Information control, or, How to get to Orwellian governance

And you can write ten books, similar to ones I see at the book store, making fun of the president. You can make movies making fun of him, even inaccurately, like Fahrenheit 911, and absolutely nothing happens, because we have the opposite of Orwellian governance.

It is certainly difficult to maintain an effective and credible democracy if the party in power controls the main news media.
(and all the while citing "liberal media bias")

However I think humour and ridicule, as in the recent quail-shooting misadventure of the VP, have an effect which could be cumulative and have the desired effect in the long run.

The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.

--Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., in a letter to the Editors of The Kansas City Star, May, 1918.

Alright! Now were talking. This is a thread. I'm going to read the link and come back.

I notice that "Pacifica" was not in the study.

www.pacifica.org

I was considered nuts when I said "the inteligence on WMD's is not real"or "The Election is fixed (2000 Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris)"

I had to be careful walking amongst the hysteria knowing the truth and speaking it.

Balls and brains their in short supply.

This is the saddest administration in American history bar none. Every thing we stood for, and sneered at the Soviet Union for violating, has been trashed in the name of protecting our freedoms. As a result both our international reputation, and the very freedoms we valued have been badly damaged.

agreed. yet i have a distinct feeling that the wind is changing.

not because of the liberal media, the liberal dems, the liberal whatnot.
but, because you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. but you can't fool all of the people all of time.

and most importantly, because so very little of what the bush cadre claims bears any resemblence to what people are seeing and experiencing.

Acquiunk, this isn't the USA I grew up knowing and, for the most part, loving. Thankfully, Don'tTreadOnMe has a good point. More and more Republicans are turning their backs on what they consider a corrupt and out-of-control administration.

One worry is the longer this attitude lasts, the more acceptable it will become. As generations grow up in a society that is becoming fascist, the less it will appear to be wrong. IMO.

Thanks, Bernie, for posting this information. It takes its place with tons of other damning info.

Odd...I would have thought American governments very skilled at propaganda and disinformation...look at the massage of the intelligence pre Iraq, as one very simple example.

What Rummy seems to want is more self censorship by American media and organs of government. (Along the lines of the ridiculous "You are anti American/troops/pro terrorists if you dare to ppoiont out US torture and violations of human rights stuff)


I was thinking about this the other day....since propaganda is common, especially leading up to, and during wars.


Thing is, just as ONE cavil with it in this situation....this "war against terror" has no end, no conditions for "victory". It is the ultimate "state of emergency" so beloved of governments which want power with no scrutiiny or dissent..where both are seen as treachery....so this is scary stuff, indeed.

At least he is admitting the aim, in some ways, but clearly denying the extent to which it is already reality.



Speaking of how falsity is arrived at almost unconsciously by those determined to hear only what they want to hear, I am unsure if this has been posted elsewhere, but it is a fascinating analysis of how the pre war intelligence was falsified, in effect, almost unconsciously:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR2006020902418.html?referrer=email&referrer=email





Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq
Intelligence 'Misused' to Justify War, He Says

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 10, 2006; Page A01

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Pillar's critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke, a former National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its failure to deal with the terrorist threat beforehand.

It is also the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so directly and publicly condemned the administration's handling of intelligence.

Pillar, retired after 28 years at the CIA, was an influential behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency's leading counterterrorism analyst. By the end of his career, he was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at Georgetown University.

White House officials did not respond to a request to comment for this article. They have vehemently denied accusations that the administration manipulated intelligence to generate public support for the war.

"Our statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources and represented the collective view of the intelligence community," national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said in a White House briefing in November. "Those judgments were shared by Republicans and Democrats alike."

Republicans and Democrats in Congress continue to argue over whether, or how, to investigate accusations the administration manipulated prewar intelligence.

Yesterday, the Senate Republican Policy Committee issued a statement to counter what it described as "the continuing Iraq pre-war intelligence myths," including charges that Bush " 'misused' intelligence to justify the war." Writing that it was perfectly reasonable for the president to rely on the intelligence he was given, the paper concluded, "it is actually the critics who are misleading the American people."

In his article, Pillar said he believes that the "politicization" of intelligence on Iraq occurred "subtly" and in many forms, but almost never resulted from a policymaker directly asking an analyst to reshape his or her results. "Such attempts are rare," he writes, "and when they do occur . . . are almost always unsuccessful."

Instead, he describes a process in which the White House helped frame intelligence results by repeatedly posing questions aimed at bolstering its arguments about Iraq.

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" between Hussein and al Qaeda, which analysts had discounted. "Feeding the administration's voracious appetite for material on the Saddam-al Qaeda link consumed an enormous amount of time and attention."




The result of the requests, and public statements by the president, Vice President Cheney and others, led analysts and managers to conclude the United States was heading for war well before the March 2003 invasion, Pillar asserted.

They thus knew, he wrote, that senior policymakers "would frown on or ignore analysis that called into question a decision to go to war and welcome analysis that supported such a decision. . . . [They] felt a strong wind consistently blowing in one direction. The desire to bend with such a wind is natural and strong, even if unconscious."

Pillar wrote that the prewar intelligence asserted Hussein's "weapons capacities," but he said the "broad view" within the United States and overseas "was that Saddam was being kept 'in his box' " by U.N. sanctions, and that the best way to deal with him was through "an aggressive inspections program to supplement sanctions already in place."

"If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication," Pillar wrote, "it was to avoid war -- or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath."

Pillar describes for the first time that the intelligence community did assessments before the invasion that, he wrote, indicated a postwar Iraq "would not provide fertile ground for democracy" and would need "a Marshall Plan-type effort" to restore its economy despite its oil revenue. It also foresaw Sunnis and Shiites fighting for power.

Pillar wrote that the intelligence community "anticipated that a foreign occupying force would itself be the target of resentment and attacks -- including guerrilla warfare -- unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam."

In an interview, Pillar said the prewar assessments "were not crystal-balling, but in them we were laying out the challenges that would face us depending on decisions that were made."

Pillar wrote that the first request he received from a Bush policymaker for an assessment of post-invasion Iraq was "not until a year into the war."

That assessment, completed in August 2004, warned that the insurgency in Iraq could evolve into a guerrilla war or civil war. It was leaked to the media in September in the midst of the presidential campaign, and Bush, who had told voters that the mission in Iraq was going well, described the assessment to reporters as "just guessing."

Shortly thereafter, Pillar was identified in a column by Robert D. Novak as having prepared the assessment and having given a speech critical of Bush's Iraq policy at a private dinner in California. The column fed the White House's view that the CIA was in effect working against the Bush administration, and that Pillar was part of that. A columnist in the Washington Times in October 2004 called him "a longstanding intellectual opponent of the policy options chosen by President Bush to fight terrorism."

Leaked information "encouraged some administration supporters to charge intelligence officers (including me) with trying to sabotage the president's policies," Pillar wrote. One effect of that, he said, was to limit challenges to consensus views on matters such as the Iraqi weapons program.

When asked why he did not quit given his concerns, Pillar said in the interview that he was doing "other worthwhile work in the nation's interest" and never thought of resigning over the issue.

Pillar suggests that the CIA and other intelligence agencies, now under Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, remain within the executive branch but "be given greater independence."

The model he cites is the Federal Reserve, overseen by governors who serve fixed terms. That, he said, would reduce "both the politicization of the intelligence community's own work and the public misuse of intelligence by policymakers."





I find this an utterly fascinating account of how bad governments do things, (and it is well supported by my own small experience in a government advisory position)......I suspect it is actually very common, but one would hope a governent might behave better re adecision to kill large numbers of people....its own and citizens of other countries.


This article gels well with accounts I posted some damn place here of another intelligence officer, who resigned well before this chappy did.


So... we have so many different kinds of censorship...the most dangerous, perhaps, that which our leaders impose on their very own brains?

This alos gels well with the study of partisanship someone posted on a thread here, which I cannot find, but which Nimh reposted in another thread:

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy -- but only in candidates they opposed.

When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats -- the scans showed that "reward centers" in volunteers' brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.


Surely this is a similar process to Bushinc's blind rush to war?


We are a scary species.



We need MORE counter information, not less.


Let us pray that Al Jazeera and other sources continue to challenge the hell out of the nonsensical beliefs of some Muslims, too.


BTW, I have no cavil with the US spreading its own point of view into the Muslim world, but encouraging home censorship, and lack of challenge?


Shame.

It might be helpful if someone gave a specific case of someone being denied a right in the U.S. in the past few years, which the law says he possesses. Surely, if we're on the brink of 1984, you can give one such example. But remember, it must be a right that the law says he possesses.

I suppose you wrote "in the US" so as to discount Guantanamo Bay jail and the "rendition" activity currently going on all around the world, carried out by the USA.
That is, incarceration without due proces of law, without limit of time, without charges being brought. And torture.

I offer these as a starter.

Speaking of information control, depsite the constant complaints of the right about how the "liberal" media is biased against them, it is interesting how toothless it often is in challenging White House spin>

Here is an interesting Media Matters story on failure to examine the White House's pablum on the UN Report into the horrors of Guantanamo:

"NBC's Miklaszewski provided McClellan's dubious defense of Guantánamo without challenge
Summary: NBC News' Jim Miklaszewski uncritically reported White House press secretary Scott McClellan's response to a new United Nations report on the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, even though McClellan's claims had previously been undermined by both the International Committee of the Red Cross and internal U.S. government emails.
On the February 16 edition of NBC's Nightly News, NBC News chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski uncritically reported White House press secretary Scott McClellan's response to a new United Nations report on the treatment of detainees at the U.S. military's Guantánamo Bay prison facility, which alleges that "some interrogation techniques [practiced at the facility] are actions amounting to torture." Even though McClellan's assertion -- that the report is "a rehash of allegations from prisoners who are trained by Al Qaeda to make false claims about being tortured" -- has been undermined by a 2004 International Committee of the Red Cross report and internal U.S. government emails, Miklaszewski did not mention any of the substantial evidence that refutes McClellan's assertion. Miklaszewski also failed to challenge McClellan's claim that all of those held at Guantánamo "are dangerous terrorists" and "people that are determined to harm innocent civilians or harm innocent Americans," even though a recent National Journal report and a Seton Hall University School of Law study have concluded that the government has only scant or weak evidence against many of those held at the Guantánamo naval base, which is located at a U.S.-controlled port in Cuba.

Allegations that prisoners at Guantánamo have been tortured have not come just "from prisoners who are trained by Al Qaeda to make false claims about being tortured" as McClellan asserted, but have been documented in FBI emails, in which, as Media Matters for America has noted, FBI agents described graphic instances of abuse by interrogators at Guantánamo that the agents personally witnessed. In one email, an FBI agent described the interrogation methods employed by Department of Defense officials as "torture techniques." T.J. Harrington, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, detailed in an email several agents' accounts of abusive treatment, including one in which a female sergeant "grabbed [a] detainee's thumbs and bent them backwards and indicated that she also grabbed his genitals." The sergeant, according to Harrington, warned her subject that past interrogations had left other "detainees curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain." Harrington also included an account of a detainee being "subjected to intense isolation for over three months ... in a cell that was always flooded with light," which led to him "evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in a corner of the cell covered with a sheet for hours on end)." A third FBI document described a detainee "chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor" and who was subjected to food deprivation and temperature extremes. "The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him," the FBI agent wrote. "He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

A November 30, 2004, article in The New York Times reported: "The International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba," based on visits to the prison by ICRC staff and interviews with Guantánamo detainees. According to the Times article, the ICRC "has been conducting visits to Guantánamo since January 2002," and that "ts officials are able to visit prisoners at Guantánamo under the kind of arrangement the committee has made with governments for decades. In exchange for exclusive access to the prison camp and meetings with detainees, the committee has agreed to keep its findings confidential."

McClellan's claims that "[w]e know that these are dangerous terrorists. They're being kept at Guantánamo Bay. They are people that are determined to harm innocent civilians or harm innocent Americans," are contradicted by a February 3 report in the National Journal that documented the apparent lack of evidence against many of the detainees:

Some of the men [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld described [in a June 27, 2005, statement] -- the terrorists, the trainers, the financiers, and the battlefield captures -- are indeed at Guantanamo. But National Journal's detailed review of government files on 132 prisoners who have asked the courts for help, and a thorough reading of heavily censored transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners, didn't turn up very many of them. Most of the "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo -- for four years now -- are simply not the worst of the worst of the terrorist world.

Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.

[...]

Even as the CIA was deciding that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo didn't have much to say, Pentagon officials were getting frustrated with how little the detainees were saying. So they ramped up the pressure and gave interrogators more license.

The questions to the detainees about 9/11 and Al Qaeda and about each other were so constant, so repetitive, so oppressive that some prisoners, out of exasperation or fatigue or fear, just gave in and said, sure, I'm a terrorist. False confessions and false accusations are rampant, according to the lawyers and the Defense Department records.

One man slammed his hands on the table during an especially long interrogation and yelled, "Fine, you got me; I'm a terrorist." The interrogators knew it was a sarcastic statement. But the government, sometime later, used it as evidence against him: "Detainee admitted he is a terrorist" reads his tribunal evidence. The interrogators were so outraged that they sought out the detainee's personal representative to explain it to him that the statement was not a confession.

The National Journal reported that, according to Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's "bin Laden unit," "y the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives." .........."


Full story here:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200602170011





It is worth going to the site, because you can click on several parts of what is written, to take you to evidence, and the video is available.





Sloppy journalism, on a very important story, or media reacting to constant barrages of invective re "liberal bias"?

Which law has been violated by the existence of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners please? Your references to charges and due process would seem inappropriate since these are not persons suspected of civil crimes, but rather prisoners of war or something similar. What were the prisoners captured during WW2 charged with??? So, again, what law has been violated? What is the "rendition activity," and which US law does it violate?

The fact that you don't know says a lot about the news management you are living under.

It has been a major topic here for months.

It also might have something to do with the fact that I just got married, and was also in the hospital. So, please, if you can, answer my questions.

Brandon

Plenty info here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/rendition

Er, sorry Brandon, I was not to know. I know you for an intelligent and well-informed poster, so was a bit surprised by the question.

Congratulations BTW, on your marriage, and best wishes.

Hpoe you are feeling a bit better healthwise, too.

Some germane comment here

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article346357.ece

Thanks, for the congratulations. I am feeling much better, thanks.

Can you list one, and I would prefer only one, action which has been ordered or undertaken by the government, and tell me which law it violates. I see the links, but they don't specifically answer the question. It's very easy to give a link, and make the general statement that it proves your point, but I'm not sure it does. If you can give me one example, and cite the law it violates, that would be evidence in support of your point. The abuses at Abu Ghraib, for example, are not, since they were contrary to the orders those soldiers had.