From Think Progress

On April 20, The New York Times published an expose revealing the Pentagon’s secret program using retired military analysts to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” Since that time, the media have been disappointingly silent on the story and their roles in the Pentagon’s program.

Today, a reporter finally asked White House spokeswoman Dana Perino about the Pentagon’s propaganda. In response, Perino attempted to defend the program:

But I would say that one of the things that we try to do in the administration is get information out to a variety of people so that everybody else can call them and ask their opinion about something. And I don’t think that that should be against the law. And I think that it’s absolutely appropriate to provide information to people who are seeking it and are going to be providing their opinions on it.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that all of those military analysts ever agreed with the administration. I think you can go back and look and think that a lot of their analysis was pretty tough on the administration. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk to people.

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From Rolling Stone
By Matt Taibbi

I pulled into the church parking lot a little after 6:00 p.m., at more or less the last possible minute. The previous half hour or so I’d spent dawdling in my car outside a Goodwill department store off Route 410 in San Antonio, clinging to some inane sports talk show piping over my car radio — anything to hold off my plunge into Religion.

There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people milling around its swinging door. Some of these were carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already pounding, skipped a few extra beats. The church circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why did I need bedding? What else had I missed?

“Excuse me,” I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking man with a name tag who was standing near the front of the bus. “I see everyone has blankets. I didn’t bring any. Is this going to be a problem?”

The man was about five feet one and had glassy eyes. He looked up at me and smiled queerly.

“Name?” he said.

“Collins,” I said. “Matthew Collins.”

He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the appropriate sheet of paper, and X-ed me out with a highlighter. “Don’t worry, Matthew,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “A wonderful woman named Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You just tell her what you need when you get there.”

I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.

Read more Jesus

From The Asia Times
By Jim Lobe

With the United States intelligence community and Congressional investigators warning that the greatest threat to the US is developing in the tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, appeals for the George W Bush administration to reassess its “war on terror” and Pakistan’s place in it are growing.
In particular, US policymakers should place more confidence in plans by Pakistan’s newly elected, civilian-led government to deal with tribal leaders, including those associated with the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist forces, in the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), according to critics.

In addition, Washington should be prepared to provide substantially more aid to Pakistan, particularly development assistance for FATA, which, these analysts argue, has not been given nearly the attention that it deserves.

“There is a very narrow window of opportunity here to make the strategic shift in American policy toward Pakistan that many of us have been arguing for since 2005,” said Brian Katulis, a South Asia specialist at the Center for American Progress, a predominantly Democratic think-tank, who just returned from Pakistan after extensive consultations with leaders in the new government, including regional authorities who have been negotiating with Taliban and tribal leaders in the frontier areas.

“We’ve diverted too many of our resources to Iraq and not paid enough attention to events in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said. “This is where the central front in the war on terror is; it isn’t in Iraq.”

Read more Pakistan Policy

From True Blue Liberal
By Alex Abella

Back when neoconservatives ruled Washington (was it really just five years ago?), some conservative observers compared the controversial Iraqi banker-politician Ahmed Chalabi to George Washington. As head of the largest Iraqi exile group, The Iraqi National Congress, he had convinced the Bush Administration that invading Iraq would be a cakewalk, that invading Americans would be greeted as liberators, not conquerors. Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, Vice President Dick Cheney, President Bush, all saw Chalabi as the man who would be hailed as the founding father of his country. Nowadays, four thousand American casualties and a trillion dollars later, we see that that Chalabi is really today’s Talleyrand.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1814, when the great powers of Europe wanted to dismember France, Talleyrand, a French nobleman, was able to preserve the territorial integrity of France through sheer diplomacy alone. Like Talleyrand, Chalabi used his persuasiveness to save his country, leading the mightiest military power in the world to depose the tyrant of his people, and in the process restore his own family fortune—all through skilful diplomacy. For, what is diplomacy if not carefully calibrated lies to secure advantage over an adversary?

Chalabi’s story, like so many in official Washington over the past 60 years, is linked to RAND–specifically, to RAND’s brilliant nuclear strategist and founding father of neoconservatism, Albert Wohlstetter.

Back to Iraq

Ahmed Chalabi’s rise to prominence in Washington circles came at the instigation of Albert Wohlstetter, who met Chalabi in Paul Wolfowitz’s office. Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, a friend of Wolfowitz and Wohlstetter, had already talked up the exile to both men, knowing they would see the value of Chalabi’s acquaintance. Wolfowitz, Wohlstetter, and Lewis shared similar values and background; each of them secular Jews, defenders of Israel, devoted to reason and to the spread of American values. Wohlstetter and Lewis shared a common fascination with how Kemal Atatürk created the modern, secular Turkish state — seeing it as a model for the new Iraq Chalabi would lead. Read the rest of this entry »

From Common Dreams
By Sheldon Rampton

The Pentagon military analyst program unveiled in last week’s exposé by David Barstow in the New York Times was not just unethical but illegal. It violates, for starters, specific restrictions that Congress has been placing in its annual appropriation bills every year since 1951. According to those restrictions, “No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress.”

As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.” By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.

These concerns about “covert propaganda” were also the basis for the GAO’s strong standard for determining when government-funded video news releases are illegal:

The failure of an agency to identify itself as the source of a prepackaged news story misleads the viewing public by encouraging the viewing audience to believe that the broadcasting news organization developed the information. The prepackaged news stories are purposefully designed to be indistinguishable from news segments broadcast to the public. When the television viewing public does not know that the stories they watched on television news programs about the government were in fact prepared by the government, the stories are, in this sense, no longer purely factual — the essential fact of attribution is missing.

In a related analysis, the GAO explained that “The publicity or propaganda restriction helps to mark the boundary between an agency making information available to the public and agencies creating news reports unbeknownst to the receiving audience.”

Read more Pundit Scandal

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

It has now been more than ten days since the New York Times exposed the Pentagon’s domestic propaganda program involving retired generals and, still, not a single major news network has even mentioned the story to their viewers, let alone responded to the numerous questions surrounding their own behavior. This steadfast blackout occurs despite the fact that the Pentagon propaganda program almost certainly violates numerous federal laws; both Democratic presidential candidates sternly denounced the Pentagon’s conduct; and Congressional inquiries are already underway, all of which forced the Pentagon to announce that it suspended its program.

Still, there has not been a peep from the major news networks at the center of the storm, the integrity of whose reporting on the Iraq war is directly implicated by this story. Even establishment media defender Howard Kurtz called their ongoing failure to cover this story “pathetic.”

Like Fox and CBS, NBC News outright refused to answer any questions about the allegations when asked by the NYT’s David Bartsow, and its prime time anchor, Brian Williams, has delivered seven broadcasts since the story was published and has not uttered a word to NBC’s viewers about any of it. Yesterday, I wrote about an entry on Williams’ blog — which he calls “The Daily Nightly” — in which Williams found the time to mock one frivolous cultural puff piece after the next in the Sunday edition of the NYT, even as he still had refused even to acknowledge the expose in last Sunday’s NYT that calls into serious question the truthfulness and reliability of his “journalism.”

After I wrote about Williams’ blog item yesterday, his blog was deluged with commenters angrily demanding to know why he has failed to address the NYT expose. In response, Williams wrote a new blog item last night in which he purports — finally — to respond to the story, and I can’t recommend highly enough that it be read by anyone wanting to understand how our establishment journalist class thinks and acts.

Read more Military Analyst Story

From The Dissident Voice
By Joshua Frank

This is what it has come to.

Hillary Clinton seems poised to damage Barack Obama so badly in the Democratic primary that he will end up flopping around like a suffocating trout in the general election when he faces John McCain. From the progressive left, the Green Party, totally strapped for cash and lacking an effective platform, seems intent on running former Democrat Cynthia McKinney for president, known in mainstream America only for her ugly spat with Capital Hill police. And of course there is Ralph Nader who is running another quixotic campaign on sound issues and moral fortitude, but with absolutely no grassroots base to form a rebellion against the powers that be — a campaign that will inevitably become mired in expensive ballot-access battles that will drag on far beyond the election itself.

It’s a dismal time for electoral politics indeed. Candidates that oppose the Iraq war, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the oil cartel, the banking industry, the PATRIOT Act and the death penalty are shoved to the political margins, starved for cash, lacking an organized movement and are ignored by the press.

Back in 2000, during Nader’s most spirited presidential run, anti-globalization sentiment, fueled by the WTO protests, was coming to a head. Nader spoke forcefully about the concerns of the activists that took to the streets of Seattle one year prior, addressing the corporate takeover of our natural resources, the exploitation of labor in developing countries and the fallacies of neoliberalism at home. For many, Nader’s candidacy was less about Nader the persona and more about what his campaign represented. Sadly, the reality today is much different than it was eight years ago.

Unless Hillary Clinton somehow pulls out the Democratic nomination, Nader’s struggling campaign will likely draw only a fraction of the support it did in 2004, despite what a few cherry-picked polls are saying about his chances. Barack Obama has all but sealed up the progressive vote, riding on his airy rhetoric of “change” and “hope”. This no doubt will deflate Nader’s campaign even further.

Read more Piffle

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Cynthia Tucker

There will be no apologies from this precinct. I have long argued that harsh voter ID laws are unfair, unconstitutional and un-American, and I will continue to say so.

The fact that a group of wealthy male jurists favors suppression of the franchise hardly makes it right. After all, the Founding Fathers believed that only white men should have the vote. They weren’t right, either.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a wrongheaded ruling that upholds Indiana’s voter ID law, widely believed the harshest in the nation. For now, the decision validates similar laws in several other states, including Georgia.

It’s no coincidence that Republicans rule in most state Legislatures that have pushed through these laws. For decades — since the civil rights movement enabled black voting rights, in fact — Republicans have used the guise of protecting against “voter fraud” to justify laws that harass, intimidate and invalidate voters of color. Having given up trying to woo black and brown voters with progressive politics, the GOP has resorted to procedures that suppress their vote.

The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, then a young Arizona attorney active in Republican politics and an adviser to Barry Goldwater, was accused of harassing black and Latino voters at the polls in Phoenix in 1962. Testifying before the Senate in 1986, after Rehnquist had been nominated as chief justice, James Brosnahan, a former assistant U.S. attorney, said that he had investigated complaints about behavior by Rehnquist and others that “was designed to reduce the number of black and Hispanic voters by confrontation and intimidation.” (Rehnquist denied the charge and was confirmed.)

Read more Voter ID Laws

From The Free Press
By Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

The US Supreme Court has just dealt a serious blow to voters’ rights that could help put John McCain in the White House by eliminating tens of thousands of voters who generally vote Democratic.

By 6-3 the Court has upheld an Indiana law that requires citizens to present a photo identification card in order to vote. Florida, Michigan, Louisiana, Georgia, Hawaii and South Dakota have similar laws. Though it’s unlikely, as many as two dozen other states could add them by election day. Other states, like Ohio, have less stringent ID requirements than Indiana’s, but still have certain restrictions that are strongly opposed by voter rights advocates.

The decision turns back two centuries of jurisprudence that has accepted a registered voter’s signature as sufficient identification for casting a ballot. By matching that signature against one given at registration, and with harsh penalties for ballot stuffing, the Justices confirmed in their lead opinion that there is “no evidence” for the kind of widespread voter fraud Republican partisans have used to justify the demand for photo ID.

Voting rights activists have long argued that since photo ID can cost money, or may demand expensive trips to government agencies, the requirement constitutes a “poll tax.” Taxes on the right to vote were used for a century to prevent blacks and others from voting in the south and elsewhere. They were specifically banned by the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1964.

But the Court’s lead opinion, written by Justice Stevens, normally a liberal, said that though rare, the “risk of voter fraud” was nonetheless “real” and that there was “no question about the legitimacy or importance of the state’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters.” The burden of obtaining a voter ID, said the court, was not so difficult as to be deemed unConstitutional. Ohio election protection Attorney Cliff Arnebeck believes Stevens joined the decision to divide the Court’s conservative majority, and to leave the door open for further litigation.

Read more Supreme Court

From uExpress
By Ted Rall

“Why are we talking about this in the White House?” John Ashcroft nervously asked his fellow members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee. (The Principals were Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General Ashcroft.)

“History will not judge this kindly,” Ashcroft predicted.

“This” is torture. Against innocent people. Conducted by CIA agents and American soldiers and marines. Sanctioned by legal opinions issued by Ashcroft’s Justice Department. Directly ordered by George W. Bush.

An April 11th report by ABC News describes how CIA agents, asked by previous presidents to carry out illegal “black ops” actions (torture and killings), had become tired of getting hung out to dry whenever their dirty deeds were revealed by the press. When the Bush Administration asked the CIA to work over prisoners captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, Director George Tenet demanded legal cover. The Justice Department complied by issuing a classified 2002 memo, the so-called “Golden Shield,” authored by Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee. “Enhanced interrogation techniques”–i.e., torture–were legal, Bybee assured the CIA.

Read more Arrest Bush