Happy Birthday: Freedom of Information Act Is 40 Today

Posted by on July 4, 2006 at 8:07 pm. NO Comments :

July 4, 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Its purpose was to ensure the public’s right to access information from the federal government. For the first time, the government would bear the burden for certifying why requested information should not be released, and any refusal to release information could be challenged in court.

The FOIA was nearly stillborn as Johnson was bitterly opposed to the legislation. His press secretary, Bill Moyers, described LBJ as having to be:

“…dragged kicking and screaming to the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of the Freedom of Information Act; hated the thought of journalists rummaging in government closets and opening government files; hated them challenging the official view of reality.”

The National Security Archive at George Washington University discovered more objections to the bill as expressed in LBJ’s signing statements. Via Editors and Publishers:

Draft language from Johnson’s statement arguing that “democracy works best when the people know what their government is doing,” was changed with a handwritten scrawl to read: “Democracy works best when the people have all the info that the security of the nation will permit.” This sentence was eliminated entirely with the same handwritten markings: “Government officials should not be able to pull curtains of secrecy around decisions which can be revealed without injury to the public interest.” Another scratched sentence said the decisions, policies and mistakes of public officials “are always subjected to the scrutiny and judgment of the people.”

In 40 years, the presidential impression of the FOIA has actually declined. the Bush administration has been cited as the most secretive in history. Moyers enumerates many examples in a speech he gave before the Society of Professional Journalists. BushCo intelligence agencies have also been busy re-classifying tens of thousands of documents that were previously available for years. Vice President Cheney, with the help of hunting buddy, Justice Antonin Scalia, won a case to keep secret the names of the energy company cronies on his energy task force. More recently, Don Rumsfeld’s Defense Department ejected all reporters from the detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay – except, of course, for Fox News, which was later invited back.

This record of secrecy is compounded by the outright hostility that this administration shows for the institution that our founding fathers designated to maintain our freedom. The press has been subject to accusations of treason and calls for prosecution for publishing stories on the president’s anti-terrorism programs that violate civil liberties. The House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the media for printing these stories.

As we celebrate that other anniversary that everybody seems to be talking about today, we should take a moment to recognize this 40th birthday of legislation that was enacted in the best spirit of this country’s principles. James Madison seems prescient in his statement back in 1822:

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”

Happy Birthday, Freedom of Information Act.

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Shameless Self-Promotion

Posted by on July 3, 2006 at 6:56 pm. NO Comments :

I entered my George Bush Voodoo Doll in the Huffington Post Contagious Festival. By clicking on the link above you can help move me up in the rankings.

While I’m being shameless…..if you click on the Bush Voodoo Doll in the ad to your right, you can actually buy one. Or you can buy many other fine products from Crass Commerce, like note cards, magnets, coasters, etc.

Thanks for you support.


Banned In America – Congress Condemns The New York Times

Posted by on June 29, 2006 at 12:03 pm. 2 Comments :

The House is voting on, and will likely pass, H. Res 895 (PDF), a bill designed to condemn the New York Times for publishing a story that disclosed government spying on private banking transactions. The program is just another effort on the part of the Bush administration to further erode civil liberties in pursuit of their agenda of fear.

Never mind that the story disclosed nothing that wasn’t already publicly available (as Glenn Greenwald expertly illustrates), or that the Wall Street Journal and the L.A. Times also ran the story, or that, while this leak outrages the administration, they have no problem leaking the identity of covert CIA operatives in order to punish their critics.

This bill is about one thing only: Intimidating the press into silence. Ironically, it is directed at a press that is already silent most of the time on the important matters that face our nation and world. This is just a continuation of a policy to manage the media through fear. Earlier this month, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) called for the criminal prosecution of the editors of the Times just because they finally started to do their job. Bill O’Reilly has been castigating the Times and asking his viewers if they would rather side with government or the press. Thomas Jefferson already answered that question saying:

“…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.”

The media is already a doddering institution that, more often than not, fails to satisfy its mission. But this sort of legislative assault on the first amendment can only make things worse.


Prosecute The Messenger, Part III

Posted by on June 28, 2006 at 9:33 am. 1 Comments :

In the wake of the New York Times story on the government prying into banking transactions, an army on the right has formed to denounce, not just the story, but the Times for revealing what they consider to be a program vital to the safety of Americans. Politicians and pundits on the right are crawling all over themselves to condemn the Times, and others who published this material, as traitors. They are calling for the Times to have its press credentials revoked and for the paper and its reporters to be prosecuted under anti-espionage laws.

Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory has masterfully summarized and responded to the nonsense being spewed by these repressive opponents of a free press.

They believe that the Bush administration ought to be allowed to act in complete secrecy, with no oversight of any kind. George Bush is Good and the administration wants nothing other than to stop The Terrorists from killing us. There is no need for oversight over what they are doing because we can trust our political officials to do good on their own. We don’t need any courts or any Congress or any media serving as a “watchdog” over the Bush administration. There is no reason to distrust what they do. We should — and must — let them act in total secrecy for our own good, for our protection. And anyone who prevents them from acting in total secrecy is not merely an enemy of the Bush administration, but of the United States, i.e., is a traitor.

The whole article, and the case made in it, is worth reading and disseminating as far and as wide as bloggingly possible.


The MySpace World Domination Conspiracy

Posted by on June 28, 2006 at 2:27 am. 4 Comments :

OK, here it is. This blows the lid off of the totalitarian overlords once and for all. The mother of all conspiracies and MySpace is at the center of it.

Go back with me to February 2002, when the existence of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Office at DARPA was disclosed by the New York times. John Poindexter, the former Reagan National Security Advisor who was convicted of lying to Congress about his management of the Iran-contra affair, was the head of TIA, whose mission was to:

…gather as much information as possible about everyone in a centralized location for easy perusal by the United States government, including Internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases, car rentals, medical records, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, utility bills, tax returns, and any other available data.

After having been revealed, the hue and cry from the public resonated through the halls of Congress. Russ Feingold introduced the Data-Mining Moratorium Act of 2003, to suspend operations at TIA until a review of its practices could be completed. Not surprisingly, the review was never initiated by the Republican majority and the program just seemed to fade away.

In fact, some of the critical technologies were surreptitiously transferred to other intelligence agencies including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA), a branch of the NSA. The NSA, of course, was already engaging in illegal covert programs to wiretap phone conversations and collect records from the phone companies. The NSA chief through much of that time was General Michael Hayden, who was also a deputy to John Negroponte, Director of DHS. Negroponte was also Ambassador to El Salvador while Poindexter was at the White House funding contras in Nicaragua. More recently we learned that the government is also tracking private banking transactions without obtaining warrants or submitting to any judicial oversight. And Hayden went on to become the Director of the CIA.

Stay with me now – here’s where it gets interesting. ARDA, which has changed its name to the Disruptive Technology Office (I’m not kidding), has been funding research into the mass harvesting of the information available on social networks like MySpace. The New Scientist reports that:

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities…..data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions we make.

Combining that data with the personal information that MySpace collects, the recorded network of friends, and the communications that are made and stored online, will produce some pretty thorough profiles.

Now, with the government creating these clandestine agencies, shuffling them around and changing their names, supporting them with ever more technology to pry deeper into our personal lives, and attacking the media any time they report on some aspect of these activities so as to insure their secrecy, what is the next piece of this puzzle to fall into place?

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corp and Fox News, buys MySpace for $580 million dollars. Never mind that MySpace, while growing its membership exponentially, has lost money since its inception. What better steward for this program of privacy obliteration than the committed right-wing baron of one of the world’s largest media empires?

Am I just paranoid, or does it seem like there really is a governmental and corporate cabal that is positioning itself to become the Big Brother that Orwell warned us about?


Vets For Freedom: Fronts For GOP

Posted by on June 26, 2006 at 10:29 pm. NO Comments :

Vets For Freedom (VFF) claims to be “a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the unbiased, nonpartisan truth of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.” They are marketing their services to media firms for whom they offer to provide reports from Iraq as embedded correspondents. The only problem is that they are actually a fiercely partisan group of Republican operatives who are purposefully concealing their biased connections and funding.

Source Watch has learned that Taylor Gross, whose PR firm is pitching for VFF, is a former White House spokesman for President Bush – a fact that Gross omits when offering the group’s services as non-partisan reporters. The Buffalo News was solicited by Gross and published an article about the encounter.

But the real meat of this melowdrama is the information turned up by Source Watch. Their investigation reveals associations with a variety of GOP connected organizations including:

  • The Herald Group
  • Campaign Solutions
  • Creative Response Concepts
  • The Donatelli Group
  • The Republican Party
  • Swift Boat Veterans for Truth

The ties to these organizations suggest a sophisticated degree of coordination. This can only be described as deliberate campaign to plant positively biased propaganda in the media. While they have not yet had any success in syndicating their faux correspondents, they have had their representatives appear in broadcast media (including CNN) as spokespersons for veterans.

These imposters are deeply rooted in Republican politics, but they are also somewhat inept. The attempt to cover their tracks was executed so amateurishly that Source Watch was able to paint a pretty complete picture of this deceit. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to keep an eye on them. Undoubtedly they will continue to spread their misinformation and they are well positioned to be this year’s Swiftboat Liars group. They have already begun disparaging other vets that are critical of the war and the Bush administration like Democrat John Murtha and Republican Chuck Hagel.

This is a band of weasels that we will need to be prepared to smack down with the truth whenever they raise their shiny snouts.

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Stalking Points Memo – Warmongers At Home

Posted by on June 25, 2006 at 11:31 pm. NO Comments :

Warmongers At Home

Gather round as Bill explains the geo-political complexities of the conflict in the Middle-East. By the time this lesson is over, you too will be an expert at building strawmen and posing questions that are deftly left unanswered.


(Click the pic here to go to Stalking Points Memo page, then click the pic there to start the Flash movie)


Washington Post: Jon Stewart, Enemy Of Democracy?

Posted by on June 23, 2006 at 3:13 pm. 2 Comments :

With that headline, the Washington Post commences a serious mischaracterization of a study centered on Daily Show viewers. The study’s authors, Jody Baumgartner and Jonathan Morris of East Carolina University, sought to define “The Daily Show Effect” on its audience.

The WP says:
“Two political scientists found that young people who watch Stewart’s faux news program, “The Daily Show,” develop cynical views about politics and politicians that could lead them to just say no to voting.”

The researchers themselves found that:
Daily Show viewers, primarily young adults in their late teens and early 20s, tend to trust their own knowledge of politics. And that, …whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, we don’t know. But that, As “Daily Show” viewers grow more confident in political knowledge…they could become more active voters…”Participation breeds more participation and informed participation” he said. “So that by itself would be a net positive.”

So amongst the conclusions of the researchers was the possibility that the Daily Show may produce a greater likelihood of voting. The Post doesn’t cite that possibility anywhere in its article, while featuring the notion that the program could suppress voting.

I would submit that any program that leads viewers “to be cynical about individual candidates, the electoral process and the media…[and]…to trust their own knowledge of politics,” is performing an essential public service. It proves that the program is producing an enlightened skepticism that is firmly rooted in reality – contrary to the ramblings of the folks at the Washington Post.


SWIFT Invasions Of Privacy

Posted by on June 23, 2006 at 2:12 pm. 1 Comments :

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is opening the vault to reveal your banking transactions to the federal government. This is being done with what they call an “administrative” subpoena that is not approved by any judicial agency. Once again, this administration has found a way to peek into private matters of law-abiding citizens by spreading the fear of terrorism and proclaiming that they will protect our sorry butts.

The story was investigated by the New York Times who proudly asserted that they went forward with publication, despite pressure from the White House. But it appears that the truth is that they held the story for several weeks when they were negotiating with officials that sought to suppress the news. The NYT only rushed to print because they were about to be scooped by the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal.

NYT reporter, Eric Lichtblau, even admitted that the paper’s decision to publish was partly based on the fact that, “It was done at the cabinet level this time around,” and that the president did not get involved directly. Does that mean that if the president had directly made the request to kill the story, the paper would have complied? That doesn’t seem like a point of pride to me.


Guantanamo Press Ban Update

Posted by on June 23, 2006 at 1:09 pm. NO Comments :

Since the Pentagon booted reporters out of Guantanamo last week, they have apparently relented and invited a reporter back in. By happenstance, it is a reporter from Fox News.

ThinkProgress has the story about how Andrew Napolitano was singled out for a guest pass to the Cuban detainee facility. But since the original story claimed the prior evictions were to prevent lawsuits from news outlets that were not present, does this mean that these other media outlets are now free to sue because Fox was allowed in and nobody else?