Rachel Maddow has a great re-cap of the faulty and deceitful tactics used by the Bush administration that led to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.  Using video evidence Maddow shows the shifting justifications for war — an aggressive war that was clearly criminal.  Yet Obama and the Democrats want us to look forward, not back.  This is all in the past, they say.  What we have here is an affirmation that our political elites are and will never be held responsible for their crimes.  Completely depressing if you ask me.

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Technorati Tags: George W. Bush, Iraq war, propaganda, Rachel Maddow

Glenn Greenwald has yet another excellent post that I have to share with anyone who hasn’t read it.  Here he focuses on the views of Cass Sunstein, Obama’s top official in the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which is tasked with — according to its website — “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs” among other things.

Greenwald begins by noting a paper Sunstein co-wrote in 2008 detailing how government should “employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-’independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate‘ online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories’ about the Government.”

Sunstein’s strategy of using propaganda reflects long-standing liberal ideas in American political culture.  In the early- to mid-20th century, liberal theorists like Harold Lasswell, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippmann praised the use of propaganda as a means of controlling public opinion, and Sunstein is simply carrying on this tradition.

But Greenwald is most forceful in pointing to the hypocrisy of liberals who are now defending the Obama Administration for committing the very same acts they were so outraged about when done under Bush — particularly the paying of conservatives Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher to promote Bush Administration programs as implicit “independent” experts.  But now Obama’s Administration has been outed doing the same with Jonathan Gruber’s advocacy of the health care reform proposals.

Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack “intellectual integrity”; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case.  Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being “just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals.”  What is one key difference?  Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views — he favors health care — and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he’s defending are dismissed as a “fake scandal.”

I recommend reading the Greenwald article in its entirety.  Don’t miss it:

Greenwald: Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal

Technorati Tags: Liberals, Obama, propaganda

Yesterday I received an email on the topic of the 2008 election that was strangely familiar.  And there was a reason for the familiarity: I had seen it four years before, forwarded to my email box by the same person.  The reality is that this message is a complete hoax, and the fact that it is regurgitated after multiple elections (first being the 2000 election) and forwarded throughout the internet shows that gullible people are easily fooled because it comports with their established ideology.

First of all, here’s the email:

THIS WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD & BREAK YOUR HEART

Interesting  Statistic
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of  Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out facts of 2008  Presidential election:

Number  of States won by:
Democrats:  19
Republicans:   29

Square  miles of land won by:
Democrats:  580,000
Republicans:   2,427,000

Population of counties  won by:
Democrats:  127 million
Republicans:  143 million

Murder rate  per 100,000 residents in counties won  by:
Democrats:  13.2
Republicans:   2.1

Professor Olson  adds:
“In aggregate, the map of the territory Republican won by Republicans was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.

Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare.

Professor Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler’s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation’s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.

Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at  stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom

Anyone not blinded by ideology would quickly see these so-called “facts of [the] 2008 Presidential election” are suspicious, starting with the number of states and square miles of land won.  Has it really been that long since the election that people actually think McCain won 10 more states than Obama?  Talk about short-term memory.

It only took me 2 seconds — literally — to search Google to find out that this email is a long-discredited hoax.  FactCheck.org completely dismantles the widely forwarded message in its current 2008 manifestation.  Starting by pointing out that Professor Olson has denied being the source of these “facts” since 2000, FactCheck then addresses the stats:

• President-elect Barack Obama actually carried 28 states (and the District of Columbia), not 20 as claimed in the message. Sen. John McCain carried only 22 states, not 30.The murder rate for counties carried by Obama was 6.56 per 100,000 inhabitants, less than half the rate claimed in the message. The rate for counties carried by McCain was 3.60 per 100,000, much higher than claimed in the message.
• The total area of states won by Obama is actually 1,483,702 square miles, significantly more than the 580,000 stated by the e-mail. McCain’s states have an area of 2,310,315 square miles, not the 2,427,000 claimed.
• The population of counties carried by Obama is just under 183 million, not the 127 million claimed. McCain carried counties with a total population of just under 119 million, far fewer than claimed in this message.
• The murder rate for counties carried by Obama was 6.56 per 100,000 inhabitants, less than half the rate claimed in the message. The rate for counties carried by McCain was 3.60 per 100,000, much higher than [the 2.1] claimed in the message.

As you can see, the stats are not just slightly wrong, they’re way off.  But I doubt this will stop dishonest people from using it again, because in the world of right wing America ideology trumps reality every time.

Technorati Tags: Election 2008, politics, politics of fear, propaganda, Republicans

Here’s an excellent analysis by Richard Seymour of the Israeli government’s shifting propaganda line regarding the recent bombing of a UN-run school which killed 43 refugees.  It’s a typical example of Israel’s Big Lie in this brutal assault on the Palestinian people, which, repeated so often, becomes officially-sanctioned truth: those evil Hamas fighters hide among the civilian population and are therefore ultimately to blame for the resulting civilian casualties.

The IDF’s initial justification for the attack on the Al-Fakhura school was that Hamas had used the building to fire mortars from, and its tanks had responded. Implicit in this was an admission that they had targeted the school on purpose. The tank shells, presumably shot from quite nearby, were fired by soldiers operating under orders from command centres equipped with detailed targeting intelligence. As is now known, the Israeli military had the GPS coordinates not only of this UN school but of the other UN schools that it attacked. And the first thing the IDF let us know is that it was done on purpose. Their excuse was barbaric, of course. The idea that an invading force may attack a building filled with hundreds of terrorised civilians just in order to kill two of those resisting the invasion is nothing short of grotesque. But the fact that it was barbaric was part of the point: rather than bluntly condemning a war crime, you were invited to focus on whether Hamas would be so evil as to attack Israel’s brave boys from within a civilian building. Because it is so frequently repeated you might be predisposed to assume that Hamas did indeed position its ‘infrastructure of terror’ among unsuspecting citizens but, whether you are so predisposed or not, you are already drawn into the macabre calculus of the murderer if you even get involved in that argument. You have tacitly accepted the logic in which war crimes are not merely acceptable, but actually appropriate, if the enemy really is as evil as Israel says. The usual suspects, of course, immediately embraced Israel’s excuse: Israel’s killing, they expostulated, merely demonstrates the ruthless, diabolical genius of Hamas. If anything, they added, the IDF was admirably restrained in its action. But it is doubtful that many others were taken in.

–More–

Technorati Tags: Gaza, Israel-Palestinian conflict, propaganda

I only just came across this video from the website Big Think.  It’s a few months old but remains relevant.  Answering the question, “What is the best way forward in Iraq,” Chomsky rightly asserts that occupying forces never have rights, only responsibilities.  He starts by pointing out how the Western intellectual and political class never discussed what might be the best option for the Soviet Union following its invasion of Afghanistan, or the best option for Saddam Hussein following his occupation of Kuwait.  “But when the West invades another country,” Chomsky states, “all the values shift.  The only question that arises is ‘What’s best for the aggressors?’”

Technorati Tags: Iraq, Noam Chomsky, oil war, propaganda

While the mainstream media devote hours of analysis to lipstick-gate, they continue to accept without question the Bush and McCain claim that the surge in Iraq has been a success.  One doesn’t have to look far to find example after example of this being put forward as a self-apparent truism.  The logic behind the reporting is little more than, “Look, the violence is down, therefore the surge has worked.”  Forget the over-arching goal of the surge was to bring about political reconciliation between the conflicting groups in Iraq.  In reality, the political situation is worse than ever.  As Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress writes:

The greatest myth promoted by Bush in his speech [at the National Defense University] was found in this line: “Political reconciliation is moving forward, and the Iraqi government has passed several major pieces of legislation.” By overstating the meagre steps taken by Iraq’s leaders in barely passing a few relatively insignificant laws in their parliament, Bush’s statement ranks right up there with his 2003 “mission accomplished” speech and vice-president Dick Cheney’s assertion that the insurgency was in its “last throes” in 2005.

Katulis continues:

The surge has frozen into place the accelerated fragmentation that Iraq underwent in 2006 and 2007 and has created disincentives to bridge central divisions between Iraqi factions. Moreover, rather than advancing Iraq’s political transition and facilitating power-sharing deals among Iraq’s factions, the surge has produced an oil revenue-fuelled, Shia-dominated national government with close ties to Iran. This national government shows few signs of seeking to compromise and share meaningful power with other frustrated political factions.

So much for political reconciliation.  Rather than furthering steps toward some form of power sharing, the surge has solidified the divisions unleashed by the invasion and occupation of Iraq.  But McCain, Bush, and the media will inevitably make the case that at least the surge has reduced violence.  This is the core of the “surge worked” hypothesis, yet it rests on a basic logical fallacy.  Just because Y came after X, it doesn’t follow that X caused Y.  Professor Juan Cole recently pointed this out with regards to media commentary on the surge.

The reality is far more complex than this simplistic narrative.  An important factor to declining levels of violence was the so-called Sunni Awakening movement in Anbar province in which the US allied with, armed, and paid Sunni insurgents to fight Al-Qaeda.  But this began before the surge, and there is no reason to believe this strategy required an increased troop level.  Cole agrees:

In al-Anbar Province, among the more violent in Iraq in earlier years, the bribing of former Sunni guerrillas to join US-sponsored Awakening Councils had a big calming effect. This technique could have been used much earlier than 2006, indeed, could have been deployed from 2003, and might have forestalled large numbers of deaths. Condi Rice forbade US military officers from dealing in this way with the Sunnis for fear of alienating US Shiite allies such as Ahmad Chalabi. The technique was independent of the troop escalation. Indeed, it depended on there not being much of a troop escalation in that province. Had large numbers of US soldiers been committed to simply fight the Sunnis or engage in search and destroy missions, they would have stirred up and reinforced the guerrilla movement.

An additional reason for the reduced violence in Iraq has been the unilateral cease-fire of the Mahdi Army ordered by Moqtada al-Sadr.  Gen. Patraeus even admits this fact, stating that the “Sadr trend stands for service to the people,” and that he hopes Sadr’s organization will become “constructive partners in the way ahead.”  While Patraeus would like to see the cease-fire as a result of the surge, the reality is again more complicated.  Cole sees the successful ethnic cleansing of Baghdad – in which it has become a mostly Shiite city with almost no mixed communities and others separated by walls – as an important reason for the Mahdi Army’s cessation of hostilities because this was one of their major aims.  As well, their pro-Iranian Shiite rivals, which include the Iraqi state, were becoming much more powerful militarily in relation to Moqtada al-Sadr’s organization.

Ethnic cleansing in Iraq points to a darker aspect of the surge, in which what so many call “success” is the result of brutality and violence.  Robert Parry also makes this point:

With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society has been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.

But this dark side of the “successful surge” is excluded from the U.S. political debate. As during the pre-invasion period, the Washington press corps acts more like Bush’s propagandists than anything close to skeptical journalists.

Instead media commentators waste our time with meaningless questions and speculation about what Barack Obama actually meant when making a comment about lipstick on a pig.  Well all I can say, at least there are alternatives to the he-said-she-said style of reporting that passes for journalism and analysis.  The following video is a commentary by Aijaz Ahmad from TheRealNews.com.  It was originally broadcast following Bush’s State of the Union address in early 2008.  Ahmad covers some of the issues I mention above and provides compelling reasons to question much of the conventional wisdom.

Technorati Tags: Election 2008, George W. Bush, Iraq, Iraq surge, media, propaganda