Ian Welsh: "We are ruled by people who are what they have been conditioned to be" -- and look at the results

Insiders know stuff they don't want us outsiders ever to.

"These policies are insane, if one assumes a minimum of public spiritedness. They have not worked. They will not work.

"But they do work in the social sense: They create successful lives for the people who devise and implement them. They are rewarded with money and social approval, they receive feedback which screams, 'Continue!' "

-- Ian Welsh, in his post yesterday,
"The Political Consequences of Mental Models"

by Ken

In the above quote pulled out of Ian Welsh's post yesterday, I realize I've left out which policies "these policies" refers to. Really, it almost doesn't matter. It should be clear that the reference is to policies promulgated by people in a position to set policy, and the model Ian proposes works for pretty much any policies such people are likely to promote.

Still, for the record, here are some of the instances Ian had just cited:

• "the repeated use of force in situations where force has failed to work over and over again."

• "the inability to tolerate democratic governments of opposing ideologies despite the fact that destroying them, after a period of autocracy, generally leads to worse outcomes than simply working with them. (See Iran for a textbook case.)"

• "the belief that the US needs to run the world in tedious detail, that regular coups, invasions, garrisons, and so on are necessary -- along with the endless, sovereignty-reducing treaties described in 'free trade deals.' "

These are policy choices dictated by conditioning, beliefs that people believe because they've been conditioned to, usually according to mental models developed in their minds through processes that have little -- if anything -- to do with actual thought. Ian had begun by pondering the question of whether Western leaders have deliberately destabilized the Middle East. Which landed him in an age-old conundrum:

Q. "Stupid or evil?"
A. "Both."

DICK CHENEY: MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE

By way of illustration in this post, called "The Political Consequences of Mental Models," Ian offered this case:

I know someone who worked with Cheney and believes that Cheney honestly thought that removing Saddam would make the world a better place. Also (and the person I know is a smart, capable person) that Cheney was very smart.

But smart in IQ terms (which Cheney probably was) isn’t the same as having a sane mental map of the world. Being brilliant means being able to be brilliantly wrong and holding to it no matter what. Genius can rationalize anything.

Which prompted some thoughts on the human "thought" process (and here I would stress that "thought" is being used in its broadest possible sense, referring to not necessarily much more than "activity in the brain").

Human thought is mostly an unconscious and uncontrolled process. What comes up is what went in, filtered through conditioning. We are so conditioned and the inputs are so out of our control during most of our lives (and certainly during our childhood) that our actual, operational margin of free will is far smaller than most believe.

We interpret what we know through the mental (and emotional) models we already have. Thoughts are weighted with emotion, recognized and unrecognized, connotations far more than denotations.

Machiavelli made the observation that people don’t change, they instead react to situations with the same character and tone of action even when a different action would work better.
This doesn’t mean one cannot undergo ideological changes, it means character changes only very slowly, and that we have virtually no conscious ability to change our thinking, actions, or characters on the fly.

This is true for both the brilliant and the stupid, though the tenor of challenges for both is different.

"The science of conditioning," Ian wrote, "was strong from the late 19th century through to the 60s," but "has faded out of the intellectual limelight." However, "viewed through the lens of conditioning, much that makes no sense makes perfect sense."

Ian offered a classic example: the "insider" perspective vs. the "outsider" one:

Over fifteen years ago Stirling Newberry told me, “Insiders understand possibility, outsiders understand consequences”.

Insiders are rewarded for acting in accordance with elite consensus, and very little else.

Outsiders, not being part of that personal risk/reward cycle are able to say, “Yeah, that’s not going to work”.

They are both right and wrong.

"Conditioning," Ian wrote, "extends well beyond observable behavior and into thought, and the structure of knowledge."

Intellectual structures are felt, and each node and connection has emotional freight. This is true even in the purer sciences, and it is frighteningly true in anything related to how we interact with other humans and what our self-image is.

It is in this sense that the disinterested, the outsider, those who receive few rewards for acquiescence, are virtually always superior in understanding to those within the system. Outsiders may not understand what it “feels” like, but the outsider understands what the consequences are.

THE MYSTIQUE OF "INSIDE KNOWLEDGE"

Those of us who lived through the Vietnam war became accustomed to being told that opposition to it was based on inadequate knowledge, that the people who were making our policy, who were prosecuting the war, had all kinds of knowledge about the situation that we didn't, and they therefore had to be deferred to. Naturally they couldn't share this inside knowledge with us, because it was, you know, inside knowledge. It was secret, and therefore knowable only to insiders wise enough and security-cleared enough to possess such knowledge.

Eventually, of course, and still totally unbeknownst to us benighted outsiders, as inside an insider as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who had been as responsible as anyone for enmeshing us in the conflict, began to have doubts about the quality of that inside knowledge, which led to the Pentagon Papers, which still had to remain secret -- until they weren't, thanks to Daniel Ellsberg, with assists from the highest decision-making levels of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and others as well, not least the U.S. Supreme Court.

For his efforts Ellsberg was charged with assorted acts of espionage, theft, and conspiracy, which Wikipedia reminds us "carr[ied] a total maximum sentence of 115 years."



Not many people nowadays think of Ellsberg as a traitor, which is why the insiders who rose in righteous wrath against Edward Snowden had to go to such pains to distinguish Snowden's leaks from Ellsberg's. Unfortunately for them, Snowden's revelations turned out to be a gift that kept on revealing, and the more that was revealed, the more foolish the people who were denouncing him as a traitor came to look. This was all "inside knowledge" being revealed, and to the people who had previously had exclusive access to it, it was awfully important that it remain secret.

And it's very likely that some of them, at least, believed as sincerely as Ian's acquaintance insists Dick Cheney did that they were doing a wise and patriotic thing, helping make the world a better place, by both acting on and suppressing all that information. It's very likely too that many of them were confirmed in their beliefs by just the sort of conditioned "mental models" Ian was writing about yesterday.

Again, as Ian put it, "the disinterested, the outsider, those who receive few rewards for acquiescence, are virtually always superior in understanding to those within the system. Outsiders may not understand what it 'feels' like, but the outsider understands what the consequences are." And he concluded:

This is true far beyond politics, but it is in politics where the unexamined life, the unexamined belief structure, and the unexamined conditioning, are amplified by long levers to brutalize the world.

The last thing I. F. Stone wanted to be was an insider.

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In the matter of "Edward Snowden, hero or villain?," one person I'm prepared to listen to is Daniel Ellsberg

People seem to forget that back in the day, Daniel Ellsberg was widely held to be just as filthy a traitor as Edward Snowden is now.

"I'm not going to jump into the hero vs. not fray. I think there are important things to be said on both sides. Goodness knows, the arguments on both sides are familiar and mostly obvious, though each side might benefit from listening calmly to the other."

-- me, four weeks ago

by Ken

Oh God, now I'm quoting myself. Next I'll be stopping strangers on the street and reading old blogposts to them.

Still, I stand by the point. Back then we already had a face-off on newyorker.com between John Cassidy ("Why Edward Snowden Is a Hero") and Jeffrey Toobin ("Edward Snowden Is No Hero"), two writers I admire a lot, and they've still made the cases better than anybody I've seen since. Which is another way of saying that, for all the verbiage that's been shoveled onto the pile, I haven't encountered much that adds anything.

And parenthetically I still say that people who see the hero-or-villian question as a no-brainer would benefit from listening a little more closely to the opposite side -- and it doesn't get done a lot better than the Cassidy and Toobin pieces do it.

For the people who reflexively shout, "Hero!": The rule of law is a cornerstone of our system, and there really is such a thing as national security, and ES knowingly broke laws whose breakability individuals really don't get to decide on; can we even imagine the consequences if everybody claimed the right to decide which stolen government secrets should be revealed and which shouldn't. Have you really thought about the implications?

For the people who reflexively shout, "Villain!": Yes, but have you considered the stuff that Snowden, like Bradley Manning (and Julian Assange) before him, made public? Stuff that we had not just a right but a need to know. Stuff that was being suppressed because our government seems to have evolved to the point that in a truly nonpartisan way it believes it's no longer answerable to us the people.

I'm less interested in figuring out which argument is "better" than I am in standing back and suggesting that we're getting the worst of both worlds, and each argument tells us that we've got trouble here in River City.

But all of this, as I say, is old news. And I admit it's possible, since I've tried my best to tune out the infernal squabbling, that somebody has added points of substance to the argument which I've missed. One person, however, caught my attention, and that's Daniel Ellsberg.

By way of reminder, here's how the Washington Post introduced the Ellsberg op-ed piece the paper published yesterday:

Daniel Ellsberg is the author of "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers." He was charged in 1971 under the Espionage Act as well as for theft and conspiracy for copying the Pentagon Papers. The trial was dismissed in 1973 after evidence of government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, was introduced in court.

Ellsberg has come into the Snowden controversy because he is now regularly cited as a classic case of a "good" whistleblower, one who revealed government secrets that need to be revealed and then stood up like a man and turned himself in. For those who see Snowden as a hero, he's following in the footsteps of Ellsberg; for those who see him as a villain, he's a travesty of the sainted whistleblower Ellsberg.

Now I have no quarrel with the view of Ellsberg as a hero for making possible the publication of the Pentagon Papers, that exhaustive inquiry into the history of our involvement in Vietnam which our government went to the extraordinary lengths of having prepared, and which our government thought mustn't under any circumstances be revealed to the American people. (And heroes' badges too to the New York Times for putting its head on the chopping block in defense of its right and obligation to publish those truths.)

As Ellsberg put it in his op-ed piece, his "authorized access" to these extraordinary documents "taught me that Congress and the American people had been lied to by successive presidents and dragged into a hopelessly stalemated war that was illegitimate from the start." When you consider the devastating effects this war had both on the people of Southeast Asia and on the people of the U.S.A., this is kind of a huge deal.

Nevertheless, there's already irony in the anointment of Ellsberg as a good, even sainted, whistleblower, with the only question to be decided whether Edward Snowden is a new Ellsberg or not at all like Ellsberg and therefore a treasonous dog. Because back in the day it was Ellsberg who was widely vilified as a treasonous dog. It's important to remember, as the Post's introductory note to his op-ed piece reminds us, that his legal peril came to an end not because of any sudden official recognition that he didn't deserve to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law but because the government got caught having broken too many laws in its pursuit of him.

Ellsberg himself declares his view of Snowden's actions without hesitation or equivocation:

Snowden believes that he has done nothing wrong. I agree wholeheartedly. More than 40 years after my unauthorized disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, such leaks remain the lifeblood of a free press and our republic. One lesson of the Pentagon Papers and Snowden's leaks is simple: secrecy corrupts, just as power corrupts.

And I think Ellsberg's personal credentials in the matter give his view what we might call "standing," and I'm happy he has shared it with us, especially so unequivocally. But I think he has something more important to share: a crucial difference, in his view, between his case and Snowden's.

It's a difference, not between what the two secret-sharers did, but between the climate in the country today and that in "a different America, a long time ago." Ellsberg is speaking particularly to the issue of whether Snowden has failed to follow his example by failing to turn himself in to authorities, as he did. Once again he's solidly behind Snowden. The title on his op-ed piece is "Snowden made the right call when he fled the U.S."

Ellsberg reminds us that he too "went underground" -- with his wife, Patricia, for 13 days.

My purpose (quite like Snowden's in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging -- with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI -- to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers [besides the New York Times and Washington Post, that is, to whom he had already provided copies, which both papers were legally enjoined from publishing], in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a "fugitive from justice."

But he's quite certain that Snowden wouldn't be treated the way he was when he turned himself in.

[W]hen I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn't have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon's era -- and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment -- but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to "incapacitate me totally").

I hope Snowden's revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning's conditions as "cruel, inhuman and degrading." (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

Nor, Ellsberg argues, is Snowden's physical presence required to continue making the case for the importance of his disclosures.

As Snowden told the Guardian, "This country is worth dying for." And, if necessary, going to prison for -- for life.

But Snowden's contribution to the noble cause of restoring the First, Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution is in his documents. It depends in no way on his reputation or estimates of his character or motives -- still less, on his presence in a courtroom arguing the current charges, or his living the rest of his life in prison. Nothing worthwhile would be served, in my opinion, by Snowden voluntarily surrendering to U.S. authorities given the current state of the law.

I don't know. Maybe Daniel Ellsberg isn't the ultimate judge of who is or isn't a new Ellsberg. Last month Post columnist Jonathan Capehart dismissed his opinion in a column, "Snowden failed to follow Ellsberg's example":

Enough with the breathless comparisons. Edward Snowden is no Daniel Ellsberg. I know the latter has heaped praise on the former. But the high-mindedness of our present-day national-security leaker is nowhere near the gutsiness of the man who changed the course of the Vietnam War by releasing the Pentagon Papers more than 40 years ago.

Well, I'm not nearly as prepared to dismiss Ellsberg's opinion out of hand. In his view, Snowden's revelations about the NSA surveillance depict "in effect, a global expansion of the Stasi, the Ministry for State Security in the Stalinist 'German Democratic Republic,' whose goal was 'to know everything.' But the cellphones, fiber-optic cables, personal computers and Internet traffic the NSA accesses did not exist in the Stasi's heyday."

Ellsberg says he hopes that Snowden "finds a haven, as safe as possible from kidnapping or assassination by U.S. Special Operations forces, preferably where he can speak freely."

What he has given us is our best chance -- if we respond to his information and his challenge -- to rescue ourselves from out-of-control surveillance that shifts all practical power to the executive branch and its intelligence agencies: a United Stasi of America.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Freedom... We're Talking About Your Freedom

This is a tough post for me to write and I've been avoiding it. I encouraged Noah and Ken to work on Wikileaks instead and I referred to it a few times in Streams of Consciousness, our nightly wrap-ups. And I just hoped people would get their fill reading smart commentators like Digby on the subject. That's because I lived through it, or something just like it, before-- from afar. In 1971 I was spending a few months in Kabul when Daniel Ellsberg slipped the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times... and all hell broke lose. People were even talking about it there. This week there were two last straws that made me go for it-- the tweet from Ron Paul (below) and this open letter to Amazon, urging a boycott on the super-website from Daniel Ellsberg himself.

December 2, 2010

I’m disgusted by Amazon’s cowardice and servility in abruptly terminating today its hosting of the Wikileaks website, in the face of threats from Senator Joe Lieberman and other Congressional right-wingers. I want no further association with any company that encourages legislative and executive officials to aspire to China’s control of information and deterrence of whistle-blowing.

For the last several years, I’ve been spending over $100 a month on new and used books from Amazon. That’s over. I ask Amazon to terminate immediately my membership in Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card and account, to delete my contact and credit information from their files and to send me no more notices.

I understand that many other regular customers feel as I do and are responding the same way. Good: the broader and more immediate the boycott, the better. I hope that these others encourage their contact lists to do likewise and to let Amazon know exactly why they’re shifting their business. I’ve asked friends today to suggest alternatives, and I’ll be exploring service from Powell’s Books, Half-Price Books, Biblio and others.

So far Amazon has spared itself the further embarrassment of trying to explain its action openly. This would be a good time for Amazon insiders who know and perhaps can document the political pressures that were brought to bear-- and the details of the hasty kowtowing by their bosses-- to leak that information. They can send it to Wikileaks (now on servers outside the US), to mainstream journalists or bloggers, or perhaps to sites like antiwar.com that have now appropriately ended their book-purchasing association with Amazon.

Yours (no longer),

Daniel Ellsberg

When Ellsberg finally leaked the Pentagon Papers he had already spent over a year trying to persuade anti-War senators, like William Fulbright (Arkansas wasn't a fiefdom of the Walton Family back then and there were actual independent-minded politicians), Charles Goodell (a Republican who Nixon and Agnew were able to destroy politically) and George McGovern, who told him the First Amendment was all the protection he needed to make it public, but that it wasn't the place of an elected official to do it. In those days, it took forever to do 7,000 pages of photocopying on a xerox machine. There was no wikileaks.com and not even an internet. Imagine.

Rick Perlstein reports extensively on this sad chapter of American history in his brilliant book Nixonland and that's where all the blockquotes below are coming from. The NYTimes began publishing excerpts from the 43 volumes Ellsberg gave them on June 13, 1971-- Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing US Involvement. The papers showed without doubt that Vietnam was a wrongful war and, in Ellsberg's own words, "demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates."

Kissinger found it easy to manipulate the drug-addicted, alcoholic Nixon and he stoked a rage in the always paranoid president to go on a jihad against everyone and everything involved with the leak, even though Nixon's first assessment was that it had nothing to do with him-- it didn't-- and why should he even care. It went from that to injunctions and accusations of treason. Nixon's attempts to force the Times and over a dozen other papers to stop publishing went to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that the papers could be published freely.

Justice Brennan's decision argued that press reports that embarrass the government were precisely the reason the First Amendment was invented. Just Black concurred. "Every moment's continuance of the injunctions against these newspapers amounts to a flagrant, indefensible, and continuing violation of the First Amendment... [F]or the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says." Just in case the court ruled the other way, the previous evening Mike Gravel, the forty-one-year-old senator from Alaska, had called an extraordinary two-man night "hearing" of his Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds. He began reading aloud from a four-thousand-page typescript-- the historical narrative portion of the Pentagon Papers, provided to him by an anonymous source.

He started at 9:45 p.m. "The story is a terrible one," Gravel warned. "It is replete with duplicity, connivance against the public. People, human beings, are being killed as I speak to you. Arms are being severed; metal is crashing through human bodies." Then he began to weep.

He read for three hours and word spread throughout Capitol Hill and the hearing room was soon packed. He was able to introduce the entire document into the Congressional Record, thwarting Nixon and Kissinger. But they were on the warpath and Nixon seems to have snapped completely and never recovered. Kissinger had figured out that Ellsberg was the leaker within a couple of days and destroying him became a White House crusade. Remind anyone of Peter King, the demented Republican congressloon from Long Island? He wants Julian Assange prosecuted as a terrorist and he seems to be cracking up the same way Nixon did.

The he cacophony of outrage and hysteria engendered by the Wikileaks disclosures has ranged from the embarrassing (the NYT’s Bill Keller admission that he allowed the US government vet his reports) through to the downright bloodthirsty (see calls for Julian Assange’s assassination from the likes of John Hawkins, Marc Thiessen et al).

But the prize for breathtaking hypocrisy must surely go to Long Island GOP Congressman Peter King who has been all over the airwaves since the leaks began, demanding that Wikileaks be treated like Al Qaeda and placed on the list of foreign terrorist organizations. “Their activity is enabling terrorists to kill Americans,” he told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday. “Wikileaks is an accessory to this, they are taking information which they know is classified, which they know can cost life. They are as guilty as (Pfc Bradley Manning) is.”

What Peter King neglected to tell Morning Joe, or NBC’s Matt Lauer and Fox News for that matter, is that when it comes to supporting foreign terrorist organizations, the L.I. politician is not only in a league of his own in Washington but is the only living Congressman who can say that he owes his political career almost entirely to the ties he forged with one group of foreign terrorist bombers and gunmen.

In the wake of November’s mid-term gains for the GOP, Peter King is poised to take over the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee in the new session. That is an extraordinary turnabout for a politician who spent most of the previous thirty years as the most prominent American supporter of the Irish Republican Army, earning in the process the hostility of his own GOP colleagues, the US, British and Irish governments and the attention of the FBI, the Secret Service and Britain’s intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6.

Americans should be grateful to Julian Assange but many seem to be hysterically and irrationally aroused by criminals like King and the guilty parties brought to light by the leaks. John Grooms, taking a more balanced perspective at Creative Loafing, thinks Rep. King ought to switch to decaf:

WikiLeaks’ release of a quarter-million State Dept. cables is a welcome, up-close look inside the foreign policy bubble. You want “transparency in government”? You got it. The leaks will probably be the center of media reporting for the rest of the week — accompanied by the usual Chicken Little-style panic and anger from the right wing. Rep. Peter King (R-NY), the chair (come January) of the House Homeland Security Committee, is especially freaked out. King says WikiLeaks “presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States,” and wants the group to be classified, and prosecuted, as terrorists and spies. Never mind that re-classifying whoever you don’t like as a “terrorist” has been the standard method of despots for over 100  years. And never mind that the cables were “released” after the involved newspapers let the White House know about the various topics of interest in the cables, and even made some changes and deletions requested by the government. Hopefully, Rep. King will soon switch to decaf.

...At the Fox Nation site, nearly every comment on the story by their readers was “This guy (Wikileaks honcho Julian Assange) needs to be eliminated, he’s a traitor, Pres. Palin will put an end to these leaks [this is not a joke], blah blah blah.” Then I noticed the Fox Nation “mission statement,” sitting right there on the site’s front page, which says it is “for those opposed to excessive government control of our lives, and attempts to monopolize opinion or suppress freedom of thought.” Hmm, I guess their idea of freedom of thought only applies to those with whom they agree. Reminds me of late-’70s gay Brit singer Tom Robinson, who sang that the right’s version of “freedom” actually means “freedom from the likes of you.”

Fair enough. It also reminds me of former FBI agent/whistle-blower/congressional candidate Coleen Rowley, long a Blue America favorite. Coleen has an informed perspective on wikileaks and she wrote about it Saturday at OpEdNews.

Unfortunately, the US corporate PR machine is again triumphing. The naked emperor has shot the little boy trying to yell the truth. About 70% of Americans, misled by the likes of Amy Klobuchar, now declare that ignorance is bliss and they want to see Assange assassinated and WikiLeaks taken out. Only a tiny fraction of critical thinker Americans recognize that what they don't know CAN hurt them.

The last time an Administration got 70% of the country to believe a false proposition (that Iraq was behind 9-11), we launched an unending war that has already killed over a million and, in so doing, we shot ourselves in the foot. So unless Americans are willing to take their heads out of the sand, that's about to happen again. We find ourselves in such an Orwellian tragedy, that if we don't laugh, we'll cry.

Note: I agree with the realists that neither those in the White House nor in the Congress are listening. The elected in Washington DC operate in a kind of lead SKIF that encloses those inside the DC Beltway like Maxwell Smart's old "cone of silence". (So the politicians are truly unable to hear anyone outside that bubble and they are deaf to all except the ir own corporate and special interest funders, which include the powerful Military Industrial Complex war profiteers and also includes the neo-con aligned Likud branch of Israeli warhawks.)

...For the most part, the media seems to view a WikiLeaks truth-telling mechanism and government whistleblowers as trying to upset their easy job of transcribing leaders' press releases. Not surprisingly, much of the press says, "quick shoot the little boy calling the emperor naked." The corporate media is funded by the corporations and wealthy Americans who don't want to pay higher taxes or even pay any taxes and who are largely profiting off the continuing wars.

No one remembers that in the summer of 2001, Richard Clarke was unable to get anyone to pay attention to his plan to stem Al Qaeda terrorism. It seems incomprehensible as we bankrupt ourselves (which, by the way, is and always was Osama Bin Laden's stated goal, to bankrupt the U.S.) that Richard Clarke and others were repeatedly put off during that summer of 2001 when "all their hair was on fire", being told that there was "not one dollar available" for anti-terrorism efforts.

So that's the current horrible situation we find ourselves in at the present moment. The current quagmire devoid of truth on every level is a vortex sucking us all down. A truly independent media mechanism like WikiLeaks and more government whistleblowers would be a huge part of a root solution and that is why those in power are in the process of somehow (whether thru assassination or prosecution), taking them out. WikiLeaks had given me a flicker of hope of perhaps getting a sufficient number of Americans to take their heads out of the sand at least long enough to see the danger all around them, their children and grand children but sadly the Propaganda Machine already has 70% of Americans in agreement that they would prefer not to know the Sorrows of Empire that will befall them (as Chalmers Johnson termed it).

America is very lucky that Bill Keller wasn't the editor of the NY Times when Daniel Ellsberg sent over the Pentagon Papers. People in our generation, on the other hand, are poorer for the quality of editors the Times employs these days: