ABC furiously beating the drums for war against Iran

Glenn Greenwald points to yet another so-called news report designed to stir up unwarranted fear and to encourage war against Iran. The following is an excerpt from another excellent article in which Greenwald takes the so-called news media to task:

I just saw this two-minute ABC News report from Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross that sinks to even lower depths than what I highlighted yesterday. It has to be seen to be believed. It’s a perfect museum exhibit for how empty-headed American media stars uncritically recite whatever they are told by government officials, exaggerate or fabricate bad acts by the designated Enemy du Jour while ignoring and suppressing the precipitating acts of America and its client states, and just generally do whatever they can to keep fear levels and war thirst as high as possible. This is nothing short of irresponsible propagandistic trash . . . Note that this entire story is based on pure fabrication — not just by accepting as Truth the Israeli and American accusation that Iran is behind these attacks, but far worse, continuously warning about Iranian attacks on synagogues and other targets inside the U.S. There is literally zero evidence that any of that is happening. . . . the most destructive part of this state-subservient journalism is how it completely suppresses the actions of the U.S. and Israel that have precipitated all of this.
Here is ABC's "news" report to which Greenwald was referring: video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

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American news media beating the drums to start war against Iran

It is shocking and dismaying that American "news media" is currently leading the charge for America's next war, against Iran. "News outlets are focusing on how the war would progress rather than challenging the propaganda of the American government and Israel. Please read this article by Glenn Greenwald and speak out. Here's an excerpt:

The propaganda at play here is intense indeed. For several years, the U.S. and Israel threaten on an almost daily basis to aggressively attack a country, all while engaging in multiple acts of war against them, and then when their leaders suggest they may not acquiesce to such an attack with passivity and gratitude, those vows of defensive retaliation are used to depict them as the threat-issuing aggressors. And the American media, as always, eagerly implants the propaganda. Thus, if such a war breaks out, NBC News‘ Mik announces, “the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet would be the world’s first line of defense,” though those crazed Persian leaders have threatened to use “Iran’s massive stockpile of ballistic missiles” and to “launch those missiles at U.S. targets.” . . . time and again, Americans support whatever new war of aggression their government proposes, then come to regret that support and decide the war was a “mistake,” only to demonstrate that they learned no lessons from their “mistake” by eagerly supporting whatever the next proposed war is.
This recurring felt-need to go to war repeats pursuant to a tried and true formula described by Normal Soloman in his documentary, "War Made Easy." When you hear out-of-touch commentators (even "liberal" commentators) advocating the "need" for war with Iran, take the time to respond by questioning the claims and offering real world facts. Take a look at what happened at Huffpo when Alan Dershowitz showed that he has drunk the Kool-aid--notice the many hostile comments to his article. The case of Iran is an intense and coordinated propaganda battle that is turning into yet another terrible and destructive war to feed the pockets of the military industrial complex and to satisfy America's need for a scapegoat for its many self-inflicted problems. We are truly living in days of bread and circuses.

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The many lies about Afghanistan

Who would you trust more to report what is really going on in Afghanistan? High ranking generals spellbound by the sunk costs and warped to incoherence by their increasingly outrageous promises of success in this ten-year old war? Or would you trust a 17-year army veteran who has put his career in jeopardy by reporting his frank observations outside of his chain of command? Here is the detailed unclassified report of Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis. He has also provided a classified version to various members of Congress, as reported by Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, in an article he has titled, "The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read." Here is an excerpt from the unclassified report by Daniel Davis:

[A]s was repeated with frequency during the first quarter of 2011 senior ISAF leaders have explained that we killed a significant number of insurgent (INS) leaders and foot soldiers, we took away his former sanctuaries, cut off his supply routes, took away his freedom of movement, discovered a huge number of weapons and ammo caches, and captured hundreds of insurgent fighters. But if these things are so, the expectation of yet another all-time record of violence warned by the leaders was illogical. If I have tens of thousands of additional ISAF boots, and I kill hundreds of INS leaders thousands of his fighters, capture huge numbers of caches, take away his sanctuaries, and deny him freedom of movement, how could he then significantly increase his level of attacks as the Taliban did in the first half of 2011? By any rational calculation, our vastly increasing numbers combined with the enemy's dwindling pool of fighters and loss of equipment ought to have had precisely the opposite effect: they should have been capable of conducting considerably fewer attacks, emplacing a smaller number of IEDs, and their influence on the population should have been notably diminished. Yet none of those things came to pass. ISAF leaders, nevertheless continue to make bold and confident statement after statement that we are succeeding, that the insurgency is weakening, and that the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GoIRA) is gaining the confidence of its people though they offer almost no tangible evidence to that effect, while explaining away the considerable volume of evidence which logically should cause one to reach a very different conclusion.
What is the truth about Afghanistan? Davis cites with approval from a 2011 report by Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (see pages 10 and 11): • US and ISAF won every major tactical clash, but lost much of the country; • ISAF denied the scale of the insurgency and the seriousness of its rise. Issued intelligence and other reports claiming success that did not exist; • The US and ISAF remained kinetic through 2009; the insurgent fought a battle of influence over the population and political attrition to drive out the US and ISAF from the start; • In June 2010, the Acting Minister of Interior told the press that only 9 of Afghanistan's 364 districts were considered safe; • No ISAF nation provides meaningful transparency and reporting to its legislature and people. But what about all of those optimistic reports from high ranking U.S. military brass? Davis cites with approval from a report written by Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) and signed by ANSO Director, Nic Lee, examining "the security situation in Afghanistan in order to inform the greater NGO community about the risks they face when operating there."
More so than in previous years, information of this nature is sharply divergent from (International Military Forces) 'strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage (NGO personnel) to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.
The report by Davis is compelling, detailed and damning of the propaganda issued by the U.S. regarding Afghanistan. His report is a must read in these times while we continue to spend $2 Billion per week on this fiasco. Now it's time for American journalists to step up and report the truth, though Davis is not optimistic that they will carry out their mission (see p. 28):
So long as our country’s top TV and print media continue to avoid challenging power for fear of losing access, there is every reason to expect many senior Defense Department leaders will continue to play this game of denial of access in order to effect compliant reports. As I’ve shown throughout this report, there is ample open source information and reports all over the internet that would allow any individual – or reporter – to find the truth and report it. But heretofore few have. As I note later in this report that there are a number of high ranking generals in the military today who are brilliant leaders and have the highest standards and integrity (giving me hope that there is a chance of reform in the future), so too there are some really fine journalists in both print and on-air media organizations. We need more experienced and honorable journos – and their parent organizations – to summon the courage to report wherever the truth leads and not simply regurgitate the bullet points handed out by some action officer. America needs you.
Feb 15, 2012 - Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone discusses the report of Lt. Col. Daniel Davis with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:

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Lie-Truth Cost-Ratio

It seems to me that, by a wide margin, most statements uttered by most people are inaccurate or downright untrue. Most of these problems result from sloppy fact-finding and sloppy reasoning; they are not the result of people intentionally misleading each other. This problem with inaccurate and false statements is even more common in the political arena, and they are also more dangerous because political lies and coverups damage our democracy. They cause us to waste time and resources on many small things and some huge things like needless wars. Falsehoods pour out of politicians mouths like water gushing out of fire hydrants. It has gotten so bad that many of us fear that our democracy is at risk. What else could one reasonably conclude when less than 10% of Americans approve of the work of Congress. But these untruths, the falsehoods, the lies and the coverups continue unabated. I'd like to discuss two of reasons for this sad situation (I'm sure there are other reasons too): 1. The confirmation bias. When political or financial motivation exists (and it almost always exists), human animals notice, say and believe the things they are motivated to notice, say and believe. The confirmation is invisible to us; we are aghast when others call us "biased" (See Jonathan Haidt's discussion of the invisibility of the confirmation bias here). We only see bias and selective perception in other people. We constantly deny that our own perception of the "facts" is warped by our motivations, including our financial motivations. We are convinced that the lies we want to believe are truths and that our coverups are not coverups. Actually, we don't see the coverups that benefit us as coverups. Rather, we see accusations that we are covering-up the facts as annoyances. We deny these requests for purposes of expediency and we declare inconvenient things to be "irrelevant." 2. It is much easier to lie (or to palter) than to take the time to determine the truth. I don't know how to quantify the extent of this problem, but I'll take a wild guess: On average, it takes 500 times more work to expose a lie or coverup than to tell a lie and cause a coverup. It's a lot like the physical world. It takes a lot longer to build a house than to destroy a house. Whatever the exact number, we ought to give this lopsided Ratio a name, because it is a phenomenally important factor to consider in our need to fight for policies to encourage open government. Perhaps it could be called the Lie-Truth-Cost-Ratio. This lopsided Ratio gives untruthful people (liars, obfuscators and those who are reckless with the truth) huge advantages, given that time and money are such precious resources. In the time it takes to write one accurate and detailed report regarding a serious policy issue, untruthful people can issue hundreds or thousands of untruthful statements on the same topic. In the political realm, is the solution investigative journalism? Probably not, because investigative journalism is dying; to do it right costs lots of money. Further modern media outlets often resist free-wheeling investigative journalism because the corporate media is in the position to foot the bill for investigative journalism, yet the results of such journalism too often embarrass advertisers and business relationships connected to media enterprises (only six corporations own and control most of the media in America). Citizens can also function as journalists too. Can we depend on private citizens to fill the void? Unlikely. Who is willing to give up significant time with their family or time to take a walk or time to watch a movie in order to do the painstaking research to expose liars, even when those lies cause massive waste of desperately needed public funds? Because we are human animals, we live in a distracting world where fatigue is a reality--we crave eating, exercising, sleeping and entertainment, and none of these enjoyable activities is long-term compatible with hunching over a computer keyboard or analyzing big piles of abstruse documents in order to expose corporate or political lies. Who do you know who is willing to do any of these things in his or her spare time? Do you even know anyone who has an adequate skill-set for doing this type of work? Who do you know who would be willing to spend even $100 of his or her money to obtain records, even where there is a good chance that those records would expose government or corporate wrong-doing? We are sometimes fortunate that public interest groups gather a critical mass of people, money and energy to investigate complex political issues, but their funding is often no match for the funds spent (and the number of untruths told) by corporate and government players, who are highly motivated to make issues complex in order to make them impenetrable. It is important to keep in mind that making a political or corporate system needlessly complex (2,000 page bills, anyone?) are a highly effective way of hiding the truth. Further, there are so many lies out there that they cannot all be investigated. I'll make another highly speculative guess: Only 5% of important political claims are investigated by any journalist or public interest group to any meaningful degree. That is largely due to the power of the Lie-Truth-Cost-Ratio. Here's a real-life example: the current controversy regarding proposed Keystone XL pipeline. I'll set aside, for now, the environmental concerns that are often dismissed or underplayed by the corporate players and the alleged news media. Instead, I'll look simply at the alleged quid pro quo regarding those who have been pushing for the project. The Koch brothers have indicated that they have no financial stake in the XL pipeline. In the real world, these sorts of claims appear in newspaper headlines, and they are declared be the "news." In a perfect world, these claims would be meaningfully investigated before being reported. But investigating each of these sorts of claims would require highly motivated people (including journalists at the U.K. Guardian) countless hours, because the truth regarding complex matters like this can only be determined by reviewing hundreds of convoluted documents. Robert Greenwald has produced the following 2-minute video announcing his own suspicions: [More . . . ]

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What do you call people who lie, cheat and steal?

How do you characterize people who lie, cheat and steal? Well, it all depends on who those people are. If they are poor people who lie on welfare application forms in order to steal food money from the government, they are called criminals and they are subjected to prison time. If they lie to homeowners in order to steal homes, they are called "banks" who are simply doing "banking," and they won't face prison time. I've learned from my own law practice over the past few years that it is common for banks to concoct false paperwork, including false affidavits and court filings, when they are trying to foreclose against homeowners. My experience is also the experience of numerous other attorneys who represent home owners. Now I do need to be clear: No homeowners should have the right to live in their houses for free. On the other hand, no bank should be allowed to kick a homeowner out of his or her house until and unless the bank proves that it is legally entitled to kick the homeowner out of the house, and there are specific rules for how a bank would know whether it would be entitled to kick a family out of a house. In millions of foreclosure cases, however, banks have been making shit up. They are engaged in flagrant robo-signing, they are allowing unauthorized people to sign critically important legal papers, and they are filing this false paperwork in courts from coast to coast. The centerpiece for much of this chaos is a artificial entity called MERS that has been created by the banks to stand in for them whenever convenient and to provide plausible deniability when it is not convenient. I've written about MERS previously. This practice of the big banks should stop, and the people doing these things should go to prison (The Missouri Attorney General recently brought a criminal case against an entity that was cranking out fraudulent paperwork). These banks should also be punished by not allowing them to foreclose. Instead, they should be declared to have, at best, unsecured status regarding the home loans they have screwed up, and they should be made to stand in line with all of the other unsecured creditors (e.g., credit card companies and utility companies). This is not a harsh remedy for huge sophisticated entities that are intentionally breaking the law to unfairly assert the extraordinarily harsh legal remedy of foreclosure. I'm attaching the Complaint recently filed by the New York Attorney General, The People of the State of New York, by Eric T. Schneiderman, Attorney General vs. JP Morgan Chase Bank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo Bank and others. This suit concerns the common practice of America's biggest banks to concoct MERS to circumvent the proper recording of real estate in the state of New York (this same problem is going on in each other other states too). The end result is that the banks are cheating local government recording offices of substantial fees, and destroying the right to confidently trace property rights in real estate (i.e., The American Dream, i.e., the most expensive thing most people will ever own). In sum, banks have intentionally created a system called MERS that makes sure that transfers of title to real estate are not being properly recorded. It is now the case in many states that one cannot determine who actually has property interests in real estate. This is true for 70 million pieces of property in all 50 states. The New York suit is extremely well written; it provides a detailed look into many of the things that the big banks have done in an attempt to rewrite laws in order to make money unfairly and to screw consumers. I invite all concerned citizens (lawyers and non-lawyers) to read the NY AG's new lawsuit to see how incredibly corrupt the system has become, thanks to the efforts of big banks. Next time you are wondering why well-informed people refer to banks as "house-jackers" or "banksters," consider these allegations by New York's Attorney General (this is but a small sampling of what you will find in the NY AG's suit):

20. When the subprime mortgage crisis hit and the number of defaults and foreclosures skyrocketed around the country, the shortcomings of the MERS System and its impact on tracking a property's chain of title became readily apparent, sparking widespread litigation. The creation and use of the MERS System by Defendant Servicers and other financial institutions have resulted in a wide range of deceptive and illegal practices, particularly with respect to the filing of New York Foreclosure Proceedings in state courts and federal bankruptcy courts.

21. The use of the MERS System, coupled with faulty and sloppy document preparation and execution practices, have resulted in foreclosures being filed against New York homeowners where the foreclosing party lacked the authority or standing to sue. MER members, including Defendant Servicers, have brought over 13,000 foreclosures against New York homeowners naming MERS as the plaintiff/foreclosing party. Indeed, for years MERS affirmatively encouraged its members to file foreclosures in MERS' name, again based on the rationale that doing so would save banks time and money. However, MERS often lacked standing to foreclose, and representations in court submissions that MERS owned and/or held the promissory note in such proceedings were often false and deceptive.

22. Even when foreclosures were not initiated in MERS' name. New York Foreclosure Proceedings involving MERS-registered loans often included deceptive submissions. Because MERS Inc. served as the mortgagee of record, the foreclosing party needed to be assigned the mortgage before filing the proceeding to have standing. In many instances, this assignment was not properly made. MERS certifying officers, including Defendant Servicers' employees and agents, have executed and submitted to court MERS mortgage assignments that contain many defects, including affirmative misrepresentations of fact, which render them false, deceptive, and/or invalid. These assignments were often automatically generated and "robosigned" by individuals who did not review the underlying property ownership records, confirm the document's accuracy, or even read the document. These false and defective assignments have often masked gaps in the chain of title and the foreclosing party's inability to establish its authority to foreclose, and as a result have misled homeowners and the courts.

23. Although there are several New York court decisions finding that foreclosing parties lacked standing, the issue of standing is rarely raised and litigated because most homeowners lack counsel and are unfamiliar with MERS' precise role in their loan. Indeed, a significant percentage of foreclosure actions result in default judgments.

24. In addition, MERS' indiscriminate use of non-employee certifying officers has confused, misled, and deceived homeowners and the courts and made it even more difficult to ascertain whether a foreclosing party actually owns or holds the note and mortgage to have standing to foreclose. MERS certifying officers, including Defendant Servicers' employees and agents, have routinely executed and submitted in court mortgage assignments and other legal documents on behalf of MERS without disclosing that they are not MERS employees, but instead are employed by other entities, such as the mortgage servicer that filed the case or its counsel. As a further complication, the same MERS certifying officer might execute multiple documents on behalf of different parties in a single proceeding.

25. In short, MERS' conduct, as well as Defendants Servicers' use of the MERS have resulted in the filing of improper New York Foreclosure Proceedings, undermined the integrity of the judicial process, created confusion and uncertainty concerning property ownership interests, and potentially created clouds of title on properties throughout the State of New York.

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