If It Weren't For Those Meddling Kids...

I think its safe to say that anyone who follows political discourse and life in general knows that, at some point, our collective media stopped being watchdog of the common man and slowly shifted toward being an Orwellian vehicle for propaganda. And anyone who has followed the truly galling and outrageous effort by BushCo to gut the inner workings of our federal government by firing career professionals and installing hacks in an effort to run a government without actually believing in such a thing.

I also think its fair to say that, while this was all being plotted out the big money in the political world decided - in a bipartisan effort - that corporations are more important than people, and legislated and ruled accordingly. And in this effort, the media - watchdog of the people, eyes and ears to the world, uncoverer of the seedy underbelly - fell under the auspices of the very people the media used to reveal to us.

Winston Smith knew that.

Anyway. I compare the top-to-bottom disembowling of the media as we know it to the ongoing effort to turn our federal government into a crony-laden country club with free contract money for every winking executive board member in sight, and it reminds me why the corporately-puppeted media is failing, and will ultimately fail altogether.

The internet.

Journalism, after all, isn't a business. Its an ideology. Its a mindset. Its a craft. And despite the inner and upper workings of those who attempt to present it on the large scale, those values and concepts cannot be and never have been contained within the walls of the machine. Every paper and broadcast outlet will have a traditionally minded journalist or two buried beneath those hired for Limbaugh factor - shock and ratings, be as outrageous and entertaining to whatever sense of entitlement fits the target demographic. But outside of that, there are people who believe and understand that, as a musician doesn't need a record label to make music, a journalist doesn't need a masthead or a call sign to be a journalist.

The internet is what corporations fear - something that allows the masses to create and distribute ideological property that they once 'owned', and thus profited from. Everyone from musicians to investigative reporters to sports to science to information services to, of course classified ads have been liberated from their traditional bastions and allowed to be defined and created freely, often at the expense of the monoliths.

My question is this: If the internet, and other means of connecting people and sharing information and skill and talent and creativity at the individual level, can make certain specifically inherent corporations and institutions practically obsolete, then what possibilities are there that those who find our political machine to be equally deficient to lead and gather and call together from the bottom up?

The individuals with the skills to bypass the machine have done so. Is there a way to bypass this machine?

"McCain Rebukes Statements By Phil Gramm"

Um. Fuck you.

When we vote in November, we don't just elect some guy to run the country - we elect the Nation's Boss - the guy who hires and nominates and recommends the people who will run the agencies that affect our everyday lives.

McCain hired Phil Gramm, a guy who believes that our everyday economic hardships in life our figments of our imaginations, to be his campaign economic advisor. He has a roster packed with Rovian strategists politicizing and mudding up every element of his presentation, the same trick that got us where we are now.

Don't vote for what's said - vote for what's done and who's appointed to do it.

You May Ask Yourself.. My God.. What Have We Done?..

Jesus Fuck.

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

...

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

...

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document.

“What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

NY Times Article

The 1957 Report Cited (.pdf)

Documents from the ASC Hearing (.pdf)

First it was "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US", now “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War”.

God, "we" suck.

hat tip to Atrios