October 2009

MEDIA ROOTS- The oft repeated lie will be perceived as truth. Post 9/11, the news reported has been managed propaganda, aimed at creating a climate of fear. Stories that do not reflect kindly on the agendas of the government or businesses that influence and fund the media are effectively blocked or back paged under sensationalized trivialities.

Without a functioning media that properly informs the populous which issues are significant, people will remain unaware of the pressing issues in our country and world and will be prevented from acting as responsible citizens in defense of their interests. By impeding the public from taking an informed participatory role in society, the mainstream media is crippling the democracy of the United States and undermining its very function.

Ron Suskind of the New York Times writes about speaking with a top White House aide.

“The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality… We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality- judiciously, as you will- we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.  We’re history’s actors… and all of you will be left to just study what we do.”

This statement demonstrates just how controlled our mainstream media has become.  The purveyors of information are so confident in their ability to manipulate public perception that they don’t even try to hide it.

Most Americans are unaware of even the most basic facts about the most important event of their lifetime.  A CNN 2003 Gallup poll showed that 51% of Americans believed that Saddam was personally responsible for 9/11. And despite being reported in the media that the U.S. and other countries had not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a 2006 Harris poll showed that a surprising 50% of U.S. adults think that Iraq had such weapons upon invasion.

These statistics are no accident.  Our country was in a volatile state after 9/11, and a great deal of responsibility was entrusted to our media to accurately report the competence of the administration’s handling of the war on terror. But the media failed in this respect, and did not scrutinize the Bush administration’s unsupported claims. The intelligence founding our pre-emptive invasion was distorted in order to manipulate public perception and garner support for the war, while the accountability from media watchdogs was virtually nonexistent.

The current and prior administrations’ agendas have been enabled by the mainstream media’s failure to report on crucial stories, and the information that is dispelled is saturated with disinformation. This makes it extremely difficult to discern the truths from the lies. For example, the Bush administration financed the preparation and distribution of false stories to the American public, and then used those stories to justify going to war. The Iraqi National Congress (INC) was paid $340,000 a month for the dissemination of information to the media about Saddam Hussein’s crimes, despite the fact that the CIA had determined their information to be completely unreliable. The propagation included inserting false stories about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and fictional meetings between Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden into unsuspecting publications. Also, the Pentagon allotted a multimillion dollar contract to the Lincoln Group to run a pro America propaganda PR campaign in Iraqi newspapers, TV and radio in an attempt to boost the image of the war.

Due to the lack of common knowledge surrounding such issues, many people believe the media’s rhetoric is infallible, assuming the journalists are properly reporting all that is necessary to know. But television news organizations have become inundated with celebrity gossip, distorted information, and character assassinations among politicians. Once they stopped reporting on the casualties and circumstances of the Iraq war and Afghanistan occupation, it was easy to forget that we are in fact at war with one country and continuing to occupy another.

Some of the most under reported stories are the most damaging. Over the course of the last eight years, the Bush administration managed to pass constitution altering Acts that directly threaten our individual liberties and freedoms. The Military Commissions Act that was passed in 2006 dismissed the Constitutional principle of habeas corpus, one of our most innate rights as American citizens to have court review of unlawful detention. A story that should have been breaking news pinned on the front pages of newspapers was nearly ignored from mainstream media. And this is only one instance of the drastic measures that have been enacted and subsequently pushed under the rug by the prior administration and their complicit media. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act, passed in 2007, destabilized the Posse Comitatus Act and undid prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law. The National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51), a directive that planned for the continuity of government in the event of a national emergency, allowed the Bush administration to effectively declare martial law whenever they deem it necessary.

Possibly the most frightening Act of them all, the Homegrown Terrorism and Radicalization Act, which was overwhelmingly passed in Congress by 404-4 votes on October 23^rd, 2007 but was stalled in the Senate, would have initiated a new crackdown on dissent and Constitutional rights of American citizens under the guise of fighting terrorism. The act would have established a “National Commission on the prevention of violent radicalization and ideologically based violence… and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism and ideologically based violence in the United States.” The idea of developing a Commission to study and report on these findings seems harmless, but the definitions of terrorism and extremism in the bill are so vague that it could be used to define or generalize any group that is working against the policies of this administration.

The definition of violent radicalization criminalizes thought and ideology, while homegrown terrorism is defined as “The ‘use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence to intimidate or coerce the government.” The term “force” is unclear and could encompass political activities such as rallies, marches, and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience. When the act was proposed in Congress, it was used to target websites that are putting forth unanswered questions about the 9/11 attacks, and threatened to shut them down.

Threatening to limit the information available on the internet is a slippery slope, because it is the last bastion of free media we have. More and more people are becoming disillusioned with mainstream press and have helped the internet emerge as a powerful media resource. The public is now looking on the internet to sift through the information that is under reported or falsely portrayed in newspapers and television. Because of this, extremely important organizations such as Project Censored and Common Dreams have arisen, and are taking a stand on pushing these issues to the forefront. Only independent media organizations such as these can help the restoration of a democracy and the essential role of its informed citizenry.

The systematic dismantling of our Constitution is happening unabated. If the mainstream press did its job and primarily focused on these very important topics, then the public might be more apt to vote or participate in the democratic process on a larger scale. We need an objective reporting of the facts and a press that emphasizes the importance of a responsible and active citizenry, so that we can re-establish everything our country was built on. We can stop the deterioration of our democratic process and America can once again be the shining exemplar of freedom in the world.

***UPDATE

To find out more about media consolidation and the six major corporations that effectively guide the mainstream media’s output of information watch this video.

***UPDATE

Although the Bush administration is out of office, the same constitutional erosions still apply to Obama’s reign. In March of 2010, Obama signed an extension to the controversial Patriot Act without any reforms. Additionally, Obama has sided with the Bush Administration on key civil liberties issues dealing with terror detainees, military commissions, warrantless wiretapping and national security secrets. 

The ACLU chief, Anthony Romero, has recently stated in an interview with Politico that he is “disgusted” with Obama and his position on civil liberties. He explains his point-

“It’s 18 months and, if not now, when? … Guantanamo is still not closed. Military commissions are still a mess. The administration still uses state secrets to shield themselves from litigation. There’s no prosecution for criminal acts of the Bush administration. Surveillance powers put in place under the Patriot Act have been renewed. If there has been change in the civil liberties context, I frankly don’t see it.”

President Obama is a former Harvard law professor and head of the Harvard Law Review. Unlike Bush, Obama is an expert on civil liberties, the bill of rights and the Constitution. During his campaign, Obama repeated the promise that he would restore civil liberties and work to dismantle the Bush/Cheney war on the Constitution, but he has failed on all fronts to fulfill this promise. Just because there has been a transference of administrations doesn’t mean our civil liberties have been magically restored. Obama has been seated into a benevolent dictatorship by inheriting and adopting the Bush administration’s legislative policies and just because there is a different face on the same policies doesn’t mean we should forget about the freedoms that have been curtailed. Instead, we must be even more viligant and steadfast in the movement for accountability and restoration of the rule of law.

Written by Abby Martin

May, 2010

WHITE FUNGUS– Welcome to White Fungus Issue #11 – some falling debris from Taichung City, Taiwan.

Well it’s been a pathetic year for hope, peace and change.

Despite the mood for self-congratulation among liberals and progressives following the election of Obama, the ones with real cause to celebrate were the marketing gurus who ushered in the new feeling of ‘Yes We Can.’

Pipping corporate luminaries such as Apple Computers and Dell, “Brand Obama” was named Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008. The Age’s executives put it succinctly “as we have been marketing candidates like commodities ever since Ronald Reagan, I think this was the best we ever did.”

It was the triumph of feeling and spectacle over achievement of specific policy pronouncements. And despite escalating wars, the capitulation to Wall Street and pseudo posturing on the environment, for many the rallying cry is still ‘patience’, ‘give it time’ and ‘it’s not easy.’

In the face of massive global catastrophes the call is for measured incrementalism towards meager and unsubstantiated goals.

There’s been a tendency to view Obama – the kind of guy liberals would like to have a beer with – as some kind of friend, sweetheart or long lost family member, rather than as the one thing he ascertainably is, a politician.

And while liberals and progressives are now getting antsy, as their positions become increasingly untenable, and their fantasy turns into a nightmare. When it comes to criticizing Obama, the gloves are very much still on.

Talking to Larry King before the recent Afghanistan surge, Michael Moore, one of Bush’s most prominent critics, rallied against escalation but had nothing but praise for the new Decider in Chief.

“I think it’s impressive that he’s a thoughtful man. It’s great to have a smart person in the White House who really thinks about the cost of human life before making a big decision like this… I am so glad we have that man in the White House, even though I may have, whatever disagreements… I know this is weighing on him and I’m going to trust in all my heart that he’s going to make the right decisions….”

Even before the election, Naomi Klein warned Obama supporters that “if you’ve proven you’re a doormat, you can pretty much expect to get stomped on.”

And that has clearly been the pattern for this administration to date: dangle a carrot, such as the ‘public option’ to employ progressives as foot soldiers, then pull the rug out towards the end of the process, tout victory and enact corporate-friendly ‘reform.’

In his prescient article Are Liberals Pathetic?, Chris Hedges quotes Ralph Nadar who asks “What is the breaking point? The escalation of war in Afghanistan? The criminal war in Iraq? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put workers in their place? There is no breaking point.”

Hedge concludes: “So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.”

© WHITE FUNGUS, 2010

(Videos Below)

SALON– Andrew Sullivan rightly recommends this new Atlantic article by David Freed, which details how the FBI and a mindless, stenographic American media combined to destroy the life of Steven Hatfill.  Hatfill is the former U.S. Government scientist who for years was publicly depicted as the anthrax attacker and subjected to Government investigations so invasive and relentless that they forced him into almost total seclusion, paralysis and mental instability, only to have the Government years later (in 2008) acknowledge that he had nothing to do with those attacks and to pay him $5.8 million to settle the lawsuit he brought.  There are two crucial lessons that ought to be learned from this horrible — though far-from-rare — travesty:

(1) It requires an extreme level of irrationality to read what happened to Hatfill and simultaneously to have faith that the “real anthrax attacker” has now been identified as a result of the FBI’s wholly untested and uninvestigated case against Bruce Ivins.  The parallels are so overwhelming as to be self-evident.

Just as was true for the case against Hatfill, the FBI’s case against Ivins is riddled with scientific and evidentiary holes.  Much of the public case against Ivins, as was true for Hatfill, was made by subservient establishment reporters mindlessly passing on dubious claims leaked by their anonymous government sources.  So unconvincing is the case against Ivins that even the most establishment, government-trusting voices — including key members of Congress, leading scientific journals and biological weapons experts, and the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall St. Journal — have all expressed serious doubts over the FBI’s case and have called for further, independent investigations.

Yet just as was true for years with the Hatfill accusations, no independent investigations are taking place.  That’s true for three reasons.  First, the FBI drove Ivins to suicide, thus creating an unwarranted public assumption of guilt and ensuring the FBI’s case would never be subjected to the critical scrutiny of a trial — exactly what would have happened with Hatfill had he, like Ivins, succumbed to that temptation, as Freed describes:

The next morning, driving through Georgetown on the way to visit one of his friends in suburban Maryland, I ask Hatfill how close he came to suicide. The muscles in his jaw tighten.

“That was never an option,” Hatfill says, staring straight ahead. “If I would’ve killed myself, I would’ve been automatically judged by the press and the FBI to be guilty.”

Second, the American media — with some notable exceptions — continued to do to Ivins what it did to Hatfill and what it does in general:  uncritically disseminate government claims rather than questioning or investigating them for accuracy.  As a result, many Americans continue to blindly assume any accusations that come from the Government must be true.  As Freed writes, in a passage with significance far beyond the Hatfill case:

The same, Hatfill believes, cannot be said about American civil liberties. “I was a guy who trusted the government,” he says. “Now, I don’t trust a damn thing they do.” He trusts reporters even less, dismissing them as little more than lapdogs for law enforcement.

The media’s general willingness to report what was spoon-fed to them, in an effort to reassure a frightened public that an arrest was not far off, is somewhat understandable considering the level of fear that gripped the nation following 9/11. But that doesn’t “justify the sliming of Steven Hatfill,” says Edward Wasserman, who is the Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, in Virginia. “If anything, it’s a reminder that an unquestioning media serves as a potential lever of power to be activated by the government, almost at will.“

No matter how many times the Government and media jointly disseminate outright lies to the American citizenry — remember Iraq, or Jessica Lynch’s heroic Rambo-like firefight with Evil Iraqi Villains, or Pat Tillman’s death at the hands of Al Qaeda Monsters, or all the gloriously successful air strikes and raids on Terrorists that never happened? — that propagandistic process never weakens.  As a result, many Americans (especially when their party is in power) simply place blind faith in whatever the Government claims (even when the claims are issued anonymously and accompanied by no tested evidence).  Hence, the Government claims it knows that Ivins is the anthrax killer; the American media largely affirms that claim; and, for so many people, that’s the end of the story, no matter how many times that exact process has so woefully misled them and no matter how many credible and even mainstream sources question it.

Third, the Obama administration is actively and aggressively blocking any efforts to investigate the FBI’s case against Ivins through an Obama veto threat, based on the Orwellian, backward claim that such an investigation “would undermine public confidence” in the FBI’s case “and unfairly cast doubt on its conclusions.”  As explained in a letter to the Obama administration by Rep. Rush Holt, the former physicist who represents the New Jersey district from which the anthrax letters were sent:

The Bureau has asserted repeatedly and with confidence that the “Amerithrax” investigation is the most thorough they have ever conducted — claims they made even as they were erroneously pursuing Dr. Steven Hatfill. . . . Many critical questions in this case remain unanswered, and there are many reasons why there is not, nor ever has been, public confidence in the investigation or the FBI’s conclusions, precisely because it was botched at multiple points over more than eight years. Indeed, opposing an independent examination of any aspect of the investigation will only fuel the public’s belief that the FBI’s case could not hold up in court, and that in fact the real killer may still be at large.

The anthrax attacks were one of the most significant political events of this generation — as significant as the 9/11 attack, if not more so, in creating the climate of fear that prevailed (and still prevails) in the U.S., which, in turn, spawned so much expansion of government power.  It is worth remembering what happened in the Hatfill case in order to be reminded of just how inexcusable it is that there has been no independent investigation of the case against Ivins and that the current administration is now aggressively and quite strangely blocking any efforts to do so.

(2) More generally, it is hard to overstate the authoritarian impulses necessary for someone — even in the wake of numerous cases like Steven Hatfill’s — to place blind faith in government accusations without needing to see any evidence or have that evidence subjected to adversarial scrutiny.  Yet that is exactly the blind faith that dominates so many of our political debates.

Throughout the Bush years, anyone who argued against warrantless surveillance, or torture, or lawless detention and rendition, was met with this response:  but this is all being done to Terrorists.  What they actually meant was:  these are people accused by the Government, with no evidence or trials, of being Terrorists.  But the authoritarian mind, by definition, recognizes no distinction between “Our leaders claim X” and “X is true.”  For them, the former is proof of the latter.  Identically, those who now argue against due-process-free presidential assassinations of American citizens and charge-less indefinite detentions are met with a similar response:  but these are dangerous people who are trying to kill Americans, when what they actually mean is:  Obama officials claim, with no evidence shown and no process given, that these are dangerous people trying to kill Americans.  The authoritarian mind refuses to recognize any distinction between those two very different propositions.

No matter how many Steven Hatfills there are — indeed, no matter how undeniable is the evidence that the Government repeatedly accused people of being Terrorists who were no such thing, even while knowing the accusations were false — the authoritarians among us continue to blindly recite unproven Government accusations (but he’s a Terrorist!) to justify the most extreme detention, surveillance and even assassination policies, all without needing or wanting any due process or evidence.  No matter how many times it is shown how unreliable those kinds of untested government accusations are (either due to abuse or error), there is no shortage of people willing to place blind faith in such pronouncements and to vest political leaders with all sorts of unchecked powers to act on them.

Written by Glenn Greenwald

© COPYRIGHT SALON.COM, 2010

History Channel documentary about the Athrax attacks in which they disclose that the Anthrax didn’t originate from Iraq like the Bush administration said- instead it originated in a highly secure US government laboratory.

Keith Olbermann gives a special comment about Bruce Ivins, the man who was aggressively persecuted by the government and media, allegedly forcing him to take his own life because of the allegations. Now evidence is being uncovered that suggests he wasn’t the perpetrator of the attacks after all. David Williams of the LA Times tells Olbermann that he would be “shocked” if the Justice Department didn’t provide the totality of the evidence against Bruce Ivins in the public sphere, but to this day there hasn’t been any solid evidence provided.