Tommy Franks, a doomsday scenario

Comment by Larry Ross, Feb 16, 2004

This is an excellent article. We will research the original article quoted, which was December issue of Cigar Aficionado. It is surprising that General Tommy Franks (previously in charge of US forces in Iraq} would publish such a radical article.

This scenario is the kind of thing I have been predicting. In fact I think Bush has little or no chance of being re-elected unless some kind of catastrophic event happens. He will depict it as caused by external enemies - probably terrorists. Like Hitler's burning of the Reichstag, to justify German militarism, fascism and war, Americans wont know who really is responsible for such an event. It will cause his popularity to zoom up and his re-election "as the strong President America needs to deal with such matters to be assured".

I will make reference to it in my Paul Revere talk. More Americans might be shocked into action if they knew about it. American mass media that has been so incredibly compliant with the Bush Administration, should carefully consider whether their short-term advantages are worth it. The long-term results of a second term for Bush is likely to be endless wars and the loss of American civil rights with more Patriot-type laws. American society could be radically changed for the worse for forseeable future. Also, If Bush implements his pre-emptive nuclear war strategy, which is quite possible, that could trigger a nuclear holocaust. Any remaining living would envy the dead. Americans should spare a moment's thought for their grandchildren.

Larry Ross, Secretary,
NZ Nuclear-Free Peacemaking
nuclearfreenz@lynx.co.nz

From Tommy Franks, a doomsday scenario

St. Petersburg Times, Robyn E. Blumner, Times Perspective Columnist, December 7, 2003

The doomsday scenario was laid out by Gen. Tommy Franks, the recently retired head of CentCom, in of all places the December edition of Cigar Aficionado magazine.

"What is the worst thing that can happen in our country?" Franks asked rhetorically. "Two steps. The first step would be a nexus between weapons of mass destruction . . . and terrorism." The second step would be "the western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy."

Franks suggested that a "massive casualty-producing event" might cause "our population to question our own Constitution and begin to militarize our country."

For those tapped into the alternative media world of the Internet, the quotes bounced around faster than a Paris Hilton sex video. Franks, a four-star general, was warning of a future he sees as possible if not likely. Our economy might survive another terrorist assault, so might our mass culture - it'll take more than a nuclear device to shut up Jessica Simpson - but the prognosis for the Constitution is bleak.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman repeated the alarm in a recent column when he said that virulent terrorism "is the most serious threat to open societies, because one more 9/11 and we'll really see an erosion of our civil liberties."

We ain't seen nothing yet, according to the experts. If terrorism's sting is felt again, fascism may be its aftermath.

These pundits and prognosticators are saying out loud what anyone who has been following the government's actions since 9/11 already senses.

Consider how far down this road we've already moved: The passage of the USA Patriot Act has given the government extraordinary powers to spy on Americans without cause. The FBI has been unleashed to surveil Americans engaged in antiwar protests. Immigrants have been secretly detained and deported by the hundreds. And two Americans have been imprisoned indefinitely and without charge as "enemy combatants." (Only last week did the Defense Department agree to grant one of those, Yaser Esam Hamdi, access to a lawyer.) To all this, the courts and Congress have barely blinked.

In Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, we are holding more than 600 prisoners from 42 countries who are being refused prisoner of war status or any other formal legal designation. The Bush administration believes these prisoners should have no access to American courts to challenge the legitimacy of their detention and the president alone, as commander in chief, has the power to decide each man's fate. The Justice Department will argue this in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this term.

In essence, the administration is asserting something unprecedented - that the kinds of emergency powers that might flow to the military on the battlefield should be available in the "war on terrorism."

But combating terrorism is not the same as prosecuting a traditional war. As the administration itself has explained, with terrorism there is no discrete enemy, place of battle or anticipated end to hostilities. Emergency powers take on a very different sheen when the emergency is permanent and everywhere.

Egypt has slouched toward totalitarianism in this way. Since 1981, the country has used fighting terrorism as a justification to repeatedly renew emergency laws that allow the government to hold suspects without charge and try civilians in military courts - with the U.S. State Department objecting the whole way. Conveniently, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has also used the laws to
thwart prodemocracy efforts and dispatch political enemies.

It was the Nine Years' War in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that facilitated the seizure of power by the world reformers who then took control of nearly all human and social development. In 1984, George Orwell described Oceania as in a constant state of war with a changeable enemy who "always represented absolute evil." These inventors of the great dystopias understood the way governments use war and its associative fear and instability to consolidate power. Despotism thrives on insecurity. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs puts safety right behind food, water and sleep. Humans naturally crave stability and are willing to sacrifice values such as liberty in its pursuit.

Within the current government there are those who would exploit this weakness. Before it was leaked to the Center for Public Integrity, a bill dubbed the Patriot Act II was in development at the Justice Department. The draft would have allowed for the stripping of American citizenship and the secret detention of citizens; and popular conjecture had it that Attorney General John Ashcroft was just waiting for another terror attack to roll the bill out. In that moment of national panic, a malleable Congress wouldn't resist.

So, will another major terrorist attack on American soil lead, as Franks warns, to the end of freedom and democracy? There aren't many hopeful signs to the contrary.