Scott, check your antiwar.com email.

And here’s something from the Daily Reckoning

http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Issues/2006/DRUS081806.html

Augustus was a murderous dictator, but fortunately, Virgil knew how to tell a good story.

*** Colleague Lila Rajiva writes that telling a good story has been an imperial priority ever since. Even in the United States, which prides itself on a free press, the government hires propagandists to plant fake news stories in the media. For instance, it paid a P.R. firm to tell the world that Saddam Hussein had WMD hidden in Iraq. And then it used the phony stories to justify its war:

“[P.R. firm] Rendon [was] hired by the CIA in 1990 to help ‘create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power,’ [and] went on to earn a hundred million dollars in government contracts in just the five years following. It got together anti-Saddam militants, gave them a ‘brand’ - the Iraqi National Congress, and advised them on P.R. strategy. It also hand-picked Ahmad Chalabi, the ex-bank con turned peddler of pro-war propaganda, and primed a flyspecked assortment of defectors in the fine art of bluffing polygraphs. All to further neo-conservative plans for creative destruction in the Middle East.”

*** It is too bad Americans don’t know more history. They might have a better idea where their imperial role is leading them. At least, they might pick up a few tips on the way. Like Sir George Murray.

While fighting the French in Egypt in 1801, Murray and his men were in dire need of water. But Murray, having read the classics, knew that Julius Caesar had once had the same problem on practically the same spot (just outside of Alexandria). He checked the copy of Caesar’s writings he always carried around and found that the Romans had stumbled on water at a certain depth underground. He dug in the region and soon had plenty.

Of course, Hitler’s generals studied Napoleon’s Russian campaign carefully too, but they didn’t seem to have learned anything from it. At least one of them had a copy of Caulincourt’s history of the campaign in his greatcoat, when the Russians captured him.

*** History would tell us that in the pantheon of imperial spectacles, the War on Terror is only a crude, silly one. Terror is, after all, only a tactic…the last resort of a weak enemy unable to mount a real threat. As near as we can tell, the War on Terror is actually a kind of P.R. move meant to boost support for military spending, for dismantling civil liberties at home, and for heavily armed meddling abroad.

P.R. is the lie with which the public spectacle starts…then we get the farce…and only finally, the disaster that ends them. Yesterday’s news reminds us which stage we are still in:

“Two fighter jets were scrambled Wednesday to escort a London-to-Washington flight to an emergency landing in Boston after a passenger became so agitated she needed to be restrained, authorities said.

“The federal official for Boston’s Logan International Airport said there was no indication of terrorism and denied reports that the passenger aboard United Flight 923 had a screw driver and a note referring to al-Qaeda.

“Gov. Mitt Romney said the 59-year-old woman was from Vermont and became so claustrophobic and upset that she needed to be restrained…”

Devious, those terrorists.

What is the movie’s “take” on things? What exactly was lied about according to these widows? Housewives strike me as extremely down to earth and practical people, not prone to conspiratorial flights of fancy. What are they all mad about?

The movie is about the government’s obstruction of any real investigation. It does not posit any theories as to what happened and is absolutely nothing like the pieces of crap that pass for 9/11 documentaries out there. I thought it was really good. As I said in the blurb I gave them, the issue is accountability, and there is none.

And yes, Randi Rhodes is pathetic indeed. For the record, I address the problem of Bush calling “them” Islamic fascists, here.