I’m not a big fan of the New York Times, but today’s front-page investigative report on the Pentagon’s managing of the news is absolutely first-rate. One of the Pentagon officials, Torie Clarke, the Pentagon’s main propagandist, said her goal had been to achieve “information dominance.” In other words, she wanted the Pentagon’s message to get out and crowd out the independent information from others. To do this, the Pentagon recruited retired military officers and fed them select information that was often at odds with reality. Wow! I’m already sounding like a spin doctor. What I mean in the earlier sentence is that the Pentagon lied.
The payoff for many of these retired officers was that various “defense” contractors for whom they worked got a better shot at military contracts. [Why “defense” in quotation marks? Because most of what the Department of Defense does has nothing to do with defense: it’s offense, much of which makes us less safe.]
Interestingly, some of the retired military knew they were being lied to and passed the information on as truth nevertheless. In other words, they lied. One, General Paul E. Vallely, a FOX News analyst from 2001 to 2007, stated, ““I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south [in Iraq.]” But on his return, Vallely told FOX’s Alan Colmes, “You can’t believe the progress,†and predicted that the number of insurgents would be “down to a few numbers” within months. Of course, it wasn’t. And it turned out that Vallely didn’t “believe the progress.”
How did they rationalize their lying? Take Timur J. Eads. Please. Eads is “a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.” Eads said he had withheld the truth on television for fear that a four-star general would call and say, “Kill that contract.” I’ve heard of people running from battle because they might be literally killed. And I’m sympathetic. But lying because the consequence of telling the truth is that your employer might lose business and you might get fired? Wowee. Pretty scary.
The whole article is well worth your time.
ICasualties Is Returning
After an absence of a couple of weeks, ICasualties.org is coming back online.
ICasualties.org is the best source for details on US casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. They have compiled an extensive database of this information, which is sortable by state, city, time periods, rank, service, etc. They help to feed this information to Antiwar.com and much of the alternative and mainstream media.
ICasualties was recently the victim of a malicious cyber-attack which disabled their server and sent visitors to random sites. The perpetrators have not been identified. Our administrator, Michael Ewens, contacted their Webmaster, Michael White to offer advice on how to battle the attack. They expect to be getting more of their old content back up over the next several days.
It is important to resume linking to ICasualties.org to restore their previous high rankings on Google and other search engines. They do an important job and it is important to support them.
Congress Quietly Repeals Martial Law Provision
In late 2006, Congress revised the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act to make it far easier for a president to declare martial law. Those changes were repealed at the end of this January as part of Public Law 110-181 (HR 4986), the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (signed into law by President Bush on January 28, 2008).
Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), who championed the opposition to the original law, was also the hero of the repeal. It helped that all the nation’s governors opposed the 2006 law.
Boise State Professor Charlotte Twight, the author of the excellent Dependent on DC, alerted me to the change last night. I checked on Nexis and the only news coverage I found regarding the repeal was a 322-word Gannett News wire story from February 1 that focused on how the repeal made governors happy.
I first wrote about the Posse/Insurrection peril for American Conservative a year ago. My most recent piece on the subject was an article for the January issue of the Future of Freedom Foundation’s (FFF) Freedom Daily. The law was changed between the time the piece was published and when FFF posted the January article online on April 9.
War Is an Economic Policy, Senator McCain
This morning I received a request to sign an “Economists’ Statement in Support of John McCain’s Economic Plan.†The statement laid out his plans to prevent taxes from rising, to reduce some taxes, such as the corporate income tax, to support free trade agreements, and to restrain the growth of domestic government spending. Notice something missing? I did.
Here’s the answer I sent to the co-chair, economist James Carter:
There’s nothing in there I disagree with. [I later found a few things but I agreed with the vast majority.] The problem is that it leaves out a huge part of his economic policy that will make it virtually impossible to achieve what’s in the statement. That huge part is his policy on war–with Iraq and maybe with Iran. War is very expensive and is part of an economic policy. So by signing the statement, I would be helping Senator McCain maintain the fiction that there’s no connection between war and economic policy. I’m unwilling to do that.
DC Freedom Rally Today
A couple hundred Ron Paul supporters gathered in front of the Capitol today to hear speakers organized by the Granny Warriors.
I stopped by mid afternoon. I was told by one attendee that “Ron Paul came by and spoke around 11:15. Unfortunately, the sound system was not yet working at that point.†He said he had heard Congressman Paul might return and speak again later today.
Here are some pics – (Full size versions are available at my Flickr page here)
<img src=’http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3167/2417392868_381a585e15.jpg’ alt=” class=’alignnone’ /
UPDATE 4 17 08: Some commentors have suggested that I grossly undercounted the number of attendees. I note that the front page of the http://www.dailypaul.com website continues to highlight the photo I took of the rally.(The photo is used without permission or clear attribution). This photo and other photos posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bovard/ indicate the crowd size.
Cheney Debunked Again (a year ago)
Dick Cheney is a liar. A lousy one. He is again threatening that “al Qaeda in Iraq” (which he would have you believe is interchangeable with the “al Qaeda in Waziristan” he let escape in 2001) will take over the fertile crescent if U.S. forces withdraw. In this version, they will make so much money from control over the oil that they will somehow be a threat to us or something…
Well, last summer when Rudy Giuliani tried to pretend that al Qaeda was motivated to attack the United States due to freedom for women and to paint Rep. Ron Paul M.D. as some sort of terrorist sympathizer for stating the plain truth in the War Party’s house about Osama’s tactic of provoking a full scale invasion of Afghanistan (Iraq was a bonus) in order to bleed our empire dry and force our combat troops off of what they consider to be holy land, the Arabian peninsula – and out of the Muslim world at large – I decided to see what the experts had to say.
I came up with Ron Paul’s Reading List for the Farsighted: Interviews for Antiwar Radio with Robert A. Pape, Michael Scheuer, Chalmers Johnson, Philip Giraldi and Ray McGovern. They said Ron Paul was right and that Rudy Giuliani was ridiculous.
In particular, they addressed the fact that Osama bin Laden has every reason to be pleased that the U.S. occupies Iraq and that “al Qaeda in Iraq” (which did not exist until more than a year and a half after the invasion) was only tolerated to the degree they were while helping to fight the occupation.
(Now that the U.S. has temporarily bribed the “Sunni insurgency,” whom they’ve renamed the “Concerned Local Citizens” or “Sons of Iraq,” to stop fighting Americans and instead help fight al Qaeda, they have actually put many of the al Qaeda men on the payroll as well, according to Patrick Cockburn who told me that he saw this with his own eyes.)
Anyway, last May I asked Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorism officer in the CIA and columnist for Antiwar.com, whether the War Party was right in pointing to a threat of an al Qaeda takeover of Iraq in the event of U.S. withdrawal, he answered:
“No. I think the reality is that if the United States leaves it will be a very bad thing for al Qaeda because the Sunnis don’t particularly want them around and would get rid of them.â€
“There have already been reports that the Sunnis are already kind of tired of them because when they stage a major provocation or attack, it’s the local Sunni population that has to take the grief when the U.S. Army descends. … It’s a marriage of convenience with al Qaeda insofar as it’s a marriage at all. So I think it would be fallacious to assume – In fact, let me [say it] stronger than that: I think it would be ridiculous to assume that al Qaeda could establish some kind of serious presence in Iraq similar to what it did in Afghanistan because the dynamic is completely different.â€
If Dick Cheney’s militia can’t take over the place, how are we supposed to believe that a ragtag group of Egyptians, Lybians and Saudis can?
(I first debunked this nonsense for Antiwar.com back in 2005.)
Thanks to Anders, A UK blogger and Stress regular, who created this short Youtube to help drive the point home.