This is a great piece from the Huffington Post on how the media can make things disappear even though it is public information.
Fog Facts are things that have been made public, but have somehow disappeared into the mist.
Thereby becoming invisible.
Here are some examples: seven of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers have phoned in to say they were alive.
After the US took over Iraq, including the oil for food program, $19 billion of Iraq’s money disappeared. The Florida recount, completed in 2001, showed that Al Gore got more valid, countable votes than George Bush.
What keeps us oblivious to these things is the failure to frame them, the failure of somebody to push them, and sometimes the deliberate manufacture of fog.
In turn, ignorance of the facts, keeps us from seeing the real picture.
A lot what has happened in the last six years is baffling. Let’s focus on one area, our response to the 9/11 attacks.
The fog, in this case, is made of the things the administration has said. The facts are the things that they have actually done. If someone sells you a car and you notice that it eats grass and milk is coming out of the exhaust, it’s pretty good bet it’s a cow.
The War on Terror does not catch terrorists, especially the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and the people in charge don’t really seem to care. That’s with the expenditure of $200 billion in supplementary spending, over and above the normal cost of maintaining our military and intelligence operations.
Let’s look at what they actually did, instead of what they spoke of.
That would suggest what the real goals are.
The big, obvious thing that the War on Terror permitted was for America to make its imperial lunge.
There were papers that made it clear that this was an administration goal, the most notable one posted at the Project for a New American Century, and there were statements too.
Something more subtle also took place. It is quite dangerous and it is largely unremarked.
The War on Terror permitted the administration to put an end to the concept that everyone is equal before the law.
We suddenly have people who are beneath the laws. They are called terrorists and unlawful combatants.
All it takes to make someone beneath the law is to denounce them. They then have no rights, no phone call, no lawyers. They cannot argue about what they’ve been called. They can be whisked off to a prison and held incommunicado and tortured. Or at least seriously abused.
It appears unlikely that this could happen to you or I or your friends across the street. But with the end of equality before the law, there really is nothing to stop it. Except our belief that our leaders are all honorable men who would not abuse such power.
Along with the creation of a class that is below the law, there is also a new class that is above the law.
The presidential legal staff, including Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee and John Yoo, came up with the theory that when the presidents puts on his commander-in-chief outfit, and acts in that capacity, he is not constrained by any laws. Not international law, not the laws of the United States, not by treaties and not even by the constitution.
Furthermore, anyone that he commands to do things when he is wearing that costume, is also unconstrained by those limits, statutes and laws.
They are all above the law.
In addition, we have created a three tier international system in which there are entire nations below the law: terrorist states, states the harbor terrorists and failed states.
There is, of course, one nation that is above the law. That is the United States.
I would like to take this occasion, my first appearance on the Huffington Post, to offer the first official Fog Facts Challenge!
Give us $200,000,000,000 (two hundred billion dollars) and we will deliver to you Osama bin Laden, and any ten others to be named later, or double your money back!
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