Propaganda techniques used by FOX "News"

Dr. Cynthia Boaz lists 14 propaganda techniques that FOX "News" regularly uses in order to brainwash the American voting public. They are:

1. Panic mongering.
2. Character assassination/ad hominem
3. Projection/flipping
4. Rewriting history
   
5. Scapegoating/Othering
6. Conflating Violence With Power and Opposition to Violence With Weakness
   
7. Bullying
8. Confusion
9. Populism
10. Invoking the Christian God
11. Saturation
12. Disparaging education
13. Guilt by association
14. Diversion

Go read her definitions of each of these. They are short and easy to understand. Then ask yourself how big money and power has been able to use these propaganda techniques to damage American politics. These are the stock in trade of the FOX network.

An explanation for "Obama hatred" in the media

Why are the Conservatives so angry? What is it about President Obama that seems to unhinge them? Their angry political rhetoric has been a constant for years since it is a tool they use to get elected, but the level of the anger has sharply increased since Obama was inaugurated. This is not just a few select individuals. It seems to be a group characteristic of many of the extremist right-wing. This question has puzzled me for most of 2009.

But now I learn that the columnist Charles Krauthammer is one of the "Scoop" Jackson Democrats who switched to being a Neocon conservative from having been a speechwriter for Walter Mondale. Knowing a bit about the "Scoop" Jackson Democrats who went Republican, I think I can now answer that question that has been puzzling me. Krauthammer has published some of the most outlandishly insane columns since Obama was inaugurated and those columns have become increasingly outlandish and unhinged. That he was a Scoop Jackson Democrat explains his current outlandish thinking.

I didn't become aware of Krauthammer until he had already eaten the loco weed, so I was unaware that he had been a Scoop Jackson Democrat. That is a very illuminating event. The key characteristic of the Scoop Jackson Democrats that drove so many of them was to always oppose "evil" with force. Remember, Scoop Jackson was first elected to Congress in 1941. His tenure in Congress was shadowed by Pearl Harbor, WW II, and the nuclear bombing the "unrelentingly evil" Japanese. The attitudes of that period never left Jackson, and his aides were chosen to match.

The "Scoop" Jackson Neocon defectors from the Democratic Party to the Reaganites justified their move primarily because they objected strongly to the apparently feckless policies of Carter when he did not go after those they defined as "evil" with both feet and a nuke. Reagan promised what they wanted, so Wolfowitz, Pearl and so many switched over to the Republicans. As I said, I was unaware that Krauthammer was one of them.

To make a switch that extreme required strong motivation. And now I think they see Carter redux in Obama. Obama's not attacking "evil" the way Reagan and both Bush's promised to. In fact, he is claiming that he will back off, even reducing the blockade against Cuba and offering to open discussions with the Iranian government. And there is nothing they can do about it. Obama's currently in power as President. After the last eight years they are powerless to prevent him from - in their view - acting like he supports the evil doers by negotiating with the "evil" enemy. (Of course, those "evil" enemies declare that they are justified by the evil behavior of the oppressive Americans. That's impossible of course. Americans are a unique source of "good" in the world so such allegations must be lies and propaganda put out by the evil-doers.)

I think that's the motivation behind so many of the unhinged attitudes and statements from the extremist right-wing Republicans. They expect massive force to be applied to prevent the slightest gain by the evil-doers, and they don't see it in Obama in particular or in the Democrats/liberals who elected him in general. So they feel responsible for taking any possible action to limit the "damage" that Obama and the Democrats/liberals can do until they are replaced with people who know "what is really going on."

I'd say that goes to the misunderstanding that there actually is something that can be called an evil nation or an evil group. That misunderstanding personifies national policies and tries to put a single human face on those policies. It confuses the nature of an organization with a single human individual, a process that is totally inaccurate. That error is a problem because while individual humans can be evil, even when they rarely are, they don't see themselves that way. Instead they see themselves as the good ones, and when they fear strongly they attack what they fear.

When the target of their attacks is America, it feeds the American right-wing fantasy that the frightened attackers are evil as a group and they are attacking America based on their evil nature, not because they fear attack by an ignorant unthinking American colossus. Yet American representatives are frequently self-absorbed and generally ignorant of local conditions and proud of their ignorance.

Naturally in those conditions the enemy foreigners see the Americans as evil an take actions to defend themselves. The Americans then view this is unjustified attacks by evil foreigners, so no force expended to counter them is wrong or unjustified.That justifies the American use of military in preemptive invasions and justifies the use of torture on the recalcitrant evil-doers.

You'd think a board certified psychiatrist (Krauthammer) would recognize the inherent error of attempting to personify entire groups of people and even nations as "evil." I'd guess that he at some level realizes that if he did, his personal and financial support from the right-wing would disappear almost overnight. Certainly much or all of his ample paycheck and his personal acclaim would disappear. So he is in effect bought and paid for to be a right-wing propagandist, much as is Bill Kristol who frequently published his work. My bet is that he represses such thoughts and would be angry at reading what I have just written.

Similarly, Bill Kristol's rag, the Weekly Stnadard, would disappear overnight if Rupert Murdoch's subsidy money stopped, as would the Wall Street Journal's Editorial page in its current incarnation. Murdoch is one of the super wealthy defending his fortune from the masses. Much of the direstion and funding of the conservative ideologists is sources in such superwealthy individuals and families who are defending their fortunes and social standing.

I think that at the base the right-wing is so angry because that they firmly believe this mistaken idea that the word "evil" has meaning when applied to groups of people. It doesn't.They believe that groups can each be characterized by the face and image of a single individual. They don't accept that every group is made up of shifting coalitions of smaller groups, and that the spokesmen for the group merely represent the small subgroup that is momentarily dominant in that group. The more realistic view of every group is what makes negotiation frequently very effective to modify the policies and actions of the group. In the black-and-white personified view of a group, only overwhelming force can change the behavior of that group. it also misunderstands the nature of "evil."

Evil is a characteristic of individuals, and rather rare. "Evil" requires intent and a refusal to recognize the humanity of their victims. While groups can adopt policies that conduct evil actions, like slavery, such policies are instigated by people who refuse to recognize the humanity of their victims. The agents of those evil inhumanities may not be themselves evil. They are trained and motivated to the actions they conduct. Human beings are normally very dependent on the opinions of others around them, and tend to be quite empathic of those who they recognize as human. For such individuals to conduct truly evil actions on another results in guilt and is avoided. Generally even individuals who perform evil actions are doing so because they have been taught that the actions they take are justified and the victims are not themselves human. Any effective negotiator recognizes that motivation towards human empathy, or at least operates on that assumption.

What is common, however, is black or white thinking. That is especially common politically in Conservatives. In fact, the Conservative philosophies and ideologies are designed to attract people who do not make subtle distinctions among ideas. To them a person cannot be just a little bit evil or a little bit good. They must be totally good or totally evil. Since by definition we Americans are good, the others much be evil if they disagree with us. This is how the Neocons see American foreign policy.

If you believe that to be true, you must meet evil with overwhelming force to stop them. No limits on that force are justified since they are totally evil. Any compromise with total evil is a sur"24" is a good guy. Whatever HE does is good because he is the good guy!

Obama in their eyes is not one of the good guys or he'd be a Conservative Republican, so he and his liberal Democratic supporters are clearly evil. By definition, that means totally evil. There are no gradations of "a little evil" or "mostly evil." If one is evil, they are totally evil. There are no limits someone believing this will be held to. So the more extreme of the right-wingers - the active propagandists - have been spreading every story they can imagine to convince voters of the evil they think Obama.

Are these Conservatives really unhinged? Or do they really see themselves as the truly good guys battling the utterly evil with every weapon at their disposal? I don't think they are as insane as their crazy statements are. They are simply people who have been misled by propagandists who are using the propaganda fallacy of the excluded middle - that is, black and white thinking. They feel threatened by those who disagree with them, and they are using every tool in the book to defend themselves and those like them.

More from the FOX propaganda channel

It is really amazing how the FOX "news" people can drink the koolaide and appear to even believe their garbage. Jed I provides a really interesting exchange between FOX anchor Megyn Kelly and Bill Burton from the Obama campaign. As Jed I points out, watch how Kelly becomes infuriated as Burton calmly makes his points and lets her rant inanely.

What is the nature of time in historical and legal research?

Time. We all live through it, but do we understand it? Is there a difference in the nature of time in historical research and physics research? Mary L. Dudziak presents some interesting insights into the nature of time. Here is an example:

In the scholarship on law and war, time is seen as episodic. It is sometimes seen as linear and progressive, but the most common feature is that time is episodic. There are two different kinds of time: wartime and peacetime. Historical progression consists of moving from one kind of time to another. Law is thought to vary depending on what time it is. The relationship between citizen and state, the scope of rights, the extent of government power are thought to depend on whether it is wartime or peacetime.

A central metaphor is the swinging pendulum – swinging from strong protection of rights and weaker government power to weaker protection of rights and stronger government power. Moving from one time zone to the next is thought to cause the pendulum to begin swinging in a new direction. [Snip]

"Like everyone else," she writes, "historians assume that time exists, yet despite its obvious importance to historical writing – what is history but the account of how things change over time? – writers of history do not often inquire into the meaning of time itself." One of the difficulties in talking about time is that the words we use to describe it seem to presuppose an understanding of time. Hunt continues: "Time feels like an essential and defining feature of human life, yet when pressed to define it, we inevitably fall back upon duration, change, and ultimately, the tenses of our languages, past, present, and future."

Time has been central to other fields, especially physics, philosophy, and anthropology. Within fields, ideas about time have been highly contested. "Temporality enters our conceptual framework both as a descriptive component of our immediate experience and as a component of our theoretical description of the world," writes Lawrence Sklar.

Most of us simply believe that time just "IS" and that we understand it. But that assumption simply isn't true. Time is as much a linguistic phenomenon as it is a physical one, as is demonstrated above in its conception as "the tenses of our languages, past, present, and future."

Then you have to look at time in the manner it is applied in the different disciplines such as history and physics. In history time is seen as episodic, but in physics it is considered to be a constant and measurable dimension. Those views of time clearly conflict. Most of us are not even aware of the conflict, let alone which of the views we subscribe to.

Why do those views differ? It's because time performs different functions in the theories of history and of physics. So how is that possible?

It's because we are human beings. We don't ever know everything. We can't - as was described by Herbert A Simon in his theory of Bounded Rationality. We adopt the theory of time that makes the theories we are working in work.

The different views of time are each appropriate to the purposes to which we wish to achieve. The result is that physicists use a view of time as being constant and measurable, while historians and legal scholars use a view of time as being episodic. Very rarely do the two views contradict each other, unless the members on one discipline attempt to apply the theory appropriate to the other.

Since different views of time are rarely stated explicitly, the likelihood of confusion is high. This is especially true when politicians apply an inappropriate view by ignoring the experience of experts in the field without any understanding of what they are doing. Or more maliciously, that kind of confusion makes political propaganda quite easy to sell.

Consider how the Bush administration insists that we are at war with some strange amorphic enemy they call Terrorism - another effort is to create some enemy they call Islamo-fascism. It is blatantly an effort to change the nature of law and the relationship of the Presidency to the Federal Government. That propaganda fiction is what is behind the idea of the so-called Unitary Presidency.

By making the explicit nature of time and its application to theory, along with an understanding of the different possible views of time and when each is appropriate, the propaganda fiction the Bush administration is attempting become clear. There has not been a real shift to a state of war. War requires an existential threat to the nation, one that the various forms of banditry that the conservatives, Neocons and Bushies try to lean on to justify their actions simply don't achieve. That is the real fiction that is being created to justify the criminal actions of the current administration.

Ms. Dudziak's post presents an interesting analytical tool to those of us mere humans who attempt to deal with reality in spite of bounded rationality.

The essence of the Pentagon propaganda aimed at Americans

Glenn Greenwald returns to the story of the corps of retired military individuals who became the Pentagon's special propaganda corps on TV "News."

So the Pentagon would maintain a team of "military analysts" who reliably "carry their water" -- yet who were presented as independent analysts by the television and cable networks. By feeding only those pro-Government sources key information and giving them access -- even before responding to the press -- only those handpicked analysts would be valuable to the networks, and that, in turn, would ensure that only pro-Government sources were heard from. Meanwhile, the "less reliably friendly" ones -- frozen out by the Pentagon -- would be "weeded out" by the networks. The pro-Government military analysts would do what they were told because the Pentagon was "their bread and butter." These Pentagon-controlled analysts were used by the networks not only to comment on military matters -- and to do so almost always unchallenged -- but also even to shape and mold the networks' coverage choices.

Even a casual review of the DoD's documents leaves no doubt that this is exactly how the program worked. The military analysts most commonly used by MSNBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC routinely received instructions about what to say in their appearances from the Pentagon. As but one extreme though illustrative example, Dan Senor -- Fox News analyst and husband of CNN's Campbell Brown -- would literally ask Di Rita before his television appearances what he should say (7900, 7920-21), and submitted articles to him, such as one he wrote for The Weekly Standard about how great the war effort was going, and Di Rita would give him editing directions, which he obediently followed.

Among the most active analysts in this program were all three of the most commonly used MSNBC commentators -- Gen. Montgomery Meigs, Gen. Wayne Downing, and Col. Ken Allard.

This is clearly not a public information program run by the Pentagon. It consists of developing a channel of propaganda from the Pentagon directly into the Television news organizations, then manipulating the TV organizations so that they became dependent on the propaganda channel in place of TV controlled news reporters.

By doing this the Pentagon could quickly get it's views out to he public and immediately respond to and quash bad news that placed the Pentagon in a bad light.

No wonder the American people are so poorly informed about the invasion and Occupation of Iraq. The news media have been turned into nothing more than a government propaganda channel.

Up-is-Down, Black-is-White, Pollack and O'Hanlon are War Critics

The media has again demonstrated its refusal to research personal history of the people it covers. Case in point - when did Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon become War Critics and Bush opponents? This is truly 1984 thinking. Black is White, Up is down and war supporters are actually war critics. Glenn Greenwald does an excellent job of dissecting their actual views of Iraq and the Bush administration.

Think Progress has an interesting article on Tucker Carlson's defense of Pollack and O'Hanlon, particularly naming Glenn Greenwald and slamming "hysterical bloggers." Hey, that's what Carlson does. He earns his living as an administration cheerleader, and Pollack and O'Hanlon are the propaganda flavor of the day!

FOX's Bill O'Goebbels does it again

FOX's premier propagandist and master of "The Big Lie", Bill "O'Goebbles" O'Reilly compared Daily Kos to Capone, Mussolini. Media Matters for America describes the event.

Strange. Whenever I see the master propagandist, O'Goebbels, of the Republican Ministry of Propaganda (other wise known as FOX) I get a mental picture of him happily unloading people from cattle cars and sending them into a camp through a gateway that has a sign over it. The sign, translated from the German, says "Work Makes you Free."

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[If most Americans weren't too young to remember the pictures of the sign in German that said "Arbeit Macht Frei", today's Republican Party would not exist, and Bill O'Reilly might have to work for a living if he were out of prison.]

News from Baghdad Bergner, with the credibility of Baghdad Bob

In the interest of accurately informing the American public the U.S. Army offers the professional services of Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner. Emptywheel provides the latest in his explanations of what is happening in Iraq, interestingly designed to support the Bush administration's efforts to convince the American public that the only problem is Iraq is -- al Qaeda.

Is it something in the water in Baghdad that makes official spokespersons become totally detached from reality like Baghdad Bob was?

More media crap to scare the American public

Shock! Horror! Fear! There was a bombing attempt near a London West End night club!

Don't believe it? OH! Oh! CNN has the story, and it's not one car bomb. It's TWO! The first one was filled with nails and had two (not one, but two!) canisters of ... gasoline?

Wait a minute! Isn't that a suburban homeowner on the weekend with a carpentry project and the fuel for the lawn mower?

OK. So one Mercedes with nail and gasoline. But there was also a second nearby with propane canisters and nails inside. Coincidence? Well, CNN doesn't want its faithful viewers to think so.

For those of you not yet suspicions that we are hearing another media over-hyped provocation to fear, go check out Larry Johnson at his blog No Quarter.

For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incendiary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal.

And you wonder why I treat the so-called news media as delivering a load of really smelly crap? Especially FOX, CNN, and MSNBC.

There is NO TV NEWS that can be trusted. The do not deliver news to their viewers. Lies and over-hyped packaged efforts to manipulate the audiences' emotions? Yeah, that they deliver. But if you want news, turn off the TV.

Here is what even the so-called journalists on MSNBC think about the so-called news on their channels:
But the public will get what they ask for, right?

How can you tell he is al Qaeda? He's in Iraq and he's dead.

Back in the deep dark days of the Vietnam War "news" reports based on military handouts would tout the number of Viet Cong killed in the latest military operation. After several years, some reporters actually did some reporting and asked the military personnel submitting body counts up the chain of command how they knew the dead bodies were Viet Cong.

The reply? "They are dead, aren't they? What are they going to do? Argue?" When asked how they determined that some were civilians and some were Viet Cong, the reply was "Kill them all and let God sort out the bad guys." Here appears to be a story of this type. 17 killed, reported as al Qaeda by the military. But were they really just a local defense force killed by U.S. aviation as they were themselves attacking a local insurgent stronghold? Sure looks like the "Kill them all and let God sort them" program.

This week Glenn Greenwald makes the point that now the reporters just take the military press handouts in Iraq and print them as truth. I guess they have to. Wouldn't want to lose the propaganda war now, would we? I mean, look what happens when real reporters get loose and start telling that devastating "Truth."

Last week Glenn pointed out that recently every dead Iraqi has become a dead member of al Qaeda. Somehow the minor detail that there are over 20 different militias attacking Americans, both Shiite and Sunni seems to have been lost in the translation. I guess the U.S. government has decided that it is too difficult to specify that one attack on Americans was conducted by Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (Shiite), another by some Sunni local militia, and a third by foreign fighters who have been attracted to Iraq because that's the place to go if you want to kill Americans.

So the Army is doing us all a favor by "simplifying" the news so that even the dumbest or most radical of Americans (*cough* Bush or Cheney *cough*) can tell who is "us" and who is "them." The news media is just going along with the program.

Wouldn't want to be accused of rocking the boat by real reporting, now would they? Just keep it simple for the stupid ignorant public.

What's the old saying? If you can't trust your own government, who can you trust? As the Bush administration has proven, the answer is that you can trust no one. Especially not this Bush administration or the military they have sent to fight the useless war in Iraq. Nor can we trust the media to give us honest news.

But it isn't just our own government and media lying to us. The enemy is doing a better job of propaganda than the Americans. Here is from John Hughes writing June 20, 2007 at the Christian Science Monitor:

Now some US military officers, too, charge that a clever enemy media campaign is gaining traction and that the US is losing the war in information about battlefield operations.

A Marine officer whose credibility I trust cites an operation of success in the Fallujah region earlier this month that was reported as a disaster by US and British media companies. His unit had established a new precinct headquarters for Iraqi police, Army troops, and US Marines to patrol and protect a dedicated area. It was well received by the local populace and almost 200 Iraqis volunteered for police recruitment. Insurgents sought to disrupt it but were routed.

Meanwhile, in a separate firefight at a makeshift suicide vehicle factory, three separate suicide bombers were killed, two suicide trucks were discovered and blown up, and foreign and other fighters were killed or captured. On the defending side, one civilian and one policeman were wounded, with no US or other casualties. "The enemy was killed in his tracks; his best weapon was discovered before it could cause any harm," says the officer, "but Western media reported no enemy killed in these operations, 28 civilians killed, and 50 civilians wounded. We are getting demolished," the Marine officer says, "by nefarious enemy media outlets … 'reporters' or 'sources' for Arab and other news agencies either on insurgent payrolls or who have known sympathies with insurgent operations, and by collective Western media that are often being manipulated by enemy elements. What incredible economy of effort the enemy is afforded when US media is their megaphone. Why spend precious resources on developing your own propaganda machine when you can make your opponent's own news outlets scream your message louder than you could ever have hoped to do independently?"

Clearly the insurgents have taken to heart the message that their war is a war of words as well as arms.

So what is happening? The U.S. military can't get the news media to report anything except spoon-fed propaganda hand-outs, while the insurgents appear to be effectively getting the media to report their handouts while suppressing the real news that might support American efforts. In the meantime, those of us who depend on the media to provide some level of reliable and useful information can't find much of it in the major media sources.

Sure the media is getting manipulated on all sides. That is a problem the media has to solve. They aren't doing much of it, except for McClatchy News.

It really is frustrating.

The Mind of the Voter

How do voters make decisions who to vote for? Drew Weston says his research has one BIG answer. It's not rational.

The vision of mind that has captured the imagination of Democratic campaign strategists for much of the last 40 years -- a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions -- bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. When campaign strategists start from this vision of mind, their candidates typically lose.

Democrats typically bombard voters with laundry lists of issues, facts, figures, and policy positions, while Republicans offer them emotionally compelling appeals, whether to their values, principles, or prejudices. As a result, we have seen only one Democrat re-elected to the White House since Franklin Roosevelt -- Bill Clinton, who, like Roosevelt, understood how to connect with voters emotionally -- and only one Republican fail to do so -- George H.W. Bush, who ran like a Democrat and paid for it.

Essentially Drew Westen is suggesting that we choose our politicians based on emotion, then expect them to government based on logic and rationality. That sure would explain why polls show that American voters prefer Democratic positions even though conservatives keep winning election. Or at least, this is an alternative explanation to the one that the conservatives are stealing elections. I may add his explanation to those I consider useful, but I won't discard the clear evidence that "conservative" or "Republican" are just other ways of spelling the word "criminal."

Run! Hide! Sky is Falling! Iranians training Terrorists! Run! Run! Hide!! Kill Someone!!

Independent senator Joe Lieberman just told Bob Schieffer today on "Face the Nation" that the Iranians are training Iraqi terrorists to kill Americans at a location in Iraq. Joe made it sound like the Iranians are training al Qaeda and that we have to take out the training location as a part of the Global War on Terror. Bob responded to Joe's assertion by saying "I think you have made some news here today."

I find several things wrong with this. First, Joe Lieberman seems to be a strange person to provide this information to the public. I would have expected something like this to come from the White House, or at the lowest level, from the Pentagon. Why would the administration give this story to Joe Lieberman to put out on Sunday Morning, particularly a Sunday Morning in which Tony Snow has been on the talk show circuit? Second, I don't really trust Joe Lieberman. If he says it is raining, I'm going to walk to the window and look outside, and if it looks like rain, I'm going to double-check to see if it is really wet.

So I decided to check this story out on the Internet.

First Story: From today's The Independent we get a reprint of a story written by Phil Sands in Baghdad and originally published April 15, 2007. It is entitled "Iran trains 'thousands' of Iraqi insurgents.

Thousands of Iraqi Shias are being trained in advanced guerrilla warfare tactics at a secret camp near the Iranian capital, according to militants who say they have spent time there.

Through an Iraqi intermediary who also went to Iran, The Independent on Sunday spoke to two seasoned guerrilla fighters. They said large numbers of Mahdi Army volunteers loyal to the maverick Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr had gone to the base in Jalil Azad, near Tehran, for instruction.

Abu Amer, a 39-year-old Mahdi Army fighter who asked that his full name not be used, said he had been trained by instructors he believed were from Iran's Revolutionary Guard. "Shia fighters are being trained in modern fighting methods, such as use of powerful explosives and bringing down helicopters," he told the IoS. [Note: IoS is "Independent on Sunday."]

So it is an old story, and it involves an assertion that the Iranian Shia Revolutionary Guard is training members of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's militia in terrorist methods of fighting.

Besides being an old story, what is the surprise? The Mahdi Army is the major Iraqi Shia militia, is a well-known ally of the Iranian Shias, and has coordinated with the Iraqi government very little. The Mahdi Army is also a major opponent of the Sunni insurgents and can be expected to be fighting the Sunni militias as soon as the U.S. military stops fighting them. If there is any significant connection between al Qaeda, al Qaeda-in-Iraq, or any of the terrorists who have been involved in 9/11 or in the terrorist incidents in Europe it certainly has not been reported in the news. The Mahdi Army and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are long-time allies. This support for the Mahdi Army is no surprise, and no significant threat to America.

Second story: On April 11, 2007 FOX News published an AP story entitled "U.S. Military: Iran Training Iraqi Insurgents in Using Roadside Bombs."

BAGHDAD — Iran has been training Iraqi fighters in Iran on the assembly of deadly roadside bombs known as EFPs, the U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday.

"We know that they are being in fact manufactured and smuggled into this country, and we know that training does go on in Iran for people to learn how to assemble them and how to employ them. We know that training has gone on as recently as this past month from detainees debriefs," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the U.S. military spokesman, said at a weekly briefing.

EFP stands for explosively formed penetrator, deadly roadside bombs that hurl a fist-size lump of molten copper capable of piercing armor.

In January, U.S. officials said at least 170 U.S. soldiers had been killed by EFPs.

Caldwell also said on Wednesday that the U.S. military had evidence that Iranian intelligence agents were active in Iraq in funding, training and arming Shiite militia fighters.

OK. EFPs. There has been a consistent stream of misinformation in the American Press (and especially pushed by FOX) that has tried to claim that Explosively Formed Projectiles (EFP's) are so sophisticated that they can only come from Iran. I have previously debunked this at:

• How close are we now to war with Iran now?,
• Remember those EFPs that could only come from Iran?,
• Anyone can make an EFP and
• Are the EFP's actually from Iran? Or is it another Bush effort to start a new war?.

Third story, this time from CNN published April 12, 2007. The title is "Iraqi insurgents being trained in Iran, U.S. says."

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraqi insurgents are being trained in Iran to assemble weapons and Iranian-made weapons are still turning up in Iraq, the U.S. military said Wednesday.

The statement comes two months after the United States said it had asked Tehran to stop the flow of weapons into Iraq.

Coalition forces found a cache of Iranian rockets and grenade launchers in Baghdad on Tuesday, spokesman U.S. Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said Wednesday.

What can I say? This is more of the same effort to whip up war hysteria in the U.S. against Iran. First - rockets and grenade launchers are ubiquitous around the world. Like EFPs, any partially industrialized nation can make them. It is rarely necessary because the two largest arms suppliers in the world (the U.S. and Russia) are always ready to supply one side or the other of every conflict. When one of those two aren't ready to send out new weapons, the supply of used small arms that hangs over the market is tremendous. Every temporary peace treaty or armistice adds to it.

Second - Iran is sitting on the extremely long border of an unstable nation that is being pressured by its occupier and most significant enemy to become a base for an attack on Iran. Any nation that wanted to survive would be arming, training and supporting its allies in Iraq. That's exactly the same as our training and arming of the military and police in Mexico, Colombia, Haiti, and dozens of other states. The purpose of that effort is to make the supported nations more stable and less of a threat to the defending nation. Iran is one of the longest existing civilizations on Earth, and is not run by fools. They will take the necessary actions to defend themselves. The same is true for Moqtada al-Sadr. al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is the necessary militia intended to defend a minority Shia sect in an unstable, probably failed, nation state. The Mahdi Army needs to take its allies where it can find them, and the U.S. need not apply for ally status. Not that the Bush administration ever would. But the thing is, the actions of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are defensive, as are the actions of Mogtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. They and their small arms are not threats to the American Homeland, and wouldn't bother the U.S. military if we didn't have them in Iraq for the purpose of threatening Iran.

I'm not saying that Iran could not be a real threat to the United States, though I really doubt that Iran would ever be as big a threat as North Korea (which can't currently effectively attack the U.S. due to distance) or Pakistan, or Libya, or India for that matter. I am saying that the propaganda being pushed on the American public to allow military strikes against Iran do not address that possibility of a threat in any way.

That the Revolutionary Guard might train Mahdi Army members is no surprise and no real danger to the American Homeland, and for all the scary headings, this is all the reports have to offer. Iranians providing low-level military training to their Iraqi co-religionists. The same Mahdi Militia members could get the same training (and on much the same equipment, interestingly enough) from the U.S. military if they joined the Iraqi Army or Iraqi Police Forces, and many of them do exactly that. The only likely difference is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards probably don't need to offer as much training on defusing EFPs as the Americans do. Just building them.

Other related stories: Additional similar stories can be found at Google, but they are all older than the ones from April 2007 or from the same time and repeat the same material.

My conclusion

I don't think that Joe Lieberman did make any real news today. He seems to be attempting to recycle the anti-Iranian propaganda stories that popped up in the American Press last April. So the question is why is he attempting to recycle the old stories? [Note: this may be the first of several efforts to recycle the old stories. That's how I would manage this kind of propaganda operation. Sourcing it with Sen. Lieberman makes me suspicious that there is no new Intelligence being marketed and will be none.]

My best guess is that Joe is practicing as the Independent Senator from Connecticut and from Israel. He wants the U.S. to attack Iran because Iran is the direct source of much of the Middle East threat to Israel. While I don't think Iran is a really significant threat to the U.S., it is a major source of danger to Israel. Israelis have a really good reason to fear Iran, and if they can get someone to take Iran on they at least feel safer. As a result, I suspect that someone handed Joe the previous stories from April and has been trying to get him to recycle them. Joe's motivation is very similar to that of the NeoCons in general (or the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) who really believed that if America were to attack and occupy the clearly weak nation of Iraq then America could put long-term military pressure on Iran and keep Iran bottled up as a threat to its neighbors.

Widespread public fear tends to bring right-wing militarists to the surface in politics. Those same right-wing militarists do not want interference from others who would sacrifice some of the ability to conduct military activities in order to reduce tensions between opposing nations. Iran has been supporting Hamas and increasing the fear in Israel, and the Israeli militarists have found allies in the American militarists who were surfaced by the attack on 9/11.

Joe Lieberman has found a home in the right-wing militarist elements of both America and Israel, (as have the American NeoCons) and I doubt that he sees much Joe sees much distinction between the two nations.

That's why Joe dropped his (dated) so-called Intelligence on "Face the Nation" today. That's also why we can safely ignore it.

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Addendum June 11, 2007 8:13 AM CDT
Here is a report from "The Newshoggers" about The Sen. from Israel's ridiculous statement on "Face the Nation" yesterday. In it Cernig points to the new article at NRO by the well-known NeoCon, Michael Ledeen, advocating an American attack on Iran in support of Israel. [Note: this is the same NeoCon "Michael Ledeen" who has long-term close connections with Italian Intelligence services as well as with Dick Cheney and is suspected of connection with the forged "Niger Letters" used by the Bush administration as justification for the peremptory invasion of Iraq.]

The speed with which Ledeen got his article out in support of Joe Lieberman demonstrates the fact that Lieberman's statement on FtN yesterday really was the opening salvo of a propaganda effort to get America to attack Israel's enemy, Iran.

Glenn Greenwald also identified the sources of Lieberman's propaganda effort. What I found particularly interesting was these quotations:

"Israeli Minister Avigdor Lieberman (whose duties include strategic affairs and Iran) visited the U.S. earlier this year, and gave an interview to The New York Times in which he said this:

"Our first task is to convince Western countries to adopt a tough approach to the Iranian problem," which he called "the biggest threat facing the Jewish people since the Second World War.” [Minister] Lieberman insisted that negotiations with Iran were worthless: "The dialogue with Iran will be a 100-percent failure, just like it was with North Korea."

The same month, the current Israeli Prime Minister echoed those sentiments:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Friday compared Iran's nuclear ambitions and threats against Israel with the policies of Nazi Germany and criticized world leaders who maintain relations with Iran's president. . . .

Israel has identified Iran as the greatest threat to the Jewish state. Israel's concerns have heightened since the election of Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who frequently calls for the destruction of Israel and has questioned whether the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews took place.

It should be clear that the panicky propaganda of the Israeli right-wing militarists do not really create a problem that the U.S. needs to go to war with Iran to solve. In fact, the opposite is much more likely to be the case. The militaristic panic out of the Israeli right-wing extremists and their American fellow-travelers is very likely the source of many of the problems America is facing, and much of the solution will involve getting those right-wingers out of American decision-making and expose their propaganda every time they surface.

"We didn't have this kind of biography in the year 2000"

Carl Bernstein is out pimping his new book on Hillary Clinton. Here, from Media Matters of America, we get a few of his comments as he tries to get people to buy his screed.

"We didn't have this kind of biography in the year 2000, and the country has suffered catastrophically, because they didn't know who or what they were voting for in some instances."
-- Carl Bernstein, Paula Zahn Now, 6/7/06

BILL O'REILLY: I have to tell you, I still don't know what to make of the woman even after -- even after reading the book. That's how complicated this woman is.

CARL BERNSTEIN: That's terrific.
-- The O'Reilly Factor, 6/5/07

Gee. Do you think that Carl will publish a similar set of books on Rudi Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and/or John McCain?

My bet is he won't. Not that the subjects wouldn't be at least as interesting, and certainly are not as well-known, but he probably can't find a wealthy right-wing angel to pay him to write it, pay to get it published (Regnery Press? Knopf Publishing?) and then to buy his books by the gross so that they can give them to the shredders their friends.

Bill O'Reilly worse than Father Coughin of 1930's

Media Researchers at Indiana University have documented that Bill O'Reilly calls a person or a group a derogatory name on the average every 6.8 seconds in his opening editorials. According to Think Progress the researchers used techniques for researching the propaganda content of six months worth of his editorials.

Researchers found that O’Reilly "was prone to inject fear into his commentaries and quick to resort to name-calling. He also frequently assigned roles or attributes — such as ‘villians’ or downright ‘evil’ — to people and groups."

No surprise to anyone except Bill himself.

ABC News and why the press is not to be trusted.

Glenn Greenwald describes the shoddy and unsupported news report from ABC News claiming that Iran might have a nuke by 2009. The news report makes an unsupported assertion that

Iran has more than tripled its ability to produce enriched uranium in the last three months, adding some 1,000 centrifuges which are used to separate radioactive particles from the raw material.

The development means Iran could have enough material for a nuclear bomb by 2009, sources familiar with the dramatic upgrade tell ABC News.

Note that these assertions were from an anonymous source and are not accompanied by any hint that the source had any real knowledge on the subject. I've heard more reliable gossip from a drunk who I did not know who was sitting at a hotel bar.

Yet, as Glenn goes on to point out, this was quickly picked up by the liar-in-chief at one of his press conferences and used to try to rachet American fear of the Iranians up to the point of war, just as he did with Iraq.

This is shoddy news reporting. I wonder if it originated from a Bush partisan?