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Insanedawg 
Posts: 26
(8/22/02 3:27 am)
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Thinking about 9/11
Posted by TheFakeG at The Flame Place:
Found this on another site, it's a good read
"DO NOT FORGET"
I sat in a movie theater watching "Schindler's List," asked myself, "Why didn't the Jews fight back?"
Now I know why.
I sat in a movie theater, watching "Pearl Harbor" and asked myself, "Why weren't we prepared?"
Now I know why.
Civilized people cannot fathom, much less predict, the actions of evil people.
On September 11, dozens of capable airplane passengers allowed themselves to be overpowered by a handful of poorly armed terrorists because they did not comprehend the depth of hatred that motivated their captors.
On September 11, thousands of innocent people were murdered because too many Americans naively reject the reality that some nations are dedicated to the dominance of others. Many political pundits, pacifists and media personnel want us to forget the carnage. They say we must focus on the bravery of the rescuers and ignore the cowardice of the killers. They implore us to understand the motivation of the perpetrators. Major television stations have announced they will assist the healing process by not replaying devastating footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers.
I will not be manipulated.
I will not pretend to understand.
I will not forget.
I will not forget the liberal media who abused freedom of the press to kick our country when it was vulnerable and hurting.
I will not forget that CBS anchor Dan Rather preceded President Bush's address to the nation with the snide remark, "No matter how you feel about him, he is still our president."
I will not forget that ABC TV anchor Peter Jennings questioned President Bush's motives for not returning immediately to Washington, DC and commented, "We're all pretty skeptical and cynical about Washington."
And I will not forget that ABC's Mark Halperin warned if reporters weren't informed of every little detail of this war, they aren't "likely -- nor should they be expected -- to show deference."
I will not isolate myself from my fellow Americans by pretending an attack on the USS Cole in Yemen was not an attack on the United States of America.
I will not forget the Clinton administration equipped Islamic terrorists and their supporters with the world's most sophisticated telecommunications equipment and encryption technology, thereby compromising America's ability to trace terrorist radio, cell phone, land lines, faxes and modem communications.
I will not be appeased with pointless, quick retaliatory strikes like those perfected by the previous administration.
I will not be comforted by "feel-good, do nothing" regulations like the silly "Have your bags been under your control?" question at the airport.
I will not be influenced by so called,"antiwar demonstrators" who exploit the right of expression to chant anti-American obscenities.
I will not forget the moral victory handed the North Vietnamese by American war protesters who reviled and spat upon the returning soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines.
I will not be softened by the wishful thinking of pacifists who chose reassurance over reality.
I will embrace the wise words of Prime Minister Tony Blair who told Labor Party conference, "They have no moral inhibition on the slaughter of the innocent. If they could have murdered not 7,000 but 70,000, does anyone doubt they would have done so and rejoiced in it?
There is no compromise possible with such people, no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must!"
I will force myself to:
-hear the weeping
-feel the helplessness
-imagine the terror
-sense the panic
-smell the burning flesh
-experience the loss
-remember the hatred.
I sat in a movie theater, watching "Private Ryan" and asked myself, "Where did they find the courage?"
Now I know.
We have no choice. Living without liberty is not living.
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Insanedawg
Posts: 27
(22/8/02 11:30)
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Re: Thinking about 9/11
Big Mikes reply:
Liberal media this, liberal media that. Next thing you know, you are going to blame Peter Jennings for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Guess what people. The media is biased but no more so than you, me or anybody else. You can listen to Limbaugh, O' Reilly and the rest of the right wing whackos bitch, moan and groan until the cows come home about how their voice isn't being heard when for the past 20 years of Reaganomics, this is all that we have heard. It's very idealistic to ask the press not to be neutral in a news story, but it's not going to happen. You can say the same thing about an umpire or a referee giving a call to a home team that he would never give to an away team because that would mean that the ref wouldn't make it out of the arena alive. Then to blame the media for exploiting us for 9-11 ??? I suppose your next comment is that the president of NBC News helped bankroll Bin Laden so that NBC's News ratings would go up. If the media is so damn liberal, why did they constantly hound and harrass ( not that he didn't deserve it ) Clinton for 8 years. I suppose you're going to say that if it weren't for the Republicans, that would have gotten swept under the rug too. EVERYTHING that is going on right now goes much deeper than the media and to use them as a scapegoat is asinine.
Any thoughts on this discussion. I suppose you could just go to the flame place, but I know you dont all go there.
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Hugemon 
Posts: 296
(25/8/02 8:32)
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 Re: Thinking about 9/11
Without naming any specific posters, I'd like to comment on a few things here that I have serious issues with...starting with THIS comment...
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I will not be manipulated.
!!!~ROTFLMFAO~!!!
This is just about the most hysterically funny thing that I have read in months.
Ironically, the very same people that urge you towards making these types of declarations have ALREADY BEEN "manipulated".
So much so, in fact, that they are NOW trying to manipulate YOU into accepting & sharing their point of view, and as is almost ALWAYS the case, into toe-ing their own particular political party's official lines.
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Civilized people cannot fathom, much less predict, the actions of evil people.
There is a big difference between being civilized, and being blind to the truth, deaf to the screams of thousands, & ignorant of the facts.
Above all, I find it pretty damned arrogant for anyone to even SUGGEST that civilized=innocent. Add to that last declaration my unbridled opinion that America is NEITHER civilized, NOR innocent.
"We" as Americans currently seem to be little more than a collective army of rabid dogs, howling & yowling madly, as we continually nip at the heels of those dogs who make the supreme mistake of not being EXACTLY the same as "we" are, and we ONLY *nip* those offenders when we cannot exterminate them entirely.
America used to be the "Land of the FREE & Home of the BRAVE".
Now, America is the Land of the Intolerant A$$HOLE, where "we" collectively say, Don't you DARE deny me MY god-given rights to STOMP OUT the god-given rights of OTHERS!
Let me be the FIRST to publicly admit the following:
I AM TRYING TO MANIPULATE YOU.
I might be just as big of an opinionated A$$HOLE as anybody else, but at least *I* admit it.
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On September 11, thousands of innocent people were murdered because too many Americans naively reject the reality that some nations are dedicated to the dominance of others.
ROTFLMFAO....and would "we" be ANY different, if America wasn't one of the MOST powerful countries in the world, able to dictate its foriegn policy to other governments, backed by our near-supreme military might? IMHO, the answer to that question would be a definite NO. America isn't scratching & clawing it's way to the top for the simple fact that America is already the TOP DOG.
And being any kind of success will ALWAYS make you many enemies. Talk about being naive...it's a simple fact of human nature that America has enemies because "we" are so powerful.
People have called me PARANOID because I go to such lengths to protect myself on the internet. I consider them to be truly and innocently IGNORANT of the dangers involved. I can guarantee you that if *I* had been in charge, Sept 11th would never have happened, specifically because I AM PARANOID...and I am also THAT DAMNED GOOD.
People also seem to be claiming that America is GUILTLESS, but I honestly don't think that is anywhere NEAR the case. We've simply done a better job of covering "our" collective asses, whenever it became necessary to shield our MANY injustices from the "public eye".
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I will not forget the liberal media who abused freedom of the press to kick our country when it was vulnerable and hurting.
Liberal THIS - Conservative THAT. Shut the F@CK UP with your manipulative buzzwords.
....Oh, I'm sorry...wasn't that a Politically Correct statement?
Lest anybody get excited, the above comment was meant to further illustrate how many of todays criticisms are broadly applied to any one individual's opinions. Everywhere I look, I see one STEREOTYPE or another, being thrown blatantly around, in an attempt to discredit the actions & statements of totally separate individuals.
God knows, somebody out there, reading this right NOW, is labling ME as belonging to some freakish group that they don't particularly care for. Guess what? I honestly couldn't care less.
I got news for ya, if you think that ALL democrats, republicans, liberals, or conservatives are either GOOD or BAD. There are good & bad people on every side of practically every issue. Wolves have discovered how easily they can sneak up on their prey by wearing sheep's clothing.
Just like the recent discovery of the Catholic Priests molesting little boys shows, you cannot always accept people as they appear to be.
Here's a story that you may also be interested in :
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National ID: An American Horror Story
By
Tom DeWeese
Too good Reports [Weekender, July 28, 2002; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/
"Show me your papers. Where have you been? Where are you going? What authorization do you have to be here? Please come with me." Lines from an old World War II movie about Nazi Germany? Dialog from the old Soviet Union? An American nightmare? All three, actually.
A nation must first issue identification papers before it can demand to see them. The first part of the coming nightmare is now proceeding at full speed.
Two Northern Virginia Congressmen, Jim Moran (D) and Tom Davis (R) have teamed up to introduce the "Driver's License Modernization Act of 2002" (H.R.4633). The bill calls for state driver's licenses to include a computer chip with the owner's fingerprint or eye scan. Moran and Davis say they just want to help prevent "identity theft" and, by the way, "we think what happened on September 11th makes a compelling case to do it now."
Under the Clinton Administration, Americans were continuously told that intrusive government regulations were for the "good of the children." Since September 11th massive moves by the government against civil liberties are all wrapped in the "fight against terrorism." H.R. 4633 is nothing new. It just carries a couple of new excuses for shackling the American people with 24-hour surveillance of their every move.
The truth is the Moran-Davis bill has absolutely nothing to do with fighting terrorism. A national "smart driver's license" would be worthless in that effort. This bill has its roots deeply imbedded in the effort to establish a national ID card back in 1996. That year, national identification card provisions were quietly placed in three key bills, including the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, the Welfare Reform Act and the Kennedy-Kassenbaum Health Care Reform Act.
In each bill, identical language called for the federal Department of Transportation (DOT) to coordinate with the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) to standardize each state's driver's license to contain a unique numeric identifier for the purposes of becoming a national identification card. The law was supposed to go into effect on October 1, 2000.
The legislation called for the new ID cards to be used for obtaining services including buying a plane ticket, opening a bank account, obtaining employment, obtaining medical care, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and buying firearms. The reasons given for the creation of the card varied from protecting medical privacy to stopping illegal immigration, to catching deadbeat dads. The law was quietly stopped just months before it was to go into effect by an amendment from Alabama Senator Richard Shelby.
However, the bureaucrats had already completed the basic plan for a national ID, and the apparatus was in place. Since it was stopped in 1999, various efforts have been undertaken to put the national ID back on track. Those efforts were failing regularly, until September 11th.
Under the bill, states would have five years to begin issuing licenses with computer chips that would store "biometric" data, including either a fingerprint or retinal scan. A business or government agency that wanted to check the cardholder's identity could take a reading from the person and compare it with the image on the chip. The bill would also mandate the establishment of standards for documents accepted by states to "better establish the identity of the person applying for a driver's license or non-driver ID card." Nothing in this bill is different from the 1996 game plan that was thwarted.
Why is the idea so frightening to all who love liberty? Why should all Americans rise up and oppose the implementation of a national identification card? Some ask, how can we afford to be so cavalier about security when "terrorists lurk in every metro tunnel and nuclear power plant?"
It won't serve only to convince most Americans why national ID's are America's coming nightmare simply by saying government tracking of its citizens is contrary to a free society and that absolute power by the government means absolute control of the citizens. That argument should be enough, but since most Americans have now been conditioned to look to government for every solution, instead of to themselves, we now have to be shown why the mechanics of a national ID won't save us from terrorism.
One: the government can't handle the workload it already has. Thirty percent of all the information in current federal data banks is incorrect. Getting it corrected forces one to interface with bureaucrats who order you to stand in line (or wait on hold), take a number and prove your case. The free American citizen can only stand back and wait and hope that the problem was solved. If not, the process begins again.
Two: Now, consider that same process when your entire life is wrapped up in a "smart" card that contains the ability to access your bank accounts, credit card, ATM card, personal information (including taxes), business records, employment records, education records, even traffic tickets. What happens if your records are mixed up with a felon's? You are stopped for a routine traffic violation; the policeman's onboard computer flashes a warrant for your arrest, but it's only a mistake. Who do you call? How do you prove who you are? The official computer is law.
Three: Those who support this bill think that by inserting all kinds of high-tech uses of biometrics that they are making the card fool-proof. They are only fooling themselves while shackling honest people. Criminals, especially terrorists backed by rich nations know how to trick biometrics scanners. Recently, the Fraunhofer Research Institute in Darmstadt, Germany set out to see if it could beat such security systems. It did, easily.
Americans are being stampeded into accepting false solutions to the war on terrorism. A national ID card is only a challenge for terrorists to overcome, but it will be a nightmare for honest American citizens.
Politicians continue to deny they intend to implement such a system, but a reading of plans already drawn up by the AAMVA clearly show the intention to unite the data banks of every DMV in the nation with those of federal agencies. Those plans have been supported by Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. The details are spelled out in the Driver's License Modernization Act of 2002 (H.R. 4633).
Despite denials, it all leads to a national identification system that will become the big-brother nightmare of government snooping and authorizing every move Americans make. The loss of our freedom to travel and to keep our personal lives to ourselves will be lost. The national ID is the greatest threat to freedom. H.R. 4633 is that threat in legislative form. There is no middle ground. Americans must choose which America they want and send that message to Washington now.
 | Behold, a pale horse, and the man that sat on him was Death |
| ...and HELL followed with him |
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TARL FURY1962 
Posts: 11
(24/8/03 2:23)
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 Bush family whitewashing in Iraq & Nazi Germany
By Chris Floyd
Holocaust revisionism took decades to rear its ugly head, but the whitewashers of war crimes in the Bush Regime are trying to pervert the facts of history mere weeks after their Leader triumphantly declared "mission accomplished" in the war on Iraq. "Weapons of mass destruction?" Never heard of 'em. Never mentioned 'em. Maybe we'll find some. Not that important. Time to move on. Hey, how about a tax cut?
But even as revisionist-in-chief George W. Bush was staging his somber photo-op in Auschwitz last week, the web of lies he and his little buddy Tony Blair concocted to "justify" launching an act of military aggression--on the very Hitlerian grounds of "preventive war"--was being shredded by their own intelligence services. In an unprecedented move, U.S and British spies went public to denounce the cartoonish manipulation of professional intelligence data by the war-hungry leaders. Reports of Saddam's "imminent threat" were "sexed up" on Blair's order, said UK spooks, while American agents said Bush was spoonfed a stew of uncorroborated confabulation by a "special team" of ideological hatchet-men overseen by Pentagon honcho Don Rumsfeld. Congressional and Parliamentary probes are now afoot.
In the end, the "weapons of mass destruction" that the Christian Coalition had sworn were "armed and ready" to unleash unspeakable carnage on the world turned out to be--by Bush's own admission--a couple of trucks, which contained not a speck of hazardous material. Not exactly the fearsome arsenal the Dear Leader had invoked, in ever-increasing detail, throughout the long buildup to aggression. The actual CIA report which Bush cited was even more--or rather, less--revealing, noting that the trucks' designs were in fact consistent with their stated purpose: the production of hydrogen for weather balloons, Slate.com reports.
Thus revisionism--panicky, cynical, maladroit--was the order of the day. Rumsfeld--whose smirking rictus of iron certainty was a mainstay of the drive to war--began backing off big-time. Maybe there ***weren't*** any WMD, he shrugged; maybe Saddam destroyed them before the war. Unfortunately, the UK press dug up a quote from St. Tony himself on the subject: "We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." But to be fair, Blair's broadside ***was*** fired long ago, practically in cave-man times: March 18, 2003, to be exact. It's certainly irrelevant in our go-go modern world, where history is written with water and each day is a new blank page.
So it was most apt that the only question Bush was heard to ask during his Auschwitz tour actually dealt with Holocaust revisionism: "Do people challenge the accuracy of what you present?" he asked his guide, the New York Times reports. This might seem a rather bizarre question at first glance--but then, Bush has a personal stake in the cultivation of historical amnesia. His own family fortune was built in part by a long and profitable collusion with the Nazis--an ugly story oft told here, and raked up again by Newsweek Poland during the presidential visit.
Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, and Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, helped finance the rise of the Nazi Party through their intimate entanglements with Nazi industrial, shipping and banking interests. This long (and well-documented) collaboration continued even after America was at war with Nazi Germany. It seems the blood money was just too good to pass up--even if it had to be dug out of the corpses of young American soldiers and innocent civilians throughout Europe and North Africa. The Walker-Bush cabal's Nazi partners also helped finance--then profited from--the Auschwitz camp. Finally, in 1942, the U.S. government seized the Walker-Bush Nazi assets under the Trading With the Enemy Act. But the well-connected clan managed to bury the news in the back pages: brief mentions of the companies involved, but no names of the Establishment grandees behind them. They also pulled strings to keep their American assets from being seized as well, even though the profits from these enterprises were inextricably mixed with their Nazi loot. Prescott later cashed in these tainted assets for millions, a nest egg that helped launch him into the Senate and his son and grandson into the White House.
So perhaps George Walker Bush felt uneasy treading on the bone-ash that lies beneath the soft, green grass of Auschwitz. Or perhaps not. For quietly buried in the back pages last week was news that the Walker-Bush tradition of war profiteering carries on. A small brief in the Financial Times revealed that Bush-connected "reconstruction" firms Halliburton and Bechtel, now in control of Iraq's oil fields, want to raise massive bank loans using future oil profits as collateral. In other words, these Establishment grandees will pocket billions in free money that will have to be paid back later by the Iraqi people, if and when their oil fields are returned.
Both companies made millions with Saddam during the dictator's murderous heyday: Bechtel helped build Saddam's mustard-gas plants, while Halliburton, under Cheney, pocketed $73 million working with Saddam's UN-sanctioned regime after the first Gulf War. Meanwhile, Halliburton--which still pays Cheney a tidy annual sum--was handed yet another no-bid Iraq contract last week: $400 million in government grease this time.
That's the way of the war profiteers, these men of "honor and integrity" who build their family fortunes, their corporate treasuries and their political dynasties on bone-ash. The grass they tread is always soft.
Quote:
Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times
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TARL FURY1962
Posts: 12
(24/8/03 2:29)
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Jon Lovitz for President!!!
White House Chief of Staff Jon Lovitz
yeah...! that's the ticket!
In light of the recent announcements by many in the Bush administration that "the president should not have used that piece of intelligence [Iraq's alleged attempt to buy uranium from Niger] in his State of the Union address," and in hopes of clearing his legacy completely, former President Bill Clinton has issued a statement: "I should not have had sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky."
Well, that should clear that up.
An absurd supposition?
Why?
If a sitting president can wipe the slate clean at a time when he was trying to convince the American people that invading Iraq was in our national security interests and misleading the country into a war in which our men and women as well as thousands of Iraqi civilians would die, certainly an admission of having sex should put an end to the diatribe that still fills the AM dial.
It seems like the entire administration is in lockstep over this little "oversight."
Donald Rumsfeld testified in front of a congressional hearing last week saying that he just found out about the Niger report being false in the last couple days. And he said it with a straight face.
Is Saturday Night Live alum Jon Lovitz running this administration?
"Yeah, I, uh, didn't know about the forgery until just this week. I, uh, was out of the office and forgot to read any CIA reports or newspapers over the past year.
"Yeah, that's the ticket."
Then on this ABC's Sunday morning "This Week," Rumsfeld said that he meant he had heard about it a few weeks ago.
Pressed, he said the weeks actually add up to four months.
"Four weeks, yeah, that's what I meant. Y'see, in the Defense Department, saying 'couple' means, um, 'four' and 'days' means 'months.'
"Yeah, that's what I meant."
This comedy bit gets even better.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- who first said that the President using the statement, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," was a mistake -- followed it up a day later by saying, "The statement that he made was indeed accurate."
"Yeah, when I said 'mistake,' I was saying that it was, uh, an 'accurate mistake1' You're allowed to do that when you're a president because, uh, all the Presidents are doing it.
"Yeah, that's what I meant!"
Being that it is the British who are saying that the statement is true, Rice was asked whether she or her colleagues in the administration had seen additional British evidence. To that Rice said, "The British have reasons, because of the arrangements that they made, apparently, in receiving those sources, that they cannot share them with us. We have every reason to believe that the British services are quite reliable."
Yuh. President Bush shares all the security-privileged information that lead Blair and the English to become our warring comrades in Iraq, and when the Bush administration becomes embroiled in as large a potential scandal as this has become, Blair refuses to share the information that would clear up the matter for his bud tout de suite because of his country's "arrangements".
Even Lovitz would have a hard time waxing that's the ticket on this one.
And the jokes keep on keepin' on.
Rice does Harry Truman proud when she passes the righteous buck saying that it was the CIA that cleared Bush's State of the Union speech in its entirety, including a sentence alleging that Iraq was seeking to buy nuclear material from Africa.
"If the CIA -- the director of central intelligence -- had said take this out of the speech -- it would have been gone," Rice said. "We have a high standard for the president's speeches."
Rice also added, "I'm not blaming anyone here."
Well, I'm sure CIA Director George Tenet is breathing a sigh of relief. Now all he has to do is to come up with a Lovitz-inspired rationale for missing that small detail.
"My, uh, dog ate the speech. Yeah, that's it. I forgot to feed him that day and he's really fond of misinformation.
"Yeah -- that's the ticket!"
Another one of the administration's "Whose Lie... um, Line Is It Anyway" wannabes is Secretary of State Colin Powell, who only eight days after the State of the Union, when addressing the United Nations, deliberately left out any reference to Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa. "There was no effort or attempt on the part of the president or anyone else in the Administration to mislead or to deceive the American people," said Powell. "I didn't use the uranium at that point because I didn't think that was sufficiently strong as evidence to present before the world."
"Yeah, that's it. I didn't tell it to the world because the world is, uh, a lot more important than the citizens of the United States.
"Yeah, that's the ticket."
Powell said he also read the State of the Union speech before it was delivered and understood it had been seen and cleared by the intelligence community
CIA officials say they warned members of the president's National Security Council staff that the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa. Even so, Tenet has an extenuating excuse, er, um, circumstance too. Intelligence officials say Tenet never saw the final draft of the State of the Union.
"Yeah, I heard of it. But, uh, I was really busy with the, uh, spy, Bond thing. Y'know. Tenet, George Tenet."
"Yeah, that's the ticket."
And finally, what of the star of this hilarious sketch?
Besides throwing the blame on the CIA and Tenet, President Bush said, "There's going to be, you know, a lot of attempts to try to rewrite history, and I can understand that. But I'm absolutely confident in the decision I made."
"Rewrite history?" Who's doing the rewriting? Isn't "rewriting history" something someone does when he takes the truth and twists it until it comes out sounding like whatever he needs to accomplish his own objective?
Yeah, that's the ticket.
-- by Steve Young
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TARL FURY1962
Posts: 13
(24/8/03 2:37)
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Weapons of Mass DECEPTION
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Quote:
He thinks men honest,that do but seem to be so. -Othello
The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state," were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.
To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but reformed spin doctors or, even better, two of the most seasoned investigators into the dark arts of political propaganda, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton.
Stauber and Rampton run PR Watch, the Madison, Wisconsin-based group that keeps tabs on the nefarious schemes of the global PR industry to sugarcoat useless, costly and dangerous products. They have also written three of the most important non-fiction books of the last decade. In 1995, they published Toxic Sludge is Good For You, a detailed expose of how the PR industry plots and executes campaigns to greenwash corporate malfeasance. This was followed by the prescient and disturbing Mad Cow USA. Last year, they produced Trust Us We're Experts, a grim and exacting account of the way scientists-for-hire are deployed to rationalize the risks of dangerous products and smear opponents as know-nothings and worrywarts.
Now comes their exquisitely timed Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. Here Stauber and Rampton give us an immediate history, a real-time deconstruction of the mechanics of the Bush war machine. This lushly documented book is a chilling catalog of lies and deceptions, which shows the press contretemps over the Niger yellowcake forgeries to be but a minor distraction given the outlandish frauds pullulating daily from the White House and the Pentagon. The history Rampton and Stauber recounts is every bit as groundbreaking as Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent and War Without Mercy, John Dower's riveting account of the vile uses of propaganda against Japan during World War II. Weapons of Mass Deceptions shreds the lies, and the motives behind them, as they were being told and describes the techniques of the cover-up as they were being spun.
Stauber and Rampton cut through the accumulated media fog to reveal how the war on Saddam was conceived and how the media battle plan developed and deployed. The identify the key players behind the scenes who stage-managed the countdown to war and follow their paper trails back through the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.
Most of this book was written well before the invasion of Iraq. Yet, the story it relates is only now being nibbled at by the mainstream press, which had done so much to promote the vaporous deceptions of the Bush administration. Stauber and Rampton expose the gaping holes in the Bush administration's war brief and shine an unforgiving light on the neo-con ministers, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, who concocted the war in the sebaceous quadrants of the White House and the Pentagon, over the objections of the senior analysts at the CIA and State Department.
The two journalists also trace in comic detail the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?
Stauber and Rampton offer the best explanation to date. Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.
Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were diposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fallback position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war supported by the US) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush pr machine was: Move on. Don't explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable not to justify it.
The Bush claque of neo-con hawks viewed the Iraq war a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. Stauber and Rampton demonstrate in convincing and step-by-step detail how the same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war.
To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spin meisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was either shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers who Powell tapped as Undersecretary of State in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was the grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses Ogilvey and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
At the state department, Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of US foreign policy." She extracted more than $500 million from congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming US propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.
"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers. "All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of US policy.
Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange none-the-less. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international-a kind of informational carpetbombing.
The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the US war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."
Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all afterplay.
Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Prior to becoming Rumsfeld's mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton's DC office.
Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bi-partisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Galen, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.
The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Arkansas. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. The seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs' felicitous influence peddling may help to explain why the damning references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were redacted from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.
According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.
Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these pr executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin that combat.
At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the DC firm the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington's heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for both Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.
As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.
Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the US bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of the group's work there.
But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by US troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."
The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associated to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.
So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf psy-ops, the privatization of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."
What exactly, pray tell, is perception management? Well, the Pentagon defines it this way: "actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning."
In other words, lying about the intentions of the US government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories in the press.
Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media is manipulated for political objectives. So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic Influence, the Pentagon shut down the operation and the press gloated with satisfaction on its victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that will he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue. "You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You can have the name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have."
At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the UN and even NATO, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the US overwhelmingly opposed the war.
Domestically, it was a different story.
A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction.
Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies. Not about tactics or strategy or war plans. But about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 percent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 percent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn't have any weaponized chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon pr flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.
This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception."
During the Vietnam war, tv images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the US withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using tv as a force to propel the US into a war that no one really wanted.
What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the US army functioned as "our protectors." The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and everything they can ask of us."
When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battled, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of self-less rescuers, knights in camo and nightvision goggles. Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-tv-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.
The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and US soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.
"A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue, director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about about installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign tv news crews banished from Baghdad.
Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3 to 1 margin.
Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war."
The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the US government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for the United States." This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi television?"
The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
How times have changed. In 1987, Mylorie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She penned an article for the New Republic titled Back Iraq: Time for a US Tilt in the Mideast, arguing that the US should publicly embrace Saddam's secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than the minor demon himself, Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar," wrote Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."
In the roll-out for the war, Mylorie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows and op-ed pages.
Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the message and made sure they all stayed on the same theme. "There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a slightly different way," said Benador. "If not people get scared." Scared of intentions of their own government.
It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case for war detailed by Stauber and Rampton (and other independent journalists) were right there for the mainstream press to unearth and expose. Instead, the US press, just like the oil companies, cravenly sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.
Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."
The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.
It's war that sells.
There's a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.
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