DRScoundrels

Author’s note: I’ve decided to adapt my series on statism into a book length manuscript.  The following is an excerpt from the second chapter.  Here’s hoping you enjoy, and find it informative!

Chapter Two: Vessels of Myth, Conduits of Narrative

“Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea, or group.”

-Edward Bernays

“Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence.”

-Louis Althusser

“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda.”

-Hannah Arendt

The narrative is omnipresent, built upon a foundation of ubiquitous myth.  Every day you are immersed in modern propaganda, which is defined in the concluding quote of the above cited examples as “a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea, or group.”  You are a participant in a war, a war of ideas and information, even if you do not wish to acknowledge yourself as such.  You are a participant in ideology, even if you do not consider yourself to be an ideologue.  Each moment of your life, while you are conscious and awake, you are bombarded with propaganda which reinforces within you an “imaginary relationship” which you as an individual conceive of as a representation of your real condition as an existent subject within society.

The media is the cannon by which you are convinced to believe certain things.  Within your mind, information percolates, bubbles, bursts, and detonates as you absorb it, and you assimilate it in ways which reinforce your imaginary view or concept of yourself and the relationship that self holds to culture and society.  But what is the media?  What are the vessels of myth, the sluices which carry narratives to you and pour those narratives into your ears and eyes so that you can use the material to erect a fantasy of sorts within your mind to represent how you see yourself in relation to everything and everyone else?

We generally believe the media to be limited to those entities which have traditionally carried information: the print, radio, an television news media organizations who go out and get the raw data, package it, and present it to you filtered of extraneous details and fortified with analysis to render that data into information, which is chock full of context and perspective.  This is too limited a definition of the media.  The media is ubiquitous, expansive, and omnipresent.  The advertising agencies, the focus groups, the posters and flyers drawn up by various smaller and independent organizations, bands, artists, all of these make up the media.  The non governmental organizations, or NGOs, which release white papers and study results in their “consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relation of the public” to this or that are also part of the media; as are the various government bureacracies like the State Department, whose Secretary can by mere fiat determine whether or not a group is a terrorist group or a politically and socially acceptable entity acting legally.  The think tanks, foundations, web sites, and other funnels and filters of information are also part of the media.  You are part of the media, with your voice in the street whenever you are approached by news crew looking to sample your opinion.

In point of fact, it is very hard to think of anything or anyone who isn’t arguably a part of or a participant in the media. That’s the ubiquity of the media; it holds us all in its grasp even as we refer to it derisively as the “liberal media,” or the “mainstream media,” thinking all the while that we are elucidating for ourselves a position wholly separate from the media as regular folks, when in fact, we have merely enunciated that we the conservative media or the fringe/marginal media.  The great danger of human existence is to assume that you are of no consequence and to resign yourself to be cast about on the waves of history, resenting all the while the encroachment and advance of the media into your life.  You invited them in with your passivity, with your pretend existence as an ambivalent or apathetic observer or non-participant.  You participate, whether you want to or not, and whether you realize it or choose to deny it.

Many of us are like the Apostle Peter, who when faced with the prescient Christ who foretold of his thrice denial, insisted that such a denial was not possible.  Not only was it possible, it was inevitable.  Peter thought that he would observe the trial of Jesus; and that he would not participate or be found out.  He made the classic mistake many of us make, assuming that he could exist and be of limited or no consequence.

Participation is our destiny, and even those who abdicate active roles for passive apathy accomplish an active role for ourselves in doing so. Given the pervasiveness of the media, the altogether cogent argument that each individual in a society is a participant in that media regardless of whether or not he or she recognizes that fact, there is no escaping our inevitable action and reaction dynamic.  As the quote by Althusser from Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses sets forth, we construct our imaginary view of ourselves and our relationship to “real conditions of existence” utilizing the the stew of propaganda which we are daily immersed in by virtue of our citizenship in a society where the media is all-pervasive.  There is no avoiding the media, because we might as well openly acknowledge the reality: Les médias, c’est moi!

We may well acknowledge that while the news media carries the narratives and myth of the state to us, we perpetuate those narratives and myths with our  retellings, additions, and subtractions to those narratives and myths when we discuss them amongst ourselves and our peers.  This blurred distinction is important not only because it establishes the citizen as a vessel of myth, but because it shows how we are enlisted in the information war, no matter how unwittingly, by our reaction.  It also points in some ways to another blurred distinction, one in which many of us among the population, considering ourselves to be citizens participating in democratic society, recoil at any narrative which states that our role is cosmetic at best and irrelevant at worst where the real decision-making is concerned by responding in the fashion of Louis XIV: “I am the state!”

We bind ourselves up in the state, we identify ourselves as being singular with it when it conforms to our imaginary and perceived relationship to the real conditions of our existence, and we only repudiate it when the state goes in the opposite direction of our personal ideology.  If the state has been inconsistent, it has been so in the same manner of our own pronounced inconsistency.  It is perhaps not surprising that the media, an entity made up not only of those organizations which are traditionally accepted as the media, such as print, radio, and television news, but also those organizations and individuals such as the bloggers, pundits, and the audiences who routinely identify with and dissociate from the state in the aforementioned manner, might also demonstrate inconsistencies as well.  After all, we are all one great hodgepodge.

The great distinction of totalitarianism and totalitarian movements is that they have been movements of mass more than anything else, even as they attempted to dress up in the language of class struggle and oppressed minorities or peoples who faced persecution at the hands of some Other. The totalitarian is by his nature an advocate of pervasiveness and ubiquity; and he is total in his saturation and permeation of a society.  He is so total, in fact, that all lines of distinction tend to become blurred between the state and the individual, the media and the state, the individual and the media.  This homogenous existence is the end result of totalitarianism.  We are all the same.

To question this sameness, to deny that you are the state, is to set yourself in opposition to everyone else who does acknowledge their affiliation with the state in such a way as to tacitly endorse even those portions of state action which they virulently oppose.  It is to be unpatriotic, if you will; it may even be anti-American.

Moreover, the acceptance of this homogenous identification, this infernal sameness, is the end of rational thought.  We see this most clearly in our philanthropic endeavors or our human rights advocacy, where some common characteristic is seized upon to compel diverse groups of people towards a common cause: you know it as unity.    In the name of achieving some laudable end, we set aside our differences and obliterate that which divides us to come together and sing kumbaya, or “We are the world, we are the children.”  The absurdity of the thing is obvious enough to thinking individuals, but the price of admission to such bonhomie is the surrender of one’s capacity to think.  Don’t think for a moment about the fact that we clearly aren’t the children in Africa, whose distended bellies and malnourished bodies can’t even sustain hair follicles on their heads, because the price of empathy is the obliteration of rational distinction.

You can’t be compassionate, the thinking goes, unless you identify with the sufferer by taking on his or her identity as your own even if you can’t or won’t assume the real suffering.  The surrender of difference, of rational thought, of distinction in order to maintain credibility as as a human being will also inure you to the fact that many charitable endeavors are criminal in their siphoning off of contributions for administrative costs.  A good many of these philanthropic organizations embezzle some ninety cents of each dollar in contributions to sustain their bureaucracies.

Besides, the real reason one contributes so readily to such nonsense and buys the CD or downloads the iTunes version of such a song isn’t altruism at all;  rather, it is  the desire we have to maintain our imaginary relationship to real conditions, to keep apace with our peers and friends in the race to do good.  Vanity, vanity, all is fact vanity.

If you participate in this, if you fail to reject it wholesale, you are in some way endorsing it with your participation and your failure to be difficult.  The failure to be difficult and obstinate is perhaps the greatest sin of our time.  No one bothers to consider what the root causes of human suffering are; moreover, no one cares to make the uncomfortable connection between human action and human consequence.  We can’t blame Africa for its plight, even though its governmental models fail to present deliverance to its people.  It is the fault of the colonial powers, or the imperialists, or the system of capitalism; it is never the fault of the Africans for failing to effectively resist the forces which emanate from those systems and historical constructs.  Oppression is perpetuated upon indigenous peoples most effectively when the oppressor enlists a few of the indigenous to serve as his agents.

What we have failed to see about Africa, or Asia, is that their failure to overcome the cycles put in place by colonialism and imperialism is as much due to the leaders of African states as it is to the continued machinations of the IMF and the World Bank.  Someone has to take the loans, and someone has to accept the obligation of paying them back even after overthrowing the previous government.  The problem of Africa is that there are so few African leaders who show any willingness to be difficult and obstinate in the face of financial piracy.  Resistance is the obligation of every man who finds himself put at a disadvantage or under an obligation by a third party such as a corrupt government or oligarch.  A lack of resistance is tantamount to an assent to enslavement.

The success of the state depends on its determination to identify, shape, and influence these realities with propaganda, and this often entails direct action in order to blunt, undermine, or quash any meaningful resistance.   There are certain requisites for maintaining standing in one’s community, and we all pay those tolls in our daily lives. Those of us who question the matters are derided as difficult non-conformists who object simply to object.  The fact that it is our right to do so in a free society without fear of reciprocity and retaliation is apparently lost on the virtuous souls who routinely pontificate their outrage whenever someone engages in ‘unacceptable’ speech.  The reality that dissent is a powerful form of resistance, and that resistance to tyranny up to the point of violent revolution is a notion touched upon by our Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln in his Inaugural Address, and even John F. Kennedy is lost upon those who insist upon strict adherence to the state’s line.

Our Founders signed onto the idea contained within the Declaration of Independence that men had the right to cast off their government when that government became “destructive” to the ends of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Abraham Lincoln declared in his Inaugural Address that “If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might in a moral point of view justify revolution; certainly would if such right were a vital one.”  In a 1962 speech from the White House, John F. Kennedy declared that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

In a world where the media and the state are linked, where the state often owns media outlets, as it does with three of the seven national television outlets in Italy; or where the media moguls of the world often aspire successfully to political office or influence, as in the case of Silvio Berlusconi, an Italian prime minister who came to control six of the seven national Italian television outlets by owning three of them as a private citizen and controlling the other three as prime minister, we cannot say that the state and the media are separate, but we must convince ourselves that we are separate from the state and the media and adopt a critical eye towards both.

We do not have to descend to cynicism, but we must retain a sense of the incredulous.  If we do not, we run the risk of being unable to distinguish between the truth and myth contained within the narratives foisted upon us each day by the state and the media.  We may face ridicule for our non-conformity, and a thousand arrows of invective and vitriol may be fired our way, but we are the sentries upon which a free society depends: an informed and skeptical citizenry immunized from manipulation.  Such an informed and skeptical citizenry was revealed to be nearly non-existent when it became apparent that the Bush Administration had paid three commentators to write columns and interview guests in order to advance legislation favored by the Bush Administration concerning marriage and pregnancy.

Journalism and Payola; or, Promoting the Common Good Through Necessary Measures.

In a story originally reported by Greg Toppo of USA Today, it was revealed that Amstrong Williams, a syndicated television personality, was paid $240,000 “regularly comment on the NCLB (No Child Left Behind Act) during the course of his broadcasts.”  The Department of Education paid Williams to not only promote the bill, but also to interview the DOE’s Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots which would then air on Williams’s show,  and to persuade producers affiliated with The Black Forum, a group of African-American journalists to address the bill on their shows as well.  Williams did not disclose the contract with the Department of Education on air, nor did he ever speak critically of the bill in any way.

What is so extraordinary about the fact that Williams did not speak ill of No Child Left Behind or the rapid expansion of the Department of Education’s funding is this: it was the custom of the Republican Party to include within its platform a call to abolish the entire Department of Education from 1980 on, up to the time when George W. Bush came into the Republican presidential nomination on a wave of primogeniture and compassionate conservatism.

In point of fact, conservatives, of whose circle Williams was a supposed member in good standing as a former aide to Clarence Thomas and the host of a show entitled The Right Side, had bitterly decried and denounced the Department of Education and federal intrusion into education since the late seventies establishment of the department under Jimmy Carter.  No Child Left Behind was an extraordinary expansion of federal oversight and intrusion into education, which conservatives had for decades contended was best left to local control.

Additionally, the following was noted in Toppo’s article: “Williams’ contract was part of a $1 million deal with Ketchum that produced “video news releases” designed to look like news reports. The Bush administration used similar releases last year to promote its Medicare prescription drug plan, prompting a scolding from the Government Accountability Office, which called them an illegal use of taxpayers’ dollars.”  So there you have it: an ostensibly conservative president and an ostensibly conservative commentator expanding federal power over education after two decades of staunch conservative opposition to federal power over education.

The fact was that the Bush Administration had not merely paid Williams $240,000 to promote their pet legislation, they had also used similar ‘video news releases’ to push their Medicare prescription drug plan, which was itself an expansion of another government program traditionally denounced by conservatives from all quarters.   Consider the Bernays quote at the beginning of the chapter: “Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea, or group.”

The media was not independent of the state, it was on the payroll as an complicit party to the state’s effort “to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea, or group.”  The payola scandal that had begun with Armstrong Williams would expand to include two other journalists, syndicated columnists Maggie Gallagher and Mike McManus.  Gallagher received a federal contract from the Department of Health and Human Services in the amount of $21,500 for helping to promote President Bush’s $300 million plan to promote marriage.

Gallagher’s work included “drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.”  Additionally, Gallagher’s work for a private organization, the National Fatherhood Initiative, was funded to the tune of $20,000 through a Justice Department grant.  Now, while Armstrong Williams was paid to write columns and promote a bill under consideration on his show, Gallagher’s work was for private and public organizations, and involved her writing brochures, drafting articles, and composing essays.

But all the while, Gallagher continued to promote the same programs and initiatives in her syndicated column as well, without ever disclosing that she had been paid some $41,500 in taxpayer money to do work on the side for a department of the United States government and a private organization funded by a Justice Department grant.  The fact that her opinion was that of a mercenary obviously might have impacted her readers in a negative way, and they would have perhaps consider forays into the area of fatherhood and marriage as alien to the authority of the federal government if one of their own conservative columnists had not been banging the drum for just such expansions of federal oversight and influence.  Gallagher’s take on the Bush initiatives in the National Review Online was thus: “The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples,” while also managing to “educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage,” which would “carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children.”  Indeed.

The Bush Administration also hired actors to pose as journalists in a series of fake television news produced by Home Front Communications, where actors in various scenes gave the President a standing ovation as he signed the Medicare prescription drug benefit into law.  The actors posing as journalists also gave glowing reviews to the Medicare bill, and the inevitable result was that the videos were disseminated by CNN to local news affiliates who broadcast them without any disclosure of their origin or the fact that they were faux news segments.  There was no on-screen notification that the individuals appearing in the segments were actors. In point of fact, the video stipulated the following:

“In December, President Bush signed into law the first-ever prescription drug benefit for people with Medicare.  Since then, there have been a lot of questions about how the law will help older Americans and people with disabilities.  Reporter Karen Ryan helps sort through the details.”

Karen Ryan wasn’t a reporter; she was an actor.  She wasn’t objectively sorting through the details like a legitimate reporter, noting that the prescription drug benefit would have adverse consequences for the deficit and would exempt drug companies from negotiating prices for Medicare drugs with the government.  She was there to shill on behalf of the benefit, to present only one side of the debate, the side favored by the Bush Administration, and the Bush Administration used taxpayer dollars to fund the entire shenanigan.  Moreover, Ms. Ryan was quite prolific: she appeared as a reporter on behalf of the No Child Left Behind Act on WLFL-22 in Raleigh, North Carolina, in October 2004.

The Center for Media and Democracy investigated to see how extensive the use of such fake news reports was, and what it found was that 77 television stations used Video News Releases, or VNRs, distributed by either corporations or the government on subjects as varied as the health benefits of dairy, or the energy advantages of ethanol, without disclosing the fact the fact the reports were not in fact conducted by the station or any other journalism entity.  But the bottom of the screen was clear enough: viewers saw the reporter’s name, the station’s identification, and the usually ticker of news scrolling by, without ever once hearing that the “report”  they were viewing was actually an advertisement built and paid for by Pfizer or the Department of Energy.  This despite the fact that the Federal Communications Commission requires disclosures of VNRs by media outlets.

Additionally, the problem wasn’t just that the reports were appearing as the product of the local news or its national affiliate; it was that the news anchors were reading scripts written by corporations to introduce and close the VNRs as well.  Take Detroit station WJBK-2, which in 1991 aired a VNR by pharmaceutical company Upjohn on its anti-anxiety drug Xanax.  The anchor’s take: Doctors say there seem to be few side effects to the drugs.”  Side effects of Xanax include sexual dysfunction, blurred vision, confusion, dizziness, impaired attention, and addiction.

The problem was that the government effort to seed the media with stories advocating on behalf of legislation at taxpayer expense was illegal according to the Government Accounting Office, which found in 2006 after a review of 340 contracts covering seven departments that the Bush Administration spent $1.6 billion in taxpayer funds promoting its programs between 2003 through 2005.  Where corporations are concerned, the use of VNRs is misleading and totally corrosive to the notion of a free, independent, and objective press abiding by journalistic integrity and ethics, but if the VNRs are accompanied by a disclosure, there is nothing illegal about airing them.  Unfortunately, as the Center for Media and Democracy found, nearly all of the television stations reviewed did not disclose to their audiences that the VNR was not in fact news, but rather a long advertisement paid for by a corporation or an agency of the United States government.

The assumption of the viewer at home was that the commercials consisted of those minute and a half to two minute long breaks between the news programming, but the reality of the matter was that they’d been bombarded with pure propaganda masquerading as journalism.  It’s one thing when you know that a clip on television is a paid advertisement, because you take it with a grain of salt. When the clip isn’t presented as an advertisement, but rather as television news or reporting, you don’t hold the same skeptical view of the information therein.  You trust it more, or you view as being somehow more objective and honest than an advertisement.

The New York Times’ own investigation found that 20 government agencies had engaged in the use of such VNRs, distributing them to local news stations who broadcast the VNRs without disclosure to their audience, and presented the contents as actual reporting.  As the New York Times’ noted, “It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.”  Here are a few examples, culled from the opening paragraph of the article:

“Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.,” a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of “another success” in the Bush administration’s “drive to strengthen aviation security”; the reporter called it “one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history.” A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration’s determination to open markets for American farmers.”

These segments never originated in an independent and free media; they were filmed, funded, and distributed by a government to the media, which then broadcast the segments as news without so much as an ounce of disclosure as to their origin.  Earlier, I noted that the media and the state had synchronized somehow to the point where the distinction between the two had become blurred.  Each of the illustrations above confirms this thesis, which essentially holds forth that the media is nothing more than a vessel of myth, a conduit of narrative into which the messages are poured by the government; and those messages then flow through the sluices to the homes of every American man, woman, and child via their television on the nightly news.

If you wonder why it is that the reality of our world is so often overlooked by our media, to the point where the media can completely get the story wrong, as it did in the lead up to Iraq, the story of the Global War on Terror is perhaps the most informative example you can examine.  In many ways, it is a continuation of the sort of media expropriation conducted by the government in the aforementioned examples.

Shifting Justifications for Intervention, Flexible Standards for Success: The Global War on Terror.

“Penciled in for 10 March.”

-George W. Bush to Tony Blair on January 31, 2003, regarding the impending invasion of Iraq.

“I’ve not made up my mind about military action.”

-George W. Bush to the American people on March 6, 2003.

“[Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction.”

-Colin Powell, February 2, 2001.

“The most important thing is for us to find Osama Bin Laden. It is our number one priority and we will not rest until we find him.”

-George W. Bush, September 13, 2001.

“I don’t know where he is and I really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.”

-George W. Bush, May 13, 2002

“Gosh, I just don’t think I ever said I’m not worried about Osama Bin Laden. It’s kind of one of those exaggerations.”

-George W. Bush, October 13, 2004.

“We know he [Saddam Hussein] has absolutely been devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.”

-Dick Cheney, March 16, 2003.

“I don’t believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.”

-Donald Rumsfeld, May 14, 2003.

“I think that the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.”

-Ari Fleischer, July 9, 2003.

”It was amazing I won,” the president told Mr. Persson, referring to the 2000 presidential election. ”I was running against peace and prosperity and incumbency.”

-George W. Bush, in a conversation with the Swedish Prime Minister picked up by live microphones.

In the preceding section, I noted that every historical misstep by the state has its antecedent in some earlier misstep, usually statist or academic. The Global War on Terror as a misstep, insofar as the invasion of Iraq was achieved by manufacturing consent and manipulating intelligence, has its antecedent in an earlier misstep which took place when George H.W. Bush was the director the CIA under Gerald Ford.

Certain members of the Ford Administration were not convinced that the CIA’s assessment of Soviet military might were accurate.  Chief among those in the camp of skeptics were Ford’s chief of staff Richard Cheney and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.  In order to ascertain the true picture of Soviet military prowess, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the CIA director at the time, a man named George H.W. Bush, concocted the notion of a Team B study group to independently review the raw intelligence in order to either confirm or repudiate the CIA’s findings, which were roughly as follows:

1. The Soviet Union was on the downward slope of decline.
2. It’s military might was declining due to the fact that the Soviets could not economically afford to maintain their military equipment or equip their personnel.
3. If left alone, the Soviet Union would eventually and inevitably collapse in a matter of two to three decades.

One of Team B’s members was a young Paul Wolfowitz, who would go on to fame as one of the neoconservative architects of the second Iraq War.  Indeed, Wolfowitz, together with his deputy Douglas Feith and a host of other neoconservatives affiliated with the Project for a New American Century, would be among the chief architects of American foreign intervention and empire around the globe.  Three decades before, however, Paul Wolfowitz would prove his bona fides and usefulness to Cheney and Rumsfeld by heading up the analysts who made up Team B.

Team B’s findings, drawn from the same raw intelligence data as the CIA’s conclusions, differed greatly with the CIA’s assertions about Soviet power.  Team B found that Soviet military power, far from being the corroded and decaying military infrastructure that the CIA asserted it had become, was as potent as ever.  The air defense systems that the CIA had concluded were non-functioning and outdated after reviewing surveillance images, were in fact in perfect working condition.  Team B pointed to the Soviet training manuals, “which proudly asserted that their air-defense system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly.”

Of course, Soviet propaganda and official publications also asserted that the Soviet Union was a worker’s paradise and that the Communist Party existed to represent the will of the people under Soviet rule.  There simply was no capacity within such a totalitarian state for any admission of weakness or insufficiency on any front, and pointing to a Soviet manual as evidence of the flawless functionality of Soviet air defenses was patently absurd.

As Thom Hartmann notes in his article “Hyping Terror for Fun, Profit-And Power,” Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld claimed “the lack of proof proved that undetectable weapons existed – they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.”  A lack of proof proved that undetectable weapons existed. Indeed.

Consider the second to last quote at the opening by then Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer: “I think that the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.” As incomprehensible as this logic is, it worked to dissuade any real consequences for the Bush Administration as the months went by and no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.  It worked in our present decade, just as it had worked in the Ford Administration when Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld had asserted that the lack of proof was proof in and of itself that undetectable weapons existed.

The power of myth in statism is this: if your ideology aligns you with the individuals or groups spouting such utter nonsense, you will abdicate your capacity for rational reflection and go along with their idiocy.  For as Althusser noted, ideology is merely the representation of imaginary relationships to real conditions of existence.  Consider what then Majority Leader Dick Armey said some time after it had become apparent that WMDs were not in Iraq, in regards to the briefing he received which convinced him to vote for the authorization of force in Iraq: “If I’d gotten the same briefing from President Clinton or Al Gore, I probably would have said, “Ah, bullshit.” But you don’t do that to your own people.”

Years after Team B successfully influenced policymakers to increase defense spending into the Reagan years, its members would go on to positions with think tanks and policy groups like the Project for a New American Century, which advocated invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein in the late 90s. After the election of George W. Bush in 2000, they would take central roles in the White House and the bureaucracies of the federal government.  From there, they would hype a non-existent link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, along with manufacturing a crisis in the form of purported WMD arsenals held by Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, the role of the think tank is instrumental in explaining how individuals like Wolfowitz blend into the background after leaving the White House only to re-emerge years and even decades later to assume roles of great prominence in policymaking.  Think tanks, the individuals they employ, and the views they put forth ultimately serve the role outlined by Bernays in his book Propaganda, for their efforts constitute “a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea, or group.”  While their ostensible goal is to function as a safe refuge for independent academic study and intellectual process, a think tank in essence consists of nothing more than ideological mercenaries.   Joon Nak Choi’s work “The Revolving Door: Charitable Foundation Funding for Think Tanks and Implications for Democratic Governance” found that between 2000 to 2007, “philanthropic organizations gave over $230 million to non-profit policy research institutes (“think tanks”).  Choi went on to note the Harvard Law Review’s 2002 estimation that the top twenty conservative think tanks spent “more money annually than all soft money contributions to the Republican Party combined.”

Essentially, while we tend to focus on the role of money in politics, we give little attention to the role of money in the marketplace of ideas.  Much of what makes it onto the news, whether in statistical analyses or study findings, emanates from think tanks, and their findings hold the patina of legitimacy by virtue of some academic connotation. We believe that the individuals who occupy think tanks are intellectual and academic types, the dry professorial individuals who spend their days poring over the data and reaching conclusions which are then revealed to the world in studies that make it onto the news.

The truth is that many of the think tank occupants are professional bureaucrats and political counselors whose party happens to be out of power.  Choi references the work of R. Kent Weaver, whose 1989 screed “The Changing World of Think Tanks” concluded that “…governments in exile…where officials of the party whose presidential candidate has been defeated can seek gainful employment while they lick their wounds, wait for their party to come back to power and (hopefully) come up with new ideas.”

The reality is that thinks tanks are but one stop on a “revolving door,” as Choi calls it, which consists of individuals who transition from think tanks to political campaigns to the Executive Branch and back to the think tank.  At all points, these individuals are the ones authoring and shaping policy, and they are paid for their effective articulation of specific positions and initiatives by philanthropic foundations whose boards and funders pay to see a particular worldview promoted at all costs.

An academic employed at a think tank, therefore, is no different from a journalist who takes money from a government to promote a particular viewpoint while existing above the fray owing to the connotations of independent thought and free opinion journalism and academia hold for most people.  We believe that academics and intellectuals, like journalists, aren’t for sale, or at least that they should not be for sale.  The truth is that in our world, everything is for sale, and one of the reasons we have no real changeover in policy even though we have changeover in government in the Executive Branch is because the entire model of state narrative myth “reinforces continuity in politics,” as Choi comes to conclude.

This model and the explanation it provides gives us the best possible explanation for why individuals from Team B could lay dormant for eight years under the Clinton Administration, and then re-emerge roaring in the second Bush Administration.  The ideas are not “new,” as Weaver concludes, but rather new ways of saying and doing the same old things, to where the methods used to hype the threat of the Soviet Union in the late 70s with Team B are then used to promote the threat of Iraq in the late 90s and urge pre-emptive invasion almost two and a half decades after the fact.

All of political action is a struggle to find ways to rephrase and re-present the same ways of acting, to apply classic methods from yesterday to the problem of today while articulating those methods in a way to make them appear fresh, vibrant, bold, and palatable to the wider public.  The reality is that Iraq and the Middle East emerged to take the place of the Soviet Union in the ideological worldview of neoconservatives, who were presented as having recently emerged when in fact their tenure stretched back over three decades in Washington.  There was nothing new or innovative about the neoconservatives and the agenda they agitated to implement.  It was the same tired doctrine of intervention with public support whipped up by manufacturing an atmosphere of crisis and imminent threat.

The same warriors who had defeated the CIA in the late 70s by reinterpreting intelligence to support their notion of a Soviet Union that was more powerful, potent, and immediate in the threat it presented to the United States than ever, were now back in place to challenge the CIA’s assertion that Iraq did not present an imminent threat to the United States.  Their methods had been honed decades ago, and here they were again, ready to take on the intelligence establishment and make the case for invading Iraq and remaking the country over into a democracy.

The mercenaries of Team B also had their apologists in the press, most famously New York Times columnist Judith Miller, and her bona fides had been established in the first Gulf War with the publication Saddam Hussein and the Crisis In the Gulf, a book written in 21 days which set forth a history of Saddam Hussein’s rise to power.  Miller would go on to ignominy when her claims that WMD had been found in Iraq would later be shown as false, and her earlier reporting that Iraq had attempted to obtain aluminum tubes for centrifuges to refine uranium would also come under criticism when it was revealed that she had ignored evidence in the form of a report by Department of Energy scientists advised by former Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist Houston G. Wood III indicating that the tubes were not suitable for centrifuges.

Eventually, the controversies surrounding Miller’s reporting would lead to her resignation from the New York Times, but it was no matter: she went on to employment at Fox News and the Manhattan Institute, a neoconservative think tank.  Interestingly enough, before Miller went on to employment at the Manhattan Institute, she recalled her failure in an interview with MediaChannel.org to write a report based on a high level White House source’s disclosure of intelligence in July 2001 indicating a large scale Al Qaeda attack in the works.

When Miller was confronted over her failure to independently verify and confirm the information provided to her by Bush Administration officials, her response was telling: “[M]y job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.” The problem with Miller’s position is obvious, in that it leads to a revolving door narrative whereby a government official with an ulterior motive plants a story in the press, a story which is then reported as credible to the public, and after the story has been aired in the press, government officials then go on television and point to the story they or their peers planted as confirmation and independent verification of their positions.  They use the entire charade as a means of credibly manipulating the public’s consent for war and invasion, but the reality of the matter is that all they’ve accomplished is an echo chamber where their initial effort to seed the press with a story reverberates over and over and over again.

Everything about Miller’s patterns of reporting, from the flaws which her editors routinely overlooked in earlier stories, to the planting of those errors by her high level sources, is consistent with Team B’s manipulation of the press during the late 70’s, a manipulation which led to drastic increases in military spending, ostensibly to address a growing Soviet threat that was in fact declining and imploding from within.

The fact that upon her resignation Miller was retained by both a neoconservative think tank which also happened to doubtless employ many of her high level sources, and a network renowned for its right wing slant and open sympathy to neoconservative positions, up to and including the employment of Miller’s colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, gives one pause as to the idea that our press is free and independent.  The truth is that the press is an auxiliary of the state, either through corporate ownership by businesses which routinely lobby the state for concessions and abatements, or through carefully cultivated relationships between state officials and reporters who betray their journalistic ethics in order to lay claim to the high level anonymous sources and the cachet such sources carry.

When such a reporter is exposed for their failures to corroborate and independently verify the claims of their sources, and their reporting is effectively shown to have set forth unsubstantiated claims and innuendos as fact, it is no matter.  Disgrace is temporary, and they merely slouch off to employment at an ideological think tank where their coworkers will just happen to be many of those same high-level sources.  Moreover, they can find employment at and ideologically minded and driven media outlet as well, where they can continue their efforts to present propaganda and outright deceit as verified and credible fact, so as to manipulate public opinion and consent.

As pervasive and ubiquitous as the totalitarian state is, and as appealing as that state is to the elites and the mob within a society, the reality is as Arendt noted, “Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself; the masses have to be won by propaganda.”  Propaganda, that is, presented as journalism on the front page of the New York Times by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with a long history of factual inaccuracies in her reporting and a documented relationship with the neoconservatives who made up the Bush Administration’s plotters for an Iraq invasion.  When you can stir the previously apathetic masses into feverish bouts of fear that they are under the threat of imminent attack, that the smoking gun may in fact be the mushroom cloud in their city, you can manufacture and engineer consent.

When those masses have been subjected to state-sponsored universal education, and conditioned through that education to accept state myths and narratives as doctrinal truth, your task is that much easier.  When those masses have been denied any training in epistemology, logic, or rhetoric which might enable them to ferret out the sophisticated methods and ploys routinely utilized by propagandists; or when those masses have been denied a history that is bracing for its truthfulness, they have no means of replying against the state.  They may have a feeling that the state is not credible, and they may have lived through a period in which the state manipulated public sentiment to enter into war under false pretense, such as the Gulf of Tonkin and Vietnam, but they lack the formal educational training to be able to articulate with any precision or competence their outlook and view.

When confronted by a professional media, an entire machine which exists to denigrate and discredit anyone who challenges the statist narrative, either by deriding them with labels like conspiracy theorists, Birthers, Truthers, and the like, these average individuals are either bludgeoned into silence or discredited to their peers.  This is the power of statism and myth; that all other competing narratives should be deracinated and discredited from a society until only the controlling narrative of the state remains and the end of the state can be achieved with minimal effective opposition.  It is the obliteration of effective resistance to statist overreach and aggression, and the obviation of any formal attempt to hold the state accountable for its failures and incompetence.

When the state maneuvers itself into a war under false pretenses, the initial motivation for that war often transmogrifies into some other motive at the state’s convenience.  Initially, we went to war in Iraq because Iraq allegedly had hundreds of tons of raw material for weapons of mass destruction, be it weaponized uranium, VX gas, or sarin gas.  Furthermore, it was alleged that Iraq had attempted to procure both aluminum tubes for the purposes of centrifuge construction to enrich uranium, and uranium from Nigeria.

The former allegation was dismantled a year before it was publicly made by Department of Energy scientists who were advised by the world’s eminent authority on centrifuge construction, a former Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist named Houston G. Woods III.  The scientists found that the diameter of the aluminum tubes was inconsistent with centrifuge construction, that the metallurgical content of the tube was more consistent with an Italian rocket known as the Medusa-81 than a centrifuge tube, and that if Iraq had wanted to construct centrifuges on a scale large enough to effectively weaponize uranium, by utilizing the tubes in question for centrifuges Iraq would be going in the opposite direction efficiency-wise.  Additionally, the tubes were anodized aluminum, which rendered them uniquely unsuitable for use in a gas centrifuge, as the anodized coating would have to be removed for use in a gas centrifuge. In short, the former allegation had been refuted a year before Miller’s reporting in the New York Times by scientists who deal with little else besides centrifuge construction and the logistical challenges thereof.

The latter allegation (that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger) made little if any sense in context; as Iraq already possessed 500 tons of uranium within its borders at its nuclear facility in Al-Tuwaitha which had previously been weaponized but had been rendered useless by a process known as “isotopic dilution” in Russia. Moreover, Iraq also possessed uranium reserves of its own in the northeastern corner of the country at its Akashat mine, and it had an extraction plant at Al Qaim as well.  All it had to do was to extract uranium from Akashat and refine it elsewhere.

Given the 500 tons of uranium already in Iraq’s possession at Al-Tuwaitha, it stands to reason that if Iraq had wanted to weaponize uranium for the purposes of building a nuclear bomb, it would have done so with that uranium.  But the narrative of the state was such that Iraq had to attempt to procure uranium from other countries, and so a forged document was necessary to establish this narrative.

Let’s trace the origin of the narrative for the sake of understanding how exactly a forged memo came to play a role in drawing the world’s most powerful country into a preemptive invasion of Iraq.  In 2001 and 2002, Italian intelligence chief Nicolo Pollari attempted to bring his story of Iraq’s alleged efforts to procure uranium from Niger to the CIA, whose analysts and officers rejected his allegations as lacking credibility.  Pollari, as head of the Italian intelligence service the Sismi, first disclosed the story to the CIA on October 15, 2001, but was rebuffed.  The Sismi further attempted to report the alleged procurement to British intelligence, only to be rebuffed there as well.

Nearly a year later, Pollari met Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley in Washington with the same story, and three days afterwords, a story in Panorama, a weekly magazine owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister and media magnate, would hold forth the allegation that Iraqi intelligence had acquired 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria.  Less than a month afterward, the forgeries given to another Panorama reporter would allege that Niger had been the source of the uranium.

The Panorama reporter who received the forged documents, a reporter by the name of Elisabetta Burba, never reported on the documents after receiving them from a man named Rocco Martini, but her editor Carlo Rossella sent her to the U.S. embassy with the documents.  This had the net effect of bypassing the CIA, whose analysts and officers had rejected the allegations as specious twice before, and getting the documents directly into the White House via the National Security Council and Stephen Hadley.

In short, rather than utilizing the intelligence service that the United States funds at great expense, the Bush Administration sought to bypass that intelligence service when it became apparent that its justification for war with Iraq wouldn’t be rubber stamped.  And so the Sismi used two moles it had inside of the Niger embassy in Rome to obtain stationary which was then passed on to Rocco Martino via Sismi officer Antonio Nucera, a vice-captain in the division of the Sismi tasked with oversight and intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction and proliferation.  Martino himself was a former policeman who had lived out of Luxembourg selling information to French intelligence.

A review of the story in linear fashion would look something like this:

1. The head of the Sismi, Nicolo Pollari, twice attempted to plant a fake link between Iraqi intelligence and Niger for the ostensible purpose of detailing a transaction involving uranium yellowcake.  Pollari used the story with the CIA on October 15, 2001, whose analysts rejected it, and British intelligence, which also rejected his claims. During this time, according to multiple sources, the Bush Administration was already attempting to construct a justification for removing Saddam Hussein from power.
2. Pollari then met with Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, himself a direct subordinate of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice on September 9, 2002.
3. Three days afterward, in a newsweekly (Panorama) owned by Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a story appeared which changed the the country from Niger to Nigeria.
4. Less than a month later, after Antonio Nucera obtained stationary from an intelligence asset within the Niger embassy, documents purportedly showing a uranium transaction between Niger and Iraqi intelligence were forged and passed off to Panorama reporter Elisabetta Burba via Rocco Martini, and Burba’s editor Carlo Rossella sent her to the U.S. embassy with the forged documents.
5. The U.S. embassy then provided the documents to the White House directly, thereby bypassing the CIA, and President George W. Bush used them as the basis for his claim that Iraq was attempting to reconstitute its nuclear program.
6. Congress passed a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq in part due to those forged documents, which originated within Italian intelligence under the leadership of a man who answered to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was also the owner of the media outlet which broadcast the allegations of a yellowcake link between Nigeria and Iraq, and whose reporter would receive the forged documents linking Niger and Iraq in a yellowcake transaction.  Her editor would order her to carry the documents to the U.S. embassy.

Pollari would deny the meeting with Hadley, insisting that he had only met officially with one member of the Bush Administration since 2001: CIA director George Tenet.   Despite the fact that Sismi sources and National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting between Pollari and Hadley, Pollari still denied the meeting took place.

When it became apparent that forged documents were at the root of the Iraqi invasion, no one bothered to trace the obvious pattern of deception common to both the aluminum tube story written by Judith Miller of the New York Times and the Panorama story which alleged a yellowcake transaction between Iraq and Nigeria.  That pattern is simple enough, and when outlined in the same linear fashion as the Italian intelligence forgery of the Niger memo, it would look like this:

1. Government officials attempt to establish a link between a particular target and illegal activities using intelligence agencies.
2. If the intelligence agency does not cooperate or go along with the effort, or it discredits a portion of the information used as the basis for the allegations in play, the government officials will go to friendly media outlets as anonymous sources.
3. A story will appear in the media outlining some clandestine and illegal program on the part of the foreign target.
4. The government officials will then blanket talk shows and media outlets, and their allies within think tanks and policy driven institutes will further provide confirmation of the claims in the form of expert analysis. They will point to the very stories they planted in the media as confirmation within an independent media of their claims.
5. Public sentiment will be whipped up for large scale action, usually military.
6. Congress will authorize action.
7. Inevitably the truth will emerge, and fallout will result.
8. Damage control efforts begin, as in the case of the CIA accepting the blame for the intelligence failure on WMDs, even though the CIA rejected the Sismi’s allegations and was bypassed by the American embassy in order to provide the Niger memo directly to the White House.
9. A short time after a manufactured show of public contrition by the scapegoat, as in CIA director George Tenet, the real party responsible will issue a second apology and acknowledgement of  responsibility will which will be lost in the wake of the first apology.  In the case of Stephen Hadley, his acceptance of full responsibility was lost in the aftermath of CIA Director George Tenet’s coerced admission of responsibility.  In all truth, the CIA had done its job and rejected the Italian intelligence claim of an Iraq-Niger uranium yellowcake deal as false.
10. The mainstream historical narrative is cemented, inaccuracies and all.  All competing versions are relegated to the level of credulity reserved for conspiracies.

What is more, the fact remains that much of the media is incapable of covering the stories of the day independently or following leads without interference.  Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s role in Italian media is telling: he owns three of the seven national television stations in Italy through Mediaset, and his ownership of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore gives him control of a substantial share of the Italian print media.

Additionally, three of the four national television networks not owned by Silvio Berlusconi are state owned and operated networks.  As prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi would attain significant oversight and control of those networks as well, leaving just one national television network out of seven eluding Berlusconi’s direct control or influence.  With 45% of the audience in a society where 82% of the people depend solely upon television for their news, and an additional 30% influence in the book market and 38% of the magazine market, Berlusconi controls the conduits of myth and narrative by which most Italians receive their view of the world.  In short, Berlusconi has a significantly larger stake than anyone else in Italy in the most precious commodity of all: information.

You may believe that it is different here in the United States, but the facts do not agree with your belief.  Five conglomerates control most of the print, radio, and television media outlets in the United States, according to Ben H. Bagdikian, whose book The New Media Monopoly outlines the ways in which American media control was consolidated in the hands of just five entities and the implications for American policy and social reality.  As Bagdikian puts it:

“The leaders of the Big Five are not Hitlers and Stalins. They are American and foreign entrepreneurs whose corporate empires control every means by which the population learns of its society.  And like any close-knit hierarchy, they can find ways to cooperate so that all five can work together to expand their power, a power that has become a major force in shaping contemporary American life. The Big Five have similar boards of directors, they jointly invest in the same ventures, and they even go through motions that, in effect, lend each other money and swap properties when it is mutually advantageous.”

If you wonder at how the media could have so universally missed the signs that the intelligence leading up to 9/11 or the invasion of Iraq was flawed, you have only to look at our homogenized media, and the overlap in ownership between the media conglomerates and their interests in defense contractors and other industries.  We have for years been acutely sensitive to the notion that state control of the media is the first step towards totalitarianism, but we have never fully considered the implications for our society of a private media conglomerate that controls radio, print, and television outlets on the one hand and defense contractors on the other.  Moreover, given the fact that such conglomerates tend to contribute vast sums of money to elected officials, and fund the the thinks tanks through the philanthropic foundations their shareholders underwrite, we’ve never once thought to ourselves that we may seriously have already entered a totalitarian existence in which the government and the media have been expropriated by large corporations.

Today, America is abuzz at the notion that we are entering an era of socialism, but the truth of the matter is that socialism arrived under Roosevelt and has been expanded ever since.

The phase of history we find ourselves entering is an illusion in which a president who gives banks continued free reign and implicit guarantees of future taxpayer bailouts is somehow worse than the preceding four presidents, each of whom was linked in some way to bailouts of the Savings and Loan Industry, the automobile industry, Long Term Capital Management, and the banking industry as a whole.  Far from being worse than those four preceding presidents, Barack Obama represents a continuation and logical extension of the pattern established by his predecessors.  He’s just not as good at managing the narrative, and why would he be?  He doesn’t own anything of substance, nor does he have any meaningful connections with anyone within the ownership class which would immunize him from a death of a thousand cuts if he did try to implement an actual liberal agenda.

There are those who will protest at the preceding sentence and point to the healthcare reform bill, which creates a vast bureaucracy to oversee the nation’s healthcare industry in all of its forms.  In all truth, however, any close analysis of the bureaucracy and the law will see that far from empowering government to act in the interests of ordinary citizens, the bill actually locks the government and the citizens purportedly represented by that government into a course where insurance companies will be perpetually enriched at the expense of average people who are now required by law to purchase their private product.  The bill will not control cost, or lower premiums; and it will not paralyze or render beholden the insurance companies to a government comprised of elected representatives whose election campaigns are funded by contributions funneled to the coffers by industry lobbyists..  Even its most ardent defenders acknowledge as much after the fact of its passage.

That last sentence is the key: in the moments before an initiative or proposal’s successful passage or implementation is assured, the justifications are held up as accurate and certain; but after it’s passage or implementation is assured, then and only then is the truth of a lesser or different standard of justification acknowledged.  We entered into an Iraq whose leaders were plotting a resurrected WMD program which included a nuclear program; moreover, they were also meeting with Al Qaeda in Prague.   It was further said that we would need only a minimal amount of troops, that we would be out of Iraq in a matter of weeks, and that we would be welcomed as liberators.  After the consent of Congress had been assured, and we were on the verge of invasion, the truth came out.  In March of 2003, as American forces stood poised to invade Iraq, it was acknowledged that the Niger memo was a forgery and that the intelligence linking Al Qaeda and Iraq was specious at best.

When it became apparent that there were no WMDs or stockpiles of nerve gas and chemical agents, the justification for the war shifted to one of pure altruism: we had removed an evil dictator and liberated an entire country.  We would sow Western style democracy throughout the Middle East by first planting the seed in Iraq.  Our success was no longer dependent upon locating and destroying stockpiles of WMDs; it was in ensuring that democracy could take root and survive after our departure.  The months stretched into years, and even today, there is no certain date of complete and total withdrawal from Iraq.

When we deal with the why of Iraq, and consider the motivation for mounting a major invasion of Iraq under admittedly false pretenses, with the aluminum tubes as centrifuge material having been discredited a year before Judith Miller and the mainstream media reported on the mounting threat of a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear program, we must consider the only motivation that really matters: money.

Chapter Two Bibliography Raw Form

1. “Modern propaganda is a consistent…” Bernays, Edward.  Propaganda. IG Publishing Brooklyn, NY 2005.  52.
2. “Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence.”  Althusser, Louis.  “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (1971), 153. ISBN 902308-89-0. Retrieved from: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm
3. “Only the masses…” Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Shocken Books, New York, NY 2004.  pg. 450
4. “Many of us are like the Apostle Peter…”
5. “To be fair and accurate…”Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly resolution 53/35: The fall of Srebrenica” Retrieved from: http://www.un.org/News/ossg/srebrenica.pdf
6. “movements of mass more than anything else…”
7. “Mass leaders in power have one concern with overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.” Arendt, pg. 459.
8. Amstrong Williams paid $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind. Toppo, Greg Education Department paid commentator to promote law.  Retrieved from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36545-2005Jan25.html
9. “Williams’ contract was part of a $1 million deal…” Ibid.
10. GOP opposition to Department of Education.  Online Backgrounders, PBS The Department of Education, Fall ’96.  Retrieved from: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/backgrounders/department_of_education.html
11. GOP opposition to DOE.  De Rugy, Veronique and Gryphon, Marie.  Elimination Lost: What happened to abolishing the Department of Education? February 11, 2004.  Retrieved from: http://www.cato.org/research/articles/gryphon-040211.html
12. Maggie Gallagher paid to help promote marriage with federal contract. Kurtz, Howard. Writer Backing Bush Plan Had Gotten Federal Contract. Retrieved from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36545-2005Jan25.html
13. Mike McManus on Bush payroll. Collins, Dan. 3rd Columnist on Bush Payroll. Retrieved from: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/26/politics/main669432.shtml
14. Chen, Michelle. Bush Administration Spent $1.6 Billion on ‘Propaganda‘ Efforts, The New Standard, February 15, 2006.  Retrieved from: http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/2815
15. Fake news reports.  Tryhorn, Chris.  US government faked Bush News Reports, Guardian, March 16, 2004.  Retrieved from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/mar/16/uselections2004.broadcasting
16. Television Stations broadcasting VNRs. Farsetta, Diane. Television Stations Respond…And It’s Worse Than You Think, Center For Media And Democracy, PR Watch.org, Published in PR Watch, Second Quarter 2006, Volume 13, No. 2. Retrieved from: http://www.prwatch.org/node/6600
17. New York Times investigation finds 20 government agencies use VNRs. Barstow, David and Stein, Robin.  Under Bush, A New Age of Prepackaged TV News, New York Times, March 13, 2005.  Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html?_r=1
18. Iraq War and Al Qaeda Quotes for opening of Shifting Justifications for Intervention: The War in Quotes. Various, edited by David Stanford, Andrew McNeel Publishing, Kansas City, MO 2008.  14, 15, 18, 25, 61. List of sources retrievable at: http://www.doonesbury.com/warinquotes/sources
19. “Penciled in for 10 March.” Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (New York, The Penguin Press, 2006), 261.
20. “I’ve not made up my mind about military action.” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030306-8.html
21. “[Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability…” Retrievable at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0wbpKCdkkQ
22. “The most important thing is for us to find Osama…” Retrievable at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070913-2.html
23. “I don’t know where he is and I really don’t care.” Retrievable at: http://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/voices/200304/0428span.html and http://en.allexperts.com/q/Legislation-Presidential-Congressional-337/quote-Bush.htm
24. “Gosh, I just don’t think I ever said I’m not worried about Osama Bin Laden.” Retrievable at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/13/debate.transcript/
25. “We know that he [Saddam Hussein] has absolutely been devoted…” Retrievable at: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/cheneymeetthepress.htm
26. “I don’t believe anyone I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.” Retrievable at: http://www.slate.com/id/2083532/
27. “I think the burden is on those people…”  Retrievable at: http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2003/07/wh070903.html
28. It’s amazing I won.” Bruni, Frank.  The President in Europe: Plain-Talking Bush Is Using His Charm on the European Stage, June 16, 2001 New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/16/world/president-europe-president-plain-talking-bush-using-his-charm-european-stage.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
29. The lack of proof proves that undetectable weapons exist. Hartmann, Thom. Hyping Terror for Fun, Profit-And Power, December 7th, 2004. Retrieved at: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1207-26.htm
30. “If I’d gotten the same briefing from Clinton or Gore…” The War in Quotes, Ibid.  pg. 31, and Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York, Three Rivers Press, 2006), 124.
31. “…between 2000 to 2007, philanthropic organizations gave over $230 million…” Choi, Joon Nak.  The Revolving Door: Charitable Foundation Funding for Think Tanks and Implications for Democratic Governance, Proposal Submitted to the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society Graduate Fellowships, June 25, 2007.  1.
32. “Harvard Law Reviews estimate that top twenty conservative think tanks spend more than Republican Party.” Ibid, 1 and “The Political Activity of Think Tanks: The Case for Mandatory Contributor Disclosure” 2002. Harvard Law Review 115(5), 1502-1524.
33. Think tanks and governments in exile. Weaver, R. Kent. 1989. “The Changing World of Think Tanks.” PS: Political Science and Politics 22(9), 563-578.
34. Revolving door reinforces continuity in politics. Choi, pg. 1.
35. Judith Miller reports on aluminum tubes for centrifuges. Gordon, Michael R., and Miller, Judith “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts, New York Times, September 8, 2002. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/international/middleeast/08IRAQ.html?ex=1121140800&en=76eddceb628af81e&ei=5070
36. Gellman, Barton and Pincus, Walter.  Depiction of Threat Outgrew Silence, August 10, 2003 Washington Post, Retrieved from: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0810-01.htm
37. Centrifuge physicists publish Technical Intelligence Note concerning the aluminum tube… Spinning the Tubes, Australian Broadcasting Corporation Four Corners 10/27/2003.  Transcript Retrieved from: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2003/transcripts/s976015.htm
38. Historical overview of aluminum centrifuges, with application to Iraq.  Context of ’1950s: The First Zippe-Type Centrifuge is Produced’  Various authors, History Commons, Retrieved from: http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq_44#complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq_43
39. Miller ignores contradictory evidence in the form of Technical Intelligence Note saying tubes are not suitable for use as centrifuges. Gellman and Pincus, Ibid.
40. Aluminum tubes consistent with Italian Medusa-81 rocket. Moore, James. Judy and the Little Tubes, August 3, 2005. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/judy-and-the-little-tubes_b_5117.html
41. Anodized coating renders the aluminum tubes unsuitable for use in gas centrifuges…Moore, Ibid.  and David Barstow, William J. Broad, and Jeff Gerth, “How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence,” October 3, 2004.
42. Miller’s reporting debunked a year beforehand by both the Department of Energy and the International Institute for Strategic Studies…Moore, James. Ibid. Retrieved from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-moore/judy-and-the-little-tubes_b_5117.html Also, Gellman and Pincus, Ibid. Retrieved from: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0810-01.htm
43. Miller doesn’t report Al-Qaeda pre-9/11.  O’Connor, Rory and Malone, William Scott. “The 9/11 Story that Got Away,” May 18, 2006.  Retrieved from: http://www.alternet.org/story/36388/
44. “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst.” Loewenstein, Antony “Engineering consent: The New York Times’ role in promoting war on Iraq,” Sydney Morning Herald.  Retrieved from: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5931.htm
45. Iraq WMD threat repudiated. Gellman and Pincus, Ibid.
46. Moran, Rick. “About that 500 tons of yellow cake…” American Thinker, July 20, 2005, retrieved from http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/07/about_that_500_tons_of_yellow.html This piece confirms the debunking of the Niger memo detailing the alleged purchase of uranium yellow cake from Niger by Iraq, and also highlights the possession of 500 tons of yellow cake in Iraq’s possession at the time of the second Gulf War, yellow cake which had been rendered harmless by isotopic dilution carried out by the Russian government.  Additionally, it presents a different perspective on Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, as well as CIA efforts on WMD intelligence.
47. Italian forgery of Niger-Iraq yellowcake link, meeting between Sismi head Pollari and Hadley… Rozen, Laura “La Repubblica’s Scoop, Confirmed.”  The American Prospect, October 25, 2005. Retrieved from: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=10506
48. Further documentation of above events: Bonini, Carlo and D’Avanzo, Guiseppe. Doppiogiochisti e dilettanti tutti gli italiani del Nigergate, la Repubblica.it, October 24, 2005.  Retrieved from: http://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezioni/esteri/iraq69/sismicia/sismicia.html Note: if you can’t read the Italian, use Google Translator.
49. Five conglomerates control most of the print, radio, and television media…Bagdikian, Ben.  The New Media Monopoly, Beacon Press, Boston, MA 2004.  pg. 3. Retrieved from: http://books.google.com/books?id=p_VqW4UMcDMC&lpg=PP1&dq=bagdikian%20the%20new%20media%20monopoly&pg=PA4#v=onepage&q&f=false
50. “The leaders of the Big Five are not Hitlers and Stalins…”  Ibid, pg. 4.