Ray McGovern and Greg Thielmann on the potential catalysts to armed conflict in Iran.
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How Would A U.S.-Iran War Begin
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I assume any war between the US and Iran would start with questionable ‘intelligence’ from Israel, as in the Iraq war.
Let’s hope we’ll never find out for certain. We are no longer in the hands of the gop, now if we could break up the giant corporations who keep drawing us into these wars the United States would better off for everyone.
Thanks for the great series, I’ll be reviewing it a lot.
The segment about the USS Liberty really hits home. My dad was sent to Vietnam based on the crazy ideas of McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and the rest of the “best and brightest.” He was on sea duty 16 of my first 18 years. (Thankfully, he came back, and is now happily retired.) We get along a lot better, now that we understand how he and the US military were used for improper purposes, all while being told not the truth, but a story designed to override our free will, to manufacture our consent.
The truly good news is, IMO, this medium right here. We’ve been able to reduce the time lag, between deployment and busting of war-mongering myths, by at least a factor of 10. Most of the public were fooled in 03, yes, but I’m hoping they’ve overplayed their hand. The myth-jacking of the health care reform “debate” is a case in point. They can’t keep hitting us with the “flashy thing,” as in Men In Black. We’re already so deep within cover stories within stories, who knows if we’ll ever come back to our senses.
“Strategic disinformation campaigns,” or as I call them, myth-jackings, are scalar, too. They work in conjunction (one might even say connubium) with the Shock Doctrine. It can be deployed against whole nations to “prepare the battlespace,” and as psy-ops on an individual level.
For example, I clearly remember RM writing, over at Consortiumnews.com, about a particular type of persuasion Pres. Obama might want to beware of.
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MCGOVERN: He asked what I would tell President-elect Barack Obama if I were Mike Morell, the chief CIA analyst assigned to brief Obama daily.
What fun, I thought. On more sober reflection, it seemed more useful to prepare questions of the kind President-elect Obama might wish to ask Morell, since the briefings are supposed to be a two-way street.
Obama is no shrinking violet. Just the same, it may be useful to warn him not to succumb to the particular brand of “shock and awe” that can be induced by ostensibly sexy intelligence to color reactions of briefees, including presidents. I have seen it happen.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/110708c.html
If that doesn’t send a chill up your spine, as the old song goes, “Jack, you dead!”
What I want to know is, did it work? Who’s directing the domestic “strategic disinformation campaign” now that Rove/Cheney aren’t in power? Who does the dirty deed for — or is it to? — Obama and the Democratic Party? Is it a GOP, NSA, CIA etc. trade secret? What’s the relationship there?
David Shuster and Rep. Anthony Weiner discussed the idea of healthcare lobbyists overplaying their hand on The Rachel Maddow Show Monday, 12 Oct.
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[SHUSTER:] AHIP didn’t produce this report themselves. They paid the firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to do it for them. It’s worth noting that PricewaterhouseCoopers has a history with this sort of thing. In the 1990s, when the federal government was thinking about taxing tobacco, PricewaterhouseCoopers was hired by the tobacco industry to produce a report warning of the perilous economic dangers of a tobacco tax.
Now, the America’s Health Insurance Plans wants to warn of the perilous economic dangers of health reform they called-you guessed it-
PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Joining us now to talk about how the health industry may have shot itself in the foot with this report is Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York.
And, Congressman Weiner, it’s nice to see you again.
REP. ANTHONY WEINER (D), NEW YORK: My pleasure. Thanks.
SHUSTER: Congressman, first of all, the report assumes no behavioral changes whatsoever in response to the new propose policies. That seems like a dead giveaway that this report is flawed. But what’s your view?
WEINER: Well, the one behavioral change we are clearly not going to see is the insurance companies aren’t going to suddenly start saying, “You know what, we are going to stop making 30 percent profits and cut it down to 10 percent or 5 percent because of this bill.” You know, they unwittingly did this but they made the single best argument I’ve seen in a while for why you need a vigorous competitor for the health insurance industry, namely, the public plan. They are freely saying that it doesn’t matter what you guys in Congress do. We are going to keep raising our rates, raising our rates.
You know, there is a word for this. It’s called chutzpah. They are, right now, on the eve of this vote, saying, “You know what, since you didn’t public a public option in, we are going to raise the rates” in their own calculation, “by 111 percent.” They really do seem to have no shame about the way they’ve perceived, but many of my colleagues saw this report and are responding in exactly the opposite way that I think the insurance industry thought we’d respond.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33293461/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show/
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