Constitution - Nothing But a Piece of Paper?

McGentrix wrote:

Setanta wrote:

McGentrix wrote:

I believe "curveball" was an alias to protect the identity of the individual, not an anonymous source.

This is rare idiocy indeed--it is astounding to me that it does not occur to you that sources are described as anonymous precisely because their identity is to be protected. This ranks as one of the most idiotic statements you have ever made--and that's filling a damned tall order.

tsk, tsk, tsk.

"curveball" is a verifiable source. Officials know whom the person is and have the ability to question as needed. "unnamed sources" are not verifiable, nor are they reliable.

.

Speaking of revisionist history.

"curveball?" was verifiable? But best of all, "Curveball" was reliable? I don't think Curveball was even available to be questioned as needed since it was the Germans that had him.

Outrage meter pegged? This'll break it altogether...
by Mike Stark [Subscribe]
Sun Dec 11, 2005 at 09:21:53 PM PDT

I've been waiting for someone to do this one justice... maybe it's been overlooked because this scandal developed over several administrations, Republican and Democrat... who knows? What matters is the indisputable record...

First - perhaps there are lawyers with relevant knowledge that can comment on this because I am not entirely up to speed on the law. That said, I do know that it is illegal for the United States government to use our tax dollars to spread propaganda to Americans... keep that in mind as you follow me to the other side...

what will you find there? Oh... well, just that the entire Iraq war was cooked up and sold to us as an extension of a 15 year old propaganda operation. Remember the Iraqi National Congress - the organization led by Ahmed Chalabi that fed us Curveball and all the other lying miscreants selling information about WMD? It was a propaganda front. You paid for it.

The story comes to us from Rolling Stone.

Quote:

One of the most powerful people in Washington, Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information -- and, by extension, the news media -- to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." Working under this extraordinary transfer of secret authority, Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam.

Did you catch that? The entire Iraqi National Congress was created from scratch by a propogandist paid by your tax dollars. There was never any groundswell movement of disillusioned Iraqi exiles with heartfelt desire to return their homeland to peaceful rule... It was all a sham - paid for by the CIA...

Quote:

Strapped to the polygraph machine was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and was now determined to bring down Saddam Hussein. For hours, as thin mechanical styluses traced black lines on rolling graph paper, al-Haideri laid out an explosive tale. Answering yes and no to a series of questions, he insisted repeatedly that he was a civil engineer who had helped Saddam's men to secretly bury tons of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. The illegal arms, according to al-Haideri, were buried in subterranean wells, hidden in private villas, even stashed beneath the Saddam Hussein Hospital, the largest medical facility in Baghdad.

It was damning stuff -- just the kind of evidence the Bush administration was looking for. If the charges were true, they would offer the White House a compelling reason to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. That's why the Pentagon had flown a CIA polygraph expert to Pattaya: to question al-Haideri and confirm, once and for all, that Saddam was secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

There was only one problem: It was all a lie. After a review of the sharp peaks and deep valleys on the polygraph chart, the intelligence officer concluded that al-Haideri had made up the entire story, apparently in the hopes of securing a visa.

The fabrication might have ended there, the tale of another political refugee trying to scheme his way to a better life. But just because the story wasn't true didn't mean it couldn't be put to good use. Al-Haideri, in fact, was the product of a clandestine operation -- part espionage, part PR campaign -- that had been set up and funded by the CIA and the Pentagon for the express purpose of selling the world a war. And the man who had long been in charge of the marketing was a secretive and mysterious creature of the Washington establishment named John Rendon.

snip...

Quote:

Although Rendon denies any direct involvement with al-Haideri, the defector was the latest salvo in a secret media war set in motion by Rendon. In an operation directed by Ahmad Chalabi -- the man Rendon helped install as leader of the INC -- the defector had been brought to Thailand, where he huddled in a hotel room for days with the group's spokesman, Zaab Sethna. The INC routinely coached defectors on their stories, prepping them for polygraph exams, and Sethna was certainly up to the task -- he got his training in the art of propaganda on the payroll of the Rendon Group. According to Francis Brooke, the INC's man in Washington and himself a former Rendon employee, the goal of the al-Haideri operation was simple: pressure the United States to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As the CIA official flew back to Washington with failed lie-detector charts in his briefcase, Chalabi and Sethna didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone, called two journalists who had a long history of helping the INC promote its cause and offered them an exclusive on Saddam's terrifying cache of WMDs.

For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.

"We were trying to help the Kurds and the Iraqis opposed to Saddam set up a television station," Sethna recalled in a rare interview broadcast on Australian television. "The Rendon Group came to us and said, 'We have a contract to kind of do anti-Saddam propaganda on behalf of the Iraqi opposition.' What we didn't know -- what the Rendon Group didn't tell us -- was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work."

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers. Miller later made perfunctory calls to the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, but despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline. "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer," Miller wrote, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.

By law, the Bush administration is expressly prohibited from disseminating government propaganda at home. But in an age of global communications, there is nothing to stop it from planting a phony pro-war story overseas -- knowing with certainty that it will reach American citizens almost instantly. A recent congressional report suggests that the Pentagon may be relying on "covert psychological operations affecting audiences within friendly nations." In a "secret amendment" to Pentagon policy, the report warns, "psyops funds might be used to publish stories favorable to American policies, or hire outside contractors without obvious ties to the Pentagon to organize rallies in support of administration policies." The report also concludes that military planners are shifting away from the Cold War view that power comes from superior weapons systems. Instead, the Pentagon now believes that "combat power can be enhanced by communications networks and technologies that control access to, and directly manipulate, information. As a result, information itself is now both a tool and a target of warfare."

I dunno how to flog this story and get it the attention it deserves... but the families of the 2144 dead and twenty thousand wounded Americans deserve to know that the entire thing was a marketing campaign... That ad executives paid for by the CIA and Pentagon created the INC, that the INC supplied a mounds of savory lies for the neocons, the neocons spun the lies to the Times and other media outlets, and all along the American people were played for suckers.

Remember that the next time you see some political suit express their respect for the troops.

FreeDuck wrote:

Can we get back to the analysis of the use of the Constitution as toilet paper now?

I imagine it to be rather scratchy and not at all absorbent....

I see. So if the author had only named his sources with aliases then we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

"Unamed Source #1"," Unamed Source #2" and "Unamed Source #3" would be verifiable and reliable based on Tico's and McG's points

parados wrote:

I see. So if the author had only named his sources with aliases then we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

"Unamed Source #1"," Unamed Source #2" and "Unamed Source #3" would be verifiable and reliable based on Tico's and McG's points

You obviously didn't understand my point.

Ticomaya wrote:

parados wrote:

I see. So if the author had only named his sources with aliases then we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

"Unamed Source #1"," Unamed Source #2" and "Unamed Source #3" would be verifiable and reliable based on Tico's and McG's points

You obviously didn't understand my point.

And you obviously didn't understand McGs. :wink:

It's the fact that so many hate Bush so badly that they are willing to swallow this kind of crap. THAT is what we SHOULD be discussing.

I'm pretty sure he (and we) understood your point Tico; just as I'm pretty sure that he (and we) think your point is absurd, ridiculous, and unworthy of being taken seriously.

This topic of the discussion is what attitude does the admnistration have toward the constitution. The Rightwing, Inc. would like to turn it into a discussion of personalities so as to avoid that issue. So, first a diversion of what the meaning of anonymous is, and now an attempt to divert this into a discussion of people's attitudes towards the Shrub.

The IVth Amendment to the Constitution reads, in its entirety:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Computerized records are not "papers." See how easy that was?
I sumit that the Patriot Act has been used as an attempt to circumvent this amendment and its provisions. Specifically, the Patriot Act is used in an attempt to circument requirement for probable cause in securing warrants to search and seize. Although i am no great admirer of Gonzales, i consider that Ashcroft was much more dangerous and dismissive of civil rights. That by no means, however, means that people's right to be secure in their persons, papers and effects are any more safe with the current AG than was the case when Ashcroft was AG--in his case, it appears he thought the abbreviation meant Assistant God.