Obama’s election marked a new dawn for hundreds of millions of people, who were looking to an eloquent, constitutional lawyer for “Hope” and “Change” in America. However, it quickly became apparent that Obama had little substance beyond the slogans branded by his campaign.

With a little more than a year left in his presidency, his milquetoast legacy has been embodied by his greatest skill: wordcraft. Obama’s team has continued, if not exacerbated, most Bush era policies, simply rebranding them in order to appease and confuse the public into compliance.

One of the first things his administration did was declare an end to the “War on Terror” that the Bush sociopaths launched worldwide. Turns out, all they wanted to do was stop calling it a “War on Terror,” making clear that any further military involvement abroad would simply be called “Overseas Contingency Operations.”

Six years later, and the Nobel Peace Prize winning president has bombing campaigns in seven different countries under his belt. And the casualties of the empire’s plunders? Collateral damage.

There are also new terms for war. When US and NATO bombed the hell out of Libya resulting in the failed state we see today, it wasn’t a war. No, it was merely a “Kinetic Military Action,” according to government officials.

Torture is now “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and the act of kidnapping and exporting torture is simply called “extraordinary rendition”.

Whenever the administration sends predator drones to bomb people around the world, they’re just “surgical strikes” targeting “militants”. However, simply being military aged male constitutes someone as a militant, and according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, less than four percent of drone victims in Pakistan are officially listed as al Qaeda.

When Obama’s cabinet dropped the term “enemy combatant”, it was a purely symbolic move to distance itself away from the Bush Guantanamo era. Unfortunately, over 140 men still remain rotting away in the notorious prison despite what they’re now called on paper. And when these prisoners go on a hunger strike, it’s now called a “long term non-religious fast”.

As journalist Glenn Greenwald reminds us, altering the names of policies doesn’t change the fact that they’re still happening:

“The Obama administration…makes only the most cosmetic and inconsequential changes – designed to generate headlines misleadingly depicting a significant reversal – while, in fact, retaining the crux of Bush’s extremist detention theory.”

Obviously this rebranding tactic wasn’t invented by Obama’s PR team. 

Propaganda was propelled with the advent of PR genius Edward Bernays and later Nazi mastermind Joseph Goebbels, whose powerful techniques have been perfected and employed for decades by governments worldwide. Disturbing Newspeak phrases that absolve their pillaging and mass murder have permeated society and warped our interpretation of reality.

How Words Absolve Mass Murder

The term “Mowing the Lawn” is what governments say to allude to the literal mowing down of civilians. Shockingly, the callous term has been used not only by Israeli military commanders in reference to the recent bloodbath of Palestinians, but it’s also been used by Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser Bruce Riedel who said this about drone strikes:

“You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.”

If you think that’s bad, officials also use the cute phrase “Shake ‘n Bake” to refer to using banned white phosphorus before blowing up people with high grade explosives. Administrators also think so lowly of the people they’re killing with flying robots that they brutishly call them “bug splats”.

Beyond war, in today’s cut throat capitalist world overrun by neoliberal doctrine, there’s a language of dehumanization employed towards everything, spoken among the elite class and policy heads in order to keep things running efficiently.

As the Guardian points out, the term “cleansing the stock” is actually used to describe excess human beings by parliamentarians. After all, you can’t afford to actually feel emotion, empathy or sorrow for the paupers at the bottom of the totem pole.

Unsurprisingly, when it comes to the natural world, the language is even more crude.

According to journalist George Monbiot,

“Nature is “natural capital”. Ecological processes are ecosystem services, because their only purpose is to serve us. Hills, forests and rivers are described in government reports as green infrastructure. Wildlife and habitats are asset classes in an ecosystems market. Fish populations are invariably described as stocks, as if they exist only as moveable assets from which wealth can be extracted – like disabled recipients of social security.”

All of these devaluing terms have seeped into mainstream consciousness, dutifully repeated by media figures and then, by us.

Words hold tremendous power, and if we don’t reclaim our language and start seeing people instead of “militants”, drone victims instead of “bug splats”, or natural splendor instead of “green infrastructure”, then the voiceless are destined to be silenced forever.

Follow me at @AbbyMartin

The 9/11 attacks gave the US a huge opportunity to embark on a new era of global unity and partnership.

Instead, the tragedy was exploited – not only to erode Americans’ civil liberties, but to engage in endless militarism based on imperial bloodlust.

The US government tortured, bombed, invaded, occupied and destabilized entire nations that had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no threat to this country. Incredibly, the countries that most likely did play an operational role remain the US’ strongest allies in the Middle East.

The Bush administration claimed the attacks were simply a failure of imagination, when in fact hijacking planes and crashing them into government buildings was a known tactic of terror.

Officials also turned a blind eye to an innumerable amount of warnings. From Morocco to Russia, dozens of foreign intelligence agencies warned the US of an imminent terrorist attack in the months prior to 9/11. The infamous August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing, in which Bush was warned of a 9/11 style plot, was just the tip of the iceberg. According to The New York Times, even more ‘shocking’ classified briefs were delivered to the highest echelons of the intelligence community.

Other lingering questions include why Pakistani ISI’s General Mahmoud Ahmed was having breakfast with lawmakers in DC on the morning of 9/11 after ordering Omar Sheik to wire transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker. This, along with evidence of Saudi royal backing, calls into question why the 9/11 Commission Report concluded that the source of funding for the attacks is “of little practical significance.”

Despite the group’s casual disregard to investigate foreign governments that helped finance the operation, a document that could expose the subject is called The Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After The Terrorist Attacks of 9/11 – except 28 pages of it, entitled ‘Potential Sources of Foreign Support for the September 11 Hijackers,’ were redacted by the Bush administration and remain classified to this day.

Amazingly, simply bringing up any of these inconsistencies paints you as a lunatic in the mainstream media, which lumps any and all questions about 9/11 as baseless conspiracy theories. No matter how out there some of those theories indeed are, they shouldn’t delegitimize the facts.

Based on the historical record, here’s the best case scenario: Hundreds of warnings were ignored, no one was fired because of it and countless have died as a result.

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Warnings Ignored, US Ally Funding, Bush Admin Lies & Redacted Truths

Coverage includes an exclusive interview with Brian McGlinchey, spokesperson for 28pages.org, former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley about the agency being blocked from investigating Zacharias Moussaoui, AKA the ’20th Hijacker,’ RT’s Alexey Yaroshevsky at Ground Zero’s crass 9/11 gift shop.

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I also went on Off the Grid with Jesse Ventura to talk about being ostracized for questioning the official 9/11 narrative as well as my trip to Guantanamo Bay.

Abby Martin Goes Off the Grid with Jesse Ventura

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Follow me @AbbyMartin

Photo by flickr user Glyn Lowe

After more than 1,800 deaths, $108 billion in damages, and almost a decade of recovery efforts, Hurricane Katrina is now remembered as the single most devastating natural disaster in US history.

There were more than 50 failures in levees, leading to 80% of New Orleans being flooded. In particular, the construction of the lower ninth ward levee was called into question after a barge destroyed it, which directed the worst of the flood into the poorest areas.

Tens of thousands of people were trapped for days without food nor water and entire neighborhoods were submerged with sewage.

But instead of addressing the catastrophe like the humanitarian crisis it was, government officials treated New Orleans like a warzone. Thousands of police, national guard troops and active duty soldiers invaded the city to restore ‘law and order,’ and private mercenary firms like Blackwater were already on the streets before emergency aide could reach city residents.

Amidst the chaotic scramble by the federal government to deliver relief on the ground, defense contractors had turned large swaths of the city into an armed prison, meanwhile ordering civilians to turn in their firearms (including those legally registered). At the same time, bands of white militias patrolled the streets, using deadly force against African-Americans while police turned a blind eye.

Breaking the Set traveled to New Orleans to follow up on how the city is faring nine years after Katrina, and found miles of roadways in disrepair, tens of thousands of blighted homes and neighborhoods like the ninth ward looking like the storm just hit yesterday. According to 2010 census data, nearly a third of the population has left New Orleans, primarily in poorer communities.

The lessons of Katrina need to be heeded now, because it’s not a matter of if, but when the next Katrina hits. And the question remains: how will we respond if the government  treats its own people like refugees and goes to war with us again?

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Hurricane Katrina Unheard: Blackwater, White Militias and Community Empowerment

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Exclusive coverage from New Orleans includes interviews with Ward ‘Mack’ McClendon, founder of the Lower Ninth Ward Village community center about how he is revitalizing the community and two co-founders of Common Ground Collective, former Black Panther Malik Rahim and notable anarchist Scott Crow, about taking arms against the white militias that patrolled Algiers Point and killed at least eleven black people in the aftermath of the storm.

Photo & report by @AbbyMartin