BUT FIRST... here's a quick update on the latest press conference with America's favorite Corporate Con Artist, Donald Rumsfeld. Poor old Rummy, pressed by reporters who are asking real questions, is now alternating between total fantasy (spewed with an almost hysterical fervor), nasty total denial, and blaming. At a press conference this afternoon, he sounded like a blustering old "one cocktail too many" loon. Meanwhile, several reporters raised excellent points, which made Rummy seem even more loon-like.

Here are some of Rummy's outrageous statements (just in the 15 minutes or so I listened) along with the good points raised by reporters (notes jotted quickly down, so just the choicest bits are included, paraphrased somewhat):

REPORTER: Is there a disparity in the casualty figures you released? There are almost no wounded, only dead. In nearly every military action, there are far more wounded than dead...how do you explain that? Is it possible the government is withholding information?"

RUMMY (with great, unconvincing melodrama) "My goodness gracious (exact words), no one in this government would ever ever withhold information like that! Why I am just shocked and amazed anyone could even raise such a question!

REPORTER: Do you think you may have miscalculated how much the Iraqi people want to be "liberated" by an outside nation?

RUMMY: I think it's too early to tell... I can't tell what the mood of the Iraqi people is...it isn't important.

REPORTER: (Some time after the above comment was made) Wouldn't it be a good idea to "discern the mood of the people before you sent your soldiers into a city of five million for house to house?

RUMMY: I didn't say that...I never said that...I just mean that we'll find out later what their attitude is as we go along.."

SAME REPORTER: How can that help if you don't have a good sense of what is going on with the people of Baghdad?

RUMMY: We'll play it by ear once we've taken control of the REAL ESTATE (meaning Baghdad).

The Biggest bomb dropped by Rummy was a very clear indication that Syria and Iran are being targeted next in the Endless Corporate War.

It is obvious that the Bush cartel is taking a gambler's tactic: act as if you are in control, everything is going as planned...then hope like hell the gap between your line and reality will close at some point. Heard Ari the Egg with Eyebrows after the Rummy press conference...God, what a sociopath, never the hint of human emotion or nonrobotic mental activity there. I knew kids like that in elementary school - cold little pricks that delighted in torturing small animals. Real Nazi material.

HYPOCRISY ALERT: Speaking of Rummy, he is trying to get Congress to turn over a blank check to spend on any project Bush and he cook up, any time, any place in the name of "fighting terrorism." The flexibility is urgently needed, he asserts - can't wait around for stuff like itemizing why we want it or waiting for approval.

BUT! When Martin O'Malley and other mayors and governors across the country have tried to get additional, desperately needed funds released to address homeland security alerts, the Bush administration says, Sorry, those kind of requests take time, itemization, approval..and we just don't have that kinda flexibility!

Btw - the cost to a city the size of Baltimore for financing the latest "color-coded alerts" is about $70 million a week.

And Now for our Main Feature!

NBC (Non-Factual Baghdad Coverage?)PULLS OUT THE PROPAGANDA STOPS

The aggression with which NBC, through its news programs, has pushed this hawkish administration, the war in Afghanistan and now this war, is blatant. But it should come as no surprise : NBC is owned by the GE corporation, which is one of the biggest military contractors on Earth. Once, the biggest producer of nuclear bombs, GE now peddles everything from lightbulbs to fighter jet engines to the military. The tie between NBC's war promotion and GE's potential for gains through war has, like other incestuous corporate-government relationships swirling around the Bush administartion, has the potential to raise intense questions. So, the Bush operatives have, apparently, taken steps to bury the evidence.

If you go up to the website for the Directorate of Information on Operations and Reports for the Department of Defense (the folks who keep the statistics), you will find that the top 10 contractors are easy to find, link to, and read. However, if you try to access the list for the top 100, you discover that it is a pdf file that requires Adobe Acrobat Reader, and, once you access it, the companies are not listed according to dollar value of contracts, but alphabetically, with the dollar value rankings scattered all over the place. Worse yet, the text is tiny and hard to read.

But the Bush administration knows all too well that lazy, superficial press folks (ie., most of the media reps out there today) will probably bail out as soon as they encounter any little difficulties and go with the top ten list. Why make 11-100 harder to access? Because the most glaring cases of Bush cronyism and conflict of interest can be found from number 11 on. And, this includes NBC's owner GE, which comes in at number 11. Another bit of poking reveals that, under Bush, business has boomed for GE. From 200 to 2001 alone, the corporation's military contract revenues went from $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion. Revenues for 2002-2003 will go through the roof.

So, the number 11 military contractor on Earth (since the US is the biggest spender on things military) is also the owner of one of the most aggressive and deceitful promoters of Bush's war on the air. If you think there is a coincidence here, then you are just the sort of person Bush and Co. count on to promote their agenda.

http://www.dior.whs.mil/peidhome/procstat/p01/fy2002/P01FY02-Top100-table1-rj.pdf

Main page http://www.dior.whs.mil/peidhome/procstat/p01/fy2002/top100.htm

Examples of NBC Propaganda

Here's some NBC war-promotion/disinformation examples gleaned just through watching Tom Brokaw for 15 minutes on the evening of 3/27 and the Today Show for one-half hour on the morning of 3/28 (hosted by America's own warmongering "sweetheart" Katie Couric).

TOM BROKAW Uses classic CIA disinformation technique to steer public away from alternative news sources.

      Brokaw's "story" on war blogs was text-book perfect disinformation. First, he appears to give "credit" and "coverage" to the alternative coverage of the war being offered on the Internet with a general description of the medium. He then proceeds to lump two men working on logs from inside Baghdad - ie, eyewitnesses - with a guy working out of his garage in the Midwest who runs bizarre stories like "Saddam Hussein receives keys to Detroit" and another activist who makes outrageous claims, such as the US using napalm in Iraq. Get it? The conclusion is supposed to be: All these people are ALIKE - so don't listen to those eyewitnesses in Baghdad when they start reporting disturbing things...they are LIBERAL LOONIES. Much the same tactic was used to diffuse the environmental movement - serious activists were lumped in with flaky extremists as a smear tactic.

Brokaw also tries to diffuse the significance of the alternative war coverage (the "dime a dozen" scheme) imply that there are hundreds of thousands of war blogs because, says Brokaw, if you do a search (google, eg) you get 300,000 entries. But this is a completely meaningless statistic. Afterall, if you put in "network news" into google, you pull up 6,790,000 entries. So, Tom, guess that makes you a dime a thousand!

   But, Tom and NBC have a vested interest in this war. NBC is owned by GE, one of the top 5 military contractors on Earth, peddling everything from lightbulbs to fighter plane engines to the government. They make out like bandits in time of war.

Today Show:

"Brand USA versus Brand Iraq": These two features ran in the same half hour: A slot on the big run of US flag paraphenalia as Americans "show their patriotism" and an brief interview discussing the disturbing issue of "Iraqi nationalism." What this is doing is disassociating the positive concept of patriotism from Iraqis. In other words, our support of an immoral war is "patriotic," but when Iraqis patriotically defend their homeland from invaders, this is incomprehensible "nationalism."

Shaming Junior Hich School Students

NYC teacher, Ms. Aguilar and two junior high school students were interviewed in a short slot about the protest against the war they conducted earlier this week. The students talked about the incredible outpouring of support by the public for their efforts. The NBC commentator (forget her name - dark hair, the usual "central casting" look) broke in with "Yes, but wasn't reaction DIVIDED...didn't many people have objections..don't MANY PEOPLE see you students as PAWNS being used to promote an agenda?" I kid you not! This was within a few words, what this woman actually said to a seventh grader.

The poised young lady who replied looked angry but contained and replied that she thought it was a shame that anyone imagined that young people have no mind of their own.

NBC Takes 50-50 Lie to New Heights to Cover up Real Breakdown on American attitudes toward war

This classic disinformation scam (taking a lopsided argument and making it look 50-50) was driven to a new low of calculated deception in a segment on Brunswick Maine. This slot was supposed to show how nearly equally divided "typical" American communities are in their opinion on the war. (Btw, the need to create features like this proves by itself that the media KNOWS that the division is lopsided in favor of the anti-war folk. If it were really so equal, why go all the way to coastal Maine for your "example" and use such blatant deception to push your case?).

Anyway, the 5-minute slot selectively highlighted townspeople to present what appeared to be a near- 50-50 division over the war. But they left out one little detail: Brunswick is a military town. I am on solid ground here - in fact my husband went to school in Brunswick and I myself lived just outside the town for three years. Brunswick, as the NBC feature shows, has a population of 22,000. But what they didn't mention was the huge Naval Air station. All they did was refer, in a 2-second rapidly passed over comment that there was a naval facility there, whilst showing a half-second glimpse of a couple of planes sitting near a single building..

However, BNAS is HUGE, covering about half of Brunswick. It also accounts for nearly a large percentage of the population - over 4,000 enlisted persons and officers, not counting their families, which runs it up to well over 5,000 (probably more like 10,000) at least one-fourth of the population of the town!!! Check out this link to the station: http://www.nasb.navy.mil/ and you'll get the stats and see the photo of the sprawling facility. NBC obviously knew about this - there's no way you can drive through the place without noticing the thousands upon thousands of acres of base with his chain link fences (which runs alongside the main road to town for about two miles), military housing complexes and air strips/towers. For NBC to "cameo" Brunswick as a town with a "typically divided" viewpoint on the war is like cameoing Haight Ashbury during the Vietnam war as a "typically divided" town.

Sheer calculated deceit.