Mojowire for 12.20
PART II

NEED TO KNOW
S9 Greetings once again fellow breakabouts and highmovers. It's been a wicked week for conspiracy theory, hasn't it? We know. Here on S9 station, we have an entire deck of the command torus dedicated to tracking every last moonbat conspiracy theory we catch moving across the world political landscape. We keep an eye on them for the same reason we watch for rogue comets and asteroids— you never know when one will fly out of nowhere and wreck everything. There are a lot of objects to track.

It's only going to get worse, you know. The fire of conspiracy theory is fueled by the heavy growth of official secrecy that the Bush administration has deliberately planted and lovingly tended for the
last three years. The Clinton administration was also fairly excessive about keeping secrets, but the Bush people are making them look like pikers.

Let's start with the news this week that the Bush administration has persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to review the three-- count them-- *three* lower court decisions that have all refused to accept the administration claim that the documents produced by the Cheney energy task force should be protected from disclosure be executive privilege. The administration swears that it really has nothing specifically damning to hide— it just wants to establish a precedent.

Meanwhile, tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists on the web and off the grid are crazy with speculation about what the Vice President is really trying to hide by keeping those documents secret. But what if the thing the White House is trying to hide is precisely what they say they are trying to hide? Dick Cheney says he thinks every document produced in the executive branch ought to be regarded as an official secret unless it is explicitly marked For Immediate Public Release.

Let's take him at his word. After all, this administration spikes Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests as default policy. It's on record as considering it official policy to resist FOIA requests unless the information requested is explicitly something the government wants publicized in the first place.

Civil libertarian organizations have been trying for the better part of two years to pry information out of the government about how it has used the USA PATRIOT Act and other similar laws passed in the grief over 9/11— not to mention what it knows about the real benefits that have been achieved with the new powers. They have gotten not much more than John Ashcroft's personal opinion that civil libertarians are only providing aid and comfort to America's enemies by asking such questions.

Let's recall what John Ashcroft said in Congressional hearing December 2001, “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends.”

We may want to ask ourselves whether we have a problem with excessive official secrecy now. National security often depends on keeping sensitive official information secret, but there are very real and serious risks in excessive secrecy. Excessive official secrecy is actually *bad* for national security because it ultimately results in a hyperinflation of the importance of counter-intelligence operations.

Charged with protecting such a large volume of information from compromise, the secret police require enhanced powers of surveillance, detention and interrogation to defend against spies. Inevitably, the means and methods of counter-intelligence become official secrets, which themselves require aggressive defense against unauthorized public disclosure. Think about the lengths the secret police must go to prevent the public from learning about exactly how reliable is the information produced by "stress and duress" techniques.

And now the firewall in the FBI between criminal investigations and counter-intelligence is dismantled. You know what this means? It means we now have our very own American version of the CHEKA, which was Felix Dzerzhinsky's All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counterrevolution and Sabotage, and which begat the GPU and the NKVD, and which ultimately evolved into the KGB under Stalin. It was the CHEKA that started with the concentration camps for the traitors and enemy combatants.

So yes— it's been a bad week for conspiracy theories. Maybe the civil libertarians would be able to see the forest of unchecked state security apparatus better if it weren't for all the damned individual
trees of excessive secrecy blocking the view.
Cue James music for exit
As they always said in that excellent British TV program, The Prisoner, "be seeing you..."

HEY BUDDY...WANNA SCORE SOME DOCS?
J. Apparently, according to a Newsweek article, there is a growth industry in Iraq in forging official documents from Saddam’s regime and selling them to American and British rubes..errr, I mean journalists.

The Daily Telegraph in the UK got some documents that suggested that the 9/11 gang got together with some Iraqi intel types and documented a relationship between the Evil Doctor Saddam and Osama and the Legion of Doom.

This was used by many to prop up the fantasy held closely by Dick Cheney and Rummy and others that Iraq was part of 9/11, and it started to show up in some of the usual suspects’ work, such as the damaged man-droid that has replaced William Safire.

And before anyone could begin to question the dubious nature of the documents, they somehow managed to obtain the status of sacred gospels among the neocons, who apparently will believe and buy anything as long as the wrapping at least looks enough like what they think it’s supposed to look like.

The reporters who initially pimped the documents in question should have been tipped off by their whole Unified Field Theory of Iraq. Basically, Al Qaeda agents landed in Baghdad in a flying saucer to declare undying allegiance to Saddam and give him a year’s supply of Yellowcake, The Nigerian Treat, and then loaded up a hold full of Quantum Torpedo's, Shrink Rays, Anthrax, itch powder, counterfeit Pokemons, nuclear warheads disguised as Jesus Bobbleheads, ringwraiths, and other assorted items from Crazy Saddams WMD and stereo store. They then flew to Osama's orbiting death station to issue orders to the liberal media and anti-war activists.

This is perfectly in line with the Hadley story in the Weekly Standard, which declared all the Administrations theories about WMD and Al Queda verified because Doug Feith was forced to turn over the same wrong information to the Senate he had been pimping to the President.

Cut and pasting makes everything shiny and new!! And it’s easy apparently...there are dark alleys in Fallujah where shrouded men with copy machines are cranking out page after page of “Sooper-Sekret Plans for the Iraqi Devil Robot” and then hide in deep shadows selling the goathide bound portfolios for a handful of American scratch to earnest young FoxNews journalists who think they’re John LeCarre characters out of “A Perfect Spy.”

S. There is a desperation in Pro Bush circles to conjure up tangible proof that the Administration isn't stupid and liars all in the same magical building. I really don't know why. They seem perfectly content in denying they ever meant what they were saying 7 months ago, and that if we just sniff the deadly fumes from the New York Times Print edition, the truth will become clear.

You see, the war was all about human rights, the media just twisted it around to be about WMD. Damn the liberal media! Besides, there must be Al Queda operatives and Doomsday weapons in Iraq, Rummy said so.

Just apalling!

And as an aside, are Republican women still sliding off their chairs when they hear the existential poetry of Don Rumsfeld these days? Or do they get that creepy feeling they used to get when 60 year old men with whiskey breath used to roll up on them in their cherry red Caddillacs and offer them car rides and candy when they were 14? Just checking...

Naturally, certain media sources will offer these documents like they were just handed from elite Iraqi's in Saddams government in a Baghdad parking garage with flickering lights. I wonder if they manage to get the traces of white-out off the documents before they sell them to Standard and Fox reporters.

And sure, as long as the documents say what you want them to say, why would any rising young truth seeker look too closely at the paperwork. What the hell, they knew it all along anyway, remember?

Personally, I am greatly amused by this new market. I think millions of Rupert's money should be spent buying forged documents from grifting Iraqi's that confirm everything they suspected but could not prove.

Remember, like the Mojohaus covert action consultant and special operations editor (who’s name cannot be revealed here) says, the paperwork is whatever it says it is.

I bet there are Iraqi's cooking up documents of Clintons secret love affair with Saddam, Rosalyn Carter’s secret Saddam love child, and of course, the murder of Vince Foster.

How do I get in on this gravy train?

THE GORENATOR
J. So how’s this for a Hollywood pitch meeting...A Democratic presidential candidate is about to make a turning point in history, so the Republican Party sends an evil political terminator back through time to take him out, but then forces of good send back another similar robot programmed only to protect him...

Been done? Yeah, and it’s being done right now in the weird dichotomy of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and their relationships to former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

So do you think Al Gore showed up in a black leather jacket, dark glasses, riding a Harley and saying “Gov. Dean, you must survive, you will lead the resistance once the GOP Machines take over...”

Yeah, hackneyed and done already... But there is a weird symetry that’s hard to escape concerning how the Dean campaign is shaking out. On one side, you have Al Gore speaking and campaigining for him, sounding like he should have done for himself four years ago, and on the other, you have this dried-out beetle-carcass of Joe Lieberman who hasn’t passed an honest word through his piehole in the last several weeks.

Through it all, the Dean campaign manages to gamely move on, leaving the others vying for the spot of “The Anti-Dean.” The Doctor’s foreign policy address last week, which, by the way, left a lot to be desired, still left the rest of the field scratching their heads and spinning horrible tales of treachery.

In the meantime, the GOP’s machine is gripping so hard they can barely function in public. They actually had to thaw out G. Gordon Liddy and trot him out onto Crossfire with Robert Novak to get the appropriate level of lies, bitterness and sarcastic invective that could be broadcast on regular cable during the daytime.

Hell, even Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council has been able to read the writing on the wall, it sounds like; when he spoke last week, From was notably understated in his criticisms of Dean.

This thing is now Dean’s to lose. He has the money, he has the popular support and he is gaining the respectability of a frontrunner. The endorsement just makes a concrete reality of that, although it has been growing in perception for weeks.

It appears to many that Dean is the real thing for the party, galvanizing the liberal base while maintaining a moderate enough posture that he can have broad-based support with a campaign that knows how to do what it takes, apparently, although no one will really be able to judge that for sure until people actually start voting here in a few weeks.

S. It’s in this context that this contest between the former running mates is seen. Gore, the candidate as he should have been, versus Lieberman, the candidate how he really is when not marginalized by a moderate.

And we *still* think that Joe Lieberman needs to just come out of the closet and change what side of aisle he sits on ... it’s not like we don’t know.

These are different parts of the party, an establishment, which is finding itself more and more marginalized from its constituents, and a revitalized left, which is finding a voice, even as its candidate is taking a more moderate tone than some now might like.

But even so, there are a lot of people looking at the Gore endorsement and thinking, “you know what, I’m tired of losing. Dean is a pretty good guy, and the Gore endorsement just makes him that much more of a front runner; a signal perhaps that a larger amount of people are putting aside minor differences and uniting under a common cause. At the end of the day, I can live with my differences with him and he will be a damn sight better than Bush.”

That was the essential problem with the Gore candidacy four years ago. We didn’t see an appreciable difference between the two candidates. In retrospect, perhaps that was a mistake, but Gore didn’t give us much to go on in that regard.

Now, we have something we can hang on to, and Gore has provided a modicum of protection against the depridations of the T-1000 Liebermanator, even though he is the superior model in many ways to the older unit.

But if there is a hope of defeating the dreaded Bush juggernaut in 2004, it is going to have to be a candidate who is not afraid of stepping out and giving as good as he gets, and so far, the only candidate who looks like that is Dean.

And if he can get a better run at mainstream acceptance from a Gore endorsement, while sending Lieberman packing at the same time, then so much the better. We are in this one for the Republic boys and girls. Bush is giving no quarter, and we need someone who will respond in kind. Who is going to do that with any kind of realistic chance of getting elected? Gephardt? Edwards? Sharpton?

No, we are at the point of no return on this one. Democracy is about choosing, and this year there is a real choice, because we won’t have an America to vote on if there is another four years of neocon captivity.

J. So our patriotic thought for the day: Equal protection under the law means the Terrorists win... , or as John Ashcroft says... “The Constitution? I’m melting....I’m melting...”

exit theme: RENEGADE MASTER

S. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, unless, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.

And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com.

J. And now you can check out the Mojowire online at Mojowire.Blogspot.com; you can read the entire archive.

This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...