Updates: Amy Goodman Charged And Released / DN! Producers Face Felony Charges / Russians Protest Yevloyev Murder

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and her two detained colleagues have been released from police custody in Minnesota, but their "legal" troubles are only beginning.

Goodman has been charged with obstruction of a "legal process" and interference with a "peace officer".

And her two colleagues, DN! producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, face felony rioting charges!

Kouddous and Salazar were detained while covering a street protest; Goodman was arrested when she sought their release.

There's a bit more at DN! (and, they say, much more coming soon).

The folks at DN! note that

During the demonstration in which the Democracy Now! team was arrested, law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force against protesters and journalists. Several dozen demonstrators were also arrested during this action, including a photographer for the Associated Press.

OpEdNews has a huge piece from Mark Crispin Miller and Rady Ananda called "Thugs with Badges: Crackdown in Minneapolis" which describes what else has been happening there.

Late Tuesday night, at 2:00 a.m. on August 27th, Minneapolis police arrested members of the Glassbead Collective, and searched their rooms, as a pre-emptive measure against protest at the Republican National Convention. Glassbead is a New York City group that documents police misconduct and First Amendment activity around the United States.

Vlad Teichberg, a journalist from Glassbead, reports being detained at 2 am in Minneapolis on August 27th. Notes, computers, cameras, cell phones, clothing, and money were confiscated by police.

Democracy Now! stresses that the arrests of Goodman and the two producers were "unlawful". But that's a horribly quaint and outmoded concept in the post-9/11 world.

This is the GWOT, remember? The Global War on the Rule of Law.

The OpEdNews piece quotes Vlad Teichberg:

... police are manufacturing accusations. This particular problem can undermine the very essence of our democracy. It is fundamentally un-American and threatens the very fabric of our existence, because if the people who are told to enforce the laws are free to violate those laws, there can be no rule of law. And what do we have? We have a society run by a bunch of thugs with badges.

I must respectfully disagree with Vlad Teichberg.

The very essence of our democracy is electoral integrity, and that is already gone. There is nothing left to undermine. Both major parties and the mainstream media are complicit in a vast array of crimes, and they have sufficient power, especially over the echo chamber and the election machinery, to make sure we can't vote one war criminal out of office without voting another one in.

This police action is fundamentally American. It defines the very fabric of our existence. The people who are told to enforce the laws are indeed free to violate those laws. They do it as a matter of course in the name of protecting us. And their so-called supervisors won't even risk perjuring themselves by telling Congress otherwise.

The rule of law is a thing of the past. The law is now nothing more than a political weapon. If you think it's there to protect you ...

~~~

Here's a follow-up on the "accidental" murder-by-police of the dissident Russian journalist and website owner Magomed Yevloyev, from Reuters in the International Herald Tribune via Larisa:

1,000 protest killing of journalist in Ingushetia

More than 1,000 people gathered in Russia's troubled Ingushetia region Monday to protest the death of Magomed Yevloyev, a leading journalist and opposition leader who was shot over the weekend while in police custody.

Yevloyev, owner of the opposition Internet site www.ingushetiya.ru, was the most high-profile Russian journalist to be killed since the investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was shot outside her Moscow apartment in October 2006.

The police said he had been shot by accident when he tried to grab an officer's gun.

His supporters and human rights groups said they did not believe that version of events.

Yevloyev had often clashed with Ingushetia's Kremlin-backed leader, Murat Zyazikov, and officials had tried to close down his Internet site.

Protesters gathered Monday in a central square of Nazran, Ingushetia's biggest city, around a truck that was carrying Yevloyev's coffin.

"They killed our colleague in a dastardly and open way," Magomed Khazbiyev, a protest organizer, told the crowd. "If the federal authorities do not intervene in what is happening, we have the right to demand Ingushetia's secession from Russia."

The protesters responded with loud shouts of "Allahu Akbar," or "God is Great." About half of them left when Yevloyev's body was taken for burial. About 500 people remained and said they would not leave until Zyazikov had left his post.

It's kind of funny, isn't it? -- how Reuters and the IHT will give us detailed reports about a grievous offense against freedom of the press in Russia, but none of the major media have anything to say about what's been happening in Minneapolis-St. Paul, or Denver before that!

Not funny-haha, you understand. Funny-treasonous.

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Federal Court OKs Treason, Crimes Against Humanity

The traitors and war criminals who have taken over our government are dancing with joy this evening, and rightly so. Earlier today, a Federal Court of Appeals in Washington granted them legal immunity for every criminal action they have taken while in office.

The ruling, made by a panel of three judges in dismissing an appeal in the case of Valerie Plame [photo], absolves government officials of individual accountability for any actions taken in an official capacity, regardless of whether those actions violated federal law or jeopardized national security. In effect, it legalizes treason, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Ho hum. Andy Sullivan reported it this way for Reuters:

Appeals court upholds CIA leak lawsuit dismissal

A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday dismissed former CIA analyst Valerie Plame's lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney and several former Bush administration officials for disclosing her identity to the public.

The Court of Appeals in Washington dealt another setback to the former spy, who has said her career was destroyed when officials blew her cover in 2003 to retaliate against her husband, Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson.

It's not only -- or even primarily -- a setback to the "former spy", as Andy Sullivan puts it. It's a setback to the Rule of Law, and a victory for the forces of tyranny. Perhaps Andy Sullivan can't say this, but that doesn't make it any less true.

Plame's outing led [to] a lengthy criminal investigation, which resulted in the conviction of Cheney's top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

President George W. Bush commuted Libby's 2 1/2-year prison sentence last year.

Plame and Wilson sought money damages from Cheney, Libby, former White House aide Karl Rove and former State Department official Richard Armitage for violating their constitutional free speech, due process and privacy rights.

But the court ruled that the named officials are not liable for their actions, as Sullivan continues:

[A] three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld a federal judge's ruling that dismissed the couple's lawsuit.

The court ruled Cheney and the others were acting within their official capacity when they revealed Plame's identity to reporters.

Government employees who engage in questionable acts, such as abusing prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay facility or engaging in defamatory speech, cannot be held individually liable if they are carrying out official duties, the court said.

"The conduct, then, was in the defendants' scope of employment regardless of whether it was unlawful or contrary to the national security of the United States," Appeals Court Chief Judge David Sentelle wrote in the opinion.

It is interesting -- and horrifying! -- to note that this decision ventures well beyond the "just following orders" defense which was used by the Nazi war criminals and found wanting at Nuremberg.

It even goes beyond the "divine right of government officials" long desired by the Dominionists of the allegedly "Christian" so-called "Right". At least under the proposed "Constitution Restoration Act", government officials would have to claim they believed they were carrying out the will of God in order to be absolved of their crimes.

And -- let's be clear -- there is no question about whether crimes have been committed in this case. The Vice President's right-hand-man, Lewis "Scooter" Libby [photo], has already been convicted, and although his sentence was commuted, that doesn't make him any less guilty.

The crime in this case involved much more than outing Valerie Plame, an undercover national security professional, ruining her career and jeopardizing the lives of everyone who had ever worked with her. It was done at least in part to discredit her husband, Joe Wilson, who had publicly challenged one of the administration's most useful lies.

The lie was useful because it propelled the country along the road to war against Iraq -- a war waged on false pretenses that has already cost our country trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, not to mention all the other damages that are not so easily counted.

The falsely "justified" war has cost Iraq even more, of course; we've wrecked the infrastructure of a country that used to be home to 28 million people, and along the way we've killed more than a million of them and turned millions more into refugees.

It's a war of aggression, the ultimate crime against humanity, and it was all based on lies, including the tale about how Saddam Hussein had allegedly sought to obtain uranium from Niger -- a claim Joe Wilson investigated personally and found to be utterly baseless.

Proponents of truth and justice regard Joe Wilson's actions in this case as heroic: after all, he was taking a great personal risk in trying to defuse a dangerous situation by bringing to light a mistaken claim which was repeated endlessly by the administration.

But the claim wasn't exactly "mistaken". It was a deliberate, carefully crafted lie. And rather than allowing the truth of the matter to stand, the highest officials in our government chose to attack the truth-teller indirectly -- through his wife!

Exposing the identity of an undercover national security officer is -- according to federal law -- an act of treason. Telling deliberate lies in order to facilitate a war of aggression is -- according to international law -- a crime against humanity. These are the most serious crimes anyone can commit on the national and international stage respectively. All of this goes overlooked in the coverage provided by Reuters and others, who are -- as usual -- focusing on the narrow.

But even in the short and narrow version of this story, the course of action taken by our government officials has been despicable. To get back at a man who told the truth and tried to save many innocent lives, they attacked his wife! They couldn't confront Joe Wilson directly, of course, because he was telling the truth and they knew it.

So instead they outed his wife and damaged his family, and at the same time they also destroyed a precious national security asset -- an undercover professional, an expert on controlling the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration, under the tutelage of political operative Karl Rove [photo], perfected the tactic of using the specter of terrorists with nuclear weapons as a cattle prod. And in light of this, the outing of Valerie Plame alone reveals hypocrisy of the highest order.

But it's only one of many examples of rank hypocrisy in this case, and those examples are but drops in an ocean of hypocrisy, treason, and crimes against humanity that can be found (can't be missed!) in the horrific annals of this extraordinarily destructive administration. But Andy Sullivan and Reuters aren't saying anything about any of them. They're busy casting the decision as a "setback" to a "former spy".

Plame's lawyer says she will probably appeal. But surely the entire weight of the bipartisan criminal policy establishment will be aligned against any potential reversal of this decision.

And in the meantime, what about the rest of us? Because we weren't personally affected, because our careers weren't destroyed, we have no "legal standing" in this case, despite the fact that the ruling -- if upheld -- unleashes a most virulent form of tyranny, and despite the obvious fact that this is the ruling's primary intention.

You probably won't hear anyone criticizing this decision in the mainstream media -- and you might not read much about it elsewhere on the internet -- who knows? John Edwards had an affair, did you hear? Paris Hilton made a video!

So let's recap, shall we? A Federal court has ruled that some of the highest officials in our government are not accountable for their acts of treason, mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity -- not because they were following orders (for surely some of them, especially Karl Rove and Dick Cheney [photo], were giving the orders); not because they thought they were doing something righteous or Blessed by God; but simply because they held positions in the United States government -- regardless of the fact that these actions violated the most serious federal and international laws, regardless of the fact that they all knew their actions were deeply illegal, and regardless of the fact that they were never legitimately elected to those government positions in the first place -- or legitimately re-elected in the second place.

Furthermore, the court decrees, this immunity applies not only to the principals in this case but to all manner of American government officials committing all manner of horrific crimes -- including torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Did you get that? Do you finally get it now?

The terrorists have won. The federal courts are now ruling that they are all beyond the law.

No doubt the perpetrators of 9/11 will be afforded the same immunity [* UPDATE: This prediction came true two days later]. Ho hum.

Just another "setback" for a "former spy".

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New Book From Former White House Whore Cuts No Rope

The new tell-all [sic] book from professional liar and former White House mouthpiece Scott McClellan may best be seen as a crass attempt to make a few bucks while trying to avoid responsibility for the war crimes and crimes against humanity in which he so gleefully participated.

But there's still a noose in The Hague with Scottie's name on it, and the real journalists who work for McClatchy have all the details.

The noose with McClellan's name on it is in a room full of nooses -- with the names of all the war criminals who have taken over our government.

And this room may well be the last, best, and only hope for mankind.

It's a shame nothing in it will ever be used.

UPDATES:

I agree with Larisa Alexandrovna when she says (at At-Largely): "Go there and show these few, brave reporters some love. Leave a comment."

Jason Leopold at ConsortiumNews points to a passage in the book which suggests Karl Rove had a hand in the cover-up of the Valerie Plame case. Wow! Wouldn't that be a shock!!

Back at At-Largely, Larisa agrees with Jason's assessment, at least in the broad outlines. And Kathy says there's strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that Bush authorized the leak of Plame's identity.

Wouldn't these all be shocks? Oh come on, now. Seriously. Wouldn't you be just mortified? Imagine how it would look to the people of America!

If it shattered their "faith" in "democracy", might that lead to something positive?

Screwed: How The Bush Administration Defied All 50 States So Predatory Bankers Could Rape American Consumers

Here's one of the most disgusting stories to come along since ... well ... Tuesday:

The Bush administration [...] used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer [photo], courtesy of the Washington Post, in toto, with my emphasis (and thanks to z):

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime:
How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers:

Thursday, February 14, 2008; A25

Several years ago, state attorneys general and others involved in consumer protection began to notice a marked increase in a range of predatory lending practices by mortgage lenders. Some were misrepresenting the terms of loans, making loans without regard to consumers' ability to repay, making loans with deceptive "teaser" rates that later ballooned astronomically, packing loans with undisclosed charges and fees, or even paying illegal kickbacks. These and other practices, we noticed, were having a devastating effect on home buyers. In addition, the widespread nature of these practices, if left unchecked, threatened our financial markets.

Even though predatory lending was becoming a national problem, the Bush administration looked the other way and did nothing to protect American homeowners. In fact, the government chose instead to align itself with the banks that were victimizing consumers.

Predatory lending was widely understood to present a looming national crisis. This threat was so clear that as New York attorney general, I joined with colleagues in the other 49 states in attempting to fill the void left by the federal government. Individually, and together, state attorneys general of both parties brought litigation or entered into settlements with many subprime lenders that were engaged in predatory lending practices. Several state legislatures, including New York's, enacted laws aimed at curbing such practices.

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

In 2003, during the height of the predatory lending crisis, the OCC invoked a clause from the 1863 National Bank Act to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative. The OCC also promulgated new rules that prevented states from enforcing any of their own consumer protection laws against national banks. The federal government's actions were so egregious and so unprecedented that all 50 state attorneys general, and all 50 state banking superintendents, actively fought the new rules.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

Throughout our battles with the OCC and the banks, the mantra of the banks and their defenders was that efforts to curb predatory lending would deny access to credit to the very consumers the states were trying to protect. But the curbs we sought on predatory and unfair lending would have in no way jeopardized access to the legitimate credit market for appropriately priced loans. Instead, they would have stopped the scourge of predatory lending practices that have resulted in countless thousands of consumers losing their homes and put our economy in a precarious position.

When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.

As I read this piece, I couldn't help asking myself: How much more treason are we going to put up with?

When I finished reading, I started thinking: Why isn't this front-page news all over the country? This is not some crank we're talking about; it's the governor of a very important state! And he's not whining about what the feds did to him or his little fiefdom; he's speaking for all 49 others as well! So why is this story not considered "news"? Why is it only an "opinion" piece? Why was it run on page 25? Why aren't reporters chasing this down all over the country?

... and all these questions answer my first one, don't they?

So does this video: "Orwell Rolls In His Grave".

Stark For A Day: I'm Dreadfully Sorry

California Congressman Pete Stark, whose "incendiary comments" last week "offended" supporters of the president, his war, and his health care policy, survived a censure motion yesterday in the House but gave a teary apology nonetheless.

It reminded me of 2005, when Dick Durbin apologized for his remarks about Gitmo. Durbin's remarks were called "reprehensible" by the White House and the media echoed the line -- without ever bothering to mention how reprehensible was the policy Durbin had criticized.

Pete Stark's inflammatory comments were not especially lucid in my opinion -- he said the president sent troops to Iraq to have their heads shot off for his amusement -- but most Americans didn't consider them criminal. In a CNN poll, 88% of the respondents said they didn't think Stark should apologize. But he did anyway. With tear ducts wide open.

“I want to apologize to my colleagues — many of whom I have offended — to the president and his family and to the troops,” Stark said. He added that he hoped the apology would allow him to “become as insignificant as I should be” as the House moves forward on critical, divisive issues.

Stark then left the podium, wiping away tears as Democratic colleagues surrounded him with supportive handshakes.

Thanks, Pete. Thanks for standing up for the people who supported you! What's the matter, 88% isn't good enough for you? What do you need? 90? 95?

Here's the speech Pete Stark should have delivered but didn't:

Dear Fascists:

You want me to apologize. You want to censure me. You want me to take my words back.

Go screw.

I said what I said. Why should I pretend I didn't? What good would that do?

If you were offended, good. You deserve to be offended. More than that, you deserve to be hanged. We all do.

In 2000, we got a serial failure for president, and he was never even legitimately elected. We all knew it. Everybody in politics knew it! But we played along as if everything was just fine.

Less than a year later, our unelected president sat and listened to little children reading a book about a goat while "terrorists" hijacked airplanes and attacked us. Then he awarded Medals of Freedom to the heads of the national security agencies that had failed to protect us. And we smiled and nodded.

The administration has claimed for the past six years that it must have everything it wants, including the power to wage offensive war anywhere in the world, and the power to disregard the Constitution that we are all sworn to protect. And the administration tells us it needs these things in order to protect us. But it has never been held to account for failing to protect us six years ago.

And in those six years we have unearthed irrefutable evidence, proving in a hundred different ways that the story we've been told about those attacks must be false. But not a single member of this chamber has the courage to stand up and say so. May God have mercy on our yellow souls.

Our cruel and stupid unelected president declared limitless, endless war on the rest of the world and we gave him the money to do it -- hundreds of billions of dollars at a time, whenever he asked for it. And what's worse, we pretended we had no choice.

In 2002, in 2004, and again in 2006, we saw convincing evidence that our elections had been rigged, but we never said a word. Instead we carried on -- to our great shame -- as if our government were legitimately elected. And we kept on giving this criminal administration whatever it wanted.

We authorized warrantless surveillance, to be used against anyone, anywhere, for any reason, and with virtually no Congressional oversight. We claimed we had no choice; we had to do it, otherwise he would have canceled our summer vacation, or called us "soft on terror", or some such thing. It didn't matter that nobody would have believed him. But it did matter that we didn't want to fight. So we didn't. We had an excuse, it was a good excuse, and we used it shamelessly.

We legalized a new "definition" of torture under which the unelected president himself gets to decide what the word means, and a new system of "justice" under which people can be incarcerated indefinitely without charge or hearing or even a right of appeal. The correct word for this is "treason". And we are all guilty.

We allowed the president to claim that he could designate anyone anywhere an "enemy combatant" and have that person killed without any due process whatsoever. And when the president announced that "terrorists" had been dealt with in this way, we stood and cheered. We deserve to be hanged by the neck until dead.

Fortunately for me on this fine Beltway day, my political opponents, though they consider me their enemy, are not asking for my neck. All they're asking for is an apology. And they shall have one!

To Nancy Pelosi: The last time I checked, I didn't work for you. I work for the people of my district and the people of my state and the people of the nation, in that order -- but I do not work for you. I frankly don't give a damn what you think about my remarks, or what you think about anything else, either.

We could have had this criminal administration impeached by now if it weren't for you and your bootlicking. And I'm sorry, but you're one of the people who should be apologizing.

To George Bush: I've heard you lie so often and so hatefully about so many things that I have begun to disbelieve every single thing you say. For a moment last week I did actually believe you wanted our soldiers to get their heads blown off just for your own amusement. It is, after all, the only justification you haven't used, and I naturally assumed it was the real reason for the war.

But I was wrong about that, as so many good American citizens have informed me over the past few days. It's not only for your amusement, sir. It's also for your enrichment. And that of your "base". I'm sorry I didn't mention that last week, sir. And I apologize.

To 88% of America and 99% of the world: I am truly sorry for what America has done, for what America has become, and for what the Congress -- including me, sad and sorry Pete Stark -- have allowed this unelected president to do to this once-proud country, and to the world.

There's no way around it. We all deserve to hang. And I, for one, am dreadfully sorry.

A More Convincing Truth: How To Make Myths Go Away Faster

In September of 2004, Chris Floyd asked:

How many times must the truth be told before it conquers the lies?

I call that "a wrong question", because no answer is possible.

Wrong questions are everywhere: How many grains of sand are there in the Sahara? How many drops of water are there in the Pacific? How many stars are there in the sky? These are all wrong questions because none of them can be answered, but they can still point us toward knowledge. So even though they're wrong, they're not useless. We just have to look for related questions that can be answered.

(Astute readers will note that I am not criticizing Chris Floyd, for whom I have great respect; clearly his wrong question was rhetorical; in other words it was meant to be wrong! But the rest of the piece is right, as usual, as you will see when you read it all!)

The point of the rhetorical question Chris posed is this: Why does it take so much truth to make certain lies go away? And why do other lies seem to last forever? Conversely, what sort of truth has the best chance to conquer the lies?

Just a few days ago we were discussing a mind-bending piece from the amazing Washington Post columnist, Shankar Vedantam, in which he seemed to have trouble distinguishing between "where" and "when", a blunder he compounded by using "or" instead of "and". Fortunately for Shankar Vedantam, he was unopposed -- playing chess against an inflatable doll, so to speak -- so these two colossal blunders didn't finish him off. Instead he carried on in this manner until he somehow managed to conclude that the surge in Iraq will work, if it goes according to "conventional mathematics".

What does this have to do with Chris Floyd's question? Here's Shankar Vedantam to the rescue, from yesterday's Washington Post:

Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach (mirrored here)

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued a flier to combat myths about the flu vaccine. It recited various commonly held views and labeled them either "true" or "false." Among those identified as false were statements such as "The side effects are worse than the flu" and "Only older people need flu vaccine."

When University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that within 30 minutes, older people misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true. Three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual.

Younger people did better at first, but three days later they made as many errors as older people did after 30 minutes. Most troubling was that people of all ages now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC.

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

In other words, according to Shankar Vedantam's logic, when we say:

There was no Al-Q'aeda in Iraq before September 11th; in fact Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were enemies.

some people will wind up remembering:

Al-Q'aeda ... Iraq ... September 11 ... Saddam Hussein ... Osama bin Laden.

Do you believe this? I can think of other examples that would corroborate it. I've taught math. I've seen my students make the same mistakes over and over even though I repeatedly told them otherwise, and showed them how it should be done. But the number of students who forgot within three days was nowhere near 28%. More like 1%.

But Shankar Vedantam can corroborate his story, too, maybe:

Experiments by Ruth Mayo, a cognitive social psychologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also found that for a substantial chunk of people, the "negation tag" of a denial falls off with time. Mayo's findings were published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2004.

"If someone says, 'I did not harass her,' I associate the idea of harassment with this person," said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. "Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person's name again.
...

Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth.

Is this research directly relevant? Perhaps. I believe there's a big difference between a suspect denying his own role in a crime -- "I did not harass her" -- and a neutral party denying a verifiably false assertion -- "Slovenia is not just another word for Slovakia". But I can see how a different sort of statement -- "Slovenia and Slovakia are two different countries" -- might stay clearer in the students' minds longer.

As we've seen -- as we're seeing, to our great dismay -- it's very difficult to counter a myth once it gets established, and Shankar Vedantam explains why:

As early as 1945, psychologists Floyd Allport and Milton Lepkin found that the more often people heard false wartime rumors, the more likely they were to believe them.

The research is painting a broad new understanding of how the mind works. Contrary to the conventional notion that people absorb information in a deliberate manner, the studies show that the brain uses subconscious "rules of thumb" that can bias it into thinking that false information is true. Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency.

The experiments also highlight the difference between asking people whether they still believe a falsehood immediately after giving them the correct information, and asking them a few days later. Long-term memories matter most in public health campaigns or political ones, and they are the most susceptible to the bias of thinking that well-recalled false information is true.

What is this? Shankar Vedantam making sense? Apparently he his; I'll explain later.

The research also highlights the disturbing reality that once an idea has been implanted in people's minds, it can be difficult to dislodge. Denials inherently require repeating the bad information, which may be one reason they can paradoxically reinforce it.

Indeed, repetition seems to be a key culprit. Things that are repeated often become more accessible in memory, and one of the brain's subconscious rules of thumb is that easily recalled things are true.

Many easily remembered things, in fact, such as one's birthday or a pet's name, are indeed true. But someone trying to manipulate public opinion can take advantage of this aspect of brain functioning. In politics and elsewhere, this means that whoever makes the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone who denies it later.

One of the great secrets of propagandists: get there first with the lie, and the truth will have a tough time following.

There's more to the story, of course. Repetition is one key factor, and it doesn't seem to matter where all the repetition comes from:

a new experiment by Kimberlee Weaver at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and others shows that hearing the same thing over and over again from one source can have the same effect as hearing that thing from many different people -- the brain gets tricked into thinking it has heard a piece of information from multiple, independent sources, even when it has not. Weaver's study was published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The experiments by Weaver, Schwarz and others illustrate another basic property of the mind -- it is not good at remembering when and where a person first learned something. People are not good at keeping track of which information came from credible sources and which came from less trustworthy ones, or even remembering that some information came from the same untrustworthy source over and over again.

Here Shankar Vedantam is saying that myths are most easily established if they arrive early and are repeated often, even if all the repetition comes from the same source, and even if that source has been shown to be untrustworthy.

In other words, discrediting the source can only go so far. If the same discredited source continues to tell the same lies, people will tend to keep believing them. And there's a political component as well:

The experiments do not show that denials are completely useless; if that were true, everyone would believe the myths. But the mind's bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.

Do people really want to believe myths for their own reasons? This reminds me of another Shankar Vedantam column I've read this week, "Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases" (mirrored here), in which Shankar Vedantam reports -- in the gentlest mainstream terms possible -- on a study that finally reveals a shocking truth about America: white racists tend to vote Republican!

Now put two and two and two together with me, will you?

White racist Republicans who want to believe the myth for their own reasons and who hear lies supporting that myth constantly -- even from a discredited source -- would be extremely difficult to convince of anything. For instance, it might be difficult for such people to suspect a white person of a crime when a darker suspect is readily available.

Thus we get phenomena such as that revealed by Dan Froomkin's piece from October of 2005, which says:

President Bush's job-approval rating among African Americans has dropped to 2 percent, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
...

A few months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found Bush's approval rating among blacks at 51 percent.

This was when Bush's approval rating was in the nineties among the country at large -- or so we were told at the time. But I'm sure none of this has anything to do with anything we're talking about here.

In other words, it's not just about race, as U. S. News reported Tuesday:

Polls: Show Most Muslims Do Not Believe Arabs Perpetrated 9/11

The Washington Post reports this morning that "many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane." A report last year by the Pew Global Attitudes Project "found that the number of Muslims worldwide who do not believe that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks is soaring -- to 59 percent of Turks and Egyptians, 65 percent of Indonesians, 53 percent of Jordanians, 41 percent of Pakistanis and even 56 percent of British Muslims."

Well guess what? Among the general population, even with all the "wanna-believe" bias thrown in, there's no stopping the truth, either:

51% of Americans Want Congress to Probe Bush/Cheney Regarding 9/11 Attacks.

One particularly nagging question for 9/11 Truth activists runs like this: "How can we make that number bigger, faster?"

Shankar Vedantam offers some clues, but first we have to un-spin him. (You didn't think this was gonna be easy, did you?)

In the column we mentioned earlier this week, we liked Shankar Vedantam's presentation of the data he was getting; it was the spin that we found annoying. And this column is just the same. Big surprise: The liberal media is slipping another shiv between your ribs!

Shankar Vedantam agrees that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. But rather than emphasizing how often we were told the opposite, from what must at this point be considered a single untrustworthy source

he attributes the success of the propaganda to the style in which it has been debunked.

But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.

And therefore, he concludes, the "myths" about 9/11 are equally durable, and for the same reasons. I agree with him entirely. We just don't agree on what the myths are!

So Shankar Vedantam writes:

Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane.

Those notions remain widespread even though the federal government now runs Web sites in seven languages to challenge them. Karen Hughes, who runs the Bush administration's campaign to win hearts and minds in the fight against terrorism, recently painted a glowing report of the "digital outreach" teams working to counter misinformation and myths by challenging those ideas on Arabic blogs.

A report last year by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, however, found that the number of Muslims worldwide who do not believe that Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks is soaring -- to 59 percent of Turks and Egyptians, 65 percent of Indonesians, 53 percent of Jordanians, 41 percent of Pakistanis and even 56 percent of British Muslims.

Isn't this interesting? Even the vaunted State Department's propaganda machine cannot stem the tide of truth! And it's no wonder, really, considering how chock-full-o-holes the official story is.

Remember Ruth Mayo in Jerusalem? She has an opinion on how to make the myths go away faster:

Mayo found that rather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that "Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did," Mayo said it would be better to say something like, "Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks" -- and not mention Hussein at all.

Ain't that beautiful?? At least she doesn't believe it completely.

The psychologist acknowledged that such a statement might not be entirely accurate ...

Not entirely? No, not quite!

But this does raise another important question:

Is it possible to use lies to "refute" the truth? or can lies only be used to "refute" other lies?

Surely that depends on the inherent consistency if the lie, and how well it is corroboated by known facts. But maybe it also depends on how the lies are dismantled, and how the truth is told.

And here's the interesting thing: Even though the lies continue to resonate, especially among the unreachable Americans who believe whatever they want to believe for their own reasons, the truth -- about our global nightmare and the event that triggered it -- is still spreading.

We must be doing something right. Actually we are doing a lot of things right. But one thing is clear, even amid the manure thrown around by the spinning Shankar Vedantam. We cannot simply deny the lie: we have to tell a more convincing truth.

And this leads me to my final point. There's a big difference between proving that an assertion is untrue and simply denying it. Just because something has been denied, that doesn't make it false. People in full-spectrum denial, like the folks at Screw Loose Change, and the creators of the 9/11 fiction emanating from Popular Mechanics, and even some so-called truth-seekers in the so-called 9/11 Truth movement, blur that distinction. And most often, when you see somebody saying "That's been debunked", it merely means it's been denied.

All the official myths about 9/11 have been refuted. The refutations have all been denied, but they have never been debunked, nor can they be, for you cannot debunk the truth. It may be just as important to understand this distinction as it is to know the "facts" about what went on that day.

The manner in which you present your argument makes more difference than you may think. But so does the content.

Memo to the State Department:

If you tell people the truth, in a calm and reasoned way, they will have no trouble believing you!

The following cold posts have been particularly well-received in this regard, and I recommend them to any readers who have not yet seen them:

BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Begins

BBC vs 9/11 Truth: The Smear Continues

Meet Jerome Hauer, 9/11 Suspect Awaiting Indictment

9/11 Was a Hoax: How and When I Knew It

Trouble

~~~

Meanwhile ... What are you doing on September 11th?

Good Riddance To Michael Deaver

The New York Times reports on the death of yet another despicable swine who betrayed his country for money and the scent of power:

Michael K. Deaver, who arranged some of Ronald Reagan’s most memorable photographic backdrops for public consumption and privately gave the president blunt, sometimes contrarian advice, died yesterday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 69.
...

Mr. Deaver was widely known for creating photo ops that showed Reagan atop the Great Wall of China, at the cliffs of Normandy and filling sandbags to show concern after a Louisiana flood. And he played a central role in planning Reagan’s funeral in 2004; the last visual was burial as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.
...

Mr. Deaver worked for Reagan in one capacity or another from 1967 to 1985, but after he left the White House in 1985, his income soared and then his reputation plummeted.

He formed a hugely successful lobbying firm, Michael K. Deaver & Associates, whose clients included Canada, South Korea, Puerto Rico, Saudi Arabia, TWA and Philip Morris. He posed for the cover of Time in 1986, sitting in the back seat of a limousine with a telephone at his ear, the Capitol in the background.

But the accompanying story was headlined “Cashing In on Top Connections,” and in 1987 he was convicted on three counts of perjury for lying to a House subcommittee and a federal grand jury about efforts to use the White House in his lobbying efforts.

Mr. Deaver, who blamed alcoholism for a faulty memory of events and bad judgment, was fined $100,000 and given a suspended three-year prison sentence and probation.

When you use your White House connections to lobby on behalf of foreign governments the crime is properly called treason and the proper punishment is death.

No suspended sentences. No probation. Chop chop chop.

Look how well the system doesn't work!

Get orange on September 11th, get downtown, and get visible.

The basic idea is to set the stage to do it again. And again and again and again.

We're looking for justice here, not a day off work.

And by the way, the crime is called treason.

No suspended sentences.

No probation.

Tom Toles: That's The Spirit!

As usual, when you see Toles here, it's an open thread.

This particular open thread features "How George Tenet Lied" by Ray McGovern, published at Bob Parry's Consortium News dot com:

Here in Washington we are pretty much inured to effrontery, but Tenet’s book and tiresome interviews have earned him the degree for chutzpah summa cum laude. We are supposed to feel sorry for this pathetic soul, who could not muster the integrity simply to tell the truth and stave off unspeakable carnage in Iraq.

Rather, when his masters lied to justify war, Tenet simply lacked the courage to tell his fellow citizens that America was about to launch what the post WWII Nuremberg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime”—a war of aggression.
...

Someone should have told the former CIA director that unprovoked war is not some sort of game. Out of respect for the tens of thousands killed and maimed in Iraq, it is time to start calling spades spades. It was a high crime, a premeditated felony to have taken part in this conspiracy.

There's lots more, and it's well worth reading. Hint, hint!

Dear Mike: Please Say The Word!

Here's an Open Letter to Mike Gravel from John Doraemi of Crimes Against The State and OpEd News. As is my custom, I have touched up the spelling and punctuation, and added some emphasis and space:

Dear Senator Gravel,

Do you want to win?

You are one word away from turning US politics on its head. There is one powerful, earth-shaking word that can stop this madness in its tracks and press "reset" on the entire imperial project.

That word is "Treason."

In particular, the treason that transpired on September 11th 2001. There is no other issue, and no other combination of words that will put you in the White House except for this issue, and this word: Treason.

Treason is knowingly allowing the attacks on our nation and not doing anything whatsoever to stop them. That happened. Everyone knows it, yet no one puts it on national television.

Treason is being told "America is under attack," yet sitting there, stalling for time, and reading a children's book.

Treason is when the Vice President of the United States illegally assumes control of our armed forces and orders a stand down of force protection at the Pentagon, as witnessed in Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony under oath to the 9/11 Commission.

Treason is receiving a Daily Briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" and then failing to respond to this threat in any meaningful manner.

Treason is being moved from your high rise hotel in Genoa Italy because of a warning of suicide hijackings of commercial jets, and then lying to the country repeatedly that this threat was never conceived of before.

Treason is violating one's oath of office to defend the Constitution, and then burning the Bill of Rights, destroying the foundation of our freedoms and of our nation.

Treason is participating in the cover-up and illegally destroying crime scene evidence so that we cannot forensically solve the greatest crime in American history.

Treason is obvious to many millions around the world, including the intelligence services of other nations who warned the U.S. during the summer of 2001 that this attack was imminent and expected.

Senator Gravel, America is hanging by a thread. The media have been complicit in obeying the government and in covering up the glaring Treason of September 11th. You are in a unique position to open up this issue to scrutiny.

Other candidates will not tread there. They lack the guts, or the brains, or the morality to confront the high treason that has allowed and fostered international terrorism. U.S. leaders have deliberately allowed known terrorists to escape justice and to act against civilians. This is a provable fact.

You could be the man that saved America from fascism and totalitarian rule. But it's all or nothing.

Say the word.

Resources:

Testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta [ WinWMV | REAL.RM | QT.MOV]

The 9/11 Commission Report, One Year Later. Did the Commission Get it Right? Congressional Hearings of Representative Cynthia McKinney [PDF]

"Ties With Terror: The Continuity of Western-Al-Qaeda Relations in the Post-Cold War Period", Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed [HTML]

The Facts of September 11th 2001 [HTML]

Video of Senator Gravel at the first Democratic Party Debate [YouTube]

How about that? What if Mike Gravel said "treason" on national television?

What if Mike Gravel stood up there with all all the cardboard cutouts pre-programmed with AIPAC talking points, oops, that should have said RNC talking points, um, excuse me, I mean DLC talking points ... sorry about that, but what if, in the middle of the cacophony of meaningless lies and despicable threats, Mike Gravel cut right to the heart of the most burning and neglected issue of our time?

What if Mike Gravel said what all thinking Americans and everybody else in the whole world already knows?

What if Mike Gravel stood up and said: "This is our biggest problem: Bush committed treason! Cheney committed treason, too! And nobody will even talk about it."

Can you imagine? It sounds like a great idea to me!

If you like the idea as much as I do, why not contact the folks at Mike Gravel's campaign -- and send them this link? Or this one? Or this one?

Aside from injecting another badly-needed dose of truth into the national discourse, it could solve a lot of other problems too.

How To Win The War On Terror

Creating A Fascist Dictatorship Is Easy

Chilling indeed is Naomi Wolf's recent piece in The Guardian, "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps". (Thanks to Bob in Prague for mentioning it in a comment.)

Here's a quick summary:

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms ... George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

Ms. Wolf's column gives examples of the Bush administration doing each of these ten things, and I commend it to your attention if you haven't already read it. It is no doubt harrowing, but it probably only tells about half the story. Our position appears to be much worse than Ms. Wolf lets on.

To supplement her case, we can add some of the tactics which, even if they haven't been features of all fascist-enablers throughout history, have been used (and continue to be used) against American democracy:

11. Stage false flag terror attacks

Ms. Wolf doesn't go so far as to call 9/11 a false-flag attack, but I have no such qualms. It was obvious on the day, and the passage of time has made it even more so.

For that matter, the first attack on the World Trade Center (in 1993) was patently false. So too were the London bomb attacks of July 7, 2005, as well as the Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004.

The constantly-repeated but unsubstantiated official stories of these attacks all make it look as if the entire world is under threat from terrorists. And in fact it is. But the terrorists are not Arabic or Muslim or hiding in a cave.

12. Corrupt the electoral process

Prevent people from voting if you think they will vote against you. If you can't prevent them from voting, prevent their votes from being counted. And if you can't prevent their votes from being counted, prevent them from being counted correctly.

13. Poison the nation's political discourse

Stake out violent, radical positions and call them "mainstream". Refer to your political opponents as "enemies" and call their positions "lunatic fringe", even if those positions were recently identified with mainstream politics.

Fabricate misleading names for your legislation, so people who know nothing about the actual bills will support them.

14. Lie about everything -- constantly!

Even if you get caught lying and are forced to tell the truth once, that's only a temporary setback. Go back to the original lie as early and as often as possible.

Presidential spokeswoman Dana Perrino recently told a news conference that our troops are in Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi government. See how easy that was?

15. Attack on all fronts simultaneously

This splits the opposition. Some will oppose your foreign policy; some will oppose your domestic economic policy; some will oppose your domestic social policy. This works in your favor by dissipating their energy, and may even lead to arguments among the opposition as to which issue(s) should be fought hardest. Your main objective is to make sure the opposition never has a chance to unite.

16. Accuse your opponents of the crimes you intend to commit

If they deny the charges, you say "They'll deny anything." If they refuse to dignify your charges with a denial, you say "See! They don't even deny it". And then when you get caught doing it, you can claim it's no big deal -- just something everybody does.

17. Disguise your agenda

If your society is affluent, pretend to be conservative. People who consider themselves conservative are basically very greedy and extremely stupid and they will support you to the hilt, especially if they have no idea what you are doing.

If your society is poverty-stricken, pretend to be socialist. Then the people who have nothing will support you in the hope of improving their lot. It will never happen, of course, but they probably won't find out until it's too late.

18. Engage in selective political assassination

Disguise some of the murders as accidents, but in other cases make it very plain that the victim was deliberately killed. This not only eliminates potentially powerful opposition but it also instills fear in the segment of society that the assassinated leaders represented.

19. Start a war and claim it's a national emergency

Claim special powers because the country is at war. Claim you are doing everything in your power to make the country safe. But don't actually take any steps in that direction, for the safer the people feel the less they will support you.

20. Hide as much information as possible

What they don't know can't hurt you.

21. Wrap your treason in the flag, and hide your sins behind the Bible.

It works like a charm. Doesn't it?

Here's Naomi Wolf again:

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

I disagree entirely. We may be just one false-flag attack away from total dictatorship.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

Or perhaps a combination of both ... slow erosion and sudden shocks.

But that's a minor disagreement, in the grand scheme of things. More to the point:

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

How can we in fact "stand our ground and fight for our nation"? I hope to explore that question in greater detail in upcoming posts. In the meantime, and as always, your thoughts and comments are most welcome.

Truth Is Scarcely Visible As Eland Rips Chertoff Rips Brzezinski

At Robert Parry's Consortium News, guest columnist Ivan Eland plants both feet firmly in the world of fantasy with respect to the events of 9/11, yet still manages to tell a few vital truths when he calls BS on the Bush administration -- specifically Michael Chertoff -- for Exaggerating al-Qaeda's Threat.

Michael Chertoff, President Bush’s secretary of Homeland Security, desperately tried to refute Zbigniew Brzezinski’s cogent charge that the administration has hyped the “war on terror” to promote a “culture of fear,” in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

The op-ed was called "Make No Mistake: This Is War" and it was published on Sunday. Why Ivan Eland declines to link to it is beyond me.

Brzezinski's column was called "Terrorized by 'War on Terror'" and I understand completely why Chertoff declined to link to it.

Eland continues:

In addition to shamefully smearing Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Advisor, by associating him with the fringe opinion that the administration plotted the 9/11 terrorist acts, Chertoff also declared, “Al-Qaeda and its ilk have a world vision that is comparable to that of historical totalitarian ideologues but adapted to the 21st–century global network.”

Chertoff's "smearing" of Brzezinski, if indeed that's what it was, is very subtle:

Since Sept. 11, a conspiracy-minded fringe has claimed that American officials plotted the destruction. But when scholars such as Zbigniew Brzezinski accuse our leaders of falsely depicting or hyping a "war on terror" to promote a "culture of fear," it's clear that historical revisionism has gone mainstream.

This false denial from Chertoff may have been required, but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous. It is painfully obvious that our "leaders" have indeed falsely depicted and hyped a "war on terror", and Mr. Chertoff -- one of the guiltiest parties in this regard -- knows as much.

This is the same Michael Chertoff who proclaimed that the alleged "Liquid Bomb" plot -- which was supposedly foiled in the UK last August -- was designed to destroy 10 or 12 airplanes and kill hundreds of thousands of people in the process, as if each airplane could carry tens of thousands of passengers.

But Michael Chertoff "smears" Brzezinski only by referring to him in the same paragraph as what he calls the "conspiracy-minded fringe".

Ivan Eland is much less subtle, levelling a much more blatant smear against those who recognize 9/11 for what it was, and who -- unlike Ivan Eland (and unlike Robert Parry, for that matter) -- have the courage to say so. (Parry, once among the most fearless of journalists, won't talk about election fraud, either. So it goes.)

On the other hand, Eland is right when he says that Chertoff's

rhetoric makes it seem as if al-Qaeda is more dangerous than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. When comparisons are made to these villainous titans, we should be suspicious.

After his insane pronouncements last August, we should be suspicious whenever Michael Chertoff says anything!

The same kinds of comparisons have been used before. When Bill Clinton wanted to bomb Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, he compared both leaders to Hitler. In the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush also used the same comparison.

Yet, the small countries of Serbia and Iraq, as well as the rag-tag group al-Qaeda, have nowhere near the resources of a Nazi Germany and have not tried to completely overrun an important and wealthy continent.

Yes, it's all perfectly true and it's also perfectly obvious. Somewhat less obvious -- but still visible -- is al-Q'aeda's role as an instrument of western intelligence services. But Ivan Eland doesn't seem to know -- or care -- about that.

And he doesn't really have to, because his target -- Chertoff -- can be demolished with virtually no ammunition whatsoever.

Chertoff’s overheated rhetoric doesn’t stop there. He adds yet another implicit comparison -- to communism. He opined, “Today’s extreme Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda do not merely seek political revolution in their own countries. They aspire to dominate all countries. Their goal is a totalitarian, theocratic empire to be achieved by waging perpetual war on soldiers and civilians alike.”

Here the implicit comparison is to the universal communist movement, which tried to spread its revolution around the world.

Maybe in some fifty-year-old dream, the implicit comparison is to the "universal communist movement", a movement which, by the way, never existed but which was nonetheless hyped and falsely depicted for decades.

Eland misses the more obvious comparison: to the modern-day United States, the one force in the world which is -- even as we speak -- waging a self-proclaimed endless, limitless war against the rest of the world.

This endless war doesn't really have much to do with terrorism, and that fact is becoming clearer by the day. It does have a lot to do with oil, though.

Does Ivan Eland mention oil? Does Chertoff mention oil? Does Brzezinski mention oil? Or are we looking at a trilogy of more-or-less total lies?

Here's a hint. Eland continues:

Although Osama bin Laden does try to kill both soldiers and civilians -- and is justifiably deemed a vicious terrorist -- his real objective is not to dominate “all countries” by fomenting an Islamist revolution. If bin Laden had this as a genuine goal, it would be laughable to think that he could get any significant public support in Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu countries for a revolution to convert them to draconian Islamic rule.

No kidding. It seems ridiculous when phrased that way.

But on a more pragmatic level, it is equally ridiculous to base anything on what Osama bin Laden says, considering that it's been more than five years since he's said anything! We might as well base our notion of bank security on the pronouncements of Bonnie and Clyde.

In fact, his officially stated goal of recreating a caliphate that would put all of the diverse Islamic countries under one ruler is preposterous enough on its own. Even Chertoff admits that the Islamist extremists’ intent is “grandiose.” Should bin Laden ever create such a caliphate, it would not have the economic or military power of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

Should bin Laden ever create such a caliphate, it would be one of the most amazing feats ever achieved -- because everybody knows dead men don't create caliphates.

Chertoff himself acknowledges that his own comparison is weak: “To be sure, as Brzezinski observes, the geographic reach of this network does not put them [sic] in the same group as the Nazis or Stalinists when they achieved first-class military power.”

Despite bin Laden’s inflated rhetoric, his real aims -- which are also supported by many mainstream Muslims -- are to remove a non-Muslim military presence from Islamic lands and compel the United States to stop supporting what bin Laden sees as corrupt regimes in the Middle East.

These may have been his real aims when he was alive. On the other hand, he may have been nothing but a figurehead -- a CIA asset through and through. His main job may have been to do and say things which would give the folks like Michael Chertoff ammunition.

Most mainstream Muslims, however, reject bin Laden’s despicable means of targeting civilians to achieve his goals.

Non-Muslim intervention in and occupation of Muslim lands has driven Islamist violence in Chechnya, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan (during both the Soviet and current U.S. occupations), and Lebanon (during Israeli invasions and the U.S. nation-building mission during the Reagan administration). The U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf initially motivated bin Laden to strike U.S. targets, eventually resulting in the horror of 9/11.

Supposedly.

Personally I find it very disturbing that a supposedly dissident journalist would continue to parrot the official government line in the face of the facts that the government has been demonstrably lying about virtually everything, virtually all the time, and that even now -- five and a half years after the attacks -- we still have not seen any credible evidence linking Osama bin Laden to those attacks.

We've seen much more credible evidence to support the contention that al-Q'aeda doesn't even exist!

The amount of incredible evidence we have seen makes the situation much worse.

But Ivan Eland is blissfully unconcerned with any of that; he's more interested in the blowback theory.

The 9/11 attacks were treacherous acts of terrorism, but Chertoff and the Bush administration, the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and the American media act as if they were the beginning of history. Only in religion and quantum physics are there events without cause.

Clearly Chertoff and the Bush administration are interested in deception -- they've virtually made it a religion. So why on Earth should we pay them any more heed?

On the other hand, Ivan Eland is right when he says that

Most Americans are unaware of their government’s history of unnecessary and profligate meddling in the affairs of countries throughout the Middle East. For their own safety and security, Americans cannot continue to ignore that the Islamist venom resulting in 9/11 was rooted in this U.S. interventionist and quasi-imperial foreign policy.

Certainly it would be a step forward to acknowledge the roots if Islamic and Arabic venom. But to claim without a shred of evidence that it resulted in 9/11 is extremely irresponsible.

It's nothing like the sort of reporting readers of Consortium News once enjoyed. But apparently it's all we're ever going to get.

Fortunately, in this case where the target is an outrageous pack of transparent lies, it's almost good enough.

Instead of perpetuating the myth that the United States is at war with “fanatics” who have a reflexive hatred of America, the nation’s homeland security chief could better spend his time examining the real motivator for such terrorism—U.S. foreign policy—and recommending a policy of military restraint in the Middle East to reduce the chances of terrorist attacks at home.

If there is any doubt that this strategy would work, the case of Lebanon during the early 1980s should be examined. After the bombing of the Marine barracks and Ronald Reagan’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from that country, the number of anti–U.S. attacks by the Islamist group Hezbollah plummeted.

This is a great point! Finally. I knew there would be one, eventually. Or at least I suspected as much.

But perhaps creating a “culture of fear,” as Brzezinski put it, is more politically useful to the Bush administration than actually carrying out what should be the first and foremost responsibility of any government—the protection of its people.

Nobody in his right mind could argue this point -- or the previous one, for that matter. Creating a culture of fear has been tremendously useful to the Bush administration. There's no "perhaps" about it.

Without the culture of fear which this administration has created, they would have all been executed for treason a long time ago.

But all Ivan Eland can bring himself to say about this is "perhaps".

What are they afraid of? Why can't Ivan Eland and Bob Parry bring themselves to state the obvious truths of the matter? It's not as if they are in danger of losing a paying gig. They are essentially only blogging already.

And given that context, it's a shameful display, in this frozen writer's opinion. But it is also sufficient.

Despite missing the point -- over and over and over -- Eland still manages to shred Chertoff's position, and this to my mind is the clearest possible evidence that Chertoff is lying.

I mean, if you can be taken apart quite easily, by somebody who hasn't a clue ...

Larisa: 'Rove Determined To Strike In The US'

Larisa Alexandrovna has been away -- either on vacation [?!] or chasing a big story [!?] -- and we've certainly missed her. As regular readers of her blog already know, she's also been ill, and I'm sure I speak for a great many people when I wish her better health immediately.

The good news is: She's ba-a-a-a-ck!! Savagely funny and right-on-the-mark in her latest blog item:

"Karl Rove determined to strike in the US"

Karl Rove apparently has direct access to terrorists or at least their play book, because he knows something that even experts seem not to know: what the terrorists are thinking.

"We are foolish if we think we can turn away from this threat and draw inward, and they will not come," President Bush's chief political strategist told an audience of about 400 at the Mount Union Theater. "If we lose, they will follow," he said.

I think this advice should have been taken during the end of the Nixon era in which apparently our national nightmare had just begun. Had Nixon not been pardoned, then his little mob would have likely followed him to the slammer, including Mr. Rove. Instead, "they" have followed us for the last 30+ years. But I will ask again, and continue to ask, since no member of Congress appears to have this question on the tip of his or her tongue for some odd reason: why does a political hit man running campaigns have the highest level clearances?

That question is easy to answer, at least from the point of view of those who want the political hit man to have the highest level clearances: Because knowledge is power. It's really that simple.

The more difficult question, the one Larisa is surely asking, is: Why do we allow it?

And the answer to that one, I believe, was best articulated by Joseph Heller, when asked about all the interwoven themes of his novel Catch-22. Heller interrupted the question, saying there was only one theme:

They can do anything that we can't prevent them from doing.

Once again it really is that simple.

What can we do to prevent it? That's why they do it.

As for the question of how Karl Rove knows what the terrorists intend to do, I was wondering the same thing about John McCain a few days ago when he made essentially the same statement, and three possibilities came to mind:

1) He's clairvoyant.
2) He's bluffing.
3) He's in cahoots with the terrorists.

Let's look at this with dispassionate logic: If we dismiss the possibility of clairvoyance, the only available options amount to treason in one way or another. In other words, either he's bluffing -- threatening terrorism for political advantage -- or else ... well we don't want to think about that, do we?

Seriously: What difference does it make? The statements made by Rove, McCain, Cheney and Bush (among others) -- not just recently but continuously since 9/11, and especially whenever they feel threatened -- amount to an ultimatum: a threat of terrorist action against the United States in the event that Congress, reflecting the will of the American people, forces an end to this war-of-choice, which (apparently we were supposed to forget) was started deliberately on the strength of a pack of carefully constructed lies and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising.

But we haven't forgotten. And we really can dismiss the possibility of clairvoyance. Because if Bush, Cheney, Rove et al. are clairvoyant, 9/11 would never have happened unless they wanted it to.

Therefore we know exactly what these threats represent: a protection racket of the vilest sort:

Give us full control of your country -- the budget, the legal system, the military, the works! -- or else you will be attacked by terrorists -- again!

And so. The treason is obvious. The Guillotine Department is standing by. What are we waiting for?