http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/15/1632233


Informant: John Calvert

by Mike Whitney

Confidence in the media has never been lower. A broad section of the public doesn’t believe anything they read in the papers nor do they see reporters as impartial observers of world events. This should be no great surprise. The model of a privately owned media ensures that the facts are massaged to suit ownership, a practice that inevitably undermines credibility. The marriage between the media and the state increases the danger to the public interests. This is especially true when the media becomes a marketing tool for the government, promoting its vastly unpopular wars, its attacks on the social safety net, and its vicious assault on civil liberties. The media has become an adversary to the people it is supposed to serve. It now functions exclusively as a weapon in the imperial arsenal, exalting the state and its wartime agenda, while savaging the institutions of democracy and personal liberty. Its role as state-propagandist is conspicuous in everything from its blind devotion to the president to its obfuscation of facts that discredit the administration. If we consider a few of the critical stories the mainstream media suppressed, we get a clearer idea of its overall agenda...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Whitney1115.htm

Rediscovered Testimony Given by CIA Director in 2001
Suggests Manipulation of Pre-war Intelligence

by Jason Leopold

President George W. Bush’s attempt Friday to silence critics who say his administration manipulated prewar intelligence on Iraq is undercut by congressional testimony given in February 2001 by former CIA Director George Tenet, who said that Iraq posed no immediate threat to the United States or other countries in the Middle East, Dissident Voice has found. Details of Tenet’s testimony have not been reported before...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Leopold1115.htm

by Evelyn J. Pringle

In its systematic and concerted effort to portray a link between Saddam and bin Laden, the White House propaganda team was so successful that a poll conducted in late 2002 showed that over half of the people polled believed that Saddam was connected to 9/11. While that may have been great news for the home team back then, the problem for Bush today is that he is never going to get 50% of Americans to erase their memory of all the statements that were made, and believe the line that members of the administration never said anything to make people think that Saddam was involved in 9/11...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Pringle1115.htm

by Jim Glover

Dear SLPD:

In your editorial of November 12, you continue to beat up on military whistleblower Jimmy Massey, who had the temerity to point out that our brave men and women in uniform in Iraq might not be acting as humanely as our mythology would have them do. You conclude by congratulating yourself as follows: Absolute truth is hard to come by, but as the bloggers bloviate and the blowhards blow, good reporters and good newspapers are out there digging. Really? Perhaps, then, you could answer a few questions that have been bothering me about good newspapers...

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov05/Glover1115.htm

Red State Road Trip: A 60-Minute Documentary

How could America have given George W. Bush a second term? Filmmaker Chris Hume decided to find out by embarking on a 6,000-mile, cross-country journey in search of America’s soul. The result: a fascinating, hilarious, and often disturbing road-trip adventure.

http://www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm

The intelligence community's "failure to undertake a real review of the documents - even though their validity was the subject of serious doubts - was a major failure of the intelligence system," the presidentially appointed Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States concluded last March.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111505P.shtml

"They took us to a cage - an animal cage that had lions in it within the Republican Palace," he said. "And they threatened us that if we did not confess, they would put us inside the cage with the lions in it.... And they opened the door and they threatened that if I did not confess, that they were going to throw me inside the cage. And as the lion was coming closer, they would pull me back out and shut the door, and tell me, 'We will give you one more chance to confess.' And I would say, 'Confess to what?'"

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111505N.shtml