Radical Roots: Congressional Oversight Showdown, 11/3/05
The Senate Democrats took a great step towards acting like senators in early November, 2005, when they shut down the Senate with a bit of parliamentary footwork, going into closed session to demand answers on the "misinformation and disinformation" that led to the war (i.e., the Bush League lies).
I recall quite clearly that the corporate media folks who helped to sell the war lies were quite alarmed as they stood outside those doors, wondering what lies to tell the public -- or whether it wasn't too late to tell lies at all. Much more a pack of PR hacks than journalists, they wore "We're busted!" expressions as they waited for the awful reality of Congressional oversight to break forth from the sealed Senate chamber. Having so well kept the public in a state of ignorance, they were rightly afraid of the effect the revelation of the systematic manipulation of media would have. They realized how hard a sell it would be to say that they were King George's embedded media, but didn't really mean to get into bed with the "unitary executive."
Even the Fox news take on things boded nothing but ill for the pro-war Establishment:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,174187,00.html.
Senate Republicans, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas, pledged a hearing on the pre-war intel to get things moving again -- and have stonewalled the issue ever since. Mainstream "Journalism" pledged to pursue the truth -- and have backtracked to repeating the lies, tweaked every once in a while by shifting the emphases of old lies and introduction of new lies.
Ignorance Is Bliss: So Keep Ignore the 6/26 Hearing!
The sin of commission (i.e., lying) is still a favored trick of the meretricious media..., but it isn't necessarily their best trick. For that, my vote goes to their capacity for sins of omission (i.e., not telling the truth). "Mary Tricks Media," the Internet Underground's nickname for the mainstreamers, is living up to its meretricious reputation: They are willing to move and moan for money, but would prefer to "just lie there" as George has his way with them. They understand the game of presstitution quite well: since they were only "kinda sorta" involved in the scam, they'll have an easier time saying later that they really didn't like it at all -- which comes right before the next line, which is that it was a regrettable mistake. The truth is, of course, that an embedded gal has gotta do what she's gotta do!
The most recent sin of omission of note is the failure by any of the mainstream media to report the 6/26 Senate Democratic Policy Committee meeting on pre-war intelligence, held in a partisan Democrat setting because of the continued unwillingness of Senate Republicans to live up to their promise to hold hearings on the all-important (and utterly indefensible) lead-up to the war.
C-SPAN, granted, thought the matter of the meeting important enough to warrant late-night airing on the day of the hearings, (Monday, 6/26) -- then rebroadcast on a weekend afternoon (Saturday, 7/1):
http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record=546878130. Alas, that was the extent of the mainstream coverage for a hearing that held the keys to impeachment -- and possible imprisonment -- of both Bush and Cheney.
Some will remember the "Downing Street Hearings" of Rep. John Conyers. The pre-war intel hearings last week were even more damning -- particularly as they included the Downing Street memo reportage as an "encore" to the testimony of Bush League insiders (from better times, when they were going along with the program) who were willing to recant in public and reply to questions.
The Naked Emperor: Lies & Coercion; Conspiracy & War Crime
I leave it to you and your readers to refer to the notes of Daily Kos write David Swanson about the particulars of the two-hour hearing:
http://fishgrease.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/6/26/19142/7905. The notes themselves are part of the lamentable tale: Swanson didn't even stay throughout until the end of the hearing, and neither he nor Daily Kos did an actual story on the biggest intelligence story of the year! It's a sad reality of the current state of the nation that such media as Daily Kos, set up as an alternative to mainstream presstitution, are becoming "mainstream alternative" media by participating in an attenuated presstitution! What I saw, though, is reflected in his notes well enough, and could make for a fine story -- even if I have to do his job for him and write it!
In the hearing, one former Bush League apparatchik after another lamented the collective failure to get the truth out, pointed tentative fingers at the media and the Congress for being complicit, and solidly condemned the White House. They affirmed that, indeed, intelligence was used to back policy (i.e, the Bush League lied); and that the reason for the willingness of the intel community to go along could be summed up in three words: the vice president (who intimidated professionals).
Before it was over, they affirmed that the Downing Street Memoranda of 2002 were in line with what they saw from the front lines of the infowar against truth by the White House, that the decision to go to war was agreed upon in a nefarious deal by Georgie Porgie and Tony Baloney -- and..., er..., that yep, it certainly fit the letter of the law in meeting the definition of war crimes!
Needless to say, there was plenty there for "King George" headlines -- except that the previous king by that name had a greater regard for the rule of law than the current one.
The rest of the world laments that US media are much more interested in Oil and Israel than Honor and Integrity. Those outcries, though, are like the intel hearings: muffled by non-coverage (a lie of omission), or dismissed as anti-American anti-Semitic nonsense (a lie of commission). There's still another variant of how to kill the truth, though, which is a lie of intermission: just bury the real story beneath another story altogether!
The trick worked exceedingly well in the Jessica Lynch affair, which was what distracted the popcorn-munching war fans of April, 2003 from the Battle of Baghdad, in which the US 3rd Infantry, 101st Airborne and Marines fought a brutal, bloody battle that began at Baghdad Airport on April 5 and was only ending on April 9, as the media/military propaganda machine set up the "toppling of Saddam" shot by..., well, toppling Saddam (the statue, that is). It tells a lot about how well King George's camp followers are doing presstitution nowadays that they even outdid the Battle of Baghdad Cover-Up (BOBCUP), which -- thanks to veterans in the Internet -- has been reported despite the media blackout:
http://www.nationalvanguard.org/printer.php?id=6479.
Shades of Orwell and Huxley in NY and DC
This time, the trick started with the Three Amigos of the NY Times, LA Times and Wall Street Journal, all of which were, no doubt, as aware of the pending pre-war intel hearing as the Drudge Report -- thought the Drudge Report was the only one that reported the pending hearings with it's June 23 notice:
http://www.drudge.com/news/82774/senate-dems-hold-iraq-hearings.
The Three Amigos, though, were intent on giving Bush Leaguers a softball to hit, so they "broke" the story that will frame the "free press" debate of the pending elections: bank transfer snooping! Granted, juxtaposed against the claims of top intelligence officials that the the war lies amounted to war crimes, this is pale stuff -- but there was no juxtaposition, of course. We started this essay with the failure to report the truth; now we come to the half-lie that took its place.
Last week's "news" of bank transfers allowed Republicans to posture as guardians of the public's safety (their bogus "post-911" issue), while allowing the Democrats to posture as guardians of the public's rights (as the public is set up for WW3). It allows the media to act as if it were opposing the Bush League with "exposure" (on a topic that the Bush League has been airing for years). It was a nice touch for the NY Times to link this "revelation" story to the NSA story (even using the same reporter, Eric Lichtblau, since that story garnered the Times a Pulitzer -- this brave new world's Order of Lenin, given to such titans of Times integrity as Judas Miller. Judas Miller received her prize for lying us into a war (with the assent and encouragement of the Times); while Lichtblau's prize came of a story that the Times ordered suppressed for a year after learning of it -- thereby allowing Bush to ease through the 2004 elections without the pesky issue coming into the debate (where the American People might think it worth discussion).
All this dog and pony show because all the parties above are implicated in low-down acts that -- according to the pre-war intel witnesses -- might be construed as war crimes by an objective and informed American People. Leading a country to -- and then keeping it in -- a war touted as a "global war" (but never named a world war by a complaisant media) is serious business, after all. If the public knew all the stuff that goes into the sausage of corporate presstitution, it would retch and puke. Ergo, it can't know, it's that simple -- in a dictatorship, that is.
Occasionally someone, like NY Times reporter David Rosenbaum forgets the rule and pays the price. If you don't remember David Rosenbaum, you should -- except that the presstitutes even desert their own. He's the reporter who went to work on the NSA story with Lichtblau -- and died of a "fatal mugging" on the streets of D.C. last winter. Fatal muggings were, of course, a favored assassination technique of the old Soviet Union, against whom I fought my Cold War in Army military intelligence. It's well worth mentioning that Rosenbaum was working on the same NSA spying story as Lichtblau, and even more worth reading what the buzz in the international grapevine is:
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m19465&l=i&size=1&hd=0 Orwell said it all before most of us were born, but it's worth stating over and over: He who controls the present controls the past; he who controls the past controls the future. The Bush League has decreed -- in deeds that silence words -- that it controls the present debate, past history and future course of the USA. The aim, King George never tires of telling us, is a generational war in the Middle East, something that simply can't happen without a draft (never mentioned) or a use of nukes (seldom mentioned) and the complicity of an embedded media (not mentioned since the days when it was proud to call itself an embedded media).
The reality of a criminal cabal that sent us off to a criminal war is something that must be suppressed at all costs, and the embedded media knows what Bush means when he orders them to stay undercover. After all, they reckon, this troublesome war crime angle is most inconvenient, as it brings to mind other folks who were heralded for their capacity to distill truth for their countries, little-mentioned people who went by names like Goebbels and Riefenstahl.
Captain Eric H. May, a former Army intelligence and public affairs officer, is the founder of Ghost Troop, which was formed in response to the Battle of Baghdad Cover Up (BOBCUP) in 2003. He has published a four-volume report to congress on the 2003 media/military collusion at www.ghosttroop.net, a report still ignored by Congress, avoided by the media, and relished by the Internet. His last Lone Star Iconoclast column was 6/28: 911 Truth and Texas Terror:
http://www.lonestaricon.com/absolutenm/anmviewer.asp?a=248&z=37