Legal Domestic Propaganda

Anti-Propaganda

1/1/2017 Justin Arn

(c/o The Prophet Flickr)

The U.S. is awash in lies! Yes, gullible fools crowd our streets, our schools, and our voting booths  vomiting their worthless opinions upon us at every turn! We are plagued by disinformation,   propaganda, lies,  delusion. 

That is what our media tell us. That is what we hear every day. Generalizations and opinions hurled upon the populace without the faintest regard for anything but the inspiration of emotion. We have heard all of this before, though.  In the 2000s it was terrorists, 90s the Y2K bug, and welfare.  Look back and you will find a lines of thought and persuasive appeal with one thing in common: they want  to excite you.

The choice of sources from which we get our news are  of the highest importance in this new Information Age. How informed--or misinformed as may be the case-- we remain is a direct result of whom allow to influence and persuade us.

Legal Domestic Propaganda is a resource and analysis tool. An Anti-narrative so-to-speak. LDP does not to weave new tales of history or invent wondrous explanations for current events. Its purpose is to help people navigate their way through the bullsh*t, and find their own explanations. Propaganda is used by those with power regardless of their political persuasion. This is anti-propaganda.

Many Alternative News sites debase and degrade all of journalism for propagating the system, and other like reasons. But such a narrow view is is woefully wrong in light of the many valiant journalists in the world that risk life and limb (literally) to expose the truth. LDP honors the organizations and investigative journalists that speak truth to power and represent the credibility that America should expect from its newsmakers. Here are a few of the best:

Yahoo reveals billion email Hack.

Largest hack to date revealed one year later.  

By Justin Arn

12/14/2016

Yahoo, currently in buyout negotiations with Verizon made an untimely admission about the extent of its security problems.  Over 1 billion users had their email addresses and personal details stolen rom the company servers.

The online giant makes this disclosure after it already admitted being the victim of an entirely separate theft of 500 million email addresses earlier in the year. 

The only real question remaining is; who still has a Yahoo account? 

Without doubt, one of the most infuriating aspects of this is the complete disregard with which Yahoo has handled the situation. Not only were the company's security protocols ineffective, but apparently its attitude regarding user information was reckless as well.  

Not admitting to the theft unti now, a full year later reveals the extent to which user information is barely blip on the corporate radar for our largest tech companies.  

The truth is that until users demand that their privacy be respected and also punish via boycott those companies who fail to respect it, our tech giants will continue to treat user information and concerns as an afterthought. 

Full story: Boston Globe

National Security Archive declassified documents regarding Condor

Operation Condor Revealed after 40 years in CIA lockbox. 

By Justin Arn
12/13/2016

The Internet abounds with free but increasingly hidden or compromised information. Fake News, Russian hackers, and Public relations wizardry are all playing their part to usher us further down the rabbit hole in this newly coined post-truth era.

So where does a budding researcher go for information in a post-truth world? 

Why not begin with the National Security Archive? George Washington University, home of the independent organization, nevertheless does great work disseminating newly declassified information from all areas of government and military sector.  More especially the archive and the Universty function as a legitimizing historian of sorts for the intelligence and military apparatus For example: here's some of their latest I just received via email.

OPERATION CONDOR: Officials of Amnesty International Targeted for ‘Liquidation’.  New Documents Shed Light on OPERATION CONDOR, planned missions in Europe

National Security Archive Alert

Washington D.C., December 12 -

Operation Condor, the trans-border, multinational effort by Southern Cone secret police services to track down and “liquidate” opponents of their regimes in the 1970s, targeted officials of Amnesty International as well as human rights groups, and planned overseas missions in Paris and London, according to a comprehensive CIA report on Condor operations released today by the Obama administration. “The basic mission of Condor teams to be sent overseas,” according to the CIA, was “to liquidate top-level terrorist leaders. Non-terrorists also were reportedly candidates for assassination,” the CIA reported in May 1977, and “some leaders of Amnesty Internation[al] were mentioned as targets.”

The secret CIA report is included among more than 500 pages of documents on repression during the military dictatorship in Argentina declassified today by the Obama administration as part of a commitment made by the president last March when he visited Buenos Aires on the 40th anniversary of the military coup. “I believe we have a responsibility to confront the past with honesty and transparency,” 

Obama stated then.

The CIA’s sources inside Condor reported that “a training course was held in Buenos Aires for the team heading overseas,” and that “Condor leaders were considering the dispatch of a team to London—disguised as businessmen—to monitor ‘suspicious’ activities in Europe.” According to the CIA, “Another proposal under study included the collection of material on the membership, location, and political activities of human rights groups in order to identify and expose their socialist and Marxist connections. Similar data reportedly are to be collected on church and third-world groups.”

In another TOP SECRET/EXDIS/CODEWORD Condor document declassified today, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research reported that “six Southern Cone nations" which were “participants in a counterterrorist network codenamed ‘Condor’” have agreed “to undertake the liquidation of Latin American” targets “living in France.”

The documents are part of a second tranche of intelligenceand presidential records posted today on the website of the Department of National Intelligence. The administration posted an initial set of documents on Argentina, drawn from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, on August 8, 2016.  As more records are processed for declassification, several more releases are planned for 2017, after Obama leaves office.

“With the release of this revealing documentation, President Obama has advanced the cause of human rights in Argentina and elsewhere,” said Carlos Osorio, who directs the Southern Cone documentation project at the National Security Archive and has actively supported the Administration’s special declassification project. “This gesture of declassification diplomacy,” Osorio noted, “will be part of the legacy of Obama’s presidency.

Among the documents that the National Security Archive identified as newsworthy was a NSC summary of the torture of Alfredo Bravo the president of Argentina’s Permanent Assembly
for Human Rights.

The report was sent in August 1978 to President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, by his top aide for Latin America, Robert Pastor, who detailed the atrocities the military had committed against Bravo. Pastor reported that Bravo had been “subjected to a bucket treatment where his feet were held in a bucket of ice water until thoroughly chilled and then shoved into a bucket of boiling water.” Bravo had also been subjected to electrical shocks and “subjected to ‘the submarine’—repeatedly being held under water until almost drowned.”

In a handwritten note in the margin of the document Brzezinski wrote: “a compelling, powerful report.

For further information, contact: Carlos Osorio: cosorio@gwu.edu

The National Security Archive plans to post additional documents from the new release on Argentina on its website:  

National Security Archive

Read Unredacted, the Archive blog

THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals

National Security Archive, Suite 701

Gelman Library

The George Washington University

2130 H Street, NW

Washington, D.C., 20037

Phone: 202/994-7000<

Fax: 202/994-7005

nsarchiv@gwu.edu

The Fallacy of the last century

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/14/neoliberalsim-donald-trump-george-monbiot?CMP=fb_gu

Dark Magic

The Power of Fear
11/11/2016 Justin Arn

Everywhere I look I see fear. Young people afraid for their future.  The LGBT community afraid for their safety and fundamental rights. Minorities afraid for themselves.  The election of Donald Trump has certainly created a great hulking mass of people who are afraid.  More than any other time in this country's history the thrall of fear has infected our minds.

The older generation, my parents age for example don't understand it. Children being let out of school? Rioting in the streets over a valid election? They scoff at the young for being foolish. I can understand that.

I consider my age one of my greatest assets in this current milieu. At 36 years old I straddle either side of two extraordinarily different generations: the genxers and the millenials. These are only names of course, but what is significant is that these groups have a shared history amongst one another. As we grow older we understand things differently, and our peers generally understand things the way we do because they have many of the same experiences. While our opinions may vary, our understandings seldom do for this very reason.

The experiences of so many people caught in the thrall of fear is foreign to my parents generation because they don't understand what young people do. They don't see it that way. Namely, the spell at work upon the millenials was never cast upon the genxers, or at least, the dissemination didn't take as strongly. 

Being in between the two, I can see both sides. I can feel the spell being cast by nameless magicians upon my mind. Yet I can distance myself from its effects and return to a more enlightened state, by realizing the spell and reminding myself that what I'm seeing is not real; it is only an illusion meant to trick me.

This ability is not at all uncommon but few care to name the forces at work here.  Before those names can be understood though, it's important that those of you who may be caught in the thrall of this spell take a moment and realize the illusion. 

Nothing has changed. Your country, all of its good and bad is the same as it was yesterday.  The only difference now is the great wafting smell of fear that emanates from large dense sections of the population. That smell is so attractive, so profound, so utterly primal, that there are those who would take advantage of it. They're doing it right now actually. See them at work in your news feeds, egging on your dismay and capitalizing on your reactions.

Another time in our recent history a great fear was capitalized upon: 9-11.  To this day so much of the suffering taking place in our world can be said to be a direct result of the capitalization upon fear from that day.  Make no mistake about it, if you feel afraid it's because someone wants you to feel that way. 99.9% of humanity are decent loving people and nothing has changed.

Perhaps FDR said it best:
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

He was right. Wake up.