The spotlight article at antiwar.com today is an extraordinary confession of guilt by Tom Streithorst, a news cameraman who helped cover the early days of the war in Iraq.

He tells how his news crew pitched a story about kids showering US soldiers with flowers, and then refused to let reality get in the way as they chased the shot.

I remember, at dinner sometime that month in Kuwait, asking a table of journalists who among us believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Of the 12, only one did. Perhaps not coincidentally, he was the highest paid of the group. But reading our copy and watching our film clips, would anyone have guessed our doubts? The difference between what we said to each other sitting in the bar after work and what we filed would shock the American public.

Why didn’t I do my moral duty to tell the truth? Why didn’t I say to the producer that I would not be party to distorting what we had seen? In part, I can excuse my behavior because I just shot the pictures, I did not edit them. But this denies my culpability. I knew what the editor wanted, and I saw it as my job to give him those images. Refusing to film would have been unthinkable, unprofessional. I was just doing my job. So was the producer. So were the military police officers. So was President Bush.

After returning to New York, I told a friend about my experience. She said I should write it down. I laughed and said I couldn’t. If I did, I might never work again. I joked that the only way a journalist can lose his job is to tell the truth.

But that’s finally what I’m doing...

I thought this observation by Streithorst was also compelling:

Unfortunately—and probably inaccurately—our military took as the lesson of Vietnam that the American people will accept anything in war except the death of our boys. American soldiers in Iraq were thus told that any time they feared for their lives, or the lives of their comrades, they should reply with deadly force. If a car approached a checkpoint just a little too fast, and one soldier thought he just might be at risk, he was within his rights to wipe out the family inside.

In their own crazy, confused, angry minds, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the gang were still fighting the 'Nam war! They firmly believe that the only reason Uncle Sam lost in 'Nam was because dirty f***ing hippies back home won the PR war in the news media, and (just as they would have been happy to napalm another million gooks) they were happy to oversee the deaths of a million Iraq men, women and children - even those bringing them flowers - just to make sure it didn't happen all over again.

How sad is that?

Link at my sig.

Paulson is also part of the US government's "Plunge Protection Team", controversially created by Reagan in 1988 after "Black Monday" rocked the markets.

As Danny Schechter recently explained it on Alternet, "this secret branch of government has a sophisticated war room using every state of the art technology to monitor markets worldwide".

It has emergency powers. It doesn't keep minutes. There is no freedom of information access to its deliberations. There are 147,000 entries in Google on this powerful body but I could only access 10...

It is time for a Congressional investigation and more media scrutiny. Let's find out if this "Working Group" helped defuse the crisis or made it worse? Is it rigging markets?

Link at sig.

Mr Johnson's discussion of the special treatment being afforded Goldman Sachs by Paulson (former G.S. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer) deserves a lot more scrutiny.

Just weeks after Bush appointed Paulson, Goldman Sachs helped the Saudis bring down the price of oil ahead of the US 2006 mid-term elections. Goldman Sachs dumped more than $6 billion in gasoline futures contracts, which was like a clarion call to the markets: when the big funds change their weighting, smaller funds quickly follow suit. Even if the move is actually contrary to market realities, it doesn't matter. The price of oil dropped 20% - until the very day of the election - and then began to rise again.

As Lew Rockwell explained it at the time, what Goldman Sachs did is called "painting the tape":

Goldman doesn’t lose money. This is a managed commodity index. Goldman manages the index, but the actual money put up comes from institutions, hedge funds and other unlucky saps that trusted Goldman to manage the commodity index as a hedge against inflation – not to bail out of $6 billion in contracts over a few weeks. The result: Unlucky saps – Major losses. Goldman – Zero losses and their man running the Treasury. Which side of this trade would you want to be on?

And what about Robert "The Vulcan" Zoellick, who resigned as Condi Rice's deputy in July 2006 to take a position with Goldman Sachs? He became president of the World Bank a year later. Zoellick served from 1993-1997 as an Executive Vice President of Fannie Mae. Then he became a Senior International Advisor to ... (guess who?) ... Goldman Sachs.

It's no coincident that Zoellick was one of "The Vulcans" who signed the PNAC's January 26, 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton that advocated war against Iraq. Other signatories included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John R. Bolton, Richard Armitage, and Bill Kristol.