ONE OF THE WAYS we can tell we're being lied to is by noticing how the official version of the story changes over time.
Consider Waco. Recent revelations about what happened there stand in stark contrast to what we were told at the time of the siege. Not only have the so-called drug lab and the reputed .50 caliber machine gun failed to show up, but also the telltale front door has disappeared in a cloud of smoke and mirrors – right along with key documents, the Posse Commitatus Act, great bleeding chunks of the Bill of Rights, and shreds of America's already badly tattered honor.
In this new context, even the widely televised, but never cross-examined, testimony of a single witness to Koresh's alleged sex with an underage neighbor looks more and more like the testimony of that other sobbing teenage girl we were shown over and over again on TV. You remember her, don't you? The one who said the Iraqis massacred premature Kuwaiti babies to ease their theft of the hospital's incubators. Yeah, that one, the one who it turned out later was lying through her teeth.
This stuff is no surprise to those of us who notice how the official version of so many stories so often changes over time. We've come to expect it. The massacre at Waco itself should have been no surprise, not after what happened to MOVE. While the left has championed one and the right has championed the other, they are precisely and exactly the same cause. Right wing, left wing, same bird.
Even if you've never heard of MOVE, you're probably familiar with the fact that three days before those babies were torched at Mount Carmel, two of the officers who beat Rodney King were finally convicted in a second trial. This was quite a concession. After the first trial 52 cities experienced what the media euphemistically called "racial unrest," even when some of it happened in virtually all-white Ames, Iowa. Racial unrest? Not hardly.
That was a spontaneous mass uprising against the police. I personally witnessed incidents in two separate California cities, Pinole and San Francisco. Antipolice sentiment runs deep in this country. Even a fool knows that the cops on TV and the cops in the rearview mirror are as different as different can be. Anyone who thinks that minorities are the only ones likely to know someone who has been a victim of police brutality simply hasn't been asking around.
Nope. It was an uprising all right, and Uncle Sam backed down. He changed his story and slapped those two cops on the wrist. Then, three days later, to prove to the world he could still get it up, he burned down a church full of women and children and machine-gunned the ones who tried to escape out the back door – where the lapdog news cameras couldn't see. Shades of My Lai – "We had to destroy the children in order to save them."
Just as Waco was no surprise to those who knew about MOVE, and MOVE no surprise to those who knew about My Lai, so My Lai was no surprise to anyone who knew about Wounded Knee, nor was Wounded Knee a surprise to anyone who knew about the massacre at Sand Creek on November 29 and 30, 1864. Typically, most of the victims were women and children.
Or consider May 26, 1637. On that day, a body of Connecticut militiamen
with sizable Narraganset Indian reinforcements overran a Peqout village on the Mystic River just as its inhabitants sat down to eat, and drove those it didn't slaughter outright into the frozen swamp to die of exposure. More than 1,000 died. Massacring people is as American as apple pie and Chevrolet. A solid case could be made that anyone who heard what the Crusaders did at Acre – or the British in Ireland – could have seen it all coming.
We can learn from history if we're paying attention. First learn this: History is the propaganda of victors, and victors lie. But sometimes, years later, truth seeps out. Sometimes it surprises even the most jaded of disinformation buffs.
Recently, a Korean news article appeared online that quoted a Japanese daily saying that in the last days of WWII, Japan tested its own atomic bomb on an islet of the Korean coast. That is most definitely not what they taught me in school. Is that what they taught you in school? I don't think so.
Of course, they left out so much else that I really shouldn't have been surprised at all. But I was. Or was I? Perhaps I was merely astounded. I am astounded. Is there no limit to the breadth and the depth of the cover-up we call our government? I scoured the news for weeks looking for a denial. None appeared. Bigger surprise: A couple weeks later I was thumbing through the newest catalog of Amok, a mail-order book distributor. What do I find? There's a book out on the subject!
Now we hear about it! It kinda makes you wonder what our grandkids will find out 50 years from now about what's really going on right now, today, to us. I've noticed a pattern emerging over the years in the way in which Uncle Sam owns up to his lies, when at all. The big stuff he breaks to us gently, a little at a time. Nuclear warfare is big stuff, really big stuff.
In 1944 there was a tremendous explosion at Port Chicago in Contra Costa County. The navy said an ammunition ship had exploded as it was being loaded. More than two 200 sailors were killed. Most were African Americans.
Seventeen years ago – and 18 years after the fact – articles written by Robert L. Allen and Peter Vogel as published in The Black Scholar, Journal of Black Studies and Research 13, nos. 2 and 3, (spring 1982), presented a very convincing case that the explosion was no accident but a test of an early form of the atomic bomb. One too big to be carried by plane, one designed to be delivered to Japanese port cities by ships remotely controlled or guided by a suicide crew. They didn't teach us that in school, either. The Black Scholar is an obscure journal. Even I, who try to pay attention to such things, missed out on this one until 1988, when I saw it in Mae Brussell's files.
The mass media never picked up the story at all. At least now it's online, though certainly not available through every search engine. Uncle Sam stands by his version, at least so far.
But who knows, maybe one day he'll cop even to this one. Hell, he's already copped to the fact that a man claiming to be, but bearing no physical resemblance to, Lee Harvey Oswald was put under surveillance by the CIA in Mexico City. People used to be called clinically paranoid for believing in that one. And lately he's been creeping dangerously close to admitting he burned all those babies in Waco. If he'll admit to that, anything is possible.
After all, after enough time had passed, he admitted to My Lai, Wounded Knee, and Sand Creek. At this rate I wouldn't be surprised even if someday they tell us we actually lost WWII. It's what I've been saying for years. Sooner or later, one way or the other, truth will out.
One truth about state-sponsored terrorism is that sometimes mass murder just isn't necessary. Sometimes a single act of mayhem will suffice. As Sun Tzu said 2,500 years ago, "Kill one scare ten. Kill ten scare a thousand."
Which brings us to the Bari case. On May 24, 1990, environmental and labor activist Judi Bari was driving from my friend's place to my other friend's place when a bomb went off in her car.
That's a little too close to home for my taste.
When somebody gets car bombed while driving from your friend's place to your other friend's place, you're supposed to do something about it. Aside from that, you'd better do something about it. You might be next. What I decided to do about it, among other things, was to tell you. What you decide to do about it is up to you.
I've been telling people about it since it happened. I try to keep up-to-date. Every once in a while I get to tell that I heard a bit of good news. On the whole the news has been bad. Judi was crippled by the bomb. She later died of what some of us believe was artificially induced cancer. The FBI investigation turned into a witch hunt. The FBI at first charged Judi with having made the bomb herself. Later the story changed. Surprise! Then Judi sued. Then Judi's lawsuit against the FBI was thrown out of court. No surprise.
But all is not lost. Not yet, anyway. A bit of good news just happened. I'd like to pass it along. On Friday, Sept. 24, 1999, a federal appeals court reinstated claims that Oakland police and the FBI conspired to falsely accuse Judi Bari of responsibility for her own car bombing.
A three-judge panel ruled that several FBI agents, along with three Oakland police investigators, aren't entitled to "qualified immunity," a liability exemption generally granted to law enforcement authorities in their routine handling of criminal investigations. It would be nice if all the right-wingers who never said a word about what happened to MOVE, would get just as worked up over what the FBI and/or their friends did to Judi Bari as they are over what the FBI did at Waco.
It would be even nicer if all the left-wingers who stuck up for MOVE, but have been so shamefully silent about the more recent atrocities, would forgive the Right, welcome their support, and finally speak up about the atrocities at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
There is a reason that forces strive – in media, in classrooms, in churches and temples – to keep us divided into wings, into races, religions, genders and persuasions. Julius Caesar summed it up in the very first sentence of his account of how, though woefully outnumbered and completely surrounded, he nonetheless managed to conquer Gaul: "All Gaul is divided."
So are we. There's a lesson to be learned here. All Gaul was divided. And then it wasn't Gaul any more. It was Rome. We can learn from our history. We can change the story ourselves. Life's tale isn't written – it's improvised. We make it up as we go along. It doesn't have to end like this, not with a bang but a bleat. We could be somebody. We could be contenders. But only if we unite. Forget the wings. Look out for the claws and the droppings.
