Myth-Jack THIS

Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter'

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
June 30, 2008

As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.

Iran Divided and the 'October Surprise'

Robert Parry
June 24, 2009

Iran’s current political divisions can be traced back to a controversy nearly three decades ago when Iran faced war with Iraq and became entwined with U.S. and Israeli political maneuvers that set all three countries on a dangerous course that continues to this day.

Veteran Investigative Journalist Bob Parry on the Iran-Contra Scandal and the Perils of Reporting It

Investigative journalist Robert Parry helped expose the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s while working as a reporter for the Associated Press and Newsweek. He joins us from Washington. [includes rush transcript]

Cheney Learned Iran-Contra Lessons
Jonathan Schwarz
May 9, 2009

Editor’s Note: The Iran-Contra Affair of the 1980s was the “missing link” connecting Watergate and the national security scandals of the 1970s to the restoration of the imperial presidency under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney this decade.

Other dangerous patterns also were established during Iran-Contra, including a bullying Republican Party aided by right-wing attack groups, a timid Democratic opposition, and a feckless Washington news media unwilling to do the hard work of accountability.

Interestingly, one key person who “got” this bigger picture was Cheney, who was White House chief of staff during the collapse of the imperial presidency in the 1970s; was a chief congressional defender of the Iran-Contra criminals; and then oversaw the restoration of the imperial presidency after 9/11.

From that experience, Cheney also gained an understanding of how important cover-ups could be in this process, as Jonathan Schwarz notes in this guest essay:

In a new article by Stephen "W.W. Beauchamp" Hayes, former Vice President Cheney gripes extensively about the Obama administration. It's exactly what you'd expect.

Iran Contra 2.0: How the Bush Admin Lied to Congress and Armed Fatah to Provoke Palestinian Civil War Aiming to Overthrow Hamas

In its latest issue, Vanity Fair reports that the White House tried to organize the armed overthrow of the Hamas-led goverment after Hamas swept Palestinian elections two years ago. According to the article, the Bush administration lied to Congress and boosted military support for rival Palestinian faction Fatah in the aim of provoking a Palestinian civil war they thought Hamas would lose. Vanity Fair dubbed the episode “Iran Contra 2.0”—a reference to the Reagan administration’s funding of Nicaraguan Contras by covertly selling arms to Iran. We speak with David Rose, the journalist who broke the story. [includes rush transcript]

Pentagon Relies on Iran-Contra Figure for Denying Afghan Mass Killing
Meanwhile, one of the Pentagon’s key “sources” for its denial of the death toll from the recent mass killing of civilians in the Afghan village of Azizabad has been revealed to be Fox News correspondent Oliver North. North was indicted and then later pardoned in the 1980s for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal.

Defense Secretary Nominee Robert Gates Tied to Iran-Contra Scandal and the Secret Arming of Saddam Hussein
President Bush nominated former CIA director Robert Gates on Wednesday to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. We take a look at Gates’ role at the CIA in connection to the Iran-Contra scandal and the secret arming of Saddam Hussein with former CIA analyst Mel Goodman, who testified before the Senate in 1991 against the nomination of Gates as CIA director, and investigative journalist Bob Parry who helped expose Iran-Contra. [includes rush transcript]

Robert Gates’ Former CIA Branch Chief and a CIA Analyst Who Testified Against Him on the Politicization of Intel During Iran-Contra
Robert Gates, President Bush’s nominee to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense is facing his Senate confirmation hearings today. We speak with two former CIA analysts who worked with Gates at the Agency. Ray McGovern was Gates’ CIA branch chief in the early 1970s and Jennifer Glaudemans is a former CIA analyst who was asked to testify at the 1991 confirmation hearings for Gates when he had been nominated to be CIA Director. [includes rush transcript]

Robert Parry: Hillary Clinton Signals Free Pass for Bush
“Former President Bill Clinton’s comment that his wife’s ‘first thing’ as President would be to send him and former President George H.W. Bush on a worldwide fence-mending tour has a political subtext,” reports investigative journalist Robert Parry. “It signals that a second Clinton administration would give a free pass to the second Bush administration on its abuses.” [includes rush transcript]

McCain Sat on Board of Group Linked to Central American Death Squads

As Republicans continue to talk about Bill Ayers, McCain himself is coming under new scrutiny for his ties to a group linked to former Nazi collaborators and right-wing Central American deaths squads. During the early 1980s, McCain was a board member of the US Council for World Freedom, which took part in efforts to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. The Council later went on to become a major figure in the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration defied a congressional ban to secretly funnel weapons to the Contras, the US-backed proxy group organized to violently overthrow the Sandinistas. McCain said he resigned from the Council’s board in 1984.

Robert Parry: Why Are McCain Backers So Angry?
“From Republicans at political rallies to GOP lawmakers on TV talk shows, McCain-Palin supporters are angry, very angry—and they seem to think their anger justifies whatever they do: from calling Barack Obama a ‘terrorist’ to shouting ‘kill him’ and ‘off with his head’—to getting huffy when their violent rhetoric is challenged,” writes investigative reporter Robert Parry, editor of ConsortiumNews.com. [includes rush transcript]

Secrecy News reveals official censorship of our shared narrative by omission of covert actions

2009-08-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

Our official version of events is a tapestry of knowing lies. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) have posted an important revelation about our affairs in South America under the Nixon administration; namely, covert actions to destabilize Uruguay were omitted under suspicious circumstances. Read the whole article for the surprise ending.

State Dept Alters Stance on Uruguay History August 4th, 2009 by Steven Aftergood
In the early 1970s, the Nixon Administration plotted to interfere in Uruguay’s presidential elections in order to block the rise of the leftist Frente Amplio coalition. But when the State Department published its official history of U.S. relations with Latin America during the Nixon era last month, there was no mention of any such activities. Instead, the State Department Office of the Historian said that Uruguay-related records could not be posted on the Department website because of “space constraints.” Following repeated inquiries, however, the Historian’s Office revised its position last week and said it would include Uruguay-related records in its Nixon history after all.

The United States should work “overtly and covertly” to blunt the political appeal of the Frente Amplio and to diminish its chances for victory in the Uruguayan presidential elections, advised one declassified document (pdf) from 1971. Several important documentary records of that turbulent period were compiled by the National Security Archive in 2002. See “Nixon: ‘Brazil Helped Rig the Uruguayan Elections,’ 1971″ edited by Carlos Osorio.

Meanwhile, urban guerrillas who were violently challenging the governments of several Latin American countries drew the worried attention of U.S. intelligence officials. In particular, the Uruguayan Marxist revolutionary group known as the Tupamaros, which murdered a U.S. AID official in 1970, “has had a spectacular and rapid rise to prominence during the last few years,” according to a 1971 CIA analysis entitled “The Latin American Guerrilla Today” (pdf).

But none of this concern over Uruguay could be discerned from the State Department’s official history of U.S. policy towards the region. A July 10, 2009 State Department press release announcing the publication of the latest online volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) on American Republics, 1969-1972, mentioned almost every Latin American country except for Uruguay. The original Preface of the new FRUS volume (pdf) made the peculiar assertion that: “Due to space constraints, relations with… Uruguay… are not covered here.” This assertion is doubly strange since the new FRUS volume was only published online, not in hardcopy, so that “space constraints” are hardly a factor.

Read the rest here.

Scahill tells Olberman about our dark Prince of Blackwater

2009-08-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Scahill has appeared on Countdown to discuss with Keith Olberman the game-changing charges of murder against our homegrown neo-Crusader himself, Eric Prince, who explicitly advocates a holy war against Islam, sending mentally unfit mercenaries to "the sandbox" to "kill hajiis."

It's important to note what Scahill reports about the affidavits: they also were given to the feds, and the Justice Department declined to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation of Prince, who has deep family ties to the sources of funding for the extreme Religious Right and close connections with powerful Bushies.

How more clear can it get? Bush himself preached a bogus holy war only five days after 9/11.

Bush vows to rid the world of 'evil-doers'

September 16, 2001 Posted: 4:54 PM EDT (2054 GMT)

By Manuel Perez-Rivas
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President George W. Bush said Sunday he is confident the nation will rebound from the week's terrorist attacks, and he urged Americans to go back to work on Monday knowing that their government is determined to "rid the world of the evil-doers."

"Tomorrow, when you get back to work, work hard like you always have. But we've been warned. We've been warned there are evil people in this world. We've been warned so vividly," Bush said. "And we'll be alert. Your government is alert. The governors and mayors are alert that evil folks still lurk out there. As I said yesterday, people have declared war on America and they have made a terrible mistake."

"My administration has a job to do and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of the evil-doers," he said.

Orly Taitz tries her myth-jacking voodoo on MSNBC's David Shuster

2009-08-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

Via Huffington Post

Dobbs's attempt to insult Maddow bounces right back in his face

2009-07-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

Via Huffington Post

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Shuster interviews Harper's legal affairs contributing editor Scott Horton

2009-07-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Does Dick CHeney have bodies to hide all over the world?

2009-07-20T07:04:00.000-07:00

Are the ghosts of his victims coming back to haunt Dick Cheney?

H/t psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/

See also "More on Cheney's Pet CIA Project" by Scott Horton in his No Comment blog on Harpers.org

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The precise ignorance of John Yoo

2009-07-20T06:53:00.000-07:00

Keith Olberman's co-host David Shuster and Harper's Magazine legal affairs contributing editor Scott Horton completely demolish the ludicrous arguments made by John Yoo regarding the permission slips for torture he concocted for the Bush administration. Yoo's arguments are precise in only one sense: they precisely ignore inconvenient evidence.

Is this what a consigliere looks like?

H/t psychoanalystsopposewar.org

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

5 cases of myth-jacking from 1947 to today

2009-07-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

Allow me to ask: What are think tanks for?

"[T]hink tanks”... monitor and adjust governance norms and networks by using research, analysis, and advocacy to structure discourse about social problems and solutions among multiple elites and in the popular imagination.” http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08192005-162045/

They exist for myth-making. Compare five cases:

1) Pakistani military strategist Colonel Akbar Khan conceived the concept of jihad to offset the lack of military balance between the two emerging enemies. Akbar Khan's concept of jihad was no more than subversion in the enemy country, but it was couched in jihadi terms. He himself took over the grand-sounding name of a Muslim conqueror as his nom de guerre. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KG17Df01.html

2) Z. Brzezinski: "Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

3) Despite quiet support and encouragement for Latin American “death squads” through much of the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. government presented itself as the standard-bearer for human rights and criticized American adversaries that engaged in extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary detentions.

That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as Bush announced his “global war on terror,” while continuing to impress the American news media with pretty words about his commitment to human rights – as occurred in his address to the United Nations on Sept. 25, 2007.

Under Bush’s double standards, he took the position that he could override both international law and the U.S. Constitution in deciding who would get basic human rights and who wouldn’t. He saw himself as the final judge of whether people he deemed “bad guys” should live or die, or possibly face indefinite imprisonment and torture.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/071509.html

4) The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s endorsement in a bitter legislative dispute, then flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.

For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: “Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU’s board of directors. (Note that Mr. Keene writes a weekly column that appears in The Hill.)”

The conservative group’s remarkable demand — black-and-white proof of the longtime Washington practice known as “pay for play” — was contained in a private letter to FedEx , which was provided to POLITICO.

The letter exposes the practice by some political interest groups of taking stands not for reasons of pure principle, as their members and supporters might assume, but also in part because a sponsor is paying big money.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25072.html

5) "That about sums everything up: War Crimes are heinous and intolerable acts that all decent people reject; "anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated"; and War Criminals must not be allowed in any positions of authority . . . . except when the War Crimes in question are committed by Americans, in which case all investigations and accountability must be blocked and those who defended and even approved them are perfectly welcomed in our highest positions of authority (including, ironically, overseeing our war in Afghanistan). See also, quite relatedly: this post from earlier today on how we continue to shield from any accountability the clear and serious crimes committed by Bush officials in how they spied on Americans.. . . Let's just repeat the sermon from the anonymous Obama official in demanding an investigation into crimes by this Afghan warlord: 'We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.' It doesn't appear that they know what the word 'anyone' means."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/11/accountability/index.html

Col. Akbar Khan and Zbigniew Brzezinski are just two of the godfathers of myth-jacking

2009-07-16T06:59:00.000-07:00

Pepe Escobar: Pakistan's army leaders have been masters of the double game since the 1980s. Could you briefly describe how they deploy their stealth?

Arif Jamal: Actually, the strategy of playing a double game is as old as the country. When British India was partitioned into two dominions in 1947, Pakistan faced an enemy in India which was several times bigger, more populated, resourceful and most importantly militarily more powerful. It was not good sense to take on a far more powerful enemy in a conventional military way.

Pakistani military strategist Colonel Akbar Khan conceived the concept of jihad to offset the lack of military balance between the two emerging enemies. Akbar Khan's concept of jihad was no more than subversion in the enemy country, but it was couched in jihadi terms. He himself took over the grand-sounding name of a Muslim conqueror as his nom de guerre.

From that time onwards, the Pakistani military leaders kept inciting the local Muslim population in the Indian-controlled state of Jammu and Kashmir to subversion and turning subversion into a guerrilla war until 1980, when they decided to wage a real jihad in Afghanistan [against the Soviets]. At the same time, Pakistan never abandoned the diplomatic option of resolving its conflicts with India. The Pakistan army supported a full-scale anti-Soviet jihad or subversive guerrilla war in Afghanistan. Publicly, Pakistan denied any support to the Afghan mujahideen. The only time Pakistan claimed responsibility for subversion in a neighboring country was when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan [in 1989]. It was a victory for the jihad policy. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KG17Df01.html

Zbigniew Brzezinski:
How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen

Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

* There are at least two editions of this magazine; with the perhaps sole exception of the Library of Congress, the version sent to the United States is shorter than the French version, and the Brzezinski interview was not included in the shorter version.
The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum author of the indispensible, "Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" and "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" Portions of the books can be read at: <http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm>

http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

Note the mechanistic reduction he makes. That's what ails us. What unites us? Just Our Mother's womb itself. Our myths unite us in a common human cosmos.

And here's another example of the same method in use by the US military and foreign policy establishments.

Bush's Hit Teams
By Robert Parry
July 15, 2009
And, at least inside and near the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush’s “global war on terror” appears to have recreated what was known during the Vietnam War as Operation Phoenix, a program that assassinated Vietcong cadre, including suspected communist backers.

Through a classified Pentagon training program known as “Project X,” the lessons of Operation Phoenix from the 1960s were passed on to Third World armies, especially in Latin America, giving a green light to some of the “dirty wars” that swept the region, causing tens of thousands of political murders, widespread use of torture, and secret detentions.

Bush’s alleged plan for global hit teams also has similarities to “Operation Condor” in which South American right-wing military regimes in the 1970s sent assassins on cross-border operations to eliminate “subversives.”

Despite quiet support and encouragement for Latin American “death squads” through much of the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. government presented itself as the standard-bearer for human rights and criticized American adversaries that engaged in extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary detentions.

That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as Bush announced his “global war on terror,” while continuing to impress the American news media with pretty words about his commitment to human rights – as occurred in his address to the United Nations on Sept. 25, 2007.

Under Bush’s double standards, he took the position that he could override both international law and the U.S. Constitution in deciding who would get basic human rights and who wouldn’t. He saw himself as the final judge of whether people he deemed “bad guys” should live or die, or possibly face indefinite imprisonment and torture.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/071509.html

In other words: he was playing god. This is how we do it! Myth-jacking nations into bogus holy wars is what we do.

Comment on John Pilger's New Statesman article: "Mourn on the 4th of July"

2009-07-11T10:13:00.000-07:00

O brother, my Brother! What a great treatment of a method of managing electorates I've been calling *myth-jacking.*

Myth is not synonymous with lie; a myth is a metaphorical image of the composition and functioning of the cosmos. The power of myth is to shape the world in which we are enacting this wholly absurd theater of life.

Remember Rummy's myth-jacking memos?
"This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. "
http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?&id=content_9217

National myths deliver us as a people into our Promised or Waste Land, exactly as we load them with our intentions: passengers into life boats, or kittens into burlap sacks?

Our myths, our shared narratives, are as indispensable as a mother's womb.

Benign or malign, either way we get taken for a ride. As Americans, we need to direct our own passage, but we aren't educated and socialized to be self-sovereign citizens.

Instead, we're taught to be loyal subjects, fans, of a political master of a mechanical universe; to shut up and do as we're told; to demonstrate our loyalty by our fervor when presented with patriotic symbols.

We're trained, like pigeons in Skinner boxes, to go kill or die at the whim of an imperious president "for god, king, and country," just like the good old days.

For example: We were jacked to war by myths of Iraqi WMDs. The myths themselves were the WMDs.

In this way, the power of myth is being used to power weapons-grade domestic propaganda.

Our myth says: God loves us the most, that's why we're destined to rule the earth forever, amen. God bless America! (God damn the rest of you.)

Since we're doing the work of the Big Guy Upstairs, says the myth, we can do no wrong; likewise, anyone who opposes us also opposes God, making them 'evil-doers' of whom we are duty bound to rid the world.

Factual arguments, however well phrased, often fail to move electorates, but the power of myth never fails

The Associated Press's special report on Pentagon "influence operations"

2009-05-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

knowbuddhau

Bravo, o brother my Brother. This is the most exciting potential of the Web (to me): busting myths, loaded with malign intent, even as propagandists deploy them.

With 27,000 "influence operators," a $4.7 billion budget, and the corporate media's obsequiousness (with a few notable exceptions), I wonder: what other attempts to jack our shared narrative are under way?

I'm still stunned by your 11 Feb 09 article in Harper's.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pentagon Targeted and Mistreated Journalists, AP Head Charges
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004359

The Associated Press's special report on Pentagon "influence operations" can be read here [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29039384/ ]. The Pentagon's Public Affairs Office has been one of the last redoubts of the Neoconservatives. Burrowed Bush era figures remain in key positions in the office, which had responsibility for implementation of some of the Rumsfeld Pentagon's most controversial strategies in which

***the American public was targeted with practices previously associated with battlefield psy-ops.***
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Doesn't that constitute our own military
firing on us? Are the influence operators any different than snipers? And the infamous "Message Force Multipliers"?

A) Hide intentions;
B) Fire "live" rounds at target audiences with high-power microphones etc. with the intention of forcing a change in behavior against the will of the target;
C) Make career-advancing killings.

Or we could see it as the attempt to hack into the psyches of Americans as if we were mere voting-machines on two legs.

My fellow psychologists have weaponized psyche itself, and the DoD has turned against us.

To our NSA-type fiends, with bodies to hide all over the world, are we, the sovereign citizens, now the enemy?

Permalink

(1)

9:41 am, May 29, 2009

mblips

Thank you for drawing my attention to the Harper's piece. The MSNBC link does not work. Could you check and repost.

Permalink

(1)

12:13 pm, May 29, 2009

knowbuddhau

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29060453/

There's a slight difference there at the end. Thanks for pointing it out, I've been habitually posting that dead link for months now.

The actual report is proving more elusive than I expected. Prof. Horton, a little help?

See also
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/05/pentagon-boosts-spending_n_1644 10.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/pentagon-propaganda

Permalink

9:37 pm, May 29, 2009

Show us the Abu Ghraib photos of acts taken in the name of We, the People

2009-05-29T06:15:00.000-07:00

Scott Horton, in The Daily Beast, details the Pentagon's dishonest response: blame the messenger.

The Pentagon is denying the facts: photographs of Abu Ghraib torture are even more sexually explicit than first reported, including rape and sodomy, writes The Daily Beast's Scott Horton, who has obtained specific and detailed corroboration of the photos.
The Daily Beast has confirmed that the photographs of abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison which President Obama, in a reversal, decided not to release, depict sexually explicit acts, including a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.

These descriptions come on the heals of a British report yesterday about the photographs that contained some of these revelations—and whose credibility was questioned by the Pentagon.
The Daily Beast has obtained specific corroboration of the British account, which appeared in the London Daily Telegraph, from several reliable sources, including a highly credible senior military officer with first-hand knowledge who provided even more detail about the graphic photographs that have been withheld from the public by the Obama administration.

Psychologists were hacking human psyches like mere machines

2009-05-29T06:05:00.000-07:00

Do CIA Cables Show Doctors Monitoring Torture?
by Sheri Fink, ProPublica - May 28, 2009 8:27 am EDT
A version of this story was published on Salon
The new information comes from descriptions of cables, classified as top secret and relating to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, that were transmitted from a Central Intelligence Agency field station to the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters nearly every day between Aug. 1 and Aug. 18 that year.

The descriptions of the cables (here [2] and here [3]) reveal that a daily "medical update" and "behavioral comments" along with status and threat updates were sent to CIA headquarters throughout that period. On five occasions between Aug. 4 and Aug. 9, an additional cable was sent containing "medical information" along with such information as the strategies for interrogation sessions, raw intelligence, the use of interrogation techniques to elicit information, and the reactions to those techniques. The fact that medical information was included in these cables hints that Abu Zubaydah was medically monitored during or after being subjected to those techniques. Both professional organizations and human rights groups have rejected as unethical any monitoring role for medical personnel.

A summary of the 34 cables and of a handwritten log book were released to the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this month on orders of U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who is presiding over a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the group. The lawsuit was based on a request for records related to detainee treatment that the ACLU and four other advocacy groups made of the U.S. Departments of Defense, Justice and State and the CIA in 2003. The new summary, known as a Vaughn Index, was released in response to a motion that the ACLU filed in 2007 after then-CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged that the agency had destroyed videotapes of detainee interrogations in 2005.

The cables themselves have not been made public, and the agency is contesting their release. In response to a request for more detail on the medical information included in the cables and the reasons that information was transmitted from the field site to CIA headquarters, CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano wrote in an e-mail to ProPublica: "The materials speak for themselves."

The U.S. Department of Justice gave the ACLU other documents [4] this month that suggest the cables are among nearly 550 interrogation-related cables sent from field stations to CIA headquarters between April and December 2002. Among those analyzing the new documents are National Public Radio's Ari Shapiro [5], the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman [6] and Firedoglake's Marcy Wheeler [7].

The documents are the latest installment of an ongoing story about the role of doctors and psychologists in the government's efforts to pry information from suspected terrorists. Professional organizations of doctors, nurses, public health practitioners and psychologists have stated their opposition to health professionals' involvement in torture. "The AMA has taken the clear stand that the participation of physicians in torture and interrogation is a violation of core ethical values," the American Medical Association said in a statement last Friday. Last month, the AMA sent a letter to President Barack Obama reiterating, as it did during the Bush administration, that the association's ethical code prohibits physicians from participating in torture or coercive interrogation.

However, there is evidence that health personnel, at least some of them physicians, have been involved in interrogations. For example Col. Thomas M. Pappas, former chief of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, who was interviewed as part of the Taguba investigation [8], testified that a psychiatrist and another doctor monitored interrogations [9] at the prison and had the final say in what aspects of the interrogation plan were implemented.

The question raised by the cables is, How deep was the involvement of physicians or other health professionals in the actual interrogations at CIA "black sites" such as the one where Abu Zubaydah was held?

Previously released documents show that Bush officials overseeing the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah saw the involvement of medical personnel as crucial because it could help prevent prosecution of interrogators under U.S. law. As ProPublica previously reported [10], Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee signed a memo on August 1, 2002 spelling out those concerns and the terms under which interrogators could waterboard and slap Abu Zubaydah, subject him to "cramped confinement" and stress positions, and shove him into flexible walls.

"The constant presence of personnel with medical training who have the authority to stop the interrogation should it appear it is medically necessary indicates that it is not your intent to cause severe physical pain," the memo said.

Abu Zubaydah began cooperating in late April under questioning by Ali Soufan, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who said he did not use coercive methods. In congressional testimony this month, Soufan disclosed that there was a "CIA medical team supporting us" when he and other FBI and CIA personnel first spoke with Abu Zubaydah. Soufan said the medical team insisted that Abu Zubaydah, who was injured during capture and in danger of dying, be taken to a hospital for treatment.

It is unclear whether the same CIA medical team that evaluated Abu Zubaydah's health problems in the spring was still caring for him in August when he was waterboarded. Nor is it clear precisely how health personnel might have been asked to cross the line from providing medical care to participating in or supporting the interrogations, which Soufan and other sources have described as becoming increasingly abusive under the instruction of a former military Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training psychologist contracted by the CIA. Soufan and others, including another psychologist employed by the CIA, protested the escalating techniques and left the site. The new documents do not indicate whether medical personnel might also have objected.

In a cover letter accompanying the new Vaughn Index, acting U.S. attorney Lev L. Dassin wrote, "The Government is ... acknowledging that August 2002 was the month during which Abu Zubaydah was subjected to the most intensive interrogations." An Aug. 4, 2002, cable with the subject "Abu Zubaydah Interrogation" is a typical entry in the Vaughn Index:

This is a four-page cable from the Field to CIA Headquarters. The cable includes information concerning the strategies for interrogation sessions; the use of interrogation techniques to elicit information on terrorist operations against the U.S.; reactions to the interrogation techniques; raw intelligence; a status of threat information, and medical information.

The news that medical information was being transmitted regularly to CIA headquarters throughout the time Abu Zubaydah was being repeatedly waterboarded troubled medical ethics experts interviewed by ProPublica. Normally, health professionals who work at U.S. prisons share inmates' medical information with authorities only "if there's a need to know; for example if someone has a seizure disorder, we put in a medical order for a bottom bunk," Dr. Dean Rieger, chief medical officer for Correct Care Solutions, a healthcare management company for correctional facilities, said in an interview with ProPublica. Rieger, who has been involved in corrections for more than three decades and who coauthors a column on medical ethics for the Society of Correctional Physicians, said it would be problematic to continue sharing an inmate's medical information with authorities overseeing a system "that creates the harm in the first place."

University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan agreed. At that point, "you gotta start protesting and stop transmitting," he said in an interview. "The issue isn't privacy violations, it's complicity ... You're part of the torture team at that point if you're assessing injuries and saying whether the person's capable of enduring more."

Legal memos written in 2005 suggest the CIA had reached precisely the opposite conclusion -- that waterboarding and other harsh interrogations should involve personnel from the CIA's Office of Medical Services, including its physicians.

A recently declassified Justice Department memo discussed the involvement the OMS eventually had in supporting interrogations. That memo [11], quoting still-classified OMS guidelines from December 2004, said that the "use of the waterboard requires the presence of a physician." Another memo [12] said that OMS doctors and psychologists had been consulted about the effects of using several techniques together, such as "when an insult slap is simultaneously combined with water dousing or a kneeling stress position, or when wall standing is simultaneously combined with an abdominal slap and water dousing" and concluded they would not cause severe pain.

Medical personnel were also given the responsibility of monitoring the interrogations for safety. "Should it appear at any time that Abu Zubaydah is experiencing severe pain or suffering, the medical personnel on hand will stop the use of any technique," Bybee's 2002 memo said.

It is unclear whether the "medical personnel" designated to monitor Abu Zubaydah's interrogation included M.D.s. "There is no role for physicians in those practices," Dr. Otmar Kloiber, secretary-general of the World Medical Association, told ProPublica. Kloiber said that physician involvement in interrogations increases the chances that questioning will devolve into abuse and torture. A physician's reassuring presence can give questioners a green light to escalate physical and mental pressure.

In a confidential International Committee of the Red Cross report [13] made public by New York Review of Books contributor Mark Danner last month, Abu Zubaydah described to ICRC interviewers days of being waterboarded to the point he believed he would die, slammed into hard and flexible walls, and confined in a small box where one of his wounds reopened and began to bleed. "Eventually," Abu Zubaydah said, "the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor."

The ICRC report also reveals that other detainees who spent time in the CIA's black sites perceived that some staff who treated them or monitored their interrogations were physicians.

The potential presence of physicians as opposed to other types of personnel raises crucial questions.

Numerous officials, both Republican and Democrat, have characterized waterboarding as torture. There is widespread agreement among doctors -- whether employed by the military, other government agencies, or not -- that ethical standards prohibit physicians from using medical knowledge or information about patients to support torture.

The World Medical Association, which lists 85 countries including the U.S. as members, was established in 1947 to uphold independence and ethical behavior among physicians after the horrors of Nazi medicine were revealed. It is arguably the world's key arbiter of medical ethics.

Earlier this month, the group's governing council issued a resolution reaffirming the group's long-standing position that physicians are forbidden from "participating in, or even being present during, the practice of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading procedures" and must denounce those acts whenever they're aware of them.

According to officials from the WMA and the Norwegian Medical Association, which put forward the resolution, the original draft made specific reference to U.S. detention facilities. At the WMA council meeting in Jerusalem earlier this month, intense discussion ensued between normally staid physicians over whether to remove mention of the U.S. and make the language more generic.

WMA officials declined to say who took up which side.

"It got heated enough I had to call a short recess and have a cooling-off period," WMA chair Dr. Edward Hill told ProPublica. Hill, a former president of the American Medical Association, said the U.S. delegation stayed out of the debate.

But the American delegation made its views clear, according to Dr. Trond Markestad, who drafted the original resolution and who chairs the ethics committee in the Norwegian Medical Association. "They felt it was a bit unfair, wasn't really correct, to single out that one [example] since there were so many wars going on and so many things happening all over the world and since they'd already addressed this nationally."

The final version of the WMA resolution passed unanimously after language naming the U.S. was removed. The resolution condemns "reports worldwide" of "deeply unsettling practices by health professionals, including direct participation in the infliction of ill-treatment, monitoring specific methods of ill-treatment, and participation in interrogation processes."

The group also resolved to support physicians who refuse to participate in or condone torture. Kloiber told ProPublica that WMA members are concerned, for example, that physicians in areas where sharia law is adopted are being asked to carry out punishments such as amputations [14].

The WMA resolution calls on national medical associations, such as the AMA, to investigate breaches of fundamental medical ethics among physicians. But the AMA has not made public whether its ethics and judicial body has ever investigated or sanctioned physicians for participating in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Last Friday, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York launched an advocacy campaign [15] that aims "to hold accountable healers that have harmed." The group is encouraging citizens to file complaints against health professionals suspected of participating in torture and to support legislation, such as a proposed bill in New York state [16], that prohibits health professionals from participating in torture or the improper treatment of prisoners at home or abroad.

Tags: Abu Zubaydah, ACLU, al-Qaida, American Medical Association, CIA, Department of Justice, Detainee Treatment Scandal, Torture, Waterboarding, World Medical Association

NYT plays word games with our shared narrative

2009-05-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

The CIA’s Congressional Mumblers and Dissemblers
Originally published by Ken Silverstein in Washington Babylon on Harpers.org. Emphasis added.
From Jeff Stein:

A former deep-cover CIA operative says the spy agency’s congressional briefers routinely shade the truth or hide facts altogether from congressional overseers. “They mumble, they dissemble, and there’s a lot of ‘on the one hand . . .’” said the retired official, who spent 25 years as a CIA operations officer but now writes blistering, unauthorized critiques of the spy agency using the pen name “Ishmael Jones.” …

The CIA deploys so many briefers to the Hill it’s hard for both the agency and intelligence committee members to reconstruct who said what to whom, he added. “Its enormous numbers of employees have led to briefings being handled by groups, with vague chains of command, so that it may have been difficult to pin down what was said, when it was said, and who was in charge,” Jones said of the CIA interrogation briefings.
Jones also charged that, contrary to beliefs that the agency has a political agenda, “In reality the CIA is loyal only to itself. As long as Mrs. Pelosi supported its bureaucratic lifestyle, it supported her, but when she attacked it, it fought back. The CIA may not be able to conduct efficient intelligence operations, but it knows how to survive.” Reports that CIA managers were outraged or demoralized by the water-boarding controversy are wrong, Jones also maintained. To the contrary, he said, they felt that revelations of their interrogators roughing up, or even torturing, detainees made them look tough.

Melvin Goodman details the deception of We, the People, by CIA

2009-05-26T08:23:00.000-07:00

Via Consortiumnews.com

The CIA's History of Deception

Melvin Goodman

"Let me be clear about this,” CIA director Leon Panetta told his troops last week, “it was not CIA policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values.”

Of course, Panetta is entitled to his opinions, but he cannot create his own facts. And, as a long-time member of the House of Representatives, he surely must know that there is a long and substantiated record of CIA deceit and dissembling to the congressional intelligence committees. Here are some highlights of that record:
In 1973, CIA director Richard Helms deceived the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, refusing to acknowledge the role of the CIA in overthrowing the elected government in Chile. Helms falsely testified that the CIA had not passed money to the opposition movement in Chile, and a grand jury was called to see if Helms should be indicted for perjury.

In 1977, the Justice Department brought a lesser charge against Helms, who pleaded nolo contendere; he was fined $2,000 and given a suspended two-year prison sentence. Helms went from the courthouse to the CIA where he was given a hero’s welcome and a gift of $2,000 to cover the fine. It was one of the saddest experiences in my 24 years at CIA.

In the new Ford administration, Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and White House chief of staff Dick Cheney orchestrated phony intelligence for the Congress in order to get an endorsement for covert arms shipments to anti-government forces in Angola.

The CIA lied to Sen. Dick Clark, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa and a critic of the Agency’s illegal collaborations with the government of South Africa against Angola and Mozambique. Agency briefers exaggerated the classification of their materials so that Senate and House members could not publicize this information.

Agency shields of secrecy and falsehood were extremely effective.

In the 1980s, CIA director William Casey and his deputy, Bob Gates, consistently lied to the congressional oversight committees about their knowledge of the Iran-Contra Affair. Sen. Daniel Moynihan, D-New York, believed that Casey and Gates were running a disinformation campaign against the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Casey even managed to alienate Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, a pro-intelligence, conservative who typically walked through barbed wire for the CIA.

Gates’ lies on Iran-Contra led to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unwillingness to vote him out of the committee in 1987 when he was nominated to be CIA director by President Ronald Reagan. Gates was nominated again in 1991 and this time he was confirmed, but not before the hearings produced rhyme and verse on Gates’ tailoring of intelligence to fit the biases of Bill Casey.

Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, Aldrich Ames performed as the most destructive traitor in the history of the CIA, but CIA directors Gates, William Webster and Jim Woolsey failed to inform the congressional oversight committees of the serious counter-intelligence problems that had been created.

In the late 1980s, the CIA concealed from the Congress that Saddam Hussein was diverting U.S. farm credits through an Atlanta bank to pay for nuclear technology and sophisticated weapons. The chairman of the Senate and House intelligence committees, Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Arizona, and Rep. Dan Glickman, D-Kansas, were furious with the deception tactics of CIA briefers.

The greatest CIA disinformation campaign in the Congress took place in 2002-2003, when CIA director George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, consistently lied about Iraqi training for al Qaeda members on chemical and biological weapons as well as the existence of mobile labs to manufacture such weapons.

Several days before the congressional vote on the authorization to use force, CIA senior analyst Paul Pillar delivered an unclassified memorandum to the Hill with a series of false charges about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Pillar’s memorandum and a national intelligence estimate on the same subject were also used to develop Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations in February 2003.

More recently, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Michigan, the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, documented the dissembling of the CIA to cover-up the Agency’s involvement in a drug interdiction program in Peru that led to the loss of innocent lives. Hoekstra accused CIA director Tenet with misleading the Congress.

The CIA still has not addressed the serious procedural and institutional problems that were exposed in a report from the Office of the Inspector General on the Peru program, which concluded that Agency officials deliberately misled Congress, the White House and the Justice Department.

In closing, Panetta emphasized that it was the CIA’s task to “tell it like it is, even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.”

If only that were the case in the 1980s, when the CIA hid from the Congress the intelligence on the decline of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact or more recently when the CIA tailored intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda in order to give the Bush administration an intelligence case to go to war.

Panetta should understand that there was far less dissembling to the Congress 35 years ago when the Agency’s Office of General Counsel only had two attorneys, but with the addition of 63 attorneys over the next two decades there was greater politicization of Agency testimony and briefings.

Today there are nearly 200 lawyers with the Office of the General Counsel. Panetta should also understand that it is long past time for him to make sure that the Agency replaces the current acting directors of the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of the General Counsel in order to make sure that the CIA is indeed telling truth to power.

Melvin A. Goodman, a regular contributor to The Public Record where this essay first appeared, is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent more than 42 years in the U.S. Army, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense. His most recent book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Video: Matthew Alexander interrogates DIck Cheney

2009-05-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

Via AlterNet.org

Matthew Alexander interrogates Dick Cheney

2009-05-25T08:20:00.000-07:00

Matthew Alexander, the interrogator whose team found Zarqawi, turns his skills to an analysis of DIck Cheney's recent speech (originally published May 24, 2009 in Huffington Post):

Former Senior Interrogator in Iraq Dissects Cheney's Lies and Distortions
As a senior interrogator in Iraq (and a former criminal investigator), there was a lesson I learned that served me well: there's more to be learned from what someone doesn't say than from what they do say. Let me dissect former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech on National Security using this model and my interrogation skills.

First, VP Cheney said, "This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately... it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do." He further stated, "It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so." That is simply untrue. Anyone who served in Iraq, and veterans on both sides of the aisle have made this argument, knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq. What the former vice president didn't say is the fact that the dislike of our policies in the Middle East were not enough to make thousands of Muslim men pick up arms against us before these revelations. Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives.

Secondly, the former vice president, in saying that waterboarding is not torture, never mentions the fact that it was the United States and its Allies, during the Tokyo Trials, that helped convict a Japanese soldier for war crimes for waterboarding one of Jimmie Doolittle's Raiders. Have our morals and values changed in fifty years? He also did not mention that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both prohibited their troops from torturing prisoners of war. Washington specifically used the term "injure" -- no mention of severe mental or physical pain.

Thirdly, the former vice president never mentioned the Senate testimony of Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who successfully interrogated Abu Zubaydah and learned the identity of Jose Padilla, the dirty bomber, and the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) was the mastermind behind 9/11. We'll never know what more we could have discovered from Abu Zubaydah had not CIA contractors taken over the interrogations and used waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Also, glaringly absent from the former vice president's speech was any mention of the fact that the former administration never brought Osama bin Laden to justice and that our best chance to locate him would have been through KSM or Abu Zubaydah had they not been waterboarded.

In addition, in his continued defense of harsh interrogation techniques (aka torture and abuse), VP Cheney forgets that harsh techniques have ensured that future detainees will be less likely to cooperate because they see us as hypocrites. They are less willing to trust us when we fail to live up to our principles. I experienced this firsthand in Iraq when interrogating high-ranking members of Al Qaida, some of whom decided to cooperate simply because I treated them with respect and civility.

The former vice president is confusing harshness with effectiveness. An effective interrogation is one that yields useful, accurate intelligence, not one that is harsh. It speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of interrogations, the goal of which is not to coerce information from a prisoner, but to convince a prisoner to cooperate.

Finally, the point that is most absent is that our greatest success in this conflict was achieved without torture or abuse. My interrogation team found Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaida in Iraq and murderer of tens of thousands. We did this using relationship-building approaches and non-coercive law enforcement techniques. These worked to great effect on the most hardened members of Al Qaida -- spiritual leaders who had been behind the waves of suicide bombers and, hence, the sectarian violence that swept across Iraq. We convinced them to cooperate by applying our intellect. In essence, we worked smarter, not harsher.

Noam Chomsky busts the myth of American innocence

2009-05-22T06:56:00.000-07:00

Salon.com has published an article by the venerable Noam Chomsky which busts the myths of America's innocence when it comes to waging war:

The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so.

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantánamo was a torture chamber. Why else send prisoners where they would be beyond the reach of the law -- a place, incidentally, that Washington is using in violation of a treaty forced on Cuba at the point of a gun? Security reasons were, of course, alleged, but they remain hard to take seriously. The same expectations held for the Bush administration's "black sites," or secret prisons, and for extraordinary rendition, and they were fulfilled.

More important, torture has been routinely practiced from the early days of the conquest of the national territory, and continued to be used as the imperial ventures of the "infant empire" -- as George Washington called the new republic -- extended to the Philippines, Haiti and elsewhere. Keep in mind as well that torture was the least of the many crimes of aggression, terror, subversion and economic strangulation that have darkened U.S. history, much as in the case of other great powers.

Accordingly, what's surprising is to see the reactions to the release of those Justice Department memos, even by some of the most eloquent and forthright critics of Bush malfeasance: Paul Krugman, for example, writing that we used to be "a nation of moral ideals" and never before Bush "have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for." To say the least, that common view reflects a rather slanted version of American history.

Read the rest here.

The Daily Show does Dick Cheney

2009-05-22T06:10:00.000-07:00

Note Cheney's denial of the Middle Way in his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, which I illustrated in my Seattle Buddhism Examiner post on Wednesday.

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Dick Cheney, master myth-jacker

2009-05-22T05:51:00.000-07:00

McClatchy does an excellent job of busting the several myths with which Dick Cheney is trying to jack our shared narrative.

Cheney speech contained omissions, misstatements

Originally published by Jonathan S. Landay And Warren P. Strobel, Mcclatchy Newspapers – Thu May 21, 7:10 pm ET
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

In his address to the American Enterprise Institute , a conservative policy organization in Washington , Cheney said that the techniques the Bush administration approved, including waterboarding — simulated drowning that's considered a form of torture — forced nakedness and sleep deprivation, were "legal" and produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

He quoted the Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair , as saying that the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al Qaida organization that was attacking this country."

In a statement April 21 , however, Blair said the information "was valuable in some instances" but that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is that these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security." Read the whole thing here.

This is why I quit reading the New York Times in favor of truer fonts

2009-05-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

I don't trust the editor's of the New York Times. And I don't know the journalists from the propagandists. That's why I rely on genuine journalists and investigators at such sources as Democracy Now!, Harper's, and Glenn Greenwald. Today, Scott Horton, in his blog No Comment, deciphers the lexicon that enables torture:

A good example can be found in reporting about the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, on which the Times played an essential role. The Khmer Rouge’s waterboarding was “torture.” But Bush Administration waterboarding is just an “enhanced interrogation technique.” What’s behind the distinction? It’s a blend of fear and hypocrisy.
A week ago, Dana Priest of the Washington Post (which has a similar problem with using the T-word) came close to candor in an online chat session in which she acknowledged that the Post won’t use the word “torture” to describe the Bush program because the Bush Administration itself doesn’t. What she really means, of course, is that the Post knows that the Bush Administration would have had a fit had they used the word.
But this week, the Times exposed its hypocrisy in a most revealing way. It happened on the obituary pages, in a piece that ran about former Air Force Colonel Harold E. Fischer.

[...]

But note the difference in Timesspeak: Mao’s People’s Liberation Army uses them, they’re “torture.” Bush uses them, they’re not. Andrew Sullivan offers a searing analysis in a letter to the editors of the Times that will probably never be published.

[...]

The language used by the Times and similar publication shapes the debate. Because major media outlets will not use the word “torture” to refer to the Bush program, large parts of the public now understand this as a “legitimate policy discussion.” The Times policy enables torture. It’s about as simple as that. George Orwell diagnosed the problem and the cure to it in a famous London Letter from 1945:

The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization…. I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one’s own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.

The Times needs to make that moral effort. Its failure to do so is alarming.

Kudos to Charles Kaiser at the Columbia Journalism Review, whose chronicling of the Times’s dissembling on torture is a lesson to all of us in solid critique of journalistic malpractice.

Deafening silence greets David Barstow's Pulitzer

2009-05-12T08:24:00.000-07:00

DEMOCRACY NOW EXCLUSIVE: DAVID BARSTOW, THE MAN WHO PULLED THE PLUG ON THE PENTAGON'S MESSAGE FORCE MULTIPLIERS, AND THE CONTINUING DEAFENING SILENCE FROM THE NETWORKS WHO MYTH-JACKED US TO WAR

AMY GOODMAN: We begin our show today with New York Times reporter David Barstow. He recently won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for exposing how dozens of retired generals working as radio and television analysts had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to military contractors that benefited from policies they defended.
Barstow uncovered Pentagon documents that repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration themes and messages to millions of Americans in the form of their own opinions.
The so-called analysts were given hundreds of classified Pentagon briefings, provided with Pentagon-approved talking points and given free trips to Iraq and other sites paid for by the Pentagon.
David Bartow [sic ] wrote, quote, “Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse—an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.”
The officials appeared on all the main cable news channels—Fox News, CNN and MSNBC—as well as the three nightly network news broadcasts.
The Pentagon program started during the build-up to the Iraq war.
BILL O’REILLY: You met with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
MAJ. GEN. PAUL VALLELY: Special briefing on Thursday. Very interesting. A lot of good information, especially about post-Saddam, post-regime time, what are we going to do then? And it’s a very well laid-out plan.
AMY GOODMAN: The Pentagon continued to use retired generals to counter criticism on various issues, ranging from Guantanamo to the surge in Iraq. In some cases, analysts would appear on cable news programs live from the Pentagon just minutes after receiving a special briefing.
WOLF BLITZER: This is just coming into CNN right now. The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has just wrapped up his meeting with retired US generals. Our own military analyst, retired US Air Force Major General Don Shepperd, is fresh of that meeting. He’s joining us now live from the Pentagon.
MAJ. GEN. DONALD SHEPPERD: The message needs to be, imagine an Iraq—imagine Iraq under the control of Zarqawi with another conveyor belt for tourists, combined with oil and water and land and resources. Imagine the effect of that. That’s the message that has to get out to the American people.
AMY GOODMAN: Since the New York Times first report appeared thirteen months ago, the major cable news programs and television networks have responded with what has been described as a, quote, “deafening silence.” Even after David Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last week, the story—and even Barstow’s prize—went unnoticed on cable news and television networks.
Up until this week, the Pentagon defended its actions. In January, the Pentagon’s inspector general dismissed allegations the program violated laws barring propaganda and rejected reports showing the analysts used their Pentagon access to win government contracts for defense companies. However, on Tuesday, the Pentagon took the unusual step of admitting that the report was flawed and withdrew it.
Well, David Barstow joins us right now in our firehouse studio, investigative reporter at the New York Times, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for investigative reporting. This is his first national broadcast TV interview.
And we welcome you to Democracy Now!
DAVID BARSTOW: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s begin by talking about—first of all, congratulations on your award.
DAVID BARSTOW: Thanks.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s begin by talking about this report that has been retracted by the Pentagon. Explain exactly what it said and where it was and how it was retracted.
DAVID BARSTOW: Well, on January 14th of this year, as you pointed out, the inspector general came out with this long-awaited report that was—essentially, a group of members of Congress, after the stories ran, asked for the inspector general to take a look at this program that I wrote about and look at a couple of key questions. One was, did it violate longstanding laws that we have that forbid the Pentagon from targeting the American public with propaganda? And another was this question of whether or not the special access that was granted to the military analysts who participated in this program, whether that access was used to help them in the competition for contracts related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that as soon as the stories ran, the program itself was suspended by the Pentagon, pending the outcome of this investigation. But what happened earlier this week was really unusual. It really is very rare for the inspector general of the Defense Department to rescind and repudiate and, in fact, even withdraw the report from its own website.
And the reason why they did is because after the report was released, it became pretty clear that there were significant problems with it, significant factual problems with it. The one that jumped out to me immediately as I read through the report for the first time was that it listed one particular general who I had written an awful lot about, General Barry McCaffrey, who’s probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC. They listed him as having absolutely no ties to any defense contractors. Well, I had written 5,000 words that detailed tie after tie after tie he had to defense contractors, either as someone who sat on the boards of publicly traded companies, as a consultant to many defense contractors, and as an advisor to a private equity firm in New York that invests heavily in the biggest defense contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, it became pretty clear that there was something wrong with this report.
What we’ve learned in the last few days is that a couple of different independent inquiries happened inside the inspector general’s office in the wake of that report, in the wake of concerns that were being raised by members of Congress and others that there was something wrong with this report. And as they dug deeper and deeper and deeper into it, they just found more and more factual errors, flaws in methodology. We learned that the people who did the initial report didn’t even bother, apparently, to read all of the emails that we had pried loose over the course of a two-year Freedom of Information Act battle with the Defense Department. So, ultimately, they came very reluctantly to the conclusion that the only thing that they could do was simply to rescind the entire report.
We’ll see where it goes from here. There are some members of Congress who are saying, “We need to know more about why that inspector general’s report went so far off the track.”
AMY GOODMAN: And who exactly did the inspector general’s report?
DAVID BARSTOW: Well, they had a unit within the inspector general’s office that focuses on policy. And one of the interesting aspects that came out, or has come out in the last couple of days, is that normally the inspector general’s office follows a pretty rigid series of rules in terms of how it’s supposed to do its investigations. And what the internal inquiries of the inspector general’s office discovered is that many of their own internal policies and rules that are supposed to provide a level of quality control over their work product were, in fact, not followed in this case.
AMY GOODMAN: I think what’s so interesting about this story is not only what the Pentagon has done; it’s the lack of reporting on this by the networks. Of course, you know, that is your subject here, how the networks use them. How many times have you been invited on the networks—you just won the Pulitzer Prize for this investigation—to explain this story of the networks’ use of these pundits?
DAVID BARSTOW: You know, to be honest with you, I haven’t received many invitations—in fact, any invitations—to appear on any of the main network or cable programs. I can’t say I’m hugely shocked by that.
On the other hand, while there’s been kind of deafening silence, as you put it, on the network side of this, the stories have had—sparked an enormous debate in the blogosphere. And to this day, I continue to get regular phone calls from not just in this country but around the world, where other democracies are confronting similar kinds of issues about the control of their media and the influence of their media by the government.
So it’s been an interesting experience to see the sort of two reactions, one being silence from the networks and the cable programs, and the other being this really lively debate in the blogosphere.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk all about the program in a minute. David Barstow, investigative reporter for the New York Times, has just won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his articles “Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” and “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex.” This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest today is David Barstow, investigative reporter at the New York Times, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his articles “Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” and “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex.” How did Glenn Greenwald put it on his blog? “The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV.” Well, today we break that sound barrier.
As Glenn Greenwald put it, “The New York Times’ David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize […] for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of [the New York Times], were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Barstow uncovered. [And yet] here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow’s exposés:
‘Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.’”
David Barstow, take it from there. Talk about the Pentagon program that you exposed.
DAVID BARSTOW: I think the program had its roots in the 2002, in the run-up to, the buildup to the war in Iraq. The main architect or architects were folks inside the Pentagon, notably Torie Clarke, who was the main spokesperson for the Pentagon at the time and a former public relations executive who had some pretty sophisticated ideas about how it is that you influence the American public in a sort of spin-saturated world, where people are increasingly cynical both of journalists and of public—the official spokespeople of the government. And her idea, the idea that she pitched to Don Rumsfeld, then the Secretary of Defense, was that the way to really influence the American public was to try and find people who were viewed as independent of both government and the media, people who were considered authoritative and expert, people who would have an ability to cut through the spin.
And the group that they began zeroing in on were all the military analysts who were being hired in droves after 9/11 by all the major TV networks. In the view of Torie Clarke and her staff, these guys were sort of the ultimate key influencers. They were seen as, most of them, retired decorated war heroes. They were, many of them, retired generals, some three- and four-star generals. They came from an institution that traditionally is extremely trusted by the American public. And they were seen by the public not really as of the media, but not of the government either.
And so, in the fall of 2002, Torie Clarke and her aides, with the strong support from the White House and from her bosses, set out to target this group and to make them, really, one of the main vehicles for reaching the American public and building support for the war on terror. So that’s how it sort of began, was with this idea that they could take this thing, this thing called the military analyst, which is a creature that’s been around for a long time—going back to the first Gulf War, we remember some of the retired generals first coming on air—and they could take this and the fact of 9/11 and the fact of how prevalent they were on air, sometimes appearing segment after segment after segment, getting more air time than many correspondents were getting, holding forth, not just on the issues of where the airplanes were flying and where the tanks were moving, but weighing more heavily on even the strategic issues of what should we do next and how should the war on terror unfold, what should be the next targets.
And they looked at them as effectively what they were doing was writing the op-ed on air for the networks and for the cables. And they noticed the way the relationships between the anchors and their sort of in-house generals, there was a sort of bond between anchor and general. And you didn’t see the kind of challenging questioning that would go on if you had sent, for example, a representative of the Pentagon to the TV station. It was a much more—almost fawning, in some cases, kind of relationship between anchor and general. So they saw this group, and they saw in this group a way of taking the media filter, which politicians are always so fond of complaining about, and turning the media filter into more of a media megaphone. And so, that’s sort of what was going on here, at least in the beginnings of this.
AMY GOODMAN: According to Media Matters, the army of analysts that you identified, what, made 4,500 appearances and quotations on ABC, ABC News, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headlines News, Fox News and NPR.
DAVID BARSTOW: At least that many.
AMY GOODMAN: Give us the story, the one case study, one of the case studies you do, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex.” Tell us the story of Barry McCaffrey, General Barry McCaffrey.
DAVID BARSTOW: Well, General Barry McCaffrey is really one of the most sort of impressive military leaders. He was the youngest four-star Army general, I believe, in our history. He was the man who became famous during the first Gulf War for leading the left hook into Iraq. He also then became the drug czar under President Clinton.
And in September of 2001, an odd thing happened. Actually, the week before 9/11, he was asked to join the advisory—defense advisory board of a major private equity firm in New York called Veritas Capital, which at that moment, just at that moment, was making plans to invest heavily into defense contractors. Nine-eleven happened. Weeks later, General McCaffrey was hired by NBC to be its—one of its military analysts. And so, what you see happening with General McCaffrey in the years since is that he has been on, time and time again, talking about the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, but at the same time, most notably through his ties to Veritas Capital, he has been deeply involved in the business affairs of some of the major defense contractors who are operating in both of those war zones.
And what’s more, none of those ties have been disclosed to NBC’s viewers when they’re bringing him on to talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that’s—one of the threads that we followed was, how did his appearances on television, and what did he say on television, to what extent did his positions on TV overlap with the undisclosed business interests of these major defense contractors?
In addition, General McCaffrey works as a consultant. He has his own consulting firm. And what that consulting firm does is it helps defense contractors gain access and win contracts. So, at the same time, while he might be going over to Iraq, for example, in his capacity as a military analyst for NBC and getting access to all of the top generals in Iraq, he’s also representing companies who are trying very hard to get into that market. And so, what we did was we looked very closely at how those different roles overlapped and intersected with General McCaffrey.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Barstow. We’re going to turn right now to a clip of General McCaffrey. As the media watch group Media Matters has pointed out, MSNBC continues to interview General Barry McCaffrey without disclosing his ties to military contractors. In this interview from February, McCaffrey advocates for building up the Afghan security force, but it’s not disclose that McCaffrey is a member of the board of directors of DynCorp International, a company under contract to train part of the Afghan national security force.
NORAH O’DONNELL: And a big headline: the President is expected to announce a major drawdown in the number of US troops in Iraq. NBC News has learned that more than half of the American troops there will be pulled out within nineteen months, leaving perhaps around 50,000 still in the war zone. MSNBC analyst and retired US Army General Barry McCaffrey is here.

GEN. BARRY McCAFFREY: By the way, another question to be decided is, what are we doing in Afghanistan? Are we there to build an Afghan security force with our NATO allies and then withdraw? Or are we there to fight a counterinsurgency battle in this gigantic country?
NORAH O’DONNELL: And that review is underway, and the President is waiting for it.
GEN. BARRY McCAFFREY: Yeah.
NORAH O’DONNELL: General Barry McCaffrey, great to see you. Thank you so much for joining us.
AMY GOODMAN: General McCaffrey on MSNBC. David Barstow, elaborate on that.
DAVID BARSTOW: Well, what we don’t know and what we can’t tell is—and I think this is a point that needs to be made—is whether or not the positions General McCaffrey took were taken specifically to advance the undisclosed interests of these contractors or whether they were positions that he genuinely holds as a military man. And it may be that they were in fact absolutely what he felt and believed as a military man.
But the point was—and this was something that we tried to explore with the executives at NBC—was the question of “But how do you ever really know?” And is that information that ought to be at least presented to the American public, so that when the American public is listening to someone like him, who is so authoritative, so eloquent on the subject of war, that at least they can weigh that in as they’re trying to figure out how much weight to attach to his opinion? And what is—what the NBC executives said back to us is that they just didn’t see that there was any need to make those kinds of disclosures. Now—
AMY GOODMAN: You interviewed the president of NBC News, Steve Capus?
DAVID BARSTOW: I did, yes. What I’ve learned since the story ran is that although they, for the most part, defended their use of General McCaffrey after the story on General McCaffrey ran, they have begun relooking at their internal ethics policies, their standards and practices. And what I’ve noticed in the last couple of months, I did see an appearance where General McCaffrey was on TV, and David Gregory in fact did tell viewers, “OK, he sits on the board of DynCorp.” And so, there was at least a move toward a little bit more disclosure.
But there’s still the sort of deeper question of—there are a lot of retired military officers who have great expertise out there, who in fact don’t work for defense contractors who are over in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is this question of, if a network wants to make use of that expertise and bring that to the table in their coverage, why not find somebody who doesn’t have these outside entanglements to do that?
AMY GOODMAN: And I will point out, that clip we just played was also after your piece. You say General McCaffrey—you quote Steve Capus as saying that “General McCaffrey is not required to abide by NBC’s formal conflict-of-interest rules, because he is a consultant, not a news employee.”
DAVID BARSTOW: That’s the position they took. You know, that’s quite something. I mean, one thing that we did discover through the reporting of this is that the military analysts, many of them, aren’t just having an on-air role, but they’re having an off-air role, as well. They’re, in some cases, participating in the editorial meetings where coverage of the war is being discussed. They’re weighing in on story ideas. They’re suggesting, in some cases, story ideas. And in some cases, they were suggesting story ideas that were suggested to them from the Pentagon.
And so, it’s—I think it would be—I think it’s probably a little bit of a surprise for viewers, who became so accustomed to seeing these generals as part of the news coverage, to now be told, “Well, wait a minute, they’re actually not considered journalists in any way, shape or form. I mean, they’re consultants, and so therefore they’re not beholden to any of our other ethical standards that would, for example, make it impossible for Tom Brokaw to go over and cover Iraq but at the same time be representing a defense contractor seeking business in Iraq.” If that were happen, we all know that would be a huge scandal in journalism. But when it comes to these guys, those rules didn’t apply.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, shortly after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Eason Jordan, then the chief news executive at CNN, admitted that CNN sought the Pentagon’s approval of prospective CNN news analysts during the lead-up to the Iraq war.

EASON JORDAN: I think it’s important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict. I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, “At CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us, on the air and off, about the war,” and we got a big thumbs up on all of them. That was important.
AMY GOODMAN: Eason Jordan. Your response, David Barstow?
DAVID BARSTOW: Well, what was interesting was that—what we saw during the process of the sort of the wooing, the cultivation, of these generals. I mean, it’s important to note that some of them, during moments of the war, developed deep misgivings about what they were being told in these briefings. They began to suspect that they weren’t really getting the straight truth, that they were getting a sort of—well, they were getting a sort of a rose-color view of what was really happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet, when those guys began to sort of go off the reservation and began giving voice to those doubts on air, what we saw happen was that some of them found their access rather abruptly cut off.
And so, there was this effort on the part of the Pentagon to use access as the sort of the carrot and the stick. And access is a really important thing to focus in on here, because if you’re in the world of defense contracting in Washington, access to people and to information is really the coin of the realm. It is so important to have that kind of granular, up-close, frequent contact with the very top people at the Pentagon to understand what are their needs, what are they thinking about next. And in some cases, you would see these guys go back out into the marketplace and advertise the special access they were getting as military analysts to people who they were trying to bring in as clients or as consulting arrangements or as board—to win a seat on a board of a company.
AMY GOODMAN: I was struck by your story of—well, the description of General Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named the president of the new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions. General McCaffrey was chair of Global Linguist. And explain what it was and what happened with it.
DAVID BARSTOW: Global Linguist was a company that was set up specifically to go after one of the biggest defense contracts that was let during the Iraq war, and it was a contract to supply many thousands of translators to the entire American military war effort in Iraq.
General McCaffrey at some point became aware of the fact that the American generals in Iraq were not pleased with the performance of the company that held the contract and that they were thinking about rebidding the contract. He then recruited General Marks to come in to be the president of this new subsidiary for DynCorp. And as you mentioned, General McCaffrey would be the chairman of this subsidiary. And that company then spent months fighting to win this contract that was worth over $4 billion. It was a contract that would have, when it was announced and when it was granted to Global Linguist, would actually send DynCorp’s stock up 15 percent in one day. And so, the two of them together were involved in this effort to win this contract.
This is in, really, the latter part of 2006, right as the American public, if you recall, after the midterm elections, there was a huge moment of sort of internal national soul-searching about what do we do with Iraq. Should we get in or get out of Iraq? This was when Jim Baker and his commission were weighing ideas about whether we should exit Iraq by March of 2008 or not. And at that same time, General McCaffrey and General Marks and this company, Global Linguist, were locked in this battle for this $4 billion-plus contract to supply all the translators in Iraq. And at the time, they were going on television talking about should we stay or should we go. Now, at the time, both of those guys took the position that we really needed to stay in Iraq and see it through. General McCaffrey, especially, was hugely critical of the Baker-Hamilton recommendation to pull out most of our combat troops by March of 2008. So there was this sort of confluence at that time of their business interests and what they were saying on air.
What we don’t know, and it’s important to note, that not only were these relationships not disclosed to the viewers of either CNN or NBC, but CNN at least claimed that they weren’t even aware that General Marks, their main military analyst, in fact had this role with this company, was deeply involved in fighting for this contract. And then, indeed, when they found out in mid-2007 or later on in 2007 that he, in fact, did play this role with this company, CNN pretty quickly severed its ties with General Marks, and he no longer appears on air as a military analyst for them. NBC, that’s not the case.
AMY GOODMAN: December 18, 2006, Pentagon stuns Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp stock jumps 15 percent. And as you point out, according to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month, plus expenses. Once Global Linguist secured the contract, he would also be eligible to share in profits which could potentially be significant. The contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.
DAVID BARSTOW: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Barstow. We’ll be back with him in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist David Barstow. He just won the award for, among his pieces, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” investigative reporter, also wrote the piece “Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand.”
I want to turn right now to a clip of Dana Perino. This is the response from the Pentagon and the White House to your report. Former White House press secretary Dana Perino was asked about the program in April 2008, just after your piece appeared in the New York Times.
REPORTER: Did the White House know about and approve of this operation?
DANA PERINO: Look, I didn’t know. Look, I think that you guys should take a step back and look at this operation. Look, DOD’s made a decision. They’ve decided to stop this program.
But I would say that one of the things that we try to do in the administration is get information out to a variety of people, so that everybody else can call them and ask their opinion about something. And I don’t think that that should be against the law. And I think that it’s absolutely appropriate to provide information to people who are seeking it and are going to be providing their opinions on it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those military analysts ever agreed with the administration. I think you can go back and look and think that a lot of their analysis was pretty tough on the administration. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk to people.
AMY GOODMAN: The former White House press secretary Dana Perino. David Barstow, your response?
DAVID BARSTOW: One thing that I wanted to look at closely with this, Amy, you have to think about this, about the question of whether or not—I spent a lot of time looking at, what was the information being told to this group? Was the information that was being told to this group—was it truthful? Was it accurate? Or was it spin? Was it whitewash? And the problem with what she just said is that when you dug deep into the weeds of this, when you looked at the talking points, when you looked at the transcripts of the conference calls between the military analysts and the Pentagon officials, while certainly there was plenty of truthful information that was given to them, time and time again they were also given information that deeply contradicted what we now know to be the truth, the truth that was known inside the Pentagon and the White House, about the true state of affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So, for example, on questions about—say, for example, let’s take the effort to train up Iraqi security forces. These guys were constantly being told one story about how wonderful the effort was going, even though the White House and the Pentagon knew all along that this program was in fact—the training effort was a mess in lots of different ways. You could also see it—even, I remember talking to a couple of these guys who were brought in just before the war began, and they were brought in for a presentation about WMD. What do we know about WMD in Iraq? And even the guys who were there in these secret briefings about the WMD in Iraq, as they listened to the story they were being told by the Pentagon officials, had a clear instinct at the time that they were being given information that wasn’t either very strong or wasn’t accurate or didn’t hold up.
So, in other words, if what she said was true, if what the White House was doing was giving really a thorough briefing of what the White House and Pentagon knew about the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror at large, you know, that would be one thing. But that, in fact, is not what was happening in many of these sessions. And when you looked at the transcripts of these sessions, the other thing that jumped out at me was that there was never the normal kind of relationship you would see in terms of the tension between people who are journalists, who are independent-minded, and a government official. There was never that sort of questioning, that probing, to see whether or not the information was really correct, whether they’re being told whole story, whether they’re being told the story straight. Instead, what you often came away with was this feeling that you were watching a kind of like a sales meeting, where the military analysts were sort of synching up with the Pentagon and almost brainstorming together about, you know, what would be a better way to explain this, what would be a better way to communicate the themes and messages in order to keep the support for the war strong here at home.
AMY GOODMAN: And you have the Pentagon hiring a private contractor, Omnitech Solutions, to monitor, scour the databases for any trace of the analysts.
DAVID BARSTOW: I mean, the thing that is really important to understand here is that the people who were the kind of the architects of this, many of them were deeply influenced by the post-Vietnam experience, and they had this deep belief in them that the reason why ultimately we lost in Vietnam was because we lost control of the message here at home. And in their view—and this is something that Mr. Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and others said publicly—our strategic center of gravity in the war on terror wasn’t in Baghdad, and it wasn’t in Kabul; it was right here at home, it was with the American public. And so, that’s why they put so much effort into reaching and cultivating this group.
And what you would see is, when things like Abu Ghraib happened, when questions were being raised about the adequacy of the armor being given to American troops, invariably they would pull these guys in, and they would sort of bring them in to neutralize the critical coverage, sometimes the critical coverage that was coming from the network’s own war correspondents.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, the investigations that are supposed to be ongoing? For example, the Government Accountability Office, the Federal Communication Commission, the whole issue of the US propagandizing its own population, the Pentagon using the networks to do this?
DAVID BARSTOW: Well, those investigations were waiting the outcome of the Defense Department inspector general investigation. So, the fact that—and after their report was initially issued in January, the inspector general said, “Well, we may have to do some minor revisions on this.” And my understanding is that those two other inquiries were kind of put on hold until they could get done with their minor revisions, except the ultimate outcome of that was not minor revisions, but outright repudiation of the report itself. So I’m not sure how that’s going to influence the work that the GAO is doing or the FCC is doing.
AMY GOODMAN: Is it legal?
DAVID BARSTOW: Is what legal?
AMY GOODMAN: Is what—this entire program, is it legal? I mean, we had passed the Smith-Mundt Act after World War II—
DAVID BARSTOW: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —against propaganda.
DAVID BARSTOW: The problem with that is that our definitions about propaganda are so mushy, and I think it does need that sort of careful look by people who understand the statute and understand our traditions, you know, to make that call. And I trust that will happen.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, David Barstow, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Congratulations again on your Pulitzer Prize. David Barstow, investigative reporter with the New York Times, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for his articles “Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” and “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex.”

Questioning K'Naan

2009-04-14T07:41:00.000-07:00

Thanks for this eloquent first-person account.

To paraphrase Michael Franti & Spearhead, we can machine the world to pieces, but we can't machine it into peace. And Pres. Morales of Bolivia said, what say you?

PRESIDENT EVO MORALES: [translated] Thank you very much for the invitation and for this kind interview. I’m very pleased, as always, to talk with you and share our proposals on behalf of life.

I’ve come at the invitation of the Permanent Forum of Indigenous Peoples of the United Nations. I was, as a union—to share experiences on climate change, first as a peasant union leader and second as a president.

Unfortunately, the so-called developing countries are the hardest hit by natural phenomena. These natural phenomena are a result of the unbridled industrialization of the Western countries. I think that the countries of the West are under an obligation to see how they can pay the environmental debt to reduce harm to the planet earth. The planet earth has suffered a death warrant [sic, poss. "wound"] and must be saved, and that means saving planet earth is to save life and to save humankind.

But there are other factors that are leading to the inflation in prices for some agricultural goods, ... And it’s not possible to understand in this new millennium how there are governments, presidents, institutions that are more interested in a heap of metal than in life. They’re more interested in fueling luxury cars than in feeding human beings.

That’s where we raise a question. First, land is to be for life and not land for scrap metal or a heap of metal. And while some presidents and some international organizations want to implement measures of this sort, well, I believe very much in the social movements. ... and we need to wake up some presidents and international organizations before this problem of hunger that’s suffered by families and hectares of land being earmarked to cars rather than people goes any further. [End quote.] Pres. Morales on Democracy Now! 24 April 08

Our world is fatally overmechanized. When the tsunami struck, the sea puked up the poisons dumped by the real pirates here, sickening your people, stealing their livelihoods. And now, more white men in more metal machines are on the way to escalate another bogus war.

Why is it that perpetual bogus "holy" war is the only way we know of being in the world? It's the mythology!

The myth of the cosmos as Newtonian mechanism needs to die now. We are organic beings who conceive of our selves and our ultimate Source as machines, that's our problem. And we help the Machine Men defeat us when we champion the same damn myths that oppress us.

As a fellow poet, K'naan, I'm curious: what do you think of Morales's rejection of mechanism as a way of life?

Think Progress and the Myth of "A Clean Break" from Bush

2009-04-12T10:44:00.000-07:00

Hey TP, you war-mongering faux leftists: where's your "clean break" rhetoric now?

There are 3 pages of this schtick. You guys were jacking us with myths of a "clean break" before, now what say you?

And then there's Geithner and Summers and Crew; what kind of "clean break" do they represent?

Your "clean break" myth is busted, TP. We see through your mask, esp. regarding escalating our holy war in Afghanistan.

Lifting Bush's Shroud
http://pr.thinkprogress.org/2009/03/pr20090305/
"Americans deserve a government that operates with transparency and openness," read a statement by Holder, underscoring the clean break with the Bush administration.

Obama's Wasted Efforts at Bipartisanship
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/13/obamas-bipartisanship/
In the early days of his young presidency, President Obama has already accomplished a great deal, making a clean break from Bush on a variety of issues, ...

Salazar makes clean break from Bush’s midnight ‘headlong rush’ into offshore drilling.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/10/salazar-makes-clean-break-from-bushs-midnight-headlong-rush-into-offshore-drilling/

OBAMA'S UNSCREENED TOWN HALL AUDIENCE IS CLEAN BREAK FROM BUSH'S SUPPORTERS-ONLY EVENTS
http://pr.thinkprogress.org/2009/02/pr20090210/

Obama Justice Department Re-Hires Attorney Fired ...
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/02/03/hagen-doj-rehire/
Hagen’s rehiring is only the latest move in an effort by President Obama and new Attorney General Eric Holder to provide a “a clean break with the past policies of the Bush administration.” [cites http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1876621,00.html ]

Economy -- Energy Recovery
http://pr.thinkprogress.org/2009/02/pr20090203
Recognizing that it is time to "mark a clean break from a troubled past, and seta new course for our nation,"....

Obama abandons ‘war on terror’ catchphrase.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/01/31/obama-terror-catchphrase/
Obama’s First 100 Hours: A Clean Break From Bush.

Untitled
http://pr.thinkprogress.org/2009/01
Obama's intelligence and OLC picks are a clean break from the lawlessness of the Bush administration.

http://thinkprogress.org/search/search.php?q=%22clean+break%22&x=0&y=0

What are myths, and what do they do, anyway?

2009-04-10T22:32:00.001-07:00

You'll want to listen to all four parts of each. Only 2 bucks each, what a bargain!

http://shop.alanwatts.org/content/images-man-parts-12

http://shop.alanwatts.org/content/jesus-his-religion-or-religion-about-him-12

Pentagon's Message Force Multipliers Jacked Us to War

2009-04-10T18:29:00.000-07:00

From the Media Matters Archive:

EXCLUSIVE: Military analysts named in Times exposé appeared or were quoted more than 4,500 times on broadcast nets, cables, NPR

On the heels of an April 20 New York Times investigative report exposing the hidden relationship between media military analysts and the Pentagon and defense industries, Media Matters for America today exclusively released an accounting of the analysts identified in the Times exposé and their more than 4,500 appearances and quotations on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, and NPR. The release documents just how far and wide the Pentagon program reached. Read more

Past Media Matters Research:

ACTION: Tell the Networks You Deserve Independent Analysts

Press Release: Four-Star Elephant in the (News)room

Military analysts named in Times exposé appeared or were quoted more than 4,500 times on broadcast nets, cables, NPR

CNN military analyst Shepperd on trip to Gitmo: "Did we drink the government kool-aid? -- of course"

Memo to the media: Have you hosted on air the person who told Rumsfeld at military analyst meeting, "You are the leader. You are our guy"?

Networks again refuse to go on the record about NY Times' military analyst exposé

Networks continue to ignore NY Times' military analyst story, but all find time for Hannah Montana

Networks reportedly refused to appear on PBS' NewsHour to respond to NY Times' military analysts story; several continue blackout

Special Report aired quotes from military analyst Robert Scales -- but has not mentioned he was in Times' exposé on military analysts

Multiple choice: Of the following, which outlet covered two recent major national security stories -- NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, or ... Comedy Central?

Flashback: Media Matters had previously documented conservative misinformation from military analysts

Online Response:

Crooks and Liars: Pentagon Propagandist General Calls for US to Sponsor Terrorism Against Iran (May 15, 2008)

Salon - Glenn Greenwald: Joe Galloway blasts Pentagon and Larry Di Rita on "military analyst" claims (May 15, 2008)

Mediabistro - FishbowlNY: Everyone But the Networks Seem to be Talking About that NYT's Military Analyst Story (May 14, 2008)

Mediabistro - TVNewser: Examining the NYT's "Examination" (May 14, 2008)

Crooks and Liars: Military analysts named in Times Report appeared or were quoted more than 4,500 times on broadcast nets, cables, NPR

The Huffington Post: Pentagon "Media Analysts" Appeared on Major Networks or Were Quoted More Than 4,500 Times

The Politico: 4,500 times

The Carpetbagger Report: Pentagon Pundit propaganda produces political peril

Editor & Publisher: MM: Military Analysts Named by 'Times' Got on the Air 4,500-Plus Times

Open Left: Opening the Day: Obama to Get Crushed in W Virginia

Suburban Guerilla: 4500

Think Progress: Media quoted 'military analysts' over 4,500 times since 2002.

Eschaton: 4500+

Minnesota Monitor: Media Monitor: O'Reilly remixed (and more)

Democrashield: What Liberal Media?

DemocraticUnderground: Military analysts in NYT expose appeared or quoted 4,500 times on broadcast, cable, NPR

Message Force Multipliers, Wherefore Art Thou?

2009-04-10T15:24:00.000-07:00

From Media Matters April 23, 2008

During the April 22 edition of The Daily Show, Stewart said:

STEWART: Now, another event making a recent cameo, the Iraq war. Remember? Remember when it started and it was kind of a big deal that some journalists were embedded with the troops? Well, this is great. As it turns out, it was more of an exchange program, because they actually also had troops embedded with the journalists. It's the subject of tonight's "The Less You Know."

[begin video clip]

STEWART: Look at these sweet, kindly former killing machines. The networks hire them to give expert analysis and insight into our country's war effort.

FMR. MAJ. GEN. PAUL VALLELY: We're winning the war on terror.

FMR. LT. GEN. THOMAS McINERNEY: This was the best-trained force we have ever had.

FMR. GEN. JAMES "SPIDER" MARKS: This is the best leadership our military has had in its history.

FMR. GEN. MONTGOMERY MEIGS: And when I ask senior army officials who are longtime friends who aren't going to give me a B.S. answer how we're doing, are we winning or losing? They're saying we're winning.

[end video clip]

STEWART: These people are old and trustworthy, like my grandpa who served in the war. They wouldn't lie to me -- right, Grandpa? You killed Hitler. And never cheated on my grandma with a French whore. Why would he? He was in love.

STEWART: Well, it turns out many of these ex-military were not so "ex" -- working on behalf of defense contractors and the Pentagon itself. And while the news networks called them "military analysts," the Pentagon, in just released memos, referred to them as "message force multipliers" -- which sounds so much cooler than sneaky old guys. Message force multipliers. What are they, machine guns that shoot Post-it notes? By the way, message force multipliers? Worst Steven Seagal movie ever. They say he couldn't stay on message. They were wrong. They said he couldn't read prompter. All right. But have there been any reports about the broader war on terror that don't come in unreliable old-man form? Well, we're in luck, if by in luck you mean [bleeped out].

The Government Accountability Office just put out a report on America's progress pursuing the non-Iraqi perpetrators of 9-11, or as many of us refer to them, the perpetrators of 9-11. Now, the name of the report -- and this is admittedly a little coy -- is The United States Lacks Comprehensive Plan to Destroy the Terrorist Threat and Close the Safe Haven in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Or, for you anagram fans, TUSLCPTDTTTACTSHIPFATA. The report stated that despite all that has occurred these last seven years, the Pakistan-Afghanistan border now has vast unpoliced regions attractive to extremists and terrorists seeking a safe haven. Well, thank God someone's safe.

For more, we turn to our own message force multiplier, senior military analyst Rob Riggle. Rob, thank you so much for joining us. Rob, this is serious revelations -- serious revelations coming out of the Pentagon and the Government Accounting Office about progress in the war on terror. What is your take on these reports?

RIGGLE: My take?

STEWART: Yes.

RIGGLE: My take is that in the United States war on terror, we've been walking in a [bleep] circle.

STEWART: Really?

RIGGLE: I mean, have you read this report?

STEWART: I read the, I saw the title.

RIGGLE: Well, let me just give you the Cliff Notes, OK? In 2001, there was a memo: Bin Laden determined to attack the United States from a safe haven in Afghanistan. Now, seven years and $700 billion later, we get a new memo saying, bin Laden determined to attack United States from a safe haven somewhere around Afghanistan. We're right back where we started. We could have gotten here by doing nothing.

STEWART: It is discouraging to see that -- it is discouraging. You know what's interesting, Rob? It is discouraging --

RIGGLE: I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew this [bleep] didn't know where he was going. I mean, all of us, we were all in the backseat. America was just in the backseat. You know, you know, acting like, "I don't think this is the way to defeat Al Qaeda." And he's like, he's like, "I know what I'm doing. I know a shortcut through Iraq. Everybody, come on now, just trust me." And we're all like, "I don't know, maybe we should ask for directions. You know, I'm pretty sure Al Qaeda is the other way." And he's like, "Shut up, shut up. What the hell. I'll dump your ass in Yemen. You're just like your mother. Keep your hand off the radio, [bleep]."

STEWART: That's an interesting, that's an interesting -- Rob, that's an interesting metaphor.

RIGGLE: Man, shut the (bleep) up, all right?

STEWART: OK. So, do you think the president's going to make any changes based on these reports?

RIGGLE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, this will be a wake-up call. If there's anything this president responds to, it's written criticism.

STEWART: Well, thanks, Rob. That was a great report.

RIGGLE: Whatever. Whatever.

STEWART: Rob Riggle, everybody. We'll be right back.

Krugman: Wizards of Wall Street are Shown to be Frauds

2009-03-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

Is he echoing Iglesias?

@5:45 JON STEWART: Is the greatest disappointment for you that you were a guy who believed in what they were doing and probably still believe in the political end of it, to be... do you feel betrayed in that sense?

DAVID IGLESIAS: Yeah, and to use a Star Wars kind've image, I thought I was working with the Jedi Knights and I was working for the Sith Lords, y'know.

JON STEWART: I wanna tell ya something--

AUDIENCE: WOO-HOO!

JON STEWART: I wanna tell ya somthing, for the audience for this show, you could not have used a better example... http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=173526&title=david-iglesias

The Market Mystique
By Paul Krugman
Excerpted from a blog post originally published March 26, 2009 in the New York Times
But it has become increasingly clear over the past few days that top officials in the Obama administration are still in the grip of the market mystique. They still believe in the magic of the financial marketplace and in the prowess of the wizards who perform that magic.
The market mystique didn’t always rule financial policy. America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business. Banks attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two; they used the money thus attracted to make loans, and that was that.

[...]
But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.
Sooner or later, things were bound to go wrong, and eventually they did. Bear Stearns failed; Lehman failed; but most of all, securitization failed.
Which brings us back to the Obama administration’s approach to the financial crisis.
Much discussion of the toxic-asset plan has focused on the details and the arithmetic, and rightly so. Beyond that, however, what’s striking is the vision expressed both in the content of the financial plan and in statements by administration officials. In essence, the administration seems to believe that once investors calm down, securitization — and the business of finance — can resume where it left off a year or two ago.
To be fair, officials are calling for more regulation. Indeed, on Thursday Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, laid out plans for enhanced regulation that would have been considered radical not long ago.
But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules.
As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.

10. March 28, 2009 12:39 pm Link

Your comment [on "Was I unfair?" posted 3/27/2009] is awaiting moderation.

Sorry, magicians, I applaud Krugman’s use of the Wizard metaphor. I’ve been calling it “myth-jacking,” a synthesis of Campbellian comparative mythology, radical behaviorism, and zealous evangelizing of the myth of the cosmos as god’s own justice-dispensing machine.

This is the myth by which we are being jacked to hell and stuck with the bill right freakin’ now.

If the cosmos is a Newtonian machine, then to get more out put, what do we do? Grab the key and wind ‘er up, right? And on the advice of chief cultists Greenspan, Summers, Gramm, and other high priests of the temple of overwhelming force, they did with the economy what 3-year olds do with wind up toys.

Turns out, that key they’re still twisting like mad? It’s the neck of the Goose who lays the Golden Eggs. Is it dead yet? Can they reattach the head and make it fly again?

We are being FORCED to dance to the tune of fanatical mechanists and atavistic social Darwinists, who just happen to be the same damn NSA-type fiends who’ve been jacking us to hell and back, and sticking us with the bill both ways, for god knows how long now.

It’s all about the conversion of our Commonweal into private property in the context and under the cover-story of a bogus “holy” war.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD (2001): The implications of this finding cascade across several realms….

But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. (”Analysis” literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems — predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again — and when will we ever learn? — we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?

The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology — and for two major reasons.

First, the key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code — and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.

Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?ex=1226466000&en=f7655ce4049eba50&ei=5070&pagewanted=all

NAOMI KLEIN: And here’s the quote. This is Larry Summers in 1992: “Spread the truth. The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.” And then he laid out those laws a little bit later. He referred to the three “ations,” and those were privatization, stabilization and liberalization. So he has been preaching the doctrine. He is by no means sort of an innocent bystander. He is a dyed-in-the-wool privatizer, free trader. http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/25/naomi_klein_robert_kuttner_and_michael

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: In a speech at the Kennedy School of Government in September 2000, Summers declared: “The traditional industrial economy was a Newtonian system of opposing forces, checks and balances… While, in contrast, the right metaphors for the new economy are more Darwinian, with the fittest surviving.”

He forgot to add the part about the fittest surviving by being bailed out by the rest of us.

Real economic Darwinism -- or Randian capitalism -- would mean letting old institutions that have failed die. Keeping them on life support is not just catastrophically burdensome for taxpayers, but also prevents new institutions from flowering.

In a fawning new profile of Summers in The New Republic, we discover that Summers' tired thinking extends to the way he views being tired.

Noam Scheiber reports that "Summers functions on exceedingly little sleep.... To power through the day, Summers relies on a punishing Diet Coke regimen. The combination of fatigue and extreme caffeine intake can produce the occasional verbal and physical tic: Summers is a chronic foot-tapper and sometimes turns over words and clauses like an engine that won't start."

The notion that driving yourself to the point of exhaustion and chronic foot-tapping is a sign of commitment and achievement is as obsolete as the belief that pumping more money into the same institutions that created the crisis will solve it.

Summers' old boss, Bill Clinton, once said, "Every important mistake I've made in my life, I've made because I was too tired." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/larry-summers-brilliant-m_b_178956.html

GORDON BIGELOW: Economics, as channeled by its popular avatars in media and politics, is the cosmology and the theodicy of our contemporary culture. More than religion itself, more than literature, more than cable television, it is economics that offers the dominant creation narrative of our society, depicting the relation of each of us to the universe we inhabit, the relation of human beings to God. And the story it tells is a marvelous one. In it an enormous multitude of strangers, all individuals, all striving alone, are nevertheless all bound together in a beautiful and natural pattern of existence: the market. This understanding of markets—not as artifacts of human civilization but as phenomena of nature—now serves as the unquestioned foundation of nearly all political and social debate. As mergers among media companies began to create monopolies on public information, ownership limits for these companies were not tightened but relaxed, because “the market” would provide its own natural limits to growth. When corporate accounting standards needed adjustment in the 1990s, such measures were cast aside because they would interfere with “market forces.” Social Security may soon fall to the same inexorable argument.

The problem is that the story told by economics simply does not conform to reality. This can be seen clearly enough in the recent, high-profile examples of
the failure of free-market thinking…. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/05/0080538

JIM HIGHTOWER: Why was Greenspan so insistent on no regulation? Because he is the hardest of hardcore laissez-faire ideologues, holding a blazing disdain for government. An avowed worshiper of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, he views public oversight of business as an evil force that deters the creativity of smart elites. He is so psyched by his religious-like faith in the “free market” that he fervently believes in what he considers to be the innate good will and moral superiority of investors and bankers. He asserts that these self-interested individuals can simply be trusted to do the right thing, and that government should not second-guess their decisions.

Even the faith of snake handlers is not as devout as Greenspan’s. Unfortunately, however, he was able to hitch our nation’s economic well-being to his own absurdist ideological fancy. The guy who was lionized as the smartest, most- stable economic thinker in the land essentially turns out to have been a quasi-religious nut. http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/node/1801

Myth-jacking is obviously our MO, the state of the art in manuFRACTURing consent.

— Dave Parker

Mythimating Appalachia and Gaza Alike

2009-03-25T07:03:00.000-07:00

Check out this Lillis post from 3/24/09:
http://washingtonindependent.com/35488/epa-halts-mountaintop-mining

"...and communities throughout the Appalachian region suffer daily from contaminated drinking water, increased flooding, and a decimated landscape …"

Take a look at that word, "decimated:" it means, to reduce by a factor of ten. Our lords of coal have done to Appalachia what our lords of war have done to Gaza.

Two examples come to mind.

Democracy Now! April 2, 2008
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/2/oil_execs_...

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic Congressmember Jay Inslee of Washington State also questioned the Senior Vice President of Exxon Mobil, Stephen Simon, about the kind of change that could be expected from Exxon Mobil when they’re investing less than one percent of their profits in renewable energy.

REP. JAY INSLEE: Mr. Simon, listening to your testimony makes me even more convinced that we need to act to create an incentive for decision makers in industry to really make real investments in the clean energy revolution rather than relatively small ones. And the reason I say that is that, listening to you, as far as I can tell, you’re spending less than half a percent of your gross revenues on clean energy research. Is that right?

STEPHEN SIMON: It would be a very modest amount. I would acknowledge that. But I would not acknowledge that we’re not doing a lot to address greenhouse gas emission.

REP. JAY INSLEE: Well, considering that we have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent in this country below our levels by 2050, would you agree that if your company continues on its present course, it will fall several hundred orders of magnitude short of what we have to do to prevent cataclysmic global climate change?

STEPHEN SIMON: Well, the assumption there that that’s required in order to do that, I would—

REP. JAY INSLEE: Well, how else is it going to happen? I mean, oil isn’t going to all of a sudden become clean. We need to do the research to figure out these technologies.

STEPHEN SIMON: No, but the fact is that we are going to have oil and gas and coal, and it’s going to constitute about 80 percent of the energy equation. With that as a given, how do we then address and do what we can to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions with that being the case?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[[[Full-spectrum dominance /Our Commonweal///[[[{{{ENERGY}}}]]]]]

Spoken like a true economic hit man, eh? Perkins confessed to exactly the same kind of scheme: with certain givens built in from the inception, we oversell nations on destructive extractive industries, bribing whoever has to be bribed, racking up unforgivable public debt, then taking over upon default. This is how we do it.

Now consider Gaza.

[[[Full-spectrum dominance /Our Commonweal///[[[{{{GAZA}}}]]]]]

1100 dead Gazans compared to 10 dead Israeli soldiers. Now that's what I call "leveraging." The difference is of two orders of magnitude; two "powers."

Israel has just finished razing Gaza to the negative second power, aka "bombing them back to the Stone Age." The US is supplying nearly a billion dollars to rebuild what we helped destroy. We expedited delivery of advanced weaponry for Israel to exalt itself to the second power, aka deus ex machina aka "Shock & Awe," and now we're sending money to rebuild.

So there stands proud Israel over prostrate Palestine, propped up and powered by machines of war and almighty dollars made in the USA.

So do we call this "centimated," or maybe "millimated?" No, I know: MYTHIMATED. Jacked to hell and back, and stuck with the bill both ways by myths conceived with malign intent (as the residents of Libby, Montana, now dying of mesothelioma, who brought home lethal vermiculite dust on their clothes for their loved ones to breathe, having been told myths of its safety by WR Grace and gov't health officials alike).

beloved/[{UNION}]/Beloved

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck"d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know"st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper"d swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

--John Donne, The Flea (from Scott Horton's blog, No Comment http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004598)

R. Twobloods Mingeldby the Third, at your service

2009-03-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

Please allow me to introduce myself, 'tho I am NO1 of wealth or fame: R. Twobloods Mingledby the Third, your not so humble servant, at your service.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And now that I've listened a few times, I want to note two things.

R. Twobloods Mingeldby III would make a great name, for I don't know what purpose, I just like the very English sound of it. Maybe I'll go about today in that character. R. Twobloods Mingeldby the Third--isn't that our true name?

That second poem--whoa, what a thought-stopper that is.
dp

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	Regarding http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/hbc-90004598
Date:	Sun, 22 Mar 2009 09:27:59 -0700
From:	Dave Parker
Reply-To:	parked@u.washington.edu
Organization:	Completely Different Research
To:	harpers@harpers.org

Thanks for the Gielgud/Glover video. I really enjoyed hearing the Flea. On first reading I really struggled with the rhythm. Gielgud's reading is more to my liking, or maybe I just have fond memories of him in Arthur.

Glover, though, completely captivated me with his strolling recitation, esp. when he comes to a stop near the hedge.

So power is what Donne's poetry is all about? I've been thinking, for some time now, so's mine.

I bow in your virtual direction,
Dave "knowbuddhau" Parker
Oak Harbor, WA
Myth-Jack THIS

Elisabetta Serani, The Flea (1657)

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met,
And cloister’d in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck’d from thee?
Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou
Find’st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
‘Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield’st to me,
Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

–John Donne, The Flea (ca. 1610) in Poems of John Donne, vol. 1, pp. 1-2 (E. K. Chambers ed. 1896)

The flea has an enviable position in literature, especially from the fables of Aesop to the various flea-inspired tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Sometime in the later nineteenth century, modern notions of sanitation intervened, and its literary demise began. But its role varies—it is often somewhat comic, reminding man of the frailty of his condition and of the fact that even the tiniest and most unassuming of creatures can afflict him. (Truer than many knew at the time, of course, since we now know that the flea was the principal vehicle for the spread of the Black Death and numerous other plagues). But the peak of the flea as a subject of art must have been in the seventeenth century, when it served as a subject for dozens of significant paintings (by Crespi, Piazzetta, de la Tour and Serani, for instance, whose painting provides a subtly masked sexuality) and became a steady topic of poets and songwriters. From this period, Donne’s poem stands at the unchallenged pinnacle. It’s a poetic tour-de-force, an amazing demonstration of innovation and dexterity. It addresses simultaneously an utterly trivial subject and one which could not be more profound, and its imagery is extremely daring. The voice is also intriguing–it opens with an imperative tone, then turns philosophical, introspective, then it marshals argument for a cause. The voice could just as easily be that of a man or a woman, moreover.

Listen to John Gielgud and Julian Glover read and discuss John Donne’s The Flea in the BBC’s “Six Centuries of Verse: The Metaphysical and Devotional Poets” (1984)

Commenting on Glenn Greenwald's Blog, Unclaimed Territory

2009-03-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

Psychologists have weaponized psyche. (As harpie, a regular commenter on Glenn Greenwald's blog, and others there, have so amply documented.)

I'm a student of that fair art (I have a BA, not a BS). So what I am doing here is my best to undo what I consider a grave crime against Psyche.

I'm a member of the One Drop Zendo association. There's an ocean in every drop of seawater, right? We are to Psyche what drops are to the ocean. Our nature, Hakuin-zenji wrote, is that of ice and water: apart from water, there is no ice; apart from Psyche, there is no individual awareness.

So every violation of every individual psyche is a violation of that same Psyche we all share. It's most obvious incarnation is this voice you hear in your head. I mean, you can neither predict nor control what words come next, can you? And yet you hear these unspoken words

So whose voice is this?

Kill and Tell: More Snuff Videos from Military.com

2009-03-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

WTF are these doing among "entertainment" videos? Are these the work of Message Force Multipliers? Isn't this what the bogus charges in the bogus trials (eg, Prof. Sami al-Arian, Padilla, al-Mari) have been all about: manufacturing evidence, jacking up our fear of home-grown terror, McCarthy-style? Then where are the Militias, like the ones that spawned Timothy McVeigh?

It appears, from an ask.com search, that the "Blowing Away Palestinians" video was blogged around 10 December 2008. It first appears on Military.com's forum on 24 February 2009. [http://shock.military.com/Shock/videos.do?displayContent=185657]

One expects propaganda in Obama's message to Iran; are these videos what Scott Horton meant by the "battlefield black psy ops" that have been targeted at the American public?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Guantanamo Bay Inmate Leads Taliban

BBC News - A former Guantanamo Bay inmate, Mullah Abdullah Zakir, has become a top Taliban commander in Helmand Province, according to British government officials.

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UNLOAD on Bad Guys UPLOAD TO FLASH DRIVES

Conflict is constant...while Combat has met the K-byte and evolved....Smile...you are always on film

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You Can Run...and Now You Can Fly

Apache takes out insurgents with a hellfire missile in Iraq.

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500lb Bomb in Samara Night Vision

500lb JDAM landing on it's target during an operation in Samara, Iraq.

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Blowing Away Palestinians via Remote Control

The Israel Defense Forces has found a way to target Gaza Strip terrorists from kilometers away, with just three pushes of a button. It may look like a video game, but it's actually a new system called "The Seer Shoots," which has entered operation in recent days on the Gaza Strip border.

How's that for obscene? Killing "Palestinians" is just 3 button-pushes away. Except they're actually "kilometers away," so how does the all-seeing shooter know? Easy: someone in authority said so in a "no questions asked" context.

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Remote Controlled Machine Gun

Remote Controlled FN MAG 58 mounted on a VBL.

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Soldiers Fire Mortars at Insurgent Position

US Soldiers fire mortars at insurgent position at night in Iraq.

IED Team vs. UAV Hellfire

Taliban place an IED and get a hellfire missile instead.

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Israel's Suicide Drone

A drone that dive bombs the enemy Kamikaze style.

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War Games in Paradise

Welcome to Cobra Gold, the largest US military exercise in Asia. So what's the stated purpose of this $14.1 million exercise? Readying a combined force of U.S.-Thai marines and sailors to rescue civilians from hostage areas.

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Cockpit View From Attack Helicopter

First person view of attack helicopter firing off some rounds.

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A10 Flexes Muscle on Taliban

A10 showing it's brute strength and power, awesome!

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Afghanistan Air Strike

BOOOOM! Bakwa, Afghanistan air strike on insurgent’s hide out.

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Another One Bites the Dust

Mulitple views of a 500 pound bomb dropped on an insurgent hideout in Iraq.

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Terrorist Training Camps in the US

The Spread of Homegrown Terrorists - Islamic training camps in America's back yard. Why are these communities left to flourish in the US?

Homegrown Jihad in the USA

Under the leadership of a radical Pakistani cleric, Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, Muslims of America has thousands of devoted followers who are being groomed for HOMEGROWN JIHAD (sic).

Hamas in America

A look at Hamas in Minnesota.

Hamas Military Wing Part 1
Hamas Military Wing Part 2

A video following Hamas forces digging tunnels in the Gaza Strip preparing for the ultimate war, Jihad, against Israel.

Ted Nugent Would Have Nuked Afghanistan

A post 911 interview with Ted Nugent.

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Taliban Hideout No More

A 500 pound bomb gets dropped on a Taliban hideout in Afghanistan. A good start on spring cleaning.

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Marines Unload on Insurgents

Marines ambush some insurgents who are using a bombed-out hotel to hide in during night time raid.

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Can You Hear the Bomb Dropping?

Could you hear this bunker-busting bomb dropping from thousands of feet in the air and try to outrun it?

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Dagestani Mujahid Killed By Russian Forces

Raw video of Dagestani Mujahideen in a vicious shootout with Russian security forces.

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Chechen Mujahideen Shoot Down Russian Helicopter

Chechens from the Islamic International Brigade shoot down a Russian helicopter near Grozny in 1999.

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500 Pound Bomb Dropped on Insurgent House

Target destroyed.

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The Hidden Army of Radical Islam in Bosnia

Sky News has obtained evidence of thousands of radical Islamic Holy warriors hiding in Bosnia, a decade after the end of the war. Tim Marshall went to Zenica in search of answers. He found a growing radicalisation, and a new base for Al-Qaeda.

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White Phosphorous Gaza Uproar

Although Israeli officials have denied using the highly controversial white phosphorous compound against Hamas forces in Gaza, evidence suggests otherwise.

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UAV Predator Engages Insurgents

A group of insurgent leaving an ambush on coalition forces is engaged by a MQ-1 Predator UAV with a Hellfire missile.

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Intense Iraq War Footage

Warning - Graphic Footage.

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Welcome to Gaza

this is the Gaza Strip

Submitted By: Infidel For Life

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Taliban Targets Schoolgirls

CNN - Authorities are unable to stop the Taliban from blowing up girl's schools in Swat. CNN's Reza Sayah reports from Islamabad.

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US Soldiers Ambushed with RPGs

US Soldiers are ambushed with IEDs, RPGs, small arms fire in Iraq.

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Firefight in Fallujah

Raw footage of US led forces engaged in a massive fire fight in downtown Fallujah.

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Building Taken Out by IAF

Building in Gaza taken out by IAF with IDF ground forces looking on.

Huge Israeli Airstrike Caught on Tape

An explosion from an IAF strike is seen in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah on Tuesday,Palestinian medics: 18 gunmen, 3 civilians killed in IDF strikes on Gaza city. Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas on Tuesday accused Israel of aiming to "wipe out" the Palestinian people in Gaza.

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Chaves (sic) Wants Israeli President Locked Up

Rabid anti-american Hugo Chaves sent the first plane loads of aid to Hamas and the Palestinians and called for a UN tribunal to arrest and inprison Israel's president for war crimes against humanity.

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Close Call in Gaza as Kids Run for Cover

A report i caught on German TV a short while ago shows an airstrike very close to some kids on the street.

Historic Newsreel of the Myth-Jacking of Tibet by the CIA March 13, 1959

2009-03-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth

Michael Parenti

The issue was joined in 1956-57, when armed Tibetan bands ambushed convoys of the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army. The uprising received extensive assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), including military training, support camps in Nepal, and numerous airlifts.27 Meanwhile in the United States, the American Society for a Free Asia, a CIA-financed front, energetically publicized the cause of Tibetan resistance, with the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, Thubtan Norbu, playing an active role in that organization. The Dalai Lama's second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, established an intelligence operation with the CIA as early as 1951. He later upgraded it into a CIA-trained guerrilla unit whose recruits parachuted back into Tibet.28

Many Tibetan commandos and agents whom the CIA dropped into the country were chiefs of aristocratic clans or the sons of chiefs. Ninety percent of them were never heard from again, according to a report from the CIA itself, meaning they were most likely captured and killed.29 “Many lamas and lay members of the elite and much of the Tibetan army joined the uprising, but in the main the populace did not, assuring its failure,” writes Hugh Deane.30 In their book on Tibet, Ginsburg and Mathos reach a similar conclusion: “As far as can be ascertained, the great bulk of the common people of Lhasa and of the adjoining countryside failed to join in the fighting against the Chinese both when it first began and as it progressed.”31 Eventually the resistance crumbled.

26. Heinrich Harrer, Return to Tibet (New York: Schocken, 1985), 29.
27 See Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and William Leary, "Secret Mission to Tibet," Air & Space, December 1997/January 1998.
28. On the CIA's links to the Dalai Lama and his family and entourage, see Loren Coleman, Tom Slick and the Search for the Yeti (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).
29. Leary, "Secret Mission to Tibet."
30. Hugh Deane, "The Cold War in Tibet," CovertAction Quarterly (Winter 1987).
31. George Ginsburg and Michael Mathos Communist China and Tibet (1964), quoted in Deane, "The Cold War in Tibet." Deane notes that author Bina Roy reached a similar conclusion.
32. See Greene, A Curtain of Ignorance, 248 and passim; and Grunfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet, passim.

And let's go to the Pentagon for the latest propaganda.

Tibet Revolts Against China

Historic Newsreel about the 1959 revolt by Tibet that eventually forced the young Dalai Lama into exile in India. Archival footage provided by The Military Network. To learn more about The Military Network, go to www.redafilms.com. (187.95s)

Submitted By: Member 157578

Wilkerson Diagnoses the Moment of Our Psychotic Break

2009-03-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

This is the very definition of myth-jacking (Via The Washington Note):

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON (GUEST POST): But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.

Col. Wilkerson offers compelling evidence of what I've been calling "myth-jacking."

"But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces."

Rather than uphold truth, democracy, and the yada yada yada, what did they do? Deployed snipers with high-powered microphones to strafe the airwaves with myths of terrorists with swarthy complexions oh my!

The Pentagon's Message Force Multipliers are no different than snipers with microphones. Have they all stood down?

"The Associated Press’s special report on Pentagon “influence operations” can be read here. The Pentagon’s Public Affairs Office has been one of the last redoubts of the Neoconservatives. Burrowed Bush era figures remain in key positions in the office, which had responsibility for implementation of some of the Rumsfeld Pentagon’s most controversial strategies in which the American public was targeted with practices previously associated with battlefield psy-ops."[1]

In other words, we have weaponized psyche and, like the NSA's capacity to spy, turned it upon ourselves.

"Obama is no shrinking violet. Just the same, it may be useful to warn him not to succumb to the particular brand of “shock and awe” that can be induced by ostensibly sexy intelligence to color reactions of briefees, including presidents. I [Ray McGovern] have seen it happen."[2]

Myths, of course, aren't simple lies, they are metaphors, they are vessels, into some of which we are more easily lured than others. Like kittens into burlap sacks. Or Roma and Jews into cattle cars en route to Dachau. And so on.

Joseph Campbell began lecturing at State's Foreign Service Institute in 1956. Look at the dramatic change in our foreign affairs after that, which just so happen to express his themes masterfully.

Myth-jacking, a hybrid of comparative mythology, and radical behaviorism in a mechanical cosmos, is the state of the art in manuFRACTURing consent.

In this, our Newtonian cosmos, in which the economy is god's own justice-dispensing machine, if you want more money, what do you do? Grab the key and wind 'er up, aka "economic stimuli."

On the advice of their high priests, Greenspan and Rand, bankers did with the world economy what 3-year olds do with a wind-up toy: grabbed the
key and twisted like mad. Turns out, the key they were twisting is the neck of the goose who lays the golden eggs.

Just as the Nazis jacked Germany with myths of the master race threatened by vermin; just as McCarthy jacked America with myths of Commies under every bed; so, too, have we been jacked to hell, by myths of terrorists with WMD, and are even now being stuck with the bill.

[1] Scott Horton, February 7, 2009. "Pentagon targeted and mistreated journalists, AP head charges." http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004359
[2] Ray McGovern, November 7, 2008. "President-elect's Queries to Briefers." http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/110708c.html

Throwing Dodd Under the Bus (Updated)

2009-03-19T08:21:00.001-07:00

And now for something Completely Different. 14 years ago, my graduate studies in research psychology ended abruptly when I ran out the clock, having not obtained.

So now, I'm presenting this in the spirit of a phenomenological psychology research report. I've been developing this most recently in the comments of Glenn Greenwald's blog, Unclaimed Territory, on Salon.com, with one of my universal usernames, knowbuddhau2. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

THROWING DODD UNDER THE BUS
Is there a manual on this somewhere? Or do manipulators of public opinion, like artists of other types, simply work their magic intuitively?

The fact that Campbell lectured at State's Foreign Service Institute, followed by a dramatic change in our foreign affairs, which just so happens to express his themes masterfully, leads me to conclude: this is how we do it.

The history of my science, psychology, can't be told without its twin, "public relations." I trust this community is sufficiently aware of that sordid tale for me not to repeat it.

This is what happens when we reduce being human to point instances-- quantum singularities--of egocentric pain in a mechanical, lifeless, dare I say god-forsaken cosmos where kinetic power determines the order of our day.

The on-going effort, to reduce us to machines the better "to predict and control" (Our Motto) human behavior, by conceiving of psychology as being of the type of natural science modeled after physics, has been among the worst ideas ever. Sure, we've learned a lot. But at what cost, and who benefits?

One of the best things I've learned from that type of psychology is this: brains function on the basis of neuronal models of stimuli. Stimuli are re-presented to awareness by virtue of the activity in distributed networks of neurons: our internal theater of the mind is a sort of holographic projection of these networks.

Neuronal models of stimuli are the kenotic (self-emptying) vessels of mind, into which experience is pouring; from which awareness is arising like steam; and out of which we are flowing water. That is, they function just like these words are functioning right now.

Humbled by the Genome's Mysteries, by Stephen Jay Gould

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?ex=1226466000&en=f7655ce4049eba50&ei=5070&pagewanted=all

The implications of this finding cascade across several realms. The commercial effects will be obvious, as so much biotechnology, including the rush to patent genes, has assumed the old view that "fixing" an aberrant gene would cure a specific human ailment. The social meaning may finally liberate us from the simplistic and harmful idea, false for many other reasons as well, that each aspect of our being, either physical or behavioral, may be ascribed to the action of a particular gene "for" the trait in question.

But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. ("Analysis" literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems — predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again — and when will we ever learn? — we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?

The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology — and for two major reasons.

First, the key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code — and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.

Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems. Our 30,000 genes make up only 1 percent or so of our total genome. The rest — including bacterial immigrants and other pieces that can replicate and move — originate more as accidents of history than as predictable necessities of physical laws. Moreover, these noncoding regions, disrespectfully called "junk DNA," also build a pool of potential for future use that, more than any other factor, may establish any lineage's capacity for further evolutionary increase in complexity.

The deflation of hubris is blessedly positive, not cynically disabling. The failure of reductionism doesn't mark the failure of science, but only the replacement of an ultimately unworkable set of assumptions by more appropriate styles of explanation that study complexity at its own level and respect the influences of unique histories. Yes, the task will be much harder than reductionistic science imagined. But our 30,000 genes — in the glorious ramifications of their irreducible interactions — have made us sufficiently complex and at least potentially adequate for the task ahead.

We may best succeed in this effort if we can heed some memorable words spoken by that other great historical figure born on Feb. 12 — on the very same day as Darwin, in 1809. Abraham Lincoln, in his first Inaugural Address, urged us to heal division and seek unity by marshaling the "better angels of our nature" — yet another irreducible and emergent property of our historically unique mentality, but inherent and invokable all the same, even though not resident within, say, gene 26 on chromosome number 12. [Bold added.]

Reductive Mechanism is a failed method for approaching psyches. And yet that's what we do, we FORCE people to do as we say, or we ratchet up the pain until they do. And then what? Are they supposed to disregard being machined to death, like Rachel Corrie, for example?

Mythic symbols and narratives function as the icons on the Control Panels of our minds.. By now, American mythology has been analyzed and weaponized. Propagandists know how to push our buttons and leverage that powerful knowledge to great advantage.

* [[[Full-Spectrum Dominance / Our Common Weal///[[[{{{DISSENT}}}]]]]]]
"Full spectrum dominance over our Commonweal powered by suppression of dissent"

* [[[Full-Spectrum Dominance / Our Common Weal///[[[{{{Chris Dodd}}}]]]]]]
See the bus?

* [[[Full-Spectrum Dominance / Our Common Weal///[[[{{{Rachel Corrie}}}]]]]]]
Now the brackets are Caterpillar tractor treads.

It's our updated, upgraded, nuclear-powered Goering Method: declare an attack and denounce opponents on psycho-spiritual grounds, e.g., he’s a Muslim! No, he’s The One! (ie, McCain’s campaign.) Shazam! A skinny guy from Illinois now looks like a Messiah or Anti-Christ. That's how we power social-engineering projects. Between those poles flows the power of myth.

Mechanists make the fundamental mistake of trying to use mechanical tools on a mythosociopsychical problem: Justice. You can't machine Justice. But that's what Rove tried to do with our Justice Department.

Scott Horton tells us, Rove “calls himself ‘Grendel,’ ‘Moby Dick,’ and ‘Lord Voldemort.’ He is the man ever behind the scenes, manipulating and driving the events on the surface without being seen." [Italics original, bold added; http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002498]

Coincidence?

Who’s using the power of myth to power weapons-grade domestic propaganda for Dems?

Lao-Tzu: "When right Way is used by Wrong-headed, Way still works, now for wrong reasons."
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(Original version)

Is there a manual on this somewhere? Or do manipulators of public opinion, like artists of other types, simply work their magic intuitively?

The fact that Campbell lectured at State's Foreign Service Institute, followed by a dramatic change in our foreign affairs, which just so happens to express his themes masterfully, leads me to conclude: this is how we do it.

The history of my science, psychology, can't be told without its twin, "public relations." I trust this community is sufficiently aware of that sordid tale for me not to repeat it.

This is what happens when we reduce being human to point instances-- quantum singularities--of egocentric pain in a mechanical, lifeless, dare I say god-forsaken cosmos where kinetic power determines the order of our day.

The on-going effort, to reduce us to machines the better "to predict and control" (Our Motto) human behavior, by conceiving of psychology as being of the type of natural science modeled after physics, has been among the worst ideas ever. Sure, we've learned a lot. But at what cost, and who benefits?

One of the best things I've learned from that type of psychology is this: brains function on the basis of neuronal models of stimuli. Stimuli are re-presented to awareness by virtue of the activity in distributed networks of neurons: our internal theater of the mind is a sort of holographic projection of these networks.

Neuronal models of stimuli are the kenotic (self-emptying) vessels of mind, into which experience is pouring; from which awareness is arising like steam; and out of which we are flowing water. That is, they function just like these words are functioning right now.

Reductive Mechanism is a failed method for approaching psyches. And yet that's what we do, we FORCE people to do as we say, or we ratchet up the pain until they do. And then what? Are they supposed to disregard being machined to death, like Rachel Corrie, for example?

[[[Full-Spectrum Dominance / Our Common Weal///[[[{{{Rachel Corrie}}}]]]]]]

Now the brackets are Caterpillar tractor treads.

[[[Full-Spectrum Dominance / Our Common Weal///[[[{{{Chris Dodd}}}]]]]]]

This is an illustration of what we mean when we say, "The White House threw Dodd under the bus."

In our world, god doesn't just come from a machine, god IS the machine! Listen to the way we talk about our military: as if it were the weather. We treat our military leaders like priests of the temple of almighty god.

Myth-jackers know this very well. By now, a thorough study has been made of American mythology, and how to leverage that powerful knowledge to their advantage.

It's our updated, upgraded, nuclear-powered Goering Method:

SEN. ROBERT BYRD: My hands tremble, but my heart still throbs. I read this quote: “Naturally, the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.” Hermann Goering, president of Reichstag, Nazi Parliament, 1934. [http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/25/body_of_war_new_doc_tells]

Dress it up in the right costumes on the right characters and Shazam! A skinny guy from Illinois now looks like a Messiah or Anti-Christ. That's how we power social engineering projects. Between those poles flows the power of myth.

Mechanists make the fundamental mistake of trying to use mechanical tools on a mythosociopsychical problem: Justice. You can't machine Justice. But that's what Rove tried to do with our Justice Department.

Rove's Monday Whoppers

Scott Horton

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002498

He calls himself “Grendel,” “Moby Dick,” and “Lord Voldemort.” He is the man ever behind the scenes, manipulating and driving the events on the surface without being seen. His hand is behind the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys and his manipulations were a conscious effort to put federal prosecutors to work for partisan political purposes.[Italics original, bold added.]

Sadly, I see the Democratic Party doing the same thing, only different.

Jonathan Turley Piles On Sen. Dodd with False Charge

2009-03-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

UPDATED Wednesday March 18, 2009 c.7:30 PM PDT

UPDATE II Wednesday March 18, 2009 c.8:25 PM PDT

UPDATE III Wednesday March 18, 2009 c.9:00 PM PDT

I first learned about the smear campaign against Sen. Dodd on Greenwald's blog

The Dishonest "Blame Dodd" Scheme from Tresury Officials
I'm not defending Chris Dodd here. As I said, there are all sorts of legitimate (though still unresolved) ethical questions about Dodd's personal financial matters. And if he were responsible for these compensation exemptions, then he ought to be blamed. But he simply wasn't responsible. He opposed them vehemently (The Hill at the time even noted that "Dodd is not backing down" from his opposition to the exemption that Geithner/Summers were demanding, and Jane has much more evidence, including the legislative history, conclusively demonstrating what really happened here). Geithner and Summers obviously thought that the exemption was justified when they were running around protecting those past compensation agreements, and they simply ought to explain why, rather than trying to sink Chris Dodd's political career in order to protect themselves.
The only point here is that what the White House and many journalists are claiming simply did not happen. They're just inventing a false history in order to blame the politically hapless Dodd for what Geithner and Summers did. And they're being aided by a right-wing noise machine that knows Dodd is vulnerable and which views the opportunity to blame the AIG bonuses on him, probably accurately, as a final nail in his political coffin (Media Matters today details today the right-wing falsehoods in the attacks on Dodd by documenting that the claims against Dodd are inaccurate, but they don't say who was actually responsible for the exemption). The next reporter who writes a word about this or listens to anonymous White House officials blame Dodd for these provisions might want to spend a moment reading Jane's post and looking at the evidence showing what actually happened, rather than mindlessly writing down what ~~Rahm Emanuel~~ these anonymous White House officials are whispering in their ears.

Just after reading of the scheme, I happened to catch Prof. Jonathan Turley on Countdown, After saying, public anger against AIG is misplaced, that we should be angry with Congress instead, he slips in the knife.

"And in fact an amendment was put through that protected the bonuses of executives that were brought in before the last stimulus package I believe Sen. Dodd helped put that in," with the emphasis coming on senator's name (c.1:45-2:00 in the first video segment of tonight's show).

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

UPDATE Greenwald has more on the story:

Some of these emailers have suggested that Dodd's comments are at odds with what I wrote. They quite plainly are not.
The narrative I wrote here (and which Hamsher wrote in her post) both included exactly that sequence:

That was the exact provision that Geithner and Summers demanded and that Dodd opposed. And even after Dodd finally gave in to Treasury's demands, he continued to support an amendment from Ron Wyden and Olympia Snowe to impose fines on bailout-receiving companies which paid executive bonuses."

I explicitly wrote that it was Dodd who, after arguing vehemently against this provision, ultimately agreed to its inclusion. And the statement from Dodd's office that I quoted above included the same series of events ("Because of negotiations with the Treasury Department and the bill Conferees, several modifications were made, including adding the exemption"). That's exactly what Dodd said today on CNN.
The point was -- and is -- that Dodd was pressured to put that carve-out in at the insistence of Treasury officials (whose opposition meant that Dodd's two choices were the limited compensation restriction favored by Geithner/Summers or no compensation limits at all), and Dodd did so only after arguing in public against it. To blame Dodd for provisions that the White House demanded is dishonest in the extreme, and what Dodd said today on CNN about the White House's advocacy of this provision confirms, not contradicts, what I wrote.
[...]

I agreed reluctantly," Dodd said. "I was changing the amendment because others were insistent."

It was the Treasury Department -- at least according to a Treasury official granted anonymity for the extremely compelling reason that he "asked not to be named" -- that pushed for the carve-out, and did so over Dodd's objections. That was the point from the beginning. That's precisely what made it so outrageous that the administration was trying to blame Dodd for a provision which Obama's own Treasury officials advocated, pushed for and engineered.
Anyone who doubts Dodd's opposition should just go read the above-excerpted articles which reported contemporaneously about the dispute Dodd was having with White House over the scope of the compensation limits. For obvious reasons, those real-time accounts are far more instructive about what really happened than what the parties are saying now that everyone is trying to avoid blame for the politically toxic AIG bonus payments.

UPDATE II Mike Lillis of The Washington Independent has more on the story:

Executive Compensation Limits: The Loopholes
2/4/09 12:34 PM
With Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner by his side, President Barack Obama just announced the highly anticipated new executive pay limits for companies receiving taxpayer help under the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program.
“In order to restore our financial system, we’ve got to restore trust,” Obama said. “And in order to restore trust, we’ve got to make certain that taxpayer funds are not subsidizing excessive compensation packages on Wall Street.”
And while the rules certainly go further than the Bush administration ever attempted, several loopholes stand out: [Full story.]

White House, Congress Complicit in AIG Bonus Scandal
3/18/09 5:10 PM
On day four of AIG bonus-gate, the message from Capitol Hill has emerged as clear as it is unanimous: The $165 million paid this week to executives of bailed-out American International Group is “appalling,” “outrageous” and “a breach of public trust.”
Yet as pitchfork populism continues to fuel the congressional castigation, a vital element of the debate has gone largely ignored: Congress, going back to September, has had numerous opportunities to limit executive pay for bailed-out banks, only to ignore or abandon those efforts in the face of opposition from the finance industry, the White House or both.
The result has been that hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout funds have left Washington with virtually no conditions on how the money would be spent. The banks have taken advantage of that freedom, collectively paying out billions in bonuses, retention salaries and other perks to the same employees who helped run the companies into the ground.

Julian E. Zelizer, congressional expert at Princeton University, said the failure of policymakers to limit executive pay for bailed out banks was no accident. “Neither Congress nor the president wanted to look as if they were ‘taking over’ financial institutions,” Zelizer wrote in an email, “nor did they want to anger business.”
The result, he added, was “predictable:” a bailout strategy with plenty of leeway for the companies receiving the money.
Indeed, allowing most bonus payments to continue was a central element of both the Bush and Obama administrations’ bailout strategies. When Henry Paulson, Treasury secretary under the Bush White House, first unveiled the Troubled Asset Relief Program in September, the public wailed about the absence of conditions on the money. Congress intervened to add some limits on executive pay — provisions that Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) labeled “anything but mild.” But liberal critics of those compensation limits, including a number of congressional Democrats, pointed out loopholes allowing the companies to pay their executives virtually any sum they wanted. Most provisions, for example, apply only to companies receiving more than $300 million in TARP funds.
“Under this bill,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said at the time, “the CEOs and the Wall Street insiders will still, with a little bit of imagination, continue to make out like bandits.”
In January, the House passed legislation placing tighter restrictions on TARP spending, including tougher limits on executive pay. Senate Democrats, pressed by administration officials, never took up the bill. [Full story.]

UPDATE III WaPo has more:

How the Fed Failed to Tell Obama About The Bonuses

Federal Reserve officials knew for months about bonuses at American International Group but failed to tell the Obama administration, according to government and company officials, exposing problems in a relationship that is vital to addressing the financial crisis. As pressure mounted on AIG employees to return the bonuses, new details emerged yesterday about what the Fed, the Treasury Department and the White House knew regarding the payments and when. AIG executives said the Fed was informed by the company at least three months ago that by March 15 it would pay $165 million to employees working at its most troubled division. The Treasury and White House said they learned of the payments from Fed officials only days before they were due.

Close coordination between the Fed and the administration is now more important than ever as they near the launch of two signature programs to rescue the financial system, which together could reach $2 trillion, aimed at reviving consumer lending and purchasing soured assets and loans from ailing banks.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, a central figure in the decision to bail out AIG last fall as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in an interview yesterday that he had not been aware of the size of the bonuses and the timing of the payments.

"I was stunned when I learned how bad this was on Tuesday [March 10]," Geithner said in an interview. "I shouldn't have been in that position, but it's my responsibility and I accept that."

Two days later, Geithner told the White House. The last-minute disclosure irked some of the president's senior advisers, but they refuse to point fingers now, saying the timing had little impact on the outcome or the president's public statements this week.

"Would I have liked an earlier warning system on this? Yeah," said David Axelrod, a senior White House adviser. "Would it have markedly changed things? Probably not. The legal constraints are the legal constraints."

One source familiar with the discussions said the company had provided details about the bonuses to senior Treasury officials at least a month ago. A Treasury spokesman said last night that was not true.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress are increasingly questioning how Geithner could not have known about the bonuses, given his past role in AIG's bailout, which has totaled more than $170 billion so far.

"I'm sick and tired of hearing the administration and the Secretary of the Treasury say, 'I just found out about it,' " Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.) said yesterday. [Full story.]

On the Advice of Chief Cultists Greenspan, Rubin, Gramm, et al.

2009-03-16T08:53:00.000-07:00

Originally posted as a comment to Glenn Greenwald's blog Unclaimed Territory on Salon.com.

If this was an economic hit job, meaning that "financial weapons of mass destruction" were deployed like the Israeli military recently deployed against Gaza
And if they were intended to demonstrate the infinite kinetic power of the cultists, to "jump start" the economy, or any of a number of Frankensteinian metaphors, which, of course, have gone horribly wrong precisely because of the unshakeable faith of the cult of kinetic power in "leverage," force, power, always applied from the outside, preferably by supersonic jets, to accomplish everything they desire;
And if the blatant hubris of positions leveraged 30, 35, or even 40:1 indicate that the cultists know no other way of being in the world, other than kinetic force (their response, to being overleveraged: more leverage!);
On the advice of Chief Cultists Greenspan, Summers, Volcker, Geithner, et al., over-payed paper-pushers did with our economy what every 3-year old does with a wind-up toy: they grabbed the wind-up key and twisted like mad until they broke the toy.
It was a bad idea done badly, and now the "bonuses" look more like the kickbacks we give to corrupt foreign officials during our overseas economic hit jobs.
Was the disaster the policy, thus the bonuses?

One of my biggest problems with the current discourse is the illusion that there are separate players involved when we say things like, "Wall Street did this" and "The Fed did that," etc. From the outside, they are distinct; but aren't they all on the inside?
There's a beaten path, from Goldman Sachs, to the Fed and Treasury. And back and forth. So what is private, what is gov't anymore?
Looks to me like a concerted effort to FORCE the economy, an organic being, to dance to the tune of fanatical mechanists, with entirely foreseeable results: once again, greedy men have killed the goose that lays the Golden Eggs.

It's the same process, over and over: abusing organic beings by treating US as machines.

"A Strategic Disinformation Campaign" to Jack the Nation to War

2009-03-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

Gates Carries Over Iraq-WMD Lie

Originally published by Melvin Goodman on Consortiumnews.com

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Gates to be Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), but he was denied confirmation because a majority of members on the Senate Intelligence Committee believed he was lying about his knowledge and role in the Iran-Contra Affair.

Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh “found insufficient evidence to warrant charging Robert Gates with a crime,” but he concluded that Gates had been "less than candid" about his knowledge of Oliver North’s illegal support for the Contras and the illegal diversion of funds from Iranian arms sales.

In 1991, after being re-nominated by then-President George H.W. Bush, Gates survived the confirmation process to become DCI despite the opposition of more than 30 senators who also found Gates less than candid in discussing his role in the politicization of intelligence on the Soviet Union, Central America and Southwest Asia.
In his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, Gates avoided explaining how the CIA exaggerated Soviet military forces, although he spent a great deal of his working life at the CIA tailoring national intelligence estimates on Soviet military capability and intentions.

And today, Gates is lying about the Iraq War, arguing that an intelligence failure was the reason for the Bush administration’s decision to launch a preemptive attack against Iraq.

Gates told PBS's Tavis Smiley this week that the United States will be more cautious about launching another preemptive attack because of the intelligence failures of the Iraq War, but that the role of the White House and the CIA in distorting the intelligence on Iraq had nothing to do with the decision to go to war.

In reality, the Bush administration relied on phony intelligence to create and employ a strategic disinformation campaign to convince the Congress, the media and the American people of the need for war.

President Bush wanted the war to establish himself as a genuine Commander-in-Chief; Vice President Dick Cheney wanted the war to create a more powerful presidency; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted the war to make his case for transforming the military into a smaller and more mobile force; National Security Advisor Condi Rice wanted the war because the old boy network favored it.

Sadly, Secretary of State Powell knew that going to war made no sense, but he unwisely made the phony case for war at the United Nations because he wanted to be seen as a team player. And now Gates, who owes all of his success to the Bush family, is helping George W. Bush make the case that faulty intelligence was responsible for the Iraq War.

There are lessons to be learned about the Iraq War, but the role of faulty intelligence in the declaration of a preemptive attack is not one of them.

[Full article]

Indisputable Documentary Evidence of Our Torture

2009-03-15T17:35:00.000-07:00

UPDATED BELOW
UPDATE II
UPDATE III

Via Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar

Tales From Torture's Dark World
Mark Danner
Excerpted from an article originally published in the New York Times on March 14, 2009
The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.
A short time ago, this document came into my hands and I have set out the stories it tells in a longer article in The New York Review of Books. Because these stories were taken down confidentially in patient interviews by professionals from the International Committee of the Red Cross, and not intended for public consumption, they have an unusual claim to authenticity.
Indeed, since the detainees were kept strictly apart and isolated, both at the black sites and at Guantánamo, the striking similarity in their stories would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely. As its authors state in their introduction, “The I.C.R.C. wishes to underscore that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the 14 adds particular weight to the information provided below.”
Beginning with the chapter headings on its contents page — “suffocation by water,” “prolonged stress standing,” “beatings by use of a collar,” “confinement in a box” — the document makes compelling and chilling reading. The stories recounted in its fewer than 50 pages lead inexorably to this unequivocal conclusion, which, given its source, has the power of a legal determination: “The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
•
Perhaps one should start with the story of the first man to whom, according to news reports, the president’s “alternative set of procedures” were applied:

Full story

UPDATE Monday March 16, 2009

Via Scott Horton's blog No Comment on Harpers.org

Danner quotes the report’s conclusions:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

And Danner offers a powerful conclusion of his own:

the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush Administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact. We can also say that the decision to torture, in a political war with militant Islam, harmed American interests by destroying the democratic and Constitutional reputation of the United States, undermining its liberal sympathizers in the Muslim world and helping materially in the recruitment of young Muslims to the extremist cause. By deciding to torture, we freely chose to embrace the caricature they had made of us. The consequences of this choice, legal, political and moral, now confront us. Time and elections are not enough to make them go away.

The Danner piece merits long and patient study. It contains some of the starkest evidence we have yet seen that the Bush Administration adopted torture as a conscious policy and then lied about it aggressively to Congress, the American people, and the world. Even so, the disclosures in the Red Cross report are but another drop in the bucket. Much remains shrouded in secrecy, and the calls to lay it bare grow steadily louder.

UPDATE II Tuesday March 17, 2009

Via Democracy Now!

Red Cross Report: US Committed Torture at CIA Black Sites

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report two years ago that the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners “constituted torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The findings were based on interviews with prisoners once held in the CIA’s secret black sites. The Red Cross said the fourteen prisoners held in the CIA prisons gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding. The author Mark Danner published parts of the secret Red Cross report in the New York Review of Books. Danner said the Red Cross’s use of the word "torture” has important legal implications. Danner said, “It could not be more important that the ICRC explicitly uses the words ‘torture’ and ‘cruel and degrading.’ The ICRC is the guardian of the Geneva Conventions, and when it uses those words, they have the force of law.”

UPDATE III Wednesday March 18, 2009

AMY GOODMAN: The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report two years ago that the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners “constituted torture” in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The findings were based on interviews with prisoners once held in the CIA’s secret black sites.

The revelation was made this weekend when the author and journalist Mark Danner published extensive excerpts of the Red Cross report in the New York Review of Books. In the article, Danner quotes from a speech President Bush delivered from the White House on September 6th, 2006. Danner writes the speech is “perhaps the only historic speech [Bush] ever gave.” In it, Bush admitted the US was using what he called “an alternative set of procedures” to interrogate terrorism suspects.

Yesterday I spoke with Mark Danner about the secret Red Cross report he obtained and what it reveals about the Bush administration"s treatment of prisoners. Danner is a contributor to The New York Review of Books and is a Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of “Torture and Truth.”

Mark Danner, contributor to the New York Review of Books. He is a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and a professor of human rights and journalism at Bard College. He is the author of Torture and Truth.

Danner assumes the war on terror is an effort "to persuade young Muslims" not to kill us. It's not: persuasion is for sissies, Cheney would say. We're men of action! We'll FORCE them to do as we say.

The cosmos is a machine; society is god's own perpetual motion justice-dispensing holy war cash machine. You want more money? Grab the key and wind 'er up.

Turns out, that key they were twisting? It's the head of the goose who lays the golden eggs. No amount of "shock treatments" or "jump starts" or other Frankensteinian metaphorical efforts will make that dead bird fly.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how did you get information about his whereabouts?

MATTHEW ALEXANDER: Well, the things that we used in Iraq is we took the methods that had been used prior to our arrival, and we changed them. The methods that the Army was using were based on fear and control, and those techniques are not effective. They’re not the most effective way to get people to cooperate. My team was a little bit different, because we were made up of several criminal investigators who had experience doing criminal interrogations, in which we don’t use fear and control. We use techniques that are based on understanding, cultural understanding, sympathy, things like intellect, ingenuity, innovation. And we started to apply these types of techniques to the interrogations. And ultimately, we were able to put together a string of successes within the al-Qaeda organization that led to Zarqawi’s location.

AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean, sympathy, those kind of—using that approach?

MATTHEW ALEXANDER: Let me just give you one example out of the book. There’s a—let’s go to the example where I convince one of Zarqawi’s associates to give up a path towards Zarqawi. This man was a highly religious man. He was deeply schooled in Islam. He had spent fourteen years studying Islam. And we had tried fear and control techniques on him for a period of about three weeks, and they didn’t work. He had maintained that he had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “fear and control”?

MATTHEW ALEXANDER: By “fear and control,” I mean using tactics that are basically intended to intimidate a detainee. You’re not allowed, within the rules of interrogation, to threaten a detainee, but there’s ways to create fear without threatening a detainee. And those methods, although legal, are not most effective. The methods that—

AMY GOODMAN: What are they? How do you inspire fear?

MATTHEW ALEXANDER: You can inspire fear by—you can state what are the consequences for someone’s actions.

AMY GOODMAN: You can say you’re going to kill them if they don’t talk?

MATTHEW ALEXANDER: You can’t say that you’re going to kill somebody if they don’t talk. What you can say is you can state what are the punishments for a certain crime, and if that person’s been involved in that crime, then the point will get across. I think the JAGs, the military lawyers, the terms that they use is you can’t put the dagger on the table.

Now, if you look at the way we do criminal interrogations in the United States, you can certainly tell a criminal suspect what are the consequences for a crime that they’ve committed or that you suspect they’ve committed. So that, I think, is a permissible and ethical way to conduct an interrogation. However, it’s not the most effective. The most effective techniques are those that rely on rapport building and relationship building and then adapt that into the culture of the person that you’re interrogating.

AMY GOODMAN: So talk now, moving from fear to what you did with him.

MATTHEW ALEXANDER: What we did is we got to know our detainees, first of all. You can’t effectively build a relationship with somebody and convince him to cooperate unless you know them. You have to get to know what motivates them, why they’ve joined the insurgency, why they decided to pick up arms against you. And then, once you understand that, then you can appeal to them and offer them some type of negotiation or compromise or incentive. And, you know, the best incentives that we could apply were ones that were intangible, things like hope, things like friendship, like respect, like wasta, which in Arab culture is a term referring to status.

You know, ultimately, interrogation is just one tool we’re using in this war. And we have to conduct ourselves while we’re doing interrogations according to American principles. If we don’t, then we’re not living up to the ideals that we proclaim to have. And for me, this war, it’s more about preserving our American principles than it is about defeating al-Qaeda. We can’t become our enemies in trying to defeat them.

That's it right there! As much as I admire our brother's courage, conceiving the cosmos as a giant jungle-gym for wannabe war gods is the problem.. Since it's not really about the war per se, can't we conceive of a way of being in the world, other than perpetual holy war?

Free Trade is a Myth, Not a Mere Lie

2009-03-15T16:06:00.000-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: Brown says he’ll raise the issue of a global fund at the next G20 meeting in July.
Well, my first guest has been among the leading economists to criticize the neoliberal policies imposed on poor nations but not followed by the West. Ha-Joon Chang is an economist at the University of Cambridge specializing in developmental economics. In 2005, he was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. He is author of the books Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective, and his latest is called Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, as you come from, well, Gordon Brown’s country to this one. First, what is your assessment of the situation right now? Warren Buffett has just said that the economy has gone off a cliff.
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, I think we are facing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, it probably wouldn’t get as bad as the Great Depression, because, unlike in the Great Depression, governments are more willing to intervene with deficit spending and nationalizing financial institutions and giving subsidies to industry and so on, whereas in the 1930s they more kind of adamantly held onto free market doctrines, which they subsequently abandoned, but, I mean, there was a period of time when they just held onto it and lost the opportunity. So I don’t think the impact would not be as severe as what it was in the 1930s, but yes, I mean, there’s no question that this is as big or possibly even bigger a crisis than what we saw in 1929.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what are neoliberal policies? And then you can critique them.
HA-JOON CHANG: Yes. Well, basically, the reason why it’s called “neoliberal” is that it’s a successor to nineteenth century classical liberal doctrine. I mean, “liberal” in American usage usually means kind of the left to the center, but in the European usage, “liberal” means basically belief in the free market and private ownership and basically rule of money.
Now, neoliberals have moderated some of the old liberal beliefs. For example, the old liberals actually thought that democracy was bad for capitalism. You know, they thought if you have democracy, poor people vote and create things like income tax, which they have, but, I mean, it actually helped the economy rather than destroyed the economy like the liberals said. So the neoliberals [inaudible] some degree of progressive income tax. The liberals used to be against, for example, having a central bank. The neoliberals actually like the central bank pumping money into the economy when things are going wrong. So it has modified the classical liberal doctrine, but neoliberalism still has, in its core, belief in free market, free trade, deregulated economy and private ownership.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you find it funny that you’re saying—that Gordon Brown is saying what you have been saying for a while—
HA-JOON CHANG: That’s right, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —talking about the hypocrisy of the West? But explain what that is, what the US has done or what the West has done with poorer countries when they’re in trouble, and then what we do when we’re in trouble.
HA-JOON CHANG: That’s right, yeah. For example, when the developing countries go into financial crises like the rich countries are experiencing today, they were told by the IMF and the World Bank, and ultimately the rich country governments which control these institutions, that they have to cut spending; ideally, they should run budget surplus. They have to raise interest rate to 30, 50, even 80 percent in some countries. And basically, they have to tighten the belt. Now that the rich countries have the financial crisis, they have cut interest rate to practically zero. You know, I mean, when South Korea had its financial crisis back in 1997, the IMF insisted that the country runs budget surplus equivalent to one percent of GDP. This year in the US alone, budget deficit is estimated to be equivalent to something like 12 percent of GDP.
Now, I mean, how do you explain that? I mean, that these policies are not good enough for you? I mean, “We’ll use one set of policy, which we think are the good ones, but you have to use something else.” You know, the American writer Gore Vidal once upon a time famously said that the American economic system is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, and the international macroeconomic policies have been like that. I mean, it’s what I call monetarism for the poor and Keynesianism for the rich. So when the rich countries have a fall in demand, they think nothing of boosting it up by printing money and increasing government spending; the poor countries shouldn’t do that.
Now, it’s not only the macroeconomic policy where this hypocrisy has a role. For example, the rich countries have been telling the developing countries to adopt free trade and told them, “Look, I mean, all countries in history probably, with the possible exception of Japan, have become richer through free trade. So how do you think that you guys can manage it otherwise?” Well, actually, if you look at the British history, American history, you find that today’s rich countries used protectionism, center, left and right, when they were developing countries. You know, I mean, for about one century, until the Second World War, the United States was actually the most protectionist country in the world. You know, there’s something there when Pat Buchanan said free trade is not free American, because in its 200 years of history, it has practiced free trade only for about fifty years.

[...]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Ha-Joon Chang. He is a world-renowned economist, wrote Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. I wanted to ask you about the Obama administration’s response to the financial crisis. This is President Obama speaking Friday in Columbus, Ohio.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Now, there were those—there were those who argued that our recovery plan was unwise and unnecessary. They opposed the very notion that government has a role in ending the cycle of job loss at the heart of this recession. There are those who believe that all we can do is repeat the very same policies that led us here in the first place. But I also know that this country has never responded to a crisis by sitting on the sidelines and hoping for the best.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama. Your response, Ha-Joon Chang?
HA-JOON CHANG: Right. Well, no, I mean, I agree with this sentiment, but the people he put in charge of the economy, like Paul Volcker and Larry Summers, I mean, these are people who actually created this problem. You know, Volcker is, if you like, the godfather of monetarism in this country. And Larry Summers, when he was at the World Bank as the chief economist and then when he was at the Treasury later, I mean, was going around the world preaching to other countries that they have to deregulate their financial market, open up their borders to the American and other rich country financial flows. Now, what they are doing now isn’t what they were doing before, but if they have started believing in something else, they should come clean and apologize, don’t you think? I mean, because these are the people, with others, who created these problems.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to be done right now?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, I think one important thing that this country needs to do is basically to abandon this obsession with private ownership and go for nationalizing the banks. You know, what the government is proposing now is basically “We’ll plug whatever gap that emerges in the banking sector, because if they go down, we go down all together.” No, I mean, at one level it’s true. But if you want to do that, you have to actually make people answer to these demands. So, now that the taxpayers are paying all this money, why not actually nationalize these banks and make them public servants so that they answer to those who have paid for them?
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of the debate here in the United States, while you’re here watching television, the whole controversy over nationalizing the banks?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, I think that this is the legacy of, if you like, neoliberal dominance. I mean, somehow, what you guys call the N-word here is a dirty word. But actually, in the history of capitalism, there are many countries that have run very successful economies on the basis of nationalized banking sector. For example, France until the 1990s, I mean, was basically based on nationalized banking system, and still the government has quite a lot of stake in the banking sector. Singapore, which people believe is some example of free market economy, is actually, in that country, more than 20 percent of national output is produced by nationalized companies.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re originally from South Korea.
HA-JOON CHANG: That’s right, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: What about South Korea?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, in South Korea, too, you know, I mean, it didn’t use public ownership as much as Singapore or France, but there are very successful companies like POSCO, the steel company, that is now the third largest steel company in the world, was started out as a government-owned enterprise. I think this notion that public enterprises do not work and therefore nationalization will be a disaster, I mean, it’s not supported by evidence.
AMY GOODMAN: What about nationalization of companies like GM and Chrysler?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, if you—no, I mean, let’s play by the capitalist logic. If the taxpayers are paying the money, you have to nationalize them. You know, I mean, the whole problem, people say, is that all these bankers were playing with other people’s money. So now, I mean, that they are being paid by the taxpayers, it is only right that the taxpayers control these companies. If they don’t want this money and they don’t want to be nationalized, they should go bankrupt.
AMY GOODMAN: Ha-Joon Chang, I wanted to ask you about Latin America, how leaders there are responding to the economic crisis after decades of following Western demands. Earlier this year, the World Social Forum was held in Brazil. Several Latin American presidents criticized the US for exercising double standards and allowing massive state intervention in financial markets. This is Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa.
PRESIDENT RAFAEL CORREA: [translated] The guilty parties in this crisis try to give lessons on morality and good economic handling. The most powerful people on the planet have united to find a therapy for the dying. They’re getting together—the central bankers, the representatives of large financial firms, the people primarily responsible for the crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. He’s also a trained economist and was reportedly influenced by your work.
HA-JOON CHANG: Yes. I mean, I think he has read my work, and in a number of places, he has quoted me. Yes, but Rafael is only—I mean, the striking examples of a whole group of Latin American leaders which have abandoned neoliberalism and are seeking their own ways. I mean, you know, today, which country in Latin America really listens to the United States? I mean, only Colombia and Chile. And I mean, even Chile now has President Bachelet, who famously joked that the reason why the United States doesn’t have a coup d’etat is—unlike Latin America, is that it doesn’t have US embassy. And, of course, that led to a diplomatic stir there. But now, even in Paraguay, I mean, the country which was ruled by military dictator General Stroessner for thirty-five years, has this left-wing former bishop as the president. And the whole continent has basically been drifting away from the neoliberal American strategy. And with this crisis, they’ll move away even further, unless America changes its approach to the continent.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the people you take on big time in your book is Thomas Friedman. Your first chapter, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree Revisited: Myths and Facts About Globalization.” We only have a minute to go, but what do you think are the myths that need to be debunked in this country?
HA-JOON CHANG: Well, basically, the myth is that America has been founded on the free market; the government has done very little; it has thrived under free trade. But actually, if you look at the history, this is actually the country that has succeeded most with protectionist policies. This is a country which has huge industrial policy, only that it’s called research funding in defense industry and research funding in health research. It actually spends, in proportional terms, a lot more money than Japan or European countries in supporting research and development, thereby steering the industries into certain directions. So let’s put it this way. I mean, this country has to basically come to terms with what it has done. I mean, it has been haunted by this ideology that, “Oh, we never did anything other than free market and free trade.” It’s time to give that up.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that America will continue to be a leader in the world economically, or do you think this is going to fundamentally change its position?
HA-JOON CHANG: No, I think in relative terms, it’s obviously in decline, but, I mean, it’s still, by far, the single richest economy in the world. And, you know, I mean, I give credit where it’s due. I mean, it’s the only country which became the world hegemony and created room for other countries to rise together. These were the Marshall Plan days, which sadly ended in the ’70s, and the US became even more kind of insistent on pushing these wrong policies on the developing countries and some other countries. But, you know, it has a great record, and I think that the country should exploit that history and try to reinvent itself as a new leader in the world.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you, Ha-Joon Chang, for being with us. His latest book, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Safe travels back to Cambridge.
HA-JOON CHANG: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: He’s an economist there at the University of Cambridge in Britain.

Ratner Calls for Prosecutions, Not Whitewash Commissions

2009-03-15T15:33:00.000-07:00

JUAN GONZALEZ: On Capitol Hill, debate has begun over forming a truth commission to shed light on the Bush administration’s secret polices on detention, interrogation and domestic spying. A hearing on the issue was held Wednesday, two days after the Obama administration released a series of once-secret Bush administration Justice Department memos that authorized President Bush to deploy the military to carry out raids inside the United States. The author of the memos, John Yoo, said Bush could disregard the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, committee chair Patrick Leahy said the newly released memos highlight the need for a truth commission.
SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: Vice President Dick Cheney and others from the Bush administration continue to assert that their tactics, including torture, were appropriate and effective. I don’t think we should let only one side define history on such important questions. It’s important for an independent body to hear these assertions, but also for others, if we’re going to make an objective and independent judgment about what happened and whether it did make our nation safe or less safe.

Just this week, the Department of Justice released more alarming documents from the Office of Legal Counsel demonstrating the last administration’s pinched view of constitutionally protected rights. The memos disregarded the Fourth and First Amendment, justifying warrantless searches, the suppression of free speech, surveillance without warrants, and transferring people to countries known to conduct interrogations that violate human rights. How can anyone suggest such policies do not deserve a thorough, objective review?
I am encouraged that the Obama administration is moving forward. I’m encouraged that a number of the things that—number of the issues we’ve been stonewalled on before are now becoming public. But how did we get to a point where we were holding a legal US resident for more than five years in a military brig without ever bringing charges against him? How did we get to a point where Abu Ghraib happened? How did we get to a point where the United States government tried to make Guantanamo Bay a law-free zone, in order to deny accountability for our actions? How did we get to a point where our premier intelligence agency, the CIA, destroyed nearly a hundred videotapes with evidence of how detainees were being interrogated? How did we get to a point where the White House could say, “If we tell you to do it, even if it breaks the law, it’s alright, because we’re above the law”?

AMY GOODMAN: Go on through the memos that have now been released.

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, I said that the key memo is this one that we’ve been discussing, this one that the military can operate in the UnitedStates. I mean, as I said, that’s really—you know, I used to talk about
Fuehrer’s law when I talked about the President. Everybody thought I’m exaggerating. Fuehrer’s law is what the Fuehrer, Hitler, said; that’s the law. And what these memos do is essentially say that what Bush says is the law. So that’s memo number one.

There’s another memo here on extraordinary rendition. We’ve discussed it here before. That’s where you send people overseas for torture. You nab them or grab them in Pakistan or Afghanistan, send them to another country where it’s more likely than not where they’ll be tortured. And these memos go through why that may—the argument they make is that that’s not against the law, that the Convention Against Torture doesn’t apply and the anti-torture statute, you know, can be avoided by not having the intent to carry out torture. So they essentially authorize sending people—sending people for torture.
Then, two of the memos—and this is pretty interesting—actually concerned Jose Padilla. Jose Padilla, you remember, got off the plane in Chicago, the so-called dirty bomber, never charged with that, and when he’s in the prison, the military comes to the prison door. They knock. Maybe they knock. And they say, “Give us Jose Padilla.” And they grab him. This is in America. This is in the United States. And they take him, and for five years they put him in a military brig. Two of the memos justify and say the President had the power to do that to Jose Padilla, an American citizen living in the United States, that the military could come in—could come in and get him.
Then, a couple of these memos go to what—parts that we haven’t yet seen exposed, which I think will be a broad and vast intelligence effort in the United States, surveillance effort, done by the Department of Defense, under the auspices of these memos, to essentially surveil and look into what all of us are doing in the United States. That hasn’t come out yet completely, but it’s going to be in these memos.
And there’s another memo on the warrantless wiretapping that essentially says the commander-in-chief can carry out warrantless wiretapping as his commander-in-chief power.
And let’s look at what these memos were built on. You know, first you have the question of, are we at war at all? So, first you have this questionable proposition, this questionable proposition that the war against al-Qaeda, so-called war against al-Qaeda, or the global war on terror, is a war at all. Or shouldn’t this be really a legal operation in which people are arrested and charged? So, my position, of course, is this should have been done under law. But so, they first make a questionable assumption about war, and then, once they call it a war, they then say, “Well, the President’s the commander-in-chief, and under war, commander-in-chief power, he can do whatever he wants.” So even if this had been the Second World War, he couldn’t have the power that he’s asserting here.
I have to say that, you know, to see these memos, to put it into that they were actually instrumentalized—this is not just theoretical; this is what was happening here for eight years, essentially a dictatorship—and then to see the response of many of the Democrats here to saying, “Oh, let’s just expose it and turn the page,” I mean, what we’re saying is that’s the way it’s going to happen again, because unless you prosecute people, there is no deterrence for not doing this again. And it’s out there, it’s public. If you’re going to do a commission—and I’m opposed completely to the Leahy type—if you’re going to do one, you can’t bury the issue of prosecution. You have to appoint a special prosecutor and make sure a commission of inquiry works together, because a commission can tear up and finish up prosecutions by giving immunity.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And Michael, the prime author of these memos, John Yoo, what happened to him? He went back for awhile, left the Bush administration, went back to Berkeley, law school, to teach. What’s happened with him since?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, first of all, I think that these memos, these most recent ones, shred any semblance, any scintilla of reputation that John Yoo ever had that he was, you know, doing something in essentially an honest way. I mean, this finishes his reputation. I think the only—the questions we’re faced with are, is he going to be disbarred, and is he going to be prosecuted?
And it’s interesting. You know, two of the memos, which I didn’t mention, were issued by Steven Bradbury, who was head of the office that John Yoo was formerly in, the Office of Legal Counsel. And those memos are the—they were done within a few weeks of the Bush administration leaving office, in fact, one within a week of him leaving office, essentially, in a relatively mealy-mouthed way, saying he cautions against looking at the Yoo memos, that they shouldn’t—the OLC doesn’t really agree with them anymore. But he has a footnote in there saying—to protect the John Yoos of the world—saying, “I think all of those prior memos,” referring to the John Yoo memos, “were done—did not violate professional responsibility,” because it’s recognized that currently there’s an investigation going on of John Yoo, and I think it’s very—and Bradbury, himself—and I think it’s very likely that that’s going to come out and say certainly disciplinary, if not disbarment, for those guys. So I think Yoo is facing that and, as I said, prosecution.
Now, his geographical travels, of course, have been—as you said, he went to Berkeley, which, as he described a couple of days ago at a speech in Orange County, is made up of a bunch of hippies and radicals. That’s his former law school, or it’s still his law school. And there’s been a push to get rid of him at the law school. I think he finally realizes he can’t stay there, so he’s teaching at some—I guess a very conservative law school in Orange County, which is, of course, the heart of law schools and others that are very conservative. So he’s slowly being cornered, slowly being cornered.
One thing I should say about Yoo and even about the Leahy hearings, the one—you know, while I think they’re a bad idea, I think one thing that could come out of them, which Rivkin, the conservative commentator, made a good point on—he says, “Look at, you’re going to expose the stuff on the record.” And then, while he didn’t use the name of the Center for Constitutional Rights, he said, “Then people are going to be able to prosecute these guys in Europe, because the evidence is all out there.” And that’s correct. As more and more information comes out and these memos come out, we’re going to continue to pursue efforts in Europe and pursue prosecution at home. The Center actually currently has a campaign, if people go to our website, to actually tell Leahy, “This is not enough. We want prosecution.”
AMY GOODMAN: Where is Donald Rumsfeld?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, you know, he and Rice, right? They’re—you know, what is California? What is it? Like a magnet for right-wingers? You know, they’re both at the—what is it now?—on the campus of Stanford. What’s it called? The Hoover Institution? Yeah. So they’re there, or they’re going there, Rice and Rumsfeld, and they’re going to be some kind of scholars-in-residence at Stanford at the Hoover Institution. And there’s apparently a protest that was starting either yesterday or today objecting to that. So, you know, maybe we can all get them into a corner of Orange County and actually give them their own country and just put prison walls around it. You know, I’m not sure, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: And are there other countries that are pursuing a possible prosecution against any of these Bush administration officials?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, I think right now what’s happening is they’re going to wait and see what Obama does. If Obama doesn’t do anything in the next few months, I think there’s going to be a huge push in Europe. At the same time, there is stuff going on in Europe, and that’s—when there’s conduct or illegalities on the country itself, they don’t have to wait for the United States. So, you have an investigation, that we’ve talked about here, in Italy of the CIA agents going on who kidnapped an Egyptian cleric of the street. In Spain, you have a—
AMY GOODMAN: Explain that. You have CIA officers being tried in absentia in Italy.
MICHAEL RATNER: That’s correct. There were twenty-four CIA officers involved in a conspiracy to kidnap an Egyptian cleric off the streets of Milan. There’s an independent prosecutor in Italy who has been running a trial now for probably a year or more, in which testimony is being taken on what those CIA agents have done. I think there’s arrest warrants issued for a number of those people throughout Europe. So that’s one relatively successful effort in Italy. And again, if you look at it, they actually kidnapped someone and violated the sovereignty of Italy, so they went after them.
Spain, likewise, has an investigation going on with a court, a judge, because the rendition flights landed in Majorca, they landed in Spain. And so, Spain looked, and its territory has been violated. So that’s going on.
But I think, overall, what we’re seeing here is—I mean, from my perspective, we’re seeing actually more push for prosecutions than I actually expected, that the American public, it seems, is not really giving the sort of Obama line, “Let’s look forward and not backward.” Of course, to me, prosecutions is looking forward, because that’s how you prevent torture in the future. So I think we’re seeing a much greater push. I do think, though, that, as I want to say, that the combination of the memos and Leahy should just really send a message to America that we’ve got to make these guys accountable.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What about the—do you have any hopes for any more independent investigations going on in the House at all? Or in—
MICHAEL RATNER: Oh, I think that’s a good question. You know, I think Conyers has a better take on this than Leahy. Conyers does want a commission or an investigation set up, but his material also talks about accountability and prosecutions. I think if you had a commission here—not a commission; I would never call this a truth commission. I mean, this is not—this is not South Africa. This is not, you know, an emerging democracy from, you know, Chile or something. This is—supposedly was a functioning democracy. In that case, you don’t need, quote, “a truth commission." What you need is a commission of inquiry that’s going to lead to prosecutions. And I think that’s much more what Conyers is looking for. I’m sure he’s in favor of prosecutions. And, you know, there’s a huge effort, a grassroots effort, out there, as petitions—hundreds of thousands of people have signed this stuff.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Maher Arar. The Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, has represented this Canadian citizen, who was sent by the United States, when he was transiting through JFK Airport, took him, held him in detention, then sent him to Syria, where he was tortured, eventually got back to Canada. Tell us what is happening. This is a new administration, the Obama administration. What’s happened with this case? He was awarded $10 million by the Canadian government?
MICHAEL RATNER: He was awarded $10 million, completely cleared. As of the end of the Bush administration, he was still on the terrorist list, prohibiting him getting into this country. And there’s a major lawsuit that the Center has pending. We’re awaiting word from that from the Second Circuit here in New York. It was argued before the full set of judges on whether or not he could sue his torturers or really sue the people who sent him to torture—the FBI agents, Ashcroft and others—and whether that’s a constitutional violation. So that’s what we’re waiting on.
We haven’t heard anything about whether the Obama administration is going to say, “Yes, we can do that.” And, you know, this has been a fairly strong negative of the Obama administration. I know you’ve covered it here, their position on state secrecy in the ACLU case on renditions, where they stood up in court and said, “We are insisting on state secrets. We vetted this with the Obama administration, and we’re insisting on it.” Hopefully that will not happen in the Arar case. But there has not yet been the push against this administration, this current one, to say, really, “Open this up, stop the state secrets stuff, and go for real accountability.”
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. We’re going to break, and we’d like to ask you, Michael, to stay with us, as we go to the segment on Cuba coming up, the more than a thousand artists, musicians, calling for Cuban musicians being able to come into the United States, challenging the blockade. We’ll also be joined by Vicki Huddleston. She was the equivalent of the US ambassador to Cuba, if there was one, the [US Interests Section in Cuba] under George W. Bush, and has taken an interesting stance on this. And we’ll be joined by a Grammy Award-winning musician, Arturo O’Farrill.

Executive Summary of "Sold Out: How Washington and Wall Street Betrayed America"

2009-03-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

SOLD OUT: HOW WALL STREET AND WASHINGTON BETRAYED AMERICA

Executive Summary

Blame Wall Street for the current financial
crisis. Investment banks, hedge funds and
commercial banks made reckless bets using
borrowed money. They created and trafficked
in exotic investment vehicles that
even top Wall Street executives — not to
mention firm directors — did not understand.
They hid risky investments in offbalance-
sheet vehicles or capitalized on their
legal status to cloak investments altogether.
They engaged in unconscionable predatory
lending that offered huge profits for a time,
but led to dire consequences when the loans
proved unpayable. And they created, maintained
and justified a housing bubble, the
bursting of which has thrown the United
States and the world into a deep recession,
resulted in a foreclosure epidemic ripping
apart communities across the country.
But while Wall Street is culpable for
the financial crisis and global recession,
others do share responsibility.2
For the last three decades, financial
regulators, Congress and the executive
branch have steadily eroded the regulatory
system that restrained the financial sector
from acting on its own worst tendencies.
The post-Depression regulatory system
_________________________________________________
2 This report uses the term “Wall Street” in the
colloquial sense of standing for the big players
in the financial sector, not just those located
in New York’s financial district.

aimed to force disclosure of publicly relevant
financial information; established limits
on the use of leverage; drew bright lines
between different kinds of financial activity
and protected regulated commercial banking
from investment bank-style risk taking;
enforced meaningful limits on economic
concentration, especially in the banking
sector; provided meaningful consumer
protections (including restrictions on usurious
interest rates); and contained the financial
sector so that it remained subordinate to
the real economy. This hodge-podge regulatory
system was, of course, highly imperfect,
including because it too often failed to
deliver on its promises.

But it was not its imperfections that led
to the erosion and collapse of that regulatory
system. It was a concerted effort by Wall
Street, steadily gaining momentum until it
reached fever pitch in the late 1990s and
continued right through the first half of
2008. Even now, Wall Street continues to
defend many of its worst practices. Though
it bows to the political reality that new
regulation is coming, it aims to reduce the
scope and importance of that regulation and,
if possible, use the guise of regulation to
further remove public controls over its
operations.

This report has one overriding message:
financial deregulation led directly to the
financial meltdown.

It also has two other, top-tier messages.

SOLD OUT 15

First, the details matter. The report documents
a dozen specific deregulatory steps
(including failures to regulate and failures to
enforce existing regulations) that enabled
Wall Street to crash the financial system.
Second, Wall Street didn’t obtain these
regulatory abeyances based on the force of
its arguments. At every step, critics warned
of the dangers of further deregulation. Their
evidence-based claims could not offset the
political and economic muscle of Wall
Street. The financial sector showered campaign
contributions on politicians from both
parties, invested heavily in a legion of
lobbyists, paid academics and think tanks to
justify their preferred policy positions, and
cultivated a pliant media — especially a
cheerleading business media complex.

Part I of this report presents 12 Deregulatory
Steps to Financial Meltdown. For
each deregulatory move, we aim to explain
the deregulatory action taken (or regulatory
move avoided), its consequence, and the
process by which big financial firms and
their political allies maneuvered to achieve
their deregulatory objective.

In Part II, we present data on financial
firms’ campaign contributions and disclosed
lobbying investments. The aggregate data
are startling: The financial sector invested
more than $5.1 billion in political influence
purchasing over the last decade.
The entire financial sector (finance, insurance,
real estate) drowned political
candidates in campaign contributions over
the past decade, spending more than $1.7
billion in federal elections from 1998-2008.
Primarily reflecting the balance of power
over the decade, about 55 percent went to
Republicans and 45 percent to Democrats.
Democrats took just more than half of the
financial sector’s 2008 election cycle contributions.
The industry spent even more — topping
$3.4 billion — on officially registered
lobbying of federal officials during the same
period.

During the period 1998-2008:
• Accounting firms spent $81 million
on campaign contributions and $122
million on lobbying;
• Commercial banks spent more than
$155 million on campaign contributions,
while investing nearly $383
million in officially registered lobbying;
• Insurance companies donated more
than $220 million and spent more
than $1.1 billion on lobbying;
• Securities firms invested nearly
$513 million in campaign contributions,
and an additional $600 million
in lobbying.

All this money went to hire legions of
lobbyists. The financial sector employed
2,996 lobbyists in 2007. Financial firms
employed an extraordinary number of
former government officials as lobbyists.

16 SOLD OUT

This report finds 142 of the lobbyists employed
by the financial sector from 1998-
2008 were previously high-ranking officials
or employees in the Executive Branch or
Congress.

These are the 12 Deregulatory Steps to Financial Meltdown:

1. Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the Rise of the Culture of Recklessness

The Financial Services Modernization Act
of 1999 formally repealed the Glass-Steagall
Act of 1933 (also known as the Banking Act
of 1933) and related laws, which prohibited
commercial banks from offering investment
banking and insurance services. In a form of
corporate civil disobedience, Citibank and
insurance giant Travelers Group merged in
1998 — a move that was illegal at the time,
but for which they were given a two-year
forbearance — on the assumption that they
would be able to force a change in the
relevant law at a future date. They did. The
1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall helped create
the conditions in which banks invested
monies from checking and savings accounts
into creative financial instruments such as
mortgage-backed securities and credit
default swaps, investment gambles that
rocked the financial markets in 2008.

2. Hiding Liabilities: Off-Balance Sheet Accounting

Holding assets off the balance sheet generally
allows companies to exclude “toxic” or
money-losing assets from financial disclosures
to investors in order to make the
company appear more valuable than it is.
Banks used off-balance sheet operations —
special purpose entities (SPEs), or special
purpose vehicles (SPVs) — to hold securitized
mortgages. Because the securitized
mortgages were held by an off-balance sheet
entity, however, the banks did not have to
hold capital reserves as against the risk of
default — thus leaving them so vulnerable.
Off-balance sheet operations are permitted
by Financial Accounting Standards Board
rules installed at the urging of big banks.
The Securities Industry and Financial Markets
Association and the American Securitization
Forum are among the lobby interests
now blocking efforts to get this rule reformed.

3. The Executive Branch Rejects Financial Derivative Regulation

Financial derivatives are unregulated. By all
accounts this has been a disaster, as Warren
Buffet’s warning that they represent “weapons
of mass financial destruction” has
proven prescient.3 Financial derivatives have
_______________________________________
3 Warren Buffett, Chairman, Berkshire
Hathaway, Report to Shareholders, February
21, 2003. Available at:
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters

SOLD OUT 17

amplified the financial crisis far beyond the
unavoidable troubles connected to the
popping of the housing bubble.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission
(CFTC) has jurisdiction over futures,
options and other derivatives connected
to commodities. During the Clinton
administration, the CFTC sought to exert
regulatory control over financial derivatives.
The agency was quashed by opposition from
Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and, above
all, Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. They challenged
the agency’s jurisdictional authority;
and insisted that CFTC regulation might
imperil existing financial activity that was
already at considerable scale (though nowhere
near present levels). Then-Deputy
Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers told
Congress that CFTC proposals “cas[t] a
shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an
otherwise thriving market.”

4. Congress Blocks Financial Derivative Regulation

The deregulation — or non-regulation — of
financial derivatives was sealed in 2000,
with the Commodities Futures Modernization
Act (CFMA), passage of which was
engineered by then-Senator Phil Gramm, RTexas.
The Commodities Futures Modernization
Act exempts financial derivatives,
including credit default swaps, from regulation
and helped create the current financial
_____________________
2002pdf.pdf>. [sic]

crisis.

5. The SEC’s Voluntary Regulation Regime for Investment Banks

In 1975, the SEC’s trading and markets
division promulgated a rule requiring investment
banks to maintain a debt-to-netcapital
ratio of less than 12 to 1. It forbid
trading in securities if the ratio reached or
exceeded 12 to 1, so most companies maintained
a ratio far below it. In 2004, however,
the SEC succumbed to a push from the big
investment banks — led by Goldman Sachs,
and its then-chair, Henry Paulson — and
authorized investment banks to develop their
own net capital requirements in accordance
with standards published by the Basel
Committee on Banking Supervision. This
essentially involved complicated mathematical
formulas that imposed no real limits,
and was voluntarily administered. With this
new freedom, investment banks pushed
borrowing ratios to as high as 40 to 1, as in
the case of Merrill Lynch. This superleverage
not only made the investment
banks more vulnerable when the housing
bubble popped, it enabled the banks to
create a more tangled mess of derivative
investments — so that their individual
failures, or the potential of failure, became
systemic crises. Former SEC Chair Chris
Cox has acknowledged that the voluntary
regulation was a complete failure.

18 SOLD OUT

6. Bank Self-Regulation Goes Global: Preparing to Repeat the Meltdown?

In 1988, global bank regulators adopted a set
of rules known as Basel I, to impose a
minimum global standard of capital adequacy
for banks. Complicated financial
maneuvering made it hard to determine
compliance, however, which led to negotiations
over a new set of regulations. Basel II,
heavily influenced by the banks themselves,
establishes varying capital reserve requirements,
based on subjective factors of agency
ratings and the banks’ own internal riskassessment
models. The SEC experience
with Basel II principles illustrates their fatal
flaws. Commercial banks in the United
States are supposed to be compliant with
aspects of Basel II as of April 2008, but
complications and intra-industry disputes
have slowed implementation.

7. Failure to Prevent Predatory Lending

Even in a deregulated environment, the
banking regulators retained authority to
crack down on predatory lending abuses.
Such enforcement activity would have
protected homeowners, and lessened though
not prevented the current financial crisis.
But the regulators sat on their hands. The
Federal Reserve took three formal actions
against subprime lenders from 2002 to 2007.
The Office of Comptroller of the Currency,
which has authority over almost 1,800
banks, took three consumer-protection
enforcement actions from 2004 to 2006.

8. Federal Preemption of State Consumer Protection Laws

When the states sought to fill the vacuum
created by federal nonenforcement of consumer
protection laws against predatory
lenders, the feds jumped to stop them. “In
2003,” as Eliot Spitzer recounted, “during
the height of the predatory lending crisis, the
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
invoked a clause from the 1863 National
Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting
all state predatory lending laws, thereby
rendering them inoperative. The OCC also
promulgated new rules that prevented states
from enforcing any of their own consumer
protection laws against national banks.”

9. Escaping Accountability: Assignee Liability

Under existing federal law, with only limited
exceptions, only the original mortgage
lender is liable for any predatory and illegal
features of a mortgage — even if the mortgage
is transferred to another party. This
arrangement effectively immunized acquirers
of the mortgage (“assignees”) for any
problems with the initial loan, and relieved
them of any duty to investigate the terms of
the loan. Wall Street interests could purchase,
bundle and securitize subprime loans
— including many with pernicious, predatory
terms — without fear of liability for

SOLD OUT 19

illegal loan terms. The arrangement left
victimized borrowers with no cause of
action against any but the original lender,
and typically with no defenses against being
foreclosed upon. Representative Bob Ney,
R-Ohio — a close friend of Wall Street who
subsequently went to prison in connection
with the Abramoff scandal — was the
leading opponent of a fair assignee liability
regime.

10. Fannie and Freddie Enter the Subprime Market

At the peak of the housing boom, Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac were dominant purchasers
in the subprime secondary market.
The Government-Sponsored Enterprises
were followers, not leaders, but they did end
up taking on substantial subprime assets —
at least $57 billion. The purchase of subprime
assets was a break from prior practice,
justified by theories of expanded access to
homeownership for low-income families and
rationalized by mathematical models allegedly
able to identify and assess risk to newer
levels of precision. In fact, the motivation
was the for-profit nature of the institutions
and their particular executive incentive
schemes. Massive lobbying — including
especially but not only of Democratic
friends of the institutions — enabled them to
divert from their traditional exclusive focus
on prime loans.

Fannie and Freddie are not responsible
for the financial crisis. They are responsible
for their own demise, and the resultant
massive taxpayer liability.

11. Merger Mania

The effective abandonment of antitrust and
related regulatory principles over the last
two decades has enabled a remarkable
concentration in the banking sector, even in
advance of recent moves to combine firms
as a means to preserve the functioning of the
financial system. The megabanks achieved
too-big-to-fail status. While this should have
meant they be treated as public utilities
requiring heightened regulation and risk
control, other deregulatory maneuvers
(including repeal of Glass-Steagall) enabled
these gigantic institutions to benefit from
explicit and implicit federal guarantees, even
as they pursued reckless high-risk investments.

12. Rampant Conflicts of Interest: Credit Ratings Firms’ Failure

Credit ratings are a key link in the financial
crisis story. With Wall Street combining
mortgage loans into pools of securitized
assets and then slicing them up into
tranches, the resultant financial instruments
were attractive to many buyers because they
promised high returns. But pension funds
and other investors could only enter the
game if the securities were highly rated.
The credit rating firms enabled these

20 SOLD OUT

investors to enter the game, by attaching
high ratings to securities that actually were
high risk — as subsequent events have
revealed. The credit ratings firms have a bias
to offering favorable ratings to new instruments
because of their complex relationships
with issuers, and their desire to maintain
and obtain other business dealings with
issuers.

This institutional failure and conflict of
interest might and should have been forestalled
by the SEC, but the Credit Rating but the Credit Rating
Agencies Reform Act of 2006 gave the SEC
insufficient oversight authority. In fact, the
SEC must give an approval rating to credit
ratings agencies if they are adhering to their
own standards — even if the SEC knows
those standards to be flawed.

Wall Street is presently humbled, but not
prostrate. Despite siphoning trillions of
dollars from the public purse, Wall Street
executives continue to warn about the perils
of restricting “financial innovation” — even
though it was these very innovations that led
to the crisis. And they are scheming to use
the coming Congressional focus on financial
regulation to centralize authority with industry-
friendly agencies.

If we are to see the meaningful regulation
we need, Congress must adopt the view
that Wall Street has no legitimate seat at the
table. With Wall Street having destroyed the
system that enriched its high flyers, and
plunged the global economy into deep
recession, it’s time for Congress to tell Wall
Street that its political investments have also
gone bad. This time, legislating must be to
control Wall Street, not further Wall Street’s
control.

This report’s conclusion offers guiding
principles for a new financial regulatory
architecture.

Robert Weissman, Director of Essential Action and editor of the Multinational Monitor. He is author of the new report “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America.” [www.wallstreetwatch.org]

AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration officials appeared before Congress Tuesday seeking to reassure lawmakers about the economy. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, testified before separate House committees that the President’s massive spending bill would benefit working Americans. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke testified before the Senate Budget Committee about the potential impacts of stimulus.
While the Obama administration is looking to turn around the economy with its stimulus plan and budget proposal, what about the issue of financial regulation, what some people point to as the fundamental cause of the crisis? A new report points to twelve deregulatory steps that led to the financial meltdown. It also does an analysis of the amount of money Wall Street poured into Washington in campaign contributions and lobbying over the last decade. Their answer? A staggering $5.1 billion over the past decade.
Rob Weissman is the author of the report. It’s called “Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America.” He is director of Essential Action, editor of the Multinational Monitor, joining us from Washington, D.C.
Good morning, Rob Weissman. Talk about what you think were the steps that brought us here.
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, we saw over the last decade and really the last three decades, with both parties in power in Congress and the executive branch, this long series of deregulatory moves. And as you go step-by-step through them, you see that those are the things that really paved the way for the current financial collapse.
Perhaps the signature move was the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prevented co-ownership of commercial banks and securities firms, investment banks. That was precipitated by and directly authorized the creation of Citigroup, which is now sucking so much public taxpayer money and has really been at the cutting edge of driving the financial crisis we’re now in.
You can go forward another year and see that Congress, with the Clinton administration authorization, prohibited the executive branch agencies from regulating financial derivatives, the instruments that no one can really understand or get a handle on but which have multiplied the problem from the housing crash many-fold over. So we now have $600 trillion in financial derivatives being traded around the world, with no one having a handle on what they are, who owes whom, and all of this requiring us to pour tens of billions of more dollars more every day, it seems, into AIG.
You can step forward and look at the failure to enforce rules against predatory lending, beginning with the Clinton administration, but really accelerating in a really terrifying way with the Bush administration, so that there were about three actions taken by federal regulators in the peak period of predatory lending—three—against some of the commercial lenders and mortgage brokers who were undertaking some of the most abusive predatory lending activities. And on and on it goes.
And there was, of course, over the last three decades a real surge in deregulatory ideology. And perhaps the people who were putting this stuff forward believed in it. But it also makes sense to think that, maybe a little bit, they were influenced by the staggering amounts of money that the financial sector was pouring into Washington, as you said, more than $5 billion in campaign contributions and lobbying money. And, you know, they got a good return on investment, and it was good for them while it lasted. It’s turned out to be quite a disaster for them but, more importantly, for the rest of the country and the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Rob Weissman, I want to keep going through these steps and then talk about the money that Wall Street’s poured into Washington. The SEC’s voluntary regulation regime for investment banks?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Yeah, there have been, for a couple of decades, a rule in place that required the big investment banks to hold onto a certain level of capital, so they couldn’t be—they couldn’t rely on too much borrowed money if they engaged in their speculative activity. In 2004, the SEC repealed that rule at the request of a consortium of the leading investment banks, led at the time by Goldman Sachs and Henry Paulson, soon-to-then-be the Treasury Secretary. And what that rule—what the new rule said was, well, let’s let the investment banks set the standards on their own for how much borrowed money they can use, based on their own internal risk assessment models, which no one could understand and turned out not to do a very good job. As a result, they were much more leveraged, that is to say, they used much more borrowed money, so they could gamble at much higher levels, and they created a much bigger house of cards, which we saw topple starting in 2007.
AMY GOODMAN: Glass-Steagall?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: Glass-Steagall?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Glass-Steagall was this Depression-era law from 1933, adopted because of the crisis—in response to the Great Depression and the previous bubble through the 1920s. And it said commercial banks and investment banks, and then later commercial banks and other financial service entities, ought to just be separate entities. Commercial banks have too important a role. They are husbanding depositor money, and they ought not to be engaged in speculative activity. They shouldn’t be using the depositor money for high-risk gambles that could endanger the depositors and the well-being of the financial system.
Under the guise of financial modernization, there was a decade-long effort by the investment banks and the big commercial banks to repeal that law. In 1998, Citibank and Travelers Group, the insurance company, announced that they were going to merge. That was a merger that was illegal under existing law, but they got a two-year exemption under a regulatory loophole. They then proceeded to force the repeal of the law that had prohibited their merger, and then the merger was subsequently consummated. Robert Rubin, who had been the Treasury Secretary, at the time was negotiating a new deal with Citigroup and then went on to be an executive with the now-merged Citigroup, was the central player making sure the Glass-Steagall repeal took place, that Citigroup moved forward, and with all the disastrous effects we are now familiar with.
AMY GOODMAN: Close adviser, of course, to President Obama. And what about Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner in that?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, Geithner didn’t have such a central role, but Summers was really involved in the Clinton administration in a lot of these key decisions. Geithner was in the Clinton administration, more focused on international issues. But Summers, for example, was a very vociferous opponent of regulating financial derivatives. There was an effort within the Clinton administration’s executive branch to impose some really modest standards on financial derivative regulations—on financial derivatives, which at the time were beginning to explode but still weren’t at the level that we’re now familiar with.
Summers, Rubin and Greenspan banded together with Republicans in Congress, led by Phil Gramm, to prevent the efforts within the executive branch to regulate derivatives, and then in 2000, they passed a law—Congress passed a law, which Clinton signed into law, prohibiting the federal government from regulating financial derivatives at all, with the result that not only are they not regulated, not only are they not required to register to show that they serve some social purpose before they’re allowed onto the market, but no one has a sense of who owes what to whom.
In the course of—we’re bailing out AIG, because they have engaged in so many of these—hundreds of billions of dollars worth of these financial derivative arrangements. It’s clear now that AIG itself did not know who they owed—who they were going to owe, who they had entered into all these contracts for. They were engaged in such a wild speculative frenzy that they’d cut a deal with anybody. It turns out that the executives at AIG literally thought they would never have to pay out any money on these whatsoever. So they thought they were being paid to do nothing. Money for nothing, we’ve called it. And that turned out to be wrong. Unfortunately, the money that’s coming is not just coming from the AIG shareholders, but now, to the tune of almost $200 billion, from the US taxpayer.
AMY GOODMAN: I brought up Glass-Steagall again, because, well, I think it was seventy years ago—it was on this date that—or seventy-five years ago—that FDR was inaugurated and gave his “nothing to fear but fear itself " address. Rob Weissman, your current piece that talks about the amount of money that Wall Street poured into Washington—who did it? Over how many years? This number, $5.1 billion.
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, what we did is look at the entire financial sector—so it’s the commercial banks, the investment banks, the insurance companies, the real-estate companies, the accounting firms, all of whom are heavily intermingled now, by the way—looked at their campaign contributions over the last decade. That total is more than $1.7 billion. They spent about twice that much, $3.4 billion, on lobbying, with the results that we’re talking about. So, more than $5 billion, and that is a way understatement on what they spent. It doesn’t include the money they’ve poured into state-level activities. It’s a narrowly defined definition of lobbying, only people who are officially registered lobbyists.
We saw that they had 3,000 separate people working as lobbyists for them in 2007. We looked at twenty different top firms in the financial sector. We found 144 who formerly had high-level positions in the US government. I mean, it’s epitomized by people like Rubin and Paulson, who came from Goldman Sachs, went into government—in Rubin’s case, he went back into the private sector—and who were driving policy on behalf of Wall Street and the big financial sector to the massive detriment of the American public and, as we now know, really the entire world.
AMY GOODMAN: What are the recommendations that you make, Rob Weissman?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, the first thing is that all these deregulatory moves ought to be repealed. But beyond that, we think it’s time for a big picture look at this stuff, and we’re worried that, although Wall Street is obviously on its heels right now, they are not—they are not absent from Washington. This lobbying activity is ongoing, including on a variety of small things being debated in Congress today. But in the big picture, we think there has to—we can’t just get mired down in some of these details.
The financial sector itself ought to be much smaller. In the preceding three or four years, the financial sector was taking about a third of all corporate profits in the United States. It was way too big relative to the rest of the economy. It shouldn’t be more than ten percent. So it should be shrunk down.
There is a range of activities that ought to be prohibited altogether. A lot of these exotic financial derivatives, which serve no social purpose, should be just banned. Any new instruments that are put on the market ought to be required to get pre-approval from government regulators, just the way a new pharmaceutical product has to get pre-approval, be shown to be safe and serve some social benefit before it’s allowed on the market.
We ought to erect again regulatory walls and barriers that prohibit institutions from doing different kinds of things. Banks ought not to be engaged in these exotic derivatives. They should not be putting taxpayer-insured money at risk in this kind of stuff. Consumers need to be directly empowered to organize themselves, so that they are a counterbalance to the influence of the commercial financial sector.
And I think we ought to have a financial transactions tax, a speculation tax, so we slow down the level of speculative activity. That kind of tax would be highly progressive, because it’s only rich people who are engaged in mass transactions on Wall Street. It would bring in a lot of money, have major social benefits.
And finally, I think if you look back over what happened in the last four or five years or the last decade, it’s clear that a huge amount of money was made on Wall Street, but the firms themselves are now in complete crisis. They’re needing the taxpayer money. Some of them are going bankrupt. They’re being merged out of existence. So the companies themselves destroyed themselves.
Why did they do that? What were the incentives that led them to take such crazy risks that they actually destroyed themselves? And it’s very hard to avoid looking at the way individual people were compensated. They got massive bonuses, sometimes five, ten, twenty times their regular compensation level, based on what they did in the previous year. So I think we have to have compensation caps, for sure, on executives and others. But even more importantly, the incentive mechanisms can’t be that they get paid on how they did that year, when they can manipulate it or they can benefit from a bubble. It has to be, any compensation incentives that are going to be in the form of bonuses have to be tracked to a very long-term performance by these companies.
AMY GOODMAN: Rob Weissman, President Obama got millions from the finance industry, one of his largest contributors. Do you see this regulation happening? We only have about thirty seconds. Where do you see the pressure come from?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, it’s up for grabs. His advisers, actually, of course, are very terrible on this. But we’ll see. They’re going to have to do something that’s very serious and to restrain the financial sector if they hope to bring the economy out of the problems it’s in. There were some good pieces in the budget. The financial sector is fighting them like crazy right now. For example, they want to eliminate the ability of companies to manipulate their taxes by relying on offshore subsidiaries. The insurance companies are going berserk and lobbying on Capitol Hill to try to stop that. The Obama administration, in this case, is trying to do the right thing.
AMY GOODMAN: Are the companies that are getting bailed out using some of that money to lobby in Washington right now or make campaign contributions?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Well, they’re not using that money, but what’s the difference? They’re using some other money. So they’re still very engaged. There is an effort, for example, right now to—
AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.
ROBERT WEISSMAN: —crack down on predatory lending. They are trying very hard to get that language eliminated from the appropriations bill that just passed.
AMY GOODMAN: Rob Weissman, thanks very much for being with us. His report is called "Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America.”

There They Go Again: Glenn Beck is to News what Boy Bands are to Music

2009-03-15T13:28:00.000-07:00

UPDATED BELOW

Shep Smith and the Manufacture of a New Propaganda Star, Glenn Beck
(Via Think Progress)

Tonight [March 13, 2009], Glenn Beck is hosting a life [sic] special to assure his conservative followers, “You are not alone.” While purporting to promote the special, Fox’s Shep Smith repeatedly mocked Beck and the program, admitting that although he watches Beck’s show, he doesn’t listen to it. Smith also pointed to a giant satellite truck parked outside and wondered if it was for Beck’s “ego.” Chris Wallace told Smith he must be jealous:

SMITH: Do you even understand this Glenn Beck Friday? Because I really don’t.

WALLACE: Well, I do, and what pains me — and you know, Shep, how highly I respect you — is you seem upset by Glenn Beck Friday.

SMITH: Upset?!

WALLACE: I mean, Glenn is a meteor here at Fox News–

SMITH: He is the greatest star of all time!

WALLACE: And you should be happy for his success–

SMITH: I am here to worship him.

WALLACE: –and you seem to be begrudging — you’re begrudging him his success.

“We are here to celebrate, worship, and adore,” Smith told Wallace. Watch a compilation of Smith’s mockery:

Smith jokingly declared that Beck is “bigger than O’Reilly.” Wallace encouraged Smith to be more fawning of Beck: “I for one am on the Glenn Beck bandwagon and I advise you to join it as well.” [Emphasis added here.]

UPDATE

Via HuffPo's Jason Linkins

Thing is, I like the idea of being those people, who crowded the streets and sang songs and clapped for firemen and broadly demonstrated that there was no reason to ever suspect we would fall to terrorists, because of our simple and unspoken bravery. And then the President basically said that we should all go shopping or take vacations, and then our patriotic warmth got warped into supporting a bunch of ancillary ambitions and fantastic attacks on our liberties in the name of "if you're not with us you're against us." And now, Beck wants to reclaim that moment for his own brand of charlatanism? No, no. I am with Shepard Smith, here.

"I feel like a televangelist," enthuses Beck. How dare you sully the good name of televangelists!

Matthew Alexander and Scott Horton Discuss the Terrorist-Recruiting Effects of Our Use of Torture

2009-03-15T13:13:00.000-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to some larger issues, this very important point that you make that you believe that more than 3,000 US soldiers were killed in Iraq—I mean, this is a huge number—because of torture, because of US practices of torture. Explain what you mean.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: Well, you know, when I was in Iraq, we routinely handled foreign fighters, who we would capture. Many of—several of them had been scheduled to be suicide bombers, and we had captured them before they carried out their missions.
AMY GOODMAN: Coming from where?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: They came from all over the area. They came from Yemen. They came from northern Africa. They came from Saudi. All over the place. And the number one reason these foreign fighters gave for coming to Iraq was routinely because of Abu Ghraib, because of Guantanamo Bay, because of torture practices.
In their eyes, they see us as not living up to the ideals that we have prescribed to. You know, we say that we represent freedom, liberty and justice. But when we torture people, we’re not living up to those ideals. And it’s a huge incentive for them to join al-Qaeda.
You also have to kind of put this in the context of Arab culture and Muslim culture and how important shame, the role of shame in that culture. And when we torture people, we bring a tremendous amount of shame on them. And so, it is a huge motivator for these people to join al-Qaeda and come to Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the pressure, I guess you could say the peer pressure, for you to torture and how you decided to follow the approach you did.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: Yeah, you know, torture, it’s so narrowly or broadly defined depending on who you’re talking to these days. I would say torture, to me, is just unethical behavior. And you can do things that are legal, within the rules, that are unethical. And so, I just know, me, by my gut feeling, based on the principles that I was raised on, you know, that my parents gave to me, that there’s things I’ll never do, because I know it feels wrong and it is wrong. And so, you know, others felt comfortable either pushing all the way up to the limits and doing things that were unethical, but were legal, or breaking the rules. I felt that was not something I was ever going to do and I wasn’t going to allow my team to do.
I think what’s more important at this point is we know that torture has cost us American lives. We know that it’s ineffective. And we know that it’s wrong, and it’s damaged our image. I think, you know, for me as a military officer, my job isn’t to identify broken wheels, it’s to fix them. And so, the approach that I took and that I talk about in the book is, how do we move forward? You know, we’re given this choice of either terrorist attacks or torture. But maybe there’s a third way. Maybe there’s a better way to do interrogations that has nothing to do with torture. And in the book, I describe the process of coming up with these new ways and how my team, together, we were able to come up with the new methods.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, but we’re going to come back to this discussion and also talk with Scott Horton and who should be held responsible for the torture practices the government has been involved with, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and beyond. Matthew Alexander is our guest. It’s not his name, but it’s the name he’s chosen. It is the name on his book, How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue with Matthew Alexander, who’s written the book How to Break a Terrorist. We’re also joined by Scott Horton, an attorney who specializes in international law and human rights. He’s written extensively about prisoner abuse in Iraq. He’s the legal affairs contributor to Harper’s magazine and writes the blog “No Comment.”
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Scott Horton. As you listened to Matthew Alexander lay out his story, it’s certainly a different approach than we’ve gotten out of many of the interrogations at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and other places.
SCOTT HORTON: Well, this is obviously a very important book and an important account for many reasons. I think, one, it really demonstrates the integrity and the effectiveness of traditional American military values and techniques. It shows that they work, and they harvest results. The pinpointing of Zarqawi was certainly one of the two or three most important intelligence breakthroughs in the course of this entire war effort. So that’s, I think, a very, very striking point.
But second, our discussion about torture and the introduction of torture, to date, has really focused on events that happened at Abu Ghraib, things that happened at Guantanamo, a prominent memorandum signed by the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, early on. But I understood instantly, when I heard his account about the pushback he got from the Department of Defense, why. And that’s because his account breaks extremely important new ground. It shows us that there is an entire another channel in which torture developed, and that’s inside of the Special Operations Command.
And by the information I’ve collected, which I think this account confirms, that goes back to the beginning of the conflict, 2002. Special Operations Command set up, operated essentially as a personal fiefdom by Dr. Stephen Cambone, who was the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. And Dr. Cambone was authorizing taking the gloves off, using brutal methods, using torture. And that happened way before the Justice Department got involved, memoranda were written, everything else.
Now, why is that significant? This timeline is very, very important, because it shows that the use of torture and torture techniques comes much earlier than the crafting of the torture memoranda and the Justice Department, the approval process. And that then shows, in turn, that these memoranda were written after the fact in an effort to protect people who had already engaged and implemented this policy. So this is a bombshell, in fact.
AMY GOODMAN: Matthew Alexander, did you see memoranda? Did you see memos posted about what you could do?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: Yes. I mean, there was some confusion amongst all interrogators, at some point, about what was allowed and not allowed, because at one point, what was allowed in Guantanamo Bay was not allowed in Iraq. And I had interrogators on my team who had come from Guantanamo Bay, and things that they were allowed or not allowed to do there were allowed or not allowed in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: For example, dogs.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: Dogs were not allowed. I know they were allowed at one point at Guantanamo Bay. But by the time I arrived in Iraq in early 2006, dogs were definitely outlawed.
But let me give you another example. Good cop, bad cop, which is—you know, it’s a technique that we use all the time in the criminal investigative world. It’s an effective techniques. But it wasn’t allowed in Iraq for a long time, although it was allowed as an enhanced interrogation technique in Guantanamo Bay. So this—
AMY GOODMAN: Why wasn’t it allowed in Iraq? Because they didn’t want the good cop?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: You know, I’ve never gotten a good explanation about why we weren’t allowed to use good cop, bad cop. You know, if it’s torture, then why do we use it in criminal interrogations? It’s not. And I think it more has to do with the fact that there wasn’t a uniform policy from the beginning for all interrogators that applied across all theaters, which there should have been.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Horton, your latest piece in Harper’s magazine, “Justice After Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration”—you think President Bush on down should be prosecuted?
SCOTT HORTON: Well, I think we have to start with a proper investigation before we reach conclusions about who should be prosecuted and for what crimes. I think there’s simply no question but that serious criminal conduct occurred. And, in fact, we’ve had prosecutions already. I mean, we can count seventeen NCOs, so it’s grunts at the bottom of the military food chain who have been prosecuted for this abuse. There has been no accountability, however, for those who made policy. And I think as a matter of proper administration of criminal justice, it’s the policymakers who should most be held to account.
So the first step is to establish all the facts and establish them carefully and calmly. Who took what decisions when? Security classifications had been wielded very effectively to obscure much of what went on. I think, you know, Matthew’s statements make that clear, and the redactions in his book make that clear. In particular, we know these things were going on inside the Special Operations Command, and security classifications were used to keep that entire tale secret, even secret from congressional oversight committees that attempted to probe into it. So the answer here, I think, is for President-elect Obama to appoint a presidential commission of inquiry, like the Rockefeller Commission, or a hybrid presidential—
AMY GOODMAN: What’s the Rockefeller Commission?
SCOTT HORTON: The Rockefeller Commission was appointed to look into criminal conduct within the CIA in 1975, the same things that the Church Committee was looking into. Or something like the 9/11 Commission, which is a hybrid congressional-presidential commission, and fill it with eminent persons, give it a clear mandate, and let them get to the bottom of the facts. When the facts are established—and that’s a process that I’m convinced would take a couple of years—then we can deal with the question of prosecutions.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Horton, has any US official ever been prosecuted for torture?
SCOTT HORTON: We’ve had military officers who have been prosecuted for torture twice: in 1903 and in 1968. Both of those cases involved waterboarding. And we had camp commanders during the Korean conflict who were court-martialed and punished for abuse of detainees. So the answer is yes, but higher-level policymakers, no. But senior military officials, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, Obama officials, advisers to Obama, have said that he is unlikely to go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations. And then there’s the question of President Bush, whether he would issue any kind of pre-emptive pardons.
SCOTT HORTON: Well, that’s an AP report, and the AP report relies on two sources, and I believe one of those sources is John O. Brennan, who was the chief of staff to Mr. Tenet, who would of course be a target of such an investigation, so it’s easy to understand why he would say Obama won’t do it. I’m told—
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, he was head—he is head of the transition team on intelligence, but has taken himself out of the running.
SCOTT HORTON: I think that’s correct. And I’m told by the Obama transition team that no decision has been taken on this issue, nor is there any particular rush or need to take a decision before January 20th. In fact, I think there’s an important piece they’re waiting to see play out, and that is whether President Bush is going to issue a pre-emptive class-based pardon. And I think there’s a lot of speculation he’ll do it.
AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean?
SCOTT HORTON: The President, before he leaves office, may very well—and if he does it, I think it will be on his last day, on the way out—issue a pardon to all those who were involved in the formation and implementation of his enhanced interrogation program, what he refers to affectionately as “my program.”
AMY GOODMAN: Now, this is from Reuters. It says that ex-generals will be going to Washington to urge Obama to take action on the torture issue. They’re saying Barack Obama should act, from the moment of his inauguration, to restore US image, battered by allegations of torturing terrorism suspects. They’re planning to press their case with the President-elect’s transition team in Washington, about a dozen retired generals and admirals expected to meet with his team saying that they’re going to offer a list of anti-torture principles, including some that could be implemented immediately. Matthew Alexander, do you know about this?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: I’ve heard of this. And there’s not just retired generals; there’s people within the military who have stood up. There’s people who stood up with me in Iraq and said no to torture and that they wouldn’t do or participate in certain things. Colonel Steve Kleinman, who is probably the most senior officer we have in the military who has been trained as an interrogator, has spoken before Congress several times. And his story is also told in Jane Mayer’s book, The Dark Side, about how he was sent to Iraq to teach interrogators how to use SERE techniques.
AMY GOODMAN: Psychologist—isn’t Kleinman a psychologist?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: SERE techniques are the evasion and resistance techniques that we teach our own troops how to resist against interrogations. And he was sent to Iraq and told to teach interrogators how to use these as torture weapons, and he refused to do so. So the change, I think, has come from people within the military who have stood up and said, “No, this is against American principles.”
AMY GOODMAN: Were you subjected to SERE techniques? I mean, did you go through that training?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: I did go through SERE training. And I remember this moment I’ll never forget at the end of SERE training.
AMY GOODMAN: Where were you?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: I was in Spokane, Washington. It was very cold. It was the first week of February, subzero temperatures. And it’s very challenging training. You know, it’s a prisoner of war environment. And at the end of the training, I remember, we stood in formation, and we were very exhausted, and they played the national anthem. And afterwards, an instructor gave a speech, and he told us about how some American prisoners of war in Korea had been tortured to death and refused to give up information. And I remember taking great pride in the fact that our country did not torture, that we did not resort to such practices. And that’s why I felt such an obligation to write this book and to get the word out that we’ve got to return to that. We’ve got to return to a place where we do not conduct torture in any organization within our government.
AMY GOODMAN: The issue of torture has raged in the association of psychologists, the American Psychological Association, psychologist participation. Did you work with psychologists?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: We had psychologists. They did not advise on the tactics or techniques that we should be using for interrogation. They actually were there for the safety of the detainees, to ensure that if someone—one of the detainees started to experience problems mentally, that we could identify that and get them the appropriate help.
AMY GOODMAN: Who do you believe should be held accountable?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: I can’t make judgments about accountability. I mean, I’m a soldier, and ultimately my job is to fix and make better our processes that help us defend our nation. You know, the accountability finger for torture, I think, you know, it is a leadership issue. I think we set examples from the top down, and our troops follow those. But at the same time, I think all the troops do have training to know what’s right and wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think prosecution of those who crossed the line would help people understand what’s right and wrong?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: I would say that if it was an interrogator who had crossed the line, they certainly would be prosecuted.
AMY GOODMAN: If it was an official?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: If they crossed the line and broke the law, yes, I think they should be held accountable.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that should go right on up to President Bush?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER: I think it should go to anybody who breaks the law. I don’t think the law—I think the history of the United States has proven, you know, that we impeach and try anybody who breaks the law. It’s not really for me to decide who has broken the law or who hasn’t. What I know is that we’ve got to change the system to do a better job of interrogating.

Michael Ratner and Scott Horton Discuss Investigating Bush Admin Crimes on Democracy Now!

2009-03-15T12:41:00.000-07:00

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another debate that you’ve been having. You just had a debate on this at New York University. Scott, you wrote the cover story of Harper’s called “Justice After Bush,” and this involves whether Bush administration should be tried, something clearly Obama is shying away from, saying move forward, don’t look back. Make your case, Scott Horton.
SCOTT HORTON: Well, I think the parameters of this debate have changed quite a bit, and I think Eric Holder recognizes that. You know, since I wrote my article, we saw both Bush and Cheney go on television and acknowledge point blank their involvement in decisions to torture, and they put forward—both of them put forward a reliance on counsel defense. “We talked to the lawyers, and the lawyers told us it was OK.”
And then we saw Susan J. Crawford, who was the senior most Bush administration official responsible for dealing with the Guantanamo tribunals, state that she, reviewing the case of al-Kahtani, concluded that he had in fact been tortured, and she laid out, in an interview with Bob Woodward, in some detail her conclusion. Now, what’s significant about that is that the entire program for interrogating al-Kahtani went to the National Security Council, was reviewed and was approved, including the approval of Cheney and Bush. So they’re both linked to a case that their own principal agent considers to have been torture.
This creates something that just can’t be swept under the carpet in the criminal justice system. In fact, under the Convention Against Torture, Articles 4 and 5, the US now has a clear obligation to commence a criminal investigation into what happened and act on it. And the Obama administration hasn’t yet done that. I think it’s going to have to look reality in the face, and it’s going to have to reach some hard decisions.
AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner?
MICHAEL RATNER: Yeah, I think Scott’s last point is very crucial here.

You now have Cheney admitting that he was one of the architects of waterboarding, Holder saying it’s a violation of the torture statute—of the anti-torture statute, and the torture convention saying there’s an absolute obligation to begin a criminal investigation. As we sit here, the Obama administration is in violation of the Convention Against Torture if it doesn’t commence an investigation of Cheney, of Rumsfeld and the others. So that’s point one.
To me, the best argument, the best argument as to why you need criminal prosecutions, is the picture you showed on this show of Obama signing the executive orders prohibiting torture, because I look at that picture, and I love that picture, but I think of the next president who comes along who’s going to sign executive orders going the other way. Our fundamental rights, the right against torture—to be free from torture, should not be dependant [sic] on the length of the President’s arm. The only real deterrent is prosecution.
And I have to say that it has not made me pleased that over this period of the last few months a number of groups are saying, “Well, for political efficacy, we can’t get prosecutions. Let’s go for something else, truth commissions or whatever.” What we need now is a really strong statement from people like Scott and others that say, “We need to open criminal investigations.”
AMY GOODMAN: Truth and reconciliation commissions, that is what you called for. Are you changing your view now?
SCOTT HORTON: No, I don’t think it’s a question of either/or.

I think that both of these things are necessary, in fact. And the simple fact is that a prosecutor assembling a case to go after Bush administration officials is not focused on informing the public about what happened, and that’s an essential function here. We need to have it. We need to know the truth about the last seven years, exactly what was done and on whose authority. And I think a blue-ribbon panel is the best way to go about that. But I think, in fact, in the end of the day, when all those facts come out, that’s only going to reinforce the prosecutor’s hand by building public support for prosecutions.
AMY GOODMAN: Kucinich, who has called certainly for impeachment—and there is also this issue even of impeachment afterwards, that it has some relevance—is calling for a truth and reconciliation commission.
MICHAEL RATNER: I don’t—first of all, truth and reconciliation, we ought to get rid of that term. We ought to call it a commission of inquiry or something like that. This is not Latin America. This is not South Africa. We have a democracy. We can go forward with something that’s much more robust than that. But I do think you can do them together, but you have to have a real commitment, a real commitment to prosecution. You can have “Let’s get the facts out on the record,” but you—
AMY GOODMAN: So, what would it look like? What would the prosecution look like? You clearly have Obama wanting—saying he wants to move forward. There are all these issues. He wants bipartisanship. He’s always pushing for that. How do you move forward with a prosecution? Who does it?
MICHAEL RATNER: You know, as much as I welcome, obviously—and my office does, who represents Guantanamo detainees—the efforts of the Obama administration to change a lot of the stuff that we’ve been litigating, I do find it difficult to hear him say we have to look forward and not backward, because, to me, prosecutions look forward. They tell you why we are not going to have torture in the future. And so, they are actually looking forward. So I find that to be an odd statement.
But how would they look like? Scott and I have discussed this. We think a special prosecutor has to be appointed, who can begin to open investigations, criminal investigations of what I would call the torture team, broadly, but it’s really members of the War Counsel, who were the lawyers who actually fabricated or made these memos, fit them around a policy so torture could be carried out. And it’s members of the Principals Committee; it’s Cheney, it’s Bush, it’s Rumsfeld, it’s Tenet. Those are the key people you’d focus on. Scott may have some additions. But you could do it with a special prosecutor here.
AMY GOODMAN: Truth commission, the problem with it is if people just see it as gathering information—why not do it simultaneously? But part of it often, in getting at the truth, is granting immunity for people to tell the truth about what they did, so at least there is a history that is written. How do you get away from that? Or how do you do that and prosecute at the same time, Scott Horton?
SCOTT HORTON: That’s going to be one of the complications here. I mean, I think we saw that with Iran-Contra, for instance, when we had congressional probes going on, and we had immunity deals worked out. And that was—ultimately provided the basis for overturning some of the convictions that were obtained. It’s a complication, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do both on parallel tracks. You just have to be very cautious about how you proceed.
MICHAEL RATNER: And the other question that occurs with any kind of criminal—I mean, commission of inquiry, is, let’s take a look at the CIA. The CIA was running the secret sites where waterboarding took place and where, if you read Jane Mayer’s book, a vast amount of torture, enhanced interrogation techniques. Even the Senate committee under Levin and McCain, the Armed Services Committee, when they came out with their recent executive summary placing a lot of this at the feet of Rumsfeld, they could not get information from the CIA. One of our—one of my concerns, certainly, with a commission of inquiry would be the CIA will just clam up like that. And yet, you gave George Tenet the Medal of Freedom for running these—
AMY GOODMAN: I didn’t.
MICHAEL RATNER: Not you, Amy. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t accuse you of that. But you and the royal we, the President, whatever, gave it to him. And how are we going to get at that at a commission of inquiry? You’re going to have trouble with it. A prosecution is much more likely. And I do agree, the problems of running them simultaneously are the issues that Scott addresses. I don’t think it’s easy to solve. We obviously prefer a special prosecutor immediately, quickly, to look into this. I think it’s—as I said, it’s a legal obligation now, that the longer it continues will be the longer this administration is in violation of the Convention Against Torture.