Reality, Truth and Evil by TH Meyer (Reviewed by K.Barrett)

[Tim Howells]

http://mujca.com/meyerreview.htm

Rumsfeld spent 2000 and 2001 carrying around extra copies of Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, praising the book to the skies, and offering free copies to all and sundry. Wohlstetter's book, while it ostensibly supports the official myth that Pearl Harbor was a perfidious surprise attack, includes enough information to the contrary to enlighten the discerning reader to the unspeakable but implicitly acknowledged truth: The Roosevelt Administration provoked the attacks, knew they were coming, and left thousands of sailors in harm's way as an offering to the gods of war. Wohlstetter's book is a perfect illustration of neocon doublespeak: Tell a vivid, simplistic, emotionally-charged lie to the masses ("Perfidious surprise attack! Heroic purple-fury response!") yet include as a subtle subtext the unspeakable truth that only the elite are smart enough to discern and strong enough to handle: "Roosevelt sacrificed thousands of American lives to the greater good of getting the US into the war."

Rumsfeld wasn't the only 9/11 suspect hyping Wohlstetter's doublespeak. 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer cited it at the Commission's very first public hearing: "It (Pearl Harbor—and by implication 9/11) was just a dramatic failure of a remarkably well-informed government to call the next enemy move in a Cold War crisis...Today it might be some of the same words. It wasn't a Cold War crisis and it wasn't the Japanese, but it was al Qaeda." Commission Chair Thomas Kean and his fellow Commissioner, CIA drug runner Barry Seal's lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste "also drew on this deceptive comparison with Pearl Harbor" (7).

Meyer shows that FDR and his brain trust were not surprised or upset after Pearl Harbor, but—like the Bush Administration and the CIA after 9/11—reacted as if they were overjoyed and relieved. The Bush/CIA party commemorating (celebrating?) the 9/11 attacks was apparently a cheerful affair: "At CIA headquarters in Langley, Bush junior celebrated a kind of promotional party just two weeks after the attacks, assuring the assembled CIA officials (including their boss George Tenet): `September 11th is a sad memory, but it's a memory...And I can't thank you enough on behalf of the American people" (24). The official White House website story (p. 57) has to be seen to be believed:

September 26th, 2001
President Thanks CIA
Remarks by the President to Employees of the CIA
Langley, Virginia
1:23 PM EDT


THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all very much. Well, George (Tenet), thank you very much, and thanks for inviting me back. (Laughter.) There is no question that I am in the hall of patriots, and I've come to say a couple of things to you. First, thank you for your hard work. You know, George and I have been spending a lot of quality time together. (Laughter.) There's a reason. I've got a lot of confidence in him, and I've got a lot of confidence in the CIA. (Applause.) And so should America.

Meyer is to be congratulated for calling attention to the Bush-CIA celebration of the 9/11 attacks. But that isn't the only evidence that Bush and top CIA officials were overjoyed, not disturbed, by 9/11. Griffin notes Rumsfeld's unseemly crowing and military-moneygrubbing on the evening of 9/11 itself (The New Pearl Harbor, 99-100). But it gets worse. The preface of veteran Middle East CIA agent Robert Baer's 2002 book See No Evil ends on an astonishing note: "The other day a reporter friend told me that one of the highest-ranking CIA officials had said to him, off the record, that when the dust finally clears, Americans will see that September 11 was a triumph for the intelligence community, not a failure." And in the October 6th, 2005 New York Times, a ex-top CIA official claims that the intelligence community's handling of 9/11 was not a failure, but something "good, positive, extraordinary." See: http://mujca.com/orwell.ht