US has no business condeming Iranian elections...

As I wrote over at Consortium News:

The Right has been bashing President Obama for not calling the Iranian elections a fraud. Perhaps Obama understands that you can’t tell someone to fix a problem you haven’t first fixed in your own house.

American democracy is seriously at risk so long as many of our votes are counted solely by machines.

As electronic voting has moved into the U.S. (and other countries), the notion that a handful of people can swing entire elections is not just a fantasy; it is a definite possibility.

Read the rest here.

Why Would Anyone Oppose Torture? By David Swanson

Dear Readers,

I'm reposting, with David Swanson's permission, his important and succinct ten reasons why no thinking person should support torture as U.S. policy. This came from his blog at http://www.davidswanson.org. Please share broadly.

Why Would Anyone Oppose Torture?
By dswanson - Posted on 09 June 2009
By David Swanson

Someone recently asked if I could please explain to him why anybody would oppose torture. After all, we defend killing in wars, so why not defend torture? And wouldn't I torture to save my kidnapped child?

Here are my top 10 reasons for opposing torture:

1. It's illegal. If you want to legalize it, legalize it, but don't discard the whole idea of following laws.

2. When the United States tortures, it loses the ability to tell any other nation not to torture, including nations you wouldn't want torturing the people you wouldn't want tortured, namely Americans.

3. U.S. torture, according to the U.S. military and the FBI, has been a major recruiting tool for anti-U.S. terrorists and a cause of the death of thousands of Americans.

4. False statements created by torture were used to take this nation into a war in Iraq that has killed over a million Iraqis and thousands of Americans at enormous cost in dollars and in safety and prospects for peace. One justification for that war was to stop Iraqi torture, but Iraq now tortures and America can say nothing against it.

5. Torture was used even after the invasion to generate more false statements purely for political purposes.

6. There is no evidence that torture has saved anyone's life, but the United States has tortured dozens of people to death.

7. Expert interrogators do not use torture because it does not work as quickly or as reliably as other methods. So torturing someone to save your kidnapped child would be less likely to save your kidnapped child than relying on a skilled interrogator.

8. Torturing people brutalizes the torturers as well, damaging them and those they live with.

9. Torturing damages our society, brutalizing the thoughts and practices of prison guards, police, and citizens.

10. The myth that certain people cannot be spoken to and must be tortured creates deeply damaging prejudices, because those people are always defined as part of a certain racial, religious, or cultural group that comes to be seen as sub-human.

I hope this clears up the confusion.

Remembering RFK's call on the anniversary of his last day of life

Forty-one years ago, on the morning of June 4, 1968, reporter Jack Newfield rose early and drove around Los Angeles before the sun came up, before the polls for the California primary opened. What he saw contradicted the conventional wisdom that people of color and poverty didn’t vote. He saw long lines of people in some of the poorest areas of the city lined up to vote for Senator Robert Francis Kennedy. In fact, more people would vote in Watts and East LA than in Beverly Hills in that election.

A great part of Robert Kennedy’s appeal came from his authenticity. Unlike most people in politics, he didn’t focus on the politically expedient. Kennedy campaigned for gun control in pro-gun Oregon. He chided medical students seeking Vietnam War draft deferments because he didn’t feel it was fair to put the burden of fighting the war solely on the backs of the poor. He complained many times about welfare, feeling that it caused dependency, when what the people really needed were jobs. In South Africa, he denounced apartheid and wondered aloud, “What if God is black?”

As a Senator, frustrated by the slow pace of the legislative process, he became a community organizer, rounding up leaders in both the activist and business communities to turn an economically disadvantaged New York neighborhood into the nation’s first community redevelopment program, the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. As Newfield wrote in his memoir “RFK,” “Kennedy seemed to believe in moral outrage as public policy. He felt that the ‘unacceptable’ – like living conditions in Bed-Stuy – had to be changed, not just deplored in speeches.”

Kennedy became a fierce opponent of the war he and his brother helped to start. Under pressure from Tom Wicker on “Face the Nation” as to his contradictory stance of opposing the Vietnam War while refusing (at that point) to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic party presidential nomination, Kennedy breached his own dam, saying:

“…we’re killing innocent people because we don’t want to have the war fought on America soil, or because they’re 12,000 miles away and they might get to be 11,000 miles away. … Those of us who stay here in the United States, we must feel it when we use napalm, when a village is destroyed and civilians killed. This is also our responsibility. This is a moral obligation and a moral responsibility for us here in the United States. And I think we have forgotten that. … I think we’re going to have a difficult time explaining that to ourselves.”

The day after Kennedy’s now famous speech in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, Kennedy spoke these words at a luncheon in Cleveland:

“What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? … [W]e seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.”

Kennedy also spoke of “another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions, indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.”

But Kennedy’s strongest words could well be repeated today when considering the terrible conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, our battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the rhetoric of hate radio, for that matter:

“When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies—to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. …

“We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land.”

Kennedy’s own life was short indeed. He lived only eight more weeks after that speech before an assassin’s bullet took him down in the pantry in Los Angeles.

Kennedy was asked by the British TV host David Frost just a month before his death how he would like to be remembered.

Kennedy responded, “Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back again to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do it? I’d like to feel that I’d done something to lessen that suffering.”

Whose suffering can you lessen today? Will you do it? There are so many ways. If you don’t see a direct path, consider contributing money to a charity. If you have no money, consider volunteering at a homeless shelter. Write a letter to your Congressperson asking them to create more jobs. Do something today, in honor of one of the best leaders this country never got the chance to have at the helm.

I twitter

Hey, dear Real History afficianados. I wanted to tell you that I do Twitter, occasionally. I expect to do that a little more, mostly because it's a quick, fast way to share a link or two that isn't worthy of a blog entry.

If you want to 'follow' my 'tweets' you can go to www.Twitter.com and look me up. I'm there as lisapease.

I hope people caught Rachel Maddow tonight on MSNBC. She quoted testimony showing that the "ticking time bomb" scenario really never works, in reality.

As she also pointed out, torture doesn't work because most people committed to terrorism are going to just wait it out if an attack is impending.

While I have enjoyed numerous seasons of the show 24, I believe it has done incredible damage in causing people to believe torture really works, when the record shows the direct opposite. In most cases, first, you can't know that the victim of torture really has the goods to confess. And if they do, will you know the truth if they tell it? Or will you torture them further, believing it to be a lie? Or will they just say anything? In the end, torture simply isn't effective.

But it's a shame that the debate centers around that.

I wish the debate was about who we are as a country, and, frankly, as a species. Since when is torture acceptable on any level? If we get to that point, we've taken a wrong turn long ago.

Why do you think terrorists attack us? Because of serious, prolonged actions by our country. If we want to be safe from terrorism, a better international policy will be far more successful than torture. And guess what? It has a preventative effect. Torture has the opposite effect. It just makes us more reviled around the world, not less.

We don't want people to fear us. People will work to overcome what they fear.

We want people to love us. And that means behaving very, very differently on the world stage.

I hope we're up to the task.

Arlen Specter's JFK Specter

Please see my article today at Consortiumnews.com re Arlen Specter's JFK Specter.

Something important is missing from this story. What is the military hiding re the NYC low flyover?

Why was the military trying to film a plane low-flying over NYC?

I don't buy the explanation - the only one given - that they were just trying to update file photos. Because according to this article, the exercise cost nearly $330,000!

But what really disturbs me are two lines in this story:

... The Federal Aviation Administration said the aircraft, which functions as Air Force One when the president is aboard, was taking part in a classified, government-sanctioned photo shoot.

... New York Police Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne said the department had been alerted about the flight "with directives to local authorities not to disclose information about it."

Classified?

Why would such a public act be "classified"?

Why would the government officials direct the NYPD to keep silent?

I mean, why shouldn't I jump to a conclusion here?. Why not pre-film a plane low-flying over NYC and then use that in some story later to present an event as real that might be entirely fake? A "Wag the Dog" scenario, so to speak?

I'd really like to hear a better explanation. Because lacking one, this story reeks of something far more sinister. I hope Obama and McCain join forces to get to the bottom of why this plane was launched on such a mission, which ended up retraumatizing some citizens of NYC. I know how they feel. I start to feel ill when I see planes over downtown Los Angeles, and we weren't even attacked. It's a horrible feeling, to be afraid of something I never gave a second thought to before.

I really want to know, now. What the heck was the military doing, and why?

Obama is already writing the book on Diplomacy

This story is a reminder of why so many of us worked so hard to get Barack Obama elected President. He's showing exactly the kind of diplomatic skills we so desperately need in anyone who would help America be a leader in the world again.

Read the full thing, but here's a teaser:

According to sources inside the room, President Obama just played peacemaker in a spat between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Hu Jintao, President of the People's Republic of China.

The dispute? Sarkozy, on behalf of France and other European nations, wants stricter standards for tax havens, and specifically wanted to publish a list of non-compliant jurisdictions. The Chinese fear that cracking down on such places would endanger major Chinese banking centers like Hong Kong and Shanghai.

So what did Obama do?

Mr. Obama, according to this account, stepped between the two men, urging them to try to find consensus, and giving them a "pep talk" about the importance of working together.

The senior adminstration official said that Mr. Obama pulled Mr. Sarkozy aside, took him to a corner, "and discussed possible alternatives," the senior official said.

Once they arrived at one, President Obama "sent a message to the Chinese" that a counter-offer was on the table. The Chinese spent some time considering the offer. But they took a few minutes.

So Mr. Obama, with the assistance of translators, suggested that he and Mr. Hu have a conversation as well. They, too went to the corner to talk. After a few minutes, Mr. Obama called upon Mr. Sarkozy to join them.

"Translators and sherpas in tow, they reached an agreement," the official said. "There was a multiple shaking of hands."

That is what diplomacy looks like. You look for your common concerns and build on those. You don't go for the heart of the issue, which can be divisive. You nibble around the edges until you find the core principles you both agree on.

I wish activists across the political spectrum could learn this trick. And I wish a lot of journalists and historians could UNLEARN this one. I recall talking to a mainstream journalist, who was very much about forging a "consensus" about what happened in Dealey Plaza. To me, the truth is absolute, whether we ever agree upon it or not. But in politics, and action, consensus-building is a necessary skill.

His ability to talk to differing parties and bring them together is what drew me to Obama in the first place. I started looking into his background, since the press wasn't talking about it, and found he had a long history of bringing disparate groups together (like getting the police and anti-death penalty advocates to agree on measures that would reduce the number of innocent people on death row).

I'm really proud of my president today. I hope we get to hear many more stories like this in the months and years to come.

The CIA and the Media

I've talked about this many times before, and will talk about it many times again. But this article should be required reading for anyone interested in how our news is shaped. And I'm sure the CIA isn't the only group with its hooks in the media.

Please read, if you haven't already, Carl Bernstein's landmark piece, "The CIA and the Media," originally published in Rolling Stone in 1977. The New York Times did a follow up piece later that same year talking extensively about the one outlet Bernstein doesn't go after, his home journal of the Washington Post.

Another excellent summary can be found here: http://www.geocities.com/cpa_blacktown/20000318mediaoverb.htm

And please read this memo from then CIA Director Robert Gates (now Secretary of Defense), written fourteen years after Bernstein's breakthrough piece, which contains the following text about the CIA's Public Affairs Office (PAO):

A. MEDIA

1) Current Program:

a) PAO now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some "intelligence failure" stories into "intelligence success" stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.

b) PAO spokespersons build and maintain these professional relationships with reporters by responding to daily inquiries from them over the telephone (3369 in 1991), by providing unclassified background briefings to them at Headquarters (174 in 1991), and by arranging for them to interview the DCI, DDCI and other senior Agency officials (164 in 1991).

c. PAO responds to numerous requests from authors, researchers, filmmakers, and others seeking information, guidance, or cooperation from the Agency in their endeavours. Some responses can be handled in a one-shot telephone call. Others, such as Life Magazine's proposed photo essay, BBC's six-part series, Ron Kessler's requests for information for his Agency book, and the need for an Agency focal point in the Rochester Institute of Technology controversy drew heavily on PAO resources.

d. PAO has also reviewed some film scripts about the Agency, documentary and fictional, at the request of filmmakers seeking guidance on accuracy and authenticity. In a few instances, we facilitated the filming of a few scenes on Agency premises. Responding positively to these requests in a limited way has provided PAO with the opportunity to help others depict the Agency and its activities accurately and without negative distortions. Except for responding to such requests, we do not seek to play a role in filmmaking ventures about the Agency which come to our attention. For example, although we knew that Oliver Stone's movie on JFK was in the works for some time, we did not contact him to volunteer an Agency viewpoint.

Here's a picture of the document for the above text, for the doubting Thomases among us.

It should be obvious to anyone who reads and digests the above that if print media was important, and TV, that control of major blogs on the Internet would be the next step in their strategy for total media dominance.

I've written at length about the CIA and the Media in the book The Assassinations. I refer you there for the details I don't have time to repeat here. If you are serious about learning Real History, you have to learn about the control of the media. You can't stop yourself from being propagandized if you have no awareness that it's happening.

It's also a bit scary that Obama is leaving in charge of the Defense Department the man who had no qualms bending the media to the will of the CIA. In this same document, the CIA references the 'briefing' (I read that as propagandizing) of new Congressional members.

I recommend reading the whole document - as it mentions the priority the CIA gives to its contacts in Academia and the business world as well as the media.

Duplicity

Either I should have been in counterintelligence, or I have seen way too many movies. I really enjoyed this film, but saw the final twist coming less than 20 minutes into the film! Still, it was fun being proven right, and when is it ever not fun to watch Clive Owen?

I talked to someone today who just hated the film - found it hard to follow and didn't care about any of them. But I enjoyed the twists, the knowing and the not knowing.

That said, I am SO glad I don't have to live that life. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

P.S. My four word review of Knowing: Another 2012 movie, yawn. (The year isn't 2012, but it might as well have been.)

CIA assassination team reported to Dick Cheney, says Hersh

“After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

Provocative words from Sy Hersh, as quoted in the Minnesota Post. Read the whole thing here. Listen to it here.