They found marijuana, a trove of plans for future terrorists attacks, details about the network, and now pornogrpahy in the bin Laden lair.

It’s a script. I’ve seen it before, my first exposure to it in 1989 when Manuel Noriega was captured and imprisoned. First you give a dog a bad name, then you can beat him, or in bin Laden’s case, kill him.

I swear that if the Soviets were half as good at the propaganda game as the Americans, there would still be an Evil Empire to rail against, and we would not need Muslim terrorists. But the Soviets were crude, which has a lot to do with why they could not sustain their empire.

When W left the White House, they found a trove of cocaine, pornography, including kiddie porn, and secrets about future U.S. invasions. And a bible.
___________
PS: I can’t help myself here. This is the late great Tim Russert swallowing whole on government propaganda about Al Qaeda caves, which, by the way, never existed except in the drawing shown on screen here.

_________________
From Masterson’s Musings, a guy with a better memory than mine:

May 14, 2011 by sasoc

Enough With the Con about “Finding Porno”

May 13, 2011 by sasoc

Back in 1989, the genteel GHWB authorized the American invasion of Panama to oust Manuel Noriega. After he was captured, news reports of Noriega’s “porn stash” surfaced everywhere. Here is the breathless Time Magazine version on January 1, 1990:

Noriega’s increasingly bombastic language and his trigger-happy troops may have been indications that events were spinning out of control in Panama, forcing him to extremes. But other evidence suggested that the dictator was losing control of himself: U.S. troops searching his various hideouts found, along with pictures of Adolf Hitler, collections of pornography and sophisticated weapons and more than 50 kilos of cocaine. In one Noriega guesthouse, searchers found a bucket of blood and entrails, which they said may have been used for occult rites to protect him. Was the accused drug trafficker deteriorating into a megalomaniac drug user?

It is entirely believable that Noriega was a bad guy needing to be removed, but such an orgy of evidence of corrupted moral character strained credulity.

And now we are being fed the same script regarding OBL:

A stash of pornography was found in the hideout of Osama bin Laden by the U.S. commandos who killed him, current and former U.S. officials said on Friday. (source)

All by the book.

Many, many years ago, when I had just bolted from the right wing, I joined the local branch of the Sierra Club in Billings, Montana. There were maybe ten of us, and with such numbers posed a lethal threat to the business community in Billings. I am not kidding … they even sent in a spy! (Spies are not hard to spot in groups of ten people.)

It was a technically a much larger group. Here’s how that works: For a pittance, people “join” the national Sierra Club, and get a tote bag and the national magazine. They are then referred down to the local group, and are put on the local mailing list and receive the local newsletter. So from maybe 200 people in the Billings area formed the “branch,” and from that came the ten who actually went to meetings. (I later learned from Montana Wilderness Association that membership counting is quite an art, and often includes spouses and children of the joining member. But not pets. Well, dogs maybe. But no cats!) “Members” serve as a front to give the group a grassroots feel as they pull down money from Pew or other foundations that are their true funding source

Many environmental groups, like Alliance for the Wild Rockies, really are grassroots. Wild West Institute is another, and each of these websites will lead to other worthy groups. These groups understand that to sell out for funding is to sell out the mission. I belonged to Montana Wilderness Association for years when it too was mostly grassroots. Since I left its budget has mushroomed, paid positions multiplied, and the mission is down the toilet.

I soon became the newsletter editor for Sierra Club, and in the early days of desktop publishing, it was an excruciating task. I had to fill four full pages each month, and so wrote things to fill space, and eventually was taken aside by the Grand Poobah whose name I have long forgotten and told that all writing had to go through him for vetting. That’s fair, I know. But I just could not bear the idea that my thoughts had to be subordinated to his. So I didn’t do it much. It was my first indication that I am not a good person to have in a group.

One thing I did do without permission of the Poobah gave me indication of what was to come in the ensuing years. I thought it important that groups with differing viewpoints meet each other face-to-face. There was a local right wing pro-development anti-wilderness group, name also long forgotten, that was headed by Charles Hauptman, an oil geologist. I picked up the phone and called him and ask for an interview. I told him it would be respectful, that I would not be hitting him from the bushes. He agreed.

I was nervous, as I had never done such a thing before. Further, because I had worked in oil and gas, where there is great technological expertise, I assumed that there was also great political intelligence on the right wing, and that I would be challenged by a strong intellect and fierce competitor. I prepared a list of questions and on the day of the interview called Chuck to double-check time and place. He said forget it. No interview.

I have long since learned that there is not much more intelligence on the right than on the left, and that the best minds are often outliers. I’ve met people from all ideologies, and so have developed a disdain for isms and ogies. All I want are smart people with good hearts.

I had often heard the word “polarization,” but never really understood the psychological mechanism behind it. It’s both fear and projection. If we are to hate someone, it is best not to know the person we hate, as that only makes it harder. It was much easier for Hauptman and his group to sculpt the left and environmentalists as a mental construct, a demon, than as real people. Polarization is a large part of propaganda, as groups need to be isolated from one another to promote hidden agendas.

The greatest polarizing force in the media is radio. As McLuhan discovered, radio is a tribal drum, a one-on-one medium – one speaker, one listener. It has inflammatory power. A talented radio speaker is able to make the listener angry, and the angry listener has to do something with that anger. Since radio does not allow feedback (“talk radio” is an illusion), the inflamed listener seeks other outlets. From there it is easy to manipulate him.

In case you don’t know it, I have just outlined the origins of the Tea Party – they are polarized talk radio listeners. People on the left who have ‘infiltrated’ rallies are surprised to find out that they are often intelligent and well-educated, but the one common theme among them is sources of information.

This is the reasoning behind imposing a Fairness Doctrine on public air waves. It’s good public policy. It forces people to deal with one another.

The Internet is an anti-polarizing force. Or could be. But once polarized, the natural tendency of people is to stay that way.
_____________
PS: Polarization even happens within groups. I’m going on memory here, often faulty and selective. David Brower, pictured above, led an insurgent movement within the Sierra Club, called the “John Muir Sierrans” to remove the club from the grip of professional Democrats like its leader, Carl Pope. In 2000 some who ran for the national board said they would endorse Nader instead of Gore, enough that they might swing the vote. Two were from Montana, as I remember, and they won their seats. Even though board members had fought for their seats based on the promise to endorse Nader, once seated, they changed their minds. (Budgets were probably the lever – Pope likely told the two from Montana that their state would suffer if they did not endorse Gore.)

Later I talked to a regional organizer for Sierra working out of Bozeman. She was salaried help with an office and budget and all of that. I asked her about her thoughts on the Brower/Pope battle. She knew nothing of it, didn’t even know it had happened. Apparently professional staff knew less than outsiders.

I guess if you get your news from Fox, you’re not going to hear about this, but there is a law in Canada that prohibits a news channel from broadcasting “”….any false or misleading news.” For that reason, Fox news is not shown in Canada. Prime Minister Harper wanted the law repealed so Fox could move into Canada. Regulators up there say no.

How they decide what is false or misleading is not hard. I’ve written in the past couple of weeks about two bright shining lies on Fox, one switching poll results to say that Americans did not support collective bargain rights for Wisconsin public employees, and the other the palm tree incident. The latter is not technically false, but surely misleading.

My favorite TV program of all time was called “The Rockford Files.” James Garner, as an actor, carried with him just the right amount of disdain to get through life and stay sane. It is because of Jim Rockford that I have forgiven James Garner for The Notebook. He probably just needed the money.

There are many memorable scenes from that series, but one that stands out for me has Jim and his Dad, Rocky, in the California desert investigating a real estate scam. Rocky is patiently listening to one of the men explaining to him how there is going to be a lake and marina, and that he might want to get his name on a list of people that are going to be first in line. Rocky smiled as he listened.

Later, talking to his son he said “You know, Jimmy, there we were, standing right in the middle of the desert, and that man tried to sell me a boat.”

This comes to mind this morning because we often get sucked into things by slick salespeople. We need to stand back, like Rocky, and cast a disdainful eye. This link is to a website that chronicles acts of terrorism against Americans from 1975 up to and including 9/11. Counting Oklahoma City (168), which was committed by a Christian terrorist, the number comes to about 4,100.

Since 9/11, according to the FBI, there have been 125 terrorist plots or attacks in the United States. Of these, 45 were by Muslims, and 63 by American right wingers. This includes 36 by the anti-gubbmint anti-tax crowd, 27 by the KKK and white supremacists, and 3 by right-to-lifers.

I would guess that correlation between these right wing terrorists and ownership of Atlas Shrugged would be about 1.0. John Stuart Mill did not say that conservatives were stupid people, but did say that most stupid people were conservative. Not all who believe in Ayn Rand are crazy, but right-wing nuts are drawn to her like a magnet.

Then there’s the number of deaths that the American military has caused – I could go back to 1980, when Reagan first claimed that we were being victimized by Muslim terrorists, but instead go only to 1991 – the first Gulf War. Keep in mind that these figures are always disputed. The US does not count, and those who do count are often ridiculed or threatened to back down or back off. Studying these numbers is not a good career move.

Here’s the grisly toll:

First Gulf War, 1991: 158,000 (Source, Beth Daponte, Carnegie Mellon University – note, she has since backed off);

Iraq Sanction Regime: 500,000 (Source, Richard Garfield, a Columbia University nursing professor). Note – UNICEF put this number at 500,000 in 1995, while Garfield’s number covers the entire period 1991 to 2002. As always, it’s hard to know what’s real.

Afghanistan/Pakistan, 1991-present: ??? – 10,000? 100,000? Who knows? It seems that as little as we care about Iraqis, we care even less about Afghans and Pakistanis. There just aren’t any credible numbers out there right now, and may never be.

Iraq Invasion 2003 forward: Low: Iraq Body Count, 104,605 (midpoint); Middle: 655,000 (midpoint) (Johns Hopkins, 2006); High: Opinion Research Bureau, 2007 1,200,000 (midpoint).

OK, let’s add them up. Nah, let’s not. Also consider this – in 2008 Amnesty International estimated that 4.7 million Iraqis were displaced by the war, including 2 million refugee’s.

So, as I review this information for the umpteenth time, I am most interested in the dull thud it makes when it lands. There’s a mental block working here, one so powerful that American crimes of Stalinesque stature do not register. It’s the mindset known as “American exceptionalism.” It blocks out information, minimizes it, denies it, ignores it, or in rare cases, justifies it. People who do not like this information will read this, and it will not register, and the next time they come across the information, it will be brand new to them. That’s why I think of American exceptionalism as “American Alzheimer’s.”

So, like Rocky, I look out over this desert, and address my comments to the one or two who read this who actually embrace reality: “You know, Jimmy, there we were standing right in the middle of a massacre, and those men tried to tell me that Muslims did it.”
___________________
PS: Number of people killed on 9/11: 2,977. Not 2,976. Not 2,978. 2,977. When people who matter die, we do indeed know how to count.

I heard about this yesterday – Fox up to its usual tricks. Along about 1:45 in this video, Bill O’Reilly purports to show thugs in Madison to make his point that the protesters there are bad people. Problem – look in the background – there are palm trees.

Gotta call Foxshit on this one.

From the Miami Herald:

We deplore the Cuban government’s announcement that Cuban prosecutors intend to seek a 20-year sentence for Alan Gross. Mr. Gross is a dedicated international development worker. His imprisonment without charges for more than a year is contrary to all international human rights obligations. … He should be home with his family now. (Gloria Berbena, U.S. spokesperson)

This, from a spokesperson for a country that houses hundreds of people for years without formal charges in a prison held by force of arms on the island of Cuba.

And by the way, Ms. Berbena, Bradley Manning is a little pissed too.

Mr. Gross works for the Agency for International Development, an US operation that supposedly promotes democracy throughout the world. According to Victor Marchetti, former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John D. Marks, a former officer of the United States Department of State, AID is a CIA front. See the book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence – as far back as 1974 AID was outed, but still it carries on as if no one knows anything.

Because, frankly, here in the land of the free, our journalists are trained not to know such things. They are very, very good at not knowing the things they should not know.

Is anyone here in the land of the free looking into the specific charges concerning Mr. Gross’s activities in Cuba? Not likely – it’s all behind a curtain. All we are allowed to know is that Gross is facing 20 years in prison. Propaganda, our deep indoctrination, does the rest of the work: because it is Cuba, we auto-pen the blanks, and imagine trumped up charges, show trials, etc.

But back to basics – no American anywhere has the right to complain about abuse of prisoners or absence of habeas corpus. It’s an offense to simple decency to accuse others of the very crimes we commit. But beyond that, it’s Orwellian mind magic that when it happens right out in the open like this, people are not aware of it

Like everyone, I’m sickened by the shootings in Tuscon. The apologists of the right wing are out in force now, distancing themselves from the shooter and attempting to draw equivalencies between far right and center-right, aka “the left.” But Jared Loughner is just an anti-government guy.

There are always a few on the fringe who cannot manage their anger. So set aside the fact that it happens so regularly in this country, and not others. What is going on here?

My first impulse today was to go back and reread Marshall McLuhan on the power of radio. McLuhan was a scholar and a fad of the 1960’s – he even made an appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. His famous assertion was that “media is message,” or that content is not so important as the vehicle that delivers it. He broke down media into “cool” and “hot.” Cool medium requires high participation – say for instance, the television show South Park, with its cutout characters and so few people doing voices, requires us to fill in the details of personality for the characters. That takes real effort on our part.

Radio, according to McLuhan, is a “hot” medium, one that “beat the tribal drum.” The reason is that we cannot interact with it (despite the three or four calls that talk radio hosts allow per show, it is a one-way medium). The host is spreading a message to a large audience, but on the receiving end there is one talker, one listener. It’s an intensely personal experience on the receiving end, all thinking done by the talker, and no response allowed by the listener.

Right wing radio listeners are remote and inaccessible to debate or reason, virtually intellectual slaves to the talk radio host. When he makes them angry, they have nowhere to go with that anger.

…the immediate aspect of radio [is] a private experience. The subliminal depths of radio are charged with the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums. This is inherent in the very nature of this medium, with its power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber. The resonating dimension of radio is unheeded by the scripted writers, with few exceptions. The famous Orson Welles broadcast about the invasion from Mars was a simple demonstration of the all-inclusive, completely involving scope of the auditory image of radio. It was Hitler who gave radio the Orson Welles treatment for real. (McLuhan’s emphasis)

However, McLuhan believed that more advanced societies are less susceptible to the drumbeat of radio.

Highly literate societies, that have long subordinated family life to individualist stress in business and politics, have managed to absorb and to neutralize the radio implosion without revolution. Not so, those communities that have had only brief or superficial experience of literacy. For them, radio is utterly explosive.

In the U.S., the talk radio phenomenon is almost entire exhibited by the far right wing. “Left” talk radio doesn’t travel well or draw much audience. Could this be the reason for something painfully obvious at every Tea Party rally, every Sarah Palin speech, every fundamentalist religious gathering … that these are not literate people? Could the failure of left-wing talk be simply due to the fact that the left side of our narrow spectrum in the U.S. is more literate?

It is what it is. Radio is a drum beat for a wild animal that needs to be kept in its cage. Since 1987, U.S. talk radio has run free, and the right wing has become angrier and more irrational and more powerful all at once. It is a monopoly – there is no discussion on talk radio – there is only one point of view. In 1949, the aftermath of World War II, and after a fierce right wing radio preacher named Father Charles Edward Coughlin performed much as Rush Limbaugh performs today, The FCC instituted the Fairness Doctrine. It was never a law, only a regulation, and a sensible one. It merely said that more than one point of view had to be carried on public airwaves. It wasn’t just Coughlin – it was all of fascism. The power of radio scared people. The Fairness Doctrine kept the beast in his cage.

There are many, many Jared Loughner’s running around today looking for signs or signals to act up. Indeed they are crazy. Most right wingers are not that – my impression is that they are over-matched. They are angry and looking for someone to be angry at. It’s an easy step for a politician or any other provocateur to channel that anger.

We need, once more, to revisit the wisdom of the past. The FCC in 1949 was way ahead of us.

From Progressive Review:

The number one threat to the United States is said to be international terrorism. So you’d think it would easy to find out exactly how big a threat. Unfortunately, Google will pretty much fail you on this, perhaps because, well, the numbers just aren’t all that exciting.

For example, the State Department, well buried in its annual report, was able to find just nine Americans worldwide who died in 2009 as a result of terrorism.

And Firedog Lake came up with this domestic calculation: “If you count the Ft. Hoot shooting as a terrorist attack, 16 people have died in the United States as result of terrorism in 2009. The other three deaths include the Little Rock military recruiting office shooting, the Holocaust Museum shooting, and Dr. George Tiller’s assassination, the last two coming at the hands of right-wing extremists.”*

Indeed, this is merely the power of propaganda, which (side note) doesn’t exist in this country. The government, or “military-industrial complex”, as Eisenhower sheepishly called it (and, as Chris Hedges reminds us, only when Ike was safely on his way out of office), has great plans for conquest of the Middle East and Central Asia. Fear is merely a mobilizing tool to keep us solidly behind their objectives.

I have long known (since 1989, to be precise) that the United States is not threatened by any other country or group in any significant way. The ragtag group that somehow pulled off 9/11 was quickly dispatched in late 2001 (and bin Laden likely killed at that time). The only “threat” posed is to the unstated objectives of the MIC, conquest. Local populations are our true enemies. So it is no surprise that when we go on a terrorist rampage, the death tally is staggering.

So as we go on about our business of killing native Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Colombians, (and soon Iranians, if they would just give us pretext!)**, it is nice to know that even though they do not threaten us in any way, that domestic propaganda is so effective that merely saying as much in public will bring swift retribution. Neither wing of “The Party” speaks out at the absurdity of our fears or the underlying reality of our safety.

So on this Thanksgiving, 2010, let us remember the 19 who died in 2009 (including the two killed by right wingers), and of course forget the hundreds of thousands that we have dispatched abroad. May they all rest in peace as we here in the home of the brave live in cowardly fear and inexpressible ignorance.
__________
* I’m having a hard time recalling, but I think to date the number in 2010 is zero.
** And, as the Obama Administration desires, American citizens
(h/t: LB)

I watched this video with a sense of wonder at the recovered memories it contains. It is not that Martin Luther King does not know what is in store for him, while we do. It is not that he is speaking out against the Vietnam War, and not much about civil rights. Most people who know history but are not historians know that King was a vocal opponent of that war.

These three men – King, Mike Douglas and singer Tony Martin, are talking about some of the most heated and controversial issues of their day. There were riots in the streets, people at each others’ throats. The Pentagon and FBI were following King and keeping a file on anyone who participated in any demonstration. Emotions were at a high pitch, people were on edge.

And yet, listen to the tone of the conversation. King is flanked by two men to deeply disagree with him and his activities, and who are especially concerned about his opposition to the war. Yet they are respectful, allowing him to think and respond in complete statements. Their questions are thoughtful and reflective, even Martin’s, though he is merely an entertainer. King has time to think, to form a sentence, before he responds.

Take King and transport him to 2010, change the interviewers from Douglas and Martin to say, Bill O’Reilly or Chris Mathews, and to an entertainer like Stephen Colbert (the caricature, and not the real man, who is reflective). No longer are they respectful, no longer can they think before they speak. They would snap at one another, as the game over the years has changed from exchange of views to rat-a-tat brush sniping and talk-over. (Also, there would be a couple of commercial cuts, after which whatever was said before the rat-a-tat ads would be forgotten. That’s an oddity about modern television interviews – views are presented in small and quickly forgotten thought capsules.)

How did this happen? The right wing did this to us, starting with Rush Limbaugh in 1987. There is plenty of blame to go around, but not among various factions – all blame is on the right. Limbaugh hijacked the dialogue, aided by the Reagan boys who opened the radio airwaves to monopolization by one faction by shutting down the fairness doctrine.

No matter where we travel in this land, if we turn on our radios we are harangued by local and national righties. On the TV, there is the ubiquitous Fox, with an MSNBC-whispered response. (“Mainstream” media is, as always, subservient to power, but softer in tone.) Worse yet, even those who can expose themselves to other views do not. We are polarized.

This is not about content. It is tone. There is a name for what Rush and Sean and Bill and all the others are doing – “agitation propaganda”, or agitprop. It is not accidental, and not without purpose. It has made us what we are – mindless screamers. These people, knowingly or not, act with purpose to inflame our emotions and to shut out reasonable voices. They eliminate reflection and self-reflection.

Godwin forgive me, there is historical precedent for this, though history does not repeat. But there is methodological precedent.

Chris Mathews, you are not worthy to kiss Tony Martin’s shoes.

Have you ever had one of those rare moments of insight where something at once seems so obvious that you break out laughing? I had one last week. We were standing at the Ted Stevens airport in Anchorage, one of those zigzag lines, and a guy going the other way in line said “Are you going to Dallas?” I said no, and he quickly shot back “Chicago?”. I did not tell him our destination, but thought that if he had asked a typical American, he’d be turned into authorities for suspicious activity.

He probably just wanted me to deliver some cocaine for him. No big deal.

And then it hit me: All of our airport security, even if it is effective, is pointless. All a ‘terrist’ A-Rab or Muslim has to do is put a bomb in a suitcase, take it to security, and blow it up right there, where all the people are. Nothing has been screened at that point, so that it could be a pipe, nuclear, fertilizer or McDonald’s grease bomb.

And it hasn’t happened. For whatever reason, very few people on the planet want to kill civilians for its own sake. We’re safe. But our governing system since the early 1950’s has been predicated on the fact that we are a National Security State, and that we must always be afraid of something. So we are inculcated from youth in the culture of fear – crime, drugs, Communism, and now terrorism. The result is a people so easily manipulated by some archetype villain like Osama or Saddam that we readily support our government, run by sociopaths, as they plunder, attack and terrorize the globe.

It is tempting at times to simply go some place where people are both relaxed and behaved, like Canada or Costa Rica. We have talked about it at times, but family, of course, keeps us here. Neither of those countries is likely to be attacked by the U.S. any time soon, and so their people are at peace.

Life is always a struggle to survive, and bad things happen. There are bad dudes everywhere. Our country is run by cliques of corporate and military sociopaths who dangle images of pretty people in front of us to act as “leaders.”.

Sociopaths are everywhere, maybe four percent of our population, and one percent in other countries, according to Harvard’s Dr. Margaret Stout. So there is nowhere to hide from them. George W. Bush is one, as surely were Cheney and Rumsfeld, Kissinger, Nixon, and Bill Clinton, to name but a few.

But people in other lands have a more casual attitude about danger, perhaps due to the incredibly low odds of bad things happening, but most likely because they have not been subject to the intense and corrupting propaganda that enmeshes us.

The French have been overrun in the past by real monsters, and their country devastated by two wars in the twentieth century alone. Yet the country does not run on fear, as ours does. We make fun of them, I know, but it is we, and not them, who are the real pussies of the planet.

So please, dear Americans, take a deep breath, let it out, and then next time as you make your way through airport security, remember that you are in more danger at that point in time than at any time during your flight. And that danger is virtually nil.

Think of airport security for what it really is: A jobs program, and as George Carlin reminded us, a way to make white people feel safe when they fly. If only … if only … Americans could know that they are safe, then the rest of the planet could relax too. We could stop the bombing, invading, occupying. .

Americans … you are safe. Now sleep … sleep, my sweet white knights of the planet. Tomorrow is a brand new day. Keep up what you are doing, and there will be no one left alive to rescue.