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CounterPunch
January
18 / 19, 2003
No Evidence is Evidence
Rumsfeld's Paradigm
Shift
By CAROL NORRIS
Up is down, red is green, yes means no, and no
evidence is evidence. Rumsfeld, that loveable lug, is at it again.
When Saddam Hussein agreed to weapons inspectors, the Bush Cartel
found it almost impossible to take yes for an answer. Holy cow,
they said amongst themselves, he's going to let them in. What
are we going to do now? We are readying our troops as we speak.
We promised our friends at the Carlyle group and Halliburton
(among others) big contracts and big bucks from this one.
What they decided to do was discredit
the weapons inspectors. That way, if the inspectors never find
anything, people will think it is because Blix and his team are
incompetent, not that there aren't weapons. And the possibility
of war remains a go.
But, despite their best public relations
efforts, the discrediting didn't play as well as they hoped.
So they searched and searched, trying to find a scrap of something
they could pass off as plausible evidence. But, nothing appeared.
We've got to come up with another plan, they said.
So, Rumsfeld, the master mind of the
Pentagon's now defunct "Office of Strategic Influence,"
whose stated mission was to generate disinformation and propaganda,
was quoted as saying Iraq is "skilled at denial and deception"
and "the fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with
new evidence of Iraq's WMD program could be evidence, in and
of itself, of Iraq's noncooperation. " And, by the way,
now the burden of proof of innocence is on Iraq.
The entire world ought to have stood
up and shouted a collective: "You've got to be kidding!"
But he wasn't. With these proclamations
and statements of conjecture, Rumsfeld, no doubt, hoped to create
a subtle, yet major paradigm shift, an alteration of perceived
reality: no evidence is evidence. The hope was that a little
seed would be planted in the minds of Americans and the media
that will grow and blossom into unquestioned reality. "Yeah,"
they hope the average citizen will say, "Saddam is really,
really sneaky. And bad. So, he's definitely got weapons, even
if we can't find one of 'em. Let's go get him. Let's go get all
of 'em."
Rumsfeld & Co. very cleverly set
it up so that the inspectors don't ever have to find a thing,
because now no evidence is really evidence. So, no matter what,
they have their evidence and Hussein will never be exonerated,
which means he's still a potential threat, which means the possibility
of war remains alive. (Confusing? Of course it is. That's what
they're counting on.)
Another paradigm shift is that the Bush
team and the UN don't have to provide any evidence of Iraq's
continuing efforts to build WMD. Iraq has to prove it isn't.
(The U.S. is charging Hussein is involved in criminal activity.
But, in the U.S., in criminal cases, the burden of proving a
case against a person is on the party bringing the charges. A
person does not have to prove his or her innocence; the prosecutor
must prove that the defendant is guilty. I wonder why they think
this is moral and just here in the U.S., but not elsewhere? [Come
to think of it, for some here, that's going by the wayside, too.
But, they don't talk about that much.] Hasn't Bush professed
one of his goals is to export the decent standards of Democracy
to the world? I guess maybe he only uses democratic principles
when it furthers his objectives.)
In any event, Iraq need not worry about
trying to prove anything, because the Bush crew is never going
to believe any proof they offer. Never. Rumsfeld made sure of
that when he said Hussein is known for his "denial"
and "deception." So, not Hussein's full cooperation
with the inspectors, certainly not his word, not the reports
from the biological, chemical and nuclear teams that are scouring
his country; the most definitive proof will never be proof enough.
It's a total set up; a no win situation;
the window to war the Bush Cartel hopes to point its missiles
out of, if they don't happen to find any evidence to shoot their
arsenal at. They could find evidence today. No matter. Who needs
evidence, says the Bush administration. Our trap is set.
Unlikely, but just maybe Rumsfeld actually
believes what he is saying when he says no evidence is evidence.
And it isn't just simply a page of Doublespeak from Orwell's
1984. When one is engaged in a lot of covert actions, one starts
seeing that same behavior in everyone, everywhere. One becomes
indiscriminately disbelieving and suspicious. It's classic.
Perhaps Rumsfeld so readily sees current
"noncooperation" in Hussein because that very phenomenon
is happening in the Bush administration's many games of Do As
I Say, Not As I Do. For instance, our government is demanding
total and full disclosure from Iraq. Yet, Senate Minority Leader
Tom Daschle stated that the Bush administration has failed to
provide disclosure to Congress about the prospect for a war on
Iraq, as is its legal requirement as part of a resolution passed
last October.
[Lest we forget: the Bush team does not
have the legal right to declare war. Only Congress has that right.
This Congressional declaration of war was put in place specifically
so a president would not have the exclusive power to decide such
a momentous thing. It was meant to keep this awesome power from
being abused. No, September 11th does not change that. In fact,
it argues more for checks and balances to ensure measured decisions
are made in such emotional times. Remember, too, for all he's
done and as despicable as he is, Hussein had nothing to do with
September 11th.]
Another example: Rumsfeld accuses Iraq
of being skilled at deception. Yet, after his disinformation
Office of Strategic Influence was closed due to public outcry,
Rumsfeld was not one to be defeated. So, he created a new position
- Deputy Undersecretary for Special Plans. The job's responsibility
is to continue the same deception operations as the Office of
Strategic Influence was to perform, just under a different name.
(You also might want to take a look at the toned down website
of John Poindexter's brainchild - Total Information Awareness
office - it states some of its purpose is "storytelling"
and "truth maintenance.")
This "noncooperation" and games
playing also translates into withholding information or preventing
any serious dialogue about anything the Bush Cartel wants to
keep hush-hush. The current administration is one of the most
secretive in history. It is removing information from the public
domain at an alarming rate. The FOIA is being eviscerated; thousands
of very important governmental documents are being shredded;
Bush's military record (or lack thereof) has disappeared; Ashcroft
has given orders to agencies not to cooperate with people looking
for "sensitive" information information that
the public has a legal right to know about; 8,000 pages from
the Iraqi Declaration were removed by the U.S. before it was
released to the UN (those pages presumably named corporations
that aided Iraq in its biological and weapons proliferation);
chunks of government and industry websites have been deleted
and what remains has been sanitized, minimizing embarrassing
facts about industry ties and the like; Cheney's Halliburton
case miraculously got dismissed from the courts right along with
the truth; the fact that language protecting Eli Lilly against
certain law suits was somehow buried in an unrelated security
bill with nobody taking responsibility has long been swept under
the rug. The list goes on and on and on.
The Bush administration is setting dangerous
precedents, opening a Pandora's box of issues. In the National
Security Strategy that the White House issued last September,
the US claimed it has a "right" of military preemption
anywhere around the world. Yet, the U.S. keeps watch over other
countries, believing none have this same right and none have
claimed it.
But that won't last long. We have just
as much of a right to do it as they do, other countries will
say. And they'll be correct. The Bush administration doesn't
have the right to do things other countries can't, as much as
they try to pretend otherwise.
Similarly, the U.S. is playing the game
of Two New Weapons of Mass Destruction for Me, and None For You.
This is a dangerous game as any kid on the playground can tell
you, because the kid who isn't allowed to have any toys won't
play for long at least not the game you're playing. He
sees the inequity and the injustice and soon something's gotta
give.
Thus, Bush is creating a world of preemptive
strikes, nuclear weapons proliferation; a world that can ignore
environmental treaties and erode citizens' rights, only naming
a few.
And now, the administration via the voice
of Donald Rumsfeld may very well be creating a precedent for
the use of theoretical possibility and conjecture no evidence
is evidence as a rationale for war. At the rate we're going
war, the world over, may soon be founded on mere hunches.
Perhaps Rumsfeld's logic will filter
into situations that have nothing to do with war. Perhaps one
day we'll see the same reasoning in our courtrooms: If the jurors
find no evidence whatsoever that a defendant has, say, murdered
his wife, then perhaps they'll conclude the lack of evidence
is, in and of itself, really proof that he did do it.
If a police officer gives a driver suspected
of driving under the influence, a breathalyzer test that comes
up negative, perhaps that is evidence, in and of itself, that
she is actually driving drunk. A whole new system of law, justice
and ethics could be born.
Iraq, in fact, may not be cooperating
in ways we haven't discovered. But we need real proof, not theoretical
possibilities. What are they going to call this war: Operation
Because There Was a Theoretical Possibility? (Even if they found
proof, war will only make us less safe. But, that's another issue.)
It seems to me when Rumsfeld made his
dubious comments, it provided evidence, in and of itself, of
an administration that will shamelessly stop at nothing to get
what it wants making embarrassingly transparent leaps into
the treacherous waters of unsubstantiated conjecture, knowing
the media will leap right in with them as much of America, cued
by their TV sets, hurry to put on their swim suits of credulity,
ready to follow along side by side with Tony Blair who stands
at attention in his uniform of mask and snorkel.
It is evidence, in and of itself, of
a brazen administration run amok.
It is evidence, in and of itself, of
a president who is in actuality, simply an all-too human, failed
businessman with major family connections, who feels the need
to compensate for his long list of failings, hoping to make his
daddy proud.
It is evidence, in and of itself, that
this administration is desperately scrambling for something
anything - any excuse to deploy the poor and disenfranchised
Americans that mostly make up our military, asking them to risk
their lives so the Bush adminstration can flex its world-wide
muscles as it secures strategic positioning, hoping we Americans
will hold up our giant foam fingers and chant, "We're Number
One."
It is evidence, in and of itself, that
to our current administration, the potential of gallons and gallons
of spilled innocent Iraqi "collateral" blood is less
of a concern than the promise of a cheap gallon of oil.
Let's shift the paradigm so that the
burden is on the Bush administration to prove to the American
people and the world otherwise.
Carol Norris
is a freelance writer and psychotherapist. She can be contacted
at writing4justice@planet-save.com
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