Hubris: Selling The Iraq War

Hubris : Selling the Iraq War - As seen on MSNBC, Hosted by Rachel Maddow, based on the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by David Corn and Michael Isikoff.

The Pentagon’s Lie Machine

Military Whistleblower Exposes A Campaign Of Deception 

By Justin Raimondo, 
February 15, 2012 
Courtesy of "Anti-War"

The publication of Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis’s piece in the Armed Forces Journal, followed up by an interview in the New York Times and the posting of a longer piece[.pdf] by Rolling Stone, is a remarkable event in the sense that rarely has a more comprehensive debunking of official lies been written by an insider. Col. Davis has served in both the Iraq and Afghan campaigns, and recently was on a tour that took him to a number of Afghan outposts. His reports relate, in numbing detail, the complete disparity between the official pronouncements of our military spokespersonsand the grim truth of what he saw on the ground in Afghanistan.

As our generals testify before Congress [.pdf] that our efforts in Afghanistan are bearing fruit, that the “surge” worked both in Iraq and Afghanistan, that our training the Afghan security forces is succeeding, and that we are on the road to “victory,” Col. Davis turns this Panglossian scenario on its head. The reality, he says, is that the “surge,” in both cases, failed – in Iraq, because the additional troops had nothing to do with the internal split in the insurgency that caused it to temporarily abate, and in Afghanistan because casualties went up in direct proportion to the increase in troops – without any corresponding gain on the battlefield. As for the vaunted Afghan security forces, which are being hailed as reliable guarantors and legatees of a hard-won US “victory,” Col. Davis draws a portrait of them as invariably having their backs to the enemy – that is, when they aren’t collaborating with them, calling “mini-truces” via radio while US soldiers take the brunt of the fighting.

Davis’s charge: that the military high command, in conjunction with our political leaders, engaged in a campaign of systematic deception designed to depict our failed attempts to conquer and colonize Iraq and Afghanistan as glorious victories, when, in reality, the exact opposite is the case. He gives a series of stunning examples, debunking lie after lie, finally asking:

“One of the key questions most readers must be asking about this point in the report, is how could such an extensive, pervasive, and long-running series of deceptive statements have gone unnoticed by virtually the entire country?”

Glad you asked. The reason is simple: the media has become an adjunct to the military’s “information operations,” i.e. psychological and propaganda operations, which are not just directed at the foreign “enemy,” but also at the enemy on the home front, i.e. the American people, who, if they knew the truth, would pull the plug on the whole operation. Col. Davis puts it more politely:

“There are a number of reasons, but perhaps none bigger than the role played by the major media in this country. This is not an issue where “the liberal media” of the major networks failed, or ‘the right-wing conservatives’ of Fox News, nor any other specific network. Rather, it was a cumulative failure of our nation’s major media in every category: network news, cable news, magazines and major newspapers.”

Davis reports that journalists who fail to follow the Pentagon line are simply excluded from having any access. In order to report what is actually occurring on the battlefield – and compete in the news business – reporters must interact with military leaders, but that interaction, relates Col. Davis, comes at a price – the integration of the media into the Pentagon’s lie machine. He illustrates his point with the report issued by the Department of Defense Inspector General on Donald Rumsfeld’s clearly illegal projectto use retired officers as propagandists to build support for the Iraq war. The Pentagon coordinated the effort with the “mainstream” news media, planting their agents on all the major news outlets. The media portrayed these infiltrators as “experts,” treated them like real journalists, and gave them a platform from which to pontificate as if they were objective observers. As Davis puts it:

“A Pentagon media outreach program – ostensibly to ‘educate’ the public – only uses spokesmen who are willing to speak the bullet points provided by the Secretary of Defense, and if those spokesmen don’t act as ‘team players’ and say what the Pentagon wants, they are dropped. For their part, the networks only want men and women to speak as experts if they have that top-level access. All of this begs the question: what sort of objectivity and honest analysis did the American public get from watching the major media outlets during this period?”

The answer is that the American public got what they will continue to get: a completely false picture of our various wars of conquest [.pdf]. In spite of the Inspector General’s detailed narrative of a consistent attempt by the Pentagon to commandeer the American media and wield it as a weapon of war, the Inspector General nonetheless concluded these activities “complied with regulations and directives” and were therefore okay. Move along, nothing to see here….

How could our media have missed what is arguably the most important story of the decade – the utter failure of our best efforts to subjugate the Iraqi and Afghan peoples? Col. Davis indicts the American news media for its passive complicity in a campaign of systematic deception:

“So long as our country’s top TV and print media continue to avoid challenging power for fear of losing access, there is every reason to expect many senior Defense Department leaders will continue to play this game of denial of access in order to effect compliant reports. As I’ve shown throughout this report, there is ample open source information and reports all over the internet that would allow any individual – or reporter – to find the truth and report it. But heretofore few have.”

It’s significant that he counterposes the internet to the “mainstream” media: there can be little doubt we’ve been doing a far better job of reporting the Iraq and Afghan wars than our corporate competitors in the world of Dead Tree Journalism and televisedtalking bobble-heads. That aside, however, the question arises: is the military deliberately lying to us, or are the generals just so close to the battlefield – and so self-interested – that they can’t be objective and somehow saw a glorious victory where there was only historic defeat?

As a libertarian, I assume the former, but I can see why the rest of you might need a bit more empirical evidence, which Col. Davis helpfully provides.

In the modern parlance of war, “information operations” are on the same level as strictly military operations, and this brings into focus the ominous implications of the precedent set by Rumsfeld’s media blitz. Davis cites an Army manual [.pdf] on information operations (IO):

“’IO becomes a core competency. The importance of dominating the information spectrum explains the objective of transforming IO into a core military competency on a par with air, ground, maritime and special operations.’ It is a remarkable development to suggest that using information in combat is on par with ground and air forces. Three years later the Department of Defense published an unclassified doctrinal manual that provided further clarity on Secretary Rumsfeld’s information focus.”

That unclassified document emphasizes the “integrated employment of electronic warfare (EW), computer network operations (CNO), psychological operations (PSYOP), military deception (MILDEC), and operations security (OPSEC), in concert with specified supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own.”

The new counterinsurgency doctrine of the Pentagon dictates that “Information Operations” must be a part of every military campaign, as essential as having a supply of ammunition. They aim to win “hearts and minds” – but whose hearts and whoseminds?

“Since it is so crucial for the Joint Force to ‘fully integrate” IO into every aspect of military operations,” Davis continues, “it is important to understand what some of these inputs specifically require. Two are of particular import: military deception and psychological operations:

“Military Deception is defined as ‘(JP 3-14.3) being those actions executed todeliberately mislead adversary decision makers as to friendly military capabilities, intentions, and operations, thereby causing the adversary to take specific actions (or inactions) that will contribute to the accomplishment of the friendly mission’ and PSYOP as ‘(JP3-53) planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

The clear implication of Rumsfeld’s media infiltration program is that these “adversary decision makers” aren’t necessarily foreign enemy combatants, either Iraqi insurgents or Taliban fighters. Davis quotes from an article [.pdf] by Col. Richard B. Leap in a compendium of essays by Public Affairs (PA) officers that points to the real identity of these unnamed “adversaries”:

“Many PA practitioners believe their only role is to inform the domestic and international publics with accurate, truthful information and provide access to government and military officials and operations to confirm what is reported. All should agree that PA must always present truthful, credible information, however, if Public Diplomacy and open PSYOP only target foreign audiences, then who besides PA can counter the enemy’s or the media’s shaping of US domestic opinion?”

It is strictly illegal for the US military to aim its propaganda arm at the American public, but in this age of a truly globalized media the line between foreign and domestic is easily blurred. Technology has rendered that prohibition irrelevant and entirely nonfunctional. The Smith-Mundt Act is apparently just as much a dead letter as our Constitution.

Col. Leap bemoans the dramatic drop in US support for the Iraq war, noting that Pew polled support at 61 percent in 2003 “compared with only 13 percent” three years later. His solution:

“Public Affairs organizations must devise new means and methods to better ‘frame’ issues for domestic and international audiences on policy successes while countering enemy disinformation in order to reverse these trends.

“Further, the US Government must clarify the roles, responsibilities, authorities and relationships between Public Affairs, Public Diplomacy and Information Operations to not only influence foreign target audiences, but to safeguard US national will. A failure to do so may result in strategic defeats in the future.”

In Col. Leap’s opinion, the goal of the Public Affairs officer in the service of the US military is not to defend the country – it’s to safeguard the National Will. The will to do what? Why, whatever the Pentagon and the political leadership desires. These are the movers and shapers of the National Will: the rest of us, including the media, are mere instruments in their capable hands.

As for those of us who are not, we’re presumably disseminators of “enemy disinformation,” different from the Taliban only in that we operate on the domestic scene and not in the mountains of Afghanistan. No wonder Antiwar.com has the FBIbreathing down our necks.

Reading Col. Davis’s paper, I was struck with the enormity of what we here at Antiwar.com are up against: a US government-financed and coordinated propaganda campaign with effectively limitless resources. I knew this in theory, but seeing it right there on the printed page, especially Col. Leap’s definition of his job description, is sobering. How can we possibly succeed, I thought, when we have to fight this?

The answer was apparent as soon as I had formulated the question: they need all their resources just to keep the truth from the American people. We, on the other hand, only need our voice – and the means to make it heard.

There’s just one way to make sure that voice is never stilled, and that’s by becoming afinancial contributor: the War Party has the US Treasury at its disposal, but we only have you. They have your tax dollars, but we only have our readers and supporters who voluntarily donate to make sure there’s a counterpoint to the war propaganda spouted by government officials and their media shills. Sure, we’re outgunned and out-manned, but we don’t need to equal or even approach their level of expenditure. We just need a bare-bones operation that “lives off the land,” so to speak, like a classic guerrilla operation – because we have the truth on our side.

This is the biggest weapon in our arsenal, but we need some kind of platform on which to launch it: and that’s what Antiwar.com is all about. For sixteen years, we’ve presented a vital counterpoint to the Pentagon’s media sock-puppets on a daily basis, debunking the lies of the War Party as soon as they’re uttered. We can’t continue to do it, however, unless we start seeing some better results from our current fundraising campaign. We don’t need a lot: we have a very small staff, and they do the work of twice their number. Yet we do need a bare minimum in order to survive as a viable, frequently-updated (at least daily) alternative to the badly-compromised “mainstream” media in the increasingly important realm of international affairs.

The Public Must Challenge News Coverage

Mainstream media often dismisses talk of conspiracy as silly - yet in the case of News of the World, a vast criminal conspiracy was shown to have existed [EPA]


A Look Back At The Dramatic News Events Of The Past Summer Shows That The Media's Coverage Is Often Badly Flawed.

By Dan Hind
Last Modified: 17 Aug 2011 10:21
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

In the last month, we have seen one engrossing news event follow another in quick succession. On July 5th, The Guardian revealed that the News of the World had been illegally hacking into the voicemail records of the victims of crime. In the week that followed, the revelations accumulated and the scandal cut short the careers of senior police officers and media executives. The frenzy of news and analysis had only just ground to a halt when attention shifted to the terrorist attacks in Oslo and Utoya in Norway on July 22nd. Then, after a brief detour to America and the melodramatic negotiations over the debt ceiling, we had riots and looting on the streets of Britain's cities and what looked like panic on the stock markets of the world.

High summer is meant to be a quiet month for news. In Britain, it used to be called the silly season - a time when news editors could run stories about the Loch Ness monster secure in the knowledge that nothing terribly urgent happens in August. Just as publishers held back their blockbusters until September, politicians waited until after Labour Day to launch eye-catching initiatives. Asked in September 2002 why he was talking about the menace posed by Iraq all of a sudden, Andrew Card, the White House Chief of Staff, won lasting notoriety when he explained that "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August".

An Unusual Summer

Politicians like to appear powerless before the onrush of events. The political establishment in the America is united in pretending that it has no choice but to cut spending on social programmes, for example. The markets leave them no choice but to do what they want to do. But there is also a sense, in Europe at any rate, that our rulers are not entirely in control of events. The British prime minister, the mayor of London, the Home secretary and the chancellor of the Exchequer all cut short their holidays last week when rioting broke out in North London and spread to other English cities. The problems in the Eurozone have forced several European leaders to cancel their breaks. That doesn't happen in a normal August.

As the 24-hour news channels and the social media filled with one super-drama after another, they crowded out other stories. A famine in Somalia barely registered. Conflict continued in Libya and Syria and there were major demonstrations in both Israel and Egypt but they no longer excited the same volume of chatter and speculation in the western media that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt inspired a few months earlier. Mubarak's telegenic court appearances came and went, attracting a flicker of interest from broadcasters outside the region. The Arab Spring had turned into the Arab Summer, a drawn out struggle between the peoples and governments of the region. The significance of what was happening hadn't diminished, only its ability to monopolise the global news agenda.

It is all too easy to be caught up in each drama as it comes. We watch the crowds in Tahrir Square and feel the thrill of people power. We watch the crowds in London and shudder at the prospect of a city lost to mob rule. The images present themselves. The analysts and commentators offer their explanations and interpretations, controversies break out, lines are drawn. Events are made to conform to existing world-views or, more rarely perhaps, world-views shift a little. Everything seems terrifically urgent. Then the caravan moves on.

It is worth asking what, taken together, the events of this unseasonably eventful summer have to tell us. Or rather, what the coverage of these events tells us. Since the launch of CNN the global news agenda has been filled by a succession of events that have little in common but their capacity to enthral audiences. The two Gulf Wars, the OJ Simpson trial, the terrorist attacks of September 2001, Tiger Woods' marital difficulties and Lindsay Lohan's brushes with the law all have their moment at the centre of attention. The world historical takes turns with the eye-catching, the sensational and the scandalous. This series of incommensurable events is itself an event, perhaps the defining constant of our time. In one sense this summer's news has been no different. In Britain the prequel to the News International was a frenzy of speculation about the private antics of professional footballers and celebrities.

Fantastical Assumptions

But if we step back from this series we can see that the coverage on which we rely is often badly flawed. Time and again this year we have learned how fantastical the background assumptions of the major media are. Since September 2001 talking heads and opinion formers have been all but united in telling us that political change in the Middle East would inevitably empower religious extremists. Good rational sceptics found themselves reluctantly accepting the need to support dictators who were at least the natural enemies of al-Qaeda. Reality collided with this widely accepted nonsense on the streets of Egypt and Tunisia and it turned out that the alternative to Western-backed tyranny might be democratic after all.

Over the last decade the major media have been almost unanimous in dismissing the significance of conspiracies. Anyone who thought that secret criminal cabals were influencing events in Western democracies was obviously a ridiculous charlatan or a pathetic fantasist. Then we learned that a vast criminal conspiracy had been conducted in the offices of News International. While this criminal conspiracy was going on senior executives at the company had sought to intimidate MPs and other public figures. Not unreasonably the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown denounced what he called a "criminal-media nexus" in the House of Commons.

There was something ludicrous about this particular collapse of the conventional wisdom. One author was working for the same company as the members of this "criminal-media nexus" while he was writing a book that mocked conspiracy theories and their proponents. David Aaronovitch, the author of Voodoo Histories, was assuring his readers that "conspiracies aren't powerful" at the very moment when his fellow employees at News International, in league with convicted criminals, were bugging, bribing and blackmailing on an industrial scale.

The Media Keeps Us Uninformed

Time and again we are finding that our media system is failing in what its defenders claim is its primary goal and justification - to keep us tolerably well informed. And even its most glaring failures do not seem to encourage a more critical, and self-critical, culture in newsrooms. When news of a terrorist attack in Oslo first broke many outlets were quick to decide that Islamists were punishing Norway for its involvement in the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Only later did it emerge that the perpetrator, Anders Breivik, was a neo-fascist Islamophobe. Then the media decided he wasn't a terrorist after all and so the myth of terrorism as a uniquely Islamic practise could be left unchallenged. There are signs that social media can challenge this infuriating wrong-headedness, but we should not exaggerate the power of networks to reach large audiences when compared with, say, broadcast news.

Print, broadcast and digital media will continue to present us with engrossing spectacles. The global economy will continue to stagger from crisis to crisis. Competition for resources and the conflict between rich and poor will both intensify. The public relations industry will seek to insert commercial messages and celebrity scandals between each outbreak of history. Commentators will continue to make claims that make less and less sense. Politicians will continue to propose solutions that are ever more absurd and sinister.

In Britain we have an exemplary mix of market-oriented and public service media. For several years they collectively failed to tell us that a major part of the information establishment had become a criminal conspiracy. This failure was of a piece with a wider inability to notice and describe quite obtrusive features of reality. Most of the press and the broadcast establishment had no real idea what was happening in the financial markets in the decade before 2007, for example. Their ignorance and incuriosity were so complete that even the former editor of the Financial Times, Richard Lambert, was later moved to admit that "precious few journalists gave any hints at all of what was to come". A few shrewd investments by the bankers had turned the news media into purveyors of fantasy.

The world will continue to surprise and bewilder us while we rely on the same institutional machinery for our information. We will only break the spell of the flow when are able to put the systems of established power, including the media, under sustained and meaningful scrutiny. This will require that we each have some power to direct inquiry and to ensure that important discoveries find an appropriate audience. Democracy without democratic media has been tried and we find ourselves here, in the midst of a global economic crisis and a vast undeclared war. The current constitution of the media is deeply implicated in our predicament.

It is only as patrons of research and inquiry that we can achieve the status of sovereign citizens. Neither market forces nor public servants can be relied on to describe the world in ways that displease the powerful. But we can create a system that will. We need only open up decisions about what is investigated and publicised to the conscious deliberation of a public of citizens. Such a project will never capture the circuits of the global attention industry. After all, it threatens the prerogatives of the owners and operators of the major media concerns. But it can be done. It must be done if we are to restore contact with the world, each other, and ourselves.

Dan Hind has worked in publishing since 1998 and is the author of two acclaimed books: The Return of the Public and The Threat to Reason. He is this year's winner of the Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize.

The Media Is The Enemy

Of Peace, Liberty, and The Truth

By Justin Raimondo,
August 17, 2011
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

Ron Paul is getting more publicity out of not getting publicity in the wake of hisvirtual tie with Bachmann in the Ames poll than he’s gotten to date. Suddenly everyone’s noticing the “mainstream” media is trying very hard not to notice the twelve-term Texas congressman and libertarian icon, despite his success inquadrupling his previous Iowa showing and barely being edged out by Bachmann.Jon Stewart’s takedown of the Ron Paul media blackout is devastating, and, for the most part, funny. Barring that crack about Paul being “the ‘Patient Zero’ of the Tea Party” – likening tea partiers to HIV-positives is offensive on so many levels, I don’t know where to start – Stewart’s critique of the anti-Paul bias in the mainstream media is 100 percent accurate. Roger Simon, writing in Politico, found it “amazing” and “disturbing” that “Paul almost wins the thing and he remains poison.”

To us long-time Paul-watchers, who have witnessed this media blackout in operation for years – and are way beyond being merely “disturbed” by it – there is nothing in the least bit amazing about the media’s hostility to Paul. The latest snub is merely a repetition of what has been the Party Line, a line that – like Paul himself – crosses ideological boundaries, and Stewart’s takedown – which spliced together footage of both CNN and Fox News anchors, wearing identical smirks, disdainfully dismissing Paul – showed this red media/blue media united front in action.

Claims of media bias come from both sides of the political spectrum: the left has its Chomskyite analysis of the important role played by the media in “manufacturing consent,” and the right has been crying – with some justification – “liberal media bias” since time immemorial. Journalists used to not take any of this seriously, because they, after all, are objective observers – or at least they used to be, before the advent of advocacy journalism in the style of Fox News and MSNBC. The cable news industry still hides behind this disinterested façade, but with the changes in the news media itself this pretense is getting harder to defend.

I think Ron himself had the right analysis of how and why the media blackout is so brazen: As he told Simon:

“’They [the media] believe this guy is dangerous to the status quo,’ Paul said, ‘but that is a reason to be more energized… In his interview with me, Paul stressed his ‘peace’ message — he wants our troops brought home from foreign soil — and believes that and his fiscal conservatism will gain him supporters. ‘We are trying to reverse 100 years of history, the change from a republic to an empire, the change to tax and spending, who wants to admit that?’ Paul said. ‘Who wants to admit we don’t have to be policeman of the world?’”

Paul is correct to home in on his foreign policy views to explain why the “analysts” and Washington know-it-alls insist he “has no chance of winning the Republican nomination,” as the Wall Street Journal averred. The conventional wisdom is, asAaron Blake put it so succinctly in the Washington Post:

“Despite his strong showing at Ames, Paul is still given virtually no chance to win the Republican nomination as his libertarian-leaning brand of politics and distance from most Republicans on foreign policy matters make it difficult for him to win over mainstream GOPers.”

A few lines down, however, and we read:

“Paul’s vote total was also three and a half times as large as his showing four years ago and almost 40 percent of the total vote he got in the 2008 Iowa caucuses – where turnout is usually more than 10 times as high as the straw poll. Paul also appears to be benefiting as the most full-throated opponent of U.S. involvement abroad from an increase in anti-war sentiment in the GOP.”

Either Paul’s anti-interventionist views virtually rule him out as a potential GOP presidential nominee, or else his views benefit him – Blake can’t have it both ways. That he’s desperately trying to is evidence of some confusion, as well as an ingrained bias. Confusion because journalists are not omniscient: they’re just ordinary people, who often don’t have the foresight to see new trends developing even as they are occurring – although you’d think that would be the core of a reporter’s job, especially one who specializes in politics. The breakdown of the right-left, red-blue, Fox-MSNBC paradigm is an ongoing process, one bound to take unexpected turns – and take many by surprise, up to and including those, like Paul, in the forefront of this trend.

I don’t think anyone has been more astonished by his success than Ron Paul. He is clearly thrilled at the sight of thousands of young people cheering him on and chanting “End the Fed!” at campus rallies across the nation. I don’t think he expected the outpouring of support that greeted his announcement: in fundraising capabilitiesalone, he’s a top tier candidate no matter what the Beltway pundits say.

The media’s refusal to report Paul’s growing support, beyond grudging acknowledgement that he’s come in from “the fringe,” reflects its institutional bias in favor of the right-left red-blue narrative that has, up until now, dominated American politics, and in which so much of the news industry is heavily invested. This narrative doesn’t allow for any significant deviations, and certainly not on the presidential level: all must submit to its tyranny, in spite of its archaic and increasingly obstructionist character. What it obstructs is any meaningful challenge to the functioning of the Welfare-Warfare State. If one party is in power, welfare is given more weight than warfare, if the other takes the throne, then welfare is given the axe. In any case, these two aspects of the modern American state are inextricably intertwined, as “defense” spending in the age of empire becomes just another dollop of pork to be ladled out tocorporate and political interests – and welfare becomes a way to keep the disgruntled quiescent in wartime.

Think of the media as the Greek chorus to the two “majors,” with different media actors cheerleading one party and razzing the other – but never straying outside the bounds of the red-blue narrative, with its rigid definitions and litmus tests. This mindset is encoded in the two-party system, and institutionalized in our ballot access laws, which privilege the two “major” parties – the very same two parties that have led us down the path to endless war and imminent bankruptcy, and are now running away from their dual responsibility for the present crisis.

In this indirect but not insignificant sense, then, the “mainstream” media is an arm of the State, and, indeed, not only acts to police the political discourse, but reports government propaganda as if it were fact. We saw how this worked during the run-upto the Iraq war, when the Bush regime played the New York Times and its “mainstream” colleagues with ease, using the front page of the Times as a veritable bulletin board of government talking points. The Bush administration may have lied us into war, but the supposedly “liberal” media facilitated it in every possible way, acting like stenographers taking dictation rather than journalists out to discover the truth.

That these same people have a real problem reporting on a growing anti-war, anti-Washington movement fast taking hold in the GOP and in the general population is not at all surprising. That’s because the mainstream media is the enemy of all these things, invested as they are in sucking up to power and vaunting their role as court “intellectuals.” No one should be either amazed or disturbed that they’re downplayingthe success of the system’s foremost opponent: after all, that’s their job.

Our job, here at Antiwar.com, is precisely the opposite. Our job is to expose the schemes and debunk the lies of the War Party and the apologists for Power. Back when the mainstream media were “reporting” Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” Antiwar.com reported the real facts: that there were no such weapons, as President Bush was forced to finally admit. The media fell for it because they wanted to fall for it: it made their job easier, it made them friends at court, and it gave them something exciting to write about. Doubters were sidelined as cranks, or Saddam sympathizers.

The media is a reliable instrument of government just as surely as if it were an official agency, like the Voice of America: it is owned by corporate entities entirely dependenton the good graces of government officials, and whose natural inclinations are to cozy up to Power rather than challenge it. That’s why the new internet-based media is so disturbing to these mandarins, whose opinions are no longer automatically elevated to holy writ. Antiwar.com is in the forefront of this new media wave – but we need your help to capitalize on this success and subvert the red-blue media narrative.

The “mainstream” media apologists for the status quo have deep corporate pockets, while we upstarts have some ways to go before we catch up, to put it in considerably understated terms. We depend on you, our readers, for the support we need to continue the kind of independent journalism so woefully lacking in the “mainstream.”

Yes, I know the economy is bad, and everyone is hurting – but this is important. This is our chance – our only chance – to break through the media blackout and take back our country from the War Party. Our job is never done, and yet we must interrupt it to raise the funds we need to carry on – because we have creditors demanding payment we couldn’t have put off launching our current fundraising drive another day. We must make our goal of $100,000 – a pittance compared to what the War Party spends. But then again we don’t have to spend millions, like they do, because we have the truth on our side.

No, we don’t need millions, but we do need thousands – one-hundred thousand, to be exact, and we can’t do it without you. For fifteen years, our readers have been our sole source of support. We don’t have any big foundations or eccentric billionaires giving us six-figure contributions: hundreds and by now thousands of individuals from every part of the political spectrum have sent in their tax-deductible contributions, and sustained us up until this point. This has guaranteed our editorial independence, but it makes us work harder in order to retain your support – support which, in my humble opinion, I think we’ve more than earned.

Now we’re asking our readers and supporters to come through again – and the need has never been greater. We’re working to undermine – and bypass – the same media bias that has sent news of Ron Paul’s success down the Memory Hole. They can’t bear that he’s rising in the polls because they can’t bear a world where their opinions and prejudices are not the received wisdom – so won’t you help us make life just a little bit more unbearable for them?

Please – give as much as you can, as soon as you can. The media is our enemy: this much we know. The question is: will we have the intelligence and perseverance to forge our own media, and take our case to the American people?

Our fate – the fate of peace and liberty in our time – is in your hands.