What's the answer to this?
Glenn Greenwald
Sunday Aug. 10, 2008 07:12 EDT


A commenter here on Friday noted what appears to be a rather glaring contradiction in the case against Bruce Ivins. In response to criticisms that the FBI's case contains no evidence placing Ivins in New Jersey, where the anthrax letters were sent, The Washington Post published an article -- headlined "New Details Show Anthrax Suspect Away On Key Day" -- which, based on leaks from "government sources briefed on the case," purported to describe evidence about Bruce Ivins' whereabouts on September 17 -- the day the FBI says the first batch of anthrax letters were mailed from a Princeton, New Jersey mailbox. The Post reported:

A partial log of Ivins's work hours shows that he worked late in the lab on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 16, signing out at 9:52 p.m. after two hours and 15 minutes. The next morning, the sources said, he showed up as usual but stayed only briefly before taking leave hours. Authorities assume that he drove to Princeton immediately after that, dropping the letters in a mailbox on a well-traveled street across from the university campus. Ivins would have had to have left quickly to return for an appointment in the early evening, about 4 or 5 p.m.

The fastest one can drive from Frederick, Maryland to Princeton, New Jersey is 3 hours, which would mean that Ivins would have had to have dropped the anthrax letters in the New Jersey mailbox on September 17 by 1 p.m. or -- at the latest -- 2 p.m. in order to be able to attend a 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. meeting back at Ft. Detrick. But had he dropped the letters in the mailbox before 5:00 p.m. on September 17, the letters would have borne a September 17 postmark, rather than the September 18 postmark they bore (letters picked up from that Princeton mailbox before 5 p.m. bear the postmark from that day; letters picked up after 5 p.m. bear the postmark of the next day). That's why the Search Warrant Affidavit (.pdf) released by the FBI on Friday said this (page 8):

If the Post's reporting about Ivins' September 17 activities is accurate -- that he "return[ed to Fort Detrick] for an appointment in the early evening, about 4 or 5 p.m." -- then that would constitute an alibi, not, as the Post breathlessly described it, "a key clue into how he could have pulled off an elaborate crime," since any letter he mailed that way would have a September 17 -- not a September 18 -- postmark. Just compare the FBI's own definition of "window of opportunity" to its September 17 timeline for Ivins to see how glaring that contradiction is.

In theory (and there is no evidence for this at all), Ivins could have left Fort Detrick that night after work and driven to New Jersey, but then the leaked information reported by the Post about Ivins' September 17 morning "administrative leave" would be completely irrelevant, and according to the Post, that isn't what the FBI believes occurred ("Authorities assume that he drove to Princeton immediately after" he took administrative leave in the morning). The FBI's theory as to how and when Ivins traveled to New Jersey on September 17 and mailed the letters is simply impossible, given the statement in their own Probable Cause Affidavit as to "the window of opportunity" the anthrax attacker had to mail the letters in order to have them bear a September 18 postmark. Marcy Wheeler and Larisa Alexandrovna have now noted the same discrepancy. That is a pretty enormous contradiction in the FBI's case.

* * * * *

The FBI's total failure to point to a shred of evidence placing Ivins in New Jersey on either of the two days the anthrax letters were sent is a very conspicuous deficiency in its case. It's possible that Ivins was able to travel to Princeton on two occasions in three weeks without leaving the slightest trace of having done so (not a credit card purchase, ATM withdrawal, unusual gas purchases, nothing), but that relies on a depiction of Ivins as a cunning and extremely foresightful criminal, an image squarely at odds with most of the FBI's circumstantial evidence that suggests Ivins was actually quite careless, even reckless, in how he perpetrated this crime (spending unusual amounts of time in his lab before the attacks despite knowing that there would be a paper trail; taking an "administrative leave" from work to go mail the anthrax letters rather than just doing it on the weekend when no paper trail of his absence would be created; using his own anthrax strain rather than any of the other strains to which he had access at Fort Detrick; keeping that strain in its same molecular form for years rather than altering it, etc.).

The FBI dumped a large number of uncorroborated conclusions at once on Wednesday, carefully assembled to create the most compelling case they could make, and many people -- as intended -- jumped to proclaim that it was convincing. But the more that case is digested and assessed, the more questions and the more skepticism seem to arise among virtually everyone.

The Washington Post Editorial page -- the ultimate establishment organ -- published its second Editorial yesterday calling for an independent investigation of the FBI's case against Ivins and pointed out just some of the numerous, critical holes in that case:

The case is admittedly circumstantial, and questions have been raised about the reliability of the FBI's scientific evidence, the inability to tie Mr. Ivins to the handwritten notes included with the mailed anthrax, the process by which the FBI excluded as suspects others who had access to the anthrax, and more.

The NYT today has an excellent Op-Ed from a microbiologist (the former Chief of Fort Detrick's bacteriology division) pointing out the numerous deficiencies in the FBI's scientific assertions. Critically, that Op-Ed describes the properties of the high-grade anthrax sent to Sen. Daschle and then notes: "It is extremely improbable that this type of preparation could ever have been produced at Fort Detrick, certainly not of the grade and quality found in that envelope."

The transcript of my interview with Dr. Gigi Gronvall of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh's Medical Center -- in which she points out the complete lack of scientific data presented in the FBI's public case and explores the numerous other private and public institutions around the world engaged in high-level anthrax research -- is now available here. A senior epidemiologist who posts at ScienceBlogs has raised several other significant deficiencies in the FBI's scientific case -- here and here -- while a microbiologist and evolutionary biologist at the same site has expressed extreme doubt about one of the FBI's key molecular claims, here. Are there any scientists anywhere who find the FBI's claims impressive or convincing?

For those inclined to place faith in the FBI's professed claims of "confidence" as coming from a trustworthy and admirable institution -- the same way people placed faith in the Honorable Colin Powell's quite similar one-sided, selective disclosure of evidence before the U.N. in 2003 -- this ought to serve as a reminder of the foolishness of doing so, from ABC News' World News Tonight, October 22, 2002:

PETER JENNINGS, ABC NEWS

(Off Camera) We have an exclusive report tonight about the anthrax attacks. It has been a year since the anthrax letters were sent to a number of media organizations and politicians. And as you may recall, five people died.

(Voice Over)The FBI tells ABC News it is very confident that it has found the person responsible.

PETER JENNINGS (CONTINUED)

(Off Camera) ABC's Brian Ross is here. Brian? Same case, same individual.

BRIAN ROSS, ABC NEWS

(Off Camera) That's right, Peter, Steven Hatfill. And while there's no direct evidence, authorities say they are building what they describe as a growing case of circumstantial evidence.

There are so many people with motives far more substantial than Ivins' to perpetrate an anthrax attack of this sort, and so many places other than Fort Detrick where this anthrax could have been produced (if it could have been produced by Ivins at Fort Detrick at all). An independent investigation by a body with meaningful subpoena power and an aggressive and respected investigator (and an accompanying law making it a felony to provide misleading information to, or to withhold information from, that body) is imperative. Is there anyone at this point who disagrees with that?

-- Glenn Greenwald

After Ron Suskind Reveals Bush Admin Ordered Iraq-9/11 Fakery, House Judiciary Chair John Conyers Opens Congressional Probe

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind joins us for part two of an interview on his new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Suskind reports that in 2003 the White House ordered the CIA to forge and disseminate false intelligence documents linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. While much of the attention on the book has focused on the forged letter, Suskind also reveals that the Bush administration and the British government knew prior to the war that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. We also speak to Rep. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which is investigating some of the explosive findings in Suskind’s book.

Guests:

Ron Suskind, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and author of The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. His earlier books include The One Percent Doctrine, The Price of Loyalty and A Hope in the Unseen.

Rep. John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind joins us again today to discuss his explosive new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism.

Suskind reports that in 2003 the White House ordered the CIA to forge and disseminate false intelligence documents linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. The CIA allegedly forged a letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein. It was backdated July 1, 2001 and stated 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta was trained for his mission in Iraq.

While much of the attention on the book has focused on the forged letter, Suskind also reveals that the Bush administration and the British government knew prior to the war that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

AMY GOODMAN: Ron Suskind interviewed Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. Dearlove said Britain received intelligence in the beginning of 2003 about Iraq’s lack of WMDs, but the Bush administration buried the information. Dearlove told Suskind, “The problem was the Cheney crowd was in too much of a hurry, really. Bush never resisted them quite strongly enough.”

Ron Suskind joins us again here in our firehouse studio. We’re also joined on the phone by Congress member John Conyers, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Congressman Conyers has said his committee will review some of the explosive findings in Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! For those listeners and viewers who didn’t get a chance to hear you lay out the allegations, Ron—well, first, many people wrote in through the day, and we’re going to be reading some of their questions to you. But why don’t you lay out the kernel of the key allegation you have made about this letter?

RON SUSKIND: The Iraq intelligence chief is a one-year saga that started in January of 2003. The United States and Britain get together. They open a secret back channel to this man. He slips out of Baghdad, meets with a British intelligence official in Amman, Jordan. The information flows up through the White House. They’re the real customer here. And he says, from the start, there are no WMD. He of course has real credibility here as the Iraq intelligence chief, the number one man. He oversees the biological program himself, and he said it’s over.

He also said the mind of Saddam Hussein is something you all don’t understand. He’s really afraid of the Iranians and their nascent nuclear program. He doesn’t want them and others in the region to see that he’s a toothless tiger, that he has no weapons. He doesn’t even believe the United States would ever want Iraq.

All of this ends up being made very public later. It’s all briefed right up to the White House to the President starting in January of 2003. The final report’s delivered in February. At that point, we cut off the channel to Habbush. But, of course, we already have an arrangement with him, the United States. We resettle him in Amman, Jordan. As the summer unfolds, it becomes clear to the world, the things that Habbush told us ahead of time. We pay him $5 million, the United States. We hide him.

And then the letter. In the fall of 2003, when the White House is facing the most serious charge of the Bush presidency, that we went to war under false pretenses, they come up with a plan of how they might use Habbush, the White House. They order the CIA to have a fabricated letter created ostensibly in Habbush’s hand, backdated July 2001, solving all the White House’s political problems. As one of the key on-the-record sources says, it was a check-the-box for all of the problems politically the White House was facing in the United States.

That, of course, is illegal. You cannot have the CIA run disinformation campaigns on the American public. Just imagine the havoc that would ensue if that were not a law. That’s why right now Congress is investigating.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the information, though, that he provided initially, obviously British intelligence, as you say, was involved, so this would have an impact on the knowledge that Tony Blair and the British government, as well, had about the reality of whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

RON SUSKIND: Absolutely. You know, it’s interesting, because in the extensive interviews with both Richard Dearlove, who was the head of British intelligence in this period, now he’s at Cambridge University, and Nigel Inkster, who was the number two British intelligence chief, they talk about the fact that this was, in a way, sort of a last chance for the British. They didn’t want to go to war with the ardor that the Americans did, as Dearlove’s comment reveals. And they said, “Let’s exercise real intelligence.” As Dearlove says, “We’re better at this than you people. We have relationships where you often have none. Let’s try to exercise the known and the knowable here, so that we can bring at least some clarity to this debate,” which, of course, the British understood was gusty, full of assumption, without real evidence. That’s why the meeting with Habbush was set up.

AMY GOODMAN: Our first question from a listener and viewer that has been emailed into us was: Have you actually seen this letter? And you have said $5 million was the money that the US government paid to Habbush as hush money. How exactly do you know this?

RON SUSKIND: There are extensive conversations with people inside of CIA, again, many of them on the record in the book, not just about the $5 million, but about when the payment was made, about how the figure was arrived at, discussions, again, with senior officials on the record, and sort of saying $5 million figures, where, in the broad context—after all, we paid the guy who turned in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed $25 million. And so, they discussed with some openness how we arrived at the $5 million figure. It was not and is not in dispute.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we also have Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, with us. Congressman Conyers, you have been looking at a lot of issues dealing with the Bush administration. To what degree do these revelations, if they prove to be true, affect the—will affect the outcome of your investigations?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, that’s what we’re investigating now. Top of the morning to three excellent investigative reporters.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Good morning to you, sir.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: It’s going to have a great effect. That’s why I’m investigating.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Ron Suskind, about what it would mean for Congress to investigate? We now know the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Conyers is talking about investigating, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. What were you able to gather? What could they gather?

RON SUSKIND: The fact is, the book, as readers now around the country know, lays this out, letter and verse, with great clarity, again, with on-the-record sources, and a great number of off-the-record sources, as well, were helpful in the overall project.

What you can see now, I think, is Congress having an opportunity to exercise some of its constitutional mandates, which has been very difficult during the history of this administration, as Chairman Conyers and certainly even more people on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence know. They have not been briefed on key issues, as well as key issues in and around this matter of Habbush. You know, the fact is, is that the administration has consistently, consistently undercut Congress’s role of oversight, which of course is statutory in its clarity and its legal strength, to oversee what the administration does, especially in matters of secrecy. This was all set up very, very carefully so Congress will be briefed so they’ll know what’s happening so we don’t have essentially a secret foreign policy carried forward by any president. This is an opportunity for them to finally exercise, essentially, their obligations in Congress.

For instance, there are many things laid out in the book that the administration has not in any way either commented on or denied. They’re focusing on this specific letter because it means illegality, which could, you know, go right up to impeachment hearings, ostensibly, in the next couple of months. However, this Habbush matter, from beginning to end, is an extraordinary array. For instance, Congress simply now should be saying, tell us exactly why the entire Habbush report, from British intelligence to the CIA and briefed to the President—what is the justification for that being secret at this juncture?

You know, time and again, the administration basically says everything that’s classified is classified, and frankly, we have to give you no reason why. Those even involved inside of the administration say that process of classification is woefully broken. The fact is, is that for all this period of classification, from the concept starting, the line between national security, which is what it’s supposed to be about, and national embarrassment has been one that people in administrations have tried to draw, because they said if it’s not justifiably national security, someone should really be looking at that, and if it is a matter of national embarrassment, it should be revealed. This is clearly in the category of national embarrassment and not national security, the entire Habbush mission, now that it’s public.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you go through your conversations with Dearlove, the head of MI6, telling him that you—well, you didn’t have this letter, but you knew of this letter.

RON SUSKIND: Well, when I get to Richard Dearlove, as I point out in the book, I first, just simply knowing about Habbush—Habbush, our secret source, has been kept quiet for five years as essentially, you know, the most portentous secret that the United States is holding—when I first see Richard Dearlove, I know about the mission with the Iraq intelligence chief, and he’s shocked that I know.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s in the playing cards—wasn’t he?—that they gave out to soldiers in Iraq.

RON SUSKIND: Yeah, he’s the jack of diamonds, I guess, which would befit his financial arrangement, as opposed to hearts or clubs. But, you know, Habbush also is somebody that the United States claims publicly to be someone they’re seeking. There’s a million-dollar reward out for his capture.

AMY GOODMAN: That the US government is giving?

RON SUSKIND: Well, it’s on—yeah, it’s on—

AMY GOODMAN: But they’ve given him $5 million.

RON SUSKIND: Right. So I guess the $4 million would be the net there, but, you know—but ostensibly, this is a matter of a vast disinformation campaign about the Iraq intelligence chief. The United States should have known about this in present tense, frankly. You know, imagine just if the President, for his sixteen words at the State of the Union address, did not say, “We have recently learned about British intelligence finding Niger documents on uranium.” Imagine if he had said, “We now know that there may be no WMD in Iraq.” Imagine the debate that would have gone forward from that point. An actual debate, as I think is constitutionally mandated when it comes to an act of war, would have actually occurred at that time with Congress and the American public. I submit that virtually every president of the twentieth century would have said we have to have a real debate, as something as portentous as going to war.

Dearlove is startled that I know anything about the back-channel mission with the Iraq intelligence chief. He says, “Well, only a few people know about this. I don’t understand how you know. Clearly, you do. Do you want me to talk about it, confirm it?” I said, “Well, I don’t really need it confirmed.” But we chat, and he lays it out, letter and verse, what the thinking was, what the British thinking was, what Tony Blair’s thinking was, and ultimately the reaction, when the Americans said, “Thank you very much, but no thank you.”

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “Thank you very much”?

RON SUSKIND: Well, we—the report goes in. Dearlove said, “We did our best.” Obviously there were doubts. It was never, you know, to use that overused phrase, a slam dunk. You know, the fact is, should we believe this guy? Should we not? How can we check what he says? All of those were things that were roiling through both Britain and America at that point. I think, as Rob Richer says clearly, or even better, Buzzy—

AMY GOODMAN: Top CIA.

RON SUSKIND: Top CIA guy—or the number three guy at CIA, Buzzy Krongard, he says, “Look, 25 percent of us thought it was denial and deception. 25 percent said he’s the real McCoy. Others said, ‘Ooh, I don’t know how to touch this,’” because ultimately this is a hot potato inside of the government. Ultimately, what’s clear is the United States government didn’t want to know, frankly, almost anything that it didn’t have to know at this moment. It was moving forward, as Dearlove says and as Nigel Inkster says, his deputy—he says the United States, at this moment, was like a runaway train.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, let’s get to your next question after break. We’re talking to Ron Suskind. And we also have on the line with us the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers. Ron Suskind’s explosive book is The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. We are talking about where the findings in Suskind’s book go from here. Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind—his new book is out, it’s called The Way of the World—we’re also joined by the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers. He says he’s looking into investigating the findings of Ron Suskind’s book. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Congressman Conyers, I’d like to ask you, would you consider trying to get the former Israeli intelligence chief—I’m sorry, Iraqi intelligence chief to come and testify before Congress and get to the bottom of—because, obviously, he would have quite a bit of information on the allegations in Ron Suskind’s book?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, he does, and so do a lot of other people. But, dear friends, I’m in the third day of an—I’m not considering an investigation. I’m investigating.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: What do I mean, I am investigating?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, what does it mean to be in the third day of that investigation? How do you begin?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: What do you think that means? You’re an investigative reporter. What do I mean, I’m investigating? You know what? You’re asking me to tell you what I’m investigating. I didn’t ask Ron Suskind when he was taking months to put the book together, I didn’t start investigating him. How can I tell you three days into an investigation? And you say, what do I mean?

RON SUSKIND: I’m sympathetic to you, Chairman Conyers. You know, people maybe shouldn’t see how the sausage is made, really just how it tastes and how you get to the finish.

I mean, one of the things, though, that I think we’re talking about here, which is interesting, is what powers Congress has to get many of these documents declassified. You know, the fact is, throughout this Habbush mission, from beginning to end, especially this year from January 2003 until December, when the letter comes out, there are, I’m certain, a pile of documents that are stamped “classified” inside of the government that I can’t imagine have any actual justification at this point for remaining classified. And I guess one of the questions is, what powers Judiciary or other committees in Congress, both House and Senate, might have to get these documents immediately declassified. Obviously, no one in the government, frankly—and I’ve said this before—there’s virtually no one inside of the executive branch that pushes for the declassification of documents. It’s certainly Congress’s role, though, to say this must be made public. And throughout the chain here on Habbush, there are many such documents. What powers do you think Congress will have to get these brought into daylight?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, you’re talking to maybe the most frustrated person attempting to exercise the oversight responsibilities that I have on Judiciary. There’s nobody who’s been trying harder than me to get to access all of the things in the Department of Justice, the executive branch, the FBI, the CIA. No one has been more zealous in that than I.

RON SUSKIND: Chairman, I—

REP. JOHN CONYERS: But for me to get engage in a discussion this morning, the third day into the most critical investigation of the entire Bush administration, is a little bit much, I think.

RON SUSKIND: I’m just trying to get a sense—I think the viewers here are sort of trying to get a sense of the barriers. I know you’ve been the most ardent of anybody. But what sort of barriers do they throw up, in terms of saying, well, either “No, we can’t” or “It’s difficult to declassify documents” or “Well, we’ll look for that one, and we’ll get back to you.” I know they’ve offered you virtually every dodge and fake and excuse. I think it’s something I understand, but I think viewers may not understand how difficult it is to get them to cough this stuff up.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, Ron, look, let’s—the past is already history. The present is going on right now.

RON SUSKIND: I hear you.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: I’m not here to tell you my troubles with the administration or—I’m happy to be on the program, because I’ve already read 96 percent of the book, and we’re investigating, but for me to start telling you what might be available and what the problems are and what the challenges are going to be, I think, is very unprofessional in an investigation of this seriousness.

RON SUSKIND: I agree.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Congressman, I’d like to ask you, as a veteran member of the Congress, you recall another investigation that occurred decades ago in the waning days of another administration: the Iran-Contra scandal. And when quite a bit of information was dug up about what President Reagan and the administration knew or didn’t know about the lies to the American people around Iran-Contra, and the general thrust of a lot of the people those days was, “Hey, these are the last days of this administration. It’s over. Forget it. What’s the use of continuing the investigation?” The lessons you learned from that investigation and how it might affect the way you proceed in these waning months here?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: I don’t want to make that comparison. I was there, and you were on the case, as usual. And this is not—this is not a retrospective. The 110th Congress isn’t over. We’re starting our work, and then we’re doing it in a period where the Congress is in recess. I’m calling everybody back. We’ve got a huge amount of work to engage in. And because I don’t have the appropriate radio to hear the program at 8:00 in the morning, I am happy to be invited on, because I don’t have to wait ’til this evening until the releases come out at 11:30 to read what all of you said. So this is a wonderful service to me, and I’m grateful to you for it. But I am not here to tell you what was—it was like with Iran-Contra, as I know you know it well. But this isn’t a history lesson we’re in.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me put this question to Ron Suskind. Yesterday, we went through the responses of everyone from Condoleezza Rice to George Tenet to Rob Richer. And I want to know what he would have to say if he was put under oath. Now, he responded to your book—he was one of the people you interviewed—by saying—he’s former head of CIA’s Near East Division—“I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbush as outlined in Mr. Suskind’s book.” So, tell us about what he actually said to you.

RON SUSKIND: Richer went through letter and verse on the Habbush mission, the reaction of people inside of CIA, his recollection specifically of Tenet getting the assignment, turning to him. He talks about “Hey, Marine, you’re not going to like this.” Tenet clearly is sort of holding it out like a fish that’s rotting. He passes it to Richer. He knows that this is something that down the ranks they’re not going to be too pleased with. Tenet is following orders. That’s certainly the take that Richer has at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: He says he remembers a cream-colored letter, like stationery from the White House?

RON SUSKIND: Absolutely. I said, “Talk about what exactly you remember.” And I put that on the transcript, which I put up on the internet, so people can see. As I’m pressing him, not for what he thinks or not over what he supposes, but exactly what he remembers, he says he’s sure it’s from the Vice President’s Office. I said, “Why?” He says, “I’d bet my career on it. Everything was coming from those guys at this point. ‘Go check this. Go do this.’ Some of it fanciful.” I said, “Well, certainly, in terms of specifically disinformation, a lie, they hadn’t done the deception.” He says, “No, that’s what made this different.” I said, “But do you know specifically it was from the Vice President?” He says, “No, what I know is it was from the White House.”

AMY GOODMAN: George Tenet, the CIA director.

RON SUSKIND: George Tenet. Richer saw the stationery. You know, and the fact is, is that Richer then talked to others inside of CIA about this specific mission, including one of the deputies who ran the Iraq Division, who—John Maguire, who of course is in the book, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Who gives the same kind of comment—

RON SUSKIND: Of course.

AMY GOODMAN: —“Not within my chain of command was I told to fabricate…”

RON SUSKIND: Right. But the fact is, is that it’s never within Maguire’s chain of command, so he’s answering something that’s not being alleged. When it comes to Richer, there’s fuzzy words about who fabricates. Well, the fabrication happens way down the ranks. That’s actually a specific act. The chain of command issues are very legally narrow. Ostensibly, this is the kind of thing written very, very carefully, with a lawyer involved, which doesn’t really answer, well, the many, many things that are in the book. As to the specifics of what is not alleged, the evidence is in the book.

And the fact is, is it’s not a matter of a passing conversation. We had many conversations on this specific issue, on the Habbush matter, with all of the key sources. There was never any mystery about what it was, what the Habbush letter was, what the Habbush mission entailed, in terms of the setup with the Iraq intelligence chief. I mean, exhaustive, hour after hour. And the way I do it as an investigative reporter, is you go back again and again and again.

AMY GOODMAN: Did they get Habbush to sign it?

RON SUSKIND: No. Interestingly, Maguire talks about this. He’s really the expert on Iraq. He’s a real American hero guy. He’s been to Iraq many times, and he’s—

AMY GOODMAN: He’s in Iraq now?

RON SUSKIND: Well, he’s not in America right now. But, you know—but the fact is, is that he talks about the fact that in his discussion with Richer, he’s like, “It’s ridiculous. Habbush isn’t going to want to sign this thing. He’s too smart for that. You know, he’s the intelligence chief of Iraq. He’s a guy like us.” He knows if he were to sign a letter that was truly authentic, alright, in his own hand, if you will, that his family could face real trouble. You know, he has relatives, extended family, still back in Iraq. If he’s seen as actively supporting the United States—at this point he’s seen as missing—you know, his family could be in trouble. You know, and he wouldn’t do anything, you know, that disastrous for him, even though we paid him the $5 million.

The sense from Maguire—again, he’s not handling it, he’s just discussing it with Rob when he first hears about it. And then Maguire is going off to a new assignment. It’s passed down to his successor, who runs Iraq for CIA. Maguire says—

AMY GOODMAN: Richer’s new assignment, of course, is vice president of Blackwater.

RON SUSKIND: Well, he’s actually now working mostly with King Abdullah of Jordan as his main job. But, you know, he’s a guy with connections all through the government and has briefed Congress many times. He’s a credible guy. He has been around. He was also a character, a minor one, in my last book, The One Percent Doctrine. I’ve known him for many years.

But interestingly, Maguire says, “We’re probably just going to have to fabricate it ourselves, get someone to write it and then just deliver it.” And John Maguire and I talked at length about that. Now, Maguire is not involved in the actual fabrication and execution of this, but Maguire is a pro, you know, very good at this. And he looked at the optics of it, so to speak, right at the start, and said, “Well, we’ll probably just”—you know, to Richer—“We’re probably just going to have to, you know, have somebody do it.” And Maguire, of course, is delighted he’s not going to be the one who has to do this ugly work.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But what does that say about—even about the quality of the work that was done, that they produce a letter that the principal has not signed and that other reporters then—they leak it to reporters, who then—

RON SUSKIND: Well, of course, the principal—they’ll have someone sign it as Habbush. You know, it’s someone else will do the handwriting. You know, but the—

AMY GOODMAN: And Habbush is paid $5 million to be silent, not to comment on this.

RON SUSKIND: Of course not, of course not. And that’s the sense. Habbush will stay silent. He’s not going to give us any trouble.

But mind you, what’s interesting is that, you know, Maguire’s view—and we talked at length about this—is that, you know, this was amateur hour, you know, an order from the White House. And he says, Tenet should have pushed back. Tenet, remember, George Tenet, is not an intelligence man; he was a staff man in the Senate. He’s really sort of a staffer politician sort of guy. And inside of CIA, even though he became the director of CIA, there’s a separation between people who really have done CIA operations for decades and Tenet, who really doesn’t have real acuity for that. So Maguire talks, in the book—and there’s a quote, people who read it—he’s, “I wish George had more experience in actual operations, like some CIA directors, because he could have told his bosses in the White House, ‘This is a bad idea. Habbush is never going to sign it. We don’t think this is such a good plan.’” But Tenet doesn’t push back. And as he said, “That’s one thing,” Maguire says, “we blame George about.” Other directors might have pushed back. George didn’t. Instead, he took the assignment, passed it down the ranks, and CIA executed.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, George Tenet denies this and has responded to your book, saying that it is not true. But—

RON SUSKIND: Well, he says, “to the best of my recollection,” and that’s something reporters in Washington know is a classic George move.

AMY GOODMAN: And now say what exactly the letter says.

RON SUSKIND: The letter says that—it’s a letter, sort of a personal letter from Habbush to Saddam, again, dated July 1, 2001, and it talks about the fact that Mohamed Atta has been in Iraq training for the upcoming mission, which is not named, but sort of suggested—obviously it’s 9/11 that they’re suggesting—and he has trained, you know, in and around Abu Nidal, who of course is ostensibly hiding in Iraq at this point. There’s some talk, sort of flowery language, about the great mission ahead, you know, and its righteousness. That’s one major part of the letter. And again, it’s only altogether really in, you know, just a very short space of a few paragraphs. And then, there’s talk about Saddam buying yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help from a small team from the al-Qaeda organization, which they throw in ostensibly for good measure.

What’s interesting is that what really undid them here was the overreach of the assignment from the White House. Again, as Maguire says—and others in CIA, I’m sure, agree—it was amateur hour. You know, CIA wouldn’t have come up with an operation like this. It was clearly something they were ordered to do from the White House, which had a kind of ham-handedness to it. That overreach, the desire of the White House to solve all of its problems, really doesn’t fit with how actual deceptions are run. CIA actually does this sort of thing. You know, we would never put all of that in one letter. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t pass the smell test, which it doesn’t after a week in the global news cycles, where people are writing about it and reporting about it and going, “Jeez, this is an awful lot in one letter.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, not only that, but it sounds like the talking points for Dick Cheney on all the Sunday shows. These were the main things that he was constantly raising.

RON SUSKIND: Precisely. Look—and again, Maguire and I talked a lot about this. I said, “How does this fit in what CIA generally does?” He says, “Well, actually, you know, this is not the kind of thing that we would do on our own.” If you really want to do a deception, he explained to me, what you do is you get something a little off. You put in things that are clearly true, and then there’s one part that you’re interested in, and you twist it just a teeny bit. Then maybe there’s one other thing that’s brand new, again, so it has plausibility, instead of this, which is really, as he said, a check-the-box for all of the major political issues that the administration is facing at this moment about the march to war and false pretenses being under our Iraq case.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove—

RON SUSKIND: Yes, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: What exactly does he say about the letter? First, you say, he’s startled that you even know about it.

RON SUSKIND: Well, he and I are not discussing the letter. He’s discussing the front end of it. He’s discussing the Habbush mission and all of the British engagement, their hopes, in some cases their fears, and their reaction, when the United States, after—he says, this very dangerous mission—he says this is a high-risk mission here, and there’s fear at the start that maybe it’s a trap. Maybe the British intelligence manager or an extraordinary agent, Michael Dearlove, who runs the Mid-East for the British, that, you know, he might die.

And one of the reasons it’s in Jordan is that we have leverage in Jordan, again, through Rob Richer, the CIA intelligence official, because he is so close to the Jordanians. He is a very close associate of King Abdullah’s and others in Jordan intelligence. That’s why it’s set up in Jordan. That’s why everybody is on tinder hooks, as it unfolds.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And presumably Saddam Hussein was aware that all this was going on.

RON SUSKIND: It’s a debate inside of the government, you know, and there’s back-and-forth on that. Again, in the exhaustive reporting on this—and it was exhaustive—I talked to many officials. Does Saddam know, or does he not? All the way from the British to the Americans, there’s debate. It’s not clear Saddam knows. There’s a sense he does. And, you know, and the fact is, is that at the end of the day, what everybody says is that it’s clear, no matter if Saddam knew or not, that much of the intelligence provided by Habbush, especially about the mind of Saddam Hussein, is something he never ever would have authorized being revealed, because it shows Saddam is addled, isolated, his fears, and ultimately, that Saddam is not really exactly who we think he is at this point. All of that, as Richer says, is the most valuable intelligence we get from the Habbush mission. It really gets us into the mind of Saddam Hussein.

Also, fascinating, the operators inside of CIA were delighted that a window had been opened to Saddam Hussein. All the folks in the Iraq Operations Group, which is a vast group of operatives who are actually working Iraq—of which many of them had worked operations in Iraq for years, they’re saying, “This is a golden opportunity. We have a window right into Saddam’s inner circle through the intelligence chief, Habbush. We can put anything through that window. We can put misinformation through that window. We can turn Saddam in various directions. We even can send Habbush in with a team to take Saddam out.” As Maguire says, I think with great clarity, “Imagine, then we could walk to Baghdad instead of fight our way to Baghdad, something that could save many American lives.”

That debate is going on in January between the operators who are saying, “Golden opportunity, this channel has been opened,” in January of 2003 and folks who are very anxious about the case for war, most of them from the White House—two teams fighting. When it’s clear that the evidence from Habbush is that there are no WMD, the White House gets spooked, and the White House cuts off the channel. Operators inside of CIA are livid. They’re saying, “My goodness, American lives are at stake here! You’re cutting off the channel because you don’t want to know more? And we have to now go forward without the advantages and opportunities that Habbush might have provided?”

Meanwhile, of course, we had made our arrangement, and we resettled Habbush. But nonetheless, operationally, when it comes to Iraq, this is kind of an abomination, to be frank.

AMY GOODMAN: And who does Dearlove say, head of MI6—

RON SUSKIND: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —British intelligence, who does he believe in the White House wants this to go forward? Does he feel that Bush wanted it from January and before that? Was it Bush?

RON SUSKIND: From the beginning—I have reported in a previous book, The Price of Loyalty, that it was from the first National Security Council meeting of this presidency. The President said, “How are we going to do this?” Not “whether” or “why” but “how.” The fact is, inside of CIA, many people now echo that. They talk about that in the book. It was from the first Bush—it was—

AMY GOODMAN: This was about Paul O’Neill, the Treasury secretary, that you write the book.

RON SUSKIND: Right, but throughout CIA, people involved in this say the same thing. It was about the very first meeting that the President wants to get Saddam Hussein.

Now, mind you, Dearlove says, I think with real interesting clarity here—he talks about the fact that Cheney was pushing so ardently, so fiercely for war that Bush ultimately almost hands over the basic responsibilities of the presidency. He says—Dearlove says, in a sort of a grave finish to this interview, where he says it wasn’t too late for Cheney—it was too late for Cheney when the intelligence comes, because he was going, no matter what. But it was not too late for Bush to say, “Now, hold on a minute”—hold on, the American public, wait, in terms of the whole world, that is now behind us on this case for war. And I think that is where historical judgment may be harshest.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a lot to take in, Chairman John Conyers, a lot of big scope for your committee, for the House Judiciary Committee. Is there a chance that you would join together with the Senate? Is there a way the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—maybe actually, Ron Suskind, you could tell us—Jay Rockefeller is the head of that—what exactly are their intentions? There are joint House-Senate committees.

RON SUSKIND: Generally—and I’m sure Chairman Conyers would echo this—generally, the way it has worked before is that there are joint engagements between the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, because, remember, they’re very carefully constructed, where they have staff and of course congressmen, congresspersons, who have security clearance opportunities. They get to see things that the American public doesn’t get to see. Sometimes there are small groups who get to see the most precious stuff, because the administration, any administration, is afraid of leaks. But generally, a joint effort between those two intelligence committees is the way it has worked in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: And what would that mean? What could Senate intelligence do? Jay Rockefeller?

RON SUSKIND: Senate Intelligence can move forward in ways that, frankly, even Congressman Conyers, with his greatest ardor, would have trouble doing, again because they can go into the shadows. They can talk directly to CIA and say, “We understand this is classified, but we have people here who are charged to look at classified information in a kind of lockbox.” CIA—you know, traditionally, CIA says, “Well, let’s look for what you need.” They tend to drag their feet. Sometimes they say it is problematic to even get this information to some people in Congress, because they’re ongoing operations. There are all manner of ways the CIA over these past few years has basically said, “We’ll give it to you when we’re good and ready.”

This is not an instance, I don’t think, of that, though, because if you have a violation of law, things do change. And if there is a stated violation of law—and the book seems it does indicate in its evidence that they’re in that realm here—then Congress has more powers to say, “Your executive privilege claims,” which the White House often makes, “they don’t hold water in courts when there is the issue of wrongdoing.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to—I mean, you’ve written now several books, as you say, on this administration. And I’d like to ask you, for those who, looking at American history, say this is not the first time that presidents have fabricated reasons to go to war—John Quincy Adams accusing President Polk of fabricating reasons to go to war with Mexico, obviously the Gulf of Tonkin—what, in your view, makes this administration unique or distinct compared to the other lies that have been foisted on the American people in the past?

RON SUSKIND: You know what? The fact is that we are ever in a pull and tug, an ebb and flow, when it comes to these issues, in terms of what the public says. We have a right to know in a democracy, especially on issues of greatest import, where young and women may die in battle. And what an administration often will say, a president will say, “This is my business. You’re on a need-to-know basis. I’ll tell you what I believe you’re supposed to know.” This back-and-forth has gone on for many years.

I think it’s clear in these past few years that we’ve had a kind of hammerlock here between the cult of message, where, frankly, people are not having discussions that are real ones, certainly not in the Fourth Estate, as we might have in previous decades, with senior officials, even with a president, where they’re giving the good enough reasons that underlie action A and B.

Combine that with an extraordinary spread of secrecy. You know, they are classifying everything down to the most minor documents. And I’ve looked at documents that are classified, and you say, “That is impossible that you would think that is an issue of national security.” That is a core problem of this period. You know, and frankly, some people inside of the administration, you know, and some wise heads who have served other presidents say what we need, we need a 9/11 Commission-style group, bipartisan, elder statesmen, who say these things should be made public, because right now everything gets classified. And there is nobody, nobody of consequence, inside of this government—and it may be true going forward—who says this must be made public, even if it’s going to hurt like hell. And that’s really an issue now for the democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: In your coverage of movements, do you think people demanding this will make the biggest difference?

RON SUSKIND: Absolutely. It’s the only thing that makes a difference in a democracy. I mean, the fact is, a lot of people have been sitting here for years, going, “Oh, what can I do? Well, you know, where do I engage? You know, they’re the pros, and I’m just going about my life.” Well, it’s not the way it actually works, because at this point, at this late period in this administration, before they leave the stage, many people are saying, “Now, wait a second. I kind of own this government. The way this works is I’m the sovereign, the people. They’re servants, public servants.” It’s an interesting sort of phrase with tension in the words. They have awesome powers, but they actually serve the public. And the notion of rule of law being supreme to any individual is the core of what the founders understood, in terms of the tyranny of power.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Congressman Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, do you think there is any chance of a bipartisan commission like this being set up?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: It has been suggested. It’s under investigation and consideration right now. But the importance of this discussion today is critical not only to the committees—there are four committees, and how they relate to each other will come forward very shortly—but there is also the question of the media, the Fourth Estate, the press. This is now public information that, it seems to me, shouldn’t be great breaking news over a progressive news program, but this has to be investigated by the rest of the media, unless they consider this to be irrelevant or too late, or whatever reasons are, that they’re coerced or afraid themselves, too timid. But what you’re doing is a great service. And I consider the relationship of the committees on the subject matter, the responsibility of the media, and the American people being brought into this discussion as the citizens, that in a representative democracy, that’s what all of us are supposed to be working on. And so, you have my congratulations for allowing me to be here and with you and with all of the large number of people that are also taking part in this by listening to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, Chairman John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee. We have to break. We have a very late break. I want to apologize to our radio and television stations for that. When I come back, I do want to ask—I want to ask Ron Suskind about the media, because we do have listeners and viewers who have asked questions about them picking up this story. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, here for the second day. We have been overwhelmed with questions and comments from our audience all over the world. His book is called The Way of the World. One of the listeners or viewers who wrote in said, “I have seen no coverage of Ron’s allegations in the New York Times. I think such is important to legitimize the issues he raises. Has Ron been contacted by the Times, why does he think there has been no coverage?” Ron Suskind?

RON SUSKIND: There have been a variety of reporters who are working on this story from the major media. The fact—and the major newspapers. The fact is, it’s gotten enormous publicity, God knows. It’s been everywhere, and it’s been—you know, I was on The Today Show for two days. It’s been on the network news programs. It’s certainly been on the cable news programs. And the blogosphere is all but burning up with it.

I think for the newspapers, they are actively trying to advance the story. That’s sort of the way they do it at a newspaper. I was at the Wall Street Journal for ten years, and I write for the New York Times Magazine periodically. You know, I think what reporters are saying—and we have some of the best reporters in the world, make no mistake—is, “How can I advance the story? How can I find, essentially, my own fresh added corroboration, added evidence, essentially, to what is clearly laid out in the book?”

I think what’s interesting is that it’s been a difficult period for reporters. Everyone understands that. But I think right now they’re trying to get their bearings back. I’ve been writing for years my books, disclosures in them dovetailing with, you know, great reporters, like Dana Priest of the Washington Post, Jim Risen of the New York Times, you know, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, whose book Dark Side is out now, too. We’re all trying to do essentially the same thing, which is to pull loose this crucial information for the American public to know, so they can judge their government fairly and then know how to act. At this point, there is a body of evidence. Thank goodness it’s out. But on this one, reporters around the world are out hunting right now to nail down other parts of the story, and I think we’ll probably see yield from that in the next few days or certainly weeks.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we have about thirty seconds, but there was one other question that was forwarded to us: How culpable was the media in persuading the American public to digest the talking points of the White House? And has there been any radical shift in the war coverage since the beginning of the war?

RON SUSKIND: Yeah, absolutely. The media has gone through a real therapy session on this, because, you know, on balance, everybody understands that the White House used a new method of sort of fear, anti-patriotic—you’re not patriotic for doing your job—intimidation on the media. It worked. Power works in this way, and the media is now trying to recover, step by step. But the fact is, the White House operations for these sorts of things, as we see just in the last week, are still intact and operating to try to terrorize, to try to bring fear to sources. They’ve been hunting for sources for many reporters for years. It chills sources. It makes them fear for their families, for their future. And this is still going on.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Ron Suskind, author of The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism.

Patriotism is a manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome.

The Neocons Do Georgia. Humanity's Greatest Enemy?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
August 15, 2008

The success of the Bush Regime’s propaganda, lies, and deception with gullible and inattentive Americans since 9/11 has made it difficult for intelligent, aware people to be optimistic about the future of the United States. For almost 8 years the US media has served as Ministry of Propaganda for a war criminal regime. Americans incapable of thinking for themselves, reading between the lines, or accessing foreign media on the Internet have been brainwashed.

As the Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, said, it is easy to deceive a people. You just tell them they have been attacked and wave the flag.

It certainly worked with Americans.

The gullibility and unconcern of the American people has had many victims. There are 1.25 million dead Iraqis. There are 4 million displaced Iraqis. No one knows how many are maimed and orphaned.

Iraq is in ruins, its infrastructure destroyed by American bombs, missiles, and helicopter gunships.

We do not know the death toll in Afghanistan, but even the American puppet regime protests the repeated killings of women and children by US and NATO troops.

We don’t know what the death toll would be in Iran if Darth Cheney and the neocons succeed in their plot with Israel to bomb Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons.

What we do know is that all this murder and destruction has no justification and is evil. It is the work of evil men who have no qualms about lying and deceiving in order to kill innocent people to achieve their undeclared agenda.

That such evil people have control over the United States government and media damns the American public for eternity.

America will never recover from the shame and dishonor heaped upon her by the neoconned Bush Regime.

The success of the neocon propaganda has been so great that the opposition party has not lifted a finger to rein in the Bush Regime’s criminal actions. Even Obama, who promises “change” is too intimidated by the neocon’s success in brainwashing the American population to do what his supporters hoped he would do and lead us out of the shame in which the neoconned Bush Regime has imprisoned us.

This about sums up the pessimistic state in which I existed prior to the go-ahead given by the Bush Regime to its puppet in Georgia to ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of Russians in order to defuse the separatist movement. The American media, aka, the Ministry of Lies and Deceit, again accommodated the criminal Bush Regime and proclaimed “Russian invasion” to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Russians in South Ossetia by the Georgian military assault.

Only this time, the rest of the world didn’t buy it. The many years of lies--9/11, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, yellowcake, anthrax attack, Iranian nukes, “the United States doesn’t torture,” the bombings of weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games, Abu Ghraib, renditions, Guantanamo, various fabricated “terrorist plots,” the determined assault on civil liberties--have taken their toll on American credibility. No one outside America any longer believes the US media or the US government.

The rest of the world reported the facts--an assault on Russian civilians by American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian troops.

The Bush Regime, overcome by hubris, expected Russia to accept this act of American hegemony. But the Russians did not, and the Georgian military was sent fleeing for its life.

The neoconned Republican response to the Russian failure to follow the script and to be intimidated by the “unipower” was so imbecilic that it shattered the brainwashing to which Americans had succumbed.

McCain declared: “In the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.” Imagine the laughs Jon Stewart will get out of this on the Daily Show. In the early years of the 21st century the United States has already invaded two countries and has been beating the drums for attacking a third. President Bush, the chief invader of the 21st century, echoed McCain’s claim that nations don’t invade other nations. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7556857.stm

This dissonant claim shocked even brainwashed Americans, as readers’ emails reveal. If in the 21st century countries don’t invade other countries, what is Bush doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what are the naval armadas and propaganda arrayed against Iran about?

Have two of the worst warmongers of modern times--Bush and McCain--called off the US/Israeli attack on Iran? If McCain is elected president, is he going to pull US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan as “nations don’t invade other nations,” or is President Bush going to beat him to it?

We all know the answer.

The two stooges are astonished that the Americans have taught hegemony to Russians, who were previously operating, naively perhaps, on the basis of good will.

Suddenly the Western Europeans have realized that being allied with the United States is like holding a tiger by the tail. No European country wants to be hurled into war with Russia. Germany, France, and Italy must be thanking God they blocked Georgia’s membership in NATO.

The Ukraine, where a sick nationalism has taken hold funded by the neocon National Endowment for Democracy, will be the next conflict between American pretensions and Russia. Russia is being taught by the neocons that freeing the constituent parts of its empire has not resulted in their independence but in their absorption into the American Empire.

Unless enough Americans can overcome their brainwashed state and the rigged Diebold voting machines, turn out the imbecilic Republicans and hold the neoconservatives accountable for their crimes against humanity, a crazed neocon US government will provoke nuclear war with Russia.

The neoconservatives represent the greatest danger ever faced by the United States and the world. Humanity has no greater enemy.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Deceiving the World with Pictures


This photo was first published by the Reuters as an image of a "dead woman being carried by the Georgian soldiers from the town of Gori". But this "dead woman", incredibly, is clutching the nurse's arm.


This man exhibiting rage and grief happens to sit in the exact same place where the earlier picture was taken: the same pile of garbage is behind his back and scraps of metal from the picture of a "dead" woman being 'rescued' are lying around like in the earlier photo -- plus some, additional, unidentified scraps of metal. What are these supposed to represent?
Fighting Dirty: Pictures to Provoke Hatred and More Suffering

Remember the image of an emaciated Bosnian Muslim allegedly caged behind "Serb barbed wire", in a "Serb concentration camp" Trnopolje? The fake photo filmed by a British news team became a worldwide symbol of the war in Bosnia. Even after it was proven that the "prisoner" wasn't a prisoner to begin with, and was filmed outside the gate, part of which had barbed wire, this picture had still continued to be proudly exhibited all over the world to this day as the "evidence" that Serbs ran the "concentration camps" in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even the Hague tribunal's web site carries this fake image on its home page, offering another demonstration of its patent bias and voluntary blindness, a willful disregard for the facts and truth in all forms.

Deception through imagery is as old as man's ability to produce images. But photo-manipulation and staging the atrocities against one's own people to have them immediately filmed, disseminated throughout the world and used to provoke violent reaction -- retaliation -- against the designated culprit, was never used with so much success in propaganda war as during the 1990s, against the Serbs in all stages of Yugoslav civil wars.
Someone Keeps Moving "Their Son"


The caption Reuters gave to this photo is "Georgians stand next to the body of their son in the town of Gori". The woman is looking up towards the sky from where, presumably, death had stricken "her son".


But for the purposes of this photo the body of the "son" has been obviously moved quite a bit away from the curb. This was clearly not done in order to cover up the naked parts of the dead man's body, nor to allow some measure of dignity to the dead. Was it done for the light? (One should challenge Reuters to find a mother -- any mother -- who would allow the body of her child to be dragged through dirt half naked like this, while she is taking instructions from a photographer where to stand, where to look and what to do next)

Shameful role Western mainstream media has played in demonizing the Serbs and spreading the filthiest, basest propaganda against the Serbian nation and its leaders during the civil wars in the territory of former Yugoslavia, had dealt a fatal blow to Western news agencies' claims of neutrality, objectivity and impartiality. It turned out that Western mainstream media is a willing cobelligerent in the aggressive imperial wars West is constantly engaged in, being no more than a tool used by Western political powers to advance their own agendas.

One will often hear Reuters, AP, AFP, DPA and others refer to, say, Serbian RTS as "Belgrade's official TV", as if BBC, CNN, CBC, ABC and others are "independent", far removed from the offices of their respective states' governments and administrations. Rubbish! If they are all independent and each on their own, then how come they're all always tooting the same horn and always rooting for the same side in every conflict, every war, every confrontation -- how can that be?! How was such a wide consensus achieved on every single international issue, when was this perfectly unison choir formed, spanning millions of newspapers, magazines, web sites, TV studios and news agencies? Are they all copying from each other because they are all border-line retarded, a world wide club of semi-retards who can't come up with a single original thought, or because they follow political instructions, an unwritten, unquestionable set of rules, a codex saying you either fall in line and follow the script, or you're out in the cold, and out for good? You decide.

But, when you see the rigged photo stories like these latest ones from British Reuters, be kind and remember -- they might be out to destroy entire nations, but someone's paycheck depends on it, so ...they had to do it.

Recommended: Russian analysis of two photos from Reuters set, photographed men switching roles and clothes in different takes; Did mercenaries help Georgia?, Russia Today

" With unfailing consistancy, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries ... whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests."
Michael Parenti

FIRST (ABRIDGED) CATALOG OF U.S. MEDIA BIASES, DISTORTIONS AND SUPPRESSIONS
PATRICE GREANVILLE

Wherein we start tracking down some of the major biases and distortions stealthily influencing the way Americans perceive the world--and themselves

Introduction

Understanding media in the U.S., as in most modern nations today, is essentially a political task. The media are powerful engines of influence, consciousness-raising, and therefore public mobilization and public containment. They have the power to make or break people, issues, institutions, nations, and even systems, when underlying crises render them more vulnerable to shifts in public opinion. This is rather obvious by now, in the aftermath of so many foreign adventures sold to the public as great crusades, or the curious passivity of the masses in the face of domestic policies designed to benefit no one but the ultra-rich, but since the chief aim of Cyrano is to educate the public about the current state of the media and its horrific impact on our vanishing democracy, we have found it useful to compile a simple tool, a catalog of media biases and operating assumptions that shed ample light on the problem.

Essentially, the American media face a critical choice. The deterioration of American society due to longstanding structural contradictions is pushing them—and the public—to accept the realization that an impartial information system can't serve two different --and in this case, deeply antagonistic--masters. In all class-divided societies such as the United States, the interests of the rich and the interests of the common citizen, let alone the poor, are in direct and irreconcilable opposition, locked in a zero sum: what one gains, the other loses. Thus the media have reached their great fork on the road: either they tell the truth about the fundamental issues confronting society, thereby serving the interests of "the people," or they more or less deliberately fail to do so, thereby serving the strategic interests of the ruling oligarchy, who—incidentally—also happen to own the media. In fact, private commercial ownership is the single most powerful factor shaping the quality of the media's output. Other explanations seem grossly inadequate, misleading, or downright contrived by comparison. Now, some people are wise to the actual role played by the media, but the overwhelming majority, though suspicious and largely alienated, remain passive and confused.

How is such a colossal feat of imposture and pacification accomplished? The corporate system has perfected a communications machinery ruled by powerful, widely accepted myths that prop up the legitimacy of the system by hiding and whitewashing its antisocial flaws. This article does not claim that the system functions robotically and by executive fiat so as to rule out all deviations. The latter do crop up, but never with enough persistence to prevail against the ocean of distortions and banalities that drown out the most serious messages. This usually suffices to stifle meaningful political action. Ironically, these deviations are actually "tonics" to the media system, enhancing its credibility, for they tend to convince the casual observer that the media are indeed independent of government or ownership control.

Our catalog is the product of a huge number of well-documented observations. Still, social realities must be measured on balance, and by this standard the purported independence of mainstream US journalists, the claim by the "Free Press" to ideological autonomy, or even a meaningful adversarial position, must be regarded as baseless.

Our method was simple. In each topical area we tried to ascertain if the positions embraced by the military-industrial complex in accordance with its perceived short- and long-term needs were eventually reflected by the media. As intimated above, the evidence turned out to be surprisingly uniform and more copious than we expected. In most, it not all, cases where the image and perhaps the very fortune of the capitalist system was at stake, the media dutifully followed the line prescribed by the corporate-governmental elites. In this framework, the well-publicized departures from the ''national" consensus usually involved matters of tactics, timing, or taste, never essential values and goals.

The assembled data show that the American media operate principally as instruments for political and economic marketing on a very broad stage as befits a global superpower with interests in literally every corner of the world. American ideological marketing is heavily concentrated around the following themes:

A--The presentation of capitalism as the best of all possible systems, and the natural culmination of all political evolution, and of American culture as currently constituted as the best of all possible worlds. After capitalism, only more and better capitalism;

B--The equating of capitalism with "Americanness, " truth, the defense of civilization, decency, social justice, egalitarianism, and authentic democracy (all claims easily contradicted by the accumulated record and plutocracy's inherently anti-democratic dynamic);

C--The active legitimating and selling of capitalism's domestic and international policies, its governing institutions, top leadership, and mode of politics (esp. ritualized elections);

D--The softselling and whitewashing of inequitable power and economic distributions, worldwide;

E--Promoting the notion that, with all its imperfections, the American marketplace (capitalist marketplace in general) is the most democratic and fair mechanism to regulate the economy, since every purchase represents a "consumer vote of preference for a particular product and price."

F--The active endorsement of "constant and infinite growth" as a sign of progress in a finite world. This is an 18th Century notion embraced in the early stages of capitalism, when humans could not possibly envision a collision between their unrelenting economic activity and the planet's ecological survival. If nothing else, the unremitting pursuit of constant growth in a finite world is the trait that marks capitalism off as a certifiably insane system, yet scarcely a word is ever heard in the media to alert the public to this dangerous peculiarity, whose fruits we are finally beginning to see in the mounting levels of pollution and global climate change.

All the above functions require a continuing barrage of messages supportive of capitalism's principal values and assumptions (i.e., individualism, unchallenged unlimited wealth accumulation, "unchangeable" human nature, etc.), plus a well-rehearsed set of equally flattering historical narratives. On the other hand, a deep-running negative bias is normally attached to all items dealing with capitalism's arch-rival, socialism, or any attempts to change in meaningful ways the kind of status quo favored by the American elites. Themes A through F can be safely described as the unwritten "Commercial Constitution"of the American infotainment system.

Classifying some of the techniques

The successful insertion of ideological slant into the information mainstream requires a variety of approaches. For the sake of an informal classification, we offer below a number of disinformation "categories" (using "disinformation" in its broader sense to imply any instance of deliberate propaganda for political benefit) that obtain in much of the "Western press," but which appear in highly concentrated form throughout the U.S. media:

1. Principal Operating Falsehoods
2. Systematic Topical Distortions
3. Historical Lobotomies
4. Disinformation
5. Downplays
6. Suppressions
7. Ahistoricalism
8. Superficiality
9. Selective Sourcing
10. Fragmentation
11. Saturation/Hysteria Whipping


As stated, these categories are merely descriptive aids; they do not exhaust the actual list of possible manipulation approaches, nor are they advanced here as part of some grandiose academic insight, as they are rather obvious to any intelligent observer, and their relative "invisibility" is precisely the product of the blindness and conformity enforced by the system we criticize. Moreover, it should be kept in mind that some of these approaches are likely to overlap in regard to some issues. By their very nature they cannot be mutually exclusive.

1. Principal Operating Falsehoods (POF; henceforth also referred to as ''poffery")--The handling of U.S. Foreign Policy (USFP) affords an excellent example of a critical area practically blanketed by poffery. Here both the actual historical record, unsavory methods, and objectives pursued by the American leadership for almost a century have been and continue to be dutifully "laundered" and sold to the public as selfless crusades necessitated by our national security, moral imperatives, etc. USFP is normally depicted as the sincere national attempt to do good in an often ungrateful world. The goals are described as preserving democracy, freedom, and "the American Way of Life," a polite coinage for capitalism. Other POFs include the denial of class conflict in the U.S. ("harmony" of business and labor interests); the presentation of government and media as "impartial agencies above class or group interests, and the presentation of economic freedom (business's freedom to operate as it pleases) as inseparable and indistinguishable from political and civil freedoms, a pseudo-fact eloquently exposed by the obscene thriving of multinationals throughout a Third World plagued by military fascism.

2. Distortions (D)--Usually this category connotes facts reported out of context, or the media's concentration on only negative or positive aspects of a particular story, depending on whether it is a capitalist or socialist ox that is getting gored.

3. Historical Lobotomies (HL)--These relate to the presentation of certain important issues, events, and ideas without the minimum depth, impartiality, or simple truthfulness required for correct and full understanding. Some well-known examples include the political paternity of fascism (an embarrassing "secret" to be sure); the actual causes and origins of the Cold War and ongoing arms race ("Soviet aggression ... .. desire for world domination," and similar explanations); causes for upheaval and revolution in the Third World, origins of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and many others.

4. Disinformation (Di)--This category chiefly involves the sympathetic and uncritical dissemination of outright lies and fabrications furnished or planted in the media system by pro-capitalist sources, especially governmental and paramilitary agencies such as the CIA, the Pentagon, right-wing think tanks, and international and domestic propaganda "assets.'' (Consider here the contributions of such notorious sources of "information" as Robert Moss, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Claire Sterling, the Buckley clan, and others, and their impressive access to media and governmental ears.)

5. Downplays (Dn)--This simply implies that, as a rule, important issues, ideas, and news inimical to capitalist interests are accorded hostile and totally inadequate coverage. Through downplay an embarrassing news story is rendered harmless, as it barely scratches the consciousness of an already overloaded public. Downplay is a technique chiefly favored by the most prestigious media, i.e., The New York Times, Washington Post, CBS, etc., who use it as a face-saving device ("That item? Oh, yeah, we covered it."). Downplays can be qualitative, quantitative, or both. A qualitative downplay usually requires resource to inadequate topical depth and blacked out contexts. Quantitative downplays (far more common) operate on the basis of inadequate frequency and/or sheer scarcity of physical coverage. (One or two inches on page A21 of the Times, or no more than a flash in the pan in the nightly TV news show.) A case of consistent downplay, bordering on suppression, involves the massacre of East Timorese patriots by Indonesia, a Pentagon client. Downplays can also be classified as "friendly" (when America's sins and errors are covered up), or "hostile," when an enemy's good points and accomplishments receive short shrift. (Cf. "saturation coverage," below.)

6. Suppressions (S)--A suppression involves the total blackout of a particular item. Washington's active participation in the training of wholesale (state) terrorists and torturers, for the ostensible purpose of promoting a social climate conducive to "economic development," is a fine example of suppression. (The programs are carried out routinely by CIA or CIA-connected personnel, under the auspices of innocuous sounding fronts such as the notorious Office of Public Safety that trained police personnel.) The actual objectives of U.S. foreign policy are also the target of systematic suppression.

7. Ahistoricalism (Ah)--This trait denotes the inability and/or unwillingness of the capitalist dominated media to see certain sensitive events, social systems or institutions as dynamic, perennially changing entities. In capitalist eyes certain systems (especially capitalism itself) are almost eternal givens. They cannot really evolve, change, mature or die as all other systems have done before. This tends to underwrite a static vision of history, which of course favors things as they are. Thus, after capitalism, the media can only accept more and better capitalism. Anything else is heresy, madness or worse. This way of seeing things has powerful repercussions. For example, most defenders of capitalism refuse to admit that competition in the marketplace is a self-liquidating concept, as by operating freely it invariably ends up devouring itself. (As capitalism ages the many small and competitive firms that exist in its youth tend to be replaced by far fewer and more powerful firms; in other words the system moves in the irreversible direction of monopoly and megacorporations. Any law or laws contradicting this essential tendency are bound to fail, since--barring strong government intervention--the tendency will time and again reassert itself and recreate the problem.) Another common instance of ahistoricalism typical of the American media is their way of covering or explaining revolutionary turmoil and processes. The "violence" of the left, guerrillas, and other irregulars, is almost always depicted in invidious terms, sensationalized and decried, but no real useful information is given about the longstanding unbearable social conditions that preceded the explosion and which gave rise to the desperate armed struggle. The inevitable implication is, therefore, that the subversives are perversely and recklessly upsetting a "nice," "moderate," and basically viable society where recourse to armed resistance is not necessary, and where one only needs to strengthen the center.

8. Superficiality (Sp)--Superficial treatment is traditionally applied to the description of problems afflicting American society or similarly organized societies. Since real news analysis (i.e., in-depth, no-holds-barred investigation) is shunned or suspect as not sufficiently "objective and professional," etc., only the symptoms of problems are permitted circulation. Most of the actual causes are thus conveniently kept out of sight. Thus while the public raves and rants against "crime" (especially the violent, unorganized variety), "poverty," and other social ills, their causal connection to the very matrix of income and employment opportunities under the present system is rarely examined. The Brazilian bishops have said that to study capitalism seriously is to indict it. The American media intuitively know this, and reflect it in their evasive routines.

9. Selective Sourcing (Sel)--The American media display pronounced preferences with regard to "sourcing," a matter that then easily influences their reporting. In most situations the favored sectors will include the "establishment" side of an issue--from government officials to wealthy contacts. In the U.S. itself, the most-favored sectors include the top layers of the elected and career governments (President, closest aides, top congresspeople and bureaucrats), prominent corporate leaders and their spokespeople, and a vast stable of paracapitalist individuals and institutions clearly involved in the elegant manufacture and dissemination of supportive propaganda (Irving Kristol, David Horowitz, and Norman Podhoretz come to mind in the first category; Freedom House, the Heritage Foundation and The American Enterprise Institute are good examples of the latter). All these capitalist propaganda "assets" are aided and supported by a huge network of lesser known figures and institutions, and lavishly financed by some of the most rabidly rightwing corporations and plutocrats in the U.S. Their most typical products involve the blueprinting of cryptofascist plans and policies, and the weaving of "new" social theories and "facts" that aid in the legitimating of injustice, exploitation, and existing vast disparities in wealth and power. The media, almost uniformly, distribute their wares uncritically, and, we should add, much too often servilely.

A second class of favored sources comprises what we might call the "witnesses to history crowd." Here the media lean toward the utilization of a veritable chorus of disgruntled voices. Anyone with a complaint about socialism is almost automatically qualified. This category has often included anti-Castro Cubans and Vietnamese refugees, who have eloquently "assessed" revolutionary progress in their homelands; the testimony of harried businessmen in countries undergoing socialist transformations (Nicaragua's Robelo comes to mind as a recent example); and the mournful voices of dissent so often heard from behind the Iron Curtain. It scarcely needs mentioning that while all these foreign witnesses have more than their ample say in the US media--and this is not to deny that some complaints are perfectly valid--real American critics and dissenters rarely get a chance to present their views to their compatriots. A similar informational limbo is reserved for foreign supporters of regimes disapproved of. Few issues escape this treatment.

10. Fragmentation (Fr)--Also called focalization, this mode of mass communication relies on "the machine-gun-like recitation of numerous unrelated items," many of which possess clearly dissonant emotional and importance values, with advertising compounding the problem. As Herbert Schiller notes elsewhere in this issue, "the total indifference with which advertising treats any political or social event, insisting on intruding no matter what else is being presented, reduces all social phenomena to bizarre and meaningless happenings." The net effect of all this is a mounting inability on the part of the public to grasp issues in their totality, a fact that inhibits understanding and blocks emotional buildups which might otherwise result in public mobilizations. Finally, fragmentation is often accompanied by immediacy: the reporting or discussion of events as soon after their occurrence as possible. This speed of delivery, which only further aggravates the evanescent structure of all information, and which contributes directly to mental overloads, emotional numbness, and the illusion of being well informed, can be seen as a direct consequence of converting news into commodities subject to competitive merchandising ("scoopism"). Fragmentation is the principal, if not exclusive, mode of mass communication utilized by the US television system.


11. Saturation (Sat)--11. Saturation (Sat)--A propaganda technique usually reserved for the whipping up of national consensus through opinion waves, or public hysteria, or for the episodic rekindling of standing mythologies used in the ideological war with socialism, Saturation is normally--but not exclusively--initiated by the American government, particularly the presidential office, which through a variety of postures, channels, and pronouncements signals to the media that a chosen subject is suitable for informational carpetbombing. In the recent past we have been witness to (friendly) saturation coverage accorded the return of the Vietnam POWs (which served to rebuild patriotic fervor and further legitimate the war); the return of the Iran hostages (which largely pushed aside and mystified the miserable historical record we had chalked up in that country); the plight of Lech Walesa and Solidarity in Poland, a topic which even merited a hypocritical congressionally approved propaganda extravaganza, "Let Poland Be Poland," (panned by the international publics), and the cynical selling of the electoral farce in El Salvador--no doubt a necessary prelude to further U.S. involvement in that nation under the pretext of "providing help to people who so desperately want democracy and freedom." Other cases in the last few years include the passing away of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul, which were treated to levels of truly hysterical coverage verging on instant canonization. And just a few days ago (Jan 2007) we saw the outrageous amount of space and insufferable redundancy devoted by television and print media to the death of Gerald Ford.


Cases of hostile saturation also abound. The Japanese, perhaps more so than the Germans, were thoroughly dehumanized during World War I1, while the Chinese--not to mention the North Vietnamese and NLF in South Vietnam during the Indochina wars--were the subject of semiobsessional negative treatment in the years immediately after the end of World War II and the Korean War. (The Chinese image changed rather abruptly when Nixon began to woo China as a possible counterweight to the Soviets. This sudden about-face in the media's tone toward the "Yellow Peril," "the Red Chinese threat," and similar scarewords, demonstrated, once again, the intimate ideological connection binding the American media and the nation's power structure.)

All of the above techniques appear singly or severally in various topical areas, according to need, and some, such as ahistoricalism and fragmentation appear in most items of news and entertainment. They are simply inherent in the capitalist way of thinking and therefore have been totally incorporated in the corporate media grammar.

In future issues we plan to introduce our readers to similar "dissections" of Soviet, Cuban and Chinese media, with comparative evaluations relating to esthetic aspects and social and historical effects. Also, we shall try to present overviews of Arab and Israeli mass communications systems; and surveys of Third World, Japanese, and Western European models.*
The Deliberate Waste of A Critical Resource

The self-limiting vices enumerated above and which are for the most part inherent in the presentation of topics by the corporate media create an enormous opportunity for honest journalists and social communicators, people who prefer not to take money under false pretenses. Just as Mother Jones' editor Adam Hochschild suggested, there is an "almost total absence of competition in terms of quality investigative journalism." [See AT LONG LAST CYRANO].

The topics that the professional media should be covering truthfully and in earnest, so as to permit the American public to arrive at fair and just policy decisions when they are really needed, not after many decades of generalized suffering and monstrous crimes, should be the basic curriculum of all self-respecting journalism schools, not to mention any responsible news outlet. They can be summed up in the following dozen tenets:

PRIORITY TOPICS FOR A NEW SERIOUS JOURNALISM

Who we are, what our intentions are toward the rest of the world;
Who "they" are, and how they really live;
Where the real threats to our national security actually come from and what options we have;
The nature of the economic system we live under;
Who really governs us and with what results;
How other countries are governed (truthfully, for a change) and with what results;
The actual nature and origins of "hostile" systems around the world (especially socialism) and their performance;
Our true role in the world, notably among poorer nations, and the methods we use to advance our elite's objectives, objectives automatically wrapped in the flag;
The actual causes of war and turmoil in the world today, and of revolutions and counter-revolutions;
The appropriate responses to aggression and exploitation ... the list need not stop here, but this is a good start.
The truth about job creation and job destruction, and the role of technology in employment and environmental areas;

Wider discussion and coverage of environmental and moral topics —including our treatment of animals—which are currently neglected, ignored, or manipulated by the system.

The adoption of such an admittedly revolutionary curriculum naturally is not likely to happen before the system itself is substantively revised. The gaps in coverage, the distortions, are not so much accidental as integral to the health and prosperity of the system. They can't be corrected without endangering its very survival. In sum, when the American people finally start getting the right answers to these questions, the system, as we know it, will begin to collapse. No wonder, then, that disinformation is as necessary to the system as truth is to us. So, what next? There are no shortcuts to the problem at hand. For this phase of the struggle, truthful communications must bloom. Mass education about the issues of the day must become everyone's job, everyone's passion. So start compiling your own catalog of media biases, and the answers we need to hear. Make participation in alternative media resources a top priority: feed them news items, feed them cash, if you can, and give them some of your time. But make sure before you start that you're not seeing the world upside down.

The Awkward Hug

In Waukesha James T. Harris, an AM conservative radio host admonished McCain: "It is absolutely vital that you take it to Obama, that you hit him where it hurts, there's a soft spot."

After bringing up Reverend Wright, ACORN and some unspecified "shady characters", Harris got really dramatic and said "I am begging you, sir, I am begging you. Take it to him."

So who is James T. Harris? He's an AM radio talk show host on Saturday and Sunday afternoons for WTMG AM 620 in Milwaukee. But there is more to James T. Harris. He's outsource ready.

Harris runs a business called "IllumiNation". The Web page that describes how to engage Harris's services are indeed quite illuminating:

"Choose Your IllumiNation™ Program Now in Three Easy Steps!

1. Know the Desired Outcomes you want your audience to experience.
2. Define an ample time slot to allow us to introduce and unpack the program for those outcomes.
3. Pick a single program or combine multiple programs that fit the allotted time and desired outcomes."

I'm sure it is just a coincidence, and we have no evidence that John McCain's campaign would actually hire PR type people such as Harris to help move along the campaign, but if McCain ever needs someone from Wisconsin to stand up and ask a question the campaign would like to have asked, maybe as a precursor to the last debate of the general election season, James T. Harris looks like he can deliver.

Engaging Our Services
Choose Your IllumiNation™ Program Now in Three Easy Steps!

1. Know the Desired Outcomes you want your audience to experience.
2. Define an ample time slot to allow us to introduce and unpack the program for those outcomes.
3. Pick a single program or combine multiple programs that fit the allotted time and desired outcomes.

Step #1: Outcomes

The outcomes you want your audience to experience should, whenever possible, determine the length of time to allocate to a subject expert. With IllumiNation, our subject experts will deliver outcomes. Only the constraints of time will determine how far we can or cannot “drill down” into the depth of the topic at your event. Therefore, your assessment of your audience’s needs should occur before final decision is made by the event planners about the available time slot.
Step 2: Length of Program

Deciding how much time to allocate for a subject expert to present is a very important decision! A presenter needs time to introduce a topic and “unpack it” for the audience’s benefit. Therefore, IllumiNation’s unilateral services (where our role is not co-mingled within the roles of other presenters) require specific time increments so the program is delivered competently at a level that meets or exceeds your expectations:

* Motivational awareness speeches: 1 hour
* Educational awareness program: 2 or 3 hours
* Seminars and training: half-day (4 hours) and full-day sessions ( 5, 6, 7, or 8 hours)

In circumstances where clear, desired outcomes drive the need for increments other then even hours, IllumiNation’s program will consider adjusting programs in our desire to provide the best service possible for our clients. In these cases, our standard, incremental fees will also be adjusted in a corresponding manner. Requests for special appearances or a podium speech under one hour in length are always considered but the hourly rate will not be adjusted downward (and where travel is required, may be adjusted upward).
Step #3: “Package” Your IllumiNation Program!

You can mix and match any program from this IllumiNation menu using our program increments to fit your event’s available time slot. Each of our programs can be considered a “module.” Combine topical modules to form a longer, seamless program that covers more subject matter for your audience.

For example, if you have three hours to do great things for your audience, IllumiNation can deliver:

* Option a: Three separate, 1-hour programs, or;
* Option b: One 2-hour program plus one 1-hour program, or;
* Option c: One 3-hour program.

Our clients often like a one hour motivational program up front, followed by an in-depth, two hour program to deliver the “meat” of the subject with substantive takeaways, experiential exercises, hand-outs, and interactive discussion.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Mens Attitudes. Knopf. New York. 1965
NOTES FROM PROPAGANDA

PROPAGANDA OF AGITATION AND PROPAGANDA OF INTEGRATION
1. The second great distinction within the general phenomenon of propaganda is the distinction between propaganda of agitation and propaganda of integration. Here we find such a summa divisio that we may ask ourselves: if the methods, themes, characteristics, publics and objectives are so different, are we not really dealing with two separate entities rather than two aspects of the same phenomenon?

2. Propaganda of agitation, being the most visible and widespread, generally attracts all the attention. It is most often subversive propaganda and has the stamp of opposition. It is led a party seeking to destroy the government or the established order. Governments also employ this propaganda of agitation, when after having been installed in power, they want to pursue a revolutionary course of action. Most of Lenin and Hitler's propaganda was propaganda of agitation. Hitler could work his sweeping social and economic transformations only by constant agitation, by overexcitement, by straining energies to the utmost.

3. In all cases, propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the individual to bear heavy ordeals. It takes him out of his everyday life, his normal framework, and plunges him into enthusiasm and adventure; it opens to him hitherto unsuspected possibilities, and suggests extraordinary goals that nevertheless seem to him completely within reach. Propaganda of agitation thus unleashes an explosive moment; it operates inside of a crisis or actually provokes the crisis itself. On the other hand, such propaganda can obtain effects of relatively short duration. If the proposed objective is not achieved fast enough, enthusiasm will give way to discouragement and despair. Therefore. specialists in "agitprop" break up the desired goals into a series of stages to be reached one by one. There is a period of pressure to obtain some result, then a period of relaxation and rest; this is how Lenin, Hitler and Mao operated.

4. This propaganda of agitation is obviously the flashiest; it attracts attention because of its explosive and revolutionary character. It is also the easiest to make; in order to succeed, it need only be addressed to the most simple and violent sentiments through the most elementary means. Hate is generally its most profitable resource. It is extremely easy to launch a revolutionary movement based on hatred of a particular enemy. Hatred is probably the most spontaneous and common sentiment; it consists of attributing one's misfortune and sins to "another," who must be killed in order to assure the disappearance of those misfortunes and sins.

5. Along with this universal sentiment, found in all propaganda of agitation (even when provoked by the government), are secondary motives more or less adapted to the circumstances. A sure expedient is the call to liberty among an oppressed, conquered invaded, or colonized people: calls summoning the Cuban or Algerian people to liberty, for example, are assured of sympathy and support. The same is true for the promise of bread to the hungry, the promise of land to the plundered, and the call to truth among the religious.

6. As a whole these are appeals to simple, elementary sentiments requiring no refinement, and thanks to which the propagandist can gain acceptance for the biggest lies, the worst delusions--sentiments that act immediately, provoke violent reactions, and awaken such passions that they justify all sacrifices. Such sentiments correspond to the primary needs of all men: the need to eat, to be one's own master, to hate.

7. Given the ease of releasing such sentiments, the material and psychological means employed can be simple: the pamphlet, the speech, the poster, the rumor. in order to make propaganda of agitation, it is not necessary to have the mass media at one's disposal, for such propaganda feeds on itself, and each person seized by it becomes in turn a propagandist. Nor is it necessary to be concerned with probability or veracity. Any statement whatever, no matter how stupid, any lie will be believed once it enters into the passionate current of hatred.

8. Finally, the less educated and informed the people to whom propaganda of agitation is addressed, the easier it is to make such propaganda. That is why it is particularly suited for use among the so-called lower classes (the proletariat) and among African peoples. There it can rely on some key words of magical import, which are believed without question even though the hearers cannot attribute any real content to them. Among colonized peoples, one of these words is "independence," an extremely profitable word from the point of view of effective subversion. It is useless to try to explain to people that national independence is not at all the same as individual liberty; the African countries generally have not developed to the point at which they can live in political independence in the Western manner; that the economy of their countries permits them merely to change masters. But no reason can prevail against the magic of the word. And it is the least intelligent people who are most likely to be thrown into a revolutionary movement by such summary appeals.

9. In contrast to propaganda of agitation is the propaganda of integration--the propaganda of developed nations and characteristic of our civilization; in fact, it did not exist before the twentieth century. It is a propaganda of conformity. It is related to the fact, analyzed earlier, that in Western society it is no longer sufficient to obtain a transitory political act (such as a vote): one needs total adherence to a society's truths and behavioral patterns. As the more perfectly uniform the society, the stronger its power and effectiveness, each member should be only an organic and functional fragment of it, perfectly adapted and integrated. He must share the stereotypes, beliefs and reactions of the group; he must be an active participant in its economic, ethical, aesthetic and political doings. All his activities, all his sentiments are dependent on this collectivity. And, as he is often reminded, he can fulfill himself only through this collectivity, as a member of this group (this is one of the points common to all American micro-sociology). Propaganda of integration thus aims at making the individual participate in his society in every way. It is a long-term propaganda, a self-reproducing propaganda that seeks to obtain a stable behavior, to adapt the individual to his everyday life, to reshape his thoughts and behavior in terms of the permanent social setting. It must be permanent, for the individual must no longer be left to himself.

10. Integration propaganda aims at stabilizing the social body, at unifying and reinforcing it. It is thus the preferred instrument of government, though properly speaking, it is not exclusively political propaganda. Integration propaganda is much more subtle and complex than agitation propaganda. It seeks not a temporary excitement but a total molding of the person in depth. It is primarily this integration propaganda that the present study is concerned with, for it is the most important of our time despite the success and the spectacular character of subversive propaganda.

11. Let us note right away a final aspect of integration propaganda: the more comfortable, cultivated and informed the milieu to which it is addressed, the better it works. Intellectuals are more sensitive than peasants to integration propaganda. In fact, they share the stereotypes of a society even when they are political opponents of the society.

12. One essential problem remains. When a revolutionary movement is launched, it operates, as we have said, with agitation propaganda; but once the revolutionary party has taken power, it must begin to operate immediately with integration propaganda (save for the exceptions mentioned). But the transition from one type of propaganda to the other is extremely delicate and difficult. After one has, over the years, excited the masses, flung them into adventures, fed their hopes and their hatreds, opened the gates of action to them, and assured them all their actions were justified, it is difficult to make them re-enter the ranks, to integrate them into the normal framework of politics and economics.

13. The integration of the revolutionary rebel into a prodigiously disciplined, organized, and regimented army, which goes hand in hand with his intellectual and moral indoctrination, prepares him to be taken into custody by integration propaganda after victory, and to be inserted into the new society without resistance or anarchical excursions. This patient and meticulous shaping of the whole man, this "putting into the mold," as Mao calls it, is certainly his principal success. Of course, he began with a situation in which man was already well-integrated into the group, and he substituted one complete framework for another. Also he [Mao] needed only to shape the minds of people who had very little education (in the Western sense), so that they learned to understand everything through images, stereotypes, slogans, and interpretations that he knew how to inculcate. Under such conditions, integration is easy and practically irreversible. Again, integration propaganda is by far the most important new fact of our day.

Joe the Plumber, dumb and dumber
John Aravosis (DC) · 10/16/2008

Maybe we should count ourselves lucky that McCain didn't make him VP. More from Politico:

John McCain hung his final presidential debate performance on an Ohio plumber who campaign aides never vetted.

A day after making Joseph Wurzelbacher famous, referencing him in the debate almost two dozen times as someone who would pay higher taxes under Barack Obama, McCain learned the fine print Thursday on the plumber’s not-so-tidy personal story: He owes back taxes. He is not a licensed plumber. And it turns out that Wurzelbacher makes less than $250,000 a year, which means he would receive a tax cut if Obama were elected president....

A McCain source said Thursday that the campaign read about Wurzelbacher on the Drudge Report, while another campaign aide confirmed that he was not vetted.

Hey, maybe that's where they vetted Sarah Palin too! There's more:

Obama veered from his prepared remarks in Londonderry, N.H., to question McCain’s use of Wurzelbacher, saying the Republican senator’s tax plan would do more for corporations and wealthy individuals than, say, a plumber.

“He is trying to suggest that a plumber is the guy he’s fighting for,” Obama said told a rally with 4,100 people. “How many plumbers do you know making a quarter of a million dollars a year?”

....Wurzelbacher acknowledged to reporters that he doesn't have a plumber's license, but said he didn't need one because he works for someone else at a company that does residential work. State and local records show Wurzelbacher has no license, although his employer does.David Golis, manager and residential building official for the Toledo Division of Building Inspection, said Wurzelbacher still would need to be a licensed apprentice or journeyman to work in Toledo.

Wurzelbacher also owes the state of Ohio $1,182.98 in personal income tax, according to Lucas County Court of Common Pleas records. The Ohio Department of Taxation filed a claim on his property until he pays the debt, according to the records. The lien remains active.

One more point that Joe and I will be mentioning again. We just found out today that Obama's $250,000 cap on the tax cut, that's $250,000 in taxable income NOT total income. In other words, that means if you make under $250,000 AFTER deductions, you get a tax cut. And if you have your own business, that means your real salary could easily be $400,000 before deductions. That's a hell of a salary for Joe the Plumber to be making and whining about.

Rick Sanchez Calls Out Media That Fell For "Mutilation" Hoax
Sam Stein
October 24, 2008

The big political story of the day revolves around what turned out to be a non-story. Several media outlets (the vast majority conservative) were left with egg on their faces after they trumpeted up the tale of a McCain volunteer who claimed to have been assaulted by a large black man because of a McCain bumper sticker on her car. On her face was carved a backwards 'B' (meant to represent Obama's name). The Drudge Report called it "mutilation."

It was a hoax. And now, some in the fourth estate are left to explain why they pushed this apparent political ploy. Those in the business who showed some prudence are calling out their competitors for taking the bait.

On CNN today, anchor Rick Sanchez did just that, naming the outlets that not only reported but actively pushed the story of Ashley Todd. In addition to explaining why his station didn't report the story, Sanchez dug the knife in a bit deeper when it came to Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio talk show host who appeared on CNN Thursday and blamed "that side" (i.e. the Democrats) for engaging in "extraordinarily" disturbing acts.

"Part of the story is the fact that it was reported by the media," said Sanchez. "We would not be telling the story now had it not been carried by so many outlets. As I mentioned before, it was mentioned on, as a matter of fact I have a list and not to mention names, but the initials of the news organizations are Fox News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Newsday. And also radio talk show hosts went on their radio stations and talked ad infinitum about the story yesterday, one of them even seemingly being a braggadocio about it when he was on the air with our own Wolf Blitzer yesterday."

Separately, the College Republicans -- a group of which Todd is a member -- sought to distance themselves from the whole affair, telling the Huffington Post: "When Ms. Todd initially contacted us claiming to have been attacked, our first reaction was obviously to be concerned for her safety ... We are as upset as anyone to learn of her deceit. Ashley must take full responsibility for her actions."

Dennis Prager: Equality ‘Is A European Value, Not An American Value’»

Right-wing radio host Dennis Prager spoke before an audience of 3,000 at Minneapolis’ Orchestra Hall, during which he attacked the “left” for constructing “a grand edifice of lies about America.” One of those lies, according to Prager, is that “equality” is an American value:

Equality, which is the primary value of the left, is a European value, not an American value. Let me tell you that right now. I know this sounds offensive to half of my fellow Americans, because they have been Europeanized in their values. The French Revolution is not the American Revolution. The French Revolution said Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. The American Revolution said Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. We have lost touch with what our distinctive American values are. We have distinctive American values. … We have a better value system, and this is being protected by one of the two parties: the Republican party.

Watch it:

It’s a good thing Prager was there to explain the ideals behind the American Revolution. Otherwise, Americans might have relied on “Europeanized” documents like the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…

Or if they had looked to the United States Constitution, they may have erroneously thought “equality” was an important American value:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Thankfully, Dennis Prager is here to protect and defend American inequality.

Human rights must be kept whole, no matter what that may cost the powers that be. In this case there must be no compromise, no median worked out between pragmatically oriented rights (between rights and utilitarianism)–all politics must bend its knee before human rights, and only in this fashion may politics ever aspire to reach the stage where it will illuminate humanity.

–Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden—Anhang II (1795) in: Sämtliche Werke vol. 5, p. 703 (Grand Duke Wilhelm Ernst ed. 1927)(S.H. transl.)

…the group of manifestations by which any society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself, to unify its members’ behavior according to a pattern, to spread its style of life abroad, and thus to impose itself on other groups. We call this phenomenon “sociological” propaganda, to show first of all, that the entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly, that its influence aims much more at a entire style of life that at opinions or even one particular course of behavior.
Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. pp. 62.

Alongside the mass media of communications, propaganda employs censorship, legal texts, proposed legislation, international conferences, and so forth—thus introducing elements seemingly alien to propaganda…. The judicial apparatus is also utilized…during a trial…the judge is forced to demonstrate a lesson for the education of the public: verdicts are educational. Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. pp. 12-14.

"Will: The liberal/conservative argument has always been governed by the two polar values of Western political thought: freedom and equality. They're both important, both valuable, and they're always in tension and it's always being adjusted. Today, liberals tend to stress equality - understood not as equality of opportunity but often also as equality of social outcome...and to that end they want the government to be very busy fine-tuning society and engineering it. To that end they think that the government should redistribute wealth and therefore they think the multiplication of entitlement programs is a definition of the public good.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to stress freedom, and are therefore willing to accept larger disparities of unequal outcomes in order to preserve freedom and tend to regard the multiplication of entitlements as inimical to the public good, as subversive of the attitudes and aptitudes essential for a free society."

CHRIS WALLACE: But Senator, you voted for the $700 billion bailout that’s being used partially to nationalize American banks. Isn’t that socialism?

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: That is reacting to a crisis that’s due to greed and excess in Washington. And what this administration is doing wrong and what Paulson is doing wrong is not going out and buying up home loan mortgages, home mortgages, and giving people new mortgages at the new value of their homes, so they can stay in their home. They’re bailing out the banks. They’re bailing out these institutions.

CHRIS WALLACE: But you voted for that.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Of course. It was a package that had to be enacted because the economy was about to go into the tank.[/color]

"Will: This takes us very directly back to very basic philosophic questions. Do you believe that man is simply born a blank slate to be written on by society? And therefore, as liberals tend to believe, if you engineer society with sufficient skill, you will engineer people with sufficient perfection."

Will: The liberal/conservative argument has always been governed by the two polar values of Western political thought: freedom and equality. They're both important, both valuable, and they're always in tension and it's always being adjusted. Today, liberals tend to stress equality - understood not as equality of opportunity but often also as equality of social outcome...and to that end they want the government to be very busy fine-tuning society and engineering it. To that end they think that the government should redistribute wealth and therefore they think the multiplication of entitlement programs is a definition of the public good.

...reason involves universality. For, the emphasis on reason declares that man’s acts are those of a thinking subject guided by conceptual knowledge. With concepts as his instruments, the thinking subject can penetrate the contingencies and recondite devices of the world and reach universal and necessary laws that govern and order the infinitude of individual objects. He thus discovers potentialities that are common to multitudes of particulars, potentialities that will explain the changing forms of things and dictate the range and direction of their course. Universal concepts will become the organon of a practice that alters the world. They might arise only through this practice and their content might change with its progress, but they will not depend on chance. Genuine abstraction is not arbitrary, nor is it the product of free imagination; it is strictly determined by the objective structure of reality.

The universal is as real as the particular; it only exists in a different form, namely, as force, dynamis, potentiality.
Reason and Revolution, Herber Marcuse.

Prager: Give me in a nutshell the primary differences between a liberal and a conservative today.

Will: The liberal/conservative argument has always been governed by the two polar values of Western political thought: freedom and equality. They're both important, both valuable, and they're always in tension and it's always being adjusted. Today, liberals tend to stress equality - understood not as equality of opportunity but often also as equality of social outcome...and to that end they want the government to be very busy fine-tuning society and engineering it. To that end they think that the government should redistribute wealth and therefore they think the multiplication of entitlement programs is a definition of the public good.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to stress freedom, and are therefore willing to accept larger disparities of unequal outcomes in order to preserve freedom and tend to regard the multiplication of entitlements as inimical to the public good, as subversive of the attitudes and aptitudes essential for a free society.

Prager: As you move leftward in American politics, your model is Western Europe.

Will: Exactly. The question is, who wants to be and who does not want to be like France and Italy today? I'd rather not.

Prager: Or Sweden in particular...I think the imagery of the perfect society is more a Sweden or Denmark, for example.

Will: This takes us very directly back to very basic philosophic questions. Do you believe that man is simply born a blank slate to be written on by society? And therefore, as liberals tend to believe, if you engineer society with sufficient skill, you will engineer people with sufficient perfection. Conservatives tend to take seriously, whether they're religious or not, the doctrine of original sin - that man is a problem.

[James] Madison said that democracy is a good thing but democracy is inherently a problem because the people can be dangerous, they can be tyrannical, they can be foolish, and therefore you need what he called 'republican remedies for the diseases to which republics are prey.'

Prager: When did this begin? I asked for this essential difference between conservatives and liberals...when I was growing up, I don't remember liberalism as it is today. What happened?

Will: What happened I think was the 1960s. Between 1938 and 1964 there was no liberal legislating majority in Congress. In 1938 Roosevelt badly overreached with his court packing plan, he was going to add members of the Supreme Court to make it more compliant with his wishes...the country rebelled and swatted him down really. Between '38 and '64 a coalition of Republicans and conservative, mostly southern Democrats could prevent the excesses of liberalism. In 1964 the man for whom I cast my first vote for president - Barry Goldwater - got badly beaten, lost 44 states...huge Democratic majorities were swept into both houses of Congress and for two years they could do whatever they pleased. What they pleased to do was radically expand the state and make the government far more intrusive, more ambitious regulating our behavior. The country, again, rebelled against that, and the conservative era really began.

” Integration propaganda is designed to persuade persons to think and act in certain desired patterns. Its goal is conformity by individuals and uniformity of society by establishing shared stereotypes, beliefs, and group reactions. In many ways, integration propaganda is the antithesis of agitation propaganda. Integration of persons ensures stable behavior, reshapes thought and action by unifying, remolding the person, and reinforcing group relations. This type of propaganda is much more complex requiring long term planning for permanent, not temporary, effect. Thus, it is subtle, if not invisible, acting slowly and gradually assimilating the total persona. Integration propaganda is the most effective toward intellectuals.

Between '38 and '64 a coalition of Republicans and conservative, mostly southern Democrats could prevent the excesses of liberalism. In 1964 the man for whom I cast my first vote for president - Barry Goldwater - got badly beaten, lost 44 states...huge Democratic majorities were swept into both houses of Congress and for two years they could do whatever they pleased. What they pleased to do was radically expand the state and make the government far more intrusive, more ambitious regulating our behavior. The country, again, rebelled against that, and the conservative era really began.

Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity dive shamelessly in, talking about the 'Obama recession' and other partisan lines.
By James Rainey
November 9, 2008

You have to give Rush Limbaugh a perverse kind of credit. At least when he is demonizing Barack Obama, fabricating Obama policies, blaming Obama for single-handedly causing the recession and the stock market crash, he doesn't pretend to be fair.

Opening his first post-election rant against the president-elect, Limbaugh launched in with a certain relish. "The game," he told his radio listeners, "has begun."

Sean Hannity, on the other hand, insisted on feigning a post-election detente, telling his Fox News television audience last week, "I want Barack Obama to succeed."

Didn't he think anyone would notice that, just a moment later, he was back parroting the failed campaign argument that Obama is a "mystery"?

"I fear [this] is the guy that has these radical associations 20 years ago," Hannity added, an odd way of demonstrating support for the new commander in chief.

A healthy skepticism is not only the media's right but its obligation. Indeed, commentators at many mainstream outlets -- including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal -- have already argued that Obama's best bet to succeed will be if he hews to a centrist path.

But many on the losing end of last week's election want to hold on to their anger. And there are those in the media -- led by the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity -- only too ready to feed that animus, along with their own ratings.

"The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen," Limbaugh told his radio audience of 15 million to 20 million on Thursday. "Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession. Might turn into a depression."

Apparently the tanking of the real estate market, record losses in the auto industry, and massive failures in the banking and investment industry have very little to do with our problems. The economic system is collapsing, Rush wants us to know, because it anticipates the tax increases Obama has pledged on capital gains and for the highest income earners.

But maybe that shouldn't be so surprising, because radio's Biggest Big Man also assures us that the Democrat welcomes "economic chaos" because it gives him "greater opportunity for expanded government." In a time when the nation calls out for cool leadership and rational discussion, Limbaugh stirs the caldron, a tendency he proved in a particularly grotesque way last week when he accused Obama's party of plotting a government takeover of 401(k) retirement plans.

"They're going to take your 401(k), put it in the Social Security trust fund, whatever the hell that is," Limbaugh woofed. "Trust fund, my rear end."

A slight problem with Limbaugh's report: Obama and the Democrats have proposed no such thing.

The proposal, in fact, emanated from a single economist, one of many experts testifying to a congressional committee.

The president-elect has thus far shown as much interest in taking over your 401(k) as he has in moving the capital to Nairobi. (If you look hard, you might find that one somewhere out there in the blogosphere, too.)

To broadcast such a report -- so drained of context as to constitute a lie -- would be a shameless act at any time. But Limbaugh needlessly stirred the fears of the millions he holds in his thrall -- making the 401(k) thievery sound like nearly a done deal. Shameless.

Hannity and Limbaugh filleted Obama's selection as chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, in a way that exposed their partisan gamesmanship.

Mainstream newspapers have filed plenty of unflinching accounts of Emanuel's tough, occasionally ruthless tactics as a Democratic congressional leader and onetime operative in the Clinton White House. That assessment of bare-knuckle partisanship Hannity seized on. But it wouldn't do to report another aspect of Emanuel's record -- his Clintonesque bent for the political center.

So the Fox-man simply created a new persona for Emanuel as, you guessed it, "one of the hardest left-wing radicals on the left."

Ever open-minded, Hannity concluded, "I think they're going to overreach, and I think we're going to see the person that I think Barack Obama is. I think he is hard, hard left."

Then, I kid you not, Hannity ended with this pledge: "We'll see. We'll give him an opportunity."

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham apparently didn't get the memo requiring Obama's opponents to sink immediately and mindlessly into rank partisanship.

The South Carolina senator, one of Sen. John McCain's closest allies in his bid for the presidency, praised Obama's selection of Emanuel as "a wise choice." He added that the new chief of staff could be a tough partisan, but was also "honest, direct and candid" and willing to "work to find common ground where it exists."

Perhaps Hannity, Limbaugh and the rest of those intent on poisoning the soil before bipartisanship can take root might recall words of wisdom from Brit Hume, a veteran newsman who is close to leaving the Fox anchor desk for semi-retirement.

The problem with the accusations of Obama being "dangerous" and "radical," Hume said on election night, "was that it just didn't fit with the man you saw before your eyes."

Rainey is a Times staff writer.

George Will: ‘The First New Deal Didn’t Work’»
Nov 23rd, 2008
Thinkprogress.org

Economists on both the left and right broadly agree that the need for stimulative government spending is necessary to prevent a further collapse of the global economic system — just as the New Deal and the deficit spending of World War II restored the health of the global economy in the last century.

This morning on ABC’s This Week, conservative columnist George Will echoed the false right-wing meme that FDR’s New Deal policies made the Depression worse:

Before we go into a new New Deal, can we just acknowledge that the first New Deal didn’t work?

Watch it:


As Nobel-laureate Paul Krugman wrote recently in the New York Times, “There’s a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it’s important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most Americans.”

Krugman observed that the true short-comings of the New Deal policies resulted from the fact that they were not bold enough over the short-term:

[T]he truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious. […]

In short, Mr. Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

Brad DeLong offers this chart to emphasize the value of the New Deal:

Paul Rosenberg has more.

Study: "Center-Right Nation" Narrative Spiked Immediately After Election Day
By David Sirota
November 21st, 2008


When I wrote my first column about the "center-right nation" [10/31/08] and subsequently launched the "Center-Right Nation Watch" series on this blog I predicted that the news media would actually increase its usage of this term after Obama won. I did a Lexis-Nexis search of the term, and was the first to note the trend and make the prediction that "if Obama wins, expect more frantic talk from the fringe about how electing a black man billed as an Islamic Karl Marx obviously means our country is more conservative than ever."

Feeling like I was out on a limb (and remember, this was almost 2 weeks before a group of major progressive pundits belatedly started writing about the trend), I asked a friend out here in Denver who works with a company called Trendrr to officially track whether my prediction was right - and you can see from the results above, it was - more so than I ever expected.

As the graph shows, the use of the exact term "center-right nation" spiked immediately after election day (point "0" is the day my column published, point "1" is election day). You can use this link to track the growth of the "center-right nation" term in real-time.

While it's true - this trend study doesn't tell us how many of the "center-right nation" references are saying this is "not a center-right nation." But a look through Lexis-Nexis shows it's safe to assume that the vast majority of these references are asserting this is a "center-right nation." Indeed, you can watch ThinkProgress's video highlight reel of conservative pundits and reporters insisting that despite the huge Democratic landslide and overwhelming public opinion data to the contrary, America remains a "center-right nation":

YouTube link
So we're not talking about theory anymore - we're talking about empirical fact. The media has exponentially increased the amount of times it claims that this country is a "center-right nation" - at the very same time public opinion data shows the country is a decidedly center-left nation. In short, we have the two hard data points proving that as the country has become more progressive and validated its progressivism on election day, the media has increased its claims that the nation is conservative.

After 9/11, Rove pressured the entertainment industry ‘to produce propaganda.’»
By Matt Corley on Dec 1st, 2008
Thinkprogress.org

The New York Times reports today that shortly after 9/11, the White House met several times with “a delegation of high-level media executives, including the heads of every major studio,” in order to discuss how “the entertainment industry could play a part in improving the image of the United States overseas.” Karl Rove attended at least one of the meetings. One of the participants in the meetings, former RIAA chairwoman Hilary Rosen says Rove “put pressure” on them to “produce propaganda”:

Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, who was also present at the post-9/11 meetings, said that Mr. Rove and other White House officials were looking for the kind of support Hollywood gave the United States during World War II.

“They wanted the music industry, the movie industry, the TV industry to produce propaganda,” she said. “Rove was putting a lot of pressure on us.”

Hall of Mirrors
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
January 8, 2009

The American print and TV media have never been very good. These days they are horrible. If people intend to be informed, they must turn to foreign news broadcasts, to Internet sites, to foreign newspapers available on the Internet, or to alternative newspapers that are springing up in various cities. A person who sits in front of Murdoch’s Fox “News” or CNN or who reads the New York Times is simply being brainwashed with propaganda.

Before conservatives nod their heads in agreement, I’m not referring to “the liberal media.” I mean the propaganda that issues from the US government and the Israel Lobby.

It was neoconservative Bush regime propaganda fed to America through Judith Miller and the New York Times and through Murdoch’s Fox “News” that convinced Americans that they were in danger from a small secular Arab country half way around the globe called Iraq. It was the American media that convinced Americans that getting rid of dangerous “weapons of mass destruction,” weapons that did not exist in Iraq, would be a cakewalk paid for by Iraqi oil revenues.

It is the same propagandistic American print and TV media that have rationalized Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan based on seven years of lies and deception.

It is the same media that today provids only Israeli propaganda as “coverage” of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

It was the New York Times that spiked for one year the leaked information from the National Security Agency that the Bush regime, in violation of US law, was illegally spying on Americans without warrants. The “liberal” New York Times agreed to suppress the story so that Bush would not face reelection under the cloud of his outlaw behavior.

Conservatives think the Washington Post is “liberal media” despite the fact that the editorial and commentary pages are controlled by neocons and their sympathizers.

During the run up to wars and during wars, the American press has always been a propagandist for the government. The only exceptions occurred during the later phases of the Vietnam war and the Contra-Sandinista conflict in Central America. Karen de Young and some others tried to honestly cover the Contras and Sandinistas and were demonized by “patriots” taken in by the government’s lies.

Conservatives still blame the “liberal” media for losing the Vietnam war, when in fact all the media did was to provide some truthful reports that opened some American eyes.

When the truth cuts against the position of the US government, conservatives see it as “liberal.”

When propaganda supports the government’s lies, conservatives see it as “patriotic.”

However, any resemblance to independent reporting disappeared from the American media when the Democratic regime of President Clinton allowed Murdoch and a small handful of moguls to concentrate the American media in a few corporate hands. That was the end of American reporting.

Journalists disappeared from media management and were replaced by corporate advertising executives with an eye not to offend any source of advertising revenue, and certainly not to offend the government, which controls the broadcast licenses that comprise the value of the mega-companies. Today reporters write the stories that their masters want to hear, or they are out. The function of editors is to make certain that no uncomfortable information reaches the public.

The public is slowly catching on, and the print media is dying. The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times are all on the ropes.

Americans are still subjected to Fox “News” and CNN propaganda piped into airport waiting rooms, doctors’ offices, and exercise centers

People ask me where they can get reliable information. I tell them that their goal cannot be reached without their commitment of time.

People who have access to television services that provide English language foreign broadcasts, such as Iran’s Press TV, Russia Today, or Al Jazeera, can get get news and insights from those parts of the world demonized by the US media.

The BBC World Service still reports facts while covering itself by providing the views of the US, UK, and Israeli governments.

Both the Asia Times and Israeli newspapers, such as Haaretz can be read online in English. There are other such newspapers, and all of them provide information that Americans will never see in their own media. Any American newspaper that was as truthful about the Israeli government as Haaretz would be closed down.

The only US print source with which I am familiar in which some honest reporting can be found on a regular basis is the McClatchy papers.

Americans addicted to print media must turn to alternative newspapers, which tend to be weekly or bi-weekly. However, the news and commentary provided are often superb..

Alternative newspapers are often the children of people motivated by a sense of justice and the love of truth. Such people have become an endangered species in the American “mainstream media.” The free press Americans have today is online and in the alternative media.

The function of the “mainstream media” is to sell products and to brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups. By subscribing to it, Americans support their own brainwashing.

Paul Craig Roberts was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week, and columnist for the Scripps Howard Newspapers.

Looting Social Security
By William Greider

This article appeared in the March 2, 2009 edition of The Nation.
February 11, 2009

Governing elites in Washington and Wall Street have devised a fiendishly clever "grand bargain" they want President Obama to embrace in the name of "fiscal responsibility." The government, they argue, having spent billions on bailing out the banks, can recover its costs by looting the Social Security system. They are also targeting Medicare and Medicaid. The pitch sounds preposterous to millions of ordinary working people anxious about their economic security and worried about their retirement years. But an impressive armada is lined up to push the idea--Washington's leading think tanks, the prestige media, tax-exempt foundations, skillful propagandists posing as economic experts and a self-righteous billionaire spending his fortune to save the nation from the elderly.

These players are promoting a tricky way to whack Social Security benefits, but to do it behind closed doors so the public cannot see what's happening or figure out which politicians to blame. The essential transaction would amount to misappropriating the trillions in Social Security taxes that workers have paid to finance their retirement benefits. This swindle is portrayed as "fiscal reform." In fact, it's the political equivalent of bait-and-switch fraud.

Defending Social Security sounds like yesterday's issue--the fight people won when they defeated George W. Bush's attempt to privatize the system in 2005. But the financial establishment has pushed it back on the table, claiming that the current crisis requires "responsible" leaders to take action. Will Obama take the bait? Surely not. The new president has been clear and consistent about Social Security, as a candidate and since his election. The program's financing is basically sound, he has explained, and can be assured far into the future by making only modest adjustments.

But Obama is also playing footsie with the conservative advocates of "entitlement reform" (their euphemism for cutting benefits). The president wants the corporate establishment's support on many other important matters, and he recently promised to hold a "fiscal responsibility summit" to examine the long-term costs of entitlements. That forum could set the trap for a "bipartisan compromise" that may become difficult for Obama to resist, given the burgeoning deficit. If he resists, he will be denounced as an old-fashioned free-spending liberal. The advocates are urging both parties to hold hands and take the leap together, authorizing big benefits cuts in a circuitous way that allows them to dodge the public's blame. In my new book, Come Home, America, I make the point: "When official America talks of 'bipartisan compromise,' it usually means the people are about to get screwed."

The Social Security fight could become a defining test for "new politics" in the Obama era. Will Americans at large step up and make themselves heard, not to attack Obama but to protect his presidency from the political forces aligned with Wall Street interests? This fight can be won if people everywhere raise a mighty din--hands off our Social Security money!--and do it now, before the deal gains momentum. Popular outrage can overwhelm the insiders and put members of Congress on notice: a vote to gut Social Security will kill your career. By organizing and agitating, people blocked Bush's attempt to privatize Social Security. Imagine if he had succeeded--their retirement money would have disappeared in the collapsing stock market.

To understand the mechanics of this attempted swindle, you have to roll back twenty-five years, to the time the game of bait and switch began, under Ronald Reagan. The Gipper's great legislative victory in 1981--enacting massive tax cuts for corporations and upper-income ranks--launched the era of swollen federal budget deficits. But their economic impact was offset by the huge tax increase that Congress imposed on working people in 1983: the payroll tax rate supporting Social Security--the weekly FICA deduction--was raised substantially, supposedly to create a nest egg for when the baby boom generation reached retirement age. A blue-ribbon commission chaired by Alan Greenspan worked out the terms, then both parties signed on. Since there was no partisan fight, the press portrayed the massive tax increase as a noncontroversial "good government" reform.

Ever since, working Americans have paid higher taxes on their labor wages--12.4 percent, split between employees and employers. As a result, the Social Security system has accumulated a vast surplus--now around $2.5 trillion and growing. This is the money pot the establishment wants to grab, claiming the government can no longer afford to keep the promise it made to workers twenty-five years ago.

Actually, the government has already spent their money. Every year the Treasury has borrowed the surplus revenue collected by Social Security and spent the money on other purposes--whatever presidents and Congress decide, including more tax cuts for monied interests. The Social Security surplus thus makes the federal deficits seem smaller than they are--around $200 billion a year smaller. Each time the government dipped into the Social Security trust fund this way, it issued a legal obligation to pay back the money with interest whenever Social Security needed it to pay benefits.

That moment of reckoning is approaching. Uncle Sam owes these trillions to Social Security retirees and has to pay it back or look like just another deadbeat. That risk is the only "crisis" facing Social Security. It is the real reason powerful interests are so anxious to cut benefits. Social Security is not broke--not even close. It can sustain its obligations for roughly forty years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, even if nothing is changed. Even reports by the system's conservative trustees say it has no problem until 2041 (that report is signed by former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the guy who bailed out the bankers). During the coming decade, however, the system will need to start drawing on its reserve surpluses to pay for benefits as boomers retire in greater numbers.

But if the government cuts the benefits first, it can push off repayment far into the future, and possibly forever. Otherwise, government has to borrow the money by selling government bonds or extend the Social Security tax to cover incomes above the current $107,000 ceiling. Obama endorses the latter option.

Follow the bouncing ball: Washington first cuts taxes on the well-to-do, then offsets the revenue loss by raising taxes on the working class and tells folks it is saving their money for future retirement. But Washington spends the money on other stuff, so when workers need it for their retirement, they are told, Sorry, we can't afford it.

Federal budget analysts try to brush aside these facts by claiming the government is merely "borrowing from itself" when it dips into Social Security. But that is a substantive falsehood. Government doesn't own this money. It essentially acts as the fiduciary, holding this wealth in trust for the "beneficial owners," the people who paid the taxes. This is the bait and switch the establishment intends to execute.

Peter Peterson, a Republican financier who made a fortune doing corporate takeover deals at Wall Street's Blackstone Group, is the Daddy Warbucks of the "fiscal responsibility" crusade. He has campaigned for decades against the dangers that old folks pose to the Republic. Now 82 and retired, Peterson claims he will spend nearly one-third of his $2.8 billion in wealth--he ranks 147 on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans--alerting the public to this threat (leave aside the fact that old people have already paid for their retirement or that Social Security's modest benefits are equivalent to minimum-wage income). The major media treat him adoringly. Most reporters are too lazy (or dim) to check out the facts for themselves, so they simply repeat what Peterson tells them about Social Security.

It is a frightful message. Peterson describes a "$53 trillion hole" in America's fiscal condition--but the claim assumes numerous artful fallacies. His most blatant distortion is lumping Social Security, which is self-funded and sound, with other entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid. Those programs do face financial crisis--not because the elderly and poor are greedily gaming the system but because the medical-industrial complex has the profit incentive to drive healthcare costs higher and higher. Healthcare reform can solve the financing problem only if it imposes cost controls on private players like the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Peterson is financing a media blitz. His tendentious documentary--I.O.U.S.A.--opened in 400 theaters and was broadcast on CNN with appropriate solemnity. Last September Peterson bought two full pages in the New York Times to urge the next president to create a "bipartisan fiscal responsibility commission" once he was in office (Peterson was for John McCain). This group of so-called experts would be authorized to design the reforms for Congress to enact. But Peterson does not want Congress to have a full, freewheeling debate on the particulars. The reform package, he suggests, should be submitted to a single "up-or-down vote by Congress, as is done with military base closings." That's one of the gimmicks intended to give politicians cover and protect them from their constituents. It is profoundly antidemocratic. But that's the idea--save the government from the unruly passions of citizens. Peterson's proposal also resembles the notorious fast-track provision, which for years enabled presidents to steamroll Congress on trade agreements, no amendments allowed.

Peterson's proposal would essentially dismantle the Social Security entitlement enacted in the New Deal, much as Bill Clinton repealed the right to welfare. Peterson has assembled influential allies for this radical step. They include a coalition of six major think tanks and four tax-exempt foundations.

Their report--Taking Back Our Fiscal Future, issued jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation--recommends that Congress put long-term budget caps on Social Security and other entitlement spending, which would automatically trigger benefits cuts if needed to stay within the prescribed limits. The same antidemocratic mechanisms--a commission of technocrats and limited Congressional discretion--would shield politicians from popular blowback.

The authors of this plan are sixteen economists from Brookings and Heritage, joined by the American Enterprise Institute, the Concord Coalition, the New America Foundation, the Progressive Policy Institute and the Urban Institute. "Our group covers the ideological spectrum," they claim. This too is a falsehood. All these organizations are corporate-friendly and dependent on big-money contributors. No liberal or labor thinkers need apply, though the group includes some formerly liberal economists like Robert Reischauer, Alice Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill.

The ugliest ploy in their campaign is the effort to provoke conflict between the generations. "The automatic funding of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid impedes explicit consideration of competing priorities and threatens to squeeze out spending for young people," these economists declared. Children, it is suggested, are being shortchanged by their grandparents. This line of argument has attracted financial support from some leading foundations usually associated with liberal social concerns--Annie E. Casey, Charles Stewart Mott, William and Flora Hewlett. Peterson has teamed up with the Pew Trust and has also created front groups of "concerned youth."

Trouble is, most young people did not buy this pitch when George W. Bush used it to sell Social Security privatization. Most kids seem to think Grandma is entitled to a decent retirement. In fact, whacking Social Security benefits, not to mention Medicaid, directly harms poor children. More poor children live in families dependent on Social Security checks than on welfare, economist Dean Baker points out. If you cut Grandma's Social Security benefits, you are directly making life worse for the poor kids who live with her.

The assault sounds outrageous and bound to fail, but the conservative interests may have Obama in a neat trap. Their fog of scary propaganda makes it easier to distort the president's position and blame him for any fiscal disorders driven by the current financial collapse. He will be urged to "do the right thing" for the country and make the hard choices, regardless of petty political grievances (words and phrases he has used himself). Obama's fate may depend on informing the public--now, not later--so that people are inoculated against these artful lies.

The real crisis, in any case, is not Social Security but the colossal failure of the private pension system. Most people know this, either because their 401(k) account is pitifully inadequate, or their company dumped its pension plan, or the plummeting stock market devoured their savings. Obama can protect himself with the public by speaking candidly about this reality and proposing a forceful, long-term solution. He should expand the guarantees that ordinary people need to get their families through these adverse times. Instead of taking away old promises to people, the president should make some new ones. Healthcare reform is obviously an important imperative, but so is retirement security.

The solution to retirement insecurity is the creation of a national pension, alongside Social Security, that would be the bedrock social insurance. Improving Social Security benefits is one step, but it cannot possibly restore what so many middle-class families have lost. Tinkering with the 401(k) would be doomed, because it is basically a tax subsidy for the middle and upper classes, another way to avoid taxes that failed utterly to produce real savings [see Greider, "Riding Into the Sunset," June 27, 2005].

The new universal pension would be mainly self-financing--that is, funded by mandatory savings--but the system would operate as a government-supervised nonprofit, not manipulated by corporate executives or Wall Street firms. A national pension would combine the best qualities of defined-benefit plans and individual accounts. Each worker's pension would be individualized and portable, moving with job changes, but the savings would be pooled with others for diversified investment.

There is nothing radical about this approach. It follows the form of the government's thrift savings plan for civil servants and members of Congress, TIAA-CREF for college professors or other union pension plans jointly managed by labor and management trustees. The crucial difference is that since the new universal pension would be nonprofit, nobody would get to play self-interested games with the money that employees are storing in it for retirement. People could check their accumulated balance at any time.

Washington would set the performance standards and enforce proper behavior, but the operations of retirement programs could be widely decentralized among many private organizations or sector by sector. Other nations, like Australia, have proved this can be both democratic and reliable. Economist Teresa Ghilarducci of the New School has designed a promising and plausible plan (available at the Economic Policy Institute's website, epi.org, or in her book When I'm Sixty-Four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them). With payroll savings of 5 percent and government-guaranteed returns on investment, average workers could count on pensions that would replace 70 percent of pre-retirement earnings when combined with Social Security. Low-wage earners could be subsidized by government to make up for inadequate pay. Private retirement plans that collect a higher percentage of pay and provide higher benefits could continue, so long as they exceed the federal standard. One great virtue of this approach is that nobody gets left behind, dependent on charity, the predatory instincts of the financial system or the magic of the marketplace.

Another great virtue is that a national pension would confront the country's glaring economic weakness--the collapse of national savings. As the economy digs out of its hole, restoring household savings will be crucial for ultimate recovery and for reduction of our dangerous dependence on foreign capital. Obviously, any system that adds a new payroll tax cannot be introduced at the depth of a recession, but the work of constructing it can begin right now, with the new system phased in gradually, as economic conditions permit. Instead of second-guessing the past and destroying its accomplishments, this reform would look forward and create conditions for a more promising future. Nobody gets a free lunch, and everybody has to take personal responsibility. But unlike what the governing elites are attempting, nobody gets thrown over the side.

* Wingnuts
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
By Nicole Belle Thursday Apr 30, 2009 7:00pm
(Strong language/NSFW)

The Wrap:

Frank Luntz, the arch-conservative pollster known as the research hammer by which the Gingrich revolution came down hard on President Bill Clinton, wants to take over research for the entertainment industry. And you thought Arianna Huffington did a quick-switch job? “I want to replace Joe Farrell,” said Luntz, wandering the halls of the Milken Institute conference on Monday in Beverly Hills, where he was a featured speaker. Luntz clearly has a lot to learn in Hollywood -- including the fact that Farrell of National Research Group retired a number of years ago. But the pollster and Fox News analyst is serious about making his play. He's bought a home in Santa Monica and is already doing survey work for Universal’s marketing chief Adam Fogelson and speaking to producers about other projects.

Why would he give up pollstering in American politics -- where he has been so successful -- for the movies? Luntz, who sold his company, Luntz Research, to Omnicon in 2005, said he’s had enough of politics. “I’m tired of selling reality,” he said. “Reality sucks. It’s mean. Divisive. Negative. What Hollywood offers is a chance to create a new reality, in two hours time.”

Reality? Ha! Luntz wouldn't know reality if it hit him with a two-by-four. All Luntz has done in his pathetic sell-out, dumbed-down career is create a new reality for the sheep who watch Fox News to buy into.

Hollywood is a PERFECT location for Luntz. All fake, all surface and no substance behind the glitter.

captbebops » Wed Aug 12, 2009 12:53 pm
I want to thank AntiFascist for starting this excellent thread and for the links to the articles he posted.

Today's history lesson: How the Brownshirts used street violence as martyrdom propaganda
Sunday, August 09, 2009
-- by Dave

[Script reads: "We Are Creating the New Germany! Remember the victims -- Vote the National Socialist List". Larger image here.]

Following up on yesterday's correction of Rush Limbaugh's historical revisionism, noting that both Blackshirts and Brownshirts made their political bones by beating up on union organizers and socialists ...

From State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda, by Steven Luckert and Susan Bachrach, pp. 48-50:

In the final years of the Weimar Republic, Germany was mired in a grave political and economic crisis that left the society verging on civil war. Street violence by paramilitary organizations on the Left and the Right increased sharply. In the final ten days of the July 1932 parliamentary elections, Prussian authorities reported three hundred acts of politically motivated violence that left twenty-four people dead and almost three hundred injured. In the Nazi campaigns, propaganda and terror were closely linked. In Berlin, Nazi Party leader Joseph Goebbels intentionally provoked Communist and Social Democratic actions by marching SA [Brownshirt] storm troopers into working-class neighborhoods where those parties had strongholds. Then he invoked the heroism of the Nazi "martyrs" who were injured or killed in these battles to garner greater public attention. Nazi newspapers, photographs, films, and later paintings dramatized the exploits of these fighters. The "Horst Wessel Song," bearing the name of the twenty-three-year-old storm trooper and protege of Goebbels who was killed in 1930, became the Nazi hymn. The well-publicized image of the SA-man with a bandaged head, a stirring reminder of his combat against the "Marxists" (along with other portrayals of muscular, oversized storm troopers), became standard in party propaganda. In the first eight months of 1932, the Nazis claimed that seventy "martyrs" had fallen in battle against the enemy. Such heroic depictions -- set against the grim realities of chronic unemployment and underemployment for young people during the Weimar period -- no doubt helped increase membership in the SA units, which expanded in Berlin from 450 men in 1926 to some 32,000 by January 1933.

The attorney for Kenneth Gladney wrote the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition after the union thugs beat Gladney last night outside the Russ Carnahan Town Hall meeting.

Once again,here is video of the beating provided by Missourah Blog.

Here's the letter from Attorney David B. Brown on the brutal attack:

August 7, 2009

Dear Mr. Hennessy:

I am Kenneth Gladney’s attorney. Kenneth was attacked on the evening of August 6, 2009 at Rep. Russ Carnahan’s town hall meeting in South St. Louis County. I was at the town hall meeting as well and witnessed the events leading up to the attack of Kenneth. Kenneth was approached by an SEIU representative as Kenneth was handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags to other conservatives. The SEIU representative demanded to know why a black man was handing out these flags. The SEIU member used a racial slur against Kenneth, then punched him in the face. Kenneth fell to the ground. Another SEIU member yelled racial epithets at Kenneth as he kicked him in the head and back. Kenneth was also brutally attacked by one other male SEIU member and an unidentified woman. The three men were clearly SEIU members, as they were wearing T-shirts with the SEIU logo.

Kenneth was beaten badly. One assailant fled on foot; three others were arrested. Kenneth was admitted to St. John’s Mercy Medical Center emergency room, where he was treated for his numerous injuries. Kenneth was merely expressing his freedom of speech by handing out the flags. In fact, he merely asked people as they exited the town hall meeting whether they would like a flag. He in no way provoked any argument or altercation, as evidenced by the fact that three assailants were arrested.

We hope that Kenneth fully recovers from his injuries; however, he is in great pain at this time. We will be pursuing legal action at our discretion. This was a truly senseless hate crime carried out by racist union thugs. Regretfully, Representative Carnahan’s statements blaming Kenneth for being a disruptive force are wholly untrue and slanderous. We would like to think that an elected official in Representative Carnahan’s position would gather accurate information before carelessly rushing to judgment.

Kenneth supports conservative ideals, although he subscribes to no particular political party. We are calling on the SEIU, Representative Carnahan, and President Obama to condemn the racist actions of these union thugs. In the days to come, we will be investigating whether these thugs are working at the behest of Representative Carnahan and how strong their alliances to various organizations–such as ACORN–may be.

We hope the St. Louis Tea Party and tea party organizations around the country will protest Representative Carnahan’s offices and also protest SEIU offices in every major city across the U.S. These Democratic strong-arm tactics must end now.

Regards,

Attorney David B. Brown

Pressed On FreedomWorks’ Connections To Tea Parties, Dick Armey Lashes Out At TP As ‘Juvenile Delinquents’
By Lee Fang
thinkprogress.org

On Thursday, Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks partnered with an anti-health reform group pushing to privatize Medicare to host a Republican rally outside the Capitol. Alongside speakers such as Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Armey proclaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death. Well, Barack Obama is trying to make good on that.”

Speaking to reporters and ThinkProgress after the rally, Armey pretended that the upcoming 9/12 anti-Obama march on D.C. was entirely “grassroots,” and that his corporate-backed group only provided “consulting.” In fact, most of the groups paying for the rally are front groups and phony think tanks fully-funded by big business to create an image of public and academic support for their special interest agenda. One of the most visible organizations mobilizing the protest this Saturday is the Tea Party Patriots group. As Talking Points Memo has reported, the Tea Party Patriots’ listserv is managed by FreedomWorks staffer Tom Gaitens. Not only is the list managed by FreedomWorks, but Armey’s staffers have final say on decisions such as the logo for the event this Saturday. Tea Party Patriots does not even hide its close affiliation with corporate front groups, since it lists FreedomWorks as a coalition partner. The Tea Party Patriots listserv was used to distribute the infamous memo from a Tea Party Patriots volunteer detailing how town hall attendees should “rattle” Democrats by interrupting their events with coordinated yelling and shrieks.

When ThinkProgress asked Armey about this close relationship with the Tea Party Patriots, he erupted in rage. He also denied even knowing his own employee:

Q: Mr. Armey you said you have no affiliation with the Tea Party Patriots group that’s organizing this rally, but isn’t it true that your staff members manage the Tea Party Patriots list serv?

ARMEY: Absolutely not.

Q: So Tom Gaitens is not connected to your–

ARMEY: Who? First of all who is Tom Gaitens?

Watch it:

Armey proceeded to call the ThinkProgress reporter a “juvenile delinquent.” Armey has lashed out before at critical questions, attacking Joan Walsh, saying “I am so damn glad you can never be my wife ’cause I surely wouldn’t have to listen to that babble from you every day.”

Gaitens — who helped organize the very first pilot “tea party” protests in February and demanded that “folks … need to intimidate Congress” — is listed multiple times on the FreedomWorks’ website as the Florida Outreach Director for Armey. He has not only won awards from FreedomWorks, but he also helped organize a tea party this year where Armey was the main speaker.

Of course, Armey’s deception is the very basis on which FreedomWorks gins up support for its causes. FreedomWorks maintains several other domain addresses to promote tea party events. Last year, the Wall Street Journal exposed FreedomWorks for building “amateur-looking” websites to promote the lobbying interests of Armey.

How I missed the 2 million man teabagging flash mob today
By kombiz Sunday Sep 13, 2009 8:00am



I apparently missed the largest flash mob in American history today, and it took place just a few blocks from my house. Michelle Malkin and the redstaters have been abuzz about how there were more than two million people marching on Washington today, (that would make it bigger than even the inauguration) but all anyone who wasn't a right-winger saw today was 30,000 to 60,000 right-wingers bused in from around the country.

Here's what the organizers themselves told us to expect. Dick Armey told the right-wing Newsmax that they're generating hundreds of responses in interest to the 9/12 March. The tea party patriots told us that they were expecting as many as one million to turn out and that they had permits for a one million man march on Washington.

After reading breathlessly on the twitter feeds of several right-wingers that millions of people were descending on the capital, Michelle Malkin on her blog estimated two million people. I went up to take pictures of crazy signs, of which there were many, many, many, many samples.

Now, there were real people at the rally. At certain points organizers for different county Republican parties would use a bullhorn to try to round up their members back to the buses for the trip back to Pennsylvania and Virginia. But one would think that after six months of organizing by Fox News and local Republican parties, the 9/12 protests could get more than thirty to sixty thousand people to come out to D.C. After all, there's apparently a groundswell of anger at the President. If nothing else, there's got to be more than 30,000 Republicans who live around the DC area.

I wanted to provide some perspective about the difference between thirty thousand people and one million people. For reference, the teabaggers were mostly in front of the Capitol and around the Capitol's reflecting pool. For anyone not familiar with DC, they were directly to the east of 3rd Street in Washington.

For reference, I crossed 3rd Street and took a picture facing west from the Capitol at the Washington Monument, similar to some of the crowd shots we'd seen after the inauguration. Here's the difference between the teabaggers' protest today vs. President Obama's inaguration crowd, which included anywhere from 1 million to 1.5 million people. So, what happened to all that grassroots anger?

9/12 Tea Party Photo: False Image Spread By Anti-Reform Activists
First Posted: 09-14-09 01:40 PM | Updated: 09-14-09 02:22 PM
Rachel Weiner
www.huffingtonpost.com

Tea Party protesters trying to tout the size of their march on Washington last weekend have been passing around a photo of a packed National Mall. But the picture is years old.

Politifact asked Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department, if the rally was big enough to fill that space. Piringer said no -- and moreover, the picture can't be from 2009.

"It was an impressive crowd," he said. But after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol the crowd "only filled the Capitol grounds, maybe up to Third Street," he said.

Yet the photo showed the crowd sprawling far beyond that to the Washington Monument, which is bordered by 15th and and 17th Streets.

There's another big problem with the photograph: it doesn't include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth St. and Independence Ave. that opened on Sept. 14, 2004. (Looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum.) That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn't show the "tea party" crowd from the Sept. 12 protest.

"I've seen bigger crowds at Montreal Expos games, but I still wouldn't fake a photo just to justify your predictions of millions descending on Washington," said one gleeful Democratic media strategist. "This is grade-A stupid and just plays into the argument that these were astroturf protests to begin with. They've always brought the noise, but the question that was supposed to be answered this weekend was, could they bring the numbers? In that respect this was an unmitigated disaster."

A number of conservative blogs have since taken the photo down. Some have corrected their posts. Others say the circulation of the picture was a left-wing conspiracy to discredit the event. However, many of them are still claiming that at least a million people attended the march. Nate Silver estimates about 70,000 protesters showed up.

It isn't the first failed attempt by the protesters to inflate the size of the event. On Saturday, organizer Matt Kibbe announced on stage that ABC News had estimated a crowd of 1 to 1.5 million. ABC News had reported no such thing.

G. Gordon Liddy’s producer claims around ‘a million’ attended the GOP’s anti-health care reform rally.
By Matt Corley on Nov 5th, 2009 at 6:15 pm

After the 9/12 march on Washington, conservatives falsely claimed that over a million people attended, when in reality the closest thing to an official count — numbers given by the Washington DC Fire Department to ABCNews.com — placed the crowd at “approximately 60,000 to 70,000 people.” Though today’s anti-health care reform rally has been much more sparsely attended, that hasn’t stopped conservatives from inflating the numbers again. On G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show today, producer Franklin Raff, who was on the ground at the rally, told guest host Joseph Farah that the crowd is “just as big or bigger than” the 9/12 rally, which Raff estimated “at about a million.” Listen here:

Capitol Hill police told NBC’s Luke Russert that the crowd was about 4,000. At around 2 PM eastern time, Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-KS) posted an aerial picture of the crowd on her TwitPic page, clearly showing a crowd far, far smaller than “a million”:

Astroturf In Action: Right-Wing Billionaire David Koch Pays For 40 Buses To Haul In Protesters
By Lee Fang on Nov 5th, 2009 at 4:28 pm

Americans for Prosperity (AFP), the corporate front group founded in the 1980s by Koch Industries billionaire David Koch, worked closely with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) to orchestrate the anti-health reform rally today. As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, AFP has been encouraging right-wing activists to board their buses —free of charge— to attend the rally. While AFP does not disclose all of its corporate donors, foundations controlled by David and Charles Koch provide millions in yearly funding, and David continues to chair the AFP foundation and preside over AFP’s annual convention.

ThinkProgress found at least a dozen AFP staffers standing at their designated bus drop off point near the Capitol, handing out signs, directions, talking points, petitions, and donuts to protesters. Many of the people who work at AFP are longtime Republican operatives, like Ben Marchi, the AFP Virginia director who previously worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee and for Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX). Victor Zapanta produced this video report of AFP staffers talking about their exploits at the rally today:

AFP STAFFERS: We have 25 buses just from Pennsylvania, New Jersey we probably have 5 or 6 from Maryland.

AFP STAFFERS: We have about 40 buses coming.


David Koch’s AFP has a long history of marshaling “grassroots” support for GOP objectives. In the early 1990s, AFP, then known as Citizens for a Sound Economy, worked secretly with then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) to organize angry crowds following the Clintons as they touted their health reform bill. Industry money from health insurance, telecommunications, oil, and other companies has flowed freely to AFP over the years to help AFP promote an agenda of boosting the rich, stripping consumer safeguards, and maintaining corporate monopolies. Phillip Morris rented out AFP from the Koch family, contributing millions to the organization in exchange for AFP to build opposition to tobacco regulations.

AFP’s daily activities are managed by Tim Phillips, an infamous astroturf lobbyist who built a career using Christian front groups to wage stealth campaigns. For example, his work includes fighting under the radar to promote energy deregulation for Enron and helping Jack Abramoff clients continue forced abortion sweatshops in the Northern Mariana Islands.

Will the media report on the true driver of today’s rally? Or will they leave David Koch out of the equation, despite his hand-in-glove involvement.
Update: This afternoon on the House GOP's live webcast, Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH) praised the anti-health reform protesters for arriving to the Capitol without any assistance paying for the buses. He also said no central organization was orchestrating the effort:

LATTA: Some stakes took over 20 buses [...] You know, they're not rabble-rousers.

KINGSTON: Who paid for them?

LATTA: They all paid for themselves. You know, these people came down on their own.