Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 05/23/2009 - 2:14pm. Guest Contribution
By Elliot Cohen for BuzzFlash

On May 13, in a Washington court filing, the Obama Justice Department eliminated the category of “unlawful enemy combatant,” which the Bush administration had built into the 2006 Military Commissions Act for purposes of detaining suspected terrorists without due process. But now President Obama wants to replace this category with a new system of “prolonged detention” that could conceivably keep detainees in prison into perpetuity in order to prevent crimes they have not yet committed. Add to this Obama’s continuation of the Bush administration’s program of warrantless spying on millions of Americans, and the recipe for abuse is chilling.

According to the old definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” included in the 2006 Military Commissions Act, an unlawful enemy combatant is "an individual engaged in hostilities against the United States who is not a lawful enemy combatant." In other words, if the government suspects that an individual poses a threat to national security, he can be detained as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” But the Obama has now dropped this definition, or has it?

In his May 21 Archives Speech, Obama said, “there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people….” For example, he said, this would include people “who have received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, commanded Taliban troops in battle, expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans.”

To deal with these detainees, Obama intends to create a category he has called “prolonged detention” by which “al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates…that we capture—like other prisoners of war” will be “prevented from attacking us again.” So we will have “prisoners of war” who allegedly “cannot be prosecuted” for their past crimes but who allegedly pose a future threat to national security for reason of which they will be detained for a “prolonged” period of time.

Since the “prisoners of war” in question are suspected terrorists, and since the “war on terrorism” has no definable end in sight, what “prolonged” here could possibly mean boggles the imagination. Will they ever be released or will they die in prison for crimes they have not yet committed? Moreover, if they really cannot be prosecuted, they cannot be accorded the right of habeas corpus unless this means being charged with the potential to commit a future hostile act against America. All this and Obama still contends that ”we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded” and that’s why his administration “has begun to reshape these standards to ensure they are in line with the rule of law.” But just how Obama could square preventively detaining individuals for crimes they haven’t yet committed with the rule of law is beyond comprehension. Obama appears to have missed a major point about the rule of law. Law is inherently retrospective. It looks back for purposes of holding people criminally or civilly liable for their past actions. It does not look forward to future acts not yet committed.

In the same speech, Obama has also reaffirmed his opposition to an independent commission to look into the war crimes committed by the Bush administration. “That is what I mean when I say that we need to focus on the future,” said Obama. “I recognize that many still have a strong desire to focus on the past. When it comes to the actions of the last eight years, some Americans are angry; others want to re-fight debates that have been settled, most clearly at the ballot box in November.”

Apparently, Obama does indeed want to forget about the past and to focus on the future. He wants to forget about prosecuting members of the Bush administation, including Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, for ordering the torture of detainees. The perpetration of such war crimes he prefers to leave buried in the past, but he wants to look to the future by “prolonged detention” of detainees for crimes they did not yet commit.

The Bush administation’s mistake was to create a separate system of rules to apply to “unlawful enemy combatants” and to do so it gutted major legal protections including habeas corpus. Unfortunately, Obama is now following in the Bush administration’s footsteps.

The legal machinery of our justice system is not incapable of accomodating exceptions. For example, the Miranda Rule, which requires that a suspect be read his or her rights before being arrested, admits of an exception when Mirandizing a suspect would jeopardize the public safety. Thus the courts are equipped to set rational precedents should a detainee present a clear and imminent danger to the public saftety. In fact, it is already a crime to threaten to commit a crime when the intentions are clearly conveyed to the alleged victim and the latter has reasonable belief that the defendant has both the intention and the ability to carry out the threatened crime. However, if a detainee has threatened no crime (in this case, to perpetrate an act of terrorism), then it is unlawful to charge the individual with a crime.

Further, if a terrorist the likes of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed really did mastermind the 9-11 attacks then it is his past acts, not his future ones, that should be the focus of the courts. If there were truly evidence that was not obtained as a result of forced confession, then the evidence legally acquired would still be admissible. On the other hand, if the evidence required to convict a defendant was illegally obtained through torture, then it would be a miscarriage of justice to convict the defendant on the basis of that evidence.

Obama’s new “legal” category of “prolonged detention” sets the dangerous precedent for incarcerating someone for crimes they haven’t yet committed. This raises the Orwellian specter of the “Thought Police” who come in the dead of night to take away dissidents. The Obama Justice Department has already signed onto Bush’s program of warrantless spying on the personal electronic communications of American citizens. The precedent set by preventative incarceration should not be considered apart from such a breakdown of Fourth Amendment protections. The government may not yet be able to read minds but it now has an incredible power to intrude into private communications. Viewed in this light, it is not such a stretch to imagine being preventatively imprisoned for saying something over a wire that the government thought was “hostile against the United States.”

Unfortunately, Obama’s desire to look to the future has blinded him to the need to learn from the past. Perpetrating wrongs in order to redress wrongs does not equate to justice.


Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is a political analyst and media critic. His most recent books are Critical Thinking Unleashed and Ethics and the Legal Profession. He is a first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Sat, 02/07/2009 - 9:25am.

By Elliot D. Cohen

Dick Cheney’s recent warning of a future “9-11 type” terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland was quickly dismissed by some mainstream media pundits as just another benign and misguided attempt by the former Vice President to frighten us. But perhaps he should be taken more seriously.

Cheney warned of a high probability of a nuclear weapon or biological agent being deployed in a major city, which could kill hundreds of thousands of people. “I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt,” warned Cheney. “Whether or not they can pull it off depends on whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”

On MSNBC’s Hardball (February 5), host Chris Mathews dismissed the former Vice President’s admonition, stating that, Cheney "was wrong in a way that was lethal. 100,000 people dead including 4,000 Americans are dead, something like 15,000 wounded because he was wrong." Salon’s Joan Walsh stated, "We have a situation where it's vintage Dick Cheney. It's dark, it's dire, it's creepy, it's kooky, it's very scary, but there's absolutely no evidence.” Mother Jones’ David Corn asked, "How detached from reality is he?"And Mathews mocked, "He does seem like a character out of 'Dr. Strangelove.'" On MSNBC’s Countdown (February 6), in a “Special Comment,” host Keith Olbermann accused Cheney of fear mongering and trying to save face.

But, it may be time to ask more probing questions and to entertain more creative hypotheses to explain Cheney’s vigilance, even if some of these hypotheses have been seen as unthinkable during the Bush administration. If there is anything we should have learned from history, it is that explanations that were once dismissed as absurd sometimes turn out to be true when the blinders have been removed and a careful investigation is conducted.

What facts, if any, about an impending attack did Bush and Cheney know prior to 9-11? Were these attacks merely a convenient excuse to invade Iraq or was there some even more ominous connection? What stake does Cheney now have for trying to frighten the Obama administration into carrying out the mandates of the Bush administration? Merely assuming that Cheney is now just trying to save face is not sufficient and even appears to be inconsistent with his persistent, blatant disregard for the public’s perception of him. The media, no less than the Obama administration itself, should be investigating these matters instead of making assumptions.

By simply dismissing Cheney as misguided rather than dangerous, the media fails to do its job. Cheney was more than just wrong when he waged a bloody war against Iraq based on phony intelligence. He was not just wrong when he sponsored rendition, torture, and deprivation of due process. He was most probably responsible for outing covert CIA agent Valerie Plame in an effort to punish her husband for exposing his fraudulent claim about Saddam Hussein’s attempt to purchase uranium yellowcake. These and other aggressive acts suggest that Cheney may be willing to do whatever it takes to get what he wants.

A wake up call from the annals of history is also in order. Cheney was the principle in the formulation of the military strategy that came to be called “The Bush Doctrine.” Stripping away all pretence, this doctrine advocates attacking sovereign nations for purposes of amassing geopolitical power. It is Machiavellian to the core and Cheney’s “Project for the New American Century” even countenanced a “new Pearl Harbor” as a catalyst for taking America into the “New American Century.”

Taking a cue from the Machiavellian line “It is better to be feared than loved,” Cheney quipped, “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy.” Here “respected” appears to be a euphemism for “feared.” Cheney added, “I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.” But Cheney clearly wants Obama to believe it.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is a political analyst and media critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. A first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award, he has been a guest on Mike Malloy, Ring of Fire, Thom Hartmann, Majority Report, and Free Speech TV, among other national venues.

The McCain/Palin campaign has gained ground on the Obama/Biden campaign not because it has proven to more Americans through rational argument that its proposals for addressing the nation’s domestic, foreign, and global problems are superior but because it has successfully used chicanery and fallacious emotional appeals, well poisoning and personal attacks to manipulate and deceive more Americans into changing their minds. Unfortunately, unless Americans start demanding rational argument before endorsing a candidate, they are likely to receive more of the same once the “victor” takes office.

Last week, the media was resonating with the allegation that Obama had made a sexist remark about Governor Sarah Palin by comparing her to a pig with lipstick. And what was the basis of this allegation? At an event on Tuesday night in Norfolk Virginia, Obama used the folk metaphor of “putting lipstick on a pig” to characterize McCain’s claim that he would bring change to Washington as being like trying to put lipstick on a pig. Obama said, “It’s still a pig.” The only connection to Palin was a joke she herself had made at the Republican National Convention. “What,” she asked, “is the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom?” Answer: “lipstick.” The McCain/Palin campaign quickly responded by placing an ad on the Internet charging Obama with sexism and asking for an apology.

If Obama denied the charge, which he, in fact, did, he would dignify it. On the other hand, if he ignored the charge, then a doubt would be created as to whether or not it was true. Either way, misgivings would be created in the American public about whether Obama was really a sexist.

Unfortunately, like crying rape when there was no rape, such a tactic tends to make a mockery of a serious issue. Sexism is still a serious problem in the United States and it should not be so used for political gain. In fact, the history of the McCain campaign makes clear that what it is really after is the White House.

For example, this past August, the McCain campaign published a video ad on the Internet this time portraying Obama as “The One.” The video mocked Obama with a scene from the movie, The Ten Commandments, in which the waters parted for Moses (played by Charlton Heston). At one point it is stated “He can do no wrong” and then the video shows CBS news correspondent Lara Logan ask Obama, “Do you have any doubts?” and Obama answering “Never.” Unfortunately, the real question Logan asked was “Do you have any doubts about your foreign affairs experience?” The omission was designed to make it look like Obama did not have any doubts about anything whatsoever.

In another part of the video, Obama states, "I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions." But this too was lifted out of context. It was said in the context of a closed meeting with congressional representatives during which, referring to his speech delivered in Berlin, Obama stated that the 200,000 people who came to his speech came not just for him. This part was omitted for the deliberate purpose of making him sound arrogant. Obama in fact never said he was “The One” but rather that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” and here is the context in which these words appeared:

"You see, the challenges we face will not be solved with one meeting in one night. It will not be resolved on even a Super Duper Tuesday. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys who have so little, who've been told that they cannot have what they dream, that they cannot be what they imagine. Yes, they can."

Obama’s real point was therefore to emphasize that the people are the ones who must affect change. Yet, the ad drew the fallacious inference from this statement that Obama “has anointed himself ready to carry the burden of The One.” This is the opposite of what Obama was saying, namely that the people, not he, must bear the burden.

So what of this ad’s attempt to make Obama look arrogant? Why would the McCain campaign have even attempted to do this in the first place?

On September 4, Republican Representative Lynn Westmoreland referred to Obama and his wife as “uppity.” “Just from what little I’ve seen of and Mr. Obama,” he said, “they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity.” This term is strongly emotive, pejorative and a racially charged stereotype of a black person who is arrogant. Facts: “The One” depicted a black man who was arrogant, and Westmoreland actually used the bigoted term.

In his speech at the Republican National Convention, McCain said,

"I’ve worked with members of both parties to fix problems that need to be fixed. That’s how I will govern as President. I will reach out my hand to anyone to help me get this country moving again. I have that record and the scars to prove it. Senator Obama does not."

However, it is false that Obama has not “worked with members of both parties to fix problems.” For example, he co-sponsored with Republican Senator Tom Coburn (OK), the “Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act,” a bill that sought to create a search engine and database to track how government spent tax payers’ money, and which held elected officials accountable for those expenditures. He has also co-sponsored with Republican Senator Richard Lugar (IN) the “Lugar-Obama Proliferation and Threat Reduction Initiative,” a measure signed into law by President Bush, which expanded the State Department’s ability to detect and interdict weapons of mass destruction and their components.

But there are not just factual misrepresentations here. The plot thickens because McCain is also claiming to “have the scars to prove it.” What scars? The manipulative device he is using is a form of meaning from association, a psychological version of the illicit advertising technique of bait and switch. McCain does, indeed, have scars from his captivity in Viet Nam and he wants his audience to associate these with his success as a bipartisan politician. However, while he may be able to speak volumes about what it is to be a POW, the “scars” he has to prove it does not count as experience in bipartisan politics. Unfortunately, most Americans will not catch the psychological manipulation, and McCain’s speech writer is banking on it.

On July 30, Obama made the following comment:

"There are things that you can do individually though to save energy…Making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much."

After Obama made this statement, the McCain campaign began handing out tire gauges to reporters. Prominently engraved across the cylinder were the words, “Obama’s energy plan.” While it turned out that there is evidence to suggest that Obama was actually correct about the amount of fuel saved by keeping one’s tires adequately inflated, this is not the main point. More telling is the fact that the McCain campaign made a straw man out of Obama’s energy policy. In fact, Obama’s energy policy provided for the development of alternative energy sources. Nor did Obama’s comment deny that domestic drilling should be a part of an energy policy package. “Increased domestic oil exploration certainly has its place, said Obama on August 4, “as we make our economy more fuel-efficient and transition to other, renewable, American-made sources of energy. But it is not the solution.” The fact is, Obama had been pressing the idea of alternative energy sources including wind, solar, and bio fuels such as corn ethanol all along. The McCain campaign knew this but it was easier to attack a straw man than to tell the truth.

When Sarah Palin claimed to have said “No thanks” to the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere” she left out that she was also a strong advocate of it at first. When she said she sold her jet on E-Bay, she failed to mention that, while she put the jet up for sail on E-Bay three times, she was unsuccessful at selling it there. These are half-truths at best, lies at worst.

Unfortunately, instead of addressing the issues, the McCain/Palin campaign has tended to follow this pattern of factual distortions, deception, well poisoning, manipulation, and personal attacks. This bodes badly for the prognosis of what living under a McCain/Palin administration would be like. In all probability, much like the Bush administration, it would lack candor and would do its best to manipulate and deceive the public into supporting its policies.

What can the media do to about it? The media should not allow itself to become the rag of a government party. It should carefully check the facts before it decides to print a story. It should be vigilantly on the outlook for attempts by a campaign to use media smear tactics and other fallacies in order to defeat its opponent. The job of the Fourth Estate is to keep the people informed about government corruption, not to be a handmaiden to it.

What can the voters do about it? The American public needs to demand that the issues be addressed. They need to be sensitive to the attempt to deceive and manipulate their vote, and they need to insist on evidence and rational argument before believing what is claimed.

The McCain/Palin campaign is not only playing dirty with its political opponent. It is also an assault on the integrity of every American who is exposed to these ploys. This is to treat us all like objects to be manipulated and used for political gain, and not as persons. Voters should insist on rational argument to address the crucial issues at stake in the upcoming election. Anything less is an affront to the dignity and personhood of the American people.

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is a political analyst, columnist, and media critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. He is the first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 12/17/2007 - 10:15am.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

by Elliot D. Cohen

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has yielded to the Bush Administration and telecom lobbyists by sending the Senate Intelligence Committee's version of the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S.2248) to the Senate floor. This bill, a brainchild of Dick Cheney that insulates telecommunications companies from both retroactive (past) and prospective (future) civil and criminal liability for assisting the government in illegally spying on the American people, is about to mark the end of democracy in America.

A few versions of the bill had been sent up from committee to Reid. One version drafted by the Senate Judiciary Committee does not grant retroactive immunity. But the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC) version of the bill gives the Bush and Cheney exactly what they want -- legal protection to conduct surveillance operations in secrecy in virtually any way they see fit, and full immunity to the telecoms for assisting. It would now take 60 Senate votes to amend this bill to protect the Constitutional rights of American citizens.

Not only does this bill insulate the telecoms from retroactive civil and criminal liability dating back to September 11, 2001; but it also insulates these companies from such liability at least until 2013 when the law sunsets. There are presently about 40 civil suits now pending that would be wiped out if this bill, in its present form, becomes law.

SIC S.2248 also fails to provide adequate judicial oversight. Instead, the bill requires the Attorney General or Director of National Intelligence to certify to a FISA Court that procedures are in place to "minimize" the extent to which American citizens are spied on without a court warrant. And there is also a "limitation" according to which this certification does not have to identify the specific facilities, places, premises, or property at which the acquisition authorized will be directed or conducted. Nor is there any requirement to divulge the identities of those persons being targeted.

The primary oversight activity granted to the FISA Courts by SIC S.2248 is in reviewing the minimization procedures adopted by the government to determine if they meet the minimization standards adopted in 1978. Unfortunately, there is no real judicial oversight to determine if the government is truly applying standards consistent with the 1978 provisions.

SIC S.2248 accordingly gives the federal government a virtual blank check in conducting its surveillance activities. In exchange the government is also required to attest that it is following the Fourth Amendment, avow that it has a "significant purpose" in gathering foreign intelligence, and disavow that it has any similar "intent" to spy on Americans. This is not what the Founding Fathers intended when they established a real system of checks and balances to guard against abuses of power. Under the terms of this bill, government can easily conduct massive, indiscriminate spying operations without its victims -- the American people -- having any legal recourse.

That the Bush Administration is presently conducting such wholesale spying operations is at this juncture past reasonable doubt. Presently, there is credible evidence that, installed deep inside major national hubs of AT&T, is surveillance equipment that copies and routes all Internet and telephone traffic to a National Security Agency (NSA) computer network where the content of these messages is examined using undisclosed, top secret search criteria. This massive surveillance program has been the basis of a class action suit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T on behalf of American citizens. This suit as well as all the others now pending against AT&T and other telecoms (notably Verizon) will be wiped out with the passage of SIC S.2248.

The dangers this bill poses to the survival of democracy in America are far-reaching and fatal. Here are some of them:

1. SIC S.2248 would permit the notorious Total Information Awareness (TIA) project started by Bush and Cheney in 2003 to go forth. This project, renamed the "Terrorist Information Awareness" aspired to create a colossal network of integrated technologies for intercepting, storing, searching, monitoring, reading, and analyzing all private, computerized records of 300 million Americans. Amid public outcry, this project was presumed to have been de-funded by Congress but instead the project, including several of its core technologies, was transferred from the Department of Defense to the NSA. These core computer technologies now appear to have been deployed by the NSA in spying on the telephone and e-mail conversations and Internet activities of millions of Americans. If SIC S.2248 becomes law, this massive, illegal spying operation is likely to continue and escalate behind an impenetrable veil of secrecy.

2. Operating behind this veil of secrecy without judicial inspection, search criteria of TIA technologies can easily be programmed to intercept, read, and collect the electronic messages of political opponents in order to gain an unfair campaign advantage in the upcoming presidential election. Especially at this juncture in time, with the presidential election looming close on the horizon, there is dire need for a FISA law that permits legal scrutiny of the NSA surveillance program.

3. That the Bush Administration is motivated to engage in such egregious violations of privacy is beyond speculation. In 2005, it was revealed that it has kept extensive computerized files on more than 10,000 Americans it considered political enemies. These files have included intimate personal details of individuals who may have disagreed with Bush/Cheney such as members of Congress; local, state and federal officials; journalists; and even ordinary citizens. The purpose of this "enemies list" has been for use by senior level administration officials in waging campaigns to discredit these perceived adversaries. It cannot therefore be dismissed that it is presently utilizing the TIA technologies it now has at its disposal to gather incriminating or damaging information on its Democratic opponents in Congress and elsewhere to intimidate them into walking lockstep with the administration. This could potentially include anything from taking impeachment off the table to passing dangerous legislation -- including SIC S.2248 itself.

4. In this election year, with TIA at its disposal, the Bush Administration can do more than intercept and read its political opponents' e-mail and phone messages in order to gain an unfair campaign advantage. Electronic voting itself requires transmission of the votes cast by American citizens to a central tabulation headquarters through the phone lines. Without the necessary judicial intervention, the TIA system can also be deployed to block votes, reconfigure them, and thereby change the outcome of election results. Presidential candidates, particularly Democratic ones, therefore have self-interested reasons to try to stop SIC S.2248 from becoming law.

5. Given the Bush Administration's penchant for targeting the media, immunizing the telecoms from legal accountability can also make it possible to set TIA search criteria to read journalists' electronic correspondence. Indeed, even bare knowledge that all electronic messages are being tapped can have the effect of chilling the First Amendment right to a free press by making sources more reticent to freely disclose information, especially via international phone and e-mail communications. It can also make journalists themselves less inclined to cover an anti-Bush Administration story when they are aware that their communications are being monitored.

6. But ordinary citizens also have reason for concern. Natural language parsing technologies of the kind used to search electronic messages are notoriously fallible and subject to false positives. This means that all Americans, even those who believe they have nothing to hide, are also at risk.

7. If SIC S.2248 becomes law, all citizens will be suspects in a massive dragnet operation without any legal recourse of their own. Still, the bill opens up the possibility for discriminatory enforcement of the law. Persons of Middle Eastern descent, for example, could become priority targets of surveillance. Given the current administration's suspension of habeas corpus, its policy of "rendition," and its willingness to use torture, such selective targeting can have egregious and far reaching consequences for targeted groups. A case in point, which illustrates the dangers of selective targeting is that of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Middle Eastern descent, who in September 2002 was stopped without probable cause at JFK airport on his way back to Canada and "rendered" to Syria, to be tortured for nearly a year. Since according to SIC S.2248, civil and criminal suits are off the table, such discriminatory targeting could be carried out with the assistance of the telecom companies in violation of the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the laws. According to SIC S.2248, the victim of such a violation could have no legal cause of action against the telecom company for its acquiescence in such a travesty of justice. This is as absurd as it is dangerous in a society that claims to be a democracy governed by the rule of law. It is in principle no different than the case of the Jews in Nazi Germany who under Hitler were tracked by IBM using punch card computer technology. Under Hitler's "law," IBM was also granted legal immunity for its egregious violations.

8. If SIC S.2248 becomes law, the Internet will be subject to policing by government acting secretly through the telecom companies. This situation opens up a Pandora's Box for government censorship of information it considers "subversive," which is a sizable part of the Internet. In recent years, the telecom companies have gained considerable legal leverage over the phone lines and cables that carry Internet exchanges. In this climate of growing corporate control over these pipes, SIC S.2248 would add still further fuel to the fire that threatens to burn away net neutrality. If the government acting through the telecoms can police the Internet without Judicial scrutiny, then it becomes abundantly easier for it to censor and manipulate its content in the name of "national security" while hiding behind a grant of legal immunity. Given the Bush Administration's penchant for stretching legal boundaries beyond their just limits, a virtual blank check to police Internet traffic is also a recipe for controlling what gets pumped into it. This is also a recipe for fascism.

And there is good reason to believe that Cheney and company would favor a police state to a democracy. It is well documented that his political objective has and continues to be that of making America the world's sole superpower through the buildup and use of military force. This goal is not attainable unless central government can anticipate and subdue its opponents both at home and abroad.

Most Americans would cringe at waging a bloody war in Iraq for purposes of acquiring greater control over its oil fields. Yet, justifying a preemptive war by connecting Iraq to WMDs or September 11 to Saddam Hussein is more effective than the truth. Enlisting support from the mainstream media and telecom corporations in promulgating propaganda and spying on Americans, in exchange for lucrative military contracts, corporate mergers, relaxed media ownership rules, and other government perks, works better than respecting First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Democracy breeds alternative social and political perspectives. Dictatorship breeds single-mindedness and stamps out opposition to the status quo. The latter is the environment that Cheney and Bush seek in attempting to attain their narrow ideological mission. SIC S.2248 is, for them, a perceived means to this end. The end of democracy is part of the price they are willing to pay.

In conceding to the Bush Administration, Harry Reid has become an accomplice to the demise of democracy. Anyone other Senator who votes in favor of SIC S.2248 does the same.

Presently, the House version of this bill, the Restore Act (HR 3773), does not grant retroactive immunity to the telecoms. It is therefore better than SIC S.2248. If the latter passes in the Senate, the survival of democracy in America may well rest with how these two bills are reconciled.


A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.<www.elliotdcohen.com > is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is "The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship." He is a first-prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 12/11/2007 - 10:22am. Guest Contribution

by Elliot D. Cohen

Despite the fact that the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran maintains a high level of assurance that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons program in 2003, President Bush and Vice President Cheney remain resolute in stopping the "threat" posed by Iran. "Not everyone understands the threat of nuclear proliferation, in Iran or elsewhere," said Cheney speaking recently to an audience of Veterans of Foreign Wars. "But we and our allies do understand the threat, and we have a duty to prevent it."

So even as the rationale for going to war with Iran has been largely defused by the NIE, the specter of a "preemptive" war still hovers over America as its chief executives refuse to back down. Unfortunately, there are verifiable, ideological reasons for this persistence that the mainstream media have not revealed.

In 1992, during the George H.W. Bush Administration, Defense Department staffers Paul Wolfowitz, I. Lewis Libby, and Zalmay Khalizad, acting under then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, drafted the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), an internal document that advocated massive increases in defense spending for purposes of strategic proliferation and buildup of military defenses to establish the preeminence of the United States as the world's sole superpower, and to prevent any nations from challenging its supremacy in the future. This document, which was leaked to The New York Times and The Washington Post, stated, "The U.S. may be faced with the question of whether to take military steps to prevent the development or use of weapons of mass destruction." Such steps, it said, could include a preemptive attack with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons or "punishing the attackers or threatening punishment of aggressors through a variety of means," including attacks on the plants that manufactured such weapons.

The DPG was also clear about what should be the U.S.'s "overall objectives" in the Middle East. Of these, the main objective, it said, was to "remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."

Amid public outcry after its release, the H.W. Bush Administration was forced to publicly retract the doctrine. However, the DPG did not disappear. Despite its draconian and Machiavellian character, Cheney was impressed by it, and in 1997 he, Libby, Wolfowitz, and Khalizad joined William Kristol, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, and several other adherents and soon-to-be George W. Bush appointees in founding the so-called Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a politically influential research foundation dedicated to realizing the major objectives of the DPG.

In 2000, the year that George W. Bush became president, PNAC published a document entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (RAD), which "saw the project as building upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration. "The Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) drafted in the early months of 1992," it said, "provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests." RAD also went on to decry the fact that the DPG was leaked before it was formally approved and "buried by the Administration." Nevertheless, RAD was clearly intended to revive the DPG by making it the basis of a "road map" for the incoming George W. Bush Administration. It stated, "Our report is published in a presidential election year. The new administration will need to produce a second Quadrennial Defense Review shortly after it takes office. We hope that the Project's report will be useful as a road map for the nation's immediate and future defense plans."

This "road map" was quite clear about the direction the Bush Administration was supposed to take with regard to Iran. RAD stated, "Iran may well prove as large a threat to U.S. interests in the Gulf as Iraq has. And even should U.S.-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in U.S. security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region." Moreover, it was quite clear from the DPG that, of these "longstanding American interests," the primary interest was access to oil.

RAD also insisted that, "the United States must retain sufficient forces able to rapidly deploy and win multiple simultaneous large-scale wars and also to be able to respond to unanticipated contingencies in regions where it does not maintain forward-based forces." This mandate to be able to fight and win "simultaneous major theater wars" is part of the fabric of the PNAC plan for the U.S. to assert itself as the sole preeminent international power. Not only does it not shy away from launching two or more wars at once, but it also actually asserts that this "two-war standard" is essential for maintaining its superpower status.

From here it is an easy inference as to why Cheney and Bush are still beating the war drum. The Clinton Administration was an interruption in the military strategy to achieve geophysical supremacy through the buildup of military forces, and the Middle East -- especially Iraq and Iran -- are and continue to be primary targets of its simultaneous multiple theatre strategy for achieving its objective.

Unfortunately, the current administration has learned from the past experience of its Vice President that lies and deception are to be favored over honesty and truth. How could the current administration ever come clean with a public that has already rejected its bellicose vision? How could it tell the parents of those who have died in the war in Iraq that the facts have been twisted to fit an ideology aiming at geopolitical preeminence rather than at preempting an imminent threat to the homeland? And, how could it audaciously ask more able-bodied men and women to risk their lives in an attack on Iran that aims at securing access to the region's oil? If Bush and Cheney now and then get caught in lies and deception, there is always another lie they can concoct to conceal their true intent. This is less than ideal but is still more advantageous to their mission than telling the public the truth. So the American people can expect more of the same.

Speaking at a security conference in Bahrain this week, the present Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, claimed that Iran may have secretly resumed its nuclear weapons program. And he said, "Everywhere you turn, it is the policy of Iran to foment instability and chaos, no matter the strategic value or the cost in the blood of innocents -- Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike." This resembles the strong, disingenuous rhetoric that also preceded the invasion of Iraq. It bears the scent of the same road map to war.

Still, the mainstream media, our "Fourth Estate," continues to mislead the public by omitting relevant, verifiable facts about the Bush Administration's ideological roots -- its close affiliation with the PNAC and the latter's doctrinal basis in the DPG of Cheney's Department of Defense during the first Bush presidency.

Leaving this matter uninvestigated may portend serious, global consequences for the survival of a democratic America and the international balance of power.


A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.<www.elliotdcohen.com > is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is "The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship." He is a first-prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Submitted by Chad on Mon, 11/12/2007 - 10:24am. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen

Amid public outcry, in 2003, Congress defunded the Bush Administration's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, a massive Orwellian technology-driven surveillance and data mining initiative. Now, it is attempting to pass through the FISA Amendments Act of 2007 (S. 2248), a bill that would affectively give legal standing and retroactive legal immunity to a major component of this project.

S. 2248 is now before the Senate Judiciary, and will be voted on in just a few days. Unless public opposition is once again vigilant and strong, this new TIA bill has a good chance of passing in committee and of reaching the full Senate floor. Unfortunately, the dire consequences of this legislation for the survival of democracy in America, including the potential to destroy fair elections, have been greatly muted, misrepresented, and downplayed by the mainstream media; and mounting pressure on Congress from both the Bush Administration and the giant telecommunication corporations have combined to increase the odds that S. 2248 will soon become law.

The bill would quash about 40 pending lawsuits against AT&T by granting it full retroactive legal immunity for its alleged role in helping the National Security Agency (NSA) acquire the contents of millions of domestic and international electronic messages sent by American citizens through the AT&T network. These messages were allegedly routed to secret rooms requiring NSA clearance hidden deep inside major AT&T hubs throughout the United States for purposes of building a massive data mine. This unprecedented surveillance offensive was first exposed in 2005 when an AT&T employee at the San Francisco hub blew the whistle.


According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties organization based in San Francisco that has filed a class action suit against AT&T, the company had installed a fiber-optic splitter at its San Francisco office that copies all e-mails and other Internet traffic passing through the system and deposits these copies into a separate government computer network. The EFF alleges that the secret NSA rooms, to which the copies are sent, contain "powerful computer equipment connected to separate networks. This equipment is designed to analyze communications at high speed, and can be programmed to review and select out the contents and traffic patterns of communications according to user-defined rules" (emphasis added).

With this cooperation from the telecoms, the Bush Administration now appears to have realized a major component of its TIA project, a publicly denounced program that was presumed to have been abandoned by the Bush Administration. The purpose of this project was to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness." In its present form, the integrated surveillance network has the capacity to maintain fully searchable copies of the contents of all electronic communications of American citizens. Since there is virtually no judicial oversight, the Bush Administration now has a blank check to define its search criteria any way it wishes, not only to look for terrorists but also for anyone else it may deem a threat -- including investigative reporters and political opponents. The implications of a government in possession of such an awesome power are profound and far-reaching. These dire consequences include the potential for systematic and widespread disruption of fair elections in the United States. In these months prior to a national election, the Bush Administration now has the capacity to read private correspondence between its Democratic opponents and thereby to gain unfair political advantage. It has the capacity to blackmail congressional and other government agents into lockstep conformity with its mandates. It accordingly has the power to eviscerate not only Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure, but also to invade and chill off First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and the press. In short, it has the power to shut down democracy in America. It is therefore not surprising that the Bush Administration now seeks to immunize the telecom companies from civil suits and judicial scrutiny since the unfettered operation of these companies is a vital component of its TIA network.


It is also not surprising that S.2248 gives telecom companies retroactive immunity for its role in helping government to secure the contents of e-mail and other electronic communications. According to Title 2, Section 201 of the bill, "the term 'assistance' means the provision of, or the provision of access to, information including communication contents…" (emphasis added). The bill also states that "the term 'contents' has the meaning given that term in section 101(n) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801(n)). According to this provision of the 1978 law, "Contents," when used with respect to a communication, includes any information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of that communication." However, 1802(a) of the same law states unequivocally that "there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party;"
Unfortunately, proposed bill, S. 2248 uses the 1978 FISA law's definition of "content" to legally protect telecom companies to systematically and en mass acquire and provide government with the contents of any and all communications to which a United States person is a party. This is in glaring contradiction to the nature and purposes of the 1978 FISA act in the first place -- which was to protect American citizens from falling victim to government eavesdropping while at the same time providing facility for government to conduct surveillance of "the acquisition of the contents of communications transmitted by means of communications used exclusively between or among foreign powers" (emphasis added).

Not only does the current bill insulate the telecoms from lawsuits made by private citizens; but it also preempts investigations by state governments. According to Section 803, "No State shall have the authority to-- '(1) conduct an investigation into an electronic communication service provider's alleged assistance to an element of the intelligence community' or to "(2) require through regulation or any other means the disclosure of information about an electronic communication service provider's alleged assistance to an element of the intelligence community…" The proposed bill therefore provides ironclad retroactive legal protection to the telecoms.

In the United States, no American person, corporate or otherwise, can be lawfully given legal immunity to violate the Constitutional rights of other American persons. Provision 1801(h) of the said 1978 FISA act clearly states,

no contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party shall be disclosed, disseminated, or used for any purpose or retained for longer than 72 hours unless a court order under section 1805 of this title is obtained….

This was the law of the land that prevailed between September 11, 2001 and January 17, 2007, the times to which S. 2248 exempts the telecom companies from legal accountability. These companies are American persons and are therefore legally accountable. To exempt one person from legal requirements in order that this person can violate the constitutional rights of other American persons violates equal protection under the law, and is unconstitutional. In giving these companies a free pass, Congress will affectively be relinquishing the rule of law.

During Nazi Germany, Hitler enlisted IBM's punch card computer technologies to identify Jews, trace their ancestral roots, and ultimately exterminate them. With the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure -- and consequently the chilling of First Amendment rights of free speech and the press -- the specter of Nazi Germany hovers over America. If history teaches anything, it is that such unregulated unitary executive authority portends grave risks to national security.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. <www.elliotdcohen.com > is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is "The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship." He is a first-prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Originally Published on Truthdig www.truthdig.com

Oct 30, 2007

By Elliot D. Cohen

The Senate Intelligence Committee has recently agreed to give the Bush administration what it wants: full retroactive immunity for the telecom companies against civil suits for helping the government eavesdrop without warrant on the phone and e-mail conversations of customers.

According to the Washington Post, the draft Senate bill “will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States. ... Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants” (emphasis added). The devil, however, is in the details, and, unfortunately, the Post has not disclosed the nature of such “other information.”

At least 40 of the lawsuits to which the Post is referring are against AT&T for its alleged role in helping the National Security Agency parse through millions of phone and e-mail messages passing through rooms hidden deep inside major AT&T hubs in the United States.

This NSA/AT&T program was exposed in 2005 when Mark Klein, an AT&T employee at the San Francisco hub, blew the whistle. Klein produced photographs and other documents to show that AT&T kept a secret room requiring NSA clearance.

Eventually, other whistle-blowers came forth to report similar secret rooms at other AT&T hubs in other U.S. cities, including St. Louis, Seattle, Atlanta and Los Angeles. On behalf of the customers of AT&T, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action suit against the company for its collaboration with the NSA in what the EFF considers illegal “dragnet surveillance.”

The EFF maintains that AT&T installed a fiber-optic splitter at its San Francisco office that copies all e-mails and other Internet traffic and provides these copies to the NSA, including both domestic and international Internet activities of AT&T WorldNet customers.

This clearly involves more than a telecom company’s cooperation in turning over standard telephone records and summaries of e-mail traffic to the government. Rather, its primary purpose is to look for suspicious message content—presumably that which suggests a terrorist plot. This requires the use of natural language-parsing technology, a form of artificial intelligence that in part looks for predefined words and word relations.

According to the EFF, the secret rooms created under the supervision of the NSA contain “powerful computer equipment connected to separate networks. This equipment is designed to analyze communications at high speed, and can be programmed to review and select out the contents and traffic patterns of communications according to user-defined rules” (emphasis added).

In the absence of judicial oversight, there is no way of knowing what the system’s predefined definitions are.

Therefore, it is not possible to discern who else the government may be targeting with neither warrant nor probable cause—perhaps lawbreakers such as drug traffickers, Internet predators and money launderers; but targets might just as well include investigative journalists, political opponents and other persons deemed hostile to the Bush administration.

It is also difficult or impossible to tell, without judicial oversight, how the Bush administration might use this information. For example, it could expand an “enemies list” or brand dissidents as “unlawful enemy combatants” according to the vague and potentially dangerous definition provided in the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in 2006.

It’s clear why a grant of legal immunity to the telecoms to secretly conduct surveillance for the government is a high priority for the Bush administration. With the judicial branch out of the loop, the administration will have a blank check to pursue “Total Information Awareness,” the name earlier given to an Orwellian mass surveillance project that was defunded by Congress in 2003 amid a public outcry. The purported purpose of that project was to “imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness.”

Now the legal seeds may finally be sown for a major component of such an integrated system. There would be immunized cooperation of the telecoms, copies of all electronic communications of virtually all Americans in a federal computer network, and the potential for straining out the content of messages that “look suspicious,” according to secret predefined definitions, for secret purposes carried on without judicial oversight. And all this, of course, propagated on the vague pretext that surveillance is “directed at reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States” (Protect America Act of 2007).

Add to this that the parsing technology being used to secretly gather information is notoriously unreliable and can turn up false positives linking innocent Americans with crimes, terrorism and other “forbidden” activities. With the disbanding of Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure without court warrants or probable cause, no Americans, not even those who are apolitical and believe they have nothing to hide, are safe. Under this judicially unregulated Orwellian system of total information awareness, all Americans who use the Internet and/or the telephone (which means virtually all Americans) are suspects in a massive, nationwide (and global) government dragnet.

The Washington Post has reported that granting retroactive immunity to the telecoms will have the effect of “wiping out” pending lawsuits against AT&T. This, however, is an oversimplification because not even Congress has the power to immunize anyone against being held accountable for the violation of another’s constitutional rights.

According to Lee Tien, attorney for the EFF, “When you’ve got pending lawsuits and suddenly pull the rug out from under them ... that’s a major attack on the role of the judiciary.”

If the bill becomes law, Tien said, plaintiffs’ attorneys will argue that the grant of retroactive immunity violates the separation of powers and involves an attempt to legitimize the violation of the plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment right to privacy. In that case, Congress will have acted to provide a major impediment to the survival of a free America in a monumental battle to be waged in the courtroom—and quite possibly the Supreme Court.

Congress should therefore act responsibly in the first place by unequivocally refusing to grant retroactive immunity to the telecoms. For it to do otherwise is a breach of trust with the American people and a precedent fraught with peril.

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.,<www.elliotdcohen.com > is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is “The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship.” He is a first-prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 09/24/2007 - 10:56am. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen

To the vast majority of Americans, today may seem like just another day -- work, coffee, TV, and the family dog. But there is now something chillingly different about America. The "Democratic" Senate has just officially sanctioned the end of democracy in America with the passage of a resolution condemning MoveOn.org's ad accusing General Petraeus of cooking the books for the White House to show that the "surge" in Iraq has been working.

When Thomas Jefferson considered whether he would rather have a free press without government or the opposite, he declared,

"The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

Behold these words: "The basis of our government being the opinion of the people." Jefferson never said this opinion had to be true or in line with the executive branch of government. To the contrary, it needed only be "the opinion of the people."

To all senators, Democrat and Republican alike, who voted to condemn MoveOn.org for speaking its conscience, these words of Thomas Jefferson are the immortal words that you have betrayed. It is now not "General Betray Us" but instead "Congress Betray Us." You have sold out the very essence of our democracy -- the free expression of opinion. In your official capacity as representatives of the will of the people, you have driven the final nail into the coffin of democracy. Henceforth, America is officially a nation without a free press, a nation without a backbone; a jellyfish deflated and devoid of what was once the spine of a free nation.

Members of the press, you are now officially on notice that you may no longer serve as an organ through which the voice of the people may be heard -- unless of course the message happens also to accord with the opinion of the White House. To the independent media, this is truly a somber day. To members of the mainstream corporate media who follow like drones, this may be business as usual -- just another story to roll over for.

But to all American citizens who cherish their nation for which it stands, the official end has finally arrived. According to the Senate, to speak freely, as to speak out against the Iraq war, now means to speak without the right. Americans, speak freely.


Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. <www.elliotdcohen.com > is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. He is also first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 08/13/2007 - 9:07am. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

The recently passed "Protect America Act of 2007" (S. 1927), which expands presidential powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to spy on our overseas phone and e-mail communications without a court warrant, appears to be just the tip of the iceberg of government eavesdropping on American citizens. Yet, mainstream media (MSM) have given scant coverage to the NSA/AT&T domestic spying program, and a landmark case now pending before the 9th circuit federal appeals court, the outcome of which may mark the final blow to Fourth Amendment privacy rights in America.

On January 31, 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class action suit against AT&T for allegedly collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in electronically eavesdropping on the phone and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, both domestic and overseas, as these communications passed through the AT&T system. This program, which appears to have been approved by the President, first came to light in 2005 when an AT&T employee at the San Francisco hub blew the whistle on the program. The whistleblower (who produced photographs and other pertinent documents) claimed that AT&T kept a "secret" room requiring NSA clearance. As millions of phone and e-mail messages entered the hub, wires were spliced to reroute them through this room. The messages were then parsed for key language related to whatever the government was searching for -- presumably, terrorists. Other whistleblowers eventually reported similar secret rooms at other AT&T hubs in other U.S. cities, including St. Louis, Seattle, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.

Both AT&T and the Justice Department made motions to dismiss the case. Not denying the existence of the program, the Justice Department argued that the trial would require disclosure of top secret information. AT&T claimed immunity under a provision of the Electronic Communications Protection Act (18 U.S.C. 2511). However, presiding U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker denied both motions, arguing that "The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security." The Bush administration then appealed the decision to the 9th circuit, where amidst passage of S. 1927, it is now pending before the 9th circuit. There are also 54 other lawsuits involving NSA spying whose fates, along with the EFF case, await the 9th circuit's ruling.

Prior to the enactment of the "Protect America Act of 2007," FISA limited electronic surveillance without a court order to "the acquisition of the contents of communications transmitted by means of communications used exclusively between or among foreign powers" (italics added) where there was "no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party." Otherwise a warrant from a FISA court had to be issued. Now, under the extended powers, no warrant is needed as long as the surveillance is "concerning persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States." In this regard, the revised law "clarifies" the previous FISA definition of "electronic surveillance" stating, "Nothing in the definition of electronic surveillance under section 101(f) shall be construed to encompass surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States" (Section 105A). Thus, for example, it does not matter whether an overseas communication is between two U.S. citizens-one located in the US and the other outside of it -- just as long as the surveillance is "directed at person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States." This means that all overseas communications coming in and out of the United States can be monitored without warrant or probable cause.

The "Protect America Act of 2007" also gives telecom companies such as AT&T and Comcast a central role in the acquisition of foreign intelligence by stipulating that the information acquired must be obtained from, or with the assistance of a communications service provider including any employee, agent, or officer thereof "who has access to communications, either as they are transmitted or while they are stored, or equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store such communications." Accordingly, the Act legalizes the role of telecom companies as accomplices in eavesdropping on the overseas communications of Americans.

But the plot thickens still. In addition to monitoring all overseas communications, and making the telecoms an accessory, the Bush administration now wants the 9th circuit to permit the AT&T/NSA spying program. Since this program indiscriminately monitors all communications made through a service provider, this would permit government eavesdropping on all communications occurring in the United States, including ones exclusively between American citizens -again, presumably, to "protect" America. The pattern here is by now a familiar one: violate the law, legalize the violation, and then use the legalized violation as precedent for legalization of further previously unlawful actions.

The present slippery slope toward the demise of Fourth Amendment protections also has implications for the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and of the press. If government is authorized to police private communications without court warrants granted on the basis of probable cause, then this can have a chilling effect on what is said in these communications; and it is not difficult to foresee this progressive pattern of oppression leading toward the silencing of opinions deemed by the president "hostile" to "national security." (Legal precedent already exists for this. See, for example, the chilling new definition of "unlawful enemy combatant" in the Military Commissions Act of 2006.)

Unfortunately, there has been scant coverage by MSM of the AT&T/NSA spying program and the pending court cases against it, despite the imminent threat this program and its legalization poses to communication privacy in America, and indeed to democracy itself. So why haven't the MSM given due attention to this serious threat to national security?

The answer probably lies in the ever-increasing trend toward corporate media consolidation in America. First, the MSM corporations including News Corp (FOX), General Electric (NBC), Time Warner (CNN), Viacom (CBS), and Disney (ABC) have all enjoyed joint ventures with AT&T. Since these few giant media corporations that control network news in America are driven largely by their bottom lines, they are not likely to persist in exposing a serious business partner to bad press. Consequently, such stories are played down or not covered at all.

Second, the behemoth media and telecom companies have strong monetary incentives to cooperate with the government -- such as the receipt of lucrative military defense contracts, tax breaks, and relaxed ownership and antitrust rules. For example, the recent merger of Bell South with AT&T was possible only because the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), presently chaired by Kevin Martin, a Bush appointee with close ties to the White House, approved the merger.

It is therefore easy to see how these giant corporations have allowed themselves to become pawns of what may be the most powerful and controlling White House in American history. In the present situation, the Bush administration has exploited their voracious appetites for profit in order to eavesdrop on American citizens. Sadly, it is the American experiment in democracy that has paid the price.

In the end, democracies stand or fall on the collective, unified power of the people. If the American people, in substantial number, refuse to use (or reduce reliance on) the services of giant telecommunication corporations that cooperate with government in undermining our constitutional rights (enlisting when we can the services of other companies that refuse to cooperate), then these giant companies will be likely to listen -- since to do otherwise would mean lost revenues. Similarly, if we are willing to seek alternative, independent media to keep informed (and we must keep informed), then giant media companies such as News Corp, Time Warner, and General Electric will be less likely to censor and play down the stories that independent media are now competently covering. Unfortunately, most Americans get their news from the MSM, not from independent media such as Web-based sites. This would need to change if democracy in America is to survive.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. <www.elliotdcohen.com > is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. He is also first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Elliot D. Cohen
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 07/30/2007 - 9:41am. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

There is presently a serious possibility that America will come under martial law before the 2008 presidential election and be irretrievably turned into a totalitarian state. If this happens there won't even be a free election in 2008. We can and should eliminate this ominous threat to national security by impeaching Bush and Cheney now. But the man in charge, John Conyers, is afraid of what Fox News might say about him.


In my recent article, This Summer, will America Officially Become a Totalitarian State?" I presented the following facts:


In May 2007, Bush posted a national continuity policy to the White House Web site that bypasses Congress and puts him in charge of all three branches of the federal government if there is a "catastrophic emergency" -- vaguely defined to include anything from a destructive hurricane to a terrorist attack. This leaves democracy in America dangling on a thin thread of chance that such a "catastrophe" doesn't happen.

On Wednesday , Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he has a "gut" feeling that Al Qaeda will launch another terrorist attack on the U.S. mainland sometime this summer. Chertoff's "gut feeling" comes on the heels of the latest National Intelligence Estimate , which maintains that in the past year, Al Qaeda has reconstituted its core structure and has grown stronger along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.


Curiously, the story about Bush's national continuity policy received (virtually) no mainstream media coverage, and its significance in light of the recent NIE report was not broached. Yet, these facts point to a serious and disturbing possibility that a "catastrophic emergency" in the form of a terrorist attack on the homeland will occur before the next presidential election, giving the Bush administration the green light to turn the United States into a totalitarian state. Notice that this is not based on speculation or groundless conspiracy theory. It is based only on the facts: With the posting of the current national continuity policy, Bush has ipso facto announced his intention to take over all three branches of the federal government in the event of another serious terrorist attack. And the NIE does "judge that the United States is currently in a heightened threat environment."


Never mind that this is "only a possibility" and not a certainty. The NIE itself is very clear that it is not saying a terrorist attack is "certain." But, it is irrational to demand certainty in matters of national security before taking action. Imagine you had a suspicious growth, which was steadily enlarging, and your physician told you there was a serious possibility that it would become malignant. Would you ignore it because you could never be sure, or would you remove it? The advice you would hear from any competent physician would be to get rid of it. This is not unlike the present state of our democracy. The stakes are its very survival. The only reasonable response to this national security risk is to eliminate it, and this can be done by starting impeachment proceedings now. Unfortunately, Congress (Democrats and Republicans alike) have fallen asleep at the wheel.


The Bush administration has shown an ever-increasing and blatant disregard for the rule of law. This is a White House that has recently used "executive privilege" to thwart investigations into impeachable offenses (from the firing of federal prosecutors for political reasons to the illegal spying on American citizens). It has turned the Department of Justice, under the direction of Alberto Gonzales, into a rubber stamp for its own illegal activities. It has canceled habeas corpus and engaged in serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions (in the torturing of prisoners of war). It has engaged in fraudulent "caging" of minority votes in order to install itself in the White House. To expect that this regime will voluntarily follow the rule of law in relinquishing the power it has steadfastly amassed by ransacking the United States Constitution is wishful thinking. This flies in the face of the evidence of the last seven years.


So as the Democrats look to 2008, they neglect the serious possibility that there will not even be a free election. To ensure a constitutionally valid transfer of power in 2008, it is necessary that Bush and Cheney be impeached now. However, John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, refuses to pursue impeachment proceedings because "Fox News would go after him and accuse him of being partisan." He is afraid of jeopardizing his legacy. The irony is that his legacy may already be dead in the water. The patriotism and magnanimity of a public servant is not measured in the self-serving sacrifice of the public welfare, but instead in the courage of personal sacrifice for the greater good.


So, how might we, the American people, send Conyers and others in Congress a clear message before it's too late?


There have already been eighty one towns, cities, and counties that have voted to impeach Bush. More local municipalities need to follow this lead. But what is also needed is an organization to go to bat for them in Congress. The National League of Cities (NLC) is such an organization. It is the largest national organization representing municipal governments throughout the United States. Its mission is "to strengthen and promote cities as centers of opportunity, leadership, and governance." According to the NLC website,


"Working in partnership with the 49 state municipal leagues, the National League of Cities serves as a resource to and an advocate for the more than 18,000 cities, villages, and towns it represents. More than 1,600 municipalities of all sizes pay dues to NLC and actively participate as leaders and voting members in the organization."


Since, the NLC engages in lobbying and grassroots campaigns in Washington, D.C. on behalf of local municipalities, it might well provide the resource we need to give our local governments a voice in Washington.


All Americans have a duty to advocate for impeachment proceedings now. They should join forces at the level of their local municipalities, and the NLC should represent them in Congress.


America is now in grave jeopardy of being besieged and forever lost. Impeaching Bush and Cheney now is not only good preventative medicine; it would be malpractice not to do so.

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.<www.elliotdcohen.com >is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. He is also first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 07/12/2007 - 4:19pm. Interviews
BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

My belief is that the person in the street, the person who tunes in to TV, needs to be more critical, needs to ask questions, needs to demand answers, and should be willing to shut off Chris Matthews unless he starts doing his job for the public and not for General Electric.

-- Elliot D. Cohen, coauthor, Last Days of Democracy


* * *

Elliot D. Cohen <www.elliotdcohen.com > is a regular contributor to BuzzFlash.com and most recently the author of The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America into a Dictatorship. Cohen doesn't mince words, as you can see from his most recent commentary on BuzzFlash, "This Summer, Will America Officially Become A Totalitarian State?"

Like many BuzzFlash readers, Cohen is astonished that so many Americans are ignorantly sleeping through the theft of democracy, quite a heist to be sure. Television and corporate media have helped the ruling elite make issues like war secondary to Paris Hilton's release from jail. Make that tertiary, after a wrestler/entertainer killing himself and his family.

Perhaps, Americans with money are far too comfortable and lost in a world of entertainment to be able to identify important news with public policy implications anymore. And the have nots are just trying to survive.

Meanwhile, the corporate media barons hand us a version of the news that is really a combination of Tabloid journalism, Disney entertainment, and Republican propaganda talking points. It's not really news at all. It's a diversion from the news that matters to our security and the future of our democracy.

If you want light summer reading, grab a Harry Potter book.

If you want the truth, grab Elliot Cohen's latest Jeremiad, Last Days of Democracy.

* * *

BuzzFlash: We at BuzzFlash are certainly grateful for your writing commentary over the years, including the Project Censored work. Before we get into your book, The Last Days of Democracy, the piece that won the Project Censored award was specifically about how the Internet is being overlooked by the mainstream media, and also some of the threats to the Internet. Can we talk a little bit about that?


Elliott D. Cohen: Sure. It concerned the Brand X Supreme Court decision, which essentially conceived of the Internet as a one-way information provider, rather than seeing it as an interactive, two-way street. The effect was to reconceptualize the Internet as being like the cable television model, where the controllers of the Internet are really the people who own the pipes. If Comcast owns the Internet pipes -- the cables -- then they can control what kind of content flows down it. This was such an important decision.

That court case moved us away from what was the common understanding of the Internet as a common carrier, where any Internet service provider could provide content. And the mainstream media didn't pay any heed to it. There was a virtual media blackout concerning this Supreme Court decision. My article did an analysis of the Brand X decision and attempted to make this known to people. And I think it did.


BuzzFlash: The implication is that the carriers could discriminate against the individual web sites or providers of content on the Internet. But thus far, the people who are providing the Internet access have not started discriminating based on what one will pay as a content provider to them to provide faster service.


Elliott D. Cohen: That's the next step. The Brand X ruling provided the legal basis to actually do this. It allows the large companies like Comcast and Verizon to create these tollbooths. Really, money will buy what's news and what's truth.


BuzzFlash: Now let's transition, because media plays a big role in your new book, The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship. Your first chapter is titled "A New American Dictatorship." Why did you decide to call it that, and what are the implications?


Elliott D. Cohen: It sort of carries its message on its face -- the new American dictatorship is about the control of the population of Americans by the corporate media political establishment. The media, of course, is supposed to be the guarantor of democracy in the sense that it prevents the government from getting away with corruption and abuse. But because of media consolidation and how much beholden the media is to the government these days, there's really a corporate media/government quid quo pro going on.

This essentially means that the media isn't doing its job the way it was conceived by our Founding Fathers. It's essentially becoming a paid political announcement, to a large extent. Those who are holding the purse strings of the media -- in other words, the government, the FCC -- can make or break these media organizations. If the media corporations simply work cooperatively with a really megalomaniac government to control and censor, they can prevent news from getting out.


BuzzFlash: Let me play devil's advocate, although I agree with you. I believe I heard Ted Koppel once say, in effect, that in all the years he was doing "Nightline," no one from the government that called to say that they wanted a story censored. So that's just sort of poppycock to say that we don't have a free media in America, and an open and democratic and questioning media. How would you respond to that?


Elliott D. Cohen: That does fly in the face with stories that I heard from other people who do know. I've heard that Karl Rove paid a visit to The New York Times to see that stories were not broken. In fact, speaking of The New York Times, when you look at the NSA spying program, they sat on that story for over a year because the government told them not to print it.


BuzzFlash: There was a meeting in the Oval Office. They met with the publisher and editor and asked them not to publish it, and they didn't publish it.


Elliott D. Cohen: Right. And it's not necessarily a call from the President, but it's an understanding that you shouldn't go too far in challenging us. When it comes time to address relaxing media ownership rules, or providing tax breaks or other corporate perks -- how about GE getting a contract to create jet engines for a war? Even if they don't say anything, the idea here is that the media companies are so intertwined with the government that the newsroom becomes just another extension of this whole quid pro quo operation.


BuzzFlash: Something we've examined often at BuzzFlash is this convergence of the mainstream media, where you have corporate consolidation over media. More and more, almost all of them are not separate divisions. Some news divisions fall under entertainment, and all the major networks are subsidiaries of larger corporations. And as you've indicated, in the case of NBC, General Electric is the larger corporation.

It would be hard to have NBC running something on nuclear power plants where GE plays a role. On ABC's "Good Morning America," you're likely to see the promotion of a Disney film. And at CBS, a subsidiary of Viacom, we had CEO Sumner Redstone saying in the 2004 election that he admired Kerry, but he was voting for Bush because Bush was good for Viacom and CBS.


So there are corporate control issues. They don't want to offend the Bush Administration or any Republicans, because they consider them more favorable to their bottom line, and they need them for regulatory relief, and for contracts.

But also there's the entertainment factor, which is to say they need eyeballs, and they're going to the lowest common denominator because that gets viewers, meaning a blonde girl who's gone missing in Aruba, or Brittany Spears, or Michael Jackson, or Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. They also get anchors who are very attractive. On "The Daily Show," we saw a very funny piece by Samantha Bee where she basically showed all the different babes, basically very attractive, sexy women, who are on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, sometimes in very skimpy skirts, laughing through stories about Iraq and so forth.

So reporters know that they can't do certain stories because the parent company's going to take offense, or it might hurt them with the Bush Administration. Is the bigger problem that television news is just sinking to its lowest common denominator for ratings?


Elliott D. Cohen: It needs to be understood in the broader context of the relationship between media and government, because with this whole dumbing-down process, obviously, the media is trying to appeal to the emotions of the populace. But the populace, by virtue of being dumbed down through this process, is also blissfully ignorant of exploitation. It's easier for the government to provide inadequate and really lopsided news.

Why did so many Americans swallow the idea that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11? People are not really paying attention to details. They're so used to being distracted by the glitter of entertainment and infotainment that it becomes just a kaleidoscope of concepts and ideas floating around that really don't have any connections to one another, or clear connections. And people are just learning not to ask many questions. Meanwhile, the media's making money in this way, which is really what they care about. And the government likes it that way. So it's a mutuality in terms of this entertainment aspect that you're talking about -- a mutuality between government and media.


BuzzFlash: Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show" also had a segment about a cable news anchor who interrupted coverage of news from Iraq to cut to Los Angeles, because Paris Hilton was entering a car. What is the news value of seeing someone enter a car? And yet CNN, a major 24-hour news provider, cut away from the serious discussion of a public policy issue to break into a non-story about a celebrity who is only known for being a celebrity. What does that tell us?


Elliott D. Cohen: It basically supports what I was saying -- that the media has created a fragmented view of reality where priorities and values are not well understood or even appreciated. When you look at Paris Hilton, she is a symbol of the whole dumbing-down process. She stands for basically a shallow individual who doesn't have much to offer. Yet people are interested in her because she's a celebrity.


BuzzFlash: Is this our version of Marie Antoinette's, "Let them eat cake?"


Elliott D. Cohen: The bottom line is determining what we ultimately see and hear. Fifty years of experience has informed and enlightened the advertisers that this is how they can create a lot of money for the corporations. They keep the people watching, but also keep them unaware of what's going on.

In the book, we talk about the allegory of the cave, which was the story that the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, recounted as a way to get people to see the dangers of not keeping track of reality. It is a story about people who, from the time of their childhood, are living in a cave. They watch shadows on a wall and think that is reality. It's only when one gets out of the cave and sees the reality that he wants to go back and tell the others that what they formerly saw as reality really wasn't.

BuzzFlash: In your book you have a section on Fox News. Fox president Roger Ailes actually got his start as a producer of "The Mike Douglas Show," and now he essentially runs a GOP talking points, propaganda network.With Roger Ailes there was this emergence of the Republican, PR, advertising, propaganda operative. What impact has that had?


Elliott D. Cohen: Again, Fox News is not happening in isolation, but it is part of this whole political corporate machine. Fox is owned by NewsCorp, and that also owns Direct TV. And Direct TV now contracts with Boeing for satellites, which contracts with the U.S. military. So, when you see it that way, what you can see is that Fox becomes basically foot soldiers for the government. That's the function they serve. I think they're doing a good job as these propagandists for the Bush Administration.

But when it comes down to understanding who does the worst for a democracy, Bill O'Reilly or somebody like MSNBC's Chris Matthews, in my estimation, O'Reilly isn't the worst offender. And I talk about that in "Look Who's Not Looking Out for You," one chapter of The Last Days of Democracy.


BuzzFlash: Who is the worst offender then?


Elliott D. Cohen: I think Chris Matthews is worse because he has this air of being unbiased and open. But when you watch how he proceeds, he simply supports those individuals who have the most popularity and are in power. When it came to his interview with Howard Dean, for instance, when Dean was running for President, he trashed him. When it came to Tom DeLay, he coached him through an interview. Then later, when the war started to become less popular, he said that he was never in favor of Bush, and never really in favor of the war. But if you look at some of the things that he said back in the earlier period, he was certainly touting the Administration line.


BuzzFlash: Well, when Bush landed on the aircraft carrier -- the infamous "Mission Accomplished" day -- Chris Matthews talked about what a manly man he was.


Elliott D. Cohen: Yes.


BuzzFlash: And lately he's had, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out at Salon, a "man crush" on Fred Thompson. The interesting thing about Chris Matthews is he comes from a print background. He had a column for the San Francisco Chronicle. I had been looking at some of those columns while he was just being his usual tawdry self on "Hardball." And the columns were actually reasonable. So clearly, who he's playing on television is distinct from his writing persona for a column, which brings us to the question about television of personality.

You have the cult of personality on television. You have people saying things like, Mitt Romney looks like a president -- he's got the jaw. He's got that little grey fleck in his hair. You've got a lot of pundits on television talking about how presidential candidates look. If they look presidential, then that merits being president.


Elliott D. Cohen: What is the end product of this for democracy? People are simply not asking questions. They're not thinking critically about things that are affecting us and will affect us for all time to come, from the environment to whether or not we have a form of government that allows us to vote. There are so many issues that have been swept under the rug and not carefully examined, and not brought to us, because the media's just not doing its job. It's a big list. It means the last days of democracy, as the book suggests.


BuzzFlash: How do you put the genie back in the bottle? Television has such an extraordinary influence on Americans. And for a person who's really relying on mainstream television news, there's almost daily Alzheimer's -- the news does not seem to acknowledge anything that occurred even the day before.

You have Bush going through four years of ever-changing reasons for being in Iraq, ever-changing expectations, ever-changing goals, ever-changing military reports, constantly issuing statements from the White House on almost every front that totally contradict what was said maybe a few months ago, a few days ago, the day before. And yet television never brings these up. You have to watch "The Daily Show" to find out about this.

One specific incident that has bothered me was addressed by Jon Stewart and in a small article in the Chicago Sun-Times. Regarding the U.S. attorneys that were let go by Gonzales at the suggestion of the White House, initially the Administration had said most were released because of performance issues. Tony Snow later said, we never said that they were released because of performance issues. Then Jon Stewart replayed the tape of Tony Snow saying they were released because of performance issues.

I mean, he flat-out lied. This isn't even conjecture. Here was a videotape. Jon Stewart played them side by side. He said, "Let's have Tony Snow debating Tony Snow." That's a minor thing, I guess you could say. But it's not really a minor thing to have the White House Press Secretary caught in a lie that's on videotape, and not even a shade of gray lie, or a parsing words lie, but a lie-lie. There's no room for any interpretation here. He claims he didn't say something he said.

The media made nothing of this. But if television doesn't have a historical memory, how is there any hope that the American people are going to start knowing from day to day when the wool is being pulled over their eyes?


Elliott D. Cohen: Well, I am critical of the tendency to hold the politicians and the media responsible for all these failures that we're talking about -- the failure to provide a consistent and coherent view of reality, and to report it appropriately. We tend to look at the public as just passive recipients of the news, as though they don't have any responsibilities and they don't have any obligations to ask questions, and to look for consistency, and to demand it.

My belief is that the person in the street, the person who tunes in to TV, needs to be more critical, needs to ask questions, needs to demand answers, and should be willing to shut off Chris Matthews unless he starts doing his job for the public and not for General Electric. I think this is a matter of education. What people are doing on the media, is indoctrination and manipulation, not education. If more people become critical thinkers and ask questions, the media does have its dependence on an audience. I think there needs to be a campaign to try to get people to stop being so gullible, and to make more demands, and to be more critical. I think the cycle can be broken through educators and through indie media -- the kinds of things that you do at BuzzFlash.


BuzzFlash: You have a section in The Last Days of Democracy about blaming the liberals. Can you talk more about that? It's certainly a topic near and dear to our heart. On BuzzFlash, we have disagreed when The New York Times and Washington Post are described as liberal publications. The New York Times may be in terms of its editorial policy, but it certainly is not in terms of its news pages. Nor is the Washington Post. In that case, the Post is pro-Iraq war and anti-Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, to almost the extremism of the Wall Street Journal. So where is this liberal media that the right wing talks about?


Elliott D. Cohen: The liberal media that the right wing talks about is in the premises of Bernard Goldberg and people like him who write about it, and try to disseminate the myth here.

BuzzFlash: The mainstream media are now afraid of being accused of being liberal, when I don't find anything certainly politically liberal about the mainstream press. It may be true that in the urban papers, they're liberal to a certain degree on issues like gay rights or endorsing gun control. There are some social issues they're liberal on. But when it comes to election time, and it comes to the war in Iraq, they are not liberal.


Elliott D. Cohen: That's right.


BuzzFlash: Let's finish up by returning to where we started, which is with your Project Censored article about the Internet. Let's assume Net neutrality is maintained. What is the role of the Internet in our attempt to change and perhaps rescue democracy?


Elliott D. Cohen: I think it's immense. If the Internet can survive without being turned into just another corporate media organ, then there's an opportunity for real democracy to flourish in cyberspace. TV news is still the main source, but the Internet is becoming more of a force to reckon with. That's why the Bush Administration as well as The Project for a New American Century, which we discuss in the book, are really pushing this idea of controlling cyberspace. But if they fail to shut it down, I think that's where democracy has its strongest possibility of overriding these forces that tend to drag it down.


BuzzFlash: Elliott, thanks so much.


Elliott D. Cohen: Okay, terrific.


BuzzFlash interview conducted by Mark Karlin.

Resources:
The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America into a Dictatorship (Paperback), by Elliot D. Cohen and Bruce W. Fraser, a BuzzFlash premium.

Elliott D. Cohen on BuzzFlash:
Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
This Summer, Will America Officially Become A Totalitarian State?
Would A Dictator Graciously Relinquish Power?
Chavez Had a Right to Call Bush the Devil - And Pelosi, Rangel and other Dems Should Have Said So
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 07/16/2007 - 10:26am. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

The unfolding of events over the past 7 years and the recent emergence of certain key facts point to the prospect of an ominous conclusion: before the summer is up, America will be brought under martial law with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney at the helm.

In May 2007, Bush posted a national continuity policy to the White House Web site that bypasses Congress and puts him in charge of all three branches of the federal government if there is a "catastrophic emergency" -- vaguely defined to include anything from a destructive hurricane to a terrorist attack. This leaves democracy in America dangling on a thin thread of chance that such a "catastrophe" doesn't happen.

On Wednesday, Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he has a "gut" feeling that Al Qaeda will launch another terrorist attack on the U.S. mainland sometime this summer. Chertoff's "gut feeling" comes on the heels of the latest National Intelligence Estimate, which maintains that in the past year, Al Qaeda has reconstituted its core structure and has grown stronger along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

This information is disconcerting in itself. But it becomes even more so when considered in the context of the Bush administration's unrelenting quest for power. Consider these facts, for example: The September 11 attacks were foreshadowed by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in its report on Rebuilding American Defenses (2000) when it stated, "the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor . . ." This would not be significant were it not for the fact that the Vice President, among other key members of the Bush Administration, were founding members of PNAC.

This neoconservative organization also prescribed forced regime change in Iraq and buildup of a permanent U.S. military presence there. The primary goal for invading Iraq was not to quell tensions or stop the threat of terrorism posed by the Hussein regime but instead to advance U.S. interests in the region through military force. The 2000 report stated, "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." Regime change was therefore pretense for the invasion.

Clearly, the invasion of Iraq was never conceived as a means of stopping Saddam Hussein from instigating terrorism. This was made plain in the official British documents known as the Downing Street memos, which said that Bush was attempting to make the facts "fit" the policy in order to justify invading Iraq -- since Hussein's WMD capability was in fact "less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran." The redeployment of U.S. troops and special forces to Iraq was done in spite of the fact that the hub of Al Qaeda was in Pakistan and Afghanistan. So the Bush administration permitted Al Qaeda to regroup and strengthen in Pakistan and Afghanistan to pursue its ideology of global dominance in Iraq.

Add to these facts that the Bush administration has displayed consistent disregard for the rule of law by canceling habeas corpus, disregarding the Geneva Conventions in the torture of prisoners of war, using signing statements to override congressional lawmaking authority, eavesdropping on Americans without court warrants, summarily refusing to comply with Congressional subpoenas, firing federal prosecutors for political reasons, outing a covert CIA agent, threatening to jail journalists for disclosing leaked government documents, censoring mainstream media and infusing it with government propaganda ("prepackaged news" staged by PR firms working for the government), placing "gatekeepers" in all federal agencies who report directly to the White House, eliminating legal protections for government whistle blowers, arresting peaceful protestors, manipulating the terror alert system to instill fear in Americans, and stacking the Supreme Court.

In a press conference on Thursday regarding the war in Iraq, Bush indicated that he will not be discouraged by what the American people believe. He said that, while he preferred to be loved, he had to do the right thing.

Do what is right by whose standards? Not those of the generals; and certainly not those of the majority of Americans. While the mainstream media brought out its analysts to comment on Bush's press conference, none drew the obvious conclusion. In a democracy, it is the will of the people, not that of a single man, that is paramount. But, according to Bush, respecting the will of the American people would be nice if it happened to accord with his own will, but not in the least essential to shaping U.S. policy, even if that policy happened to affect the lives and limbs (and tax dollars) of the American people. This is dictatorship (or "decidership") at its core, not democracy.

All of these facts, among others, point to the willingness of this administration to stop at little or nothing to advance its ideology. It has proven its resolve to lie to the American people, violate their civil liberties, and discount their will. It has shown little respect for the rule of law or the U.S. Constitution.

So, this summer (or sometime before the 2008 presidential elections), will America officially become a totalitarian state brought under martial law by a ruthless dictator? If Chertoff's gut is right, just add the current national continuity policy and the conclusion follows.

Like a game of chess drawing to a close, there is a chilling aura that the final checkmate is imminent. In the least, democracy in America is in grave danger and at best dependent on chance.


Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. <www.elliotdcohen.com > is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. He is also first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 06/19/2007 - 12:04pm. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

There is something morally repugnant about claiming to support a war that involves the destruction of thousands of human lives unless you are truly committed to the cause this war advances. One test to see how committed you really are, is whether you would sacrifice your own life for it or the lives of others whom you love. If not, then you have no business underwriting others sacrificing their lives for the same cause. Those who fail this test are clearly hypocrites. Unfortunately, in America, there are a substantial number of such pseudo-patriots. Sitting behind the wheel, these bumper-sticker patriots take it slow, but play fast and furious with the lives of others. Safety first, at least for themselves -- unfortunately not for the service men and women who dodge land mines and the fire of automatic weapons in the hellish war that these "safe" drivers support.

These hypocrites want a world safe for them and those about whom they care. They take no personal risks; they have no children in harm's way, nor would they ever permit it. They want others to take the risks and make the sacrifices. Bluntly stated, they are cowards.

Just like their war monger leader. After all, this "commander in chief" also never saw combat during the Vietnam war and instead went AWOL. Now his daughters have come of age, have they not? Is this "president" not so dedicated to "the mission" as to send other young women into harm's way by the torrents? And how many drones still sit in Congress and vote lockstep, afraid to step out of line, more willing to approve escalation of a bloody, pointless, and immoral war that has already claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands, rather than to stand on principle. Hypocrites and cowards, they are all.

Draped in the American flag, these blind conformists, statesmen and constituent alike, have been partners in the destruction of more than life itself. They have corrupted the spirit of American democracy. Like Nazi-like windup toys, they have rallied round the flagpole in support of a megalomaniac government administration that has voraciously gnawed away at the American Constitution: dismantling checks and balances and the Fourth Estate; trampling on fundamental rights to privacy and to freedom of speech; un-separating church and state; contravening established International Law such as the Geneva Conventions to barbarically torture and humiliate prisoners of war; canceling the writ of habeas corpus; and engaging in numerous other anti-democratic, un-American antics that would make the Founding Fathers puke.

These are the same little bigots who cast a jaundice eye on anyone who does not uphold their Christian fundamentalism. Some of them actually make hate and fear their career, some on the pulpit, and others in the halls of Congress. This "moral majority" despises gays, lesbians, and liberals and blames them for anything from the 9/11 attacks to Hurricane Katrina. For this band of hate mongers, tolerance for religious and moral differences (values on which this nation was founded) is a filthy word -- the coin of gays, lesbians, liberals, and other "heretics" and "heathens."

For this sanctimonious lot, the "enemy" consists of "terrorists" and "unlawful enemy combatants," which, in the words of Bush's Military Commissions Act (2006), means anyone "hostile" to American interests. This translates as anyone they hate -- including environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

With the arrival of this paranoid ideology at the White House, just war theory has been replaced with the doctrinal monster of preemption (aka the "Bush Doctrine") whereby America now has the "right" to invade "hostile" foreign nations and to maintain a "permanent presence" in them (that is, take control of them). The architects of this self-serving doctrine consist of the original members of the so-called "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC), a neoconservative activist group begun in 1997 by hardheaded neocon William Kristol. The avowed PNAC mission was (and still is) to strengthen and use the U.S. military (including the offensive proliferation of nuclear weapons together with a defensive policy of strategic defenses -- the revival of the failed "Star Wars" plan) to corporately privatize and control the world.

Out of these PNAC ideologues, the Bush administration was formed to carry out this nefarious, megalomaniac mission -- under the direction of such original PNAC members as Vice President Dick Cheney, his faithful ghoul Scooter Libby, former deputy secretary of defense and World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, former chair of the Defense Policy Board Richard Pearle, and even the president's brother Jeb, among others.

Many Americans know little of this scheme to rule the world, and those who do often see it as "conspiracy theory," a term often used to render a claim immune from empirical confirmation. But this is no pie-in-the-sky paranoia. The true paranoia comes from those who have orchestrated the plot, not from those who report it. The blueprint for militaristically seeking global dominion, including the invasion of Iraq (and Iran) can be found in PNAC's report of 2000 titled, Rebuilding America's Defenses. It's on the Internet. It's not a conspiracy "theory" to point it out.

These bellicose vampires are sucking the life out of our democracy. And they are being aided by the American corporate mainstream media that ghoulishly promulgate the "official" propaganda released by the White House. Such empty parroting is more "cost effective" than conducting an independent investigation. This is how it works whether it is Fox News, CNN, ABC, CBS, or MSNBC.

Dollars dictate reality. Cost decides news, not facts. This is why it took so long for many Americans to find out that there weren't weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was cheaper and much easier to quote government sources than to butt heads with the White House. It was also a lot less risky since the federal government and its agencies (the FCC in particular) have the power to break up disobedient media conglomerates with antitrust laws, or otherwise to reward cooperative ones with tax breaks, military defense contracts, relaxed media ownership rules, and other government kickbacks.

To maximize their bottom lines, the corporate media also keep a select group of high-priced hookers in their news stables. MSNBC's Chris Mathews is a good example. He supported the Iraq war and spoke highly of Commandant Bush when it was fashionable to do so, but only recently made an about-face when support for the war began to wane. His views change with the direction of the wind and he "plays hardball" only when he has safely situated himself behind the backstop.

Americans who truly love their country should beware the little hypocrites, cowards, chameleons, and bigots who beat the war drum but assume no personal risk. They foster the wasteful sacrifice of others' lives while, at the same time, safely positioning themselves behind the flag. These are mean-spirited and unprincipled people, motivated by fear and hatred, not by rational standards. They demand of others what they themselves would not demand of themselves.

There are a considerable number of bumper-sticker patriots left in America who claim not to support the war but only the troops. This however is another logical howler, for what does this mean but to approve of what the troops are doing -- which is fighting a war these pseudo-patriots claim to reject. There are also others who claim that as long as the troops are in harm's way, we must support them by not speaking out publicly against the war. Why not? Because it would destroy the troops' morale, they say. Well, what would that mean anyway even if true? Discourage them from needlessly risking their lives? Discourage them from re-enlisting? Make it harder for the neocons to find pawns to accomplish their megalomaniac plan to rule the world?

Still others will say that they support the troops because the troops are putting their lives on the line for our beloved nation. But if the war is not helping the nation (and in fact harming it) then they are putting their lives on the line for no good reason. Thus they are approving of wasting the lives of those whom they claim to support, which makes no sense whatsoever.

To avoid such hypocrisy, all bumper-sticker patriots should peel the yellow "Support our troops" ribbon off their bumpers and replace it with, "Bring our Troops Home!" because that is the only rational, consistent way to support our troops.

At this time in American history, when democracy is dangling by a thin thread, separating the charlatans from the true patriots, the truthful from the dishonest, is of no small importance. And for those who themselves have been driving slow in the fast lane, there may not be much time left to fess up.


A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is a media ethicist and critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship <http://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Democracy-... >. He is also first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.

Elliot D. Cohen: How Do You Spell “DICTATOR”?
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 01/12/2007 - 3:44pm. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contribu...

The majority of Americans are clearly against escalating the war in Iraq; Bush was advised against it by the military generals; the Democrats in the Democratically-controlled Congress are unified against it, and now even Republicans have begun to express their opposition; the troops have already been spent and their morale is low. But despite all these indisputable facts, Bush has gone ahead with his plan to deploy more than twenty-one thousand additional troops to Iraq anyway. The most shocking fact of all, however, is not Bush's arrogant disregard for the will of the American people. It is rather that it could well have been predicted in light of the facts surrounding his administration. These facts paint a dismal, coherent picture of a burgeoning dictatorship in America. Unfortunately, this story (but for a piecemeal, fragmented, censored version) never saw the light of day in the mainstream media.

This alarming story is of a "president" who has made "the facts fit the policy" in cajoling and deceiving his nation into going to war in the first place; who has abused the constitutional authority of Congress by getting it to transfer its war-declaring power to him under false pretenses (the false promise that war would be a last resort while all along the war plans were on his desk); who has dishonored the Fourth Amendment by systematically engaging without a court warrant in wire tapping of American citizens' e-mail and phone messages while at the same time publicly denying that any such warrant-less wiretapping was being done; who has acquired the private phone records of every American citizen from the major telecom companies (which corporations themselves having been in the pocket of the Bush administration); who has successfully backed a move by the FCC to foreclose common carriage over the Internet pipes, portending the potential, future downfall of the free Internet (see Web of Deceit); who has invaded personal and confidential banking records; who has cancelled the right of habeas corpus for "unlawful enemy combatants" while defining the latter as virtually anyone whom he deems "hostile" to the interests of the United States; who keeps an "Enemies List" that includes journalists who oppose his policies; who has threatened journalists who publish leaked information with prosecution for treason; whose high officials (apparently with his permission) have outted covert CIA operative Valerie Plame in order to get even with her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for exposing falsified intelligence that Saddam had attempted to acquire uranium "yellowcake" from Niger in order to build nuclear weapons; who has sanctioned infiltrating peaceful, citizen, anti-war groups and blocking freedom of speech of anti-war demonstrators; who has sanctioned martial law and the doing away with Posse Comitatus (legal prohibition against use of military for domestic law enforcement) in order to deal with natural disasters; who has paid journalists like Armstrong Williams to tout the administration's "no child left behind" policy, and who has hired PR companies to seamlessly inject phony news about the successes of the war effort, among other hot button topics, into network affiliate news; who has disregarded the Geneva Conventions, setting himself up instead as the arbiter of the meaning of torture; who has issued signing statements exempting himself from legislation forbidding cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners; who has knowingly permitted (and may well have ordered) the abuses at Abu Ghraib; who was installed (not elected) by the Supreme Court in 2000, and, by all indications of exit polling, was never truly elected to office in 2004. This is a man who, on at least three different occasions, had announced that dictatorship would be easier than democracy as long as HE was the dictator; who along with his cronies, such as Tom DeLay, have struck out at "activist" judges for not toeing the administration line, prompting former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to warn about the impending danger of lapsing into dictatorship.

The larger picture into which all this fits becomes clearer when viewed in the context of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). (See Bush's Global Mission.) This is a group of neoconservatives, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who anticipated 9-11 by claiming in 2000 that it would take a "catalytic" and "catastrophic" event to transition the United States into its role as the preeminent world power; and who, in the same year, defined the 'axis of evil," and a couple years earlier sponsored legislation to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This is a group, backed by the oil and weapons industries, whose aim has been to use military force to overthrow any "regime" that opposes American corporate interests (in particular, Iran and Iraq), and to send in its behemoth corporate partners like Halliburton to take control of their natural resources (oil). Put bluntly, the goal of Bush and company is to rule the world. This spells "Dictatorship"--with a capital "D." Yet the average American knows little or nothing about PNAC. The mainstream media never covered the story!

True, the corporate media have recently begun to say more than they have in the past six years, probably because the public tide has turned against the Bush administration and these companies cannot afford to disenfranchise the majority of Americans who are tired of listening to White House white washings. While Fox continues to trot with the Bush administration; while O'Reilly continues to propagate the myth of a democratic White House--furiously fiddling while Rome burns--some of the unprincipled media chameleons such as MSNBC's Chris Matthews have only recently begun to speak out against Bush's war effort. Only one Network anchor, namely MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann, has been a trail blazer.

The mainstream, corporate media need collectively to set the record straight if only for the sake of their own survival. (Behemoth corporations like GE and Time Warner have deep pockets but no inherent moral conscience.) Under their watch, a dictator has risen to power. These news organizations have betrayed their constitutional charge as "Fourth Estate" during a time when checks and balances were so direly needed. They now need to come clean with the American people. They need to make abundantly clear that symbolic, toothless gestures of congressional dissent are not sufficient measures to counter the unconscionable efforts of a dictator to spend hundreds of thousands of lives--American and Iraqi alike--to build a global empire designed to fill the pockets of oil barons (Bush/Cheney and company) with the spoils of war.

Bush wants to establish a permanent American presence in Iraq. This is what the PNAC plan calls for, and the next probable target is Iran. Already an American attack has in fact been launched on the Iranian Embassy in Iraq. And Secretary of Defense Gates, following the lead from Bush, is now calling for an increase of at least ninety-two thousand more American troops in Iraq over the next five years. There is therefore nothing "temporary" about this "surge." It is a war without any foreseeable end, and it will predictably spread beyond Iraq unless Congress does its job, and does it now.

The Vietnam War ended during the Nixon administration when Congress took measures to cut off appropriations. But politics might well have overtaken prudence had it not been for a mainstream media vigilant in its coverage of widespread anti-war protests along with vivid footage of the body bags of young Americans struck down in the jungles of South East Asia. Like Bush, Nixon warned against the "enemy" attacking our homeland unless it was defeated on its home turf. Like Bush, Nixon resolved to "surge" rather than to back down. And like Bush, Nixon believed he was above the law. But Nixon resigned in disgrace rather than face being thrown out. The Democratic Congress has the ability to affect a similar end to the present dictatorial reign, but already it has pledged not to impeach, and what it now proposes to do is express toothless disapproval like children playing make-believe.

The media needs to fulfill its sacred trust by exposing the inept docility of Congress by once and for all giving a coherent and honest account of all of the facts surrounding this presidency. It needs to tell the American people the truth, in no uncertain terms, about what the stakes are in permitting a dictator to continue to thrive. Armed with the facts, Americans then need to pressure their representatives in Congress to do their jobs as though the survival of the free world depends on it, because it most assuredly does. The days are numbered, and the prospects grow dimmer the more emboldened this dictator gets.

Elliot D. Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. He is the 2007 first-place recipient of the Project Censored Award for his Buzzflash article, Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story. His forthcoming book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are Turning America into a Dictatorship (Prometheus Books, April 2007).

Elliot D. Cohen: Bush's Global Mission: His Flawed Logic for Escalating the Iraq War
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 01/09/2007 - 5:40am. Guest Contribution
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D.

Recently, in one of his special comments, Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC's Countdown, remarked, "First we sent Americans to their deaths for your lie, Mr. Bush. Now we are sending them to their deaths for your ego." This echoes the logic commonly ascribed to Bush for his resolve to send more American troops into harm's way in Iraq. But this would be to underestimate Bush's deeper ideological commitment, a resolve that goes well beyond his own ego.

What has allowed the Bush administration to rationalize away and to demand the "sacrifice" of hundreds of thousands of lives, both Iraqi and American alike, is an ideology profoundly more treacherous than vanity alone. As a matter of historical record, it has been one ideology or another, from religious extremism to Nazism, that has enabled human beings to brutally kill or oppress without being deterred by a guilty conscience. In the case of the Bush administration, the ideology in question is one underwritten by the so-called "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC). It was this "Project" that sanctioned invading Iraq in the first place, and it is now the likely basis for Bush's refusal to leave.

PNAC is a Washington-based, neoconservative think tank founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan in 1997 and financed by the oil and weapons industries. Its members include current and former Bush administration officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney; former Chief Advisor to the Vice President I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Jr.; former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; former Deputy Secretary of Defense and current President of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz; current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton; former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle; and even the President's brother, Jeb. The main goal of PNAC is to bring about a "New American Century" in which the United States uses it military muscle to dominate and force corporate privatization throughout the world.

At the root of the PNAC ideology is the proliferation of American interests and values: "We need," it states, "to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values." In other words, anyone that stands in the way of American economic growth and expansion; any nation or group that refuses to adopt American values; to acquiesce in its corporate culture and to feed its bottom line, are to be counted among "regimes hostile to our interests and values." To the extent that terrorists and other extremists fall into this category, they make suitable military targets. Thus it was never really about stopping terrorism as such. And, indeed, any nation that happens to be "swimming in oil" like Iraq provides a prime target for engaging military action to stem the "hostility."

Moreover, PNAC prescribes the same sort of tenacity that Bush has himself demonstrated in remaining true to "the mission"; but what this mission really is, has less to do with the prosperity of Iraq than it has to do with the power and control the U.S. can attain over it through the exercise of military force. Carving out the "access of evil" its words would be prophetic if only they were not themselves the blueprint for U.S. policy under Bush. In its 2000 election year report, entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (PDF), it flatly states, "We hope that the Project's report will be useful as a road map for the nation's immediate and future defense plans." It declares,

We cannot allow North Korea, Iran, Iraq or similar states to undermine American leadership, intimidate American allies or threaten the American homeland itself....Keeping the American peace requires the U.S. military to undertake a broad array of missions today and rise to very different challenges tomorrow, but there can be no retreat from these missions without compromising American leadership and the benevolent order it secures. This is the choice we face. It is not a choice between preeminence today and preeminence tomorrow. Global leadership is not something exercised at our leisure, when the mood strikes us or when our core national security interests are directly threatened; then it is already too late. Rather, it is a choice whether or not to maintain American military preeminence, to secure American geopolitical leadership, and to preserve the American peace (my italics).

The same report chillingly declares that the "process of transformation" in which the U.S. emerges as the preeminent world power is likely to be a lengthy one unless there is "some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." For PNAC the end justifies the means -- no matter how duplicitous and how many lives must be sacrificed.

The logic I am ascribing to Bush is not grounded in a questionable conspiracy theory. It is a simple syllogism the premises of which can readily be extracted from the pronouncements of PNAC:

1. Do not retreat from any military mission essential to establishing American world domination.

2. The mission in Iraq is such an essential mission.

Therefore, do not retreat from the mission in Iraq.

Sadly, the first premise is morally repugnant. It is the same old megalomaniac, dictatorial ideology that has led to world war and holocaust. And the second premise, which treats Iraq as a pawn in attaining global preeminence, is speculative and without empirical grounding.

Bush's positive argument for sending in more troops is similarly flawed:

1. Do whatever it takes to secure military victory essential for establishing American world domination.

2. Sending more troops into harms way in Iraq is necessary to secure such a military victory.

Therefore, we should send more troops into Iraq.

Regarding premise 2, most military experts have come to the opposite conclusion. Nevertheless, as a devoted trustee of the PNAC credo, Bush is disinclined to scrub "the mission" and his logic instead compels him to escalate it. This logic is clear and simple but it is clearly and simply wrong, and fraught with peril.

A leader of a superpower armed with such simplistic reasoning is dangerously bound to miss reality. Still, knowing the logical hand he is playing -- his blind, dictatorial, militaristic commitment to the PNAC ideology -- can provide a window into what else might be in store for us.

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Elliot D. Cohen is the 2007 first prize recipient of the Project Censored award, editor of the International Journal of Applied Philosophy, and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. His latest book is, The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way to Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness.