The West Nile Story Orchestrating Hysteria & Secrecy in the Run-Up to 9/11 by Mitchel Cohen
INTRODUCTION
"We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a New World Order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations."
- U.S. President George H.W. Bush September 11, 1990
Erased from consciousness in the barrage of misinformation that has congealed into what today we in the United States know simply as "9/11" is the memory of 9/11's antecedents. Yes, I'm talking in part about 1938's 9/11 (November 9th in Europe) -- Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass -- the date the Nazis in Germany began "the Holocaust" in earnest, with the support of such stellar U.S. corporations as Dupont, General Motors and Ford, who made tanks for the Nazis.
For decades GM and Ford received reparations from the U.S. government for bombing their factories in Germany in World War II. On Europe's 9/11 in 1938, the "good Germans" at the time ransacked Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues, burned more than one thousand schuls to the ground, and beat and arrested thousands of Jews, shipping them to concentration camps.
I am also referring to 1973's 9/11, when Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a U.S.-backed coup, assassinated Chile's elected socialist President Salvador Allende and established a military dictatorship. Thousands were executed. Some of those same U.S. corporations were involved here as well.
And then there was 1990's 9/11, when U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush declared his "New World Order" in a speech before the US Congress. Using words like "democracy," "peace" and "law," Bush laid-out his sales pitch for raining thousands of tons of napalm, air-fuel explosives, phosphorous bombs, cluster bombs and uranium-encased shells upon the sovereign people of Iraq led by his former ally, Saddam Hussein, who had been installed as Iraq's president the previous decade with the help of the CIA.
Each of those 9/11's were used to rationalize new mechanisms of exploitation and control, and force recalcitrant populations to accept global capital's reshaping of whole areas of the world in the image of neoliberalism and the New World Economic Order. General Colin Powell, later to become President Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, correctly portrayed the government's position in fending off antiwar opposition to Bush's so-called "humanitarian" mission in Somalia, headquartered at Conoco's offices, early in the 1990s: "To pull out of Somalia would be devastating to our hopes for the New World Order ..."
Clinton -- who had been regularly bombing Iraq all through his presidency with missiles encased in so-called "depleted" uranium (Clinton also used DU weapons extensively in his bombardment of Yugoslavia, and they have since become standard issue in the U.S. arsenal) -- signed a top secret directive authorizing first use of nuclear weapons against Iraq and in 1998 ordered two Los Angeles class submarines carrying Tomahawk missiles equipped with nuclear warheads to the Persian Gulf.
Which brings us to September 11, 2001. One cannot fully appreciate the attacks on civil liberties following 9/11 unless one uses a longer lens to examine the proposals and legislation that had already been drafted prior to that horrible morning. For a number of years, major proposals such as the neo-conservative "Program for a New American Century" had already been circulating. So had earlier versions of the USA Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, which did away with habeas corpus and succeeded in installing secret tribunals in cases where foreigners were accused of acts of terrorism. The Model Emergency Health Powers Act -- which has met with great resistance and has not yet been fully entered into law -- would extend federal government control over U.S. citizens themselves by empowering a non-elected "czar" to override state health laws and declare "health emergencies," construct "quarantine" camps, require mandatory vaccinations using untested and genetically engineered vaccines, and round up those said to have contracted the "emergency disease" as well as those who refused to be vaccinated for it. Bits and pieces were implemented here and there but the sponsors would first need to override the growing movements against corporate pollution, genetic engineering of crops and vaccines, forced "emergency" vaccinations, corporate farming and the mass spraying of pesticides -- a resistance that has stood in the way of a few corporations amassing even greater profits. Try as it might, not even the events of 9/11 have allowed the U.S. government to fully implement its whole package of repressive legislation. The resistance to repressive legislation -- as slight as it may be -- stands in tribute to the American people's legitimate distrust of their government and the corporations it represents, and their organized resistance to portions of the repressive agenda.
It was in this context that in August 1999, scientists working at the Bronx Zoo and associated with a Level 3 government lab on Plum Island, New York, devoted to animal diseases and biowarfare research, disclosed that clusters of birds had died from a mosquito-borne viral disease previously unknown in the U.S. The scientists and government officials feared that the virus -- West Nile -- might attack human beings and present a serious health emergency. West Nile became the first in an annual train of scary disasters that, they said, would require emergency measures that bypassed normal civil liberties protections. In lockstep, newspapers and TV orchestrated panic over West Nile, Anthrax, Smallpox, SARS, Swine Flu, and Avian Flu -- most of which hit after 9/11. Each go-round enabled the sponsors of the legislation to chip away at public opposition to the terms contained in them, with each disease adding another nail into the Bill of Rights' coffin.
Calls for the overriding of "inconvenient" civil liberties took on new urgency under the pretext of preparation for bioterror attacks. In fact, a full-scale drill simulating a bio-chemical attack had been slated for New York City on the morning of September 12, 2001, using Pier 92 as the command center. Many FEMA and other officials had been deployed to the city on September 10th and some say they were already present at Pier 92, the 9/11 command center, on the morning of 9/11.(1) Once 9/11 occurred, Bush and Cheney were given carte blanche to do whatever they desired.
Nor was it just Bush and Cheney. Emergency legislation was assigned to and developed by secretive think-tanks working closely with key members of Congress. Before 9/11, Democrats as well as Republicans were having difficulty blindfolding and handcuffing the U.S. Constitution. Condoleeza Rice and her fellow PNAC conspirators' noted favorably that it would take "a new Pearl Harbor" to get past the public resistance, even though provisions in such legislation as the USA Patriot Act, Homeland Security Act, Model Emergency Health Powers Act and others that sought to curtail civil liberties had already been leaking into the body politic before 9/11. But it took 9/11 -- that "new Pearl Harbor" -- to cement many of them into place.
The official 9/11 story presented a series of twistories that are now stitched into the collective unconscious of the "New American Century." What I tell here is the story of one of those forgotten but crucial threads, and the importance of popular ecological resistance movements in its unraveling.
NOTES
1. NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, testimony to the 9/11 Commission. Giuliani's testimony on May 18-19, 2004, is strangely the only testimony missing from the Commission website, but it available in full at the WNYC radio website at: <http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/28147>http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/28147. Here is part of what Giuliani said about the Project TRIPOD bioterror drill slated for Sept. 12, 2001: "The reason Pier 92 was selected as a command center was because on the next day, on September 12, Pier 92 was going to have a drill, it had hundreds of people here, from FEMA, from the Federal Government, from the State, from the State Emergency Management Office, and they were getting ready for a drill for biochemical attack. So that was gonna be the place they were going to have the drill. The equipment was already there, so we were able to establish a command center there, within three days, that was two and a half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center. And it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed." An Office of Emergency Management press release mentions that the TRIPOD exercise was supported by "The Office of Justice Programs, through the Office for Domestic Preparedness". The Office for Domestic Preparedness was the effort assigned to Dick Cheney by George W. Bush on May 8, 2001.
Mitchel Cohen is the coordinator of the No Spray Coalition against toxic pesticides, an organizer with the Brooklyn Greens/Green Party, and the Chair of the WBAI (99.5 FM) Local Station Board*.
* for ID purposes only
Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in. ~ Leonard Cohen