[Mb-civic] TBRNews.org Journal Vol. V, No. 20

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 The Journal Vol. V, No. 20--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Table of Contents
CALEA Documentation
'Plamegate' is no summer squall
Crushing blow for British army's good name
The Anti-Neocon
Television and the Hive Mind

 CALEA DocumentationDEPARTMENT OF JUSTICEFederal Bureau of InvestigationAgency Information Collection Activities: Proposed Collection;Comments RequestedACTION: 30-Day Notice of Information Collection Under Review:Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) Readiness  Survey.-----------------------------------------------------------------------The Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has submitted the following information collection request to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review and approval in accordance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995. The proposed information collection is published to obtain comments from the public and affected agencies. This proposed information collection was previously published in the Federal Register, Volume 70, Number 70, page 19503 on April 13, 2005, allowing for a 60 day comment period.The purpose of this notice is to allow for an additional 30 days for public comment until August 17, 2005. This process is conducted in accordance with 5 CFR 1320.10.Written comments and/or suggestions regarding the items contained in this notice, especially the estimated public burden and associated response time, should be directed to the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Attention Department of Justice Desk Officer, Washington, DC 20503. Additionally, comments may be submitted to OMB via facsimile to (202) 395-5806. Written comments and suggestions from the public and affected agencies concerning the proposed collection of information are encouraged. Your comments should address one or more of the following four points:·                     Evaluate whether the proposed collection of information is necessary for the proper performance of the functions of the agency, including whether the information will have practical utility;·                     Evaluate the accuracy of the agencies estimate of the burden of the proposed collection of information, including the validity of the methodology and assumptions used;·                     Enhance the quality, utility, and clarity of the information to be collected; and·                     Minimize the burden of the collection of information on those who are to respond, including through the use of appropriate automated, electronic, mechanical, or other technological collection techniques or other forms of information technology, e.g., permitting electronic submission of responses.Overview of this Information Collection(1) Type of Information Collection: New Collection.(2) Title of the Form/Collection: Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) Readiness Survey(3) Agency form number, if any, and the applicable component of the Department sponsoring the collection: Form Number: None. Federal Bureau of Investigation.(4) Affected public who will be asked or required to respond, as well as a brief abstract: Primary: Business or other for profit. Other: Federal Government, State, local, or tribal government. The information collected in the survey will be stored in a database and be used to evaluate the effectiveness of CIU programs for implementing CALEA solutions in the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Affected Telecommunications Service Providers (TSP) will be asked to identify the platforms within their networks that have CALEA responsibility. For each identified platform the TSP must specify if it is CALEA ready (Law Enforcement can obtain a CALEA surveillance). If the platform is not CALEA ready, the TSP is asked to identify the software release that provides CALEA functionality and the date when the platform anticipate installing that software release.(5) An estimate of the total number of respondents and the amount of time estimated for an average respondent to respond/reply: It is estimated that 3483 TSPs will provide 21,323 responses. Each response is estimated to take 15 minutes to complete.(6) An estimate of the total public burden (in hours) associated with the collection: There are an estimated 5,330.75 total annual burden hours associated with this collection.If additional information is required contact: Brenda E. Dyer, Department Clearance Officer, United States Department of Justice, Justice Management Division, Policy and Planning Staff, Patrick Henry Building, Suite 1600, 601 D Street NW., Washington, DC 20530.Dated: July 13, 2005.Brenda E. Dyer,Department Clearance Officer, Department of Justice.'Plamegate' is no summer squall

July 20, 2005
By Jim Lobe
Asia TImes

WASHINGTON - While to people living outside the Washington "Beltway" the current affair over the disclosure by top White House officials of the identity of a covert intelligence officer may seem somewhat esoteric, the stakes could not be higher.

It is not just that Karl Rove, President George W Bush's top political adviser, and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, may have violated a 1982 law to protect US spies and could face criminal indictments, at least for perjury or obstruction of justice.

The case may also prove to be one more string - albeit a very central one - that, if pulled with sufficient determination, could well unravel a very tangled ball of yarn, and one that would confirm recent revelations in the British press about the so-called Downing Street memo, which indicates that the Bush administration was "fixing the facts" about the alleged threat posed by Iraq's Saddam Hussein in order to grease the rails to war.

It may also expose how a close-knit group of neo-conservatives and Republican activists both inside and outside the administration also waged war against professionals in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department in the run-up to war, precisely because, as experts, they repeatedly came up with new facts that contradicted the propaganda of both the White House and its backers. Facts that somehow either had to be "fixed" or discredited.

If special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and his grand jury find that the White House and its "non-governmental" supporters conducted a deliberate campaign to discredit ambassador Joseph Wilson, in part by revealing the identity of his CIA spouse, Valerie Plame, many Republican lawmakers, who are increasingly nervous and tight-lipped about the case, will be forced to distance themselves from Bush and the Iraq war, making it far more difficult for him to rally support for new adventures, such as air strikes or covert actions against Iran.

"This case is about Iraq, not Niger," wrote the New York Times' Frank Rich in a widely noted column on Sunday entitled "Follow the Uranium", a reference to Wilson's trip in February 2002 to Niger to follow up on an intelligence document - since found to have been forged - that appeared to show that Saddam had bought a large quantity of yellowcake uranium from that African nation, presumably for his alleged nuclear weapons program.

"The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons," Rich went on. "The real culprit ... is not Mr Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high ..."

Wilson, of course, first suggested that "fixing facts" was precisely what the administration was doing when he wrote his July 6, 2003 Times op-ed. The article recounted how he had been sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate the yellowcake report, found that such a transfer was "highly unlikely", and reported his conclusions orally to CIA debriefers after his return.

He also wrote that he originally understood that Cheney had asked the CIA that such a mission be carried out and thus assumed it had been reported back up to the vice president's office.

The fact that references to Saddam's alleged acquisition of yellowcake kept popping up in Bush's and Cheney's speeches over the following months, however, prompted him to pose the key question in his article: "Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?"

Eight days later, Washington Post columnist Robert Novak, citing "two senior administration officials" as sources, not only publicly identified Plame as Wilson's wife, but also stressed that Plame, whose expertise in the agency was weapons of mass destruction, had proposed her husband for the mission in part because he had served in Niger.

In fact, as a result of new information that has come to light over the past week, it is now known that both Rove and Libby told or confirmed to at least two other reporters before Novak's article appeared that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, and that she had played a role in his selection.

That the aim of these contacts was to discredit Wilson also now appears beyond question. Indeed, citing sources close to the grand jury investigation, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday that Rove and Libby were "especially intent on undercutting Wilson's credibility", to the point where it caused some consternation in the White House.

The White House "off-the-record" campaign against Wilson was supplemented by a very loud "on-the-record" effort by prominent neo-conservatives and their news media, including the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, The Weekly Standard, and The National Review Online.

The last kicked it off on July 11 with an article by Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the only person who was neither a journalist nor an administration official who claims to have known about Plame's relationship to Wilson before Novak reported about it.

While May, a former communications director for the National Republican Committee, did not identify Wilson's relationship with Plame, he included a litany of "talking points" about Wilson's objectivity. "He's a pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an ax to grind," May declared.

A week later, May published a second article in which he broadened his attack to the CIA in general, calling the selection of "a retired, Bush-bashing diplomat" for such a sensitive mission a "dereliction of duty", suggesting the choice showed either incompetence or a deliberate effort to disrupt the administration's march to war.

It was a familiar theme that he and other neo-conservative critics of the agency, such as Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Frank Gaffney, Newt Gingrich and the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol - all of whom serve on the FDD's board of directors and were outspoken supporters of the war - have voiced frequently over the past several years, and particularly in the run-up to the war itself.

Indeed, just as lower-level CIA officials were discussing sending Wilson to Niger, top agency officials several stories higher were already discussing how to implement a new top secret intelligence order from Bush ordering the CIA to support the US military in achieving regime change in Iraq, according to the Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack.

And just as the CIA debriefers were presumably compiling their assessment of the yellowcake report based in part on Wilson's mission after his return in March 2002, Cheney was declaring publicly for the first time that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time".

With the CIA having been given its marching orders and Cheney squarely on the record, top agency officials saw that Wilson's "facts" would be unwelcome. Three months before the Downing Street memo, the "fix" was in, and it now appears that Wilson's conclusions were never passed along to the vice president's office.

Crushing blow for British army's good name

Military chiefs furious at betrayal by politicians as prosecutions raise fears of further damage to soldiers' confidence and reputation

July 20, 2005
Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian

The decision, announced by the attorney general late last night, to prosecute British soldiers for war crimes under the International Criminal Court Act, is a crushing blow for an army known and respected worldwide for its peacekeeping prowess and discipline.

In the Lords last week, former chiefs of defence staff lined up one after another to harangue the Ministry of Defence for succumbing to "political correctness" by allowing British soldiers to be subjected to legal constraints by lawyers who had no idea what it was like to face not a conventional enemy, but insurgents in Iraq, a uniquely dangerous security environment.

In a Lords debate last Thursday they voiced particular concern about the case of Trooper Kevin Williams of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, who was accused of murder in Iraq. The case against him eventually collapsed when the crown prosecution service accepted that there was no realistic prospect of conviction.

They were reflecting deep concerns among serving military chiefs who feel they are being betrayed by their civil and political masters - with the exception, perhaps, of their new and sympathetic defence secretary, John Reid.

During the debate, Field Marshal the Lord Inge, a former chief of the defence staff, said he dreaded the possibility that British servicemen would be tried by the ICC, warning that any such prosecution would undermine faith in the armed services' chains of command.

Lord Boyce, the chief of defence staff at the time of the first war on Iraq, told peers: "Our armed forces are under legal siege and are being pushed in the direction in which an order could be seen as improper or legally unsound. They are being pushed by people not schooled in operations but only in political correctness."

He added: "If we continue to travel down this road, there will come a point when the close relationship between the commanding officer and his or her people will be lost. If that is destroyed the consequences could be serious."

The defence staff were assured by ministers that the ICC statute would have no impact on British soldiers.

The ICC was supposed to have been an essential plank in new Labour's "ethical" foreign policy advocated by the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook. It had been intended to target the war crimes that shocked the international community in such places as the Balkans and Africa.

Moreover, the US refused to sign up to the ICC and the French obtained a "get out" clause for their troops. British soldiers, General Sir Mike Jackson, the head of the army, has insisted, are not above the law, but it may be galling for him to see his troops being dragged through the courts when so many others - including American troops - are getting off, the charges against those implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal notwithstanding.

Earlier this year a military review body reduced the sentences of two soldiers imprisoned for abusing Iraqi civilians in a case that drew comparisons with Abu Ghraib.

Both were found guilty of abusing Iraqi civilians suspected of looting in May 2003. Their trials in Germany focused on photographs taken of the abuse, which included dangling one man from a forklift truck. The photos provoked outrage in Britain, with Tony Blair calling the images "shocking and appalling".

British soldiers, notably those engaged in fierce fighting against insurgents in Amara, a town some 100 miles north of Basra, have achieved heroic deeds, rewarded by a VC and other honours. They have trained Iraqis and negotiated with tribal leaders in a way that has earned a level of trust which is the envy of American military commanders.

The new reality of policing war zones is a sharp rejoinder to that work but not the first time the modern British army has faced pressures - the most notable example being Northern Ireland. The long-awaited, and costly, Saville inquiry report on the events of Bloody Sunday is expected to castigate the parachute regiment and the commanders for killing 13 unarmed Catholics on a civil rights March in Derry in January 1972.

Previous reputation aside, those who have mistreated Iraqis amount to only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of British troops who have served there, insists the MoD. If only the US had listened to the British and prepared properly for post-invasion things would have been so different, say military chiefs.

Yet this only part of the picture. British troops were ill-equipped and the chain of command cracked up - witness the deaths of six military policemen in southern Iraq in 2003, deprived of ammunition and unable to communicate with their base.

Lawsuits damage morale and there are indications that the whole Iraq experience is seriously affecting recruitment, already hit by the scandals at Deepcut barracks. Pressure and overstretch is affecting training.

These are not excuses, but if military commitments cheerfully agreed by the Blair government continue at their present rate without taxpayers prepared to cough up more for the military - and with Britain to take over control of Nato forces in Afghanistan next spring - then the reputation, and discipline, of the British army will be damaged, perhaps irretrievably.

The charges

Two separate cases have resulted in charges. The first centres on allegations of offences against Iraqi detainees in Basra in September 2003 and involves seven servicemen. One of the detainees, receptionist Baha Da'oud Salim Musa, died.

Those charged in connection with this case are:

Corporal Donald Payne, 34, of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, accused of the manslaughter of Baha Musa. Also charged with inhuman treatment of persons and perverting the course of justice.

·                     Lance Corporal Wayne Crowcroft, 21, of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment: inhuman treatment of persons.

·                     Private Darren Fallon, 22, of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment: inhuman treatment.

·                     Sergeant Kelvin Stacey, 28, of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment: assault causing actual bodily harm, alternatively common assault.

·                     Warrant Officer Mark Davies, 36, of the Intelligence Corps: neglecting to perform a duty.

·                     Major Michael Peebles, 34, of the Intelligence Corps: negligently performing a duty.

·                     Colonel Jorge Mendonca, 41, lately of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment: negligently performing a duty.

The second case involves four servicemen and relates to the alleged killing of Ahmed Kareem, an Iraqi civilian, in Basra on May 8 2003.

·                     Sergeant Carle Selman, 38, of the Scots Guards: unlawful killing of Kareem.

·                     Guardsman Martin McGing, 21, of the Irish Guards: unlawful killing of Kareem.

·                     Guardsman Joseph McCleary, 23, of the Irish Guards: unlawful killing of Kareem.

·                     A 21-year-old lance corporal with the Irish Guards has also been charged with the unlawful killing of Kareem but has yet to be informed.

The Anti-Neocon
July 20, 2005
by David Corn
TomPaine

"I'm the anti-neocon." That's how Robert Merry recently described himself to me. After reading his new book-Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition -I have to say: He got that right.

His book is the most scorching mainstream critique of the neocons and their misadventure in Iraq that I have encountered. Merry, the publisher of Congressional Quarterly and a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, rips apart that small band of ideologically driven chickenhawks and leaves their bones scattered on the floor of a Council of Foreign Relations conference room. Merry is a hard-ass practitioner of global realpolitik. There is not a smidgeon of sentiment in a single sentence of this book. He's certainly not keeping company with one-worlders and those who would identify (or misidentify, in his view) American national security interests with feel-good global humanitarianism. But in a classic example of that old Middle East cliché-the enemy of my enemy is my friend-he has produced a book that liberal-minded foreign policy folks ought to gobble up. And I would dare the neocons to enter Merry's knife-throwing gallery.

His high-minded goal was to pen an intellectual history that traced the ideas that led-over decades-to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. (Let's assume that ideas had something to do with it.) Merry does reach back far, reviewing the works and notions of such profound ponderers as the Abbé Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre (who postulated that humankind was on an inevitable journey toward further enlightenment and civilization), Oswald Spengler (the chronicler of the ups and downs of civilizations), and such big-idea moderns as Frances Fukuyama (the premature prophet of the End of History), Samuel Huntington (the advocate of the Clash of Civilizations), and Thomas Friedman (the cheerleader for the Glory of Globalization). Merry suggests that in the broadest terms there are two ideas that have motivated Western thought: the Idea of Progress (humankind is on a never-ending advance), and the Cycle of History (history is the story of civilizations that rise and then fall; screw progress). And a corollary to the Cycle of History view, he notes, is Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, which suggests that not only is progress not inevitable but that conflict between civilizations is. The capital letters are his.

Out of all this, he notes, American history has yielded four basic strains of foreign policy: conservative interventionism (the hard-headed Cold War policy that came out of World War II), conservative isolationism (poster boy: Pat Buchanan), liberal interventionism (sending U.S. troops to help troubled countries such as Haiti), and liberal isolationism (think of the movement against the Vietnam War). His descriptions invite the charge that he is being overly simplistic. For instance, he claims Reagan's use of force in Central America in the 1980s-which he points to as an example of conservative interventionism-was necessary to "save Western civilization from the threat of Soviet expansionism." No, it wasn't. But the real question for him-and for us-is, which of these four teams is essentially right?

To answer that, Merry has fun batting aside those he consider wrong. He scoffs at Fukuyama's thesis-that America and other Western democracies represent the culmination of human civilization and stand as the obvious (and only) ideal for the rest of the world. From this stance, Merry notes, it's a perilously short distance to presuming a missionary destiny for the United States: Let's make them more like us. He notes that Fukuyama, in his famous 1989 essay "End of History," observed that nationalism and ethnic zeal could no longer threaten a nation and that Islamic fundamentalism "has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance. Ouch. And he whips Thomas Friedman to an inch of his intellectual life, noting that the gaga-on-globalization columnist is deft at analyzing transnational economic forces but willfully naïve in saying that the people of the world, looking toward the United States as "a spiritual value and a role model," will harness these new economic trends and ride off to a better future because they have no choice. "Political analysis as exhortation is not serious political analysis," Merry rightfully huffs, adding, "The impulses of human nature go far beyond the material comforts and options that so preoccupy Friedman."

Why does Merry devote himself to disproving Fukuyama and Friedman? It's because they are idealists whose out-of-touch-with-reality views (as Merry sees it) lead toward danger. But it is the neocons who have put this danger into practice. It's no secret: Merry is with the hardheaded conservative interventionists and quite sympathetic to Huntingtonism. The world is nasty and full of nasty people-most notably, Islamic extremists-and it's our job not to change the world but to define the threat wisely and specifically and to take the practical steps necessary to thwart that threat or at least keep it at bay for as long as possible.

He and I would, no doubt, consume many beers in any full-length conversation about the past glories and mistakes of U.S. foreign policy. But Merry is not interested in raking through the coals of the many past debates. This is what concerns him now: "Can an effective brand of conservative interventionism be fashioned for the post-9/11 era, when the West is locked in a clash of civilizations with major elements of the world of Islam and cultural instability seems on the rise elsewhere around the globe?" He adds, "That is probably the most pressing question facing the country-and the world-today." And the biggest obstacle to fashioning a positive response, he argues, is the neocons.

Another obstacle, he claims, are liberal interventionists such as those who supported the U.S. bombing in Kosovo and Bill Clinton's involvement in the Balkans. Merry goes for the jugular in questioning the arguments for and the wisdom of these actions. This section of the book is not for the faint-hearted. ("True, Serbian actions in Kosovo prior to the bombing were barbaric. But in fact they never matched the kinds of abuses the [Clinton] administration had been willing to accept in Turkey, Kashmir, Sudan, and Rwanda-or in Croatia, for that matter. Thus did the United States action reveal a fundamental reality of any moralistic foreign policy: inevitably it exposes a selective morality.") But since the liberal interventionists are not in the driver's seat and did not lead the nation into the wrong war in Iraq, Merry has less reason to worry about them these days. So he unleashes the lion's share of his fury upon the neoconservatives.

He traces the history of this bunch and pokes at the contradictions and inconsistencies that lie in their wake. This band of Democratic-liberals-turned-Republicans-armchair-warriors, he notes, have abandoned the typical "conservative hostility" toward utopian visions and bold government initiatives and have "embraced a Brave New World in which American exceptionalism holds sway everywhere and peoples around the globe abandon their own cultures in favor of Western ideals..[T]he neoconservatives have arrived at a point where they aren't really conservative at all." The neocons' transition into idealists-hey, let's fight for democracy in the Middle East!-is an odd one and ought to be greeted with skepticism. Merry points out that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the neocons held firm to a less noble operating premise. It was Jeane Kirkpatrick, the godmother of the neocons, who wrote an influential article that bitterly decried assigning human rights a priority in foreign policy. She scoffed at those who believed "that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances." Such conversions, she said, take "decades, if not centuries." (Hmmmm.) And in a 1978 essay, Irving Kristol, the neocons' godfather (and the actual father of William Kristol, the movement's unofficial student body president), urged the United States to be "less vaguely moralistic in its pronouncements." In 1980, Merry notes, Irving Kristol wrote that it was a "fundamental fallacy" to believe that people in all nations are entitled to a liberal constitutional government. The apple has bounced far from this tree.

So how did we get from there to the point where Bill Kristol and Co. are rah-rahing and egging on a president who justifies invading a country-forget those nonexistent WMDs-with the most lofty rhetoric about exporting democracy and freedom overseas? It's not just 9/11. The neocons were hankering for a war against Iraq long before nineteen al Qaeda recruits stunned the world. The neocons, Merry writes, "have a tendency to make their way to whatever watering hole they can find to quench their need for a rhetorical argument of the moment." And in the years prior to 9/11, they became enthralled with the idea of "American hegemony." Merry considers this quest for a Wilsonian-fueled hegemony nuts, for it obscures the difficult questions and prevents consideration of what to do about complex, centuries-in-the-making, on-the-ground realities.

Merry sees the clash between "the West and Islam" as the fundamental reality of the day. But he is not looking forward to any ultimate confrontation. This reality, he argues, "demands from the West a steady, careful, measured approach to diplomacy and war. Will the West, with all its power and influence, stimulate and aggravate these emerging cultural tensions around the world? Or will it seek an approach aimed at protecting its interests while calming as much as possible the cultural hostilities that are an integral part of our era." He's essentially calling for a Nixonian approach. (I can't bring myself to refer to it as  Kissingerian.)

His book half-echoes the critique made by the left (whether it is the isolationist or interventionist left) of the current regime. Merry is talking about wrestling with realities. The neocons speak of redefining reality-which also can become ignoring reality. Remember Dick Cheney's promise that American troops in Iraq would be welcomed as liberators? Merry does, and he catalogues all the false assumptions made by the neocons and Bush's foreign policy team:

"This litany of misstatements, misperceptions, faulty thinking and off-the-mark predictions raises a question: how could so many highly intelligent people be so wrong? The only answer is that they stumbled into a classic case of ideological policymaking-viewing the world through the prism of a rigid ideology, and then placing the pieces together to fit that ideological picture."

Instead of offering a solution to the knotty dilemmas of the post-9/11 threat, the Iraq war has worsened the problem. This war, Merry maintains, can only "enflame anti-Western passions in the world of Islam." That will mean "more jihadists directed against the United States." The war also increases the odds of destabilization in other lands-such as Saudi Arabia (which has oil we need) and Pakistan (which has nukes we don't want to see used or transferred). Merry sums up:

In taking his military into the heart of Islam and planting his country's flag into the soil of a foreign culture based on flimsy perceptions of a national threat, George W. Bush has brought his country and the world closer to that kind of Armageddon than it faced before. He did so on the basis of a world outlook and political idealism that are alluring, comforting, and widely embraced throughout American intellectual circles. They are also false and highly dangerous.

Strong stuff. This book shows that anti-war passion does not reside only on the left. Merry, an Establishment sort, whacks Bush and the neocons for turning America into the "Crusader State." And he calls for a foreign policy with less idealistic zeal. Cut deals with strongman dictators who can contain Islamic fundamentalism. Realize that "missionary democracy in the Middle East is not necessarily our friend, for it likely would foster fundamentalist and anti-American regimes in that strategically important region." Take the swagger out of U.S. diplomacy. Drop the tough talk about who is "evil" and who is not.

Such actions, he maintains, only "exacerbate the civilizational war." Instead, he advises, the United States to "foster the emergence of Islamic core states" and to not fret too much about their records on democracy and human rights. He calls for a rapprochement with Iran. He also suggests Washington does what's necessary to encourage China and Russia to join in a containment policy aimed at Islam. "What is required," he writes, "is an approach that is sustained, measured, defensive in nature, limited in ambition, and based on a sophisticated understanding of the cultural currents in play in the world."

Merry is indeed the anti-neocon. Forget any idealism. Lose the rhetoric about freedom, democracy and human rights. Don't give a damn about American hegemony and exceptionalism. Just figure out what must be done in practical and realistic terms to curtail the threat posed by Islamic extremism. It would be hard for me to endorse an overarching policy so free of sentiment and aspiration. But when idealism has been commandeered by the neocons for this misguided (and so far unending) war, the desire for a foreign policy devoid of such notions is understandable. Merry's provocative book is so hard-edged that it poses a challenge to neocons and their critics on the left. But his skewering of the Kristol crowd is so thorough and delicious that it makes one yearn for more tough-talk from the self-described realists of the foreign policy establishment.

David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).

Television and the Hive Mind

July 20, 2005
by Mack White

Sixty-four years ago this month, six million Americans became unwitting subjects in an experiment in psychological warfare.

It was the night before Halloween, 1938. At 8 p.m. CST, the Mercury Radio on the Air began broadcasting Orson Welles' radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. As is now well known, the story was presented as if it were breaking news, with bulletins so realistic that an estimated one million people believed the world was actually under attack by Martians. Of that number, thousands succumbed to outright panic, not waiting to hear Welles' explanation at the end of the program that it had all been a Halloween prank, but fleeing into the night to escape the alien invaders.

Later, psychologist Hadley Cantril conducted a study of the effects of the broadcast and published his findings in a book, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. This study explored the power of broadcast media, particularly as it relates to the suggestibility of human beings under the influence of fear. Cantril was affiliated with Princeton University's Radio Research Project, which was funded in 1937 by the Rockefeller Foundation. Also affiliated with the Project was Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) executive Frank Stanton, whose network had broadcast the program. Stanton would later go on to head the news division of CBS, and in time would become president of the network, as well as chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation, the influential think tank which has done groundbreaking research on, among other things, mass brainwashing.

Two years later, with Rockefeller Foundation money, Cantril established the Office of Public Opinion Research (OPOR), also at Princeton. Among the studies conducted by the OPOR was an analysis of the effectiveness of "psycho-political operations" (propaganda, in plain English) of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Then, during World War II, Cantril÷and Rockefeller money÷assisted CFR member and CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow in setting up the Princeton Listening Center, the purpose of which was to study Nazi radio propaganda with the object of applying Nazi techniques to OSS propaganda. Out of this project came a new government agency, the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS). The FBIS eventually became the United States Information Agency (USIA), which is the propaganda arm of the National Security Council.

Thus, by the end of the 1940s, the basic research had been done and the propaganda apparatus of the national security state had been set up--just in time for the Dawn of Television ...

Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that, when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of logical thought. Here, information is broken down into its component parts and critically analyzed. The right brain, however, treats incoming data uncritically, processing information in wholes, leading to emotional, rather than logical, responses. The shift from left to right brain activity also causes the release of endorphins, the body's own natural opiates--thus, it is possible to become physically addicted to watching television, a hypothesis borne out by numerous studies which have shown that very few people are able to kick the television habit.

This numbing of the brain's cognitive function is compounded by another shift which occurs in the brain when we watch television. Activity in the higher brain regions (such as the neo-cortex) is diminished, while activity in the lower brain regions (such as the limbic system) increases. The latter, commonly referred to as the reptile brain, is associated with more primitive mental functions, such as the "fight or flight" response. The reptile brain is unable to distinguish between reality and the simulated reality of television. To the reptile brain, if it looks real, it is real. Thus, though we know on a conscious level it is "only a film," on a conscious level we do not--the heart beats faster, for instance, while we watch a suspenseful scene. Similarly, we know the commercial is trying to manipulate us, but on an unconscious level the commercial nonetheless succeeds in, say, making us feel inadequate until we buy whatever thing is being advertised--and the effect is all the more powerful because it is unconscious, operating on the deepest level of human response. The reptile brain makes it possible for us to survive as biological beings, but it also leaves us vulnerable to the manipulations of television programmers.

It is not just commercials that manipulate us. On television news as well, image and sound are as carefully selected and edited to influence human thought and behavior as in any commercial. The news anchors and reporters themselves are chosen for their physical attractiveness--a factor which, as numerous psychological studies have shown, contributes to our perception of a person's trustworthiness. Under these conditions, then, the viewer easily forgets--if, indeed, the viewer ever knew in the first place--that the worldview presented on the evening news is a contrivance of the network owners--owners such as General Electric (NBC) and Westinghouse (CBS), both major defense contractors. By molding our perception of the world, they mold our opinions. This distortion of reality is determined as much by what is left out of the evening news as what is included--as a glance at Project Censored's yearly list of top 25 censored news stories will reveal. If it's not on television, it never happened. Out of sight, out of mind.

Under the guise of journalistic objectivity, news programs subtly play on our emotions--chiefly fear. Network news divisions, for instance, frequently congratulate themselves on the great service they provide humanity by bringing such spectacles as the September 11 terror attacks into our living rooms. We have heard this falsehood so often, we have come to accept it as self-evident truth. However, the motivation for live coverage of traumatic news events is not altruistic, but rather to be found in the central focus of Cantril's War of the Worlds research--the manipulation of the public through fear.

There is another way in which we are manipulated by television news. Human beings are prone to model the behaviors they see around them, and avoid those which might invite ridicule or censure, and in the hypnotic state induced by television, this effect is particularly pronounced. For instance, a lift of the eyebrow from Peter Jennings tells us precisely what he is thinking--and by extension what we should think. In this way, opinions not sanctioned by the corporate media can be made to seem disreputable, while sanctioned opinions are made to seem the very essence of civilized thought. And should your thinking stray into unsanctioned territory despite the trusted anchor's example, a poll can be produced which shows that most persons do not think that way--and you don't want to be different do you? Thus, the mental wanderer is brought back into the fold.

This process is also at work in programs ostensibly produced for entertainment. The "logic" works like this: Archie Bunker is an idiot, Archie Bunker is against gun control, therefore idiots are against gun control. Never mind the complexities of the issue. Never mind the fact that the true purpose of the Second Amendment is not to protect the rights of deer hunters, but to protect the citizenry against a tyrannical government (an argument you will never hear voiced on any television program). Monkey see, monkey do--or, in this case, monkey not do.

Notice, too, the way in which television programs depict conspiracy researchers or anti-New World Order activists. On situation comedies, they are buffoons. On dramatic programs, they are dangerous fanatics. This imprints on the mind of the viewer the attitude that questioning the official line or holding "anti-government" opinions is crazy, therefore not to be emulated.

Another way in which entertainment programs mold opinion can be found in the occasional television movie, which "sensitively" deals with some "social" issue. A bad behavior is spotlighted--"hate" crimes, for instance--in such a way that it appears to be a far more rampant problem than it may actually be, so terrible in fact that the "only" cure for it is more laws and government "protection." Never mind that laws may already exist to cover these crimes--the law against murder, for instance. Once we have seen the well-publicized murder of the young gay man Matthew Shepherd dramatized in not one, but two, television movies in all its heartrending horror, nothing will do but we pass a law making the very thought behind the crime illegal.

People will also model behaviors from popular entertainment which are not only dangerous to their health and could land them in jail, but also contribute to social chaos. While this may seem to be simply a matter of the producers giving the audience what it wants, or the artist holding a mirror up to society, it is in fact intended to influence behavior.

Consider the way many films glorify drug abuse. When a popular star playing a sympathetic character in a mainstream R-rated film uses hard drugs with no apparent health or legal consequences (John Travolta's use of heroin in Pulp Fiction, for instance--an R-rated film produced for theatrical release, which now has found a permanent home on television, via cable and video players), a certain percentage of people--particularly the impressionable young--will perceive hard drug use as the epitome of anti-Establishment cool and will model that behavior, contributing to an increase in drug abuse. And who benefits?

As has been well documented by Gary Webb in his award-winning series for the San Jose Mercury New, former Los Angeles narcotics detective Michael Ruppert, and many other researchers and whistleblowers--the CIA is the main purveyor of hard drugs in this country. The CIA also has its hand in the "prison-industrial complex." Wackenhut Corporation, the largest owner of private prisons, has on its board of directors many former CIA employees, and is very likely a CIA front. Thus, films which glorify drug abuse may be seen as recruitment ads for the slave labor-based private prison system. Also, the social chaos and inflated crime rate which result from the contrived drug problem contributes to the demand from a frightened society for more prisons, more laws, and the further erosion of civil liberties. This effect is further heightened by television news segments and documentaries which focus on drug abuse and other crimes, thus giving the public the misperception that crime is even higher than it really is.

There is another socially debilitating process at work in what passes for entertainment on television these days. Over the years, there has been a steady increase in adult subject matter on programs presented during family viewing hours. For instance, it is common for today's prime-time situation comedies to make jokes about such matters as masturbation (Seinfeld once devoted an entire episode to the topic), or for daytime talk shows such as Jerry Springer's to showcase such topics as bestiality. Even worse are the "reality" programs currently in vogue. Each new offering in this genre seems to hit a new low. MTV, for instance, recently subjected a couple to a Candid Camera-style prank in which, after winning a trip to Las Vegas, they entered their hotel room to find an actor made up as a mutilated corpse in the bathtub. Naturally, they were traumatized by the experience and sued the network. Or, consider a new show on British television in which contestants compete to see who can infect each other with the most diseases--venereal diseases included.

It would appear, at the very least, that these programs serve as a shill operation to strengthen the argument for censorship. There may also be an even darker motive. These programs contribute to the general coarsening of society we see all around us--the decline in manners and common human decency and the acceptance of cruelty for its own sake as a legitimate form of entertainment. Ultimately, this has the effect of debasing human beings into savages, brutes--the better to herd them into global slavery.

For the first decade or so after the Dawn of Television, there were only a handful of channels in each market--one for each of the three major networks and maybe one or two independents. Later, with the advent of cable and more channels, the population pie began to be sliced into finer pieces--or "niche markets." This development has often been described as representing a growing diversity of choices, but in reality it is a fine-tuning of the process of mass manipulation, a honing-in on particular segments of the population, not only to sell them specifically-targeted consumer products but to influence their thinking in ways advantageous to the globalist agenda.

One of these "target audiences" is that portion of the population which, after years of blatant government cover-up in areas such as UFOs and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, maintains a cynicism toward the official line, despite the best efforts of television programmers to depict conspiracy research in a negative light. How to reach this vast, disenfranchised target audience and co-opt their thinking? One way is to put documentaries before them which mix of fact with disinformation, thereby confusing them. Another is to take the X Files approach.

The heroes of X Files are investigators in a fictitious paranormal department of the FBI whose adventures sometimes take them into parapolitical territory. On the surface this sounds good. However, whatever good X Files might accomplish by touching on such matters as MK-ULTRA or the JFK assassination is cancelled out by associating them with bug-eyed aliens and ghosts. Also, on X Files, the truth is always depicted as "out there" somewhere--in the stars, or some other dimension, never in brainwashing centers such as the RAND Corporation or its London counterpart, the Tavistock Institute. This has the effect of obscuring the truth, making it seem impossibly out-of-reach, and associating reasonable lines of political inquiry with the fantastic and other-wordly.

Not that there is no connection between the parapolitical and the paranormal. There is undoubtedly a cover-up at work with regard to UFOs, but if we accept uncritically the notion that UFOs are anything other than terrestrial in origin, we are falling headfirst into a carefully-set trap. To its credit, X Files has dealt with the idea that extraterrestrials might be a clever hoax by the government, but never decisively. The labyrinthine plots of the show somehow manage to leave the viewer wondering if perhaps the hoax idea is itself a hoax put out there to cover up the existence of extraterrestrials. This is hardly helpful to a true understanding of UFOs and associated phenomena, such as alien abductions and cattle mutilations.

Extraterrestrials have been a staple of popular entertainment since The War of the Worlds (both the novel and its radio adaptation). They have been depicted as invaders and benefactors, but rarely have they been unequivocally depicted as a hoax. There was an episode of Outer Limits which depicted a group of scientists staging a mock alien invasion to frighten the world's population into uniting as one--but, again, such examples are rare. Even in UFO documentaries on the Discovery Channel, the possibility of a terrestrial origin for the phenomenon is conspicuous by its lack of mention.

UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, the real-life model for the French scientist in Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, attempted to interest Spielberg in a terrestrial explanation for the phenomenon. In an interview on Conspire.com, Vallee said, "I argued with him that the subject was even more interesting if it wasn't extraterrestrials. If it was real, physical, but not ET. So he said, 'You're probably right, but that's not what the public is expecting--this is Hollywood and I want to give people something that's close to what they expect.'"

How convenient that what Spielberg says the people expect is also what the Pentagon wants them to believe.

In Messengers of Deception, Vallee tracks the history of a wartime British Intelligence unit devoted to psychological operations. Code-named (interestingly) the "Martians," it specialized in manufacturing and distributing false intelligence to confuse the enemy. Among its activities were the creation of phantom armies with inflatable tanks, simulations of the sounds of military ships maneuvering in the fog, and forged letters to lovers from phantom soldiers attached to phantom regiments.

Vallee suggests that deception operations of this kind may have extended beyond World War II, and that much of the "evidence" for "flying saucers" is no more real than the inflatable tanks of World War II. He writes: "The close association of many UFO sightings with advanced military hardware (test sites like the New Mexico proving grounds, missile silos of the northern plains, naval construction sites like the major nuclear facility at Pascagoula and the bizarre love affairs ... between contactee groups, occult sects, and extremist political factions, are utterly clear signals that we must exercise extreme caution."

Many people find it fantastic that the government would perpetrate such a hoax, while at the same time having no difficulty entertaining the notion that extraterrestrials are regularly traveling light years to this planet to kidnap people out of their beds and subject them to anal probes.

The military routinely puts out disinformation to obscure its activities, and this has certainly been the case with UFOs. Consider Paul Bennewitz, the UFO enthusiast who began studying strange lights that would appear nightly over the Manzano Test Range outside Albuquerque. When the Air Force learned about his study, ufologist William Moore (by his own admission) was recruited to feed him forged military documents describing a threat from extraterrestrials. The effect was to confuse Bennewitz--even making him paranoid enough to be hospitalized--and discredit his research. Evidently, those strange lights belonged to the Air Force, which does not like outsiders inquiring into its affairs.

What the Air Force did to Bennewitz, it also does on a mass scale--and popular entertainment has been complicit in this process. Whether or not the filmmakers themselves are consciously aware of this agenda does not matter. The notion that extraterrestrials might visit this planet is so much a part of popular culture and modern mythology that it hardly needs assistance from the military to propagate itself.

It has the effect not only of obscuring what is really going on at research facilities such as Area 51, but of tainting UFO research in general as "kooky"--and does the job so thoroughly that one need only say "UFO" in the same breath with "JFK" to discredit research in that area as well. It also may, in the end, serve the same purpose as depicted in that Outer Limits episode--to unite the world's population against a perceived common threat, thus offering the pretext for one-world government.

The following quotes demonstrate that the idea has at least occurred to world leaders:

"In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us realize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." (President Ronald Reagan, speaking in 1987 to the United Nations.

"The nations of the world will have to unite, for the next war will be an interplanetary war. The nations of the earth must someday make a common front against attack by people from other planets." General Douglas MacArthur, 1955)

Someone remarked that the best way to unite all the nations on this globe would be an attack from some other planet. In the face of such an alien enemy, people would respond with a sense of their unity of interest and purpose." (John Dewey, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, speaking at a conference sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1917)

And where was this "alien threat" motif given birth? Again, we find the answer in popular entertainment, and again the earliest source is The War of the Worlds--both Wells' and Welles' versions.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that H. G. Wells was a founding member of the Round Table, the think tank that gave birth to the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) and its American cousin, the CFR. Perhaps Wells intentionally introduced the motif as a meme which might prove useful later in establishing the "world social democracy" he described in his 1939 book The New World Order. Perhaps, too, another purpose of the Orson Welles broadcast was to test of the public's willingness to believe in extraterrestrials.

At any rate, it proved a popular motif, and paved the way for countless movies and television programs to come, and has often proven a handy device for promoting the New World Order, whether the extraterrestrials are invaders or--in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still--benefactors who have come to Earth to warn us to mend our ways and unite as one, or be blown to bits.

We see the globalist agenda at work in Star Trek and its spin-offs as well. Over the years, many a television viewer's mind has been imprinted with the idea that centralized government is the solution for our problems. Never mind the complexities of the issue--never mind the fact that, in the real world, centralization of power leads to tyranny. The reptile brain, hypnotized by the flickering television screen, has seen Captain Kirk and his culturally diverse crew demonstrate time and again that the United Federation of Planets is a good thing. Therefore, it must be so.

It remains to be seen whether the Masters of Deception will, like those scientists in The Outer Limits, stage an invasion from space with anti-gravity machines and holograms, but, if they do, it will surely be broadcast on television, so that anyone out of range of that light show in the sky, will be able to see it, and all with eyes to see will believe. It will be War of the Worlds on a grand scale.

Jack Kerouac once noted, while walking down a residential street at night, glancing into living rooms lit by the gray glare of television sets, that we have become a world of people "thinking the same thoughts at the same time."

Every day, millions upon millions of human beings sit down at the same time to watch the same football game, the same mini-series, the same newscast. And where might all this shared experience and uniformity of thought be taking us?

A recent report co-sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Commerce Department calls for a broad-based research program to find ways to use nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive sciences, to achieve telepathy, machine-to-human communication, amplified sensory experience, enhanced intellectual capacity, and mass participation in a "hive mind." Quoting the report: "With knowledge no longer encapsulated in individuals, the distinction between individuals and the entirety of humanity would blur. Think Vulcan mind-meld. We would perhaps become more of a hive mind--an enormous, single, intelligent entity."

There is no doubt that we have been brought closer to the "hive mind" by the mass media. For, what is the shared experience of television but a type of "Vulcan mind-meld"? (Note the terminology borrowed from Star Trek, no doubt to make the concept more familiar and palatable. If Spock does it, it must be okay.)

This government report would have us believe that the hive mind will be for our good--a wonderful leap in evolution. It is nothing of the kind. For one thing, if the government is behind it, you may rest assured it is not for our good. For another, common sense should tell us that blurring the line "between individuals and the entirety of humanity" means mass conformity, the death of human individuality. Make no mistake about it--if humanity is to become a hive, there will be at the center of that hive a Queen Bee, whom all the lesser "insects" will serve. This is not evolution--this is devolution. Worse, it is the ultimate slavery--the slavery of the mind.

And it is a horror first unleashed in 1938 when one million people responded as one--as a hive--to Orson Welles' Halloween prank.

In a sense, those people who fled the Martians that night were right to be afraid. They were indeed under attack. But they were wrong about who was attacking them. It was something far worse than Martians. Had they only known the true nature of the danger facing them, perhaps they would have gone to the nearest radio station with torches in hand like the villagers in those old Frankenstein movies and burned it to the ground, or at least commandeered the new technology and turned it towards another use--the liberation of humanity, instead of its enslavement.

RELEVANT LINKS

U.S. Government Report: Human Beings to be Merged with Technology to Create a "Hive Mind" Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/07/20/1026898931815

Copyright Ó 2005
 
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