Wonderful interview with the acid-tongued Gore Vidal. He makes me laugh out loud. Unfortunately, the subject matter is rather depressing:
The idea of a supine Congress, the best that corporate money can buy, is
allowing this to go past them without any question, puts me in mind of
my favorite Emperor – and I always talk about Emperors when I do
Pacifica, at least on the West Coast – Tiberius, who was a very
brilliant man, and a patriot in his way. When he became Emperor, the
Senate passed a bill, assuring him that any legislation that he sent
them would be automatically accepted, and become law. He sent back word
and he said, “You’re crazy. Suppose, suppose the Emperor is mad,
suppose he’s ill, suppose there’s a palace coup and somebody else is
sending things in his name? How can you be so certain that what you’re
passing is really his, or should be passed?” They sent it back:
“Anything your Imperial Majesty sends us is law for us.” And Tiberius
said, “How eager they are to be slaves.”
And this is more and more my view of the American people in general.
They’ve allowed an election to be stolen in November 2000. They made no
fuss. We have perpetual war for perpetual peace. We have the
Enemy-of-the-Month Club: one month it’s Noriega, one month it’s Saddam
Hussein, one month it’s Khadafy, currently it’s Osama bin Laden, we
are…
“It’s going to be a loooooong war!” said George W. Bush, with such glee,
’cause it means he has Imperial powers. And it also means that we are
not going to get the Constitution back. Once civil rights are gone,
they are gone. People get out of the habit of them.
Then there was this little nugget that I hadn’t heard before:
I don’t think it’s Osama, I think he’s part of it in some way, but…
The best, the only news you really get, unless you know people who are
actually involved, is from the European press, they do follow this, and
they are not as strictly censored as the American press, where we don’t
get any facts of any kind. But the former foreign minister Mohammed
Hakum, I used to know, of Egypt, he said, look, we’ve been tracking
Osama for years. We know all about him, talking about the Egyptian
Secret Service, as also Mossad had, the CIA has, we know everything
about him. He’s no more capable of pulling off as intricate a stunt as
9-11, organizing it, putting it in place, he said, that’s a major
country’s has done that, with a secret service and modern forces. It
isn’t coming from a bunch of religious fanatics no matter how
dedicated. They can’t do it, any more than Timothy McVeigh all alone
could have made that bomb and detonated it without blowing himself up.
There was a larger group involved. And the FBI had a pretty good idea
who they are.
Who governs? Obviously the oil companies are involved in our
Middle-Eastern capers. And for those reasons we have motive, and we’ve
provoked a response from Moslems. What Mohammed Hakul is suggesting,
was that a country was involved, and he didn’t say which one, but he was
sort of pointing his finger at Pakistan. They had the secret service,
they had the intelligence. And we do know that the head of their secret
service, which is called ISI, a man called Mahmoud Ahmed, happened to be
in Washington by the way at the time of 9-11, he had sent about two
weeks before 9-11, a hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta, the
first suicide bomber who was in the United States. This was
embarrassing when it came out, and he took early resignation, early
retirement.