Harper Government Says Our North is Being Threatened by a Ghost

"[Authoritarians] will benefit from historical crises that automatically drop increased power into a leader’s lap." Bob Altemeyer

Osama Bin Laden is dead. He has been dead for ten years.

Even Fox News reported on his demise.

When the first videotape of Bin Laden appeared the Bush administration called it a hoax. According to the Daily Telegraph on December 28, 2001:

The recording was dismissed by the Bush administration yesterday as sick propaganda possibly designed to mask the fact the al-Qa'eda leader was already dead.

Bush read Fox News.

And yet every time he got into trouble politically he produced a videotape of a robust ghost with renewed threats of an attack.

In 2004 when he was running against John Kerry , a new tape appeared and his poll numbers jumped 6 points. According to the late Walter Kronkite, on Larry King in 2004:

Consider this: if this was the real Osama, didn't his appearance prove that Bush has wasted two hundred billion dollars and a thousand American lives (plus 100,000 Iraqi lives) without making us any safer from Osama? If the 2004 tape were genuine, wouldn't it prove that Bush is a total failure in his own "war on terror"?

I guess the neocons didn't think it through, but Bush was re-elected, based on fear.

There is a group of American veterans trying to get their government to stop the charade, and Prof David Ray Griffin has written a book, presenting compelling evidence that the videotapes since Bin Laden's death in mid-December 2001, are fakes.

And Bin Laden went to his grave denying any involvement in 9/11. The only "proof" they have are those tapes.

Terrorism is real, but it is not confined to Islamic radicals. Tim McVeigh was not Muslim, nor was the Unabomber.

I don't know if Al-Qaeda actually exists. I don't know who was behind 9/11. I just know that a lot of people have died chasing a ghost.

And now Stephen Harper is trying to defend his enormous increases in military spending chasing the same bloody ghost. And this ghost is now threatening our North. He is a very busy ghost indeed.

The assessment also mentions that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network has identified Canada as a target on several occasions, though any analysis of those threats in the northern context have been struck from the report.

As Peace, Order and Good Government concludes:

Our tax dollars are being laundered through the DND to pay people to sell us on the need for increasing the defence and security budgets in order to meet every problem with a military solution. When articles like this fail to properly identify the sources they rely on, then journalism is just part of the marketing campaign.

No one is immune from Terror, including the North. But this is fear mongering.

Neoconservatism is as much a religion as a political theory. A religion based on myths. And their deity is Leo Strauss.

When Rick Salutin reminded us that Stephen Harper was a neocon and thus a Straussian, he was fired.

I don't know if Harper ever read Strauss, and in fact I rather doubt it. But you can still call yourself a Christian and never have read the Bible.

The late Irving Kristol, himself a Straussian and Bush insider, once stated* that he was deeply indebted to Leo Strauss for an understanding of the “noble lie.”

“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

Are we the children? What level of "truth" are we entitled to?

Footnotes:

*Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss and Straussians Against Shadia Drury and Other Accusers, by Peter Minowitz