Category: Ethics in Government

By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, media-general, Peace and War

It’s all over the blogosphere–but not in the mainstream news: Cheney’s office considered sending in heavily armed Navy Seals on boats disguised as Iranian craft to create an artificial incident so the US could go to war against Iran, according to Seymour Hersh. The project was rejected, as Americans killing Americans didn’t sound appealing. But that they even considered it makes you wonder–this goes beyond even the deceptions used to get us into Iraq.

And why is the msm so silent on this?

Hersh is one of the most distinguished investigative journalists of our time–the person who broke the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam war, more than 30 years ago, and who has broken several stories about various nefarious deeds in the Bush administration.

If this allegation is true (as I suspect it is), it is without question grounds for impeachment and probably criminal prosecution. But where’s the investigation?

In the first five pages of Google results for hersh hormuz seals, there is exactly one bit of coverage of Hersh’s very serious allegation in the mainstream media, from WQXT, St. Augustine, Florida. There was a story on today’s Democracy Now, which is where I heard about it–but that’s not the mainstream media.

Today, my local paper had an article about Britney Spears’ father continuing legal oversight over her finances. Why is this news, while a plot to take an illegal action and disguise it as the work of a hostile government in order to enter a war goes unmentioned?

I don’t give a flying f about Brittney–but I sure do care about actions on the part of our government that lead to lives lost, decrease the effectiveness of our diplomacy, channel the resources of the US government into all the wrong places, etc.

Video clip and transcript of Hersh’s interview at the Campus Progress journalism conference. Here’s a quick bit:

HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.

Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

Philly.com (online edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News) reports that the mayor of Atlantic City was sentenced to three years probation for veterans-benefits fraud.

What I find most interesting is that the city government as an overall entity seems to have a problem with ethics:

Levy resigned in October from the mayoralty of the beachside resort city, concluding a year in which three City Council members were convicted on corruption charges, another was arrested for driving drunk in a city vehicle and a fifth was indicted for his part in an attempt to blackmail a sixth councilman.

Hmmm…could it be that legalized gambling fosters a climate where money counts more than virtue? Gambling has been Atlantic City’s major industry for decades.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

Remember when Bush Ran in 2000, saying he’d be “a uniter, not a divider”? Hint: it was well before he started saying anyone who isn’t with us is against us.

Yet from Day One, this illegal administration has run the most partisan White House in my memory–and yes, I remember Johnson and Nixon. The latest partisan scandal (among too many to count, including the firing of US Attorneys, the persecution of Alabama’s Democratic governor, the packing of the supreme court and the entire federal judicial system with ideologues, the outing of Valerie Plame to get even with Joe Wilson, and about a hundred other examples) is the report that prospective hires at the Justice Department were screened for political conformity.

This made the mainstream news (I saw it in my local paper)–but I didn’t find a mainstream source quickly. Here’s the story as it appeared on Huffington Post.

Here’s a little excerpt:

As early as 2002, career Justice employees complained to department officials that Bush administration political appointees had largely taken over the hiring process for summer interns and so-called Honors Program jobs for newly graduated law students. For years, job applicants had been judged on their grades, the quality of their law schools, their legal clerkships and other experiences.

But in 2002, many applicants who identified themselves as Democrats or were members of liberal-leaning organizations were rejected while GOP loyalists with fewer legal skills were hired, the report found. Of 911 students who applied for full-time Honors jobs that year, 100 were identified as liberal–and 80 were rejected. By comparison, 46 were identified as conservative, and only four didn’t get a job offer.

The real mystery is why the Democrats haven’t been in open rebellion. Any Democrat who tried 1/10 of Bush’s shenanigans would have been impeached long ago.

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By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Peace and War, Politics

I’ve been calling for the impeachment of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for five or six years now. OK, so I’m not a Democratic Party bigwig, and they don’t have to listen to me. But Ramsey Clark was Attorney General under LBJ, and he’s been sounding the call at least as long as I have.

Why should these men be impeached?
A very abbreviated list:

  • A long litany of unconstitutional acts that have made us a “rogue state”: illegal wars, torture of prisoners, attacks on civil liberties, etc.
  • Massive corruption and favoritism, not to mention attacks on perceived “enemies” (shades of Richard Nixon)
  • Attacking the patriotism of those who disagree with them
  • Holding themselves, their private contractors,a nd their offshore prisons above the law
  • Interfering with elections
  • Firing US Attorneys who chose not to divert resources into their pet (and baseless) fight on non-existent voter fraud among Democrats and minorities
  • Either gross incompetence, gross malfeasance, or both in the response to Katrina

    • Again, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The current gang of ruffians gets my vote for the worst administration in U.S. history. Even Warren Harding did a better job.

    So therefore I take great pleasure in reading in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer that Congressman Dennis Kucinich, perhaps Congress’ most honorable member, has finally introduced an impeachment resolution–35 counts of it! A reader comment notes it took 3 hours to read the whole thing.

    Of course, the Judiciary Committee has done nothing with his resolution last year to impeach Cheney, and will likely do nothing with this one unless Bush is foolish enough to actually try to start a war with Iran. I still don’t understand why the Dems have had no guts on this, even after they won a majority in Congress in 2006. What have they been waiting for?

    I am not going to defend in any way Bill Clinton’s lying under oath about his inability to keep his pants zipped
    –but if that was grounds for impeachment, the far larger crimes of Bush and Cheney should have been on the table a long time ago.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, media-general, Peace and War

    More on the scandal I wrote about Sunday regarding the Pentagon’s shills infiltrating the media in the run-up to the Iraq war.

    This from Jim Lehrer’s Online News Report. Lehrer’s guest was John Stauber, founder/executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy and author of Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq and other books:

    What happened here was a psy-ops campaign, an incredible government propaganda campaign whereby Donald Rumsfeld and Torie Clark, the head of public relations for the Pentagon, designed a program to recruit 75, at least 75 former military officers, as your report said, most of them now lobbyists or consultants to military contractors, and insert them, beginning in 2002, before the attack on Iraq was even launched, into the major networks to manage the messages, to be surrogates.

    And that’s the words that are actually used, “message multipliers” for the secretary of defense and for the Pentagon. This program continues right up to now.

    JUDY WOODRUFF: And is the essence of this that what they did was — what the Pentagon did was illegal?

    JOHN STAUBER: Yes, what they did was illegal. Now, the Pentagon might contest that, but we’ve had various laws on the books in our country going back to the 1920s. It is illegal for the U.S. government to propagandize citizens in this way.

    In my opinion, this war could have never been sold if it were not for this sophisticated propaganda campaign. And what we need is congressional investigation of not just this Pentagon military analyst program, but all the rest of the deception and propaganda that came out of the Bush administration and out of the Pentagon that allowed them to sell and manage this war.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Media Ethics, media-general, Peace and War, Uncategorized

    A recent front-page story in the New York Times reveals that the Pentagon has gone far beyond paying Armstrong Williams. A whole gaggle of retired military leaders posing as neutral pundits turn out to have been under the sway of the Pentagon:

    Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

    In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

    The Times stops short of accusing these military figures of taking money directly from the Pentagon. But they were, in a real sense, embedded, and these relationships were not disclosed to the electronic news outlets who hired them. Democracy Now reported two days later that the military flew some of these people to Iraq at its own expense and conducted one-sided briefings there.

    Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, one of two commentators on the DN segment, says the media was completely lacking in due diligence, inviting these pundits without asking questions:

    I think the extent of the briefings was somewhat shocking and the blase attitude from the networks. They didn’t care what military contractors these guys were representing when they were out at the studio. They didn’t care that the Pentagon was flying them on their own dime to Iraq. Just basic journalistic judgment was completely lacking here. So I think the story is really about a media failure, more than a Pentagon failure. The Pentagon did exactly what you would expect to do, taking advantage of this media bias in favor of having more and more generals on the air when the country is at war.

    And when the commentators were in a position to refute the Pentagon, they stayed silent. Hart again:

    One of the most shocking things in the story is that in early 2003, these guys got a briefing about WMDs, and the government said, “We actually don’t have hard evidence right now that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.” Did any of them go on the air and say that? No. The Pentagon, I think, had total control and total faith that these guys would deliver the message that they intended to deliver to the public, and that’s exactly what they did, and the media did very little to counteract this overwhelming propaganda campaign from the Pentagon.

    And there were consequences to those who strayed from the party line:

    Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

    On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the ”twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give ”a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox ”may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was ”not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

    Mr. Cowan said he was ”precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, ”simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

    And still, the Democrats won’t talk about impeachment. Considering the extremely bellicose noises this same government and its media allies are making about Iran, we had bloody well put that impeachment discussion “back on the table.”

    And still, as Arianna Huffington points out, most of the mainstream media not only ducks responsibility for its many failures leading up to and continuing through the war, but doesn’t even acknowledge there’s a problem.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Social and Economic Justice

    Greg Palast’s latest column discusses a secret summit among the Presidents of the US and Mexico and Canada’s Prime Minister along with heads of major corporations to further push the NAFTA trade agenda.

    Here’s the part I find really disturbing-=both as a union member (NWU) and as a consumer:

    As trade expert Maude Barlow explained to me, the new NAFTA Highway will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet aims of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SPP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade with China.

    It’s not a long article. Go and read it.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Media Ethics, Peace and War, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized

    Here’s a website that shows falsely captioned photos as well as photos cropped in such a way as to completely change their meaning. The topic is the violence in Tibet–but according to this site, many of the pictures are actually from India or Nepal, or show things other than the Chinese anti-Tibet violence that they purport to.

    Let me state my biases upfront:

  • I am a supporter of the Free Tibet movement, and have been so since 1978 when I learned about Chinese repression there
  • I have been increasingly aware of what appears to be a disinformation campaign by the Chinese government to discredit the Free Tibet movement–and I recognize the possibility that this website could be part of that disinformation campaign
  • I attended a speech by the Dalai Lama in 1982, and in 1993 my wife and I hosted a young Tibetan woman for over a year, as part of the Tibetan Refugee Resettlement Project

    • Still, even as a supporter of Tibetan freedom, I am appalled to see this apparent media distortion, even though it helps “my side.”

    I’m no photo expert, and it’s possible that this site is offering Photoshopped doctoring of its own, or is mislabeling the pictures. But my gut tells me the captions on this website are accurate, and that the mainstream media in the US, Germany, France, Asia, and UK have run photos that claim to show one thing and actually show something completely different. It’s not the first time this has happened; one prominent example in the relatively recent past is the toppling of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad–made to look like a huge an enthusiastic, locally originated event that was actually staged by US Marines in front of a small crowd that may have been comprised primarily of supporters of the discredited Ahmed Chalabi.

    Which does make me wonder whether the CIA or similar organizations have their fingers in this apparent distortion of the Tibet reportage, and wonder who has been feeding the media these islabeled or cropped-to-distortion images.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government, Politics

    If McCain is an example of “straight talk,” I shudder to think of what the crooked guys look like.

    Here’s another lie and amplification of what it means. According to Cliff Schecter on AlterNet, McCain’s official calendar had him missing a key vote on the neocon agenda because he was in California–BUT he managed to show up for 15 other votes of lesser importance that day.

    Schecter writes,

    According to the Washington Post database tracking Senate “vote missers,” McCain had missed a whopping 261 of 468 votes, or almost 56 percent, by March 2008. McCain is understandably busy running for president — and all the candidates running for that highest of offices in 2008 have shown a poor record in showing up for votes. But number of votes missed is one thing; which votes you miss is another. McCain the maverick has missed votes in a way that betrays a calculated strategy: namely, to avoid going on the record when doing so would be politically risky.

    Not exactly a “profile in courage”–or integrity.

    Meanwhile, in the we-knew-that-already department, for the first time, the mainstream media has clearly delivered the link between torture policies and the highest levels of government. Here’s the AP story directly linking Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice to the torture policies, expressed in a way that made even John Ashcroft (who was present, as was Colin Powell) uncomfortable.

    And just what does it take to get our spineless Congressional leadership to get off the dime and start impeachment procedings?

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics in Government

    Demcoracy Now reports on a particularly nasty initiative to hack into bloggers. Here’s the full report:

    Military Considers Recruiting & Hiring Bloggers

    In media news, new questions are being raised over the relationship between the Pentagon and bloggers. Wired.com has uncovered a 2006 study written for the U.S. Special Operations Command that suggests the military should clandestinely recruit or hire prominent bloggers. The report stated “Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering.” The report also suggested the Pentagon hack blogs that promote messages that are antithetical to U.S. interests. The report went on to say: “Hacking the site and subtly changing the messages and data—merely a few words or phrases—may be sufficient to begin destroying the blogger’s credibility with the audience. “

    At first I thought it might be an April Fool’s joke, especially when a Google search for pentagon blogging hack didn’t turn up anything useful. But I traced back the quote to its authors, James Kinniburgh and Dorothy Denning, and from there easily located the source document. It’s right there, on page 35.

    Is this what we’re paying our tax dollars to fund? For the government to go into our blogs and twist our words for their own purposes? Is this why the founders of our country incorporated the First Amendment? Does anyone else remember what George Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith did for a living in the totalitarian 1984? He rewrote published newspapers to parrot the government’s current line, working in the “Ministry of Truth”

    Bloggers–do NOT stand for this! If I find they’ve been int my blog, I’ll be on the phone with the ACLU and the National Writers Union immediately.

    Once again, this administration is using 1984 as a playbook. It’s time to say NO.

    PS–to bloggers thinking about taking the Pentagon’s pay for placing soft stories, all I can say is…DONT. The blogosphere is all about credibility; this would kill yours faster than you can say “Armstrong Williams.”

    Bloggers need to protest en masse, and make it clear that we will not stand for this.

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