"The Committee On The Present Danger"

[kpete]

EVERYONE should know this story and cheney, bush and rumsfeld need to be embarrassed with it

Published on Monday, February 13, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Rumsfeld and Cheney Revive Their 70's Terror Playbook
by Thom Hartmann

............

Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was something nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end, they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission including their old friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.

Wolfowitz's group, known as "Team B," came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology. It could - within a matter of months - be off the coast of New York City with a nuclear warhead.

Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of this powerful new Soviet WMD was unproven - they said the lack of proof proved the "undetectable" sub existed - they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz helped re-organized a group - The Committee on the Present Danger - to promote their worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom many of these same men would later become lobbyists.

And they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the United States, and making themselves and their defense contractor friends richer than most of the kingdoms of the world.


Memory lane-with clues to whats really going on:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0213-28.htm

[Toots]

1. I wonder are these men really just scared shitless cowards or devious in ways

to get off with America's Treasury or maybe both..They behave like total cowards....There is always a boogie man out to get them and America...How could the "Home of the Brave" tolerate such people?

[warren pease]

3. Nah, they're chickenhawks, but not ideological cowards...

Large numbers of Americans, though, seem to have been turned from swaggering self-determinists and rugged individualists into cowering little candy-asses, hiding from those murderous Islamofascists who want to kill them in their beds.

The "home of the brave" has become the "studio apartment of the gutless," partly due to the influence of the 9/11 fairy tale and how it was exploited to impose absolute lock-down social control over a previously diverse population, and partly due to Americans' innate racism and xenophobia, which predisposed them to hate and fear the evil doers from a strange foreign land where Chez Burger King doesn't exist and made it fairly easy to keep them scared and compliant.

But Cheney and Wolfowitz and the rest? They're not necessarily cowards, except where getting drafted is concerned. They're not even originals. They're just recycling the time-honored template for repression and imperialism used most recently by -- at least on a large scale -- Stalinist Russia and the Third Reich. The rules of the game were expressed perfectly by Hermann Goering, Hitler's sybaritic sidekick, during an interview conducted while he was locked in a jail cell in Nuremberg awaiting trial for war crimes:

Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

(Verified by Snopes)

That's what I think, anyway, based on the evidence.


wp

[SpiralHawk]

5. Precisely. Republicon chickenhawks live in fear -- and promote fear

So they can send other people off to fight for them, while they stay at home and whine...

FEAR and profit are what they are about...

[JHB]

2. Wolfie and many of the other neocons had reputations for being...

...very bright and insightful. Those were the sort of words tosses around when other people were describing their work, at least as far as such chatter filtered its way down to my unbenighted ears (mostly via tv talk shows in the 80s).


I think there needs to be a serious re-examination of their work (history and polysci majors looking for a subject for their PhD thesis, take note).

Somehow I suspect their best comparison is with court astrologers of ages past (or the "talks to dead people" John Edwads these days), gaining influence by telling anxious patron what it wants deep-down to hear. (In this case, telling conservatives that all their most paranoid fantasies about Soviet power were right, and that liberal solutions would capitulate to The Enemy.)

[IDemo]

4. Of course we need a "Committee On The Present Danger"

But Cheney, Bush and company should be the present dangers in question.