Category Archives: corporate news

The Crisis of the Now: Distracted and Diverted from the Ever-Encroaching Police State

Posted on by
Reply

corp_media_500

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility.”—Author Neil Postman

Caught up in the spectacle of the forthcoming 2016 presidential elections, Americans (never very good when it comes to long-term memory) have not only largely forgotten last year’s hullabaloo over militarized police, police shootings of unarmed citizens, asset forfeiture schemes, and government surveillance but are also generally foggy about everything that has happened since.

Then again, so much is happening on a daily basis that it’s understandable if the average American has a hard time keeping up with and remembering all of the “events,” manufactured or otherwise, which occur like clockwork and keep us distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from reality while the government continues to amass more power and authority over the citizenry.

In fact, when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this. As investigative journalist Mike Adams points out:

This psychological bombardment is waged primarily via the mainstream media which assaults the viewer by the hour with images of violence, war, emotions and conflict. Because the human nervous system is hard wired to focus on immediate threats accompanied by depictions of violence, mainstream media viewers have their attention and mental resources funneled into the never-ending ‘crisis of the NOW’ from which they can never have the mental breathing room to apply logic, reason or historical context.

Consider if you will the regularly scheduled trivia and/or distractions in the past year alone that have kept us tuned into the various breaking news headlines and entertainment spectacles and tuned out to the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms:

Americans were riveted when the Republican presidential contenders went head-to-head for the second time in a three-hour debate that put Carly Fiorina in a favored position behind Donald Trump; Hillary Clinton presented the softer side of her campaign image during an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon; scientists announced the discovery of what they believed to be a new pre-human species, Homo naledi, that existed 2.8 million years ago; an 8.3 magnitude earthquake hit Chile; massive wildfires burned through 73,000 acres in California; a district court judge reversed NFL player Tom Brady’s four-game suspension; tennis superstar Serena Williams lost her chance at a calendar grand slam; and President Obama and Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg tweeted their support for a Texas student arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school.

That was preceded by the first round of the Republican presidential debates; an immigration crisis in Europe; the relaxing of Cuba-U.S. relations; the first two women soldiers graduating from Army Ranger course; and three Americans being hailed as heroes for thwarting a train attack in France. Before that, there was the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse; shootings at a military recruiting center in Tennessee and a movie theater in Louisiana; the Boy Scouts’ decision to end its ban on gay adult leaders; the first images sent by the New Horizons spacecraft of Pluto; and the victory over Japan of the U.S. in the Women’s World Cup soccer finals.

No less traumatic and distracting were the preceding months’ newsworthy events, which included a shooting at a Charleston, S.C., church; the trial and sentencing of Boston Marathon bomber suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmation of same-sex marriage, Obamacare, lethal injection drugs and government censorship of Confederate flag license plates; and an Amtrak train crash in Philadelphia that left more than 200 injured and eight dead.

Also included in the mix of distressing news coverage was the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray while in police custody and the subsequent riots in Baltimore and city-wide lockdown; the damning report by the Dept. of Justice into discriminatory and abusive practices by the Ferguson police department; the ongoing saga of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account while serving as secretary of state; the apparently deliberate crash by a copilot of a German jetliner in the French Alps, killing all 150 passengers and crew; the New England Patriots’ fourth Super Bowl win; a measles outbreak in Disneyland; the escalating tensions between New York police and Mayor Bill de Blasio over his seeming support for anti-police protesters; and a terror attack at the Paris office of satire magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Rounding out the year’s worth of headline-worthy new stories were protests over grand jury refusals to charge police for the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown; the disappearance of an AirAsia flight over the Java Sea; an Ebola outbreak that results in several victims being transported to the U.S. for treatment; reports of domestic violence among NFL players; a security breach at the White House in which a man managed to jump the fence, cross the lawn and enter the main residence; and the reported beheading of American journalist Steven Sotloff by ISIS.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on the spate of entertainment news that tends to win the battle for Americans’ attention: Bruce Jenner’s transgender transformation to Caitlyn Jenner; the death of Whitney Houston’s daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown; Kim Kardashian’s “break the internet” nude derriere photo; sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby; the suicide of Robin Williams; the cancellation of the comedy The Interview in movie theaters after alleged terror hack threats; the wedding of George Clooney to Amal Alamuddin; the wedding of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt; the ALS ice bucket challenge; and the birth of a baby girl to Prince William and Kate.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these sleight-of-hand distractions, diversions and news spectacles are how the corporate elite controls a population by entrapping them in the “crisis of the NOW,” either inadvertently or intentionally, advancing their agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

Professor Jacques Ellul studied this phenomenon of overwhelming news, short memories and the use of propaganda to advance hidden agendas. “One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones,” wrote Ellul.

“Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts; man’s capacity to forget is unlimited. This is one of the most important and useful points for the propagandists, who can always be sure that a particular propaganda theme, statement, or event will be forgotten within a few weeks.”

But what exactly has the government (aided and abetted by the mainstream media) been doing while we’ve been so cooperatively fixated on whatever current sensation happens to be monopolizing the so-called “news” shows?

If properly disclosed, consistently reported on and properly digested by the citizenry, the sheer volume of the government’s activities, which undermine the Constitution and in many instances are outright illegal, would inevitably give rise to a sea change in how business is conducted in our seats of power.

Surely Americans would be concerned about the Obama administration’s plans to use behavioral science tactics to “nudge” citizens to comply with the government’s public policy and program initiatives? There would be no end to the uproar if Americans understood the ramifications of the government’s plan to train non-medical personnel—teachers, counselors and other lay people—in “mental first aid” in order to train them to screen, identify and report individuals suspected of suffering from mental illness. The problem, of course, arises when these very same mental health screeners misdiagnose opinions or behavior involving lawful First Amendment activities as a mental illness, resulting in involuntary detentions in psychiatric wards for the unfortunate victims.

Parents would be livid if they had any inkling about the school-to-prison pipeline, namely, how the public schools are being transformed from institutions of learning to prison-like factories, complete with armed police and surveillance cameras, aimed at churning out compliant test-takers rather than independent-minded citizens. And once those same young people reach college, they will be indoctrinated into believing that they have a “right” to be free from acts and expressions of intolerance with which they might disagree.

Concerned citizens should be up in arms over the government’s end-run tactics to avoid abiding by the rule of law, whether by outsourcing illegal surveillance activities to defense contractors, outsourcing inhumane torture to foreign countries, causing American citizens to disappear into secret interrogation facilities, or establishing policies that would allow the military to indefinitely detain any citizen—including journalists—considered a belligerent or enemy.

And one would hope American citizens would be incensed about being treated like prisoners in an electronic concentration camp, their every movement monitored, tracked and recorded by a growing government surveillance network that runs the gamut from traffic cameras and police body cameras to facial recognition software. Or outraged that we will be forced to fund a $93 billion drone industry that will be used to spy on our movements and activities, not to mention the fact that private prisons are getting rich (on our taxpayer dollars) by locking up infants, toddlers, children and pregnant women?

Unfortunately, while 71% of American voters are “dissatisfied” with the way things are going in the United States, that discontent has yet to bring about any significant changes in the government, nor has it caused the citizenry to get any more involved in their government beyond the ritualistic election day vote.

Professor Morris Berman suggests that the problems plaguing us as a nation—particularly as they relate to the government—have less to do with our inattention to corruption than our sanctioning, tacit or not, of such activities. “It seems to me,” writes Berman, “that the people do get the government they deserve, and even beyond that, the government who they are, so to speak.”

In other words, if we end up with a militarized police state, it will largely be because we welcomed it with open arms. In fact, according to a recent poll, almost a third of Americans would support a military coup “to take control from a civilian government which is beginning to violate the constitution.”

So where does that leave us?

As legendary television journalist Edward R. Murrow warned, “Unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.”

Why America Will Never Hear the Entire Benghazi Story

Posted on by
Reply

ct-benghazi-hillary-clinton-20151022

By Larry Hancock

Source: WhoWhatWhy.org

The underlying story of Benghazi is one that cannot and will not be talked about in any open session of Congress. This means that Thursday’s hearing featuring former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was nothing but an exercise in futility.

It is the story of a covert CIA operation that was operating from a separate facility in the Benghazi compound that was simply known as the “Annex.” Some two dozen CIA case officers, analysts, translators and special staff were a part of this operation and its security was provided by CIA Global Response Staff (GRS), who had entered the country under diplomatic cover.

The CIA’s mission included arms interdiction — attempting to stop the flow of Soviet-era weapons to Central Africa — and very possibly the organization of Libyan arms shipments to vetted insurgent groups on the ground in Syria.

There is also evidence that the mission was working in concert with military personnel from the Joint Special Operations Group Trans-Sahara. At the time of the attack, an unarmed American surveillance drone was in flight over the territory east of Benghazi and Trans-Sahara military personnel were stationed in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

In contrast, the State Department’s special diplomatic mission facility, classified as “temporary,” was minimally staffed with a rotating series of State Department officers sent to and from Tripoli.

US Ambassador Christopher Stevens had not been in Benghazi for a year. When he arrived for a short stay in September 2012, only a single diplomatic officer was present there, and that officer rotated back to Tripoli upon the ambassador’s arrival. Stevens was accompanied by a communications officer and a handful of Diplomatic Service Security staff. The security personnel provided protection for the ambassador during his travels and meetings in the city. His presence was intended to be extremely low key, but it was exposed in the local media shortly after his arrival.

Fruitless, Meaningless, Pointless Questioning

Asking Clinton to justify maintaining the State Department temporary mission in the face of a worsening security situation is fruitless, given its actual function as a clandestine national security mission cover.

Questioning Clinton about that role would be as meaningless as questioning senior CIA personnel about operational information. Such missions cannot be publicly acknowledged or discussed, and revealing anything about them is strictly prohibited.

The same national security laws constraining State Department and CIA personnel also prevent lawmakers, other than those on select intelligence committees, from being briefed on such missions. And even those privileged individuals could not raise related questions in public — or even in closed sessions that include committee members or staff without the appropriate clearances.

In addition, querying Clinton about her involvement in the immediate response to the attacks is also pointless. The Secretary of State has no legal or operational role in a military response to a diplomatic facility attack. Only National Command Authority (president/secretary of defense) can order a foreign military intervention. The State Department does have Foreign Emergency Support Teams (FEST), composed of personnel from multiple agencies and maintained on alert to respond to crisis. But the FEST teams have no military elements and are dispatched only in the aftermath of a crisis, when the security situation allows. Following an attack their role is damage assessment and recovery.

Earlier investigations have already documented that President Obama ordered a military response immediately upon word reaching Washington. They showed as well that the AFRICOM commander responded to that order right away, directing deployment of the closest military quick reaction units — units which were on station in Spain, training in Eastern Europe, or back in the United States.

There were no armed American aircraft or naval units close enough to respond during the attack, those assets were in operation in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the Horn of Africa in Somalia and Yemen.

Maintaining a Covert Profile

As for the well-equipped paramilitary operatives at the CIA station, according to their own statements, they were initially held back by the CIA station chief — as they had been in other incidents. And the station chief was, in turn, acting under his directive to let local militia groups respond. That practice was intended to maintain the station’s covert profile. Unfortunately, it was not consistent with providing any real time defense for the State Department compound.

Given all of the above, it is clear why the hearing quickly turned into a game of “pin the tail on the donkey.” As Democrats have claimed all along — and some Republicans have recently admitted — the committee’s work is mostly about beating up a political adversary and not at all about advancing the security of American diplomats abroad.

 

Larry Hancock conducts investigative and historical research in the areas of intelligence and national security. He has studied Benghazi in regard to both its covert aspects and the issues it raises for diplomatic security. That work is published in Shadow Warfare, A History of America’s Undeclared Wars (Counterpoint, 2014) and his most recently published book, Surprise Attack, from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 to Benghazi (Counterpoint, Sept. 2015).

Marrying robots, killing with drones, and making empty selfies

Posted on by
1

by Edward Curtin

Source: Intrepid Report

Today everything has become a spectacle, including writing. My title probably caught your eye, as it was intended. But now I would like to tell you a personal story about a man whose brilliant work foreshadowed and dissected the issues of my title before it existed. In this he was prophetic, and it is why his work is so important. He always insisted that true artists were able to uncover society’s conflicts before they emerged consciously. Though a psychologist by profession, he was in this sense an artist as well.

His name, Rollo May, has disappeared from public discourse in this era of biological psychology and psychiatry. This great American thinker and writer was the man who introduced existential psychology to the United States. And though he died twenty-one years ago, his prescient voice begs to be heard in our current conditions.

From his first important book in 1950—The Meaning of Anxiety—he examined key underlying issues that have plagued this country ever since: the worship of technology as a death cult; the loss of a genuine sense of self; sex obsessions leading to lovelessness and impotence; and violence yoked to a lack of compassion.

In book after book, he reiterated one of his central themes: that full passionate life is only possible when one refuses to block off from consciousness the frightful emotions of anxiety, guilt, and despair. In this, his life’s work ran against the grain of the emerging zeitgeist of happy pills, mood stabilizers, and the happiness industry. “After despair,” he wrote, “the one thing left is possibility.” For possibility (Latin, posse, to be able) means power, and true power only comes to those who dare to be weak and freely embrace their personal destinies and the truth of their political and cultural conditions. I think it is not an exaggeration to say that we are presently living in an era of despair, and to embrace that reality is a hard but necessary pill to swallow. May is a wonderful guide.

While topical, in many ways his message is timeless as well. But I would like to tell you about some things I learned from him years ago that speak to our current condition. And it seems fitting that I should begin these thoughts on a day when a prominent, mainstream website has published an article arguing that humans should be able to marry robots and the day of those blissful conjugal ties is in our not too distant future. So I will proceed with those lovely words ringing in my mind: “I now pronounce you robot and wife.”

It was during the closing years of the Cold War when he and I sat down for a long conversation about his thought. Cold War rhetoric and nuclear saber rattling dominated the news and a strong anti-nuclear movement was astir. I had been deeply impressed with May’s paradoxical thinking ever since I had read his award-winning Love and Will in 1969, a year in which I had been forced out of a college teaching position for “heretical” thinking and opposition to the Vietnam war. In his work, which was not openly political, I nevertheless found a voice of deep wisdom and prophetic power. He seemed to be unearthing hidden springs of the madness sweeping the country, and in so doing also addressing the future, and, of course, me. I was feeling particularly vulnerable, yet paradoxically intensely strong, as I had recently declared myself a conscientious objector from war and the Marine Corps. It was a time like today when death and destruction were in the air, and, as Yeats puts it: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

The first thing I noticed about May the day we met was that he seemed painfully vulnerable, as though he had so opened himself to existence that the slightest breeze could blow him away. Yet when he began talking I sensed a fierceness, as well, as I recalled a favorite quote of his from Beethoven: “I will seize fate by the throat.”

So I asked him, “In reading your works one of the things that strikes me is the vitality you draw from an awareness of death. Most people would call this morbid and depressing, and yet it seems to bring you joy. I wonder how this began for you?”

“Well,” he answered without hesitation but in his ruminative way, “I’ve had some long bouts with killing illnesses. I had tuberculosis for five or six years. I had malaria fever when I was in Greece. And I’ve had several other bouts with death. If most people would call the consciousness of death depressive, I think they are the ones who have the—what I would call—masochistic or neurotic viewpoint. All through human history mortality has been faced directly and out of it, and this especially true for the ancient Greeks, they got the sense of the value of life from the fact that we are mortal. Now our age is afraid of death and we repress it and we think the only wise thing is to think about living, which strikes me as itself very sick. It’s because we’ve wedded ourselves to technology, and technology is really a study of death. You say ‘vitality.’ You can’t speak of technology as having vitality. Vitality is the human beings contribution and he ought to use technology to make his life richer. But we have become identified with it.”

Presto! Back to the present/future! As if on cue, a refutation of May’s dismissal of machines having life walks in my door. I see the mailman deliver our mail, so I get up and fetch it. An invitation has arrived for a public lecture at the college where I teach—a lecture by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, the man of “Singularity” fame, the prognosticator of the day he says is coming when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence and human biology will disappear into the machine. Ray has a plan to never die, so he takes 130 plus supplements a day to keep himself alive until he is able to upload his consciousness onto a hard drive and become one with the machine for a happy immortality as bits of information. Sounds like a great hereafter. And Ray has a backup plan in case the pills don’t do the trick and keep him going until he impregnates the machine; he’ll be fresh frozen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation where he expects to be defrosted like a frozen burrito in no more than fifty years.

May said to me, “I’m very much against the quantitative views of human life. You could live exceptionally as Pascal did and die in your middle forties. As Kierkegaard did also. The length of life I don’t think is relevant. The idea that we are going to prolong life for two hundred years seems to me to be the most misplaced goal in the whole technological, crazy scheme.”

It looks like Rollo had a point: the worship of technology as a death cult. He could see it then, and today it is carrying us to our doom unless we change course. “More and more,” he wrote, “the question is being asked whether society as a whole is psychotic, and the pause after the question is a sign that the answer could be yes as well as no.” There was, he then felt, a fear of psychosis on a very broad scale, and at the heart of this fear is a loss of faith in the reality of the self, as well as a widespread feeling that one can never be sure anything is real. This sense of unreality has increased exponentially since then, and the issue of self-identity has become a hall of mirrors in our reality-media funhouse. “As in a Kafka novel, everything is waiting for us, but we ourselves do not appear.” But what does appear today, as then, but in a slightly different guise, and grows larger and larger as people’s faith in themselves grows smaller and smaller and their sense of impotence increases, is the possibility of nuclear warfare and world destruction—a new cold war started by the United States by encircling Russia and setting Ukraine ablaze. The ultimate technological death cult is, of course, nuclear weapons .

May made the connections. Like the great sociologist C. Wright Mills, he knew that our destinies are personal and social, and to deny one is to deny the other. By being existential he meant understanding the individual, not as an atomized self, but as a person-in-the world. Mills called it the sociological imagination; May preferred the term paradoxical. But they were on the same page. One’s sense of self—self-identity—is rooted social and historical conditions.

Starting with Man’s Search for Himself in the 1950s and continuing until his death in 1994, May repeatedly explored the reasons why there was an increasing loss of a genuine sense of self resulting in widespread identity confusion and a growing apathy linked to a lack of compassion. He clearly described the anxiety and loneliness that ate at so many people who “not only do not know what they want; they often do not have any clear idea of what they feel.” Feeling only empty and bored and lacking a real sense of self, they conform to hollow cultural values and mores while consuming the goods and services that a consumer culture offers to fill them up. Consuming, they are consumed. This powerless dependency, rooted in a lack of self-identity and the need to be liked, leads to painful anxiety, despair, and powerlessness resulting in acquiescence to social ills. This is today’s selfie/media culture in a nutshell, what Christopher Lasch once called the culture of narcissism.

I obviously couldn’t ask him when we talked, but I can imagine his response to today’s trends of people marrying robots, selfie photos, Facebook, avatars and second lives in cyberspace, the growth of pornography, sex with machines, the sexual saturation of culture, electronic warfare, drone killings, etc.—a bemused laugh and a comment suggesting the tragedy of it all. In Love and Will he wrote that “the contemporary paradoxes in sex and love have one thing in common, namely the banalization of sex and love. By anesthetizing feeling in order to perform better, by employing sex as a tool to prove prowess and identity, by using sensuality to hide sensitivity, we have emasculated sex and left it vapid and empty. The banalization of sex is well-aided and abetted by our mass communication. . . . They oversimplify love and sex, treating the topic like a combination and learning to play tennis and buying life insurance. In this process, we have robbed sex of its power by sidestepping eros (the creative life force); and we have ended by dehumanizing both.” He predicted that this technical approach to sex would lead to sex obsessions, lovelessness, and increased sexual impotence. And here we are—Viagra, big butts, enhanced this and enhanced that—all in the service of sexual satisfaction produced by the cult of technique and devoid of passion.

“Shooting” yourself with a phone camera, sex with a robot or a machine, and killing with drones—this is life today. We have become separated from our humanity by our machines. We worship our images and in so doing can’t grasp the death and destruction caused by our drones and foreign wars. Others don’t exist in this solipsistic culture. May saw it coming and explained why. He saw that violence was yoked to a lack of compassion and that this lack of compassion (to suffer with others) was connected to our flight from death and emotions we consider negative. He saw this form of thinking as an effort to control life that was self-defeating and could only lead to more violence.

“Paradoxical thinking,” he told me, “seems to me to be the only kind that gets to the root of human existence. I don’t think analytical thinking does. It leaves out too much. You remember Heraclitus. I think he’s quite right that we always think in terms of positive/negative. We think like electricity, thus both the negative and positive pole and the oscillation back and forth, and human thinking is a play with opposites.”

Since he has written so much about the breakdown of our traditional myths and symbols, I asked him if there was any one word or symbol that he thought encompassed the body of his work.

After a long pause, he said, “No, I think that’s impossible for any person who writes to say. I think you could say it much better than I could because we’re so much in it. All I know is that I think paradoxically.” And without pause or any word from me, he continued. “Well, if you wanted to push me, I would say that what I think is the basic, well, the basic symbol of my life, I would say that it is compassion. That’s what matters most to me. I grew up in a rather difficult family, quite difficult. I did not have a good childhood. I was quite lonely as a child. And I did suffer a good deal.”

Out of this childhood pain, he learned early to be a therapist for his family, and felt that these experiences gave him an acute sensitivity to others’ feelings. In his memoir Paulus, about his friend, Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, he wrote words that could equally apply to himself: “Someone has to mediate, to make a connection through his own life between opposites.” For out of his wounds, May has created a powerful body of writings, and out of a torn self, a paradox of wholeness.

For us today, in the era of apathy, depression, and indifference to the suffering and deaths of “others” everywhere, May’s work begs to be resurrected. He urges us to care again, and to let our care and compassion lead us to act to stop the violence that we are taught to ignore. Don’t look away, I can hear him say, face fully all dimensions of the human experience, the negative and positive; remember that despair and joy are linked to the possibility of freedom; reject the cult of death that hides within technological obsessiveness; and remember that love brings the intimation of our mortality but also our greatest joys and passions.

And if he were still sitting across from me—and you—today, he’d probably also say with a grin, “Above all, don’t marry a robot.”

Edward Curtin is a sociologist and writer who teaches at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and has published widely.

Why Hillary Won the Debate (Even though She Didn’t)

Posted on by
4

images

By Gary Leupp

Source: Dissident Voice

CNN and Facebook co-sponsored last week’s Democratic presidential frontrunners’ “debate.” After the event, CNN conducted a poll. “Who won the debate?” it asked. The result: 83% Bernie Sanders; 12% Hillary Clinton.

Facebook also took a poll. “Who do you think won?” Over 79% responded, “Bernie Sanders.”

The CNN editors’ take? “CLINTON’S CONFIDANT SWEEP.”

Slate conducted a poll. “Who won the presidential debate?” asked the magazine. 75% of respondents said Bernie Sanders; 18% gave it to Hillary Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton won,” reported Slate “senior writer” Josh Vorhees exuberantly. “She just needed to be solid in the debate. Instead, she was spectacular.”

Spectacular! with 18% of Slate’s own polling numbers. Go figure.

“Who do you think won?” asked Time Magazine. The response?  Bernie Sanders: 70%, Hillary Clinton 16%.

The Time headline:  “CLINTON IN CONTROL.”

Are you disgusted yet? This goes far beyond distortion, and far beyond the tampering with facts that characterized Soviet-style reporting in Izvestia and Pravda in the decade before the USSR collapsed. This is in-your-face rejection of empirical reality, to say nothing of an insult to the viewers polled. The entire mainstream news media is complicit.

Imagine if the “free” press—free to publish whatever its corporate editors want, including even the truth, at their discretion—had sought to spin this story differently.

“POLLS SHOW BIG WIN FOR SANDERS,” CNN might have proclaimed, between commercials.

“A great night for Sanders,” Slate might have announced.

“SANDERS TROUNCES CLINTON,” Time might have acknowledged.

But no, and this is par for the course. The TV cable news anchors took ages to concede that, well, yes, maybe Jed Bush—despite his solid RNC support and Wall Street’s firm endorsement—is not the inevitable GOP candidate. They’ve had to acknowledge that (for whatever reasons) Donald Trump’s actually striking a much deeper chord than warmonger Dubya’s little brother among likely voters.

But they’re stubbornly refusing to recognize some things they don’t want to see—things that don’t follow their script.

They don’t understand that people in their twenties who constitute the 75-year-old Sanders’ support base have no problem with “socialism” but rather have lots of problems with Wall Street. These “millenials” are even—horrors!—increasingly inclined to question the national god of capitalism itself. It has fewer positive connotations to them than it did for their parents who grew up during the Cold War and were subjected to its particular brainwashing agenda.

That’s the sort of brainwashing that allows Trump, a demagogue preying on the most abjectly ignorant to tell cheering crowds that he calls Sanders “a ‘socialist, slash, communist,’ okay? ‘Cause that’s what he is!”

‘Cause that’s what he is! Sanders is a communist. End of story. End of rational thought.

I myself am not a Sanders supporter. He’s nowhere nearly left enough for me. But then I’m not a supporter of the whole bogus, skewed, money-driven two-party electoral system itself, which seems designed to hoodwink people, channel their energies into itself, and then produce disillusionment soon after the election, as the elected official reneges on promises and proved to be anything other than a harbinger of “change.” The system is wired to then hoodwink people again, re-channel their energies (again back into itself), bouncing people back and forth between two hopelessly corrupt parties that are really two factions of a single corporate party.

The system tells us, “If you don’t vote, you have nothing to say” and reduces political involvement to endorsing one of its (safe) choices. It excludes from the debate stage even the discussion of needed radical change. The electoral process is designed to keep you out of the street (where history is really made) and lead you into a box, like a confessional booth or a porno video cubicle, a private space in which you’re touched by something greater than yourself and leave with a sense of gratification. You were a good citizen. You exercised your precious right to VOTE and did your part!

Casting that ballot in private is supposed to make you feel good about yourself, as a participant in the state. It’s supposed to make you think that, since you actually participated in the construction of the existing polity, when you talk about what it does, you can accept personal responsibility for its crimes.

For example, you might say: “We shouldn’t have invaded Iraq.” In doing so you implicitly include yourself—despite your disagreement—among those who actually did the vicious deed. I prefer to say, “Leave me out of that ‘we,’ since I had nothing to do with it. I fought against it, tooth and nail, attending every anti-war demonstration I could and railing against it to all who would listen.”

“Well, our government did it,” you might correct yourself. “We voted for it.” But I will reply I didn’t; I stayed at home on election day, 2000. It’s like I was invited to a party that day, and disliking all who’d be there, I politely declined to attend.

When you vote, you vote not so much for a person as for the system itself, validating it and the rules surrounding the procedure. Casting the ballot is the state’s highest ritual, the individual’s most intimate connection with the state. It makes you feel one with it. It’s rather like taking the Holy Communion at mass. You’re swallowing something, and making a statement of faith: I believe in this system!

This (corporate) system you vote for, every time you vote at all, commands the (corporate) media to such an extent that it can do what we see in the reportage cited above. It can turn reality on its head and get away with it, whether it’s shaping public opinion about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, U.S. successes against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Syrian “moderates” gaining against Assad, or victory in a farcical televised debate.

Whatever you think about Sanders, is it not outrageous that the mass media can obscure his plain victory in that exercise as a triumph for Hillary Clinton? Even a “spectacular” win? Isn’t it clear that she was pronounced the victor not because she actually won out over Sanders but because powerful people steering the “free” press needed her to do so?

As PR/disinformation master Karl Rove once put it (and this should be repeated as often as we repeat that wonderful quote from the imprisoned Goebbels at Nuremberg about using fear to build mass support for war): “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

It’s not a sentiment unique to Republicans. Recall how, during the 2012 Democratic national convention, the crowd clearly voted down the inclusion of a line supporting Jerusalem as the eternal, undivided capital of Israel in its platform. The change required a two-thirds majority of the vote, according to party rules. At least half the delegates voted against it.

Still, the convention chairman to the outrage of many present announced (after some hushed consultation) that the “Ayes” carried the day. So much for democracy at the “Democratic” Party’s convention.

The mainstream press, by and large, wants Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic nominee for president. Wall Street’s leading candidates are Jeb Bush and Clinton; both are beloved of big money and either one will do. Sanders (even though in office he would likely buckle to their will, the same way Greece’s “socialist” Alexis Tsipras buckled to the IMF and European Central Bank) is anathema to Wall Street. And the connections between Wall Street, the Washington power elite, and the press are—to use the Chinese expression—as close as lips and teeth.

Finance capital rules the world and will do so until the “millions and millions” Bernie keeps talking about find some way to effectively challenge it.

Thus Sanders could not win the debate, even though he did. And Hillary was destined to win the debate, even though she didn’t. Get it? And isn’t it great you have the right to vote for her?

 

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu. Read other articles by Gary.

The MH17 Big Lie: The Russians Did It

Posted on by
Reply

mh17-crash8-data

By Stephen Lendman

Source: Steve Lendman Blog

Downing MH17 was a classic false flag, the scheme likely cooked up in Washington, using its Kiev puppet regime to do its dirty work, then point fingers the wrong way.

The Russians DID NOT down MH17 – nor Donbass freedom fighters. No credible evidence suggests it. Only fools and liars believe it.

What could they possibly gain from downing a commercial airliner, unrelated to conflict on the ground, killing 298 passengers and crew members.

Washington and/or Kiev had motive and opportunity, gaining plenty by pointing fingers the wrong way, supported by the usual scoundrel media chorus, featuring Big Lies and innuendos.

The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) is a front for US imperial policy. Joint Investigation Team (JIT) countries include the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium and Ukraine – conspiratorially allied against Russia, Washington pulling the strings behind the scene.

DSB’s final report is out. It stopped short of naming perpetrators, suggested Russia and Donbass freedom fighters were responsible without saying so.

It claimed a (a no longer in use Soviet era) Russian-made Buk 9M38-series (surface-to-air) missile (used only by Ukraine, not Russia’s military) downed MH17 – refuting earlier reports based on high-resolution photos showing cockpit damage from likely 30 millimeter air-to-air cannon fire.

Eyewitnesses on the ground saw a Ukrainian warplane trailing MH17. Russian radar tracked a Ukrainian SU-25 jet fighter within three km of the fated aircraft.

An unsatisfactorily answered question is why Ukrainian air traffic control let MH17 overfly a war zone. Other commercial airliners avoided it for obvious reasons.

Did Kiev authorities deliberately put MH17 in harm’s way to down it and blame Russia and Donbass freedom fighters for their crime?

Did Washington and Ukrainian fascists jointly plan the incident? Further US and EU sanctions followed plus relentless, irresponsible Putin-bashing.

DSB’s September 9 preliminary report said MH17 “broke up in the air probably as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.”

Its final report claimed a missile was launched from an Eastern Ukraine 320 square km area without pinpointing the launch site.

Its chairman, Tjibbe Joustra, suggested it came from rebel-held territory without specifically saying so. He claimed “Flight MH17 crashed as a result of the detonation of a warhead outside the airplane against the left-hand side of the cockpit. This warhead fits the kind of missile that is installed in the BUK surface-to-air missile system.”

It was fired from “an area where the borders have fluctuated a lot, but it’s a territory where the pro-Russian rebels have laid down the law.”

A White House statement ludicrously called DSB’s report an “important milestone in the effort to hold accountable those responsible.”

A criminal investigation is underway. Dutch Prime Minister insultingly asked Russia for “complete cooperation.” The DSB ignored key Moscow supplied evidence.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed it, saying: “There are facts delivered by the Russian side that for unclear reasons are being apparently ignored.”

Moscow “repeatedly expressed its disappointment over the lack of proper level of cooperation and engagement of the Russian experts into the investigation.”

Russia’s Roasaviation deputy head Oleg Storchevoy accused the DSB of ignoring “comprehensive information” presented by Moscow, suggesting willful coverup – in a letter to the International Civil Aviation Association (ICAA).

Russian arms manufacturer Almaz-Antey presented its own findings, based on exhaustive study and sophisticated simulations of what likely happened, disputing DSB’s conclusions, saying MH17 wasn’t downed from rebel-held territory.

CEO Yan Novikov said an older, out-of-date Buk missile (last produced in 1986), no longer used by Russia, still used by Ukraine, downed MH17. DSB members ignored Almaz-Antey’s findings.

The incident occurred on July 17, 2014. The instant knee-jerk reaction from Washington, other Western capitals, and go-along media scoundrels (still unchanged) was “Russia did it” – despite no evidence suggesting it then or now.

A sampling of headlines following release of the DSB’s final report include the following:

New York Times: “Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 Most Likely Hit by Russian-Made Missile, Inquiry Says”

Washington Post: “The Latest: Ex-war crimes judge: Dutch report refutes Russia”

Wall Street Journal: “Dutch Investigators Say MH17 Was Downed by Russian-Made Missile”

Los Angeles Times: “Malaysia Airlines Flight 17: Report says Russian-made missile system downed jet”

Chicago Tribune: “Dutch Safety Board: Russian-made Buk missile downed MH17 in Ukraine”

BBC: “MH17 Ukraine disaster: Dutch Safety Board blames (Russian-made Buk) missile”

The disturbing innuendo from all these headlines implies Russian-made means Russian-launched.

It bears repeating what should be clear to everyone. Russia DID NOT down MH17 – nor Donbass freedom fighters. Kiev fascists, very likely complicit with Washington, were responsible, wanting Putin blamed for their crime.

 

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Catching Up With the Unabomber. When Does the End Justify the Means?

Posted on by
4

220px-Unabomberforpresident

By Brian Whitney

Source: Disinfo.com

The Unabomber, known as Ted Kaczynski, was not a fan of technology. To expose the world to his anti-technology philosophy, from the years 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23, before he was eventually caught and sent to prison. He remains there today. At one time, he was possibly the most famous criminal in the world.

He said of technology’s role:

The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.

In his essay Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski argued that while his bombings were “a bit” extreme, they were quite necessary to attract attention to the loss of human freedom caused by modern technology. His book Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. “The Unabomber” breaks all of his philosophies down for those of us that just know him through corporate news stations.

Was the Unabomber crazy, or just so sane he was blowing our minds?

I talked to David Skrbina, confidant of Kaczynski, and philosophy professor at the University of Michigan. Skrbina wrote the intro to Technological Slavery.

Can you tell me a bit about how you and Kaczynski began to communicate? Are you still in touch with him today?

Back in 2003, I began work on a new course at the University of Michigan: ‘Philosophy of Technology.’ Surprisingly, such a course had never been offered before, at any of our campuses. I wanted to remedy that deficiency.

I then began to pull together recent and relevant material for the course, focusing on critical approaches to technology. These, to me, were more insightful and more interesting, and were notably under-analyzed among current philosophers of technology. Most of them are either neutral toward modern technology, or positively embrace it, or accept its presence resignedly. As I found out, very few philosophers of the past four decades adopted anything like a critical stance. This, for me, was highly revealing.

Anyway, I was well aware of Kaczynski’s manifesto, “Industrial society and its future,” which was published in late 1995 at the height of the Unabomber mania. I was very impressed with its analysis, even though most of the ideas were not new to me (many were reiterations of arguments by Jacques Ellul, for example—see his 1964 book The Technological Society). But the manifesto was clear and concise, and made a compelling argument.

After Kaczynski was arrested in 1996, and after a year-long trial process, he was stashed away in a super-max prison in Colorado. The media then decided that, in essence, the story was over. Case closed. No need to cover Kaczynski or his troubling ideas ever again.

By 2003, I suspected he was still actively researching and writing, but I had heard nothing of substance about him in years. So I decided to write to him personally, hoping to get some follow-up material that might be useful in my new course. Fortunately, he replied. That began a long string of letters, all on the problem of technology. To date, I’ve received something over 100 letters from him.

Most of the letters occurred in the few years prior to, and just after, the publication of Technological Slavery. Several of his more important and detailed replies to me were included in that book—about 100 pages worth.

We’ve had less occasion to communicate in the past couple years. My most recent letter from him was in late 2014.

You have said that his ideas “threaten to undermine the power structure of our technological order. And since the system’s defenders are unable to defeat the ideas, they choose to attack the man who wrote them.” Can you expand on that?

The present military and economic power of the US government, and governments everywhere, rests on advanced technology. Governments, by their very nature, function to manipulate and coerce people—both their own citizens, and any other non-citizens whom they declare to be of interest. Governments have a monopoly on force, and this force is manifest through technological structures and systems.

Therefore, all governments—and in fact anyone who would seek to exert power in the world—must embrace modern technology. American government, at all levels, is deeply pro-tech. So too are our corporations, universities, and other organized institutions. Technology is literally their life-blood. They couldn’t oppose it in any substantial way without committing virtual suicide.

So when a Ted Kaczynski comes along and reminds everyone of the inherent and potentially catastrophic problems involved with modern technology, “the system” doesn’t want you to hear it. It will do everything possible to distort or censor such discussion. As you may recall, during the final years of the Unabomber episode, there was very little—astonishingly little—discussion of the actual ideas of the manifesto. Now and then, little passages would be quoted in the newspapers, but that was it; no follow-up, no discussion, no analysis.

Basically, the system’s defenders had no counterarguments. The data, empirical observation, and common sense all were on the side of Kaczynski. There was no rational case to be made against him.

The only option for the defenders was an ad hominem attack: to portray Kaczynski as a sick murderer, a crazed loner, and so on. That was the only way to ‘discredit’ his ideas. Of course, as we know, the ad hominem tactic is a logical fallacy. Kaczynski’s personal situation, his mental state, or even his extreme actions, have precisely zero bearing on the strength of his arguments.

The system’s biggest fear was—and still is—that people will believe that he was right. People might begin, in ways small or large, to withdraw from, or to undermine, the technological basis of society. This cuts to the heart of the system. It poses a fundamental threat, to which the system has few options, apart from on-going propaganda efforts, or brute force.

What do you think of the fact that when our government, or any figure in authority such as a police officer, kills in the name of the established belief system, it is thought of as just. But when a guy like Kaczynski kills in the name of his belief system, he is thought of as a deranged psychopath?

As I mentioned, governmental authorities have a monopoly on force. Whenever they use it, it is, almost by definition, ‘right.’ Granted, police can be convicted of ‘excessive force.’ But such cases, as we know, are very rare. And militaries can never be so convicted.

At best, if the public is truly appalled by some lethal action of our police or military, they may vote in a more ‘pacifist’ administration. But even that rarely works. People were disgusted by the war-monger George W. Bush, and so they voted in the “anti-war” Obama. Ironically, he continued on with much the same killing. And through foreign aid and UN votes, Obama continues to support and defend murderous regimes around the world. So much for pacifism.

Let’s keep in mind: Kaczynski killed three people. This was tragic and regrettable, but still, it was just three people. American police kill that many citizens every other day, on average. The same with Obama’s drone operators. Technology kills many times that number, every day—even every hour. Let’s keep things in perspective.

Kaczynski killed in order to gain the notoriety necessary to get the manifesto into the public eye. And it worked. When it was published, the Washington Post sold something like 1.2 million copies that day—still a record. He devised a plan, executed it, and thereby caused millions of people to contemplate the problem of technology in a way they never had before.

Does the end justify the means? It’s too early to tell. If Kaczynski’s actions ultimately have some effect on averting technological disaster, there will be no doubt: his actions were justified. They may yet save millions of lives, not to mention much of the natural world. Time will tell.

You recently wrote a book, The Metaphysics of Technology. Can you tell us a little about that?

Sure. In thinking about the problem of technology, it struck me that there was very little philosophical analysis about what, exactly, technology is. We’ve had many action plans, ranging from tepid and mild (think Sherry Turkle), to Bill Joy’s thesis of “relinquishment” of key technologies, to Kaczynski’s total revolution. But if we don’t really understand what we’re dealing with, our actions are likely to be misguided and ineffectual. In short, we need a true metaphysics of technology.

On my view, technology advances with a tremendous, autonomous power. Humans are the implementers of this power, but we can’t really guide it and we certainly can’t stop it. In effect, it functions as a law of nature. It advances with an evolutionary force, and that’s why we are heading toward disaster.

I see technology much as the ancient Greeks did—as a combination of two potent entities, Technê and Logos (hence ‘techno-logy’). For them, these were quasi-divine forces. Logos was the guiding intelligence behind all order in the universe. Technê was the process by which all things—manmade and otherwise—came into being. These were not mere mythology; they were rational conclusions regarding the operation of the cosmos.

Like the Greeks, I argue that technê is a universal process. All order in the universe is a form of technê. Hence my coining of the term ‘Pantechnikon’—the universe as an orderly construction, manifesting a kind of intelligence, or Logos. Our modern, human technology is on a continuum with all order in the universe. (Harvard astrophysicist Eric Chaisson has argued for precisely the same point, incidentally; see his 2006 book Epic of Evolution.)

The net effect of all this is not good news for us. Technology is like a wave moving through the Earth, and the universe. For a long while, we were at the peak of that wave. Now we’re on the downside. Technology is rapidly heading toward true autonomy. Our opportunity to slow or redirect it is rapidly vanishing. If technology achieves true autonomy—we can take Kurzweil’s singularity date of 2045 as a rough guide—then it’s game over for us. We will likely either become more or less enslaved, or else wiped out. And then technology will continue on its merry way without us.

This is not mere speculation on my part, incidentally. Within the past year, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates have all come out with related concerns. They don’t understand the metaphysics behind it, but they’re seeing the same trend.

How has your experience communicating with Kaczynski changed you as a person and as a philosopher?

As a philosopher, not that much. Kaczynski generally avoids philosophy and metaphysics, preferring practical issues. In a sense, we are operating on different planes, even as we are working on the same problem.

As a person, I have a greater understanding of the basis for the ‘extreme’ actions that he took. It’s not often in life that you get a chance to communicate with someone with such a total commitment to their cause. It’s impressive.

Also, the media treatment of his whole case has been enlightening. When his book, Technological Slavery, came out in 2010, I expected that there would be at least some media coverage. But there was none. The most famous “American terrorist” publishes a complete book from a super-max prison—and it’s not news? Seriously? Compare this topic to the garbage shown on our national evening news programs, and it’s a joke. NPR, 60 Minutes, Wired magazine, etc.—all decided it wasn’t newsworthy. Very telling.

One last thing: Expect to hear from Kaczynski again soon. His second book is nearing completion. The provisional title is “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.” But don’t look for it on your evening news.

Things are not as simplistic as you think.

Buy Technological Slavery, by Ted Kaczynski, and The Metaphysics of Technology by David Skrbina. Kaczynski does not profit from his book.

Brian Whitney’s latest book is Raping the Gods.

Related articles: Ted and the CIA Part 1 & 2 by David Kaczynski

http://blog.timesunion.com/kaczynski/ted-and-the-cia-part-1/271/

http://blog.timesunion.com/kaczynski/ted-and-the-cia-part-2/285/

The Internet Doesn’t Exist

Posted on by
4

history

By Jacob Silverman

Source: The Baffler

The Internet has been very busy. In just the last week, Caitlyn Jenner broke the Internet, but she also united it. The FCC made war on the Internet. The Internet shamed a couple. The Internet had a dark side, Nikki Finke was barred from the Internet, the Supreme Court made the Internet less safe for women, the Internet named a famous fetus, the Internet did stuff with a superhero movie, and the Internet changed. A girl also won the Internet, Jack White had a difficult history with the Internet, and the Internet “shafted” a Canadian journalist.

“The Internet” is the universal straw man, a hero or villain for every occasion. The Internet, the Internet, the Internet—this decentralized communications network has long been granted a proper noun and practically a degree of sentience. Yet few people talk about “the Telephone” as if it were some person or place, though perhaps they once did. This eagerness to grant the Internet some degree of autonomy—to make it into an actor, an entity—stems in part from its apparent abstraction. Where does all this information come from? As Ray Bradbury famously said, “To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

Bradbury wasn’t just slipping into kneejerk techno-fear. He was also guilty of the same fallacy that crops up again and again in digital journalism: the assumption that the Internet is some monolithic mass, a discrete population or interest group. “It’s distracting,” Bradbury said, without specifying what “it” was.

But in another, more important way, Bradbury was absolutely right: the Internet doesn’t exist.

A couple years ago, Rachel Law, a grad student at Parsons at the time, had this to say: “The ‘Internet’ does not exist. Instead, it is many overlapping filter bubbles which selectively curate us into data objects to be consumed and purchased by advertisers.” As she also said, a bit less academically, “Browsing is now determined by your consumer profile and what you see, hear and the feeds you receive are tailored from your friends’ lists, emails, online purchases, etc.”

What we call the Internet—and what web writers so lazily draw on for their work—is less a hive mind or a throng or a gathering place and more a personalized set of online maneuvers guided by algorithmic recommendations. When we look at our browser windows, we see our own particular interests, social networks, and purchasing histories scrambled up to stare back at us. But because we haven’t found a shared discourse to talk about this complex arrangement of competing influences and relationships, we reach for a term to contain it all. Enter “the Internet.”

The Internet is a linguistic trope but also an ideology and even a business plan. If your job is to create content out of (mostly) nothing, then you can always turn to something/someone that “the Internet” is mad or excited about. And you don’t have to worry about alienating readers because “the Internet” is so general, so vast and all-encompassing, that it always has room. This form of writing is widely adaptable. Now it’s common to see stories where “Facebook” or “Twitter” stands in for the Internet, offering approval or judgment on the latest viral schlock. Choose your (anec)data carefully, and Twitter can tell any story you want.

We fall back on “the Internet” because it gives us a rhetorical life raft to hang onto amidst an overwhelming tide of information or a piece of sardonic shorthand to utter with a wink and a grimace, much like “never read the comments.” It also reflects a strange irony about today’s culture: despite being highly distributed, and despite offering an outlet for every subculture and niche interest and political quirk, what we think of the Internet often does feel rather uniform and monolithic.

This impression is partly based in fact; the tech and media industries are currently undergoing a kind of recentralization, exemplified by the rise of massive platforms like Facebook and recent mega-deals, such as Verizon buying AOL or Charter Communications (who?) snapping up Time Warner Cable. Attention is increasingly being manipulated and auctioned off by a handful of big conglomerates. The relegation of Twitter to also-ran in the social media sweepstakes—the loser to Facebook in the rush to industry monopoly—also reflects this centralization. That a company with hundreds of millions of users can seem like a failure only shows how bad the market is at apportioning value. (But there I go falling into abstractions again—as if there is anything called “the market.”)

“The Internet” is easy, a convenient reference point and an essential concept for web journalists tasked with surfacing monetizable content from this great informational morass. Digital culture, or writing about “what people are talking about on the Internet,” is considered its own beat now. But in the same way that someone born in the 1980s might not think of himself as a millennial—an arbitrary distinction crafted by demographers and marketers—a user of an online service is not necessarily from, or part of, the Internet. Even some of the subcultures often held up as part of the Internet are mostly notional. Is “Black Twitter” a specific, homogenous entity, as it’s so often described in news coverage? Or is it more something that people do, a set of social relations acted out by varying groups of mostly black Twitter users?

The more we write about what takes place online as if it occurred in some other world, the more we fail to relate this communication system, and everything that happens through it, to the society around us. To understand the Internet, we have to destroy it as an idea.

Jacob Silverman’s book, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, is out now.

Was Afghanistan’s Invasion Also Based on Lies?

Posted on by
Reply

binladen01_04

It’s Time for a Real Investigation

By Jack Balkwill

Source: Dissident Voice

There appears to be a bigger lie than “weapons of mass destruction.”  It’s not simply that the illegal invasion of Iraq was based on lies, but that the entire “war on terrorism” is likely based on lies.

We were told by our government that Afghanistan was invaded for giving shelter to Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  Mainstream press have pushed this so repeatedly that “9/11″ and “Osama bin Laden” have become interchangeable.

While working on this piece I asked the first three people I ran into at my local grocery store “Who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks?,”  three times getting “Osama bin Laden” for replies.  This is not scientific, yet it makes one wonder how this would work out in national polling.

But what if bin Laden was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks despite the drumbeat of government officials and the corporate press?  What if there has been a rush to judgment to make it appear the Bush regime was taking definitive action?

The invasion of Afghanistan certainly wasn’t about the Taliban – the Bush regime gave the Taliban $43 million in “aid” only four months before the 9/11 attacks, so were on friendly terms.

Following are three reasons to question official sources on their casus belli for invading Afghanistan.

Attempts to Peacefully Resolve the Issue

First, before the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to try bin Laden in exchange for evidence that he was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

President Bush provided no evidence, and invaded Afghanistan instead.

After the start of the U.S. air campaign, the Taliban offered to send bin Laden to a third country for trial if evidence could be provided that he had been involved in the 9/11 attacks – a proposal the United States also promptly rejected.

Why not provide evidence, if it were available, to prevent a war?  It was obvious that the people of Afghanistan would defend their country from a foreign invasion, as they had since Alexander the Great invaded, and there would be a great loss of life (see Roman Empire, British Empire, USSR, etc.).

There can only be two answers– that there was no evidence supporting the cause for invasion, or that former President Bush is a psychopath who doesn’t care about human life, so contemptuously ignored the request for evidence.

Bin Laden’s Denials

Second, bin Laden denied, more than once, in the months following 9/11, that he was involved in the dirty deed.  Less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, al Jazeera quoted bin Laden:  “The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.  I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seem to have been planned by people for personal reasons.”

In an interview with Pakistan’s Karachi Ummat on 28 September 2001, bin Laden was quoted,

Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people. Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle. … I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.

This is a translation from Arabic to Urdu to English, and may not be entirely clear.  But for those who believe bin Laden was lying, I would suggest they come up with a motive for such a lie.  The USA had offered a $25 million reward for information leading to his capture, and President Bush had threatened “I want justice, and there’s an old poster out West that says, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive,’” so bin Laden had nothing to gain from such a lie – he was condemned either way.  Bin Laden’s followers would have admired him as a great hero for having taken on the USA, so he had much to gain by accepting responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, were it a fact.

Demonization

Third, there was an extensive effort to demonize bin Laden, at times with apparently false charges.  Why would this be necessary for one who was guilty?

Our government and corporate media, as one on National Security State issues, made him out to be abominable, and without providing evidence, unceasingly assumed his guilt.  Recordings were blasted and headlined in Western corporate print and electronic media of bin Laden accepting responsibility for 9/11.  The public were not given the same eyeball-grabbing headlines when the recordings were proven to be likely bogus.

Here is a Guardian report showing that Swiss Scientists suggested that an audio tape of bin Laden taking responsibility was likely faked, although widely broadcast in the corporate press as evidence of his involvement in 9/11 attacks.

Here’s a BBC report showing how the “smoking gun” video may have been faked, again, after the corporate press hyped the video as incontrovertible evidence.

Conclusion

The official version, that 19 Arab hijackers were responsible, has flaws.  One flaw was that many of the alleged hijackers have been found alive and well since 9/11.  Of course, it may be that the hijackers used pseudonyms to conceal their identities.

But getting beyond these 19 Arabs is difficult because they are all dead and cannot be interviewed.  Official government investigations into 9/11, much of which are classified, look like reflexive actions to neatly tie up loose ends rather than serious inquiries.

Certainly, as Ward Churchill pointed out (and lost his job for raising the issue), Arabs had a clear motive for the 9/11 attacks, with the UN revealing, only two years earlier, that the sanctions pushed mainly by the USA on the people of Iraq resulted in over 500,000 deaths of children under age five, mostly Arab, and most Arabs were aware of this and seething with anger.

To jump to the conclusion that bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks causes one to wonder, “Why then did the FBI never bring charges against bin Laden for the hijackings and murders?  Why did the wanted posters (up to his death he was on the FBI ten most wanted list) not mention the biggest crime, though they mentioned smaller terrorist incidents as reasons for his being on the list?

We may never know if bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, but his involvement was used as the excuse for invading Afghanistan and slaughtering a massive number of people, based on the assumption that they gave bin Laden refuge.

Just as nobody has been charged with a crime for the illegal invasion of Iraq based on lies, it would appear that an investigation is in order involving the justification behind invading Afghanistan, starting with the matter of proof that bin Laden was directly involved.  The American people and the people of Afghanistan have every right to be presented with the evidence.

Jack Balkwill is an activist in Virginia. He can be reached at libertyuv@hotmail.com Read other articles by Jack.

Related article: Who Was Really Behind the 9/11 Attacks?