The Huffington Post reports: "An ongoing exploration of the documents related to the Pentagon's 'message force multipliers' program has unearthed a clip of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggesting that America, having voted the Democrats back into Congressional power, could benefit from suffering another terrorist attack, and doing so in the presence of the very same military analysts who went on to provide commentary and analysis of the Iraq War."Here are Rumsfeld's words w/ HuffPo's emphasis added:
RUMSFELD: That's what I was just going to say. This President's pretty much a victim of success. We haven't had an attack in five years. The perception of the threat is so low in this society that it's not surprising that the behavior pattern reflects a low threat assessment. The same thing's in Europe, there's a low threat perception. The correction for that, I suppose, is an attack. And when that happens, then everyone gets energized for another [inaudible] and it's a shame we don't have the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats...the lethality, the carnage, that can be imposed on our society is so real and so present and so serious that you'd think we'd be able to understand it, but as a society, the longer you get away from 9/11, the less...the less...
Here, Rumsfeld has made a startling admission about his own worldview and that of policymakers like him and those media personalities who act as cheerleaders for neoconservatism:
The national security state they've built up, with the brand new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security; the TSA with all its sexual assaults and violations of the Fourth Amendment; the doctrine of preemptive war and the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians that resulted from it; the open-ended occupations of other countries... all of these things don't serve to keep us safe from terrorists. No-- not in Rumsfeld's twisted, neoconservative view of the world.
He admits here that terrorists serve as the scapegoat and justification for all of those things. The real goal isn't to keep us safe. The real goal is to keep us in chains and under surveillance, and if we get tired of it, if it doesn't make sense to us, if we want to change it... then the right "cure" for our "bad attitude" is another terrorist attack. Only then will we take terrorism seriously enough to put up with all this tyranny, waste, and bloodshed coming out of Washington.
Americans could benefit, in Rumsfeld's twisted view, from a good terrorist attack every once in a while. So much for actually wanting to keep Americans safe from terrorism.
Wes Messamore,
Editor in Chief, THL
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