.. this is how they do 'em
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The article in question was pointed out by/on ICH:
«Defense Dept. To Fund Pro-American Publicity In The Iraqi Media: The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300 million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to "engage and inspire" the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government.»
The link was not correct, so I searched for and found the item, published by WP:
«One official described how part of the program works: "There's a video piece produced by a contractor . . . showing a family being attacked by a group of bad guys, and their daughter being taken off. The message is: You've got to stand up against the enemy." The professionally produced vignette, he said, "is offered for airing on various [television] stations in Iraq. . . . They don't know that the originator of the content is the U.S. government. If they did, they would never run anything."
"If you asked most Iraqis," he said, "they would say, 'It came from the government, our own government.'"»
Propaganda is lies - must be lies, because if they were limited to telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they'd never be able to convince even the most dumbed-down sheople® to 'support' their Nuremberg-class wars (murder for spoil.)
Why the 'rest of the West' allows/tolerates such vile US(+Israeli) criminality is beyond me. Where are the adults?
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The US kleptocracy, in league with the Israeli kleptocracy, aided and abetted by the UK & Aus dittos (the wannabe hegemon, its illegal sprog and poodle with dag), have swindled and raped the world, not 'just' in their Nuremberg-class invasions/occupations, but also in the finance sphere, (see current voracious-greed based financial collapse) and equally voracious resource 'harvesting,' keyword 'economic rent.'
The invasion/occupation of Afghanistan should never have been allowed/tolerated; even though the US claimed it as 'hot pursuit,' we now know that it was a pre-prepared plan pursued under the cover of blind anger, the latter possibly even contrived. But the subsequent invasion/occupation of Iraq was known at the time to have no justification, apart from some criminal US 'strategic objectives,' aka murder for oil. All this is known, all this was/is/will remain illegal.
Now that the 'masters of the universe' have been exposed as the lying criminal frauds that they always were, in multiple fields of endeavour, and them having prepared then precipitated a financial crisis of possibly 1929-magnitude, we have the opportunity, one could say the necessity, of cutting the US loose. Dump the $US, set up a proper world-bank, a proper world-currency - at a single stroke removing the obscene US-deficits dragging us all down, and removing the US-gun at our heads - and then get on with saving the planet.
2008/10/09
information/psychological operations ...
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5 comments:
G'day Phil, "cutting the US loose ...", seems someone else is thinking along those lines.
THE President of Russia has called on Europe's leaders to create a new world order that would minimise the role of the United States.
The Afghanistan surge ... from Tomdispatch Anand Gopal - "The Surge That Failed."
A key section:
When, decades from now, historians compile the record of this Afghan war, they will date the Afghan version of the surge -- the now trendy injection of large numbers of troops to resuscitate a flagging war effort -- to sometime in early 2007. Then, a growing insurgency was causing visible problems for U.S. and NATO forces in certain pockets in the southern parts of the country, long a Taliban stronghold. In response, military planners dramatically beefed up the international presence, raising the number of troops over the following 18 months by 20,000, a 45% jump.
During this period, however, the violence also jumped -- by 50%. This shouldn't be surprising. More troops meant more targets for Taliban fighters and suicide bombers. In response, the international forces retaliated with massive aerial bombing campaigns and large-scale house raids. The number of civilians killed in the process skyrocketed. In the fifteen months of this surge, more civilians have been killed than in the previous four years combined.
During the same period, the country descended into a state of utter dereliction -- no jobs, very little reconstruction, and ever less security. In turn, the rising civilian death toll and the decaying economy proved a profitable recipe for the Taliban, who recruited significant numbers of new fighters. They also won the sympathy of Afghans who saw them as the lesser of two evils. Once confined to the deep Afghan south, today the insurgents operate openly right at the doorstep of Kabul, the capital.
This last surge, little noted by the media, failed miserably, but Washington is now planning another one, even as Afghanistan slips away. More boots on the ground, though, will do little to address the real causes of this country's unfolding tragedy.
If at first you don't succeed ... Don't learn from experience, just keep using the same flawed method and lie about it to the public.
If enough of the public start waking up and there is the threat of an electoral backlash, then there is the option of denying them the vote. And see elsewhere for other material on ways and means of doing this.
From DemocracyNow! starting with Greg Palast ...
Also - Chris Floyd on the matter.
Picking up another theme ... keep an ear to the ground.
The Bush administration has repeatedly defended its warrantless surveillance of Americans as being directed only against "people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."
Now two intercept operators who worked for the National Security Agency at Fort Gordon in Georgia have come forward to tell ABC News that isn't true.
David Murfee Faulk described to ABC's Brian Ross how he had listened to "personal phone calls of American officers, mostly in the Green Zone [in Baghdad], calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses and sometimes their girlfriends."
"Co-workers of mine were ordered to transcribe these calls," Faulk stated. "When one of my co-workers went to a supervisor and said, 'But sir, these are personal calls,' the supervisor said, 'My orders were to transcribe everything.'"
Adrienne Kinne, who like Faulk is an Arab linguist, said she had received the same orders and had listened to hundreds of Americans in the Middle East simply calling home. She emphasized that these were "Americans who are not in any way, shape, or form associated with anything to do with terrorism. It was just personal conversations that really nobody else should have been listening to."
When asked about President Bush's statement that the intercepts were directed only at known al-Qaeda suspects, Kinne stated, "That is completely a lie." She said that military officers, journalists, and Red Cross workers were among the people whose calls she transcribed.
Glenn Greenwald.
There are, for now, several points worth noting here:
(1) There is one reason and one reason only these abuses occurred: because George Bush broke the law — committed felonies — by ordering the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants.
(2) While the extent of the abuses disclosed here is substantial — “hundreds of Americans”; journalists, Red Cross and aid workers; military officers speaking to their friends and families — these disclosures are from only two relatively low-level individual NSA linguists at one NSA facility in Georgia. If just these two individuals are aware of this level of abuse, just imagine what the true extent of the abuses is — both quantitatively (how many innocent Americans had their conversations eavesdropped on?) and qualitatively (who, beyond journalists and aid workers, were listened to?).
(3) Most disturbing here is that these calls were not merely surveilled, but were recorded and transcribed. In whose custody are these recordings and transcripts and what was done with them?
(4) This was not the work of rogue employees or bad apples. Note that Faulk specifically said that the abuses were brought to the attention of NSA supervisors — the ones whom the Bush administration has repeatedly claimed were adequate substitutes for FISA judges in deciding who should be surveilled — and those supervisors said that they were ordered to transcribe the calls in question.
(5) These abuses aren’t merely grotesque invasions of privacy and civil liberties, though they obviously are that. Independently, surveillance abuses undermine genuine counter-terrorism efforts and national security interests in the extreme. If NSA agents are listening in on the calls of innocent Americans, including journalists and aid workers — including their intimate calls and even their “phone sex,” as Faulk said — then that means they’re not listening in on actual terrorist suspects.
Criminal and incompetent .. criminally incompetent.
G'day Phil, all the money that us to be used to nail,out and prop up ... Chris Floyd has something to say about that.
Will do more sometime - depends on the passage of the 'flu.
G'day Phil, Chris Floyd and Dean Baker on the spin and where the blame really lies.
From CF:
The myth has quickly taken hold that the global financial crash was caused by bad mortgages. This has allowed rightwing hatemongers to blame the meltdown on the "liberal" programs that encouraged home ownership among a small percentage of lower-income people (a poisonous canard that parts of the mainstream media have actually done a fairly good job of knocking down), while "progressives" of various stripes have denounced banks and other financial institutions for pushing over-easy credit on people who couldn't really afford it.
Unsustainable mortgages are a key factor in the global crash, of course. And many people (most of them white, by the way) did take out mortgages they would not be able to afford if the housing bubble ever burst, which it has, most spectacularly. And yes, it is undeniable that the financial services industry has been tempting people with easy credit like schoolyard pushers flashing reefers.
All of this was bound to end badly, and did. But this alone would not have been enough to threaten the destruction of the entire global financial system, nor cause the blind, screaming panic that has strangulated the financial markets, seized up the vital flow of money between banks, and caused the "free" market-worshipping governments of the Western world to carry out nationalizations and interventions that, in sheer numbers, dwarf anything ever seen following a Communist revolution. (As John Lancaster notes in the London Review of Books, the Bush Administration's takeover of Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac alone was "was, by cash value, the biggest nationalisation in the history of the world." And that was just the beginning.)
What has struck mortal fear in the heart of markets and governments is not bad mortgages, but the almost incomprehensibly huge and complex market for "derivatives," based in part on mortgage debt -- but also on a vast array of other sources that were "securitized," turned into tradable if ghostly commodities then sold off in a bewildering variety of increasingly arcane forms. This was accompanied by the expansion of yet another vast market in insurance mechanisms designed to protect these derivatives -- mechanisms which themselves became "securitized."
At the same time, the financial services industry used its paid bagmen in governments around the world to loosen almost all restrictions not only on securitization and the trading of derivatives, but also on the amount of debt that institutions could take on in order to play around in these vastly expanded and deregulated markets. For example, as Lancaster points out, UK's Barclays Bank had a debt-to-equity ratio of 63 to 1:
Imagine that for a moment translated to your own finances, so that you could stretch what you actually, unequivocally own to borrow more than sixty times the amount. (I’d have an island. What about you?)
The result of all this has been the construction of a gargantuan house of cards, based on next to nothing, and left alone in the shadow of building "perfect storm" of greed, deregulation and political corruption.
Glenn Greenwald has a series on the Repugs. And you can find more at the site.
DemocracyNow! on the Repugs beginning with Max Blumenthal on Palin's pals.
News: Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize for Economics.
another Parthian shot ...
.. (running out'a time - again? no, still)
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Q: What went wrong in the US?
A: Read this for some tips:
October 13, 2008
This Just In
Greed is Not Good
By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN
[counterpunch.org/green]
WARNING! - to any US reader:
The word 'stupid' is deployed.
some follow-up ...
.. on the US' filthy lies
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Here're two stories via ICH:
1. Private Military Contractors Writing the News? The Pentagon's Propaganda at Its Worst
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted October 17, 2008.
«Less than a week after the Washington Post reported that the Department of Defense will pay private contractors $300 million over the next three years to "produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to 'engage and inspire' the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government," ...»
[alternet/Segura]
2. America's National Strategy of Global Intervention
By William Pfaff
October 18, 2008
«The noteworthy thing about this National Defense Strategy statement is that it says nothing directly about American national defense. It is a strategy for intervening in other countries, and preventing others from blocking or resisting American interventions.»
[ICH/Pfaff]
The 1st equates PR to propaganda (and quotes the same WP item referred to in my headline article), the 2nd equates 'US defence' to offence.
From the 1st:
«To name a few, says Farsetta, "the fact that the media produced is overwhelmingly not attributed to the U.S. government;" "the fact that one of the 'strategic audiences' listed in the contract is 'U.S. audiences,' in apparent violation of U.S. law;" and "the difficulties in holding private contractors operating in war zones accountable to any standard (ethical, performance or otherwise)."»
[Segura, ibid.]
Now PR (aka propaganda, see Bernays) is used to create largely false impressions, and is far more often than not composed of (filthy!) lies. The two articles together demonstrate that the US propagandises its own citizens (well, we know that - now, at least, thanks, but "No, thanks!" to GWBush&Co), but what of the implications for democracy? Sheer and utter hypocrisy, and one of the main results, as seen around the world is the US murdering for spoil. Those who perpetrate these frauds and/or crimes (the M/I/C-plex, Military/Industry/Congress) are outright criminals; those who assist (venal and corrupt corporate MSM (often including publicly financed broadcasters(!!?)), apologists, lying trolls, etc.) are accessories. But what of 'outside' parties (Germans & French regimes, say), who *must* know all about this (their so-called 'Intel Agencies' - even blind Freddies could see if they took the trouble to look at something other than flat-panel TVs), those who see AND say nothing, do nothing to stop the US depredations, what of them?
Where are the adults?
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