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Public Enemy Number One: the Public
Keeping Us in the Dark and Under Watch
Public Enemy Number One: the Public
by KEVIN CARSON
CounterPunch JUNE 17, 2013
It’s important, when listening to the official shapers of opinion in the media, to ask ourselves what they really mean by the words they use. As Orwell pointed out in “Politics and the English Language,” those in power use language to obscure meaning more often than to convey it.
A good example is the recurrence of phrases like “endangered our national security” and “aided the enemy,” from people like Eric Holder, Peter King and Lindsey Graham, in reference to leaks by people like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. Now, they certainly intend to evoke certain associations in the minds of listeners with their word choices. If you’re not careful, you may find yourself responding in just the way the users intend — allowing their words to conjure up in your mind homes, families, neighbors, churches, a whole way of life, threatened with invasion and destruction by a nameless, faceless enemy — in the words of Orwell’s Two-Minute Hate, “the dark armies … barbarians whose only honour is atrocity.”
But if you look behind the words, their actual meaning is something entirely different. To the kinds of people who throw around such words, “national security” is a corporate-state world order enforced by the United States, run by people like themselves, which enabling global corporations to extract resources and labor from the people of the world and live off unearned rents. “The enemy” is you. And the danger is that you might figure out what’s going on and disturb their cozy little setup.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/17/public-enemy-number-one-the-public/
PS: When it comes to explaining power, Professor Carson is on the money.
30 replies
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CNN's "Tailwind" and Selective Media Retractions
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
CNN's recent retraction of its "Valley of Death" story might suggest that American journalism maintains high standards for military or intelligence-related reporting--and sets the record straight when those standards aren't met.
In July, CNN (and corporate sibling Time) retracted reports that U.S. special forces operating illegally in Laos in 1970 had used nerve gas as part of "Operation Tailwind," which targeted American defectors.
Based on months of research and interviews conducted primarily by CNN producer April Oliver, along with senior producer Jack Smith (with correspondent Peter Arnett used mainly for star power and "marketing purposes"
, the reports contained on-air, on-the-record comments from several Tailwind participants to the effect that sarin nerve gas was used and that U.S. defectors were killed (CNN Newsstand, 6/7/98, 6/14/98; see also CNN Talkback Live, 6/8/98). But CNN’s presentation of the evidence was marred by overreaching--with inadequate time given to Tailwind veterans and experts who disputed the conclusion that sarin had been used.
Producers Oliver and Smith have defended their work by pointing out that their report needed a full hour for a complete, nuanced presentation (CNN higher-ups refused, according to Oliver, saying the network was "not in the business of doing documentaries anymore" , that even their 18-minute report did include doubters and that it was top CNN executives in the final edit who deleted a comment by a Tailwind pilot that tear gas, not nerve gas, had been deployed.
Soon after the report aired, CNN management began retreating in the face of immense pressure--first from the military establishment, including Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and former CIA chief Richard Helms, and then from a media establishment more inclined to rally around the military than to explore the U.S. government’s secret war in Laos. With CNN producers muzzled by management for several weeks, the media "debate" overlooked evidence from journalists and Vietnam veterans that U.S. defectors were indeed targeted during the Vietnam War. Even the comment made by former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird (Associated Press, 6/9/98) that the U.S. had sent nerve gas to Vietnam in 1967 was quickly forgotten.
SNIP...
We asked a number of Washington Post staffers whether the newspaper ever retracted its Tonkin Gulf reporting. "I can assure you that there was never any retraction," said Murrey Marder, a reporter who wrote much of the Post's coverage of the August 1964 Tonkin events.
Marder remembers noting that the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese navy had been shelling North Vietnamese coastal islands just prior to the reported "unprovoked" attacks by North Vietnam on U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf. But the Pentagon’s propaganda machinery was in high gear: "Before I could do anything as a reporter, the Washington Post had endorsed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution."
CONTINUED...
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/cnns-tailwind-and-selective-media-retractions/
By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
CNN's recent retraction of its "Valley of Death" story might suggest that American journalism maintains high standards for military or intelligence-related reporting--and sets the record straight when those standards aren't met.
In July, CNN (and corporate sibling Time) retracted reports that U.S. special forces operating illegally in Laos in 1970 had used nerve gas as part of "Operation Tailwind," which targeted American defectors.
Based on months of research and interviews conducted primarily by CNN producer April Oliver, along with senior producer Jack Smith (with correspondent Peter Arnett used mainly for star power and "marketing purposes"
, the reports contained on-air, on-the-record comments from several Tailwind participants to the effect that sarin nerve gas was used and that U.S. defectors were killed (CNN Newsstand, 6/7/98, 6/14/98; see also CNN Talkback Live, 6/8/98). But CNN’s presentation of the evidence was marred by overreaching--with inadequate time given to Tailwind veterans and experts who disputed the conclusion that sarin had been used.
Producers Oliver and Smith have defended their work by pointing out that their report needed a full hour for a complete, nuanced presentation (CNN higher-ups refused, according to Oliver, saying the network was "not in the business of doing documentaries anymore"
, that even their 18-minute report did include doubters and that it was top CNN executives in the final edit who deleted a comment by a Tailwind pilot that tear gas, not nerve gas, had been deployed.
Soon after the report aired, CNN management began retreating in the face of immense pressure--first from the military establishment, including Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and former CIA chief Richard Helms, and then from a media establishment more inclined to rally around the military than to explore the U.S. government’s secret war in Laos. With CNN producers muzzled by management for several weeks, the media "debate" overlooked evidence from journalists and Vietnam veterans that U.S. defectors were indeed targeted during the Vietnam War. Even the comment made by former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird (Associated Press, 6/9/98) that the U.S. had sent nerve gas to Vietnam in 1967 was quickly forgotten.
SNIP...
We asked a number of Washington Post staffers whether the newspaper ever retracted its Tonkin Gulf reporting. "I can assure you that there was never any retraction," said Murrey Marder, a reporter who wrote much of the Post's coverage of the August 1964 Tonkin events.
Marder remembers noting that the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese navy had been shelling North Vietnamese coastal islands just prior to the reported "unprovoked" attacks by North Vietnam on U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf. But the Pentagon’s propaganda machinery was in high gear: "Before I could do anything as a reporter, the Washington Post had endorsed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution."
CONTINUED...
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/cnns-tailwind-and-selective-media-retractions/
NYT Op-Ed by the author of “The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State.”
Giving In to the Surveillance State
By SHANE HARRIS
The New York Times/Op-Ed August 22, 2012
IN March 2002, John M. Poindexter, a former national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan, sat down with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency. Mr. Poindexter sketched out a new Pentagon program called Total Information Awareness, that proposed to scan the world’s electronic information — including phone calls, e-mails and financial and travel records — looking for transactions associated with terrorist plots. The N.S.A., the government’s chief eavesdropper, routinely collected and analyzed such signals, so Mr. Poindexter thought the agency was an obvious place to test his ideas.
He never had much of a chance. When T.I.A.’s existence became public, it was denounced as the height of post-9/11 excess and ridiculed for its creepy name. Mr. Poindexter’s notorious role in the Iran-contra affair became a central focus of the debate. He resigned from government, and T.I.A. was dismantled in 2003.
But what Mr. Poindexter didn’t know was that the N.S.A. was already pursuing its own version of the program, and on a scale that he had only imagined. A decade later, the legacy of T.I.A. is quietly thriving at the N.S.A. It is more pervasive than most people think, and it operates with little accountability or restraint.
SNIP...
Today, this global surveillance system continues to grow. It now collects so much digital detritus — e-mails, calls, text messages, cellphone location data and a catalog of computer viruses — that the N.S.A. is building a 1-million-square-foot facility in the Utah desert to store and process it.
What’s missing, however, is a reliable way of keeping track of who sees what, and who watches whom. After T.I.A. was officially shut down in 2003, the N.S.A. adopted many of Mr. Poindexter’s ideas except for two: an application that would “anonymize” data, so that information could be linked to a person only through a court order; and a set of audit logs, which would keep track of whether innocent Americans’ communications were getting caught in a digital net.
CONTINUED...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/whos-watching-the-nsa-watchers.html?_r=0
What's really changed, CanSocDem:
50 years ago: Medgar Evers assassinated
On June 12, 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot from behind in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. A veteran of World War II, Evers was the Mississippi field officer for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). He was born in Decatur, Mississippi, the son of James Evers, a sawmill worker, and Jessie Wright, a domestic. Evers left behind his wife Myrlie and three young children. He was 37.
The assassin was Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the racist White Citizens’ Council. Beckwith, who later joined the Ku Klux Klan, was not convicted of the crime in two separate cases with all-white juries. He was ultimately convicted in 1994 in a case launched based on evidence gathered subsequently—largely that he himself had boasted of the murder to acquaintances for years.
Two major events in the civil rights movement had occurred a day earlier, on June 11, 1963. In the morning Alabama Governor George C. Wallace carried out his promise to defy a federal court order and personally block two African American students from attending the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. With news cameras rolling, Wallace dismissed an appeal by Assistant US Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. He eventually left the building under threat of arrest by Alabama National Guard General Henry Graham, whose forces had been placed under the control of US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
In response to the events in Alabama, later in the day US President John Kennedy gave a speech that, for the first time since the administration of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier, indicated active presidential support for equal rights. Kennedy warned of rising social tensions creating “a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety,” and expressed concerns that racial oppression was undercutting US pretensions as the guardian of democracy abroad.
“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or cast system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?” Kennedy asked.
“Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law,” Kennedy concluded.
SOURCE: http://wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/10/twih-j10.html
Today's political leadership has a lot of catching up to do, especially in regards to integrity, hypocrisy and justice.
[font color="blue"]Nguyen Hand Bank, the P-2 lodge and Banco Ambrosiano, BCCI, the S&L "failures" and more: the thread through all the scandals is the hand-in-glove financial relationship of Intelligence Agencies, organized crime and terrorist proxies. As one financial corruption is exposed, another begins, and the players remain the same, as do the crimes: money-laundering, drug-smuggling, assassination and staged terrorist acts. [/font color]
More: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2118878
DUers were unafraid to get their fingernails dirty, lifting up that rock -- 2004, before the Great Bankster Bailout of '08. Nostalgia.
