Unplug the Signal: The Truth Will Not Be Televised
by Nathan Janes
PUPAGANDA.com

A flow of information is constantly streaming from the television set; a bombardment of words and pictures.  The speed at which this information is communicated makes it easy for the signal to take control, switching the viewer’s brain to stand-by as information is absorbed without analysis or question. Today the television’s constant signal shapes the conclusions of the masses and produces the collective norm.  The signal prescribes what is news and what is truth through the words of so-called experts and authorities, gelding the consciousness and independent thoughts of those subjected to it. Through television, the masses can be made to accept the most monstrous distortions of reality. The signal is a chill wind of continuous oppression over the minds of the masses. It controls the management of society and culture, creating uniformity across all subjects.

The fuel for this vehicle of mass deception is a technique known as perception management where an array of psychological techniques are used to alter the truth, leading the viewer to a desired conclusion. Some call this spin or propaganda while others know it as lying.  According to Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister for Adolph Hitler, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it… It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Most of what can be found on the nightly news is nothing but advertisements selling more government and a false reality that benefits only those in control. Television is the dictator of information; newspaper and radio are the whisper campaign of the television’s message.

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Obama staffer wants ‘cognitive infiltration’ of 9/11 conspiracy groups
By Daniel Tencer
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
The Raw Story

In a 2008 academic paper, President Barack Obama’s appointee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs advocated “cognitive infiltration” of groups that advocate “conspiracy theories” like the ones surrounding 9/11.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.

As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,” according to the White House Web site.

Sunstein’s article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that “our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a ‘crippled epistemology,’ in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources.”

By “crippled epistemology” Sunstein means that people who believe in conspiracy theories have a limited number of sources of information that they trust.  Therefore, Sunstein argued in the article, it would not work to simply refute the conspiracy theories in public — the very sources that conspiracy theorists believe would have to be infiltrated.

Sunstein, whose article focuses largely on the 9/11 conspiracy theories, suggests that the government “enlist nongovernmental officials in the effort to rebut the theories.  It might ensure that credible independent experts offer the rebuttal, rather than government officials themselves.  There is a tradeoff between credibility and control, however.  The price of credibility is that government cannot be seen to control the independent experts.”

Download a PDF of the article here.

Sunstein argued that “government might undertake (legal) tactics for breaking up the tight cognitive clusters of extremist theories.” He suggested that “government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.”

“We expect such tactics from undercover cops, or FBI,” Estrin writes at the Rag Blog, expressing surprise that “a high-level presidential advisor” would support such a strategy.

Estrin notes that Sunstein advocates in his article for the infiltration of “extremist” groups so that it undermines the groups’ confidence to the extent that “new recruits will be suspect and participants in the group’s virtual networks will doubt each other’s bona fides.”

Sunstein has been the target of numerous “conspiracy theories” himself, mostly from the right wing political echo chamber, with conservative talking heads claiming he favors enacting “a second Bill of Rights” that would do away with the Second Amendment.  Sunstein’s recent book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, was criticized by some on the right as “a blueprint for online censorship.”

Sunstein “wants to hold blogs and web hosting services accountable for the remarks of commenters on websites while altering libel laws to make it easier to sue for spreading ‘rumors,’” wrote Ed Lasky at American Thinker.

Original article here.

Exclusive Interview with FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds
By Khatchig Mouradian
The Armenian Weekly
August 21, 2009

On April 23, 2007, I sat down in Washington, D.C. with FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds for an extensive interview, which was published in the Armenian Weekly and on ZNet and widely circulated. On Aug. 18, 2009, I conducted a follow-up phone interview with Edmonds, who was visiting New Zealand. The interview is an overview of what has transpired in her case since 2007, with emphasis on her deposition in the Schmidt vs. Krikorian case in Ohio earlier this month.

Edmonds, an FBI language specialist, was fired from her job with the FBI’s Washington Field Office in March 2002. Her crime was reporting security breaches, cover-ups, blocking of intelligence, and the bribery of U.S. individuals including high-ranking officials. The “state secrets privilege” has often been invoked to block court proceedings on her case, and the U.S. Congress has even been gagged to prevent further discussion.Edmonds uncovered, for example, a covert relationship between Turkish groups and former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who reportedly received tens of thousands of dollars in bribes in return for withdrawing the Armenian Genocide Resolution from the House floor in 2000.

Born in Iran in 1970, Edmonds received her BA in criminal justice and psychology from George Washington University, and her MA in public policy and international commerce from George Mason University. She is the founder and director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) and in 2006 received the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. She speaks Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani.

Below is the full transcript of the follow-up interview.

***

Khatchig Mouradian—I asked you in 2007 what had changed during the five years since 2002, when you first contacted the Senate Judiciary Committee to reveal the story on Turkish bribery of high-level U.S. officials. You said, “There has been no hearing and nobody has been held accountable. We are basically where we started…” Two more years have passed, we have a new president, and I have to ask the same question again. Has there been any change?

Sibel Edmonds—Nothing has changed. As far as the Congress is concerned, the Democrats have been the majority since November 2006 and I have had zero interest from Congress on having hearings—any hearings—on this issue, whether it’s the states secrets privilege portion of it or the involved corruption cases. The current majority has been at least as bad as the previous one. At least the Republicans were gutsy enough to come and say, We’re not going to touch this. But the new majority is not saying anything!

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Fascist Morning Joe: Tase, Take 9/11 Truthers to Concentration Camps
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
March 4, 2008

In response to the arrest of a 9/11 demonstrator during a Bill Clinton appearance in Corpus Christi, corporate media shill and former Republican Congress critter Joe Scarborough and his co-hosts demanded 9/11 truthers be tasered and taken to detention camps. “Where’s the taser?” Joe wants to know as MSNBC runs footage of the man’s arrest. “Tase him!” His co-host adds: “Led away in handcuffs and hopefully taken to one of those secret prisons in eastern Europe and never to be heard from again… I hope we have a special prison for 9/11 conspiracy theorists.”

In other words, the corporate behemoth MSNBC believes people who disagree with the government not only do not deserve First Amendment rights and protection, but also believe demonstrators should be kidnapped by the CIA and taken to a “special prison” to be tortured and ultimately killed, as this is the fate many who disappear suffer.

Is it possible the United States is about to become like Pinochet’s Chile? In 1973, thanks to the CIA and U.S. corporations, Chile became a brutal police state. Chileans were subjected to systematic and massive violations of their most basic human rights. Official figures indicate that nearly 3,000 people were executed, disappeared or lost their lives as a result of torture and political violence. It would seem “Morning Joe” would enthusiastically welcome the installation of a fascist state where those he disagrees with are disappeared, tortured, and murdered.

Last October, CNN host Glenn Beck called 9/11 truthers “insane” and “dangerous anarchists” in response to 9/11 truthers infiltrating the Real Time with Bill Maher show. “These truthers are exactly the kind of people who want to rock this nation’s foundation, tear us apart and plant the seeds of dissatisfaction in all of us… [this is] the kind of group a Timothy McVeigh would come from,” declared Beck, setting a precedence followed this morning by the scurrilous Joe Scarborough and his complaisant minions.

“In thousands of 9/11 protests over the course of the last six years, not one person has been arrested for violent conduct,” Steve Watson wrote at the time. “To cart blanches suggest that the truth movement is dangerous, ‘a threat to children’ and intent on violence is extremely inflammatory and indicates just how afraid of investigating and debating the facts people like Glen Beck actually are.”

The core of the 9/11 truth movement is composed of highly educated and progressive individuals who are strictly opposed to violence and are intent on protecting a free and peaceful society which has been under dire threat ever since the attacks of 9/11 and the ensuing cover up.

Furthermore the movement represents the very antithesis of anarchism in that it is actively seeking to restore and protect our traditional form of government which has been usurped by an unaccountable cabal that continues to operate outside of Constitutional law and with little restraint using 9/11 as justification.

Indeed, Beck and Scarborough are calling for such draconian measures simply because the 9/11 truth movement is comprised “of highly educated and progressive individuals who are strictly opposed to violence” and because of this they must be demonized as a threat to national security and thus the government must kidnap, torture, and murder them. Although Scarborough did not suggest 9/11 truth “idiots” be murdered, this is of course the ultimate fate of those who oppose militarized fascism, now gaining speed in the United States.

Original article here.

*******ACTION ITEM*******

Let MSNBC know what you think about their reporter’s comments about sending people who question 9/11 to secret prisons. This is the same network and Scarborough is the same anchor who last year hosted calls for Rosie O’Donnell’s death for questioning 9/11.

MSNBC

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Mr. Phil Griffin,
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Steve Capus,
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steve.capus@nbc.com

ACLU: 900,000 Names on U.S. Terror Watch Lists

February 27, 2008
Justin Rood Reports

The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

If that number is accurate, it would be an all-time high, exponentially more than the 100,000 names on the list several years ago. But the number needs to be taken with a grain of salt: after all, the ACLU doesn’t keep the list, the FBI does, and the bureau doesn’t generally like to talk about it. (Indeed, the FBI has not yet responded to a request for comment for this post.)

But if the ACLU’s figure isn’t accurate, it’s also unlikely to be off by that much. Last September, the ACLU notes, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General reported the FBI watch list was at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month.

The ACLU says they “extrapolated” from those figures to determine the list’s current size. ACLU’s Barry Steinhardt added that the group had spoken privately with people familiar with the watch list, who told them the 900,000 figure was not outlandish.

In the past, The FBI has told ABC News that the size of its watch list is classified. Despite that, both the bureau and the DoJ Inspector General have published the total figure in unclassified reports.

There’s no doubt the FBI’s list is growing: just last June, ABC News reported it was at 509,000 names, based on information in an unclassified FBI budget document.

But strangely, the list may be growing not because of swelling legions of foreign terrorists. Instead, it appears the FBI may be adding tens of thousands of names belonging to U.S. persons it suspects of being domestic terrorists — people who have no known ties to international terrorist organizations.

A separate entity, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), keeps a list of all names believed to belong to terrorists linked to international terror groups. That list, which was at 100,000 names in 2003, grew to 465,000 names by last June – but since then has grown only modestly, according to NCTC spokesman Carl Kropf. Today, Kropf said that list stands at roughly 500,000 names. (Unlike the FBI, the NCTC does not maintain that the size of its watch list is classified information.)

The FBI takes that list and adds to it a new collection of names which belong to U.S. persons believed to be domestic terrorists: people who have links to terrorism but not to any international group.

Last June, the NCTC was responsible for putting 465,000 names on the watch list, and the FBI appeared to add an additional 44,000. By September, extrapolating from the DoJ Inspector General’s report, the FBI’s contribution appears to have grown to somewhere north of 200,000 names.

Today – if the ACLU is to be believed – the FBI’s contribution may be as high as 417,000 names. Which would raise a new question: Where are so many domestic terrorists coming from? Or do they simply use more aliases than foreign terrorists?

Update: The FBI responded late Wednesday afternoon. Spokesman Chad Kolton did not dispute the ACLU’s figure, but noted that the watch list contains names, aliases and name variations for individuals. The number of people on the watch list, he said, was around 300,000, and only 5 percent are U.S. persons. Kolton noted that the list is “regularly reviewed for accuracy.” Last year the bureau removed 100,000 records “related to people cleared of any nexus with terrorism,” Kolton said.

Original article here.

Published on Tuesday, February 12, 2008 by The Hillsboro Times-Gazette (Ohio)

The New Crime of Thinking in the US
by Gary D. Barnett

• “Ideologically based violence: The term ‘ideologically based violence’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.”

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Bush is trying to set up OpEdNews as a “terrorist recruiter.”
by Ed Martin

www.opednews.com

Barbara Peterson’s Nov. 14 article points out how Bush’s Homeland Security is trying to make the case that web sites that publish articles questioning the events of 9/11 are terrorist recruiters. Given Bush’s recourse to calling everyone who doesn’t agree with him a terrorist and combined with his executive order confiscating all the worldly goods of anyone who disagrees with him, Barbara Peterson’s article didn’t get the attention it deserves.

The sinister effect of what Bush is doing is that Barbara’s article, this article, and others here on OpEdNews that question the motives of the Bush administration and the events of 9/11 can be determined to be “terrorist recruiters.”

I’m quoting and paraphrasing from Barbara’s article, but it is well worth repeating. Here’s the part from her article that makes the connection:

At a Homeland Security sub-committee hearing on terrorism risk assessment where the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth website is presented along with Taliban recruitment sites, training manuals and bomb making techniques, Representative Jane Harmon asked Bruce Hoffman, Chairman of the Rand Corporation in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency, “So this movement develops them into violent killers?” Hoffman stated that, “falsehoods and conspiracy theorists have become so ubiquitous and believed that you almost have some sort of parallel truth, and it has become a very effective tool for recruiting people.”

Barbara points out that Hoffman is talking about A & E for Truth, calling them conspiracy theorists and equating them with the recruiting sites of the Taliban.

If that were true, which it isn’t, Bush could determine that that is an act undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq.

Now, here’s the scary part that ties it all together.

Bush’s Executive Order of July 17, 2007, stripped down to its meaning:

“All property and interests in property of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn or otherwise dealt in, detemined by the Secretary of the Treasury, to pose a significant risk of committing an act undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq.”

Does questioning what happened on 9/11 pose a risk of undermining efforts in Iraq? That’s not for us to determine, that’s strictly up to Bush and his Treasury Secretary. We have no say in the matter, but if Bush takes it into his head that we might, could, maybe, possibly pose a risk, we lose everything we have. All we have to do is ask, “Is that the way it happened?”

Notice the lack of subtlety used by lumping professional architects and engineers in with Taliban terrorists. Bush is trying to get a handle on a way to shut down anyone who questions what happened on 9/11, starting with the web sites that have the most authoritative, professional people, the ones most likely to get at the truth. He’s afraid if they keep it up, the truth just might come out.

Bush has given it away, here. By trying to prevent the truth from coming out, by not wanting the truth exposed, he’s just making it more obvious that the truth can hurt him. That’s what he’s trying to hide.

By applying qui bono, who benefits, to this thing, we can draw some obvious conclusions. Five months after Bush took office, he was dragging along with a dismal 50% approval rating, and he hadn’t even done anything. There was nothing to approve or disapprove of but the nonentity, Bush, himself. He was nothing going nowhere. Right after 9/11, his approval rating shot up to a phenomenal 90% and he had just about the whole country kissing his ass, getting everything he wanted. And, he became what he always wanted to be, a self-described “War President,” using 9/11 as the basis of his lies to create his own, personal war.

The events of 9/11 benefited George Bush enormously, more than any other man. And, he’s going to use his executive order to confiscate everything we have to keep us from asking how that came about.

Ed Martin is an unindicted curmudgeon. He is not a Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal, deist, atheist, or a member of any -ism.

Complaints Flood CNN After Beck Smears Ron Paul Supporters As Terrorists
Neo-Con and ex-Marxist demonize founding fathers, Ron Paul supporters as terrorists in outrageous attack on free speech, urge use of U.S. military against domestic enemies, anti-war left, libertarians, talking points have roots in September 2006 White House strategy document, demands for retraction flood CNN, sponsors boycotted

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, November 16, 2007

Complaints and demands for a retraction and an apology are flooding CNN today after Neo-Con host Glenn Beck and ex-Marxist David Horowitz smeared Ron Paul supporters, libertarians and the anti-war left as terrorist sympathizers and inferred that the U.S. military should be used to silence them, parroting a talking point that traces back to a September 2006 White House directive.

This is part of an ongoing propaganda assault which has also been mimicked by other anti-American Neo-Con talking heads like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.

Beck opened up his show segment by inferring that the U.S. military should be used to silence domestic dissent against the war, claiming that those he would later identify as Ron Paul supporters, libertarians and the anti-war left and link with terrorists, were a “physical threat.”

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Simon Wiesenthal Center presents 9/11 sites alongside radical Jihadist sites to House Hearing on “Terrorism and the Internet”

Posted by reprehensor at 911blogger.com

On Tuesday, November 6, 2007, a House Homeland Security Subcommittee had a hearing on “Terrorism and the Internet”. The hearing featured presentations from several groups, including the RAND Corporation, and Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The hearing was chaired by Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, and ranking Republican, Rep. Dave Reichert.

Toward the end of the hearing, Weitzman rolls out a PowerPoint presentation that presents a few 9/11 truth sites sandwiched in between websites that offer training in terrorist tactics, and a website that glorified the attack of 9/11. Among the websites presented under the heading “Internet: Incubator of 9/11 Conpiracies and Disinformation”, are Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, and other sites, such as Killtown’s, who brought this Hearing to our attention.

Now, we wouldn’t want anybody getting the wrong idea here. Here at 911blogger we are opposed to any and all terrorist activities, including STATE SPONSORED TERRORISM. Don’t really care who the state is either. It’s all bad.

Californians, if Harman is your representative, please set her straight. Washington state, if Reichert is your critter, don’t let him absorb this crap with no static.

CSPAN has been more than fair to 9/11 skeptics. Last year they broadcast Alex Jones’ American Scholars Symposium, in 2005, they broadcast David Ray Griffin, and they will probably listen to feedback regarding this broadcast.

View the hearing as a video stream here — the pertinent section begins at the 43:31 mark, but I recommend watching the entire program, because there is so much disinformation in the broadcast itself, it’s hard to know where to begin unraveling it.

Homeland Security – Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_…

Please ask the Simon Wiesthenthal Center (Mark Weitzman in particular) to stop conflating terrorist violence with 9/11 truth, and even though he has not extended the courtesy to us, be polite;

mweitzman@swcny.com

Ich bin ein Berliner (That goes for you too.)

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

– Justice William O. Douglas

I was born the very day World War II ended. My fellow postwar “Baby Boomers” grew up on old black and white documentaries of that war and the events leading up to it. But those films never really answered the most important question, a question that has nagged me, and I suspect most of my generation

How did Germany and the German people become the Mrs. O’Leary’s cow of an entire continent? How could a culture, re-formed during the Renaissance, create a horror like Auschwitz?

How does something that extraordinary happen? It’s a question that has not only burdened American Baby Boomers, but three generations of postwar Germans as well. But for them it’s much more than just a historical curiosity. For postwar Germans it’s also been a nagging sense of collective guilt – guilt about events they had nothing to do with, but guilt nonetheless. It’s a guilt built on the realization that their parents and grand parents either participated in, supported and/or enabled what happened over half a century ago — or, at the very least, did nothing to prevent or stop it.

Of course the fascist rulers of the Third Reich ruled with a heavy hand. So it’s not hard to understand why so many Germans simply laid low rather than oppose the regime.

“Nazi terror from above and the demise of the rule of law started just a few days after Hitler’s assumption of power in January 1933. The penalties of opposition became higher and higher. In the first nine months alone, at least 100,000 people, most of them leftist Germans, were thrown into hastily erected concentration camps. Others ended up in ordinary prisons and many died. Countless more were roughed up by rampaging brownshirts in broad daylight or taken into police custody on trumped-up political charges. By 1936, a brutal police state had penetrated virtually all spheres of life.” ( New York Times books.)

While the rules have tightened here since 9/11, we’ve not experienced anything near that scale. Speaking out is remains a survivable exercise.

Which begs the question; what will be our excuse? How will we explain the things we’ve allowed this administration to get away with — the torture, the “renditions,” the secret prisons, the warrant-less wiretapping, the lies we and our media allowed to stand? What are we going to tell our grand children when they ask us what the hell we were thinking, feeling and doing while all that was afoot?

I understand it’s against the rules of polite society to recklessly throw the “f” word around by comparing anything that’s happening today to the kind of atrocities that occurred under Hitler. It”s even worse to compare any contemporary American political/religious/social leader to Hitler.

So I won’t. I won’t go that far, because it hasn’t gone that far – yet.

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NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims
By Ryan Singel
October 11, 2007

Did the NSA’s massive call records database program pre-date the terrorist attacks of 9/11?

That startling allegation is in court documents released this week which show that former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio — the head of the only company known to have turned down the NSA’s requests for Americans’ phone records — tried, unsuccessfully, to argue just that in his defense against insider trading charges.

Nacchio was sentenced to 6 years in prison in 2007 after being found guilty of illegally selling shares based on insider information that the company’s fortunes were declining. Nacchio unsuccessfully attempted to defend himself by arguing that he actually expected Qwest’s 2001 earnings to be higher because of secret NSA contracts, which, he contends, were denied by the NSA after he declined in a February 27, 2001 meeting to give the NSA customer calling records, court documents released this week show.

AT&T, Verizon and Bellsouth all agreed to turn over call records to an NSA database, according to reporting in the USA Today in 2006. At that time, Nacchio’s lawyer publicly stated that Nacchio declined to participate until served with a proper legal order.

The government has never confirmed or denied the existence of the program, but is trying to win legal immunity for telecoms being sued for their alleged participation in the call records program and the government’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans. Turning over customer records to anyone, including the government, without proper legal orders violates federal privacy laws.

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