Wayne Madsen

George Soros’s and the Neo-Cons’ Control of Washington’s Propaganda Program

An examination of the current 2013 budget for the U.S. government’s Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) that oversees the International Broadcasting Board (IBB) and which determines the slant taken by the U.S. government’s propaganda efforts on radio, television, and, increasingly on the Internet, illustrates the head-lock that George Soros and neo-conservative “soft power projection” interests have on the official state-sponsored information disseminated by the U.S. government to a global audience.

The new propaganda bias of such IBB-controlled outlets such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Free Europe should comes as no surprise, considering that former CNN chairman and chief executive officer Walter Isaacson laid down the gauntlet after he assumed the chairmanship of the Broadcasting Board of Governors in 2009 by calling for the United States to aggressively challenge what he termed anti-American “propaganda” emanating from such international broadcasters as RT (the former Russia Today), Iran’s Press TV, and China’s CCTV. Isaacson walks in lock-step with the goals of Soros and the Council on Foreign Relations as the head of the politically-connected Aspen Institute. Isaacson stepped down from his broadcasting chairmanship position in January 2012.

The priorities for U.S. propaganda include stepping up efforts to effect political change in what are termed the five remaining “Communist” countries in the world through Cold War-era dissemination of “news” and other content via the Voice of America (VOA), the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) , and “grantee” organizations RFE/RL (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty), Inc., and Radio Free Asia (RFA). Soros’s Open Society Institute holds a predominant role in the administration of the “grantee” broadcast arms, which were originally operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before de facto control was passed to Soros after the collapse of communism in Europe. The targeted five remaining communist nations are China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam.

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Gilad Atzmon

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Paul Craig Roberts

Andy Worthington is a superb reporter who has specialized in providing the facts of the US government’s illegal abuse of “detainees,” against whom no evidence exists. In an effort to create evidence, the US government has illegally resorted to torture. Torture produces false confessions, plea bargains, and false testimony against others in order to escape further torture.

For these reasons, in Anglo-American law self-incrimination secured through torture has been impermissible evidence for centuries. So also has been secret evidence withheld from the accused and his attorney. Secret evidence cannot be confronted. Secret evidence is distrusted as made-up in order to convict the innocent. The evidence is secret because it cannot stand the light of day.

The US government relies on secret evidence in its cases against alleged terrorists, claiming that national security would be threatened if the evidence were revealed. This is abject nonsense. It is an absurd claim that presenting evidence against a terrorist jeopardizes the national security of the U.S.

To the contrary, not presenting evidence jeopardizes the security of each and every one of us. Once the government can convict defendants on the basis of secret evidence, even the concept of a fair trial will disappear. Fair trials are already history, but the concept lingers.

Secret evidence murders the concept of a fair trial. It murders justice and the rule of law. Secret evidence means anyone can be convicted of anything. As in Kafka’s The Trial, people will cease to know the crimes for which they are being tried and convicted.

This extraordinary development in Anglo-American law, a development demanded by the unaccountable Bush/Obama Regime, has not resulted in impeachment proceedings; nor has it caused an uproar from Congress, the federal courts, the presstitute media, law schools, constitutional scholars, and bar associations.

Having bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory, Americans just want someone to pay. They don’t care who as long as someone pays. To accommodate this desire, the government has produced some “high value detainees” with Arab or Muslim names.

But instead of bringing these alleged malefactors to trial and presenting evidence against them, the government has kept them in torture dungeons for years trying to create through the application of pain and psychological breakdown guilt by self-incrimination in order to create a case against them.

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Naomi Wolf

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill", which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."

In surreal reasoning, justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices’ decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest – that is, who are not yet convicted – haven’t been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There’s the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – Der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there’s the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner".

Believe me: you don’t want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

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Tom Carter

“It is hard to conceive of a more profound constitutional violation than the torture of a US citizen on US soil,” wrote lawyers for Jose Padilla in a petition filed Monday with the US Supreme Court. A lawsuit brought by Padilla, who was illegally “disappeared,” imprisoned and tortured by the US government for four years, was thrown out by lower courts on the grounds that the courts have no authority to subject the wartime actions of the executive branch to “judicial scrutiny.”

Padilla’s treatment constituted a test case for the incommunicado detention and torture of US citizens by the military without any judicial process. The Padilla case, as much as any other to date, illustrates the disintegration of democracy in the US and the erection of the legal scaffolding of a police state.

According to the precedent set by the Padilla case, federal authorities and the military may unilaterally abduct, imprison and torture a US citizen, in clear violation of the Bill of Rights, without anyone ever being held accountable. If this can be done to one individual, there is nothing in principle preventing the government from doing it to hundreds or thousands or millions of individuals.

On June 2, 2002, Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was declared by then-president George W. Bush to be an “enemy combatant.” On this basis, i.e., the sole say-so of the president, US military personnel seized Padilla from a Chicago jail, where he was incarcerated pursuant to a “material witness” warrant, and transported him to the Consolidated Naval Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, a military prison.

“It would be almost two years before anyone beyond the Brig’s doors heard from Mr. Padilla again,” the petition states. For nearly four years, Padilla was subjected to continuous physical and psychological torture, from which he suffered permanent brain damage.

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