Lying Murderers and the Media Who Protect Them

The housing crisis, hurricanes, political corruption, Wall Street meltdowns and major, OVERT wars on two fronts. Pakistan soldiers have been told to fire at American soldiers who have crossed the border into their sovereign country. We comfortably ponder the insanity that has become normal while people who live in other places spend their days in fear of US missiles crashing into their homes. Is there any line across which BushCo. won’t tread in its last, desperate grasp at “full spectrum dominance?” Will the human beings who wield power ever realize that today’s destruction will cause blowback so severe that 9/11 will seem like just a bad day? And how the hell are the rest of us going to pick up the pieces once the house of cards come tumbling down?
You know our “foreign policy” sucks really huge eggs when Ollie North is defending the case. For a quick brief on the details, go to ThinkProgress.org’s excellentU.S. Military Relied On Oliver North To Dispute Afghanistan Civilian Deaths»
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/08/military-oliver-north/
Glenn Greenwald’s excellent blog discusses the disgusting attempts at covering up this latest disgraceful military episode in Afghanistan.
Thursday Sept. 11, 2008 07:13 EDT
The government, the media and Afghanistan
North Now
[...] What makes the Azizabad attack particularly notable is the blatant and now clearly demonstrated lying engaged in by the U.S. Government regarding this incident, with the eager propagandistic assistance of what we are constantly told is the "legitimate news arm" of Fox News -- namely, Brit Hume's show and his stable of "legitimate news reporters." Working in unison, Fox and the Pentagon continuously denied claims that large numbers of civilians had been killed in the airstrike, accusing the villagers of lying and U.N. investigators of having been "duped." But a mountain of documentary evidence and independent investigations have now conclusively confirmed that it was the U.S. Government that was lying and the villagers' claims which were true all along, forcing the military to "reinvestigate" its own conclusions. While local villagers, the Afghan government, U.N. investigators, and independent journalists all insisted that the U.S. air attack resulted in the slaughter of 95 civilians, including 50 children, and killed no Taliban fighters, the U.S. military repeatedly issued vehement denials of those claims, insisting for weeks "that only 5 to 7 civilians, and 30 to 35 militants, were killed in what it [said] was a successful operation against the Taliban." The Bush administration even "accused the villagers of spreading Taliban propaganda" and claimed "that the villagers fabricated such evidence as grave sites," even though those "villagers have connections to the Afghan police, NATO or the Americans through reconstruction projects, and they say they oppose the Taliban." [...] There are numerous vital issues raised by this episode relating both to the bombing and particularly how the U.S. Government so frequently issues false claims, but in light of all the recent uproar over what is and is not "appropriate journalism," I want to focus for the moment on Fox News' role in this. When the U.S. military originally was denying the villagers' claim, the Pentagon claimed it had had conducted an investigation and that an unnamed "independent journalist" who happened to be with them confirmed their account that large numbers of Taliban were among the dead and only very few unarmed civilians were. But then this was revealed:

The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was a[ Marine] colonel.

That "independent journalist" is the same person who, in 1986, proudly went before Congress and boasted: "I will tell you right now, counsel, and to all the members here gathered, that I misled the Congress," [my bold] and then justified that lying -- and to this day still justifies it -- on the ground that it was for a greater good. That behavior -- which led to multiple felony convictions that were ultimately overturned because he had received immunity in connection with his testimony -- hasn't prevented North from being employed as a "reporter" by the serious, legitimate news arm of Fox News, nor from appearing regularly on Brit Hume's Serious News Show as a journalist, nor being cited as an "independent journalist" by the U.S. military to confirm its claims and accuse Afghan villagers of lying about the number of their dead.
[...] [Jim] Angle then introduced Fox News "national security correspondent" Jennifer Griffin, and this is what Fox viewers heard:

GRIFFIN: So what did happen during the 2:00 a.m. raid into Azizabad? The Special Forces teams involved have been muzzled pending the new investigation, but FOX News cameramen Chris Jackson and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North happened to be embedded [my bold] with the Marine Special Forces Unit involved in the raid. This is their video exclusive to FOX News. They witnessed the entire operation firsthand. (END VIDEOTAPE)

Fox's news show -- not Bill O'Reilly, but Brit Hume's "legitimate news program" -- continued to insist, based upon the "reporting" of "journalist" Oliver North and his cameraman, that the U.S. military's original claims were true, and the villagers and the U.N. were lying, even as the U.S. military itself was, in light of the ample evidence, severely backtracking on its story:

[...] "The [video] footage that is there on this shows horrendous pictures of these bodies and clearly identifies women and children. In some cases, the bodies are not in one piece," a U.N. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "Whether you say it was 76 or 82 or even 92 -- it was clearly not seven who were killed there." Said a senior U.S. military official: "Whatever information [Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan] got that was shared by Afghan and U.N. representatives led him to believe there was good cause to want to look at all of this more deeply."

It is hardly uncommon for claims by the U.S. Government regarding the multiple countries in which our "War on Terror" is being waged to be vehemently disputed by a whole array of people. The only difference here is that video, other documentary evidence, and independent investigations have all emerged confirming the falsity of the U.S. Government's claims.
[...] Way beyond Fox, this is the same thing that our media generally (and with some important exceptions) has been doing for years, at least -- mindlessly repeating and confirming false Government claims. [my bold] That's what makes Carlotta Gall's on-scene actual investigation of the Pentagon's Afghanistan claims so notable -- it's so unusual. From Jessica Lynch's heroic Rambo-like firefight to Pat Tillman's murder by Al Qaeda monsters to pre-war claims of the Iraqi menace to post-war claims of Glorious Progress to current claims of the Grave Russian and Iranian Threats to the concealment and then justification of virtually every act of government radicalism over the last eight years, our media has, by and large, done what Fox News did in the Azizabad case -- offer itself up as an uncritical conduit for state propaganda.

And that's to say nothing of their more overt propagandistic activities -- the still-extraordinary fact that for the last seven years, virtually every American news program has employed as "independent analysts" people who were part of a formal, coordinated and likely illegal U.S. Government propaganda program run out of the Pentagon, a program which resulted in countless false stories broadcast by these networks to boost Government lies. And even after all of that was revealed and documented on the front page of the NYT, these media outlets -- all 3 networks, plus CNN and others -- continue to employ the propagandists, and worse, refuse even to tell their viewers about what happened, or even to disclose to their viewers the existence of the story, and then -- at best -- actually defend it all when forced on their obscure blogs to mention it.

* * * * *
There’s more. I urge you to read the full post: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/11/azizabad/

FEMA, Continuity of Government and 8 Million Americans on Main Core

How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public?

So ends The Last Roundup, Christopher Ketcham's report on massive domestic surveillance, and it is the very question to ask your candidate. Did you know that FEMA was originally devised to provide survival of the federal government, not the people, after a nuclear strike? That’s just one interesting fact among many important items you need to know. I skipped over Mr. Ketcham’s synopsis of the Card/Gonzales Ghoul Trip to John Ashcroft’s hospital bed, presuming most readers know about this infamous night. There’s so much information here it was hard to carve out the essentials, but I hope you will read the entire article. Remember: Just because paranoia is in the mind of the beholder, they probably are out to get us!
The Last Roundup
Is the government compiling a secret list of citizens to detain under martial law?
By Christopher Ketcham
[...] Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.
[...] According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.
Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.
[...] Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.
Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes," who were to be held at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish "temporary detention and processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be is not specified.
[...] Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.
"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time."
[...] The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.
Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.
[Following are several paragraphs discussing Oliver North's surveillance program REX 84, "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government to FEMA and military commanders, as well as Texas congressman Jack Brooks’ unsuccessful attempt to find out what North was up to during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings.]
[...] In July 2007 and again last August, Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush administration's Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.
But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are "extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around the same time, he told the Oregonian: "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."
More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."
[...] Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.) [...]
http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2008/05/government_surveillance_homeland_security_main_core_01-print.php