News Stories Which Highlight the Structure of the System

[BabylonHoruv]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/hedge-fund-hedges-its-political-bets-rentech-renaissance-technologies

Just more evidence of the two man con.

[Cain]

From Chris Woods, Senior Reporter with the BIJ, in an email to Glenn Greenwald on his article about how "every male over 18 in a strike zone is considered a militant by the US" story:

As well as reporting all those killed as "militants", the mainstream US media is consistently failing to report when civilians are credibly reported killed, even as media internationally do so.

Excepting today, civilians have only been reported killed twice in Pakistan in 2012, from 17 attacks (February 9 and May 24). On both occasions civilian deaths were reported by major international agencies (Reuters, AP etc), and picked up worldwide (eg BBC, Jerusalem Post...) But not within the US. I can find no reference to civilian casualties in any mainstream US publication on either occasion (for the May 24 attack most also censored out the fact that a mosque was hit.)

So the US mainstream media is not only classing all victims – regardless of known status – as "militants." It is actively censoring out actual reports of civilian deaths.

It's just as easy to get people to self-censor by using weasel words and appeals to nationalism as it would be to actually directly sit a censor in their offices.  Cheaper, and less likely to cause resentment, too.

[Cain]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/world/americas/07nazi.html?pagewanted=print

The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust administrator Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to C.I.A. documents released Tuesday that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informants after World War II.

The C.I.A. was told by West German intelligence that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name Clemens — a slight variation on his actual alias, Ricardo Klement — but did not share the information with Israel, which had been hunting for him for years, according to Timothy Naftali, a historian who examined the documents.

Two years later, Israeli agents abducted Eichmann in Argentina and flew him to Israel, where he was tried and executed in 1962. The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the C.I.A. to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hitler's regime later used as American agents.

The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet K.G.B., according to historians and members of the government panel that has worked to open the long-secret files.

Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman from New York and member of the panel, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, said the documents showed that the C.I.A "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "force us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.

The United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The records also show that American intelligence officials protected many former Nazis for their perceived value in combating the Soviet threat.

But Ms. Holtzman, speaking at a news briefing at the National Archives on Tuesday, said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail. "Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Ms. Holtzman said.

The West German government was wary of exposing Eichmann because officials feared what he might reveal about such figures as Hans Globke, a former Nazi government official then serving as a top national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Mr. Naftali said.

In particular, he said, the documents fill in the story of the "catastrophic" Soviet penetration of the Gehlen Organization, the postwar West German intelligence service sponsored by the United States Army and then the C.I.A. Mr. Goda described the case of Heinz Felfe, a former SS officer who was bitter over the Allied firebombing of his native city, Dresden, and secretly worked for the K.G.B.

Mr. Felfe rose in the Gehlen Organization to oversee counterintelligence, a Soviet agent placed in charge of combating Soviet espionage. The C.I.A. shared much sensitive information with Mr. Felfe, Mr. Goda found. A newly released 1963 C.I.A. damage assessment, written after Mr. Felfe was arrested as a Soviet agent in 1961, found that he had exposed "over 100 C.I.A. staffers" and caused many eavesdropping operations to end with "complete failure or a worthless product."

I've occasionally considered writing a "historical thriller" set in the 1960s USA, which would revolve around the idea that the KGB was using the CIA's ties to various Nazis as blackmail, both from double agents such as Goda and files that fell into their hands in the aftermath of WWII, and that much of the apparent craziness of the 60s in the covert political sphere could ultimately be tied back to this conflict.

The most worrying thing is that this may not be alternate history at all.

[Triple Zero]

Hah! Nice find Cain. You could do an Illuminatus! Trilogy on it, mixing up fact, fiction and conspiracy just enough to make everybody wonder

also,

But Ms. Holtzman, speaking at a news briefing at the National Archives on Tuesday, said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail. "Using bad people can have very bad consequences, Who would've thought bad people would LIE to us and 0wn us so badly?" Ms. Holtzman said.

[Telarus]

Wow, very nice find.


Hey, Look at this one. Putting more armed US drones into the air is a bit of PR blunder, so we'll just arm some drones for an ally as a gesture of goodwill.


Who would've thought that mounting a machinegun onto a remotely piloted flying machine would count as "Goodwill"  in 2012

Where the fuck are my flying jet-skis.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh good, Italy with armed drones sounds like a GREAT idea.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

From Chris Woods, Senior Reporter with the BIJ, in an email to Glenn Greenwald on his article about how "every male over 18 in a strike zone is considered a militant by the US" story:

As well as reporting all those killed as "militants", the mainstream US media is consistently failing to report when civilians are credibly reported killed, even as media internationally do so.

Excepting today, civilians have only been reported killed twice in Pakistan in 2012, from 17 attacks (February 9 and May 24). On both occasions civilian deaths were reported by major international agencies (Reuters, AP etc), and picked up worldwide (eg BBC, Jerusalem Post...) But not within the US. I can find no reference to civilian casualties in any mainstream US publication on either occasion (for the May 24 attack most also censored out the fact that a mosque was hit.)

So the US mainstream media is not only classing all victims – regardless of known status – as "militants." It is actively censoring out actual reports of civilian deaths.

It's just as easy to get people to self-censor by using weasel words and appeals to nationalism as it would be to actually directly sit a censor in their offices.  Cheaper, and less likely to cause resentment, too.

How do the parapolitics work with this kind of near-perfect, national level manipulation?

[Cain]

Good question.

I don't think it's a conscious policy.  Not entirely.  You need a culture supportive of such actions.  Lots of journalists nowadays come from the same rarified circles as much of the US elite, for example.  They are therefore more inclined to trust that "the government" is to be trusted, regardless of who is actually in power.  Lots of major publications have editors who are also tied directly into the US political-corporate elite; Bill Keller, for example, is a journalist by training, but he is also the son of a former Chevron chariman and chief executive.

Newspapers don't make a lot of money.  They are heavily reliant on advertisers and moving copy as fast as possible, and so they don't bother to factcheck.  Much of what passes for news is PR releases from government agencies, or newswires (who also do not fact check, but are more honest about this).  Likely what happened was that the major US news agencies picked up the story from the Pentagon, spent 2 minutes on Google making sure there weren't any amazingly obvious errors, then spent 5 minutes running it through an online thesaurus, then spent another minute playing around with the wording before sending it to be printed.

As such, there is at the highest levels, the natural inclination to believe what the government says, combined with overworked underlings being harassed for printable stories as fast as possible.  This makes it very easy for the Pentagon's story to go unchallenged.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

With all the internet induced upheaval the mainstream news companies are going through I can picture that quite clearly. Thanks

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

...It seemed incredible to me that with all the fraud that took place during the housing bubble, the Justice Department was focusing not on the banks that had issued the fraudulent loans, but rather on those who had taken out the loans, which invariably went sour when housing prices fell.

As I would later learn, Charlie Engle was no aberration. The current meme — argued most recently by Charles Ferguson, in his new book "Predator Nation" — is that not a single top executive at any of the firms that nearly brought down the financial system has spent so much as a day in jail. And that is true enough.

www.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/opinion/nocera-the-mortgage-fraud-fraud.html?_r=1

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

...It seemed incredible to me that with all the fraud that took place during the housing bubble, the Justice Department was focusing not on the banks that had issued the fraudulent loans, but rather on those who had taken out the loans, which invariably went sour when housing prices fell.

As I would later learn, Charlie Engle was no aberration. The current meme — argued most recently by Charles Ferguson, in his new book "Predator Nation" — is that not a single top executive at any of the firms that nearly brought down the financial system has spent so much as a day in jail. And that is true enough.

www.nytimes.com/2012/06/02/opinion/nocera-the-mortgage-fraud-fraud.html?_r=1

Oh, America.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

WASHINGTON - June 13 - A leak today of one of the most controversial chapters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) reveals that extreme provisions have been agreed to by U.S. officials, providing a stark warning about the dangers of "trade" negotiations occurring under conditions of extreme secrecy without press, public or policymaker oversight, Public Citizen said.

"The outrageous stuff in this leaked text may well be why U.S. trade officials have been so extremely secretive about these past two years of TPP negotiations," said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch.

Although the TPP has been branded a "trade" agreement, the leaked text of the pact's Investment Chapter shows that the TPP would:

    * Limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S.  boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;
    * Extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;
    * Establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and
    * Allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.

In May, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee's Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs and Global Competitiveness – the committee with jurisdiction over the TPP – filed legislation to open the process after he and his staff were denied access even to the U.S. proposals for the TPP negotiations.

Last month, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk defended the unprecedented secrecy of TPP negotiations by noting that when the draft of a major regional trade pact was released previously, it became impossible to finish the deal as then proposed.

www.commondreams.org/newswire/2012/06/13-0

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Wyden is one of the few guys in government who actually seems to be on our side.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Wyden is one of the few guys in government who actually seems to be on our side.

Definitely. At least in the past dozen or so articles that he's been mentioned, he was kicking ass.

I can't get over the fact that Wyden, having jurisdiction over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was denied access to it.

How much more blatantly corporate-tastic can this country get?

[Placid Dingo]

Good question.

I don't think it's a conscious policy.  Not entirely.  You need a culture supportive of such actions.  Lots of journalists nowadays come from the same rarified circles as much of the US elite, for example.  They are therefore more inclined to trust that "the government" is to be trusted, regardless of who is actually in power.  Lots of major publications have editors who are also tied directly into the US political-corporate elite; Bill Keller, for example, is a journalist by training, but he is also the son of a former Chevron chariman and chief executive.

Newspapers don't make a lot of money.  They are heavily reliant on advertisers and moving copy as fast as possible, and so they don't bother to factcheck.  Much of what passes for news is PR releases from government agencies, or newswires (who also do not fact check, but are more honest about this).  Likely what happened was that the major US news agencies picked up the story from the Pentagon, spent 2 minutes on Google making sure there weren't any amazingly obvious errors, then spent 5 minutes running it through an online thesaurus, then spent another minute playing around with the wording before sending it to be printed.

As such, there is at the highest levels, the natural inclination to believe what the government says, combined with overworked underlings being harassed for printable stories as fast as possible.  This makes it very easy for the Pentagon's story to go unchallenged.

In WWII Japanese propaganda was considered more effective than German for this reason. The German stuff was known to be propaganda, even if you agreed.

The Japanese just fell in with the official line, with no direct government intervention.