SEVENTEEN TECHNIQUESA FOR TRUTH SUPPRESSION

By David Martin

SEVENTEEN TECHNIQUES FOR TRUTH SUPPRESSION

Sat Dec 17, 2005 17:39

SEVENTEEN TECHNIQUES FOR TRUTH SUPPRESSION

By David Martin

Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can
bring down a government. When the government lacks an effective, fact-
based defense, other techniques must be employed. The success of
these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press
and a mere token opposition party.

1. Dummy up. If it's not reported, if it's not news, it didn't
happen.

2. Wax indignant. This is also known as the "how dare you?" gambit.

3. Characterize the charges as "rumors" or, better yet, "wild
rumors." If, in spite of the news blackout, the public is still able
to learn about the suspicious facts, it can only be through "rumors."
(If they tend to believe the "rumors" it must be because they are
simply "paranoid" or "hysterical.")

4. Knock down straw men. Deal only with the weakest aspect of the
weakest charges. Even better, create your own straw men. Make up wild
rumors and give them lead play when you appear to debunk all the
charges, real and fanciful alike.

5. Call the skeptics names like "conspiracy
theorist," "nut," "ranter," "kook," "crackpot," and of course, "rumor
monger." Be sure, too, to use heavily loaded verbs and adjectives
when characterizing their charges and defending the "more reasonable"
government and its defenders. You must then carefully avoid fair and
open debate with any of the people you have thus maligned. For
insurance, set up your own "skeptics" to shoot down.

6. Impugn motives. Attempt to marginalize the critics by suggesting
strongly that they are not really interested in the truth but are
simply pursuing a partisan political agenda or are out to make money
(compared to over-compensated adherents to the government line who,
presumably, are not).

7. Invoke authority. Here the controlled press and the sham
opposition can be very useful.

8. Dismiss the charges as "old news."

9. Come half-clean. This is also known as "confession and avoidance"
or "taking the limited hangout route." This way, you create the
impression of candor and honesty while you admit only to relatively
harmless, less-than-criminal "mistakes." This stratagem often
requires the embrace of a fall-back position quite different from the
one originally taken. With effective damage control, the fall-back
position need only be peddled by stooge skeptics to carefully limited
markets.

10. Characterize the crimes as impossibly complex and the truth as
ultimately unknowable.

11. Reason backward, using the deductive method with a vengeance.
With thoroughly rigorous deduction, troublesome evidence is
irrelevant. For example: We have a completely free press. If they
know of evidence that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
(BATF) had prior knowledge of the Oklahoma City bombing they would
have reported it. They haven't reported it, so there was no prior
knowledge by the BATF. Another variation on this theme involves the
likelihood of a conspiracy leaker and a press that would report the
leak.

12. Require the skeptics to solve the crime completely. For example:
If Vince Foster was murdered, who did it and why?

13. Change the subject. This technique includes creating and/or
publicizing distractions.

14. Scantly report incriminating facts, and then make nothing of
them. This is sometimes referred to as "bump and run" reporting.

15. Baldly and brazenly lie. A favorite way of doing this is to
attribute the "facts" furnished the public to a plausible-sounding,
but anonymous, source.

16. Expanding further on numbers 4 and 5, have your own
stooges "expose" scandals and champion popular causes. Their job is
to pre-empt real opponents and to play 99-yard football. A variation
is to pay rich people for the job who will pretend to spend their own
money.

17. Flood the Internet with agents. This is the answer to the
question, "What could possibly motivate a person to spend hour upon
hour on Internet news groups defending the government and/or the
press and harassing genuine critics?"

Don't the authorities have defenders enough in all the newspapers,
magazines, radio, and television? One would think refusing to print
critical letters and screening out serious callers or dumping them
from radio talk shows would be control enough, but, obviously, it is
not.

=================================
THE CHARLES GOYETTE SHOW... ONE MORE TIME!!!
http://www.charlesgoyette.com/archive/index.cgi?2005-11-23-Charles

James Bamford washauthor@aol.com Rolling Stone Magazine - "The Man Who Sold the War - Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/8798997?pageid=rs.Home&pageregion=single7&rnd=1132759103789&has-player=false

7:30 am-8:00 am Carole Mckenna Arizona Peace Coalition Rally Monday Nov. 28th in protest of Bush's attendance at a Jon Kyl for US Senate fundraiser.

8:00 8:00 am-9:00 am

Sen. Bob Graham "What I Knew Before the Invasion" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/18/AR2005111802397.html

What I Knew Before the Invasion

By Bob Graham

Sunday, November 20, 2005; Page B07

In the past week President Bush has twice attacked Democrats for being hypocrites on the Iraq war. "More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power," he said.

The president's attacks are outrageous. Yes, more than 100 Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war. Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace -- that if Hussein was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud.

The president has undermined trust. No longer will the members of Congress be entitled to accept his veracity. Caveat emptor has become the word. Every member of Congress is on his or her own to determine the truth.

As chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, and the run-up to the Iraq war, I probably had as much access to the intelligence on which the war was predicated as any other member of Congress.

I, too, presumed the president was being truthful -- until a series of events undercut that confidence.

In February 2002, after a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer, Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in Iraq -- a war more than a year away. Even at this early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al Qaeda.

In the early fall of 2002, a joint House-Senate intelligence inquiry committee, which I co-chaired, was in the final stages of its investigation of what happened before Sept. 11. As the unclassified final report of the inquiry documented, several failures of intelligence contributed to the tragedy. But as of October 2002, 13 months later, the administration was resisting initiating any substantial action to understand, much less fix, those problems.

At a meeting of the Senate intelligence committee on Sept. 5, 2002, CIA Director George Tenet was asked what the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) provided as the rationale for a preemptive war in Iraq. An NIE is the product of the entire intelligence community, and its most comprehensive assessment. I was stunned when Tenet said that no NIE had been requested by the White House and none had been prepared. Invoking our rarely used senatorial authority, I directed the completion of an NIE.

Tenet objected, saying that his people were too committed to other assignments to analyze Saddam Hussein's capabilities and will to use chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. We insisted, and three weeks later the community produced a classified NIE.

There were troubling aspects to this 90-page document. While slanted toward the conclusion that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction stored or produced at 550 sites, it contained vigorous dissents on key parts of the information, especially by the departments of State and Energy. Particular skepticism was raised about aluminum tubes that were offered as evidence Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. As to Hussein's will to use whatever weapons he might have, the estimate indicated he would not do so unless he was first attacked.

Under questioning, Tenet added that the information in the NIE had not been independently verified by an operative responsible to the United States. In fact, no such person was inside Iraq. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries, all of which had an interest in the United States' removing Hussein, by force if necessary.

The American people needed to know these reservations, and I requested that an unclassified, public version of the NIE be prepared. On Oct. 4, Tenet presented a 25-page document titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs." It represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed them, avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version. Its conclusions, such as "If Baghdad acquired sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year," underscored the White House's claim that exactly such material was being provided from Africa to Iraq.

From my advantaged position, I had earlier concluded that a war with Iraq would be a distraction from the successful and expeditious completion of our aims in Afghanistan. Now I had come to question whether the White House was telling the truth -- or even had an interest in knowing the truth.

On Oct. 11, I voted no on the resolution to give the president authority to go to war against Iraq. I was able to apply caveat emptor. Most of my colleagues could not.

The writer is a former Democratic senator from Florida. He is currently a fellow at Harvard University's Institute of Politics.

Guest: U S Senator Bob Graham, Bob Graham, Carole Mckenna, James Bamford

Subject: Peace Rally, John Rendon, The Man Who Sold The War, Rolling Stone Magazine, Iraq War Propaganda, Bob Graham

* Listen to the MP3 Audio - Segment 1 (9.88 MB)
http://www.charlesgoyette.com/archive/media/2005-11-23-Charles-01.mp3

* Listen to the MP3 Audio - Segment 2 (9.69 MB)
http://www.charlesgoyette.com/archive/media/2005-11-23-Charles-02.mp3

* Listen to the MP3 Audio - Segment 3 (8.63 MB)
http://www.charlesgoyette.com/archive/media/2005-11-23-Charles-03.mp3

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