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PNAC's Call for a New Pearl Harbor

I'm reading Amy Goodman's new book, The Exception to the Rulers. She pointed out something that really bothered me, that I hadn't heard before.

The Project for a New American Century, a posse of neo-con hawks, wrote a report (Rebuilding America's Defenses) in September, 2000, that they sent to Bill Clinton. Out of the 18 people who signed the letter, 10 are currently in the Bush Administration. They include Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, and Zalmay Khalilzad. Dick Cheney was one of the PNAC's founders. The urged Clinton to attack Iraq and take out Saddam.

So what's the big deal here? Well, these war mongers (most of them chicken hawks who never saw service) actually said that a shift toward a more aggressive policy in the middle east would happen slowly, absent "some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

Now if that doesn't send a chill up your spine, you must paralyzed with the fear the people have been injecting us with. Or just stupid. Because when the most influential members of the current administration actually wrote that they needed a "new Pearl Harbor" to speed up American Military aggression in the Middle East, it sure gives fuel to the conspiracy theorists I've argued with. And even if they didn't actually say, hey, old buddy Osama, you know we trained you and funded you all those years, now we need a little favor, this little nugget certainly gives some credence to the possible motive behind Operation Ignore, as Al Franken calls the now well documented Bush Administration lack of enthusiasm for anti-terrorism efforts.

When you hear Paul O'Neill say they ignored it, and Richard Clarke says they ignored it, and John O'Neill says they wouldn't let him investigate Bush's oil buddies, like Bandar Bush, who fund terrorism through their Wassabi "charities," it certainly looks like the Bushies didn't want to do anything that might prevent the "new Pearl Harbor" they needed to advance the American Empire.

This story was reported on Nightline in March, 2003. This is worth looking back on as Bush sits on Cheney's knee while "testifying" before the 9/11 commission. Especially the bit about John O'Neill, who I've never heard the mainstream media mention. That's why I'm going to start watching Amy Goodman on Democracy Now more often!