Letters to the Editor

• We Are Our Government And Thus [Should] Define Its Standards

  [Read the article: Interview with Aaron Brown on NYT "military analyst" story]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  The brick wall here is that the big media institutions do not agree at all that promoting and presenting uncountered government propaganda is contrary to their function. They define free media as having the choice to present whatever they want (barring nipples and such), and if what they want to present is uncontested government propaganda, then so be it. You -- or I -- have no say in the matter. There are, after all, alternative media resources. You don't want propaganda? Go somewhere else, then.

  .

  That seems to be their unshakable position. Given all the perks they receive for operating as conduits for government propaganda, it's hard to believe they'll ever willingly concede your moral point.

  -- Ché Pasa

  It seems to me that one vital consequence of this woeful reality, that C.P. rightly points to and as karrsic further illuminates, must be the restoration of the fundamental intent of our nation's governing structure: i.e., that it is for we, the people, to determine amongst ourselves, via Congress, without need for affirmation by the current status quo perpetrators, what we will accept as minimum standards of conduct by those entrusted in any way with our public property or with the First Amendment privilege of keeping the citizenry informed.

  In other words, wherever those media "perks" are publicly-generated - whether it's the use of our national airwaves, or the enactment of new and dangerous powers via "reporter's shield" legislation - the people and their Congress must stand up and define and enforce a standard that rejects and punishes media propaganda that is indeed otherwise likely only to continue and proliferate.

  As with so much else wrong in this country today, it comes down to Congress acting - as Constitutionally intended - on our behalf as representatives of our voices and will. The blockades to that vital function of Congress re-emerging are what we need to break down. Such efforts to force Congress to act on our behalf will take multiple forms, of which exposing the current shameful state of our media for what it is, as Glenn is doing and as ABC's last debate helped do, is obviously one key component.

  This approach ties in to so much of the debate in this country about Executive Branch wrongdoing, and to the way in which Congress usually "questions" its ExBr witnesses. So often legislators are simply trying to score 'political points' by trying to goad the witnesses into agreeing with the questioner that the actions at issue were wrong. But it's beside the point whether the perpetrator 'agrees' (which they invariably don't, publicly) that their actions were wrong. Like prosecutors and juries, legislators are able - and have a duty on our behalf - to make their own independent judgements about right and wrong, given the facts, and that is a vital role of our Congress: to set the minimum Constitutional standards of conduct below which we will not let our government fall. If they weren't so blinded by party politics - and the abusive and distorting effects of the two-party-only system - I think this would be a lot clearer to them.

  This approach is performed with excellence by a reviewer of Phillippe Sands's new book, writing in the Guardian, as highlighted by Howie Klein (also see digby and dday recently on the subject of torture):

  "...For me, whether this kind of interrogation meets the legal definition of torture (I think it does) or whether or not it is constitutional (it obviously is not) is entirely beside the point. Caught up in a debate about whether they could do something, no one ever asked if they should do it. The United States should not be in the torture business, full stop.

  ...

  The lawyers only enabled this decision, they didn't make it. President Bush rejected the moral and practical arguments in favour of advice from John Yoo, Jack Bauer and Joe Stalin. That is how a young woman from small town West Virginia ended up dragging an Iraqi man around on the ground by leash."

  - Ken Gude

  http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2008/04/impeaching-bush-and-cheney-has-never.html

  That's the sort of moral conscience we need to hear our legislators voicing, without regard for the opinions of those whose actions are being repudiated, followed by action to enforce a standard of conduct intended to prevent a repeat of this pattern in years to come.

  *****************

  selise, FYI: Note that you seem to have stumbled onto a SJC hearing page from last year (2007) re FISA. The link you thoughtfully gave us is the start of the PAA process last May 1, rather than a hearing scheduled for next week. Many thanks for your earlier heads-up about today's SJC hearing about NSLs - C-Span didn't cover it, so the SJC broadcast was the only outlet for the two-hour hearing, unfortunately. I caught the very end with Senator Whitehouse and the three witnesses, and will watch to see if C-Span recorded it for a later broadcast.

  With regard to torture, more excellence from Scott Horton; a recent interview he's done with Phillippe Sands has been posted:

  Jim Haynes emerges as a central player in The Torture Team. He was involved throughout, at each stage of the decision-making. I have come to appreciate that he has--at best--a semi-detached relationship with truth. His propensity to mislead was evident from his first public intervention on the issues I have addressed, in June 2004, when the administration relied on him and Alberto Gonzales to spin a false narrative on the beginnings of the abuse at Guantánamo, and its relationship to Abu Ghraib. - Phillippe Sands

  http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=80cf3ce9-d5c0-43d8-a5f3-5dbff7210220

  Paul Dirks: Make that Article I... But thank you for pointing out those Congressional powers and responsibilities, which have, shamefully, increasingly been shirked and abdicated, including the power and responsibility to declare (and thus end) war, as need be.

  Permalink Wednesday, April 23, 2008 02:30 PM