As with so many things under the Bush administration, the political reality of what had happened was transparent, but the political reporting remained vague. The writing was already on the wall for members of the power elite, and folks were starting to hide from their duty behind the Voltaire phrase that it was a dangerous thing to be right when your country was wrong.

Accordingly, the mainstream media pretended not to notice that the worthies who should have impeded the unconstitutional Bush League power grab had been threatened with the kind of diseased death that befell several of their staffers. Congress itself was closed for a week and its offices were taken over by federal forces in hazmat suits. When staffers finally returned, they supposed that their sensitive files had been gone over by the FBI, and that whatever could be used to harm them was now in the possession of the “unitary executive,” as Bush Leaguers began to call their boy George.

Later the same mainstream media didn’t report much or investigate at all when the official story began to fall apart. It turned out that all the various anthrax spores used in all the various anthrax attacks had originated from the same batch — at the Defense Department’s biowarfare facility in Fort Dietrich, Maryland. Nor did hesitant reporters pay much attention when it turned out that the “Muslim terrorists” said to have sent the poisoned letters — promising death to America, death to Israel and praise to Allah — were a fabrication by Christians or Jews, a Neocon “false flag” operation to help the Bush League expand its newfangled “Global War on Terror.”

The mainstream media refused to report all the damning details; the FBI political police refused to answer questions about them; and our Congress refused to ask questions, beginning a long slide by all these parties from doing their duty that continues to this very day, with the sudden appearance of an FBI solution of the anthrax attacks.

Friday FBI officials somehow kept straight faces as they announced that Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, an award-winning employee at Fort Dietrich, had become the focus of their seven-year do-nothing investigation. He was very near to being formally charged with the crime, they averred. Alas, they added after a pause, Dr. Ivins had committed suicide rather than face prosecution. That was too bad, because they really had wanted to tell us the truth of the anthrax attacks between 9/11 and the Patriot Act — attacks that had just happened to help the Bush administration achieve its political goals.

DELETE the PRESS

I have always thought that nonmilitary folks were being a bit too cute with their pronouncements that military intelligence is an oxymoron. Though the American officer corps has not frequently profited from the kind of first-rate minds so prominent in European and especially ancient history, we are no dummies. The first thing we learned in military intelligence is the last thing I forget: trust no one.

Using this wise dictum to trust no one, a couple of decades ago I became an Army specialist in the erstwhile USSR, absorbing its history, language and literature. I did it all from an abundance of patriotism and through the generosity of the American taxpayer. Although I loved the Russian people, generally speaking, I didn’t believe a word of the crap the Russian government was telling its citizens through its official media.

Time has made me older, wiser and sadder. Nowadays I take the same view of our current government and its official media that I once took of the Soviet Union’s nomenklatura and their vicious apparatchiki — which is that they are a self-serving elite who feel free to misinform or murder others to achieve their political purpose. If there is any truth to be had in contemporary America, then it must be found in the samizdat of the Internet.

Those who wish to understand human affairs and national history — no matter who the person or what the country — would do well to look at them with my jaded perspective. Granted, skepticism and cynicism are dark lenses through which to perceive the world, but when we wear them, we won’t be stunned and stupefied by the brilliance of official bullshit.

The word for the wise: the FBI attempt to make Bruce E. Ivins the Lee Harvey Oswald of the anthrax attacks is obscurantism. Rather than swallowing a shallow “mad scientist” story, consider another: The Bush League has decided that, in these waning days of his reign, their King George needs to clean up his mess of dirty operations, and all the king’s men in the FBI are simply wiping up the mess by wiping out a patsy, then you pronouncing the case closed.

In this day of the Internet, the inquisitive reader can find many parallels to Dr. Ivins. Below is a list of the “top 10 hits” that I have observed and written about, often after being contacted by the victims’ families. They are listed according to the date of their assassinations and can be found in my archives:

Senator Paul Wellstone, October 25, 2002
Rachel Corrie, March 16, 2003
Dr. David Kelly, July 17, 2003
Specialist Alyssa Peterson, September 15, 2003
Margie Schroedinger, September 22, 2003
Specialist Pat Tillman, April 22, 2004
Colonel Ted Westhusing, June 5, 2005
David Rosenbaum, January 6, 2006
General William Odom, May 30, 2008
Tim Russert, June 13, 2008

The most fun thing? Definitely the women.
— Soldier X

An anonymous man wearing a US Special Forces T-shirt is a war criminal, if his three-minute YouTube interview is to be believed. In it, he claims to have taken part in routine torture of Iraqis — Hajji’s in soldier slang — in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, and to have been part of a scheme with other guards to prostitute a 15-year-old Iraqi girl who later hung herself.

YouTube continues to be the worst nightmare of a White House that has practiced infowar — the militarization of information — since 9/11. I heartily encourage each of my readers to view the clip, then make his or her own decision as to whether or not to believe that Soldier X is in earnest, as my military contacts and I believe, or is part of a well-acted hoax, as Bush apologists are arguing.

If Soldier X is telling the truth, he isn’t telling us anything new. In April 2004, American journalist Seymour Hersh was writing in articles and saying in interviews that the shocking treatment of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, proved by photographs, was systemic, encouraged and enabled by the CIA, and was expressly okay-ed by the Bush administration.

The CIA showed us a lot of shit, man.
– Soldier X

It bears remembering that the US government and the US media collaborated to keep the vast majority of the photographic record detailing torture, rape and murder from the American people and the international community. While endless images of 9/11 were completely kosher for broadcast and print by a cheerleader media that took its signals from a cheerleader- in-chief, the images of our war crimes were not.

It all started at Guantanamo Bay, apparently, and was exported to Abu Ghraib in September 2003, along with Major General Geoffrey Miller, the Gitmo commandant who was willing to teach the special touch to our soldiers in Iraq. Specialist Alyssa Peterson, a former Mormon missionary and military intelligence soldier serving in the US detention apparatus in Iraq, made strong objections to what she saw after Miller took charge in Iraq — and died from a shot in the head a few days later. Military officials at first called it a weapons discharge, then later labeled it a suicide.

A few days earlier, Captain James Yee, a veteran of the first Iraq war and West Point graduate, had been arrested and detained as he traveled to the US from Gitmo, where he was serving as a Muslim chaplain. The military would later release and discharge him without charges, after months of media repetition of the official line, which was that he was a traitor. When he was arrested I wrote an e-mail to my friend Chase Untermeyer, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, guessing that the chaplain was trying to make a report of abuses. Ever cynical, I even suggested that torture and sexual degradation were at the bottom of it all — and am sorry to find that I was right. Citizens who have heard ad nauseum that there’s no way we could have seen Abu Ghraib coming should read my e-mail to Untermeyer.

What’s the big deal about making a Hajji walk around like a dog and bark?
– Soldier X

Infowar is still being waged against the American people by my former colleagues in military public affairs and the mainstream media. Accordingly, not one in a hundred Americans has a clue that the five-year war in Iraq, once sold to us as a spring fling to quickly snatch up WMD’s and liberate a pro-US Iraqi people, has resulted in around one million Iraqi dead and four million Iraqi refugees. Like the misinformed masses of Orwell’s Oceania, most Americans don’t even realize that the current official objective of fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq wasn’t always the objective.

One of the lessons of Abu Ghraib is that we are now fighting a genocidal war against Arabs for oil, just as we once fought a genocidal war against Indians for land. Soldier X, who believes that all Arabs are guilty, is a brutal reminder of the innumerable soldiers who once believed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Like the Indians of yesteryear, the Arabs of today have what we want. In such cases, it has always been necessary for our nation to be deceived into thinking that extermination is self defense, and that the human beings we are exterminating aren’t very human anyway.

Another lesson of Abu Ghraib is that torture, rape and murder are things that can quite easily be taught to the boy or girl next door. There is no immunity in the American character to war crime — nor is there any assurance that what we practice abroad will not be practiced against us at home. In the last week, President George Bush has argued the benefits of torture; presidential candidate Senator John McCain has decided that his former dislike of torture was misplaced; Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to define waterboarding as torture; and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has expressed the opinion that torture is not unconstitutional. General Sherman was right when he said that war was hell, and these are the devils who guide us to it as they order lesser demons like Soldier X to do their bidding.

The most persuasive anti-Nazi I ever knew was my mentor, Dr. Peter W. Guenther, who believed that Nazism was monstrous at every level. As a professor of humanities, he thought it was both inhumane and inhuman. As a professor of art history he thought its aesthetics were artless histrionics. He readily granted that his intellectual opinions were molded by his personal experiences. As a German veteran of World War II, he regretted the loss of his youth, the waste of his friends’ lives and the devastation that they had inflicted on others. He held Hitler accountable for all of this — after all, it was Hitler who had drafted them into the war. He had served from 1939 to 1945, from Poland to Norway to France to Russia. He once quipped that before every one of their invasions their leaders said they were fighting for national defense, but after the shooting started every soldier on every side believed that he was fighting for his own self-defense.

By the time of the Iraq war he was retired from academe, and I was writing military analysis for media. As US forces began storming up the Euphrates Valley in the spring of 2003, hell-bent on Baghdad, we began to discuss the limited American mobilized manpower and materiel, and the overall limitations of blitz tactics. Guided by his insights, I published a then-radical op-ed in the Houston Chronicle that predicted a quicksand war in Iraq, and maybe a world war as a result of it.

As the easy war promised us by the Bush administration wore on into the summer of 2003, Dr. Guenther and I began to note that there were more similarities between Post-9/11 America and Third Reich Germany than just over-reliance on Blitzkrieg tactics. We finally determined that the two nations were following parallel political courses. Most disturbing for my mentor, who had become a patriotic American citizen after World War II, was the painful conclusion that our American president, with his global war for a New American Century, was just another German fuhrer, with a world war for a Thousand Year Reich. “This is a bad copy of a bad original,” he said.

“Drang Nach Ost” — The Eastern Offensive

George W. Bush came into office with a secret war plan and no excuse to implement it — just as Hitler had come into office in 1933 with the same predicament. Both of them wanted the prize of Middle Eastern oil. In Hitler’s case that meant going through “Judeo-Bolshevik” Russia on the way, while in Bush’s case that meant going through “Islamo-Fascist” Iraq. In Hitler’s case the guiding document was Mein Kampf, while in Bush’s case there were two. A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm was presented to the Israeli government in 1996 by American neocons Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and David Wurmser, among others. Restructuring America’s Defenses was presented to the American government in 2000. Its arguments mirrored the Israeli document, and had been drawn up by the neocons as well. In 2001 Feith, Perle and Wurmser became key Bush administration members.

Neither Hitler’s nor Bush’s plans for world dominance could have been pursued without some good luck, though. Both leaders entered office with over half their nations opposing them, and an avid opposition that wanted to pull them down. Hitler’s good luck came with the Reichstag fire, blamed on Jewish Communists, which mobilized his fatherland to rally behind him. Bush’s good luck happened on 9/11, blamed on Muslim Fundamentalists, which mobilized his homeland to rally behind him.

In both cases, their followers smiled at their good luck, and began their new order of things. Hitler quickly instituted an Enabling Act for the protection of the German people, slated for expiration in five years, which was quietly continued. Bush quickly instituted a Patriot Act for the protection of the American people, slated for expiration in five years, which was quietly continued. Hitler created the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) to further protect the German people, while Bush created the Homeland Security Agency (Homeseca) to do the same for the American people.

“Führer Prinzip” — The Unitary Executive

Both leaders were believers in the authoritarian concept. A few weeks before assuming office, Bush said outright that he thought dictatorship would be a fine form of government, if he could be the dictator. They both believed that power should come from above and obedience should come from below, and they offered protection in exchange for loyalty. Thus no one was surprised when Hermann Goering made a fortune helping to run Germany, just as no one was surprised when Irving “Scooter” Libby received a pardon for his pro-Bush political crimes in America.

Both leaders supplemented their new security police and security acts with concentration camps such as Dachau and Gitmo, initially designed for only a small percentage of national enemies. Both dispensed with international rules and regulations in their treatment of enemies in those installations, and applied a wide variety of innovative persuasive techniques to extract information and obtain confessions. The lessons learned in these proto-type camps proved to be invaluable in later establishments such as Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib.

Both leaders relied on agreeable legislatures. In Germany the Reichstag cheered enthusiastically as it endorsed the increase in police powers, the reduction in civil rights and the national march to world war. In America Congress did the same things, but in more subdued fashion, even with a show of dissent. In Germany, Hitler declared a dictatorship under Article 48, provided by the old Weimar Constitution for the event of a national emergency. In America Bush recently created National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51), thereby legalizing a dictatorship in the event of a national emergency.

“Gott Mit Uns” — God’s on Our Side

Neither Hitler nor Bush could have effected their radical plans without a party full of functionaries and a compliant national media, of course. Hitler relied on his “Nazi” party, a word derived from the name of his National Socialist organization. He had a brilliant individual named Joseph Goebbels to control the Reich Propaganda Ministry and rally the public behind Nazi policies. Bush relied on his “Nozi” party, a word derived from “Zionism,” with the first four letters Z-i-o-n remixed into N-o-z-i. He had a brilliant cartel of Zionists to control the American Mainstream Media and rally the public behind Nozi policies.

The greatest accomplishment of both the Nazi and Nozi parties was convincing themselves and their citizens that they were not conspirators of any sort, but rather the victims of an international conspiracy. The Nazi party never tired of saying that Judeo-Communism was the hidden enemy, against which all the powers of a determined fatherland had to be directed, and that they were the targets of anti-German propaganda. The Nozi party never tires of saying that Islamo-Fascism is the hidden enemy, against which all the powers of a determined homeland have to be directed, and that they are the targets of anti-Semitic propaganda.

The rest of the world didn’t buy the pro-war propaganda from Germany’s Nazis three generations ago, and they don’t buy it from America’s Nozis three generations later. The way the rest of the world sees it, what we have been taught to call the axis of evil is not so dangerous to the world as the axis of America and Israel. They see American naval forces massing in the name of national defense against Iran, and they remember Iraq. They see Israeli air forces attacking Syria, and they remember Lebanon. The rest of the world knows who we have become, even if we don’t.

Peter Guenther’s Epilogue: He died in 2005, and was followed by his wife Andrea six months later. They had been married for 58 years, and had been American citizens for more than 50. For more about my friendship with them, refer to the first and fourth volumes of my 2003 Iraq war correspondence here.