Libby Case could bring back Memories of Nazi Propaganda control by Media!

[KoKo]

Journalists may testify in CIA leak case

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer Mon Jan 1, 4:04 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Some journalists who made careers out of questioning government officials and bearing witness to history may soon find themselves answering questions from prosecutors as key witnesses in the
CIA leak case.

Ten or more reporters from some of the most prominent news organizations could be called to testify in the perjury and obstruction case of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. It's rare enough for reporters to become witnesses. But the Libby case is even more unusual because journalists will be dueling witnesses — some called by the defense team, some by prosecutors.

-snip-

Jurors likely won't hear much about the leak itself because the original source, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, has already confirmed his role and Libby is not charged with the leak. But the trial is certain to renew questions about whether the administration used reporters to drum up support for the war.

Roy Peter Clark, a scholar at the Poynter Institute, a school and resource center for working journalists, said he worries about the fallout from the trial. If it's perceived that reporters grant anonymity to officials engaged in political gamesmanship, prosecutors might be more likely to subpoena them in cases where anonymity was granted in serious issues of public importance.

"This case, it's magnified by the fact that it's in Washington and the status of the players," Clark said. "It's a bizarre and I'd say dangerous case."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070101/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/c...


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FROM: "Nuremberg Trials"
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The prosecution case: propaganda as an instrument of aggression

The prosecution case, argued by Drexel Sprecher, an American, placed considerable stress on the role of media propaganda in enabling the Hitler regime to prepare and carry out aggressive wars. “The use made by the Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack. They used the press, after their earlier conquests, as a means for further influencing foreign politics and in maneuvering for the following aggression.”

Fritzsche was named head of the German Press Division in 1938 after the “primitive military-like” methods of his predecessor, Alfred Ingemar Berndt, created “a noticeable crisis in confidence of the German people in the trustworthiness of its press,” in Fritzsche’s words.

The Nuremberg prosecutor detailed the propaganda campaigns taken up by the German media, under Fritzsche’s immediate supervision, in relation to various acts of foreign aggression, including the incorporation of Bohemia and Moravia (1939) and the invasions of Poland (1939) and Yugoslavia and the USSR (1941).

The Nazi press propaganda campaign preceding the invasion of Poland involved manufacturing or manipulating complaints of the German minority in that country. Fritzsche explains: “Concerning this the leading German newspapers, upon the basis of directions given out in the so-called ‘daily parole,’ brought out the following publicity with great emphasis: (1) cruelty and terror against Germans and the extermination of Germans in Poland; (2) forced labor of thousands of German men and women in Poland; (3) Poland, land of servitude and disorder; the desertion of Polish soldiers; the increased inflation in Poland; (4) provocation of frontier clashes upon direction of the Polish Government; the Polish lust to conquer; (5) persecution of Czechs and Ukrainians by Poland.”

In regard to the Nazi propaganda surrounding the Yugoslav events, the prosecutor noted the “customary definitions, lies, incitement and threats, and the usual attempt to divide and weaken the victim.”
Fritzsche describes how he received instructions on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941: “ Ribbentrop informed us that the war against the Soviet Union would start that same day and asked the German press to present the war against the Soviet Union as a preventative war for the defense of the Fatherland, as a war which was forced upon us through the immediate danger of an attack of the Soviet Union against Germany. The claim that this was a preventative war was later repeated by the newspapers which received their instructions from me during the usual daily parole of the Reich Press Chief. I, myself, have also given this presentation of the cause of the war in my regular broadcasts

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/nure-a16_prn.shtml

[autorank]

1. Nominated - most intelligent post of the new year...

...that I've seen and that covers more than a few. The juxtaposition is just perfect.

Don't expect the paper boy to hit your porch anymore;)

Let them "twist slowly, slowly in the wind" in a sort of "modified hang out"...I'm liking it already.

Excellent!

[porphyrian]

2. I'll kick that. - n/t

[H2O Man]

3. Well done.

The trial will be fascinating, in part because of how the journalists involved will tell part of the story about the OVP/WHIG operation against the Wilsons, and in part because of the way other journalists will begin to report other, as of yet untold (in the corporate media) parts of the story.

[Me.]

4. The Problem Is

When the press becomes collaborators (If it's perceived that reporters grant anonymity to officials engaged in political gamesmanship, prosecutors might be more likely to subpoena them in cases ) they become part of the problem, and deserve to be challenged. I put this to Lucy Dalgleish, who is fervent about the rights of the press, because either she and her colleagues exercise peer oversight, promoting the truth we used to expect from reporters, or we will all lose in the end. The willing compliance of much of the media puts them in the aiding and abetting category.

[autorank]

6. I agree. As I'm fond of quoting, Orson Welles said of the Hollywood Red Scare:

"In Europe people betrayed their friends to save their lives. In Hollywood, people do it to save their swimming pools."

There's a low key but detectable ariviste sensibility about the media. They're smug new members of what they perceive to be the ruling class. Little do they know that they've just become high profile purvey rs of the great lies that will unravel soon. Two fragments: an article in the WaPost says DC area folks are really taking to more tropical plants in view of climate change; a video on AOL's home page saying the ice break up at the North Pole will open up new sea lanes for commerce. We're not to far from eco catastrophes that will make these lies apparent. There is an acute collective memory . Why didn't they tell us? Why did they lie deliberately? Well, that means they conspired;) with their employers to deceive us, to prevent remediation...just like Bush did in NOLA by not tellingly the city the levies were breaking when he knew the city had stopped evacuating. There will be a reckoning. We will all remember.

[H2O Man]

9. The problem is also

when the identity as "journalist" is a cover for a person who actually works for another employer. An example that sheds a bit of light on this was when Judith Miller reported on the Iraq war. There was no supervision by editors during much of that time. Her work was, however, coordinated and supervised by two people from the Bush administration.

[DemReadingDU]

5. yahoo link

hope this works, the original link was broken

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070102/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/cia_leak_reporters_3

[KoKo]

10. Thanks for refreshed link. Don't know what happened with the other one

and I had to leave just after I posted so didn't catch it in time to edit.

:hi:

[Peace Patriot]

7. We need to make a distinction between journalism and the war profiteering

corporate news monopolies. The latter don't DO journalism, and are not entitled to First Amendment protections. They are corporations, not people. And the highly paid hacks of these power consortiums are not permitted to publish the truth. They should ask their corporate bosses for "free speech" before they ask we, the people, and our Constitution to protect them. Their pompous claims to special protection are just laughable.

In California, corporate predators pushed Prop. 13 as a measure to protect old people from losing their homes due to increasing property taxes, but what Prop. 13 was really for was for Exxon-Mobile, Shell and other giant multinational corporations to be freed of taxes on enormous tracts of California ag land. "Property rights" was the false flag. But why should corporations have property rights, or any rights? They are not people. What the Corporate Rulers have done is to appropriate the individual human and civil rights that were established by our Revolution and that many individuals have died for. Thomas Jefferson & Co. would roll over in their graves. They never intended "free speech" for gigantic multinational corporations that act like independent monarchies and are killing our democracy, not to mention our planet. "Free speech' is a false flag. Every one of these giant corporate news monopolies needs to be dismantled--their monopolies busted, their corporate charters pulled, and their licenses to use the public airwaves rescinded. They are a bloody menace! Many of them are in the weapons industry, and all of them are entangled in the "military-industrial complex" in one way or another. They are profiting from war and selling war! That's what their so-called "reporters" do--they sell war, and, when one turns out to be a disaster, they sell the next one. And this is not going to stop until we deal with their bosses and the powerful financial monsters that they have created.

[KoKo]

11. Well said. Addressing that so-called "mistake" of Corporate Personhood

that happened way back in the 1800's I believe...with a Supreme Court decision that was murky. And Corporations have used that murky reading ever since.(At least that's what I remember about the origins of Corporate Personhood..don't have link) Situation has reached crisis proportions.

I liked your analogy of "False Flag." Kind of puts it into a perspective that most people can understand even if they don't "get" the meaning of Corporate Personhood and how these multi-nationals all work together with the Think Tanks to push agenda through Local Government and Congress.

NYT's is independently owned but one wonders how long they've had this "agenda" that would allow a Judith Miller to be so independent. Some have thought that both NYT's and WaPo have had CIA Mockingbirders there for decades. Given what we here out on the "internets" have seen of shoddy and "agenda" reporting since the Clinton days ...it seems that it's not a "conspiracy theory" to imagine both Corporate and Government Agenda working hand in hand with these Newspapers and TV Media. It's even possible now for many of us to identify the "likely suspects" in the Punditocracy and Reporting world who are the "stenographers."

[Peace Patriot]

13. I began to notice the identical phraseology of the war profiteering corporate

news monopolies on Hugo Chavez of Venezuela--that seemed right out of the Bush State Dept., although I traced it to a fascist Catholic Cardinal in Venezuela who spent his career in the Vatican finance office, and was one of the few Vatican officials ever to be expelled (he was fired during the Italian fascist banking scandal of the 1980s). The phrase was "According to his critics...increasingly authoritarian," that or something similar, with never any identification of "his critics." AP, WaPo, the WSJ, the NYT--they all used it, and were apparently consulting Opus Dei for their information.

There is no evidence--zero, zilch--that Hugo Chavez is "increasingly authoritarian." He just won re-election with 63% of the votes in the most highly monitored elections on earth (--elections, I would like to point out, conducted on electronic voting machines but with a FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT HAND-COUNT of the paper ballots!) (--know how much of OUR electronic vote is audited? 0% to 1%, depending on the stranglehold that Bushite corporations, Diebold/ES&S, have on local/state election officials and legislators.) Hugo Chavez's policies, which strictly adhere to the tenets of Venezuela's very fine Constitution, have the overwhelming support of the Venezuelan people, who are devoted to democracy. So, one thing you are doing in calling Chavez a "dictator" is insulting Venezuelan voters, Venezuela's extensive grass roots democracy, and the many intelligent and progressive people who work in the Chavez government. Would THEY support a dictator--they who have worked so hard to destroy fascism in Venezuela? Chavez's only crime is that he represents the great of majority of Venezuelans, who want Venezuela's oil revenues to benefit everyone, not just the rich elite, and who are demanding social justice for the vast poor population that has been brutally oppressed in the past and never before served by government. It is those ideas that our war profiteering corporate news monopolies don't want to gain any currency here. And they have acted IN CONCERT, using the same phrases over and over again, to demonize ONE of the leaders of this democracy movement in South America. There are many others--it is a continent-wide revolution. "Friend of Fidel Castro" is another. Chavez has many friends, including the first indigenous president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, the newly elected leftist economist Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Lula da Silva, the former steelworker president of Brazil, and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, who has helped Argentina recover from crippling World Bank debt. Only Fidel Castro is ever mentioned in articles about Chavez.

I've been aware of the collusion of our corporate news monopolies on other themes--notably the Bush Junta's 9/11 story, the lies about WMDs in Iraq, and the non-transparent, Bushite corporate controlled (s)election of 2004. But these common phrases on Hugo Chavez--"increasingly authoritarian," "friend of Castro"--have confirmed it for me. They are not a free press. They are propaganda monopolies in a conspiracy to keep our population ignorant, disempowered and disenfranchised. In the case of Chavez, they have denied our people--including our business people--knowledge of the momentous changes occurring throughout Latin America--changes for the better, toward democracy, and also a vast sea change toward self-determination and rejection of US domination and exploitation. Our corporate news monopolies' articles on Chavez are DISINFORMATION--and whether they are using "talking points" from Cardinal Lara, or Exxon-Mobile, or the Bush Cartel State Department--it doesn't matter. It is NOT reporting. It is crap. And the reporters and columnists and commentators who vomit this crap all over our country, in the employ of the five rightwing billionaire CEOs who own all the media, are NOT entitled to First Amendment protection, in their capacity as Corporate Ruler toadies and lapdogs, in my opinion. If they were to speak independently, of course they would deserve that protection--but not while they are on salary to people who abhor and are trying to destroy our democracy.

I am a Jeffersonian Democrat and a fierce defender of the First Amendment. I believe that there are NO EXCEPTIONS for freedom of speech for individual citizens. I would remove all libel laws, all laws curtailing "subversive" speech, and any and all strictly verbal expression of ideas, even hate speech. If society wants to prosecute the subversive or the hateful, they have to catch them in the act, not in their words. I believe that, in a context of TRUE free speech--in which everyone has access to the public venue, and in which neither filthy moneyed interests nor any other faction has a monopoly of such access--the best ideas will rise and the worst will be discarded. That's what democracy is all about. The corporate news monopolies are ANTI-DEMOCRATIC and should be dismantled--lawfully, by consensus of the people. They are NOT entitled to "free speech" or "journalistic" protections. And I hope that Libby's Treasongate trial helps make that clear to the American people. In so far as individual reporters tell the truth, and/or resisted being used for treason, they are deserving of praise, and I think that some of them may have shown courage or wisdom in that regard. But the overall corruption of government, led by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, using the corporate news monopolies as direct conduits of lies, deception and disinformation needs to be exposed and ended. The chief problem in that regard, from the point of view of the public and its information needs, is the monopolistic power of the rightwing billionaires who control all news and opinion, and who SHARE the Bush Junta's contempt for the American people and hatred of democracy.

[Me.]

12. They've Been Getting Away With It For Far Too Long

Corporate news is a huge problem just as a great many corporations are. It’s not a new story, but they will have to be dealt with once and for all.

“This held as a legal doctrine until the end of the 1800s, and even after that largely held until the Reagan Revolution, when corporations began reaching back to an obscure headnote written by a corrupt Supreme Court clerk in an otherwise obscure railroad tax case in 1886.

But today corporations are asserting that they -- and only they -- should stand side-by-side with humans in having access to the Bill of Rights. Nike asserted before the Supreme Court last year, as Sinclair Broadcasting did in a press release last month, that these corporations have First Amendment rights of free speech. Dow Chemical in a case it took to the Supreme Court asserted it has Fourth Amendment privacy rights and could refuse to allow the EPA to do surprise inspections of its facilities. J.C. Penney asserted before the Supreme Court that it had a Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from discrimination -- the Fourteenth Amendment was passed to free the slaves after the Civil War -- and that communities that were trying to keep out chain stores were practicing illegal discrimination. Tobacco and asbestos companies asserted that they had Fifth Amendment rights to keep secret what they knew about the dangers of their products. With the exception of the Nike case, all of these attempts to obtain human rights for corporations were successful, and now they wield this huge club against government that was meant to protect relatively helpless and fragile human beings.” Cont…

“In this book, Hewes, who was a teenager at the time of the Tea Party (which he named in 1834), tells that the whole point of this million-dollar (in today's terms) act of vandalism was to protest a tax cut -- a corporate tax break -- that the British had given to the East India Company, which would allow it to unfairly compete with and wipe out the thousands of small entrepreneurial tea importers and tea shops that dotted the colonies.cont…

“But in the 1886 case, we are told by over a hundred years' worth of history books and law books, the Supreme Court decided that corporations were, in fact, persons, and entitled to human rights, including the right of equal protection under the law -- freedom from discrimination.” Cont…

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/01/int05004.html

[KoKo]

14. Thanks for the link for the "Corporate Personhood" origins.

The worse is that the media most watch and read is shrinking as advertising dollars are stretched thin. MSNBC was supposed to abandon it's "news" to "crime stories" and move Matthews and Olbermann over to it's sister CNBC. Don't know whats happened with that since Olbermann's ratings have gone up.

Networks have dropped their News Bureaus in other contries long ago to cut costs and now we see the likes of "entertainer" Couric as an anchor repeating RW Think Tank and Administration Talking Points. ABC is pretty much lost as any impartiality has long since gone with Jennings death.
Brian Williams is still tied to GE and CNN's heart belongs to Blitzer and the Think Tanks.

As the amount of diversified news goes off TV or is put on back pages of NYT, LAT, WaPo and other newspapers we are forced to go to the internet. BUT most Americans just don't have the time to sit in front of a Computer all day trying to parse through it all. Until some kind of ability to get what the liberal and moderate internet sites are reporting on Screen on Home TV or in Print we are going to have an ignorant population.

That's why we have got to get the FCC to Re-Regulate and allow diversity back into the mediums most Americans are used to getting their news from. Until then we are left with trying to make whatever difference we can here...and those of us who have some time to keep linking and parsing will have to do double duty to keep getting the truth out here on the internet in whatever way we can.

[Hubert Flottz]

8. K&R

Never Again My Arse!

[KoKo]

15. Kick for what "Corporate Personhood" is all about.............!

[Me.]

16. I'll Second That

It's important for people to know and Id bet most don't know how far it's gone

[bobthedrummer]

17. kick