Congress Wants To Legally Feed Us Propaganda

By James Donahue

We have always known that the government and corporate propaganda machine has been working overtime when it comes to keeping the public informed. In spite of all of the alleged lying and twisting of facts, it has been technically illegal for our leaders to feed misinformation to the American people.

Now two members of Congress, Rep. Mark Thornberry (R) and Rep. Adam Smith (D) have slipped an amendment to the latest military defense bill that will neutralize existing laws – the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 1987 – that are supposed to protect us from government misinformation campaigns.

The defense bill has already passed the House. If this version gets through the Senate and is signed into law by President Barack Obama, the public mistrust of everything our government tells us will be fully justified.

This bit of Congressional misbehavior has been uncovered by writer Amy Sly on the website BuzzFeed.

In her story, Sly writes that amendment supporters argue that “informational material used overseas to influence foreign audiences is too good to not use at home.” They reason that the misinformation labeled as “new techniques” are needed to help fight Al-Qaeda, the borderless terrorist organization blamed for 9-11 and other alleged attempts to conduct terrorist attacks on the United States.

In other words, the objective is to bombard us with government created lies to keep us safe from would-be terrorists. Does anybody think there is anything wrong with this line of thinking? Does anybody think this hasn’t already been going on? Does anybody now believe that former President George W. Bush and his cronies were not lying to us when they said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was harboring “weapons of mass destruction” and used the lie as an excuse to invade Iraq?

Does anybody believe United States military forces and other NATO troops need to remain any longer in Afghanistan to fight the Al-Qaeda network, which left town years ago? Now we are told our troops are remaining to stabilize the Afghan government and train native military troops to fight terrorism. What appears to be the real reason is the discovery that great resources of gold, precious minerals and possibly even gas and oil deposits exist under that barren landscape. There is money in those hills and some big American corporate investors are clamoring for access. Tribal leaders are fighting hard to make sure that never happens. This seems to be the real reason our troops are still over there getting maimed and killed. It is not happening in the defense of our country. They are being sacrificed for corporate greed.

The new law, Sly wrote, “Would give sweeping powers to the State Department and Pentagon to push (misinformation via) television, radio, newspaper and social media onto the U.S. public.” The story quotes one unnamed Pentagon official as saying “it removes oversight from the people who want to put out this information. There are no checks and balances. No one knows if the information is accurate, partially accurate, or entirely false.”

Because the public believes we have been consistently lied to over the years, even since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a general feeling of distrust of our government has been evolving. Thus we hear of a myriad of conspiracy theories that include the Kennedy Assassination, the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Waco assault on the Branch Dravidians and 9-11.

Many do not believe the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan were justified. And the so-called “War on Terror” has only served to make Americans submissive to a line of legislation like the Patriot Act that stripped us of our Constitutional freedoms. Now we are hearing stories about new explosives that can be sewn into the underwear of potential suicide bombers and pass unseen at airport radar scanners. Does such a weapon exist or is it another attempt to increase the fear level among the people?

We appear to be plunging headlong into an Orwellian society and the American people seem oddly complacent about what has been happening. Have we all been brainwashed, are we being fed mind-dulling drugs in our food and water, or have our people been so cleverly dubbed by the propaganda machine that we are satisfied with giving up freedom for the alleged safety offered by Homeland Security?

We seem to have accepted the fact that government agents are reading our e-mails and all of our electronic communications. We have submitted to the extremely humiliating body searches before boarding aircraft. We have not complained about all of the little video cameras recording nearly every move we make in public. Are we also going to quietly submit to constant surveillance by a fleet of some 30,000 drones soon to be flying over our heads and possibly armed with guns, bombs and cameras?

How dare our legislators consider slipping a secret law on the books that gives our government the legal freedom to blatantly lie to us whenever it wishes?