EXCERPT:
In the early days of the rebellion in Egypt, US TV viewers had the somewhat surreal experience of seeing Al Jazeera being broadcast on one of the two sets in Obama’s office, though Al Jazeera English is blacked out to cable viewers in the US, with the exception of those in Toledo, Ohio; Burlington, Vermont and Washington DC. (This did not prevent both Obama and Mrs Clinton from decrying censorship in Iran.)
Poor Mrs Clinton. She envisages a vast imperial communications network disseminating sophisticated propaganda for the American way. She hints that it should be financed out of public funds, a ramped up version of Voice of America, devotedly followed by audiences behind the Iron Curtain half a century ago. The propaganda model is the “Mighty Wurlitzer”, as the propaganda apparatus commanded by the CIA’s Frank Wisner Sr. was termed.
But the world has moved on. One has only to watch US TV for 10 minutes to conclude that America’s communicators no longer have the intellectual resources and political literacy to mount successful, well-informed propaganda. The Fox Channel is for home-turf idiots. And besides, what would the state-subsidized propagandists be able to boast about? Predator raids in Afghanistan? Guantanamo? Thirty million on part-time work or jobless in the Homeland? America is not the sell it once was, when the economic growth rate was headed up and capitalism seemed capable of delivering on its promises.
March 2 was a busy day. The Army filed 22 new charges against PFC Bradley Manning, suspected of passing classified information to the WikiLeaks website. The charges include "aiding the enemy," -- a capital offense. These charges coincided with Gen. Petraeus apologizing, also on March 2, to Afghanistan’s puppet leader Karzai for the deaths, via machine-gun from Apache attack helicopters, of 9 children, killed as they gathered firewood in a mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan. A 10th child was injured. The general said he was really, really sorry, and that it seemed that "regrettably, there appears to have been an error in the handoff between identifying the location of the insurgents and the attack helicopters that carried out subsequent operations."
Among the material that Manning is accused of handing on to Wikileaks is footage of Apache helicopter assaults in Baghdad. The worldwide web was transfixed on April 5, 2010, when Wikileaks put up on YouTube a 38-minute video, a 17-minute edited version, taken from a U.S. Army Apache helicopter, one of two firing on a group of Iraqis in Baghdad at a street corner in July of 2007. Twelve civilians died, including a Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and a Reuters driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.
Two lethal helicopter assaults, two different outcomes for those divulging them. Petraeus gets a pat on the back for his swift effort at damage control; Manning gets charges that carry the death penalty.
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