http://tinyurl.com/4aoelr AMY GOODMAN: Over the past four decades, veteran reporter Robert Scheer has built a reputation as one of the leading journalists in this country, from his time as a war correspondent during Vietnam to his widely read columns today. Over the years, he has interviewed Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Clinton. He has written seven books. His latest is hitting bookstores next week. It’s called The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America. Robert Scheer is also the editor of truthdig.com.


Welcome to Democracy Now!


ROBERT SCHEER: Thank you.


AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. The Pornography of Power—why pornography?


ROBERT SCHEER: Because it’s not the real thing. It’s a trick. It’s like—I liken it to a lap dance. You know, you’re promising something that doesn’t exist. They’re promising security. These defense contractors, lobbyists, politicians, they pretend they’re dealing with real issues in the world, and they’re not. They’re just getting your money, and they’re deceiving you. And at the end of the day, you wonder, how did I end up in this grimy, dangerous place, and forking over ever more money, and it has nothing to do with making me happy. So I use the pornography symbol as example of what they’re doing.


And that’s really what this hijacking of 9/11 is all about. These guys who did the hijacking, what we do know about it is they used $3 implements that you could buy at Home Depot. They didn’t use F-22s, F-35s. They didn’t use subs or anything else. So there’s no enemy in sight. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about was in big trouble. George Bush’s father had cut the defense budget by 30 percent. It was going way down. We were finally going to get a peace dividend. And then they jumped over 9/11. They said, “Wow! This is our new opportunity. Let’s dust off all the ships and planes that are no longer needed, and we’ll build them now.” And we are going deeply into debt to building these things that have absolutely no use. We have this enormous arsenal that, according to the Reaganites, humbled the old Soviet Union. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore. And we’re building, you know, two-and-a-half-billion-dollar-a-piece submarines to fight who?


And every once in awhile they bring up China, and they’re even in trouble on that one now, because it turns out that China and Taiwan are getting along quite famously this week, and they’re talking about a new chapter of peace. And so, we don’t even have the China bogeyman anymore. And the idea that you need submarines to go get guys who are in caves in Afghanistan is absurd.


AMY GOODMAN: You write it costs between $400,000 and $500,000 for Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda to pull off the 9/11 attacks, according to the authoritative estimate of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission appointed by President Bush. But within days of the hijacking, Bush demanded 50,000 times that amount: $20 billion in emergency appropriations from Congress.


ROBERT SCHEER: Right. I think we—I think people have trouble. We all know that from school. What’s $1,000, what’s $1 million, what’s $1 billion, and what’s $1 trillion, you know? And people have trouble keeping track of the money. But the $20 billion that he got right away, that’s nothing. I say, we had a situation where Bush vetoed an extension of child healthcare that would have involved $7 billion, OK? That’s two subs that we don’t need that are built every year. Alright? We have the F-35, an airplane that’s a $300 billion program. Why do we need new planes? The F-22, a $65 billion program. So we are wasting trillions of dollars on this old-fashioned defense budget that benefits Boeing, benefits Lockheed. Everyone knows it’s a scam. Everyone knows there is no military function for this, there’s no national security. And what happened is they got a license to steal. 9/11 was their license to steal.


AMY GOODMAN: You wrote that you almost dedicated the book to Richard Nixon.


ROBERT SCHEER: Right.


AMY GOODMAN: But you didn’t.


ROBERT SCHEER: Yeah. Well, no, he was a horrible man, and he killed a lot of people and should have been tried for war crimes. I don’t want to exonerate Richard Nixon. But the fact is that Richard Nixon was the enemy of the neoconservatives. Richard Nixon recognized that communism was nationalist, that there was not an international communism—that was the old bogeyman justifying the whole military budget—that we could business with communist China and with the Soviets. We did. And this is what spawned the neoconservative movement of the Richard Perles and the Wolfstetters and so forth.


And so, Nixon recognized that imperialism doesn’t pay, that, you know, it’s better to buy the oil on the open market than to try to control—look what’s happened. We control the second biggest pool of oil in the world right now in Iraq, and the price of oil is an all-time high, OK? So what are we getting from it? Meanwhile, there’s China that doesn’t have oil, and they’re going around buying this stuff up. They’re acting like modern-day capitalists, these communist Chinese. And we have forgotten. We’ve returned to a very old-fashioned imperial model. You know, let’s have a big army, let’s have a big military, let’s conquer people, let’s occupy them. It’s not efficient. And the proof of it really is in the price of gas at the pump. You know, this gas and oil in Iraq was supposed to pay for our occupation. Instead, American consumers are now paying for the oil. http://tinyurl.com/4aoelr

Not really an enviable position to be in eh?

when I think of the money we could be spending on issues that would help our people in healthcare and education I get sick to think Americans voted for war and weapons to enhance our ability to kill, WHY IS THIS SO?????

No doubt Gramps.

One day of this war could fund head start for a year!
One day could supply thousands of kids with insurance.
One day would put many cops on the street.

Etc etc.


Iraq is, was and will always be nothing more than lost money. More than a trillions dollars lost.
Consider that it takes a thousand thousand to make a million, a thousand million to make a billion, and athousand billion to make a trillian. When somebody dies because they couldn't get insurance, or a road falls apart from lack of maintenance, or children don't get quality education, or any number of very important social issues are left under or unfunded, blame the Iraq war, the war that did not need to be fought, the war of Lies!

And place it at the door where it belongs BUSH AND THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESS INCLUDING THOSE STUPID DEMS THAT VOTED WITH THEM.

Hey dudes, the money isn't lost. We all know where it went.

Helliburton, BechtHell, Kills-Burns-Ravages, Exxon-Mobil, Blackwater, Greystone, the Carlyle Group, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, damn, a whole swag of others, including the millions for over-armored trucks that some gullible idiots ordered...

Aaaaarggh. All these scumbags.

http://www.rationalenquirer.org/features/portfolio/

http://www.publicintegrity.org/pns/

I thought this was interesting reading, too, although the economics drove me to drink....their conclusions are interesting.
Anyone else read these guys ?

http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/223/

Great links!

Thanks Rou. .

The military industrial complex at its worst!!!! And we march on to the edge!!