Believe Nothing

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.” – The Buddha

That's fine for him to say. The Buddha lived in a "reality-based community." Not like the senior White House aide who turned up his nose at such thinking, and sneered to Ron Susskind that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

It's talk like that which has deservedly bred a new generation of skeptics, who have been struck by the daily indignities of things not adding up. More often than not, the best sense made of the past four years has come assuming the worst.

Here's the teeniest of examples, from a CBC report last week on the explosives missing from Al Qaqaa:

An Iraqi militant group said Thursday that it had obtained a large amount of explosives missing from a munitions depot near Baghdad.

Its members got the missing explosives by co-ordinating with officers and soldiers "of the American intelligence," said the group, which calls itself Al-Islam's Army Brigades, Al-Karar Brigade.

It's this kind of fall-between-the-cracks news, suggestive of hidden agendas, duplicity and corruption, which is the hallmark of the Bush - let's call it "Experience." It's this which has served to recruit, from those who've been paying attention, several new crack divisions of "conspiracy theorists," locked and loaded with questions, questions, questions.

And it's not just the minutiae that falls between the cracks. Consider the ambiguous role of Pakistan in the "War on Terror."

Pakistan, so the story goes, is America's linchpin ally in Central Asia.

Nevermind that a stronger case can be made for Pakistan's state sponsorship of 9/11 than for Saudi Arabia's.

Nevermind that FBI informant Randy Glass, working an undercover sting, was told by Pakistani ISI operatives that the World Trade Center towers were coming down, and his repeated warnings, including the mention of planes used as weapons, were ignored by federal authorities.

Nevermind that ISI director Mahmood Ahmed ordered al Qaeda's Omar Saeed Sheikh to wire $100,000 to Mohammed Atta.

Nevermind that Omar was both al Qaeda and ISI.

Nevermind that Ahmed was in Washington the week of September 11 meeting with senior officials.

Nevermind that, after the revelation of the wire transfer, Ahmed retired quietly and was never sought for questioning by American authorities.

Nevermind that Ahmed's name was struck from White House transcripts on the rare occassion that the story was mentioned.

Nevermind that best reports place bin Laden in Pakistan, protected by concentric rings of Pakistani forces.

Nevermind that Omar, 9/11 paymaster and ISI operative, hatched the plot to kidnap Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Nevermind that Pearl was murdered not because he was a Jew, nor because his killers "hated freedom," but because he was close to exposing the al Qaeda/ISI symbiosis.

Here's Bernard-Henry Levy's answer to his own question, in Who Killed Daniel Pearl?:

Isn't that, incidentally, what President Pervez Musharraf himself said when, the day after the murder, in an astounding, angry outburst, he exclaimed that Daniel Pearl had been "over intrusive" - too curious, sticking his nose in places he shouldn't have? Didn't Musharraf give it away when, in a comment cited in the Washington Post (among others) on 23 February 2002, he dared to declare, "Perhaps Daniel Pearl was over inquisitive; a mediaperson should be aware of the dangers of getting into dangerous areas; unfortunately, he got over-involved in intelligence games."

So the question then becomes: Why? What had Pearl discovered, or what was he in the process of discovering, that condemned him to death? What is the stolent secret that, for his captors, was out of the question for him to walk away with?

The relationship between al-Qaeda and the ISI, of course. The tight web of relations between the two organizations, the two worlds.

And finally, nevermind that the relationship is actually a triangle, with the ISI serving as the CIA's chief proxy in Central Asia, covertly sponsoring, training and sheltering Islamic terrorists since the Carter administration. It's the ISI which inspired and trained the "fired-up Muslims" for Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard.

Nevermind all that.

Would a John Kerry Administration return America to a reality-based community? Perhaps the semblance of one. But the exegencies of energy security will still drive American policy, Iraq will remain a failed vassal state (or perhaps be carved into three), and new fronts will open in the bogus and perpetual "War on Terror." Still, and undoubtedly, the world would be better spared four more years of Bush. (Even imperial Romans pining for the republic could recognize they were better off under a Trajan than a Caligula. Even Gauls, who wanted neither, could see that.) And at this time, it does look good for Kerry. But that's according to reality-based thinking, and I don't know when America and the world it's taken hostage will be governed by that again. Certainly not in this New American Century. Not while Dick Cheney's still at large.

And here's a head's up if ever there was one: it appears that tomorrow, under the auspices of the Office of National Preparedness, Cheney himself will be managing anti-terror drills which have been scheduled - rather oddly, I think - for Election Day. (And those who've been paying attention well know what Cheney was doing the morning of September 11.)

So one final, pre-election word of advice, borrowed from the movie Seven:

If Dick Cheney's head splits open and a UFO should fly out, I want you to have expected it.