Armed Madhouse

by Greg Palast

  Terrorism, opium production and massive human rights violations underscore the urgency of my request.

  But once Gilman’s man Bush took control of the files in 2001, the terrorism, opium and human rights violations were not so urgent. And even if Gilman got the files now, what would he do? It’s not the kind of thing you’d bring up to the Prince over barbecue at the Crawford Ranch. We mustn’t discomfit the Saudis over their contributions to Terror-R-Us—especially if America itself is stinking with “winking.”

  The problem with creating Frankensteins, whether an Osama or a Taliban, is that these creatures often rise and turn on their creators.

  For example, another creepy critter to crawl out of the Reagan-Bush anti-Iran Frankenstein factory is identified in this State Department memo, marked “SECRET”:

  In his 90-minute meeting with Rumsfeld, Saddam Hussein showed obvious pleasure with President’s [Reagan’s] letter and Rumsfeld’s visit.…Rumsfeld told Saddam U.S…. had successfully closed off U.S.-controlled exports by third countries to Iran. In response to Rumsfeld’s interests in seeing Iraq increase oil exports…

  Unfortunately, Reagan’s words that pleasured Saddam remain classified.

  The Reagan-Bush Frankenstein Factory is still producing new models. Pervez Musharraf, personal protector of the atomic bomb salesman, Dr. Khan, can be seen in photos arm in arm with our president as if they are going together to the senior prom. Given our experiences with Saddam and Osama, our monsters tend to get out of control after about eleven years. Therefore, we can expect, in the year 2013, President Jeb Bush will have to order the 82nd Airborne into Pakistan to remove the Killer of Karachi.

  “Obvious Pleasure” Saddam and Rumsfeld meeting

  Above is a photo of the actual secret memo of Donald Rumsfeld’s visit with Saddam Hussein in 1983. My question is, what indicated to Rumsfeld that Saddam “showed obvious pleasure with President’s [Reagan’s] letter”? Hand-clapping? A visible tent in Saddam’s pants? Coca-Cola or blood spurting out his nose? The Secretary of Defense’s office did not return our calls.

  George and Tony Get Their Al-Qaeda Fix

  We take off our shoes at the airport in Pittsburgh, we have robot chips planted in our driver’s licenses, we have our cousin Larry in Falluja.

  But there seems to be one thing missing in the War on Terror: the terrorists.

  Where are they? Are they at all?

  What about the July 2005 bombings in London? The cruel, evil jerks who blew up the London Tube, despite appropriating Al-Qaeda’s name for their Web site and T-shirts, had about as much to do with Al-Qaeda as a Beatles tribute band has to do with the Fab Four. It was a horror—but no September 11. American-bred monster Timmy McVeigh slaughtered a lot more people in Oklahoma City with his cow-poop bomb.

  I’m not belittling the heartbreaking hideousness of the London bombings, but let’s get the facts straight. If Al-Qaeda is the Panzer Division of terrorism, these London bombers were terrorism’s Cub Scouts: A handful of poor young Muslim schmucks whipped into a frenzy by mewling mullahs, like the cleric in North London who enjoyed the comfortable middle-class dullness of England during the week while on weekends preaching “a 9/11, day after day after day.” But there has been no 9/11 day after day.

  And that’s no little matter. Because George Bush and Tony Blair are Al-Qaeda junkies. They’ve sold us on everything from fingerprinting five-year-olds to invading Baghdad to tolerating plummeting paychecks in the USA all on the slick line that we are under attack by a well-trained, well-armed, well-funded hidden army called Al-Qaeda.

  And that is why, after these four teenage fools in London blew themselves up, Blair’s foreign secretary dramatically dashed out to tell us that the explosions had the “hallmarks of Al-Qaeda.” Our Commander-in-Chief, looking as commanding as possible (no reading of kiddie stories this time), could not have been more satisfied. “Hallmarks of Al-Qaeda”? Bullshit. And Blair and Bush knew it.

  Our “War President,” as he arrogantly calls himself, is having a little problem with his War on Terror. The enemy’s gone AWOL. Except when we go looking for trouble, as in invading Mesopotamia. Otherwise, trouble pretty much stopped looking for us. Admit it, we’re pretty darn safe.

  America is not under attack. There is no WAR on terror because, except for one day five years ago, there has been no terror attack. This isn’t Lebanon or Israel or Chechnya. We don’t go to a pizza parlor wondering if we’ll get our keisters blown off before the last slice. This is not Iraq, with the daily bombing in the Kasbah as Shias, Sunnis, Turkmen and Kurds settle matters of religion and petroleum with Semtex.

  Even September 11. Forgive me for pointing this out, but it was, in the end, the deed of a bunch of wingnuts with box-cutters hankering for a hot time with virgins in the next life who got “lucky” and killed a horrendous number of my former coworkers at the World Trade Center.

  Where are the terrorists? We’ve got a boatload of sorry-ass losers in orange suits in Guantánamo we captured five years ago who are supposed to tell us Osama bin Laden’s address. Even if they had it, Osama’s probably moved. And, since he was dying of kidney problems, he’s a goner.

  Where is Osama? He’s last year’s model. Even if he survives, he’s no longer a player. That’s because first, George Bush gave him what he wanted, U.S. troops out of the Land of the Two Holy Places, Saudi Arabia. Second, bin Laden’s ultimate goal is a bust. Terror, at least big-time global terror, is, like the war in Iraq, all about the oil. Bin Laden was an artifact of $10-a-barrel crude. As he made clear in his Declaration of War, the failings of the Saudi royals were in allowing the West to bring down the price of the great oil reserves under Islamic sands.

  Ironically, Osama’s obtaining his goal, raising oil prices, is his undoing. With oil up, Osama’s war platform crumbles beneath him. It’s amazing how much political-emotional-religious angst among Saudi Arabians is cured by $50-a-barrel crude. The Saudi royals no longer fear Osama nor need to fund him; Pakistan’s dictator has control of Afghanistan without need of the Taliban; the Caspian’s oil is safely “privatized”; the Libyans have signed with BP; working-class Iranians are voting against mullahs who promise jihad instead of a piece of the oil pie; and overwhelmingly, Muslims would rather not spend their weekends blowing up their neighbors.

  Yes, Bush can say there have been no terror attacks since September 2001 because of the wonderful way he and Sheriff Dick have protected us. But, that’s like the guy in my old neighborhood on the Lower East Side who said his dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback, is trained to scare away lions. I asked him, “How do you know they scare away lions?” He pointed down Second Avenue and said, “See any lions?”

  Neither America nor Britain are not at war. This is not the Blitz. If anyone thinks I’m belitting the killings in New York, in London, or in Madrid (that was Al-Qaeda), you’ve got me wrong. These are true crimes. The problem is that Bush’s declaring a War on Terror, mirroring Osama’s own Declaration of War, draws us into the totalen Krieg (Total War) mentality in which all perfidy is excused, from our President’s coddling Pakistan’s bomb merchant to our Congress’s repealing your right to know the poisons created at your neighborhood chemical plant. A whole list of corporate gimmes sought by lobbyists before September 11 are now marketed to Congress as protection from Al-Qaeda. To cover this extreme greedismo, we’ve been sold a new Red Scare, and that is certain to bring us the new McCarthyism. Get ready.

  Are there still killer fanatics in Pakistan screaming, “Death to America! Death to the Jews!”? Yes, always have been. Always will be. But they don’t constitute an organized armed force ready to call up their thousands from sleeper cells in Cincinnati.

  Despite this, I’m telling you now: We will be hit again. Bush has made that horribly certain by poking hornets’ nests worldwide and offering punishment to the planet instead of prosperity. And despite the machine guns at the Indian casino parking lot in Southold, America is prepared neither to prevent nor to respond to attacks by small
groups of committed fanatics. Homeland Security’s loot is spent on cyber toys, color schemes, kicking in the doors of the local library, or, as I discovered, manipulating elections in Latin America. Against the crimes of religious fanatics or skinhead berserkers, foreign or domestic, we are less prepared than under the Clinton Administration. The entire USA PATRIOT act was written, let’s not forget, before the September 11 attack. It was aimed at slicing a hole in civil liberties and filling the pockets of connected hucksters and database magnates while budgets for simple police work, the guts of real protection, bleed away.

  And who will get us next? Don’t assume they’ll be clutching Korans. Another Hurricane Katrina and America won’t need to look abroad for insurgents. Until September 11, 2001, the deadliest terror attack in American history was carried out by an all-American Gulf War veteran. It is worth remembering that Bill Clinton pretty much ended that threat with solid police work (treating terror as a crime, not a war) and a truly powerful weapon: a series of lawsuits which cost the skinhead Right its assets. Note that Clinton quashed the terror (Oklahoma was not the lone incident) without invading Idaho or invalidating the Constitution.

  Outside the war zones we create, organized terror’s power is diminishing, and for Bush and Blair, that is a political problem. That’s why the attack by the loony London teenagers in 2005 was such a boon to the Al-Qaeda addicts in the White House and Downing Street: They needed a new terror fix. Even if it wasn’t the real Al-Qaeda, it was enough for Bush and Blair to mainline into the body politic a big, fat dose of fear.

  Once they had the world media all jumped up on a new fear high, Bush and Blair could resume their sales pitch for their two-barrel cure: less liberty, more weaponry.

  Our leaders are counting on cowardice in the hearts of the heartland. In 2004, the Republicans’ unstated reelection campaign slogan was, “They are coming to get us.” Americans, scared for their lives, soiled their underpants and waddled to the polls crying, “Georgie, save us!”

  From his bunker, Mr. Cheney has created a government that is little more than a Wal-Mart of Fear: midnight snatchings of citizens for uncharged crimes, wars to hunt for imaginary weapons aimed at Los Angeles, DNA data banks of kids and grandmas, even the Chicken Little sky-is-falling Social Security spook-show.

  In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt calmed a nation when he said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

  Today, George Bush says, “We have nothing to sell but fear itself.”

  Double Cheese with Fear

  Fear sells better than sex. But who’s buying?

  The mothers of this country who are wrestling with threats!

  Oh, my! What threats? If you thought it’s just Osama, you’re taking big chances, because more danger is just outside your door, ringing the bell.

  It’s the pizza delivery guy. Aren’t you afraid yet? Did you know that 25% of pizza delivery drivers have been in jail within four months of starting the job bringing you your pie? From Sing-Sing to your doorstep! One in four!

  Who said so? Derek Smith said so. He said (I can’t make this up):

  What pizza do you like? At what price? Are you willing to take the risk associated with dealing with a company that doesn’t screen their drivers?

  Who is this guy? Derek Smith is the founder of a company called ChoicePoint, prime contractor for the Department of Homeland Security. He’s the man standing between your family and Al-Qaeda’s mushroom-and-pepperoni sleeper cells. You should know something about this Smith, because he knows an awful lot about you.4

  Last time I checked, Smith and ChoicePoint had piled up over 16 billion files on every living and dying U.S. citizen, and they’ve put it up for sale, bit by bit. The company pulled in over a billion dollars in revenues in 2005, only eleven years after Smith founded it.

  ChoicePoint, the largest personal profile database company in America, is the leader in the Fear Industry. The problem for CEO Smith and the firm he founded in 1994 is that, at first, the public wasn’t buying…until September 11, 2001, when ChoicePoint’s new business plan fell from the sky.

  “The War on Terror hasn’t been decided yet, but a few winners are emerging,” wrote Forbes a few months after the attack. “High up on the list of businesses that will benefit…ChoicePoint, Inc.”

  They didn’t have to wait. ChoicePoint’s Bode Technologies division picked up a $12 million contract to identify by DNA testing pieces of corpses found in the Staten Island garbage dump holding the Twin Towers.

  Al-Qaeda’s attack set up an explosion of demand for Smith’s top product. His top product is you. Your Prozac prescription, Satan’s church donations, Victoria’s Secret bill payments, driver’s license, voting record, you name it. And George Bush is buying. ChoicePoint is operating a private FBI or, more accurately, a private KGB, because they keep files on you that the law doesn’t allow the FBI to hold.

  The law in question is the U.S. Constitution, which says the government can’t spy on you unless you’re suspected of a crime—but ChoicePoint can, and that’s where the game begins. Under the USA PATRIOT act, Congress has outsourced the snooping. The Act allows the Feds to ask ChoicePoint for data the government itself cannot legally obtain. The spooks at the new Total Information Office (now “Terrorism” Information Office since Congress changed the name and removed the logo, the All-Seeing Eyeball—no kidding) couldn’t wait. In one classified document that came our way, a Total Info honcho exhorted agencies to come up with “far-out, funky” uses of the ChoicePoint info they aren’t supposed to have. Groovy, man.

  And what does the family Bush do with ChoicePoint’s funky information? In Florida, it was ChoicePoint’s DBT unit that came up with the list of 94,000 “felons” to purge from Florida voter rolls before the 2000 election. At least 91,000 were innocent legal voters, but the vast majority of these were guilty of nothing more than being Black, Democrats or both. (See Chapter 4.)

  And now, ChoicePoint wants your blood. Why? Because “ChoicePoint Cares.” That’s the name of its program to reunite those kiddies on milk cartons with their loved ones. And they’ll need your DNA to do it.

  That’s the point of the ghost stories of pizza men coming to snatch your milk-carton baby, to convince “the mothers of this country facing threats” to raise no objections to the data goldminers digging into your bank accounts, medical records and bloodstream. And now, with Osama out there, Americans can’t wait to rush into the protective arms of our computerized Big Brother.

  But come on, if ChoicePoint gets the bad guys for us, who cares? However, ChoicePoint, unlike the Canadian Mounties, is not likely to get their man. The Illinois State Police, for example, tested ChoicePoint’s DNA-matching evidence used in more than a thousand rape cases. The police scientists say ChoicePoint got it wrong 25% of the time. In some cases, it appears, ChoicePoint produced test “results” on evidence that didn’t exist.

  As you see, ChoicePoint cares, but ChoicePoint also lies. In November 2000, when our Observer-BBC Television team discovered the false tagging of Black voters in Florida, I expected their PR men to give me the usual song and dance to slither out of the tough questions. But ChoicePoint’s spokesmen simply made it up, telling me they’d checked the names against Social Security numbers. I got the scrub sheets, and they hadn’t checked in 95% of cases. They did, however, list each voter’s race.

  The company flat-out denied to one reporter that they give DNA to the feds, but when one of my investigators called, posing as a student interested in a career in “data management,” the firm boasted it is the biggest supplier of DNA information to the FBI. “And that scares the hell out of me,” said a ChoicePoint executive (who has since bailed out of the company) on condition of anonymity. ChoicePoint says it only keeps DNA records on bad guys. However, said the insider, “Derek said his hope [is] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States… linked to all the other information held by CP,” from medical records to voting records.

  So what? Because,
the executive told me, they get it wrong. Way wrong, says the World Privacy Forum’s Pam Dixon, who sampled ChoicePoint’s credit-reporting wares and found 90% of the records contained errors. At least they’ve improved from Florida days.

  Bad information spread about you can ruin you. But so can good information in the wrong hands. In 2005, ChoicePoint mistakenly sold 145,000 credit card records to a band of identity thieves. That little slip earned them, in 2006, a $15 million fine from the Federal Trade Commission, the highest in FTC history.

  Your data wasn’t protected, but the company’s inside track is well bullet-proofed. Its retainers include Vin Weber, former congressman and a cofounder of Project for a New American Century (PNAC) with Richard Armitage, who served on the board of ChoicePoint’s Florida unit. (Armitage, after the vote-purging work was done, was appointed a Deputy Secretary of State.) The remainder of the ChoicePoint Board of Directors looks like a Bush fundraising gala, including Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus and his partner Ken Langone, Treasurer of Rudy Giuliani’s aborted Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton.

  Billionaire Langone is perfect for ChoicePoint, a man who knows how to make good use of data: He was charged with insider trading by the Securities Exchange Commission in 2004. Admittedly, the chief of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Grasso, likened the accusations against Langone of a massive fraud to “a traffic ticket.” The stock market regulator Grasso might have been a wee bit influenced by Langone’s secretly approving Grasso’s taking more than $100 million in extra pay from the Exchange. Apparently, the Attorney General of New York thought so and, in a civil complaint, has charged Grasso and Langone with conspiracy, charges both are fighting. But let’s not single out one Board member. ChoicePoint CEO Smith is, in 2006, himself under investigation for insider trading. Smith failed to notify victims of the credit card number theft until after he had unloaded some of his own ChoicePoint stock. The Securities and Exchange Commission raised some questions about the suspiciously brilliant timing of Smith’s sales. The company has said the sales were entirely proper.