From Omission to Non-Denial Denials

On November 5 I published a piece on David Swanson’s well-made case in an interview on voting independent, with a few deservedly strong words on ‘The Real News’ sharing common characteristics with way-too-many pseudo or semi-alternative news outlets backed by the same-alphabet-soup of foundation backers and tainted by the same-divisive & destructive-partisanship. You can watch the interview clip in question and read my commentary here.

This morning I received a rant-full and long-winded e-mail from Mr. Paul Jay- the founder and host of this not very real ‘Real News’ network- filled with lawsuit threats against me, poorly-argued points, omitted facts, non-denial denials, and a few plain old lies. Per his request and happily I just posted his e-mail response in the comment section of my commentary post here. Okay, now I want to further highlight and elaborate on my factual statements and assessment of Mr. Jay and his enterprise ironically (and uncreatively) called ‘The Real News.’ In order to do this I am going to take one point at a time, put each in context, provide real examples and parallels, and let you assess each one’s validity. Read more È

From ten years on, everything about 9/11 feels otherworldly and irrational, the reasons for it, the apparent helplessness in the face of it, the curious identities of the people involved and the American government’s response to it. It defied logic then and it still does. The World Trade Towers were proud symbols of who we were as early 21^st century Americans, at least who we thought we were. After all, wasn’t the spiritual motto of the original 1939 Flushing, NY World’s Fair “World trade center� pavilion dedicated to “world peace through trade?�  

There would be no peace after 9/11. The destruction loosed a demon that had been struggling for America’s soul since the creation of the Cold War in 1947. The U.S. would now be freed to pursue “evil� wherever it could be found and there would be no turning back. The creation of the World Trade Towers by Rockefeller brothers Nelson and David had been steeped in psychological symbolism from their start in the early 1960s. As the most well known scions of American business, the Rockefeller family brought more than just money to their endeavors, they brought a vision for the future of the planet and a philosophy to guide it.

Begun as a massive undertaking to revitalize lower Manhattan, Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David and New York Governor Nelson pushed hard for the project and each tower stood as a symbol of their respective power. As metaphor, the towers were more than just two of the tallest buildings in the world. It might be said they were as important as the two pillars Joachim and Boaz which stood at the entrance to Solomon’s Temple; mystical gates to a Cathedral of wisdom in which all could worship under one religion; the religion of business, Capitalism.

The Rockefellers were no strangers to the power of psychological warfare and its impact on American opinion. During World War II Nelson had headed the U.S. government’s intelligence agency for Latin America, the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA). CIAA’s film division guided the 1942 production of Walt Disney’s Saludos Amigos to promote pro-American sentiment in South America. In 1954 Nelson was appointed as President Eisenhower’s White House special assistant on Cold War tactics and psychological warfare. Nelson Rockefeller played a central role in formulating domestic propaganda programs throughout the 1950s as chairman of the Planning Coordination Group which, in addition to its propaganda work, oversaw all CIA covert operations. His 1956 Special Studies Project directed by Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger produced many of the domestic policy recommendations that came to be known as President Kennedy’s New Frontier. His family’s philanthropic support of the arts had been carefully coordinated with the CIA and was both overtly and covertly propagandistic.

As a committed Anglophile, Rockefeller had aided British intelligence during World War II when he rented space in New York’s Rockefeller Center at a steep discount to a number of British propaganda agencies including their secret intelligence service for the Americas, the British Security Coordination (BSC). The BSC’s chief, Sir William Stephenson (Intrepid) set up shop in New York City with the help of some of New York’s wealthiest families with one main objective in mind: Get the United States into the war in Europe on Britain’s behalf.

One key agent in the psychological war for American public opinion was young RAF pilot Roald Dahl who along with James Bond creator Ian Fleming, playwright Noel Coward and Gallup pollster David Ogilvy were given free rein to commit sabotage, political subversion and propagandize “the nativesâ€� (Americans) through whatever means possible. Read more È

The root cause of what the United States suffers from today, both politically and economically stems from the psychological warfare campaign triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  At that time, Americans responded dutifully if not robotically to the threat as a barrage of propaganda poured from a hoard of foreign policy “experts� claiming vindication for Vietnam while bemoaning America’s military weakness. Zbigniew Brzezinski himself claimed that the Soviet invasion was a vindication of his prediction that the Soviets would be emboldened by a lack of U.S. resolve elsewhere. The shaken president, Jimmy Carter announced a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the creation of a rapid deployment force to the Middle East and a new get tough posture toward the Soviet Union.

On January 2, 1980 the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour presented former U.S. Ambassador Theodore Eliot and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes to speculate on the implications of the invasion. As an unabashed neoconservative ideologue, Pipes should have been considered a controversial choice sitting alongside the thoroughly Eastern establishment Eliot. But on this evening Pipes had been carefully chosen to play the very special role of delegitimizing détente with the Soviet Union while moving the discussion permanently and irretrievably to the neoconservative right.  Paired with Eliot, the dean of American diplomacy and soon to be Secretary General for the United States of a gathering of international elites calling itself, the Bilderberg group, the two were there to send the signal that the ideology of neoconservatism, globalism and the institutions of the American government were now one and the same.

It was a moment that would change the United States in ways that few Americans would immediately understand and many continue to find baffling. Years earlier, Pipes had been chosen to chair a highly controversial operation known as the Team B experiment in competitive analysis.

The decade of the 1970s had presented a series of strategic shocks to the United States. The Watergate scandal and the Arab oil embargo, campus protests, combined with the American military failure in Vietnam had shaken Washington’s own belief in the American narrative. Vietnam had removed the veil from America’s Cold War defense-intellectual elite, revealing their elaborate plans and complex mathematical formulas to be useless as a guide to action. But even before the end of that war in 1975, pressure had been building from a powerful collection of right-wing ideologues to ignore their own complete intellectual failure, wind back the clock and return to an openly militarized Cold War approach to the Soviet Union. Read more È

The state’s use of psychological warfare to bend the population to war is as old, if not older than the existence of states themselves. But it was perhaps Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering whose statement while on trial at Nuremberg best summed up the cynical simplicity of the logic.

“Of course people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders, that is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.�

Psychological warfare in the form of propaganda comes in all shapes and sizes as well as shades of black, grey or white.  America’s coordinated use of psychological warfare began in earnest during World War II and ever since has grown and expanded into public relations, advertising, cinema, radio and television, electronic video games and now social media. Its pro-war boosterism extends over sports, religion, education, news and entertainment (and of course the military) to form a seamless electronic cocoon-like web. It is employed on an ever growing list of those deemed as enemies of America as well as on a confused and agitated American public – whose corporate news networks frame and manage an increasingly shallow narrative while engaging in a kind of Orwellian Kabuki Theatre of fairness and balance.

Americans were heavily propagandized to support a U.S. entry into World War II and again heavily propagandized to accept the morality of deploying the atomic bomb to end it, despite dissent from within the scientific community. Even Mickey Mouse was conscripted for America’s total war effort along with the minds of America’s youth. Following the war Americans were heavily propagandized to accept the Cold War, the need for maintaining a permanent army, navy and air force as well as the buildup of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

 Since 9/11 Americans have been bathed in psychological warfare on Islamic terrorism despite the fact that only a handful of incidents in the West can be attributed to radical Islamists. What is generally not appreciated by America’s leadership about this kind of prolonged use of propaganda on the American public is that it exposes the rationale for the longest war in American history in Afghanistan as flimsy and unconvincing and completely sidesteps the outright lies and deceptions used to justify the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The origins of Washington’s war in Afghanistan have always been strategic, long term and particularly black, obscured throughout the Cold War by a narrative adapted from Britain’s 19^th century colonial expansion. Read more È

By Elizabeth Gould & Paul Fitzgerald

 9/11. The number still rings in the mind as if chosen to act as a Pavlovian trigger: Outrage, anger, paranoia, retribution. A shadowy band of religious zealots fly not one, but two commercial airliners into the heart of America’s financial community while others deal a deadly blow to the Pentagon. It was a Hollywood movie, an act of war rivaling Pearl Harbor. Why did it happen? Who would do this to Americans, to America? How could a band of ragged terrorists plotting from a cave in faraway Afghanistan have accomplished such a complex task given the size and pervasiveness of the largest and most expensive military/intelligence apparatus in the history of the world? And even more curiously, why would Islamic radicals give the ideology-driven neoconservative administration of George W. Bush exactly the pretext they needed to launch a bloody invasion and further occupation of the Middle East?

According to the official narrative, 9/11 was an attack on everything American and in so doing changed everything about America. Like Kafkaesque characters who’d suddenly found themselves on the other side of a Cold War “Iron Curtain� mirror, Americans would now have to “watch what they say and watch what they do,� open up to questioning or face jail when prodded by squinty-eyed border guards and forsake any hope of privacy or dignity in a new world of electronic spies and full body scans. Former National Security Advisor, Admiral John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program would be enacted and a preexisting “Patriot Act� would be signed into law to clamp down on dissent and real or imagined domestic terrorism.

Some careful observers like Anthony Lewis of the New York Times had already noticed the bizarre coup-like changes coming over Washington in the months leading up to the attack as the George W. Bush administration inaugurated radical shifts in domestic and foreign policy that seemed un-American and alien to anything that had gone before. But those concerns would soon be forgotten in the race for revenge. 

9/11 would ultimately give President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisors all the public approval they needed to transform America and invade Afghanistan and Iraq to cleanse the world of evil in an endless “war on terror.� In the end it would turn America’s reputation for racial and religious tolerance, military invincibility and economic dominance on its head.

Looking back on the carnage of the last ten years it’s easy to see how the psychology of 9/11 changed America. What’s not easy to see is how a long standing campaign of covert psychological warfare built up since the early days of World War II had made the slow destruction of American democracy and the ascension of rule by secrecy inevitable, long before the planes ever left the runway on 9/11.  Read more È

Pepe Escobar returns to our show to discuss the ever-changing, constantly-shifting, and holes-filled script in the US raid that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden. He reports on the news accounts on the Arab uprising in Egypt and the rarely reported realities of the Libya War, the conflicted responses of the United States to the uprising in Egypt and Libya versus those in other places such as Bahrain and Tunisia, and the hypocritical stand on Saudi Arabia. Mr. Escobar talks about the US assembly line of Boogiemen used as catalysts for conflicts and wars, the conflicting accounts on the Bin Laden Death Operation that have been completely censored by the US media and the official narrative as an elaborate PSYOP, the critical turning point in US-Pakistan relations and the China factor in the region, the Central and South Asia geopolitics factor, and more!

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News Network. He is an investigative journalist with three decades of experience in covering politics and conflicts around the globe. He’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering stories and cases from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was in Afghanistan and interviewed the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Masoud, a couple of weeks before his assassination. Mr. Escobar has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of three must-read books: Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War, Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge, and Obama Does Globalistan.

Here is our guest Pepe Escobar unplugged!

Interview with Pepe Escobar [ 1:08:58 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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There are ‘experts’ views,’ and then there are experts’ views. There are ‘government sources,’ and then there are government sources. Not all experts are equal. And, not all sources are reliable. Am I talking in riddles? Of course not; give me a chance and I’ll explain.

We have members of the popular media (mainstream and quasi alternatives alike) ever anxious to market and disseminate government conspiracy and propaganda. They, members of the popular media, have their own rolodex of ‘experts’ and analysts, some on their payroll, to help them propagate the delivery and execution of government-given propaganda-conspiracy. The same principle applies to ‘sources.’ The popular media relies on their government sources who act as middle-men-government messengers who’ve been given a government written and approved script to be delivered; almost always anonymously. Well, this is exactly what we have been getting from our media, around the clock, since the announcement of the Bin Laden Death Operation: ever-changing government scripts, delivered mainly by anonymous government sources to the US media, and further embellished and expanded upon by government-connected experts and analysts on the payroll.

On the other hand, there are many independent real experts whose analyses and views you won’t, or rarely, get to hear or read about; at least not in the mainstream media or at quasi-alternative sites. And there are current and former government sources not tasked with messenger duties; many of whom don’t see the ‘calculated’ necessity to remain ‘anonymous.’ I can assure you, you do not, and will not, read or hear these experts’ and sources’ statements, analyses or views when it comes to government-written stories and their media buddies.

Last weekend Boiling Frogs Post contacted several independent sources and experts, and asked them for their straight-forward take on the absurdity-filled and ever-changing Bin Laden Death story. I say independent, because they are. As you’ll see these veterans and sources come from all different walks of Intelligence-Law Enforcement-Military, and as far as political orientation goes, they fall into every single category-liberal, conservative, libertarian and none. I want to thank them all for honoring the request given to them on extremely short notice, and for being honest, direct, commonsensical, and in some cases realistically humorous. Here is what they had to say, and say it briefly per my request, starting with my favorite investigative reporter and bestselling author, whom I respect tremendously and consider ‘truly independent,’ James Bamford: Read more È

The standard, call it classic, definition of PSYOP is badly in need of an update. When you look it up, you see something along these lines [Emphasis are mine]: planned propaganda operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. It is way past time to add ‘domestic’ in there. Isn’t it? Come on; remember our mini PSYOP cases like Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. I say ‘mini’ because they were mini, thus, eventually exposed. The ‘major’ ones, at least here in the US, tend to go unnoticed or not widely debated. Right now, we may be very well looking at one of those major ones as it is unfolding: White House Osama Death PSYOP Script.

On Monday, less than a day after the supposed operation, I started covering the Osama Death sensationalism. In my first post I said: “It is way too early for a comprehensive analysis or even a short commentary.� I wish others, the so-called media had exercised the same restraint, instead of spreading the far-fetched and fantastical script given to them by their masters to fire up and round up the gullible and easily hurray-ing majority. 

On Tuesday, I pointed out the uncanny resemblance between the script and method used in the Jessica Lynch PSYOP case and the latest Osama Death case: “It is too early. I can talk about the strange timing, absurdity of some mysterious burial at sea, questionable coincidences, and or our government’s pretty tainted record when it comes to facts: Remember Iraq’s WMD lies, Pentagon’s made-up script on Jessica Lynch, wrongfully accused Steven Hatfill, questionable Anthrax suspect Bruce Ivins, Niger Yellowcake fantasy…� Again, it took the resourceful media another 24-48 hours and tons of pounding to make the connections.

Here are the latest changes to the Obama administration’s lies-filled script. Let’s keep track of them, and keep them on the front burner, because as you know, as more come out, as we get more confirmed contradictions, the fantastical story tends to get pushed onto the backburner by the media, from front page stories-headlines to Page A2, and from there to B18, and pretty quickly into the usual black hole: Read more È