector general also noted that the official who destroyed the tape had no regrets or second thoughts: “The quality-assurance manager told us that if presented with similar circumstances, he would again take the same course of action.”

Mr. Mead wrote that this attitude was “especially troubling” and that supervisors should take “appropriate administrative action.”

Although the matter had been referred to the Justice Department, the Mead report added, prosecutors said they had found no basis for criminal charges.

An F.A.A. spokesman, Greg Martin, said that his agency had cooperated with the 9/11 commission and that that was how the tape’s existence had become known at the agency’s headquarters.

“We believe it would not have added in any way to the information contained in all of the other materials that have already been provided to the investigators and the members of the 9/11 commission,” he said.

Nonetheless, Mr. Martin said that “we have taken appropriate disciplinary action” against the quality-assurance manager. For privacy reasons, he said, he could not say what those actions were or identify any of the employees involved.

9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon Allegations Brought to Inspectors General

By Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, August 2, 2006; Page A03

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”

Although the commission’s landmark report made it clear that the Defense Department’s early versions of events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the revelation that it considered criminal referrals reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension between it and the Bush administration.

A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the inspector general’s office will soon release a report addressing whether testimony delivered to the commission was “knowingly false.” A separate report, delivered secretly to Congress in May 2005, blamed inaccuracies in part on problems with the way the Defense Department kept its records, according to a summary released yesterday

A spokesman for the Transportation Department’s inspector general’s office said its investigation is complete and that a final report is being drafted. Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, said she could not comment on the inspector general’s inquiry.

In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today, Vanity Fair magazine reports aspects of the commission debate — though it does not mention the possible criminal referrals — and publishes lengthy excerpts from military audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC News aired excerpts last night.

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD’s Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft — American Airlines Flight 11 — long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at 9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The military was not aware of the flight until after it had crashed in Pennsylvania.

These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said. The agencies’ reluctance to release the tapes — along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and other evidence — led some of the panel’s staff members and commissioners to believe that authorities sought to mislead the commission and the public about what happened on Sept. 11.

“I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described,” John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. “The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true.”

Arnold, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not have all the information unearthed by the panel when he testified earlier. Other military officials also denied any intent to mislead the panel.

John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.

“My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don’t know,” Lehman said. “But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn’t seem to make sense to me.”

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“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

- Aldous Huxley

The next President of the Russian Federation will be Vladimir Putin’s protégé, 42-year-old Dmitry Medvedev.

Dmitry Medvedev, the man Putin handpicked to be his successor, won a decisive victory in Russia’s presidential elections March 2. The result was long anticipated. Speculation now surrounds what kind of leader he will be.

Medvedev has promised to improve schools, build housing, encourage business and amend the tax code to encourage “household and social stability”, including tax breaks for retirement savings, charitable donations, education and medical costs. Medvedev has said he will also modify the health care system to allow more choice.

Media analysis of Medvedev is inconclusive. While Medvedev has presented himself as a Putin loyalist, he has also intimated that he intends to wield power in a manner “gentler” than the world has seen under the 55-year-old Putin. How sincere he really is and how much independence of action he will have are debatable, since Vladimir Putin has designated himself to become the Prime Minister of Russia when Medvedev assumes the Presidency on May 7, 2008.

The Prime Minister is appointed by the President of Russia and is first in line to the presidency in the case of the President’s death or resignation. The Prime Minister is the current Head of Government of the Russian Federation. Executive power is split between the Prime Minister and the President of Russia, who is Russia’s Head of State. What this distinction means for the future governing of Russia is not clear, since the factions supporting both Putin and his protégé, as well as their motivations, remain unidentified in the world media.

In the United States of America, an examination of President George W. Bush’s policies over the past eight years suggests that the 43rd American President has been profoundly dependent upon fellow Republicans, lobbyists and obscure bureaucrats to provide direction for his Administration. However, the true motivations and objectives of these unquantified influences behind the American Presidency, as with the Russian Presidency, remain unknown.

Despite multiple changes in political party leadership at the federal level in the United States over the past thirty years, national policy has remained surprisingly consistent, both in foreign and domestic affairs.

Successive Administrations’ policies have favored big business domestically, and military intervention in foreign affairs. During the current Presidential campaign in the United States, there has been no indication made by any candidate that this trend will not continue.

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four.

More than seventeen years have past since the United States declared victory in the Cold War waged with the Soviet Union. Begun before most of us were born, this clash of political ideologies has been the defining concept behind international relations since the end of the Second World War. Innumerable regional conflicts have been fought under the invisible influence of one superpower or the other, and millions of people have died, of whom more than one hundred thousand were Americans. Countless more innocent human beings have suffered every horror imaginable in bringing about this change in the world order. Domestically, the policies of our governments have been subject to the priorities superimposed upon them by the need to win at all costs this struggle for western civilization’s “survival”, an expediency which has resulted in bloated military budgets, the compromise of civil rights, the slowing of social progress and a suspension of the rule of law. When the Soviet Union imploded, the time had finally arrived for us to reap the rewards brought about by three generations of human sacrifice. It never happened.

International Terrorism, the creed of anarchists and antichrists, was lurking in the shadows all along. Just as malevolent and uncompromising, this new specter has replaced the godless Communists in opposing America’s efforts to bring freedom and democracy to all peoples of the world. Ostensibly to combat this new threat, the United States has chosen to maintain its sixty-year policy of using military intervention wherever and whenever it is deemed necessary. For as long as it takes, therefore, additional economic sacrifices will be required of us, and further curtailments of our civil liberties imposed in order to protect our prosperity and freedom.

Such inane reasoning is the essence of rhetoric currently employed by our political leaders, and is intended to rationalize the corruption which pervades today’s global relations, to justify the attendant economic disparities, and to normalize the sustaining of social inequality caused by the perpetuation of the power structures from which these conditions originate. A succession of uninvited U.S. interventions into the affairs of other countries throughout the last half of the twentieth century has not been in the service of oppressed peoples at all. These intercessions have served primarily to enrich American entrepreneurs and corporate interests, while expanding the pervading influence of American arms. Yet, with remarkably little deviation, U.S. foreign policy has been portrayed throughout the post Second World War period as one of benevolent paternalism in the ideological struggle against Communist oppression.

American foreign policy is formulated to benefit U.S. mercantilism. Throughout their country’s history, American leaders have steadily expanded the nation’s wealth, power and dominion, through direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the economic and political life of other countries. How hegemony is attained has always been of secondary importance, and any “collateral damage” considered incidental.

Corporate magnates who benefit the most from these policies do so through the industry of the middle class and the poor. The required support of this majority of Americans is garnered by manipulating their opinions and perceptions through the control of media and government institutions. This covert means of influence allows America’s elite to promote their own agenda while concealing their intentions from public scrutiny. With predictable regularity, these private priorities are faithfully adopted by political minions who have been groomed, financed and promoted for this very purpose.

This is not, of course, a phenomenon unique to our generation, or even the twentieth century. The image of the big businessman preying on the weak, cheating the vulnerable and plundering their resources is contemporaneous with the creation of the corporation as an instrument of business. During the American Civil War and into The Gilded Age, when large corporations began to dominate U.S. economic activity, there were observers of this development who warned against allowing so much power to be concentrated in the hands of private citizens, contending that these corporations “would be controlled by one man or combinations of men who would use these new leviathans to become masters of the nation”. And so they have.

Since 1945, corporate influence has become all pervasive. With the expansion of the United States’ geopolitical influence since the end of WWII, and its absolute military dominance since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc by 1990, the influence of these corporate carpetbaggers who follow in the American military’s wake has grown exponentially. A vicious, self-perpetuating economy based primarily on exporting war has come to fruition in the United States, and continues to spread its destructive influence throughout the world. Here, in North America, “privatization” has become the mantra of corporations who conspire to secure public assets for private profit, and assume control over the responsibility for delivering social services which have historically been provided and maintained by Government for our collective good. The goal isn’t to improve service delivery, or to enhance our quality of life, but to exploit another source of potential profit while consolidating control of the nation’s economy in their hands – none of this can be achieved without the complicity of legislators, our political “representatives”.

Public servants must be in collusion with elements of the corporate sector if the democratic process is to be effectively bypassed. Men and women lacking moral compunction, possessed by an irrational need to achieve personal fulfillment through power over others, must be recruited to complete the task. It’s not difficult for anyone to provide examples of politicians who have betrayed the public trust. Every generation, it seems, is fated to suffer the consequences of these individuals’ corrupt behaviour, and every successive generation must then deal with and rectify the damage incurred, if at all possible.

As human societies become more sophisticated, however, the ability of conscientious citizens to organize in opposition to criminals operating from within government lessens. Initiating political reform through honest and genuinely democratic debate in the nation’s media is no longer possible, since our print and electronic communication networks have been progressively concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few. The nature of media is business, and, as such, it is a commercial enterprise for profit. Corporate journalists, who share the same prejudices as their sponsors, and ultimately the same interests, are responsible for providing us with a product, not with the truth. As consumer, the public is expected to buy the product, not participate in its creation. The content of the “news” is determined entirely beyond the scrutiny of its intended audience and, with minor deviations, has become a homogeneous product as predictable in its content from one outlet to another as is buying a MacDonald’s hamburger in Dallas, Detroit, or Des Moines, Iowa.

Exercising our legal rights afforded through the franchise of citizenship is reduced to forms of expression that we are conditioned to consider socially and culturally acceptable, as portrayed in the media. Protesting policies by demonstrating in the streets is not considered appropriate behaviour for a “cultured” person; expressing opposition to our leaders’ decisions during times of war through civil disobedience is selfish and unpatriotic, even traitorous; valuing social welfare programs over the sustained growth of commerce is simply ridiculous. The media establishes the standards by which we are expected to gage our own conduct, an electronically conveyed “peer pressure” that’s shared universally. Conditioning an audience in order to achieve a predictable response works, particularly if the message is constantly reinforced, and especially among young audiences with limited life experience.

Our history is a commodity, its characteristics designed for mass consumption and intended to evoke a desired response. Our schools of “higher education” have effectively become retail outlets designed to encourage brand loyalty and product preferences. As author Jane Jacobs observed, “Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary business of North American universities”. Corporate employers are seeking job applicants who demonstrate the ability to cooperate and conform; “team players” who choose not to think for themselves. Acquiescence to authority is the primary requisite for acceptance in the world of big business. Our children are being taught to accept as fact the revisionist history provided them by a corporate academia, itself addicted to private sector sponsorship dollars, as is the corporate media that reinforces the message of unconditional acceptance and deference to a “higher authority” in every public venue. Through constant repetition of the message to young and receptive minds, combined with the “dumbing down” of programming content, the intended audience can be conditioned to accommodate a plethora of contradictions in dogmatic themes without perceiving these as being contradictions. Financial success is the primary objective in life; therefore, adjusting one’s personal ethics to accommodate the potential for financial success becomes justifiable, even rational, since you have to “change with the times” in order to keep up and succeed.

Through such means are lies substituted for truth. How else can we explain the metamorphosis of George W. Bush’s image in the national media? Lewis H. Lapham, editor for Harper’s Magazine and author of Gag rule: on the suppression of dissent and the stifling of democracy, made the observation that this “ignorant and boorish candidate from Texas, of whom only failure was expected, unaccountably won the Republican party’s nomination for president in 2000. Then, through a series of editorials published in The New York Times, he was suddenly transformed into ‘a man of dazzling charm, in possession of a growing political savvy’. Why did the Times, ostensibly a liberal publication, suddenly support Bush?” Why did the media in general warm up to George W. Bush?

Former President Bill Clinton has engaged in humanitarian work in cooperation with fellow former-President George H. W. Bush, specifically in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami disaster and Hurricane Katrina. Once regarded by these same media networks as little more than a juvenile delinquent whose behaviour was controlled by his hormones, an opportunist who sold sleep-overs in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House for campaign contributions and was haunted by allegations of real estate fraud in his past, this same Bill Clinton’s public image is now that of a wise and compassionate man, his opinions the voice of reasoned experience worthy of our closest consideration.

Why is it that former President Ronald Reagan, in death, is now elevated to secular sainthood? While being accredited with toppling the Soviet Empire virtually single-handedly, Reagan has also been awarded the moniker of “The Great Communicator”, although in reality the man was considered by his peers to be no more than a second-rate actor with a knack for remembering his lines. Just like the character Comrade Ogilvy from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-four, a fictitious hero who was penned into existence by Big Brother’s speech writers for public adoration, the Ronald Reagan we are being taught to believe in never existed; “Comrade Ogilvy, unimagined an hour ago, was now a fact… Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.” We, The People, are being lied to.

In times of major crisis, it becomes very important for America’s controlling elite to present a united front for the public’s consumption. Leadership from both the Republican and Democratic parties must band together in order to deter a groundswell of public resistance to policies which are unpopular, or simply not in the public’s interest. The United States’ invasion of Iraq required overwhelming support by both parties in Congress in order to appear credible when presented to the American public. Congress provided this endorsement. Democratic senator John Kerry, for example, voted for war on Iraq, then during his campaign for the presidency in 2004 was only critical of minor details in the Bush Administration’s methods to “win the peace”. After George W. Bush’s re-election, follow-up media coverage presented us with the two sage characters of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, in mutual agreement and fully endorsing the steps being taken by the administration in its occupation of Iraq. The essence of oligarchic rule in the United States is sustained by preserving the status quo. It does not matter which political party the reigning President belongs to, but what his world-view is; “Who wields power is not important,” observed Orwell, “provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.”

The power of the United States is global, an all-pervasive economic and military influence poised to engulf followers and dissenters alike. Decisions made by American leaders in the early decades of this new century will probably decide the fate of civilization as we know it, and the concerns that need to be addressed are imposing. Historian Ronald Wright has clarified our plight succinctly, concluding that, “We still have differing cultures and political systems, but at the economic level there is now only one big civilization, feeding on the whole planet’s natural capital….Experts in a range of of fields have begun to warn that these years may be the last when civilization still has the wealth and political cohesion to steer itself towards caution, conservation, and social justice.” None of this can be achieved without the leadership of the United States, possessor of the world’s largest economy, the largest consumer of the earth’s resources, and the world’s largest polluter.

Corporations from every industrialized country have been exploiting the resources of “third world” countries, both human and ecological, for centuries, and are intentionally undermining the emergence of democratic political systems today in “underdeveloped” countries which strive to represent the interests of their indigenous populations. Sadly, during the twentieth century it has been the U.S. federal government, acting on behalf of American corporations, which has been the leading obstacle to the success of many grass roots democratic movements around the world. Antiquated forms of “industrialization”, which benefit established, “first world” banks and corporations, are currently being promoted by the World Trade Organization, and subsidized by the International Monetary Fund. These policies continue, regardless of the environmental impacts, and of the long-term, unsustainable debt which is being imposed upon these countries’ people by dictators and despots in collusion with the “developed” world’s corporate “community”.

Consumption of non-renewable resources for short term profit by corporate entities threatens the welfare of us all. Deforestation, desertification, oil depletion, and economic inflation ultimately result in a continuously declining standard of living for everyone – the ultimate result of our current forms of consumption driven economies. The hidden costs of the rise in all diseases, especially cancer, caused by environmental degradation, have yet to impact us privileged few of the Western World to a significant degree. It is coming, however, and it can’t be avoided. Despite our current leaders choosing to pretend that these concerns are still “non-issues”, despite the best efforts of corporate public relations efforts, they will become the primary concern of all educated human beings before too long. Cancer is already the biological plague of the twenty-first century. Its containment will only be achieved by protecting the earth’s remaining ecosystems from additional damage caused by humans. We must attempt to detoxify ourselves by detoxifying our land, air, and water. People of the world community must stop the casual use of the chemical cocktail made available to modern industry and farming. A new market model must be created, or an old one resurrected, that rewards businesses embracing the principals of conservation and environmentalism in their operations. Given proper consideration, there is no reason why doing the right thing cannot be profitable.

If these problems do not warn us of the potential collapse of contemporary human civilization, perhaps we should remind ourselves of the continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear power’s poisonous by-products, both of which will be with us indefinitely, still uncontrolled and still just as potentially lethal as they were more than forty years ago when billions of human beings contemplated the very real possibility of over-night extermination.

These are the threats facing humanity’s collective future, and all potential solutions lie within the sphere of influence held exclusively by America’s leaders.

If we are to avoid the demise of democratic rule, however inadequate democracy may seem in practice, and the danger this possibility presents for our survival, we must start by examining the motivations of our leaders. A critical evaluation of their motivations is essential for achieving any meaningful understanding in the search for solutions to our political crisis of confidence, and the establishment of enduring reforms. The duplicity and hypocrisy displayed in their conduct can no longer be dismissed as “politics as usual”, now that the fate of mankind’s global community is in jeopardy. At the very least, we as individuals have the power to influence the course of events through our vote, meager as it may be. While most people may not have the time or energy to become activists on behalf of their beliefs, we all have the obligation to vote responsibly, and to withhold the power of elected office from those who are undeserving. To do that, we must learn to recognize the enemies of democracy and vote against them.

October 14, 2007, a man died at Vancouver Airport when four RCMP officers attempted to take him into custody. That evening, Canada’s television networks reported on the incident (available at www.youtube.com).

CBC’s Chris Brown (my spelling) described the death of a “distraught man that no one could understand or reason with”. RCMP spokesperson Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre was interviewed at the scene and indicated that the deceased “was pounding on the windows behind us, he was throwing chairs, at one point he grabs some computer equipment off the desk here at the airport, threw that to the ground”. Brown reported “when the man appeared poised to throw something at them, one of the officers pulled out his taser”. After the individual was shot with the taser, Lemaitre stated, “The man fell to the ground, uh, yet still continued to be combative and fight”. Brown concludes his report by informing his audience that “police say moments after they handcuffed the man, he stopped breathing and was pronounced dead at the scene”.

The same evening, Lauren MacNab (my spelling) reported for Global News on the incident, indicating that the “RCMP in Vancouver say they had no choice but to use [a taser] today on a yet unknown but clearly agitated man”. According to Sgt. Lemaitre, the deceased “was sweating profusely, he had tipped over his luggage cart, uh, he was pounding on windows, he grabbed a, uh, computer off of one of the, uh, workstations and thrown it to the ground”. MacNab stated, “While he was shouting in an Eastern European language, the RCMP say they don’t know where he was coming from, only that he had just arrived. After repeatedly ignoring their calls for him to calm down, the decision was made to use the taser. Even after the man in his forties was struck with 50,000 volts of electricity, he continued to struggle. Then, just four minutes after he was placed in handcuffs, he wasn’t moving at all”.

The following evening, October 15, CTV News followed up with a report by Lisa Rosington (my spelling). The dead man had now been identified as Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski. Through a series of unfortunate events, airport officials had directed Dziekanski, who spoke no English, to a reception area and left him there to languish without explanation. After being in the airport for more than ten hours and still waiting to meet his mother, he became irate. It was his ensuing behaviour that brought the RCMP to the scene. Spokesperson Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre explained, “We were told that the security personnel had a man who was throwing chairs around, pamphlets around, yelling, screaming, taking his fists and pounding on the glass”. Witnesses to the altercation were reported to have expressed the belief that the RCMP had used excessive force. Lemaitre rejected that assertion, indicating, “There were no choke holds placed, there were no punches thrown. They were just trying to get him to settle down. They were able to place handcuffs on the individual and, uh, during that course as they’re still trying to get him to calm down the man slipped into unconsciousness”. Asked whether or not there was an alternative to the use of a taser, Rosington reported “the Mounties say pepper spray wasn’t ideal because the area was crowded with travelers and suggest that the baton may have been too violent.” Lemaitre also indicated “There was only one officer trained to use [the taser], and that was the one who used it”.

These and other reports left their audiences with the impression that a hysterical wild man had been rampaging through the Vancouver Airport and that, under the circumstances, the officers’ response had been appropriate in trying to protect both the public and the suspect from unnecessary harm.

While accusations of excessive force continued to appear in the media, the official rendition of events was not vigorously challenged until after Nov. 14, when the RCMP reluctantly returned a home video they had confiscated at the time from eyewitness Paul Pritchard, of Victoria, B.C. In The Globe and Mail on Friday, Nov. 16, columnist Rod Mickleburgh reported that the RCMP had initially refused to return the video because it was “evidence vital to the investigation”, but relented under the pressure of Pritchard’s legal demands for its return. Now that the film footage is in the public domain, the RCMP describes it as “only one piece of evidence” in their investigation.

Paul Pritchard’s full ten-minute video of the incident (also available at www.youtube.com), clearly illustrates that the statements made by RCMP spokesperson Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre were both inaccurate and misleading.

Pritchard was filming from a public concourse adjacent to the glass enclosed reception area in which Dziekanski was waiting. Dziekanski is alone in this area until the RCMP arrives. One minute into the filming, Dziekanski stands at a set of automatic doors with a small folding chair held in front of him. He holds it in such a way as to keep the automatic doors open while he talks to other passengers across a four-foot handrail. He is not using the chair as a weapon, nor does he threaten anyone. Dziekanski talks with other passengers for almost two minutes. These other passengers determine that he cannot speak English and are overheard talking among themselves, trying to summon someone in authority to the scene. While clearly agitated and breathing heavily, at no point is Dziekanski “yelling” or “screaming” and it is obvious that he is not a danger to the other passengers.

There is a break in Pritchard’s filming and then we see a woman conversing with Dziekanski through the glass wall of the reception area for almost a minute.

About four minutes into the video, he pulls a computer hard drive from the reception area’s kiosk counter and throws it to the ground, then picks up the folding chair he was holding earlier and throws it against the glass partition to no effect.

Security staff appears on screen seconds later and a witness explains to them, “He speaks Russian and nobody can help him. We need a Russian interpreter here to calm him down.” Dziekanski remains in the isolated reception area, making no threatening moves towards the security personnel, who stay outside of the automated doors.

Witnesses continue talking to the security staff. A woman is heard to say, “He’s so scared himself. Just leave him.” A man asks, “Why aren’t police officers here? You guys came. You got the police?” To which a security guard responds, “Everyone just calm down, okay? Please.”

Everyone is quiet and calm, including Dziekanski, until six minutes into the taping when RCMP officers arrive on the scene. Dziekanski returns to the automatic doors and calls out to them as they approach, twice repeating three syllables, presumably in Polish, that sound as if he is saying, “polika, polika”.

As the RCMP approach, a security officer and various witnesses repeatedly tell them that the man does not understand English. At 6:19 of the taping, they climb over the handrail, opening the automatic doors. An officer can be heard saying, “How are you, sir? How ya, bud?”

The officers walk into the reception area unopposed and are alone with Dziekanski, who gestures to his bag and the computer on the floor while he talks to an officer. He is clearly not acting irrationally. One of the officers is standing behind him. All of the RCMP officers are within two or three feet of Dziekanski and they appear to have the situation under control.

What transpires next is not quite clear. At 6:36, an officer seems to direct Dziekanski to move away from his bag, pointing away from it in another direction. Dziekanski raises his arms in a gesture of compliance and cooperates, moving off in the direction the officer is pointing. His hands are open and empty.

The four officers follow Dziekanski over behind the kiosk and our field of vision becomes obscured by the kiosk itself. At 6:41, it appears that an officer may have attempted to place him in handcuffs. Dziekanski has moved away from the officer who was pointing, his back pressed against the kiosk in a defensive manner, and he is speaking excitedly.

Inexplicably, rather than grabbing Dziekanski, from whom they have been mere inches away, the RCMP officers step back and fan out, surrounding Dziekanski. At 6:45 he is shot with a taser. Dziekanski starts screaming in pain and falls to the floor clutching his chest. As he is writhing on the floor he is shot again at 6:52.

The officers pounce on him at 6:59. Dziekanski is in a fetal position, grabbing his chest and screaming in agony while the officers struggle with him to pull his hands from his chest and handcuff them behind his back. They apply their full body weight to holding him down, kneeling on his neck and back and sitting on his legs. All four RCMP officers assist in forcing him down flat on his stomach. At 8:00 it appears that the suspect, although still struggling, has been restrained and is under control.

At 8:13 of the tape we hear a last moan from Dziekanski who is still feebly struggling, prompting an officer to aggressively press down on his neck in response. By 8:28 he is no longer moving. At 8:43 it appears that Dziekanski is unconscious and the officers relax their grip. After 9:00 they are checking for breathing and a pulse.

In retrospect, by 9:30 on the tape, it is apparent that the suspect who was being taken into custody for vandalizing a computer and causing a public disturbance is dead. About three minutes had passed between the time Dziekanski was calmly talking to the RCMP officers and his handcuffed corpse lays sprawled on the airport floor.

Contrary to Sgt. Lemaitre’s public statements of Nov.14, made prior to the video’s public release, at no time does Dziekanski appear “poised to throw something” at the officers – one of two justifications given for the use of the taser. It was also reported “After repeatedly ignoring their calls for him to calm down, the decision was made to use the taser. Even after the man in his forties was struck with 50,000 volts of electricity, he continued to struggle.” Approximately four seconds appear to have elapsed between the time officers initially tried to handcuff Dziekanski and the first shot from a taser – not much time to “repeatedly ignore their calls for him to calm down”, even if he had understood what they were saying. In his public statements, Sgt. Lemaitre also neglected to mention that Dziekanski was shot twice with 50,000 volts of electricity within a seven-second interval, the second time when he was incapacitated and had fallen to the ground.

Lemaitre stated that after Dziekanski fell to the ground, he “still continued to be combative and fight” and the four officers pinning him to the ground “were just trying to get him to settle down. They were able to place handcuffs on the individual and, uh, during that course as they’re still trying to get him to calm down the man slipped into unconsciousness.” Dziekanski was involuntarily writhing in pain caused by two taser shots of 50,000 volts. It’s hard to imagine anyone lying still under those circumstances. While trying to breath with the combined weight of four police officers pressing down on him, Dziekanski may have experienced a heart attack, then suffocated.

Dziekanski was described as a “distraught man that no one could understand or reason with”, even though he had been calmly conversing with RCMP officers for several seconds and had been cooperative before his sudden death.

Dziekanski was not “throwing chairs” – he threw a chair. While the video cannot show us what had happened prior to Paul Pritchard’s filming, Dziekanski is not seen “yelling, screaming, taking his fists and pounding on the glass”, therefore the officers, who arrived after filming started, could not have seen such behaviour either. The only screaming we see Dziekanski do is after he has been tasered.

Global News reported RCMP officials as saying the officers “had no choice” but to use the taser. As an alternative to the use of a taser, CTV News reported “the Mounties say pepper spray wasn’t ideal because the area was crowded with travelers and suggest that the baton may have been too violent.” Throughout Pritchard’s video, it is very clear that there were no other travelers near Dziekanski, who was isolated in a separate area. During the entire incident, he remains alone within an enclosed area until confronted by the RCMP, who stood all around him within two or three feet without being threatened.

Tasers were introduced in Canada as a “less lethal” alternative to the use of “lethal force” – guns. It is impossible to imagine that the officers ever considered drawing their guns on Dziekanski, and equally unimaginable that they truly believed he was so great a threat that they had “no choice” but to use the “less lethal” alternative. No one was in danger. There was no compelling justification at all for the use of tasers, pepper spray, or even batons to subdue Dziekanski.

Sixteen Canadians have died since 2003 after being tasered, according to Vancouver lawyer Cameron Ward. Six of them have been in British Columbia, three in Vancouver.

In 1999, representatives from police departments across Canada gathered at the Ontario Police College for a three-day conference to develop a national model to train officers in the use of force. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police released “A National Use of Force Framework” in November 2000. A representative of the RCMP was a participant in its creation. The framework consists of a graduated response in the use of force for any situation an officer might encounter. Principle one states, “The primary responsibility of a peace officer is to preserve and protect life.” Principle two states, “The primary objective of any use of force is to ensure public safety.” Neither principle was considered in Vancouver airport on Nov.14, 2007.

On June 14, 2005, The Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner British Columbia, Canada (OPCC), released a report on the use of tasers entitled Taser Technology Review: Final Report, in response to public concerns over increasing injuries and deaths associated with the use of conducted energy devices (CEDs), as tasers are also known (“Taser” is actually one brand name among several commercial models of CEDs). In their introduction, the report’s contributors (all police officers of various ranks), reject the use of terms such as “less than lethal” and “less lethal” explaining, “We believe this terminology has inadvertently created a mindset among users and the public that these weapons can never have lethal effects; an expectation that is clearly unrealistic. Throughout this document, and in our supporting material, we have used the term ‘lower lethality’ which more accurately conveys the notion that death may be associated to the use of these technologies.”

The OPCC report recommended that tasers be used only under very specific circumstances, with equally specific methods in their use once deployed.

Tasers should not be used against someone who is “passively resisting”. Police should not use the taser multiple times. After a taser shock, the subject should be restrained in a way that allows him to breath easily. The report also recommends “Where individuals are contained in a room, officers should use the time to formulate a plan for entry and restraint that allows them to immediately turn the person over to ambulance personnel.” None of these guidelines were followed in Vancouver Airport on Nov.14, 2007.

On Nov.15, Sgt. Lemaitre also stated “There was only one officer trained to use [the taser], and that was the one who used it”. At the very least, that officer is guilty of criminal negligence causing the death of Robert Dziekanski by first shooting him twice with the taser in quick succession, and second, by allowing and participating in the pinning of Dziekanski which impeded his ability to breath. To suggest that this officer followed the procedures of his training, as RCMP Sgt. Lemaitre did, defies all credibility.

These contradictions cannot be reconciled. It can only be concluded that either the officers responsible for Robert Dziekanski’s death lied to their superiors, or RCMP spokesperson Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre knowingly misrepresented the facts and intentionally misled the public.

Columnist Katie Rook reported in the Toronto issue of the National Post on Saturday, November 17, 2007, that Municipal police forces in B.C.’s Lower Mainland deployed the taser a total of 152 times in 2006, up from 97 deployments in 2005, an increase of more than 56 %. Over the past two years, the RCMP in British Columbia reported 914 uses of the taser. In the four years prior, tasers were only used by the RCMP 563 times. An analysis by The Canadian Press of all taser incidents reported by the Mounties revealed that more than 79 % of people tasered were not brandishing a weapon. It seems that the taser is becoming the weapon of choice.

I can understand why. No officer wants to be bitten by a diseased felon, or grapple with a suspect then come away with a broken nose, or worse. Police are regularly being murdered and maimed in Canada and the numbers continue to grow, along with our society’s other crime statistics. Why risk life and limb when you can just point and shoot? Well, considering the time, training and resources that go into commissioning an RCMP constable, I think the public is justified in demanding more. RCMP officers are paid well because a great deal is expected of them. Risk is part the job. The possibility of personal injury should be anticipated, just as it is with soldiers, firemen and paramedics. A “regular member” constable earns $72,125 annually, plus benefits, and a full pension after 25 years of service. In a 25-year career with an annual raise of 3%, a recruit will have earned more than 2.3 million dollars in salary alone, assuming he is never promoted. Compare that to a minimum wage earner in B.C. or Ontario who makes about $12,800 a year with no benefits and no pension; if I wanted someone to just point and shoot a taser, I could hire him for 8 dollars an hour and save a hell of a lot of money for the state.

Recall why the “less lethal” alternative was introduced in the first place – too many cops were pointing and shooting their guns. Are we to accept the misuse of tasers as the lesser of two evils, consoling ourselves with the knowledge that fewer suspects are being killed? These women and men have state sanctioned authority over their fellow citizens; it should not be a license to kill. There is nothing wrong with police officers deploying tasers – if protocols for their use are adhered to. The death of Robert Dziekanski was not a tragic accident. It was the result of professional misconduct.

Federal Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has ordered a review of the use of tasers. On Nov.15, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion said he hadn’t seen the video. “We know that the RCMP are reviewing the use of the taser and this must be done because of unfortunate accidents and I want to carry the sympathy of our party to the family,” Mr. Dion said during a visit to Victoria. “This unacceptable situation should be corrected.”

A review of the taser’s use by our federal government is a cowardly avoidance of the truth – RCMP officers abused their power and killed a man. Again. This is the real “unacceptable situation” to which Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion should be referring. It was not an “unfortunate accident”. We don’t have reviews to consider the merits of police officers carrying guns every time a cop shoots someone; we ask if the shooting was justified. If a cop beats someone with a baton or pepper sprays him or her, we ask if it was an appropriate course of action; we don’t call into question the efficacy of using these tools of law enforcement. If a drunk driver runs someone over, do we question the use of cars? If a speeding driver kills someone, do we consider it an unfortunate accident?

Deputy Commissioner Gary Bass, commanding officer for the RCMP in British Columbia, told The Globe and Mail that members of the public have been acting “very aggressively” toward officers since Mr. Dziekanski’s death. Bass disclosed that the four officers involved in the incident – one a relatively senior corporal, the other three with one to three years’ experience – were reassigned to office duties two days after the Oct. 14 incident, in part to guarantee their personal safety. “They’re doing work that doesn’t require them to be in front-line duties,” he said. Such a move is not standard practice, he said, but was judged to be a prudent step.

The Federal Commission For Public Complaints Against The RCMP will be conducting an investigation. The Commission’s Chair, Paul E. Kennedy, stated he does not want to “prejudice” the RCMP investigation by interfering, but will be “closely monitoring RCMP progress as it relates to the investigations underway so that I can ensure, at their completion, a timely response to this complaint.”

On the RCMP website, Commissioner William J.S. Elliott posted a statement expressing his concern “that growing misperceptions are eroding the public’s confidence in the RCMP.” He explained “The RCMP recognizes the video images recently made public are disturbing for anyone who sees them. We do not, however, believe that it is appropriate to draw conclusions based on these images alone.”

An erosion of the public’s confidence in the RCMP should be no surprise, given its recent history. The public’s distrust of the RCMP is not based on “misperceptions”, but definite perceptions of criminal malfeasance. Here are two blatant examples:

A coroner’s inquest into the death of Kevin St. Arnaud, 29, ended January 26, 2007, with the jury classifying the death as a homicide. They heard evidence that RCMP constable Ryan Sheremetta shot Kevin St. Arnaud three times in the chest from a distance of some 5.5 metres in the early morning hours of December 19, 2004. Kevin was intoxicated, unarmed, had his hands up and was holding only a white plastic bag and two plastic pill bottles just before he was killed. He had broken into a pharmacy and was being pursued across a soccer field by two RCMP officers.

Constable Sheremetta testified under oath he fired all three bullets from flat on his back after falling in the snow. He claimed to fear for his life because Kevin advanced on him with his right hand in his pocket and he felt that St. Arnaud was going to pull a weapon. Sheremetta claimed Kevin approached him in a menacing manner, shouting, “you’re gonna have to shoot me motherfucker”.

His partner Constable Colleen Erickson, a twenty-four year veteran of the RCMP, saw the shooting from nearby and testified that Sheremetta was standing “in a combat stance” when he fired the shots and that she did not hear the alleged threat. A civilian eyewitness who also contradicted Sheremetta’s testimony was Abe Klassen. He reported that Sheremetta was standing just before the shooting, and that St. Arnaud had his hands up in surrender.

The testimony of five witnesses contradicted Constable Sheremetta’s version of the shooting.

The forensic evidence of three experts revealed that both men were standing, that Kevin St. Arnaud was stationary just before he collapsed, and that the three fatal bullets entered his body in a downward trajectory of 30 to 40 degrees.

Although there were residential homes facing the scene of the shooting, about 100 metres away, none of the 31 RCMP officers who investigated the shooting interviewed their occupants to determine if anyone had seen or heard anything.

The primary investigator, RCMP Staff Sgt. Glenn Krebs, conceded that he concluded in April of 2005 that there were “inaccuracies” in Sheremetta’s account, but his superior, RCMP Staff Sgt. Flath, nonetheless subsequently advised Crown Counsel that there was “insufficient evidence” to support criminal charges, despite the fact that the jury in the coroner’s inquest classified Kevin St. Arnaud’s death as a homicide.

When interviewed about the inquest’s findings by CBC’s Terry Milewski, RCMP spokesperson Pierre Lemaitre, then a Corporal, stated “There were no surprises in the coroner’s inquest to us. What we heard we already knew.” Milewski asked, “So you knew that Sheremetta’s story about what happened would be contradicted by five other witnesses?” Cpl. Lemaitre replied, “Yes, we did and we presented that exact investigation to the Crown.” “Doesn’t that fact bother you?” Milewski asked, to which Lemaitre answered, “Again, I repeat, it’s been my experience and certainly the experience of major crime investigators that when you have witnesses who recollect an event, it’s always a little different.” Constable Ryan Sheremetta has since returned to active duty.

On October 29, 2005, Ian Bush, 22, was arrested outside a small town hockey arena in northwestern B.C. for possessing an open beer and giving police a false name. Bush did not have a criminal record. Twenty minutes later, the arresting officer Constable Paul Koester shot Bush in the back of the head while alone with him in a detachment cell. Koester said he was “fighting for his life” when he shot Bush. Koester also said he was about to black out from being in a chokehold applied from behind by Bush when he discharged his weapon.

Koester, 28, acknowledged at a coroner’s inquest that he did not provide a written statement about the incident until three weeks after Bush was shot dead. It wasn’t until three months after the death that Koester was formally interviewed about the shooting.

A blood splatter expert testified at the coroner’s inquest that the position of the blood marks showed it was impossible for the officer to have been choked from behind while he was firing his weapon.

Ian Bush’s body remained where he died for two and a half days before a coroner examined the body.

Pathologist Dr. John Stefanelli said the post mortem showed a gun had been partially pressed to Bush’s head, but because Bush’s body was never refrigerated before he did the autopsy and had started to decompose, any detailed analysis was “problematic.”

On Nov. 29, 2007, Paul E. Kennedy, the chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, currently “monitoring” the RCMP’s investigation into the death of Robert Dziekanski, ruled that Const. Paul Koester had acted in self-defense and had a reasonable apprehension of death. “I found as a matter of fact Ian Bush was behind and on top of Officer Koester, that Officer Koester took his gun, struck him three times in the head to force him to release and he wasn’t released,” he stated.

RCMP spokesperson Corporal Pierre Lemaitre described the shooting of Ian Bush by Constable Paul Koester as “a horrible tragedy that both Koester and the Bush family will have to live with for the rest of their lives.” Asked about the fact that Bush’s body was left to decompose in the room where he was shot for two and a half days, Lemaitre said, “That is not unreasonable, it’s expected in a crime scene investigation.”

Cpl. Pierre Lemaitre

It is extremely unlikely that any significant reforms will result from Robert Dziekanski’s death, anymore than there were after the deaths of fifteen others before him. I doubt that any officer will be appropriately punished for this wrongful death. Time will pass, memories will fade; our indignation will subside. He will be forgotten, as were all the others, until the next taser victim is added to the growing list of names.

Police violence is not becoming epidemic in Canada; it is intrinsic to the way our country functions. As the burdens of competing with one another for wealth and security in our modern society intensify, so will the incidence of violent conflict. As of 2006, the population of Canada was estimated to be almost 33 million. More than 15 million reside in the ten largest urban centres of the country, more than two thirds in the largest one hundred. There are limits to our potential for growth, both economically and environmentally, yet our political leadership behaves as if it is oblivious to these self-evident truths.

As our population continues to grow, so does the strain on our communal resources. Public services must increase every year to satisfy our collective needs. More food, electricity, housing, health care, schools, transportation and policing services are required if our cities are to be adequately sustained. More waste and pollution must be dealt with. Our infrastructures are already crumbling from financial neglect while soaring public debt limits future initiatives for urban renewal. Every year more people compete for less. What does our future hold, if not more chaos?

Unless you are wealthy, (which affords you power and protection), you only possess the illusion of civil rights; the mirage will quickly dissipate when you try to exercise them. The police are not here to “serve and protect” you; they are not even here to “uphold the law”, necessarily. They are here to maintain order. If abuses occur and “ordinary” citizens suffer as a result, that is an unfortunate part of the price our leaders are willing to pay for the privilege of maintaining order in our society.

If ever you find yourself in the midst of a peaceful public demonstration, an organized act of legal civil disobedience, or even circumstances beyond your control and a police officer gives you a command, don’t think twice. Comply immediately. Don’t let thoughts of exercising your civil rights cloud your judgment. Don’t question the officer’s authority. Do as you are told, it could save your life – but still, be prepared for a shock. The officer “serving” you might be having a bad day.