Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Authoritarian apologist writes the most honest piece of journalism you will ever read

In another hilariously sad example of the erosion between reality and The Onion, CNN contributor LZ Granderson wrote quite the interesting piece last week. He urges Americans -- I'm not making this up -- to stop being so "nosy" about the bad things their government does. Specifically, he's talking about Fast and Furious. Read it and literally weep.

We are a nosy country.

Though to be fair, it's not entirely our fault. Between the 24/7 news cycle, social media and reality TV, we have been spoon fed other people's private business for so long we now assume it's a given to know everything. And if there are people who choose not to disclose, they must be hiding something. Being told that something's "none of your business" is slowly being characterized as rude, and if such a statement is coming from the government, it seems incriminating.

Times have changed. Yet, not everything is our business. And in the political arena, there are things that should be and need to be kept quiet.

You see, freedom isn’t entirely free.

It also isn’t squeaky clean.

And sometimes the federal government deems it necessary to get its hands a little dirty in the hopes of achieving something we generally accept as good for the country. . . .

We do not want to open Pandora’s Box, not about [Fast and Furious] and certainly not about a bunch of other potentially scandalous things the federal government has been involved with. . . .




We still don't have access to all of the messy facts surrounding the Iran-Contra scandal that erupted during the Reagan administration. All we know is that weapons were sold to Iran in exchange for hostages and that the proceeds from those sales were used to illegally fund rebels in Nicaragua who were supposedly fighting Communism.

Lt. Col. Oliver North took one for the team back then, and there’s a good chance Attorney General Eric Holder will have to take one for the team in the Fast and Furious controversy. And by team, I’m not referring to Republicans or Democrats, but rather Americans . . . .

Such as the death of Osama bin Laden. . . .

Were they legal?

Hell no.

Were they effective?

Who knows?

Were they done as a way to keep America safe?

Yes.

North was a fall guy. Not for President Reagan but for all of us. Just as Holder has become a villain to many who are pointing fingers at him.

But to go much beyond the criticism of these men runs the risk of learning that this great nation of ours is heavily involved in doing some things that are not so great.

Think about it: We have allowed weapons to cross the Mexican border and into the hands of criminals for years. Many of these weapons were involved in killing innocent Mexicans. There’s nothing very admirable about that. But the truth is, it’s very American.

By allowing guns to infiltrate Mexico’s drug cartel, we thought we could trace them up the ladder to the leaders. Take off the head and the body dies. As for the innocent people who lost their lives? Collateral damage. That’s the uncomfortable backstory to this scandal. And there are likely other operations like it in our nation’s history that we don’t even have a clue about.

And maybe it’s better for us not to be so nosy, not to know everything because, to paraphrase the famous line from the movie “A Few Good Men,” many of us won’t be able to handle the truth.

This goose-stepping fucking fascist vomits up phrases like "freedom isn't free" as if they mean something. And yet, his doublethink definition of "freedom" involves unquestioningly obeying whichever sociopathic mass murderers are currently in control. He compares the essential democratic act of questioning power to nudging in on the personal issues of reality TV stars. If not for America's spiraling descent into tyranny, I might act surprised that this Orwellian garbage was published in a major news outlet.

The only thing that isn't "squeaky clean" about freedom, is that those who are free need to keep a constant lookout for those who seek to destroy their freedom. That "eternal vigilance," as Jefferson put it, is the curse of freedom. Right now, I'm only seeing one group of people trying to destroy my freedom, and they're not Mexican gun runners. They include people like this dickhead, who has the sheer arrogance to tell me what information I can and cannot handle. He's telling me to shut the fuck up and let Big Fucking Brother siphon all the facts for me.

Oliver North "took one for the team?" What "team?" Are you fucking five? Those fascists aren't on my team. Reagan and North's terror squads were not fighting "Communism." Nicaragua was a democratic nation. We trained terrorists to rape and to murder and to burn the country to the ground. North is a war criminal. Fuck you.

The government has "likely" done other questionable operations that "we don’t even have a clue about"? What about the ones we do have a clue about? What about the CIA's terrorist bombings of civilian targets Cuba; what about the CIA's plan to commit false flag terrorist attacks against American citizens in order to spark a war; what about that time the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into killing himself; what about the CIA's mass sexual abuse and experimentation on hundreds of unwilling subjects, over a period of decades, to study brainwashing and torture; and their recruitment of Nazi scientists and war criminals to do it?

Please. I've already come to admit what these people are. Don't presume to know what kind of facts I can process. Fast and Furious is peanuts. The crimes against humanity that I just mentioned are all in the public record; and in the age of information, ignorance is a choice. It's pretty fucking obvious that they don't do these things because they juz wuv *~fweedom~* SO MUTCH <33. There are no longer any excuses for anyone to be apologizing for these fascists.

Stop speaking in circles and say what you mean: the American government is full of evil Nazi fuckers, and you're too much of a fucking coward to acknowledge it. So you don't want the rest of us to know it either. That is what I just read.




Now, I don't want to go making accusations. But I'm just going to go ahead leave here an excerpt from an outstanding book, The Praetorian Guard, by former CIA operative John Stockwell:

While there are innumerable conscientious journalists who are eagerly probing for facts and reporting them, the major organs of the media are themselves literally multinational corporations. The people who sit on the Board of Directors of the New York Times, CBS, or the Washington Post also sit on the boards or have interest in defense and other major multinational corporations. NBC is actually owned by General Electric, which is one of the largest defense contractors. While the owners of the major newspapers do not and in fact cannot meddle heavily in the daily running of their organs—sooner or later the readers would become incensed and wouldn't buy their newspapers—they certainly hire and fire the editors who do. And by the time and individual acquires enough seniority to become an editor, he or she generally does not have to be coached on a daily basis.

The owners and editors of major news organs are well aware of the power they wield and they consciously exercise it. We have abundant examples: Clare Booth Luce of the powerful Lucepress conglomerate was firmly and openly committed to the destabilization of Fidel Castro's Cuba in the 1960s. She enjoyed having Cuban exiles associated with CIA's OP-MONGOOSE program into her home for visits. The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Washington Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA." This is what Bob Woodward's book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA is really about, namely the symbiotic relationship between the Washington Post and the CIA. Every time he dug up a story about CIA activities, he and the Post's editors called CIA Director William Casey to consult with him about its publication. They did not always agree with his reaction, but they always called.

In 1984, the Washington Post and then the New York Times reported that New York Times reporter Leslie Gelb had cooperated with the CIA under the Carter administration in 1978 to recruit journalists in Europe who would publish stories that would encourage readers to be sympathetic to the development of the neutron bomb. In 1975, the Church Committee of the Senate found that there existed an intimate (and unholy) relationship between the CIA and editors and journalists at every level. Several hundred people in the media cooperate with the CIA, some as paid agents, some on a quid pro quo information-sharing basis (You run this story for me and I'll give you three "scoops" of information your competitors do not have.) Some, like Graham and Luce, are ideological fellow-travelers who believe in the CIA's missions; others are members of the same Old Boy network.

He goes on to describe how, during his own operation in Angola, he and his partners were able to "feed stories to the media like an intravenous needle and tube in a patient's arm." Then of course, there are always the rumors around Operation Mockingbird, which may be a CIA campaign to influence the media beginning in the 1950s.

So the CIA has a history of inserting propaganda into American media. But as Stockwell showed, LZ's propaganda could still be easily explained even if he wasn't working directly for the CIA. As Orwell explained,

"The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady."

Right now, that orthodoxy in American media is defending power. When Chomsky wrote a book about it, he called it the "propaganda model." He was blacklisted throughout the media shortly after writing it. The 4th branch's role is defending power. Nothing else.

The much heralded Tim Russert said, "when I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it’s my own policy our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission." The Washington Post's Richard Cohen condemned the investigation into the Plame leak because, "As with sex or real estate, it is often best to keep the lights off." How many journalists can you name that have openly condemned Obama's attack on whistleblowers? Two? Three? Furthermore, the man who's helped enable more disclosure and transparency surrounding the American power structure than all western media outlets combined -- Julian Assange -- is currently taking refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, because he fears extradition to the United States. Some in the media have called Assange a "terrorist." Some have called for his death. They're not outraged at the American war crimes he exposed, they're outraged that he exposed them. Bradley Manning faces life in prison for releasing video footage of a helicopter blowing apart journalists and children, and the only mention he gets in the media is when they cheer on his show trial. I'd imagine certain factions of power in Nazi Germany would've had similar attitudes towards those who dared to tell the German people what their army was doing.

The only thing that makes this article different is its honesty. Usually they're not so blatant, media is usually controlled simply by omitting certain facts, or by forbidding certain discussions from taking place. On Memorial Day weekend, Chris Hayes brought up the question on his show of whether we should really be labeling all American soldiers as "heroes" simply for putting on a uniform.

I feel… uncomfortable, about the word because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. Um, and, I don’t want to obviously desecrate or disrespect memory of anyone that’s fallen, and obviously there are individual circumstances in which there is genuine, tremendous heroism, you know, hail of gunfire, rescuing fellow soldiers, and things like that. But it seems to me that we marshal this word in a way that is problematic. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

If you watch the video, you can easily tell it makes him uncomfortable simply by bringing it up. And for good reason, because he was predictably condemned throughout the media. Ann Coulter called him a woman. Even after all these crimes being exposed now -- after Robert Bales massacred 17 people in their homes in the dead of night, 9 of whom were children; after it was just revealed that 12 boot camp instructors at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas raped 31 women (that we know of) -- nobody can bring themselves to admit that there might possibly be some people in the U.S. military who could be absolute monsters. Hayes was forced to make a public apology, and the conversation was immediately shut down. That is not what we talk about in the United States, the land of the free.




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