e. michael jones quotes this a lot

Science of Coercion: Communication Research and
Psychological Warfare, 1945-60, by Christopher Simpson
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, USA (19 May 1994)
ISBN-10: 019507193X
ISBN-13: 978-0195071931
Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc, USA; (13 Jun 1996)
ISBN-10: 0195102924
ISBN-13: 978-0195102925

Book Description
The Science of Coercion provides the first thorough examination of the role of the CIA, the Pentagon, and other U.S. security agencies in the evolution of modern communication research, a field in the social sciences which crystallized into a distinct discipline in the early 1950s. Government-funded psychological warfare programs underwrote the academic triumph of preconceptions about communication that persist today in communication studies, advertising research, and in counterinsurgency operations. Christopher Simpson contends that it is unlikely that communication research could have emerged into its present form without regular transfusions of money from U.S military, intelligence, and propaganda agencies during the Cold War. These agencies saw mass communication as an instrument for persuading or dominating targeted groups in the United States and abroad; as a tool for improving military operations; and perhaps most fundamentally, as a means to extend the U.S. influence more widely than ever before at a relatively modest cost. Communication research, in turn, became for a time the preferred method for testing and developing such techniques. The Science of Coercion uses long-classified documents to probe the contributions made by prominent mass communication researchers such as Wilbur Schramm, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and others, then details the impact of psychological warfare projects on widely held preconceptions about social science and the nature of communication itself. A fascinating case study in the history of science and the sociology of knowledge, The Science of Coercion offers valuable insights into the dynamics of ideology and the social psychology of communication.

pepe escobar talks with gareth porter

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

when the kissing had to stop

extracted from Daily Mail (UK), Jul 21, 2008

The Green Paper on Benefit Reform published today by Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell is part of the biggest-ever crackdown on welfare abuse. The proposals are also seen as part of a campaign by ambitious ‘arch Blairite’ Mr Purnell to establish his credentials as a possible successor to Gordon Brown. The proposals were drawn up for Mr Purnell by investment banker David Freud, the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud. Mr Freud was commissioned by Tony Blair to lead a similar welfare shake-up three years ago, but it was blocked by Mr Brown, who was then Chancellor. At the time he presented his proposals, Mr Freud is said to have been involved in an angry confrontation with Mr Brown. However, after Conservative leader David Cameron last year gave his backing to Mr Freud’s radical welfare plans, Mr Brown performed a dramatic U-turn on his support for the ideas.

jstreet, jstreet, bla bla bla

What’s Next For JStreet?
Dylan Matthews, American Prospect, July 17, 2008

JStreet, a new pro-peace Israel lobby in Washington, made a splash when it launched this past April, earning praise from The American Prospect‘s own Gershom Gorenberg and Ezra Klein, and predictable scorn from conservatives. The organization is led by director Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration and a veteran of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. In addition to his experience in American politics, Ben-Ami has been active on Israeli issues for years: He was communications director for the New Israel Fund and started an Israeli public relations firm, Ben-Or Communications. Since its launch, JStreet has been busy running campaigns against John McCain’s support of John Hagee, the administration’s saber-rattling toward Iran, and mainstream Jewish organizations’ refusals to acknowledge the ceasefire in Gaza. It also released a list of its first eight endorsements for the November 2008 elections which contains both junior members of Congress and challengers seeking office for the first time. Last Friday, the Prospect spoke with Ben-Ami by phone.

Dylan Matthews: How much interaction has there been between JStreet and the campaigns, both during the primary season and now in the general?

Jeremy Ben-Ami: We made a conscious decision that our greatest political impact in the 2008 cycle is actually going to be made in the congressional races. The amount of money that is being invested in the presidential race and the amount of forces that are at play mean that a new group like ours cannot have a very great impact in such a big pool, and so we decided to try to be a larger fish in a smaller pool.

DM: Well then let’s talk about the congressional endorsements. How did you go about picking the first list, since that came out pretty recently?

JB-A: We’re going to have about 30 to 40 races in which we endorse, and we’re rolling them out in waves of roughly eight to 10. Our goal in the first round was to really emphasize the message that there is a new political dynamic emerging on Israel and the Middle East, from the Jewish community and also in friends of Israel outside the Jewish community. We are part of that, [as] an outside advocacy group, but we also think that part of that [new dynamic] is having new, fresh faces on the political scene.

DM: I noticed that, of the candidates on your first list, there was only one Republican, Charles Boustany. Was there anything that made him stand out from the rest of the caucus?

JB-A: Absolutely. I mean, he’s actually very interested in establishing himself as a leader on this issue in Congress, and he paired with Rep. Gary Ackerman of New York in the fall of 2007 in a bipartisan letter to Condoleezza Rice urging greater US diplomatic support for the peace process that was coming out of Annapolis and also for a greater level of interest in the Palestinian movement in trying to build something positive on the West Bank. And so that kind of leadership from both sides of the aisle is what we’re looking for, and we’re very much interested in building on that in the future.

DM: Okay, about one of the other candidates you endorsed, Darcy Burner, in Washington. Matt Stoller had a report a couple weeks ago saying that Burner had told him that she had gotten a phone call from some people with affiliations with AIPAC, who told her, in explicit terms, to move away from JStreet—that you guys are extreme leftists who want to leave Israel for dead. How much do things like that worry you, both in that case and in going forward with JStreet?

JB-A: It actually doesn’t worry me at all, because, first of all, when people circulate lies and complete distortions of truth, it’s not going to work. In the end, the types of things that they’re saying are simply provable as wrong. If you go to our advisory council, people on our finance committee, people who signed up to support JStreet in Israel, people who ran the Israel Defense Forces, the commander in chief of the Israel Defense Forces, the man who ran the occupation of the West Bank, and the former foreign minister of the state of Israel. If people are going to go around telling congressional candidates that people like that are anti-Israel or trying to undo the state and are anti-Semitic, it’s just so ludicrous that I don’t anticipate it would have any impact. We will have to show that more American Jews actually agree with JStreet’s agenda, that our policies are actually the better policy, supported by people in Israel, and that kind of debate I’m more than happy to have. But the kind of stupidity of people calling us self-hating Jews, or anti-Israel, or leftists, and all of that, is definitely not going to work.

DM: Do you expect to endorse Senate candidates this cycle, or are you sticking with the House?

JB-A: We’ve said we’ll probably endorse, we will endorse in one Senate race. Whether we’ll do more than that, I’m not sure.

DM: There’s a general theme in campaign coverage that the Republicans have more of a shot at the Jewish vote this time than they’ve had in the past, that Obama is a weaker candidate among Jewish voters than past Democratic nominees have been. Do you think that is accurate, or has that been an overblown theme?

J-BA: Well, it’s accurate. I mean, the polling shows this. There’s definitely a lower percentage of the American Jewish community that appears ready to support Obama than supported, let’s say, Gore and Kerry. And that is just factually there, in the polling. It’s still early, and Obama’s doing a lot of work to try to reassure American Jews about Israel, about who he is, but, I mean, I don’t think he’s going to get less than two thirds of the Jewish vote, but he still has work to do to get up to the level, closer to 80%, that Kerry got, and I think Gore got about 75% himself. I would expect that Obama will come in at the high 60s, at the end of the day, but still a little bit lower than the other guys.

DM: As part of trying to respond to this gap with Jewish voters, it seems like Obama has made several moves to the right on Israeli policy. He severed links with Robert Malley over his meetings with Hamas, at the AIPAC conference he declared he wouldn’t consider dividing Jerusalem. Especially given the role that Malley has had on the JStreet advisory council and JStreet’s position in favor of negotiations, what do you make of that?

J-BA: We came out and said strongly at the time of the AIPAC conference that an issue like Jerusalem should not be a political football. It’s inappropriate to try to use an issue like that, which is so sensitive and so important, which should be left to the parties to decide, and inject it into American politics to make a political point. We were very disappointed by the statements made by the senator at AIPAC, and we’re very disappointed that some lies about somebody like Rob Malley, who is very close to many of us personally, and who has been spoken and vouched for by former national security advisers and former secretaries of state and others, that that could be used against Rob, those types of lies, is just terrible. We would just ask these candidates to stick to the issues and not to get engaged in that kind of political pandering over a very serious issue, not to make people’s personal background an issue in a campaign. The majority of American Jews agree with the positions of JStreet, and it’s a safe bet that we’re going to continue to try to convince candidates that they will actually score political points by articulating a vision more in line with JStreet than in line with what has traditionally been assumed to be necessary to say.

intro to matt taibbi’s new book

‘The Great Derangement’ : A book excerpt by Matt Taibbi
Newsweek Web Exclusive, Jul 12, 2008

To be perfectly honest, I knew all about Pastor John Hagee—his Cornerstone Church was one of the reasons I’d come to San Antonio in the first place. Hagee was one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country—not because his ministry was so very large (although he claimed up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons), but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.

Not exactly a new idea, Christian Zionism in simplest terms describes Christians who believe in supporting, politically or otherwise, the State of Israel. It has risen as a force in international politics primarily because of two factors. The first is a rise in America in belief in dispensationalist Christianity, i.e., End Times prophecies—the belief that Armageddon is coming and that, with it, the True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the nonbelievers stay on earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures. The enormous success of the Left Behind books and movies (which depict the earth during Armageddon as a delicious chaos, with airplanes suddenly stripped of their believer pilots, buses flying off highways, blood-soaked atheists realizing their tragic mistake far too late, etc.) helped spread these beliefs, so much so that dispensationalism is now more or less the default doctrine of most Southern Baptists. If you enter a megachurch practically anywhere in America these days, you can expect that much of the congregation will be actively awaiting the end of the world.

But you can’t have Armageddon without certain preconditions, and most important among those is a final battle that the Prophet Ezekiel predicted will take place between a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russia) and God’s chosen people, Israel. Most End Timers believe the key alliance here will be between Russia and Iran and that only following a savage military confrontation between those states and Israel, probably of a catastrophic nuclear nature, will Christ reappear and begin his glorious second reign.

Thus the whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to “hurry God up” in his efforts to bring about this key final showdown. Practically speaking, this manifests itself, mainly, in the form of American evangelical Christians endorsing pro-Israel policies, support that Israel itself has been happy to receive (Benjamin Netanyahu has even appeared at Hagee’s Cornerstone Church) despite the fact that dispensationalist doctrine also envisions the mass conversion of all Jews to Christianity after the final battle, with dire consequences for those who don’t. I wonder exactly how most Israelis would feel about the sudden warmth being shown them by American evangelicals if they knew, for instance, that people like ardent End Timer Hal Lindsey had predicted the “mother of all Holocausts” for those Jews who refused to convert at the Second Coming.

Anyway, Pastor Hagee, that drawling, white-haired, barrel-organ-voiced Texan with the kindly smile who gives such powerful ministry on TV, is one of America’s chief pitchmen for Christian Zionism. He founded a group called Christians United for Israel (CUFI), whose mission is to rally Christians to Israel’s cause. According to The Washington Post, Hagee has regular access to the White House and has many followers among George Bush’s staff. Remarkably, when CUFI held a conference in Washington this past summer, no less a personage than Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman gave the keynote address. Also participating as speakers were Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, while George W. Bush and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert sent recorded greetings.

When I first started reading about Hagee and about the felicitous alliance between the American religious right and the hard-liners in the Israeli government, my first reaction was to applaud it as a brilliantly cynical piece of international politics. Whether it was conceived in the corridors of Mossad headquarters or in some dreary arch-capitalist think tank funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation (and I’m guessing it was probably some combination of both), I had no idea, but it was unmistakably an ingenious solution to the problem of how to rally southern conservative Christians a few generations removed from their cross-burning Klan days to the cause of Israel. If it turns out that it was dreamed up by the same guy who figured out how to get laid-off midwestern factory workers to whoop for free-trade Republicanism by plastering the airwaves with French-kissing men, I have to say, that guy deserves some kind of special medal—a Triple Order of Satan, or something like that.

But during the election season, I started to wonder if this kind of thing might eventually backfire on the people who concocted these ideas, if indeed they were dreamed up from on high. As a temporary electoral gambit designed to garner support for Israel, it’s brilliant, but let’s not forget that it doesn’t work unless you get tens of millions of people really believing that the world is about to end. I wonder sometimes if the cynics in Washington think that they can get away with just bending the yokels’ ears once every four years, cashing in on Election Day, and then going back to the grimy you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours money politics that dominates everyday life inside the Beltway.

I think those people forget that after every Election Day, even after they’ve been forgotten by Washington, those yokels are still out there, thinking, waiting, watching. Their minds change. And if their needs are not tended to, they drift away. And if you’ve gotten used to making political decisions based on the Book of Revelation, you can drift pretty far. I wanted to see how far, exactly—I was going to join the church.

israeli draft resisters get hammered

IDF: Increase in indictments filed against draft-dodgers
Hanan Greenberg, YNet, 20 Jul 2008

Since July 2007 some 370 indictments have been filed against Israeli youngsters who have evaded military service, as opposed to only a few dozen indictments filed a year earlier. According to Lieutenant-Colonel Morris Hirsch, special military advocate for absentees and deserters, the hike is due mainly to increased cooperation between the IDF and Israel Police. A year ago Ynet revealed a plan initiated by Brigadier-General Avi Zamir, who was recently appointed chief of IDF personnel, aimed at apprehending as many draft-dodgers as possible by disclosing to Israel Police information on deserters and youngsters who have evaded army service for over a year in the hope that any routine driver’s license check would lead to their arrest. Now it appears that the plan is bearing fruit. “There is a significant rise in the number of draft-dodgers who are being arrested and in the number of indictments filed against them,” Hirsch said, “a draft-dodger who is apprehended by police is immediately transferred to IDF custody.” The senior army officer said the military courts are handing down harsher sentences to deter draft-dodgers. Last week a military judge sentenced a 25-year-old draft-dodger to nine months in prison, the maximum penalty allowed for such an offense. The Military Advocate General’s Office is currently establishing a body that will deal with draft-dodgers so that, according to Hirsch, “we will be able to put them on trial in a speedy and effective manner”.