By Judge Mark Plawecki
The Truman Show, America's longest running program of fear, this week quietly celebrated its 65th birthday. Condor's mnemonically unimpaired readers will recall that on Feb. 27, 1947, Michigan GOP Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Democratic President Harry Truman that the only way to get a massive military buildup a mere eighteen months after World War II's end was to "scare hell" out of the country. "Give 'em Hell" Harry promptly obliged; his Truman Doctrine speech pledged to fight communism anywhere and everywhere on earth.
The Show's ratings took a temporary hit in 1991 (with the Soviet Union collapse), creating some panic among MICMAC* officials, but al-Qaeda's appearance later in the decade assured long term commitments from all concerned Show sponsors.
A curious twist occurred in Episode 780 (that's one for each month since early 1947). On Feb. 9, NBC reported a story that Israel's secret service Mossad has collaborated with Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian dissident group, to assassinate five Iranian scientists since 2007. These attacks allegedly were done to help dissuade Iran from building nuclear weapons, long a defining goal of Israeli foreign policy. Two high ranking U.S. officials anonymously confirmed the story.
Assassinating Iranian scientists in this fashion poses a small technical problem for the Israelis and their public cheerleaders in the U.S. (Congress and mainstream media). According to the U.S. State Department, MEK is an officially designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Founded in the 1960s on Marxist and anti-Western principles, MEK has been long associated with violent incidents and cult-like behavior. It has reportedly killed U.S. military advisors and attacked U.S. diplomats.
Strangely, MEK's terrorist tag has not prevented some high profile U.S. politicians from speaking on its behalf. The Christian Science Monitor reported last August that former governors Ed Rendell (PA) and Howard Dean (VT), retired General Wesley Clark, ex-NYC mayor Rudy Guiliani, and Bush II CIA Director Michael Hayden were among those receiving from $10,000 to $50,000 per speech to preach the Gospel of MEK Reformation. Clark and Guiliani were predictably seen last Friday on CNN's "Erin Burnett Outfront" trumpeting the Iranian nuclear threat. Unfortunately for their credibility, the New York Times reported the next day that the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies still says there is no hard evidence Iran is working on building nukes.
The State Department is in a difficult position. It can 1) cave in to the highly paid shills and take MEK off the Terror list, which will infuriate legitimate Iranian dissident groups like the Green Movement (the well publicized 2009 Tehran protesters); 2) prosecute the likes of Dean and Guiliani for providing material support to terrorists (about as likely as the Cubs winning the 2012 World Series); or 3) teach Americans how to distinguish between good and bad terrorists. We are well trained to know that other designated FTOs Hezbollah and Hamas are bad, so we need indoctrination as to why a cult-like band of loonies with deep pockets who routinely killed Americans in the not-so-distant past are now good.
The Truman Show is presently showing noticeable signs of the rapidly aging process. Soon senility may set in among the scriptwriters. Dean, in response to NBC's story, astonishingly stated, "Either the source committed treason, or committed the usual Washington sin of lying to the press." In other words, if the report is accurate (and only MEK has denied it) we have a former Presidential candidate opining it is treason for U.S. officials to leak the truth about one foreign nation's assassinations of another's scientists, assassinations which are escalating the possibility of U.S. involvement into yet another Middle East war. Since we may presume Dean is currently incapable of coherent foreign policy thought, it is obvious his scriptwriters have glaring holes in their narrative. Perhaps, before $5 per gallon gas becomes normalized here, a fourth option, that of pulling the plug on this long-running farcical serial, may be in order. Who knows, replacing it with a program based on the quaint old Constitution might attract some loyal viewers, too.
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*Former MicMac League pitcher Mark J. Plawecki is a 20th District Court judge. Not realizing (when he played) what MICMAC stood for, he has belatedly deduced it to mean the Military Industrial Congressional Media Academic Complex.
Published: Wed, Feb 29, 2012
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