It is for that reason that, as Chomsky puts it, the media is actually a mechanism for pervasive "thought control" of the masses in the favour of an elite, and that before reading a newspaper, let alone looking at a TV program, citizens need to "undertake a course of intellectual self-defence to protect themselves from manipulation and control""
The US security establishment today is made up of the huge defense contractors - corporations like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon and Endgame via (until recently) less well-known companies like Booz Allen and Hamilton, who employed not only the now famous whistle-blower Edward Snowden but also one Mike McDonnell, a former head of the NSA. Scarcely surprising that Booz has been entrusted with so many juicy defense contracts out of a NSA "secret-defense' budget estimated at around $10 billion a year. (The NSA's new centre for stocking computer records at Bluffdale, Utah will cost on its own $2 billion.)
That's a lot of public money to spend with nothing formally to show for it. But the reality is, as the French newspaper, the Figaro, put it, quoting an unnamed senior figure in the French defence department who had been entertained at those secret briefings in Fort Meade (the ones that Snowden leaked the Powerpoints of), ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, "the NSA has been 80% preoccupied with economic intelligence.'
Curiously, the Times does not seem to know this despite the fact that there have been several public inquiries into the mass interception of civilian communications in the US and a large (multi-year) investigation by the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment arm of the European Parliament published in 1999. (I was a visiting researcher at STOA, in the 1990s, and even I "exposed' the NSA eavesdropping in a book in 2005 [8].)
As I recently argued on OpEdNews [9], the STOA report explains why the American interest is so great. The claim made by the authors (by Duncan Campbell and others) is that mass communications interception and processing is a system which enables the countries using it to obtain significant economic information and, hence, to secure a leading position on the commercial markets. There are numerous, soundly demonstrated, examples where American companies have secured contracts as a result of communications having been intercepted including.
* In January 1994 an arms supply contract worth 30 million francs with Saudi Arabia ended up with McDonnell-Douglas, the rival of the Airbus consortium, because the former was privy to the financial terms offered by Airbus thanks to the electronic interception system.
* The French electronics giant, Thomson lost a contract worth 1.4 million dollars for the supply of a surveillance system to Brazil because the Americans had intercepted details of the negotiations and passed them on to the US Raytheon Corporation, which subsequently won the contract.
* The NSA intercepted phone calls between Thomson-CSF and Brazil concerning SIVAM, a $1.3 billion surveillance system for the Amazon rain forest. The contract was awarded to the US Raytheon Corporation - who announced afterwards that "the Department of Commerce worked very hard in support of U.S. industry on this project,' as well they might.
Finally, a well-informed press report in the Baltimore Sun as long ago as 1995 noted that: "from a commercial communications satellite, NSA lifted all the faxes and phone calls between the European consortium Airbus , the Saudi national airline and the Saudi government. The agency found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official. It passed the information to U.S. officials pressing the bid of Boeing Co and McDonnell Douglas Corp., which triumphed last year in the $6 billion competition.'
Other accounts have been published by reputable journalists and some firsthand witnesses citing frequent occasions on which the US government has utilized covertly intercepted communications for national commercial purposes. These include targeting data about the emission standards of Japanese vehicles; 1995 trade negotiations the import of Japanese luxury cars; French participation in the GATT trade negotiations in 1993; the Asian-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC), 1997.
Norman Solomon the American journalist, and antiwar activist has pointed out [10] the curious synchronized dance of New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, all of whom have responded to Snowden's revelations by siding with the secret agencies of the U.S. government. Brooks even denounced Snowden as "a traitor' during a June 14 appearance on the PBS NewsHour, saying indignantly: "He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave him a job, the people who trusted him. . . . He betrayed the democratic process. It's not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what's private and public. We have - actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and established by tradition.'
So, for the New York Times and much of the political establishment, it is speaking out, not listening in that thus is against the Constitution. Thus the Grey Lady once again manages to turn Black into White.
----
Links and notes
1. http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php]
2. click here
3. click here
(in print on June 10, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition. The authors were MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
4. for example, click here=a&id=163348
The US security establishment today is made up of the huge defense contractors - corporations like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon and Endgame via (until recently) less well-known companies like Booz Allen and Hamilton, who employed not only the now famous whistle-blower Edward Snowden but also one Mike McDonnell, a former head of the NSA. Scarcely surprising that Booz has been entrusted with so many juicy defense contracts out of a NSA "secret-defense' budget estimated at around $10 billion a year. (The NSA's new centre for stocking computer records at Bluffdale, Utah will cost on its own $2 billion.)
That's a lot of public money to spend with nothing formally to show for it. But the reality is, as the French newspaper, the Figaro, put it, quoting an unnamed senior figure in the French defence department who had been entertained at those secret briefings in Fort Meade (the ones that Snowden leaked the Powerpoints of), ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, "the NSA has been 80% preoccupied with economic intelligence.'
Curiously, the Times does not seem to know this despite the fact that there have been several public inquiries into the mass interception of civilian communications in the US and a large (multi-year) investigation by the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment arm of the European Parliament published in 1999. (I was a visiting researcher at STOA, in the 1990s, and even I "exposed' the NSA eavesdropping in a book in 2005 [8].)
* In January 1994 an arms supply contract worth 30 million francs with Saudi Arabia ended up with McDonnell-Douglas, the rival of the Airbus consortium, because the former was privy to the financial terms offered by Airbus thanks to the electronic interception system.
* The French electronics giant, Thomson lost a contract worth 1.4 million dollars for the supply of a surveillance system to Brazil because the Americans had intercepted details of the negotiations and passed them on to the US Raytheon Corporation, which subsequently won the contract.
* The NSA intercepted phone calls between Thomson-CSF and Brazil concerning SIVAM, a $1.3 billion surveillance system for the Amazon rain forest. The contract was awarded to the US Raytheon Corporation - who announced afterwards that "the Department of Commerce worked very hard in support of U.S. industry on this project,' as well they might.
Finally, a well-informed press report in the Baltimore Sun as long ago as 1995 noted that: "from a commercial communications satellite, NSA lifted all the faxes and phone calls between the European consortium Airbus , the Saudi national airline and the Saudi government. The agency found that Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official. It passed the information to U.S. officials pressing the bid of Boeing Co and McDonnell Douglas Corp., which triumphed last year in the $6 billion competition.'
Other accounts have been published by reputable journalists and some firsthand witnesses citing frequent occasions on which the US government has utilized covertly intercepted communications for national commercial purposes. These include targeting data about the emission standards of Japanese vehicles; 1995 trade negotiations the import of Japanese luxury cars; French participation in the GATT trade negotiations in 1993; the Asian-Pacific Economic Conference (APEC), 1997.
Norman Solomon the American journalist, and antiwar activist has pointed out [10] the curious synchronized dance of New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, all of whom have responded to Snowden's revelations by siding with the secret agencies of the U.S. government. Brooks even denounced Snowden as "a traitor' during a June 14 appearance on the PBS NewsHour, saying indignantly: "He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave him a job, the people who trusted him. . . . He betrayed the democratic process. It's not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what's private and public. We have - actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and established by tradition.'
So, for the New York Times and much of the political establishment, it is speaking out, not listening in that thus is against the Constitution. Thus the Grey Lady once again manages to turn Black into White.
----
Links and notes
1. http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php]
2. click here
3. click here
(in print on June 10, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition. The authors were MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
4. for example, click here=a&id=163348
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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