The Management of Savagery. Max Blumenthal
“They started screaming about colonialism. We stopped”
Moments later, Stern repeated his call for nuclear annihilation. “Blow them all to sky high!” he said. “Atom bombs! Just do it so they’re flattened out and turned into a paved road and we’ll take the oil for ourselves.”
This was not right-wing radio, but one of the consistently most highly rated morning shows in the country. Stern’s exterminationist diatribes demonstrated how deeply the neoconservative mind-set had been inculcated into mainstream American culture, how it had been simmering just below the surface of the bawdy blather that normally dominated the drive-time airwaves and was waiting to explode upon what PNAC described as “some catastrophic and catalyzing event.” The sleaze-laden shock jock who compared himself to Dan Rather as the attacks unfolded had given voice to large sectors of a shell-shocked public, earning him praise for channeling the outrage that average New Yorkers felt on that clear blue day.
Exactly a week later, before an audience of millions on the Late Show with David Letterman, the real Dan Rather appeared in the guest chair to render Stern’s tirades into smooth, vaguely Texas-accented sound-bites. “This will be long, the casualties will be greater,” Rather informed Letterman. “We’ve suffered casualties but there will be more. When we send our sons and daughters into this kind of war, into this twilight zone that they’re going, there will be great casualties.”
Visibly exhausted after nights of long, emotionally taxing broadcasts, Rather broke down several times. Following one teary display, he gathered his composure just enough to issue a vow of loyalty to the nation’s leader. “George Bush is the president,” said Rather. “He makes the decisions. As just one American, wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.”
When Letterman attempted a mild intervention—“What are the events that pissed [bin Laden] off?”—Rather insisted on the most comforting explanation possible, one that formed the basis of Bush’s talking points: “They hate America. They hate us. This is one of those things that makes this war different. They don’t want territory. They don’t want what we’ve got. They want to kill us and destroy us … Some evil, it can’t be explained.”
Letterman explored another line of critical questioning, this one slightly more daring than the last, but softened it with a humorous tinge: “I think about the CIA, they can’t even find the drinking fountain. Have we made some mistake, or done something we shouldn’t have?”
Rather quickly pivoted away from the uncomfortable question to one of the Bush administration’s pet obsessions. “Saddam Hussein—if he isn’t connected to this,” Rather stated, “he’s connected to many other things. He’s part of this ‘hate America’ thing … His hate is deep for us … It’s a new place and we’re headed for a new place.”
And where was that new place? According to Rather, delivering an eerily faithful recitation of neoconservative plans for the Middle East, “the focus is on, and we should understand, not just Afghanistan—Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya.”
Like Stern, Rather could hardly be associated with the exclusive, almost incestuous family of the neoconservatives. But the outlook they had insinuated into the country’s political culture and impressed upon the Bush administration had clearly shaped his understanding of the Middle East, terrorism and warfare. Through familiar, trustworthy faces like Rather, the American public was seeded with the mentality of interventionism and military unilateralism.
Down at the Pentagon, whose western wing had been smoldering only days before, Wesley Clark, the former head of the military’s European Command, strode into the office of a member of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We’re going to attack Iraq,” the general grumbled to him, a look of anguish on his face. “The decision has basically been made.”
Clark returned to the same general six weeks later to revisit the issue of invading Iraq, a source of rising exasperation among the Pentagon brass. “Oh, it’s worse than that,” the general told Clark. He waved around a classified memo he had just received. “Here’s the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense [Donald Rumsfeld] outlining the strategy. We’re going to take out seven countries in five years.”
He then rattled off the Bush administration’s targets for regime change: first Iraq, then Syria and finally Iran, with Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan somewhere in between. The memo was a virtual mimeograph of the neoconservative “A Clean Break” produced in 1996 for Netanyahu. The momentum toward an invasion of Iraq was almost unstoppable.
Truthers and Experts
On September 17, 2001, President George W. Bush appeared at the Islamic Center in Washington, DC, a mosque dedicated in 1957 by then-president Eisenhower. Before a crowd of dignitaries and diplomats, Bush delivered an impassioned address stressing the “invaluable contribution” Muslims had made to American life. “In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect,” he continued. “Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must be not intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value.”
With his nobly worded address, Bush sought to calm the wave of anti-Muslim attacks that had erupted since 9/11. In the suburban Chicago town of Bridgeview, where thirty percent of residents were Arab, a “pro-American” vigil days after the attacks transformed into a racist mob as 300 marched toward a local mosque, chanting “USA! USA! USA!” and bellowing “Kill the Arabs!” They were halted only by a last-minute mobilization of police. Elsewhere, across the country, Sikhs were targeted with verbal abuse and physically attacked by patriots who mistook them for followers of bin Laden, now the omnipresent, bearded face of evil.
While Bush’s rhetoric may have helped reduce the anti-Muslim tide spreading across the country, he nonetheless signed off on the Patriot Act, granting the executive branch unprecedented wartime powers to investigate and prosecute Americans. The bill comprised a scattershot of sweeping surveillance proposals that represented a wish list of the FBI, giving the bureau unprecedented latitude to spy on, among others, Muslim American communities. Christopher Smith, the Republican congressman from New Jersey, credited a 1994 documentary, Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America, with playing a “real role” in the bill’s passage. In the days after 9/11, with an eye on passing a bill like the Patriot Act, the documentary was distributed to every member of the House of Representatives.
The film was produced by Steven Emerson, a self-styled terror expert who had wrongly blamed Arabs for bombing the Oklahoma City Federal Building and held expansive civil liberties protections responsible for transforming the United States into “occupied fundamentalist territory.” Funded by right-wing billionaires including Richard Mellon Scaife and criticized by investigative journalist Robert Friedman for “creating mass hysteria against American Arabs,” Emerson’s “Jihad in America” consisted of grainy footage of the extremists that inhabited the Al-Kifah center in Brooklyn during the time they were serving American foreign policy goals in Afghanistan. Having been assets in the CIA’s program during the Cold War, evildoers like Rahman and Azzam were exploited all over again, this time as props in America’s new “war on terror.”
Passed by a vote of ninety-nine to one in the Senate, the Patriot Act undoubtedly benefited from the folk myth of terrorist sleeper cells and Arab Americans celebrating Al Qaeda’s terror. Dan Rather had popularized the rumor during his post-9/11 Letterman show appearance when he cited “a report” that “there was one of these cells across the Hudson river … they got on the roof of the building, they knew it was going to happen, they were waiting for it to happen, and when it happened, they celebrated.” Howard Stern also spread the canard on the country’s most popular radio show in the days after 9/11.
In fact, the FBI had registered only one incident of people appearing to celebrate the attacks. The bizarre event consisted of three men suspiciously filming the flaming World Trade Center from atop a white van. “They were, like, happy, you know,” a witness observed. According to investigations by ABC News and Jewish Daily Forward, those men were not part of any Islamist terror