What Would Debbie Downer Say?

Source:

America:  Osama Bin Laden's dead!  President Obama's the man!

Debbie: Until Fox News twists this to make Bush the hero. According to redstate.com, it's thanks to President Bush because of his “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guntanamo Bay Prison that Osama is dead.

America:  Well, whatever the story is, it's the first time in a long time that all is right with the world!

Debbie:  Good thing that the millions of  lives lost/destroyed, the trillions of dollars spent, the implementation of "Big Brother" type surveillance/loss of our 4th amendment rights,   unmanned predator drones, piloted by gamers,  the shredding of our Constitution, unemployment, the foreclosure crisis, the bankster's plundering of the economy, is all behind us. Right?

America:  Right! It's a good thing that we water-boarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed because that's how we got the information that killed Osama.  This is pay-off! It's time to get out the kilts and bagpipes, prepared speeches, glow sticks, and head down to Ground Zero!

Debbie:  I wonder if any of  the sick and fallen 9/11 heroes will be able to make it.  Probably not. The ones who have not yet succumbed to toxic WTC dust are too busy trying to prove they're not terrorists. 

America:  Yeah, too bad for them, but, now that our bad-ass military brought down Osama, those sick and fallen heroes have not suffered in vain. For the first time in a long time, our future looks bright!

Debbie:  The  nuclear hell-storms that al-Qa'ida plans to unleash according to WikiLeaks should make it very bright. The Islamists vow bin Laden death will not mute Jihad call.  I'm sure the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and TSA are getting ready to roll out plans to escalate  the use of torture, fire up more predator drones, ratchet up the surveillance state, and...

America:  Alrighty then, well, it's May...no worries about frost interfering with our celebrations...

Debbie: Mr. Frost interviewed Benazir Bhutto in November of 2007, before she was murdered. She told him, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh – one of those convicted of kidnapping and killing U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl - murdered Osama Bin Laden.

America: You know what, Debbie? You're really taking a royal crap on our celebration of Osama's death. We, the people completely held our tongue when you showed us pictures of dead Iraqi babies, and we didn't say one word when you went on and on about the NATO strikes that took out a school for disabled children in Libya...

The US government, as Paul Craig Roberts said, has an  "unlimited belief in the gullibility of Americans".

Links:


Has Osama Bin Laden been dead for seven years - and are the U.S. and Britain covering it up to continue war on terror?

Osama bin Laden corpse photo is fake

YEARS OF DECEIT: US OPENLY ACCEPTS BIN LADEN LONG DEAD

U.S. anticipates al Qaeda 'threats of retaliation'

Preparing the Battlefield

Agenda 21

Building Moderate Muslim Networks - RAND's blueprint for the Muslim world. The protests we are seeing now are playing out exactly as prescribed: from protest organizers to the protest leaders, to the America's military leadership activity behind-the-scenes...it's all there

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News Inc

Today, American journalism is replete with incestuous relationships between government, industry, and academia, thanks to a few of the largest Fortune 500 corporations that own and operate news organizations. What we call mainstream "news" is now a bottom-line serving propaganda machine, riddled with conflicts of interest. Moreover, mainstream "journalists" have morphed into strategic communication professionals.And authentic investigative journalism does not exist, if it ever really existed in the mainstream media when you take into account all that the Internet has unearthed from as far back as the 1930s. However, it seems, whatever the situation was, it may be far worse now.

Because of the incestuous "working relationship" government and corporate media enjoy, average Americans receive not only a censored version of reality, but also many times, a fabricated version of reality. The fourth estate, the press, rather than acting as watchdog of American democracy, is now an instrument of the growing corpocracy that is in the process of transforming America from a Constitutional Republic to an oligarchy.

Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator and author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?", "A Tragic Legacy" and most recently, "Great American Hypocrites", eloquently depicts the corporatized mainstream media as he analyzes and describes his own experience in his recent article: The merger of journalists and government officials

"...Over the last month, I've done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable -- identical -- are the political figures and the journalists. There's just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they've ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, "Assange = Saddam" script. So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a "high-tech Terrorist,") that you're viewed as being from another planet if you don't spout it. It's the equivalent of questioning Saddam's WMD stockpile in early 2003.

It's not news that establishment journalists identify with, are merged into, serve as spokespeople for, the political class: that's what makes them establishment journalists. But even knowing that, it's just amazing, to me at least, how so many of these "debates" I've done involving one anti-WikiLeaks political figure and one ostensibly "neutral" journalist -- on MSNBC with The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart and former GOP Congresswoman Susan Molinari, on NPR with The New York Times' John Burns and former Clinton State Department official James Rubin, and last night on CNN with Yellin and Townsend -- entail no daylight at all between the "journalists" and the political figures. They don't even bother any longer with the pretense that they're distinct or play different assigned roles. I'm not complaining here -- Yellin was perfectly fair and gave me ample time -- but merely observing how inseparable are most American journalists from the political officials they "cover."

(2) From the start of the WikiLeaks controversy, the most striking aspect for me has been that the ones who are leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks -- the ones most enraged about the leaks and the subversion of government secrecy -- have been . . . America's intrepid Watchdog journalists. What illustrates how warped our political and media culture is as potently as that? It just never seems to dawn on them -- even when you explain it -- that the transparency and undermining of the secrecy regime against which they are angrily railing is supposed to be . . . what they do.

What an astounding feat to train a nation's journalist class to despise above all else those who shine a light on what the most powerful factions do in the dark and who expose their corruption and deceit, and to have journalists -- of all people -- lead the way in calling for the head of anyone who exposes the secrets of the powerful. Most ruling classes -- from all eras and all cultures -- could only fantasize about having a journalist class that thinks that way, but most political leaders would have to dismiss that fantasy as too extreme, too implausible, to pursue. After all, how could you ever get journalists -- of all people -- to loathe those who bring about transparency and disclosure of secrets? But, with a few noble exceptions, that's exactly the journalist class we have.

There will always be a soft spot in my heart for Jessica Yellin because of that time when she unwittingly (though still bravely) admitted on air that -- when she worked at MSNBC -- NBC's corporate executives constantly pressured the network's journalists to make their reporting favorable to George Bush and the Iraq War (I say "unwittingly" because she quickly walked back that confession after I and others wrote about it and a controversy ensued). But, as Yellin herself revealed in that moment of rare TV self-exposure, that's the government-subservient corporate culture in which these journalists are trained and molded...."

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US Judge Orders Whistle-blower Site Offline.

WikiLeaks.org, the transparency website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents, "uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis" has been taken offline in the US and is unavailable due to a restraining order issued by the California Northern District Court in San Francisco. The largest Swiss bank specializing in hiding the assets of the bank Julius Baer (the parent company of the accused Cayman bank) filed federal US proceedings against the transparency group WikiLeaks.

The Presiding Judge Jeffrey S. White ordered a permanent injunction against WikiLeaks - or the web host, Dynadot - as the owner of the site is outside US legal jurisdiction, at first, but then reconsidered if it refrained from posting actual documents.

The Whistle blower site vows to defy court order.

Additional info:

WikiLeaks discussion blog discusses the ethical and technical issues surrounding the WikiLeaks.org project which claims to be the "uncensorable" version of WikiPedia, for "mass document leaking" and whistleblowing."

US Judge Arranges Summary Execution of WikiLeaks.org

Julius Baer vs. WikiLeaks

The Citizen Media Law Project comments.

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