July 17, 2006

Radical Roots: Congressional Oversight Showdown, 11/3/05

The Senate Democrats took a great step towards acting like senators November 2, 2005, when they used a bit of parliamentary footwork to shut down their house of Congress, and went into closed session to demand answers on the "misinformation and disinformation" that led to the war.

The corporate media folks who helped to sell the war were quite alarmed as they stood outside those doors that night, wondering what new lies to tell the public -- or whether it wasn't too late to tell more lies at all. They wore "We're busted!" expressions as they waited for the awful reality of Congressional oversight to break forth from the sealed Senate chamber. Having so well kept the public in a state of ignorance, they were rightly afraid of the effect the revelation of the systematic manipulation of media would have. They realized how hard a sell it would be to say that they were King George's "embedded media," but didn't really mean to get into bed with him. Arguing that you're just a bit embedded is very much like arguing that you're just a little bit pregnant. Even the Fox news take on things boded nothing but ill for the pro-war Establishment.

Senate Republicans, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas, ended the impasse by pledging a hearing on the prewar intel to get things moving again -- and have stonewalled the issue ever since. Mainstream "Journalism" pledged to pursue the story -- and have been running away from it ever since.

Ignorance Is Bliss -- So Keep Ignore the 6/26 Hearing!

The sin of commission (i.e., lying) is still a favored trick of the meretricious media..., but it isn't necessarily their best trick. For that, my vote goes to their capacity for sins of omission (i.e., not telling the truth). "Mary Tricks Media," the Internet Underground's nickname for the mainstreamers, is living up to its reputation: They are willing to move and moan for money, but would prefer to "just lie there" as George has his way with them, then afterwards say that their hearts weren't in it.

The most recent sin of omission of note is the failure by any of the mainstream media to report the 6/26 Senate Democratic Policy Committee meeting on prewar intelligence, held in a partisan Democrat setting because of the continued unwillingness of Senate Republicans to live up to their November promise to hold hearings on the lead-up to the war -- and the media failed to remind the public of the promise.

C-SPAN, granted, thought the matter of the meeting important enough to warrant late-night airing on the day of the hearings, (Monday, 6/26) -- then rebroadcast on a weekend afternoon (Saturday, 7/1). Alas, that was the extent of the mainstream coverage for a hearing that held the keys to impeachment -- and possible imprisonment -- of both Bush and Cheney. We can see it for ourselves in the C-SPAN version, of course -- for a mere $90 bucks. So much for the free press.

Some will remember the "Downing Street Hearings" of Rep. John Conyers, which were largely ignored by the media. If anything, the 6/26 prewar intel hearings were even more damning -- particularly as they included the Downing Street memo reportage as an "encore" to the testimony of Bush League insiders who were willing to recant their role in the war set-up in public and reply to questions.

The Naked Emperor: Lies & Coercion; Conspiracy & War Crime

Daily Kos writer David Swanson wrote notes about the particulars of the two-hour hearing. The notes themselves are part of the lamentable tale: Swanson didn't even stay until the end of the hearing, and neither he nor Daily Kos did an actual story on the biggest intelligence story of the year! It's a sad reality of the current state of the nation that such media as Daily Kos, set up as an alternative to the mainstream, have become a wishy-washy "mainstream alternative."

In the hearing, one former Bush League apparatchik after another lamented the collective failure to get the truth out, pointed fingers at the media and the Congress for being complicit, and condemned the White House. They affirmed that, indeed, "cherry-picked" intelligence was used to back policy (i.e, the Bush League lied); and that the reason for the willingness of the intel community to go along could be summed up in three words: the vice president. They self-absolved themselves even as they self-condemned themselves, a bit of ambivalence that passes for high virtue in the political whorehouse of current Washington, D.C.

Most importantly, before it was all over, they affirmed that the Downing Street Memoranda of 2002 were in line with what they had seen from the front lines of the infowar against truth by the White House; that the decision to go to war was agreed upon in a nefarious deal by Georgie Porgie and Tony Baloney; and that the twisted trail to the war fit the definition of war crime. Needless to say, there was plenty there for "King George" headlines -- except that the previous king by that name had a greater regard for the rule of law than the current one, and had a free American press to contend with.

Nowadays the rest of the world laments that US media are much more interested in Oil and Israel than Honor and Integrity. Those outcries, though, are like the intel hearings: muffled by non-coverage (a lie of omission), or dismissed as anti-American anti-Semitic nonsense (a lie of commission). There's still another variant of how to kill the truth, though, which is a lie of intermission: just bury the real story beneath another story altogether!

The trick of lying by intermission worked exceedingly well in the Jessica Lynch farce, which distracted the popcorn-munching war fans of April, 2003 from the Battle of Baghdad, in which the US 3rd Infantry, 101st Airborne and Marines engaged in a brutal fight that began at Baghdad Airport on April 5 and was only ending on April 9, as the media/military propaganda machine set up the "toppling of Saddam" shot by..., well, toppling Saddam (the statue, that is). That biggest story of the war would have been buried altogether, absent the efforts of Internet activists.

Shades of Orwell and Huxley in NY and DC

This time, the lie of intermission started with the Three Amigos of the NY Times, LA Times and Wall Street Journal, all of which were, no doubt, as aware of the pending prewar intel hearing as the Drudge Report -- thought the Drudge Report was the only one that reported the pending hearings with it's June 23 notice.

The Three Amigos, though, were intent on giving Bush Leaguers a softball to hit, so they "broke" the story that will frame the "free press" debate of the pending elections: bank transfer snooping! Granted, juxtaposed against the claims of top intelligence officials that the the war lies amounted to war crimes, this is pale stuff -- but there was no juxtaposition, of course!

The sorry story they ran allowed everyone involved all the comforts of hypocrisy. Republicans were able to pose as guardians of the public's safety, and the Democrats were able to pose as guardians of the public's rights -- as both parties lead the public to World War. The media was able to pose as a critic of the Bush League with "exposure" -- on a topic that the Bush League has been airing for years. It was a nice touch for the Times to link their "revelation" story to the NSA story of last year -- which they suppressed for a year so that the public wouldn't be troubled by it until after the elections of 2004. The Times even used the same reporter, Eric Lichtblau, who received the Pulitzer Prize for the year-old "news" of the NSA scam -- more evidence that the Pulitzer Prize is this brave new Bushworld's Order of Lenin, given to such titans of Times integrity as Judas Miller. Judas Miller received her prize for lying us into a war -- with the assent and encouragement of the Times. The LA Times joined the NY Times is editorializing on their lofty news coverage, while the Wall Street Journal editorial section condemned its own news section.

All this dog and pony show because both parties and all the lapdance presstitutes are implicated in low-down acts that -- according to the prewar intel witnesses -- might be construed as war crimes by an objective and informed American People. Leading a country to -- and then keeping it in -- a world war plan touted as a "global war" is serious business -- in a republic, that is. The parties and the press reckon that they would invite a "constitutional crisis" by telling after kissing the boy king, though. If the American People knew all the stuff that goes into the sausage of Mary Tricks Media and the Cowards Congress, they rationalize, it would retch and puke. Ergo, it can't know, it's that simple -- in a dictatorship, that is.

Occasionally someone like NY Times reporter David Rosenbaum forgets the rule and pays the price. Rosenbaum was a Times D.C. political reporter whose last article, published Dec. 24, 2005, pointed at then-nominee Sam Alito's 1984 decision in favor Reagan administration wireless wiretaps -- something that touched closely on the Bush League NSA domestic spying. Rosenbaum died of a "fatal mugging" two weeks later on the streets of D.C. last winter. Fatal muggings were, of course, a favored assassination technique of the old Soviet Union, against whom I fought my Cold War in Army military intelligence. The US Media didn't miss a beat as it parroted the official story of a random act of violence, but the Internet grapevine saw it differently, and truly.

Orwell said it all before most of us were born, but it's worth stating over and over: He who controls the present controls the past; he who controls the past controls the future. The Bush League has decreed -- in deeds that silence words -- that it controls the present debate, past history and future course of the USA. The aim, King George never tires of telling us, is a generational war in the Middle East, something that simply can't happen without a draft (never mentioned); the use of nukes (seldom mentioned); and the complicity of an embedded media (not mentioned since the days when it was proud to call itself an embedded media).

The reality of a criminal cabal that sent us off to a criminal war is something that must be suppressed at all costs, and the embedded media is eager to oblige, knowing full well what the Whitewash House means when it orders them to stay under cover. After all, they reckon, this troublesome war crime angle is most inconvenient, as it brings to mind other folks who were once heralded for their capacity to "distill truth" for their countries, little-mentioned people who went by names like Goebbels and Riefenstahl. So under cover they stay, scratching at sheets of poor print, wishing they could be as natural when they faked it as Judas Miller, the high priestess of presstitution, and earn the proud Pulitzers the way she did.

Captain Eric H. May, a former Army intelligence and public affairs officer, is the founder of Ghost Troop, which was formed in response to the Battle of Baghdad Cover Up (BOBCUP) in 2003. He has published a four-volume report to Congress on the cover-up -- a report still ignored by Congress, avoided by the media, and relished by the Internet.