Chomsky: What makes the mainstream media mainstream? (part two)

Orwell

Orwell wrote Animal Farm in the mid-1940's, a satire on the Soviet Union, on a totalitarian state. "Literary Censorship in England" was an introduction to that novel, but it was suppressed and wasn't discovered until some 30 years later. In it Orwell says that whilst England isn't a totalitarian state, and doesn't have the KBG breathing down peoples necks, the result is pretty much the same: "People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out."

People only succeed in the media when the power structure knows they're going to say the right thing. Much like university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They've been through a system.

"Corporations sell audiences to other corporations."

"The obvious assumption is that the product of the media, what appears, what doesn’t appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power systems that are around them. If that wouldn’t happen, it would be kind of a miracle."

This hypothesis is extremely sound and stands up under the harshest scrutiny.

Such discussion is unlikely to be found in the education system. And obviously not in the media. Why would it?

Leninism

It's a system simi;lar to Leninism. We - the elite political and corporate class - do things for you and are doing things in the interest of everyone. We let you vote once in a while. But otherwise shut up, do as we say, think what we tell you to think, and let us get on with making the decisions.

How did this evolve?

Much of it comes from the first World War, after which the US went from being a debtor to a creditor nation.

Highly organized state propoganda was first seen during World War I in the form of the British Ministry of Information (BMI). The BMI was used to pursuade the US to enter the war, otherwise Britain was in trouble. It was geared towards sending the US propoganda, massive fabrications of "Hun" attrocities, largely aimed towards US intellectuals. It succeeded. BMI documents show that their goal was "to control the thought of the entire world," as Chomsky puts it.

Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform, in spite of the fact that he intended to go to war. The problem for Wilson was this: how do you get a pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics who want to kill people. To this end they set up the only major state propoganda agency in US history: the Committee on Public Information, often called the Creel Commission. It worked, stirring up enough hysteria to convince Americans to go to war.

A lot of people were impressed by this, including Hitler, who cited (in Mein Kampf) state propoganda as a reason why Germany lost the first World War. The US business community was also impressed.

Public Relations industry

A US invention, a 'monstrous' industry derived from the Creel Commission. Edward Bernays was a leading figure of the Creel Commission and went on to write Propoganda, published in 1925. (Incidentally, whilst 'propoganda' means something different today, at the time it meant simply 'information' and didn't have the negative conotations it has today.) In Propoganda, following his experience of the first World War, Bernays says that it is possible "to regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies".

Also of the Creel Commission, Walter Lippman (the most respected 'serious' journalist in the US for over half a century) spoke of a new art in democracy which he called the "manufacture of consent". Chomsky says:

"By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate."

[Which is why Chomsky says elsewhere that "Democrat and Republican are two sides of the same business faction". It doesn't particular matter which side you vote for because the same interested parties (the corporations and banks) are backing both sides and their interests will served no matter what.]

Academic political and social science derives from the same propoganda industry (Chomsky cites Harold Lasswell as their founder). Lasswell and others realised that "politics has to become political warfare, applying the mechanisms of propaganda that worked so brilliantly during the first World War towards controlling people’s thoughts."

Strangely, "controlling people's thoughts" is not somemthing you'll study in media classes at college.

James Madison, during the constitutional convention, said that the goal of the new system was "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority".

Chomsky: What makes the mainstream media mainstream? (part one)

What follows are detailed notes of a talk Chomsky gave at the Z Media Institute in June 1997. The talk was called what makes the mainstream media mainstream?

The media readily lends itself to being studied. The evidence of what is and is not being reported, the focus of what is reported, what is ignored or suppressed, etc, can be analysed every day by looking at the press itself.

Studying the media - or any institution

Ask questions about its internal structure. How does it relate to other systems of power and authority? Internal records (memo's, letters, that sort of thing) from leading figures in the instituion can be highly revealing, valuable tools for understanding how the institution works.

Institutions should be studied as a scientist would study a complex molecule. You make a hypothesis about its nature and then see how it holds up under scrutiny. In the case of the media, make a hypothesis about what the media product will look like. How does the hypothesis hold up?

What do you find?

There are different media that do different things, such as entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, newspapers, and so on.

One sector of the media is the "elite media". This is the "agenda-setting" media, the large media institutions with the vast resources. The New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, for example.

So you have a news editor in Dayton, Ohio, who doesn't have the resources "to figure out what the news is"; who has to fill the quarter page he devotes to non-local stories and diverting his audience. Well, he puts there what the New York Times says he should. Local papers do not have the resources to do much else. They do not have 'foreign correspondants" littered around the world.

If you get out of line and start producing stories that the elite or agenda-setting media doesn't approve of, you'll soon hear about it. (Chomsky cites a recent San Jose Mercury News incident as a dramatic example of this.) If you try to break the mold, you simply won't last long. All of which is an understandable reflection of the obvious power tructures of corporations. They are tyrannical institutions.

"The real mass media are basically trying to divert people."

Let them do something else - watch sports, soap operas, etc - keep them occupied while we run the show, while we take care of the serious stuff and make the big decisions.

Who are the elite, agenda setting media?

Take the New York Times and CBS. They are major, highly profitable corporations. Most are either linked to or owned outright by much bigger corporations, for instance General Electric, Westinghouse, etc. They are way up in the power structure of an extremely tyrannical private economy, an economy that is hierachical, controlled from above.

Universities

The media are a doctrinal system, a sytem based on a body or set of principles, on dogma. The media interact closely with universities. A reporter writing about, for instance, Southeast Asia or Africa, is supposed to go to a big university and find an expert to tell him what to write; or to foundations such as the Brookings Institute or the American Enterprise Institute. These corporate funded foundations are very similar to the media.

"Universities are not independent institutions."

"There may be independent people scattered around in them, but that's true of the media as well." In fact that's generally true of corporations and of fascist states.

Universities are dependent on outside sources of support: from private wealth, big corporations, and from government, which is so closely linked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them.

People who don't accept this structure, and internalize it, are likely to be weeded out anywhere from kindergarden up. Conformity and obedience are rewarded, people who think independently are not. They are often marginalised, isolated.

[Part two will follow.]

The BBC: "a mouthpiece for establishment views"

"Media commentators have been quick to point out that the communal door linking BBC, government and business executives has been turning for a very long time."

~

Thanks to a recommendation I was recently introduced to the website medialens, a 'UK-based media-watch project which offers authoritative criticism of media bias and censorship'.

Whilst I'm new to the site I was particularly interested in the following article by David Edwards, one of two medialens editors:

New Chairman confirms the BBC as a mouth-piece for establishment views (September 2001)

The new chairman at the time was Gavyn Davies. Whilst the BBC would have us believe they are an impartial organisation without corporate bias, Davies CV tells a different story. In 1997 Davies was touted as the next governor of the Bank of England. He was former chief economist for Goldman Sachs. He has a wealth of over £150million. Davies and Greg Dyke (BBC director general at the time) are both New Labour supporters and have given money to the party. Davies wife ran Gordon Brown's office. Their children were pageboy and bridesmaid at Gordon Brown's wedding. Blair has stayed in Davies holiday home.

Edwards also notes that Sir Christopher Bland, outgoing BBC chairman at the time, went on to become chairman of British Telecom.

In other words, it would be hard to find anyone more biased in favour of both government and corporate interests. As Chomsky might say, to expect otherwise of Davies would take some kind of miracle.

According to Edwards such bias can be found throughout the BBC's history, right up to the point of its inception:

"The BBC was founded by Lord Reith in 1922 and immediately used as a propaganda weapon for the Baldwin government during the General Strike, when it became known by workers as the "British Falsehood Corporation". During the strike, no representative of organized labour was allowed to broadcast on the BBC; the Leader of the Opposition, Ramsay McDonald, was also banned."

It's an insightful article. I was talking to someone recently about this. We're told that the BBC is perceived around the world as some kind of beacon for truth. That it's free from corporate and governmental bias, "because of the unique way the BBC is funded." It's content and the credentials of its chairmen tell quite the opposite story. The BBC is obviously biased and we have little reason to expect it not to be.

"The idea that the "non-corporate" BBC somehow counterbalances the corporate media is made absurd by the fact that, on issue after issue - global warming, sanctions against Iraq, the bombing of Serbia, Western support of Indonesia, inaction over East Timor, the history of US and British support of Third World tyrants - all promote near-identical establishment views."

Television and the media: the almighty inventors of false realities.

"I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television...You put somemthing on television and it becomes reality. If the [real] world contradicts the images [on television], people start trying to change the world to make it look like the images [on television]." (Hal Becker)

"They must find it difficult: those who have taken authority as truth rather than truth as the authority." (Gerald Massey)

"If it is not in the media it did not happen. If it did not happen but is in the media we believe it has happenned." (Charles T Tait)

FILM: Money as Debt

"The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled."
John K Galbraith (Canadian economist, 1908-2006)

If you're like me you've probably never asked yourself how banks 'create' money. Similarly you probably didn't realise that 'creating' money was something banks did. Well, they do.

~

Everytime you take out a loan from a bank it 'creates' money. It does so by simply writing the money into existence in your account. The bank stakes little when it does this. It literally creates the money out of thin air. Yet you, who must labour to pay back the loan, plus the interest, may lose your car, your house, or whatever else it was you used to back the loan if you cannot keep up the payments.

Can it really be that simple? Yes, it really is. The common and understandable fallacy is to think that banks lend money which they already have in their possession. They don't. They create money in the form of debt. Money is debt. Indeed if there was no debt, there would be no money for anyone to spend. 'If this is news to you', the film notes, 'you are not alone'.

“The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented...If you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.”
(Sir Josiah Stamp Director, Bank of England 1928-1941, reputed to be the 2nd richest man in Britain at the time)

Money as Debt is a clear and insightful 47min animated film about money, debt and our quite ludicrous banking system. It was made by Canadian artist Paul Grignon. It explains how our banking system came to be what it is today; how each and every one of us are in one way or another enslaved by it; how the 'central banking system' is doomed ultimately to collapse (its design makes this inevitable); and the film also offers some real solutions for change.

For more information about the film including a full transcript, references, endorsements and a wealth of quotes, see the Money as Debt website. Watch the film below or on google here.

On the eighth day God created the banker

In the beginning there was - a goldsmith. The paper and coins that we call money today originated from receipts written by the goldsmith for gold that people deposited in his vault. Crucially the paper recepits written by the goldsmith were not 'money' and were not thought of as 'money'. The money was the gold. The paper was just that, paper, a receipt.

One day the goldsmith had an idea. He realised that since he was the only one who knew what was in his vaults he could write out paper receipts for gold that he didn't actually have. Since he made interest on gold deposited in his vaults, this new scheme would allow him to earn interest on entirely ficticous gold. Meet the banker.

Fiat currency

'Fiat' means by 'official sanction' or decree. So 'fiat currency' is money created by the sanction of government.

Fractional reserve requirements

In the past the total amount of currency in existence was limited to the total amount of gold in existence (or whatever physical stuff was used to back the currency). As such, in order for more money to be created, more gold had to be mined. However since our currency is not backed by gold - or indeed anything at all - the only real limit to the amount of money in circulation is the amount of debt that can be created by banks. Fractional reserve requirements are a somewhat arbitrary limit set by government on how much debt or money banks can create.

~

For example, on a fractional reserve requirement of 9 to 1 a bank with an initial deposit of £1,111 can make a loan of £10,000. This £10,000 is brand new money, brand new debt. Today - as a result of lobbying by banks - fractional reserve requirements of 20 and 30 to 1 are not uncommon.

~

Time lag

~

It's only the time lag between the moment when debt (or money) is created and the time when it must be repaid that keeps the shortage of money from catching up and bankrupting the entire system.

~

"One thing to realize about our fractional reserve banking system is that, like a child’s game of musical chairs, as long as the music is playing, there are no losers."

(Andrew Gause, Monetary Historian)

~

Other quotes

"I am afraid that the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that banks can and do create money...And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people"
(Reginald McKenna, former Chairman of the Board, Midlands Bank of England)

“Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess.”
(Irving Fisher, economist and author)

"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
(Mayer Amschel Rothschild, International Banker)

"Everyone sub-consciously knows banks do not lend money. When you draw on your savings account, the bank doesn't tell you you can't do this because it has lent the money to somebody else."
(Mark Mansfield)

“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal, that there is no human relation between master and slave.”
(Leo Tolstoy)

“None are more enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
(Goethe)

"Once a nation parts with the control of its currency and credit, it matters not who makes the nations laws...Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognised as its most sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile."
(William Lyon Mackenzie King)

9/11 Truth Movement: Karen Johnson at Arizona State Senate

On 10 Jone 2008 Arizona State Senator Karen Johnson called on the Arizona Senate to endorse a new and independent investigation into the 9/11 attacks. Johnson spoke of the inadequacy of the official 9/11 investigations which failed to reveal the full truth of the largest terrorist attacks on US soil in the country's history. Johnson paid specific attention to the overwhelming evidence supporting the theory that the three WTC buildings that collapsed on 9/11 were each brought down by controlled demolition and not, as the official investigations claim, fire and damage from the airplane impacts.

In attendence was Blair Gadsby, a professor of religious studies who has been on hunger strike for over two weeks outside John McCain's office, demanding that McCain look at new evidence regarding the 9/11 attacks.

BBC's Pro-Israeli Bias by Stephen Lendman

Whilst the main focus of Lendman's article is the BBC's pro-Israeli bias, his overall analysis of the BBC at the begginning of the article seems accurate to me. Pro-government, pro-big business; "a propoganda system for elite interests". Whilst here and there it is possible to find honest investigative reporting on the BBC (for instance Panorama's recent Daylight Robbery by Jane Corbin), such instances are rare.

And Lendman is right to note how little difference there is between the BBC and its Anglo-American corporate counterparts. To my eyes their content seems largely indistinguishable, cetainly in terms of reporting about corporate and governmental corruption. Take (again) the BBC's Daylight Robbery, an incisive television piece about corporate financial corruption in Iraq. The film estimates that some $23billion is unaccounted for, stolen or missing from the massive corporate contracts awarded by the US government to the multinational corporations. It picks out the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown Root (KBR) as a major benificiary of the missing billions.

Whilst such journalism should be applauded and its like encouraged, we may equally ask the BBC why there was no headline story about it on their website (my search showed there was no accompanying story at all)? Or why such war-profiteering does not make the nightly news when over 1.1million people have today been killed in the cause of the making of those billions?

Global Research, June 13, 2008.

'In its near 86 year history, BBC has a long, unbroken and dubious distinction. Today it's little different from its corporate-run counterparts in America, Britain and throughout the world. In fact, on its tailored for a US BBC America audience, what passes for news matches stride for stride what people here see every day - mind-numbing commercialism, shoddy reporting, pseudo-journalism, celebrity and sports features, and other diverting and distracting non-news that should embarrass correspondents and presenters delivering it. It offends viewers and treats them like mushrooms - well-watered, in the dark, and uninformed about the most important world and national issues affecting their lives and welfare.

That's the idea, of course, and has been since BBC's inception. John Reith was its founder and first general manager. Reassuring the powerful, he set the standard adhered to thereafter: "(You) know (you) can trust us not to be really impartial." BBC never was and never is.

Impartiality has no place on BBC nor does its claim about "honesty, integrity, (and being) free from political influence and commercial pressure." How can it? Its Director-General, Executive Board Chairman, BBC Trust Chairman and senior managers are government-appointed and charged with a singular task - to function as a "propaganda system for elite interests." On all vital issues - war and peace, state and corporate corruption, human rights, social justice, or coverage of the Middle East's longest and most intractable conflict, Westminster and the establishment rest easy. They know BBC is "reliable" - pro-government, pro-business and dismissive of the public trust it disdains. Now more than ever.

This article covers one example among many - BBC's distorted, one-sided support for Israel and its antipathy toward Palestinians. In this respect, it's fully in step with its American and European counterparts - Israeli interests matter; Palestinian ones don't; as long as that holds, conflict resolution is impossible. Therein lies the problem. With its reputation, world reach, and influence, BBC's coverage exacerbates it...'

FILM: Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's war on journalism [notes]

These are some of the notes I took whilst watching the documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's war on journalism (on freedocumentaries). Much of the film consists of testimony from former FOX insiders. Some were only willing to speak on condition of anonimity.

TRAILER

STATISTICS

Murdoch's Empire

9 satellite television networks
100 cable channels
175 newspapers
40 book imprints
40 television stations
1 fim studio

Murdoch's Audience

280 million: US television networks
300 million: Asia satellite networks
300 million: homes receiving his cable channels
28 million: read his magazines

Total Audience

4.7 billion people (can that really be true?)

NOTES

FOX News Channel was established in 1996. Roger Ailes, FOX CEO and chairman, said FOX's aim was to "restore objectivity" in the news. And to do "fine, balanced journalism". [Really, that's what he said.] He was formerly a media strategist in the presidential campaigns of Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr.

Murdoch was and is fanatically pro-Reagan. Reagan's birthday is treated by FOX like a religious festival, a holy day, with wall to wall coverage devoted to the great man...

Former employees speak of a kind of surveilled Stalinist system within FOX, a system where everyone is constantly monitored and in fear of saying the wrong thing.

Every morning FOX employees receive a list of what to report, how to report it, and a list of what to ignore or repress. If you don't tow the line you lose your job. A 23rd March 2004 FOX memo stated (on the 9/11 Commission) "don't turn this into Watergate".

The streaming banners and graphics are consciously designed to subvert the audience into accepting neo-conservative, pro-right ideas.

FOX is a Republican party political broadcast that runs 24/7. Nothing more.

A former employee spoke of how the "news flash" was used when the Columbine shootings occured, but then it soon started to be used for meanigless stories about celebrity and cultural trivia.

"Some people say..."

Opinions can't be disproved. "Some people say..." is a tool which allows the reporter or presenter to promote any political perspective he or she likes. It allows for lies to be peddled as truth. Everything is permissable.

FOX's devotion to Christianity compells them to run stories that ask such deep and searching questions as, "Why is Jesus so popular?"

Fear is the most economic and reliable weapon in the propoganda tool box. Make them afraid. Make them very afraid.

"Fair & Balanced"

A FOX slogan. Fair and balanced. But what law compells the media to report in a 'fair and balanced' way? It's a law called the "fairness doctrine". The fairness doctrine legally prevents the US media from reporting with undue bias...

Well, it used to. The "fairness doctrine" was abolished under Ronald Reagan. FOX and every other corporate news organisation in the US can legally say pretty much whatever the hell they like. So they do. End of story.

[You can see why Murdoch is so pro-Reagan. Reagan as good as gave Murdoch the keys to his Empire.]

The economy "is in great shape"

FOX default position. Bush has been great for the economy. Everything is just great.

Iraq "is in great shape"

FOX default position. The war has been great for Iraq. Everything is just great.

The Home Office is creating a database to store details of every phone call, email and web page visited in Britain

By Andy Bloxham writing for the Telegraph.

~~~

"The Home Office will create a database to store the details of every phone call made, every email sent and every web page visited by British citizens in the previous year under plans currently under discussion, it has emerged."

"The Government wants to create the system to fight terrorism and crime."

~

"A Home Office spokesman said the move was needed to reflect changes in communication that would "increasingly undermine our current capabilities to obtain communications data and use it to protect the public"."

~~~

Read the full article here.

~~~~~~~

"This and no other is the root from which the tyrant springs: when he first appears he is a protector." (Plato)

Mario Savio: Speaking in 1964

Sibel Edmonds and the Machine: chewed up and spat out

Sibel Edmonds was born in 1970 and is Turkish-American. Up until March 2002 she worked as a translator for the FBI. During the course of her work she encountered evidence that the the FBI was actively supressing evidence of US involvement in the illegal sales of nuclear materials and technologies to Turkey (often on behalf of Pakistan's ISI), drug trafficking, money laundering, terrorism, and corruption from the very highest levels of the US government down.

~

Joseph K in the 21st Century

~

When Sibel Edmonds brought this evidence to her superiors at the FBI she was told to leave it alone and that pursuing it would only open a can of worms. So she took her concerns to higher management within the FBI and eventually to assistant director Dale Watson and the FBI's director Robert Mueller. At this stage she was told not to take her concerns any further. If she did, she was told, the FBI would retaliate against her. When Sibel Edmonds refused to keep quiet she was fired. The offical and indeed only reason she was given for being fired was, "Solely for the convenience of the United States government.

~

In March 2002, around three weeks before she was fired, Sibel Edmonds took her case to the Department of Justice Inspector General's office and also the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC). The Inspector General promised the SJC a completed investigation into Edmonds case by autumn of that year. The investigation was never finished and never made public. The reason cited was "state privilege" and "national security". In spite of this several Senators of the SJC continued to work with Edmonds on her case. However this work finally came to an end in May 2004 when Attorney General John Ashcroft sent an order to Congress saying that the Justice Department was "retroactively" classifying everything Congress and the SJC had in its possession in regards to Sibel Edmonds case. The SJC was ordered to delete everything about Edmonds from their websites. The Attorney General was literally gagging Congress. From that time on the Senators of the SJC who had worked on Edmond's case simply stopped returning her phone calls.

Sibel Edmonds has since become known as the most gagged woman in US history. If she speaks out about what she knows she will be jailed.

That is a brief synopsis of Sibel Edmonds case. Listen to Edmonds tell her story in her own words below.

~

~

Who you gonna call?

~

What's perhaps most revealing when you look into Sibel Edmonds story and hear her speak is that you begin to understand how the vast US political, judicial, corporate and media machine operates when it is the US government itself that is accused of wrong doing. The FBI is the federal government agency whose purpose is to investigate crimes and gather evidence. They not only refused to investigate the evidence Edmonds had - or at least they refused to make their investigation public - they fired her, simply because she would not ignore the crimes she had uncovered. So Edmonds went to Congress. And Congress was duly gagged by the Attorney General. Then the courts threw out her case after hearing testimony given by government lawyers that Edmonds and her council were barred from hearing (they were told by the judge to leave the court room and were given no transcript of what was said; a situation that you cannot help but describe as Kafkaeque). Then there is the testimony she gave to the 9/11 Commission (behind closed doors). Not only was it left out of the final report, it was also stricken from the public record. All the while the Executive branch of government has classified everything in relation to Edmonds case. And I mean everything. Even Sibel Edmonds date of birth has been classified. And of course there is the coporate media, which does and says nothing.

~

In US politics the constitutional 'checks and balances' that are suposed to restrain government are now utterly impotent. Government does pretty much whatever it likes, even if that means commiting crimes (and in Edmonds case we are talking about potentially treasonous activity). And why not? Especially when you know you have the means to cover those crimes up, and to halt, control or impede any investigation into them. And if someone speaks out, that can be dealt with. Those who refuse to be silenced, the whistle blowers, those who try to alert the public of illegal government activity, can simply be chewed up and spat out by the machine. Just like Edmonds. Just like Joseph K.

~

As Edmonds says in the above film: where else can she go? Who does she call when it is the government who is being charged with criminal activity? She has tried the courts, the FBI, Congress, the SJC and the media, and each of them have failed her and have failed others like her.

~

If anyone says to you, "well, why don't people speak out?" Tell them that they do. And that one way or another those people are silenced.

~

9/11: Cover Up

Whilst working at the FBI Sibel Edmonds, amongst everything else, came across evidence that several of the 9/11 hijackers had been actively protected by the Justice Department, the State Depeartment, the White House and the FBI prior to the attacks. Not only was this covered up, following the attacks high level officials within the Bush administration were actively involved in getting persons suspected of being involved with those hijackers out of the country.

~

Links

For sale: Weat's deadly nuclear secrets (The Times, Jan 2008)
Interview with Jim Hodge
Just a Citizen (Sibel Edmonds website. You may be interested in the 'gallery'. Remember that Edmonds has been gagged from naming those involved in her case...)
National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (founded by Edmonds in 2004)

The Orchestrated Eradication of Liberty in Britian

"Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end."(Lord Acton)

Around five or six months ago I decided to keep a file dedicated news articles about the increasing number of ways the British state is spying on us. I was partly motivated after finding out that home secretary Jacqui Smith had quietly passed a law in July 2007 giving 795 public companies and government agencies the right to spy on all British mobile phone calls and messages. No discussion. No debate. You are no longer at liberty to make private phone calls.

Then I kept reading other stories in the press about new government spying programmes, so many so that it was becoming hard to remember them all. Hence I started keeping the file.

A few weeks ago I noticed how large this file had grown. Forty-five articles in around six months. And this list is not exhaustive.

The majority of the articles I've linked below are from mainstream British news organisations and were published in the last six months. Relatively few were published earlier than this. I should also mention that the majority of articles are exclusively about Britain. I've got another file with article's about the eradication of civil liberties in the US, Europe and elsewhere. For the moment, that's another story.

In the 'war on terror' state power is winning, liberty is losing.

It's nevertheless worth noting the numerous parallels between Britain and the US in regard to not just surveillance measures and the eradication of liberty but also the politics of 'terror'. Both here and in the US the state is using 'terror', by which I mean deliberate fear-mongering, to scare the populous into accepting the erosion of their liberties.

This is far from an original state of affairs. Hitler did exactly the same in the 1930's and for the same reason: to increase the power of the state and to diminish the power and liberty of the people. It is what you would expect in an actual or creeping dictatorship: the creation or exajuration of a common enemy, a mutual national threat (in our case we know that Al Qaeda was a creation of the CIA and we know that the threat posed to us by Al Qaeda has been relentlessly exajurated by government and media alike). The state then claims only it can protect you from this enemy, from this national threat. The cost of state protection is liberty.

The global 'war on terror' is in many ways perceivably indistinguishable from a global war on liberty.

The threat to liberty in this country does not begin and end with the state. Powers are increasingly being centralised beyond national democratic boundaries. Work is underway to create databases and surveillance networks that are Anglo-American and European in nature, not just national. It is also noticable that surveillance measures and policies introduced in the UK are simultaneously turning up in the US and elsewhere around Europe.

[To this end consider the following stories which are detailed in the list below. 1) The US now has the authority to spy on British citizens who are on British soil. 2) The FBI is striving to gain access to British biometric information in its efforts to establish a global database of everyone. 3) The US - a country on the verge of martial law - has told Britain that it can "kidnap" British citizens if they are wanted for crimes within the US. That is, a US Supreme Court ruling now gives the US authorities legal jurisdiction in this country. And we are not talking about extradition here. We are talking about "kidnap".]

Government spying programmes in the UK have reached epidemic proportions. Trends in the US and Europe are following the same trajectory. Everything is increasing. The spying with cameras and listenning devices; the recording of phone calls, emails and internet activity (programmes are actually underway to censor the internet); the introduction of iris and fingerprint recognition technology; increasing DNA and biometric databases; ID Cards; the use of RFID chips in prisoners; mobile phone tracking technology; face recognition technology; smell recognition technology...

"All those who would sacrifice a little liberty for a little security will lose both and deserve neither." (B Franklin)

The articles below should be read as a warning. We are getting ever closer to the point where pretty much everything we do will be monitored in a state surveillance grid from which it will be impossible to escape. This has to stop. The government needs to understand that we are not going to tollerate being spied on and monitored. The laws allowing government to do so must be repealed. The surveillance apperatus, dismantled. There can be no exceptions.

It's a simple choice between liberty or slavery. You choose.

1. 1.5m children to have DNA taken next year
2. Smith targets internet extremism: "The internet can't be a no-go area for government."
3. Camera looks through clothing
4. Big Brother Britain: government and councils to spy on all our phones
5. Big Brother is watching us - and he lives in the town hall
6. Big Brother is watching us all
7. Big Brother is watching you
8. Big Brother tapping our phones and emails 1,000 times a day In the last nine months of 2006, various authorities and agencies made "253,500 requests for phone taps, the interception of emails or post."
9. Britain makes camera that sees under clothes
10. CCTV camera microphones to be axed: A somewhat absurd report by the Telegraph stating that camera microphones are to be "outlawed" because they are "highly intrusive". Yet later in the report they say camera microphones will be allowed in "extremely special circumstances," so they're not being 'axed' at all.
11. CCTV could be used in exam rooms
12. CCTV in class spies on teachers, says union
13. Child fingerprint checks at European borders
14. Children should be put on DNA database: This is the view of Britian's most senior forensics expert, Gary Pugh. Behaviour should be analysed to assess if children are "potential offenders". If found guilty - of potential future crimes - their DNA is taken.
15. CIA and Google team up in creation of vast closed source database for global spying
16. 'Coercion' plan to force ID cards on first time drivers
17. Council that snooped on parents now uses anti-terror laws to spy on fishermen
18. Every pupil to be numbered and kept on government database for life
19. Face scans for air passengers will start in the UK this summer
20. Facebook can ruin your life. So can MySpace, Bebo...: Information you post on scoical sites can be used against you.
21. FBI wants instant access to British identity data
22. 'Free CCTV film access for security services': They can spy on us at will.
23. Insects become fly-on-the-wall spies, with tiny cameras, radio controls and microphones: Moths, beetles, rats, pigeons and sharks have been installed with electronic brain implants so they can be controlled remotely. They can also carry cameras and microphones. No, really.
24. Government to begin rolling out ID cards 'by stealth' within a year: 'Workers in sensitive jobs will be required to apply for the compulsory cards in 2009, despite the Home Office postponing the overall scheme until 2012...Some 100,000 British airport staff and others working in sensitive locations are expected to be affected by the move.'
25. Government wants personal details of every traveller: 'Phone numbers and credit card data to be collected under expanded EU plan.' Interestingly, the UK is 'the only country of 27 EU member states that wants the system used for "more general public policy purposes" besides fighting terrorism and organised crime.'
26. The government trumpets free speech while trampling on it
27. Heathrow airport first to fingerprint
28. Heathrow fingerprint plan probed
29. Hi-tech face recognition cameras used in Budgens to spot underage drinkers
30. How mobile phones let spies see our every move: 'Government's secret Celldar project will allow surveillance of anyone, at any time, and anywhere there is a phone signal'.
31. London cops declare war on photography
32. Man arrested, put in DNA database for "allegedly" dropping apple core
33. Met police officers to be 'microchipped' by top brass in Big Brother style tracking: All cops will chipped and tracked.
34. MI5 seeks power to trawl records in new terror hunt: 'Millions of commuters could have their private movements around cities secretly monitored under new counter-terrorism powers being sought by the security services.'
35. Military Industrial Complex biometric surveillance control grid revealing itself
36. New anti-terroism rules 'allow US to spy on British motorists'
37. Police to deploy hundreds of airport-style mobile electronic search units
38. Prisoners 'to be chipped like dogs': Prisoners who once wore trackable bracelets are now to have Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips surgically inserted under their skin. RFID chipping may also be used to track prisoners in jail.
39. Roadside cameras that detect blood will catch lone drivers who abuse car-sharing lanes
40. Schools to fingerprint pupils for new school dinner payment system
41. Surveillance system tracks faces on CCTV
42. US and Britain: "Endemic surveillance societies"
43. US says it has right to kidnap British citizens
44. UK council accused of Big Brother tactics over use of fingerprint technology in schools: A school in Wales is introducing a system whereby children will pay for their lunches with fingerprints rather than money.
45. When surveillance cameras talk

Keith Fucking Nails It

Project Censored

Founded in the US in 1976 Project Censored conducts research into important national news stories that are 'underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media'. Between 700 and 1,000 stories are submitted to Project Censored each year. Of these, through the work of over 200 Sonoma State University faculty, student and community members, 25 stories are selected for content, reliability of sources and national significance. These 25 stories are then ranked in order of importance by a panel of judges and published in a yearbook called Censored: The News That Didn't Make The News.

The annual Project Censored top 25 archive is also available online. See archive here.

Project Censored is an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to find out the things that the US corporate media doesn't want you to know. To my knowledge, much of Project Censored's content is as little reported here as it is in the US.

For instance consider from the current 2008 list #16 No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11. This is one of several stories on Project Censored relating to 9/11 which have received next to no attention in the mainstream UK media.

Also from the current list #2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law. As I refered to in The United States of America: On The Road to Martial Law, the plans to execute what would in effect be a military dictatorship in the US are in place. Detention camps have been built. Laws giving the president the authority to indefinately detain anyone he likes have been signed. Not to mention the suspension of Habeas Corpus which is top of the current list: #1 No Habeas Corpus for “Any Person”. Again, these clearly urgent stories have largely failed to make their way into the British media. Though the fact that they largely unreported in the corporate US media is much more disturbing.

Highly pertinent to present times is the following story from last years list: 2. Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran. A story which reaffirms the age old US policy of arming countries with weapons and technologies and then kicking - or threatening to kick -the shit out of them.

Project Censored offers fascinating and frequently disturbing insight into just how efficient the US corporate media has become in controlling the news.

Thank fuck for the internet!

Volvanic Eruption In Chile

Steven Jones et al Publish Paper in The Open Civil Engineering Journal

Read the paper from Steven Jones blog linked below.

Fourteen Points of Agreement with Official Government Reports on the World Trade Center Destruction

On the question of NIST's refusal to investigate or even consider the possibility that World Trade Centre building 7 was brought down in a controlled demolition, the paper mentions the following exchange (below), which says something about NIST's attitude towards doing tests for the use of explosives. Remember that NIST - whose investigation props up the official governmental 9/11 story - said they found no evidence for the use of explosives whilst also admitting that they had done no tests for them. While NIST have not yet been able to provide any explanation as to why WTC 7 collapsed they continue to ignore and dismiss this possibility.

Anyone who thinks it's ludicrous that WTC 7 could have been brought down by controlled demolition have to realise that NIST, which is a government funded agency, did not scientifically investigate the possibility that it was. There are now many highly credible controlled demolition and architectural experts who have shown, I think conclusively, that WTC 7's collapse has every hallmark of a typical controlled demolition. The evidence is very clear and straight forward. Buildings tend not to spontaneously disintigrate like this of their own accord. A partial collapse is one thing. It is quite another when a building suddenly collapses and the structure below offers the same resistence as air.

~~~

The exchange below is between investigative reporter Jennifer Abel and NIST spokesperson (Michael?) Neuman.

~~~

Abel: "...what about that letter where NIST said it didn't look for evidence of explosives?”

Neuman: "Right, because there was no evidence of that."

Abel: But how can you know there's no evidence if you don't look for it first?

Neuman: "If you're looking for something that isn't there, you're wasting your time...”

The Bank Of England & The Federal Reserve

I've heard many times that the international bankers which owned the Bank of England are the same people that established the US Federal Reserve bank in 1913. I recently came across the following charts from the Congressional House Banking Committee Staff Report, published August 1976, which explain the somewhat complex links between the major London and US banking institutions. They also detail the links between them and the major US and British national and muti-national corporations.

See the charts here.

Chomsky: The Obedient Rise, The Disobedient Fall

The following excerpt is from Anarchy in the USA, an interview Chomsky gave to Charles M Young for Rolling Stone magazine on 28 May 1992.

~~~

QUESTION: Do you ever wonder about the psychology of these American commissars? You've written about the filtering process by which the obedient rise to the top and the disobedient end up elsewhere, but I wonder what goes on in their heads.

CHOMSKY: I don't think it's that hard to figure out. All the people I've ever met, including me, have done bad things in their lives, things that they know they shouldn't have done. There are few people who say, "I really did something rotten." What people usually do is make up a way of explaining why that was the right thing to do. That's pretty much the way belief formation works in general. You have some interest, something you want, and then you make up a belief system which makes that look right and just. And then you believe the belief system. It's a very common human failing.

Some people are better at it than others. The people who are best at it become commissars. It's always best to have columnists who believe what they're saying. Cynics tend to leave clues because they're always trying to get around the lying. So people who are capable of believing what is supportive of power and privilege - but coming at it, in their view, independently - those are the best.

The norm is that if you subordinate yourself to the interests of the powerful, whether it's parent or teacher or anybody else, and if you do it politely and willingly, you'll get ahead. Let's say you're a student in school and the teacher says something about American history and it's so absurd you feel like laughing, I remember this as a child. If you get up and say: "That's really foolish. Nobody could believe that. The facts are the other way around," you're going to get in trouble.

QUESTION: Do you remember the fact you came up with?

CHOMSKY: Well, this happened so often. I got thrown out of classes...not a lot...I don't want to suggest it was any real...there are people who did it constantly, and they end up as behavior problems. You raise too many questions, you ask for reasons instead of just following orders, they put you in certain categories: hyperactive. Undisciplined. Overemotional. It goes all through your education and professional life. A journalist who starts picking on the wrong stories will be called in by the editor and told: "You're losing your objectivity. You're getting a little too emotionally involved in your stories. Why don't you work in the police court until you get it right?"

That does start in childhood. If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.

Steve E Jones Paper To Be Published In Science Journal

On 4 April Steven E Jones revealed on his blog that he has had a paper on his 9/11 research peer-reviewed for publication in a mainstream science journal. Whilst I don't know the content of the paper this is nevertheless another major step forward for Jones and the 9/11 Truth movement. Science journals don't deal with "conspiracy theories" (whatever the hell they are), they - like Jones - deal with science and verifiable facts.

~

In the same blog post Jones said that, just days after the paper was accepted, he was contacted once again by the "engineer with government contacts". This is the same engineer who told Jones he would lose his job at Brigham University unless he took his earlier paper on 9/11 off the internet. Jones refused, and within days was forced by the university to go on paid leave (he later decided to take early retirement). This time the engineer said, "you may never be able to accept that what I have said is the truth, because accepting this means that you have made many serious technical errors. However, you will have to accept this someday."

~

More veiled threats by the man with contacts to the government. Jones says, "What do you think he is referring to, some gov't program such as a "special camp" for those who question the 9/11 story? (j/k, I hope...)" So do we, Dr Jones. After all, those detention camps aren't being built to house no one.

~

And finally, Jones once again advises people in the US to get stocked up with enough food and water to last at least three months (preferably a year) in case of some internal state of emergency within the US. This is quite a shocking endictment of how much faith people in the US have in their government. But looking at governmental responses to things like Katrina, the 9/11 first responders, the constitution, liberty, free speech, the people of Iraq and Afghanistan (indeed, you could just fill in the blank), then this endictment isn't so surprising. The threat of martial law is ever present in the US. All it will take is the right spark. A spark the military industrial complex is no doubt baying for.

Joined Up Journalism II

FBI Head Predicts Al-Qaeda Defeat (7 April 2008, BBC)

A week is a long time in the 'war on terror'. The head of the FBI Robert Mueller (speaking in London to an audience which included Johnathon Evans, head of MI5, and Ian Blair, the metropolitan police commissioner) said that the West can achieve victory over Al-Qaeda within three-and-a-half years.

~

(One may wonder what this victory might look like on the streets of Britain. Could it be that in three-and-a-half years all the attacks will stop? Could it be that in three-and-a-half years we can do away with all the surveillance measures that our government has brought in in the name of 'terror'; measures which have turned liberty into little more than a thing of memory?)

~

Ignoring certain truths about Al-Qaeda and the 'war on terror' for a moment, consider the following story, also from the BBC, and coming less than a week after they reported that an end was in sight in the fight against Al Qaeda.

~

Terror Threat To UK 'Is Growing' (13 April 2008, BBC)

~

It makes no sense. We are just three-and-a-half years from defeating Al-Qaeda. Then a week later, Al-Qaeda is a growing threat. We're winning the 'war on terror'. And then a week later losing it.

~

The BBC doesn't flinch.

~

You could perhaps defend the BBC by saying that they were just reporting what they were told. In the first instance by Mueller, and in the second by home secretary Jacqui Smith. But then the BBC is of no use to any of us unless it validates what it is told by making sure it is the truth. If the words don't correspond to the world, they're meaningless.

~

This it seems to me is the problem with the BBC. Quite simply: they don't validate what they are told. When a member of government or any kind of official speaks, they all too often report it without question. Even when this unquestionning faith leads to the innate and confusing kind of contradictions that you see in the above stories.

~

Around a year-and-a-half ago I wrote to the BBC to ask them why they continued to report that Osama Bin Laden was behind 9/11 when the FBI had said that in the four-and-a-half years since the attacks they had found no "hard evidence" that he was. They said Bin Laden remained the chief suspect because the US government said he was. I asked if they had seen or come across any evidence linking Bin Laden to the attacks. They had not. I found ths astonishing. It really seemed that things like evidence and the truth did not matter, even though Bin Laden's guilt was given as justification to launch military strikes against Afghanistan.

~

In the real world, when people continually lie you lose faith in them. You start to treat their assertions with scepticism. This is a very understandable state of affairs.

~

So when General David Patraeus told the BBC in March that Iran was "behind Green Zone attack" in Iraq, you might expect a degree of caution on the BBC's part. Is there evidence? According to Patraeus, there is. Did the BBC ask what this evidence was? No. Instead we learn that Patraeus "thought Tehran had trained, equipped and funded insurgents who fired the barrage of mortars and rockets."

~

The BBC continues to report and relay what these people say without question or investigation, no matter how contradictory, dubious or downright false what they say is. And they are carrying the Iran war propoganda with the same regard for truth as when they carried the Iraq propoganda. That is, with no regard at all.

David Lynch: Explaining His Thesis Of The Role New Mobile Phone Technology Has Played In The Advancement Of Cinema

The Gulf of Tonkin: "It didn't happen."

The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred on 4nd August 1964. On that day the US Maddox, a naval destroyer, was said to have been attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats whilst carrying out missions in the Gulf of Tonkin. The media lept on the story that the communist Vietnamese had attacked a US vessel. And on the basis of the attack the US Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. This resolution gave president Lindon Johnson the power to go to war without an official 'declaration' of war. Thus the president was able esculate military operations in Vietnam without recourse to Congress, something hitherto demanded by the constitution. In the end these operations would last for more than a decade and would bring about the deaths of over 50,000 US soldiers and between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 Vietnamese citizens. The trigger for the Vietnam conflict, the incident that was used as its justification, was the one that occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin on the 4th August 1964.

But the simple fact is that there was no such incident. The Maddox was attacked by nothing at all on 4th August 1964. Robert McNamara the then Secretary of Defence and someone who played a central role in selling this lie to Congress and the American public later admited, "It did not happen." The truth is that the Gulf of Tonkin story was a top to bottom fabrication used to coerce Congress and the American public into accepting the Vietnam conflict. It succeeded.

It's a precedent we are all familiar with. Lies being used to justify whatever military action our government wishes to carry out. Britain attacked Afghanistan on the basis of Bin Laden's involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Yet we have not seen a shred of evidence linking Bin Laden to the attack; not to mention the fact that Bin Laden and 16 of the 19 alledged 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, not Afghans. Then there's Iraq, which Britain attacked because of the lie that it posed a threat to us.

You may remember a few months ago there was an incident in the Strait of Hormuz close to Iran where the US accused Iranian ships of harrassing and provoking three US Navy ships. This incident occured just a month after the US National Intelligence Estimate revealed that Iran's nuclear programme - which was being touted as justification for a US attack on Iran - had been suspended four years earlier. The parallels between this much exadjurated incident and the Gulf of Tonkin are striking. Both were staged events intended to pull the wool over the eyes of the people in the cause of governmental war mongering.

Next time you hear in the press that Iran or Syria or whoever else has attacked the West, remember the Gulf of Tonkin.

John Dewey: The Individual and the World

Recently I heard Chomsky quote an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer called John Dewey (1859-1952). I had never heard of Dewey before and have since learned that he was a significant influence upon Chomsky's thinking. This is the quote:

"Government is the shadow cast by business over society."

Chomsky elaborated by saying that changing the shadow does not change the substance. In other words, it doesn't particularly matter who is elected or from which party, the umbilical cord linking corporations and international banks to government will remain in tact. We can change and affect government, but cutting the umbilical cord is not a democratic matter.

~~~

I have just come across the following passage in which Dewey puts forward a description of knowledge and thinking, and explores the way new ideas emerge in cultures governed by custom and accepted beliefs.

The Individual and the World

There is a valid distinction between knowledge which is objective and impersonal, and thinking which is subjective and personal. In one sense, knowledge is that which we take for granted. It is that which is settled, disposed of, established, under control. What we fully know, we do not need to think about. In common phrase, it is certain, assured. And this does not mean a mere feeling of certainty. It denotes not a sentiment, but a practical attitude, a readiness to act without reserve or quibble. Of course we may be mistaken. What is taken for knowledge — for fact and truth — at a given time may not be such. But everything which is assumed without question, which is taken for granted in our intercourse with one another and nature is what, at the given time, is called knowledge. Thinking on the contrary, starts, as we have seen, from doubt or uncertainty. It marks an inquiring, hunting, searching attitude, instead of one of mastery and possession. Through its critical process true knowledge is revised and extended, and our convictions as to the state of things reorganized.

Clearly the last few centuries have been typically a period of revision and reorganization of beliefs. Men did not really throw away all transmitted beliefs concerning the realities of existence, and start afresh upon the basis of their private, exclusive sensations and ideas. They could not have done so if they had wished to, and if it had been possible general imbecility would have been the only outcome. Men set out from what had passed as knowledge, and critically investigated the grounds upon which it rested; they noted exceptions; they used new mechanical appliances to bring to light data inconsistent with what had been believed; they used their imaginations to conceive a world different from that in which their forefathers had put their trust. The work was a piecemeal, a retail, business. One problem was tackled at a time. The net results of all the revisions amounted, however, to a revolution of prior conceptions of the world. What occurred was a reorganization of prior intellectual habitudes, infinitely more efficient than a cutting loose from all connections would have been.

This state of affairs suggests a definition of the role of the individual, or the self, in knowledge; namely, the redirection, or reconstruction of accepted beliefs. Every new idea, every conception of things differing from that authorized by current belief, must have its origin in an individual. New ideas are doubtless always sprouting, but a society governed by custom does not encourage their development. On the contrary, it tends to suppress them, just because they are deviations from what is current. The man who looks at things differently from others is in such a community a suspect character; for him to persist is generally fatal.

Even when social censorship of beliefs is not so strict, social conditions may fail to provide the appliances which are requisite if new ideas are to be adequately elaborated; or they may fail to provide any material support and reward to those who entertain them. Hence they remain mere fancies, romantic castles in the air, or aimless speculations. The freedom of observation and imagination involved in the modern scientific revolution were not easily secured; they had to be fought for, many suffered for their intellectual independence. But, upon the whole, modern European society first permitted, and then, in some fields at least, deliberately encouraged the individual reactions which deviate from what custom prescribes. Discovery, research, inquiry in new lines, inventions, finally came to be either the social fashion, or in some degree tolerable.

The Azores Summit: Still Lying After All These Years

At the Azores summit five years ago today President Bush declared that the US “has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security.” This sentiment was echoed by Prime Minister Blair: Iraq was a threat to us and its neighbours. Notably Iraq was said to be a threat with or without Saddam. That is, even if Saddam left Iraq - something which was rumoured to be a possibility at the time - the Anglo-American led 'coalition' would invade anyway.

~

The rhetoric has continued to morph whenever the lies have become too untennable to sustain. The Weapons of Mass Destruction lie was soon outed: there weren't any. Iraq's military capabilities were crippled during the previous Iraq invasion and hadn't been rebuilt. Once this became clear and undeniable then the reason for the Anglo-American invasion changed. We were then told that the invasion was about removing Saddam from power. History was rewritten.

~

But at the Azores summit prior to the invasion - as Chomsky says in his August 2003 article Preventative War 'The Supreme Crime' - the Anglo-American position was clear: even if Saddam left Iraq the invasion would go ahead regardless. The invasion had - and has - nothing to do with removing Saddem from power. This was simply another lie to cover up the previous one.

Follow The Money

Who has gained most from the Iraq invasion? Not the 1,000,000 dead Iraqi's, or the 4,000,000 Iraqi's who've been displaced. And not the dead, injured and unnecessarily put at risk British and US soldiers. The people who gained most are the same people who always gain most from war and conflict: international banks, defence contractors, oil corporations, and those wishing to expand American empire.

The US and British governments wanted war and chaos in Iraq and the middle east and they got it. They lied 5 years ago as they lie today because the truth makes them look like cold calous murderers with no regard for the suffereing of others.

Big Media Interlocks With Corporate America by Peter Philips

Mainstream media is the term often used to describe the collective group of big TV, radio and newspapers in the United States. Mainstream implies that the news being produced is for the benefit and enlightenment of the mainstream population—the majority of people living in the US. Mainstream media include a number of communication mediums that carry almost all the news and information on world affairs that most Americans receive. The word media is plural, implying a diversity of news sources.

However, mainstream media no longer produce news for the mainstream population—nor should we consider the media as plural. Instead it is more accurate to speak of big media in the US today as the corporate media and to use the term in the singular tense—as it refers to the singular monolithic top-down power structure of self-interested news giants.

Read more.

DAVID LYNCH: Explaining His Thesis Of The Role Product Placement Plays In Cinema

The United States of America: On The Road To Martial Law

"Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees."

The above is an excerpt from a February 4th article co-written by Dan Hamburg (a former Congressman and Executive Director of Voice of the Environment) and Lewis Seiler (President of Voice of the Environment) published in the San Fransisco Chronicle. The article, Rule by fear or rule by law?, is an all too rare instance of the corporate media acknowledging the threat the US government and its corporate masters are now more than ever posing to the US populous. The threat is clear: it's of the implimentation of martial law in the United States of America.

~

For the sake of clarity, martial law is defined as (according to my Collins dictionary): "Rule of law maintained by the military in the absence of civil law."

The camps refered to above (with the capacity to hold many hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions) are being built below the radar of the corporate press. So, too, is the legislation being brought in that gives the federal government the authoirty to detain pretty much anyone it likes, without trial, and to hold them indefinately:

"The Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through Congress just before the 2006 midterm elections, allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on a list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and noncitizens alike."

~

The threat of martial law being implimented in the US isn't a matter of opinion based on a biased interpretation of cherry picked facts. It's real and it's detailed in a plethora of laws and executive orders that, under the right conditions (such as after an attack on US soil), will grant the president all the authority and control of a military dictator; even the ability to launch nuclear strikes at will. Comparisons with Hitler and the Nazi's are simply accurate and factual. For instance consider the following, which were detailed in Aaron Russo's film America: Freedom to Fascism:-

1) Executive Order #11000, which gives the government the authority to force civilians to work in labour brigades under government supervision. Indeed the government has the authority to displace entire populations from towns or cities if it so wishes.
2) Executive Order #11921, giving the president the authority to declare a state of emergency that is neither named nor defined and that Congress cannot review for six months.
3) Senate Bill #1873, giving the government the authority to vaccinate people with untested vaccines against their will.
4) Congressman Sensenbrenner's Bill (HR 1528), a law which requires people to spy on their neighbours and/or wear a wire to this end. Refusal to obey carries a mandatory prison sentence of at least two years.

~~~

And before you start thinking, 'Well, at least this doesn't affect me'. Think again. In December 2007, as reported in The Times, the US said it has the legal authority to "kidnap" British citizens if they are wanted for crimes within the United States. Then there are FBI calls to have access to British identity data (as reported in The Guardian in January 2008) in keeping with plans to create an interational database of everyone.

What I'm suggesting is that the troubling prospect of martial law in the US seems to be part of a wider transnational momentom: a momentom geared towards extinguishing any hope we could have of living in a world where 'privacy' and 'liberty' mean anything. Both are under threat, in Britain as much as in the US. And unless this momentom is halted and indeed reversed, then prospects for the future look very bleak. Our government is literally taking liberties to such an extent that it would be quicker to detail the ones we still have rather than the ones that are now denied to us. I'll nevertheless remind you of one liberty that you've lost: the right to make private phone calls. Every conversation you have on your phone, every text message you send or receive, the government has lawful unrestricted access to the lot. This has to stop. We need to start demanding more of ourselves and of our government. There are historical precedents of governments and regimes that curbed liberties to this extent. We called them fascist and totalitarian and in the not too distant past we fought them. Today our government seems to be using them as a blueprint.

The Origin Of Life Made Easy

This video explains the prevailing scientific theory as to how life came into being on earth. It details how organic matter, over a period of around a billion years, emerged from inorganic sludge. Crucially, at no point in this process is a deity required. It's a fair question for the theists: what role does your God play in this process?

INTERVIEW: Aaron Russo

Aside from detailing the pure and unconstitutional tyranny of the Federal Reserve system in the US - a tyranny which put a group of unelected private bankers at the helm of the biggest corporation in the biggest economy on earth, enslaving the American people to a century's worth of unnecessary debt - America: Freedom to Fascism, by the late Aaron Russo, also warns of the impending threat of a comprehensive social dystopia from which no-one can realistically hope to escape. By all accounts, the wheels of this threat have been turning faster and faster since the events of 11th Sepember 2001. Listen to Russo talk about this and his film below.

CHOMSKY: On Corporations and Government

People are encouraged to take their anger and frustrations out on the government. But the real propogators of tyranny - who have 'demolished civil society', who have purposely marginalised people, creating the fabricated 'wants' that people spend most of their lives pursuing - are the powerful private coporations which back government. Whilst our media is filled with stories and scandals about government, these powerful, privately owned coporations remain hidden, out of sight, unnamed, untouchable. This is a genuine achievement of corporate propoganda. An achievement made possible because the people who own the media (and thereby control the flow of information and ideas, deciding what constitutes 'news') are those very same powerful, privately owned corporations. They tell you what they want you to know. What they don't want you to know remains hidden.

FILM: America: Freedom to Fascism, Links

For more information about the film visit the official site: America: Freedom to Fascism.

~

View the trailer below.

Watch the full film here for free on google video.

FILM: America: Freedom To Fascism

The question Russo started out asking when he began his film was whether or not there was an actual law requiring US citizens to file a 1040 tax return. That is, to pay tax on their labour - an income tax. He'd heard stories that the income tax was unconstitutional and unlawful. Whilst making the film, he found out that - it was. Below is a brief summary of some of the issues discussed in the film.

What is the Federal Reserve?

The Federal Reserve (often refered to as the Fed) issues money to the US government. In spite of its name, the Federal Reserve isn't federal. It's owned by a group of private bankers, not all of which are known. There's a false perception - which has been consciously fabricated - that the Federal Reserve is part of or run by the government. It isn't. It's a private company that operates in collusion with government, not under it. Someone in the film says that the government and the Federal Reserve are like a mafia cartel, one forcing people to pay up through the threat of violence and imprisonment, while the other collects the money. This is more true than you probably realise.

[I've also just read that the Federal Reserve bankers are behind the Bank of England (I've heard this said a few times), along with many other institutions such as the Bank of France, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland, the United Nations, 'the ultimate front for international banking interests.']

Money

In the past, you could take paper receipts (what we call money) into a bank and exchange it for gold. The receipt itself had no value beyond the gold (or whatever else) it represented. In effect, the gold was the money, not the recipt. However the Federal Reserve isn't backed by gold. It literally prints money out of thin air. This invariably produces inflation (someties called the 'hidden tax') because everytime more money is printed the value of the money already in circulation simultaneously diminishes. Since the value of the currency is diminished the cost of things increases.

~

"Paper is poverty...it is only the ghost of money, not money itself." Thomas Jefferson

Interest

The money loaned to the government by the Federal Reserve is loaned at interest. This means that for every dollar in public use interest must be paid to the Federal Reserve. In order to pay the interest more money must be printed, by the Federal Reserve, at interest. Thus creating an endless supply of revenue for the private bankers who own the Federal Reserve.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS)

This is the federal goverment agency that collects taxes, including the unlawful, unconstitutional income tax. Now, if you're like me, you'd probably assume that money collected through a manditory income tax would go towards things such as running government and paying for public services. This isn't so. The Grace Commission (a top to bottom investigation of government set up by Reagan when he entered office) reported of the income tax that "100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the federal debt."

Not one cent of this tax benefits a single US citizen. It all falls into the pockets of the private bankers who own the Federal Reserve. As ludicrous as it sounds, in effect, people work a significant portion of each year to pay the Federal Reserve for the privelidge of having a currency.

Income Tax

There is a lawful income tax. But it doesn't apply to money earned personally though one's labour. It's a tax on corporate gains. This is the meaning of income tax. In spite of this, in 2005, $278.5 billion was collected in legal corporate tax, whereas $927.2 billion was collected via the unconstitutional, unlawful labour tax.

1913

JP Morgan. Paul Warburg. John D Rockerfeller. According to Russo it was these bankers in 1913 who convinced Philander Knox, then secretary of state, to lie to the American people and declare that the 16th Ammendment had been ratified when it hadn't (read more about this here or here). The 16th Ammendment gave congress the power "to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived". The bankers knew that money gained through tax via the 16th Ammendment would belong to them.

The bankers then bribed senators to pass the Federal Reserve Act. They did this when many senators were at home during Christmas vacation. The act was passed and signed into law by president Woodrow Wilson. This is how a group of private bankers took complete control of the production of money in the US.

"Give me control of a nations money supply, and I care not who makes its laws." Mayer Rothschild

After thought: As Chomsky says, the two party political system is an illusion. Democrat and Republican are two sides of the same business faction (Chomsky also says that the same analysis applies to Britain, albeit to a lesser extent). The name of this business faction is the Federal Reserve - or New World Order, or Global Elite, or whatever you want to call these people.