Гор Видал - Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace

TV-watchers have no doubt noted so often that they are no longer aware of how often the interchangeable TV hosts handle anyone who tries to explain why something happened. "Are you suggesting that there was a conspiracy?" A twinkle starts in a pair of bright contact lenses. No matter what the answer, there is a wriggling of the body, followed by a tiny snort and a significant glance into the camera to show that the guest has just been delivered to the studio by flying saucer. This is one way for the public never to understand what actual conspirators — whether in the FBI or on the Supreme Court or toiling for Big Tobacco — are up to. It is also a sure way of keeping information from the public. The function, alas, of Corporate Media.

In fact, at one point, former senator Danforth threatened the recalcitrant FBI director Louis Freeh with a search warrant. It is a pity that he did not get one. He might, in the process, have discovered a bit more about Freeh's membership in Opus Dei (meaning "God's work"), a secretive international Roman Catholic order dedicated to getting its membership into high political, corporate, and religious offices (and perhaps even Heaven, too) in various lands to various ends. Lately, reluctant Medialight was cast on the order when it was discovered that Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent, had been a Russian spy for twenty-two years but also that he and his director, Louis Freeh, in the words of their fellow traveler William Rusher ( The Washington Times , March 15, 2001), "not only [were] both members of the same Roman Catholic Church in suburban Virginia but. also belonged to the local chapter of Opus Dei," Mr. Rusher, once of the devil-may-care National Review , found this "piquant." Opus Dei was founded in 1928 by Jose-Maria Escriva. Its lay godfather, in early years, was the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. One of its latest paladins was the corrupt Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, still in absentia. Although Opus Dei tends to Fascism, the current pope has beatified Escriva, disregarding the caveat of the Spanish theologian Juan Martin Velasco: "We cannot portray as a model of Christian living someone who has served the power of the state [the Fascist Franco] and who used that power to launch his Opus, which he ran with obscure criteria — like a Mafia shrouded in white — not accepting papal magisterium when it failed to coincide with his way of thinking."

Once, when the mysterious Mr. Freeh was asked whether or not he was a member of Opus Dei, he declined to respond, obliging an FBI special agent to reply in his stead. Special Agent John E. Collingwood said, "While I cannot answer your specific questions, I note that you have been 'informed' incorrectly."

It is most disturbing that in the secular United States, a nation whose Constitution is based upon the perpetual separation of church and state, an absolutist religious order not only has placed one of its members at the head of our secret (and largely unaccountable) police but also can now count on the good offices of at least two members of the Supreme Court.

From Newsweek , March 9, 2001:

[Justice Antonin] Scalia is regarded as the embodiment of the Catholic conservatives. While he is not a member of Opus Dei, his wife Maureen has attended Opus Dei's spiritual functions. [while their son], Father Paul Scalia, helped convert Clarence Thomas to Catholicism four years ago. Last month, Thomas gave a fiery speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, to an audience full of Bush Administration officials. In the speech Thomas praised Pope John Paul II for taking unpopular stands.

And to think that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams opposed the presence of the relatively benign Jesuit order in our land of laws if not of God. President Bush has said that Scalia and Thomas are the models for the sort of justices that he would like to appoint in his term of office. Lately, in atonement for his wooing during the election of the fundamentalist Protestants at Bob Jones University, Bush has been "reaching out" to the Roman Catholic far right. He is already solid with fundamentalist Protestants. In fact, his attorney general, J. D. Ashcroft, is a Pentecostal Christian who starts each day at eight with a prayer meeting attended by Justice Department employees eager to be drenched in the blood of the lamb. In 1999, Ashcroft told Bob Jones University graduates that America was founded on religious principles (news to Jefferson et al.) and "we have no king but Jesus."

I have already noted a number of conspiracies that are beginning to register as McVeigh's highly manipulated story moves toward that ghastly word closure , which, in this case, will simply mark a new beginning. The Opus Dei conspiracy is — was? — central to the Justice Department. Then the FBI conspired to withhold documents from the McVeigh defense as well as from the department's alleged master: We the People in Congress Assembled as embodied by former senator Danforth. Finally, the ongoing spontaneous media conspiracy to demonize McVeigh, who acted alone, despite contrary evidence.

But let's return to the FBI conspiracy to cover up its crimes at Waco. Senator Danforth is an honorable man, but then, so was Chief Justice Earl Warren, and the findings of his eponymous commission on the events at Dallas did not, it is said, ever entirely convince even him. On June 1, Danforth told The Washington Post , "I bet that Timothy McVeigh, at some point in time, I don't know when, will be executed and after the execution there will be some box found, somewhere." You are not, Senator, just beating your gums. Also, on June 1, The New York Times ran an AP story in which lawyers for the Branch Davidians claim that when the FBI agents fired upon the cultists they used a type of short assault rifle that was later not tested. Our friend FBI spokesman John Collingwood said that a check of the bureau's records showed that "the shorter-barreled rifle was among the weapons tested." Danforth's response was pretty much, Well, if you say so. He did note, again, that he had got "something less than total cooperation" from the FBI. As H. L. Mencken put it, "[The Department of Justice] has been engaged in sharp practices since the earliest days and remains a fecund source of oppression and corruption today. It is hard to recall an administration in which it was not the center of grave scandal."

Freeh himself seems addicted to dull sharp practices. In 1996 he was the relentless Javert who came down so hard on an Atlanta security guard, Richard Jewell, over the Olympic Games bombing. Jewell was innocent. Even as Freeh sent out for a new hair shirt (Opus Dei members mortify the flesh) and gave the order to build a new guillotine, the FBI lab was found to have routinely bungled investigations (read Tainting Evidence , by J. F, Kelly and P. K. Wearne). Later, Freeh led the battle to prove Wen Ho Lee a Communist spy. Freeh's deranged charges against the blameless Los Alamos scientist were thrown out of court by an enraged federal judge who felt that the FBI had "embarrassed the whole nation." Well, it's always risky, God's work.

Even so, the more one learns about the FBI, the more one realizes that it is a very dangerous place indeed. Kelly and Wearne, in their investigation of its lab work, literally a life-and-death matter for those under investigation, quote two English forensic experts on the subject of the Oklahoma City bombing. Professor Brian Caddy, after a study of the lab's findings: "If these reports are the ones to be presented to the courts as evidence then I am appalled by their structure and information content. The structure of the reports seems designed to confuse the reader rather than help him." Dr. John Lloyd noted, "The reports are purely conclusory in nature. It is impossible to determine from them the chain of custody, on precisely what work has been done on each item." Plainly, the time has come to replace this vast inept and largely unaccountable secret police with a more modest and more efficient bureau to be called "the United States Bureau of Investigation."