Could it be that people are starting to wake up?

I'm seeing more and more analysis of what has been going on with the Bush Administration's Propaganda Machine since September 11th. People are starting to get it.

I don't know if they're reading more Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, but it's definitely out there.

The latest example can be found here.

Here's a taste:

After 9/11, the Bush administration creates a huge cabinet-level agency whose entire purpose is to be relentlessly, stringently paranoid about the possibility of terrorist attacks. Simultaneous to the creation of the DHS, the administration creates the color-code alert system, which has absolutely no concrete purpose beyond generally scaring the shit out of the population.

Now it comes out that the Bush administration routinely overruled its own house paranoiac to unilaterally declare orange and red alerts. The White House, of course, doesn't have its own intelligence apparatus. In making a dissenting assessment of intelligence, its judgments were entirely political.

We already knew that the timing of these alerts was extremely suspicious. The public has forgotten already, but it's worth recalling now that just four days before Christmas in 2003, at a time when the country was still somewhat divided over whether or not to go to war in Iraq, the DHS announced a code orange alert. Just as the population was settling in for the holidays, Donald Rumsfeld made an unequivocal announcement:

"Indications [are] that [the] near-term attacks," he said, "will either rival or exceed the [9/11] attacks."

Then there was the code red in New York on July 29, 2004 the same day that John Kerry made his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. We were told, among other things, that al-Qaeda was planning on blowing up the Citibank building. News leaked out later that this intelligence was at least three years old.

At the time, everyone blamed Tom Ridge for this. It was Ridge, after all, who said of the Citibank threat: "The quality of this intelligence, based on multiple reporting streams in multiple locations, is rarely seen."

Now it comes out that it wasn't Ridge at all, but the White House, acting on its own initiative. Considering the timing of the alerts before elections in 2003, in a period when the administration was garnering support for the Iraq invasion, and before the 2004 election—the idea that the White House just pulled these stunts willy-nilly is criminal. Watergate started as a bunch of cheap frat pranks to knock Ed Muskie out of the race. This would be terrorizing 270 million people to go to war and win an election, if that's what they did. What does it look like?

Wow. I can only hope that it's happening. Perhaps we're closing out on the era ofOrwelliang Language Shifts and the administrationstendencyy to reframe reality.

That for example Scott McClellan pretending yesterday that he had not blamed Newsweek for the riots thatoccurredd.

From Editor and Publisher Online:

NEW YORK At a White House press briefing Monday, Press Secretary Scott McClellan, pressed by reporters and with Afghan President Karzai in disagreement, retreated on claims that Newsweek's retracted story on Koran abuse cost lives in Afghanistan.

He also claimed that he had never said it did, even though a check of transcripts disputes that. On May 16, for example, he said, "people have lost their lives." On May 17, he said, "People did lose their lives," and, "People lost their lives" due to the Newsweek report.

Last week, we in the reality based community were angry that The White House had blamed Newsweek for violence it didn't cause and angry at Newsweek for printing a retraction of a story that had widely been reported elsewhere and is ostensibly true.

What is the new official truth this week? "We never said that!"

Errrrrg!

But, that's alright. Maybe the collective cognitive dissonance and mass hysteria generated by September 11th and then proactively nurtured by the despicable people in the Bush Administration is finally starting to collapse.

For our own safety, we can only hope.

One last thought for people who want to fight the propaganda.

Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.
–Abbie Hoffman

You don't have to agree with me on any issue other than needing transparency in government and honesty from our leaders. When we have that, we can work out any ideological differences. Until then, I will continue waiting for the thought police to flush me down the memory hole.

-The Oklahoma Hippy