The Art Of Lying

A History Of Lies: WMD, Who Said What and When ?

"Fool Me Once, Shame On You. Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me"

Intelligence leaves no doubt that Iraq continues to possess and conceal lethal weapons

George  Bush, US President 18 March, 2003

Saddam's removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction

Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003

Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a bit Tony Blair 28 April, 2003

We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd Tony Blair, Prime Minister 18 March, 2003

It is possible Iraqi leaders decided they would destroy them prior to the conflict

Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Secretary 28 May, 2003
 

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. Dick Cheney

Speech to VFW National Convention
August 26, 2002

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons. George "aWol" Bush

Speech to UN General Assembly
September 12, 2002

If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world. Ari Fleischer

Press Briefing
December 2, 2002

We know for a fact that there are weapons there.

Ari Fleischer
Press Briefing
January 9, 2003

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. George W Bush

State of the Union Address
January 28, 2003

We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more. Colin Powell

Remarks to UN Security Council
February 5, 2003

We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have. George W Bush

Radio Address
February 8, 2003

So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad? . . . I think our judgment has to be clearly not.

Colin Powell
Remarks to UN Security Council
March 7, 2003

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

George W Bush
Address to the Nation
March 17, 2003

Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes. Ari Fleisher

Press Briefing
March 21, 2003

There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. And . . . as this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them.

Gen. Tommy Franks
Press Conference
March 22, 2003

I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.
 

Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman
Washington Post, p. A27
March 23, 2003

One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites.

Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark
Press Briefing
March 22, 2003

We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat. Donald Rumsfeld

ABC Interview
March 30, 2003

Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty. - Neocon scholar Robert Kagan

Washington Post op-ed
April 9, 2003

I think you have always heard, and you continue to hear from officials, a measure of high confidence that, indeed, the weapons of mass destruction will be found.

Ari Fleischer
Press Briefing
April 10, 2003

We are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them. George W Bush

NBC Interview
April 24, 2003

There are people who in large measure have information that we need . . . so that we can track down the weapons of mass destruction in that country. Donald Rumsfeld

Press Briefing
April 25, 2003

We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so.

George W Bush
Remarks to Reporters
May 3, 2003

I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now. Colin Powell

Remarks to Reporters
May 4, 2003

We never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country.

Donald Rumsfeld
Fox News Interview
May 4, 2003

I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program. George W Bush

Remarks to Reporters
May 6, 2003

U.S. officials never expected that "we were going to open garages and find" weapons of mass destruction. Condoleeza Rice

Reuters Interview
May 12, 2003

I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago -- I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago -- whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they're still hidden.

Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, Commander 101st Airborne
Press Briefing
May 13, 2003

Before the war, there's no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found.

Gen. Michael Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps
Interview with Reporters
May 21, 2003

Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're going to find weapons of mass destruction.

Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff
NBC Today Show interview
May 26, 2003

They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer.

Donald Rumsfeld
Remarks to Council on Foreign Relations
May 27, 2003

For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.

Paul Wolfowitz
Vanity Fair interview
May 28, 2003

It was a surprise to me then — it remains a surprise to me now — that we have not uncovered weapons, as you say, in some of the forward dispersal sites. Believe me, it's not for lack of trying. We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad, but they're simply not there.

Lt. Gen. James Conway, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force
Press Interview

Why Bill Clinton Is So Good An Orator

Bill Clinton Addresses the DNC REUTERS/Jim Young

The art of speechwriting and speech-giving -- and it is an art, no doubt -- is also, in many ways, a science. A good speech flows sort of like a backward scientific method; it starts with a preconceived idea, and is supported by evidence reinforcing the idea. And politics aside, there may be no one better at doing this than William Jefferson Clinton.

The best speeches, political or otherwise, follow a set of five basic guidelines, says Greta Stahl, content developer (read: speechwriter) at Duarte, a communications firm that advises TED talkers, CEOs and companies from Cisco to Twitter. “Most great speeches really start with a message, and choose strategically which evidence to cite. It’s sort of the opposite of how you form an opinion,” she said.

Understand Your Audience and Target Your Words Appropriately:

This is actually pretty hard in a political convention, because you’re playing to two separate audiences: The cheering one on the convention floor who will already vote for you, and the one at home, watching on TV, minds maybe or maybe not made up.

“If you think about Mitt Romney, people didn’t really see him as very personable or relatable, so you could see a pattern in all the speeches at the convention that would go out of their way to address that,” Stahl said. “I think why a lot of people think Bill Clinton succeeded was he addressed what people wanted to hear — am I better off than I was four years ago? He sort of started with that question. What do voters think, and what do I need to do to convince them?”

Nancy Duarte, CEO of the eponymous firm, has charted the mechanics of great speeches, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In the video below, the ebb and flow of ideas — the negative “what is” and the positive “what could be” — are starkly obvious, if they’re not already just by listening to it. There’s a specific structure here, and it’s that structure, Duarte and Stahl believe, that can make spoken words so effective. And yes, Clinton’s speech from Wednesday night followed this structure. More on that in a moment.

Build The Speech Around A Big Idea:

Before you can think about structure, you have to have the message, which Duarte and her company call the Big Idea. Everything in the speech is built around that. “For Ann Romney, the message was, ‘Here is this guy who I love and trust, and because of that you should love and trust him too,’” Stahl said. “For Bill Clinton, it was ‘Barack Obama is the better choice for the middle class.’”

Balance Emotion and Fact:

Once you’ve nailed that down, step three is the balance between emotion and fact. This, Stahl points out, can get complicated. It’s important to balance anecdotes and personal stories, which can make someone sound more interesting, with some data that puts their story in greater context — but you’d better be honest.

“[GOP vice presidential nominee] Paul Ryan talks about a plant that closed in his hometown, and balances that out with statistics about jobs lost in America. So that works, because it gives you a sense of scale, and it’s personal. Now there’s been some controversy in the press over whether that story was actually true,” Stahl said. “But as a tactic, I think it works.”

Make It Your Own:

This is where Clinton really soars, Stahl said. The Washington Post notes that the transcript of his prepared speech rang in at 3,136 words, but the former president spoke for 48 minutes and 5,895 words. So that means he made up almost half of it on the fly.

“You have to be a really awesome, comfortable public speaker to do that, and add remarks. It can go really awry if you do it without thinking about it,” Stahl said, noting Clint Eastwood’s mind-bogglingRNC speech. “Clinton also has this amazing ability to feed on a crowd — he really benefits from being in a room with 20,000 people. He feeds on that energy and it feels like he’s really talking to them. He’s pretty unique.”

Exploit Contrasts:

Back to that structure. The this-or-that contrast that finds its model in King’s speech can be found in plenty of political oratory, including Clinton’s talk the other night. It can be very effective as a comparative technique, as Clinton used it over and over. While Obama’s speech last night was notably lacking in the King-like oration that made him so famous, he, too, painted a broad characterization of choice. You can choose, he said, to reduce the deficit without raising taxes on the middle class; to export more products; to improve early childhood education; and so on.

Stahl said speeches that work share this basic form, and she, Duarte and others have found it throughout some of the best-known public talks throughout modern history. The key is to end on the high note, which they call the "new bliss" -- show the contrast, and end on "what could be." Stahl said there is some research to back up the fact that this really works, including psychological studies of storytelling, but she added that sometimes you just know.

"There is some analytical element to it, but there is an element that is emotional, too. It's something you can see in the audience. When you’re getting a reaction, you can evaluate the speech in terms of, 'What is happening in that moment, and what made that work?'"

This contrast between the despair of now and the hope of tomorrow, the heart of what makes a speech so effective, has also become the centerpiece of the election. You can vote for them, and get this; or you can vote for us, and get something different. Both parties say it, and it's true — the candidates have dramatically different ideas, and the parties have different ideas, for how to run this country. Acknowledging those differences is more than just a tactic for a political speech.

Via: "PopSci"

Psywar

The Real Battlefield Is Your Mind

How did the land of the free and the home of the brave arrive at a place where citizens could be manipulated with such efficiency and on such a massive scale?

This film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the "elitist theory of democracy" and the relationship between war, propaganda and class.

Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips (“Project Censored”), John Stauber (“PR Watch”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”) and others

5 Reasons Israel Is Losing The PR Battle

Right-wing Israeli officials are concerned about attempts to "delegitimize" Israel, and fund former officials and intellectuals to attempt to combat this perceived trend. But it seems obvious that Israel is gradually sinking in the perception of the outside world, and there are concrete reasons for this change. Most of them derive from the train wreck that is Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Israeli blockade on the civilians of the Gaza Strip. Others derive from the hawkishness of the Likud government and its Kadima predecessor.

They have nothing to do with anti-Israel sentiments or hatred of Jews. No one is condemning the municipality of Haifa or the administration of Tel Aviv. The criticisms are criticisms of aggressive expansionism and a trigger-happy government. The criticisms are getting louder and more mainstream, with potentially deleterious effects on Israel’s economy as time goes on.

1. Giving the finger to any ‘peace process'

Israeli land theft in the Palestinian West Bank has reached epic proportions under PM Binyamin Netanyahu, with settlement populations surging 18%. The right-wing in Israel is so isolated from the real world that they have begun claiming that the Palestinian territories are not even occupied. They claim that the Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist forces them to occupy Palestine (in fact, the PLO recognized Israel as part of the Oslo accords, after which the Israelis screwed the Palestinians over royally).

They distort history and say the most ridiculous things, such as that the League of Nations Mandate awarded to Britain in the 1920s allows them now to steal Palestinian land and water without recompensing them. The brazenness and zombie-like relentlessness of this march onto other people’s land has provoked an increasingly influential international boycott movement, targeting the "settler-industrial complex" that preys on the hapless Palestinians under Israel’s control. That is why the Church of England recently endorsed a World Council of Churches-inspired program that brings people to the Occupied Territories to see for themselves what Occupation is doing to the stateless and rights-less Palestinians. The resolution was a major defeat for the Likud, right-wing branches of Zionism. 

Likewise, the US Presbyterian Church very nearly adopted a resolution to disinvest from companies perceived as enabling the Israeli land grab in the West Bank. As it was, they urged positive investment to help the Palestinian victims of Israeli injustice. These votes are straws in the wind. As Israel moves formally to incorporate the West Bank into itself, it must offer citizenship to the Palestinians on the land it covets, or else it would perpetuate the new apartheid.

2. Hypocrisy

Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu keeps threatening to launch a war on Iran and urging my country to sacrifice its young men, to stop Iran from continuing to enrich uranium. (Iran says the enrichment is for peaceful energy purposes and there is no good evidence to the contrary.)

Israel itself not only enriched uranium, it made 400 nuclear bombs. There are allegations by an Israeli and American journalist that Israel’s Mossad spy agency has murdered a series of Iranian scientists. (If Iran were alleged to have done something similar at Dimona in Israel, all hell would have broken loose.)

And, it now turns out that Binyamin Netanyahu was involved in a spy ring that smuggled nuclear triggers out of the United States to Israel. Israel is alleged routinely to threaten to use its nuclear weapons if it doesn’t get its way, deploying a sort of nuclear blackmail. It is very hard to see why Iran’s population should be reduced to a fourth-world standard of living by international sanctions for doing much, much less than Israel has done, or why Netanyahu should be able to smuggle US high-tech out of this country with impunity.

3. Disregard for the rule of law

The Israeli practice of kidnapping Palestinians at will and holding them indefinitely without trial is abhorrent to all civilized persons. (They call it administrative detention in Tel Aviv.) If a Palestinian is suspected of having actually committed a crime, then it should be possible to present evidence for it and to try the person.

Israel took the Palestinian soccer player Mahmoud Sarsak into custody three years ago, and only just released him under severe international pressure. The Israelis say he is an Islamic Jihad terrorist, but clearly have no good evidence for this charge or they would have tried him. Instead, they just put him away, apparently forever. He went on a hunger strike that endangered his life, and provoked widespread protests from the soccer playing lobby. But Sarsak’s plight also elicited a condemnation from the Austrian senate (Bundesrat). Israeli complaints that criticizing "administrative detention" is "anti-Semitic" and that after all Syria is doing something much worse are absolutely painful to hear. It is playground ethics: "he hit me first," "you just don’t like me," "why punish me when other kids have done really bad things?"

The Israelis would benefit from a reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of the US Bill of Rights on issues such as a fair and speedy trial for everyone arrested, and from an acquaintance with the basic international law of Occupations, which rules out most of their practices toward the Palestinians. Note that when the Bush administration attempted to make Guantanamo a legal black hole, the US Supreme Court struck it down.

4. Punitive policies toward non-combatants

The Israeli blockade on the civilian population of Gaza is evil, creepy and illegal in international law. That is why the international community is pushing back. For instance, UNESCO is establishing a science chair at a university in Gaza. Israel is the occupying authority in Gaza, and is therefore bound by the Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of its subjects. Some 40% of Palestinian families there are refugees from what is now Israel, expelled by militant members of the Yishuv in 1948, and many of them still live in camps. The blockade has reduced some 56% of them to food insecurity.

Israel surrounds the Strip, and destroyed its airport and seaport, preventing it from exporting most of what it makes and produces, and limiting imports. The little territory of 1.6 million Palestinians suffers severe health as well as mental health damage from these Israeli policies. No Israeli official can explain what future the residents of Gaza might have that is not a kind of Israel-imposed hell. (And no, they aren’t generic "Arabs" who will melt into the great sea of other "Arabs" as the more racist Israelis might hope.)

Israeli relations with Turkey, long excellent, have been deeply harmed by the blockade and Israel’s attack on a civilian Turkish aid ship that tried to get supplies to the non-combatant population there. Israel refuses to apologize for killing nine aid workers, including an American citizen.

5. Violations of international law

Israel’s occupation forces it into a whole range of illegal and reprehensible behaviors. This is nothing to do with Jews or Israel, it is to do with occupations. The Israelis have been arresting minors, sentencing them to harsh terms and fines, and treating them much differently than they would Jewish minors guilty of the same offenses. The British Foreign Office has just condemned these practices.

Israeli policies are no more off limits to criticism than are Argentinian or Indonesian ones, despite what the country’s remarkably thin-skinned and intolerant partisans often allege. And, when the chorus of criticism is coming from Anglicans, Presbyterians, the UK Foreign Office, the Austrian Senate, and UNESCO, that is a pretty wide set of world institutions not easily pigeon-holed as mere bigots. Maybe it is time for the Israeli government to reconsider the self-destructive course it is on, which likely will lead to the end of the state some decades hence, as Israeli President Shimon Peres is frantically warning.

Via: "AlterNet"

Edward Bernays: The Master Of Modern Propaganda

Posted by guest blogger "Sayf Maslul" 

Part-1



Part-2



"The modern master of the propaganda game was PR genius Edward Bernays, Viennese-born nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays took propaganda seriously for his career work: he combined individual and social psychology, public opinion studies, political persuasion and advertising to construct “necessary illusions” which filtered out to the masses as “reality.”

"Bernays proudly referred to this all-important social process as the “engineering of consent.” All of this had little, if anything, to do with real democracy. The objective for Bernays was to provide government and media outlets with powerful tools for social persuasion and control. As a matter of fact, so impressed was he with Bernays’ early works Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels relied heavily upon them for his own dubious inspiration in the 1930s. Apparently, that Bernays was a Jew mattered little to Goebbels....

"Bernays and journalistic giant Walter Lippman came to Woodrow Wilson’s aid in 1917 to reverse negative public sentiment about war. These two behind-the-curtain wizards were indispensable in helping the president whip gun-shy America into an anti-German frenzy to go “over there” for WWI. Bernays created the patriotic war slogan “Make the World Safe for Democracy”—an irresistibly patriotic mantra that America embraced..."

(above comes from "Propaganda: The Art of War", by James Sandrolini at Chicago Media Watch.)

---

"...Wilson created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) on April 13, 1917. According to a must-read study by Aaron Delwiche at the School of Communications, University of Washington, (4) "Under the leadership of a muckraking journalist named George Creel, the CPI recruited heavily from business, media, academia, and the art world. The CPI blended advertising techniques with a sophisticated understanding of human psychology, and its efforts represent the first time that a modern government disseminated propaganda on such a large scale. It is fascinating that this phenomenon, often linked with totalitarian regimes, emerged in a democratic state." "Invoking the threat of German propaganda," the study continues, "the CPI implemented 'voluntary guidelines' for the news media and helped to pass the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The CPI did not have explicit enforcement power, but it nevertheless 'enjoyed censorship power which was tantamount to direct legal force.'"

"The tools, techniques and processes developed by the CPI to manipulate the collective attitudes of the public did not disappear with the termination of [WWI]. The heads of the organization went on to apply the lessons learned in time of war to a country at peace. These former CPI agents moved on to Madison Avenue, joined the nascent Public Relations firms and became lobbyists.

""Two years later," the study states, (5) "the Director of the CPI's Foreign Division argued that 'the history of propaganda in the war would scarcely be worthy of consideration here, but for one fact — it did not stop with the armistice. No indeed! The methods invented and tried out in the war were too valuable for the uses of governments, factions, and special interests.' Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, took the techniques he learned in the CPI directly to Madison Avenue and became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic government. 'It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind,' wrote Bernays in his 1928 bombshell Propaganda. 'It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace.'"

"The intelligent few....regimenting the public mind... Edward Bernays [1891-1995] is also known as the Father of Spin (6) and the godfather of modern public relations (the "father" of public relations is Ivy Lee whose firm, Ivy Lee & T.J. Ross, was hired for $25,000 a year by the German conglomerate, I.G. Farben, which invited him to meet Hitler and Goebbels. His son, James Lee went to work for Farben in Berlin.)

"The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, founded in 1937 to educate the public about the nature of propaganda, identified "seven basic propaganda devices: Name-Calling, Glittering Generality, Transfer, Testimonial, Plain Folks, Card Stacking, and Band Wagon."

(the above is from Propaganda: Then and Now, by Gilles d'Aymery at Swans.)

---

"Bernays was a press officer for Woodrow Wilson at the peace conferences in Europe following World War I, his job being to present Wilson in the most favourable light possible in order to boost his popularity with the American public. By this time the word propaganda was already gaining a sinister implication in the West due to its association with communism, and Bernays coined the term Public Relations as a positive alternative. 


Back in America Bernays set to work for major corporations, with one of his most spectacular successes being to help break the taboo against women smoking. He paraded a group of attractive young ladies through New York smoking and bearing the slogan 'March for Freedom'. Anyone criticising the idea of women smoking would now appear to be against freedom, and the numbers of women taking up the habit shot through the roof.

"After this success Lehman Brothers and other big New York banks financed the development of department stores, confident that they could use the techniques pioneered by Bernays to persuade people to purchase a range of products that left to themselves they may very well not have bothered with. This period also saw the introduction of the techniques of product placement and psuedo-scientific product endorsement so familiar to us today. All of this dubious activity in the capitalist economy was one of the main factors leading to the bubble which ended in the Wall Street crash of 1929.."

(The above is from BBC's Century of the Self, a review by Paul Shepherd.)

Additional information On Edward Bernays From: "Wikipedia"

The Advertisers

Posted by Guest Blogger "Sayf Maslul"


“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers” and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.” [By Banksy]

Losing The Battle For Arab Opinion

As Arab Foreign Ministers Say The Libyan Regime Is Illegitimate, We Ask If Gaddafi Has Lost Another Battle.

Inside Story
Last Modified: 13 Mar 2011 11:24 GMT
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

The foreign ministers of the six Arab Gulf states met on Thursday in the Saudi capital Riyadh to discuss the ongoing crisis in Libya. They say that the existing Libyan regime is illegitimate and contact should be initiated with the Libyan rebels' national council.

The foreign ministers have also urged the Arab League to take the necessary measures to stop the bloodshed in Libya.

The Arab Gulf Council countries have already backed a no fly zone over Libya earlier this week.

So has Muammar Gaddafi lost another diplomatic battle?

Joining Inside Story to discuss this are: Salman Shaikh, the director of the Brookings Centre in Doha; Con Coughlin, the executive foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph newspaper; and Hussein Shobokshi, a columnist at Ashraq Alawsat newspaper.

Managing Public Perception

Psychological Warfare: Managing Public Perception

A Democracy Of Material Goods

How did the land of the free and the home of the brave arrive at a place where citizens could be manipulated with such efficiency and on such a massive scale?

Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips (“Project Censored”), John Stauber (“PR Watch”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”) and others.http://metanoia-films.org/



Actor Mark Ruffalo reads union leader Eugene Debs' famous "Canton, Ohio" speech. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuGp-0G1p4M

"Israel Must Learn From Nazi Tactics"

Retired Judge Hadassa Ben-Itto Says As Part Of PR War, Israel Should Adopt Tactics Used To Distribute Protocols Of Elders Of Zion

By Modi Kreitman

Published: 07.05.10, 16:44

Courtesy Of "Y Net News"

LONDON – "We must learn from the Nazi tactics," Retired Israeli Judge Hadassa Ben-Itto said recently during a conference discussing ways to improve the State of Israel's PR efforts in the world.
The meeting, which was held last week in the English capital, was attended by some 150 senior Jewish legal experts.
Ben-Itto said during the conference that Israel should adopt the tactics used by the Nazis after they distributed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Refusing to reach a compromise and continuing their battle in the courts although they had no proof of the protocols.  

"I thought about it, about our 'hasbara', and nothing is working because our story is complicated and the world is used to a sound bite," she explained.
"I have reached the conclusion that we must use these tactics in courts worldwide, just like the Nazis – with all distinctions – used the courts to spread their message."