We're Not Scaremongering...This is Really Happening

Title lyrics from Radiohead's "Idioteque."

The immortal Republican claim that the media apparatchik in the United States is some sort of liberal (in the US sense of the word) behemoth is so demonstrably false that it hardly bears rebuttal. This is not to say, as some do, that they are inherently Conservative (again, in the US lexicographical form). Rather, the failure of the US media is that they are entirely devoid of skepticism and the ability for critical thought processes.

Very rare is the moment when they even take a detour from the tabloid-driven drivel they typically spew forth at equally-uncritical viewers and readers, but when they do, reporting comes only in the form of blandly reporting who said or did what. Never is the veracity of these statements examined.

This method is wholly responsible for the drive to the war in Iraq in the 2002-2003 period, and, despite the hand-wringing and mea culpas in the interim, the American media is again willing to sell an unwitting public another war, this time in Iran. The script could not be any clearer. And, like Hollywood, when the government finds a formula that works, they throw creativity out the window.

Again the country is being treated to breathless front-page articles about a secret Iranian nuclear site. Just as with the Iraqi sale, we are shown pictures of buildings and must take at face value everything the government tells us they mean. Iran, of course, has declared that it is indeed a nuclear facility, but what does that mean? Without any evidence, we are told that we must assume that the site is weeks away from producing weapons-grade nuclear material. This despite the fact that not one ounce of intelligence has been produced which indicates Iran has any such ability.

Simply indicating that Iran has a nuclear facility is not a cause for war. They are entitled, by all treaties to which they are a party, to build and maintain nuclear-power facilities. Is it inconceivable that Iran would pursue nuclear weapons technology? Of course not. But one picture and bloviating does not make a sufficient case that they already have.

Even if they have, one is then forced to make the case that they are not, as a sovereign nation, allowed to pursue such ends. After all, every single one of the countries now engaging in the typical international demagoguery currently maintain vast arsenals of nuclear weapons. That Iran is not allowed to do the same is simply taken as granted, not even worth arguing. That Israel is none-too-subtle about threats to Iran is never addressed. It is just accepted that should Israel choose to attack Iran with nuclear weapons, Iran has no choice but to throw up their hands and accept their fate.

No other country on Earth spends as much money on war-making as the United States. No other country deals as many armaments as the United States. And no other country comes close in the number of fortresses on foreign soil. All this is ignored. In this current dystopian universe, the world's foremost warmongering country is still allowed to parade around the halls of the UN as a beacon of peace. This view is not anti-American, it's pro-reality.

And while Obama does his best Bush impersonation, his beating of the war drums is still too muted for the blood-thirsty press and opinion-makers. And the "liberal" press has re-assumed the role they play some handsomely, that of unquestioning sidekick for an imperial President.

Related posts:

Truth From Power April 20, 2008
Missile Defense: Rehabbing the Cold War July 13, 2008

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On Priorities

Updated below @ 1820, 9/29

The American political scene will never be accused of being held captive by perspective. When even something as basic as "which of these numbers is larger?" can't be harnessed by the blathering press and political leaders, one can hardly expect to find the ability for relative comparisons running rampant. Two disparate issues stand out for me as cases-in-point: election fraud vis Iran and Afghanistan, and the Defund ACORN Act.

Everyone knows about the election fraud in Iran. It was on every channel for nearly a month, demonstrating the journalistic acumen of the American media (re: Bringing you the news in 140 characters or less!), and proving once and for all Iranian leaders are the evilest of all evil-doers the world has ever seen. Granted, said leaders are not great ambassadors for democracy (no one would make such a claim), but the elections were in the news for a reason. The same reason the brutal Egyptian and Saudi regimes don't make the news.

Compare that coverage with that of electoral fraud in Afghanistan. It's okay if you haven't heard of it. Not many have. Why would you? The person accused of fraud is our guy. That's enough to keep him under wraps. If electoral shenanigans were mentioned, it was only to point out Taliban violence. CNN did not do wall-to-wall coverage on things like this:

The shaky footage shows two election monitors inspecting a book of 100 ballot papers that are still stitched together, as they were intended to arrive at the polling station in rural Afghanistan. But something is wrong; instead of being pristine, ready for the voter to make his or her mark, each paper bears a large blue tick next to the name of one candidate: Hamid Karzai.

As the monitors flick through the pad, the back of the ballots clearly show the authorisation stamp of election monitors, validating them as votes ready to be put in the ballot box and counted.

"We found it the day after the elections," one of the monitors in the footage told me. "They were trying to put it in one of the [ballot] boxes but didn't have time, so we took it home and filmed it. If we had given it back to the election committee they would have used it again, so we burned it, but filmed it to protect ourselves if they come and threaten us."

Or this:

The Afghan elections, already tainted by widespread accusations of misconduct and fraud, received another body blow Wednesday when the head of the European Union's election-monitoring commission said that as many as 1.1 million votes cast in the vote were "suspect."

The latest dark cloud over the Aug. 20 election came as Afghanistan's election commission released a preliminary vote tally Wednesday showing President Hamid Karzai with 54.6 percent of the votes cast – enough to avoid a runoff if the total stands up to one official recount already launched and to mounting doubts like those from the EU.

The EU's general depiction of fraud was bad enough. But even more damaging to the Western-backed government of President Karzai was the finding by Phillippe Morillon, head of the EU monitor, that more than one-third of the votes Mr. Karzai received in his reelection bid – 1.1 million of about 3 million votes for Karzai – could be fraudulent and must be investigated.

None of this minimizes Taliban violence, but it does clearly indicate that American views on the world are guided more by a commitment to its allies and stock assumptions than democracy, despite public claims. President Obama has parlayed his campaign speeches into an Afghanistan policy still riding the opinion of Afghanistan as the good war. Meanwhile, the world's beacon of democracy has attached itself to the falling star of a loose coalition of corrupt warlords, most of whom are politicians in name alone. Any lingering notion that the Afghan government holds its own people in any due regard would have fallen away if such fraud was reported with the same fervency as it was regarding Iran.

The furor surrounding ACORN is better covered, mainly because it fits the tabloid model of American journalism. ACORN has always been a target of Republicans, but who would have thought the end would come with a topic so dear to their hearts: prostitution. David Vitter is surely proud.

Consider the thought process here. The defunding act would have no chance were it not for two random ACORN staffers doling out some helpful information on how to get in the flesh business. Okay, but consider the implication here. If followed to its logical conclusion, this would mean that any company that had any employee commit a federal offense would soon be off the government roll. Like these companies, for instance.

While we await that action with baited breath, let's consider a few of these offenses which might rise a little higher on the immorality of the scale. Maybe electrocuting US soldiers.

And while the Pentagon has previously reported that 13 Americans have been electrocuted in Iraq, many more have been injured, some seriously, by shocks, according to the documents. A log compiled earlier this year at one building complex in Baghdad disclosed that soldiers complained of receiving electrical shocks in their living quarters on an almost daily basis.

One study called electrocution "the most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq." And what bastion of liberalism made such a claim? The US Army. Nearly every facility constructed in Iraq by KBR/Halliburton contained dangerous electrical wiring. But, rest assured, putting American soldiers in mortal danger has not hurt the company's bottom line. Nor has the fact that its employees engaged in the gang rape and imprisonment of a female employee.

Then there's Blackwater. In the past months, Blackwater's compound has been raided by the ATF for illegal weapons trafficking, been accused of tax evasion through offshore havens, employed young Iraqi girls for oral sex, and had employees indicted on manslaughter. Yet, 90 percent of its income continues to come from the government.

So let's not kid ourselves as to the magnitude of these crimes here. If the actions of random employees loses a organization government funding, it's only fair to ask when rampant corruption and misdeeds will have their day in the self-aggrandizing Congressional theater. The bill itself states that the organization must be involved in elections, but surely the Republicans leading the charge don't intend for us to consider funneling millions into campaign coffers fitting the bill. But occasionally we may have to accept English at face value, rather than waiting for the political/media filter to deliver it to us.


Update:

The US has decided that Karzai will remain president regardless of final results.

The White House has ended weeks of hesitation over how to respond to the Afghan election by accepting President Karzai as the winner despite evidence that up to 20 per cent of ballots cast may have been fraudulent.

Abandoning its previous policy of not prejudging investigations of vote rigging, the Obama Administration has conceded that Mr Karzai will be President for another five years on the basis that even if he were forced into a second round of voting he would almost certainly win it.

The decision will increase pressure on President Obama to justify further US troop deployments to Afghanistan to prop up a regime now regarded as systemically corrupt.

[...]

Mrs Clinton told Rangin Dadfar Spanta, the Afghan Foreign Minister, that...Mr Karzai would remain President even if investigations now under way cut his share of the first-round vote to below 50 per cent.

Better get something to wash that democracy down with, Afghanistan. It's a bit bitter.


Related:

Supporting the Troops Through No-Bid Contracts May 6, 2008
When You Were Here Before...Couldn't Look You in the Eye August 9, 2009

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Crickets at the Pentagon

It's now been 10 days since the New York Times ran its piece exposing the propaganda machine in which the Pentagon utilized retired military commanders, who stood to gain from defense contracts, to propagate its message--unattributed--in the mass media outlets. In those 10 days, not a single major news outlet has discussed it, clearly indicative of the significant role played by the outlets themselves.

Consider the implications here. In the run up to the war, and in its early stages, the press of a free nation willingly disseminated the government's propaganda message in support of the war. A free press that is supposed to speak truth to power, thereby enfranchising the public, instead chose to serve, unadulterated, the meal the Pentagon was dishing out.

Until last Sunday, it seemed that the embed program was the biggest embarrassment for free press in decades. Now that pales in comparison, yet not a single major news outlet has seen fit to even broach the subject or offer apologies for committing crimes against intellectual honesty and serving the will of the state before their viewers.

Finally asked about it today (probably by someone other than a regular member of the White House press corps), Dana Perino repeated the company line that the program was okay because "it's absolutely appropriate to provide information to people who are seeking it and are going to be providing their opinions on it." The law, however, disagrees.

The GAO addresses just such a program:

Because the Department’s role in the production and distribution of the prepackaged news story is not revealed to the target audience, the prepackaged news story constitutes covert propaganda. We disagree with the Department’s contention that the prepackaged news stories are not covert propaganda because they contain only factual information. To constitute a legitimate information dissemination activity that does not violate the publicity or propaganda prohibition, the Department must inform the viewing public that the government is the source of the information disseminated.

In two successive sentences, the administration's argument (along with Max Boot and John Podhoretz) loses two of its main ingredients. Namely, that the factual basis of the information disseminated is immaterial to the question of propaganda and that failure to cite the government as the source--regardless of intent--qualifies as covert propaganda. The Pentagon met the government's own criteria for propaganda.

As is par for the course in this administration, the Pentagon, who has suspended the program, and its spokespeople are relying on recipients of the party line to forget that words have definitions. Words like occupation and invasion and torture. But propaganda does have a working definition, and the Pentagon program surely meets it.

The Office of Legal Council has insisted that the Executive Branch is not subject to the GAO, but even its legal semantics don't do much to alter the basic premise. The OLC claims that publicity doesn't meet the standard for propaganda so long as it is factual in nature and not meant to support a particular program or department policy.

Consistent with that view, OLC determined in 1988 that a statutory prohibition on using appropriated funds for "publicity or propaganda" precluded undisclosed agency funding of advocacy by third-party groups. We stated that "covert attempts to mold opinion through the undisclosed use of third parties" would run afoul of restrictions on using appropriated funds for "propaganda."

Assuming that they are correct in this assessment, the test is still met by the Pentagon program, as the military analysts were clearly supporting a specific policy, not merely disseminating facts. Those that didn't were denied access and those that did were rewarded. Documents obtained by the Times prove as much. Support of the administration's war policy was a prerequisite for participation, so clearly the program fails to adhere to the OLC's own standards for legal communications.

No matter how you slice it, the Pentagon's propaganda campaign was at the very least immoral and dishonest, and by many standards--the GAO, the OLC, and the US Code--probably illegal.

The possibility that there will be consequences aside (there won't), the mass media owes the American public at least a cursory story about the program. Voters deserve to know that the government of a free country is engaging in covert propaganda to push its policies through a complicit media.

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Truth From Power

Another day, another incredible revelation of the true scope of the Orwellian fantasy world that has been constructed in just a few short years in the United States.

Not that it should come as a surprise. That pundits and military analysts began selling a fallacious stock of goods in the run up to and in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq is not news. That it was the product of active collusion with the Pentagon and the Bush administration should, though, elicit more outrage than it probably will.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

It is in that last sentence that I believe the crux of our journalistic problem in the States can be found. In an effort to gain--and maintain--access to 'sources' or 'government contacts,' journalists have sacrificed skepticism. How can we expect journalists to speak truth to power when they rely as their main sources on cogs in the incarnation of that power?

Often in the media, there is a drive to present 'both sides' of a story. This is to be applauded, certainly, but only if both sides are playing fair. To have a supporter of the war who speaks glowingly of it of his or her own misguided volition is one thing. To present someone who is simply relaying the Pentagon's talking points in order to defend a policy upon which their financial standing depends is entirely another.

If the government talking points were trustworthy, journalism wouldn't be necessary. We could simply read the White House press releases and be done with it, assured that "we are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia" or "2+2=5" and move on with our lives. But that isn't so.

One of the most essential feats for a budding dictatorship is to render control of the press. There's a reason for that. There's a reason that the people of North Korea, some of the poorest and most downtrodden in the world, don't rise up against a 5-foot-tall laughingstock of a man. Military force is certainly part of that, but control of the press goes even further toward explaining how a small percentage can control the masses.

We need journalists as a check on power, not beholden to it. The press in this country presided over the marginalization of the war opposition, often holding up these financially-dependent military analysts as evidence of their folly. But the folly lies with journalists. Having spent a year graciously disseminating the government line in the run-up to the war, pleasantly granting air time to false prophets, and failing to present the slightest bit of skepticism, it is time journalists come clean.

Journalists have a duty to American citizens. A duty that lies in skepticism and truth. The White House disseminates its own line, there's no reason for the press to engage in the redundancy of doing that as well.

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He Who Speaks for the People

I'll admit to watching about 10 full minutes of last night's Democratic debate before opting for the much more interesting--and informative--wallpaper across the room. That the debate, and I use that term loosely, can stand as tantamount to failing and shortcoming of the current state of political discourse would be an understatement of epic proportions.

The first 50 minutes was devoted entirely to a rehash of the same BS that's been harped on for the last six weeks without any sign of ebbing. American politics has come to resemble a hybrid of Tiger Beat and US, offering absolutely nothing substantive or of any consequence.

What's more infuriating, though, is the suggestion, based on absolutely no evidence, that this style is exactly what Americans demand. George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson were just begrudgingly fulfilling the role demanded of them by the public. In their response to criticism, they hold themselves up as helpless hostages of the will of the citizens. Servants are they, with not a second to waste on such distractions as the economy, or the specifics of a health care plan, or the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In an interview with Greg Sargent, Stephanopoulos repetitively invokes that mindset:

He dismissed criticism that it had focused too heavily on "gotcha" questions, arguing that they had gone to the heart of the "electability" that, he said, is forefront in the minds of voters evaluating the two Dems.

"This [Stephanopoulos' definition of 'electability'] is the core question for the campaigns, and a lot of Democratic voters right now. That's why we decided to lead with it."

Asked why we should presume that electability, rather than issues, was the dominant concern of many Dems right now, Stephanopoulos argued that it was a frequent topic of discussion on the campaign trail.

With that, Stephanopoulos brilliantly demonstrates the kind of circular logic which allows for the presentation of tabloid political coverage as legitimate. The thought is prevalent in the media, but no less nonsensical for being so. Suggesting that something is important because it's talked about is a logical trainwreck traveling in circles and barely gripping the rails of sanity.

The suggestion that the volume of media coverage is in some way an objective judge of relative importance is insane and ludicrous on its face. The idea's idiocy is surpassed only in its supreme arrogance, the arrogance to claim some secret, personal knowledge of the will and desires of 'the people' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Consider ABC's own data as to the most pressing issue among voters:

Economy/Jobs 41
War in Iraq 18
Health care 7
Terrorism 5
Ethics 4
Immigration 4
Other 13
Unsure 5

Even if we can assume that every single person who selected 'other' meant 'tabloid-style political hackery,' it still doesn't rate anywhere near the top priority.

The consensus today seems to be that Obama took the brunt of the questioning, but even that evaluation glosses over the main travesty. The problem isn't that Stephanopoulos and Gibson asked either Clinton or Obama tougher questions, went easier on one than the other, or illustrated quite clearly what the General Election debate will look like.

The problem, the underlying root of everything wrong with politics in America, is the top-down approach to the entire game of debating. Instead of a forum for presenting reasons to vote for a specific candidate, debates have become a spectacle of attempted erosion of credibility and parade of inconsequential, patronizing reasons not to vote for the other guy.

So we can debate endlessly about weather or not someone is sufficiently patriotic or feminine. We can talk about bowling as a sitting President admits to violating international and domestic law. We can discuss who's really the Everyman, even though it's clear that none of the 3 candidates will ever again be confused as such. We can do that.

But lapel pins don't secure borders, either domestically or abroad. A shot of Crown Royal won't bring back jobs. And an association with Reverend Wright won't make John McCain's foreign policy less disastrous.

As long as the media is allowed to dictate the discussion, the public loses. It's not that the media is liberal or conservative or whatever the running narrative is that week. It's not whether they go softer on one candidate or another. It's whether we as Americans continue to allow them to set the agenda. It's whether we continue to stand for a debate almost entirely devoid of substance and keep sailing along mindlessly until the next vapid windstorm of faux controversy sweeps us away, only for us to be ripped back the other way by the undercurrent.

The quandary, then, is whether we choose to stand up, walk to shore, and stake out a path that suits our needs or simply lie back and let the unheeding river push us along the unforgiving banks of its own telescopic worldview.

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