Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Robert Parry’s Consortium News is holding a fundraiser. I just sent them some money, and I strongly encourage you to do the same. You can donate by credit card, by paypal at consortnew@aol.com, or by check to Consortium for Independent Journalism, 2200 Wilson Blvd., Suite 102-231, Arlington VA 22201.

There simply is no other journalist in the U.S. like Robert Parry. For instance, did you know Alvin A. Snyder, director of the U.S. Information Agency’s television and film division in the early eighties, wrote a book in 1995 called Warriors of Disinformation? And that in the book he takes you in detail through exactly how the Reagan administration lied at the UN Security Council in 1983 about the Soviet shootdown of KAL-007? And that this former government official then straightforwardly explained that “all governments lie”?

I had no idea at all. And to date, no one else anywhere has noticed it except for Parry. And not only did Parry notice it, he remembered it and brought it up again immediately after Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN (where I missed it for a second time).

Here’s some of Alvin Snyder wrote:

By my calculations, the National Security Agency, with the apparent approval of the State Department and White House, had deleted at least five critical minutes of conversation between the Russian fighter pilots and their ground controllers from the tape that we presented as evidence in the UN Security Council…We had been duped…Former U.S. officials involved in the cover-up, who insist on anonymity, confirm that monitoring data was withheld from our UN tape…

The moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first…The story of KE-007 will be remembered pretty much the way we told it in 1983, not the way it really happened.

BONUS!: Here’s what Reagan said immediately after the massacre;

…the world notes the stark contrast that exists between Soviet words and deeds…What could be said about Soviet credibility when they so flagrantly lie about such a heinous act? What can be the scope of legitimate and mutual discourse with a state whose values permit such atrocities? And what are we to make of a regime which establishes one set of standards for itself and another for the rest of humankind?

We’ve joined in the call for an urgent United Nations Security Council meeting today. The brutality of this act should not be compounded through silence or the cynical distortion of the evidence now at hand.

link

This moment, in which the Attorney General of the United States claims to be considering the possibility of allowing our laws against torture to be enforced seems a good one in which to reveal that I have seen over 1,200 torture photos and a dozen videos that are in the possession of the United States military. These are photographs depicting torture, the victims of torture, and other inhuman and degrading treatment. Several videos show a prisoner intentionally slamming his head face-first very hard into a metal door. Guards filmed this from several angles rather than stopping it.

The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) of Australia revealed several of these photographs, video of the head slamming, and video of prisoners forced to masturbate, as part of a news report broadcast in 2006. But the full collection has not been made available to the public or to a special prosecutor, although it was shown to members of Congress in 2004. When these photos are eventually made public, I encourage you to take a good look at them. After you get over feeling ill, it might be appropriate to consider Congress’ past 5 years of inaction. You’ll be able to feel sick all over again.

The rest.

David Swanson:

There are a million and one things that people can do to try to end the U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and to prevent new ones in Iran and elsewhere, as well as to close U.S. military bases in dozens of other nations around the world. Certain people are skilled at or interested in particular approaches, and nobody should be discouraged from contributing to the effort in their preferred ways. Far too often proposals to work for peace are needlessly framed as attacks on all strategies except one. But where new energy can be created or existing resources redirected, it is important that they go where most likely to succeed.

In my analysis, we should be focusing on three things, which for purposes of brevity and alliteration I will call: Communications, Congress, and Counter recruitment / resistance. Communications encompasses all public discussion of the wars and impacts all other approaches, including targets I consider far less likely to be influenced by us than Congress, such as the president, generals, the heads of weapons companies, the heads of media companies, the people of Afghanistan, your racist neighbor, etc. If our communications strategy can change the behavior of any of these targets, terrific! We should be prepared to take advantage of such opportunities should they arise. But the first place we are likely to be able to leverage successful communications will be the House of Representatives. Counter-recruitment / resistance is another area that overlaps with communications but involves much else as well, and it is a strategy that we continue to underestimate.

The rest.

Who would have guessed the corporate media would completely ignore the simplest solution to the health-care crisis? Just because it would massively reduce the profits of big corporations?

Yet shockingly enough, that’s just what’s been happening. Help Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting to tell them to stop:

As we know, Juan Cole is an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, an apologist for radical Islam” who “peddles Hamas propaganda.” Obviously if he were Iranian, he would have just voted for Ahmadinejad while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

And yet today he’s written extensively about the evidence the election in Iran was just stolen by the country’s Islamic theocracy.

I’m confused. It’s like the world’s turned upside down!